When Tears Have Dried – Opening Chapters

 

1

SEEKING WATER

SOPHIE HAD RUBBED anti-dazzle tanning cream on every part of her exposed polished metal skin. Otherwise she would blind her grandfather and be easily spotted from miles distant, such was the power of the dazzling overhead fiery sun.

“We’re running pretty low on water, Gramps,” said Sophie, as she and her grandfather continued to struggle across the featureless desolate landscape beneath the baking sun. Their khaki clothes and deeply tanned bodies made them look like a living part of the desert land that they trekked upon. Their feet pounded away at the dry dirt and sand.

“Not really too much of a problem,” replied her grandfather, winking across at Sophie.

Sophie’s green robotic eyes shone for an echo in time like a pair of emeralds in the sharp sunlight, and a gleeful smile broke upon her tanned metallic face, revealing a healthy set of gleaming white polished titanium teeth. She loved her grandfather. But Sophie’s face quickly transformed into one of concern. “But we’re too far away from an exploration hub. What are we going to do? Shouldn’t we be sending out an emergency message?” she said, adjusting her heavy rucksack with a couple of jerks. She wondered how her grandfather never complained of his even larger and much heavier rucksack, and how he never seemed to tire. He was sixty-seven and a biological, after all.

“We can get some natural water in a few miles—just be patient—we don’t want to bother Services. They’re busy enough as it is.” He stopped for a moment, removed his cap and wiped away the glistening sweat of his forehead.

“Oh,” began Sophie. “Natural water. I’ve never seen any before. You mean water in a trench?”

“Got it in one, Soph,” said her grandfather, preferring his single syllable version of her name—he rarely called her Sophie, though everyone else did.

“There’s really a trench near?”

“There’s one ahead of us all right—the biggest one on the planet.”

“The Marianas Trench!”

“Yep, none other.”

“I forgot about natural water,” said Sophie. “You said you’d take me to visit some one day. I always thought our books at school made up all those facts about natural water. You know, politics and all that. The government is always covering things up, hiding the truth from us. Especially when it comes to the environment.” Sophie slowed her pace a touch and sought out the core of her grandfather’s eyes. “Gramps? Natural water. Does it really, really exist?”

“Of course natural water exists. But if tomorrow’s experiment fails, then it won’t last another few decades.”

“Is this environmental experiment a big one?”

“Maybe.”

“Just a minute,” began Sophie, with a degree of panic in her eyes as she began to digest what her grandfather was suggesting. “We can’t actually drink the natural water; it’s illegal. You’ll get us all sent to prison.”

Her grandfather let out a roar of laughter. “Don’t you worry about it, Soph. We’ll never be caught. There won’t be any Service Rangers around today. And I haven’t lugged a water purifier”—her grandfather pointed his thumb back at his rucksack—“all this way for personal amusement.”

“But there are always Rangers around places of environmental importance. And there’s nothing more important than natural water, is there?” And it suddenly dawned on Sophie that they hadn’t seen a single Ranger, or a sign of one, all day.

“Well, there ain’t going to be any around today on account of the experiment. That’s why I hastily organised this trek. This is our one and only chance to taste the forbidden nectar.” He gave Sophie a wink, punctuated with a mischievous grin.

“Gramps, you’re a canny rogue. One day you’ll get us all—‍”

“—sent to prison,” completed her grandfather. “Aye. Too true. Too true.” Her grandfather did a little cheeky jig. Small puffs of sand and dirt rose from the ground in protest.

Sophie had to smile before asking, “But why won’t there be any Rangers? Are they on strike or something?”

“Nope. Directly to do with the experiment.”

“What?” Sophie looked confused.

“Never mind. Just think of what it means: we’ll soon taste natural water. Everyone tries to get away with that taboo at least once in their lives.”

“But few succeed. And those who do pay a heavy price.”

“A price they’re usually more than happy to pay.”

Sophie decided to change the topic as she would never be able to talk her grandfather out of anything he had set his mind on doing. “Is it really true, this land we’re straggling across was once the bottom of a huge volume of water? I mean, honestly and truly.”

“Of course. Honestly and truly with pink ribbons and multi-coloured bells on it. A sea. The Earth was covered in ’em. In pre-Environmental times, there was more sea than land. In fact, three-quarters of the Earth was covered with huge deep blue seas.”

“How impossibly wonderfully weird,” said Sophie, managing a little playful skip despite her rucksack.

“I’m sure if someone from those days saw a world without any seas, they would think it impossibly disastrously weirder.”

“The seawater didn’t have salt in it, like it does in the trenches, did it?”

