‘Sorrow,’ he murmured bleakly, and I saw the shadow of longing, the pain of parting, mirrored in his eyes. ‘You see,’ he said. And he kissed me again.
We sat all night, and he told me of his coming to Glory and the years of his rising to power. He told me of the death of the agents – not murder but chosen deaths met on the High Path. They had been converted, he said. I knew he was seeking to convert me, and that in convincing me to accept death, he fought his love. In turn, I sought to win him from his oaths to heaven. Every minute that we were together, love seemed brighter and more dangerously alluring. We walked the High Path together, exalted and despairing.
The next day, or perhaps many days later, for time had ceased to matter, he showed me the maps that indicated the stockpiles set under all the other cities, confirming what I had guessed. To destroy Glory was not enough. Heaven wanted all humanity wiped from the face of the earth. In Freedom, ironically, the cache, now isolated and harmless, is right beneath this healing centre where I now sit and write. It was installed even as the foundations for a new wing were laid. The Angel had told me of his own agents, moving like shadows through all of the cities to lay the foundations of Geddon. I wondered that no one in Freedom had noticed what had been done.
‘It is the essence of Freedom that its citizens will not interfere with one another,’ the Angel told me. Then he showed me the room on the perimeter of Glory, where the explosions and weapons would simultaneously be set off.
‘This time, it must all be destroyed. Heaven cannot raise flesh easily and it will be aeons before it can happen again.’
‘You’d kill all of those thousands of people after they survived the madness of the worldwars?’ I asked, as we stood in that small machine-dominated room.
‘I would free those souls left behind,’ he said gently. ‘I will free them from fear and death and pain and sorrow.’
‘And from love and beauty of the sort that only flesh can know?’
Again there was a flash of pain in his eyes, and he stroked my cheek, then pointed to my ring. ‘Why not summon him then? He will come here though it is forbidden. He could kill me and save you.’
I thought there was a flare of hope in his eyes.
‘You would not let him,’ I said, knowing that this was true but not all the truth. I could not bear the thought of Sorrow dying.
‘You believed he was an Angel?’ Jack Rose asks. I have let him read the words written down. His eyes are filled with pain and he makes no effort to hide it. He does not care if I know how he feels.
‘He was,’ I say. ‘He came to bring Geddon. He fell in love and he trusted me. But I am not an Angel.’
‘You loved him?’ He turns away to stare out the window, bracing himself.
‘Yes,’ I rasp, and wonder how many shapes Sorrow can take.
‘You killed him,’ Jack says flatly. ‘You had to. He would have killed himself and me and you and all of us. All the children left – not just the ones in Glory. He would have killed humanity out of love. You killed him so that we would survive.’
I feel the pain and memory of Sorrow well up and spill out of me. Again I see his face, suffused with radiance, for he walked the Highest Path of all in the moment of dying, knowing that he failed because of loving me, knowing that I remained behind, and was lost to heaven. Again I feel the whoosh of the explosions, and the flaring heat of the flames as they coiled around me. The sound of Glory dying was the sound of my anguish.
‘Tell me again what happened at the end,’ Erasemus said. ‘I know you have written it, but . . .’
He stopped, not wanting to say what I saw so clearly in his face. That if I thought Sorrow had truly been sent by heaven, then perhaps I was mad. If that was so, perhaps I had been mistaken in reporting that the control centre had been annihilated, and was incapable of detonating the explosives hidden in the other cities, in Freedom.
‘He showed me the control room, and when I had the chance, I went back to destroy it. I rewired it so that it would be blown up. I didn’t realise the city would go up with it. I thought it would just be the room.’
‘He might have lied when he said the control room was the only control centre. Maybe the weapons could be triggered some other way.’
I looked at the wall, and after a moment he went out. Unless he believed Sorrow had been an Angel, he must doubt. He could not understand that an Angel is truth. Erasemus believed Sorrow had been mad, and I could not tell him any different. People see what they want to see. Sorrow told me that. People can look into the face of the sun, and see only the eternal night.
