by Sam Smith
Is that what I'd glimpsed in Rynnl's village? Is that what had attracted my attention to the children?
I'd felt an indifference to me there that had bordered on malevolence. Would my child hate me?
Three days after Rufena had left, having given up trying to get enthusiastic about my latest painting, I took my craft to Rynnl's settlement.
63
Rynnl met me outside his house. I smiled a greeting, squatted down beside the door. He waited for me to tell him why I was there.
Knowing that he was waiting, I played the game of making him speak first. Which, by the time he'd checked through the Knowledge to make sure there was something he hadn't missed, was a good twenty minutes.
"Why have you come here?"
"The children." I knew that the children would be hearing, watching me say this, "The deaths are somehow connected to the children."
No-one on the planet, I decided, could pause for as long as Rynnl. The man was a born leader, covering his arse from every angle.
"In what way?"
"That I don't know. It's a feeling more than a rationalization. Can I stay?"
After another lengthy pause Rynnl gestured to a house under a tree across the way.
* * * * *
The children watched me. One of them did.
While the rest of them played, one of them watched me.
I followed them around the settlement and into the nearby woodland. While I was watched by one, some of the other children swung on a rope over a stream, two girls made patterns in a smoothed piece of mud, and three boys fished in the stream with their hands, giggled with delight when they held — for a moment — a silver fish flapping out of the water.
I smiled to see their happy excitement. My smile was noted.
I watched them come to their houses to eat — a cluster of interconnected houses — catered for by a group of tired adults, with some of the older children tending to the needs of the smaller.
I watched the youngest put to bed by the eldest, the eldest told to go to bed by the yawning adults.
I asked Rynnl about the children's education. There was none. Once a month each child would be taken aside, asked random questions to see how well they could use the Knowledge. And once every so often they had to practise pen and keyboard skills. The rest of the time they played.
Play, it had been decided in the Knowledge, was good for children.
Next morning I was watched watching a group of prepubescent girls making headdresses and capes out of fallen leaves that they stitched together with grasses. I watched them moving carefully in their dresses, humming to themselves, watched them perform complex in and out dances.
I couldn't make out the logic of the dances, though the girls smiled throughout their execution. (Practising for when they took charge of the universe?) I knew something was amiss about the dance, something more going on here that wasn't worth asking Leon about. Leon wasn't being told everything. Secrets secrets.
Rufena trying to get pregnant, the certainty came to me, was part of the plot. She was there to decoy me, to lead me away from what was truly happening.
What was truly happening?
Children leapt a fallen trunk. One watched me watching them.
I was watched watching the lone self-absorption of an adolescent boy in a woodland glade. I was watched watching a boy and girl grimly squabble over a smoothed curve of a branch that they had been straddling to ride down a long mud slide.
The boy wanted his go out of turn. Not his turn he should have fetched water from the stream to keep the mud slippery. All children know the rules. All the children told him off. He walked off alone into the forest.
I felt sorry for him. He had just got overexcited and, though his chin was still lifted defiantly, he was now ashamed.
Watched, I went wandering off after him, had the vague idea — recalling such states from my own childhood — of offering consolation.
He jumped out from behind a tree. As Rufena used to do. Except her jumping had been with laughter. His wasn't. I noticed how the teeth of the young are always sharper.
"How do you think we're connected with the deaths?"
Despite his challenging glare there was concern in this boy; and — from that concern alone — I knew in that instant that these children were not willfully causing the suicides.
"Maybe you're not. Not directly. I just feel that it has something to do with you. With how life's arranged here... I don't know."
But speaking I had given myself some ideas.
That evening I went across to Rynnl's house, asked him why the children were kept away from their parents.
"Their parents," hand behind the face, "are with them."
"Where, physically, are the parents?"
"Where their work is."
"Why are the children brought here? If there is no need for school?"
"For protection. For care. In a diminishing population every individual is precious. Children especially."
"The parents too are separated?"
"Life has changed since Leander."
64
The store cellar is dark.
All three are smaller than me. But not children,
With a start of apprehension I recognize them, start to slide around the walls and to the steps before they realize I'm there.
"Ha!" the one with red eyes jumps before me. "Get back!" He points to the corner furthest from the steps, "Over there."
Despite his diminutive build I am forced to obey, take myself back around the walls.
Red Eyes goes to consult the other two. I wait.
Claws comes over to me. He isn't aggressive this dream.
"We need to escape the totalitarianism of the Knowledge." He glances over his shoulder, "Its uniformity has made us mediocre, incapable of, frightened of, original thought. Can you help us?"
"I don't know," it pains me to say it: I wish my brain awake and not in this dream so that I can think, can truly be of help.
Irritated by my continuing silence he turns away.
Watching him consult, argue with the other two, I wait, make no attempt to leave.
