by Thomas Ha

People usually pass through the gray silence of the desert.

Beyond charred sumps and refinery towers, oil fields and dust walls, they drive without an intent to tarry. Most know this for a middle place among middle places—a stretched limbo land where no one was meant to linger.

If any were to travel between ports and processing plants, or extraction centers and byproduct dump ditches—they might notice a few of the towns pockmarking the dirt where local workers emerge and return almost unseen. And if they were to turn off the primary two-way and veer toward the ridges that run at the foot of the skyline, they just might encounter a single roadhouse lit by two stark words in crackling neon under near-impenetrable blackness—The Gwyd. Like the centerpoint of a dream without a clear beginning or end.

It’s there, in the depths of the desert night, that a small convoy of vehicles sits at the edge of the electric light-bathed gravel lot of that lone roadhouse, its singular shape in the middle of the middle place. They hush, so close to The Gwyd, their wheels at an uneasy stop. Maybe they’ve just arrived, or maybe they’ve always been there and slowly remembered themselves in the light.

Either way, they slam their doors and crunch across the gravel with weight and reality. A procession of heavy and unrelenting boots, twelve men’s boots, make their way up the wooden steps into the mouth of the roadhouse with the thump-thump of unmistakable purpose.

They enter the smoky atmosphere of The Gwyd, these uniforms. These hard-lined figures, like an invasion into the gentle juke music and otherwise listless hum, where oil workers sit and slump and curl over glasses and wet tables. These crisp uniformed men move about the room, their rifles like the snubbed noses of dogs. The men seem tired, like they’ve been searching for some time. How long have they been searching? Difficult for any to remember.

The one that seems to be in the lead, wearing a black, sharp hat, sits with the air of authority at the bar and looks down upon the faces there the way one would study a landscape.

This serious man with the black hat, he knows The Gwyd has been here as long as the fields it borders. Run by a local man and his family, changing from weathered hand to weathered hand, a place for after-shift drinks and the slow seepage of unpleasant living. Before that, a temporary shelter from bombardments in wartime. Before that, something else.

This serious one with the black hat, the others call him “the Captain,” and he holds a photo of a young man and woman for all to see, up high like a teacher to his pupils. In the photo, the young man and woman are smiling and holding each other lovingly. So young, those two in the photograph, that you can almost see the children in them, still. None of that dullness that always takes over on Sirami.

“Where are they?”

But, of course, the oil workers sober enough to answer don’t answer with much. They stare emptily at the uniformed men. Not overly eager. Like many towns out by the oil fields, this is just not a town that talks.

The serious man with the black hat, this Captain, taps his fingers in rhythm. He speaks in rhythm. His men walk, it seems, also in rhythm. They bring a manuaton with them too; it moves haltingly through the doorway and observes the patrons and steps in rhythm before taking a seat next to the Captain. The Captain thanks his stiff metal companion when it lights his cigarette.

“Where are they?”

The serious man with the black hat, this Captain, explains to the room that footage indicates the couple came this way. Satellites show heat nowhere else in the vicinity. There are only so many places to go, and the desert cold is not survivable for anyone without equipment.

He clears his throat. He wants to tell a story. He orders a drink over his shoulder, then says, listen to this story.

“Listen to this story.”

His manuaton opens its featureless metal face, widens what is supposed to be its mouth. There is a hiss and pop like an old phonograph, and a series of sounds come from his artificial companion.

Click. Click. Beep. Click.

Click. Click. Beep. Click.

Click. Click. Beep. Click.

“Listen to this story,” the Captain says.

• • •

Once upon a time, there was a remote base, or castle, let us imagine. Yes, a castle, filled with knights serving in the holiest of orders, let’s say. These knights, soldiers in service to their faraway Mother Queen, they oversaw the peasantry who worked a strange and dusty land. It was their duty to operate this particular fiefdom, and so they did. The extractions were always on time. The processing and refinement of fuel, efficient. The deliveries to their homeworld, smooth and unproblematic. The profits, incredible. These knight-contractors were remarkably well-suited for the work.

