The Human Son

by Adrian J. Walker

‘You, of course.’

  I had only ever seen one drawing before in my entire life. It was in one of the books my brother Greye had given me in India, The Once and Future King, depicting the young boy, Wart, with both hands gripping the handle of the great sword, Excalibur, still lodged deep in the rock. I flinched from it then, as I did to yours now.

  This may seem strange to you, natural as I now know this compulsion to render flattened versions of objects upon surfaces is to you. But you must remember: by the time I came into existence, almost everything which humans had created had been destroyed, or, if it was made of polymers, compressed into the little moon. This included art of all forms.

  Those books Greye had given me, and that story of the unlikely king with its rough sketch of the pivotal scene, were some of the only remaining artefacts, and I felt no urge to look for more examples. Why would I? The human trait of curiosity was as useless as its impulse to write, sing and draw, and every bit as dangerous.

  This is how drawing was viewed: dangerous. There existed no better evidence of why human beings had failed than the mountains of art they had created in an attempt to decipher their existence. A trillion trillion marks etched in clay, canvas and memory chips time and time again over fifty millennia, everything from the fearful smudges made in dark caves to the lavish oil renderings of battles I had been told once hung in great halls, to the sketches of sweethearts and the ink needled into the skin of a loin-clothed hunter. Every human hand that had ever lived past infancy had drawn something. Each one was imperfect, each one a twisted reflection, each one proof that, no matter how hard humans tried, they could never understand reality enough to master it. And more than mere clumsiness, this misunderstanding had led to frustration, distraction, anger, blame, greed—everything that had led to their downfall.

  That is why it was dangerous.

  Homo sapiens’ one success was the erta, and the erta did not draw.

  I looked down at the mess of lines and shapes flung together on the paper. A tall figure looked back at me, unsmiling, with long hair sweeping out to one side. Its eyes were too big, but accurately proportioned, and one long-fingered hand held another smaller one, attached to a scruffy figure beneath. Both stood at sharp, odd angles to the ground, upon which there were jagged outlines of leaves surrounded by the occasional spiral—the wind made visible. Behind them were the rough shapes of clouds and mountains, and what I thought might be the sea.

  I loved it immediately.

  ‘And me,’ said Reed, pointing to it. ‘See?’

  My heart gave a tremor. Horror—not just because I knew what would happen if he presented such a thing at school, but because, within those hasty scrawls and careless marks, within the confines of the larger figure’s broken oval head and somewhere between the hooded eyes, crooked nose and smile less mouth, I swear I saw myself.

  I screwed the paper into a ball, eliciting from you a gasp of dismay.

  ‘Reed, never do this again, do you hear me? Never.’

  ‘But,’ you stammered, staring at my shaking fist in which your drawing was now squashed. ‘But why?’

  ‘It is wrong. It is not allowed, do you understand? Never do it again or you will be in extremely bad trouble.’

  You stared back at me, mouth quivering.

  ‘Do you understand, Reed? Never.’

  You nodded your head and we left for school, hurrying across the circle in stunned silence. You ran in without looking back and, when the classroom door had shut and I was sure there was nobody around, I unfurled my fist and flattened the paper. There we were: me and you, crude and perfect in the winter sun. I kept it in my balloon, and told no one.

  SCHOOLING OPENED UP your mind to the universe and all its fascinating riddles. Once, when we were walking in the forest, I believe I was witness to a revelation of sorts. It was late morning and the sun was reaching its zenith. We stepped into a clearing cut with a great shaft of orange light filled with dust and butterflies, their shadows flitting across the bracken beneath. You stopped and wondered at the scene, as did I, but then your mouth twitched with amusement, and you gave a frown. You swung to where I stood, raising your hands.

  ‘What is this?’ you said with a baffled grin. ‘How am I here? What am I?’

  I considered the truth; quantum vibrations in a fifty-seven-dimensional array of fields, but it was not what you wanted to hear. In any case, you were not waiting for a response. Instead you shook your head and laughed, and I laughed with you.

