A New Light

I didn’t realize I saw things differently from everyone else until I was six days old. It was sometime in the evening of my sixth day, when we were harvesting crops and preparing for the night, and I remember clinging to my father’s back, wiggling my tail in excitement as he leapt up the tall cliffs into a place where the plants were always wet and delicious fruits grew in abundance.

It was my first time going, because I’d finally become strong enough he couldn’t throw me off. Like most youngsters I was overly confident and thought my father was too strict, until his first leap. It was as terrifying as learning to swim, and I was terrified all the way to the top.

Father laughed and told me to find some berries. He warned me that there was a common poisonous one that looked exactly like the popular moonberry, and showed me both. He said the only way to tell them apart was the shape of the plant’s leaves.

“But father,” I said. “They’re different colors.”

He grunted. “No they’re not. There’s two basic colors, light and dark, and everything has some amount of each. The exact combination of the two is called a shade.”

“I guess they have the same shade, but they’re different colors,” I insisted.

“Same shade and different colors? Nonsense, child.”

“The poisonous one looks like a fire and the moonberry looks like the ocean.”

“You’re telling me the ocean and fire are different colors, independent of their shades?”

“Yes, father. And the leaves of the trees are another, like the ocean but more alive.”

“Well…gather some moonberries now, we need to hurry back.”

After we returned he took me to the doctor, who knew of one other child in the village who claimed to see different lights in the sky, not the sun and not the moons. “She said they danced, like shaken curtains,” the doctor said. “Have you seen anything like that?”

I admitted I hadn’t, but I started watching the sky from then on. As it slowly darkened, I eventually saw them, extremely faint phantoms dancing in the darkness. I was excited to report this to my parents, but my mother left the room and my father seemed both curious and upset.

“People are talking about you,” he said. “Everyone knows I have a freak child who sees colors that don’t exist. The doctor says it’s clearly a mental illness and worries it might spread. Parents don’t want their kids to start seeing new colors.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “I’ve always been like this! I thought everyone could see them. It isn’t like they’re changing all the time, they’re consistent.”

“Don’t talk back to me,” he said, and put me to work preparing brine for making cured meat.

I learned not to talk about the colors. Once some boys from the village climbed the cliffs and died eating the poisonous not-moonberries, and I cried thinking about how my eyes could have helped them. Then I wondered, could I really? Did I just imagine they were different? Would I have died with the boys because of my arrogance?

I stared at random objects a lot, trying to imagine a world where everything of the same shade was also the same color. The doctor said I was distracted and asocial and advised my parents to put me in a special school. That’s where I met Fen and she changed my life.

It was the morning of my seventh day, my final day as a child, when my father left me at the special school for the first time and I tiptoed in. Most of the students were involved in the usual noisy fun and games before class, but one sat alone at a table with a box of small objects and a sheet of paper. I slid into the seat across from her, staring at the vividly colored illustration of some imaginary bird on her paper.

“Did you make that?” I asked.

She looked up at me suddenly and started rolling it up. “Huh? This? Yeah I’m just playing around.”

“I can see the colors too,” I said. “I mean, I think I can.”

She stopped and leaned forward, suddenly relaxed again. “Is that why you’re here?”

“Yes.”

“Oh my light, I’m so glad to see you,” she said. “So, I have a theory that there’s actually lots of different types of light, but they’re all mixed up and most people can only see how much there is all together. There must be something different about us that makes us see the different types of light.”

“You think fire light and sun light are different colors because they’re made of different types of light?”

“Exactly. And look, I’ve found these soft rocks and berries that make marks of different colors on paper. Every substance has its own light, but if you combine them you can make new ones.”

Fen convinced me that we weren’t imagining the colors, and we became the closest friends, and she insisted there was a scientist in the big city studying light. If we could find him, maybe he could help us understand. So during the dawn of our eighth day, ready to set out on our own as independent adults, we decided together that we would move to the city and find the scientist.

The first light of the new day was bright and warm, and we were both eager to begin our adventure. Our families made a great show of worrying over us, but some of them were visibly relieved to see us go. The general consensus of the townspeople who knew nothing about us was that we were a dangerous threat, and we weren’t the only ones who got harassed over it.

As we climbed the steep path into the misty forest, I looked down at my childhood home and wondered if I would ever see it again. “Don’t look back anymore,” Fen said, “you might fall. Eyes forward girl.”

I followed her and unexpectedly felt a bit lighter. We snacked on moonberries and laughed about not getting poisoned. The path lifted us over the ridge into the sun, and led us onward into the great expanse of forest and fields that separated us from the city.

Our journey was long but uneventful, and before the sun was high in the sky we arrived at the gates to the city. It was set between two huge boulders, made of a metal that seemed to shine like the morning sun itself. The keeper hailed us and we gave our clan calls, and he let us through.

Having never been in the city before, I was overwhelmed with the sounds and smells of it, far more intense than I had expected. People shouted and machinery hissed and there seemed to be a million footsteps all around me. And the colors! Walls and roofs and the people’s patched garments were a dizzying mess of colors melting into each other at random, even more chaotic than the noise.

“They all really can’t see it,” I whispered to Fen.

