The Great Forgetting (31 page)

Later, Jack visited the room at the very end of the long hall, where the Maestro had assembled artifacts from before the Great Forgetting in a kind of small museum. The room was filled with incongruous artifacts: a copy of
A Man in Full
written by some guy named Ron Sweed; a framed copy of the
Times
, dated March 30, 2021, headline: “Browns Win the Super Bowl!” There was a soda machine standing in a corner that accepted the Nazi-American quarter Cole's mother had given him and spit out a bottle of something called Umami Pepsi that tasted like beef broth and stung the top of his tongue.

The declaration came just before noon. Cole had just stepped out of the shower, when everyone heard an odd percussive
FOOOOMP!
, and then a message landed in a tube beside the front door.

“Hmm,” said the Maestro. It was one of those pneumatic tubes some banks still use to make transactions from your car. The Maestro walked to it and withdrew the rolled-up parchment from the container. It was a single page. From where he stood, Jack could see it was notarized.

“Clever,” said the Maestro as he finished reading.

“What?” asked Jack.

“Scopes found a loophole. My chambers are sovereign. A place the Hounds cannot trespass without invitation. But it seems every twenty years the Hounds may audit me.”

“Audit you?”

“Yes. Well. You know. Inventory my computers, tally my expenditures, subtract any contraband. Oh, dear, they'll probably take my whiskey.”

“What does this mean for us?” asked Sam.

The Maestro coughed nervously. “I'm afraid it means the Hounds are on their way with instruments they will use to lobotomize you. Come with me, I expect we have only a few minutes before they blast the door down.”

3
    As quickly as they could, everyone returned to their rooms for their belongings, what little there were. They regrouped in the hall and followed the Maestro into the museum. The Maestro went directly to the Umami Pepsi machine and pushed it aside with some effort. Behind it was a thin metal door and another keypad full of buttons and arrows. Jack watched as the Maestro typed in the code: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Enter.

“You're kidding,” said Jack. “That's the code I used to get extra lives in
Contra
on my Nintendo. It's the Konami code.”

“It's my code,” said the Maestro, opening the hatch. “There were video games that needed to be reintroduced after the Great Forgetting, too.
Pac-Man, Skyrim, Polybius…”

The door opened onto a concrete tunnel. Jack took the rear, listening for the sound of the front door collapsing and hoping they were not too late.

Another fifty yards and they entered a great chamber decorated with ornate sculptures. A statue of General Halloran upon his horse, shotgun raised, sat on a shelf above the door. The air inside this empty space tingled with ozone, as if thunder and lightning were planning another war.

“Whoa,” said Cole, eyeing the contraption resting on tracks in the middle of the room. Jack pulled Sam close.

It was a simple rectangle of glass, ten feet tall and sixty feet long. Most of its surface was transparent and they saw plush seats arranged inside. To Jack, it looked like a piece of modern art, some minimalist's idea of the form of something.

“Is it a train?” asked Jack.

“It's more like an elevator,” the Maestro said.

Nils smiled. “A great glass elevator.”

“The
Lady Anne
was created to serve as an escape capsule in the event that we ever had to flee the Underground. This track leads all the way to Washington State, just south of Seattle. It's a long journey but it's quite comfortable inside.”

“Wait,” the Captain said. “We're supposed to ride this thing across the entire country?
Underground?
How do you know the track isn't crushed somewhere down the line by a cave-in?”

“The tunnels were built to last millennia,” the Maestro said. “Your only other choice is to surrender to the Hounds.”

“The Great Glass Elevator it is,” said Jack.

The Maestro pushed a button on the side of the craft. The interior of the cabin filled with a warm purple glow. Above the door, a liquid crystal display clicked on, flashing green letters:
Ariel Express
. A door slid open with a gentle
WHOOOSH!

Nils was first to enter. Then Sam and the Captain and Cole.

“Here,” said the Maestro, handing Jack a round tin. “Some cookies for your trip.”

“Aren't you coming?” asked Jack.