  What is this? What am I?

  I call these your Great Questions. And I am afraid they have no answers.

  YOU LEARNED NUMBERS too, and told me all about them. These conversations I found much easier to endure. It was through numbers, in fact, that I learned how to live with the lie, if not to love it. When you talked about letters and words, your eyes travelled from side to side along the table before you, tracking them as you would along a page and smiling as if you were watching a rodent scurry about its business. But as soon as you began speaking of numbers, your chin would lift and your gaze would rise to the ceiling where it danced about in wonder. The numbers were up there somewhere, glittering like stars, and you described them to me in endless detail.

  Sevens were yellow, threes were green. Eights and fours belonged in the mountains, fives, ones and nines beneath the water. One and two did not get on, because one did not want company and two yearned to be with five. Zero made you laugh. It was forgetful, and had no idea where it had come from or what it was doing there. Ten was special, a bright, benevolent overlord who looked after its realm of single digits beneath. All the numbers beyond it lived in wide, sunlit hills and tall mountains with snow upon their peaks.

  I listened, rapt, hands on my knees.

  You told me how you added numbers together. They fitted together like wooden joints, three and seven—already familiar by virtue of their similar colours—interlocking perfectly to make ten, one clicking onto nine like the last brick in a puzzle. Numbers, you explained, tessellated. This is perfectly true.

  Numbers are everything. It may feel as if they are an invention, some made-up grammar used to account for reality, but they are not. They were around long before erta, long before humans and long before the world. They exist beyond matter, beyond space, beyond time. All things—stars, mountains, atoms, words, letters, lies—break apart into numbers, and the universe itself is merely an array of quantum events, each one tessellating with its neighbour like a cloud of dust motes holding hands. So you were right to watch them dance with such wonder in your eyes.

  I sometimes forgot the lie when you talked in this way. Instead of sitting tight-lipped and nodding, waiting for you to finish, I allowed myself to talk back, agreeing with or correcting you. I longed to push you on, and often found myself babbling about quadratics, dimensional probability vectors, paradoxical calculus and the far realms of mathematics for which there were no words because they had not been discovered by humans before they died.

  One evening, in the middle of one such diatribe, I stopped to see you staring up at me, terrified.

  ‘What is wrong?’ I said, my hands still perched in the position I had adopted to illustrate my current point. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘You… you were screaming. It sounded like a bird.’

  I tried to restrain myself from then on.

  — THIRTY-TWO —

  YOU TALKED OF people too, the Ertlings to whose true natures you were oblivious and yet with whom you were forming stronger alliances by the day. ‘Lukas said something silly today…’ and ‘Zadie played catch with me…’ and ‘Rupert threw a ball so hard today that he broke a fence post.’

  I winced when you told me that Rupert threw a ball so hard he broke a fence post. These moments stayed with you, I was sure of it, and how many of them would it take to shatter the lie?

  Your talk was not always favourable. You spoke as much of misgivings and misdoings amongst your classmates as you did about play and silliness.<
br />
  ‘Sara does not like Zadie talking to her when she is with her other friends.’

  ‘Rupert told me today that I could only play ball with him if I could throw it the length of the playground.’

  ‘Lukas used to be friends with Jan, but they fell out and now Jan will not talk to me and I do not know why.’

  I paid this talk as much attention as I did your effusions over numbers. The more I listened, the more convinced I became that this talk of others, this secret side-lining of information, this gossip, was in some way central to the way your language had developed. Evolution is a series of happy accidents, and human language is no exception. It was just that it did not only provide the means of collaboration required to hunt, build camps, and defend them. Gossip, it seemed, was just as central to your survival; who liked, and did not like, whom.

  The erta do not gossip. Perhaps that is why we know so little about each other.

  Of course your education was still merely the means by which you were to be tested, and your test was not in how well you could learn how to read, or the imagination with which you understood the numerical system. The real test was in your behaviour.

