By His Sacrifice
by Daliso Chaponda
I
H |
is toys were chosen by a group of twenty-seven physicists, paradoxologists and psychologists. Saul’s favourite was a copper slinky. This pleased them. His favourite book was Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon.” This pleased them too.
It was mostly positive signs for the first four years of his life. They watched him progress and patted each other on the back. “It was worth the sacrifice,” pronounced Angelica, the Project Leader. She had left behind a husband and twin daughters but that was not the sacrifice she spoke of.
Harrod, Saul’s head teacher, had the most trouble accepting what they had done. His hours with Saul were his only oasis of joy. The child was exuberant. Saul had soft mulatto skin, large brown eyes he’d inherited from his mother, and tiny fingers which clutched Harrod’s wrists tightly enough to reel him into the present. Often he felt he did not deserve the child’s love.
When Saul was tested on his fifth birthday, the results were disappointing. He performed worse on the test than an average child of his age. Naturally, the finger was pointed at Harrod. “You have been too distracted,” Angelica accused. “Your obsession with guilt is jeopardizing the project.”
“It is easy to blame me,” he replied. “But there are more rational explanations. Saul has grown up with no companionship of his own age. We have been obsessed with intelligence above all else. Creativity and passion are equally important. We have been bringing him up like a lab specimen. Of course he didn’t do well in the tests.”
Angelica recognized this as more than Harrod’s tendency to blame himself for everything. She passed on his words to the council.
Two weeks later, eighteen children were kidnapped.
II
The Esposito family woke up to find their daughter’s sleeping cot empty. Mrs. Esposito screamed and collapsed. “Where is she? Where is my baby?”
The Austrian authorities could not answer her question.
Fernando Esposito, the little girl’s uncle, was a detective in the Rio de Janeiro police force. He took a leave of absence and flew to Vienna. His sister had barely spoken since the kidnapping. She sat in her daughter’s room daily, staring at the empty cot.
In a severe boarding school, Fernando had been taught that weeping was weak. The beatings had been more brutal for the ‘cry-babies’. He had learnt to bite back the tears and take the pain like a man. When he tried to speak to his sister and she stared at him blankly he felt the tears well up but he did not cry. Instead, he swore an oath to her that he would find her daughter.
If she understood his words, her face did not show it.
III
Gabriella remembered the sun. She stared up at the solar lamps that bathed the compound with light and thought of golden sunsets. And clouds. Clumps and columns of white fluff.
“What you mean you’ve never seen clouds?” She asked Saul, scrunching her nose.
“I’ve seen them on vid-screens.”
“That’s not the same,” Gabriella teased.
Saul said nothing. He did not say much else to her that break-time. He found her in the evening, after classes and asked her to tell him about clouds.
She did, even though telling him made her sad. “Cumulo... cumulo-something the big ones are called. They look like candy floss.”
“What’s candy floss?”
Gabriella’s sadness changed. She was no longer sad for the skies she would never see and the sun she would never feel. She was sad for the boy in front of her and she just wanted to give him a big hug or tell him a funny joke. She tried as hard as she could to find, in the few words she knew, the right ones to make Saul see clouds, taste wind and smell spring. She told him about the game she and her mother played where they pointed at the shapes in clouds and said, “Look a double headed elephant.”
“Look, a trumpet.”
Talking about her mother made Gabriella think of the nuclear fires and she began to cry.
Saul placed his palm on her shoulder. “Let’s play that game now.”
Through her whimpers she nodded.
Saul pointed at a shadow cast by a pole which marked the edge of the compound. There was a large circular transmitter come motion sensor come force field generator on top of a pole. “A tall skinny man with a big head. Your turn.”
Gabriella looked around, searching for a shadow that hid a secret.
IV
Saul asked Gabriella hundreds of questions about what it had been like living above ground. They worried at how depressed this made Saul. Angelica disagreed. “No. It’s perfect. He has to care for the planet enough to sacrifice himself. She is making him love the life he could have lived. Because of Gabriella, he is mourning the things lost in the nuclear war.”
“But it’s a lie,” barked Harrod; his eyes were red and there was a tremor in his voice.
Soon, Harrod would no longer be useful. Angelica wished this was not the case because he had given so much to the project. He deserved more but he had been insufferable ever since the other children had been brought down. He complained, whined and questioned the tiniest details.