The Maestro shook his head. “We have to maintain the algorithm,” he said. “Nobody else can. The Hounds won't kill me. They can't.”

“Thank you,” said Jack. He turned to join the others already inside, but the Maestro grabbed his arm.

“Jack, over the last century we've come to know what a man is capable of. We are constructs of our past experiences, of the stories we remember. And we know each of you and your memories so well, we have a sense of how your stories will conclude. It's not seeing into the future. It's a calculation of your probable outcome.”

“You know what's going to happen to us?”

“We know what will
probably
happen,” the Maestro corrected. He dropped his voice low so that only Jack could hear. “There are many ways your story could end. In most of these endings, all but one of your group dies. But there is the possibility that you can save somebody else. A small chance. It requires you to recognize the lessons of your life. You must learn.”

“I don't…”

The ground shook violently beneath their feet. Thunder rumbled as the doors to the Maestro's lair were blasted apart. In moments, the Hounds would be upon them.

The Maestro pushed Jack inside. Immediately the door slid shut. The cabin filled with an electric hum and the
Lady Anne
lurched forward as a conveyor belt engaged. Crew and cabin soared sideways down a tunnel, into the dark.

4
    There was room enough inside to spread out and get cozy. Jack counted twenty-four plush seats, the kind you might find on a Greyhound. Everyone found a place to sit. It was a smooth ride, but the transparency of the walls was disconcerting. It gave them a sense of how quickly they were traveling through the earth and it made Jack's stomach roll.

Sam was full of the same ragged energy she'd given off that day at the fair when they were kids, when she had sat inside a different glass cage. He took her hand and caressed her fingers. The Captain sat in a chair facing them, wincing at the pain in his knees.

Sam rubbed her nose against Jack's neck, a simple gesture that warmed his body. She pushed closer.

“My dad mentioned Ariel once,” said Cole from his seat across the aisle. “It was a kind of branch office for the Collectors. Four of them used to work there, gathering artifacts up and down the West Coast. But then, around 1990, there was a mutiny among the Hounds. This one Hound, Scopes, overthrew their leader, Titano. To consolidate power, Scopes pulled everyone back to New York. He exiled the old boss to Ariel. He might still be there. We should be careful.”

“Do you really think you can get us to Mu?” asked Jack.

“I think so, yes,” said Cole. “I know someone who can take us there. But he might need a little convincing. He's forgotten who he is.”

5
    Ten hours into their journey a gentle bell chimed and a female voice announced, “Miakoda: City of Spires.” Outside the transparent glass, the tunnel gave way to an enormous cavity in the earth that held a silent metropolis. Great spotlights snapped on as they flew along a raised conveyor. Jack shook the Captain awake.

Their capsule turned toward the city and rose, slantways, into the air. They swayed slightly as hidden gimbals allowed for a balanced ascent. Jack felt his guts drop inside his body as if he were on an elevator that was rising too quickly.

Miakoda was an empty city of glass and concrete. Skyscrapers twisted like tops of ice cream cones in configurations that reminded Jack more of Whoville than Cleveland. Spotlights illuminated a great park in the center, a perfect circle decorated with bronze statues and empty fountains. A preserved billboard advertised Lawson's All-Dressed Potato Chips. Behind them the spotlights turned off in their wake, sealing Miakoda in darkness once more.

“What happened here?” asked Jack. “It doesn't look damaged at all. Why did they bury the whole city?”

“They used neutron bombs in the war,” said Cole. “Kills the people, leaves the buildings. But the neutrinos stick around for a few hundred years, blasting microscopic holes into everything organic. You'd be dead in a minute if you stepped outside.”

“But where do you bury an entire city?” asked the Captain.

“Look there.” Jack pointed beyond Sam, through the window, to the domed ceiling. A round hole blinked open and then closed, like an eye. “What was that?” he asked.

It was the voice of the computer that answered. “Directly above you will see the exhaust port that regulates the immense heat generated by the stray neutrinos that have made this city uninhabitable. The temperature is regulated by tubes of circulating water that must be vented periodically.”

