The Vorrh tv-1

by B Catling

  He listened, not out of curiosity, which would have been impermissible, but out of a sense of impending satisfaction. His duty and his task were again complete.

  * * *

  The crates were a teaching library. Each box contained poignantly selected examples of the world outside: its structures, materials, animals, tools, plants, minerals and ideas were represented for explanation. Some were preserved samples, sealed in jars; some fresh, some alive. There were also photographs, prints and reproductions.

  The Kin, which is the name they called themselves, would open the crates away from their pupil. They would become silent and stiff, their heads in the boxes. He thought they were listening for instruction, or having their memories prompted. But he never heard a voice, just a long, piping whistle.

  They would take turns to explain the wonders to Ishmael. Sometimes they specialised in certain subjects. Abel would delineate materials and processes; Aklia would explain plants, minerals and the earth in which they grew, also their attendant insects; Seth would demonstrate tools, act out history and show inventions; Luluwa would illustrate the animals, how they worked and how they might be used.

  There was always a small box inside the large one. This was taken out and examined in the kitchen, and would then be turned into food for him. He loved the word ‘kitchen’; it was one of the first he’d learned. It was nourishment, perfume and warmth, and he smelt its sound long before he tasted it. It also made the others’ mouths go very strange. He watched when one of them said it, all of his attention turning to the speaker. It was the first thing he remembered making him laugh – not knowing why, just in response to their reactions. It somehow got better when they did nothing but stare blankly back.

  They only ever laughed once, some days after he had shown them how he did it. They had watched his demonstration with such solemn attention that it had turned his perfunctory titters into full-blown guffaws. But when they came back and laughed for him, it was horrible. He could not explain why. It was simply wrong, the grating opposite of what he’d felt and heard during his spontaneous outburst. They had been practising it for him, for his sake, to join in, but they had no depth of reference. It was not in any of the crates. They promised never to do it again. In return, he promised never to scream again, never to sob uncontrollably.

  Their care and tenderness was much better expressed through action and movement and touch, through the gentle unfolding of knowledge, companionship and food.

  The day that Luluwa showed him how his body could extend into her and produce nectar was overwhelming. She had cleared away the lesson of flies and he had posed a question about the thing she had called ‘pleasure’. He knew it was like the white dry ‘sugar’ or the thick yellow ‘honey’, not outside or on the tongue, but all over. She said that his kind had many ways to find it, and that they were all connected to knowledge. She said pleasure was made of cream, like her motor.

  Some weeks before, Abel had shown him a small part from one of their bodies – the curved hollow of a Bakelite shell. Its interior was notched and ingrained with tiny lines, small dents and channels. Bumps covered its surface, very different from the smooth perfection of its gleaming other side.

  ‘We are hollow, only fluid inside,’ Abel had said, ‘not like you and the other animals, packed full of matter and organs. We work in another way. All of our forces are held in a thick cream contained within us; all that we are is alive in that cream and it feeds and talks to the inside of our shell through these complex ducts and circuits.’ He pointed to the inside of the fragment in his hands. ‘We know nothing of its workings, it is forbidden that we question and examine its process. We have a greater knowledge of you than we do of ourselves.’

  Ishmael wanted to know more about pleasure and pressed Luluwa for a description. She said there were no words to explain it. ‘Your kindred have a connection between their breeding and their sweetness, a swelling of both that works like the magnets in Lesson 28. Their conception also follows the same construct.’

  He wanted more.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is time to show you. You are like the animals that we have seen – you must place your tube inside the pouch of the female to breed. The seeds then pass to fertilise the egg. This you know. But what you will learn is that its action is layered with pleasure.’

  Ishmael understood her words, but not their consequence.

  ‘When you release your seed,’ she said, ‘there is a great song of warmth.’

  He stared and spun inwardly. She coiled down closer to him. Her hard, gleaming hand stroked his thigh. The firmness of her shell drew an erection.

