by E. J. Swift
He imagines the pilot arrowing north, towards Panama. Bodies on the beach, a stricken ship, a wounded Osirian man. I was right. I was right to warn them.
The herbalist is chivvying him, angry that Taeo has taken up more than his allotted time. It is only when he gets to his feet that he notices the hump of another body, covered with a blanket, pushed to the edge of the room. Gently he lifts a corner of the blanket.
‘What are you doing? Your time’s up!’
‘I just want to see her face.’
The woman’s eyes have been closed. She looks peaceful enough. He notes the same materials of her clothes. The long plaited hair. Only the richest Patagonians grow their hair long; water and the energy to heat it cost too much.
‘We’ll bury her,’ says the herbalist. She hesitates. ‘She came a long way to die here.’
He looks at her. Does she feel responsible? Does she blame herself for the woman’s death? He starts to say: It’s not your fault, but the moment passes. The herbalist jerks her head towards the door, pragmatic again. When he thinks about it, perhaps it is her fault – the villagers may have pulled the survivors from the ocean, but there is no evidence anyone has sent for professional medical help.
Taeo steps outside the hut and finds that the line has grown. The next visitor, a young woman holding a piece of cloth embroidered with the sign of the spider, goes into the hut. The leader is standing a little way off, watching closely as Taeo emerges.
What next?
He decides he wants a good look at the boat before he does anything else. Back down the muddy path, his pack weighing him down, twice he has to squeeze past a Patagonian going up the hill. On the beach, the crowd around the Osirian boat has expanded; Taeo notices another fishing craft drawn up past the tideline.
Taeo finds his boatman where he left him, refusing to land, and explains that they will have to wait a little longer. The boatman shakes his head. He says they shouldn’t stay. People will be coming. He does not specify which people, but Taeo guesses he means soldiers. The boatman is right; he doesn’t have long. Taeo promises more money. The boatman folds his arms stubbornly. Taeo doubles the offer again, at which at last the boatman nods his head. He goes back to his seat at the stern of the boat, facing away from the beach.
Once again Taeo pushes his way through the crowd, who have devolved into separate, whispering denominations. Those who were there first are explaining the situation at length and, as far as Taeo can gather, with much exaggeration. A few children play a kind of tag, running up to touch the boat, then darting back to the safety of their peers.
Taeo ignores all of them and goes around to the bow of the boat, where the hole torn by rocks gapes in the hull. He peers through but can see no way of getting into the interior, so walks around to where the deck rises vertically from the pebbles. He levers himself up to a deck hatch, opens it and climbs inside.
The beam of his flashlight bounces off multiple surfaces tipped by ninety degrees. Ladders extend horizontally and he has to crawl along the walls of the corridors. Water lies dormant in salty pools. Now his pack is a hindrance, catching on the sides of the narrow passageways. He squeezes through. It is not a large boat. He finds a sleeping area with bunks hanging loose from what has become the ceiling, an engine room, a storage area, a small eating space. Sufficient space, he surmises, for a crew of about ten. He picks up a couple of things from around the bunks which might be personal effects. A metal tin with engravings on the lid; the interior is full of fine white granules. He dabs his finger and sniffs tentatively, but it appears to be salt.
Then he finds a stash of guns. They are not locked away, but jammed anyhow into a trunk as though in a hurry. The water has seeped in here too. He handles one of the guns gingerly. He doesn’t recognize it, although he has never used one, so why would he? Everything made in Osiris would have come from Boreal or Solar Corporation blueprints; Antarctica had no part in the city’s construction.
To Taeo’s inexperienced eye, it looks more like defensive weaponry than an arsenal bent on a land attack. Nonetheless, the guns present a serious problem. The villagers are wary right now, but it is only a matter of time before they investigate the boat themselves. Especially now that they have seen Taeo go inside.
He doesn’t know if the guns will fire, and there is no way he can test them to find out. Not here, anyway. After hesitating, he puts one of the smaller weapons – a handgun – into his pack.
