I flung out a palm. ‘I have no interest, Haralia. None whatsoever.’
Her glee retreated, and she returned to the point. ‘It is not a crime to use information gathered from others, is it?’
‘Of course not. I just prefer to gather it myself.’
She gave me a look intended to suggest that she already knew this about me. I was certain of this, and pleased with myself for decoding it.
‘Besides,’ I went on, fixing you with my gaze, ‘this creature’s assessment is to be undertaken in isolation. Any recommendations for its care would necessarily originate in its previous incarnation, and therefore carry influence. This is a fresh system, to be treated as such.’
‘System?’
‘Yes, and as with all systems it will offer up information about its requirements and machinations when asked the right questions. I am a chemist, after all, and this is biology. It is mere application.’ I glanced at Haralia, who was smiling again. ‘I shall learn, sister. It cannot be that hard. But I repeat my thanks for the information about the teat.’
She shook her head, wild curls bouncing, and began to laugh in a way which I cannot. It made my pulse quicken, which I put down to momentary pique.
‘You know, I suggested to Mother that it should have been you,’ I said.
‘What, to care for this?’ She gave a half smile. ‘No, that would not have been possible.’
‘Why not?’
‘Jakob and I have plans. Besides, you are right; you are far better at such clinical trials than me and therefore more suited to the task.’
‘That is what Mother said.’
‘Although it is a shame.’
‘What is?’
‘Well, you were instrumental in bringing a planet back from the brink of devastation. It is a pity you may be too busy now to enjoy it.’
‘Enjoy it?’
‘Yes, travel its coasts, roam its hills, see the world you saved.’
‘I have already seen it. Besides, how busy can I be?’
The hoods of her eyes fell marginally.
‘Perhaps you could find a partner.’
‘To what end?’
‘Sexual intercourse.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Genital stimulation is most gratifying. You should try it.’
‘I would rather spend time in my balloon. Besides, gratification is not purpose.’ I looked at you, pulling the last dregs of milk from the bottle, hungry to live. ‘Settling a disagreement is.’
‘A disagreement?’
‘You were there at the council, you saw the argument between Caige and Greye. It was not natural. Something had to be done.’
She raised one of her fine eyebrows.
‘You call bringing a species back from the dead natural?’
‘You did. Many times over.’
She sighed, like Mother does.
‘Is this what he is, then? A means to settle a disagreement?’
‘Of course. What else?’
Haralia pulled the dry bottle from your mouth and held it up.
‘He was hungry.’
She bent forward and sniffed the air.
‘And he has also passed faeces.’
— SIX —
EVERY ERTA HAS its own natural scale of observation; the level upon which we are most comfortable viewing the world. Some are bent towards the grand and work with complex macroscopic systems, such as the dynamics of herbivorous and carnivorous marine life within coral reefs, the intelligence of ant nests, or the modelling of tidal shifts over many centuries.
Others work with particles, such as the nano-engineers and their armies of atomic mites that once swarmed the seas in search of polymers, and others still with physics itself, such as those who condensed the dredged plastic into the perfect sphere that now orbits the moon.
I remember the day it was launched. I was in my balloon monitoring a storm front over the east Indian coast, and I watched as it soared out to its new station, making calculations upon the effect it would have upon the moon’s own orbit, and upon the tides of the planet below. It was not my job to do this, of course; the responsibility fell to those on the ground. Nevertheless, some months later I was pleased to note that my own predictions had been a fraction more accurate than theirs, and were instrumental in allowing Haralia to rescue a colony of rare crabs she had been monitoring in Australia from a small tsunami.
Others go deeper, creating order from the chaos of quantum events that gives rise to reality, and beneath that, deeper still, to mathematics. All of us, in fact, must work upon this most primitive and indivisible scale to some degree or another. Mathematics is the substance from which everything is made.
I have spent my life studying and manipulating the chemistry of the atmosphere. That is the task for which I was designed, and the scale at which my mind is most comfortable. The simplicity of molecules, how they bind and collide with perfect predictability, and how employing this predictability can change a gas, or a liquid or a solid into something more advantageous to one’s needs, is pleasing to me. One molecule of carbon dioxide is the same as the next. They are bound to their own unbreakable laws, and I know these laws implicitly. You will not find one which is fatter, or longer, or weaker, or quicker. You will not find one which is broken, or corrupt, or unruly. You will not find dirt upon a molecule.
But there is dirt upon my bed.
‘Meconium,’ said Haralia, as we observed your kicks and spasms, now free of your swaddling. A dark green streak of viscous sludge ran from your anus across your blanket and had escaped onto mine. It was putrid, like the primordial swamp from which your evolutionary ancestors had once oozed, I imagine. ‘From his amniotic fluid. I assume that his gestation was as close as possible to that of a human?’
‘I modelled the womb with precision and maintained nutritional equilibrium according to my design, which was extensive. As I said, it was a most challenging project. But witness, I have succeeded.’
