Tamaruq

by E. J. Swift

  Tuning out the noise of the summit, Karis becomes aware of some other kind of disturbance at the doors. Raised voices carry from outside. Nkem Sosanya has noticed too. She beckons one of the Corporation guards and gives him an instruction. He goes outside.

  Aariak leans back.

  ‘Io.’

  ‘What?’

  She doesn’t speak but jerks her head in the direction of the door. Karis gets the picture. She wants him to check it out. He resents the order, but then he thinks, why the hell not? He’s had enough of his seat in these chambers for one lifetime.

  He slips from the tiered seats and makes his way around the back of the delegates. In the corridor outside, he finds the security guards and Sosanya’s man trying to pacify a fierce-looking woman with a rifle and an adolescent boy who darts at the door when Karis steps out, only to be caught and yanked away by one of the guards. Karis stops, taken aback. The woman is shouting in a language that sounds like Portuguese but isn’t. Spanish. Is she Patagonian? How the hell has she got here?

  The situation is escalating. The woman grasps her rifle and speaks threateningly. The guards’ hands go to their guns. Now the boy is shouting too, jumping up and down. The woman turns in despair to Karis and tries again with him. He spreads his hands.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re saying.’

  She raises her eyes to the ceiling and shouts something in her own language that Karis takes as a curse, directed at him, or some higher entity. Then she addresses him again.

  ‘Vikram Bai,’ she says. ‘Vikram Bai. Is. Here.’

  The name goes through him like an electric shock. How the fuck does she know about Vikram?

  He glances back at the doors. Has anyone else heard the commotion? Where have these two come from? He should go back in. Tell Aariak. Tell her they’ve been rumbled.

  The woman’s eyes are fixed on his, the boy’s as well, the boy is looking at him like he’s a murderer. They can tell something is up. Move, he tells himself, but everyone is staring at him now and his feet refuse to obey.

  The woman gestures; she wants something to write with.

  Karis pulls the smartcloth they’ve been using to communicate while in session from his pocket and unfolds it. He offers it to the woman. She stares at it warily, then takes it with her fingertips. She taps out three words in Boreal English. She hands the cloth back to Karis.

  Vikram.

  Redfleur.

  Cure.

  He stares at her. She stares back at him, the desperation in her eyes clear as she tries to convey whatever it is that she needs to communicate.

  Karis thinks of Vikram Bai, the Osirian man who the Antarcticans found through their spy cameras walking into the African tower last night. Vikram Bai, who Karis knows is their one remaining bargaining chip, a last chance to keep foreign feet from landing on the peninsula. Vikram Bai, who is rumoured to have a cure for redfleur, as this woman clearly knows.

  He knows what Evie Aariak would do. She’d take this pair away and she’d shoot them in a deserted waterway.

  If he lets Vikram go, he could be exiled for treason. Aariak will make it her mission to end him. She’s a true defender. He looks at the woman and the boy who are suddenly at his mercy. Everything he has heard within the Chambers and outside of it is tangled up with these two skinny Patagonians. The singing at the funeral, his mother’s singing, Shri Nayar, standing in his office: you should be ashamed. And it occurs to him that all his life he has done things without thinking about whether they matter.

  ‘Come with me,’ he says. He holds out his hand. ‘Come.’

  The Patagonian woman looks at him suspiciously.

  ‘Antarctican?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You have to trust me.’

  She might not understand the words but she takes his meaning. He can see the consternation in her face as she makes her decision. She looks to the doors of the Chambers. They can both hear the shouting on the other side. He senses there isn’t much time left. Then she nods.

  ‘Yes.’

  The noise. Cutting through Vikram’s head like a laser bisecting ice. He doesn’t know where the commotion is coming from or what is making it but it hurts and he wishes it would stop. It doesn’t stop. It grows louder.

  He hears the distinct sound of a shot.

  His eyes open. His vision is blurred and he panics momentarily, thinking he’s been blinded but then it clears, leaving a bright keening pain behind his eyes. He finds himself lying in an empty bathtub, bound at the ankles and the wrists, in a bathroom he’s never seen before. Fragments of memory return one by one – last night, the shark – walking through the city – the silent towers – the assailants coming at him from either side—

  He can hear the creak of footsteps making their way through what must be another part of an apartment. He wriggles backwards. Manages to get to a sitting position. Somehow it’s important to be sitting when he dies.

  The footsteps grow closer. They’ll find him, any minute now. There’s a certain irony, he thinks, in having made it this far. Right to the heart of Osiris. One regret burns at him. Adelaide. He didn’t find her. She was here and he didn’t find her.

  The door handle turns. Vikram keeps his eyes steady. Whoever it is, he’ll meet them face on.

  A slight, furtive figure steps through the doorway.

  ‘Hello,’ says Mig. He is grinning.

  Vikram looks at him and begins to laugh. He can feel the relief crashing off him in waves. The boy’s alive.

  Mig explains as they untie him. They’ve all come. Him. The pilot. The Alaskan, though she’s in the aeroplane. This one – he jerks a thumb behind him, and Vikram sees an unfamiliar man hovering in the apartment behind – is a Tarkie. But he brought us to you.

