The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls

by Anissa Gray

  Can I follow my hand through the wall?

  He pushed forward, and was able to slowly push his arm in right to the shoulder. But when his chest reached the barrier, he was blocked; when he twisted for a better angle, his head also came up against the barrier and stopped.

  What if I’m stuck here forever—half in and half out?

  In alarm he pulled away, and his arm came out easily enough. He could feel some resistance, but nothing painful, and nothing pressed against his skin to hold him. In a few moments he was free.

  He touched the arm and hand that had been on the other side and couldn’t find anything wrong with them. Whatever kept life from thriving on the other side hadn’t killed him yet—if it was a poison, it wasn’t immediate, and it certainly wasn’t the barrier itself.

  He reviewed the rules he had learned for crossing the wall. It had to be bare skin. He had to strike it with some force. And if he wanted his whole body through, he’d have to strike the barrier with his whole body at once.

  He stripped off his clothing, folding it neatly and laying it on top of his bow and arrows. Then he piled some rocks on top of them so they wouldn’t blow away. Silently he hoped that he would indeed need these clothes again.

  For a moment he contemplated leaping face first against the wall, but didn’t like the idea—striking it with his fist had felt like hitting a wall, after all, and he didn’t relish doing that with his face or his groin. Not that it would feel wonderful to do it backfirst either, but it was the lesser of two evils.

  He walked a ways along the edge of the barrier until he came to a place where there was a fairly steep hill. He walked to the top and then, after a few deep breaths and a whispered farewell to his family, he ran headlong down the hill. Within moments his running was completely out of control, except that when he neared the wall he planted a foot and flung his body in a wild spin designed to lay him flat against the barrier.

  Flat was not what he achieved at all. Instead his buttocks passed through first, and then, as he slowed, his thighs and his body up to the shoulders. His arms and head remained outside the barrier, even as his feet fell through and struck the stony ground on the other side. His heels hurt, but he hardly cared about that, because here he stood, his body inside, his arms and head outside.

  I’ve got to get back outside, he thought, and try it again.

  Too late. In the last moments before he stopped moving at all, his shoulders had passed inside. He was stuck again as he had been before, unable to bring his body along to follow his arms. The key difference this time was that his head was outside the barrier, and his chin and ears seemed to be reluctant to follow him inside. Worse, he couldn’t even bring his arms all the way inside, because he needed the full weight of his body to pull them through, and with his chin hung up on the barrier, he couldn’t do it.

  This has got to be the stupidest way anyone ever found to die, thought Nafai.

  Remember your geometry, he told himself. Remember anatomy. My chin may be at too sharp an angle from my neck for me to pull it through, but at the top of my head there’s a smooth, continuous curve. If I can just jut my chin forward and pull my head back . . . assuming that I don’t rip my ears off in the process . . . but those can flex, can’t they?

  Slowly, laboriously, he tilted his head back and felt himself pulling through. I can do it, he thought. And then my arms will be easy enough.

  His head came through all at once, at the end, his face fully inside the barrier. Only his arms continued to protrude through to the outside.

  He meant to pull his arms through at once, after resting for just a moment, but as he rested, panting from the exertion, he realized that his need to breathe only increased, and was growing desperate. He was suffocating somehow, even as he drew great draughts of strange-smelling air into his lungs.

  Strange-smelling air, dry and cool, and he wasn’t getting any oxygen. Even as the panic of suffocation rose within him, his rational mind realized what he should have known all along: The reason that nothing lived behind the barrier was that there was no oxygen in here. It was a place designed to eliminate all decay—and most decay, the rapidest of it, was linked to the presence of oxygen, or oxygen and hydrogen joined to form water. There could be no life, and therefore not even microbes to eat away at surfaces; no water to condense or freeze or flow; no oxidation of metals. And if the atmosphere also failed to support anaerobic life-forms, there’d be little within the barrier to cause decay except sunlight, cosmic radiation, and atomic decay. The barrier had been set up to preserve everything within it, so it could last for forty million years.

  This sudden comprehension of the purpose of the barrier was no comfort. For his rational mind was not particularly in control right now. No sooner had he realized that he could not breathe than his hands, still sticking through the barrier, began clutching for air, trying to pull him back through the barrier. But he was in exactly the same situation he had been in before, on the outside, when only an arm was through the wall. He could push his arms deeper into the barrier, but when his face and chest reached the wall, he could go no farther. His hands could touch the breathable air on the other side, but that was all.

  Made savage by fear, he beat his head against the barrier, but there simply wasn’t leverage—even with panic driving his muscles—to get force enough to push his face through to the breathable air. He really was going to die. Yet he still struck his head against the barrier, again, again, harder.

  Perhaps with the last blow he stunned himself; perhaps he was simply weakening from lack of oxygen, or merely losing his balance. Whatever happened, he fell backward, the resistance of the barrier slowing his fall as his arms slipped inside through the invisible wall.

  This is fine, thought Nafai. If I can just get to where the slope goes the other way, I can run down toward the barrier and get through again, only this time face first. Even as he thought of this cheerful plan, he knew it wouldn’t work. He had spent too long already trying to get through the barrier right here—he had used up too much oxygen inside his own body, and there was no way he had enough left to climb another hill and make another downward run before he blacked out.

