The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  That very scene was the one that came to me in a dream. Its hypnotic quality meant that I had experienced it all, and seen myself far away from the shore, heavy with a full belly, desperately trying to move away, panicking, and then desperately trying to swim back. And, as soon as her feet, my feet, touched the wall again, regretting my weakness.

  The dream confirmed a thing that perhaps I had known and forgotten, or that perhaps I had always known somehow: my mother had tried to swim away in this manner when she was pregnant with me, imagining her offering to the ocean would be doubled. Now, looking back, I can see that Mother was not proud of that weakness, regretted it deeply, and it tainted her life. In that case, what was I for her? Nothing more than a sacrifice, expendable? This generated more questions than ever; about my parents, their union, my strange childhood, my distant and beautiful mother.

  ‘You are right to believe in your dreams, child,’ Savina said. ‘For you yourself have a little shuvaní blood in you, from your mother’s side.’

  Was this possible? Were we like Savina, if only a little? Mother’s family was old and aristocratic; having mixed shuvaní blood did not tally with what I had been told about them. And then she explained further: that one of our ancestors had owned hundreds of shuvaní souls, and that among them was one young woman, so beautiful that he could not help but marry her. And so she had passed us this curse.

  So now I knew for certain: Savina’s story was true and my mother had been a swimmer in her youth.

  And a swimmer is always a swimmer.

  Had my father found out that this had happened, and got angry at her; was that why he tried to take me away with him, with no intention of harming me? But, even if that were the case, why had he murdered a beanie child?

  This was before the swimmers put bombs in the wall, before they killed people. This was when they only offered themselves to the Three Oceans to atone for humanity’s sin of destroying the planet. But in time things would become confused in people’s heads, the way things do: my mother would be dead long before they decided to up their fight; and still, still… The storytellers would have done their work by then, and people would have been told what to think, and how to think it.

  Swimming was different from what they said, from what they thought. Even I, in my little pond, would feel like I was doing something a little bit subversive, forbidden. Between the shore and the Barrier everyone could enjoy a few hundred yards of clean water, unspoiled half-moon sandy beaches, like the cove in Kon-il, like in Old Town. But elegant techies did not swim; there was something polluted in the very idea of submerging yourself.

  I, however, loved my swimming sessions. Every time I entered the yellow-green water of the pond, I felt as if a secret boundary had been crossed. I was one with the little flies, the fallen leaves and other pieces of nature that floated away as I rehearsed my weak strokes. In communion with the water, I was reborn into a different realm. The world seemed more silent from inside there. The forest and its creatures did not stop their jittering; it simply was that, once in the water, my senses seemed to mutate, and I stopped paying attention to them, my attention diverted to other things that were more pressing, more real: the light brush of the carp at my feet, the change in the light, the new perspective of my vision, which for once made the overgrown seaweed found in places more dangerous than the trees above, the flickering of something unknown to me, possibly dangerous, that always seemed about to reveal itself beneath the surface. Afterwards I would lie on my back and look at the canopy, some light managing to reach me through the leaves and the branches. I felt as if I was hanging from the sky that was only dimly visible.

  In those moments, I belonged to the water entirely, and could feel its pull.

  It was a mirage from their reality, from what the swimmers were trying to do. There were no real dangers on my pond, secret undercurrents that swirl you from left to right, or suck you down. For starters, the swimmers would throw themselves naked, and receive wave after wave over each bit of their body, abandoning themselves to its capricious movements. They would tread water, or swim, or simply let themselves be guided until that point, that moment, in which the ocean and the sky would touch. And this could only happen on the other side of the Barrier, where cetaceans wailed and monstrous creatures lurked, where survival was almost impossible. How many had ascended in this way? I had no way to know; to my knowledge, their beliefs were not recorded.

  This is what I knew: they would happily walk the three or four miles until the weakest point on the wall for a pre-swim within its clean contained waters, and, perhaps, they would consider what they were about to do, they would reflect. I wondered if they had prayers and superstitions, like the little shuvaní beliefs enacted by Savina. There was no way to know: theirs was a world of secretive rites, unknown meanings. Why had Mother initiated Eli and not me? I tried not to think about it, as I did not think about so many other things, but a furious rage simmered under my orderly surface whenever I remembered the scene. It tainted everything I did, everywhere I went.

  Afterwards, they would defy the militias that guarded the wall, and cross at some point to the other side. This action may have only got easier as time went by, as the military presence in our settlements had gradually decreased. I wondered if there was a liminal moment in which the water on the other side felt like the water on the protected side, to suddenly change into the unknown; or whether they threw themselves directly into the long vista of brown debris. I had no way to know, I had never looked on the other side of the wall.

  * * *

  Now, I was in Old Town. But I still dreamt of my pond, and thought often about the ocean, so clean and pure on this side of the Barrier, and of what it meant to Urania.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  I was startled by the question and the unknown voice, a distinctive tone of anger hanging in the air. I looked up. The little patio where I had taken my reveries to was a communal area for several compounds. I had gone there following the animated sound of water, and had sat in front of a little fountain dripping golden reflections. A techie boy of about my age, perhaps a little younger, was looking at me from between the eucalyptus plants.

