The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  Some children came to look at us enquiringly; no, not to look at her. They came to look at me. There were half-naked, unsmiling children. They brought us milbao; not my favourite thing, but Pearl made me drink it. She said it was so difficult to make, they would be offended if we didn’t. And so I drank it: a slimy juice, sticky, that smelt like vomit.

  We got back on my rented HoveLight300, what people down here called a ‘hovering’ vehicle, but we were not flying. For some reason I could not fathom, Pearl had asked if we could go to her house by road. The contact of the HoveLight300 with it made an unpleasant crushing sound. It would also delay us greatly, but I could not deny her this, not after what had happened right before the wedding. It was such a little ask, so easy to comply with. Our advance, therefore, was painfully slow. Travelling like this included a lot of stops. The road became obstructed by the plants often; the hired hands walked ahead then, cutting with machetes the lianas and the leaves and the branches that had appeared overnight over the path. Soon, she repeated, so soon now. But to me it felt as if we were entering the mouth of a beast, all those green branches a cavity full of teeth that could crunch us beneath its force. Everything was extreme. I felt as if I was drowning in smells. Orange, cinnamon, and that vast flower, lady of the night.

  We arrived eventually at a place falling to pieces, but her whole expression metamorphosed. I understood: this is how my blue-haired companion looks when she is happy.

  A group of sombre-looking servants appeared on the steps, unreadable expressions on their faces. We are home, she announced.

  * * *

  We had survived, crossing the uncertain space of the forest, changing it for the certainty of a place, but I could not shake an odd anxiety.

  The strange indeterminacy of the wild, empty zone, composed of millions and trillions of varieties of flora and fauna that we did not understand yet; a vast extension of non-cartographic space, where my things did not work: the HivePod, the HiveCam, some of the hovering tech, including my HoveLight300, no doubt, would prove faulty here. And still, this place where we had arrived was no refuge either. For Pearl thought it hers when it was not. It belonged to them and them only.

  There was an old man, and a young girl smiling through white teeth, a slight gap between the two at the front. And then there was Savina, the old family servant, the saviour who had kept it all going, all those years back. Or that was what Pearl explained to me.

  ‘You have to like Savina; I want you to like her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she is like my own mother.’

  The woman was looking through a sneer, there was no other way to put it, as if she was laughing at us.

  But Pearl would say no more than that. We were sitting on the porch. You could not hear the ocean from the house; although, in truth, we could not be so far away from it. In the HoveLight300 we would reach the coast in around forty minutes. Walking it would take a morning to get there. But the whole place felt noisy, its shapes and forms complaining under the cracking sun. Those shapes and forms felt odd and strange: I had seen them on our screens up above, studied them in our digital repositories. But now, facing them directly, the oversize leaves and those eternal trunks, shooting up, covering the sky in most places, made me feel a bit giddy. Perhaps it was the heat, which made everything heavy and my own skin clammy to the touch.

  I had an idea of where we were, if I thought of a map, but at the same time it was difficult for me to understand our position, to place myself. I blamed the topography of the place: all you could see was the profusion at the entrance of the forest, and behind it, over its canopy, a glimpse of the rocky mountains of the sierra. And then nothing, a white sky, cloudless. It was strange not to see the Upper Settlement. It made me feel strangely unsettled, and the place where we were felt somehow unreal, the drawing of a child. I said this out loud, and Pearl answered:

  ‘Perhaps it is the ring that is a dream.’

  ‘The ring? How could the ring be a dream, Pearl? It is solid, man-made.’

  ‘This is also solid, as solid as it is possible to be,’ she said, pointing at the mountains. ‘What if it is all a mirage, an illusion they tell us about? There are more of us down here, you know.’

  I told her she was wrong: more people now lived among the stars than down on the surface of the planet. She looked troubled. She had not known, realised, or been told: only the remnants of civilisation had been left behind now, most of what mattered was up there already.

  She went very quiet after this. I continued looking at the sierra, and said, to make her feel better, that she was right, that mountains could not be unreal. But she did not reply.

  Later on, I was inside the house. There was a room prepared for us with a couple of books and papers and ink. I could not see any connections for my HivePod, and despaired for a moment. I would have to write on paper, like in the olden days. When I was a youngster, I had used paper for a time: an affectation, also designed to show everyone that I had access to it. Here, it didn’t seem to be valued; I saw every day how they discarded perfectly reusable pieces, or how they wrote menus or lists of things to do on them, instead of committing those things to memory. They made a crude version of paper themselves, so they did not see it as something scarce. But their laziness made me sick. I tried to tell the young servant girl to be careful of wasting paper, and she laughed at my face.

  What could I do with the paper? Write to my father? I imagined how this may be received, and flinched. I did not know what my father expected from me, what his dealings with Mr Vanlow actually were.

