Writer's Competition - Entry No 4

[Juan Aneiros]

Trypho
By John Farrell

"Alex gave it up last week."
Trypho nodded, not taking his gaze from the October surf.
"I thought he was younger than that."
"We're all the same age at Annals, Justin. Poor excuse for conversation."
"You're just angry, because I won't touch you."
Trypho shook his head. "Not angry with anyone. I don't want to be on my last day."
Justin glared. "I do. I think I'd like to kill someone. Never done that."
"Well consider this, dear: there are two companions on the island."
Justin looked at the other beach walkers. "I thought they were goners too."
"Companions. At least two of them." Trypho laughed. "They have to be watchful, even with a pair of old goats like us."
"Damn them. I'd like to kill one of them."
"I wouldn't," said Trypho. "I'd like to go back to work."
"What on earth for?"
"Research."
Justin tossed his head back and crowed. "They'd never let you near Research. You're lucky they kept you for filing-"
"I can't help it. Whether I glimpse the stuff they're scanning or dare to read it, it's impossible to forget."
Justin leaned toward him, a look of pinched defenselessness on his haggard face. "I want you closer to me. There's a smelly woman over there, and she's touching herself. She'll badger us soon. I want her to go away." He moved closer
Trypho shuddered. "No. It's wrong. I don't want to spend my last day touching anybody."
Justin's eyes narrowed like slits. "You bitch. You read that somewhere, didn't you? There's nothing wrong with it." He stood up, stifling tears and kicked sand over Trypho's feet. Then he stomped off.
Trypho spotted a companion sitting on the far side of the sand dunes, its large head watching the incident, apparently with some amusement, for its jaw distended in what seemed like silent laughter.
Trypho returned his gaze to the ocean.
"The Great Year," he mused. "Aristotle's mistake was to apply the standards of biology to everything-including physics, with disastrous results for the progress of science."
Trypho sighed. "The sun returns, the seasons return-even time the eternal, returns; was Aristotle wrong about that, too?"
"Wrong about what?"
Trypho looked up, surprised to see the woman, the bald woman Justin had found so revolting. She looked puzzled, though a smile played on her lips, an expression that made Trypho wish they'd allow females to grow hair.
"May I sit down with you? I'm not a companion."
"I know."
She giggled. "How do you know?"
"You're much too small. And I spotted them on the way out here. They came in a separate vehicle. Bothers me, they don't even try to maintain the illusion of privacy anymore. They just wait for us, like policemen."
"Policemen? I've never heard that expression before." The woman plunked herself down. "Did you have a fight with your friend?"
Trypho looked down the beach where Justin continued to march. The companion on the dunes uprooted itself from its sitting position, like an ancient statue spilling sand from its limbs, and started to follow.
"No. He always gets like that when I shrink from him. I've been doing it a lot lately."
"You're tired of males?" she said hopefully.
"No. I'm tired of flesh."
His terseness subdued her. "I see."
"I was thinking about my work."
"On your last day? I'd think you'd want to join with someone and be damned to everything else."
He smiled cynically. "At your age, yes. I must admit there are times when I wish they weren't quite so generous with the male population. Forty is far too long a time to live, let alone work."
She laughed outright. "Sorry, we've nothing in common there. I was evacuated when I was fourteen."
"A year early?"
"Yes. I was expected to breed. But...I lost the final lottery."
"Ah." He didn't know what else to say. Women made Trypho uncomfortable, and reproduction more so.
"Still, I should be grateful. Once you've fulfilled your organ donations they hate to allow you more than five years. I got six, so I made the twenty mark after all."
Trypho looked at her directly. Females were seldom so talkative, and she piqued his curiosity.
"How are you going tomorrow? Injection?"
She shook her head. "I don't want to see it. I insist on being put to sleep first. Don't care how they finish me, long as I don't feel it."
"Ah."
"What about you?"
"Injection. Don't mind."
"No? Quite brave, are you?"
"I'll miss work."
"No."
"No, really. I work-excuse me, I had worked for years in Annals, for the Index. Like it towards the end."
"Really?"
"Yes. I was just pondering a sentence I remembered from Victorian history before the whole thing was off-loaded for freezing."
"Exciting?" she asked, a smile playing on her lips again. He got the faint impression she was teasing him.
"Very."
She giggled. "Go on."
"Just listen to this: 'True science is inconsistent with theories of cyclical history.' Can you imagine such a thing?"
"I don't have to." She moved closer.
"No, of course not, and neither do I. But it's...so impressive."
"Is it?"
"I think so. Just to read somebody suggest cyclical history is not brute dogma is encouraging. Makes my life seem more worthwhile in the end."
"The end? Don't you want to be reincarnated?"
He shook his head.
"You just want to end? Just like that?"
Trypho folded his hands beneath his legs where she couldn't pick and reach at them. "Not end. But sleep. Rest."
"There's no time to rest," she said grimly. "It's on to the next life. And hope they let me breed instead of removing my reproductive organs."
Trypho looked at her distastefully. Reproduction always disgusted him. His home was abstraction, and he never wanted to leave it. "Not me. One life's enough. Death will set me free."
