“What are we, then?” asked Horkai.
“We just are,” said Rykte. “Why can’t that ever be enough?”
* * *
OVER THE COURSE of a few days, he got stronger, began feeling better. Soon he was pulling himself from room to room, exploring Rykte’s house. It was an old cinder block affair, nothing fancy, five rooms in all. Horkai wondered aloud why he had chosen it rather than something else.
Rykte shrugged. “I grew up here,” he said. “When everything collapsed, I didn’t see any reason to leave.” He looked around. “Had to rebuild most of it,” he said, “but it gave me something to do. Finding intact windows that fit was the hardest part of it.”
Besides the room Rykte had given to him, there was Rykte’s own room, which contained little more than a bed and a dresser, full of simple, practical clothes, a kitchen with cabinets packed with hardtack and preserved foods. A bathroom, with the commode torn out, was now piled with stacks of books. Rykte had built an outhouse back behind the house—though, for the time being, Rykte installed a chemical toilet in the former bathroom for Horkai. There was a sort of living room containing a couch, two armchairs. A credenza to one side of the front door was heaped with guns and knifes, a few grenades as well.
“Just in case,” said Rykte, and winked.
In the basement, Rykte told him, he was trying to grow mushrooms, something to supplement their diet. So far without much success. A shed not far from the outhouse served for storage, was filled with anything that Rykte had scavenged that he thought might be useful. He carried Horkai out to it and Horkai was surprised to see only practical things, no relics or mementos to recall past days, just tools, lumber, rope, bits and pieces of metal, rolls of medical tape, vacuum-sealed packets of freeze-dried foods. A hand-cranked distiller surrounded by canister after canister of distilled water.
“What if you run out of food?” asked Horkai.
“There were enough people around here with food storage that at first it wasn’t a problem,” said Rykte. “Can’t see that it’ll be a problem in my lifetime. Plus I’m trying to get mushrooms going in several basements around here. Should be okay eventually.”
“You’re not lonely?” asked Horkai after a few days.
Rykte shrugged. “A little,” he admitted. “But I learned early on to keep my distance. Others always want something from you, especially when they realize you can survive outside. Before you know it, they’re no longer asking you for something; they’re holding a gun to your head and trying to force it out of you.”
“Do you feel that way about me?”
“You’re welcome to stay as long as you want, if that’s what you’re asking,” Rykte said. “You don’t bother me.”
* * *
“WHAT ABOUT YOUR LEGS?” Rykte asked him a few days later when he saw one of Horkai’s legs shivering. “I thought you must have been paralyzed before the change.”
“No, not before,” said Horkai.
“Well, then they’ll come back,” said Rykte. “They’re already coming back.”
“They can’t,” said Horkai. “I’m ill. If my spine reconnects, it’ll travel to my brain and kill me.”
Rykte looked at him for a long time, finally shook his head. “Doesn’t sound right,” he said. “Do you know this for a fact?”
“I was told,” said Horkai.
“Is it possible that whoever told you this might have had some reason to lie?”
“It’s not impossible,” Horkai said.
“I haven’t had even as much as a cold since the change,” said Rykte. “I can drive a rusty nail into my forehead and come away tetanus free. Early on, I lost an eye in a scuffle only to have it grow back a few days later, good as new. We age, but not very quickly, not as quickly as we did before. Whatever happened to our bodies purified them, made them no longer subject to certain conditions that other mortals face. Our bodies have been transformed, and that has made us not only very hard to kill but also very hard to injure.”
“And so I’m being lied to?”
Rykte shrugged. “Let your spine grow back together and find out. It’s worth the risk.”
* * *
THE BRIEF QUIVERING IN HIS LEGS was followed by a tingling sensation, then by little jabs of pain. Over the course of a week he tried mentally to will his legs to move, found that they would but not in the way he expected them to, flopping and spasming instead.
