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fjord and listening to the gusting wind charging out of the dark,
thick-clouded night. The rain cleared for a while, revealing details on the
far side of the fjord, so that she was able to look out to where the
Solipsists' fires had burned that night. That pair of fierce specks had
glittered through the evening like baleful eyes from the depths of an ancient
myth, and - despite the fact that the shore the Solipsists were travelling on
had looked more rugged and indented than their own had been that day - they
had burned still further ahead than they had the night before.
A great gust of wind shook the trees above her, dislodging drops that struck
her face. She wiped them from the nightsight lenses with the heel of her good
hand.
Where the Solipsists' twin fires had blazed against the steep dark mat of
forest there was only one faint image left now; a last dying memory of warmth
in the loud surrounding night, like one of those eyes slowly closing, the life
within it going out.
She watched that hazy, uncertain image and - for all that it was the product
and symbol of people who had for no good reason she could discern suddenly
become her enemies - she willed that distant, ember memory to prevail against
the leaching cold that made her teeth ache and her body shiver, and against
the laws that ran the universe and the system and the world and every thing
and body within it; the laws of decay, consumption, exhaustion and death.
Then the rain came again, brushing its way up the fjord in tall sheets, and by
that interposing sweep extinguished -
if not the fading embers themselves - the projected image of that fire in her
eyes.
21 A Short Walk
`But what's he like?'
`Oh . . . Attractive, I suppose.'
`What? Tallish, darkish, handsomish? Hunkish?'
`All of the above. Well, maybe not hunkish. . . But that's not it; it's his .
. . manner. When you hear him, it sounds like something between philosophy and
politics, and even if you don't agree with what he's saying you can't help
being impressed by the way he says it. It's as though he knows even more than
he's saying, knows everything, but still really needs your approval, your
agreement for it to be true, and you just can't help but give it. You feel
flattered, privileged . . . seduced.
`It looked like there was a big but vague organisation there; something that
had grown up organically around him.
And even though most of the people I saw were young, there were plenty of
older people there too, and I got the impression he was talking to the
establishment on the Ghost; maybe beyond. But he was just an amazing person.'
`Obviously,' Zefla said, smiling at her as they walked.
It was cold. The weather had turned just before dawn, the heavy rain clouds
blowing away before a chill, clear sky that had shed moonlight and sparse
junklight on the forested mountains of the fjord, coating them in silent
silver.
Then Thrial had risen, casting a rich glow like pink gold down the fjord.
After a miserably small breakfast which had left them all hungry, and with
only a quarter of a foodslab left each, Miz and Dloan had decided to make a
serious effort to kill something edible for lunch. The two men had set off
uphill when they broke camp that morning, hoping to find game in the higher
forest.
Sharrow and Zefla walked through patches of frost and puddles skinned with
brittle crusts of thin, glass-clear ice.
Their breath smoked in the air.
Sharrow felt spacey and vague and slightly numb; she kept shivering, even
though she didn't really feel cold. She put it down to lack of food. She felt
ashamed at how pampered she had become; she hadn't realised how much simple
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things like toilet paper and a toothbrush meant to her, and felt demeaned that
their absence could assume such significance.
Her hand throbbed dully inside her glove; she had taken some painkillers. She
hadn't changed the plaster that morning because the hand had swelled up during
the night and it hurt too much when she'd tried taking the glove off.
She'd decided just to let it be; perhaps it would get better of its own
accord.
`Probably end up as one of those sordid cult leaders,' Zefla said after a
while as they plodded into a bare area of the forest where a fire had left
thousands of tree trunks standing upright and bare, black posts already
surrounded by slender young trees forcing their way towards the sky around
them. `You know, pedalling some weird concoction of re-tread gibberish and
living in a palace while their. followers sleep shifts and work the streets
and give you this big flatline smile when you tell them where to stuff their
tracts.'
`No,' Sharrow said, shaking her head (and felt dizzy when she did that, and
stumbled on a blackened branch crusted with white). `No, I don't think so. I
don't think that's what's going to happen to this guy, not at all.'
Zefla looked at Sharrow as they walked, an expression of concern on her face.
`You all right?' she asked.
`Hungry!' Sharrow laughed. She nodded to herself, breathing deeply in the
chill air and staring up at the blue expanse above. `How about you?'
`Never better,' Zefla said, scratching through her gathered-up hair to her
itchy scalp. `Could use a shower, though.' [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]