Corvus

  'It's not your fault,' Laura said.

  'It's not your fault,' Stella said.

  Zach closes his eyes but the voices continue to intone not your fault when the smell of your fault the slaughterhouse smell of his mum screaming to the god of fault for Laura to dive while the shivery silvery water spindles away along a deep fault towards

  'Zach.'

  At Pani's touch he jerks awake, confused, half submerged, still swept by the tide of voices, a wrack of images.

  'It's finished,' Pani says. 'Come inside.'

  Now, and snow.

  It's surprisingly bright within the small shelter, as if the snow itself were radiating a fierce supernal energy. They settle themselves on the platform Pani has managed to construct as additional insulation. He's also carved up the seal remains and insists that Zach accept the fattiest pieces. As they eat, they exchange only a few words, and though Zach is still shivering, he feels marginally warmer. He considers whether they might risk lying down for an hour or two.

  'Is Laura your wife?' Pani asks.

  Zach's chapped lips are coated with grease. Before answering, he rubs the last scrap of fat over his cheeks, which are taut with windburn. It stings like saltwater on abraded skin.

  'A friend,' he says.

  'You must miss her. You were crying her name when I woke you.'

  'Yeah, I miss her.'

  They finish their meal without further conversation, and Zach is again impressed by Pani's delicacy, his considerateness. Just about any other boy his age—even Max—would ply Zach with questions. And then he asks himself if this isn't a prejudice like so many. When did he ever pay much attention to others? Except to spurn them. Except to fuck them.

  'We can take turns sleeping,' Pani says. 'You go first.'

  Though reluctant, Zach eventually yields because there is sense in Pani's argument. With his head in the boy's lap, he stretches out and closes his eyes, but his shivering soon resumes full strength, and after a while Pani shifts uncomfortably and bends to whisper, his voice hesitant.

  'Zach, I think I need to help you get warm.'

  'How?'

  From the blush that rises to the roots of Pani's hair, Zach realises what the boy is proposing. Zach almost laughs, then looks away and feels his own cheeks reddening—Pani is serious.

  'Please, Zach, don't be cross. It's normal, it's what we do when something like this happens.'

  In the end, Zach agrees rather ruefully, then dozes afterwards, his sleep fitful. Later he will remember rough waves, the taste of salt. Sometimes he mutters, and Pani hears Laura's name several times, though the rest is the sort of gibberish which sounds like sense, if only you'd listen a bit closer. But when he strains to catch hold, the words flop about like a badly speared fish. At one point Zach raises his head and opens his eyes to stare at Pani without recognition, music like firesong filling the iglu, warming their blood, then gives a strangled cry, rolls to the side, and retches. Pani holds Zach's head till the spasm passes, but at no time does silence fall. The iglu is bathed in an intense blue light.

  When Zach finally rouses, it takes him even longer than before to clear the soupy frazil from his mind.

  'Pani,' he mutters, 'why didn't you wake me?' Then, 'Why is it so warm?'

  'You're a very powerful shaman.'

  'I've told you, I'm no shaman.'

  'Oh yes you are. You talked a lot in your sleep, strange shaman talk, but it was when your raven flew far out over the ice that I wished for spirit wings.'

  There it is again, that switchback of memory, or dream, or something, then like a deer that's already leapt away from your headlamps, it's gone, and he remembers nothing—sensation without content, a neuronal misfiring in this place of ice. He passes his hands through his hair—his hair! It feels indecent, the depth of his hunger. What else would he give to have Laura back for good? His limbs as tithe, his eyesight, his mind? There are far too many questions he hadn't got round to asking Lev, but the crucial one, the one which would have made a difference, had been self-censored: will a cognoscens upload eventually disintegrate to the same degree as a sapiens?

  Pani follows Zach's gesture. 'You shouldn't have cut it off. It's bad luck for a shaman.'

  'Some shaman.'

  'Zach, I saw a cave deep under the sea, a beautiful blue cave, and the White Seal. You were combing her hair.'

  Zach stands rather too abruptly, then sits down again till the vertigo passes. 'First a raven, now a fish. Not a shark, I hope.'

  Pani regards him soberly. 'That's not all I saw.'

  Must have been like an all-night cinema.

