The Shelter Cycle by Peter Rock

Author:Peter Rock
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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When he wasn’t exploring, decreeing, or exercising, Colville was reading. Survival manuals, dictations and decrees he’d never heard, new Teachings, piles of newspaper clippings. As he took food only from pallets up high, from their dark sides, he took only a few papers at a time and then returned them.

The Messenger warned about the Soviets and the Asians and Osama bin Laden; she wrote: The West will be confronted by Asia in economic matters and by Islam in matters of religion. She warned about technology: Scientists have genetically engineered pigs and cows to bear human genes. They have grown a human ear on the back of a mouse. There was a time in Atlantis, too, when many people abandoned their first love and their allegiance to the divine Light within. Their scientists even went so far as to create grotesque forms of interbreeding man and animals through genetic engineering. These half-man, half-goat forms we read about in mythology are a soul memory of these events.

Colville’s eyes adjusted to the dimness—he’d brought so many batteries for the headlamp, but they would not last forever. Of the pale lights in the hallways, every third or fourth one still glowed. He gathered chairs from the many rooms and stacked them on each other as steadily as possible. Sitting that way—up close to the ceiling, wrapped in his sleeping bag, wearing a wool cap—he held his head to one side so light could shine on the words. He read the words, sometimes aloud; let the vibrations all pass through him, settle in the darkness around him. He paused only when he began to feel sleepy or cold, and then he climbed down to do calisthenics or practice yoga. Kilo, atop a padded camping mat, raised his head to watch.

The yellowed newspapers were all from the time of the shelter cycle. Articles about the Activity—anger in the surrounding community, geothermal disputes, herds of elk, buffalo escaping from Yellowstone Park—were surrounded by stories about President Bush’s deficit plan, Gorbachev’s glasnost. The mayor of Washington, D.C., admitted his drug use; the wall came down in Germany; an earthquake struck San Francisco.

He read some of the books that had fascinated him when he was a boy, which still entertained him yet now felt almost beside the point. Theories telling how civilization had evolved on earth twice, how the visitation of ancient astronauts was the return of descendants of ancient humans who had been separated from earthbound humans; how there were Egyptian artifacts that looked like tiny Space Shuttles, cave paintings in Italy where people seemed to wear space helmets, the famous Lid of Palenque whose carving showed the Mayan king inside a rocket ship.

The books he liked best were from his father’s shelves: all the survivalist literature, the books about the classification of plants and animals. Sometimes there was scribbling in the margins; more often there were underlined passages, signaling what was important to his father, what he had gleaned: Just as cold is actually the lack of

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