The Raft: A Novel (17 page)

It was over.

And so, with the orb still filling you with its meaningless words, you slid and tipped to the side, losing your seat on the branch. You felt the gravity of the earth as it wrenched you down.You were out of the tree, your legs flailing, your arms flapping at your sides as you went plummeting. The air wrestled with you; the force and speed of the earth’s pull seemed to separate your internal organs from each other until you were no longer a person but a formless and powerless mass.Your body plunged and you forced your eyes open. The cloud above pulled away and suddenly you were in the brightness and clarity of a sunny day. The tree trunk raced up into the sky alongside you, becoming another pinpoint, this time in the cloud, as if it were growing upwards at a rapid and unnatural rate. You were calm, your mind was at rest. At peace. You surrendered to the whim of an uncompromising physical force, waiting to smash you to pieces on the ground below.

But then you saw him.

Andy.

And your body seemed to slow mid-fall. Your hair didn’t flap madly on your head, but undulated gently as if you were now under-water.You turned your head to see him. The boy you had yearned to see for so long.

Your son was climbing up the tree trunk. He had been climbing up
behind
you all along, looking for you. If you had waited there, up in the tree, he would have reached you.You would have been reunited. But you’d given up. The orb had said you wouldn’t find him, and you’d believed it. Now you were falling, and there was nothing that could be done.

Andy turned his face and saw you. His expression was one of surprise and horror.

Andy, is that you?

Dad!

You were now filled with a painful guilt, and the slowing of your fall gave you the time to feel the full throes of your remorse. It gave you the time to think you could do something about it—that perhaps you could grab onto the tree and save yourself—but no, there was no hope. You had only appeared to slow, and your body was still on course with the hard ground below.You could do nothing, and when you turned again, you could see that the trunk beside you was changing; the rough texture of the bark was smoothing over, losing its brown colour and beginning to glimmer with a metallic sheen. The tree formed windows—windows and linear edges—and soon, it wasn’t a tree at all. It was Jai-Li’s tower, the Huang
-345.
You were falling alongside a vast city-scraper of steel and glass.

Let me tell you a story,
the orb said, the voice having changed neither its tone nor its tranquillising tempo.
Would you indulge an old woman and her story?

You could still see Andy far above, and now he was clutching onto the side of the tower, but he was shrinking into the distance as you fell further and further from him. Your speed began to escalate, and your arms, legs and hair fluttered wildly as you raced breathlessly towards …

You blinked. Your eyes were open. At first you did not know where you were, but it came to you quickly. You were lying on the slope of the mountain beside Jai-Li’s tent, next to a smoking pile of blackened wood.

The dream. It was the same moment that had played itself over and over in your mind, night upon night, week upon week. But this time it had been clearer than ever. It had been so clear that when you awoke, you could still feel the tingle of the rushing air on your skin, still feel the nauseating warmth of the orb. It left you feeling the agony of having lost your son for the first time more clearly than ever before.

Remember Jack Turning
, the voice had said again, as it had said every night.
Remember his face. His fear.
But still, you couldn’t. You did not know a Jack Turning, you had
never
known a Jack Turning. Maybe Jack Turning knew where your son was; maybe Jack Turning had taken him.

You rolled onto your back and looked up into the sky.

After your waking world steadied, you managed to clear the dream from your head. It was time to think about Jai-Li’s story about her life in the tower. Her story had been interrupted, but she’d said enough to keep your mind ticking over—her father, her mother, the robot, her prearranged child …

Did this mean her newborn was the one she had been warned about? And if so, did that have something to do with the reason she so desperately needed to escape?

But there was something else on your mind, besides all of that: both Jai-Li and Moneta had told you their stories in such great detail.
You.
Jai-Li couldn’t have told Theunis, and she must have trusted him, surely. And Moneta had purposely sought you to tell
her
story. She’d needed your help in the garden, but that was little more than an excuse.

So again, you mused, why
you
?

Bits of bark and leaves crackled under your weight. There was the strong fecund scent of soil and sap. You pulled the blanket Theunis had brought up to your neck and folded the end of it under your feet.

You forced your eyes shut and coiled into a foetal position and your last thought before slipping back off to sleep was what Jai-Li had said before she’d even begun her story. She’d
needed
to tell you. She’d believed it would “guide” you in some way. As absorbed as you had been by the tale that had proceeded, however, you could not see how it would direct you. Perhaps, if she finished her story, it would all become more obvious. But her last words, the ones that persisted, clinging delicately to the rest of your thoughts like a stubborn gossamer web, were more direct and more tenderly haunting: Find him. Never give up.
Find your boy and bring him back to you.

You finally drifted off, and achieved a few more hours of sleep untroubled by dreams of any kind. In the early morning you awoke rested. The woods seemed a different place. In the light of dawn, there were new colours and textures; the world was green, brown and yellow, rough, smooth and prickly. The darkness that had constricted you the night before had broken like a fever.

Theunis was standing over you.

You rubbed your eyes and squinted up at him. He looked tired. His eyes were red. The stubble on his face was longer and darker.

The night, he said, had gone by without incident. You nodded and crossed to the tent to check on Jai-Li, but she was still asleep. You patted Theunis’s shoulder to clock out of your shift and, within a few minutes, were making your way down to the beach.

When you stepped out of the woods and into the open white light, it seemed as if you hadn’t been part of the commune in weeks. Something had changed over that time, but how? You had only been away for a night. Nothing could have changed. Perhaps it was you. You had changed.

Either way, the commune appeared even more hopeless and removed than it had before. You walked across the sand, between the fly-covered stalks of roasted brown kelp. Between and behind the tents were the usual faces, but nobody bothered to look at you. No one had missed you (
the boon of a being a loner, Kayle
). You headed straight for Gideon’s tent.

