Our Dried Voices Read online

  Samuel was one of the few colonists who did not return to the same hall where he had taken his midday meal. As the others trudged resignedly toward the seven halls, Samuel stood in the fading light of the meadow and waited. The low sun caught the tips of the colony’s few trees and dragged their shadows through the mossy grass. A solitary female sat atop a hill overlooking the rest of the meadow, her posture perfectly erect and relaxed as she surveyed the movements of the colonists below. Despite the distance, Samuel could tell immediately there was something about this woman that set her apart from everyone else in the colony, and he felt his gaze drawn to her by some gentle, inexplicable force.

  Behind him, under the woman’s own watchful stare, lay two of the three halls whose food machines had not broken down at the midday meal. Soon the last of the colonists had entered one of these two buildings. A few minutes passed. The meadow lay calm. There was no wind and the long rays of the setting sun turned everything an unnatural golden color. Then a lone male staggered from the door to one of the halls. He hesitated in the darkening meadow, glanced about uncertainly as the remains of the day shriveled around him. He shuddered, once, though the air was warm as always. More colonists emerged from the hall empty-handed. The food machine had been broken. A stale breeze kicked up and the colonists shielded their eyes from this sudden assault. A few waited inside the meal hall. The rest milled about close to the entrance. When a considerable number of colonists had exited the building, the first man let out a single plaintive moan. The other colonists looked away and began to disperse.

  Hearing this cry, Samuel turned to face the failed meal hall and watched the hungry colonists shuffle away into the dusky meadow, staring blankly at the grass a few meters in front of their feet. The wind died just as soon as it had begun, and now a faint chill did creep into the evening air. At the second meal hall nearby, all was still and quiet. Not a single colonist had exited the building. Samuel turned toward the hill behind him, but the woman was gone. He looked around and saw her gliding across the meadow toward the other hall. She seemed not to notice the now-considerable collection of people drifting out and away from first hall; she did not glance around at all, but kept her head fixed boldly on the second building ahead. Samuel stood and watched the woman for a moment, spellbound by her flowing gait, the tensile strength that coursed through her limbs and something more which he could not define, the thing that brought together these qualities of her body, that made them possible.

  The woman entered the second meal hall and the spell was broken. Samuel came to his senses and scurried off in the direction of the second hall. By now, a few colonists were exiting the building, meal cakes in hand. Samuel entered to find more of them seated inside at the tables, jabbering gleefully to one another between mouthfuls of food. At the far end of the hall, the woman received her cake and turned in Samuel’s direction. Upon first glance she looked no different than any of the other adult females in the colony, distinguishable from the male colonists only by their slightly shorter stature and the soft curve of their breasts beneath their tunics. Yet there was something about this woman’s face, a certain tightness of her features that lent a fullness to their expression and distinguished her from the other people of Pearl.

  She, on the other hand, paid no attention to Samuel, but just as they passed she happened to glance at him, and for the first time Samuel got a look at the woman’s eyes. They were hard and metallic, like copper, and when she turned toward Samuel they caught the fading sunlight and flashed fiercely. Samuel’s breath stuck in his throat and he felt a sudden hitch in his step, but the woman paid him no mind, looked away and continued on. Samuel turned to watch her go for a moment, striding through the doorway as though she were utterly alone in the world.

  But then his stomach protested insistently and the moment was lost. He forgot the woman with the copper eyes, received his meal cake and ate it quickly at a table by himself.

  * * *

  At the morning meal the next day, the two remaining food machines broke down. By the afternoon of the third day, after the time for the midday meal had come and gone with no food received, the colony was approaching a sustained panic. It seemed hotter that day, the sun glaring down from high in the cloudless sky. The colonists skittered about to find shade or cool relief in the river. But there was no laughter, no squeals of pleasure or glee. One colonist would find solace under a rare tree; the others would dance nervously around his sanctuary. No one could say why the breakdown of the food machines should have had this effect. No one could say why colonists struggled to meet the eyes of those with whom they had so often shared a morning of carefree play. As the afternoon wore on, the surrounding mountains loomed large in the distance, great black rugged titans thrown up from the rich green meadow. The sun began to wane and the mountain shadows crept through the flowerless grass, bringing with them the impending hour of the evening meal.

  Most colonists resorted to other means of finding food. Some ventured into the meal halls anyway. The rest roamed the meadows, tearing up and devouring handfuls of grass, biting into whole branches of shrubs or greedily gulping water from the river. The air around the people of the colony hung heavy and still, weighing on them as they bent their backs and stooped to the ground or crawled on all fours and grazed like maddened cattle. The quiet was broken only briefly by the moans of the hungry colonists, wild and wordless pleas that sprang unbidden from unfed lips and were lost again in the twilight.

  Like the other colonists, Samuel survived. He pulled up some clumps of bitter grass and ate them a few blades at a time, drank from the faded blue water of the river and sat against the façade of a meal hall and waited. As darkness fell, he decided to retire early for the night. There seemed nothing better to do.