  ‘I live here,’ I replied.

  ‘Here? In this compound?’

  Disbelief was evident in his clear blue eyes.

  I knew at once what was happening. I recognised the scene far too well.

  If he looked at me, he was bound to misinterpret it. I was wearing expensive clothes, but my skin was not entirely white, my eyes darker than his. My accent a bit off-kilter. There is no other way to put it: I looked, I look, a bit wrong, not altogether techie, not altogether beanie, not altogether right. I waited for it. At last, it came:

  ‘Do you mean to say you are part of the help here? You are not allowed to use this space.’

  My first impulse was to get up, walk the small distance between us, and hit him hard in the face. I contained that impulse. Instinctively, I knew it even then, before I had grown enough to understand it: it was important that I kept to an even higher degree of decorum than the boy in front of me… precisely because I sounded wrong, I looked wrong. He could say everything he wanted to me, but I could not answer back, defend myself. Only he and he alone had the privilege to hurt others.

  ‘Okay, I will leave now.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘My stepfather will hear about this. Which one is your compound?’

  ‘Your stepfather?’

  Now he looked confused.

  ‘Anmal Vanlow.’ My stepfather was one of the richest members of the community. The boy looked alarmed.

  ‘I’m sorry, I…’

  Despite the glee with which I got up and left, I was sad, for that was the moment when I knew it: I would never make a friend in Old Town.

  5

  Mother had always become more absent the longer she spent without seeing the water. All her jubilant dreams and sumptuous desires were situated in the short space of the offing. Did Mr Van
low take us to Old Town because my mother was going mad in Gobarí? I never dared ask that question.

  I had my own secret desires back then, other worries to occupy my teenage brain with: would we ever go up to the Upper Settlement with Mr Vanlow? The ring, perched over the atmosphere, the place where all the dos and don’ts were decided. It was not surprising that the servants thought so little of us, for they knew well that we did not make any decisions that mattered. We too were also forced to stay on a dying planet. Nothing of what they were doing up there was ever explained to us. From time to time we woke to the news that the forest had swallowed up this or that settlement. I grew up imagining the forest like a huge living thing, dormant until we did something to upset it. And then it would slowly stir all limbs as trees and mountains and those gigantic flowers, and the ever-changing vines, and the man-size leaves, moving as if it were one uncanny thing. A monster that destroyed and consumed everything in its wake. I didn’t know it then, but my imaginings weren’t very far away from the reality. I just didn’t know the reasons behind what had happened; I did not completely understand about the vessels either, about sending people up, to get lost in all eternity. To swim among the stars.

  * * *

  Back in Gobarí, when I was little, Savina had shown me Old Town in one of our books—our household boasted a collection of twenty, a mark of distinction. The drawings in them depicted round stone buildings, domed stylised gardens, and elongated rockets which were meant to be the vessels, although the vessels were a bit different, I think; perhaps the book was outdated, and those were previous models. From them, the children of the beanies and the techies—never ringers—waved goodbye to their proud parents, big smiles on their faces. There were more drawings than words, no more than three or four sentences per page, printed in thick, round letters. You were meant to infer all the meaning through the drawings. I knew this was made on purpose, so the book could be used by people with different degrees of learning.

  Savina had been taught to read by the first techie family she had served, and now she taught me. The Registry merited its own chapter, and the book alluded to its many treasures, kept from ancient times, times before the green winter caught up with us. It was difficult to imagine a world that had not been mostly green, composed of long, empty stretches of naked earth (‘desertic’, as it was called); but this was how things had been for a long time before me and my parents and grandparents had been born. It was difficult to imagine a world where something known as ‘balance’ existed. We were the children of excess. The Registry, for example, was said to contain all of it, the ancient and the new knowledge, to preserve it all, exactly as all the other Registries scattered across the planet. I remember looking at the chapter in awe. It was one of my favourites, together with the book about animals, which showed how animals used to be, before time accelerated: to survive, most species mutated rapidly afterwards, and were still mutating.

  Some people thought that the mutated creatures had come from above, discarded experiments from up in the ring. But Savina did not believe that. She said that, as time had stopped at some point, and humanity thought itself eternal, time had decided to go quicker. I was not sure I knew what she meant. But it had to do with that idea of some Earth ‘balance’, and with the loss of it. One thing was certain: if the animals had accelerated quickly, but we hadn’t, this ought to mean that they had been forced to mutate into beasts by an external force. By what force? By whom? When had this happened? I had no answer to those questions.

  The ring, the Upper Settlement, also merited its own chapter. The interior scenes depicted long corridors and citizens dressed in their approved white clothing, talking to each other, watering plants—strangely small specimens kept in white containers—or playing with small children. Of all of them, I was always impressed the most by the lady in white. She was overlooking these amiable scenes from a huge balcony, and she was said to be the scientist who had initiated it all. To me, more than scientist I thought she was a magician, perhaps even a witch. She also smiled benevolently over her neat, beautiful subjects; but I could sense something off in her countenance, as a child I was instinctively afraid of her and her power.

