“Papa?” Emma’s voice whispers in the darkness.
“What is it, sweetheart?”
“When will they arrive?”
He knows who ‘they’ are, but he’s still a little surprised by the question. He had expected her to try and talk about his illness or weep a little.
“You know that as well as I do.”
“Yes, but I’d like to hear you say it.” Silence. Then, “Some days I don’t think they’ll ever come.”
A moment, then he starts to talk, “In just under ten years, if they’re on schedule. Don’t worry, you’ll see them.”
“Yes, I’ll see them. If they come.”
She had stressed the pronoun a little too strongly. Silence falls over them again. “When…” Emma’s voice fades, then regains its strength as she completes her sentence. “After Mother died, would you really have killed yourself if I hadn’t existed?”
Why was she opening up so many old wounds tonight? Had he hurt her so badly by hiding his disease from her? In any case, he doesn’t want to lie to her again.
“Yes, I believe I would have. Either that or the solitude would have killed me.”
Another silence. Then he thinks he hears her say, “Me too…” But he isn’t sure.
His ankle has started paining him again. He should take another analgesic, but deep down Thomas knows that he prefers the pain, that he prefers to suffer. He has so much to atone for, first Nancy’s death and now his imminent abandonment of Emma. After what seems to him a very long time, Emma’s slow deep breathing announces her sleep.
They’re both walking along the beach of the Australian Enclave, arms around each other’s waists, for mutual support. It’s very late, three or four o’clock in the morning. The full moon, high in the tropical sky, spreads its light over the calm sea, a long silvery ribbon. Thomas feels both dull and euphoric. Everything appears more beautiful, more pleasant, but at the same time as if held at a distance by drunkenness. At times, he sees the landscape of this region, protected from the rest of the world, as if through a lens that is out of focus or a thick sheet of silk paper. But you can’t party every day! He suddenly stops and sits on the ground at the foot of a dune that stretches lazily, ending in the water. “I can’t take it anymore. I’m staying here. Forever.”
“Get up, lazybones,” she castigates him. “You old fogey. The others are already on the cliff. Only a few gliders will be left for us. All it takes is a bit of excitement and a few drinks and you’re all in?” Nancy’s eyes shine in the darkness as she gently chides him. “So, take your clothes off. We’ll go for a swim. Maybe that will wake you up.”
They undress awkwardly, Thomas complaining that people could pass by and that… She stands up, in an attempt to help him, but they lose their balance and both fall to the sand. They lie there, stretched out, vanquished by alcohol and fatigue as much as happiness. Thomas looks glassily up at the sky for a long time, staring at the infinite depth of the black canopy studded with the abstract pointillism of the constellations he occasionally has difficulty identifying from this unusual angle coming as he does from the other hemisphere. “Do you see the stars?” Thomas asked her. “It’s hard to believe that they only see them one or two days each month in Northern Europe… If they’re really lucky…”
“Yes, they’re so beautiful on nights like this one,” Nancy murmurs dreamily. “And they’re ours now. Finally, in a manner of speaking…”
“Selected. Do you know what that means? They’ve finally selected us. After five years of tests, studies and training. I had given up hope. We’re finally going to leave this ball of rotten, polluted mud, where everyone’s killing everybody and people are smothering under the weight of their own waste and their numbers. We’re going into space! Beyond the LaGrange points, beyond Mars and the Belt, beyond the outer planets and outside the system! We’re going to found a new world!”
“I know.” She sighs a little, then finally smiles, indulgently. With fake sarcasm, she says, “You’ve talked of nothing else the entire evening … but I’m happy. It’s so important to you.”
He smiles in return, then turns back to the stars. “Not just for me. Not just for us. For everyone. You’ll see. It will be incredible, fascinating, exalting. A world for us. Clean and new. A world we’ll make even more beautiful, freer, more just, for us and for our children. Because we’ll have tons of kids, now, won’t we? No more population controls after the first few years. Children who will have an opportunity to do better than we did with the Earth.”
“We’re not the first to believe that, you know. To feed off those illusions.”
“People need dreams. I need dreams … to live, to keep on.”
Another, pensive silence, then, “Enough, already! You sound like some pamphlet or, worse yet, a recruiting agent!” Nancy tosses a little sand, artificial and de-acidified sand, like all of the sand on the beach, at him. Ruffling his hair, she laughs. He notices that his drunkenness is making him talk nonsense, platitudes.
He shut ups, once again trying to lose himself in the distant lights of the sky beyond the virtually invisible dome, detectable only through the treachery of the rare iridescent reflections on the surface; the dome that surrounds all of Adelaide, along kilometres of hills identical to this one, along the shore of the Enclave and the minuscule portion of the Pacific Ocean which the southern Hemisphere Ecological Agency now supervises with such concern.
“So, are we going swimming?”
He smiles again. “To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t have the strength,” he sighs, starting to stumble a little over his words. “I think I’ll stay here forever. I think I might even have a little nap…”
“No way, Mister.” Nancy twines the hair that falls to her waist around her hands. Thomas closes his eyes. Soon he feels those hands, covered with the soft, warm hair, slide along his chest, caress his face. “Wake up, wake up,” croons Nancy, to the tune of an old nursery rhyme.
