by E. J. Swift
‘The tower,’ says Vikram. ‘The tower collapsed.’
His eyes are dark and inward, lost in his own reverie. The Patagonians would say this man has bad spirits in his mouth. His story is full of horrors: the underwater, the collapsing tower – what kind of place is this sea city? Taeo has no desire to go there, and yet he is riveted by the idea of it, a dread fascination growing alongside his instinctive scientific curiosity. He wants to ask questions. Lots of questions. He is going to have to be patient. The important thing is to gain Vikram’s trust, and to do that requires careful manipulation.
‘You must be glad to leave the city behind.’
‘I’ll never go back,’ says Vikram.
‘You don’t need to.’
Vikram hesitates. ‘Will you go back to … Tarctica? Will you be allowed?’
Taeo keeps his face carefully neutral. ‘My time here is almost at an end. So yes, I’ll be going back.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘We call it the land of mists and winds. There are vast landscapes of ice and there are young trees and new flowers and meadows. It’s a land of trial and experiment. A home you can be proud of.’ The strange thing is that the words he says are true. In spite of everything they have done to him, he is proud. He does love the Republic. He loves it for its vision and its aspiration and what it will one day become.
‘I want to come with you, when you go.’
‘I think that’s a good idea. We’ll both be safer there.’
Vikram nods, but says no more, as though to acknowledge the idea too openly is to tempt fate.
‘We’ll make headway tomorrow,’ says Taeo. He reaches for his pack. In one pocket is the funny little metal tin, full of salt, that he took from the Osirian ship. He holds it out. ‘I found this. I didn’t know if it might be important.’
Vikram takes the tin and opens it. The salt inside has encrusted into clumps.
‘This was Mia’s. She was the last one … left with me.’
Taeo remembers the dead woman under the blanket. That long plait of hair like a thick vine.
He waits.
‘There’s a custom – you throw the salt, to ward away the ghosts.’ Vikram’s voice is rough with suppressed emotion. ‘The dead, I mean.’
‘As a mark of respect.’
‘Yes.’ He stares at the tin, seeming unable to close it or put it down. Customs don’t let you go so easily, physical or mental. Taeo knows that. You can train your mind but it does not forget.
He reaches over. ‘May I?’
Vikram nods. Carefully, Taeo takes a clump of the salt between finger and thumb.
‘Over your shoulder,’ says Vikram.
He throws it as instructed. ‘To the crew of the Wings of Osiris. Rest peacefully, wherever you are now.’
Vikram closes the lid of the tin.
‘Thank you,’ he says quietly.
The rain has stopped. Water drips from the leaves sporadically and the air is rich with petrichor scent. The smell of accomplishment. Taeo can feel his success, a taut, anticipatory sensation at the centre of his chest. A voice in his head says: you’re close now. You’re very close.
He has secured his ticket back home.
PART TWO
LA CIUDAD / THE CITY
10 ¦
ON A FORGOTTEN day some time between two hundred and three hundred years ago, the musician Juliana Cataveiro pulled her daughter’s limp body from a street flooded with the South Atlantic and carried her home through a hurricane. The storms raged for three days. During that time, Juliana sat in the attic of her house with her daughter and sang to her. On the first day, the South Atlantic plucked things from houses and bore them down the streets in strange, floating processions. On the second day, the wind took the roof off Juliana’s house. She dared it to take the body of her child and it did not. The child turned blue and cold. When the rain ceased and the sea fell flat and glimmered as though it had never stirred, never mind drowned souls in their hundreds, Juliana Cataveiro burned her daughter, put the ashes in a tin and her guitar on her back and came south, which was the only way to go.
Cars and bikes had been swept away, so she came on foot. She walked through a changing world, but it did not matter to her because she had already changed, and the change was in the ashes on her back, and it was not reversible. She walked through jungles that burned and cities that crumbled and slid. One day she passed through starved, ghostly towns, the next she was ambushed by the warlords of water wars. She followed the rusting railway lines south and no one stopped her. She said no words. She sang no more songs. Those who saw her pass experienced a peculiar sensation. Some said they saw their own deaths. Some saw angels, tiny shining ones, clustered about her back. Others heard the voices of the unborn.
