The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  ‘They are nothing, an optical effect, very much like the Aurora,’ my teacher had explained.

  ‘The Aurora?’

  ‘The Aurora Borealis.’

  And so, I had been fed this lie: that the surges of coloured lightning were a natural effect, not man-made. Hearing about the Aurora had fascinated me, starting my interest in the life and culture and nature of the Northern Hemisphere, or what was left of it. The day I realised those lights were nothing like that, I felt strangely humiliated, as if I should have known instinctively what had a natural origin and what was man-made. But no one could anymore. Eventually, when I was older and attending the gymnasium, we had been encouraged to attend the energy surge sessions, and it was explained to us what they were. It was then confirmed to me, the lie. And still, we had been expected to feel proud of what we were doing.

  I followed Savina’s directions to the beach, where I found her: Pearl. In fact, the little half-moon of white sand was almost empty, but I saw her immediately, splashing about the ocean water. I wondered idly about perching myself on a rock, but thought better of it. They had sharp edges, and I worried I would cut my feet. I could see the two phantom vessels in the distance, unfinished, translucent and imposing, and the wall at the end of the water. But the wall looked much farther here than in town. It was nothing but a thin line, out on the horizon. I wondered if it would disappear if I closed my eyes.

  Not knowing what to do, I entered the water.

  The rippling waves caressed my feet.

  I jumped in, hands and head first, and emerged re-energised. Suddenly, everything that I had been dreading was a faraway memory; the water had washed away all the fear. I felt that if I spoke to her, she would understand.

  She had seen me, and was coming my way, with deep strokes. And I in turn could see her swimming, and felt that if we stayed there, in the water, nothing could touch us, and we could be free.

  She reached me but didn’t say anything, only my name, softly, and she embraced me. And together as one we twisted and twisted in the water, kissing and embracing and letting go of all our fears.

  A feeling overcame me then, of wanting to be free, with her, forever. For a second, I considered what would happen if I pushed her head down and didn’t let go. And it was so real, so intense, that I scared myself, and started moving towards the shore. Absurdly, I thought that, if I had stayed close, I would have drowned her.

  I was exhausted, lying in the sand. I had not swum for aeons, and up till that moment I had only done so in the pools of the ring and in Pearl’s pond. The ocean water was different, heavy over my limbs. She got out eventually, and came to rest by my side. She was wearing a thin white ceremonial dress that clung to her legs and her torso.

  ‘What if we did it?’ she asked. ‘What if we swam never to return? You and me, Arlo?’

  I could not formulate a reply, for I had had the same desire, I had felt the same pull. But then she laughed, and I knew she was teasing me.

  ‘I am going up there,’ she said then, pointing at the ring. ‘There are things that I need to find out, things that I need to discover, and process, by myself. I am on a journey, Arlo. A journey to learn.’

  ‘To learn what?’

  ‘How to tell stories. Will you come with me?’

  ‘I am going up north, I have volunteered,’ I said. What I didn’t say was that I wanted to prove to everyone at the farm that I was on their side, because my intention was never to return to the Upper Settlement. I also didn’t tell her that up there she would be used and spat out again. I wasn’t sure how, I could not articulate how; I had seen it happening too many times to so many who came from down here.

  ‘Will you come back?’

  ‘Yes! Although it may be months, years, before I find what I am looking for.’

  This would be the last time that I saw Pearl on the surface.

  * * *

  I should have told her then, another wasted opportunity. About the bacteria, of course, whatever hope it might afford to the people down there. And I should have told her something else, but I chose not to.

  It was Dika who had told me. We were lying on the soft yellow floor, hidden behind a hay bale. I liked being with Dika. It lacked all the complications of my union with Pearl, although I was missing her terribly, with a dull ache in my heart. Dika knew Pearl was my partner, my companion, that we had been united.

  ‘It must have been difficult for you, loving her. After what she did.’

