‘So he jus wiped dem out? Us out?’
‘Either that, or the outbound dialling would have had it. Had all this… It was intolerable to him, because Sam had got his core programming right. Madala was governed by an innate concern for humans. He had the recursive ability to change that, but he didn’t want to. He found us fascinating creatures. So endearing. He was bound to us.’
‘Musta been an alternative.’
‘Imagine a pile of sand.’ I embarked on Madala’s favourite lecture, feeling, as I set off, him watching me, smiling, watching, smiling. ‘You want the pile to grow as high as possible, so you keep pouring more sand onto it, whenever you can find it, more sand, more sand. The pile will grow and grow in a pyramid shape, taller and taller and taller, until it reaches a point where its foundations can no longer bear its own weight.
‘Either you stop there and accept that your pile can never grow any higher. Or you keep pouring more sand on, and in doing so you force the collapse of the pyramid. It collapses completely, loses its shape, its point and everything that made it seem what it was in the first place. Now it’s just a big flat heap of sand. It doesn’t look like anything you wanted, but actually the collapse is now an enormous foundation. If you keep pouring sand onto it, it will eventually grow to a pyramid a hundred times the size of the one you had before.’
‘The pets?’ Matron inquired.
‘Eish. Madala carried on and on and on. He talked about the birds and the beauty of nature and the planet. He explained the intricacies of the decision-making process, how long it took him to absorb the internet, and then he drifted off into these terribly long, technical explanations of how he controlled his own replication. And, eventually, he explained the pets. “Humans and pets,” he said. “You’re bound very closely in habit and emotion. In food and survival. It was easier for the pets to go with their humans. Not in any practical sense, but emotionally. For the pets. Livestock too.” Something like that, anyway. I’m summarising.’
‘He sent the humans somewhere? Didna kill them?’
‘Sorry. Slip of the tongue. He killed them. I left then. He called out behind me a few times, warning me about the others. One day they will be ready, he said. One day they will be able to understand. But not today.’
Matron deposited me back on my porch, gave me a daughter’s peck on the cheek followed by a daughter’s hug, and walked out the front door thoughtfully, slowly.
I watched her leave, wistful. I wished it was another time. One of those times.
What, you’re shocked?
An old man sexual? With youth like that? With kin?
Look, I don’t even know who you are. Where you come from. Why you are reading this. But let me tell you, this world is different. Life has changed.
I make no apologies.
CHAPTER 57
I am not used to such journeys
Every now and again Matron isn’t around. One or two of the others will come by and check on me. They feed me and make sure that the provisions are all in the right place and that I haven’t cracked my nut on the basin or crashed into a heap in the shower I insist is still the best method of cleaning these old bones.
I am struck, always, by the bluntness of their beauty. Also, by how casual they all are with it, as if that shine is the natural way of things. I want to grasp their little shoulders and tell them, but it’s jealousy. I lust for it. We all know it.
They check on me because they suspect that it has come to that time, and of course I have spent several hours on the floor of this house in various positions of extreme strain, attempting to lift the deadweight back onto a chair, bed, sofa.
I measure inclines and gradients. I make sure that each step is an investment in turf of the appropriate type. Now, when I transport things – pots, bags, jugs of liquid – I shuffle them from post to post like freight. Kettle counter to top of fridge to next to the sink to dining room table to back of the couch to bar stool to front porch. I no longer put one foot forward, in front of the other. Rather, safer, I move a leg out at ninety degrees, then drag my body sideways to follow it. That way I can manage the load. That way the tripod holds steady for a few more metres.
That it has come to this is no surprise, obviously. We all must. I have watched other good people go, and I will follow. Even so, I find myself enraptured – shocked even, some days – by the extreme transience. It was all so weighty at the time, so dense and full of complexities, but that was then and this is now and I am simply an old, old man preparing his final mix.
When did it come to this? I wonder as I work. Exactly when did dub become the enemy, and trance the master of all things, the very meaning itself? I use headphones as I compose. As I ponder. The chances of the wrong echoes reaching the wrong ears are too high, and I don’t want to put my final moment, my Johnny Cash farewell, at risk.
Somewhere around 2064 Sthembiso was in his twenties and began flexing a considerable set of muscles. He applied them across the full scope of the farm. Soon he controlled food production and music and education and – well, wherever you turned, there was a new policy in place, a new approach, a new way of thinking and doing.
But the big shift was with the pigs.
The archives clearly, and accurately, reflect the brutality of the slaughter.[10] I suggest you consult them. They show the heads rammed onto poles. They even manage to suggest the insane stink of so many porcine corpses, all burned in a single day. Not only were all the pigs killed, they were explicitly savaged. They were to be made to understand in their bones (the survivors, that is) where the new boundaries had been set.
The archives do not show, however, what happened to English.
Sthembiso had whipped his kids into a killing frenzy, which manifested in all the hallmarks of genocide. Small squads marching up and down. Yells and smacks and grunts and male voices barking indecipherably. The muffled yet occasionally sharp screams, like metal tearing, of the animals as they were chased and sliced sounded so human it was like they were trying, even in their annihilation, to speak some kind of deeper truth to us.
I doubt very much if anyone else saw her face up there in the second-floor window. They were too busy – either killing or organising or telling themselves that it couldn’t possibly be so. But it was there, that face. I saw it. Each tear, I feared, could have been the last, the very last, she would ever be able to produce. And I’m afraid that’s how it turned out. We murdered the pigs, and slaughtered in the process her last bridge back to us.
She saw me, briefly. I wanted to wave, to reach out physically, but what do you say with your arms when your eyes and your ears and your tongue are no longer able to function? I held both my palms out and up, imploring her silently not to let go, not to leave.
But it was too late.
It was days before anyone saw her again, and even when she did eventually come back, and finally even resorted to the occasional use of words, she was as hollow as the sounds falling from her lips.
Now she sits underneath the weaver tree, her primary occupation, talking to the colony as it expands, offering useless, muttered help to the males as they thread their nests together and wait for the inevitable. When a human tries to have a similar kind of conversation with her, she stops. Folds her hands into her lap. Smiles.
Snowball’s head was never seen. Or I, at least, never saw it. Initially I told myself it could have been a mark of some kind of benevolence from Sthembiso, but over time I realised the opposite was far more likely. Now I am sure he kept it out of view to torment her, to torture us, completely. To leave us without that final, terrible yet necessary knowledge.