The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  By year four, two thirds of the world’s oil fields had turned into aquifers. It would occur without warning—apart from statistical probability, as it kept on occurring. One minute a well would be pumping oil; the next water and oil, and then water.

  There was no territory where every field was tran-substantiated, a fact that prompted intelligent observers to think that she—the constantly identified woman who cleaned rivers—was leaving each oil-producing region some fuel for the time being. ‘It’s a period of grace,’ said the intelligent observers. ‘It has to be.’ Meanwhile, former desert places were using the aquifers to irrigate groves of young olives and date palms, and gardens of tomato, squash, cucumber, eggplant. In places where winter was irremediably cold, and people relied on oil for heating, and suddenly no one was interested in selling it to them, those people simply disappeared. Many of them came back in spring with packets of seed and bundles of cuttings and garden tools, bursting with good health, and stubbornly refusing to elaborate on where they had been and what they had learned. The mayor of one such town produced what came to be the rote response to questions. ‘I will only talk to whomever helps me build a glasshouse.’ Bullying officials didn’t roll up their sleeves. Reporters occasionally would. ‘We were on an island,’ explained the mayor, once the glasshouse door was hung and its interior swept out. ‘With blue sea all around it. It wasn’t as hot as a Greek Isle, but it was otherwise quite similar. A group of people were ready and waiting for us when we arrived. They fed us, housed us, and put us to work. Only five of them had any Russian, and it was antique Russian. But we got by, and between the bouts of hard work had a pleasant time.’ He grinned at the reporter. ‘We’re nomads now. We’ll go back there when winter comes again. This is now our Summer Town.’

  The motorway across the valley from the prison became quieter by degrees. Then, almost overnight, it fell completely silent.

  It was the first stretch of road replaced by forest. A ‘taking gate’ soundlessly consumed the bitumen, crash barriers, cat’s eyes, giant curettes of LEDs, the pre-cast concrete sound screens, and the manky road reserve. Forty miles in thirty-six hours. The disappearance left a trench all the way down to clay and gravel. The trench lay naked for a week, watered by rain, then was filled with a forest, shade trees and fruit trees, nut trees and little pools of potager-style gardens, with vegetables, mature seedlings, dormant seeds and tubers, all flourishing according to the season, which was early spring. The forest arrived glistening with rain, under rain, walked into the world by that woman (and her generally neglected confederate).

  These ready-lawn food forests—the temperate one that replaced the motorway near Taryn’s prison; tropical ones with pawpaw and mango, banana, taro, cassava, and cocoa trees; or desert ones with olives, lemons, dates, tamarind and pomegranates—always replaced roadways, always came with water if there wasn’t any, bringing a series of small springs that flowed as if from underground. The ready-lawn forests were few and didn’t have the dramatic impact on human lives that the cleaned rivers and stolen oil had. But they were as suggestive a gift as the unasked-for cookware or power tools spouses give each other at Christmas as a heavy hint. Hint or encouragement. (Yes. We have to learn to fix things, not throw them away. And, no, we can’t keep eating out.)

  For the past year Taryn had enjoyed her twilight writing sprints to the sounds of owls, foxes and badgers, and birdsong draining down into the world as sunrise touched the tops of the trees.

  Munin was a frequent visitor. Between her visits, Taryn would be expecting her while never quite able to recall how it was the raven would arrive. Then, at 5am in winter or 2am in summer, there would be a stealthy rustle from under Taryn’s bed as Munin emerged from the box Taryn kept forgetting was there. The box that no cell-inspector ever found. The Firestarter was now a two-way gate, raven-sized, its other end located in a very windy spot on the summit of Ben Nevis. It was Hugin’s idea to make the gate two-way and send it to Taryn. ‘I knew something had slipped my mind, and since it wasn’t Shift, it had to be the Firestarter. Shift had left it just lying around in his hut, under things.’

  Sometimes Taryn would sit on her bed swinging her foot so that it knocked on the box. Tonk. The Firestarter.

  Sometimes another bird would come through, often surging into human form so fast he’d end up with his nose pressed to the closed hatch in Taryn’s cell door, frozen in wariness, one eye rolled back to regard her.