Spiky has adopted an actor's mobile face, winks at me with an easy confidence as he approaches. He switches into the pose of supplicant,
“Is there a secret?”
I have no inkling what he's talking about. Think, I tell myself, try to make thoughts come.
"Is there?" I ask him.
"Thought so," he says, eyebrows raised, eager to be scandalized.
He too becomes impatient with my silence.
"So what is it?" he asks.
"I don't know."
"Is it," he too glances behind, lowers his voice, "The Great Suppose?"
"The Great Suppose?"
"It is!"
"The Great Suppose?"
65
Next morning I went watching the children again. Again they were down by the stream.
This day some of the boys had invented a wrestling game. Each had to come from the opposite bank across a log which bounced under their weight. When they met they wrestled. The loser fell into the stream. The winner walked across to the other bank. Often both fell in. There was much shouting and laughter.
I watched them. Apart from the one watching me there was nothing that different about these hybrid children, nothing that odd about them. My son could be one of those boys. A stranger to me. My daughter could be the one girl who joined the game, and who, shrieking, fell. A stranger to me.
What would Rufena and I do when our child was brought to a children's settlement?
I couldn't imagine such a future. Not for myself nor for my child.
This universe belongs to the young: they're the ones who're going to have to live in it. And I couldn't see a place in it for my young self, nor for my child.
So much for the universe and the future.
That morning in the forest a larger boy was dominating the log bridge, was throwing off all-comers. Despite th
e protests of the other children he wouldn't get off the log, was spoiling the game for everyone.
I was still young enough to want to join in. And I was bigger than him.
He knew that his tenure was over as soon as he saw me approach the bridge and chuck off my tunic. The other children cheered. The boy and I smiled at one another, the bridge sagged under my weight, the boy put up a token resistance and went diving into the river pool.
The children went silent looking at me on the bridge. Now I would hold sway. I thought quickly, laughed my father's laugh, and I beckoned the smallest girl to me. Wide-eyed she approached.
I explained to her the rules of my game, paper/scissors/stone — paper wrapped stone, stone blunted scissors, scissors cut paper — and I showed her the gestures for each.
I cheated. Putting my hand behind my back I let the children on the bank behind me see what I was going to display on the count of three. Her stone fist blunted my two-fingered scissors. Beaming she stepped forward and pushed me into the stream.
I had thought, while explaining it, that it was a pity the children wouldn't be able to play it among themselves — hybrids can't have secrets (unless it's suicide). But the two players on the bridge each gave a long shout while the other children counted down from 3. The loser went into the stream.
Once I was dried and dressed the children stopped watching me.
Friends with them I decided that I'd like to be a father. Except that my children would be here in a settlement and I'd be elsewhere.
66
On the screen is an old film. It is of my kitchen, taken from a fixed angle lens, where the ceiling meets the wall.
I walk into the kitchen. I am wearing my tunic.
"When I first started eating worms," the voice-over is mine, "I cooked them to an unrecognizable crisp, ate them highly salted."
The picture moves in close on a portion of a plate visible over my fuzzy shoulder. Small dark oblongs can be seen. On the soundtrack — side glimpse of my jaw moving — is a crackling and a crunching.
"As I became acclimatized," I walk into the kitchen carrying the same plate and naked now, "I cooked them less and less."
A still of the fully exposed plate shows the worms palely cooked, a hint of pink, stranded together.
"I knew this, however, to be a temporary measure." New film, new me, new plate. "And that very soon I would not bother cooking them at all."
Close up of the plate, worms moving over it and over each other. My hand comes out and, taking several, puts them to my face.
* * * * *
I woke with my fingers in my mouth.
67
Most of the following morning I spent in my craft playing with the machines, trying to find out more about this planet where my child was to be born.
Not of a technical mind most of the machine responses were gobbledygook. After 4 hours, however, I did find a map of beacons, with beside each beacon its coordinates; and, with below the coordinates, a figure I came to recognize as the number of hybrids living there.
Sririsl's lake had 1. (I, human, didn't count.) Rufena's settlement had 12. The very largest settlement on the globe had 76. This settlement, Rynnl's, had 52. Give or take 2 an estimated 43 of those were children. Most coordinates had 1.
I sat in the craft a long time looking at the screen, at another secret that was no secret. Not even Leon, though, had thought to tell me that the people were scattered so far or so thinly. (Or had he left me to make that discovery for myself?)
The children found a new game that afternoon. (The log bridge game had been given up after a girl had hurt her legs.)
This game involved a rock jutting out from a slope and, below it, a branch. The children jumped off the rock, grabbed hold of the branch as they dropped past. The branch bent near double under their weight and impetus, then sprang back, swinging them up to the base of the rock where they were caught by one of the older children, who passed them back up onto the rock.
