Tamaruq

by E. J. Swift

  In my country, there is a famous mountain where people once went to end their lives when they felt themselves of no more use to family or society. This was not viewed as a crime, but as an act of honour.

  I wonder if Biruk felt honour, or only shame.

  I’ve decided to stop recording.

  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.

  June 2417

  It’s the early hours of the morning, hot as hell despite the aircon, and I can’t sleep. What’s the date – I should say the date. Second of June, twenty-four seventeen, there you go. My name is Davida Akycha Kvest and I’m a redfleur virologist. I’m the only one left, actually, except Yoseph, but Yoseph’s given up, I can see it in his face. He should leave but he doesn’t know where to go. What would he do? He’s as institutionalized as I am. They keep promising me replacements. I’ll believe that when I see it.

  I’ve got into a bad habit – sleep for a few hours and then wake and lie here, sweating and turning in my bunk. Thoughts revolving round my head like a bloody carousel. Nights when I can’t help thinking about how my life might have been different, if it weren’t for this one fucking bug that we just can’t beat.

  I might sleep better for a start.

  I was meant to retire a year ago. Strange to reflect on old notions: always thought I’d get a place on the coast back home. Lead a quiet life, fishing, music, good food, good wine. Watching the Arctic shipping fleet go by. I do believe I’ve earned that. But I’m still here. Holed up in a laboratory in the middle of the desert, hundreds of kilometres from civilization.

  Somehow I can’t leave. It’s as though the rest of the world operates on a different time stream, one that I slipped out of years ago, and even if I wanted to, there is no way of rejoining. The dislocation is too great. Life is mutable, yes, and selves change, but there are some lines that cannot be undrawn.

  Here, there is us, and there is the redfleur. Me, and my nemesis, to give it a fictional terminology. The redfleur is as tied to me as if we’re stitched together. Every day we rise to do battle at dawn. We lose, we win, we lose. We fight a greater war.

  Often on these nights when I can’t sleep I make a cup of tea and go and sit outside the compound. On a clear night the stars reveal a strange, shadowy, denuded landscape. On other nights it’s black as a void. I’d say it feels like world’s end, except at the end of the world there should be silence. The desert is never silent. You can hear things. You can hear the sand moving. You can hear the wind. You can always hear the wind, even if it’s a way away, howling gently, a hint of wolfish voices tucked in its call, like a promise.

  THE PILOT

  THE DOOR TO the cockpit opens. Ramona’s mother climbs through and settles herself in the co-pilot seat. She has changed out of her own clothes into some of Ramona’s spares, which are too big for her, but at least they’re clean. They sit in silence. Below, the shadow of the aeroplane skims over the dunes, as wave after wave of desert passes by. Ramona keeps the plane steady and an eye to the skies to east and west.

  ‘How far is it to the south?’ asks Inés.

  ‘I’m not sure. There are maps here, but there’s nothing to indicate where that place was. We just have to keep heading south.’

  ‘So what shall I tell them back there? Days, do you think?’

  ‘Yes. Days. Maybe weeks. We’ll have to stop at Panama for supplies. Maybe in the highlands too.’

  ‘I’ll tell them,’ says Inés, but she doesn’t move. ‘They were scared,’ she says. ‘And angry.’

  ‘I get it.’

  ‘It’s every person’s right to take revenge.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Then why are you angry? I don’t know what you saw inside that place. Not yet. But I can guess.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it, Ma.’

  ‘You think it’s worse for a daughter to see her mother kill someone than for a mother to watch her daughter do the same?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She fights back the tears. ‘I don’t know.’

  She does not know how to explain that if the deaths lie with her, she can reconcile herself, or at least she can see to a future where she can reconcile herself. That the prisoners took their revenge should not be any different; why should they not, even the youngest? But she can’t erase the scene in the yard from her mind, any more than she can shake the image of the experiments behind the glass. It’s her fault, for choosing to go there. For choosing to ignore that this was a possible outcome.

  She changes the subject.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about the jinn?’

  ‘What is the point in telling you?’

  ‘I would have come home. I would have looked after you.’

  Her mother puffs air.

  ‘You know I would have, Ma. But you didn’t tell me. I had to find out from Carla instead.’

  ‘So, every little thing I should write to you now? If I step on a snake, and my ankle swells up, shall I write? If a mosquito bites me, shall I write? If I fall and scrape my hands, shall I write?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. This is different. This is the jinn. What if you hadn’t made it through the conversion? What if you got a fever, the next day? I might never have got to see you again. Don’t you understand how upsetting that is?’

  ‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’

  ‘Ma!’

  Inés gazes out of the window, her eyes following the ripple of the dunes below.

  ‘I don’t like goodbyes.’

  They collapse back into silence. Ramona wants to say something more, but her tongue feels clumsy in her mouth; everything she says will be wrong.

