Perihelion Summer

by Greg Egan

  Matt held his phone up and shook it. “Sorry.”

  The boat stopped in the shallows, and Matt waded out and clambered on board. Before he could say a word, Arun beamed at him and embraced him tightly. That wasn’t usually his style; Matt couldn’t recall the two of them actually hugging since they’d helped thrash the law students in a rugby match a decade ago.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked.

  “Absolutely.” Arun kept smiling as he started up the outboard and set off for the Mandjet. Matt didn’t push him for an explanation; under the circumstances, anyone who could keep from sinking into despondency was probably best left unquestioned, lest it break the spell.

  In the shelter of the bay the water was calm, making the docking easy. They met up with the others in the mess. Matt had felt badly about leaving his crewmates to head north without him, however much they’d protested that they understood, and it was a relief to find no flickers of resentment on their faces at the prodigal’s return.

  “How’s your family?” he asked Aaron, everyone else’s being more or less out of harm’s way.

  “They decided to stay in Cobar,” Aaron replied. “There’s a plan to fit out the copper mine so the whole town can live down there for the worst parts of the year.”

  “That’s ambitious.” Matt had fantasized about digging a bunker in his parents’ backyard, but the geology would not have been accommodating.

  “I guess they’ll be surviving on mushrooms,” Aaron added. Matt wasn’t sure if he was joking.

  The five of them sat down together for a lunch of grilled fish. Matt took a bite and sighed. “Ah, there’s that taste I’ve missed!” He was joking as he uttered the words, but there was something comforting in the constancy of the food supply that almost made up for the monotony.

  When they’d finished eating, Jožka asked Matt, “Are you up for a meeting, or do you want to leave it till tomorrow?”

  “No, I’m ready.” On the long ride up the coast, Matt had contemplated trying to lobby people one-on-one before they made a decision on the Mandjet’s future, but he’d given up on the idea. He wasn’t cut out for that kind of politicking, and it would be better if everyone just spoke their mind freely.

  Yuki said, “If we’re going to start offering a taxi service, we need to think about the routes that will be in high demand. Anyone who can’t get into China overland will want to try their luck in the Pacific. But given that British Columbia’s already seeing boat arrivals from half of South America, avoiding the crowds will probably mean going all the way up to the Bering Sea.”

  “The Russian navy might have something to say about that,” Jožka replied. “And the Americans, for that matter.”

  Aaron said, “Won’t they be too busy with the Mexican border to care about Alaska?”

  “They have enough guns to go around,” Jožka remarked dryly. “Anyway, the whole idea that the Arctic is about to bloom is just misconceived. Sure, the sun’s going to be brighter in winter, but if you’re so far north that it’s scraping the horizon the benefits won’t be that great. And then the summer’s colder. That’s not a recipe for turning tundra into farmland.”

  “There are people talking seriously about building new islands in the North Pacific,” Arun said. “There are dozens of guyots in the Emperor seamounts that aren’t far from the surface. China has had plenty of experience turning submerged land into islands; it’s about time they put it to good use.”

  Matt said, “That could take years.”

  “Sure,” Arun agreed. “But if we can help people get closer to the region, at least it would mean that the host countries wouldn’t have to absorb them all. They can be temporary residents, waiting for their own new nation to be completed.”

  Matt wasn’t persuaded. “Don’t you think China will have factored that in already? If they do start building islands, they’ll have plenty of temporary residents of their own to populate them.”

  “Then someone else will have to build more,” Arun countered. “The more refugees there are in the North Pacific rim, the more pressure there’ll be to make homes for them.”

  Jožka said, “That’s assuming they don’t just sink the boats before anyone so much as sets foot on shore.”

  Arun went quiet. Jožka was sitting beside him; she reached up and put an arm across his shoulders in what looked like a conciliatory gesture, though it was not the kind of thing Matt had seen her do before.

  He said, “If there’s one shoreline worth reaching that no one’s going to be defending with gunboats, it’s not in the northern hemisphere at all.”

