The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

‘We will see each other again.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Sooner than you think, my little bird.’

  That was the hardest, to see Savina go. I have never lived through a night like that night, and I hope that I never will again. Gobarí, or what was left of it, was deserted; only a skeleton team of servers had been deemed necessary to keep things in order in our absence. The last night, alone in the house with only a handful of servants, was one of the strangest I can remember. A sadness so deep that it crushed my chest. I went through the empty rooms, now clouded in the darkness of dusk, and felt as if something had finally broken, something I could never put back together again. I walked from one room to the next, from Urania’s to Savina’s abandoned space, to the place at the back where a few struts now gave strength to the part of the house where my brother’s room had been. The loneliness weighed heavy upon me; I could not breathe: it wasn’t an episode this time, but something oddly different. I felt as if a hole had opened inside of me, a hole I could never fill. First my father, then my mother, then my brother. There were only a couple of books left from our collection, and I went to find them. I could still see my father, going over them with me, before he disappeared and Savina took over. I could see him, swimming away, while I was perched on the rock. And the urgency of those days was mixed now with the belief, deep within me, of his innocence. Could it be possible? I had always felt that he was trying to protect me when he took me away. I decided I would do what I could to find out.

  The next morning I started my journey to stay with the Sisters, and that meant going back to Old Town. I promised myself I would not stay in Old Town forever; that, if I could not go back to Gobarí, I would go up to the ring as soon as I could. Even then I knew many years would have to pass for that to happen.

  The Sisters had made an exception for me, for I was still two months away from my thirteenth birthday. They changed my date of birth on the admission screen, and that was that. I felt odd when I saw them do that, alarmed; as if that little lie had the power to set off a chain of events of cataclysmic proportions, that would at some point erase my whole existence.

  8

  The sorting of accumulated knowledge, that was the Sisters’ business. And it turned out I had a gift for it, for organising, cataloguing, thinking of those who would come after us, who would need to make sense of it. I started training to work in the Registry, a vast, unending collection of knowledge from past days, dating from long before the green winter itself, everything that remained of a lost world, and the foundations of all our beliefs. Whether I wanted it or not, it seemed that I would become a curator.

  I spent the first month with a group of six other girls undertaking some basic training, and learning the history of the place. We took our meals together at a round table, and slept in a dormitory which contained ten beds, three of them empty. They were all from techie families, and hardly looked in my direction. All except one of them. A nice surprise awaited me in the Registry: Laurel was starting as well, and we were in the same little cohort.

  ‘Your stepfather arranged it.’

  ‘Mr Vanlow?’

  I could hardly believe it. My stepfather, perhaps sensing that I would be lonely, had brought Laurel there to be with me. I was ecstatic.

  ‘I am so, so thankful,’ she said. But I did not want her to feel any sense of debt towards me, so I hastened to say:

  ‘Laurel, I am really glad that you are here! But I did not do anything. You owe me nothing.’

  As soon as the words left my mouth, I winced. But Laurel, good old Laurel, did not seem to mind. She chuckled, and explained:

  ‘Our fortunes changed, thank the Three Oceans!’

  I smiled, and we hugged. I was conscious at that moment of how lucky I was to have been accepted into the school as well, and wondered how many strings Mr Vanlow had to pull to make it all happen. Now, I would train for a few years, and emerge on the other side with a profession. He would not need to look after me, or think of me. I would not be a burden.

  Once the first month was over, the seven of us were taken for the first time into the Registry itself. A Sister directed us there. She was mostly dressed in black: long black skirt, white shirt and, over it, the black manto falling on her shoulders. But she was young, and low-ranking, so we could see her face, unlike the higher-ranking cobijadas who covered their faces completely with the manto, only allowing one of their eyes to shine out with its vast knowledge. The entry room exhibited examples of what could be found inside, a melange of artefacts and relics. It was haphazardly put together, or so it seemed to my uneducated eye; in truth, everything there was meticulously placed and labelled. That entry section was opened to the public, and all of us would work there in turn during the first year of our apprenticeship, looking after these less important objects.

  The profusion of cabinets formed a maze of wood and plastic and glass; each turn a thousand new discoveries, so packed they were. It never seemed to end, object after object superimposed, mingled, one overlapping another. There were also some religious objects in view: from the ceiling hung the astrolabes and the compasses and the clocks; from the corners, sextants and quadrants, some of them made decorative by twisting over themselves into infinite spirals, with complicated calculations painted on their surfaces. Behind these objects the vaulted ceiling was painted black; and in that ominous representation of the sky shone the constellations, composed star by star with shiny silver paint. At one end of the room, a massive Totem; around the chamber the walls were covered from floor to ceiling with bookcases, where the papers and the scrolls and the bound volumes competed for space. We were facing a never-ending profusion of objects and books and manuscripts, even though these were dearer, and people could only gaze at them from behind triple glass and at a great distance. But what the room also contained, which fascinated me from the beginning, was the cadavers of the long-past ‘digital’ times that had marked the last epoch of humanity before the green winter itself. There were pods for looking at digital archives, as well as artistic interactions. All of these were, of course, mixed up with shuvaní recipes for sale in little glass jars, and storytelling merchandise. In other words: things and things and more things.

