by Richard Farr
Kit looked at the head of the spear, and then at Mayo’s head; I could tell she was thinking how well the two of them would fit together. I turned to Isbet, and spoke rapidly with her in Tain’iwa, knowing Mayo couldn’t follow it. I was trying to persuade her to take Kit and get out, but she kept looking at Mayo, looking at Kit, and shaking her head.
“Ib delem i’iwa’em,” she said. “Keluk andur. Ji’tep awanat, ix’ix em’t edaran.” We stay with you until we reach the caves. That way we’ll know where the entrance is. And we’ll try to stop him somehow.
She looked at Kit, who nodded as if she’d understood everything. “We come with you,” Kit said to me.
“If you get hurt, Yekaterina Cerenkov, I will never forgive myself for getting you involved in this. Do you understand that?”
“I understand perfect, Majka. But what can I do? This guilty-if-I-not-having-protected-you thing, problem with it is it work both ways, yah? You care about another person more than you care about yourself, sure, sometimes this is total pain in the butt. Maybe one day we have chance to get used to it.”
I wanted to say something, but not something stolen from a greeting card, so I shut up and just stared at her, as if staring hard enough might make it possible to capture and hold on to the look in her eyes forever.
She touched her hand to my face. “Come on. I smell very strange smell. I think is fake volcano.”
She was right that it didn’t smell like Ararat. The air around Ararat had smelled of minerals—sulfur and rock: the center of the earth, burning. This was all wood, soil, and animal fat. We picked our way slowly and carefully, scanning every inch of the green leaf-sea that surrounded us. At the top of a rise there was a faint noise in the distance, like a stadium crowd heard from miles away. More rain?
“River,” you said.
Oh, just great.
“He’s right,” Mayo said. “Down here. It’s not much more than a stream, though, and there’s one of these big beech trees across it. Makes a decent bridge.”
Wrong about that.
The river wasn’t much—barely a dozen feet across—but it was swollen to maximum capacity, a roaring, powerful, animal thing barely contained within its smooth rock channel. The water was doing twenty knots, and it was the color of builder’s tea in a Glasgow café. And the beech tree “bridge” was gone.
“It was right here, I’m certain.”
Kit, Isbet, and I stood with our backs to the water, watching. No I’iwa, or none we could see. Mayo hunted for another place to cross. You crouched by the water, looking puzzled, almost as if you could will a bridge into being. But once again I had the sense that you were looking inward, trying to see something that was just outside your mind’s grasp.
“Here,” Mayo shouted. He’d found another trunk—a small one, slick with moss and moisture. He slung the gun around his neck, grabbed a branch above him, and managed to get a couple of steps out over the water. Dog sat and watched with great interest. I glanced down at the water and tried not to throw up.
“Cross that?” I said. I was talking aloud, to myself. “You have to be absolutely fu—”
“I help you,” Kit said, grabbing my hand. “Don’t think. Or think only about sky. Nice blue sky, yes, pretty isn’t it? I hold your hand, just listen my voice and do what I say. Yes?”
Isbet wasn’t focused on helping me: she was focused on getting rid of Mayo, and had sidled to within a few paces of the log’s end. She was clearly planning to give it a kick. But when Mayo was about three feet out he slipped anyway. His own weight pushed the trunk sideways. Somehow his flailing arms caught in a vine and he managed to land on our side again as the trunk slumped into the water. One of his legs went in, and it too was tossed sideways by the force of the water, but he flung both arms around a rock and managed to crawl to safety. As he got up, he was looking straight at Isbet. It was obvious what she’d been intending to do.
“The feeling’s mutual,” he said, getting to his feet and raising the gun. “I should have got rid of you earlier.”
Kit and I were standing too far away to do anything, and you were crouched by the water, watching impassively—either not caring what happened, or already knowing the outcome.
I was waiting for the familiar sound of the gun when there was a yellow blur on the ground. The sound I heard next might equally have been the gun going off high over Isbet’s head or Mayo’s ankle bones snapping like wet sticks as Dog’s jaws closed around them.
