But then the light had flared, beautiful and terrifying, sublime and sickening, erupting over the beach and the mountains as the burst, glittering ship spun end over end towards the cold planet where she fell forever to the snow; a snow-flake amidst the fall.
There had been another night when she slept badly, trying to curl up round her injured hand, holding the thing to her like a treasure and trying to will the pain to stop and let her sleep until eventually she fell into a kind of coma from sheer exhaustion, a semi-sleep in which she dreamt of the distant sparks of the two fires on the other side of the fjord, so far in front of them now that they could only just be glimpsed with the naked eye, flickering through the trees. She had thought she’d heard Cenuij calling to them from the trees ahead, but at least he hadn’t actually appeared in her dream.
Then she was woken with the others to the freezing cold of another day when the floor of grey flat water and the ceiling of grey flat clouds were shackled together by chains of sleet, and in the clear spells between the hail and the sleet showers they could see that the mountain tops were covered in white.
She marched on, talking with the others and to herself and getting hungrier and thinking about food and wishing her hand would stop hurting, and telling the others she was fine even though she wasn’t. They took the detour the android had suggested, around the beach in front of the cliff, near the point on the other side of the fjord, then crossed the first of the two large streams the android had warned them about by going across a fallen tree. Miz cut some branches off it with a laser to make the traverse easier but still she almost fell.
The forest was a cold, dark, damp place and she hated it. She hated her hand for hurting and her belly for being empty and her head for being dizzy and sore and her anus and vagina for itching and her eyes for not focusing and her brain for not working properly.
The android carried her across the second stream, the cold water washing round its chest.
They walked on as the weather cleared a little then got even colder while dark, tall clouds built up to windward and started towards them. Sometime about then she began to forget which day this was and where exactly they were and what they were looking for and why they were looking for it.
Plodding on became everything; her being became centred on the in-out ebb and flow of breath, the thud-thudding of her feet hitting the ground one after another and the lifting, dropping, lifting, dropping motion of her legs, sending vibrations up through her that she received as though from far away and in slow motion. Even her voice sounded distant and not really hers. She listened to herself answer the things the others asked her, but she didn’t know what it was she was saying and she didn’t really care; only the onwardness of walking mattered, only that slow thud-thudding that was her feet and her heart and the wounding pulse of her poisoning pain.
She was alone. She was quite alone. She walked a frozen shore in the middle of nothing, with only the solitude to stalk her either side, and she began to wonder whether she really was a Solipsist, the traitor amongst them.
A brain in a body; a collection of cells in a collection of cells, making its way in a menagerie of other cell-collections, animal and vegetable, wandering the same rough globe with their own share of its dumb cargo of minerals and chemicals and fluids carried strapped and trapped in and by that cage of cells-temporarily-always part of it but always utterly alone.
Like Golter; like poor, poor Golter.
It had found itself alone and it had spread itself as far as it could and produced so much, but it was still next to nothing.
They had grown up-had they only known it-in one room of an empty house. When they began to understand it was a house, they had thought there must be others nearby; they had thought perhaps they were in the suburbs, or even a well-hidden part of the city, but though they had colonised those other rooms, they had looked out from their furthest windows and tallest skylights and found-to their horror, and a horror only their own increased understanding made them fully able to appreciate-that they were truly alone.
They could see the nebulae, beautiful and distant and beckon-ing, and could tell that those faraway galaxies were composed of suns, other stars like Thrial, and even guess that some of those suns too might have planets round them… but they looked in vain for stars anywhere near their own.
The sky was full of darkness. There were planets and moons and the tiny feathery whorls of the dim nebulae, and they had themselves filled it with junk and traffic and emblems of a thousand different languages, but they could not create the skies of a planet within a galaxy, and they could not ever hope, within any frame of likelihood they could envisage existing, to travel to anywhere beyond their own system, or the everywhere-meaningless gulf of space surrounding their isolated and freakish star.
For a distance that was never less than a million light years in any direction around it, Thrial-for all its flamboyant dispersion of vivifying power and its richly fertile crop of children planets-was an orphan.
There was this wall. She was coming slowly up to this flat wall. The wall was white and grey and studded with little round stones; to one side there was a larger boulder shaped like a giant door handle. She wondered if the wall was really a door. Somehow, she was sure that Cenuij was on the other side. She could see ice and frost on it. The wall was coming closer all the time and seemed to be very tall; she didn’t think she’d be able to see the top. It kept advancing towards her even though she was sure she had stopped walking. Walking had been everything for longer than she could remember; it had been her universe, her existence, her whole reason for being, but then she had stopped and yet here was this wall coming towards her. Very close now; she could see frozen trickles of water between the small stones, and what might have been small, frosted plants. She looked for Cenuij’s eye, peeking through at her from the other side. Somebody else must have noticed the wall because she thought she heard a shout from somewhere far away.
The wall slammed into her. There seemed to be a safety rail. Her head hit the wall anyway, and everything went dark.
The android saw her falling and rushed forward as Miz shouted out. It couldn’t hope to save her properly, but it was just close enough to stretch out a leg and get a foot under her upper chest, slowing her descent just a little before her falling weight took her down and she fell to the stony beach and lay there, face down and still.
Feril hopped once, unbalanced, then knelt with the others as they gathered quickly around her.
“Is she hurt?” Miz said, as Zefla and Dloan gently rolled her over. There was a small graze on her cheek and another on her forehead. Her face looked old and puffed. Her mouth opened slackly. Miz took her right glove off and rubbed her hand. Feril touched her left glove.
“She’s lying in this water,” Zefla said. “Let’s get her to the trees.”
They took her into the forest and laid her down. Feril ran its fingers over the taut left glove again. “There appears to be something wrong with her hand,” it said.