Mary glanced at Rachel, but she remained silent. Mary said, “Yes, Luke, that’s part of what science is about—understanding things well enough to predict what they’ll do.”
Luke seemed to consider that. But then he said, “So the Lord chose to further test everybody in the world.”
“Just everybody in the northern hemisphere,” Mary replied irritably. “At least, with nuclear winter. Economic and social collapse, along with Lassa and other epidemics—I guess you might call that a testing.”
Luke nodded, recognizing none of her irony. “The Doctor said all the world would be destroyed at Armageddon.”
“And yet we’re still here—and so is the Ark.”
“Yes. Those who survived are the chosen of Christ.”
Mary was about to point out that the odds were high that most of the survivors in the world had never heard of Christ, but Rachel adroitly intervened. “Luke, how did the Flock survive the Long Winter?”
A frown settled in on his features again. “A lot of us didn’t survive it. We made one of the households into a hospital, and it was always full. And with our fall crops and most of the livestock gone, we didn’t have enough food. It was a time of dying, everybody wasting away, always too cold, too hungry, too sick, too burdened down with grieving. Before the thaw came, we buried seventy people. And five newborns. The babies—they were all born sick or dead, one of them so strange, its mother went crazy. Oh, Lord, I couldn’t understand it! I couldn’t understand why—” The sudden outburst was as suddenly cut off. He looked down at his hand clenched on the wineglass, relaxed it. “It was a hard testing, and if it wasn’t for the Doctor leading us on through prayer and faith, none of us would be alive.”
Mary rose and refilled his glass, as well as hers and Rachel’s. She felt his grief, a leaden ache under her ribs, knew it as she did her own. Yet she was thinking how ironic it was, his grief and his gratitude for life, when he clearly believed in a better life after death, perhaps even believed in an imminent apotheosis. She sat down on the floor again, asked, “What about your father? Did he die in the Long Winter, too?”
Luke took a swallow of the mead. “This tastes like… when the women are making jam. No, my father didn’t die that winter. It was in the Blind Summer. He and I were the only ones left of our family then. My sister and brother passed on in the winter, too. I thought it was over for us, the dying. Then one day my father was out plowing, and the horse got spooked. He went around to her head to talk to her, but she bolted. Trampled him to death.”
Neither Rachel nor Mary broke the silence for a time. Finally Rachel said, “Blind Summer is an apt term. The scientists predicted that, too.”
He turned, surprised. “They knew the sun would get hotter?”
“They knew the ultraviolet radiation would increase. The sun didn’t change, Luke. Nothing happening on this little pebble whirling around it could affect the sun. Oh, Mary, remember the headgear we rigged for our animals? But the wild animals… when I think of the suffering humankind inflicted on those millions of creatures—we had no right to do that. We might choose to destroy ourselves, but we had no right to destroy so many other creatures.”
Luke objected, “But Armageddon—it was the Lord who brought down the fire from heaven to punish the sins of men.”
Rachel let her annoyance show. “Those fires didn’t come from heaven. Human beings made those fires. I’d like to believe that any—that god is above all just. A just god wouldn’t make the innocent suffer so hideously with the guilty.” She waited, while Luke stared at her, doubt burning in his eyes, then she shook her head ruefully. “But I’m getting into theology again. Since you speak of the Ark in the present tense, I assume it survived. How many people live there now?”
His mental shift of gears was obvious. “How many? Well, there were fifty-three of us when I left.”
Mary closed her eyes, and for a moment she felt dizzy. She was trying to imagine fifty-three human beings alive in one place. That was a community—a place where there was real hope for the future of humankind, a place where…
But Rachel seemed to take that revelation and its potentials in stride. “Then you’ve had some increase since the End.”
“Yes. We took in eight people who found their way to the Ark during the Long Winter. The Doctor said we had to take them in, since they were good Christians, and the Lord had led them to the Ark.”
Rachel nodded. “You said you lost seventy of your maximum of a hundred and fourteen in the winter, and I assume you’ve had some deaths since. How many births have you had in the last ten years?”
Luke didn’t answer immediately, again on the defensive, and Mary wondered why it should bother him to admit what was obvious and inevitable, considering what these people had suffered.
Almost grudgingly, he said, “We’ve only had three babies live. The Doctor says the radiation made the women barren.”
“And the men sterile,” Rachel pointed out. “You said the day of the End was sunny with an east wind? You must’ve had more fallout from the Willamette Valley than we did. Well, at least some of your flock are still fertile. You seem to be multiplying and bearing fruit, even if it’s slowly.” She paused, as if waiting for Luke to comment on that, then when he didn’t, she asked bluntly, “Are you one of the fertile males?”
His cheeks reddened, but he answered the question. “Yes, I am.” He glanced fleetingly at Mary, and she felt within her an equivocal sensation that she identified as hope.
It is possible, and she wondered if that made it inevitable.
Rachel accepted Luke’s disclosure with a nod. “In that case, I’m surprised you left the Ark. I’d think you’d be too valuable to the Flock.”
Mary thought irritably that Rachel made him sound like a prize stud, but she said nothing, and at length Luke replied, “Yes, I guess I am… valuable, but I had to go.”
“Why?”
“Well, to… to find out if there was anybody else left.”
“Yes. We made a sojourn like that many years ago. We didn’t find anyone. I understand the reason—the true reason—for your sojourn, Luke, but I’m surprised the Doctor or the elders let you leave the Ark.”
“They let me go because—well, I had a vision. It came in a dream. The Lord told me to go out and find… other people. I told the Doctor and the—how did you know about the Elders?”
“You mean that the elders form a sort of ruling committee over which the Doctor presides?”
“Yes, that’s true, but how did you know?”
Rachel might have told him that such a system of government was almost inevitable in the kind of community he described, but she only shrugged and asked, “Where did you go? And did you find anyone?”
“Yes,” he said, smiling a little, fully aware of the power that single word wielded. “I’ll tell you about my travels, if you’d like.”
Mary looked up at Rachel, saw that she had apparently frozen with her glass only a few inches from her lips. If you’d like. How, after all these years, could they not like to hear about his travels if they included the discovery of other survivors. Mary asked perversely, “Aren’t you getting awfully tired?”
He didn’t expect that. “No. Really, I’m not.”
For a moment he seemed as imploringly earnest as a child who didn’t want to be put to bed. She rose to add more wood to the fire. “Yes, of course we’d like to hear about your travels.”
He returned her smile, watching her as she sat down, drawing her knees up and folding her arms on them. Then he took a long breath, as if he were bracing himself, but not for an undesired ordeal. She had the feeling he’d been waiting a long time to tell this tale.