by Glenn Grant
The debates have made him question quietly, looking up quotes in the Koran and wondering about the pre-eminence of the Sharia. His old beliefs have slowly dropped away, half-dissolved by the acid of critical analysis. Tonight, he thinks he can join the real underground Net, the one with the hottest, darkest shareware and the most heterodox opinions on the most forbidden topics. He runs through the gamut of the lower levels, thankful that the occult hierarchy is accessible. Sometimes, no entrance can be found; a connection has been shut down by the Sûreté informatique, a brief victory in the incessant fight against the clandestine Net. Finally, he types in the ultimate codeword:
“Liberté.”
ONE
Heather Spears
Heather Spears, writer and artist, has published nine collections of poetry and three books of drawings since 1958. Her poetry books, How to Read Faces (1986) and The Word for Sand (1988), both won the Pat Lowther Award. The latter also won the Governor General’s Award for poetry. Her art has been in six juried and sixty-seven solo exhibitions in Europe, the U.S., and Canada. She lives presently in Copenhagen, where she is a freelance artist, drawing instructor, and is pursuing graduate studies at the University of Copenhagen in Arabic and in English Studies.
In 1989 she began to write science fiction as well, both stories and novels. Her SF trilogy, Moonfall (1991), The Children of Atwar (1993), and The Taming (1994), is set in the same future world as “One.” “She is able to sidestep many of the givens of genre SF while never losing sight of its prime directive: to create a sense of wonder,” says Douglas Barbour. “I have no hesitation about placing Spears next to Le Guin—one of the most literate and intelligent SF writers.…”
* * *
Tasman’s earliest memories were not good ones. A brightness not escapable—she is lying in a transparent box and being watched. Also touched. She is also crawling about in it—the memories were not really that early, for her life up to the age of four was punctuated by these periods in the box—and the faces of the watchers, large and oval, behind the transparent walls that are rather moist, slippery, and warm. Two faces prevail: these are the faces of her mothers, they carry over to the times at home, which seemed to her to have always been in the Darkening of the year, shadowy. Mamel’s face, the large oval swimming on the right, gentle, the eyes not always ready to meet hers, looking askance, up and away as if asking for help. Mamar’s on the left, a mirror likeness but something firmer, the set of the mouth a little tighter, the look more steady. Tasman is lifted out of the box and suckled on their breasts. Otherwise watched, touched by fingers, instruments. Other faces watch her. Always twinned.
She suffered, as one “suffers” an illness—and hers was an inexplicable congenital deformity—surely long before she was aware of her ordinary physical boundaries, though she explored her motor powers—her hands were not the box or the sheets, her will extended her fingers or clasped them, her voice uttered noises that were not the clicks and bleeps of the machines, she learned by ordinary effort to grasp her feet, roll over, sit up. Her handicap became evident to her not so much from her own sense of her body as from the looks and touches—the anxiety and commiseration in her mothers’ (in Mamar’s, resignation like a continuous exhalation of breath, in Mamel’s something still complex and unfinished, as if at war with itself). And this look or something like it but distanced, in the other faces, a curiosity that saw her as an object, and, in some who cared for her from time to time, fear. Even avoidance of touch (which is the severest of punishments), or a touch that was superficial and diffident, with no meeting of eyes.
So there was no particular moment when Tasman, growing, learning to walk and speak, became aware of what she was. In one sense she had always been aware: she saw that human communication is not always worried, or fearful, or diffident, or impossible to establish; she knew this by the way the adults around her communicated with each other; so that the deep twin-bond that was everywhere was learned by her through observation and in exile.
Stronger than father, stronger than mother,
Sister to sister, brother to brother.
An innocent nursery-rhyme now, that had once been a battle-cry, in the far-off times of the Barbarians. Mamar and Mamel, leaning into each other’s smiles.
