by A. E. Shaw
In her little green shoes, tapping and sliding across the floor, Selina was as complete as she had ever been. She found rhythm and music inside herself, and brought it to the tips of her numbed toes in perfect order. She twirled and spun and was graceful and elegant and yet she knew how to surprise and delight with movements unknown. She had learnt to dance in a vacuum, with the slightest of guidance and the minimum of space. Unconfined, the result was pleasantly disturbing.
The man began to clap, and Selina understood she was to stop. She turned to him, eyeing his unusually open demeanour. Most men she knew were nervous, hunched, quick and sly, or talkative and sweet. This man was so relaxed, so quiet that she felt unusually drawn to him. His eyes were bright and warm, milky and dark all at once.
The man turned to her mother. “She will be perfect. There’ll be a few tests. The immune system must be strong.”
“That’s fine,” said her mother, “There’s no reason for her to be anything but perfect.”
That night Selina slept on a feather bed for the first time. The room was silent. She woke up every other moment, panicked, for her family were nowhere to be seen, and the silence was new and oppressive.
A couple of restings later, she’d become used to this. And then one day she was told it was time to go “to the hospital”. Selina was not afraid. She’d no idea what that was.
A ring of people encircled the building, people in clothes the likes of which Selina had never seen before, dark and close-fitting, instead of loose and pale, torn and tied from whatever could be made and found, swathed well about the body to protect it from the heat of the sun and the chill of the night. Worse, though, these people in the dark suits wore masks that covered their faces, masks with long snakelike things attached to them that ran to their backs, where they had great, inexplicable humps.
She wanted to ask her mother what these things were, if those were humans inside there, and, if so, why they were dressed so, but her mother was fixed on the way ahead. The line of guards parted to allow her through. They did not need to speak to anyone at all.
Once through the surroundings, the hospital rose up high; white stone, great pillars stretching up into the sky.
She was whisked away, taken to a plain room coated in silvery metal which was cold against her skin. A nurse masked and bound in clean white clothing whisked and whipped at her with sharp objects for longer than Selina thought she could bear, and yet bear it she did, and without so much as a whimper. They withdrew blood in three places and caused her pain in at least two others, and then they cut away a chunk of her hair, and shone lights in her eyes, and Selina bit her lip and kept silent all the while.
Her mother didn’t ask her anything about it on their way home, which felt, after her time in opulence, twice as long and a thousand times as filthy as the journey there had done.
Shortly after this, Selina was taken to the castle.
Her dream extends to the last time she saw her mother. She can’t remember her scent, or, again, her face, but she remembers the warmth of her eyes, proud, just like every time she smiled and clapped and congratulated her on her dancing.
In the dream, reason once-removed from herself plays alongside her memories, contemplations come, wholly formed, debating whether or not her mother knew all along where she was going. If there was a plan that had been long-constructed. All she took from her childhood to this new life was her dancing: she danced, and danced, as far as she knew, only for herself. It never occurred to her that it was a strange existence, that it was peculiar that she was housed in this way apparently only to enable her to dance. Everything was presented as if it were the obvious and only option, and so, of course, it was. The idea of questioning, of thinking that other ways of living were available, was non-existent. Dancing seemed to be enough. And she’s missed it, she realises, now. She’s missed her family too.
There are tears running down her face, as she holds tighter to Alej, he an unconscious tether yanking her back from complete sadness. Alej registers her presence in his own sleep, where she forms a fond darkness in the back of his own dreams: a gentle sense that he’s not alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Book
The text is in strong font, thick letters that assault the eyes with a clarity and a ferocity no writing Aiden has ever encountered has had. It takes him a moment to recognise the letters for what they are.
So Aiden begins to read, his eyes finding themselves grateful for something so familiar as reading, his mind glad to be, and reading something new. Learning: that’s what this is, and what Aiden does.
How did it all begin? The everlasting question that drove a species to the edge of extinction.
These words alone grace the first page. Aiden reads them through multiple times, without understanding, before turning to the second.
Mankind searched in infinite vain for the truth about its own arrival on the shores of this planet. It has come no nearer consensus than the thought that either we spent generations stretching and wobbling our way out of the great and terrible seas until we developed legs, or, or, that a god - one God, some god, many gods - placed us here fully formed and ready and willing to live and serve until they decide to take us back into the blankness they made us from.
These ideas were once wielded like the sharpest weapons, used to separate one into many where divisions were unnecessary, developing details which created fear and ignorance. This construction lessened the powers of us all by keeping us apart. These questions of origin, of truth, they are finally questions of the Past. They are not our questions. Here we are finally able to escape their vicious insignificance.
The irrelevance of personal belief has, through my realisation of our family’s great dream, been replaced by the wisdom of personal society: we all live to serve and be served, to learn and to teach, to speak and to listen. And with the world as it is at last, there is space to be heard, to imagine, to develop together.