He is making his way back to the hatch when he realizes there is someone else in the boat.
A dead woman.
Her body is beginning to bloat. Her eyes are closed and blankets that might have been wrapped about the corpse have unravelled. She is wearing a red jumper with a hood and two scarves tucked into it. The body lies stiffly. There is some discolouring to the skin of her face, but it is only when he notices the darker patch and a puckering in the clothing at her stomach that Taeo realizes how she died – she was shot. Who killed her? Was she dead before the ship was wrecked?
He stares at the body. The sight of the corpse trapped in the ship moves him in a way that seeing the survivor did not. She never saw where they ended up. She never got the chance.
He tries to imagine the circumstances of the journey, the conditions on this ill-equipped, rusting boat. Would the Osirians have killed one of their own? Why did they come here? What made them leave their prosperous city?
Despite the closed eyes he has the eerie sense the woman is watching him, surveying his clumsy progress through her tomb. He leaves the corpse untouched and makes his way out of the boat, his pack with its new additions slung across his body.
The light outside is bright. The gun in his pack is right at the front of his thoughts. With every surreptitious glance in his direction, he thinks it has been spotted. Keep it casual. As he jumps down from the deck he can see the village leader across the beach, watching him closely.
The tide is creeping steadily up the beach. Soon it will be lapping at the shipwreck.
Taeo takes the leader aside.
‘Listen,’ he says. ‘You know who that man is. You know what he is. There’s a reason you didn’t get a doctor.’
‘We did our best,’ says the man, angrily.
‘But you could have done more, and you didn’t. I know why. I get it. I’m only here because one of your guys blabbed to everyone in a bar in Fuego. Now you may be making a nice profit on him now, but how long do you think it’ll be before the army shows up, or pirates, or worse?’
The leader eyes Taeo warily. But he knows. He is far from stupid.
‘If I were you,’ says Taeo, lowering his voice, ‘I would get rid of the evidence.’
The leader bristles. ‘You want to kill him? What do you think we are, barbarians?’
‘No, I’m not suggesting— what do you think I am?’ The leader opens his mouth and Taeo says quickly, ‘Don’t answer that. I’m offering to take him away from you. Understand, I will take that man far from here. You can burn the boat and the bodies. You never saw anyone alive. No evidence.’
Now the leader is nodding shrewdly. ‘I see, I see. You want this man.’
‘I’m offering to help you.’
‘You want him. Well, maybe you can have him, for the right price.’
‘A price? I’m doing you a favour!’
The leader folds his arms firmly. ‘No favour that I can see. This is business.’
‘Fucking hell.’ Taeo glances back at the tideline, his ride back to Fuego rocking as the ocean rushes up and is sucked back down. It is almost midday. The sun is high in the sky, warm on his face; the sea glints with silver. He does a swift calculation of the value of the Patagonian currency he has on him and what he can afford to offer. ‘Two thousand peso.’
The leader pulls an insulted face. ‘Is this a joke?’
‘Two five.’
‘He’s worth very little, it would seem, this man.’
‘Look, I don’t have time for haggling. Just tell me what you want fo
r him. I only have so much cash.’
A calculating look descends over the man’s face. ‘Not cash, no. Not from you.’
‘Then what?’ Taeo explodes, and several of the milling villagers look up, interested by the exchange. Taeo gathers his control.
‘You know.’
‘What—’
Then he understands. There is only one other thing of enough value he carries on his person. The leader has read him like a slate.
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Just— fine.’
It is right at the bottom of the pack, concealed in an interior pocket. He pulls out the package and hands it over; there is no time to do a split, not here amid all these curious eyes. The leader squirrels it seamlessly into his own pocket. The amount of narcotic in that bag is worth several times the cash Taeo is carrying. It’s pure opium, the good stuff. The best stuff. Now the leader’s stuff. Just the thought of its loss is causing him to shake.