  ‘What time is it?’ Vikram asks. ‘Are the talks still going?’

  The pilot nods.

  ‘But I don’t think there’s much time.’

  ‘What about Adelaide? Adelaide Rechnov?’

  The pilot looks blank, but the Antarctican obviously recognizes the name. He switches to Boreal English, resisting the urge to seize the man’s shoulders and shake the information out of him.

  ‘Do you know if she’s alive?’

  ‘I don’t know. They didn’t expect—’ He stops, seeing Vikram’s face.

  ‘I have to see her,’ he says urgently.

  ‘If you don’t go into the talks right now, this place will be bombed before you can. There’s no time for anything else. We have to get in there.’

  ‘Come on,’ says the pilot impatiently. ‘Why are we waiting?’

  Vikram looks from face to face, divided. Mig. Ramona. Karis. Their expectation is perfectly clear. They’ve come for him. Why is he waiting? What could be more important than this? He knows they are right, but it doesn’t reduce the compulsion to run, run away, run to her, to rush into a room and say: how is this possible that we are both here in this place, not dead?

  But the three of them are standing there, waiting for him.

  Mig puts a tentative hand on his elbow. He starts to steer.

  ‘This way.’

  As they help him out of the apartment, Vikram sees the uniformed body of an Antarctican sprawled in the doorway. The pilot steps over it. Her face is grim. She still has her hand on the rifle. As they hurry back towards the Eye Tower, Mig begins to tell him their tale.

  ‘You can’t go in there, the summit’s still in session—’

  ‘And it’s about to break down,’ says Karis. ‘Unless I can get this man in front of Sosanya. So let us through or—’

  The pilot raises her rifle and points it resignedly at the head of the guard.

  ‘I can vouch for them,’ says Karis. ‘They’re here to help.’

  As the doors inch ajar Vikram can already hear the conflicting voices welling from inside. Numbly, he remembers there was a time when he was here before, when it was he and Adelaide against the world. Now the world is larger and darker and she’s gravely injured
in a hospital room and he’s on his own.

  He steps inside the Chambers. The other three move defensively to surround him. He sees the faces of those in the room, bright with anger, no one he recognizes, no one he knows except – he sees Linus Rechnov, the man turning pale with shock – people are turning towards the speaker’s platform where a woman with a shaved head rises, protesting over the intrusion, and the man called Karis runs up to the speaker’s platform and whispers in the woman’s ear.

  She sits upright, startled. Her gaze settles upon Vikram. He is intensely aware of her scrutiny, of the others at his side, Mig bristling with preemptive outrage, the pilot warily resting one hand on her rifle; of the Antarcticans staring at him in trepidation, and one woman in particular at Karis with hatred.

  Quiet falls through the room.

  The Solar Corporation leader stands.

  ‘Lock down this room. No one leaves until I say.’ She beckons to Vikram’s party. ‘Come with me.’ She glances across to Linus and another woman who Vikram recognizes instantly as a westerner. ‘You two as well.’

  There is one more person they need, the pilot tells him. The Alaskan. They sit around the table, Sosanya insisting upon silence until she arrives, escorted by Solar Corporation guards. The Alaskan settles into her chair with a grunt. She looks happier than anyone else in the room.

  The African, Nkem Sosanya, folds her hands. She looks directly at Vikram and speaks in Boreal English, causing Karis to start with surprise; she’s been concealing her knowledge of the language all along.

  ‘Karis Io says you have an immunity to redfleur.’

  Now that he is here, the focus of the room and of this quietly commanding woman, the words seem strange and difficult.

  ‘I survived it once. I don’t know what that means. I believe the answer lies with this city.’

  ‘Yes. I can see the scars on your face. We have been fortunate to keep redfleur outside of the Corporation’s zones, but our citizens abroad have not been so lucky. If you really have immunity, you have the potential to save millions of lives.’ She glances to the door. ‘There is not much time. The Boreals and the Antarcticans are on the brink of open warfare. I will have to make an announcement.’

  The pilot says something urgently to the Alaskan, who clears her throat.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not just the matter of Vikram Bai and his immunity. Or rather it is, but it goes deeper than that. Ramona Callejas has uncovered a Boreal experimentation site north of the belt. The experiments are kidnapped southerners. We have the diaries of the head scientist which suggest that this city was once used as an ancillary centre for genetic experimentation.’

  The Alaskan nods towards Vikram.

  ‘It’s possible that this is linked to this man’s immunity.’

  ‘Or it’s something to do with Osiris itself,’ says Vikram. ‘Like the tea. I always wondered about the coral tea.’

  Sosanya takes the news with more equanimity than might have been expected. Vikram wonders if anything would faze her.

  ‘We’ll need verification for what you are saying.’

  The pilot leans forwards, tapping the table. ‘You can hear the diaries for yourself.’ The Alaskan translates. Sosanya nods.

  ‘An experimentation site?’ Her face wrinkles with disgust. ‘This will take days to unravel. For now, I need to make an announcement.’

  The Alaskan coughs and Vikram says, ‘There are some conditions attached.’

  ‘You’d better state them quickly.’

