Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi

by John Grant

  Marlene was obviously going through the same process.

  She broke out of the trance before I did.

  "Well," she said with an abrupt laugh, kicking at the rock where it lay in the sand, "it's not as if we're likely to lose it."

  "Whatever sent it could just as easily take it away again," Jo pointed out. "We gotta use it or we might lose it, like the cliché says."

  It was an expression I hadn't heard before, but I understood its essence. "So we'd better find out pretty fast what we're supposed to use it for, you mean?"

  "That's right, little man."

  "But how? Is there an instruction manual carved into the side, or something?"

  Jo made a pantomime of bending over to look. "Not so far as I can see."

  We all laughed at that.

  "It'll come to us," said Jo, tapping the side of her head and then pointing toward the silken peach sky as if to indicate she expected to receive a message from there. "Call it intuition. One of us will suddenly realize what the thing's purpose is."

  Already my glow of cozy credulity was beginning to wear off. It wasn't that I thought Jo had been dishonest in any way – I believed she'd told me the truth as she knew it. It was that truth itself that I was losing faith in. I liked Jo, I trusted Jo, I loved Jo almost as much as I loved Marlene, but that wasn't to say she couldn't be deluding herself – and us.

  I didn't take part in the animated discussion that followed, with people proposing countless new and ever more ridiculous potential uses for the stone. Marlene noticed my silence, and after a while she came across and sat down in the sand next to me, taking my hand and tugging me down beside her.

  "What's the matter, Joe?"

  "I don't like it." I gestured toward the rock. "That thing."

  "It's just a rock."

  "That's not what Jo's saying. What everyone's saying."

  "They're just fooling around."

  "No, they're not, Marlene, and you know it. Jo's perfectly serious about it being a tool of some kind. A machine, even. A device sent to us for a specific purpose."

  "True."

  "What do you think?"

  The veneer of lightheartedness faded from her face. "I'm like you. I don't like it either."

  "What makes you say that?"

  "You really want to know?"

  "Yes. I trust your judgement, Marlene. I trust you more than anyone else here." I took her hand in both of mind, played with the fingers. She had very long, graceful fingers, yet powerful, as if she'd been a harpist or a surgeon in her previous life.

  "Then," she said hesitantly, looking down her fingers as if they belonged to someone else, "the truth is, I think it's a weapon."

  I was astonished. The idea of its being a weapon couldn't have been further from my own mind. I hadn't even thought about weapons since coming to the beach, not unless you counted the handfuls of sand the crazies had hurled in our general direction – no, not even then, because that had been more like chimps at the zoo throwing their feces: an insult rather than an intent to harm.

  "How could it be a weapon?" I said after a while.

  "Because it can be used as one."

  "I don't follow."

  "There's nothing else on the beach we can use to harm each other – not seriously. The branches don't come off the trees and bushes. We can't drown each other in the water. I'm pretty sure we couldn't suffocate each other in the sand. There are no high places we can shove each other off. This may not be any kind of Paradise we've all found ourselves in, but it couldn't have been better designed to make sure we're safe from each other. But now – just look at that damned thing. You know how human beings are, Joe – how we always are. Give us anything new and the first thing we want to do is work out some way we can use it to maim and kill people."

  "I'm not too sure there's any way we can harm each other, here," I said. At some stage I'd stopped my game with her fingers, but her hand still lay in mine. I squeezed it gently. Even as I'd spoken those words I'd been doubting them, because my mind had cast back to that odd little exchange I'd had with Jo not long after I'd met her. "Would you kill for each other?" she'd said. "Die for each other?" And I'd said I thought both were impossible. She'd seemed less sure.

  I looked across at Jo, who was still standing in the midst of the rest of our tribe, joking, her hand on someone's shoulder.

  Jo, a weapon-user? I just couldn't see it. I could imagine her clenching one of those enormous fists and swiping someone on the jaw, if they managed to enrage her enough, but that was it. And I'd never seen anyone or anything irritate her even close to the point where she might lose her temper.

  What of the rest? Again, it was impossible to conceive. Eileen could be a bit sneaky on occasion, but that was about as much malice as you could find among us. It was as if, along with all the other human capabilities we'd lost when we'd drowned and made our separate ways here, we'd managed to shed our hatreds and enmities as well.

  Back then when first she and I had met, Jo had begun saying something quite different before stopping herself, and distracting me with a remark about whether I would kill or die for Marlene if I could. What had she been about to say? Some truth that at the last moment she'd decided she didn't want to tell me? That I wasn't ready for? Had she already been aware of the rock's existence, and that we'd eventually find it?

  Could it be, and here I drew in my breath in something close to pain, that Jo herself had been the one to bring the rock here? I had no idea of what she might have done before she encountered us, and she'd never talked about it. Come to that, she'd never talked at all about her pre-drowning life, either, unlike the rest of us, who tended to prattle on endlessly about our prior existences, using the recountings as a means of hanging onto who we were. We told each other more than we really wanted to know: there wasn't a person among us about whom I didn't know the grisly details of their loss of virginity, for example. But not Jo. She was skilled at diverting the course of conversation away from the topic of her past.