  Despite the impossibility of communication with the outside world, I did not write to anyone. How would I send letters up to the Settlement? It all seemed so useless then: my aborted letter writing, this strange place, Gobarí, my recent union. My thoughts were interrupted by the young servant girl, who came in at that moment, carrying something or other. Or perhaps she had been sent to spy on me. She saw that I had spread out the paper and other writing tools on the table and laughed once more, who knows why, and said something I did not catch; I hardly ever made sense of their talk, although it is also true that I did not try very hard to understand them. All the servants did the same, all the time, coming and going in and out of rooms as if they owned the place, and Pearl did not seem to mind.

  Instead of the letter, I started writing my first impressions of the place. I could see Pearl from the window, and, now and again, I could hear snippets of her conversation with the old man. The house, the garden, and general maintenance questions were the matters that occupied their discussion. But it did not seem by her tone that Pearl was asserting her place as the rightful owner of Gobarí, it rather seemed that they were talking as equals.

  I wondered what this might mean, and resolved to mention it later to her. That was a dangerous slippery slope. I had already noted to my dismay that she did not refer to them as ‘servants’; indeed, avoided naming them such.

  As if on cue, a voice interrupted my reasoning.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Startled, I turn to find the strange woman, Savina, looking furiously at me from the threshold.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She seemed to think my answer an invitation to enter the room, which she did. Instinctively, I got up from the desk. She was glaring at it.

  ‘What are you doing with the paper?’

  I did not understand her worry, and I simply could not abide her tone. This created the perfect opportunity to reassert our position.

  ‘I do not need to answer such an impertinent question.’ She flinched, her eyes fluttering in disbelief. What was happening here? Had she never been admonished by a superior? ‘In fact, this paper is rather inadequate, I trust there is one of better quality for my writing.’

  ‘Your writing?’ she chuckled. ‘Let me tell you, that paper there is not to be spent so quickly, it takes us a whole afternoon to make it!’

  So I had misunderstood, partly, their usage of the thin
g. Still, behaviour like this could not be tolerated. If this woman needed to be reminded of her place, so be it.

  ‘In that case, you should have procured more quantity before our arrival. I will use all the paper that I need while I am here,’ I said with finality. Truth be told, if my HivePod did not work in that place, paper was the only other option to do the work I was expected to do. But I would be damned if I was going to explain myself to her. ‘And now, please leave me. I am sure you can find something to do.’

  I dismissed her with a wave of my hand, and she turned furiously towards the corridor. I did not even look at her, concentrating instead on the task in front of me; but I could tell she had glared in my direction before leaving, as her two eyes had pierced the back of my neck, as if they were on fire.

  12

  I did not feel safe in Gobarí. Perhaps it wasn’t the forest, after all. For I hadn’t felt safe in Old Town either. Mr Vanlow had been very attentive while we were there, and she, the strange girl I was going to be bonded with for life, was infused with a rare intelligence as well. She was trained as a curator, and that was far more than I had been led to expect. The actual ceremony was brief and beautiful. It took place before we started on our honeymoon to her old house in the forest. As may perhaps be understandable, I was wary of the future. For our bond did not follow the rules among the stars, but was earthly made.

  I was in Old Town for less than a week, and knew Pearl for a few days before we married. There were not many preparations to make, as her stepfather had arranged everything for us, and there weren’t many guests to invite. Pearl and I spent as much time together as we could, sometimes with Mr Vanlow, sometimes with her friend, Laurel, less often on our own. She had few possessions and not much to pack, as apparently the life of junior curators was rather monastic; but still there were some decisions to make, little things to discuss and consider. I could not help noticing, during these conversations, that she looked much more excited at the prospect of returning to her childhood home, Gobarí, than about the actual ceremony itself. I hoped she had no doubts about me. I did not want to displease my father, or Mr Vanlow, and this arrangement suited me as well, for different reasons. Still, the morning before the ceremony was meant to take place, I was told that Pearl did not want to go through with it.

  I was speechless, a bit shocked. Was it possible that she was going to reject me? Mr Vanlow could not tell me the reason, so I decided to take matters into my own hands: I got dressed and went out onto the hot promenade. Once in the street, I realised I did not know in which compound they lived, square mansions arranged in huge fortresses, housing several families around a cool patio, and overlooking the cleaner parts of the ocean. My HiveApp helped with that, and soon I was knocking on her door, panting and worried. I am not sure I had grown fond of her, not so soon; I am embarrassed to say that I was ashamed of the possibility of having to return empty-handed, jilted by this half-caste child from the surface. She opened the door angrily.

  ‘Pearl, what is going on? Your stepfather says you don’t want us to be united. Please, tell me, what I have done?’

  ‘I know what goes on up there.’

  ‘What? What goes on up where?’

  ‘In the ring. I know why you come down here to find your brides.’

  And then she told me, although I wished she had not spoken: how in the Registry school she had learnt from other feral children about what went on in the Upper Settlement, that we had to come down to find our brides because up there we could not have children anymore.

  I could not deny all of it; but I deflected, and told her that if she wanted to be a storyteller, there was no better place to train than up in the Settlement: the best teachers were there.

  ‘You will be able to do anything you want, my love, once we are up. Together.’

