“After a few moments an alarm sounds,” said Mahonri, “so we’ll have to be quick.” He had worked his hands deeper into the gloves and used them now to force open the cylinder’s lid. “The alarm is meant to attract whichever one of us is awake. If that individual doesn’t respond quickly enough, then it starts waking us up, one by one.”
He reached into the cylinder with the tongs, carefully slid out a small metal cylinder, held it near to Horkai’s face. Horkai could feel the cold radiating off it. No red letters on it. “Metal on the outside to protect it from external contamination, glass core inside. I can’t show it to you. The sample itself has been coated with cryoprotectants: glycols and DMSO. Should protect the sample for almost a millennium.”
“The sample?”
Mahonri looked at him quizzically. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were following me. I thought we were on the same page.”
“And what page is that?” asked Horkai, his voice flat.
“You’ve seen the plants already,” said Mahonri. “The seeds. These are the animals: fertilized embryos, thousands of them, from every kind of animal they could get hold of. This is the ark. What we’re living through now,” he said, gesturing at the walls, “is a modern-day equivalent of the Flood.”
“If I remember my Bible, God promised there’d never be another Flood,” said Horkai dryly.
Mahonri quickly backpedaled. “Metaphorically, I mean. And technically there’s no water. So we can still call it a flood—metaphorically—and yet still understand that God hasn’t broken his promise to us.”
The alarm had begun to sound, a piercing noise that made Horkai’s eardrums throb. Mahonri quickly reinserted the cylinder, closed the vat, and started the cylinder up again. The alarm stopped.
“There you have it,” said Mahonri, hanging the tongs back up and beginning to take off his gloves. “Welcome aboard. That’s all, really, that there is to see.”
“So you have everything ready for when it’s safe for humans again?”
“Yes,” said Mahonri.
“All the other cylinders are the same?” asked Horkai.
“Well,” he admitted, “not all. There are two that you’re never to touch.”
“Which are those?”
Mahonri’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you want to know?” he asked.
“If I don’t know,” said Horkai, “how can I know to avoid them?”
He watched Mahonri turn the statement around in his head until finally his eyes relaxed and he smiled. “You have a point,” he said. He led Horkai to the side closest to the wall and pointed to two of the frozen storage tanks. From the outside, they looked absolutely identical to the rest. Through the lid of one, Horkai saw only a craquelure of ice, opaque, impossible to see through, impossible to glimpse what was inside.
“What’s inside?” he asked.
Mahonri shook his head. “It’s not for me to say,” he said. “There’s much you have to learn first. In time you’ll be told.”
And Horkai, not knowing exactly how to respond to this and unable to think of a way to insist, finally simply accepted this explanation and nodded.
* * *
THEY FOLLOWED THE BACK WALL this time, passing the end of each row of cabinets, until they came to another opening. It led onto what was less a hall than a tunnel, the walls rounded rather than squared off, the stone itself unpolished. The wheelchair had some difficulty, and in the end Mahonri grew tired of waiting for him and started pushing him.
How long they traveled down the tunnel Horkai couldn’t say. It couldn’t have been long, really, perhaps no more than a hundred feet or so. In the end and very suddenly it opened out, spreading into what at first seemed a cavern until Mahonri raised his light and Horkai saw that this, too, was man-made, could see the grooves where the rock had been chiseled and blasted away.
The floor of most of the chamber was covered with water, and Horkai could hear the sound of dripping. He could not see a river or a stream; the water instead seemed to seep in through the rock walls, which were glistening with it.
“It filters in,” said Mahonri, noticing Horkai was staring. He fingered the edge of his garment. “It’s quite pure by the time it reaches us,” he said.
Near the edge of the water was a little makeshift building, made by balancing sheets of corrugated tin against one another, drilling a few well-placed holes in them and binding them together with wire. A stone bench sat just in front of it, the water lapping at its base.
“Welcome to my humble abode,” said Mahonri, and bowed.
