by Sam Smith
Though young I was not a primitive. Nor was I insensitive to the moods of others. I didn't always understand, however, why Rufena didn't want to have sex with me.
Menarche was obvious. And I was happy for her then just to visit me, for us to lay wrapped warmly together. Other times too, when my ardour and energy were not matched by hers, or when she seemed removed from me, then too I didn't want to impose my lust upon her.
But, in love with Rufena, I wanted her to be a part of me, for me to be a part of her, for us two to be one. One of One: the Knowledge was never far away.
The Knowledge, however, was a part of Rufena. As I loved Rufena then I would have to learn to live with the Knowledge, with the past and present of a whole people.
Not that the Knowledge was always at the forefront of her mind, nor mine. Some days, brimful of tenderness, we'd both lay our palms along the other's cheeks and, our faces so framed, we'd make minute study of one another's every feature. None other but us two was so engrossed in that study.
And at those times, overcome with affection, I'd feel myself melting into her face, until it became as a mirror. One.
Other times though (moments later) her attention slid from me, the gaze went inward; and I knew, that although she might be taking physical comfort from my presence, her thoughts were far from me.
To make minute study of her face then was to see the 500 years of history that had been the making of her, and of which she knew all and I knew so little. The male erection, however, creates a mentality which feels it can wipe away whole worlds with desire... 19 I may have been, but that I knew for a priapic illusion.
Only a bore forces his passion on another; and I did not see myself as a bore. Rufena was still with me; I was still allowed to hold her; and, I told myself, that was enough.
57
Sunlight ripples warm over my length. My insides move warmly. All is as it should be; and yet...
Perplexed by the 'and yet' I look about me.
Suspended in its cradle my concertina body pulses behind me. Attendants flutter around and about, pass pre-digested food into my toothless maw, adjust temperature and waterflow. This they do by pushing further open some gates in the compound, drawing others closed.
With one last and satisfying peristaltic convulsion another egg pops out, is immediately basted in sperm. Whereupon a nursery fish takes it in her mouth and removes it to the hatchery.
The attendants peck free my pulsating body of parasites and soft crustaceans. My warm insides move comfortingly, sunlight ripples over me. All is as it should be; and yet...
58
As autumn established itself in colours of flame — the maple over Sririsl's house becoming first yellow, then golden, then red; the two conifers becoming darker by comparison — I became aware of a change between Rufena and I as subtle as a single leaf falling in the forest.
She began to stop herself making love to me, pulling away, saying,
"Not now."
Everything in love is important, two words equaling whole libraries.
When Rufena hadn't wanted to make love — before the onset of those two words — she had simply not opened herself to arousal. Same as me on a few rare occasions, usually angry at her for her overlong absence and punishing her and myself. But then, being close to her, I'd change my mind. Rufena though, put off by my earlier sulks, wouldn't respond — lips, an arm, a leg, a body turned away from me.
What was different in this new rejection was that she was initially open to me, her kisses increasing in intensity, body pressing itself into mine, only for her to suddenly push me away, say,
"Not now."
I became instantly jealous, suspected her of having an affair with another, of loving another before me. That — the logic of her still coming to visit me, amended — she couldn't bring herself to choose between us, felt the old attraction for me pulling against the attraction of the new, with herself in the middle not wanting to be unfaithful to either.
What, in any life, has significance? Look too hard and you'll begin to believe in superstitions.
The scenarios my jealous mind imagined were many and various. Half-believed suspicions that hardened, at a single word, into certainties. Though I never thought once of leaving her, only of winning her, of having her completely to myself. And if that sounds selfish then I'm sorry but that's the way of love; and I loved Rufena, every aspect of her — the way she walked slender through the forest, the way sunlight made golden haloes of her brown hair, the rich dark smell sometimes of fungi on her fingers. And because each was associated with her I loved the forest she walked through, the sun that shone in her hair, the fungi that smelled brown on her hands. Mine was an inclusive love, not a jealous excluding love...
I am claiming too much for myself. I was jealous. I couldn't understand how she could love another; and if she didn't — as Sririsl claimed — love another then I couldn't understand what was more important than our love that it turned her away from me.
So I'd be thinking one day. And the next I'd be angry. An anger that I couldn't express in the presence of any hybrid.
The past was sitting there like a judge looking out through their eyes. Through Rufena's eyes. I felt myself a fraud — all that endless tenderness wasn't me. I wanted to shout out my suspicions, to slap her secrets out of her. Daren't.
I made myself watch again the interview with the Talker. I did not want to be the least like that sardonic interviewer. And I convinced myself that my anger, my hatred was not like his. Mine was born out of the frustrations of love. I loved her; and my suspicions pained me. I did not, did not, did not want to lose Rufena.
I thought that she must have sensed my despair when she came and stayed with me for a whole seven days and seven nights; and for each of those seven days and seven nights we seemed to make love with pause only for food and restorative sleep.
Only for her to then disappear for a whole eight days.
