The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  * * *

  When they Jumped, the children carried seeds with them, the building blocks of our civilisation.

  Before the green winter, a few visionaries had an idea: to store in a repository—a building similar to the Registry, except they were called libraries, museums, bibliothecas, treasuries, vaults, archives, menageries, and other innocent names—the building blocks of an old custom that had defined their existence for over twelve thousand years: agriculture.

  Until then, humanity had been weighed down by its past, trapped into interpreting collections and repositories put together many generations before them; but some saw through this mistake. They had the technology to do it, armed with new tools that transformed their repositories into monstrous centres for data-mining, collections destined to last forever. The seeds were an afterthought; they started by archiving the DNA of half the lifeforms on Earth. As always, they built a centre of untold knowledge, but they did so without asking themselves the right questions: where would these animals live, if they were to be replicated one day? Who would have access to their DNA? Who could use these resources in the future, if indeed there was a future ahead for humanity?

  It was these very seeds on which Eli was building her own version of civilisation.

  Eli and her sister had worked inside the wall, for the engineer in charge of preparing those seeds for their interstellar journeys inside the vessels. The men from the past had built the vault to store them deep within something called the permafrost; an iced strata of soil, I think, meant to last forever.

  Unfortunately for them, this eternal permafrost melted. They rebuilt the vault.

  The team in charge of this treasure travelled to the northernmost point of the planet every year, where they met with colleagues from other NEST programs scattered around the globe, in order to check on the status of this eternal vault. Eli’s master had followed the usual protocol on his last ever trip to the north, many years back. He had collected the seeds, placed them into the little sorting pods, and brought them back to his compound. Once in town, he stored them in specially created conservation freezers installed in his chambers until they were needed. And there they stayed, for no trip happened, no Jump had been performed for decades. And there they still were, long after Eli’s master had died, just waiting for her and her friends.

  From this story, what surprised me most wasn’t the forgotten seeds, or the first vault disappearing into the melted permafrost, or the fact that Eli had a life of her own while I attended the Registry school. What surprised me was that she lived inside the wall, all those years, long enough that she knew her way in and out of the place undetected. After Savina, she was the only other person I have ever met that had been inside the Barrier. Perhaps my stepfather. I had never asked; but this tallied with my knowledge of him, of his comings and goings, his business and his associates.

  Eli was filling me in on all this information while she stroked her pet coypu. It was a large specimen, only a baby and already weighing around thirty kilos. She expected him to reach sixty-five, and maybe to ride him one day.

  ‘We do not intend to farm animals here, plants only,’ she said, as she played with his muzzle.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘Rearing animals for their meat was also one of the ways in which they warmed the atmosphere. Besides, it happens to be the most unproductive way of using land known to man.’

  ‘Where did you learn all this?’

  ‘My techie master, he taught me these things.’

  Eli explained that right before the green winter, millions of people were starving; but the remaining millions, apparently, went on undeterred, had not given up their frenzy of meat consumption. Only the poor had been affected by the shortages of water and food, the bad air, the forced migration, malnutrition and death.

  ‘The ultra-rich continued evolving their technology as if nothing that was going on was their problem. First, they had escaped into exclusive compounds; then into orbiting houses; and lastly, into the ring itself. With time, half of us had been abandoned here.’

  ‘But I thought the ring was created for the good of all humanity, and whoever went there earned it somehow, by pleasing the lady in white…’

  She laughed at this.

  ‘Of course, that is what they want you to think! That there is a predetermined order in what they did, that whoever ended up there deserved it more than us. The lady in white? Do you really believe all those children’s stories? Let’s face it, Pearl, they abandoned us here.’

  All this made me think: was Arlo right when he said there were more people already in the ring and its satellites than down here? What did that say about humanity, what did that say about us? We had evolved separately for so long, two sides of the same coin, that it was as if two different kinds of human beings now sat awkwardly opposite each other: the ringers on one side, and the rest of us on the other.

  * * *

  Some of Eli’s followers lived in the various barns, whereas she and the others, mostly from the first group who had fixed the farm with her and her sister, had claimed the main farmhouse for their use. It was decided that I would stay there, as Eli’s guest. Her wife, Unity, also lived in the main house. Her name told me she was a techie, and she hadn’t come alone. Some techie whizz-kids had followed her here from Old Town, perhaps with genuinely good intentions, perhaps attracted by this kind of easy activism they could abandon at any point to return to their comfortable existences. They occupied one of the barns, and worked endlessly over HivePods, punching commands on old-fashioned keyboards, dictating them orally to the machines, or drawing them directly onto the screens with their fingers. I saw them only once, but they were dextrous, worked fast. It was obvious they knew what they were doing, although it did not occur to me to ask what their task was, what they could possibly be doing holed up on a farm.

