Machine Learning

by Hugh Howey

  My neck cramped up, but now something had taken hold of me, some wild thought that this was the right thing to do, to stare at the sun for as long as I was able. Releasing the post, I drifted around in circles there in the dirt, admiring the shapes and colors as they spun in my vision. I saw purple. I saw strangers swim through the sky. When my lids clamped down involuntarily, I used my fingers to pry them open again. The burn and pain went straight through me until it felt like an itch being scratched. I spun and spun and felt the barbed wire catch at my trousers. The fence would keep me in. I thought of Collins spinning around in his little Indian hut. The barbs were suddenly those sticks, poking at me, corralling me. The light shone right through my eyes, down to the base of my skull, and deep into my neck where words are formed. My face grew warm, but now the bright light was cool as it swam through me. I could hear myself laugh. The horse drew away farther, and I cared little.

  When the vision came, it was a thunderclap. A sudden roar, though I realized the words had been there before. They were the buzzing in my brain, nonsense words, but I knew what they meant. I saw them like shapes and things, like swirling dreams. There was shouting, someone on the road with me, a man with my own voice. Crying and crying, fingers pinned my eyes open, and I never wanted to look away from the sun again. I loved it in that instant. I wanted it to fall out of the sky and enter me through my eyeballs; I wanted to let it blow me across the prairie and set everything on fire, to burn that land ahead of its coming, to make room. I saw men and women and children fall before me. I saw an infant thrown into the flames, blood in everyone’s eyes. And the voices, these words foreign and understood that came like pictures directly into my head, this voice on the road that spoke as I spun and spun between the barbed wire and my skittish horse, they sounded like the tongue of a Red Man.

  I woke up and men were dead. My men. Something told me there had been a killing. My head throbbed like my heart was trapped in my skull, had swollen up, and needed out. It took a moment to realize my eyes were open but I wasn’t seeing anything. I could barely make out a shape in front of my face when I waved my hand before it. Groping about, I felt a bunk beneath me, a wall of steel bars behind. I was in the pen. I could feel the firing squad lined up, instruments of death aimed at my chest, could see the men I’d killed.

  “Sir, he’s done stirred.”

  Voices and shuffling feet. I had Arapaho on my tongue, the taste of silver and fire, words like pictures drawn in the dirt, telling me what to do. Something alien had communicated with me. A part of it lived deep inside.

  “Drink some water, son.”

  There was a hand on my wrist, a hand reaching through the bars. A tin of water was pressed into my palm, sloshing cool on my forearm. My lips stung as I drank. I pulled the cup away and touched my mouth, found my lips swollen and cracked. My throat burned. But the horrible throbbing in my eyes and my brain drowned out these lesser hurts.

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Major?” My voice was a pale shadow of its old self. I drank more, ignoring the sting of my fouled lips. “What did I do?” I asked.

  “They found you face-up in the dirt, babbling like you had a few too many. Your horse came back to the fort without you.”

  “I can’t see.”

  “That’s what you’ve been sayin’. Doc said to put you in here where it was dark, that it should come back. You rest up, okay? Can’t afford to lose any more of my men.”

  “How many?”

  I could hear the boards creak as the major shifted his weight. “How many of what, son?”

  “Did I . . . How many dead?” Memories and visions were mixed up in my head. Words I knew and words I didn’t. There were flashes of green and swimming lights in my eyes like an angry campfire. Something was telling me to kill or that I already had, hard to tell which.

  “Get some rest. I’ll send some food over.”

  I nursed my water and decided I hadn’t done the things I thought I had. But I could feel the urge. Some silent screaming beneath my skin, something directing my bones. I was reminded of a visit to Richmond when I was a boy. A friend of my mother’s was a pastor there, took us to his great big church. There was a belfry terribly high off the ground, a circuit of rickety stairs, and at one corner you could peer down at the street like a bird. And something in me felt this urge to jump out and go plummeting down, something so strong that I had to back away and clutch my father, even though I was too old to be holding his hand. And now this demon was in my blood again, but this time to hurt others.