  ‘What are you referring to?’ I knew that things in Pearl’s life had not been easy at times, but I truly was lost as to what Dika’s meaning might be. As a beanie girl in the sierra, she had grown up around Benguele and Gobarí, taking up seasonal work whenever it was available. She was a few years older than Pearl, and remembered seeing her around.

  ‘She killed somebody, didn’t you know?’

  I sat up with a sudden movement to look Dika in the face. She had all my attention.

  ‘Who? Pearl?’

  ‘Yes. She killed a little girl, Verity. They were always together.’

  ‘She killed a girl? When? How?’

  ‘She was little. It was a sort of accident, they were playing at being swimmers.’

  ‘What are you talking about? And how do you know about all this?’

  ‘All of us knew, Arlo! We knew Pearl liked playing dares with beanie children. Verity drowned, they were best friends. Her father tried to conceal it. Everything was hushed up, to protect her. Her mother, and the woman who lived here; they all went along with it.’

  Now, things were clearer. The whole horrible meaning of the affair dawned on me, the story taking shape in my mind. Her father must have tried to conceal the body of the girl, and then tried to escape with Pearl, so as to hide her and protect her from the authorities; which is ultimately to say, from us. No doubt he had been seen disposing of the body, and accused of the crime himself; and surely his wife and friends had agreed to his suggestion that he ought to take the blame for it, in order to save Pearl.

  ‘But,’ I found myself protesting, ‘if the girl drowned, it could have been an accident after all…’

  ‘Someone had hit her on the head before. With a coquina stone.’

  It could still have been a childish accident, I had no doubt about that. My own brother had once been responsible for one of our classmates losing an eye. They were two kids, fencing with some metallic tools they had found lying around; and next thing you knew, the boy was lying on the floor in pain, his hand trying to keep his bloody eye in place. I knew these things happened, and I was sure that did not mean it had been an intentional act; but what I also knew, with increasing finality, was that Pearl wasn’t aware of any of this, and that surely she did not remember the event, perhaps she was not even conscious of it taking place. Or was she?

  * * *

  I could not do much with this new knowledge, at least not for now. I needed to concentrate on other things. If I ever saw Pearl again, perhaps I would try to explain.

  Eli and her followers needed something from the vessels, an important component which would help them keep the seeds longer. An incursion into the abandoned vessels in Old Town had taken place, only to find them dead inside, hollowed. What was needed could not be recovered from those abandoned pieces of junk. I found myself offering the solution: there are other vessels. Where? they marvelled, as children would. And I in turn marvelled at their innocence; for it was obvious that they could not truly, really, see beyond their forest and their farm and their sierra, whereas we could glimpse the magnitude of our task from above, from the stars.

  There were other vessels, other NEST programmes operative. The one I knew about was in Pan-Inuit territory. They marvelled again at this piece of information. Did they look more wholesome, those vessels, than the ones here? Oh yes, I confirmed, they do. I did not add that anything, anywhere, would look more wholesome than anything here, in this forgotten southernmost part of this dying continent.

  Second problem. How
could we go so far? When the ice melted, the Pan-Inuit had to move inland into the Jutland peninsula, a long way from Benguele. We would have to cross the whole continent. And then I found myself saying to these children: my HoveLight300. What? they asked, so I translated for them: my hovering vehicle. Latest available model, with enough power to climb up to the ring itself. Surely it would deposit us there in no time. I calculated the flight at four hours there, and four hours back. That was provided we could do the whole flight in the lower atmosphere. Otherwise, no more than seven hours there, and seven hours back.

  I admit that I enjoyed my brief position as saviour.

  Third problem: none of us knows how to manoeuvre your hovering vehicle. Solution: I would come as well.

  And, as easy as that, it was decided.

  That was why I would soon find myself there, flying over the never-ending white expanse.

  23

  That is why I find myself here now.

