When they reached adulthood, they were called to the valley ports where their mothers and fathers, now grey and sated of their drive to raise young, waved them off on their journeys to assist the rest of us in our task to balance the planet. They were given only basic jobs, their natural docility and sheltered upbringing rendering them even more useless than those curious humans whom I am led to believe elected to help instead of rest.
Twice each year they returned home to visit their doting parents. And when those parents finally died, they were allowed to follow, swiftly and without protest.
You may as well call them robots. The term is as good as any other.
‘WE WILL HAVE to make some more, of course, to provide other children with which the human can interact and learn. It will be a fine test of its social behaviour.’
‘You wish me to make them too?’
‘No, leave that to us. We will ask for volunteers to foster them when the time is right. You concentrate on the human.’
‘Very well,’ I said, rising from my seat. ‘Then I shall begin at once.’
My mother’s hand stopped me.
‘Ima, you do understand: this is a species we are talking about. Whether their resurrection is to be considered further will depend entirely upon this child’s life.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘Therefore, it must behave naturally. It must not be aware that it is different to you, or any other erta. Shows of superior strength or intelligence are likely to confuse it.’
‘You are asking me to behave like a human? I am sure I would not know how.’
She stood and faced me. We are the same height, my mother and I, although her skin has aged a little more and her hair is auburn, whereas mine is the colour of new hay.
‘Behaving like humans is the last thing I want any of us to do, my child. But for this to be a fair experiment, we must rein in the attributes which elevate us from them. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘It should not be too difficult. Our purpose is fulfilled. All we need to do is live peacefully until we are ready to transcend.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
I turned to leave, for I was eager to begin, but she stopped me again.
‘Ima, whatever you do, you must not impose your own agenda upon the outcome of the project.’
‘I have no agenda, Mother, other than the desire to seek clarity and truth. Like all erta.’
These pauses of hers. Entirely unnecessary. Eventually she smiled.
‘Well, then,’ she said. Two words as useless as her sighs, blinks and pauses. ‘Then you have a new purpose, Ima. Go and fulfil it. We shall all be watching.’
‘Thank you, Mother.’
‘And Ima, look to your sister for assistance for you are quite right; her expertise may prove valuable to your preparation.’
I bowed, left and set to work in the Halls that very afternoon.
I KNOW HOW this will end for you. I meant what I said to my mother—I have no agenda. I serve only truth and reason, and my purpose now is merely to provide the necessary data for my species to make an informed choice about humanity’s resurrection.
Nevertheless, nine months later and here I am watching you scream and wriggle upon my bed, already feeling my body’s nervous system rail at the sound. It is clear to me. I already know.
There will be no choice to make.
— FIVE —
MY DWELLING IS identical in shape and size to every other dwelling in every ertian settlement. It is a single-storey house made from precisely-cut timber and stone, with an oak roof, two windows and a stove. There are three rooms; the first a small toilet, the second a wood store, and the third a living area furnished with bed, chair, and table. At the front wall a small kitchen looks out upon a perfect stone circle, one of which gleams in the heart of every ertian settlement.
The dwelling, the circle, the settlement—all are bright and spotless, and perfectly symmetrical, like all ertian things.
At this time of year, the sun’s first rays as it clears the rocks south of the cove shine directly through my kitchen window and fall upon the table, so that, for a short time—two minutes and thirty-seven seconds today, a period which will decrease daily as summer approaches and both Earth and sun move through space—the room is filled with nothing but the brown shadows of wooden objects surrounding a single rhombus of bright amber light. The rhombus contracts and extends as the sun climbs, and my settlement wakes up.
Our entire population, all 111,110 of us (ignoring Oonagh who lives in the mountains) inhabit the northerly coastline of what had once been known as a country. Countries were areas of land defined by coasts and rambling lines called borders, which were generally the product of bloody argument. Like almost everything else in human history, these borders were figments born in the minds of those who had survived the argument, and believed in by those who sought not to repeat it.
This particular country was known as Sweden, and we gravitated here almost a century ago when our work began nearing its completion and travel became less frequent. It was chosen because it had been Dr Nyström’s home and therefore our place of origin, but also because of the seasons, which are predictable and distinct. It is pleasantly warm in summer but not too humid or dry, and cold in winter but not wet. Winds are infrequent. Rain is gentle. The sea is cool and calm.
It was not always like this. The planet’s climate, rebalanced as it may be, is different to how it had been when we arrived. This place we call home was not always so temperate, and could often be harsh.
We live in seventy-five settlements, each separated by a distance of no less than half a kilometre upon a wide chalk road. This road is cut into a forest we planted some three hundred years ago, and traces an exact logarithmic spiral from its southern coastal tip to its centre high in the hills. The formula it describes you would have once referred to as ‘golden’, and I have often considered this as I travel its slow arc. There is nothing golden about it, for gold is rare and largely useless, whereas the mathematics of this shape are not. Only a distracted or confused mind would call it thus.
