The Human Son

by Adrian J. Walker

  ‘What is it?’ I enquired.

  Greye pointed at my arm.

  ‘There appears to be something on your sleeve.’

  I inspected the smear on my cuff.

  It was your faeces.

  I STOMPED, RANKLED, through the wet forest. Of the many causes I could attribute to my mood—Benedikt’s sly words, the scorn of my village, my brother’s dismissal, my mother and sister galivanting with their horses while I sat trapped in the darkness of my own house—none were as prescient as the recognition of my own behaviour.

  Huffing?

  Sighing?

  Complaint?

  Attention seeking?

  Pleading for help?

  These behaviours were not characteristic of me. They were not, as far as I was concerned, characteristic of any erta.

  What has become of you? I had asked the villagers of Fane. Well, what had become of me?

  I stopped at the top of the hill above Ertanea and looked around. The forest ran down on either side of us, land and coast, covered in pine. Unbroken beams of sunlight warmed the valley as far as the planet’s curvature would allow me to see. On the other side, a bank of thunderheads loomed on the seaward horizon, their shadows the only darkness for miles in any direction. I straightened my back and breathed the salt air laced with ozone. Another storm would soon sweep over us, but as always it would pass.

  I pulled your sling tight around my neck and set off down the hill. Before long I was running, my strides lengthening, quickening, pulling at the ground. My reflexes guided me safely around trees and there was no landslide to bring me down. With each step I launched myself further and further into the air, gravity yielding to my strength until soon the distance between each step was so great that I may as well have been flying home.

  — THIRTEEN —

  I SLIPPED INTO a dull routine. I do not say this with glumness, for a dull routine was exactly what I desired.

  Not what I desired—what I needed.

  My moment at the top of the hill had enlightened me as to what I had forgotten, which was that I did not need what I did not need. I did not require attention from my siblings and cousins. I did not require the support of my village. I did not require the council’s recognition of my project as being anything but a simple exercise in data collection.

  Nor did I require the support of my mother, or sister. They could run with their horses endlessly, for all I cared. It was as Greye said: not in five hundred years have I ever required help. This was precisely true, and I was not about to go begging for it now.

  It was back to your equation, and the solving of it.

  This is what you do.

  You drink milk from soaked fabric, sucked from my nipples.

  You process this and excrete waste with fairly predictable regularity.

  You lie upon a blanket, kicking, watching shadows move.

  You smile when you see me. My face brings you endless delight, and every time it appears is a novelty for you. I wonder whether this is an issue with your memory, or whether you have an inflated sense of joy.

  You cry, often.

  You sleep, sometimes.

  This is what I do.

  I feed you with a milk-soaked blanket draped over my shoulder.

  I change your blanket when you have soiled it, cleaning you to reduce the risk of infection.

  I wash and dry the blankets used for feeding and protection, an endless task.

  I watch you kick upon the bed, noting the slow development in the extent to which you can move, and coordinate your limbs. I alter the position of objects around the room to provide variety in its shadows. When it is dark I use candles, which flicker. You find this exhilarating.

  I pace the room, often.

  I sleep, occasionally.

  The variables all exist and are balancing themselves. You are alive, you are healthy, and you are growing. You are solving your own equation.

  The problem is me.

  When you cry I try to stop it. If I cannot—if you are not hungry or dirty—I express frustration, which worsens the situation.

  When you wake in the middle of the night, I try to send you back to sleep. I try to change you, feed you, adjust your position, open a window. When none of this works, you cry. It appears that you are almost as aware of my behaviour as I am of yours. In short, I am part of the equation too, and it is my variables which are unbalanced. I crave sleep which I cannot have. I crave control over uncontrollable things. I crave a routine which has long departed. So I need a new routine, a dull one, run by you.

  Simple.

