The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  (We were never told in as many words that this is what happened, but we all knew it, somehow. You could smell it, in the fact that the programme had stopped, that no vessel had gone up in decades. That nothing, ever, had come back from those ships that were sent.)

  Hence, for the people down here, venturing into the forest was the main adventure of the day, made you a hero of sorts. Pearl had explained to me that she had grown up in fear and awe of the forest.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong; I love Gobarí. I think Mother felt we would be protected here, somehow.’

  ‘Protected? What did she need to protect you from?’

  I could not tie the notion of protection with that ever-changing, unpredictable space, an uncertain refuge where one day you could be swallowed up by the extreme green, or taken away by some unknown giant birdlike creature, or simply devoured by a carnivorous plant you had no time to flee. Pearl was acutely aware of living like this:

  ‘Some days, I was constantly on alert; Savina would know when the forest was hungry, or was about to change. Those days were terrifying,’ she explained. It all sounded as if she was explaining how she had survived, rather than lived.

  And then she told me about her father.

  ‘I think he was trying to save me.’

  ‘From what?’

  But she could not formulate a reply. I did not tell her that I already knew the story, and that, like her, I could sense holes in it, parts that did not add up.

  ‘My father was innocent.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I found the report in the Registry. He never confessed to killing the girl.’

  ‘Is that all your proof?’

  She said nothing else.

  In the gymnasium, we would write long convoluted essays about the meaning of some minor ornament, of that or this thing, tracing back its historical and anthropological origins up till before the Green Event, or, as it was called down here, the ‘green winter’. Our research included reading some of the fables that moulded their beliefs. I knew the tale of the white lady, the tale of the three sisters, the tale of Alira. Those were Pearl’s favourites, we read them together in Gobarí, at night, under the light of an oil-tin candle. Or rather, she read them to me, as I found it hard to read under that peculiar light. I craved the immaculate, clean and crisp white light of the Settlement. The pristine row of tables on which we did our work. The screenboard surface where the text would appear, and there we would read them, make sense of them, memorise them, form our own theories. At the time, I was not interested in this part of the world, and I learnt more about the northern regions. Now, I regretted that.

  I had only been selected to write this report because I was coming here to marry Pearl, under my father’s orders. I didn’t see us up there as saviours, I didn’t see us as anything. I believed in very little; certainly, not in myself. Nor the Jump, the vessels, or the false hope they brought to an exhausted world. I know we were not supposed to ‘believe’, that wasn’t our role. But, at least, I should have believed that the current status quo would bring some solace to those below us, that everything was done for a reason.

  Unfortunately, I could not find any evidence of that down here.

  Up in the Settlement, I would go running on the upper deck quite often. To my right, the transport lines carried citizens from one section of the Settlement to another. To my left, I could enjoy the oval garden, my favourite place, with its invented trees and its strange birds, none of them belonging here, there, or anywhere, a figment of our imaginations that, somehow, we had managed to bring to life. From time to time, an oversized dragonfly would fly to me, and accompany me for a while, her colours bio-engineered to shine with many different shades. She was expecting some of the sweet lumps of energy-sugar that we runners usually carried with us; I, however, chose not to pollute my body with any of those additives. Above me, the dark sky, some stars, and the occasional old satellite, still orbiting after all this time, sending empty messages back to nowhere. Sometimes I would push myself, tire myself out, strive further, and the effort would make me giddy. At those times, I would always look at the glass ceiling dome, and consider the sky. And wish I could fly, just like Alira did in that children’s fable; Alira, or the lady in white, our founder. She had separated herself from what went on down below, from the ideas of the old men who took it upon themselves to run the planet when everything changed irrevocably. It was she, as well, who sought a way for more of us to be up in the sky with her. It was she who decided that some of us would be here, and some of them would be down there. She, in her infinite wisdom, had decreed these separations so we could survive, and we ought to thank her daily, for survive we had.

  But I would look at the open space, visible through the massive windows in the oval garden, and would want to go further, further up. Did I want to Jump? I would have been the first starborn to do so. I do not think so, I was not so brave. I think I just wanted an escape. And I had found it somehow, but by heading down instead.

  The Fable of the Lady in White

  There was a boy who had grown up next to a desert. Over there, a little mountain range. Past that, another village. A girl who he was fond of lived in that village beyond the mountains. One day, he travelled there, and asked the girl to unite with him. The girl refused. She was promised to another.

  He returned to his village, angry to be rejected. That night, he could not sleep for the anger and the jealousy he felt.

  ‘I wish,’ he said to himself, ‘that a terrible tragedy might befall both of them!’

  No sooner had he said those words than a lady in white descended from the sky, and stood in front of him.

  ‘Boy,’ she called. ‘Boy, is that what you want?’

