In addition to the Sunspot and projecting unit, there were two further devices strung with wires. The first was a black cube which, from the writing engraved upon its underside, I deduced to be a memory store of some kind. This was where the recordings themselves were held.
The second device was a thin glass panel, perfectly transparent. I ran a finger across it and was rewarded with a dull, disinterested chord as it activated whatever systems were hidden away inside its core.
I had used a device such as this to calibrate my first balloon—itself a crude machine compared to my current one. They seemed to be everywhere, these boxes with hidden parts that took input and provided output, thereby giving the illusion of intelligence. I always wondered why humans had looked at things in this manner—viewing intelligence, thought, even consciousness itself as some intangible thing that had to be coded as a trick and locked away. Perhaps it was because they thought of themselves as little boxes—“cells of awareness” as I had heard caterwauled from one of your records—and therefore anything approximating their own intelligence must be too.
It is not true, Reed. Intelligence is everywhere. It is everything. Witness the trillion stars turn in great arcs, the starling flock pulse across the night sky, the great oak trees connected by deep roots, their trunks swarming with ants moving with a will outside of their own.
Everything is a murmuration.
The device, having completed its twittering, lit up with an array of coloured boxes. Soon finding the one which allowed me to browse the data stored upon the cube, I set about the task of understanding it.
The problem as I saw it—and the reason why these recordings had not gripped you to the degree which Jorne had hoped—was that they had been indexed only by date and location. This meant that a huge proportion of the data, as was the case with history, was dull and uneventful. In order for you to see humanity’s great events, the data required an extra layer.
And I knew exactly where to find it.
Upon the book shelf were several thick and dusty tomes with names like The Penguin History of the World, History of World Wars, and Europe: 1066-2066, which you had so far avoided due to their size and distance from the ground. I took them down and, after a brief flick through the pages, was satisfied they had what I needed.
It took a little over ten minutes to understand how to encode a routine upon the device, and less than an hour to develop one which scanned and stored the text of every page. As I sat at the table with the tablet suspended above me, chattering away to itself as I flicked through each book, I too scanned the pages. I learned a great deal that evening.
With the raw data collected, all I had to do then was perfect some code which parsed it and pulled out the dates and names of famous events. The Great Fire of London, The Storming of the Bastille, The Battle of Boston in the Second American Civil War, The Siege of Madrid. Of course I did not want it to be dominated by Benedikt’s tumbling towers and bloody wars—although I noted that there were a lot of them—so with my new found knowledge of human history, I was able to ensure that less violent events were also included: the first showing of Hamlet at the London Globe theatre, the declaration of independence, VE Day on the streets of Piccadilly, Woodstock, the fall of the Berlin wall, the three-month long vigil in Mexico City after the massacres of 2038.
With the data indexed, it was simply a matter of providing a means of accessing it via the interface—a five minute task—and I was ready to test my work.
In the darkness of that room, I scoured history for its great moments. This was thrilling at first, and I felt a kind of envy as I watched them. I wanted to be there watching them all, hearing the passion in the voices, feeling the electricity, smelling the air. But after a few hours I grew bored of crowds and urgent words mouthed in silence, and started to browse away from the big events, back to the scenes of monotony that Jorne had first tried with you.
August 17th, Seattle, 1979. There were the streams of people upon the street as they had been before, and there were the buildings rising above them. I panned up. Windows whistled past in a blur and I stopped on one, behind which was a woman’s face looking up at the sky. I zoomed in on her, trying to make out her expression. It was midway between sadness and hope, and she was lost in it, whatever memories or expectations were inflicting this emotional hybrid upon her, just as she was lost in the clouds that grazed the top of her building. She was stuck in her box, like the code I had just written. I spent the rest of the night finding other similar scenes.
They were everywhere.
Vietnam, 1669: The rice farmer in the paddy field who would smile with no warning and with seemingly no impetus. Germany, 1942: The girl in the death camp stroking her dead mother’s hair. Madrid, 1845: The old man walking down the street, muttering to himself and the pigeons. Each of them held a billion secrets, none of them told.
And then there was the woman on the mountain.
Patagonia, 1978. A woman clung, star-like, to a cliff. With numerous ropes and metal devices she was attempting to scale it, but a blizzard had left her struggling.
She hung there for twenty minutes without moving once. Then, finally, she took a breath and strained against her foothold while simultaneously clawing upwards with an axe. It met its target and she followed with her other hand, but it was not enough, and she slipped.
It was some fifty metres before the rope snapped taut, and there she dangled, swinging for ten minutes at least, head slumped and arms limp by her sides. I thought perhaps the rope had broken her back, and was about to move on from this grim scene when she suddenly jerked awake, legs wheeling. I sat up, heart thundering at this new development, and reached for the tablet to zoom in further.
Her face was creased in pain and exertion, and her lips moved as she muttered things into the blizzard. There was a hidden battle playing out, and it was one I was sure she could not win.
But then, to my astonishment, she began to climb.
