What a waste. And time was running out.
Rust, corrosion, wind, rain. The nibbling teeth of mice and the acrid droppings of insects and the devouring jaws of years. The war of nature upon machines, of the planet’s chaotic forces upon the works of humankind. The energy that men had pulled from the earth was being inexorably pulled back into it, sucked like water down a drain. Before long, if it hadn’t happened already, not a single high-tension pole would be left standing on the earth.
Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last lights to go out.
The worst of it was, he’d be there when it happened. The batteries were decaying. Decaying badly. He could see it happening before his eyes, on the screen of his old battle-hardened CRT with its thrumming bars of green. The cells had been built to last how long? Thirty years? Fifty? That they could hold any kind of charge after almost a century was a miracle. You could keep the turbines spinning forever in the breeze, but without the batteries to store and regulate the current, one windless night was all it would take.
Fixing the batteries was impossible. The batteries weren’t made to be fixed. They were made to be replaced. You could retrofit all the gaskets you wanted, clear away the corrosion, rewire the controllers till the herd came home. All basically busywork, because the membranes had had it. The membranes were cooked, their polymer pathways hopelessly gummed up with sulfonic acid molecules. That’s what the monitor was telling him with that little-bitty hiccup in the day-to-day. Short of the U.S. Army showing up with a brand-new stack fresh from the factory—Hey, sorry, we forgot about you guys!—the lights were going to fail. A year, two at the outside. And when that happened, it would be he, Michael the Circuit, who’d have to stand up and say, Listen, everybody, I’ve got some not-great news. Tonight’s forecast? Darkness, with widespread screaming. It’s been fun keeping the lights on, but I have to die now. Just like all of you.
The only person he’d told was Theo. Not Gabe Curtis, who was technically head of Light and Power but had mostly checked out when he got sick, leaving Michael and Elton to run the shop; not Sanjay or Old Chou or anyone else; not even Sara, his sister. Why had Michael chosen Theo to tell? They were friends. Theo was Household. Sure, there had always been a touch of the gloom about him—Michael of all people knew this when he saw it—and it was a heavy thing, to tell a man that he and everybody he knew was dead, basically. Maybe Michael was just thinking of the day when he’d have to explain the situation, hoping Theo would break the news instead, or at least back him up somehow. Yet even to Theo, who was better informed than most, the batteries were more like a permanent fixture of nature than something man-made, governed by physical laws. Like the sun and sky and walls, the batteries just were. The batteries drank up the juice from the turbines and spit it out into the lights, and if something went wrong, well, Light and Power would fix it. Right, Michael? Theo had said. This problem with the batteries, you can repair it? Around and around like this for some time, until Michael in complete exasperation had sighed and shaken his head and spelled out the situation in words of exactly one syllable.
Theo, you’re not hearing me. You’re not hearing what I’m saying. The Lights. Will. Go. Off.
They were sitting on the porch of the small, one-story frame house Michael shared with Sara, who was off somewhere for the afternoon, riding herd or taking temperatures in the Infirmary or visiting Uncle Walt to make sure he was actually eating and washing—mooning around restlessly, in other words, the way she always did. It was late afternoon. The house stood at the edge of the short-grass meadow where they turned out the horses to graze, though the dry days of summer had come on early, and the field was the color of bread crust, burned clear through to the dirt in places, forming bare spots that pillowed with dust when you walked across them. Everybody knew the house as the Fisher place.
“Off,” Theo repeated. “The lights.”
Michael nodded. “Off.”
“Two years, you say.”
Michael studied Theo’s face, watching the information taking hold. “It could be longer, but I don’t think so. It could be less, too.”
“And there’s nothing you can do to fix it.”
“No one can.”
Theo exhaled sharply, as if he’d just taken a punch. “Okay, I get it.” He shook his head. “Flyers, I get it. Who else have you told?”
“Nobody.” Michael lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “You’re it.”
Theo rose and moved to the edge of the porch. For a moment neither spoke.
“We’ll have to move,” Michael said. “Or else find another power source.”
Theo was looking away, toward the field. “And just how do you suggest we do that?”
“I don’t. I’m just stating it as a fact. When the batteries drop below twenty percent—”
“I know, I know, that’s it, no lights,” Theo said. “You’ve made that clear.”