* * *
Her weaning was formal, but private. Knowing no better, she accepted her gifts and made the short speeches and felt in part what she ought to have felt. She was four years old, the ceremony rather early, but there was no reason to extend infancy in her case. (“She can only suck her fingers, after all.”) Perhaps here, standing before her mothers, with the decorative blue wax still tingling and cooling on her lips, for the first time she really understood what it meant to have no twin to turn to. The ceremony was performed at home. The final lines were not said, or their responses. She was used to being bereft, but not this frightened.
They lived in Lofot on the Barents Sea in a small, level house, the roof of which formed most of the yard. The city was modern. She remembers it mostly in Darkening, its lights that swelled and changed colour, gradual and ordinary, through the hours. The colours through the verdant leaves, and shimmering in long vertical pathways on the canals. She had no fathers. They had gone away, they were dead in the Savannahs, stories of them were muddled in her mind with the Great Tales. She thought they were Travellers, because she wanted to believe this, tellers of letters, though in actuality they had gone away in the aftermath of her birth, escaping. Mamel told stories to her, so early that they became confused with the little she knew of her fathers, and she let it remain like this. The hero Saduth Twel, whose twin was bitten in the ear by a venomous snake as he slept.
“But wasn’t the Twel waking?”
“It happened so fast, Twel was looking the other way. Nothing could save the Twar and he commanded his brother, using the strong oath, to garotte him before the poison reached their lungs, and he did, with an arm belt, and the Twar died looking into his eyes, and did not loosen the belt, even as he was dying.
He struggled not / against his brother:
He died and wished him life.”
“Then what happened?”
“Twel felt very sick, he knew he must leave Twar and bury his mind in the desert, but he had no tools except the short knife. But he threaded the wire out of the other arm belt, and with this he did the act.”
Tasman’s hands moved involuntarily to her neck. “How could he live?”
“He stanched the blood, he buried the Twar mind in a basket of long grass. Twel was very sick. For two days he mourned.
‘It would be better for me
To go with you into death.
Why have you wished me life?
You are content, but I am alone.’”
“Alone,” whispered Tasman. The word was archaic, almost taboo. She shivered.
“Why do you tell her these tales?” asked Mamar in the rote speech and received the rote answer, “Because she asks, and because they are part of our heritage.”
“Did Saduth Twel live?” asked Tasman.
“He came to Whalsay, and he was crawling. They saw him from the city, moving across the valley between Whalsay and Hoy Mountain, in the open marshes. His face was black. He lived, because it was the wish of his twin. That is a long time ago.”
“Who was the hero?”
“They were both heroes, but it is called the Tale of the hero Saduth Twel.”
The story absorbed Tasman; she speculated about heroes, and her fathers. A snake had killed them surely, and in the real story, the Twar would not be so unkind as to wish life on his Twel, he would drag the belt loose at the last minute “with both hands,” his need for air stronger than his will. They would wrestle on the ground like the unweaned, yelling and biting at each other’s ears and noses, the sharp crack of their skulls would resound in the desert:
Bad sound / worst of all,
The moon will fall, the moon will fall.
She had seen children chided with this verse, and
going untouched for punishment. And she had heard this sound in the street, unmistakable, as she lay on the bushy roof and watched them playing. And once, at night—shouts outside and that awful whiplash crack, and the sound of feet running.
And she’d seen the moon past the lights, or cool and seemingly smaller in the daylight sky; they said it would fall one day, it was nearing the earth. But not in these generations. Wise men not yet born would prevent this, said her mothers. There is a great Book in Manchu, an entire city, dedicated to this learning. The moon and the earth would be friendly, there would be conversation between them in those unimaginable days, they would turn their faces to each other in kindness. There would be two worlds.
