The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  ‘I want to get closer to the vessels,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’ This was Laurel. I needed to touch the massive structures, to feel their solidity under my hand, but I did not know how to explain this. For the first time, I didn’t feel scared of travelling inside them into the unknown, but instead a strange lightness; I imagined that they could help me ascend to the ring, somehow. I knew that they had escape pods inside, enough for at least half their passengers. I would fantasise about stealing one of these mid-ascent, and making my way to the ring, where I would make my fortune, exactly as Mr Vanlow was doing here.

  I was daydreaming too much, and I was too old for daydreaming. After so many years in the jungle, not setting foot in Old Town since I was little more than a toddler, it was strange to find myself among the certainty of the coquina stone buildings, to the fabled marble cathedral, walking those strange streets every day at all hours. The cathedral itself was beyond my wildest imaginings. A religious building in the old days, it housed the Registry now. I knew it as the place where things were collected, interpreted, and explained back to us by the storytellers, the place from which all known taxonomies emerged. Little did I know it would become my home in a few months’ time, and that I would spend the next few years of my life inside its stone walls, that I would share it with Laurel. She mentioned that her aunt was trying to get her a place to study there.

  ‘Is it very difficult?’ I asked.

  ‘My grandfather, he sacrificed himself to the ocean.’

  I could not form a reply but could not help opening my eyes wide in recognition and awe.

  ‘It was terrible for my family. My father lost his job, we were really poor for a very long time, while I was growing up. Eventually, my parents had to go and work in another town. Getting there, they had an accident in their hovering vehicle.’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’ I winced at my own inadequacy; could I really have nothing better to say after such a revelation? Their life must have been very difficult indeed, they must have suffered terribly, been really ostracised.

  After I heard this, I felt sorry for Ariel as well. I could now interpret his attack when he first saw me as a survival reaction: eat before you are eaten.

  Getting to the vessels wasn’t difficult. They sat in an old, disused port, but entry to that section wasn’t restricted. There were youngsters around, playing with hovering cycles, racing each other. They were scruffy techies, as if they were wrong versions, or copied versions of techie kids. Everything about them felt posed. I would later learn that it was the richest kids, the ones who had this studied, uncaring air. Their presence there, ignoring the gigantic structures that sat indifferently behind them, like white beetles, was unexpected; although the vessels weren’t white, and being so close to them now I could see they were not translucent either, that was a visual effect when I looked at them from Kon-il cove. In fact, they looked brownish, dirty, and somehow abandoned. I knew the NEST project had been discontinued now, and that those vessels in Old Town were left to rot. What I did not know is how pitiful they would look up close, reminding me of two dying, beautiful birds.

  That was what the city reminded me of, precisely: a rare bird, an unexpected mutated animal or place, exactly like our overgrown ‘garden’ in Gobarí, or like my mother, Urania. I had so few models to make sense of it all. I felt dizzy, looking it all avidly; hearing its citizens’ conversations; finding the squares and the alleys from which I could see the ring; discovering two ancient trees, meant to be thousands of years old, thick and solid and magical, their many branches and profusion of roots a climbing frame for Old Town children. They were known as the draco-milenario, so my surprise was acute when I learnt that they had only been there for a few hundred years. Nevertheless, I was obsessed with them. Everything in Old Town possessed that same capacity to fascinate me, including the siblings who had accompanied me on my illicit walk. Old Town was not excessive like Gobarí, but suspended in time somehow, awaiting its yet-to-come fate.

  ‘How is it?’ I asked Ariel and Laurel, my chin pointing up towards the Upper Settlement. ‘How is it, living so close to it?’

  ‘We are not close. Not as much as you think, anyhow.’

  ‘Exactly. We are as close as you are up in the sierra.’

