by Sam Smith
I now knew with absolute certainty that there was no virus in the Knowledge, no free-floating beast of a psychosis. I had found instead a people in a predicament, a people trapped both by their history and by their future.
I had assumed that Arbora's sparse population was due solely to the hybrids having to spread themselves thinly to maintain their telepathic ellipses. That was only part of it. The remarkable fecundity of the Leander Chronicle had passed: the hybrids were now suffering the same ailment as Space — a diminishing birthrate. Stasis in reverse.
And I had no answers. Knowing that I had no answers left me, oddly, feeling calm. Knowing nothing I had to do nothing.
As I waded through fallen leaves, as I idly searched for Sririsl, I stopped awhile here and there as if to examine this changed forest through my changed eyes. All my attention though was directed inward.
Leon, I knew now, was not a hybrid. For the simple obvious reason that, had he been a hybrid, then, because he'd seen them, my poems would have been in the Knowledge and Sririsl would have had no need to ask, in her innocence, to see them.
And I trusted her innocence.
Leon was simply another man like me, one perhaps who knew more than I, but one who, like me, knew none of anyone else's thoughts without being told.
Rufena, I knew now, loved only me.
Sighing, I turned at a sound. Sririsl, bag strap cutting into her scraggy shoulder, was coming towards me. We, both, smiled tiredly at one another. Reaching me she put her hand on my shoulder,
"Are you well?"
"Yes. Are you?" I took the bag from her. She straightened her back, stretched her arms,
"This time of year exhausts me."
We took the full bag to the stores. Coming back past the hens I said,
"I'll help you the next few days with the collecting. Then, if Rufena asks, I'll move into the settlement with her."
Sririsl's face went flat and I knew that she was consulting Rufena.
"Is that what you want?"
"This is all new to me." I took as long answering as they. "I'm not sure what I want. Except that I want my child to grow near me. And I don't want anyone else to kill themselves."
"What do you want with Rufena?" Sririsl was letting herself be used as a Talker.
"I don't want to hurt her. I don't... Look into the Knowledge at the literature on human affairs." I waited, "You will see that sex, for human beings, serves two purposes. Not only does it procreate the species, this recreational sex also acts as a bonding agent between monogamous couples, in order that they are kept together to rear the child. That's what I want for Rufena and I."
For company's sake I ate with Sririsl that evening. For my sake I made conversation. I thought that I was making conversation until I heard myself ask,
"The Knowledge, for it to be instantaneous, requires many of your number to be isolated. Is instanteity necessary?"
"To know first has often been our only defence. Our survival can depend on it."
"The others would not be pleased if Rufena were to move here?"
"She's not far enough away for it to affect any ellipses."
* * * * *
I asked later,
"How many have killed themselves while I've been away?"
"On this planet?"
"Yes."
"Seven."
Two a day.
70
Next day, by the time Sririsl and I returned from collecting, it was dusk. Rufena was sitting in my chair in my house.
Sririsl hadn't told me that Rufena was there, knew how much Rufena liked to surprise me. I had, however, been expecting her. Nevertheless I acted surprised; and Rufena smiled, was pleased with herself.
But it was a small smile; and, when Sririsl went off to her own house, Rufena was tentative in her approach to me. Gone was the happy assuredness of new love. And it was I, and I alone, who had damaged this love.
Remorseful, not wanting to frighten her, to further harm our love, I approached Rufena as uncertainly, noticed the youngness of her body. (All day long I'd had Sririsl's skinny arms reaching out to me, and when walking fast the rapid panting of her old lungs.) Rufena sat full-skinned, still and calm, regarding me.
At that moment I loved her with a tenderness beyond speech.
She looked tired though: autumn was her busiest time as well.
"Let's eat," I said.
So we embarked on another phase of our relationship.
Knowing how busy she was I didn't let myself mind now when Rufena didn't appear for days on end. Though, aware now of my human need for her, she came more often, even out of her breeding cycle.
In our lovemaking we were gentle with one another, like incipient invalides, not wanting to hurt. And out of this sad gentleness Rufena conceived.
Autumn collections completed, she moved in with me. As simple, as undramatically as that. One day she stayed.
Frosts crisped the mornings, crackled the top layer of fallen leaves. One foggy morning the bare branches, every twig of every tree, was sheathed in ice. Which later melted and dripped in the sun, froze in the shade. The forest became a blue and white fantastical place.
Some clear nights I stepped outside and looked along the curling arm of the galaxy. Which didn't have me yearning for Space. Rather it had me think, in planetary terms, that it was like looking down on another lake.
By such small differences do we notice huge changes in ourselves.
That winter Rufena and I had no need to venture out from our house under the conifer; or only to replenish our small stores from the larger stores; or to put some feed down for the hens. Most of the time, immediately after Rufena moved in, we seemed to spend snuggled into one another's warmth.
That animal comfort, of course, didn't last.
Rufena was content just to grow — her abdomen had swollen remarkably quickly after conception — and she was happy to watch the changes in herself. The urge to create, however, remained unspent within me.
