Immobility (12 page)

But Mahonri had stopped, was waiting for him, weirdly lit by the makeshift flashlight he was carrying.

“Incidentally,” he said, “how did you know to come here? Did one of us recruit you?”

“I didn’t know,” said Horkai, realizing he was out of breath. “I just saw that someone had started painting the street signs again and decided to find out who.”

“That was me,” said Mahonri proudly.

“And then I saw from the road the arch of one of the openings. “It seemed as good a place as any to go for shelter. It was just luck that brought me.”

“It wasn’t luck,” said Mahonri. “It was God. Look at you. You are our brother, you belong here. God led you here to help us do His work.”

Not knowing what to say, Horkai said nothing, trying keep his face as neutral as possible. This seemed to be enough for Mahonri for the time being; he gave a curt smile and turned on his heel, starting down the row again.

They came to a break in the row, a cross-passage that would allow movement to another row. They crossed the break, continued straight on.

“What is in these?” asked Horkai, more as a way to slow Mahonri down than out of any real curiosity.

“Records,” said Mahonri. He stopped, turned around. “What we have here is the history of the human race, a record of births and deaths for hundreds and hundreds of years.”

“Why?” asked Horkai.

“What do you mean, why?” Mahonri responded. “Humanity is important. All these things must be preserved so that, when the time comes, humanity shall know what it has been, is, and will be.”

“When the time comes for what?”

“When the time comes for humanity to return.”

“Return from where?” asked Horkai.

“From extinction,” said Mahonri. “We’re here with the sacred calling of watching over the records, of preserving them and keeping them safe. And now you are here to join us.”

“Just records?” asked Horkai, thinking,
How can anything come back from extinction?

“Excuse me?”

“What about the gardening you’ve been doing? Or is that on your own time?”

“No…,” said Mahonri, dragging the word out long. “That’s part of it, too. We’re much more than clerks. We’re keepers.” He gave a guileless smile. “Would you like the tour?” he asked.

Horkai hesitated, then nodded.

Mahonri set off again, continuing straight ahead. Horkai banged the wheelchair along the cabinets, trying to keep up.

They came to another break in the row, and this time Mahonri turned right. Horkai followed him past aisle after aisle, until they hit a wall. Here, they turned left.

“This all was meant for records, too,” the man said, his voice deadened by the closeness of the cabinets. “But it became clear we needed the space for other things.”

The cabinets abruptly ended, the final one mangled and only half there. Mahonri touched a switch, and an LED bulb came on overhead to reveal an open space a little over two hundred feet square, bound by granite walls on two sides. Filling it were eight man-sized storage tanks arranged like the spokes of a wheel. Six were currently iced and buzzing. Around these were a series of sixteen smaller titanium cylinders, each about three feet in diameter and three feet tall. Only four were iced.

“Power was the hardest thing,” said Mahonri. “At first there was an emergency generator we could use, but we rapidly ran out of fuel. So, we converted to solar cells. You saw them in the parking lot, no doubt. They’re all over the far side of the mountain as well, thousands of panels. Even with that, we still have to keep most of the lights off, and we can never use all the storage pods at once.” He looked around him, gestured to the pods. “Lehi’s in the one closest to us, followed clockwise by Zarahemla, Teancum, Helaman, Enos, and Jonas. Originally we thought we’d save the tanks for humans, freeze them and use them to start over with later, but we couldn’t manage to get any back here without them dying.”

“But aren’t you human?” asked Horkai.

“Of course not,” Mahonri said. “And you’re not either. If you were still human, you’d be dead by now.”

“If we’re not human, what are we?”

“Lots of theological debate over that one,” said Mahonri. “You can look at the commentary if you’d like, the notes that each of us makes when the others are asleep—our thoughts on our callings, our religious musings. The Scriptures aren’t clear about it. Helaman believes we’ve had our actual bodies taken away from us, replaced temporarily by organic machines that are neither hurt nor affected by what destroys an ordinary body. Jonas believes that God works by natural means and that he’s allowed us to be infected by a polyextremophilic bacterium, some sort of
Deinococcus,
say, or perhaps by a variety of bacteria, and that this has given us our resistance.”

