A Parley

The inner side of the island had its own population, and they were the ones the village whispered about, and I met them on the second day, and I have not stopped meeting them since, because they are the part of the story that does not stay on the island.

I was three hours into the scrub, following a dry creek bed toward the high ground, when I came on the first one. He was sitting against a fallen eucalyptus with his back to me, and he was not sitting the way the Kindred sat. He was sitting the way a dog sits, folded, heavy, and he did not move when I came close, and when I spoke he turned his head, and the head was a thing I have tried and failed to put words to. It had a brow, and a jaw, and eyes, and the eyes were the eyes of something that had once known the use of them, and they looked at me, and they looked past me, and they did not see me at all.

I backed away slowly, the way you back away from a question you are not ready to answer, and the thing went back to looking at the scrub, and I walked on, and the creek bed climbed, and the second one I found lying on its side in the water, and I could not tell if it was alive, and I did not go close enough to find out.

The third one found me. It came up behind me on the ridge, fast and silent, and when I turned it was standing ten feet away, and it was the largest thing I had seen on the island, bigger than Kato, a mass of gray flesh on two legs that had forgotten the use of them, and it looked at me with eyes that were still, impossibly, almost human, and it opened a mouth full of teeth that had been filed and grown again and filed again, and it said, in a voice that came up out of it like a stone rising through water: "Flesh. You are flesh."

I ran. I ran down the ridge into the eucalyptus, and the thing came after me, and the sound it made was not a sound I had words for, and I understood, running, that the inner side was not a place the Warden sent the unfinished. It was a place the unfinished became, and that the line between the village and the deep scrub was a line with a current in it, and the current ran one way.

I lost it in a thicket. I lay in the roots of a tree until my heart stopped hammering, and I did not get up until the light had changed, and then I walked, and I walked until dark, and I slept in a hollow with my back to a rock and my hands on a stick, and I dreamed of the woman with the muzzle, and in the dream she was reciting the Code, and the Code was the only thing keeping her upright, and I woke with the chant in my ears and the island quiet around me.

On the third day I came down off the high ground toward the sound of water, and the water was the sea, and the sea was the far cliffs, and I stood at the edge of the island with the wind in my face and understood the shape of my sentence: the Warden's world ended at the cliffs, and the cliffs were a wall I could not climb, and the boat came and went at the jetty on the other side of the island, and between me and the jetty lay the village, and the shed, and the Warden, and the Whistle standing at the inner gate.

I made camp at the cliffs. I fished with a line I had made from the cloth of my shirt, and I drank from a seep, and I watched the horizon, and on the fifth day a boat came around the headland, low and white, and it was not the Meridian. It was a launch, and it came straight for the cliffs, and a man stood in the bow, and the man was Voss, and beside him stood Kato, and I understood that I had been found, and that the finding had been arranged, and that I had never once in my life been harder to find than the Warden had wanted me to be.

I did not run. I walked down to the water's edge, and the launch ground up on the gravel, and Voss stepped out with his hands open, and he looked at me for a long time, and then he said, "You have been on the inner side for five days, and you are still upright, and you are still yourself. Do you know how rare that is? I have sent forty-one of them to the inner side in fifteen years, counting every made thing that has ever crossed it. Three have come back talking. You are the fourth."

"I did not come back," I said. "You came to get me."

"I came to offer you a seat," Voss said. "The Meridian sails in two days. It can take you to San Pedro, or it can take you back to the Station, and you can watch me work, and you can write about it, and the world will know what I have made, and you will be the one who told it." He smiled the small careful smile. "You are a scientist, Mr. Marsh. You came here to study a dead urchin barrens and found the only thing on this coast that is alive. That is not an accident. That is an instrument finding its purpose."

I looked at Kato, standing in the launch with the ruin of his face, and I looked at the cliffs, and I looked at the sea, and I did not know what I was going to do, and I understood that the Warden had known it before I did, and that the knowing was the thing he made.