* * *
Tasman, at her weaning, was given garments that Mamel made specially for her. They were the usual sleeved tunics, but only one sleeve was open to pull over her head, the other was closed with seams and stuffed. Though Tasman had many of these tunics as she grew, she came to call them by one name, Pillowmarie. At four, she resisted wearing Pillowmarie furiously, but her mothers kept it on her with intricate ribbons tied behind her shoulders (“She might as well get used to it.”) and gradually she realized that her freedom outside the house was greater, going with her mothers to receive food or walking with them along the dykes was now possible, even when people were about—though there were stares, the adult looks were at least subdued and apologetic, not frightened or hostile.
Her mothers were overprotective, making her wear Pillowmarie in the house. She knew they had conversations about this and arguments, tears also, when she was supposed to be asleep. Mamel saying, “It will train her to tilt her head.”
And Mamar: “Nothing will make her normal. We believed she was a Twel mind, heart heavy, but she has not revealed it. I can’t feel it.”
“She’s both and the Twel’s strongest.”
Tears. “Have her, then. Twel—you were the one who couldn’t bear it.”
Tasman did not understand much of this. The Pillowmarie was placed on her right one day, on her left another. It was as if they were waiting for her to show a preference. The cloth flopped against her ear, interfered with her peripheral vision. She sensed her mothers watching. She sat by them and ate, now out of her own bowl. The bowl, a weaning gift, was double, and she ate with both hands. Pillowmarie bobbed against her temple. If Mamel painted a face on Pillowmarie, would it breathe or eat? Hardly.
* * *
Sometimes, at night, Tasman talked to herself, but she could not pretend she had a twin. Her hands talked, or perhaps the location of her two play personalities was in her shoulders. She chose to become the voice of one side or the other—such play was listened to and remembered by Mamar for medical Book. Tasman lying on the sleeping pallet and talking softly:
“I am going to Book soon.” (Pause.) “And-you-come-too” (a courtesy speech). “Then I am going to World and-you-come-too. In the Lightening of the year. There is a big story in Book and I’ll read it to you. Thank you. I’ll draw you pictures, it will have a desert in it, a Savannah. They give you colours in Book, and you can have lights. You can colour with lights. Fire in my mind, water in your mind. I want to light real fires, big ones. Aren’t you afraid? I’m not afraid, I’m going to Book soon and you aren’t even there.”
This last was said with some satisfaction. Tasman did want to learn and had really no problem in choosing Book instead of World. World children did not have an institution, but wandered. That they could play with fire was an enormous enticement. They played with fire and on the beaches and touched real things. At Book, nothing was real. The excitement was that it was seemingly endless, doors opening doors as if forever. The children might ask anything at all and the answers prepared them for more asking. Most children went to Book, eagerly, when they were weaned, which could be at five or nine or even later if they were male. They had played enough with the world by then, though some would choose to return to it. Weaned twins had to work out where they most wanted to go. Real fire burns Book. Book is a fire that burns forever. It was a lesson in co-operation. Sometimes a Twel at Book never learned to read, but drew endlessly while his brother read or played with numbers; the screens were all double. There were laboratories as well as libraries. The teachers were there to show them how to use Book, to find the answer to anything they wanted.
* * *
Tasman had to wait longer than her fifth year before there was a Book that could or would take her. And that single attempt proved disastrous.
Even with Pillowmarie her appearance at Book frightened the smaller children, and the older ones were interrupted. Questions were suddenly not about subjects that had interested them before, but about Tasman; scared twins her own age clung to the teachers: “What happened to her twin?” But the older children wanted to know about the oldest Tales. Tasman, meanwhile, miserable at a double screen she had so looked forward to manipulating, drew aimlessly while big boys passed behind her and whispered to each other. “Let us ask to read this, this is about the Barbarians.” By the end of the morning, no one was interested in anything else. Teachers stroked her but she felt anxiousness in their touch. She wanted to go home.
“Will you choose World, then?”
“I want Book, not World, I want Book.”
And now Tasman, too, wanted to know about the Barbarians, to learn to read the oldest Tales. But no Book would take her.
