Osiris (osiris project)

by E. J. Swift

  “Aren’t you curious about why I’m here?”

  “No. Double fuck off.”

  The door started to shut. Vikram wedged his foot to block it. Through the gap, Adelaide stared down at his dirty boot. Her attitude changed. She arranged herself against the mirrored wall of her hallway, delivering an evil smile. Her lack of fear was almost insulting. He supposed it came hand in hand with her arrogance-as the Architect’s granddaughter, she’d never had to be afraid.

  “Have you ever been in jail, what was it-Vikram?”

  “For a number of days. And yes, it’s Vikram.”

  “What’s it like down there?”

  He ignored this. “Contrary to what you might think, I’m not a spy. Not for Linus, or for anyone. I’m here for my own reasons.”

  “To be arrested?” she enquired.

  Vikram remembered Linus’s reaction the first time Vikram had sought him out. There were similarities between brother and sister, and not just their looks. Confidence rose from them like a costly, seductive perfume.

  “That’s up to you,” he said.

  “You’re right,” she agreed. “It is.”

  She surveyed him speculatively. Something had given him the edge of advantage. She had not called for backup, as he had thought she might. There was a reason for that; she might be unafraid, but presumably she wasn’t stupid. Perhaps she did not trust her own people.

  Perhaps she was just bored.

  “I’m here because I think you’re the only one who can help me,” he said.

  Adelaide cocked her head.

  “That’s entirely possible. But you’re missing one crucial element. Why would I want to help you?”

  He shrugged, following instinct. “Because you’d be doing something you’ve never done before.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. You’d be helping people.”

  She looked unimpressed.

  “And it would make you look good,” he added.

  “I don’t have an issue with the way I look, do you?” she said sweetly, and if he did not meet that gaze he had to look at the rest of her, which was no doubt what she intended. There was only one way to play this game. He stared at her openly for a good ten seconds before replying. The posters did not lie: she was that beautiful.

  “Not especially,” he said.

  “Good.” There was a pause, and he wondered if he had read her right. Then she said, “Two minutes then.”

  Vikram looked past her into the apartment. A lone red petal wilted on the floorboards of the mirrored hallway.

  “Can I come in?”

  “I’m fond of the doorstep.”

  “Fine. But I don’t think you’re very hospitable.”

  Adelaide’s eyes snapped with apparent delight at this game. “You’ve lost a good twenty seconds already.”

  Inside his coat pockets, Vikram crossed his fingers.

  “Listen,” he said. “This city has everything. It wouldn’t take much to give some aid to the people who need it. I know it doesn’t affect you now but one day it might. People are angry, over there, in the bit you forget about. But we do exist. There will be more riots and one day the violence will come here and then you’ll wish you did something about it before. But if you used your influence like Linus said you could-”

  “Leave Linus out of it,” Adelaide interrupted. “More. Seconds. Lost.”

  He looked at her for a moment, not as he had before, but as though he was searching her out. Testing her. He doubted anyone had ever looked at Adelaide Mystik this way before, and he was not sure how she might react. But she seemed to lean into his gaze. She did not break the silence.

  “Have you ever seen anyone dead?” Vikram asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “My grandmother.”

  “Did you see her die?”

  “She died in her sleep. I saw her afterwards.”

  “It’s different when you watch them die.”

  “Is it.”

  “You should know,” he said. “You were at the execution.”

  She stared back at him in a way that should have been frank, if she had been capable of frankness. He sensed catacombs beneath her expressions.

  “You knew that man?” she asked. “Eirik 9968, you knew him?”

  “Not personally.” Once again, a flutter of guilt accompanied the lie. It was impossible to tell whether she believed him.

  “Then who died on you? Death seems important to you, so who was it?”

  “I’ve known a lot of people who died.”

  “It’s never about the many. Nobody’s that philanthropic.”

  “Her name was Mikkeli,” he said blankly.

  “Ah. A girl.” Adelaide twirled a strand of red hair between two fingers. “And is that why you want to help your people, for this dead girl?”

