The creaking, salt-encrusted, rust-streaked hovercraft Solo had headed north from the Log-Jam up the coast of Piphram, its holed exhausts blattering, its route marked by twin lines of smoke from its alcohol-powered rotary engines, stirred into wide helices by its dented, vibrating propellers. It refuelled from a commercial tanker in the Omequeth estuary and crossed the Shiyl peninsula over the Omequeth Corridor, still heading north towards the savanna south of Nasahapley.
“But if you’re God,” Sharrow said to Elson Roa, “why do you need the others?”
“What others?” Roa said.
Sharrow looked exasperated. “Oh, come on.”
Elson Roa shrugged. “My apparences? They are the sign that my will is not yet strong enough to support my existence without extraneous help. I am working on this.” Roa coughed. “It is, indeed, in a very real sense, an encouraging sign that we lost six of our number at the Log-Jam, as this indicates my will is becoming stronger.”
“I see,” Sharrow said, nodding thoughtfully. This was her third day aboard, the second after she’d woken up following her over-enthusiastically applied nerve-blast on the deck of the Log-Jam tanker. It was her third talk with the lanky, serious, very still and staidly eccentric Solipsist leader.
They were due to arrive in Aïs tomorrow.
The Solo’s route north and west had been a circuitous one, determined by estuaries, land corridors, seas, lakes and arguments amongst Roa and his apparences concerning the reality or otherwise of apparent obstacles such as islands and small craft. They were, anyway, making slow progress at least partly because the Solipsists seemed unable to work the ACV’s major sensory and navigational apparatus, and so could not travel at night or in mist and fog.
“So,” she said. “Are you immortal?”
Roa looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure,” he said. “The idea may not be relevant; time itself may be a redundant concept. What do you think? I may have created you as a platform for part of just such an answer.”
“I really have no idea,” she confessed. She waved a hand towards the bulkhead behind her. “What about the others? Do they-the apparences-all call themselves God, too?” she asked.
“Apparently,” Roa said, without the hint of a smile.
“Hmm.” She bit her lip.
Roa looked awkward. He seemed to think of something, and reached into a pocket in his violet and yellow tunic and pulled out a grubby piece of paper. “Ah,” he said, clearing his throat. “Your friend Mister Kuma sent a signal to say, um…” Roa squinted at the piece of paper, frowned, turned it upside down and finally scrunched it away in his pocket again. “Well, it said he’d meet you in Aïs at the, um, Continental Hotel… he’s paid the money into the account we asked him to, and, um… he wished you well.”
“Oh,” she said. “Good.”
Roa looked suddenly confused. “Um, apart from one, who’s an atheist,” he said suddenly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“We all call ourselves God except for one apparence, who is an atheist.”
“Ah-ha,” she said, nodding slowly. “And what does this person call themself?”
“ ‘Me.’ “
“Uh-huh.”
Roa cleared his throat, then closed his eyes and made a strange humming noise while rolling his head around on his neck for a few moments.
Then he opened his eyes. She smiled at him.
He looked displeased, got up and walked out.
She suspected he’d been hoping that when he opened his eyes, she’d have disappeared.
The Gun came into her dreams again that night. It was reading one of the Huhsz Passports. The Passports looked like books, and she tried to read what the book said, but every time she looked over the Gun’s shoulder it shied away, dipping and ducking on its skinny, bendy telescopic legs and continued to read the Passports, laughing to itself now and again, and no matter what she did she couldn’t get to see what it was finding so funny, so she kicked at its legs the next time and the Gun tripped and fell; she grabbed the Passport, but the Gun jumped up again, very angry, and shot her before she could open the book to see what it said.
She woke terrified in the small cot, palms sweating. They were heading for Aïs, near the Huhsz World Shrine. She and the Passports were going to be in the same place. She was mad; what was Miz thinking of? Probably they were all going to die.
Perhaps she should just give herself up. She stared into the darkness while the hovercraft whispered around her, tomb-dark.
What could she do against the Passports? What could anybody do? Miz was mad, or setting up a trap. You couldn’t destroy the Passports; they carried one of the nano-bang holes left over from the AIT Accident, each one broadcasting a small amount of radiation and a vast quantity of neutrinos, making them impossible to hide. Even if you destroyed the fabric of the Passport the hole would survive, and that was what the World Court recognised. Mad, mad, mad, she thought, twisting over and over in her cot, entangling herself in the thin sheet. The Huhsz could only hunt her; the World Court could order her arrest virtually anywhere if the Passports were destroyed (except what good would it do to destroy the fabric and leave the hole?) What was Miz planning? What could he do? Put them on a fast ship and sling them at the sun? The World Court would commandeer a faster ship… You couldn’t hide them, you couldn’t hold on to them, you couldn’t destroy them…
She fell asleep again eventually, her thoughts still revolving and repeating and echoing in her skull, dancing graceless pirouettes of hopelessness and despair.
Apart from some trouble with a group of peasant-squatters and an overhead power line, the Solo’s journey to Aïs was uneventful. Sharrow had been released from her cabin. Her passport and her satchel full of personal effects-including her gun, credit cards and cash, rather surprisingly-had been returned. She had watched the latter part of the journey from the flight deck of the old ACV, and talked to more of the Solipsists.
She discovered that the other Solipsists saw no contradiction in being part of a group of which they were not the leader; they all assumed they were, and Roa was just something they had imagined to deal with the boring parts of the job. There were still arguments, but the system of Roa being in charge appeared to work. (Democracy was out; they’d only vote for themselves again.)
Roa wisely did not name a second-in-command, in case this was taken as a sign that he was growing uncertain. This had happened before, and Roa had almost been murdered in his sleep by the person/figment concerned. Roa had dealt with the person sternly, hence at least one of the dents in the Solo’s stern starboard airscrew.
The old ACV powered along the coast of Nasahapley towards Aïs. An hour before they got there, she watched from the flight deck as they passed the territory’s religious cantonment, the sprawling, walled settlement on the coastal flood-plain dominated by the black and gold spires of the Huhsz World Shrine.
She waited for the regretful words, the apologetic explanation and the change of course that would take the hovercraft curving round towards the Shrine, but it never happened.
The Solo was too large to be allowed to travel in Greater Aïs county, where they had rules about that sort of thing. Elson Roa and a couple of the others unloaded a small half-track from the ACV’s garage deck and took her to the city in that, leaving the other apparences to argue with the harbour authorities about landing dues, mooring rates and untreated sewage discharges.
The small half-track rumbled into the dusty main square of Aïs; ochre, colonnaded buildings sloped on all sides. They had driven part of the way down the central reservation of a boulevard, collecting a couple of small shrubs on the nudge bars and a traffic violation. The half-track’s driver-a young albino originally called Keteo who drove with more enthusiasm than skill and more speed than accuracy-skidded the half-track to a stop just before the square’s central fountain, and sat staring malevolently at the flower-beds across the other side of the square.