Willem of the Tafel

PROLOGUE:

THEN, MORE THAN

FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO

WE SHOULD’VE KNOWN.

Humanity should’ve known better.

We should’ve prevented it.

But we didn’t prevent it.

We didn’t act; we didn’t care, or not enough. Many refused to believe it was happening; some didn’t think it could be that bad. Still others thought it wouldn’t affect them.

The changes to the global climate were subtle, at first. In some parts of the world summers became warmer and more rain fell; in others winters became harsher, colder. Some areas saw more storms, deadlier storms, while in other areas rainfall reduced from little to nothing at all. There were those who claimed the variations were natural: it had happened before in Earth’s history, and one could not draw conclusions about climate change from short-term weather patterns. Then there were those who blamed solar storms, or their gods, or the infidels, Jews, gypsies or the gays.

But few looked to themselves for answers.

In the mountains, before the people’s eyes, glaciers melted away, faster and faster every year. Then the mountains themselves started to crumble as huge areas of permafrost thawed, yet humanity refused to accept that they were responsible in any way. When the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets began to melt and sea levels began to rise, it was slow, gradual, easy to miss. It was dismissed, again. Storm surges caused more and more damage, islands shrank but none had disappeared; cities flooded and recovered. But eventually, things became unbearable: the Pacific lost several island states, and in the Indian Ocean the Maldives was a quick bite to a rising ocean. The lowlands of the Indian subcontinent were almost permanently flooded, and the constant heat waves made Australia uninhabitable. Suddenly, hundreds of millions of people were on the move, trying to leave the heat, or their flooded home lands: cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, Dhaka, Hong Kong, Shanghai or Singapore, all devoured by the oceans. The rich countries in the northern hemisphere tried to stop the influx of people, but it was too late and, before long, the surge of people crushed borders as literally millions and millions fled north from the Indian peninsula into China, on into Russia, Europe and North America.

No one remembered who started it, because they all perished. But on a particularly calm November Sunday, someone had launched a nuclear missile that exploded right on top of London. The British government responded in kind. Twenty minutes later, Russia and the United States launched their intercontinental missiles against each other, soon joined by China, India and the other nuclear powers, obliterating the entire northern hemisphere, and most other places around the globe, to dust in less than an hour. People sought shelter, yet had nothing to return to. Billions died as the ash and dust clouds rose to the sky and stopped all sunlight reaching the surface, killing animals and plant life. Within weeks, the radioactive fallout from the hundreds of blasts contaminated everything on the planet.

For years, the Earth appeared dead, though there were still pockets of life around the equator, where the cloud coverage had dissipated more quickly.

Had an observer come by planet Earth at that time, they would’ve put up a warning sign: Stay away from this planet!

* * * * *

CHAPTER 2:

NOW TIME

BONGANI WALKED down the long corridor in near darkness. Having been born inside the complex he was used to the dark. Energy conservation was a way of life, and artificial light was an unnecessary luxury the need to preserve electricity did not afford. Bongani, at the age of seventeen, was considered an adult by Tafel society. It was the year 437 after the Great War, and the people of the Tafel had not seen the sun since.

Living underground in what was once, in the old time, a military installation, they were the sole known survivors of the Great War. Only 417 people were left, running the complex, surviving from day to day, eating whatever the caves and the hydroponic gardens provided, which wasn’t much. Bongani was a Shadow, which meant that he was of dark skin, thus barely visible in the dark. Others would have to come fairly close to see him, and even then they’d see little more than the white of his eyes. Most of the Tafel dwellers were Shadows, but there were also some Ghosts, although they had adapted poorly to the environment. Most had died early on, in the first decades after the war, for they needed the sun more than the Shadows. There had been others, too, in the early days. Bongani couldn’t even remember what they were called. It was, after all, over four centuries ago, and in Tafel society, storytelling wasn’t highly regarded; survival was. Survival without the light of the sun was almost impossible.

Bongani couldn’t recall the last time someone had gone to the surface. He was born after they last sentenced someone to that certain and painful death penalty, but Tafel society was an open society. Anyone could leave at any given time, yet no one in their right mind would, at least not voluntarily. They all knew that the surface was no longer viable to humanity, to life. Since they had closed the heavy steel doors all those hundreds of years ago, their hopes for reports of life on the surface had been lost to the fight for survival.

