Veracity

by Mark Lavorato

  I was already getting a handle on how their minds worked. Their reasoning would have been something like this: as they could prove that our nature was completely malevolent and distrustful, that it was essentially amiss, then whatever was contrary to that nature, would stand a very good chance of being 'on track'. (Was this also starting to make some kind of bizarre sense to me as well?) Could we, in a way, be certain that we were walking the best path with our species because it was the very path that appeared to us as counterintuitive? Couldn't we use our nature as a type of inverted guide? Why not? I mean - it wasn't as if this was a foreign concept, considering the fact that we apply the same logic to our lives on a small scale every day. After all, that was morality perfectly defined in a nutshell: the act of restraining ourselves from doing what we're naturally inclined to do, because, if there is one thing that we've learned from our impulsive blunders, it is that when we do exactly what we are impelled to do, it ends up being detrimental to our world. They had only taken this idea, which we all subscribe to, and pushed it one bold step further.

  So, in many respects, yes, the more I thought of it, the more I saw they were sensible in keeping so many things from us. If they had given us the details, we would have only gotten absorbed in them, lost sight as to why they were kept from us in the first place, and then we would have lashed out because we wanted more. In fact, if I looked at it in a certain way, the most remarkable thing wasn't the depth of which we were kept in the dark, but rather the degree of which I was so maddened by it. What was there to be angry about, really? We all know how accomplished we are at quarantining ourselves from the whole story in order to avoid grief, so why should we be so offended when others do the same thing for us? And this was true; they weren't only being cautious with information for the island's safety (or, for that matter, the world's) it was also simply being done for our own good. And it was important for me to finally understand this.

  I flinched a bit as a small stone bounced onto the slab of rock in front of me and landed in the water. When I turned around to see who'd thrown it, I was surprised to see Kara standing in the shade, already hunkering down into the underbrush to avoid being seen.

  Within the younger generation, the code of conduct to be adhered to when someone threw a rock and crouched down into the bushes, was to check if the coast was clear and, without hesitation, walk over to crouch with them, quickly exchanging some clandestine information before heading off again. But hesitate I did. I wasn't sure how I felt about speaking with Kara at that given moment. It had been a while since we were able to sneak off and have one of our conversations, and I hadn't exactly had the will or energy to rehearse a clever follow-up to it. And whereas before, such rehearsal seemed useful to me, I knew that now, it was essential. I would need to weigh out and filter every last word before letting it pass through my lips, because, rest assured, as I spoke, she would be trying to pierce through the veil that shrouded what wasn't being said, listening for patterns in the things that were avoided, and then slyly chasing after them. So, as I stood up and walked into the trees (as casually as I could, in case someone was watching) it was nervousness that I felt more than anything else.

  I was attracted to Kara. She had these intense eyes that were always fixed on the person she was talking to, and they'd lowered with me as I crouched down into the shrubs, surveying my movements. Her hair was dark brown, almost black, and was just long enough to hang lazily beside her neck, the very ends of it waving out in different directions. Her skin looked to be incredibly smooth to me, and I'd always wanted so badly to reach out and touch it, which, considering what I'd just been thinking about, would probably only have led to something disastrous.

  "I just bumped into Siri," Kara began. "She told me that you were out, and that you were walking toward the peninsula. So I thought I'd come and see - you know - how you are."

  "Oh."

  She smiled with a bit of impatience, probably knowing that we would only have a fifteen-minute window to speak with each other and wanting to get right to the point of things, which, in all fairness, was the nature of all of our dialogues. "So..." she leaned in, unable to wait any longer, "tell me - how are you?" Of course, what she really meant by this was: Tell me about where you went, what happened, what Coming of Age is all about - tell me what the big secret is.

  But I couldn't. I really, truly couldn't. I was just beginning to appreciate the long list of deep-seated reasons why I should keep quiet. In fact, I realized, looking over both of my shoulders, it was crazy to even be sitting with her without having prepared for it first. I wasn't ready for this. She intimidated me.

  I tried to squirm out of it as best I could. "To be really honest with you, I've been told explicitly not to talk with anyone except the Elders about quite a few things. So... I mean - I'm sorry for not being able to say anything, but... it has to do with the safety of the island."

  "What?" She pulled her head back, as if in disgust, "Wait, wait, wait. You go away for about a week and you come back sounding exactly like them? Is that how it works? No. I don't get it. So I'm afraid you'll have to explain yourself a bit. Why? Why can't you talk about it with me?"

  "Safety."

  "Oh..." she nodded her head mockingly, "of course - safety. So... if you were to utter just a few honest words, what random, 'dangerous' thing might happen? Would the waves rise up and drag us both out to sea?"

  "Come on."

  "No? Hmm." She made herself look as if she were playing a guessing game, squinting at the leaves above us, a contemplative finger tapping on her lips. Then her eyes lit up with a probable answer, her finger pointing into the air, "Ah ha! Or maybe..." she paused, leaning in again, her expression growing serious, "maybe the people of the island would rise up, and drag everyone who knew the secret out to sea. What do you think?"