“We have justified so many things,” Harrod continued. His words were addressed to no-one in particular. “We have robbed these children from their families and normal life on the surface. We lie to them every day. So many terrible things and there is always the possibility, that possibility we all hide from and never say out aloud. What if we’re wrong? When it comes down to it, everything we’re doing is based on a theory. Imagine we’re wrong?”
Not ‘soon’, Angelica realized, ‘now’. She made the order after the meeting. She felt no guilt.
Harrod’s last words were “forgive me”. The scientist who shot him wondered to whom Harrod had addressed his plea. Like most Baronists, he had not believed in God.
V
Saul still asked about Harrod many months later. He had been told that Harrod died heroically. “He saved all of us. There was a crack in the engine that generates energy for the entire compound. He sealed it but he died in the attempt.” It was a carefully chosen lie — to increase Saul’s admiration of martyrdom.
Harrod had been the only teacher who had befriended Saul. He had been the closest thing to a father in the boy’s life. His absence left a void in Saul that nothing could fill.
“Why can’t he just accept the loss?” Angelica asked one of the psychologists. “Isn’t it easier to adapt to death at that age? The other children are all coping with having lost their parents and they are dealing with it better than Saul. Why can’t he forget as well as they can?”
Angelica was wrong about the other children. They had not forgotten about their parents; they just did not talk about them often. This was what they had learnt: if one person loses their parents and talks about it, everyone feels sympathy for them. When everybody has lost their parents, the person who brings it up does nothing but remind all the rest about their own pain.
In other ways, Angelica was right. Saul was unable to talk to the other kids; he didn’t know what to say to them or how to be. His only friend was Gabriella and even she preferred playing with Ricky with the blond hair. She only played with Saul when Ricky with the blond hair was otherwise occupied. Saul knew this. It made him hate Ricky with the blond hair and it made him hate himself.
VI
“He doesn’t necessarily have to be a genius,” said Angelica to the rest of the council while looking through the results of the most recent academic evaluations. There was a hint of desperation in her tone. It was eight years since the other children had been brought into the compound and Saul was still scoring worse than most of them.
The others at the table looked at her bleakly. They were among the brightest minds on the planet and they could barely understand quantum and temporal physics. To make breakthroughs, Saul needed to be more than just gifted. He needed to be a Mozart.
“Maybe it will come with time,” said Angelica, trying hard to be positive. “He’s only thirteen.”
Her optimism was a sham. There were only nine more years. Recently, she had started to have the sort of thoughts Harrod used to. She began to wonder if they had been wrong. Maybe in bringing Saul to the compound they had done exactly what they were trying to avoid.
A consummate leader in all ways, Angelica did not let her doubts show. No-one doubted her conviction and it helped them to believe.
VII
Nineteen children in puberty – nine boys and ten girls. Flirtation and kisses were inevitable. Saul had vivid fantasies about Gabriella and Maia and Hanna and Thirumeni and Linda. Mainly about Gabriella because sometimes she leant forward and whispered into his ear. He would later remember the feel of her breath against his lobe. Sometimes, her body brushed against his. Sometimes he wanted to reach forward and pull her into his arms.
A decade had gone by but things had not really changed. Gabriella still spent time with Saul only when Ricky with the blond hair was otherwise occupied. Saul still hated Ricky with the blond hair.
Ricky with the blond hair’s full name was Richard Montcalm. He was beautiful and his memory was perfect. He also understood numbers and equations in a way that excited his teachers. Now, all that they learnt in their classes was science: nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, probability mathematics, temporal theory.
The children were finally allowed into the section of the compound that had been off limits to them for the last nine years. They were introduced to the scientists who had been arduously struggling to build a machine that could send an object backwards through time.
“We have no choice but to succeed,” the children were told. “Within ten years the force fields which protect this compound will run out of power and the radioactivity from the surface will kill us.”
“Then why aren’t you working on a way to make the force fields draw power from something else?” Gabriella asked.
“All we would do is buy ourselves time,” Angelica explained. “We are trying to reverse things. We want to make a time machine and send someone back in time to stop the war before it happens.”
This was a beautiful idea to the children. Of course it was. They had grown up reading H G Wells and Jules Verne and Kurt Vonnegut. The books available in the compound had been chosen carefully.
Ricky was fascinated and he boasted to the other children, “I’m going to do it. I’m going to find a way to make a time machine.”
