The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Vol. 1 Part 24

"Nothing," I tell her. The body that carries me is too fundamentally damaged. It could be repaired, of course, but what is the point? My task is over, I have failed. I will be reabsorbed. Someone else will be sent, and they will try again. The anomaly will have grown, but it will be fought, only not by me next time, or at least, not by the combination of traits that is this me.

"What happens to us when he has sucked us dry?"

She is strong, this one.

"If this is the Accord, then where does the data go when he has absorbed it? You said he's some kind of black hole-what's inside him?"

"Who knows?" I say. "The physically dead enter the Accord and we live on, again and again, for eternity. But attractant anomalies like this remove us from the afterlife. It's like asking where the dead went before there was an Accord. They died. They stopped being. They ended. If he takes us from the Accord, we end."

"What can I do?" she repeats, and I realize that she does not mean to ask what she can do to help my mortally damaged body, but rather what can she do to stop the anomaly, the attractor, her lover.

"He said I was his air, his feathers, that I held him together," she said. "I want that to stop."

In that instant I want to paint her. Like the rainbows, I could paint her a million times and each would be different, but always her strength, her purity, would come through.

"You have to get close to him," I tell her.

Tish Goldenhawk "You HAVE TO get close to him," this wreck of a human construct tells her. "Hold him."

Tish Goldenhawk nods. In her mind she can see Angelo holding Ferdinand, absorbing him. She knows exactly what this agent of the Accord means. "What then?"

"That's all," he tells her. "I will do the rest."

ANGELO WAITS FOR her in the encampment, smiling. She should have known he would not go on without her.

"I'm sorry," he says. His words have no meaning. They are just vibrations in the air. "They tried to kill me."

She nods. "They're dead now," she says, wondering then at the lie-whether she has made a fatal mistake already.

He shakes his head. "One lives," he says, "but only tenuously. He does not have long, I think."

He turns. "We must move on," he says. "There will be more of them. Another day and we will reach a city, I think. A city would be good."

She looks at him, tries to see him as she had once seen him, a charming, exciting escape. That had only ever been one of her fantasies. She tries to see him as her lover, but cannot. Tries to see him even as human, but no.

"I can't," she says in a quiet voice.

He turns, raises an eyebrow.

"I can't go on." Getting stronger. "I'm leaving. Going home. You don't need me anymore."

"But..."

"No buts," she says. "I can't do this. I'm exhausted. Drained. I'm leaving."

He is not human, but there is so much in him that is.

"You can't," he says. "I... You're my support. My feathers, the air that holds me up. The air that I breathe!"

"I'm tired," she says. "You can't lean on me anymore. I'm none of those things... I'm not strong enough. Can't you see? It's me who needs supporting!"

"I will always support you," he says.

He opens his arms, just as he had for Ferdinand, who had been too weak to continue.

He steps forward.

She waits for him to come to her, to hold her.

Scent of cinnamon, of dry, dusty feathers. She holds him.

She senses the flow, the seething ma.s.s of energies. They came from... beyond.

He gasps, straightens.

She holds on.

He is looking down at her. He knows. He dips his head and kisses her on the brow.

She holds nothing, holds air, hugs herself. She drops to her knees.

There are feathers, nothing else. She gathers some. She will cast them for him, with bread, when she gets back to Penh.e.l.lion.

She does not doubt that she will go there, go home.

Poor Milton. Poor Druce. She has changed. She does not know what can be salvaged, but she will go home now and she will see.

She stands.

Even if nothing can be repaired, she has no regrets. She would do it all again.

She is of the Accord.

They all are of the Accord.

The Wedding Party.

Simon Ings.

THE RISK IS in standing still.

It can come at you quickly. A gas lamp sets a tent alight and six Somalian refugees die in the flames-Ta-da!

Or it can be subtle. Last year, a great many Somalian refugees gave up their flight altogether, boarded boats in Aden, and headed home-and why? Maybe because the Yemeni authorities let on how many Palestinian refugees had already died in the camp they were bound for-the camp at Al Ghanaian.

The point, either way, is this-the risk is in standing still.

I've said to my wife: "Aiden's dead. Mocha's closed out."

I said to her: "Lebanon to Syria to Cyprus. Come on."

I said, "He hasn't any choice."

This is her brother we are talking about. My lover-which is a joke. Rather, he is the other side of that coin I once coveted-Redson and Hope, that long-wished-for alchemical wedding.

Slip through Europe, that's the ticket. If you can call it slipping. Slump through Europe. Slouch through Europe. Squat, squeeze, s.h.i.+mmy through Europe, to the Red Cross camp at Sangatte, just a short walk away from the Channel Tunnel.

Kurdish gangs patrol the camp, which isn't even a real camp-just a converted railway warehouse. The Kurds organize the escapees; they arrange transit attempts through the Tunnel; they know what's what. Whether you're a single man from Iraq or Iran, or a family from Afghanistan, Kosovo, or Albania-it's all the same to them. You don't get through without you paying the fee.

