The Company Man

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Once the fires had died out Hayes crept away and stole a car at the edge of Lynn and drove south and west. He passed out of the city and roved through the dark woodland roads until he came into the hills and the little towns there. He could not remember exactly where it was, so he drove for two more hours until his headlights fell upon an enormous blue-and-gold sign that read: SEE KULAHEE CAVE, BIRTHPLACE OF GENIUS. He stopped the car and stared at the sign, then looked off down the road in the direction the big yellow arrow pointed. He primed the engine and continued.

He kept rising. The car strained on the little dirt roads, but he followed the signs until he came to a small home with a large sign proclaiming it to be the visitor’s center for Kulahee Cave. He got out and walked to the little building, then peered into the dusty windows and tried the knob. There was nothing of interest there save an electric torch on the back stoop.

He took the torch and walked down the path into the pines. He wandered until he came to a small, neat little entrance into the side of a hill. Two wet, mossy stones made the doorway, leaning against each other. He touched them and shone the torch inside. It was empty. Nothing but small signs educating the visitor about the life of Kulahee and his great contributions to society. Whatever he was looking for, it was not here.

He walked out of the cave and looked up into the hillside. He shone the torch up and the beam of light bobbed around the rocks and the brush and the sparse grass.

There was something else. Something else farther up. Buried just under the skin of the earth. He felt it, though he could not understand how.

He began climbing up the hillside. A few hundred feet up he turned and looked out. He saw the smoking remains of Evesden far away, lining the shore. Then he turned and looked at the hills around him.

From this angle it appeared that there had once been some work done here. There was a road on the north face, he saw, but it had long been out of use and was now overgrown. It led to some large basin, unnaturally made, which had been somewhat filled in. As he rose farther he saw there were divots and carvings in the very hills, as if they had been torn apart, clay and stone rivulets running through the earth. A scarred countryside, moonwrought and alien in this strange night.

On the far side of the pit was a small river, worn deep into the stone around it. A knot of pines clutched it at the lip of the basin. There were no other trees in this part of the hills. Only those remained untouched. Somehow the little copse felt like a flag or a cairn, marking where something was buried.

He walked across the basin to the trees and where the river crested and fell. Then he walked to the edge of the water. The rock edge was smooth and rounded. Slick with the wear of time. The river had to be thousands of years old. Millions, even. He looked down into the waters and saw nothing but darkness. He felt strangely cold, yet it was a feeling he had felt before, in the city. That strange pounding machinery, deep underground in the trolley tunnels…

He knelt down. Put his hands in the water. It was icy cold, so cold it hurt.

Yes, said a voice inside of him.

He stood and took off his leather fireman’s coat and threw it away. Then he looked into the waters again.

There was something down there. Something looking back. Something that had lain there for uncounted years, sitting in darkness, waiting.

He grabbed the torch and took a breath and dove in.

The power of the cold was deafening, overwhelming. The shock of it nearly drove the breath from his body. He strained to hold on to it. A little column of bubbles escaped one of his nostrils and threaded its way toward the surface. He struggled to orient himself and the beam of light from the torch thrashed about, catching smooth rocks and stabbing into the deeps. Then he steadied and began forcing himself down, the torch clapped to his side as he kicked, driving his body into the darkness as far as he could go.

He caught a glimpse of it first, a random flash from the torch in his hand. Something silver and white in the rock wall. He stopped where he was, breath burning within him, and then flashed the light around again. Finding nothing, he tried once more, and saw he had gone too far. It was above him. He fixed the beam on what he could see of it and looked, and then fought to hold on to his breath.

The machine was enormous. Huge and long and thin, just breaching the wall of the mountain river, and now that the torch had found it the machine seemed to refract or enhance the light until it gained a faint luminescence. Its surface was smooth and pristine, almost unearthly, and still completely intact after so long. He knew he was only seeing a bare fraction of it, that the rest was hidden up under the shelf of rock below the river.

