Tamaruq

by E. J. Swift

  PATAGONIA

  THE TWO FIGURES wind steadily through the forestry, the boy moving lithe and silent, the woman in front awkward, clumsy, clutching at branches when she misses a step, not always successfully. A muttered, interrupted litany flows between them: the woman huffing, this way, is it still this way, Mig’s reply, yes, yes, keep walking. Now over that way. To the left. Left. Occasionally the woman sighs and asks, how much further? Mig: it doesn’t matter. The woman: I didn’t expect to be walking so far. Mig: what did you expect?

  She doesn’t reply. The answer is curiosity, of course, but more than that, a burning necessity to see for herself, to know the truth of it. She has always sought out the truth of it. This impulse could not be ignored, although the journey south has been fraught, and she has left things behind that she should not have left, people and work, because of a few words snagged from the radio, hooked like fireflies out of the dark. Because of a story.

  They progress. The trees are in full leaf and the light falls in narrow strips between them, reminding Mig of other things, corrugated iron and metal railings, tall, straight pillars in Station Sabado. Despite the absence of human life this place carries an echo of where he used to live. The woman blunders on, making enough noise to alert every wild creature on the island, making Mig uneasy – there might be snakes here, concealed in the undergrowth. Mig insists the woman stays in front. He doesn’t trust her.

  He doesn’t trust any of them. Many have come. They all have to prove themselves. Some of them do, some of them don’t. He keeps a knife strapped to his body, the blade a constant pressure against the soft casing of his skin. This woman, with her loose words and awkward gait, does not appear dangerous – but those are always the ones you should watch the closest.

  When the trees grow denser, the light more sporadic, the woman slows. Mig senses a tentativeness in her step which was not there before. He nods to himself, satisfied. It is right that she should feel this. After all, she has come for the miracle, and miracles are never cheap. Someone always has to pay.

  The forest opens out abruptly to reveal a stream and the woman stops, dazed by the transition in light. For a moment she stays where she is and looks about her quietly. At the running water that splits around a series of rocks. The sunlight bouncing off the current.

  Mig scans up and down the stream. The boat is where he left it. No signs that anyone has been here.

  ‘You know, you forget about this,’ says the woman. ‘You forget it’s all here. Where I am. Up by the marshes. The sand. I’ve been there so long now. I had these ideas. I thought I’d make a difference. All those things. You know? You don’t think about it while you’re there. It’s only here… Gods, look at the water. It’s so clear.’

  Mig is not interested in her rapture, he’s interested in keeping both of them out of sight. He indicates.

  ‘We take the boat,’ he says. He takes a blindfold from his pocket. ‘You wear this.’

  The woman hesitates, then closes her eyes. Mig helps her into the boat. When she is settled in the stern he also ties her hands – something he’s gained expertise in lately. He could truss up a goat in sixty seconds. The woman’s hands lie meekly in her lap, the skin dark, the nails cut short and blunt. Mig looks at them, thinking about what she is. Wondering who she has saved and who has died on her watch.

  Neither of them speaks during the remainder of the journey. Both are immersed in their private thoughts, Mig intent upon the careful steering of the boat, alert always to any suggestion of human presence along the banks, but all is quiet, as it should be, only the birds and the wind ruffling the trees, quiet in a way he still finds disturbing to the ear. Since Pilar died he has felt different, like the old Mig was spirited away somewhere, wherever she went, and this place with its emptiness and its salt winds and secretive trees is like a second life, an afterlife. Where the abandoned go. The people who seek them out are pilgrims, earnest and determined, with ideas and things to prove, to other people, or to themselves. He looks at this new one, the doctor from the uninhabitable zone. He is not yet sure which category she falls into.

  The woman resists the urge to scratch at her blindfold. Her back aches from the hike but she keeps her spine erect. It is important not to show fear, even to a boy. Is she afraid though? Not exactly. Rather she feels the rush of anticipation, adrenaline pushing through her body. The words from the radio rest against the darkness of the blindfold. Glowing there, tantalizing her. A call that could not be ignored. Her colleagues asked her not to go and she shut all of them out.

