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"If tomorrow" Guidance began, years ago, "every benevolent text dissapeared, and you were to bear the only words of his anyone would ever hear again, would you know enough to teach them?"
She posed the question to her small congregation, as Sunset hit the beach, chill fall air settling over the crowd and reminding them too much of the encroaching storm. A hypothetical question, posed to prove a point. The benevolent texts were already well contained in a water sealed chest, not to be opened until after the town was finished.
She encouraged them to jealously guard knowledge of something they were at no risk of losing.
The group was too small to remember all they would need to. Too many engineers, and hard working folks, being pressed to their limit. Being pressed to ignore their last days in the sun and to expedite their descent into the darkness.
Then they were down. And they were safe. And the first things that were felt were not the cold or the illness, not the damp or the hunger from the early rationing days. The first things that were felt were the boredom, the homesickness.
There were small children born that first winter, in the days before the years lost their meaning. And parents would whisper over their cribs, tears streaming down their faces as they tried to remember how that lullaby went, the one their mom used to sing to them.
There were animals and texts and songs and histories saved in the halls of Brother Seldom and the conservatory. Ol' joshy had a thick stack of weathered mystery books that had changed hands between all of them, paper yellowed and warped, covers barely keeping them shut for the way the pages tried to fan out from one another in the humidity of the corridors in Founder's Wake.
Stories coveted and in short supply.
Many of the early days were given over to longing for knowledge that was now permanently out of reach.
If asked, its doubtful anyone could tell you who the first poet was, who decided first to put down their tools and began pressing the pale seaweed into paper to write on just for the ache of needing to make something new.
But everything, everything new that was created and brought to light was shared with abandon and breathed in with relish, old complaints of quality or originality dead with the old world.
Infants slept to murmurs of, "You won't fall, the sea provides, you'll float safe here by my side."
Children jumped rope in courtyards, saying silly rhymes, "Seahorse, seafoam, and a Puffer Fish, jump 4 times and you'll get your wish." The number of jumps climbing with each child's turn.
Some books were of fantastical lands, far from here, written as if the flood never came. As if we were all happy.
…
I cannot describe to my children what sunlight felt like. Their only conception of a flower is the slowly dwindling bottle of rose oil I put in all our hair on special occasions. They have never eaten a potato pancake.
One day I will pass and my children will live on. My grandchildren if they so choose. And when we are gone who will remember the sun.
I was just a child myself when I left my father and siblings behind to join my best friend on the journey to the beach. Only sixteen. And even I feel a shame at not having known more about our world while we had it.
…Of all the mistakes we made, that is one I have the power to make right.
I learn every song I hear and sing it back to myself until the notes are soft and familiar like a well loved tunic.
My best friend joins me in the kitchen as I do, puzzling out harmonies by ear until calling our children in for dinner.
The glow of the starfish through the windows sets the room in a comforting turquoise as the three of them pile into seat around the table.
And to them it's as if the flood never came.
As if this was how the world always was.
And they are happy.