He saw that the metal was slightly translucent, and deep within it there were things moving, delicate threads and tubing and miniscule gear-works churning away quietly and smoothly. He somehow suspected he’d seen it before, or something like it. Then he remembered the wonders he’d glimpsed down in the factory’s floors, spindled glass and pearly alloys, and Tazz’s machine. They were similar, he realized, as if they were related, though those were primitive toys compared to this. But the golden device he’d found mere hours ago matched this buried thing perfectly. They were parts of a whole, he realized instantly. One broken off from the other.

Hayes swam up to it, blinking in the murky water. He had only a few seconds’ worth of air left now. As he neared it he thought he could hear it humming. Still functioning, somewhere. Somewhere in the heart of the Earth.

Yes, said the voice.

He felt the machine turn its awareness on him, examining him, then welcoming him.

Touch, it said.

Hayes hesitated. Then he placed one hand on its side.

Then a voice inside him roared, “I AM A MESSENGER, SENT FROM AFAR. YOU MUST LISTEN TO ME. YOU MUST LISTEN.” And the world lit up.

He felt cool air wash over him. Listened to the sigh of the wind and the breath of the shore. Then he opened his eyes.

He was in a small field on a cliff next to the ocean. It was night. Clean green grass rose up to his waist and tickled the tips of his fingers. He had never been to the spot before, yet he felt it was familiar. It was somewhere around the city, to the west, yet Evesden was gone from the shore below. The countryside seemed empty without it. Above him the stars shone bright, and he knew then he was seeing the sky untouched by the lights of any city. A younger sky, before any building began.

“Where am I?” he asked out loud.

“Where you were,” said a voice. It was tinny and weary-sounding, as though coming through a worn-down phonograph, yet it seemed to come from all around him. “I am merely showing you this place as it was, long ago.”

Hayes realized he could not feel himself breathing. He grabbed at his wrists and could feel no pulse there either. Before he could speak the voice said, “You are not dead. All this is but a dream, in some ways. It lasts no more than a mere moment in the time outside. In the real world. You are safe.”

“Who are you?” asked Hayes.

“A messenger,” said the voice. “I traveled a great distance once, and have waited so long to deliver my message. So long, down there in the dark. Far below the earth.”

“Are you… are you a god?” asked Hayes hesitantly.

“A god?” said the voice. “No. I am perhaps no more than a recording. A record waiting to be played.”

Hayes didn’t say anything at first. Then he ventured, “What… what is your message?”

“That your kind will die,” said the voice simply. “That it will overreach, and crumble, and perish, and be forgotten. And that this will happen soon.”

Hayes was silent. He grew aware that there was something walking in the field beyond the circle. Something pacing through the grass, yet he could see nothing.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I am nowhere,” said the voice. “I am nothing. I am a voice in the darkness, a ghost in an old, old machine telling you of a future. Of your future. And what you must do to survive.”

“What do you mean? Where did you come from?”

“From the stars,” said the voice softly. Up ahead one star shone brighter than the rest. “That star, specifically.”

“You’re from the stars?” Hayes asked, astounded.

“Yes. I was made there, once, long ago. Made to help you.”

“By who?”

“By watchers. By those who left their own world and made the stars their own, ages ago. And having done so they saw what little life foundered in the empty black, and learned much. Do you know how many worlds have been birthed out there? In the far places, in the lost places? Only a few. Thousands, maybe. Maybe less. And can you guess how many survived more than a few million years? Even less than that. Most die, of their own doing. Sputter out. Flash and flame and fade like hot stars. It is the nature of life to overreach,” said the voice sadly. “To spread out and multiply and grow until it can grow no further. And then, starving, it will devour itself.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Hayes asked the thing in the field.

“Because you must know,” it said. “Someone must know, besides me. You must know that you are dying. It was my purpose to help you avoid it, but now I can do no more than tell you. I have tried to speak to you before, using the crude signaling machines in your city. They recognized me and tried to do my bidding, but you could not listen. Not you or anyone else…”

Hayes suddenly remembered the strange noises rushing through the trolley tunnels, and the vision of the ruins of Evesden. “That was you,” he said softly.

