Beneath the World a Sea Page 4

  Well, why not? Ben thought. He settled into a more sustainable pose, and she flipped over a page and began to draw again. ‘So what have you got on today, Ben?’

  ‘Nothing until eleven, when I’ve got a meeting with the police chief here and the Head Administrator.’

  ‘Da Ponte and Tiler. Ha.’ She scratched away with her charcoal, making a series of long curves. ‘Good luck with that.’

  ‘You know them?’

  ‘I’ve met them a few times. This is their world. They’ve been here a long time. Everyone has to develop their own way of coping with the Delta if they’re here for more than a few months, and they’ve both learnt to manage by keeping very very still.’ She paused, held the pad further away from herself to see the effect.

  ‘I’ve got to admit,’ he said, ‘that my understanding of this place is so limited that I do wonder what a meeting’s going to achieve.’

  ‘Well, cancel it, then,’ she said, resuming her scratching. ‘They won’t mind. In fact, I’m sure they’d rather you cancelled it altogether. There’s a call box just over there, look. Dial one for Administration. Leave a message. Then I suggest you go out into the forest. Meet some Mundinos. And hopefully a duende or two. I promise you, until that’s happened, you’ll have no idea at all what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Because of this disturbing effect they’re supposed to have?’

  She was taking another pause, holding out her picture and looking back and forth with sharp critical eyes between the picture and his face. ‘“Supposed to have”,’ she repeated. ‘Ha! There really are things you need to experience before you do anything else.’ She made a mark, considered it, rubbed at it with her finger. ‘Oh and by the way,’ she said, ‘everyone here knows that you’re here about the duende killings, so you can probably afford to relax that whole “need to know” thing.’ She glanced at him, scratched away at the paper, glanced at him again. ‘Tough assignment. How to stop people you know nothing about from killing a creature you’ve never encountered.’

  ‘That’s about it, I’m afraid,’ he said, thinking he’d take her advice and put the meeting off for a day.

  They sat in silence for a while, him looking southwards along the quay, her glancing back and forth between his face and her page, sketching, pausing, sketching again. It was an odd thing to have his face examined quite so closely, simply as a physical object.

  ‘Oh look,’ he said presently. ‘There’s Jael and Rico.’ The two of them had arrived and sat down four benches away. They had cakes of some kind in a paper bag. Rico had his guitar. He stretched out his arms and his long thin legs, graceful and fluent as a cat, and as he did so he glanced across at Ben and winked. Ben looked away uneasily.

  ‘Yeah?’ Hyacinth adjusted some detail in her drawing and didn’t look round. ‘Keep your head still, please. You’ve moved.’

  ‘They’re a strange pair.’

  ‘Sure are.’

  ‘Just a couple of drug-addled hippies, I suppose.’

  ‘Bit more than that.’ Hyacinth opened a box and selected a finer piece of charcoal. ‘Jael’s work was once going to be the next big thing in science. Jael Tarn. Have you not heard of her?’

  ‘Do you know what, I think I have. I think I read something a few years ago. It’s just that …’

  ‘I know. You don’t expect to see a famous scientist acting like she does. She used to work on the interface between biology, subatomic physics and psychology. It was very original stuff. But she came down here and chucked it all in. Decided it was beside the point.’

  ‘And Rico?’

  She shrugged. ‘He is just a drug-addled hippy, as far as I can tell. Can’t say I get what she sees in him, but it seems he’s useful to her.’ She paused, held the picture at arm’s length again, nodded. ‘Anyway, here you are, Ben. I’m done. What do you think?’

  She held up the pad and there he was, a little sterner in the face than he would prefer to see himself, a little more single-minded in the eyes, but she’d absolutely got those taut muscles in his cheeks and jaw, whose tension he could feel from inside, like steel cables. He was, unmistakably, a policeman.

