Feeding

My job is to take you safely outside and back, so listen carefully.

Keep your masks on. It will help with the smell. And don’t touch the drift with your bare hands. If it comes while we’re exposed, drop your buckets and shovels, don’t wait for me or anyone else. Get back to OURHOME.

Ready?

Put on your gloves.

This way. Steady yourself on the railing. You’re liable to become dizzy in open spaces, and we will descend several flights of stairs. Let your eyes adjust, then I’ll explain what you’re seeing.

Those are OURHOME’s outbuildings. The smaller one is a pumping station, and the circles clustered around it are catch-basins where we collect the drift. The livestock prefer it raw and as fresh as possible. That larger building is the barn where they’re housed. We’ll gather what we need then head there.

It won’t look like very much in your buckets. On the ground it’s heavier than you’d expect. The individual platelets are as thin as a bedsheet and scarcely larger than your hand, and they’re almost weightless until they touch something, but once the drift settles, it forms a turf-like crust, often a foot deep or more. Within a few days, that will liquefy, but by then another drift is coming, and anywhere it pools is uninhabitable. OURHOME was built up high to avoid the flooding.

Look there on the horizon. The black lake you see was a city. I lived there once.

No, I am more comfortable here at OURHOME, despite everything that’s been lost.

Farms, crops, highways, suburbs—networks, logistics, efficiencies of scale—it was all coming apart even before the drift, and it didn’t last long after. Most people just didn’t have the discipline. They’d already forgotten how to do anything for themselves. Or they were squeamish, and there’s no room for that anymore.

Not an easy lesson to learn, after a certain age, in my experience. That’s why you were all still very young when you were shown the drift for the first time. Your minders came unannounced and took you from your rooms, and you thought, perhaps, that you were due for another programming period, but they walked you past the tutorial labs and the food service and the work hall and brought you up to the observation deck instead and gathered you all in front of the window and opened the shutters so you could look out at the drift coming down from the sky, silent and slow, like black leaves sinking to the bottom of a pool.

You will remember something else from that day, I’m sure.

There was a man out there, chained to a stake, and you watched him struggle.

You do remember, of course. I can judge from your expressions. The condemned man was pulling frantically at his chain while the drift fell on him and stuck to him, sealing his eyes and nose and mouth and making useless flippers of his arms, weighing him down until his knees buckled and he collapsed. And the drift kept falling until the muddy field and gravel tracks and pitted hills were all buried and black.

Then you understood why you weren’t allowed out, and you stopped complaining. You did your work and you learned what you were taught so that you could be of use to OURHOME, and today you receive your reward.

You smell the drift now. You thought it would be foul. To the contrary, it is alluring in the extreme. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened so quickly if there had been other options, but that’s why people started eating it.

Yes, I ate it.

The flavor? I couldn’t begin to tell you. There are too many things you’ve never had. You have no basis for comparison. What could it mean to you if I said it tasted like the flesh of the sweetest fruit, the tenderest and most savory cut of meat? I can scarcely recall those things myself.

It tasted like bliss, and I would have kept eating it except for OURFATHER. I’d have eaten myself stupid if he hadn’t pulled me and the others out of it and brought us back to where he was setting up OURHOME and clothed us and trained us, gave us mates and fed us real food.

He saw what was happening: people who ate the drift were changing. They got fat and sleek and content. The world was ending, and they just sat in the open, feeding on drift piles. Eventually, you couldn’t shift them. A drift would cover them over, bury them completely. But when that happened to eaters, they didn’t die. The drift would melt away, and they’d still be there, still eating, still growing. Changing the whole time.

After a while they couldn’t feed themselves anymore.

That gave OURFATHER an idea. He went to one of the places where the eaters had planted themselves. If necessary, he was prepared to coax them—even in that state, the eaters were not insensible to pain—but OURFATHER found them before their faces went away and they were eager to talk. They told him to bring some eaters that were still small back to OURHOME and explained how to tend them and keep them at a manageable size.

It’s less than a day’s walk from here. You could see it yourselves, if you cared to risk the journey. Most of them are still there—bigger than cars, packed together like kernels on an ear of corn, and breathing very slowly.

Spread out here around the edge of the basin. Give yourselves enough room to move. Then use the blade of the shovel to cut a square in the drift. Be careful when you lift it out and into your bucket. If it falls on the ground, start over. The eaters get fussy when their feed is bruised.

Oh, yes, ours still express opinions. In fact, they will want to speak to you while you feed them. The form we keep them in, doing one doesn’t stop them doing the other, and they’ll happily do both for hours. They have a strange way of speaking: they say it’s a species of poetry, like songs of praise. Most of it we don’t understand very well, but still, we have good reasons to trust them. There is a new star visible in the sky on clear nights when there’s no drift. Something bright that’s getting closer every year. And there are the fruits of our labor. But as OURFATHER told me, I tell you: OURWORK is to keep feeding our eaters. You don’t need to listen or respond to them, just pay attention that they receive their feed properly, like I’ll show you. The message for us that OURFATHER was the first to hear, it hasn’t really changed:

“The drift is our feed,” the eaters say. “It is good. But we are the best food. Your young may eat of us when they come of age. Take enough that we do not become fully ripe, or we will have to stop eating, and we do not wish to stop. But the bulk you must save for the ones who sent the drift. We are meant for them. We will tell them what you have done for us. You are good shepherds. Put the drift in my mouth. It is delicious, but oh you will see, I am more delicious.”

They do go on. But be patient, and when the eater you’re assigned is satisfied, I will give you a knife to use. They’ll sing louder when you cut into them, but don’t stop carving until you have a piece large enough to feed your whole pod. Your minders will show you how to prepare it, and then you can have your first taste of the best food. It really is the best food.

Buckets full?

Then let’s go. The eaters are waiting for you in the barn.