But there was one particular soldier, a squire, a trainee, let’s call him, preparing for the work of the order. And this trainee, he found himself caught up in something serious—with a young girl. This girl was a local to the colony, one of the peasants, who serviced the castle. Her family was in repair and parts trade. And this military trainee, he began spending more and more time with this local girl and her family. Until, eventually, he seemed to forget his duties, which is a very serious sort of thing.

The sort of malfeasance, when you are of the order, that just cannot do.

Click. Click. Beep. Click.

His superiors took notice and disciplined him accordingly. He was made to work longer hours. His privileges were taken away. No piloting of ships or travel to other worlds. His access to the castle town, restricted. But these punishments seemed only to encourage the delinquent behavior. The boy snuck out of the barracks and kept associating with the peasantry and locals instead of his own.

Click. Click. Beep. Click.

It reached a regrettable point. He was sentenced to public flogging and a week in the stockade. The knight-contractors, in accordance with the just methods of military self-governance, put him out in the town for all to see. The peasants were made to watch, obviously: The girl, somewhere among them in the crowds, no doubt watched as well. And then he was left overnight to suffer his wounds and the indignity of associating beneath his station.

Click. Click. Beep. Click.

Then someone had to go and make a terrible mistake. The terrible mistake of breaking the boy out. It could have been the girl or one of her family. It could have been a sympathetic knight. Maybe someone from a Sirami insurgent cell, looking to tap a turncoat. Whoever it was, rest assured, those responsible will be found. We do not take this sort of intrusion on military matters lightly. And there is nowhere they can go that we cannot find them, no matter how far into the desert they might run. No ships taking off and leaving the colony anytime soon. So anyone found harboring those two will, of course, be punished more severely than you could imagine. While anyone who assists will see due and appropriate rewards.

Would anyone like to speak up?

Please, I’d like to know.

But first, raise your hand if you saw either of the people in this photograph.

• • •

Before the Captain finishes his story about castles and soldiers and peasants, a few of the oil workers are already raising their hands, their arms almost floating. They don’t look like they register what they’re doing. The Captain thinks he sees bewildered looks pass over their faces, maybe when they realize what they’ve revealed.

“Thank you.”

The manuaton still has its metal, featureless face open, that clicking and beeping continuing, and underneath it a hum at a frequency that most cannot properly hear. The Captain nods to several of the uniformed men, and they head to the storeroom and back areas of The Gwyd. The Captain tells them to look for underground hatchways, old bomb shelter entrances. The oil workers who raised their hands are still holding them in the air.

“Oh. You can lower your arms.”

Just as involuntarily as they seemed to before, those workers put their arms back on the tables. They look unsettled. Like something has seeped into them through the Captain’s words.

The Captain takes pleasure in the discomfort he imagines. He smiles to himself and looks around the barroom, observes the little details while nodding his head in time to the click, click, beep, click. His eyes rest on the wallpaper of The Gwyd, and he comments on the strange pale pattern embedded in the violet color. It looks, to his eye, like a flower or a spiral. The familiarity of it, the universality of the curving symbol, reminds him of something he might have seen elsewhere. Maybe in one of the towns. Or on one of the bases or tankers from the homeworld.

“Any luck?”

The tired-looking men in uniform he sent to ransack the place are not finding anything. The roadhouse itself is not all that big, not even a dozen rooms to search. Three of the men begin to look outside, in case there’s something hidden in the yard. The Captain turns back to some of the customers who raised their hands earlier. He settles in on a bearded man wearing a bandana around his neck, maybe because the bandana is a traditional style associated with the Sirami population and that draws a kind of ire.

“When did you last see them? It’s okay, my friend. You want to tell me.”

The bearded worker looks to the other men at his table with what the Captain identifies as embarrassment. The implication that he would cooperate with the Captain is troubling. But the man swallows, spasms, like he’s starting to dry-heave. He looks like he’s going to be sick and might throw up his beer on the table, if he doesn’t speak.