Rykte told him not to worry, that everything would come back. He sat beside Horkai, massaging the legs and moving them carefully back and forth, up and down, helping them relearn the movements they had lost.
“What did you do before the Kollaps?” Horkai asked during one of these sessions.
“Why do you say it that way?” asked Rykte, not looking up from his legs. “Why do you pronounce it like it’s a foreign word?”
“I don’t know,” said Horkai. “That’s how they say it where I’m from.”
“And where is that?”
“I don’t know,” said Horkai. “I can’t remember things very well.”
“What did I do?” asked Rykte. “Not much. Went to high school. I was sixteen when things fell apart.”
“You watched your parents die?”
Rykte looked up, nodded. “My parents,” he said. “My friends, my neighbors, people I knew from school, from church. Those who survived the first blast were afraid of me, and then hated me. A few of them even tried to kill me. And then, fairly quickly, most of them died.”
“I’m sorry,” said Horkai.
“Why?” said Rykte. “You weren’t one of them. You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
* * *
AFTER A FEW MORE DAYS, his quivering legs learned to hold him upright for a moment or two. Rykte would stand him upright and he would stand there until the legs suddenly gave out and he’d go down, and Rykte would have to catch him. A day after that, he watched Rykte walk away from the house in the early morning, a rifle slung across his back, and disappear. He was gone for several hours, but when he returned he was carrying two aluminum underarm crutches.
“Was looking for forearm crutches,” he said, “but I didn’t find any. These will have to do.”
By late afternoon and after a few falls, he’d learned how to use the crutches. His sides hurt from where the crutch handles rubbed against him, and the web between his thumb and forefinger was growing sore, had perhaps started to blister. But he could move around on his own power.
He made a few turns around the house, then begged Rykte to take him outside.
“All right,” said Rykte. “In any case, there’s something I want to show you.”
* * *
THEY WENT OUT THE BACK DOOR and past the shed. The crutches were a little more difficult to operate in the dirt, but he managed. Rykte took him to the back fence, then carefully pulled off three of the boards, stacking them to one side. He helped Horkai through the opening.
On the other side was a flat expanse of dirt, then a slow slope down to a drainage ditch through which a feeble stream ran. Unlike the other water he had seen, it wasn’t red. Looking up it, he could see the end of a corrugated pipe from which the water was coming. In the other direction it went straight for a while then curved before it was lost behind a fence.
“What did you want me to see?” Horkai asked.
“This,” said Rykte, and pointed at the stream.
Water, thought Horkai. So what? He looked back up at Rykte. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“Look closer,” said Rykte.
And so he did, trying to see what it was about the water that made it different, made it unusual. Was it a little cleaner, a little purer? Maybe, but not enough to make much of a difference. The color was a little strange, maybe, but …
And then he realized and almost fell. “Oh my God,” he said. It wasn’t the water that was a strange color but what was at the bottom of the streambed. There was a thin layer of moss, very pale but there.
“It
’s very delicate,” said Rykte. “Easily damaged. But resistant to the poisons in the air and soil and water. Things are starting to come back, slowly but surely. In another five years, we might even start to see grass. A decade or two after that, and there’ll be flowering plants. Tack on a hundred years, we might even begin to see trees. All this will go on in some way or other. The only thing we humans managed to destroy was ourselves.”
“But we’re not dead yet,” said Horkai.
“With a little luck, we will be soon,” said Rykte. “We’re a curse, a blight. First we gave everything names and then we invented hatred. And then we made the mistake of domesticating animals—almost as big a mistake as that of discovering fire. It’s only one step from there to slavery, and once you think of humans as animals—as mules, say,” he said, giving Horkai a look, “we become a disposable commodity, war a commonplace. Add in a dominant religion that preaches the end of the world and holy books that have been used to justify atrocity after atrocity, and you’re only a step away from annihilation. It’s better not to let society develop at all, to leave each person on their own, alone, shivering, and afraid in the dark.”