I could easily imagine what she was doing in those eight days; and I did not want to be thus shared. Nor was it any compensation to think of my seven days: I could not delight in their memory, saw them only being re-enacted with an unknown other.
Out of those thoughts I watched her return to me, studying me as she slowly approached along the lake shore to where I was sitting on a boulder; studying me as if weighing me in the balance of her loves and finding me wanting, but still with a wary lingering fondness for me.
That was a strange day.
We wandered forest trails, rustling the leaves, slowly easing the strangeness of eight days absence from between us. We talked hardly at all. A glance, a quick smile, a touch; and long long looks at one another, as much with sadness as with affection. I had the sense of us being two lost children rather than two young lovers. And I worried that, seeing Meffo's melancholic smile on Rufena's lips, that my beloved Rufena too might be found hanging from a forest bough.
I looked on her with tears in my eyes.
"What's wrong?" she caught hold my hand.
"Are you going to kill yourself?"
The words, though, were instantly strange in my mouth: this was not of the real Rufena I was talking.
"I love you," she gave the perfect reply. "How could I leave you?"
"You do — too often."
A sad smile acknowledged that.
"I love you," I closed her in a kiss. She responded, withdrew,
"Not now."
As if it had needed those unshed tears in the forest to show me the way, that evening I wept alone and aloud in my house. I could no longer, I told myself, bear the look of pain in Rufena's face. I did not want to put the one I loved through such despair. If she loved another then she should go to him.
Him?
Her?
Other?
What if not a lover? What other pressure could she be under?
Admitting tearfully to myself my own unhappiness I wondered if the Knowledge had been using Rufena to destroy my human insularity, render me vulnerabl
e to the disease? Dreams hadn't worked: was it using love instead?
59
"You're fatter than I remember."
My impertinence both surprises and pleases me. It doesn't please the fat man. He turns aside, waits.
I watch his shallow breath, pity his bulk.
He is older than last time. (My dreams are aging!) He now has an old man's sagging enfolded breasts.
I do not want to be with him in this room in Space. I try to change the dream to a forest floor on Arbora.
I fail.
Aware of my failure the fat man starts to wheezing laugh at me. His belly moves in great gulps,
"You small pathetic fool." His jowls flap apart as he speaks and the eyes glint from deep inside the folded flesh of the hot face, "You mislead yourself at every turn. By reaching for those truths — those that glimmer, apparently, on the edge of consciousness — you are going too close to the edge. One slight push," he lowers his voice to a crafty aside, "by me or another, and you — fool — will be tipped over."
I shift uncomfortably on the hard chair.
I too am naked. But I am in my summer gold. I like the look of my body. This man's ideas are as overblown as he is pastily overweight.
"Not so fast..." I confidently begin.
"Fast!?" he comes flapping over. "Fast!? Yes Yes. Fast. You humans frequently overtake yourselves."
I realize that his legs, overshadowed by his enormous stomach, are not very long.
"You are too slow my little fool for this universe. The speed of your traveling, the speed of all your machine-aided change — constructions, demolitions, even the simple rotation of planets — all goes too fast for your human psyche. Just as soon as you get used to one set of conditions, they change."
"Yet we live in this same universe," I seriously start to reason. "We both are now living at the end of human history."
"You, Okinwe Orbison," (It frightens me his knowing my name), "should know by now that it is the intensity of the experience that matters, not its duration."
I can't, even knowing I am in a dream, see by what logic he has arrived at that statement,
"You've lost me."
"We will always lose you." He leans on my shoulder, his cold wet flesh pressing on my arm, my chest, "And because of that you're jealous."
(They know! They know!)
"Do you know where jealousy comes from?"
He leans further over me. I feel that I am about to be engulfed by his flesh.
"Jealousy," he tells me, "is caused by that which we cannot wholly possess. Jealousy is caused by that which we cannot take for granted, whose ownership will always elude us."
"What if," I mock-meekly ask (my slyness in this dream surprises me), "What if I am prepared not to own?"
Pushing himself upright and off me he waddles a few steps away,
"In that case you're very nearly there." He turns his whole bulk around, raises one of his stubby fingers, "What is man? What is his purpose? What is his relation to other living things? There are no other questions."
60
I met Sririsl by the hens. She and the hens looked at me concerned.
I was stiff with resolve, was determined to speak, to tell Rufena through Sririsl that she was free, and thus spare her the pain of meeting me again.
Just as soon as I had told Sririsl, then — my clothes were already packed — I would leave.
Sririsl spoilt all that by straightaway taking my hand.
"Okinwe..." she stroked my forearm, "tell me what is wrong."
The more my love for Rufena had grown so too had my fondness for Sririsl.
I looked from Sririsl's hand on my forearm to her face; and I blubbed.
I doubt that I made much sense to start with. Gradually, though, through Sririsl's gentle questioning, I managed to convey my intention of leaving for the sake of Rufena's happiness.
"She won't be happy," Sririsl shook her head at me.
"At least I'll spare her having to make the choice."
