Excerpt: Walking in Cemeteries

"Already, I am developing a taste for walking in cemeteries."
-Jules Renard (1864-1910)

Cable was born on the eve of destruction. The night she was born to a panting, proud mother, thousands of people started to die. Theirs were slow deaths, violent and bloody, but they were not a result of war. Only half a million people remained alive, and all to smart to fight with one another.
No, the destruction Cable knew was disease. It took thousands upon thousands upon thousands, destroyed many of the only cities left, until Cable's small community in what had once been Detroit was all that was left. When the smoke cleared, the scholars in their home like monks in a monastery returned to their study, silent, without mourning.
Cable could remember the day that signals from the outside stopped coming and everyone stopped hoping. She was only three, but the air of destruction and despair permeated her small psyche and colored it for years. She mourned as well. But as she mourned, she was taught—with so few people left alive, they had to make sure that every person knew their duty. So Cable was told the story of the time before the disease, and long, long before people stopped existed save for as machines to remember and record.
“You see, Cable,” said Janess Wollstone, a pretty blond woman that Cable didn't trust, “people are cruel things. Me, and you, and everyone here is just a step away from wanting to kill each other, or an animal, or even the world. And in the time when people were like this, were animals, they did awful things. They killed each other, and they ate the flesh of animals, and they used their machines so much that the contraptions started to poison the earth with the foul air they breathed.
“Now, in a year people called 2300, 2300 years after the birth of Christ, things were as bad as they could get. The scientists and the people who knew these things predicted that the world would start to get too hot for anything to live, thus fulfilling the tales of Hell, I believe, and there would be too many people and not enough food. In any case, twelve billion people is a lot—too many for one planet. Entire countries would die because they couldn't get food or water, and people died in the streets from the heat or from breathing too much that was not air. And a few wise men saw what was happening and decided it had to stop.
“'How can we stop people from being people?' they wondered. 'How can we stop them from fighting and taking too much of what is not theirs?' And they decided that every person on earth had to die. They did not achieve this by fighting, however, but by persuading people not to have children, sometimes handing out birth control to those who could not afford it. And over two hundred years, the population quickly decreased and only a few million people remained, living in small, concentrated segments on the earth's surface.
“They had a question for the universe. You see, up there, there are all sorts of other planets like earth, but people never managed to find one that had other people who were smart and could talk to us. 'If we're the only sentient beings ever to exist,' these people asked, 'then do we really have a right to destroy that?'
“So it was resolved that a few people must always stay alive to preserve nature's greatest feat. Only a few thousand were really necessary, but by their calculations inbreeding would occur in populations less than a quarter million and they wanted to be on the safe side--”
Cable interrupted, her little girl hands pressed to the sides of her face, distressed. “I don't understand.”
Janess smiled at Cable and ruffled her hair in a way that made Cable distinctly uncomfortable. “Of course not. The important part of the story is this. We are the people left behind to remember. That's why we can never do anything that is not either absolutely essential for survival or absolutely essential for the preservation of the past. You know the big room, full of books? That's a library, and every book there is about one thing from the time before.”
Cable grew up understanding her duty, but it didn't mean she liked it. She was exceptionally bright, and the youngest person alive until Janess' child was born, but she didn't enjoy learning about the past. She followed the rules, but pushed them to their limits, going out of the large, empty building into the world around them, all in the name of protecting the community. In reality, she just couldn't stand remembering the past. It seemed to her like an old man sitting in a puffed up velvet chair and smoking a pipe, recounting to his greasy friends all the ways he mistreated his wife, beating, bruising, sexually harassing her and calling her filthy names, all while she stood there and took it, but never remembering the time that she stopped taking it and left, with her beautiful face scratched and blue and her hair in a tangle, and grew stronger than anyone could be who'd been through less. The library was the house of that old man, the books the tale of how he nearly killed his wife, but the tale of her resilience was told only to those who ventured outside. No one remembered the earth in books or told of her kindness. The three thousand years since the destruction had stopped and Cable was born were quiet, as if humanity mourned the earth's rejuvenation. So Cable went outside into nature to rejoice in earth's life.