Prologue:
Every year on the anniversary of the prophet's death, they’d bring the body out to its original spot. Back through the rice paddies of the western region 6.6. Leaving a strewn river of spiked mud. Scientists in gear would tow a hover pallet to the exact spot where they found him and try to glean more understanding from his presence rather than what he left behind. That is what they think when they write down their findings. The way the stalks of the young rice greens hover gently beneath his body. The second hemisphere sun beats everywhere, except there. They will shine their globe magnifiers in all directions, but nary a shadow will enter the 5x5 prohibiter. There is no reason when questions go unanswered.
No evidence surfaced.
Part 1
“The Authority have been called.”
Jehoven speaks bluntly as he pushes a wet rag up over his hair, slicking back what little grew there. As a farmer Jehoven’s only job was to speculate the growing season, no time could be spared from planting the new shoots in the sector of his land inhabited by a dead body. His wife pulls the lever of the mechanical shredder and proceeds to dice four hog legs into 2inch cubes of meat for storage.
“Seems like all we deal with nowadays is delays. This is the last of the hog, and we won’t be due for another bi-animal package until next season. We need that sector planted if we’re to bring enough in for double portions.”
She rubs her growing belling thinking of the slogan in training school, Bring your country wealth with growth of family. How wrong they were. She places the cubed meat into individual sealing bags, leveling their weight and distributes them into the freeze box. This is Jehoven and Anster’s 4th child and apprehension weighs heavily in the air with mixed-use pesticides. Their first, a girl died in infancy not long after their second season planting rice. After that they were blessed with two boys one after the other. Both born blind. They live in the convent of Saint of Dominion, where they learn trades like mending fishing nets. They are equal in age and in sight and none the wiser to the cruel world that brought them into darkness. Anster misses their games and soft voices, but knows their journey is not yet done. She hopes her next will be less impaired than the others. That is the way of things since the plague of the yesteryears. Before normal became obsolete.
“Yes well, nothing can be done until they come, I can’t remove it, it’s the law and they would know.”
A body floating above the new rice shoots. Hovering in the ripples. She could hardly believe it, when she saw it, and when Jehoven tried to move it with slide shovel just to see if it wasn’t a figment of his imagination in the hot sun; the green shoots below quivered in their weakness and died abruptly. They decided there was little they could do until the authority came. What they had could not be wasted.
Jehoven sets down his basket of new shoots that he and Anster tended over the winter in their green house. Their entangled white roots the color of Grandmother’s hair. These were the last they were able to save, and would not need to buy more if the crop yielded. It would put them in the front with some of the other farmers who still owed to the seed storage handlers. They would be able to garner more attention, too, which in turn would help sell their product. However, if Jehoven waited any longer the germinated seed would not be viable and he would loose half a sector of good crop. The second season was short for planting, but long for growing and yielded the most if planted right. They waited all day for the authority, but no one arrived. On the second day Jehoven went to town to get a proctor, believing that the authority might have thought his call a mistake. A proctor would be more efficient, and he chided himself for not thinking this before, but he knew the more prying eyes there were, the more talk there would be. The proctor did not even reach the floating man before he fainted. Anster and Jehoven helped him to sit up and made sure to lock his arms once he was able to walk again. Once there, he did what Jehoven did too, and when the leaves shriveled, he stopped abruptly.
“Your crop is precious Jehoven, This will be dealt with swiftly, no grain shall be disturbed.”
He ran back to his motorized rickshaw and Anster and Jehoven gathered their problems would be answered shortly. They did not wait long and in the meantime, garnered the attention they did not want from a neighboring farm where their ragtag crew of misshapen children goggled at the dead man. All the children were missing a limb at birth, a leg or arm, a protuberance of pruned trees. By midday, the trucks came one by one up the lane and their black hooded beakers set against the cool brown undertows of Jehoven’s ancestral land like capes. Making tracks they set up at the edge of the sector without a word and blockaded prying eyes and course gossipe. One military truck stood guard by the entrance to their land while the other remained with the scientists, the ones in starched white suits and masks. The seedlings in the basket died the next day, baked in the sun haphazardly left outside in the commotion. Anster found them later and cried as she threw them in the compost, a sector gone already.
