by Sam Smith
For a psychologist Leon Reduct was a very passionate man. (Or was the psychologist, aware of its power, putting on a show of passion for me?)
"History is subjective," I conceded.
"History is the available facts. The Leander Interface is the only chronicle we found. That is what our history knows. What I have since been told of their Knowledge is that there existed three other chronicles that weren't found. In each chronicle the emphasis was vastly different. One stressed the power of legend, another cosmic connections — largely mathematical — and the third was more or less a manual on breeding. History is also what we don't know."
One evening, tired of the act of reading, I wandered through to Leon's cabin and asked what Talkers liked to be called now. It couldn't be Hybrids, I reasoned, as they had now bred several generations among themselves.
As he turned from his notepad he winced for me in anticipation of my reaction,
"The One." He shook his head, "I know... I know it has religious overtones, smacks of totalitarianism. But, logically, what else could they have called themselves? Think on it."
"What," I smirked, "are individuals known as? One of One?"
"They call themselves," Leon bestowed a smile on me — his clever (too clever?) choice — "as we do, people."
Carrying my reading with me to lunch I tapped a finger on the page,
"In early breeding programmes, pre-hybridisation on Valask, Nautili in psychosis killed themselves." I flipped the book shut. "Self-immolation has always been a strategy open to both hybrid and Nautili. Why is this different?"
"Because all those deaths were for the greater good. These deaths are against the greater good, are harming the Knowledge."
"Talkers hated us too," I said the next mealtime. "Why aren't they holding our maltreatment of them responsible for these deaths?"
"They have hidden successfully from humankind for over 550 years. With no new human input into the Knowledge now for three centuries they can have only themselves to blame."
"Why isn't this suicidal urge some planetary disease acquired on Leander? These people must be, after all, the mutant descendants of those hybrid children born on Leander?"
"They have analyzed and analyzed Leander's residuals. A cocktail of toxics is all they can decide, origins and causes uncertain. But, yes, it is a worry in the Knowledge. I don't, however, think it's that which is increasing their suicide rate. More probably it has a mental, a psychological, cause."
"Why isn't it catatonia?" I dared air my little psychological knowledge.
"Catatonia is absolute passivity. Is as close to death you can get while still being consciously alive. This is suicide. This is active and deliberate self-destruction."
"They haven't bred a telepath monster? A free-floating psychosis in the Knowledge? A mental version of the Nautili beasts?"
"Could be. Like the nameless fear that comes in dreams. That has the power of remembered dreams. I have some books on dreams if you'd like to make copies..."
Leaving one meal table I asked,
"Are their partners still chosen via the Knowledge?"
"By and large, apparently, yes. But the strength of the yearning is diminishing. This too has been ascribed, associated with, the increase in suicides. This is a very worried species Okinwe."
While reading alone in my cabin, guessing that Leon wouldn't let me take the Chronicle with me, I also made notes: pp256 Leander Chronicle '...if conscious of death's coming, they leave behind one last whiff of regret. No pain, no anger, no remorse, just a wistful regret, an unspoken, "Not now", an unfulfilled longing for they know not what...’
From Leon's glimpsed research I also asked for a recording of an interview with a Talker, made a copy for myself, studied it many times with a morbid fascination.
Recorded during the disappearances, the hostility of the interviewer and the camera were almost palpable. Pretending to amicable inquiry of a Talker's mode of life, the interviewer made no mention of the missing Talkers. There arose gradually, however, a contemptuous quizzing of the Talker's every bland statement; the camera all the while lingering upon the male Talker's long body, the loincloth tucked between his short chubby legs.
"They still look like that?" I asked Leon.
"No. They've evolved. Their legs now measure 21 centimetres longer than tank-bred Talkers. There's also a uniformity of organ placement within the torsos becoming evident. Although, occasionally, there's a reversion to near Talker-type."
On our second to last meal I asked,
"Who's paying for this?" I indicated the ship, included us two in the calculation. "Not the TTF?"
The Talker Trust Fund had become, via its human executive board, a financial and political power about 200 years before, with the consequence that it had had to be famously disbanded.
"We are being financed by the Talkers," Leon replied, "but not via that Trust Fund. Apart from the name that had nothing to do with them. They've no need to advertise, are good at finance, have the speed and expertise of the Knowledge at their disposal. You will be well paid. First credits are already in your account."
This self-confessed aptitude for fiddling funds had given human conspiratists much room for the concoction of ever more bizarre and boring theories. None of which could be proven because our minds were being manipulated along with the finances.
However, as we neared our journey's end, the consideration of extra finances in my account was a most pleasing thought.
9
In swirls of white, green and blue the planet hung in the black under us. Just knowing what awaited me down there... I had never experienced excitement like it... As Leon sought a landing beacon I kept having to take deep breaths.
Coming down onto the daylit side we overflew green islands in a ruffled lilac sea below a lilac sky, slowed finally along a sward of green on the edge of a settlement. (Or so I came to think of such clusters of trees. The settlement from above had actually looked like a stand of trees. The houses were built in among the trees, the roofs fitting around the trunks.)
