The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  Nothing about this story made any sense. What was he protecting me from? And why did he kill Verity? But also, had he really killed her, if he had never admitted to it? But then, why kill himself? Was that also untrue?

  The documents had helped fill some gaps in the story, but I still had the same questions. And his absence, as sudden as if the Three Oceans had swallowed him up, meant I could never answer them.

  10

  I had not seen Savina for a long time, and my stepfather spent large stretches of time, months on end, up in the ring. But I should not have been so ungrateful, for the Registry was also my refuge. I felt lonely, yet also safe. Apart from Laurel, I spoke to almost nobody. Everyone kept to themselves, lost in the endless day-to-day work. I had finished my apprenticeship, and I was now a junior worker. I assumed this would be my life from now on.

  One day, Mr Vanlow, Papa, reappeared. I had not seen him in eighteen months, the longest stretch he had left me. The last time he had been in Old Town, he had come to see me by surprise, and took me to a storyteller observance. He was coming from the ring, he said, and was going straight back the next day. This time was different. This time the first thing he said when he saw me was that he was planning to stay down on the surface for a long time, perhaps forever. I did not answer. I did not know what to say to him.

  ‘You have grown,’ he said. He also said he had missed me. I had also missed him; he was my only connection to the past now. We partook of some of the luxurious edibles that he always ordered whenever he came to see me. I had not mentioned Urania’s death; he had not mentioned her at all. ‘How would you like to live in the Upper Settlement?’

  I was speechless. I had the stupid notion that, as everything was old, dusty and false down here, up in the ring everything was shiny and new. I suspected that they forced us to preserve this past so as not to let us see into the future. I feared we were failing to see the here and now, what was happening right before our very eyes. Going up there, I thought, could help dispel the clouds.

  ‘Up in the ring?’

  ‘If you want. I would like you to be happy, Pearl. To be secure and happy.’

  I had taken off my uniform for the first time in months, to see him. My newest civil dress did not fit me so well any longer. Laurel had hurriedly helped me mend it. I had felt strange when I put it on, as if I were trying to hold on to a past that didn’t exist anymore; my own past.

  As we spoke, I thought of Alira, the school’s very own Santa Incorrupta. As her name indicated, she was starborn, a true daughter of the Upper Settlement. Hundreds of years ago she had suffered a mutation. Her sin: flying, and reading minds. She had been part of a group of people that had started to mutate, developing fantastical new skills. Needless to say, they had been heavily persecuted, for the good of humanity. Alira’s statue had beautiful wings representing her power, and she was poised in a complicated position, as if she were about to take flight.

  Alira’s statue was smiling. Alira always smiled.

  Swimming is like flying, mother used to say. So I do not know if Alira’s story is a metaphor, or if her mutation was real. Other students have told me that the corpse has no wings. But little girls should not fly, wings or no wings. They got jealous of her. Little girls should not fly, read the inside of a man’s mind, or walk on water.

  The Sisters taught us to think of Alira when we needed to give ourselves strength. Alira, the pious girl who went to her death with a smile on her face. We were taught to smile whenever we did not know what to say, or how to interact, especially with starborns. Papa wasn’t one of them, really; I smiled anyway.

  I would often pause by Alira’s statue. With time, I learnt to read outside of the sanctioned story. I could see there was something frightening about her smile, something unwholesome. Was it possible that only I could see it? It was her eyes. They were wide open in terror. And discovering this fact suddenly transformed that same, pious smile into a twisted mouth crying for help.

  Now, I was the one who was going to fly away, it seemed.

  * * *

  After my stepfather’s visit, everything became a frenzied gathering: getting my things together, preparing myself to get out of the Registry. Some of the junior curators were jealous of me. Jealous of what? I did not know what happened outside those walls, what the world was really like. I seemed to have forgotten it all. I was an adult, but also, in many ways, I was a child, about to be sacrificed.

  I had not met Arlo, my chosen partner. A starborn, he was descending all the way from the Upper Settlement to claim his bride. I was scared of leaving the school, scared of this person I did not know, this Arlo. Scared of going up. I had never wanted to live in the ring, not really, I must have been mistaken when I thought I did. I realised that now.

  The designated date arrived, and my stepfather collected me from the school. Inside the hovering vehicle sat Arlo; I had never seen such pure blue eyes anywhere. Blue eyes and lighter skin were more common up in the ring than down here. His short-cropped hair and beard were the colour of dune grass.

  We were hovering back to the outskirts of town when everything changed once more, with strange finality, and we woke up as if from a dream; that morning was the morning when the Barrier suffered its first attack, and nearly two thousand people were killed in a explosion. Their bodies flew into the ocean among the debris, and I would never forget this image, seen from above, as our vehicle surged into the sky: the ocean reconquering the beach furiously, a further wave that had also killed hundreds of others, an unholy mixing of water, translucent until the moment that the ocean brought back in its wake the brown debris, rubber and plastic and century-old things, and my little offerings, which would surely be washed up onto the shore as well. And all that the Barrier had managed to keep out. At least for those lucky enough not to see it, for those who had managed not to see, and for those who had not wanted to see it.