Aiden pauses, imagines all he’s just read as a blanket, covering him. A fable, a story. Our family? Aiden knows the concept of family, but presumed it terribly dated.
He strokes the page with his finger, feels the slight raise of ink against textured, rippling paper, and closes his eyes for a moment, to see if he can recognise the letters from touch alone. He cannot, but senses that if he spent just a little longer trying, then he would be able to. Would he want to? His brain wanders and skips, and it is only when the wine, in his other hand, tilts in his wandering absence and spills a rivulet of red down onto the silk sheets that he’s snatched back into awareness. He chastises himself first for wasting the wine (as if there weren’t more than he could ever readily drink on the trolley) and second, for failing to concentrate. He sips once more, places the wine to one side, and continues.
In this new world, we are free of the concerns of old, for there is no longer anything to be gained from either separation or conflict. We are few, and we are wise. What our forefathers began, we perfect.
He reads these lines twice. There is a warmth to them, particularly to the word ‘perfect’, which he has aimed to centre himself about. And yet, the catch, already tweaking its way into his reactions. We and our sound so inclusive. This book said it was for him, but it speaks as if there were others of his value. It doesn’t speak to him in the way he’d presumed, with the reverence required. Still, of all the things he has learned, he understands well that a tale is never over until the final words are spoken. The moral of a story comes always at the end. At this point, the end is far from here.
We are at the sharp end of existence. We were forced to close our gates upon a would-be end of the world, and were it not for the greatness and wisdom of my ancestors, humanity itself would have been lost. If at any time you doubt this life, then take a moment to reflect on how unlikely it is, amidst the terror of the Outside, that we are here to express that doubt at all.
But doubt is precisely what Aiden is feeling, doubt cold and rigid as knife steel, doubt brought on
by this passage alone, his insides mushing and swivelling in reaction to the words as quickly as his mind takes them in. Even taking into account that the book is for him, it’s refusing to address the residual peculiarity Aiden has, in which he understands that the world was made for him. It is not at all unlikely that he exists. He flips back one, two, three pages, skims them through again, hoping words will leap out and settle his existential confusion, but they don’t.
He takes a breath, the air in the room deep and tasting of grass and metal, of mud and sunshine. Aiden’s mind spins into a nonsense like a nursery rhyme he was never sung, as the wine swims about his half-fed insides, catching and shaping him into something soft and pliable, searching to fit - to find - a suitable mould to sink himself into.
So the book continues, promising looming disaster in its account of this miserable, fighting rising population. Aiden feels nothing where the text would have him have experience smelling fear, and his eyes consume the words ever faster, as he becomes hungrier. If he could just find the handle…then he can take a moment and eat, oh, to eat…
Humanity has never been able to agree upon its purpose, or, indeed, if purpose is a precondition of existence. The cracks between us become chasms, disagreements grow stronger and, however the earth itself tries to unite us, however it’s tried to set us back on the right path, whether with vast floods or great winters, with the shifting of lands and the creation of new valleys, with the explosions of mountains or the baking heat of a desert over land that begs for rain: however it tries to display to us that ultimately our pride in our convictions isn’t worth a single second of a single life, every collective attempt of first the separate lands, such as they were, and then…
On, and on it goes, flowing disregard for punctuation notwithstanding. The solid letters describe the horror of the Outside, the fury of a nature covered in crawling, consuming beings, who, in Aiden’s mind’s eye, are nothing more than cavemen of ancient times, the sort who came long before the beginning of his social and political lessons. Why must he read this miserable recording of such an unpleasant history? And yet he cannot leave it here.
The dominant arc of human nature has been intolerance. It shaped everything: every war and ruling we have embarked upon has always been for protection against a perceived enemy, for posturing to put off this enemy, for self-aggrandising reasons. Very little had ever been done solely for the good of humanity as a whole before our plans came to fruition.
My methods might look drastic to a benevolent history. I ask that you remember only this: I succeeded. Where all other custodians of our species have fallen, I have risen. I need no forgiveness, for none remaining could hold a grudge: that I have saved all that could be saved is without question.
And Aiden is still sitting here none the wiser as to what exactly it is that the author has done, nor as to why it is written at him. He pauses, and hunger makes itself known.
The food is cold, now, hours since it was brought to him, but Aiden doesn’t care. He wolfs down the rest of the meats and the cheeses, can’t get them to his stomach quickly enough. He knocks back the wine easily, rejoicing in the way his guts gurgle and fill, the physicality of filling himself with such a mix of flavours, the swathe of textures in his mouth, the sensation of food in abundance. He eats with neither care nor dignity, taking to a dish of yellow-gold custard with his hands, filling his mouth with the buttery sweetness, licking the remnants greedily from the sleek-smooth clay and sucking his fingers absolutely clean.