  I smiled. They hadn’t got my meaning, poorly expressed as it was: they were much closer than I would ever be to the ring, even with their problematic family past, for unlike me they were techies through and through. I was a strange mixture of beanie, from my father; techie, from my mother; with a little shuvaní blood intermixed. I would never own up to this, but they, of course, could read it in my looks. Despite everything, they could jump on the twice-daily flights up, if so they wanted, in one of the many daily exchanges between the town and up above, in which people like them came and went constantly. But other people, not me. Surely nobody like me. I imagined their lives had been determined by it; perhaps even more than my own, I reflected, since I had enjoyed a certain freedom in Gobarí. I imagined them constantly looking up to their benign gods in the sky. I already knew that some people, mostly beanies, made offerings to the ring regularly.

  One thing that puzzled me about Old Town, though: where were the people like Savina? I could not see anyone that looked like they were of shuvaní blood; apparently, the compounds inside the Barrier were full of them. They were known as the best servants, and the richer techie families had been able to keep them after the Delivery Act, paying them formidable salaries to look after their houses and their children. However, they hardly ever ventured outside the wall.

  From time to time I would see a shuvaní girl looking after some expensively dressed children as they busied themselves climbing the roots of the dracos. She would invariably be dressed in colourful garments that reminded me of Savina’s, but which possessed a different quality, somehow; they were much dearer versions of her ample skirts, and it was obvious that the fabrics came from exclusive manufacturers.

  Most things in Old Town looked like that, improved or better versions of things we had in Gobarí, made to last longer. Everything was a little bit different. Everything had a different flavour, was surprising to some degree, while at the same time being recognisable.

  Time also felt odd in the city. Things felt so solid, so certain. I could not comprehend these many certainties around me—the stone buildings, the garments and objects made to last—not after so many years in the forest, an uneasy space, but nevertheless my home.

  One thing: the first few nights in Old Town I did not know how I would manage to sleep, deprived of all the living things that sang their lullaby, the sweet rush of the waving branches in the dark, each and every one of the million living things a conduit for my childhood emotions. The shock of the stone buildings had numbed me. I understood it, that I had been a child until that point, and this unmoored feeling was growing up.

  Eventually, I got to see it. I had gone alone with Laurel this time. She had guided me through some secret alley-ways.

  It was raining, a light summer rain. Laurel guided me across a patio covered in puddles. On both sides, similar walls of very similar buildings: the same humidity stains, the same flaking paint right and left, the same empty, boarded-up shops, partly covered by the ocean mist. It was very early in the morning. A wild cat appeared from around a corner, and crossed ahead of me. I followed it with my eyes. Its flexible body found an impossible space between the buildings, and it disappeared.

  ‘There,’ said Laurel. I looked up.

  The ocean behind the Barrier felt like a vast monster. Even if the Barrier—we did not call it the wall, for that was the beanie word for it—was so close; and yet, it was also at a great distance, a curved, gigantic smile, laughing at us. What did it protect us from? What exactly was this debris, plastic, that we had been told could kill us? This was not true, of course. It may have been a poisonous material, for it had help precipitate the green winter; but Mother had been a swimmer, and I knew that she had moved inside the water, de
ep within its embrace. And she had survived. That lie was like all the other lies that floated down from the ring, lingering like a bad smell, designed to bend us into submission. We perched on some rocks, put there centuries before to stop the ocean from breaking against the old medieval wall; a useless endeavour. I had never been so close to the thing. It didn’t feel like protection, but like the wall of a cell in a prison.

  That day, looking at the ocean, the clean bit on our side of the Barrier, sensing its pull, I felt that I understood Mother for the first time. Perhaps it was my shuvaní blood, perhaps it was that I missed the forest. Or perhaps it was that I was my mother’s daughter after all, and I understood the power of dying well and on your own terms.

  ‘We should dye your hair blue, like when you were little,’ Mother said. She had not spoken directly to me in weeks; or if she had, it had been without seeing me—the way she did those days—looking over me while imparting this or that instruction. A smile formed on my face. It hurt.

  * * *

  The oddest thing about Old Town: there were hardly any animals. A few birds, the town’s beloved flamingos. But that was it. A peaceful, managed scene.

