By Light Alone (49 page)

They saw another raft, but made no attempt to go towards it, and were not themselves approached. One day the dawn rose over a shield of land laid flat upon the water, with brandnew rich-people dwellings built at the brand-new waterline. A single sunkite floated over the peak of the island’s centre, its tether catching the light like a geometrically purified everlasting line of lightning. This, Issa knew, was a Greek island. She had done the Greek islands at school, eons and ages before, and was frustrated that she did not know the name of this one. Sudhir steered the raft away from the landmass, and continued southwest.

In the night everybody was woken by the sound of a flitter passing overhead; but it did not attack. Issa lay awake for a while, staring at the stars. It was the oddest thing. She looked, and they seemed very far away, infinitely distant, lost in the immense space of the world of
Angels and Pain
and all those spaceship books. But then she would blink, and she would be possessed by the certainty that the stars were close enough to touch . . . that if she just reached up her hand she could get her nails underneath one of them, a yard above her face, and prise it loose. This would leave – what? A hole? And through the hole – what?

She did not raise her arm. She went back to sleep.

The next day, the Stanbulis began to get sick. It happened to all of them at once, which was the worrying thing. The rafters set them all in one corner, and crowded closer together to leave as much space between them as possible. Some said now was the time to put them back in their boat and cut them loose – taking their motor, said others. But no decision was taken, and by the end of the day nobody would have agreed to go close enough to them to carry them across to their own craft. They looked hideous: big raspberry-coloured sores visible on all exposed skin, the scabs around their mouths big and white as knucklebones. They lay too ill even to moan. The whisper went around the raft: ‘They’ll die! Push them straight in the water!’ But nobody had the hardness of heart to do it. Or perhaps nobody had the stomach to go closer to the revolting symptoms of disease.

The following morning, they were still alive, but looked worse than ever. ‘Somebody should give them water,’ was Mam Elessa’s opinion; but when one of the boys retorted ‘You do it, then’ she turned her back on him. Issa went as close to them as she dared. The sores had grown bigger in the night, and now looked like sliced tomatoes laid upon their skin. Three were lying on their backs, and she watched their chests looking for movement. It was hard to tell.

By sunset the general opinion was that they were all dead. ‘We can’t just leave them there to rot,’ said Sudhir. ‘We have to dispose of them.’ Three lads offered to throw them overboard, if they got blow-jobs from the girls of their choice as a reward; but older women beat them on their heads and faces with the flats of their hands and chased them away. In the end Sudhir and two of her associates wrapped scarves about their mouths and kicked the bodies overboard with their feet.

That night, Issa lay unable to sleep, thinking that the bodies were following the raft as Tapa had done. She dozed, woke, dozed. Rain fell and woke everybody up. When dawn made the eastern cloud-cover gleam dusty silver, the rafters scanned the waves, but saw no sign of the Stanbulis.

Three days and nights passed. Sudhir altered the direction of the raft, so that now they were travelling directly west, heading for the glory of sunset every evening. Issa sought her out. ‘Show me your Rodion,’ she said. ‘On your Fwn.’ Sudhir observed her for a while, and then wearily complied. ‘I do know him,’ Issa confirmed.

‘I’m too exhausted for your make-believe now, Issa,’ said Sudhir.

‘It could be of use to the mission,’ said Issa, although she could not imagine exactly how. ‘I could be an asset.’

‘Go away.’

The next day they saw smoke from beyond the horizon: a great spectral skyscraper of black tailing off near its roof into streamers and puffs of grey. By the afternoon they discovered the source of this smoke: land. A wildfire was burning upon that place, although whether it had been started deliberately or accidentally it was not possible to tell. There were no signs of civilization. The fire was a bowstring of brightness drawn across the scrubland, and it sent a huge amount of smuts and dust upwards. As they passed, Issa could smell it. The smell stayed with them for a long time.

Two days later a storm pounced on them like a panther, and the cabin was struck by lightning. Nobody was hurt.

Two days after that, the first rafter showed signs of the Stanbuli sickness.

