Gateway To Success
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It was a very short time before the first two of the five ships were ready to set off. I had not realized it, but when the ship went into full acceleration they would have been going at almost one gee and would need something like twenty hours to get there—if that’s what “there” is.
It wasn’t until the second one had gone that I saw the others go; all together they must have left in a little more than an hour from leaving here. And now there were only four of them left: my own vessel was still there, though with the new ships coming it was beginning to feel lonely.
There was no way to make contact by radio or any other means. In fact, I didn’t even know which one of us was actually ahead. The five ships could have moved as fast as they liked for all I knew.
There was a good deal of discussion about who should be on the next ship, which might mean the last remaining one, but it was agreed that the first three people to leave must have been selected because they did not know anything about the other members of their team.
So I stayed where I was and let my fellows take over. They seemed to think I’d be better off if they left me behind anyway since they thought that this might be some sort of training exercise and I might prove useless. It took me a long while to realize that I might just as well die as life on board that ship.
But now I felt I had a chance again. If I could find out how the others got on, why they had chosen each other, and how many of them there really were, then I might have a chance—not only to escape but to learn more about myself too.
But how? As far as I could see there was nothing I could use except the comm system, but there was a problem even there: I couldn’t speak or hear any human voice at all. When I asked I was given an explanation that was so complicated that it would have taken me half an hour just to figure out whether the words meant what they sounded like.
At least once a day the same man would come into my room and try to talk to me, and always he looked quite pleased and surprised when I understood him. He would laugh at himself and say things like “Oh, you’re learning! That’s good.”
Then he would tell me about the world outside, and about the other humans—that was another thing the men in my life did; they told me things about themselves all the time. But these stories were strange indeed.
One would tell me how another person had died, or how a ship had burned up, and the other would look away and whisper “That’s terrible,” while they both kept smiling, and after a while, they would switch to some story about how someone else had won or lost a game.
Or sometimes they’d talk about something that had happened in the past. Once I heard a story about a ship crashing somewhere. Another time the two of them talked about their mothers, and they were talking to me as though it was the most natural thing in the world, but neither of them ever seemed able to understand what it felt like to lose a parent.
And yet they both spoke of having lost parents and siblings; they must have been young children when that had happened.
It occurred to me that they must have been born and brought up inside that ship, never venturing out onto the surface of their planet. Perhaps it was only the other members of their teams who had ever left. I tried asking about it, but they weren’t interested, and I didn’t want to push too hard.
They said that they’d been taught the language of the place they came from, and perhaps that was true, but that made no sense at all. I found it hard to believe that a whole group of people could have learned only one language, particularly one as difficult as the one used by the ones I met.
It was obvious they could not possibly have grown up with any kind of mother-child relationship. They had never talked with me about anything that might have been personal. I don’t know why I had not noticed it before, but they were utterly unlike me.
They were cold and calculating, and always happy; they did what they were told without question; they had a strong urge to do whatever seemed necessary for their survival, whatever that might be. I began to think that I might never learn anything more about myself unless I got out of this place.
The longer I lived with them, the less I felt I knew them, even the ones I liked. There was something very strange about them; they did not behave as I imagined humans would. It was almost as though they were robots programmed to do certain actions, but there was something that prevented them from doing those actions in the way that they should have done.
“We’ll go back into the water!” I whispered to my friend as soon as he came in one morning. He looked around the room, startled, and then he smiled, nodding slowly. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I suppose we will.”
After that my visits to him became shorter and less frequent. We were supposed to keep quiet during our lessons, so we could not chat much. After a few weeks, he was gone. My friends said that they suspected he wasn’t coming back, although he hadn’t been given the option.
He was simply gone forever, just like that. Some of the others were upset about it, but my feeling was that he must have wanted to get out; otherwise, he wouldn’t have bothered to stay with me. He had been my only real companion anyway, so his loss hurt less than theirs. But it did make me feel better to think that he had escaped, and if he could do that, why shouldn’t I?
The other members of my team were still there, all three of them. Their names were Jana, Rima, and Dario; they were all tall women and all beautiful too as if I’d stepped into a fairy tale. All three of them wore dresses that reached their feet, with sleeves and long skirts, and their hair was covered in braids tied together.
They were all very pale and looked tired, as though they spent a lot of time working hard to live; perhaps they worked all night or played games of strategy and chess. One time Jana told me a story about a man named Simeon who had built some kind of machine to fly through the air over a lake where dragons dwelled, and she had explained to me how such machines could be constructed.