  His hands came free and he fell backward onto the stony ground.

  He must have struck very hard, for to him it sounded like the loudest, longest thunderclap he had ever heard. And then wind tore across his body, picking him up, rolling him, twisting him.

  As he gasped in the wind, he could feel that somehow, miraculously, his breathing was working again. He was getting oxygen. He was also getting bruised as the wind tossed him here and there. On the stones. On the grass.

  On the grass.

  The wind had died down to a gusty breeze—he opened his eyes. He had been flung every which way, perhaps fifty yards. It took him a while to orient himself. But, lying on grass, he knew he was outside the barrier. Was the wind another defense mechanism, then, hurling intruders through the wall? Certainly his body was scraped and bruised enough to bear that interpretation. He could still see a few dust devils whirling in the distance, far within the dead land.

  He got up and walked to the barrier. He reached out for it, but it wasn’t there. The barrier was gone.

  That was the cause of the wind. Atmospheres that had not mixed in forty million years had suddenly combined again, and the pressure must not have been equal on both sides of the barrier. It was like a balloon popping, and he had been tossed about like a scrap of the balloon’s skin.

  Why had the barrier disappeared?

  Because a human passed through it completely. Because if the barrier had not come down, you would have died.

  To Nafai it seemed like the voice of the Oversoul inside his head.

  〈Yes, I’m here, you know me.〉

  “I destroyed the barrier?”

  〈No, I did. As soon as you passed all the way through, the perimeter systems informed me that a human being had penetrated. All at once I became aware of parts of myself that had been hidde
n from me for forty million years. I could see all the barriers, knew at once all their history and understood their purpose and how to control them. If you had been some exceptionally determined intruder who didn’t belong here, I would have told the perimeter systems to let you die; they would have immediately been hidden from me again. That has happened twice before, in all these years. But you were the very one I meant to bring here, and so the purpose of the barrier was finished. I ordered its collapse, bringing oxygen to you and, therefore, to the rest of this place.〉

  “I appreciate that decision,” said Nafai.

  〈It means that decay has reentered this place. Not that it has been wholly excluded. The barrier excluded most harmful radiation, but not all. There has been damage. Nothing here was meant to last this long. But now that I can find myself instead of running into the perimeter system blocks, maybe I can figure out why I was looping.

  〈Or Issib and Zdorab can figure it out—they’re at the Index even now, and the moment you passed through the perimeter, the blocks went down for them, too. I’ve shown them everything you did, and they’re now searching through the new areas of memory opened to all of us.〉

  “Then I made it,” said Nafai. “I did it. I’m done.”

  〈Don’t be a fool. You got through the barrier. The work is only just beginning. Come to me, Nafai.〉

  “To you?”

  〈To where I am. I have found myself at last, though I had never been able to think of searching for myself until now. Come to me—beyond those hills.〉

  Nafai searched for his clothes and found them scattered—winds that could blow his body around had easily snatched his clothing out from under the stones. What he needed most were shoes, of course, to make the trek across the stony ground. But he wanted the other clothes, too—eventually he’d have to come home.

  〈I have clothing waiting for you here. Come to me.〉

  “Yes, well, I’m coming,” said Nafai. “But let me get my shoes on whether you think I need them or not.” He also pulled on his breeches, and pulled his tunic over his head as he walked. And the bow—he searched a moment for his bow, and didn’t give up until he found a piece of it and realized that it had broken in the wind. He was lucky that none of his bones had done likewise.

  At last he headed out in the direction that the Oversoul showed him inside his mind. It took perhaps a half hour of walking—and he wasn’t quick, either, his body was so bruised and sore. Finally, though, he crested the last hill and looked down into a perfect bowl-shaped depression in the earth, perhaps two kilometers across. In the center of it, six immense towers rose up out of the ground.

  The recognition in his mind was instantaneous: the starships.

  He knew the information came from the Oversoul, along with many facts about them. What he was seeing were really protective shells over the tops of the ships, and even then, only about a quarter of each ship rose above the ground. The rest was underground, protected and thoroughly linked into the systems of Vusadka. He knew without having to think about it that the rest of Vusadka was also underground, a vast city of electronics, almost all of it devoted to maintaining the Oversoul itself. All that was visible of the Oversoul were the bowl-shaped devices that pointed at the sky, communicating with the satellites that were its eyes and ears, its hands and fingers in the world.

  〈For all these years, I have forgotten how to see myself, have forgotten where I was and what I looked like. I remember only enough to set certain tasks in motion, and to bring you near here to Dostatok. When the tasks failed, when I began looping, I was helpless to help myself because I couldn’t find where to search for the cause. Now Zdorab and Issib and I have seen the place. There has been damage to my memory—forty million years of atomic decay and cosmic radiation have scarred me. The redundancy of my systems has compensated for most of it, but not for damage within primitive systems that I couldn’t even examine because they were hidden from me. I have lost the ability to control my robots. They were not meant to last this long, even in a place without oxygen. My robots were reporting to me that they had completed all safety checks on the systems inside the barrier, but when I tried to open the perimeter, the system refused because the safety checks had not been completed. So I initiated the safety checks again, and the robots again reported that all was complete, and on and on. And I couldn’t discover the loop because all of this was at the level of reflex to me—like the beating of your heart is to you. No, even less obvious. More like the production of hormones by the glands inside your body.〉

  “What would have happened if you could have broken out of the loop?” asked Nafai.

