by Dorothy
Tennov
This is the story of an unscientific people who destroyed their
niche, As resources diminished, the more powerful
eliminated the less powerful. Those among them who were least driven by reason,
least empathetic, and best able to tolerate killing and, later, eating of
others, lasted the longer, but eventually all succumbed until there was no one left.
Or so it seemed to Quantilar, the
last, or so he thought, of the island’s human inhabitants, In fact, there was
someone who survived him; actually, two people, actually, three. This is their
story. Quantilar died without knowing that 0ne of his
sons still lived.
The island was so remote from the nearest land that in hundreds
of years no ship passed within view. The last ship had come in the year 1710.
It marooned eight crew and some women passengers with children. When our story
opens, 300 years have gone by.
There had always been
bickering, but it was sporadic. However, as the population grew, it divided
into natural factions based loosely on kinship, but tied together by bonds of
marriage, as when chiefs’ children mated. A wise leader had channeled much
incipient competitions into sports and productivity.
There was a young woman named
Sylvoa (sill-vo’-ah). One
day, she noticed that a tree had fallen over in the last storm. It was the
tallest one, and its loss made the woods less thick, brighter, smaller. A
fleeting image of treelessness elicited a chill. Sylvoa shivered with the germ of a thought. She had
conceived an idea. Education was minimal on the island except for the basic 3
R’s, but Sylvoa had gone on to read and reread all of
the island’s five remaining books. There was no paper left, but she had often
drawn pictures on the walls of the island’s many caves. She had heard many
times of the shipwreck and the eleven original settlers. Only three, Anna,
Brenda, and Suellen, were women, but each gave birth
to several children, and the population took off. Anna was Sylvoa’s
great, great, great, great grandmother.
From babyhood, Sylvoa had been fascinated by numbers and had, from
childhood, taken to counting items on the island. She counted trees, people,
and chickens, and each year she carved the numbers on the wall of a certain
cave, one of which she alone was aware. The cave had been the secret property
of a family who had befriended her and who had all been killed during the last
purge. When they were gone, she was the only person left who knew of its
existence. The population numbered 798 at the time of Sylvoa’s
first count.
For several years she
counted, carefully keeping her records.
She noted that over the
years, numbers of people increased at first, but number of chickens, trees, and
pigs decreased. In this way she was able to predict with mathematical certainty
what the end would be. Others did not know until the shortages were visible and
inconvenient.
Sylvoa’s parents had been among the wisest on the island and so
had instructed her in the dangers of the Throggers, a
group of families that had assumed power over the rest of the population
through ruthlessness. It was a progression toward victory for the brutal Throgger forces. As they rose to power other families
disappeared. Sylvoa’s parents had warned her about
the brutal regime, the regime that eventually martyred them. But they had
prepared their daughter with the ability to slip away.
Sylvoa had worked out an amazing, solitary, scheme. Her cave
was both large and secure. Because she alone had the advantage of advance
knowledge of the catastrophe to come, she had had years to prepare before the
killing began and before she would have to take secret and hidden refuge until
it was over. Bit by bit, she had accumulated food, weapons, clothing, blankets,
and seeds.
There came a tipping point.
She had expected it, but it was faster and even more brutal than she had
anticipated. It came when the Throggers themselves
finally realized the inevitability of the disaster and sought to save themselves by killing off everyone else. By then, Sylvoa had retired to her cave, emerging only at night,
visible to no one.
Her plan required her to have
someone with her, and, as no one else was left, it would have to be a Throgger. And it would have to be male.
She selected her man, and
lured him to the cave where she imprisoned him and began the task of explaining
how she had anticipated this and prepared. Before long, she said, the Throggers would be gone, having killed each other off, even
having turned cannibalistic to their closest relatives. Sylvoa’s
cave contained enough supplies to make a new start, to live on the food she had
stored until they could plant food with the seed she had brought.
[There are several possible
endings. Golding already did the rescue end. I like
this one best. I don’t mean I like it, but it’s best for conveying the message
and it best fits what had gone before and what I think would really happen.
It’s a feminist ending]
Events transpired as Sylvoa predicted. Sylvoa gave her
Throgger captive, Kalman, a kind of education
that she believed would civilize him, the kind her parents had given her so
long ago. However, once there was no danger from the outside, Kalman took command over Sylvoa
and over their world. His own immediate pleasures overcame the careful planning
that would be necessary for carrying out Sylvoa’s
plans for their survival. Mostly, it depended on the planting of the seeds. But
as food supplies dwindled, Kalman ate the seeds. At
the time, Sylvoa had been weakened by giving birth to
their daughter, Twill.
Sylvoa loved her baby and found through Twill her the greatest
joy, the only real joy, of her barren life.
She did not know whether Kalman represented all males, or whether she had simply
made a bad choice. Ever cautious, even before she brought him into her
confidence about the cave, she had prepared a second cave. Just in case. You
never know. In case the first cave was discovered, Kalman
never knew about the second cave.
In the end, Sylvoa had to kill her chosen mate in self-defense, and to
use the last of the food carefully in order to extend mother’s and baby’s time
together for as long as possible. To spare them the torture of starvation, when
the food was gone she quietly killed her baby and herself.
In the silence of the
depopulated island, insects crawl over their inert bodies.