‘It was foreseen that it would come to this moment of balance,’ Sorrow had said, standing in the doorway of the control room. His eyes were on the weapon I held. Jack Rose had made it himself – a little sheathed knife that, triggered, ejected its blade. My hand trembled.
‘You love me,’ the Angel said.
I nodded, weeping. ‘I do, but I have to stop you. I can’t let you destroy everything.’
‘Only flesh, my love. Only the material world. I would never harm you.’ He was smiling because he was an Angel and Angels are love and only know love. He loved me, but he did not understand the nature of flesh, the need of it to survive. The drive to go on which is stronger than fear or hate or even love.
‘Heaven calls – can’t you feel it?’ he said, his face exalted. ‘It is time. It is not too late, even with all you have done. We will end it together.’
He reached for the lever which would bring Geddon to the world before the control room could explode and sever Glory from the other cities.
I triggered Jack’s knife and a red flower bloomed over the Angel’s heart. He fell like a snowflake, as the city around us juddered. His head was in my lap. He smiled and tried to lift his fingers to my face.
‘Too late,’ he whispered, his hand falling back. ‘I failed heaven. I failed you, my dear love. We must part.’
‘No,’ I whispered, but he was gone, flesh and spirit.
I do not know what it means that I have survived. I meant to follow him, for we had begun the High Path together. Yet I live and suffer. Perhaps the path is longer for me, because of my betrayal. But in one thing, I did not betray. He went to heaven, I saw the pain in his eyes as his spirit left the flesh – his name was a foretelling – for his Anguish at the last was terrible.
‘What will you do now?’ Jack Rose asks.
‘I will survive,’ I say. ‘That is what we humans do. You taught me that. It’s what flesh does best, you said. Nothing is more important than that. To survive, we will do anything – starve, hunger, claw. Kill an Angel.’
‘We are what we are now, Rian,’ he says softly. ‘If we once were just spirit, we’re not that any more. We’re flesh and maybe we have a different path to tread than heaven intended. Maybe heaven will leave us alone now.’
‘Maybe,’ I murmur, and my heart twists, but I do not let my pain show. ‘I heard you are leaving.’
He nods. ‘I’ve had enough of being a watcher. The authorities have heard of lands beyond the wastes where there are a few isolated settlements. There might be no truth in it, but we need the gene pool so I am taking a boat out. It’s likely to be a one-way trip. All I have to do is let them know there are others. They’ll come when they can and if they want.’ Jack Rose hesitates. ‘You could come with me, Rian.’
Survive and go on, I think, for accepting, too, is part of surviving.
‘I could . . .’ I say.
ROACHES
The day was bright and cold, casting sharp-edged shadows over the crumbling city. Framed in a sagging doorway, the boy stood motionless and pale, wary eyes skimming along slabbed grey surfaces, alert for movement.
But that alone was not enough to be sure.
He listened with ears so attuned to the noises of the dead city that he did not register the gritty hiss of the wind, or the rustle it caused at the fringe of great sodden banks of debris on the cracked footpath.
His eyes rested o
n a spiral dance of leaves, a voice inside his thoughts warning of the danger that lay in moving around in the daylight: Gordy’s voice speaking to him out of the past, stiff with warning.
‘Day is dangerous because you might be seen, and night is dangerous because you can’t see who might be watching.’
But the scrapers fell when they willed. The boy sniffed at the air, ripe with the rain smell, knowing anything exposed would be destroyed. But he noticed the way the sun shone fair on the ruins. You could be seen for miles out in the open like that.
He chewed his knuckle, trying to decide.
The Carnies living in that part of the city had passed by that morning as he watched unseen from his high window. Usually they stayed away all day. But you had to act as if they might be back at any moment.
‘Don’t expect the Carnies to be like us,’ the Gordy voice said. ‘Their brains are scrambled. They are not like us. Don’t try to out-think them. If you let them see you or guess you are there, they will hunt until they find you, and they will eat you.’
