“Rachel, there are survivors out there.”
“Yes, there are survivors. Probably millions in the southern hemisphere managing to adapt to this new Stone Age. There must be survivors all over the world in isolated pockets like ours. But not here, Mary. Not here.”
Mary stared at Rachel but couldn’t see her face, only the shape of her body limned by the firelight against the darkness. Her voice was quiet, nearly toneless, when it should have been strained with pain.
And Mary realized she was listening for her own pain.
She gazed out into the dark wilderness, and held back a cry. Let me see a light. Just one tiny spark of light.
Not here. Somewhere in the world, lights were burning on this night. Not here. The word that gagged in her throat was loneliness.
Human beings were social animals. They weren’t made to live in solitude so absolute, so hopeless. They weren’t made to live celibate, sterile lives, to die in a void.
“Rachel, if we could only go on farther, across the Columbia, maybe, or south into California…”
“Of course, we could go on, but we have to make up our minds whether we want to continue to be farmers, or to take another step backward and become nomads. You can’t have both, Mary. We’ve been away from Amarna over two weeks, and we’ve covered less than two hundred miles. And even then, we may go home to find some of our animals dead, or something worse might’ve happened. The point is, if we choose to go searching over long distances for survivors, we’ll have to forfeit Amarna, and I wonder how long we’d survive as nomads. Most of the land we’d be traveling through won’t be exactly hospitable.”
Is that all it comes to—survival?
And Mary knew the answer.
Without a whimper, the hope died and left within her an irrevocable silence.
She said, “It would’ve been easier—more merciful, anyway—if we hadn’t lived through the winter.”
The wind gusted colder in the wake of those words. At length, Rachel said, “Maybe. And maybe something will put us out of our misery eventually. Right now, I’d prefer to pursue other options.”
“Other options?” Mary stared at Rachel’s shadow shape. “What other options do we have?”
“Well, there’s the problem of finding other survivors. Our trouble is there are only two of us. That forces us to choose between being farmers or nomads. But maybe somewhere—it’ll have to be somewhere fairly near—others were luckier in terms of numbers, so some of them would be free to leave home to make the same kind of search we are now. They’d look for exactly what we’re looking for. Maybe they couldn’t actually see our fires, but they could see our smoke. There’s hardly a day when we don’t have a fire of some kind going. We can’t find them, but they can find us—by our smoke.”
The hope that had seemed dead stirred. “Yes, anyone following 101 is bound to see our smoke, and that’s the only way to travel along the coast.” Then the hope sighed into quiescence again. “So, all we can do is go home and wait and… survive.”
Rachel leaned forward, rested her elbows on her knees. “There’s something else we can do. We can prepare our legacy to the future.”
Mary laughed, heard the acid edge in it. What kind of legacy could they leave? And to whom? To what future?
Rachel said levelly, “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. There’s nothing we can do about the hellish mess humankind has made of this living world, and there’s nothing we can do about our lost civilization, except… Mary, when you try to define civilization, what you come up with has to include the factor of accumulation. The discoveries of each generation are its legacy to all those that follow.”
Unseen in some indefinable distance, an owl cried. Mary said, “But the chain is broken now.”
“Yes, but it’s been broken before.” Rachel’s voice was as soft and as poignant as the owl’s. “Not so totally. Usually it breaks in one culture, while it’s maintained in another. A great deal is always lost in those breaks. We don’t know how much was lost in the dark ages in Europe, but we know what was saved. Western civilization was built on it.”
“And was that a good thing?”
There was a hint of annoyance in Rachel’s reply, but it didn’t last. “It depends, I suppose, on how you define good. A lot of extraordinary things happened, or were invented, discovered, or created in the context of Western civilization that I’d call good. I know far more about the universe than Solomon in all his wisdom, not because I’m so much wiser, but because of the two and a half millennia of civilization that occurred since he died. Every painting I did was a child of that civilization. And shards of that civilization have survived.”
“What, Rachel? What could possibly have survived?”
“I don’t know what might have survived elsewhere. I only know what has survived in our possession. The books, Mary.”
Mary shuddered, folded her arms against her body, overtaken by a sensation of fear she could neither control nor understand.
Rachel meant the books at Amarna, her own and those she had scavenged the last two years. She had spent every hour she could purloin from their punishing schedule reading those books, sorting them by subject and author, separating out the duplicates. Mary had never taken part in that, had avoided looking at the books, much less reading them. She hadn’t even recognized her denial of them, nor let herself wonder why she denied the written word, which had once been her craft, her art, her life.
Now, as she thought about the books, she found herself suddenly and silently weeping, and the ravening agony of grief doubled her over.
Now she understood.
It was fear of this knife-edged pain that had blinded her to what was so obvious to Rachel. For Mary, handling and reading those books was tantamount to touching and talking to the corpses of loved ones. They were reminders of what was lost. It was that loss she had wanted to deny as she wanted to deny the darkness before her now.
Yet now the grief, inch by inch, second by second, surrendered. She felt herself trembling, and it wasn’t because of revived pain or even the cold wind. It was a manifestation of hope.
Our legacy to the future.
The future. That was where hope lived.
Rachel said, “We have over six thousand books at Amarna now. Of course, it’s a pitiful fraction of human knowledge. But it’s all we have. I don’t believe they’re the only books left in the world, just as I don’t believe we’re the only survivors, but I keep thinking maybe we have the only existing copies of some books. They must be preserved if it’s remotely possible. Mary, what else can I do for humankind? You’re young and still capable of bearing children—if other survivors do find us—but I’m past that. And maybe those books will make more difference in the long run.”
Mary felt an encompassing calm, and she tried to remember when she had felt anything like it, when fear and doubt hadn’t been foremost in her mind. Before the End, certainly. Yes, she could remember one moment in her life when she felt a similar calm: the night she finished the last page of the last revision of October Flowers. The calm arose from her realization that she had accomplished something worthwhile, and she had done it well.
She thought about that book, thought about her book being read in an unforeseeable future, and the idea was profoundly satisfying. She thought of the legions of writers—all dead now, probably, if they weren’t before the End—who had written with the conviction that their words would be read by future generations they couldn’t imagine.