Extinction (43 page)

“Knowledge is different from context.”
 

“Same as for your lost man in boots?”
 

“That issue is at least partly resolved. In your mind, you call the man you claimed not to know
the Magician.
”

“I don’t know that. It’s just a guess.”
 

“Tell us.”

Sadeem sighed. He only knew middle-tier information anyway. Perhaps the Elders knew why the Archetypes mattered, but Sadeem could only tell her the facts (or legends) as the Mullah saw them. It was probably a useless secret — like confessing to knowledge of the boogeyman, but not of where it was hiding.

“It’s just a story we tell. In a book of prophecies. The Elders knew more, I’m sure, but to the rest of us it was one more thing we heard — alongside legends of the Horsemen returning to the planet, and bringing the end.”
 

“Who are they?”
 

“Some in my group thought Meyer Dempsey might be the King. And that’s one of only a few things rumors of the Scroll agree on: that the King survives. It made us curious to follow him, knowing that if we were right, he’d make it to the new Mecca. Or Jerusalem. Or whatever. So were we right? Did Dempsey survive?”
 

“He is in the new capital. The new Cradle of Civilization.”

“What about his group?”

“Do you mean Clara?”
 

Sadeem stopped, mouth open.
 

“Who is Clara?”

“The girl you were hiding from us. The Lightborn.”

Sadeem said nothing.
 

“We cannot see the girl your mind recalls in the new city, no,” Eternity answered.
 

Sadeem’s head hung. A slow exhale escaped.

“Why were you hiding the girl? Did you think she was one of the Archetypes?”
 

“No, she … ”
 

Eternity waited.
 

“Okay. Fine. She was Lightborn. We didn’t know what they meant. Only that they were different. Something about the way their minds process things. They were unusually skilled at telepathy, beyond what we saw happened in most people around your broadcast stones. They sometimes seemed to be prescient, definitely precocious. Clara was a child in many ways, but in most ways her mind was adult. Or beyond.”
 

“Why did you hide her from us?”
 

“It was just a matter of the unknown. The Astrals didn’t seem to know much about the Lightborn, and that made us more interested in them. When Clara came to us, we took the opportunity. I gave her puzzles and watched her play. I discovered only that her mind was extraordinary. Nothing beyond that in any way that should bother you. If you’ve scanned my brain, you know there’s nothing more. There wasn’t enough time to learn about her before your Dark Rider came and it all fell apart.”
 

Eternity seemed to think. Finally she nodded, apparently satisfied.
 

“And the Archetypes?”
 

“From where I stood, they were exactly that:
Archetypes
. Personifications of the types of people who’d be needed when a new epoch began. Even those below the level of Elder knew the basics of what was supposed to happen when the Horsemen returned: You’d judge us with your archive; you’d cause ruin and destruction if we failed, as we always have. When it was over, the population would shrink, though I hadn’t realized
how
much. But when you left, the new humanity would require certain attributes to be strong in its bloodline. It would need leadership, so there would be a King, if not a literal king. They’d need wisdom, so there’d be a Sage. But to counterpoint wisdom there’d be an Innocent, which some feel is where the Christian story of Eden comes from.”
 

“In all the past epochs, humanity has never been ‘innocent.’ There has always been evil.”
 

“And that’s why one of the Archetypes is
the Villain
,” Sadeem said.
 

“It is merely a construct. A way for the Mullah to imagine each epoch’s beginning.”
 

Sadeem nodded.
 

“This is consistent with our scan. But if it was a framework for your society, why did you keep it secret?”
 

If she was asking, the scan hadn’t been deductive enough to provide Sadeem’s real answer:
That I never learned the details of the Legend Scroll and kept hoping they might be a kind of resistance against you.
But even that had been absurd from the start. The Scroll was replete with words like “always” and “each time.” That alone meant that if the Archetypes had formed a resistance in past epochs, it hadn’t been especially effective.
 

So Sadeem gave an answer that was still true, even if not all the way: “I couldn’t just give you everything. Humans fight.”
 

He thought Eternity might balk — might say “irrelevant” a few more times. But instead she nodded in apparent acceptance.
 

“This does explain another anomaly we’ve discovered. It may even explain the Stranger we’ve discussed during your time here.”
 

“So you
don’t
know everything?”
 

“In each epoch, there has been an element of uncertainty. The Founders seeded it as an essential part of your species’ existence, but it has always been foreign to us. The intention was to create a variety of experience for our Watchers to study, beyond what happens in our purer consciousness. But doing so meant working with a tool that was useful on one hand, but dangerous on the other.”
 

“What element?”
 

“Your mind calls it
chaos
.”
 

“So what’s the anomaly?”

“Our intention was to recall all Astrals from the surface. But there’s one entity within our collective that we have been unable to recall. A soldier, in your words, who spent enough time with humanity to become infected. That one has not returned.”
 

Sadeem pondered Eternity’s words, feeling a strange kinship with this woman-who-wasn’t-a-woman — this force that had killed off all but a few tenths of a percent of his world’s people. In the moment, she was almost a person, like him. A being who’d faced a human sense of defeat, even if tiny. Something she didn’t understand, despite her best efforts.

“A Titan?” Sadeem said. “Or a Reptar?”
 

“A Transformed.”
 

“A … ?” The word clicked. “Wait. Are you talking about the second Meyer Dempsey? The one Clara called Kindred?”
 