  Long after the tin cup was dry, I continued to pass it back and forth between my hands. It was Collins who brought me my supper.

  “You gone and blinded yourself, ” Collins said, a voice in the darkness. Hinges pealed as he let himself into the pen, and I realized the door had never been locked. I hadn’t killed no man. Not that day, anyhow.

  The plate was warm as he rested it on my knee. A fork was pressed into my palm. “You manage all right?” he asked. “See anything yet?”

  I shook my head. I saw things, but not like he meant.

  “I blame myself, ” Collins said. “But what was you thinking?”

  “I weren’t,” I admitted. “Just started and couldn’t stop.”

  Collins laughed. “Most take a glance and know it’s a bad idea.”

  I groped around the plate with my fork, found some resistance, some weight. Took a sniff of potatoes and blew on ’em in case they was hot. How anyone lived with such blindness, I couldn’t fathom.

  “I heard voices,” I told Collins. I wasn’t sure I’d ever tell anyone, but it just came out. “Voices and . . . I had a vision.” I swallowed the potatoes and shook my head. Patches of murk swam in the darkness, a vague discernment of shapes. I’d welcome just seeing my own hands.

  “You heard voices. You mean when they scooped you off the road?”

  “Before.” I peered at where I thought Collins stood, where I heard him. “They were telling me to do awful things. I think Randall was poisoned by the sun.”

  “Randall was poisoned by the Arapaho. He was babblin’ that nonsense right up until we shot him. You just need some sleep is all.”

  I nodded and ate, and Collins gave me silent and invisible company. By nightfall, it felt as though some of my eyesight was returning, but not much. I fell asleep on that cot for drunkards, madmen, and murderers—and wondered which of them I was.

  When I awoke, it was not yet dawn. My internal clock had unwound from the late shifts and lack of sleep. But I could see my hands, and my lips only partway stuck together. Groping about, I let myself out of the pen and sought my own bunk.

  Along the way, with my fingers brushing cedar clapboards to keep from spinning in circles, I noticed the pinpricks of tiny lights in my vision. It was pitch-black across the fort, and it was like somehow the brightest of stars were able to penetrate my blindness. But no: it was my eyesight returning.

  I stopped and marveled at the tiny spots of light in that infinite darkness. The voices were out there, straining to be heard. There was a madness in my soul, an invader.

  It hadn’t taken a full hold of me, but its claws had left marks. It was the same madness I’d seen in the war cries of the natives we fought with. It was the madness Randall had seized upon. A cry from some distant throat telling me that this land was someone else’s and that a reckoning was coming. That was the sight I’d seen: a land wiped clean and taken by those who didn’t belong, a land of dead and missing cattle to starve us the way we’d done with the buffalo, a time of great sickness and men dying beyond counting, with infection rained down from the heavens like some poisoned blanket.

  This was the calling. I heard it clearer that night than I ever would again. I stood there for what felt like hours, searching for those pinprick stars and marveling at how our own sun was said to be one like them. Our sun, where native tribes stood sentinel in the morning so we couldn’t see them coming, where they would watch and watch and plan their
deadly raids. Many a time, they had brought hell on us from the east with the rising of the sun, the Arapaho and the Sioux and the Apache, but I reckoned we’d done the same and that others might do it to us one day. Generations back, a man with my name had crossed a wide sea and brought his own hell from the east. Others would come. It were folly to think we’d be the last.

  That was my vision, what I saw clearly that night in my blindness and with an earful of strange voices. I saw the night and its lights like never before. There was a far and dark sea out there, hanging over me. A dark sea that ships sailed on, scouts arriving at dawn to watch over us, vast fleets to rain down by dusk. But it was not yet dusk. It was early yet. And those stars were like campfires impossibly distant where strange men spoke in strange tongues and conjured war. They spoke with words that I could not fathom but could see like scratches in the dirt, could see like a calling to do bad things on their behalf.