On the fifth day Jehoven, emboldened by his wife’s plea and scared of the outcome that the floating man brought to their land, walked to the white tents. He was stopped midway down the lane by a Military guard in a black suit who told him he could go no further.
“But this is my land, and those are my crops, what about us?"
Jehoven pointed to his wife as she tried to look innocent, holding her ripening body. The soldier did not glance down nor did he seem to notice her bounty. He would not let them pass. Dejected they went back to their farm and maintained the other sectors as best they could. At least most of his field had been planted before the floating man appeared. At least that would not be disturbed. It would grow plump rice and he and Anster would tend their smaller patches of cabbage grass and rooted lumes which would suffice. Jehoven did not know his life would be forever changed that day he found the man. The scientists would stay for two whole seasons and would not leave until the fourth season’s planting had come and gone. When they did leave, and the last truck’s dust melted into the atmosphere, a man came to Jehoven’s house. Akin to the proctor he wore a silvered suit and spoke with a tilting accent, bewitching Anster with his overzealous presence. Later Jehoven would scold her for being naive to his city-like airs. Jehoven would look over the paperwork he’d left with his wife which included vouchers for seeds cheaper and far less superior than what he used, but would suffice in his mind for the ones the scientist trampled in their wake. Months later, he would look back on the time spent waiting for the crops to grow as a serene time. For it was quiet on the farm, no insect buzzed that season nor seasons afterward. Jehoven’s 4th child came into the world, without a voice. As if she too enjoyed the quiet.
“But she can see.”
His wife pointed out.
“So what if she doesn’t have a voice, she can see. That is far better, she will not have to go to Dominion she can stay here with us.”
She kissed the child on its small nose and her eyes closed to to half slits. She did not coo for she made no sound and content with this, his wife stopped bickering.
News of the floating man spread in Jehoven’s district and for much time after his daughter’s birth his land was known as a pariah. Abject to much talk and ominous gatherings. Many would come to overlook his rice paddy devoid of crops. Jehoven would keep it spare for the scientists and the onlookers. For a while, Anster charged a penny to see it, allowing them to finally save enough to buy superior seed and a few new clothes for the baby. However every year the scientist would return and for one season they would set up their tent masked arena. They would bring out the floating mans body from Cryo freeze suspended in prior life jelly the likes of which cost more than the land it floated above.
Once when his daughter was eight years she climbed a tree to look over the tents, as she had never seen the floating man before only heard tell of him from the men in town hard leaning into their liquor. At the top most branch she hooked her leg in a gnarled loop and fell splitting her calf wide open and the red blood spilled into the rice paddy. No sound emitted from her mouth. She rolled in the mud and in her delirium she reached for the branch that had held her so steadily and it held her as she maneuvered herself to pull the white sheets from their poles, revealing the scientists behind them. They patched her up in an internal medical machine. Which set her bones back in place under its fluorescence light. That day she did not hear her father's stern whip across her back, just the two snaps, the branch, and her bones.
“It’s an infection of the liver microbes. You will not have long now, be comforted by the fact that your sons will take over your farm."
The doctor smiles and hands Jehoven a bottle of small grey pills.
“Take them for pain, once a day.”
