By Light Alone (52 page)

At the end of the week, suddenly, the mood on the barge changed. Although Li issued no direct orders, it somehow became generally known that they were heading off, that the time for the attack was upon them. The engines were warmed up, and the barge pulled away into open water.

That evening Christophe found Issa at the prow, watching the ceaselessly fascinating way the boat in motion cleaved the waves. ‘Have you ever been to war before, Issa?’ he asked.

She looked at him, and it was obvious the answer he was expecting. She shook her head.

So he put an arm about her shoulder. ‘You might think there’d be no need to ask that question, since you’re so very young. But you’d be surprised! I’ve met veterans of Florida who were younger than you.’

‘I don’t suppose,’ said Issa, still looking out to sea, ‘that war is so
very
different from peace.’

‘Spoken like a true Spartacist! Always the struggle, eh?’

‘What will you need me to do?’

‘You come along with us. We’re going to steal a flitter – we have a number earmarked by people on the inside – and we’re going to go collect Rodion. You’ll accompany us. He may be less than pleased about coming along. We’ll restrain him if necessary, but he’s very old, and it would go better all round if he could stay calm. Talk to him, get him to remember you, chat about old times. That kind of thing. OK?’

‘OK,’ said Issa. ‘And afterwards—’

‘Afterwards we get out.’

‘I mean . . . the city?’

‘We’ll destroy it,’ said Christophe. ‘To begin the action of revenge for Triunion and for Florida.’

The day passed, and another one did. Then, after the long voyage, events came to a head with anticlimactic rapidity. In the morning they came to a coast marked by a long dyke. The barge made its way through the channels formed by a number of mostly submerged rectangular buildings: the waves were small and numerous and little blots and blurs of snow were swizzling down from the dark morning sky. One of the buildings had once had giant letters arranged along its flat roof, displaying the name of whatever corporate or governmental business had been conducted within. Now only a five-metre A remained, the waves splashing around its spread legs. Li brought the barge in and threw a rope around the shoreward limb of this huge letter.

They waited for an hour or so. Issa watched the dyke, expecting – she didn’t know what. Longhairs to come swarming over the top of it? The dyke itself to crumble and fall? The US Army? But nothing happened. Black clouds threatened a heavier snowfall, but it did not quite come. Only a few flakes moved in the sky, cold and grey as old ashes. Thunder groaned wearily away to the south, but there was no lightning. Issa had a hat, shoes, a cotton jacket, but she still felt the cold. She walked around the deck to get a better view of that way, pulling her blanket closer around her, and watched the landscape. The dyke ran a long way north and south, but in the latter distance there was a white bar between sea and sky, like a giant’s rib laid upon the ocean, water become a bone. The thunder came from that direction, but there was no lightning. Then she did see some flickers of light, but they were coming up from behind the white bar, not down from the sky. She understood then: that white line was the Hough Wall, and that behind it was Manhattan. The word ‘home’ came to life inside her, she couldn’t stop herself. But at least she had the discipline to remind herself that (the hand tenderly patting the crown of the other girl’s head) it wasn’t home, any more.

She almost expected to see Rageh, standing behind her, but when she turned about the deck was empty. It was horribly cold, and there was hardly any sunshine. The weariness was gritty inside her muscles. But then a deep, resonant boom echoed over the water, and she looked back to the south with a little chirrup in her heart.

There was some sort of midge-like activity over the Hough Wall, but they were too far away properly to see it. A little later she saw a bird approaching them, and a moment later she could see that it wasn’t a bird after all. Li and Christophe came bustling up onto the deck. Issa looked again away to the south, and she could see that it was a flitter. Then everything happened very quickly. It grew larger and larger, and then it suddenly reached them. A domestic machine, it touched down on the deck of the barge. Li bundled Issa up inside it, and Christophe and another man came after. Issa recognized the man from the barge, but couldn’t think of his name. Then without any ceremony, or introductions, the driver took the flitter up again, and in moments they were swooping low over the water towards Manhattan itself.

