by Sam Smith
"I don't think so." I shook my head, "No. Not that I'm aware of." And looking into my head thus, I felt my old fear of intrusive telepathy surfacing again; to be as quickly quelled.
"You've changed," Leon said.
"Impending paternity."
"Yes... That’s probably it.” He didn’t sound bothered whether he believed it or not. “Yes. And their expectations of you are probably not so much what you've thought, but the way in which you've entered their lives. Already, with your hand, you've effected some change. Already the suicide rate has fallen off. Although that could be accounted for by curiosity about you two. And your Rufena is as much a curiosity to them as you."
"In what way?"
"Strange, apparently, to find one quite so self-willed in the Knowledge. Your whole relationship therefore is under much scrutiny. Not hostile though. Oh no. Protective of you. When I finally insisted on coming, and they still refused, explaining that they didn't want any more unknowns entering your equation... You, Okinwe Orbison, have a lot of sympathizers in the Knowledge."
In his saying my full name I heard others' usage of it, wondered if I was on the way to becoming Legend.
"Sympathizers?" That implied detractors.
"They're aware of your struggle. The Knowledge, Okinwe Orbison," Leon this time made my name sound like a lament, "the Knowledge is awaiting the birth of your child; and something else from you too."
Pride and trepidation in equal parts turned about my insides. My child, that embryo within Rufena, epitomized the future for us all, was the unknown, the unknowable.
"I don't like," I heard myself say, "seeing my child, or myself, as an unwitting agent of change." I hadn't consciously thought that before, realized how much I needed to talk to different people, to hear myself say such things, to have them explained to myself.
Leon dropped himself into Sririsl's chair,
"We're all of us in the dark most of the time."
"Some of us more than others. And some of us see all in mirrors, through the eyes of others. I, as a poet, as a painter now, must see it only through my own eyes. No matter how little, nor how much. Do you know I am no longer jealous of the Knowledge?"
Leon pulled a noncommittal face. (Because he was still obsessed by the Knowledge? Until his coming I hadn't heard mention of it in months, not as a separate entity.)
Leon had now, however, put on his professional listening mask, was about to let me talk to myself.
"I was. I was chronically jealous of the Knowledge. Painfully jealous. I mean that literally. It pained me to be so jealous. Jealous of it taking Rufena from me. Of it owning a part of Rufena. Of it knowing Rufena as I would never know her. But the Knowledge, I one day realized, couldn't know Rufena as I knew her, with the immediacy that I knew her..."
I sensed Leon becoming bored with this talk of Rufena. He didn't love her like I did. "And not only Rufena. I was jealous of it in all the others. That they should have, with so little effort, instant access to all that learning..."
"How do your dreams fit into this?"
"Don't know. The strangeness of the place?"
I brushed aside his question, considered what I'd earlier said, proceeded,
"That was before I realized what a burden, what a handicap, what are the drawbacks of the Knowledge. The absolute sophistication, the deathly ennui of the Knowledge..."
Dropping to a squat in front of Leon I held onto his outstretched and still damp feet to balance myself, looked into his big brown eyes.
"I know, you too, why these people are killing themselves. Individually theirs are the classic symptoms of depression, complicated here by their feeding those symptoms back into the Knowledge and there getting them reinforced."
That much we had talked of on our way to Arbora.
"What I didn't consider," I said, "was the initial cause of that depression. It's not the Knowledge. Like Space the cause is pure and simple despair. Like Space these too are a people without a new future."
I stood, began walking about the room; and walking I itemized Space's much-discussed symptoms of a people without a new future — falling birthrate, indifference to society's ethos — manifesting itself in a lack of indignation over corruption, a lack of outrage at crimes of violence (the crimes born of anger and despair at society) and a passive and cynical acceptance of crimes of fraud.
"We have been looking, I have been looking," I corrected myself, "for psychological causes. When it's philosophy we should have been considering. And what, basically, is philosophy? A reason for living. These now are a people without a purpose. Except to keep the Knowledge going. Laudable in itself, but hardly something one can devote one's life to. Like being a race of librarians. What else, though, for them is there? These are a people, a species, grown prematurely old and run out of dreams. What now is the purpose of their being?"
Leon edged forward on his seat.
"I grant you the similarities," he didn't look at me standing in front of him, "between here and Space. And I grant you the suicide rate is higher in Space than here. Wasn't always so. Living in the controlled environments of Space initially made humankind feel powerful and important, made them feel superior to the natural order of things — digestion, disease and decay. People in the synthetic environments of Space came, however, to spend most of their lives deluding themselves that they could also avoid their own deaths. Time and age, still, generally comes as a shock to them. Often a suicidal shock. Whereas those people who've chosen to live on weather-torn planets, they have their awareness of their passing insignificance increased, and this makes for a more realistic appraisal of humankind's insignificance, is altogether psychologically more healthy. In Space suicide is — so disparate is Space — yet another hidden statistic. Here suicide has more impact."
"Obviously."
