The Race

by Nina Allan

  Whenever I see Dodie now I think of those women, of those falling-apart sewing patterns in their faded envelopes, and I feel afraid for her. She’s obsessed with Maclane, I can feel it. I think of Maclane’s crisp linen shirts, the soft mound of his belly, the gold cufflinks – clink, clink – on the bedside table.

  Can Dodie and Maclane really be lovers, or are they just friends?

  I keep thinking something bad is going to happen. There’s nothing I can do to stop it though, even if I’m right. It’s none of my business.

  Dodie’s card parties in the saloon are now our main entertainment. In spite of what he said about being out of practice, Maclane turns out to have lost none of his talent. The game turns him from a considerate and courteous gentilhomme into a scheming Quest-demon. The Carola sisters, who play regularly at his table, are clearly enchanted with him. Dodie pleads with me to join their circle and although I am tempted because the game looks such fun I have to keep refusing. I know I am nowhere near good enough, and I don’t want to put in the hours of study and practice it would take to be able to play against Maclane and the others. I watch the games sometimes though – I find them thrilling. There is another man who plays very well, Dagon Krefeld. Dodie says he is a professor of mathematics, travelling to Bonita to take up a post at the university there. His skin is dry and wrinkled as a prune’s, but he has the gimlet eyes and wicked laugh of a TV vizier.

  His main aim in life at the moment seems to be beating Alec Maclane at Quest. He hasn’t managed it yet, though he is getting closer. I think Krefeld is sleeping with one of the saloon staff, a young and handsome able seaman named Vicente.

  Not all of the passengers have succumbed to the Quest craze, and for some the tedium of the voyage has found other outlets. A married couple, Pierpoint and Mol Gillespie, are now sleeping in separate cabins. I don’t know what’s happened between them, only that Pierpoint will now be leaving the ship at Brock. Mol is sailing on to Bonita as originally planned.

  For the first three nights or so after leaving Lilyat’s waters people gather on the passenger deck after supper, to applaud as the search beams are switched on and to take part in what they call whale-watching parties. Whether these are meant as entertainment or surveillance I am not sure. No whales are spotted and the parties soon lose their novelty. Little by little the anxiety that marked the Aurelia Claydon’s passage into open ocean begins to disperse.

  Even the idea of the whales is losing its fascination. It’s much more fun to join in the gossip surrounding Dodie’s card parties.

  ~*~

  I am spending a lot of my time in studying Thalian. Nestor Felipe has lent me a grammar book, and I am using it to try and make sense of A Thalian Odyssey. To begin with I go right through the text, checking each word in the original against the Crimondn translation on the opposite page. When I feel ready I cover up the translation and look only at the original. It’s difficult at first, but the longer I persevere the easier it becomes, first to remember individual words and phrases, then to understand whole sentences. I have even begun to write out my own translations of my favourite passages, just for practice. At this stage I understand only about half of what I read, but every now and then I come across a line that stops me dead, that crushes the breath from my chest as if I’ve been punched. It’s at these moments that I know I’m improving, that I am understanding the poem as it is meant to be read.

  When Nestor Felipe gives me the grammar book I thank him in Thalian. These are the first words of the language I have spoken aloud to anyone, except myself. The syllables feel bulky in my mouth, and I am afraid I’ve garbled them, but when Nestor Felipe nods and smiles I know that these few simple sounds at least have been uttered correctly.

  When you take the trouble to learn another language, you are giving yourself the chance to see the miracle of communication in close up. For me, a Crimondn speaker since birth, a book is a book. That dumpy, single syllable is not just a word, it is in some sense the object itself, a sound-picture, the same as it would be for the smartdogs. For Saffron Valparaiso a book is a livra. We can grasp each other’s meaning, but we can never erase or replace one another’s sound-pictures. For me, livra can never be book, it can only mean book. It can only ever be a cipher, not the actual thing.

  I once told Maud about a secret fear I had, that working with the smartdogs might eventually make me become unhooked from language, that words would not be words any more, they would just be sounds.

  “Try it,” I say to her. I print the word ‘squirrel’ on a piece of paper in heavy black capitals, then tell her to speak the word aloud and keep saying it, to repeat the word fifty times, a hundred, without stopping. “At the end you won’t know what it means,” I say. “It’ll just be a sound. Even the letters on that piece of paper will stop making sense.”

  Maud does what I say, repeating the word squirrel over and over again until she collapses on the bed. She’s laughing so hard she’s clutching her stomach. Her eyes are streaming with tears.

  “What is it?” she says. “What the hell is a fucking squirrel?” Just speaking the word aloud sets her off again. She finds the whole thing hilarious, and I can understand why, but I still think it’s terrifying.

  A smartdog needs no words. It can live without words quite easily. Words do not help it to run and hunt, to love and mate and feed and find shelter. They do not further clarify the cool of the rain on its back on a warm spring day. It’s not words that make a smartdog feel it could run forever.

  Smartdogs sense the coming on of dawn or dusk hours before we can.

  Words are for those who build cities, who build whirligigs and smartweapons and flame throwers.

  Words are for writing journals and counting the days, for understanding the purple-shaded, time-driven rhythms of A Thalian Odyssey.