  He had to cover his eyes to look at her. She was shining like a star, her whole body luminescent. Her clothes were immaculate, pristine. She walked on the earth floor of his house, and her feet did not get dirty. Her silver bracelets shone reflections here and there.

  ‘I can help you,’ she insisted. ‘But you need to be sure. Once it has all started, there will be no turning back.’

  The boy agreed. He was resentful of the lovers; jealousy was eating him up.

  ‘Very well.’ Then the lady in white did something strange. She caressed one of her silver bracelets, and a little man made of light appeared and posed himself on her hand. She talked to this little man made of light, and whispered for him to do something for her. Then the man disappeared. The lady smiled kindly at the boy, and flew away into the clouds.

  That night, later on, there was a blue explosion of light up in the sky. The light danced over the horizon, forming the shape of animals, playing with one another, hunting each other. At some point, the light went out.

  The boy went to sleep. He did not know what the lady would do; he suspected it had all been a dream, and nothing would come of it.

  In the morning he was woken up by a commotion. There was a lot of noise outside his hut, a rattle of people talking to each other. He went out to see what had happened.

  The little mountain range ahead of them had changed colour and turned completely green overnight. But the transformation wasn’t the most incredible thing of all. People were saying that the green that now covered the little promontories was moving in the wind, rippling like fur does.

  How could a mountain grow green fur overnight?

  People moved away as the eldest member of the community advanced slowly to see the marvel. ‘That is not fur,’ the eldest said.

  And then he explained.

  The word stirred some memories: forest. A forest that had appeared overnight. There was no surprise at this: most of the members of the community had not known anything called forest in their lifetimes, and so they did not recall how they were made, or came to be.

  Then the elder spoke again. What about the village on the other side of the mountain? Rangers were dispatched. They returned at night. The village did not exist any longer. It had disappeared. It might s
till be there in theory, invisible, buried deep under the green that had emerged seemingly out of nowhere to gobble it up.

  The strange thing was, the members of the community did not seem to react. Even when trees and bushes—all new words that their mouths had to rehearse carefully—had grown overnight, until they covered it all, the little dwellings, the parked wagons, the people. Even when there were no survivors. It had happened somewhere else, to other folk. Even when the rangers spoke of vines growing through the empty carcasses of carts, discarded rubble, children and their parents… The villagers had been spared those images, so they did not mind the fate of their neighbours.

  It had happened to others, they said. We are lucky.

  Soon, however, there were reports coming from other places, other occurrences. The apparent repetition of the phenomenon, in which the green mantle gobbled up a human settlement in its entirety, could simply not be ignored any longer. Nor could the fact that it was obvious another similar event would eventually happen. It was anybody’s guess where, or when, it would happen. And it did happen. Again, the same song: it did not happen to us! It happened further away, over there!

  The final realisation struck at last: their turn would come eventually. As if the message that someone had been sending had not been loud enough, until finally, suddenly, it had been picked up with a loud bang. Humanity’s final awakening, though not before going through the normal cycle of denial, negotiation, and acceptance.

  The night finally arrived, when the blue light shone directly over their heads, over their houses, over their tame desert animals and over their dirty children. There was no place to hide. When they saw the green rushing down the mountain, advancing in their direction, they understood it was their turn to disappear.

  PEARL

  16

  On the surface, every pregnancy was cause for rejoicing. There was a sense that it made everybody involved a better person. Me, I dreaded it all, except what was bound to happen.

  They took Alira, and brought me here, one of the inner docks, filled to the brim with other refugees. It is a strange limbo-life, sleeping in a dark section, with gritty blue-fluorescent lighting alongside the grey walls. Every morning, a knocker-up comes and, for a small fee, wakes me up, so I can be on time at my place of work, several levels up.

  I am a cleaner now, up in the ring.

  The dock where I sleep and dream of my daughter is at least six levels down from the white and pristine sections inhabited by the ringers, their promenades and boulevards infused with the benign light of their fake sun. They walk up and down, drink and eat delicious looking food, attend theatrical events in little, intimate venues, and, once a week, they congregate around the Forum, a circular piazza; on some days, by virtue of the citizens occupying its round steps, it transforms into a theatre. Those days are my favourites. The storyteller appears, and delivers the news, and explains the latest scientific advances, and relates the deaths and the births, and creates new myths for us all to follow.

  I am no more than a shadow, moving around collecting discarded things, and taking them back to the incinerator. I wear the required working attire, made of a fabric that makes me almost invisible to passers-by, so as not to be in the way. I actually prefer this arrangement, as I imagine these garments will also help me one day to look for her. At night I return to my dock, eat a protein pouch, and go to sleep in a room with twenty strangers.

  I am finally here.

  Do I think about the surface? I think about Arlo; about Eli’s letter that took me back to her. Those days, which were so painful, are now also the happiest ones of my life. I close my eyes, and think about the forest, and about Eli, and about the green.