People were content to survive. Survival meant to co-operate, to listen, to do as the elders decided. Tafel society was a combination of ancient tribal traditions and the leadership of science. Without the help of science, they’d have died soon after retreating into the vast system of caves, or at least that’s what everyone was told. The leaders of the society were scientists, and mostly Shadows. The few Ghosts that were still alive did not hold many senior positions. They didn’t have the numbers to impose themselves, and down there the old ways no longer worked: ways that had once allowed them to impose their rule, supported by money and violence. But that had been on the surface. Except for the faintest of memories, and the resentment, nothing of that existence remained.

Tafel society was dying, slowly. Bongani knew this, and he understood that with their demise, the entire human race would face extinction. They faced so many challenges: all water had to be filtered to make sure it wasn’t contaminated, caves sometimes collapsed and there was always the struggle for food. Energy was scarce but, thanks to geothermal energy that had replaced an ancient nuclear reactor, they had been able to keep going; they were able to simulate sunlight for their crops. Only a few people worked the fields and even they spent most of their days outside of the light. They had become accustomed to wearing protective gear and shades to protect themselves from the light in the food caverns. Their bodies couldn’t withstand too much exposure when there wasn’t enough energy to light up the entire complex.

Their numbers were dwindling. Whether it was due to inbreeding, genetic changes due to the environment or just bad luck, Tafel women didn’t give birth to enough children to sustain their population. Over the past fifteen decades, rigorous rules had been put in place to ensure every woman had as many births as possible without risking her life, and with as many men as possible, to maintain genetic diversity. However, as everyone eventually became inter-related, miscarriages, still births, and birth defects were more and more common, and fewer and fewer children reached maturity. Bongani’s mother—he didn’t really know who his father was—was one of the leaders of the community: a genetic botanist working in improving their food supply. She had given birth to four children, and Bongani was the only one to reach adulthood. Two of his siblings had been stillborn and his younger sister had died five years ago in a cave-in in one of the remote areas, off the crop fields. He had mourned her, not as a sister, but as a valuable future contributor to the survival of society.

In Tafel society, everyone had a clear and given role; no member was superfluous and every loss a disaster. Children were taken from their mothers shortly after birth and raised by nannies in cohorts, to allow their mothers to return to work. The bond between mother and child was weak and not valued. First and foremost, children were members of the Tafel, and as such they were all family. Only the geneticists kept tabs on who was related to whom in order to slow down the deterioration of their gene pool. Thus, no one really knew who their father was, although there were suspicions, particularly when one’s features happened to resemble one of the male members. Bongani had a hunch who his father might be, but since the man couldn’t possibly know how his sperm had been used, it made no sense to approach him about it. Besides, all adults were considered elders—the Tafel equivalent to parents—and were respected and treated accordingly. Biology was something only the leadership cared about.

The Council of the Tafel society consisted of three chosen scientists, one geneticist, one botanist and one engineer, who ruled together. Beneath them were three groups of three other senior scientists from each of the main scientific arms: procreation, food and energy. There really was no need for much other scientific research and over the centuries all other sciences had slowly withered away. All inhabitants fell into one of these three groups and were trained to take over when older members died. Bongani, like his mother, worked in the fields, training to become a botanist.

Four hundred and seventeen, Bongani thought, I can’t believe we lost Madiba. At the age of sixty-two, Madiba, the council leader, had unexpectedly passed away the day before, leaving the entire society shaken. For as long as Bongani could remember, Madiba had been their leader; a fixed star, a calming authority and father figure for the entire community. Now he was gone, and they had to elect someone else to take his place. Madiba had been a botanist, just like Bongani and his mom. His replacement would come from their midst. Given that no botanist was older than the remaining two council members, Mavuto, a fifty-eight-year-old engineer, would become their next leader.

Bongani looked up to Mavuto. The man was ruthless and would no doubt try to change things, for the better, at least for Shadows. While Madiba had been a just ruler, keeping the three groups equally represented in all things and making sure there was no dissent, people knew that Mavuto felt that his group was the most important one. Without energy there would be no food and light, and without food and light there would be no life in Tafel. It was that simple. If one dared to outwardly oppose the council, their rule always appeared unanimous. Bongani was secretly hoping that Mavuto would change all that.

It had been more than fifty years since anyone had been banished from their community, banished to what everyone knew was certain death, above ground. It had been fifty years since the steel gates had last been opened, fifty long years. Anyone could leave, of course, at any time, but why risk it? Bongani had been told by the nannies who raised him and his cohort there had been much dissent in the council. One of the younger geneticists had raised the idea of sending an expedition above ground to see if the sun had returned—if indeed, the people of the Tafel could return above, to the surface. There had been much commotion, because the last time an expedition had been sent to the surface, over two hundred years ago, they had never returned, presumed dead. Subsequently, the council had decided not to risk the lives of any more people and stopped further expeditions.