If this all goes to plan, he has no idea when he will be able to smoke again. It is terrifying how much that thought unnerves him.
But you’ll be with Shri. It won’t matter then. You won’t need it.
‘He’s all yours,’ says the leader.
It takes all of Taeo’s strength to lift the man. As he strains, fresh blood starts to seep through the bandage around the Osirian’s leg. He cries out and the herbalist pulls back the cloth where it has been cut to treat the leg and points. A row of stitches crosses the suppurating wound.
‘You cannot take him, this man is badly hurt!’
She takes the man’s hand and twines his fingers through hers and he clutches at her, at the covers, thwarting Taeo’s best efforts to pry him away.
He looks at the man’s twitching face, the sheen of sweat across his forehead.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I can’t leave him here. People will be coming.’ He repeats what he said to the leader. The herbalist protests, but with less conviction now. She knows.
‘You should destroy the evidence. Burn everything.’
He carries the Osirian outside. The leader says something in consternation, but Taeo is concentrating on his hard-won prize. Extraneously, he is aware of the villagers as he progresses towards the steep path to the beach, the pointing, the remonstrations.
At the top of the path, Taeo pauses to catch his breath and to check where his boat is waiting.
The boat is not there.
A little way out, he can see the bright hull of their passage back to Fuego motoring away from the scene.
‘No …’
He lays the Osirian down and sprints towards the waterline, slipping and sliding down the hillside path, waving his arms frantically and trying to ignore the laughter of the villagers and the idiotic spectacle he presents.
‘Get back here! Get back!’
The boat recedes. He is stranded a hundred kilometres from Fuego Town, with a political bomb on his hands and no communications network.
‘You’re on your own from here.’
Two reluctant villagers, under suffrage by their leader, help Taeo carry the unconscious Osirian a little way into the forest. By the time they leave it is well into the afternoon, and the mood in the village has turned. They are clearly anxious to get rid of both Taeo and the troublesome survivor. Taeo’s last sight of the beach reveals a group of small figures preparing to make a bonfire of the wrecked Wings of Osiris.
Once again he lifts the Osirian’s arm around his shoulders and begins the slow shuffle forwards, moving away from the village whose houses soon fade behind them until they are out of sight and hearing altogether. The trees grow closer together. The Osirian’s feet drag on the ground and Taeo is worried about the wound to his leg. The man is spare but he is tall and a dead weight. Every fifty metres or so, Taeo has to stop and rest.
As they go deeper into the woodland, sounds surround them. Chattering insects, rustling branches and birds alighting upon them in a flurry of wings. The trees are slender but cut off much of the light. By dusk, Taeo can barely see. He blunders forwards. He knows his awkward progression will have left a trail any tracker could read, but there is nothing more he can do until the Osirian regains consciousness.
He lowers the man gently to the ground and props himself against the trunk of a tree. He cradles the Osirian’s head in his lap, listening to the other man’s shallow breathing. The last, the only survivor. Still alive. Taeo should be thankful for that, he supposes, and yet the mission that seemed so simple twenty-four hours ago has now become complex. His body is shaky with withdrawal; he craves the relief of a pipe.
As the day fades into night, he imagines he hears other sounds. The roar of fire. Human cries. Sharp cracks that might be a tree falling, or a gun fired. He feels like a wind-up toy whose coil is being cranked at every utterance.
He dozes and wakes with a jolt, and the process repeats, and repeats, until the first faint glow of light reveals the shape of the forest around him, and the face of the man he has saved. He is struck again by a resemblance to Shri in the man’s features, and finds at once a reproach and a comfort in it. Even though he knows the similarities are both superficial and merely the tricks of genetic code, in that fleeting light before dawn it is as if some part of her has come to reside in the Osirian, and is watching over him.
8 ¦
THERE IS NOTHING but poppy country as far as she can see. Field upon field of the flowers in bloom, broken only by the occasional cluster of buildings that marks a farm. Sheets of colour warm in the afternoon sunshine. Red. Violet. White. The silver stripe of a river. The blinking shadow of the plane.