  But he hadn’t come for two years, and the last time she saw him he’d cried all night in her arms. Wept as he had on the beach of the Tacit. But this time there was nowhere she could ask him to take her. Nowhere he could run to.

  Taryn’s visitor wasn’t her father, overeager and early. It wasn’t Carol, who would visit, but not at this season, and whom Taryn would see very soon, since they planned to live together for part of every year. Carol, Ignace and their three-year-old son were at Prince’s Gate with Angela, Angela’s partner, Taryn’s editor and her family, Jane Aitken and several other women of the island. They all worked in Prince’s Gate’s extensive vegetable gardens and published informational booklets about preserving and smoking, making compost, caring for fruit trees and raising poultry and goats. The booklets were for barter, as were the packets of seeds they distributed at the local libraries in an eighty-mile radius of Prince’s Gate. (Libraries were becoming real centres of community everywhere. It was where people knew they’d find some often elderly gardener who’d been deputised by ‘the ladies and gentlemen’ to hand out seed, seedlings and advice.)

  The visitor wasn’t Basil or Carol. It wasn’t Jacob—who had been largely absent for the past two years, though Munin still delivered his short and unsatisfying letters. Taryn’s visitor was Raymond Price.

  Price was not dressed with his usual sartorial elegance—something Taryn had noticed and Jacob had made much of, with a mix of envy and admiration, every time he talked about the man. Price was wearing a woollen hat, Gore-Tex walking boots, and a duck-down body warmer. Taryn wouldn’t have recognised him, except he had visited her a number of times in her first years of incarceration. Other people like him had visited also—and the three who threatened violence later suffered deaths of fairytale cruelty, after which she was left in peace.

  Price sat at a table in the empty visitors’ room. Taryn’s guard turned up the heat pump. She settled on the other side of the room and got out her knitting.

  Taryn took a seat opposite Price.

  ‘I thought I’d drop in before you leave,’ Price said. ‘I’m surprised you refused early release.’

  Taryn shrugged. She wasn’t going to explain anything so near to her heart. There were days she’d find herself looking about for that length of chain—the one from Scolt Head, and Purgatory.

  Price imitated her shrug, and managed to make it look pubescent.

  Taryn smiled. ‘I will only speak to whomever helps me build a glasshouse.’

  Price pursed his lips. ‘It’s cold out there. The wrong season for glasshouses.’

  ‘But not as cold as it was some years ago when the Arctic vortex kept collapsing.’

  ‘Yes. It is properly cold in the Arctic now,’ he conceded. ‘So you might say we’re beginning to see the point.’

  ‘You still say “we”.’

  ‘I’m still working for the government. In a slightly different capacity.’

  Taryn looked over at the guard. She could feel herself tensing up—a sense of peril in her throat and chest. ‘Don’t try anything,’ she warned.

  ‘You mean in a spiteful spirit of revenge? Surely you understand our cause for resentment?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Really?’

  Taryn didn’t respond. A condensation of deeper silence began to rain down from the ceiling. Taryn’s clothes were sticking to her. It was sweat but it felt like cold and damp. She understood that she was isolated and indefensible, in every sense of the word. ‘I have friends,’ she reminded him, and herself.

&nb
sp; ‘How nice for you. And none of your friends has been a casualty of the changes so far?’

  Taryn considered the insinuation of ‘so far’ and wondered if sharing what she knew would help her. Some of what she knew, so he’d gather there was more, and might therefore value her more.

  ‘I hope you don’t imagine there haven’t been casualties,’ Price said. ‘Great suffering. And where’s the end of it?’

  There was, it turned out, a line of inquiry he wanted to open. Things had been much quieter for two years. There were fewer notable events. Yes, groups of people in real strife would still vanish, and some of them would come back in better shape and equipped with know-how and new loyalties. But Price wanted to know whether this was it. A tapering off. He wanted to know whether there was a clock running on what people like him, and those he served, were expected to do in return. He wanted to know how long they had, and what was negotiable. He wanted to negotiate.

  ‘What do you have to say about the falling birth rates along those rivers?’ he said.

  Taryn sighed. ‘You know, there were always people who found cause for complaint about falling birth rates whenever women in developing nations got educations and the means of supporting themselves.’