“Stop that. It’s very arousing.”
She clucks, then gives a wicked little laugh. “That’s the whole point!”
He turns over, stares at her for a long time, as she lies on her side against him. He feels Nancy’s breath on his skin, on his face. A moonbeam shines on her rounded thigh. Thomas stretches his hand out, casting a shadow, to caress her tenderly. They kiss, deeply, separating for just an instant, regretfully, to catch their breath. He closes his eyes again, singing her name, “Nancy, Nancy, Nancy, Nancy…”
The drunkenness and fatigue, which continue to cloud his vision and mind, gradually fade. Nancy’s naked body lies against his, soft and curved. Thomas’ hand caresses the red reflection on her hip over and over. Nancy’s hair shines like a halo around her face, lost in the shadows. Once again, Thomas brings his face closer to hers.
“Nancy, Nancy… Emma…”
He quickly jumps out of bed, as if it is on fire, pain suddenly rushing in his leg, brutally ejected from the dream.
She is looking at him, calm, serene. “You were calling her. She can’t come. I’m here.”
She’s a stranger. She has to be some stranger, talking to him like that. It can’t be Emma. His little Emma. Shock. A complete lack of understanding. “But what’s gotten into you? You… You…”
She looks disappointed by such predictability. Pained as well.
He doesn’t know whether to be angry with her or ashamed of himself.
Still calm, despite everything, she sits down on the foot of the cot. “You should be able to understand, you know, to go beyond appearances. If anyone should understand, it would be you. I’ve thought about it. I have my reasons. Yes, you should be able to see how vital it is for me. I don’t have any choice. Against your will, you’ve left me no choice.”
He says nothing, doesn’t dare say anything.
She sighed. “I guess I’ll have to
explain it to you.”
He finally feels the shadow of possibility, the beginning of a hypothesis taking shape in his mind, a vague, evanescent light. But even before he can consider it, he panics, shoving it back into the dark chaos of unformulated thoughts. Like a child frightened by the existence of the world, he covers his ears with his hands, closed, terrified. “I don’t want you to explain anything! I don’t want you to explain! I don’t want to hear anything! I want to forget! Go back to bed and leave me, leave me alone.”
She gets up, looks at him eyes full of regret, almost pity. “You’re afraid, but you don’t know why. You don’t even know what you’re afraid of. But I do.”
She slowly backs off in the dark and slides silently into her bed, pulling the blanket up noisily. But she goes on, “I only hope that you’ll come to understand me before it’s too late. Before it’s too late for both of us.”
He turns around, trembling, and limps painfully through the darkness to the kitchen. His world is falling apart around him, the very structure of everything he had ever believed in crumbling into dusty illusions. Or sudden lucidity? What’s happening to them? What’s happening to Emma? What is this aberration? Was it the brutal announcement of his death that triggered the entire scene? Has her mind come unhinged under the weight of her fear, pain, despair? No, she had always been the stronger of the two. She was the practical one, he the dreamer. It had been the same with Nancy. Emma is talking and acting logically. He knows that deep within. Perhaps it’s the only course open to them, even if it seems unacceptable to Thomas. That’s what makes it all so terrible… Yet, she’s never… And why wait until now to tell him? Was she doing it for him? For her? But it’s impossible? Impossible, isn’t it? His mind is filled with confusion, with insane, fleeting suppositions. His thoughts are like a skein of yarn, tangled, inextricable. He pulls over a chair and drops into it, without even turning on the light. He sits opposite one of the portholes, his face reflecting on the glass surface. Once again, facing himself, nothing but himself. And with a decision to make. He has never liked, never wanted to make decisions. Deciding means choosing, cutting off options, closing doors. He feels empty, without resources. The pain that has stirred to life in his ankle bores into his leg, rising to well above his knee. Not a sound. Outside, the rain has stopped. But inside his head, the storm rages on. What if he’s wrong? What if making a decision also means finding new opportunities, opening up new doors? He stares down at his hands, as they tremble a little. He’s afraid of himself. He’s afraid of Emma. He spends the rest of the night there, on the uncomfortable chair he made with his own hands, with wood from a tree that grows on this planet, trying unsuccessfully to find satisfactory answers.
The morning light finds him slouched over on his chair. When he tries to stand up, his ankle pains him terribly. It wavers for a minute, then intensifies. He drags himself over to the bedroom. Emma is still sleeping. The sheet has slipped to the ground, uncovering her. The sun, although still weak, lights the room sufficiently, casting a weak, delicate red halo around her body.