All that, in first impressions, I noticed. What I wanted to see most of all, though, were the people.
That wasn't easy.
They were so distant — across rippling grassland — my eyes blinking in the unaccustomed breeze. A group in among the trees and houses I took — more from their actions than from their stature — to be children.
From out of the settlement one person came along a path through the windswaying grass. Leon had told me to stay beside the ship. He had walked to meet this figure.
I had been expecting loincloths as in the film interview. This figure though, slightly taller than Leon, was wearing a calf-length tunic not that dissimilar to those currently in vogue in Space.
This adult — the tunic and the long hair wouldn’t give me a clue to the gender — peered over at me in the shade of the ship's wing. I peered back, trying to see how short the legs were, how long the body, how big the feet. The tunic, however, allowed only speculation. Maybe something in the way the figure walked..?
For all my uneasy inquisitiveness about this 'Hybrid' I was relieved to see the flesh and blood reality. Part of me — despite the journey, despite the Chronicle — the poet-skeptical had still suspected that this might all be an elaborate hoax, that I could be part of some bizarre psychological experiment... — I was therefore both relieved and apprehensive at sight of this my first Hybrid.
Or was it a Hybrid?
Time enough to find out later, I told myself as Leon returned hot and wind-bothered.
"We're to take one of their craft. He's given us a list of potential suicides for you to study. Fetch your suitcase."
10
In a small curved craft, enough room for two seats in its belly and some luggage behind, we flew North.
Apart from a few green open spaces most of the planet we overflew was wooded. And that being my first impression I will call the planet, for the purposes of this story, Arbora.
T
he man we were going to visit was in his mid-40s, lived alone near a mountain. The darkness, apparently, had been with him about a month.
Leon did not use the controls.
"Your contact, the man back there, Rynnl," Leon told me, "will program any coordinates that you might need. Just tell him what you want."
"How?"
Leon gave me a hand-sized communicator, showed me how to contact Rynnl. I asked him how I should pronounce the name. Sounded no more than the preliminary to a cough.
The downward curve of the planet flattened, curled upwards as we dropped quickly towards the treetops. Over to our right I saw the grey stack of a mountain. Our craft went swaying up a long wooded valley; and parked itself perfectly. (I had been braced for a sudden stop, but even in Space I hadn't known a smoother docking.)
Our craft's door opened behind and below us. Turning I followed Leon down steps onto bare earth.
Like those I had seen in the settlement this single house was built around and under trees. What I hadn't seen in the settlement, and which was here on a patch of grass beside the house, was another craft — larger than the one which had brought Leon and me here from the city.
Two hybrids came out of the white base of the craft. Above it was dark green.
Both hybrids were women. Both were wearing tunics. (How much influence did Space have on this planet? How much contact with Space to have this much influence?)
One woman's hair was grey. The other had hers dark and cropped short, her skin a mottled dark brown. Neither expressed surprise at seeing us. Neither smiled a greeting to us.
"He's dead," the grey-haired one remembered to (was reminded to?) tell Leon. "About half a day."
"How?"
The other hybrid pointed to a branch growing out from beside the parking bay. I thought I could detect scuff marks among the lichen (where a rope had been tied?)
Leon pulled a face in acknowledgment. The two hybrids turned about, went slowly up the steps into their craft, the steps closing immediately behind them and the craft rising above the treetops.
We were left on the grass outside the house. I still hadn't seen the length of their legs.
"Why didn't Rynnl tell us he was dead?" I asked Leon.
"You'll find this happening a lot." Leon looked around the valley, turned towards the house, "You tell them what you want. They arrange it for you. They don't think to ask you why you're doing what you're doing, assume you know all that they know and that you have your reasons for doing what you want to do."
While talking I made an idle inspection of the house: all the windows were high up under the eaves.
"Rynnl did not tell them what we were coming here for?" I persisted.
"To investigate areas of darkness. Which are slow to disperse. Some of that darkness is probably still here."
I looked around the bright green-reflected light of the rooms, out through the door and down the winding valley, leaves flickering underside white in a slight breeze. There was no darkness in that valley: it had left with the two hybrids.
"Can I stay on here a few days?" I asked Leon, "Acclimatize?" I wanted to get the feel of the place, breathe its air. "See it," I quoted a classic, "with the emotionally uncluttered eye of a stranger."
Leon studied me. Decided,
"Sure. I'll send the transport back."
11
By the time Leon left it was late afternoon. He'd insisted on finding the kitchen for me, what food was available, what bathing facilities, where I would sleep...
"It'll help me towards understanding," I stopped him, "if I find out all these things for myself."
Leon, though still fussing, accepted that. He told me that he was going off-planet, would be back in about 22 days, in the meantime to contact Rynnl for anything I required. So that I wouldn't feel too isolated he'd send the craft back to me the moment he landed.
I asked why I couldn't use the dead man's craft parked beside ours in the double bay. (I glanced covertly to the branch.)