  Her words were probing fingers, digging through his hair and his skull to root around inside. Vikram told himself it did not matter what he said now. Adelaide could have what answers she wanted as long as she helped him.

  “Something like that.”

  “Something like that,” she repeated. Her gaze idled up and down him. Vikram matched it.

  “Yes.”

  “And what exactly do you want to do for your westerners?”

  “Food. Warmth. Jobs. Hope. Is that concise enough?”

  “I’m not sure,” she mused. “I suspect it might turn out to be rather more complicated than that.”

  “I could tell you more, but it might take longer than your two minute allocation.”

  “You are insolent.” Adelaide toyed with the lace of her nightclothes. “What are you going to do for me in exchange for my voice?”

  “What do you need?” He kept his face expressionless. A smile lit up her beautiful, flawless features.

  “I’m sure I can find something. Let’s just call it an i.o.u. for now, shall we? Meet me at The Stingray on Friday. Fourteen o’clock. Don’t be late.”

  “I’ll be there,” he said.

  She reached out, past the doorway for the first time, ran her finger lightly along the edge of his jawline. Her face was close to his. She looked incredibly young; only the traces of lines in their making showed she had left her teens behind. Perhaps it was that that made her so unreadable, like a slate yet to be written.

  “You know it won’t bring her back,” she said.

  It wasn’t a compassionate line. He wondered why she had said it.

  “I think I know that.”

  “Goodnight then.”

  “Goodnight.”

  The door shut. There was no sound from the other side, or from upstairs. Vikram stayed for a minute, memorizing the patterns of the wood, and those of the girl behind it.

  He waited another hour before the first Undersea train of the morning. He had bribed a man to smuggle him over the border by barge, a quarter of the credit from the two weeks work. The man had hidden him in a cupboard-sized compartment, and when they reached the checkpoint, Vikram had heard skadi guards banging up and down the length of the barge and his heart had leapfrogged. It irked him that Adelaide hadn’t asked how he had got to her, hadn’t cared, even if it was better she didn’t know.

  The Undersea was dark and virtually deserted. Vikram had earmarked a hiding place in his carriage, but no one checked the train going back west. When he finally reached 614-West it was still dark and he was burning with a low exhilaration. He debated banging on Nils’s door. Nobody liked to be woken before dawn, though, and he hadn’t decided what to tell Nils when he did see him. Out of habit he tried the lift. Its OUT OF ORDER sign had been graffitied long ago. Vikram was tempted to add his own mark: an affirmation of the night’s work, but he had nothing to scratch or spray with.

  He ran up the first couple of flights, then slowed, stopping every few floors to catch his breath. After thirty-six floors he felt leaden with tiredness. He fumbled with the key in the lock-still weak-and collapsed onto a stew of rugs and clothes. He pulled everything over him. He expected to sle
ep instantly, but his brain thwarted him, spinning into action. He replayed each moment of his conversation with Adelaide. Was she lying awake now, or was she sleeping? If she was sleeping, what was she dreaming? Did she have ground-dreams like everyone else?

  Vikram’s dream was always the same: a stretch of golden sand. A beach. He walked along it, at first near the surf where it was damp, and then inland, past tufts of vegetation. The vegetation gave way to waving grasses. Where the grasses grew through the sand there were pebbles, smooth and white. In the dream he picked one up, one by one, and dropped them into a bucket that never filled.

  Vikram lay awake a little longer. Sounds dulled by memory now crept back to taunt his hope of sleep. An itinerant banging from the floor above. The stamp of footsteps up and down stairs. Shouting. Always a dispute somewhere that could only be resolved when one throat grew too hoarse to continue or a raised fist brought an end. Beneath it, the ever present chatter of a city that had not known unconsciousness for a long time. Osiris articulated itself in waves of vocals, rising, falling, meandering through his subconscious like the disparate moods of the sea.

  He was woken by persistent hammering. Dozy with dreams, he stumbled to the door. A flashlight temporarily blinded him, then dispelled the darkness of the room. Behind the torch he made out the faces of Nils and Drake. Drake’s wayward hair was squashed beneath two woollen hats and a hood. She was grinning.