There is no patience for the dying these days. Once you know, it’s time to get on with it. Most prefer the quick death. An accident with a turbine, at least your family will get a full payout of your earnings. Jehoven’s body has been weakening every year since his wife died and his daughter went away to the big city. Her hands rang out in the air and swiped the words from the clouds he used to say. His sons returned from Dominion with an impregnated teen between them. Their relationship betwixt the two as neither knew whose child belonged to which man. They coaxed their father in his old age to give up the rice paddies in turn for milled shrimp and minnow ponds which he obliged knowing his final days were before him and neither did he wish to quarrel with his last remaining breaths. When he grew too weak to sit and shell peas or join the local men at chess in town he would take the mechanical rickshaw out to the abandoned rice paddies and watch the silver minnows mate under the trees. Their bodies encircling shadows, a dance of joy and rejection. He would walk over to sector 6.6 and the now-erected pillars marking the spot where the prophet was found. After that day he never went inside the perimeter again even after the scientists left. He knew it was forbidden even if no one told him so. This year they had already come and gone, their tank tracks dusted over by passing storms. Jehoven stood at the perimeter for hours in the sun, long after his children had brought in their catches and started to make the evening meal. He heard their laughter, but instead of going back he stepped over the tethering and walked into the perimeter. The cool mud sloughed up onto his ankles and beneath he could feel long dead roots of vegetation. He walked slowly and delibiterly until he reached the middle of the plot and he sank down so that the water reached his middle. Soaked he felt the earth beneath him and he pulled his body gently until he too floated not unlike the prophet did. For one second he imagined the young green shoots beneath the prophet’s body waiving in the undulating motion of the water and for him knowing nothing meant more than he thought it would.
The men in the nearby council village would talk about the floating man years after their children had gone away to technical school or Dominion. Years even after Jehoven had died and his land bought by the scientists in the big city. Converting his tiny farm into an obelisk of scientific research. Their black tents forever darkening the farm, now in marble. They say the floating body of man suspended in time is laid out in the 2nd season sun every year and perused over like a book. Why will they ask, though no one is around who could answer their questions. Their questions will turn to speculations and so in time the floating man became the prophet. Although no one knew him to predict the future or sooth the sick. His entity only believable in his ability to float over suspicion.
Part 2
Time moves fast when you're young they say, only the old timers say this. For them it moves slow, the ticking of the clock is louder when you listen for it. Once everyone was the same and used to use their difference to alienate each other. Now everyone is different and no one cares.
Renegade Tark peruses over the notes of her predecessor the one with no hands. He was meticulous in his calculations. The proctor at the end of the hall makes sure the binders are put back in their correct spots before printing the numeral codes for the next ones. She hands them to Ren one at a time and places the used ones back in their designated folders. Ren studies them day and day out. She makes notes with her monitor and carefully etches out plans softly as to not disturb the other proctors. She is the 8th, they whisper when she enters the rotating obolisk doors. They wonder if she will make a breakthrough in the last’s research, if she will find a solution. None have made one thus far. The last proctor worked the longest and made the most notes, but did little to ascertain the phenomenon of the floating man, now known as the prophet. The anniversary of his finding fast approaches and for Tark it will be her first witnessing. The droll of the day weaves in and out of weeks as she studies and at night she hurries to her dorm across the the 3rd sector field. It was built 20 years ago to house the scientists dedicated to the findings and she and the other proctors live there all year. On cool nights in the fourth season when the smell of hay and manure of nearby farms has dissipated, she stands on her balcony overlooking the section of land and waits for the miracle. Sometimes it is a dragonfly darting between the rushes. Sometimes it is a bird, the objects of her eye are always in flight.
Ren’s body is agile and part of her daily routine is to run around the mud track that connects the two compounds, the obelisk, the dormitories and the land. No one else runs, although they are encouraged to exercise. There are things everyone knows about the prophet, items of which that aren’t ruled by speculation. He was a man and by all accounts still is. Born in the fourth district on the 8th hemisphere to a rich family. A tube baby he was grown in a lab with little to no defects on his part and was altogether thought norm by many standards. During the flight of credit his family fell into ruin and their decreased flow of cash caused the family to move the 6th district. His father became a store clerk and his mother a seamstress, but without the aid of birth control the prophet's birth was followed by five more children all with degrees of deformity, naturalized and efficient as expected. By the time the boy was ready for school he was already working in a neighboring farm to help make ends meet in his household. The facts trail off here, and by all accounts as many youth are allowed to run ragged with no decree of rules. The boy left home at some point to traverse the world. He reappeared from time to time working odd jobs in distant communities. When he died his approximate age was estimated to be 35 years. Some fine lines marked by days spent in the hot sun criss crossed his back and face as though he had been whipped. Once removed from the plantation, an autopsy was performed, revealing no inner deformities, even for a tube baby, which is unheard of. And so it was written in news streams around the globe, the first man of norm. The man who floated above them all and so he became the prophet.