“What are you, a libertarian?” asked Horkai.
“No,” said Rykte.
“An anarchist?”
“Who isn’t these days?” asked Rykte. “But no, no more so than anybody else.”
Horkai looked at him a long time. “You really think humanity should die out?”
“Objectively, yes,” said Rykte. “I’ve thought about it and thought about it, and rationally it seems the right thing. If we want anything at all to go on, humanity should die out.” He turned to Horkai and smiled. “But when I think about it subjectively, it doesn’t seem so clear cut.”
“No?”
“No. So I do nothing. I neither help humanity along toward its own extinction nor do I prevent that extinction from happening. I don’t slaughter everyone I meet, don’t use well-placed grenades to open the few remaining shelters to the poisons outside. But neither do I help them. What does that make me? Ineffectual? Uninvolved?”
“Lukewarm,” said Horkai.
Rykte smiled. “So then because thou art lukewarm,” he said, “and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.”
“I’ve heard that before,” said Horkai.
“Of course you have,” said Rykte. “It’s from the Bible.”
“The Bible,” said Horkai. “Burn that as well?” he asked.
“Of course,” said Rykte, smiling. “It’s the cause of more deaths than any other book, including Mein Kampf. Better if it had never been written.” The smile faded from his face. He turned to Horkai, his eyes hard and serious. “But I guess it’s different for you,” he said. “You’re not exactly lukewarm, are you.”
Horkai didn’t say anything. They just stood there staring at each other until Rykte clapped his hand down on his shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “There’s something else I want to show you.”
* * *
THEY FOLLOWED THE STREAM to where it came out of the pipe and then crossed over the ground behind, Rykte helping him. He heard the noise long before he could figure out where it was coming from, a slow, low droning. He was sweating now, the soreness in his hands becoming blisters, but his legs were already a little stronger, a little more stable.
They traveled up the alley and to the fence in back of another house. Rykte approached the middle of the fence and felt along the boards until one came off in his hands. The ones just to one side of it came off just as easily. He stepped through, gestured to Horkai to follow him.
The noise grew stronger as they approached the house, growing very loud once he opened the door. They went in; then Rykte came close, spoke into Horkai’s ear.
“Leave your crutches against the wall,” he said. “I’ll carry you the rest of the way.”
He put the crutches against the wall, leaning heavily on Rykte. Bending down and pulling him up into his arms, grunting a little, Rykte carried him through the house, down the stairs to the cellar.
The noise was deafening once they were on the stairs. Horkai reached out and touched the wall, felt the vibration. They kept going down, the cellar coming slowly into view.
It was filled with a series of gas-powered generators, perhaps a dozen in all. They were attached by transparent plastic tubes to a water tank in the corner, but Horkai could tell by the color of the fluid in the tubes that it wasn’t full of water. The generators were all circuited up to a central converter, which in turn fed their current into a large black cable, which snaked across the floor to a storage tank.
Rykte moved toward it. For a brief terrifying moment, Horkai had the impression that he was planning to put him in it. Instead, he held him over it, mouthed at him to look down.
Horkai did. Expecting to see a stored body, he was surprised when he discovered that the pod was empty, and was again filled with the suspicion that it might be for him.
But it wasn’t empty, he realized as he continued to look. There was no body there, but there was still something. A small cylinder with red writing on its side.
* * *
“I COULD HAVE DESTROYED IT,” said Rykte a few minutes later, when Horkai was back on his crutches and they were moving back to Rykte’s house. “But I didn’t. Instead I froze it. That’s what I’ve come to see my role as, at least in your case. I won’t make a decision about it, but I’ve preserved your right to make a choice.”
He reached out and touched Horkai lightly on the shoulder. “It’s been opened. It’s been thawed and refrozen. The contents may be damaged,” he said. “It may not do any good to give it to whoever you were going to give it to. But then again, it might do a great deal of good, might even allow them a new, fresh start, another generation. You can let humanity go the way of all flesh to extinction, or you can try to help it to keep limping on. So now, what, if anything, will you do?”