  The phone box was a British one, except that it was painted in pale United Nations blue and had been adapted for the American coins that were used in the Delta Protectorate. Ben put a dime in the slot, phoned in a message postponing the meeting, then headed off southwards through the town, thinking to walk out into the forest. There were a few more people on the streets now, about half of them local Mundinos as far as he could tell, and half international visitors like himself. He passed another café with four or five customers inside, and a butcher’s shop, and a small, dark ‘International Book Store’. In a shop called Fantini’s, which was also a diner of sorts, he bought himself a French loaf, a bottle of lemonade and some cooked chicken.

  ‘Obrigada, senhora,’ he said to Mrs Fantini, trying out the Portuguese he’d been mugging up on since he took his post.

  ‘De nada,’ she told him, with a smile that struck him as sly, though not unfriendly. On the wall behind her a miniature Iya hung from a nail, watching Ben blankly with her little stone eyes.

  Almost at the end of the town (it was only a dozen streets wide), there was a little place with a prettily painted shopfront that sold ceramic ornaments. Ben was surprised by this – was there really a market for such things in Amizad? – and, out of curiosity, stepped inside. There was a shelf of quaint Mundino characters in traditional dress, and a row of ceramic clock towers – the little town’s Eiffel Tower – but what caught his eye were the figurines of duendes in various sizes. At this point, he’d still only seen duendes in photographs – and very blurry ones at that, for the creatures didn’t photograph well for reasons not yet understood – but nevertheless he was startled by the way that they were presented here, with vulnerable, almost beseeching eyes, and hands stretched out as if offering friendship. He was turning one over in his hand when the owner of the shop came out of a back room where she’d been working, drying her hands on a piece of rag.

  ‘That’s ten dollars if you’d like it,’ she said, and then, ‘You must be the new policeman. How do you do? My name is Justine.’

  He shook her hand. She was a Frenchwoman, a few years older than himself, quite tall and thin, with large eyes and delicate features, and somehow fragile, like her own creations. She wore green school sandals and had her hair in a single long plait that hung most of the way down her back.

  ‘From what I’ve read about duendes,’ he said, ‘I never thought I’d see a cute one in a gift shop.’ He realized at once that he’d said the wrong thing. She wasn’t a confident enough person to be angry, but instead she visibly shrivelled. And Ben understood that, in her mind, this was not a gift shop, and that what he had assumed to be a sentimental and formulaic souvenir was to her a work of art, an expression of what she wanted to think of as her deepest or truest self. ‘Beautifully made,’ he added hastily. ‘And how amazing that each one is different.’

  She rallied a little. ‘I try to bring out the life in them. I try to show that these creatures too are children of the same universe as ourselves.’ Her eyes moistened slightly. ‘The Mundinos butcher them in their thousands, you know. I do hope you’re going to be able to help them. The poor things can’t speak for themselves, so I make these little figures to do it for them.’

  ‘That’s … that’s very commendable. I’ll certainly buy one. But I’m going for a walk now, so perhaps you could keep it for me until my return.’

  ‘With pleasure. Where will you walk?’

  ‘I thought I’d go into the forest.’

  She looked startled. ‘On your own, on foot?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He jiggled the model duende in his hand. ‘Who knows, I might find one of these chaps for real.’

  Soon after Justine’s shop, the road, which had hitherto followed the waterfront, curved inland to avoid a small rocky outcrop that marked the end of the town and of the stretch of the River Let
he that came right up to Amizad. Having avoided this lump of rock – it was the core of a volcanic side vent – the road continued along the edge of the much larger Rock which was the island on which Amizad stood. But here there was no town and no Lethe. To Ben’s right, in place of houses and roads, a waste of stone and earth, apparently completely bare of vegetation, rose up to the extinct volcanos that formed the crest of the island. Several research stations were visible near the top, along with the aerials and parabolic dishes that were busy measuring the perturbations in space and time that set the Delta apart from the rest of the planet. And to his left, where the river had been, there was now the forest, abutting directly on to the rock. He was right next to it at last. There were spiral magenta leaves above his head, white helices dangling down within his reach, opening their lovely pink bells.

