by Nina Allan
“Nothing, necessarily,” Caine said. “It’s the secrecy that’s bad. If there’s nothing to hide, why not tell us the truth?”
“What’s the point of them, anyway?” I said. “What are we expected to do with these alien languages once we’ve translated them?”
I listened to the sound of my words, rising up through the August twilight like coloured balloons. Caine once told me that sound goes on forever, even when we can’t hear it any more. Every word that every person ever uttered is still out there somewhere, floating around in space, travelling onward forever. What if aliens really are out there somewhere, listening in to all our stupid conversations and wondering what in God’s name we’re on about?
“Language is power,” Caine said. “If you know what someone’s thinking, you’re already one step ahead of them.”
Two months later, at the end of September, Caine and Sarah were driven to Inverness, where they were put on a hopper flight to Thalia. I went off by myself, into the hills above the Croft, where I could cry without anyone knowing. When Maud asked me later where I’d been I tried to look blank.
“Just around,” I said, trying to make out it didn’t matter where I’d been, that it was just a day like any other. She looked at me strangely but left it at that, which was unusual for her – normally she’d go on and on until I was either forced to tell her or make something up. The one thing Maud hates most is feeling left out.
I know it’s hard for her, being Kay’s daughter and living at the Croft and being so close to us all but not really one of us. I would hate it, I think. I sometimes think that Maud was stronger than the lot of us put together.
Sarah promised she would write to me from Thalia but she never did. I never received a letter from her, anyway.
Kay said we shouldn’t feel hurt, that they’d be busy with work, and that we’d all be together again soon enough.
I wonder about that. Now more than ever.
Am I anxious about what I’ll discover?
Not really. Not yet.
~*~
When I told Dodie I didn’t remember my parents, that was the truth. It’s not the whole truth, though. I do remember some people who used to look after me, a woman especially. When I asked Kay about them she told me they were house-parents at the foster home where I was placed after my parents died. I came to live at the Croft when I was four. When I was six years old, Kay explained to me that my own mother and father were both killed in a massive tramway accident.
“There were fifty-six fatalities,” she said. Fifty-six, she repeated, as if knowing how many people died somehow acts as a proof that the crash really happened. I’ve searched many times for more information about the accident – in the library at Asterwych where there was free internet, in the microfiche files Peter Crumb hoards in his study – but I’ve never been able to find anything that matches up with what Kay told me.
When I finally confide my doubts to Maud she just shrugs and says my parents were probably politicals.
“Or perhaps they just sold you,” she adds. “Like with Sarah’s mother.” Her face goes slack and stolid, the way it always does when she knows someone is displeased with her.
She knows we never talk like that about Sarah. It’s almost a rule.
I change the subject because it’s easier than starting an argument. But I go on looking for information about the tramway crash and not finding it. And then, not long before her departure, Sarah tells me about my arrival at the Croft.
“You were so quiet,” she says. “You wouldn’t speak for ages, not to anyone. I remember you kept wetting the bed. Kay went mental.”
Sarah giggles at that, and so do I. This was all so long ago and I remember none of it. It might as well have happened to another person. Sarah’s mother runs a coffee shop in Asterwych. She set up the business with the money donated to her by the programme for giving up Sarah. Sarah used to go for supper with her, once a month. Sarah was an experiment, the only one of us who had an implant. Mostly we never thought about it. Caine was always trying to reassure her, telling her she’d have been the same as us anyway, which was something that felt true even if it wasn’t.
No one knows who Sarah’s father is, or was. I guess Sarah’s mother needed money very badly. Caine used to say you should never judge people for what they do, because most of the time they can’t help it. At least Sarah’s mother knows where Sarah is, and that she’s safe.
~*~
I do remember Limlasker, who was a smartdog, huge and white, with a black marking across his hindquarters, like a handprint.
Limlasker was taller than I was. He filled my world.
I used to hug his neck and listen to him thinking, his faraway, secret thoughts, like soft poems, like the special private words of a lost brother.
I never ask anyone about Limlasker, because when it comes to Lim I couldn’t bear to be lied to. I don’t want anyone to tell me he never existed.
~*~
At half-past six I make my way to the saloon. Dodie Taborow is already there, sitting at a corner table with Alec Maclane.
“Maree!” she calls. “Over here.” She raises a hand and waves, flashing her rings. Alec Maclane’s presence seems to have reinvigorated her. I notice also that she has changed for dinner. I wonder briefly if my own jeans and blouse are now out of place.
Alec Maclane regards me solemnly. His eyes are grey and rather beautiful. His formal way of dressing and general courtliness made me assume they were of an age, but now that I see him close to, I realise Maclane is quite a lot younger than Dodie, perhaps by as much as twenty years. This discovery disturbs me, though I would have thought Dodie more than able to take care of herself. Maclane has changed for dinner also – he’s dressed elegantly in a flamboyant paisley shirt and velvet trousers. He looks a little tired around the eyes, but certainly not ill. This so-called fatal disease of his is still a mystery.
“We’ve been talking about getting together a four for Quest,” Dodie says excitedly. “Alec is a county champion. Do you play cards at all, Maree? We’d love you to join us.”