  Jožka smiled. “You want to do the southern loop?”

  Matt nodded. “If we can make it work, wouldn’t it be the safest choice?”

  Yuki said, “The Mandjet can probably do it, but who’s going to choose that kind of life, willingly? Eight months at home, two months at sea, two months in Antarctica. Where the climate will be lovely in summer, but there’s no infrastructure, no one to trade with, and who knows what prospects for growing food?”

  Matt laughed. “‘Willingly’? I’m sure everyone would prefer their old lives back, but compared to a gulag on the Okhotsk Coast, I would have thought it sounded pretty good.”

  “The Mandjet could do it,” Yuki repeated, “but what’s the plan? We turn up in some Indonesian fishing village offering to take a few dozen people south? At which point we’re outnumbered, and if they actually had their hearts set on the Pacific we won’t be in a position to say no. But even if this is something people want, they’re not going to want to do it alone—not in one vessel that holds less than a village worth of passengers.”

  “So we’re part of a flotilla,” Jožka interjected. “The more the better, if there’s a problem at sea.”

  “How many fishing boats meant for short trips in an archipelago do you think could make it to Antarctica?” Yuki retorted. “If we’re part of a flotilla, and the other boats just sink one by one, we’ll have people piled up five-deep on every deck before we reach the Southern Ocean.”

  Matt said, “I have a friend in Dili, a marine engineer I worked with on the rigs. I want to ask him if he can figure out a way to use the Mandjet as a kind of hub. We can’t take a huge number of passengers ourselves, but if Eduardo can pick the kind of boats that go with us, he’s not going to choose anything that’s likely to sink, and we can help out with food and drinking water so that everyone’s provisions last longer. I mean, people are going to be doing this, with or without us. The question is: where would we be the most use? Trying to smuggle people to Alaska, when we’re pretty much the slowest, least stealthy vessel on the ocean? Or keeping people fed, while moving fast enough for the temperature to stay comfortable for humans and cobia, in waters that no navy or coastguard will be trying to defend?”

  Arun looked dismayed. “Once or twice, maybe it would work. But year after year? If we really want to help people, we should help put pressure on the countries to the north to make room for them, so they end up somewhere they can live a decent life.”

  Jožka said, “Whatever happens, China, Europe and North America aren’t going to take everyone. Even if they wanted to, they don’t have the capacity. Some people will have no choice but to find a way to keep living in the south. Maybe that means seasonal migration, maybe it means something else. I hope there are a hundred different solutions, but I can only think of one that the Mandjet could be part of.”

  They kept talking late into the afternoon. Matt couldn’t allay all of Arun’s and Yuki’s qualms, but in the end they conceded that if there were people already committed to the southern loop, the Mandjet could play a role as a support vessel. Giving up hope of sanctuary in the north to try to roll with the climatic punches might or might not be a viable strategy, but having a supply of captive fish along the way could hardly make things worse.

  When Matt stepped out onto the deck, the sky was black; however untropical the weather, the sun still sank as fast as ever. He hadn’t actuall
y spoken to anyone in Dili for almost a year; he hadn’t wanted to sound out Eduardo prematurely only to find that no one else on the Mandjet agreed to the plan.

  The call through the satellite triggered thirty seconds of buzzing and odd silences before the ringing started, but Eduardo answered almost at once. He greeted Matt cheerfully, though his voice sounded strained.

  “How are you surviving the winter in Perth?” he asked. There was a baby crying somewhere nearby, and people shouting in the distance.

  “Actually, I’m up near Broome,” Matt replied. “Just off the coast.”

  “You’re on a boat?”

  “Remember that project I was working on in my spare time?”

  Eduardo laughed. “How could I forget the Mandjet? You had more pictures of it than I had of my kids.”

  “It’s finished now. Everything’s working: the flies, the fish, the wave power.”

  “Congratulations. You stuck with that a long time.”