The front of the shack was open, no wall there at all. Inside the shelter was a cot, an uneasy swirl of blankets on it. Three folding chairs were stacked against the back wall, and on the floor at the head of the bed was another LED lamp. Beside the folding chairs were a dozen or so boxes, in two stacks that almost reached the ceiling.
“Homey,” said Horkai.
“I like it,” said Mahonri. He pulled up one of the folding chairs and snapped it open. “Some of the others sleep in the archive itself, but I prefer to be here, by the water. One of us will have to sleep on the floor,” he said. “Shall it be me tonight? Then you can take tomorrow night, and after that we’ll just alternate until you know the system well enough that I can be stored.”
“Okay,” said Horkai.
“Are you hungry?” Mahonri asked.
Am I? He hadn’t thought about it until now, but yes, he did have to admit that he was not only hungry but starving even. He nodded.
Mahonri opened the top box and reached into it. He came out with two packets. He tore these open and then made his way to the underground lake, filling each of them with water.
“It’ll be just a minute,” he said when he came back and set the packets on the floor. “Which gives us just enough time to pray. Would you like to do the honors or shall I?”
“Uh, you?” said Horkai, caught off guard.
Mahonri folded his arms and bowed his head. He closed his eyes and then began to pray. “Heavenly Father,” Horkai heard, sitting there with his arms on his knees and his head unbowed. “We thank thee for bringing our brother home to help us with our work…” and by that time Horkai was no longer listening, his mind wandering instead, his thoughts only making their way when he heard Mahonri say, “In the name of thy beloved son, Amen.”
Mahonri opened his eyes and rubbed his hands. “If you don’t like the flavor you get, we’ll open you another one,” he said. He pointed to the boxes. “We’ve got plenty.”
When he handed the packet over to Horkai, its contents had become a thick, gummy paste. It didn’t taste like anything. He ate it anyway, sitting in his wheelchair, spooning it into his mouth with his fingers, occasionally exchanging glances with Mahonri, trying to make sense of him.
* * *
AFTER DINNER, MAHONRI UNBUCKLED his boots and began to talk. “I don’t get the chance very often,” he said. “Not to talk to anyone but myself, anyway. After a while it makes a person a little crazy. It’s nice to have someone else here.”
“I can understand that,” said Horkai.
“What did you do before?” asked Mahonri.
“This and that,” said Horkai evasively.
“I sold cars,” said Mahonri. “Lived in Murray but had a used lot over in West Valley City. Well, it wasn’t my lot exactly, but I worked there.”
“Where were you when it happened?”
“At home with my wife and child. We immediately went down to the basement and waited. But it didn’t do much good. A few hours later, they were covered with sores. A few days after that, they were dead.”
“But not you.”
“Not me,” he said. “Hardly seems fair, does it, but the Lord had work remaining for me here.”
“Watching over the records,” said Horkai.
“Yes,” said Mahonri. “I’m a keeper. As are you now. We are here to preserve things, to help humanity start over again, once it’s safe.”
“But how do
you know things should start over?” asked Horkai. “Maybe it’s time for things to come to an end.”
“You have doubts, brother,” said Mahonri. “It is very difficult to have no doubts, to have faith instead. Faith is the more courageous path.”
“Is it?” said Horkai. “Is it really?”
Mahonri ignored him. “It is all written in the Scriptures,” said Mahonri, “if you know where to look. The wicked of the earth will be destroyed by war, death, pestilence, and disease, and only then will Christ return and live among us. And then, for a thousand years, there will be no war and the earth shall be changed so that it is again like unto the garden of Eden. There shall be no disease and there shall be an increase in understanding. Satan will have no power over the people, and the righteous shall reign. Has this happened yet? No? Then the world must needs continue until the Second Coming shall arrive.”
“You really believe that?”
