‘You are upset. Why?’
He made a frustrated growl and hurled his pebble into the sea.
‘You’re impossible.’
He turned, but I grabbed his shoulder before he could storm off.
‘Difficult is not the same as impossible,’ I said.
This brought a slow, unwilling smile, which I was glad to see. He shook his head at the sand.
‘I watch you too, you know,’ he said.
‘I know you do. Why?’
He looked up, the smile becoming something else.
‘Apart from the fact that I enjoy it, Ima, I watch you because most of the time, when I do, you are watching him, and when you watch him I see something in you. It is the same thing I saw in Thomas, and in the rest of them on the boat every day.’
‘What is it you see?’
‘There are no words for it.’
I searched his face.
‘I don’t know what you want from me. I don’t know what you want me to say.’
‘I want you to say what you wish for, what you hope for. And I want you to admit that he means more to you than just data.’
I looked past him, along the lip of that gigantic sea upon which you splashed, innocent to its depths.
I opened my mouth, preparing to say that I wished for nothing, and that data was all that there was. At that moment, this may or may not have been true, but then something happened that shattered all doubt.
In chemistry there is such a thing as a transition point, the moment at which one state becomes another, when the chaos churning beneath the surface suddenly explodes and shows the world its intent. This is common to all chemical reactions, whether they occur in test tubes, planetary atmospheres, or hearts. And if my relationship with you, Reed, can be viewed as a chemical reaction, this this was our transition point.
A beam from the setting sun shot through a waving palm and struck your face. Your skin appeared orange as a flame, and your eyes reflected the light in such a way that it made them appear to be lights themselves, each one gleaming with… with what? With life. With hope. With possibility. That is how it seemed, and my body, which had been at relative peace, suddenly filled with the exact same light. I appreciate how ridiculous this sounds, but that is the only way I can describe it.
My body filled with the exact same light.
Then the moment shifted again.
You looked directly at me, and you had done so many thousands of times before but never like this. My muscles tightened, my belly too. My heart lost its rhythm, the air caught in my throat, I could not blink, could not breathe, and in this state I remained, a prisoner to your eyes, watching helplessly as you threw up your arms and ran to me, calling my name.
Without thought, I gathered you up and as the warmth of your small body rushed into mine, all at once I could breathe again, and think, and startle at the taste of my own tears.
I turned to Jorne, and his smile was as crooked and full as ever.
‘What do you feel?’ he said.
‘There are no words,’ was my reply. ‘Please help him.’
He put his hand on my shoulder.
‘I’ll take you to Payha. She will know what to do.’
— TWENTY-FOUR —
‘WHAT IS SHE doing?’
I stood beside Jorne in the corner of a warm room, dimly lit and uncluttered, as Payha inspected you upon a bed. Hers was one of fifty-three stone dwellings in the Sundran village to which Jorne had led us, higher and deeper into the forest than I had ever been before. She had deep brown skin, cropped hair, a slender neck and was quite beautiful, if a little rugged.
She had a smile for Jorne when she opened the door, but it vanished when she saw me.
‘Payha,’ said Jorne. ‘Can you help us?’
I held you up, asleep in my arms, and her animosity fell away at once.
‘Is that—?’
Jorne nodded, and she took us inside.
‘Payha was a medical expert,’ Jorne confided. ‘A doctor. She helped eradicate disease from the Utopian Hills, and worked at sea, nursing humans who became ill. That’s where we met.’
‘You have known her for a long time, then.’
‘Yes.’
She began by performing a brief investigation of your upper orifices, during which time you sat still, doing as she asked. Occasionally she would stop and offer you a smile, but it was a terrible thing, like somebody having their lips pulled back by callipers. You smiled back, but I could tell you were unnerved.
‘Why is she doing that?’ I whispered to Jorne.
‘It’s called “bedside manner”. Payha told me it settles the patient.’
‘It’s terrifying him. Please tell her to stop.’
Payha produced a small wooden box from beneath the bed. From this she produced a coiled tube connecting a silver pad at one end with two curved appendages. These she put in her ears, while the pad went on your bare chest. You jumped at the sensation of cold metal.
‘What is that?’ I said, stepping forward.
Payha turned at my advance, eyes narrowing again.
‘A stethoscope,’ she said. ‘For his heart.’
I stared at the instrument’s twisting pipe and crude, ragged lines.
‘But… that is a human object. It is contraband. Where did you get it?’
She stood, sharing a look with Jorne.
‘Do you want my help, or not?’ she said.
At last I nodded.
‘Then let me work.’
I returned to my place in the corner.
Payha then took a black rectangular object from the box, attached to a short tube ending in a disc.
‘This might feel a bit funny,’ she said, in a curious fluttering voice that disturbed you even more than her smiles. You jumped as she attached the disc to your arm, and it hissed.
‘Ow.’
‘There, there, said Payha, with another of her smiles. ‘Brave boy.’ She patted your head three times with a flat palm, a little harder than I would have liked.
‘Ow.’
