The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

I didn’t say anything. I was thinking instead: because I must! Because I need to help Eli. Because I need to know what is going on up there. I need to see it, only then will I be able to tell the story as it needs to be told.

  Perhaps she had read my mind; for she said nothing for a few seconds, but eventually got up, with much sighing and head-shaking, and went out into her herb garden. I followed her, and looked at what she did from the threshold. Some vine that hadn’t been properly cut was spreading to one of the beds, and she took a machete that was stuck in a stump, and cut it with a dextrous movement. Then she collected some herbs. She also took a toad from somewhere and brought it back inside.

  ‘There, child,’ she said, instructing me to go into her bedroom.

  It was half-dark in there; in a corner I could see some little orange feathers. They made me think of the pigeon that I had found in the cabinet room at Benguele, but also of the hare, so many years back. The sensation of crunching her brains had never left me, the triumph and disgust mixed together. Had Savina used some little orange-feathered animal previously, in some of her recipes? Was she right when she asserted that they were only medicinal? Was there no suggestion of anything unnatural in them? The little orange feathers made me shiver, and I looked the other way.

  We both knelt in front of the stove by the wall, and she put a little stone bowl on top with some water. As soon as it started to boil, she threw her ingredients in; the toad she pulled apart with her hands, then and there, and removed its insides, all the while singing her little words, that she had been so sure were not incantations. The concoction inside the bowl smelled fetid. She said:

  ‘To do what you want, you must drink this. I will let you decide. But there is no turning back from this, child.’

  And with that she left the room, leaving me alone.

  * * *

  Everything went black then. But when did it go black, exactly?

  I am back in the Registry, still have time to go for a walk in the quad before we need to report for the night. I come out and find myself next to the slope at the back of Gobarí, the one you take to go up to the mountain. I walk down the slope, and follow the path until I reach the middle of one of the clearest meadows in the whole of Gobarí. I see machines bringing up the earth with huge metal forks, but I am not sure I understand what they are doing. I see young men and women dressed in ceremonial robes.

  The meadow has become a yellow expanse of wheat, one of the crops that Eli is growing, until it ends abruptly in rocky formations, small ranges, as it gives way to the beach.

  Until that moment I thought I knew that spot well.

  If I turn, a brief ante-forest, pine mostly, and Venus flytraps, and other things as well. At that end, the eucalyptus bushes.

  I have been here on countless occasions, normally to harvest a little from the eucalyptus. I am familiar with the landscape. But now I cannot see exactly where the meadow ends.

  I realise that I need to orientate myself a bit better, and look around. Where is the slope? Where can a mountain range, even a little one like ours, hide itself? The light has changed suddenly, as if the dark was gathering slowly, slowly, picking up consistency.

  I set off, and walk for a moment. I had decided which way to go. But then I see, all of a sudden, that I could be going the wrong way despite my careful efforts. I turn round, and look for something, anything. After recognising the shape of a rock, I walk there, never quite reaching it. The sierra looms over me. So it is there, after all. An eerie sense of dread, the anxiety of looking into an abyss. I start drowning in that anxiety, in that fear. A fat white cloud passes by, revealing a sky of pale blue, burnt blue that is almost white. The sun threatening to burn it all, and the light changing once more.

  Far away, the little red dot that I suddenly, urgently, know is Eli, flutters and shakes like a little firefly. She is perched on a rock, looking at me. Any moment now she will wave her hand at me in recognition. One, two, three… Any moment now.

  Behind her, the hare appears, looms over her figure; and I know, painfully, urgently, that I will not get there to save her in time

  I run towards her, but I find that I cannot climb the rocks and gradients as easily as I should. As if something were paralysing me.

  When I look back she is gone. There is no one there. I still run, up and up, falling, stumbling, bleeding from the palms of my hands, fiercely running over dangerous rock formations and gradients, until I get there. Once up, I have to remind myself to breathe, and I double over, hands on my knees, exhausted by the effort.