“Old Faithful,” the Captain said. “We're under Yellowstone.”

“Correct.”

The elevator passed over an empty coliseum, its Astroturf proudly advertising the Miakoda Tornadoes, and then into another tunnel, heading west once more.

 

SEVEN

THE MIND AND THE MATTER

1
    They arrived at the western terminal fourteen hours later, and the Captain nudged the boy awake. Cole had been dreaming of his father. The closer they got to Mu, the more he felt the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. His father had never meant for this task to be his.

The glass elevator came to a jarring stop at an abandoned subway platform wrapped in hanging white moss. The doors opened with a wiff of compressed air. “Ariel,” the female voice intoned.

Cole accepted the Boy Scout backpack from Sam. The Captain carried two gallons of pure water, all that was left. He followed the others into the dank cavern. The doors closed behind them with a shudder and the capsule pulled back into the dark tunnel and disappeared from their story forever.

The floor, walls, and ceiling of this way station were a single tiled mosaic that depicted an army of Indians on horseback engaging a division of German panzers. A red-skinned warrior stood atop a tank, pulling a Nazi from the open lid by his blond hair, knife raised for scalping.

Cole fished a flashlight out of the backpack and shined it around until he found a wide staircase concealed behind a curtain of moss. Jack went first. After a hundred steps the staircase ended at a blast door.

“Oh, good,” said Nils. “Another creepy fucking door.”

Cole tried the wheel, but it was rusted tight. He backed up and let Jack have a go. The history teacher put his back into it and slowly it turned, depositing a scrim of red dust onto the floor. The stairway was suddenly filled with the warm light of the western sky.

One by one, the travelers stepped out, shielding their eyes against the bright summer sun. They emerged from a concrete shack disguised to look like part of a water treatment facility, large domes of steel and fiberglass on the edge of a wide lake. This was where fluoride was mixed with the water of Lake Merwin before it was sent along to the residents of Cowlitz County, Washington. The air was thick with evergreen mist and the fragrance of the thimbleberries on the edge of the forest. Foothills rose around them, crowning the still waters. In the distance they could see the blasted top of St. Helens, blue and hazy on the horizon.

“Now what?” asked Sam.

“We need to find a library,” said Cole.

2
    Two hours later, Jack and Cole walked into the small library that was part of the new strip mall in Battle Ground, just south of Ariel. They had taken a cab, which had dropped off the others outside a Menchie's around the corner. The Captain was after a yogurt topped with toffee chips.

Cole made his way to a bank of computers across from circulation while Jack walked around the library, keeping an eye out for Hounds. He busied himself by reading the framed historic newspaper clippings that hung on every wall. Battle Ground was the site of an uprising by the Yakima Indian tribe centuries ago. Their leader, Chief Umtuch, had died here under mysterious circumstances. Ariel, he learned, was known for two other mysteries: D. B. Cooper and Bigfoot.

The day before Thanksgiving 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper purchased a ticket for Flight 305 out of Portland to Seattle, a thirty-minute hop on a 727. There were few passengers on the jet that afternoon. As soon as they were at altitude, Cooper gave the stewardess a note claiming he had a bomb and would blow up the plane unless they gave him two hundred thousand dollars and four parachutes. The pilot landed at Sea-Tac and the feds gave Cooper the money and chutes in exchange for the passengers. Then the pilot took off again. Somewhere over Ariel, Cooper jumped out the back of the plane with the money, never to be seen again. To this day, it remains the only successful American hijacking.

Some of the more colorful residents of southern Washington believe Cooper landed near Lake Merwin, where he was promptly eaten by a Bigfoot.

Bigfoot was popular in this part of Washington State. At least a dozen news articles dating back to the sixties showed grainy photographs of the Sasquatch, spotted by hikers in the woods around St. Helens. One high-res photo, taken in 2005, captured the creature drinking from a river. Jack grinned. There was no mistaking the monster in the picture. It was a naked Hound, bathing himself in a stream.

Cole stepped up behind him. The look on his face was troubling.