By Light Alone (50 page)

Morning brought the sound of gulls, which in Issa’s half-awake mind sounded like the quarrelling of angry ghosts. Standing up, she saw a slab of land on the horizon, and boats visible in a bitten-out-chunk of a harbour, and lots of houses like mah-jongg tiles. She ran to the motor and swivelled the circle on the little screen. Slowly the raft responded, turning to miss the island.

She went over to sit on that part of the raft that gave her the best view. This happened to be where the Stanbulis’ boat was strapped to the side, and looking at it made her wonder why she hadn’t thought of it before. Instead of removing all the corpses from the raft, she could decouple and take this much smaller craft. It would, she supposed, be harder to cross the Atlantic in a boat that size; but – did she need to cross the Atlantic? She’d planned to get to New York by way of going home. But according to Rageh, home was what had made her feel the loneliness and the upset in the first place. Could she not choose her own destination now, and leave all that debilitating pain behind her?

But where would she go?

The sound of an approaching flitter distracted her from these contemplations. Her heart ran and jumped with fear. The craft flew close enough for her to see that it was a civilian flitter, and she almost relaxed; but then one of its door slid open and somebody inside began shooting at the raft. Issa heard the snap, snap, snap of the gun, and saw shreds of flesh bounce up from one of the prone bodies. The machine overflew. Issa lay down. If she stood there, the only upright figure, she would be an obvious target. The flitter’s sound diminished, grew again, and passed over with some more snap-snap sounds of gunfire. She lay very still, and hoped not to be hit.

The flitter made one more pass, and then flew off. Presumably the people aboard were disappointed that the raft provided them with no live targets. Issa lay there for a long time, listening to the sounds of the water, and her body was raised and lowered by the undulations of the raft on the water. When she decided it was safe to sit up, the island was no more than a thick line between sea and sky, away behind her.

Rageh was there. ‘Will you go to America?’ he asked.

‘I suppose you’re asking me that because I’m thinking it,’ she said. ‘But look, this is stupid.’ She reached out to touch him, half-expecting her hand to go right through him (wasn’t that what happened with ghosts?), but surprisingly he was palpable and solid, if cold, to her touch. She took hold of the torn petals of head at the back and bent them back into shape. It was like moulding plasclay, or manipulating something in a Virt. The pieces all went back, and with a little pushing and pulling of his cheeks his head was restored – almost – to its former state. Like a mended pot.

Rageh gave her such a sweet look that she laughed with delight. ‘Thank you,’ he said, gravely. ‘Really – thank you very much.’

Later that same day she saw a boat, coming towards the raft. It was a wide-bodied barge of a craft, low in the water, but clearly well-built and with powerful engines. Issa wondered if she should try and steer away from it, but it was soon apparent that it was steering directly towards her.

She waited.

It came within twenty metres, or so, and slewed round to present its lengthy broadside. Faces were visible, watching her over the side. They were, she was relieved to note, longhair faces. A woman stood up near the prow and shouted: ‘Are you Issa?’

‘I am!’ she shouted back, startled.

‘We’ll not come closer. Swim to us.’

Unsure she had heard correctly, she replied: ‘What?’

‘Swim across to us,’ yelled the woman.

Issa looked around at the raft. It was a shabby thing, ramshackle and ruined, and covered with dead bodies. She didn’t even think twice.

The only thing she took with her was the Fwn, which she tucked into her trousers. The water was gaspingly cold, and salt water went in her mouth and down her throat before she really got going, so her threshy crawl was accompanied by a series of coughs and splutters. But she reached the side of the barge soon enough, and took hold of the bottom step of a plastic ladder lowered down to her. Climbing up was onerous, but she managed that too. Finally she was on the deck, and surrounded by longhairs.

The woman who had shouted to her introduced herself. ‘My name is Li,’ she said. ‘I’m in charge here.’ Her English was smooth, though slightly accented.

‘You’re a Spartacist?’

‘Of course,’ said Li. ‘And you are Issa.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Sudhir was one of mine.’