She climbed through the wind, she climbed through the cold and she climbed through the screaming pain she was clearly enduring. She climbed all the way back to the point from which she had fallen, and when she reached her target, she found her footholds and resumed her original attempt.
An hour later she was at the top, lying on her back, laughing at the sky.
And I laughed with her.
At dawn I had witnessed a thousand quiet faces locked within themselves. I had also drunk two bottles of hurwein, and I stumbled from Jorne’s dwelling in a daze, wrapped in a blanket and wandering through the misty forest, thinking about how faces seem to ignite when great words are spoken, and wondering if that woman would have ever made it to the top if she had not fallen first.
— FORTY —
SO WE BECAME distracted; me by my work and the quantum telescope recordings; you by your music and treks with Jorne. But we were not the only ones. The council was distracted by the rate of development in transcendence, which of course meant that I saw less and less of my mother, and Benedikt too.
I rarely saw Haralia, and when I did I barely recognised her.
Gone was the shining skin, the bouncing curls and bright frocks. Now she wore nothing but the solemn cloak of the Devoted, her head buried in its deep hood. I saw her once as I was travelling back to Fane. I no longer enjoyed the place. You were rarely there by then, and the dwelling was like a memory that no longer belonged to me—muddled, dark and out of place. I could not watch the quantum telescope recordings, or look through the books, or investigate the objects in the Room of Things. I merely spent my time there cleaning and tidying, though neither was necessary.
Also there was no hurwein.
I passed her on the chalk road leading into Fane. I was glad to see her, and I thought we might take tea.
‘Haralia,’ I called out, as she drifted past.
She stopped and, after a pause, turned.
‘Ima,’ she replied. I faltered. It was an acknowledgement, not a greeting.
I attempted
a smile. ‘How are you? Do you have time to come by? We could—’
‘No. I do not have time. I must away.’
She continued along the road.
‘Not even a little? It has been an age since we talked. How is your work?’
This stopped her.
‘I would not expect you to understand, Ima. You know nothing of what we are achieving, this higher purpose with which we have been blessed.’
‘I have my purpose too.’
She drifted across the road and stood before me.
‘And where is he?’
You were with Jorne as usual. At least I thought you were.
‘I don’t… I mean I’m not—’
‘You don’t know. I know exactly where Jakob is all the time. I can feel him with me wherever I go.’
‘Reed needs his freedom. If he is to persuade the council of humanity’s right to endure, then he must explore his own humanity.’
‘Yes, I see, by wandering through forests and floating on a plank in the sea, I suppose?’
‘Doing what in the sea?’
‘You have not seen them? Him and that poor man who lusts after you? I saw them in the cove south of Tokyo. They take turns paddling out on a long plank and trying to ride it back on the breaking wave. A strange object, almost—’ her eyes narrowed ‘—almost as if it did not belong here. What could that mean, do you think?’
My heart gave a sick flutter as I realised what she was talking about—the tall, finned surfboard that stood in the corner of the Room of Things
‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’
‘No, that is very clear, because you do not know where he is or what he is doing from day to day. And this is your idea of purpose.’
My eyes dropped. She was right.
‘Do you know what they are saying about him?’ she went on.
‘What?’
‘That he is slow at school, unable to keep up with the others, and they’re not trying hard, Ima, you must know that. They say he spends most of his time staring out of the window, distracted, elsewhere. And he smells atrocious, and he is awkward to be around, and he stares. Some of the girls no longer like to be around him, they say he makes them feel uncomfortable.’
‘He is friends with Zadie,’ I said, hopefully.
‘Ah yes, Zadie. Pretty Zadie. I am sure he is glad of her friendship. You really have no idea what is happening to him, do you? You have no idea of the changes he’s going through.’
‘I know about puberty,’ I said.
‘Clearly not enough to see the signs. You’re too busy drifting about on pointless balloon trips of becoming insensible on that dreadful drink.’ She sneered. ‘I can smell it on you now.’
Trembling, I raised a hand to my mouth, trying to catch wind of my breath.
‘The way you cling to this world, Ima, this flesh.’ She spoke slowly, the words drawn out like stretched gauze. ‘It bewilders me. Existence is so much more than this, and it is almost in our grasp. Can’t you tell.’ She turned back to me. ‘Can’t you feel it?’
I had no words, so I spoke none.
‘No,’ she said, closing up. ‘It seems you cannot. I have to go.’
With that she turned and made for Ertanea.
HARALIA WAS RIGHT; a change had come over you, and it was not just evident in the hair on your face or the broadening of your chest. You had become gripped by a foul sullenness and fidgeted constantly, as if you were prey to some furious itch that would give you no peace. And yes, you did stare out of windows, and seem not to hear your own name. And yes, you had started to spend more time in the room—the old wood store, which we had cleared and furnished with a bed I had constructed from pine. And yes, you had started to smell.
And so had your sheets.
