Beneath the World a Sea Page 5

  He was right next to the duendes and they were watching him.

  ‘Good evening,’ he croaked, and carried on, forcing himself not to look back until he was a good fifty yards past them. They were still there. He could just make out the silhouettes of their heads. Even now they were watching him.

  ‘Mummy’s good boy,’ said a voice inside his head. It was his own voice, but he heard it as if it was someone else. ‘Mummy’s boy. Mummy’s good good boy. No bad thoughts at all.’

  •

  It was completely dark when he arrived back in Amizad. He’d been walking with only the light of a big half-moon and the glow of pools and channels through the trees, from which, a couple of times, he’d seen strange, shadowy creatures emerging. But it was still only half past eight in the evening and, as he passed her shop near the edge of town, the potter Justine was just shutting up. He didn’t want to see her. He didn’t want to have to look into her eyes, but, as he tried to hurry past, she spotted him and came out with the figurine he’d bought earlier.

  ‘Hello! Mr Ronson! How was your walk in the forest? Don’t forget your little duende!’

  So he took the simpering symbol of human–duende understanding and threw it into the harbour on his way back to the hotel.

  (6)

  Please don’t think for a moment,’ said Katherine Tiler, ‘that we don’t understand the gravity of the problem, or the need to address it. All Ernesto and I are asking for is some sensitivity to the cultural context, and some understanding of the resource constraints.’

  The postponed meeting was happening. The room was dim and brown and, in spite of the open windows and the two fans slowly revolving overhead, uncomfortably hot and stale. Feeling himself beginning to sweat already, Ben sat at one end of the table, Katherine Tiler at the other. To Ben’s left, was the police chief Da Ponte. The small stature of both of them made Ben feel unnaturally large.

  He had papers in front of him, a digest he’d compiled himself from a series of reports that had been sent to him by the Protectorate Agency, and a list of queries he’d wanted to clear up. His notepad and pen lay ready beside them. He cleared his throat. A huge distance seemed to separate Ben as he was now from the Ben that, back in May, had convinced an interview panel in another dim and woody room in Geneva that he was the one for this job.

  ‘To restate the current position,’ he said, ‘now that the agency has determined that duendes should be regarded as persons, the practice of killing them is equivalent to murder under international law, and it simply can’t be ignored any longer. We need to get a handle on this problem. We need a much better picture of just how many duendes are being killed. We need to build a new culture in which duende killing isn’t acceptable. And, of course, we need to start arresting and prosecuting perpetrators. I appreciate your resources are stretched, and probably we need to address that, but I hope you can see that doing nothing is not an option.’

  They regarded him in silence: not a hostile silence exactly, but a bland, polite silence, waiting to make sure he’d finished.

  ‘I think it was a good idea of yours to go into the forest yesterday,’ the Chief Administrator finally observed. ‘I think it’s important to really get to grips with local conditions before jumping to any conclusions.’

  ‘You’re not the first to say that.’

  Tiler inclined her head in acknowledgement. ‘I’m not surprised. This is a very strange place, as you will have gathered already, and nothing works in the way it would do in the world outside. I’m still learning, and I’ve been here for twenty years. Ernesto, of course, was born here.’

  ‘Ha! I was indeed,’ said Da Ponte, ‘but even I don’t understand it. Did you encounter any duendes during your wanderings, Inspector?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Ah.’ Da Ponte seemed almost to smirk under his large moustache. ‘And how did you find the experience?’

  ‘It was disturbing, of course. But I anticipated that.’

  ‘You can begin to imagine, perhaps, how difficult it would be to have such creatures coming right into the village where you live, crawling up out of the water, climbing on your roof with their suckered feet, peering round the edges of your doors?’

  ‘Indeed, but that’s not a reason to kill them. Other ways need to be found to manage this. Fences round the villages, for example.’

