The Colony Where Nobody Is Allowed to Sleep
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THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION
The alarm went off at 3:00 a.m. and Marcy’s tongue was already bleeding.
She tasted it before she was fully awake. Copper, warm, wrong. She’d bitten through the side again, and when she tried to swallow, something caught between her molars and stretched.
She pulled it out. A pale thread with a red end.
“Marcy?”
Dean was sitting on the other bunk. The mattresses had been taken away the previous evening. Apparently a person sufficiently tired could sleep on a metal frame. They were learning all sorts of useful things.
“You went under,” he said.
“So did you.”
He looked at the clock. The alarms sounded every twenty minutes now. Between alarms they were supposed to keep each other talking.
“How long?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
She’d been dreaming about her mother’s kitchen in Ohio. Coffee. Rain on the window. Her mother standing at the sink, doing something with her hands. Then the floor had gone soft beneath the linoleum.
“You were making that noise again,” Dean said. “Clicking.”
“I bit my tongue.”
“That’s the third time this week.”
She held her palm under the blue light. The blood looked almost black.
Under her bunk was a little pile of something pale and crumbly, like dried dough. She touched it with one finger.
Warm.
The floor around it gave slightly beneath her hand.
She took her hand away.
Three weeks earlier, the colony’s first dreamer had been Old Man Reuben.
They’d been on the planet eight months. Most of the habitation modules were buried under a shielding layer of soil, connected by corridors that smelled of disinfectant, damp clothes, and whatever the ventilation couldn’t quite remove. Above them were the greenhouses, the landing field, and a sky nobody had learned to love.
The day before the peaches, the drilling crew had deepened the heat bore. One of them mentioned a pale layer in the rock, soft enough to clog the drill. Nobody thought much about it then.
Reuben fell asleep in the mess hall after a double shift in hydroponics. Head on his arms, snoring in front of everyone. Forty minutes later he woke with a basket of peaches beside him.
Real peaches. Fuzzy skin. That smell. Marcy could remember the smell more clearly than anything he said afterward.
They had been eating protein paste and vitamin supplements for eight months. There were leaves in hydroponics, experimental crops, carefully measured portions of things that were technically food. There had been nothing you could hold up to your face and smell with your eyes closed.
Reuben said he’d been dreaming about his grandmother’s orchard.
The peaches were warm.
The council had them tested. Ordinary fruit tissue. Sugars, water, a stone inside each one. Nothing that explained where they’d come from, nothing the tests could identify as dangerous.
They ate them. God, they ate them.
Marcy had a slice. She licked the juice off her thumb, then looked around to see whether anyone had noticed, which seemed embarrassing to her then.
After that, people started sleeping on purpose.
The second incident was a child. Lila, seven, who dreamed about her dead dog.
It appeared in her bunk. Same scar on its ear. It ate. It barked. It licked her face until she couldn’t stop laughing.
Her mother cried for an hour. Then she asked whether she could sleep next.
The council said to wait. There would be supervised trials. They needed to understand what was happening.
People slept anyway. In maintenance corridors, behind storage racks, curled up in the laundry room with somebody sitting beside them, whispering what they hoped would appear.
Coffee. Fresh bread. Wine. Clothes that fit. A guitar. A working shower with enough pressure to make you feel you’d actually washed something off.
Then a man dreamed of his dead wife.
She was warm. She knew his name. She kissed him and said, “I missed you,” in exactly the right voice.
He held her for a long time. When he finally pulled away, he began to scream. Later he tried to explain that she had the face he remembered from before the illness, but the weight of her, the weight in his arms, was what she’d weighed at the end. He couldn’t make anyone understand why that was worse.
She waited outside the medical bay while they sedated him. Once she asked Marcy whether he was angry with her.
Marcy said no.
What else was she supposed to say?
The council met with the scientists and the psychologist. They talked about quantum replication, neural fields, mineral deposits, REM cycles. Six hours. By the end they had several competing explanations and permission for further monitored sleep.
There was a piano in the recreation room by then. Someone had dreamed one into existence. Marcy walked past it that evening and heard a woman playing a song she’d forgotten she knew.
She stopped to listen.
People would ask later why they hadn’t been more frightened. She never knew how to explain the piano without making them sound stupid.
Marcy’s tongue didn’t heal.
The first bite had been small. The second had opened it again. By the third, there was a slit along the edge deep enough for food to lodge in, and the tissue inside looked gray.
She couldn’t remember dreaming anything that ought to do that.
Mostly she dreamed about home. Sometimes about the ground beneath home. There would be something under the kitchen, and then under that, and she would be trying to reach her mother without stepping where the floor was moving.
She woke with grit under her fingernails. Once she woke with soil packed behind her lower teeth.
Then Reuben went to sleep and roots grew out of his mouth.
They threaded through the bedding and into the seams of his bunk. The medics cut through two before they realized that the thicker one contained muscle, and that Reuben could feel what they were doing to it.
He kept making a little pleading sound through his nose. His eyes were open. There was nowhere in his mouth left for words.
When they lifted the bunk, the flooring came with it.
The sleep ban began that evening.
