"We're going to have to do something about those things."
"Please, God. What do we say?"
"I'll do the talking."
"I need to know what our line is, Corrag. What if they separate us and interrogate us? Our stories need to line up."
"Look, Candia. Story line is not our strong suit. We need to appeal on an emotional level. I don't know what we're going to say yet."
The town, when they reached it around a bend in the road, sat above a sheltered bay lit by the stars. It was comprised of an odd array of boxy wooden houses with very little in the way of architectural interest. But there was a store and a dim, faraway sort of light on behind the etched glass. Nobody else seemed to be present or even accounted for. Corrag was giddy with delight, however, at the sight of a light, for it signified warmth. Her toes had long ago stopped feeling pain, which was generally known to be a danger sign. The door to the store, which sold iconic hardware and processed food items, was painted red in thick globs of ancient coats over the original wood, and it had a latch for a handle, which she pushed down with her useless, frozen thumb. When she pushed it creaked. They stepped forward inside onto the ancient faded linoleum of Frenchie's Home Goods. Corrag pulled off her gloves in a civilized gesture. The two men inside, one behind the counter, did not react to their presence, but rather continued to talk as if nothing had just happened. Corrag stopped her forward progress to listen. Candia pretended to be interested in an item on a display stand located in the middle of the floor. It seemed to be some sort of engine part she lifted from a crate of similar parts. Corrag wriggled her toes. There was no feeling in them. The men continued talking.
"They're holding their toes to the fire on that one."
"Oh, yah. The council boys don't give in that easy."
"And the McHenry boy scored twice on the power play."
"But the Kings need a clue. That coach is...”
"I don't know what you call it."
"Then the other day he had a shit with the Goose Bay crowd."
"It's Mercier driving the whole Salmon deal."
"Yah."
"Can I help you?"
The man behind the counter was the older of the two, although his grey hair was still thick and curly. The other man wore a felt hat and his face gave little away in terms of emotion. Corrag grabbed a box of frosted donuts and stepped to the counter.
"How much are these?"
"Those? About whatever it says on the box. Can you read it for me? My eyes are fading. Yours are probably better, although you look like you've been out in the cold a spell."
"Yes. I have. I'm freezing. It says three dollars ninety-seven. Is that in Canadian?"
"Oh, are you part of the college crowd up for the cross-country tri-motor sports event?"
"No, not quite, but sort of. I can pay with this."
The other man whistled the start of Hark the Herald Angels Sing and faced Candia and then looked away and stepped off balance to the side in embarrassment at the state of her appearance. The arm and leg chains were wrapped absurdly up in her sleeves and her face was black with dried blood and engine grease. Corrag slowly pulled out Marina's whalebone carving and placed it in her palm upon the counter. The man studied it and his muscles almost imperceptibly froze. He closed her palm for her.
"Your hands are freezing."
"Yes, we've been outside. It's cold out."
"Bring the donuts. Both of you come into the back. Julian watch the door for me."
"Yes, sir," said Julian, recovering a bit of his composure.
The back room had no heat, but the man wasted no time turning on the spare baseboard gas-fired unit along with an ancient flat screen on the wall that came up with some spreadsheet of inventory figures. He switched it to the provincial news channel and scanned rapidly with finger touches.
"Nothing here. Where are you two running from? Be honest with me. You have a Jonah token so I am trusted with your safety."
"The Nenkaja," said Corrag.
"Have the donuts," he said, and disappeared back in the store. Corrag ripped open the box and handed it to Candia. She fiddled with the screen until she got a home page and found some news from the main Repho channel, the Mann Report. There were disturbances in Democravia and the Council had been seized by something called the Union of Concerned Beings. Corrag sat on the faded sofa and took the box of donuts from Candia and popped a sugarcoated donut in her mouth. The newscast droned on about the rise and fall of stock prices on the Repho exchange. Sandelsky was doing well.
"They're still there. Democravia's gone. It's all been for nothing," said Corrag.
"But we're safe," said Candia. "That's good, right?"