“What should we do?”
Theo gave a hopeless laugh. “How in hell should I know?”
“I mean, should we tell people?” Michael paused, searching his friend’s face. “So they can, you know, prepare themselves.”
Theo thought a moment. Then he shook his head. “No.”
And that was all. They’d never spoken of it again. When had that been? Over a year ago, along about the time Maus and Galen had gotten married—the first wedding in a long, long time. It felt strange, everyone so happy, and Michael knowing what he did. People were surprised that it was Galen up there with Mausami, instead of Theo; only Michael knew the reason, or could guess at it. He’d seen the look in Theo’s eyes that afternoon on the porch. Something had gone out of him, and it didn’t seem to Michael like the kind of thing a person could get back.
There was nothing to do now but wait. Wait, and listen.
Because that was the thing: the radio was forbidden. The problem, as Michael understood it, had boiled down to too many people. It was the radio that had led the Walkers to the Colony in the early days, nothing the Builders had ever planned on, since the Colony wasn’t supposed to last as long as it had. So the decision had been made that right then, in the year 17—seventy-five years ago—the radio should be destroyed, the antenna taken down from the mountain, its parts chopped up and scattered in the dump.
At the time, it might have made sense. Michael could see how that was possible. The Army knew where to find them, and there was only so much food and fuel to go around, so much room under the lights. But not now. Not with the batteries the way they were, the lights about to fail. Blackness and screaming and dying, et cetera.
It wasn’t long after Michael’s conversation with Theo, not more than a few days as he recalled, that he had happened upon the old logbook—“happened” being not quite the correct word, as things turned out. It was the quiet hour, just before dawn. Michael had been sitting at the panel in the Lighthouse like always, minding the monitors and flipping through Teacher’s copy of What to Name the Baby (that’s how desperate he’d become for something new to read; he’d just made it to the I’s), when, for some unknown reason, restlessness or boredom or the discomfiting thought that if the winds had blown a little differently his parents might have named him Ichabod (Ichabod the Circuit!), his eyes had drifted upward to the shelf above his CRT, and there it was. A notebook with a thin black spine. Standing there among the usual whatnot, tucked between a spool of solder and a stack of Elton’s CDs (Billie Holiday Sings the Blues, Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones, Superstars #1 Party Dance Hits, a group called Yo Mama that sounded to Michael like a bunch of people yelling at each other, not that he understood the first thing about music). Michael must have looked right at it a thousand times, and yet he couldn’t remember seeing it before; that was curious, the thought that gave him pause. A book, something he hadn’t read. (He’d read everything.) He rose and took it from its place on the shelf, and when he cracked the spine the first thing he saw, inscribed in a precise hand, an engineer’s hand, was a name he knew: Rex Fisher. Michael’s great (great-great?) grandfather. Rex Fisher, First Engineer of Light and Power, First Colony, California Republic. What the hell? How had he missed this? He turned the pages, crinkled with moisture and age; it took only a moment for his mind to parse the information, to break it into its components and reassemble it into a coherent whole that told him what this slender, ink-filled volume was. Columns of numbers, with dates written in the old style, followed by the hour and another number Michael understood to be the frequency of transmission, and then, in the spaces to the right, short notations, rarely more than a few words but heavy with suggestion, whole stories folded into them: “unmanned distress beacon” or “five survivors” or “military?” or “three en route from Prescott, Arizona.” There were other place names, too: Ogden, Utah. Kerrville, Texas. Las Cruces, New Mexico. Ashland, Oregon. Hundreds of such notations, filling page after page, until they simply stopped. The final entry read, simply, “All transmission ceasing by order of the Household.”
