Austral

by Paul McAuley

  ‘But it was made by your people. They designed and planted all this.’

  ‘They quickened it. It’s grown wild and strange in its own way since then.’

  At first glance you might have thought that the two of us, chatting away as we sat in the warm sun, were good companions resting in the middle of a leisurely hike. But the girl’s hands were crawling around each other in her lap, and every so often, when she thought that I wasn’t looking, she glanced sideways at me, nervous, appraising.

  She said, ‘What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Do you think that your parents and the other ecopoets should have made people like you?’

  ‘Your mother and father made you what you are,’ I said. ‘How is that different?’

  ‘But they made you into something else.’

  ‘A monster, you mean. Less than human.’

  I wasn’t angry. I’d heard it all a hundred times before. The ignorant, the prejudiced, the genuinely curious – they all expected me to justify my existence. They all wanted to know what it was like to live inside the skin of someone edited down to their germline, a symbol of the free ecopoets’ rebellion, so on.

  The girl said, ‘Is that what you think you are? A monster?’

  ‘I’m as human as you,’ I told her. ‘Just a little different, is all.’

  Remember who you are, Mama used to tell me when I came home upset because tourists had stared at me or had made remarks or taken pictures. Remember that this is your land. You live here, it’s yours by right. They are only visitors.

  The girl asked if was it true I had a layer of blubber under my skin, could I close my nostrils underwater? Having fun with me now. I thought that was a good sign, it meant that she was relaxing. Letting down her guard. And if I told her about myself, who and what I was, it would help her understand why I had done what I’d done, maybe even win her sympathy.

  ‘I’m nothing like a seal,’ I said. ‘Or any other kind of animal. All of my edits are based on human genes. Some Inuit, some Fuegian. Storing brown fat and burning it when I need to stay warm, that’s a Neanderthal trait. My elevated metabolism, higher core temperature and what’s called non-shivering thermogenesis, I get that from the Kawésqar. You know who they are, the Kawésqar?’

  The girl shrugged.

  ‘They’re native to Patagonia. Back in the day, they could sleep naked in primitive shelters at zero degrees. There’s a story that once upon a time a group of Kawésqar visiting Esperanza were mistaken for huskies. Attacked by ignorant yahoos. Of course, we’re a lot bigger than most Kawésqar. And most other people, come to that. Some say it’s just a side effect of the genetic mix. Others claim it was designed in. Increasing someone’s size lowers their surface area to volume ratio. Minimises loss of body heat, so on. Though if we were smaller, I guess, we wouldn’t be so scary. People might pay less attention to us.’

  ‘Isn’t it what you are, how you were made, that people are really afraid of?’ the girl said. She seemed genuinely interested.

  ‘There are plenty of countries where it’s legal to change the germline. Where people like your father don’t discriminate against people like me.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s ever talked about huskies.’

  ‘He’s a member of the party that was planning to neuter us. Hard not to take that personally. But that’s not what this is about.’

  ‘No, you want money,’ the girl said flatly.

  ‘I want a little help is all.’

  ‘Then call him. Call my father. Get this over with.’

  So much for winning her sympathy.

  ‘I will. In a little while. When we get to where we’re going.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me where that is.’

  ‘You’ll see when we get there.’

  ‘Maybe I won’t go any further.’

  ‘Of course you will.’

  As we walked on, I asked the girl whether she knew the story of how our grandfather, Edward Toomy, had met my grandmother.

  ‘I know he ran around with ecopoets when he wasn’t much older than me, he had a son he didn’t know about until years later. My father’s enemies tried to use it against him.’ The girl glanced at me, said, ‘Didn’t he die, the son? Your father.’

  ‘His fishing boat sank in a storm,’ I said. ‘A couple of years after that we were rounded up and exiled to Deception Island.’

  I’d been three years old back then, have only vague memories of a bustle of women in the aftermath, of being scared when Mama clutched me so fiercely I thought she’d never let me go. I can’t remember if she cried then. I know she didn’t ever cry afterwards. She turned her grief outward, turned it into anger. I don’t really remember my father, either. Little more than a looming friendly presence, rough hands scarred by hard work. I can’t see see his face, can’t hear his voice.

  The girl said that she was sorry, and seemed to mean it.

