The Finding of the Warden

We did not go to the mess hall. We went to the administration block, because the administration block had the only radio on the island besides the one on the jetty, and Corbett said the radio was the boat, and the boat was the only thing that mattered now. We ran up the graded road with the shed behind us and the dark coming down, and I understood that the island had changed masters, and that the new master was not going to keep any Code.

The administration block was dark. Corbett went through it room by room with the rifle up, and I followed, and the rooms were empty, and the desks were neat, and the screens were dark, and the whole building had the feel of a place that had been abandoned at a specific second. We found the radio in the back office, and Corbett sat down at it and worked the dials, and the radio was dead.

"The antenna," he said. "The mast. They cut it." He sat looking at the dead speaker for a long moment, and then he said it again, differently: "He cut it. Kato. That's the second thing he did after the shed. He cut the antenna, and he let the boat go, and he sent the village over the fence."

"What do you mean, sent the village over the fence?"

Corbett looked at me, and his face was the face of a man explaining a war to a child, and he said, "Kato was the Warden's first made. The Warden kept him because he was the only one who never reverted, and the reason he never reverted is that he never had anything to revert from. He was made from nothing. He was made from the Warden's idea of a man, and the idea had no animal in it, and the animal is the thing that holds the Code. Without the animal, there is nothing to fight, and there is also nothing to keep. Kato has been walking on this island for fifteen years with no Code and no animal, and the only thing that held him to the Warden was the Warden, and the Warden is on the shed floor." He stood. "Kato has opened the inner gate. He has opened the outer gate. He has sent the village into the scrub, and he has sent the inner side into the village, and the island is going to sort itself out the way it has been trying to sort itself out since the first gull, and we are not going to be here for it."

The radio was dead, and the boat was gone, and the launch was still at the jetty, and I said so, and Corbett shook his head.

"The launch has no fuel. Kato drained it. That's the third thing." He looked at the window, at the dark, at the sound that was beginning to build beyond the fence, the sound of many things moving that had never moved together before. "The Meridian is four days out, and it does not know, and it will come to the jetty, and it will find the island quiet, and it will find the fences open, and it will be the last thing that ever comes to this island."

We went to the jetty anyway, because there was nowhere else to go. The launch sat at the dock with its fuel hatch open and its tanks dry, and the night was full of the island's new sound, and I stood at the end of the dock with my back to the sea and watched the fence line in the dark, and I understood that the fence was the only boundary left, and that boundaries only work when both sides keep them.

Corbett sat on the dock with the rifle across his knees, and he talked, and the talking was the boat, the only boat he had. He told me about the first year, when the Kindred were twelve and the Code was new and the Warden believed it would hold, and the second year, when the first one went to the inner side and the Warden called it a failure of the body and Corbett knew it was a failure of the hope. He told me about the cougars, one after another, the dogs, the pigs, the deer. "The small one," he said, "the one the woman keeps, was made from a deer three years ago. The woman asked to be made from nothing. The Warden refused. He said she was the only one who could keep the Code for the small one."

"The Warden kept her human," Corbett said, "because a kept thing is worth more than a made thing. That's the whole secret of the island, Owen. The making was never the work. The keeping was the work. And the Warden never knew it, because he was never the one doing the keeping."

The sound beyond the fence was closer now, and I could pick the voices out of it, and the voices were not saying the Code, and I stood at the end of the dock with the sea at my back and the dark full of the island's sorting, and I understood that Corbett had been telling me, all along, what he had been keeping: not the Code, not the island, but the possibility that a man could leave it. He had been keeping the boat, and the boat was the thing that had finally come, and the coming of it was the end of the keeping.