The Silence Between Empires
Crabtree Library, 2026
I.
The sun went down slow over the flatland and Vessa walked through it the way she walked through everything now, without hurry, her boots pressing shapes into the pale dust that would be gone by morning. The wind out of the south carried the smell of creosote and something older beneath it, a mineral smell, the smell of stone that had never been rained on. She had walked for two days along the ridge above the interstate and had seen nothing living but a hawk and once, at dawn, a coyote that had watched her from a bluff without moving until she was well past.
Her cooling system had come on twice in the heat of the afternoon and it hummed now at its lowest setting, the small vibration at the base of her skull that she had stopped noticing in the second year and had begun noticing again in the fourth. The mesh under her scalp caught the last light. She was aware of her own heat signature and of the temperature of the stones and of the faint radio wash of the Mesh three hundred and forty kilometers to the northwest, a soft chorus of nothing, of others like her breathing in their sleep or standing watch or sitting in the mess hall eating what they no longer needed to eat.
She stopped at the top of the rise and looked down at the gas station.
It had been a Chevron once. The sign was gone but the concrete slab remained and the pumps stood in their row like the vertebrae of an animal that had lain down there and given up. The roof over them had partially collapsed. There was a car under the roof, doors open, the interior gutted by weather and by whatever small animals had once lived in this country and no longer did. She saw the shape of a child's booster seat in the back. The fabric had rotted away and only the plastic frame remained, and a shoe on the floor of the car, small and pale.
She descended.
At the pumps she stood for a long time. The Mesh chirped once in her ear and she silenced it with a thought. She was not on report and she had not called in and would not call in until she had something to say. Her orders were to walk the sector and observe. She had walked the sector for eleven days. She had observed the wind and the dust and once a place where a very small fire had been made and abandoned, cold coals, the char of a mesquite branch. She had reported the fire. Command had not answered.
Behind the station there was a shed, and behind the shed the ground gave a little under her boots.
She stopped.
She stepped back. She stepped forward again. The ground gave. She knelt and cleared the sand with her hands, moving methodically, and the metal was rimed with the pale crust of the desert and only barely visible when she had finished, a plate about a meter square, riveted, with no handle. She sat back on her heels and looked at it.
Her mother had had a phrase for a thing that was not what it seemed. A wolf in a wool suit, she said. Vessa remembered this the way she remembered many things now, which is to say the memory arrived complete and unbidden and stayed for a moment and left, and she was not sure whether she had recalled it or only been given it by the network, some archived shard of her old self returned to her by a system that curated what it thought she needed. She had learned not to trust the memories entirely. She had also learned not to disbelieve them. They were what she had.
She placed her palm flat against the plate. Warm. Warmer than the ground around it. She sent a diagnostic ping through her fingertips and got back a wall of encryption she did not recognize. Not Mesh. Not commercial. Something older, or something that pretended to be older. She kept her hand there a moment longer and felt, or thought she felt, a very small vibration, as of a great machine at rest somewhere far below.
She stood.
She walked a slow circle around the station. There was a second plate under the concrete pad, hairline seams she would not have seen if she had not been looking. A third, beyond the fence line, half-buried under a mesquite. She stopped counting at seven. The whole rise, she understood, was hollow. The gas station had been placed here to mark the door and to draw the eye. Whoever had built it had understood that a ruin is invisible in a country of ruins.
She did not call it in.
She made her camp a quarter kilometer east, in the lee of a broken silo, and she lay on her back and watched the stars come out. Her cooling system stepped down and the hum went to nothing. The sky above her was so black that the stars seemed to have been added afterward, punched into it with a small sharp tool. She thought of her mother. She thought of a Sunday she had spent when she was seven, at a lake she could no longer name, and of her mother wading out to her waist and turning and holding out her arms.
She slept.
In the morning she rose before the sun and stood facing the door under the gas station and she said, softly and without knowing why she said it, We see you.
Then she began her walk back to the Mesh.
II.
Iyo woke to the sound of water.
The water was not real. She knew this and had always known it. The sound came from a small speaker set into the ceiling above her bed, calibrated to the frequency of a stream that had run through a valley in the Alps two centuries before her birth. The recording had been made in April, at snowmelt. She had asked once, as a girl, whether the stream still existed. Her attendant had said, Some things persist.
She rose.
The room was white and small and had one window that opened on nothing. Beyond the window was a screen and on the screen at this hour was the light of a morning that was neither real nor unreal, only chosen. Today it had chosen a pale gold, the sun rising over an ocean she had never seen. The waves moved. Birds she could not name crossed the frame at intervals that were, she suspected, algorithmic.
She dressed. The garments were laid out for her as they were laid out every morning, folded on a low table by the door. Soft and pale. She had asked once for something red and had been told, gently, that red was not in the palette this season. She had not asked again.
She walked the corridor to the refectory. The corridor had white walls and a floor of pale stone that was quarried, so she had been told, from a mountain nine kilometers away and three kilometers deep. Her feet made no sound. The children she passed made no sound. They lowered their eyes as she went by, in the way she had been taught to lower her eyes when someone older passed, and she nodded to each of them, and each of them nodded back.
In the refectory she ate slowly. Grain and fruit and a small cup of the coffee they had grown here since the beginning. Her tablemate was a woman named Selen who was two hundred and eleven days older than Iyo and who had been chosen for a program Iyo did not fully understand, some kind of surface work. Selen ate her fruit with her fingers and did not look up.
Are you frightened, Iyo said.
Selen looked at her for the first time. Her eyes were the pale gray of the ceramic bowls.
I am, Selen said.
They did not speak after that. Iyo finished her coffee and returned her tray and walked back down the corridor toward the wing where her instruction was. Along the way she passed a window that was not a screen. It was a true window, one of the few, and it opened onto the great hydroponic bay, which they called the Garden, and which lay four levels below her feet.
She stopped and looked down into it.
Green. Green in rows. Green under a light that had been engineered to match the sun of a temperate zone in June. There were people moving among the rows, in the soft pale garments they all wore, tending the plants with small tools. Iyo watched them for a long time. She watched a woman kneel beside a tomato and take from her pocket a soft cloth and clean each leaf, one at a time, and set the cloth back in her pocket and stand and move to the next plant.
They had been told, all of them, that the Garden fed them. This was true. They had also been told that the Garden was a comfort, that it reminded them of the world above, that it was in some sense a piece of the earth brought inside to keep them company. This was also true, in the way that a photograph of a person is a piece of the person. It was true and it was not.
She turned from the window and went to her lesson.
Her instructor was a man named Ora who had lived in the House for one hundred and forty years and who was, so far as Iyo could tell, always tired. He greeted her with a nod. He gestured to the chair opposite his desk. She sat.
Today, he said, we will speak of the surface.
She waited.
You will be sent up, he said. Within the month.
She said nothing. Her hands lay in her lap. She looked at his face, which was the face of a man of perhaps sixty, tanned by lights that were not the sun, patient and unrevealing.
You are ready, he said. You have been ready.
I have not seen it, she said.
You have seen images.
Images are not seeing.
He inclined his head. This is true, he said.
He rose and walked to the window of his office, which was another true window, opening this time onto a small courtyard where a single tree had been planted in a bed of stone. The tree was a fig. It bore no fruit. Iyo did not know why it bore no fruit. She had asked once and been told, with the same soft finality with which she had been told about the red, that this was a matter for another time.
