The Raft: A Novel (48 page)

“We can’t stop,” he said. “Not here. We’ll die if we stop.”

“Andy,” I said, panting. “I need to find Andy. That’s it. Then we go home.”

Home. What home? All I knew was that wherever we were, and wherever Andy was, it was not and would not ever be home. Home was peace, wherever peace resided.

Gideon turned and helped me up to stand, adding, “Then we go home.”

(
I ran into her, just as I’d imagined, and then I cried. She asked me what had happened. She asked me where I’d been, but I said nothing. She kissed me on the top of my head, rubbed my back in circles, and said to me the words I’d hoped to hear, but at that moment they sounded like the most impotent little words I’d ever heard:
It’s okay, sweet pea, everything’s going to be all right)

Quon

T
he thick iron gates parted and opened slowly, squealing on their large hinges. We walked cautiously through the opening and entered what looked to be another commune. A number of tents and shacks squatted around the colossal vessel, each pegged into the solid earth with iron rods. Steam rose in the distance. There was the clang of metal on metal from an undetermined location, and then the clanging stopped.

At first, there appeared to be no one.

Gradually, men, women and children began to emerge from their shaded nooks. More and more of them, hundreds of people, slipping from the shadows. They walked into the dusty road that lay before us—the road leading to the entrance of Chang’e 11. They stayed close to each other and stared at Gideon and me with empty eyes and blank, impassive faces. Their clothes were torn, dusty and rumpled. Their hair was tangled and dishevelled, their skin leathery and dark. These desert people were shadows of their former selves, I could tell. For whatever reason they had chosen to dwell beside Chang’e 11, their time in that place had eaten away at them, their souls and their minds bled from their bodies by an ever-thirsty vampire.

They said nothing to welcome or rebuff us. It was hard to tell whether they knew we were really there at all.

“We’re here to see Quon,” I said, my voice whipped away by a hot breeze. For a moment they did not react to my words, and then, with perfect synchronicity, they broke into a terrible laughter. They cackled and howled and threw their wrinkled faces to the sky. The commune filled with their inflated roar.

As suddenly as it had begun, the laughter stopped. The joke was over. The vacant faces returned. The hollow eyes.

And then a collective breath, drawn in deeply before they roared as one: “I. AM. QUON.”

I looked to Gideon but he did not look back. He wouldn’t take his eyes off them.

The many synched voices rumbled: “PLEASE. COME IN. MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME.”

“There was a man once,” I said loudly. “Just one man. Quon. I want to see him.”

“WHAT DOES IT MATTER?” they all said. “ONE MAN OR MANY?”

“You’re a coward, Quon! Hiding—”

“HIDING?” they bellowed mechanically—men, women, children. And I could now hear something else under their collective words: the mutterings of individual voices, soft and distant. The droning white noise of the people they had once been, the inner stirrings of terror and confusion. A voice here, a voice there:
Don’t go in, where am I, why me, no, no, no, I can’t do this, oh god, oh god, help me, has anyone seen my child, I don’t belong here, take me with you, I’m looking for my father, please, I don’t know where I am, why, why, why, is anyone there …

It didn’t last long. A silence quickly befell them all, as if an anxious puppeteer had pulled their strings taut, and then the unified voice went on: “I AM NOT HIDING. I’M HERE. THIS IS IT. THE RENASCENCE. THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE ONE. THIS IS WHAT YOU ALWAYS WANTED, ALWAYS DREAMED OF—UNITY.”

“You don’t impress me,” I said. “Show your face.”

The communers paused. They edged back to the sides of the road, opening the path to Chang’e 11 … They raised their right hands and in perfect unison waved in the direction of the entrance. On each face I saw the same smirk, and then a quiet snicker hummed through the crowd. A cruel prank awaited us and they could not contain their mutual glee. As Gideon and I walked along the desert road, lined with those puppeteered people, their heads swivelled as we passed.

Had these automatons been lured into the desert or had they chosen to submit themselves? Perhaps they too had come on a pilgrimage. A journey not unlike our own, to meet their “maker”—to question him, or destroy him or even to hail him. Whatever the reason, their maker had not allowed them to leave. I promised myself then, no matter what happened, no matter what Quon said or did, I would fight with all my strength and will against such a fate.