As they had eaten Gordy.
‘Be careful . . .’ the boy whispered to himself in Gordy’s voice.
He swallowed a sudden dryness at the back of his tongue. Gordy would call it too much of a risk, but if there were books . . .
He took a deep breath and stepped out. The sun felt delicious and dangerous on his skin. His bare feet made no sound and he walked as Gordy had shown him: very slowly, ready to freeze at any moment, always staying close to the edges of buildings and shadows. The fall of the scraper had covered the road in a fine white dust, and the boy flapped a cloth automatically behind him, erasing foot marks as he picked his way through the rubble.
Excitement clawed at his gut as he spied the edge of a book. A quick glance around, then he knelt and reached into the narrow gap between two slabs. He groped and felt the book move fractionally, sliding just out of reach.
Sweat beaded his chest and face as he struggled to make his arm longer, his fingers more certain. The cracked stone gnawed at his armpit.
‘Book . . .’ he muttered, the word as fierce as an oath.
Again the book shifted tantalisingly. But this time he managed to get the edge of it between thumb and forefinger. ‘Be careful, be slow, be patient. To be too quick is to die quickly.’ Gordy’s words were a litany as he inched the book out.
Gordy had told him about books.
‘That’s all there is left of the old world,’ he had said. ‘The days of books are gone for good.’
He had explained how the black scratchings that filled the pages hid words. Only those who knew the secret of the scratchings could know what the words said.
Gordy had told him the messages of many pages, and had begun to teach him the magic of understanding the scratchings. He still remembered how to make his own name.
The wind breathed its cold breath and the dust stirred unnoticed as the boy made the mark of his name in the dirt as Gordy had done.
‘What does it say?’ he had asked, for he did not know what his name was and was filled with curiosity.
‘It says Roach,’ Gordy had told him. Then he had made another mark. ‘That says my name. Gordy. See?’
‘Roach . . .’ The word had sounded mysterious and powerful. Then the older man had told him the story of the roaches.
‘Before the Carnies and the red dust came, there were lots of different things in the world. There were dogs and cats and snakes and horses and birds and fish. But the red dust came and made them all mad, and so they ate each other in the Dying Times. And all that was left were the human Carnies, because there were more of them than any other kind of creature, and us. But there was one other kind of thing that didn’t go mad and that was those little bugs you call scritchins. In the Olden Times they were called roaches. The red dust didn’t make them mad. They were tough. The world’s best survivors and that’s what you are too. You and those scritchin bugs are the same thing, and so you share the same name.’
For a while the boy made the marks that told his name everywhere they went in their twilight excursions. Then Gordy told him the Carnies might notice the markings and wonder who made them. It seemed the Carnies might know the secret language too.
‘Who knows how much they might remember?’ Gordy had mused.
The boy did not believe the dirty wild Carnies were capable of such knowledge, but he kept his doubts inside his mouth and did not let the words show his thoughts.
Before Gordy came, the boy had been alone. For as far back as he could remember, he had hidden from the Carnies. There had been more of them once, but he supposed they just kept eating one another and so there were fewer and fewer.
Each night he hid in the wardrobe in his high scraper room, and when the sun disappeared he would hunt scritchins until the moon came.
The night Gordy came, he had heard the Carnies’ hunting calls from the street below, and noises that told him someone had entered his scraper.
He heard the sounds of footsteps and his sweat was cold as he imagined the Carnies grinning their horrible mad grins as they squatted, waiting in a circle.
Stiff with terror, he had lain unmoving in the wardrobe for long hours. He had peed himself, and he bit his tongue rather than cry out when the cramps twisted his muscles. In the end, he came out because he was exhausted with the dreadful waiting and imagining. Better to be eaten.
But when he came out, there was only Gordy asleep across the doorway. While the boy was trying to make up his mind what to do, Gordy had opened his eyes and spoken.