  Occasionally I witnessed this assessment, at the school gates, for example, when the parents—Benedikt included—watched you interacting with their ertlings. Sometimes, if I was back from a balloon trip early and happened to pass the school when you were playing outside, I would catch sight of the teachers moving around you in wide, hawk-like circles.

  On one such occasion you spotted me passing in the middle of a game. I stopped and waved, and you waved back, but the distraction caused you to walk straight into the path of an oncoming ball. It hit you square in the head, knocking you sideways. I heard one of the ertlings—a male—laugh, so you picked up the ball and threw it directly at him. This caused some gasps among the others, and the teacher to stop in her tracks. I hurried away.

  Aside from this incident, you seemed to get on well with the others. You made particular friends, I was dismayed to learn, with Lukas, Benedikt’s fostered ertling.

  ‘Who is my father?’ you asked me one afternoon, as you helped me prepare some herring in the kitchen.

  This was not a difficult question to answer.

  ‘You do not have one.’

  ‘But Lukas has one.’

  ‘Yes, he does. But he does not have a mother, and you do.’ I smiled down as I disposed of some innards in a bowl. ‘Me.’

  ‘Why do some children have mothers and some have fathers?’

  ‘Because it depends on who has chosen to look after you.’

  You took some time to absorb this. I could almost see the questions flicker in your eyes.

  ‘Will I get to choose someone to look after?’

  It was my turn to pause.

  ‘I do hope so, Reed.’

  ‘Why?’

  I wiped my hands and knelt before you.

  ‘Because looking after something that is not you is the most wonderful thing. It frees you from yourself.’ I tapped your head. ‘From everything up here.’

  You smiled at this and, with no warning, kissed my cheek.

  ‘Can I go and play now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And with a grin you ran off as if nothing had happened, leaving me wayward and breathless, quite unable to stand.

  ONE AFTERNOON AS I approached the school gate to collect you, I heard scuffles, grunts and shouts coming from the yard instead of the now familiar sound of play. Benedikt was standing by the gate, watching, along with three other ertling carers further along the fence.

  ‘What is happening?’ I asked, as my pace quickened.

  Benedikt looked back at my approach.

  ‘There was an argument,’ he said, standing aside. ‘See for yourself.’

  You were on your back, unable to move. Lukas, sitting astride your chest, had pinned you to the ground by your wrists and now loomed over you with a placid smile as you struggled, helpless, beneath him. A crowd of your classmates stood nervously around, biting nails and wringing hands, but hiding just as much glee as they displayed of their uncertainty.

  ‘Get off me,’ you squeaked, but Lukas merely broadened his smile.

  I lurched for the gate, ready to spring upon the young ertling, but Benedikt snatched me back by wrist.

  ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘This is not your argument.’

  I tried to wrench myself free from his clawed grip.

  ‘What do you mean? Look at them; he’s hurting him! Let me go!’

  Benedikt’s frown grew dense, like wild thickets.

  ‘This is precisely the kind of behaviour we should be interested in.’ I followed his stare across the yard, where I saw two teachers watching from a safe distance. Benedikt leaned closer. ‘The kind of the behaviour you should be interested in.’

  I finally broke free and ran to the gate.

  ‘Ima, wait—’

  ‘Stop!’

  Lukas, you and the crowd of ertlings looked up at the sound of my voice.

  ‘Stop that now.’

  Lukas’ smile slowly left his face. His attention was all on me, and as his grip weakened you saw your opportunity and wriggled one hand free. Your fingers curled together.

  ‘Reed, no!’ I cried, but the blow had already been delivered. It was weak, landing on Lukas’ left side with a dull thwack. There were gasps, and Lukas turned back, inspecting the spot where you had made contact. Confused, but reaching a decision, he swung his own fist high above his head.

  ‘Lukas.’

  Benedikt’s growl stopped Lukas in his tracks, and this time he stood straight up, leaving you wheezing on the floor.

  ‘Come,’ said Benedikt, and Lukas obediently picked up his bag and walked to the gate. I ran to where you lay.