  On an impulse.

  ‘We’re here,’ says the boy.

  As she climbs out of the boat there are other voices, greeting the boy. She feels hands on her shoulders and back, guiding her forwards. She senses she is surrounded. Ridiculous, really, the idea of her being brought here in blindness as if she were one of those characters from the radio stories about northern spies, who always operate in secret, and practise deceit. She is a smart woman who went away to do something good, and here she is on a remote archipelago island whose name and location she does not even know, being shepherded to see a man who has no name, only a reputation which has spread from the archipelago to Titicaca, and beyond.

  When they remove the blindfold it takes a moment for her eyes to focus. She is inside a small log cabin, rudely furnished and stocked with camping equipment which looks like it’s seen better days. There is a table in front of her. A man is sitting in the chair on the other side of the table. He is so still that for a moment the eerie idea crosses her mind that he might be robotized. Then he gestures.

  ‘Please sit down.’

  A thin, intense face, not South American. The features are – memory jogs, a flicker of a country in the old world order that she struggles now to recall the name of and quickly gives up trying, because his eyes are fixed on her, studying her, appraising her, and she finds she can’t look away. There are scars across his cheeks, evidence of tissue damage. It’s the pathway of a consuming virus that blasts through the skin’s cells, leaving marks that may not ever disappear. The scarring pattern classic of an older, curable strain, you see it occasionally on foreigners – but the outbreak in Cataveiro wasn’t an older strain, and it wasn’t curable. By the gods, he is lucky. More than lucky – he is something that should not exist. He is a miracle.

  She can feel the acceleration of her heartbeat telling her that she was right: right to leave, right to come here.

  She says, ‘You’re the man that survived the redfleur.’

  He doesn’t answer her directly.

  ‘Are you thirsty? Can I get you some water? We have coffee, too.’

  She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to wait.

  ‘You are, aren’t you? You’re him?’

  ‘I’m told that’s what people say. Mig tells me your name’s Beatriz?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can’t tell you my name. Not yet, anyway. You understand why?’

  His Spanish is accented but confident; she can tell he’s a foreigner but she couldn’t say how long he’s been here. She nods.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Where have you come from?’

  ‘Titicaca. The marshes.’

  The man who survived redfleur unfolds a map and spreads it across the table, orientating it towards her. The map has the hummingbird glyph in one corner and a signature the doctor recognizes: it is a Callejas map. Once again she feels a tug at her memory, something she heard about the pilot, something recent. Wasn’t there talk of a reward? The salt woman was involved, the pilot had gone rogue, killed someone… The doctor remembers she came to the clinic once, brought an injured boy for treatment. Didn’t seem like the killing type.

  She points to Titicaca.

  ‘Up here.’

  He studies the location.

  ‘You’ve travelled fast, to come so far.’

  ‘There was a west-coast ship heading south.’ She pushes away the memory of seasickness. ‘You’re not from this countr
y?’ she asks.

  He smiles. ‘No.’

  She sits back in the chair, gazing at him frankly.

  ‘Is it true you survived it?’

  ‘I survived an illness.’

  ‘But the redfleur?’ she presses. ‘In Cataveiro?’

  He doesn’t answer.

  She shakes her head. ‘That was a Type 9. Even the Boreals don’t have a cure. This is incredible. If it’s true, we need you. I’m a doctor. I work in the outback. There’s nothing much up there, and we’re lucky, it’s never come to us. But I know what it does. I know what happened in Cataveiro. And it’s not just here – up in the north as well, it’s getting much worse, they say, they haven’t had a breakthrough in years.

  ‘We need you,’ she repeats.

  The man looks unconvinced.

  ‘You mean you want to study me.’

  ‘Yes! Of course I do. I’m not a virologist, but I know people – scientists, teachers, in the university—’

  ‘Is that why you came, Beatriz? You want to persuade me into a laboratory?’