Gideon said nothing as we walked through the commune. As we reached the end of the road the large section of the massive structure creaked into life and lowered to the ground, like the drawbridge of an ancient castle. I looked back at the hundreds of faces turned in our direction and then Gideon and I walked into the dark confines of Chang’e 11.

A long and dark passage stretched into the belly of the ship. A memory hit me: Jai-Li’s walk along the well-lit corridor towards the underground house in the tower. I felt what she must have felt. She had wanted to escape her life of imprisonment. She had wanted answers.

It took a while for our eyes to adjust to the dark interior of the vessel. All heat was gone, replaced by the industrial cold of non-operational machinery. The walls of the passage were made of welded sheets of metal, studded with heavy levers and hung with faded warning signs. Each step on the iron grating of the walkway caused a clanking echo that rippled into the congealing darkness. I worried for a moment that the door would close behind us, sealing us in a gigantic mechanical tomb, but that was a chance we had to take. We would not walk back out until we had what we had come for: answers.

The interior was dank. Oily liquid gathered in the corners of the ceiling and dripped through the grate beneath us. Eventually we came to a corner and turned, deeper into Chang’e 11, away from the light of day. I could hear my breath, and Gideon’s. We approached an iron door that stood partially open and stepped through into a large room sloppily furnished with defunct equipment and dusty panels of instruments. A dim blue light shone from the corner of the room, but we couldn’t see any power source.

“There,” Gideon said, and pointed his blue-lit arm to another door at the far end. We walked through another door and along another passage and then another.

The ship groaned, contracting and expanding under its own weight. The further we walked, turning and turning in endless, maddening circles, the more it seemed that the byzantine corridors would never end. We were dooming ourselves to an impossible maze. The air began to thin as we pushed forward into the iron gut of Chang’e 11. I could no longer see Gideon beside me, but I could hear him. I could feel the faint warmth from his body.

Then the warmth was gone.

The breathing had stopped.

I spun in my spot, fanning out my hands to get a sense of where I was. There were no walls alongside me. Gideon was gone and there was nothing around me but the darkness. Panic settled swiftly; my breath came out in ragged gasps. I swung my head from side to side, my hands flailing before me.

“Gideon,” I called. There was no reply. “Gideon.”

(
If the light won’t have me, let the dark. The light, I’ve learned, is happier to whore itself
)

I stopped. Breathed deeply to calm myself. I closed my eyes then, embracing the darkness instead of fighting it. My breathing slowly returned to normal. My hands came down slowly at my sides. As the sound of my own fear began to subside, a faint sense of orientation took its place.

Listen
, Kayle. Listen. You don’t have to
see
where you are. You know where you are. You’re here. You’re not lost. You are here and you are
now.
You are here and now and it is all and it is everything. Do not fear it. Move forward, move slowly, and do not fear anything. You’ll find your way.

Just listen.

“Mr. Kayle,” I heard. “Here.”

I opened my eyes and the hulking shadow of Gideon stood before me. There was a dull groan of metal on metal and then there was light. Gideon had his hand on the handle of a large door. He swung the door out carefully and the rest of his features materialised in the widening gap between door and frame. I smiled and made my way towards him, entering another division of the vessel.

Gideon stepped in after me, into what appeared to be a vast iron hall. (
The room was the hall of Valhalla itself: an incomprehensibly unwarranted amount of space with almost nothing inside it
) The far walls were lined with broken screens and dashboards and all was weakly lit by a large, circular skylight. Sunlight, struggling to reach the depths of the vessel, probably refracted into the hall from large mirrors lodged within the hull above. But such a skylight would be useless in space, I thought, unless it had been used to provide the astronauts with a heaven of sorts—to keep a long-travelling crew orientated beneath the cosmos.

Nine years in space was a long time to be away from home. What were the unspoken necessities for such a long voyage? Could we handle being away from something as matter-of-fact as an overhead sky? What would happen to us if we were denied the staples of our earthbound environment? Our bodies might survive these missing things, but could our minds? Could we truly last without a sky, an open plain, a horizon, or fresh air?

Could Jai-Li?

Gideon and I walked towards the centre of the hall. The weak light met the floor, illuminating a man. He was seated on a big black chair—the throne of a commander, a captain, or a king—raised off the floor and attached to a metal pole that pivoted from the ceiling. He was wearing an astronaut’s suit without the helmet, his arms loose on each of the rests. His head drooped listlessly to the side. He was frail and studiedly languorous, uninterested in our arrival in the court of his castle.