"For now. Totally dependent on the kindness of strangers."
"What's a Jonah token?"
"I have no idea. Something about the carving Marina gave me. Said they'd know about it in Red Bay. She was right."
"God bless her," said Candia dreamily.
Corrag was drowsy, and as the heat in the room grew she found it almost impossible to keep her eyes open. At one point she bolted to her feet and opened the door back to the store. Nobody was there and the lights were off. She went back in and closed the door. The hum of the water pump kept the memories of their recent ordeal away. The flat screen had gone blank. Candia was asleep. She thought she might as well be also. She sat and stretched out as best she could next to Candia's grimy chains on the sofa and closed her eyes, and instantly she was dreaming. She was running on open ground, free, in the warmth of a Democravian summer. Beside her was a child, brown skinned, face like an angel.
Seven -- The Haven
Red Bay was an unaugmented town almost in its entirety; the people fished for sustenance and exported the dried herring and blues off to the Repho via airlift from St. John's. Many were part of the Jonah cult, which as Corrag learned, had spread along the Atlantic periphery out of the Hebrides and down into the Repho in pockets. The members of the cult were bound to old-style communication channels and wrote long missives to members in other seaboard towns and identified themselves with homemade letterhead stationery with the graph of a whale and the letter J flat in the belly of the whale. The letters were transported in fishing boats that ran along the coasts and crossed the blue waters in season. The cult leaders in Red Bay were Charles Fugel, childhood friend of Wilders Gersome, the owner of Frenchie's Home Goods and Fernanda Fredricksen. The two women, Candia and Corrag, by escaping from the Nenkaja, were accorded celebrity status among the members. They moved into a room in Fernanda's attic, and when the spring finally came at the end of April, Corrag had put on twenty extra pounds with the baby and continued to fatten on the fish stocks and squash dishes that Fernanda prepared in her kitchen. Fernanda's children had moved away to the Repho in search of other lives. They were augmented and never came home. Fernanda was lonely, but resigned to her loss. She took solace in the Jonah cult, which preached the Day of Atonement and release from the Belly of the Whale in the third generation.
The town youth stared at Corrag in awe and some in fear. The sun was climbing higher every day. There was a park next to the bay that Corrag liked. She was getting heavier and shorter of breath on the steps carved into the hillside, the earth held in with hemlock beams soaked in copper green. Candia had a boyfriend who worked on the fishing boats. She waited for the evenings, sleeping late, then went out to the quiet water, standing on the rocks encrusted with mussels, and watched the boats perform their docking maneuvers. The boats went out early in the mornings before dawn and returned at dusk and sometimes later depending on how far they had roamed in search of catch. There was an ebb and a flow to the life in Red Bay that made for a settled sort of momentary contentment. Corrag felt oddly restless despite herself, despite the need for calm to make a good place for the baby. It kicked and danced in its little world, responding to her thoughts and pronouncements. She sat on the bench at the top of the cliff and pulled up her shirt to let the sun play its tune. It was July.
&
nbsp; By August the mosquitoes descended in clouds when Corrag poked a fork into the ground to retrieve some early potatoes from Fernanda's garden. She filled a bucket with the little pearls as she swatted at the air. Straightening, she heard her name being called from the house. It was Candia. She was hardly ever around. Corrag headed back to the house, and halfway there was hit by a sudden urge, a cramping that made her pick up the pace. By the time she was at the house her water had broken. She sat down on the back steps, spilling the potatoes, as the waves of shooting pain overtook her.
"Candia," she called. Fernanda poked her head out the back door and the little grey house cat slipped inside, startled by the sudden air of surprise.
The two women and Euclive, a member from Goose Bay, got Corrag inside onto the sofa, and Candia went for the midwife. Fernanda did not have an emosponder. Most of the town did without, although there was a nanofiber line onto the North American circuits installed by the provincial government about ten years previous.