She seemed distracted, head down: a parody of human pensiveness as if there was one brain in her one head. “But now, with your story of Archetypes, there is context. Because we can still feel our Transformed the way you can feel one of your fingers, and what’s there isn’t worse than defiant. It is black with infection. Perhaps it is right to stay behind. Not just to protect our collective but to seed your new humanity with evil, as your Villain.”
 

Sadeem found himself about to respond — perhaps to protest the idea of Astrals discarding their garbage with humanity — but she was right; it almost made sense. In the Eden myth, it wasn’t Adam or Eve who brought Original Sin — or its potential — to the Garden. It was the serpent.

Eternity looked up, and for perhaps the final time, Sadeem was struck with just how good at imitating humanity this inhuman thing had become.
 

“Then the issue is closed. Humanity has reached our intended seed number, and the land masses have been restored. The Forgetting is complete, and that seed shall start fresh.”
 

“They’ve forgotten everything?”
 

“Now that we’ve retracted our influence, their minds will stabilize. Only factual memory of the past has been erased. They will not remember their past wonders. They will not remember their old civilization or old cities or old ways. Once we have returned you to the surface and verified the Forgetting is complete from within our stream, our ships will leave your planet, and they will not remember us. But they will know each other. They will know how to build fires and shelters, how to hunt and work together, how to begin the next attempt at evolving their consciousness into one like ours. Perhaps humanity will be what it has the potential to become the next time we return.”
 

“And by ‘potential,’ you mean like you.”

“Humanity can evolve a collective like ours. It has nearly happened before.”
 

“Maybe we’re not supposed to be like you. Maybe, since you intentionally made us different, our ‘collective’ is supposed to be something else.”
 

“Perhaps.”
 

“When you send me back home, before you leave,” Sadeem said after a moment of silence, “will you make me forget, too?”

“Oh no,” Eternity replied. “Someone has to be the Sage.”

CHAPTER 51

Piper entered the small shelter, feeling an increasingly common sense of dislocation. It was almost like seeing something move in the corner of her eye then looking properly to discover that whatever she’d almost seen had jumped back into place after turning her head. Something wasn’t quite right, but she didn’t know what. Piper had the sense of her mind as a bathtub, plug pulled from the bottom and thoughts draining faster than she could turn on taps to refill it. A helpless situation — and even more, it felt inevitable. Maybe something was going very wrong, but it wasn’t anything she could stop. And it would be over soon.
 

She sat beside Lila, who had Clara on her lap. She was too big, but Lila had barely let the kid leave her grip — let alone her sight — since their reunion. Lila didn’t seem exactly eager to go through …
 

To go through …
 

Well, whatever peril they’d recently left behind them.
 

“Feeling okay?” Lila asked her, looking up. She was sitting in a chair made of metal and canvas. Not the kind of thing that could be easily made, the way cobblers in the square made things. So where had it come from? Piper couldn’t recall.
 

“Just kind of uneasy. I keep getting these weird … visions.”
 

Lila almost asked one question then obviously diverted to another. Piper wasn’t the only one having trouble articulating herself these days, and looking at Lila she seemed to remember a sense of
visions
meaning more than they did now. As if one of them had been a psychic or a fortune teller, seeing visions and reading other people’s thoughts on a regular basis.

“Visions of what?” Lila asked.
 

Piper looked down at Clara. “Clara, honey? Do you mind helping your grandpa with some stuff he’s doing outside?”

Lila’s grip on Clara’s arm tightened enough that the girl flinched. Then she let go a little, but Clara looked up at her, wincing.
 

“He’s right outside, Lila. It’s bright daylight, and you can see for miles.”
 

Lila still held Clara’s arm, reticent. But Piper was right. Nobody could snatch Clara without someone seeing or stopping it — especially not with Meyer and his brother watching her in the dooryard.

Lila turned to Clara, urged the girl out of her lap, and said, “Go ahead. Just be sure to stay with Grandpa and Kindred. Don’t go wandering off, okay?”
 

Clara rolled her eyes, but only a little. Then her mother beckoned for a hug, and Clara complied without comment. A moment later she was out the door, and Piper heard the strike of Meyer’s axe, the small clicking sounds as Clara stacked wood.
 

“What’s going on?” Lila asked.
 

“You’ll think I’m crazy.”
 

“I promise I won’t.”
 

“This is going to sound so stupid.”

“Just say it. I won’t laugh.” She smiled. “Or send you to the medic.”
 

Piper’s eyes darted around, her mind trying to cobble the interior mess into a cohesive whole. “Look. I feel like an idiot, but I keep thinking I see … ” She sighed. “Visitors?”

“From up the delta? From the desert?”
 

“From the sky.”
 

Lila laughed. “The Astrals.”
 

“So I’m not crazy?”

“Not about this, no,” Lila said, still smiling. “Have you talked to Stranger?”
 

Piper shook her head. “He’s so busy. Everyone is planting soon. Everything needs a blessing.”
 

“I did, not long ago. He said, ‘Thoughts of the Astrals are slippery.’”

“So he knows about them?”
 

Lila nodded. “He says they created us. They’re from the heavens, like the gods. But then he said they’re preparing to leave, as they have in the past. And that until they do, we’ll remember them a little … but once they’re gone, we won’t remember them at all. And for now, it’s like clinging to a dream.”
 

Piper tried to focus. She remembered personal details fine: She was Piper Dempsey; she lived in the fourth house to the far side of the square with her husband, his twin brother, their daughter, Lila, and her daughter, Clara. They spent most nights with their neighbor Peers and his dog, just sitting and talking. She knew she liked Peers but hadn’t always, though she now couldn’t remember what he’d done to offend her.