“Don’t. It will only be worse. You’re feeling worse. Much worse, my friend. Do you feel that? Better to answer. Release. You want release. You do.”

The bearded man sweats like someone taken ill. His teeth press together so hard that people can hear the sound. His eyes begin to roll. His companions at the table look panicked and get up, but several uniformed men shift their rifles in their hands, so they settle down.

“When did you see them, my friend? If you tell us, we can treat your arm too.”

The bearded man looks down slowly at his arm, which is uninjured. But he inspects it closely, like he can’t avert his eyes from the skin there.

“Do you feel that? So many small cuts. I think you’ve had an accident with some broken glass.”

The Captain pulls a flashlight from his pocket and shines the light on the arm three times. The bearded man’s breath goes sharp, ragged, like he feels the phantom sting. He runs his fingers over his flesh, like he expects there to be blood. His breathing is rapid, more rapid. His upper lip trembles, and his mouth twists in pain. It goes on like this for a minute or so. Until it’s too much.

His head thuds down on the table, and his body goes limp.

“That’s fine. We’ll try again. In the meantime, plenty of friends to ask.” The Captain looks around the room. He is picking and choosing. Less for people with information, more for people he thinks will be amusing to talk to. “But … before we see what others have to say, perhaps it’s a good time to check in with the proprietor. Any of you know where we can find the Old Man Gwyd?”

Some of the oil workers glance behind the bar.

“I’m afraid he’s not around. Hasn’t been with us for years. Happy to speak in his stead. I am who you’d call the proprietor, I guess.”

The Captain turns and, for the first time since entering, acknowledges me, standing there, behind the bar. Their type rarely looks at service people unless given reason, and I guess this finally provides that reason.

“Hello again.”

I place the drink he ordered in front of him.

• • •

“Do we know each other, sir, or …?”

The Captain studies my eyes, my lips. He’s not sure how to address me. I am difficult for him to place. At some angles, in some moments, in some lighting, I look one way, in others I seem almost wholly another person.

“That depends. Have you been here before? If so, then yes.”

Click. Click. Beep. Click.

The Captain momentarily forgets himself. He looks around the roadhouse, the patterned wallpaper, the Sirami locals, then at his haggard soldiers. He feels off-balance. The confidence and the presence he had a moment ago wash away like water retreating from the shore. But then it comes crashing back. He straightens his uniform.

“I hope you realize we expect your cooperation.”

“Oh.”

“I was told Old Man Gwyd deferred to the I.C. on all military matters. He’s flagged as cooperative. Is that not correct?”

“He did believe in cooperation and the benefits that came with it, when he ran things. That’s correct.”

“And you? You run things now? Do you believe the same?”

I bow my head. “Well, The Gwyd has always been a neutral gathering ground. Since before the war, during, and well after. What you and your men do here is no different than what others do here. You know?”

The Captain does not know how to interpret that. I can see he does not feel my full submission and is tense, so I pour more into his glass, generously, and pour some into a second glass, which I raise. I toast to his ongoing search, and that gets a small smile out of him.

We sip together.

The drink coats his tongue and settles in his mouth, and he is careful to watch me drink the same. “I thought I ordered Sirami whiskey.”

“Oh. This is that, more or less,” I reply. “At least, a local variation. We call it something else usually, though. The closest words for it might be Silent Succor. But we often default to grouping this into your terms: Sirami whiskey. Language is funny. Usually one has to dominate if two speakers of a different sort are to reach an understanding. One speaker has to bend to the other’s use of language. That’s the way it works on this colony. On all the colonies. Language bends. Culture bends. That’s how you know who’s in control. You know?”

The Captain’s smile is thin. “I know.”

“Those two kids you’re looking for, haven’t seen anyone like that in here.”

“Yes. You didn’t raise your hand. Otherwise we might be speaking very differently about the matter. But things escape our attention all the time, my friend. You could think you’re telling the truth, might not know what you know.”

