Immobility

to. Kill them before they kill you. The cylinder is important, much more important than a life or two. Particularly if the lives in question are theirs.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” said Horkai. “Why did they take the cylinder?”

“I’ve told you everything we know,” said Rasmus.

After a long moment, Horkai said, “Another question.” He thumped one of his legs with his fist. “How am I to get there? I can’t walk?”

Rasmus shook his head. “You’ll be taken there,” he said.

“What’s in this cylinder?” asked Horkai.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Rasmus.

Horkai shook his head. “I won’t go after it unless I know.”

Rasmus hesitated for a long time. “Seed,” he finally said.

“What kind of seed. Wheat or something?”

“Yes, basically.”

“What makes it special?”

“It’s special because it’s been kept safe since before the Kollaps. It’s undamaged. We need it to start over.”

Horkai nodded. “Who’d they kill?”

“These people are ruthless,” Rasmus claimed. “When we had the cylinder, we had two technicians working on it. They were tied up and killed, their throats cut from ear to ear.”

“And you want me to find out who among them killed the technicians and bring them to justice?”

“That’s not what this is about,” said Rasmus, waving one hand. “Their deaths are something we have to live with. We don’t need revenge. What we need is the cylinder.”

No, thought Horkai, there’s still something wrong. Why would grain be kept in a subzero environment? It doesn’t make any sense.

Or maybe that was a method of storage, a way of preserving it that he simply wasn’t aware of? Hadn’t he heard stories of wheat grown from seeds found in the stomach of a man frozen in a glacier? Why did details like that come back to him and not the important things? Maybe there was a reason for freezing it, maybe even a reason Rasmus himself wasn’t sure about.

In any case, the choice was clear. Either he could go along with it and try to figure it out himself or he could simply go back into storage, to the nonlife he’d been living for the last thirty years. What other choice was there? Illness or no, he didn’t particularly want to be frozen again.

“All right,” he said. “I’m in.”

Rasmus smiled. “I thought you’d see it our way. Get some rest. You’ll leave in the morning.”

PART TWO

6

MORNING AND AWAKE AGAIN and after a moment of panic relieved to find he was still himself, still able to remember his name. Horkai, Josef. His doubts, his nightmares, held at a distance, at least for now.

He lay on the narrow bed, staring at the bare and glowing concrete walls crumbling in places to reveal a network of dark rebar. What had the room been before? A large supply closet, maybe, or a small office. What time was it? In the artificial light, it was impossible to tell. He reached over and ran his finger along the wall; when it returned, it had picked up some of the luminescence. Some sort of phosphorescent bacteria or mold.

He pulled himself to sitting, then forced his dangling legs to hang off the side of the bed. There was, beside his bed, a kind of makeshift desk: a metal shelf attached to the wall at hip level, a chair slid beneath it. He sidled down the bed until he was closer to it, could make out in the poor light a pad of paper and a dark stick, perhaps a pencil. There was nothing else in the room, not a single book.

After moving to the very end of the bed, he found he could reach out far enough to grasp the door handle, which proved to be locked. Am I a prisoner? he wondered. Perhaps he had locked it himself when he reached for it; he looked for a button or some other device on the knob, but no, it was locked, and locked from the outside.

Fair enough, he told himself. He’d nearly killed the technician, almost without thinking about it. He’d sent both Olaf and Oleg to the infirmary. There was no need to read anything into it. Perhaps they were just being cautious.

He scooted back along the bed until he could reach the chair, pulled it next to the bed, heaved his way onto it. He could feel the jolt in his back and spine, but it wasn’t the same intense pain he’d been feeling before. His body was already adapting, learning to dampen out and process sensation, blot out pain. Soon he’d be more or less himself again, more or less human. And then maybe his memory would come back as well.

Moving the chair over to the desk proved much harder. Without functioning legs, he had no way to scoot it along. At first he could push against the side of the bed and slide the chair away, but soon he was too far away to get any leverage and his own weight kept the chair from actually moving. In the end, he had to fall out of the chair and then drag it and himself along to the desk and then pull himself up into it.

By the time he was sitting in the chair again, he’d bent one edge of the desk-shelf and cut his forearm. He felt exhausted. How would it be possible to travel forty-six miles like this, even with help? he wondered. Without legs, how could they expect him to go anywhere?

What he’d thought was a pencil was a pen. He toyed with it, twirling it between his thumb and forefinger, and then lined up the pad of paper and wrote. The lines of ink, when they came out, glowed softly:

What I Know

1. I was stored for thirty years.

2. I have been woken up to perform a task.

3. Something is wrong with my memory.

He stopped, then with his thumb brushed over the words “with my memory” until they blurred and became a glowing splotch. Something is wrong. He stared at the wall in front of him. With his memory certainly, but it was more than just that: there was something wrong with the world at large, and something wrong here as well. The locked door suggested as much. He stared at the wall and tried to see, on it or through it, something—some scene, image at least—from his past.

At first nothing came. He closed his eyes, sighed. And then an image flitted through his half-dozing imagination that made no sense at all. He caught a glimpse, as if he were standing inside it, of a dome supported by pendentives, rising over a large rectangular space. It was made of stone, probably granite, and lit only from outside, by small slotted windows high in the dome itself. He could hear a sound like muffled laughter but when he turned toward it, it stopped, starting again once he turned back to the dome itself. The pillars, he saw, were moist, covered in a viscid gray substance that glistened where the sunlight struck it. There were paths of the same substance in the dome above as well, he saw, like snail paths, and there, at the very top of the dome, a rubbery agglutination the length and thickness of his forearm that, suddenly, moved.

He opened his eyes, shook his head. Probably just fragments of a dream, he thought, no reason to think it was a memory. It didn’t make any sense as a memory.

When he looked down, he saw his hand had been busy with the pen and had gone on doodling without him. On the pad below his list were several glowing sets of legs, independent of any bodies, each one carefully circled.

* * *