  Yet Jo, devious? I couldn't credit it. She had an open heart, of that I was certain.

  And at the same time I shivered, realizing as I did so that Marlene was shivering too.

  I leaned my head close to hers. "We've got to challenge Jo on this," I said softly. "When the hubbub's died down and people have lost their initial thrill. Find out what she knows."

  "Yes." Marlene's whisper was so quiet it was as if she were just mouthing the word.

  "I'll be the one to do it," I said. I was a schoolboy again, staunchly volunteering to be the one to thrash something out with the teacher while having no real intention of doing so. I tightened the hand that wasn't holding Marlene's. No, this time I couldn't back out. I wasn't a bullshitting schoolboy any longer. This time I had to go through with it.

  I felt as if the shadow of a cold rain cloud had fallen across the beach. Something new and sinister had come among us, and it wasn't the rock.

  It took me a few moments to identify what it was.

  Suspicion.

  8

  None of us wanted to leave the place where we'd discovered the rock. It was our property, our treasure. While Jo could probably have carried it with us as we ventured farther along the beach, even she couldn't have done so without difficulty. The notion of that was dismissed without being discussed. This was to be our base for the foreseeable future. Although we still roamed the beach as before, always a couple of us were left behind to guard the rock – not that anyone could have run away with it, of course, but the crazies could have defaced it out of malice, or even one of the deadies might do so in random, aimless ignorance.

  It happened one time that Jo and I were left as the guards. The others had set off in their usual high spirits. Perhaps today would be one of those rare days when they found a new recruit, or perhaps, who knew, they might even come across a second rock.

  Jo and I chatted for a while of this and that, mostly thises and thats which we'd already talked about countless times before.
None of the conversation was very important until, suddenly lying down on her back by the rock and putting her hands behind her head, she grew more serious. It was doubly unexpected coming from Jo, who more than any of us tended to keep things at the level of light banter.

  "Come over here, little man," she commanded. "I want to speak to you."

  In that uncomfortable state of feeling apprehensive yet not having any idea what I should be apprehensive about, I obeyed.

  "What's up, Jo?"

  She didn't answer, but instead said, "How do you see our future here?"

  "You mean, yours and mine?" I stammered.

  She laughed. "No. I mean the future for all of us. You, me, Marlene, Derek, Eileen – the whole damn' passel of us. Our tribe. Us and all the countless others there must be on this fucking beach who've managed to cling onto their minds who we've not discovered yet."

  I looked around me. The question seemed a strange one. "I don't know. It's not something I've thought about. It doesn't seem, well, relevant, somehow."

  "You'd be happy if we just kept on the way we are?"

  "What other choice do we have?" I said, shrugging.

  "Each day the same as the day before? Oh, you know I don't mean that literally, but you know what I mean. Nothing ever changes for us. If we keep going as we are then nothing ever will."

  "So what's so wrong about that?"

  "Little man, imagine yourself back in your old life. Would you have been happy if someone had told you nothing would ever change in it? That you'd never develop at all? That things would just stay the same as they were until one day you dropped down dead?"

  I thought back, as she'd asked, and felt the heat come to my face. Now that I considered it, in most ways that was how my life really had been like – certainly after Marion went. Before that, and during the few years my marriage had been good, I'd faced the future as if it were an intoxicatingly fine exotic meal I'd smelled being cooked and could hardly wait to eat. We were going to have kids, I was going to earn a pile in real estate and then maybe retire to write the great novel, or maybe Marion and I would discover a second youth and abandon everything to go backpacking around the world. When Marion left me, though, it wasn't the losing her that hurt me, because I'd fallen out of love with her years before, it was the losing of my appetite for the future. I saw no chance of ever nurturing a deep relationship like that again – was frightened of the very possibility, perhaps – and alongside this I lost the idea of a future formed of growth and change, a future in which I might realize not all of my fantasies but at least a few of them, while holding to the hope that the others might fall into place likewise one day. A symptom was my avoidance of any emotional entanglement: Naomi Fredriksen had not been the first of her kind and, had I lived, would almost certainly not have been the last. I preferred it that way. I preferred a life that was entirely made up of a sequence of present moments that were virtually indistinguishable from those before and after them. I felt more secure that way, more comfortable. I didn't want to run the risk of the future.

  In a way, the life I had been forced to lead on the beach of the drowned was the ultimate rendition of what I had wanted all along: steadiness, predictability, stasis.

  That's not what I said to Jo, because I realized it cast me in a somewhat unflattering light, but I must have let enough of it slip through that she understood the truth.

  "I'm so very sorry, Joe," she said. It wasn't often she used my name like that, because of the obvious confusions that could arise. "So very sorry to hear that. I wonder how many people noticed you'd gone?"

  It was a cruel shaft, but not meant cruelly.

  "The people at the office, I guess." I shifted my rear uneasily on the sand. "The people in the shops where I, well, shopped. The cashiers at the bank. Maybe Marion, if only because she'll have stopped getting alimony."

  "That's not really anybody, is it, Joe?"

  "Marion was somebody to me."