  ‘I’m genuinely interested in what you think about it.’

  ‘No, you’re making a case. Look. There were too few sources of clean water. Those gates are now all running at twenty per cent, effectively only filtering these days. The sidhe couldn’t keep poisoning their wetlands with our shitty water. And it wouldn’t have done any good to—say—use the Lethe instead of their own rivers. Imagine the problems that would have brought with it.’

  Price looked away, imagining. The dial of his indolent but somehow intense attention turned, and Taryn could almost hear the otherworldly voices come into his head.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘The glaciers of Jotunheim couldn’t be persuaded to melt. And the frost giants have already given us more than enough. Once the upstream polluters stop, once the trash mountains have all been removed—then the rivers can become wholly themselves again. Wholly and holy in the case of the Ganges. They’ve been given a chance.’

  The trash mountains were being dealt with very slowly. Neve had been picking away at the task on her own, so everything went at half speed. And there wasn’t any useful gravity in interstellar space, and it turned out the Exiles’ Gate was producing its own gravity so the displaced pollution was being spun into a planetoid of frozen water, rubbish and flotsam right on the other side of it.

  Taryn said, ‘We have to find something other than financial incentive for civilisation. At least for the time being.’

  ‘So there is an end to this?’

  ‘A hundred years, maybe. Eighty with good behaviour.’

  Price leaned forward. The gentle clacking of knitting needles paused as the guard eyed him.

  ‘Is there something about that particular period? One hundred years?’

  ‘Yes. But we don’t talk about it.’

  ‘You have two kinds of “we”, Ms Cornick. Humanity, and that other “we” of your inner circle.’

  ‘Life is mostly Venn diagrams. Even a person can be. A quarter this, a quarter that, half something completely different.’

  Price leaned back. His jaw muscles rippled. ‘Why don’t you people just give us a timetable? Conditions? Demands?’

  ‘You must realise none of this is about us. It’s not being done for us, or against us. This isn’t The Day the Earth Stood Still. We aren’t being warned. We’re being treated as kindly as possible while other interests are served. And if you haven’t yet worked out whose interests, then you’re not as smart as Jacob thinks you are.’

  Price brightened. ‘Berger is still in circulation?’

  ‘He’s liaising about. His joke. He gets to explain things when people are over-excited and the ladies and gentlemen can’t make themselves understood. Or can’t be bothered making themselves understood.’

  ‘Do you not understand,’ Price began with sudden evangelical fervour, ‘that the interests mostly likely to be served by everything that’s happened will be those of the brutal among us? Thugs. Warlords. Lawless people.’

  Taryn laughed. ‘Those people are easy to find. They have blood halos. They won’t even get to finish sowing the wind before the whirlwind plucks out their eyes. And Ray—may I call you Ray?—have you really not worked out who benefits? Who is meant to benefit? Tell me, what do you hear if you stop listening for the answers you anticipate? What would you hear if we opened the window?’

  ‘You are not opening a window, Taryn,’ the guard said. ‘It’s brass monkey balls today.’

  They ignored her.

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ Price said.

  ‘That’s what I used to say. “You can’t really mean to save the world,” I said, because I couldn’t imagine anyone pulling the thread that would make so much of what I loved unravel. But we are not being saved. We didn’t know which God to pray to.’

  Price looked so alarmed, and so pleased underneath it—pleased to be proven right, somehow—that Taryn realised she’d have to clarify. ‘We are being saved, by the by. Maybe not all, but most of us. But our salvation is a side effect of someone else’s. The fossil fuels, the plastics and insecticides, the droughts and floods and hurricanes were going to kill us in our millions. This is better. This will be better.’

  ‘But we don’t have a choice!’ Price shouted. Then blinked.His vehemence had surprised him.

  ‘Most of us didn’t anyway.’

  ‘They’re dictating our futures.’

  ‘They aren’t. Only one of them made a decision. The rest went along with him because it gets them out of the house, while they’re waiting for their own salvation to arrive from another quarter, pretending very hard that they don’t really care about it anyway. We’re very lucky they were charmed by his plans. Without the ladies and gentlemen it wouldn’t be possible to shoulder us aside quite so gently. Everything that’s happening is a flow-on effect. This people and that people and us people. Changes. A shift in how things stand.’

