The entire Chapter 2 of Ignorance, the Freedom of the Weak, volume I:
Far from the crowded cities lies the true happiness of man. It was the firm opinion of Sayanne, orphan and farmer.
Her domain spanned as much as the eye can see, encompassing fertile land, forests, pastures crossed by shallow rivers and daring hills. She thought of it as heaven, her personal slice of paradise. But can heaven be heaven without anyone to share it with?
Sayanne had to reject such thoughts. She was recovering from her parents’ death.
The splendid surroundings helped tremendously, compelling her to contemplate beauty instead of death. Yet she could not spend every second picking flowers. She needed something to aspire to, she needed to work, to feel that life was moving forward.
It was difficult to distance herself from pain when time was standing still. There was no work to be done.
Huge machines the size of her house roamed the land with mathematical precision, going back and forth, sowing, sprinkling, reaping, threshing, grinding. Since the weather stood still, just like time, they continued to do their job over and over again with no break.
Sometimes, maintenance people would arrive and run their tests, but even if parts needed to be replaced, the mammoths stubbornly refused to stop. Farmers had their superstitions and did not allow anyone to power down their two-hundred-ton oxen, making the mechanics look like surgeons trying to operate on someone strolling in the park.
Sayanne had never seen one stop or even slow down. As a child, she used to wonder how they were able to shrink as they distanced themselves from the house, becoming toy-sized somewhere at the borders of her land.
They demanded little in return. All she had to do was read some notifications from a display in the kitchen. The machines constantly ran self-diagnostic tests to monitor their condition and communicated the results. If something went wrong, Sayanne just called the right people.
The same went for raising the few animals around the farm and pretty much for everything that needed care. Every work-related activity had a suitable machine assigned to it.
Sayanne turned to music and painting to fill the void. It came naturally, as the marvelous ambiance was more than enough to inspire a sensitive soul. The diverse scenery provided her with endless opportunities for pictorial composition.
The house set the boundary between plain and forest, but the rivers crossed both. There was a place here suited for every feeling of the soul. When she wandered out the door, she witnessed the endless stretch of the plain ever-changing in color. Transfigured from the rich black of the freshly plowed earth into the green of the sprouts and finally the ripened yellow, these fields were the sole indication of life’s cyclicity.
Only there, time seemed to be moving forward, although, for Sayanne, it was running in circles. She was barely seventeen, too young to perceive its erosion.
The forest had been the same for as long as she could remember. She felt safe inside, ageless like the woods. She knew where every tree was, and the trees knew her. They gave her stability. Sayanne knew that no matter how many times she came back, she would find everything unchanged. It was a sanctuary shared only with her departed parents. Her father would take her tiny hand in his own and lead her through this mysterious green world sustained by imposing pillars, troubled by nothing but the winds.
As years went by, he took her farther and farther, breaking border after border. It was a time when nature was falling out of trend, and rootless people flocked toward a carefully managed urban existence, which promised them happiness.
Nature became useless in the face of bold scientific advancements. Land had no value anymore, and that suited the few people who did not give in to the lure of a deceiving happiness.
Being easy to acquire, farmers expanded their territories freely, according to their needs or their greed. Sayanne could drift all day long and still not exit her domain. Thinking about it, she could not remember if she had really ever stepped out into the world.
Her father was an ambitious man, and even if there weren’t any profits to be made, he constantly challenged himself to sow and reap more and more. Whenever he reached his goal, he set the bar higher and acquired more land to plow.
He never did any of the hard work himself since the machines would take care of everything for him. The challenge consisted in cleverly managing the mammoths’ capabilities, stretching their technical limitations beyond specifications without causing them to collapse while simultaneously increasing the yield.
And he was quite good at it, judging by the vastness of his plains. However, every time he stretched his fields, the woodland behind the house would expand as well. The woodland never yielded anything.
Sayanne opened her big green eyes.
The bright sunlight subtly creeping into the bedroom was veiling her innocent face. Feeling the gentle warmth, a smile flourished on her lips. Without a care in the world, Sayanne lingered under the sheets, trapped between the enthusiasm of a bright new day and melancholy.
The longer she lay there, the faster her reverie would be poisoned by apathy, the milky sheets tightening softly around her body, morphing into dark, branched vines anchoring her to the past. Those were the memories that surfaced and lured her away from reality, hoping to gently sink her soul within the abyss of the mind.