The midwife arrived with Candia. Corrag was feeling a little better. She sat up and smiled. The midwife took her temperature and ordered more blankets. Then Corrag felt the sharp overwhelming labor of childbirth. By the late afternoon, about six hours in, the baby's head emerged, a whorl of black hair in tight little curls. Candia gasped. Corrag bit her lips so hard they bled. The pain blanked out all thought. She felt like she'd been buried under a rockslide. When the baby burst out into the midwife's capable hands, with eyes in slits of black rage, Corrag took one look at the bundle of fibers and muscles wrapped in mucous membrane as it opened its mouth and gasped a bleating complaint. Her heart went out to the raging boy that it was.
"There now," said the midwife, putting him on Corrag's chest.
He took to feeding with ferocity, a good sign, and Corrag felt an even deeper contentment at the dropping of the milk in her breasts. His name would be Arthur. She thought Kevin would like that too.
Arthur's eyes changed from black to a hazel backlit by the same flame of enthusiasm as they had displayed on the day of his birth at the fountain of Corrag's full breasts. Weeks in, the members were concerned at his lack of a father. Fernanda lectured Corrag on her need to find a suitable marriage partner from the bachelors of the coastal towns. Corrag was quite happy alone in Fernanda's attic. She felt anchored against the possible storms that might come their way.
"I think I can do this."
"Yes, but the boy...”
"He is different."
"He will need a male."
"He will have males. There's Childers. There's Charles. There's Euclive."
"I won't argue. It's something we believe. A male and a female can do the job."
"What about two males. Or two females?"
"Not as good. Not as healthy. Period."
"Why not? Can't we accommodate to it?"
"We can, of course. But it's the ideal we want if we're talking about resisting the Whale. Our children don't have all the supports of the augmented world. They have to have it all, the resources our ancestors have always relied on. Inside here." Fernanda tapped her chest.
"But everyone is different."
"Okay, Corrag. I'll let you have the last word. But why not attend the Fishermen's Association ringo this Friday at the hall?"
"Okay. I will."
Fernanda left her alone in the attic with Arthur after that. Corrag thought about what she'd said. It didn't make any sense. She had known women in the Nenkaja, like Betty, who were fiercer and braver than any man. And she had known men, like Beithune, more deeply in tune with the natural and psychic worlds than any woman. The sources of a child's personality, the influences on their development, were impossible to predict or contain in any formula, no matter how time-honored. Arthur would have the benefit of the best of everything. She would never settle for just a man for the sake of conforming to anyone's outward picture of perfection. That was the same as accepting augmentation as the only ticket to adult advancement. She stroked the baby's cheek softly as it looked up into her eyes with growing understanding. The infinitude of possibilities would be his to discover, just as Corrag had seized it for herself from a world that had tried to shrink her to its predetermined dimensions.
That Friday in the afternoon, after Corrag's walk along the seaward trail, observing the slow progress of the icebergs in the bay and the profusion of boats in for the ringo, Fernanda accepted the baby from her outstretched hands at the door of the house. Candia and her boyfriend, Eddie Fox, were waiting a little further down the road, talking in a little, intimate huddle. Arthur began to cry, but Fernanda expertly calmed him, bouncing and rocking and cooing breathless endearments.
"You do love him, don't you, Fernanda?"
"He is adorable. Of course I do. You'll be fine. Go on."
Corrag felt that Fernanda understood how special Arthur was. She was lucky to have her. She felt like she was almost a mother to her and a grandmother to the baby she now held in her arms at the door. And Arthur, conceived amidst hate, would have the peaceful contentment of a settled childhood in a community of hard-minded, visionary resisters. But he would always be different, an extension of her own journey of discovery, and she doubted that any man could understand that continuum. It was no longer just Corrag alone. It was her and Arthur. A man would have to love the two of them undivided.
"Ready, Corrag? This will be fun," said Eddie.
"Ready as I ever will be," said Corrag in a dubious tone.