It is good, fertile soil. Today Ramona does not care that its purpose is so singular. Today she is just grateful that she can get the drugs that Inés needs. It is tempting to land at one of the farms and directly bargain with the farmers, but there is a man in Cataveiro – not a good man, not at all, but a man who produces the purest stuff. She does not want anything less than top-grade quality. She has seen what croc does to the city’s addicts.
She fidgets in her seat, restless, unable to settle. The plane has just crossed latitude fifty-one south. She has turned off the instrument panel; she knows the way to Cataveiro and prefers to fly without it when she can, just as the very first pilots must have done. In those days, she imagines, aeroplanes were revered, perhaps even worshipped. But that was before the Neon age, when colossal energy guzzlers soured their mystique, and before they became such effective dispersers of bio-weaponry and blight. If it were not for the hostile machines which destroyed much of last century’s poppy harvests, Ramona might have company up here.
As it is, she is alone, and the thin trails of cirrus cloud drifting above are the only blot on the horizon. Windspeed is minimal. If the weather stays like this, it is easy flying from here. The plane cruises at a smooth hundred and fifty kilometres per hour, and the battery levels are steady. In a way, she wishes the journey were more demanding.
Once again she glances at her pack on the passenger seat. She keeps looking at it, wresting her gaze away, looking back.
‘Go on then.’ Speaking her thoughts aloud. A habit from so much time alone, never problematic until she has company. ‘Look at the damn thing.’
She has to dig deep in the pack. It is right at the bottom where she stowed it, wrapped in cloth. She unwraps it and holds the holoma aloft in one hand. Smooth. Matt surfacing. Jet black. She runs her fingernail lightly over it. Nothing. She had a feeling it wouldn’t scratch. It doesn’t smear, either. Not even her sweat sticks to it.
Impenetrable.
‘What am I to make of this, Colibrí?’
She turns the thing over. Who knows which side is up and which is down?
‘He said it was about the shipbuilding programme. Could be something big.’
It makes her feel dizzy, looking at the holoma for too long, as if she were looking down into a very deep crevasse.
‘Maybe the Antarcticans have finished their ships. Maybe they’re planning a move. Oh, I don�
��t know. It could be anything. You can’t trust an ice man.’
She did trust him, though. That was the strange thing.
Recalling Taeo’s instructions, she holds the holoma tightly for ten seconds, then five. At first it looks like nothing has happened. Then a single white light begins to glow in the centre of the holoma.
Ramona stares, at once repelled and drawn in by the light. What is it, a summoning? A signal to other holomas? She taps it. Nothing happens. She turns the holoma upside-down, shakes it, tosses it from hand to hand. Nothing. The little light continues to glow, steady, unyielding. Now she feels alarm. Is it transmitting? She reverses the ten-then-five and the light winks off.
The hand holding the holoma is quivering. Unlike some, she has never been able to control her response to machines. The first thing she and Raoul did when she got the plane to Tierra del Fuego was to disconnect all of its networks. Raoul said the plane was trying to talk to things: satellites that had been drifting unmanned since the Blackout, and other aircraft, broken down for their parts. For all the years it lay forgotten in the desert, the plane was reaching out to things that were no longer there.
‘But you found it,’ said Raoul.
She said: ‘Maybe it found me.’
‘That’s your luck,’ said Raoul.
She wraps the cloth untidily around the holoma and stuffs it back down to the bottom of her pack. Now she remembers Taeo issuing some kind of command – restricting her access? That must be it. So she can act as his courier but she is not permitted to know the truth about what she is carrying.
Bastard, she thinks.
And: You should have pushed harder.
And: I had to leave. There wasn’t time.
Her thoughts drift inevitably back to the highlands, and what awaits her there. She cannot shake the fear that Inés will walk away, as she has done so many times in Ramona’s life, without explanation or a note. That this time, there will not be a return.