Our seventy-five settlements were named after places which were once homes to humans, picked at random from the atlas as it had been during those final years of human existance. Hamlets, towns and megatropolises, now long gone but which once had their own fictitious borders and names: Oshino, Anchorage and Dundee.
Although, of course there is no such thing as random. Everything is predictable, given the right data.
Each has a population of exactly 148, this being the optimum number of erta who can comfortably self-organise together. Any less and efficiency is sacrificed. Any more and decisions become clouded by the abundance of data, although as I have said, disagreements between erta such as the one between Greye and Caige are almost unheard of. For this reason, shortly after we settled here movement between settlements became strictly monitored, such that any erta seeking to spend longer than a day outside their own settlement would require a temporary replacement from their destination. This has rarely required enforcement. We understand the risks, the same way we understand deep-sea currents, and glacial flow, and the migratory habits of swallows.
At the exact centre of the spiral, and 437 metres up into the forest, sits Ertanea. This is the seventy-fifth settlement, home to the High Council and the three halls: Reason, Necessity and Gestation. It is a capital of sorts, with some buildings reaching three storeys.
Twelve-and-a-half kilometres south of Ertanea, bordering a long, tree-lined beach, lies the settlement of Fane. It is shadowed by a jagged cliff, and has been my home for almost eighty-two years.
I was talking about the sun, and how it rises above this cliff. On your first morning, like every other, I watched the amber rhombus appear upon the rough wood surface of my table, and noticed that you had fallen asleep. So I left you like that, lying still upon the bed, and went outside for some air.
Jakob was still there, chopping wood acros
s the circle. I raised my face to the sun and closed my eyes. Your birth and my journey home had taken half the night, and I was fatigued. No matter, I thought. I would go to bed early that evening.
I took a long, slow breath as a breeze passed over my face. It was cooler than the ambient temperature by some four degrees, suggesting a change in the weather later. Light rain, perhaps.
The sound of Jakob’s chopping had stopped.
‘Hello again, Ima.’
‘Hello,’ I replied, without opening my eyes.
‘Haralia is not awake yet.’
‘That is not a surprise. The sun is barely up. Why are you?’
‘I always rise early when she visits.’
Jakob is fourth generation, one of Greye’s descendants with an expertise in dendrology. I believe he spent a good deal of his life working in the equatorial rainforests. He has a slim torso and a long neck with a pronounced laryngeal prominence, a light beard and unruly hair. He has also formed a relationship with my sister Haralia, who lives in the settlement of Oslo, twenty miles away. The precise details of this relationship evade me and I have no desire for this situation to change.
It is not that I look down upon physical relationships, nor, like some, that I disapprove of those between different generations. It is just that I am yet to be convinced that such associations are anything but illusions; mere distractions now that we have fewer pressing matters to occupy our minds.
Personally, I have never felt anything more than intellectual kinship with another erta, or the mild genetic affinity between relatives, as I have with Haralia. She is the closest of my siblings in both bond and proximity. The remaining eight I rarely see, and are scattered between hillside settlements far away.
Until she and Jakob became close—and, again, I would question the accuracy of that word—I saw her once or twice a year. Now it is twelve times that amount.
‘I shall tell her you are here,’ repeated Jakob. ‘Once she is awake.’
‘As you wish.’
‘What are you doing today, Ima?’
I opened my eyes. Jakob was standing by his stack of logs, leaning upon his axe. The polished stone of its blade caught the sun and momentarily dazzled me. I shielded my eyes.
‘I think I shall walk on the beach,’ I replied. ‘Mark the tides. When it is dark later I will stargaze. There is a constellation I have not—’
Before I could finish, there was a commotion from inside my house. You had started up with your wailing again.
‘What is that noise?’ said Jakob, swivelling his axe.
‘I have to go,’ I replied, and went inside.
‘I shall tell her!’ called Jakob as I closed the door, but I did not answer, for he had already said that.
YOUR RIGHT ARM had come free from its blanket. It lolled uselessly to the side, spasming occasionally as if grasping for something inches above. I replaced it, but this made no difference to your mood and your face persisted in its grotesque parody of pain. Your eyes squeezed shut, your toothless black maw bent into a trembling crescent, and your screams filled the air, causing particular disruption to my left ear drum.
Perhaps you were hungry, I thought, and realised that, actually, I was. So I left you crying on the bed and went to my kitchen for herring. I ate three looking out of the window, watching Magda carrying a churn across the square. She is short for an erta, fifth generation, dark hair, full torso. She smiled at Jakob as she passed, then glanced at my house, craning her neck with a furrowed brow. Niklas emerged from his house and made his way to the well. His footsteps were slow and measured, the same way he talked. He looked over as he put on his cap.
Still you squealed behind me. The very air seemed to distort.
I ate one more herring and found a jug of goat’s milk in the pantry. With this I filled a bowl and took it to the bed.
‘Come,’ I said, leaning over you with a ladle-full of warm cream. ‘Drink.’
