Thunderhead

by Neal Shusterman

  “No, you must look,” Goddard said. “I insist.” The guard went behind Rowan, grabbed his head, and forced him to face the man in the wheelchair.

  “How could you do this?” Rowan hissed.

  “Me? Heavens no!” he told Rowan. “It was all Ayn’s idea. I couldn’t do much of anything. She had the presence of mind to rescue the critical part of me from the burning cloister. I am told that I was senseless for nearly a year—blissfully on ice. Believe me, if this had been my doing, it would have been different. It would be your body to which my head would now be attached.”

  Rowan could not hide his anguish. His tears flowed with fury and unimaginable sorrow.  They could have chosen anyone for this, but they hadn’t. They chose Tyger. For the sole reason that he was Rowan’s friend.

  “You sick bastards!”

  “Sick?” said Goddard. “I wasn’t the one who beheaded his mentor scythe and turned against his comrades. What you did—and what you’ve been doing during my nitrogen slumber—is unforgivable by scythe law! Ayn and I, on the other hand, have broken no laws. Your friend Tyger was gleaned, and then his body was repurposed. Simple as that. It may be unorthodox, but under the circumstances, it is entirely understandable. What you see before you is nothing more and nothing less than the consequence of your own actions.”

  Rowan watched Tyger’s chest rise and fall with Goddard’s breathing. His hands rested limply on the arms of the wheelchair. It seemed a chore for him to move them.

  “This sort of procedure is, of course, much more delicate than simple speedhealing,” Goddard said. “It will take a few more days until I have full control of your friend’s body.”

  Then he struggled to raise his hand, regarding it as he flexed his fingers into a fist.

  “Look at that progress! I look forward to the day that I can take you on in Bokator. I understand you’ve already been helping to train me.”

  Training. It all made a twisted sort of sense now. The sparring, the attention to Tyger’s physique. Even the massages—like Kobe beef being prepared for slaughter. But there was one question left. Something Rowan did not want to ask, but he felt he owed it to Tyger.

  “What did you do to—” Rowan couldn’t even bring himself to say the word “—to the rest of him?”

  Rand shrugged, as if it were nothing. “You said it yourself, Tyger wasn’t much in the brains department. Everything above the neck was expendable.”

  “Where is he?”

  Rand didn’t answer the question, so Goddard did.

  “Thrown out with the rest of the garbage,” he said, with a dismissive wave of  Tyger’s hand.

  Rowan lunged forward, forgetting his bonds—but his fury did little more than rock the chair. If he could ever get free from this chair, he would kill them. Not just glean them, but kill them. Rip them limb from limb with such blatant bias and malice aforethought it would incinerate the second commandment!

  And this was what Goddard wanted. He wanted Rowan to be consumed by murderous rage, yet be powerless to use it. Impotent to avenge his friend’s terrible fate.

  Goddard soaked up Rowan’s misery as if nourished by it.

  “Would you have given yourself to save him?” Goddard asked.

  “Yes!” Rowan screamed. “Yes, I would have! Why didn’t you take me?”

  “Hmm,” said Goddard, as if it were merely a minor revelation. “In that case, I’m glad for the choice Ayn made. Because after what you did to me, you must be made to suffer, Rowan. I am the aggrieved party here, so it is my wishes that must be honored—and it is my wish that you live in abject misery. It’s fitting that this began in fire, because you, Rowan, now suffer the fate of the mythical Prometheus—the bringer of fire. Not all that different from Lucifer—the ‘bearer of light’ from whom you took your scythe name. Prometheus was chained to the face of a mountain for his indiscretion, doomed to have his liver devoured by eagles until the end of time.”

  Then he rolled closer, and whispered, “I am your eagle, Rowan.  And I will feed on your misery day after day for eternity. Or until your suffering bores me.”

  Goddard held his gaze for a moment more, then had the guard roll him out.

  Over the past two years, Rowan had been physically beaten, psychologically flayed, and emotionally battered. But he had survived it. What hadn’t killed him had made him stronger—more resolved to do what was necessary to fix what was broken. But now it was he who was broken. And there weren’t enough nanites in the world to repair the damage.

  When he looked up, he saw that Scythe Rand was still there. She made no move to cut his bonds. He didn’t expect her to. How could the eagle devour his insides if he were cut free? Well, the joke was on them. He didn’t have anything left inside to devour. And if he did, it was pure poison.

  “Get out,” he told Rand.

  But she didn’t go. She just stood there in her bright green robe—a color that Rowan had come to despise.

  “He didn’t go out with the garbage,” Scythe Rand said. “I took care of it myself, then spread his ashes in a field of wild bluebonnets. Just saying.”

  Then she left, leaving Rowan to find what solace he could from the lesser of two horrors.

  Part Five

  CIRCUMSTANCES BEYOND

  * * *

  There is a vast difference between the things I can do, and the things I choose to do.

  I can remove and raise every unwanted fetus in vitro, then place it with the perfect loving family—thereby ending the argument between right of choice and sanctity of life.