After so many months of slow, antique travel it was momentarily disorienting to be moving with such rapidity. But Issa adjusted her mind, and peered through the window. The Hough Wall swept beneath her, and there were the towers of the city. Memory surged inside her.
Home
, said the voice.
Home!
She shut her eyes, but of course she had to open them again. The towers, the towers, palaces of kings and princes! The flitter nipped past one monolith, a thousand metres high, and swam into the chasm of air. Looking down, Issa could see the streets swarming with people. Longhairs, longhairs, and in amongst the profusion of motion and bustle she could see the writhe and tumble of individuals falling, collapsing, tumbling. There were a great many shorthairs too, some armed, some not, either fleeing or resisting. A police flitter schwomped past, no more than ten metres below Issa and going in the opposite direction. ‘There,’ Li shouted to the pilot. They banked, turned up a different street, and this one was even more crowded with people: longhairs swarming like ants. And further in, two police walkers wading through this sea of people. And the crickle crackle of continuous gunfire. That background noise was not the ocean, behind the Hough Wall. It was the sound of so many thousands of people yelling with one yell.

Issa’s stomach clenched and heaved, but it was only the flitter swooping down. A moment later they were on a roof, and they stumbled out, and she was breathing actual New York air. But the air was filled with roars and yells and the battering noises of weapons being discharged. Snow was trying to fall, butterfly flakes falling sluggishly through the cold, but then there was a deafening clatter. Away to the side Issa caught a glimpse of a door dancing and bouncing into the breeze like a thrown playing card. ‘Come on,’ cried Christophe, and the four of them bundled inside the building. It had the inevitability of a dream. She knew this stairway. She knew this room: and there was Rodion – standing, looking with dismay at the strangers inside his house. She didn’t remember him looking
quite
so old, but it was certainly him. It was him in the flesh, live and breathing and real. In her head with vivid, winter clarity she thought:
Now we can take him and finish this place for ever
. It was a giant thought, the kind of thought a god might have.

Rodion had opened his mouth.

Issa took one step towards him before she saw the other person in the room, and then, as it were, her consciousness tumbled down the spiral staircase inside her head. ‘Daddy!’ she screeched. Never before in the long history of humankind had a man looked so startled. She ran and grabbed him about the waist. Everything else just fell away. It all vanished. ‘Daddy!’

‘No!’ he cried, in terror. ‘No!’

‘There’s no time for this,’ said Li. Christophe and one of the other men were behind Rodion, one at each shoulder, and the astonished old boy was propelled from the room and up the stairway. The stairs had been programmed to respond to his presence (Issa remembered this!) with gentle undulations of individual steps so as to facilitate his passage upwards. The unexpected motion of the steps threw Christophe, and he almost stumbled. Issa was right behind. ‘He comes too!’ she called to Li. He was her daddy after all. ‘He comes too!’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ snapped Li, pushing past her. ‘We’re not here to collect all the random strangers of—’

‘Watch out!’ bellowed Christophe.

There was a knot of people coming up the stairwell from below. Li dashed upstairs; moaning, Rodion was dragged behind her. Issa was not far behind. Yelling below them. But, between the undulating stairs and the impediment of having to drag the reluctant old man, Li’s foot slipped. She fell forward and banged her knee. ‘Oh!’ she cried, in pain.

As she began to pick herself up again Issa ran against her. It was not precisely a conscious decision. But neither was it entirely a surprise to her as she did it. She felt her shoulder connect forcefully with Li’s stomach; she put as much of her energy and weight into the tackle as she could. Li was jarred sideways on the step, knocked against the wall and started to fall. Her mouth made an out-puffing ‘o’ and then she was tumbling downstairs. The people coming up yelled with surprise and alarm, and a high-pitched voice called ‘Arto, watch out!’

Issa herself rebound from her collision, and her back hit the other wall. She steadied herself. ‘Come on,’ she told her father. He was staring at her with the look of a man trying to process a blit. ‘Come!’ She heaved on his wrist, and he began bumbling up the stairs.