  Matt said, “So now that it’s finished, the question is, what is it good for?”

  He sketched the idea of the southern loop. When he stopped talking, Eduardo was quiet for so long that Matt began to wonder if he was struggling to find a way to let him down gently. The stakes were so high that everyone had started succumbing to wishful thinking, and there was no reason to think he was immune himself.

  But when Eduardo finally spoke, he said, “This might be the push I need. I’ve been trying for months to get a fleet together to go south for the summer, but it’s been hard to get anyone to make a commitment.”

  “So what are most people planning to do?” Matt asked.

  Eduardo muttered something in Tetum that Matt was fairly sure was obscene. “Some people have been conned into paying smugglers who’ve promised they can get them into China. Some people think the whole thing’s a conspiracy to get them off their land—they say the coming wet season will either be normal, or as cool as this dry season has been. And some people think they can tough it out, however high the temperature goes.”

  “But you’ve talked to people about Antarctica?”

  “Of course. No one wants to do it, but some of my friends agree that it might be the least worst choice, compared to staying here and getting cooked, or being slaughtered by pirates off the coast of Mindanao.”

  Matt said, “Okay. So where do we go from here? Should I bring the Mandjet to Dili?”

  “That wouldn’t be so smart.” Eduardo made it sound as if Matt had just proposed hang gliding into a volcano. ”Everything’s falling apart around here. If you sail that thing into Indonesian waters I promise you it will be in a scrapyard by nightfall.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “Give me a chance to talk to people, then I’ll get a group together to come and take a look. Maybe we can meet off Melville Island, but you shouldn’t go farther north than that.”

  “All right.”

  When Matt hung up the call, he stood for a while, staring across the bay at the lights of Broome. He could hear music drifting over the water. As good as it felt to be vindicated, it would have been infinitely better to hear that everyone in Dili had a ticket to China, there was no need to flee into the wrong hemisphere entirely and he should stop thinking about Antarctica and go home and wait for life to return to normal.

  9

  The delegation approached in a battered wooden fishing boat, some twelve meters long. A mast rose from the deck, but it was a calm day and the sails were furled, leaving the boat chugging along on diesel.

  The whole crew of the Mandjet had gathered to watch the arrival, passing around the binoculars and trying to read the name of the boat as they squinted against the glare of reflected sunlight, but the paint had flaked off to the point where any reconstruction would be pure guesswork. “Can you see that making it through the Roaring Forties?” Yuki asked.

  Matt said, “No, but they’re probably trying to keep a low profile. We’re the ones auditioning for the trip.”

  When the boat pulled up beside the Mandjet, the sea was so quiet that Matt just lowered a ladder from the side of the deck, and four of the occupants in turn jumped to it and clambered up, leaving a teenage boy in charge at the wheel.

  Eduardo introduced his companions, all weathered, silver-haired men: José, Martinho, and João. They shook hands with everyone, and thanked Matt in English when he said, “Welcome,” but they left Eduardo to do most of the talking and translating. Matt had picked up a little Portuguese and Tetum from his fellow workers on the rigs, but not enough to speak without embarrassing himself.

  Eduardo hadn’t been entirely clear as to why the Mandjet had to pass muster with these particular people—whether it was a question purely of their status in the community, or more their expertise in maritime affairs. In any case, the guests were given a full tour, starting from the control room, taking in the garden and not shying away from the maggots. The four originators of the project had prepared short spiels on their areas of expertise: Jožka on the cobia, Yuki on the flies and the garden, Arun on the generators and electronics, Matt on the propulsion and the structure as a whole. Eduardo dutifully translated every word, but he seemed a bit bemused. “At least you didn’t use PowerPoint,” he whispered.

  Matt wasn’t sure how else the crew were meant to prove their competence; things had moved on since the days of the Great Nantucket Knot-Tying Contest. But however confident he was of the Mandjet’s capabilities, it was hard not to be intimidated by the weight of their guests’ experience. And not just of the sea; these men were old enough to have lived half their lives under the Indonesian occupation, when a tenth of the country had died from starvation and violence. He felt as callow in their presence as the boy they’d left on the boat.

