by Sam Smith
Slowly I turn.
I cannot see the creature, sense only the forest trees as tall shapes all around me.
Has it gone?
I hear again the rasp of its breath behind me. I know its tongue is red, teeth white, eyes predatory keen.
I am about to die.
But not yet.
Heart still, I turn again, feel the forest branches turn above me, feel the creature lightly rustle behind me.
I am going to die.
All has the sharp clear sounds of fever — a falling leaf sawing through the air, crashing to the ground.
Sweat prickles from my tight forehead. My heart thumps like a bruise.
I am going to die.
But not yet.
The beast exhales damp and warm upon my bare back. Feeling it raise itself on tiptoe, I turn.
The beast moves around behind me.
I will be glad of death when it comes.
39
Silent as a thief night had fled.
I lied on my ordinary bed in a room filled with morning's grey and white light.
Consciously I slowed my panting, told my heart be quiet; and, breathing slow and deep, I let the febrile terrors of night be slowly dispelled by the prosaic birdsong of morning.
I was tired though, desperate for sleep, frightened of its content.
Pulling into my mind images of a dark-haired girl with grey eyes and a smooth rounded abdomen, I turned her this way and that, smiled into her smile. But still the fear, pulsating up, stayed in my throat.
I pulled into my mind a girl with grey eyes and who had breasts that rose and fell with every step, every lift of her arm; a girl with a hand small and warm within my own.
Smiling I turned onto my side in bed. Cooler air was drawn down my back. The beast was behind me again, the fear instant.
40
The day laid heavily upon me. I couldn't be bothered with my swim, pushed my chair to the doorway, and sat looking down through the trees to the shined lake.
I was still there when Sririsl came back from the forest. The light was in my face.
"Are you unwell?" Sririsl asked.
I squinted up to her silhouette.
She would be remembering the state I was in when found in the desert. (There was an intrinsic unfairness in all my transactions with these people — that they should know so much of me, I so little of them.)
Thinking further on what she had said — my brain was slow that morning — I realized that I didn't feel so good, had put it down to the weather.
"I keep having these dreams," I heard myself tell her. "Do you dream?"
She wearily let her collecting bags slip off her thin shoulders. Then, with stiff movements, she turned herself around, lowered herself onto her haunches and sat beside the door, her back against the wall. I heeled the chair into the doorway so that I'd be able to see her face. Not that it would tell me much.
"Yes," Sririsl had consulted the Knowledge. "I dream."
"What about?"
"Usually about something that's been bothering me." She shrugged uncomfortably, "Of my man. Sometimes."
In that half-shrug, in the tilt of her grey head, there had been something sadder than grief, an acceptance of all human mortality?
"You miss him still?" I asked reaching across to her hand atop her knee and laying mine with a pat atop hers.
Sririsl looked long at my young hand, a close study of it; until, so conscious was I of my hand being there, that I withdrew it.
“Yes," she smiled at me; and I remarked on the almost human smile — of warmth, of understanding. Of gratitude?
"Yes," she said. "I do miss him. But not so much as once I did." And she smiled at me again.
This was not Sririsl's usual quizzical smile at my non-hybrid novelty. There was a genuine liking for me in this smile...
"Your dreams bother you?" she said.
I had looked away.
"They're so vivid," I told her. (My turn this day to be slow in responding.) "They're so real. I live them. They exhaust me."
Tell that to your Knowledge, I told her eyes. I can't take much more.
"I can get Rufena to bring something over to help you sleep."
"I'd still dream."
"Maybe not."
"My dreams, before this, I used to think of as my conscience speaking to me. These dreams, though, seem to have nothing to do with what's happened. Maybe more to do with what's about to happen. Nor are they unfulfilled desires. I don't know..."
"Rufena," Sririsl touched my elbow, "would not mind coming."
"Thanks, but I'd rather not."
For the chance of seeing Rufena again I considered changing my mind, asking her to bring something, which I wouldn't then use. I didn't want to voluntarily drug myself; but nor did I wish to enter into even innocent deceptions.
"Whatever the cause," I told Sririsl, "I feel these dreams are important, that they're trying to tell me something. I feel..." I hesitated, didn't want to give my suspicions away, didn't want to insult with my suspicions. "I suspect," double-bluff I decided, "that the dreams might be a side-effect of your Knowledge. Of living so close to so many telepathists."
Sririsl and the Knowledge considered that hypothesis.
"Thought is an electro-chemical process," she declared. (I was beginning to instantly recognize when Sririsl was quoting from the Knowledge.) "Digestion requires the body's own manufacture of the right enzymes. Wrong food can equal wrong thought. Thought is more than stimulus. All of We don't know who We are. How can single you? There must always be mysteries. Dreams are dreams. Self switched off. Sense creating kinds of sense...
“That's all we know at the moment."
We had become silent. Wanting speech I touched my fingertips to the age-freckled back of her hand upon her knee. Again she made a study of the two hands, again looked around to me with that warm smile.
"Why doesn't your other daughter come to visit you?"
"Only Rufena lives near."