  ‘I’m not angry with you,’ I said. ‘Or trying to make you feel guilty. But we’re family, and you deserve to know the true story of how Eddie and Isabella met, how they had a son together. It’s a pretty good story, too. Has a little of everything. Adventure. Romance. Oh, and betrayal. We mustn’t forget betrayal, because that’s what led to this.’

  The Ballad of Isabella and Eddie

  When Isabella Schilling Morales moved to the Antarctic Peninsula, the world was still struggling to adapt to the consequences of global warming. Climate change driven by the increase in the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans had been wilder and more extreme than predicted way back at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The weather had become feral. Deranged. Heatwaves were more frequent and more intense. Rainfall was heavier and droughts were longer. Meltwater from ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica had contributed to a rise in sea level of more than three metres and more than a billion people had been made homeless, displaced as coasts and cities were flooded, fleeing famines, water wars and civil wars. It was a comprehensive disaster.

  The Antarctic Peninsula, a skinny archipelago of mountainous islands united by permanent ice sheets and curving north from the mainland like a thumb sticking out of a fist, had warmed much faster than the rest of the continent. Coastal ice shelves broke up, undermined by intrusion of warmer currents, and glaciers retreated inland, exposing land and lodes of ore which had been buried under ice for millions of years. After expiration in 2048 of the old Antarctic Treaty System, which had set aside the continent as a scientific preserve, new agreements permitted exploitation of the peninsula’s mineral and petroleum resources in exchange for funding of geoengineering projects that could help to protect the icecap on the mainland. The first settlers were sponsored by governments and transnational corporations, but they were soon followed by kleptocrats seeking sanctuary from political and social instability, and despite storms and mountainous waves a good number of refugees also made it across the Drake Passage. An oil tanker crowded with Pakistani men, women and children beached on Elephant Island, for instance, half of them freezing to death before help arrived. A container ship from Mozambique limped into port at Esperanza with less than a hundred survivors among two thousand dead. One day an ancient 777X packed with more than four hundred people fleeing civil war in Uruguay, including the former Vice-President, ten cabinet ministers and three Supreme Court judges, landed at O’Higgins International Airport. So on, so on. At last, the Antarctic Authority was forced to impose a quota system. After that, the only people granted permanent residency rights were those who could afford to purchase citizenship, and key workers sponsored by the authority or by transnats.

  Isabella Morales was one such worker, armed with a brand new doctorate in bioengineering from the Universidad de Chile, recruited by ecopoets who were greening tracts of coastal land. There was still an abundance of marine life on and around the shores of the peninsula, but its sparse terrestrial ecosystem had failed to adapt to post-warming conditions and human activity had introduced invasi
ve species which flourished as the climate thawed. Rats, cockroaches, Argentinian ants. Iceland poppy, yellow bog sedge that choked new waterways, grasses that displaced meadows of native mosses. Rather than attempt the near impossible task of eradicating the invaders, there was the idea, back then, that it would be better to establish robust and diverse ecosystems that could withstand them, to guide and channel inevitable, inexorable change.

  It was a version of ecopoiesis, the old technocratic dream of fabricating self-sustaining ecosystems in orbital colonies, on lifeless planets. Critics grumbled that it was nothing but hubristic greenwash, an attempt to divert attention from exploitation of the peninsula’s resources, but they were outnumbered by advocates who claimed that it would be a small but significant atonement for all the wildernesses destroyed or compromised by climate change, industrialisation, deforestation and agriculture. A symbol of hope and renewal in an age when even nature could no longer be considered natural.

  Building terrestrial ecosystems from scratch was less ambitious than the lost dreams of turning Venus or Mars into versions of Earth, but it was still difficult and monstrously expensive. Isabella joined a little tribe of third-generation ecopoets who worked in labs and greenhouses during the interminable winters and lived in tents and ATVs in the brief summers, moving from place to place, driving forward on a vast variety of projects. An energetic, dedicated, disputatious mix of scientists, Gaians and anarcho-primitivists, they were notionally supervised by the Antarctic Authority, but over the years had developed a considerable degree of independence, mutating into a non-hierarchical collective united by common goals, sharing resources and decision-making. As the glaciers retreated, exposing broad valleys between mountain ridges still capped with permanent ice, the ecopoets established a version of the tundra found on islands north of the peninsula. Later, with the effects of the great warming continuing apace, they began to plant out forests, and introduced the first animals. Slowly, a green stain of life spread south along the peninsula’s ragged coasts.