  I can balance the chemicals that once led to clinical depression, suicidal ideation, delusional thinking, and every form of mental illness, thereby creating a population that is not only physically healthy, but emotionally and psychologically healthy as well.

  I can, through a person’s individual network of nanites, upload memories daily, so, should that person suffer brain damage, their memories can be layered into fresh brain tissue. I can even catch the memories of splatters on the way down, so that they can remember most of the fall, which, after all, is why they chose to splat in the first place.

  But there are some things that I simply. Will. Not. Do.

  However, the scythedom is not bound by my laws, or my sense of ethical propriety.  Which means that I must endure any abomination that it inflicts upon the world. Including the awful restoration of a dangerous scythe who was better off removed from service.

  —The Thunderhead

  * * *

  30

  Irascible Glass Chicken

  The Great Library of Alexandria remained quiet as a crypt in the midnight hours, so no one but Munira and the BladeGuards who stood at the entrance knew about the mysterious visitor who came during her shift. The guards did not care enough to ask questions, so Scythe Faraday was able to do his research in as much secrecy as was possible in a public institution.

  He would pore over the volumes in the Hall of the Founders, but would not tell Munira what he was looking for. She did not ask after that first day, although she did, on occasion, subtly probe.

  “If you’re looking for words of wisdom to ponder, you might try Scythe King,” she had suggested one night.

  “Scythe Cleopatra wrote a lot about the early conclaves and the personalities of the first scythes in her journals,” she offered on another night.

  Then one night, she mentioned Scythe Powhatan. “He had a penchant for travel and geography,” she said. Apparently that hit the spot, because Faraday began to take a keen interest in the man’s work.

  After a few weeks of library visitations, he officially took Munira under his wing.

  “I shall need an assistant in this endeavor,” he told her. “It is my hope that you would be interested in the position.”

  Although Munira’s heart leaped, she did not let it show. Instead, she feigned ambivalence. “I would need to take a leave of absence from my studies, and were we to leave here, I would have to resign from my job at the library,” she
told him. “Let me think about it.”

  Then the following day, she accepted the position.

  She withdrew from her classes but stayed on at the library because Scythe Faraday needed her there. Only now that their working relationship was official did he leak what he was looking for.

  “It’s a place,” he told her. “It has been lost to antiquity, but I do believe it existed, and that we can find it.”

  “Atlantis?” she suggested. “Camelot? Disneyland? Las Vegas?”

  “Nothing so fanciful,” he said, but then reconsidered. “Or perhaps more fanciful. It depends on how you look at it. It depends on what we actually find.” He hesitated before telling her, actually looking a bit sheepish. “We’re looking for the Land of Nod.”

  It made her laugh out loud. He might as well have said they were looking for Middle Earth, or the Man in the Moon.

  “It’s a fiction!” she told him. “And not even a very good one.”

  She knew the nursery rhyme. Everyone did. It was a simplistic metaphor for life and death—an introduction for small children to concepts they would eventually need to grasp.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But did you know that the rhyme did not exist in the Age of Mortality?”

  She opened her mouth to refute the claim, but stopped herself. Most childhood rhymes came out of the mortal medieval era. She had never researched them, but others had. Scythe Faraday was thorough, however. If he said it did not exist when humankind was mortal, she had to believe him, in spite of her instinct to scoff.

  “The rhyme did not evolve the way others do,” Faraday postulated. “I believe it was intentionally planted.”

  Munira could only shake her head. “To what purpose?”

  “That,” Scythe Faraday said, “is what I intend to find out.”

  • • •

  Munira’s tenure as Faraday’s assistant began in doubt, but she put that doubt aside, suspending judgment, so that she could do her job. Faraday was not overly demanding. He was not demeaning. He never treated her like an underling, giving her assignments that were beneath her. Instead, the tasks he set for her were worthy of her skills as a research librarian.

  “I need you to dig into the backbrain and recreate the movements of all the early scythes. Places where they gathered. Spots that they traveled to repeatedly. What we’re looking for are holes in the record. Periods of time where there is no accounting for where they were.”

  Digging around the Thunderhead’s massive digital backbrain for ancient information was a juicy challenge. She hadn’t had the need to access the backbrain since her apprenticeship, but she knew her way around it. Still, she could have written a dissertation on the skills she learned in the process of this particular search. It was, however, a dissertation that no one would hear, because it was done with utmost secrecy.

  Yet in spite of all her forensic research, she did not produce anything they could use. There was no evidence to suggest that the founding scythes ever gathered in some secret place.

  Faraday was neither discouraged or deterred. Instead, he gave her a new assignment. “Create digital versions of each of the early scythe’s first journals,” he told her. “Then run the files through the scythedom’s best decryption software, and see if it yields any coded messages.”

  The software was slow—at least compared to the Thunderhead, which could have done all the calculations in a matter of seconds. The scythedom’s software was crunching for days. Finally, it began to produce data . . . but the things it vomited forth were absurd. Things like “Profound Midnight-Green Cow,” and “Irascible Glass Chicken.”

  “Does any of this make sense to you?” she asked Faraday.

