The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  I had thought plastic was colourful. I was misinformed.

  She had started showing me a few secret shuvaní recipes. She would never call them potions. She explained that Mother and Mr Vanlow had known each other as children, and that was why they were marrying so soon, for he had loved her for many years, in secret. Afterwards, some malicious people started talking about those evenings in the kitchen. Had Savina and I cast a spell to trap Mr Vanlow? Had he married Mother because of our shuvaní ministrations? Even now, I cannot answer the question, for I am not sure what concoction we were putting together, Savina and I.

  * * *

  Shortly after the wedding, Eli came back to Gobarí once more. Mr Vanlow was determined to bring the house back to its former splendour; he seemed happy to abandon Benguele (a farm, and therefore a much less aristocratic place), and he hired people to do repairs around the balcony, the crumbling porch, the land and the gardens. This took me by surprise. Did we have gardens? Until then, I had not known. Everything was overgrown with wild vegetation. Everything seemed to be infused with the stagnant smell of the leaves and the thicket and the flowers. Passion fruit rotted on their branches. The bats flew chaotically over the canopy of the trees, their shrieks the last thing you heard before allowing sleep to overcome you.

  I had been back to the pond often on my own. The truth was that I was always hoping to see Eli again, moving the branches, joining me in the water. But she had never came back after that last afternoon. In my head I talked with the basilisk, and sometimes would feel something moving between my feet. But there was nothing there. My swimming sessions were a joy, even without her, or perhaps, precisely, because they were only mine. I was foolish to think that, as would soon become apparent.

  I was glad to see Eli back in the kitchen with her sister. I still was angry with her, at the things she had said by the pond. My family and I were leaving. We were going to spend some time in Old Town during the refurbishment of the house. Savina would come with us, and Eli’s sister would stay back in her place, feeding the men who were going to set our house straight. I was glad Eli had seen me with my new city outfit. She was still wearing the shirt she had taken from me months ago. It looked like rags. It was much darker and I could see it had been mended repeatedly. I felt pity; but the cruel sort of pity. At last I mounted the hovering vehicle, and Mother, Savina, my brother Aster, Mr Vanlow and I glided over the land, following the missing road into Old Town.

  I can see now that I was behaving like a petulant child; but something else nagged at me, I had other reasons to feel betrayed by Eli. A couple of weeks before leaving, something happened. I had been collecting yarrow and violet, on Savina’s orders, and I decided to have a swim; but this time the pond wasn’t enough, I wanted to taste the flavour of the ocean in my mouth. So I walked to Kon-il. It was a long walk, half a day in good weather, to reach the coast. It was the same place where I had seen my father swimming, all those years back.

  Little blue bird, little blue bird. Where are you going, little blue bird?

  There were some people standing there, on the beach, my beach, the last thing I had expected, and I hid among the rocks. When I looked again, it surprised me to see my mother with another woman, much older than her, and another one, younger. They were chanting something, and they had drawn a spiral with shells and other offerings at the edge of the tide. The ocean was receding, and the water touched the shells lightly. Some kind of intuition awoke within me, and I understood that I was witnessing an initiation. The younger woman entered the water, and swam. I did not move from where I was hiding; I was sure I was not meant to be there. When the younger woman returned to shore, I could see her face, Eli’s face.

  I thought many times of Eli after that, and she appeared in my dreams. In one of them, we were next to the vessels, and she was scared to be put in one and sent up to the sky, up and up we go. But I made her do it. This was a good way of killing her, for it would be a slow death no doubt. I knew she would die up there, everybody knew that; they were just too scared to admit it. What I dreamed was that she was sent in my place, that this was her punishment. And I knew the dream would come to be true, as all my dreams did eventually.

  I had seen a Jump, only once, when I was little more than a toddler. It was the last one. It took place many years ago, but some things have stayed with me, some images that were difficult to shake. The procession celebrating the heroes, who were paraded around the streets, their faces stuck in manic smiles, although their eyes looked sad to me. Their beautiful white robes, their ceremonial flower crowns. Their constellations, drawn on the floor in thousands of coloured petals. The rest of the streets completely covered with green leaves.