  ‘Do you know how many people die every year from redfleur? If you have immunity—’

  ‘I’ve heard the numbers.’

  ‘Then come with me,’ she says passionately. She cannot believe he would refuse her.

  The man gets to his feet and goes to stand by the single high window, looking out. She has no idea what he is looking at. She hasn’t seen anything of what there is between the boat and this hut.

  ‘Save your entreaties,’ he says. ‘You won’t persuade me to go anywhere with you.’

  ‘Then what are you doing here, hidden away in the middle of the forest? Where have you come from? Who are you?’

  He speaks without looking at her.

  ‘You’ve heard enough to find me here. Surely you must have some idea?’

  She stares at the pilot’s map. The familiar, tapering contours of the South American continent. The less familiar outline of the mass below it, and between them, the breadth of blue. She speaks slowly.

  ‘I’ve heard… strange things.’

  ‘You call it the sea city,’ says the man. ‘Where I’m from. Also the lost city, I believe. Its true name is Osiris.’

  The colours on the map seem suddenly brighter, the blue more vivid and intense. She wasn’t scared before, but she feels something close to it now.

  ‘You want to take me to a laboratory, cut me open and look at my blood,’ says the man calmly. ‘But you’re asking the wrong question. The question is not what. It’s where.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘If it’s true, as you think, that I survived the redfleur, and if it’s true that this has never been seen before, then it has nothing to do with who I am and everything to do with where I come from.’ Still facing away, the man’s voice is low and hypnotic. ‘It’s the only logical answer.’

  She thinks about this, struggling to process the implications of what he is saying. It all seems so impossible.

  But you came here because of impossible.

  ‘You mean… you’re saying there might be others? People like you? People who have immunity?’

  ‘I have no idea. But I plan to return there and find out. If I can find it again, that is.’ A touch of irony tinges his voice. ‘Which brings its own challenges.’

  She is astounded.

  ‘You’re going back to—’ she thinks the word, but cannot say it. No one says that name. ‘You’re going back?’

  ‘I’m taking an expedition.’

  There are a thousand questions that enter her head. The one that comes out is the least relevant of all of them.

  ‘How are you going to get there?’

  He turns back to face her.

  ‘Forgive me if I don’t tell you the full details of my plan. You’re not the first to seek me out. There are others. Some have left. Others have stayed. The choice is entirely yours. Take a look around, see what you make of us. You’re free to spend as long as you wish here. But if you try to leave without an escort, I warn you now you will be detained. As you’ve already experienced, we keep tight security here. No one leaves or enters the camp without an escort. It’s imperative that no one finds out where we are. The day they do is the day I’m dead. If you want any chance for a cure for redfleur, you’ll respect that.’

  She cannot take her eyes from his face, and she has to speak, she has to say the things that are tumbling around her head.

  ‘You know what they’re saying about you. That you’re something new. Something genetic. Maybe northern, maybe not. They say you have scales. You can breathe like a fish, stay underwater for hours. I know it can’t be true but people talk about it like it’s real.’

  The man studies her for a moment. He says, ‘I know exactly what they’re saying about me.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Nothing more. Not now.’

  He opens the door, and a surge of bright light spills across the threshold. It is summer outside, and warm. She can hear birds. She stares through the doorway, not knowing what to do or what has just happened. The man holds the door, waiting. She gets to her feet. As she passes him, he says, ‘We’ll speak again,’ and she sees in the harsh clarity of daylight the details of the scarring on his face, the ridges and the discolouring of the skin, where the redfleur has razed, and the redfleur has let him go. She thinks about what is in his blood, tries to imagine the value of the body standing before her, so quiet and still. She tries to guess at his age, and cannot. There is something timeless about him. Again she recalls the stories she has heard, the firefly words on the radio, and she thinks, now I understand.