The I’iwa chose that moment to appear again.
I was running past you—hoping, without much hope, that I’d get the gun before Mayo could use it again. Isbet lunged at him from the opposite direction. Our turn for luck. Just a mite faster, a pace closer, and one of us would have run right through the invisible dotted line, the low parabola, along which the spear was traveling. Instead it thrummed like a hummingbird as it passed through the gap between our heads.
Mayo had bent over double and had his hands around Dog’s throat. If he’d been standing, the head of the spear would have caught him in the chest; instead, it entered the top of his left shoulder, in the soft hollow between his collarbone and his shoulder blade. He rose to his full height, bellowing, “Everything! It’s everything!”
The shaft of the spear was sticking vertically out of his shoulder, next to his ear, and a dark stain was flooding his shirt lower down. The picture didn’t quite make sense at first. Then I saw the spear’s tip, poking out in the middle of the stain. It had sliced clear through his shoulder and come out again under his armpit.
That should have been the end for David Maynard Jones. But, like Gilgamesh, he hadn’t planned to die, not ever, and he made it very clear that he didn’t plan to die now. With his good arm he grabbed me to him. Kit was swinging a punch at him, but he managed to swing the butt of the gun around. It caught her with an audible crack in the side of her head.
I turned and saw her go down. You seemed to know something was wrong, at last, and launched yourself toward us. I heard Isbet cry out—“Oda’xin ga’iwa jam’eyep!” Kill him, Dog!—but he lashed out at her; she went down too, and he managed to land a savage kick in Dog’s ribs.
He’d had to reach away from me to do that, which gave me some space. I leaned back, allowed my mind to linger for a moment on the thought of him hitting Kit, and, with all the fury I could muster, smashed my head into his chin.
It almost worked.
I was able to wriggle free, sort of, and I moved toward you. But he grabbed me by the hair and pulled me back with such force that I thought my neck would break, turning me round and forcing my face against his.
The scar tissue was like sandpaper against my cheek. “You just don’t get it, do you?” he hissed. “Like Bill Calder, you don’t get it. This isn’t about improving human life. It’s about the choice between certain death and eternal life. Eternal life, Morag. Infinite life. What the Seraphim are doing is precisely what the Architects want: it will feed them and make them stronger and stronger. There’s no stopping that now, and it means the rest of humanity’s toast, defunct. Homo sapiens might as well already be extinct. And what does it matter? Every single memory from every single person now living: it’s half a trillion years of conscious experience that the Architects will be vacuuming up. What a pity! But it’s a drop in the infinite bucket. If Babblers like us can escape—if just one human consciousness can escape and become truly immortal, like them? You do the math.”
“I want to fight them, not become one of them.”
“Ordinary human beings are finished. The Architects made us what we are so that they could consume us. The end has already begun, and there’s nothing you can do for the others. You can only work with me and claim what’s yours.”
He let go of me long enough to grab the handle of the spear. “Looks bad, this, doesn’t it? Superficial tissue damage, though. Muscle and ligaments—easy to repair. If I can just survive the blood loss, and stay alive long enough, we’re not going to need tissue anyway.”<
br />
It might have been halfway believable with a hospital close by. But not here—and anyway, he was wrong about the superficial damage. As I watched him, Lorna’s voice came to me, giving a running diagnosis.
Aye, it’s true there’s a space there, in the shoulder. Spear goes through that gap, an’ comes out in the armpit, it’s right ugly, an’ ye’ve buggered a couple o’ major muscles, but ye’d survive that, wi’ a bit o’ luck. T’other hand, suppose yer out o’ luck? Suppose the spear nicks a lung?
Mayo had said himself that he’d used up several lifetimes of luck on Ararat. Apparently he was all out. The bright red bubble at one corner of his mouth became a trickle, then a river, then a flood. In the space of a moment, the look in that one mad eye went from surprise, to rage, to nothing. A dead man stared at me.
