by E. J. Swift
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by E. J. Swift
Praise for E. J. Swift
Title Page
Dedication
March 2412
Part One: Not Dead Yet
Osiris
Part Two: Last of the Penguins
Patagonia
Tierra Del Fuego
Antarctica
Nunavut, Alaska
Part Three: The White Fly
Osiris
Antarctica
Osiris
Antarctica
Osiris
Part Four: The Scaled Man
Patagonia
Antarctica
Patagonia
Part Five: Silverfish
Osiris
Part Six: The Polar Star
The Pilot
The Scientist
The Pilot
Part Seven: Bokolu
Osiris
Part Eight: Nirvana
Patagonia
Part Nine: To Catch a Gull
Osiris
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
Fleeing from her family and the elitist oppression of the Osiris government, Adelaide Rechnov has become the thing she once feared: a revolutionary.
And the stark realization that there is life outside their small island existence means Adelaide’s worries are about to become much bigger.
But in a world where war is king and only the most powerful survive, there can only be one victor...
The thrilling, epic finale to The Osiris Project
About the Author
E. J. Swift is the author of Osiris and Cataveiro, part of The Osiris Project trilogy. Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies from Salt Publishing, NewCon Press and Jurassic.
She was shortlisted for a 2013 BSFA Award for her story ‘Saga’s Children’.
Also by E. J. Swift:
Osiris
Cataveiro
Praise for E. J. Swift
‘Dystopia is back . . . fascinating . . . [a] promising debut novel’ SFX
‘An assured and accomplished debut novel . . . an absolute gem’ Interzone
‘A fantastic blend of worldbuilding, excellent storytelling and complex characters’ SF Signal
‘Swift’s first novel, with its brilliant near-future vision of an ecologically and socially devastated world and characters who resonate with life and passion, marks her as an author to watch’ Library Journal
‘Marvelously well done. A glittering first novel: a flooded Gormenghast treated with the alienated polish of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. The result is a gripping novel, readable, beautiful, politically engaged and wholly accomplished. Swift is a ridiculously talented writer’ Adam Roberts
‘Cataveiro has a soulful, lonely quality as Taeo and Ramona embark on their missions, haunted by memories of the past and visions of what lies ahead . . . an intriguing world to get lost in’ SciFi Now
For M–P, my old friend
March 2412
After seven days of tornados it’s safe to go outside. Smoked a cigarette in the yard, watched the sunset – red and cloudless, almost peaceful. I saw a sandstorm swirling on the horizon but it was moving south, away from here.
I was glad of a few moments alone. The latest reports have frightened me, more than I like to admit, enough to break my hiatus from here. There’s been a spate of outbreaks across the Boreal States, and worse, it’s infiltrating south. Thousands in the Patagonian capital, one of the Indian enclaves entirely wiped out. We’re told to keep our spirits up, the work is valued, but when I ask for more funding, there is none. Are the banks losing confidence in the project? Are we hearing the full truth, or do they pacify us, like children? Has it reached an epidemic, a pandemic? Only Antarctica and the Solar Corporation remain unaffected since inception; up in the Arctic Circle our borders are too porous, the virus slips through like a devil in the night.
Remote as we are it’s easy to feel that we’re indestructible, that nothing can touch us here. The deliveries keep coming. We continue the work. We occupy our minds. Some of us pray, some of us drink. But on days like this it’s all too easy to imagine an alternate scenario: one in which we send our weekly report, and nothing comes back. We wait. We tell ourselves some other crisis has delayed the response – an airship crash, an assassination, the Africans squeezing the energy line, it could be anything – we tell ourselves we’ll hear back soon. Days slip by. Weeks. We wait. Eventually we can’t ignore it any longer, the absence of contact, the diminishing supplies, and we have to admit to ourselves what none of us wish to admit. No one’s coming.
There’s one explanation. The redfleur took them, every one; there’s no one left to come.
Just us, and the desert sky.
And them.
There would be a certain irony to that.
PART ONE
NOT DEAD YET
OSIRIS
THEY PULLED HER out of the water and took her away from the place where he died. She was half drowned, saltwater swilling in her lungs, howling and delirious. One of them gripped her beneath the ribcage and pushed upwards until she vomited all the liquid and could only retch, twitching in the stern of the boat like some strange sea creature they had dredged up from the deeps. All around them the derelict west was on fire. The ocean gleamed red with the reflection of flames and the pitted towers were outlined in stark relief against the night. Skadi boats weaved ribbons across the surface. One of the two could hear sirens and human screams, tormented sounds issuing from the water and from behind the fire, and the other watched the flames and sensed the burn of heat on skin.
They took her home, a run-down apartment where the electricity was touch-and-go and several but not all of the appliances worked. It was not the worst they had lived in but not the best either. Broken objects stood where they had last been used with a vaguely helpless air, as though there might one day be the means to fix them, and they hoped, while not entirely believing, that this might be the case. The rescued woman from the sea became a fixture like these other things.