  I wanted to give some quick-witted retort to this, but nothing came out - just a bit of anxious breath. This was exactly the reason I didn't want to talk to Kara; she was a little too sharp. The Elders and I had gone over exactly what I was to say to people who were wondering about specifics, but none of those fixed phrases would have worked with her. She would have only asked a few quick questions to get around them, questions that sounded like they were just on the fringe of safe enough to answer, and then plucked out the few clues and hints that were worth keeping, and sketched the gaps in between. (It occurred to me at that point that Kara would probably make a great Elder one day.) In the end, I decided to just keep my mouth shut until she spoke again, which took a few discomfiting moments.

  "Okay, okay - don't worry about it," she said, dismissively, and looked away. "I mean - if you really can't talk about it, I'll have to respect that." I watched her suspiciously. "But... there is one thing that I want you to tell me; and I'm sure you'd be allowed to, because everyone that Comes of Age says the same thing word for word. I guess I just want to know if what they say is really true - the rumours I mean." She gestured out toward the horizon, "Were there really a lot of people out there once?"

  I thought this over carefully. She was right that I was allowed to say it, and I couldn't see the harm in letting her know that it was actually a fact, as the pretence for the expedition would involve everyone knowing it anyway. "Yeah. There were people out there. There were cultures and communities all over the world. But they're gone now."

  For some reason, Kara acted like I'd thrown a weight onto her back with this. It seemed that, even though she'd heard the story re-circulated countless times, she'd always taken it as a kind of impossibility. But it wasn't; and that fact seemed to be settling onto her for the first time. "How...? I mean - what happened to them all?"

  I scratched my chin. Things were getting a bit more delicate. I'd been afraid that the answering of one question was only going to lead to the asking of another. I wondered what the best way to go about this was. If I told her anything, it would have to be evasive, yet conclusive, it would have to be something she couldn't really follow up on with a series of new
and awkward questions. I worded and reworded a few wily statements in my head, but realized that, in the end, she would see through it all anyway. No, if I was going to give her an answer - and I wanted to give her an answer - there would have to be some element of truth to it. So, I finally decided to offer a very blanketed and vague piece of truth that she'd probably already come up with on her own. What could be dangerous in that?

  I sighed before I began. "Well, as I'm sure you've witnessed yourself, we're beings with a fairly self-destructive nature. I guess it was only a matter of time before something happened on a global scale. And it did."

  She turned to face the waves, shaking her head. "Wow," she said, and fell into a thoughtful silence, scanning the blue of the water, the crashing waves, the foam that those waves shot into the air, the few bubbles that bounced onto the dry rock, the dark circles of moisture they left behind. Her expression was constantly changing, her face lighting up with a painful grin for a moment, then an anxious glare, a distracted frown.

  After a while, she started speaking out at the ocean, quietly. "You know... sometimes, if I really listen hard, it's like there're voices out there, under the waves. Not normal voices; more like a low moan, a murmur. Anyway, I was just thinking that, maybe that's where they come from; from all those people that died, from all the horrible and beautiful things they did to each other. Because that's what it sounds like. There's this deep sadness in it, a kind of relentless suffering, but also something that seems to say: Everything's okay. Everything's - I don't know - healing."

  I sat there, dumbfounded. This was Kara; this was her world, a reality where, no matter how hard I tried to keep up, I always felt left behind, deficient.

  "Can you hear anything in them?" she asked, turning to me and catching me gawking at her.

  "Uh... no. I can't."

  But I didn't need to hear them to recognize the wisdom in what she'd said. Without knowing a single thing about The Goal, she'd both explained, and justified it in a few brief sentences better than the Elders had done in a over a week of drawn out discussions. She was exactly right. There had been an enormous amount of suffering, of unnecessary pain, yet now, finally, it had stopped, and the earth was recovering from it, slowly mending what we'd destroyed.

  Something unexpected happened that day. It was true that I hated the way the Elders had gone about things, the way we were all being funnelled toward a decided end. It was true that the lie they'd constructed and maintained was unfair to us, oppressive, even cruel. But none of that - absolutely none of it - meant that they were mistaken about our species. All of their rules, secrets, strategies, and actions weren't a measure of how misled they were, it was a measure of how desperate they were, of how far they'd been driven to do what was right with a creature that was wrong. It all clicked into place. After listening to Kara, if there were any doubts in my mind, if there was any part of me that was still wavering, still holding off, waiting to make a definitive choice, it was suddenly gone. Something inside of me caved in looking at those waves, trying to hear the same voices that she was hearing, ones that spoke of the great consequence of our collective actions, yet also of the chance to start things anew.

  Yes. I had finally been pushed over the edge. I believed. I'd become a believer.

  Which, incidentally, was exactly what Mikkel thought I would be - and was busily preparing himself to deal with.

