by Adam Roberts
After so many months of slow, antique travel it was momentarily disorienting to be moving with such rapidity. But Issa adjusted her mind, and peered through the window. The Hough Wall swept beneath her, and there were the towers of the city. Memory surged inside her. Home, said the voice. Home! She shut her eyes, but of course she had to open them again. The towers, the towers, palaces of kings and princes! The flitter nipped past one monolith, a thousand metres high, and swam into the chasm of air. Looking down, Issa could see the streets swarming with people. Longhairs, longhairs, and in amongst the profusion of motion and bustle she could see the writhe and tumble of individuals falling, collapsing, tumbling. There were a great many shorthairs too, some armed, some not, either fleeing or resisting. A police flitter schwomped past, no more than ten metres below Issa and going in the opposite direction. ‘There,’ Li shouted to the pilot. They banked, turned up a different street, and this one was even more crowded with people: longhairs swarming like ants. And further in, two police walkers wading through this sea of people. And the crickle crackle of continuous gunfire. That background noise was not the ocean, behind the Hough Wall. It was the sound of so many thousands of people yelling with one yell.
Issa’s stomach clenched and heaved, but it was only the flitter swooping down. A moment later they were on a roof, and they stumbled out, and she was breathing actual New York air. But the air was filled with roars and yells and the battering noises of weapons being discharged. Snow was trying to fall, butterfly flakes falling sluggishly through the cold, but then there was a deafening clatter. Away to the side Issa caught a glimpse of a door dancing and bouncing into the breeze like a thrown playing card. ‘Come on,’ cried Christophe, and the four of them bundled inside the building. It had the inevitability of a dream. She knew this stairway. She knew this room: and there was Rodion – standing, looking with dismay at the strangers inside his house. She didn’t remember him looking quite so old, but it was certainly him. It was him in the flesh, live and breathing and real. In her head with vivid, winter clarity she thought: Now we can take him and finish this place for ever. It was a giant thought, the kind of thought a god might have.
Rodion had opened his mouth.
Issa took one step towards him before she saw the other person in the room, and then, as it were, her consciousness tumbled down the spiral staircase inside her head. ‘Daddy!’ she screeched. Never before in the long history of humankind had a man looked so startled. She ran and grabbed him about the waist. Everything else just fell away. It all vanished. ‘Daddy!’
‘No!’ he cried, in terror. ‘No!’
‘There’s no time for this,’ said Li. Christophe and one of the other men were behind Rodion, one at each shoulder, and the astonished old boy was propelled from the room and up the stairway. The stairs had been programmed to respond to his presence (Issa remembered this!) with gentle undulations of individual steps so as to facilitate his passage upwards. The unexpected motion of the steps threw Christophe, and he almost stumbled. Issa was right behind. ‘He comes too!’ she called to Li. He was her daddy after all. ‘He comes too!’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ snapped Li, pushing past her. ‘We’re not here to collect all the random strangers of—’
‘Watch out!’ bellowed Christophe.
There was a knot of people coming up the stairwell from below. Li dashed upstairs; moaning, Rodion was dragged behind her. Issa was not far behind. Yelling below them. But, between the undulating stairs and the impediment of having to drag the reluctant old man, Li’s foot slipped. She fell forward and banged her knee. ‘Oh!’ she cried, in pain.
As she began to pick herself up again Issa ran against her. It was not precisely a conscious decision. But neither was it entirely a surprise to her as she did it. She felt her shoulder connect forcefully with Li’s stomach; she put as much of her energy and weight into the tackle as she could. Li was jarred sideways on the step, knocked against the wall and started to fall. Her mouth made an out-puffing ‘o’ and then she was tumbling downstairs. The people coming up yelled with surprise and alarm, and a high-pitched voice called ‘Arto, watch out!’
Issa herself rebound from her collision, and her back hit the other wall. She steadied herself. ‘Come on,’ she told her father. He was staring at her with the look of a man trying to process a blit. ‘Come!’ She heaved on his wrist, and he began bumbling up the stairs.
There was a loud commotion below them.
