The Raft: A Novel (35 page)

“Is this what your brother saw?” I asked. I had to know. I had to know for the prophecy that been imparted to me: The sea of rooftops. The burning house. A man named Shen. A man named Quon. And the nicest family ever made.

I had to know for Andy.

He lolled his head clumsily, looking down, fascinated by his own bleeding chest. Confusion filled his face, then terror, then disbelief. Then all expression faded and he looked like a boy again, young and ignorant. The stuttering crusader was gone: the calm and enlightened Holy Man too.

He looked up at me slowly and he held out his blood-red palms for me to see, the way a child might after messing with paints. As his hands came up, I was reminded of the story he’d told me himself: the story of the king cursed with insatiable hunger, wagging his fist at the gods before choosing to eat himself into oblivion.

“Yes,” he said. “No.”

And then he collapsed in the dirt, fresh bloody kill for the trees.

Extracts

(Excerpt from
The Age of Self Primary)

After the “One Family” proposal was implemented, and family members were separated in the hopes of deterring tribal culture, it was later agreed by the New Past that information itself had been the means of mankind’s spiritual and intellectual undoing. Where once it was believed that knowledge would set them free, they now learned that a traditional information-based education only denied them the inheritance of a more profound communal connection. In the same way the Agricultural Revolution had only taught them to distrust that the world would continue to provide for them, thus perpetuating a culture of fear that consequently distanced them from the natural world, a questioning mind only served to separate them from the one and only answer that was: they were already complete by simply existing at all. The blind addiction to questioning had been the true inhibitor during the Age of Self. A question, after all, only leads to more questions. And a dream—whether of the past or the future, beautiful or nightmarish, aspiring or sentimental—only robbed them of the perfect present, the one true medium in which they were capable of evolving into something interminably greater than themselves.

Chang’e 11

S
hen Wu woke up to the sound of the phone ringing beside his bed. It whined like a sick animal, flashing blue, projecting twisted shadows against the walls of the dark room.

His wife shifted beside him, and he turned to see if she had been disturbed by the electronic intrusion. She was lying with her back to him. Her shoulder blades slid beneath her smooth skin. She groaned and pulled the blanket up around her small shoulders. Beyond her, long arteries of rain streaked the window, each drop holding the green and red neons of the city lights.

“Shen. Private call,” he said, clearing his throat. The ringing stopped. A man’s ragged breath reverberated in his inner-ear receptanode.

“
Wéi … n
h
o,”
Shen said softly, rubbing his eyes and looking at the time on the phone. It was 1:34 am. “Who is this?”

“Shen? It’s Quon,” a voice replied.

“Quon?” Shen slid up against the cold wall at the head of his bed. “It’s one-thirty in the morning.”

“Can you sleep?” Quon asked.

Can you sleep?
Shen thought.
What kind of a question is that, can you sleep?

“I was sleeping, if that’s what you mean.”

“Were you?” Quon said, his voice nervy. “So you can then. That’s good. That’s good. I can’t. Not like I used to, anyway …”

“Quon? What is it? What’s this all about?”

“I need to talk to you, Shen,” Quon said, his tone passive, panicked, as if he had been asked to make the call at gunpoint but didn’t want to give away the gravity of his situation. “I need to talk to you right now.”

“Okay, well. We are. We’re talking.”

“No,” Quon cut in. “No. No phone-nodes. I have to see you in person. Meet me at The Glimmer Room in twenty minutes. I’ll be there.”

“What? Wait—”

But Quon had already hung up, severing any chance of making an excuse not to go.

Shen frowned in the darkness. He looked to his side and touched the small exposed patch of his wife’s shoulder. Hua moaned softly again but went on sleeping. Her skin was soft and firm—softer and firmer than he remembered it ever being in the eighteen years they’d been married. He knew she was a woman who took care of herself, but ever since his return to earth his wife had seemed younger and more beautiful than ever. At the time of his arrival, he had attributed it to having spent such a long time away from her—drifting through the loveless, inhuman chaos of the universe and staring at the cold, geometric machinery—but it had been weeks since his return, and the novelty of her suddenly-realised beauty had not worn thin. If anything, every day he found himself more impressed by her, more baffled by her ageless body.

“I’m going out for a bit,” he whispered, and kissed her on the cheek. The skin on her cheek was cold. She murmured something—a lazy semblance of words. Shen covered her with the blanket and got out of bed. He went to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror, turning his face from side to side.

He was getting older. There was no escaping that fact. His eyes were buried in satchels of skin. The lines that connected the sides of his nose to the edges of his mouth were deeper and longer. His hair was thinning, just as his father’s had done, and his earlobes were wide now, and dangling.