  Words are what humans are, even more than flesh.

  If Nestor Felipe is not a good man, he hides it well, which is something I am not used to in ordinary people. Could Nestor Felipe be like Caine or like Sarah, like Margery Kim who Caine said was like a sister to him but who left for Thalia before I could get to know her?

  Could he be like me? I don’t think so, but if Felipe is a spy he has a funny way of going about it.

  His tea-coloured eyes seem full of thoughtful amusement, at the world or at himself, I don’t know which. His horn-rimmed glasses and slight pot belly make me think of Detective Selkirk, in Iris Mottram’s Selkirk books. Which makes him more or less the opposite of Peter Crumb.

  ~*~

  I spend time with Lin Hamada every day.

  We eat our meals together in the saloon. Afterwards we will sometimes go up to the passenger deck for an hour or so, to look at the sea and exchange news, such that it is, of the things we’ve seen or done during the day. With all the days being the same it is surprising how much we find to talk about. Every so often we spend the whole day together. It’s not something we plan – it’s more like we forget to move apart.

  “Lin seems like a nice girl,” Dodie says to me. I don’t see so much of Dodie now – she’s either with Alec Maclane or playing cards – but when I do she is the same as ever. She is a gossip, I know that, but not of the kind who enjoys hurting people. What Dodie enjoys is information, for its own sake, the possession of secrets.

  When she says to me that Lin seems nice, I know that what she wants is for me to give up some piece of information about Lin in return, some piece of private knowledge. Most of all she wants to know exactly what it was that happened to Lin’s face.

  She still thinks that Lin’s face is the most important thing about her. If I were to deny that, she would find it astounding.

  “She is, very nice,” I say. “I like her a lot.”

  She nods, conceding defeat. “I’m glad you’ve found a friend, Maree. It’s not good for you to be with old people all the time.” Perhaps she’s bored with the subject already. Most likely she simply accepts that as Lin’s friend I’m reluctant to gossip about her. Either
way she doesn’t press me any further.

  A little later I see her walking arm in arm along the deck with Alec Maclane.

  ~*~

  When I was fourteen I thought I was in love with Maud. By the time I reached the age of sixteen I was beginning to realise that I was just passing the time with her, that in spite of all the sex we were having we were more like sisters than lovers. That our closeness was to do with chance, with our constant and inescapable physical nearness to one another. There was no deeper connection, not really.

  I could never let Maud learn this, or guess that the only thing that kept me from breaking up with her was knowing that I would be leaving soon in any case, that we were destined to be parted anyway.

  Leaving her was still awful, though. Those emotions were real.

  I have not written her a single word since we set out from Faslane.

  My love for Caine was something different, an infatuation that could never have lasted, I see that now. We’re worlds apart – he is as distant from me as I was from Maud.

  The question now is: am I falling in love with Lin Hamada?

  It’s a question I don’t want an answer to. Loving Lin can bring only pain, and I want the time that remains to us to pass without any feeling other than the contentment that comes from being in one another’s company. It should be enough just to be near her, day by day, to let the future feel as distant as the shores of Thalia.

  “Are you really going to do it?” Lin says to me. “Do you really mean to sign your life over to these people, no questions asked? You don’t even know who they are.”

  She means the people who run the compound in Kontessa, who are in charge of the programme. It’s true that I don’t know, that I have put my trust in them only because Kay and Peter Crumb have trained me to do so. But then Kay also encouraged me to put my trust in her story about the tramway crash that killed my parents, and so far as I’ve been able to discover that never happened. I tell Lin I don’t know what I am going to do, that I need time to decide, words that sound reasonable enough when I say them but that afterwards – when I’m alone in my cabin – seem shaky and unreal, even cowardly. I cannot imagine not going to Kontessa, because I cannot imagine what will happen to me if I don’t. Perhaps I am afraid to. The word freedom sounds exciting when you say it, but it has implications. When I tell Lin what Kay said about the tramway crash she doesn’t say much of anything. But three days later she tells me she’s been looking online and she can’t find any record of it, either.

  “There’s a satellite connection in the radio room,” she explains. “Juuli let me use it. I didn’t tell her why I needed to and she didn’t ask.”

  For a moment I can’t think who she’s talking about, then I realise she means Juuli Moyse, the woman with the short grey hair who works in the engine room.

  “I’m not trying to be nosy or anything,” Lin says. “I’m worried about you, that’s all. I don’t like what’s going on.”

  “I don’t think you’re being nosy,” I say, and I don’t, although to be honest I don’t feel comfortable with what she’s doing. She is trying to nurture my own small seedlings of doubt, trying to give me the idea that if I’ve been lied to about one thing there’s a good chance I’ve been lied to about everything else.

  That what I’ve been told is not the truth about myself, but a convenient story for the benefit of others.

  Lin is trying to help me prove that I don’t exist.

  ~*~

  There was no internet at the Croft, because Peter Crumb forbade it. I don’t know if he knew you could go online for free at Asterwych library. Maud liked to sneak off there and surf the net sometimes, though I think it was more to prove that she could than because she wanted to.

