The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  ‘That there are some that could never have mutated like they did; and that they are experiments, creatures that you have tried to put together. And when they didn’t work, or they didn’t fulfil your purpose, or even if you just didn’t like how they turned out, you set them loose on us down here.’

  ‘You are intelligent, Pearl, and educated. It is not possible that you believe such nonsense.’

  ‘Is it, Arlo? Is it all nonsense?’

  ‘You can’t possibly believe that we experiment with animals and send the ones we don’t like down here.’

  ‘So what do you do with them?’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘With the ones that turn out badly. Because if you bio-engineer species all the time, there must be some experiments that don’t work.’

  ‘Who knows.’ I was getting agitated. ‘Perhaps we eat them!’

  I had spoken without thinking, but my reply hung in the air between us, both of us aware that it made sense, for she didn’t form a reply this time.

  ‘Very well,’ she said eventually. ‘Isn’t it possible that some experiments have managed to escape down here, perhaps in some of the dozens of transport shuttles that you send down every day?’

  ‘Pearl, you probably don’t know this because you have never travelled to the Upper Settlement, but there are many protocols that would make this impossible. Even for the smallest living organisms: everyone who gets onto one of the flights needs, by law, to go through a thorough process of decontamination—’

  She stopped me right there.

  ‘Oh… I see. You don’t want to get our diseases, is that right?’

  I didn’t know what to say. But she was right. I had received a large number of vaccines before coming down here, and still it was possible that I would contract some kind of unknown fever. I had to sign a disclosure agreement with the shuttle company, to the effect that I was the only person responsible for the decision to come down; and that if something went wrong, or I was maimed, or if I died as a result of my trip to the surface, my family would not hold them responsible.

  ‘Come,’ she said, getting up from the chair she was occupying, and moving towards the door with determination. ‘I want to show you something.’

  As always in recent days, grabbing her hand sent an electric current up my body. It was true that I sought her more often now, that I got up and went to her room to find her, that I wanted to spend long hours listening to her voice and looking in her eyes.

  But I also felt a strange danger when I was around her, as if she knew something I didn’t, and I could die for that reason. As if my life was in her hands.

  I felt like this now, as she took me deep into the forest. From time to time, she would look back at me, smiling. And that was oddly scarier, for I did not know her intentions. I felt danger now, and pushed the feeling away.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To the pond. I would like you to meet an old friend.’

  She had told me that a basilisk had been said to roam these waters from time immemorial, long before the green winter.

  We saw nothing, of course, although at some point she threw a stone into the cool, inviting water, claiming to have seen him. We were sitting on the deceptive little shore, and I looked at her. Her upper lip was covered in little pearls of sweat, and her chest was heaving, her eyes closed.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘I had a friend once.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘I used to meet her here, she would sit there, exactly where you are. I wanted to kill her once.’

  ‘Why? What had she done to you?’

  She looked up; her sad smile was reflected in her eyes.

  ‘She knew things… She must have known all along. And she never told me.’

  ‘What did she know?’

  ‘She knew about my father.’

  She looked at me defensively, almost angrily, and I knew she was trying to parse whether I had heard the stories.

  Of course I had, for Mr Vanlow had filled me in before our union: it was only appropriate that he did. Her father, accused of murder; the subsequent debacle of the family fortune, and also the lack of evidence available at the time. It had almost finished them. I don’t think Vanlow’s intention was to present himself as the family’s saviour, but it was clear that his intervention had been critical.

  She could see straight away, almost as if she were reading my mind, that I had been told the tale. She chuckled, and started singing. Little Death, little Death, what have you done to me…

  ‘Pearl, you are safe now, you are safe with me.’

  At this, she laughed more openly, and I felt stupid; down on the surface I needed her protection more than the other way around. She turned in my direction, she was not laughing anymore. Instead, she seemed to be examining me, looking deeply into my eyes, looking for a lie, perhaps, to catch me somehow red-handed. And then she spoke.

  ‘Do you know what the beanies call this place?’

  ‘The pond? No, I don’t.’ I assumed she wasn’t referring to the cartographic names we gave to everything up in the Settlement, when we looked from above. The name for a place like this would be something like TR-2486492.

  ‘Dead Woman’s Pool.’

  I sensed a shiver down my spine.

  ‘My brother was found here,’ she continued. ‘And my mother’s heart broke here. She was the one who found him, you see.’ I still said nothing. Something was painfully moving along my throat, and I swallowed hard. ‘Look,’ she continued, ‘I have no idea of what my stepfather has told you, but he killed them both.’ She was furious now.

  I also knew a bit about that, for I had had to be filled in about the destroyed southern wing of the house, apparently lost to a flood. I knew what had happened here.

  ‘Pearl, I’m so sorry.’

  She looked deep into my eyes, perhaps also furious with me. But she must have been happy with what she found, for with a swift movement she straddled me, and began to kiss me. We had not kissed since the ceremony, and that kiss had been different. Now, her tongue went deep into my mouth, and mine into hers, as our hands started pulling away clothes, only some, for we ended up half-dressed, only our pants and the upper sides of our vests hiding our skin. At some point we lay on the grass, and there we finished, each on our side, hands interlocked and eyes looking deep into the other’s.