"What choice?"
"Between her other lover and me."
"There is no other lover."
"Don't lie for her."
"I won't lie for her."
I dried my face. Sririsl would know.
"There is no other lover?"
"Of course not."
"But..?" I said, "What about..? Why..?
"What Okinwe?" Sririsl said.
"Some days," here I felt that I was breaking a confidence while at the same time knowing that Sririsl must already know, "Some days she won't make love to me even though I know she wants to make love to me." I was blushing.
Sririsl gave her old woman's drythroated laugh,
"That's because she's trying to get pregnant. We need children Okinwe. We are breeding less every year. If you two keep having sex outside of ovulation your sperm count will fall when it's most needed. We have to have more children."
61
To say that I was stunned would be an understatement. I managed to make enough polite noises to escape Sririsl, but I don't know what I did with myself until Rufena found me in the forest that afternoon.
I looked up from my seat on a fallen tree, saw her — receptacle of sperm — walking the dappled wood towards me.
She too was looking hard at me, with something akin to anger.
"I hate your not knowing!" she shouted at me, wouldn't come close. She began to cry, "It hurts me when this happens. I love you! I love you Okinwe! Believe me!"
I was instantly weeping again, an echo of her tears.
"I don't know what to believe," I stood. "I've never been used like this before. As a stud. As a stud!"
"I love you. Believe that!"
"It's getting too complicated."
"Love is not a single thing." She came stumbling to hold me, "Love is of many parts. That is but one strand. Do you love me for one reason only?"
I held her face in my hands.
"Rufena," I kissed her wet nose. "I love you for every follicle in your eyebrows. What are we to do?"
"Love one another." She squeezed me hard, "Love one another. What else is there?"
62
There is a happiness all its own in mutual confession and forgiveness.
As I couldn't know Rufena's Knowledge, neither could Rufena know what I was thinking, feeling, without me telling her. But oh the telling was difficult. Especially to the one person to whom I should have been telling everything. What if, though — of the hundred tiny worries I had in a day? — if I had told her them all would I have insulted her in some way with my doubts, my anxieties, with my disloyal suspicions?
Rufena too must have kept as much to herself.
"Because we want you here for two things," she said, "to stop the suicides and to father a child, the one doesn't invalidate the other. And neither lessens my love for you."
"How do you know that it isn't the Knowledge making you love me?"
"It can't. This has to be real love. For the simplest reason that if it isn't a love match then I can't conceive."
"Why not?"
"A state of high excitation is needed to conceive. Love provokes that high excitation."
"Have you conceived?"
"Don't know yet. But I will. I love you."
"Love can't be the only reason."
"Why does there have to be only one reason? Have you ever done anything for one reason alone?"
I thought of my making love to Rufena when first we'd made love, my performing for the watching others in the Knowledge. My motives may have been many and mixed, I told myself, the outcome though had had its own singular integrity. As did our love. Or did it?
In this new ostensible spirit of openness I returned to quizzing the Knowledge through Rufena. (Oddly, I remarked to myself, I wasn't in the least tempted to ask Rufena what the other research assistants were doing. Which was because, if I reached a conclusion about the suicides, I as jealously wanted that to be my own? And I smiled to think that Leon Reduct had done wel
l to choose artists — each guarding his copyright, happy to keep independently and egotistically to themselves.)
Then, in the low light of my bedroom, the Knowledge, in response to my wondering about its collective thinking processes, heartstoppingly told me through Rufena,
"Look to your own internal universes." Which was exactly what I'd said to it in my dream.
What was the Knowledge trying to tell me? It was telling Rufena to allow herself to get pregnant. What was it telling me? To make her pregnant? Had it led me to Arbora solely to make her pregnant? A man, any man, chosen for his genetic code, lured here by his egotism, purveyor of his sperm?
Had the suicides been real? Or had they been designed to make me emotionally unstable and therefore susceptible to love?
"What were the Knowledge's instructions regarding me?"
"To cooperate with whatever request you made. No matter how odd it might seem. Was the same for you all."
Rufena smiled at me, cuddled up,
"No mention was made of love." That was her invention.
"Ah..." I kissed her, "Love."
I loved Rufena. I didn't trust the Knowledge.
Rufena had asked, 'What else is there?' The answer was children.
So, although in the happy two days following our tears of recrimination by the fallen tree, we confided and confessed much, I still didn't tell her of my growing concerns for the child we might have. (Not because I necessarily wanted to keep those concerns secret from the Knowledge, more that those forebodings then hadn't yet reached the point of expression.)
Children will always be strangers to their parents. Many fathers in Space never see their children. My own father, though, had swung me laughing around him; and something in me wanted to do that with my child.
My child, though, would probably be of the Knowledge. What would I know of him, he of I?
Would he even know me? Would he be taken off to a village of children? To grow up with those dead eyes watching the controlling adults. (Not long since a child I knew how little children consent to be controlled. How much resentment did the Knowledge not allow to be expressed?)