by Sam Smith
Or could the dream have had its foundation in the residual thoughts left by Sririsl's man? I knew no more of him than that he had lived and died in this house, possibly in this room, possibly in this bed...
No, I told myself, I wasn't going to succumb to planetary superstitions, start believing in ghosts and floating spectres.
Awake, the house felt real — walls, bed, ceiling — felt substantial, felt safe. This, I was convinced, was a good place.
With thoughts such as these circling below my consciousness I slipped back into a deep undreaming sleep.
I awoke to an open door, birdsong, and the yellow ceiling dapple of sunlight reflected off water. The thought-naming of water brought back memories of the dream, in its every detail, without now though the frightening immediacy of the night.
Should it prove to be of importance I decided to make, there and then, a record of the whole dream.
28
Sririsl was sitting on a round rock down by the lake's edge. She had the anthology with her, was already about halfway through. That bothered me.
Taking my tunic over my head I dropped it on the little beach and waded out into the sundazzled water. When waist-deep I plunged below the sun.
The water was lake brown, didn't go to green as in my dream. Nor could I stay below, had to come gasping to the surface.
The dream hadn't then been a premonition.
Paddling there I thought again on the two dreams. Never before had I had dreams whose images had pursued me so lucidly into wakeful day. And, recalling the beast smashing into the underwater defences, aware of cold currents sliding below, I swam back to shore.
I sat on the round rock next to Sririsl. She watched as I made a game of scraping the water from my skin. Her aged smile, looking on me, was one of fondness.
"Tell me of your life Sririsl," I said, wanting her to stop reading, wanting to know what might make someone want to kill themself.
While I leaned back on my straight arms, face to the golden sun, Sririsl told of being brought up in a nearby settlement.
"Which way?"
She pointed. I squinted.
Eating breakfast — before my swim — I had stood in the doorway, had looked at all the paths and had thought '...the enchantment of forests, paths leading us astray...' Was that what my dream had been — enchantment?
Add witches to ghosts and spectres. Dismiss.
Sririsl had returned to the anthology.
"Are your parents still alive?" I asked.
Her father was; but not near here. She told of his work grafting new tree species onto old.
I recalled seeing two sets of leaves apparently coming from one trunk in the first wooded valley. I hadn't looked further, had assumed two trunks had grown entwined, their different leaves vying for the light. This, though, Sririsl explained, was how most of their food and fabric was grown, with minimum disturbance to the natural habitation.
I asked of her mother.
Sririsl, after the little hesitation of all hybrids that was surprised that I shouldn't know the obvious, was happy to tell of her mother, of how she had helped Sririsl's father with the grafting, how — although he had an aptitude for guessing compatibilities — it had been her mother's dexterity and care which had brought the grafts to growth.
I wanted to know how professions were decided on Arbora.
"Need first," Sririsl said; and, if no pressing need, then an interest in a subject. As, through his interest, her father had developed his talent for guessing compatibilities. Her mother's aptitude had been for nurture.
When Sririsl's mother had died — an illness, not suicide — her father had moved away from the settlement. By then Sririsl had met her own man and she had two young daughters.
Sririsl felt her father's loneliness at times, the absence of her mother, added now to the absence of her man.
"He died?"
"Yes."
"Of what?"
"A heart disorder."
"Wasn't it diagnosed?"
"Late onset. He should have had checks. We had no time. His death was very sudden."
"Weren't you angry?"
"Yes. With everyone. Him most of all. He was so conscientious."
Her voice had gone peculiarly flat, as if — out of habit — she was quelling emotion.
"Where are your daughters?"
"Both are in settlements. One near here, the other further South. She doesn't like winters here."
"Do you miss your daughters?"
"All are with me," Sririsl held her hand up, palm facing backwards, signifying that they were behind her face, in the Knowledge.
We could never be alone...
Her eyes were drifting back to the anthology.
"What first brought you and your man here?" I indicated the lake.
In hybrid society, Sririsl told me, everyone has a function. Even if it's only the place where they're living to complete one of the necessary ellipses. Sririsl and her man had come here, though, to try to get a rice crop growing in the lake, near the edges. But, without converting the margins to obviously, visible-from-above, artificial paddies, no worthwhile crop could be grown.
The two of them by this time, however, having raised their baby daughters here, had become fond of the place. So both had stayed gathering forest crops. Even when both her daughters had moved away, still she had been happy here. Then her man had unexpectedly died.
"Why don't you move into the settlement with your nearest daughter?"
"I have become this place. The place me. I have a function here."
If everyone had a job, then I wanted to contribute too.
"I'll help with the gathering of crops," I told Sririsl. "It might help me to understand."
29
That afternoon took me away from the lake and into the forest.
First we stopped by a single large tree under which, on the bare beaten earth, was a flock of red birds. Their beaks were yellow. Their legs too were yellow, but scaly. Their black-centred eyes too were yellow. While their short red wings seemed to be more for stirring up dust than for flying.