Her mothers had received a letter she did not hear, but they spoke of it. They stopped taking her past the yard, even with Pillowmarie. It was approaching the Darkening of the year. She lay on the roof, in the heat, watching the low sun beyond the fronds, the bit of glistening sea past the dykes to the northwest.
“In the night of the afternoon / we will come
calling. In Darkening, we will touch you /
where no one has touched you since your weaning.”
An old love song, voices intertwining, from a roof farther down the street. Soon the blue lights of afternoon would cover the city and the leaves, and the white jasmine, would all be turned blue. She leaned forward, tucking Pillowmarie under her chin. When I learn to read, she thought, I will read the oldest Tales first of all.
* * *
“Mam, tell me about the Barbarians.”
Mamar spoke sharply. “You will learn that at Book, we know so little.”
“I want to go to Book now. Tell me what you know.”
Mamel sighed. “I will tell you something—Mar can sleep if she likes.” They stroked Tasman; she sensed Mamar’s touch, resigned and now gentle.
“Once upon a time, there were more Barbarians than people on the earth. Although they were human, they were fierce and cruel. They lived in great cities that are now ruins in the Sheath, and it is difficult or impossible to explore those places because of the heat. But some people say that when the moon comes near, it will be cool there and we will again traverse the earth.”
“How could the Barbarians live there, when it is so hot?”
“It was not so hot then, Tasman. They lived there very well.”
“Did they come and kill us?”
“No, our race lived there too. At first, there were very few of us—and when we were born, they killed us if they found us. But parents also killed their own children. Every bicephalic child was killed, it was a decree, but some were saved—in the cities in their medical Book; they say the fathers of our race, Janus, lived to maturity because they were in Book. But there is another Tale about Janus.”
“Tell me.”
“It was in the place called Lond, which is a great fiery ruin now on the far edge of the Savannah in the Peninsula. Janus was born. Their mother was a Barbarian among Barbarians, and she looked at them and said,
‘This was a hard birth, and I knew / Who you
would be, Janus my sons. / I knew my thighs
/ Would nearly break bearing you. /My face
is black. / I cannot walk, or I would hide you.’
So she gave them to her husband an
d begged him to kill them, because she could not hide them and there were by then too many in the medical Book; and some said, they also killed them there. Her husband, however, took pity on them, and wrapped them up and took them into the east part of that country, and no one stopped him.”
“Was it Darkening?”
Mamar spoke. “In Book, you will learn that it becomes dark and light very swiftly in the Sheath of the world.”
“So he ran in the dark,” went on Mamel, “and in the light he rested and hid. He gave them the milk of animals. I do not know how they survived. Janus’s grown body fathered twins, their mothers were much younger, that was Effe, some say they were only eleven years old but perhaps they were thirteen or fourteen.”
“Were Effe hid in Book?”
“Surely, Tasman, but they were considered too young to be watched. Effe and Janus had many children while they lived. Effe Twel and Effe Twar, / First Mothers, help me to bear.”
“Were their children killed?”
“Not all. Janus had a kind of fortress city by then in the eastern Peninsula. It was the time of the terrible slaughterings and mutilations. But no more Barbarians were being born. I do not know why the old Barbarians did not learn love, or surrender, but it is said that their loneliness was eating into them and they were crazed. Remember that they had powerful cities and enormous wealth. They lived long into our age but they died. They preached and practised genocide against our race. It is said, they refused to look at their own children, but had them killed. Wherever they found us, they killed us.”
Tasman looked from one to the other of her mothers’ faces. Mamar’s gaze was steady and sad. Mamel’s difficult, the eyes not yet finished with crying, the mouth stretched a little into a smile. She said, “At Book the other children asked about the Barbarians when they saw you. That does not mean you have anything to do with that ancient race. You are good and kind, and no one knows why you were born untwinned. You asked us about the Saduth because of this, and we told you, because it is good for you to know that being alone is possible on the earth.”