“Huh.” I nod. “That could be. Maybe they’re not in here, then, wandered out on the road.”

“We have good information that they came this way on foot. And they wouldn’t make it farther without help. Nothing makes it in the desert cold.”

“No, nothing does. You are right about that. Well, your boys have been through the building. Nowhere else to hole up. Except, of course, the sub-outposts. I’m sure you checked those.”

“The sub-outposts?”

“Oh. I assumed that’s what your men were doing. They look like little metal shacks with antennae up top. There are twelve or so out and around The Gwyd. Difficult to see in the dark, I admit.”

The Captain speaks into a radio on his wrist and instructs the three outside to investigate. I explain the shacks are spread out across the desert. Part of the old research station that used to be here, before, you know, the war and everything after. It will take them some time to wander from one to the other, check to make sure they’re empty. I doubt he’s going to let anyone up and walk away in the meantime, so we just have to wait it out.

Click. Click. Beep. Click.

“That manuaton with you, very interesting machinery.” I point to the metal man, whose face is still open, playing those clicks and beeps over a barely perceptible hiss. “First order complexity, right? You program it with your own direct instructions, I take it?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“My father, when he ran the place, he very much liked manuatons. We have a few old ones, still. He saw some rough similarities, between people and manuatons. Not all that different in his view. He always said, you can program a man, too. Get him to act how you like. Direct instructions in the mind, just so. You know?”

“Hm.”

“Ideas. Suggestions. Influence. Cues and conditioning. I’ve seen a man bark and chase his own tail under the right circumstances. Seems like you might know a thing or two about that, too. Making people follow commands, I mean.”

Click. Click. Beep. Click.

The Captain doesn’t answer, but the grim smirk of his answers enough.

“Thought so. They say it was a big part of what we used to do in Sirami before it became an oil pit. Research. Soundwaves, visuals, and subtle psychological effects on the brain. The terrain out here, too, something about the flatness and the geological makeup, amplifies and dampens sound in unexpected ways. It can be roaring wind one second, and a world-swallowing silence the next. The kind of silence that scrambles your head if you’re caught in it long enough. You know?”

The Captain drinks.

“We have a story of our own about that sort of thing, kind of goes like this …”

• • •

There once was a—well, he’d go by many titles—but to people around here he was something of a magus. A man of tricks and spectacles and strangeness too hard to describe. He lived out in the wild fields of Sirami with a young child, an apprentice. And the people believed this magus was a master of illusion, because he could make you believe most anything with the right conditions, which made him beloved by some and dangerous to others.

The magus worked in many disciplines, schools of the wondrous, but his greatest passion was searching for a certain song, a perfect song. The perfect song for the perfect mind, he said. That was, above all, his passion. He believed that was one of the highest principles of reality.

A good song merely describes things, it makes you see, hear, and imagine, he said.

A great song merely compels things, it makes you feel and react.

But a perfect song changes everything, changes you to your core, so that you might even forget who you are. You can make anything happen with the perfect song.

Perfect song, he thought. Perfect control. That was the theory, at least.

So the magus and his apprentice studied songs, and part of that studying involved building little traps for Sirami birds out in the fields—gentle, humane traps, like little tuning fork towers. Twelve or so traps dispersed out in a spiraling pattern. To help with the study of songs, of sounds, and other strange things that lay inside the living. They learned to hear every little song of every little bird across the skies. And, over time, the magus thought, they might be able to teach the birds to sing, too, with those same towers.

With the right sounds, anyone could be made to do anything, he told his student. And not just sounds. Light. Colors. Patterns. Taste. Sensation. All kinds of tricks. Together, with the right timing and information, you could disrupt the human mind, induce hallucination, and even reproduce waves and patterns in such a way that the mind might transform a personality into something else, someone else, entirely.

Do you believe that? The magus asked his apprentice.

I believe it, said the apprentice.

No. You don’t, but I believe it. And my beliefs are your beliefs. Repeat.

Your beliefs are my beliefs.

