What shall we do with him? Which voice was that again? Harvest him?
He’s not ready. He’s even less ready than the other one.
And yet here he is.
It can’t be forced. When it is, results are … unstable. Remember what happened to Sarne.
Who is Sarne? he wondered.
So what do we do? asked the second voice.
Do? What else can we do?
We throw him back.
* * *
A GLARE OF SOME SORT, the sensation of heat, the smell of dust. He coughed and felt a hand on him, gripping his shoulder, acknowledging him.
A voice:
There, there. It’s going to be all right.
Strange the things that seep their way down to you while you are unconscious, part of him thought. Or were such things just imagined, a story he was telling to himself, a dream he was dreaming?
Where am I? Coming out of storage? Coming out of sleep? Dead?
With great effort he managed to open his eyes, saw little more than a blaze of light, furious, scorching the inside of his skull. And then, through it, suddenly bursting, the rough shape of a face, little more than a white circle with two eyes gouged out of it.
Decided to open your eyes, did you?
Face sliding sideways to momentarily block the light. A round head, bald, pale. A mouth with its corners tensed up in a smile.
Glad to see you’re coming around.
He tried to speak, but nothing came out. The face gave him a keen look and then leaned closer, so that all he could see was the top of an ear and the side of a head. It was there for a while, while he tried to speak again, and then it moved away, revealed the whole face again.
And then his vision blurred and faded and he felt himself slip away.
* * *
A STRANGE SENSATION, a feeling of light-headedness, a sense of motion, of movement. He heard someone groan, but it took him a while to realize it was him. He willed his eyes to open and they opened, but only very slowly—one of them, anyway.
He saw the ground moving below him, but farther away than he would have thought. He saw the curve of a man’s back, and far below, appearing and disappearing, two booted feet. He was being carried, he suddenly realized, but the person carrying him wasn’t in a hazard suit, was neither Qatik nor Qanik. And then he remembered that no, of course it wasn’t Qatik or Qanik: both Qs were dead. But if not them, who would it be? And why would they be outside without a suit?
And then he remembered what’d seen earlier: pale head, lack of hair, just like himself.
Oh no, he thought, they’ve found me.
23
HE DREAMED THAT HE WAS IN a world that had been destroyed, subject to a collapse the reasons for which he had a hard time laying a finger on. In this world, something had happened to him to change him, to make him unlike other men—though not only him: there were others, at least a few, who had been through the same transformation as well. In some ways it was a good thing. He was stronger than before, more resilient, very difficult to kill. But in other ways it was less of a good thing: People were frightened of him, would lie to him, would keep their distance. He didn’t belong anywhere. Even among those who, like him, had been changed, he didn’t feel like he belonged.
But what does that matter? he told himself in the dream. Who cares if I belong? Certainly I don’t care.
But even as he said it, he felt something gnawing at him. Maybe he did care. Maybe he belonged with humans. Certainly he still felt like he was human. Or maybe he belonged with the others, the ones who looked like him but who thought of themselves as inhuman, as posthuman, as transhuman. But I still think of myself as human, he thought. Why don’t they feel they are? And why do humans feel I’m not?
Then the dream focused. He found himself in a rectangular room topped by a dome, pendentives descending to each of the four corners of the room and coming to ground in four separate piers. Irregular ribs radiated in a spiral pattern from the dome’s center to gather around a circular opening at the summit. A church, maybe, or some sort of capitol building. It was made of stone, probably granite, and lit only through the opening in the top of the dome itself, and through a series of narrow windows in the rectangular room below. He could hear something, muffled laughter, but when he turned toward where he thought it was coming from, it seemed to be coming from somewhere else.
He moved toward one of the piers. When he touched it, he discovered that what he’d thought was shadow was, in fact, something else, a glutinous gray substance that clung to his hands and fingers and seemed not to want to come off. What he’d thought at first were irregular ribs were lines of this substance, paths made of it, and as he looked closer, he could see a large tadpole-like creature wriggling along one of the paths. What was it? He removed his gun and aimed it, but before he could fire, the creature slithered up the dome and through the hole at the top and was gone.
The scene blurred away and then refocused again, and he was in a large room, but it felt small since it was filled with large metal cabinets that ran to the ceiling, cutting out narrow rows. He was walking down the row, following someone whose face he couldn’t see, but he could tell from the back of his head that, just like himself, this man was bald, pale, no longer human. He was muttering to himself, but Horkai couldn’t hear what he was saying. He could sense there was something wrong, but couldn’t quite figure out what. Overhead, fluorescent lights flickered on, flickered off. He was walking slowly, but the figure in front of him was walking even slower still, and each time he slowed down, the figure slowed down even more so that, little by little, he was coming closer and closer. His feet rang strangely on the floor, and he wondered what it was about the floor, or about his shoes, or about both, that made this so.
He looked down and saw that where he had thought he had the legs of a human he had the legs of a horse or a donkey or some other beast of burden, and they were shivering, struggling to hold themselves upright. The sound he was hearing was the striking of his hooves against the granite floor.
