by Sam Smith
I looked along the hill to the sound of the waterfall. Then I looked past the parking bays.
Meffo was below there, swinging from a branch level with the path.
She had been strangulated, her face purpled, thick tongue exposed. Her tunic was crawling with dark insects. Some were on her face, some on her tongue. A line of the small creatures came down the rope, passing another line crawling up.
Decomposition would be fast here.
Returning to the house I called Rynnl, informed him what had happened to Meffo, asked him to send an ambulance. I told him that I wouldn't wait, that I was on my way back.
23
Little bald Leon Reduct was waiting for me as I came down the steps from my craft. (How quickly we take ownership of things — craft, planet. He was now the stranger.)
I had dozed on and off during the journey; had had no more dreams like that of the assassination though. (That dream was as strong in my mind as the image of Meffo crawling with insects.)
Leon took my arm, began walking me,
"Rynnl has given us a house. Come. You need sleep."
"No." Shoulder high I pulled my arm from his hand, stepped a pace away from him, "I need to talk."
"As you wish." Leon's bald head gleamed as he nodded. He looked at me and nodded again, "As you wish."
The first room inside the house had two chairs, had been prepared for us. I knew the dining area would be the next room, bedrooms next, then bathroom and lavatory; no matter what the host tree, no matter what the rock face.
"I'm going to paint pictures on all these walls." Arm raised I went pacing around the room.
"I'm sure Rynnl won't mind."
Watching me, as I continued to walk around the room, Leon sat himself down.
"I've seen four deaths," I told him. "One of them happened right in front of me. I heard the neck break."
I paused by the door, looked out at the settlement: houses under broad-leafed trees, no-one in sight.
"I couldn't stop Meffo. I knew she was going to kill herself. Couldn't stop her. Why are they doing it?"
I was standing over him.
"We don't know," Leon said quietly, by way of reminding me what I was there to do. "Have you no ideas yet?"
I walked away from him,
"I don't know how these people think." I gestured to the settlement, "I don't know how these people work. How am I supposed to know why some of them are killing themselves?" My arms, I noticed, were held out in entreaty.
Leon took a deep breath,
"Let's start with what you think you don't know."
I listened to the question, looked down on him as he waited for my reply. His intent was to placate me. And I knew — from his studied approach, from his noncommittal staring into middle distance — that Leon had encountered reactions like mine in his other recruits.
His demeanour now said that he didn't want to further excite me. I didn't let it work.
"What don't I know?" I turned it around. "I didn't know that they all had jobs. I didn't know that they live where they do because they have jobs to do there."
"They don't."
"Meffo did."
"Not all of them though. Work is voluntary. Where they live and work is their choice."
That new information needing to be absorbed stopped my pacing. I'd had an idea forming that suicide might be a way of leaving a job they didn't like. Now I had to think again.
"There's voluntary and there’s voluntary," I heard myself say.
"True. And the work needs to be done. They all know that. So your guess is as good as mine how much pressure there is."
I sat down opposite Leon.
"They all seem about fifty plus."
"Youngest suicide, so far, has been fifteen."
I leant back in the chair, loosed a deep sigh.
"I don't know how I'm supposed to stop this. What am I supposed to do?"
"You're doing what you were brought here to do. You're looking for answers."
"I know so little. I am so at a loss."
My part in this conversation was more of a surprise to me, I think, than it was to Leon. I hadn't realized how desperate I was. The new had engrossed me. I had been looking outside myself, not at what it was doing to me. The very reverse of my life in the city.
"I can't believe," I said, "that with all that knowledge at their fingertips they can't figure out what's causing it."
"There's an old expression — 'Not seeing the wood for the trees.'"
"Seen plenty of those lately."
Grimacing I looked up to the high slit of a window. When I looked back to Leon he asked,
"What do you specifically need to know?"
"Specifically? ...Nothing. Everything. I need to know them. Them as a people."
Standing I went to the door.
One man, middle-aged, a carrier-box dragging its strap on his shoulder, walked slowly between the far houses.
"Do you know they're dressing up just because I'm around? If they're acting out of the ordinary how am I supposed to know what ordinary is?"
"Good point. I'll talk to Rynnl. Would you mind going naked?"
"What I do doesn't matter. I'm a stranger here. If I behave strangely what's it matter?"
Leon was regarding me with a worried expression. (Wondering what strangeness I intended?)
"You wanted honesty," I said, "I'm being honest."
"I appreciate that," delivered slowly, a professional placator.
"My fear is," I confessed to Leon, "of the Knowledge itself. I feel that it's against me as a mere human. I feel that information, on its instruction, is being deliberately withheld from me. It feels like a conspiracy."
"It's not," Leon was crisply definite. "Don't forget that it was the Knowledge that decided on human intervention."
He had said that before. To another recruit?