  ‘The skin patches,’ she says at last. ‘You promised.’

  ‘When we’re south.’ Inés replies without looking at her.

  ‘All right.’

  She reaches over and squeezes her mother’s hand.

  ‘I know you don’t like goodbyes. But it would have broken my heart.’

  ‘You have a strong heart, my lucky one. You would have survived. You will survive, when the day comes.’ Inés points to the west, where a bank of mustard clouds is building between the desert and the sky. ‘What is that?�
�

  ‘It’s a sandstorm, Ma. We’ll need to land.’

  Ramona’s eyes itch with tiredness. Her heart is sore and she wants nothing more than to curl up in the hold of the plane and sleep for days. But they aren’t safe yet.

  ‘I can’t promise you we’ll make it home,’ she says. ‘I can’t promise them.’

  ‘All your life I tell you this, my girl. I would have liked to protect you from it.’ Inés sighs. ‘But not everything is possible.’

  PART SEVEN

  BOKOLU

  OSIRIS

  A MOTOR BOAT breaks from the escalating chaos of the city, streaking across the long stretch of open water towards the waiting ship. Confusion breaks out on deck. Medics rush to the rail, shouting, cables whir as platforms are lowered to the surface. Karis is shunted to one side. He isn’t prepared for what comes back – the bodies, lolling on stretchers, moaning, the mess of blood, the places where limbs should be and are not. The medics converge. He hears snatches of conversation. A super-ship has sunk. It takes a moment to register. The Boreals have sunk one of their fucking super-ships. And something else. A shark. There was a shark. Past the medics, glimpses of eyes vacant with shock, of shredded, ribboned flesh. Impossible to unsee. The medics abandon one of their cases. In the minutes Karis has been standing here, she’s died.

  ‘Can we clear some space here!’ a medic yells. Karis feels a hand on his shoulder, another officer.

  ‘Go below deck, Io. Nothing you can do here.’

  In his windowless cabin, the bombardment continues. Every moment he thinks himself on the verge of sleep another distant rumble drags him back to alertness and a humid, breathless fear. He wakes uncertain how long he has slept, or if he has slept at all. His body in the narrow confines of the bunk feels mummified, like he’s lain here for centuries, slowly calcifying but conscious throughout. It is a gargantuan act of will to raise his knees, swing his legs over the edge of the bunk, and switch on the light. He waits, listening for the sound of detonations. He can’t hear anything of that now. Only the creak and hum of the ship, sounds that cause him a different kind of alarm, persistent and niggling. Everyone knows these ships aren’t ready for ocean faring. But here they are. Here he is.

  He goes to the communal wash area to splash water on his face. The beard on his chin is at a week’s growth now. It feels unnatural to him, but there seems no point in shaving. Who cares what he looks like here? He makes his way to the officer’s mess, then changes his mind and goes up on deck, unable to ignore the heavy silence any longer.

  When they arrived last night there was little to see, except for the sodium mass of the city rising out of the ocean, imposing but mysterious, like a figure beneath a veil in the mist, whose intent is yet to be revealed. The ship carrying Karis is a standard defence vessel and it stayed clear of the action, retaining camouflage, until the wounded came in. It was a super-ship that first broke through the metres-high chain fence encircling the city and proceeded to attack the Boreal fleet waiting on the other side.

  Today the sky is overcast and the sea looks hostile, turbulent, to Karis’s untrained eye. It makes him nervous. Two of the surviving Antarctican super-ships are visible, as are the outlines of several Boreal submarines moored by the nearest Osirian towers, which means both sides have reversed camouflage, at least for now, and some form of ceasefire has been agreed. Or some of the fleet have reversed camouflage, but not all, and this is just another element in the game. Karis does not doubt that at this moment other wars are under way, invisible wars of wavelengths and espionage, as each fleet attempts to ascertain what and who the other is carrying. Ostensibly, both sides are adhering to the Nuuk Treaty. Karis doesn’t like to think about what might happen if that changes.

  Parts of the city continue to smoulder. The sky is grey and the smoke is grey and the city is grey and the churning sea is grey. It looks like a place that has long been forsaken, a place from which there is no coming back. A place like Ruination Ridge, he thinks, picturing the Bokolu’s dripping pincers, and then he remembers those maimed bodies on deck. Not for the first time, Karis wonders what the hell Maxil Qyn was thinking when she issued the command to retaliate.

  Then Karis thinks about the Boreals, about those sleek, deadly submarines which arrived in stealth and were meant to be years from completion. He imagines a torpedo streaking through the water from below. He imagines being blown up, the ship coming apart, his physical body obliterated in the explosion, or worse, scattered in unidentifiable parts. It seems a terrible thing, to come apart. All of a sudden the deck feels less solid, and Karis hopes the other wars, the invisible wars, are being fought. There is still blood on the deck, dark and congealed.