  It had been the swimmers, they said, and everyone repeated it everywhere. The swimmers, the swimmers…

  We glided over the city. Were we going back to Gobarí, perhaps? No, we were just going back to our compound in Old Town. But I would soon see Gobarí again. The old house would be waiting for us, for our return. And I knew what would happen next: for I had dreamt of Alira’s fate. And in my dream, I remembered it now, all the constellations had been out of shape.

  I looked back at the Registry from above; we were very high up. The vehicle was a newer model, it could climb as high as the ring if we wanted, apparently. My stepfather said this to reassure me; but the notion made me feel as if my breath was dying inside my body. My fear must have been painted on my face, for Arlo took my hand in his and squeezed it to give me strength, or as if to say, I am here.

  Oh, yes, he was there, and he would be there the next day.

  And we wouldn’t go up to the ring that morning.

  But soon, so soon, one day…

  We left the Registry behind and approached our old compound, and I started to feel an unmistakable sensation: as if I could not breathe, as if I were dying. An episode, then. But I knew what it was, and I could be calm, restful. I thought of the pond, of swimming in it. It did not work. Aster and Mother were waiting for me there, both dead. I thought of the ocean, and saw myself swimming in its embrace. I felt calm almost at once. Soon, I thought then, I would be back home again.

  * * *

  It seems all that happened so long ago; it hasn’t been even a year, but it feels like aeons. As if we had moved smoothly into another epoch, another time. It is easy for me to feel this way, for I am up here now, up here at last. I flew voluntarily: up and up we go, up and up into the sky. No need for a vessel.

  The child inside me moves and twists and wriggles and kicks, until it doesn’t do any of these things anymore. And then come the masked men in protective gear, plastic covers for their faces and hands, as if I were contagious, or still in quarantine. And they check measurements in the LivePod, and they prod me as well, and they do not say anything, do not l
ook at me. Even when I ask them directly what is wrong, what could possibly be wrong. And then the LivePod starts moving, and I am taken into another section of the chamber, and the walls open and suddenly my room transforms itself into an operation chamber. And they place a mask over my face and instruct me to count backwards, and to close my eyes, and I know what is coming, and I know that when I wake she will be out of me, and gone.

  And then, then, then is when I truly come to love her.

  The Fable of Alira

  She was so tired she thought that she would die. Her body would slowly shut down, bit by escaping bit, until there would be nothing left of herself, nothing more than an empty carcass of rotten, useless flesh. She would go to sleep and never wake up; or maybe she would sleep for a hundred years, until the next realignment. She was called Alira. Her sin: she was capable of flying, of other things as well. A portrait had been painted of her. It had beautiful wings, and she was poised in a complicated position, as though about to take flight. Of course, she had no wings. All she had to do was will herself to go up and up and up.

  They had arrived the previous night. The streets were a maze, mirror images of each other held together by the fog. They had arrived in their velvet coats, their feet in leather boots, expecting nothing but darkness. What received them was the torrid late November sun, scorching every corner of the city. They had travelled light. The people they encountered had all directed them so far away from home, south-and-west, always south-and-west. Here, there were the books, and the books meant healing. And so they had endured the horrid inns, brief stays in hellish flea-infested rooms, walls smeared with brown stains, dust-covered furniture.

  At the hour of the crows they were called into the chamber. They saw row after row of wooden tables stretching out the entire length of the place, young men sat on long benches, eating their soup. The old men were sitting at a table in the back, facing all the others, on an area of floor raised one metre higher than the rest. They wore purple and crimson robes, their heads covered with square hats, their hands thickly jewelled, shining crimson and blue, sending tiny, playful reflections all over the room, like some old-fashioned visual shuvaní spell.

  ‘Is this the child?’ one of them asked.

  Someone gave her a gentle push.

  Alira, Alira.

  You are named after the old ballad.

  And how will we know if you are the one?

  ‘How do you know my name? I don’t know yours,’ the child blurted out before she could stop herself, turning in the direction of the decrepit old man who had entertained the thought.

  The elders looked curiously in his direction and he nodded very lightly.

  And then they all knew that she had read his mind.

  * * *

  She had shown herself to be worthy. In the next realignment she would be given to the stars, would travel billions of years, only to be consumed by the cosmos before being returned once more, transmuted into a beautiful constellation. She would be transformed into pure meaning. The ones given to the stars burnt themselves out in the sun’s descending flames. The highest possible honour known.

  The next realignment was about to happen, a week of festivities ending in the healing—a sacrifice. Sleep brought odd dreams, strange images. Alira saw herself over a large expanse of water that seemed to never end. In it, leviathan creatures swam under the stars. The water was as dark as the sky; it was impossible to know where one ended and the other started. The constellations reflected themselves on it. The Hare, hiding between the twisted roots in her forest of the nearest galaxy. The Librarian, handling an object that could be an old satellite.