I assumed he’d simply crumple to the ground, but he had one last act to perform. He went over backward, like a felled tree, but his fingers didn’t let go of me, and the weight of his body kept me moving, turning, overbalancing.
As I fell, I saw in a blur that the I’iwa were standing all around us. Dozens of them, spears raised, motionless. Each of them had a different tattoo. I wondered what the tattoos meant.
Mayo crashed backward onto a hummock of rock at the very edge of the river. I cried out—“No!”—and their expressions changed as they rushed forward, astonishingly fast, because they had seen what was about to happen.
His dead hand released me at last. I continued to fall. And it was already too late.
The water—did I mention this already?—the water in the river, hurling itself past at an impossible speed, was the color of tea.
With the glaciers in the New Guinea Highlands long gone, you might expect a river to be warm. Maybe it was warm. But the sensation I experienced was like lethal cold, or lethal heat—or being electrocuted by a fire hose. I was in severe, whole-body pain. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move a muscle. I was like a silently screaming statue—a helpless Gilgamesh—punched sideways, instantly sucked under, and there was no way I was ever coming up again.
My back hit the wall of the channel. I was flipped upside down. I was spun sideways, and my head scraped the other wall. I rolled over sideways several times, like a log down a hill. When the currents did spin my face just barely to the surface, it was only for a split second, but I saw sky. I was near the bank, there were overhanging branches, and I tried to reach one, only to find that my arms at my sides were as responsive as wooden oars. I went down again without breathing, and knew my lungs would burst, and knew I was going to die.
I wish I could tell you that at the very end I was thinking of you, of our life together and our life apart, of all the things I’d shared with you and wanted to share with you. But the pure quintessence of terror isn’t like that. I was drowning. It was the way of dying I’d always feared the most. I was reduced to wanting only one thing in the world, which was to drown quicker.
I might have got my wish, but the next churn brought me to the surface just in time to be thrust against the opposite bank again. A fallen branch stabbed me in the side of the head and it was like a hot wire being jabbed into my brain: a pain so local and intense that I screamed and took in air.
My hands flung themselves out as if working now entirely on their own, trying to grasp the branch. Way too late: it was already ten yards behind me. But one of my hands closed around a handful of roots instead. The roots stretched and tore, but some of them held against the fierce backward drag of the current and I got the other hand into them too. Because of those roots I was able to look back, and I saw you one last time.
One snapshot. One fragment of consciousness. In that fragment, like a diamond, such a world of detail!
Mayo was lying motionless, with his chest raised up and his arms out, splayed as if crucified. The spear shaft was still poking out of his neck, and an artery must have burst, because the stain spreading into the sunlight around him, already bigger than his body, was bright vermillion, the signature color of a billion oxygen-saturated cells that his muscles and his brain would never get to feed on. Behind him, seen only as vertical flashes of white, were the I’iwa, doing what they seemed to do best—transitioning from visible to invisible as they retreated from the scene. A patch of yellow also disappeared as I saw it, but then it appeared again—Dog, ranging fast along the bank toward me. With its nose an inch from the ground, it was hunting for me, I knew, but it hadn’t seen me yet and of course the water would defeat even its brilliant nose. You were a few steps behind, and with the advantage of height you spotted me.
Behind you there was only the endless forest. Isbet had vanished. Kit had vanished too, and I had time, as I hung there in the octopus-grip of the water, to think that I had loved every last thing about her, and that therefore it was a stupid, deep, obvious, and undeniable flaw in the very structure of the universe itself that this was it, that we’d had almost no time together, that she was probably dead, and I was about to die, and we’d never see each other again.
Just as Dog reached me, the roots in my hand gave way and I was swept on, farther and farther downstream. And a bend in the river revealed a wall of rock. And it was the opposite of what we’d seen at the waterfall, because there was a hole in the rock—a toothy, wet, twenty-foot hole like the mouth of a wailing rock star—and the river, instead of flowing out of it, was plunging directly into the mountain.
