Wool (48 page)

Lukas pinched a thick chunk of the Order and flopped it to the side. He skipped past all the recipes for averting silo disasters and checked out some of the more academic reference material toward the back. This stuff was even
more
frightening: chapters on group persuasion, on mind control, on the effects of fear during upbringing; graphs and tables dealing with population growth …

He couldn’t take it. He adjusted his chair and watched Bernard for a while as the head of IT and acting mayor scrolled through screen after screen of text, his head notching back and forth as he scanned the words there.

After a moment, Lukas dared to break the silence. “Hey, Bernard?”

“Hm?”

“Hey, why isn’t there anything in here about how all this came to be?”

Bernard’s office chair squealed as he swiveled it around to face Lukas. “I’m sorry, what?”

“The people who made all this, the people who wrote these books. Why isn’t there anything in the Order about them? Like how they built all this stuff in the first place.”

“Why would there be?” Bernard half turned back to his computer.

“So we would
know
. I dunno, like all the stuff in the other books—”

“I don’t want you reading those other books. Not yet.” Bernard pointed to the wooden desk. “Learn the Order first. If you can’t keep the silo together, the Legacy books are pulp. They’re as good as processed wood if no one’s around to read them.”

“Nobody
can
read them but the two of us if they stay locked up down here—”

“No one
alive
. Not today. But one day, there’ll be plenty of people who’ll read them. But only if you study.” Bernard nodded toward the thick and dreadful book before turning back to his keyboard and reaching for his mouse.

Lukas sat there awhile, staring at Bernard’s back, the knotted cord of his master keys sticking out of the top of his undershirt.

“I figure they must’ve known it was coming,” Lukas said, unable to stop himself from perseverating about it. He had always wondered about these things, had suppressed them, had found his thrills in piecing together the distant stars that were so far away as to be immune to the hillside taboos. And now he lived in this vacuum, this hollow of the silo no one knew about where forbidden topics were allowed and he had access to a man who seemed to know the precious truth.

“You aren’t studying,” Bernard said. His head remained bent over his keyboard, but he seemed to know that Lukas was watching him.

“But they had to’ve seen it coming, right?” Lukas lifted his chair and turned it around a little more. “I mean, to have built all these silos before it got so bad out there …”

Bernard turned his head to the side, his jaw clenching and unclenching. His hand fell away from the mouse and came up to smooth his mustache. “These are the things you want to know? How it happened?”

“Yes.” Lukas nodded. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I want to know.”

“Do you think it matters? What happened out there?” Bernard turned and looked up at the schematics on the wall, then at Lukas. “Why would it matter?”

“Because it
happened
. And it only happened one way, and it kills me not to know. I mean, they saw it coming, right? It would take years to build all—”

“Decades,” Bernard said.

“And then move all this stuff in, all the people—”

“That took much less time.”

“So you know?”

Bernard nodded. “The information is stored here, but not in any of the books. And you’re wrong. It
doesn’t
matter. That’s the past, and the past is not the same thing as our Legacy. You’ll need to learn the difference.”

Lukas thought about the difference. For some reason, a conversation with Juliette sprang to mind, something she was forever telling him—

“I think I know,” he said.

“Oh?” Bernard pushed his glasses up his nose and stared at him. “Tell me what you
think
you know.”

“All our hope, the accomplishments of those before us, what the world
can
be like, that’s our Legacy.”

Bernard’s lips broke into a smile. He waved his hand for Lukas to continue.

“And the bad things that can’t be stopped, the mistakes that got us here, that’s the past.”

“And what does this difference mean? What do
you
think it means?”

“It means we can’t change what’s already happened, but we can have an impact on what happens next.”

Bernard clapped his small hands together. “Very good.”

“And this”—Lukas turned and rested one hand on the thick book, then continued, unbidden—“the Order.
This
is a road map for how to get through all the bad that’s piled up between our past and the future’s hope.
This
is the stuff we can prevent, that we can fix.”