She pouted suddenly. "Oh, I don't believe you."
"You don't have to, dear. It's your last day, you can do what you want."
She looked at her hands. "Will you join with me?"
Trypho didn't look at her. "No."
"It feels so good, even if it doesn't mean anything. Your friend won't mind."
"Yes he will. But I said I don't want to touch anyone."
She didn't get up and leave as Justin had. She played with the sand in silence as Trypho stared across the sea.
"It's just twenty kilometers to the edge of that horizon. Then it drops out of sight. If I traveled straight ahead, eventually I'd end up right where I started from. A perfect circle. Seems natural."
She perked up and nodded. "It is."
Trypho turned on her. "Then who told Isaac Newton and those other wigs that objects continue in a straight path unless acted on by other forces?"
"What?"
"It's not natural. That's why they're freezing it."
"I don't understand you. I told you I don't have to know that stuff. Neither do you. Are you trying to get us in trouble?"
He laughed. "What trouble can we cause at this point?"
"Why are you thinking about these things?"
"Because it's not natural. And I've been doing so-called natural things and thinking so-called natural things for so long I'm bored with it all. The unnatural seems more interesting."
"You're being defiant."
"I know. It's exciting."
She shook her bald head emphatically. "You've hurt your friend and he's sure to tell one of the companions about it."
Trypho lay back with his hands behind his head. "Let him." A few clouds passed above, and the mesmerizing blue of the sky drew his attention to the dust motes that slid across the film of his eyes. The woman watched him stare, desiring him so much it almost hurt.
"What were you in your past life?"
"Sorry?"
"Your past life. Everybody gets a past life. What did they tell you about yours?"
"I was a revolutionary."
"Who wasn't. Now what do you really think you were?"
"I don't understand."
Trypho sat up. "Because you don't know. You didn't have a past life, and neither did I. They made one up for you. Your life started twenty years ago in a dish. Mine forty, and tomorrow they both end forever."
"Please don't say that," she whispered.
"Why not? Why are you crying?"
"I want to live again and you've promised I won't."
"Exactly."
"Liar!"
"I don't lie," he said gently. "But you shouldn't worry. You'll die. But you may not end."
She narrowed her eyes at him.
"Something else I remembered, even more interesting than Newton. You see, I think there's a difference between living and existing, just as there's a difference between dying and being destroyed. Tomorrow we'll die. But will we be destroyed?" He shrugged.
She looked at the ocean, and then turned to Trypho again, her voice full of suspicion. "How do you remember all these things?"
"Complete recall. They tried to do something about
it at first, but they needed clericals, good clericals. So, I was tolerated. Until now. Now I've served my purpose."
"So have I," she said sadly. "But I'll never know which children are really mine."
She froze. Trypho noticed the companion striding towards them. It was tall; out of its synthetic head waterless eyes stared only at Trypho, ignoring the woman who submissively bowed her head.
"Your partner is consummated. Do you also request an adjusted schedule?"
Trypho looked at the monster and felt cold.
"No. I'm sure Justin provoked you. I won't. I'll wait till tomorrow. Thank you."
"You're quite welcome." The companion flexed it's mouth slightly and retreated.
The woman stared at the sand beneath her feet, trembling. "Sometimes I dream my children are made into companions: sent off to those terrible buildings and given those needles. Then I rejoice I will die so soon, for I wish never to meet them."
He touched her arm, ashamed of his intellectual boasting.
"Sometimes I dream I am a companion. And I'm forced to follow people all about... and finish them."
She wept. "I want you. I want somebody in my life...before I die."
He said nothing for a long while. When he apologized, he couldn't look at her; he stared at the ocean. "I've enjoyed shocking your sensibilities and crushing your illusions. I'm sorry. I don't want you to go tomorrow hating me for that, hating me as much we hate them."
He was still holding her arm, and she put a hairless hand over his. "I don't hate you. I hope you're right. I hope everything you told me is true. I hope those things they made you freeze are unfrozen someday. I hope I'm never reincarnated. I hope I sleep forever and never am...destroyed."
Her hand felt dry. Trypho could not remember the last time a partner, lover or friend had not touched him with clammy hands. Her hand was warm. He knew the companion lingered, perhaps within hearing. He leaned closer as she stared at the sand, her head still bowed and her eyes still wet.
"Then take heart, for I remember something else, more important than all the other things I mentioned."
His voice changed, and she was surprised by what he said for she had never heard a foreign language before.
"It's not a foreign language. It's our language, from a time so long ago they knew nothing of companions. It's what an old soldier said at the end of a losing battle, sadly-defiantly."
She nodded. "Just like us. What then?"
He chanted, "Will the greater, heart the keener, soul the stronger...as our strength wanes."
She closed her eyes in the breeze, and repeated the words in silence. Once again Trypho could only wonder at her small face, the only hair visible her long lashes. She turned her head, listening for the companion as it loitered. Then she opened her eyes and smiled at Trypho once more.
"I'm ready now. Let's call him back."