Immobility

A SENSATION OF COMING BACK to life, only not quite that: half life maybe. Still utter darkness, though perhaps a faint hint of light on the horizon. A swirl of memory and imagination, a swath depicting a past, real or imaginary, smeared across the inner walls of his skull.

The darkness spattered with light now, but still nothing visible, no figure distinct from the ground. A tickling in the throat, aching fingers, hunger, well-simulated feelings and sensations, almost as if he were really experiencing them, almost as if he had a body again.

And then suddenly, vague laughter, slowly fading. Words, their sounds murky but comprehensible and properly sequenced—probably real for once rather than imagined—this:

Hey. Hey. Are you still alive? Are you still alive in there?

A woman’s voice, something parting his eyelids, a blurred and twisted face, vaguely female. A dull pain that would have been located somewhere in his head, if he still had a head.

Hey, you fired the flare, right? I mean, who else would it be? Has to be you. And that wasn’t so long ago. We both know you’re not really dead. You’re not the sort to die.

Something moist against lips, trickling into a mouth and pooling against one cheek, trickling down a throat. A hand on a throat, rubbing it, massaging it, until suddenly it convulsed, swallowed.

There we go. Alive after all, aren’t you.

It came again, wet, and this time the throat swallowed a little less involuntarily, and he was aware, too, of it as being more than just a throat. He was aware of it as being his throat.

And then just as quickly as this awareness had begun, it flashed away.

WAS HE DREAMING STILL? He was somewhere, inside now, a blurry space, round, as if he were in the center of a sphere. A vague shape, a face, a woman’s face, or no, not quite a woman, not exactly human. Or maybe it was just that his eyes couldn’t focus. Hairless? Maybe, or maybe simply shorn short. Eyes not focused enough to do anything. Distant laughter. Something cool and wet touching his face, obscuring his vision.

Words again, or sounds anyway gradually becoming words. Female voices. But when in this world had he seen a woman? No, he must be hallucinating. Then again, how could a world exist without women? Maybe the rest of it was the hallucination. Maybe this was the only thing that was real. Was he becoming more conscious? Maybe, maybe not. He tried to sit up, felt something holding him down, hands or straps.

…anything? one voice finished. What had it been saying before? No, he couldn’t capture it.

Just this, said the other voice. It was wrapped in his shirt.

Ah, said the first voice. How enterprising of him. Shall we partake? Diversify the field? Was it a woman’s voice after all? He wasn’t exactly sure anymore.

I don’t see why not.

Leave him some. Otherwise he’ll be disappointed.

He squinted, tried to see them better, but their features remained in flux, something wrong with his eyes, maybe.

Seems to be waking up. Resilient, isn’t he?

We all are, at that stage. At what stage? he wondered. He groaned, tried to sit up again, felt this time the pressure of hands.

What shall we do with him? Which voice was that again? Harvest him?

He’s not ready. He’s even less ready than the other one.

And yet here he is.

It can’t be forced. When it is, results are … unstable. Remember what happened to Sarne.

Who is Sarne? he wondered.

So what do we do? asked the second voice.

Do? What else can we do?

We throw him back.

A GLARE OF SOME SORT, the sensation of heat, the smell of dust. He coughed and felt a hand on him, gripping his shoulder, acknowledging him.

A voice:

There, there. It’s going to be all right.

Strange the things that seep their way down to you while you are unconscious, part of him thought. Or were such things just imagined, a story he was telling to himself, a dream he was dreaming?

Where am I? Coming out of storage? Coming out of sleep? Dead?

With great effort he managed to open his eyes, saw little more than a blaze of light, furious, scorching the inside of his skull. And then, through it, suddenly bursting, the rough shape of a face, little more than a white circle with two eyes gouged out of it.

Decided to open your eyes, did you?

Face sliding sideways to momentarily block the light. A round head, bald, pale. A mouth with its corners tensed up in a smile.

Glad to see you’re coming around.

He tried to speak, but nothing came out. The face gave him a keen look and then leaned closer, so that all he could see was the top of an ear and the side of a head. It was there for a while, while he tried to speak again, and then it moved away, revealed the whole face again.

And then his vision blurred and faded and he felt himself slip away.

A STRANGE SENSATION, a feeling of light-headedness, a sense of motion, of movement. He heard someone groan, but it took him a while to realize it was him. He willed his eyes to open and they opened, but only very slowly—one of them, anyway.

He saw the ground moving below him, but farther away than he would have thought. He saw the curve of a man’s back, and far below, appearing and disappearing, two booted feet. He was being carried, he suddenly realized, but the person carrying him wasn’t in a hazard suit, was neither Qatik nor Qanik. And then he remembered that no, of course it wasn’t Qatik or Qanik: both Qs were dead. But if not them, who would it be? And why would they be outside without a suit?

And then he remembered what’d seen earlier: pale head, lack of hair, just like himself.

Oh no, he thought, they’ve found me.

23

HE DREAMED THAT HE WAS IN a world that had been destroyed, subject to a collapse the reasons for which he had a hard time laying a finger on. In this world, something had happened to him to change him, to make him unlike other men—though not only him: there were others, at least a few, who had been through the same transformation as well. In some ways it was a good thing. He was stronger than before, more resilient, very difficult to kill. But in other ways it was less of a good thing: People were frightened of him, would lie to him, would keep their distance. He didn’t belong anywhere. Even among those who, like him, had been changed, he didn’t feel like he belonged.

But what does that matter? he told himself in the dream. Who cares if I belong? Certainly I don’t care.

But even as he said it, he felt something gnawing at him. Maybe he did care. Maybe he belonged with humans. Certainly he still felt like he was human. Or maybe he belonged with the others, the ones who looked like him but who thought of themselves as inhuman, as posthuman, as transhuman. But I still think of myself as human, he thought. Why don’t they feel they are? And why do humans feel I’m not?

Then the dream focused. He found himself in a rectangular room topped by a dome, pendentives descending to each of the four corners of the room and coming to ground in four separate piers. Irregular ribs radiated in a spiral pattern from the dome’s center to gather around a circular opening at the summit. A church, maybe, or some sort of capitol building. It was made of stone, probably granite, and lit only through the opening in the top of the dome itself, and through a series of narrow windows in the rectangular room below. He could hear something, muffled laughter, but when he turned toward where he thought it was coming from, it seemed to be coming from somewhere else.

He moved toward one of the piers. When he touched it, he discovered that what he’d thought was shadow was, in fact, something else, a glutinous gray substance that clung to his hands and fingers and seemed not to want to come off. What he’d thought at first were irregular ribs were lines of this substance, paths made of it, and as he looked closer, he could see a large tadpole-like creature wriggling along one of the paths. What was it? He removed his gun and aimed it, but before he could fire, the creature slithered up the dome and through the hole at the top and was gone.

The scene blurred away and then refocused again, and he was in a large room, but it felt small since it was filled with large metal cabinets that ran to the ceiling, cutting out narrow rows. He was walking down the row, following someone whose face he couldn’t see, but he could tell from the back of his head that, just like himself, this man was bald, pale, no longer human. He was muttering to himself, but Horkai couldn’t hear what he was saying. He could sense there was something wrong, but couldn’t quite figure out what. Overhead, fluorescent lights flickered on, flickered off. He was walking slowly, but the figure in front of him was walking even slower still, and each time he slowed down, the figure slowed down even more so that, little by little, he was coming closer and closer. His feet rang strangely on the floor, and he wondered what it was about the floor, or about his shoes, or about both, that made this so.

He looked down and saw that where he had thought he had the legs of a human he had the legs of a horse or a donkey or some other beast of burden, and they were shivering, struggling to hold themselves upright. The sound he was hearing was the striking of his hooves against the granite floor.

Panicked, he looked back up and saw that where before there had been a keeper there was now a figure wearing a thick black hazard suit, moving awkwardly in front of him, swaying, crashing into the cabinets first on one side then on the other. And then the figure crashed into a cabinet and broke through it, and Horkai saw through the hole a large barren expanse under a burning sun.

The man in the hazard suit turned and gestured for him to follow, and then turned and kept walking. Horkai started to push through the jagged hole but his foreleg caught and tore on the metal lip and he found himself falling, the man in the hazard suit no longer there, nothing there but dust and misery stretching as far as the eye could see.

Lucky for me, he thought in the dream on the way down, that I’m safe in storage.

But then he woke up to discover that, for the most part, it wasn’t a dream at all.

24

WHEN HE FINALLY WOKE for good, it was to see a face staring down at him, light pouring in through a window behind it. It was a face very much like his own—no hair, no eyebrows, no stubble of beard or mustache, only a smooth pale head, blurry, but coming into focus as he blinked.

