A Collapse of Horses

by Brian Evenson

  “I always liked him,” Wilkinson said. “I thought he liked me too.”

  “He does like you,” said Orvar. “And how do you know that you weren’t the one attacking him?”

  “Was I?” asked Wilkinson.

  Orvar didn’t know. “You didn’t lose an eye,” Orvar told him. “You probably won’t even have a scar.” And then he made him promise to be careful next time he drank.

  So, no more fights, but more and more dust in the filters. He banged them out twice daily; sometimes, especially first thing in the morning, he would have to knock them against the wall repeatedly before he’d feel a healthy current of air flowing from the vent. After a week or so, even the airflow from the just-cleaned vents seemed to be growing weaker. Or was he just imagining it?

  Working hours were lonely, with half the crew drilling in the shaft and the other half analyzing and sorting samples in the makeshift space that might one day be a lab. For now they made do with a series of plastic sheets tacked to the ductwork above to form a rough square enclosure, sheets that did little to keep out the dust that now seemed to be everywhere. It was on them all, a kind of pollen-like layer that made their skin gray. Every night Orvar would use enough of his water ration to dampen a cloth in order to wipe his body down, but the dust seemed to be on him again immediately. It wasn’t gritty or grimy; he could hardly feel it. But there was still the nagging awareness of it being there, on him, on everything.

  Find anything? he’d ask each man at some point in the day, sometimes more than once. They always shook their heads. The site was not, or at least not yet, productive. They had another month, perhaps, to make it so before the company would have to decide whether to dispatch their reinforcements or simply send a vessel to retrieve them.

  Sometimes Orvar would go to watch the progress being made in the shaft, the men shouting at one another over the noise of the rock drill. He would stand at the entrance, feeling the rumble in his legs, then he would turn and go back.

  At other times he would go to the office, the only room in the complex that qualified as finished. It was sparsely furnished—computer system, communications console, and a series of control panels regulating the temperature of the complex, monitoring the environment, or in some cases just in stasis awaiting the arrival of the machinery that they would monitor. There was the single metal desk, foldable but nonetheless solid, and a set of metal folding chairs, all stacked against the wall except for the one Orvar habitually used. Grimur’s chair was different, an upholstered and wheeled thing that, despite the vessel’s space restrictions, he had managed to fit in. Behind it, near the wall, was a bedroll. Grimur slept alone in here rather than in the bunkroom.

  Grimur always seemed to be busy, though what he was doing was hard for Orvar to say. He suspected Grimur had even less to do than he did, yet the man was always at his computer, always typing. He often kept his hands poised over the keys while they spoke.

  He would ask Orvar how he was, then nod in acknowledgment no matter what Orvar answered. He would ask about the men and nod there as well.

  “No more fighting?” he might say, one eyebrow raised. And Orvar would explain that no, everything seemed to be going well.

  “Ah,” Grimur would respond, half distracted. “And the drilling?”

  “They haven’t come across anything yet,” said Orvar.

  Only then might a shadow flicker across Grimur’s face. Orvar did not know what sort of involvement his superior had had in choosing the site, what he was likely to lose if the site proved nonproductive. But he could tell Grimur would lose something.

  At least the rock they were boring into was igneous and solid—they had gotten that right, even if the site wasn’t proving productive. No dust coming out of the shaft. The dust had instead seeped in, drifting into the shaft through the filtration system. The men had noticed this. It seemed to be everywhere now, a little thicker every second. It hung in the air, a delicate haze that gave a blur to the lights.

  Moving about the complex, dragging a finger against the wall, Orvar began to think of himself as being underwater. It was as if he were walking along the ocean floor and had come upon the remnants of a city, flooded somehow and forgotten, never meant to be found again.

  And yet, he thought, this is where I live.

  The men were huddled together talking, but fell silent as he came farther down the shaft. All of the men were present, not just the extractors—the testers were there as well.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “Just taking a break,” one of them said. Lewis.