  Eventually, the time came, and the vast structure was sent up from the staithe built into the sea. People were frantic, excited; I looked at my parents for reassurance, for I could not understand the electricity in the air. As I’ve grown up, learnt about the Jumps, I have also come to realise that sometimes they were followed by rioting crowds, social unrest; as if the same society that promoted and encouraged them intuitively knew that they were sending those children to their deaths. I remember how the vessel could be seen for a long time, a small star in the middle of the day, a pale dot that never really disappeared. At night, it was possible to follow its ascent, if one knew where to look, confused among the stars.

  Up, further up, the massive ring of the Upper Settlement was also lightly visible. I always found it difficult to imagine that human beings lived up there, perched like birds over the planet’s atmosphere. But there they were, enjoying their pure air, domesticated gardens; away from the forest that swallowed us up and spat us out raw, day after day after day. Safe, protected. A privileged balcony from which to observe the vessels’ ascent, jumping up into the dark embrace of the sky; those people sent to find a better world for us all.

  Did I fear that the Jump was the fate that awaited me? I cannot be sure of when that knowledge entered my consciousness. The Jumps, the selection of beanie and techie children, the NEST project, were no more than remote ideas, strange words on adult lips. But I was, I am, I will forever be, scared of the vessels. The massive structures had always produced a falling sensation in the pit of my stomach. As if I instinctively knew that something so gigantic could not really hold itself up there, would eventually fall from the sky, crushing us all. As if they were nothing more than a mirage to keep us going, to help us pretend we could escape this green inferno, touch the sky if needed; an illusion as unreal as the Upper Settlement itself. Now I know better, for I made it up here eventually, to the ring, and let it trap me in its orderly prison.

  4

  We are on the move. One white corridor followed by another white corridor followed by another white corridor. My LivePod hovers over the floor, advances smoothly. The rocking motion could send me to sleep if I am not careful. I would like to be awake, I need to be awake, fully aware of what they do to me.

  I wanted so badly to come up to the ring. It was what I had always wanted. This used to surprise my friends from the Registry, especially Laurel.

  ‘Aren’t you scared to go up there? I thought you didn’t like enclosed spaces,’ she would say. I would explain that the installations inside the ring were so extensive, filled with gardens and avenues and boulevards, storytelling theatres, public-curated collections, sports installations… Inside, it was as big as two or three of our towns, more perhaps. It was impossible to feel trapped. This was all second-hand knowledge, of course, from my stepfather.

  Now, I am here, inside a white, vast chamber, oblong shaped. The ceiling sends me back my own image with its metallic reflections; it reminds me of me, looking at my own reflection over the pond. At one end there is an oval window. Through it, I can see one of the many green spaces here. There is hardly any furniture. My Health-issued LivePod. Some monitors hovering about it, moving around madly as they check on me. Far away, at the other end, a red sofa in front of the window. The system checks every morning, decide
s if it can open the glass lid for me to get up or not. So far, it has opened every morning. That means that she is healthy, doing well. Food appears in pouches at regular intervals, so does water. I am visited by the health professionals, or at least that’s what I think they are, who talk among themselves and don’t really share much of what is going on with me. But I catch their conversations, and know that all is well. At least, I imagine it, allow myself to imagine it.

  They are all wearing masks and plastic goggles and gloves and other protective gear, so I’ve never seen their faces. But I recognise them by their voices, and there is one who is obviously the leader, instructs the others, and the little drone machines that hover around me, tells them what the next steps are.

  I cannot tell if they are wearing protective gear because they want to protect the baby, or because they are protecting themselves from me. Everyone who comes from the surface needs to spend a minimum of a fortnight in quarantine as soon as they alight from the transport. You present your credentials, a tattooed barcode on your inner wrist, and then you move on to the decontamination chamber. It is more tedious than anything else. Once you are given the go-ahead, you exit into a plastic corridor that takes you directly into the quarantine facility. There is no way of escaping this. I do not remember my fourteen days of quarantine; they all blur into each other in my mind.

