Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) (36 page)

Alex had skimmed over the book he had found in the time capsule – the one on government – in the past.  It had mentioned things like cooperation and the benefits of community; but from the pens of Plato or Hobbes or Mill or Rawls, the ideas were mostly beyond him.  He took a few nuggets away from it, ones that made sense in his own cultural context, and ones that fueled his
adolescent predilection for rebellion, but the majority of the book’s value remained locked up in college level reading skills and in a culture and society he knew nothing of.  Such was the book on religion which, like many of his books from school, he recognized as important but couldn’t help but feel were boring.  The things people believed, in that book, were just silly.  He had often wondered how people could believe it seriously, or, if the book was just recording what people said they believed when in fact everyone silently felt otherwise.

Though these notions were ever more relevant to him with each passing day, he was more concerned with
his
state in nature, rather than
the
state of nature.  He was forced to become ever more independent and self-reliant, something that left little room for philosophy.  Alex was increasingly taking the position of the parent too, while Olesianna slipped further and further into depression and inactivity.  At first, her ardent refusal to risk any danger in the mountains kept them on a slow and winding course through the valleys.  Yet after only two days, Alex found that, in an effort to keep their course steady, he could wander through the mountainous heights without her complaining.  Ambivalence seized him then as he both enjoyed and loathed his new found authority.  Unhindered by Olesianna’s fear, Alex led them through the impressive mountain range safely and quickly, but, it seemed to him, at the cost of his mother.  It was a loss all together new to Alex, and though not nearly as intense as what he felt for his sister, watching the once proud maternal figure slip from position of infallibility was quite nearly as devastating.

“Do you think anyone else has ever made it this far?”  Alex asked his mother one evening
when she seemed to be doing better and up for conversation.

“
Hard to picture dunomads in a place like this.  Even the ones your father described seemed to be from the desert.”

“What did he say about them?”

“Oh just hypothesizing.  He didn’t know anything for sure, but he was pretty convinced that the ones who attacked Teleopolis were probably the city’s criminals.  They saw us and were jealous.”

“Of our freedoms.”

Olesianna let out a little chuckle, not quite a laugh, but more like a derisive snort.  “For our freedoms,” she repeated distastefully.  “No.  For our
stuff
.  We had everything, and they were within sight but starving in the desert.”

“And
that’s
what made them attack us?”  It was counter to the standard Teleopolan tale, and for that alone, it intrigued Alex, but something didn’t seem completely right about it.

“That was your father’s theory.”

“So
the hate
was about wanting our things…” Alex said to himself, referring to the reason the dunomad’s version of
the will
. 

“
Probably.  We had all of the food and water.”

“So it was
our
fault.”

“Oh no, your father would disagree with that, Alex.”

Alex felt a stinging disappointment from his father, a figure with whom he still had a relationship even if it was distant and imagined.

Olesianna continued.  “Life’s more complicated than that.”

A thought quickly jumped into Alex’s mind.  He recalled one of the nuggets from his book on politics and something a man named Mill or maybe Benjamin thought up.  It was that you could govern a society by numbers, equating the good with the bad, determining which outweighed which, and decide from there.  It had been an attractive idea to him but now it suddenly seemed in conflict with what his father was telling him through his mother.  Alex wondered: if there could somehow have been some person who had seen everything from the beginning and could put it all in perspective, would he or she be able to put it all in numbers?  Alex felt for sure that he could have if given the opportunity, and he could say for certain whose fault it was.  Even if people couldn’t know what the truth was, it still existed, didn’t it? 

They were both quiet for a long time, one focused on the now the other, the past. 

Alex’s thoughts meandered along until the next one came out as words.  “So do you think anyone else ever made it to the mountains?”

“I don’t think so, Alex.”  Olesianna was leaning against the window now, her eyes closed.

“I bet they took the same path we did.”

Olesianna forced out the words, trying to humor her son.  “Why do you say that?”