  Alira woke up tired, feverish. She was imagining how it would feel to swim in those eternal waters, accompanied by the gigantic creatures that dwelt in them. She imagined flying out of them, giving a huge jump that would propel her from the waters into the sky, and she imagined how it would be to soar up and up and up, finding her way among the constellations. And she knew this to be good and proper, and she felt ready to accept her fate.

  There was another dream that never left her for long. The boy was over her, and he was older. His face was red and puffed up and sweaty, his eyes two points of yellow dirt impregnated with blood. She could distinguish the pores of his skin, each translucent pearl of white sweat. His face became blurred, and she could almost imagine that she was somewhere else. Was that the time she had been lost in the forest, her forest? The world donned a light mask of unreality. She remembered running, crying, brown stains. She must have fallen and cut herself with the scattered branches, dark and pointed, which inflicted a pain she had not known before. She was found at last, caked in mud and dirt and blood and sweat. She was ill for a long time afterwards, and could hear her parents crying inside their heads, forced smiles painted on their faces, so nobody knew what exactly had happened to her. That’s when she knew she was different, by reading their thoughts about how upset they had truly been because their silly little girl had got lost.

  The next time she encountered youngsters, who tried to surround her when she was filling a bucket with water, she started panting and panting, and she jumped, and she soared into the sky.

  She had marked herself out for sacrifice with those actions; but she had never felt freer. Alira, Alira. Oh, Alira, how free you were!

  * * *

  The day is finally here. Spring has proved to be never-ending, infinitely cruel in its vastness, but the day has arrived at last. The flames of the sun almost reach the domes and the turrets and the minarets, drying the mossy walls. The old men work fast to solve the riddle. Healing approaches. At the appointed hour, a promenade of elders in their crimson robes crosses the town at twilight. On the mantelpiece the clock ticks away with stubborn persistence. One, two three. Soon, it will be time. The procession is quietly approaching to claim her.

  All Alira’s excitement burns itself out and she feels cold and sweaty, as fear replaces it. The bells ring the quarters with their usual restlessness, and she knows, with a frightful certainty, that nothing will change, that everything will remain the same after her ascent. She knows there is no knowledge beyond the stars, no new beginnings. The sun will continue torturing them all in the city; in her village, the twilight will forever cover it all like a shroud, the house and the garden and the dunes and the forest, as it has always done. The constellations will offer no explanation, no resolution.

  Understanding this upsets her more than she can explain.

  Outside, the oranges and purples are transformed in a violet vista that covers the world as far as she can see. The sun is a white condensed orb, waiting to be fed. The crows circle the town. The old men are finally here. They have found the answer just in time. Healing will be performed.

  Alira is taken down to the street.

  Eyes up to the sky, she could see everything that had already happened—the famines, the extinction of animals, the men hunting men, the vastness of the waters that flooded it all, and then receded, and then once more flooded, crowded this time by leviathan-like creatures, and the old towns covered in water, their treasures forever lost—and she saw what was happening now, the old men desperately trying to harness whichever power was available, purging all mutations they encountered, purging progress. And then she saw as well what was going to come.

  She breaks into a run. Before rounding the corner, and soaring up in a mighty jump, she turns to look back once more to the procession, to the square filled with the old, decrepit men, to make sure they are not following her. And there she goes, to find another world among the stars.

  ARLO

  11

  I was so tired that I thought I could sleep forever, perhaps die in my sleep. Lie down on the dark hammock and never wake up. My body would shut down slowly, bit by bit, until there was nothing left, nothing more than an empty carcass of rotten, useless flesh. All the strange colours and the odd noises would cover me up, until I was one with the forest.

  We had arrived the previous evening
, me and my bride, invisible hands carrying our belongings inside one of the buildings. We had travelled light. I gather that some of her childish treasures had been left behind, and this was the first time I saw my strange new companion cry—I imagine this to be the cause of her tears—a furtive tear, pushed away by a small hand. She was a feral child from the surface, with strange, wide eyes, alien and unreal. And we were now heading towards her childhood home, crossing a stretch of the forest. The smells and the colours, everything conspired to make me think I was in a dream, perhaps conjured by the strange girl I now called wife. I was finally here, at the end of the known world.

  ‘How far away are we?’

  ‘Not far, now.’

  ‘What is this settlement called?’ That was all I had become down here: question after question after question. She hesitated before replying:

  ‘Matanza.’

  Matanza, massacre.

  ‘What happened here?’ I sounded more judgemental than I had intended.

  ‘Nothing, nothing happened.’

  And she went on to explain: the arcane tradition of fattening your pig, and inviting all your friends and relatives to a feast that includes its killing, preservation and eating. Carefully organised proceedings, with no living part of the animal left untouched, everything becoming edible or usable. At my question of why a place was called after such a thing, she simply answered that the custom predated an event—that they call the ‘green winter’ for some reason—and therefore predated modern times. In other words, it was called this because it had always been called this; and that seemed a sufficient explanation. Eventually, I remembered reading something about the bloody tradition in my early days as a bio-anthropology student. I couldn’t help but notice how she had left some parts out, deliberately no doubt: the animal’s cries of fear from the early morning onwards, the knowledge of what was coming deep within him already.