No. My beliefs are your beliefs. Repeat.

My beliefs are your beliefs.

That’s right. My beliefs are your beliefs. Do not forget that, the magus said.

So the magus and his apprentice continued studying, learning, song and illusion. Until one day, they were interrupted by a sudden arrival. A deployment—you called them knights, so let’s call them that, knights—came upon the wild fields from distant lands, slowly taking over and building their outposts, their castles, here and there over the face of Sirami. Eventually, these knights noticed the magus and his project, his study of birds, and grew curious. They saw opportunity and they were trained to look for nothing else but opportunity. So they said they’d allow the magus to continue his work, undisturbed, in exchange for teaching them basic tricks, minor illusions, simple songs of a sort. And of course, helping them nab a wandering bird now and again whenever they were hunting for birds for their own reasons. The magus, seeing the benefit of cooperation, agreed.

But, no. We can’t give them the birds, the apprentice said. They’ve already begun to take everything else. If we give them the birds, the fields, and everything in between, what will be left?

You do not care what is left, the magus said. Repeat it.

I do not—you do not care what is left, she repeated.

Your thoughts are only my thoughts, the magus said.

Your thoughts are only my thoughts.

Your choices are only my choices.

Your choices are only my choices.

You are me.

You are me.

The magus listened to the silent plains for something only he could hear.

• • •

The Captain eats, tender meat dissolving in his mouth, mashed gently between his yellowed teeth. It’s been slow-cooking in the kitchen for a while, so it practically melts. He doesn’t realize how hungry he is until he takes that first mouthful, then another. I tell his men they’re welcome to share in the cassoulet kept warm in The Gwyd’s kitchens. A couple of manuatons have been working on it for days, a good, dark crust forming on top. Of course, he only half-listens to the story about the magus while he eats. He doesn’t recognize the flavor, but it’s familiar, much like the story, familiar like he’s come across it before.

“What is this?”

I laugh warmly. “You don’t remember? Oh.” I study his blank expression. “We talked about this. Desert hogs. Not indigenous to this world but brought in over time in the later settlement waves. They live in shitty little burrows, mostly, under the dirt, but sometimes they lose their way and get caught out in the desert cold, wander for hours, freeze. Get turned around at the sub-outposts, so we preserve them, make stews of them now and again.”

The Captain nods, and it sounds like they talked about it. He tells his men to help themselves in the kitchen and then warns the rest of the oil workers in the room not to try anything. There are twenty-one men in their I.C. section. So even if the customers were to start scuffling with a couple, the rest would rush in pretty fast. The oil workers at their tables sit in silence, unmoving, staring, stiff in their seats. No one blinks or talks.

“This is delicious.”

“I’m glad you approve. You tell your men they’re welcome to the other hog meat, too, bit frozen and tough, but it’s back there in the locker. Hung up bodies. Not pretty to look at. But I’m sure they’ve seen worse in the reclamation years. You know?”

The Captain chews quietly and finishes his drink.

“What were we saying?”

“To tell the truth, I don’t even recall.” I grin.

The Captain almost grins back.

“That technique of yours, like you used on that man. Or when you got everyone to raise their hands. What an interesting approach. Do they teach that to all I.C. men as part of your training in interrogation or something?”

“Oh no. No. That’s really just … it’s a sort of … a fascination of mine.” The Captain preens. “There are archives here, old records, of the work done before the reclamation, similar to what you described. Therapeutic research by mesmerists, mostly. Their experiments, processes. Certain basics, at least. Use of something they called a primer, to prepare the mind for reception, usually sound, or light, a visual pattern sometimes, something with repetition. Then a lure, usually a spoken piece, thirty seconds or more. Acclimates the subject to accepting the voice of the interrogator.”

“Like your story earlier.” I nod appreciatively. “Castles, knights, peasants, and such.”

“Yes. That’s right.” He seems surprised I made the connection. “I’ve found … the more specific the story, the less effective the lure. Abstract stories, loaded with symbols, archetypes, are better carriers of thought. Generalized associations do a lot of work disarming cultural, individual differences. And that disarmament puts certain minds in a suggestive state. Some minds are softer than others.”