I had heard their squawks and clucks the previous evening, had assumed their noise to be part of the forest, not the sound of domesticated livestock.
The birds had their own small house around the trunk of the tree, even had their own circular doors. Opening roof hatches Sririsl removed several white eggs.
"Protein and iron," she told me, placing them in a shaped carrying container.
Seeing my wariness of the pecking, scratching, flapping animals she told me not to be afraid, picked one up and gave it to me to hold.
Tucked under my arm, once I'd overcome my terror of its twisting head, I must confess that I found holding that warm feathered creature quite comforting.
Sririsl took me deeper into the forest, introduced me to certain trees and their fruits.
On the way back I collected the egg container and found myself lightheartedly imitating the croaking sound of one of the birds — hens, Sririsl called them — and the bird quizzically imitating me. This noise-question to noise-question 'conversation' kept me amused for almost half an hour, with different birds coming over, heads to one side, to interrogate me and my interlocutor.
The episode left me wondering how many human conversations were an exchange of information, and how many were simply comforting noises.
Wondering on the nature of conversation I walked on with Sririsl through the dappled forest, both of us glancing to one another, seeking understanding.
We stopped on the edge of a large glade. A small house was built partly around a large tree.
"Mind the steps," Sririsl warned me as I followed her through the door.
Stairs led underground. The storage area spread out under the glade.
All that we had collected we placed in different containers. Some berries were kept cool, others squelchingly processed. The eggs we posted through a round hole, heard them grindingly processed. Without our tunics the
cellar was cold.
On our way back to the lake I paused often to ask the name of a tree or a plant.
The anthology remained half-read.
30
He is twice my size.
The fat makes his eyes small and his wrists thick; and as he talks he sweats, streams running out of his tight curly hair and down over his face. When he sucks off the sweat-dribbles his lips slip together. Sweat lies glistening within the reddened folds of his chins.
The chins move.
"Pleasurable melancholy," he says as if announcing the subject of a 'talk'.
Swaying forward he leans over me. I am sitting on a hard chair too small for me.
The pink skin of his belly is stretched tight, the white umbilical knot protruding like a stunted root.
"Sadness can be enjoyed."
He scrapes a finger in among the blue-speckled folds of flesh below each eyebrow, flicks the sweat aside. It splatters on the smooth Space floor. (How did I get back here?)
"Such enjoyment can become, with practise," the insides of his slippery lips are wet and purple, "exquisite. Like the many small pains we gladly accept during the sexual act."
I do not want to bring to my mind this fat man in the performance of any part of any sexual act. But having thought it I can see, at the confluence of his belly and thighs, the circular black comma'd tip of his penis. He has an erection. (But how does he manage sex? His back bent over the end of a bed? over a chair? feet and head on the floor? partner astraddle? is that what he uses this chair for?)
From that small seat I look up to him leaning further over me, slack breasts swinging.
"Depression is often its own reward." He twists his mouth to suck sweat from his cheek, "Being inconsolably miserable brings its own satisfaction. Also contains an inner and fatal logic."
The small eyes are filling with sweat.
He blinks.
I watch a shower of warm drops coming towards me.
* * * * *
I awoke on the rock where I'd lain myself to dry.
The morning had come over dark, a purplish cloud shadowing the lake. Grabbing my towel I hurried up to the house, took the dream in a shiver with me.
31
I couldn't, I reprimanded myself, afford to fall asleep by lakes. Sririsl could easily have finished another sixth of the anthology.
She hadn't.
When I reached her house she wasn't reading, but was closing a waterproof hood about her face.
I was still naked, towel in hand.
“You're going gathering? In this?" The rain was starting as I spoke, spotting through the leaves, spraying cold over the dry skin on my back.
"Rain can be enjoyed," Sririsl smiled at me, the naked stranger.
My dream found echoes in her words, in my nudity.
"Can I come with you?" Despite her waterproofs it still seemed an odd and dangerous thing for her to do alone. And unnecessary.
"Your choice."
"Why not leave it until the rain stops?"
"They are vine berries. Their damp skins will attract spores and they will spoil."
Her look said that she needed to go, questioned my wanting to accompany her.
"I need to know everything," I told her. "I need to know."
Sririsl shrugged, stepped past me. I stopped by my house, put on my tunic, caught up with her.
"You'll get soaked," she said.
"The rain can be enjoyed."
"Not that much."
Since the valley I had been puzzling where the rainwater went, why it hadn't dripped from the eaves of the houses. I'd already discovered narrow gutters under the lip of the roofs. Now I had someone to ask.
"Where does the rain go from the gutters?"
As we squelched across a forest glade Sririsl explained how the rainwater was fed back into ceiling tanks next to the trunks. Once those tanks were full the overflow went down to the tree roots. As did all the waste water from the houses. Else the trees would wither and the houses would become visible from above.