  “Find anything yet?” Orvar asked. Another of the men, Yaeger, he thought, kept brushing off his arms, over and over again. A sort of nervous tic.

  “What do you mean?” asked Gordon.

  Orvar stared. “What do I mean? The same thing I meant yesterday.”

  “The site’s not going to be productive,” said Gordon. “If it was, it would have happened already.”

  “Shut up, Gordon,” said Durham. “Don’t harass Orvar.”

  Orvar shrugged. He was trying not to pay attention to Yaeger, to the restless, endless movement of his hands, brushing, brushing.

  “Maybe they made a mistake,” he said. “We knew that was a possibility. That’s why they send a skeleton crew first. We could still find something.”

  Gordon shook his head. “I’ve been on a project that folded,” he said. “By now, we should be packing up.”

  “Maybe Grimur thinks there’s still a chance,” said Orvar.

  But Gordon, an experienced extractor, did not want to be appeased. “No,” he said. “Something’s going on.”

  “Don’t be paranoid,” said Lee.

  “I don’t know what it is,” said Gordon, “but it’s something.”

  “Gordon,” said Orvar, looking him steadily in the face. “There’s no hidden project. I promise.”

  “You trust Orvar, don’t you?” Durham said to Gordon. “You can see he’s telling the truth.”

  Gordon reluctantly nodded. “Maybe Grimur just hasn’t told him.”

  “No,” said Orvar. “I know Grimur. He’d tell me. Do you want me to ask him?”

  “He’ll probably lie,” mumbled Gordon.

  “I’ll ask him,” said Orvar. “I’ll know if he’s lying.”

  “And you’ll tell us,” prompted Jansen.

  Orvar reached out and touched Gordon on the shoulder. The man flinched.

  “I’ll tell you,” said Orvar. “I promise.”

  The shaft seemed longer on the way back. He was out of breath by the time he’d gotten within the complex walls again. He was having trouble gathering his thoughts. What’s wrong with me? he wondered, but he shook it off. No sense letting Gordon’s paranoia infect him. Still, what if Gordon was right? What if there was a hidden project? But Grimur would have told him. As security officer, it made sense that he would be told. Didn’t it?

  Even if he hadn’t been told, Grimur wouldn’t be able to hide it from him. Orvar was sure, or almost sure, that that was true.

  He started toward the office but then, reconsidering, doubled back to check the filters.

  When he held his hand up to the vent opening, there was a slight trickle of air, but only very slight. He turned off the system, opened the baffles, removed the filters. Before he could start cleaning, Wilkinson was there, next to him.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Wilkinson. “Broken?”

  “Routine cleaning,” said Orvar. “I do this every day.”

  Wilkinson narrowed his eyes. “But you already did it once today,” he said.

  Orvar hesitated. Then, slowly, he explained that yes, he had already done it once today, but most days he did it several times, just to be safe. All the while he was thinking, Wilkinson has been watching me. Why? Wilkinson was doing the same thing with his arms that Yaeger had been doing earlier, brushing at them again and again, though not quite as frequently. What’s wrong with Wilkinson?

  He watched the m
an’s eyes flit hurriedly about their sockets. Maybe it’s nothing, he thought. We’ll all be a little nervous until the site proves productive. He tried to remember what it was that Wilkinson actually did.

  “Which team are you on?” Orvar asked.

  “Team?” said Wilkinson, surprised. His hands stopped in midbrush. He squinted. “Are there teams? I thought we were all in this together.”

  “No,” said Orvar. “Where do you work, I mean. The drill or testing the samples?”

  Relief washed over the man’s face, but it was quickly lacquered over by a gnarled layer of suspicion. “Why do you want to know?”

  Orvar spread his hands in front of him. “It’s just a question, Wilkinson,” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  Wilkinson thought about this for a moment, then finally said, “The drill?”

  “And you’re on break now?” asked Orvar. “Is this how you usually spend your break?”

  “I should be getting back,” Wilkinson said. A moment later he was retreating, casting nervous glances over his shoulder.