“Hm. Yes. Very soft, some. I think I very much know what you mean. A shame you never met my father. I think you would’ve liked talking to him. He really got along with men like you.”

A soldier emerges from the kitchen doorway then, covered in blood.

“What are you doing back there?” the Captain asks, annoyed.

The soldier explains they were running low on meat for the cassoulet, so they added more from the locker, since I told them it was alright. The Captain seems irritated at being interrupted, but waves the other man off and continues on, eager to explain to me how he’s been studying the Sirami techniques of subtle influence for years. Reading. Research. And, of course, practice. It’s mostly to pass the time, he says, because there’s not much else for military men to do in the stretch of desert otherwise.

“Yes. I imagine it’s hard to find entertainment, especially since, you know, there aren’t many of you left.”

“Excuse me?” The Captain stops eating.

I’ve touched on something sensitive, I realize, so I raise my hands in a gesture of servility, in case I’ve offended. I tell him I probably don’t know what I’m talking about. Yes, that’s it. I am just talking is all.

“No. Explain what you mean.”

“Just talk. They just say … everything’s emptier, over in the I.C. bases.”

“Who says?”

“Oh, I mean, I don’t know. Passersby, here and there, I guess. We get all sorts of visitors at a rundown waypoint like this. Just jibber jabber. You know how it is. Whispers, rumors. They probably don’t know what they even mean, either, just repeating what they’ve heard. Like me. You know?”

“What have they heard?”

“Well …” I lower my voice. “That the Intrasystem Consortium’s falling apart—no functioning authority across worlds the way there used to be. Homeworld’s no longer talking to its military dropships and outposts. That you all are on your own out here. You know?”

The Captain’s face goes dark.

“They say it happened some time ago, maybe months or years, and it’s taken a while for the news to get out. Something about economic overextension, or political infighting. But their hold on colonies, the insurgent ones, the reclaimed ones, the loyalist ones, all of it, crumbling. No easy way to keep tabs and coordinate every station and planetoid from the homeworld. Took decades, but we’re feeling the full toll of the Nine Moon War come to bear. Conflict over that many territories comes with a cost eventually. The infrastructure’s gone to shit. Left only with shambling ghosts. You know?”

“Well, those are lies.”

He’s pretending to be unbothered, but his pupils are slightly dilated, his speech, a little too quick after taking a breath. This is something that holds true, and he knows it too well. He knows, and I know. And they’re worried; that’s why they’re wasting all this effort hunting down simple deserters like this. They don’t really care about some boy and his sweetheart flying the coop. They care about what the kid’s seen in their bases and behind their doors. They care what a deserter might say to people about what’s going on, what he might share with other folks that could spread across the surface of Sirami. But what the Captain doesn’t understand is that it’s far too late anyway.

“Of course. Like I said. Just rumors. You know?”

The Captain adjusts his hat, wipes his mouth. His anxiety is visible around his eyes, and he wonders aloud what’s taking his men so long. They don’t answer his radio call. He yells to the men over in the kitchen, who’ve since gone silent.

“You ordered them out too.”

“What?”

“Remember? You ordered them out too. To search all of the sub-outposts together.”

The Captain doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember that at all. He stands up from the bar and looks around the room. The customers at their tables sit there, still, unmoving. Some of their mouths are hanging open. One or two have their heads tilted to the side. The Captain’s eyes are drawn to the wallpaper behind them, the pale pattern, like a flower or spiral, repeated.

“Should we join them?”

“What?”

“Should we join the men outside? Searching the sub-outposts? You know?”

Something doesn’t feel right, and it makes him reach instinctively for his pistol. There’s a flash of terror there, all of a sudden, in his face. Seems like he sees something different about the room briefly, like the lighting, the color, is not quite what it was a moment ago. It’s only a second, but I think he gets the briefest glimpse of something darker. The people sitting at the tables, featureless and stiff, their hands, metallic. He looks to his manuaton at his side, its mouth closed shut, silent. He can only hear himself breathing. And me, of course.

