“Real food,” he told us. “Food fit for humans.”
* * *
After that, he took us to another chamber within the House, just me and Ostel. The others had seen this before, and they had duties and chores just as the two of us would have soon enough. For now, though, despite the food, despite all we had seen, we needed that one step more to make us part of Sharskin’s world. We needed to be shown.
The walls of this chamber were craggy with angular projections he called consoles, some of which had been cracked open by old roots to show a honeycomb of metal pieces within. Sharskin trailed his fingers across them and I saw a deep flicker of light within them, as though they were cages for ghosts.
“This room is the heart of the House,” he told us in hushed tones at the threshold. “This is where our ancestors stood and remade the world. Here they planned their greatest victory. Here they fell from grace and into sin. When they issued out from the House, friends, it was to become lesser men, meaner creatures comfortable in their ignorance. Of all their children, it is only we who are privileged to know the truth.” And he strode into the chamber, leading our eyes until we saw huge forms standing there and cried out, shrinking away. There were alcoves along one wall, and each was occupied by a thing that seemed manlike, but far larger. Certainly it was no beast: two arms, two legs, and if not quite a head, then at least a neckless dome where a human head would be. They were eight feet tall, though, and their limbs were hard metal, each joint marked out with sharp lines. I counted seven standing upright in their bays, and one that had emerged, frozen in mid-step across the floor, its arm reaching out forever for something time had long since taken away. I could see the trails where intruding vines had grown up around it before being torn away. Errant root fibres and hairs were still clogging its joints. Its face was a curved mirror surrounded on either side with nodules, warts and blank, glassy eyes. Three jagged pictures were on the left side of its chest, the sort that we’d been told held the learning of the ancients.
“Our ancestors had many servants,” Sharskin explained to us. “But after we fell from the true path and turned our back on our destiny, they would no longer labour for us. Remember, though: there once was a golden age when these metal men were ours to command, and no man had to cut wood or dig. And know that such a time shall come again, for we will bring it about, you and I. But perhaps even this has not convinced you of your destiny. Perhaps you still shrink from greatness. So let me show you the truth, and you will finally know how cruelly the world has deceived you.”
He turned away, looking up at the curved ceiling where breaches in the metal had been sealed with moss and hide and some of the odd, filmy cloth the ancients used, the stuff Sharskin had made his robe out of.
He barked out, “Playback display tutelary video interstellar navigation year two introductory module.” The jumble of nonsense and half-familiar words a ghost might use, but spoken with human inflection and flair. And the House spoke back to him, saying, “Confirmed. Working.”
It spoke in a voice like a copy of his own, similar and dissimilar to a ghost taking over a human throat, for it did not come from him or from any living lips, but instead sounded like a dead thing mimicking his tone.
Ostel and I cowered, staring into every corner, sending terrified looks at the great metal servants in case one had come to life at Sharskin’s bidding. For a moment I knew sheer dread, that this uncanny voice had spoken from the walls, from nothing. I was on the brink of a world that contained so much more than I ever knew, and everything was terror.
Then everything was wonder, for in the air before us, pictures began to form. They were faint, so that I had to squint to make them out. Parts of them were missing and once or twice the entire vision flickered and died, only to spring up slightly changed. I saw spheres hanging in air that had been painted with a panorama of stars, moving around each other, coming closer, falling unimaginably further away. A woman’s voice was speaking, but her words were faint and scratchy, and those I caught were strange to me, just sounds made in a voice that was humanlike and yet not human.
We saw a ball that was blue and green. It was brought forward for our attention as though proffered by an invisible servant, and Ostel and I stared at it blankly, trying to understand its obvious import. Before our eyes a silver dart sprang from it, just a speck at first, then larger and larger so that I understood the ball was still very far away, and the dart was leaving it behind. The woman was speaking in calm, measured tones, and once or twice her intonation was that of someone making a humorous aside, though I could not get the joke. She used some words I knew, but they were all strung together in ways I could not understand and half of them were missing.
The silver dart grew very large until it filled most of the room, surrounded by a cloud of little spiny pictures as though it was swimming in a sea of forgotten knowledge. Something about its shape was familiar, the parts of it that jutted out and the pattern of them across its metal skin. Then it was small again, or it was further from us, and there was another ball hanging in the air before it, painted a swirly green from top to bottom.
Ostel was still gazing blankly at it all but I sent Sharskin a fearful look and found his eyes already on me.
“It’s the House,” I got out, hearing my own voice shake.
“Yes,” he breathed. “Good, boy. The House, and the distant home of our ancestors that it left. And now . . .”
I was watching the dart as it fell towards the green. “That’s . . . here?” But I did not believe even myself, because how could that ball just hanging in the air mean everywhere I had ever known? But then the ball was growing bigger and bigger, and I fell over as it seemed about to fill the room and crush us all, and yet it never quite did, extending out past the walls in some way and showing me a closer and closer view of its wrinkled surface. I saw murky, roiling masses that I knew for clouds seen from the wrong side, and then I was staring down from an impossible height at a great landscape of purple and green, an expanse of trees as far as I could see, broken only by the teeth of mountains. I saw no villages, no fields. The silver dart fell towards a world that had never been shaped by human hands.
I gave up, then. I could no longer fight the knowledge that everything Sharskin said was true. He was the last priest of true humanity, and we the outcasts were his flock, his agents in the world. I gave myself over to his destiny.
* * *
Over the next three days I laboured. Alongside my brothers I cut wood and I threw stones at any beasts not already put off by the unnatural nature of the House and its occupants. I shored up our metal home where the roots had torn it badly, packing earth in where cracks and stress had warped the walls. I took a metal knife and cut back nature wherever it sought to break in—and I had never appreciated just how fast everything in the world grew, and how it redoubled its efforts when you tried to curtail it.
Of my fellows, we were all of a piece now, chosen by Sharskin as robust enough and obedient enough to become his votaries. Some had doubtless deserved their Severance, criminals and the incurably idle. If so, life outside their village had cured them of such sins. Any who might try to live off the sweat of others had already been weeded out. Menic was far from the first to begin the journey to the House and never finish.
About three in four of us were men, the remainder women. Perhaps women were less given to a life that might lead to Severance, or more useful in a community so that lawgivers were lenient where they might otherwise be harsh. At first, the thought of sharing a house with women stirred parts of me that had lain shrivelled and dormant since that last chase after Livvi and my accident, and I know Ostel had the same thoughts. Sharskin had a hard rule, though: no man was to lie with a woman, not now, not ever. It was a rule hard as metal, for him. I saw him beat a pair who flouted it, and he came close to breaking their bones. Woman with woman, man with man, these things plainly irked him, too, but if you were willing to trade his disappointment for comfort, these things were not outright forbidden. Nothing that might make a child, though. After a while, one of the veterans explained that, way back at the start of the congregation, it hadn’t been that way. Then some of the women had got with child, and everyone had discovered just how an outcast’s baby sickened and died and rotted in the womb, how the antipathy of the world was so much crueller to the unborn. After that came Sharskin’s rule, because he would have no more dead children or mothers under his care.