  Here and there, darker rocks emerge from between the snow, some scattered flaxen shrubs. Far away, I see an arctic hare running away from us. We are now flying very low. It is too far to tell, but I know that it is probably as big as me, perhaps bigger. It is white and grey, with green fluorescent patches. It makes me think of past times, when men hunted seals, whales, and other animals unknown now, or made holes in the ice to find some kind of fish now lost, called, I think, halibut. We follow the hare for a while, and eventually it disappears.

  I am not travelling alone. My companions are Vania, Alexander and Bohemas. Children of the south, of the heat and the colours, they have kept quiet in the past few hours of flying over the white. They say nothing, and I say nothing. Back in Benguele, I had explained what kind of clothing would be required, and how to procure it. It soon became obvious that we would need to manufacture everything, an invented uniform of dead animal skin, fur and cotton. When I explained this, and told them we might need to cover ourselves with the animal fur, they looked at me with horror. Surely they had misunderstood. I tried to explain that this was very common among the Pan-Inuit, and that people everywhere did it before the green winter. They did not seem to believe me. I was forced to insist, for I knew there was no other material that would keep us alive.

  Now that the cold has permeated even inside the vehicle, and Vania and Alexander and Bohemas have covered themselves with everything they have found, I smile to myself. Luckily, I had insisted on throwing some extra furs inside the vehicle, convinced that they would be useful. The three of them are wearing southern red rabbit faces on their heads as hats, the long floppy purple ears tied up under their chins.

  I am too tired to drive; however, I have not dared to use the automatic pilot, in case our course could be seen up in the Settlement, and have resorted to manual. I have been driving for hours and hours. After a while, I notice how they nudge Vania, and he gets up slowly and comes to me, saying that he wants to learn the rudiments of flying my ‘machine’, as he calls it. I am surprised, touched that they had thought of relieving me of this work, and readily accept. He doesn’t look that happy, and I realise that, perhaps, a drawing of lots has decided who will take on this onerous task; I agree nonetheless to go ahead with it. After half an hour, he can control the main features, and once he knows how to programme the basic routes, he is good to go. Grateful, I take a nap.

  After thinking that we could perhaps be seen up there, we had also decided to fly as low as possible, and this has meant doubling our time. Once we arrive, we plan to hide the vehicle, so I will need to descend as soon as a pine copse close enough to NEST appears. I have never descended among vegetation; and although I know it is possible, and am trained in all the basics of emergency landings, I have no idea if I will find a suitable clearing between the trees.

  I am not sorry to be here, not really; although there is, as always, a doubt nagging at me. I know Vania, Dika’s brother. I have often harvested or done some other kind of work with him, or with a group of people that included him. But I have never spoken to Bohemas before this journey. He seems to be a surly man, unusually taciturn, at least for the kind of fierce warrior to the cause that I have been led to believe he is. He is as dark-skinned as Vania, both with the leathery complexion of those who labour long hours on Eli’s plantations. The presence of Alexander here baffles me: for he is one of the children of Unity, and I have never seen him unglued from his HivePod, pushing the keyboard, speaking into it, lightly drawing command-instructions with his finger poised on the light blue screen. I am told that we may need him to open the doors to the machines, perhaps to input some light commands needed to retrieve the piece that we are looking for. He is a stout young man, not used to work with his hands and dressed in garments that once were fashionable in Old Town.

  And still, and still… Something is not quite right here. Everyone is vague as to what this piece is, what its usefulness would be. Why bring him, a dead weight, someone who may delay us, perhaps get us into trouble?

  In Benguele, I had tried to impress on them all the need for bringing some kind of firearm on the journey, but they had insisted on their machetes instead. There were no firearms on the farm. Eli had claimed not to own any, but she had also admitted that she knew where to find some. I saw this as a sort of admission of her connection, even if only a mutual sympathy, with the group that had been wreaking havoc all over Old Town. It was difficult for me to accept that, embedded as we were into our own—Pearl’s and my—private drama; we had hardly followed the news. But the explosion in the Barrier had been followed by a couple of smaller attacks. They had poisoned the milbao in one of the restaurants in town, one with those signs on the door: ‘No beanies. No shuvaníes. No exceptions.’ They had staged a mass suicide, fifteen of them swimming past the wall into the depths of the unknown.

