VII

Some time passed, a few days. Hair, when I rubbed a hand along the scalp, came away in clumps, uprooted. I forced my way out of the bed and crawled to a cache of cans. I would have eaten the contents of one but could not find the pry. I found the spigot and had a little water and vomited it up again, and then had a little more and this time kept it down.

A few more days went by and I managed to get up off the floor and make it back to the bed, rolling a can along before me, and though I did not at first have the strength to climb into the bed, eventually I did. I was weak and ill but not dead, not yet. It was not long after that that I stumbled upon the pry and opened the can and choked down its contents. Now I would either get better or have a brief moment of respite followed by sickness unto death.

How many days did I have left to me? Many? Only a few? The Ts had told me that we lived sometimes five years, sometimes a few less, sometimes a few more, depending on our exposure to the outside air. How long had I been alive? What was my purpose?

I slowly worked my way into the suit. I walked through the warren and to the seal and then passed through, coming out on the other side scrubbed and clean. There was the ladder. I put my foot on the rung and began my ascent.

The climb was difficult. Often, I found myself stopping and wrapping my arms around the rung in front of my face, waiting for my dizziness to subside. It never subsided entirely, but a few moments of rest, a few careful breaths, and I could move upward again without the risk of falling.

I crawled off the ladder and pushed my way through the second seal and out into the world beyond. The light was brighter than any I had ever seen, or at least that I remembered having seen, and it took some time for my eyes to adjust. Not far from the seal was a structure made of materials not dissimilar to those found in the warren, and I went toward this, having no clear goal in mind. Perhaps I would get lucky, I told myself, and find the material I needed here, close by. Then I could go down again almost immediately before the air leaked too thoroughly through my suit and poisoned me enough to kill me.

But as I came closer, I became less optimistic. The metal door of the structure hung loose and open, as if it had been abandoned or even raided. Inside, there was only some kind of storage chamber, but less the sort that would hold the cylinders that would contain material and more the sort meant to store a full-grown person. It was empty. There were, I saw, peering in, straps by which the wrists, ankles and chest of the person stored could be secured. The cabling at the back of the chamber had been cleanly cut, making the chamber no longer functional.

I opened all lockers and cabinets but found nothing useful.

And so I left. I stepped out of the structure and into the world outside. I let my eyes wander, looking for something that I might walk toward, but it seemed as if the same red-gray waste stretched indifferently in every direction.

I closed my eyes and spun around until the dizziness became unbearable, and then I opened them and took a lurching step forward. This was the direction to which I consigned my fate.

I walked for several hours, or at least what I would judge to be several hours. I have no way of judging time here except by the motion of the sun, and not knowing the particulars of this place, I do not know how to judge that with any accuracy.

I only stopped because I could go no farther. My legs ached and my dizziness had so intensified that I had to lie flat on the ground. Everything still spun around me, but I could bear it better when I was anchored by more than just the soles of my feet.

I lay there, breathing in and out, waiting for the dizziness to subside. How long had it been since I had eaten? I found it curious that nowhere in my memory of the last few weeks did food feature at all. Perhaps, I told myself, this was what was causing my dizziness, rather than a more serious condition.

I watched the sun hesitate beside a mountain peak and then, finally, slip behind it and subside. The air grew dark until it was as dark as it can be in the warren with all light extinguished except the emergency indicators, and then it grew darker still. I could see nothing at all. Even if I raised my gloved hand in front of my faceplate, I could not see its fingers. My body grew cold and I began to shiver.

I do not know how many hours went by. I know so little, I now realize, about life outside the warren. The little I have been told seems largely to have been warnings intended to keep me within the warren.

But some hours went by. I am sure about that, even if I am not certain how many. Maybe a dozen, maybe less. As I grew colder, I imagine the hours went slower, but without any kind of chronometer this is more an impression than a certainty. In the end, light began to leak back into the world and, half-frozen, still nauseous, I regained my feet and continued walking.

The sun, again, never rose high in the sky but mounted just a little and then rode a slow arc before descending again. I walked all day, stopping periodically to rest or quell my dizziness. I vomited and wallowed in the stench of the bile. I saw things: an endlessly flat landscape, dust so powdery and fine it clung everywhere to my suit, rocks that I saw less than stumbled on. There was no sign of habitation, and when I turned, just before the sun departed, and looked behind me, I saw no sign of the warren, despite the flatness of the ground.

