The Last Hour of Gann (169 page)

Maybe it was the dream that made her do it, although none of this felt like a dream yet. Maybe it was her bitchy nature. Maybe it was just because it was Mama saying it, but Amber suddenly had to argue.

“I could save them,” she said. “I could shout the place up right now, tell them the ship’s going to crash, tell them everyone who goes is going to die.”

“Go ahead,” said her mother. She tossed her hair back and looked at the ship, her eye lingering over all those people going in. She looked…sad. Honestly sad, not angry or self-pitying or bitter but just…sad. “They’ll drag you out of here and launch anyway.”

“So what if they do? If I could just delay them five minutes, maybe five minutes is all it would take.”

“For…?”

“For the ship. You know, for whatever happened out there to miss us.”

“You think so?”

“Maybe,” said Amber defensively, but now her mother’s sad eyes were staring into hers and she remembered all
at once that there had been four more days of boarding after this. Five minutes, give or take, just didn’t mean that much in the end. “Maybe,” she said again, but she didn’t believe it.

“A butterfly flaps its wings in Japan and it rains in New York.”

“Huh?”

“A butterfly flaps its wings in Japan,” said her mother, “which blows pollen into the nose of a cow, which sneezes, which startles the rest of the herd into running, which changes the air currents by just a tiny fraction of a degree, which picks up momentum and instability as it travels across the ocean until it becomes a storm front, and it rains in New York.” She paused for a puff. Her eye sparked red with reflected light from the cherry. Meoraq’s eye. “Is that what you were thinking, little girl?”

“That sounds like total horseshit,” Amber admitted.

“That’s because it is. It relies on the idea that while all these little things are happening, the rest of the world is holding still to let them happen and that simply isn’t the way the world works. The reality is, it would have rained in New York anyway. The reality is, a butterfly flaps its wings in Japan and a fence gets broken, but that just doesn’t have
as much punch.”

Amber hadn’t moved in all this time, hadn’t taken a single step, but she found herself at the head of the line.
Scott was waiting in his clean red uniform, one of thousands of brand-new crewmen, a cog in the machine that was about to blow up.

“So you’re saying it doesn’t matter what we do?” Amber asked uncertainly.

“Of course it matters,” said her mother, now gazing at the big television monitors where the Director was giving his uplifting speeches over and over…like Nuu Sukaga inviting all the post-Wrath survivors to come to Matezh hundreds of years too late to matter anymore. “But you can’t always stop it.”

“Because…
it’s supposed to happen?”

Her mother looked at her, still not in a mean way, but with such bizarre force that Amber had to drop her eyes and even squirm a little.

“Are you asking if this was God’s plan?” her mother asked quietly, and suddenly the skyport was gone, replaced by the screaming wind and wasteland of Meoraq’s world. She could see the
Pioneer
, there at the end of the long, black scar it had left in the crash. She could see thousands of moaning, weeping, terrified people staggering around in the wreckage, illuminated by a sky filled with fire. “Do you really think this was part of anyone’s
plan
?”

Amber couldn’t answer. She could see herself down there, dragging Nicci through the crowds with her duffel bag firmly over her shoulder, heading for
Scott and that other man (
he was going to need someone to roll around with he said and then he apologized but not because he didn’t mean it and his name was john something french i think and if he’d only come with us we’d have rolled around plenty and how different things could have been maybe better maybe worse but oh so different
).

“People make their own choices,” said her mother, now walking away behin
d her. “And God has to let them live with the consequences.”

Amber turned around to follow and staggered in the sudden silence. The wreck of the
Pioneer
was gone; she was in the courtyard at Xi’Matezh. The cliff was cold and muddy. That crumbling wall surrounded her, blocking out all but a little piece of the ocean. Her mother was already leaning up against the broken wall, smoking and watching the tide come in. Amber hesitated, then turned away and tried to open the outer doors of the shrine. Meoraq was in there. He was watching the video without her and she had to get to him before he came out. But her hands slipped weirdly over their surface without finding a gripping place; the more she struggled with them, the taller and heavier they seemed to get, until they towered over the whole enclosure, threatening to fall.

She gave up, stumbling back in their shadow, and turning at last to discover a lizardman standing where her mother had been. He was strangely hard to see. The sun was coming up over the ocean, stinging at her eyes like tears, blurring him in and out of recognition. She thought it was Meoraq at first, then Zhuqa, then some stranger in a white hood, but when she got closer, he looked back at her and she realized he was Lashraq. He still had her mother’s cigarette in his hand. He waited for her to join him at the hole in the wall and then took an impossible drag through his inflexible lizard-lips and turned back to watch the ocean.

The Ruined Reach as she’d last seen it was gone. The flotsam of a million bloated bodies bobbed on the tide, stretching out north to south as far as she could see, interrupted only by the carnage of a ruined port the land hadn’t yet reclaimed. There were no seagulls to scream over this feast, no crabs or sharks to pick it over from below. Everything was dead: the people, the animals, the ocean. She couldn’t smell it, which was the first she knew—cigarette-smoking lizardman and all—that this wasn’t real.

“Am I dead?” she asked warily.

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me!”

“Only if you’re not dead.”

That…
made a certain amount of sense. If she was dead, she had a feeling not much would matter at all anymore. So since it did matter, was that proof she was alive? But if she was alive, she had to be dreaming, and if this was a dream, it wasn’t proof of anything.

“Are you supposed to be God?”

He snorted and glanced at her. “You sound skeptical.”

Amber groped for and found an irrefutable argument. “God doesn’t smoke!”
             