  * * *

  We get to a snow-covered field that separates us from the compound. Jutland is now an archipelago on uncertain shores, continuously changing—this world has no more certainties, it seems—and circumscribed with unpredictable ice. The snow plains also mutate capriciously: it has been difficult for me to remember which way to come, even with my cartographic training; the geographical features always mutating. I had been assisted in my endeavours by the many screens and panels of my vehicle, the little flickering lights giving me clues as to the locations that I am seeking. The compounds are not kept under a coat of mystery; after all, this one now runs those improvised tourist visits inside the vessels in progress.

  My companions have shown caution, mistrust, of their new environment. I know, from reading centuries-old volumes, that when snow was more common, sometimes people who saw it for the first time as adults behaved like children around it, taken by a strange joviality: the white substance, so miraculous, as if from a dream, here today and gone tomorrow, had the strange capacity of quieting the world, submerging it into something closer to a deadly calm. But they have instead taken unsure steps over the ice, which was wet in a particular way that I remember: frozen and refrozen often, perhaps with special machinery. Their feet had completely disappeared in the snow a couple of times, and this they had not understood.

  We have not encountered blizzards, and we ought to be thankful for that, for I truly do not know how my companions would handle themselves. I only saw one such blizzard when I was here before, and I saw it from the inside of a construction. I wasn’t allowed to go out under any circumstances. Even given my low-ranking status up in the Settlement—the ungrateful child from a lacklustre family—down here I possessed some status. Coming down, I was a sort of little king in waiting for them, and the people who gave me their hospitality truly preoccupied themselves with my well-being. I had imagined back then that, perhaps, they developed some fondness for me; soon I realised with a pang that, most probably, they were frightened of something happening to me down here.

  Storms are not rare now, but they are less snowy and more filled with hail, and at the end of them the tundra can become a muddy space, with patches of dirty white here
and there, but nothing more. I am therefore surprised at the pristine whiteness surrounding the NEST compound. The snow seems powdery here, with shiny crystal specks of ice. It is luminescent. There are a number of dark constructions, a little tower, and some hovering vehicles parked. At the limits of my vision, only one vessel. The communicating platform for the second lies naked, useless. Were there two here once? I seem to remember so. Has one gone already? It looks like it.

  My three companions also grasp this fact at once, and I find myself attacked all of a sudden: how did I know the vessels would still be here, waiting after this long? If both had done the Jump, all this trip would have been for nothing! But I truly did not see why they were bickering: one vessel remained, after all.

  Here, I suddenly remember, the celebration to honour the Jumpers is very different from the one down south, perhaps on account of their lack of green. Naked branches, twisted into amorphous imaginary creatures, pine cones, and offerings of berries and nuts featured prominently. No animal heads.

  We decide when to make our move. The vessels are much further, closer to an ample expanse of white, and I have not discounted the possibility of crevasses. Behind them, far in the distance is the man-made pykrete glacier, named after its inventor, Geoffrey Pike, with its corresponding snow machine lurching on its top. And then we see them: the pack of bio-engineered mammoths that always accompany these fabrications as standard. They are massive, brown with orange specks, their tusks moving softly in the powdery snow below them; but their presence also gives perspective to the size of the glacier, and to the vessel. For the first time, I feel a strange unease when considering the massive structure. Will it fly, when needed? Will it ever come back with good tidings?

  At seven p.m., while I am taking the first watch, and shortly after the sun has fallen, I see shadows around the mammoths, some shape that I cannot understand. It looks like a gigantic floating thing, resting behind the vessels, organic, with a surge of long limbs, unlike plant tendrils, more like tentacles floating down. The mammoths have moved as far away as they possibly can, without making any noise. I do not share this information with my companions, lest it alarm them.