G is for Ghosts

by Rhonda Parrish

  P is for Persistence

  Pete Aldin

  Ana steps between the pillars that frame the museum entrance and slips off her suncoat, sunhat and sunglasses. She enters an anteroom that’s easily twenty degrees cooler than the street outside. Sweat has plastered her short hair to her scalp; her bared arms are slick with it. Beyond the anteroom she finds herself in a vault as long as six hay sheds, as startlingly bright as it is clean. She had expected gloom, she had expected stuffiness—that’s what her older cousins told her to expect. Her cousins are idiots.

  It is marvellous in here. A wonder. Unlike anything she has seen or experienced before, except perhaps in the curled and faded pages of books. White marble. Even lighting, no shadows. Currents of filtered air so smooth and cool they feel like ice cream on her skin. Dispersed along the long vault’s walls and throughout its middle, stand daises as high as Ana’s knees and shaped like the hexagons her bees use for storing pollen and honey. And on those daises—her heart skips a little—stand the Recalled …

  Two smiling attendants in dusty pink coveralls approach. Ana knows that government people wear scents, unlike normal people. She breathes in a lungful of their sweet cologne: peach and vanilla, aromas and tastes she remembers from a wealthy uncle’s gifts when visiting her father’s farm holding several years ago, aromas so achingly sweet they make her empty stomach clench.

  The women take her broad-brimmed hat, her coat, and then her name. This will make it easier for her to retrieve her clothing at the other end—and for them, she believes, to check against their records. There are others spread around the vault. Pilgrims like her. She recognizes several who had stood ahead of her in the line outside. They too have made this journey of a lifetime, a venture both privilege and expectation.

  Once in a life, she thinks. Once in a life. She has yearned for this since childhood—and she will remember it long after she has borne her own children—doing her duty to keep Europe populated, to keep the Earth populated...

  She wants to keep moving but an attendant stops her with a gesture and lifts a ceramic dish from a low table, holds it toward her. The dish is piled with fish-and-rice balls. Ana’s father didn’t pack her enough food—even for a workday, he never packs enough food—and she is so famished from two days of queuing that she wants to take handfuls of the treats. Politely, she only takes one. The other attendant presses a ceramic cup in her free hand; as parched as she is hungry, Ana drains it immediately. Juice, thick and sweet and delicious. She wants to run a finger around the inside of the cup, to suck it from her finger. But she is not at home and she must be polite. She hands back the cup with its insides still slick.

  The attendant murmurs, “There are filtered water fountains around the museum, dear. You’ve been out in the sun a long while, so make sure you drink your fill.”

  The other attendant adds, “And don’t rush your visit. You may remain here for as long as you desire.” She gestures to the rice balls. “See me again if you become hungry.”

  Ana returns their solemn stares. A soft object squishes into her left ear—something she knows is called an earphone—while one last item presses into her free hand. This final thing is called a trident and it looks like a toy version of the pitchforks she uses to toss hay. Only this pitchfork feels as light as a handful of grass, and seems made of plastic except for the two chrome tips that cap each tine.

  Alone again and nibbling the rice ball, Ana ventures in. The other pilgrims are spread around exhibit stands, making busy with their tridents or standing with heads bowed in reflection. For the most part, they keep to themselves. Like her, they came here alone—and to be alone. Everybody travels here without a friend or a loved one.

  Once in a life and you do it alone, the District Warden had told her at her briefing. Your journey. Your experience. In as much as you can, avoid strangers so that your mind can be free to meditate upon the greater issues of our world.

  Avoid strangers, she thinks now. Avoid people. Not so difficult a task in a world with so much space. With so few people. The trick is always to avoid the bad people. But she has been lucky there—as lucky as a woman of her time in history can be, at least. On the journey, she slept well off the road. Once in the city, she joined the museum queue and stayed there.