  I could hear admiring noises coming from behind me—the other youngsters of my cohort—but I was suddenly overcome by the impossibility of it all, by the notion that making sense of those things and of that place would be beyond human capabilities. I felt one of my episodes coming on. I looked for a quiet corner, and hid myself between the monstrous glass things, keepers of hundreds of items, from the minuscule to the enormous, dreading the taxonomies that I would be forced to understand to make sense of it all. It was an excess very similar to the excess of the forest; but this was man-made, which surprised me greatly. I could do a number of things: I could force myself to calm down by retreating to my safe space; but now I could only see my brother, Aster, bloated in the pond, my mad mother, and Savina, leaving me behind. And, if I concentrated on ignoring them, all I could see, what my mind stubbornly returned to, was the dead hare, the liquid and the brains and the skin melting out, and her sweet rotten smell. In order to push away all these images, I sprang into the pond in my mind, instead of thinking about the landscape, trying to recreate in my mind the feeling of first submersion in the water. That did it, and at last I felt calm, reassured.

  I knew that the Registry was the place where we studied the past, venerated it, certain in the knowledge that our survival depended on avoiding its repetition; but I had no idea of the vastness of its collections. And this was only the entry chamber. The real collection was kept behind the large wooden doors I could see at the end: stack after stack of items to catalogue, study, describe.

  This was one of the first things that I learnt and marvelled at: the real proportions of the Registry. It did not restrain itself to occupying the old temple of a lost religion that used to be called a ‘cathedral’, but connected underground with many other buildings around the city which t
he curators had assimilated. The archives and repositories went on for miles. I became particularly interested in the past digital culture, and learnt that the visual and digital pods served to inspect their old version of what was their own HiveMind: a primitive thing called a ‘web’, inspired, it seemed, by the overreaching webbing of arachnids; but oddly without understanding the basic principle of the insects’ netting technique. Instead, this ‘web’ resorted to chaos and an apparent desire for data-profusion of which only some faded remnants had survived. Other sections were occupied by papers and books and manuscripts and scrolls, carefully looked after. Some of those were indeed so old that it was forbidden to touch them, breathe on them; a knowledge of the past so fragile, it seemed, that it could crumble from the weight of your gaze on it.

  At home, in Gobarí, everyone had been welcome to our collection of books, around twenty tomes at some point; here, I could, in the performance of my training duties—carrying a message from a curator to another, changing the water for the instant milbao machine—traverse rooms and chambers that contained thousands of them. The first time I was faced with this reality, with so many books that I would not be able to read them in my short lifespan, I had to force myself not to feel dizzy, for the notion was enough to send my head spinning. The high-ceilinged rooms in the Registry tended to overlook another alien vision after the jungle of my childhood: the quaint hidden patches of garden, large, green quads of tamed nature, where the younger storytellers relaxed by hitting a ball with a stick. I was as mistrustful of a ‘managed’ patch of green as I was of a ‘managed’ collection of things: I expected that both would eventually rebel.

  * * *

  I had been in the Registry for one year when I was finally given the most basic tools of my trade: a white apron and gloves, and my own set of protective masks against the dust and mildew. It was my responsibility to look after these, make sure they were kept in pristine condition. We were taken into a round, high-ceilinged chamber, with different recovering stations. Each of us had a high stool, a table with the basic HivePro apps installed into an oval machine, and a conservation pod of our own. The automated trolleys would bring us little objects—unimportant tomes, little stuffed animals from the past—each of them a test of sorts, all part of the same dusty menagerie of rot and decay. We would put these memento mori inside our portable conservation pods, where their mould would be eaten away, their corners unbent. Inside the machine, the stuffed little birds we used for practice acquired an odd shine, as if a little bit of life were infused into them from the sterile insides of the white oval, making me expect that they would take flight when I passed my hand over the glass lid to slide it open. It never happened, of course.

  One morning my automated trolley delivered one such stuffed specimen, a young osprey. I performed my duties and took it back. But it had taken me longer than usual, as the little test had become several tests: for while preparing it, I had noticed something else had been stuffed with the animal, all those centuries back—two centuries, three? Its parasites. I found myself performing this strange exercise in assemblage; everything had its place, its meaning, its reason for existing: the nest, the eggs, the bird, the parasites… Everything was taken apart, and put together again, as if I was making a puzzle. Everything… except the parasites themselves; for I suddenly had the intuition that this was the test I had been given, and that I was meant to do something else with those. There was a section in the Registry dedicated to processing all lost entomology, and it was there I took them. I was right: that had been the test.

  The remains of the assemblage exercise needed to be delivered to the cabinets that would contain the artefact until someone required it for teaching, or to weave a storyteller lyric. The ones connected to the old natural world were called pastorals, and they had become my favourites. An item such as this could feature in one of them. I reached the repository, with its cabinets of treasure, and endless rows of moving shelves; you needed to turn a wheel to open a gap between them, and find the place where the little box should be kept.

