Bridging Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Half-brother.”

  Maata laughs, a rich, smoky sound.

  “Yes, he is objectionable, isn’t he?” Her eyes return to the smartpaper. “I wouldn’t have taken the job if I’d known.”

  Granny brings the towels and seems surprised to find Maata sitting on the bed.

  “Jeezum bread, I’d forgotten. Christian, dis is my lodger, Maata. She’s from New Zealand. You’ll have to sleep in the guest bedroom, sweet boy.”

  New Zealand.

  “You discovered the Irihana Wave.” Christian is stirred to admiration and, at last, a little fear. She could have killed millions of people. She could have, but she hadn’t. “You doubled the land size of New Zealand.”

  “Not that they’re grateful,” Maata mutters without looking up. Her hand touches her chin, seemingly without volition. “They needed it, though. All those Polynesians with their homes underwater and no place to go. A good doctor forces the medicine down whether the patient likes it or not.” Her pudgy fingers tap the smartpaper and her lips purse. “Walter’s complaining about pump fifteen parts being recycled instead of printed. Alignment isn’t perfect. I could kill that brother of yours.”

  “Half-brother.” Christian takes the towels from Granny, setting them down on top of the robotrolley, whose wheels grind a little; it needs recharging.

  “Viv used to come with me to de Freezers,” Granny says brightly. “We found dem on Scrub Island. So deep, and deliciously cold. Our parents never knew about dem. Much deeper dan dose sacred Arawak caves, Big Springs and The Fountain. Have you visited dem, Maata, young missy?”

  “They’re underwater, Granny,” Christian tells her. “Just like the Freezers. Just like pretty much all of Scrub Island.”

  “Your mudda loved Scrub Island, sweet boy.”

  Christian smiles.

  “That’s why you buried her there.”

  “Dat’s why,” she stabs a gnarled finger at his chest, “we buried her dere.”

  “Roy gave it to me,” Christian says. Maata looks up from the smartpaper.

  “He gave Scrub Island to you? As in, complete title, sea bed and stones, underwater and over?”

  Christian nods slowly.

  “I’ve got the deed right here. On permanent paper. He gave me the north-eastern power rig, too, the one at Windward Point Bay. I suppose when you get your lava flowing up to form a new island, Scrub Island will re-form above water, too?”

  “No,” Maata says flatly. “Scrub Island is on the far side of the rig. It gets nothing.”

  “Wouldn’t want my mother’s grave smothered in ash anyway,” Christian says too quickly, defensive of his naked naivety. The test to join the space mission hadn’t been an intelligence test, or a physical fitness test. It had purely been based on people’s ability to get along with others. Christian is forgiving. He doesn’t hold grudges.

  Perhaps he should.

  “The Windward Point rig output is below ten percent of optimal,” Maata follows up ruthlessly. “Roy hasn’t maintained it at all, except as a storm break. The Wave comes from the north-east, from six thousand kilometres across the North Atlantic. It’s coming slowly, but it’s coming, because of the Greenland ice sheet melting. You don’t redistribute 2.8 million cubic kilometres of ice without causing pressure changes in the mantle. I’m relying on Windward Point geothermal sensors to confirm the Wave’s rate of travel. Which is beyond foolish. But your half-brother refused to pay for new sensors.”

  There’s a knock at the door. Loud. The sound of footsteps running.

  Christian and Granny share a confused glance.

  Maata sighs deeply. She puts her palm to the smartpaper for a few seconds, waiting for it to switch off. Then she heaves her heavy body up off the bed, headed for the door.

  Christian and Granny stand aside for her. They follow her to the front door. Something about her grim determination demands it.

  On the top step, a scratched-up white hard hat balances on its crown. When Maata picks it up, Christian spots the black writing briefly before Maata tucks it under her arm.

  “What is it, young missy?” Granny inquires, covering her mouth as she coughs. “You left your hat at work?”

  “Yes, Granny.” Maata forces a smile. “I’ll pop it under the house with my dirty boots.”

