Station Eleven (15 page)

RAYMONDE
: The places we return to more than once aren’t dissimilar to here. Some places, you pass through once and never return, because you can tell something’s very wrong. Everyone’s afraid, or it seems like some people have enough to eat and other people are starving, or you see pregnant eleven-year-olds and you know the place is either lawless or in the grip of something, a cult of some kind. There are towns that are perfectly reasonable, logical systems of governance and such, and then you pass through two years later and they’ve slid into disarray. All towns have their own traditions. There are towns like this one, where you’re interested in the past, you’ve got a library—

DIALLO
: The more we know about the former world, the better we’ll understand what happened when it fell.

RAYMONDE
: But everyone knows what happened. The new strain of swine flu and then the flights out of Moscow, those planes full of patient zeros …

DIALLO
: Nonetheless, I believe in understanding history.

RAYMONDE
: Fair enough. Some towns, as I was saying, some towns are like this one, where they want to talk about what happened, about the past. Other towns, discussion of the past is discouraged. We went to a place once where the children didn’t know the world had ever been different, although you’d think all the rusted-out automobiles and telephones wires would give them a clue. Some towns are easier to visit than others. Some places have elected mayors or they’re run by elected committees. Sometimes a cult takes over, and those towns are the most dangerous.

DIALLO
: In what sense?

RAYMONDE
: In the sense that they’re unpredictable. You can’t argue with them, because they live by an entirely different logic. You come to a town where everyone’s dressed all in white, for example. I’m thinking of a town we visited once just outside our usual territory, north of Kincardine, and then they tell you that they were saved from the Georgia Flu and survived the collapse because they’re superior people and free from sin, and what can you say to that? It isn’t logical. You can’t argue with it. You just remember your own lost family and either want to cry or harbor murderous thoughts.

SOMETIMES THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY
thought that what they were doing was noble. There were moments around campfires when someone would say something invigorating about the importance of art, and everyone would find it easier to sleep that night. At other times it seemed a difficult and dangerous way to survive and hardly worth it, especially at times when they had to camp between towns, when they were turned away at gunpoint from hostile places, when they were traveling in snow or rain through dangerous territory, actors and musicians carrying guns and crossbows, the horses exhaling great clouds of steam, times when they were cold and afraid and their feet were wet. Or times like now when the heat was unrelenting, July pressing down upon them and the blank walls of the forest on either side, walking by the hour and wondering if an unhinged prophet or his men might be chasing them, arguing to distract themselves from their terrible fear.

“All I’m saying,” Dieter said, twelve hours out of St. Deborah by the Water, “is that quote on the lead caravan would be way more profound if we hadn’t lifted it from
Star Trek
.” He was walking near Kirsten and August.

Survival is insufficient:
Kirsten had had these words tattooed on her left forearm at the age of fifteen and had been arguing with Dieter about it almost ever since. Dieter harbored strong anti-tattoo sentiments. He said he’d seen a man die of an infected tattoo once. Kirsten also had two black knives tattooed on the back of her right wrist, but these were less troubling to Dieter, being much smaller and inked to mark specific events.

“Yes,” Kirsten said, “I’m aware of your opinion on the subject, but it remains my favorite line of text in the world.” She considered Dieter one of her dearest friends. The tattoo argument had lost all of its sting over the years and had become something like a familiar room where they met.

Midmorning, the sun not yet broken over the tops of the trees. The Symphony had walked through most of the night. Kirsten’s feet hurt and she was delirious with exhaustion. It was strange, she kept thinking, that the prophet’s dog had the same name as the dog in her comic books. She’d never heard the name
Luli
before or since.

“See, that illustrates the whole problem,” Dieter said. “The best Shakespearean actress in the territory, and her favorite line of text is from
Star Trek
.”

“The whole problem with what?” Kirsten felt that she might actually be dreaming at this point, and she longed desperately for a cool bath.

“It’s got to be one of the best lines ever written for a TV show,” August said. “Did you see that episode?”

“I can’t say I recall,” Dieter said. “I was never really a fan.”

“Kirsten?”

Kirsten shrugged. She wasn’t sure if she actually remembered anything at all of
Star Trek
, or if it was just that August had told her about it so many times that she’d started to picture his stories in her head.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never seen
Star Trek: Voyager
,” August said hopefully. “That episode with those lost Borg and Seven of Nine?”

“Remind me,” Kirsten said, and he brightened visibly. While he talked she allowed herself to imagine that she remembered it. A television in a living room, a ship moving through the night silence of space, her brother watching beside her, their parents—if she could only remember their faces—somewhere near.

The Symphony stopped to rest in the early afternoon. Would the prophet send men after them, or had they been allowed to leave? The conductor sent scouts back down the road. Kirsten climbed up to the driver’s bench of the third caravan. A dull buzz of insects from the forest, tired horses grazing at the side of the road. The wildflowers growing by the roadside were abstract from this vantage point, paint dots of pink and purple and blue in the grass.

Kirsten closed her eyes. A memory from early childhood, before the collapse: sitting with a friend on a lawn, a game where they closed their eyes and concentrated hard and tried to read one another’s minds. She had never entirely let go of the notion that if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting, that if two people were to cast their thoughts outward at the same moment they might somehow meet in the middle. Charlie, where are you? She knew the effort was foolish. She opened her eyes. The road behind them was still empty. Olivia was picking flowers below.

