The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  Until that moment, I thought I knew everything that I needed to know, everything there was to know, about the Benguele siblings. I had even seen them sometimes, had some faint memories of them. As our closest neighbours, they had visited us in Gobarí, at least while my father was alive. After he was gone, we lost everyone connected to us, slowly at first, then with ruthless certainty. Everybody was gone, and our return to Gobarí, now as our permanent home, was built with the taste of solitude in our mouths.

  Inside the round chamber there were pictures of the Benguele woman and her brother, printed in that old-fashioned way on paper, and pinned to the wall in the manner of decorations. In some of them were Urania, and even my father. I swallowed hard, struggling to order the narrative in my head. So, the Benguele woman had a brother, who was also a high-ranking official. This was Eli’s master; that was why she had known about the farm. And they both had known my mother, Urania; that was how Eli and her sister got their positions. My thoughts were interrupted by Eli, who was still trying to explain the place to me.

  ‘This around us,’ Eli said, waving her hand at the unexpected myriad of objects and mementos, ‘is quite likely why your stepfather got rid of the farm so quickly, after spending so much money on it. He must have been shit-scared when he found it.’

  I knew what she meant. If this had been discovered on his property, he would have been accused of treason, perhaps even put in jail.

  Eli explained that it would be my job to make sense of this madness. I soon realised that I would need to spend a few days, perhaps weeks, alone inside the chamber, visualising it all so as to try to make sense of how it was set out. She left me alone. However, despite my training, I couldn’t find any obvious key to the organisation method. I made notes on some repurposed paper I found. I looked in vain for the acquisition ledger; there wasn’t one. All these were indisputable signs of a secret collection, an illegal collection. The lack of order also made my task potentially more difficult on two accounts: the collection would probably have no thematic thread, no narrative of its own, but would be a haphazard selection of whichever items the Benguele woman had managed to pilfer at different chance moments. This would make the building of a catalogue, one that a storyteller could use later on for something coherent, much more difficult. Even worse: it was clear that, if I were going to put some order into the place, I would have to do so from scratch.

  The Benguele woman, Eli explained, had been a traitor indeed. It had been revealed at the end that she was also a swimmer. For many years, perhaps her whole life, she had managed to keep her faith hidden from the rest of the world. At the end, she had not been able to resist—a swimmer is always a swimmer.

  I did not reply that I knew this already, for she had been the older woman who had danced with my mother at Eli’s initiation.

  I did not know how to interpret my findings, how to interpret her. Had those things been de-accessioned, liberated out of a much larger repository, rather than stolen? Were they proof that I wasn’t alone in my anxieties? Had I found a twin soul in the deceased swimmer? That was the answer I wanted to read in those shelves and drawers, the little wooden doors that, when opened, overflowed with detritus that spilled out onto the floor. I started looking underneath the tables, behind the little reading sofas, inside every cupboard door. Everywhere I looked I saw the anxiety revealed by the little mountains of things, displayed without purpose. The act of taking something for the simple sake of taking it. She wasn’t liberating artefacts from somewhere else; she was bringing them here for herself, a senseless accumulation for its own sake.

  I unhooked one of the pictures of my parents with the Benguele siblings, such a strange image, oddly discomforting, and looked deep into it. My parents were so young, smiling so broadly, that I felt unsettled. Who were those people? I could not recognise them at all. The background of palm trees and oddly-shaped yellow flowers I did recognise: a little meadow that used to exist in the direction of the pond, now overgrown and disappeared. The four adults were brandishing hiking sticks—my mother, hiking? I turned the strange object around; it was a sort of wooden square conceived to hold the image behind glass, possibly inspired by an old design I had seen in the Registry. There was something strange at the back, as if something too bulky was about to burst it open. I fiddled with some little metal flaps, and the wooden square at the back gave way. What fell to the floor wasn’t the picture only, but a group of them. Already, as I knelt down to get them, my heart was fluttering wildly inside me.

  There were images of me and my brother, as little children, holding bouquets of flowers and smiling. There were also crowns of flowers sitting on our heads, and we were both wearing costumes for the Jump, the dressing-up kind that children sometimes play in, or wear during actual ceremonies. The pictures could in fact have been taken during the last Jump in Old Town, which I knew we had attended. My brother and I weren’t alone in the pictures: the little beanie girl, Verity, was also in them. Why did the Benguele woman have a picture of me and my brother and the beanie girl in Jump costumes, hidden away? It probably meant nothing, but looking at it sent a shiver up my spine.

  I found something then, moving some stand-alone shelves, following an intuition.

  Die now, little bird. Die now.

  The pigeon, a small specimen, no larger than my forearm, was rotting behind one of the shelves, a gluey patch of green and pink feathers and little white moving things. Her two heads were turned in opposite directions, as if she was pointing around the room at the mess. She must have got into the building through some flap in the air-preservation system that had opened at the worst moment for her, become trapped inside this room nobody ever went into, and died here.

  I remembered the osprey, and its nest, and its parasites. And this absurd idea of keeping all the pieces of the puzzle; what was there to do, except put the puzzle together again? And that, I knew, would take time, would consume time. And, in the process, the person dealing with the puzzle would forget their real purpose: what they were meant to do with the artefact in the first place.