“Quon,” I said. “
Quon!
”

The astronaut’s head lifted slowly and he turned to look at me. He smiled drunkenly, twisting his neck from side to side, clicking it into place.

He sat up in his chair and cleared his throat.

“You,” he said, leering. “Old chap.”

Gideon and I stopped on the outskirts of the beam of light. Quon ran his tongue around his lips and gums, taking his time. He slumped back in his chair and wove his fingers into each other, cracking his knuckles.

“You’ve come a long way,” he said.

“I want you to tell me where to find my son.”

Quon snorted, amused. “Right, right. Your son. Andy. Is that right?” He leaned to his side and grabbed a can of Diet Coke. He sucked it down, his long, pallid neck convulsing as he swallowed. He crushed the can in his hand and threw it across the floor.

“That’s right.”

“Right,” he said again. “
Young
Andy. But that’s not all. Surely. Hm? And this man beside you.
Gideon
, is it?”

Gideon said nothing. Quon offered him a smile. The same smile as when he’d come down from the woods to watch me pull Gideon’s dead body on the logs. I was acutely aware that at any moment he could cast us both into such a place, a place without time, with no escape. A place where we would live long enough to forget who we were, lose ourselves to lunacy. He could condemn us to such a place with just a thought.

I wondered how many people had attempted to stop him, if, indeed, there had been any. Perhaps every person in the commune outside had tried and each was now trapped somewhere in an incomprehensible version of reality. How could anyone have come close enough to pull a trigger, or take out a knife? He’d have simply looked them in the eye, and cast them into an eternity of his making. No paradise, either, I imagined.

“I want Andy,” I said. “Do you know where he is or not?”

“What do
you
think?”

“I think you know.”

“
I
think you might be right, Kayle.”

“Then tell me.”

“Why on earth should I? Can you give me one good reason?”

I said nothing. He was probably reading my mind, knowing I had no next play. I tried to think of nothing, to quell the fear that swirled in my thoughts like poisonous dust.

He looked up to the skylight. “The sun,” he said, “is so weak. We fear it and admire it, but against the other suns in the universe, it’s nothing exceptional. Trust me. Our sun is a dying ember. There are real fires raging out there, but to us they’re just pinpricks in the night. Pretty little stars. Nothing like our precious and mighty
sun
. No!” he laughed. “You humans know nothing about who you are, or even where you are. So you scramble for scraps and paint them gold. You call what you do ‘living’, but you’re just like the sun that bore you—nothing but self-important, dying embers.”

“I’m not interested in your stories. I’ve heard enough.”

“I see.”

“I just want my son.”

“Of course you do. And he’s here.”

“Where?”

“Hm, well …” Quon tapped his finger against the side of his head. “Somewhere in the mess.”

“You don’t have him. Only his memories. His past. Those aren’t
him.
”

“Ah,” he said, gaining curiosity. “So there’s more to you than just your memories, hm? Are you sure about that? Hasn’t really been my experience, but I appreciate your conviction. You really believe it.” He paused, stared me down, and then broke the gaze, rolling his eyes across the walls of the large room. “I must apologise for how things look around here; it’s a bit of a mess. Not particularly homely at the moment, but … well, we are in the process of relocating. You know how these things go. We’re expanding, you see, planning for the future.” He held his bony white hands up to his face and seemed to study them, front and back. “My mental endeavours have taken a toll on my body, but then not much can be said for the human body. It’s a flimsy vessel. Doesn’t quite live up to the ambitions of the mind, does it? No, the mind, oh, it yearns to explore, to expand, to crash through barriers—to live a thousand years! But the body—the flesh is an anchor. A dead weight, as they say. And in my case, it seems the body has been less willing than usual to support the architecture of my …
vast
consciousness. Which is why I’ll be leaving this terrible sack and moving on. I hear there’s a temple up in the mountains that’s quite lovely this time of year. A place where the fruit and vegetables are the largest and sweetest, the water is the purest, and the flesh … well, the flesh is less reluctant to rot on your bones. Yes, you know this place too, don’t you? We have a mutual friend with a newborn child making her way there as we speak. Making her way to a man named Sun Zhang—still wandering around up there with his three daughters—a man whose slow-ageing body should accommodate my transferred consciousness most suitably, for a time.”