We Speak Through the Mountain, page 10
She closes her eyes, opens them again. A flash of light like mirrortalk across the river. “Would they disappear you for it?”
“I don’t know. But I have no other choice.”
“I got your back,” she says. “Somebody’s gotta.”
9.
I layer up, mostly by feel. My coat is last, my good wool coat from back home, and my rucksack, tightly packed. I pull the straps taut till it doesn’t shift, till it feels like part of my body, the way I did when I came here. Then I cross the room and pull aside the panel that kept us from tripping over my bike every time we went to open the window. The bike carries a faint, animal smell still — my own sweat and blood, the combined dust and resin of the mountains, woodsmoke. Smells that do not belong in this place. Smells from outside. The world.
Clementine says, “So you’re not gonna sit and wait for your escort, huh? What are you going to do?”
“Better if you don’t know.”
“But you can’t take your bike.”
I shake my head, unable to speak for a moment. To leave it behind breaks my heart, but on the walk back from Cardinal’s office I ran through my increasingly slim set of options, and the bike only featured in a few of them. If I lose my nerve, I’ll be back before she knows it; if I get caught, I’m sure I’ll be expelled, and I’ll be back to get my things; if I succeed with a clean getaway, I’ll be back to wait for my escort; but I’ve packed as if I don’t expect a clean getaway. Basically I’m ready for a specific, worst-case scenario of failure. “This is gonna have to be the official goodbye. For now.”
We hug briefly, and she tugs on the straps of my rucksack too. “Good,” she says. “Tight. I was gonna say don’t forget to write . . . but don’t write to me. They’ll read it.”
“No, not here. I’ll write to you in Calgary,” I tell her. “When you graduate and go home.”
“In four years!” She laughs, her voice trembling. “You’ll forget me by then.”
“Not in a million years.”
* * *
Last night it smelled like incipient snow despite the clear sky; now the promise is fulfilled, and the air is white. It’s not snowing heavily but the flakes are large and wet, and while the air isn’t that cold on its own the wind is so strong that my face burns where it is exposed above my scarf. Even the street lights barely penetrate the swirling flurries. Everything is white and grey, grey and white, except for me, in my dark green coat.
I get off the main streets as soon as I can, and in the alleys between buildings I flit past with all speed, hoping I look like nothing more than an unusual weather phenomenon. Glimpses of books, computers, tanks, vats, piping, cables. Has everyone gone to bed? So few windows give a hint of light. As I run I feel like I am being pushed from behind but I ignore this. I am used to it. The sensation comes from the weight of the past, which I always feel, which they do not.
I’m not heading straight for the infirmary. I’m aiming at one of the storage quonsets, an old one behind the museum. Desperation is not the word I want to use here; I just want whatever roiling chemicals that are surging through my body to sharpen me like a knife, make me canny. Partly it is because this may be the last time I get to feel this way, because my Cad will return when I am gone. I know that. I don’t want to think about it, about the adversary waking up, hitting the wall of my momentary freedom and joy, scrambling over it. Dragging me to the other side.
I think of the elk, my trophy, his heavy, muscular throat. Head full of daggers. In a spy movie, I would kill anyone who tried to obstruct my mission, but in real life I don’t think I could. I think I could not kill if I had to. He could do it, because he is an animal. They all think I am an animal though. Why shouldn’t they?
The quonset is dark. I slip to the back of the building, where it faces the mountain, and cast around for a likely shaped stone under the swiftly accumulating snow. All my senses feel ramped up, freshly charged. I have to hurry but I can’t rush. There’s one: I take off my scarf, wrap the stone in it, and creep to the regular door next to the big ones for equipment and forklifts.
I flagged this place on the map before I even knew what I was doing — what Henryk always called the curse of my memory, which picks things up that you then have to sift through for something useful. Then I didn’t think about it again till we began coming here to get supplies for fieldwork — the augers and trowels, bags and boxes they felt didn’t need real security, just a home out of the weather. No electronic lock like the newer buildings. It’s a regular doorknob with a keyhole, not even a deadbolt.