  "Truly?"

  Four breakers came and went before I answered. "No. Not truly. The Marion who once had been mattered to me. The Marion of today didn't."

  "Do you like it here on the beach?"

  Again I looked around me. Grey sands. Grey sea. Grey-faced deadies. A rock. Jo.

  "It's all right," I said.

  "So you don't want anything to change?"

  "No. Do you?"

  She sat up abruptly, smacking one big fist so forcefully into the palm of the other hand I thought she must surely break a bone or two.

  "Too fucking right I do, buster!" she yelled. Some of the deadies nearby turned their heads slowly to look in our direction. "This place is a goddam prison cell. You can't see the bars, but that doesn't mean they're not there. You can't even see the walls of the cell you're in because they're too far away, but they're there too, all right. What makes it a prison is that nothing ever changes, and where nothing ever changes there is no future. And the kindly jailers of this prison we're in are all the people like you who don't care that this is the situation, who actually like things this way! Doesn't something stir within you, little man, something that makes you ache to bring change into this dump? Don't you feel that yearning?"

  I didn't know if this was a rebuke. Well, I knew it was a rebuke all right. What I didn't know was if it was directed personally at me or if it was just Jo's howl of anguish to the world.

  "No," I said very quietly. "I don't feel it."

  She gave a great sigh and slumped back down again, her hands working together at her waist. "Then I must feel it for you."

  The words hung there between us while I tried to guess at their meaning. Eventually I gave up.

  "What about you, Jo?" I said. "You're always so tight-lipped about yourself. You never tell us anything about your past – where you've come from, who you were." She'd never until now mentioned anything about her future, either – the future she saw for herself – but I didn't think now was the time to say so because it would only draw her attention back to my own lack of aspiration for my own future.

  "You've noticed that I'm bigger than you are, haven't you, little man?" Her voice, so loud just a few moments earlier, now seemed to be coming from a very long way away, as if she were speaking to me out of a half-trance.

  I smiled, knowing she couldn't see my face. "Sort of."

  "You ever see anyone as big as me, back in your own world?"

  I thought hard. I'd probably met people who weighed as much, but they were just grossly obese. Jo wasn't fat, though. She was of average, somewhat muscular build for her height. And I'd certainly never come across anyone as tall as her. She was built to a different scale from everyone else. Beside her the rest of us, both here and back in my previous life, were pygmies.

  "No," I said.

  "Doesn't that lead you to an obvious conclusion?"

  Whatever the conclusion, it wasn't obvious to me. "No," I said again.

  "Well, think about it."

  I did, not just then but for some while afterwards – for what would have been days, had there been days.

  I was going to tell Marlene about the conversation, but somehow I never got round to it.

  I've no idea how much later it was that I found myself returning on my own to the rock from a protracted period of foraging – during which we'd found nothing, of course. The rest had decided to keep going a while longer; I'd chosen to head back because this time it was the turn of Marlene and Jo to be the rock's guardians. Jo's questions about the future, and her evasiveness about her own past, were still troubling me. I thought that, with Marlene there as well, perhaps she'd be readier to open up a little more.

  As I approached them, I saw that Jo was standing with the rock in her hands while Marlene lay at her feet. I didn't think much of it at first, but when I drew closer it seemed to me there was something out of place about the way that Marlene was just lying there, so still. She was sprawled in a position that must surely be uncomfortable. She was ...

  I began to run as I realized the
horrible truth.

  "What the fuck have you done?" I yelled at Jo as I ran forward.

  She turned in my direction, the rock still clutched in her hands, and there was a wildness in her eyes that I couldn't recognize.

  "Ah, the little man's here!" she shouted.

  I stumbled in the loose sand, fell flat on my face, rolled myself back up onto my feet again, kept running forwards. Jo just stood there waiting for me, her mouth shifting into a broad grin.

  "Come and see for yourself!" she called gleefully. She looked down at Marlene's splayed body.

  And then I was standing over that body myself. I wasn't breathing heavily – I wasn't breathing at all – but I felt winded nevertheless. My vision was smeared with tears, but as it cleared I began to see what it was Jo had done.

  Marlene's skull was just a mess of splintered bone and dirty-pink brain. Her face was an unrecognizable pulp from the repeated heavy blows Jo must have rained on it with the rock. There was a spray of dark streaks fanning out on the sand from where Marlene's head had essentially ceased to exist. Bits of torn organic matter stained the rock. A crazy pattern of images – Marlene's face teasing, Marlene's face animated by curiosity, Marlene's face irritated by some trivial setback or other – raced through my mind, superimposing themselves on the baleful, repugnant reality. The person I had come to love was now ... was now ... was now ... this.

  Naomi Fredriksen. Marlene. One a lover, the other loved. Both killed alike, although in such very different worlds. There, my wits had fled at the spectacle. Here, it seemed I had no wits to flee.

  I looked up at Jo, who was grinning like a child who has for the first time been allowed to cook supper.

  "You killed her, you bitch."

  My words came out cold. A tiny dispassionate part of me was perplexed as to why I wasn't collapsing in hysteria.