It went something like this. A man was ascending. His chunky, handsome head, shortcropped dark hair and a fierce expression, was on a level with Issa’s feet. He was lifting something up towards her, except that it wasn’t towards her, it was a gun and it was aimed further up the stairs. Somebody cried ‘Arto!’ and then the whole space was filled to bursting with noise, horrid deafening noise. It was so insanely noisy that Issa screwed her eyes tight, and the noise tripped over itself, like the devil’s drumfill, and extended. It was guns being fired, of course, she knew that. But she had no idea guns could be so loud! Somebody punched her in the chest – right in the middle of the chest! – and, shocked, she opened her eyes to see that it hadn’t been a punch. Rather, Christophe had knocked into her as he tumbled down. He was kneeling, strangely, and descending at the same time. She looked again and saw that he was sort of rattling down the stairs on his knees. That must be painful! But he had his arm out, too, and an antique pistol was in his hand, and it was chimneying smoke, and his eyes were shut, and then his gun fired again. She saw the momentary horizontal white stalactite of flame at its tip, and then saw its retinal afterghost printed upon the back of her eye. But she could also see hidden somewhere behind that jagged glare inside her eyeball, Christophe falling forward and continuing to tumble, face down now. His legs came up, bizarrely, and his feet wiggled. Then his whole head-down body rotated and he collapsed down the stairwell. Issa looked about her. The chunky, fierce-faced man had gone, and Issa looked again and she saw him pressed backward against the wall, with his head at a curious angle, and his arm straight up, like he was trying to catch a waiter’s attention. She couldn’t see his gun. But she could see that his shirt was soaked with black fluid. Then she saw that he wasn’t breathing.
After all the great press of noise, it was ringingly quiet. Inside Issa’s ears an angel was singing. The angel’s song was one, pure, seamless, celestial note; but she understood what it was. It was: home. Rodion was three steps above her, sitting down, his mouth still open – but breathing, living, alive.
She pulled her father’s wrist. ‘Up,’ she told him.
He did not have the power to resist.
There were more people downstairs, and at first she thought they would be armed, just as the fierce-faced man had been. But then a young lad came up the stairs, looking scared, and he seemed familiar to Issa, although she couldn’t immediately place how she knew him or put a name to him. It would come to her. But he had no weapon. It was clear that he had no weapon. ‘Come up,’ she called to him, feeling that she had to take him with her as well. So he came up, looking at her with an astonished face. And behind him came a plump woman, and she knew who that was. And finally up the stairs, with the perfect mirror-logic of the grown-up world, came she herself, Leah, the real and consummate Leah.
‘There is,’ Issa cried, very loud, her heart full of happiness and weeping at the same time, ‘no time! Upstairs! Upstairs!’
By sheer force of her will, she moved all these individuals to the top of the stairs and out on the roof. They were out. Issa was in charge now. They all rushed to the waiting flitter, and Issa pushed all the others in through the door before climbing in herself. The driver was protesting, and waving a pistol, but when she got in at last he put away his weapon. ‘Li is dead,’ she told him, with uncontradictable forcefulness. ‘We have to go right now.’
‘Do we have him?’ the driver asked, gape-eyed.
‘That,’ said Issa, grabbing the pilot by the chin and directing his gaze towards where Rodion was tremblingl
y sitting, ‘is Rodion. Now go.’
The driver looked at the whole cabinful of shorthairs who were now inside his flitter, but if he thought about arguing with Issa he immediately thought better of it. The door shimmered shut and the flitter lifted into the sky. It was five metres above the roof. It was ten metres up, and fifteen metres. The top of the Hough Wall was visible through the grid of the taller buildings.
‘Wait,’ said the driver, looking down. ‘Isn’t that Li?’
It was. She was there, emerging from the top of the stairs and through the frame where the roof door had once stood. It was unmistakably her, looking up at them. The flitter wobbled in its ascent, and stopped. It hovered.
Li on the roof was staring in rage, or bafflement, up at them. She had a weapon in her hand.
‘We do not go back for her,’ Issa told the driver.
‘What do you mean?’ he replied. ‘Don’t be crazy! What do you mean?’
‘She is about to fire at the flitter,’ said Issa, with total focus. ‘See?’
‘She thinks we’re abandoning her!’ said the driver, and Issa could see that her spell was broken. ‘She won’t fire if we go back down.’
The gong chimed. Or whatever it was. A proud, profound sound. A sort of deep-clipped, giant’s cough, like a vast door being slammed a long way off. ‘Look,’ said Issa, her composure returning to her. She was in charge. She had never stopped being in charge. ‘Look.’ The driver followed the line of her arm. In between the buildings, the vertical line of puffing-out dust was clearly visible in the very middle of the Hough Wall.