  ‘I will show you that I have been fashioned like your kind to explain these marvels to you. These lessons of humans have been clearly taught to me alone, for you.’

  She showed him a latch in the crease between her legs, normally hidden by its underside position. She asked him to move it and, with chattering fingers, he felt the mechanism of this secret thing. After a while she joined in, her nimble fingers sliding its notch down the entire length of her division, leaving the long cleft open.

  ‘Touch inside,’ she said.

  It was warm and soft. He looked closer, some of his hand now within her, fingers moving the folded layers.

  ‘Kelp,’ he said. ‘It’s made of kelp.’ Kelp had been in Lesson 17. Jars from the sea.

  If she could have smiled, she would have. Instead, she stroked his head and said, ‘No, but very like it. It’s a material you have not yet seen.’ She pushed the notched bulb in a little further and moisture flooded his touch.

  ‘You leak like me,’ he said. ‘Like me and the animals. You never did before.’

  ‘This is not the same. This is not the passing of waste fluid, but a special oil to let you move inside me without friction or hurt.’

  She guided him towards her, positioning her prone body, and with the same attentive concentration that she showed when peeling the animals apart, she drew him into her. An inner clasping made Ishmael flinch, but she rectified it with the pressure of her left hand in the small of his back and a series of whistling clicks that he knew were declarations of satisfaction, the same sounds she made when he understood her other lessons. A growing wave of succulent achievement overcame him, and he began to push deeper inside her. His hands gripped the hard perfection of her curved hips, making the contrast of her hot interior a wonderful benefaction.

  This was different from all the other things she had shown him. The understanding was in his whole body, churning with sugars that gave him a direct power he had never dreamt of before. He tasted might and dominance and the impossible joy of retreat as she fed his anxious childhood into the past. They rocked together while he cried, sobbing pleasure, locked in her arms, sensation boomeranging sensation with continual vigour. Suddenly she began to shake, every joint shuddering, her voice impaling itself on an imprecision of sound. This had never happened before, and she had no understanding of its purpose or meaning. Only Ishmael knew that one of her inner ventricles had been flushed directly to the shunt mechanism of her sleep and recharging mode, had switched into total response as he reverberated against her, causing her to flick in and out of sleep in a fast stutter of consciousness and oblivion, producing something like pleasure constructed of surprise in her old, servile body of juice and stringency. As long as the rule regarding her Kin was in place, she would never be able to comprehend her reaction. The mystery would be for Ishmael alone to understand.

  * * *

  It had been the angels that had caused the damage. The priest had spoken to the girl about them for a long time, on one occasion for more than an hour. He explained how they were not gods themselves, like the myriad clans of deities who had previously infested their beliefs, but winged servants who could interact between God and man. The mistake had come when he’d opened the pages of Paradise Lost, a large edition with Gustave Doré’s magnificent illustrations.

  He had shown her the angels; sometimes she saw the demon
s too. There was no problem: she’d liked them all, especially when their wings were open and ready to fly. Then they had come upon one of the pages of Adam and Eve in the garden, before the fall; Book V. 309 – 311.

  Adam called: Haste hither, Eve and, worth thy sight, behold,

  Eastwards among the trees, what glorious shape

  Comes this way moving; seems another morn

  Risen on mid-noon. Some great behest from heaven

  To us perhaps he brings, and will vouchsafe

  This day to be our guest.

  The accompanying image showed the couple beneath a tree. She, seated on the rocks with her back to the reader, he before her, pointing further into the picture, where the angelic presence had appeared and was walking towards them. Nearby, and balancing the scene, were two deer, one lying down with a docile, but watchful, lion. The landscape was lushly grown over; the grass and plants in the foreground giving it a vivid, scratchy reality.