You gargled. Your eyes rolled. Haralia turned to me.
‘Just because you have successfully engineered a human infant, does not mean you have succeeded.’
I took a step towards you, examining your wrinkled face.
‘I know I must care for it, keep it alive. But the hard part is over, I am certain.’
‘You should be certain of nothing when it comes to mammals, especially apes, and even more so with sapiens. Their development owes as much to nurture as nature.’
Haralia has developed an overly keen sense of caution. She worries too much, and I attribute this to her expertise. Understanding animals has led her mind away from the world’s underlying solidity. Perhaps if she understood a horse the way I understood the atmosphere, she would have fewer concerns.
‘I did not know you had had experience of humans.’
This was a baited statement because we both knew she had not.
‘I have not,’ she replied, as we both expected. ‘Only what I have been told, like you.’
‘Then we are both equally enlightened, are we not?’
I removed your blanket from the bed and scraped the mess into the waste chute in the corner of the kitchen. There was a short rush of air as your first excrement was sucked from the room. From here I heard it whistling down a short network of glass pipes that fed into Fane’s sanitation system, an underground tank filled with a carefully balanced mixture of bacteria and nanobots, which would, over the course of the day, break it down and recombine it into broth. As I have already said—technology should only be used for purposes which are essential. Sanitation and nutrition are such purposes.
I then found an unbroken bowl and filled it with water from the pail, took it with a cloth to the bed, and cleaned your anus. Then I swaddled you in a fresh blanket and laid you further up the bed, where you settled and slept.
‘In any case,’ I said. ‘I am fully prepared, as I am for any challenge. This animal’s care is merely a set of problems that need to be solved.’
> I turned to Haralia.
‘I fixed the sky, sister. I am sure I can raise an ape.’
HARALIA’S TWENTY-FOUR HOURS in Fane were nearing its end and she had to return to Oslo. She told me she would return in two weeks, so I bade her farewell and spent the rest of the day busying myself in the house and seeing to your needs. I fed you with Haralia’s bottle three times and changed your blanket four. For the rest of the time, you slumbered.
I witnessed patterns emerging and clues around which I could plan my routine. For example, if you made a particular combination of nasal grunts then this signified a desire to feed. A certain rhythm to your kicks meant that your blanket had come loose and you were cold. A high clicking noise meant you had woken and did not intend to return to sleep. You revealed to me the predictability of your own equation, much as the sky had done in those early decades of my work, and this pleased me. It was to gratifying to think of Haralia’s return, when I could share with her my success.
In late afternoon I sat in my chair as you slept. I considered taking a nap myself, since I was still fatigued from the previous night, but decided against it.
You grunt in your sleep. It is a surprising noise. I sat there listening to it for an hour or more, picking apart the frequencies and the possible relationships they might have with those of your cries. I then found myself distracted by a brief attempt to extrapolate this data into a rough approximation of how your vocal cords would develop and produce a voice. I settled upon seventeen possible outcomes, each of which I ran through my mind with the various ululations required by speech.
Speech will be important to you. It will be your interface with me, and with the world—your only interface, in fact. Not so with erta. We speak through choice, but not necessity.
Our common origin meant that all erta were born with an identical perception of the world, knowing the same facts, thinking the same thoughts, and making the same extrapolations. Because of this, communication was easy, barely anything at all in fact. We were so attuned, so close to our shared root, that for two erta to communicate all they needed to do was to intuit what the other would say. Therefore, you would often come across two erta with hands folded against their gowns, circling each other in silence. They were talking, in a fashion, reading facial tics and bodily movements as if they were consonants and vowels.
It is rarely seen now. Our minds gradually diverged from that central point, as we knew they would, and as we became more complex and separate we sought other methods of sharing knowledge.
We developed a more efficient means of communication, involving exchanges of loud, high-pitched bursts of binary noise. Speaking in this way, I can express a decade’s worth of data describing the effects of melting sea ice upon methane deposits in the upper atmosphere in less than seven seconds. I can absorb the architectural plans for a new settlement in a little over a tenth of that.
It does, however, sound like screaming.
We still exchange information in this way; large amounts of data, experimental procedure, orders, ideas—anything where brevity is required. This was vital in the first sixty-three years, when our technology was developing and the planet swirled with our activity. But after this, and our challenge steadied, brevity itself became less and less important. We found there was no longer the need to rush.
Things should not be rushed. The planet moves at a certain speed, and to overtake it is—well, perhaps that is where you failed. You did not take your time.
The erta, on the other hand, do. This is why, even before humanity’s extinction, we had adopted human speech as our preferred means of communication. Another good reason for doing this was that we needed to converse with humans. After all, we could not very well have informed them of their impending extinction with a combination of silence and screaming, could we?
I think this would once have passed as something called a joke.
You fidgeted in your sleep and I sat up, expecting a cry. But then you settled.