  Katherine nodded, slowly and a very large number of times, as if digesting a profound and difficult truth. Ben passed his hand over his slippery forehead. In the square below, someone shouted a greeting to a friend, and the sound coming through the open window served to emphasize the leaden silence inside the room.

  ‘I had a few questions to ask you both,’ Ben said, picking up the piece of paper with his list of queries.

  But Katherine Tiler was already pushing back her chair. ‘No problem,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Give them to me, and I’ll arrange to have the answers left for you on your desk.’

  He knew he should ask to go through them now. They were straightforward practical questions and she could probably answer a lot of them straight away. But somehow he lacked the energy.

  ‘I should like to be informed of any new duende killings,’ he told Tiler as she opened the door for him. ‘I would like to be involved in the investigations. Can you please ensure that happens?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘No problem at all. Isn’t that right, Ernesto?’

  ‘Of course.’ Da Ponte sucked for a moment on his moustache, and glanced across at his boss. ‘If you wish, Inspector, I can call you at the hotel as soon as a report comes in.’

  ‘That would be good. Please do, regardless of the time of day or night.’

  It occurred to Ben that Tiler had mentioned something about him having a desk here, and he should ask where it was but, now he had the option of an open door, he couldn’t bring himself to delay things even for a few minutes more.

  In the square, people were gathering at the café tables. They were outsiders rather than locals, scientists and administrators working at the various research stations on the slopes above the town: bright, able professionals, many of them quite young, who came from all over the world, though mainly, of course, from North America. In front of the Café Lisboa, the smaller and less popular of the two cafés, there was just one table left with no one sitting at it, though a coffee cup and an ashtray had yet to be cleared, and he decided to stop there, have a look through his papers over a coffee, and consider his next move. Or so he put it to himself anyway, though it was questionable whether he’d yet made a move at all.

  His coffee had arrived, and he was leafing through his papers, making notes and just beginning to feel almost as though he was doing something useful, when someone sat down in the seat opposite. It was Jael, who he’d last seen on the quay with her boyfriend Rico. Ben was uneasy at once: there was something boundaryless about the two of them which he didn’t feel comfortable with at all. She looked at him completely blankly when he greeted her. ‘I’m Ben,’ he reminded her. ‘We were on the boat together.’

  She nodded as she took out a cigarette. ‘Of course! The policeman. Here to rescue the duendes.’

  ‘I gather you’re a biologist?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘So what is your take on the origins of the lifeforms in the Delta? Extraterrestrial. Or terrestrial like us?’

  She watched him intently for a moment, then blew out smoke. ‘Why just those two options? For all we know, they could be a relic population of the original life of Earth and we could have an extraterrestrial origin.’

  She glanced out into the square and waved. Her boyfriend was over there, Ben now saw. Rico looked as if he’d just returned from some errand. He gave Ben a thumbs-up and, in that graceful catlike way he had, squatted down under the clock tower. What an obnoxious person he is, Ben thought with a sudden burst of anger, disliking Rico intensely even as he watched in fascination the way his slender limbs moved. He had met so many people like him in his po
lice work, people who called themselves anarchists, lived in squats or housing cooperatives, claimed benefits, switched promiscuously from one sexual relationship to the next, and thought that just because they’d abdicated all responsibility for anything whatsoever that happened in the world, they were somehow morally superior to those like him who were actually trying to keep the wheels of the world turning.

  ‘Rico and I aren’t very interested in such questions,’ Jael said, turning back to Ben with a brief, functional smile. He didn’t like her either, but she was a very different kind of creature from Rico. He felt that whatever he said to her, she would be able to bat away without even making an effort, like a tennis champion facing some clumsy amateur across the net. ‘Those sorts of questions tickle our curiosity, of course,’ she said, ‘but they’re essentially trivial and answering them is really little more than a kind of stamp-collecting. It gives everyone a vague warm sense that our knowledge is growing and humanity is becoming ever more important, but it doesn’t really get you anywhere at all.’

