The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  Every week, on my free afternoon, I used my Registry pass to walk on top of the Barrier, something that was now permitted. Other people did it in order to see and be seen, as the ocean view with all its centuries-old debris was only available to those with a certain status. My reasons were different: all I wanted to do was to honour her, to see what should have been Mother’s last resting place, not some dirty pond filled with muck.

  I had finally decided what to do with the robin. It would happen on my free afternoon, when I was allowed to take these walks on the wall. I made sure to leave the Registry by the staff entrance, so as not to be inspected by the X-ray machines. Atop the Barrier, on the other side, the ocean was the same pulpy mush of remnant plastic imported from the past that it always was: it would still last, most of it, another six hundred years or so. It shone with its spectral glint, a faded brown, as if our ancestors had just vomited it.

  I took out the stuffed robin from my purse and threw it into the water, saying a shuvaní prayer for my dead mother as I did it. With that simple action, I had just committed the highest of treasons. All around us the ocean was the same mixture of maroon debris, an oily surface that did not let you see what lay beneath. I knew that great leviathans lived down below, and I hoped that my offering would make its way to them. I imagined that the cetaceans wailed in recognition of my gesture, and that the sound reached to me across the water. It was said that they simply lay on the ocean bed with their mouths open, and all sort of creatures climbed into them. But that was down below. Up here, the ring was visible, and I wondered if their satellites or their nosy drones could see what I had just done. Behind the ring’s structure, all around it, the sky flickered on and off with its fluorescent blue hue, the indigo surge suddenly blotting out the sky. But I didn’t care about my fate at that moment. I felt elated, as if a great weight had been removed from me at last.

  9

  Urania’s ghost is sitting on the windowsill, as she is every morning, observing the flamingos flying up and down. They perch themselves all along the Barrier, a little pink line of monstrously large birds. All I can see from the dormitory is the never-ending wall, the bit of ocean before it, and a line of tall palm trees waving with the wind.

  And then I realise: I am not in the dormitory, or in the Registry. Laurel is not sleeping in the bed next to mine, and I am alone. The shadows resolve themselves into my chamber in the Upper Ring, and I have woken up inside my LivePod, same as every morning.

  Inside me, my daughter is twisting and swirling and kicking. There is not as much space as a few weeks ago, and some of her little movements are painful now. At the moment, I feel as if my ribcage is about to explode. I am in pain if I lie on my left side. I am in pain if I lie on my right side. I am in pain if I move a leg to try to leave the pod. As a result, I stay inside the pod most of the morning.

  * * *

  When we fixed books in the Registry, we worked with very advanced pod models, the most advanced I have ever seen on the surface. It was obvious they were sent directly down from above. The technology was very similar, the look of the machine was very similar to what they have here. I would be given a book that had survived for centuries, perhaps. Some time and effort and credit would be spent in bringing it back to good shape and storing it. Books in particular worried me, for no one had assessed their usefulness. We mostly accepted that they were all important, no matter the subject, no matter if there was someone alive who could decipher their writing or not. The process forced me to place it inside the conservation pod, opening it page by page; I would be there for some time. The process was as follows: after being delivered a book, I placed it inside the white oval, and kept it open with old-fashioned paperweights. The blue laser light started moving up and down across the width of the page. I saw the parchment unbending, cleaning up. I would have called it magiks if I hadn’t known that it was science.

  So, I would place it inside the machine, wait until the blue laser light made it look like new, then I would open the machine, take the book out, turn a page, and start again. The little glass door opened up, the machine whirred away noisily, and I would see what they were about, mementos from a past that was now useless: why did we need those things?

  Not everyone was trusted with paper artefacts, and my distrust of the objects was accompanied by pride at their being delivered to me.

  After a few hours, the book was like new, and could be put back to use. The automated trolley from the curators—the real ones, not students like us—came by punctually, and I would deposit the book inside it.

  * * *

  In Gobarí, our collection of twenty books made our household special, but all the books had a faint smell of mildew, were filled with orange humidity stains that grew like flowers; their covers were slightly rotten, their corners soft and slightly bent at the tips. But they showed us things, they taught us things. I adored each and every one of them. I could never have considered them a waste of space, a waste of resources. My first images of Old Town, or the Upper Settlement, or the inside of the vessels: they all came from those books, Savina’s favourite tools for teaching. Basic survival instructions, skills for when we would be up there, first aid teachings. The known taxonomies, flora and fauna. And the constellations, of course, all in one place.

  Everyone in the Registry had a different story of how precociously they had learnt to read. Some had taught themselves, as if that were possible, or had learnt how to do it at ridiculously early ages. The conversation also gave the opportunity to assert that your family was a book-owning one. It was considered inelegant to have learnt with screen-based methods: everyone knew that the true mark of distinction was to possess some of these little objects, the majority of which were being destroyed before our eyes. I normally said nothing. I had learnt to read with them and, at twenty, my family had probably owned more books than theirs. But my story was different. I did not learn to read aged three, or alone following a page with the audio version from a HousePod being played at the same time. I did not amaze our helpers or break a record in being the youngest. In fact, I did not learn to read properly until I was eight years old, and Savina would have to force me to do it. She would sit with me patiently, I would lose heart, and would want to stop. But she persevered. No one else in my household had realised I could not read, and therefore they did nothing to fix this, only Savina. She was the only one who did not give up on me. But there was something more back then that I only understood during my time in the Registry: the books had other connotations for me, of things that were not quite right, thoughts that darkened a room in the heat of the midday sun.