Roach recognised the word ‘eat’ and thought Gordy was announcing his intention.
‘You might as well eat me and get it over with,’ he had said. Roach remembered those words and now he understood what they meant.
Somehow they had sorted it out. Roach could hardly recall how, though he remembered vividly the terror of the hiding and the waiting.
Gordy had escaped from a Carnie camp and his eyes had been filled with hurting as he told his story. The Carnies had hunted him, but he had given them the slip, and ended up in Roach’s wardrobe room.
‘Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’ Gordy had said.
Once they understood each other, Gordy had wanted to know everything Roach could remember until his head hurt with all the thinking and remembering.
‘Why do you hide in the wardrobe?’ Gordy asked.
His questions were like picking a scab you thought was healed. Sometimes there was more there than you thought, and it hurt. Sometimes he would remember a new thing.
One night Roach dreamed of a woman. Not a Carnie woman with breasts that sagged like old waterbags and filthy matted hair, but a woman whose hands were as smooth and warm as the insides of his legs. He dreamed she was much bigger than he, and had pressed her lips on his mouth and face and put him into the wardrobe. ‘Be very quiet, my sweet,’ she had whispered. ‘When I come back we’ll go to the country where we’ll be safe.’
The next morning he had told the words of the dream to Gordy. ‘It might have happened that way,’ Gordy decided. ‘It might be that this woman was your mother. Maybe she was one of them who didn’t give in to the dust so quick. Maybe she tried to lead the Carnies away from you.’
‘She’ll come back for me,’ Roach announced.
‘Maybe,’ Gordy responded.
Roach could tell from the way Gordy’s eyes slid away that he did not believe the Mother would return, but he had not seen the look in the dream-woman’s eyes as she made her whispered promise. Roach had been unable to find the words to show the look to Gordy, but he knew the woman called Mother would come back and take him to Country where there would be no Carnies or crumbling scrapers, and where there might be other roaches who had resisted the madness of the red dust.
After Gordy was taken, Roach discovered loneliness was a thing that ate into your belly like hunger, and which no food would ease. He began to long for the time when the Mother would return. He dreamed of Country, and it became a fan
tastical place where green grass covered the ground like in the park where the Carnie gangs fought their battles.
Gordy had explained the Carnies belonged to gangs. They hunted one another and the few mad loners for food, and also fought wars which were bloody savage gang battles where the losers were thrown shrieking into the cooking-fires as part of the victory feast. He said the wars were part of an older madness.
Roach had dreadful silent nightmares for a long time over what he saw in the park the day Gordy had taken him there. And he never forgot Gordy’s warning.
‘Be careful. Never let the Carnies see you or guess you exist, or they will hunt you until they find you. And they will eat you.’
Gordy had tried to convince him to sleep outside the wardrobe, but Roach had refused. In the end this saved him, for the Carnies came one night while they slept.
‘Stay! Stay!’ Gordy had screamed, and the Carnies had laughed, thinking he pleaded to be left. But trembling in the wardrobe dark, Roach had understood that last desperate message.
Days passed before hunger drove him from the fetid urine reek of the closet, his mind filled with pictures of the man he had seen thrown screaming onto the fire in the park. Only this time, the man had Gordy’s face.
He had never seen Gordy again.
Not long after, the mother dream began to recur.
Sometimes the dreams turned into nightmares at the last minute when the Mother smiled, revealing sharpened Carnie teeth. Roach began to think of going out to look for the Mother-woman, or for Country. But he did not know where to begin.
And then he remembered a thing Gordy had told him about books. ‘You can find the answers to any question in books, if you know how to read. Some books can even teach you that.’
And so he had begun the search for the book that would give him the magic knowledge of the black markings. The wardrobe room was filled with books which were yet to reveal their secrets.
He had asked Gordy once to scratch the ‘Mother’ word, and he especially kept books where he could find that marking. Each night he dreamed of the Mother, and each night it seemed to him she was more real, and closer, and that she would come very soon to bring him to Country.