I looked at him and said, “But we’re thinking about it.”
He nodded. “I can’t teach you anything, really, because you have to learn it for yourself. Not one of the youngsters inside this rock can ever know the pain we have suffered, at home, and here. You know this place. You accept it. Earth would be strange ground to you. By digging, you are not looking for your future, but for our past. If you want any of it.”
“But what if the rock’s systems fail?” I said. “Then we have no future or past.”
He nodded. “Yes, but don’t think that the object of your search is to get us all back home. Son, I see all these things only dimly. You’ll have to think it through for yourself, or it will do you no good.”
“I am thinking,” I said. “When our life support systems fail, we’ll have nothing, so we have to get out or die.”
6
The next day six of us went out again with our shovels. Myself, Johnny Spengler, Pierre Huppert, Chen Lee, Abasi Cary, and Juan Geyle.
We went into the tall pine forest, because I had the idea that its growth might have hidden exactly the kind of entrance we were seeking.
After an hour of digging, we had a deep hole.
Pierre Huppert, who had not gone out with us before, threw down his shovel and waved his long, thin arms. “This is crazy. What do we expect to get? Let’s go meet some of the girls by the lake. Isabel said she might be able to sneak two of her friends out today.” I wondered for a moment if the one I sang to myself about might be one of them.
“Pierre,” I said, “if we don’t find out what has happened to us, then a day may come when all this, the air, the trees, our food source, may stop working. This rock has been out much too long, and we’re young enough to live to the day when we won’t be able to breathe. Something is wrong. Haven’t you been listening?”
He wiped the sweat off his brow with his sleeve. “Yeah, yeah, I heard some of it. But what if it’s all wrong? What if this is all there is, and all this talk of Earth and getting outside is just talk.”
I looked at the others and said, “We all know we’re living inside this rock a long time now. It was sent out when our parents were young.”
“Yeah, but have you seen anything with your own eyes that proves any of it? No, you haven’t. Not one of us here has.” He looked around at us as if we were fools. “Not one thing. Not a picture, or anything. Just what the old people say, and a few drawings they’ve made.” Pierre spoke quickly now, as if he’d made a great discovery. “Stars, planets, people walking around on the outside of places! Try to imagine it, and it’s crazy.”
Suddenly I realized the depth of his ignorance. It was only a step away from my own. But he was right. The only education we’d had was from our parents, and not all of them had taken as much trouble as my parents had. We knew first-hand only how we lived here.
“It’s true, Pierre,” Johnny Spengler said. “You think this place made itself?” He looked at us with his soft, brown eyes, and spoke as if he had been listening to something far away, and had paused to tell us about it.
“Why not?” Pierre answered. “That way there’s no problem explaining why it’s here. It was always here.” He grinned through his overbite, happy with his answer, thinking it would shut us all up.
Big Abasi Cary jumped down into our hole and shoveled out some more dirt. He grunted as he hit something.
“Lookee that,” he said, dropping the shovel and getting down on his knees. He cleared some dirt with his large hands and we saw polished metal.
“Well, this did not make itself,” he said, “that’s for sure.”
We peered down at the bright blue surface.
Abasi rapped on it with his big knuckles, making a dull sound. We all listened, as if expecting something to answer. I had always imagined, from what my father had told me, that our captors, his captors, lived beneath the land. In a sense, that was true.
“We’ll never cut through that with our shovels,” Abasi said.
I jumped down into the hole, grabbed his shovel, and said, “Make room.” He climbed out.
I struck the metal.
The blow made a loud, dull sound, sending a shock through my hands and wrists into my shoulders. I dropped the shovel, and my friends laughed.
“That’ll teach ya,” mumbled Chen Lee. “It’s solid all the way down to wherever!”
“Forever!” Pierre added.
I sighed with defeat and leaned back against the wall of dirt behind me. This would take some more thinking, maybe more than I had in me.
We trudged back to the smaller dining hall, washed up in the common bathrooms, then found places to sit. The hall was filling up with kids. There were a few adults, looking uncomfortable. There was no one dining hall that we could fill up only with kids. Adults had to eat, and we couldn’t keep them out.
Our group sat near the serving area. The digging had somehow suppressed my appetite. I stared at the serving wall, and saw it as if for the first time. Panels slid back, and there was always food there: protein steaks, green and yellow vegetables, potatoes, several kinds of coffees, milks, and fruits. All of it came around again and again. All the utensils were recycled, as were our bodily wastes. Again, I wondered how long these systems would last?
“They make for a lot of laziness and boredom,” my father had told me. “Better if we’d had to raise crops to eat. It would have been hard work, but we might have had fewer suicides, fewer quarrels.
They might have given us educational programs to study, too. As it is, raising our kids, purely on what we know and can remember, has been frustrating. How I miss books, movies, and music. You’d marvel at how much there was! Databases of knowledge and literature beyond the life experiences of any one individual. You could be a hundred people in any one month. You could time travel, so to speak, to all ages of human history. We’re mostly blind here, son. Blind!”
