Four Myths
One:
Cold Spring
The fire burned brightly on the edge of the surrounding darkness, close to the shore-line, next to the ocean.
The salt water licked dark, oily strokes across the dampness of the sand, gentle caressing fingers counting every grain, arranging each tiny particle with loving precision, then, unsatisfied, returned moments later to renew the task and improve on its delicate handwork.
The water threatened to engulf the fire, but the tiny blaze had been built with artful care a scant stretched-stride from the high water mark, and the tips of the exhausted waves grasped at it in futile frustration, out of reach, but only just.
San-San took another handful of the dried seaweed they had collected earlier and threw it on the fire. At first it hissed, as the ice crystals which had formed on its surface melted, boiled and evaporated all in the same instant, then it began to pop as the small bladders expanded and burst in the heat of the flames. San-San liked the noise they made, and he threw another handful on, just to hear it again.
“That’s enough for now,” Whe-saa told him, “we don’t want the fire to get out of control.”
San-San squirmed, wriggling into the sand, feeling its grittiness under him He was beginning to feel bored, and more than a little chilly, although he would never have admitted this to his mother. This was the first year he had been allowed to join The Watch , and he was determined to make himself worthy of the adult status this honour conferred upon him.
Still, he had to admit, it was turning out to be less fun than he had anticipated.
His sister, Shu-a-teh, a veteran of some three previous Watches, knew how to improve the situation. She rolled closer to her mother.
“Tell us a story, Whe-saa,” she pleaded, “fires are for telling stories!”
Whe-saa smiled, in spite of her daughter’s irreverence.
“Yes, fires are for telling stories,” she said, with amusement. “Look into the flames and see what is there.”
“The whole world is there, for the world was born in fire. Shaash breathed fire from her mouth and the world was formed as the great flame cooled, like ice drops form from cooling steam.”
“Shaash made the world, and when the world had been in existence for ever, she gave birth to all the living creatures who inhabit its homes.”
“Shaash desired to make a creature which would, in time, come to know her as their mother, and become one day as powerful as she, and together they would enlarge the world and determine its cause.”
“Her children were to be as beautiful as Shaash herself, so Shaash took the most beautiful part of her body – her left eye, and from it she made a thousand thousand of her most perfect creations, and placed them in their rightful place in the world”
“The people of Shaash woke and knew they were the same as their Mother, and they used the power which was in them, and they caused the seas to diminish and the land to rise, and the created with fire, even as their mother had created the world, but not all they created was fitted to its home, and not all they created was as beautiful as it should have been.”
“Then Shaash should have restored the balance and taught her children the lesson, but Shaash said ‘They are the same as me, they are my true children, they will not disappoint me’ for sometimes a mother cannot help but have favourites, and she turned her blind, left side to the ugliness they created, and saw only the best of them.”
“But the children of Shaash did not know how to control what they created, and in this way they were truly the daughters and sons of their mother………”
* * * *
Jess came out that morning to check the seeds, as he had every morning for six weeks or more now.
It was a tricky business, trying to get the things to germinate at all, let alone grow once they were outside the protective environment of the greenhouse. Last year it had been well into May before the first, gnarled, clubbed shoots had reluctantly raised their ugly heads to the vicious sun burning in the sky above.
To reach the glass covered half-acre, Jess passed along a narrow avenue of tall trees, leafless still. The morning was warm, but that did nothing to raise his spirits, he remembered these trees from his childhood, some thirty or forty years past, and he could still see the avenue in full green, only the ancient elm at the end of the row failing to respond with explosive exuberance to the seduction of spring.
Last year, only one of the trees had shown any signs of life as the new season dawned, and as Jess passed its flaking trunk he looked up anxiously for any signs of bud-break and new leaf.
There was none.
It was a tragedy repeated all over the world. In the north, the great pine forests were dying, shedding their last needles like tears for their plight into the dead, acidic lakes, and in the last, pitifully tiny remnants of the tropical jungles which had once, in aeons past, covered three quarters of the land surface, tall trunks stood stiff and still, monuments to their own passing, and silence had at last returned to the place where life first howled and shrieked in triumph at its own birth.
Jess reached the great greenhouse where the last repository of nature’s bounty lay cossetted and entombed.
Life, tamed at last, reduced to a four bit code, stitched and joined, snipped and cut, Selection and Eugenics, survival of the fittest, the tallest, the most abundant, the straightest, the most identical to its neighbour, and those that failed were cast aside for ever as part of the great, unnecessary surplus.
Under the cover of the shielding glass, the last ten varieties of grass struggled to continue unto the next generation. Victor Ludorum, and the genetically perfect shall inherit the earth. It wasn’t their fault there was no Earth to inherit, how were they to know the goal posts would be moved?
Arianne was already half way through her check list. She turned as she heard Jess enter through the air-lock, and he could tell just by the look on her face that the breakthrough had not come today.
He peeled off his mask and gloves and hung them on a hook by the door. He had been careless about wearing such things until his younger brother had lost half his face to hungry cells and the surgeon’s knife. Jan had rarely gone out with mask and gloves either. Now, he just rarely went out.
Jess walked slowly down the rows of empty trays to where Arianne was carefully scrutinising one more barren section with her usual professional expertise.
She sighed, and put down her clipboard.
“Nothing?” He knew already, but he had to ask.
She shook her head quickly. “No, but there’s still time, we’re still within statistical limits.”
He nodded. It was all he could manage in the way of the ritual of hope and confidence they employed so mechanically now.
Arianne was staring out through a clear glass panel in the side of the greenhouse, her eyes misty with distant vision, lost beyond the confines of the glass.
“It’s a beautiful day,” she said, unexpectedly, “lovely and sunny, and warm for the time of year,” she continued talking, still gazing through the pane, oblivious to Jess’s surprised stare in her direction.
“When I was a girl, we used to go for picnics. You know, out in the open air, sit on the grass, get dirty hands and ants in the sandwiches, that sort of thing.” her voice became a wistful remembrance.
“Pick flowers, climb trees, paddle in the stream. Did you ever do that sort of thing Jess…… did you?”
She turned suddenly to face him, and there was anger in her now.
“We finally did it, didn’t we? They kept telling us, but we wouldn’t listen, we thought it couldn’t happen, but it has, it’s happening now, and we can’t put it right this time, can we? Can we!”
