It was not until she was in the lorry with him, her hands resting lightly on her bare knees, her back arched in an elegant curve, and the fold of gold-brown hair hanging still over her eye, that it dawned on him: she was still with him. Silent. Smiling. Improbably patient. She had said yes.
The orchards fanned east in an irregular patchwork from the outskirts of Wood-bridge, gathering finally along the banks of the Alde and the Ore. The rivers — wide, muddy, tidal throats — gathered and ran for some miles parallel to each other, and to the sea, which lay behind a thin band of reclaimed land. This ribbon of land — more a sea defence than anything else — was not given over to agriculture, but retained its ancient fenland garb of broken jetties, disused windmills and high, concealing reeds.
Rebecca glimpsed it only once, as Connie drove her through the deserted town of Orford, with its view over mudflats. Then they turned away from the coast, the road shrinking beneath them to a narrow gravel track, as it wound its way among the apple trees.
The monotony of the view was broken only once, by the Alde and the Ore, mingling indirectly through a knot of winding ditches and narrow (you might jump across them) surgically straight canals. The land here was riddled with old channels and overgrown oxbow lakes, as though someone had scrunched up the land and then imperfectly flattened it.
A pontoon bridge and an even narrower driveway led Connie and his companion, at last, to his house.
Across the front door, someone — a disgruntled worker, or other protester — had painted a sign.
Qit
eaht
The lettering was predictably feeble: the work of one for whom letters were not carriers of information, but merely designs.
She didn’t need to be able to read to see that it didn’t belong: “What does it say?”
He pondered it. “It’s their slogan, now,” he said.
“Whose?” she asked him.
“It says, ‘Quit Earth.’” He scratched at the paint with his bludgeon hand. It would not come off.
It was late in the season, and the light died early, that first night.
They sat drinking apple brandy in the darkness, on deck chairs in front of the house. Glow bulbs cast a febrile warmth like a tremor through the chill air.
“Read to me,” she said.
So he read to her. He wondered how she bore it: all those V’s for R’s (R was a letter he found barely audible unless it was rolled on the tongue, at which point the sound struck him as faintly obscene). Not too mention the Z’s he had to insert in place of those wonderful, utterly inimitable W’s. It wasn’t just the phonetic habits of his own language getting in the way (as far as that went, the speech of his ethnic group, the so-called Desert No’ivel, was notoriously fluid and sing-song); there were anatomical differences, too.
He studied the line of her mouth. He imagined her tongue, frighteningly prehensile. The relative chill of it (so, at least, he had heard, though he had no experience of it himself; felt still — or told himself he felt — a faint revulsion at the idea.) Her teeth, their —
What was it again? Yes: “buttery yellowness.” He laughed — to the human ear, an all-too-malevolent hiss.
Startled, Rebecca turned to face him. In the light from the warm glow bulbs, her irises were brown grey, like stones under water.
He could hardly bare to sit there, and not touch the fold of her hair.
(In the realm of the erotic, otherness is its own reward.)
Then it came to him: she knew this was what he was feeling.
He wondered at what point he had left off reading.
He considered whether or not she had done this before, with one of his kind, and the thought aroused him. He wondered dizzily whether this made him a “homosexual.”
(She resembled his own sex, more than the female of his species. Puscha females are not bipeds. It is only relatively recently in their evolutionary history that they have lost the ability to fly. Their sentience is sudden, traumatic, triggered by pregnancy, and short-lived thereafter. Their abrupt, brief capacity for symbolic thought opens them to the possibilities of language — but they have time only to develop a kind of sing-song idiolect before the shutters come down again over their minds. They are resourceful, destructive of crops, and are routinely culled.)
Rebecca leaned forward in her chair, to touch the feathers about his eyes. The lines of her arm were reassuringly familiar to him, though the tone of her skin was not. He reached out with his bludgeon hand to trace delicately the line of the fold of her hair.
A moment later he heard the voice of Hadmuhaddera calling across the lawn, in the broad Lowland No’ivel accents that he had always faintly loathed:
“Hi there, Connie, where’ve you been hiding yourself?”
For the rest of the evening, the unctious pedagogy of Hadmuhaddera filled the chair between them. Hadmuhaddera, stiff and small, as though some more elegant version of himself were struggling for release within, spoke volubly of the strange differences and stranger similarities of Puscha and human culture — as though Puschas (or humans, for that matter) were these monolithic, homogenous units!
In the guise of leading Connie through the uncharted shallows of ‘human’ habits (“pain au chocolat is a splendid invention, in that it allows you to eat chocolate for breakfast”) he patronized Rebecca furiously.
Connie felt all the pulse and tremor of the evening come apart in the tepid, irregular slaps of Hadmuhaddera’s tongue against his broad, blue palate.
Rebecca meanwhile stretched out almost flat in her chair, her water-polished eyes wide and black and bored, her arms thin and white like sea-polished wood against the arms of her chair.