They put blankets and pillows together and tried to get her to sleep, but she lay catatonic, her body racked with tremors, and no matter how many covers they pressed on top of her she remained cold. She stared upwards, appearing to see nothing. Nothing physical, anyway. When she did sleep it was never for long. She woke screaming and so she became afraid of sleep; they could see the fear spark beneath her lids even as they drooped, the terror of what sleep might bring. Ole Larsson, who was deaf, saw only the open mouth of the girl, muted, a hole stretching in her face. Mikaela Larsson heard the cries, and made soft, pacifying noises. They tried to quiet her, although there were others who screamed too in this tower. She was not out of place. She was not the only one with demons.
When she screamed too loudly they put a hand over her mouth and tried to calm her until she shook with dry sobs. They patted her shoulders, which were thin and bruised. They put salve on her skin. Both of her wrists were hurt; they chose not to think about why that might be. What might have caused those marks to be there.
They were not sure what to do with her. Through the first night they murmured. There, there. There, there. They stroked her forehead, her hair. It was long and russet and rough with saltwater. They remembered a bird they had once nursed back to health. They had found it tangled in a cluster of junk on the surface, plastic wires twined around its feet, flapping helplessly, without the tools or knowledge to free itself. It was like that. They guessed the girl was a resident of the unremembered quarters. If so, she had no family. They were not sure what had brought them out on the night when their city burned and the old haunted tower collaps
ed, releasing all of its ghosts into the open air like spores, where they must be drifting now, without sense or direction. A bad thing, to set those ghosts free – they felt it with a sense of unease. If asked, Mikaela Larsson, a kind-faced woman who believed in providence, would struggle to explain their motives. They were part of no movements. They had no political agenda. But they had found they could not stay inside. Something was happening. A need to aid propelled them. With their habitual, unspoken symbiosis, they fetched their boat and rowed the short distance from the tower where they lived to the unremembered quarters and there in the water they found the woman, half-drowned.
And now they had her and did not know what to do.
The woman was someone, but they did not recognize her. Even if she had told them her name, it would have meant little to them. Nothing the City had done had ever made much difference to their lives. On the other side of the border, laws were passed and acts declared. Ole and Mikaela took shifts at the plant and sat together in the evenings, one listening to scratchy music on the o’dio channels, and the other reading, salvaged books and papers, or they played cards or bones, or went to watch the gliders practise, stood arm in arm, with a flask of warm spiced raqua if money was better. They kept to themselves. The City was another country.
The morning after the tower collapsed they coaxed her into clean clothes, noting the abrasions on her body, and tried to make her eat. They gave her coral tea. When her hands shook and she spilled the steaming liquid, they wiped it up and pressed cold cloths to the scalds. There, there. They had a son, but he visited rarely. She was like the daughter that had never been. There, there. When she managed to eat a few mouthfuls they watched with pleasure. Good, Mikaela encouraged her. And another. Ole smiled and nodded. They spoke little. The woman did not speak at all, except in dreams. What she said in her dreams was incomprehensible. They did not try to understand; they only wanted her to be well again.
The woman did not know it yet, but being found by these two was her first piece of luck for some time. For now, she was in the fog. There were senses here, premonitions and paranoias, sudden horrors that sneaked up with moist hands at her back, but there was nothing that could be grasped. Here, everything slipped. Mostly it felt as though she had never come up for air. She was still underwater, suspended somewhere between life and death, turning over and over in a watery limbo without name.
‘Ata,’ says Mikaela Larsson.
Ata. Ole mouths the syllables, testing them silently first.
Ata.
This is what the woman who used to be known as Adelaide Rechnov writes for them on a piece of paper, a week, or maybe a fortnight, after. She is no longer sure about time, about anything that once could be counted and now cannot.
The paper is spotted with grease from the work surface. The word sits upon it. Ata. A-ta. A part of her must be working, still functioning, because she chose the name. It sounds not unlike the old one, so she will not be caught out when someone calls an unfamiliar word. She will not be caught again. She cannot be caught.
Ole and Mikaela Larsson take turns to go to their shifts at the plant and to look after the woman, until they feel they can leave her alone. One day they come home and find a tail of matted hair lying in the sink. She has taken a pair of scissors to her head. She sits on the floor snipping away at what is left. They watch silently. Eventually Ole removes the tail of hair and washes it out in a bucket and sets it out to dry, separating the strands. The woman is angry when she sees it but Mikaela takes her arm and says they can use it. Hair is good for pillows, or some other insulation, they can sew it into her clothes, she says. It will keep her warm in the winter. Gently, she takes the scissors from the younger woman, prying them out of her hand. Let me. The woman falls abruptly still and obedient and Mikaela takes the ends of her hair, clipping at them neatly, leaving the fringe long when the woman insists.
