Aliya Whiteley - [BCS298 S02] Page 2

  She tried to think only of her daydreams, which always involved the sun. Standing in it, lying in it, bathing. Being kissed by it. She had spent so much time learning about it when she should have been choosing a trade, and she had run out of time to find an apprenticeship because nobody valued her knowledge of that radiant ball that hung above ground. Her mother had declared her interest a phase, then an infatuation, then an inappropriate obsession caused by faulty hormones. It did not matter—Kim knew she would always love the sun. To be in its presence would complete her life.

  The lifeless body of the Olme made strange sounds beside her, in the storage cave. It shifted, squeaked and muttered in the dark. Kim could picture its organs shifting inside it, filling with gases that were then expelled as long, high whines.

  Sun, I’m coming, she said in her head. Similar seismic shifts were happening inside her. Her own organs were moving; she felt sure of it. They were traveling in tiny increments, rubbing against each other, growing, shrinking, changing who she was.

  Is this making me better or worse? she thought.

  The Olme settled further into death.

  When the butcher came to start the task of preparation for the ceremony, she looked hard at Kim and then gave her a kindly hug. “How was it?” she asked.

  Kim shrugged. She hated the idea that there had to be words for every experience.

  “You deserve a prize for your service, Kim.” The butcher whispered a word to her: a password, that would open the only door Kim had ever wanted to travel through.

  “Thank you,” she said. The butcher nodded.

  And the next time Kim saw her, the butcher was a tall, formal creature of ceremony, carving and sawing and rewarding. She called Kim forward, then looked down her nose as if they’d never met.

  “The gift of time.”

  It was a long thick strip from the hind flank of the Olme. Kim opened the rucksack she had brought along for the occasion, and the butcher slid it inside. Then she left the ceremony behind, keeping her eyes cast down as she walked so as to avoid making eye contact with her mother, and started the journey upwards. She traveled through the caves and tunnels that she knew well at first, and on to those she had only visited before when determined to flout her mother’s rules, and finally to those that were lined with wires from which steady-burning bulbs dangled, making her eyes water.

  Nailed to the wall of Cave One was a long ladder. She climbed it, hand over hand, legs working, muscles tiring with the unfamiliar movements. She did not dare to look down. It took all her courage to reach the trapdoor set in the rock at the top and knock against the wooden planks that separated her from the surface.

  There was no reply.

  She knocked again, then banged. In the fear of not being answered, she remembered why she had come this far, and she called out the password, over and over, until the trap door was lifted and a warm red light flooded her vision. It was not sunlight, surely? She had expected to be blinded by it—had been ready to be given eye protection by the surfacers. This light was gentle and dim.

  “Where has the sun gone?” she asked. A hand was held out to her, and she took it. Pulled up to stand in an open world, lidless, exposed to an expanse of emptiness, she crouched down and grabbed handfuls of soft green flooring to anchor herself. “Has there been an accident? Is the sun still there?”

  “Here,” said the man who had helped her up. He clapped a heavy hat on her head, just like one he was wearing himself, and the sensation of being closed and covered diminished Kim’s terror just enough so that she could take in a little of the world above. It was an indistinguishable mixture of sights and sounds, straight lines and swooping curves, jutting walls and tangling growths and nothing familiar. The man took her arm, and propelled her forward. “Come on.”

  “Why is there no sun?” she asked again, as he led her away from the trapdoor. Everything was changing color again, from soft red to darker violet, mixed with a creeping greyness.

  “There’s a sun!” said the man. He sounded amused. “It’s just setting. End of the day. But the councilor will want to see you, even if we’re after hours. It’s not far.”

  He took her to a tall building of chiseled, even stone walls. The roof was slanted to a sharp point. Inside, false bright lamplight blazed. Kim, fighting the pain in her eyes, managed to make out a large hall, without furnishings; very long spears had been arranged in crossed designs around the walls. A woman stood before her, at the foot of a staircase. She, too, wore a thick hat. Her bearing made her importance obvious. She was like the butcher during the act of cutting up the Olme: businesslike, and prepared to run the show.

  “You’re from Downtown,” said the woman.

  The name meant nothing to her.

  “Underground. And you know the password. Nobody has used it in a generation. Longer. Does it mean...”

  Kim waited. She gave no words away.

  “Does it mean you carry part of an Olme?”

  “You know about Olmes?” she asked, surprised out of her silence.

  “Let me see what you’ve brought.”

  Kim took off her backpack and held it open for the woman to see.

  “What’s that?”

  “A slice from its hind.”

  “It doesn’t smell.”

  “Olme doesn’t. Unless you touch it.”

  The woman reached out, then curled her fingers into a fist and dropped her hand to her side. “It can’t possibly be real,” she said. Her voice carried excitement and fear in equal measure.

  But tests at the local laboratory proved otherwise.

