Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset (52 page)

When the bullet hit him, he thought it was the greatest joke of all time. He couldn’t really believe it; but nevertheless it was very funny. He watched the blood make a mess of his nice clean uniform with amazement.

The first bullet slammed into his stomach.

The second bullet smashed his wrist.

The third bullet broke his leg.

He fell down.

There was a sound of automatic rifle fire as his two bodyguards rushed towards him, firing blindly across the bridge. They never reached him. For the enemy had automatic rifles also.

Greville was still conscious. He lay slumped by the metal parapet, staring at dents in the rusty ironwork. He felt a great surge of satisfaction. This was the very place.

He thought of Pauline. He thought of Liz. The two faces became blurred and indistinguishable.

‘
Love somebody
…
Build something
,’ whispered that familiar but still unrecognised voice.

‘I knew what it was to love,’ he said aloud. The thought surprised him. It also hurt him – more than the bullets had done.

‘Goddammit I knew what it was to love!’

Things were happening at both ends of the bridge. Greville’s column had brought up their horse-drawn tank. The horses were released, and the tank roared forward under its own power and on the four gallons of precious diesel fuel that it still contained. Meanwhile, at the other end of the bridge, a bazooka came into operation. The first shot blew the turret off the tank, but it still continued on its way. The occupants were determined to get to their beloved Kaygee at all costs.

The second shot missed and hit one of the bridge suspension cables. It snapped like cotton. The bridge swayed and began to slant dangerously sideways. But the tank still came on.

Greville felt entirely happy. He had been hit by three bullets but he felt entirely happy. Or perhaps ‘satisfied’ would be the better word. London was still alive.

‘We’ve got a new civilisation going, Pauline,’ he babbled. ‘We’re back to square one. Everybody wants to kill everybody else. It’s quite exciting, really.’

The second suspension cable snapped, and the bridge rested perilously on a single I beam. The tank came on: the bazooka continued firing.

Greville looked once more at Pauline’s dead face. It dissolved. Then he saw Liz. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured, ‘I’m only good for screwing.’

Greville reached out a hand to touch her. The pain was hitting him now and he found it hard to speak.

‘I never really told you,’ he whispered with difficulty. ‘There weren’t the
words for it. You gave me much more than screwing. Much more even than love. You gave me—’

There was a great tearing. The bridge sagged for a moment like crumpled cardboard. Then, taking Greville and the tank with it, it fell into the river.

The blue waters of the Thames foamed and clouded, turned grey, then dark brown. But presently they cleared as fragments of debris and a dead body, held up by a little air still trapped in its clothes, drifted slowly down the river, under the city’s remaining bridges and out towards the sea.

It was a fine summer morning, promising a long warm day.

The star ship blew itself to glory, as the three of them knew it would, on the thirty-fifth day of their imprisonment in the donjons of Baya Nor. If they had shared the same cell, they might have been able to help each other; but since the day of their capture they had been kept separate. Their only contacts had been the noia who lived with each of them and the guards who brought their food.

The explosion was like an earthquake. It shook the very foundations of Baya Nor. The god-king consulted his council, the council consulted the oracle; and the oracle consulted the sacred bones, shivered, went into a trance and emerged from it a considerable time later to announce that this was the signal of Oruri, that Oruri had marked Baya Nor down for greatness, and that the coming of the strangers was a favourable omen.

The strangers themselves, however, knew nothing of these deliberations. They were incarcerated with their noias until they were rational enough – which meant until they had learned the language – to be admitted to the presence of the god-king.

Unfortunately the god-king, Enka Ne the 609th, was not destined to make the acquaintance of all of them; for the destruction of the star ship was a very traumatic experience. Each of the strangers wore an electronic watch, each of them had been able to keep a very accurate calendar. And each of them knew to the minute when the main computer would finally admit to itself that the crew had either abandoned the ship or were unable to return. At which point the main computer – for reasons obvious to the people who had built the vessel – was programmed to programme destruction. Which meant simply that the controls were lifted from the atomic generator. The rest would take care of itself.