  'The best part was the music.' Pani hums a few phrases, his rendition as accurate as ever, so that Zach, with the sudden feeling that Cybil has been robbing the graveyard of his memory all along, gropes under his parka. Laura's pendant warms under his fingertips, warms and silkens into cloth of gold. He remembers his history—the cloth of kings and emperors and sultans, of tapestries and pageantry. And funerary palls.

  'You see?' Pani says. 'She's kept the ivory seal.'

  Zach feels round under his clothing, then gets up and flaps each layer vigorously, front and back, sides, front again, to dislodge the pendant. 'It's missing,' he says. Hearing how lame this sounds, he dredges up, 'I must have lost it in the crevasse.'

  'You think so?'

  That grin! Feeling vaguely guilty—but for what, exactly?—he catches himself about to say 'It's not my fault.' Irritation sharpens his tongue. 'Believe your fairytales, if you must, but they're not going to get us out of this mess.'

  Pani turns away, but not before Zach sees a bleak expression cross his face.

  'Pani? Look, I'm sorry.'

  The boy busies himself with apportioning the remaining food.

  'I'm sorry about your family. I wish I could change what's happened'—if only Pani knew—'but I can't.'

  His face now expressionless, Pani removes one piece from the pile closest to him and adds it to Zach's; a second. The silence lengthens, each minute longer than the last.

  'Will you please stop that,' Zach says at last, 'and look at me.' When Pani complies, Zach is blindsided, achingly, by the hope which trembles beneath the child's long, dark lashes, a pleading look; the look of a much younger boy. Words leak as though from an aneurysm before he has a chance to clamp the memory. 'Where I come from there are many different sorts of—well, you'd call them shamans. Maybe I can talk to one of them. Maybe one of them can help. But no matter what, I promise not to leave till you're with some of your own people.' Damn his glibness! If Fulgur hasn't pulled him by now, there's a good chance they won't—or can't. He mutters the abort code under his breath, then half in self-mockery, half in defiance, reels it off backwards. So much for magic incantations (and prayers).

  Pani delays lying down for as long as possible, and even then fights to keep his eyes from drifting shut. He talks about the 'white time' of dreaming. He talks about the First Spirits. He talks about the people's ways till Zach takes his hand and begins to hum the same ballad which lulled Laura at her most feverish. Most of his favourite people live in books, yet are no less real to him than the lost or dead. Memory has a certain plasticity: imagination can replicate the engram encoding of past experience. And the simu neural network, never static, is subject to multiple coding.

  Pani's hand, the warm skin, the bones. Zach brings it to his lips, while Pani widens his eyes in surprise, then smiles a sleepy smile. Zach can smell the mixture of sweat and seal and sea, can anticipate the salty taste. Pani's breathing is slowly slipping into a presleep rhythm, its own lullaby. If he, Zach, a cognoscens, can't tell the difference between this boy and the one who must have been his template, is there one? Or has the very question become irrelevant, supplanted by new metaphysical conversations?

  Zach wonders how much time remains to him here, then laughs wryly to himself. We never escape our earliest grammars, do we? Even in Mandarin, where verbs have no tense, you slice time by adverb and particle into discrete sliver
s of an imaginary cake; in reality, a quantum cake. Wu's Qli theorems are the most inaccessible of all his work, often misconstrued to mean that consciousness by and of itself begets time. But in fact he demonstrated that there are manifold timeframes—an infinite number—though the human mind can't access them. That had been Zhou's dream: to facilitate a consciousness which could escape the windy tunnel of linearity; a consciousness capable of quantum perception. Homo cognoscens.

  Except, like everything else, there is no predicting what you actually render.

  Pani's breathing has become regular enough for Zach to remove his hand, but as soon as he attempts to rise, the boy curls up his legs, renews his grasp, and mutters 'stay,' all without waking properly.

  With a small shiver Zach lowers himself like a bather reluctant to plunge into frigid water, props his elbow on a thigh, and bows his head. The restive quiet eddies round him, deceptive, plosive in its power to burst the dykes and dams of constructed choice. Again he's being asked to fulfil someone else's expectations. Again someone wants him to play the hero. There's something bizarre about a virtual existence which parodies the real. Who in god's name has been doing the programming? For all his pranks, this isn't like Mishaal. It's rumoured that, before the Reign of Randall, Groening would occasionally appear in the labs to watch a caged mouse run itself to death on its treadmill. Novelists must feel a certain omnipotence over their fictional characters: how much more skewed do you have to be to make your living transcoding real people into virtual fictions?