  Kim adjusted quickly to a life in which she was the center of attention, and everything she said was greeted with amazement. At first she told the truth about the Olme, as she understood it, to many rich and influential people who held parties for her in grand houses. She described the butcher, the gifts, and the craftspeople who received them. With every retelling she found the crowd who surrounded her filled with wonder and agitation. The Olme grew bigger and more monstrous with each reimagining. Was it in the way she used her voice? She felt a distance springing up between the way it had been and the way she talked of it. She began to hate the sound of her own voice, which had a strange, flat timbre in the high-roofed houses.

  The sun might have been enough compensation for that, but it would not speak to her in any form but anger. Whenever she tried to look at it, she was blinded. She stood in its brightness and raised her arms to it, and after only a short length of time found that her skin burned and blistered. She wanted to love it, but it did not love her.

  It was, she discovered, very hard to go on caring about a thing that did not care for her.

  At about that time, Kim realized she missed her mother.

  She thought about returning to the dark sometimes, but mainly she thought about the slice of Olme that had been taken from her and experimented upon at the laboratory. Had it been taken, or had she given it? She wasn’t sure. The feeling that she should have kept it bothered her. She felt duplicitous. False, in some way that she couldn’t pin down.

  So she didn’t try to explain it. She kept going to the parties, even after the people seemed to calm down and find her of less interest. Often she stood on her own, beside the crossed spears that decorated every room. She would drink the free drinks, eat the free food, and watch the people mingle in their strange heavy hats that they never took off. Then she would go back to the pointed house that had been provided for her and sleep all day so that she did not have to spend time with the sun.

  At one such party, a woman came to speak to her. The woman had sloping shoulders and a curved back. She looked as if she had spent a lifetime doing manual work; she immediately reminded Kim of home.

  “Do you remember me?” she said.

  Kim shook her head.

  “I greeted you. When you first arrived. I was the councilor.”

  “No,” said Kim. That had been a confident person, just like the butcher. She realized that time
must have done its work on the butcher too, and everyone she had known. Nothing would be the same down there. “Really? How long ago was that?”

  The woman said a number that didn’t mean anything to her. “I gave it up a while back. I’m retired now. It was a hard job, making all those decisions for the benefit of everyone. Can I ask you something? Are you glad you came here?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “I wish I’d seen your Olme. Imagine. A living Olme.”

  “I didn’t see a living one.”

  “No. Well. Do you know what I think about the most, when I look back over my time in the job? I think about you offering me that part of the Olme. I wish I’d picked it up.”

  “You want to smell terrible for the rest of your life?”

  “I want to have proof that it happened,” said the woman. “Chances are, that was the very last one of its kind. There have been no eruptions for such a long time.”

  “Eruptions?”

  “Drolmeflies,” she said, as if that should mean something to Kim. “You know, the next stage. You don’t know this? The Olme are the larvae. Then they pupate, hatch, dig upwards. Take to the skies. The last eruption was hundreds of years ago. Over four hundred people were killed before we could bring it down, stop it from feeding. The fact that such an event hasn’t happened in so long made us think they were extinct.”

  “Then... what lays an Olme?”

  The woman considered the question. She said, “Something else. Something we haven’t seen. It must be terrible, whatever it is. Or was. But the signs are good, aren’t they? Maybe that was the very last one. We’ve lived in fear for so long, but now we can start to believe that the need to hunt the Olmes are over. All your people could return to the surface. Do you think more of you will come up?”

  Kim looked around the room. How many people knew why they wore those hats? How many could have picked up a spear and thrown it, straight and true, at a flying monster? The crowd were mingling, laughing. They had their own old jokes to tell, and even if they didn’t understand the punchlines any more, they would laugh.

  Would the butcher come up to the surface if she knew, or her mother? Would the masters and the apprentices give up what they loved, even if it did not love them? There were still some questions that couldn’t be answered. She shrugged, and rolled her eyes.

  Eventually the woman left her alone, and she abandoned the party and went for a walk in the night air. How fresh it was, and cold. She loved the icy touch of the wind; after removing her hat, she put her fingers to her hair and shook out the loose band that held it back from her face. The sensation was as close to freedom as she had ever felt.

  Her feet took her back to the trapdoor. It was sealed up tight, and the same guard sat beside it. When he saw her, he jumped to her feet. “Your hat!” he said. “Quick, put it back on.” He plucked it from her fingers and clapped it back upon her head.

  “Why?”

  “It’s not polite,” he said. “To be seen without one. It’s just one of the rules. What are you up to?”

  “I want to go home,” she said, although she hadn’t known it until the words had left her mouth.

  “Really?”

  “Why does that seem so surprising?”

  “Isn’t it all hard work down there? It’s up to you, though. Here you go. It’s a free choice—be up here, or down there. Different things suit different people, right? It’s all for the greater good.”

  Kim didn’t reply. She started down the ladder, and with each rung she descended she considered what she would say to the people who remained, who had tasks to fulfill, who had decided whether to be rewarded with gifts that bore a scent so strong that it could mark them forever.

  © Copyright 2020 Aliya Whiteley