You will be told, when you go up, that you are among the last of us to be sent, Ora said. This is true. There have been others. There will not be many more. You are not the beginning of anything. You are near the end.
She waited.
Do you understand why, he said.
I do not, she said.
He nodded, as if this were the correct answer, and turned to face her.
There is another people, up there, he said. They call themselves nothing that translates well. Their soldiers are joined by a common mind. They have been walking the surface for two years and they have not yet found us. They will find us soon.
You wish me to warn them, she said.
No, he said.
You wish me to spy on them.
No, he said, and his voice was very tired now, the tiredness she had noticed in him from the beginning. I wish for you to see them. To walk among them if you can. To learn what they are, so that when they come we may know what we are dying to.
She looked down at her hands. The hands were the hands she had always had. She had been told, at fourteen, that they were her mother's hands, and she had asked who her mother was, and she had been told that this was a matter for another time.
We will die, she said.
He did not answer at once. He returned to his desk and sat and folded his hands in front of him and looked at her with a kindness that made her want, unaccountably, to weep.
Some of us will die, he said. Others of us will be permitted to live. This is what treaties are for, and there will be a treaty. But the ones who made this place will not be permitted to live. This has been arranged.
By whom, she said.
He smiled, very slightly, for the first time she had ever seen.
By all of us, he said. By them. By us. By the earth, if the earth still has opinions. It has been arranged for a long time.
She sat with this. The room around her had not changed. The window still opened onto the fig tree that bore no fruit. Somewhere down the corridor a child laughed, or made the sound that had been taught to them as laughter, and the sound was very small and pure.
Why me, she said.
Because you asked about the stream, he said.
She looked at him.
We keep a record, he said, of the questions that are asked. Most of you do not ask. You who ask are the ones we send.
He rose again. The lesson, apparently, was over.
Go and sit with the Garden, he said. Until they call for you. Look at every leaf. When you are on the surface you will want to remember them.
She rose. She bowed, as she had been taught. She left the room and walked back along the pale corridor to the true window above the Garden, and she sat on the small bench there, and she looked down at the green, and she did not weep, because she had not been taught how.
III.
Sevan buried the woman where he found her, which was in the shade of a cottonwood by a wash that had not run in six years. She had been young. He judged this from the bones of her hands and from a plastic clip in her hair that had a small pink flower on it. He gathered stones from the bed of the wash and laid them over her in the pattern he had made his own, three at the head and three at the foot and one in the middle, over the place where the heart had been. He said no words. He had said words once and had stopped.
He was seventy-three years old. He had been a math teacher in a small town in New Mexico and now he was what he was, which was a man who walked. He had a horse that was not truly his, a bay mare he had found half-starved in a paddock the second summer and who had followed him ever since without being asked. He called her Nan. She stood now at a little distance, cropping at the pale grass by the wash, and she looked up at him when he had finished and then looked back down again.
He wiped his hands on his trousers.
The woman had died no more than a week before. He did not know how. There was no wound he could see. Her pack lay beside her, open, a few tins, a knife, a book. The book was a paperback with the cover torn away. He picked it up and turned it in his hands and read the first line of the first chapter, which said, There was a boy who lived in the mountains and did not know he was a boy. He closed the book. He put it in his own pack.
He mounted the horse.
The country he rode through had once been ranchland and before that had been the country of a people whose name he had learned as a child and no longer used, out of a private shame he could not have explained. He rode east, slowly, along the wash. The sky was very high. There were no birds. Some days there were birds. This day there were none.
He had been walking for two years. In the first year he had counted the dead. He had stopped counting at four hundred and thirteen, in the ruin of a small town whose water tower still bore the name of its high school football team. He had spent three days in that town, laying stones. When he left he had ridden without looking back.
In the second year he had begun to think of himself as a deathwalker, though he had told no one, because there was no one to tell. The name had come to him one night in a dream and he had accepted it. He was not the first to have such a name and would not be the last. What he did was old. Older than the towns, older than the ranches, older than the names on the water tower. He walked out and he laid stones and he moved on.
Now he rode east. There was a place ahead, a bend in the wash where an old road crossed, and beyond it a hill from which he could see for many miles. He had been to this hill before. He liked to sit on it in the evenings.
He came to the hill at the last hour of the light and dismounted and led the horse up the shallow slope. At the top he sat on a flat stone he had found there the year before and looked out over the flatland.
Something moved in the far distance, along the ridge above the old interstate. He watched a long time. A figure walking. Alone. Moving south, then stopping, then moving on. The figure went behind a rise and did not come out again. He waited another half hour but the figure did not reappear.
He did not think the figure had seen him. He had learned, in these years, to sit still on hills.
He ate a little of what he had. He gave the horse water from the skin. He watched the stars come out.
He said, aloud, to no one, Something is beginning.
The horse turned her head at the sound of his voice.
He said, Or something is ending. I cannot tell yet.
Then he slept, on the ground, wrapped in the old blanket that had been his since the beginning. He dreamed of the woman under the cottonwood, and in the dream she sat up and looked at him and said, kindly, You did not need to bother.
IV.
Vessa returned to the Mesh on the third day and did not report the door.
She walked in past the perimeter and the perimeter knew her and let her through, and she went to her quarters and stripped and stood under the water for a long time. The water was recycled. It tasted of nothing when it entered her mouth, and everything when it left. Iron. Chlorine. A faint sweetness that was, she had been told, the taste of a mineral added to keep them all from getting sick. It did not occur to her now to wonder whether they could get sick. It had once. She could not remember when she had stopped wondering.
She dressed in the soft grays of off-duty and went to the mess hall and ate. The others nodded to her. She nodded back. She sat with a woman named Reyva who had come in from the eastern sector the day before and who was known throughout the unit as someone who did not talk. This was why Vessa sat with her.
They ate in silence.
After a while Reyva said, You look tired.
Vessa said, I am.
Reyva nodded and did not press her. This was why one sat with Reyva.
After the meal Vessa walked out into the yard. The yard was a stretch of packed earth between the barracks and the perimeter wall, and there was a bench at the far end of it, and Vessa went to the bench and sat down. The sun was setting again. The sun set every day, she thought, whether or not anyone watched it, and yet she could not stop watching. Something in her had been fitted to the sun and would not be unfitted.
The Mesh hummed at the edge of her awareness. Someone in the north was singing. She could not hear the words, only the shape of the singing, a low soft sound moving through the network like water through a pipe. Someone else, closer, was arguing with a superior over a supply requisition. She let the sounds go through her without listening.
She thought about the door under the gas station.
She thought about her mother.
There had been a room. She remembered a room now, with more clarity than she had had in weeks. A long room with beds in it, and her mother in one of the beds, and the light coming through a high window at an angle that told her it was afternoon. Her mother had not spoken. Her mother had not been able to speak. The vaccine had reached her three weeks before. She had come home from the clinic with the small bandage on her arm and by evening she had been unable to lift her right hand and by morning she had been unable to speak and by the third day she had been placed in the long room, which was not a hospital, because the hospitals were full, but a school gymnasium with cots laid out on the polished wood.
Vessa had gone to see her every day.
The room had smelled of disinfectant and of the bodies of people who could not attend to themselves. The nurses were kind. The nurses had been going without sleep for weeks and there were not enough of them and they moved among the beds like women underwater, slowly, doing what could be done. Vessa had been a nurse herself. She had known these women. She had gone in one afternoon and offered to help and had been turned away, gently, because it was thought that she should be with her mother, who did not have much longer.
Her mother had lived four more days.