Suddenly, he feels the intolerable weight of the solitude of these past years bearing down on him, of the days when he talked to himself in order to maintain his sanity, when Emma was too young to respond, when he imagined that Nancy was still there, beside him, and then realizing that he was nothing, alone in their bed, shamefully caressing himself in the night, thinking of her with all his might in the despair of her absence. From deep within his being, no from within his flesh, he feels the wave, the desire rise. He wants to touch Emma’s body, a body other than his own, to feel, to… No! He turns suddenly around, bites his fist in rage and despair. He puts his weight consciously on his leg, provoking pain to chase away desire. No! He’s not an animal. Slowly, slowly, the savage tide draws back, the wild storm abates. He picks the sheet up off the floor and spreads it gently over her before returning to the kitchen.
Why did Emma open this door in him? He takes the toolbox down from the cupboard and starts working on the water heater. He has to keep his hands, his mind busy. He searches, unscrews, strips the wires, reconnects them, checks the cables, trying to empty his mind of any thoughts that are not directly related to the work at hand, but his injured ankle is now so painful that he finally sets his tools down in order to look at it.
“Well to be perfectly honest with you, that’s not a pretty sight.”
Emma, dressed and smiling, is bending over him, examining the ankle. It’s now so swollen that it looks twice the size of his other ankle. Emma lightly runs her finger along his ankle, and Thomas grimaces with pain.
“Yeah, well, there’s no way you can make the rounds today. You’ll be spending the day in bed.”
“But…”
“We’re not discussing it. You have to take care of yourself. I don’t want a patient on my hands for weeks.” She re-bandages the ankle.
“Now, time for a little breakfast and then a nap. But first, something to relieve the pain…”
Later, while they eat, the clouds move back in and the rain begins to fall, heavy, insistent, noisy. Thomas tries to avoid looking Emma in the eyes as much as possible.
“You’ll manage on your own?”
“Of course I will. I’ve done it a hundred times, either on my own or with you. And someone has to go. This is the fourth day of the week, the day we milk the ‘cows’.”
“The rice paddy can wait. We’ll seed it again in two weeks. Take care of the animals for now, and take a look at the greenhouse.”
“OK.”
He takes something to help him sleep and finally agrees to lie down. What good will it do if he continues to let himself go like this, if he can no longer do his share of the work? He needs rest. And to get away from all this madness, all this pain, even for a minute. The rain beats down against the walls. The wind roars ferociously. During that semi-conscious stage, where you have no thoughts at all, he listens to the savage symphony of the wild planet. “Away with you! You’re not from here! Away with you!” That’s what this world kept saying to them, what it had said to Thomas over and over again for years. But maybe he had only heard what he wanted to hear. From an infinite distance, he’s aware of Emma, back with the buckets of ‘golden milk,’ the clear, sweet liquid the ‘cows’ gave them regularly, twice a week. And then, he slips into a welcome, peaceful nothingness.
When he wakes up, Emma is bent under a bag of potatoes that she is storing in the cool room with the other vegetables. Still dripping with rain, she smiles when she sees him standing there. “Did you manage to sleep? Are you feeling better?”
He relaxes and finally manages to smile back, almost as he used to.
“I slept and it does hurt less. No problems? Everything went well?”
“Of course.”
She slips in front of him, her arms laden with clothes, and her smile grows, “I even have some good news for a change. Our patient is doing very well. She almost gave her usual quota of ‘milk’. It’s still not edible, unfortunately, based on the smell and the look, in any case. But the medication you gave her seems to have worked, at last.”
“Can I help you with the laundry?”
“All right, but you’ll do it sitting down.”
The rain stops as they fold clothes, and a few rays of the pale sun even manage to pierce the clouds, at one point.
“Two days in a row,” Emma exclaims joyously.
At the end of the afternoon, Thomas puts on his rain coat and goes out. Emma doesn’t try to stop him. Despite the peace that now reigns between them, the day has not given Thomas any of the answers he either hoped for or feared. He still feels uncomfortable when he looks at her. He walks behind the house and stops at the tomb.
“Nancy… If you were still here, you’d know what to do. You’d give me another point of view. You’d be my conscience. If only you could still give me a sign, tell me what I sh
ould do! I miss you so much…” He stands in front of the sad pile of flat, gray stones covering the earthen mound in the middle of the grass. It is surrounded by a thick carpet of mud, pierced here and there by small puddles of thick, murky, muddy water.
He closes his eyes. Even after all these years, the injury opens and bleeds each time. It hurts just a little less than the last time, perhaps, but the pain never leaves him. He feels someone at his side — it can only be one person — and he turns slowly to Emma.
“I wish so much I could have known her,” she whispers, looking at the grave.
“She would have liked to have known you, too,” he hears himself reply. “She would have wanted to see you, to touch you. She wanted you so badly at the end. You should have seen the joy on her face whenever she felt you move.”
“When I think that it’s all my fault she’s there…”
No, Thomas corrects her internally, it’s my fault. But he says nothing. Emma kicks the mud, uncovering a shiny object that had been half buried there. She bends down, picks it up and raises it to the weak light of the sky. It’s a piece of polished metal, partially tarnished. Probably an old fragment of the spaceship. She looks at it thoughtfully for a minute. Then something changes in her face. She holds the object, sparkling briefly in the light, out to him.
Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction Page 31
