This must be going on everywhere, she thought. Like a giant game of go. Light and dark; everywhere. She wondered who would win. She wanted the light-coloured ones to win. They appeared to be winning. She walked on, noticing that the city around her seemed to be growing. The buildings were less wrecked and not as far apart as they had been. The sky was lightening again, as the milky shapes above surrounded and took over the dark ones. The city was crowding in now, buildings creaking upwards into the sky as she watched. There were people as well. They were small and still far away, but they moved about the grid of the city, beneath the towering, stretching buildings.
The sky was milky, the sky was clear. The sky-wide circles had taken over the sky. A terrific wind started up, and howled round the buildings as the sky became brighter and the sunlight slammed down. She kept walking but saw everybody else swept away and whirled into the air, fluttering whitely. The sun glinted through one of the great lenses in the sky, dimmed briefly, then flared, exploded, blinding her and wrapping a cloak of heat across her face.
When she opened her eyes the buildings had melted and stood as pillars over the grey ash beneath her feet, supporting a sky of cracked red glass, like something old and fused and smeared with blood.
The grey ash shuddered, sending a tremor up through her feet, shaking her. The sky called her name.
She woke to find Philippe shaking her shoulder. Sucre stood at her feet, kicking them, looking bored. In one hand he held a large knife, in the other her cello case. Her eyes widened; she sat up. Sucre put the knife in its sheath and hefted his assault rifle. The plastic restrainer joining Hisako to Philippe had been cut; she was free.
Sucre jerked his head towards the door. 'You come with me; we go to a concert.
8: Conquistadores
They took her across to the Nakodo in Le Cercle's Gemini; the one she and Philippe used on their dives. The sunlight was bright on the water through the patchy cloud, and she hugged her cello case to her, gaining some distant comfort from its leather smell. Sucre sat in the bows, facing her, mirror shades showing the cello case, her, and the vencerista at the outboard. There was a small thin smile on his face; he hadn't answered any of her questions about why they were heading for the Nakodo with the cello. He kept the Kalashnikov pointed at her the whole way across. She wondered what would happen if she threw the cello case at him. Would it stop the bullets? She didn't think so. He would probably puncture the Gemini if the gun went off on automatic; maybe he would even hit the vencerista at the stern, but her own chances of surviving would be small.
She imagined, nevertheless, throwing it at him, leaping after it; Sucre somehow missing it and her, her grabbing his gun, perhaps knocking him overboard (though how to do that without losing the gun, strapped round his shoulders?), or just knocking him unconscious, still getting the gun from him in time to turn and fire before the man in the stern could reach for and fire his own machine-gun… yes, and she could swim away from the probably sinking Gemini, using the cello case as a life raft, and rescue all the others or get word to the outside world, and everything would be just fine. She swallowed heavily, as though consuming the wildness of the idea. Her heart beat hard, thudding against the cello case.
She wondered how often people had been in such a situation; not knowing what was going to happen to them, but so full of fearful hope and hopeless fear they went along with whatever their captors were arranging, praying it would end without bloodshed, lost in some pathetic human trust that no terrible harm was being prepared for them.
How many people had been woken by the hammering at the door in the small hours, and had gone — perhaps protesting, but otherwise meekly — to their deaths? Perhaps they went quietly to protect their family; perhaps because they could not believe that what was happening to them was anything — could be anything — other than a terrible mistake. Had they known their family too was doomed, had they known they were themselves already utterly condemned and without hope, destined inevitably for a bullet in the neck within hours, or for years — even decades — of toil and suffering in the camps before a cold and disregarded death, they might have resisted then, at the start, when they still had a chance, however futile their resistance might finally be. But few resisted, from what she knew. Hope was endemic, and sometimes reality implied despair.
How could you believe, even in the cattle trucks, that what had been the most civilised nation on earth was preparing to take you — all of you; the entire trainload and strip you, remove and sort artificial limbs, glasses, clothes and wigs and jewellery, gas you by the hundreds in a production line of death, and then pull the gold teeth from your skull? How? It was the stuff of nightmares, not reality. It was too terrible to be true; even a people inured over the centuries to prejudice and persecution must have found it hard to believe it could really be happening in the West in the twentieth century.
And the doctor or engineer or politician or worker in Moscow or Kiev or Leningrad, roused from sleep by the fists on the door; without knowing he was already dead as far as the state was concerned, who could blame him for going quietly, hoping to impress with his co-operation, to save his wife and children (which, maybe, he did)? Nervously confident in his knowledge that he'd done nothing wrong and had always supported the party and the great leader, was it any surprise he quietly packed a small case and kissed his wife's tears away, promising to be back soon?
The Kampucheans had quit the city, seeing some warped logic in it at first, thinking it best to humour the men from the jungle. How could they have known — how could they have taken seriously the idea — the glasses on their noses would bring the iron rods down on them, smashing them to bits, consigning them to mud?
Even knowing what was going to happen, perhaps you still hoped, or just could not believe it was really going to happen to you, in (in their times) Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, El Salvador… Panama.
She looked away from her reflections on Sucre's smiling face. The distant land was green and squashed. Perhaps help would come from there. Maybe Orrick had succeeded in a way; somebody ashore might have heard the shots and explosions as they killed him. The National Guard would come and the venceristas would flee, leaving their hostages alive; it would be absurd to kill any more, wouldn't it? International opinion; outcry; condemnation, retaliation.
She hugged the case closer, felt herself shiver. The rectangular bulk of the Nukodo filled the sky in front of her, blocking off the sun.
She followed Sucre up the steps from the landing pontoon, still holding the cello in its case in front of her. Another vencerista met them on the deck and led them into the ship. She was ushered into the officers' mess. The curtains were drawn; two lights shone from the far end of the mess-room table. She could just make out a figure sitting there. A chair was drawn up a metre or so from the end of the table nearest her. Sucre motioned her to sit there, then went to the vaguely seen figure sitting behind the lights. She screwed her eyes up, peering forward. The lights were Anglepoise lamps, sitting on the table, shining straight at her. The air-conditioned room made her shiver again, making her wish she wore something more substantial than just the yukata.
'Ms Onoda, Sucre said, from behind the lights. She shielded her eyes. 'The jefe wants you to play for him.