  ‘But these days we’re making huge strides in so many fields!’

  She leant forward to look straight into his eyes and, very disconcertingly, did not look away again. ‘Huge strides? Are we? Whoever “we” might be. Well, perhaps “we” are, but it doesn’t matter how big the steps are if the distance is infinite, does it? The destination remains as far away as ever. People fill in the gaps between the things we know with pretty words or trivial facts so they don’t have to see their ignorance stretching away to infinity, but that’s how it is all the same.’

  She examined Ben’s face, seemingly amused by his obvious resistance to what she was saying.

  ‘What Rico and I have found,’ she said, ‘is that you have to go another way entirely if you actually want to understand, and not just acquire pretty stamps to stick in your album.’ Ben had looked a little away from her to avoid her gaze, but she now moved her head even further forward so that he was forced to look at her again. ‘You have to start from the position that you already know how things are,’ she said, ‘and that you aren’t an outsider in this universe. The Greeks had a word for it. Alethia. Unforgetting. Truth isn’t something out there, in other words. It’s something we already possess but have temporarily forgotten.’

  Ben wasn’t sure how to respond to this. Silly New Agey nonsense, it sounded to him, but he knew Jael would easily demolish any attempt he made to challenge it. ‘I didn’t realize Rico was a scientist too,’ he said.

  Jael laughed. ‘Oh, he is, he is.’ She glanced across at her boyfriend, who was sitting with the guitar on his lap, his head tipped back and his eyes rolled upwards, as if he’d temporarily forgotten where he was. ‘He’s a true scientist. Untarnished by any training whatsoever. How are you getting on with your enquiries?’

  ‘Well, I’ve made a start,’ Ben said warily.

  She blew out more smoke. ‘You can hardly expect the Mundinos to love the creatures, can you, when they climb out of the creeks at night and fuck with their heads? The Mundinos aren’t philosophers, after all. Why would they be?’ Still watching Ben’s face, she smiled. ‘Why, if you lived in a place like this, would you want to be something as dumb as a philosopher?’

  ‘This … this fucking with their heads, as you call it,’ he said. ‘Have you any thoughts about how it works?’

  She laughed, glancing across once more at Rico over at the clock tower. He was running his fingers over his guitar but not really playing it, and Ben realized he was just filling in time, waiting for Ben to leave so he could come over and join Jael.

  She turned back to Ben. ‘You’ve experienced it yourself by the look of you. Am I right?’ She nodded. ‘Okay, so you know what it’s like. The locals think the duendes put nasty things into their minds, and I’m sure you’ll agree that’s understandable, but really all the duendes do is break down barriers. Things already inside your head – half-thoughts and feelings that you don’t normally acknowledge – become as powerful as the things you normally choose to focus on.’ She laughed. ‘Which is unsettling, because it undermines your sense of being a consistent person and reveals all the sides of you that you’ve been busy denying or projecting on to others. Liberals find out they’re really conservatives. High-minded egalitarians discover their elitist contempt for common people. Nice, well-behaved, respectful men discover their buried rage towards women.’ She watched the policeman’s face, clearly amused to see how uncomfortable she was making him, and trying to guess which item on her list in particular the duendes had uncovered in him. ‘It’s hard to cope with,’ she said. ‘Unless you’re Rico, that is. They really don’t bother him at all.’

  Ben looked across at Rico who gave him another thumbs-up. A flock of those blue iridescent birds arrived in the town square, whirled round it twice, regarding everyone there with their small, hard, jewel-like eyes, and disappeared again in the direction of the Lethe. It made Ben notice for the first time that there were normally no birds there – none at all – unlike every other town square he’d ever been in. He thought perhaps he’d seen a pigeon the previous day, a single bedraggled pigeon that had strayed in from outside, but if so it was no longer here now, and perhaps he was remembering some other place and time. He laid some coins on the table and stood up to go.