  Christian carefully steers down the stairs. He searches the road for a retreating back but can’t see anyone. When they’re out of Granny’s earshot, Maata murmurs,

  “They think I can do something.” She grips the hat’s peak, white-knuckled. It has a Spanish-sounding woman’s name on it.

  “Can’t you?”

  She shakes her head. Ducks under the house. Picks up the central rib of a palm frond and snaps it over her knee.

  “Supply and demand,” she says angrily, driving the new stake into the sand beside the others. “Too many human lives in this world. They signed theirs away when they came to the island. Somebody back home will get something, I suppose.”

  She brushes the hat off. Sets it gingerly on the stake. Kneels, holds it in both hands and kisses it like a mother tucking a frightened child to sleep.

  “There are so many,” Christian says, deeply saddened, though he knows it’s nothing in the larger scheme of things. Maata’s broad shoulders shake. She turns her head to tell him,

  “Your half-brother!”

  Her cheeks glisten with hot, furious tears.

  Christian risks kneeling in the sandy soil with her. A memory flashes through him, of burying a pet budgerigar, a weightless bundle of blue. She allows him to lay an arm over her shoulders; through the short-sleeved overalls she feels fleshy and soft, so unlike the grim fellow skeletons in nanocloth he’d helped out of the landing module.

  He likes the feel of her. Doesn’t want to take his arm away even when she dries her eyes. There’s a new awareness between them when her wet gaze lands on his. Sweat on her top lip, caught in the fine hairs there. Dirt on her hands.

  BY LATE EVENING, the breeze has finally cooled.

  The sunset, which should have been framed by silhouettes of coconut palms and pleasure boat masts instead meets the naked gooseflesh of the sea. Two fluorescent amber dragons of cloud twine at the horizon. Granny leads the recharged robotrolley, with a tray of tea and reconstituted juice, onto the veranda.

  “Jeezum bread,” Granny gasps. She pauses to press one hand to her chest and cough her deep, ominous cough. “Christian, sweet boy, you ever seen such a high tide? De whole beach gone! Must have been a bad, bad hurricane just gone. What was its name, again?”

  Christian, exhausted by the day, bends gingerly to pour the tea, porcelain stained orange by the light.

  “I bet this view is always changing, Granny. How long have you lived here, again?”

  “Practically born here,” Granny says proudly. “My mudda was beside herself when we first came. A real city woman, you know. She thought dere would be more society. Why else were dere so many banks? And my fadda in charge of de biggest of all. But dose banks were for hiding rich men’s money. Not for de local people.”

  Christian lets her soothing voice wash over him. Maata joins him at the railing. The sea and sky pull their gazes as easily as the receding blue jewel of the Earth had pulled Christian’s gaze when he’d thought never to see it again.

  “A real gentleman, my fadda,” Granny continues. “Never raised his voice. Never laid a hand on us. When I was six months from starting school, my mudda was offered a job as a teacher’s aide. She took it because if she turned it down, Lord knew when somebody else would move away, or die.

  “My fadda told her: You don’t need to work. But if you insist on taking dat job, just know I will not be helping you in de house. You are a mudda and a wife first.

  “So my mudda went a bit crazy trying to prove she could do everything. Tried to hide it from us but she started drinking and smoking. Dese fifteen steps you see here? One time my fadda’s car pulled in as we were carrying de shopping. She left two bags at de bottom
of de steps for him. He did not even look at dem.”

  Granny hacks and hacks.

  “My throat a bit dry,” she says apologetically, taking a swallow of water. “Dis cold a nuisance. Anyway, my fadda won de best garden competition every year. He never touched dose roses. It was all my mudda’s work. I thought she would murder the neighbour boy when he cut one and gave it to me!” She laughs, and chokes, and laughs. “Viv – his real name was Walter, but he loved de cricket with such passion, we called him Viv – he wanted to marry me. But he wasn’t very handsome and his family was poor. My fadda would not allow it. Dey sold deir house so Viv could go to UTech in Jamaica. He bought it back for dem, ten years later, but I was married to your grandfather by den, sweet boy. With your mudda a babe in my arms, do you think I could still go with Viv to de Freezers?”