And you pay the fee. Of course you do. The risk is in standing still. The risk is in standing up- standing up, I mean, to them. There are riots in Sangatte, as you would expect from eight hundred and fifty refugees crammed into quarters meant for two hundred. All of them trying somehow, anyhow, to sc.r.a.pe together that fee.

I've said to Hope-that's my wife's name, Hope-"Get Redson to Cyprus and I'll do the rest." And I'm already promising more than I should. The Snakeheads have much of this route I'm suggesting sewn up-from the Balkans to Sangatte, some say.

She says nothing. She looks out the window at the poisoned Devons.h.i.+re countryside. No sound impinges from outside. The foot-and-mouth crisis has occasioned a wholesale slaughter of livestock in this region. Nothing moves. It is as though the holocaust has been extended even to the insects and the birds.

"He hasn't a choice!"

She looks out the window at the rain. If you can call it rain, drizzle scrubbing the land and the sky into one.

Drizzle subsumes everything, the yellowish paniculate-faint traces of a bruise-that must, I suppose, mark a nearby pyre. It subsumes too, and utterly, the fine spray from the hose, which runs above the five-bar gate. The hose spans the farm track on thin scaffolding. And there's the bucket where I dutifully scrubbed my boots an hour- Jesus, no, two hours ago. Impatient, I turn her chair; I force her to look away from the window, away from the near-bankrupt ruin that was a Devon dairy farm (it's not even ours, we just rent the house).

She hates it when I pull her chair about, when I take advantage of her condition. I stroke her head. "Stop it," she says.

"He really has no choice," I insist. "If it was anyone else he'd have got away with it. But Beneson was the only left-footed striker on the team. The national team. They won't let it go."

Redson-my lover, ho ho; anyway, my brother-in-law-he was working the qat caravans out of Somalia when he surprised a burglar, coming in through his kitchen window. Got terrified. Shot him-and thought that he was within his rights so to do. And he would have been-had the burglar not turned out to be a national hero.

Hope can do this. She can get him out. Overland from Mogadishu to Nairobi. Round the lake to Kampala and from there by air freight to Libya. By boat to Lebanon, then Syria, Cyprus, "Come on!"

Hope can do this-because she has done it herself. After we split she went back home to Malawi, as safe a country as you're going to get in central Africa, working at the Dzaleka refugee camp in Dowa. Only she got caught up with the Congolese mafia that run the bus concessions out of Lilongwe and Blantyre, and had to run in the end. If you can call it running. They drove her and drove her, nowhere was safe. And when she had had enough of running-if you can call it running-she bit the bullet. She slipped through, slunk through, squeezed herself painfully through Europe's ever-tightening net-did a good job of it, too-but in the end it was too much. She had to call me, make some sort of peace with me, beg me to help her cross the Channel into Britain. Which I naturally did.

The snakeheads have Europe sewn up. From the Balkans right through to Sangatte, so they say. And that was enough for me. I got out of all that, and quick. For several years now, the nearest I've come to that line of work is to sort out the illegals who haunt Cricklewood. I'm a sort of fly-by-night foreman-c.u.m-bus driver. You know what it's like-two navvies this way, and three navvies that and jump quick in the back of the van before we all get nicked. Seeing to the casual labor market of Cricklewood is more than enough to fill my day, and this morning I found myself seriously wondering if I'm up to this fresh obligation.

But Redson is my lover, the other side of that coin I put such store by. And call me sentimental but I cannot bear to think of them parted like this. These two people. These two half-people, I should say, because it seems even now that they are only the halves of a single person, a person I might once have drawn together. A person I loved. Hope/Redson. Redson/Hope.

I've said to her: "Calais's as tight as a b.i.t.c.h. So I'll take him through Ouistreham. They've just axed the frontier post and there's boats sailing to Portsmouth all day."

"You mustn't," she says. "No. Stop it." Her torso flexes uselessly. Her head bobs and tosses.

I am stroking her neck. "Please." I am shucking her s.h.i.+rt free and stroking her breast. "Please."

"It's safer," I tell her, "it's really come on. It's so much safer now."

My hand does its business. The tears come and I wipe them away for her. I settle her back in her chair and I know I have won.

Hope has done her business and I have done mine. Redson has landed up in Sangatte, because it's safer for us to follow the migrant flow, because the Snakeheads have their nostrils raised and aquiver for the innovations of a compet.i.tor.

Anyway, I got him out of there last night and paid the Kurd his b.l.o.o.d.y fee. Then, soon as we were out of sight, I legged it with Redson back over the fence, away from the Tunnel, and back onto the highway system. It took a while to find the van-when I go shopping I'm always losing the d.a.m.n thing in the multi-storey. It's not big- people movers are taller.

We reached Ouistreham by first light. Redson sat there blinking up at the buildings like an inner-city kid on an excursion trip-he's a natural tourist, a camera on legs.

I've rented us an old villa on the Riva Bella-the white sand beach near to town. Redson needs to sleep if we're to make a start tomorrow, but the end is in sight, the biggest hurdle yet to cross, and the door had swung open on the room holding all my gear-he saw everything. It took an age to calm him down. "It's so much safer now." Though surely the size of the van is clue enough, what I have planned for him.

