11
• Silo 18 •
Lukas sat at the little desk constructed from an embarrassment of wood and stared down at a book stuffed with a fortune in crisp paper. The chair beneath him was probably worth more than he’d make in a lifetime, and he was sitting on it. If he moved, the joints of the dainty thing twisted and squeaked, like it could come apart at any moment.
He kept his boots firmly planted on either side, his weight on his toes, just in case.
Lukas flipped a page, pretending to read. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be reading, he just didn’t want to be reading this. Entire shelves of more interesting works seemed to mock him from within their tin boxes. They sang out to be perused, for him to put away the Order with its rigid writing, bulleted lists, and internal labyrinth of page references that led in more circles than the great stairwell itself.
Each entry in the Order pointed to another page, every page another entry. Lukas flipped through a few and wondered if Bernard was keeping tabs on him. The head of IT sat on the other side of the small study, just one room of many in the well-stocked hideaway beneath the servers. While Lukas pretended to shadow for his new job, Bernard alternated between fiddling with the small computer on the other desk and going over to the radio mounted on the wall to give instructions to the security forces in the down deep.
Lukas pinched a thick chunk of the Order and flopped it to the side. He skipped past all the recipes for averting silo disasters and checked out some of the more academic reference material toward the back. This stuff was even more frightening: chapters on group persuasion, on mind-control, on the effects of fear on upbringing, graphs and tables dealing with population growth—
He couldn’t take it. He adjusted his chair and watched Bernard for a while as the head of IT and acting Mayor scrolled through screen after screen of text, his head notching back and forth as he scanned the words there.
After a moment, Lukas dared to break the silence:
“Hey, Bernard?”
“Hm?”
“Hey, why isn’t there anything in here about how all this came to be?”
Bernard’s office chair squealed as he swiveled it around to face Lukas. “I’m sorry, what?”
“The people who made all this, the people who wrote these books. Why isn’t there anything in the Order about them? Like how they built all this stuff in the first place.”
“Why would there be?” Bernard half turned back to his computer.
“So we would know. I dunno, like all the stuff in the other books—”
“I don’t want you reading those other books. Not yet.” Bernard pointed to the wooden desk. “Learn the Order first. If you can’t keep the silo together, the Legacy books are pulp. They’re as good as processed wood if no one’s around to read them.”
“Nobody can read them but the two of us if they stay locked up down here—”
“No one alive. Not today. But one day, there’ll be plenty of people who’ll read them. But only if you study.” Bernard nodded toward the thick and dreadful book before turning back to his keyboard and reaching for his mouse.
Lukas sat there a while, staring at Bernard’s back, the knotted cord of his master keys sticking out of the top of his undershirt.
“I figure they must’ve known it was coming,” Lukas said, unable to stop himself from perseverating about it. He had always wondered about these things, had suppressed them, had found his thrills in piecing together the distant stars that were so far away as to be immune to the hillside taboos. And now he lived in this vacuum, this hollow of the silo no one knew about where forbidden topics didn’t dare tread and he had access to a man who seemed to know the precious truth.
“You aren’t studying,” Bernard said. His head remained bent over his keyboard, but he seemed to know Lukas was watching him.
“But they had to’ve seen it coming, right?” Lukas lifted his chair and turned it around a little more. “I mean, to have built all these silos before it got so bad out there—”
Bernard turned his head to the side, his jaw clenching and unclenching. His hand fell away from the mouse and came up to smooth his mustache. “These are the things you want to know? How it happened?”
“Yes.” Lukas nodded. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I want to know.”
“Do you think it matters? What happened out there?” Bernard turned and looked up at the schematics on the wall, then at Lukas. “Why would it matter?”
“Because it happened. And it only happened one way, and it kills me not to know. I mean, they saw it coming, right? It would take years to build all—”
“Decades,” Bernard said.
“And then move all this stuff in, all the people—”
“That took much less time.”
“So you know?”
Bernard nodded. “The information is stored here, but not in any of the books. And you’re wrong. It doesn’t matter. That’s the past, and the past is not the same thing as our legacy. You’ll need to learn the difference.”
“The difference between our past and our legacy.”
“Hm.” Bernard nodded. He seemed to be waiting on something.
Lukas thought about the difference. For some reason, a conversation with Juliette sprang to mind, something she was forever telling him—
“I think I know,” he said.
“Oh?” Bernard pushed his glasses up his nose and stared at him. “Tell me what you think you know.”
“All our hope, the accomplishments of those before us, what the world can be like, that’s our Legacy.”
Bernard’s lips broke into a smile. He waved his hand to continue.
“And the bad things that can’t be stopped, the mistakes that got us here, that’s the past.”
“And what does this difference mean? What do you think it means?”
“It means we can’t change what’s already happened, but we can have an impact on what happens next.”
Bernard clapped his small hands together. “Very good.”
“And this—” Lukas turned and rested one hand on the thick book. He continued, unbidden, “—the Order. This is a roadmap for how to get through all the bad that’s piled up between our past and the future’s hope. This is the stuff we can prevent, that we can fix.”
Bernard raised his eyebrows at this last, as if it were a new way of looking at an old truth. Finally, he smiled, his mustache curling up, his glasses rising on the wrinkled bridge of his nose.
“I think you’re almost ready,” he said. “Soon.” Bernard turned back to his computer, his hand falling to his mouse. “Very soon.”