  After taking a few more steps inside and another nibble of the rice, she pauses again to study the vault. Now that she’s here, finally here, her heart is in her throat, her mind has snagged in indecision like a sleeve on a bramble. Although most pilgrims keep their distance from each other, there is one small crowd …

  They cluster before a dais on which stands a tall man with orange-tinted skin and a clump of hair combed sideways across his head. As if conditioned by outside’s waiting line, these people are queued—although again and by unspoken agreement, they keep more than an arm’s length between them. She counts eleven of them. A popular exhibit, this one. She ventures closer to check the name—just as the pilgrim at the head of the line plunges his trident within the orange-skinned exhibit’s gut making the tall man on the dais arch in agony and drop his jaw in silent protest. Ana reads the name, recognizes it. But the orange-skinned man wasn’t on her list and seeing the queue there, she quickly decides she won’t waste time with him.

  There are three exhibits she definitely wants to visit—one of them an exhibit her mother visited. Ana spies the first of them a third of the way along the great hall. But as she starts off, popping the last of the rice ball into her mouth, another Recalled catches her eye. She diverts toward it. Many of the exhibits reside in niches like this. The size of the alcoves varies by some logic she can’t discern.

  This one is narrow. The man atop this dais seems old and he stirs at her approach, peering down his long sloping nose at her, reaching up to stroke his long sloping beard. He wears a finely designed tunic with two sets of buttons running down it and a wide sash draped from one shoulder to one hip. A sword is at his hip. Her earphone comes to life with a quiet intake of breath.

  ‘King Leopold the Second of Belgium represents the worst of expansionist greed. He and his kind gouged and disembowelled the Gaia to rob her of what they called her “resources”.’

  Ana does not understand all these words, but she listens, rapt. The ‘King’—a word she does know—continues to hold her gaze without any hint of shame over the actions he committed in life.

  The earphone continues, ‘He and his kind tortured, enslaved and murdered their fellow humans while destroying magnificent animals and habitats for the sole reason of amassing more wealth and power than they could ever possibly use. Wealth and power they spent upon their own pleasure only. If anyone deserves everlasting torment, it is Leopold and those other monarchs he represents. Citizen of the Wounded Earth, because of his evil, you suffer and the Earth suffers. Visit justice upon him.’

  Ana knows what comes next. Her mother told her. Her father told her. The Warden told her. And she saw that other pilgrim doing it to the tall and orange Recalled just now. Without raising her arm far, she pushes the trident forward, poking its middle tine into King Leopold’s left thigh. A grimace of pain contorts the King’s face; his grunt is thick and loud in her ear via the earphone.

  Ana pulls back her hand with the trident and steps away, the rice and fish and grape juice curdling in her stomach. She doesn’t want to hurt him. He’s not the one I came to punish, she tells herself. That’s why I don’t want to. That’s why.

  Ana moves on, seeking the first of the three exhibits on her list. Moving past a pilgrim her age who twists his trident into the face of a cattle baron and chuckles as the baron’s ethereal fingers try helplessly to free him. Moving past a woman the age that her mother was when skin cancer killed her—the woman rakes her trident along the torso of a man named Rockefeller, sneering as she does. Ana forces herself not to look at the faces of the next two pilgrims she passes.

  And then she is standing before the first of the daises she decided to visit. Three men stand up
on it and her pause is enough to prompt the earphone into life. ‘Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, Karl Benz and Henry Ford are but three of the people responsible for the scourge of the automobile. They were instrumental in the development of this foul invention which caused so much of the pollution that sickened Earth so. Their invention contributed directly to the Greenhouse by way of that pollution, as well as indirectly.’

  Again, Ana has not been taught all these words she’s hearing, but she does know about steam- and oil-powered vehicles and the polluting industries that served and were served by them. Rusting hulks of ‘cars’ and ‘trucks’ remain along the old, broken-scabbed roadways near her home.

  The earpiece continues, ‘If anyone deserves everlasting torment, it is the developers of the grand polluter, the automobile. Citizen of the Wounded Earth, because of these evil men, you suffer and the Earth suffers. Visit justice upon them.’

