Cataveiro

by E. J. Swift

  There is a pause, and Ivra says, ‘If it’s real, you know the Republic is going to be calling you back.’

  ‘I wish they would, but I think you’re hopeful. My punishment isn’t over yet.’

  ‘I mean they’ll call you back to your work.’

  ‘I won’t go,’ says Taeo, but uneasily. He has felt the weight of Antarctican law and it is not a light one. ‘Not on their terms.’

  ‘You say that now. They told me you were working on something. A new fuel. Could be revolutionary, they said. How are you going to feel when the Boreal States send their submarines south?’

  Taeo is angered by this. ‘The submarines aren’t ready. They won’t be for years. And they’ve got my damn research.’

  ‘You can’t trust intelligence,’ says Ivra. ‘Nobody really knows what the northerners are up to. All we know is that they want our continent, and when the time comes they’ll be happy to destroy anything that stands between them and it. This place –’ he waves a hand back towards the coast ‘– this place won’t even register.’

  Taeo cuts off the retort that springs to his lips, reminding himself just in time that Ivra has lived here for ten years now. He has clearly formed an attachment for the country, despite its endless inconveniences and hostile people.

  ‘Anyway,’ he says. ‘It’s all speculation until we find out more.’

  Ivra grunts assent.

  An idea is forming in Taeo’s head.

  He’ll send his own holoma to the north.

  At the Facility gate, the young soldier on duty shines a light directly in Taeo’s face before checking his papers. The kid’s cheeks are pitted with smallpox scars.

  ‘You’re clear,’ says the kid.

  ‘We’ll catch up tomorrow,’ says Ivra. He heads back down the hill. He has lodgings in the town.

  Taeo watches him go, peering through the rain. An Antarctican settlement would have guiding night lights, but in this place you feel your way through the darkness, the way you feel your way through conversations. For a moment he imagines he sees the lights of a ship, outlined like a constellation of stars. A big ship, an Antarctican ship. The lights are mesmerizing. Taeo wants to run down there, throw himself off the sea walls and swim until he reaches the hull. He imagines hands reaching down to pull him out of the water. His rescue, his redemption. He can actually feel the warm fingers wrapped around his own.

  There is no ship. There are no lights – only his own yearning.

  Room 5.27. No name on the door. He is nameless now. He sheds his sodden clothes and dries off, shivering. He craves hot water but you can only get it in a narrow time window in the morning. At first he had tried to make his spartan room more homely. It is not the austerity he minds so much as the lack of personality about the space. But his efforts, the things he brought with him, seem a parody of themselves. Like the Antarctican lamp which is not compatible with the backward Patagonian wiring – it sits on the table, useless to everyone.

  Out of habit rather than any expectation, he checks the room’s energy gauge and is surprised to see the needle has wavered the tiniest fraction over zero. He drags his chest to the middle of the room and unlocks it, carefully retrieving three holomas. The first one, which is completely dead, he puts on charge. The second two have not been used. He places one on the lid of the chest. Each holoma is a smooth black elliptic device, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand.

  Taeo thinks about what he wants to say. His mind is racing and it is difficult to separate the strands: what he should say, what he shouldn’t say, what he must say. This is his opportunity. He needs to sound professional. In control.

  Not so long ago, those things were easy. He could walk into a room and people would fall quiet, waiting to hear what he had to say.

  He puts his palm to the holoma and feels it warm in response.

  ‘Begin recording.’

  His first message is for the Republic. He tells them what he has overheard. He tells them he will investigate the shipwreck, and that if there are survivors, he will secure them until he receives further instructions. He stresses that there were a number of Patagonians present when the news was announced. If it really is an Osirian boat, it will be almost impossible to contain the news, and even if it is not, he reminds them, the mere suggestion that Osiris might still be out there will cause a stir in the Boreal States. He does not mention Ivra, who will doubtless record his own holoma. He says he will report back with the outcomes of his investigation.