  It was then that I was overcome by the dizziness again. I simply could not understand what I was seeing, and therefore I could not understand what we were doing: one thing that had been impressed on us during our early training was the lack of space, the eternal, never-ending problem with space. But in front of me what I saw was not one, or two, or even three, but what looked like hundreds of repeated copies of the stuffed bird I was carrying, osprey after osprey after osprey. I took out one of the boxes: the exercise in assemblage had been repeated by curators before me, dozens of times, it seemed, perhaps hundreds. And they had all also kept the nest, or nests, of that and of several other specimens; they had kept the eggs; they had kept the things it ate. The cabinets where all these were stored went on underground for what looked like kilometres; and, in that section, I could not in truth say that I had seen anything other than extinct bird after extinct bird, in dead, dusty profusion.

  I had reasons to be confused. For this theoretical problem with space did not tally with what I was seeing, with how the space was being used in practice: the Registry had been collecting more than could be kept, a problem possibly inherited from times that predated the green winter. But those never-ending rows also pointed at a lack of focus, a lack of clarity. I could now understand why our instructors, seasoned curators, complained that they could not accession new things. There was simply nowhere to put them.

  But, equally, I knew by heart the theory that, whatever we did, we could not de-accession. To de-accession, it was necessary for objects to go through a tedious protocol, a formal Un-Significance Assessment evaluating their historical, scientific, aesthetic, artistic, social and spiritual uselessness. And, providing the object passed it, then it was paramount that it was offered to another Registry, before anything else was done with it. Ultimately, de-accessioning, these disposal exercises, was a fantasy. Disposal was pretty much a heresy in the Registry, its protocol too complex. It was also, some argued, morally wrong.

  Is that what we were being trained to be, passive curators, occupying ourselves with interpreting what other people had collected generations ago, instead of collecting now?

  Millions of items in storage had yet to be interpreted, and therefore could not be made accessible, or story-sized, which conspired to make the collections dead weight, not useful for any purpose. All that dead knowledge, too much to make sense of, so much so that our collections explained nothing, taught nothing. Hundreds, thousands of curators were needed simply to interpret these colossal repositories of the past, conservators to look after their materiality, and storytellers to narrate them, to help us understand their meaning. This meant that huge provisions of money were needed. Collecting less actively was the only possible solution to manage this inherited profusion. We had problems of space, problems of documentation, problems of conservation, and problems of storytelling. The latest ones seemed to me the riskier. For, as it had been impressed on us from our very first day in the Registry, the main reason to perform this endless interpretation of the past was so as not to repeat it. Ever.

  * * *

  I had not seen Urania in nearly three years. I had not seen Mr Vanlow either. Savina visited me sometimes, and brought me news of the world.

  I knew something was amiss the moment I saw Savina’s face as she sat, or rather perched, on the chair where she always waited for me, in the middle of the vast marble chamber where we received our family visits. Her face was slightly green, there was no other way to put it. She looked as if she was about to throw up. She saw me advancing towards her, and did not get up at once, as she used to do, but stayed where she was, averting her eyes.

  ‘Savina, whatever is the matter?’ I asked, incapable of containing myself, of starting with the little niceties that always punctuated those visits. I suddenly understood. ‘Mother?’

  She looked up then, and there was such sadness in her face that I felt sorry for her, sorry that it had fallen on her of all people
to come and deliver the news I now expected, my stomach contracting inside me as if someone had punched it hard.

  ‘Child,’ she said. Nothing else. It was clear then: Urania was dead.

  ‘When? How?’

  It turned out that the beanies who had been looking after her had left her alone, sometimes for days at a stretch, tied up to a chair. On one of these occasions, she had managed to loosen the ropes. And then she had gone directly there.

  ‘The pond?’

  Savina did not need to answer my question. It was obvious.

  Urania had gone swimming, in one of her fabulous robes. No one could tell if she had become entangled in the many layers of fabric, and had drowned unwillingly, or if she had committed suicide.

  ‘We may never know,’ Savina said. ‘And, child, listen to me. I do not want you to go thinking of the worst, to imagine the worst. Your mother was very ill. She had been very ill for a very long time.’

  We said a shuvaní prayer together, and Savina left, until the next time she had a free afternoon from her many chores. It would be weeks, not months, she promised.

  * * *

  I am not proud of what happened, but something was pulling at me, a restlessness mixed up with an acute anxiety I started to develop. I told myself the news had made it worse, of course, but there was nothing I could do for Urania, whereas in the Registry everything was being managed so badly, so badly… I became obsessed with imagining that things could change, if only someone worked to change them. If there was no time or space to collect our own present, then there was no time or space to interpret or communicate it to our fellow man. The day-to-day performance of our tasks did not let us see our present, plan our future.

  Mother had always been fond of one extinct bird from the past. It was called a robin. I came across the stuffed specimen, an insubstantial collection of faded feathers, multiplied ad nauseam; furtively, without thinking, I placed it in the pocket of my white gown. It was so tiny, almost weightless, as if it did not really exist. I did not know then what I would do with it.