  The knitting hadn’t resumed. The guard asked, ‘What would we hear if we opened the window?’

  ‘Birds. The creak of icy branches. The forest.’

  ‘Brrr,’ said the guard, with a shiver. She picked up a bag of yellow wool. It was time to start on a new stripe.

  ‘It’s all horribly high-handed,’ Price said.

  ‘Yes. So how does that feel?’ Taryn was acid.

  There was only the clack of knitting needles. Then another guard came in with a cup of tea for Taryn’s guard, and another visitor.

  Taryn’s guard said, ‘Okay, Mr Price, it’s one visitor at a time, so you are going to have to leave.’ She put her knitting aside, got up and adjusted her belt, which was too loose now with all the walking she was doing—was having to do—these days.

  ‘Hello, Berger,’ said Price.

  ‘You had the same idea we did,’ Jacob said.

  ‘A final interview.’

  ‘I’d be careful about using the word “final”,’ Jacob said. Then, ‘Taryn. It feels unnatural not to give you a kiss.’

  ‘You’re just going to have to feel unnatural,’ said the guard.

  ‘I frequently do,’ said Jacob.

  ‘Mr Price, you’re really going to have to say your goodbyes.’

  Price produced some credentials. Taryn craned over the table to get a look at them. ‘The Ministry of what?’ she said.

  ‘Very well, Mr Price,’ said the guard. ‘But I’ll have you know I thought it was very unfair of you people to make Ms Cornick serve the whole six years.’

  Taryn was perplexed. ‘I chose to.’

  ‘If you hadn’t chosen, they meant to make you.’ The guard was genuinely indignant. ‘Everyone had instructions.’

  Price said to Jacob, ‘So, you thought to get in early and spirit Ms Cornick away before she answers any questions?’

  ‘She’s not
going to answer any questions.’

  ‘I’ve just about answered all the important ones,’ Taryn said.

  ‘Taryn!’

  ‘What difference does it make? Munin has been carrying my notebooks out of here for months. A whole book’s worth of writing. My next book, the one my agent wanted. Title: The Absolute Book. A history of how this all came to pass. It begins with two sisters raising their babies in a house beside the Wye, hands on through two sisters hiding behind a curtain while a man possessed by a demon sets fire to a library, and ends with the sisters who visit me in prison and bring me notebooks. My history, intimate at every point, right up to where I try to set Price straight, and it doesn’t sound like a fairytale anymore.’

  Everyone stared at Taryn. She folded her hands, which were shaking.

  Price recovered first. He said to Jacob, ‘We have tried to keep track of your parents, Jacob. I don’t suppose you ever see them.’

  ‘Drop dead,’ said Jacob.

  ‘And you’re here to make sure your friend doesn’t talk to me?’

  ‘No, Ray, I’m here to paint the target.’ Jacob frowned and patted his pockets. He produced a note and read it out. ‘“Jacob—don’t forget the Firestarter in Taryn’s cell.”’ He laughed and looked over at the guard. ‘Do you think you might be persuaded to let Taryn fetch something from her cell?’

  The guard said she didn’t like the sound of painting the target. Taryn reassured her that everyone was just being theatrical. Jacob was an actor friend of her father’s. The thing they were talking about was a little prop from one of his films. She’d kept it as a comfort.

  ‘Are you telling fibs?’ said the guard. ‘Whenever this man is in the room,’ she gestured at Price, ‘you start making up all sorts of stuff.’

  ‘Yes, I’m lying. The thing I want to fetch is a scroll box that once belonged to my grandfather. An antique.’

  ‘All right. I’ll take you,’ the guard said.

  They were gone for fifteen minutes. Taryn changed her shoes—she had a pair of walking shoes she was determined to hang on to, given the wide-open spaces waiting for her and the primitive and insufficient sidhe footwear. She carried the Firestarter back to her visitors, and found them ignoring each other, like cats in the middle of a slow-burning territorial dispute. She put the Firestarter on the table, but didn’t sit down again. She could see her guard wanted her to. And Jacob also. But they remained standing and the guard gave up.