  This holoma he will place at the agreed drop-point at the harbour, from where someone Taeo has never seen will collect the message and ensure that it makes its way back to the homeland.

  Now for the agents north of the belt. He needs to circumvent the tediously slow web of drops and pickups and codes, and get a message straight to the Panama Exchange Point.

  Holomas work like magnets. When in proximity, both devices will activate, and the holoma bearer will know another holoma is nearby. So all he needs to do is to find a fast carrier.

  He notices the power gauge is flickering; the charging holoma has squeezed out the last drop of energy. He puts the other two aside and turns off the overhead light. When he presses his palm to this one, a cluster of white lights glow on its surface. He taps each, watches their images materialize one by one, though he knows each word by heart, has watched them over and over. It is a month since the holoma arrived.

  There are several holum from Shri, one each from Kadi and Sasha, and a minute of Nisha making incomprehensible noises. Shri’s eyes look directly at him and she keeps smiling but he can tell the smile is forced, uncomfortable. The children are doing as well as can be expected in the new school, she says. Sasha has started his Siberian and Swahili classes and there has been a lot of playing spy (Shri’s eyebrow lifts pointedly). Where has that come from, does Taeo suppose? He imagines a note of accusation in her voice, but perhaps she is trying to play down the situation, or perhaps she means nothing by it at all. The image of her is at once clear and fuzzy, present and not. He wants to reach out and touch her hair, her face, but she is nothing but a manipulation of light rays.

  He remembers her face at First Light. Carnival night in Vosti Settlement, which everyone admits throws the greatest celebration of the holiday. People come from settlements all around the peninsula for Vosti’s carnival, riding the hover-rail or the snow-mobile through the winter dark, putting the final touches to their headdresses while they sip from flasks of piping-hot sake.

  Shri shouldn’t have been there, as he found out later. She had promised to attend a family engagement, but she had wanted to see the Vosti carnival with her friend (whose name Taeo has forgotten – she and Shri lost touch – and yet he always recalls her with a kind of abstract fondness, thinking of the two women travelling together in the pod of the hover-train). Shri had been persuasive – she has always been very persuasive. Taeo has often imagined the conversation that brought her to Vosti, the ruses she would have used.

  Tell me about the carnival, Shri would have said, fixing the friend with her most captivating gaze.

  And the friend would have said: Shri, by ice, how can I describe this to you? There’s the costumes for a start. She would have told Shri about the faces masked and bejewelled, and the dancers who flung the nine flags of the Republic like matadors. She would have described the pageant: the crossing of the Southern Ocean, the great swathes of material, all blue, to represent the water, and a woman dressed entirely white, for Antarctica. And after the pageant, which finishes in the minutes that the sky begins to lighten, all the street lights go out. You stand in the dark, hearing the breathing, the low, excited murmurs of those around you, watching the sky, waiting.

  And then the edge of the sun stirs above the horizon.

  For a few moments, the entire settlement stands united in awe, in a kind of disbelief. The sun has returned, it has not abandoned us. There will be an end to the winter after all.

  The drums begin. Joyous rollicking beats, samba
invigorating the street, and everyone begins to dance.

  Taeo danced in those days. It didn’t matter that he was no good at it. The streets were so densely packed that you couldn’t help but be carried along, and in those earliest minutes of nascent orange light you felt a weight fall from you which made your feet free, and your heart full. The sake turned your head giddy; everywhere you looked people were turning to one another and hugging and crying a little.

  Happy First Light! Happy First Light!

  In the crush Taeo found himself hugging Shri. Her arms wrapped around his shoulders, her body pressed close to his. On her breath were traces of sake and spices. She stood back and looked at him, beaming. Her mask was pushed up from her face, as his was, and strands of her hair had got caught in it, and her face was revealed, intricate swirls of gold and silver painted on clear brown skin. She said in Portuguese, ‘I love your carnival!’