Sririsl consulted the Knowledge, decided I needed to know more,
"Ours is an unusual distaff line. Some very strong bonds. Not all my offspring though. Only Rufena. A stubborn girl."
We had sunk again into silence. I needed the companionship of talk. Of some human noise.
"I thought you sang?" I said. "In the Chronicle, on Leander, they sang. I've heard no-one singing here."
"We used to. Something's happened to us though. We grow less and less. Have little to sing about."
"Pity."
Sririsl nodded. She smiled, sat smiling and nodding to herself, as if silently listening to and rehearsing a song.
"Right," she said, lifted her old chin and let the song out to the air.
I didn't understand all the words — names of creatures, of plants — but enough to know, from the melody if not the meaning, that the song was in praise of life.
After my applause and Sririsl's pleased smile with herself, we floated away into silence again.
"You want," Sririsl was looking slyly around to me, "Rufena to come here again?"
"That's up to you. To her," I said carefully, but could feel myself blushing. Sririsl laughed, used my arm to haul herself up off the floor and, laughing some more, she left.
Rufena didn't come that day.
I realized that I had been nervously waiting for her when, that evening, Sririsl, not Rufena, came into my house. Sririsl returned the anthology to my bookshelf, smiled a thank you.
41
That evening, considering the life-prolonging importance I had attached to the anthology, I decided that the time had come to again take stock, to make a record of my fears and suspicions to date.
"First my dreams," I said, and reviewed them all, starting with the previous night's terror, ending with the dream of assassination on the night of Meffo's death. (Was this night to be the night of Sririsl's death? To prevent her I could physically stay with her; but, if I couldn't change her mind, then it would only be a putting of
f of the day. And her last smile hadn't betokened suicide. And, were I to impose my presence on her, might it not make her think I expected her to kill herself? And thus her thoughts would centre on suicide? Thus I would have caused that which I wished to prevent. Now, and ultimately, it was her choice.)
"Never before in my life," I told my notepad, "have I had dreams of such clarity, such intensity. The only conclusion can be that this state I'm in — and Leon Reduct has informed me that I am part of this experiment — is due to my being here.
"Now I haven't been on any other natural planets. These vivid dreams therefore could be a consequence of my simply being upon a natural planet. (Hallucinogens have been popular among planetary cultures: who knows what was here on Arbora before the hybrids' arrival? Who knows what remains in the planet's ecosystem?)
"I think, though, given the peculiarities of the present inhabitants of this planet, that my dreams are a direct/indirect consequence of the Knowledge.
"The first dream, I believe, was a definite side-effect of Meffo's suicide. The power of her emotions somehow transmitted her anguish to me, which — because I am not of the Knowledge — got transmuted into a dream about assassination, about death.
"The other dreams, once I'd become sensitized (attuned?) to that final despair, have been provoked by the last thoughts of other suicides. My mind is, I believe, on the periphery of the Knowledge."
At that point I took a deep calming breath, and looked about my living room for eavesdroppers. (I'd already decided that the hybrids, given the all-pervasiveness among themselves of the Knowledge, wouldn't have adopted the snoop culture of mechanized eavesdropping popular among many in Space.)
I went on,
"I believe that the Knowledge has become, has long been, a power unto itself, independent of the hybrids; is now a being all its own, with individual hybrids no more than its cells. Now, like any other creature, its one aim is to survive. It will therefore protect itself from anything it perceives as a threat.
"The first manifestation of the Knowledge's independence was when Hybrids were still Talkers and human politicians were trying to come to power by manufacturing hatred of them. The Knowledge it was who decided that all Talkers should leave. The Knowledge it was who then decided that Talkers should breed among themselves. The Knowledge it was who chose their partners for them.
"I believe, therefore, for reasons not yet known, that the Knowledge is actively directing certain of its people to kill themselves. (Because, within it, they somehow pose a threat to the Knowledge? Because their lack of commitment is undermining the Knowledge? Like tumours they have to be excised? However, it being a self-conscious entity, it has to hide the truth from itself, thus it makes the deaths seem like individual suicides?)
"Or has the Knowledge itself become a mindless beast? Is the Knowledge the beast who is behind me? Reaching out to me? Not yet able to make full contact? And so is threatening me?"
I finished my notepad entries that night by wondering aloud what was to be gained by staying with Sririsl beside the lake. (Assuming, that is, that she didn't kill herself.)
"Nothing appears to be happening here. Sririsl doesn't act as if she's about to kill herself. (Is the something I want to happen, I ask myself, her suicide?)"
I had to think hard on that.
No, I decided, I had become fond of my grizzled Sririsl, did not desire her dying. But I was on Arbora to study death. What then was I to do?
In idly looking over the other coordinates that Rynnl had provided me with — in the making of contingency plans for where next I was bound should Sririsl die — I had realized that my research area covered a whole hemisphere. How many other planets did the Hybrids have, I had wondered, thinking back to Leon's 27 other research assistants. What scale of self-murder was I here caught up in? What would I learn running from place to place?
