“Close the curtains!” she roared at me.
“What?”
“Close them!”
I did. I knew, really, what she was thinking, felt the same surge of furious hope that perhaps it would work.
Daisy wailed.
“The more you’re out in the light the more you change!” Jan shouted. ”What’s going to happen when there’s nothing left of you but light? You need darkness.”
“You can’t!”
“Help me get her upstairs,” said Jan grimly. “We’ll have to fit shutters on the window.”
“You can’t,” sobbed Daisy, although it wasn’t exactly sobbing, I don’t think she could cry by now. “I’ll get out! You know I’ll always get out!”
I looked at her, her face invisible in the light, her body glowing dangerously through the duvet.
I thought of the mud she tracked through the house when she was ten, twelve; the diaries she bought and didn’t write in, how small she looked when she first caught a bus by herself.
I didn’t let go of her but I loosened my hold a bit. “Daisy” I asked. “Would you go back to the way you were before◦– not when you were ill, of course, but before that?”
“I can’t.”
“But if you could?”
Daisy stopped struggling and didn’t answer for a while. But I don’t think she was hesitating, so much as trying to remember what ‘before’ even meant.
“No,” she said in the end, as I knew she would.
I closed my eyes. But I could still see her shining through my eyelids.
“What’s it like?” I asked. “It doesn’t hurt?”
Daisy relaxed, softening like white-hot metal or molten glass. “No,” she said. “No, it’s wonderful. I can see where the light comes from. I can see where it goes. I can feel everything inside it, inside me. Colours.”
“Can you?” I said, hearing my voice tear around the words. “Majorelle Blue?”
“Majorelle Blue,” agreed Daisy, no longer sounding anguished; no longer sounding like a girl. The light pouring out of her. “A lemon-yellow bed. Majorelle blue…”
“Right then,” I said. And I let her go. Jan tried to hang onto her but I held her back.
“Leave her alone,” I said.
Daisy got up. She crossed the room. Parted the living room curtains. The sun poured in through the windows and melded with hers until it was impossible not to look away.
Then she wasn’t there, and there was nothing but sunlight in the garden.
It was midsummer’s day.
Jan searched for her for hours, days. Called the police. Called me a murderer, pushed me away. Ran into Daisy’s room and sobbed on her bed.
I sat in the living room and stared at Daisy’s silhouette, imprinted on the glass she’d walked through in solid light.
The phone rang and rang today. It might have been the lawyers, the police. The court case◦– I keep forgetting about it; it doesn’t seem very important. Nor did answering the phone. Though we’ll have to decide, at some point, what we’re going to do. If any kind of damage-limitation is even possible.
If this is even a matter of damage.
Today Jan came downstairs and found me on the sofa where I’ve been sleeping (though lately, I’m feeling less need for sleep). I’ve been leaving the curtains open; she shut them.
“Alan,” she said, and held out her hands.
The light was still a soft, dawn-like tint to her wrists, climbing up under her sleeves and rising from under her collar into her cheeks.
I laughed, because there seemed nothing else to do, and showed her mine.
I noticed the light in the flesh of my fingertips first, then found it was everywhere; lining the contours of my body, glimmering around blood vessels of my throat. It’s still dim enough that the bathroom light will cancel it out.
We should have thought of it. We should have seen that of course, exposure to all that light she shed around the place would do exactly the same to us as it did to her. And all the people who touched her at the hospital, and that we’ve touched since…
Maybe it’s preventable. Maybe it takes more of it than that. It might be limited to us.
“Well, now what’ll we do?” said Jan, almost sheepishly. Whether because the light’s already getting into my eyes and brain, because of the soft glow of her skin or because of something else, it seemed I could see the details of her face more clearly than I had for a long time.
“Come here,” I said, and pulled her into my arms. The familiar warmth of her was still all hers; not the heat of the light.
We kissed. We hadn’t done that it in I don’t know long. It hadn’t seemed necessary, but now it did.
“Tell me your favourite colour,” I said.
-
A MAP OF MERCURY
ALASTAIR REYNOLDS
When at last his ship had escaped Mercury’s gravitational pull and aligned itself for the long cruise back to Jupiter space, Oleg unstrapped from his launch couch and floated through the cabin until he reached the aft stowage rack where he had slotted the artwork. It had been a fight against temptation, not opening the box until now, but he had promised himself that he would not do so until he had reached space. Perhaps it was unwise to open it at all, and certainly before he surrended it to his Jovian masters. But he had been given no special instructions in the matter.
The box was light, almost too light, as if it contained no more than air or packing. Was it a last trick on the world, he wondered? An empty container? A box full of high-grade vacuum?
He would have to open it to know.
The container was an unprepossessing object. It was a plain white in colour. Its upper third was hinged and secured by a simple metal clasp. It was the kind of thing, he reflected, in which one might recieve a hat or perhaps a new space helmet.
The clasp released easily under his fingers. He hinged open the top of the box. Immediately beneath the lid lay, as anticipated, a wadding of packaging. He plucked the cottony material away, until a harder form began to reveal itself. It was the upper part of a rough-textured sphere. It was beautifully shaded and coloured◦– a warm grey, relieved by blue and gold mottling and the circles and sprays of fine white cratering. The polar region glittered with tiny embedded diamonds, signifying motherlodes of frozen water, locked in shadowed craters for mindless aeons.
Well, of course. It was a globe. The clue had been there in the title all along.
A Map of Mercury.
He had come in with high expectations◦– unrealistically high, perhaps.
The artists kept the place clean. Being cyborgs they could tolerate both the lit and unlit faces of the slow-turning world, but they moved anyway◦– camping and then travelling on, endlessly. Except for their artforms, littering the crust like Ozymandis heads, they left no trace of themselves. On airless Mercury the shadows of these things clawed out to the limit of the world’s curvature.