  Christian leans deeper against the rail so that Granny won’t see what’s in his eyes; a vision of molten rock running over this place; over the rosebushes and the fifteen steps. Over the church with the ocean at its door and the grave that Granny hasn’t filled, not yet.

  “Granny,” he says, “living here with you was the best time of my life.”

  “You’ll keep it in your heart when you go,” she says, “just like you did before, sweet boy. Be on your guard; stand firm in de faith; be men of courage; be strong. We will all see our brightest days again in de arms of our Lord.”

  Christian is distracted from the arms of the Lord by the nearness of Maata Irihana. He wants to lean left so that his shoulder presses against her.

  “You’re sleeping in my bed,” he says under his breath.

  “It’s my bed,” Maata whispers, leaning against him. “There’s room for two.”

  Christian doesn’t go to her bed that night or the next night, or even the night after that.

  But on the fourth night, he goes.

  The bed is smaller than he remembers. Sex is more complicated and cautious than he remembers. Maata positions him like a doll and lowers herself with calculated care, keeping most of her weight off his dangerously porous skeleton. In the dark, his fingertips feel faint scars on her chin. She tells him they’re from a tattoo removal and her insides tense deliciously when she hesitates on the brink of saying more.

  The giggling, the attempts to stay quiet, are the same.

  iii.

  MAATA TAKES CHRISTIAN to the bore with her.

  “I’ll fake a name tag for you,” she says. “There’s too much ill-feeling. Towards Roy.”

  Christian accepts the advice. In the early morning, surrounded by mountains of slag and continuous noise, they stand at the brink of a shaft no wider than Granny’s living room.

  The engine housing of the drill, a six-storey square on four stumpy steel legs, hovers over them. They put on heat-proof suits with in-built radios for communication and oxygen tanks to avoid fumes from the hole. Standing on a gleaming silver safety net, Christian can’t see down very far at all. The two-metre-diameter central pipe, sticking straight down from the housing like the inserted proboscis of a monster mosquito, is surrounded by a cog-shaped elevator whose scalloped edge permits the super-heated, vaporised rock to escape, uncaptured, into the atmosphere or to crystallise on the housing, forming stone daggers that a remote-controlled robot arm breaks off busily.

  “Come into the elevator,” Maata’s voice says in his helmet. It feels strange being suited up and yet still so heavy; he associates suits with the absence of gravity. The tech is older and he doesn’t trust it, but he goes along with Maata, as he’s always gone along with everyone, except for his father on the one momentous occasion when he chose leaving the planet forever over completing a business degree at Cambridge.

  Through the clear floor of the elevator, he glimpses the kilometres-long drop of the completed portion of the shaft. Oxygen being pumped into the cramped, space-module-like, ring-shaped space with opaque walls and transparent ceiling and floor makes a soft, reassuring hiss. Maata helps him peel off the uncomfortable suit.

  “The drill head is the world’s biggest plasma torch,” she says simply with neither arrogance nor modesty. “I designed it. Half the rock is turned to gas. The rest is broken into rubble and sucked up the shaft. There are pump stations at one kilometre intervals. Quartz sand, shipped in from Florida, is pumped down to form the heat-resistant ceramic coating on the inside of the bore.” She points. The coating gleams white in the artificial light; bulbs are set at ten metre intervals into hollows in the central pipe. “When the magma from the Wave rises up through the shaft, I can’t have it losing heat through the walls. The drill head continuously forms the casing as it goes. Walter’s the ceramic engineer in charge of overseeing that process. I’ve had a report from the electrician of some staining on the wall, close to the surface. We’ll take a look.”

  They don’t go far down into the bore before the elevator stops and Christian has to seal his suit. Maata opens a panel which is flush against the bore wall. Here, the white ceramic is rosy-streaked, or perhaps it’s just Christian’s filthy visor.

  “You must have drilled this part of the bore three months ago,” Christian says.

  “Yes. But the lights have only now been repaired. To save money, your brother –”

  “Half-brother.”

  “– stripped the initial lamps and cables from some local sportsground. Of course they eroded away almost instantly.” She peers closely at the coating, torch in hand.

