Wonders of a Godless World (26 page)

The voice didn’t hesitate.

Even if there is a comet, it doesn’t prove anything. You certainly didn’t visit it out in space with your imaginary foreigner—you heard about it on the radio while you were tied to the bed in your cell. The radio was going the whole time, remember? There was a news report about a new body becoming visible in the night sky, and from there you invented this whole absurdity about the end of the world. If anything, the comet is only more proof of your delusion…

But the orphan could scorn him at last.

Oh, he’d been so smart, he’d almost fooled her; he’d twisted everything inside out and she had so very nearly fallen for it. But that fuzzy dot in the sky had banished all her doubts. It was real, it was coming closer, and he was still trying to gain the use of her power, to bring the rock crashing down upon the planet.

It was clear, then, what she had to do.

No, you’re regressing. The comet has nothing to do with you. It’s just your paranoia, your delusions of grandeur, your sickness.

His voice was still calm, still arguing rationally—but the orphan could hear the flutter of panic just beneath. He was truly afraid now, and rightly so. He had fallen into a snare of his own devising. After all, it was his own impatience that had made him press the comet too hard, squeeze it too tight, so that its surface ruptured. The telltale corona was his own fault. Otherwise the deadly thing would still be invisible up there, and then his trickery might have succeeded. Well, not anymore. She took his unresisting body and lifted it again, a new strength invigorating her arms and legs.

You cannot do this.

Oh, but she could.

Smiling, she turned to the volcano. With the same ease—the power that certainty gave!—she reached downwards and sent a burst of heat surging through the magma reservoirs. The mountain rumbled and shook, and the orphan laughed. She could tear the whole island to pieces if she wanted.

But all she needed was a flow of lava. She pushed, and sent a pulse of molten stone up through the underground channels, and then out, overflowing from a fissure low on the mountainside. Smoke and ash billowed into the night again, and a glowing river began to flow down the volcano’s flanks.

In response the foreigner abandoned words. He knew what the lava was for, and lies had not saved him, reason had not saved him. He had only one resort left. Abruptly, like talons, he was digging into her mind.

And it hurt! It was worse even than when he had stolen her strength to move the comet. Ah, but she had been confused then, bereft in space, her body drugged. She was ready for him this time, and she resisted, her mind as hard and smooth as glass. She could not hope to lock him out forever, she knew. He was too
strong, and inevitably she would tire. But she needed only a little longer now.

The night was lit a dull orange by the fires on the mountain. With the foreigner limp in her arms, the orphan turned aside from the path and descended from the ridge, down into the adjoining valley. Soon she was wading through grass, and then she was enfolded by jungle again. Trees and creepers rose around her, and it was very dark beneath the canopy, but yes—there was the little stream.

It was all as she remembered it. All as he had shown her, way back at the beginning. No doubt he would say now that she had always known about this place, that perhaps she’d overheard someone at the hospital talking about it. Or that she’d been very thirsty that day, and had smelt the water in the stream, and so come looking. But she didn’t believe any of that. The lava tube had been
his
secret.

He was wrenching at her mind now. Oh yes, he knew where she was taking him, and what she intended. He had called it worse than murder, and it was. After all, there was no point in killing him. He would only come to life again.

She followed the stream as before, climbing up the gully, and finally a hole opened ahead in the darkness. It was an arch of stone, the ragged mouth of a tunnel that led into midnight. The lava tube. The orphan lifted her gaze beyond the entrance and saw, through the undergrowth, the fierce glow of fires. Further up the gully, the jungle was burning. The lava was coming, as she had arranged. It would not come through the tube, of course; the tunnel was long since blocked. No, the molten river would simply flow down the gully, slow and deep, until—

The foreigner’s attack broke out anew, a mad hammering at her mind. And the blows told. A certain numbness was creeping over
her, a dislocation between thought and action. She was weakening. But she made herself move forward into the tube. It was black in there, yet her eyes could see. She carried the foreigner inwards for a distance, and then set him down on the rocky floor. Fifty paces behind her was the opening, and fifty paces ahead the tube ended in a blank stone wall.