"It's not paranoia," I said, not sure if it wasn't. "It's the power the Knowledge has. Let us assume that these suicides are desperate people. They have to be — they are about to exterminate themselves. Yet every one of the four I have seen, they have — in extremis — obeyed the Knowledge and put on their tunics prior to throttling themselves." Another oddity occurred to me, "Have there been any other forms of suicide?"
"All by hanging."
"Do they have dreams telling them to kill themselves?"
"I don't know."
"Can you find out?"
Leon nodded his assent, was about to frame a question.
"What did the post mortems show?" I asked him.
"None have shown anything other than death by strangulation. Decomposition rates have varied according to climate, according to local circumstances. So too bacterial and fungal infestations. No other common factor — other, that is, than death by strangulation."
I thought a while on that. Our talk subsequently slowed. I gave him more details of what had happened in what locations. Parts of our earlier conversation were repeated, became punctuated by sighs and silences.
"Why do some voluntarily isolate themselves?"
"The Knowledge is a constant distraction, I'm told. Some people need to limit all other sensory input. Not all recluses kill themselves. About the same proportion as those in settlements. It seemed easier for us to deal with one person at a time. Possibly that has been a mistake."
"To curtail stimulus... Is that why all rooms are inward-looking, windows for light only, not for looking out?"
"And no paintings on the walls."
"The Knowledge," the certainty came to me, "is not entirely beneficial."
When I woke late next morning Leon was gone and the children were naked.
24
Leon had asked me where next I was bound.
"Serendipity," I'd told him. Didn't turn out to be quite like that.
The first set of coordinates my finger found were again in the hot deep South, came with the memory smell of fetid decomposition. So I moved my finger on to the next set. Which turned out to be
in almost the same temperate latitude as Rynnl's settlement.
In retrospect it was a lucky decision. Depending on how you define luck.
After the trees and low green mountains of Rynnl's land I passed over a strip of ruffled sea — part of the same sea where the island had been — and then I dropped down towards a land of forests and lakes.
I flew over what I now recognized as a settlement — a stand of trees among swathes of harvestable greens and browns — and I came on down over a long mirroring lake and into the forest.
Something about the light, the feel of the place, made me pleased to be there. (My planetary genes identifying something of home?) Added to which — and I had no idea why — I didn't expect to find a body. Thus I rattled down the steps out of my craft wearing a smile.
The woman awaiting me wasn't wearing anything. A skinny woman with long grey hair she had on only a sag in her belly and a droop in her breasts. Her monochrome nakedness seemed her normal state.
My smile broadened in greeting. (She was about the same age as Meffo, but thinner and taller.)
"Okinwe Orbison," I introduced myself; unnecessarily I knew, but the act of speaking made me feel comfortable. She nodded. (A smile?)
"Sririsl," she said, "My house."
The house was around a large deciduous tree, with next to it the double parking bay under a conifer; and around a larger conifer, beside that, another house.
"You can stay there," Sririsl said.
Behind her, through the upper branches of some smaller trees, was the long silver shine of the lake, white clouds riding the blue sky.
"What a beautiful place." I said.
"Yes," Sririsl agreed, with again the suspicion of a humouring smile. This woman was suicidal?
I inspected my house. (A relief — I'd been expecting to share.) It had the usual Arboran layout — living room, eating room, bedroom, bathroom. High windows, nil decor.
Sririsl was waiting in the living room.
"Whose house was it?"
"Father of my daughters."
"Where is he?"
"He died."
"Oh," I said, at a loss, suspecting suicide, that after all I'd again arrived too late. "Of what?" I asked.
Sririsl shrugged,
"An illness."
I was there, paid to be there, as an independent-minded investigator, to find out why these people were killing themselves. I knew little about the people and, I realized, less about death. (In Space people rarely talk about death or the dead. People move on, move off, elsewhere cease to be.)
Unfamiliar with the subject I was uncomfortable with it. (Like all explorers, investigators, I was finding out as much about myself as about any of my subjects.)
"Do you mind if I stay in this house?" I didn't want to offend, exacerbate Sririsl's suicidal sensibilities.
"You've come to watch me," Sririsl said. "It's the obvious place to stay."
I nodded. She was being matter-of-fact, not putting on a brave face.
"I'll fetch my case."
One part of me didn't want to seem happy about her gloom. Another part, and I attributed it to the spirit of the place — a clearness in the still air and a sparkle off the water — put a skip into my step.
Leaping back up into the craft I collected my case and, swinging it, came smiling back into the house.
I actually sang as I hung my five changes of clothes in a low cupboard. Three needed a wash.
"A lot of clothes," Sririsl looked at them from the doorway. (mockingly?)
I glanced over at her easy nakedness and grimaced at my fussily clothed self. I wasn't though about to disrobe in front of her — in such a closed and confined space — might have given her — old and wrinkled as she was — the wrong idea.
My books I carried through to the living room, arranged them on a low ledge along the outer wall. It was wide enough to have also been a seat.
"Is it safe to swim in the lake?" I asked Sririsl behind me.
"Yes. But cold."