Sayanne pulled the sheets away with a swift motion and jumped out of bed just as fast. She stood on her feet next to it, ready to escape, but she knew she had nowhere to run. Today, she was not fast enough.
Today, time would flow backward but only within her heart and mind. The ears of wheat would continue to rise in the fields and not shrink back into seeds. While she hovered there, absent, the window flowers bloomed before her eyes. Their confession failed to impress. Sayanne’s gaze pondered inside of her, a world where the clocks were spinning according to her moods.
The moment had come to visit the forest again.
Although she had plenty of rest, she could not find the strength to escape into reality, as if that brief effort to shed her cerement had drained her of vitality. Sayanne executed the morning routine mechanically and, at some point, found herself sitting motionless at the kitchen table, staring into thin air until existence gradually came into focus.
She realized she was waiting for her mother’s caress and for the plate of scrambled eggs that would have followed. The harsh sunlight blinded her, chasing away the memories. Sayanne adjusted the windows’ neutral density filters, allowing no more than a tiny fraction of light to pass through, just enough to find her way back.
She scrutinized the pale-orange disc contoured on the window glass. It was harmless. Sluggishly, the young woman retraced her mother’s steps from memory and set the table. She tried to eat, but it was not the same, so she left the plate half full.
Sayanne returned the ND filters to their previous setting as she walked out of the kitchen. The light flooded everything behind her.
She picked up the pan flute from her room and left the house through the back door. Judging by the roar of the engines, the mammoths were laboring close by.
Sayanne stepped into the shade of the elderly trees, extending her arm and brushing their trunks with her fingers as she passed by, greeting them. She looked up at their crowns. The foliage was keeping the light away, much like the windows’ filters. A sunray slipping between the leaves speared her eyes, causing her to twitch nervously and look away, breaking the spell again.
She leaped away childishly, trying to elude the sunrays that impaled the forest, playing on the foliage’s negligence. Fragmentary pools of light drawn on the ground revealed fleeing insects, rotten leaves, moist dirt and other secrets for brief moments before being trapped and veiled. Regardless, they prevailed shyly.
Distracted by her elusive game, Sayanne was leaping further and deeper into the woods, into places few people had seen or treasured. She imagined the trees dancing around her, passing her by while she stood still, admiring their choreography.
The young woman continued to romp around like a child, exchanging countless dance partners until she found herself twirling at the edge of a golden clearing. The tall blades of yellow grass, enlivened by the sunlight, swayed together with her. She stopped for a moment to admire them from the comfortable vantage point provided by a mossy old rock.
The light could only reach as far as the edge of the rock, unable to envelop her. She delighted herself in the spectacle of reflections, teasing the veil of light that reached out to her.
The rhythm of the golden blades enticed her to bring the pan flute to life. Closing her eyes after capturing the essence of the glade, she opened the barriers of her soul and cleansed the shady forest with the poetry of her heart.
Large tear drops escaped her gentle eyelids, rolled down in slow motion and softly caressed the sculptural contours of the cheeks. Sayanne sang her pain away. She never screamed, never begged, never crumbled. She just sang, lighting the path to the ephemeral past, cheating herself with the surrogate of faded happiness.
The pain would return. It always crept back subtly after the last echo of the pan flute died. And when the trees felt distant, it had no more places to hide. Sorrow’s notes resonated in the far corners of the forest, flowing with her tears. She struggled to keep them both fluent.
In the clearing, blades of grass were bowing down like being enchanted.
Her eyes were running out of tears. It was time to come back. The pan flute froze, inarticulate, receiving the last kiss. She gently wiped away the tears, and with a first glance, she noticed the reverence of the golden grass. Impressed, she blushed and let a large smile brighten her face.
Yet the blades were not bowing down to her. They were being overwhelmed by a five-hundred-kilogram savage predator rising from the ground. Sayanne saw a black ball of shiny fur blooming in the sunlight, suppressing the tall grass as it emerged from its hideout and unraveled into a massive beast.
The feline’s dark green eyes blended in with its black short-haired coat, allowing the two serrated fangs hanging from its upper jaw to be the first and probably the last feature its prey would catch a glimpse of.
Sayanne should have been terrified, but the dominating feeling was surprise. She recognized the predator from holograms and documentaries. Although she had never seen a live one before, she had enough knowledge about them to know that it did not belong there.
Sayanne was staring death in the face, but all she could do was wonder about the sudden presence of a ferocious feline hundreds of kilometers away from its natural habitat.
