Then the Hope made a friend of one of the people who was not like the other people. Neither this person nor the Hope knows they have made friends, as far as I know. Perhaps they will. They didn’t have much in common. After all, one was a little human and the other was a big ship. But they did have one thing in common, which was that both of them wasn’t a man or a woman. This was what brought them together and made them make friends even though they didn’t know they had made friends. Sometimes one was a man and the other was a woman, other times one was a woman and the other was a man, it didn’t matter which. When they met and made friends without knowing it, they made dreams and the dreams were born. The first dream was a dream of water. Water goes around in a big circle, from sea to sky to land to sea and back to sky again. Water can be diseased for a while, but it will always become pure again. The Hope had a dream of people of water, pure, cured, living for ever, hurting nothing. The dream came to life. It will be one of many. Like it, I am a dream. I was born. I live. I am a rat. I have a purpose. Some dreams are nice and some dreams are nasty. Nobody can say what dreams they are going to have, they can only go to sleep hoping that it is going to be a good one to make up for the way that life is so horrid and rubbishy for them. Dreams really belong to the bits of life outside like the wind and all the rest, the bits that don’t really care about people and can be beautiful and angry in equal amounts. I was born perfect with my purpose and alone. I ran away almost straight after I was born, because I did not need to learn anything from the things that had given birth to me, the Hope and the person. I was born knowing my purpose so nobody could tell it to me, although in the first days of my life the Hope did come and tell me lots of things about the Hope because that was all part of my purpose. It is no good sorting out rubbish if you aren’t told what to do with it. So I listened to what the Hope had to tell me and I knew my purpose better and I knew what I had been born to do better. After all those years of thinking, the Hope had at last come up with the answer, the cure to the sickness. I was only part of the answer.
The Hope tries to cure itself in many different ways, but the Hope cannot do it alone. I promised to help, knowing that it was my purpose. Agreeing to the promise, the Hope gave me a knife, which was old and had been thrown away and had been lying in wait for me. I took the knife and the Hope told me a shape and I cut that shape into myself to swear to the Hope that I would do my purpose. It hurt! it still hurts a bit, but that makes me keep the promise. The Hope called it a “bond”. It would join us together. I would carry on me the answer to the Hope’s sickness. It is a circle. The Hope is travelling in a circle. The Captain does not know, the crew do not know, the passengers do not know, all the people do not know. The Hope lies to the Captain and the crew. They think their charts and compasses are correct, but their charts and their compasses lie to them. The purpose of the Captain and crew never has been and never will be to steer the Hope because the Hope needs no steering. The Hope chases itself round and round in a circle that takes a year. It has been doing so for a long, long time. Nobody knows. I know nobody knows because I ask them. If they do not know, I kill them to cure the Hope. I do not always like doing this. I have never said my purpose is a nice purpose but it is a rat’s purpose. Although it is my purpose, I feel sorry for them. In many ways they are like me, it’s just that they don’t have a purpose. I always tell them I am sorry. It makes me feel better. I make the Hope feel better. The Hope will keep going in circles until I have had time to cure it completely. The Hope is patient. The Hope needs time to think, because the darkness is still there in the Hope’s thoughts and it takes time to see. I will keep going too, with the bond on me as a promise. The Hope calls me the last and best rat. I am the only one. I am Lonely the Rat. I have a purpose. I will save the Hope.
As Paolo finished this last page, he no longer wanted to hold the notebook. Death, which he had decided was a disease, infected that notebook on every smeary, scrawled page. Paolo put it down, went to the basin and washed his hands for five minutes. Then he splashed cold water over his face and rested his hands on the edge of the basin and let the water drip off his face. His eyes were closed.
Lonely the Rat was the story of a madman. There were plenty of madmen on board and no doubt plenty of alternative Lonely the Rats. The thin man had been deranged, no more, no less. He was not a dream born to life. That was plain fantasy. He had no purpose other than to kill as many people as he liked. Paolo opened his eyes and took a look back at the notebook’s red cover and childish handwriting. With that one look, he knew he was lying to himself. Lonely the Rat was, as its subtitle had promised, a true story. Paolo knew that without knowing why. He sensed it. He had lived his whole life on board this floating shitheap. His ship-born instincts could not let him kid himself. Now that the thin man, Lonely, was dead… Now that Paolo had killed this thin man, Lonely…
No one else knew. Paolo Bellini was the only person on board who knew.
Wasn’t that funny?
There was no other side. The ocean really was unending. It didn’t just seem that way, it really fucking was! The Hope was chasing its tail like a mad dog driven crazy by fleas.
“Bullshit,” said Paolo out loud and the word was false from his tongue.
Paolo hung on to the railings. There were a handful of other people here, all minding their own business as he was minding his. The whole Hope was spread out behind him. Seagulls hovered around the ship in a speckled cloud. The wind came thickly salted off the sea and into his face, tugging at his hair the way a child pulls its parent’s hair for attention, and the seagulls played games with the wind but cried as they played, their falling-down notes of dissent answered by distant cousins higher up, further away, grey specks of sound lost in a white-noise sky. Some of the gulls strutted close by Paolo and made loud interjections as the passengers inhaled the torpid air and chose to feel invigorated by it.