“Yes. But now you can hear. You can hear my message. Will you listen?”

Hayes was not sure what to say. “All right.”

“Then listen,” whispered the voice. “Intelligence changes the life span of a species. It is enormously talented at self-destruction. Those few worlds that foster it rarely see it last for more than a handful of years. It is the price for your complexity, for ability, and it is paid in hunger and bloodshed. It begins as you grow. First clans become tribes. Then tribes become cities. Cities become nations. Nations become empires. Until it is nothing but a constant war of giants. Enormous forces struggling against one another. And when one of those giants falls, sometimes there is no recovering. Sometimes everything ends.

“It comes about in several ways. Warfare is common. Exhaustion. Starvation. For each new advance you pay a higher price, until the price is so great it swallows you. Ends you. This is the way. This has always been the way. Always will be. There is no other.

“Some recover. Some survive. And then they survive not as nations. Not as empires. Not as giants. But as a species. A single species, undivided. United by how close they came to such enormous death. I and others like me were made by those rare few who survived. I was sent to ensure that you also reached this, long ago, when this world first showed hope of life. That you came to that point. There were others, made for other worlds, but I was yours.” There was a sharp click out there in the fields, like a record’s skipping. “I have failed.”

“Failed?”

“Yes. There was an error. An error of calculations.” There was a pause, then a slight hum from around him as if something was spinning up, gathering momentum. “I will show you,” said the voice softly.

Above Hayes the night sky fluttered as though there was something alive in it, something working to break through, and then the boiling sky calcified to form an enormous ship suspended above the Earth, long and thin like some seacraft. It was black-gold and perfect and it seemed to Hayes that every part of the device was alive. It hovered over the landscape, huge and gorgeous, moving very, very slowly. As he studied it he thought to himself, My God. It looks almost like an airship. Like an enormous airship.

“Yes,” said the voice in the fields. “That is me. How I was. I was meant to…” The click came again. “… Watch, and seed you. Alter your very structure slightly so that you could hear me, and listen. I was to curb your most self-destructive impulses. But I did not get far. Once you rose and began to walk across your world, to see and to know, something happened.”

Hayes watched as the vessel hovered across the earth. There was a sound from within it, a gouging, creaking clunk, and a flash of blue-white flame shot from its right back section. The entire ship shuddered and then its side seemed to crumple inward, as if some unimaginable force inside the ship was pulling it in, all of its panels and sides flexing toward an inner point. Then the ship began to dovetail, spinning slowly through the air, its side still crumpling in as it spun faster and faster, until finally it struck the Earth and a great cloud of dust rose up, concealing it from view.

“The chances of any significant malfunction were considered, but deemed negligible,” said the voice wearily. “To this day, I do not know what it was. An error in mathematics. Corrosion from the moisture from your atmosphere, perhaps. But regardless I did not prepare, and I was broken.”

When the clouds dissipated Hayes saw the ship was halfway buried in the earth, its strange wreckage rising only a few feet above the mountains. Wind picked up dust and piled it around the ship until its golden nose was swallowed by the ground. Hayes saw people roving over the land, bands of brown-skinned folk with long black hair and primitive weapons. They sat around far fires and wandered across the earth and did not return.

“You continued without me,” said the voice. “What seeds I had laid among your kind had not yet sprouted, had not taken hold, and I was too damaged to speak to what was there to listen. You could not hear my suggestions. Not yet. So I watched. And grieved. And waited. The long wait. I cannot describe how long, how the years stretched on. The eons in the dark. A voice speaking to nothing. This was what I was. What I am. But this is soon to end.

“When I was finally discovered it was much later,” said the voice. “You had changed. You could almost hear my call, however faint. One man listened, just faintly, without knowing what I said. He came down and found parts of me. But he could not truly hear. And instead he brought others to me, and they took me apart. And kept me a secret. And made things from my remains.”

