I sit down next to her and stare at her with my jaw down around my ankles. “What are you doing?” I finally hiss in what’s sposed to be a whisper.
“Shh!” she shushes, looking back over her shoulder at Wilf, but he could’ve already forgotten he picked us up for all that’s going on in his Noise. “I don’t know,” she whispers by my ear, “just play along.”
“Play along with what?”
“If we can get to the other side of the herd, then it’s between us and the army, isn’t it?”
I hadn’t thought about that. “But what are you doing? What do Ben and Hildy gotta do with it?”
“He has a gun,” she whispers, checking on Wilf again. “And you said yourself how people might react about you being from a certain place. So, it just sort of popped out.”
“But you were talking in his voice.”
“Not very well.”
“Good enough!” I say, my voice going a little loud with amazement.
“Shh,” she says a second time but with the combo of the herd of creachers getting closer by the second and Wilf’s obvious not-too-brightness, we might as well be having a normal conversayshun.
“How do you do it?” I say, still pouring surprise out all over her.
“It’s just lying, Todd,” she says, trying to shush me again with her hands. “Don’t you have lying here?”
Well of course we have lying here. New World and the town where I’m from (avoiding saying the name, avoiding thinking the name) seem to be nothing but lies. But that’s different. I said it before, men lie all the time, to theirselves, to other men, to the world at large, but who can tell when it’s a strand in all the other lies and truths floating round outta yer head? Everyone knows yer lying but everyone else is lying, too, so how can it matter? What does it change? It’s just part of the river of a man, part of his Noise, and sometimes you can pick it out, sometimes you can’t.
But he never stops being himself when he does it.
Cuz all I know about Viola is what she says. The only truth I got is what comes outta her mouth and so for a second back there, when she said she was Hildy and I was Ben and we were from Farbranch and she spoke just like Wilf (even tho he ain’t from Farbranch) it was like all those things became true, just for an instant the world changed, just for a second it became made of Viola’s voice and it wasn’t describing a thing, it was making a thing, it was making us different just by saying it.
Oh, my head.
“Todd! Todd!” Manchee barks, popping up at the end of the cart, looking up thru our feet. “Todd!”
“Crap,” Viola says.
I hop off the cart and sweep him up in my arms, putting one hand round his muzzle and using the other to get back on the cart. “Td?” he puffs thru closed lips.
“Quiet, Manchee,” I say.
“I’m not even sure it matters,” Viola says, her voice stretching out.
I look up.
“Cw,” Manchee says.
A creacher is walking right past us.
We’ve entered the herd.
Entered the song.
And for a little while, I forget all about any kinda lies.
I’ve never seen the sea, only in vids. No lakes where I grew up neither, just the river and the swamp. There may have been boats once but not in my lifetime.
But if I had to imagine being on the sea, this is what I’d imagine. The herd surrounds us and takes up everything, leaving just the sky and us. It cuts around us like a current, sometimes noticing us but more usually noticing only itself and the song of Here, which in the midst of it is so loud it’s like it’s taken over the running of yer body for a while, providing the energy to make yer heart beat and yer lungs breathe.
After a while, I find myself forgetting all about Wilf and the – the other things I could think about and I’m just lying back on the cart, watching it all go by, individual creachers snuffling around, feeding, bumping each other now and again with their horns, and there’s baby ones, too, and old bulls and taller ones and shorter ones and some with scars and some with scruffier fur.
Viola’s laying down next to me and Manchee’s little doggie brain is overwhelmed by it all and he’s just watching the herd go by with his tongue hanging out and for a while, for a little while, as Wilf drives us over the plain, this is all there is in the world.
This is all there is.
I look over at Viola and she looks back at me and just smiles and shakes her head and wipes away the wet from her eyes.
Here.
Here.
We’re Here and nowhere else.
Cuz there’s nowhere else but Here.
“So this . . . Aaron,” Viola says after a while in a low voice and I know exactly why it’s now that she brings him up.
It’s so safe inside the Here we can talk about any dangers we like.
“Yeah?” I say, also keeping my voice low, watching a little family of creachers waltz by the end of the cart, the ma creacher nuzzling forward a curious baby creacher who’s staring at us.
Viola turns to me from where she’s lying down. “Aaron was your holy man?”
I nod. “Our one and only.”
“What kind of things did he preach?”
“The usual,” I say. “Hellfire. Damnayshun. Judgement.”
She eyes me up. “I’m not sure that’s the usual, Todd.”
I shrug. “He believed we were living thru the end of the world,” I say. “Who’s to say he was wrong?”
She shakes her head. “That’s not what the preacher we had on the ship was like. Pastor Marc. He was kind and friendly and made everything seem like it was going to be okay.”
I snort. “No, that don’t sound like Aaron at all. He was always saying, ‘God hears’ and ‘If one of us falls, we all fall’. Like he was looking forward to it.”
“I heard him say that, too.” She crosses her arms over herself.
The Here wraps us still, flowing everywhere.
I turn to her. “Did he . . . Did he hurt you? Back in the swamp?”
She shakes her head again and lets out a sigh. “He ranted and raved at me, and I guess it might have been preaching, but if I ran, he’d run after me and rant some more and I’d cry and ask him for help but he’d ignore me and preach some more and I’d see pictures of myself in his Noise when I didn’t even know what Noise was. I’ve never been so scared in my life, not even when our ship was crashing.”