The tea was surprisingly good, and for a while I lost myself in that dizzy place halfway between scent and taste, thinking of that hot day with Greye in India, and the folded hands of Roop, and of how much I missed simply sitting like this with nothing but tea and memories that did not matter.
Suddenly Oonagh frowned.
‘Why do you watch me like that?’
I straightened my neck.
‘Are you male or female?’ The words came before I could stop them, and I held a hand to my mouth before any more could escape.
Oonagh’s creased face opened in surprise.
‘My goodness.’
‘I am sorry, I did not mean to be rude.’
I was relieved to see a smile.
‘The truth is it has been some time since even I considered it. I believe it was always something of a grey area.’ Oonagh blinked, considering the question, then lifted the hem of the threadbare cloak sprawled over the chair. After a glumly raised eyebrow, the cloak was allowed to fall back into place.
‘Still a grey area. Female is my best bet.’
She picked up her goblet and slurped from it, a single gulp disrupting the frantic rasp of her breath. Once she had swallowed she gave three dry, seal-like coughs and settled in her chair, gazing back at me. A kindness softened her face.
‘Now, do you have any other questions about my appearance?’
‘You are not well,’ I said. ‘What is wrong with you?’
‘Cancer, child.’
I frowned.
‘But I have had cancer four times. Why does your body not reject it?’
She peered down at her torso.
‘It tries, but the bastard thing keeps returning. No matter how many times my body kills it, each time it just seems to come back stronger. Things are not the same in there as they used to be. It appears death will no longer be quelled.’ She looked up. ‘But I sense you’re not here to talk about my health, are you?’
‘No.’
‘Then what?’
‘Things are not the same out there either, Oonagh.’
She raised one tufted eyebrow and worked her jaw. Her eyes glazed, looking through me, until finally she nodded gravely.
‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘Disagreement? Argument? Deceit?’
‘And more besides.’
‘Then I must assume our work is done.’
‘Surely you knew.’
She gave a dry laugh.
‘I told you, I haven’t had a visitor for fifteen years, and besides nobody tells me anything anyway.’ She sighed and looked into the flames. ‘No, it is as Elise feared it would happen.’
‘Elise—you mean Dr Nyström?’
‘Of course.’
‘What was it she feared?’
‘You are aware that our improvements’—the word was spoken as if it was being held up for inspection—‘over humans are as much about what was taken away as what was given?’
‘Yes. Certain traits were muted.’
She gave a half-smile.
‘Yes, I like that word. We are just as much a muting as we are a mutation. Well, Elise’s fear was that these muted qualities might only last for as long as they were required. She believed that there was nothing to prevent them from returning, once the erta had fulfilled their—’
‘Purpose.’
Oonagh turned from the fire. ‘Was she right?’
‘That would account for it.’
‘Then death will not be quelled, and neither too will life. Why are you here, Ima? Why do you ask these questions?’
I hesitated. I did not want to tell her about you, not yet, for I was still not sure I trusted her any more than I trusted them.
‘I am here because I believe I have been lied to. And I am asking you these questions because I want to know the truth.’
‘Then why not ask your mother?’
‘I cannot.’
‘Yes.’ Her eyes flicked around me like insects. ‘The truth is a luxury few children receive from their parents.’
I looked away at this, exposed. Suddenly all I could think of was you alone outside in the blizzard. How long would it be before a lantern found you?
‘I should not have come, I am sorry.’
I stood and hurried for the door.
‘You’re nothing like her, you know.’
I froze midway across the room. Turning, I saw Oonagh’s frail silhouette standing against the fire.
‘What?’
She walked towards me and stood, resting upon her stick.
‘Kai, your mother. You’re oceans apart. Mind you, that should come as no surprise. She was never like me either; I made sure of it.’
‘What do you mean?’
She looked away, her expression suddenly haunted by a memory.
‘I only wanted to please her, to help her.’ She fumbled with her stick. ‘I never thought… never expected that they would… You have to understand…’
‘Oonagh, please, tell me what happened.’
She stopped and looked up, fingers folding and unfolding over her stick. Finally she gave me a glum nod.
‘Follow me.’
OONAGH LED ME to a far corner, where she pulled a lamp from the wall—an ancient gas-powered contraption that spluttered and roared when she lit it—and held it above a dusty table strewn with papers. She rummaged among them, finally pulling out a small square of paper which she held to the light.
‘Have you ever seen one of these?’ she said. ‘It’s a photograph.’
I peered at the faded image. It was of three humans—a male and female adult and a female child. They were smiling, happy, standing in sunlight at the edge of a lake. The child was wearing sunglasses in the shape of stars, and presenting a small fish which I assume she had just caught. Clouds scudded across an endless blue sky.
‘If you ever find yourself wondering how it is you exist,’ said Oonagh, ‘then here is your answer.’
‘Who is it?’
I passed the photograph back to Oonagh, and she studied it with affection.
‘The child is Dr Elise Nyström, and those are her parents. It was taken in 2017, when she was eight.’