Redson is younger than Hope by two years. They have a Malawian mother, dead of AIDS. They have a Scottish father, a lapsed minister who vanished as soon as they got of an age to start asking about pa.s.sports and paternity. There is another brother, a half-brother, through whom I first met them-Olaf, a surgeon at the hospital where I did my placement. It was him who taught me how to fillet skin flaps for the scores of amputees we were dealing with then. Malawian roads, for all that they are practically empty, are some of the most dangerous in the world.

Hope's skin is as dark as Olaf's-she's as dark as any pure-bred African. Dad's pallid genes kept out of sight, dwelling instead, deep in the bone, narrowing and tightening her features as she grew, lengthening her neck and her back. Dad's seed made her magically beautiful-people imagine she's desert stock, from Namibia or even further north. A regal Saharan beauty. They'd never guess the wet and windy truth.

Redson, though, he's the other side of the coin. Dad's seed floats on Redson's surface like a rash. It has gingered his hair and freckled his hands. Rough, blotched skin hangs off his heavy features like an old dog blanket. Stocky, hairy, unpleasure-giving. Until you understand the nature of my desire, my choice of lover seems ludicrous. You see, I was only half in love with him, just as I was only half in love with Hope. I loved the person they might be. But love's all done with now. Unsa-tiated, love gnarls itself into something else, something nameless.

He is saying things to me like, "Leave me alone." "I want to stay in France." "I can speak French." Only he is a murderer-in the law's eyes, if not his own. And where might he procure a faster, more reliable change of ident.i.ty than from me, with all my contacts-and all of them on the other side of that maddeningly narrow strip of water, that Channel?

And I am sitting here holding his hands, rea.s.suring him for what seems like hours, is hours-2pm now, and you can see the panic and the exhaustion battling it out through that mottled, gingerish skin of his as he slides down in his seat. I stir him, lift him, urge him to the room I have laid out for him-dark, cool, looking landward, in an upper storey overlooked by no one.

It is hard to let go of his hand, hard not to bring it to my face. It is hard to face tomorrow.

So after a catnap I walk into town and have an early dinner at a seafood restaurant done out like a Thirties Parisian metro. I order smoked cod and cider and though the food is excellent I realize I have made a very bad choice. I must not drink because of tomorrow, and without a drink, and surrounded by this decor, how can I not fill my head with thoughts of metros and train tunnels, nets closing in, of narrowing doorways and lids coming down-?

I am back before Redson wakes. Carefully, I let myself into his room. He sleeps nude, as usual. It is a warm night, so he has pushed the blankets back and made do with a sheet. I ease it down, past his shoulders, his flank, his knees. I resist the temptation to touch, to map his body with my hands, to relent. He has no choice; nor have I.

You can deaden nerves by acupuncture-that's the principle behind the blanket I'm laying over him. It's faster than gas anesthetics and safer too. Except that it sounds unnervingly like a fire as it crackles and crinkles, tucking itself around his sleeping flesh.

Ta-da!

Dawn breaks and I'm detaching the muscles from his right shoulder blade, rolling the shoulder girdle opposite to the direction of the cut to get the angle. It's still not light enough that I can douse the lamps I brought along, though the heat they give off is wicked, and I need still more light to safely free and divide the neurovascular bundle, where it emerges just beneath the serratus. Once the clavicle's free it's just a matter-or it should be-of closing the skin flaps over suction drains. Only it's the same problem with this arm as the last; in my hurry I've made the flaps too short. So I do what I did last time and saw off the acromion process parallel to the scapula, to make the wound more flat.

By now I'm exhausted and it's light outside, so I take another catnap, then I go back in and turn the lights out and open the curtains. There's a table under the window and I stand there, luxuriating in the cool coming in through the top of the sash, while I work on his arms, first one, then the other-disarticulating the elbows.

The bags I'm using are the cleverest, the scylliated insides sucking round and close over each body part. Pink goo runs across the seam like a cartoon smile.

In the afternoon I start on his legs and it's back-breaking work-I forgot how back-breaking. He's tall for the tank, and after careful measurement, I've plumped for pelvectomy. Work this radical is not without its sublime moments. Once the iliac vessels are out the way you can see the sacral nerve roots deep within the pelvis. But for the most part it's pure butchery, hacking the muscles of his back from the wing of the ilium.

And on with his blanket again. And a catnap for me.

It's dark again by the time the pelvis starts to open.

For two days, the drains do their work. For two days, Redson looks up at me, wide-eyed, his expression no different to the one he wore when we drove through Ouistreham. Mouthing. Trying to speak.

For two days, I hunt out things to distract him. Music for him to listen to. Things to read to him. But sound does not touch his spirit, and never has. He was born all eyes.

Even with all this equipment I cannot for the life of me jerry-rig the mirror he asks me for, so that he might look out of the window at the sky-"The sky, at least!"

Of course he cannot be moved.