Each time the land changed, Juliana Cataveiro stopped, and felt the soil. Each time she frowned, and shook her head. No, not here. No, not here. No, not here. And so on until she came to a valley with a cold running river and barren hills rising all around. At a bend in the river Juliana stopped. The riverbank was rough and muddy. Here, yes here. She dug a hole with her hands, a metre deep. In it she buried the ashes of her little girl. She took out her guitar and she picked something sad and bittersweet on the strings, but she could not sing. She scratched her daughter’s name in the soil. She was ready to die now.
A traveller passed through the valley – a trader, or a soldier, or an artist, or a nurse – and asked who she was. Juliana had no words and could not answer. The trader or the soldier or the artist or the nurse read the name of her daughter. He looked at the valley and saw its potential: the river, the hills which encircled it. He imagined trees and agriculture. He went on his way telling others and bringing them back.
When he returned the mysterious woman was gone. Her guitar was on the riverbank, damp with the morning dew. Her daughter’s name was still there, dug into the soil. And there it is today, listeners, beneath the foundations of the city, and if you look closely on a night when the stars are near, you can see it, or so they say.
At 4.30 a.m., Station Cataveiro is broadcasting stories for children, or old women who act like children. The Alaskan is not listening. Not really. Only a little, maybe, only the periphery of her hearing. She knows all the stories. It is absurd that they make her heart flutter, still. With her level of memory, she could probably quote them verbatim. This one is an old favourite of the city’s storytellers. This is the story told in the tango clubs, the romantic one. Told by guitarists and flautists. This was the story the Alaskan heard first, but her favourites are the darker tales. She likes the dark. That is where the interesting things dwell. The dark spaces and yawning gaps in time. The Alaskan should have lived in the Blackout years. They would have suited her well.
Instead she is bedbound in a hot, airless attic in a crumbling old district of Cataveiro in a country that is not her own.
Luckily, something or someone is always arriving in Cataveiro, and the Alaskan is usually the first to know.
11 ¦
THE FIRST SETTLERS of Cataveiro come from the coasts. They bring with them belongings they can carry on their backs, or cram into cars that have enough charge to start. However far they run, they cannot escape the sea. It lodges in the canals of their ears. It rushes through the deserted avenues and carnival streets and sea wall walks and seeps into the outlying favelas of the once-great cities.
The settlers of Cataveiro flee from the sea, but they bring the water with them. In transit, it takes a new form, that beloved of the troubadours; it becomes music. Cataveiro is founded upon the music of the sea.
Patagonia changes; a valley that was once barren becomes fertile farmland, and it is here that the settlers build their new homes, on the slopes above a bend in the valley’s meandering river. As the settlers form a collective and summon their families and more refugees come from the fire zones, so the river is plumbed. In the summer months it idles through the valley, low and stagnant. In the hyperstorms it swells and the b
anks break and the valley floods. The settlers remember the coast and sing of water.
When demand on the river becomes too great, the desalination companies move in. Lines from the coastal plants converge upon the city. The family Xiomara grow rich. Cataveiro is a town now. It acquires banks, a university, a trade in opium from the burgeoning poppy fields to the north and south. In civil war the army comes, drawn by bars and women. The guerrillas follow to stake their own claim. And still the water music courses through the nights, beautiful and treacherous.
The city – it is a city now – expands, sprouting limbs in every direction like those of the Nazca spider. Cities in the north burn and sink as the land buckles. Malaria and typhoid race south. Cataveiro takes in those who survive, be they farmers, lawyers, altruists or thieves. Cataveiro does not care who comes, so long as they heed the water music and the water laws.
