The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  Little Death, little Death, what have you done to me… What was happening? Everything felt so unreal in that moment: the sierra, the Upper Settlement. Perhaps everything was an illusion, and we had been lied to from the beginning of time, from the green winter itself.

  ‘I need more light…’ I mumbled.

  ‘No need,’ she said, and got up, came down to me, and took the letter from my hands. She started reading it out loud, in the darkness. I realised she knew its contents by heart.

  It was signed by someone called Eli, someone who asked Pearl to come to find her at once, to go to somewhere called Benguele and join her and others. It asked her to leave me behind, not to tell me where she was going, or to kill me if she had to. And I realised that, if she was sharing it all with me, perhaps that was what she intended to do.

  Was it true, everything that the letter said? She would come with me, and would give me a child, and then another. And then, when she could not give me more, I would put her to sleep forever, and I would come down again, and claim another bride, and then another, and then another. Or even better, she would end up inside a vessel, and I would make sure she disappeared up into the ether, never to come back. Up and up we go, high into the sky, like the children’s lullaby.

  Was that true? I had come looking for a family, wishing for a family; a family of my own.

  But I had seen the other things as well, I had seen them.

  ‘Is it true?’ she asked.

  And I really could not tell her if it was. I was standing next to the window, and I saw the mountains in the semidarkness, with a purple light hovering above them, and an ominous, dark sky. I truly did not know at that moment if I was imagining it all, if the mountains, Gobarí, the Settlement, were false things, and we were all living in a nightmare.

  ‘Pearl…’ I started. She was looking at me and shaking her head right and left, her mouth pressed into a thin line, her eyes rolling in disbelief. I had to say something, anything. ‘Pearl. Please. There are things that I need to explain. But this is not one of them, I can assure you that.’

  She looked at me again, let the letter drop onto the bed. Crossed her arms over her chest.

  ‘You asked if we move you, on purpose. It is not exactly that. Sometimes, the data suggests it is safest if we let some areas go…’

  ‘Let some areas go?’ she shouted back.

  ‘I’ve used the wrong words, it is not that, not exactly… We… The energy surge, you have to understand that, at the beginning, it was a tricky thing to use.’

  ‘The energy surge? What energy surge?’ she looked at me quizzically. Did she really not understand? Did she really not know?

  ‘The blue light.’

  ‘The blue light?’

  ‘Yes, Pearl. You see it as a blue light, every time we action the terraforming technology; but it has taken us generations to do it properly, and we are still learning.’

  That was it, a proper explanation.

  So she could forget about the other thing.

  It did not seem to have the reaction I had expected. She went silent now, and sat on the bed. She wasn’t looking at me, but at the floor.

  ‘Pearl…’

  ‘Terraforming. You just said terraforming,’ she interrupted.

  ‘Yes, terraforming.’

  ‘What does that mean, exactly?’

  And I told her what that meant. How the technology had got out of hand in the past, when it was thought that it could save us from the mutation of Earth into a desertic planet, and how overusing it in the earlier days created the current ecosystem; and how even now we used it sometimes, but only, I was careful to add, whenever we felt it was the right thing to do, in order to prevent a worse outcome elsewhere, as we can control it better.

  She did not reply, and sat there in silence for what felt like a long time. Eventually, she got up, and left the room, and the house.

  Why did I not go after her in that moment? I was conscious of my actions, knew that I needed to run after her. But something kept me glued to the floor. Through the window, I saw her entering the forest, going, perhaps, in the direction of the pond.

  Eventually, I left the house and went after her, straight into the forest, but I ended up walking without direction, deeper and deeper within its dark embrace. I walked until I passed all the tame marked spots the people from the house used to orientate themselves; I walked past the signs that directed me to the pond; I walked past the farthest point where I had been; and then I continued walking. But I couldn’t find Pearl anywhere. My face was hot, the heat turning my tears into a warm, sticky liquid, not unlike the milbao I had so despised at the beginning, and had only later grown to love. For I was changing, I hoped, like the forest changed, every day, every hour. But it was too late for me or for us, and walking deep into my death was the only thing left for me to do.

  * * *

  I realised at some point that the darkness had changed, but I continued walking. We had all known the truth about marrying surface girls, but no one would speak it out loud; not my father, not Mr Vanlow. Only the girl that I had married.

  For a moment I could see the bright orb, fighting to get down among the leaves; it was a strange colour, not yellow, not white, but bluish. Odd, strange, unnatural light.

  I had that same feeling again, that we were all props put on a toy model by some cruel God. I realised then: this place, the surface, was no pleasure garden, and it never had been.

  I was lost, and kept stumbling and falling in the dark. I kept cutting myself as well, my hands, my face. I knew that spending the night out there would kill me. The hostile trees formed a jungle around me, and I felt that I could fall asleep in its embrace. Die, I said to myself. Lie down to sleep and die. For how was I going to show myself anywhere, now that everything was in the open? That horrid truth? For now I understood, she must be right. Now, my father’s insistence that I would accept Mr Vanlow’s proposal, and marry his stepdaughter, made some kind of sick sense. And, if that was true, I could not show myself again, not to her, not to Mr Vanlow; but equally, I could not go back anymore to that place, to my father and my brother. If I accepted this truth, its knowledge would force me into exile, but I didn’t belong here either. I had nowhere to go.