  * * *

  Already, while in training, I had understood something: we were as blind as ever. We were dooming ourselves to the same nonsensical repetition of the same nonsensical mistakes that the pre-Winter men had made. We were weighed down by things that had come to us centuries ago, for which we now had a crude sort of responsibility. No future awaited us, none at all. Our epoch, without a name, was slowly exhausting itself to a point of no return. No matter how much we had been told not to repeat the past, we were already replicating its mistakes. Our forefathers had also been weighed down by their ancestors’ previous collecting, and that had made them unable to interpret their own epoch, to see what was coming. And now we were again weighed down, intensively cataloguing and interpreting the past, unable even to articulate our present.

  Perhaps they saw something of what was coming, out of the corner of their eye. And they did what humans do: they looked the other way. Or, perhaps, they simply thought themselves eternal. For it was the idea of time itself that disappeared somehow for them, that they made disappear. They saw time as a continuum in which they were the highlight, the most enlightened women and men ever to walk the planet.

  Their love of the digital was a sign of their strange relationship with time. There was no need to spend time going from place to place anymore, to invest months, years, in accessing culture, learning how to read, to look, to understand. One of their most successful digital inventions was still in use in the Registry. The tool in question reunited in digital form several parts of a given manuscript, fileted at some point in the past, and now divided between several repositories, scattered all over the planet. Over the screen, the pages would virtually recover their places, appearing as they had been before the volume had been destroyed, as if by magic. Before, some researcher had to go from one bibliotheca to another bibliotheca to see how the tome had been put together, and now everything was at their fingertips, without the need to le
ave their compounds. Of course, for this invention to be needed, it was necessary for someone previously to destroy these manuscripts, steal and sell their illuminations. It is ironic that the pre-Winter men themselves both destroyed the manuscripts and invented a way—digital, unreal—to put them back together. It is also symptomatic of their epoch: the destruction and the guilt; first the ruination of everything and then the hurried, superficial repair. And they believed the fallacy that the digital would be eternal. Even after the rebooting of the systems that made their crude HiveCulture possible, the digital society, the connectivity that was lost after the Winter, lost in a moment, our painstaking work as archaeologists of the digital has shown us that not all that was in their own Hive had remained there forever. There are no forevers. They created a sphere that was meant to last an eternity; there are no more eternities.

  If the woman of Benguele had been a collector of anything, it was of these digital archives, files and documents. She seemed to have been fascinated by them. It was clear that she had enjoyed exclusive access to the ARACNet, the web of satellites that had retained some use, even after energy was too scarce to power most web-spaces. She had access, therefore, to some documents that I had never seen, that I had never expected to see.

  When I entered the cabinet room, I did not see the digital reading pods immediately. Eventually, I would find several of them, scattered here and there; they would prove the key, the real treasures of the collection.

  I did not want to tell anyone what I had learnt in her private cabinet; I had to storytell it to everyone. I remember it well, the conflicting feelings of that day, numbing my senses a little: I was scared of what I had found, of course. But I was also relieved, as if I had always known, as if I had always suspected. Perhaps I had. A feeling as if the world didn’t make sense somehow, a strange feeling of déjà vu. As if suddenly I had to reorganise all my knowledge of the world, what was good and what was bad, who to trust and who to mistrust.

  There was nothing here for us. There was nothing left, nothing at all…

  It was an account—secret, perhaps forbidden, maybe heresy—of what had happened, of the green winter itself. And it made sense, and at the same time it didn’t. And this indeterminacy was so scary, so scary…

  Die, die, now, my little blue bird…

  I was mixing my childhood songs, I was mixing memories, I was mixing memories with dreams. What was reality transforming itself into? I was tackling the digital reading pods, her own personal archive of web-spaces. There was order here, there was purpose: there was a running theme. She had seemed to want to collect items on this topic and this topic only.

  I knew the story of how the green winter had come to be, we all knew it. But all stories are half-made. And there is always another story behind, a different one, a slightly darker shade. And the green winter had not happened because of some strange animistic reaction by the planet, although it was a living thing, oh yes. It must be, after all. But that wasn’t what happened, not really. Now I understood completely, utterly, what Arlo had said to me. I felt sick.

  It happened then, another episode. Everything became too much, and all the objects seemed to whizz around me, turning and turning, making me dizzy. Everything became black, like the water at the bottom of the pond, and I lost consciousness. Eventually, Eli found me, crunched up against a wall. She had come looking for me because I had not been seen in two days.

  I had found my story, a story worth telling. Now I needed to decide how I was going to tell it. Perhaps, if I forced everyone to dream a future, to imagine a future, we would have one after all.

  18

  They were all looking at me, so many eyes, so many faces. I could almost taste their displeasure as the seconds became one minute, two minutes, and still I had yet to speak.

  The ring, I said at last, the ring. It had not been built during my parents’ lives; I am not sure why I started by thinking that. Or was I speaking? I visualised the images that I had seen in the digital reader, and willed them to those around me; I wanted them to see them, I needed them to see them. And they all exploded at that moment, those images, triggering a series of emotions, my words, suspended on air in full form, painted in many different colours, the ideas I was convoking for them, forming pointy geometric shapes, difficult to swallow, to accept.