“I just have a feeling.”  Alex paused for a minute and then continued.  “I think it’s interesting how people can take the same path, but can’t have the same experiences on it.”

Olesianna gave an agreeing murmur, but Alex felt like she was no longer listening.

“
I
s it just me, or do those trees look funny?”  Alex asked.

“What do you mean?”  She asked listlessly.

“Those trees in the distance, down that hill.  They look… funny.”

“They look like nor
mal trees, Alex.”

But
Alex was sure.  “I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something strange about them.”

Eventually, after navigating down a rather treacherous hillside, Alex came to understand what was peculiar about
this forest.  When he first saw them, Alex would have guessed they were a mile or so away, but it wasn’t till nightfall that they reached grove of the enormous tree trunks.  They were so large in fact that they had created an optical illusion, appearing to be much closer when in fact they were five times the size of a normal tree and nearly that distance further away.

Nothing else in the area appeared to be equally disproportionate.  The rest of the foliage remained similarly sized to those in the mountains, as did the fauna.  Unnerved by the trees though, Olesianna begged Alex to make their journey through this valley as quick as possible and he agreed.  For the night, Alex spent an hour camouflaging the hover car in a nestled slope along a hillside.  He used branches and debris to cover up their presence and when he got inside and
closed the door, found that the twigs and leaves made a wondrous frame around the windshield.   Alex stared up at the beauty before him.  Through the sticks and grass was a scene in nature that was nearly indescribable in its beauty. 

Above
, were swaying saplings and an occasional owl soaring across the black and purple sky as the nearly full moon rested precariously on the limbs of those giant trees – a type of redwood, unbeknownst to Alex.  He stared at the scene for hours until finally he slipped into a dreamful sleep, the picture before him still lingering under his eyelids. 

Suddenly, Alex awoke to find himself in cold darkness.  Everything was black, and though he could not see a thing and only felt a hard surface against his face and prone body, he knew that the darkness before him stretched on forever.  There was a strange haze hovering around him, masking the sounds of this frigid place the way a mist obscures vision.  Rolling onto his back, Alex was suddenly blinded by a sharp rift of light above him. 
It was long and narrow and stretched on and on.  It was like he was looking through a massive door that was opened just a crack, the sun itself on just the other side.  Feeling dirt and pebbles against his back Alex squirmed and tried to sit up.  His hands were bloodied and his hip was badly bruised.  He was going to die there in the crevasse.

A
lex sat up with a start and quickly threw off his blanket.  He was sweating and felt confined.  Where once the camouflaged hover car had given him a sense of fortification and safety through the night, it now seemed like a coffin.  He had to get free.  Scrambling outside and stumbling into an open area between the giant trees, Alex fell onto his back and spread out his arms and his legs as far as he could.  The grass was soft and cold and the dew helped to cool his overheated body.  Looking up at the sky, Alex was no longer trapped in his dream, that frightful memory of the crevasse which still haunted him.  He was out in the open now and safe. 

An inch worm from a blade of grass slowly crawled across Alex’s chest and he tilted his chin down to watch its journey.  Alex imagined a tiny version of himself standing there.  In an instant, a sort of epiphany struck him.  Alex found himself looking up from the surface of his own chest, his hand resting on one of the course hairs of the worm as he jogged alongside it.  He could see how much larger the trees were to his tiny body and the body of the worm.  They were now so enormous from where he stood that he felt feverish. 

Alex could recall having a high temperature when he was younger and having an odd pulsing sensation in his arms, as if they were both very large and very small at the same time.  It was like his body was inflated with air, every touch as ill-defined as the tingling pinpricks of a numb extremity.  Now hovering in this state, Alex felt as if he could truly understand things like ultimate truth, the proportion of the sun to an ant, or what a view from nowhere might look like. 

Lost in this daze, Alex did not hear the commotion near the hover car until Olesianna’s voice called out.