  Its effect on the native woman had been violent and overpowering. She immediately lost her air of casual involvement, becoming rigid and sitting bolt upright. Her whole body had begun to shake, wide eyes staring from her head, as though racked by tortures of extreme terror. She started to pull at her clothing, moaning and tearing at the fabric until she was naked and alarming, giving off a pungent odour of sweat; her voice had become deeper, sending out a wave of shared fear. Then she started to bleed. The priest had become afraid and embarrassed at the same time. She caught his eye intermittently, lashing her turned-in focus out, like a whip, until he was finally overcome with fear and embarrassment. Repelled by every element of the scene, he had fled the church.

  Returning from the jungle, the atmosphere in the camp had been appalling. Williams’ arrival caused an almost visible ripple of energy; the locals had stopped instantly, then averted their faces, staring at the ground or at whatever happened to be in their hands. One of the more obsequious recruits had run for the officers’ mess; others followed behind to see what might happen.

  De Trafford, the commanding officer, standing squarely on the veranda with a white-faced subordinate, had indicated to the door. They filed into the officers’ mess without a word. The short spell of quiet soon gave way to thunderous shouting and even louder silences.

  Williams’ anger was fastened tight by the rigours of command. He had locked his expression in stone as De Trafford spat out his accusations of the breakdown of obedience among the natives, blaming him directly for ‘that Savage bitch’s unprovoked attack’. He’d demanded to know what he had been doing to her to cause this outrage, and said he was seriously thinking about ‘having the bitch put down’. Williams had nothing to say, and gated his rage behind clenched muscles and gritted teeth. He did feel responsible for the girl, but not in a way De Trafford would ever understand. A deep, aching attachment had blistered at the edges of the sweetness he felt in her presence. All of this had taken place while he was away, but he knew he was implicit in it all, in a way he could not explain, especially to himself. The chain of impossible events had occurred, and he had been left outside of all.

  He left them and returned, via the wary looks of the lingering villagers, to the sanctum of the hut that had been designated the armoury. He found solace in unpacking the guns, while the priest crept back into the church to cleanse it of any abnormalities that might have been shed there. But when Williams opened the heavy, book-shaped wooden box, his day changed for the better. Lifting the Mars Fairfax from the velvet of its snug containment and feeling the commanding density in his fist, he looked to heaven and, cocking the massive breech with a resounding, bell-like clang, gave a grinning nod of comprehension.

  * * *

  Ghertrude Eloise Tulp was an only child. She was ‘only’ in a great manner of ways: in the way that a single child is given all; in the way that it is received and understood as a sign of natural superiority, growing into unquestionable rightness; in her luscious delight in solitude and satisfaction without a trace of loneliness.

  She was the pride, construct and admiration of her father, the third generation owner of the city’s second-largest timber merchant, who had long since left the basic details of his inherited empire to his servants, and turned his razor-keen appetites to politics and the church. She was modest in her skin, charming in her manner, with a tall, willowy vagueness, which mostly concealed the centre of her hunger. Her twenty-two years had been filled with kindness and education, but none of it had thawed her hurt at being born unknowing. She wanted to find out and possess all. Quickly.

  She had always hated being excluded. Not many dared to attempt it socially – her power was too far-reaching and influential to be toyed with. But most had tried to lock her out in more literal ways, with brass and iron puzzles that fooled their owners into trusting their blind servitude. From the age of seven, she had begun to understand their mechanics and principles and, with that realisation, what delicious power and satisfaction lay on the other side of their manipulation. She had gained access to all hours of the day and night. She had tiptoed in forbidden places. She had seen a royalty of secrets: her parents becoming the beast with two backs; treasures being hidden; the dead, rotting in conversation in the catacombs beneath her home. She had seen intrigue, incest, deceit, lies and pleasures, all closed to the assumption of sight.

  Now she stood in the elbow of the next building while the buffoon Mutter disappeared home. She waited a tantalising time, watching the street set into stillness, enjoying the restraint before she touched the door to see if her curiosity really had a menu. She walked quickly across the empty space and pushed the cold gate. It moved, heavy under her calfskin glove.

