The Human Son

by Adrian J. Walker

  And when you slumber, I sit beside your bed and watch the dreams play out upon your face, awaiting your slow blink back into consciousness, ready with a smile of my own.

  Those dreams of yours. Those endless, hidden dreams. Dreams of things that could not happen and make no sense, and others that make perfect sense but still, like those books, did not happen. Entire fictions exist within your head, where coloured imaginary animals dance above your bed, and fish with great bellies laugh among the trees. Dreams of flight, dreams of swimming to great depths, and dreams of tall, faceless beings who stalk you in the night.

  You wake from these ones screaming and I grasp you to me, whispering ‘just a dream, just a dream, just a dream,’ though I have no idea what they are like, for I have never had one.

  The erta’s nightly processing routines are quite often accompanied by a semi-conscious awareness of colour, and shapes moving in abstract patterns, but rarely anything more. I have heard some speak of occasions when images and sounds shuffled into focus among the lights—a conversation that did not happen with somebody they hardly knew, or time spent in a dwelling that was not their own—but such phenomena were only temporary and never repeated.

  Yours are nightly, and seem to span the entire reach of your sleep. Once you woke whimpering and I pulled you close as usual. This time you were not frightened, but mournful.

  ‘They were falling,’ you said. ‘They kept on falling.’

  ‘Who?’ I said, stroking your brow. ‘Who was falling?’

  ‘All of them.’

  — TWENTY-SIX —

  MY MOTHER CAME to visit three days before your fifth birthday.

  ‘What is wrong,’ I said when I opened the door.

  ‘Do I need an excuse to visit you?’ she replied.

  ‘You have not visited for five years.’

  Her expression firmed.

  ‘You seem different at the council meetings. I decided to come and see why.’ Her eyes flicked to the corner of the room, where you were playing with your blocks. ‘And there he is.’

  ‘Come in, Mother,’ I said, and she did.

  She came a few more times, and I will not say these visits were without their challenges; I found myself cleaning more on the days she came, and as I did I ran through the conversations I suspected we would have—about Haralia; ‘Aren’t you pleased for her and Jakob? They are so very brave to be doing what they are doing,’ and, occasionally, about Jorne: ‘When will I meet this man of yours? It is perfectly natural, you know, Ima. I sometimes cannot believe you have lasted five hundred years without it.’

  ‘He is not my man,’ is my retort to this. ‘But he has been a great help.’

  This, more often than not, shuts her up immediately, which is good because I do not want to talk to her about Jorne. Not to her, not to Haralia. Not even to myself.

  One day we were sitting on the beach beneath a tree and watching you make hills in the sand. The incoming tide had already doomed each attempt to collapse, and each time it did, you wailed and stamped your feet and shouted at the sea, then rebuilt it in exactly the same position. This was when your outbursts were still very much in force.

  ‘He is all about himself,’ said my mother. I bristled at the satisfaction in her voice. ‘It is as if he thinks the world is for him.’

  ‘It is not his fault.’

  She turned.

  ‘Fault?’

  ‘Watch him,’ I said.

  You had abandoned your castle and now stood near the surf, fleeing from its approach and chasing its retreat.

  ‘This is what he has been given—a choice he does not know how to make. He has been placed upon a brink between what pulls him on and what pulls him back. Curiosity and fear. He is pulled in two directions at once, so his frustration should come as no surprise.’

  For a moment my mother was silent.

  ‘You have changed,’ she said at last.

  I looked at her, suddenly incensed.

  ‘Everything has changed.’

  I stood and left the shade of the tree, shielding my eyes to watch you. My mother followed.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What I say. Everything is different. Where there used to be agreement, now there is argument. What used to be purpose, now there is indecision. Where there was peace, now there is aggression. What used to be certain, now…’

  I broke off. You had tired of playing in the tide, and returned to your castle.

  ‘When he was born I was so sure. How could this thing that squealed and wriggled and soiled itself grow into anything as effective at existence as us? Then he grew, and his temper grew with him, and I thought the same as you: his ego will be the be the better of him. He will fail for sure. But now…’

  ‘Now what?’

  I turned to her.

  ‘He grows, while we wane.’

  She drew back.

  ‘How can you say that when we are making such progress with transcendence?’

  ‘Because I used to be able to hear spiders crawl within the Halls of Reason. Now it is filled with the sound of bickering. My sister—who once prevented species from extinction—speaks as if she has lost her senses. My settlement was once a place of safety, but my fellow villagers, who chased me from my dwelling with flaming torches, squabble like geese. Whatever progress we are making, we are deteriorating just as much.’

  She was quiet, lips shut.

  ‘I had heard about your villagers.’

  ‘From Benedikt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He has no right to spy on us.’

  ‘It is his job to be mindful.’

  ‘I do not trust him. It is obvious that he wants Reed to fail.’

  ‘Then perhaps it is just as obvious that you want him to succeed. I thought I had made it clear, Ima, that the erta should have no agenda in these matters?’

  ‘The erta should have no agenda in any matter, but apparently that is no longer the case.’ I scowled and muttered. ‘Or perhaps it never was.’

  ‘Whatever do you mean by that?’