Stimulants. Paired watches. Alarms. The council ordered everyone out of the bunks and told parents to keep their children occupied. They suggested games.
Marcy had been a teacher on Earth. She knew quite a few games. By midnight, children were crying because they couldn’t remember the rules, and she was crying quietly in the supply cupboard because she’d snapped at a little girl for closing her eyes.
She hadn’t meant to shout. That was what she kept thinking. As if that helped the child.
Eli was six. Lila’s younger brother.
He’d been having nightmares for a week. Something beneath the house, he told his mother. Except they didn’t have a house here. He meant their module. It was difficult getting him to explain, and the harder she pressed, the more frightened he became.
He said it knew when he was nearly asleep.
His mother had asked for help. The clinic had given her a schedule of wake checks and a place in the supervised nursery. Marcy had sat with him there. He’d asked whether she could hold his eyelids up if he got too tired.
At lunch, the day after the ban, he fell asleep in the mess hall.
One moment he was trying to lift a spoon. The next his forehead hit the table.
His mother shook him. She called his name. She slapped his cheek, then touched the place she’d slapped as if she could take it back.
He didn’t wake.
The floor began to move.
At first it was a vibration, low enough to feel through the legs of the tables. Then Marcy saw a drinking cup slide uphill.
The middle of the room was rising.
It subsided. Rose again.
The walls bowed inward. A seam opened beside the serving hatch and something wet pressed through it, pale and tightly folded. The air smelled suddenly of an opened wound.
People ran for the stairs. Dean went to clear the outer hatch while Marcy helped Eli’s mother lift him. He was limp, but something about his weight kept changing. His legs dragged as if a hand beneath the floor had hold of them.
Then he opened his mouth.
The clicking came out of him.
Marcy felt it behind her teeth, and beneath her nails, where the grit began to move.
She nearly dropped him. His mother screamed at her to hold on.
They carried him up together.
Above ground, the landing field had split. One ascent boat lay on its side in the fissure, its pressure hull folded. The other was still upright when the ground rose beneath it and drove a landing strut through its belly.
Marcy saw a man running toward it. Then she couldn’t see him anymore.
They kept carrying the boy.
The survivors put up emergency tents on the basalt ridge beyond the colony. The rock there was still hard. You could stamp on it and hear a proper sound.
They sent the distress signal. There was no ship close enough to reach them soon.
Below the ridge, the buried modules rose and fell under their covering of soil. Through the torn ground Marcy could see the same pale substance that had crumbled beneath her bunk. It was working its way around the exposed pipes.
The pipes bent when it tightened.
Eli lay in the medical tent. The doctors tried to wake him. His mother held his hand and sang, losing her place, going back to the beginning, losing it again. Lila stayed with Dean. Nobody had seen the dog since the evacuation.
The scientists took readings until their instruments stopped giving them anything they knew how to use. One said something under the settlement had woken. Another thought it had been awake for weeks, learning from them.
Marcy sat outside with a cup for the blood she couldn’t stop producing.
She thought about that slice of peach.
She knew it was ridiculous to keep returning to it. Reuben hadn’t known. None of them had known. But she remembered licking her thumb, wanting the next slice, and she couldn’t get past the small, greedy happiness of it. She wanted to go back and catch herself before she put it in her mouth. She wanted something she could still prevent.
On the fourth night, Eli opened his eyes.
“It’s hungry,” he said.
His mother leaned over him. “You’re awake. Baby, you’re awake.”
He looked at her for several seconds.
Then he closed his eyes again.
His breathing settled into the same slow rhythm as the ground below the ridge.
They discussed killing him beside a cabinet of dressings, in voices low enough that his mother wouldn’t hear. Marcy heard because she was taking clean sheets out of the cabinet.
They’d tried everything they had. They could see what was happening to the colony. They didn’t know how much longer the ridge would hold.
One of them said the word necessary.
Marcy stood with the sheets against her chest. She wanted someone to tell them no. She wanted that person to know what to do afterward.
She went to Eli’s bed.
“Can you hear me?”
His eyes opened. The whites had darkened. So had the irises. There was no part of the eye left she could look at and recognize.
“It likes yours,” he said.
“What?”
“The kitchen.”
She let go of his hand.
“Your mommy keeps you there.”
Behind his lips, something pale moved across his teeth.
Marcy took Lila outside before the doctors began. She knew what they were going to do. She could have said something to the mother. She could still have said something.
She took Lila outside.
When Eli’s heart stopped, the ground stopped moving.
For three minutes there was silence. His mother was making a sound Marcy could hear through the canvas, but below that, underneath everything, the silence was complete.
Then a low pulse passed through the rock beneath their feet.
Inside the tent, Eli drew breath.
The doctor’s hand was still on his chest. She pulled it away and stared at the indentation her fingers had left. It filled slowly, like a mark pressed into dough.
His mother tried to lift him.
The sheet came up with his back. The mattress came with the sheet. Beneath the cot, pale cords had already reached the rock.
She kept pulling until the doctor caught her wrists.
People started sleeping again.
They’d slept before that too, of course. Seconds lost between questions. A face dropping forward and coming up with the mouth still moving, finishing a sentence nobody remembered beginning. They blamed each other for it. Marcy did too. She’d shake someone awake and ask how they could be so fucking careless, then find herself standing somewhere she didn’t remember walking to.
