Mat Johnson - Pym

“You should have,” I told her. But I held her closer when I said it so it didn’t come off as a dig.

Immediately, the thought of Angela Latham inserted into this utopia made the whole BioDome thing more appealing. More sustainable. Mentally I reshot the last few weeks with Angela by my side instead of just Garth Frierson, and this faux past seemed like one worth building a future on. This came in the briefest of flashes, because soon returned the noise of the Tekelian hordes banging away at the structure of the 3.2 Ultra BioDome like it was an aluminum piñata, just waiting for their target to implode and reveal its treasures. From the sound of it, they were all over the roof, and there were at least a hundred of them up there. Maybe it was just acoustics, but it started to sound as if all that beating might actually be working, and in moments the sky might literally come falling down upon us.

This monstrous reality wasn’t the only thing that told me the idea of Angela and me staying in this artificial environment could never work. The other great clue was the look of Mr. Thomas Karvel, who sat a good fifteen feet away, staring at six of his seven new guests with unhidden trepidation. I recognized the look. It wasn’t hatred, or racism, at least in any substantial sense. It was just that, clearly, the six of us were more startling to him presently than the one unfortunate Tekelian who was no doubt that moment ravaging Karvel’s stores of frozen pastry products.

“How did you find us?” Mrs. Karvel asked, and her tone immediately challenged my observation: no hint of animosity in it, aggression.

“I’m a tracker. I’m a tracker; I can track things.” Jeffree started talking, pausing between the first sentence and the second to give Carlton Damon Carter time to remove the lens cap from his camera and capture the discussion at hand. The fact that Jeffree had only one eye now, that his empty socket was covered in a white leather patch, did give him more gravitas. “You see, you got to get a feel, you know, in your heart, for your destination. You got to imagine it, see, in your mind, and then the ancestral spirits—”

“We took the tunnels straight here,” Angela interrupted, unaware of the reckless eyeball attack being thrown by Carlton Damon Carter in response. “Augustus got us to the tunnel, and then we just came straight here. It’s easy to pick the right path when you get closer: the walls along this route are melting. They’re covered in wet ice. That exhaust fan you have there is blowing heat straight into Tekeli-li,” she told us.

“Listen!” Mrs. Karvel said, and I thought she was going into some sort of rebuttal, but in fact she meant just that: listen . Slowly the hammering above us was decreasing. Together we stood, each looking up at his or her own bit of ceiling above. The unseen assault trickled from a hurricane to a drizzle and then dried completely up until Karvel’s radio voices and Kool-Aid waterfall were, once again, the arena’s loudest sounds.

“Shhhh!” Jeffree added totally unnecessarily. “It’s stopped!” He used hand gestures, his arms fully out to his sides as he crouched slightly, patting down the remaining sound in a pantomime of the obvious.

“But why?” I asked, looking at the silent ceiling above us. We knew so little about them, about their intelligence, culture, or history of military engagement. We had no way of anticipating their next move. They could’ve stopped for tea for all we knew. But that didn’t mean we didn’t want to gut those motherfuckers.

“It could be a bomb. It could be a bomb that they planted and now they’re running away while a bomb explodes, that could totally be it.”

“Jeffree, that is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my—”

“They must have a way in. They have no reason to bang on the walls anymore,” Mr. Karvel said slowly, in a near whisper, his eyes growing up into slits and darting to the side as if at any moment the monsters might appear from behind a magenta rhododendron bush.

The knocking wasn’t completely gone. Once we were back in the mechanical walkway, above the clanging of the machines doing as they do, you could hear it. The last rapping. The sole percussion that now stood out. I do not know if it was less threatening because it was only a lone request or because there was something to the rhythm itself that almost soothed us with every quick hit. It was coming from upstairs. It was coming from the room that the beast had last seen us escape into.

It was harder climbing the ladder to get to the top tier this time since we were holding the rifles as well. Jeffree, for no practical reason I could see, held the strap of his rifle in his teeth as he pulled himself forward, grunting loudly enough for Carlton Damon Carter’s camcorder to capture each guttural utterance. Mrs. Karvel and Angela stayed in the terrarium along with Captain Jaynes, who seemed to be adjusting to the dome no better than Augustus and clearly needed no additional shocks at the moment.

There wasn’t a peephole in the metal roof door that separated us from the unknown, and at the moment this seemed to be a great failure of design. Couldn’t an architect who had the understanding that such a door was needed to keep the metaphorical wolves at bay have also understood that one might need a safe way to see if there were wolves at all? Leaning against the door with all our strength, Jeffree, Carlton Damon Carter, and I each attempted to hold it secure as we cracked it open to peer out at whatever was calling. There, standing with the same demeanor as any other door-side solicitor I’d encountered, was the Nathaniel Latham, shivering in the cold. His face was drained to a mortal gray by the elements and the stress that was clearly weighing upon the brother.

Angela was right. This was the face of a traitor, a man who forgoes his own just to better himself. But maybe that’s too harsh, maybe I was biased. If the Confederates had won the American Civil War, wouldn’t descendants of the blacks freed by fighting with the gray army have seen their ancestors as heroes? Maybe then it was simply a question of who would win this battle, this war.

“We need to talk.” Nathaniel stood before me, urging. “Listen to me, Chris, this is not a joke. They’re going to destroy everything unless we do what they say.” In the word everything I heard not this building, structure, but all the people in it. Possibly all of humanity, if we were its last representatives. “This is not a debate. This is not a negotiation. You know what these things can do. Don’t play games with our lives here.”

“If there is a game at all in play, it’s of cats and mice. And you, sir, are in the role of the vermin,” said Arthur Gordon Pym, Nantucketer, pushing past his lesser envoy so that we could take in the power of his threat. Pym stood alone, but behind him we could see the albino hominids forming a martial line at an even fifty yards away along the side of the roof, their pale robes rustling as the Antarctic wind gusted. This may have been an attempt to seem nonthreatening, but if it was, it was a failed, miserable attempt.

“What do you want?” I said this more to the gathered army than the two men who had been sent to represent them. As if they could understand me.

“There is no need to yell. In betraying the Gods, you have already garnered their attention.” Pym seemed more sober than usual; either they had cut him off before he reached his limit, or he was taking his job seriously.

“I’m about to betray your natural-born cracker ass if you don’t get the hell out of here,” Jeffree offered by way of bluster. This however went unfilmed, as even Carlton Damon Carter was more engrossed in recording the legion of warriors that stood just beyond.