Sedentary poetry didn't satisfy, was too small, too narrow, too brief. I needed something larger, something that required more effort. So I started to paint another wall. And, my temperament being what it is, the painting soon took me over.
To Rufena's consternation, rather than wait for a brief thaw, I'd go out into the biting cold, lake frozen solid, to look for new materials. I made bigger brushes by tying sticks together, used old bits of clothes dipped in paint, experimented with other culinary substances.
Sririsl came to our house most days; and, while I laboured away at walls, the two women sat together, held hands, or Sririsl cradled Rufena the mother-to-be as she had once cradled Rufena the child.
I did one painting of them — all round shapes. Rounds within rounds within rounds.
"Is this human intuition at work?" Rufena asked me.
"How's that?"
"You've painted how it feels within the Knowledge," Sririsl told me.
Thinking of the Knowledge's ellipses I altered the painting. Altered my way of looking at the painting. Returned it, dissatisfied, to the mother holding the mother, and sought another wall.
Comments like that were typical of the new openness between us, a relaxed lack of censorship that enabled me to satisfy my curiosity on many points. And allowed me to speak my mind.
"Human beings," I told Rufena, "tell each other things because they do not want others to be deceived by their silence, to be alarmed by what they do."
"I talk more than ever I used to," Rufena smiled.
In the first flush of pregnancy Rufena's face became as open as a flower, every one of the day's moods reflected therein.
"What would you have done if your mother had killed herself?" I dared ask.
"Waited for the same," said sadly, "to happen to me."
"Anticipated it?"
"Possibly."
I asked Rufena how they had come to wear, here on Arbora, what was mooted to most of Space as the latest fashion.
"We wanted the thermo-fa
bric more than the cut. And then the fabric decides how it's to be cut. We don't, though, truly understand your need for fashion, for wanting to appear different from one another, while all endeavouring to look alike. This external statement of who you are told to think you are... We know who we are, our every difference."
I asked about her childhood, what it was like growing up away from her parents.
"Normal."
I asked what her sister made of me.
"She's curious. Concerned for me. The baby."
I asked why they'd made no attempt to go back and breed with the Nautili.
"The Knowledge told us that if we continue to interbreed we will revert to a feebled version of stock. But we are now land-dwelling creatures. If we get new genetic input it has to be from our human ancestors. You and I are the first."
"Even so... We are but two. And if the population needs to be quickly increased, why not go back to the Nautili? They know more about breeding."
"We will never go back to the tanks."
I confessed one of my earlier suspicions, that I had been deliberately selected as part of a breeding programme. That it had been part of a bigger plan to fill all those Space stations where humankind was in retreat,
"...Like the Nautili, I thought, breeding was to be your weapon. Give it four more generations and you telepathists would be in control of the universe."
"Would that it were so. Instead we hide from you as we hide from the Nautili."
"You actually hid from the Nautili?" I sought confirmation.
"Yes."
"I still don't really understand why you ran away from them."
"Same reason as we ran away from you — to be ourselves."
"But why go to all that trouble? Surely it would have been much easier to simply coexist?"
"No. They were in our Knowledge, making us, forming us. We needed to be ourselves..."
"...Are they still looking for you?"
"Possibly. We think, though, that we have evolved and that, possibly, our two Knowledges are no longer compatible. We've picked up none of their Knowledge for centuries now. And if we can't sense their Knowledge then they can't sense ours. We cannot therefore be found by them, won't be of any use to them if they do find us. And use is all to the Nautili. So why should they still be looking?"
"Are they still expanding?"
"No... Possibly... The quest for other Nautili, for those other than from Yradier and Wanhal, has been given up. They were retrenching when we left. Pursuit of us, while we were still occasionally in contact, had replaced the quest."
"There must," I mentally glanced up through the ceiling of our house, through the snow-weighted conifer, to the black of space, "be Nautili ships passing through here. They are where we are; and we're not that far from Space. Are we?"
I was aware of my confusion of self, considered it.
"Yes." Rufena smiled at me: "We think our Knowledge has, using Nautili techniques, camouflaged itself."
"How did you first make the separation?"
"In the automated ships we put entire galaxies between ours and the Nautili's Knowledge. Nautili tried to follow. But on we went, and on, our trail littered with Nautili ships and their mummified crews. And still we went on, further and further on, to the edge of the known, and beyond, and beyond."
"Legend!" I exclaimed.
"Yes," she hugged me.
Brushes in hand I turned to ask Rufena, her head in Sririsl's lap,
"Aren't you worried that breeding with me will dilute the Knowledge?"
"We sought out sperm from amphibious apes," Sririsl said, smoothing Rufena's cheek with the wrinkled back of her fingers. "Our Knowledges didn't mesh. There was a suspicion of potential communication with us. Nothing though worth pursuing."
"How did you find that out?"
"Artificially inseminated some of our women."
"How were they chosen?"
"Their men had died young. Accidents. Disease. They volunteered."