Jess could only stare in astonishment at this outburst from Arianne, she who was so calm and placid usually.
There was anger in her voice, – desperation too, and a sort of pleading, as if she was pleading with him to do something, to put it right, and he wanted to tell her that no-one could have know, that it wasn’t their fault – it happened so fast…. that it would all come right in the end, but the lump in his throat prevented him from speaking, and all he could do was nod in agreement, and hold her close to him as she sobbed unwilÂlingly against his shoulders, and the tears began to blur his own vision….
Later, they walked back to the house together, shielded by filter masks from the intense ultra-violet streaming down through the naked, unprotected sky, past dead trees with shrivelled buds, and rotting stems of plants which had finally given up the unequal struggle and returned to the dust from which they had originally built their complex, delicate
structures.
There would be no spring that year, or any year from now on. The miracle had finally failed to happen, and there would be no new flush of life in the early months, no renewal of the marvellous and diverse organisms which had been so long evolving.
Even if the planet’s protective shield managed to repair itself in time, the seeds of life would be long dead, killed by the very source of energy that first brought them into being.
Six billion souls still breathed and dreamed on the planet’s surface, but they were already dead.
* * * * *
“…. and when they saw what had happened, many of the children were sad and lay down on the Earth in order that they might find a rightful place, and many of the children returned to their mother, and she welcomed them back, though she was sad that they had not become what she had wished them to become.
But not all the children returned. Some were angry, and could not see that they were the cause of their own misfortunes, and they laid the blame with any other they could – they said it was the fault of the Earth itself, they said it was the fault of Shaash for creating the fire, and finally when there were no others left to blame, they turned on each other, and blamed each other, and fought amongst themselves.
And finally Shaash grew angry and said to them ‘Fire you were made from, let fire be your home,’ and she gave the children a fire like they had never possessed before, knowing they must either destroy themselves or learn the lesson.
And deep in her heart, she hoped that the children would learn and become like her, but even the mother of the world cannot protect and guide her children for ever….
* * * * *
Two:
Summer Heat
Waiting until the dust had finally settled and then an extra twenty heart-beats, just for security, the girl darted out from her hiding place – a crumbling scrape in the dry ground where she had lain unmoving and unnoticed for over two hours, her dusty skin and ancient, filthy rags providing her with perfect camouflage against the dry, ochre dirt, and any remaining trace of her outline blurred by the shimmering heat- haze which rose like a poisonous vapour from the scorched and desecrated earth.
She jumped nervously at a slight sound behind her, but turning, she saw that it was only a scaly lizard fleeing across the hot clay. She reacted instinctively, without the need for thought, seized a rock in her right hand and hurled it at the skittering reptile.
The lizard never stood a chance. The boulder smashed into its head with almost unnecessary accuracy, and it was dead before it even had time to register danger.
The girl leapt forward to claim her prey. She picked up the body and examined it thoroughly, but apart from one extra, vestigal hind leg and a pulsating, greenish growth near the base of its tail, it seemed okay.
She split the skin near the end of the tail and threaded the head through, then slung the corpse, still twitching, over one arm and across her back, wearing it diagonally, like a sash.
The girl was pleased. Even if there was nothing edible in the ruins she had come to investigate, she would still have a meal tonight.
The easy killing of the lizard must have made her over-confident, and her long wait in the dust until the others who were here before her left had filled her with impatience, so she stumbled through the broken brickwork and rubble without her usual caution, and she was well inside what was left of the dim interior, with her escape route blocked, before she saw the man.
He noticed her almost in the same instant. He spun and crouched aggressively, aiming the grey gun he carried at her, and they both froze.
The girl’s eyes flicked from side to side anxiously, but there was no way she could make it across the rubble strewn floor to the exit in any less than three seconds, more than enough time for the man to fire and send a hail of tiny projectiles towards her, to burrow into her flesh like a swarm of angry hornets. She waited, still as the stones around her.
The man had realised she was alone and unarmed and his confidence grew.
He rose to his feet, but still kept the gun trained on her, pointing directly at her belly.
“What do you think you’re doing her?” he barked. “don’t you know there’s going to be a test?”
The girl stared at him. She recognised by his clothing that he was a member of the armed forces, but she had no interest in the doings of two or three groups of insane survivors, all she wanted to do was to get out of this hole, alive, and preferably with the lizard.
She stood like a statue, waiting for an opportunity, the slightest break in the man’s concentration.
He began to walk towards her cautiously, drawn by curiosity. For a moment he thought…. standing within six feet of the girl, he realised at last what she was doing there, and he spat on the floor in disgust.
She was a scavenger – a wanderer; not a real citizen at all!
But he looked at her again, still curious. She looked normal enough – no extra limbs or cancerous growths eating away at her flesh. No wonder he had mistaken her for a citizen, she had all the right bits in all the right places.
He began to grin, wolfishly. He took two steps forward and grasped the flutter of decaying rags which covered her body and tore the front section away, exposing her breasts. His grin widened.
Yeah, she had all the right bits, in all the right places…..
With a quick jerk, he brought her down. The girl gave a strange, high pitched scream as she hit the ground and felt the jagged edges of bricks and glass cut into her unprotected flesh and the heat from the ground start to burn her back.
He kept his gun pressed firmly against her cheek as he bore down on top of her, tearing away the last of the rags tied around her waist, grunting as he loosened the fastening on his own clothes.
The girl began to snarl as she felt him prising her legs apart, but he struck her across the face with the gun, and took advantage of this sudden surprise to thrust all his weight down between her thighs, as if he wanted to grind her into the seething dirt below.
The girl thrashed and bucked, to no avail. The soldier was gasping in her ear, choking and slobbering.
He thrust his face roughly against hers, giving one last hard thrust as she turned her head, jerked, and sank her teeth into the bulging veins in his exposed neck.
The man roared, and his fingers twitched and clutched the trigger of the weapon, but the poison was appallingly swift, and the paralysis had him before he had time to send the fatal message.
The girl sprang to her feet and sped from the ruined building with startling speed, but not forgetting to take the lizard corpse with her. On the floor, the soldier lay twitching and convulsing, expecting death at any minute.
But death did not come. The girl’s venom was powerful enough to kill something the size of the lizard whose brains she had knocked out from a distance instead with a stone, but for something the size of a man, the sheer bulk of his body saved him. Slowly, he felt a tingling spread through his limbs, travelling along nerve pathways leaving a feeling somewhere between an unscratchable itch and a sneeze.