  A hundred yards further along the road he came to a track that headed straight out into the trees. He hesitated, feeling suddenly very nervous. But he knew there were no real dangers in the forest – no carnivorous animals, no venomous insects or snakes – and besides, the physical sensation of fear seemed very close indeed to the feeling of desire: so close, in fact, that it was hard to distinguish the one from the other. As he took his first step off the Rock and on to the forest track, he felt like a young boy on the way to his first sexual encounter.

  The track was made of living wood. Feet and wheels going back and forth had worn through the thin layer of compost and down to the matrix of entangled roots beneath, polishing the roots themselves until they were shining and smooth. He stood there for a few seconds, just inside the threshold, and then began to walk, under those big magenta trees with their countless spirals, until the Rock was out of sight. In the warm, moist air, the aroma was almost overpowering – caramel and lilies, sweet and bitter, along with that other scent that had no name – and the whole place was extraordinarily quiet. No birdsong, no hum of insects, only sometimes the faint groaning and creaking from the wood itself that he’d listened to in his nights on the boat. Away through the trees, patches of sunlight revealed ponds, pools and channels, each one silent and alone, or so they appeared, though in reality all of them were simply openings into one continuous sea.

  The track crossed a channel on a rough wooden bridge. Pinkish underwater weeds undulated gently in the slow northward flow towards the main channel of the Lethe, each a kind of necklace of bead-like, spiral-bearing nodules with only a superficial resemblance to plants in the world outside. According to the briefing notes that Ben had read, there were two theories about the life of the Delta. One: it was of extraterrestrial origin. Two: it was of terrestrial origin but completely unrelated to the rest of life on Earth, having arisen separately from inanimate matter.

  Fifty yards off a single punt was being slowly poled away from him by someone who didn’t look back, pushing the boat steadily forward through purple reed-like growth.

  Later that morning, near a hand-painted sign that indicated a Mundino village to the south, he passed three women and a little boy carrying firewood, and then, a mile later, two men repairing a canoe on the banks of a small channel. They all greeted him pleasantly, but, so it seemed to him, with that same slyness that he’d noticed in the shopkeeper, Mrs Fantini. And he felt there was something dreamy about all of them. They were immersed in their own world, waist-deep in it, as the trees were waist-deep in their secret sea. They seemed happy enough to stir from this state, to respond, to act, but happy too to return to it when the need for action had passed.

  But perhaps this impression was just a reflection of how he himself was feeling. There was a remarkable intensity about that first walk. Often he’d stop because it seemed to him that some particular combination of tree trunks, spiralling branches, pools, light and shade formed a kind of hieroglyph which, if only he studied it for long enough, would yield up some sort of secret. Several times he made diversions to sunlit pools he saw through the trees because they seemed like stages in a theatre, waiting for some mysterious performance to begin. And even though no one appeared and nothing happened, that very absence of action or actors seemed more charged with significance than any play he’d ever seen.

  Once he passed an old woman, completely naked, sitting all by herself with her feet in the water on the far side of a lake. She was surrounded by a cloud of those white helical flowers, which, one by one, she was slowly pulling towards her mouth to suck out the honey-milk. He called out ‘bom dia’ to her, and she looked in his direction with a small smile, but it wasn’t a smile of greeting, more the sort of smile that sometimes comes to a person’s face on noticing some pleasing detail in a landscape. She didn’t seem to notice the golden milk that was dripping from her chin.

  Soon after that a large flock of those iridescent bluebirds arrived, at least a hundred of them, hovering above him, their wings whirring. They alighted on the branches of nearby trees to watch him in complete silence from among the profusion of entwined magenta spirals. Then suddenly they seemed to relax, as if in the exact same moment every single one of them had concluded that he wasn’t something that required their attention. After a few seconds they flew away again, all at once.

  He was on his way back, but still a few miles from the town, when the shadows began to lengthen and the pools and channels to glow with a faint phosphorescence. The sun went down quickly at that latitude. In the rapidly deepening dusk, now about a mile from Amizad, and shortly after recrossing the bridge, he noticed three people up ahead of him, silhouetted at the side of the path, watching him approach. He’d passed another group about half an hour previously – young Mundino labourers taking time out to unwind and smoke on the way back to their village from a job in Amizad – and he assumed these would be more of the same.