Panicked, he looked back up and saw that where before there had been a keeper there was now a figure wearing a thick black hazard suit, moving awkwardly in front of him, swaying, crashing into the cabinets first on one side then on the other. And then the figure crashed into a cabinet and broke through it, and Horkai saw through the hole a large barren expanse under a burning sun.
The man in the hazard suit turned and gestured for him to follow, and then turned and kept walking. Horkai started to push through the jagged hole but his foreleg caught and tore on the metal lip and he found himself falling, the man in the hazard suit no longer there, nothing there but dust and misery stretching as far as the eye could see.
Lucky for me, he thought in the dream on the way down, that I’m safe in storage.
But then he woke up to discover that, for the most part, it wasn’t a dream at all.
24
WHEN HE FINALLY WOKE for good, it was to see a face staring down at him, light pouring in through a window behind it. It was a face very much like his own—no hair, no eyebrows, no stubble of beard or mustache, only a smooth pale head, blurry, but coming into focus as he blinked.
“There we are,” said a voice soft and smooth as silk. The face it belonged to smiled. At first he thought the face, slender with delicate features, belonged to a woman. And then he wasn’t so sure. And then decided it must belong to a man. “How are we feeling?”
He tried to move, groaned, his head throbbing.
The stranger reached out and put an open hand on his chest. “Don’t try to get up yet,” he said. “All things in their own time. Can you eat?”
He nodded. The stranger disappeared, came back a moment later with a small open jar.
“We’ll start easy,” he said, and brought the jar close to Horkai’s mouth.
“What is it?” Horkai whispered.
“Baby food, more or less,” said the stranger. He lifted up the jar and looked at it. “I made it my
self. Some water, some hardtack, a few preserved things that still looked safe. Soaked it all together, mashed it up,” He slipped a finger into the jar, brought it back out covered with sludge. “Open up,” he said.
At first he shook his head, but the stranger easily slipped his finger into his mouth, forced it through his teeth, held it there until he sucked the finger clean.
“There,” said the stranger, “that isn’t so bad, is it?” He dipped his finger into the jar again. This time Horkai opened his mouth.
When he’d finished the jar, he was still hungry, felt even hungrier than before he started eating, his mouth watering. But the stranger shook his head. “Who knows how long you were out there,” he said. “You have to take it slow. Rest,” he said. “Sleep.” And then he closed the curtains and left him alone in a darkened room.
* * *
HE DID MANAGE TO SLEEP, he wasn’t sure how long. When he awoke, the curtain was open, light coming in again, though whether it was the same day or another he couldn’t say. The man was beside him again, shaking him slightly. He had another jar, and a spoon this time, as well as a bottle with a bent straw. He hooked the straw into the corner of Horkai’s mouth and squeezed the bottle. Horkai felt his mouth flood with water. He swallowed once, then coughed, spluttering it up, then managed to swallow again.
“Too much?” said the stranger, pulling the bottle away. When Horkai kept coughing, he turned him on his side, patted his back until saliva oozed out of the corner of his mouth and he stopped. Just like when they woke me up from storage, thought Horkai. “Sorry about that,” the stranger said.
When the coughing finally stopped, the man moved him onto his back, held up Horkai’s head with his hand as he began to spoon the mush into his mouth. This went better, the mush going down smoother. When Horkai had finished the jar, the stranger smiled. “I’ll go get another,” he said.
“Are you a keeper?” asked Horkai. “Are you going to kill me?”
“A keeper? I don’t know what you mean,” said the man. “Why should I want to kill you?” he added, and then left.
“How long have I been in storage?” Horkai asked him when he came back.
“Storage?” said the stranger, a puzzled expression. “But you haven’t been in storage,” he said.
“But,” said Horkai, “I thought—”
“No,” said the stranger. “I found you and took you in. You were outside, all but dead.”
Then it began to come together, slowly but surely. “You saw my flare?” he finally asked.
“No,” said the stranger. “If there was a flare, I didn’t see it.”
“Who was with you? Who else was talking?”
“Nobody else. Just me.”
“There wasn’t a woman?”
The stranger shook his head.
“Where did you take me first? Some sort of dome?”
The stranger shook his head again. “I found you and brought you straight here. I didn’t take you anyplace else.”
“What about Qatik?” asked Horkai. “And Qanik?”
“I don’t know what those are,” said the stranger, his expression still friendly, still open. “Where they in your backpack?” And then he raised his finger. “There were flares in your backpack,” he said, “and an old flare gun. But I don’t think it had been fired. Also a head.”
“A head?” he said.
The stranger nodded. “Someone you killed?”
Horkai shook his head. “I didn’t kill him,” he said. “The mules did. He tried to kill me.”
“Mules, eh? And yet here you are, alive, and there he is, a head in a backpack.”
But then what was real and what was not? Either it all should be real or none of it, right? But it was as if he had lived parts of it and dreamed other parts, and the line between the two wasn’t something that would be easy to sort out.
“I fired a flare,” said Horkai, raising his head, feeling the strain of it. “I’m sure of it. I needed help and I fired a flare.”