  Eli had grown, not much taller, but definitely stronger. The years had given her a muscled body, toned and dark from working in the fields. She wore her hair cropped now, and her arms and upper torso were covered in images and writing and little shuvaní protection spells. Three tiny luminescent sparrows floated over her collarbone. The heroes we were honouring in our ceremony were all going to the ocean. But not to swim, Eli wasn’t a dreamer. And the farm needed something that could only be found inside the Barrier, inside the wall, at the end of the short half-moon of salty water available to the elegant oldtowners.

  ‘It’s suicidal!’ I protested. But I knew better than to ask what it was: there were certain things Eli did for the good of her community that I felt she preferred to keep discreet, and ought to be illegal. I did not press her; I was a guest there, after all, and knew nothing, understood nothing. They had gone many times back to Old Town, taken what they needed from those who weren’t sharing with others.

  ‘Besides, if it really was dangerous, what do we have to lose? We are left to rot out here, we are left to die. It is different for you.’

  ‘Why is it different for me?’

  She laughed at this.

  ‘Because you have a choice. You can go and live in Old Town, and become a storyteller, or a curator, or anything you want to do.’

  I said nothing. It wasn’t so easy, even for me, to do anything. No one could simply do anything. But it would be difficult to explain this to Eli. To my surprise, she added:

  ‘And, now that you are married to a ringer, you know that you can go up there as well.’

  ‘You know I could not do that; I would never do that.’

  But I had thought about it, so many times since my stepfather mentioned the possibility of my union. And I had married for that reason, had I not? I could not deny it. What did that say about me? I had been ready to unite myself with someone I didn’t know in order to get away from the surface, following the stupid dream of becoming somebody, doing something.

  ‘I looked out for you many times, in Old Town. But once I knew you were in the Registry school I gave up. It’s impossible to get ins
ide.’

  ‘How did you know I was back in Gobarí?’

  She laughed.

  ‘Savina,’ she said simply. ‘What took you so long, little blue bird?’ she laughed.

  I had so many questions for Eli. When she left, the pond had lost some of its charm. It was almost as if I resented the water. I avoided my reflection in its quiet surface: it was as if the water was showing me something that I didn’t want to see. Was the basilisk lurking down there, perhaps? I listened for the water, hoping to understand its ripples. And I knew that it hid more than it showed, there was more life unseen than seen there. And, in the process of this understanding, of transforming myself into one with the pond, I knew that other things also took place in the adult world, equally, under the surface.

  I was alone now. I would sit on its deceptive little shore, the tide ebbing. If I dipped my toes, I could sense its rippling, all the undisturbed life that hid down there. After Eli left, I started questioning everything. As always, jumping into the water forced me to confront myself, be attentive at the dark secrets within the water, the unexpected undercurrents, the unrequited embrace of the overgrown seaweed, the risk of staying too long, getting too cold, for sometimes the water was cold somehow, even if the forest was heaving. I was an explorer, discovering a new realm, where normal rules didn’t apply. That’s why Eli and I could make it ours.

  I had many questions. How had she survived without it? How had she survived away from the sierra? She was a true believer now, of her own religion, her own myths; she had created the way of life I saw in front of me, and recruited all these people. But what I wanted to ask her more was this: why had my mother chosen to initiate her, and not me? For it was an initiation of sorts, I knew that.

  This was the only question I could not pose. However, I could see in what she had achieved here the ending of a lineage that started then and there, at that precise moment, surrounded by young and old women, chanting and hiding and meddling on the shores of Kon-il. I could almost trace it. And, perhaps, I thought, I could have been this person, I could have led all these people that have gathered here, of all places, an abandoned farm, semi-destroyed by fire, in the middle of nowhere.

  She had asked me to come to the farm to become their storyteller.

  ‘We need one on our side, someone to give us hope, not overburden us with predictions of a new apocalypse; but, also, someone who can learn to narrate our side to others. None of this matters,’ she said, pointing at the fields through the window, ‘if we cannot tell it to others! You know that better than anyone. We need someone to show them how to dream, show them what this place can offer, to inform our opinions, establish our truths.’

  ‘Why you think I can do this? I am not a storyteller; I have only trained as a curator, which is a much lesser form of knowledge-making.’

  She dismissed my words with another wave of her hand.

  ‘You are the closest I have, little bird. Out of everyone that I, or anybody here, knows, you are the only one who has seen inside the vaults.’

  Eli’s faith worried me: I had seen what storytellers could do, back in Old Town. Masters of imaginative thinking, curators of our thoughts, moving us into action. I did not have that kind of power within me. As a curator, my studies had concentrated on the act of organising, describing, storing and preserving information. The act of collecting itself fell on other, more experienced individuals, with years of curating under their belts. The art of storytelling was left for the truly exceptional. I assumed I had not been good enough to become a storyteller. I still had not even processed the different episodes of my life, how who I was and where I came from had conspired against me from the beginning, how those circumstances had determined to some extent what I could expect from my life.

  In truth, I had gone to find Eli because I was lost, still. If I did not understand my own story yet, how could I communicate anything to anyone?