“
Dino-
what?”

“Teancum wonders if we’re becoming transfigured beings,” said Mahonri, ignoring him. “Translated by the finger of God from mortals to immortals. The fact that our bodies seem exceptionally resilient seems to support this, though the fact that we seem also to continue to age, albeit somewhat slower than humans, does not. Enos has been very compelling with his arguments for why we’re not human, but seems to have no thoughts on what we actually are.”

“And you, what do you think?”

“Me?” said Mahonri. “I think we’re the guardian angels of the human race,” he said. “We know our calling and we strive to fulfill it. The specifics don’t matter much. That’s enough for me.” He turned and pointed at the storage pods. “I occupy one of the two remaining pods when one of the others wakes up. You can use the other.”

“Why would I want to use the other?”

“You can’t stay awake all the time,” said Mahonri. “You wouldn’t last long enough if you did. If we’re going to be any use at all, we have to stay alive until it’s safe for humans outside. We’ll add more solar panels somehow and work you into the rotation. Instead of being awake for one month and asleep for six, we’ll now be able to be awake for one month and asleep for seven. Thanks to you, we’ll be alive for eight lifetimes instead of seven.”

“Hold on just a…” Horkai started, but Mahonri had already turned away, was approaching one of the nonfrosted titanium cylinders.

“Plants,” he said. “Seeds. They’ve all suffered at least slight exposure, but they’re resilient. Some might grow. Indeed, as you’ve seen, some have.” He walked over to one of the noniced titanium cylinders and opened it, beckoning Horkai forward. Horkai rolled up until he was beside it, used the arms of the wheelchair to lift himself and peer in.

There was a series of square plastic baskets inside, stacked on top of one another. Each was full of clear glass bottles, and each of these in turn was filled with seeds, all kinds, all varieties, each bottle carefully labeled.

“Don’t need to freeze these,” said Mahonri. “Just keep them dry and protected. Though we have a few frozen as well just in case. You can plant a seed that’s three thousand years old, and if it’s been kept in the right conditions chances are it’ll grow. Every once in a while when I wake up, I plant a few, just three or four, not enough to make a dent, not enough that they’ll be missed. Usually they don’t do much, but as you saw, the last batch is still alive. If this one is still alive when it’s time for me to go into storage, I’ll leave a note for the person who comes next.”

He closed the cylinder, turned back to Horkai.

“Don’t worry,” he said, patting Horkai on the shoulder. “I’ll go over it in more detail before I go into storage. I’ll write down what’s important, what you need to know.

“And now…,” he said, turning away, his voice trailing off. He took a pair of cryogenic gloves from where they hung on a hook on the wall and slipped into them. He removed a pair of tongs from its hook as well. He pressed a button on one of the iced cylinders. The lights flickered briefly, then came on a little stronger. The green light on the side of the cylinder went amber, then red.

“After a few moments an alarm sounds,” said Mahonri, “so we’ll have to be quick.” He had worked his hands deeper into the gloves and used them now to force open the cylinder’s lid. “The alarm is meant to attract whichever one of us is awake. If that individual doesn’t respond quickly enough, then it starts waking us up, one by one.”

He reached into the cylinder with the tongs, carefully slid out a small metal cylinder, held it near to Horkai’s face. Horkai could feel the cold radiating off it. No red letters on it. “Metal on the outside to protect it from external contamination, glass core inside. I can’t show it to you. The sample itself has been coated with cryoprotectants: glycols and DMSO. Should protect the sample for almost a millennium.”

“The sample?”

Mahonri looked at him quizzically. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were following me. I thought we were on the same page.”

“And what page is that?” asked Horkai, his voice flat.

“You’ve seen the plants already,” said Mahonri. “The seeds. These are the animals: fertilized embryos, thousands of them, from every kind of animal they could get hold of. This is the ark. What we’re living through now,” he said, gesturing at the walls, “is a modern-day equivalent of the Flood.”

“If I remember my Bible, God promised there’d never be another Flood,” said Horkai dryly.

Mahonri quickly backpedaled. “Metaphorically, I mean. And technically there’s no water. So we can still call it a flood—metaphorically—and yet still understand that God hasn’t broken his promise to us.”