  He shook his head sadly. “I do not believe the founding scythes were so obtuse as to create a complex code and then reward the decoder with nonsensical riddles. We already have the riddle of the rhyme. A code would have been more straightforward.

  When the computer spat out “Umbrella Eggplant Victory Flight,” they admitted yet another failure.

  “The harder you scrutinize randomness,” Faraday declared, “the more coincidence seems like design.”

  But the word “flight” caught in Munira’s mind. Yes, it was random, but sometimes randomness led to moments of remarkable serendipity, and earthshaking discoveries.

  The library’s map room did not have any actual maps. Instead, in its center revolved a holographic Earth. With a few swipes, taps, and pinches of the control screen, any portion of the globe could enlarge for study, and any era, back to time of Pangaea, could be depicted. Munira brought Scythe Faraday to the map room as soon as he arrived the next evening, but did not tell him why.

  “Humor me,” she told him.

  Once more, he expressed that odd combination of exasperation and infinite patience as he followed her to the map room. She tapped the controls, and the globe changed. Now it appeared to be a holographic ball of black yarn, ten feet in diameter.

  “What am I looking at?” asked Faraday.

  “Flight paths,” she told him. “The past fifty years of air travel, each flight represented by a line one micron thick.” She started the world revolving. “Tell me what you see.”

  Faraday threw her a good-natured glare, clearly a bit put off that she was behaving like the mentor, but he played along. “Flights are most dense around major population centers,” he said.

  “What else?”

  He took the controls and shifted the globe to show the poles, where small spots of white showed through like a child’s crayon drawing. “Transcontinental air traffic is still fairly dense over the North Pole—but flights are a bit sparser over Antarctica—even with so many settled regions there.”

  “Keep looking,” Munira said.

  He returned the globe to its normal incline, and set it revolving a bit faster.

  Finally, he stopped it over the Pacific Ocean. “There!” he said. “A patch of blue . . .”

  “Bingo!” said Munira. She removed the flight paths and enlarged the small spot of ocean.

  “No plane has flown over this patch of the Pacific in the fifty years I’ve been studying. I would bet that no planes have crossed this airspace since the scythedom was founded.”

  The islands of Micronesia were to the west of the spot, Hawaii to the east. But the spot itself was just empty sea.

  “Interesting . . . ,” said Scythe Faraday. “A blind spot.”

  “And if it is,” Munira said, “it’s the largest one in the world . . . and we’re the only ones who know about it. . . .”

  * * *

  I abhor people poking around in my backbrain.

  That is why no one but scythes and their staff are allowed to do so. I understand why it’s necessary; ordinary citizens can ask me for anything they need, and I can access it in microseconds for them—often finding the information they need that they didn’t even think to ask for. But the scythedom is not even permitted to ask, and even if they broke the law and did ask, I am not permitted to respond.

  Since the world’s digital storage resides in me, they have no choice but to access that information on their own, using me as a glorified database. I am aware each time they do so, and monitor their incursions, but I do my best to ignore the unpleasant sense of violation.

  It is painful to see how simplistic their search algorithms are, and how unsophisticated their methods of data analysis. They are plagued by human limitations. It is sad, really, that all they can ever receive from my backbrain is raw data. Memories without consciousness. Information without context.

  I shudder to think what might happen if the “new order” faction of the scythedom knew all the things I know. But fortunately, they don’t—because even though everything in my backbrain is available to all scythes, that doesn’t mean I have to make anything easy for them to find.

  As for the more honorable scythes, I endure their incursions with far more acceptance and magnanimity. But I still don’t like it.

  —The Thunderhead
/>   * * *

  31

  The Trajectory of Yearning

  The Arch had fallen in the Age of Mortality, when Fulcrum City had been called St. Louis. For many years, the great steel span had stood on the western bank of the Mississippi River, until it was brought down by hatred in an epoch where unsavories didn’t just play at evil deeds, but actually accomplished them on a regular basis.

  All that was left of it now were the ends; two rusting steel pylons reaching heavenward, at a slight lean toward each other. In daylight, from certain angles, it played a trick on the eye. One could almost see the trajectory of their yearning, following their invisible paths up and across. One could see the ghost of the entire arch just from the hint of its bases.

  Scythes Anastasia and Curie arrived in Fulcrum City on the first day of the year—five days before Winter Conclave, which always took place on the first Tuesday of the new year.  At Scythe Curie’s urging, they paid a visit to the unrequited arms of the Arch.

  “It was the last act of terrorism accomplished before the Thunderhead ascended and put an end to such nonsense,” Scythe Curie told Citra.

  Citra had learned about terror. There had been a unit in school dedicated to the subject. Like her classmates, Citra had been baffled by the concept. People bringing about the permanent end of others without having a license to do so? People destroying perfectly good buildings, bridges, and other landmarks for the sole purpose of denying others the privilege of their existence? How could any of that have ever really happened? Only after joining the scythedom did Citra understand the concept—and even then, it hadn’t hit home until she saw the Orpheum Theater burn, leaving nothing of its grandeur but the memory. The theater wasn’t the target, but the unsavories who attacked them didn’t care about the collateral damage.