“Was a county champion,” says Alec Maclane, gently correcting her. “That was ten years ago.” He looks down at his hands, which are plump and white and beautifully cared for. I am reminded of the hands of a conjuror we were taken to see once, in Asterwych, and for a moment the image of the conjuror seems to cancel out the image of Alec Maclane, to replace him somehow. It’s as if time has slipped backwards for an instant. It makes me feel dizzy.
In answer to Dodie’s question, I shake my head. “Only whist, and gin rummy,” I say. I do my best to smile. “I’m no good at those, either.”
Dodie looks disappointed for a second but soon brightens up again. “I’ve heard the Carola sisters play,” she says. “I shall have to look into it.”
I presume the Carola sisters must be the two elderly Thalian women. We eat supper, which is snapper baked in sea salt. I quickly become accustomed Maclane’s presence. He seems to exert a calming influence on everything around him. When the meal is over I excuse myself and go up on the passenger deck. I watch as the sky turns first to mauve and then to charcoal. The moon rises. I hear two crewmen talking quietly together on the deck above. I do not recognise their language – possibly it is Glasier. In a day’s time we will reach the Channel, the narrow strip of sea that separates Crimond from Farris. After a brief stopover at Charlemagne, Farris’s most westerly port, we will call at the Espinol port of Lilyat. After that we begin our journey across the Atlantic.
Between Lilyat and Thalia there is nothing but ocean. I lean upon the guard rail, looking down. When you stare at it for long enough, the ocean appears to become a unified body, greater even than itself, a massive single-celled organism with its own consciousness and will and desires. Perhaps it even has a language of its own, one of Caine’s alien language systems, something we might ascertain but not comprehend.
The ocean is never just one colour. It is like a gigantic refractive prism, c
ontaining all colours. Large seabirds – I think they are called kittiwakes – follow the churning water in the wake of the ship. Sometimes they dive right into it, remaining beneath the surface for many seconds.
Further along the deck I catch sight of the two women Dodie Taborow referred to as the Carola sisters. They stand together at the rail, gaunt and grey as ash trees, feeding the kittiwakes with bread crusts, presumably left over from their supper. The gulls are in a lunacy of excitement, shearing through the air towards them, tearing the chunks of bread from the sisters’ hands.
The women don’t seem afraid though. Rather they seem thrilled by what is happening, gasping and exclaiming to one another in the rolling, curvaceous accents of the Thalian language.
As before, they are dressed plainly, in identical grey jersey dresses that appear to exaggerate their thinness. I wonder if they are pleased to be returning to Thalia, and what it was that brought them to Crimond in the first place.
There are many Thalians living in Crimond now, and vice versa, but these women are old enough to remember a time when it was still difficult to obtain a visa for travel between our two once warring countries. There are still those who feel uneasy, both with those who used to be the enemy and with themselves.
Kay once told me her father still had to leave the room when anything about the war came on the TV. His own father had died in the bombardment of Lis, and he could never forget it.
“There was a boy at my school who was Thalian – his name was Ecco,” Kay said. “Dad didn’t like me to say hello to him, even. We had some terrible arguments about it.”
I wonder if it’s because of her father’s prejudice that Kay feels she needs to talk about the war so much and so often. I stand still, gazing at the Carola sisters who have run out of bread for the kittiwakes and who are now staring out to sea instead, their hands clasped in front of them, craning their necks forward as if scanning the waves for a sight of something marvellous, wonder or horror. I would love to step forward and greet them in their language, but I feel too shy. I whisper to myself instead, trying out the few words of Thalian I have so far mastered and trying to pluck up the courage to approach them.
Do people in Bonita still say ‘by the Goddess’ or is that one of those quaint anachronisms only an ignorant tourist would come out with? I realise how little I know about their country, and feel embarrassed and ashamed at once.
“They were both whirligig pilots, how cool is that?”
The voice comes from directly behind me. I turn around quickly, startled. The voice that has spoken is unknown to me, but I recognise the face at once, how could I not? In reality it is just half a face, the ruined features of the woman called Lin who Dodie Taborow tells me has been in a fire.
Her single eye is the colour of mercury, and has the slanting appearance that normally marks a Chinoit or Korati ancestry. Her jaw is long and strong. Her mouth, which is mostly undamaged, is full-lipped and wide. She gazes at me steadfastly, without blinking. It’s as if she’s inviting me to look at her, challenging me to do so, and once I am over my embarrassment I find I cannot stop staring. It is impossible not to be fascinated by something so outside the set parameters of what a human face is supposed to look like.
I find myself wanting to touch her skin, to explore her face with my fingers, to learn what it means.
“My rig came down and there was a fire. My ejector seat fucked up – because of the heat, probably. I fainted briefly, and this side of my face became melted to the windshield. They had to cut most of it off to remove the plastic. That’s the deal.”
She speaks the words quickly and fluently, like part of a speech she’s learned or a theatre audition. She raises her remaining eyebrow: did I do okay?”
“I didn’t –,” I stammer inconclusively. I can feel myself blushing.