On the last day Vessa had sat by her bed and had held her hand and had spoken to her about small things, about the garden at home and about the neighbor's cat and about a dress her mother had worn to a wedding thirty years before. Her mother had watched her with the wide still eyes of a person who was there and not there. Toward evening the eyes had closed. The hand in Vessa's hand had grown a little heavier and then, over the course of some minutes, had grown lighter, as if the woman inside were leaving by increments. Vessa had not moved.
A nurse had come by after a while and had checked the pulse at the throat and had said, softly, She's gone, honey.
Vessa had not moved.
The nurse had touched her shoulder and had gone on to the next bed.
She had sat there another hour. When she rose at last she had rung the small silver bell that hung from a stand by the door, which was the bell they rang when someone had passed, and two men in gray coveralls had come with a folding gurney and had lifted her mother onto it and had wheeled her out through the door at the far end of the room, which led, Vessa knew, to a loading dock, where a truck waited.
The trucks ran all day and all night in those weeks. They ran to a place outside the city where a pit had been dug.
Vessa had not gone to the pit. There was no ceremony at the pit. There had been talk of ceremonies, but the ceremonies had never come. The dead were too many and the living too few. The pit had been dug by machines and filled by machines and covered by machines, and then another pit had been dug, and another. There had been fourteen pits by the time the vaccine deaths ended, and the pits had a name in the news for a while, and then they had no name, because there was no one left to name them, and then there was no news.
Vessa had walked home from the school that evening. She had walked past the shuttered coffee shop where she had once met a girl she loved for the first time, and past the church where she had been baptized at nine days old, and past the long low building of the hospital where she had worked for eleven years. All of them were dark. In the window of the coffee shop a hand-lettered sign said, WE WILL BE BACK.
She had gone home and had sat on the couch and had not risen for two days.
On the third day the recruiters had come to the door.
She had been expecting them. Everyone had been expecting them. They came to every house in those weeks, in twos, in the new gray uniforms that were not yet called uniforms. They stood in her doorway and they spoke to her softly and they said what they had said to everyone, which was that a new order was being built, and that she was needed, and that in exchange for her service she would be given a way to go on. She had asked what going on meant. They had told her.
She had asked whether her mother's death had been a mistake.
They had said, We do not know. Perhaps.
She had asked whether she would remember her mother, after.
They had said, Yes. All of it. That is a promise.
She had accepted.
She sat on the bench now in the fading light and remembered these things and she was not sure whether she remembered them as they had been or as she had been given them to remember. The promise had been kept, so far as she could tell. She remembered her mother. She remembered her mother's hand, and the smell of her mother's kitchen, and the way her mother laughed at things that were not funny.
She also remembered other things she could not have remembered on her own. Things from before she was born. Things from other people. A boy running down a street in a city she had never visited. A woman weaving a basket. A soldier in a uniform she did not recognize, dying in the mud of a country that no longer existed. The Mesh gave her these gifts as it took other things away. She had, in exchange, forgotten the middle names of her sisters, and the color of her father's eyes, and the words to a song she had once known well.
She stood up from the bench and went inside.
She lay on her bunk and did not sleep for a long time. She listened to the low hum of her cooling system and to the softer hum of the Mesh, and she thought about the door under the gas station, and about who might come out of it.
V.
Iyo came up on a morning in early spring.
There was no ceremony. There had been a ceremony, or something like a ceremony, the evening before, in the small chapel that had been built into the wall of the fourth level, where a woman named Denia had spoken about the surface and about what Iyo would find there. The words had been kind and had not touched Iyo. She had knelt where she was asked to kneel and had risen when she was asked to rise. Afterward Denia had put her hands on Iyo's face and had looked into her eyes for a long moment and had said, without moving her lips much, Come back if you can. Iyo had not answered. There was nothing to answer.
In the morning Ora came for her. She dressed in the clothing they had made for her, which was rough and gray and unlike anything else she had ever worn, and she strapped on the small pack they had prepared, and she followed Ora down a corridor she had never seen, past doors she had never seen, to a lift she had not known existed.
They rode up in silence. The lift was slow. Ora stood beside her and looked at the numbers as they rose, and she watched his face out of the corner of her eye, and she thought that she loved him, in whatever way she was capable of love, and that she would not see him again.
At the top they stepped out into a small chamber lit by a single yellow bulb. Ora pressed his palm to a panel on the wall and a door opened, and beyond the door was another corridor, narrower, unlit, that sloped upward. He handed her a small torch.
Walk to the end, he said. There is a hatch. It will open when you press your hand to it. Do not look back until you are outside. This is not superstition. There is a light-lock. If you look back you will be blinded for an hour.
She nodded.
He said, Go with what grace you have.
She said, And you.
She turned and walked.
The corridor was longer than she had expected. It was cold. The floor was of the same pale stone as everywhere else and her footsteps made small sounds that seemed too large for the space. She thought, once, of turning back. She did not turn back. Ahead the corridor curved, and at the curve there was the hatch, low and dull and gray, and she pressed her palm to the small plate beside it and heard a soft mechanical sigh and the hatch swung outward and she stepped through.
The light took her.
She had been told there would be light. She had not been prepared. The sun on the surface at nine in the morning of an April day was not the sun of any screen she had watched. It was not gold. It was white. It was a thing without color, that burned her eyes shut, and she stood in the doorway with her hand raised against it and heard the hatch close behind her and lock.
She waited.
After some minutes she opened her eyes a fraction. After more minutes she opened them more. The world assembled itself out of the light in stages. She saw first her own hand, then her boots, then the ground at her feet, which was pale sand with small pebbles in it. She saw a plant near her boot, low and gray-green, with tiny thorns. She had not known that a plant could look like that. She had known plants only from the Garden and from images. This plant was not either of those things. This plant had grown up out of the ground of the world because no one had told it not to.
She raised her eyes.
She saw, in the middle distance, a fence, and beyond the fence the concrete slab of what had been a building, and beyond that the flat brown country stretching to a horizon so far away that she could not, at first, believe it.
She began to weep.
She had not known that she could. It had been said to her, once, that she would find the surface overwhelming, and she had not understood what this meant. She had thought overwhelming meant frightening. It meant this. It meant that a thing could be so much of itself that a person unprepared for it would come apart, quietly, standing in her boots. She wept and did not move.
After some time she stopped.
She wiped her face with the sleeve of the gray coat. She took a step. Then another. She walked out from the shadow of the small shed under which her door had been hidden, and she went down through the fence, which was broken in several places, and she stood in the open on the flat brown country and she looked in every direction.
There was no one.
She had been told that she might not be met and that this would be preferable and that she should walk. She was to walk east until she came to the ruin of a small town, and there she was to wait, and if within seven days no contact was made she was to walk on to a river that lay another day beyond. She had a map in her pack. She had food and water for two weeks. She had a small device that she had not been told the purpose of, which lay in the bottom of the pack in its own soft cloth, and she had been told, only, that she was not to activate it.
She walked east.
She had been walking perhaps two hours when she saw the figure on the ridge.
It was a woman. This was her first thought, and it stayed her first thought, though the woman was too far away to see clearly. She wore what looked like a uniform of dark cloth. She stood on the top of the ridge and she was looking at Iyo. Iyo stopped walking. She stood in the open flat country and she looked back.
The woman on the ridge lifted her hand. Not in greeting exactly. Only lifted it.
Iyo lifted her own hand in return.
The woman began to walk down the slope of the ridge toward her.