His was a stating of the obvious: we had both reached the same decisions, perceptions slightly different. I was gratified to have the impression that, my paranoia now passed, he was at last treating me as an equal. Pleased as I was, I was also impatient for me to be doing the talking,
"The assumption many historians make," and here I was instructing myself again, "is that because we progress from one event to another, the present is perfect. The present though is always just where we happen to be. It is as much the culmination of a myriad mistakes as it is the vindication of our survival. To keep on going, however, people need a purpose."
"You're right." Leon wanted to talk too, "In all that you say you're right. Survival isn't enough. But these are a people under threat. And historically when a people are in extremis their suicide rate falls."
"These are no longer a people in real extremis. That they hide is now an accepted part of their culture. They are no more under threat from Space than Space is from them. They are as certain in their day-to-day lives as any city pavement walker. What's happened with their suicides is this." Inspiration had at last struck, "It's like swimming along in warm surface water. You are comfortable and safe in the knowledge of your friends and you. Then you swim into a cold upwelling of water and suddenly you're aware of the lake’s, of the ocean's, of life's, profound indifference to you."
I was momentarily stunned by another new thought,
"They're expecting my child to give them a new future. But say, with my child's generation, telepathy breaks down. These people will have to reinvent language, art, all the human means of communication. Maybe that's what they want. Maybe they expect such effort will give them purpose. And it will temporarily. With accomplishment, though, again will come ennui."
"No. It's you they're looking to."
"My child." I shook my head: we had arrived at the same place, and diverged. "They're expecting my child to give them purpose. It won't. And as soon as they realize it hasn't given them purpose," I here lowered my voice, "the suicide rate will increase. You'd best, Mister Psychologist, quickly get into your employ some proactive philosophers."
Leon shook his head,
"They think,
I'm convinced of it, the answer's in you, not your child."
When I again disagreed it wasn't out of modesty, simply that I couldn't see any answers in myself.
Unable to find agreement, when Sririsl arrived, Leon left dissatisfied.
72
As Rufena grew bigger, and I came to feel small beside her bulk, physically we lost contact. I wasn't able to cuddle her, to feel close. She tried to stay connected, resting her head in my lap, on my shoulder; but it was a conscious effort. I appreciated the effort, but knew that she was otherwise absorbed by the child growing within her; and I knew that she and the child would share the Knowledge, and that, in my future, I would many times feel excluded, a sperm-provider supernumerary. I was fearful for her, fearful of losing her; that fear though did not stop me loving her.
Studying her water-retentive bulk, aware of my love for the woman within it, I wondered what it was that connected any two people. Why should those two particular people feel connected and not those two with any other two? What prime physiological/psychological state had Rufena and I met each other in? Why Rufena, a planet-bound hybrid? Why not one of those city women eager and willing to travel? What had made Rufena so important to me, me as equally important to Rufena?
Life, I learned there the lesson, was teaching me that love, like death, was ultimately beyond my control. As in The Leander Chronicle I knew that love had chosen us, not us love.
Uncomfortable in the small house around Rufena's self-engrossed size, I escaped clear days, booted and suited up, to walk the forest's shallow paths, scour my lungs with ice-particled air, examine the black paired tracks of unseen creatures, listen to a wind clacking ice-sheathed twigs.
More often I escaped through the snow's blue shadows across to Sririsl's house and my new painting. (Sririsl and I usually swapped, Sririsl enjoying being a mother again, rubbing aromatic oils into Rufena's belly and bloated legs.)
Shortage of materials notwithstanding the painting preoccupied me.
I had realized early on that in my conceptual depiction of the forest I had been creating a puzzle for myself to solve — how to find a way out through the walls of surrounding trees without being surrounded by more trees.
When Sririsl stayed on some times I talked with her of the painting, or rather of the sketch, as I was working mostly with homemade lumps of charcoal and earth-browns, and both were running out.
"It makes me feel," Sririsl said one day, "depressed."
I could see why: I walked through the grey and dun rooms looking for a way out through the crowding trees. And the more I looked the more worried I became that this insoluble puzzle would depress Sririsl so much that she would return to thoughts of suicide.
"I can't see a way out without colour," I told her.
"The Knowledge," she replied after a pause, "has become interested in this. What colours do you need?"
"Greens. Of course," I began. "Yellows... Woodland colours. And blues for the sky. Black and white for mixing. Reds. Definitely greens..."
Two days later a young bright-eyed hybrid came into Sririsl's house carrying two black cases. We shook hands. He, smiling, signified the two black cases. I opened them, laughed with delight to find proper tubes and tubs of paint, real brushes, sketch pads, packs of proper charcoal sticks...
The young hybrid had gone walking through the house, came back looking up at the ceiling.
"You've made this frightening," he told me. "I liked the woman wall. That had a good feeling to it."
"It did?"
"Yes," he grinned at me.
This was the first hybrid I'd met, aside from Rufena, with whom I felt an instant kinship; given time and the circumstances I felt that we could have become friends.
"Good luck," he said, shook my hand again, and left.
I immediately gave colour to the trees, and to the trees behind the trees. On the ceilings I gave colour to the skies above the leaves.