“I know you didn’t. No one does – that’s what pisses me off.”
I like her forthrightness, her lack of apology. It’s as if her words are cards in a high stakes game. She stands firmly upright, not turning aside. I like that, too.
“Is your name Lin?” I say to her. It’s the only question I feel I can ask without looking a fool.
“Yes it is, Lin Hamada. Don’t tell me people are bitching about me already?”
I can feel myself wanting to laugh and in the end I can’t stop myself.
“Of course not. Someone happened to mention your name, that’s all.”
“The lady with the rings, I bet?”
“Yes. She said you’d been in a fire.”
“And she’s right. But that’s very old news now, therefore boring. Do you feel like getting a coffee? I can’t believe how good the coffee is on board this tub.”
“I’d like that a lot,” I say. It is very nearly dark now. I see that the Carola sisters have gone inside already, that I am standing alone on the deck with Lin Hamada. The kittiwakes have gone too, flown away into the darkness to who-knows-where. I hear the thump-thump-thump of the ship’s engines, the endless rapid churning of the sea beneath.
“Was it true what you said?” I ask Lin Hamada. “About the sisters being helicopter pilots?” I know that ‘whirligig’ means helicopter – it is the word they use on TV and in the newspapers. It is the kind of word – like ‘collateral’ and ‘incoming’ – that people use when they want to make it sound like they understand militia-talk, even when many of them have never laid eyes on a helicopter or even on an aeroplane or an ordinary hopper. These flying machines are like mythical beasts – everyone knows what they look like but few people have ever seen them in the wild.
What Lin has told me about the Carola sisters seems impossible. I am already longing for it to be true.
“They haven’t seen active service for a long time, but yes, they were both commissioned officers in the air corps. They gave a flying demo at my airbase once. They were pretty awesome.”
Every now and then you might see a hopper passing over Asterwych, flying so high it’s just a speck, a black dot in the side of a cloud, a distant murmur of engines. I know from books and from TV that airplanes, like roadcars, were once a common form of transport for ordinary people. Now they mostly mean big business, or war. I have never seen an aeroplane close to.
~*~
A smartdog is more intuitive than a human being. It takes its empathic abilities for granted, the same way we take it for granted that we can talk.
For a smartdog, there is no dividing line between thought and emotion. An emotion is a kind of thought, and a thought is just an inside picture of an emotion.
Most lay people think that smartdogs don’t know the difference between truth and lies, that for a smartdog the definition of truth is the word of its runner.
All of this is wrong. Nearly all smartdogs will know at once if their runner is lying to them. It is true that they don’t have an abstract understanding of these concepts in the way that people do – for a smartdog the truth is ‘as things are’ and a lie is ‘something else’ – but a smartdog will obey a runner who is lying not because it can’t tell the difference, but because it believes the runner must have a reason for lying.
A smartdog has no concept of death. It fears pain, incarceration, being attacked, separation from its runner. But there is no cipher for death itself within its lexicon, no image-word-emotion that can encompass it.
When a smartdog embarks on a mission it does not think about what has been strapped to it. It thinks about what its runner has asked it to do, which is to carry a certain burden from one place to another. It does not fear being blown up – it fears being unable to complete the mission and so displeasing its runner.
There have been many instances of runners refusing to comply with military objectives, refusing to lie to their dogs, refusing to send a dog on a mission that will ultimately result in its destruction.
Demonstrations of this kind of obstructive behaviour usually result in the runner being dismissed from the programme. In some cases, runners have had their implants forc
ibly removed.
So far there has been only one recorded case of a smartdog refusing a mission. The dog’s name was Pathfinder, her mission was to carry a short range thermonuclear device into an armaments facility on the outskirts of Condiaz. There were a thousand civilian employees working on site at the time.
Pathfinder did not have sufficient understanding of her situation to realise that the bomb she carried could be detonated anywhere and at any time. It became clear she believed that the weapon could only be triggered by her entering the armaments compound. She was within half a mile of her target when she veered off course and headed out into the desert. In spite of repeated interventions from her runner, she refused to return.
The mission’s controllers eventually gave up on her. They detonated the bomb in the desert and repeated the mission a week later with a different smartdog. The dog, Moonrise Kingdom, carried the device right into the compound where it was successfully detonated. It was not discovered until afterwards that the earlier attempt had triggered the spycams, and the compound staff and most of their equipment had been relocated.
Garland, who will be leaving the Croft next summer, once said something strange. He said we were in danger because as far as the scientists who ran the programme were concerned we were unreliable.
“If they could do what they do without us, then they would,” he said. “They would love it if they could replace us with machines.”
Perhaps that’s what they’re trying to do anyway – perhaps Caine was right. A couple of days after Garland said what he said I had a nightmare, about a computer trying to smartread a smartdog, and getting everything wrong.
~*~
Lin is lying on her back on her bunk, her long body stretched full length, her hands behind her head. She is lying so that the bad side of her face is turned into the pillow. I don’t know if this is the most comfortable position for her or if it is something she does automatically, without thinking. Her feet are bare. They are long-toed and hard-looking, like the roots of young trees.