Payha removed the disc and gazed at the box, stroking its screen as she read whatever was displayed upon it. Finally she stood and faced me, holding up the box for me to see.
‘This device was programmed to detect every condition affecting human beings in their last century of existence. I used it on the boats and in the hills to great effect. It detects nothing in the child. If he—’
She cocked her head.
‘Reed,’ I said.
‘If he has anything at all, then my best guess is that it is an extremely rare genetic anomaly, perhaps one which has never before manifested.’
‘That is impossible, I wrote the code myself. It was perfect.’
Payha raised her chin.
‘Jorne has told me of you. He says you repaired the sky, and are something of a hero—or were, at any rate. I don’t know why you were chosen for this task. You never spent any time with humans. You never knew them like we did.’
‘I know enough not to make hideous faces at them or wallop their heads when they are ill.’
Her eyes narrowed.
‘Payha,’ warned Jorne.
She shot him a dark look, but seemed to capitulate. ‘All I am trying to say is that perhaps we are not all as perfect as we would like to think.’
I turned to you, still shirtless on the bed.
‘Can you help him?’ I said.
‘I can run more tests, but my equipment is limited, and even with a full diagnosis, the chances are he would need some kind of transplant, which would of course require another human, and…’
She stopped talking, and I realised I was still staring at you. I blinked slowly away, noticing her frown.
‘You care for him, don’t you?’ said Payha.
I nodded, still dazed by it all.
‘Then I will do what I can,’ she said. ‘But my experience with human illness has taught me that often these things have to get worse before they can get better.
The best you can do is hope.’
LATER, IN OUR dwelling, I watched you sleep by the light of the stove. I made tea, taking more care than usual to arrange the leaves in the pot, and allow the water to settle to the correct temperature before pouring. The green fronds unfurled, and the steam rose in grey snakes, and I thought of Payha’s talk of hope.
Hope. Was this the same as prayer? Was this what Roop had been doing upon that pier? And those people on Jorne’s vessel with their trinkets and gestures, and the hundred billion more before them, stooping, kneeling, clasping their hands, and crying in the dark for a creator who would never come? Was this what I was supposed to do?
No, I thought. I will not cry for help in the dark.
But when you cry for me, Reed, I will come. I will come for you every single time.
FIVE YEARS
— TWENTY-FIVE —
PAYHA HAS, SO far, been wrong; things have not yet worsened. But they have changed—more in the last two years than in the last two centuries.
For a start, Payha and I are now friends. Her icy demeanour did persist for some time after our first meeting, during the weekly visits I made with you up to the Sundran village (for which they have no other name than “home”). After one such visit, when we were outside watching you play, I decided to challenge her.
‘You believe I have a sexual interest in Jorne,’ I declared. ‘And you do not like it because you have one too. I would like to assure you that you are mistaken.’
She turned to me, eyes wide. Then she laughed—a huge, open-mouthed laugh that seemed to take her by surprise as much as it did me. When she had finished, she faced me, still smirking.
‘Ima, I do not have a sexual interest in Jorne. I am more drawn to females in that sense.’
‘I see.’ This made sense, now that I thought about it. I had often seen her walking closely with a slender, faun-haired female. ‘That girl—’
‘Mieko, yes, we are friends. However, that does not mean that I do not care deeply for Jorne. We became very close on the voyages and I would not like to see him hurt.’
‘You believe I would hurt him?’
‘He cares for you.’
I paused, struggling with the curious sensation her words had given me.
‘He has been very kind to me,’ I said at last. ‘I would never choose to bring him pain.’
‘Good. In that case we can be friends. But Ima?’
‘Yes?’
‘The thing about which you believe I am mistaken—I am not.’
I found it easier to ignore these words than to dwell upon them.
THE COUNCIL MEETINGS grew more frequent, until every week the forests were filled with screeches announcing another gathering. Eventually the calls became unnecessary, and we went of our own accord. Each time I sought out Greye to ask him what he had meant the last time we had spoken, but he was rarely there, and the times when he was he left sharply, appearing distracted. The meetings themselves became ever more disorganised and fraught with disputes over foolish things, like how much power transcendence would require, or the order in which the settlements should be abandoned—simple decisions quarrelled over as if they were unsolvable riddles.
Fane, from which I found myself disassociating more and more, became rife with its own petty squabbles; about who should be maintaining the lagoon whilst all this work was to be done, who should be maintaining the dwellings, keeping the population in check, ensuring the water supply was clean—again, things which had not been difficult before, but which now rattled in every grumble and growl exchanged upon that stone circle beneath me.
Haralia changed too, and now spoke of nothing but her new purpose. ‘Aren’t you excited, Ima?’ she said during a rare visit to my dwelling. She clasped her hands. ‘Can’t you feel the gravity of it all?’
‘Gravity?’ I said, half-heartedly wiping a table.
‘It is as if—’ she looked up at the ceiling, bathed perfectly in a shaft of sun, as if waiting for the words to fall into her—’as if we are being pulled towards our destiny.’
I began to straighten the bedsheets.
‘Pulled towards our insanity, more like,’ I mumbled.