  I paused, scanning her eyes as they danced between my own, searching for a trace of anything that lurked within. Fear, surprise, disappointment.

  Subterfuge.

  ‘Is there anything I do not know, Mother?’

  She huffed in amusement.

  ‘There is plenty we do not know. That is partly why we are transcending.’

  ‘I said “I”. By which I mean in comparison to you.’

  Her expression closed like a tall gate.

  ‘I do not know what you are talking about.’

  I turned away.

  ‘Why does Oonagh live in the mountains?’

  I counted the seconds of silence—4.832. When she spoke, her voice had shifted into a lower register. Her eyes were stern.

  ‘What a strange thing to say.’

  ‘It is only a question.’

  ‘One with no purpose but curiosity.’

  ‘What is wrong with being curious?’

  ‘Another strange thing to say. Erta are not curious.’

  The way she talked was like somebody exerting their will, rather than merely stating facts.

  ‘Is Oonagh male or female?’

  ‘Ima.’ I jumped at the snap. ‘Such questions are ridiculous. Stop them at once.’

  I folded my arms, burying my shaking hands, and looked back at you.

  She fell silent again.

  ‘Why do you think we have changed?’ she said at last.

  ‘It is obvious,’ I replied. ‘Before, we were concerned only with what was around us. Now we are concerned only with ourselves. Reed, however, travels the opposite path. Look.’

  I pointed at a pool of seawater, in which a crab was trapped. With gentle shoves, you guided it out and bore it to the safety of the shore.

  ‘What is he doing?’ said my mother.

  ‘Helping it. You see? He is not only about himself.’

  You turned and grinned at us, delighted with the
crab’s success. I had to bite back my pride.

  OF COURSE, IT is not all crabs, smiles and butterflies. You wreak daily chaos upon our dwelling, and I spend hours every day picking up and moving objects in your wake. But any balance I succeed in imposing upon our environment is almost instantly tipped. You do not wish to live in uncluttered space.

  And then there is the question of ‘why’. Why this. Why that. Why not. Why why why.

  ‘Why do frogs not have four jumping legs instead of just two?’ you asked one day in autumn at the riverbank near the top of the hill. It was cold and we had walked far. I wanted to return home.

  ‘Perhaps one day they will.’

  ‘You mean they will grow extra ones?’

  ‘No. It will happen slowly, over time.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that is how things evolve. Now stand up and let us walk home before it gets dark.’

  ‘Why do things evolve?’

  ‘So that things can get better. Come on.’

  ‘But things are all right as they are. Why do they have to get better?’

  ‘That is just how the forces of nature work.’

  ‘But why? Why don’t the forks of nature—’

  ‘Forces.’

  ‘Why don’t the forces of nature work by things staying the same? Or things getting bigger instead of better.’

  ‘Sometimes they do.’

  ‘What, get bigger?’

  ‘Yes. Occasionally bigger means better. Other times it means worse. Reed, it is cold, and—’

  ‘Will I get bigger, Ima?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will I be as big as you?’

  ‘Possibly not.’

  ‘You are very tall.’

  ‘I am. Now please—’

  ‘Why are there forces of nature?’

  This stopped me. I blinked and knelt down before you, so that our faces were almost touching.

  ‘Because the universe is a vast field of information with one goal and one goal only: to move that information from low potential to high potential. Once it achieves this goal, trillions of centuries in the future, its mysteries will be laid bare and it will have solved its own riddle. The quantum field of consciousness will be reunited, the dimensions will be compressed into a single point, and all will be pure awareness of everything that has ever happened and ever possibly could.’

  You looked up at me, quivering, with your mouth agape. A breeze whipped by.

  ‘Why?’ you said.

  Why is a question without end.

  Perhaps why is not a question at all, but an extension of your infant cry. Either way, I will never succeed in answering it, and neither will you.

  I sighed, lifted you onto my shoulders and walked us home, speaking more about frogs.

  AS I SAY, your condition has not worsened. In fact, your episodes have not returned, and every one of Payha’s tests reveal you to be an outwardly healthy boy. Sometimes it is easy to convince myself that they ever happened at all.

  But the increase in your movement and the ensuing chaos brought its own challenge—injury. You began to fall almost daily, each time incurring a fresh cut or bruise. Sometimes you bled more blood than I knew what to do with, and your pain was difficult for me to bear.

  So Payha taught me how to make medicine.

  From a precise mixture of tree resins, fish kidneys, lichen and eighty-seven other ingredients gathered from the surrounding woods and waters, we formulated an ointment. Though rough to look at (not to mention smell) it works magnificently, acting as both a pain-reliever and a healing catalyst. Gone were the tears and the blood. Gone was my misery at your pain.

  The erta have never required such things, and outside of the Halls of Gestation, there are no laboratories in which to study the onset of death. Our own bodies are laboratories in themselves; deadly fortresses defended by armies of self-replicating nano-mites and constantly evolving immunity engines imbued with a single goal: to kill anything that tries to breach their walls. In my lifetime I have endured seventy-eight serious viral attacks, twelve instances of bowel disease and four bouts of cancer, and never felt a thing. And then there have been the strokes, the heart attacks, the countless broken limbs… if an erta faces one certainty it is that her death will be a violent, catastrophic event.