Bernard raised his eyebrows at Lukas’s last statement, as if it were a new way of looking at an old truth. Finally, he smiled, his mustache curling up, his glasses rising on the wrinkled bridge of his nose.

“I think you’re almost ready,” he said. “Soon.” Bernard turned back to his computer, his hand falling to his mouse. “Very soon.”

The descent to Mechanical was oddly tranquil, almost mesmerizing. Juliette slid through the green flood, pushing herself away from the curved railing each time the staircase spiraled around beneath her feet. The only sounds anywhere were the hiss of air entering her helmet and the excess gurgling out the other side. A never-ending stream of bubbles rolled up her visor like beads of solder, drifting up in defiance of gravity.

Juliette watched these silver spheres chase one another and play like children through the metal stairs. They broke up where they touched the railing, leaving just minuscule dots of gas stuck to the surface, rolling and colliding. Others marched in wavy lines inside the stairway. They gathered in crowds beneath the hollow steps, bubbles becoming pockets of air that wobbled and caught the light radiating from the top of her helmet.

It was easy to forget where she was, what she was doing. The familiar had become distorted and strange. Everything seemed magnified by the plastic dome of her visor, and it was easy to imagine that she wasn’t sinking at all, but that the great stairway was rising, pushing up through the deep earth and heading toward the clouds. Even the sensation of the rope sliding through her gloved hands and across her padded belly felt more like something tugged inexorably from above rather than a line she was descending.

It wasn’t until she arched her back and looked straight up that Juliette remembered how much water was stacking up above her. The green glow of the emergency lights faded to an eerie black in the space of a landing or two. The light from her flashlight barely dented it. Juliette inhaled sharply and reminded herself that she had all the air in the silo. She tried to ignore the sensation of so much liquid piled up on her shoulders, of being buried alive. If she had to, if she panicked, she could just cut the weights free. One flick with the chef’s knife and she would bob right back to the surface. She told herself this as she continued to sink. Letting go of the rope with one hand, she patted for the knife, making sure it was still there.

“SLOWER!” her radio barked.

Juliette grabbed the rope with both hands and squeezed until she came to a stop. She reminded herself that Solo was up there, watching the air hose and electrical wires as they spooled off their neat coils. She imagined him tangled up in the lines, hopping around on one foot. Bubbles raced out of her overflow valve and jiggled through the lime-green water back toward the surface. She leaned her head back and watched them swirl around the taut rope, wondering what was taking him so long. In the undersides of the helical steps, the air pockets danced mercury silver, wavering in the turbulence of her passing—

“OKAY.” The radio speaker behind her neck crackled. “GOOD HERE.”

Juliette cringed from the volume of Solo’s voice and wished she’d checked that before closing up her helmet. There was no fixing it now.

With ears ringing and the silence and majesty of the tranquil descent broken, she slid down another level, keeping her pace steady and slow as she studied the slack in the wire and the air hose for any sign of their pulling taut. As she passed close to the landing of one-thirty-nine, she saw that one of the doors was missing; the other door had been wrenched violently from its hinges. The entire level must have been flooded, which meant more water for the pumps to move. Just before the landing rose out of sight, she saw dark forms down the corridor, shadows floating in the water. The flashlight on her helmet barely illuminated a pale and bloated face before she drifted past, leaving the long-dead to rise out of sight.

It hadn’t occurred to Juliette that she might come across more bodies. Not the drowned of course—the flood would’ve risen too slowly to take anyone by surprise—but any violence that occurred in the down deep would now be preserved in its icy depths. The chill of the water around her seemed to finally penetrate the layers of her suit. Or perhaps it was just her imagination.

Her boots thumped to the lowermost floor of the stairwell while she was still looking up, keeping an eye on the slack in the lines. Her knees were jarred by the startling end to her descent. It had taken her far less time than a dry hike would have.

With a grip on the rope for balance, Juliette let go with her other hand and waved it through the thick atmosphere of green groundwater. She dipped her chin against the radio switch. “I’m down,” she transmitted to Solo.