“But set against the narrow bounds of the physically possible —” Hadmuhaddera was growing philosophical under the influence of Connie’s apple brandy — “nature’s infinite variations seem no more than decorative flourishes. Like that poet of yours, dear — what’s-his-name? ‘Tall fish, small fish, red fish, blue fish,’ yes, yes, yes, but they’re all bloody fish, aren’t they? Every planet we go to: fish, fish, fish! And birds. And crustacea. Insects. Everything is exotic, but nothing is actually alien.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Your womenfolk give us pause,” Rebecca countered. “Of course, thanks to your kind Improvements, we will never be able to attain your well-travelled disillusionment.” In her quiet way, she was giving as good as she was getting. “Perhaps it is because you are the only aliens we have known — but you seem fucking peculiar to us.”
Hadmuhaddera gave vent to an appreciative hiss.
In spite of himself, Connie found himself joining in. “Nature is capable of infinite variety,” he mused, “but only a handful of really good ideas. Because the rules of physics are constant across the universe, so are the constraints within which living things evolve. Eyes, noses, ears, they’re all good ideas. They’re economical and effective. Consequently, we all have them. Languages, too — you would think they would be infinitely variable. But the differences aren’t nearly as striking as the similarities. The predicating deep grammar — that is universal, or we would not be talking to each other now.”
But if he imagined that Rebecca would join in — would become, for a minute, the gossiping groupie he had first seen at the clubhouse — he was wrong. He watched with something like pride — though he had, he knew, no right to such a sentiment — as Rebecca steered their conversation away from the theory and practice of language — that overwhelming Puscha obsession.
He watched her. Could it be that she, too, longed for the moment when they might restart the shattered pulse of their intimacy? He felt his body once again ache for the fold of her hair, and then Hadmuhaddera said:
“Ah, well, I’ll bid you goodnight.”
They watched him stagger away across the lawn into the darkness. There was no sound in the garden now, except for the stirring of leaves in distant apple trees: in a few weeks, this sound too would cease.
He thought about the apples, the trees,
about his work. He thought about pruning. The act of it. The feel of the secateurs in his hands (he was not above getting his hands dirty, though whether he won any respect for it among his workers, he was never sure). He thought about the sound his workers made, as they set about their seasonal tasks.
He thought about gardening, and the fine line the gardener treads between husbandry and cruelty; between control and disfigurement. He thought about the Improvements his people had made among the planets. The years they had argued and agonized over them. The good and pressing reasons why they had made them.
Their enormity.
Rebecca stood up and wandered off a little way. Softly, she began to sing. She had a good voice, a trained voice (he had already learned the difference). An operatic voice.
He closed his eyes against a sudden, searing melancholy. To him it sounded as though she were weeping for the world.
Before the theme came clear, she stopped.
He opened his eyes.
She was looking at him. “Is this what you wanted?” she said.
It hurt him, that she would think this of him “No,” he said, truthfully.
She said nothing more, and after a few moments, she began her song again.
They had been together now for eight years.
Every civilization begins with a garden.
The Puscha, whose numerous cultures have bred and battled away at each other for eons, have founded their present, delicate comity upon this simple truth.
Here is another truth the Puscha take to be self-evident: a flower is simply a domesticated weed.
All Puscha “Improvements” are dedicated to the domestication of language. Over the eons of their recorded history, they have confronted languages too many and too noxious to get very sentimental about pruning them. Let a language develop unimpeded, and it will give rise to societies that are complex enough to destroy both themselves and others. Xenocidal hiveminds, juggernaut AIs, planet-busting self-replicators: the Puscha have faced them all — every variety of linguistic ground elder and rhetorical Russian vine.
The wholesale elimination of literacy is one of the stronger weedkillers in the Puscha horticultural armoury, and they do not wield it lightly. Had they not wielded it here, the inventive, over-complex and unwieldy morass of human society would have long since wiped itself off the planet.
The Puscha care, not for their own self-interest, but only for comity and peace and beauty.
They are beyond imperialism.
They are gardeners.
Two
He still reads to Rebecca. But over the years, something has shifted between them, some balance has tipped.
At night, in bed, with the light on, he reads to her. Lermontov. Turgenev. Gogol. She laughs at Gogol. He reads and reads. He has perfected a kind of ersatz R. W’s will, perforce, always elude him. She lies there beside him, listening, her eyes like pebbles, wide and bored, her arms like stripped and polished apple branches, motionless upon the sheets.
He reads and reads.
He waits for her eyes to close, but they never do.
Defeated, he turns out the light.
Darkness is a great leveller.
In the dark, his books may as well be blank. He is alone. He is worse than alone.
In the dark, he finds himself dispersed and ill-arranged: loose-leafed. He cannot find himself — he cannot find his place.
Every day he commits his self, unthinkingly, to diaries and address books, journals and letters and the essays he writes so very slowly and sends to little magazines.
At night, lying there beside her, he finds he has held back nothing of himself. It is all spilled, all committed elsewhere, unreadable in the dark.
Able as he is to read and write, the world inside his head is grown atrophied and shapeless. Equipped as he is with a diary and a journal, he remembers little. Owning, as he does, so many books, he cannot from them quote a single line. Deluged as he is every day with printed opinions, he finds it wearisome to formulate his own.