After about fifteen minutes of total immobility, he at last gained a feeble control of his legs again, and began to crawl, in a jerky, unco- ordinated fashion towards the blasted hole that was the exit.
He kicked weakly but desperately into the hot dust under him, he knew time was not on his side, and tears of sweat pooled in the crevices of his body and down the hollow of his spine as he struggled to force some cooperation from his insubordinate body.
That he made it to the doorway at all was a surprise, and more than he should have been able to achieve, but as he lifted his head painfully and squinted into the furnace without, he knew it was too late.
He saw the light first, before his retinas overloaded and blacked. The heat flash melted and crisped his flesh instantly, leaving nothing alive to register the shock wave when it arrived a few seconds later.
The remains of the building burst like a dandelion clock, molecules reduced to atoms, atoms to particles, particles to energy.
Dust to dust…
Not too far away, the familiar-shaped cloud began to form.
During the night, it rained. The water was warm and black, singing with sub-atomic fury as it burned like acid into the bone dry ground.
When morning came, there was no dawn The sky was filled with soot and ash and steam, and the sun’s hot rays bounced back, baffled, before they could strike the planet’s lower surfaces.
On the third day, the constant rain stopped evaporating instantly on contact with the ground, and a silent, black lake began to spread across the empty test site.
* * * * *
“…. so the children of Shaash were consumed by the very fire which could have saved them, and still they sought to find another home for the blame……”
San-san squirmed again. He was growing bored with his mother’s lecturing tone, it was all beginning to sound too much like a school lesson.
“Tell us about the People of the Hill,” he said, burying his toes in the sand to protect them from the small flurry of snow which was now falling like soft stars all around.
“Tell us about the magic city and the wonderful treasure!”
Whe-saa sighed. Children were always the impatient ones, divine or not. She settled down, closer to the fire, and the shadows retreated once again at the sound of her voice.
“The People of the Hill,” she began, “were the last of the Children of Shaash. And they built a great city on a high, high hill, which was the only land in a world of ocean.
“And here they kept the remembrance of their mother, and here they waited for her return.
“And they waited so long, so many life-times, that they did not know of the existence of ordinary men, for to the People, we were as much creatures of myth and legend as they were to us……”
* * * * *
Three:
Autumn’s Price
Greta stared out of the frosted window, stared across the white scar tissue of the great glacier which covered the land as far as her failing eyesight could make out. She rattled off a few cracked and well-chosen curses, and banged the steel shutters closed with a bad-tempered slam.
Always the same! Always snow and ice and more snow. How about a bit of variety in life? How about some sleet or rain, just for a change? All this cold weather was bad for her joints, and it didn’t do her disposition any favours, either.
She was hurrying along the cold corridor, head down, mind concentrating on the warmth to be had in her own cell, so that as she rounded the corner the collision with Ayla was a foregone conclusion, and the younger woman was almost on top of her before she knew what was happening.
“What! This is the latest in your useless ideas, to run around the corridors with your eyes shut? Why not make it more effective by riding a wheel-trolley also!”
Ayla seemed not to notice Greta’s scalding remarks, a strange occurrence in itself, for Ayla was a pale, timid, soul who melted like soft snow in the corrosive wind of Greta’s irritability.
Instead of standing dumbstruck and tearful as she normally would have after such an encounter, she grasped the old woman’s shoulders tightly, and the emotional wobble in her voice seemed to be one of relief rather than fear.
“Oh, Greta, I’ve found you at last. Please – you have to come – there’s been an explosion at the generator. Finverr….”
Her voice broke off in a tearful choke, and Greta gave her fine collection of colourful expletives another airing.
So, Finverr, Ayla’s worthless spouse, had gone and got himself blown up at the generating plant! So what! What did they expect her to do about it?
Always it was; ‘Greta, help us with this, find a cure for that’. Hah! Didn’t they know there was no cure for terminal carelessness, and didn’t they know that age in itself was not the bringer of wisdom and omniscience that they assumed it to be.
Always Greta would clean up and wipe their asses for them. Why not let snivelling little Ayla do some of the dirty work for a change, or would she faint at the sight of a little blood? Did they think that seeing it a hundred or a thousand times before made it any less red, or made its warm scent any more reminiscent of flowers?
Ayla continued tugging at her, hurrying her along the corridor until they came to the junction – almost identical to a hundred others – that led to Ayla and Finverr’s quarters. As with most of the residents of the City, they had the whole of a large, residential side corridor to themselves, although it had been built for, and in times past had housed, many more.
The actual rooms occupied by the couple were only two in number – it made keeping warm that much easier.
Ayla and Greta entered the small living area where a disproportionately large crowd of people had gathered. There seemed to be a tangible, communal sigh of relief as the two women appeared, and Greta scowled at the sight of so many hopeful faces turned towards her.
In a hushed silence, she was led through to the back room where a man lay on the hard bed, gasping painfully and occasionally emitting an unwilling moan. Greta smelled once more the familiar odours of blood and fear and death.
She sat down on the side of the bed and looked closely at the damage. Splintered bone was visible through the pulpy red mess of his left leg; blood bubbled through his breathing and a long sliver of metal disappeared into his abdomen.
Greta grunted. Finverr was a large man – hah!, not much more than a boy to her! – proud and insolent, full of his own strength and importance. He would not die quickly.
She said as much to Ayla, who gave a piteous wail and stumbled back though to the outer room to be comforted by the assembled throng.
Greta muttered to herself in annoyance. Stupid woman! Another child playing at being an adult, what was it to her if Finverr died, he beat her and shouted at her and treated her like a worthless possession, she would be better off without him.
In the outer room, she could still hear Ayla’s muffled sobs and cries. She sighed and pulled away the torn remnants of Finverr’s clothing from around his shattered flesh and bone.
“Don’t just stand there whining like a bunch of old women,” she bawled through, “get some clean water here at least….”
Later, when she had done all she could, she shooed the others away back to their own corridors, and sent Ayla away with some sympathetic relatives, despite her pleadings to be allowed to stay. Finverr would never know the difference, but Greta doubted if her own nerves could stand a whole night of Ayla’s sniffing and hand-wringing.
The man was unconscious now, his skin pale like the snow all around the City, pale like the lilies which would not bloom for his funeral.