“I bet some of them can,” she whispered back.

We searched the streets, not expecting to find much of anything yet. But then we stumbled across a building painted uniformly the color of the sky, with the name “Institute of Light Research” written above the door. We looked at each other, and without a word we approached the door and knocked.

An elderly man wearing an unusual hat opened the door. “Yes, children?” he inquired, in a polite tone.

“Are you the scientist studying light?”

He laughed. “I’m his assistant. Please enter. Why have you come here?”

“We can see all the colors,” Fen volunteered.

I grabbed her shoulder and whispered, “We should be careful.”

“It’s ok,” the man said. “Everyone here can see them too.”

We followed him up a flight of stairs to a large room with a glass ceiling. I had never seen so much glass in my life. The scientist looked up as we entered and set his work aside.

“Sir, we have a couple new arrivals who are interested in colors,” his assistant said.

The scientist smiled widely. “Welcome, youngsters.”

“Can you tell us about the colors?” I blurted out, all inhibitions now gone.

“Of course! It’s actually quite simple.” He took a strange piece of glass from a nearby table and held it up to the light. “I’ve made this lens to spread a narrow beam of light into a wide one, and look,” he pointed at the wall, “the light is divided into every color!”

“You were right, Fen!” I shouted. “There are different types of light!”

“I call it a spectrum,” the scientist continued. “All the colors blend together gradually, no matter how wide I spread them I can’t decide where one ends and another begins. I established this institute to study the phenomenon.”

A loud bang startled us and we looked for the source. The scientist ran to a window and opened it. “Go home you miscreants!” he shouted to someone outside.

The window shattered as a rock flew through it and landed at my feet. I picked it up, finding a note tied to it that read “your colors are a delusion you freaks”. The scientist snatched it out of my hands and frowned at it before crumpling it into a ball.

“We’ve had trouble with some locals,” he said. “Ignore them. They just want attention.”

After my ‘trouble with locals’ back home I was concerned, but they assured us the troublemakers were just a small noisy group with too much time on their hands.

The scientist showed us the rest of his work and then offered us a stack of papers he had written. “I’m not much of a teacher but please ask if you don’t understand anything. We have an empty room for you if you want to stay a while. I’m afraid we don’t have much but we share it all.”

We thanked him for his hospitality and spent a few hours resting in our new room. Being in a place where everyone else was like us felt comforting in a way I couldn’t describe, but I knew Fen was feeling it too when she flopped into her bed with a long sigh and said, “I feel so…satisfied.”

“I can’t believe he figured out how to split up light!”

“I know, that was amazing!”

There was a long pause, and then I said, “I’m exhausted.” Fen didn’t reply. We slept until there was a soft knock on our door.

I crawled out of bed and opened it to find the scientist’s assistant. “A meal is ready, if you’d like to join us,” he said.

I shook Fen awake and we followed him downstairs to a dining room. The table was fully set for twelve but there were only two others in addition to the scientist and his assistant. They were both young, like us, and eager to talk about the things they’d been doing with colors. Fen showed them some of her art, and one of them revealed they had made the multicolored lamp shades in the room.

We were so optimistic in those times. We could see the benefit of color, so many possibilities. The frightened ignorant crowds that gathered outside to threaten and mock seemed powerless. The work consumed us, and every now and then we had the great delight of introducing it to another young wanderer in search of answers.

As the sunset of my eighth day approached and everyone busied themselves preparing for the night, I sensed the mood becoming more tense in the city. The newspapers constantly published stories about the harsh conditions forecast for the evening, poor crop yields, and potential food shortages before the next morning. Then a reporter turned up at the protest outside our institute and they latched onto the growing population of “color freaks”, at first treating us as an amusing distraction, and then rapidly becoming more antagonistic.

After a political commentator wrote an entire article insisting that teaching our research in schools would alter the perception of young people and destroy the social order by confusing people about what is real and what isn’t, our building was vandalized with violent threats written in pig’s blood. That’s when I first saw Fen express fear about the situation, something I’d been doing for a while.

“I wonder if we should move before nightfall,” she said at the next meal.

This time instead of brushing away our concern, the scientist nodded. “I’ve secured a building outside of the city we can move into, but we must be sure we’re not followed. These fanatics have surprised me with their boldness.”

I didn’t say anything, but felt a little resentful they hadn’t taken me more seriously at first. With night coming a lot of our studies would become impossible, as they relied on the brightness of sun light. Everyone seemed to take a pause and think more rationally about the future.

“If society is going to keep calling us dangerous freaks, why should we keep doing this?” I finally asked.

They all stared at me, a mix of confusion and horror. “Why would you say that?” Fen said. “You told us about those boys who died because they ate the poisonous berries, you kept pushing us to help people. And see how many we’ve helped!”

I looked around the table at my twelve friends. My new family. “It just feels like we’ve put them all in danger.”

“There’s always danger in exploring the unknown,” the scientist said. “But I think it’s worthwhile anyway. It’s how we grow as a species.”

Suddenly the window shattered and a noxious mist began filling the air. We all rushed out of the dining room and up the stairs, into the glass-roofed laboratory. More windows broke all around the building and we heard people entering, stumbling over furniture. The mist drifted up the stairs and made us cough.