  I must have fallen asleep at some point. Somehow I crawled next to the vast roots of a tree, twisting over each other, thicker than my arms, forming strange cradles that embraced me. It looked like a peaceful place to end it all. Then darkness proper must have engulfed me. But it got light, somehow, eventually. It is hard to know if it surprised me, the new day. I was suffering from a strong fever, I was panting and covered in frozen sweat; but somehow, miraculously, I came out at the other end of those lonely hours. I was shivering, alternating between hot and cold. My body was about to give up. Through the shadows, unreal, only living in my own eyes, I saw them coming: the mullos, who surely had come to take me to Benguele, to Hell, and this was right and proper. When jeré, men, have a bad, violent death, they sometimes come back transformed into mullos, or alive-dead, and take with them someone they loved deeply, to keep them company for all eternity. But who could love me?

  It wasn’t the mullos, of course; it was the old man and some other beanie that Pearl had entrusted to look for me. They were not happy to see me. They put together a makeshift stretcher from two oversized leaves, and carried me back, complaining all the way, to the house. We got to Gobarí, eventually; I was told I was truly lucky to make it. I was very ill after that, until the fever broke, days later.

  As soon as it did, I saw that Pearl had left me, and I was alone in the strange house.

  15

  Everybody knows about the monstrous beings that live in the ocean. It is not our fault, it was not our intention. But monsters would happen, and did happen. We were trying to help, we had the best intentions. Now, it is a nightmare, a mismanagement. Every time they saw a blue, fluorescent sky, it was us up there, trying to fix the unfixable. Terraforming Earth, after we had destroyed it, afte
r everything had been destroyed.

  The swimmers did not offer themselves to the waters, as Pearl was fond of explaining. The reality was different. They got entangled within the remnants of plastic and drowned, the thick layer of debris on the surface blocking them from reaching the air again. They sacrificed themselves, that is true; but to a very different God. No doubt some of the leviathans that populated the Three Oceans had a feast now and again; but the leviathans live much further away, in deeper waters, and if they got to eat the rebels it was only their carcasses. When I was a small boy, in school, we were shown satellite videos of them, those trespassers. Their beliefs had been decreed heretical only for this reason: to prevent more senseless deaths.

  None of these were things that I could say or explain to her, none of these myths could be debunked. She lived and died for them. Like the myth of a blue horizon, a blue sky, a blue ocean. Carbon, hydrogen, and other elements had conspired to make its chemical structure this colour and no other. However, this waste has changed this chemical formula. The detritus is non-biodegradable; hence, waste is now the central component of the ocean. I doubt Pearl was aware of that.

  Perhaps we should not have persevered, should not have generated life, experimented with it in situations where we knew our excesses were likely to compromise or alter the chemical properties of the given milieu. That was our fault, and ours only.

  What other environments had we compromised? Impossible to know.

  Alone, abandoned, I found solace in putting together some notes for my report. I remained in Gobarí as my base, and decided that I could not summarise my findings on the coarse paper provided for my use, so every afternoon I would write my thoughts and findings on the little screen of the HoveLight300. It wasn’t ideal, but was slightly less uncomfortable than writing by hand, when I cramped up after only a few sentences.

  The mornings I spent visiting the beanie and shuvaní dwellings in the area, populated by the people who had provided some kind of service to the house; I also went to a nearby beanie town Pearl had not mentioned. It wasn’t difficult to locate a couple of families willing to let me observe their daily routines at a distance, and who did not mind answering my questions. While women tended their hearths and men went out into the forest, I took notes and interested myself in everything I saw them do. None of them seemed to mind, and in a matter of days I had a substantial number of paragraphs that could be moulded into a coherent narrative, albeit one that was unexpected, utterly alien to what I had learnt about these people up home.

  The final draft of the report started by noting that, contrary to my previous experience with the Pan-Inuits, the changes proposed from the Settlement—those interactions with the environment that undermined the landscape and damaged livelihoods—did not result in the expected erosion of the people’s sense of place. Emotions run high in that southern part of the world that comprised Gobarí, Old Town, the narrow stretch of ocean coast. Emotions electrified the air, as surface inhabitants resisted losing their sense of belonging, their connection to a small stretch of land. They did struggle to survive, and still they persevered, even at the expense of their basic human traits.

  The shuvaníes took pride in their ability to bend flora and fauna to their will; but they were also weary of our meddling, an almost uncanny intuition allowed them to see that the changes and the mutations that their habitat experienced could not be the mere product of the natural upheavals that the human race had endured in recent centuries.

  I noted in my file that issues of social justice and human rights still marred what could be sensibly done down here. This was happening, even if, for the first time in generations, we were meting out the fundamental principles of sustainability. We were using the resources our environment provided in a way that didn’t compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. What was threatening livelihoods, then? People of different castes remained enslaved one way or another, even after the Act was successfully passed. Social networks of reciprocity and local knowledge were not harnessed for the common good, but for a twisted idea of self-preservation. This extended to tribes, clans, families. Strange alliances and loyalties prevailed. The end result was that overexploitation, of resources, of people, remained a constant threat; not immediately visible, but hovering just around the corner. For those who knew how to benefit, all they had to do was attune themselves to the new order of things, the fittest adapting for survival.

