“Chang, you’re too fast,” Hahnoe would say, laughing. “Have you ever truly seen a raindrop? Have you ever looked within a snowflake and seen its incredible pattern?”
She always answered, with her temper slightly riled, how dangerous such an attempt could be, how it could even kill them. Hahnoe would only sigh and say, “Do you think what you see at your speed is real? There’s no way. What you see is the illusion speed creates. Humans don’t move that fast. They stay at one place for a long while. Until they absorb more things from their surroundings, until they become stronger and more ‘perfect.’”
Hahnoe believed the only way their people could survive was to adopt human speeds. He took the risk of flying close to them at very low speed to observe and listen, and he tried to convey what he learned to the others.
When they’d left the cave, everyone had shared the same thinking, or so she’d believed. Since then, however, their interests had shifted in various directions.
Kinn and some others had embraced more direct and confrontational tactics. They sought to bring humans down by infiltrating them through vulnerable parts of their bodies, like their eyes and ears. They’d proposed starting with one or two houses and then spreading over a town until eventually all the humans in this world were defeated and the Roo kingdom restored. They’d convinced others to join them, and Kinn had held fast to the idea that their tribe could “grow” by doing so. It’d all seemed like such an unachievable goal to Chang, but she’d found that she could empathize with Kinn. After all, who in the world hadn’t felt enraged by their own helplessness?
Hahnoe’s stance was the exact opposite. Hahnoe worshiped the enormity of these sluggish humans. While Chang held no prejudice against this belief, flying slow was not her way. Her body and her heart craved speed. When she overtook everything around her, and her Lu soared into the sky shattering the air like an explosion, she felt enraptured, and more alive than at any other time.
After coming out of the cave, Chang had traveled to many places. She didn’t have as much experience flying as others in the tribe, but her Lu was fast. She could fly to almost anywhere and return in one day. But she couldn’t exit the Lu and walk on the ground unless they were home. The risks were too great. There were human feet slamming down everywhere, gigantic water droplets that could fall without warning, and merciless insects and other animals with their flashing claws.
Chang hadn’t really understood the contours and shapes of everything that filled the lands and seas. They always broke apart into infinite fragments at great distances and dissolved into foam. But not once had she ever considered this mess ugly. Things didn’t need to have a clear meaning to be beautiful. But she couldn’t describe what she saw the way Hahnoe described the rivers, mountain ranges, and humans he’d seen. She simply noticed the chaotic dance of fragments, the tremors and fragrances they left in their wake. If only they stayed longer, maybe then she would make sense of them.
Now what the stranger had said weighed heavily on her mind. What if I really die next week and the world just ends for me? What if everything I’ve seen during my entire life has been nothing but broken pieces, fakes, mere illusions scattered in the air? I wish that I could convey what I’ve seen, that there could be someone flying with me to share these indescribable feelings and recognize that all this is real.
But others in the tribe didn’t share her sentiment. They focused on matters more important. Besides, Chang couldn’t meet another Roo in flight; they were too small and too fast.
The waves rolled on by, close enough to overtake her at any moment, enormous and unknowable. Amidst Chang’s fear, faint and slender pillars of feeling grew. She wasn’t sure whether it was hostility, obstinacy, or something else. If Hahnoe were here, he might’ve gone even closer. But when Chang believed she’d reached the limit, she trusted her Lu to ascend, and flew high into the sky. When she turned toward the moon, hundreds of dim sliver fragments filled Lu’s eyes. Faster! Chang trusted with all her heart, hearing the beat of Lu’s quickening wings. Hahnoe had said flying too fast would shatter their bodies into bits. But Chang had never been to a place as far away as the moon. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get any closer to that glowing mass. Even those who had traveled the seas, the canyons, and the deserts knew nothing about the moon.
“The moon? It’s too far for us to reach,” Hahnoe had said. “And still it looks so big. The magnitude of its size must be beyond our comprehension. I doubt we’d be able to measure it with our units like kruho or even pruho. We should focus on what we can do, even if it takes a long time or puts us at risk; we have to start with the things we can reach. You’re so unwilling to compromise or try to understand.” The moon and the stars remained fixed in their places while Hahnoe’s remembered voice rang in her ears. If I could just fly faster, Chang thought, if only I could fly fast enough.
* * *
After her husband went to bed, Chang Yeon made a cup of coffee and sat in front of her computer. She couldn’t sleep and felt sick from the wine she’d had at the early birthday party her staff had arranged for her.
Why do humans need to sleep when time slips away so quickly?
The more tunings she completed, the more difficult it became to idle away her time. She couldn’t bear the idea that there were worlds unknown to her, things outside the scope of her logic. She was frustrated at this obsession. She considered what the sailor had told her and felt as though her brain was dissolving into sand. But sailors didn’t lie, and there was no reason for them to fabricate such a story. She entered some words into the search prompt and waited.