When the light goes off, and they lie side by side in the bed, listening to the leaves of the distant apple trees, Rebecca tells Connie stories.
Rebecca’s stories are different from Connie’s. His stories belong to the light; hers, to the dark.
She does not need light to tell her stories. She does not need to read or write. All she needs to do is remember.
And she remembers everything.
With no diary, Rebecca’s mind arranges and rearranges every waking moment, shuffles past and future to discover patterns to live by, grows sensitive to time and light and even to the changes in the smell of the air.
Lacking a journal in which to spill herself, she keeps her self contained. Cogent, coherent, strong-willed and opinionated, her personality mounts and swells behind the walls of her skull.
(As he lies there in the dark, listening to her, Connie reflects on gunpowder. Unconfined, it merely burns; packed tight, it explodes.)
Rebecca’s stories come out at night. They are stories of the camp-fire, of the clan gathered against the illiterate night. Hers is the fluid repertoire of the band, the gang, the tribe, reinforcing its identity by telling stories about itself.
Rebecca tells him about his workers, about their loves and their losses, their feuds and betrayals. She tells him:
“They burned an old nigger in Woodbridge last night.”
It is not her choice of epithet that distresses him — why would it? He is from too far away to appreciate such nuances.
It is the fact of it: the growing littleness of the people of this world. This gathering into clans. This growing distrust of outsiders. This reinvention of foreignness.
This proliferation of languages.
(Already, in the eight years they have been together here, Rebecca’s trained, operatic voice has taken on a deep, loamy Suffolk burr.)
He remembers something his neighbour Hadmuhaddera said, years ago: how everything that lives, wherever it lives, comes up with the same solutions, again and again. Hands, noses, eyes, ears. How everything is exotic but nothing is truly alien. He recalls, above all, Hadmuhaddera’s frustration, that this should be so.
Now there are many, manifestly reasonable arguments to support the Fifty-Seventh Improvement. But Connie is beginning to wonder if those polished arguments might not conceal darker, perhaps subconscious, motives.
Rob a culture of literacy, and rumour replaces record, anecdotes supersede annals. The drive to cooperation remains, but cooperation itself, on a grand scale, becomes impractical. The dream of universal understanding fades. Nations are reborn, and, within them, peoples — reborn or invented. Models of the world proliferate, and science — beyond a rude natural philosophy — becomes impossible. Religions multiply and speciate, fetishising wildly. Parochialism arises in all its finery, speaking argot, wearing folk dress, dancing its ethnic dance.
Connie thinks: We are good gardeners, but we are too flashy. We succumb again and again to our vulgar hunger for exotica.
He thinks: We have made this place our hot-house.
Rebecca says, “They hung a tyre around his neck. A tyre and a garland of unripe hops. The tyre weighed him down and the hops made him sneeze. They hopped and skipped around him, singing. Nigger. Nigger. Nigger. Tears ran down his nose.”
These are the rhythms of a campfire tale. This is the sing-song of a story passed from mouth to mouth. Connie’s heart hammers in time to her playful, repetitious, Odysseian phrases.
Connie recalls that Homer, being blind, had no need of books.
He cries out in fear.
Rebecca’s hand settles, light and dry as apple leaves, upon his breast. “What is it?”
“I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to hear.”
She says to him: “The ring-leader ran away in the night. They say he’s hiding near. They say he’s hiding on our land. Among the apple trees.” She says: “It’s up to you. It’s your responsibility.”
A week, this lasts: a
week of curfews, false sightings, beatings of the rush beds. At last, exhausted, Connie consults with the military authorities in Ipswich, and abandons the hunt.
At night, with the light on, he reads.
“Rudin spoke intelligently, passionately, and effectively; he exhibited much knowledge, a great deal of reading. No one had expected to find him a remarkable man…He was so indifferently dressed, so little had been heard of him. To all of them it seemed incomprehensible and strange how someone so intelligent could pop up suddenly in the provinces.”
With eyes black-brown and bored, she says:
“I’ve heard this part before.”
Yes, and if he asked her, she could probably recite it to him. (He does not ask her.)
“He spoke masterfully, and entertainingly, but not entirely lucidly…yet this very vagueness lent particular charm to his speech.”
Connie wonders, dizzily, if Ivan Turgenev’s observation, sharp enough in its day, means anything at all now.
“A listener might not understand precisely what was being talked about; but he would catch his breath, curtains would open wide before his eyes, something resplendent would burn dazzlingly ahead of him.”
Rebecca does not know what vagueness is. She could not be vague if she tried. Her stories shine and flash like knives. He glances at her eyes. They will not close. They will not close. His bludgeon hand is numb, he is so tired. But still he reads.
“…But most astounded of all were Basistov and Natalya. Basistov could scarcely draw breath; he sat all the while open-mouthed and pop-eyed — and listened, listened, as he had never listened to anyone in his whole life, and Natalya’s face was covered in a crimson flush and her gaze, directly fixed at Rudin, both darkened and glittered in turn…”
“Tomorrow,” he says to her, when at last he can read no more, “let us go for a walk. Where would you like to go?”
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