  Taeo felt, at that moment, a sense of pride and belonging as strong as any he had ever experienced. His carnival – yes, it was his carnival, his people, his settlement. And this beautiful woman said she loved it, not in patois but in his language of the home.

  The sun was lifting higher, tendrils of light winding into the sky, an explosion of colour after the dark. He could not help but think that something magnificent was beginning.

  Say something. He had to say something.

  ‘Don’t you celebrate First Light?’

  Such a stupid thing to say! Of course she celebrated First Light.

  But she said, ‘Yes. But not like this. This – this is magical.’

  Then someone grabbed her hand and she was being pulled into a moving procession of dancers. He knew a moment of vertigo, that she might disappear before his eyes, but she reached out her own hand – come on! – pulling him right along with her. He abandoned the friends he was with without a thought, and followed her. He would have followed her anywhere.

  It was simple, and it was not simple. It was simple because, for reasons Taeo never understood, Shri had decided right there in the street that they should be together. They would be together. Why? Because she knew it was meant to be. It was simple like a fairy tale, like the sun-journey stories told to children in midwinter, stories they have told to Kadi and Sasha and now to Nisha:

  The sun has gone to gather sunbeams from the stars, because every year, the sun gives out a million sunbeams to Antarctica, and now it must go and find more. It takes a long time before the sun can come back, and give us light again.

  If their tale was told, it would be told like this:

  Taeo and Shri met in the carnival on First Light, and they fell in love, and that is how it was and is and will be.

  But it was not simple. She was Indian-Antarctican, he was Brazilian-Antarctican, and despite being free to do as they liked, still the communities were tight. They teased one another. Call yourself a Brazilian? You’ve got the worst sense of rhythm I’ve ever seen. When they went dancing, Taeo moved gracelessly and Shri laughed at him and told him she loved him. She came to live with him in Vosti.

  Like all Antarcticans they were good with languages. They spoke partly in patois, more and more in Portuguese. When Shri was intent upon some task which required exacting concentration, she would mutter to herself in her own language of the home. He picked up words and phrases of Hindi, liking the way the new sounds moved in his throat, hoping that one day this learning might become a mediating force, a peace gesture in the thing they never spoke of. Neither of them cared for traditions, the past; they were interested in the future.

  Shri claimed she didn’t miss her home. Friends came to visit, but since moving to Vosti she had not been back. Perhaps it was the shunning of the family engagement on First Light. Perhaps it was something larger; she rarely mentioned her family, and when she did an ominous mood would settle upon her, and so upon Taeo, filling him with an unease that threatened the tranquillity of their home. Only once did they take the hover-rail to Tolstyi Settlement, a journey five hours long and expensive too. The door to Shri’s family house remained shut, even when Shri shouted and banged on the door and was angry in ways he had not seen until that moment. Shri did not cry. Her face took on the taut, determined expression which would become her only expression after the transmission and would always fill him with grief. She said nothing on the journey back, not one word, until they were at home and he had cooked supper and she sat at the table watching him but not watching him, her eyes elsewhere. When he put the plate in front of her and said, ‘You must eat something,’ she said, ‘It’s not Tolstyi, you know. There’s nothing wrong with Tolstyi.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I like Tolstyi.’

  ‘It’s just them.’

  Two weeks later they discovered she was pregnant. They had not planned to have a child so soon. Shri went to Central Market and paid too much money for a mobile to hang over the crib which was made of some newly mined Antarctican alloy. Taeo recognized the metal; he had tested it in the lab and could have told her each of its properties. When the sun fell on it, the mobile held all the colours of the southern lights. Shri said it would be as if the baby had her own piece of sky, an Australis all her own to guard and watch over her. If there was a word for that property in any of their languages, he did not know it. She touched her stomach and said: I want to call her Kadi, and he put his arms around her still-slender waist and said: Yes.

