‘I don’t think you should walk into railgun fire,’ he suggested. I nodded. I was feeling really stupid now.
‘Perhaps you could have started with a minor cut,’ Morag suggested. Another valid point. Rannu bound my hand with what material he could find. I certainly didn’t seem to have any of Rolleston’s recuperative powers. My arm really hurt, and like Mudge I wished we had something to kill the pain even just whisky.
‘That was a really dumb thing to do,’ Morag said as she lay against me once Rannu had gone. She felt hot and was covered in sweat from another training session.
‘Yeah, I got that. How are the plans for getting us home coming along?’
‘Fine. It’ll definitely work, assuming we don’t just get shot by our own people.’ Then she went quiet. I could see her struggling to decide how to tell me something.
‘You’re going to do it?’ I asked. She nodded and then looked up at me.
‘I want you to come with me.’
She seemed so earnest. It was times like this when she lost the hard edge that I remembered how young she was supposed to be. How young she should’ve been allowed to be.
‘Morag, I…’ I started. We’d been through this. I had no frame of reference and we were talking about the mind of a species that had been trying to kill me for most of my adult life. Regardless of how misunderstood They may have been, I just couldn’t get away from the years of hatred and war.
‘I’ll look after you. I’ll keep you safe,’ she told me, and I believed her.
This alien place was the warmest, most comfortable and safest I could remember being since a child. The sad fact was that these previously genocidal aliens had looked after me better than any human ever had since my parents died. If things were going to change maybe I needed to stop being so frightened of things I didn’t understand. If only it was that easy.
‘Okay,’ I finally answered. She smiled. Also I liked to see her happy.
‘And no more stabbing yourself.’
I did heal faster, it seemed. It made sense. After all, the stuff They’d put into me was designed to find unhealthy flesh, eat and replace it. I tried not to think about that too much. It was nowhere near as effective as Rolleston’s healing but with a few hours’ rest the cuts on my arm were starting to look a lot better. The healing process really hurt however.
Morag took me by the hand to our grotto, as I’d started to think of it. We sat down by the pool and she held both my hands. I felt faintly foolish for reasons I couldn’t really explain. I let go of her and was on my feet, blades extended, when they rose out of the pool.
‘Jakob, it’s okay,’ Morag tried to reassure me. They were organic tendrils, white in colour instead of the black I was more used to. They looked like smaller versions of the massive tendrils I’d seen in Maw City. They swayed in the pool like the snakes I’d seen on documentary vizzes. The movement was in no way comforting. My heart was beating quickly.
‘Morag, I’m not sure I can do this.’
‘Its okay, Jakob. It’ll be fine, I promise.’ Her tone was reassuring but I think I sat back down opposite her and let her take my hands because her fearlessness was shaming me. I closed my eyes.
It wasn’t the normal, disconcerting hard click of connection you felt hard-wiring yourself into something. It felt more like liquid flowing into the four plugs in the back of my neck. This didn’t make sense. Plastic and metal had no nerve endings.
Then I was somewhere else. Then I heard the music again. Music sung through space. I felt tears on my cheeks. I opened my eyes to find myself in a waterfall of liquid sparks of light. Each spark seemed to cascade over me in a feeling of pleasant, slightly ticklish, electric warmth.
I was hovering in mid-air. The best way I could describe my surroundings was as a giant organic cave-tunnel like a vein, but this didn’t do justice to what I was seeing. A warm wind blew through the tunnel/vein. It was a conduit for light and sound. Were the light and sound Their thoughts? Bioluminescent lighting sparked all around us, travelling down through the tunnel/vein. Perhaps that was Their thoughts. This was Their mind, after all, not their biology. A purely mental space. I could see junctures where other organic tunnels/veins intersected. I was hovering over what looked like a bottomless drop. This gave me a moment of vertigo but I mastered it.
Morag was right to bring me here. I reached up to touch the tears on my face. I was whole; there was no plastic or metal in me now. I was naked. So was Morag. She looked like Morag, not one of her icons. Her eyes were back. This just made me want to weep more. I was kind of glad none of the others were around to see me like this.
‘The icon?’ I managed.
‘They’re not icons, it’s us,’ she told me.
I wanted to hold her. I moved across to her, floating through the curtain of warm sparks. Everything about her felt real as we hugged each other fiercely. Was this my reward? Was this what it had all been for? I could hear the music. It was the abstract, angelic choral music that I heard echo through space in my dreams, the music that I’d thought the Cabal had silenced and replaced with the screaming of war. It was more real here than what Ambassador had shown me as I slept in Morag’s arms in the ruins of Trenton.
‘Thank you,’ I said to her as I held her tight. Then I looked up. ‘Thank you!’ I shouted. Any inhibitions seemed foolish now. ‘Can we communicate with Them?’ I asked. I wasn’t used to the sound of awe in my voice.
She pushed gently away from me. ‘C’mon.’
Then she dived through the air and through the cascade of liquid light. I went after her, my dive clumsier. I heard a noise. I couldn’t quite work out what it was. It took me a while to realise it was the sound of my laughter. Not a cynical laugh or the laughter that comes with sharing a joke with a friend, or the laughter of trying to make light of a bad situation. This laughter felt like release. As I dived through the alien mind I was freeing myself from my worries and fears. I wondered if the stunted minds and petty ambitions of the Cabal could even understand this. I think this was what I’d been searching for all those years in the sense booth. Not dislocation, like I’d thought, but connection, exploration — a feeling of there being something more.
We dived, fell, flew for what simultaneously felt like a very long time and not nearly long enough. The inner mental landscape of Them was constantly changing. I understood none of it, but none of it was ugly and everywhere was light in different hues and the ever-changing music.
Ahead of me Morag pointed towards a small tunnel-like mental vein .
‘There’s one,’ she called and swooped gracefully towards it. I followed her and tried not to hit the wall. One what?
It was dark in the tunnel. It looked much more like rock than anything else I’d seen. The singing seemed further away.
‘Morag…?’
‘Ssh, it’s okay.’ I could just make out her shape ahead of me. The only light was the warm white glow from the main vein behind us. ‘I told you we weren’t the first to come here.’
I could just about make out markings on the rock wall. It looked like scrollwork, like the designs that Pagan had decorated himself and his surroundings with. I realised that I was wading through a shallow stream of very cold water. It reminded me of fording a burn in the Highlands. The scrollwork seemed to be moving, making disconcerting patterns. It was playing tricks with my head. The patterns suggested strange, fantastical and sometimes horrific shapes.
‘If you come in peace, you can live with them, even sculpt your surroundings,’ she said.
‘You mean there are other people?’
‘I am not a person,’ a voice said. The accent sounded vaguely familiar but I could not place it. The voice sounded utterly inhuman. It seemed to resonate differently from human language. I felt it rather than heard it. Perhaps it was because of my surroundings and my recent experiences, but I found myself overcome with a feeling that I couldn’t quite understand or fully explain.