  We stopped moving and only then did I hear the noises of the forest again, the rippling of the water. I looked in its direction, and I thought I could see some odd creature losing itself beneath its rippling surface.

  14

  Until now, I had looked at this part of the planet only from above, for after studying bio-anthropology I had trained as a cartographer, following the progress of the forest’s edge on our vast illuminated screens. We had noticed it long ago: a stretch of land that was always left untouched. The jungle, marked in a violent green, advanced and retreated, capriciously waving itself over the planet’s surface like a snake. But some parts of this sierra, including Gobarí and the area around it, were always, for reasons unknown, passed over. We had been greatly puzzled by this phenomenon, and it was expected that I would write a full report while I was here to take back to my superiors, a report which would be added to the repository of data we possessed about this strange region.

  This was the end of the known world, and our Settlement sat right on top of it. There were five other Settlements, scattered above the atmosphere. Ours reigned over what had been the most southern end of an old, northern continent. But Gobarí, Old Town, the sierra… Billions of years ago, when the then continents separated, this bit of land had ended up on the right side of the divide. They belonged there by mere chance; they were so much farther south, so much at the edge of the world, that they could as easily have been part of the next continent, and left unsaved.

  I did not like these southern people. Or at least, I hadn’t before my trip. Now, I was getting to know my new companion. Afte
r our encounter on the shore of the pond, we had dinner together every night, by the light of the candles. Sometimes moths as huge as bats would enter through the open window, although I had to revise my out-of-date taxonomies: when I saw a jungle bat they turned out to be much bigger. The ampleness of what we ate was another exercise in excess, but I wasn’t complaining. I enjoyed the aloe and vanilla hot-pot, the jackfruit salad, the mango spread… Even the cold durian soup, which smelled like rotten flesh.

  After the copious meals we would retire together; we were now sharing the same bedroom. We would read one of the two books in the house, salvaged from a time now gone, sometimes out loud to each other: When jeré, men, have a bad, violent death, they sometimes come back transformed into mullos, or alive-dead, and take with them someone they loved deeply, to keep them company for all eternity inside the forest. We nursed our cups of camomile to settle our stomachs, our sips of infusion punctuated by long kisses. When the boiled water was cool enough to drink in one gulp, we had already exhausted our explorations; we could be together several times each night, for neither of us knew how to stop, it felt so wrong to stop. So much else was not right out there, in the world, and this felt different. We hardly ever heard about the emerging problems in Old Town that followed the attack on the Barrier: several short uprisings that had been promptly contained. Nothing I carried within me worked in Gobarí, and the only way we had of listening to digests was inside my HoveLight300 when I switched on its communication panel; but we soon stopped this daily routine, immersed as we were in each other. I started to think that I could be happy like this, in this place, that there was a kind of bliss in a surface life.

  * * *

  But I had other reasons to be here, reasons of my own. I had readily agreed to make the journey, as soon as it was suggested by Father. I had already decided that I would do anything not to be a burden to my family. My family. Who knew what their wishes were, their hopes? Did they have any? I had been an oddity to them, a bookish child born in the middle of a tribe of people who never seemed to display any interest in anything, who seemed to go through life without thinking. No one knew how to nurture my inclination for learning, and I remember that my parents only took me to see the collections kept in the ring on one occasion, they themselves having no taste for looking at things or reading digital scrolls on portable electronic books. Therefore, I would always feel a sense of dread when faced with repositories, which almost maimed my studies. Left to my own devices, given no direction or attention, I was forced to find my own way. I became interested in Pan-Inuit culture, submerging myself in its study, even travelling up to the one remaining northern hamlet, the first time that I ventured outside of the Settlement. It was customary to descend to the planet for at least part of one year for our studies. Of course, my family resented me for this: why was I not interested in ‘our’ culture instead? I was denying my ‘roots’, they claimed. My father, who had never written a HiveMessage to me in living memory, sent this when a picture of myself among the remaining Pre-Inuits appeared once on his screen, as part of an information digest. He, who had never written to me, saw fit to express his frustration in this manner. I could not formulate a reply. What roots? What culture? He and my mother, and to some extent my older brother, only involved themselves with scenarios and fictions that implied as little thinking as possible. I doubt they had given a moment of their time to try to understand why I was interested in learning. Still, they saw fit to recriminate me for my interest in ‘foreign’ traditions, and demanded that I abandon them by their crude actions and reprimands. They had, however, no alternative to offer. They had never offered a tradition themselves. Not even as a family did we have ‘roots’. Other families were known for this or that trait, or some story or anecdote, or even some achievement. My own tribe was a blank. Was it then so strange that I had felt the need to try and go looking for an identity? With time they became more demanding, of my attention, of my time, but I truly did not understand what exactly they were offering in return. My brother, for example, had always lived a parallel existence, uninterested in my parents or even me. He never included anyone in his jealously guarded privacy. This privacy extended to everything, even friends; even when those had first been my friends. But he arrived one day and claimed them for himself, in the process leaving me behind. At home he was silent, surly, always a sly smile on his face as if he knew something we didn’t, as if he pitied us. But there was never an indication that I could participate in this knowledge. In short: he had never, to my recollection, behaved as an older brother should. My surprise when he started demanding some of my time in a couple of unexpected HiveMessages was acute. Busy with other things, fighting my deep-seated anxieties, I did not reply immediately to them. This was a source of anger for him, and when he saw me next he reprimanded me. I could not understand: he had shown no interest in me in the past, and therefore, as an adult, my life was organised around other things and people. Carving out time and space for him now would be extremely problematic; some of the things I had fought so hard to obtain would have to be left behind.