I had never seen him weep.
“Still,” he said, looking at me intently, “raising you has occupied us usefully in a place where there is so little to do.”
He told me the stories of the great works he had read; but he couldn’t really give them to me. He spoke what he remembered of Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Brothers Karamazov, Remembrance of Things Past, The Metamorphosis, Under the Volcano, and many other works of science, philosophy, biography, and history. I tried to imagine as well as I could, from what he told me, but he always repeated that he had failed me, lacking the works themselves. The truth was that he didn’t always remember too well, and that nearly defeated him. So he made up some parts. That was an old storytelling tradition. Half of Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey had been made up. I sometimes wondered whether the stories had gotten better in his telling, though he would never say whether he was up to that level of lying and invention or not. He just did the best he could, telling it, and I felt strangeness and wonder, which proves that he couldn’t have been all that bad. Sometimes he looked at me, smiled, then said, “Sorry, son, it was better on the page. When I close my eyes, I can almost see it. Sometimes I can smell the paper on which the old book was printed.”
I gazed at the food wall. People came and went with their old, scratched trays. I imagined a river of... stuff... that flowed out of the walls, went through our stomachs, and back below somewhere into the magic cauldrons that put all the stuff back together again.
7
My father nodded and said, “It’s possible.”
“But where could I start?” I asked.
“Between meals,” he said. “When nothing is coming up to be served. You might be able to slip down one of the larger passages.”
That night I was swimming down a long tunnel. There was a light far below me, but my air was running out. I wasn’t going to make it, either before my air ran out or before I awoke. I might die, then wake up.
My father had said, “We might never know what had happened to you, unless you come back. It would be hard on your mother, not knowing whether you wer
e dead or alive. You might be just fine, but be unable to get back inside the hollow.”
“Well, what would I have to do to get back out?”
“Find a way to open one of the... I think they were ramps that let us all in here. I was walking upward blindfolded.” He smiled. “There must be a control somewhere to open one from outside.”
“We’ll make another search before I try it the hard way,” I said, glad of an excuse to delay.
He sighed and nodded. “That might be best. Why risk your life?” He looked at me thoughtfully. “It has to be somewhere within a kilometer or two of the sunplate, an entrance for bringing in people and supplies. Outside, with tugs docked along the axis of our spin, it wouldn’t make sense to make supplies or people move too far before coming up into the hollow.”
“That’s still a large area to cover,” I said.
“Get ten of your friends. Spread out every ten meters, then walk around the sunplate at, say, one klick distant, checking the ground.”
“It would take all day,” I said.
“Do that before anything else.”
I woke up sweating from my dream, telling myself that I would walk the inside of the hollow a dozen times before I tried the waste chute.
8
If on that day you had stood at the rocky, far end and looked down the long axis of our world toward the sunplate ten kilometers away, you would have seen eleven of us walking abreast in a broken line, following the curve of the land around the circle of the sunplate, a thousand meters at our left. We might have looked like small, dark insects on the greenery, circling what might have been a big, bright clock that had lost its hands.
We were searching for something in the ground, anything that would give away where the lift cover for the ramp control was hidden; we were hoping there was some kind of control that would open the entranceway to the level below the land. A lot had grown over the years to hide the clues.
It would be well over twenty kilometers before we came back to our starting place.
I looked over at my companions as we marched. It was our original group of diggers, and each had brought along a friend. We marched some twenty meters apart.
Johnny Spengler looked over at me. “It’ll be in the last few meters,” he called out. “You wait and see.”
I grimaced and kept my eyes fixed on the grass before my feet. We carried gardening tools to stick into the ground. I felt strange suddenly, because I had never thought so much about my world as I had done in the last month.
“Nothing strange about feeling that way, son,” my father had said. “You’ll feel stranger when you think about it further. The people of Earth woke up one day, centuries ago now, and realized that they lived aboard a large, biological ark, on its outside, which circled the sun. And they had forgotten their own history several times over. For much of human history we knew almost nothing of who we were. We came out of a deep past on our way to a deeper future, and had to learn that only knowledge, unblinkered by myths made from wishes, had any chance of helping us. Galilean and Darwinian revelations ambushed our pride, and many more still wait, in biology and cosmology. They’ve happened already, but no one has told us here yet.”
It was a long time later before I fully came to understand what he had said.
He had looked at me, smiling at my incomprehension, then said, “Home ground, son. I have no home ground here. But I’ve been thinking that this may well be yours one day, if certain things happen. I’m borrowing from you while I live, even though I’ve lived more than half my life here. It’s the first few years of life that make you feel a certain way about home ground.”
“I don’t quite understand.”
“You’ll know one day, about home ground. We’re marked by it, and can’t find new ground unless we lived a hundred years and forgot. You’ll know one day.”
