by Sam Smith
"You're not going to tell me anything?" Head to one side I smiled back at him, "Are you?"
I called the ambulance.
On their arrival the one man one woman crew fed me rehydration solutions, more concerned for me than for the body. I, however, refused to go in the ambulance, insisted on reporting in person to Rynnl. Unsure of my physical capabilities the ambulance crew gave my craft the settlement's coordinates.
18
Rynnl led me into his house, sat me down and gave me salty drinks — he said — prescribed by the Knowledge's pharmacia. On his flat-featured face was a look almost of concern. I sought to take advantage of that concern.
"We need to talk." My voice was hoarse, "I need answers."
"Later." He gestured me to sit back in the chair, "When you are rested and recovered."
"No. I cannot rest until I know. Tell me, to start with, why so many of your people isolate themselves."
There was pause, as I'd already come to expect, while Rynnl consulted the Knowledge, his old face flat as if listening to something behind him. (Faces flat of expression are frightening to us non-telepathic human beings. For the simple reason that, while looking straight at us, the face — a part of the means of communication — is saying nothing to us. Amongst ordinary human beings such a face is the face of madness — all communications internal and external gone awry.)
"To stay attuned to the cosmos the human soul needs an occasional diet of wilderness," Rynnl quoted tonelessly from the Knowledge, added, "We people are never alone. We are often in danger of sensory overload. Solitude, therefore, is important to us."
"One doesn't have to go to wild places to be alone," I croaked.
"No environment is indifferent to our existence. This environment has been formed around our existence. Ours, wherever we are, is a very personal landscape."
That didn't make sense to me, had no relevance that I could see.
"Why the desert?"
"Water-aversive traits are still strong in some of every generation. Such are under compulsion to seek a lifestyle like that of the desert-dwelling ancestors of your tanks."
"Why then the pool of water?"
"Individuals are prone to inner contradictions, inner battles."
I thought on the desert man's battle, on his hasty fight to hang himself.
"My journey there took five hours. Why'd he wait until the last minute to hang himself?"
"The darkness about him in the Knowledge made it as difficult for him to see out as it does for us to see in. Only when the darkness begins to disperse do we discover a death. The darkness is a deliberate masking. Such suicides are not self-immolation for the sake of the species. Theirs is the result of personal despair. And that despair disperses throughout the Knowledge, is in danger of infecting us all."
Yea yea, so I'd heard.
"What made him see me coming?"
"We are not each of us all the while conscious of everything in the Knowledge. Our individual minds would not cope. Like you with all that happens about you in a crowded room. You come to notice only that which has significance for you. His darkness delayed his seeing the significance of your journey."
I had precipitated that man's death.
Had I not gone to see him then he would, in all probability, still have been alive. I did not want to go blundering into anyone else's delicately balanced existence, push them over the edge.
So that none but I would next time know my exact destination I later asked Rynnl to let me have the coordinates of at least five other potential suicides. He gave me thirty six.
This was an epidemic.
Once my liquid and electrolyte levels were restored (one recovers quickly at 19) I leant in the doorway of Rynnl's house and watched the settlement children at their evening play.
I wondered why these children should so fascinate me. Because their play most closely resembled human life? That I drew comfort from that small token of normality? No, it was trying to tell me something.
"When all else fails," Leon Reduct had part-jokingly told me, "listen to your subconscious."
When Rynnl returned from his chores I indicated his blank walls, high windows,
"Is sensory overload why there are no decorations here?"
"We have too much to see, too much to be aware of."
"I am desperate for knowledge and you have too much."
"Not enough to stop this happening."
"Yes..."
One part of me believed that Rynnl was hiding something from me. (It is human to suppose that those who know more know everything.) Whatever was hidden from me, though, was hidden from him too. I sensed that in his sadness.
"What happened to the breeding tanks?"
"They were destroyed. Along with all the techniques. And the eggs and sperm. We are now the only progenitors."
"And some of you are killing yourselves?"
"Yes."
What more could Rynnl tell me — he wasn't suicidal. Or was he? Us humans can't know without asking.
"Are you going to kill yourself?"
Rynnl thought.
"At the moment I have no intention of it."
"Would you kill yourself?"
The answer came quick this time. (A subject that had exercised his mind?)
"Suicide is not so problematic for the self — just another going to sleep. The consequences are upon those left alive."
My thought earlier: but I was coming to distrust my patent.
"What would make you kill yourself?"
"I don't have to seek reasons to kill myself. Life supplies those. The logic for suicide, given the desire, is impeccable. Given the mood the logic for self-cancellation is irrefutable. I, however, only consider the subject of suicide now because I am surrounded by it. Curiosity about it, however, keeps me, an old man, going."
A long speech for Rynnl, tired him out. He took himself off to bed.
In the middle of the night, when they'd least be expecting it, I crept out of Rynnl's house. (Unseen by any hybrid the Knowledge wouldn't know my intentions.) In my craft I closed my eyes and dropped my finger on a set of coordinates.