“There we are,” said a voice soft and smooth as silk. The face it belonged to smiled. At first he thought the face, slender with delicate features, belonged to a woman. And then he wasn’t so sure. And then decided it must belong to a man. “How are we feeling?”

He tried to move, groaned, his head throbbing.

The stranger reached out and put an open hand on his chest. “Don’t try to get up yet,” he said. “All things in their own time. Can you eat?”

He nodded. The stranger disappeared, came back a moment later with a small open jar.

“We’ll start easy,” he said, and brought the jar close to Horkai’s mouth.

“What is it?” Horkai whispered.

“Baby food, more or less,” said the stranger. He lifted up the jar and looked at it. “I made it myself. Some water, some hardtack, a few preserved things that still looked safe. Soaked it all together, mashed it up,” He slipped a finger into the jar, brought it back out covered with sludge. “Open up,” he said.

At first he shook his head, but the stranger easily slipped his finger into his mouth, forced it through his teeth, held it there until he sucked the finger clean.

“There,” said the stranger, “that isn’t so bad, is it?” He dipped his finger into the jar again. This time Horkai opened his mouth.

When he’d finished the jar, he was still hungry, felt even hungrier than before he started eating, his mouth watering. But the stranger shook his head. “Who knows how long you were out there,” he said. “You have to take it slow. Rest,” he said. “Sleep.” And then he closed the curtains and left him alone in a darkened room.

HE DID MANAGE TO SLEEP, he wasn’t sure how long. When he awoke, the curtain was open, light coming in again, though whether it was the same day or another he couldn’t say. The man was beside him again, shaking him slightly. He had another jar, and a spoon this time, as well as a bottle with a bent straw. He hooked the straw into the corner of Horkai’s mouth and squeezed the bottle. Horkai felt his mouth flood with water. He swallowed once, then coughed, spluttering it up, then managed to swallow again.

“Too much?” said the stranger, pulling the bottle away. When Horkai kept coughing, he turned him on his side, patted his back until saliva oozed out of the corner of his mouth and he stopped. Just like when they woke me up from storage, thought Horkai. “Sorry about that,” the stranger said.

When the coughing finally stopped, the man moved him onto his back, held up Horkai’s head with his hand as he began to spoon the mush into his mouth. This went better, the mush going down smoother. When Horkai had finished the jar, the stranger smiled. “I’ll go get another,” he said.

“Are you a keeper?” asked Horkai. “Are you going to kill me?”

“A keeper? I don’t know what you mean,” said the man. “Why should I want to kill you?” he added, and then left.

“How long have I been in storage?” Horkai asked him when he came back.

“Storage?” said the stranger, a puzzled expression. “But you haven’t been in storage,” he said.

“But,” said Horkai, “I thought—”

“No,” said the stranger. “I found you and took you in. You were outside, all but dead.”

Then it began to come together, slowly but surely. “You saw my flare?” he finally asked.

“No,” said the stranger. “If there was a flare, I didn’t see it.”

“Who was with you? Who else was talking?”

“Nobody else. Just me.”

“There wasn’t a woman?”

The stranger shook his head.

“Where did you take me first? Some sort of dome?”

The stranger shook his head again. “I found you and brought you straight here. I didn’t take you anyplace else.”

“What about Qatik?” asked Horkai. “And Qanik?”

“I don’t know what those are,” said the stranger, his expression still friendly, still open. “Where they in your backpack?” And then he raised his finger. “There were flares in your backpack,” he said, “and an old flare gun. But I don’t think it had been fired. Also a head.”

“A head?” he said.

The stranger nodded. “Someone you killed?”

Horkai shook his head. “I didn’t kill him,” he said. “The mules did. He tried to kill me.”

“Mules, eh? And yet here you are, alive, and there he is, a head in a backpack.”

But then what was real and what was not? Either it all should be real or none of it, right? But it was as if he had lived parts of it and dreamed other parts, and the line between the two wasn’t something that would be easy to sort out.

“I fired a flare,” said Horkai, raising his head, feeling the strain of it. “I’m sure of it. I needed help and I fired a flare.”

“All right,” said the stranger with equanimity. “If you say so.”

He let his head fall back, closed his eyes. “Qatik and Qanik were humans,” he said. “In hazard suits. Those are their names. They called themselves mules.”

“Ah,” said the stranger. “Then they probably weren’t in your backpack after all. Were they supposed to be with you? I didn’t see them.”

His memory, Horkai realized, was confused. Qanik was miles away, dead. Qatik wasn’t as far, but far nonetheless; there was no reason the stranger would have seen them unless he’d been traveling farther up the freeway looking for them.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Do names really matter?” asked the stranger. He gestured around the room with his open palm. “Are you really likely to get me confused with someone else?”

“I’d still like to know,” said Horkai.

The man just smiled.

“My name is Josef,” said Horkai. “Last name Horkai. You can call me one or the other or both.”

“Or nothing at all,” said the stranger.

“Please,” said Horkai.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” said the stranger. “It’s just that’s where we went wrong.”

“Where who went wrong?”

“Us,” said the stranger. “Back in the Garden of Eden when Adam named first his wife and then the animals. When we started thinking about names rather than the things they were supposed to designate.”

“You’re a philosopher?” said Horkai.

The man shook his head. “A realist,” he said.

“But I have to call you something,” said Horkai.

“Ah,” said the man, smiling. “A true romantic. All right,” he said, “we can compromise.” He thought for a moment. “If you want to call me something,” he said, “make it Rykte.”

“Reek-tah,” Horkai repeated. “What kind of name is that?”

“What kind of name is Horkai?” asked the stranger, slightly mocking. “Doesn’t that seem at least as improbable?” He dipped the spoon into the food jar, held it out to Horkai, who opened his mouth. “In fact,” he said, “Rykte’s not a name at all, but a word.”

“What does it mean?”

“In this language, nothing. In another, it means ‘name.’”

“So your name is name?”

“It means not only ‘name’ but ‘rumor.’ Also, ‘fame, repute, report.’ Depending on context, a few other things as well.”

“And that’s your name?”

“No, it’s not my name. It’s a compromise,” said Rykte. “Now you have something to call me, but I still don’t have a name.”

HE LAY THAT NIGHT STARING UP at the ceiling, thinking. Where was he? he wondered. Who was this person without a name, this Rykte? What was wrong with him, and where was his community? He didn’t feel like he was in danger, but was he? Was he a prisoner?

“Am I a prisoner?” he asked the next day. He was feeling a little better now, could sit up with help and then stay sitting on his own. He could hold the bowl in his lap and bring the spoon down into it and then up again to his mouth.

“What? Of course not,” said Rykte. “You can leave anytime you’d like.”

“Really?”

“Really,” said Rykte. “You can leave now if you want, though I’d suggest waiting until you have recovered a little more.”

He took another spoonful of the mush, then another. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to accuse you.”

“It’s all right,” said Rykte. “We’ve all been through a lot.”

He nodded, took another spoonful of mush. “Rykte, could someone have taken me before you found me?” he asked.

Rykte stared at him. “I suppose it’s possible,” he said.

“I remember someone talking,” he said. “Two people, talking about me. They took me somewhere and then decided I wouldn’t do.”

“Wouldn’t do what?”

“Just wouldn’t do,” Horkai said. “I was wrong for whatever they wanted me for.”

“And so they took you back outside and left you again,” said Rykte.

“It sounds ludicrous when you put it that way.”

“What way should I put it?”

Horkai shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

Rykte reached out and touched him on the shoulder. “Is it possible?” he said. “Yes, it is. But I don’t know who it would have been or why they would have done it. All I know is that I found you on the freeway and brought you here. You were in a state of confusion, babbling about two women, but also about being in storage. Maybe it all happened, maybe it didn’t. Or maybe it happened but just not when you think it did.” He smiled. “You’re here now. Just hold on to that.”

A DAY LATER, HORKAI ASKED AGAIN, “You’re not a keeper?”

“You asked me that before. What’s a keeper?” asked the stranger. “Do you mean it spiritually, like am I my brother’s keeper?”

“No,” said Horkai. “A keeper.” And then he went on to explain to Rykte about Granite Mountain, the records there.

By the time he finished, Rykte’s face was grave. “And this mountain,” he said, “is where you came from?”

Horkai shook his head. “No,” he said. “I was just passing through.”

Rykte shook his head. “We never learn,” he said. “What we need is not a cord tying us back to our past, to the long line of disasters building up to this last greatest disaster. What we need is a fresh start.”

“They’re not people,” said Horkai. “They’re not human.”

“What are they, then?”

“No longer human. They’re like us.”