  “How d’you fancy collecting an iceberg?”

  Vikram stared at them both.

  “What time is it?”

  “Dunno. ’bout nineteen o’clock?”

  “Shit.” He’d slept right through the day. He rubbed his eyes, replaying Drake’s previous words. “Iceberg? You mean?”

  “I mean there’s a space on the boat if you want…”

  She wiggled the flashlight helpfully. Vikram located the water bucket. It was still a quarter full. He splashed his face, pulled his own coat out of the bedding and slung it over his shoulders. “I’m in.”

  Twenty minutes later, they were aboard a motor boat in pursuit of three industrial barges. Above them, the Moon moved in and out of its cloud cover. The sea was calm and dark. Vikram stayed by the rail with Nils, keeping out of the way of the crew. There were six of them including Drake, but no one else he recognized.

  “Can you hear it?” Nils whispered.

  Vikram listened. Beyond the engine motor, he heard a metallic susurration, like the sound of pooling chains. Ahead of them, high above sea level, a line of green lights stretched to left and right. He nudged Nils and pointed. It had been years since either man had passed the ring-net, but Vikram knew that Nils was thinking the same thing as him, that those were no lights: they were the glowing eyes of the dead.

  The net was invisible in the darkness, but the windows of one of its watchtowers shone. The fleet of barges approached. Heavy clanking told Vikram that a curtain of the ring-net was lifting. The barges slid past the watchtower, slipping under the gap in the net. The smaller western boat followed in the swell. As they passed beneath, Nils’s and Drake’s faces were bathed in the green glow from the capping beacons. Vikram held up his hands. His gloves were tipped with the same green. The chains clinked in a tug of wind. Then they were through, the other side of the boundary.

  Osiris waters lay behind them.

  Vikram felt suddenly hollow. Who knew what had really happened to all those boats that left the city and disappeared? If only they had left a trail, a length of string that could be followed, hand over hand, by those that might wish to go after. Vikram leaned forward, straining his eyes. The Moon had gone behind a cloud.

  The boats drove out for twenty minutes before they began to slow. Everyone on board fell silent. There was no noise except the sea, the humming motor, and a dull creaking.

  Ahead, the sea turned entirely white.

  “Is that…?” Vikram murmured.

  “Yeah,” said Drake. “That’s it.”

  The phosphorous island stretched away beyond the barges’ searchlights. The boats continued cautiously and came to rest at a point where the ice cut away smoothly, a sloping three metre cliff rising from the waves. Searchlights trained upon it. The air filled with the whirr of gears and engines.

  Two platforms extended horizontally from the first of the boats. They were crowded with men and machinery. When the platforms reached the ice field, the workers clambered onto it, unloading their equipment with practised efficiency. Against the ice they looked like busy black insects.

  Vikram watched in fascination as the process he had heard explained but never seen began. The crew dragged giant lasers into position. Through the night they would cut the ice sheet into many separate pieces, then tow them inside the ring-net. The freshwater bergs would relieve the load of the desal plants, which guzzled energy.

  The lasers began their work, with a noise like metal plates scraping together. A shout went up on Drake’s boat.

  “That’s it! That’s our bit!”

  Everyone on board ran to the rail. The boat keeled. The deck juddered underfoot as two small harpoons, trailing cables, fired across the water and embedded in the ice.

  “Who’s first?” yelled the skipper.

  Drake gave Vikram and Nils a harness and a head-torch each. “Go on,” she said. “I’ve done this before. Don’t let go unless you fancy a dunking.”

  They exchanged grins. Vikram fastened the strap of the head-torch and switched it on. A pale beam illuminated the rail and the cables. Another member of the crew showed him how to hook his harness onto the cable. Vikram climbed over the rail and pitched forward.

  A shove sent him swinging across the gulf. Air rushed at his face; he was flying. The head-torch picked out the wave trenches and the foam-flecked caps. His boots dipped the water. He brought his knees to his chest. The ice loomed. He stuck his feet out in front and landed with a crunch.