  Ana’s hand tightens around the trident’s haft. Her arm twitches forward toward them, then falls to her side. Automobiles and the lust for the oil that was used to power them and to construct many of their parts are things she has been taught to loathe. They accelerated the wounding of the Earth and the destruction of its balances and harmonies. Animal habitats and air-cleansing forests were carved away to make those scabby tar roads that cars and trucks rode over. And these three Recalled, the voice told her, helped created them—just because they could!

  And I am here to punish them for what they have done. It is my right and my duty, as one of Earth’s surviving children!

  And yet.

  And yet …

  Movement turns her head. The young man who’d been torturing the cattle baron approaches on his way to his next Recalled. His eyes meet hers. A smile is born in them. And then his gaze drops to her idle trident. When it catches hers again, there is mild shock in it, and the beginnings of what might turn into disdain. Ana drops her head before he reaches her; he mutters something in a language she doesn’t speak, a language from perhaps a distant part of Europe. But the meaning is clear. Ana isn’t delivering justice to these Recalled; Ana is shirking her duty; Ana is weak.

  Mother Earth, forgive me.

  She turns and squints across the chamber, sees the broad dais with a family of Recalled upon it, the second on her list and described in detail by her mother. Ana takes a few steps across toward it, all to see the details better. Though the family’s clothing is nothing like Ana’s—blue trousers, body-hugging tunics in bright colours that would leave their arms bare to the sun’s deathly touch—they are a family: mother and father and daughter and son, standing side-by-side and staring down at thin slabs of plastic and glass that Ana believes are called computers.

  Forgive me, she repeats in hopes that the Wounded Earth will hear her. All these people here, these Recalled, did wound your surface and your seasons, but I just can’t hurt them. I cannot. There is enough pain and misery around without me adding more.

  Ana lays her trident on the floor and marches toward the far end of the vault, with her shoulders hunched and her eyes on the floor. And she feels the scowls and frowns of every other pilgrim she passes before she reaches the next two pillars and the passage that is beyond them.

  The passageway is fully enclosed, mercifully lacking windows. Spread along it at ten-metre-intervals are benches along one wall and water fountains along the other. At the third fountain, Ana bends low and presses the tap, slurping greedily as the life-giving spring arches up and into her mouth. Straightening, her belly cold and full, she risks a backward glance. A young woman, younger than her, is coming out of the main vault. Ana snatches her gaze away, turns her back. She has no interest in letting the stranger catch up, so she pushes on.

  She is halfway along the passageway now without much idea of what awaits beyond the other end. The District Warden told her that a ‘dome’ had been added in the years since Ana’s mother and father—and cousins—made their journeys to bring justice to the Recalled. The new structure has been open and active for less than a year; all that he heard about it was that it involved some animals. Perhaps, Ana thinks, they are farming chickens in there. Or geese. Perhaps there will be a meal: eggs, a chicken soup. As she starts forward again, her water-logged tummy twinges with hunger. The rice ball was not enough. A soup would be wonderful. It might even save her life. Her father gave her so very little money with which to buy provisions for the long walk home.

  If he really wants to marry me off to Carlo—that pock-faced pig—why did Papa give me so little. So little money. So little food.

  A new thought turns her lip into a sneer of disgust. Perhaps he didn’t want her to return at all. Perhaps he was happy for her to stay here. Or die on the road. Either way, he’d be rid of her.

  It’s what he’s always wanted. Ever since Mama died.

  Oh, Mama. Her throat constricts with old grief. Why can’t it be you in those exhibits? Why can’t I hold your hand just once more? Put my head to your tummy just once more. Feel you stroke my hair and promise me life will be good.

  The entry to the new chamber looms. No pillars frame it. There is a door, much like the front door of her home except that this one is glossy, and there is no knob. As she approaches, it opens toward her, all by itself, surprising her. But there can be no danger here, so she allows herself a small smile at the wonder of it and pushes on. Beyond the door, she can see a dirt floor and patches of tall grass. A tree. The tree, from here, looks … healthy. She enters and as her breath catches in her throat, the door sighs shut behind her.

