Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

Now was the time. I popped my pills, and I lay in that bed, in that small hotel, in the middle of England, and I tried to remember.

Here I had been with Morag, that first night. We had gone to bed early, still full of the bonhomie and speeches, the food and champagne of the wedding. We made love.

But I remembered waking later, maybe three in the morning, the time your body is at its lowest, all your defenses down. She was awake, too, lying beside me, here in this hotel. The booze had worn off by then; I felt mildly hung over. But she was here. As we’d lived together for a year before anyhow I think we’d both imagined the marriage wouldn’t matter. But we’d made a commitment to each other. It did make a difference.

So we came together again, in this hotel, in the dark, right here. I remembered the scent of shampoo and spray on her hair, the softness of her skin, a slight saltiness when I kissed her cheeks — she’d done plenty of crying that day, as brides do. And around us the hotel breathed, centuries old, and beyond its walls the still more ancient pile of the old city thrust its stone roots deep into the ground. Immersed in my pharmaceutically sharpened memories, I remembered it all, as if it were real again. Maybe I cried. Probably. Maybe I slept.

I thought I heard somebody calling.

It was a woman, outside the hotel, calling from the street below, the line of the Roman road. The room felt cold, terribly cold. Listening to that voice, I hugged myself to stop my shivering.

I found myself outside the hotel.

It was nearly dawn, and a blue light leaked grudgingly into the sky, totally lacking warmth. That light was mirrored in a flood that blocked the street, between me and the city center. I was surrounded by the silhouettes of darkened houses. No traffic moved on the road, nobody was out there, nobody awake but me. The flood water rippled languidly, strewn with rubbish. The world seemed a drab, defeated place.

How had I got here? I couldn’t remember dressing, or coming down from my room. I was disoriented, overtired.

Looking along the road toward the city, I saw a shifting shadow — a curve of back, a leg, the faint sound of footsteps.

I turned north, up the road toward the city center. I walked along the middle of the road, trying to catch up with her. But those cobbles were big and smoothed with use and shiny with dew, and I had to watch every step I took in the uncertain light. I tired quickly, mentally as well as physically.

Then I came to that flood. As I approached it I could see water bubbling up out of the drains and around the rims of manhole covers. I vaguely remembered that somewhere near here the two rivers that ran through the city, the Ouse and the Fosse, came to a confluence, and the place was notorious for flooding. The water looked old and dirty, covered with a layer of dusty scum, and with bits of garbage floating in it. I couldn’t see how deep it got toward the center. You get used to these things; once towns like this had probably flooded once a decade, but now it was a rare year when it didn’t flood, and people got worn out with trying to fix things, and just accepted the change.

But the pond was in my way. I walked to the left and right, helpless. There was no obvious way around it. The side streets would lead me away from the direction to the city center, from the way I wanted to go, toward Morag. Everything was mixed up, made chaotic by the water intruding into the land; I was stranded in a strange landscape, a place where nothing worked anymore.

I couldn’t see Morag. Perhaps I had already lost her. I grew panicky.

Lawned gardens lined one side of the street. I decided to go that way. I made for an old, crumbling wall on the right-hand side of the road. It was too high to be easy to climb. I jumped up, and had to use my arms to haul my bulk up so my belly was resting on the wall. Then, with a lot of swinging, I got my right leg onto the lip of the wall, and then the left. I more or less fell down on the other side.

I landed heavily on my side on soft, moist grass, hard enough to knock the wind out of me. I lay there for a few seconds. I could feel dew, or flood water, soaking my face, my jacket, my trousers. There were high-water marks on the wall, and somebody had chiseled dates into the brick beside the higher of them: 2000. 2026. 2032. And I saw a worm, a long earthworm, crawling around on the grass. Maybe the rising water had forced it out of the ground. It looked as bewildered as I did.

I got to my feet. The side of my body I’d landed on felt like one long bruise, and I was wet and cold. I felt very foolish, a fifty-two-year-old man standing in somebody else’s lawn in the dawn light. I had to get on, get out of there.

I stepped forward and walked straight into a tree. I stumbled back and crashed into more foliage. The tree was a fern, no taller than I was, and the foliage around me was bamboo. English gardens aren’t what they were. I pushed away, not sure which way I was facing. I had been turned around in the fall. I stumbled forward again, but tripped on a skinny mound of moist earth sticking out of the lawn. It might have been a termite mound. I felt stupid, befuddled, surrounded by clinging obstacles, and every step I took, everything I tried to do to make progress, just threw up more problems.

Right. The wall had been on the right-hand side of the street, so I should keep the house to my right. I turned and pushed that way. The grass was long and clung to my shoes, and now my feet were soaked through. But I kept going, and I came to a gate that led me back to the road.

I had come far enough to have passed most of the pond in the road, but the water still lapped at my feet.

Ahead, the road rose to cross the river at a bridge. I could see somebody on the bridge, I thought, a pale face looking back at me. She was too far away; her face was just a blur, a coin at the bottom of a pond. I was sure it was her, though. I wanted to shout, but I was aware of the sleeping town all around me, and somehow I couldn’t. Anyhow it would do no good. I had to get to her; that was the thing.

The hell with it. I strode into the water. Soon I was wading. The water didn’t come much up my shins, but there was a lot of mud and garbage gathered in the bottom — maybe the road surface had collapsed here — and it sucked at my feet. Soon I was breathing hard, and my heart was hammering. At last I got out of the water. My feet and legs were soaked and muddy. I was exhausted.

I couldn’t have come more than half a kilometer from my hotel.

I could see the bridge, and the castle mound beyond with the tower on top, the relic of the old Norman castle, a gaunt silhouette against that blue sky. But she had gone from the bridge. Which way had she gone? Had she climbed the mound? If I could reach it maybe I could try to climb up after her.

The bridge was closed at its far end, for some reason. The rivers curled around both sides of the mound, and the water was high, frothing, blue-gray. The bank was eroded and lined with sandbags. Under the bridge itself the water reached almost to the top of the arches.

Maybe I should cross the bridge. Or maybe I should find some way around the other side of the mound. I couldn’t think my way through it.

I couldn’t see her anymore. I just stood there, bruised, my feet sodden, panting.

“Are you OK?”

The voice seemed loud. I turned. I was facing a young man, maybe twenty-five. He was walking his bicycle. Under a fleece jacket he wore some kind of blue uniform; maybe he was a hospital worker on shift.

He was composed as he looked me up and down. “You look as if you’ve had some trouble.” His accent was broad Yorkshire. I could see suspicion in his eyes. Not surprising; I must have looked strange.