One burning December day, a girl and a boy stumble out of the shimmering horizon. It was weeks ago that they left the sliding city, full of hope and ambition. They have clung together in the cold nights when heat evaporates and races up into the atmosphere. They have survived torrential mudslides, when the world came alive underfoot and sought to drown and bury them at once. They are dazed and dehydrated and their stomachs are eating themselves, but they are amazed, because here they stand before Cataveiro, which until this day was a legend. An idea.
They stagger uncertainly towards the first buildings, where the first wave of sea music chimes its silken tones. The city swallows them.
Three days later, the boy, Félix, emerges. He knows his path. He goes south. He goes to sea.
The girl, Ramona, does not come out for seven years.
Bicycle chimes, rickshaw bells, tram horns and skateboard wheels. The crowds part and regroup continually as residents wend their way through the city, intent on a thousand different missions. A car with darkened windows slinks through the narrow streets, forcing the pedestrians to press up against the walls of their bleached buildings. Ramona watches the vehicle. She knows it, intimately. She knows the quiet engine and the elegant metal chassis and the luxurious cushioning of the seats inside. Memories flood back: the garage, her apprenticeship. The smell of oil and steel.
She fights her way deeper into the city. Through city sweat and whiffs of vendor food, dust and sour drains and sun-warmed metal tracks, the rising stench of the river with an early summer. She has forgotten about the smell. She has forgotten that in the city everyone carries a mask in case of an epidemic, and some of them wear them in the streets every day. She has forgotten the way the city sprawls and climbs, the ladders scaling the house-fronts, the busyness on balconies and roofs, the people, walking-cycling-clinging on to the tram, so many people packed together. The way the city opens, suddenly, onto unexpected plazas, with large establishments squatting among residential blocks. Here the courtrooms, here the hospital, here a park. Cataveiro is a history of happenstance.
Outside a cheap hostel, Ramona scans a group of the street urchins who loiter everywhere, waiting for scraps of work. She needs a smart one, not just a street-smart one. She beckons to one of the slightly older boys. She puts his age at thirteen or fourteen, wary-eyed in a dark blue tee and a faded Team Vaquera cap that’s almost certainly filched.
‘I need you to find someone for me.’
‘Name them, I’ll find them,’ he says.
‘Alejandro Herrera. He was with the Galea Company a couple of years ago, but he may be in public office now.’ She has kept tabs on Alejandro, but not that closely.
‘What’s the message?’
She gives the boy a written message and a handful of peso.
‘I’ll be back here at one o’clock, for the reply.’
He darts away but she hangs on to his arm for a moment longer.
‘Only direct contact,’ she says, and folds another couple of notes into his palm for emphasis. ‘I want you to see his face.’
‘Yes, señora.’
Ramona watches the kid despatch smartly into the crowd and dart over the tram lines heading westwards. She turns the opposite way, towards the university, where there are fewer people, and more room to breathe. She avoids the district where the garage is based. It is a strange thing to be in the city where she spent so many years, and not to see the people who helped her. As she walks she feels her former life riding on her back, peering over her shoulder, the way spirits do.
Like most things in Cataveiro, the university is a loose, unstructured model in architecture and in philosophy. Anyone can attend a talk. Those who call themselves students wander in and out of lectures and discussions, and those who call themselves professors appear in one department one day and teach a different discipline the next. The campus is full of larger and smaller groups, some engaged in quiet, intense conversations, others arguing heatedly.
Two students sit in a shady, moss-walled courtyard.
‘You know the Solar Corporation is bleeding us dry. Between the ship miles and the Boreal tax, we’re fucked. It’s no wonder half the city can’t afford to run a fridge.’
‘Would you rather we bought energy from the Tarkies?’
‘I’d rather we produced our own – it’s not as if we don’t have the desert—’
‘Desert but no economy.’
‘Maybe I’ll start my own company.’
‘Yeah? Who’s going to fund you? The salt woman?’
‘Tell me then, what would you do?’
‘I’d cut out the Boreals and renegotiate with the Solar Corporation directly.’