The rooms grew smaller, the walls more fearful.
I walked about the house. I knew that such a closed environment could kill Sririsl. A way out had to be found through those trees. Yet every time I painted out a tree, left a gap, a pathway receding, it looked, if not like a trap, then false, felt sentimental, unreal...
So I painted in the tree again, closed myself in.
73
I am in a forest room.
The beast is behind me.
(How did he get in here with his huge wings? Even stooping, even though — my dream tells me — I've never seen him, I know he wouldn't have been able to get through the doors. This, I remind myself, is the logic of dreams.)
Testing I turn within the walls of the room, hear the beast rustling turn behind me.
I am not afraid of death. (This self-knowledge surprises me.)
The smell, though, curls my face in distaste. (Now I remember his smell from the forest dream without having noticed it then, the carnivore's breath of eaten blood.)
This beast, however, being mythical to my dream, smells also of death. (I know this smell because Sririsl and I came upon a deer carcass one gilded afternoon. I made the mistake of curiously prodding it. The escaping stench made me gag.)
The forest room has no ventilation. I feel my stomach clenching.
I look around the painted forest walls. All I have to do is find the door and pass through. The beast is too big to follow. (Maybe, my dream conjectures, the house was built around him.)
I can leave him here to suffocate in his own stench.
I have painted over the doors.
The stink of dead flesh is now palpable. The beast's breath is hot on my back, rasping like a wet hoarse whisper in my ear, microbe-laden coiling forward, particles of smell sticking to my face.
"You don't frighten me."
Hand to my mouth I start to feel around the paint-crusted walls. From corner to corner to corner to corner.
No door.
I must breathe, start shouting, rush around the room. The beast gets in my way, a tangle of wet wings I push aside.
"You don't frighten me!"
* * * * *
I woke round-eyed in bed with Rufena looking round-eyed down on me.
"What'd I dream?" I demanded of her.
"I don't know," she wiped sweat from me with the bedcover. "You were making noises. They didn't sound like words."
"You don't know what I dreamt?"
Frightened of me, for me, she shook her head. I crowed a laugh,
"I've won! Beaten him! Just a smell that's all. Just a smell. The fear is of fear."
Rufena didn't understand what I was saying, was worried.
"My dream," I touched her beautiful face, felt instantly tired. "Only a dream."
74
I decided to bring openness into the first forest room through the ceiling, splattered a big yellow sun up above the dark green leaves. The sun up there made the room feel taller, had no effect on the closed-in feeling.
What also happened, however, was that a drop of yellow paint accidentally splashed from the ceiling onto the wall between two grey-brown trunks. On first seeing it I made a mental note to later paint it out. As I looked around the room though my eye kept coming back to that one spot of yellow paint.
That one bright splash of colour in itself, I began to realize, was an offer of something beyond the enclosing present. And all of a moment I saw the solution to the forest puzzle, to the banishing of the green and brown gloom, to the stemming of the suicides.
In a frenzy I went around the walls of all the rooms, grabbing up brushes, knocking open paint pots and slicing in yellows and reds between the trunks, went back and added in pale greens and violets too.
There was still no way out of the forest; but everywhere now there were views beyond the here and now — into glades, into sunshine valleys, to a bush of purple fruit beyond a barren trunk, to a pool of still blue water.
With every room altered, amended, I went running to fetch Sririsl, tugged her back through the snow, walked with
her through the rooms, the two of us turning back to back and laughing and laughing.
The Knowledge learnt this from that painting — there is no way ever out of the present; but there is a view beyond it, there is hope. Yes, our deaths are inevitable. That inevitability is the forest too. But we also need futures to work towards. Not only for our own selves. We need to think of ourselves leading others towards a green glade; while, in the meantime, we ourselves can go wandering off in search of bright flowers or tasty berries.
"The colours between the trees," I explained to Sririsl, "are but promises of a future. Are dreams. Nothing more. But they are oh so necessary to life."
75
Rufena and I had waited for, had anticipated the 5 month pain. At 7 months we had given up waiting. There had possibly been a night's discomfort. Possibly.
"Already we are less Nautili," Rufena's smile was one of triumph.
76
When it came the thaw was sudden.
Sririsl said that it happened about once a decade, a warm wind came undiverted from the South. For three days was a dripping and a trickling. Outside all was slush and puddles. On the fourth day the warm air moved away; and the land froze again. Only for a day or so though. The winter was over.
Now my work began.
Now began what I had volunteered to do when I had asked Rufena to move in with me. Now began what I would have to do when Rufena stayed home and looked after the baby.
Over the winter Rufena had tried, occasionally, to teach me her job. But with all that I was to collect still under the snow I had stopped listening to her instructions. I surprised myself though, now that I went fungus hunting in earnest, by how much I thought I had remembered. Only for many of the rubbery fungoids I came home with — slippery, lip-curling to the touch — for Rufena to declare them to be of no known nutritional or medicinal value; and I was told to throw them in the bin, directed to another part of the forest the next morning, told to search for another kind of tree, another kind of fungus.