The alarm had begun to sound, a piercing noise that made Horkai’s eardrums throb. Mahonri quickly reinserted the cylinder, closed the vat, and started the cylinder up again. The alarm stopped.

“There you have it,” said Mahonri, hanging the tongs back up and beginning to take off his gloves. “Welcome aboard. That’s all, really, that there is to see.”

“So you have everything ready for when it’s safe for humans again?”

“Yes,” said Mahonri.

“All the other cylinders are the same?” asked Horkai.

“Well,” he admitted, “not all. There are two that you’re never to touch.”

“Which are those?”

Mahonri’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you want to know?” he asked.

“If I don’t know,” said Horkai, “how can I know to avoid them?”

He watched Mahonri turn the statement around in his head until finally his eyes relaxed and he smiled. “You have a point,” he said. He led Horkai to the side closest to the wall and pointed to two of the frozen storage tanks. From the outside, they looked absolutely identical to the rest. Through the lid of one, Horkai saw only a craquelure of ice, opaque, impossible to see through, impossible to glimpse what was inside.

“What’s inside?” he asked.

Mahonri shook his head. “It’s not for me to say,” he said. “There’s much you have to learn first. In time you’ll be told.”

And Horkai, not knowing exactly how to respond to this and unable to think of a way to insist, finally simply accepted this explanation and nodded.

*   *   *

THEY FOLLOWED THE BACK WALL
this time, passing the end of each row of cabinets, until they came to another opening. It led onto what was less a hall than a tunnel, the walls rounded rather than squared off, the stone itself unpolished. The wheelchair had some difficulty, and in the end Mahonri grew tired of waiting for him and started pushing him.

How long they traveled down the tunnel Horkai couldn’t say. It couldn’t have been long, really, perhaps no more than a hundred feet or so. In the end and very suddenly it opened out, spreading into what at first seemed a cavern until Mahonri raised his light and Horkai saw that this, too, was man-made, could see the grooves where the rock had been chiseled and blasted away.

The floor of most of the chamber was covered with water, and Horkai could hear the sound of dripping. He could not see a river or a stream; the water instead seemed to seep in through the rock walls, which were glistening with it.

“It filters in,” said Mahonri, noticing Horkai was staring. He fingered the edge of his garment. “It’s quite pure by the time it reaches us,” he said.

Near the edge of the water was a little makeshift building, made by balancing sheets of corrugated tin against one another, drilling a few well-placed holes in them and binding them together with wire. A stone bench sat just in front of it, the water lapping at its base.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” said Mahonri, and bowed.

The front of the shack was open, no wall there at all. Inside the shelter was a cot, an uneasy swirl of blankets on it. Three folding chairs were stacked against the back wall, and on the floor at the head of the bed was another LED lamp. Beside the folding chairs were a dozen or so boxes, in two stacks that almost reached the ceiling.

“Homey,” said Horkai.

“I like it,” said Mahonri. He pulled up one of the folding chairs and snapped it open. “Some of the others sleep in the archive itself, but I prefer to be here, by the water. One of us will have to sleep on the floor,” he said. “Shall it be me tonight? Then you can take tomorrow night, and after that we’ll just alternate until you know the system well enough that I can be stored.”

“Okay,” said Horkai.

“Are you hungry?” Mahonri asked.

Am I?
He hadn’t thought about it until now, but yes, he did have to admit that he was not only hungry but starving even. He nodded.

Mahonri opened the top box and reached into it. He came out with two packets. He tore these open and then made his way to the underground lake, filling each of them with water.

“It’ll be just a minute,” he said when he came back and set the packets on the floor. “Which gives us just enough time to pray. Would you like to do the honors or shall I?”

“Uh, you?” said Horkai, caught off guard.

Mahonri folded his arms and bowed his head. He closed his eyes and then began to pray.
“Heavenly Father,”
Horkai heard, sitting there with his arms on his knees and his head unbowed.
“We thank thee for bringing our brother home to help us with our work…”
and by that time Horkai was no longer listening, his mind wandering instead, his thoughts only making their way when he heard Mahonri say,
“In the name of thy beloved son, Amen.”