A snort.
‘Let’s get another opinion, shall we? Hey, don’t you agree we should disassociate from the Boreal States?’
This is said to Ramona as she passes through.
Their fervour is both inspiring and alarming. She wants to say to the pair, do you not realize how small this city is? How tiny our country, how far the continent extends beyond the habitable zone? How far we have been left behind? The world was once small but now it is vast again. It is only from the air that you realize how vast.
The students are looking at her expectantly, awaiting an answer. It might be interesting, but to answer is to be caught in debate, and she is not looking for debate. Not today.
‘I don’t have an opinion,’ she says.
They look disappointed.
She exits the courtyard and continues through the campus. The robotics department is easily identified. Symbols flicker over its exterior walls. The display is repellent, but somehow Ramona finds herself walking towards the building, up the steps to the gated entrance, where security guards are present to check that nothing gets out. They nod her through the doors that open on a shuddery automation, and inside, where she almost trips over some awful metal robotic thing that is scuttling about the floor. She can feel the discomfort in the air. Static, and the strange crackling white noise that only comes from these machines. She doesn’t know why she has even come in, but now she is here she cannot bring herself to walk out again.
She slips into the first hall where they are demonstrating some kind of Boreal wizardry and takes a seat at the back. At the front of the room, two professors are manipulating a device that beams three-dimensional representations out into the room. The representations are larger than life and the style of their hair and clothes is from another era. Unlike those around the campus, each of the students is paying strict attention to the demonstration. They lean forwards, their faces bearing a disgusted fascination which Ramona knows is reflected on her own face. She watches as the Boreal people leap out of the device and are sucked back inside.
The professors argue over how the projection can be stabilized. Students shout suggestions.
Ramona is aware of a growing sense of nausea at the back of her throat. She taps the shoulder of the girl sat in front of her.
‘What is this display, please?’
‘Holotech demo,’ replies the girl, twisting around. A brassy pendant of the Nazca monkey hangs prominently over her T-shi
rt, matched by two dangly earrings. ‘That’s a pre-Blackout device. It’s meant to have sound, but the profs can’t get it.’
‘It’s a strange thing to make yourself appear as a spirit.’
‘It’s like making yourself dead before you die,’ agrees the girl, but they both continue to stare. Ramona feels the weight of the holoma in the pack on her back. She wonders what would happen if she were to activate it now.
After a few more minutes the queasiness in her stomach is too great to ignore and she leaves the hall and continues through the laboratories of the department. It is better when she is moving. She watches the lab masters carrying out their experiments. The labs are full of wires and sparks and some of them smell of smoke.
On her way out of the building the guards frisk her and ask for her pack. She freezes, suddenly remembering the holoma, but their sensors pick up nothing. Apparently the Antarctican was right when he said it would be like carrying a stone. Ramona watches the scuttling robot nosing at the edges of the walls. It is important to come here. It’s a reminder.
Those outside Patagonia see their rejection of robotics as a weakness, backward and regressive. But Ramona knows it is a strength. It is a strength to be different. It is a strength to say no.
The boy returns with a message. Alejandro Herrera elects to meet on a rooftop cafe in a fashionable district of town. Here the buildings are painted cream to deflect the sun, and the scents of the herb gardens and watered flowers drift pleasantly across a terrace of tables and chairs. Sunlight glints off the low-grade solar panels dotted over the city.
Ramona is not happy with the choice of location – it is too exposed – but she has no choice if she is to meet Alejandro. She arrives fifteen minutes before the allotted time and walks the length of the rooftops, past pop-up vendors selling humitas, card players and yoga practitioners and lovers out for an afternoon stroll. A banjo player curls around his instrument, plucking languid notes. When a city enforcer strolls by she keeps her face neutral, and walks straight on. She notes where ladders run down to the next level, where balconies jut out over the streets a floor below. When she reaches the end of this impromptu promenade, she returns to the terrace and finds Alejandro waiting.