  There is a girl lying on the floor. Not Eli. Someone else. I crouch at her side: Verity, pale and beautiful at first, suddenly becoming grey and swallowed, as my brother had been. I take a branch, and I nudge her in the head. I know, at once, that she is already dead.

  20

  I notice I am being followed, oddly, by a bio-engineered bird, an old model with red, bionic eyes. The first time I see it, the bird is fluttering around me as I clean a section of benches in the piazza. At first I dismiss it with my hands, and continue working. Nothing makes me think that the bird is here for me.

  But it reappears, and I worry.

  I am on my ten-minute lunch break, and see it again while I hide in a darker corner, sucking avidly on a protein pouch. I haven’t had real food in so long, I dream often of Savina’s cooking. Postpartum pains come and go still, but this is the only time of day when I feel them, this and at night, when I am lying for a few hours trying to sleep among the coughs and the snores and the breathing sounds of my roommates. The rest of the time I am moving, moving, moving; working furiously in order to complete my allocated section on time. While I move, I have no time to think about any pain.

  Now, the bird reappears. And once it even scans me with its bionic eyes.

  I start shaking all over.

  It is probably time to pay for one of my many old crimes: the acts of de-accessioning, or, more probably, my connection to Eli. I will have to disappear into the hidden levels for weeks, find another job. And this one has been very hard to come by.

  * * *

  After I drank what Savina gave me, I woke up alone in my bed, back in Gobarí.

  I was in Savina’s home, now I was here.

  I took something, but I could not know if it had worked or not; or even worse, if Savina had tricked me. Whatever she gave me, it seemed to have given me strange dreams, nothing more for now.

  But why did she bring me here?

  That was not all she had done. She brought me here, to the last person I wanted to see. Why would she do that? Was this some obscene form of torture, of revenge? Next to me, Arlo sat in the semidarkness.

  I looked up and I saw his blue-eyed face with his soft flaxen hair and his curly beard.

  ‘Please leave,’ I said.

  Arlo moved backwards, his hands up in a gesture of surrender:

  ‘We need to talk. Please.’

  Why was he here? What did he possibly want to talk about with me? The end of time had finally caught up with us, signalled, among other things, by infertility up in the ring. Perhaps there were other things that went on that we were unaware of, even more terrible things.

  Just looking at his face made me gag with disgust. I wanted to hurt him, I wanted to hit him; but I had no energy left in me.

  ‘You are so sure of yourself, Arlo; all of you, up there. But don’t you see? Nothing lasts forever. What if the ring falls eventually?’ My words surprised even myself, for I had never thought of this possibility. But as soon as I blurted them out, I realised it was possible. Nothing was eternal, I had learnt that now. ‘What then? Everyone you love, everyone who means something to you, will die.’

  ‘Everyone I love is down here,’ he simply said.

  I was breathing with difficulty; recently I had felt so tired. It was probably what was growing in my belly, even then, after seeing Savina. As soon as I woke up I knew it: it was still inside me.

  ‘The ring cannot be destroyed anyway,’ he co
ntinued. ‘It is connected to the axis of the planet by gravitational geo-engineering; if the ring falls, or if it is destroyed, the planet will also be destroyed.’

  I considered this.

  ‘Well, perhaps that’s what should happen. Perhaps everyone should die. There is no point to us, to humanity, any longer.’

  ‘We are all equally guilty, all of us up there. Your friend is right.’

  ‘My friend?’

  ‘Eli. That letter she wrote. She was right. But, don’t you see it, Pearl? She and her friends, they were the ones that put that bomb on the Barrier, the week before our union.’

  ‘You are being ridiculous.’

  I saw his face drop then. It was clear that he had expected another reaction to his big revelation; perhaps gasps of horror, screams of anger, and me telling him to take me away from there, to save me. But I wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. I knew well how the narratives of our world worked, I had seen the truth so clearly; and no, I didn’t want to give him that satisfaction. Besides, he was wrong. Eli might be a swimmer, but she wasn’t part of those acts of terrorism. She and her followers were growing food, not murdering people.