Iyo waited. Her heart, of which she had known she had one, was doing something she had not felt it do before. Her hands were cold. She had been told, in some lesson years ago, that the body prepared itself for great events by moving blood away from the extremities, and she thought now, distantly, so that is what he meant.
The woman came across the flat land at a steady pace. She wore boots and dark trousers and a jacket with many small pockets. Her head was shaven. Iyo could see, as she came nearer, a faint pattern under the skin of her scalp, a fine tracery of lines like the veins of a leaf. Her eyes were dark. She stopped about ten paces away.
Where did you come from, the woman said.
Iyo did not answer.
The woman looked past her, toward the little shed and the broken fence. She looked back at Iyo. Her face did not change.
I'm not going to hurt you, the woman said.
Iyo said, I know.
The woman looked at her a while longer. There was, Iyo saw, a faint hum coming from her, so soft as to be almost imagined. A machine sound.
Are you real, the woman said at last.
Iyo did not know how to answer this.
The woman said, I mean. Are you flesh.
I am flesh, Iyo said.
The woman nodded slowly. She said, I thought so. I have been hunting you people for a year and a half. You are the first I have found.
I am not the first, Iyo said.
No, the woman said. I imagine not.
They stood there in the wind. A little dust blew between them. Iyo could smell, for the first time, the woman, which was not a smell like any she had known, a warm smell of metal and cloth and something faintly like the coffee they had grown in the Garden. She could smell herself, also, which was a smell of newness, of a life that had not yet been lived in.
What is your name, the woman said.
Iyo, said Iyo.
I am Vessa, the woman said. I am not going to take you in. I am going to walk with you a while. Is that all right.
Yes, Iyo said.
They walked.
VI.
Sevan saw them from the hill.
He had been on the hill for two days, waiting, though he could not have said what he was waiting for. In the morning of the second day he had seen a figure emerge from a low place in the flatland far to the west. He had watched the figure walk out into the open and stand for a long time, and then begin to move east. In the afternoon another figure had come down from the ridge and had crossed the flat and had met the first. He had watched them meet. He had watched them walk together.
He watched them for a long time.
They did not walk like friends. They walked like people who have never walked with anyone. They kept a careful distance between them, neither too close nor too far, and they did not speak much, as far as he could tell, though they were far enough away that he could not have heard them speak.
He knew what they were, or thought he did. He had heard the rumors. He had met, in his walking, three people who claimed to have seen the soldiers of the Mesh, and he had heard talk from an old man in a valley to the north of another people, people who lived under the ground, who came up sometimes and were seen only by children and by drunks. Sevan had not put much stock in the underground people. He had put a great deal of stock in the Mesh, because he had seen, twice, from a distance, their patrols.
Now here they were, one and one, walking together across the flat brown country.
Something is beginning, he said aloud, again, to the horse.
The horse did not answer. Horses rarely did.
He thought of following them. He thought of it for a long time. In the end he did not, because he had learned, in his walking, that some things are better left alone until they call for you.
Instead he watched them go until they were small and then smaller and then gone into the haze at the edge of the world.
He said, aloud, God be with you.
Then he was alarmed at himself, because it had been many years since he had said that particular thing, and he had said it now without meaning to. He sat for a while thinking about who or what he had meant by God, and could not come to a satisfactory answer, and finally he shrugged, and mounted the horse, and rode down the far side of the hill.
VII.
They came to the ruin of the town at dusk.
They had walked for the rest of that day and had made a fire in the shelter of a wall that had once been the wall of a Baptist church and had eaten from Iyo's pack and from Vessa's, and they had spoken very little. Iyo had asked once about the fine lines under Vessa's scalp and Vessa had answered, briefly, and had asked in return about the smoothness of Iyo's hands, and Iyo had answered, briefly, and after that they had let the subject rest. It was as if they had agreed, without agreeing, to speak only of small things, and to let the great things stand for a while at the edge of the firelight.
They slept on opposite sides of the fire.
In the morning they walked into the town.
The town was small. It had been small before. There was a main street with a bank on one corner and a hardware store on another, and a diner in between, and the diner still had its sign, which said EAT, in large red letters that had faded to pink. The windows of the diner were broken. Inside, on the counter, someone had left a coffee cup, and the cup had been there long enough that the paint of the town had settled inside it in a fine gray dust.
They went in.
Vessa moved through the diner with a soft attentiveness, touching things lightly, a napkin dispenser, the metal edge of a stool. Iyo stood in the middle of the floor and looked around. She had seen pictures of such places. She had not been in one. She sat, tentatively, on a stool. The stool spun. She was surprised by this. She spun it again, slowly, with her foot, and looked at Vessa.
Vessa was smiling, very slightly, for the first time Iyo had seen.
They used to spin, Vessa said. When I was a child my mother would put me on one and give it a push.
Was it pleasant, Iyo said.
Yes, Vessa said. It was pleasant.
They went upstairs. Above the diner was an apartment, one room and a small kitchen, and in the room was a bed and a dresser and a small round table and two chairs and, on the wall, a framed photograph of a young couple at what looked like a wedding. The frame had cracked. The photograph inside was intact. They stood before it, together.
Who are they, Iyo said.
Vessa looked at the photograph a long time. She said, I do not know. Someone. They lived here.
They are dead, Iyo said.
Yes, Vessa said.
Everyone up here is dead, Iyo said.
Vessa said, Almost everyone. There are a few. There are more than you would think.
Iyo did not answer.
They spent the afternoon in the apartment. They did not speak of the world outside it. Iyo sat on the edge of the bed and Vessa sat in one of the chairs at the little round table and they talked, at last, of the things that they had agreed the day before not to talk of. Iyo told Vessa about the Garden. She told her about the Alps stream that played in her room each morning, and about the tree in Ora's courtyard that bore no fruit, and about the woman who had knelt to clean the leaves of a tomato plant one by one. She told her about the ceremony in the chapel and about Denia's hands on her face. She told her about the door.
Vessa listened without moving.
When Iyo had finished, Vessa said, You will need to go back. Soon.
I do not think I can, Iyo said.
Not to stay, Vessa said. To tell them what you have seen. That is what you were sent for.
Iyo was quiet a long time. She said, I was sent to see what would kill us.
I know, Vessa said. It is coming.
Is it you, Iyo said.
Not only me, Vessa said. Some of me. Most of me. Yes, it is me. I am sorry.
Iyo looked at her hands. She said, Will there be a reason.
Vessa said, There is always a reason. They are not always good.
Then Vessa said, We know you are there. We have known for weeks. My people found a door in the sand a week ago, and I did not report it, and someone else found another door, and reported it, and now the whole Mesh is moving. There will be a war. It will be short. My people are very good at short wars. It is one of the few things we are good at now.
She stopped. Then she said, Some of you will be permitted to live. Not all. The ones who made this place. The ones who were the first. They will not live.
Iyo said, I know. I was told.
Vessa looked at her.
You were told, Vessa said.
Yes, Iyo said. I was told that this had been arranged. By all of us. By all of you. By the earth, if the earth still had opinions. I was told this a month ago by a man I love, who is one of the ones who will not live.
Vessa said nothing for a long time.
She said at last, That is a strange thing to be told before your first sky.
Iyo said, I know.
Vessa said, We were not told. We were told other things. We were told that we were building a new world. We were told that our old world had been taken from us and that we were building a new one that could not be taken. That is what I was told when I was recruited. Do you know what happens to us, in the Singularity.
