One autumn when I was old enough, my mother took me with her and the other salvagers to see the sea. I had gone with them before, on shorter journeys across the Land, once making it as far away as Suf, where they harvest the sun. But never that far, never to the old cities by the ocean, never to the sea that squatted like a beast beyond the shore, grey-blue and ever mutable, a foreign world much larger than the Land, in which all things were possible and all things, I thought, could be true.
When the world changed and the moon was hurt and our people came to the Land, the ocean remained. It only grew. Old Grandma Toffle had an ancient book of sea creatures, and I would spend the winter months curled by the fireplace in my father’s lap, and study its withered pages. Sea anemones undulating, part flower, part animal, their colours as bright as and as vivid as a mirage. Schools of dolphins caught from down below, streaks of shadow against the blue lit ceiling of the world. I envied them, their lithe purpose, the way they chased across a world so much bigger than my own. I loved the Land. Yet, sometimes, I longed for Sea. Whales, as large as mountains, rising out of a whitewash of water. My father told me that they sang, their voices carrying halfway across the world. They sang to each other, and to the moon, as they played, and as they grieved. But my father said no one had heard their song in many years.
I did not know the ocean. The creatures in the book were things straight out of fairy tales, of Old Mercurial’s ghost stories or old Grandma Mosh’s rambling hand-me-downs of the times before. I knew the story of Flora and Deuteronomy, which I think I told you (though memory plays tricks with me now, like an old yet still mischievous friend), and how the winds carried them to the Land when the sea rose at last against the shore. I knew many stories but I did not know the truth of them, if truth they had, or what had happened to the sea in all this time, for there was this: we had left it alone, at last.
Old Grandma Mosh, who had many curious ideas, believed humans only ever deluded themselves that they were the ruling species of this world.
‘Ants!’ she’d say, ‘ants, little Mai! This is an ant planet, did you know ants grow mushrooms, they herd caterpillars, they forage and hunt and fight other ants. They dig tunnels, build caverns, make alliances with other ants. Their super-colonies stretch all across the Land, a single one is an untold tangle of tunnels, millions of individual queens, billions of worker ants – this is an ant planet,’ (she’d say), ‘it had been their planet all along.’
And she may have had something in it, in the old retelling. One should not make the mistake of ignoring what one can’t see. There is the story of Shosho Mosh and the ant queen of Thebes... but did I tell you that one, yet?
In any case, both ants and humans are creatures of Land. But the sea is much wider and deeper, as unknown as space (though as a species we had dipped our toes into both). The world-ocean was there, it had always been there, and I – I longed to see it.
That autumn when we left, the houses shrunk in the distance. A thin fog had fallen over the fields and the pine and olive trees. My father and the others stood beyond the stream, waving. Their voices soon faded away in the fog. We followed tracks made by salvagers passing, we followed brooks, the natural contours of the world. At last we reached the old, abandoned roads, and marched not on but beside them, along what the salvagers call the Shoulders. Indeed it felt to me, young as I was, that we were walking on the shoulders of giants, if vanished ones. Often we would come across the remnants of rusting, broken travel pods, now filled with earth. Flowers grew out of empty windows, snails crawled along plastic and rusting metal. The roads were badly broken. The roots of trees had dug out of the earth and broken their black surfaces, and to traverse the road itself would have been hard and dangerous.
Salvagers are practical, stoic people. I was never meant to be one, I was always more given to stories. But my mother was born for this job, leading us true across all the twistings and turnings, and even Old Peculiar, the map maker, bowed to her skill. There were traps, too, though the passage itself was beautiful, as I saw mountains with peaks covered in snow, trees growing wild and free with red foliage falling like sunsets, and little green birds darting in the foliage, chattering in a language I almost thought I knew. We had to beware of the wild machines that still, sometimes, lived here in the wildness; of potholes and cave-ins, of landslides and ice. Shosho Mosh was the hunter, often disappearing for one or two days before returning from beyond the road, skinned rabbits or a small boar carried on her back. My mother would cut the meat into strips with quiet efficiency. We built fires by the roadside and ate warm tubers, buried in coals. We left stone rings behind us like markers, and often used old fire pits left there from other excursions. We would thank the Land for its bounty, and never take more than we needed. It is a hard, physical labour, salvaging, but my mother made it look easy. Then, one day, we crested a hill, and I first saw the sea.