  ‘Laurel, where are the animals here?’

  ‘Animals?’

  ‘I haven’t seen anything, except those pink things.’

  ‘Ah! Well, I guess we have hundreds, thousands of specimens; but they are down there instead of up here…’ She said this pointing with her finger to the floor, and I knew she meant the vaults of the Registry, where she longed to go one day.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I was envisioning an underground zoo.

  ‘They are preserved down there, everything they can get their hands on, from the olden days as well.’

  ‘Preserved? Alive?’

  She laughed at my ignorance.

  ‘Of course not! Mummified.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘For us, so we can study them, learn what happened.’

  This made some sort of horrid sense; although, eventually, I would also learn that things were never that simple. Learn what, exactly? All I had ever learnt about animals was to fear them. My father had impressed on me early the fear for the creatures that now shared this world with us. Perhaps that was why there were so few in town, and it was said that the ones in the ring were bio-engineered to behave in a tame fashion. The animal that I feared most when I was little was the arrow snake. It opened the skin around its neck as it glided towards its victim. It didn’t fly, not exactly, but it looked as if it did. It was called ‘arrow’ because the beanies thought it could cross through people’s hearts while in mid-flight, and kill them on the spot. Thankfully, I never saw any; only its constellation, it seemed, had followed me to Old Town. I think I feared it because it looked like the basilisk, back in our pond.

  Sometimes, when I was little, Savina called me feral. When I asked what that meant, she said that I was an unruly, stubborn sort of child. Wild. That was a bad thing to say; I used to rat her out when she called me that, saying she had said something ‘unkind’ to me. It was my childish way of protesting. Being compared to animals was the worst possible insult.

  But in the city, I felt it: we were wilder, untamed; our nature differed from those who surrounded us, those elegant people. Mother could mingle easily among them; she came from a true techie family. But Father didn’t, and that made me and my brother suspicious in people’s eyes. Could we be refined, perhaps? Was there any hope for us? My stepfather started mentioning the Sisters as a possibility. Perhaps they could do something for me. Would I not like to be a curator, one day, perhaps? Study those objects and palimpsests from the olden days? That would mean going to live inside the Registry, leaving my family behind for many years.

  One day, Mr Vanlow took all of us, including Laurel and Ariel, to a storytelling observance. It took place in a round room built for that purpose, adjacent to the main Registry building. We sat on wooden benches surrounding a little podium, quite insignificant, on which eventually a young man perched. He started declaiming. The words were alien to me. But something was happening, inside my head, underneath my eyelids, which I could close and still see it all.

  I have since understood how storytelling works, what it does with your senses. It was as if they somehow became entangled. The meaning of the story presents itself, sensation on top of sensation, all of them building together to create one woven pattern, one in which no one element is primary, the story a single perfect whole made of fragments and patches, moments of understanding, smells, vision.

  Several figures appeared, and they changed shape, and they changed colour. They were yellow, and blue, and red. And they told the story of some benevolent masters who looked kindly from above, and it made me feel safe somehow, contented. The lights danced, and mutated into something else, and I knew they had always meant to be that and that only. Colours around them exploded, and there was a fire in my heart. I had no words to explain what had happened to me, I was overcome by feeling. Some of the words danced in my mouth with sparkling tastes, some ideas lurked in my mind far too long with colours that saddened me. I looked around me, and saw Laurel clapping and smiling wildly, repeating some of the tinkering sounds of the recital, bits of the performance that she seemed to know by heart. When it all ended, I knew that I understood more things now, and that the world, our world, and my place in it, made sense somehow, exactly as it was. This knowledge set me at peace, although I could not have explained the specifics of why it made sense, why it was good. The storyteller had placed the knowledge directly inside me.

  The next time my stepfather asked about the Sisters and the school at the Registry and learning to be a curator, I said that no, I didn’t want to be a curator, but a storyteller. He laughed at this, saying that I was too wild for something so delicate and precious. Why did he call me wild? What had he been told about me?