‘Oh,’ said Issa. She looked around at the rest of the crew. ‘I’m afraid she’s dead.’

‘I know. I spoke to her just before she succumbed.’

Issa brought Sudhir’s Fwn out of her trousers. ‘On this, of course. Here,’ she said.

‘Keep it,’ said Li. ‘She told me the whole raft was dead or dying, except for one person. And she told me that person’s name. It’s easy to see why you’re well, and it’s easy to imagine the backstory. But she told me something much more remarkable even than that story. She told me you knew Rodion.’

Issa looked around herself again. ‘I did,’ she said. ‘He lived next door. He was a friend of my father’s. He used to buy me ice cream.’

‘In that case,’ said Li, smiling at Issa, ‘you can
certainly
be of use to us.’

Li took her down into the insides of the barge. ‘The crew don’t like coming down here in the daytime,’ she said. ‘They don’t even sleep down here. Too far from the sun. When we take over the world, we’ll need special crews, fed on hardfood like factory livestock, to scour the subways and bunkers.’ They passed through a hefty metal hatch. ‘One rule: close all hatches. If we get hit, and we may well, it’s best if all our compartments are watertight. Here.’ They passed into a small cabin: inside sat a small, plump, bald-headed man. ‘This is Drago, our medic. He will do some tests.’

Without a word, Drago stood, touched the back of Issa’s hand with a wand. Then he sat down.

‘A shorthair, you’ll notice,’ said Li. ‘We’re not automatically prejudiced against shorthairs, you see.’

‘What about the raft?’

‘The raft?’

‘Shouldn’t we do something with it?’

Li was looking at Drago as she spoke. ‘The best thing we can do with the raft is leave it floating about the Med. It will be almost entirely ignored, but there may be one or two wealthy people who see it, or hear of it, and are moved by the fact that these were human beings, once. Perhaps they’ll become aware that the rich are perpetrating a crime against humanity.’

Drago cleared his throat: ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Not that I doubted it,’ said Li.

‘Did you test for gWhites?’ asked Issa. ‘Of course you did. I don’t need to ask that. Answer me this question instead: why shave your head?’

Drago put his hand to his scalp, as if surprised by the question. ‘What makes you think I shave it?’

‘Perhaps you don’t want to take the Bug,’ Issa said. ‘But why not just let your hair grow? That way at least you’d look like your comrades, even if you weren’t.’ She looked from Li to Drago. ‘I don’t see the strategy here.’

‘I am naturally bald,’ said Drago.

Issa thought about this. ‘What is that? A sickness?’

‘Not at all. A hundred years ago most men were bald. Or they
went
bald, eventually. Now, of course, there are treatments to cover the fact. I prefer not to take treatments.’

‘Gracious,’ said Issa.

‘Come along,’ said Li, taking gentle hold of Issa’s elbow. ‘Let’s be going.’

‘We have organized a massive overrunning of the US coast at and around New York,’ said Li, as they climbed together back to the sunlight. ‘Partly the intention is the destruction of the city. But in fact that assault is a cover for a more specific task: we intend to seize an old man called Rodion.’

‘I know,’ said Issa. ‘Sudhir told us.’

‘You discussed it with her?’

‘She told the whole raft.’

‘Really?’ Li was frowning, or else screwing up her eyes against the light, because they were stepping back outside again. ‘She wasn’t supposed to do that until after you got across the Atlantic. Assuming you ever did. Still, no matter.’

They went to the prow of the ship. Issa was struck by the way the prow cut so sharply through the water. ‘The invasion will be a long-drawn-out process. We can’t coordinate for all our people to arrive at the same time. But that doesn’t matter. We’ll gather as many as we can. It’s a way of applying pressure.’

‘Lots will die,’ said Issa. It was one of those statements she made that struck her as true only as she uttered it. She didn’t know where the sentiment came from, or why she voiced it; but once it was out she understood it touched on something centrally important.