A season before the unveiling they come in numbers far more than thought possible. Prophesying at temples strewn across the hemisphere. They pray to the old gods, the new ones and the ones not yet born. They drive down and sleep in tents, on the ground under the sky and rejoice with the night around bonfires. Many bring keepsakes to leave at the gates. Still more bring pigments and paint themselves in striking patterns to bewitch themselves into a frenzy. Some great media overtures of the prophets' good deeds strewn over wired media to monitors around the globe. When they reach their sacred place they dance in the mud. Their bodies pressed against each other and their sweat becomes the rain and the rain becomes their breath. Steamy between their arms and privates. They writhe together. Wringing their hands at their poverty and depravity, as it comes so short lived to their endearing faith in the prophet. Some children will say years later that their parents met by the gate and mated there and their devotion not withstanding creating the children you see before you. No children from copulation by the gates of the Obelisk were ever brought into normality. The worshippers do not care; this is not what they seek.
Renegade is not normal. Renegade speaks like everyone else devoid of indifference. True her normality is forthcoming as nothing seems to be amiss outwardly. Inwardly it is another story. When she turned the age of womanhood, a ritual was performed in her city for all young girls to receive a calendar markup of their DNA and what they needed to become dutiful citizens there by achieving the right when it was time to bare children. In the large cities it is different, most people cannot choose a family. If your poor you are encouraged however. Ren remembers fondly the day she found out she would never bare children, never feel the anguish of being told your child has no eyes, no limbs or is dull in the brain. To bare children is less a travesty now knowing she will not have to deal with the painful separation of Dominion. To create something that has no worth. Emotionally she has gotten over this fact, physically Ren knows now she is missing vital organs to facilitate anything regarded in that world. The womb will never bare fruit.
It is three days before the annual ritual. The obelisk is a tizzy of movement. This year marks 150 years. On her last break Ren took speed train to the big city and visited friends from technical. Everyone was gossiping about the impending prophet inspection.
“Do you think they will finally make a descsion about whats to be done with him?
Asks one friend. They all know what should be done, give away his life feed to someone who really needs it. Cryo is an expense and the life jelly would be better worth its price in gold given to someone who really needs it. Why reanimate a dead person once a year for the sake of prosperity.
“I hear, when they bring him out he twitches.”
“Thats not true, its the jelly leaving the feeding tube, plus he’s only out of cryo for a few hours, its not enough time for him to decompose."
They all look at Ren for her answer, although not as satisfied as they want.
“How would you know, this is your first witnessing?”
Ren shrugs, she’s read the notes, she knows her role by heart, who cares if they don’t want to believe it. People need something better to gossip about than the fables of a long-dead man.
“I heard tell as its an auspicious anniversary, a miracle will happen.”
“Thats nonsense, I heard the crops will die, its been a particular bad year for residential corn, you know its a bulk up crop. Considering things I should think all produce manufacturing costs will go up.”
They twiddle their thumbs and think of ways the prophet will destroy them. Pestilence, media blackout, Dominion retribution. Their talk tires Ren out, so instead of staying the night, she decides to head back to the dormitories early. By the time she returns home all the petty cabs have quieted for the night and she is forced to walk. She passes by the farmer’s abandoned house now towering with vines. Its looming structure feels dark and wearisomely misleading, except for the sweet-smelling moon flowers that encircle what was once the front door.