The plague went all round the raft rapidly. The first day everybody except Issa had boils about their lips, and complained of thirst and pains in their eyes and sinuses. The second day some rafters got worse, and some better, and Issa permitted herself to hope that things might be all right after all. But on the third day several rafters had sores on their chest and neck, and by the fourth everybody on the raft was afflicted except Issa. Some women hissed that she was a witch or a demon, or promised her that her suffering was just around the corner. Most did not have the energy for that. Issa did her best, carrying water all about the raft, but the whole group grew sicker and sicker. The sores were disgusting, although she found she got used to them. They looked horrid, and smelt worse, but it was possible to look past them, and see the individual underneath.

The first rafters died on the sixth day. When she was bringing Sudhir water, inside the cabin, the older woman grabbed hold of her wrist. ‘I know why you’re not sick,’ she rasped.

‘I do too,’ said Issa. ‘I used to wonder why so many people got ill – like poor Tapa with her arm. Or when I was back on the mainland. They got sick and I never did. But it only really sank in these last few days. None of you have gWhites. It’s such a crazy thing! No gWhites!’

‘You have them,’ gasped Sudhir.

‘Of course!’

‘
Of course
,’ laughed Sudhir. She looked a terrible sight.

‘I thought everyone had them. I thought they were like – teeth, or something.’

Sudhir asked solemnly: ‘Do you know Rodion – really?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wish I’d known about you. Or. I
did
know. I knew something was wrong about you. I thought you were a spy.’

‘I’m not a spy.’

‘We could have used you!’ She retched, coughed, and lay still. Issa watched her intently, thinking that perhaps she was stopping breathing. But after half a minute, her chest started going up and down. ‘Sudhir,’ said Issa, in a small voice. ‘Everybody is going to die. What will I do?’

Sudhir looked at her with crusted eyes, but didn’t speak.

‘I’ll be alone,’ said Issa to herself, feeling a wash of sorrow and self-pity come up, like the ocean swell, inside her.

Sudhir closed her eyes.

Issa went back out onto the deck. It was not possible for her to say whether the waves slid and danced under the action of the wind, or whether it was the fluid wash of tears across the global surface of her eyeball. She drank some water from the desal pump. Some of the women had dangled fishlines over the side of the raft – for those moments when sudden cravings for some nibble of hardfood became particularly acute. Nobody was tending them now. Issa laid her finger against one, and felt the thrum of a trapped creature.

She felt intensely sorry for herself, and that, of course, is not a pleasant sensation. But worse than that was the sharp apprehension of her own weakness. All bundled in together, feeling bad and feeling a harder kind of worse that she felt bad in the first place. She could not have put it into words, but she had the intuition that this was a dangerous state of mind, a sort of emotional short-circuit that might burn the tender membrane of her consciousness. And instinctively, she withdrew from it. Feeling sorry for herself was stupid.
She
wasn’t sick, after all! She wasn’t in such a bad situation as the others. The thing to do, she realized, was to stay active.

The next time she went into the cabin it smelt worse. Sudhir was dead. She lay with her arms and legs starwise. One of her people was propped against the wall with his head so slumped his face was virtually pressed into his stomach.

She went round the whole raft with a beaker of water, offering it to those who were still alive. But those who were still alive were barely alive, and would not be so for much longer. Nobody had the energy to drink. Still, she did not feel she could be idle, or the tears would come back. So she cleared a space in the corner of the raft, moving bodies out of the way. She didn’t have the strength, in herself, to pull the larger corpses, so instead she waited until the swell lifted that portion of the structure, and pushed with her legs to roll the bodies away.

By evening she did another tour of the raft, but as far as she could see nobody at all was left alive. That night was not pleasant. It kept returning to her that she was alone on a ship of corpses. It was eerie, and made more so by the way the clouds spun through the heavens intermittently illuminating the heaps of bodies. She told herself:
Imagine they are only sleeping
, and that made it a little better. But the air was very cold, and there was nobody she could cuddle against to warm herself. So she slept only a little, and greeted dawn with stupid tears of idiotic gratitude.

‘This won’t do,’ she said aloud, speaking English for the first time in – a long time, she couldn’t say how long. She went back into the cabin and searched for Sudhir’s Fwn. It was in the last place she looked, which was actually underneath the woman’s dead body. She brought it out in the sunlight and sat cradling it for a long time. She wondered, vaguely, about using the Fwn to call for help: but as she sat there she found herself thinking: But who should I call? And besides, of course the Fwn was locked.