  She considered this a moment, and slowly advanced in my direction with little birdlike steps, and she hugged me. I could smell her hair. She smelled like flowers, and fresh-cut grass, and the ocean, smells we bottled up and artificially reproduced often in our home among the stars. But hers were the real thing, and I felt it for the first time: a surge of love. And then she said, still holding me, without looking into my eyes:

  ‘They also said that the forest does not eat settlements; that you say that when you expel some people from their homes to steal from them.’

  ‘What, Pearl? What can we possibly need to steal from down here?’

  ‘Please, tell me it isn’t true.’

  So I told her: it wasn’t true. And I repeated: once we were up, she could do anything she wanted. I didn’t tell her other things, of course: my certainty of her success in what she called the ‘ring’ wasn’t entirely true. I had seen people emigrating from down below, and rarely did they fulfil their promise, their dreams. They worked for us: served at our tables, cooked our food, had our children, looked after our elders. But they never entered a relevant profession. They all were educated, intelligent people; more so than us, perhaps. The reasons were different. They sounded wrong, looked wrong, not like we imagined real human beings ought to look and sound. They had strong accents, all of them, accents which made us perceive them as uneducated, even those with more knowledge than us.

  Pearl and I married by the shore on the outskirts of the broken town, the attack on the Barrier barely a week old, so recent still in all our worried minds. The world had exploded on the same morning that we picked Pearl up from the Registry, and I can understand that her whole world had shattered somehow, become an unsure thing, whichever sense of feeling secure she had must have slipped from under her feet. But I had hoped, perhaps naively, that our union might help her find firm ground once more, would make her feel secure again.

  The ocean and the Barrier, which down here they called the ‘wall’, and Mr Vanlow and a few others, they were the only witnesses of our union. Those few guests were waiting for us on the shore, as tradition imposes. Earlier that morning, Laurel and other girls from the Registry had gone down there, and had drawn a round maze with stones and seashells. I met Pearl a stretch away, and we arrived together, holding hands. She was wearing a loose white dress and a flower crown; I matched her with my white gymnasium uniform, and a bunch of flowers in my hand matching hers. Together, we walked the round maze to its centre, where the officiant, a well-known storyteller, pronounced us united in flesh and spirit, alluding to the lady in white, the Star Explorers, and all the creatures around us.

  At the precise moment when she tied us, her ornamental rope decorated with more shells that pricked my hand, a huge, unknown sound behind the Barrier startled us, as if God had blown an oversized trumpet.

  ‘What on Earth…?’ Mr Vanlow chuckled. Everyone had retreated from the shore, although the Barrier protected us. A gust of air accompanying the demonic sound had made us waver, and some of our few guests had fallen. I hurried to help.

  ‘It is them, the Behemoths.’ This was Ariel, Laurel’s brother. I had hardly had the chance to speak with him during the preceding days, but he seemed a reasonable enough young man.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. I noticed that Pearl was holding my hand, or perhaps I was holding hers.

  ‘The Leviathans, the Mighty Whales!’ I could have sworn there was a glint of madness in his eyes.

  I had no idea if this means our union was blessed, or doomed, but the circle of shells was destroyed with the sudden gust of wind brought by the wailing, as well as the small white flowers that covered the sand. I had felt sorry for that destruction of the natural world, so precious it was, up at home; but Pearl had told me the day before, as we collected them, not to worry: those little flowers that I had pitied so much only lived for one day.

  13

  And so it was that I found myself in that beautiful place, wild, untouched. But without any of the freshness of how Pearl’s hair had smelled that morning, the morning of our union. Here, everything was too much, everything was dying a little in its extravagance. Everything was provisional as well, thing
s made of other, older things, handed down, repaired a thousand times: a piece of string, dark with dirt, that I would pull to summon the servant girl. I would follow its progress, rudely nailed at the angle between the wall and the ceiling. Everything was exactly like that, felt reused, made up of discarded things. Up in the Settlement everything was built with a specific use in mind, a finality. Everything was clean, neat, hygienic, and took up the least possible space.

  Here, there seemed to be an overabundance of purpose, a surplus, an extravagance of time. I asked Pearl about it. She said she did not understand what I meant; surely reusing was a good thing, not a bad thing. We never had that problem; we would send down what we didn’t want any longer, and produce a new, improved version. She laughed at this, and her laughter reminded me of the servant girl’s.

  I wanted to explain how we did things up there, but I was sure she would laugh some more. I knew that she had already made up her mind about how life in the Upper Settlement was, fixed ideas that had already stuck inside her head. She did ask questions sometimes, and I always tried to answer her as well as I could. But I could see that nothing I said had any effect on her. She was surprised that we could live without animals.

  ‘You once told me that animals are the thing you are most scared of,’ I replied.

  ‘Yes, it is true. My father taught me to fear them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You could not understand.’

  ‘But we have animals up there!’ I protested.

  ‘Yes, but your animals are domesticated, engineered to be easily tamed. Our animals are not like that. Do you know what some people say?’

  ‘What?’ And there it was, as with most of our conversations: for they always tended to end in some kind of reproach to those above, some mismanagement or unfair thing that we had done. I was not disappointed.