  A woman rose from a table at the other café and came hurrying over as Ben crossed the square, a youngish woman, with a long, serious face and black hair.

  ‘Hi. My name is Mary Boldero. I’m a biologist at one of the research units here. I believe you’re the policeman who’s come to do something about the duende killings, yes? Great! My friends and I,’ she gestured towards her table where a couple of bearded men and a woman with blonde hair were sitting, ‘we wanted you to know that we are absolutely on your side on this. Absolutely on your side. Along with the entire scientific community here in Amizad. If we can help in any way at all, please don’t hesitate to ask.’

  She pressed Ben to join them. ‘Just for a few minutes,’ she insisted, when he seemed reluctant. So he walked over to the bearded men and the blonde woman, shook their hands and accepted the seat they fetched for him from another table.

  ‘It’s absolutely appalling what’s going on,’ one of the men said. ‘If these were human beings we’d call it genocide. And, whatever you do, please don’t listen to anyone who tells you it’s an occasional problem. The fact is that duendes are being routinely slaughtered all over the Delta on a daily basis, and all because of ignorance, superstition and prejudice. The locals even boast about it if you give them half a chance. This is nineteen ninety, for God’s sake!’

  ‘And of course the police are all locals,’ the other man said. ‘You need to be aware of that, Inspector.’

  ‘I’m sure he is, Charles,’ Mary told him. ‘This guy’s not just any cop. You should see his CV.’

  The man called Charles nodded. ‘Of course. Apologies, Inspector, I didn’t mean to tell you how to do your job.’

  They were bright, highly educated people, Ben could see, part of a community of bright, highly educated people, used to being much sharper and better-informed than anyone they met from outside of their circle, and no doubt frequently frustrated, as clever people are, by the stubborn ignorance and resistance to logic of most of the human race. You met people like this in the police force too. Certain forensic scientists, for instance. Because they thought more quickly than other people, and saw things that others missed, they didn’t always understand their own blinkers.

  ‘We know almost nothing about the duendes,’ Mary said, ‘but we know enough to realize how amazing they are. They build these so-called castelos, for instance. You’ve probably heard of them? Architecture in miniature. Extraordinary, intricate, exquisitely beautiful structures.’

  ‘You should see them, Inspector,’ Charles said. ‘Each one is unique. Incredibly complex. Detail within detail down to the microscopic level.’

  ‘Of course the Mundinos kick them to pieces whenever they find them,
’ the second woman said.

  Charles made a gesture of impotence and exasperation. ‘It’s just ignorance and superstition, of course, and we need to remember that. But still, you can’t help wondering sometimes how the Mundinos can possible fail to see the beauty of it all.’

  Mary sighed. ‘It’s just lucky they can’t reach the underwater structures.’

  ‘I guess you’re aware, Inspector,’ the other man said, ‘that the duendes may be the offspring of trees?’

  Ben laughed. ‘No? You’re kidding?’

  ‘He’s not,’ Mary told him. ‘You should come down in our sub sometime. You can see the duende larvae in their pods, hanging from the roots above. We don’t understand how genetics works in the Delta lifeforms because there’s no DNA equivalent, but it’s increasingly looking like they and the trees they grow from may be a single dimorphic species.’

  ‘That’s incredible,’ Ben said.

  ‘Bear in mind that we aren’t really looking at “animals” or “plants” here in the Delta,’ Charles said. ‘Parallel evolution makes it less obvious, but our usual categories just don’t apply. And there are so many other mysteries to solve as well. It’s incredibly frustrating that all this isn’t better known.’

  ‘Mysteries such as …?’

  ‘Well, basically life in the Delta just doesn’t follow our normal assumptions at all,’ Mary said. ‘For instance: life everywhere else is opportunistic, but here there are dozens of ecological niches standing empty. Why do so few creatures come out in the day, for instance? Why are there scavengers but no predators? Really obvious opportunities are left untouched, while substantial energy goes into things with no obvious survival value at all.’