That made me feel a little uneasy because, once upon a time, I had actually seen one of those devices. It had appeared on the deck of the ship I had come down onto. I remembered now that I had tried to stop the people from going out onto the deck, and had argued against them, saying that they would surely be killed. I wondered what had become of that machine.
Dario had an odd laugh, and when I asked Jana and Rima about him, they said he was funny, that his humor was different from anyone else’s, and that he laughed in different ways at various jokes. But I didn’t understand what they meant at first, and even after I did, I couldn’t see any difference between Dario and everyone else, except perhaps that he seemed happier.
But it turned out that Dario was quite sad. He had once told me that he was looking for the thing that made him happy, but that he thought he’d never find it. I began to think that perhaps he had discovered it here, with the others, and I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to offend him.
And then, as the months passed, he began to look unhappy again. He told us all, including Jana and Rima, that he’d decided to leave, and he was going to find a way out of the dome. “Why?” asked Jana and Rima in unison.
“Because I’m not happy, and there’s nothing left for me here,” he replied quietly. “It doesn’t matter anymore whether you come along or not.”
Jana said something reassuring, but I sensed her disappointment; she had been fond of Dario, even though she pretended otherwise. They exchanged glances and walked off together to talk privately.
I watched them, but I did not join them; they didn’t need me for anything. When they returned, they looked serious, and Rima said, “You don’t want to come with us, do you?” She sounded annoyed and angry like she blamed him for wanting to leave.
But Dario shrugged and looked away. “I guess we won’t be seeing each other again,” he said. “Perhaps we’ll meet somewhere, someday, and we can talk then.”
Rima shook her head. “Maybe you will,” she said, which made me feel uncomfortable, as though she meant it might happen sooner than I cared to admit. Dario gave them both a hug and headed off toward the door of the building.
When Dario was gone, Rima said to Jana, “Well, that’s that.” Her tone of voice implied that they were finished discussing Dario’s decision to go. They went back into the room and sat down, while the two of them resumed their lessons.
Soon afterward I also went home. My father and I ate together at the small table by the window. After a time I asked him why we had been eating so slowly today. “Oh, they’re having an auction,” he said vaguely.
There had always been auctions on Saturdays, and my mother always came in and sat next to my father until the auctioneer got bored and stopped calling bids. “There’s a good horse up for auction this week,” my father continued, and I knew immediately who he meant: he often spoke about the animals they brought into the market.
I listened patiently to my father as he recited the name of the animal: it was called “Klara”, which meant “love”. “She looks nice,” he said. “If I could have only one of the horses in the world, I suppose Klara would be the one. Of course she’s not really mine… but then, neither are you, eh? You’re just borrowing her…”
I did not understand what he was talking about, or what “borrowing” might mean. “No,” I said gently.
My father smiled at me. “We all borrow, dear,” he said. “And we all own.”
I did not tell him that my parents’ lives had been stolen from them and that I was the one who had borrowed these things. Nor did I mention that, if the truth were known, my life hadn’t been mine either; that someone else had owned me before I was born, and even now another person controlled every move I made.
Perhaps, I thought, it would have been easier for me and everyone around me if I’d learned to hate them. Then they wouldn’t be disappointed by the fact that I’d forgotten all about them. But that wasn’t possible. It was part of how I had become me.
“That’s right,” my father said after a pause. “We own everything, as long as we know where it is.” This time I laughed.
“You’re still young yet,” he said. “But when you grow up, remember that there isn’t a single thing anywhere that belongs to your parents or any of the people who’ve lived before you. We live in their memories.”
“Not even our own memories?” I asked.
He looked at me sharply, almost angrily. “Don’t ask such stupid questions, boy! Why are you so inquisitive? What do you think? That some poor old man in the past was sitting around worrying about whether his son would ever get a chance to learn about the future or the past?
No, no. Your parents and grandparents have already told you about all the ways we die and lose ourselves; they’ve given you all the information they possibly could, and they’ve done it so much more thoroughly and completely than any teacher could have imagined.
Now you’re grown-up enough to understand what’s important, and what isn’t. Don’t waste your energy on stupid things, like trying to find out what happened to people hundreds of years ago. The answer is simple: nothing!”
I nodded; I didn’t want to argue with him any longer. My father stood up and stretched, and then took his plate into the kitchen. After a moment I followed him and put away the dishes. In the living room, my mother was watching television.
When she saw my father’s face she turned off the set, and we went upstairs together. My father lay down in bed and closed his eyes, and when he slept I kissed him and pulled the covers over him. My mother and I talked in low voices, but eventually, she too went off to sleep. She never woke again.