A prison then, with only the one exit.

His assault on her mind abated suddenly, and she stared down at him in surprise—and then in revulsion. His dead eyes were fixed upon her, and his whole body, from fingers to toes, was twitching grotesquely. He was trying to wake up. In his desperation, he was commanding his useless legs and arms to function. But it was still too soon. All he could achieve was a kind of spastic quivering, horrid to watch.

Sickened, the orphan turned and walked away.

She came to the entrance and climbed back out into the jungle. The glow from the fires was bright now, she could hear the crackle of flames and smell burning wood. And there was another, more earthy, metallic smell. Much closer now. Good. She clambered up away from the stream, high enough to be clear of the lava’s path. Then she paused, and looked back to the tunnel.

He would not die, she was sure of that, not even a temporary death. The lava would be thick and slow at this point, it would not be fluid enough to roll back down the tube and devour him. It would merely seal the entrance. It would be hot in the tunnel for a while, and the air would be foul, but he had survived much worse.

There would be no death—but he would be confined in there for as long as the mountain stood. A hundred years. A thousand. And even if one day he did contrive to die, and be reborn, it wouldn’t matter. He could
not shift himself while dead. He would come to life again in the same place. The same dark tunnel. Still sealed in. His body might change, and his face, and he could wait even ten thousand years—immortal.

But he would never be able to leave.

And now the river of lava was drawing near. At its forefront it was all black, a smoking, shoving mass of stone and charred wood, but further back, the flow was white and blindingly hot, even from a distance.

She heard something, over the fires.

A sound—liquid, clotted, awful. It came from inside the tube, weirdly amplified. It was the foreigner, the man in the tunnel, crying aloud. In these final few seconds, he was somehow forcing words from a throat not fully formed. She heard the terror in the sound, and the disbelief. He was pleading with her, perhaps. But she would never know what he said. She was incapable of understanding speech.

Then the fires raged too loud to hear anything else. She watched as the lava, a congealed wave half the height of the trees, rolled laboriously over the mouth of the tunnel. And then she had to turn and run from the heat.

But that wasn’t the end of it, of course.

She climbed away from the burning jungle, towards the ridge again. And no, that wasn’t the end of it at all. She might have trapped his body, but that meant very little when he was still free in thought. He could still, even from his freshly formed prison, reach out with his mind. He could still reach into
her
.

Indeed, as if he’d just remembered the same thing, she felt him come rushing back into her head, as she’d known he would. But she barely recognised him now; he was like a wild thing, a raging animal, grappling brutally at her skull. If she succumbed and let him through, then he could still steal her strength away. And if he could do that, then the tunnel was no prison at all. With her power under his dominion, he need only make the earth quake for him, and the tube would crack wide open.

A deep weariness sank into the orphan. An overwhelming desire to sleep, to which she must not yield. In fact, she could never rest again. Never let down her guard, or he would be there. And that
was the crux of it. He would win eventually. As long as she was available to him, then the danger would never go away.

So there was only one answer.

She had to remove herself from him.

She was nearing the top of the ridge, and slowing now, not merely from fatigue. There was a sadness in her too. A reluctance to come to the finish. Because it wasn’t as simple as running away. After all, where could she go? She would never be allowed to leave the island, not on her own, not the poor idiot girl. And even if she could, it wouldn’t help. His mind was not limited by distance. He would track her down wherever she went, even if it was the other side of the planet.

And so that was the
real
answer.

She had to remove herself from the
world
.

The orphan stood atop the ridge, and gazed across the smoking wasteland to the volcano. Already the lava flows had cooled, curdling into slag on the lower slopes, and their glow now barely warmed the darkness. There was only one more thing she needed from the mountain. A final, very special eruption.