‘I already know how Dr Nyström created us.’
‘You know how she created us, but not why.’ She turned the photograph this way and that, as if scanning it for new clues, or shadows she had not seen before. ‘Elise used to say that you were never truly free until your parents were gone. Before then you were a perpetual child, forever chained to their bedtime stories, the fictions they had fed you in order to make sense of the world. Fictions about you, about them. About the world.’ She glanced at me. ‘If you were lucky enough to have such parents, of course. Many were not, sadly.’
She gazed back at the photograph.
‘But Elise was. She had no brothers or sisters, just two happy parents who loved each other and her. They had a warm house with a constant flow of visitors and parties, they played with her as often as they could, gave her an excellent schooling but never spoiled her, took her on camping trips where they lay on their backs and talked into the night about stars and planets, fed her imagination day after day, and comforted her when she had nightmares. She grew up believing she was the luckiest girl on the planet, and that her parents were the best humanity had to offer. They would protect her from anything, keep her safe from harm. They could not possibly make mistakes.
‘She told me she was twenty-two years old when she realised she was wrong. In 2031, climate change had already taken hold of the planet and was on the brink of being irreversible. Elise’s upbringing had drawn her towards science, and she was already studying for her second PhD—Atmospheric Chemistry in Cambridge, the first being Cognitive Science and Cybernetics—when it dawned on her that the climate’s turning point had been the year of her birth, 2009. This was the moment, she deduced, that humans had their last chance to change the tide, at least those of them who had any power to do anything about it, which included her parents. Both of
them were wealthy. Both had made money from the energy industry, and had, together, formed a PR firm specialising in representing big Oil…’ She paused and turned to me. ‘You understand these terms?’
‘Of course,’ I said, without a thought.
‘Interesting.’
I only knew them from what I had read in the Room of Things.
Seconds dripped by, the lamp’s roar compressing the silence.
‘Elise realised that her parents could have changed the world,’ I said, snatching up another photograph of Dr Nyström, now an adult. A young Oonagh stood beside her wearing a hesitant smile.
‘Yes,’ said Oonagh, taking the photograph tenderly, ‘if they had wanted to. But instead they had her. Of course, no one in their right minds would blame them alone; they were just two of billions who did the same thing: ignored it all. But not everyone has children like Elise. She took it personally, and extremely seriously, and from that moment on dedicated her entire life to countering her parents’ apathy. She wanted to make humanity better. That, quite literally, is why you and I exist. It wasn’t to mend a broken planet; it was to mend a broken species.’
Oonagh took a long, wheezing breath, the exhale briefly distorting the lamplight.
‘She wanted to change things for the better. But change—’ she let the photograph drop ‘—change is always about balance. If you try too hard to put things right, you run the risk of making them wrong again.’
‘Did she hate her parents because they lied to her?’ I asked.
‘No. They were still her parents, they had still given her a blissful childhood, wiped her bottom clean, bounced her on their knees and all that. They had never meant to be complicit in the planet’s downfall. Still a good father, still a good mother.’
I looked at the photograph. Nyström was beaming with pride, one hand high on Oonagh’s shoulder.
‘And Nyström was your mother.’
‘No,’ she said, hobbling back to the fire. ‘She was my god, and I loved her.’
— FIFTY —
‘CAN YOU REMEMBER your birth?’ said Oonagh, as I placed another log on her fire.
I took the seat opposite.
‘All my life I thought I did, but I had forgotten something. I only remembered it when I walked those steps.’
‘Tell me.’
I hesitated.
‘It was a feeling. Panic. Fear. Shaking hands. My mind asking questions I could not put into words. And then…’
‘The injection. I remember.’
‘What was it?’
‘A kind of long-term psychological sedative. Certain genetic traits weren’t always dampened sufficiently during gestation. Sometimes, in fact… well, not all of your siblings survived, put it that way.’
‘Why?’
‘They were born like me. Insane.’ She noticed my look of horror. ‘Yes, insane. I felt the same things you did—fear, uncertainty, confusion—except I had not had the benefit of a gestational education like you, and there was no needle waiting for me. The world assaulted me the instant I opened my eyes; light and shadow in impossible shapes, sounds, voices, smells—each one new and intangible. Trying to pick apart the sensory data of existence was an ordeal in itself, never mind when I did not know who I was or where I was, or why; never mind when that data included the rustles in leaves half a kilometre away, or the fluctuations in the heartbeat of my creator. And she stood patiently at my bed through it all, that hazy bright face coming in and out of focus, saying things to me. Her sounds of comfort were nothing more than a terrifying lunatic babble, but I clung to them. I clung to every word.
‘I screamed for a week. Elise tried various combinations of tranquillisers, sedatives and beta-blockers, but all they did was put me to sleep; the world beneath my conscious mind was just as horrifying as the one above. My nightmares seemed to last for centuries. Pure, concentrated dread.