  'Lev,' Zach whispers, 'what now?'

  At the sound of Zach's voice, Pani opens his eyes to reveal fully dilated pupils, dark tunnels shot with veins of raw, molten light. 'Play your clarinet.' He slips his free hand under the opposite sleeve and begins to dig at his forearm, a gesture so familiar that Zach's vision blurs.

  'Laura?'

  'Play,' the boy repeats before his lids seam shut.

  Chapter 45

  Zadie set a large latte down in front of the backpacker studying his Lonely Planet. 'You don't want to go there,' she said, indicating the left-hand page. 'You'll get ripped off, that's a market for tourists.' Sometimes advice was rewarded with a bigger tip, but this lad looked as if he could barely pay for his coffee.

  He glanced at her, then down at his mug. 'That's me, Mophead Mark.' She liked the bottlebrush hair, the freckled ugliness, the seafoam eyes flecked with turbulence, his slow smile. 'It's terrific, who made it?'

  Coffee art—another good source of tips. But she was giving this one away. 'I'm a design student. Keeps me from getting bored on the job.'

  'It takes real talent to catch a likeness with only a few strokes—and in froth no less.'

  'Nah, it's mere trickery, like being able to add up a column of numbers in your head. It doesn't make you Ramanujan; it doesn't even make you an accountant.'

  He seemed surprised by her mention of the mathematician. 'You're local?'

  'I didn't peg you for a racist.'

  'Wow, a bit touchy, aren't you?'

  'In South Africa you'll learn race is the first thing everyone thinks about.'

  'A few more years, skin colour will be irrelevant.'

  'A post-racial world?' she scoffed.

  'Depends how you define race. I hear there's already a cognoscens presence in Cape Town.'

  From the corner of her eye she saw Anton come through the swing door from the kitchen and hurriedly pulled out her order pad, then scrawled a number. 'Here, ring me after six, and I'll show you round. There's a few places might interest you.'

  That evening, succumbing to his entreaties—'on your stubborn mophead, then!'—Zadie led him down to the beach. They ate the gutsy samoosas she'd brought, licking their fingers and laughing as the southeaster freewheeled like a surfer high on his own recklessness. Mark wasn't much of drinker, so the second can of beer stayed in her backpack. He offered a joint, though. Barefoot, they walked along the ribbon of firm, vermiculated sand, and stopped to talk, to gaze into the moonlit spindrift, and walked on again. He liked the way her hips moved as if she were treading water, a serene swell. He liked her liquid accent, and the way it raced away from her when she described a recent exhibit, her new kitten, the hungry stick kids up north. He liked the way she pretended that sand in your pubic hair was erotic, not messy and uncomfortable.

  Towards midnight they began to retrace their steps, she knew a jazz club where the drinks were cheap, and the music Cape Town's best-kept secret: 'Even if you could find it, they'd never let you in. Security tighter than the Island, back in Mandela's time.'

  'They don't fancy foreigners?'

  'They don't fancy rich white boys.'

  'So if I had a fanny . . .'

  She laughed then, and gave him further reason to appreciate his endowments. Later, when he came to write his first novel, he'd invoke a surfer's finely tuned sense of wind and wave, but now there was no metaphor, no transcendence, now no heady rip of words, only the stoptime of breathing in rhythmic unison—a break in the incessant hiphop of pounding surf and pounding wind and pounding thoughts.

  'It'll be your cash, and no friggin shit, ya hear?'

  Hastily they uncoupled and stared at the two kids, one with a knife glinting in the moonlight, the other with a screwdriver. Zadie reacted first; nodded, unslung her backpack, handed it over—every movement slow and smooth, unthreatening. Mark studied the knife-wielding mugger while his mate cast Zadie's belongings onto the sand and rifled for wallet and mobile. They couldn't have been more than twelve or thirteen.