  Nils’s boots thudded down a second later. Vikram reached over and grabbed his friend’s hand. Holding onto the cables, they clambered up the remainder of the slope, and stopped.

  It was as though they had stepped onto the surface of the Moon. The ice was pitted and cracked, sheer blank slates giving way to hillocks and gaping craters. Fifty metres away, the laser beams were working their way across the sheet, a flicker of lightning marking their progress. The noise was phenomenal.

  Vikram stamped on the ice. It was rock hard. Beneath the groan of the severing pack, he heard water lapping against its edges. Land must sound like this.

  Others had joined them. Drake took a running leap and skidded eight metres before landing on her arse. Vikram whooped. They moved, at first cautiously, then throwing themselves around the ice. Their head-torches made peculiar shadows of the uneven surface and their own figures. They twisted to make even weirder, eldritch shapes. The ice glinted pale blue. The Moon came out from behind a cloud and turned it greenish yellow. It smelled raw and new, of the untouched and the untouchable. It had never held human imprints before.

  Nils shouted. He’d found a long, sheer slope. The three of them sat in a row at the top, Vikram in front, then Drake, then Nils. They yelled a countdown.

  “Three-two-one-go!”

  They flew down the slope, as one, then as three, as Drake lost her grip and Vikram shot on ahead. At the bottom they curled up, toppled on their backs, helpless with laughter. The sky above was a jigsaw of cloud and stars. They regained their breaths slowly.

  For as long as Vikram had known, since the beginnings of Osiris, the ice had come. Legend told of a land beneath it, a land free from storms and safe from flooding. It had a name, so rare, so precious, it was never spoken above a whisper. ’Tarctica. The southern land. It would cast off its frozen shell and one day, when all the ice had gone, the Citizens of Osiris would find a new home. So the legend went.

  The laser rays continued their work. At last, with an ear splitting crack, the segment claimed by Drake’s boat broke away. A fissure yawned, then it was a chasm, then a valley of ocean. Drak
e’s boat was already towing away the section of ice, heading back inside the ring-net and leaving the flotilla of barges to continue their dismantling work until dawn.

  The ice was moored between two towers on the outskirts of the western quarter and that night there was a carnival. Westerners came out in droves. People danced and performed theatrical charades. A band of acrobats tumbled, stood on their hands, and walked across a tightrope that had once been somebody’s clothesline and still had a pair of leggings pegged to it. Statues, crude and artistic, were sculpted out of the hillocks. Fry-boat kitchens chugged out of the city to set up shop around the edge of the ice. The vendors leaned out of their hatches, shouting their wares of squid or saufish in amicable rivalry. Other westerners arrived in tiny skiffs, hacking off blocks of ice with pickaxes and towing them back into the west.

  Nils produced a bottle of raqua and the three of them wandered about the ice, passing the bottle back and forth and admiring the spectacles. They settled at the edge of a crater where a crowd had gathered around a group of musicians. In the centre, a heater was wedged into a small pit. The smell of frying saufish and kelp dispersed through the foreign scent of the ice and skinny dogs came to lap at the meltwater.

  Through the remainder of the night and the daylight that followed, Vikram almost forgot about his private mission. Sometimes, whilst they were laughing at each other’s drunken antics, he felt the pang of a missing part, because Mikkeli should have been there to complete their quartet. And then Adelaide Mystik drifted back into view, her green eyes becoming the lights from the ring-net, the gaze of the dead.

  “Look out!”

  They had been on the ice for twenty-four hours when Vikram saw a man at the edge of the field hurl himself to one side. A moment later, a harpoon sunk a foot deep in the patch of ice where he had been standing. A second harpoon struck the ice five metres along, then another.

  Nils got unsteadily to his feet.

  “Fucking hell, it’s the fucking skadi.”

  They could see the boats crouched a little way from the ice field. Struck by panic, other revellers leapt to avoid the deadly spikes. Some fell into the water. Hands reached down to rescue them but some were pulled in after and washed away from the field, caught by invisible currents. In the darkness, Vikram heard their cries growing fainter and fainter.