  It was because of the book that I had dreamt of Old Town as a white city, immaculate streets and elegant citizens, perhaps a bit aloof, not looking exactly where they were going, but charming and beautiful nonetheless. I was modelling them on Urania, my mother. Unexpectedly, after our arrival in Old Town she had been more absent than ever, lost in her thoughts and her memories. I knew she went every day to walk by the ocean. I knew it because her mood would be more cheerful when she returned. She never ate anything in the morning, but would accept a little glass of milbao from Savina, and next thing she would don a shawl full of peacocks and flamingos, would kiss the air next to my face, and would leave our luxurious compound. Her cheerfulness let me know she was going directly to the water for her morning walk. We would not see her again until lunchtime, and sometimes she did not return at all until my brother and I were in bed. Some nights she would come to see me, and she would bend over me, and look at me with her big, odd eyes. She would say nothing, and I would pretend to be asleep if I could. She would smell of the ocean then, of the salt and the air and the sun.

  I hardly saw Mr Vanlow. While we were in Old Town, he was busy most of the time. There were lots of opportunities, he claimed.

  ‘There are fortunes to be made now that the Delivery Act has decreed that all human beings remaining on the planet’s surface are equal. Fortunes! And I intend to make one of them.’

  ‘I don’t understand; how is the Act going to help you make money, Papa?’ I would ask. He always took all my questions seriously, and so he would reply:

  ‘It is very simple, Pearl. The old servant caste is going to need things, want things. And believe me when I say that I will be only too happy to help them get them.’

  With Mother visiting her beloved shore, and Papa occupied in his business dealings, I was left to my own devices.

  ‘Child, go out and fetch me sage from the market. Here, take the credit purse.’

  The coins would feel heavy in my hand. At Gobarí, I had never handled money, as there was no need for it. But I knew that most of the freedom that Mr Vanlow had procured for us was bought with it.

  Savina had good intentions: she liked seeing me useful, and also getting as much fresh air as possible. But I was a little scared of the city, of how it aligned and at the same time did not with my bookish ideas. I had gone from roaming wildly in Gobarí to not leaving the interior of our new dwelling here.

  I left the compound, but I was too scared of the water to venture beyond the winding streets that I knew would take me to the market square. I did not want to see the ocean, even our tamed version before the Barrier. And I did not want to see the horrid structure, either: it was imposed on me from Mr Vanlow’s elegant compound every day anyway.

  ‘Hello.’

  It was the techie child. I had taken a turn, and had almost crashed against him. I swallowed my apology.

  ‘Hello,’ I replied, and moved around him to continue on my way.

  ‘Wait!’ Was that an imploring sound? I turned to face him.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I… I’m sorry about the other day.’

  ‘Don’t lose sleep over it,’ I replied, and made a further motion to go.

  ‘Have you told your stepdad?’

  I had to feel sorry for him. Was he worried about the possible repercussions of his rudeness? What did that say about my stepfather? I held my breath for a second, let out a long sigh. Gave him a moment to reflect on things. Eventually, I said:

  ‘No. Don’t worry.’ Once more I turned to go.

  ‘Where are you going now? Would you like some company?’

  He was called Ariel, although he was no starborn, so it was a mere affectation. He and his sister Laurel lived in the compound with an aunt. Their parents were dead.

  ‘Have you guys noticed? The
city is not white, not at all.’

  They looked at me as if I were mad.

  ‘What do you mean, white?’

  I could not explain it, not really. I was still holding to my bookish ideas about things, about how neat and pristine things ought to be here. Everything, however, seemed to be made of that light brownish, porous stone; every single road was cemented, covered by beautiful ceramic loza forming coloured patterns. I marvelled at the abundance of colour, all the rich patterns. They were drawn in such a way that the tiles, next to each other, looked like a continuous geometric design. We ate lunch at a little market stall, fried fish and baby squid. There was a fish named like me: little pearls. It was a sort of baby fish that was deep-fried in batches, damped on a cauldron of boiling oil as they were caught, their small size meaning you couldn’t remove their tails or their heads. You fried them like that and ate them like that, eyes and all. They were delicious. After lunch, the streets were emptied and there wasn’t anyone around. The squares and alleyways were deserted, and filled with a curious smell, a little like fish rotting, but not unbearable. People would flood the streets later, when it cooled down. From far away, the monotonous tolling descended punctually every hour from the Registry’s bronze bells—towers shot up into the sky inside whitewashed domes. They were painted like this in order to reflect the overreaching moon, and the Upper Settlement, the ring, slowly turning around itself. I had never been so physically close to the vessels, either. Even the ring seemed to be perched right above us, impossibly high in the sky. But I knew this to be deceptive, a mirage of sorts. We were not much closer than we had been in the sierra, but the angle of orbit appeared in closer proximity to us from Old Town; and of course, the ring could not be seen from the jungle.