This day the children waved to see me, made waving to me as they leapt a part of the game.
* * * * *
I played some more with the craft machines that evening. Next morning I left.
68
Since I'd accepted that my theories concerning 'malevolent' children had been wrong, a feeling of disconnectedness had entered me. I felt that I was moving through time and daily events, watching the world about me but not being a part of it.
Following my own instructions of yesterday, as if they came from another, I set off for a settlement of 8 to the West. Settling back for a rest, the craft had hardly gained any height before it was descending again.
This settlement, this distanced me saw, was almost on the crest of an escarpment, in among some large cedars. The slope of the escarpment was covered in what I now knew to be nut bushes. Wondering what they harvested when nuts were out of season I came out of the parking bay to find myself being looked at with genuine surprise by a hybrid.
"Okinwe Orbison," I said and held out my hand.
He recognized that gesture and took my hand.
He was stout and slow this man. Recovering from his surprise, he gave me his name.
"Where's everyone else?" I asked him.
He stared at me uncomprehendingly a long time, before the Knowledge told him that I couldn't know without him telling me. Then he reeled off names and local places and the tasks they were engaged in. He named only three.
"Where're the others?"
"Others?"
"Should be eight."
That statement took a long time to process.
"Rufena misses you," he said.
That startled me into the here and now, turned my heart. I missed her too; but I couldn't go back yet. Not yet. So I said nothing to that, asked,
"Where are the other four?"
"We're only eight here at harvest time. Eight houses."
I nodded, kept nodding. What was I doing here?
"Can I stay tonight?"
He gestured to the houses under the cedars.
"Which one?"
Mute he took me on a tour of those vacant.
"You going to paint these?" he asked at the last. I shook my head, asked him,
"You have work to do?"
* * * * *
Sitting outside my door that evening — with a view down over the violet escarpment and the purple forest beyond to clouds of delicate faun — I watched each of the four come home. Two men, two women, middle-aged, thick-waisted, not obviously partners, all weary, all bearing strap marks on their shoulders.
Each came from the same direction — storehouse I guessed — and each came up to me and offered the ritual handshake — even the one I'd met earlier — and each remembered to return my smile, to speak to me.
They were couples, it transpired as we gathered in the one house to eat. Any passion, though, seemed to have long dissipated. I had a sense of their enduring in that place.
Both couples had children. Both lots of children had been raised in Rynnl's settlement, were now all elsewhere, on planet and off. None were near enough to visit. None came. (My Rufena was indeed odd.)
What it was that had first seemed peculiar to me about the children in Rynnl's settlement, I now realized, was the absence of parents. (Of concerned parents, proud parents, protective parents; of parental affection, of resented parents.)
One of the women, talking of children, chuckled at my scissors/paper/stone game. The others smiling nodded. Nodding made them sleepy.
Two things impressed themselves on me, stayed with me all that evening and night. One was the human capacity for kindness; the second was — of those four adults; Sririsl, Rynnl, and Rufena too — their weary plodding sadness.
These good people, I decided awake in my bed, deserved a better life. I made a host of notes.
'When you have something as universal, as intimate as the Knowledge, what cause, what cure, loneliness?'
'At what point does self-denial, self-abnegation, become harm
ful to others? At what point, because you do not value your own life, does everything else lose its value?'
'I am missing Rufena. 3 days now. Loneliness is an ache, a void somewhere just below the midriff.'
'Like all herd animals we draw comfort from being with our own kind — our sexual partners first, then with our own kind — artists with artists, actors with actors, etc.'
'Art is a marvellous club! Its own jokes and secrets. One to which an isolated man can belong.'
'Am I trying to talk myself into leaving or into staying on Arbora?'
69
In thoughtful mood I returned to the lake.
I'd been trying to be a scientist of sorts, a technician. As such I had been seeking mechanistic causes to the suicides, and a simple repair. When I should instead, from the very start, have trusted to my poetic subconscious and looked at the immeasurable.
It wasn't the Knowledge to blame for the suicides. It wasn't the individual people. It was what joined. Not what each was, but how all treated one another, was treated by one another. It was the spaces in between, the unseen, that was important. Like Rufena's love for me, there now seemed as many strands connecting all others.
Sririsl was not at home.
In my house my painted walls greeted me. I immediately decided to change them, immediately decided that that would now become my way of life — I would paint the walls, love Rufena, and help Sririsl. Sririsl had said that autumn was her busiest time.
Sririsl was not at the hens.
I had left the lake knotted with suspicions. I had returned, I knew, changed to a changed forest. Chilly I wore my tunic, walked among the reds and yellows knowing that the knots had gone, that all my suspicions had been replaced by pity. Which included a pity for myself. My love for Rufena now had me belong on Arbora; and I had no solution to the suicides here, like all its other inhabitants, for all my questing I could find only despair.