Greta sat down carefully in the chair next to the bed and began her patient vigil for death to come for another of the City’s dwindling people.
She could remember when corridors had more than one or two inhabitants each, could remember when children were more common, facts more certain, objectives more clear…
But there were things even she could not remember;
“…tell us about how it used to be, Greta,” they nagged her. Ach! What did they want to know? That she had seen trees and flowers in her youth? That the sun had shone and felt warm on her back? That the birds had sung, and fish swam in free-flowing water? These were fairy stories, flights of the imagination, nothing more.
The ice and snow had been ever-present when she was a child, just as they were now. Tell us about it, Greta! It was the same as it is now!
The past is not a foreign country, nor am I a stranger from another time, another place.
This was what she wanted to tell them, but they wouldn’t listen. She was Greta, an old woman, who had been an old woman for as long as anyone else alive could remember.
There was no-one left of Greta’s generation now, no-one who could remember the graceful young woman she had been, no-one who could connect this wrinkled husk with the laughing child who had run to her mother with the shining icicles clasped in her hot, chubby hands, only to see them melt and trickle away to nothing and mingle with her own tears, while her mother’s arms wove around her like a protective cloak, comforting.
I am the same Greta who once cried in her mother’s lap for the loss of a wonderful treasure, she thought, but who is there to believe that now?
Tell us of when you were young, Greta, and there was spring in the world. It was the spring of my life, the only spring I have ever know, can’t you see, fools, that this is all there is, all that has been, and all that will come to you, there is no magical past, no glorious future, only a now, a continuum of snow and ice and cold and death. A punishment for believing there could ever be anything else.
Tell us of the people of your youth, Greta, were they tall and beautiful, unbent by the relentless cold and frozen hopes? Did the fire of living burn in them more strongly than the feeble flame we cherish in our hearts, flickering, threatening to gutter and expire with every new morning which brings us no end to our torment? Were they strong and fearless? Resolute of purpose and unassailed by a growing doubt, a creeping dread of where they were headed?
The man in the bed stirred and moaned in his sleep. Greta sighed. Looking at him she saw another face, across the valley of the years, from the far-away past.
People, ghosts, what did it matter now they were dead and gone, dead and gone such a long time. Were the ghosts which still drifted though Greta’s fading memories given any more substance by these tattered relics, did they still live though her? Was it true that no-one really died as long as they remained in the hearts and minds of those who had loved them? If that was so, then Greta was the last keeper of a lost generation. When she went, they would be well and truly gone, at last.
Faces arose from the past, soft and hazy, washed by time to a gentle, gothic dream, all the hard edges and cruel realities eroded and carried away in the insistent stream of years.
Her sister, bright and shining, always in Greta’s mind a perfect golden sphere, shedding all hurt and unpleasantness like soft rain. Untouched and untainted by life, dead at seven. years old, frozen for ever in all her childhood freshness, left outside the City one night, so that next morning the searchers found her small, perfect body – minus her bright, laughing soul – colder than iron, hard as the rocks under the snow.
Preserved for ever at seven years old, trapped like an insect in the amber of an everlasting childhood.
And her mother’s sphere was tin – pitted and scarred by a lifetime of pain and disappointment, crushed like an eggshell by the death of her youngest daughter, its once shiny surface dulled and deformed, a used- up, forgotten container, preparing to be thrown away.
Another face, another life. The heat of youth was in her veins, and she lay awake at night, hugging herself, dreaming untellable, explosive dreams.
Greta raked into the recesses of her mind, and hiding like a jewel, she found the careful hoarded memory of the first thrill, the first time.
Even now, after a lifetime’s bitterness, the memory of his young, slender body still filled her mouth with a rush of sweet liquid, and though she cursed herself for the futility of it, for a moment she imagined her hands on his hips, lithe muscles, smooth gliding bone, like her own had been before age had gifted her a whole catalog of imperfections
Another child, preserved untouched and ageless by the hand of death. Greta deliberately avoided re-running the painful scenes of that far-off bitter July morning.
She had mourned over Dorry’s broken body lying at the bottom of the sheer ice face too many times, in the flesh and in her mind, felt the daggers in her heart too often. This was not a memory carefully cherished, this was a memory buried and forgotten, the wound healed over as best it could. Better to let it remain in its grave.
But she still had that one, precious recollection where she held him in the dark. Only her own death would dissolve that, it was part of the very core of her being. It was all she had of him.
Finverr stirred again, and she did not mistake him for Dorry, not this time. He lived and breathed still, though for how much longer she could not say. Oh, these night-long pilgrimages through the dark hours grew longer with the years! Sleep was a luxury for children, it had been so long since Greta had passed a full night in oblivion she had ceased to think anything of it, but there were times, in the dead quiet and peace, when she felt she would not struggle too fiercely if the end were to come, there and then…
Until then, night was a time to think. Time to realise what price had been charged for her long life. Time to pay the bill in full, time for retribution.
Old age brings no wisdom when you are still capable of deceiving yourself, Greta told herself sternly. She sat up each night not because she could not sleep – some dreaming hours could still be hers – but because she was afraid to sleep!
The dreams, the visions – were they a sign of coming madness? Or was she already mad, she and every last one of them left in this decaying city, trying to preserve a way of life that had been lost for centuries, merely prolonging the inevitable, making the agony last longer. Was that what her dreams were trying to tell her?
She shivered and pulled her grey robe tightly around her thin shoulders. It was old, like her. Time had been when it had fitted like a second skin, now it hung in loose folds over her shrinking frame. Still not unlike her own skin, she thought, with malicious humour.
The night reached the bottom of the well. 3.00 am. From now on there was only up. Greta felt the cold at this time of the night. Her body still remembered that it should be curled up, warm and cozy, in a dark cave somewhere, waiting out the black hours till the terrors of the night with eyes like orange saucers retreated to their rank lairs and left the warm comfort of morning for the creatures of the sun.
Greta never knew when she passed that obscure threshold between wake and sleep, conscious and unconscious, alive and dead. The mind never registers the moment, knowingness just floats away, dissolving like sugar in the mouth.
She entered her dream as easily as slipping into water, breaking the surface tension without a ripple and floating free in an idea of lightness and viscosity, shedding vortices like years and feeling her body renewed once more as she was given back what she had forgotten was rightfully hers.