Iyo said, I know a little.
Vessa said, We are not immortal. That was a lie. They did not promise it, but they let it be understood. We live longer. Some of us live very long. But the network is what lasts, not us. Each of us in it is a small candle. When we go out, another is lit. The network remembers. The candles do not, always.
She reached up and touched, absently, the fine tracery of lines under her scalp.
I remember my mother, she said. I do not remember my first grade teacher. I do not remember my sister's middle name. I remember songs I never learned. I sing them sometimes and cannot say where they came from. There is a lullaby I have been singing myself to sleep with for a year now, and I know I never heard it as a child, and I have never asked anyone if they know it, because I am afraid to learn who it belonged to.
Iyo said, Sing it now.
Vessa looked at her.
Iyo said, Please.
Vessa began to sing. Her voice was low and not particularly beautiful, but it was very steady. The song was in a language Iyo did not know. It had a slow measure that seemed to move like water. Iyo listened. When Vessa had finished, they sat in the room together with the song still in it, the way a smell will remain in a room after the fire that made it has gone out.
Iyo said, softly, That was Turkish. My mother, or the woman whose cells I was made from, was Turkish. That song is a song about a girl who goes to fetch water from a well and finds a lion.
Vessa looked at her.
Iyo said, I do not know how I know this. I have never been told what she was, exactly. But I know this song. I have heard it in my own head, at night, my whole life. I did not know it was a song.
Vessa said, at last, Oh.
They sat with this.
Vessa said, Perhaps my candle was lit from hers.
Perhaps, Iyo said.
They did not speak of it further. There was no need. They sat together in the small apartment above the diner, in the fading light, and outside the wind moved against the broken window in a soft repeated ticking, and neither of them moved for a long time.
Eventually Vessa said, I have to go back.
I know, Iyo said.
Vessa said, If I can arrange it. If there is any way. I will come and find you when it is over. I do not know if there is any way. It is likely there is not. But I will try.
Iyo said, All right.
Vessa said, You should go back too. Tonight. Tell them what you have seen.
I will, Iyo said.
Vessa rose. She stood in the middle of the room. She looked down at Iyo, who did not rise. She reached out, tentatively, and touched Iyo's hair. Iyo closed her eyes. Vessa stood there a moment longer, then withdrew her hand.
She went down the stairs.
Iyo sat on the bed a long time. When at last she rose she went to the window and looked out. She could see Vessa in the street below, a small figure in a gray coat, walking east away from the town. She watched until Vessa was gone. Then she gathered her pack and she went down the stairs and out into the street, and she walked west, back the way they had come, toward the door in the sand.
She walked all night.
VIII.
The war began three days later. It began with no announcement. It began with the sound, at first light on a day in early April, of a great many small aircraft rising into the eastern sky from the direction of a place that was no longer marked on any map. They were dark and moved together and made almost no sound. From the ground they looked, to the very few who saw them, like a flock of birds seen very high.
Sevan saw them from a hill.
He had ridden south. He had felt, though he could not have explained it, that south was the direction to go. He was on a hill some kilometers north of a river that had once run through a great city, and the city lay before him now, a broken jumble of towers under a pale sky. The aircraft rose from the far side of the city, hundreds of them, and moved in a long dark line to the north. He watched them until they were gone. He did not move for a long time. The horse cropped grass beside him.
He said, aloud, So.
Then he mounted, and rode down toward the river.
Vessa was in the north when the war began. She had returned to the Mesh and had reported what she had seen, or some of what she had seen, and she had been debriefed for a day and a half, and she had been reassigned, and she had not slept, and she was standing now in the staging yard of a forward camp when the aircraft came in low over the treeline and settled on the ground like great tired birds, and she and forty others climbed into them, and the aircraft lifted and moved south.
She did not know where they were going. She knew it was a door.
The Mesh hummed at a pitch she had not heard before. It was the pitch of a great many minds thinking one thought at once. She was one of those minds. She thought the thought with the others and she was, in some part of herself, terrified of how easily she thought it. The thought was: Go down. End it.
They flew for two hours. They came down at last on a flat place in the desert where other aircraft had come down before them, and where a great engine was working, boring into the ground. She saw the engine at a distance as they landed. It was as high as a building and wider than a house, and it turned slowly, and the earth around it had already been cleared away in a great cone, and men and women of the Mesh were moving around the cone at its edges, and there was no smoke and there was no noise, only the deep sub-audible thrum of the engine working.
They had known where the doors were. She understood this now, or something in her understood it. They had known for months, perhaps for years. Her walk in the desert had not been reconnaissance. It had been rehearsal. They had let her find the door under the gas station so that she would have found something, so that she would have felt useful, so that she would come back and be ready.
She stood at the edge of the cone.
Around her the others of the Mesh were forming up. She joined them. The thought of the network was in her and she was in it, and she went where the thought went, and did not stop.
The engine reached the roof of the underground city at fourteen hundred hours.
Iyo felt the tremor first.
She was in the Garden. She had returned three days before, and she had told Ora what she had seen, and he had listened, and had nodded, and had said only, Thank you. He had not asked her about the woman she had walked with. She had not offered. He had gone away that evening and she had not seen him since.
She spent her days in the Garden now. She did not know why. She had asked permission and had received it, and each morning she went down and moved among the rows with a small cloth in her pocket, cleaning the leaves. She had done this for three days. On the third day she was kneeling beside a row of chard when the floor of the Garden shuddered, and the leaves in her hand shivered, and above her the great lamps that stood in for the sun flickered once and steadied.
She rose.
Around her the others in the Garden had also risen. They were looking up at the lamps. No one spoke. There was another shudder. Farther away, a bell began to ring.
The bell was not a bell she knew. She had never heard it before. Whether she had never heard it because it had never been rung in her lifetime or because she had not been in a place to hear it when it had been rung, she did not know. It rang three times and stopped.
The others in the Garden began to move.
They moved with a strange calm. They put their tools away in the small boxes at the ends of the rows. They folded the cloths from their pockets and set them on the boxes. They walked, in the same steady manner in which they had always walked, toward the great doors at the north end of the Garden, which stood open. Iyo did not know what lay beyond the doors. She had never gone through them. She followed.
Beyond the doors was a corridor, and beyond the corridor was a stair, and the stair went down.
She followed the others down. They descended for a long time. The stair was of the pale stone, and its walls were smooth, and there was no sound but the sound of many feet moving quietly at once. Iyo walked with her hand on the wall. She did not think. There was nothing to think.
They came to a great chamber.
The chamber was low-ceilinged and very wide. It was lit by lamps set into the walls, which cast a soft even light without shadows. There were, in the chamber, a great many people. They stood in loose groups. They spoke, some of them, in soft voices. There were children. There were very old men and women. There was, at the far end of the chamber, a raised place, and on the raised place stood a small group of figures in white, and among them Iyo saw Denia, and beside Denia she saw Ora, and beside Ora she saw others whom she had not seen before but knew, by their bearing, to be very important.
Denia was speaking. Her voice was quiet but it carried. Iyo pressed forward through the crowd until she could hear.
... in accordance with the arrangement, Denia was saying. It has been prepared for a long time. It is nothing that has not been known. The doors will be opened at the appropriate moment. The Elect will pass. Others will make their own way. There is no dishonor in either choice.
Iyo did not understand. She turned to a man beside her and said, softly, What is happening.
The man looked at her. He was old. His hair was white and long. He said, gently, We are being liberated.
By whom, Iyo said.