  The problem with women seemed to me of a greater order, and infinitely more worrying. Onto their shoulders fell the responsibility for every single strategy that was needed by their family or tribe for everyday survival. Every time something stopped working, and an alternative solution had to be found, they were the ones in charge of providing their communities with the basics. In some cases, I noted, it seemed that their partners did not simply have no inclination to help, but refused even to acknowledge that alternative provisions needed to be made: to put it bluntly, the men expected their home comforts whatever the weather, and weren’t remotely interested in helping out or even finding out how water, or food, or other precious resources, had been obtained. This order of things placed a massive pressure on the women’s shoulders.

  Observing the women was by far the most interesting thing that I did with my time over those weeks. Men seemed to be guided by very automatic thinking, they lacked the creativity and resourcefulness of their female counterparts. I noticed the women invariably engaged with the jungle in a very particular way that was almost animistic, an odd religious thread running through a great number of their actions. They had little chants, or perhaps prayers, to aid different everyday processes. They took care to provide offerings to certain areas or places, and in exchange collected plants for cooking and medicinal purposes from those same areas. The women also appeared to be responsible for providing clean water to their communities. In Gobarí, a very sophisticated system allowed for rainwater to be collected. However, this was destroyed in the last flash flooding disaster, a few years back. Access to fresh water, and the constant worry that this caused, contrasted sharply with the tension that existed in their mythological relationship with the Three Oceans, and that down in the Gobarí-jungle area I could experience at its fullest. The sierra wasn’t far away from the coast. In my HoveLight300, the trip would not take more than forty minutes. However, there was a clear psychological distance to it. These jungle communities were certainly inland communities, saw themselves as such, identified as such. They did not like the idea of the open water; rather, they feared it. This was partly due to the leviathans and other creatures that lurked beneath, and this idea of not seeing what was going on below the surface, of believing in the existence of the monsters or not believing, weighed heavily on them. There were factions, I noticed, who agreed or disagree with their existence. They also had their own water monster to placate, in the form of the pond’s basilisk, which I am sure was no more than a legend. Fresh water was in a completely different category; I noticed how they sourced it in a different way—never, for example, drinking from the pond which, due to the existence of the basilisk, an alicanta in their language, was ‘tainted’. If they ever saw themselves forced somehow to use this water for washing their pans or their clothes, I noticed how they always used different containers than those in which they would receive the drinking rainwater, which for them was a ‘pure’ variation of the liquid. They never mixed those containers, which I found interesting. And rain-pure drinking water was, at times, difficult to obtain. In the times when it didn’t rain at all, the women were forced to barter with the more affluent members of their own communities, those who had managed to build huge containers where this water was kept to last many months. The fact that the burden of procuring these basic needs fell disproportionately on women, I concluded, forced us to reconsider the impact of our actions down here, not just on the environmental, but also on the social processes and among genders. I wasn’t sure my readers in the Settlement would cherish this notion. />
  * * *

  In truth, I was not prepared for any of these findings. The knowledge in the Upper Settlement of what our strategies were affecting down here was patchy, scarce. We also lived by our own myths. That we brought some ‘order’ to the chaos below was one of them. At least, that was what always was impressed upon us. We would be sitting in our orderly rows, dressed in the regulated white of the gymnasium. Image after image would appear on the screenboard: graphs, statistics. From an early age, we were encouraged into the chamber in which the energy surge was enacted. We entered the round chamber in orderly rows, and stood behind a glass partition, usually accompanied by a teacher from the gymnasium. The beam of light would move towards the planet below, and a change in the surface would subsequently be visible from above. We did not see the energy as a blue light, as they did down there; but we knew what was being enacted, what we were trying to achieve. From that distance, orbiting the world, it was sufficient to understand that we were doing a good thing, and we questioned ourselves no further. We did not see the cities as more than dots, scattered here and there. We gave no thought to the people who inhabited them.

  Equally, we would analyse the Jump, bit by bit, but without looking deeper than its superficial tenets. The ceremonial covering of the streets with green leaves and branches, the elaborated constellations reproduced with flowers of many colours. The parade in which those about to be sent were treated like heroes. Their long white clothing, their tunics and long-sleeved robes that surely could not be of much use inside the vessels. It all had a particular meaning attached, a reason. It created an illusion, the elevated illusion of control, of highly regimented rules with a purpose, when in fact they were nothing other than arbitrary options, designed to make the onlookers feel some sort of reverence towards the proceedings, some sort of inevitability. The iconography of that ceremony created the idea that sending those children up to the sky was something that had to be done, in that specific way and no other. Hence, getting the right kind of flower to reproduce a Kingfisher constellation accurately on the floor became more important, more relevant, than the fact that the young person, whose constellation the Kingfisher was, was about to be slaughtered.