I lay on the ground, trying to sleep, until I started shivering. I bore that as long as I could and then stood and continued to walk, fighting wave after wave of nausea. When I vomited, nothing came out, but it was long before I could stop retching.

At what point, I wondered, lying on the ground again in the darkness, do I decide that I am going in the wrong direction? At what point do I decide there is no material to be found and simply return to the warren to die?

The sky lightened. I regained my feet and stumbled forward. The landscape was the same as it had been, except for places where the dust was not dust at all but sand. Another half-morning’s walk, and there were what looked like veins of glass running through the sand, strange solid patches, as if the desert floor had been subject to great heat.

There is no point in going on, I thought. I turned around to look behind me to see if now, somehow, I might catch a glimpse of the warren, but I still saw nothing. I was not exactly sure where to go. Which meant perhaps there was no point in turning back either.

What is this place we are in? Have we always been here or did we come here for some reason now lost to us? Why do I not know the answer to these questions?

Indecisive, I scanned the horizon, and this time thought I saw a slight disruption at some distance, almost too far away to be seen. What was it? It was too far away to say if it was indeed anything at all. But whether it was actually something or simply a mirage, it was enough to drive me forward.

Only in the declining light of the sun did I become certain: yes, there was something there, glittering, catching light, and a jagged shape, too, something projecting beyond the flatness of the desert floor. The veins of glass had become thicker now, winding together at times to form flat, smooth patches that were almost like the remnants of what the monitor had instructed me was a road. But how strange, to have a road made of glass.

I kept up my crippled pace, stopping when I had to, trying to ignore the smell of vomit and bile sharp in my nostrils, the dryness of my tongue, my parched throat and lips. I tried my best to direct myself in the waning light. When the darkness fell, I kept walking, trying to stay on course as best I could—I was so weak I did not dare to wait through the night and try to set off again. No, better to keep going, keep walking, as long as I could, and try to arrive at wherever I was going before I died.

In the pitch darkness, I stumbled several times and fell, and once in falling struck my faceplate so hard against a lump of glass that it tolled like a bell, but did not break.

There was, too, I could now hear through the ports embedded on the outside of my helmet in lieu of ears, a low and near-constant sound, something like an endless moan. At first, I thought I might have injured one or both ports, but as I continued to walk, the moan grew louder.

When darkness at last began to vanish, the sound had grown very loud, so loud that I had to decrease the volume of the ports.

By daylight, I could see where it was coming from. In the middle of the flat, desert landscape was a sandy crater, a bowl-like depression, perhaps a mile across, as if, many years ago, a meteor had struck. What I had seen from a distance was simply the protrusion over the lip of the bowl of one of many vertical stones, perhaps three hundred in all.

At first, I thought them as tall as or a little taller than a man, but as the light improved and I drew closer, I realized they were a great deal taller than that. In the middle of the afternoon, when I found myself standing among them, I found them four or five times my own height: massive stones, shaped apparently not by wind or erosion but by hand. And not stones exactly—or at least not merely stones, but tortured sculptures made of a material similar to basalt.

Each of these emitted the same horrible moaning sound, almost without cease. As I approached, they began to glow slightly as well and give the appearance of vibrating, though I did not dare touch them so as to discover if they actually did vibrate. Once I was standing in the midst of them, it was difficult to know anything for certain. The sound had grown so loud that I had begun to feel it through the fabric of my suit, and even with the ports muted I found this moaning that hands had inflicted upon stone almost impossible to bear.

There was nothing for me here. We had had a good run, and now it was time for us to die out, to follow everything else here that had already gone. I turned and plodded back up the hill, but the slope, gentle though it was, combined with the looseness of the sand, thwarted me. I climbed a bit and then slipped, fell back. I stood and tried again. I made a little progress, but in the awkward suit for every two steps I made, one step was lost and sometimes more. I had to stop, panting, to rest.

And what, I thought, catching my breath, would I gain by reaching the top? I had no place to go, I was as good as dead. Why not die there? At least there I would have stones to moan over me as I died.

I shivered. I kept struggling upward. And in the end I would have made the top had there not been a crumbling of a lip of sand that brought me tumbling along the flow of it back nearly to where I had started.