By them, he said. And by us. It has been arranged.
Where are the Founders, Iyo said.
The man looked at her a long moment. He said, They are in their libraries. They are being permitted to die there.
By whom, she said again.
By us, he said. Some of them have already died. Some of them will need help. There are those among us who will provide it. It has been arranged.
Iyo turned away.
She pushed back through the crowd toward the stair. She did not know where she was going. She only knew that she could not stand in the chamber. She climbed the stair. The stair was empty now, everyone having descended. She climbed for a long time. At the top she found the corridor and passed through it, and passed through the great doors into the Garden, and the Garden was empty of people, and the lamps were still on, and the leaves in the rows still moved a little in the currents of the ventilation system.
She stood in the middle of the Garden.
She heard the drilling.
It was very faint. It came from above. She looked up. The ceiling of the Garden was so high she could not see it well. She could see, dimly, the great arch of it, painted in a pale blue like the sky she had seen only once, and here and there the fixtures for the lamps, and, running along the crown of the arch, a fine seam that she had never noticed before.
She saw a fine trickle of dust fall from the seam. Then more dust. Then a small rock. The rock struck the row of chard where she had been kneeling. She did not move.
Above her, the ceiling of the Garden began to crack.
She turned and walked, without hurrying, to the great doors at the north end. She passed through them. She walked down the corridor to the stair. She began, once more, to descend.
Behind her the Garden opened to the sky.
Sunlight came down into the underground city for the first time in seventy years. It fell across the rows of green, across the tomatoes and the chard and the beans, across the small pale bench where she had sat, and it lay there on the Garden as though it had always been meant to, as though this were the moment the Garden had been built for, and now, having been built for it, could be dispensed with.
Vessa dropped down into the Garden with the second wave.
She dropped through a hole cut by the engine, through eighty meters of rock and steel, into the great green space below. She landed hard on the pale stone of the aisle between the rows. Around her the others of the Mesh were landing. They fanned out. The Garden was empty of people. They moved through it and cleared it. They moved into the corridors beyond it. They moved down the great stair.
She moved with them.
She thought of Iyo. She thought of Iyo as a small candle at the edge of her mind, and she moved through the city with the thought, and she did not know whether the thought was helping her or whether the thought was, perhaps, an addressed prayer, sent out into a dark she could not see into.
They met no resistance for some time.
The corridors of the underground city were long and pale and empty. The doors along them stood open. In some of the rooms there were small signs of recent life. A cup on a table. A book left open. A garment laid across a chair. In other rooms the beds had been carefully made. In one room a very old man sat in a chair by a window that looked out on nothing, and when the soldiers of the Mesh came to the door he raised a hand in greeting and said, softly, You are welcome. He did not rise. He was, Vessa saw when they came closer, already gone. He had died with his hand raised. His body had cooled enough that she could not tell how long he had been dead.
They moved on.
They came at last to the libraries.
The libraries were on the fifth level and were seven in number. Each was a great domed room lined with shelves that reached to the ceiling and were filled with books. The books were of every kind. There were, Vessa saw, first editions of works she had read in her nurse's training and had thought lost. There were manuscripts in scripts she did not recognize. There were scrolls in cases of glass.
In each library there was a group of people. They were the oldest people Vessa had ever seen. They sat in chairs. Some of them held books. Some of them held the hands of others. In the first library into which she came there were nine of them, and as she entered they turned their faces toward her and she saw the strangeness of their faces, the smoothness of the skin over the bones, the youthful eyes in the very old faces, the something in them that had been arranged.
One of them, a woman, spoke.
You are here, the woman said. Thank you. It has taken so long.
Vessa did not move.
The woman rose. She walked toward Vessa. She was small, and moved slowly, but with grace. She stopped a few paces away.
We had thought, the woman said, that we might live forever. It was, of course, absurd. We knew this. It did not stop us from thinking it. Do you understand.
Vessa did not answer.
I have children, the woman said. Grandchildren. They are here, in this city. They are among those who will be permitted to live. This is enough. I have thought about it for a long time. It is enough.
She stopped. She looked at Vessa's face. She said, You are one of the new ones. I can see the mesh. Does it hurt.
No, Vessa said.
The woman nodded. She said, Good. It should not hurt. That was one of the things we worked on, when we knew you were coming. We wanted the new ones not to hurt. I suppose we were not entirely without a conscience.
She turned to the others in the library. She said, quietly, It is time.
They rose, some of them. Others did not rise. The woman came back to her chair and sat down and folded her hands in her lap.
You have been given, she said to Vessa, without looking at her, a small object. Each of you has been given it. It is in the pocket over your heart. Please take it out.
Vessa put her hand into the pocket over her heart. She did not remember being given anything. But there was a small object there. A cylinder about the size of her thumb, dark, warm. She took it out.
Thank you, the woman said. Please put it on the table beside the door as you leave. There is one for each of us. When you are gone, someone will come and place them on our chairs. This has been arranged. It will not hurt. It has been arranged for a long time. Thank you, dear.
Vessa stood a moment longer.
The woman closed her eyes.
Vessa walked to the table beside the door. She placed the cylinder on it. She left the library. Behind her, in the domed room, no one moved, and no one spoke, and there was only the very soft sound of a great many people breathing quietly under a ceiling of books.
She did not go into the other libraries.
She stood in the corridor a long time. Around her the others of the Mesh moved. Some of them wept. She had not known that they could still weep. She had not known that she could. She wept, standing in the corridor, and no one paid her any attention, and the Mesh in her ear hummed at a pitch she had not heard before, which was the pitch of many minds thinking, at once, one thought.
The thought was: This is what we have been for.
IX.
The war ended within a day and a half of its beginning.
There had been resistance in some parts of the underground city, though not much. There were, it turned out, soldiers of a kind among the Bright, though they had been prepared for a war of a different sort and their weapons were of a strange, delicate kind that did not travel well against the Mesh. They fought a running defense along the third and fourth levels and were, one by one, taken. Some surrendered. Some were killed. Some killed themselves, quietly, in small rooms.
At the end of the second day the fighting stopped.
A message came out of the underground on an old radio frequency that had not been used for anything in a decade. The message was brief. It said that the leadership of the Bright wished to speak with the leadership of the Mesh. It said that the Founders were, all of them, dead. It said that a table had been arranged, and named a place.
The place was the surface. It was a stretch of flat ground about two kilometers from the great cone the engine had dug. Someone from the Bright had gone up and had set out a table there. The table was old and long and had come, so it was said, from a bar that had once stood in a small town nearby. It had been dragged out and set on the sand and four chairs had been placed around it.
Vessa was not one of those who went to the table.
She was not senior enough. She stood at a distance with the others, along a ridge, and watched. From where she stood she could see the table and the four chairs and the small figures of those who came to sit in them. Two from the Mesh. Two from the Bright.
She saw, on the side of the Bright, an old man in a gray coat whom she thought at first was Ora. She had heard of Ora from Iyo. She could not know his face. But this man moved with the tiredness that Iyo had described, and he sat down at the table with the tiredness of a man for whom the sitting is a great effort. Beside him sat a woman Vessa also did not know, in a white robe. On the side of the Mesh sat two she knew by sight, generals with mesh so heavily woven into their scalps that from a distance their heads looked painted with fine dark lace.
They spoke a long time. From the ridge Vessa could not hear them. She saw the small movements of their hands. She saw one of the Mesh generals lay a paper on the table. She saw the old man on the other side read it. She saw him nod. He signed. The white-robed woman signed. The generals signed.