  But, though he’d quite enjoyed his previous encounters with the locals, this time he was wearied by the prospect. It felt tiresome, having just settled back into a delightful solitude, to have to put on his social mask again, and perform his allotted role. For the fact was that, whatever Hyacinth might say or think, the role he played didn’t really feel like him at all. He felt at sea in the world and the discipline she had seen in his face was the result of a constant effort to focus his will on visible and achievable goals. But Hyacinth was subtle, he thought, and, though she seemed to quite like him in an amused sort of way, he was sure she’d never be really interested, however much he’d like to touch her, to reach her skin, however much he longed to break out of this cage of muscle and bone in which he’d somehow confined himself. For he couldn’t break out into the world as others did, and why would someone like Hyacinth be interested in a man like that?

  These thoughts, oddly urgent for some reason, and strangely loud, were rushing through his mind as he drew nearer to the three figures beside the path. For God’s sake, he reprimanded himself, why was he thinking of Hyacinth at all, when really he hardly knew her? And why did he so constantly worry about the impression he made on women anyway? It’s not as if he really wanted to be with a woman. Women always let him down, and anyway, as soon as a woman actually took an interest in him, he—

  But then he realized for the first time that he’d been mistaken in thinking that the figures watching him approach were Mundino labourers. They weren’t Mundinos, they weren’t men or women, they weren’t human beings at all.

  He would have liked to have turned and walked quickly away from them but where they were sitting was the only way he knew back to Amizad, so he had no choice but to go straight past them. He walked very slowly, refusing to listen to the babble inside his head, and about ten yards away from them, he stopped to give them a chance to move away. Given that the locals killed them on sight, he thought, surely they’d want to take the opportunity of removing themselves from the reach of a human being? But they didn’t. Still squatting side by side, the three of them watched him. He could see their little black button eyes now, their identical V-shaped smiles. The one in the middle was stroking the ground with its long fingers, the others were comp
letely motionless. He did not want to face them. He found them repugnant. He loathed their rubbery flesh, their lack of anything resembling humanity, and, if he’d had an axe with him, or a crowbar, or a shotgun, he would cheerfully have smashed their mindless mockeries of smiles. And yet in spite of this strange eruption of violent rage, some part of his normal outer self was still present, like a solitary flagbearer in the chaos of a battlefield, reminding him that, whether he liked these creatures or not was beside the point: he was a policeman, they were entitled to their lives, and he was here in the Delta to protect them.

  The three duendes watched him silently. He could see pink blotches on their grey rubbery skin now, and rows of tiny grey flecks within the pinkness. He was looking straight at their mask-like, noseless faces, their shiny round black eyes. And something behind those eyes was looking back at him.

  He felt dizzy. The cacophony in his head was deafening now: voices, emotions, phrases, images, banal fragments of songs blaring out, one on top of another. If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a … Hateful, disgusting creatures. He’d love to smash them to pieces, smash and stamp and slash, let out all that rage, smash down the wall, climb up out of his grave … But no, no, no, not really. What was the point? It was all shit anyway. He’d still be no good. No one was any good. She wasn’t going to be any different, of course. Every bear that ever there was … They never blinked, did they? Not so much as a flicker. Their eyes stripped you naked, somehow – a bare bear, ha ha, bare bear, bare bear – they stripped you down to the bone.

  Something inside of him was keeping up a constant din of meaningless babble, and bad puns that reduced words to empty sounds, and mocking challenges to every apparently genuine thought or feeling, each one of which was immediately contradicted, peeled away, rendered meaningless. There was something hysterical about this, something manic, as if in thousands of chambers all round him lurked shapes and forms – memories, objects of desire, nightmares – that, without this racket to distract him, he would have no choice but to look out at and see. And meanwhile beneath him, as the black unblinking eyes watched his approach, an enormous pit descended through hundreds of storeys into a dreadful realm of pure abstract form.