This was a popular spot, the pinnacle of the outer rim, the point of the Hope. It was a view of a wasteland expanse of ocean but you thought you were looking out the way the Hope was heading. One day you might even be lucky enough to glimpse land. There was a small sign commemorating the obvious:
Welcome to The Bows
Paolo leaned over the railings. An old couple cast a nervous glance in his direction, worried he was about to jump off although not prepared to do anything if he did. He didn’t.
Instead he looked down a cliff-face of iron, pitted and bolted and riveted and streaked with rust. Near the level of the sea the rust became dominant, surrounding the ship with an orange skirt. There, at the bottom, the ship’s sides met in a blunt apex. Paolo blinked out of his eyes the tears that the wind had put there. He focused hard.
Was it just visible? Was one bow-wave bigger than the other? Was it true?
Paolo leaned back. Out from under his shirt he took a package, something small wrapped in an old T-shirt (one like Eddy’s, with the same slogan). He checked Lonely the Rat was still safely inside, unwilling to touch the cover ever again.
He hesitated. Perhaps he should tell somebody. Perhaps he should inform the Captain. But he knew the Captain would never believe him. He’d say Paolo wrote the thing himself, just a kid trying to make a name for himself, playing a big joke on the passengers, don’t be ridiculous, go home, son.
Paolo tried hard not to smile to himself.
Then, with the seagulls wheeling and wailing overhead, he drew back his arm to hurl the package overboard.
Afterword
The Hope was my first novel, written in the autumn of 1988 at breakneck speed (some six weeks from start to finish, a feat I could never hope to repeat nowadays). It failed to change the world, of course, but at least it was published.
When Orion Books offered to reissue it after it had been out of print in the UK for almost a decade, I was glad for two reasons. First, because all the people who’d told me they’d like to read The Hope but couldn’t find a copy could now do both, and second, because a reissue would provide me with
an opportunity to give the original text a bit of a refit, patch over some of the more corroded sections, touch up the paintwork here and there, scrape off a few barnacles, generally spruce the thing up and get it all shipshape for its relaunch.
In the event, and probably more through laziness on my part than anything, I have made very few revisions. Where I have made changes, it has been for the sake of textual clarity and to correct solecisms. Other than that, I have let the novel stand as it is, with all its rawnesses and crudenesses (as I perceive them) intact.
I’d like to thank Mechelle Dudley for her sterling efforts on the copytyping front, and Mark Morris, who championed the book when it first came out.
– J.M.H.L.
Lewes, East Sussex
February 2000
ALSO BY JAMES LOVEGROVE
Novels
Redlaw
The Hope
Escardy Gap (co-written with Peter Crowther)
Days
The Foreigners
Untied Kingdom
Worldstorm
Provender Gleed
The Pantheon Series
The Age Of Ra • The Age Of Zeus • The Age Of Odin
Novellas
How The Other Half Lives
Gig
Dead Brigade
Collections of Short Fiction
Imagined Slights
Diversifications
For Younger Readers
The Web: Computopia
Wings
The House of Lazarus
Ant God
Cold Keep
Kill Swap
Free Runner
The 5 Lords Of Pain series
The Lord Of The Mountain • The Lord Of The Void
The Lord Of Tears • The Lord Of The Typhoon
The Lord Of Fire
Writing as Jay Amory
The Clouded World series
The Fledging Of Az Gabrielson
Pirates Of The Relentless Desert
Darkening For A Fall • Empire Of Chaos
Also from Solaris Books, The Age of Ra by James Lovegrove...
The Ancient Egyptian gods have defeated all the other pantheons and divided the Earth into warring factions. Lt. David Westwynter, a British soldier, stumbles into Freegypt, the only place to have remained independent of the gods, and encounters the followers of a humanist freedom-fighter known as the Lightbringer. As the world heads towards an apocalyptic battle, there is far more to this leader than it seems...
"The kind of complex, action-oriented SF Dan Brown would write if Dan Brown could write."
The Guardian on The Age of Zeus
www.solarisbooks.com
Also from Solaris Books, The Age of Zeus by James Lovegrove...
The Olympians appeared a decade ago, living incarnations of the Ancient Greek gods, offering order and stability at the cost of placing humanity under the jackboot of divine oppression. Until former London police officer Sam Akehurst receives an invitation to join the Titans, the small band of battlesuited high-tech guerillas squaring off against the Olympians and their mythological monsters in a war they cannot all survive...
"The kind of complex, action-oriented SF Dan Brown would write if Dan Brown could write."
The Guardian on The Age of Zeus
www.solarisbooks.com
Also from Solaris Books, The Age of Odin by James Lovegrove...
Gideon Coxall was a good soldier but bad at everything else, until a roadside explosive device leaves him with one deaf ear and a British Army half-pension. So when he hears about the Valhalla Project, it’s like a dream come true. They’re recruiting former service personnel for excellent pay, no questions asked, to take part in unspecified combat operations.
The last thing Gid expects is to find himself fighting alongside ancient Viking gods. The world is in the grip of one of the worst winters it has ever known, and Ragnarök - the fabled final conflict of the Sagas - is looming.
“The kind of complex, action-oriented SF Dan Brown would write if Dan Brown could write.”
The Guardian on The Age of Zeus
www.solarisbooks.com
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