“A little farther,” the conductor was saying, somewhere below, and the horses were being harnessed again, the caravans creaking into motion, the exhausted Symphony walking onward through the heat until hours later they set up camp by the roadside, the ones who remembered the lost world thinking longingly of air-conditioning even after all these years.

“It just came out of a vent?” Alexandra asked.

“I believe so,” Kirsten said. “I’m too tired to think.”

They’d walked for all but five of the eighteen hours since they’d left St. Deborah by the Water, through the night and morning and deep into the afternoon, trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the prophet. Some of them took turns trying to sleep in the moving caravans, others walking and walking until their thoughts burned out one by one like dying stars and they fell into a fugue state wherein all that mattered or had ever existed were these trees, this road, the counterpoint rhythms of human footsteps and horses’ hooves, moonlight turning to darkness and then the summer morning, caravans rippling like apparitions in the heat, and now the Symphony was scattered here and there by the roadside in a state of semi-collapse while they waited for dinner to be ready. Half the Symphony had set off in pairs to hunt rabbits. The cook fire sent a plume of white smoke like a marker into the sky.

“Air-conditioning came out of a vent,” August confirmed. “You’d press a button, and
whoosh!
Cold air. I had one in my bedroom.”

Kirsten and August were setting up tents, and Alexandra, whose tent had been set up already, was lying on her back staring up at the sky.

“Oh,” Alexandra said. “So it was electricity, or gas?”

August looked at the tuba, who was sitting nearby with his daughter half-asleep in his arms. Olivia had announced that she was too tired to wait for dinner, so he’d been telling her a bedtime story about a mermaid while Lin set up their tent.

“Electricity,” the tuba said. “Air conditioners were electric.” He craned his neck to see his daughter’s face. “Is she asleep?”

“I think so,” Kirsten said. This was when she heard the exclamation from the third caravan—“What the
fuck
,” someone said, “goddamnit, what
is
this?”—and she stood up in time to see the first cello haul a girl out of the caravan by the arm. Olivia sat up, blinking.

“A stowaway.” August was grinning. He’d been a stowaway himself once. “We haven’t had a stowaway in years.”

The stowaway was the girl who’d followed Kirsten in St. Deborah by the Water. She was crying and sweaty, her skirt soaked with urine. The first cello lifted her to the ground.

“She was under the costumes,” the first cello said. “I went in looking for my tent.”

“Get her some water,” Gil said.

The conductor swore under her breath and looked off down the road behind them while the Symphony gathered. The first flute gave the girl one of her water bottles.

“I’m sorry,” the girl said, “I’m so sorry, please don’t make me go back—”

“We can’t take children,” the conductor said. “This isn’t like running away and joining the circus.” The girl looked confused. She didn’t know what a circus was. “Incidentally,” the conductor said to the assembled company, “this is why we check the caravans before we depart.”

“We left St. Deborah in kind of a hurry,” someone muttered.

“I had to leave,” the girl said. “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll do anything, just—”

“Why did you have to leave?”

“I’m promised to the prophet,” the girl said.

“You’re what?”

The girl was crying now. “I didn’t have any choice,” she said. “I was going to be his next wife.”

“Jesus,” Dieter said. “This goddamn world.” Olivia was standing by her father, rubbing her eyes. The tuba lifted her into his arms.

“He has more than one?” asked Alexandra, still blissfully ignorant.

“He has four,” the girl said, sniffling. “They live in the gas station.”

The conductor gave the girl a clean handkerchief from her pocket. “What’s your name?”

“Eleanor.”

“How old are you, Eleanor?”

“Twelve.”

“Why would he marry a twelve-year-old?”

“He had a dream where God told him he was to repopulate the earth.”

“Of course he did,” the clarinet said. “Don’t they all have dreams like that?”

“Right, I always thought that was a prerequisite for being a prophet,” Sayid said. “Hell, if
I
were a prophet—”

“Your parents allowed this?” the conductor asked, simultaneously making a
Shut up
motion in the direction of the clarinet and Sayid.

“They’re dead.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Were you spying on me in St. Deborah?” Kirsten asked.

The girl shook her head.

“No one told you to watch us?”

“No,” she said.

“Did you know Charlie and the sixth guitar?”

Eleanor frowned. “Charlie and Jeremy?”

“Yes. Do you know where they went?”

“They went to the—to the Museum of Civilization.” Eleanor said
museum
very carefully, the way people sound out foreign words of whose pronunciation they’re uncertain.

“The what?”

August whistled softly. “They told you that’s where they were going?”

“Charlie said if I could ever get away, that’s where I could find them.”

“I thought the Museum of Civilization was a rumor,” August said.

“What is it?” Kirsten had never heard of it.

“I heard it was a museum someone set up in an airport.” Gil was unrolling his map, blinking shortsightedly. “I remember a trader telling me about it, years back.”

“We’re headed there anyway, aren’t we? It’s supposed to be outside Severn City.” The conductor was peering over his shoulder. She touched a point on the map, far to the south along the lakeshore.

“What do we know about it?” the tuba asked. “Do people still live there?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“It could be a trap,” the tuba murmured. “The girl could be leading us there.”

“I know,” the conductor said.

What to do with Eleanor? They knew they risked accusations of kidnapping and they had long adhered to a strict policy of non-intervention in the politics of the towns through which they passed, but no one could imagine delivering a child bride back to the prophet. Had a grave marker with her name on it already been driven into the earth? Would a grave be dug if she returned? Nothing for it but to take the girl and press on into the unknown south, farther down the eastern shore of Lake Michigan than they’d ever been.