She’d been right. The Roo tribe also existed in her world, only with a different name. In this world, they were called Rods and Chang Yeon had seen a picture of them online long ago. Six or eight winglike components symmetrically attached at an angle to a long stick. Images of these objects, flying at unimaginable speeds, had been captured across the world, from crowded city cafés to open fields in the countryside. Some had claimed that they were evidence of alien beings, while most everyone else had assumed they were insects distorted by the technical limitations of the cameras. In time, people had lost interest in them. But what the sailor had described was not a bug. It was a plant as well as an animal; a living creature in the sense that it had an organic body, but a machine in the sense that it only moved by commands. And it was the only means of transportation available to the Roo people.
According to the sailor, Lus were hollow inside like bamboo stems, with a thin detachable film covering their tops and bottoms. If they rotated as they flew, and if that image was captured in several layers due to some distortion caused by light, they might resemble the Rods in the old photos. And Chang, the fiftieth version of Chang Yeon, was flying in one of them.
Civilizations in offshoot worlds developed differently from each another. Despite their keen eyes and extensive extradimensional knowledge, sailors had been unable to understand how the mutant Roo tribe could’ve existed in Chang’s world. It was only after exhaustive searching that Chang Yeon’s sailor had found a legend about ant-sized people supposedly living in a limestone cave somewhere in that world’s southern Africa. The cave was not far from the Sterkfontein Caves, where the fossilized skull of a primitive human from over two million years ago had been uncovered. Scientists overlooked this other cave since it sat so close to Sterkfontein’s shadow. Since then the sailor had made numerous voyages to the cave in an attempt to learn more. Finally, deep in the cave where dim light entered through the cracks in the cave’s ceiling, it had spotted some odd-looking plants and noticed the tiny people living in a colony around them.
These plants, which the tiny people called Lu, looked like freeze-dried centipedes sprouting from the ground. The cream-colored stems had countless segments, and where each segment met the next, two leaves sprouted from the gap in a way that formed a spiral around the stems. From time to time, the tiny people clung to the plant stems like ants and drank the sticky sap flowing from b
etween the segments, but beyond that, the sailor hadn’t seen them eat anything.
“Their population is about one thousand,” the sailor had explained, “and they appear to have a level of intelligence comparable to humans. They communicate in their own spoken language and are capable of making simple tools.”
The sailor had gone on to outline the Roo, as the tiny people were called, in more detail. In most ways they appeared to be identical to larger humans. Their eyes seemed accustomed to darkness, but they were not distressed by light. They went about naked and had black hair and somewhat dull skin. There was little distinction between genders: the males were slightly taller than the females, but they all looked feeble to the sailor. Interestingly, they had lacked visible genitalia.
“They have managed to adapt to the environment inside the cave, despite being vulnerable to most outside stimuli. But those who have ventured outside the cave often perish within the first few steps. They preserve themselves not by reproduction but by rebirth. When one of their number dies, they put a few drops of sap from the Lu plant on the dead body. Exactly seventy-two hours later, the dead return to life.”
Chang Yeon had been biting her nails as she listened to the sailor. She knew she should respect the diversity of offshoot worlds and acknowledge all the possibilities that existed in them. But . . . this was too much. Oblivious to her confusion, the sailor continued on.
“What’s more interesting is that they all come back to life with young bodies. Some are quite old and had limited mobility at the time of their death. But after the Lu sap is applied, they all awaken looking to be in their late teens or early twenties. This sap clearly has some kind of mysterious regenerative powers for these people. Whether this also leads to a mental renewal, I cannot say. Regardless, their skin looks firm, they move with great energy, and in all aspects they appear significantly healthier. In this way, the tribe maintains their population at a constant level. All who die are reborn, and no one new is born. No children exist in this tribe. I’d have noticed any babies for sure. But there were none. They appear not to reproduce.”
The Sailor paused a moment. “However . . . Chang, your fiftieth version, was born to a Roo woman exactly three years ago.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Chang Yeon tried to make sense of the sailor’s words, but failed. “You just said yourself that they don’t reproduce. Besides, all of my versions have been born at the same time and place as myself, in a hospital in Seoul fifty years ago. I understand that different environments create different versions of myself, but how could a version of me have been born in a cave in South Africa? And only three years ago?”
The sailor looked into Chang Yeon’s eyes for some time before continuing on in a more comforting tone.
“That’s the tricky part. The body Chang was born into once belonged to an ordinary Roo woman. Like others in the tribe, that woman had come into existence at some point in the past and gone through hundreds, possibly even thousands of rebirths. Her self-structure didn’t match yours at all. But three years ago, she died of natural causes, and when she returned to life three days later, she had a completely different self-structure. Now, post-rebirth, her self-structure matches yours. Since nothing like this has never happened before, we suspected an error in the tuning system at first. But we’ve checked multiple times and always obtained the same result.”
Chang Yeon, unable to respond, rose from her chair. She went to the window and looked out onto the quiet streets beneath the darkened buildings. It seemed like any other cold February night. The tuning system was known to have a 99.82 percent accuracy rate. An error hadn’t occurred in over ten years.
“If you don’t feel comfortable with this, you may cancel this tuning. It’s not a problem at all. Given the particularity of the situation, we don’t encourage you to go through with the procedure. We only continued because we knew this tuning mattered so much to you. I apologize for not having informed you sooner, but we needed time to be certain of our findings.”