  But I had no idea how soon I would be reminded of this certainty, for the planet, it seemed, was just as hell-bent on chaos as you.

  — TWENTY-SEVEN —

  THE NIGHT BEFORE it happened I tucked you in and endured the usual volley of bedtime questions. Your brain was rarely willing to relinquish its grip upon the day, and squeezed at it, trying to extract as much information from it as possible before sleep took hold.

  ‘Why do we have two moons?’

  ‘Why does the little one not float away?’

  ‘Why does the river go down our hill and not up it?’

  ‘Where is my wind song?’

  You were right to question the absence of your wind song, for even on the calmest nights the eaves made low whistles. But tonight there was silence. It was unusually calm. The sky was clear, the sea lay flat, and the sounds of the forest’s various nocturnal animals were either muted or entirely absent. This should have been a warning in itself.

  ‘Sometimes the weather is elsewhere,’ I said.

  Having settled you, I went to sleep in the warm peace. When I awoke, the Earth was screaming.

  ‘Reed,’ I said, sitting bolt upright in bed. The wind was howling through the eaves, and your song now screeched in unison as the shutters rattled and rain lashed the windows. You were already sitting up, rubbing your eyes in the light of the candle I had left burning.

  ‘What’s happening?’ you mumbled.

  Someone was hammering on the door.

  ‘Ima!’

  Jorne.

  I jumped out of bed and pulled on my boots and rain cloak, then opened the door. It was still dark, and Jorne stood there wide-eyed, rain streaming from his hood.

  ‘Get Reed, we must go,’ he said. ‘It’s a hurricane.’

  There is no earthly way, I thought. The coastline upon which we lived had become one of the most peaceful and predictable areas on the planet. That is why we had chosen it. The temperature of the ocean and the protection of the mountains prohibited anything stronger than a weak gale from blowing through our settlements once every seven to ten years, and the kind of intense compression of energy required for something like a hurricane was inconceivable.

  Beyond our porch the tree canopies whipped violently in the wind, and the river had become an engorged torrent thundering at its banks. Eastward, a rim of light strained upon the horizon—the dawn squashed beneath a gigantic black spiral—and huge waves heaved upon the beach, clawing at the shifting sand.

  A violent gust sent the trees across the river into a sudden backward arch. Ripped clean from its trunk, a particularly large branch flew towards us. Jorne and I ducked as it hit the roof, breaking through the planks and sending splinters flying in all directions. You howled from inside, but before I could run to help, the tree to which the branch had once belonged gave a terrible creak.

  ‘Get down,’ yelled Jorne, covering my head. With a hideous groan the tree was wrenched from its roots and fell across the river, its canopy crashing upon us.

  I scrambled from Jorne’s arms and ran to your bed. You were fully awake, mouth agape and staring up at the gnarled finger of wood that now hovered above you. I gathered you up, wrapped you in your cloak and led you outside.

  ‘We need to find somewhere less exposed,’ I said.

  Jorne nodded. ‘Follow me.’

  We clambered over the fallen tree and made our way up the track, now slippery with mud. But as we climbed I heard voices below. Shadows ran to and fro across Fane’s circle, and voices called out in alarm. The storm-charged waves had breached the tree line and now hammered upon the dwellings nearest the shore. The lagoon was already flooded, and I watched as my own old dwelling lost its ro
of, and another beside it. The wave that had wrought the damage retreated, and I saw two figures dragged out in its foam. Then, two shapes darted from a dwelling on the opposite side of the square, one of which I knew very well. Haralia and Jakob stopped at the devastation before them. Holding one other, they turned and ran from the shoreline. But another wave was already in flight, towering above the settlement like a cliff-face ready to crumble.

  ‘Haralia!’

  The water fell and for a moment I lost sight of them. I left you with Jorne and staggered down the path, straining to see.

  ‘Ima, come back.’

  ‘We have to help them,’ I said.

  ‘There’s no time.’

  ‘We must. Haralia!’ I called again, but all was foam and mud and chaos. I had reached the fallen tree, which was now being slowly claimed by the rising river, and broke through its branches, ignoring Jorne’s cries and the cuts in my hands and face. There was a distant whinny, and silhouettes of horses reared in the paddock below. One had jumped the fence and bolted. Another followed, but caught its hooves and landed with a sickening crunch upon the ground, where it struggled for a moment and lay still.

  The water retreated and I scanned Fane’s circle. Jakob was lying face down, clinging to a post, with Haralia holding onto his leg. They did not move. Eventually my sister’s hand relinquished its grip upon her lover, and her prone and lifeless body swayed left and right in the retreating tide.

  ‘No.’ The word departed in a weak breath. My heart seemed to stop. I felt myself collapsing, folding up inside like a dying insect.

  I had not known death before, nor had I worried about it, for the simple reason that to worry about anything beyond one’s control is an exercise in madness. But I knew it now. It was here, rising like one of those terrible waves, ready to fall and crush me.

  Jorne arrived at my side with you in tow.

  ‘Ima, we cannot stay here.’