At the end of it, Aiden is sleepy and warm, breaking into sweat, strained to comfortable excess. This is fortunate, for as he picks up the book again, starts to read it again, and as it finally launches into a grand account of What Happened, comfort is something increasingly lacking.
The streets are not what they were. Where we used to tread golden paths of opportunity, of hope, where we used to lead and follow as best befitted us, so we came to tire, to drudge, and to fear. Times of development, in the north, then the south, then again in the north, then catchup and surpass from the south, and ever after north and south pushing against and leaning upon each other, so the endless battle for superiority and for truth took shape. So it came to be that the world grew smaller, as land was saturated with industry and divided ever smaller by wealth and poverty, crushed closer when the waters rose and the earth cracked.
As each group flocked here, to the remaining shreds of world, they fought for languages and land, quibbled over ethics and morals, and, at the end of it all, found nothing could fight like numbers, and so they bred. Everything was swallowed in a tide of people, people, more and more, and whilst everyone agreed that something must be done, so none of them were, themselves, willing to forgo what was referred to as their right to bear children, for then they would risk a life in which they did not have the numbers to protect themselves, for reasons that, thankfully, have dissolved into time as easily as their bodies have.
Even the Earth itself tried to rebel against the drive for control by population. Diseases came and went, and, rather than taking hold and halving populations as all had once assumed they would, humans found themselves increasingly strong and resistant. We developed survival methods for starvation, for thirst, against filth and against the death-diseases, bodies fighting to survive, even though their worth had long since vanished.
The leaders of the free world, and the captive world at that, crumbled into insignificance, outnumbered in turn by the many, ousted from any sense of power by new and vast crowds who needed only the most basic of things to survive. Armies were outrun and disinterested when they themselves realised that their right to bear children was as at stake as everyone else’s. The rebellion was far-flung and vivid, but it came too late; overrun too soon.
The masses were swollen and undulating, exhausted, ghosts of beings yet still unable to die of anything but the oldest of ages. This final society was the most caring, most dedicated there had ever been, and yet, and yet, all that could happen was that it would rot. My son, I wonder if you have knowledge and perception enough that you can guess our plan, that you have inherited our excellence, that you already understand what comes next?
My son? Aiden reads the words and repeats the words but he does not understand the words. Is the man who gave him this book his father? If so, why would he not speak with more certainty of his son’s excellence? And why give him a book, and not speak of these things in person?
And if it is his father, is this, then, his inheritance? Is this to be his home now? Is this what he has been being prepared for, for all this time? And if so, what of Alej and Selina? Are they, too, related to His Excellency, to Aiden himself? Or are they, as he has come to assume, the servants and minions that should be grateful to have been around him at all? Aiden’s excellent sense of superiority is rattled by the empty tone of the book, and the extent to which he cannot understand it.
He puts the book aside at last, reluctantly, but he must, for he is so full and tired that he can now do no more than stare, words rolling, devoid of meaning, around the back of his mind. A father? A miserable history of a miserable world which does not connect, yet, at all with the beautiful emptiness that lay outside the mountain.
He pushes thoughts to one side, and takes the last untouched item from the trolley, a crystal-cut decanter of bronzed water, shining and enticing. He tips the glass neck to his lips and lets liquid trickle into his mouth, expecting sweetness and gold, a nectar of some sort.
It is none of these things. Rather, it’s like drinking smoke and coal, chewing damp wood, warming as a heavy blanket in front of a blazing fire. It comes as a balm to the dark twisting confusion of everything he’s read, and with a few more swallows the stuff escalates to be the very point and meaning to his life.
Draining the glass, he slides between the cold sheets at last, drowsy beyond logical thought. Everything sinks into delicious quiet.
In his first sleep, more a delicate unconsciousness and delirium, Aiden is rolling lithe down the mo
untain, warm as new bread in sunlight, rolling forever, along landscapes that are empty and waiting to furl themselves about him, shape themselves for him.
When he comes to, the room is dark, but for a tiny lasting flame in a golden bracket affixed to the wall next to his bed. The trolley is gone. The decanter is on the nightstand, and when he reaches for it, it is filled with water, and not the strong dense goodness of before. And the water is not the chill, mineral-enriched water that he has grown up with, rather, this water is soft and substantial, delicious, and refreshing. Aiden gulps it gratefully, and sinks back into enveloping folds of material, clutching at his diamond collar, back at his throat where it belongs.
His second sleep is dreamless and complete.
The knock at his door evades the depth of his sleep, and it is with great confusion that he opens his eyes to the sight of Katya, pressing cautiously at his bare shoulder with cold fingertips.
He shivers away from her because she is too close to him; she does not know him, and Aiden is not used to being prodded by anyone, let alone strangers. In addition to this, his body is sore. He discovers an increasing amount of pains as he moves, sense-memories of being slung about and beaten torrenting back across his brain in a way that makes him shake, and, when Katya tries to reach further to touch him, reassuringly, shout.