Rykte shook his head again, stared at the floor. “You see,” he said. “That’s the whole problem. Names, categories, divisions. Once you label something, you learn how to hate it. Human, not human. If you’re not one, you’re the other, and then you and the others can hate each other.” He turned to look at Horkai. “You have to understand,” he said, “that we’re neither human nor not human.”

“What are we, then?” asked Horkai.

“We just are,” said Rykte. “Why can’t that ever be enough?”

OVER THE COURSE of a few days, he got stronger, began feeling better. Soon he was pulling himself from room to room, exploring Rykte’s house. It was an old cinder block affair, nothing fancy, five rooms in all. Horkai wondered aloud why he had chosen it rather than something else.

Rykte shrugged. “I grew up here,” he said. “When everything collapsed, I didn’t see any reason to leave.” He looked around. “Had to rebuild most of it,” he said, “but it gave me something to do. Finding intact windows that fit was the hardest part of it.”

Besides the room Rykte had given to him, there was Rykte’s own room, which contained little more than a bed and a dresser, full of simple, practical clothes, a kitchen with cabinets packed with hardtack and preserved foods. A bathroom, with the commode torn out, was now piled with stacks of books. Rykte had built an outhouse back behind the house—though, for the time being, Rykte installed a chemical toilet in the former bathroom for Horkai. There was a sort of living room containing a couch, two armchairs. A credenza to one side of the front door was heaped with guns and knifes, a few grenades as well.

“Just in case,” said Rykte, and winked.

In the basement, Rykte told him, he was trying to grow mushrooms, something to supplement their diet. So far without much success. A shed not far from the outhouse served for storage, was filled with anything that Rykte had scavenged that he thought might be useful. He carried Horkai out to it and Horkai was surprised to see only practical things, no relics or mementos to recall past days, just tools, lumber, rope, bits and pieces of metal, rolls of medical tape, vacuum-sealed packets of freeze-dried foods. A hand-cranked distiller surrounded by canister after canister of distilled water.

“What if you run out of food?” asked Horkai.

“There were enough people around here with food storage that at first it wasn’t a problem,” said Rykte. “Can’t see that it’ll be a problem in my lifetime. Plus I’m trying to get mushrooms going in several basements around here. Should be okay eventually.”

“You’re not lonely?” asked Horkai after a few days.

Rykte shrugged. “A little,” he admitted. “But I learned early on to keep my distance. Others always want something from you, especially when they realize you can survive outside. Before you know it, they’re no longer asking you for something; they’re holding a gun to your head and trying to force it out of you.”

“Do you feel that way about me?”

“You’re welcome to stay as long as you want, if that’s what you’re asking,” Rykte said. “You don’t bother me.”

“WHAT ABOUT YOUR LEGS?” Rykte asked him a few days later when he saw one of Horkai’s legs shivering. “I thought you must have been paralyzed before the change.”

“No, not before,” said Horkai.

“Well, then they’ll come back,” said Rykte. “They’re already coming back.”

“They can’t,” said Horkai. “I’m ill. If my spine reconnects, it’ll travel to my brain and kill me.”

Rykte looked at him for a long time, finally shook his head. “Doesn’t sound right,” he said. “Do you know this for a fact?”

“I was told,” said Horkai.

“Is it possible that whoever told you this might have had some reason to lie?”

“It’s not impossible,” Horkai said.

“I haven’t had even as much as a cold since the change,” said Rykte. “I can drive a rusty nail into my forehead and come away tetanus free. Early on, I lost an eye in a scuffle only to have it grow back a few days later, good as new. We age, but not very quickly, not as quickly as we did before. Whatever happened to our bodies purified them, made them no longer subject to certain conditions that other mortals face. Our bodies have been transformed, and that has made us not only very hard to kill but also very hard to injure.”

“And so I’m being lied to?”

Rykte shrugged. “Let your spine grow back together and find out. It’s worth the risk.”

THE BRIEF QUIVERING IN HIS LEGS was followed by a tingling sensation, then by little jabs of pain. Over the course of a week he tried mentally to will his legs to move, found that they would but not in the way he expected them to, flopping and spasming instead.

Rykte told him not to worry, that everything would come back. He sat beside Horkai, massaging the legs and moving them carefully back and forth, up and down, helping them relearn the movements they had lost.

“What did you do before the Kollaps?” Horkai asked during one of these sessions.

“Why do you say it that way?” asked Rykte, not looking up from his legs. “Why do you pronounce it like it’s a foreign word?”

“I don’t know,” said Horkai. “That’s how they say it where I’m from.”

“And where is that?”

“I don’t know,” said Horkai. “I can’t remember things very well.”

“What did I do?” asked Rykte. “Not much. Went to high school. I was sixteen when things fell apart.”

“You watched your parents die?”

Rykte looked up, nodded. “My parents,” he said. “My friends, my neighbors, people I knew from school, from church. Those who survived the first blast were afraid of me, and then hated me. A few of them even tried to kill me. And then, fairly quickly, most of them died.”

“I’m sorry,” said Horkai.

“Why?” said Rykte. “You weren’t one of them. You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

AFTER A FEW MORE DAYS, his quivering legs learned to hold him upright for a moment or two. Rykte would stand him upright and he would stand there until the legs suddenly gave out and he’d go down, and Rykte would have to catch him. A day after that, he watched Rykte walk away from the house in the early morning, a rifle slung across his back, and disappear. He was gone for several hours, but when he returned he was carrying two aluminum underarm crutches.

“Was looking for forearm crutches,” he said, “but I didn’t find any. These will have to do.”

By late afternoon and after a few falls, he’d learned how to use the crutches. His sides hurt from where the crutch handles rubbed against him, and the web between his thumb and forefinger was growing sore, had perhaps started to blister. But he could move around on his own power.

He made a few turns around the house, then begged Rykte to take him outside.

“All right,” said Rykte. “In any case, there’s something I want to show you.”

THEY WENT OUT THE BACK DOOR and past the shed. The crutches were a little more difficult to operate in the dirt, but he managed. Rykte took him to the back fence, then carefully pulled off three of the boards, stacking them to one side. He helped Horkai through the opening.

On the other side was a flat expanse of dirt, then a slow slope down to a drainage ditch through which a feeble stream ran. Unlike the other water he had seen, it wasn’t red. Looking up it, he could see the end of a corrugated pipe from which the water was coming. In the other direction it went straight for a while then curved before it was lost behind a fence.

“What did you want me to see?” Horkai asked.

“This,” said Rykte, and pointed at the stream.

Water, thought Horkai. So what? He looked back up at Rykte. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“Look closer,” said Rykte.

And so he did, trying to see what it was about the water that made it different, made it unusual. Was it a little cleaner, a little purer? Maybe, but not enough to make much of a difference. The color was a little strange, maybe, but …

And then he realized and almost fell. “Oh my God,” he said. It wasn’t the water that was a strange color but what was at the bottom of the streambed. There was a thin layer of moss, very pale but there.

“It’s very delicate,” said Rykte. “Easily damaged. But resistant to the poisons in the air and soil and water. Things are starting to come back, slowly but surely. In another five years, we might even start to see grass. A decade or two after that, and there’ll be flowering plants. Tack on a hundred years, we might even begin to see trees. All this will go on in some way or other. The only thing we humans managed to destroy was ourselves.”

“But we’re not dead yet,” said Horkai.

“With a little luck, we will be soon,” said Rykte. “We’re a curse, a blight. First we gave everything names and then we invented hatred. And then we made the mistake of domesticating animals—almost as big a mistake as that of discovering fire. It’s only one step from there to slavery, and once you think of humans as animals—as mules, say,” he said, giving Horkai a look, “we become a disposable commodity, war a commonplace. Add in a dominant religion that preaches the end of the world and holy books that have been used to justify atrocity after atrocity, and you’re only a step away from annihilation. It’s better not to let society develop at all, to leave each person on their own, alone, shivering, and afraid in the dark.”

“What are you, a libertarian?” asked Horkai.

“No,” said Rykte.

“An anarchist?”

“Who isn’t these days?” asked Rykte. “But no, no more so than anybody else.”

Horkai looked at him a long time. “You really think humanity should die out?”

“Objectively, yes,” said Rykte. “I’ve thought about it and thought about it, and rationally it seems the right thing. If we want anything at all to go on, humanity should die out.” He turned to Horkai and smiled. “But when I think about it subjectively, it doesn’t seem so clear cut.”

“No?”

“No. So I do nothing. I neither help humanity along toward its own extinction nor do I prevent that extinction from happening. I don’t slaughter everyone I meet, don’t use well-placed grenades to open the few remaining shelters to the poisons outside. But neither do I help them. What does that make me? Ineffectual? Uninvolved?”