  A couple of defence officers whose names Karis has been told but cannot recall wander up to join him at the rail. They nod a good morning. Both have the faces of the exhausted, eyes bloodshot, mouths pinched and dry. Karis assumes his own appearance is equally unsavoury.

  The first officer gestures in the direction of Osiris.

  ‘Apparently the place is in uproar. One of their leaders got shot last night.’

  ‘Who was that?’ Karis asks, although the name will be meaningless to him, and to these two, seeing as they know nothing of the internal politics of the city.

  ‘Not a name, a pseudonym. Was it the Silverfish? Something like that.’

  ‘I thought it was Rechnov,’ says the other.

  ‘No, that’s the east side. They have ruling families, apparently. It all sounds a bit pre-Neon.’

  ‘Whatever, the name’s irrelevant. The fact is she’s probably going to die. And they’re not happy. The Osirians.’

  The officer doesn’t add what Karis assumes all three of them are thinking: that the entire situation is one massive fuck-up.

  ‘How many did we lose?’ he asks.

  ‘Still waiting on the report.’

  ‘People are going to hate us when we go home,’ says the first officer. Her tone is matter-of-fact.

  ‘Not if we win,’ says the other, who has a nice, muscular physique, a physique Karis appreciates more than usual against the apocalyptic backdrop facing them. ‘Then it will be a liberation.’

  ‘And if we don’t?’ he asks.

  Neither of the officers reply. If they don’t win, it will be an even greater fuck-up. And they will have shown the Boreals their hand. Karis thinks of his family back home. Bia. His niece Grace. He would like to ask the other officers whether they share his fears, but to express such doubts would be unwise. His position here is tenuous enough as it is.

  ‘Look over there.’

  The first officer points. She is looking away from the city, towards the open ocean. Karis squints, unclear as to what she is indicating. Then he sees it, still some distance away on the horizon, but drawing steadily nearer. A ship, making no attempt to disguise itself. The reverse in fact, it is approaching with solar sails fully extended, daylight refracting and glancing off the skin, so that the ship at times glows entirely white. As it draws closer, Karis can make out the colours of the Pan-African Solar Corporation and the International Nuuk Alliance.

  ‘Mum’s come to give us a scolding,’ remarks the first officer. The second laughs.

  ‘Good luck to her.’

  She is on the ocean bed. She is lying on the ocean bed and all around her are the bones of the ships who came. A long time ago. The ships who sank. A ship weighs upon on her chest. There are faces. With skin. Drifting down. She is in a room. She is in a room and there are faces. Slipping in and out of focus, down through the water. Faces should come with attachments, with tags and memories, but there are none. However hard she looks, there is nothing.

  Pain in her chest, dull and deep. The faces loom and recede. It is important, she realizes, that they should not leave altogether. And a feeling of panic suffuses the ocean bed and the bones and the room and wherever the hell she is.

  She locks on to the first face.

  I know you.

  Something else. She wai
ts, bewildered.

  Voices.

  I can’t stay any longer, I’ve got to be there in half an hour—

  You go, we’ll stay—

  You’ll find me – if anything changes—

  A slam of recognition.

  I know you.

  She dredges her consciousness.

  ‘Dien,’ she croaks. ‘Wait.’

  The emergency summit is called in the Osirian Council Chambers. Representatives are ferried into the city under a Solar Corporation guard, and as the Antarctican delegation passes through the city’s idiosyncratic waterways, all of them deserted, Karis senses they are being watched.

  Their destination, the Eye Tower, is situated in the centre of the city and has so far escaped harm. Karis is taken aback by the undeniable beauty of its interior, the tall fir trees and the twin columns of the aquarium that wrap around the lifts that rise through the building’s core. Osirian staff direct them through the building. No one will meet Karis’s eye, though when he looks away he senses the Osirians watching him, covertly, with fascination, as though trying to decide how he has been put together and why. After scrutinizing the city’s outputs for so many years, it’s hard not to stare back. Have these people been complicit in Osiris’s disappearance, or is this clashing of cultures as much a shock to them as it is to Karis?

  The Chambers are in the shape of an amphitheatre. Everyone has an assigned place. Overseeing, and leading on the negotiations, is a team of ambassadors from the Pan-African Solar Corporation. Representing the city of Osiris are two individuals: a man, sharply dressed but with the slack, greyish face of someone who has not slept for weeks, and a shabbily clad woman in a headscarf.

  Karis taps the shoulder of the woman seated in front of him, an immaculately turned-out military type he knows as Evie Aariak, and speaks in patois.

  ‘Who are the Osirians?’

  She replies without turning.

  ‘That’s Linus Rechnov, a member of their so-called founding families, and the woman is known as Dien. She’s from the west – the rough side of town.’