She took a few lumbering and tentative steps, waving her arms and half swimming toward the entrance to Mechanical. The light from the stairwell barely penetrated past the security gates. Beyond, the oily depths of a home both foreign and familiar awaited her.

“I HEAR YOU,” Solo answered after some delay.

Juliette felt her muscles tense up as his voice rattled around inside her helmet. Not being able to adjust the volume was going to drive her mad.

After a dozen halting steps, she eventually got the hang of the awkward wading motion and learned to drag her weighted boots across the steel decking. With the suit inflated and her arms and legs brushing around on the inside, it was like guiding a bubble by throwing oneself against its skin. She paused once to look back at her air hose, making sure it wasn’t getting caught on the stairs, and she gave the rope she had descended one last glance. Even from this distance it appeared as an impossibly slender thread, a thread hanging in that submerged straw of a stairwell. It wavered slightly in the wake she was causing, almost as if saying good-bye.

Juliette tried not to read anything into it; she turned back to the entrance to Mechanical.
You don’t have to do this,
she reminded herself. She could hook up two, maybe three more small pumps plus a few additional runs of hydroponic piping. The work might take a few months, the water level would recede for years, but eventually these levels would be dry and she could investigate those buried diggers Solo had told her about. It could be done with minimal risk—other than to her sanity.

And if her only reason for getting back home was vengeance, if that was her only motivation, she might have chosen to wait, to take that safe route. She could feel the temptation even then to yank the weights off her boots and float up through the stairwell, to fly past the levels like she used to dream she could, arms out, buoyant and free …

But Lukas had kept her apprised of the horrible mess her friends were in, the mess her leaving had caused. There was a radio mounted to his wall below the servers that leaked violence day and night. Solo’s underground apartment was equipped with an identical radio, but it could communicate only with silo seventeen’s portables. Juliette had given up fiddling with it.

A part of her was glad she couldn’t hear. She didn’t want to have to listen to the fighting—she just wanted to get home and make it stop. This had become a desperate compulsion: returning to her silo. It was maddening to think that she was only a short walk away, but those doors were only ever opened to kill people. And what good would her return do, anyway? Would her surviving a cleaning and revealing the truth be enough to expose Bernard and all of IT?

As it happened, she had other, less sane plans. It was a fantasy, maybe, but it gave her hope. She dreamed of fixing up one of the diggers that had built this place, a machine buried and hidden at the long end of its vertical toil, and driving it through the earth itself to eighteen’s down deep. She dreamed of breaking that blockade, of leading her people back to these dry corridors and getting this dead place
working
again. She dreamed of operating a silo without all the lies and deceptions.

Juliette waded through the heavy water toward the security gate, dreaming these childish dreams, discovering that they somehow steeled her resolve. She approached the security turnstile and saw that the lifeless and unguarded gate would pose the first true obstacle of her descent. Getting over it wouldn’t be easy. Turning her back to the machine, she placed her hands on either side and pushed, squirming and kicking her heavy heels against the low wall, until she was just barely sitting on the control box.

Her legs were too heavy to lift … at least high enough to swing over, anyway. The weights had ended up being more than she’d needed to counter the suit’s buoyancy. She wiggled backward until her butt was more secure and tried to turn sideways. With a thick glove under her knee, she strained and leaned back until her boot was on the edge of the wall. She rested a moment, breathing hard and filling her helmet with muffled laughter. It felt ridiculous, all this effort to do something so outrageously simple, so benign. With one boot already up, the other was easier to lift. She felt the muscles in her abdomen and thighs, muscles sore from weeks of a porter’s hustle, finally help her lift her own damn foot up.

She shook her head in relief, sweat trickling down the back of her neck, already dreading repeating the maneuver on the return trip. Dropping to the other side was easy: the weights did all the work. She took a moment to make sure the wires knotted around her wrist and the air hose attached to her collar weren’t getting tangled and then started down the main corridor, the flashlight on top of her helmet her only illumination.