  I had seen storytellers in Old Town, sipping milbao surrounded by their entourages. They seemed so confident, so sure of themselves. I had always wished I could feel like that about anything, only once. But, in truth, I was not sure about anything; I guess I had never been. The certainties that we were meant to infer from the Registry’s collections had only generated more doubt and confusion within me. Eli’s faith in me, however, was clear:

  ‘Pearl, all those stories you told me, back in Gobarí! I learnt all the constellations listening to your stories! Their meaning, and where they come from, and what we could do with them. You brought them to life in front of my eyes! You taught them to me, and I was able to see through their lies.’

  The word ‘lies’ threw me. Were they lies? And had I managed to convey this idea to Eli? If I had done so, it had been completely unintended. Yes, she was right, they were only stories, designed to make us comply. But I had not realised they were until that moment, in Benguele, when she told me.

  * * *

  Now, those first experiences with the storyteller observances felt frankly naïve. If I think of my younger self, I can only see myself in relation to how my body reacted, in feelings and emotions borrowed from the narrative, perhaps initiated inside myself, but ultimately provoked by others. The observance would start with some musical notes, which would always brush at the back of my neck, while the words of the narrative would fly around me, forming strange geometric shapes. And then there would be the taste of the weaving, or the interlocking of sounds, the union of music and words. For some it was a sour taste; to me, it was as sweet as milbao. Could I do those things? Could I produce a weaving that people were capable of understanding, empathising with? It was true; I had seen the collections. But my contact with them had only generated more questions, given me more uncertainties. Perhaps this was a good thing, not a bad thing: after my years in the Registry I could now interpret certain elements of our society, perhaps the ones that Eli was more interested in transmitting. Perhaps I could now reflect and create narratives that would communicate this to others. I only understood now, for example, that the vastness of the collection had made the teaching and storytelling of the collections themselves problematic. I was bothered by a number of ethical problems—what to collect, how to teach it, to whom—all of which had been left unanswered in our training as mere managers of information storage and preservation. I also felt uncomfortable with the amount of power that the storytellers accumulated: ultimately, what was told, and when, and to whom, was their decision. The incessant collecting was as problematic as the question of providing access to the information, deciding who would have access to it and who would not.

  These vast collections, their duplicated robins and ospreys ad nauseam in the vaults we had inherited and adapted, only served as metaphors for the power that those people, mostly old men, accumulated. Were the problems posed by its colossal size an excuse for its secretiveness, for keeping the decision-making limited to a few individuals, calling upon the complications that would be posed by opening something so limitless to the public? I could see the shadow of my worry cast over the furtive acts of de-accessioning I had performed. I thought often of that person, risking so much by walking over the wall with her stolen stuffed animals, little flint objects, or the carcasses of crude centuries-old versions of HivePods. I see her deft movements throwing them out into the deep; I see her dodging other passers-by, elegant promenaders showing off their latest fashionable outfits, speaking loudly into their latest HivePod model, flaunting their wealth. Perhaps, some of them were even followed by an array of servants—paid servants, that is—a luxury that, after the Act, only the extremely wealthy could afford. These men and women and children would always walk a couple of steps behind their masters, carrying something for them: a picnic basket, an extra coat, a closed parasol. Nothing that they could not carry themselves. Lastly, I see me, always managing at last to find a secluded corner, a less visible spot, a solitary moment with no one in view, where I would perform my secret ritual. Only once did I miscalculate, and a little servant girl caught
me in this act of treason; but she said nothing, and I said nothing. In her eyes, I was doing the most heinous thing: polluting the ocean waters, a crime paid for with life imprisonment. What I was throwing did not matter to her, but I knew only too well that what I was throwing did matter; it would make the charges worse were I to be caught red-handed. I went rigid but, to my surprise, she just smiled a little, and said orí to me, the shuvaní word for goodbye.

  Remembering these little acts of sedition, I knew I did not possess the right tools to do what Eli had asked of me. But I had to try. And I would start by recalling what I knew, what I understood.

  17

  Eli took me to an outer building, round like a little dome planted on the Earth. She opened its doors by entering a number and letter code on a pad, and made a gesture that I should go in. Upon my entering, a few lights turned themselves on automatically, following their ancient settings. I looked around me for a second, and was speechless.

  The room was made up of round walls with round shelves fitted to measure, and on top a glass dome that allowed light in at any point of the day. In order to preserve the items from the light, the shelves were covered with a high-tech self-tinting glass, of the kind that reacted by darkening itself when exposed to radiation. A dedicated, carefully rendered space, equipped with the more sophisticated preservation methods. It reminded me of similar places in the Registry: telescopes, orreries, astrolabes. Three-century-old tech. Miniature paintings, drawings on preservation boxes. Manuscripts, scrolls, and as many books as I had seen anywhere outside an institution. It seemed that the Benguele woman who had first built the house had also participated in these small acts of treachery, insignificant on their own, impossible to ignore when superimposed together, one over another. I was in the middle of an illegal cabinet of stolen things.