But you did not seem to know how. So I poured some into your open mouth. This did nothing to help. If anything, it only made you less happy.
With a splutter, you ejected the well of milk in your mouth onto the blanket. Haralia had woven this from horsehair earlier in the year and given it to me as a gift, so I was a little dismayed. However, I suppose you would have choked otherwise, so at least you were displaying some degree of self-preservation.
I offered you another ladle but you rejected it, pushing your wail to new extremes. In my surprise, I dropped both bowl and ladle upon the floor. The bowl broke in two and the milk spilled out into an oval puddle, its meniscus 4 millimetres from the ground. I stood back, stared at you, picked up the fragments of my bowl and went back to the kitchen for another herring.
At least my view through the kitchen window was not distorted by the sound of your cries. A mist rose from the stone around the well. The door to Jakob’s dwelling opened and Haralia skipped out, placing a kiss upon his cheek as she passed him. He watched her as she crossed the circle. Her gait is different to mine. Her hips are wider and the bones rotate as she walks, causing her buttocks to sway, and I can only imagine that it was this phenomena that Jakob gazed at as his wood remained unchopped.
Haralia let herself in.
‘Good morning, Ima,’ she said to me, though her eyes were on you. ‘My goodness. Is this the child?’
I swallowed the last of my herring and we both stood above you.
‘Yes.’
‘What gender?’
‘Male.’
She smiled and nodded, as if she had guessed as much, which she could not have.
‘He is upset.’
‘He has been crying since the sun rose.’
‘Has he fed?’
‘I tried goat’s milk but he would not take the ladle.’
‘He needs a teat.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Like a nipple. Mammalian infants suckle.’
I looked at her full bosom, then down at my own more modest chest.
‘But… erta do not produce…’
‘Not you, sister.’ One half of Haralia’s mouth drew into a smile. She is so much more prone to joy than I. ‘Wait here.’
She left and returned some minutes later carrying a clay bottle, the end of which was fashioned into a small bulb. There was a hole halfway down, stopped with a cork. She handed it to me.
‘I kept this from my time in Argentina. It was used for orphaned lambs. Fill it with milk, please, will you?’
I watched her as I filled the bottle, sitting with you in the crook of her arm. In her lifetime, Haralia has successfully overseen the reintroduction of several hundred thousand species of mammal, reptile, insect, fish, crustacean and bird. Now that the ecosystem has found balance, she, like everyone else, has no need to continue her work. She rarely engages with animals now, apart from horses, which she adores.
I handed her the bottle and she offered it to you. You sucked at it immediately, eliciting a tubular sound from the vessel, a conglomeration of sine and square waves which decreased exponentially in pitch as it ran dry. Something darkened in Haralia as she watched your contented suckling. The subtleties of facial expressions often evade me, and before I could decode this one she took a deep breath and shook it off.
She looked up and gave me a frown, without appearing serious. She can do this, my sister; cast joy within the same look as scorn.
‘I had expected you to be more prepared, Ima.’
‘I am perfectly prepared.’
‘But you did not know it would need a teat to feed.’
‘And now I do.’
‘Only because I told you.’
‘Yes. For which I thank you, but I would have deduced it nonetheless.’
‘Still, Ima, did you perform no research?’
‘No I most certainly did not.’
If there exists any exchange which better highlights the differences between my sister and I—or at least the propensities required of our respective disciplines—then I cannot think of
it. My purpose in the sky required no research. I knew implicitly the chemical laws by which Earth’s atmosphere is bound, and likewise Haralia held the information of every species of animal that lived beneath it. However, whereas I perfected my knowledge through application, the sky offering up its secrets freely as I gathered my data, Haralia instead elected to perfect her own through theory and study. As I read the sky, so she read books, and in the early years of our lives I would occasionally happen upon her studying her great tomes by the light of a sunset, with an expression on her face that may have passed for rapture.
She found these books in human libraries. Your species delighted in maintaining these vast archives of information, which detailed everything from the width of a gnat’s wing to the colour frequencies of distant constellations. And why? Because this information was difficult for you to capture, so you kept it and locked it away, as you did with all things precious to you.
This is, to put it mildly, a crude approach to building an understanding of the universe. Things change. New data arrives all the time. Therefore your stockpile of information required maintenance, at great cost to you and your footprint. And we have already discussed footprints. The libraries and their books were disposed of when the humans had departed, along with everything else they had created. There was no longer any use for them.
I was aware that I had just scoffed at my sister, so I moderated my tone.
‘Even if I had wanted to conduct any… research, I could not have done. Apart from their genetic code and the basics of their biology, all recorded data was allowed to die with them.’
‘You could have asked me,’ said Haralia, quietly.
‘Mother did suggest that.’
‘Then why didn’t you?’
‘You have been somewhat distracted these past months.’
I looked at the kitchen window to bolster my point.
She smiled, and her face flushed. ‘Oh. You mean with Jakob. Well, I cannot deny that we have been—’
The Human Son Page 3