  ‘Get up,’ I said, as the ertlings backed away. ‘Are you all right? Can you stand? Can you walk?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ you said, shaking me off. I took a step back, and you got to your feet, shaking and glaring around the yard. You looked so furious, so small.

  ‘Are you just going to let that happen,’ I said to Benedikt as I shepherded you through the gate, you still flinching from my contact.

  ‘Why not?’ said Benedikt. ‘The argument was started by Reed. Lukas was merely restraining him.’

  ‘Reed, what happened?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing,’ you said, pouting at the ground. The other ertlings pushed past, smiling and talking with their parents as if nothing had happened.

  ‘Why were you fighting?’

  ‘It was him,’ you said, glaring at Lukas. ‘He said I wasn’t strong enough to play the jumping game.’

  ‘Lukas?’ said Benedikt, one hand upon his shoulder. Lukas looked up.

  ‘Well he isn’t, Papa,’ he said. ‘He is too small.’

  ‘I’m not,’ you snapped back.

  ‘But you are,’ said Lukas. Just a fact; no hint of malice.

  ‘I am not!’

  I pulled you back.

  ‘Reed, control yourself!’

  You looked up, fuming, and shrugged me off.

  ‘Now then, Lukas,’ said Benedikt, with an oily glance at me, ‘we have spoken about this. You must allow everyone to play your games, size does not matter. Hmm?’

  Lukas looked up at him, wide-eyed.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes, Papa.’

  ‘Good, now why don’t you two boys say sorry and we’ll forget this ever happened.’ He gave me another look as he said this, for there was no intention of forgetting these things. ‘Go on now.’

  ‘Sorry, Reed,’ said Lukas in a clear, honest voice.

  ‘Reed?’ I said.

  ‘Sorry, Lukas,’ you mumbled.

  ‘There,’ said Benedikt. ‘All better. Now run along, I’ll catch you up.’

  ‘Come on, Reed,’ said Lukas. ‘Let’s go and play.’

  He took your hand and led you away, your trudge looking ever more dejected against his happy bound. Benedikt watched you go.

>   ‘Eight years old,’ he said, ‘and already a slave to his own impotent rage. His body is not even fully developed yet. Just imagine how it will be when he is eleven, fifteen, sixteen, twenty-one. What happens to it all, Ima, do you think? What happens to all that rage as he grows?’

  I said nothing, and he turned to leave.

  ‘Benedikt,’ I said.

  He stopped and turned.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Papa?’

  He curled his lip momentarily, then straightened his cloak.

  ‘He has to call me something,’ he said, and left.

  — THIRTY-THREE —

  LATER, I TENDED to your wounds by the stove. Lukas’ restraint, though outwardly non-violent, had left red, raw welts upon your wrists, which I dabbed with Payha’s ointment.

  ‘You must learn to control your temper,’ I said. ‘It is not pleasant for others to see you in such a fury.’

  You stared at your stockinged feet, dangling from the chair.

  ‘Lukas was right,’ you said. ‘I wasn’t strong enough for the jumping game.’

  ‘Reed, don’t say that.’

  You looked up, eyes glistening.

  ‘But it’s true. There’s no way I could have kept up.’

  ‘That is no reason not to join in the game. They are supposed to be fun, are they not? There, all done.’ I straightened your cuffs. ‘Better?’

  ‘They’re not fun when everyone’s bigger than you are. And stronger.’

  ‘Well, perhaps they should not have been showing off.’

  ‘They weren’t. It’s just me; I’m weak.’

  I gripped your shoulders.

  ‘Reed, that is not true. You are strong, you are. Strength…’

  You looked back at me, eyes wide and waiting for the advice that would carry you through the pain. I struggled. I knew what strength was. Strength was superior muscle structure. Strength was a sophisticated skeletal system fortified by an ever-evolving carbon fibre mesh. Strength was flesh that repaired itself, arteries running with nano-mites, an intelligent immune system and skin that did not require ointment to rid itself of a few scratches.