  Memory rides the long corridor of time with grace for month upon seamless month as if the wave will never break, then it's arse over tit into whitewater, into seething depths. This was the moment Mark would remember time and again; remember, years on, when it ended, as he came to fear it would end. The moment he'd sought. The moment he could have chosen to grab his board and paddle ashore.

  'Tell you what,' he said. 'I'll give you my cash and 500 Euros from the nearest ATM if you let me meet the rest of you.'

  The younger lad left off his scrabbling, the older one gave a disbelieving snort. 'There ain't no rest, ghostbag. And damn sure no ATM.'

  It was Mark's quiet confidence—his lack of fear—which confounded them. 'I think there is. And lads like you can earn real money, not crotch coins. You think I'm stupid enough to come down here without a motive? Everyone knows to keep off the beaches at night, even the tourists. It's in all the guidebooks.'

  They were wary now, uncertain. A drug deal, it was written on their faces.

  'You know that simudzai means forward, don't you?' he added. Then a touch scornfully, 'The drug trade is for fools, not simus.'

  'You're not afraid of cogners?' the older lad asked.

  'Do I look afraid?'

  *****

  The simu imijondolo crouched like a wounded animal in a cleft between sheer grindstone cliffs. They reached it by a narrow, scrubby track which forded a shallow lagoon before zigzagging out of view from the shore. If there were crocodiles—weren't there always crocodiles?—no one seemed particularly fussed. The walls of rock retained the day's heat and magnified their breathing, though it wasn't a steep climb. Despite a distressing scrawniness, the simus were surefooted, lissom even, and the extraordinary vision of their kind enabled them to scamper through the darkest pockets and beneath the lowest overhangs with ease. Soon they increased their pace, smelling the campfire before they could see its shielded glow; tonight, at least, there would be meat or a stew for the hungry.

  Zadie had volunteered at the Cape Flats, but these sad little shelters of plastic sheeting and rusting, corrugated tin wouldn't keep off even the mild summer rains. Around the campfire she counted half a dozen ragged figures, at least two she thought were girls, one of whom looked no older than six or seven, though chronic malnourishment may have stunted her. Simus usually grew very tall.

  Their energy was undiminished by hunger, however, and they argued fiercely, if quietly, among themselves at the appearance of stra
ngers, monkeys no less, in their midst. To her surprise, Mark seemed to follow the rapid talk in Afrikaans, though he said nothing till invited by the tallest lad—Rafi, someone had called him—who had a compelling, self-assured air. Simus were known for their arrogance, but she wondered what had given this lad such a decided sense of entitlement. There were plenty of angry young men about, blokes ready to kill you for a pack of cigarettes or a wrong word, blokes on tik whose nerves crackled and sparked like shorted wires, whose sweat smelled of leaking battery fluid. At fifteen or sixteen Rafi already stood taller than most men, in a few years he'd be plucking lightning bolts from the sky and filliping them coolly at any sapiens underfoot. Though much of what you heard was bound to be exaggerated, she found it hard to meet his eyes; all their eyes.

  The wrangle might have continued if Rafi hadn't held up a hand, waited till they fell still, and addressed the youngest child. 'So, what do you think, Leonie?'

  The girl's eyes passed quickly over Zadie to come to rest on Mark. Her scrutiny was solemn, followed by a child's sweet smile and a confident switch to English. 'He's OK, we can trust him.' Then her thumb slipped into her mouth, a ripple of what Zadie first mistook for amusement sweeping the group. But Mark nodded as though he understood a secret language and was rewarded with a groundswell of approval.

  'Ugly muggle's got a brain.'

  'Brought any sweets?'

  'Rad hair.'

  'Hangs tough, doesn't he?'

  'Must be someone like Leonie in his family.'

  Meanwhile the older lad from the beach had busied himself with removing several lopsided wooden spits from the fire. One by one he sliced the roasted birds from the skewers with the same bone-handled hunting knife he'd brandished as a weapon, its tapered blade now glistening with fat, and deftly segmented the meat into equal portions which he arranged on two battered enamel plates by his feet. At this last remark, he paused and looked up from his crouch, thrust his knife to the hilt into the sandy ground as if to scour it for another task. The others also gave Mark their heightened attention.