My craft headed Southeast.
19
Wide awake, working back from the coordinates, I discovered that luck had had me chose the furthest site from the settlement.
The curving arm of the galaxy, like a luminous wing added to the craft, swung me — during its night's rotation — to my destination. From the darkness below — no reflected star-sheen, broken cloud cover — I guessed I had been overflying landmass for most of the night. A couple of silvery rivers, but no rippled sea.
Shortly after dawn I passed over a wide inlet. Any ocean, though, was still some way off.
I had been flying over what I had thought was green grassy land. The sides of the inlet showed me, however, that the green was dense jungle, a mass of large-leafed trees hung with creepers. This, I realized, was the same hot latitude as the desert.
My craft began its descent.
The jungle canopy rose over steep-sided hills, sank into deep misted valleys. My craft aimed straight towards the side of a hill, slowing as it neared. In the moment before we docked I saw the paired parking bays and their adjacent dwelling, all of them made to look like caves amongst a brown cliff-face of caves.
I jumped down from the steps and ran into the house. High windows, chair and blank walls in first room, table and two chairs in the next, woman in bed in the next.
As I walked into her bedroom she was sitting herself up, pulling her face out of sleep. About 50, her skin had slackened over her flesh, her grey-frizzled hair tangled over her face.
One sleep-feebled hand pushed the hair out of her narrowed eyes.
"Good morning." I held out my hand like Leon Reduct: I know a good trick when I see one, "My name is Okinwe Orbison. I have come to stay with you for a few days."
There was no more to be said. The Knowledge knew why I was there: she had the Knowledge.
Her face had
taken on that listening-to-something-behind-her expression while she appeared to study my outstretched arm.
"Meffo," she dropped her hand into mine; and, using me as support, she swung her legs out of bed. Her legs were not long. She stood before me. She was naked. The Chronicle, I recalled, said that hybrids preferred to be naked.
Meffo saw my stunned look at her body, noted my tunic. She smiled — my first Hybrid smile:
"This was only worth looking at twenty five years ago."
"You're beautiful," I told her, and meant it. Her waist was thick, her buttocks pocked, but she still had the roundness of woman in the large breasts and in the belly and that was enough to qualify for female beauty in my eyes.
"Are you going to rape me?"
The question was candid, required an answer from this 19 year old male of the priapic human race. Our record with Hybrids was not good. I didn't class myself with those rapists. I still blushed though.
"I make love only with affection," this 19 year old expert at making love replied. And in part it was true: I had no erection.
"Until you decide that's what you want to do, I think it best I wear my tunic."
Meffo, walking past me to the bathroom, didn't feel to me that she was about to extinguish herself, had none of that desperate singleminded urgency of the man in the desert. So, while she was about her morning toilet, I went — as had become my habit with all these Arboran houses — to lean in the doorway.
This doorway looked out over the jungle canopy, or — I peered down — between vast trunks of hillside trees into jungle darkness.
Lest there be any confusion let me say that this woodland was markedly different to the wooded valley of my arrival on the planet. Here was hot. Just standing still and breathing made the sweat run down my face and arms, down my breastbone.
A stream splashed and trickled somewhere over to my right. (The parking bays were to the left.) The single bell-like notes of a jungle bird came slicing through the humid green, was counterpointed by the occasional locating shriek of a tribe animal. (Back in that first valley the birds had used delicate involved trills and warbles that had embellished the deciduous woodland, lilting songs that had entwined one thicket to another.)
This jungle, like the wooded valley, had its own beauty, its own distinctive enchantment.
"Want to eat?" Meffo called me. Like all the Hybrids I'd met so far words sounded like stones in her mouth.
I walked back into this house built along the side of the cliff, its inner walls of a brown porous rock.
"It's beautiful here," I said to Meffo pouring fruit juice. Her hair was tied back.
"Yes," she smiled at me, pleased by my approval.
This round-cheeked woman had darkness over her?
20
To begin with Meffo was excited at my being there, wanted to show me 'her' jungle.
We went along to the stream, where it came splashing down the brown cliff into a deep green pool, its sides fringed with ferns larger than I. I suggested we swim. (I'd already seen her naked: modesty therefore was not a hindrance.) But she, the allegedly suicidal, warned me of anticoagulant leeches and venomous water snakes.
We, slipping, followed the stream down the hill, with me pausing often to wipe my hands and enthuse over the river-polished pebbles gleaming like jewels in the wavering light of the stream's current.
At one point, stopped this time by Meffo, I marveled dutifully at the stream flowing under the roots of a huge tree whose top we couldn't see.
And as we walked I asked of Meffo's life, if she had children.
"A son."
"Where is he?"
"Off-planet."
I knew there was nothing to be gained from that line of inquiry, asked where she had lived before the jungle.
"Further north."
"What made you chose the jungle?" My lungs I felt were full of jungle steam.