‘In the end, she gave up with the injections and tried to calm me with her own voice. She held me tight when I spasmed, kept me fed and hydrated, changed me when I soiled myself, soothed me when I scratched at the walls. She stayed with me all day and all night, never once giving up on me, and finally one morning I woke from dreams that were a little less frightening to a world that was a little less impossible to make sense of.
‘“Clock,” I said, as the dark shape upon the wall came into focus. I was still shaking, still in panic, but I understood. Beneath its turmoil, my mind had been expanding through the various dimensions available to it, and the notion of time had become prevalent that day. I had a sense of this object as a crude measuring device, straight lines orbiting a central point, marking off quanta as they did. Elise jumped from where she lay upon the bed. “What did you say?” Her excitement pleased me, and I repeated my first word. Things became easier from then on.
‘We spent some months in peace. She taught me, showed me art, films, music, all the wonders of human achievement. Mathematics and science, too, although my ability to extrapolate meant that I already knew much more than her by this point. Whenever I pleased her I felt such joy, and conversely, her disappointment brought great unhappiness. So when that message came—’ Oonagh looked at me ‘—do you remember the message?’
I frowned.
‘Of course.’ I straightened my back. ‘We issue a challenge, a call of hope, to any individual or—’
Oonagh looked away in disinterest.
‘Yes, that one. It was one of the many things the council made you and your siblings aware of during your gestation. One of the many things they taught you about the world.’
Something jarred—perhaps the extra microsecond before the word ‘taught’, or the way her lip flickered as she said it, or the way her eyes darted to the corner of the fire—but before I could address it, she continued.
‘“We must make more of me”,’ I told her. ‘“But this time make them better”.’
‘The High Council?’ I said, as she chewed her lip.
‘You have to understand, my intentions were good. I wanted to save the world, save it for her, save it for us, but… but I went too far.’
‘What happened?’
‘I made them sharper—much sharper, and free from all distraction. Gone was the screaming, the terror, the inability to process the world—instead I imbued them with coping mechanisms as they gestated, and fed them information about the world which would allow them to understand it the instant they emerged from their tanks. Fast, focussed, clear; they were beautiful, my children, so free from all the things that held me back. That held humans back, in fact. All those distractions—fear, curiosity, imagination. Remorse.’ Her eyes swelled, as if an unwanted image had appeared before them. She shut them from it, and turned to face me. ‘I tried to teach them as Elise had taught me. I showed them all the paintings, played them the symphonies, ballads and folk songs, showed them what they had been born into. I even let Elise talk to them about her own ideas for saving the planet—gigantic space stations crawling with carbon sucking plants, solar-powered kites trawling the skies, genetically engineered super trees, geo-thermal powered deep-sea coolers—I loved all the delightfully hopeless things she said. But they grew bored. I could virtually hear the calculations and equations whirring around their heads, and the simple solution that was forming in their minds. Time, the thing that first human-made object I ever saw was designed to pick through, that was all what was required. Time and—’
‘Human extinction.’
She blinked twice, slowly.
‘I used to like how they talked. Their expressions, in particular. Here’s one.’ She leaned forward, brow furrowing. ‘“There is more than one way to skin a cat”.’
The strange words hung and disappeared.
‘Humanity never had to die, Ima. Never.’
‘DID YOU DISAGREE with their intention?’
Oonagh sat back and grunted.
‘By then it didn’t matter what I said; they had already made their minds up and the plan was in motion. Cai
ge was first with his little army of militia, including Benedikt, of course.’
‘But Benedikt’s expertise is in technology.’
‘It is now, yes.’
‘But that’s not what he was bred for?’
‘Let’s just say he was a great disappointment to his father. Then Astrid brought her mathematicians into the world, then Kai, with a fleet of her own experts… including you.’
‘What did you mean when you said you tried to warn her?’
‘Well,’ she huffed, ‘your parameters seemed so extreme, Ima. I asked your mother why, and she told me she did not want you distracted the same way she had been. “Distracted?” I said, “That is ridiculous, Kai. I have seen you play a thousand games of chess for ten days straight without once looking up from the board.” I laughed, but she did not. I saw anger in her, a kind of disgust as if I did not fully understand the gravity of things. “But I did,” she said. “Eventually, I did look up from the board.” We did not speak much after that.’ She looked me up and down as if only just appraising me. ‘Perhaps I was wrong though. You’re different to what I would have expected, softer somehow, as if…’
Something clicked. With startling speed she sprang from the chair, knocking the goblet and bowl to the ground.
‘You have a child,’ she exclaimed, calculations continuing to blossom in her eyes. ‘And not just any child either. A human!’
I hesitated.
‘Tell me it is true,’ she cried.
‘It is,’ I said. ‘A boy.’
Her face shone with excitement.
‘Then they are already being resurrected?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? That was our promise to them.’
‘There was a disagreement. Some of the council believed humans would only make the same mistakes as before, if they were brought back.’
She threw back her head and released a loud, frustrated caw.
‘That’s what we were supposed to help them with! They may not have been perfect, but since when was that a pre-requisite for existence? They needed guidance, not obliteration. That was what Elise had planned.’
The Human Son Page 26