  I was uninterested in this version of a tribe, or a ‘family’, in which some had to swear allegiance to others without getting anything in return. I did not desire to have a family at any cost to my sanity: for I imagined there should be some reciprocity in the basic traits of respect and understanding. What I was eager for was to start a family of my own.

  * * *

  I should have realised the impossibility of this, how much I was lying to myself. I was hoping to form a bond with someone who viewed me with mistrust, who belonged to the world of the surface, with all the difficulties this implied. I had not been entirely honest with Pearl, either; for there was some truth in the suggestion that, at times, we ‘staged’ assaults by the forest in order to move settlements and people. This, however, was only done to my knowledge in areas that our prediction algorithms told us were at risk, and so they were an exercise in protection, in adaptation to our environment, a necessary cull.

  Would she believe me if I explained this to her? I truly did not know.

  None of this was shown to me more clearly than on the day when a letter was delivered to her by hand. Why that woman decided to write I would never understand; for the shock of coming to see her would have resonated much further. But a letter she wrote.

  Pearl vanished for most of the afternoon, and only later I realised this absence must have been connected with the unexpected arrival of the post.

  When I noticed Pearl’s absence, I asked the servant girl if she had seen her. She said no.

  ‘Can you please ask Savina?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask her yourself? Savina is leaving.’

  I went looking for the woman. She was in the process of gathering her few possessions.

  ‘Why are you leaving?’

  She looked at me with disgust. Eventually, she spoke.

  ‘I don’t like you, and you don’t like me; and I don’t like what you do to the little bird every night.’

  At first I did not discern her meaning. I still had not got used to the way they spoke down here. Then it suddenly hit me, and I felt my cheeks reddening in anger and shame. Pearl had told me that her family called her little blue bird when she was a child on account of her dyed hair. How this woman had the insolence to refer to our intimate life was beyond me, but I had no intention to remain silent.

  ‘She is my chosen companion. I am her chosen companion. And it is none of your business.’

  She looked at me, smiling oddly. I knew it would kill Pearl to see her go, and I had gone to find her with the idea of asking her not to; but now I could not wait until I saw her disappear: from the house, from our lives. It was true that she had brought Pearl up; it was also true that she had made her scared about so many things as well, presumably to keep her under her power.

  ‘Lie down, lie, little jeré; enjoy your days and your nights. But the murí will never be yours, for this is her house! The bengué will come to
find you, and prevent you from taking her up to that place of death!’

  I left that horrid place, and went into the forest, deep, deep into it, until I thought I recognised the way to the pond. I walked alone for a while in that hostile place, a reckless thing to do, no doubt; not finding anything, not finding my way, not finding Pearl either.

  Eventually, I found myself back on the path to the house; I have no idea how I managed it. Dusk was falling. Soon it would be our dinnertime. I got in, and was surprised to see that the table hadn’t been set. I could not smell any food being cooked, so I went out into the kitchen shack. The fires were out, and everything was packed away. I started panicking a little. I went back into the house, and everything was so quiet, so still; the dark was getting inside now, and the wooden furniture was getting lost in its shadows. Where were the servants? The smiling girl, the old man? Had they left with Savina?

  Had Pearl left as well?

  I remembered the letter then. What did it contain?

  I went into her bedroom, and I found her sitting there, in front of the heaviest piece of furniture in the whole house, a very old looking-glass. This had been her mother’s room, and I knew it made her sad. She looked at me through the mirror’s reflection but did not turn to greet me. Her face was a serious mask.

  ‘Pearl, whatever is the matter? Where are the servants?’

  ‘I told them to leave,’ she said. Then she got up slowly, walked past me and, without saying anything, put a piece of paper in my hand: the letter she had received that morning. My first reaction was that someone must be sick, perhaps Mr Vanlow, perhaps her school friend, Laurel, who had been at our wedding.

  ‘Is everyone all right?’ I asked. But she did not reply, and went and sat on the bed instead.

  I read the letter, I read it as quickly as I could; and then I had to start reading it again. For I could not make out its meaning the first time. It was very hot, and I had no light. I moved towards the window; but dusk was falling quickly now, so quickly…