Each of the strangers in his cell began a private countdown, at the same time hoping that one or more of the other nine members of the crew would return in time. None of them did. And so the star ship was transformed into a mushroom cloud, a circle of fire burnt itself out in the northern forests of Baya Nor, and a small glass-lined crater remained to commemorate the event.

In the donjons of Baya Nor, the second engineer went insane. He curled himself up into a tight foetal ball. But since he was not occupying a uterus, and since there was no umbilical cord to supply him with sustenance, and
since the noia who was his only companion knew nothing at all about intravenous feeding, he eventually starved himself to death.

The chief navigator reacted with violence. He strangled his noia and then contrived to hang himself.

Oddly enough, the only member of the crew who managed to remain sane and survive was the star ship’s psychiatrist. Being temperamentally inclined to pessimism, he had spent the last fifteen days of his captivity psychologically conditioning himself.

And so, when the donjons trembled, when his noia cowered under the bed and when in his mind’s eye he saw the beautiful shape of the star ship convulsed instantly into a great ball of fire, he repeated to himself hypnotically: ‘My name is Poul Mer Lo. I am an alien. But this planet will be my home. This is where I must live and die. This is where I must now belong … My name is Poul Mer Lo. I am an alien. But this planet will be my home. This is where I must live and die. This is where I must now belong …’

Despite the tears that were running unnoticed down his cheeks, Poul Mer Lo felt extraordinarily calm. He looked at his noia, crouching under the bed. Though he did not yet perfectly understand the language, he realized that she was muttering incantations to ward off evil spirits.

Suddenly, he felt a strange and tremendous sense of pity.

‘Mylai Tui,’ he said, addressing her formally. ‘There is nothing to fear. What you have heard and felt is not the wrath of Oruri. It is something that I can understand, although I cannot explain it to you. It is something very sad, but without danger for you or your people.’

Mylai Tui came out from under the bed. In thirty-five days and nights she had learned a great deal about Poul Mer Lo. She had given him her body, she had given him her thoughts, she had taught him the tongue of Baya Nor. She had laughed at his awkwardness and his stupidity. She had been surprised by his tenderness, and amazed by his friendship. Nobody – but nobody – ever acknowledged friendship for a simple noia.

Except the stranger, Poul Mer Lo.

‘My lord weeps,’ she said uncertainly. ‘I take courage from the words of Poul Mer Lo. But his sadness is my sadness. Therefore I, too, must weep.’

The psychiatrist looked at her, wondering how it would be possible to express himself in a language that did not appear to consist of more than a few hundred different words. He touched his face and was surprised to find tears.

‘I weep,’ he said calmly, ‘because of the death of a great and beautiful bird. I weep because I am far from the land of my people, and I do not think that I shall ever return …’ He hesitated. ‘But I rejoice, Mylai Tui, that I have known you. And I rejoice that I have discovered the people of Baya Nor.’

The girl looked at him. ‘My lord has the gift of greatness,’ she said simply. ‘Surely the god-king will look on you and be wise.’

That evening, when at last he managed to get to sleep, Poul Mer Lo had nightmares. He dreamed that he was encased in a transparent tube. He dreamed that there was a heavy hoar frost all over his frozen body, covering even his eyes, choking his nostrils, sealing his stiff immovable lips. He dreamed also that he dreamed.

And in the dream within a dream there were rolling cornfields, rippling towards the horizon as far as the eye could see. There was a blue sky in which puffy white clouds drifted like fat good-natured animals browsing lazily on blue pastures.

There was a dwelling – a house with walls of whitened mud and crooked timbers and a roof of smoky yellow reeds. Suddenly he was inside the house. There was a table. His shoulder was just about as high as the table. He could see delicious mountains of food – all the things that he liked to eat best.

There were toys. One of them was a star ship on a launching pad. You set the ship on the launcher, cranked the little handle as far back as you could, then pressed the Go button. And off went the star ship like a silver bird.

The good giant, his father, said: ‘Happy birthday, my son.’