  I tried to explain this to whoever would listen, but they would only lock me up for my troubles. They would lock me up before I ever got the chance to heed those voices the way Lieutenant Randall had. I was locked up years later and therefore not a part of that massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, which put an end to the war with our red kin. I was locked up while more cattle went missing and a great sickness swept the land, millions and millions of people dying like my brother had. It has not yet come, this thing from the east that whispers for me to clear the land in preparation. It has not yet come. But something stirs and will talk to those crazy enough to look and listen. There is something across that dark sea, across that expanse of space that men saner than me say no one will ever cross, but I wager my red brother thought the same thing of the deep blue Atlantic that lapped their former shores—and here we are. We who hailed from the east, who came from that rising sun too bright to see, who came first with scouts across the pitch-black, standing tall and ignorant and proud atop some deadly ridge.

  Afterword

  Very few of my stories came as assignments or via writing prompts. Most are ideas that have been percolating for a long time. I enjoy the luxury of writing whatever seizes me, rather than being stuck writing the same type of story over and over. “Hell from the East” was different. I was invited to submit something for an anthology, and the stories needed to be “weird Western.”

  I’ve always been a fan of this genre, which makes it strange that I’d never explored it on my own. The TV show Firefly is a weird Western in a way. Science fiction is the new frontier, a role that Westerns used to play. And survival on the edge will mean relying on cobbled-together technology, being in sparsely populated areas, and a dive back into lawlessness at times.

  The theme I wanted to explore with this story is the idea of alien invasion and the settling of the New World. There’s a legend that some Native American tribes would raid during the rising sun and ride in from the east, so they were hidden in the glare of the sun. This got me thinking of how Europeans arrived from the east, and kept arriving from the east, conquering, stealing land, spreading disease. They had bizarre machines and gadgets. They arrived on strange ships. Europeans were the alien invasion.

  In this story, the invasions are nested. As we push west, there’s a different threat coming. And you can only see it if you stare into the sun.

  The Black Beast

  In the Long Ago, there was a beast who couldn’t be caught. She roamed the woods by a small village, where the men would hunt for her and the women would lay traps for her, but the beast could not be caught. She taunted them from the tree line in their own tongue, calling out her eternal threat of “Just wait.”

  “Just wait,” she would screech, over and over, trying to scare them. She would fly through their hunting parties and their traps, laughing and mocking them, “Just wait.”

  One day, an old man from the village was fetching water down by the stream when the beast came close, as she was fond of doing. The man ignored the beast. He no longer had fear in his heart for her. Despite the many close calls of his youth and her eternal threats, she had never done him any lasting harm.

  Standing on the rocks that jutted out over the stream, he lowered his bucket toward the distant gurgling far below, passing the braided rope through his wrinkled hands. While the swaying bucket descended through the air, the beast came closer, her belly to the grass, her breathing audible.

  The man let the currents of the stream catch the rim of the bucket and waited for it to be filled no more than halfway; he could stand to hoist no more. Snapping it from the foam, he pulled the bucket hand over hand and set it on a flat moss-covered rock. He wheezed from the effort while the beast crept closer, her shoulders down, her tail slicing the air.

  The old man knew the beast was there. He ignored her, but being so close reminded him of younger days, days spent chasing this beast who could not be caught, his hands swishing at air, her screeching laughter, him and his friends in the dirt, hugging nothing. And now the black beast was nearer than ever, taunting him, and he knew in his old bones that he had one lunge yet.

  Smiling to himself, remembering what it felt to be young and lithe and full of power, he smeared his feet into the moss, working his toes into their soft grip. Slowly, ever so slowly. He bent his knees and reached for the bucket as if to carry it off. The water inside was still moving. Joints creaked like bent wood, and he saw in the bucket a wrinkled reflection of himself. With one hand, he unknotted the long fetching rope from the bucket. “Just once more,” he whispered to his bones. “Like old times.”