They approached the Fishermen's Hall, a large red building that housed the town offices along with a large barn used for meetings and storage of town equipment such as lifeboats. The line outside the hall ran along the side of the building and consisted of fishermen in for the weekend and the festivities of the ringo. The lifeboats had been moved outside and along the strand side of the hall. There were boats from up and down the seaboard and as far afield as Greenland and Machiasport, Maine. The three waited their turn, and when they got up to the front of the line there was some joking comment from one of the men at the door about the local girls. Corrag cringed. Once inside, they headed for the tables along the back where there was food. As they reached the table, the announcer on the rickety stage asked for silence and began to introduce the visitors assembled there with him. Corrag grabbed a lobster roll and turned and stared at the lineup, undifferentiated dignitaries on a military mission, a combined delegation from the Union of Concerned Beings and the Republican Homeland. The announcer, a friend of Euclive's whose name Corrag could not remember, droned on. Apparently it was important and they were all to be grateful for the visit. They were touring the region with the promise of future money for a deep water port to be constructed as part of the joint Arctic development program that the UCB and the Repho were now engaged in and which promised jobs and opportunity as fishing stocks continued to rebound from recent warm years. He finished his comments to polite applause and some jeering from the fishermen, who were generally not fond of government projects and in the case of the Jonah, covertly opposed to the expanding influence of what they termed the North American cyber-mind, or just simply the Whale. The announcer smiled.
"Now they'll start the music, right Eddie?" said Candia, shaking herself at the prospect.
Eddie laughed and hugged her around the shoulder.
"Any minute now. Corrag?"
But Corrag wasn't listening. She was stepping towards the stage to inspect the faces. She couldn't believe what she saw. There was Ben Calder, with a thinning crew cut, his face lined and drawn and in the uniform of a high-ranking officer of the new rulers of Democravia, the UCB, shifting his weight distractedly on stage with the slight forward slouch he had never outgrown from his teenage years. She looked at his face carefully as he looked out over the crowd. Then the lights dimmed and the contingent of visitors disappeared off the stage. Had she imagined it or had his face revealed a bored look of cynical disbelief? She wanted to believe in the old Ben, the wise-cracking high school kid who'd convinced her to trust her own
lights and not the adult, received version of who she might be. But this was a different Ben, a Ben of power and prestige, passing through the world at a remove, entrusted with the gears of governing, the mechanisms of control, an augmented man. If life were playing this kind of trick on her, she would have to play back. She had to know if it was Ben.
"Where are you going now, Corrag?" asked Candia disapprovingly.
"I'll be back," she answered, and breezed through the crowd as the music commenced. It was Hall of Waves by Okinawan, but nobody was dancing. She remembered at school dances in Edmundstown the flurry of activity that this song would set off with its power harmonics and lyrics about the surfer boys and the escape from the hall of waves that seemed to be a fate that they were all destined for. How ironic that it would come on now, to remind her of how far away and long off those days now were.
Outside the door she spied a knot of people headed down the hill to the water's edge. A twenty-foot whaler waited on the jetty to take them out to the torpedo boat docked out on the edge of open water, its bow just visible beyond the cliffs. She ran after until she was up on the shoulder of the man on the edge of the crowd; his crisp uniform and the jagged walk gave her a moment's jolt of uncertainty. But he couldn't have forgotten who she was. She touched his arm.
"Ben."
Ben turned around. He looked her in the face, and his blank, rigid features melted. He stopped walking as the group of men moved on down the hill. He said nothing, just searched her face quizzically. She got up as close to him as she could without revealing an inappropriate intimacy that might embarass him.
"Do you remember me? Corrag?"
He still said nothing, but his expression became distraught, as if she had reminded him of something deeply troubling. The he knelt and put his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes.
"Ben," said Corrag, kneeling beside him. "Are you alright? I just couldn't believe I saw you in there. After all these years. Do you remember, Ben? The last time I saw you, the dam, Abel Marin? I was given a probation sentence and you got sent back to the Basin. I tried to contact you. I prayed and prayed you'd be all right."
The Victor's Heritage (The Jonah Trilogy Book 2) Page 24