  Grimur was hunched over his computer. He barely glanced up as Orvar entered and took a seat.

  Orvar waited, his gaze wandering around the room. Nothing to look at, really: Grimur’s crumpled bedclothes just visible around the desk’s corner, the monitoring panel lit up with green and amber lights, the computer’s lid, past which he could see Grimur’s haggard face. He hadn’t shaved. His eyes were bloodshot.

  Finally Grimur closed the computer, leaned back. Over tented fingers he stared at Orvar.

  “Well?” he said.

  “They still haven’t found anything.”

  “Then they should keep digging,” Grimur said. “They haven’t stopped, have they?”

  Orvar shook his head. “They’re still digging,” he said. He hesitated. He was turning the question over in his head, trying to decide how best to phrase it. Whether to phrase it at all. Now that he was here, sitting across from Grimur, it seemed ludicrous. There was no conspiracy, he told himself, only Grimur still doggedly hoping to find something. The simplest explanations were usually correct.

  Grimur gestured to the monitoring panel. “You see the amber lights?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Orvar. “What about them?”

  “Air quality,” he said. “You need to clean the filters.”

  “I just cleaned them,” Orvar said.

  Grimur shook his head. “As time goes on and the dust builds up, you’ll have to clean them more often.”

  “I’ve been cleaning them at least twice a day.”

  “Ah,” said Grimur. “I see.”

  “Shall I clean them again?”

  “No, no,” said Grimur, absently. “Maybe the monitoring system hasn’t caught up.” But then he said, “You know, on second thought, it can’t hurt. Clean them again.”

  He stood, then moved around to sit on the front edge of his desk. He was brushing his arms, Orvar noticed. Not exactly like how either Wilkinson or Yaeger had done it, but still. Am I doing it too? wondered Orvar. He glanced down at his hands. For a moment they seemed like someone else’s.

  “What do you think it’s doing to us?” asked Orvar.

  “What?”

  “This dust,” he said. “If it’s building up like this in the ventilator, what’s it doing inside our bodies?”

  Grimur was staring at him, frowning. “What makes you think it’s doing anything?”

  “Maybe it’s not,” said Orvar, suddenly cautious.

  “The body metabolizes it,” said Grimur. “It isn’t hurting us. The company wouldn’t send us out here if it was.”

  “You know that for a fact?” asked Orvar.

  Grimur didn’t answer. Instead he stopped brushing his arms and sat back down. “Clean the filters,” he said. “Make sure there’s air coming out of the vents afterwards.”

  But Orvar didn’t stand. “Some of the men are worried,” he said.

  Grimur shrugged. “There’s always a chance a site won’t be productive,” he said. “They know that. They get paid either way.”

  Orvar shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s more than that. They think that we’re here for some other reason.”

  “Like what?”

  “They don’t know,” Orvar admitted. “A hidden project.”

  Grimur guffawed, spread his hands. “Out here? What could it possibly be? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Orvar watched the man’s face as he said this. It was calm, relaxed, giving nothing away. There was no reason not to believe him, but no reason to believe him either.

  “They think there’s a conspiracy,” Orvar said. “They think you’re part of it.”

  Grimur gestured to the computer, to the control panel. “I have enough to worry about without their paranoia,” he said. He leaned forward, the corners of his mouth turning down. “Who’s the security officer here?”

  “Me,” said Orvar.

  “Then it’s your worry.”

  There was no reason to distrust Grimur. No, the men were simply restless, dissatisfied that the site wasn’t productive. They couldn’t understand why Grimur kept them working. But Orvar understood. At the very least it kept them busy, stopped them from having more fights. And yet he understood something else: there would come a time when everything tilted the other way, and the paranoia caused by fruitlessly continuing to dig would do greater damage than shuttering the site.

  All this dust, he thought, knocking the filters clean again. Or not clean, exactly—they weren’t coming close to clean now. Maybe the dust’s the problem. He’d felt dizzy ever since they’d landed. The air tasted strange, and he could feel the particles on his skin, clogging his pores, in his throat, thickening. Wasn’t it possible the dust was clogging not only the vents but him? Wouldn’t it be in their lungs? Their blood?

