by Sam Smith
Making sure, again, that I had my few bits and pieces I stowed my bag, sat in the cockpit and said to the craft,
"Leave."
The small craft slid itself backwards out of its parking bay, tipped to its left while turning on its axis, then proceeded in an arc, gathering speed down the valley's contours.
As it left the valley's beacon the craft rose to the left — mountain below it — and, going higher, took me East.
Without, this time, the reassurance of Leon's knowing presence, I paid more attention to where I was bound.
At this latitude most of the land was wooded, broken occasionally by open tracts of green to yellow to brown. I knew that near each of those open spaces would be a settlement in among trees. The woodland was also broken by lakes and rivers. One of those rivers became wider and I flew out over a rippled sea.
Expecting any moment to see an island, or a group of islands, I became worried when none appeared, began to wonder what I should do if the taciturn Rynnl had misunderstood my request, had given me the wrong coordinates and the craft were to simply drop into the sea.
How would I escape from the craft?
What were the safety procedures? My worry enlarged into fear as the craft began to lose height and still there was no island in sight. I was planning my survival strategy — pressurized cabin therefore watertight, therefore time aplenty to figure out how to fly manually if unable to contact Rynnl from underwater. Maybe wiser to overcome fear of being thought a fool and call Rynnl before going under.
The communicator was in my hand when I saw a speck just this side of the horizon.
My sigh was long and heartfelt.
Before and below me, as the craft slowed, was a single island of high cliffs, lines of waves breaking around it and rejoining in the calm behind. Its green top was ovoid.
Nearing I noticed a wooded declivity in the centre of the ovoid. That, I knew, was where the house would be. I smiled as the craft dropped unerringly towards it.
13
The island house was different in that it was built around, not one, but several of the twisted trunks of low stunted trees, whose green warped leaves were barely a hand's breadth above the roof.
The paired parking bays were to the left of the house; and like the house in the valley they had space for two craft. Even these hermits, I thought, were occasionally sociable.
Its being in a hollow all that one could see from outside the house were treetops rising to their own densely packed horizon.
The first glance similarities with the house in the valley were that all its windows were up under the eaves, the walls of these rooms too were bare of decoration, and the occupant was dead.
A branch came out low on the trunk, low through the inner wall and zigzagged across the rear room, before going up through the ceiling. The man was hanging from a higher zag.
His face was black, tongue purple and protruding. Eyes also were wide and open, but white with red flecks. On the lower part of his tunic was a damp patch.
He rotated slightly — with the turn of the planet, the torque of the rope — from side to side.
14
Not knowing what I should do I walked out of the house — had had difficulty breathing within it — and I walked around the house's outside. Paths led off in every direction through the low woodland.
I came back to the door.
The Research Assistant, in a spirit of detached scientific inquiry, had to return and face that hanging body. Nor was it solely paid duty: the compulsion of curiosity was upon me. I had to know, almost welcomed the opportunity — the poet eager for new experience — to have a long look at a hybrid body, at my first dead human body.
Taking a deep breath I strode back into the room.
He rotated slowly on his rope.
Avoiding the damp patch, taking the hem twixt forefinger and thumb, I started to lift his tunic. The smell told me that he had also defecated during asphyxiation.
The feet were not exceptionally big, nor fat; nor were they yet cold. He hadn't therefore been dead that long, had probably killed himself during my journey to the island.
The legs were a mottled pink; and nowhere near as short as The Leander Chronicle or the interview film had led me to expect. Shorter, though, than the average human's.
I fetched a chair, stood on it to lift the tunic higher.
Genitalia were of the same proportion as a human male's. Torso though was definitely longer, backbone having a marked inward curve. (That, though, could have been due to his having been hung by the neck.)
He had an inverted belly button. Which set me to wondering if his parents were still alive and what they made of this in the Knowledge.
That thought made me feel watched, prompted me to call Rynnl.
"He's dead," I opened communication.
"I know." Pause. "Ambulance is coming."
"When did he die?"
"We became aware of his going... twenty minutes into your flight."
"Why'd he kill himself?"
That's what I was on the planet to find out; but often the most obvious question is not the one asked.
"We feel your coming hastened it. He was determined to die, was frightened you might stop him."
"Couldn't you stop him?"
Pause.
"No."
The pause this time was mine.
"Will you bring me back to the settlement?"
Pause.
"Why?"
"The only people I've met here, so far, have been dead. I need to meet the living, those not suicidal. I need to get a base line measure."
Pause.
"Coordinates have been given to your craft. Enter it now and leave."
I didn't, I realized, like being given orders.
"I don't want to leave right this moment. First I want to have a closer look at the sea." On my city/world we'd had freshwater reservoirs, no seas.
Pause.
"Leave whenever you wish. The time makes no difference to the coordinates."
I ducked into the path facing me. It wound back around thickets of lower and lower trees.