Now some of them simply lay down.
Dean made it almost to dawn on the fifth night.
He was helping her check the tents. He said, “I just need to sit a minute,” and she turned to answer somebody calling from the water station.
By the time she turned back, his eyes were closed. She shook him awake. He tried to tell her something about a ship, but she was frightened and angry and told him to get up and help her.
He dreamed of rescue.
The ships came down at dawn.
Earth markings. Navigation lights. Familiar voices on the radio, telling them to remain calm, help had arrived. Marcy cried when she heard the transmission. Even afterward, even knowing what she’d heard, she remembered the relief with a longing that made her feel sick.
People ran down from the ridge.
The first ship settled beside the broken ascent boats. Its ramp lowered. A woman came out in a flight suit and asked whether there were injured children.
One of the engineers started laughing. He recognized her voice. It was the recorded voice from their ship’s emergency drills.
He kept laughing while she walked past him.
There were beds inside. Marcy could see them through the open hatch. White sheets. Pillows with the little hollow already waiting for a head.
Dean got up and went toward them.
She caught his sleeve.
“You were asleep. Dean. These came after you fell asleep.”
“I know.”
“You know what they are.”
He looked at her, and for a moment he seemed almost angry that she was making him say it.
“I’m so tired, Marcy.”
She held on. He pulled, gently at first. The woman from the ship touched his shoulder.
His sleeve tore. Something underneath tore with it.
Marcy was left holding cloth with a strip of warm skin attached. She could see yellow tissue through the opening in his arm. He looked down, surprised, then covered it with his other hand as if that might spare her having to see.
“Don’t,” he said. “Please.”
She didn’t know whether he meant don’t look or don’t stop him. She let go.
The woman took him inside.
Marcy saw where the woman’s collar joined her neck. There was no opening. The fabric disappeared into the skin in little puckered folds.
The ramp began to close.
From inside, somebody called that there was room for everyone.
By the seventh night, Marcy couldn’t remember the last hour she’d been awake all the way through.
She had stopped taking the stimulants. They made her hands shake too much to lift the cup, and she was still losing time. Her mouth smelled rotten. A piece of her tongue had come away that afternoon, gray along one edge, with those little pale threads running through it.
She’d put it in the cup with the blood. Then she’d spent some time looking for the cup while she was holding it.
She went to the medical tent because she could hear a child crying. She still went when she heard that. There didn’t seem to be much else left of her that worked.
No one was crying when she got inside.
Eli’s mother sat beside the cot, her head resting near his hand. Lila was curled against her. The dog lay at the girl’s feet.
Its flank rose and fell with the ground.
Marcy stood in the entrance, trying to remember who she should wake first.
The cot had sunk halfway into the rock. What remained of the mattress was wet. Under the mother’s cheek, something moved beneath the sheet, slowly drawing it inward.
Marcy took a step toward her. Her boot stuck.
The ridge had softened.
She tried to pull free and lost her balance. The cup struck the floor without breaking. Blood spread around its rim, then disappeared into the surface beneath it.
From somewhere close to her ear, her mother said, “You look exhausted.”
Marcy began to cry.
She knew. She hadn’t been fooled, she wanted somebody to understand that. She knew her mother wasn’t here, she knew what had made the peaches and the dog and the woman on the ship. Knowing had got her this far. She was on the floor, she couldn’t pull her foot free, and her mother was telling her she could lie down for a little while.
She wanted to.
That was the part she couldn’t bear to hear herself admitting. She wanted it so badly she was already leaning toward the voice.
“I can’t keep doing this,” she said, or tried to say. There wasn’t enough tongue left to make all the words.
A hand moved through her hair.
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them, she was in her mother’s kitchen.
Coffee. Rain on the window. The cracked yellow cup she’d forgotten until this moment, although apparently she hadn’t forgotten it at all.
Her mother stood at the sink, doing something with her hands.
Marcy sat down. Her tongue didn’t hurt anymore. She could feel it against her teeth, whole again.
“There you are,” her mother said.
She came over and kissed Marcy’s forehead. Her lips were warm. Everything was exactly warm enough.
Under the table, the linoleum lifted against the soles of Marcy’s feet.
She didn’t look down.
Her mother put the coffee in front of her. Beyond the window, the rain stopped for a moment, and Marcy heard the alarm. Very faint. Twenty minutes, then. Another twenty minutes had gone.
“Drink it before it gets cold.”
She lifted the cup.
Something tugged beneath her tongue.
Her mother caught a pale thread at the corner of her mouth and began winding it around one finger. Gently. Each turn drew a little more out of Marcy’s throat. It didn’t hurt, although she could feel how deep it went, and when her mother paused to get a better grip, Marcy almost asked her to hurry.
The alarm was still sounding somewhere.
She could get up. Perhaps she could get up. She kept thinking it while her mother drew the thread out, and out, and wound it over the first finger and then around her hand.
Marcy drank her coffee.
It tasted like blood.
Her mother smiled at her, waiting, and after a little while Marcy smiled back.
She was home.
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