Perhaps, he thought, it was because of everything he had seen. Perhaps we were not yet ready to behold those nebulae in the furthest reaches, those spiralling vortexes of ancient matter, that vast raw core of existence. Out there, from the windows of his vessel, he had seen the birthplace of time. They all had: Quon and the seven other astrominers aboard Chang’e 11. And perhaps now it was time to pay back all those free trips through time with a few extra wrinkles, thinning crowns, and enlarged ear lobes …

Quon.

Something was wrong. He had never known Quon to be a skittish man with a flair for such cloak-’n’-dagger dramatics. Quon had always been reserved and composed. A straight arrow and a sharp shooter, as they used to say in those old American movies. The space program didn’t choose paranoiacs and unstable neurotics, especially when they were going to be restricted to the claustrophobic confines of a lone space vessel, and Quon had been no exception. Also, Shen had spent almost nine years with Quon up in that contraption; if ever there was a place to get to know someone, it was there.

So was he now suffering some kind of agoraphobia? It wasn’t impossible. Even Shen had had to get used to being back on earth. He too had felt uneasy about this place he called his home. It wasn’t that everything had changed too much in the time he’d been away, but rather that too
little
had changed. All the expectations he’d had aboard Chang’e 11 of feeling left behind by a new world had not come to pass.

An unsettling feeling, and he didn’t think it was all in his head.

After all, time shouldn’t stand still for anything or anyone. We expect cities to expand, oceans to rise, the human body to get older—but none of that had happened on the earth he had come back to. Too much was the same: The same people. The same technologies. The same problems. In some cases, even the same goddamn hairstyles. The same but not the same—like a deeply loved song overplayed until it becomes almost impossible to stomach listening to it.

That’s exactly it
, he thought, looking at his reflection.
Nothing has changed—nothing but
you.
You’ve changed, Shen. You’ve definitely gained a wrinkle or two.

Even so, had he really grown as old as he thought, or had the eerie stagnancy of the world around him simply emphasised the otherwise ordinary marks of ageing?

Shen rubbed his eyes and looked at his bleary reflection again. Time to wake up, be alert for Quon. He ran the water into the basin and splashed it into his face, then dabbed his face dry with a towel. He dressed quickly and quietly left the apartment. The hallway was empty, dimly lit by mustard-tinted lamps. Identical wooden doors stood alongside each other, just as they had done before he left, but as Shen passed along them, he felt the hallway was longer than he had imagined, with a few more doors at the end.
That can’t be true
, he told himself. It was evidently his brain kick-starting itself from the deep sleep Quon had disturbed. A forty-seven-year-old wife with unusually youthful skin was one thing, a lengthened hallway in a fifty-storey apartment block was another.

He took the elevator to the bottom and stepped out into the cold, wet street. The Glimmer Room was a good twenty-minute walk from where he stood. He could grab a taxi, he thought, but he could do with some fresh air, a bit of time to prepare himself for whatever it was Quon was so eager to tell him. So he pulled up his collar and took to the street.

Shen hadn’t seen Quon for at least two months. Not since the last round of interviews, when everyone had finally lost interest in the crew’s dramatic return from their voyage. The last time he’d seen Quon had been at that awkward dinner with the executives. Quon had been there with his wife, a quiet woman who’d attached herself to her husband like a pretty little cufflink and smiled carefully at all the right lines. Conversation hadn’t exactly flowed that night (most of the astrominers had difficulty talking freely about their nine isolated years), but Quon had not seemed particularly out of place. His wife had selected his meals for him, with no thanks from him. No surprises there. On Chang’e 11, his nickname had been Mr. Droid because of his stony and mechanical nature. When their meals had finally arrived he’d dismantled and ingested each course like he was performing an important task. Once again, nothing unusual for Quon.

At the end of the night, Quon bowed, shook hands all round, then left with his wife in a taxi.

That was all Shen remembered of the last time he’d seen him, so what had happened since then? What had led to that rock-headed man falling to pieces?

As Shen walked along the damp street to The Glimmer Room, he studied the world and its people like an undercover anthropologist. Neon lights reflected in the puddles and windscreens of cars. Flashing arrows brought brothels and clubs to the attention of passers-by. Shen slowed to look across the street. Thin, vam-piric teenagers were standing out on the pavement, draped over the takeout counter of a small roadside diner, hassling a plump teenage clerk. A blob-like autovehicle
whooshed
through the water that had flooded the centre of the street.

This was the world Shen knew, he was certain. There was no mistaking these few details. But still, something was wrong with it all. He couldn’t say what, except that once again the details were too precise … too familiar. Surely those wasted kids at the counter had been there the night before when Shen had walked along that same street with his wife? Not kids who looked like them either, but those self-same kids.

Okay, he thought, perhaps they had. So what?

He had to concede that that alone would be nothing extraordinary; it might have been their second, third or fourth night out for all Shen knew. They might have made an unfortunate habit out of harassing that fat, pimple-faced clerk in the silly white hairnet and the stained white butcher’s coat.