Greta’s sphere was shining silver – a moon of glowing beauty, a rare and lovely thing, alive with its own lustre and incandescent with opal fire.
It moved through the water leaving no wake, no turbulences, so smooth was its silky surface, so slippery, throwing out heat and light through the embracing liquid. So perfect.
All at once she heard the voices again, but, dreaming still, they did not alarm her as the remembrance of them would on waking.
She strained to catch the unfamiliar words, fighting for recognition of a beautiful, forgotten language. How it hovered there, just in front of her, frustratingly out of reach…. She let the sounds flow over her like honey, and as she heard their message understanding dawned in her head like a new day.
Into the periphery of her vision swam a fluid figure, sleek with unguarded energy. The water melted before his passage and flowed over his streamlined contours. She wanted to join with him in his swooping, gliding dance, to run free from the shackles of time and gravity and fly like an angel in the water’s warm embrace.
She moved after the shimmering form, her body as light and silvery as her spirit. She rose like a bird through the stratified upper layers of the all-encompassing water. She dived like a meteor down again into its velvet depths, shooting fire and stars from her hands and feet. She leapt like a spark, crackling with high-tension electricity.
The dark shape moved closer to her. She turned slowly, delightfully, opened her mouth to speak….
The face she confronted was dark, muzzled, unhuman. Her mouth opened, but the scream remained inside.
She woke, shivering still, as if only seconds had passed since she last clutched her robe. The voices were still in her head, calling to her, calling her name. Voices like fingers in her brain. Voices of madness, the price for having lived so long.
Greta’s sphere was lead now, and dark. Small and heavy, impermeable to thoughts, and drawing itself down, closing in ever tighter on itself, shrinking and becoming more dense as it collapsed under its own weight.
She took a long, deep breath and released it slowly. The voices were already retreating, banished by her consciousness to their dark, underwater existence. Only their memory would remain, night after night, to torture and torment her.
“Always the same,” she whispered to herself, closing her eyes tight against the sudden threat of unexpected tears. “Always the memories stay to have their revenge. Always they say ‘look, you must suffer as we have’. Suffer, Greta – you must pay for continuing to live, while we are eternally young, and can have no life but yours.”
Greta opened her eyes again defiantly. She had shed no tears since she last sang the funeral song for her mother, decades ago, and she was not yet so feeble that a few disturbed dreams would reduce her to a snivelling child.
She looked at the clock on the wall opposite, and it was 6.05 am.
Dawn, Greta, you’ve lived to see another one. Every one a triumph, every one a poke in the eye of fate, a knee in the groin of providence. She would have the last laugh yet, if that was all there was remaining to her.
She rose from the chair, stiffly, cursing with her usual fluency, and hobbled over to the one small outward window the room possessed.
She pressed the switch in the wall, worn smooth and indented by an uncountable number of such presses, and the crystal de-polarised, revealing the dawn landscape to her poor sight.
A rose-hued virgin’s blush welled up over the north eastern quarter of the sky, and the colour bled into the surrounding snow, tinting it with pale fuchsia. The snow looked as if the land underneath was bleeding, life’s crimson slowly rising through the white above to greet the morning sunrays. The wound ran, and would never be staunched. The world died as Greta watched in sorrowful silence.
She heard a noise behind her and turned. The eyes of the man Finverr met hers.
She was surprised to find him still alive, but he was a big man, full of life and arrogance. If he had lived this long it was likely he would survive a good few years yet.
He would outlast her, that was certain. His was the future, locked away in this cold city, him and his stupid wife and any stupid children he managed to get on her. Greta was almost glad that she would never know what was to come for the last of the world’s children, hiding here in their final sanctuary, waiting for the ignorance and the end.
There was a hesitant tap at the door. Greta knew who it was before she opened it.
Ayla stood there, pale and nervous, terrified of knowing the truth. Greta snorted and pointed though to the back room.
“Always the same, ” she rasped, “they never do what you expect. Gratitude, what gratitude?”
Ayla ran through with a delirious squeak, and threw herself over Finverr’s prostrate body.
But he won’t last long if you treat him like that, Greta mused cheerfully to herself, suppressing her humour with a cough. She hobbled towards the open door and made to leave, but paused and looked back through the interior door at the couple embracing within.
” I wish you both a long life,” she told them in a strong, firm voice, “A very, very long life. You both deserve it!”
She closed the door quietly and set off down the the frigid corridors back to her own abode. A very small chuckle found an unguarded exit and escaped,much to Greta’s surprise.
* * * * * * * *
The snow had stopped, and San-san raised his head sleepily from his dug- out in the sand. To his surprise, the sky was beginning to lighten out to sea, and the darkness around was no longer absolute. Morning was still a long way off, but outriders were giving advance warning of its coming.
He rolled lazily, knowing it wouldn’t be long before the soft sea water released him from the burden of gravity.
“I wouldn’t have liked to have been a city dweller,” he murmured, “Why didn’t they just come and live in the sea, if they knew we were here? Who’d want to spend all their lives on shore?”
“They couldn’t,” his mother explained, “they weren’t made like us, they drowned too easily, although they had magic which let them come to us sometimes. But the magic drew their sustenance from them, and they grew weaker and faded…”
But Shu-a-teh, eyes indigo and misty with pre-adult longings, was staring out over water as dark as her imaginings, lost in a world of what had been, and what was to come.
“Tell us about Sil-cey and the Shore Fairy,” she whispered shyly, her moist eyes reflecting shards of firelight.
Whe-saa smiled understandingly. Shu-a-teh was an age when dreams and fantasies merged into new thoughts and feelings. The story of Sil-cey and the Shore Fairy was a favourite for those who were neither child nor adult, as it had been so for herself…
She threw another pile of spitting, smoking weed onto the fire, and began, in suitably reverential tones;
“Sil-cey was a prince, the son of the ruler of the seven seasons, and he lived in the joyful palace in the heart of his father’s world.”
“He had everything he could wish for, he had a life free from trouble and excess activity, and he had the attention of all the young females, who found him most interesting and desirable.”
“But Sil-cey did not realise his own good fortune, he pined for something, he could not say what. He grew pale and thin, and life lost all its joy and motion for him.”
“Then one day he was sitting on the shore, not caring if the wind dried his eyes or the heaviness pulled him into the sand, when he saw a beautiful and marvellous creature, long in limb and graceful in motion.”