One evening I decided to broach the subject of your hygiene and walked into your room to find you in a state of undress upon the bed. At my appearance you flushed and curled into a ball to conceal your genitals which, in the brief time I had to appraise them, I noticed had grown hair too. Furthermore they were extremely engorged, and you had been fondling them furiously.
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I see you are masturbating.’
‘Can’t you knock!’ you cried out, falsetto, as you struggled with your undergarments.
‘I have never had to knock before.’
‘Well you need to now!’
You sat with your back turned, hunched upon the bed.
‘Look at me,’ I said.
You remained silent.
‘Look at me,’ I repeated, louder.
‘No,’ you yelled, still facing the wall, engulfed in a cloud of shame.
‘It is nothing to be embarrassed about,’ I said. ‘Every mammal experiences such desires, and seeking release from them is perfectly natural.’
‘Ima, please.’
‘Everything is perfectly natural.’
You turned, face red with rage.
‘Just get out, will you?’
I got out.
From then on, I knocked.
— FORTY-ONE —
SHORTLY AFTER, I met Williome as I passed the school gate on my way to the balloon.
‘Might I have a word, Ima,’ he said, thin-lipped and pallid.
‘What is wrong?’
‘I would kindly ask you to tell that thing of yours to leave Zadie alone.’
Zadie was standing in a huddle of other female ertlings, talking. Her shape had changed too. She was taller, her neck had elongated and two lumps had appeared on a previously flat chest.
‘Why would I do that?’ I said. ‘They are friends.’
‘Friends don’t treat one another as he treats her.’
I folded my arms.
‘Speak clearly, Williome, I do not have the time for riddles.’
‘As you wish. He harasses her constantly.’
‘I’m sure he just enjoys her company.’
‘He stands too close when she talks to others, especially boys.’
‘He is protective of her, that is all.’
‘He tries to hold her hand when she does not want it holding.’
‘Physical contact is perfectly natural between friends.’
He leaned in.
‘He tried to put his mouth on hers.’
To this I had no response.
‘I will talk to him,’ I said, after a pause.
‘Good, because I have already informed the council and they are taking the matter extremely seriously. Honestly, I cannot see why this project persists. I cannot see why you persist. It is utter folly.’
‘Without this folly you would never have had her.’
I nodded at Zadie, still talking with her friends. He gave a contented sigh.
‘Well yes, there is that. I have grown so fond of her, and I miss her terribly when we are apart. Still—’ he turned back with a satisfied smile ‘—it will not be long before we are together permanently. The first transcendence trials are next week. It must be difficult knowing that, whatever happens, you only have a certain amount of time left with him. You won’t be allowed to stay, and there is no possible way he can come with you.’
I said nothing. It was all I could do to hold his stare.
‘Just tell him to stop,’ he said, and left.
I KNOCKED ON your door that evening. Hearing no onanistic shuffles, I entered and found you curled up, awake, on the bed.
‘Zadie’s father spoke to me,’ I said, as gently as I could. ‘I think she was upset.’
You pulled your legs up to your chest.
‘I only tried to kiss her once,’ you said. ‘I saw Lukas do it with another girl, and I thought she might… I thought…’
You sniffed and wiped an eye.
‘I know you like her,’ I said. ‘Unfortunately, sometimes these feelings are not reciprocated.’
I remembered what my sister had said about Jorne. For all the cruelty in her words, had they still been right? Did he lust after me? What would have happened i
f I had allowed his mouth to make contact with mine that autumn evening six years before? And why had I flinched from it? Because his feelings were not reciprocated? Was I the Zadie to his Reed?
No, I realised, and the excitement of this made me as guilty as it did giddy.
— FORTY-TWO —
‘YOU COULD HELP him,’ I said to Payha.
It was cold, early winter, and we were sitting upon the cliffs near the Sundra’s village, wrapped in blankets and sharing another bottle of hurwein. The transcendence trials were taking place three miles across the bay. Excited crowds had gathered upon a wide platform called (for reasons I did not know) ‘The Drift’ to witness the first ascent of the Devoted, among whom were Haralia and Jakob.
‘What do you mean, “help him”?’ said Payha.
‘Reed. You could help him with his, you know, problem.’
I had told her of my recent walk-in.
‘What on earth are you suggesting?’ she said.
I shrugged and took a swig.
‘Nothing out of the ordinary; just a little light relief from time to time, perhaps even intercourse. I know it is not uncommon among the Sundra, or any erta for that matter.’
She looked at me, horrified.
‘Why don’t you help him?’
‘I am his mother.’
‘Not really.’
‘To him I am. He would have no sexual interest in me whatsoever, but you—I have seen how he looks at you. In truth, how he looks at every female these days. Surely you want to help?’
‘He is just a boy.’
‘He is thirteen.’
‘Does he even ejaculate?’
‘Yes,’ I said, grimly remembering your sheets. ‘Which means he is a man. He needs release.’
‘You are foul.’
‘There is nothing foul about it. It is a practical solution.’
‘Just because he is sexually mature does not make him a man, and I am five hundred years his senior. The humans had laws against that sort of thing.’
The Human Son Page 22