There was a loud commotion below them.

It went something like this. A man was ascending. His chunky, handsome head, shortcropped dark hair and a fierce expression, was on a level with Issa’s feet. He was lifting something up towards her, except that it wasn’t towards her, it was a gun and it was aimed further up the stairs. Somebody cried ‘Arto!’ and then the whole space was filled to bursting with
noise
, horrid deafening
noise
. It was so insanely noisy that Issa screwed her eyes tight, and the noise tripped over itself, like the devil’s drumfill, and extended. It was guns being fired, of course, she knew that. But she had no idea guns could be so loud! Somebody punched her in the chest – right in the middle of the chest! – and, shocked, she opened her eyes to see that it hadn’t been a punch. Rather, Christophe had knocked into her as he tumbled down. He was kneeling, strangely, and descending at the same time. She looked again and saw that he was sort of rattling down the stairs on his knees. That must be painful! But he had his arm out, too, and an antique pistol was in his hand, and it was chimneying smoke, and his eyes were shut, and then his gun fired again. She saw the momentary horizontal white stalactite of flame at its tip, and then saw its retinal afterghost printed upon the back of her eye. But she could also see hidden somewhere behind that jagged glare inside her eyeball, Christophe falling forward and continuing to tumble, face down now. His legs came up, bizarrely, and his feet wiggled. Then his whole head-down body rotated and he collapsed down the stairwell. Issa looked about her. The chunky, fierce-faced man had gone, and Issa looked again and she saw him pressed backward against the wall, with his head at a curious angle, and his arm straight up, like he was trying to catch a waiter’s attention. She couldn’t see his gun. But she could see that his shirt was soaked with black fluid. Then she saw that he wasn’t breathing.

After all the great press of noise, it was ringingly quiet. Inside Issa’s ears an angel was singing. The angel’s song was one, pure, seamless, celestial note; but she understood what it was. It was:
home
. Rodion was three steps above her, sitting down, his mouth still open – but breathing, living, alive.

She pulled her father’s wrist. ‘Up,’ she told him.

He did not have the power to resist.

There were more people downstairs, and at first she thought they would be armed, just as the fierce-faced man had been. But then a young lad came up the stairs, looking scared, and he seemed familiar to Issa, although she couldn’t immediately place how she knew him or put a name to him. It would come to her. But he had no weapon. It was clear that he had no weapon. ‘Come up,’ she called to him, feeling that she had to take him with her as well. So he came up, looking at her with an astonished face. And behind him came a plump woman, and she knew who
that
was. And finally up the stairs, with the perfect mirror-logic of the grown-up world, came she herself, Leah, the real and consummate Leah.

‘There is,’ Issa cried, very loud, her heart full of happiness and weeping at the same time, ‘no time! Upstairs! Upstairs!’

By sheer force of her will, she moved all these individuals to the top of the stairs and out on the roof. They were out. Issa was in charge now. They all rushed to the waiting flitter, and Issa pushed all the others in through the door before climbing in herself. The driver was protesting, and waving a pistol, but when she got in at last he put away his weapon. ‘Li is dead,’ she told him, with uncontradictable forcefulness. ‘We have to go
right now
.’

‘Do we have him?’ the driver asked, gape-eyed.

‘That,’ said Issa, grabbing the pilot by the chin and directing his gaze towards where Rodion was tremblingly sitting, ‘is Rodion. Now
go
.’

The driver looked at the whole cabinful of shorthairs who were now inside his flitter, but if he thought about arguing with Issa he immediately thought better of it. The door shimmered shut and the flitter lifted into the sky. It was five metres above the roof. It was ten metres up, and fifteen metres. The top of the Hough Wall was visible through the grid of the taller buildings.

‘Wait,’ said the driver, looking down. ‘Isn’t
that
Li?’

It was. She was there, emerging from the top of the stairs and through the frame where the roof door had once stood. It was unmistakably her, looking up at them. The flitter wobbled in its ascent, and stopped. It hovered.