She looked hurt.
‘How can you say such a thing?’
‘With ease,’ I said, batting a pillow. ‘I mean, really, do you have a single clue as to what transcendence will actually be like? Does anybody?’
Haralia, glowing in that pure pool of light as if it existed just for her, dropped her chin and bestowed upon me her most patient, understanding smile.
‘I don’t believe it will be like anything, sister. I believe it will be exactly what it will be; a wonderful freedom, a limitless entity of love.’
I stopped batting the pillow and frowned at her.
“Gravity”, “destiny”, “believe”—these are words to be used when you do not know something. And “entity of love”? What does that even mean?
THE COUNCIL MEETINGS, Fane, Haralia—these were unsettling times, and rather than struggle with them I elected to withdraw and seek comfort in our hillside hermitage. And comfort in you, too.
Because you—you changed the most. I have witnessed glaciers drift and freeze, mountains crumble, ocean currents reverse and an ice age pass, but these feats have nothing on you. In two years you exploded like a supernova, or a fire flooded with oxygen, or a ripe cherry in the sun. Or like anything but what you were: a collection of cells in flux.
It is as if, for those first few years, you were not really here at all. You were an amorphous thing, like shapeless clay. You could not speak, you could not eat, you could not stand. You could not even carry the weight of your own thoughts, let alone your own body. You were helpless, barely alive.
But now…
Between three and four your gait matured. Gone was the stumble of the seasick sailor upon a lurching deck (like the ones I had seen once from my balloon, flying low over the northern Pacific) replaced with the confident stride of an animal who understands how the world fits together.
Speech came swiftly too. You began to repeat everything I said, until soon your mind had filled with language, and we could converse about everything from the importance of bumble bees to the shapes of clouds. I teach you new words every day, and correct you on your grammar. This is an increasingly frustrating exercise, since the rules, once their explanation is attempted, reveal themselves as obeying equal parts insanity and logic. The same is true of time or dates or almost every other convention to which your species clung in order to explain the world around them.
How did they manage to exist like this? I ask myself this often, and sometimes I see the answer in you.
You hear things that sometimes evade my own ears. One rainy afternoon I was outside breaking stone to lay a short path to the river, while you sat on the porch playing with some wooden blocks I had whittled for you. These are your favourite things, and you stack them in endless shapes throughout the day. You cannot sleep until you have tidied them into a special circle, in order of size, which you arrange beside your bed. This you must do every night—‘to stop bad things happening’, you explained to me.
You have developed your own rituals, I suppose. Like Roop.
You were stacking your blocks when you made a noise. You hardly seemed to notice it, so engrossed were you in your current attempt at a most precarious tower, but I dropped the rock I was shifting and stood straight up. I watched you, waiting. There it was again; four distinct pitches played in a pattern of five—rising, falling, rising, falling, rising—each made with the same dual vibration between larynx and closed lips that ululates the letter ‘m’.
I had heard humming once when I was very young, from the mouth of David the laboratory technician, as he checked my pulse with shaking hands.
‘What is that?’ I asked.
He jumped at the sound of my voice.
‘Dylan,’ he stammered, and scribbled upon his chart.
I had heard other music before too, fragments of i
t drifting up to my balloon whenever I happened to be skirting the Utopic Camps in the Andes.
You, however, had not.
I sat upon the pile of rocks and listened. You repeated the pattern, giving it free rein to evolve through all 1024 possible configurations, swapping a rise for a fall or repeating a different note here or there. I could not for the life of me determine its source. Even less could I explain how it had arrested me in this way. I was enrapt.
For days the four notes occupied my thoughts. They seemed to stick there in my head, asking the same question: where are we from? But I could not answer. I had never once made music with my mouth. No erta had, in the same way that no erta had ever drawn or painted or sculpted, nor crafted a wooden bowl and pulled strings across it to pluck, nor beat rhythms upon rocks and taut animal skins, nor blown through pipes.
Nor written lies to entertain.
These endeavours—though doubtless, from the mountain of recordings, paintings and books we had to destroy, vital to your species—were fruitless to us.
The notes were outside the register I use for speech. The same applied to Jorne. Had Haralia hummed to you during her brief attempt at care, five years before?
It took me a week to realise.
One morning the wind picked up, and I lay in bed, listening to it sweep in through the roof. There, at last, was the source: four distinct pitches, whistled through the eaves. You were humming the tune of the wind. A living, breathing simile.
I understand similes now. This is your doing, for you use them all the time. ‘This petal is like a face,’ you say, or ‘that mountain has fingers’, or ‘the river sounds like snakes and monkeys today,’ and to my bewilderment I see that these things are always true.
Something happened when you ran to me upon that beach. You appeared to me, and I have not looked away since.
When you are at play, I hover nearby awaiting the turn of your head, your smile’s flash and the after-rush of happiness it brings me. When something catches your interest, like bugs or worms or a stone you have not seen before, I engross myself in your engrossment, in the flickers of your face, the twitters and mumbles that escape your lips. The world is a game to you, and I want to play too.
The Human Son Page 14