“I do,” said Mahonri, and gave Horkai a steady look. “I know that something touched me and transfigured me so that I might survive where others died. The same is true for you as well, brother. Why would you be alive now were it not for the hand of God?”
Horkai shrugged. “It could be anything. It doesn’t have to mean something.”
“For instance,” said Mahonri.
“For instance, bad luck,” said Horkai. “What’s more terrible than living when everyone else around you dies?”
Mahonri fell silent, his face suddenly looking remarkably old. “It is a hard path,” he finally admitted. “But we would not have been chosen were we not worthy of it. What were you before?” he asked. “What has become of you to make you think this way?”
“I don’t know,” said Horkai, suddenly tired of lying. “I can’t remember much about my earlier life.”
“But surely you must have been pure in heart,” said Mahonri. “Were you not, you would have perished.”
“Stop talking like that,” said Horkai. “Stop talking like you’re quoting Scripture. You yourself said that we might have survived due to being infected by bacteria.”
Mahonri shook his head. “I did not say this,” he said. “Jonas wrote it speculatively in the commentary. I merely reported it. And who is to say that God does not operate through natural means? Even if it is a question of infection, could not God have had a hand in it? Could it not be God who infected us?”
They lapsed into silence. The problem with faith, thought Horkai, is that there’s no arguing with it. Same problem, he admitted to himself, with lack of faith.
“Am I sure I can trust you?” asked Mahonri, half musing to himself. “Do you have sufficient faith to join us?”
“Let’s talk about it in the morning,” said Horkai.
17
HE DROPPED OFF ALMOST IMMEDIATELY, falling into a deep sleep almost as soon as Mahonri lifted him off the wheelchair and put him in the cot. He woke up hours later in an utterly pitch-dark room, with no idea where he was. He was filled with panic that he was unconscious again, frozen, deep in storage, but muddled desperately through that to a memory of Mahonri sitting on the floor beside the cot as his eyes closed, reading the Scriptures to himself, half-aloud. Either he was still in Granite Mountain or he’d managed to escape into a dream again. In either case, he lay there, shivering in a cold sweat, his heart beating very fast, the blood pounding in his ears, until at last, little by little, he began to calm down.
He started trying to picture the room in his head, reached out to one side to touch the tin wall beside the bed, adjusting his image of the room accordingly. Mahonri must be here, he realized, lying somewhere beside his bed. He held his breath and listened, heard at last the muffled sound of the other man’s breathing.
What now? he wondered.
It was the first time since he’d begun the journey that he’d had a chance to relax, slow down, think. He imagined Qatik and Qanik still hiding, huddled against the side of the mountain, waiting for him, slowly dying. Or perhaps quickly dying. Or perhaps already dead. What did he owe them exactly? They weren’t like him—were, if Mahonri was to be believed, almost another species. He couldn’t remember enough about who he was or what his life had been like before the Kollaps to know what he owed them, or owed Rasmus, or owed anyone, for that matter. Had he been, as Mahonri suggested, “pure in heart”? Was that why he’d been singled out, as it were, touched by the so-called finger of God? Not likely, he thought, remembering how he had almost strangled the technician who had awakened him—almost without meaning to, on impulse. No, the last thing he’d been was pure in heart, he was convinced of that.
But what was he now? Was it better that he couldn’t remember what he had been before? A fixer, Rasmus had called him, but what did that mean exactly? Someone called upon when nobody else could solve a problem and willing to proceed by any means necessary. Definitely not pure in heart.
But how did he know that Rasmus was telling the truth? Maybe he hadn’t been a fixer at all but simply an ordinary man living an ordinary life: a bank clerk or a high school teacher. Even Rasmus had couched everything he told him in doubt—my father told me and if I get a few of the details wrong, it’s because I have them secondhand—almost as if he expected from the first not to be believed.