  ‘The Alaskan requests Antarctican citizenship. El Tiburón,’ Vikram sees Sosanya’s eyebrows raise at the name but she says nothing, ‘requires international immunity. And you must promise to make a formal investigation into Tamaruq, the centre in the north.’

  ‘I can make this happen.’

  The pilot speaks to him quickly, gesturing to Sosanya.

  ‘Ramona wants your personal guarantee that you will not let Tamaruq go. She wants to know that you will give your last breath if necessary to shut it down.’

  Sosanya turns to the pilot.

  ‘I give you my word, Ramona Callejas.’

  Ramona nods, apparently satisfied, and continues to watch the exchange closely.

  ‘Osiris gets independence,’ says Vikram. He glances at Linus and the western woman. ‘As a unified city.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  Vikram looks around the table. His mouth feels dry.

  ‘Have I missed anything?’

  No one speaks.

  ‘And you.’ Sosanya looks at him straight on. ‘Have you considered what this means? Your life will no longer belong to you.’

  ‘I won’t go with anyone,’ he says. ‘They can take my blood, samples, whatever they need, but I won’t be put in a laboratory.’

  ‘That is not what I meant. Yes, I can make this a condition, but what I meant is your life is not your own, at least for the immediate future, until your immunity is established and can be formulated into something usable. You will need to be protected. You will have no privacy. People will come here from all over the world, scientists, the curious. It is my duty as the leader of the Nuuk Alliance to act in the interests of global health but it is my duty under the same act to advise you as a citizen. Do you understand me?’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘We will have to test others, of course. Regardless of the cause of your immunity, it seems clear to me that it’s related to the city. The more people we can find like you, the better our chances of brokering peace. For now, please stay here. None of you go anywhere. You’re under the protection of the Solar Corporation.’ She stands. ‘And now I have to avert a war between two hemispheres.’

  ‘There’s someone I need to see—’

  Linus is also on his feet. ‘My sister—’

  ‘I will find out her status.’

  When Sosanya has left the room there is a moment when nobody says anything and then they all start talking at once. Vikram’s attention turns to Linus Rechnov. He speaks quietly.

  ‘Can’t you find out? About Adelaide?’

  ‘Our comms are blocked during the summit.’

  ‘But she’s alive? Won’t someone just tell me that?’

  ‘She was this morning,’ says Linus.

  Vikram struggles to keep the accusation out of his voice.

  ‘Did you know she got out the tower?’

  ‘No! Stars, no. I thought she was dead. When we got you out we looked for her, everywhere, like I told you. I wouldn’t have kept that from you.’ His voice is earnest. ‘My people died inside looking for her.’

  ‘He’s telling the truth,’ says the western woman, Dien. ‘I was there when he found out. She was picked up by two of us. Two westerners, they’re with her now. Then she worked with us. She had a pseudonym. The Silverfish.’

  ‘Dien was with her,’ says Linus. ‘When it happened.’ He looks tiredly at Vikram. ‘I don’t understand what just happened. I don’t understand what you are, what this immunity is, what you’re talking about with this redfleur. But if it makes these people leave us alone then I’m eternally in your debt.’

  ‘I don’t know what I am either,’ says Vikram slowly. ‘But I know it’s something to do with Osiris. Maybe it’s related to what Ramona found. Maybe it’s something else. I might never know.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s best not to ask,’ says Dien abruptly.

  Vikram wants to ask Dien if Adelaide has talked about him, about their time together, or how she felt about him, or the day she thought he died. He wants to ask all these things and more about the woman he doesn’t know. This other Adelaide. The Silverfish. What she’s done. Why she has become an emissary for the west. But looking at Dien’s exhausted face he knows she won’t have the strength to lie, and he’s not sure he is ready for the truth.

  After that they sit and wait for Nkem Sosanya to return, no one having any more energy or desire for conversation. The sun through the window-wall casts a soporific warmth across the table. The room is one L
inus Rechnov has sat in many times, for sub-committees and private meetings, meetings designed to flatter and persuade, meetings from which Linus usually emerged with a card in hand, but he doesn’t recognize it today, or the people in it, or the city outside. Even Vikram is a stranger now, not that Linus ever knew the man, or rather he knew him in order to use him, more than once, though not without honourable intentions. Honour is a foolish concept anyway, an ideal admirable in theory but in practice deeply problematic, almost impossible to uphold, and yet he’s going to need it now, if Osiris is to have a future. And somehow Vikram’s return has made that a possibility, when for months it has felt like there were none, only the abyss of his family’s legacy, a legacy that Adelaide, with the impossibility that is so fucking typical of his sister, has managed to subvert. By reincarnating only to get herself shot.

  Across the table, Dien puts her head in her arms and sleeps, or seems to sleep. In her dream, or daydream, there is a line of trees. She grasps the branches of the first and levers herself up into the canopy, and then she swings to the next branch, and keeps on swinging, because the trees don’t stop, they continue, perhaps forever, and beneath them is a field of flowers. The blooms reach towards her feet, petals caressing her soles. She hears a cry. Let go, she tells herself. You have to let go. And she waits for the moment where her fingers will straighten.