The woman sweeps up the cuttings of hair and that evening she helps them clean the apartment, awkwardly, trailing them from one side of the room to the other, copying what they do. If they think her behaviour strange they do not say so. She is grieving, they have decided, but she will not – or cannot – say what she has lost.
Later she writes:
I need to change my hair.
They look at the note, confused. Mikaela thinks of those women on the boats whose hair is always sheer and black and she worries. You want a different colour? Is that it?
Ata nods. She hesitates. They watch her pick up the pen again.
She writes:
It isn’t safe.
They look at the three words for a long time. Without having to exchange a glance they realize that they have always known this. It isn’t safe. They do not know who she is but it is not safe for her.
They remember the damage to her wrists when she arrived. The bruising. The skin there is still new, pink and shiny. They find they cannot bear the idea of her being harmed.
Ole and Mikaela circle her in their arms and hold her in a hug. They can feel her trembling. Mikaela says, we will look after you. We will keep you safe. She leans into them, shaking, absorbing their kind, openhearted warmth, wanting to believe that it is true. That it could even be possible.
Mikaela procures the dye for her. Something plain and brown, innocuous. If she were in the City she could get lenses to change the colour of her eyes, but she is not in the City now, and has no intention of going back. In the trash banks of the tower she finds a pair of discarded glasses and the couple help her to change the glass in the frames to something that does not blur her vision. After a while she gets used to the rub of plastic against the bridge of her nose.
On the o’dio, she is reported as missing. There are patrols out there, searching the western waterways. Then she is pronounced dead. It is a relief, to be dead.
She makes herself useful to the Larssons. She can see the pleasure in their faces with each small achievement, preparing a meal, or taking her first steps outside the apartment. She lets Ole show her how to drive their boat, a small motor with blue and white stripes, pretending she has never driven before. It gives her a reason to keep going. For them, she will do this. For them, she will clean her teeth, do the shopping run and scrub the windows, polishing in round, persistent motions until the glass sparkles like sunlight on the waves of the ocean that rush by, below, below, below.
She does not allow herself to think about him. Not even his name. His name is a whirlpool waiting to open up and engulf her. It could appear at her feet at any moment, through any matter: on the interlocking decking around a tower, or the fibreglass floor of a waterbus. Where there was ground underfoot, suddenly there is an abyss.
But sometimes it happens by accident and the pain is so acute she wants to cry out. She pushes her fist against her mouth, biting into the skin of her knuckles. Mikaela wraps tape around her fingers and tells her not to touch them. She remembers being told not to bite her nails as a child. Who told her that? Her mother, probably, but to think of them is another trip-up, another entry to the whirlpool below; it is because of them that all this has happened, that a man has died, that many more than one man have died.
The last words they exchanged were not happy ones. She was angry. She felt betrayed. He told her the truth and in that moment she hated him for it.
Had she known there was no more time, it might have been different.
There were other things she would have said. There are things she would say now, but will never have the chance.
At night she dreams of all the dead in conference and sees herself as reported on the o’dio among them, slowly decomposing beneath the surface. The dye comes off her hair, and then the skin comes off her face, and she rots. A strange relief in seeing the pieces of herself come adrift, the molecules of blood and tissue flying apart in a slow-motion explosion. What is left is a stillness of water, gently reddened, translucent. An after, as if there were never a before.
One night they sit together at the table, eating a stew she has
prepared from a recipe of Ole’s, chewing slowly. The occasional nod: it’s good. If she needs to communicate something, she gestures, or writes it. At first she tried to talk, and found her throat was blocked, but now she no longer tries. Mikaela reassures her: these things take time. It will come back. She has never been in a place where there was no need for words. When she thinks of her old life – that other person, in the other city – it occurs to her that there were always words, and never silence. There were promises and lies, but there was rarely the truth.
Spoons scrape against bowls. She notices details like this, the small functional sounds, a swallow or a cough. They eat all of the stew. Mikaela switches on the o’dio. The apartment is full of the smell of cooking, briny and fresh. The woman looks at the empty dish and she is surprised by the peace that settles over her in that moment. She offers a smile to her rescuers and receives two smiles in return. Their lips curve in the same way. She is not sure if it was always like this or if they have become more like one another over time, their gestures merging into one entity, as happens sometimes with those who share lives.
She writes one word on the piece of paper and pushes it towards them. A question. Mikaela Larsson looks at her.
‘Because you need us, Ata.’
Weeks pass and they are beginning to depend on her too. Returning from the market with the day’s fresh kelp, she feels lighter than usual. She’s got a large bag of it, and she’s pleased, because she has learned to haggle without words. There are plenty of ways to communicate without speech: the slight contraction of the eyebrows, in surprise at the price, the shrug that denotes indifference. Take my money, don’t take it, I don’t care. She worried at first that her silence might mark her out, but the truth of it is, everyone has their peculiarities on this side of the border.
When she reaches the door to the apartment she hears voices. Not the o’dio but real voices in real time. Mikaela, and another, male, youngish, and with an insistent whine. She stops at once and listens.