“Actually, it did, only nowhere near as much,” said her grandfather, suddenly kicking violently at a stubbornly embedded stone until the Earth gave it up. He picked it up, ignoring the inconvenience of his rucksack, and licked its freshly revealed underbelly. He nodded his head and tossed the stone back to the ground.

“Why did you do that?” laughed Sophie, a slight furrow of incredulity breaking on her curious malleable metallic face.

“Try it yourself, and you’ll see. It’s quite harmless.”

Sophie hesitated and then just about managed to shrug her shoulders before she bent down gingerly on one knee, counterbalancing her rucksack, and picked up the nearest stone.

“Nope, you need to get one firmly lodged into the ground—one that hasn’t been moved for thousands of years.”

Sophie had never thought of stones in such a way before. She used the stone she had to dig out a firmly lodged stone that was sticking up, begging to be removed like a rotten tooth. She licked at the stone’s freshly revealed underneath, her highly technologically advanced robotic tongue’s taste sensors in full analysis mode. The stone felt cold, as the searing sun had not reached through to its underneath—it may have been baking hot all day, but desert nights were always ruthlessly cold.

“It’s salty!”

“Yep. Evidence, if ever you needed it, that there was a lot of salt around once upon a time. That salt came from a huge sea called the Atlantic.”

“Sounds quite romantic. Is that where the nursery rhyme about the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans comes from?”

“Yep,” said her grandfather, craning his neck, looking ahead. “Ocean. Sea. Just a different word for the same thing.”

“What are you looking for? There’s nothing ahead. Just burning desert.”

“I think I can see the beginnings of a steep narrow valley—one that will lead us down to the Marianas Trench. Reckon we’ll reach the natural water in a couple of hours or so. Then we can replenish our supplies and make our way to an exploration hub. There’re lots of ’em along the natural trench water stream.” Sophie felt relieved to hear this.

“It’s funny,” she said, “but I remember you telling me the nursery rhyme about the two Oceans many a time when I was your little robot angel.”

“You were never a little robot angel; more like a little robot devil, from what I recall,” said her grandfather. His blue eyes, as keen as a mythical Eagle’s, twinkled happily across to hers.

Sophie began gently laughing. She threw her head back, temporarily blinding herself beneath the burning sun of the clear blue sky.

“Can you remember how the rhyme goes?” she asked.

“Yep,” said her grandfather. “Sure I do,” he chuckled. “I said it many times to you—and your mother before that, when she was a child.”

“Tell me it again then, Gramps. I can’t remember it properly.”

“Okey-dokey, Soph. It goes:

There once were two splendiferous creatures

made of love and natural water features.

They kissed for miles along their skins

and dreamed of dreams and magic things.

With tears of joy they grew and grew

till all they were was blue on blue.

Huge and mighty with deep emotion

the word for each was called an Ocean.

 

From east to west, from south to north

“Atlantic”, “Pacific”, their names rang forth.

But then one day the Moon looked down

and saw their waters all around.

With a desert thirst and a jealous mind

he stole their love and then reclined.

He knew the Earth would lose its tide

when tears have dried … when tears have dried.

“Something like that, anyway,” finished her grandfather.

For a moment, Sophie thought she could spy herself as a robot child in her grandfather’s eyes. Or was she spying her grandfather as a biological child in his eyes?

“I think I see that nursery rhyme in a different light now,” she murmured as she yanked her rucksack into a more comfortable position. She plunged deep into thought, desperately trying to winkle out the rhyme’s inner meanings. After a few minutes of quiet, disturbed only by the scratching of their boots upon the hard dirt, sand-ridden ground, Sophie said rather sombrely, “The Moon wanted the Earth to look like him—all dry and barren. Didn’t he, Gramps?”

Her grandfather looked hard at the dry dusty land, swallowing. Eventually he replied weakly, “Yep; and it looks like the little blighter succeeded.”

Sophie tried to lift both their feelings. “Never mind, Gramps. The experiment will work tomorrow. I just know it will. Whatever sort of experiment it is, it will work. Why, I’ll bet it will replenish every trench of natural water for at least a month. Even the Moon won’t stop it from succeeding. You’ll see. Maybe it will be the start of a string of successful experiments.”

“If the experiment works tomorrow, there won’t be a need for a string of successful experiments following it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind … hey, look at this a minute,” he said, digging out his small communicator from his pockets. “It’s an illegal image. Nicked it from the Guarded History Digital Image Vaults.” He carried on marching whilst fiddling around with the controls of the communicator.

“Gramps, you’ll definitely get yourself into trouble!”

“What can they do to an old man?”

“They could send you to prison.”

“Not for borrowing a History Image. I’d just get a fine and a warning.”

“Still. I mean. And it’s not borrowing, it’s stealing.” Sophie was angry with her Grandfather.