“The sea breezes blew and fanned a great waterfall of hair which spilled over the woman’s shoulders and down her back, past her waist, and Sil- cey was struck with wonder, and knew he had come upon a Shore Fairy….”
“And the women of his father’s estate meant nothing to Sil-cey now, all his longing was for the strange creature of the shore. Day after night, month after month, he came to the same spot to watch her chase the waves as they broke laughing on the glittering pebbles, and ran like darting fish across the smooth, flat sand.”
“Finally, he could stand no more, and he gathered all his courage and revealed himself to the Shore Fairy. She was startled at first, but Sil-cey sang to her of underwater marvels and the power of flight beneath the sea/air interface, and the Shore Fairy was quiet and listened to his song and wondered.”
“So Sil-cey abandoned all his caution, and begged the woman to come and live with him in the clear green viscosity, and he begged so hard and so long, and he sang his song with such passion that eventually she agreed, but there was a condition she laid upon her coming, and that was that he should never ask her that which she feared most to hear……”
* * * * * *
Four:
Glorious Winter
Calyx swam easily through the clear, cold water. Her breathing was controlled by the clever valve attached to the filter she wore strapped over her shoulders, and a small pump moved the counter-current heat exchanger fluid through the tiny capilliaries of her skin-suit.
In an environment innately incompatible with her physiology, she experienced no discomfort or distress, nor did she expect to. When the pressure increased as she sank deeper , more ingenious devices would sneak automatically into life from their hiding places on or in her body, and begin their tasks of altering, protecting or avoiding, depending on the most effective solution to the numerous problems of keeping a particular organism alive out of its evolutionary niche.
Calyx did not even think of the swarm of tiny marvels shunting information and matter all around her. She took them for granted, she had no reason to suppose they would not perform as required, and her mind was thus freed from the mundane experience of worry to concentrate on the reason for her presence in the dark liquid world below.
Just in front of her, his image already obscured slightly by the gloom, swam the dark, streamlined figure of Sil-cey. On land he looked stocky and ungainly, his design subtly wrong, and she was the creature of light and air, leaping with long, fragile limbs and mastery of her body.
In the water, their roles were reversed, she was the clumsy one. She knew that he swam slowly so that she could keep up, but even so she felt her heart working strenuously, and her gas exchange valve was at maximum output as she swam stubbornly on through water which at times seemed to have the viscosity of syrup.
Sil-cey thought it a marvel that she could breath under water, as well as on land, but she found it an even greater marvel that he could go so long without breathing at all. He broke the surface perhaps once every hour, and then only for a minute or less, and even with all her magical aids she did not dare follow him down past the point where her ears began to hurt in earnest and her vision began to blacken and blur.
Still, it was a thrill to fly though the buoyant salt water, where gravity and direction got themselves all mixed up and indulged in humorous games which their stern alter-egos on the surface would never contemplate.
Sil-cey slowed at last, and exhilarating as the swim was, she was pleased to see they had reached the end of their journey, a deep, sheer sided trench in the ocean bed, bowed at the sides, worn by the action of underwater currents to form a vast cauldron of still, calm water. It was a great goldfish bowl, without need for containment of the water within, wherein swam the people of the sea, Sil-cey’s brothers and sister, with all joy and appreciation.
A voice formed in her mind, an image in her head, dark and smiling, or so it seemed in her visualisation. Sil-cey did not bother trying to communicate with her by sound-pressure waves, her ears did not respond well to those underwater frequencies, instead he used only direct mind to mind contact, which proved more satisfactory to both concerned.
“It is the time of gathering to sing the song of Spring!” she heard in her head.
That was the only disadvantage of mind-talk. Some of the sea people’s concepts were so abstracted that they came across only as the closest possible word-meaning she could visualise. Calyx knew that Sil-cey had not said ‘Spring’, but rather that the songs and dancing would be a celebration of some sort of renewal of the spirit, rather than the literal meaning of a different season.
Calyx herself knew ‘Spring’ only as a concept – a time after Winter, before Summer, a time when plants put forth new leaf, when animals procreated and the world grew warm.
Mithe was pedantic. Axial tilt, mean day length, equinoctal point, these were the sort of phrases which had meaning for him. It was all they had left, in reality, but Calyx preferred the older definitions, they sounded so much more…. poetic! (Bad choice of word, Mithe would die laughing, but somehow, in this luminous otherworld, it didn’t seem out of place.)
She drew level with Sil-cey as he hung in the clear water, floating like a dark cloud. He reached to her and took her hand in his, her five thin bony fingers in his four, short, connected digits. Sil-cey’s hand looked clumsy, but it was capable of everything her own could achieve, and possessed a greater strength. He pulled her close to him, gently, till she was touching his sleek, muscled body.
His large dark eyes which seemed blurred and tearful out of the water were now wide and observant. Her vision was filtered though the porous lenses which covered her corneas, otherwise she would see nothing of his face except a dark smear.
She was close enough to make out the lines of the individual hairs on his muzzle, and the long vibrissae sprouting from either side tickled her face.
She laughed. It was a peculiar sound underwater, but Sil-cey knew its meaning and he blew a short stream of bubbles in her face before playfully darting underneath her, twisting and turning, making currents which destroyed her equilibrium and caused her to tumble in the water, ending up with her head hanging downwards and her feet pointing to the surface. She didn’t mind. In the cushioning medium all around there was no sensation of falling, or fear of hurt. The water surrounded them like loving arms and protected them.
Again in her head the voice: ‘All your magic cannot keep you from swimming on your head?! Shhhh-ah! Soon you will be telling me you like being in that position! Perhaps some children will see you and think it is a new dance!’
She pretended indignation at his teasing. ‘We are not all built from rock to withstand the wind and waves!’ she thought back at him. ‘The Shore People are like sea-spray in the wind and blow as they will, above or below!’
He gave her a mock bow, paddling ostentatiously with his powerful rear flippered feet, so she could feel the rhythmic pulsing of the wave-form
‘Come with me then, and we shall see if the dance requires any swimming on the head, or flying through the air/sea interface!’
He grasped her with both stubby hands and with an energetic kick propelled them both speedily towards the centre of the great cauldron where already many of the water-people were forming intricate, exact patterns with their bodies, while all around the water vibrated and boomed with the songs they created.
