a woman’s face looking up at the sky. I zoomed in on her, trying to make out her expression. It was midway between sadness and hope, and she was lost in it, whatever memories or expectations were inflicting this emotional hybrid upon her, just as she was lost in the clouds that grazed the top of her building. She was stuck in her box, like the code I had just written. I spent the rest of the night finding other similar scenes.
They were everywhere.
Vietnam, 1669: The rice farmer in the paddy field who would smile with no warning and with seemingly no impetus. Germany, 1942: The girl in the death camp stroking her dead mother’s hair. Madrid, 1845: The old man walking down the street, muttering to himself and the pigeons. Each of them held a billion secrets, none of them told.
And then there was the woman on the mountain.
Patagonia, 1978. A woman clung, star-like, to a cliff. With numerous ropes and metal devices she was attempting to scale it, but a blizzard had left her struggling.
She hung there for twenty minutes without moving once. Then, finally, she took a breath and strained against her foothold while simultaneously clawing upwards with an axe. It met its target and she followed with her other hand, but it was not enough, and she slipped.
It was some fifty metres before the rope snapped taut, and there she dangled, swinging for ten minutes at least, head slumped and arms limp by her sides. I thought perhaps the rope had broken her back, and was about to move on from this grim scene when she suddenly jerked awake, legs wheeling. I sat up, heart thundering at this new development, and reached for the tablet to zoom in further.
Her face was creased in pain and exertion, and her lips moved as she muttered things into the blizzard. There was a hidden battle playing out, and it was one I was sure she could not win.
But then, to my astonishment, she began to climb.
She climbed through the wind, she climbed through the cold and she climbed through the screaming pain she was clearly enduring. She climbed all the way back to the point from which she had fallen, and when she reached her target, she found her footholds and resumed her original attempt.
An hour later she was at the top, lying on her back, laughing at the sky.
And I laughed with her.
At dawn I had witnessed a thousand quiet faces locked within themselves. I had also drunk two bottles of hurwein, and I stumbled from Jorne’s dwelling in a daze, wrapped in a blanket and wandering through the misty forest, thinking about how faces seem to ignite when great words are spoken, and wondering if that woman would have ever made it to the top if she had not fallen first.
— FORTY —
SO WE BECAME distracted; me by my work and the quantum telescope recordings; you by your music and treks with Jorne. But we were not the only ones. The council was distracted by the rate of development in transcendence, which of course meant that I saw less and less of my mother, and Benedikt too.
I rarely saw Haralia, and when I did I barely recognised her.
Gone was the shining skin, the bouncing curls and bright frocks. Now she wore nothing but the solemn cloak of the Devoted, her head buried in its deep hood. I saw her once as I was travelling back to Fane. I no longer enjoyed the place. You were rarely there by then, and the dwelling was like a memory that no longer belonged to me—muddled, dark and out of place. I could not watch the quantum telescope recordings, or look through the books, or investigate the objects in the Room of Things. I merely spent my time there cleaning and tidying, though neither was necessary.
Also there was no hurwein.
I passed her on the chalk road leading into Fane. I was glad to see her, and I thought we might take tea.
‘Haralia,’ I called out, as she drifted past.
She stopped and, after a pause, turned.
‘Ima,’ she replied. I faltered. It was an acknowledgement, not a greeting.
I attempted a smile. ‘How are you? Do you have time to come by? We could—’
‘No. I do not have time. I must away.’
She continued along the road.
‘Not even a little? It has been an age since we talked. How is your work?’
This stopped her.
‘I would not expect you to understand, Ima. You know nothing of