I knew much later. I know it now. But it happened in a special way. It was not only who we were in human history, the little I knew of it, but who we are in the natural scheme. I had never thought about that.
Our group of eleven continued on our circuit, poking and scraping at the tough grass. I struck down into the dirt with my wooden stick that had once been a clothes rod in a closet, and felt something hard. At first I thought it was just more of the metallic “bedrock” that shielded the engineering shell from the inner land. But this, I realized, was too shallow.
“Hey!” I cried out to the others, then dropped down to move dirt with my hands.
By the time the others had gathered around me I had exposed a shiny metal plate. There were four bolts set in the corners of its square.
“What is it?” Pierre Huppert asked, leaning down.
“Something they wanted to cover up,” I said.
“We’ll never get that up,” said Chen Lee sourly.
“Sure we can,” I said. “We’ll put sticks on the flat edges of the heads of these square bolts, and two of us will turn them.”
“Might work,” said Abasi Cary. His throat was dry, and he almost whispered.
These might be the landside controls to the big ramp my father had told me about, hidden by the departing teams.
We got the sticks and turned the bolts, big Abasi and me. They turned easily and the cover came up. We all stood back, as if something was going to jump out and bite us.
I lifted the hatch. Some dirt fell inside what seemed to be a box.
It was empty.
“What a waste of time,” said Johnny Spengler.
When I told Father about it later that day, he said, “Must have been a plug-in control unit. They took it out on their way out and closed the ramp from the inside, if that’s what it was. Might be something else. Remember, son, we don’t know anything of how the rock functions at the engineering level. Oh, not generally, just specifically. We know it takes care of itself, of the life and food systems. But I couldn’t tell you how that works, really, beyond mentioning artificial intelligences and a process called nano-manufacturing. They didn’t want us to know much while in here, or to be able to get into engineering. We might do ourselves and the rock harm.”
I sighed and said, “So I’ll have to get in there the hard way.”
His look said that he feared for my life.
“So what else is there to do?” I asked. “Can’t learn much in here. Nothing except to eat and live.”
He looked away from me and said, “We should have been back by now, and you’d have a world to grow into. There’s nothing against you and the other kids, so they would have taken you off before deciding what to do with us. Once they saw you. Your mother and I were hoping for that.”
“But they’d have to release everyone,” I said. “Your terms are over.”
“We don’t know what we’d be coming back to. If they still considered us damaged people, after all the tortures, then maybe they’d see our children in the same light of suspicion. I’m sorry, son. None of us ever intended to have children here. Most of us couldn’t. But when it happened, we thought it would all be over by the time you were grown.”
I saw his right shoulder shake a little. He covered his face with his left hand.
“But it’s not over,” I said. “It may never be over for any of us.” I felt my face tightening with emotion. “I should never have started you wondering about any of this. Who cares what’s outside!”
But I did care now, and I wanted to do something, make something better happen for my parents, even for my friends. I didn’t think this in so many words, but I felt it clearly as the words caught up with me.
My mother came in just then, out of breath from her daily after-dinner walk around the compound. She looked at us, and brushed back her gray hair. “Hello, my two men,” she said softly. “I hope you’ve had a good talk.”
My father looked up at her from his chair and smiled. His body became very still.
She gazed at him for a moment, then went through the wooden partition to their small bedroom and closed the door.
&nbs
p; My father was looking at me intently, I realized, as if to see how well I understood her state of mind. I did, more than a little, but not as much as I came to understand in later years.
“If you go,” my father whispered, “don’t tell her. You’ll be back, or you won’t.”
9
All through dinner the next evening, I stared at the largest disposal chute. People finished eating and took their trays and leavings and dropped them into the square opening. It was large enough for me to go through, but I began to wonder what exactly happened to the items. Did they burn, or did they go to some preparatory cauldron that I might be able to escape? There was no way to know except by trying it. Father said there might be some kind of incinerator, where all the materials were broken down into their simple elements and reassembled again into the things we needed, both food and utensils. Our bodily wastes went from the toilets, and were recycled in the same way. Nothing was wasted. He said that natural planets did similar things, slowly and on a larger scale. I wanted to try sliding down slowly, when the system was not operating, and give myself a chance to see if there were other shafts that might give me a better entrance to the engineering level. I would have to catch the right place before I came to the end of the shaft, if I would be able to do that quickly enough.
“It’s too chancy,” my father said. “But it’s up to you.”
Now, as I sat there alone, I had no courage for it. I went to one of the wall openings and looked down, and became afraid. This was not going to work. It was a quick drop into death. Something down there was waiting to digest me.
My father and I had also discussed ventilation shafts, but that grillwork seemed set solid with the walls and floor, and we had no cutting tools. He was sure that we did not get all our air from the plant life of the land; that balance was being helped. Air blew in from time to time, and some of it went out to be cleaned.
Black Pockets Page 16