  Arlo sat back in the old wooden rocking chair. I felt momentarily sorry for him, for us, for what was growing inside me.

  But I loved Arlo as well, of course I did. I had fallen for him on the shores of the pond, as we read fragments from Gobarí’s remaining mildewed books to each other, books that had not been deemed important enough to be sold to the Registry, abandoned and untreated by any conservation machine, dearer to me exactly for that reason. I loved Arlo, a bit like I loved those books. I loved him because below his pristine ringer looks he was faulty, imperfect. He was real, somehow, even if he came from a place that I wasn’t sure was. I loved him, but I didn’t know if I would be able to love him forever, or even if I had space left for that love. He would not come with me where I wanted to go, where I needed to go. What was growing inside me… He must never know.

  ‘The ring, your beloved Upper Settlement, is an abomination.’

  ‘This place is no better, for all that you love it so dearly.’

  He was wrong: I hated it too. I thought I understood the surface, but I didn’t, not anymore. For me, it was filled with sorrow. I had lost everybody; I missed my mother and my brother terribly. And after finding out as much as I could about my father’s crime, things were still not clear. Murderer or not, I also missed him.

  Arlo approached the window, his back to me. Was he looking at the mountain range? Or at the sky, perhaps?

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘I am going to create prophecies. I am going to find things out and tell them. I am going to tell the story.’

  He looked at me, surprised.

  ‘Little Alira is going to fly up to the sky at last…’

  ‘Don’t call me that, it’s not my name.’

  Eventually, Arlo got up and left; left the room, the house, and I thought my life as well.

  * * *

  I was alone once more in Gobarí, exactly as I had been years ago, before departing for the Registry. I had taken from Benguele the images of my parents and my brother and me, and I was looking at us. The strange child, Verity, who had been my closest friend, and whom I hardly remembered, was also in them. I thought of the strange dream that Savina’s fake potion had provoked, instead of doing what it was meant to. Verity… Why could I not remember her?

  I knew then, with a strange finality, that my dream held the last key to the puzzle. For I should believe in my dreams, as Savina had said. In it, I had seen myself as if from above, attacking her. Had I hurt Verity, somehow, and that was what my father had been trying to cover up? The implications were horrible; but it certainly fitted the puzzle. Had there been an accident while we played together, in Kon-il, perhaps? Was her death my fault? And then my father had tried to cover it up, and was trying to escape the authorities with me, to keep me safe? And then, when we had been caught, had he tried to take the blame for whatever had happened? But what had happened, exactly? Why could I not remember?

  I fell into an uneasy sleep, and woke up feeling heavy-limbed and unrested. For the first time, I rejoiced in the child inside me; but only a little. I had no intention of growing very attached to something that would be born to this world to suffer.

  I decided it there and then, though. If it was a girl, I would call her Verity.

  The Fable of the Three Sisters

  There was once an old man who had three daughters: Vertina, Analetta and Florica, the smallest, and the one he loved the most. Their father was jealous of the sun, whose rays might burn their beautiful white skins, so he built them a house underground, spacious and luxurious, and so the old man kept his daughters imprisoned in a golden coffin. In these magnificent rooms they received the visits of suitors from all over the land, who came to them attracted by the legends of their pallid beauty. The visitors were all scorched, their skins dry and dark and red, thick and coarse, and all without exception brought news of the marvels of that desert world just outside their door.

  One day, their elderly father fell ill, but only Florica looked after him. Her two older sisters spent their time daydreaming about their suitors.

  When he was about to depart for the final desert, the old man called them to his bedside, and he made them promise him that they would never venture into the dangerous outside world. The two elder daughters agreed unwillingly; only Florica was true in her promise. That same night, the old man died, and the three sisters stayed sitting next to his corpse all night, although Florica was the only one who cried, for Vertina and Analetta only desired their underground penance to finish as soon as possible.