On the day of the prophet's unveiling, three trucks wait by the bayside south entrance of the obelisk. Four scientists bring out a metal tube carrying the prophet's body. Connected to a life jelly machine tubes run to and from the machine cycling out refuse jelly for clean. The cryo tube breathes steam like a hot pill as armored guards control the hover raft towards one of the trucks. Ren is already at the site with other scientists. She prepared early and has the perimeters in check. A large tree sits right by the site. Long dead, one of its huge branches is snapped, and part of the branch lies under the water in one of the lots. The allotments are not that deep, But Ren suspects the branch has decomposed some in its wet deathbed. Long ago it was decided to only bring the body out on the day it was found. Some experiments done a few years afterward revealed it would not float any other day of the year. Back in the lab, Cryo work is meticulous and the body can only be studied for short periods of time outside the life jelly. No one is allowed inside the 5x5 perimeter where they will deposit him. At noon precisely, Ren and the other scientists take their lunch break and change out of their work gear into specified white suits. They have no modesty behind the white sheets. Ren feels the tightness lift as she removes her wire bra and replaces it will the specified cloth one provided by the company. She wonders briefly what it is like to nurse a child, and then remembers she will never have one. Memories are brief now as work takes over her every thought. Once the hover raft comes through the curtains the recording of the experiment will start.
The wire rod curtains are pulled back and for a brief moment Ren sees the black trucks and their armored guards. The silver tubs comes in and she traces her eyes back to their original target. Two scientists clad in white hand off the charts and prior life jelly tank to one of the other scientists. He pulls the hover remote and guides the tube down to the pond. The raft glides over the water and ripples form in the wake of the energy it uses to propel itself forward. At the perimeter poles he stops the raft and meticulously turns off the nobs for the life machine. The whirring ceases and comes to a stop, the blue prehnite jelly slows in the tubes and their glow gurgles back into the machines from whence they came. The Silver tube carrying the prophet steams slowly letting out puffs of white air intermittently until it has dissipated. Ren’s collegue presses numeral code on the top panel of the tube and then steps back. Dotted lights encircling the tube turn on and off in sequence and then the tube unsheathes itself, revealing a plume of grey cryo mist. It floats down slowly off the edges of the container and dances along the water before dissipating. The prophet's body is revealed naked, and he is just a man. He does not glow with etherial light rather that the glow of the tube surrounding him. As the tub dismantles itself, the hover raft is positioned at an angle. Ren positions herself by the prophet's feet and the rest of her colleagues help to deliver him to the enclosure. This years expierment has to do with plants, there’d perimeter was sprinkled with seeds last season and they have grown into a cacophony of tall stalked hill flowers. Their bobbling blooms echo in the wake of the transplanted tubed prophet. As his body slides from the hover raft it feels as if there is no air left in the world. Suctioned off within seconds Ren gasps for it searching. Her heart rate ceases to exist as it races and her monitor bracelet reacts sending a alarming sound into the atmosphere alerting her comrades. They do not react the way she thought would. Instead of coaxing her into a chair and telling her to calm down. They berate her.
“Why didn’t you remove that thing when we changed?”
“You know your not allowed any outside technology except for the regulated cameras and recording.”