You might have counted off the silent seconds, had you been there. One, two, three, four, five. ‘That’s not supposed to happen yet,’ said the driver, in a low voice.
‘We can’t go back,’ urged Issa.
Everything depended upon this. Everything came down to convincing the driver of this one thing: persuading him not to land the flitter back on the roof, but rather to take it higher and to fly away. Issa had never met him before that day. She did not know his name.
Then the wall broke in a thin vertical line, with a thunderclap. Water came through in a great pillar that broke into two, like the pages of a white book being opened.
The flitter wobbled, and then began rising. The driver’s eyes were on the wall. In moments they were far enough above the roofs to get a good view of the splinter that had appeared from top to base in the structure, and the blank pages of Atlantic water that were waiting to be written upon.
Issa went back into the cabin. ‘Dad!’ she cried, grabbing her father’s two hands in her own. ‘Daddy, it’s me.’
He looked into her eyes. She saw what happened. She saw him understand her, not only her words but the wholeness of her. And then he pulled that understanding back into the shell of his head, as a snail withdraws itself. His eyes looked at her, but his soul did not. ‘Who are you?’
‘It’s me, Daddy!’ she said. ‘You remember!’
‘No,’ he said, not loudly, but with great force. She saw right through the moment. There was a crystallized future, right there. He was going to have to choose between the changeling daughter who had his heart, who had brought him all the happiness of recovery and renewal, and the real daughter whose loss had caused him such pain. He could not choose them both, that was clear enough. It would become clear to him too, in time. He would have to choose the one or the other. Of course, the changeling had spent years growing herself like a bush of strawberry-red roses, all softness and thorn, about his heart. And of course, the real girl had spent years growing into something perfectly alien. But as she looked at her daddy, all her anger sublimed away, she thought to herself: I do not know which he will choose.
It all trembled. Her heart was the point around which the world pivoted.
Then his eyes opened wide, and water came out of them. ‘Leah?’ he cried, unable to hold back his love for her. ‘Is it you? Is it? Is it you?’ And he came over to her, and said; ‘Oh my beautiful girl!’
Everything else fell away into the void. Nothing else mattered. She was weeping, and she called out, ‘Daddy, my daddy’ and embraced him. It was wonderful and terrible to feel his torso shudder with tears as she held him. He felt smaller, inside her hug; more frail. ‘It’s alright,’ she told him. And the all and the right were equally balanced. ‘It’s alright,’ she said.
‘My beautiful girl!’
‘It’s alright.’
At that moment the whole flitter rang like a bell: a hole popped into existence on the floor, and a bigger one clicked open in the roof. Boom, boom. The noise levels suddenly increased, and air blew through loud as a snake’s hiss. ‘Come on,’ yelled Issa, her face still wet, though she was no longer crying. She moved herself back over to the driver. Bundled by circumstance, and propelled only by her willpower, he zipped the craft forward. They flew in the direction of the Hough Wall. He had been told, Issa thought, that he was to fly back to the barge. Thinking quickly, she ran through possibilities. They would have to try and dissuade him of that. But that would come later. It was clear that she was in charge now, clear that her whole life had shaped her for this role. Right now, though, everybody was at a window, and looking down. The white foam was filling the bay like a latte, and as they flew over the last of the buildings they saw the advance line of the onrushing bulge break, with a great arc of lace and frill, upon the old docks of the city. The Hough Wall groaned like a living thing, and there was another gunshot crack. The pages of the book became a curved screen, and the story of turmoil and foam was visible upon it. Issa watched the mass of water fall through the air. And at the back of the flitter, Leah, her better half, her other self, her real being, her authentic copy, the actual her who did not (now that she came to look more closely) really look that much like her, spoke, her voice breathy and amazed and teenage in a way that Issa had long since lost the ability to parse, and which she would never recover: ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘my,’ she said, ‘God,’ she said.
Water was pouring over the white wall now. It sparkled in the winter sunlight as if, oh my God, it was full of stars.
Also by Adam Roberts from Gollancz:
Salt
Stone
On
The Snow
Polystom
Gradisil
Land of the Headless
Swiftly
Yellow Blue Tibia
New Model Army
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Adam Roberts 2011
All rights reserved.
The right of Adam Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2011 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 09908 1
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.adamroberts.com
www.orionbooks.co.uk
-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share