  The power is almost gone. Taeo replays Shri’s last message. He lies on the uncomfortable bed, watching the flickering image of his partner, paused, her lips just parted on the brink of a word, a strand of hair falling across her face that in two seconds’ time she will brush away. And in five seconds’ time she will shake her head, because the hair has fallen back again. She glows, translucent. Present and not. She flickers. The holoma dims.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he says. Then the last bit of electricity squeezes from the cell. Shri goes out. She is gone.

  There is no noise but the wind and the rain. He wants opium badly. He knows he shouldn’t but he takes it out and lights the potent resin bead, watching it bubble under the flame. He smears it carefully around the hole of the pipe. Brings it to the flame. A pull, then another. Inhale. Exhale. There – there it is. This is what he needs. This is all. The darkness moves, shapes emerging out of it and melting back, as if he lies in a living pool of wax. And the world is warm, and the hurt is less.

  Something is happening. Something big. This is my chance to get home.

  It is then that he thinks of the pilot.

  5 ¦

  THE TIMER READS one hundred and eighty seconds. She clicks it over. There is a second’s pause, a gurgle in the pipe and the water sluices her in hot rivers. The timer ticks down.

  In one hundred and eighty seconds you can achieve a surprising number of things. You can stitch a wound, if you are skilled, and your hand is steady. You can cast a tale, or sing a song. Ramona prefers to listen, though she has learned to tell her own. A good enough yarn can earn you water in a desert zone, or shelter on high ground to escape the floods.

  She places her head directly under the shower head. Each individual jet of water sears her scalp before exploding through her hair, hitting her shoulders, her breasts, cascading over her belly and thighs. Hot water, revered water.

  The timer ticks down the seconds. One hundred and fifty. She lathers soap between her palms and smoothes it luxuriously into her hair. Dirt and grease stream away into the pipe system. The pollutants will be stripped from the water and the water will be used again.

  One hundred and twenty. Two minutes. In two minutes, you can bring an aeroplane to a careful landing, or lift off from the ocean.

  Soap all over, right down to the soles of her feet and between her toes. A blister on her heel pops with a brief burst of pain.

  Sixty. In sixty seconds you can pull on your pack and start to run.

  For the last minute she stands with her eyes closed, letting the water run over her eyelids, cheeks, lips and into her mouth, twisting
to make every part of her body commensurate in these few moments of bliss.

  A few more seconds, just give me another twenty – even another ten – please just this once …

  The shower stops. She stands immobile, letting the blanket of steam wrap around her body until that, too, evaporates. Where there is water, one hundred and eighty seconds is a very long time, and no time at all.

  When she opens the unit door to get her towel, the cold air brings back a whiff of the Facility. She hurries down the corridor to her room. It’s five o’clock, and it looks like she is the only one awake.

  Carla’s letter is crumpled on the bunk; she must have read it a hundred times already. She’s converting. Those two small words are a sentence.

  Ramona can picture the scene. Her mother, who disguises all things, will have pretended nothing is wrong. Eventually, the conversion will have reached the stage where she can no longer hide it. Carla will have found her, collapsed and helpless on the floor of the shack, or shivering and feverish in her bed. The doctor’s test, doubtless under duress, will have confirmed the worst.

  The letter is a month old. Her mother might have stabilized by now. The thing with the jinn is it can loiter for a long time, an invisible intruder quietly and efficiently breaking down the immune system until one small thing turns on the carrier with sudden, fatal malignancy. It could be a fever or a minor infection. It could be a cold. From here on, Inés’s life is down to the arbitrary hand of chance.

  Hundreds die every year from the jinn. It is a part of life in the south. If you cannot accept these things, if you cannot accept that time and water are short, and shorter for some than for others, then you can find no peace for yourself. Ramona knows what she should do. She should get hold of as much opium as she can find, and take it to Inés, and when it happens stay with her until she dies, making sure that it is a good death, a quiet death. Her mother is fifty-eight. This is not a bad life. In Patagonia, to live to fifty-eight is a substantial age.