  * * *

  11

  The manner in which the Elders talked about the expedition, the way it was unquestionable, imminent, and the way it was taken for granted that everything would go wonderfully, all helped to engrain the idea of becoming the leader in my mind. But as much as I wanted to be chosen, I never really thought of it as an exceptional opportunity, rather, it was just a better alternative than staying on the island under ever-stricter control. However, when they brought me into the disclosed wing of the Great Hall and showed me some of the things that I'd be delving into throughout my training, that all changed. Every map that they unrolled across the table, every sea chart they held up against a wall, every atlas they rotated to face me, all began to open my eyes to something I hadn't seen before: the magnificence of adventure itself.

  It struck me, except for our island, I'd never visited, known, traversed, explored, or touched any of the vast globe of possibilities that existed. But the expedition would do this. We would be seeing the unseen! There would be something to learn with every mile travelled, in the same way that we'd learned as children - touching things for the first time, turning them over in our hands, fascinated - there would be a new lesson under every leaf and around every corner, something fresh to our senses, some event we'd never before experienced. And as soon as I realized this, something else deep inside of me amended itself, and the thought of setting sail out across the ocean had become something unbelievably intoxicating.

  I would put my hands down on either side of the atlases and lean overtop of them, arms straight, eyes scanning the terrain like a hungry frigate bird. There were waves of sand that must have spread out like the limitless ocean, forests that belted across the belly of the largest landmasses, freshwater lakes that one could sail in for days without seeing a shore, jungles, grasslands, tundra, and strangest of all, ice, endless sheets of ice that were kilometres thick, swathing whole continents! And mountains, folds and ripples of the earth's crust that had been heaved into the air so high that the temperatures plummeted, and something called snow (which, incidentally, looked exactly the same as ice on the maps, so I'm not sure why they insisted on calling it something different) stuck to the peaks like saliva to teeth.

  And this was only the land. One of the first things that I'd realized while being lectured and taught about the different periods of our atrocious history was that, besides the sameness of the violence, oppression, cruelty, etc., the various cultures of the world had been quite distinct from one another. They spoke different languages, ate different foods, believed in different gods, and built different styled dwellings; and this would be yet another thing the expedition would learn about, simply by walking through and inspecting the ruins. I would flop into the chair behind me, my mind teeming with new questions, and the enticing thought of answering every one of them in our travels; and in the meantime, I decided to set out and gather as much groundwork as I possibly could.

  I was a model student, and seemed to become more devoted with every new thing that they taught me. As time passed, and my opinions began to match theirs more acceptably, more naturally, new doors opened for me, as we were finally free to move away from the slow ideological subjects, and into topics that I was more enthusiastic about.

  Though, admittedly, the Elders hadn't really set out to spark my imagination, nor had they intended on spending any great amount of time teaching me about the landscapes in different corners of the world, or about the cultures that once existed there, which, of course, was what I was most curious about. No. What the training was intended to do was solidify my understanding of the maleficence of our species, and then begin building the skills and knowledgebase that I would need to run the expedition should I be chosen. The interesting things were only a spin-off from the requisites, and they tried to make sure I wasn't too distracted by them.

  They gave me a lot of information to go through, study, and then discuss, and after I was caught once, pouring over maps and encyclopaedias instead of reading the material they'd given me, they took their role of 'keeping my interests focused' quite seriously. They would often walk in to check that I was learning the right material, and sometimes even sit down with me and ask me to summarize what I'd just read. But I didn't find this frustrating; because they weren't really keeping me from my interests, they were only forcing me to be more creative in researching them. And I soon discovered that I could pick up obscure, and often even forbidden facts from almost anything they gave me. I spent a lot of my time reading between the lines of the history books, uncovering all sorts of answers to outstanding questions. For instance, I'd lear
ned from reading about kings and queens that, in fact, men and women did have long-lasting relationships and often even lived together, that our gestation period was nine months, and that our offspring seemed to be decidedly adept at killing one another off to vie for 'crowns' and 'thrones'.

  But among this swamp of both revealing and interesting information, sometimes I was given material to study, which, regardless of how hard I looked, didn't seem to have anything hidden beneath the surface. When this happened, it was just a matter of bowing my head, reading it, and memorizing points to talk about later. Of all the Elders, Chalmon - who was a stocky man with a pale complexion and strange, pitted features on his cheeks - was the one who seemed most determined to give me these boring topics to study. Sometimes he would come to visit me while I was wading through volumes of his tedious selections, and ask me about what I was reading as if he were genuinely interested, the tone of his voice rising enthusiastically at the end of every sentence. I would reply in the dreariest monotone I could muster, but he never seemed to get the hint. However, little did I know that, one day, it would be his dull subject matter that would lead me to stumble upon the most dangerous thing that existed in the disclosed wing; and it certainly wasn't censored facts or volatile information that was buried inside one of his books, but rather a tiny wafer of metal that I discovered, and only because the book was so boring.