I emerged upright into a cold wind.
Beyond a lip of cropped grass the sea seemed as far below as it had from the craft. The wind made my eyes water. Vision blurring, remembering the cliffs I had seen on my arrival, I edged my way down towards the lip of grass.
The slope began to get steeper and the grass more and more slippery. From the comparative safety of some stacked rocks I studied this novel expanse of water, watched the fatal progress of several waves to shore.
I became aware — from the corner of my tearful eye — of an approaching craft, watched it come skimming down to the woods. Rising I climbed back up to the trees, ducked down the paths to the house at the hollow's centre.
It was not the same ambulance crew as in the valley. By the time I arrived the two men, both paunchy, had sealed what had been a breathing being inside a white bag.
"He was dead when I got here," I told them.
Pause.
"We know," one said, without expression, without emphasis.
Of course he knew, I thought, irritated with myself; and I wondered how many times in the ordinary daily course of events I imparted the same information to different sets of people. Here there was no need of that witless repetition. And already I missed the comfort of the ritual.
"I'm going to Rynnl," I told them. Again pointlessly: they already knew.
15
Although Rynnl took me into his house — which, according to the size and shape of the trees around which it was built, was identical in layout to the other two houses I had stayed in on Arbora — I was not made to feel welcome. Rynnl smiled not the once, introduced me to not one other person in the settlement, undertook to volunteer no information. Everything I learnt was at my insistence.
Having to ask the most rudimentary questions on craft navigation made me feel a fool. Nor could the aloof Rynnl be made to hurry over the pieces I
did understand. Yes, I knew that the craft left via the beacon of each settlement or homestead, homed in on another; but how did I actually give those instructions to the craft?
Rynnl considered my question, and started — from the beginning — explaining how the craft left on the beacon of the homestead or settlement... I'd had little to do with elderly people before: my store of patience amazed me.
I tried to talk to other adults in the settlement. Most turned away when they saw me coming. One stared expressionlessly at me, neither acknowledged my greeting, nor the questions that followed it, nor the imprecation with which I closed my attempts at communication.
What need, I told myself later, did those plugged into the Knowledge have of idle chitchat, the communal comfort of smalltalk? What more, what else, what different could I learn from those other villagers and not from Rynnl? All owned the same Knowledge. I did not.
Lonely I began to look forward to Leon Reduct's return and some human company.
I told Rynnl my fears of crashing en route to my next assignment, my concern that no-one would know where I was because I wasn't of the Knowledge.
My reliance on mechanical transmissions gave Rynnl pause for thought; but he (the Knowledge?) remembered that each craft was fitted with an emergency beacon and he (the Knowledge?) demonstrated its use. All safety procedures were self-evident once explained.
Emboldened by my mastery of Hybrid machines I asked Rynnl how Arborans grew, or made, their food. I had seen nothing so far on the planet resembling the vast food houses of Space, yet the kitchens were the same.
"We crop only perennials. Have no intensive agriculture. All are reaper/gatherers here. Bare soil might advertise our tenure."
Without appearing to censor himself Rynnl elaborated on — when asked, and he had to be asked — the planetary distribution of goods. He told me, slowly, that all factories, for the processing of food or the manufacture of materials, were either underground or off-planet.
Despite all this information, or because of its reticent delivery, I felt that I wasn't trusted. Or that I was only being told what it was safe for me to know.
Pondering on this distrust, on my distrust of them — they weren't telling me everything therefore they must be hiding something — evenings I sat outside Rynnl's house and watched the children in large groups running and tumbling, or in pairs engrossed in a game. Their animation, their ease, their ordinariness attracted. Even their noise, though distant, was uplifting, contrasted with the glum silence of the adults going about their work.
My decision to leave was a post-lunch impulse. I'd had enough of mutual distrust, wanted some honest action.
Going indoors I asked Rynnl the coordinates of who was next on my list. For once he responded almost immediately. I suspected that I'd caught him off-guard, was pleased with myself.
My new navigation skills had me heading South over a land mass.
16
Once a sunset-pinked mountain range had passed below, the rivers seemed to disappear into a brown land which, for some further while, was a caked and cracked ochre dotted with scrub. When the wind ripples of sand dunes began so too did my craft's descent.
I looked for trees. Were none. Ahead of me though was an outcrop of rounded rock, the sands rippling around it as the liquid seas had the island. How vigilant, I wondered, was this suicidal hybrid? Would he/she be already dead?
My craft slowed into the black shade of the rock, stopped in a blind hollow. I immediately let the steps down and went looking for an Arboran house new to me — one not built around a tree.
This house's walls had been moulded to the sides of the rock, windows up under the eaves. The door opened on my approach. This house had two doors, one inside the other — I guessed — to keep the sand out of the inner rooms.
Calling Hello I walked through the rooms.