Leaving the water was difficult, drained of strength as she was. Gravity’s hold suddenly attached itself to her, attempting to pull her down into the sand, down onto her belly to crawl like a snake.
She resisted its demands, and raised one leaden leg after another, forcing them to carry her out of the breakers and across the sand, while all the time her balance reacted to and compensated for the gentle rocking that was no longer there.
Sil-cey had begged her not to leave, as he always did, and every time she found it harder to resist his earnest pleas. But hollow as her own explanations sounded even to herself, she knew them to be the truth, that she must return for sustenance of the magic which kept her alive beneath the water.
When she finally made it back to the city, she was bone weary, exhausted, and she collapsed onto her bed, unable to do any more, still feeling the phantom waves and water undulating all around her, imagining its wetness on her skin.
Rest was not to be given easily though. Mithe must have seen her come back, he had probably been watching for her all this time. She had hardly lain on the bed more than a minute, when the door opened and he strode in, filled with determination and impatience.
He looked down at her lying on the bed, eyeing her disapprovingly, and she could only stare back dully, unable to do more than keep her eyelids apart by force of will. He shook his head and clicked angrily, but she was too tired to feel the irritation she should have at his rudeness.
“Three weeks!” he said at last, his foot tapping an independent rhythm of annoyance on the hard floor, “Three weeks its been this time. How much longer do you think you can keep this up?”
“Not now, Mithe,” she whispered, “I’m really to tired to argue with you…”
“Of course you are!” he snapped, “Can’t you see what you’re doing to yourself?”
“I said not now!” She tried to put some force into her words, but the effort made her head spin.
“…….. discuss this later…..” she heard in the distance, then Mithe turned and marched out, slamming the door behind him, a disturbance which Calyx barely even heard as she slipped into an unconciousness of deep green, and dark eyes and dances.
Later, she was ready for Mithe’s rebukes, but they came kinder than she expected, and this added to her guilt
She sat in the wide, bright atrium at the heart of the city. The sloping sides rose high above her head, bowing towards each other to meet at the top, forming a sort of elongated dome, almost a strange imitation of the underwater cauldron where Sil-cey’s people danced their strange dances.
In the centre of the area, surrounded on all sides by windows, and the bright, white, snow-reflected light from the world outside, was a dead tree.
It was only a small sapling, less than six feet in height, with few branches. Its buds were browned and hard, likes fossils, and the wood was ancient and brittle. The atrium gave the impression of having been built around the tree, but that was not the case, the tree had been planted at the time of the building’s completion. It had been grown from cell cultures deep frozen for centuries or more in temperatures even more extreme than those beyond the frosted windows. It had not survived outside the laboratory.
Calyx sat by the tree, on the smooth, worn floor. The atrium had a still and reverential feel to it, like an affirmation of faith. She heard Mithe’s footsteps, carried in the brittle acoustics of the dome, a good minute before he reached her.
“I had a feeling I would find you here. Still trying to breathe life into a dead stick!”
His tone was surprisingly gentle, as was the hand he laid on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off, and he sat down on the low stone wall surrounding the tree, regarding her sadly.
“One day we will have live trees, but only if you concentrate your energies, and work with us. There are too few of us for you to spend your days playing with seals!”
Her head came up indignantly at the implied slight she interpreted from his words.
“They are intelligent beings!” she snapped angrily
“Yes, I know that Calyx,” he kept his voice even, trying to mollify her irritation, “but so are we. And we’re an endangered species too, in case you hadn’t noticed. We need all our resources – and that includes you – if we are ever going to make this planet habitable again.”
“And if we do,” he paused, “when we do,” he emphasised, “we’ll
need all our people even more.” He leaned forward and put both his hands around her shoulders.
“Don’t!” she pushed him away quickly. She glared at him suspiciously.
“That’s what you really want, isn’t it? A means of repopulation!” She spat the offensive words out like sour milk. “That’s why you don’t want me spending time with Sil-cey, isn’t it?”
“And is that why you spend so much time out at sea – to avoid me?”
Mithe’s tone was not so gentle now, there was a hardness that had crept into it, and also hurt underneath the anger, which she didn’t want to hear.
“Oh, come on Calyx, what sort of game are you playing at anyway. He’s not even the same species as you!”
Mithe regretted the words even as they were leaving his lips, and the sudden fury in Calyx’s eyes warned him that he had mishandled the situation, but he refused to back down now, and returned her seething stare, locked in confrontation as to who would be the first to look away.
“Well he’s a better person than you’ll ever manage to be!” Calyx yelled at him. She could see the small muscles in his jaw working, and for a moment she thought he was going to shout, scream at her, hit her or something, and she was almost reflexively flinching when he turned without a word and abruptly strode away across the wide atrium floor, without looking back at her.
Calyx scrambled to her feet and shouted after him;
“We’ll never have trees and things again! Give up Mithe, it’s broken and you can’t fix it, not this time. None of your fancy toys will change anything, can’t you see that? ”
“We should be helping the sea-people, not sneering at them. We have all this knowledge we could give them, instead of keeping it for ourselves, Mithe, are you listening to me? Mithe…..!”
He didn’t answer her. She stood and watched him leave, then she sat down slowly on the low wall, blinking to stop her emotion from escaping.
She touched the dead bark of the tree with her finger tips. A thousand times she had examined its shrivelled buds, searching for a sign of green, and when she found nothing, in her mind she had clothed its nakedness with leafy green.
Now, even this failed her. A dead stick for a dead world, and the death of hope she could still see in the eyes of the man who had wanted her.
Down in the cauldron, in the floating green and gold, she forgot for a time the hopelessness of above and the pointlessness of existence. She swam and laughed, and sang and danced, but Sil-cey perceived her sadness and even though she had made it a condition of her visits to him under the sea/air interface that he ask her no questions about her life above, still he could not keep his thoughts within himself.
“This time you bring unhappiness with you Calyx. Perhaps I can take it from you, or at least share its burden.”
Calyx thought images of friendship and gratitude to Sil-cey.
“There is nothing you can do, Sil-cey. There is nothing anyone can do.”
“Do you know the history of this world, the whole world we inhabit, above and below, beyond the land/sea interface? Do you know of the great catastrophes, and the terrible things done in the name of my people?”
“We have stories…..” he thought shyly, “… of the great, lost worlds of the shore people, and the city on the hill…..”