“Oh, don’t be such a sourpuss, Soph. Here, maybe if I show you the image, you’ll understand why I couldn’t help myself from … er … stealing it.”

The pair stopped for a moment and faced one another in the searing, dusty, sandy stone-strewn plain. Her grandfather prodded a few buttons, and an image appeared on the small visual screen of his communicator.

“Ooh, Gramps! What a beautiful picture. It looks like a planet. Like as if God had made a giant coloured glass marble and tossed it into Space. Look at those lush blues and greens, and the wispy scarves of brilliant white spiralling here and there. But it’s certainly not from our Solar System. Is it a made-up planet? Like, maybe, an artist’s impression of one of those distant planets we’ve discovered but can never see?”

“Well, actually, Soph, it is from our Solar System; only as it was thousands of years ago.”

With an undercurrent of sarcastic laughter billowing on every syllable, Sophie said, “What planet looked as beautiful as that?” Her grandfather looked at her helplessly. She decided to attempt an answer to her question, “One of the moons of Jupiter, perhaps?”

“Nope,” said her grandfather, choking slightly on the word. Then he lifted his head from the image and looked Sophie straight in her eye, and said, “The Earth.”

His eyes were a picture of solemnity.

“Oh, Gramps!” exclaimed Sophie with a sudden surge of emotion. She could see on closer inspection that the image was indeed the Earth, only with the low-lying regions filled with huge seas. And whether it was because she recalled the nursery rhyme of the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean, who stopped crying with their love and joy, and disappeared as a consequence; or whether seeing the image on the communicator; or simply because of the look in her grandfather’s eye; she started to quietly cry. “Did we really have such a beautiful world?” she asked, in a shiver, between her silent tears.

“Yep.” The word seemed to drift away and evaporate in the heat of the day.

“God’s Glass Marble ruined by us greedy, selfish humans. I’m so ashamed.” Sophie kicked angrily at the nearest loose stone, sending it scooting along the desert floor.

With heavy metaphorical hearts, Sophie and her grandfather trekked solemnly onwards. And high in the afternoon burning sky Sophie could see the distant, almost transparent, Moon, just hanging there, as light as desert air. It always seemed to her that the Moon looked out of place when the Sun was in the sky as if it were gate-crashing the Sun’s party. And right now, as she kicked up some dust and felt a growing robotic thirst gnawing at the back of her robotic throat, she could feel the Moon laughing down at her, mockingly, like the bleached skull of the Devil’s ghost. She wondered if her grandfather had noticed the Moon—not much got past his canny eyes. She cursed the Moon in her silence, as if it was responsible for the desecration of God’s Glass Marble, even though she knew the Sun was really the culprit, ably assisted by humanity.

Half an hour had crawled by when Sophie announced, having just gulped down the last drop of water from her plastic drinking canister, “That’s the last of my water. How about you, Gramps?”

“To be honest, mine ran out a few hours ago.”

“What! Why didn’t you say? I would have given you some of mine. As a robotic human. I don’t quite need the same amount of water as a biological human.”

“It doesn’t matter, we’ll be at the trench stream in about one and a half hours.”

“This valley is quite steep though. We have to be careful as we descend. Maybe it’ll take longer than you think.”

“Nope, it’ll only take one and a half hours or so. Two, tops.”

“But I don’t know if we can make it even in one and a half hours. It’s pretty hot out here. I feel like a metal potato roasting in an oven.”

“Well, we’ve got no choice but to make it, Soph.”

“Look, Gramps, just contact the Services, that’s what we pay trek insurance for when we make these trips.”

“I can’t do that, Soph.”

“Why not?”

“I erased the communications software before showing you the illegal image. Didn’t want to get caught viewing it.”

“What!” shouted Sophie, disturbing the desert tranquillity of the valley slopes. It seemed that every grain of sand was listening intently.

“I’m sorry, but I didn’t think you had so little water left. Your robotic internal mechanisms need almost as much water as my biological internal mechanisms, despite what you say. Remember, robots were created to be just as vulnerable as humans—otherwise their existence would never have had a future.”

“Everyone knows that, Gramps. But what about your water?”

“Oh, I’m a hardy type. I know I can make the trench.”

“But there might not be any water left there. The government wouldn’t exactly announce that it was all gone, would they?”

“True, but remember there are lots of exploration hubs dotted along the trench. They’ll have all the amenities any trekker could desire—including water.” Her grandfather’s eyes spied the foot of the valley with their highest intensity.

“Are you looking for an exploration hub?” Sophie joined in the search, shielding her eyes from the sun.

“Yep.”

“See one?”

“Nope. Come on, let’s get a move on.”

And so down the valley slope they trundled. Sophie’s sentient robotic emerald eyes betrayed her worry.