"What happened?"
"Progeny were humanoid. Non-hybrid." Pause. "We didn't breed again with them."
"You not try anywhere else?"
"Non-Space planets. Loosely humanoid. But, not sure of their genetic provenance, we closely monitored them. All foetus which didn't, by the second quarter, physically resemble a human foetus we aborted."
"Why keep the humanoid shape?"
"In amniosis the foetus is fish first, humanoid by the end of the second month. We will not revert to Nautili."
"Why use your own women? Why not one of your men inseminate a humanoid female?"
"How then would we have kept control of the foetus? It has to be this way."
"And now you and I are the experiment," I said to Rufena.
Rufena mistook my awe for resentment,
"No my love. None of this was planned. Is against planning. Is contrary to experience."
I said something to the effect that I was glad that she and I weren't as cold and calculating as her ancestors. Sririsl responded,
"To you the past must seem a harsh place. All you can see from here are acts without passion."
As we held one another in the cold of one night Rufena asked,
"How did you know touch was so important?"
"I didn't. An accident. Obvious, though, with hindsight. You, as a people, are guilty of hubris. The Knowledge isn't enough for a sense of community. 'Each human being in Space,'" I quoted from the Leander Chronicle, "'is still that planetary self-contained unit crying out to be in intimate contact with others.' You are human too, need that physical contact."
"But how to manage it..."
Thus, by unfinished sentences, did I have impressed upon me that the Knowledge was as much a duty as a blessing. The ellipses, whatever else was happening, had to be maintained.
"I want it to be just you and I and our children," Rufena said. "And it can never be."
71
By the time Leon arrived winter felt constant.
Every few days the snow replenished itself, covered all tracks. The only time Sririsl and I ventured out was to cross to each other's houses or, taking turns, to feed the hens. Rufena went out hardly at all. She stayed in the house and grew bigger. (Her concern for the child in her womb, love grown already, had her daily conscientiously exercising.)
I was glad of Leon's interruption to my painting.
I'd filled every wall, door and ceiling in our house, had started on Sririsl's. But I was running out of materials and I was becoming frustrated by their lack.
Leon came in his off-planet ship, the same that had brought him and I to Arbora. He had come straight from Space to the glade by the stores, had waded from there through the light snow to our house.
I hadn't been there, was in Sririsl's house sketching with charcoal stubs the beginnings of a forest scene.
Rufena and Sririsl sent him across to me. I looked up from my skeleton forest to see little Leon Reduct come stomping through the door.
"Trouble I've had getting here," he declared.
His nose was red, eyes watering, bald head steaming, tunic wet around the hem. I misunderstood.
"Where'd you park?"
"Store beacon." He stared hard at me, "That's not it. I mean the difficulties they've placed in the way of my getting here."
"What difficulties?"
"You know what they're like." Leon was still unnecessarily rubbing his upper arms, blowing into his hands, slapping himself as he walked around, "Couldn't exactly call it deception. More like obstruction. Getting me to come up with collations, case histories, sending me off to see people who didn't need seeing. I hate being given the runaround."
"To stop you seeing me?"
"You've become important to them."
"In what way?" I'd stopped drawing.
"I need something warm," Leon went off to the kitchen.
I wasn't going to be given the runaround, followed him.
"There's a natural concern for my child," I told Leon: "It wil
l be the first of its kind."
Leon sipped his hot drink, considered; and shook his head,
"Not just that. It's you that I had to insist on seeing."
"Me? Why?"
"When I first realized that they were stopping me coming here, I too assumed that their concern was for Rufena's pregnancy. And I did, prior to that, make the mistake of voicing doubts, conversationally, over your two ages, your suitability as parents. Consequently they didn't want, I thought, anyone coming unenthusiastically here, dropping a spanner in the works."
"Do you think we're unsuitable?"
"You're only 19. She's 17. You're young. Of course I had concerns. Only natural. But you'll cope. You're both committed. I told them that."
I wasn't used now to communicating with humans like Leon, with his rapid changing of subject, with his guarding of a myriad small secrets that he thought might damage his esteem, or mine.
"And still they wouldn't let you come?" I wanted clarification.
"I thought they didn't want Rufena unsettled. So I offered to arrange a meeting between just you and I aboard my ship. Or have you come over to Rynnl's settlement. Even go off-planet. But every time I mentioned it they changed the subject, sent me off on another silly errand."
"You're here now."
"Yes. And that only by deception."
He drank, studied me in my charcoal stained tunic, looked at the forest sketch on the walls.
"I was half expecting to find you dead. You're not." His grimace said that he was pleased that I wasn't dead. "I think they're expecting something from you." I watched his mind ticking over, new thoughts on seeing me dropping into new places. "They think you — you Okinwe Orbison — are close to a solution."
"Am I?"
"Are you?"
I looked inside my mind, at the thoughts that had been circulating there since the first snow fell. Leon knew of Rufena's pregnancy, would know of my trips to the other settlements.
I could sense no revelations lurking.