The storm muffles the sound of my hammering at the knob till its smooth housing comes away, and then I must take off my mittens to pull back the catch inside the round hole. The catch burns my fingers so fiercely that I gasp, panicking that my skin has frozen to the metal, but it hasn’t. The relief doesn’t last long, and comes with not my first but certainly my strongest moment of doubt: it’s colder than I thought. How can I go anywhere in this weather? I should . . . I should stop. Go back to my room. Stay up and read, and in the morning, go with the escort.
No. Stop, I tell myself. Think of Mom. Not of yourself.
Inside, the door carefully shut again, I shuffle through the darkness, coughing. It smells of dust and faintly of mould, slightly sweet, like a rotten apple. I am still holding the stone and I almost laugh: yes, they think I’m a caveman, look at me, slinking around with a rock to bonk someone on the head with. I stoop and put it silently on the floor, and I rewrap my snow-soaked scarf around my neck.
My eyes take a long time to adjust; a little light seeps through the grime-smeared windows at the top of the quonset, smaller than the palm of my hand. All around are boxes and barrels, and one lonely forklift parked in the far corner. For a wild second I wonder if I can steal the forklift on the way back and escape, then dismiss the idea. This isn’t a movie.
There. My boot hits what I expected — a barely perceptible bump in the cement floor. Outside the storm wails, snow spattering the metal sides of the hut like thrown stones. I’m not taking my mitten off again, so it’s a long struggle to grasp the deliberately low-profile handle and open the trapdoor, first one side then the other. I feel my way down the ladder to the bottom, gasping in the dust.
There are still lots of these back home in Edmonton — tunnels connecting buildings where you can drive a forklift into a small cage that will take it and its cargo up to floor level without having to use precious internal space to have them running around. When this place was designed, I knew the domes would have to have these because they didn’t have enough spare land. Back home, they built up, so you could go up. Here, up is mountain, so you build down. All of campus has connections at ground level, but as soon as I spotted this trap door I knew there were more, far more, below.
I wonder who built all this. I can’t see the scientists dirtying their hands to chop this out of the stone. They wanted to preserve a present and a future that was beautiful and bright and clean, unlike the rapidly accumulating filth and chaos of the rest of the world.
Later, later. It doesn’t matter anyway.
It’s a long walk to the infirmary — maybe just eight or ten minutes by forklift. I shiver in the dark, and ball my fists in my mittens to warm my fingers against my palms. If I could see, I would be able to see my breath. The only way to stay warm is to walk quickly, but it’s so dark I’m afraid to move past a crawl. I guess the automatic lights respond to the forklifts in a way I can’t activate, which makes sense. Why would a single person be walking on the tracks?
It’s all right. My terror cannot rise any higher than this anyway, light or no.
Storage tubs have been piled over the trap door on the far end, which I had expected. I don’t think they’re using that quonset on a regular basis any more. But the doors open outwards, so it takes a long time of surreptitiously pushing, nudging, pushing, and nudging again to let me open one door and climb out into a different darkness: clean and sharp, smelling faintly of disinfectant even with the constant draft of the filtered air. This air smells of the present instead of the past.
I need to avoid the patient area, where someone will surely see me. First things first: check the tubs. No medications of any kind. Still, I take off my rucksack and fill the space left with other things we might be able to use at home — plastic boxes of syringes, packs of needles, compressed bags of gloves and masks. Regretfully I leave the thermometers behind — I don’t have time to look for batteries and we have none.
Such a simple thing. Still using manual mercury thermometers and after the decades and decades we only have a few of those left. And they are so delicate. When they break . . .
Don’t think about it. There’s nothing else small I can snatch, so I push the tubs to conceal the open trap door and sneak out of the room into a dark hallway, leaving the door open. If I’m confronted in here I know I can’t talk my way out of it, and can only run.