  I do remember the trip skywards in the second-class transport, how badly the straps adjusted, too big and no one around to help me fix them, and the sudden horizontal ascent, much more shaky than the smooth hovering vehicles I was used to down on Earth, and the smell of sweat and unwashed clothes and fear. We were around fifty people in several rows, closely sat next to one another, no space to move a leg, and having to fight for the hard armrest. They were mostly beanies, probably going up to serve some family, or destined for the farming levels. The few techies were distinguishable, mostly because they looked with disdain at the others around them, hoping to make clear that they were made of different stock. But even these techies were heading for minor positions as clerical hands, or low-level engineers. These kinds of individuals were always needed up there. I felt sorry for them. They tried very hard to look as if they were used to coming and going between the two places, while obviously trying to hold themselves back from vomiting.

  I tried to hold myself back as well. I didn’t know what had been done to procure the ticket for me; it would be better not to ask. They did not fly easily into your hand out of nowhere, they were a once-in-a-lifetime affair. I worried somebody had gone short; someone had lost their life-changing opportunity.

  A loud crack announced the departure, and, for a few minutes, the pressure of my stomach against my throat. Holding on to my ill-fitting straps for sheer life. And then, shooting up, up and up we go, into the unknown. Our imagined landscape of uncertainties left behind, a gigantic planet with a blotch of green and the uncertain golden and maroon ocean so loved and mourned by Mother.

  I remember arriving at the receiving station, presenting my tattoo, and being ushered through quickly, as even a low-level curator has more status up here. Although this only meant that I was transferred to another, faster queue. This queue was to take my temperature, receive a state-of-the-art health scan. I walked into the machine, placed my feet where the signs were, elevated my arms as instructed. And all my secrets were revealed. Even to myself. That was all. I had condemned myself to this LivePod.

  * * *

  And, this morning, an emergency in my little white world. A red light flashing somewhere, little rubies of a warning. I panic. The interior of the LivePod is ample; but the idea of staying here all day, lying on my back or on my side, cannot be considered for a second. Despite my condition, my episodes, I believe that I have not feared this since I got here. I wonder why this might be. I have not reached a special kind of wisdom, or ulalé, that moment in which you swim away and the ocean waters and the sky become one, and you ascend. No, nothing as impressive as that. The truth is that, in recent days, perhaps weeks, I have had no energy for anything, even for worrying. I am simply so tired, and in constant pain in any position, that nothing else matters.

  In response to the red lights, the warnings, for the first time the lid over my face does not move. My anxiety starts to spark up. Not only about staying put, and whether I would survive hours, perhaps days, inside the pod, where I can hardly move, but also about other more prosaic ailments that might make this waiting impossible.

  Every day now I wake up with back pain, particularly severe on the right side. I spend the night changing position, moving between lying on my back or lying on my left side; this is what I have been told to do, in order to send more of my blood to the placenta. But no position is comfortable. I have an oversized pillow which I use to support my back, put my legs up, rest my arms and my head. But it is not enough. Nothing seems to be. I also seem to have permanent cramps in my legs, and I suddenly long to jump out of the pod and walk a bit towards the window, hopefully sucking a milbao pouch dry. The lid continues to not move; but I should not have worried, for a group of people enter immediately—I have never seen so many—and hover over the machine, a circle of unknown eyes behind pristine white facemasks.

  And then it strikes me.

  She hasn’t moved as much recently, has she?

  It is difficult to estimate; I’ve not been keeping tabs. Perhaps I should have? No idea. But the truth is, now that I think about it, that the last few weeks she was moving all the time… and now? It is difficult to tell. Definitely less. Is that why they are here now?

  So they press a few buttons, and my LivePod starts moving towards the door, and out we go… Where?