“Lukewarm,” said Horkai.

Rykte smiled. “So then because thou art lukewarm,” he said, “and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.”

“I’ve heard that before,” said Horkai.

“Of course you have,” said Rykte. “It’s from the Bible.”

“The Bible,” said Horkai. “Burn that as well?” he asked.

“Of course,” said Rykte, smiling. “It’s the cause of more deaths than any other book, including Mein Kampf. Better if it had never been written.” The smile faded from his face. He turned to Horkai, his eyes hard and serious. “But I guess it’s different for you,” he said. “You’re not exactly lukewarm, are you.”

Horkai didn’t say anything. They just stood there staring at each other until Rykte clapped his hand down on his shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “There’s something else I want to show you.”

THEY FOLLOWED THE STREAM to where it came out of the pipe and then crossed over the ground behind, Rykte helping him. He heard the noise long before he could figure out where it was coming from, a slow, low droning. He was sweating now, the soreness in his hands becoming blisters, but his legs were already a little stronger, a little more stable.

They traveled up the alley and to the fence in back of another house. Rykte approached the middle of the fence and felt along the boards until one came off in his hands. The ones just to one side of it came off just as easily. He stepped through, gestured to Horkai to follow him.

The noise grew stronger as they approached the house, growing very loud once he opened the door. They went in; then Rykte came close, spoke into Horkai’s ear.

“Leave your crutches against the wall,” he said. “I’ll carry you the rest of the way.”

He put the crutches against the wall, leaning heavily on Rykte. Bending down and pulling him up into his arms, grunting a little, Rykte carried him through the house, down the stairs to the cellar.

The noise was deafening once they were on the stairs. Horkai reached out and touched the wall, felt the vibration. They kept going down, the cellar coming slowly into view.

It was filled with a series of gas-powered generators, perhaps a dozen in all. They were attached by transparent plastic tubes to a water tank in the corner, but Horkai could tell by the color of the fluid in the tubes that it wasn’t full of water. The generators were all circuited up to a central converter, which in turn fed their current into a large black cable, which snaked across the floor to a storage tank.

Rykte moved toward it. For a brief terrifying moment, Horkai had the impression that he was planning to put him in it. Instead, he held him over it, mouthed at him to look down.

Horkai did. Expecting to see a stored body, he was surprised when he discovered that the pod was empty, and was again filled with the suspicion that it might be for him.

But it wasn’t empty, he realized as he continued to look. There was no body there, but there was still something. A small cylinder with red writing on its side.

“I COULD HAVE DESTROYED IT,” said Rykte a few minutes later, when Horkai was back on his crutches and they were moving back to Rykte’s house. “But I didn’t. Instead I froze it. That’s what I’ve come to see my role as, at least in your case. I won’t make a decision about it, but I’ve preserved your right to make a choice.”

He reached out and touched Horkai lightly on the shoulder. “It’s been opened. It’s been thawed and refrozen. The contents may be damaged,” he said. “It may not do any good to give it to whoever you were going to give it to. But then again, it might do a great deal of good, might even allow them a new, fresh start, another generation. You can let humanity go the way of all flesh to extinction, or you can try to help it to keep limping on. So now, what, if anything, will you do?”

“Is it really that important?” Horkai asked. “Can grain really make the difference?”

“Grain?” said Rykte incredulously. He laughed. “There’s not grain in there,” he said. “Why did you think it was grain?”

“Rasmus told…,” he started to say. And then he stopped. Sort of, Rasmus had said, something like that, when he’d asked if it was grain, or wheat rather. What was the word Rasmus had used? He thought, tried to bring it back, and failed. “If it’s not grain,” he asked, “then what is it?”

“Fertilized human eggs,” said Rykte. “Frozen embryos, ready to be unfrozen and implanted. Humans can no longer reproduce. They’ve been trying for years. They’ve been rendered infertile. When I found you, you were carrying the possibility of dozens of humans with you, their whole next generation.”

Seed, thought Horkai. That was the word Rasmus had used. Seed. He’d stopped moving, was standing in the backyard motionless.

“I’ll ask again,” said Rykte, “now that you know what you’re facing. You may have the key to their continuation. You can give it to them, or you can destroy it. Or you can just wait, do nothing. So many possibilities. What, if anything, will you do?”

25

WHAT WILL I DO? he wondered later, alone in the room he had already started thinking about as his room. We name things, he imagined Rykte saying, and then think this gives us the right to claim them. The walk had worn him out. His sides felt bruised, his hands and arms still tingled, and the sensations coming through his feet and legs were broken, irregular. It came and went in waves, getting slowly stronger all the time. What will I do? he wondered again, and thought of Rasmus, not lying exactly, but very far from telling him the whole truth. He thought of the keepers, their singleness of purpose and the almost blithe insouciance that he had seen in Mahonri, of the way they seemed able to forgive almost anything if they could get one more person (if person was still the right word) to join their cause.

He thought of Rykte and the way he had stepped out of things, the kind of solitary life he seemed to lead on the edge of things, a life of apparent profound disengagement. Was it a life he could live as well?

And then he thought of the technician, the look of fear in his eyes when Horkai had almost by reflex started to strangle him. He thought of the several dozen people surrounding Rasmus, dirty and pale and malnourished, none of them much under forty, a whole generation missing beneath them, if not two. He thought of Qanik, comfortable with himself and his role as a mule, stolid and unshiftable in his beliefs. And of Qatik, much less so, a little more acerbic, beginning to be infected by doubt. And of the promise he had made to Qatik before he died.

He thought again about himself, about his past that had been lost somewhere deep within his frozen brain while he was in storage, or perhaps lost in some other way. What had he been? Had he really been a fixer, or was that just another of Rasmus’s near lies? Was he a good person or a bad person? What did I used to be? he asked himself, and then realized that, no, that wasn’t the right question to ask. The right question was not what did he used to be, but what was he going to be now?

BUT TO THAT QUESTION there was no immediate answer. Days went by. At first he worried constantly about his illness, wondering when he’d soon lose all feeling, all sensation. But soon his legs were working again, completely. He was walking without crutches with no sign that he had ever been ill, that he was likely to die, that anything was wrong with him at all. Rykte tested his reflexes, asked him how he was feeling, helped him if he asked for help, but mostly left him on his own.

Some days Horkai would stay in the house, choosing one of the books piled in the bathroom to read, having a discussion or genial argument with Rykte if he was there. Other days he would wander the neighborhood, breaking into empty and collapsed houses, looking at faded family pictures, at piles of bones huddled in the corner of cellars. Some houses were impossible to enter, were completely collapsed or so close to it that he didn’t feel he could risk going in. Others, however, had rooms relatively intact. Here a fence would still be standing, but just a few yards away it would be blown flat to the ground, with nothing to indicate why it had fallen in one spot but was still standing in another. It was as if the Kollaps (unless it was simply the collapse) had been random and fickle, unpredictable.

Other times he found his footsteps leading him relentlessly back to the other house, the one containing the storage tank. He would remove the boards from the fence and go through, step down into the noisy basement, and then stare through the lid at the cylinder covered in red writing. He would stay there staring, sometimes with his finger touching the switch. But in the end he would always climb back up the stairs and leave without doing anything. Sometimes when he came out, he’d find Rykte in the backyard, as if he’d been following him. He’d look expectantly at Horkai until Horkai shook his head, and then he’d smile just a little and step back through the fence and disappear.

26

LATER, HE REALIZED IT might have gone on like that for years. He might have slowly grown older exploring the neighborhood, reading, looking for signs that life was beginning again, wandering, and every once in a while—less and less as time went on—crossing the irrigation ditch and the fence to stare into the storage tank. But after four or five months, something happened that made everything change.

He had wandered maybe four, maybe five streets away, tracing the way the moss in the stream changed as you continued down it, thicker and greener here, almost entirely gone there, but slowly starting to thicken and spread.

He was on his knees, his face a few inches from the water when he heard something. At first, he assumed it was Rykte, probably out exploring as well, but then he heard a voice.

“… somewhere around here,” he heard the voice saying.

For a moment he assumed it was Rykte speaking to himself, even though speaking to himself wasn’t a habit Rykte seemed to have. But there was something wrong with the voice, something strange about it.

And then he heard another voice. It said, “Give me the map.”

He got back up to his feet, carefully peered over the remains of the cinder block wall. There, just on the other side, on the roadway, stood two figures in dark hazard suits, rifles slung over their shoulders. They were holding a map between them, both of them bent over it.