‘You’re always scribbling away, little Mai,’ Old Peculiar said, looking at me with his one good eye. He was a small, gnarled man; his left eye covered in a rakish patch, his right was bright and curious. How he lost it, I never learned. He’d gone deep into the blighted lands one time, for so long that he was thought of lost. When he returned he was much changed, his eye was gone, and in his bag were maps, a treasure trove of maps showing places that no longer existed. Where he got them, and how he lost his eye, he never said. Some cave of treasure, some said, a time vault of the ancients, deep in the lost places of the world where only the ants and the wild machines live still. Once the world was covered pole to pole with human habitation, cities, roads, ports, factories and fields. This was when we had forgotten Land, and the bond we owe it. In the rare times when he brought the maps out I would be fascinated by their elaborate forms, the lines of elevation and the demarcation of land, of Land. Ash-Sham, Krung Thep, Nooyok... My imagination was inadequate to picture the cities of the past, how close on each other buildings were and how tall, and I could not imagine so many people, could not imagine living among so many strangers.
One map fascinated me in particular. I do not know the place it depicted, if it were real or imagined: it was a fabulous town filled with giant, living rats and lions, puppies who sang, bears who danced to music. There were crenelated castle towers, miniature mountains belching fire and steam, giant walking bottles of soda. There were lagoons and ships and rockets, and though much of the map was hard to read I believe it was called Sneyland. Our own maps were more practical, hand-drawn, current as current could be: my mother, too, spent long hours poring over her maps, but hers just showed routes to and from the old places, marked with black bold Xs to denote threats that were left carefully unmentioned.
‘What are you writing?’ Old Peculiar said, that night, by the fire. We were not far from the ocean by then. The air smelled different, I realised later. It was an unfamiliar smell to me, it left a salty taste on the tongue.
‘It’s a letter,’ I said, surprised. He seldom expressed interest in my activities or anyone else’s, his whole focus being on the route ahead, on the dangers only he could perceive all around. But the truth was that the old roads were mostly safe to travel. The wild machines were just a story, or so I thought, gone deep into the blighted lands; and there were few predators on the Land. I always remember that first journey as breathtakingly beautiful, my first real glimpse of the world beyond, and how peaceful, and prosperous, and wild it had seemed.
‘A letter?’
‘It’s when you write to someone who is not there,’ I said, self-consciously. ‘Like when old Grandma Toffle writes to Oful Toffle, who lives in Tyr –’
‘I know what a letter is,’ he said, shortly.
‘Then –’
‘And who do you know, little Mai, who lives so far away?’ he said, and his single eye, I thought, seemed to twinkle. ‘And how would you get them this letter? Wait for a passer-by? Tie it to the foot of a bird migrating across the Land?’
‘There used to be mail carriers,’ I said, ‘in the old days, and they say people could speak to each other even if they were standing at opposing ends of the Land, as though they were right next to each other –’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But that depended on the satellites, mostly.’ He pointed up at the night sky. I could see the Milky Way, our home galaxy stretched out from horizon to horizon, a beautiful spiral like a snail’s. ‘And the satellites are dead, suspended in orbit, if they hadn’t all crashed down to Earth yet.’ He seemed surprised, himself, at his own voice. ‘In past time, Low Earth Orbit was so chockfull of junked machines that they would often crash against each other, and fall down, fiery bright, like shooting stars...’ he shook his head, and I realised then I never really knew him, what he was, what dreams he had, for all that he had always been there.
‘Who is the letter for?’ he asked, then. I shrugged, self-conscious. It was to no one real, you understand. It was a letter I was writing to the people who came before us, the people who lived on, yet never really knew, the Land. It was about my life, mostly, about our journey to the sea, about the salvagers and my father who stayed behind, about my friend Mowgai Khan and about old Grandma Mosh and her collection of antique books... and in my letter, too, I tried to ask them questions, though I knew they’d never answer back. What was it like? I wanted to ask them. To have so much, to have everything, and to still want more, to need so much for things, that everything else became secondary, even us – their children?