"They probably have some plan for his. Best if we stick to the one assigned to you."
I thanked Leon for his concern and I told him to go, stood on the grass to watch the small dark craft slip down the green valley, rise to the white and blue sky.
Alone now, I felt that I had arrived; gave a sigh of satisfaction and returned indoors.
First I sat in the wide chair in the main living area. Was it my imagination or was the chair seat lower for shorter legs? I listened, for answer, to the cry of a distant bird, to the movement of air past the open door.
I wondered why the door kept attracting my eye, realized that it was because I couldn't see out of any of the ceiling height windows. Nor were there any pictures on the walls, nor any screens.
Rising I wandered through the rest of the house. No pictures. No screens. None of the means of communication needed by the inhabitants of Space to be in contact with the rest of the human race; none of the cultural gewgaws necessary to establish social status.
I assumed that day that all the windows were up near the ceiling so that at night the house lights wouldn't be visible from space. Even then that seemed hardly logical, and I suspected that the real reason had more to do with the Knowledge.
While in the kitchen I made myself a snack, sat in there and looked at the bare walls. Tiring of those walls I made another inner survey of the house, guessing where the trunks of the sheltering trees were.
Outside I found steps up to the sloping roof. Walking hollowly about up there I worked out which were the rooms below. It was a silly inconsequential game; but I was happy to be at last by myself, enjoying not being watched over.
By this time the sky had become a violet colour and darkness was collecting in among the valley trees.
I was gazing down the valley when I became aware of the craft dropping from the sky — at first I'd thought it was a bird. But on it came with mechanical certainty, and slotted itself into the parking bay.
No-one came out of the craft. That didn't mean that there wasn't anyone in it. I unlocked the steps from outside, looked within. Empty. Leon had gone. I was truly alone.
That day I had eaten a dead man's food, sat in a dead man's chair, and that night I slept in a dead man's bed; and none of it felt wrong, weighted me with unease. What, in that valley, had caused him to kill himself? The offending branch gave me no answers, was but of a convenient height, one branch among many.
I stayed three days, moved the chair to the doorway and sat curled in it.
Looking down that long valley I was happy just to watch the changes wrought throughout a single day. The sky alone kept changing colour — from light blue through purple to red and all combinations and shades in between. While clouds, floating over, went from white through grey to violet.
Within the acreage of the valley a breeze passing by turned the silver-bottomed leaves like shoals of aquarium fish. Of a morning the valley had clouds anchored to one side, leaking up into the sky out of the taller trees. On a clear mid-morning every leaf seemed to be etched against its neighbour and the mountain's rock rose clear and bare of vegetation up into a bald blue sky. The early afternoon sunshine came reflected back from the valley in a myriad points of leaf lights.
Rain, the third morning, came in drifts and drapes up the valley. Even its confining drips and dribbles, though, made their own melodies.
Here was different to anywhere I'd been. Granted on the surface of my city/world there had been valleys, woods, rocks and rain; but one had always been aware that they'd been strategically placed, even the weather orchestrated.
On Arbora all was accidental creation. Below me were no chambers, but a crust of solid rock held by gravity to a core of molten magma. Just walking here felt dangerous. Added to which I'd heard, in the woods, the calls of many untamed birds, and of possibly larger beasts.
I'd been assured, by Leon, that all the planet's fauna would be more afraid of I than I of it. Nonetheless I had to talk myself into going for a walk down the
valley. I heard birds go flapping away from me, slapped at some insects, but I saw not one larger creature.
Looking back up at the house — I couldn't see it, simply knew where it was — I told myself again that a man had killed himself there. It meant no more than the deaths caused by my slapping at insects, no more than the unicellular life I was squashing underfoot.
I even took myself down the valley one clear night, gazed up at the stars flickering through the planet's gases. Apart from that flicker and the chill air moving around me I could have been in space. Nor could I see any light from the house. (Shutters came down over the windows as soon as the lights came on. So why were they up under the eaves?)
Returning indoors I told myself that, given a book more or two, a little screen entertainment, I could happily have spent my days in that valley. Which wasn't why I was on the planet. I recorded as much.
While I had my notepad out I thought of writing an experiential poem. But, not only were the experiences too new to write of, already they were too many.
On the fourth day I forced myself to leave.
12
On the hand communicator Leon had left me I called Rynnl.
The conversation wasn't the easiest I'd had, pauses were many and so long that several times I thought I might have lost contact and I repeated my request, my inquiry. Thus, although the conversation must have taken 30 minutes, the information that passed between us was very little.
I told him that I would be able to learn little more where I was, that I'd better see the next person most at risk. He told me the name of a man on an island and gave me the coordinates. I said that I wasn't happy giving my craft the coordinates, could he do them for me from where he was? He said yes. I asked when I could leave. He said whenever I wanted to leave. I asked if the coordinates had been given to my craft. He said that they had. What do I do, I asked. Do? he said. To leave, I said. He said to go into the craft, close the door, and tell it to leave.