The inside walls were of natural rock, the outer of artificial construction. Half the floor of the innermost room was a still pool of water. This was so unexpected that it made me smile at the wonder of it — a room given over to a clear pool of water.
Breaking out of my happy trance, remembering why I was there, I wandered back through the rooms calling Hello, came back into the dry air outside.
A beaten path led from the door deeper into the black shade at the wind-hollowed base of the rock. Steps had been carved into that rock, rose curving up through a deep gully.
As I came round the first bend of the gully, the warm desert wind blowing into my face, I became aware of movement above me, looked up and there was a man at the very top of the gully, black against the light blue sky of evening, hurrying to hang himself.
"No!" I shouted and started to run up the steps to him.
He had jammed a spar of metal across the gully, had tied a flex to it. The steps doubled back on themselves up the sides of the gully. As I passed below him he jumped.
When the flex first took the weight the spar slid screeching down between the rocks. He twisted to see what had happened just as the spar lodged tight between the gully's inward sloping walls. Like joints clicking I heard the muffled crack of his neck breaking, winced away from the splatter of his incontinence.
I leant panting back against the side of the gully and I felt the air dry in my lungs that could breathe, sweat running in streams down my face and body that could feel, watched with eyes that could watch the hanged man until the pendulum of his swing slowed almost to a stop and the stars were large in the black desert sky.
17
The root of all that I did over the next few days was paranoia pure and simple.
I didn't know whether to believe my own sense, to believe what Leon Reduct and The Chronicle had told me, how much to believe of what Rynnl had told me. I still wasn't sure what Leon Reduct's true purpose had been in recruiting me. Remember that I was but newly 19 years of age and fresh from Space, where whole lives can be lived without ever seeing one real dead body. Within 5 days I'd seen two.
Or had I?
Leon Reduct said that he had recruited me primarily because of my imagination. Was I now being made to imagine that I'd seen these two bodies? Had I been recruited, not because of my poetic sensibilities, but because I was susceptible to the Hybrids' telepathy? Was I being put through some kind of initiation test prior to being incorporated into the Knowledge?
Those though were the ideas that grew twisted with the days. Initially, breath gathered, I returned down the steps and into the house. Where I drank, not from any of the bottles, but from the pool of water. My washing there too seemed appropriate. Cleansing? Purifying? (Yet, had I not paused by that pool, I might have reached the man before he had tied the flex, might have grappling stopped him killing himself.)
I sat indoors and waited for the ambulance.
It didn't come.
In this house too none of the walls, aside from the grain on the inner rock wall, contained any decoration, offered any relief to the eye. I looked into my mind and saw the man rushing to kill himself.
I'd had a part in that self-murder. And in the one before. They'd both hurried to kill themselves because I'd been on my way to see them.
Or had they?
What if they weren't really killing themselves? If these people could, like the Nautili, mask whole planets from prying eyes, then they could also make me see what they wanted, could make me see what would have the most emotional impact.
I would fool them, I decided, by adopting a dispassionate tone of scientific inquiry. Or were they making me think that too?
When the ambulance didn't come, tired of my inconclusive thoughts, of following the grain in the rock, sighing I rose and returned slowly up the grey starlit steps.
The perpetual desert wind — chill now — pressed against the hanging body, fluctuations in its force giving it a slight swaying motion.
I climbed higher than I had before, came level with him, his head on his shoulder.
By the light of the stars I could see that he'd been a lean man in
his early thirties. But already — when I came to make a close study of his hands, feet and legs — the skin seemed to be wrinkled.
My communicator bleeped.
"What has happened?" Rynnl asked.
"He hung himself from between the rocks. Before I could reach him. He was rushing to do it. If I'd been a few minutes earlier I could've stopped him."
Silence.
"Shall I call the ambulance?" I asked, changed my mind: the Knowledge would already have informed the ambulance. "No. Don't send an ambulance. I'll call you when I've finished studying the body. If you have no objections?"
"Leon Reduct said to follow your wishes."
I bet, I thought; didn't know what to believe. I wanted to see if they could make me believe that this body was rotting before my eyes, expected the quick corruption of a hot climate — maggots here and gone, carrion fowl tearing at the flesh, strips dried on the bones. (from a book read? film seen in childhood?) Except that, over the next three days, the body didn't rot.
It swung there in the dry desert wind, skin and flesh shrinking and tightening to the bones in the first stages of mummification. (Suicides, believe me you who entertain notions of self-cancellation, are not the neat endings romantic writers require.)
In the amber light of my third evening I sat on the steps level with the head feeling through my own desert-smoothed skin to the skeleton below. I had sat there with him the cold nights too, the two of us under the wind-flickered globs of desert stars. I had talked to him then too, rattled my fingers. Clickety, thump, stop.
That third evening I noticed that his lips were starting to draw back from his short white teeth in the rictus grin of death. His brain was probably as shriveled. (Nowhere else other than a desert is one made aware how much of the human body is liquid.)