It was there, waiting, that I found my mind beginning to diverge from itself. Part of me—several parts it seemed, full and complete in their sense of themselves, though I was careful not to regard them too closely—continued to think these same death-bound thoughts, of the relief that extinction of self and species would provide. Another part, a stubborn bit of me, struggled on. I had come down originally spilling little sand, that part told me, so there must be some places where the sand was sturdier than others, crusted together. Perhaps even places where, as in the rest of the desert, the sand had been replaced by half-formed glass.

And so, rather than climb again, I walked the perimeter of the stones just at the base of the slope. I examined the ground, testing it, looking for something more promising, deafened by the moans. My extremities tingled with the sound and I idly wondered, if I remained there long enough, would it shake me into a jelly? Lie down and die, the muffled chorus within me suggested, but that other me, the one currently in charge of the body that conveyed all of us, refused to give up. Instead, it kept slowly circling, looking for a way out.

And then, once again, I grew weary and dizzy, and stood there swaying and trying to keep my balance. I coughed and spattered the inside of the faceplate with a fine mist of blood. I felt my leg buckle and moved to compensate for it, suddenly veering. I would have fallen, would have gone down, perhaps for good, but my shoulder came into contact with something solid and caught me before I did.

It took me a moment to realize that I was balanced against what could only be one of the moaning statues. Upon my touch, it began to glow brighter. It was warm, even hot, and as I pulled my shoulder away I saw smoke curling up from the rubberized fabric of the shoulder where I had touched it, the material weakened but not yet breached. I could feel an ache there that spread as the seconds passed until the whole shoulder felt inflamed. And then, as quickly as it came, it passed away, leaving the fabric melted to the skin, the arm feeling like it was still on fire.

When I came conscious again, the moans had changed pitch, descending even lower, as if trying to burrow subcutaneously through me. Deep within my skull, something had changed, and I felt pair after pair of eyes snap open and then remain there attentive, glowing yellow and bloody in the dark. An image appeared on my faceplate, but it was not, I somehow perceived, an image projected onto it from outside. No, instead, I felt that what was occurring was occurring inside my head and that I was being made to see it outside of me, as if a projection, since this would unsettle me less. But in fact, since I detected the sleight of hand, it unsettled me even more.

It was the image of a young man, perhaps only two inches tall, but seeming much taller because of the image’s proximity to my eyes. Somehow, though he was but an image, he seemed to possess not two dimensions but three. He wore a suit like my own—indeed, with the very same scars and marks on it, including the melted and stretched fabric at the shoulder—though unlike me he carried his helmet under one arm. He was not unlike myself in appearance—indeed, as close in appearance to me as my twin had been, perhaps closer. His visible skin was pale, slightly translucent, and he had the beginnings of a beard. He wore his hair like I wore mine, cropped short and brushed to one side, but while I brushed mine to the left side, he brushed his to the other. He had, like me, canines that jutted out slightly and deformed his lower lip.

I immediately disliked him.

When he seemed to notice me, he offered up a broad, open smile. And then he spoke with great urgency and sincerity in a language I could not remotely begin to understand.

When he finished, he remained there, as if expecting a response, flickering gently as he waited. And then, when no response was forthcoming, he again gave his same broad and empty smile and then repeated, as far as I could determine, the same speech in the same language.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t understand you.”

Immediately, the figure flickered and vanished. Clutching my injured arm, I tried to get my feet under me and rise.

I was just giving up the attempt when he reappeared. He was dressed not in a suit this time but in a different outfit made of what I judged to be homespun cloth—something I had only seen portrayed in my early instruction from the monitor as an example of clothing that persons once wore. In all other particulars, the man was the same. When he spoke again, though his words were now in a language I understood, his mouth did not move in concord with them, as if it were still speaking the language it had first spoken.

Stranger! he said, the words either coming strong through my muted ports or arising directly within the head itself. You must flee this place! Stranger! It is not safe here! A terrible poison resides in the air that will last for many years! This is a poison that you or your enemies created and you all are to be blamed! Shame on you! This is not a safe place! Stranger, flee!

But I could not even move, let alone flee. I lay there in my heap on the ground. My body within the suit felt slick as if with blood. Slowly, I allowed unconsciousness to overwhelm me.