  One white corridor after another white corridor after another white corridor. I stretch my neck as far as it will go. I want to see. I need to see. People, places. Those strange bio-engineered animals Arlo was always talking about. Those polished, pristinely dressed brave new people. The little drones that carry things and bring messages and play sweet music to make you forget you are in Hell. Nothing.

  There is a larger ward at the end of our short journey. My LivePod hovers and hovers, and soon I am reaching the white ceiling, pushed against the white ceiling. I do not understand what is happening, why they had let it go like a balloon, up and up we go.

  It comes now, all of a sudden. I can only see the ceiling through the glass lid. Suddenly I cannot breathe. I have to say nothing, communicate nothing. The Health-issued LivePod picks it all up. My heart rate, I guess, my muscles contracting. It descends to floor level. It opens up like a flower. I breathe then, the dear, stale, purified air of the Upper Settlement.

  ‘Calm down, you have to calm down,’ someone says.

  They monitor her movements for twenty minutes, half an hour, one hour, two hours. I am plucked and prodded, and the monitors are sending a curve up and down madly. She is fine, it is all fine…

  I doze. Finally.

  I am in an underwater cavity, and I know that I must swim to the other end. So I swim and I swim and I swim. What is there at the other end? I only know that I need to get there. The cave gets smaller and tighter, it is more and more difficult to move, and I cannot spread my arms to advance. Luckily, I realise that I can get hold of protuberances in the rock to propel me forward. At some point, I decide that I do not need to breathe down here. There is no hurry, I can take all the time in the world. I guess that now I am an underwater thing, as simple as that. I reach the other side at last.

  I am in a garden.

  I am in a forest.

  I am in a jungle.

  The jungle has been made especially for me with some kind of terraforming technology.

  The hare by my feet is dead. She has a purple-rotting hue in her orange fur, and her eyes are lost and unmoving, like the dirty amber water that simmers in the pond, back in Gobarí. Underneath it sit the orbs, two pebbles in the centre, dark and deep. What does she remind me of? A doll, perhaps, fallen from the sky. It looks as if she is looking at me through
her two dead eyes.

  ‘Can you help me, please?’ I say to the hare. ‘I need to find my husband.’

  ‘Why do you think I know where he is?’

  The hare’s voice is eerie, distant and rusty, and she speaks without moving her thin hare lips or her limbs or her face or her eyes.

  ‘Don’t you think you owe me?’ is all I answer. ‘You asked me to kill you, and I killed you.’

  ‘Look, even if I did want to help you, I probably couldn’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’ll have to be prepared to Jump, all the way into the sky. Up and up we go… Up where the dead children are.’

  I wake up.

  * * *

  I learnt early to pay attention to my dreams. I once had a really vivid dream, and my life seemed to align with its essence in uncanny ways, as if my subconscious were sending me a message.

  It was Savina who interpreted the dream for me the next morning, and that was when she explained that Mother had been taken with the fashion of giving yourself, of swimming as far as possible, not knowing if you were going to be able to come back. It was risky, as the believers had to find places to jump into the water at the other side of the wall, and sometimes they got shot at. She had always survived; not just the illicit throwing herself into the forbidden deep, but the swimming itself. The offering. She always came back, and I truly could not tell if that made her relieved or angry. I can imagine her, turning back towards the town. The strenuous effort of her legs kicking, of keeping her eyes and mouth over the water and the plastic debris. Swimming back had to be a conscious act; she had to decide upon it, turn the other way, already exhausted, and kick and kick with all her might, push the water with her arms as much as possible, and consciously try to make shore again. Why? Why set off, and why come back?

  Some days, the sky was radiant with a fluorescent blue, which sent rays of light down even during the small hours. We did not know where the light came from, why the sky was tainted that colour. Some people said it was connected to something they did from the ring, some explosion, or energy surge. For the believers, this was their preferred moment to swim away, under the uncertain blue lights dancing on the horizon. And one such night she almost did.