  On normal evenings, the colonists finished their evening meals with a few hours of twilight and early darkness remaining for play, relaxation or casual lovemaking before they retired to the sleeping halls for the night. No bells called the colonists to bed, but for the most part they all began to enter the halls about two hours after sunset. There were five sleeping halls in the colony. From the outside they looked much the same as the meal halls: long, rectangular, off-white buildings fashioned from black mountain rock. A second, smaller building abutted the width of each sleeping hall; these contained twelve single-stall toilets, all designed to flush and clean themselves automatically. And like the meal halls, the sleeping hall interiors bore the same expansive ceilings, the same soothing blue walls, as though the watery skies of Pearl had been pasted directly onto these surfaces.

  But beyond their anesthetizing appearances, the sleeping halls were little more than barracks. Rows of modest, wood-framed beds lined the single room, each bed freshly made up when the colonists entered for the night. The beds were bolted to the floor, and seams in the floor traced a rectangle around each bed. Ten metal poles extended outward from the wall opposite the door of the hall. A large rectangular seam on the wall surrounded each pole, on which hung several extra tunics like those worn by all the people of the colony. Though the fabric of this clothing rarely ever ripped or stained, the colonists did grow from infancy to adulthood, and as a person’s tunic became too small for him, he exchanged it for one of those hanging from these poles.

  Almost all the colonists slept in the same sleeping hall night after night, just as they visited the same meal hall for each of their three meals, day after day. And though all the beds were exactly identical with nothing on or around them to designate an owner, most of the people slept in the exact same bed every night. A colonist who found another person asleep in her bed would stare at the intruder in frozen consternation until some sound or sudden movement woke her from her brief trance and she forgot all about the accidental incursion and wandered off to find another bed.

  On the third day of the meal hall crisis, the first colonists began to trickle into the sleeping halls around the time the bells sounded for the nonexistent evening meal. At sunset several more had joined t
hem. By the time night crept in, the sleeping halls were almost full, as though the colonists had suddenly developed a fear of the dark. Very few slept at first. Samuel found a bed in a corner of one hall but could not force his eyes shut. Other colonists wandered around the room or huddled against a wall. Every so often someone whimpered at the aching in his empty stomach. The hall had no lights, and soon only the scant glow of the rising moon staved off total invisibility. The colonists tiptoed to the beds, brushing against each other in the near darkness and recoiling at the touch of human contact.

  When the sun rose the next morning, the colonists did not. They rolled over and pulled their blankets over their eyes to block out the offending glare. Most had lain hungry and restless throughout the night and there was little hope for sleep now as the morning stole upon them. But still they remained in bed, their eyes clenched shut. Perhaps they believed that by not opening their eyes they were still asleep and the day had not yet begun. And if they could keep the day from ever beginning, they would not have to face the prospect of another day without food.

  But eventually they rose. Samuel shivered as he exited the sleeping hall. The sun was bright and there was no wind. He did not feel as hungry as he had the previous day, but did not think this strange. He ate some grass anyway and lay down at the base of a hill. The sun crawled higher in the sky and its rays prickled his skin and burnt his lips. He licked them—they felt dry and cracked but his mouth watered heavily. The grass beneath him was warm and soft and parted willingly under the weight of his heavy limbs.

  The famine continued throughout the day. No one in the colony died of hunger—at the very least, the colonists had all retained their basic survival instincts, and those who were nearest to starvation managed to sustain themselves on grass and leaves and river water. Through half-lidded eyes Samuel saw the colony’s joyous players replaced by listless shells of human beings with pale faces and sunken eyes, the comfortable loungers by living corpses almost too weak to move. Across the meadow one colonist moaned. Half-chewed green blades spilled from his mouth. The others ignored him. They drifted over the sun-soaked meadow and waited for anything that would take away the feeling of life, a feeling which had become all too painful among the living.

  * * *

  On the morning of the fourth day the colony remained lifeless, the people staying in bed as long as possible. But had anyone been awake about an hour after sunrise, they would have seen a woman emerge from an opening in the wall of the low building attached to one of the meal halls. The woman rubbed her eyes as she stepped into the bright morning light and walked off in the direction of one of the sleeping halls. There she took a pillow from an empty bed, went back outside, and fell asleep in the building’s shadow. She met a few people as she entered the sleeping hall, those who could no longer bear the hard sun beating against their closed eyelids and had crept out into the meadow to wait for darkness. They did not recognize her. No one in the colony would have recognized this woman, for there was nothing particularly distinctive about her physical appearance. No one would have recognized her, save Samuel. For she was the woman with the bright copper eyes who had struck his attention a few days earlier.

  When the bells sounded, a few colonists drifted into the meal halls, acting out of boredom or habit or the faintest ember of hope that the food machines might have been miraculously repaired. And in fact, when the first person stepped up to the hole in the back wall, the red light flashed and there was a familiar clicking and whirring sound. And then a plate of food appeared in the opening.