  The fetching rope was salty as he placed it between his teeth. Behind him, he could hear the animal creeping closer, attempting to torment him with her shadowy presence.

  Whirling, the old man leapt for the beast. He was airborne again, flying, arms wide, eyes taking in the whole world. He saw the black fur on the beast ripple with alarm, saw the tail drop, the paws splay in the dirt, the head jerk as it prepared to run, but then he was on her, catching what couldn’t be caught. They rolled to the ground. The old man scrambled to the beast’s back and wrapped his legs around her midsection, hooking his feet together. His arm went across her neck where it was impossible to bite. The rope went quick around one paw, and then another. Old hands make the best knots. Her back legs were looped with the rest of the rope, all of it done in a moment.

  The beast screeched madly and bit at the air, but she could not move. The old man looked from her heaving ribs to the roofline of the village far up the hill. Someone would have to come for him, he thought. He imagined the stories they would tell, his children and grandchildren. They would be telling this story forever.

  “What of you, beast?” he asked. He rested on his knees. One of the beast’s dark eyes swiveled his way. “Long have you mocked us, and yet here you are.”

  The beast stopped biting the air and seemed to smile. The old man had taken note of her reach, the limit of her snarling mouth. He did not fear her and moved closer, double-checking his knots.

  “They said you couldn’t be caught,” the old man wheezed. The knots were secure. He had done it. He searched himself for injury, for some claw mark, but found none.

  “Who says?” the beast asked, with that voice that had all the years taunted and promised so much.

  “Everyone,” the old man replied. He looked down at her black fur, gleaming in the sunlight. The day was brighter, his head lighter from the exertion.

  “And what do they know of me?” the beast asked, her voice subdued.

  The old man said nothing. He looked back to the village, wondering how long it would take for someone to notice he had not returned.

  “I will tell you what of me,” the beast hissed.

  The old man turned.

  “Come,” she said. Her tongue slid out and smoothed her whiskers. “Bend low and I will tell you of this chase we make.”

  The man laughed, but he was indeed curious to hear. He glanced back toward the village, saw the bucket and felt suddenly thirsty, but he bent closer to the animal’s sm
iling teeth, remembering well their range and keeping out of it.

  “Tell me your story,” the old man said. He was dizzy with the opportunity to know the unknown. “Start at the beginning.”

  “It is not my story I tell,” the beast said. “And I know nothing of beginnings.”

  And with that, the beast stretched her neck much further than it had reached before, and she bit the old man. It was a deep and mortal wound, sudden and sure. The man staggered back, clutching at it, knowing from the great gush that it couldn’t be held.

  With a single claw, the beast parted the fetching rope bound around her wrists, then sliced the knots holding her hind legs.

  “I run from you, and you chase me,” the beast said. She stood on her great paws. “You call me uncatchable, but the truth is contrary. The day comes when all men catch me. All men.”

  The old man from the village fell back in a pool of his own blood. His life was draining away, soaking the moss.

  “Just wait,” the beast said, her voice no longer shrill. “Just wait, I tell them, but it makes you hurry all the more.”

  Afterword

  This was a story I wrote and published online for a short while, but the link broke in a website update and I never fixed it, so it was pretty much lost. It wasn’t until we started putting together this collection, and this book’s editor, John Joseph Adams, kept asking me if I was sure that was everything, that I found it through the back end of my website. I read it years after having written it, and it was all new to me. I had a vague recollection of having written it, but that was it. This is a terrifying feeling.

  It’s the feeling of seeing an old photograph and a flood of memories of that entire day, an entire period of your life, rushing back into consciousness. Where were these memories before? How did a single key unlock so much? Would those memories have been lost forever without that small reminder? The illusion of permanence and memory are too convincing.