  And what if the dust wasn’t just dust, but something else entirely?

  Like what?

  He didn’t know. Something organic, something alive.

  He shook his head and forced a laugh. Now who’s paranoid? He was the security officer. He was supposed to be keeping things stable. How could he do that if he started to think such things?

  He raised his hand and held it just below the vent. No air coming out, none at all.

  For a moment his heart caught in his throat: sheer blind panic. Then he realized he’d simply forgotten to turn the system back on.

  When he checked again, there was a little current of air. Nothing substantial, but it was there, a little air, definitely flowing. He wondered if the lights in Grimur’s office would be green now.

  He wondered too how worried he should be.

  Halfway to the shaft, he realized someone was following him. At first he thought he was imagining it, the dust-ridden air echoing his own footfalls back at him, but then he tripped, and for a moment he heard the sounds behind him separate from his own.

  He turned quickly and looked behind him. He would have thought less of it if he’d been anywhere else, but there were no surprises here. Nothing alive for tens of thousands of miles except for himself and the others. There was only the corridor, ill lit, littered with boxes and stacked paneling and various supplies. Plenty of places for someone to hide.

  He considered retracing his steps, going after them, but instead he kept going. He undid the fastener of his holster, holding his hand loose and ready just above the pistol’s butt. Probably nothing, he told himself. But he still had to force himself not to hurry.

  He turned into the bunkroom and flattened himself against the wall, gun drawn now. He held his breath and waited.

  For a long moment nothing happened, and then he heard the quiet scraping of shoes in the hall. Once they’d gone past the door, he risked a look out. Gordon, at a little distance, just turning down the mouth of the shaft.

  Probably nothing, he told himself. Probably Gordon wasn’t following me. Or if he was, it was just to prove to himself that I am on his side.

  Am I? he wondered
.

  The men were disturbed, upset. And as Grimur had reminded him, it was his responsibility to handle them.

  At the mouth of the shaft, he met Yaeger. The man jumped, startled. Startled because I surprised him or for some other reason? wondered Orvar.

  “All well?” asked Orvar, trying to render his voice hearty, reassuring.

  “Yeah, sure,” said Yaeger, not quite willing to meet his eye. But he lingered. He was rubbing his arms again, a little more quickly now.

  “I spoke to Grimur,” said Orvar.

  “Yeah?” said Yaeger. “So what is it?”

  “What’s what?”

  “Why are we really here?”

  Orvar shook his head. “No,” he said. “I was right. It’s business as usual.”

  “You heard Gordon,” said Yaeger. “If the site was productive, it already would have happened. How’s that business as usual?”

  “No,” said Orvar. “Gordon was on a very different site on a very different planet. He doesn’t know.”

  “If you say so,” Yaeger said.

  “I do say so,” Orvar said. “I’m not lying, Yaeger.”

  “I’m not Yaeger,” said Yaeger. “I’m Lee.”

  This threw him. “You’re Lee?” Orvar said. “I could have sworn you were Yaeger.”

  “Yeah, well,” said the man Orvar couldn’t help but think of as Yaeger. “I’m Lee.”

  “Okay,” he said, and the ersatz Yaeger twitched and brushed his arms again.

  Was he really called Lee? It was impossible for Orvar to believe he’d been wrong all this time. But why would the man lie?

  “What’s wrong with you?” Orvar asked before starting down the shaft. “Can you stop doing that?”

  “Doing what?” asked Yaeger or Lee. When Orvar mimicked him, the other man folded his arms.

  “It’s this dust,” he said. “It’s everywhere.”

  II.

  A few days later, the ventilation machinery began to rattle. At first it was hardly noticeable. Had Orvar not been standing there silently, holding his hand to the vent to feel if the air was flowing, he might not have noticed. But it was a little louder every time he went back after that. He was cleaning the filters four times a day now. Soon he would have no time to do anything but clean filters.