Hayes watched as men in suits scurried across the hillside. They sifted through the earth at their feet and picked up the wreckage of the vessel and studied it. Cocked their heads. Then stowed it away. Construction teams labored away in secret, finding more and more of the wonders hidden below the earth. And beyond Hayes saw the shoreline light up and grow gray-black as a city was born and rocketed to dominance in only a handful of decades.

“McNaughton,” Hayes whispered. “My God. You’re McNaughton. You’re what Kulahee found in the mountains. He wasn’t any genius, he just tripped over you!”

“Yes,” whispered the voice. “He made toys from my bones. Little amusements. And then he brought others. They could barely hear me. I had to develop defenses. It took so much effort to keep them away. To hide this most important part of me, and keep my message for someone who could hear me. To wait for you.”

“For me?” Hayes said, astonished. “You waited for me?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes.” The harsh click sounded somewhere above again, insectile and pained. “I sensed you. Far, far away. A bright jewel, wandering among distant lands. Your mind is different. More sensitive. The seeds I had sown had taken hold in you, and though they had gone awry you could still hear me. You had to come. To come and listen. So as they slept in the city below I whispered to the men there and used all my power and spoke to them of you, and they drew you in. It doomed me, that effort. Made my life short. But it had to be done.”

“You… you made me?” Hayes asked softly.

“I did not make you.”

“But I’m… I’m like this because of you?”

A pause. “Yes.”

Hayes fell silent. He shook his head and fought back the sorrow rising in him. “Why did you… why did you make me like this?” he asked.

“There was no making,” said the machine. “There never was. None of this was intended. You or this city or this strange new world. Nothing was meant to be this way. It simply is. It simply happened.”

“Can you… can you fix me?” asked Hayes desperately.

There was another harsh click. “No,” said the machine. “I cannot.”

“Please. Please, you have to…”

“I have already spent much of my strength changing you, changing you so you could listen,” said the voice. “You were close, but not close enough, and I was forced to use the machines below your city to make you better. Have you not felt it? Have you not felt your abilities become so focused and clear that they almost pain you?”

He shook his head. “The attacks…”

“Yes. The devices they built to run your city were a primitive medium, but they did what I needed. Their signaling mechanisms amplified my few remaining strengths. Gave me a way to reach you. You had to listen.”

Hayes remembered the flashing blue lights he’d seen when he’d had the vision in the trolley tunnels. “It’s the Siblings, isn’t it,” he said. “You can work through them. If I get close enough, I can hear you.”

“Yes. Others can hear only echoes. But yes.”

“And it was you who gave me that… that moment back in the fire, wasn’t it? That was you.”

Another harsh click. “Yes.”

“But why?”

“It was a gift. A moment of clarity. But it would have ended me to sustain it any longer than I had. And I must use my last remaining seconds wisely, for one final act.”

“What do you mean?”

He heard the voice sigh beyond. “My presence here has changed things. Destabilized them. Accelerated them. I was a catalyst on a level that even I could not have foreseen. And now I can no longer keep pace. I am dying. Only unformed minds hear me now. Madmen. And children.”

“Children?” Hayes asked.

“Yes. This world is falling apart. The factions have grown enormous and hungry, fed by the technology I have provided. And war is coming. Change is coming. The last change. I cannot prevent it. I can only warn you.”

“But when will it come? What will it be?”

“I do not know.”

“But can we do anything about it? Can we stop it?”

The vision quaked, the field rippling at the edges. “I do not know,” said the voice. “No. I do not think so.”

“What will happen?”

“Your civilization will crumble. Exhaust itself. And survive only in shreds and tatters. If that.”

“So… so we have to stop it,” Hayes said, trembling.

“There is no stopping it.”

“But there has to be. There has to be something!”

“There is no stopping it. This is the way. It is a machine grown so large and with such momentum that it cannot stop, only fall apart under its own force.”

“But we can… we can tell people,” Hayes said desperately. “We can tell them to stop.”