***
When they finally came for my mother, I was at school, learning my letters, and my father was at work, doing whatever he did in those days. I remember my first impression very well: I saw her lying alone in that big bedroom on the second floor, with its high ceiling and narrow windows that let in the morning light.
My mother was asleep when they brought her there. She’d been sick for a while, I remembered hearing the doctor say, and now it was all over, except perhaps a few lingering aches. They had washed her body and shaved her head, and now they laid her on a bed covered with white sheets and gave her something to drink—a sweet wine they sometimes served in restaurants.
And when I knelt beside my mother’s pillow I watched the red fluid spill out of the glass they held to her lips, and I wondered how soon she would die.
I don’t know what happened during all those hours between when she fell asleep and when she died. At least I assume the doctors waited until she really was dead.
They must have wanted to give her time to pass into the next world, and for me to see her there, as they told me later; although I knew my father had gone off somewhere, probably to look for me because he was worried, and that meant it might take him a while to reach the hospital.
My mother wasn’t wearing anything under the sheets. Her nakedness surprised me. She seemed more real without the wig, which had fallen away from her skull and lay on the floor. There was no trace of makeup or powder left on her skin, and her hands and legs were thin and cold, like a corpse’s.
I touched her cheek with one finger, and the skin felt rough, and the bone underneath moved. A little later, a nurse came into the room and spoke softly to me, saying I should wait outside, just like any other visitor.
But when I looked up from where I knelt beside my mother, I saw another woman looking down at us, and she looked sadder than the rest of them did because she seemed to know why my mother was lying there instead of walking down the street in front of a restaurant like a human being.
The nurse told me I couldn’t go in because they needed to keep my mother company, and she was afraid that if I stayed any longer, I might hurt my mother’s feelings by seeing her in such a bad condition. I walked back along the corridor, down the stairs to the entrance, out of the hospital into the streets where cars passed and people hurried by.
When I got home that night, my father was waiting for me in the kitchen. He was holding a bottle of beer in his hand, and a cigarette between his teeth. “Where have you been?” he shouted at me. “I’m worried about you, boy.”
“At school,” I said quickly. He was always scolding me for not telling him exactly where I’d been, and for going out alone. Sometimes my mother would try to defend me when this happened, and I could see how much she liked it.
I tried not to smile because I hated arguing with my father, even though I knew his arguments made sense. So I simply said, “I didn’t do anything wrong, Father. You can ask the teacher.”
But my father ignored the teacher, and said only, “Your mother is sick. Your mother is dying. Do you understand what I mean? She’ll be dead before long. Don’t ever forget what I’ve told you about your mother’s illness. If you do forget, you’re going to feel terrible about it.”
It was so dark in the kitchen I almost tripped on the table leg, but then I remembered there was a candle there; I hadn’t lit it yet. It burned brightly against the darkness, and my father squinted in its glow. “Do you love your mother? Or will you turn away from her?”
My father was frightening me with the way he talked—so strange that I hardly understood what he said. “What are you talking about?” I asked, trying to make myself sound tough, when I was frightened and uncertain. I didn’t want to tell him that my mother’s death troubled me, that I’d thought about her many times since we heard the news.
“If you leave your mother alone, and if you run off and get lost again… well, she won’t forgive you.” He paused and took another drag on his cigarette, and I stared down at the wooden floor. I knew he wouldn’t say anything more to me unless I answered him. After a few seconds, I finally managed to force the words out of my mouth. “She isn’t angry at me, Father.”
He gave me an approving nod. Then he said, “You’re a smart boy, but you need to watch yourself, all right? When your mother dies, you won’t have anyone else to talk to. I know you don’t believe me now, but it’ll happen sooner than later.
You think I don’t know what kind of life your mother has lived? Your mother was born in a small village in the mountains far away from here; she was the daughter of some very poor farmers who lived near the foot of Mount Fuji.
And when your mother was a girl she used to walk up and down those same mountain paths carrying water in a pot on her head. One day when she was ten years old, a man appeared at their house and told her she could live with him if she worked for him. She never went back home.” My father took a long drink of his beer. “I don’t like to remember things like that, son. Not anymore.”
I waited, wanting to hear more about the man my mother met when she was a girl and the work she did for him. I wanted to imagine how she felt and smelled when she carried the bucket of water up and down Mount Fuji every morning and evening, while snow fell on her hair.
The scent of snowflakes drifted through the air in my mind’s eye as she stood on the path beneath my grandfather’s cherry tree.