  Her joy spun and silently shrieked: this was forbidden and ecstatic. The house had been a great secret for all of her life, the only thing denied to a child who was given everything. No one in her family would talk about it.

  ‘Ah ja, the Kühler Brunnen House,’ they would say, and then change the subject. She had stared at it, glared at it and watched it in passing all the days of her life, from her pram to her womanhood. Something in it had tapped at her shell, stirring the wakening within. And now she had breached its outer wall, closing the gate behind her in protection from all vulgar intrusion.

  She lingered over the stables and the basic construction of the courtyard, drawing out her anticipation before approaching the entrance to the building. To her delight and surprise, the lock was simple, an old and well-known type, the kind she had been surreptitiously picking for years in her family’s homes. The door of this house would be no match for her skills, and she thrilled at the thought of devouring the secrets it had concealed for so long.

  She returned through the courtyard. Once back at the gate, she looked again at the lock and laughed, almost too loudly. This was the ridiculous contraption that had held her at bay for so long? She could have opened it years before. It had only taken Mutter’s pantomime of stupidity to give her permission and scrawl the ticket to her fulfilment.

  She shut and padlocked the gate and walked along the darkening street, humming her way home and savouring her strength and the sweet weakness of everything around her. There was no rush now; she already had the conclusion to the enigma firmly in her grasp. She would relish all the possibilities rather than leaping into the outcome; it would pay back all those years of frustrating exclusion. She now owned every imagined room.

  Six days later, when Mutter had again left, she entered the house.

  * * *

  For years, it was said that nobody had ever reached the centre of the Vorrh. Or, if they had, then they had never returned. Business expanded and flourished on its most southern outskirts, but nothing was known of its interior, except myth and fear. It was the mother of forests; ancient beyond language, older than every known species and, some said, propagator of them all, locked in its own system of evolution and climate.

  The banded foliage and vast trees that breathed its rich air offered much to humans, but could also devour a thousand of the
ir little lives in a microsecond of their uninterrupted, unfathomable time. So vast was its acreage, it also made its demands of time, splitting the toiling sun into zones outside of normal calibration; a theoretical traveller, passing through its entire breadth on foot, would have to stop at its centre and wait at least a week for his soul to catch up. So dense was its breathing, it dented the surrounding climate. Swirling clouds interacted with its shadow. Its massive transpiration sucked at the nearby city that fed from it, sipping from the lungs of its inhabitants and filling the skies with oxygen. It brought in storms and unparalleled shifts of weather. Sometimes it mimicked Europe, smuggling a fake winter for a week or two, dropping temperatures and making the city look and feel like its progenitor. Then it spun winds and heat to make the masonry crack after the tightness of the impossible frost.

  No planes dared fly over it. Its unpredictable climate, dizzying abnormalities of compass and impossibilities of landing made it a pilot’s and navigator’s nightmare. All its pathways turned into overgrowth, jungle and ambush. The tribes that were rumoured to live there were barely human – some said the anthropophagi still roamed. Creatures beyond hope. Heads growing below their shoulders. Horrors.

  The logging roads skirted its perimeter, allowing commerce to gingerly nibble at its unprotected edges. There were no commercial means of ingress or egress from its solid shadow, except for the train. The mindlessly straight track that ran towards its heart was laid, line by line, with the hunger for wood. As it grew forwards, it forgot its immediate past. The iron rail carried sleep in its miles of repetition.

  Most of the train that ran on it was composed of open platform and iron chain, built to receive the freshly cut trunks. But there were two passenger carriages, made for short and necessary visits, or for those whose curiosity outstripped their wisdom. There were also the slave carriers, basic boxes on wheels designed to carry the workforce into the forest’s interior. The slaves had changed before the eyes of their owners. They had transformed into other beings, beings devoid of purpose, identity or meaning. In the beginning, it was thought their malaise was the product of their imprisonment, but it soon became clear there was no personality left to feel or suffer such subtleties of emotion. The forest itself had devoured their memory and resurrected them as addicts to trees.