The scientist instructed us to hide behind his desk, while he opened a heavy crate in the corner and pulled out a large tube about the length of his arm.

“What is he doing?” Fen asked.

“That’s his secret project,” one of the others replied. “He won’t tell anyone about it.”

When the first intruder climbed the stairs, the scientist pointed the tube at him. A brilliant beam of light, brighter than the sun and the color of a poisonous berry, illuminated the intruder’s face and they screamed and fell to the floor. The scientist retreated behind the desk with us.

“What is that thing?” Fen asked, her curiosity as indomitable as ever.

“Shh,” he said. “Later.”

The intruder continued to scream and I realized they were saying they couldn’t see anything. Another face appeared above them, and the scientist blinded them too. Both crawled back down the stairs and we heard a commotion growing downstairs. Nobody else seemed willing to risk their eyesight, but they shouted abuse at us from below. After what felt like several hours they all finally left.

We didn’t talk much, everyone understood we had to leave immediately. We packed up everything we could carry, let the younger ones take a nap while we took turns on guard. The sun was still hovering over the horizon so we didn’t have the benefit of darkness to cover our escape, but there was a huge harvest fair starting soon and we hoped our harassers would be distracted.

Mere hours after the attack, we were prepared to go, and Fen volunteered to scout the path to the small gate at the west side of the city.

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

“You two be careful,” the scientist said, and then he offered me the tube of blinding light. “Use this wisely. This button turns the light on and off. Don’t leave it on longer than the count of three or it will burn up.”

I held the powerful light uneasily over my shoulder, hoping I wouldn’t accidentally turn it on and destroy the eyeballs of some innocent birds or give away our location.

Fen and I dashed down the deserted alley behind the building, and peered around the corner into the main path. We only saw one person walking away from us, so we ran across and into another alley. As we went, we began to hear a loud voice, which I realized was coming from the town square. We both stopped abruptly when we heard it scream “…and then the witches blinded two of us for no reason! They have a weapon of pure light!”

Fen looked back at me. “That sounds like trouble.”

“…must be stopped, to protect our children and their precious eyes…”

We both turned and sprinted back the way we came. When we arrived at the main path we didn’t even stop, and we could see the mob rushing down from the square. Their shouts got louder when they saw us.

“Go get them,” I told Fen. “I’ll deploy the weapon of pure light.”

I’d never seen her look so scared but she nodded and ran. I looked around the corner, aimed the tube at about eye level, and hit the button. I swept the beam across the crowd for a count of two before switching it off and dozens fell to the ground shrieking. My stomach lurched horribly. The crowd paused, and then surged forward once again. They weren’t going to stop for anything.

I did it again, and again. I threw up, and did it again. They were getting close now, the ones who were lucky enough to still be able to see. I looked back and didn’t see any of my friends coming.

The shouting changed and seemed to get quieter. Looking around the corner, I saw the crowd turning among the buildings, filling every path on their way to the institute. I didn’t know what to do. I ran back that way but suddenly found a dozen men in my path with spears. As they prepared to throw I hit them with the light and jumped to the side. Then without thinking I scrambled to my feet and ran.

I didn’t stop running until I reached the gate. It was strangely quiet on that side of the city, away from the festivities and the rioting mob. I looked back and saw a cloud of smoke rising into the air, and I knew it was the institute.

I jumped when I heard running footsteps and prepared my weapon, but it was Fen, alone and bloody.

“I didn’t make it to them,” she panted, and then she collapsed and wept.

“What happened?”

“They didn’t get out!”

“What do you mean?”

“When I got there the building was surrounded and on fire. They locked everyone else in.”

Another wave of nausea hit me and I dragged Fen to her feet. “Come on, nobody is guarding the gate, we need to get the fuck out.”

We ran for hours down a path that followed a creek to the big river, until we heard the pounding of the falls ahead. Only then did we slow, gasping for air, and begin thinking through our situation.

“Where do we go?” I whispered. “Home?”

“Will it be safe? I’m sure it’s only gotten worse with all the propaganda.”

“I don’t know. I’m tired.”

“Me too.”

The path brought us to a cliff overlooking the vast river, at a place where it plunged the height of ten trees into a deep dark pool. The light of the setting sun illuminated the mist, and within it I saw the most brilliant spectrum. We stopped and stared at the dazzling arc of colors.

“They have no idea what they’re missing, what they’re destroying,” Fen said.

The path split there, one branch turning back to our village, the other following the river upstream, into the mountains, where travelers seldom ventured, and stories told of strange beings with frightening powers.

“There’s always danger in exploring the unknown,” I said, bitterly. “And we saw how that turned out.”

“If we don’t do it, who will?” Fen asked. She took a couple steps upstream and looked back at me with a questioning expression. “They’re lost in a colorless world and they don’t want to see. We can’t make them.”

I just shook with fear, unable to reach any solid conclusions.

“Don’t look back,” she said. “You might fall.”

I took a step toward her, then another. I held out the scientist’s light weapon. “Will you carry this, please? I hate myself for using it.”

She took it from me without a word and we walked together into the colorful unknown.