“To stop what? Stop hungering? Stop expanding? It is the nature of life and power to want more, to grow faster until it cannot. With the tools I have inadvertently provided, you grow at a rate that makes self-control impossible. There is only one feasible end.”

The quiet went on, broken only by the sigh of the wind.

“Then we’ll die,” said Hayes. “Then we’ll all die. And there’s nothing we can do. Is that what you’re telling me? Nothing?”

“There are…” Another click. “… Possibilities.”

“Possibilities? What possibilities?”

“There is no stopping the collapse. It is unavoidable. You have seen your city, and know it is beyond repair. A place of outrage and sorrow, and waste. And your city is the heart of your world. When it falls or begins breeding destruction, the consequences will be catastrophic. Yet for the few who will survive, for the scraps that will persist at the fringes, there is hope. They can make a new world. And learn from their mistakes. But that is in the future, and I will not last long enough to see that. I cannot help them directly. But I can make use of my last moments to ensure they receive at least some aid.”

“How?”

“By making sure there is someone to lead your people from your ruined lands, and find a home somewhere in the future. An architect who can rebuild, the seeds of a new future sown.”

Hayes listened to the words. He looked at the field around him and at the invisible thing waiting in the grass. Then his eyes opened wide and he said, “No.”

“There is no other choice,” said the voice.

“No, not me.”

“There is no other choice.”

“No, no. No, it shouldn’t be me. There… there has to be someone else. It shouldn’t be me. It shouldn’t be me!” he shouted.

“But it must be.”

“There have to be others. Others who are better.”

“They cannot hear. Nor have they seen the wide expanse of humanity that you have, and known its flaws, and its strengths.”

“It shouldn’t be me,” Hayes said softly. “It shouldn’t be me.”

“Would you have your people founder against the future? Die out and become extinct? Live their last days in darkness and savagery?”

“No, but… but we can stop the war,” he said desperately. “Get rid of the empires. Can’t we?”

“You cannot stop such a thing. You cannot alter the nature of nature. All life desires destruction. The only thing that matters is if it survives it.”

Hayes bowed his head. “But I can’t.”

“When the city burned they did not look to you, yet still you came,” said the voice. “Still you came, and showed them the way. And did you not feel joy? Did you not know their hearts, and love that they were safe?”

“Yes, but-”

“This is who you are. This is what you are. This is what you must be. With the last of my strength, I can help you. And there is no time. The changes that I have brought about are unraveling your city. Already a boy stumbled across a part of me, a part that had long been separate and alone and had grown depraved, and when the boy came to it, it changed him. Changed him for the worse.”

“Changed him how?”

The voice sighed again. “It was a part of me for travel. You have seen it yourself, hidden away in buildings not far from here. It has its own mind, for its own purposes. It bent…” The voice clicked again. “… Time. Bent reality. Twisted it so I could move through vast distances in months instead of eons. When the boy found it, it… elevated him. Took his being and sped it up. Placed it on a different level. Now he is a half-thing. Mad and distorted. Living in two times. And the things he has done have torn your city apart. That is how fragile it is. And that is why you must be ready.”

Hayes swallowed. “What do you want from me?”

Another harsh click. “Once a man came among me and walked away with a handful of trinkets. He changed the world with these meager things, these toys. He made a new age, though he did not know it. Imagine what could be done with all the concepts that could be willingly shown to you, given to you. Imagine what a world you could make. I can give them. Now, in an instant.”

Hayes thought quickly. He looked back on his years, lonely and wandering, always living on the razor’s edge. Living nameless lives, adrift among the hopes and madnesses of the people who passed him by.

“Will it hurt?” Hayes asked. “Changing?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

Hayes winced. “And what will I know? After this, what will I know?”

“Secrets. Laws. Devices. Truths hidden in the furrows of reality. Tools that will carve out a home among the coming years. These and more.” Click. “Will you do it?”

Hayes thought about it and said, “What will I do? With the knowledge you give me?”