  And so it happened that one morning the two elder sisters decided they would go out into the garden outside of the entrance to their underground world, just to the garden. They did not wake their little sister, for they knew that she would not approve of the idea. So Vertina and Analetta tiptoed up the round excavated stairs, and eventually they opened the heavy door into the garden. The sun blinded them for a few minutes. Little by little they got used to that infinite light, and with tentative steps they inspected the garden; only, there was no garden. Outside, the desert stretched, impossibly hot under the sun. The two sisters were dressed in heavy drapes and skirts, and, for a moment, they had to struggle not to faint there and then.

  But the sisters did not know that their father, before he died, had asked the godmother of all, the lady in white, to look out for his daughters. So the lady in white, who knows it all, came flying down from the sky, and produced such a strong storm that the two girls disappeared in its blue light.

  When Florica woke and did not see her two sisters, she knew instinctively that they had escaped into the outside world while she was asleep. But Florica was pure of heart, and she hated to have to disobey the promise she had given her father. Eventually, with a heavy heart, she decided she needed to go out to find them.

  Outside, the lady in white who knows it all was waiting for her.

  ‘You, as well? How dare you break the promise you gave your father on his deathbed?’

  Florica said that she only wanted to find her sisters, and that she was very worried about them. The lady in white told her she must be punished for breaking her word.

  ‘You will come to my house, and you will work for me until I decide your punishment.’

  The lady in white made her climb into her magic, egg-shaped chariot, and they both went up and up until they reached the clouds. Finally, the chariot came down again in the middle of a grey and craggy moorland, where the lady in white lived.

  A whole year passed, while poor little Florica worked as a slave day and night for the lady in white. She got up early every morning and lit the fire, swept the floors, scrubbed the table, collected twigs for the evening fire, looked after the kitchen garden, mended her nice clothes; she had time for nothing else. But, given that Florica accepted her fate without ever complaining
, after one year the white lady said to her:

  ‘I thought I would keep you here ten years; but you have been very hard-working and I must let you go now.’

  The lady in white gave her a red velvet bag with three magikal stones: one would provide her with nutritious food every time she needed it; another had the power to open a magikal door wherever she asked for this to be done; as for the third one, the lady in white said that she could not remember what it did. Then she told her that once she left the wood, she should cross the steppe to the east, without losing view of a dark and tall mountain. At her peak, among the clouds, she would reach the place where Vertina was held.

  Florica walked for a whole day, and another, and another, and it seemed that she could never reach the mountain. The magiks of the first stone kept her provided with food every time she was hungry. One night, when she was especially tired, at the end of the first week of walking, she thought about using her magikal stone to transport her to the mountain; but something went wrong, and the door opened on the arid mountain slope. She went ahead.

  To give herself strength, Florica tried to remember happier days with her sisters, reading books to one another. Florica remembered one of her favourite stories, the adventures of a just and brave fighter who travels the land trying to avenge the murder of his beloved, until he himself dies, an old man. She wondered if this would be her fate.

  Everything was silent. She stepped over some particularly crunchy thing. Shells? Bones? Of little animals. Babies. Broken pieces of flint. Where was she now? An ossuary? A graveyard?

  ‘What are you doing here?’ A voice, ahead of her, hidden in the fog. Eventually, the figure of a wrinkled old woman with yellow teeth emerged.

  ‘Careful where you put your feet, child! If you break them any more, I won’t get any money for them!’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m looking for my sisters. I need to get to the fortress on top of the mountain.’

  ‘Really? Is that so?’ The old lady broke out laughing, laughter that soon mutated into coughing. ‘Don’t you know that if you cross this desert to get there, you never come back? It’s always been like this, and it will remain like this forever!’ she decreed. Then, to Florica’s surprise, she started singing: ‘Crossing the desert to get to the fortress. Crossing the desert to get to the fortress. One by one we all die…’