by Ian McDonald
‘Horrible!’ I cried. ‘Horrible!’
‘No, glorious! The next evolutionary leap. If man could not live harmoniously with his planet, his planet must adapt to live harmoniously with man. Moon, I understand your fear; it looks dreadful, it seems monstrous; believe me, it is more wonderful than you can ever imagine. I feel like…a god, Moon. A god.’
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams.
‘God, Langrishe…’
‘So, what will Moon do, then? Will she go back? Will she go down from the mountain-top—to that? You can go back, after what you’ve seen, after the wonder and glory you’ve touched here? Or will she stay, with me? You loved me enough to come here to find me, do you love me enough to stay? Am I any more monstrous than I would be if I lay paralysed in an iron lung, if I had leprosy? You would love me then, can you not love me now?’
No, not a god, Langrishe, a devil, and a subtle one at that, a driver of devil’s bargains. My mind was a firestorm of doubts and confusions; through the conflagration, the numb roaring, I reached out to touch him, lay a hand on the red ridged flesh beside his face. ‘Oh, Langrishe…’
‘You said we were one. You said we were inadequate parts of a unity, incomplete without the other. I’m not saying that you have to become like me; you don’t have to pass into an orthobody, you can just stay with me, as you are, and we can know each other as we did, before…’
‘Langrishe…’
‘Moon, I love you.’
But I had already fled into the night.
The sifting of the ashes: all the emotional underpinnings upon which the life of Moon had been built have collapsed into embers. If only he had not said that. If only he had not said that he loved me, it might have been bearable then—why did you always have to make me the guilty one? Was it always like this, mere explorations of new ways of causing pain to each other? Was all we needed from each other a mirror in which to examine ourselves?
He will come again for me, soon, calling, through the mist and the forest that lies across the shoulders of Kilimanjaro. And I do not know what I will do then. That is why I am completing this journal: the fury of the condemned man’s diary. The longest journey is the journey inwards, it is also the journey from which return is least possible. Of all travellers, it is most true for the pilgrim that you can’t go home again.
The pilgrim that comes down from the mountain will not be Moon: Moon died, up there under the breath of the snows; what returns to earth will be as changed within as Langrishe is without. And if I stay… I cannot become like that. I cannot accept that this is the future for humanity; an eternity of graceless hedonism browsing in the great world-forest, each man an island entirely sufficient unto himself? No, I reject it; do you hear me, Langrishe, I reject it! You have it right, Eliot, humankind cannot bear very much reality.
The last temptation, the greatest treason, to do the wrong deed for the right reason. I must finish now; I can hear him calling, he is coming for me. I have not much time to complete this record and still I am undecided. Maybe this will not be my last entry after all. T.P., if this journal should ever find its way back to you, by my hand, by the hand of another, even if you may not understand yourself, try to make the world understand. It is possible to love the heart of darkness while being repelled by it.
He is here now, I must put down my pen for today. Dust in the air suspended, marks the place where the story ended.
Ian McDonald won the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day, which was described by Locus as ‘an astonishing triumph of eloquence and ambition…a stunner’. He has twice been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, for Desolation Road and Hearts, Hands and Voices, and Necroville was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Award. Ian McDonald lives in Belfast.