“No, no,” said the second, pointing. “You see, we turned here. We should have turned here. We have to go that way,” he said, and gestured in the direction of Rykte’s house.

“Are you sure?”

“Am I sure?” said the second, turning his faceplate toward his companion. “No. But I’m sure this is the wrong place. If you have a better idea, let’s hear it.”

The first, grumbling, folded up the map, and they started away.

HE FLED QUICKLY BACK along the stream, back toward the house, pushed through the boards and entered through the back door. “Rykte?” he said. “Rykte?”

“What is it?” said Rykte from the front room.

“They’re coming,” said Horkai. “They’re almost here.”

“I know,” said Rykte, and indeed, when he crossed into the front room, he found that Rykte was already armed, a pistol holstered under one arm and a sawed-off shotgun in his hands. He was standing at the window, which he’d slid open a crack. “Grab what you’d like,” he said without looking around, and gestured toward the weapons table.

HE CLUTCHED A RIFLE NERVOUSLY, standing just a little behind Rykte. They saw the two men in hazard suits well before the pair realized which house it was they were looking for, when they were still standing in the street, gesturing again at their map. And then one of the pair pointed straight at their door.

The pair began coming toward the house, casually unhooking their rifles from their shoulders. Before they were halfway across the dirt yard, Rykte shouted, “That’s far enough!”

The two men froze, the sun glinting off their faceplates, making their expressions invisible. Horkai wondered if he and Rykte were invisible as well.

“Sling your rifles back on your shoulders,” said Rykte. “Or throw them on the ground. Either is okay with me.”

The two faceplates turned toward each other and then each put his rifle back on his shoulders. They raised their hands.

“No need to get hostile,” said one of them.

“We come as friends,” said the other.

“That’d be a first,” said Rykte under his breath. “Who sent you?” he called out.

“Who sent us?” said one.

“That’s what we were just planning to tell you,” said the other.

And then they were silent for so long that Horkai wondered if they expected some kind of response. Rykte, in any case, didn’t give them one.

“We know how serious a person you are,” said one of them, putting his gloved hand across his heart to show his sincerity. “We know how you love your privacy, and believe me the last thing we’d ever want is to disturb that privacy in any way whatsoever. And yet…”

“And yet,” the other continued, “here we are. If we are here, it must be important. If we would risk coming here after all these years only to have you point your gun at our heads, it must be very important indeed.”

“You haven’t told me who sent you,” Rykte said again.

“All in good time,” said the figure on the left. “All in good time.”

“We have to tell it our own way,” said the one on the right.

“Tell it, then,” said Rykte.

“It’d help us,” said Left, “if we knew who we were talking to. Do you mind giving us your name?”

“No names,” said Rykte. “Never any names.”

“No call to be hostile,” said Right. “We’ve known you so long and yet we don’t know what to call you.”

“I like it better that way.”

“All right, all right,” said Left, waving his hands. “We’re all friends here, aren’t we, Mr….”

“Who sent you?” asked Rykte again.

“Who sent us?” said Left. “We’re the same ones as before. There’s only one group you ever see, unless there are others we don’t know about.”

“If I remember correctly,” he said, “last time I told you to go away and never come back.”

“Something like that, something like that,” admitted Right. “And we really did intend to respect your request—have, in fact, respected it for a number of years. How long has it been, Oleg?” he said, turning to the other. “Five years? Six?”

Oh hell, thought Horkai. But in one way he was relieved, glad to know it wasn’t Qatik and Qanik back somehow from the dead.

“More like five, Olaf,” said Oleg, then turned to Rykte. “You see,” he said. “Nothing wrong with calling someone by his name. Olaf and I do it all the time.”

“Five it is, then,” said Olaf. “Which you have to admit, is a long time, almost as long as forever. And as I said before, we wouldn’t have bothered to come now unless we desperately needed you.”

“We need your help,” said Oleg.

“What kind of help do you need?” asked Rykte. “Food?”

“Well…,” said Olaf. “Food is good. Nobody can be indifferent to food. But what we’re talking about here is a more serious issue of survival.”

“There’s a mountain,” said Oleg. “Made all of granite. Inside the mountain lives a group of beings like you.”

“Like me,” said Rykte. “What am I like, according to you?”

“You know,” said Olaf. “Hairless. More or less impervious. That sort of thing.”

“Nice people, I’m sure,” said Oleg. “Just like I’m sure you yourself are at heart. Never met them myself. Only heard about them.”

“You’re getting off track,” said Rykte.

“Anyway,” said Olaf. “These people stole something, something that we desperately need back.”

“We need you to help us get it back,” said Oleg.

“We don’t travel well. It’s too hot out here for us,” said Olaf. “We need someone like you.”

“Why are you asking me?”

“We don’t have anyone else to ask,” said Oleg. “Without you, our people will die. Will you help us?”

“Please?” said Olaf.

“No,” said Rykte.

“No?”

“Can you really be saying no? We’re not asking much of you. Can’t you at least think about it?”

Rykte sighed. “All right,” he said. “I’ll think about it. Come back in five years, and I’ll give you my answer.”

Oleg turned to Olaf. “He’s not taking us seriously,” he said in a stage whisper.

“No, he’s not,” said Olaf.

They turned back to Rykte. “I’m going to ask you again,” said Oleg. “And this time I’ll say please. Did I forget to say please before?”

“You did,” said Olaf, “but I said it for you.”

“Please,” said Oleg. “We need you. It won’t take more than a day or two of your time. Please, help us.”

Rykte didn’t answer; he stayed at the window, brandishing his shotgun.

They waited in silence. Finally, Oleg said, “I’m beginning to get angry.”

“Perfectly understandable,” said Olaf. “Who wouldn’t in our shoes?”

“I’m beginning to wonder what’s stopping me from killing you,” said Oleg. “You won’t help us, you just sit out here on your own, ignoring everybody around you. That’s not very neighborly. What good are you? Why shouldn’t I kill you?”

“Try it and find out.”

“He’s right,” said Olaf. “You might get one of us, but you probably wouldn’t get both of us. There’s two of us, and only one of you.”

“Actually,” said Horkai, “there’s two of him.”

“Two of him?” said Oleg. “Who said that?”

“I did,” said Horkai.

“Do you have a name?” asked Olaf.

“His name is none of your business,” said Rykte.

“I recognize his voice,” said Oleg. “Is Horkai in there with you?”

“Horkai?” said Olaf. “What are you doing in there? What happened to the mission? Why didn’t you come back?”

“It’s us,” said Oleg. “Oleg and Olaf. You remember us, don’t you? We’re your friends.”

“How could he forget us?” asked Olaf.

“Well put, Olaf,” said Oleg. “Horkai,” he said. “If it is in fact you, what happened? Couldn’t you get in? Were you unable to find the cylinder?”

“You should have at least returned to debrief,” said Olaf.

“Did you panic? Go rogue?” asked Oleg.

“Know what happened?” said Olaf. “Weeks after you left, they came. Four of them, or maybe five, hairless bastards just like you but wearing tunics, scarily serene. One of them had a head that looked like it had been crumpled up, eye still growing back, jaw slowly mending, the skin strange and milky in the way that happens with your kind. Wasn’t pretty. I’m guessing you did that to him.”

“You know who they wanted?” asked Oleg.

“Rhetorical question,” said Olaf. “Obviously, they wanted you.”

“But they didn’t find you,” said Oleg.

“No, they didn’t,” said Olaf. “But that didn’t stop them from turning the place upside down. All in the name of goodness and brotherhood, of course, though they weren’t above a little casual torture.”

“As you’d know if you could see the burns through our suits,” said Oleg. “Do we blame you, Horkai? Yes, yes, we do.”

“And yet,” said Olaf. “And yet, we forgive you. You must have gotten it. You must have taken it from them—why else would they have come looking for you?” He extended a hand. “You should give it to us,” he said.

“And return with us to debrief,” said Oleg.

“Like a good little boy,” said Olaf.

“You boys are getting worked up,” said Rykte calmly. “I think it’s time for both of you to move along.”

“Move along?” said Olaf. “Christ, we were just starting to get somewhere.”

“And Horkai wants to come with us, don’t you, Horkai?” said Oleg.

“I don’t think so,” said Horkai.

“Ah,” said Olaf. “So it is you.”

“What if it is?” said Horkai.

“Ignore them,” said Rykte.

“How’s your illness?” asked Oleg.

“Still being sure to take steps to prevent it from moving up your spine?” asked Olaf.

“There is no illness,” said Horkai.

“No illness?” said Oleg. “No, there’s an illness, it just hasn’t manifested itself fully yet. What, you stopped taking preventive measures? You think just because you can survive out here, you’re immune to everything?”