Chang Yeon stared at the sailor.
“ . . . How come she’s dying? You said they can be endlessly reborn.”
“From the very beginning, the Roo people have worshiped the Lu plant. We were able to confirm this based on our research into their language and culture. It was this absolute power that promised them eternity, and the sap, which they called ‘God’s tears,’ had saved the fragile tribe from the danger of extinction. They’d become immortal beings with peaceful, idyllic lives. Yet some chose to leave the cave. Hundreds of them had been reborn with the same desire. They cut the divine stems into hundreds of internodes and entered through the films. These young people had remained there for several days when something extraordinary happened. The plant pieces began to function like animals. What they had thought were leaves were actually wings.”
Chang Yeon’s eyes widened as the sailor went on.
“But these separated internodes didn’t produce ‘God’s tears’ anymore. Those back in the cave believed this was a punishment for the blasphemy the young people had committed. Hundreds of Roos remained in the cave, living out their immortal lives. The ones who left, however, lost their immortality. These then scattered across the world and slowly began dying out. For many, adapting to their new environments lay beyond their abilities. Outside the cave, they’d had to hunt and gather their own food. The cave-dwelling Roos had the ability to retain their experiences across countless rebirths, but those outside could no longer remember anything from their past lives. We were unable to determine if anything else had changed since their last rebirth or if this is all the result of cutting the Lu plant and leaving the cave. At any rate, all of their former experiences are gone.”
Chang Yeon didn’t know what to say.
“Do you understand now?” the sailor had asked. “They are cut off. Isolated. Without the shared memory of their people, their chances of survival are extremely low. And since they don’t have ‘God’s tears,’ it’s impossible to bring their dead back to life. Some have changed their minds and returned to the cave. Yet others remain outside, rejecting eternity and carrying on their lives, struggling to adapt to the world’s hostile environments. Only a few dozen survive now, including Chang. I don’t know if it’s coincidence, but in that offshoot world, Chang found her way close to where you were born. Now, with some of her peers, she makes her home in Seoul.”
* * *
Shu was dead. Chang learned it from Hahnoe when she returned home.
“It was a young person,” Hahnoe said in a mournful tone, “a young human. Pio saw it happen, and I went with a few others to retrieve the remains.”
Chang couldn’t say anything. Hahnoe was covered in blood. He was resilient, an experienced combatant and a skilled pilot. But Chang saw that he was barely able to contain his fury and grief. How could he not be shaken? Many had gathered at the center of the habitation site, and Chang assumed that was where Shu’s body was. The air was thick with a tense silence. Among those gathered were Kinn and her gang. Kinn glanced over toward Hahnoe.
“This is the reward they give,” she said in a mocking tone, “the high and mighty humans that you idiots worship.”
“Shut your mouth, Kinn,” Hahnoe yelled.
Chang walked over to Pio. He cowered in a corner, trembling from shock and fear. Saliva dribbled from his half-open mouth and ran down his chin. Friends were trying to calm him down, but to little avail. It was some time before Pio gathered himself enough to explain what had happened.
They had gone into a human’s house on the outskirts of the city. Shu had been drawn there by an open book like an ant to sugar. After surveying the book from above, Shu had landed his Lu and walked out to take a closer look at the page. He was so absorbed in the elegant black lines that he hadn’t heard Pio’s urgent cry as an enormous finger had descended to the page. Roos feared the young humans more than the older ones because young humans saw things that adults couldn’t. Shu had forgotten this most basic protocol, captivate
d as he had been by the words on the page.
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,
I shall speak one day of your hidden origins:
A, black furred-corset of bumbling flies
Buzzing like bees round a cruel stink,2
Chang remembered the day Shu had sung these verses. It had been winter then, too, and as cold as today.
Hahnoe considered each of the seasons beautiful, but Chang found the winter unbearable. It must have been the same for the others. They’d covered the entrance of the tin pail in which they lived with a thick piece of cloth. But that hadn’t been enough to shut out the bitter winds, and everyone had shivered.
As they huddled around the brimstone bonfire they’d made, Shu sang, his eyes sparkling. The song was not their own, but one translated from a human language. Chang knew flies were dangerous animals but didn’t know what a corset was. She knew the colors black, white, red, green, and blue, but didn’t understand the words in between them nor what vowels were. Roos could count numbers, mark the passing of time, measure spaces, and make simple tools. They also drew and painted. But they didn’t have a written language. They communicated by spoken word alone and had to repeat what was conveyed several times so they could be sure to remember it. Hahnoe had once told Chang that writing was the materialization of meanings and that it remained long after people died. She couldn’t comprehend what that meant.
“If we could record what we mean with letters,” Hahnoe had said sadly, “we’d be able to make more complex tools and hunt much better. We might even be able to make machines like humans. Damn it! How come we don’t remember anything? Those who once used our bodies might have known how to do all that stuff. Maybe they could’ve done it, but just hadn’t. Why can’t we remember a single thing?”
I-Hyeong Yun Page 2