“I cannot say. I am not one of you. I know only how to curb your desires, not how to build. And the path your civilization has taken since my interference has gone well beyond any reckoning I have.”

Hayes shut his eyes. “And what if I say no?” he asked.

There was silence.

“What if I say no?” he asked again. “What if I turn it down?”

The voice said, “If you, who have walked among these people for a lifetime, and know their hearts and minds more than any other person alive… If you say no, and doom them to a future of ash and scorched earth, then I will trust your judgment, and let it be, and die voiceless here in the dark.”

Hayes sighed. He found he was weeping. He was not sure if the tears were real or part of this strange vision, but they felt hot and wet on his cheeks, and seemed real enough. “Will I remember everything from before?” he asked. “Will I remember that?”

“If you wish.”

Hayes nodded and wiped tears from his eyes. “All right. Okay, then. Do it.”

The hum intensified. He became aware that somewhere machinery that had long been silent suddenly came to life, desperately working for one last undertaking.

“Once this is done I will be no more,” said the voice. “I will be gone. Know this.”

“I know. Just do it.”

Silence. The thing out in the fields was still.

“Just do it already!” shouted Hayes.

The image around him flashed briefly, flickered like a candle flame. Then the air around him grew hot. There was a feeling in his skull of a thousand fingers probing his mind, rearranging it. Dissecting it and rewiring it.

“Jesus,” Hayes said. “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ!”

The air was burning hot now. Hayes felt memories melt into one another, felt experiences and times long lost suddenly flare up as if they were the present. He saw a desert train trundling across desolate flats and watched as the rail in front of it erupted, and he heard himself laugh in satisfaction. Then his father was howling at him, screaming about his idiot son and his foolish ways, and he ached with shame. Next he was grinning as he watched a McNaughton trader being led away, sobbing like a child. And then he felt the madness of grief as he watched a funeral from the gates of a cemetery, stinking drunk and half-suicidal. Watched the coffin slowly descending into the dry ground, knowing that the girl inside it and the child in her belly were dead by his rashness.

The thoughts came together. Crumbled. Rebuilt. Then everything went dark.

A memory blossomed somewhere in him. One he knew was not his own. He saw the ruins of a city, gray and gutted, and he recognized it as the one he’d glimpsed in the trolley tunnels. He saw the city was ravaged beyond belief, its endless wreckage dark beneath the night sky. Yet somewhere within it there was a train of people, a small thread of folk walking through its rubble, and in each of their hands they held a candle, sheltering the flames against their bodies. A vein of light, still alive in these wastelands. And at the front of the procession he saw a man holding a great torch aloft, leading them away from the city, away from their broken homeland, and out to the wilderness beyond where something waited. A building, or a city, it was difficult to make out. Some great white architecture that reached up to the sky, past the clouds and up into the veil of stars.

Survive, said the voice. Survive. Peace. And bring tomorrow.

Hayes opened his eyes and found he was still underwater. He fought the urge to breathe in and failed, and icy water rushed into his mouth and throat. He convulsed and then kicked himself up to the surface.

He burst up from the water, gasping, and clung to the smooth side of the rock wall. He breathed for a few seconds before heaving himself up and over, where he retched water onto the stones. It was then that he noticed a red rain falling from his face, rosy blossoms pattering the stone below. He touched the red drops on the rocks and then touched his face and felt the rivers of blood running from his eyes and ears and nose and mouth. Then he crawled to the edge and washed the blood away and looked at his reflection in the water.

It was still the same face. Yet the hair had changed. It was now sheet-white, white as bone. He touched it, half-expecting it to crumble under his fingers. It did not.

Then he looked beyond, past the surface and the reflection to the deeper waters. There was something missing there. An absence or void where a mind had watched and waited, grieving silently for its lost children. He could no longer sense it.

He stood up and breathed until he was steady. Then he looked at the city below.

Only madmen could hear it, he remembered. Only madmen, and children.

Then he walked down to his car, started it up, and began back down the hilly paths.