"Should Sririsl live beyond this night," I declared, and in saying it I was suddenly confident that she would, "and as she continues to be declared at risk, then I will wait on the answers here at this lake."
42
I am standing before a long table. At the table are sitting three people with the flat referring-back faces of hybrids.
"So you're the one stealing our dreams," the woman in the centre says.
"It's true!" I exclaim, happy to be proven right.
"Silence!" the man from the desert shouts, his mouth huge. I recognize the woman as Meffo.
"And keep still," Meffo is not friendly here. "Stop shuffling your feet."
The man from the island nods, looks me over and nods.
"First witness!" Meffo calls to the side.
Sririsl comes into the room.
"Not you," I say, feel tears forming. "Not you."
"No," She lifts a reassuring hand towards me. "This side of the table we're alive still."
"Silence!" the man from the desert shouts, jaw hinged open. He adds quietly, to me — a reminder of his desert — "We must have silence."
"Like a still pool," I smile to at last understand.
"Yes."
Smiling I look around to Sririsl. We two are in our ordinary nakedness. The three behind the table are uncomfortable in new tunics. How, I wonder, do I know what the two men looked like alive?
"Witnesses must give Evidence," the island man kindly tells Meffo, nodding. "That is their function."
"First," Meffo tetchily tells him, "we need an Incident. Tribunals investigate Incidents."
"Depositions! We also need Depositions," the island man becomes happily enthusiastic. "We can make a study of the Depositions, find Inconsistencies."
"No No. We need to find out what we're supposed to find out," the desert man blushingly interjects. "Investigations work always towards a Conclusion. How can we be expected to Investigate if we don't know what the Conclusion is?"
"Possibly," Rynnl has come up behind me, "I can help."
Rynnl is smooth and smarmy here, rubs his hands together,
"If you'll allow me to put this whole Predicament into its long-term Perspective..."
"No No. Investigations always have Parameters." Island man is getting heated. "We must keep within Parameters."
"What though," I hold out my arms appealingly to them all, turn in my nakedness from one to the other, don't know what I'm going to say, just wanting to take part, "What though of the internal universes of my body? The inner cosmos of my brain? The prehistory of my being? No-one, not one of you, is privy to those."
"This Tribunal has the Authority," Meffo glares at me.
"Come now..." Island man reaches along the table to calming pat her. He is too far away, which leaves him overbalanced and feeling foolish. Nevertheless he quickly composes himself, addresses us beyond the table,
"What if we were all, instead, to investigate The Flux? How best do we maintain The Flux? I, myself, posit that abrupt, that sudden arbitrary change is best for all people, or they sink into vegetative states. Stasis is to be abhorred. That way lies sterility. We have to make changes or become changed."
Desert man and Meffo make the kind of grimaces that say they've heard all this before. But behind me Rynnl says,
"Yes," thoughtfully, pleased with what he heard — new to him from the island man.
"Silence!" shouts Desert man, mouth huge again.
I too agree with The Flux statement: it makes sense of everything.
"Stop thinking!" Meffo snaps. Of course our thoughts are attuned. No they're not, I think.
"Yes they are," she says, leers. The island man nods, looks me over and nods.
* * * * *
I awoke.
* * * * *
In the clearmindedness in the middle of that night I knew that, in some way, they had entered my mind. I knew, with absolute certainty, that I was under threat.
And now that I knew, I realized — my thoughts beginning to fragment into wakefulness — the fear of intrusion had gone. I knew also, violation accomplished, there was no way that they'd drive me to su
icide.
The fight was on.
43
I'd increased my morning swim so much that now I aimed myself out to the centre of the lake; or as near as I could judge its centre, the lake being long and thin and curved at one end. Our houses were at the straight end.
This morning I was on my outward swim, had settled myself — head down — into a steady rhythm. But I became aware, slowly, of something out of synchronization.
Not wanting to stop, to upset my stroke, I suspected that a wind had found its way down the lake, had ruffled up a few waves. No waves though were catching at my arms.
Stroke and breathing thrown into confusion I had to stop.
In the water beside me was another head. Rufena had been swimming on my blind side. She laughed,
"You didn't know I was there."
Gathering my breath I shook my head,
"I heard something." I blew water out of my face, "I wasn't sure."
Two hot faces grinned at one another. We trod water.
"You haven't reached the middle yet," Rufena told me. Sririsl usually came to watch my morning swim, waited for me on the beach. I looked back across the water. She wasn't there this day.
"She's getting the eggs," Rufena told me.
"Let's swim," I said.
For the last part we swam with our heads companionably erect. Rufena looked to me when we reached what she judged to be the centre. I nodded. We turned, put our heads down; and we began the long haul back.
Glancing over to her every few strokes I wondered what she was doing there that morning. Oddly I was more uncomfortable talking to Rufena — who was of my own age — than I was talking to Sririsl, who was twice my age and allegedly suicidal. Which was my purpose in being on Arbora. Which is what put me at ease around her — I knew my role. I had no clear idea, though, what Rufena wanted from me, or how I was supposed to behave.
It was most pleasant, however, to have someone to swim beside.