They point to her bracelet and Ren struggles to remove it. Her suit is cumbersome and bulky and her wrist is zipped. A colleague maneuvers his pinpad and tries to help her, but Ren is resistant to his help and edges away from him while she tries to unzip her suit. Its more work than she realizes a little too late, with the prophet balanced on his raft in between the four scientists and knee-deep water submerges their boot-wrapped feet. Ren struggles to maneuver her suit in the thick mud. Finally, she pulls her suit close to her body and twists her arm around to unzip the suit, but as she pulls the tag that would release her from the confines of its plastic sheath, she feels the zip is caught, and she pulls just a tad to hard. As if by force she feels the mud sink beneath her and unbalanced by the tag caught on her bra or the momentum of her body, she falls. With a splash of water she grabs at the raft while her colleagues try to force her away from the prophet as not to undo all the work that have put into this experiment and the hill flowers struggle beneath her weight. If the fall wasn’t the worst of it, the rest was. In the moments between loosing her balance, Ren feels the gushing of the cool water as it fills her suit and her partially submerged body dips beneath the hover raft. She pulls her foot from under her, trying to gauge how much room she has to pull herself around the craft and out from under it. The mud sucks at her and with huge push she pulls it free but too far that it kicks the raft and the sound that emerges is not like one she has been trained to hear. The prophets body slides off the raft and rolls till it faces her. The tube from which he came slides back and disappears in a crowd of hands. The grey water fills her suit, inching closer to her neck and the prophet rolls above her. If he were breathing she would be able to see his breath upon the cool plastic shield of her helmet. She imagined for a moment what he would say to her. If his arms would reach out to her and hold her and tell her everything will be alright, we will be a happy family. She felt a stirring in her stomach and the flood of water reached her mask. With a deep gasp, Ren strained at the suit now heavier than before and pushed the hill flowers that had entangled themselves below her and above her, surrounding her and the prophet in their nestled crown of petals. There seems to be silence from her colleagues and she realizes that she and the prophet are within the perimeter, a place no other human had seen or felt besides the prophet for over one hundred years. They are silent as they try to gauge where she is, as the stalks of the flowers curtain their view. For all they know, she is drowned in in the knee deep mud. The flowers seem to bow to her as she pushes herself away from the prophet who is still laying facedown, his nose barely touching the water.
Ren removes the suit and as she pulls the sleeves from her body the sound of her monitor bracelet fades out as it disappears in a tangle of man-made carbon fiber and brackish water. She stands there in her nakedness much as the prophet does in his. Except for her boots beneath the tide of water and turns to find her way out of the perimeter. A ripple of water sloshes against her feet and she turns to see the prophet his webbed toes caressing her leg. She smiles, and thinks we are truly are all the same. The hill flowers sway in wake and neither do her fingertips reach their pale stalks; then do they commonly oblige her plea to flee from their shaded confines.
Back in the dormitories, Ren packs her bags. Her abruptness in her departure goes unnoticed. The experiment ruled a complete failure, hastily they picked up the prophet's body and inserted him back into his cryo tube. Media outlets hovered by and were told a malfunction with the cryo tube caused possibly permanent damage, no experiments would be done until the following year. Giving time for the prophet's body to reacclimate to its frozen slumber.
“Dont worry too much, these things happen…sometimes. We’ve given you a good reference, you’ll be working in the city as an education servant. It's menial work, but your good at studying so it should be no problem. Here’s your ticket and papers.”
The time between the experiment, the prophet's body, and Ren emerging is fleeting. She studies as the train moves quickly through the countryside, waves of grain turning to grey concrete. Her new dormitory sits behind a recycling plant, and the the stench of carbon is a replacement for manure. Her new colleagues don’t ask her where she’s been, whatever old personality Ren had before is gone, but she is a good worker and soon their doubts are replaced by praise. After a few years of work she moves to another sector and a better apartment that looks over the sea, and she is told if she pushes herself and works harder in a few years she’ll be given the opportunity to marry and have children. With the aid of mechanics, they can implant a tube baby. Ren smiles at the thought, but wonders if it is the right choice. Long ago she resigned herself to the bleak thought of why have something if your body never wanted it in the first place. On cool nights, she walks along the beach and sometimes, if she’s daring, she strips and dives into the ocean, the cool spray of salt playing on her skin. Her mouth feels tangy with brine and she spits, watching the froth of bubbles sway away. A few meters out is a sandbank only visible at low tide, she swims to it and pulls herself up, staring at the stars. When the city lights fade out and are dark and not a soul will be woken from slumber she heads back, she glides upon the water her toes barely touch the spray and by the time her legs hit the sand her skin is dry and flakes of salt fall at her feet.
Comments
Post a Comment