  During the nights in the Registry, I would lie in my bed and try to remember the night noises back in the Gobarí house just before going to sleep. Once, before the arrival of my stepfather, I had been so frightened that I slept with a tree branch, a makeshift weapon. What was I frightened of? I could not say, not really. I felt an episode coming, and I would go out onto the balcony and look at those constellations, shining in the sky: The Fox. Alira, the Little Bird Ascending. The Kingfisher. The Stoat. The Snake. The Three Sisters. The Lady in White. By then I could read, had read all about them, all the stories, in our twenty books.

  But the books didn’t belong to Gobarí, they had come to us from my father. It was the only thing that remained from him in our life. The tales of the constellations were his favourites, and I think he had read to me from that book when I was very little; or at least I hope that happened, that it is not something that I have created somehow, to fill the gap he left. He felt a special predilection for those fables, the earlier recorded document of our beliefs, and he had impressed on me, on Savina, the need to know their real versions, not the sugary ones that normally are read to children. Hence his readings, and later hers. From very early on I would hear about poisonings, beheadings, premature burials, beasts that killed and devoured other beasts, or even children, who survived inside the belly of some gigantic hare until the hero came and freed them with her axe
, or perhaps flutes made from the bones of a corpse, which, once you held them to your lips, retold the gruesome circumstances of their previous owner’s demise. When Savina read to me, some images formed themselves in my head, very much as happened during the storyteller observances.

  Thanks to these tales, I learnt about humanity’s selfishness; moreover, I learnt something that deeply impressed itself in my conscience: the worst cruelty is sometimes committed between members of the same family. In those fantastic stories, brothers killed brothers, poor parents were forced by hunger to abandon their children in the middle of deserts, or parents too jealous of their daughters’ pallid beauty built them coffin-like underground chambers.

  Eventually, father was not there anymore, and it was only Savina. It is thanks to her that I can read, for she and only she persevered. Once I could, I was then left to my own devices among the books, allowed access to the precious objects for a while, mostly because no one kept check of my behaviour. They were kept on a shelf on top of a desk in one of the smaller sitting rooms that we hardly used. The windows were always open there, and moths and other creatures came and went from the balcony to their heart’s content. Over my head, an air cooler languidly moved its four blades. It was the middle of the day, when people slept, that I knew I could be alone with the tomes in that room. This happiness that I felt around them made me feel guilty, as if I were somehow betraying Mother. For, as I grew up, I realised that perhaps the books had been part of our mysterious ruin. My father hadn’t brought more than ten with him when they married, and he had used my mother’s fortune to acquire another ten in the successive years.

  My mother did not dispose of the books immediately. Years later, when she was married to Mr Vanlow, and we had not left Gobarí to be refurbished yet, one evening I entered the sitting room to find both of them sipping milbao with an unknown man, dressed in the religious robes of the NEST compound, the organisation responsible for sending children up in the vessels. I was told to keep away, and no introduction was forthcoming, although I wasn’t exactly a small child anymore and would normally engage in conversation with visiting adults. It became apparent in successive visits that the man in question had been procured by Mr Vanlow to dispose of our library.

  This was unexpected, unfair. The mere idea of disposing of them had sent me to the realms of despair, and I did not speak to Mr Vanlow or Urania for days. I had the strange, wrong idea that the books were mine somehow, that I would inherit them one day. Only a couple were left, the rest were gone. I realised they had always been on loan in my life. I could not lay claim to something so precious. I never saw them again until, years later, by mere chance, I came across something surprising in the Registry.

  I had been sent to fetch some object. The way into the stacks was narrow and dark, and the stacks themselves were no better. Corridor after corridor of movable shelves, the sections only kept illuminated by a light on a timer: it was very possible to end up in those catacombs completely in the dark. The place was like a maze, but by then I knew my way around it. I had more problems deciding which section of the building, or rather which catacomb, corridor, extension or outer building, an item was kept in. The vastness of the collection meant that a guide had needed to be produced, which first told you which gallery to direct your steps to. Once in the right section, the search started. Laurel helped me determine the right catacomb, and I was happy: it was so distant from the main curatorial chamber that they would not expect me back for at least twenty minutes. Of course, I had developed my own method of making the most of this situation: I was able to get to the place in question in a maximum of five minutes by walking briskly—no running was allowed within the building, of course—and then I would quickly find my object. Depending on how quickly I found the required object, I would have enough time left for me to grab any book I wanted and read from it for a few precious moments.