He was sitting on a stump of wood outside his front entrance, reading a comic book. He craned his head up as you approached and bent back the folded pages. He held up the cover of the comic for you to see.

A large and muscular man wearing a tight blue suit and red cape was grabbing two dejected-looking criminal-types by the backs of their jackets. They were flying far above a densely compacted metropolis. You knew the fictitious character fairly well, although you couldn’t recall having read a comic book in your life. He was Superman, the so-called Man of Steel.

This belonged to someone I knew
, he said softly, cautiously.
I don’t remember who, but it was someone close to me. I remember that.

He thumbed through the book quickly, as if hoping to have some hidden significance spray out from between the pages. Then he rolled the comic book up and tapped it against his left hand.

This super man, he’s an interesting character. Everyone else in the book is weak and helpless. But he flies around saving people from their own clumsiness—these others, these ordinary people, they’re always falling off buildings or losing control of their aeroplanes. When there’s a problem, this super man arrives and saves everyone.

It’s amusing, don’t you think, Mr. Kayle? They would rather make a story about one man with all this strength and power, and then have him go around protecting everyone, instead of a story about people learning to save and protect themselves. Is this what people want? To stay weak and blundering and have someone else do the saving and protecting? Very anti-Darwinian. But it’s a very interesting fable. Funny as well. I’ve read it a few times already.You should read it.

You huffed and took a seat on a second stump in front of him. Gideon sloped over and handed the book to you.

The expressions of the drawn men were charming and rudimentary. The one criminal was a bald man with a tattoo of a skull on his neck, the other a shaggy-haired young man in a leather jacket, evidently the more fretful of the two. Superman looked calm, collected, and unapologetically smug as he dragged them up to the clouds like bags of refuse. You handed the book back to Gideon.

Finally, he said:
Something has happened, hasn’t it?

A pang of uneasiness fired through you. Gideon glanced down at the comic book again, rubbing his thumbs over the page in circles.

How is the alp on your chest these days?
he asked, and looked back up.
Is it getting worse or getting better?

I don’t know. Worse, I think.

He spoke again:
I’ve been dreaming too, Mr. Kayle. Recently, I’ve been dreaming every night. I know we shouldn’t speak about it, but it’s true. I have not been sleeping very well.

It was the first time Gideon had spoken about his own experience on the beach.

You know, I don’t remember much about my life before the beach. Not as much as everyone else. I don’t even remember my real name. Gideon was not my name—I chose it for myself before I arrived here. Most of my memories didn’t come back to me. I remember moments and flashes. Some things seem to trigger a feeling, like this book—I seem to remember countless stories that aren’t my own, that can’t ever have been real: impossible creatures, gods, monsters, superstitions, the details of meaningless mythologies. But nothing about me, about my life. There are no names. I might have lost them along the way, perhaps even some time after Day Zero. Maybe they will still come to me. I don’t know.

There is, however, one clear thing. I need to tell you. Something tells me I am not the only one dreaming about this one thing, but there’s no one besides you I feel comfortable asking. Tell me, Mr. Kayle, in your dreams, have you seen a glowing ball in the sky?

You shuddered, but played devil’s advocate, saying,
You mean the sun?

No, not the sun. Not exactly. But a ball. A sphere in the sky that sits like a planet. It is everywhere I go in my dreams. No matter where I am, it hangs in the sky above me. It is warm, this sphere, but the warmth sickens me. It makes me anxious. And it speaks, using my voice, but the voice is in my head, and it says peculiar things. It says it is coming. Coming for us. Every night this sphere grows larger and bolder in my mind and I’m starting to believe it. And fear it. Please, Mr. Kayle, I know I shouldn’t ask, but tell me—have you dreamed of this also?

You forced a slow, heavy nod. Gideon sat upright. You couldn’t tell whether he was feeling relieved or troubled by your admission.

You know
, Gideon said,
it reminds me of a story I do still remember. A long time ago, sometime at the start of the Age of Self, the Aztec people worshipped a god named Tazcatlipoca. It’s a mouthful to say. Tazcatlipoca. But this god, he was in charge of a great many things. The weather, the night, the universe, the earth, harmony, war, beauty … all of these things. And his name, translated from their language, meant “the smoking mirror” because of the obsidian glass he would use to see the entire cosmos at once. It was his looking glass, and through it, he could see everything that happened. He could peer into the corners of existence and change and engage with whatever he saw fit.

The reason I’m telling you this, Mr. Kayle, is because I’m beginning to think such a smoking mirror exists today, with us. I have a feeling that not only you and I are having this dream, and that is why we have been told not to speak to each other about it. I am beginning to think we have become sitting-ducks, as they say. In my opinion, I
do
think something is coming for us. Something from far away—an orb, a force, I don’t know—but in the meanwhile, it is observing us. Through our dreams. It’s looking into us, and it’s getting stronger. I cannot know for certain, but I believe that we have
become
its smoking mirror. And
that
is what they’re not telling us. Because The Body knows this thing, knows what it is, and fears it.

This is what I fear, Mr. Kayle. This is what these dreams feel like to me.

It was astonishing that Gideon remembered these stories about mythological characters and old gods, but could not recall the real people in his past life, or even his real name. You couldn’t help thinking perhaps those were the recollections that mattered most to him, but that didn’t feel fair—you knew how unsystematic and fractured the memories were that eventually came back. But what he’d said seemed chillingly right. Perhaps you had become, as he’d put it, the smoking mirror through which you were being watched, even studied. The orb itself was definitely getting bigger, bolder—the voice, clearer and closer—and if Gideon was seeing this same strange ball in the sky, then others were, too.

So, what about The Renascence?
you asked finally.
What is it then—some charade? What are we doing here? What are we really waiting for?