From there on in I strolled quietly, getting my breath back. I couldn’t hear any noise of hammering; maybe they’d stopped work for the night. I couldn’t blame them; two in a row was a bit much for anyone. I turned the corner to the wharf; and then I came to a dead halt and clutched at the side of the building, as if the running had suddenly seized my legs and turned them to water under me.
It wasn’t the same building. It was no clapboard shack; there were none,
not up or down the broad concrete wharves that stretched out along the
river on either side. It was a modern wall of corrugated aluminium, just
like all the others I could see, up and down. Beside some there were
ships, all right – big cargo carriers with never a mast or smokestack
between them, flanked by modern container cranes or grain or mineral
hoppers whose banks of floodlights carved out little wedges in the
night. Of the
I could have gone rampaging up and down those wharves, looking; I
didn’t. I knew too damn well what had happened. I’d feared it from the
moment I saw that paper, that date – though maybe it was already too
late by then. Maybe it had been since that moon rose. My assumptions, my
Core-bred basic instincts, had tangled with the reality that had brought
me here. I’d pushed on too deep, gone back into the Core, seen too much
of it that didn’t want to let go its grip. As, no doubt, the Knave meant
to happen. And some deeper part of me, despairing of fulfilling the
purpose that had driven me so far, so fast, had retreated into what it
knew best and shut out the rest. In a foreign country, without papers,
passport, money or even a good explanation why I was here, it had
stranded me, left me high and dry on a desolate shore. From the
There’d been no dawn. Maybe there never would be, any more. There was nothing before me but streets, a cityful of corners to turn, hoping that around one, or the next … hoping against hope. How long would that take? Empty and sick, I gripped the warehouse wall, staring up at the blank little windows high above, eyes as blind as mine to what I most needed to see. It was behind them somewhere, beneath all this modern overlay, the past sheathed in sheet steel – or coffined?
‘Hey!’ roared a hoarse angry voice. ‘
At first I still tried to remember where I was going, turning this way and that, seeking another way back through the darkened ways to the river and the docks. But soon enough my tired mind lost track, and soon after that I forgot the very direction of the docks; but I kept walking, because there was nowhere to stop. Now and again I struggled to think. What did any marooned tourist do? Go see the British consul – with a convenient case of amnesia? I’d be flown home, then. With a lot of explaining to do; about here, about gold, about … what had happened to Clare. I’d be lucky to stay out of Broadmoor. And with her on my conscience, maybe I wouldn’t want to …
After a while I found myself wandering out of the unlit maze into wider streets again, with lights and lit windows; but which streets and where I no longer cared. Some were like the elegant old brick houses I’d seen; others were garishly new, lined with blazing shop windows and neon signs – but all empty, all bare, all dead. I barged into – I didn’t know what; lamp standards, trash cans, street litter. I heard voices, angry voices, didn’t know where they came from. Perhaps there were people on those sidewalks, then; but if there were, I wasn’t seeing them. Only the cars moved, hissing past, featureless, driverless blurs of light and noise. Sometimes, suddenly, they’d come at me with howling horns, from all directions it seemed, and I’d have to dodge and weave my way through, and stagger off before they could come around again.