Earlier expeditions had returned, but their reports had always been devastating. Every twenty-five years, an expedition had been sent up and none saw any progress worth mentioning. The planet had appeared dead: no live plants, no animals and the radioactive fallout still covered everything.

When the last expedition hadn’t returned, their community had already survived for over two hundred years and they had begun to accept that life would be underground. They were alive, and that was the most important thing. For a while they even began to extend their cave network and expanded the crop-growing areas. It was back then that they started to use geothermal energy sources—they had run out of fuel for their nuclear reactor—and the loss of that expedition had ignited hope for the future in a most peculiar way.

When population numbers started to dwindle, the council realized they were in trouble, but they didn’t share that knowledge. They didn’t share that they had found traces of radioactive poisoning in sections of the population, nor that they had failed to exclude those people from the gene pool. They also had no way to counteract the adverse effects the lack of sunlight had on Ghosts—the few remaining white inhabitants of Tafel. Over time, dissent grew, and when a Ghost geneticist raised the issue of another expedition, he was chosen to go up above ground, on his own. Like the expedition before him, he never returned, and was proclaimed lost. After that, no one raised the idea again, although Bongani was sure that people still thought about it, maybe even dreamed about it, in private.

* * * * *

CHAPTER 3:

WILLEM

APPLYING A FORMULA based on the need for sunlight, nutrients and yield, the scientists of Tafel had produced beans, tuber crops, fungi, cabbages, berries and citrus fruit that provided the vitamins, calories and antioxidants needed to keep sicknesses at bay and people alive. The Tafel had long ago turned to a vegan diet: no animal could offer the efficient nutrition vegetables provided, given their own need for nutrition, not to mention space.

Bongani had never even seen an animal, or nothing larger than the spiders and bugs cohabiting the caves with his people, though had he heard of them, and that humans had once eaten them. There were no pictures left, no books, nothing, at least not to Bongani’s knowledge.

Wearing gloves that went over the sleeves of his simple jumpsuit, and a pair of goggles that protected his eyes from the bright lights, Bongani entered the large cavern where much of their produce was grown. It was the only chamber in the entire complex that was illuminated by lamps emulating sunlight for six hours a day, every day. Without the protective gear, Bongani would’ve suffered severe burns to his skin and irreversible damage to his eyes.

Fifteen feet away from him, monitoring a citrus tree, was a slim figure donning the same overalls and protective gear as Bongani. Bongani knew this to be Willem, a Ghost, and his co-worker. Having finally completed the training, Willem had been assigned only a week ago and, at seventeen years of age, he was the last Ghost to make it to adulthood. He and Bongani had grown up together; they been taken care of by the same nannies and were trained by the same scientists.

In some ways they were brothers, and yet, despite the smallness of their community and their shared upbringing, they lived worlds apart. Willem was a Ghost, and Bongani was well aware that they were not to be trusted. Too deeply rooted were the ancient memories of how the Whites had once treated the Blacks. Now the tables had turned, and Ghosts only survived thanks to the Shadows. Everyone knew that and accepted the situation as it was.

Ghost, what are you doing? Bongani wondered, as he approached the other figure.

Willem turned around, lifting an arm in greeting: "Dag, Bongani. These Oranjes are almost ripe. We’ll be able to harvest them in a day or two." He pointed at the tree where orange-like fruits were growing; with a pale orange and green skin, the fruit was a hybrid of orange, lime and lemon, to maximize its nutritional value.

Just make sure you don’t fuck it up, Ghost! Bongani snorted and walked on. Why did he have to end up on the same shift as the only Ghost his age? Ghosts bothered him. Not only were they ugly as hell, they stank, they were stupid and they were weak. Thankfully, their numbers were shrinking rapidly, and with no more female Ghosts to give birth, Willem would be the last one in Tafel—unless something happened to him. Bongani smirked and thought about it for a minute. An accident, a Ghost falling off a tree or dying in a cave-in. Those things happened…

What really bothered Bongani about the whole situation was the fact that a Ghost was being considered for the open council seat. There were a few possible candidates, but the most respected one among the botanists was a Ghost named Malcolm. He was about fifty years old, similar in stature to Willem, and he worked closely with Bongani’s mother on new high-yield crops. Bongani couldn’t imagine a Ghost on the council. It had been over a century since one served as council member and almost four hundred years, back in the first years, since a Ghost had been council leader.

Bongani didn’t know what would happen if Malcolm was elevated to the council. Would the other