For the last time she reached out with her senses—feeling him fight her at every moment—and fashioned the heat and the pressure in the underground chambers to one single purpose. It was quite delicate, really, and despite everything she marvelled at her own ability. How wondrous it all could have been, such a talent, if things hadn’t turned out this way, if it hadn’t all been ruined by him.

But it was too late now. She summoned the energy, hurled it into the mountain. There came a single detonation, a profound punch of air. A tight knuckle of smoke belched up from the volcano’s peak, but thrown beyond it, shot far and clear into the night, was a lone, black, spinning piece of rock. This time she really had done it—blown the top off the mountain. The very tip, in fact. She
watched calmly as it rose. It was a boulder the size of a house, her own miniature comet, with a very specific target. She had calculated the forces exactly, and knew precisely where it would land.

The foreigner’s savage attacks reached a new frenzy, but she held him out still, staring up. The rock attained the peak of its arc, and seemed to hang above her. She remembered flying. She remembered soaring over the mountaintop with him on the first flight they made together. She remembered seeing a little tree, hidden on the very pinnacle. She had wanted to look, later, for that tree. To prove to herself that everything was real. Well, if the tree existed, it would be up there on that boulder, right now. But she made no effort to see. The rock began to fall.

There was just one last thing she needed to do now, a final risk she must rule out. Because there was a chance—slim, but undeniable—that the foreigner had not lied to her in one special instance. There was a chance that she really was, like him, immortal. In which case, even this falling stone would not be enough. She might survive despite it, and her power with her, still at his disposal.

So, she did it. With a shrug, she gave the power up.

The power, and any hope of life eternal. In a heartbeat, it all slipped away from her like a bathrobe falling from her shoulders.

Which was the strangest thing of all. That it could be done, and so simply. And yet she knew too that such a sacrifice was permissible only as a final act, a choice to be made in the last moment before death, and at no other time. Indeed, it was the choice itself, she saw, that made death possible.

It struck her then, as the rock crept down from the sky, that in all the foreigner’s many endings, he had never
surrendered
his life. He had always fought against dying, always clung so bitterly to survival, as if there was nothing else that mattered. Even now he
was clinging on—clawing despairingly at her thoughts—just as he always had. Refusing death, and hating the world that demanded it of him.

It wouldn’t change even once she was gone, the orphan foresaw. He would refuse death still. Trapped forever in his lightless cell, he would live on and on, the most hideous existence she could imagine. He would come to hate his very immortality. And yet it would never occur to him—and this was the most ghastly aspect—that he could let it go. That he could just say—as he could have all those years ago, beneath the landslide—
enough
. Enough suffering. Let it end. And thus, truly, die.

But he was gone now. As she cast away her powers, so she cast him away too, moving far beyond his tawdry reach. And in place of all the confusion and weariness and pain, a strange peace and clarity infused the orphan.

How remarkable! Her lifelong madness—it was as if it had vanished. The fog of her thoughts had cleared, the wall around her mind had fallen, and all the things that had been blocked or hidden from her were suddenly free to enter. Memories flooded up, transformed. The boulder was tumbling down, but the orphan felt she had the leisure to relive every minute of her twenty-one years. She felt so aware. So
sane
.

Images, and print, and music; it was as though she’d comprehended them all along. And speech. A lifetime of speech rushed through her, all those words she’d heard in dumb mystification, she understood them all at last.

And names! She could remember names! Her mother’s name. The names of all the nurses and the patients. And the old doctor’s name. And more—she remembered the name of her town, and of the big town too. She remembered the name of her island, and
of the ocean around it, and of all the other oceans. She remembered the name of every city and country in the world. Endless names.

She even remembered her own.

And something was rising in her throat, pushing against vocal cords that had never formed a word, something incredible.

The rock filled the night sky. She could still step back and let it miss her, she knew. She could still withdraw her choice and return to what she had been. There was still time. Why, everlasting life, if she wanted.

But the thing in her throat was bursting.

‘Ha!’ cried the orphan, out loud.

And stepped forward.