Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi (13 page)

7

Jo fitted in remarkably well with the rest of us. She and Marlene hit it off from the outset, and she made no attempt to take over or subvert Marlene's unofficial leadership role. Soon the three of us were virtually inseparable, which could have caused difficulties among the others had it not been for Jo's personality – or, at least, the personality she revealed after she'd joined the troop. Gone was the intense, knowing, cynical, slightly bitter, darkly laughing woman I'd initially met; in her place was one who was always game for a joke or to talk – as we did, in endless circles – about our past lives and our philosophies of life. Even Derek – shy, retiring, sorrowing Derek – warmed to her, coming out of his shell to the rest of us as well. And Jo's size had its advantages, too. Once we saw the crazies, or another group of zealots very much like them; they kept their distance, throwing a few religiously flavoured obscenities in our direction but then retreating rather hastily back down the beach, trying to pretend this wasn't with their holy tails between their holy legs, pursued by Jo's laughter. And the laughter of the rest of us.

There was a lot of laughter now, more than there had ever been before.

We laughed when we found the stone.

It was the first time any of us had found anything on the beach that wasn't just sand – or a deady, of course. No driftwood came in with the waves. There were no shells or mysteriously intact bird skeletons as you'd find on an ordinary beach. Just neverending sand.

And now this stone. It was more of a rock or a boulder, if one can make that distinction. It was about the size of a basketball, and not smoothed by the water but lumpy, prominently layered, sharp-edged and flaky, half-embedded in the sand, giving the illusion that it was still in the process of a long, slow emergence at the end of a subterranean rock-factory's production line. (We'd several times dug down a few metres with our hands to see if we could find a rocky substrate, but all we'd discovered was ever more tightly packed wet sand, until we'd given up in a welter of bad language and torn fingernails. The fingernails regenerated within minutes, but they hurt like hell until they did so.) I tried to pluck it out of its sandy nest and couldn't: it was far too heavy for me, and far too secure in its sandy socket. Jo, of course, picked it up easily enough – and raised it over her head with a childish look-I'm-a-weightlifter grin on her face. But she dumped it back down on the sand quickly enough.

"Where the heck can it have come from?" said Marlene as we gathered around.

"Reality," said Jo, rubbing her hands together. "It's an igneous intrusion of reality into this joint."

"You're saying this isn't reality?" I squinted along the beach, with its listless occupants, then out to sea. "It all seems real enough to me."

"It would, wouldn't it?"

I couldn't argue with that. Besides, I knew what she meant. What this rock signified was that the beach and the ocean weren't the entirety of things. We'd come to accept them as being all there was to the universe – to the pocket universe we'd somehow landed ourselves in – but now we had a clear indication that it wasn't completely cut off from the rest of existence. There was an
outside
. However the rock had reached here, it hadn't simply been rolled up from the seafloor by an unusually powerful surge. It had come from somewhere
else
.

Which led to an obvious question.

"Do you think someone brought it?" Eileen was the first to say it.

"You see any footprints?" said Marlene.

We couldn't, but that didn't mean anything. In their aimless wandering, the deadies trampled just about every square centimetre of sand fairly uniformly. Trails of our own, more purposive footprints would remain for a while, but inevitably be overscuffed by the others until at last there was no trace left of our having been there. Towards the sea, of course, the languid lapping of the water erased everything much more quickly. For all we knew, somebody – perhaps another giant like Jo – could have come staggering up out of the waves and planted the rock where we'd found it. It'd have to have been a long time ago, though, because of the way the rock was embedded, and anyway the whole scenario seemed pretty ludicrous.

No, whatever had brought the rock here must have been a natural force at work. But what
were
the natural forces in this world, this universe, of the beach? Gravity: of course. We stayed rooted to the sand, didn't go floating off. I supposed the nuclear forces, electromagnetism – all that stuff – were operative as well. We could hear sounds, see sights. At a less arcane level, geologic forces like erosion must be in play, or else where did the sand of the beach come from? But other natural forces which I'd taken for granted clearly weren't a part of this world. Conservation laws, for example. My own body, in moving, must use up energy, yet I didn't eat anything and I wasn't shrivelling away. Wherever the energy was coming from, it wasn't being produced in any way I could even guess at.

"It's a gift," said Jo, her tone implying there was no possibility of contradiction. "We've been sent it. It's a tool, something for us to use."

"For what?" I must have sounded worried, as indeed I was: worried she was talking like one of the crazies, with their certainties of belief in the irrational.

She looked me directly in the eye. Hers were soft brown, I noticed for, surprisingly, the first time. "You know what I mean, Joe."

I didn't, and yet I felt as if I did. It was like the sensation you have when some tinpot demagogue persuades you to believe in whatever he's marketing; you have that self-satisfied feeling of completely understanding what is after all only obvious commonsense ... and it's only later you realize, picking it over in your mind, that it's absolute balls. The only difference was that now, looking into Jo's eyes, there were no red alert signals springing up in my mind to warn me I might be being conned. She was telling me the truth. I
did
know what she meant ... only I'd somehow mislaid the knowledge. I'd be able to find it again later, I was sure.

Marlene was obviously going through the same process.

She broke out of the trance before I did.

"Well," she said with an abrupt laugh, kicking at the rock where it lay in the sand, "it's not as if we're likely to lose it."

"Whatever sent it could just as easily take it away again," Jo pointed out. "We gotta use it or we might lose it, like the cliché says."

It was an expression I hadn't heard before, but I understood its essence. "So we'd better find out pretty fast what we're supposed to use it
for
, you mean?"