“You poor deluded soul,” said Olaf. “I feel sorry for you.”

“There is no—,” Horkai had started to say when Rykte’s shotgun went off. Horkai jumped. Puffs of dust rose off what was left of a telephone pole over the heads of the pair in hazard suits. Both of them flinched, began patting the fronts of their suits for holes.

Rykte racked the shotgun, the dead shell spitting out onto the floor. “As for me, you’ll have to pretty near sever my head to kill me,” said Rykte in a steady voice. “For you, all it takes is one hole in your suit. If you hurry for shelter, you might not die, but you’d be more than a little sick for a very long time. Just keep that in mind.”

“Why should—?” Olaf started to say, and Rykte fired again, this time throwing up a geyser of dust from the ground near their feet.

“First shot too high, second shot too low,” he said. “Did you read ‘The Three Little Pigs’ when you were young, back before the end of the world? Where do you suppose the next shot is likely to go?” He racked the shotgun. “I think it’s time for you boys to leave.”

They just stared for a moment and then slowly turned, left the yard. At the cracked sidewalk, they stopped and spoke to each other, turning back briefly to look at the house. And then, slowly, they went away.

ONCE THEY WERE GONE, Rykte reloaded the shotgun, put it back on the table beside the door. He sat down in a rocking chair, the pistol out of the holster and balanced across his knees.

“That wasn’t so bad,” he said. “Last time they came, it was worse.”

“What happened?” asked Horkai.

“There were a few more of them,” he said. “And a few less of us. Had to kill a few of them and deliver the heads back to their friends.”

“And then they just left you alone?”

He smiled wryly. “If you deliver enough heads, they tend to do that. At least for a while.”

Horkai sat down on the couch. They stayed there like that for some time, not talking. Then, finally, Horkai spoke.

“They’ll be back, you know,” said Horkai.

“Of course they’ll be back,” said Rykte. “We haven’t killed any of them yet.”

“Should we be preparing for them?” Horkai gestured to the pile of guns on the table.

“We’re prepared,” he said.

“But—”

“They’re going to come and we know they’re coming. They’re planning to try to kill us. We’ve got weapons, they’ve got weapons. That’s all we can do,” he said. He gave Horkai an appraising look. “Unless you want to attack them instead of waiting for them to attack us.”

They sat in silence. “This is my fault,” Horkai finally said.

“I don’t see it that way,” said Rykte.

“I told them I’d do something for them. If I go give them what they want, they’ll leave us alone.”

“Do you really think so?”

Horkai hesitated, then nodded.

“Then you have a better opinion of them than I do,” said Rykte. “These are the people who took away the use of your legs. These are the people who lied to you to get you to do something for them in the first place. Do you really think if you give it to them, they’ll suddenly change? There is always one more thing. There always will be. You’re foolish to go to them.”

“If I don’t go, they’ll just keep coming back. Over and over and over.”

“Don’t be foolish. They’ll do that anyway.”

“Maybe,” said Horkai. “But not nearly so soon.”

Rykte sighed. “You’re wrong about all this. It’s a stupid idea. But it’s your choice.” He tucked his pistol back under his arm. “Maybe I’ll come with you,” he said.

“No, you have no part in this,” said Horkai. “I was the one who agreed, I’m the one who should go.”

Rykte hesitated, then nodded. “If you’re sure,” he said.

“I’m sure,” said Horkai, although inside he wasn’t.

27

LATER, MUCH LATER, just before the end, he had a few minutes to turn all these decisions over in his head, to try to reach an understanding of where and how many times he had gone wrong, to try to figure it out before it was too late, to try to keep a sense of his faults, his errors firmly in his mind at the critical moment so that this time he wouldn’t forget them.

But the problem was that, in retrospect, almost every decision he had made seemed like a mistake.

Which one did he regret most? Was it when he first decided to accept the so-called mission, even though he knew something was wrong, that they weren’t telling him everything, possibly weren’t even telling him the truth? Was it when, inside a mountain made of granite, he had decided to try to kill a man who had been nothing but friendly to him? Or was it when—even though he knew there was no reason for it and every reason against it, even though he knew it was counter not only to his best judgment but to any judgment of any kind, even though he had been warned—he decided to go back and give them what they wanted?

THE FIRST BIT WAS EASY. Rykte switched off the storage unit, shut down the gas generators one by one. A pair of tongs and a small Styrofoam cooler, and the cylinder was out and ready to travel. Horkai took a pistol and a knife, and then Rykte insisted he take a rifle as well.

“You sure you don’t want to reconsider?” asked Rykte as they stood there in front of the house. But Horkai shook his head. Rykte nodded once. “Head for the mountains,” he said. “You’ll probably see the stadium first, make for that. After that, you should be able to find your way.”

They shook hands and then Rykte turned, went back inside.

HE STARTED WALKING toward the mountain, pistol in his pocket, knife in his boot, rifle slung over his back, carefully carrying the cooler in his arms. Is Rykte right? he wondered as he walked. Is it better for humanity to die out?

He walked until he came to the end of a cul-de-sac, then simply walked past the house at the end of it, kicked a hole in an already-broken fence, and continued on through another former backyard, little more than dust now, to move around another house and come out in another circle, another cul-de-sac. He walked across it and through the remains of a house, using the smear of the sun and the mountains to guide him, to keep him heading east. Two more backyards, a shallow culvert between them, and he was on a larger street, this one running north-south. He hesitated a moment, considering cutting through backyards, but in the end followed the street north half a block and then took it east. Ruined cars, two of them next to each other, nearly scoured of paint but with enough left to tell that one had been red, the other green. Like Christmas, he thought absurdly, and was again amazed by what his mind remembered, and what it could not.

It was a residential development, all houses, no apartments. The houses were single-story, brick ranch homes almost identical in appearance, scattered through with a smattering of bungalows and split-level ranches, the latter largely collapsed. The ranch houses, too, were often partly down or missing their roofs. He followed the road up a gentle slope until it curved north to end in a cul-de-sac. He pushed past a house and went east, climbing a steep slope that seemed to give way beneath him almost as fast as he progressed until, panting, he arrived at the top of a crumbling parking lot facing a derelict church.

The front of the church had collapsed, the roof sloping down to touch the ground. He left the cooler on the pavement and climbed this roof, the structure creaking underneath him, until he had a view down to the lake and up toward the mountain. He carefully scanned the foothills until, finally, he saw the stadium, realized he was much farther south than he’d thought. He traced a tentative path through the streets with his eyes, then climbed down and started off again.

THE SUN, HE COULD SEE, was starting its descent, though it was still a few hours from setting. He passed through the remains of backyards, slowly traveling northeast now, stopping, when he had opportunity, to climb a brick wall or a roof and look again and reorient himself.

He came to a river, its water still red, this one with a different sort of plant life running along the bottom of it, long and filamental and recoiling at the touch, almost more animal than plant. One or two water bugs, too, though more like underwater roaches than like the water striders he remembered watching when he was a child. He watched the tendril of a plant suddenly snap itself around one, suck it under. Yes, he thought, life was coming back, but it was coming back as something else, utterly unlike what it had been before. Another few decades, and perhaps it would no longer be a world humans could survive in. Chary of the plants in the water, he walked along the river until he found a place narrow enough to leap across.

From there, he told himself, he would aim roughly for the place on the mountain where the letter had been; that would lead him directly across the university.

It would have been simple. He would have done it, too, except after just a few blocks he caught a glimpse to the south of a large building, the sun glinting off it. It was, he could see even from here, an old town capitol, made of stone, pillars running along the front at regular intervals. Topping it was a metal dome. It reminded him of his dreams.

He stopped and stared for a long time. What does it matter? he told himself. I dreamed about a dome, so what? That doesn’t mean it was this dome. I have a purpose, there is no point deviating from it.

But when he started again, he was moving not toward the university but south, toward the dome.

WELL BEFORE HE ARRIVED, he looped the cooler over one shoulder by the handle, had the rifle out, the safety off. The building, he saw now that he was closer, had partly collapsed, one of the wings little more than a façade. But the middle section and the dome were still intact.

He circled the building once, looking for signs of life. No signs of recent garbage, no plywood or metal sheets blocking the windows, nothing. Most of the windows were broken all or partly out and there were cracks in the walls, some of them big enough to push through. But he decided instead to climb the front steps, go directly in.

The entrance hall was large and long, with a vaulted ceiling made of glass and steel, most of the glass gone now. It opened up into a grand rectangular room with the dome topping it, pendentives stretching down the walls to ground themselves in each corner. There were, just below the dome itself, on the vaulting of each of the pendentives, remnants of old murals, the images themselves little more than ghosts now. Here he could distinguish a human shape, there a bit of what must have been tree or mountain, but if there was a narrative to be read, he couldn’t follow it. The arches themselves were studded with stone, rows and rows of stone flowers carved into them. The dome itself was plastered on the inside and he could see remains of a mural there as well, bits of cloud and sky. Windows around the base of the dome gave light.