  “It’s boring, isn’t it, staring into a screen all day?” She said that after a while everything she read online began to sound invented, even the most ordinary facts started to take on the appearance of elaborate fantasies. Peter Crumb always said that the main reason he wouldn’t allow an online connection at the Croft was because the internet had stopped being independent decades ago, during the war with Thalia. The restrictions were meant to have been lifted once the war was over, but according to Peter Crumb many of them were still secretly in place.

  He said the internet had become a vehicle for propaganda.

  Caine thought he was probably right. Wolfe said that Peter Crumb was bullshitting us.

  “He just wants to control what we know,” he said. “That’s all it is.”

  I don’t know what to think, especially now. Everything I know about politicos is dismal and tiring.

  If I refuse to comply with the programme, or ask questions about it, there is a chance that the protection I have always taken for granted will be withdrawn.

  I have no idea how I might begin to live without it.

  I know so little about the world, only that it is dangerous.

  The word for freedom in Thalian is liberta.

  ~*~

  Alec Maclane is gone, and our ship is saved. How much these two things are connected we may never know.

  Not everyone watched. The Gillespies stayed below decks, and in the seconds before the whale dived I saw Nestor Felipe turn away and hide his face in both hands. Dodie lay crumpled against the deck like a broken doll. The Carola sisters were bending down to help her up. Their long grey dresses, drenched with seawater, clung about their legs like sodden newspaper.

  The rest of us saw everything. I saw it all. Also I saw Lin Hamada, leaning against the guard rail and gazing down into the churning water like she was watching a movie.

  Terror makes insects of us all, because it reminds us we can be nothing in less than a second.

  ~*~

  There is no warning, no premonition of any kind. At this point in our voyage, we are six weeks out from Faslane and more than halfway across the Atlantic. The crossing has been much calmer than I expected. It is still rare for us to sight another ship, but the ocean is not entirely without traffic and we do sometimes see freight steamers like the Aurelia Claydon, and fishing factories, and on one occasion we pass close by an enormous grey vessel with an extended rear deck that Lin tells me is an aircraft carrier operated by the Thalian navy. The sight of the vast ship unnerves me, but it soon sails past. It flags up neutral codes, but other than that it’s as if the carrier hasn’t even noticed we are there.

  There is no sign whatsoever of any whales.

  I think of the file of statistics we made, Sarah and Maud and I, the macabre reports of sinkings and fatal collisions that we clipped from the newspapers. From what I can remember, most of the attacks happened in the eastern part of the Atlantic, on the routes processing out from Barane and Jonestown harbour. There have been sinkings to the west of Lilyat, just as there have been sinkings everywhere else in the Atlantic, just not as many.

  There is a feeling, among the crew I think as well as the foot passengers, that we are out of the danger zone.

  I am not saying that the search beams are not switched on every evening at seven-thirty as usual. Just that none of us are really expecting anything to happen.

  When the siren finally sounds, there is a sense at first that this cannot be real, that it’s some kind of drill. It is around nine o’clock, and not fully dark yet. Most of us are in the saloon, dawdling over coffee or playing cards. For thirty seconds no one moves – there is just the heavy drone of the siren: parp-parp-PARP.

  Then we hear the sound of running footsteps outside in the companionway.

  “Oh my God,” says Mol Gillespie. She is sitting on the couch in the corner, doing a crossword out of one of her puzzle books. “It’s a convoy. It’s really happening.”

  Her words seem to break the spell. Everyone stops what they are doing and makes a run for the door.

  ~*~

  The fore and aft search beams light up the water for a mile around. The name of the crew member on watch is Marianne Roach, a deck steward on her first tour of duty.

&nbs
p; Her reason for sounding the siren is obvious. It’s as if the passage of the Aurelia Claydon has suddenly become obstructed by a range of hills.

  It is impossible to say how many whales there are in total. There have been convoys recorded that stretch for hundreds of miles. In a convoy of that size there might be three-dozen whales, perhaps more. From where we’re standing on the passenger deck we can see three long, slipper-shaped mounds of blackness, thrusting up through the surface of the water like small dark islands. We have no idea what might be happening on the other side of the ship, but Lin is able to tell me afterwards that Juuli Moyse said we were surrounded on all sides.

  “She spotted four to starboard, definitely,” Lin says. “And it looked like three following. She saw them through the drive room periscope.”

  There is no sign, as yet, of the baer-whale. We stand together at the rail, staring out at the water and waiting to see what action will be taken. Some captains choose to kill their engines and angle up their search beams, to let their ships hang silently in the water. Their hope is that the whales will ignore them and glide harmlessly past. Once the convoy is ahead of them they alter their course slightly, allowing the route of the ship and route of the whales to safely diverge.

  Others will open the engines full throttle and try to get ahead of the baer-whale. Of the number of ships sunk each year by whale convoys, the number that hold their position and the number that run are roughly equal.

  The captain of the Aurelia Claydon opts to hold. There is a sound like a muffled cough and then the engines fall silent. It is only then that I realise how much I’ve come to take the sound they make for granted, the constant hum beneath my feet, the sensation of movement. Its sudden absence is unnerving. It’s as if the ship has stopped breathing.