I tried to explain it to Old Peculiar, I think, in my halting way. He nodded, and stirred the embers in the fire with a stick.
‘I used to think about that too,’ he said. ‘Even now, sometimes, in the old places, deep in the cities where nobody lives... but do you know what I think, little Mai? I think they were not that much different to us, to you, to me. They were just people. They tried to do their best, and sometimes they succeeded, and sometimes they didn’t.’ He poked at the fire some more, sending a shower of sparks into the air.
‘You’ll find out,’ he said, gently. Then he was gone, and I was left there holding my pen, and staring into the fire. You never really know people, I remember thinking, even if you spend all your life with them. Later, I signed the letter, and I buried it in the ground. Perhaps I wasn’t writing it for the past at all, but for the future, and for my own children, after all.
That winter we sheltered in the ancient city as the rains lashed down on the Land, and my mother and the salvagers burrowed deep into the tangled mazes of its empty streets in search of useful discard, workable tech, reusable metal. This was a long time ago, when I was but a girl, but I remember that first glimpse of the ocean, how it went on and on until it reached the sky; It seemed to me an immense beast then, always moving, never quite still, its smooth back stretching across the world; and I thought, for just a moment, that it sensed me, somehow, and that it responded. A flock of birds, white against the grey-blue of the world, shot up and were framed in the light of the wintry sun. I blinked. I felt very heavy then, and for a moment the world spun and spun. Then the curious sensation was over, but the ocean remained; and we began the long descent down to the shore.
As for the city, that is another story, for another time. The light grows dim, and I must soon put down my pen. But one day, a week or so into our stay, my mother led me to the shore, my hand in hers, and together we stood on the sand and watched the sea. I saw, then, a demarcation line: a place where wet sand gave way to dry, and all along that line – which was, I later learned, the mark of high tide – there was debris.
This was not salvage. I saw seaweed, dulled by the air; small, shining seashells, their inhabitants still cowering inside; human-made ropes, black and slimy from the depths; a half-eaten plastic doll of what I thought must be a mouse, with its head missing and a hole in its chest; a plastic bottle, too – for plastic remained long after the world that had made it was gone; and a small, green-shelled sea turtle, helplessly turned on its back.
There were many things the ancients could have done, and many things they did, in fact, do. It was not so much the doing or otherwise, as much as a certain mass that was required to change things. Towards the end, I think they realised it. Some left their travel pods by the side of the road, and began to walk. Some planted fruit trees, seeded flowers, allowed nature into their cubicle homes. Some stopped purchasing that which they did not need, abandoned things, began, too late, to try and live with the Land. They began to only use the power that they needed, to harvest the sun, to get to know the seasons. They cleaned that which had been polluted. All these things happened. All these things were possible. They didn’t mean harm, they wanted the best for their children, the way their parents did, the way we do. It was all there, it just wasn’t enough, it was just a little too late. They knew, and yet the mind is capable of great delusion. They didn’t want to know.
The art of those last decades, too, is strange. There is so much vitality and violence in that last epoch, before the sea rose and the winds hit and my people came to the Land. It was the wind that tore Flora and Deuteronomy from Nuevo Soledad... but I think I told you that story elsewhere.
All this happened, long ago. It wasn’t enough to save everyone, but it was enough to save some and, in a way, to save a world. The dinosaurs lived longer and died quicker... and perhaps old Grandma Mosh is right, and this has been an ant planet all along.
All this happened long ago, and around me the light grows dim. that spring we returned to our home, laden with what could be salvaged. We try not to waste. Eventually, all that was left will be returned to the earth, repurposed and reused. Already, I know, plants and animals have returned to the old cities. And I remember that debris line, on that nameless beach, under a grey-blue skies, and the little sea turtle, lying upturned on its back. When I picked it up, it emitted a stream of pee in fright, and I almost laughed. I had never seen a sea turtle. Then I crossed the line, my bare feet sinking into wet sand. And I walked to the water, which lapped at the shore, spraying me with white foam.
I placed the turtle gently in the water, and watched it swim away.