His spines shrugged. “You’d know, I guess.” Lashraq stubbed out his cigarette on the back of his hand and tossed it into the wind, leaning out over the broken bricks to watch it fall. “Want to know why I called it Gann?”

“Huh?”

“This world.” He gestured. “Clay. The evils of men. And all the other things it means. Want to k
now why I called it Gann? Would that prove something to you?”

“It’s the name of this planet, isn’t it?”

“Before the Fall, we called the planet I’az. It’s an old, old word that means, eh, foundation. The stuff beneath your feet.”

“Earth,” whispered Amber
.

Lashraq shrugged again and turned back to the sea. “More or less. I called it Gann in the Word, though. That is, I said that Sheul called it Gann. I thought it sounded more otherworldly, you know, that God had
a secret name for all things, that He had knowledge beyond ours. And I picked Gann specifically because my youngest brother was born with a mild deformation of the throat and until they fixed him, he couldn’t talk right. He couldn’t say Zhan.” He glanced at her, smiling. “He called me Gann.”

“You named
the devil after you? As a joke?”

“Not the best joke in the world, but I laughed now and then.”

“This doesn’t prove anything,” Amber insisted. “This is nothing but…but subconscious crap! You’re not my mother! You’re not the ghost of Lashraq Zhan! And you’re for damn sure not…not…”

He waited.

Amber shook her head and went back to the doors of the shrine. They loomed, blacking out the sky, holding the whole world in its shadow, impossible to touch. The part of her that believed this was a dream insisted Meoraq was in there, that he needed her. But if it was a dream, she’d have to wake up. Meoraq needed her there, too.

“Can you help him
?” she asked awkwardly. “If I…believe in you or…do things for you?”

“That isn’t how it works.”

“Well then how
does
it work, goddammit?!” She swung around, her hands in fists, but Lashraq didn’t flinch. “You don’t plan things, you don’t help people, you sure as fuck don’t care when people die, what
do
you do?”

“I talk,” Lashraq said quietly. “
But I can’t make you listen.”

“All you’r
e telling me is you can’t help! What good are you? You…You son of a bitch, look at me!” she exploded. “Don’t you know what we’ve been through? And you just stand there and talk about fucking butterflies when we’ve come all this way and lived through so much and now
this
is how it ends? It’s not fair!”

“Suck it up,” he replied and lit another cigarette.

She cried until she could make herself stop and then she took a few deep breaths. Six of them. She looked at him. He watched the tide come in.

“Who are you?” she whispered. “Who are you, really?”

“Me?” Lashraq shrugged his spines and shoulders at the same time. “I’m the warning.”

And as she tried to wrap her head around that, he reached out and clasped her shoulder. His grip was strong; his eyes were kind.

“But there will be a boat,” he told her. “And a helicopter. So hold on, Amber. Watch for them. And take the chance when you see it, because I can only give you one.”

He tipped his head back, grunting thoughtfully in the back of his throat. “Looks like the storm is clearing,” he said.

She looked up. The sun behind the clouds turned the whole sky a blinding white. For a moment, she was back in the skyport again, and then she was nowhere at all.

* * *

Amber came around in a lamp-lit tent to the sound of lizardish laughter and the ocean. She was not alone. She rolled over with difficulty and at first tried to see Meoraq beside her, but the face was all wrong, and so were the scars and the clothes. It was Iziz, just sitting there with his knees drawn up and his hands clasped around them, staring at the side of the tent. He said, “You ever been to the mountains, Eshiqi?”

It wasn’t a
nother dream. She didn’t wake up.

“We lived there a few years when I was very young. I spent a lot of time alone, up in the rocks. One
day, I found a thuoch den with two pups and no parent. I tried to raise them, because I was a sprat and sprats are stupid like that.”

Nicci. Nicci was dead. They might all be dead by now, although it stood to reason that someone had to be alive to make the raiders all roar and laugh like that.
It wasn’t any fun to torture someone who was already dead.

“I stole away every day to look in on them and fed them what I could of my own meals. God and Gann alone might know what I would have done with them if that had worked, but it didn’t. I crawled down into the den one morning to find the big one eating the little one while the little one
whined and shivered in its own guts. I ran screaming down the side of the mountain until I fell and went the rest of the way down on my belly. My mother found me, fixed me up, and while she was doing that, someone tracked up the mountain to see what scared me. They brought me back the big pup, all warm and wriggling. I hugged it all night, crying while it licked my face and loved me in its dumb pup way. In the morning, I killed it with a rock.”

Amber turned back onto her side.

“My mother told me it was pointless to hate the pup. All animals kill each other when they have to, she said. We all eat each other to survive. Thuochs, dumaqs, humans. My mother was the worst fuck in that camp,” he added in a pensive tone, “but she had her moments.”

Amber did not answer. She tried to pretend she didn’t even hear.

“I don’t think I’ve ever told that story before,” said Iziz. “Unless I got drunk and maybe told Zhuqa and then forgot. Which is possible. But you remind me of that pup. The little one, I mean, getting your guts gnawed open by your littermate and just writhing while she did it. I wouldn’t have thought it of you.”

“
What are you going to do with me?” Amber asked dully.

“Patience, Eshiqi. Patience is more than a word. Zhuqa used to say that. Made me just spitting mad, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to it
. I’d never heard of this place,” he remarked, looking around at the walls of his tent as though he could see right through them to the shrine. “Doesn’t look like the sort of place God would spend much time. Kind of a piss-gully, if you ask me. Druud seemed to think there’d be something big here. If I understood him right, he thought there’d be some kind of flying machine. We’ve been here for days and we’ve been looking, but we couldn’t find it. Did you?”