  It was happening: somehow I was syncing the ideas and the words and the senses, exactly as I had seen story-tellers do. Perhaps I had a natural gift.

  I got bolder. I showed them the ring being built slowly, many centuries back; the first hovering abodes perfected by the wealthy, and the ring taking shape slowly, slowly. And I showed them the other earlier versions, the places where scientists had orbited the planet before.

  I showed them the first relocation process, less than one per cent of the population, the wealthiest families. I triggered the idea: they combined more wealth together, these families, than the rest of the people on the planet.

  I was waving, I was syncing. I was enraged, they were enraged. I was telling, they were understanding. I was storytelling, or at least trying.

  It was now or never. Arid earth. No green in sight. I had the notions inside me, the images inside me. I tried to sync again; this alternative reality resisted my audience, it almost resisted me; I myself had problems believing it.

  The syncing started to fail. I was losing them.

  Desperate, I thought of the Three Sisters, of those words in their fable, so difficult for us to understand, ‘arid’, ‘desertic’; I tasted the words in my mouth, the hotness I knew well how to feel. I built around them the straight lines of their shapes: I was wowing again!

  Earth had not been green. Next, the blue light. I knew what had happened, for Arlo had told me, for I had seen it, preserved in the secret digital pods. Then I hadn’t been able to believe, or rather I could not understand what he meant. Now, I understood. The Benguele repository had finally helped me to do so. And emotions were triggered in many colours, an explosion of them, and the blue surge appeared in my tale, as always directed from the ring onto us, onto the planet, mismanaged, misused, by some who didn’t care about us, why would they? We were nothing more than ants to them. The energy was released, with the idea of reforesting, at the same time from the five Upper Settlements onto us who remained below. I showed them how the energy surge worked, provoking the massive overgrowth of some areas, overgrowth that showed no signs of abating.

  I showed them the ring-dwellers’ mistake. Now, every time they saw the bluish-tainted fluorescent sky, they would know: regular explosions of energy were still poured over the surface at intervals to stop the progression of the green, or to try to manage some areas, exactly as Arlo had explained.

  Everything made sense now. And, as the pieces in the story made sense to me, so they also made sense for my audience.

  Thinking of Arlo, of the ringers’ lies, I felt a strong surge of love within me. Thinking of Arlo I saw other old men, all ringers, and other images started appearing when I closed my eyes. I did not know if only I could see them, or if everyone around me could, too.

  There was no lady in white in those images, only old, decrepit men, spinning her fable to the others. I opened my eyes and these images and ideas, spinning out of my field of vision, filled the air, running free. What was happening now? Was I storytelling, or having a vision? I had not read this anywhere, but I knew it to be true.

  It was Arlo, and his love for me; he was guiding me to that knowledge.

  I felt sorry for me, I felt sorry for Arlo.

  The triggering sensation again, the surge of green, red, multicolour emotions, and the tinkering sounds, they all combined only one meaning: my story.

  I fell on the floor exhausted, but relieved.

  19

  I miss my LivePod as much as I miss having her inside me.

  Once a week, I hide behind the crowds and attend the storytelling observance. Well, not attend exactly, for I am a cleaner, a dirty surface immigrant. But I see it all, spy
it all. The storytellers here are so much more imposing than down on the surface, there is no comparison. Down there they are no more than a cheap copy of what goes on up here. Even as I am seeing them performing, I am learning things: I study their light hand movements, the impossible colours they convoke, the neatness of their syncing.

  I am not really allowed to do this, to be here, to experience these emotions, but somehow I feel I am owed this. I am still in pain where they cut me to take her out, and I ran out of illegally obtained painkillers weeks ago. The observances help me manage this pain, offer me some solace. Surely no one could deny me this.

  This is the plan: I have to rescue my daughter.

  I have found out some things: she has been named Alira. A new friend helps me buy some more information from a paying source: she is in the NEST nursery.

  I shiver at the implications of this. Why a NEST nursery? I thought ringers did not send their children up in the vessels. I thought there were no more vessels. The paid informant offers some more, free of charge: the programme is being resurrected, and ringers will also make the numbers now. Only then do I realise something: we are a dying breed down there. Population is dwindling rapidly. And they are not counting on our survival.

  I have to get in, get her out.

  In the room where I sleep with twenty strangers, people start knowing my story, pitying my story, and they want to help somehow, although they have nothing themselves to give.

  But if I ask for some milbao I am given milbao. If I ask for a different flavour milbao I am given a different flavour milbao. I was as huge as a whale; now, I am nothing, a deflated balloon. And they all bring the milbao to fill this absence. I cling to those little acts that pity me, mistaking them for power.

  Where is she? Where is the NEST nursery? On which level? I need to start cleaning there, as soon as possible.

  Soon, I cannot eat anything else except the milbao of the same make I had while I was inside the LivePod, waiting; everything else tastes of nothing, everything they grow here tastes of nothing, of the eternal void of space.