  As the two groups stood on the deck looking inward, João asked through Eduardo, “How many adult fish are there, right now?”

  “About twelve thousand,” Jožka replied.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I do a rough census with sonar every week,” she explained. “And some sample nettings to check their health and weight range.”

  João nodded thoughtfully, but then motioned toward the enclosure’s inscrutable surface with an upturned hand. Matt wasn’t sure what he was asking, but he seemed to take the lack of a reply as assent. He clambered over the rail and dived into the blue water, not bothering to shed his T-shirt.

  He surfaced, took a breath, then submerged again. Matt wasn’t sure why Jožka couldn’t simply be taken at her word; what kind of scam could they be running that involved building a half-million-dollar aquaculture rig, but then only pretending to stock it?

  It was at least a full minute before João appeared again, but he smiled and gave a thumbs-up to his associates. There were actual fish; this was not some stone soup trick where the Mandjet’s crew lured people to Antarctica to do all the fishing for them.

  “Are we getting closer?” Matt asked Eduardo.

  “I’ll let you know,” he replied.

  * * *

  It was a week before Eduardo called. The connection was terrible, but Matt soon got the gist of the situation.

  There were a number of coffee-growing families who’d expressed an interest in the trip south, but they were worried about the fate of their land if they left it unattended. If they came back to find that armed squatters had taken over the plantations, they weren’t confident that the police, the courts, or any other branch of the government would still be strong enough to resolve the matter.

  One solution to the impasse would be to go without those families. But not only would that mean the loss of the provisions they could bring, there was a doctor who had promised Eduardo that she would join the flotilla if, and only if, it comprised at least a thousand potential patients. Wherever that threshold had come from, she was adamant that if it wasn’t met it would be her duty to remain on the island instead. Without the coffee farmers, the total fell short.

  Matt was at a loss to suggest any strategy besides the obvi
ous one. “Can’t you tell these farmers that anyone who stays behind will be too busy trying to stave off heatstroke to start making landgrabs?”

  “They accept that it might be that bad, but they’re not convinced enough to gamble on it,” Eduardo replied.

  “A doctor would be good,” Matt conceded. “Can’t the rest of us pitch in and just, you know . . . pay her?”

  “I sounded her out on that, and it only made her more stubborn.”

  “So where does that leave us? Is this happening or not?”

  Eduardo said, “I’ll keep trying with the farmers. But if we don’t get the doctor, a lot of other people might back out.”

  Matt took the news to the rest of the crew, who’d just finished lunch in the mess.

  Yuki said, “Can’t they put up an electric fence around their land? Solar-powered, with battery backup at night?”

  Arun was skeptical. “It wouldn’t be hard to tunnel under a fence, in four months. Or even just smash up the foundations and topple a section.”

  Aaron said, “Everyone’s planning to evacuate Darwin, and they’re not freaking out that their houses might be burgled.”

  “Most people aren’t,” Matt agreed, “but the government is freaking out on their behalf. Haven’t you seen the drones?”

  Aaron shook his head. “I’m too afraid to watch anything on the net in case I get beaten up for quota violations.”

  “You don’t need the net,” Matt replied. “We’re close enough to Darwin that you can see them with binoculars.”

  Arun caught Matt’s eye. He was frowning slightly, weighing something up before he spoke. Some technical quandary? Or a moral one?

  Matt felt himself smiling before he was entirely sure that he’d correctly intuited the meaning, but then his uncertainty evaporated. “Fuck, yeah!”

  Arun flinched a little, taken aback by his vehemence.

  Jožka turned to Arun. “So what’s the great idea?”

  Arun looked to Matt, unsure now if they should put it into words.

  Matt said, “Let me start by saying that if we end up in prison, I promise to install ceiling insulation and double glazing in all of your cells.”