“They are not stories,” she told him sadly, “they are the truth. Once this world, this planet, was beautiful and full of green, growing things, not snow and ice, and we destroyed it, with our pride and stupidity, and our refusal to believe, and now there are too few of us left to undo the damage done.”
“We can never find again what has been lost, for we are fading and dying, and we have little power now, nor even the will to use what we have.”
“Then let us help you,” Sil-cey thought eagerly, “show us your power, let us know how the magic is done, and we will build the world again as it was, and we will see the spring again, and summer too, for there are many of us and we are strong and full of life!”
Sil-cey swam in front of her, his dark eyes glowing and his long whiskers trembling, but when he saw the look on Calyx’s face, his excitement left him, and a strange fear took its place.
“Sil-cey,” she thought, anguished, “you don’t know what you’re saying, you must never think these things. Only misery can come from such a course, only grief and destruction. Our interference…..” she broke off, her thoughts a turmoil of aching guilt, “My interference in your lives can only result in ruin for you. Each time it happens……” Again her thoughts swirled with troubled emotions.
“Sil-cey, I should never have come here. I may have endangered you and your people, I….. who knows what damage I’ve done. I should never have come.” Her thoughts were small and bleak.
“I must go now.” In her mind her words were only a whisper. “I wish you knew what you have meant to me, Sil-cey, but……. there is a time for everything to end. I cannot stay. I may bring only death and trouble.”
Sil-cey swam in agitated circles. “Do not go! I will never think of such things again, but do not leave, Calyx, please!”
She shook her head, her thoughts fluttering like birds in her confusion.
“I must go now,” she repeated, “there is no more.”
“When will you return!” Sil-cey wailed as she swam away
Calyx kept her head down and swam on furiously, putting as much distance between herself and Sil-cey as she could, before she had a chance to change her mind.
Her last thought floated back to him, fainter from the intervening and increasing distance.
“I can never return. Forget you ever knew me, Sil-cey. Goodbye.”
Sil-cey could easily have caught up with her, but he remained hanging in the cauldron, confused and miserable. Her last words still brushed his mind.
He broadcast one last thought through the cold water. “Come back. Please come back!” But there was no reply.
Outside this time, the light so bright it blinded her to blackness. White snow, blue sky, a nuclear inferno, millions of miles away, alone with her thoughts till Mithe found her like he always did.
“It’s cold out here,” he observed, unnecessarily, then, after a while,
“Do you want to tell me?”
She thrust her fingers into the snow, crushing a handful of the fine, powdery crystals. Then she turned to look at him, and her eyes blazed like the sky, wide and blue, tiny pupils cowering away from the intense radiation all around, washed with wind-stung tears.
“Listen.” she said. He nodded.
She looked up at the cloudless arc overhead. “This is not our world anymore. Not a place we are fitted to live in. There are others who have it now.”
“The sea-people.”
She didn’t bother acknowledging his words, but continued staring out over the hard, white landscape”
“He asked me to help them,” she said, almost dreamily, “help them become like us, with our magic” She shook her head ruefully. “Or rather, he offered us their help. Wanted to share our burden with us.”
“You know why we can’t do that?”
“So they can’t mess things up like us, make all our mistakes over again, destroy themselves before they’ve even had a chance to become themselves.”
“Something like that.”
She turned to him again, smiling sadly. “We’re dreaming, Mithe, we can never get back what we had and threw away so carelessly, there will be no new spring for this poor place, no triumphant return of our children’s children. We have to let go and give it to its rightful owners, the longer we hang on the more chance we have of messing it up for them.” Her eyes were full of running liquid now, but her smile was glorious.
“Let’s do the right thing for once, and go now, quietly and with dignity. One final act of kindness for this sad home we have abused so much.”
“It’s time to go, Mithe, can’t we do it willingly, and with joy for what’s left behind, and what’s to come, no sullen and petty destructiveness this time, it’s the only thing we have left to give!” Her tears spilled over and ran down her cold cheeks, dripping onto the snow and burning tiny holes before they froze like diamonds in the soft white cloud.
“It’s hard, letting go of a dream,” she whispered, wiping her damp face before it, too, froze. “It’s hard, finally growing up.”
Mithe said nothing. He took her hand and pulled her towards him, and she came, and laid her head on his.
“Come on,” he said softly, “it’s getting late, we’d better get back.”
He took her by the hand, and they walked slowly back to the city together, in the direction of the setting sun.
“…. and Sil-cey came every day to the shore and sang for Calyx, but she never came again.”
“And the last of the children were called by Shaash, and they came willingly, for their time was over, and the time of the People was just beginning, and the world was given to the People, so that they would remember that in their beginning was an end, and all things will end so that it may begin again.”
There was a long silence after Whe-saa finished her story. San-san stirred awkwardly in the sand and, looking up, realised it was almost day.
“That’s just a story, thought, isn’t it, it’s just made up!”
Whe-saa smiled. “Most stories have a little truth in them somewhere.” she said.
“But there’s no such things as Shore-Fairies, is there?” he persisted.
“No, there are no such things.” Whe-saa reached over past the dead embers of the fire and pulled a small pink flower growing in the lee of a sand dune nearby. She turned it upside down over her cupped hand and shook it, and two small frozen dew-droplets fell out and lay on her palm, sparkling like diamonds in the morning light.
“Look,” she said, “the tears of Calyx.”
Shu-a-teh rose stiffly to her feet and walked down to the water’s edge. Already the morning’s warmth was beginning to melt the overnight snow, and through it small plants were vigorously poking their leaves in preparation for another hard days photosynthesis.
On the low hill, behind and to her right, Shu-a-teh could make out the sudden burst of blossoms which had appeared on the trees, it seemed with amazing suddenness, only in the last two or three days. A small insect buzzed past her ear, and a bird sang somewhere close by, celebrating the spring which had come at last.
But Shu-a-teh saw none of this, gazing out over the crystal clear, white-topped waves which leapt and played in the fresh morning, past the golden glory of the sunrise floating on the horizon, she saw in her mind a tall, graceful creature, hair blowing like sand in the wind, beckon to her and smile with a radiance which outshone the rising sun.
Then Shu-a-teh ran forward, into the water, feeling its cold, exhilarating bite as it wet her sand-dried fur, and then the water was all around her, rushing and singing, and Shu-a-teh sang too, for the joy of the beautiful morning, and in her heart she danced with all the children of the earth.