If anyone can do it, the other children thought, Ricky can. Saul hated him all the more for this and swore to himself then and there that he would do it before Ricky did. He might not be able to say exactly the clever thing that would make Gabriella laugh but this was something bigger and better. He would save the world. Saul began putting all his effort into assimilating all the temporal research that the scientists had done. After classes, he continued reading. He drew sketches and he made calculations.
They all sighed with relief. They patted themselves on the back.
“This is how it will happen,” Angelica said, nearly in tears. “This is how we will be saved.”
VIII
Saul worked and the other children worked. They learnt everything the scientists knew about temporal theory and they struggled to find a way. After two years of failed attempts, one child said in frustration, “Maybe it’s not possible.”
Angelica only replied, “It is possible. We know it is.”
“How can you be so sure.”
She didn’t elaborate. They had all decided against explaining too much. If they told the children more, questions might be asked that no-one was ready to answer.
All the children’s theories were examined closely, but especially Saul’s. They encouraged him whenever he was losing hope. However, try as he might, Saul could hardly even understand the things the scientist’s had taught them. Even what had initially motivated him had dulled. He still hated Ricky but he had come to accept that Ricky was better than him at everything. He had even found a way to pretend he didn’t mind Ricky and Gabriella’s relationship. They had been together for half a year. Gabriella had even less time for Saul now.
IX
An image was the greatest breakthrough. Ricky succeeded in building a camera that took a photo, not of what was in front of it, but of what had been there twenty minutes earlier. It wasn’t sending an object back in time, but it was a step in the right direction.
It bothered Angelica that this breakthrough had come from Ricky. It should have come from Saul. “Saul Baron. By his sacrifice we live. By his sacrifice we love. By his sacrifice we sacrifice.” She still said the prayer every night, struggling to keep faith despite what she saw right in front of her eyes. Time was running out.
Eight years left. And then seven and then six. Still the camera was their only tangible achievement. Many in the compound still had faith in Saul even though he wasn’t a genius. They told themselves, he’ll be the one to make the final suggestion that will click things into place.
Angelica was too rational for such blind faith. She had formulated another theory. Ricky will develop the time machine. Of course, it made sense. Ricky will develop it and Saul will be sent back in time and when all the members of the United Nations ask him, he will lie. Anyone can see how much he hates Ricky and he’ll have the choice of telling them about Ricky or taking the credit. He’ll think, I’m the one here. I’m the one who’s going to die of radiation sickness. Of course he’ll take the credit. He’ll say, I developed the time machine. I’m the genius.
There were holes to Angelica’s theory, but she was no paradoxologist so she didn’t fret over the holes.
X
The explosions came—staccato constellations of fire against the force field accompanied by tremors in the earth. There were screams and confusion. The children had no idea what was happening. The council members ran to the weapons bunker. The force field would not stay up long. It had been designed to deflect surveillance, not weapons fire.
While the others armed themselves, Angelica searched for Saul and Ricky. She had no illusions. The compound would fall and most of them would be killed in the attack. Those who weren’t would stand trial and either be sentenced to death or life imprisonment. Angelica didn’t fear death. She feared that now, just when they were so close to success, it would all fall to ruin.Three years, that was all the time they had left.
Angelica found Saul, Ricky and Gabriella hiding between two buildings. They were staring up at the bursts of flame speckling the rapidly waning force field. “Listen to me,” she screamed over the deafening explosions. “We lied to you. We lied to you for all your life and you may never forgive us.” There were tears in Angelica’s eyes now. The force field had fizzled out of existence and she heard the rattle of gunfire. The future was falling apart around her. She continued screaming, desperate that Ricky and Saul would remember her words. “But even if you hate us, you must finish. Ricky you must build a time machine and Saul, you must go back in time to 2032 or all life on the planet will end. When you are taken to the surface, things might look fine, but they are not. In three years, if you don’t go back in time, the world will end.”
An invisible force propelled Angelica forward. She slammed into Saul and they both fell to the floor. At first he thought she was dead but then he realized she was as stiff as a board. Every muscle in her body was tensed and her eyes were wide open and unblinking.
Several yards away, a Hispanic man in black combat fatigues was pointing a stun rifle at them. His expression changed, jolted by shock. “Gabriella...Gabriella? Is that you?”
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