Chapter 63
It was late autumn on my little island near the town of Poulinio, down the far end of the Mun peninsula.
I shuddered with the touch of wind when I disembarked from the Emni, smelled rain – thick rain, heavy rain blown in off the sea – and realised I didn’t have any appropriate clothes.
I had learned to travel with clothes for every biome, but it had been so long since I had set foot in any place that wasn’t climate-controlled, temperature-controlled that the reality of a world that was living and breathing and full of change knocked the air from my lungs.
My steps didn’t feel quite right; I grabbed my ticket for the tramway to Poulinio too hard and nearly crushed it in my hand; tried to climb the stairs too fast and tripped over my own feet.
The light of the sun, unfiltered by technology, hurt my eyes.
Perhaps it had always hurt my eyes. The air smelled of that nameless, unsure different that will quickly become familiar as the brain filters down its reality to only things that are changing in its endless efforts to save time and energy.
I had told the authorities I was coming, and they had replied with a polite sluggishness that suggested bureaucratic chaos raging tumultuously behind the scenes.
Of course, they said.
That island of yours.
Of course.
It’s become quite overgrown.
It’s become…
No one really wanted to go there, when you were gone.
No one wanted to…
(Walk in a cursed place, where a creature of darkness once roamed.)
Sometimes kids go out there as a dare, so please don’t be upset if you see them around.
And the fishing boats sometimes stop for a picnic, but we’ll let them know.
Let them know you’re coming back. There’s a doctor, actually, from the nearby city, who is very interested in getting a sample of your hair…
Major Phrawon was dead, had been for many years.
Even Yulin’s eldest child, who had been a shy if perfectly polite snippet of a human when I’d departed, was greying, old.
He gave me a lift out to my island, an ident to call if I ever needed anything.
I said thank you, I’d keep that in mind, but not to worry about me, not at all, and I remembered not to sing goodbye as he returned to the waters.
My island was indeed overgrown.
The bluebrush trees were bent double with their own weight, and infested with a parasitic vine whose combined mass had already toppled three of the grove, broken nests of migrating longlaps around the shattered branches.
The wild grasses had grown into thatch, smothering all the delicate flowers that had once bloomed there, the orchard almost inaccessible for the great maze of thorns that had erupted around the hedge.
It would take months of clearing, of traipsing back and forth – there was enough labour here to try and resurrect the ancient hover-sled, see if it remembered how to float, maybe order in some spare parts, but of course that wouldn’t solve the sheer monotony of the labour, of the to-and-fro that would be inevitable, that only a gardener could do.
I found myself swelling with a mixture of pre-emptive fatigue and excitement at the prospect.
What would the soil feel like, having had so many years of being left alone?
Would it crumble, damp and black beneath my fingers?
Would worms wiggle; had mushrooms sprouted beneath my windowsill, and would they be poisonous or delicacies?
I was in a uniquely privileged position to find out, I realised, and for the first time in a long time, I nearly laughed as I trudged my loop around the island.
The first sign of anything unusual was the boat.
My little boat – the one I’d used for fishing on hot autumn evenings – was a cracked remnant of a thing, lichen blooming up the side, fresh ferns bursting through the hull.
I resolved to leave it the moment I saw it, let nature continue munching on its keratinous bones.
Yet beside it – another boat. A newer boat, big enough for one comfortable rower or two people who didn’t mind a bit of a squeeze, knee knocking to knee.
A tarp had been pulled over it, weighted down on either side with stones, some care taken in its preservation.
A boat on the island implied a sailor, one who had come and not yet departed.
I looked around as if I might in that instant see the source of this anomaly, and of course saw nothing but the overhanging trees swaying in the cold sea wind, the prick of crimson promising an oncoming sunset.
It was the kind of evening for warm hats and fingerless gloves wrapped around a cup of something sweet; the kind of night to curl up indoors while the wind howled outside the window, to be buried deeper than necessary beneath thick blankets, a littler fuller than was strictly required on a belly-stuffing meal.
I feared neither a stranger nor the dark.
Indeed, the feeling that this boat stirred in me was an old one, almost comforting in its calm.
I felt curious.
For the first time in such a long time, the familiar sense of it, the familiar stirring, a kind of fascination, a childlike wonder at a thing unknown.
War had smothered it; the prospect of death held no interest. But this was a mystery, and at the mystery I felt the awakening of something lost, familiar, unkind.
Thank you, I whispered to the boat, to the coming dark, to the stirring of my soul.
Thank you.
I wandered along paths grown narrow by neglect, and now that I was looking, I saw little signs of disturbance, summer thorns snapped by the passage of an animal larger than the snuffling burrow-diggers and fungi-sniffers of my realm.
By the time I reached the vegetable patches that hemmed in my cottage, the sun was nearly set and the dark prickled with endless beauty, infinite possibility, fascinating in its depth.
Thank you, I whispered. Thank you.
Some efforts had been made to tidy up a few broken vines in my garden.
The labours were poor, crude, quickly abandoned.
Gourd had bred with gourd to create monster beasts of speckled yellow and bloody purple, new species flourishing while I had been away.
The fallen leaves had been brushed off the roof of the cottage where they otherwise might have covered the solar cells; a single light shone in the window, the battery by the door showing a 77 per cent charge.
I listened to the sea and the wind, the settling calls of the evening birds as they bickered and grew quiet against the dark.
Then I walked up to the door and knocked.
Silence from within.
After the silence, movement. A pushing-back of a chair. A moving of feet. Then silence again. Someone has risen; someone has walked towards the door. Someone has hesitated on the verge of answering. Someone is making up their mind.
I think I am perhaps curious enough that doors will not stop me.
I think, if I wish to, that I can pass straight through this wall, stick my head in, call out: anyone home?
But if I do that, who knows what will happen next. Who knows how much blood will be spilled, whose heart will be ripped out, whose brain I will end up holding in the palm of my hand as the curiosity overwhelms me, tips me from who is there to what is there and why and how and…
And all the other questions the endless, wondering dark keeps asking of this universe, never quite understanding the answers that are given.
So instead I wait, then knock again.
After a moment, I hear a latch lifted, and the door swings back.
The man who stands on the other side, half lit in the glow of the single shining lamp, is too tall for my cottage.
He would have been unusually tall for the average population of the archipelago even before his genetic enhancements made him something of a giant, my eyes level with the upper half of his chest. I have to crane to see the top of his head, which he has shaved and allowed to regrow, not glorious and golden, but limp and white, the long plait of his office gone.
He has had cosmetic surgery to soften the edges the scars – that artful tapestry– that were his pride and his identity, and I can only assume that the new green of his eyes is a permanent dye hiding enhancements.
He appears to be unarmed, but that is rather meaningless where he is concerned.
He seems a little surprised to see me, and then he does not.
“Hello,” Theodosius says, in the language of the Shine. “I wondered if you’d show up.”