Clouds kept dimming the sun, but after an hour or so she had gathered a little more energy. She tried to focus her thoughts on practical matters. She went over to look at the raft’s main motor. It was a large cylinder set underneath the water that passed water through it to propel them onwards. She understood, more or less, that this was how it worked; and understood too that changing the vector of water passed through altered their direction. The controls panel looked simple enough. But how would she know which way to steer? West, she supposed. But surely she would collide with land at some point.

She started crying again, as the comprehension that she was perfectly alone passed violently through her soul. Utterly alone. Fully alone. Then, suddenly, she was gripped with the irrational fear that all this crying was wasting precious water. So she stopped crying, and put her mouth to the spigot of the desal. When she finished, Rageh was standing next to her, with his bizarre open-trumpet crimped skull.

‘Exactly what I need,’ she told him. ‘More dead people.’

‘There’s no need to be like that,’ he replied, calmly. ‘I can’t help being dead.’

‘And I can’t help being alive.’ It occurred to her that she was speaking English, now, and that he was understanding her perfectly. But Rageh didn’t speak any English. So that meant he was only a creation of her imagination. That was logical, and it didn’t upset her. Would it have been better if he’d been a real ghost? Probably not. Probably worse.

‘What do you mean, worse?’ Rageh asked her.

‘I didn’t even say that out loud,’ objected Issa.

‘Of course you did.’

‘The worse thing
is
,’ she told him, ‘being all alone. In the middle of the ocean! On a raft full of corpses!’ It sounded ridiculous to her as she said it; which is to say, being true didn’t stop it being ridiculous. She laughed into her hand, and felt better.

‘You’re not alone,’ Rageh told her. ‘You’ve got me.’

‘It’s sweet,’ she said, falling out of English again, ‘and you’re sweet. But you’re not real. You’re only a part of my mind.’

Rageh’s face, twisted out of true though it was, gave her a sly look. The curtain was drawn back inside Issa’s mind. She gasped.

‘Do you see, now?’ he asked.

‘I do.’

‘Being alone,’ Rageh said again. ‘Kids do that. This is because kids don’t fully exist by themselves; they’re not whole beings yet. They feel the isolation of being separated from friends or family much more acutely. But a grown-up can be alone quite happily, because that’s what being a grown-up means. A child is half a person, an adult a whole one. Loneliness is a kind of amputation. You can amputate an arm; but you can’t amputate an entire person.’

Issa looked about her, at the many dead people. ‘I don’t need
them
, I suppose.’

‘You don’t.’

‘Family,’ said Issa.

There was a long pause, and the water slurped at the sides of the raft. ‘Why did you say that?’ Rageh said.

‘Just – I don’t know.’

‘It’s all behind you,’ said Rageh. ‘You’re free of all that.’

Issa nodded. ‘It’s a funny kind of free, though,’ she added. ‘Stuck on a raft in the middle of the ocean.’

‘It’s a sea,’ said Rageh, ‘not an ocean.’ But when she looked up at him, to rebuke him for his pedantry, he wasn’t there any more.

She found a plastic blanket in the cabin, and wrapped it around her that night to keep warm. It crinkled and rustled like popcorn when she moved. The sea was unusually calm, and there were very few clouds. Almost all the stars were out. She had to decide what to do. She was a grown-up now, after all. She was in charge. This thought formed a membrane inside her head that kept the tears back. It was remarkable, really. She tested it, as it were, by bouncing a test-thought off it: ‘I’m alone and stranded at sea on a raft of corpses.’ But it bounced back. She was alone, and that was fine – what good had it ever done her, really, hanging out with other people? Even on the raft, which hadn’t been all bad, there had been those boys who tried to pull her trousers down. And in the village, being with other people had meant being in a place where other people could upset her. So that was OK. Then: stranded at sea: but she had all the water she could drink, and all the sunlight she needed. She was better at sea than she had been outside Trabzon – just as that old preacher women had said. What had her name been? No, gone. Didn’t matter. Then: corpses. That
was
a problem, true, but it was a practical problem. She would have to push them into the water. It wouldn’t be easy. But it wasn’t impossible. She had plenty of time, after all.