  * * *

  We usually went into the forest led by Eli, our main task to collect a huge number of plants. It was a massive effort. I wasn’t used to working with the machetes, and the procuring of the branches, all covered in wavy leaves and hard to manoeuvre. At some point, I was trying to take a long one, overgrown with endless smaller branches, back to the place where we were collecting them, and, not looking behind me, I almost hit somebody on the head with the wood.

  ‘Careful!’ a voice shouted behind me. Then, patiently, this person showed me how to drag the fallen branch to the place where it had been cut, which ensured that I could control where the crown, spilling widely in every direction, stayed on the floor instead.

  It was a long time since I had felt so useless.

  We had spent the past two days pruning the path towards Benguele, cutting and cutting again—it always felt such a useless endeavour there, it felt as if the next day it would look exactly as it was—and we had started covering all the paths into the house, and then the patio, and the porch. Nothing remained ‘humanised’ except for the walls themselves.

  Those green-covered paths were decorated with intricate flower patterns, representing the constellations of those we were honouring. We were mimicking the ceremony of the Jump, mocking it perhaps, to send our own heroes into action. Some of the outer walls were also decorated with bunches of flowers, and after the festivities some people would weave long, thick plaits out of the greenery lying on the floor to hang on their doors and from thresholds. They would be burnt in another festivity or kept for a year for luck.

  There were also other rituals, connected with fertility, reproduction. I preferred not to think or hear about them.

  Benguele wasn’t simply a house whose only purpose was to demonstrate the techies’ dominance. It had also been a proper farm, long ago. Some rooms were lavish, white granite and marble formed the shapes of what we thought were trees and animals in the epoch before the green winter. I knew the name of some; others had been lost now from history.

  At first my stepfather had rented it for a while, and, even if he had abandoned it after he got Gobarí, he had managed to do some repairs. A fire had only destroyed some of the outer barns, and the main house was intact. But what mattered now to its occupants were the fields. Eli’s people were getting them working once again. The fields were cut-out squares in the middle of the jungle; the trees thinned so that they could not grow into a light-blocking canopy. These vast expanses, miraculously, received direct light from the sun. That simple fact changed everything: different things could be grown here than in our little temporary patches, things that required more space to breathe, more time to mature. It took huge amounts of effort to keep those fields free of the forest’s embrace. A large battalion of men had this as their only job: keeping the forest from encroaching on them. There were things growing, so many things. Things I had never seen before, tasted before; they were not new species, but old species, some predating the green winter itself.

  Eli’s older sister had worked in town for a couple of years, in the house of a high-ranking vessel-building engineer connected with the farm—his sister had first built it. That was how she had known about the place. None of us had known a Jump in our lives; the last one had occurred nearly twenty years ago, when I was a very little girl. I still remembered that image of the vessel going up. Up and up we go.

  The vessels were sent by NEST, a now-defunct programme to look for an alternative to our planet. For our parents’ generation, it had been a common sight to see a couple of the massive structures climbing into the sky each decade. It was never made clear to us how the children were selected, but it had to be children, in order to maximise the time they would have to explore outer space. I gather the selection had to do with connections, as everything else did; who you knew where, as your family was set up for life in exchange of the sacrifice. Still, the child’s natural skills and abilities also counted for something. The ones with potential to become curators and storytellers were especially sought after. They could both document their findings, and report back, or even achieve communication with cultures outside the planet if this was needed. It wasn’t a punishment to be sent into the vessels, but a high honour, and the children chosen lived in the programme’s complexes surrounded by luxuries unto
ld, copious food, and plenty of knowledge and instruction for the last few years before they were sent up. The young people who mounted those machines were very sophisticated members of our society. I do not know if children from the ring could take part in this, but I imagine that it wasn’t the case.

  The number of vessels sent simply reflected the amount of time that was required to build them. But my generation had not seen this happening: the same two vessels that I had seen from the coast with my father the last time we were together still languished abandoned at the end of Old Town, beyond the Registry. There were different theories as to why this had happened. Some believed that the NEST programme had run out of money; some said that an alternative planet had already been found. And some believed that the Jump was no more than an illusion to keep us sane. The vessels were sent into the infinite void of space, never to return, never to find anything; at some point, people had become tired of sacrificing their youth to this monstrous lie.

  The one thing that had surprised me most from my findings in the Registry: Verity, my little friend, the girl my father had supposedly killed, had been earmarked for a Jump.

  Before my father did what he did, our family fortunes had not been in danger. We lived in Old Town. We had servants to look after us. We wanted for nothing. The vessels had been parked for so long by then that they were already in disrepair. If someone were going to decide to send them now, several years would be needed to make them fit for purpose. By the time they would be ready, I would have been too old to go: nineteen was the age limit to perform a Jump. I was lucky: I would never have that fate. Now, it did not look like those vessels were going anywhere.