Her being naked, my being clothed, made us unequal. The place also made me want to be physically active. Leaving the house I began — my legs of their own accord — to run down a path. Swerving around boulders I slowed on the lake shore to pull my tunic over my head. Unclipping my hair, shaking it loose, I waded out into the deepening water.
I plunged.
Sririsl was right: the cold of the brown water bit into me. To circulate my warming blood I swam rapidly, paused for breath. The lake, long as it was, disappeared out of side around a low rocky corner. I had no intention of swimming its length.
Wallowing, my body adapting itself to the coldness, I looked back to the two houses. I could see them only because I knew they were there — the smaller and larger conifer next to the spreading maple.
I took my time swimming into shore. I wanted to pay attention to what I felt was a new beginning, keep my eyes fresh. When my fingers touched gritty bottom I stood.
Flicking the water off me, carrying my tunic, I climbed back up the path. No mistaking the humour this time in Sririsl's face when she saw me.
"This book is new to the Knowledge," she held up a poetry anthology. "Can I borrow it?"
"Certainly."
Looking me over she smiled. I was aware of my young flesh, compared to the slackness of hers, being hardened from the cold.
"Such long legs," she said, and smiling walked off towards her house.
25
Confident this time of a lengthy stay — if for no other reason than the amount of time it'd take Sririsl to read the whole anthology — I made myself at home that evening, pottered in my solitude about the house.
Wanting to put an order to events so far I started to record in my notepad my first meeting with Leon Reduct. I soon found, however, that not only did I have to describe Leon Reduct but myself as well. And already it was difficult to think myself back to that time, to that old life of mine in the city, that other person who had been me without these experiences, who hadn't even believed that Talkers presently existed, if they ever had...
I wanted also to make a record of my feelings concerning the suicides; or rather my lack of feelings, which had surprised me, had lowered my estimation of myself. That I had stayed in a dead man's house for three days solely out of academic curiosity, that I had watched the desert mummification of another body... None of us likes to think ourselves callous. What kind of man was I?
I was 19 and an unknown quantity to myself. And, apart from The Leander Chronicle, apart from what they and Leon had chosen to tell me, what did I know of hybrids?
The more I thought on it the more I felt adrift in a universe of unknowns, gravitating first to one simple idea and, when that proved a mere gas cloud, onto another as insubstantial; feeling all the while that I was being deliberately misled. Misled from what? Why should they want to mislead me? Why was I that important to them that I was worth misleading? Was I?
For my own temporary peace of mind I decided on this rationalization — that, for their emotional stability, they had hidden the reason for the suicides from themselves and had employed me to discover the reason, despite themselves.
Putting aside my notepad and my many niggling suspicions I told myself that, whatever else was going on, for the moment I liked it here in this house by the lake, and that I wanted to stay.
Opening the outside door, house-lights dimming off, I looked down on the star-chinked stretch of water. Sririsl's house was in complete darkness.
Expecting to find her dead — that expectation a still calm certainty carried inside: her appearance of humour had fooled me — I wrapped a towel around my waist and found myself walking past the parking bays.
Her door slid up on my approach, closed behind me, the lights coming back on.
Sririsl was laid back in her chair, finger on the page she'd reached prior to my intrusion.
"I'm off to bed," I told her. Her look took in the towel,
"Why aren't your poems in here?"
&nb
sp; "Too new. Not good enough."
"Can I see them?"
"They're not worth seeing." And in that moment of speaking it I was certain of it.
26
What do we know?
I knew that I was dreaming.
* * * * *
...Water changes from brown speckled to a dense green as I go deeper, level out with just the green light about me, knowledge of white ceiling surface far above.
A shoal of silversided fish come by me, each with their one eye wary of me. In false panic they flicker away. I too turn aside and go arcing deeper.
I know where I am going.
Ramparts are visible, a convex wall rising from the marine darks, a lattice work swayed with weeds. Within I have to go, turn on a perpendicular edge and am allowed through.
Many minds are within.
Contact itself is light.
Knowing where I am bound I move between the oscillations of one brother, the ocean spasm of another.
Many here are transparencies, cognisant parts of the sea. They too sweep around. I turn with them to a crashing and a crunching above.
A submarine beast with sharp claws and row upon row of serrated teeth is biting and digging his way into our domain. We are to be its meal. I alone of my brethren have the capacity to deter it, go speeding up towards the jaws.
So intent is the beast of ripping and tearing that it is unaware of my accelerating towards it.
* * * * *
Sat up in bed I pulled air into my lungs.
Apart from the assassin dream I'd had no other dream as powerful, wondered if I was picking up stray mind signals from all the Hybrids on the planet.
Or had I, by accident, picked up a signal from the Nautili?
The Nautili though, Leon had said, were no longer in constant touch with the Hybrids. Their histories had diverged, he had said.
27
What if the Nautili were returning? Could that be why some hybrids were killing themselves? Were the returning Nautili making their lives unbearable. The desert man had been an aversive: imagine if he'd had constant dreams of water...