  Now, when you cry and there is nothing to be done, I do nothing. I sleep when you sleep, whether day or night, and when you wake for no reason, I ignore you. Now, for long periods, you cry on your own in the dark. These cries can reach enormous volumes, and for this reason I have taken to plugging my ears with corks, which, after softening in water, I was able to whittle into the approximate shape of each ear canal.

  This does not help the residents of Fane, of course, who must still endure your nocturnal torture. I have neither seen nor spoken to anyone since returning from Ertanea, though Magda makes her feelings apparent by crashing and banging around her dwelling when your cries are in full force, and by talking loudly in the circle when she knows we are both sleeping.

  You still wake at dawn, whereupon I change you, feed you and take you for a morning walk in the dew-drenched hills. The early start provides us the advantage of being able to return to the house before anyone else is awake, avoiding the need to endure clipped greetings, mutterings or glares of scrutiny.

  During these walks, I sometimes stop in my tracks, certain I have heard leaves rustle out of place, or a branch broken beneath a boot. I stand still in the silence, listening, scanning the shadows between the trees, waiting for more evidence of life. I cried out once.

  ‘Hello? Who is there?’

  The lack of response made me all the more convinced that somebody was watching me.

  Then one moonless night, when I was fumbling for my ear corks, I saw a silhouette in the square, an outline cast by a flash of lightning from a distant storm. I leaped for the window, but by the time the next flash arrived, it was gone. I stayed there for some time, feeling the same presence as I had done in the forest.

  Eventually I plugged my ears and slept. But I bolted the door from that night on.

  ONE MORNING I woke to bright light, muffled cries and thumps from afar. I sat bolt upright and pulled the corks from my ears. You were wailing and my bolted door was rattling. Somebody was hammering upon it.

  ‘Ima!’

  Magda.

  With my brain still not fully convinced of the idea of consciousness, I got up and walked for the door. It shook in its hinges under the might of Magda’s persistent fist. I rubbed my eyes of sleep, hearing the urgent sound of my name called out again and again, and your abandoned screams behind.

  Attention. Give me your attention. Your time is not yours. Your sleep is not yours. Your life is NOT YOURS.

  By the time I reached the door I had flown into a sudden rage. I tore off the bolt and yanked it open.

  ‘Magda, tell what would you have me do?!’

  ‘Ima?’

  I stood, stooped and panting, before the finely-postured figure of my sister.

  ‘Haralia. I thought you were someone else.’

  She looked me up and down. Her face, though horrified, glowed with health.

  ‘Ima, whatever is wrong? What has happened to you?’

  ‘Come in,’ I said.

  She closed the door and stood by the table as I tended to your morning needs. I felt her silence as I changed you, then drew milk and sat in the chair to feed. I unfastened the buttons of my dress, allowing my right breast to flop out and, with a sigh, I squeezed your day’s first drops into your mouth.

  I sniffed and wiped my nose.

  ‘What?’ I said, noticing Haralia’s wide eyes.

  ‘What on earth are you doing, Ima?�
�

  ‘Oh. Your bottle shattered. This is how he feeds now.’

  ‘Why did you not use another bottle.’

  ‘It is not as if I had any lying about. He needed to feed and I had to improvise.’

  ‘Does it work?’

  ‘See for yourself. He has grown, has he not?’ My tone was sharp. I closed my eyes. ‘Forgive me, the shock of the day is still upon me. It is good to see you, sister. Have you been well?’

  Haralia, still gripping the chair, smiled.

  ‘I have another bottle at Jakob’s,’ she said. ‘Wait here.’

  When she returned we filled the new bottle and I replaced my wounded breast in its dress for the last time, with not a little relief. Why any mammal would choose to feed their young in such a barbaric way is beyond me.

  I would take greater care of this bottle.

  ‘I shall make us tea,’ said Haralia.

  She did so—a treat, since our new routine did not involve a drink for me so soon after rising—and we talked for a time. She told me of her trip to the lowlands with our mother, and of the wild horses, and of her happiness at returning to see Jakob. Their relationship was ever growing, she told me, and they would soon be taking a trip of their own. This would be a much longer one.