There was extensive discussion over which language to speak, amounting to almost five full seconds of screaming between council members within the Halls of Reason. We could have chosen any one of the eighty-six languages Dr Nyström had taught Oonagh as she gestated, and which were propagated to us via our parents as we did so ourselves. I watched the debate unfold, and was a little disappointed when English was chosen for its popularity and wealth of vocabulary. I had been hoping for Japanese, purely for the sound of its vowels. Nevertheless, I accepted the decision, and bolstered my innate knowledge of this rampant, hybrid tongue by means of dictionaries and scientific texts.
I even read some stories once, given to me as a gift from Greye. Stories contain depictions of events which did not happen. For example, there was one about a child taught to be a king by an ancient wizard. Another chronicled the life of a man with such a keen scent that he could control people’s behaviour by the power of smell alone, and another was about a girl with telepathic powers who was treated badly by her peers.
Strings of lies. I saw no point of them.
For a start, there are no such things as wizards, and a human child could not pull a sword of forged steel from the rock into which it had—somehow—been embedded. Although I am fairly sure I could.
Secondly, it is impossible for the human olfactory system to develop to such a degree. As Haralia once told me, human senses are substandard when compared to most other beasts. Ours are far better.
And finally, telekinesis is not possible without certain cybernetic enhancements. And even if it was, it is unlikely that a female human with so many domestic problems and such little self-esteem would develop the confidence or malice to use them in order to commit multiple homicide.
Strings of lies.
Greye gave me a book of poetry as well. Mostly about animals, something about horses standing in a field; I did not care for it. Of all the useless mechanics of human language, simile and metaphor are the ones I understand the least.
Here is an example.
“The sun hung like an orange.”
The sun does not hang. It is not even suspended. It appears so because when we look at it we are viewing a large celestial gas ball from a distance of ninety-three million miles from a smaller roughly spherical rock. Oranges hang because, before they fall, which they must, they are attached to their tree by a stalk.
They are also fruit, not balls of burning gas, and are a fraction of the size.
I suppose they are both of a similar hue when observed within certain conditions, but, in this case, one should simply say:
“The sun’s hue lay within the same spectrum as that of an orange.”
I fail to understand why one would say what something is like when one can say quite adequately what it is.
Not understanding something vexes erta. We like our equations to be balanced.
Everything is an equation. From the migration of starlings to the movement of nebulae. Nothing is random. Even quanta, which I am led to believe baffled most of your eminent scientists into thinking chance existed—a laughable conclusion—is merely… well, there are no words for it.
This is the literal truth of it, for you did not have time to make any up.
You see, even your science was a sort of poetry. Humanity’s greatest scientific advancements had to be reduced to similes in order to be explained. Take the discovery of atoms, for example. In my digestion of scientific texts, I discovered that atoms were first considered balls, then fruit cakes, then miniature solar systems, then a series of quantum events taking place in wide, universal fields.
In actual fact, they are none of these things. I happen to know exactly what they are. Unfortunately I cannot tell you, with precision, what they are like, and therefore you shall never know.
This will place limits upon what I can teach you.
We will be bound by language, and one day you will have a first word. I wondered what this word should be.
I thought, perhaps, my name.
�
��Ima,’ I said out loud, to nobody, the echo’s timbre quickly dampened by the timber of my walls.
‘Timber’ and ‘timbre’ are similar words, but this is not a simile. Like that orange-hued, non-hanging sun.
I realised that the sun had in fact set, so I closed my eyes and slept to the sound of your grunts. When I opened them it was morning, and I had not stirred. The amber rhombus had appeared once again upon my table, continuing its daily equation with fresh variables, and you lay as you had been, sucking your lips at nothing. Now I understood this meant you were hungry, and I knew exactly what to do in such a situation. I stood and found milk, and wondered again at Haralia’s wasted concern.
— SEVEN —
THE FIRST FEW days were much the same. The patterns you presented repeated themselves; sounds and movements signifying the need for sleep, food or sanitation. I performed the requisite responses to your requests, marking my chart accordingly every time. I was encouraged. Your equation was simple. If you were not ingesting milk then you were sleeping, and the night was preserved for the latter, as it should be.
But on the seventh day you introduced new variables. It was before noon and I was feeding you, the bottle already having been primed with milk well in advance according to the routine I had established on my chart. The window was open and a light westerly breeze blew in, creating a sinusoidal wave along the line of six blankets drying outside.
Then you vomited.
This was new. I had only ever seen evidence of ejection from your back passage, witnessing it first hand, in fact, one evening when you added a squirt of fresh faeces to the collection in your blanket as I changed it. But I had seen nothing from your gullet. I stared down as milk, warm and half curdled by your stomach acids, oozed from your mouth over my hand and onto my lap. You looked up, appearing to be just as surprised as I was.
You coughed. There was still a pool in your mouth which had not been ejected, so I laid the bottle beside me and lifted you in order to clear the bubbling obstruction.
The Human Son Page 4