  * * *

  Was I wild, feral, like the hare from my nightmares, the stoats that ate Eli’s little sister? Or was there some hope for me? There was only one way to find out: I agreed to go into the Registry and learn the curator’s trade, a lesser form of knowledge, as soon as I was of age. I had to wait until I was thirteen to start my apprenticeship.

  Eventually, as a new routine established itself, I only saw Mother and Mr Vanlow at mealtimes. Savina looked after my brother Aster most of the time. My wanderings around the city, mostly with Laurel, sometimes with her and Ariel, went unchallenged by any adult. I revelled in my new surroundings, strange and intoxicating, but now we had started to walk often in the direction of the Registry, the huge domed building overlooking the ocean; I was curious about my future home. Mr Vanlow was adamant that I would attend the school, and Laurel often looked at me admiringly, perhaps with a certain sadness. We sat in front of the entry building, the old cathedral, sucking our frozen milbao pouches dry, the way oldtowners preferred to eat it. The whiteness of the domes reflected the yellow light pouring from the lamps, shining with eerie reflections. The ocean mist, the dusty street in the odd crepuscular light, the tedious monotonous sound of those rotten bells calling. A strange feeling of void overtook me on those occasions, as if I were falling into an abyss—the ocean, perhaps; or maybe swimming in space, among the stars. I hadn’t had a fugue moment in a long time. But thinking about my future always gave me some vertigo.

  ‘Can you imagine, Laurel? These buildings have seen it all happening. The Registry was exactly there, standing in the same place, centuries before the green winter happened.’

  ‘Wow. It’s true! And the Barrier and the Settlement were there too, all those centuries back.’

  ‘No, they weren’t. We built them.’

  But she was adamant. The Barrier at least, she said, came from the olden days, as it had been put there to protect the shores from the advancing water. It must have first been built hundreds of years ago, perhaps thousands. Perhaps she was right. What did I know about anything? The notion was enough to set anyone’s head spinning. All those walls
around us, all those cobbled labyrinthine streets, connected us to a remote time; or, rather, their existence challenged the very notion of time itself. If I touched them, I could feel as if time had stopped, or as if the last thousand years were part of the same thing: a straight line that started with our forefathers, or even before they existed, past the green winter, stretching into our present, and that it would surely carry on well into the darkness of the future.

  I felt that if the building was standing there, in front of me, and I could use it, the same as it had been used by humans pre-Winter, then one thousand years meant nothing. The debris in the ocean would not dissolve for another five or six centuries at least; if it ever disappeared at all. We were all part of the same thing, of the same life; space and time didn’t matter so much, not really. The rules, the laws, the dos and don’ts that trickled down from the Upper Settlement, all the way to us little people, were a useless attempt at domestication, for the world had lost its human scale. We were like ants, at the mercy of the forest, of the elements.

  Had the Barrier survived old storms as well? Who knew. They could be ferocious. The pattern was recognisable, at least by those of us who had experienced the jungle outside of those streets: long periods of heat, followed by torrential rain; long periods of heat, followed by torrential rain; and repeat. Old Town enjoyed milder weather; however, it seemed that we had brought some of the horrid circular pattern with us. We were enduring our sixth day in a row of impossible heat. We had eaten so many frozen milbao that my throat was dying; we carefully avoided being sent on errands by adults in the middle of the day—unsurprisingly, most oldtowners had no idea of how to behave in these mini-heatwaves—and Ariel had taken to sleeping in the internal patio, next to the fountain, where we had first met.

  ‘The heat will break, I promise,’ I said to reassure my friends. But I knew what that would entail; and, after seeing mothers allowing their children to play, climbing the dracos in the middle hours of the day, the hottest, when all exercise ought to be avoided, or letting their toddlers’ skins burn until they peeled, I doubted Old Town would know what to do once the storms arrived. Not all of the science or the shuvaní magiks would be enough to protect them.