Maybe he’s wondering, when or how, things started to skew differently. But the truth is that things started going the other way well before this moment, back the first time he walked in the door, which is much longer ago than he remembers. He doesn’t know, can’t know, that the old man built The Gwyd to work as one giant primer, in a sense. That way, with visitors, things would always go his way, more or less.

Right now, the Captain’s clouded eyes drift over and over across the pattern in the violet wallpaper like he’s reading an unseen page of an unseen book. He’s listening, without knowing he’s listening, to several frequencies playing from the hum of the juke. His lips press and unpress, soaking in that numbness of liquor in his mouth. It seems like he is trying to pull his gun and raise it, but he finds that he can’t.

“Let’s go find your men. You know?” I say softly, knowing what he doesn’t know, that it is too late. We’re well past my lure, and he’s got only one direction to move in now.

Something in his face lets go, relaxes, sinks into my words, and he forgets again.

“Let’s go. You know?” I repeat, because repetition’s important.

Click. Click. Beep. Click.

In the hallways, he stares at the patterned wallpaper as he shuffles through, that pale shape on the violet background, again, again, leading him along. In the kitchen, the air’s still thick with the cassoulet on a low boil in a massive earthenware pot. He glances over at the locker door, partially open. Slabs of meat hanging on hooks. His men left it ajar, so he closes it. On the tables he sees some of their equipment and underneath, three sets of boots. Careless. He will have a thorough discussion with them after the search.

“This way. You know?” I take him out the back, where it’s always so quiet. The famed Sirami silence, so thick out in the desert. A sound that is no sound, but in actuality, all sounds layered in on one another, rolling all over the surface of that rocky moon. It’s difficult to see, but there are a couple of shapes walking slowly out there, at least two of his men, who shine their flashlights at us.

The Captain shines his light back.

“Do you hear that?” He looks around, a vague murmur that may or may not be real, somehow buried in the silence, like an echo through a glass jar. I explain to him it’s ambient and nothing to worry about. Soundwaves from long ago, maybe, captured or repeated in the sub-outpost equipment. Nothing ever gets truly erased on Sirami, I tell him. New sounds layer on the old. You never forget the old sounds, even if you want to, here. The apparent localized silence isn’t nothing; it’s everything buried on top of everything, depending on the spot. Destructive or constructive interference in the wrong place, and too much for the mind, if you’re not careful where you walk.

Click. Click. Beep. Click.

I feel like I’m dreaming, the Captain says quietly. Like this is a dream. You know?

Yes, people sometimes say that out here. Come. I need to check on something.

We make our way carefully on a marked path, past an I.C. soldier who’s crawling on the ground, like he’s climbing something. Another man in uniform is sobbing. One more is running in the distance. Eventually, we find a little structure to the northwest, its antennae looming overhead. The doors on it are painted with a symbol of a flower. I open it up and look into the dark.

Click. Click. Beep. Click.

The Captain stands behind me, and he thinks he sees two shapes in there. I tell him to relax and wait, nothing to worry about. There’s nothing important in there. Just some birds, hiding out for warmth in the shed. And no sooner do I say it than he sees—not the face of a young man and woman in the shadows, fearfully looking out—but two birds. Large birds, huddled together. That’s all.

Oh. Just birds, my friend. Yes, my friend. Just birds. You know?

His eyes go up to the pointed metal antennae while I continue.

Don’t worry about him. Or whatever else you hear, I say to the shed. The nights like these are long, but it’ll be fine in the end, I say and I mean it.

I’m repeating things from memory, I realize. Words I had heard on nights like these when I was young, like them. A lot of waiting in the dark, while frightening things went on outside closed doors. Hot thunder from dark skies. Ground being blasted to bits. Whistling incendiaries and screams. Barking gunshots into emptiness. It’s funny, remembering that I still remember those kinds of things. Knowing that I can hear him too, somewhere, even now. Those old words, rattling around, in my father’s voice.