When the sun went out, there was a noise like insects feeding or a slice of potato frying in oil. I saw one last half-moon of daylight from the mouth of the tunnel. And then, without warning, the all-enclosing water wasn’t there anymore. I was falling. And the very last thing I thought was that I would never, never know. And the very last thing I did was scream your name.
“Daniel!”
EPILOGUE
IN THE MACHINE
They had placed her with her hands folded on her chest, on a thick bed of leaves and moss, at the center of an octagonal room. Eight small lamps—bone bowls with long wicks, filled with pools of clear animal fat—glowed from the corners; their yellow light turned her skin the color of honey.
At the sight of her, another memory came back to him, almost undamaged, and clung to him. He was with Iona. No longer quite a child—fourteen, maybe?—and they’d been hiking in green hills somewhere. There were sheep in a field. A steep lane led down into a village. They’d had to climb a low sandstone wall, and when they rounded some old oaks, they found that they were in the far corner of a churchyard. Plain eighteenth-century gravestones and elaborate Victorian ones stood at crazy angles in the grass, the carved angels still there but the words and dates already going down to their inevitable defeat in the battle with time and moss.
The church itself was obviously in regular use, but it was empty just then except for a trapped sparrow panicking among the rafters. They stood together in the aisle, looking up at the choir and cross, and then Iona sat in one of the pews and knelt briefly on a blue embroidered hassock, her chin propped on her hands. It made him uncomfortable, because he didn’t know whether she was praying or only trying out the idea of praying. (Later she would say to him, “I’m listening for something, Daniel. I don’t know what—I don’t even know what kind of what! I’m just listening for something that’s out there that we’re not noticing. Mathematics and prayer are pretty much the same activities in that respect, as far as I’m concerned.”)
He remembered all this now because, in the chancel at the back, they’d found the marble tomb-effigy of an Elizabethan noblewoman, with a brass plaque:
“Anna Hazard, of This Parish. Obiit 1599.”
She wore a long dress, a cap, and an elaborately ruffed lace collar. Centuries of dirt and candle soot had darkened the stone until it was the same shade as Morag’s skin.
“She looks peaceful, doesn’t she?” Iona had said. “As if she’s decided death isn’t so bad.”
At the point where the river had swept her away, allowing the mountain to swallow her, there was no scent
for Dog to follow. It was enraged and bewildered by this, for a moment—the loss was like being blinded. But its mind was also not constructed to waste energy on regret; after hesitating for the space of two breaths, it plunged into the trees at right angles to the water, calling with a soft yip-yip for the boy to follow. It wondered if he would understand. Would he persist in some quest of his own, or would he understand that it, with its deep knowledge of the landscape, knew best what to do? Would he have the sense to just follow?
It yipped again, and its heart swelled as it saw him follow. He was slow, but not as slow as some of the others. Dog sensed that this was not a matter of strength but of focus—of the boy knowing what he wanted, and having now an almost-canine capacity to think of nothing but the task ahead.
Once more Dog’s nose fell to within an inch of the ground, scanning. Not for her scent, not yet: that wouldn’t be here. Her scent was a picture in its mind, a picture as clear and unmistakable as a sunlit snake. But now Dog sought for what the old man had been seeking: the smell of the underworld.
Daniel followed the animal, trusted the animal, but not blindly. He saw, through the mist that hung between the peaks, a glimpse of something thicker and darker that wasn’t mist. The smoke again? Dog moved too quickly for him, of course, and often in those first hours, the thought crossed his mind that it might have abandoned him. But every few minutes it came back.
He thought about the scene at the river, and about Isbet and Kit. He also thought about whether he would ever get into the caves and find Morag. That seemed relatively clear. Then he thought about whether they would ever get out again, and what would happen then—that was not clear. But mostly he was able to push these thoughts away, because he knew that what he was doing had to be done; why he knew, or how he knew, didn’t matter. He had seen things—had been given pieces of other people’s seeing: he thought of it that way—and he had to trust the things he’d been given to see, focus on them, and not lose them. Especially now that he could feel his self beginning to cohere again.