The doors are unlocked on either side of the curving hallway. I feel only a moment of shame: There are no thieves here on campus. Not till me.
Well, they’ll lock them after this. I nudge open door after door, hitting the dimmer panel on the walls to keep the lights from coming on at full strength. I see huge machines: X-rays, MRIs, other things. A lab that they must use for diagnostics — I see my reflection move across the face of a transparent cabinet filled with what looks for all the world like cherries but upon closer examination are clear spheres filled with blood.
In my heavy clothing I am sweating again, and the face of the cabinet radiates a welcome cool. And next to it is a grey metal cylinder marked −80ºC and plastered with warning stickers but no labels. This could be the Cad cure — part of me so desperately wants the adversary inside me to see it, recoil, give me secret knowledge — but I am already bitterly resigned to the knowledge that it’s not a real cure. Only a treatment, as they remind me every four weeks. As I saw for myself when I cut my hand open. Still there. Sleeping dragon. And as cold as it is out there, it still isn’t cold enough for this finicky stuff.
No. I have to get something else.
Something on the counter catches my eye. I am at first confused by why it did so, and then I pause and go back. Most likely it’s nothing. Most things are nothing. But they so rarely use paper here. Everything is on a screen. Easy to create, easy to delete. Easy to share. You might use paper if you wanted it to be hard to share.
I open the binder and flip through gingerly, conscious of the quiet in here — the hum of the air filter, the faintest rustle of my fingertips against the page. The pages are grimy in the corners, as if this is flicked through just like this, every day. For a moment I feel another flare of hope: instructions for the treatment? True, we don’t have all their technology, but if we had the knowledge . . . that would be a project worth throwing the entirety of our campus efforts at. That would be a grand work. What wouldn’t we do, what wouldn’t we resurrect from the world left behind, if we could do that? By ourselves? And then it wouldn’t be trapped here . . .
I should stop when I see the protocol. I already know I should. It’s fifty pages long, all dense instructions: this step then this, synthesize this then this. We can’t do any of this. I should stop. I should stop reading. I should just . . . take it and go. They can always print a new copy, and I don’t have time for this. But I keep flipping through. My heart crawls into my throat and stays there, hanging from its claws, when I see my own name —
The dimmer panel is silent. Light floods the room without warning. I close my eyes reflexively, then try to force them open as I turn, then close them again. I can feel my shirt sticking to my body with sweat both fresh and old and the fabric seems to turn separately from the rest of me. Knew it, knew it, knew it. Knew I’d get caught. I wish I’d gotten caught before this. Before I read any of this. Even the barest part of this — even the parts I don’t fully understand I wish I had never seen.
St. Martin thinks you can un-see things. Where did he get that idea?
My face floods slowly with blood; Dr. Gibson’s does too, as if he has done something wrong at exactly the same scale and category as I have. What are we both doing in here at four in the morning, blushing? I wait for him to speak first. We teach the kids: First the bear moves. Then you move.
He looks tired — not just up-late tired, but beaten down, tired in his bones. His voice sounds it too. He couldn’t go to bed; he expected me to come here. “Reid, please go back to your room.”
I’m startled; this is the last thing I expected him to say. It’s like when they got me on the way back from my elk hunt — everything quiet, civilized, we’re better than that, we don’t get violent or loud, we don’t get mad. I’m not in trouble but that’s also, unfortunately, not my goal. “Dr. Gibson, I asked Dr. Cardinal and she said no, but maybe if you —”
“No.”
“. . . She talked to you.”
“No, she didn’t need to. There’s only one reason you’d be in here, and I know you think we’re not telling you the truth, but it’s true: the treatment cannot go with you, and it can’t help your mother at this stage of her disease.”