A circle had been marked on the floor, a thin line of dark stone against the lighter stone, and another circle around it, and one more, this one in a lighter greenish stone cut through with darker lines, the whole of it vaguely giving Horkai the impression of a target. He circled around the circle but did not enter it.

He felt the columns of the pendentives, but they weren’t sticky, no gluey gray substance. He looked up at the dome, scrutinized it carefully. Yes, there was something there—dark lines, streaks along the dome, cutting through the remains of the mural. But whether they were natural wear and tear or something else, he couldn’t tell. He stayed staring up at the dome, waiting for something to move, but nothing did.

In the end, he passed under one of the arches and moved into the other part of the building. He climbed a mostly intact stairway and circled a stone balcony, having to leap across it in some places, not altogether sure how stable it was. A door marked SENATE CHAMBERS was half off its hinges, its handle stained with blood. He pushed through.

The floor just inside the door was smeared with blood. Beyond that were collapsed desks and scattered chairs, as well as heaps of black phones. In the front, a dais, a larger desk on it. On it was a body.

He moved carefully forward, rifle ready. The body was relatively recent, not the dessicated corpses he’d seen while traveling with the mules. It was naked. A stake had been hammered into its chest. It was extremely pale and hairless, just like him. He could not tell if it was a man or a woman; the facial features were ambiguous and the hips could have belonged either to a boyish girl or an effeminate man. It had what looked like the beginnings of breasts, but the body itself was chubby and the nipples looked more like those of a man than a woman. Between the legs there was no sex, neither male nor female, but instead what looked like series of a half dozen strings of pearls in a strange gelatinous casing that seemed to have been extruded from the flesh itself. He bent to get a closer look, but couldn’t figure their purpose. He was just reaching out to touch them when the creature opened one eye.

He stumbled back, bringing the rifle up, and shot it in the temple. The head jerked to one side and blood began to drip as slow as tar from the hole, and then, even as he watched, the bleeding stopped and the hole turned opaque.

Not dead after all, he thought. He stayed at a distance, wondering what he should do. Part of him—must be the human part, he thought—wanted to kill it, wanted to finish the task someone else had started. Another part, though, felt that, whatever it was, it should be given the same chance he himself had been given.

He came close again, this time reached out and tried to tug the stake from the chest. He got it up only a little bit before realizing that the flesh around it had already begun to insinuate it, to make it part of itself. He let it go.

Always remove the head, the human part of him thought.

Before it could think anything else, he fled.

HE CUT BACK roughly the way he had come, passing through old yards now reduced to dirt and crossing through ruined fences. He couldn’t stop thinking about the creature, wondering what was wrong with it, why it seemed to have sprouted strange appendages in place of its sex. After a while, he had to stop and reorient himself, realized he’d gone too far.

Back to the original purpose, he told himself. Focus, Horkai. He came to a surgery center, followed almost immediately by a sprawling medical center, which gave some evidence of being inhabited—nothing he could really put his finger on, just a feeling that things had been arranged, straightened up a little. He thought about exploring it, but in the end gave it a wide berth, thinking of what he’d seen in the town capitol.

He saw a Mormon church, and then, almost immediately, little more than a block away, another one. He saw what must have been a soccer or baseball field—too hard to say now. Another field, all dirt and dust, this one with the cracked remnants of a track encircling it and a set of rotted wooden bleachers. A high school and, fairly close on it, additional fields: the start of the university.

From there it was no time at all before he was standing near the ruined library pounding on the iron door, shouting Rasmus’s name.

28

IT WAS SOME TIME BEFORE the door swung open. When it did, it opened to a man in a baggy hazard suit, though of a thinner, less resistant sort than either the mules or the twins had had. When he saw who it was, the man immediately tried to close the door, but Horkai already had his foot in.

“What is it?” asked the man nervously. Horkai could see through the faceplate that the man was thin, old. “What do you want?”

“I need to see Rasmus,” said Horkai.

“No,” said the man. “I’m sorry. You can’t come in.”

“I’m here to report,” said Horkai. “I’ve come to report.”

“No, I’m sorry, I already told you—”

And that was as far as he got before Horkai butted him in the chest. The man went tumbling backwards, clattering down the steps, and Horkai was in, shutting the door behind him. He went down the steps quickly, stepping over the body of the man, who was groaning and beginning to struggle to get up. He wound down the stairwell to the room below.

They were almost all there, almost the whole community, the whole hive, gathered in the common room at the bottom of the stairs, though they drew back as he came near, as if afraid to be touched by him. He came down to the last step and stood there, holding the cooler in his arms, waiting. It was only after a moment that he became conscious of how many of them were armed, of how many weapons were pointing at him.

“Rasmus?” he shouted. “I’ve come to report.”

The members of the crowd murmured briefly to one another and then fell silent. For a moment nothing happened. He was about to repeat himself when a door in the back of the room opened and out came Rasmus.

He was flanked by Olaf and Oleg, their hoods off but the hazard suits still on.

“You see,” said Olaf, when he saw Horkai. “We told you.”

“And so you did,” said Rasmus. “Hello, Josef. I must admit we weren’t expecting you. And walking, too.”

“I’ve come to report,” he said again.

“A little late, aren’t you? We’d written you off as either dead or a turncoat quite some time ago.”

“I have something for you,” said Horkai.

“Oh?” said Rasmus. “And what might that be?”

He shook the cooler. “This,” he said. He opened the cooler’s lid and tilted it so they could see the cylinder inside. “Mission accomplished.”

Briefly Rasmus looked dumbfounded, his composure lost for the first time that Horkai could remember. But after a moment he gathered himself again, his face taking on its mask of benign indifference. Then he smiled.

“Well done, Josef,” he said. “Why don’t you come into my office and we’ll talk about how best to reward you.”

IT WAS UNCANNILY LIKE HIS first visit to Rasmus’s office so many months before, the only difference being that instead of them easing him into a chair, he was on his feet and could walk to a chair and sit on his own. He instinctively took the chair he’d sat in before, the one behind the desk. Rasmus hesitated a moment, almost said something, then went to sit in the central chair of the three facing the desk, Oleg and Olaf flanking him.

“Comfortable?” Rasmus asked, an edge to his voice.

Horkai nodded. “Good enough for now,” he said.

He sat there with the cooler on his lap, Rasmus staring expectantly at him.

“Well?” he said. “You wanted to report. Go ahead and report.”

“I have something for you,” said Horkai. “I’m going to give it to you and then I’ll consider our bargain complete. And then I want you to leave me alone.”

“If it’s really what we want,” said Rasmus, “I imagine we might be able to accommodate you.”

Horkai nodded once and put the cooler on the desk. He pushed it toward the trio of men until Rasmus bent forward and took it.

He opened the cooler, looked at the cylinder again.

“It wouldn’t survive unfrozen this long,” said Rasmus.

“It’s been frozen,” said Horkai. “I’ve kept it frozen until now. Though it’s probably starting to thaw.”

Rasmus reached out and prodded it, quickly yanked his finger away. He closed the lid, handed the cooler to Olaf, whispered in his ear. Olaf nodded sharply, then stood up and left, Oleg following him out.

“They’ll handle it,” said Rasmus. “We’ll get to work immediately, make sure everything is in order. If it is, we can’t thank you enough.”

“And if it’s not?”

Rasmus shrugged. “Then we still have a problem. We’ll still need your help.”

Horkai shook his head. “I’m done helping,” he said.

“Oh?” said Rasmus. “Then why come back at all?”

“To make a good-faith effort to finish what I agreed to do, to tell you that Qanik and Qatik were faithful to their purpose, and to warn you from now on to leave me alone.”

Rasmus nodded. “You’ve been talking to that other one,” he said. “The one who won’t give his name. What sort of craziness has he been pumping into your head?”

“It’s my decision,” said Horkai. “It’s not him, it’s me.”

“Josef,” he said. “We found you. My father found you. We stored you for years, sometimes diverting power sorely needed for other things to keep you alive. Despite your difference, we made you part of our community—”

“—your hive,” he interrupted.

“Yes,” said Rasmus, “sometimes we call it a hive. What does that matter? What matters is that we took you in and looked out for you and made you one of us. And now you intend to leave us without repaying us for your kindness?”

“Did that kindness include lying to me about an illness and then crippling me?”