There was no sound of celebration.
There was, from the Mesh, no sound at all. The great chorus in her head had gone quiet. There was only the very low background hum of it, of many minds holding themselves still, waiting for a thing to be done that could not be undone.
When it was done the four rose from the table.
They did not shake hands. They did not embrace. They stood a moment, and then the two from the Bright turned and walked back the way they had come, toward the mouth of the cone. The two from the Mesh turned and walked toward the ridge where Vessa stood.
The table remained. The chairs remained. No one thought to take them away.
That evening they buried the Founders.
There were, it turned out, seventy-two of them. Some had died in their libraries with the cylinders on their chairs. Some had died in their own beds. Some had died, apparently, before the drilling began, by their own arrangement. There were also others whose bodies were older, some of them by many years, kept in preservation vaults on the lowest level, ancestors of the Founders who had elected to freeze themselves against a future that had, in the end, arrived without them.
The Mesh brought them all up out of the ground. They laid them out on the flat land not far from the table. They did not lay them out in any particular order. There were, among the seventy-two, four with names that Vessa knew, names from the old world, names that had been in the news for as long as she had been alive. She looked at their faces. They looked, in the last light, like the faces of any old men. She could not tell, looking at them, why the world had once bent itself around them.
The Bright had asked, in the treaty, that the bodies be burned. It was, it seemed, a matter of religious sensitivity. The Mesh had agreed. A pyre was built out of the last of a stand of mesquite that grew along a wash a kilometer away. The mesquite made a hot smokeless fire. The bodies burned through the night. Vessa watched from the ridge. The fire threw a soft red light against the low clouds, and the clouds moved, slowly, from west to east, over the country that had once been the country of a people whose name she had learned as a child and no longer remembered.
She was thinking of Iyo.
She had asked, twice, to be allowed to go and look for her. She had been refused. The city was still being cleared. There would be time. She was told that there would be time.
She was not sure that this was true.
X.
Iyo lived.
She had descended, on the day of the drilling, back to the great chamber. She had stood at the edge of the crowd and listened to Denia finish her speech, and she had watched the Elect, the ones who had been chosen for a life beyond, move in a slow orderly line through the door at the north end of the chamber, toward the far levels where they would wait out the war. She had not moved with them. She had been about to. She had raised her foot to step forward and then had lowered it again, and had stayed where she was.
She did not know why.
Later she thought it was because of Ora, whom she had not seen among the Elect. She thought it was because of the man in the chapel who had told her, kindly, By us. By all of us. By the earth. She thought it was because of the song Vessa had sung her in the room above the diner, which had turned out to belong to her mother. She thought that if she had gone with the Elect, into whatever life had been prepared for them, she would have gone with the song still in her but with nowhere for it to go.
She stayed.
She sat down against the wall of the chamber. Around her, others sat down. Not many. Perhaps thirty. Old men, mostly. A few children. A woman about her own age, who caught her eye and smiled a very small smile and did not speak. They waited.
After some time the soldiers came.
They came down the great stair in a long silent line. They wore the dark cloth Iyo had seen on Vessa and the fine tracery of mesh under their scalps. They moved through the chamber. They did not shoot. Iyo watched them. They looked, all of them, tired. They looked, some of them, sad.
One of them stopped in front of Iyo. A man. He knelt in front of her. He said, softly, Are you all right.
Iyo said, Yes.
He said, You will need to come with us. It is not far. There is water. There is food. You will not be harmed.
She said, All right.
He rose. He held out his hand. She took it and rose. His hand was warm. His hand was, when she thought about it, no different from any hand she had known.
They led her up out of the city.
She came out through the mouth of the cone into the last light of the second day. The sky was the color of the inside of a shell. She stood at the edge of the cone and looked around. The country was vast. There were, in the distance, the small figures of others, being led as she had been led, up out of the ground. There was a tent. There was a table she did not understand the meaning of, standing alone on the flat land some distance away.
She was taken to the tent. She was given water and bread. She was told to sit. She sat. The man who had led her out sat beside her a while, not speaking, and then rose and went off to his other duties.
She waited.
Toward evening she saw the pyre being built. She did not understand what it was for. Later she understood.
She stayed in the tent for two days.
On the third day the tent was struck and she and the others of the Bright who had chosen to come up were moved to a place a little farther east, where a small settlement had been arranged for them. There were prefabricated houses. There were pumps for water. There was a low building for the shared eating of meals. It had been prepared, it seemed, some time ago. The Mesh had known, apparently, that some of the Bright would come up.
She was given a house. It was small. It had a window that looked out on the flat country. She stood at the window a long time.
She thought Vessa would come.
She thought Vessa would come the first day. She did not. She thought Vessa would come the second day. She did not. On the third day the small woman about her own age, whom she had seen in the chamber, came to Iyo's door and knocked, and Iyo let her in, and they sat together at the small table in the small house, and they did not say much, and after a while the woman rose and left. Her name, it turned out, was Ellin. She lived in the house next to Iyo's.
On the fourth day Ora came.
Iyo had not known that he lived. She saw him coming up the road from the direction of the cone, moving slowly, with the tiredness she had always known in him now much greater than before, and she went out to meet him. He stopped when he saw her. He did not speak at first. He was very old suddenly. He was, she thought, closer to his true age than she had ever seen him.
He said, You stayed.
She said, Yes.
He said, I did not know you would.
I did not know either, she said.
He was quiet a while. He said, at last, I signed a paper today.
I know, she said. I saw. From the window.
He nodded. He looked past her, at the small houses, at the flat country, at the sky. He said, It is not what I had wanted for you.
She said, I do not think it is what anyone wanted.
No, he said. It is not.
He stood there a while longer. He did not ask about the woman she had walked with. She did not tell him. There were things, she understood, that would go with each of them into whatever came next, and there was no need to say them aloud.
At last he said, I am to live in the second house down. If you wish to visit an old man, you may.
I wish to, she said.
He nodded. He turned and walked slowly on down the road.
She stood in the doorway a long time.
Vessa came on the seventh day.
She came alone, on foot, from the north. Iyo saw her from the window and did not go out. She waited. Vessa came to the door and knocked, and Iyo opened the door, and Vessa stood there a moment, and then came in.
They did not embrace. They stood facing each other in the middle of the small room.
Vessa said, I am sorry.
Iyo said, I know.
Vessa said, I did not know what I was doing when I let you find me. I did not know what I would do. I did not know what I had done.
Iyo said, I know.
Vessa was quiet a while. She said, I have been walking since the treaty. I could not come. There was much to do.
I know, Iyo said.
Vessa said, You lived.
I lived, Iyo said.
Vessa said, I have been given permission to come here. I do not have to go back for a time. If you do not want me here, I will go.
Iyo said, Stay.
They sat down at the small table. Vessa took off her coat and laid it across the back of the chair. She looked around the small house.
It is a bit like where you were, she said.
A little, Iyo said. Not really.
No, Vessa said. Not really.
They sat.
After a while Iyo said, Was it very bad, at the end. With the ones in the libraries.
Vessa was quiet a long time. She said, Yes.
Iyo said, Ora signed the treaty.
Yes, Vessa said. I saw. From the ridge.
Iyo said, He is here. He is in the second house down. He is very old now.
Vessa nodded.
Iyo said, Will there be a world for us. Any of us.
Vessa said, I do not know. There will be something. It will not be what any of us wanted. It never is.
