Stephen asks, “Will you ever open the vault, Mary?”
“Me? No. It can’t be opened until your children, or their children, rediscover how to make paper, so they can copy the books and learn from them and preserve the knowledge for their children.”
Isaac pulls his legs up, sits cross-legged. “How many books are there in the vault?”
“Nearly ten thousand, Isaac.”
His eyes go wide, and Stephen sighs. “It would take forever to copy that many books.”
“A long time, at least, but the more people there are who can write, the sooner they’ll be copied. Or even printed. A simple printing press wouldn’t be so hard to build.” Then I laugh wearily. “Oh, Stephen, we can’t predict the future. That’s what Rachel said. We can only try. And hope.”
He studies me, and sometimes his eyes seem as fathomless as a night sky. At length, he nods, as if I’ve answered a question for him.
I shift in my chair, seeking a more comfortable position. “Anyway, sealing the books was a long, slow process. Of course, at first we didn’t have the vault, so we kept the sealed books in the basement. And one reason we were so slow is that we usually read, or at least skimmed, the books before we sealed them. With each book… it was like sending a baby out on a river in a reed basket, hoping a princess would find it.”
“Like the baby Moses!” Isaac says eagerly.
“Yes, Isaac.” I don’t point out that Moses was only one of many infants in mythology sent out on such river voyages. “The hope kept us alive and… yes, I’d say happy. Surviving still meant hard work, and we were always learning new skills, but there was satisfaction in that. We took pride in our strength and resourcefulness. The old griefs never quite died for us, but we were surviving as human beings, not simply as organisms do, without cognizance, without a frame of reference. We didn’t surrender our humanity.”
Stephen nods, and there’s a shadow of sadness in his eyes. “But how did you keep going when you were so… alone?”
“Well, we kept busy, Stephen. We had no choice about that. But it wasn’t all work. Sometimes in the evenings we entertained ourselves with card games or Scrabble. That was Rachel’s favorite game.”
“I like Scrabble, too,” Isaac puts in.
I use the Scrabble set as a teaching aid now. No one here is equal to a real game of Scrabble. “Yes, it’s a good game, Isaac. But there was one entertainment we missed sorely. Music. It was a part of our humanity that was denied us. The records—oh, those silent disks. Rachel had hundreds of records, a sampling of the best music of five centuries, but even if we’d had electricity, our stereo had been destroyed by EMP. I wonder how many centuries it will take to reinvent the symphony orchestra, and if…” Both Stephen and Isaac are gazing uneasily at me. They don’t understand what I’m talking about. Or what they’ve lost.
Isaac smiles tentatively, and I want to touch the soft contours of his cheeks. But I only return his smile and go on. “At any rate, our life here at Amarna was quiet and even satisfying for eight years after our trek. We had problems and small disasters, but we managed to deal with them. We lived and worked from season to season, rather than from year to year. Now, when I look back, it seems those seasons passed quickly. Then one day—the first of April, in fact—nearly half a year after the tenth anniversary of the End, everything changed for us at Amarna.”
Now Stephen smiles, too. He thinks he knows the nature of that change, thinks it was the change that Rachel and I had longed for, the answer to our hopes.
So did I, on that April Fool’s Day.
Chapter 16
Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.
The last two weeks in March had been gray with cold rain that beat down the seedlings in the garden and made the pasture a swamp, but this, the first day of April, dawned clear, the sun drawing a mist of steam from the rooftops and fields.
When the morning chores were finished, Mary took a bucket and chisel and set out for the beach. The tide was unusually low, exposing the rocks—and the mussels growing on them—at the base of the Knob, and tonight they would feast on mussel chowder. Yorick followed her, and she didn’t discourage him, although he had a tendency to wander. She took the silent whistle; he always responded to that. Yorick was the image of Sparky, one of the litter born to fey Ophelia last fall, the last litter Sparky had fathered. The last Ophelia had mothered.
At the foot of the path Mary climbed over the logjam of driftwood cast up by the winter storms, then paused to savor the sun on the sea. The wind blew out of the east, throwing rainbows of spindrift back from the massive avalanches of the breakers, and as she watched them she remembered music she hadn’t heard, even in memory, for many years. Beethoven. One of the symphonies. Which one, she couldn’t be sure.
Yorick ran out to the water’s edge, chased a gull that casually lifted into the wind and hovered out of reach, while Mary struck out for the Knob, her shadow stretching before her. Lean and vigorous, that shadow figure, and it reflected the way she felt today: in tune with her world, blending with her surroundings, tan chino pants the color of the light sand, blue-gray jacket the color of the heavier, dark sand.
Abruptly Yorick stopped his dance with the gull, faced south, ears forward, and began barking. Mary turned, alert, but not yet alarmed. Something was moving on the beach about two hundred yards away. She wondered why she hadn’t seen it before, but it was close to the piles of drift. Maybe it had been hidden there.
It. Why was she thinking it?
What she saw was a human being.
The chisel clattered against the bucket as the bale slipped out of her hand. She blinked, expecting the figure to resolve into a mirage, an accident of light and atmosphere. But it remained unmistakably human, despite the exaggerating effect of a backpack.
A human being.
She stood flailed by emotions, all conflicting—disbelief, hope, fear, joy—and the result was paralysis.
But that passed, gave way to caution. She called Yorick with the silent whistle, ran to the tumble of drift, and crouched behind a log, held Yorick with a hand around his muzzle to keep him from barking.
And watched the stranger draw nearer with every stumbling step.
He gave no indication that he was aware of her. Yes, it was he. She could see a red beard; a wide-brimmed, leather hat shadowed the rest of his face. He wore a sheepskin jacket, gray with soot and dirt, and pants of dark cloth stuffed into hiking boots. The boots had to come from Before. The backpack, too. He was tall and thin, with long legs that didn’t seem to function properly, that gave him an odd, scarecrow aspect. A rifle was slung over his left shoulder.
He stopped. He was only a hundred feet from her now, and she wondered if he had seen her.
No. His eyes were fixed ahead on the Knob. He staggered, nearly fell, then got his balance again. He was ill. She almost cried out at that realization. When he was only a few yards away, she heard him shouting over the roar of the surf. No, he was singing. “‘… the beautiful, the beautiful river… gather at the river… flows by the throne of God….’”