“I told you before, anything I knew about you, I had from my father. I only know what he told me, which was what you had told him. If you don’t believe it, that’s your business—you’re the only one who will suffer the consequences.”

“Why did you lie to me about what was in the cylinder?”

“I didn’t lie to you,” said Rasmus. “I told you as much as you needed to know, enough to make you do what, if you could think of yourself as a proper member of the community, you should have done in any case.”

“I’m willing to bet that the cylinder was never stolen from you. That the only time this cylinder was ever stolen was when I stole it.”

“I have dozens of lives on my hands to worry about. I have the continuation of a community to attend to, Josef. Even more than that: the continuation of a species. What does it matter, next to that, if you weren’t told things in a way that you could clearly understand them? What does it matter, next to that, if the factuality of certain things was, let us say, questionable?”

“You’re a bastard,” said Horkai.

“No need for name calling,” said Rasmus.

“I’ve fulfilled my part of the bargain,” said Horkai. “Now I wash my hands of you.”

“Let’s wait and see,” said Rasmus.

“No,” said Horkai. “I’m leaving.” He stood and started for the door.

“I still have something you want,” said Ramsus.

Horkai stopped, his hand on the knob. “And what might that be?” he asked.

“Knowledge,” said Rasmus. “Answers.”

And perhaps, of everything, perhaps this was what Horkai regretted most. That upon hearing these words, he turned and returned to his seat instead of going out the door and up the stairs and leaving forever.

29

“ASK ME ANYTHING,” SAID RASMUS. “Anything you want. I’ll answer your questions honestly.”

“Why should I believe you?” asked Horkai.

“Because you don’t have any other choice,” said Rasmus. “The only person who possibly has answers to your questions is sitting here before you. Either you listen to him or you don’t.”

Horkai hesitated, finally nodded. “All right,” he said. “What was I before the Kollaps?”

“Truly? Nobody knows. My father found you, just as I said, dragged you to safety, nursed you back to health. You never spoke of who you were before or of what you’d done, but whether because then, as now, you had holes in your memory or because you simply didn’t want to talk about it, who can say? My father claimed that most everybody was like that in those early days. That everyone had lost enough that you knew better than to talk about it.”

“There wasn’t anything with me when he found me?”

“No, nothing. It was true what I said before. Everything you had was burned. It was unimaginable that you yourself survived.”

“So I wasn’t a fixer? A detective?”

Rasmus shrugged. “Who knows? I suppose you might have been.”

“And Horkai’s my real name?”

“Horkai’s the only name I have for you.”

“Why lie to me? Why tell me that I was ill?”

Rasmus hesitated. “I already told you,” he finally said, “that’s what I heard from my father. If I had the facts wrong, I’m sorry.”

“You’re still lying,” said Horkai.

“Believe what you want,” Rasmus said.

“What about the mules?”

“What about them?”

“They kept saying that one of them was first, but insisting that they weren’t brothers. What did they mean by that? Why are they mules?”

Rasmus was silent for a time, staring down at his hands. “You’re not ready to hear the answer to that,” he finally said.

“Who are you to tell me what I’m ready for?”

“Let’s just say you’re not in the right mind-set.”

“Tell me anyway.”

And when Rasmus shook his head, Horkai took out his pistol and aimed it at his head.

“More proof that you’re not in the right mind-set,” said Rasmus, still calm.

“Tell me or I’ll shoot,” said Horkai.

“If you do that, then who will answer your questions?”

And then Horkai was out of his chair and around the desk. He swung the butt of his pistol, knocked Rasmus and his chair over.

“Tell me,” he said again.

Rasmus lay there wincing, a gash on his cheek gushing blood, his eye already starting to swell shut. Even so, Horkai had to hit him again before he would speak.

“Because, like you, they’re not really human,” he said.

“Not human? How?”

“You were made out there,” said Rasmus, gesturing. “Some weird mutation or transformation triggered by the events of the Kollaps. The mules we made here.”

“What do you mean, made?”

“In a laboratory.”

“But they’re flesh and blood.”

“They’re not human. They’re grown in a solution. Recycled genetic material, manipulated to provide certain characteristics. They’re not so much brothers as slight and deliberate variations of the same being. Sturdy bastards, mules, but not as stable as humans. They’re made too quickly. Even without exposure to the outside, they last a decade or two, then start to break down. They’re disposable. But we always keep a few new ones at the ready.”

“They’re genetic experiments,” said Horkai.

“They’re members of the community,” said Rasmus. “The hive. But in the same way a dog is a member of a human family. They know their place, they’ve been trained to stay in it.”

It made him furious. He bent down and slapped Rasmus.

“Told you that you weren’t ready,” said Rasmus. “You haven’t had to live through the aftermath—you slept through it. You haven’t had to face facts the way the rest of us have for the last thirty years.”

“What’s to stop me from killing you?”

“All you’re doing with talk like that is proving that you’re an animal, that you shouldn’t be let loose,” said Rasmus, and he smiled.

Frustrated, Horkai put the gun away, returned to his seat. He leaned his elbows on the table, held his head in his hand. He heard the sound of Rasmus slowly getting up, breathing heavily, then setting his chair aright, sitting in it.

“Feel better?” Rasmus asked, his voice thick with sarcasm.

“I’m going now,” he said.

“All right,” said Rasmus. “Have it your way.”

BUT WHEN HE OPENED THE DOOR, there were Olaf and Oleg, coming back. They shouldered their way past him.

“Should be okay,” Olaf said. “Technician says that most won’t survive but a few will. Enough to get started.”

“All right,” said Rasmus. “Have him preserve the rest as well. We’ll salvage what material we can.”

“What happened to you?” asked Oleg.

“I had a little fall,” said Rasmus.

The twins both glanced at Horkai.

“Nothing to worry about,” Rasmus said. “A minor disagreement.”

“You’re going?” asked Olaf.

“I’m going,” said Horkai. “I did what you asked.”

“No hard feelings,” said Rasmus. He held out his hand. When Horkai didn’t reach out to take it, he said, “I’m not asking you to be friends. I’m just trying to thank you for what you’ve done.”

Reluctantly, he stretched out his hand, took Rasmus’s own. Then he released it and turned and reached for the handle of the door.

And that was the moment they chose to fall upon him.

HE FELT A HEAVY BLOW on the back of his head, stumbled, and fell into the door. He slid down, felt the door vibrate and crack as it was struck just above his head. He turned and saw Olaf trying to work a hammer out of the wood, with Oleg trying to get past his brother and at him as well. He kicked hard and heard the crack as Oleg’s leg gave, the cry as he went down. He looked up and there was the hammer coming down. He turned his head so it glanced off his neck to break or bruise his collarbone. He was fumbling in his pocket, trying to get the gun out, but it was stuck, he couldn’t get to it, and the hammer was coming down again. He swept his legs sideward and knocked Olaf’s feet out from under him, the hammer striking his arm and making it go numb, all Olaf’s weight landing on him. And then he was scrambling, pushing Olaf off, struggling up. He looked up just in time to have the back of a chair splintered over his face.

He went down, groaning, and immediately someone was on him, holding his face down against the ground, immobilizing one of his arms. He tried to roll over with the other arm, but then there were other people on him as well, holding him down, keeping him down, a dozen or more of them. He groaned again.

“Josef,” he heard Rasmus’s voice hiss in his ear. “So you’ve decided to stay with us after all.”

And then they were tearing his shirt up close to the collar, ripping it open, and someone was pulling the gun out of his pocket, stripping the rifle away, pulling his boots off as well.

“Get the hypodermic,” said Rasmus.

“Look what I found in his boot,” one of the twins said somewhere above him, either Olaf or Oleg, he couldn’t tell which.

“Throw it over with the other weapons,” said Rasmus. “And for God’s sake, get the hypodermic.” And suddenly Horkai’s head was free. He jerked it up, trying to look around, struggling and failing to break free. He roared with frustration. And then others’ hands were on his head again, holding it down, grinding it into the floor.

He felt a sharp pricking in his neck, and jerked.

“Hold the bastard still!” yelled Rasmus. “Hold him!”

He felt the pricking again, then briefly an intense coldness followed by a burning and an itching all over his body, and then an intense wave of pain.

He heard someone above him laughing.

He cried out and tried to throw them off, but already his limbs felt thick and distant. He felt the hands leave his head. He tried to lift it and still could, but when he tried to move his hands, they refused to obey him.

And then Rasmus was there in front of him, holding his head off the ground by the hair, still breathing heavily. He bent down so his head was almost touching the ground, so he could look Horkai straight in the eye.

“There,” said Rasmus. “As peaceful as a baby.” And then struck him in the face, over and over again, until he passed out.