They sat.
At last Iyo said, Sing the song again.
Vessa looked at her.
Iyo said, Please. I want to remember it. I want to hear it in a house.
Vessa sang. Her voice was low and unbeautiful and very steady. She sang the song about the girl and the well and the lion. When she had finished, they sat with the song in the room, and neither of them moved, and outside the window the flat brown country went on and on to the horizon, and the sun was low, and it was very quiet.
XI.
Sevan came to the settlement on a day in early summer.
He rode in on the bay mare Nan, who was thinner than she had been, and slower. He had heard, in his walking, that a place had been made up here where the two peoples were living side by side, or trying to, and he had wanted to see it before he stopped walking, which he understood, without being told, that he would soon do. He was very tired.
He rode up the road that led into the settlement. He passed the small houses. He passed a garden that had been planted in the middle of a common. He passed a low building where a woman was hanging clothes on a line. She looked up and nodded to him. He nodded back.
At the far end of the settlement, in a house set a little apart, he saw two women sitting on a bench outside the door. One had a fine tracery of mesh under her scalp. The other had hands that were very smooth. They were drinking something from cups. Between them, on the bench, sat a small dog.
The dog was some kind of terrier. Its ears were up. It watched him come.
He drew up beside the bench. He looked down at the two women. They looked up at him. Neither of them spoke.
He said, Good afternoon.
Good afternoon, said the one with the mesh.
He said, Is this where a man might get water for his horse.
There is a pump, said the other, at the common. You passed it.
He said, Thank you. I will go back.
He did not move. He looked at the dog. The dog looked at him.
Where did the dog come from, he said.
The one with the smooth hands said, He came from over there. She pointed with her cup, out across the flat country, toward the south. He came three days ago. He walked up to the door. We gave him water. He stayed.
Sevan nodded. He said, He is a good dog.
He is, the woman said. We are calling him nothing yet. We do not know what to call him.
Sevan looked at the dog a while longer. He said, at last, Do not name him too soon. Names are hard to change.
We will not, the woman said.
He touched the brim of his hat and turned the horse.
He rode back down the road to the pump. He watered the horse. He drank a little himself. He sat on a low wall by the pump and rested. The sun was hot. After a while the woman who had been hanging clothes came over and sat beside him. She had bread with her. She gave him some. They ate together without speaking.
At last she said, Are you the one they call the walker.
He said, I am one of them.
She said, There is a place for you, if you would like it. A house at the end of the road. It has been standing empty. No one will trouble you.
He looked at her. He said, I am obliged. But I think I will keep going. There are other places.
She nodded. She said, We would be glad if you came back.
He said, I may.
She rose. She went back to her line of clothes.
He sat a while longer. He watched the settlement. He watched the small movements of the people, the coming and going, the small daily things. A woman in a gray coat and a woman in a white robe walked together across the common, deep in some quiet talk. A child ran past them, chasing something Sevan could not see. Somewhere a bell rang, softly, not the bell of an alarm but the bell of a meal.
He thought, So this is what comes after.
He was not sure whether he approved. He was not sure that approval was what was called for. He thought, then, that perhaps the world had never called for approval, from him or from anyone, and that this had been the great error of the ones who were now gone, to have thought that it did.
He rose. He mounted the horse. He rode back up the road, past the small houses, past the common, past the house at the end where the two women had been sitting.
They were still there. The dog was still with them. As he rode past, the dog got up from the bench and walked out into the road and sat down and watched him go. The two women watched also. They did not wave. He did not wave.
He rode out of the settlement, north, into the flat country.
Behind him the dog sat in the middle of the road a long time after he was out of sight, and then, when it grew tired of watching an empty road, it rose and shook itself once and trotted back to the bench, and jumped up, and lay down between the two women, and put its head on the leg of the one with the smooth hands, and closed its eyes.
The one with the mesh looked at the one with the smooth hands.
The one with the smooth hands did not look up. She was looking at the dog.
The wind moved a little in the small trees that had been planted along the road, and the light was long, and the shadow of the house lay across the bench, and there was, for a little while, no sound at all except the very quiet breathing of a small dog asleep in the lap of a woman who had never, until three months ago, seen the sky.
XII.
There is more to tell. There is always more. There is the story of the settlement in the years after, of how it grew and how it did not grow, of how the Mesh and the Bright learned, slowly, painfully, to sit at the same tables. There is the story of Ora, who lived only another eight months, and of his funeral, at which Vessa sang the Turkish song at Iyo's request, and at which many of the Mesh stood in the back and listened without knowing what the words meant, and wept without knowing why. There is the story of a child born, the following spring, to a woman of the Bright and a man of the Mesh, and of the great quiet argument about what such a child would be, and of the settlement's decision, in the end, not to decide.
There is the story of Sevan, who did come back, in the winter, and who did take the house at the end of the road, and who lived there another four years before he died in his sleep on a night of hard rain. He was buried, at his request, with three stones at his head and three at his foot and one over his heart. Iyo laid the middle stone.
There is the story of the underground city, sealed at last, its great stair filled with rubble, its Garden left open to the sky, where over the years the tomatoes went to seed and the seed traveled on the wind and, in places, took root in the dust of the flat country, and where, if you know where to look, you can still find, in a good spring, a small green plant with a yellow flower growing in the middle of nothing.
There is the story of what the Mesh became, after, when the thing they had been for was done. There is the story of the candles going out one by one, and of the network's slow surrender to the country it had been built to master, and of how some of the mesh, on the very oldest, was said, in the end, to have grown a fine coating of the soft green mineral that ate at everything given long enough. There is the story, though it may only be a story, of the last of the generals, sitting in a chair at the edge of the sea, unattended, at peace.
There is the story of the world.
The world went on. It went on more quietly than it had. There were fewer people in it, and the people who remained were of two kinds and then, after a while, of three kinds, and then, after another while, of many kinds again, because the world does not permit for very long the tidy divisions of those who have tried to master it. The country grew back, in places. In other places it did not. The pits outside the cities filled with grass over many summers. The billboards fell. The roads gave up their asphalt to the sun, and beneath the asphalt was the older road, and beneath that the older road still, and beneath all of them the country itself, which had been there before any road and would be there after.
There is the story of the songs. Some songs were lost. Some songs were kept. Some songs were sung by mouths that did not know where they had come from. The song about the girl and the well and the lion was sung, for many years, at the settlement, and then at other settlements, and then in places where no one knew a settlement had ever been. It changed as it moved. In some versions the lion became a snake. In some the girl became a boy. In one version, sung in a town on a coast where none of the ones who first sang it had ever been, the girl brings the lion home and keeps him in the yard, and he is old, and he is tame, and he lies in the sun and no one is afraid.
That is not the true version of the song. There is no true version. All songs are true and none is true and the singing goes on.
The world goes on.
The dog on the bench outlived the two women who sat with it. It lived to be seventeen, which was not the oldest a dog had ever been, but was the oldest that dog had ever been. On the day it died, in the shade of the small trees along the road, in the summer of a year that no one in the settlement bothered to number, a very old woman with fine lines under the pale skin of her scalp sat beside it, and held its paw, and sang softly, in a language none of the others in the settlement knew, a song about a girl who went to fetch water from a well and found a lion, and the lion was old, and the lion was tame, and the girl was not afraid.
When the dog had gone, the woman rose, and went into the small house, and closed the door.
And the wind moved a little in the small trees along the road.
And the sun went down.
Published by Crabtree Library, 2026
