Authors: John Park

Janus (44 page)

BOOK: Janus

13.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

“Get on with it, Grebbel. If you’re going to open that door, do it. What the fuck are you laughing about?”

“I’m not—
laughing
. . . . The door’s stiff. I can’t get any purchase with one leg. You’ll have to help me.”

The officer cursed. As he stepped forward, Grebbel turned to the door. Then he pivoted. His hands blurred and struck. The officer cried out, then froze, gasping, pinned between Grebbel and the others, with Grebbel’s fingers probing his pain centres.

“I wasn’t laughing. Now I’m laughing. Can’t you see me? Because it’s all over, the last joke’s been told—”

—And here it was, finally, the only thing he might hold onto as himself. The door in the dark at the foot of the stairs, the suffering body.

And the white light when he punched through the last illusion.

There was surprisingly little sound, and only a flicker that might have been sunlight reflected from a wave. But when Elinda turned, the truck had vanished. A boiling white cloud obscured the excavations, and the end of the bridge sagged towards the water.

A white pennon of foam streamed from where the dam had been breached. Beyond it, a new cave in the valley wall loomed through the smoke.

She was already running. There were others beside her, ahead of her. Someone grabbed at her arm to pull her back, but let go when she clawed at his face.

She fought her way across the dam to where the bridge slumped into a muddy torrent. The roar beat at her. Its spray stung her eyes. And there was nothing to see. The cavern in the far wall was being scoured clean by the flood. The water carried nothing but mud and couple of logs. In the first furious release, the current had taken its secrets and its dead, and now bore them away to their dissolution in the shadowed reaches of the sea.

“It’s over,” Carlo repeated. “They’ve heard the recording. They’ll want a full statement from you tomorrow, or the next day. Get some sleep now.” Elinda had spent forty hours being questioned and treated for shock and exposure, and then been sent away. Carlo had escorted her home. But now, at her door, the night winds were dying, and she did not want to go in and pace among those empty rooms. She knew she would not sleep.

Carlo’s face was blurred by the dark; the sound of the wind in the trees obscured his voice. To the east, the clouds were streaming away and stars were coming out. “Things will change. They can’t ship us all home, but they’ll have to rethink what they expect of us. We’ll have to remake our lives. . . . Elinda, are you listening? Go to bed. You must sleep.”

She listened to the wind. She thought of clouds being torn apart on the teeth of the mountains and reforming over the valley. “I will,” she muttered and put her hand on the door. “Later. Soon. Leave me alone now please.” Her throat hurt. Her eyes were dry, but she could not remember when she had stopped crying. Silence seemed to fill her.

Sometime later she realised she was alone, and the sky was full of stars. The trees swayed about her and the stream hissed and sputtered.

She walked out onto the stepping stones. The water must be wearing them away every moment, changing their proportions minutely, so that after a season, a lifetime, a million years, their shapes would be quite different. Each layer worn away was a mask removed, but when you had peeled away the last mask, the whole of the stone was gone.

Perhaps all that was important was that the stones turned in the current and presented different edges and faces to each other, and eroded each other in different ways. There was no core, just different planes and angles, like the phases of the moon.

After a while there were threads of silver among the stones. She knelt, and her fingers made slow caressing motions in the water, shaping the outline of a small body. Then she clutched her empty hands to her breasts and wept again.

When she looked, the moons were rising over the ice fields, gilding the distant serrations of the Angels’ Hand. But Beta, the lower of the two, was almost invisible—dull red instead of ivory.

An eclipse, she told herself numbly. An eclipse on a new world. No human being had seen exactly this, though it had happened a million times and would return a million more.

And now she had only one moon shadow. She watched it darken the water beside her. Thinking about moon shadows, she made her way to the bank and turned towards her home. She thought of shadows stalking beside her like familiar ghosts, pale in early evening, but black voids at night. Shadows that slid ahead and forked into unknown darkness, or trailed her steps—at each dawn fading, stretching out and vanishing, to return, shrinking and deepening with the night. Shadows that lengthened and split apart, then reconverged and fused—that opened and closed like a pair of shears. Shadows inseparable from her, but inextricably bound to the shifting configurations of moon and sun, the cycles of sky and ocean.

In her mind she heard singing.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

By a process I can no longer trace, this book grew out of Lester del Rey’s story “Evensong.” My original (dreadful) short story gradually developed into a novel-length manuscript, at which point a number of people contributed useful criticisms: initially, past and current members of the Lyngarde writing group, Jo Beverley, Hildegarde Henderson, Elizabeth Holden, Andrea Schlecht, Madona Skaff and the late Sansoucy Kathenor; followed by Candas Jane Dorsey, Karl Schroeder, Michael Skeet and Jean-Louis Trudel. Subsequent drafts were stimulated by valuable comments from David G. Hartwell and Virginia O’Dine, and aided by Candas Dorsey’s indefatigable support.

Inevitably the writing was shaped by works I have read—to some degree, I suppose, by almost everything I have read—but the influences I am most aware of are William Golding, Fyodor Dostoevski, and Roger Zelazny.

Finally at ChiZine Publications, Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi rescued the book from the wilderness, groomed its fur, polished its teeth, sharpened its claws and sent it out into the world with its head held high.

I cheerfully accept responsibility for any remaining defects, and offer apologies to anyone I have forgotten to mention. Thanks to you all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Park was born in Britain but moved to Canada in 1970 as a graduate student and has lived there ever since. He has done research in chemical physics and been part of a scientific consulting firm. Along the way, he developed a liking for Beethoven, became a graduate of the Clarion writers workshop, and began selling short stories (not necessarily in that order). His fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of Canadian, US and European publications. He lives in Ottawa, where he is a member of the Lyngarde writing group.