But those times are long gone. And I know, if my father were here, he wouldn’t be saying anything of comfort to these people, I am sure of that much. That comfort only extended to his own and no one else. No, he’d turn these two over to the I.C. without so much as a second thought. His concerns were never with our neighbors getting picked up, one by one. I saw it, over and over, as the years went on. Families, kids, crying mothers, begging us for help. Hiding out back. Trying to find a place to stay until they could find somewhere else to go, only for my father to give them up so easily. Get them the fuck out of here. Don’t look at them. Don’t touch them. Get back to work.

I always thought he might feel the weight of guilt, break from it as time went on. That he’d hold off on calling the I.C. men to our door. Or, with all of that intelligence of his, and The Gwyd built up for protection, keep the bad people at bay. But collaboration has a funny way of getting worse instead of getting better, I learned.

The great Old Man Gwyd. Once a worker of the extraordinary, and a researcher of renown, reduced to nothing more than snitch and sneak and a shadow of his former self. I got to see, firsthand, how when things like that break inside, they don’t just break, they shatter. And in his last years, he was nothing if not shattered down deep. He was right, it turned out. You really could program a man to do anything. Just wasn’t quite in the way he’d imagined.

I still feel parts of him, in my head, where he tried to press his thoughts into mine. Some of his nastiness, his ways, bleeding through from him to me, now and again, when I encounter these situations. Bitter words that slip into the silence that isn’t really silence out in the desert. But he doesn’t get to live on in me as well as he probably hoped. No perfect control for him, in the end. Just like the I.C., no perfect way to make everyone submit, either. No perfect way to reproduce your being in perpetuity in others, no matter how you try to make them think your thoughts. It’s all messy noises between people, out here, back and forth, always shifting and changing, and I much prefer it that way.

His beliefs, not my beliefs.

His choices, not my choices.

Wait until the sun peeks over the ridgeline, and things are quiet, then follow this path, I say. You’ll find a blue van with keys in the dash over by The Gwyd. Take it east to the first town you see. I want you to look for houses with mailboxes painted with a particular symbol. A flower symbol similar to the one you see on this door. I tap the metal opening of the shed. There are more places with signs like this now, I’ve learned. Because that’s the thing about being in the middle of a middle place, when you welcome people in. People come from all around to pass through the middle of things. Across all kinds of distances. And interesting strangers from other lands share what they know, their thoughts, their own manner of songs. The way things are shifting. Discussion and organization about what might be next. No more listening to old noise.

You go as far as you can go and forget everything you can about this place.

The Captain watches me shut the doors again. Confused, child-like, he shuffles after me as we walk toward The Gwyd. The roadhouse looks over us out there, like it has for years. A place that pulls you in amid all the darkness.

• • •

A father tells his child, I’ll find a way to live forever.

A child tells their father, I’ll bury you dead.

But the truth’s somewhere in the middle, as with all things, I hate to say.

• • •

It’s barely creeping up, the shy edge of the sun. The sky’s not lifting from the full black, and there’s time to go and talk to be had, still. Everything’s motionless shadows in The Gwyd, where the curved shape of metal men sit at tables, slumped at empty glasses. Laughter and talk echo amid hissing, popping, clicking, and beeping; strange songs, like they’re coming from the walls.

Outside, a serious man rubs his bloodshot eyes, looking around his vehicle, touching his pistol, fixing his black hat. Looking at some of the other parked jeeps, bathed in neon and weakening night, and over at his manuaton in the passenger seat. His manuaton? In the passenger seat? He mutters to himself. Then he calls out to the others, to continue with what they were doing, the task, the search. Crunching on the gravel, heaviness of reality reasserting itself.

Nine sets of boots, thump-thumping their way up the steps to a destination that never seems final, into the mouth of a building that takes them in.

And out there, across the gray, a van goes off, away, through the silence.