“There was something else,” my father said suddenly. “Something about that man and the work she did.” He took another sip of his beer. “They were both very rich—very important people in a big city. The one thing that makes your mother unhappy is being too rich.”
I didn’t understand why they had been so wealthy, or what it meant to be rich. “Is that good, Father?” I asked. My father sighed. “No, son. Your mother’s happiness isn’t like a flower. It’s like a rock. If you drop it over the side of a cliff, it will stay on the ground.
But if you throw it into the ocean, it goes straight out to sea until it breaks open, and then nothing can stop it.” His eyes were wide and dark, and his breath came heavily from his chest. I could smell the sour stink of beer coming from his body; it filled my nostrils.
“That’s how it is with us, son. We’re happy when we’re just simple enough to enjoy ourselves, no matter what happens. Your mother doesn’t understand this. She thinks you and I should live as kings—that our wealth is proof that we’re doing a great job.
Your mother is full of ideas like that. Your mother is like a little child, always wanting something better for herself. I’m afraid you and I aren’t like that at all.”
“Father…”
“Don’t call me ‘father,’ son. Just ‘Sho’ from now on. What do you say?”
I nodded and smiled.
***
In the morning, when I saw my mother’s pale face again, my heart sank. Her eyes seemed to be closed, even though I knew they weren’t, and her skin was cold to the touch. In the kitchen, I knelt beside her chair and touched her hand, trying to make myself feel better.
“Did she die last night?” I whispered softly, looking up at the ceiling. “When she died, did she know that I love her and want to help her?”
The answer I hoped for was no, she wasn’t really dead, only sleeping until the next time. That would mean I’d soon see her smile again, and she’d tell me a story about her childhood when I sat on the floor by her bedside. It was strange, I thought; I couldn’t ever remember seeing her eat.
There was never food on her plate; not even the rice grains or sesame seeds from her tea. I tried not to ask her about it because she would look down and say: “Eat first, then listen. Otherwise, you’ll waste your stomach’s hunger.”
My mother never talked much about her past life, saying she had forgotten it all when she became my mother. “If you’re going to remember anything, son,” she once said, “you need to learn to read. You’ll have to study hard, and there’s no point in worrying about it now—it’s too late.
Your teacher knows that, so she’ll teach you the way she thinks best. But don’t think badly of me when I say she’s lazy.”
I didn’t like this answer either. The fact was I hated school. I had heard other children talking about their teachers before, and how they laughed and joked. Their voices rang clear through the hallway outside the classroom door, and each day brought new gossip about these strange creatures who taught us reading and writing.
Some were good-looking, some fat; some were old women and young men. They were all very different, and they all had names like Miss Smith or Mr. Jones, or Mr. Johnson. I wondered which ones my teacher would turn out to be?
“She might be one of them!” I told myself when I was alone in the house. “One of those beautiful women with red hair and green eyes! One of that kind, handsome men who wear white shirts and black suits with gold buttons! Or maybe she’ll be an old woman.
Maybe she’s one of those wrinkled old ladies in a yellow dress with her arms crossed over her knees, sitting on the veranda watching the sun come up in a field of flowers…”
None of them were quite right, I decided. And my teacher was neither one of those things, nor a monster.
“Your teacher is your mother,” Mother often told me as we sat together at the dinner table. “That’s what she does most days, teaching others. But sometimes she has to travel far away to speak on behalf of others like us—like me, and like you. That’s why we can’t go with her very often.”
It took my mind off the question of where my teacher could have gone if I hadn’t found her letter in the mailbox. I still remembered how she had looked on that first day after my parents had left the house.
A stranger with curly brown hair, wearing her clothes and shoes and carrying her books under her arm; I couldn’t stop staring at her as she walked around the living room asking people questions about the family. She seemed more real than the furniture and lamps. When she stood near the front window and spoke in the voice I loved, my heart pounded inside my chest.
My teacher was the strangest creature I’d ever seen, but I liked her. As I listened to her talk, her words washed over me like warm water. At lunchtime, she came into the dining hall with me and watched while I ate rice.
When she was done, she went out onto the veranda and leaned against the railing with her head back. Then I saw her close her eyes, listening to the sounds of the wind and the city beyond: “Ahhh… the city smells so sweet today, like spring… Ahhhh… and the sky is blue…”
Afterward, the teacher led me up to her room on the second floor of our house. I could feel the breeze blowing through the window, and I stared out across the rooftops for several minutes.