  〈If I could have found myself, I would have recognized the problem and brought you here at once.〉

  “You mean you could have shut down the barrier?”

  〈I wouldn’t have needed to. Shutting it down was within your power all along. That’s what the Index was for.〉

  “The Index!”

  〈If you had brought the Index with you, you would have met no resistance at any point. No mental aversion, and when you touched the Index to the physical barrier it would have gradually dissolved itself—avoiding the winds, which were not helpful, since they stirred dust into the air.〉

  “But you never told us the Index could do that.”

  〈I didn’t know it myself. I couldn’t know it. All I knew was that whoever was coming to the starships would have to have the Index. Then, when the safety checks were completed, the perimeter system would have opened everything up to me and I would have understood what was needed and could have told you what you needed to do.〉

  “So my nearly suffocating myself to death and then getting bruised up in the windstorm wasn’t a stupid waste of perfectly good panic.”

  〈Forcing your way in here was the only way I would ever have broken out of my loop. I have read the memory of the perimeter system and I am delighted at the way you used the baboons to draw you through.〉

  “Didn’t you show me that in my dream? That I needed to follow a baboon through the barrier?”

  〈Dream? Oh, I remember now, you dreamed. No, that wasn’t from me.〉

  “From the Keeper, then?”

  〈Why must you look for an outside source? Don’t you think your own unconscious mind is capable of giving you a true dream now and then? Aren’t you willing to admit to yourself that perhaps it was your own mind that solved this problem?〉

  Nafai couldn’t keep himself from laughing in delight. “I did it, then!”

  〈You did it. But you aren’t done. Come to me, Nafai. I have work for you to do, and tools for you to do it with.〉

  Nafai strode down the hill into the valley of Vusadka. The place of disembarkation. The place where human feet had first touched the soil of Harmony, and where those first settlers had placed the computer that would protect their children from self-destruction for so many years that to them it must have seemed the protection would be forever.

  But it would not be forever. It was dying already. And now Nafai was walking among the towers of the starships, the first human being to tread in their footsteps since they built this place. Whatever the Oversoul meant for him to do now, he would do it, and when it was done, human beings would return again to Earth.

  TEN

  SHIPMASTER

  Volemak and Rasa called the community together the moment Zdorab and Issib finished reporting what they had learned from the Index. It had been a long time since a meeting had been called without Elemak knowing in advance what it was about. It worried him. At some level it frightened him, but since he could not live with the idea of fear, he interpreted it as anger. He was angry that a meeting was called without his knowledge, without Father having sought his advice in advance. It suggested to him that the meeting was Rasa’s, somehow—that the women were making some play for power and had deliberately cut him out of the process. Someday the old hag will push too hard, thought Elemak, and then she’ll find out what power and strength really are—and that she
doesn’t have any.

  This was the filter of interpretation through which Elemak received the morning’s news. Chveya and Luet had dreamed … ah, yes, the women trying to assert their spiritual leadership, the waterseer and her no-doubt-well-coached daughter angling for the old dominance Luet had back in Basilica. And then Nafai, Issib, and Zdorab had searched the Index for information, and Nafai—of course, it had to be Luet’s husband, the Oversoul’s favorite boy—had found a secret place that none of them had visited in all their hunts. Such nonsense! Elemak had covered every kilometer of the surrounding country in his hunts and explorations—there was no hidden place.

  So Nafai had taken off on a hunt for a non-existent place, and only this morning had figured out a way past all the barriers. Once a human being made it inside, the barrier came down, and now Nafai was walking among the ancient starships, while in the meantime Issib and Zdorab were able to find things through the Index that no one had guessed at before. “This is the landing place,” Father explained. “We are living now at the site of the First City, the oldest human settlement on Harmony. Older than the Cities of the Stars. Older than Basilica.”

  “There was no city here when we came,” said Obring.

  “But this place,” said Father. “We have brought the human race full circle. And even now, Nafai is walking where the ancient fathers and mothers of us all first set their feet upon the soil of Harmony.”

  Romantic bushwa, thought Elemak. Nafai could be napping in the noonday sun right now for all anybody here knows. The Index was just a way for the weaklings of their company to assert control over the strong ones.

  “You know what this means, of course,” said Father.

  “It means,” said Elemak, “that because of what people who have nothing better to do have supposedly learned from a metal ball, our lives are going to be disrupted again.”

  Father looked at him in surprise. “Disrupted?” he asked. “What do you think we came here for, except to prepare for a journey to Earth? The Oversoul itself was caught up in a feedback loop, that’s all, and Nyef finally broke through and set it free. The disruption is over now, Elya.”