  Her eyes flitted about the room as she spoke, and even I could tell that she was trying her best to mute the joy so clearly apparent in her voice. I did not wish for this. I was glad my sister—such a different beast to me—was happy. I was glad to be sitting at that table, drinking tea with her.

  I told her of the past months, but I found myself avoiding the details of our life’s routines in the same way she avoided the details of her life’s pleasure. I focussed on the varieties of life I had observed in the forest, which I knew would be of interest to her, and of Boron’s hoof, which she said she would inspect, and of the developments in transcendence spoken about in the council meeting, which she had missed, and which drew from her a secretive smile.

  ‘Do you know something I do not?’ I enquired.

  ‘I shall tell you in good time,’ she replied.

  ‘Time.’ I looked at the window, beyond which I saw movement. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Almost mid-morning.’

  ‘Oh. We have missed our morning walk.’

  She stood.

  ‘A walk, what an excellent idea.’

  I shook my head, looking past her at the figures in the square.

  ‘We usually go before the village wakes. It is easier that way.’

  Haralia placed her hands upon her hips.

  ‘My sister. Ima. The woman who single-handedly removed centuries of poison from the atmosphere, who freed the planet’s lungs—’

  ‘Planets do not have lungs.’

  ‘—who soared above us in air so thin with oxygen it could snap, casting chemical spells that brought the atmosphere back from the brink of death—’

  ‘Gaseous solutions do not snap, and they were not spells, they were mathematical certainties. Also, atmospheres do not—’

  ‘—My sister, the saviour of the skies, is now afraid to go outside?’

  She cocked a hip, in time with her head.

  ‘I refuse to believe it. Come on. We are going for a ride on the beach.’

  ‘But Boron’s hoof.’

  ‘Then ride with me. There is room on Corona for all three of us. Come. You have no choice.’

  She smiled, and I knew she was quite correct.

  — FOURTEEN —

  HARALIA HAS CARED for many horses in her lifetime, but none more so than Corona. She is a fine beast—a mottled white mare with lean flanks and long eyelashes.

  I sat behind Haralia with you between us, as Corona walked the long beach behind Fane, tail swishing away the sand flies, nose puffing happily at the warm sprays of seawater shearing from the surf. The tide was out and the wet sand shone in the sun. I was lost in it for a while, convincing myself of the illusion that it was a sheet of polished glass. I wondered what I would look like reflected in it; it had been some time since I had seen my own face.

  We rocked with Corona’s steady gait, and the sound of a million grains of sand grinding together beneath each laid hoof. Haralia’s back was in a proud line, her abdomen arched, and her curls gleamed upon her shoulders.

  ‘How do I appear?’ I asked.

  ‘Exhausted,’ she replied, without turning. ‘And your shoulders slump.’

  I pulled my spine straight. I heard a vertebra crack.

  ‘Have you ever not slept?’ I said.

  ‘Once or twice,’ she said. Her voice had a quality to it, a proliferation of upper frequencies which I recognised as betraying a smile. She was referring to lack of sleep through choice, I presumed, in order to copulate with Jakob.

  ‘Can you explain it?’

  ‘Explain what?’

  ‘Jakob. How you feel. What it means. What you do.’

  ‘Well—’ She seemed taken aback, as if I had introduced an entirely new element to the conversation. This of course was not true, and her reaction was intended as a diversionary tactic. My sister did not need encouragement to talk about sexual congress, but she did not necessarily want to admit it.

  I was beginning to grasp the intricacies of social interaction—pointless as they were.

  ‘Where do I start?’

  ‘At the beginning, as always.’

  She sighed.

  ‘There is no beginning to how Jakob and I feel about each other. Neither is there an end, we just—’

  ‘That makes little sense. Your feelings are discrete systems, and every discrete system has identifiable boundaries.’

  ‘Well, then, think of it like a circle.’

  ‘You believe your feelings for each other are circular? I am not sure how that would work.’