On a glade's edge a vine had grown so as to cover the whole side of one tree. Several large bunches of berries were too high for Sririsl to reach. Despite her telling me not to bother, full of youthful bravado, I insisted on clambering up into the tree and edged out along the ever thinner bough to where the berries were.
To cut what could be a long story short, I slipped on a wet branch and fell out of the tree. And I looked up out of my surprise to find Sririsl laughing at me. From the ground I threw a soggy stick at her. Shrieking she ran splashing off while I regained my breath and my feet. She ran quickly for an old woman.
That incident — her spontaneous laughter, her impulsive running — made me decide that it was safe to ask her about the suicides.
"Why do you reckon people are killing themselves?"
Water dripped from both our noses, was blown away by our outward breaths as we tramped through the woods.
"The tyranny of time," she replied.
"What's that mean?"
"Time past. Time future. All that time to be filled. Remorselessness of years going by."
Uneasy reverberations here of my lakeside dream.
"Because..." I tried to remember the exact words of the dream, "Because they enjoy sadness they are killing themselves?"
"No..."
"How then," I shifted, uncomfortable with the subject, uncomfortable inside my heavy wet tunic, "How did it feel when you first wanted to kill yourself? What happened first?"
"First..." I saw her thin shoulders rise within the waterproofs. "Nothing happened. A sadness came out of the day. Out of the trees, out of the lake, out of the ground. And it wrapped itself around me."
"Did it worry you?"
"It was just there."
The Knowledge was infected. The Knowledge was trying to reach me through my dreams. I was talking to the Knowledge through Sririsl.
"Did everyone," I tried to turn the conversation away from the two of us, "have the same reason for killing themself?"
"I don't know," Sririsl answered. "The darkness won't let us know."
On our return, the rain stopped, our wet clothes off, Sririsl was sitting in her doorway and I was sitting on the dry ground beside her, my back against the wall.
"Do you want to kill yourself now?" Having once dared broach the subject I was loath now to let it go.
"I'm still here," she said, an evasion.
"Is this like Space?" I asked the Knowledge through her, not expecting an answer: "You too have nowhere to go?"
"Oh we do. We have the huge unknown. And that is frightening. We don't know what is to become of us."
That had been Sririsl not the Knowledge answering.
"Have you," intuition had me ask, "lost faith in the Knowledge?"
"It is not something that exists separately from me," she said, but I saw her face go flat, reflecting the notion back.
The Knowledge could come to dislike me, feeder of subversive ideas into it; and with that thought, that fear, I admitted to myself that I was envious of their Knowledge. And in the same instant as that admission I became determined to learn as much of the Knowledge as I was able.
Asking Sririsl about the three missing Talker books, I had her corroborate what Leon had told me — that one was a list of genetic codings, one was based upon legends, and one was of cosmic currents.
Sitting outside Sririsl's house I looked down on the lake glittering in the sunset after the rain. Different from yesterday, probably different from the day before and the day before. Every day, from dawn onwards — grey ghost of the day to come — throughout the cloud-dappled morning and drowsy afternoon, to this last dazzle before night, those few acres of water had to be a continual source of beauty and wonder.
"I haven't seen one work of art here."
"What is art?" Sririsl sounded as if she was quoting, "Art is a talking across the years. Art is a saying something to those you will never meet. What need," her voice changed back to her own
, "do we have of that? We know, perhaps, too much."
"Rynnl told me that he can know only so much of the Knowledge. Even the cleverest among you, he said, has only so much capacity for knowing. Art could cut corners there."
"Almost a century after we left there came a fashion in human art," Sririsl's wrinkled face was pulled so taut against her bones that I knew that this was the Knowledge speaking to me direct, "mostly in works of literature — articles, essays, novels, poems — for them to be addressed to us. At first we believed that humankind was trying to contact us. You weren't though. Those works were simply egos and philosophies being tested on the idea of us. Art is open to too many misunderstandings. Too much is inferred, implied."
When the window shutters went up and the door wanted to close I returned to my house overcome with thought.
Despite Sririsl's claim — for the benefit of the Knowledge? — that she was inseparable from the Knowledge, I felt that she was not happy with the Knowledge, that she could well resent it. Or had I merely detected one of the first symptoms spreading out of the Knowledge to a potential suicide?
However, having heard Sririsl laugh that day, I could not believe that she would that night kill herself. I recorded as much in my notepad.
32
Outside a hen is throwing up.
The room reeks of sweated booze. Taint of charcoal smoke coils clinging to the ceiling and walls.
My back is to the wall.
Three of them come towards me, each about half my height but dark and spiky.
"Which of us gets to screw the girl?" one says combatively.
I don't know what he's talking about. There's no girl here. Am I a girl?
I look down.
I am naked.
I am male.
Is the girl a telepath? Are they? They're still coming straight towards me.
Fear has me say,
"That's close enough."
I know I shouldn't have said that.
The centre one steps forward, stands on my toe.