The wicked witch, his mother, said: ‘Happy birthday, darling.’

And suddenly he was back in the transparent tube, with the hoar frost sealing his lips so that he could neither laugh nor cry.

There was terror and coldness and loneliness.

The universe was nothing but a great ball of nothing, punctured by burning needle points, shot through with the all-embracing mirage of stillness and motion, of purpose and irrelevance.

He had never known that silence could be so profound, that darkness could be so deep, that starlight could be so cold.

The universe dissolved.

There was a city, and in the city a restaurant, and in the restaurant a specimen of that vertical biped, the laughing mammal. She had hair the colour of the cornfields he remembered from childhood. She had eyes that were as blue as the skies of childhood. She had beautiful lips, and the sounds that came from them were like nothing at all in his childhood. Above all, she emanated warmth. She was the richness of high summer, the promise of a great sweet harvest.

She said: ‘So the world is not enough?’ It was a question to which she already knew the answer.

He smiled. ‘You are enough, but the world is too small.’

She toyed with her drink. ‘One last question, the classic question, and then we’ll forget everything except this night … Why do you really have to go out to the stars?’

He was still smiling, but the smile was now mechanical. He didn’t know. ‘There is the classic answer,’ he said evenly. ‘Because they are there.’

‘The moon is there. The planets are there. Isn’t that enough?’

‘People have been to the moon and the planets before me,’ he explained patiently. ‘That’s why it’s not enough.’

‘I think I could give you happiness,’ she whispered.

He took her hand. ‘I know you could.’

‘There could be children. Don’t you want children?’

‘I would like your children.’

‘Then have them. They’re yours for the begetting.’

‘My love … Oh, my love … The trouble is I want something more.’

She could not understand. She looked at him with bewilderment. ‘What is it? What is this thing that means more than love and happiness and children?’

He gazed at her, disconcerted. How to find the truth! How to find the words! And how to believe that the words could have anything at all to do with the truth.

‘I want,’ he said with difficulty, and groping for the right images, ‘I want to be one of those who take the first steps. I want to leave a footprint on the farther shore.’ He laughed. ‘I even want to steal for myself a tiny fragment of history. Now tell me I’m paranoid. I’ll believe you.’

She stood up. ‘I’ve had my answer, and I’ll tell you nothing,’ she said, ‘except that they’re playing the Emperor Waltz … Do you want it?’

He wanted it.

They danced together in a lost bubble of time …

He wanted to cry. But how could you cry with frozen lips and frozen eyes and a frozen heart? How could you feel when you were locked in the bleak grip of eternity?

He woke up screaming.

The donjons of Baya Nor had not changed. The black-haired, wide-eyed noia by his side had not changed. Only he had changed because the conditioning – thank God – had failed. Because men were men and not machines. Because the grief inside him was so deep and so desolate that he, who had always considered himself to be nothing more than a blue-eyed computer, at last knew what it was to be a terrified animal.

He sat up in bed, eyes staring, the hairs at the nape of his neck twitching and stiffening.

‘My name is Paul Marlowe,’ he babbled in words that his noia could not
understand. ‘I am a native of Earth and I have aged four years in the last twenty years. I have sinned against the laws of life.’ He held his head in his hands, rocking to and fro. ‘Oh God! Punish me with pain that I can bear. Chastise me! Strip the flesh from my back. Only give me back the world I threw away!’

Then he collapsed, sobbing.

The noia cradled his head upon her breast.

‘My lord has many visions,’ she murmured. ‘Visions are hard to bear, but they are the gift of Oruri and so must be borne. Know then, Poul Mer Lo, my lord, that your servant would ease the burden if Oruri so decrees.’

Poul Mer Lo raised his head and looked at her. He pulled himself together. ‘Do not sorrow,’ he said in passable Bayani. ‘I have been troubled by dreams. I grieve only for the death of a child long ago.’

Mylai Tui was puzzled. ‘My lord, first there was the death of a great bird, and now there is the death of a child. Surely there is too much of dying in your heart?’