  ‘No, not circular, like a circle. It never breaks, it always returns to the same point. Us.’

  Similes. Even my sister uses them now.

  ‘I did not ask you what it was like, I asked you what it was.’

  ‘It is…’ Sun flashed in our faces as a cloud broke, then closed once again. ‘It is hard to explain.’

  ‘It should not be, and if it is then you should question it.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Why, Ima?’

  ‘If you cannot explicitly describe something, then perhaps it does not exist.’

  She grew quiet at this. I heard her breathing through her nose.

  ‘I did not mean—’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘This is how it is. When I see him, my heart rate climbs. When he looks at me, the blood vessels in my cheeks flush with blood. When he is near, my breathing becomes unsteady and my muscles shake. When I touch him, I grow wet.’

  ‘Wet?’

  ‘Between the legs.’

  ‘I see.’

  She turned her head. Her neat profile, the line of nose and lips, looked ever more soft and perfect against the distant crags of the southern cliffs.

  ‘I do not cause these things to happen; he does. And I enjoy them. I seek them out. There. I have described it. Is that better?’

  I thought for a moment.

  ‘It is better, but still not adequate.’

  She rolled her eyes and faced forward again.

  ‘Well, I have done my best, and I do not believe you can describe sexual attraction any better. You have no experience of it.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but there are things to which I am drawn just as strongly, if not more, and I can describe them perfectly.’

  ‘What things?’

  I paused, thinking. Corona huffed.

  ‘My horse is called Boron. Chemical element B, atomic number five—’

  ‘Please do not tell me that you are attracted to chemistry, Ima. That is your purpose, not your desire.’

  ‘Not just chemistry. Boron is a name humans gave to a chemical element, as they did to every other element. We still use those names, as we do the names of the rocks, the numbers, the clouds, the stars.
But they are just names. The things which they describe persist without them. Had Homo sapiens and erta never existed, these things would still have been here exhibiting the same behaviour, moving with the same laws. They do not require any belief to exist, they merely are, and because we do exist we can watch them and manipulate them, if we know how they work. Which we do. Stop your horse.’

  Haralia pulled on Corona’s reins and I dismounted beside a pile of boulders. I surveyed the wide beach, the arch of coast running north and south from where we stood.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘And tell me what you see.’

  Haralia turned her head, slowly taking in what we both could see.

  ‘Horizon, sea, cliffs, the earth at peace. What do you see?’

  ‘I see many things. Things within things. The beach, for example. At first it appears to be a single thing, a piece of land with its own distinct shape, its valleys, planes and mountains.’ I knelt and scooped a handful of grey sand, letting it fall through my fingers. ‘But look a little closer and it is made of individual grains.’

  Haralia laughed.

  ‘Do you think I do not understand basic science?’

  ‘And look closer at these grains and they each appear differently. They have their own size, their own colour, their own shape. They too have their valleys, planes and mountains. They are entire landscapes in themselves.’

  I held aloft my finger, to which some sand still clung.

  ‘To count the grains of sand upon this beach appears infeasible. But it is not. How many grains on my finger?’

  Haralia glanced at it.

  ‘One thousand seven hundred and twenty-two.’

  I checked.

  ‘Twenty-three. One lies behind another in the lower-left cluster.’

  A breeze blew by as I swung my finger between the farthest edges the beach.

  ‘Knowing what I already know about the dimensions of this beach and the 1,723 grains of its sand upon my finger, I am now able to make a crude estimation of the total number grains of sand upon which we stand. But if I took a further sample, that estimate would improve. Another, inspecting each one closely so that I knew the variety of rock worn into each grain, and the range of shapes and sizes they made, and my guess would be better yet. Spend an entire day taking samples from north to south, firming up boundary measurements and reading the changes in depth, gathering a complete set of grain varieties and their distribution throughout the whole, forming mathematical models to describe their propensities to tesselate with one another, and I will have something approaching an accurate figure.’