  III

  Within a few days it seemed nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the colony. Laughter returned to the meadow. The big cottony clouds that signaled the next day’s rain rolled in and blotted out the sun’s heat. All the food machines functioned regularly once more. Most colonists took their meals and ate outside, reveling in the idyllic weather. Samuel arrived late to the midday meal. He ate his cake and walked along the river that wound idly through the center of the colony, occasionally stopping to dip a toe into his shimmering reflection. Groups of colonists splashed about in the shallow water, their wordless, playful cries diluted by the drowsy babble of the stream. Others napped in the shadow of the halls or the few trees dotting the meadow. Samuel wiped crumbs from his hands and turned away from the river for a shady tree of his own.

  A female colonist intercepted him, stepped into his path without a word and batted her eyelashes, her face blank save for an overwrought attempt at a fetching half-smile. Samuel would not have recognized her a second time. She moved a step closer to him as they converged at the edge of a low-hanging tree. Reached out, laid her hand on his inner thigh. He slipped a hand under her tunic. Pushed her into the shadows. There was the slight curve of her breast that marked her sex. Not that it mattered.

  Under the tree it was stagnant, windless. The willowy boughs drooping from the gnarled and stunted trunk washed away the sounds of the meadow. Their brown skin rubbed and smeared. Their breaths commingled. Shallow. Rapid. Climbing. Their heat filled the emerald shade and cocooned around them. Mottled leaf-shadows wavered across their bodies until they shuddered and fell still. They shared one final breath together, their chests falling heavily.

  They separated intact. Samuel picked up her tunic and pulled it over his head. Neither noticed. She donned his tunic over smooth skin that glistened with sweat and ran her hands down the front, ironing out invisible creases. It was just slightly loose on her.

  She turned her moony face toward him and forced another grin. “Thuvyuvarymuch. Lunkyubye,” she said, repeating a variation of words Samuel had spoken many times before.

  The branches swept closed behind her. Samuel ran his tongue around the inside of his dry mouth. He walked to the river and urinated into the current. Then he knelt and drank. The slow tide gurgled as it lapped over the bank. He swished some water around in his mouth, imitating its sound. He bent again and rinsed the sweat from his face. The stream slipped on immutable, bearing his heat away.

  * * *

  In the evening the air was cool and fine. The clouds darkened with the sunset and stained the land a faded silver. Tomorrow it would rain. Samuel had slept the rest of the afternoon under the smallest and last unoccupied tree in the meadow. He awoke before the sound of the evening bells and was the first to arrive at the nearest meal hall. He ate at a table by himself, before any other colonist could join him. Outside the sky coalesced from ink and milk to solid granite. Samuel strolled through the crisp breeze, content in the passage of another day.

  The other colonists scampered through the meadow, oblivious to their recent brush with disaster. In the measured transition of sun to moonlight, the meal halls glowed faintly opalescent and the river sparkled as it meandered through the colony, under the simple wooden fence that enclosed their little plot of meadow and away toward the sleepy mountains in the distance. Beyond the fence, there was only gray and empty darkness, kilometers of untouched meadow all the way out to the shadowed peaks on every side. Samuel played a game with himself, picking out the faint jagged horizon between earth and rock, then closing and opening his eyes to find it again. Open. Close. Open. Close. The dim silver line winked at him from out of the gloom.

  Night blackened the sky within a few moments, then broke into faint streaks of light behind the thick clouds. Lightning, distant and beautiful under a silk cloak. Samuel turned away from the mountains and fell in with the other colonists already on their way to the nearest sleeping hall. They chattered eagerly, giggled together, their voices tripping over one another like the days rolling over and onward. They crawled into soft, pillowed beds with fresh, starched sheets. Samuel fell asleep almost instantly. He did not dream. A night breeze whispered through the windows of the hall as the thunder lolled a faint lullaby.

  IV

  The next morning it rained in the colony, just as it had seven days ago, and seven days before that. And then the storms continued into the next day. On rainy days, the colonists typi
cally took refuge in the sleeping halls, which remained open all day long. But when the first colonists raced across the sopping meadow after their morning meal on the second cloud-darkened day, they found the hall doors closed and locked. Two straight days of storms was unprecedented in the colony’s memory. Locked sleeping halls were unreal. By nightfall of the second day, the doors still did not open and the rain kept falling.

  On the third morning, the vast majority of the colonists nestled damply in the seven meal halls around the colony. The soft drizzle continued on unabated. Fortunately, the food machines remained functional. The people of the colony may have forgotten the previous incident, but the same sense of foreboding returned to them now. They shrunk against the walls, their eyes downcast, most of them alone. No one moved. No one said a word. The stark furniture waited empty in the middle of the hall as the high windows wept in little gray rivulets.

  Samuel sat on the floor in one of the halls and scanned the long celestial-blue room. He found himself expectant, almost curious, as though he was sitting down to hear the beginning of a long story. He had been one of the first to enter the halls the previous day after he had tried two of the sleeping halls and found their doors locked. Unlike most of the other colonists, who suffered their cold and damp conditions hopelessly curled up in the corners of the hall, Samuel paced the length of the room until his clothes and skin were dry. Despite the incessant rain, the temperature in the colony had not dropped, and it remained warm enough inside the hall to keep him comfortable.