I wait. I feel like I’ve swallowed a mouthful of lava, feel it burning beneath my ribs. I want to be back outside in the blizzard. Back outside in the clean snow. “What if you came with me and —”
“No, Reid. I can’t. It’s university policy not to interfere with the cities. We take students in. We’re very, very careful what we let out.”
“I can see that. I see that.” In my bitterness the words come out before I mean them to, and not the way I want. “Because you’re brainwashing people here, that’s why. Not the Howse kids, not your kids. Just us. I wondered why you were only inviting students who already had Cad. You know, outside —” Laughter trembles just behind my throat, which shouldn’t be possible. He’s not smiling. Neither am I. “Outside we thought you had a real cure for Cad. Instead you’ve got this. Part of a cure. And mind control.”
“It’s not mind control,” he says sharply. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard his voice sound anything other than perfectly level and calm. “Where did that idea come from?”
“It’s in here. I just read it. Stop trying to pretend . . . look, right here. Suggestibility. Easily influenced. It’s cumulative. You used Cad . . . you found the neurotransmitters it was producing that were different from ours —”
“Yes! That’s part of how the treatment works.”
“— and you weaponized them! It’s in here!” I slap the binder closed, and we both flinch. “After four years of course no one wants to leave. You’re feeding us this . . . constant drip of compliance serum and then you ask us if we want to go or stay like we still have free will. You’re creating an army that will just stay put and work for you, perfectly happily, like bees listening to the queen. With no choice.”
“We’re not. You’ve completely misinterpreted it. We’re studying whether or not there’s an association between . . . between this effect you’re describing and the Cad treatment shots. We’re not causing it. And if we do find the association, we’ll to correct our formulation to —”
“You did find one. You already knew about it. And you’re just . . . going on. That’s what changed, wasn’t it? The universities are . . . forget the name. Whatever. The fucking domes, you kept yourselves absolutely sealed till you knew this worked and who it would work on. And now you’ve opened up the tiniest crack so you can keep perfecting it with a constant supply of fresh test subjects.”
“Reid, that’s not what we’re doing.”
“What are you doing?”
“I just told you. We are working on a permanent cure for this disease. And if we can develop one, we’ll —”
“You’ll what? You’ll send it out into the world? You’ll finally start helping people outside the domes? That’s it, that’s all you were waiting for — to cure the outsiders before you started doing anything else to rebuild the world? Bull-fucking-shit. It’s been decades. You’re never going to have a cure because you don’t want a cure. You want something else.”
“I can see you’ve made up your mind,” he says, “but none of that is true. What is true, however, is what you would have seen if you had made it to the back of that dossier.”
“I . . . what?”
“There’s something unusual about your particular strain of Cad,” he says slowly, as if evaluating each word before he allows it to slip out. “It appears to be a genetically distinct subspecies. Not merely a variant — we’ve seen lots of variants. But it occurred to me to check it when you began telling me about . . . the way you said you’ve communicated with it. Particularly during your mother’s suicide attempt that day. None of that is data. But I was surprised, after sequencing it, that the treatment worked at all. If you stay . . . if we pretend this didn’t happen, if you go visit your mother and come back to campus, we could gain a wealth of knowledge from you. You could . . . you could change our entire research program. We both win.”
My heart is hammering. I wish people could stop lying to me, I wish they could stop using such trustworthy voices. I liked Dr. Gibson, I wanted to like him so badly, and now I am studying his face like I can read truth or falsehood written on it and I can’t. Am I that valuable to him? To the research? Do I have any leverage here?
“Let me take some painkillers back for her,” I say. “Nobody has to know. Like you said: we pretend this didn’t happen. I just put them in my bag and when the sun comes up I leave like a good girl. I follow university policy. And then I come back and you can study me as much as you want.”
“Reid, even if I thought it was a good idea, I can’t give you those drugs. They’re stringently monitored and tracked; every medication is accounted for. Security knows the moment one pill leaves its packaging, let alone enough to . . . to give you. Without Admin approval, the whole security system will go off like a fire alarm.”