Li nodded, slowly. ‘Quite right. Many
will
die. We’re fighting a war, my dear, you realize that, I hope.’ She watched Issa’s face, and seeing her unconvinced, added: ‘More will die if we don’t make this sacrifice. Believe me. Your friends on the raft are only the start. We’ll be exterminated like weeds by the end of the decade, unless we act.’

Issa took a deep breath in. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well isn’t it hopeless then?’

‘Defeatism!’ chided Li. But she kept her keen eye on Issa.

‘We can send a million people into the USA. They’ll just infect us with that horrible disease and we’ll all die.’

Li said: ‘You are a canny child. But you mustn’t give up hope. The Shackle Virus was developed, we think, in a lab in Abkhazia.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Between Georgia and Dagestan. But they haven’t used it. Human rights, they say, which is bang-on. Ironic, actually. But there you are. Anyhow, a few countries with what they call “serious indigent problems” have used it. Stanbul is one. Kirim another. But not the US.’

‘Not yet.’

‘Exactly! But if they use it – when, I should say – then they will kill millions, and they will make heaps of corpses upon their own land to poison their landscape and put Attila to shame. And many of their own people will die, for the virus is not as discriminating as its inventors hoped. And anyway by then we will have moved on. You can help.’

Issa nodded. ‘What shall I do?’

‘You know Rodion, you say. You say it so casually, as if it’s nothing at all! But he is the last living member of the Redeemer’s own inner circle.’

‘I find it odd, all that Redeemer stuff,’ said Issa, walking a little way down the side of the boat to watch the wake drawn, like a comet trail, through the dark blue of the ocean. ‘He was only a man, after all.’

‘True,’ said Li, coming after her.

‘All those shrines to him. He was a man, not a god.’

‘It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he unifies our people.’

Issa found it beautiful, the way the water, cut and forced apart at the front, simply joined together again at the rear, in blithe forgiveness of the violence performed upon it.

‘You can help us liberate Rodion,’ Li said. ‘You can perform a great duty.’

‘Duty,’ said Issa, absently.

The ship moved much more quickly than the raft had done, of course; but timing was more important than brute speed. It was a question of arriving at the
right
moment. An armada of rafts of every kind, small and large, well-organized and shabby, was converging on the American city. From the south and across the Great Atlantic from the east, bringing a huge number of longhairs towards one point. It was impossible that they would all get there exactly at the same time, of course. Rather the strategy was that they apply a crescendo of human pressure, bodies pouring into the lands north and south of the city, and culminating in a fully armed military assault on New York’s Manhattan citadel.

‘Li doesn’t
know
if you’re really an old pal of Rodion’s,’ said Christophe, a muscular longhair who liked to walk about holding a gun, and who took an avuncular interest in Issa. ‘But she loses nothing by bringing you along, and may gain something important. It’s not going to be easy, kidnapping him.’

‘Liberating him from the prison of New York, you mean?’ Issa said, slyly, having picked up the idiom.

‘Sure! That! Yeah!’ Christophe’s laughter was not kind.

Quite apart from the speed, being on the barge was very different to being on the raft. The crew, for one thing, was a disciplined unit. They were kind to her, in a distant sort of way, but there were no spaces in the social knit to let her in for conversation or companionship. She didn’t mind. She got to spend every night in a bed, in a room of her own – the first time since the village. She slept very long and very deep. Each morning, woken almost invariably by the clump of booted feet marching in unison on the deck overhead, she felt she had made up a little more of some profound spiritual debt. She felt, day by day, wholer.

They passed Gibraltar, sticking out of the sea like a stegosaurus’ spine. Issa expected trouble, but there was none. Soon she felt a difference in the rhythm of the thud and slap of the boat’s passage: an Atlantic rather than a Mediterranean resistance to their motion. On deck, where she spent most of her time gazing at the seascape, the fluid plateau had a new quality to it: the dints were deeper, darker grey, the peaks rawer and more liable to snap off into dusty-looking sprays of bright white. The wind was colder, and Issa was given a lined jacket and new boots, for which she was very grateful.