He lay staring into the dark, seeing nothing. Whom should he listen to? Whom should he trust? Rasmus, with his hive? The whole structure seemed clearly a sort of mystification, a way of manipulating others for some purpose that Horkai himself couldn’t quite see. Was Rasmus the one doing the manipulating, or was he himself manipulated as well? And if so, by whom or what?
He took a deep breath. Too many questions, too few answers. What he did know was that from the beginning Rasmus had not been honest with him, was clearly holding something back. The little he’d been able to get out of the mules didn’t tell him much, just confirmed that something was wrong, that he hadn’t been told the truth and that maybe they hadn’t been either.
But why was Mahonri to be believed instead? A group of seven transfigured men, if they were still men, living deep in a hole within the side of a mountain, guarding what must be millions of records as well as the contemporary equivalent of the ark. And believing that they were acting out God’s will, having manipulated Christianity to fit changing conditions. Mahonri was obviously deranged. How could he be trusted? He’d been brainwashed, was clearly a little addled from so much time spent alone. Finger of God, Horkai thought. Not fucking likely. More like the finger of the Devil. Or, even worse, no finger at all.
So whom did that leave for him to trust?
Nobody. Not even himself, since he had no idea who he really was.
What now? he wondered, and stared up into the dark. Vague shapes were beginning to move across his vision now, vague flashes of light that stuttered back and forth, the result of the effort of his brain to see something when it was too dark to see anything at all.
What were his choices?
He could go off on his own, but without legs he wouldn’t get far. Plus there was the disease to consider, the reason he had been frozen in the first place. If that was in fact real and not one lie among many, then there was something to be said for sticking with the people who claimed they were trying to find a cure.
He could stay here with a group of religious fanatics whose only redeeming quality was that they seemed to be suffering from the same physical condition as he, and live largely in storage, allowing himself to be thawed one month out of every eight and participate in the reinstitution of the human race. Something he wasn’t exactly sure was a good idea.
Or, finally, he could do as Rasmus and his community had asked, collect a cylinder with red characters on it, whatever secret or special seed it contained, and bring it back.
The first two were dead ends and would get him nowhere. The last was a wild card: something might come of it or maybe nothing. But it wasn’t immediately a dead end. Would he ever get answers? Maybe. Would he ever know the whole truth? Probably not. But he had to try.
Which was why, almost without realizing, Horkai had pulled his dead leg toward him with both hands and was now forcing his hand into his boot, groping for his knife.
18
THE DARKNESS WAS CRACKLING with light now, all of it imagined, his optic nerve helplessly convulsing over and over. He reached to the side and touched the wall, tried to imagine himself hovering near the ceiling and staring down at the room from above. There he was, on his cot, and there, behind him, against the other wall, the boxes of dried food. But where was Mahonri? He’d been asleep himself before Mahonri had even lain down. The man could be anywhere.
He rolled very carefully over onto his side, orienting himself as well as he could toward the sound of the man’s breathing. He lifted his head, then propped himself up on an elbow. The cot creaked underneath him and he froze, stayed there half-raised, listening. But the breathing didn’t seem to have changed.
He placed the knife on the cot just beside him, against his belly. Very slowly he reached out, waving his fingers through the air. They met no resistance. He extended his hand a little farther, did it again. Still nothing. And again, his hand a little more tentative this time, expecting to touch something. Still nothing. He leaned out and down a little, the cot creaking, and extended his arm farther, and this time, halfway along his arc, he brushed something.
It took him a moment to realize it was fabric, a moment more to decide it was the man’s tunic. He drew his hand back just a little, moved it back along its arc, stretching a few inches farther. This time he touched something soft and cloudlike that he thought at first was a blanket, then prodded it enough for it to be clear it was a pillow. He stretched farther, lifting his hand, very careful now, and brushed flesh.
He stopped, hesitated, but the breathing hadn’t changed. He moved his hand again, inch by inch, until he brushed flesh again and pulled back slightly, then moved it over again, just a little, just a little, until at last he felt the man’s breath against the palm of his hand.
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