She turned to study me.
"It is very strange being with you. I do not know what is in your mind. I do not know why you are asking me these questions."
"Because I want to know."
"Yes," She thought on that, "And you have no other way of knowing."
That much was in the Knowledge: hard though for her to believe.
"So why did you come to this jungle?" I asked her.
"It attracted me."
"Through the Knowledge?"
"Yes. Medicines and crops were also required from here. So here I came."
"Your work is here?"
"Yes." And again she looked at me surprised that I didn't know that.
I had assumed that all three suicides had chosen to live in their far-flung outposts of their own free will. As we, in Space, elect where we will live; and we too have our hermits. I had not considered that these Hybrids lone residences in such remote places might have other causes. An element of compulsion even?
While she was happy to talk I was tempted to quiz Meffo about the lives of my other three suicides, what purpose each had served — in the valley, on the island, in the desert? I hesitated, though, to bring to her mind thoughts of death.
I asked where her parents were living. Her father was dead. I asked where her mother was. In a settlement near Rynnl.
I sensed, as we climbed slowly back up to her house — a cloud of flies circling around our sweating heads and ascending the hill with us — that Meffo was beginning to dislike my questioning her. Possibly, though, it was because of the hard climb and she was out of breath.
Whatever the reason the habit of silence stayed with her over lunch. Afterwards, when at my request she showed me the caves above her house, I sensed that her pleasure in having me in her jungle had passed.
Wearily she agreed to go with me to the summit of the hill. But, as she had predicted, we could see little out through the jungle canopy. Nor did the fact of her being proved right show in the least outward sign of satisfaction, rather it seemed to deepen the distance between us.
On our return I spent what was left of the afternoon squatting in the doorway. After our evening meal Meffo said that she had better do some work that day; and I accompanied her to collect the seed heads from a large umbrella-like plant beyond the waterfall.
Back at the house I squatted again in the doorway. She sat in the chair. I again tried to get her to talk, but the unresponsive silences were huge. Glancing to her I sensed her going from me — not behind her face into the Knowledge; but to a place in front of her, her head dropping forward to look down into the dark vortex of depression.
To be aware of the dark fatality that lay behind what should have been her jolly round cheeks, to know that such a gentle-featured face hid a seriousness, an intensity of purpose, a profound sadness, an insoluble despair, made me want to wrap her rocking to me. But such was impossible: she was older, different, and unapproachable.
At dusk, when the window screens came up, when the door closed and the lights came on, Meffo asked — in a practical manner — where I was to sleep, did I want to share her bed?
I, switching on a smile, said that my affection for her had not yet reached the required pitch (though saying it I was remembering her heavy-breasted body of the morning and I was tempted, but worried that such casual dalliance might be transgressing some hybrid code.) I told Meffo that I would make do with the chair.
Meffo neither responded to the uncertainty in my smile, nor to my flirting, simply took herself to bed.
Suspecting that Meffo would try that night to kill herself, I had no intention of sleeping. Moving the chair so that it was directly between both doors I sat myself down and prepared to wait out the night. Which was a silly idea when I hadn't had a full night's sleep the previous night.
21
I dreamt.
* * * * *
I am sitting on an office chair being instructed by a fat man. Even his fingers are fat.
He is standing.
"We ask for autographs of the famous," he takes a glossy-covered book from my lap, flips t
hrough its treasured pages. "An autograph is an identity assassination. The flesh-and-blood person becomes The Name on the page. The Name becomes a celebrity signing autographs."
He places the book on a desk behind him.
"The murder of a celebrity is the ultimate autograph. And you," from behind him he brings a gun, tosses it into my lap, "you are going to become a real assassin."
Coming over to me he closes my hand around the gun, pulls me roughly from the chair and propels me through a door.
A smiling man is coming along a corridor. Of the group of people with him he is the centre of attention. I shoot him in the chest. His blood splashes onto the other people. Onto the corridor walls. All eyes are on me. Identifying me.
The fat man jerks me back into the room and pushes me down into the chair. Slapping footsteps, shouts, go running past the door.
"However," the fat man says, his voice threateningly calm, "in the process of killing him you will, probably, lose your own life. You will certainly lose your identity. You have stolen his celebrity from him. You are now the celebrity who shot him."
He stubs his forefinger hard on my forehead,
"Don't be pleased with yourself."
"I'm not..."
"Your celebrity will not last." He pokes at my head again, "Give it a generation and, if he was good at what he did to make him a celebrity, then he will be remembered. Your name will be asked, maybe, in quiz shows. Now kill yourself."
His hand turns the gun around. I watch my fingers press the trigger.
* * * * *
I woke in the chair.
22
Meffo wasn't in her bed.
She wasn't in the bathroom.
With a detached curiosity I knew that Meffo was dead, simply wondered where.
The outer door opened to the diluted green jungle light of early day. A beast far off was making a rhythmic booming noise.
