The Kindred

On the fifth day I saw them clearly, and the seeing did what the hearing had started.

It happened at the fence. The path from the jetty ran along it for a stretch, and there was a gate there, a double gate of the same steel mesh, chained and padlocked, and beyond the gate the ground rose into eucalyptus and scrub. I was standing at the gate, trying to see past the padlock, when the man came out of the trees.

He was not a man. He was shaped like one, in the way that a scarecrow is shaped like one, and the resemblance had cost him something. He walked upright, but the walk was a decision, not a habit: each step was a small, deliberate victory over a body that wanted to go on all fours. His arms hung too long. His jaw was too long. His skin, where I could see it, was gray-brown and hairless in patches, and his eyes, when he finally raised them to me, were set too deep and too wide, and they held a look I had seen before only in the eyes of the cougar in the pen: they understood.

He stopped at the gate, ten feet from me, and he worked his mouth for a moment before the words came.

"New man," he said. The voice was hoarse, scraped, as if speech were a surface he had to climb. "New man at the Station. The Warden's man brought you in the boat."

"I'm not the Warden's man," I said. "I'm a castaway. I'm leaving in four days."

He considered this with an expression I could not read. Then he did a thing I have never stopped seeing, in the dark, in crowds, in the mirror: he smiled, and the smile was wrong in every particular, and it was also, unmistakably, a smile, human in its intent if not its geometry.

"Leaving," he said. "Yes. The boat comes. The boat goes. We know the boat." He turned and looked back into the trees, and something moved there, something low and fast, gone before I could name it. He turned back to me. "I am the Shambler. They call me that because I shamble. When I was made, I was made from an ape, and the ape is still in me, and I beat it down all day and all night, and that is the work." He said this without self-pity, the way a man states his job title. "Do you know the Code, new man?"

"I don't know what the Code is."

"Then you must learn it, or you cannot stay among the Kindred. But you are leaving," he said, and the smile came again, smaller this time. "So you do not need it. The boat comes. The boat goes."

He went back into the trees, and the low fast thing went with him, and I stood at the gate with my hands on the mesh until the light went flat and the eucalyptus turned black.

I should have walked back to the cottage then. I did not. I had four days left on the island, and I had just been told, by a creature made from an ape, that there was a population behind the fence who lived by a Code, and I had heard them chanting it at night from my bed, and I had seen the cougar's hands. I went through the gate the way you go into water: not because I wanted to, but because the temperature was already on me.

The path beyond the gate climbed through eucalyptus, and the scrub was loud with the island's birds, and after a quarter mile the trees opened onto a clearing with a village in it. I use the word village because there is no better one. There were huts, crude shelters of timber and corrugated sheet, arranged around a bare earth yard, and in the yard there were more of them. I counted fourteen before I stopped counting.

They were all upright. That was the first thing. Every one of them stood on two legs, and every one of them was fighting to do it, and the fight was visible in the tremor of their knees and the splay of their feet. They were all wrong in different ways, and the wrongness was the point: I saw a woman with a muzzle and soft, hopeless eyes; a creature with a back that curved like a bow; another with fingers that ended in claws he had filed flat with a stone. None of them attacked me. They did something worse. They gathered, slowly, at a distance, and they watched, and after a moment one of them came forward and stood in front of me and recited, without being asked, in a voice that cracked on every third word:

"Stay off all fours. That is the Code. Are we not made? Eat no flesh. That is the Code. Are we not made? Keep inside the fence. That is the Code. Are we not made? Raise no claw against the made. Obey the Warden. That is the Code. Are we not made?"

He finished, and the others took it up, in a murmur that swelled and ebbed like the sea, "Are we not made, are we not made," and the woman with the muzzle was crying, and I did not know if the crying was joy or fear or the animal in her leaking through, and I understood, with a coldness that had nothing to do with the evening air, that they were praying.

I had been a scientist for eleven years. I had logged data, written grants, argued with colleagues about the ethics of this and that. I had never stood in the middle of a prayer, and I had never been the answer to one.

"Are we not made?" the first one asked me, directly, and his eyes were the cougar's eyes, and I opened my mouth to answer, and nothing came out, because the honest answer was that I did not know, and he needed one that would hold him upright.

"Made," I said, because the word was the only one I had.

He looked at me for a long time. Then he nodded, slowly, the way you nod at a child who has answered a hard question bravely, and he went back to the huts, and the others went with him, and I walked back through the trees with the Code running behind me like a tide, and the fence, when I reached it, felt like a door I had walked through the wrong way, and I did not know, and would not know for a long time, which side of it I belonged on.