"That's right, little man."

"But how? Is there an instruction manual carved into the side, or something?"

Jo made a pantomime of bending over to look. "Not so far as I can see."

We all laughed at that.

"It'll come to us," said Jo, tapping the side of her head and then pointing toward the silken peach sky as if to indicate she expected to receive a message from there. "Call it intuition. One of us will suddenly realize what the thing's purpose is."

Already my glow of cozy credulity was beginning to wear off. It wasn't that I thought Jo had been dishonest in any way – I believed she'd told me the truth as she knew it. It was that truth itself that I was losing faith in. I liked Jo, I trusted Jo, I loved Jo almost as much as I loved Marlene, but that wasn't to say she couldn't be deluding herself – and us.

I didn't take part in the animated discussion that followed, with people proposing countless new and ever more ridiculous potential uses for the stone. Marlene noticed my silence, and after a while she came across and sat down in the sand next to me, taking my hand and tugging me down beside her.

"What's the matter, Joe?"

"I don't like it." I gestured toward the rock. "That thing."

"It's just a rock."

"That's not what Jo's saying. What everyone's saying."

"They're just fooling around."

"No, they're not, Marlene, and you know it. Jo's perfectly serious about it being a tool of some kind. A machine, even. A device sent to us for a specific purpose."

"True."

"What do
you
think?"

The veneer of lightheartedness faded from her face. "I'm like you. I don't like it either."

"What makes you say that?"

"You really want to know?"

"Yes. I trust your judgement, Marlene. I trust you more than anyone else here." I took her hand in both of mind, played with the fingers. She had very long, graceful fingers, yet powerful, as if she'd been a harpist or a surgeon in her previous life.

"Then," she said hesitantly, looking down her fingers as if they belonged to someone else, "the truth is, I think it's a weapon."

I was astonished. The idea of its being a weapon couldn't have been further from my own mind. I hadn't even thought about weapons since coming to the beach, not unless you counted the handfuls of sand the crazies had hurled in our general direction – no, not even then, because that had been more like chimps at the zoo throwing their feces: an insult rather than an intent to harm.

"How could it be a weapon?" I said after a while.

"Because it can be used as one."

"I don't follow."

"There's nothing else on the beach we can use to harm each other – not seriously. The branches don't come off the trees and bushes. We can't drown each other in the water. I'm pretty sure we couldn't suffocate each other in the sand. There are no high places we can shove each other off. This may not be any kind of Paradise we've all found ourselves in, but it couldn't have been better designed to make sure we're safe from each other. But now – just look at that damned thing. You know how human beings are, Joe – how we always are. Give us anything new and the first thing we want to do is work out some way we can use it to maim and kill people."

"I'm not too sure there's
any
way we can harm each other, here," I said. At some stage I'd stopped my game with her fingers, but her hand still lay in mine. I squeezed it gently. Even as I'd spoken those words I'd been doubting them, because my mind had cast back to that odd little exchange I'd had with Jo not long after I'd met her. "Would you kill for each other?" she'd said. "Die for each other?" And I'd said I thought both were impossible. She'd seemed less sure.

I looked across at Jo, who was still standing in the midst of the rest of our tribe, joking, her hand on someone's shoulder.

Jo, a weapon-user? I just couldn't see it. I could imagine her clenching one of those enormous fists and swiping someone on the jaw, if they managed to enrage her enough, but that was it. And I'd never seen anyone or anything irritate her even close to the point where she might lose her temper.

What of the rest? Again, it was impossible to conceive. Eileen could be a bit sneaky on occasion, but that was about as much malice as you could find among us. It was as if, along with all the other human capabilities we'd lost when we'd drowned and made our separate ways here, we'd managed to shed our hatreds and enmities as well.

Back then when first she and I had met, Jo had begun saying something quite different before stopping herself, and distracting me with a remark about whether I would kill or die for Marlene if I could. What had she been about to say? Some truth that at the last moment she'd decided she didn't want to tell me? That I wasn't ready for? Had she already been aware of the rock's existence, and that we'd eventually find it?

Could it be, and here I drew in my breath in something close to pain, that Jo
herself
had been the one to bring the rock here? I had no idea of what she might have done before she encountered us, and she'd never talked about it. Come to that, she'd never talked at all about her pre-drowning life, either, unlike the rest of us, who tended to prattle on endlessly about our prior existences, using the recountings as a means of hanging onto who we were. We told each other more than we really wanted to know: there wasn't a person among us about whom I didn't know the grisly details of their loss of virginity, for example. But not Jo. She was skilled at diverting the course of conversation away from the topic of her past.

Yet Jo,
devious
? I couldn't credit it. She had an open heart, of that I was certain.

And at the same time I shivered, realizing as I did so that Marlene was shivering too.

I leaned my head close to hers. "We've got to challenge Jo on this," I said softly. "When the hubbub's died down and people have lost their initial thrill. Find out what she knows."

"Yes." Marlene's whisper was so quiet it was as if she were just mouthing the word.

"I'll be the one to do it," I said. I was a schoolboy again, staunchly volunteering to be the one to thrash something out with the teacher while having no real intention of doing so. I tightened the hand that wasn't holding Marlene's. No, this time I couldn't back out. I wasn't a bullshitting schoolboy any longer. This time I had to go through with it.

I felt as if the shadow of a cold rain cloud had fallen across the beach. Something new and sinister had come among us, and it wasn't the rock.

It took me a few moments to identify what it was.

Suspicion.