“Is it really that important?” Horkai asked. “Can grain really make the difference?”
“Grain?” said Rykte incredulously. He laughed. “There’s not grain in there,” he said. “Why did you think it was grain?”
“Rasmus told…,” he started to say. And then he stopped. Sort of, Rasmus had said, something like that, when he’d asked if it was grain, or wheat rather. What was the word Rasmus had used? He thought, tried to bring it back, and failed. “If it’s not grain,” he asked, “then what is it?”
“Fertilized human eggs,” said Rykte. “Frozen embryos, ready to be unfrozen and implanted. Humans can no longer reproduce. They’ve been trying for years. They’ve been rendered infertile. When I found you, you were carrying the possibility of dozens of humans with you, their whole next generation.”
Seed, thought Horkai. That was the word Rasmus had used. Seed. He’d stopped moving, was standing in the backyard motionless.
“I’ll ask again,” said Rykte, “now that you know what you’re facing. You may have the key to their continuation. You can give it to them, or you can destroy it. Or you can just wait, do nothing. So many possibilities. What, if anything, will you do?”
25
WHAT WILL I DO? he wondered later, alone in the room he had already started thinking about as his room. We name things, he imagined Rykte saying, and then think this gives us the right to claim them. The walk had worn him out. His sides felt bruised, his hands and arms still tingled, and the sensations coming through his feet and legs were broken, irregular. It came and went in waves, getting slowly stronger all the time. What will I do? he wondered again, and thought of Rasmus, not lying exactly, but very far from telling him the whole truth. He thought of the keepers, their singleness of purpose and the almost blithe insouciance that he had seen in Mahonri, of the way they seemed able to forgive almost anything if they could get one more person (if person was still the right word) to join their cause.
He thought of Rykte and the way he had stepped out of things, the kind of solitary life he seemed to lead on the edge of
things, a life of apparent profound disengagement. Was it a life he could live as well?
And then he thought of the technician, the look of fear in his eyes when Horkai had almost by reflex started to strangle him. He thought of the several dozen people surrounding Rasmus, dirty and pale and malnourished, none of them much under forty, a whole generation missing beneath them, if not two. He thought of Qanik, comfortable with himself and his role as a mule, stolid and unshiftable in his beliefs. And of Qatik, much less so, a little more acerbic, beginning to be infected by doubt. And of the promise he had made to Qatik before he died.
He thought again about himself, about his past that had been lost somewhere deep within his frozen brain while he was in storage, or perhaps lost in some other way. What had he been? Had he really been a fixer, or was that just another of Rasmus’s near lies? Was he a good person or a bad person? What did I used to be? he asked himself, and then realized that, no, that wasn’t the right question to ask. The right question was not what did he used to be, but what was he going to be now?
* * *
BUT TO THAT QUESTION there was no immediate answer. Days went by. At first he worried constantly about his illness, wondering when he’d soon lose all feeling, all sensation. But soon his legs were working again, completely. He was walking without crutches with no sign that he had ever been ill, that he was likely to die, that anything was wrong with him at all. Rykte tested his reflexes, asked him how he was feeling, helped him if he asked for help, but mostly left him on his own.
Some days Horkai would stay in the house, choosing one of the books piled in the bathroom to read, having a discussion or genial argument with Rykte if he was there. Other days he would wander the neighborhood, breaking into empty and collapsed houses, looking at faded family pictures, at piles of bones huddled in the corner of cellars. Some houses were impossible to enter, were completely collapsed or so close to it that he didn’t feel he could risk going in. Others, however, had rooms relatively intact. Here a fence would still be standing, but just a few yards away it would be blown flat to the ground, with nothing to indicate why it had fallen in one spot but was still standing in another. It was as if the Kollaps (unless it was simply the collapse) had been random and fickle, unpredictable.
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