  That evening I was in shock, reading about something called ‘horses’ that had existed in the days pre-green winter. There were pictures of men and woman atop these horrible, huge creatures, pictures I could not make sense of. What were these animals, as big as hares, on four legs, and apparently with the capacity of pulling ancient vehicles filled to the brim with people and goods? They must have been fantastically strong. As always, whenever I came across this kind of ancient knowledge, I felt the strange implausibility of it all. I realised that time must be passing quickly and put the book back in its place, but something caught my eye. Two books along, I recognised a spine… That could not be. With the same care I used to handle everything, I pulled out the object. It was our book about animals, no question about it. It had the same marks of use I recognised so well, as well as some light pencil marks where Savina had patiently pointed at names for me to read them, syllable by syllable, perhaps fifteen years before.

  That night I thought of all the books I had treated in my pod, of how I had contributed to one more thing that weighed us down. And, for the first time, I wasn’t sorry. I also thought of my father for the first time in a long while.

  My father had died what was known as a ‘bad death’: he hanged himself inside the military compound where he was sent after the militia took him. He had killed a beanie girl, that was the accusation. But there was something else. The militia was sure he had intended to kill me as well, his own daughter. I was four years old.

  I have never believed it to be true.

  No one had been able to explain to me satisfactorily how they reached that conclusion, or perhaps I should say that no one bothered to talk to me about it. And yet. I have wondered about it all my life, not only his apparent kidnapping of me, but also how undisputed the first charge could be.

  So I found out where the documents from the case were archived, and I went looking for them as soon as I was able. This was a digital quest: everything had been uploaded to one hard-to-access digital repository, militia-level security systems. On my third year of apprenticeship I was given access to some of the upper digital layers, and then I suddenly realised: I could read exactly what my father had done, the investigation against him, and what exactly he had been accused of.

  No one knew what I was up to. I had not talked to anyone about my past, not even Laurel.

  I found there had been no real investigation. And he never confessed to killing the girl. He confessed to kidnapping me—now, this was surprising. Were my parents separated, divorced? I had no idea; but, otherwise, it could not be interpreted as such. My father, or so he repeated, was trying to ‘protect’ me. From what?

  He took me from Old Town, where we had been staying. We arrived at Kon-il. The water looked beautiful—and how, why, can I remember it so clearly? Translucent, almost white. My father perched me on a rock, and went for a swim. And I remember, even now, my fear then, as clear as that water. Somehow instinctively, without having heard about the swimmers, without knowing anything about their heretic beliefs, four-year-old me saw her father swim away, and thought that he was going to swim forever, to disappear among the waves. That he was going to leave me alone on that rock. I remember that, in fear, I pressed my feet roughly against its surface, clumsily trying to get up and run to him. In my eagerness I cut my feet on the rock. I remember the pain. But it was nothing compared to the pain of losing my father.

  These images I remember; but sometimes I remember them with other people in them: Mother, Aster or Verity, my small beanie friend. Were they there, or was I mixing different outings?

  Eventually, he came out of the water, and came to me. I was in tears. He then took me to an unknown compound, the coast visible through the window, and he left me. This was first time he had done that, leaving me alone somewhere; it would also turn out to be the last time. He took erratic leave of me, in fact, with the urgency of someone who has an important task ahead of him. Something to do. Something to do that cannot wait. Something to do now and now only.

  Time passed.

  And that task, my own task, of sitting on the sofa, an uncomfortable
sofa at that, started to weigh a great deal. My father’s instructions had not been clear at all: ‘Stay here.’ There, in the compound? There, sitting on the sofa? Terrified, I choose not to move from it.

  Time passed hard.

  My father was gone a long time. Outside, the sky over the sea, over the wall out on the sea, went black. I lay down, exactly where I was sitting. The beds were unmade anyway, as Savina should be the one making them. And she was not with us. So exactly where I was sitting I lay down.

  When I woke, my father was back. He looked, smelled, as if he had just washed. But there was also a lingering smell of fresh earth around him.

  Or was it? Is my knowledge of the fact tainted by what he was accused of later, by what I know now? And what exactly is it that I know?

  I did not know my father, not really. I was too little to know him or understand him. But I loved him, and he loved me. I recognised that unspoken bond between us.

  Again, he took me, this time from the compound, and he wrapped me tight in a travel blanket. And then he put me again in the boot of the hovering vehicle, and he asked me to be quiet again, as he closed the lid over me.

  I could see nothing; I could hardly move. Soon, I had difficulty breathing. Until I breathed it all in, that overpowering sweet smell that I could not place. My dad, it would later be claimed, had rehearsed what he was about to do with the beanie child, more or less my height, more or less my age. My friend Verity who, indisputably, had been with us in the cove. Her hair was dyed the colour the ocean used to be in the olden days, like I wore it.

  I have no idea how long I was there, and can’t remember if we moved, if I felt the hovering vehicle ascending.

  Eventually, someone found me, and I was saved; or so I am told. An unknown face wearing a khaki bodysuit, militia issue, opened the lid and took me out. I must have been there a long while, for I was in so much pain, my legs and my arms and my neck and my back, all needed restretching, readjustment. So much pain from bending inside there.