“All right,” said the stranger with equanimity. “If you say so.”
He let his head fall back, closed his eyes. “Qatik and Qanik were humans,” he said. “In hazard suits. Those are their names. They called themselves mules.”
“Ah,” said the stranger. “Then they probably weren’t in your backpack after all. Were they supposed to be with you? I didn’t see them.”
His memory, Horkai realized, was confused. Qanik was miles away, dead. Qatik wasn’t as far, but far nonetheless; there was no reason the stranger would have seen them unless he’d been traveling farther up the freeway looking for them.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Do names really matter?” asked the stranger. He gestured around the room with his open palm. “Are you really likely to get me confused with someone else?”
“I’d still like to know,” said Horkai.
The man just smiled.
“My name is Josef,” said Horkai. “Last name Horkai. You can call me one or the other or both.”
“Or nothing at all,” said the stranger.
“Please,” said Horkai.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” said the stranger. “It’s just that’s where we went wrong.”
“Where who went wrong?”
“Us,” said the stranger. “Back in the Garden of Eden when Adam named first his wife and then the animals. When we started thinking about names rather than the things they were supposed to designate.”
“You’re a philosopher?” said Horkai.
The man shook his head. “A realist,” he said.
“But I have to call you something,” said Horkai.
“Ah,” said the man, smiling. “A true romantic. All right,” he said, “we can compromise.” He thought for a moment. “If you want to call me something,” he said, “make it Rykte.”
“Reek-tah,” Horkai repeated. “What kind of name is that?”
“What kind of name is Horkai?” asked the stranger, slightly mocking. “Doesn’t that seem at least as improbable?” He dipped the spoon into the food jar, held it out to Horkai, who opened his mouth. “In fact,” he said, “Rykte’s not a name at all, but a word.”
“What does it mean?”
“In this language, nothing. In another, it means ‘name.’”
“So your name is name?”
“It means not only ‘name’ but ‘rumor.’ Also, ‘fame, repute, report.’ Depending on context, a few other things as well.”
“And that’s your name?”
“No, it’s not my name. It’s a compromise,” said Rykte. “Now you have something to call me, but I still don’t have a name.”
* * *
HE LAY THAT NIGHT STARING UP at the ceiling, thinking. Where was he? he wondered. Who was this person without a name, this Rykte? What was wrong with him, and where was his community? He didn’t feel like he was in danger, but was he? Was he a prisoner?
“Am I a prisoner?” he asked the next day. He was feeling a little better now, could sit up with help and then stay sitting on his own. He could hold the bowl in his lap and bring the spoon down into it and then up again to his mouth.
“What? Of course not,” said Rykte. “You can leave anytime you’d like.”
“Really?”
“Really,” said Rykte. “You can leave now if you want, though I’d suggest waiting until you have recovered a little more.”
He took another spoonful of the mush, then another. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to accuse you.”
“It’s all right,” said Rykte. “We’ve all been through a lot.”
He nodded, took another spoonful of mush. “Rykte, could someone have taken me before you found me?” he asked.
Rykte stared at him. “I suppose it’s possible,” he said.
“I remember someone talking,” he said. “Two people, talking about me. They took me somewhere and then decided I wouldn’t do.”
“Wouldn’t do what?”
�
��Just wouldn’t do,” Horkai said. “I was wrong for whatever they wanted me for.”
“And so they took you back outside and left you again,” said Rykte.
“It sounds ludicrous when you put it that way.”
“What way should I put it?”
Horkai shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.
Rykte reached out and touched him on the shoulder. “Is it possible?” he said. “Yes, it is. But I don’t know who it would have been or why they would have done it. All I know is that I found you on the freeway and brought you here. You were in a state of confusion, babbling about two women, but also about being in storage. Maybe it all happened, maybe it didn’t. Or maybe it happened but just not when you think it did.” He smiled. “You’re here now. Just hold on to that.”
* * *
A DAY LATER, HORKAI ASKED AGAIN, “You’re not a keeper?”
“You asked me that before. What’s a keeper?” asked the stranger. “Do you mean it spiritually, like am I my brother’s keeper?”
“No,” said Horkai. “A keeper.” And then he went on to explain to Rykte about Granite Mountain, the records there.
By the time he finished, Rykte’s face was grave. “And this mountain,” he said, “is where you came from?”
Horkai shook his head. “No,” he said. “I was just passing through.”
Rykte shook his head. “We never learn,” he said. “What we need is not a cord tying us back to our past, to the long line of disasters building up to this last greatest disaster. What we need is a fresh start.”
“They’re not people,” said Horkai. “They’re not human.”
“What are they, then?”
“No longer human. They’re like us.”
Rykte shook his head again, stared at the floor. “You see,” he said. “That’s the whole problem. Names, categories, divisions. Once you label something, you learn how to hate it. Human, not human. If you’re not one, you’re the other, and then you and the others can hate each other.” He turned to look at Horkai. “You have to understand,” he said, “that we’re neither human nor not human.”
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