  Ana is frozen in fear. There, right there five paces away, is a gigantic cat, striped with orange and black, and half as big again as the biggest man she has ever seen. From school books—the books she loved best, the books about all the creatures now extinct—she knows this cat and knows its name.

  Tiger!

  It’s impossible that it’s here. But it is. Its appearance threads terror through her bowels, her chest, weakens her legs. Will it bite her first, claw her first?

  But, no, the mighty creature shows little interest, stalking past with the merest of glances. The tiger must watch its footing because a spiky echidna is crossing its path; the great cat’s pace and footing adjusts as the little anteater waddles out of its way. And then both are gone, vanished between thatches of tall grass.

  “What is this?” she whispers as her heart thuds hard and fast.

  The ‘dome’ rises above and around her, an upturned opaque bowl that could cover her father’s entire farm holding—this feels as if she is inside a mountain. As far as she can see across its floor, there are grasses and reeds and many kinds of trees, some of which she doesn’t recognise even up close. Her pulse thumps in her throat. Because there are animals everywhere. Everywhere. So many, many animals.

  A small hiss announces the door’s opening again. With the young woman she saw earlier coming up behind her, Ana forces herself away from the entrance, moving further in, but not too far. An attendant stands several metres away, but the elderly woman wears grey coveralls and blue gloves instead of the pink clothing of the vault attendants. Her eyes are kind. One gloved hand holds a large brush; with it she strokes the back of a horse, its brown coat as shiny as the glossy door at Ana’s back.

  Noticing her, the old woman smiles with real warmth and gestures back toward the entry. Ana sees there’s a box on the wall. Blue gloves like the curator’s poke from the hole at the top. The woman says, ‘Mettiti i guanti.’

  Ana knows Italian, enough to decipher the invitation to put on gloves. So, she hurries to comply. The custodian hasn’t stopped brushing the horse; but her free hand sweeps toward the centre of the dome, her message clear. This is your place. This is your opportunity. Savour it.

  So, Ana wanders. She forgets about time—the light never changes in here, so it’s hard to know what the sun is doing outside. After she has marvelled at animals she knows from books and many she doesn’t know at all, she hears a thud-thud-thud behind her and turns. Gas
ps. The creature bounds over to her, slows then stands up on its hind legs.

  “Kangaroo,” she whispers. It —ventures closer. Are animals also Recalled, Ana wonders? Something feels different about her left glove: she checks it; it holds a clump of grass, transparent but somehow real enough that the glove has clamped around it to stop it blowing away in the gentle breeze. Stooping she holds it out. The kangaroo pulls itself toward her in its funny way of moving. Ana can’t help a giggle. As the creature snatches grass from her with its teeth and munches it, something tiny stirs beneath the kangaroo’s stomach fur. And a head appears! For a moment, Ana reels back, horrified. Then she remembers her lessons: these animals carried their babies in pouches. This is a baby kangaroo! Remembering the way the attendant’s gloves could touch the horse, she reaches out and lays a finger on the baby’s head. Feels its head beneath the pad of that finger. Strokes the dear little thing. Its mother pulls the last of the grass from her other glove.

  And a masculine voice behind her says in her language, “If you think that’s fun, you should try this.”

  The man is her father’s age and he is passing by, but he is riding. Riding a small horse—what are they called? Ponies?—and she’s wondering whether the saddle is like her gloves when he leans forward and runs his bare fingers through the animal’s mane and says, “Real as you are. There’s a free one back there.” He jerks his head behind him, and then he is gone, pushing into a copse of trees.

  Ana is left with an afterimage of his grin. A happy man. A nice man. Her father’s age, but nothing like her father in spirit.

  She looks back the way he indicated and yes, there is another pony back there, also fitted with a saddle. Its nose is in a drinking trough. Ana goes to it. Takes off a glove. With her bare hand, she strokes it. Her father keeps cows and sheep and a small brood of dogs and cats to keep away the pests. Ana knows those animals but she has never touched anything so lovely as this. The pony ignores her, content to drink.