A glow was paling the windows by the time Michael finished. He doused the lantern and rose from his chair as Morning Bell began to peal—three solid rings followed by a pause of identical duration, then three more in case you didn’t get the message the first time (it’s morning; you’re alive)—and crossed the mazelike clutter of the narrow room with its plastic bins of parts and scattered tools and dirty dishes in teetering piles (why Elton couldn’t just eat in the barracks Michael had no idea; the man was just flat-out disgusting), stepped to the breaker panel, and powered down the lights. A wave of weary satisfaction washed through him, as it always did at Morning Bell: one more night’s work accomplished, all souls safe and sound to face another day. Let’s see Alicia and her blades do that. (And wasn’t it true that when he’d lifted his face to see the logbook, it had been the image of Alicia in his mind that had distracted him? As it sometimes—often—did? And not just Alicia but the specific picture of sunlight flaring her hair as she had stepped from the Armory that very evening, Michael moving down the path toward her, unseen? An image that was, as he considered it again, quite striking? All this despite the fact that Alicia Donadio was, in point of fact, the single most annoying woman on earth, not that there was such a vast field of competitors?) He returned to the panel and moved through the steps, flipping the cells to charge, turning on the fans and opening the vents; the meters, which stood at 28 percent across the board, began to flicker and rise.
He swiveled to look at Elton, who appeared to be dozing in his chair, though it was sometimes hard to tell. Waking and sleeping, Elton’s eyes were always the same, two thin strips of yellow jelly, peeking through slitted eyelids of perpetually tearing dampness that never quite managed to close. His pale hands were folded over the curve of his belly, the earphones, as always, clamped to the sides of his scaly head, pumping out the music he listened to all night. The Beatles. Boyz-B-Ware. Art Lundgren and his All-Girl Polka-Party Orchestra (the only one that Michael sort of liked).
“Elton?” No answer. Michael turned his voice up a notch. “Elton?”
The old man—Elton was fifty at least—startled to life. “Flyers, Michael. What time is it?”
“Relax. It’s morning. We’re down for the night.”
Elton screwed himself up in his chair, setting the hinges creaking, and drew the earphones down into the folds of his neck. “Then what you wake me up for? I was just getting to the good part.”
Next to the CDs, Elton’s nightly forays into imagined sexual adventure constituted his major pastime—dreams of women, conveniently long dead, which he would recount to Michael in excruciating detail, claiming that these were actually memories of things that had happened to him in his younger days. It was all bullshit, Michael figured, since Elton hardly ever set foot outside the Lighthouse, and to look at him now, with his dandruffy head and tangled beard and gray teeth clotted with the remains of a meal he had probably eaten two days ago, Michael didn’t see how any of it was even remotely possible.
“Don’t you want to hear about it?” The old man gave his eyebrows a suggestive wag. “It was the hay dream. I know you like that one.”
“Not now, Elton. I … found something. A book.”
“You woke me up because you found a book?”
Michael scooted his chair down the length of the panel and placed the log in the old man’s lap. Elton ran his fingers over the cover, his sightless eyes turned upward, then drew it to his nose and gave a long sniff.
“Now, I’d say that would be your great-grandfather’s logbook. Thing’s been floating around here for years.” He passed it back to Michael. “Can’t say I’ve read it myself. Find anything good in there?”
“Elton, what do you know about this?”
“Couldn’t say. Things do have a way of popping up right when you need them, though.”
Which was when Michael realized why he hadn’t seen the book before. He hadn’t seen it before because it wasn’t there.
“You put it on the shelf, didn’t you?”
“Now, Michael. Radio’s forbidden. You know that.”
“Elton, did you talk to Theo?”
“Theo who?”
Michael felt his irritation mount. Why couldn’t the man just answer a question? “Elton—”
The old man cut him off with a raised hand. “Okay, don’t get your gaps in a twist. No, I didn’t talk to Theo. Though I’m guessing you did. I didn’t talk to anyone, except for you.” He paused. “You know, you’re more like your old man than you think, Michael. He wasn’t a very good liar, either.”
Somehow, Michael wasn’t surprised. He slumped down into his chair. Part of him was glad.
“So how bad are they?” Elton asked.
“Not good.” He shrugged; for some reason, he was looking at his hands. “Number five is the worst, two and three a little better than the others. We’ve got irregular charge on one and four. Twenty-eight this morning across the board, never over fifty-five by First Bell.”
Elton nodded. “So, brownouts within the next six months, total failure within thirty. More or less like your father figured.”
“He knew?”
“Your old man could read those batteries like a book, Michael. He could see this coming a long time ago.”
So there it was. His father had known, and probably his mother too. A familiar panic rose within him. He didn’t want to think about this, he didn’t.
“Michael?”
He took a deep breath to calm himself. One more secret for him to carry. But he would do what he always did, pushing the information down inside himself as far as it could go.