  Vikram watches the doctor go out into the camp. She looks bewildered, passing a hand over her eyes, her head turning slowly from one side to the other as she takes in the site, the people engaged in their various activities, who nod to her as she passes or extend a hand to introduce themselves. If he’d had that effect on people back in Osiris, things might have been different.

  He might never have left.

  He looks for Mig and finds the boy playing with a piece of rope, alert, waiting. Someone in the camp has taught the boy a range of knots. Mig is a quick pupil.

  ‘No trouble getting her here?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Well done,’ he says.

  ‘Is she going to stay?’ Mig asks him.

  ‘I’m not sure. What did you think?’

  The boy shrugs. ‘She’s a doctor.’

  Vikram guesses he is thinking about Pilar, and does not push the question. The relationship between himself and the boy is a delicate one, webbed as it is with the peculiar circumstances of their meeting: his being alive, Pilar being dead, Mig showing Vikram a way out of the city, Vikram showing Mig the place where Pilar died, as they had agreed. They couldn’t go inside – the building had taken on the function of an incinerator. The smoke and stench of burning fat was leaking through the vents, permeating the air for streets around, a smell that Vikram had faced before, at Osirian funerals, but which was new to Mig. He wanted to protect the boy from it, but he couldn’t – not that Mig would have let him, even if it were possible.

  Sometimes Vikram thinks that Mig must resent him, for having lived. Other times he feels that the boy is more philosophical than he has ever been. At any rate, Mig is here, and since the farmhouse episode has given Vikram no reason to believe that he wishes to be anywhere else, which means he’s Vikram’s responsibility now. He does his best to keep the boy occupied, not wanting him to brood.

  ‘Have you thought any more about my suggestion?’

  ‘It’s a bad idea,’ says the boy violently. ‘A bad, bad idea.’

  Vikram lets it go, but he knows he can’t postpone for much longer. Volunteers are all very well in this venture, but soon he will need someone with real contacts. Someone who knows all the ins and outs of Patagonian society, and anti-society. Someone who can pull in favours.

  Someone like the Alaskan.

  ‘Wh
at about the other thing?’ he asks.

  ‘The Tarkie thing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I found someone for you.’

  ‘Good. Send them in.’

  Inside the cabin Vikram examines the holoma that belonged to Taeo Ybanez, passing it from hand to hand, admiring the smooth black surface and satisfying weight of it. The holoma fascinates him. On their journey south from Cataveiro the device has been knocked about in his backpack, thrown carelessly to the ground on more than one occasion, but its exterior remains unmarked. He has seen it operational only once, when Taeo showed him a projection of his partner Shri. He will never be able to forget finding Taeo dead, the holoma in his palm, the projection frozen with Shri in the act of leaning over his body, her presence in the room at once static and shimmering, as if she were there for some form of valediction. Vikram managed to turn it off by wrapping Taeo’s fingers around the sphere, as he had seen the Antarctican do before. But the holoma does not respond to Vikram’s touch.

  Outside the Council Chambers of Osiris there are dozens of objects enthroned in glass cases which, according to Osirian history, were relics and antiques. Vikram does not know whether the Antarcticans possessed this technology before Osiris was built, or have developed it since, but either way, it is a brutal reminder of the reality of the city’s schism from the rest of the world. In fifty years, while Osiris has stagnated, others have grown, altered, moved on. Things have appeared – like redfleur. Things have disappeared.

  A knock at the door interrupts his thoughts.

  ‘Come in,’ he calls.

  The man who enters is small and angular, with hair greying at the temples and heavy pouches under his eyes. Vikram recognizes the face: he has been with them for a few weeks. He recalls the man’s history. A mechanic, he lost his father recently; it wasn’t redfleur, but a sudden fever.

  ‘Mig says you can unlock this.’ He holds the holoma aloft, watching the man’s reactions closely. Most Patagonians would be horrified by the sight of foreign technology, but this man does not display any unease. He squints.

  ‘I can’t unlock it but I might be able to hack it.’