Because Rafe was dead, dead everywhere except inside me. I’d kept him alive these years, condemning him, hating him until the columns of my memory were so diseased that all they could support was a nothing. The light of life shines up from your birth, and I’d left so much in the way that I had stood for years in twilight, isolated and alone while the person I’d once been still stamped and raved, blocking the light and poisoning the sun. The world could no longer reach me, and my past had become all I had, a past I could do nothing about, could never go back and change.
Everything you’ve done, everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve become, remains. You never can go back, only forward, and if you don’t bring the whole of yourself with you, you’ll never see the sun again.
I reached clumsily forward and put my arms round him, and I felt his come up to hold me too. One time was going to have to pay for all, and we knew it, and we hugged each other by the wall, our heads on each other’s shoulders, soaking each other’s coats. We hugged each other for the friends we had been, for the friends we should have remained, for time spent and time lost. We leant back for a moment and laughed shakily, just happy to see each other’s faces once more, and then we hugged one last time. And when I opened my eyes, he was gone.
After a while I walked slowly back along the path between the trees. I was never going to come here again, and so I took my time, reminding myself who this person was. There was still nothing between the trees, but it felt different now. It wasn’t emptiness any more, but a space, and spaces can be filled.
Eventually I was back in Jeamland. I didn’t bother to look for Ji’s body. I knew I would never find it, and I wondered how long it would have to walk before it found the block of flats I lived in as a child, and what happened to it after he’d spoken to me. I came back into the old square and again I stood a moment, remembering, and for the first time it felt good to think about those days.
I sensed that I would not be back in Jeamland very often, that as the years went by I would come back less and less frequently, that maybe one day I would leave and never return. That felt okay.
Then I closed my eyes and woke up.
‘Christ, Stark, are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
The End
They filled me in on what happened.
ACIA had turned up eventually. Spangle let them through, but cats filled the suite to bursting point in case there was any trouble. There wasn’t. ACIA had nothing against me any more.
C really had thought Alkland had been kidnapped, first by somebody else, and then by me. The guy who’d planted the bomb had been acting on his own, trying to climb up the ACIA ladder in true over-achiever style. He was now a grade 43 mono attendant, which served him right. C was just trying to protect Alkland. He wasn’t a bad guy after all.
It turns out that Dilligenz is a plant extract. Nobody uses it any more, apparently: it doesn’t do anything.
I told Snedd about Ji, and he nodded. He’d known before I got back, I think. I tried to say something, but he stopped me. He understood.
We walked back out of Cat, the ACIA men carrying Alkland’s body. He was buried in the Centre, next to his sister. Snedd went back to Red. He controls just about all of it now, and keeps sending me hideously detailed press releases. Shelby got her heliporter back to Brandfield, and I fixed it up for her during the week we spent going to Maxim’s every night. I’m still paying the bill.
And Zenda? She still works in the Centre, is still a zappy, can-do kind of girl. But she got a dispensation from C, and she lives in Colour with me. It’s been a year now, and it’s working out very well. I think it will stay that way. I hope so. Everyone deserves a happy ending.
Even me.
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