“Alex!” she shrieked.  “Alex!”  She was screaming his name at the top of her lungs.  The forest echoed and Alex sat up quickly.  His mother spotted him and frantically clambered over the hover car, rushing towards his form in the moonlight.  She gripped Alex in a hug, pinning his arms to his side and holding him there tightly while rocking back and forth.  Olesianna’s eyes were wide and wild. 

“I thought you’d left,” Olesianna said, breathlessly.

“I just needed some air.”

“But you wouldn’t have gone too far would you?”

“No.  No, I’d never go too far.”  Alex managed to put his hand on the small of his mother’s back and pat her lightly.  He decided that morning, just before the sun rose, that they needed to move on and so he pushed the hover car through the descending hills on a south-westerly course until after two more days, the mountains leveled out and an all too familiar sight came into view. 

N
estled at the foot of the mountains, and seemingly surrounded on all sides by brown and gray peaks, was a flat plane of sand.

“Another desert?”

“I guess so.”

Olesianna rung her dry hands together nervously and then looked to Alex.  “What do we do?”

“Well,” Alex began.  “Deserts are the hardest places to survive in, but they’re also the easiest to travel over.  We could cover five times the ground we have been when moving through the valleys.”

“But towards what?”

Refusing to answer this, Alex pressed on.  Now proficient in the car’s abilities along slopes, loose gravel and over obstacles, Alex navigated the hover car down a dried river bed and into the desert valley below.  Before long, Olesianna was lulled into silence by the monotony of the landscape and Alex was left to his own thoughts.  Both recounted their past lives in Teleopolis and without realizing it, Alex’s foot grew heavier.  Gradually, he pushed the hover car up to ninety-five miles per hour, flying across the unremarkable terrain.

Rather suddenly, for they were travelling at a very high speed, they came upon some loose sand, where once the ground had been sun baked earth.  It happened just as Olesianna felt she could stay awake no longer, for she only found sleep in brief moments of immense fatigue.  When the panic had been numbed, she would drift into a nightmare only to wake shortly afterwards in a fright.  This hard-won state of rest was ripped away and replaced with a surge of adrenaline as the sound of the loose sand whipped against the underside of the hover car.  They were enveloped in a tan fog as Alex hit the brakes
hard.  Two seconds later they were flying through the air. 

The hover car had decelerated quickly but still
crested the first sand dune at forty miles per hour.  It cleared the dip on the other side of the peak and landed directly on the ridge of the next bank.  All in all, it would have been a nearly flawless stunt except that the hover car’s systems, as a safety measure against sudden drops, automatically tried to cushion their fall by diverting all power to the lift plate.  They bounced off this second dune’s peak, displacing a lot of loose sand in the process and continued on, with a good deal of momentum, plowing steeply into the leeward side of the next dune.  The engine sputtered to a stop.

O
lesianna’s body screamed for her to wake.  A survival mechanism was warning her that she was dying and pulled her out of unconsciousness.  She was covered in as much sweat as if she had been completely submerged in water.  The heat inside the hover car was something she had never experienced before.  It burnt her skin and she felt as if her eyes were boiling inside of her head.  She shut them tightly and put her hands to them, trying to push against the pressure she felt in her skull.  Touching the metal door handle too quickly to feel the searing heat, she opened the door of the hover car.  It was sunset but the temperature had not yet fallen and the hover car was still oven hot from the time it spent in the sun without power.  Taking in a breath of comparably cooler air, she regained herself.  Her body ached with muscle cramps so tight they felt stronger than any muscle she possessed.  She quickly went back into the car to get Alex ignoring the dizzying blur of piping hot air that escaped from the door.  But he was not there.  Alex was gone and there was dried blood caked onto the dashboard.  She quickly pulled herself back outside and ran over to the driver’s side door.  It looked as if he had fallen out after the vehicle came to a stop and then flopped around in the sand before getting to his feet and heading off towards the mountains in the distance.