“What are you looking at?” I asked when I turned back to find the teacher beside me again.
She didn’t answer me, just pointed. Her finger touched her ear and then moved along my side.
“You’ve got something in your ear,” she said.
I looked down. In fact, I felt a small piece of paper pressed deep into my earlobe. I pulled it out and handed it to her. It was a folded note, and my teacher held it between two fingers like it was precious. I could hear her sniffing as she opened it, and then she smiled and passed it back to me.
“It’s from your mother, son.”
“How did you know?”
She put her hand to her mouth again and nodded toward the note. I unfolded it and found my mother’s handwriting on the top page: “Dear Tom: Today marks the tenth anniversary of your birth. I love you. —Mother.”
The rest of it was scribbled out with the pencil the teacher had given me. “No more words, son.”
“But—”
“Just read the message and pass the note along.”
In the end, my mother had written a short sentence in my teacher’s language: “We have to keep this secret.” My teacher closed the letter and tucked it back inside the envelope, then placed it in her own pocket without touching hers. For a moment she stared at her empty palm as though seeing through it until she let out a long sigh and returned the note to me.
“Do you know why your mother wrote only that much?”
“I don’t see any other words,” I told her.
She shook her head slowly as she gazed past me out at the city, “There are no more words because there are no more words needed.” She looked back at me, and I thought her eyes were shining.
“When you grow up, I want you to remember that,” she whispered in my ear. “Remember it always.”
Then she gave me her hand and we walked together down the street.
On our way home, she showed me her favorite places: the alleyway that was full of flowers every summer; the park where we could watch birds flying overhead from the terrace of an old restaurant; the narrow path that wound between two trees; and finally the little square at the foot of a hill. She had me sit in the grass, and we talked until it grew dark.
“This place is special,” she said suddenly, turning her face to look behind me.
“Why is it special?”
“Because of what it reminds me of.”
She stood up and brushed some leaves off my shirt. The wind had come up, and she stepped closer to me as it blew her hair over her face. “When I was young, I was born here.”
“Really?” I reached up to touch her hair, but she drew back. Instead, I found myself holding her hands, staring into her eyes until they began to shine. We stayed in that spot all night—the whole day, even, until the sun went down behind the hills and everyone else left. Finally, the teacher took me by the hand and we climbed the steep streets to our house.
That evening was the first time I had ever spent alone with my teacher, but after we went to sleep together, she woke me early and brought me down to her room before sunrise. There she gave me a book in exchange for my mother’s letter.
It was made of thin sheets of bamboo wrapped around each other, bound with string. Its cover bore one word in our language: “A Child of the Sun.” Then she told me, “If you can learn to read these words, I will be happy.”
And so I tried to memorize them, but after a month my teacher told me they weren’t working out. She handed me another book with a different set of letters: “These are the alphabet, the same as the ones your mother used. I’ll teach you how to write them. You might need it someday.”
I still remembered most of the sounds of the words my mother had taught me, but the new ones were difficult to decipher. My teacher would stand beside me when I sat with the books and help me sound out the simplest syllables. One evening I found that she was not there, so I called her name, calling louder until I heard the rustle of movement coming down the stairs.
“Tom! Have you forgotten already?”
“Sorry…”
My teacher laughed and ran her finger along the edge of one page as she came towards me. The ink was black and smeared, and her fingertips glowed with the warmth of life. As she touched the pages, a faint smell of perfume arose from their surface.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“This is what we call ‘the scent of a person’s mind.'”
I held the book tight against my chest. “Can you show me again?”
For hours we studied the words together, and my teacher showed me how to use my senses to read them. When I closed the book and turned away from her, a sense of peace fell upon me—not like the silence of the desert or the calm of a forest, but something that felt like my body had grown quiet and light.
My teacher had shown me something that no one else knew existed. It was as if we had found the source of the words of a song lost in the mists of time; as if we had discovered the secret meaning behind all the songs that were sung since the beginning of things.
The next morning she gave me my new book and a small bag of writing materials. I was going to leave on the next caravan trip. The letter my mother sent had been addressed to my teacher, who she had written to tell about our journey across the desert.
I was surprised to see that the letter was folded several times inside the envelope; there must have been many others waiting with it. The last thing I saw was my teacher sitting on the floor in her room, holding her hands above her knees as if they hurt her.
“You’ll write to me now?” she asked, smiling. “When you get this far north.”
“Yes,” I answered quickly. But when she stood up to leave, she looked sad and nodded without saying anything. “Goodbye… teacher,” I whispered.
The End