  “Is it a different colour? More pink?”

  “Yes. It shouldn’t be.” She opens another compartment, this one facing the central shaft, and unfolds a piece of smartpaper. It comes to life under her stylus. “What you said is true. This was done very early in the project. Yet there’s no abnormality shown in the spectral analysis. Unless an abnormal result has been accidentally deleted. I’ll ask Walter to run the checks again.”

  Christian licks his lips.

  “What do you mean, an abnormal result deleted? Do you mean sabotage by someone?”

  “I mean,” Maata says hotly, “someone cares more about finishing the project quickly than investigating potential defects in the insulation!” She closes the panel and floods the elevator with breathable air again.

  “Take off your suit,” she commands, and Christian obeys.

  She flicks some switches and the cramped, donut-shaped elevator begins another juddering descent. Before Christian can ask her if further evidence of his half-brother’s disregard for human life was what she wanted him to see, her arms are around his neck and her lips searching for his.

  “Careful,” he rebukes her half-heartedly, words muffled against her mouth.

  “Did you do it in space?” she breathes.

  “No.” The scallop-shape of the cog’s edge conveniently supports his back. “Never met anyone I liked.”

  “Let’s have the deepest fuck in the world.”

  “Yes. Okay.”

  Manoeuvring in the cramped space distracts him for a while. As the pleasure fades, though, he looks up through the clear elevator ceiling, sees on the display that he is eleven thousand metres underground and feels abruptly breathless.

  “Get off me,” he manages.

  “I’m not on you,” Maata says, eyes wide.

  “Get off!”

  She’s as far from him as the elevator will allow. He still feels crushed. Like he’ll never see the sky again. Ten thousand metres. He’s as far from the surface, in the wrong direction, as passenger jets are when they cruise above the clouds. Like a bacterium in a human hair follicle, enclosed by poison gases and unclimbable walls, and heavy.

  So unbearably heavy. Christian gasps for air.

  Then the elevator stops. They are fifteen thousand metres down. Maata is putting his suit on, because someone is entering the elevator, and then she’s taking it off again, gently, because the interior is flushed with air and the new arrival is guardedly answering her questions.

  “De discoloration is due to de drill head hitting a ferrous pocket of de limestone
.” The man is black, desiccated and ancient. He’s clean-shaven. Missing some teeth. Beneath his suit, he wears a grimy white singlet. A stained yellow do-rag covers his lumpy skull. “Some of de iron was incorporated into de insulation but it won’t affect de integrity, I promise you.”

  It’s Walter, Granny’s once-sweetheart. Christian can’t imagine him ever doing something as romantic as stealing roses. They’re half way through the earth’s crust and he’s wearing sunglasses.

  “I don’t want promises,” Maata says sharply. “I want test results.”

  Not sunglasses. They’re bionic eyes. The lumps under the do-rag must be the receivers. Eyes come with clever processors these days; Viv won’t have to do any measuring or testing with his hands; he’ll only look.

  Christian takes a deep breath. He feels calm again.

  “I know who you are,” Walter tells him, and Christian can’t know if it’s facial recognition software or just a resemblance to Granny that’s given him away.

  “You can’t tell anyone, Walter,” Maata says.

  “We trusted Roy because of his fadda,” Walter says accusingly. “De Lord took Godwin too soon, before he taught dat boy right from wrong. Sign dis, your brother says, and you’ll be cosy in England til de island is stable and it’s time to return. Only, dere’s no return for de likes of us. Permanent climate change refugee visas, dat’s what he’s pissing on de crowd like punch at carnival. And our lands, underwater and out of water, transferred to de corporation.”

  “He didn’t know,” Maata says urgently.

  “I’ve got nothing else to say.” Walter shrugs. “Give my regards to your grandmudda, boy.”

  “You should visit her,” Christian says. “She remembers you.”

  BUT WALTER DOESN’T come out of the bore when his shift finishes that afternoon.

  A heavy pounding and the sound of running feet signifies the delivery of his empty helmet to the front veranda of Granny’s house.

  THERE IS A service for Viv at the church.