  Elsewhere, opencast mines were ripping apart landscapes untouched for millions of years, settlements were springing up along the west coast, and the former science stations of Esperanza and O’Higgins at the tip of the peninsula, had become sprawling cities. Apartment blocks. Supermarkets and fast-food joints and shopping malls. Too many people threatening to repeat the same old mistakes of industrialisation and overexploitation. So back then, before their work was declared illegal and they were harried and persecuted, the ecopoets were useful PR for the Antarctic Authority, a source of upbeat news stories and images of attractive young people planting trees along the banks of wild new rivers, spreading grass and wildflower seed on scree slopes, raising animals and releasing them into the wild.

  When Isabella joined them, the ecopoets were more than forty years into their great work. An image of her from that time showed a beautiful young woman with wind-tousled waves of long black hair and a heart-shaped face, sitting cross-legged on a cushion of moss as she played with an Arctic fox cub in her lap. This was who Edward Toomy fell in love with. And Isabella fell for him. Love at first sight. Both of them struck by the lightning.

  Edward, mostly called Eddie back then, had been born in Esperanza when his parents had been working for the Antarctic Authority. He grew up in New Zealand, returned to the peninsula on a two-year contract with a petroleum company, and stayed on because he had dual citizenship. He was twenty-six when he met Isabella. Blond hair, blue eyes, a swimmer’s body and oodles of charm.

  Interviews he gave later in life always mentioned that. His boyish charm and enthusiasm. His raffish good looks. How he’d been a diving champion at school, just missing the cut for New Zealand’s Olympic team. Trouble was, he was also selfish and carelessly cruel. An unscrupulous rogue. He didn’t mean to hurt people, but people got hurt by him all the same. He’d quit university after spending a year in a haze of drugs and beer, and signed up for work in Antarctica on a whim. Because he could live and work there by right of birth. Because he wanted to prove to his parents (mother a high-level civil servant, father an accountant) that he could make his own way in life. ‘I like to think that if I’d been born in an earlier century I would have been an explorer,’ he said in an interview much later. ‘Or maybe a pirate.’

  Instead, he fell in with criminals. But first he fell in love with Isabella, or at least fell in love with the idea of falling in love with her. And she fell in love with him. Early in summer, adrift after his contract with the petroleum company ended, Eddie moved in with her and enthusiastically embraced the ecopoets’ work. To begin with, anyway. By the time winter had begun to grip the land he was already having second thoughts about joining a tribe of dedicated idealists who put the needs of the collective before the needs of any individual, and lived in the back country with zero concessions to comfort.

  Isabella was assigned to the labs in Happy Valley, working on edited plants and ecosystem design, raising shrubs and saplings for the next season’s planting in big greenhouses. Eddie Toomy, possessing no special skills, was sent off to drudge in the soil factory in Primavera, two hundred kilometres away. They saw each other maybe once a month, and Eddie spent most of the time bitching about his work and his bosses. He liked the idea of the nobility of labour, but he wasn’t so keen on actually doing it.

  Still, he stuck it out that winter. Perhaps he really was in love with Isabella, and believed that loading and cleaning out soil incubators was payment for his good fortune. And even in Antarctica winter wasn’t forever. Late spring, he and Isabella were out and about together, helping to establish a biome in a valley left by the retreat of the Victory Glacier. They planted tough grasses, moss and shrubs on clay and gravel moraines that rippled across the valley floor, sprayed mixtures of soil and seeds across bare scree and rock slopes, and in sheltered spots began to establish a dwarf shrub heath by planting out thickets of skeleton-leaf willow, dwarf southern beech and dwarf birch, white Arctic mountain heather, crowberry, Magellan barberry.

  It was said that if you ate the red berries of the Magellan barberry you would never leave the peninsula. Isabella fed a handful to Eddie as they lay in a mossy dell one balmy day in December, and he fed a handful to her. They had just made love, the moss was dry and soft as lambswool, and the sun was warm on their bare skin. They promised to stay together for ever and ever, talked about the future they wanted to share, the things they’d do, but their promises and plans barely outlasted the summer.

  A couple of months later Eddie was supervising a road train, trucking in supplies to the Victory Valley crew along a route the railway would later follow. Sometimes he’d stay over for a day or two in Eyrie Bay instead of heading straight back, returning with a killer hangover and puppy-dog remorse. As the days grew shorter and the first snows fell, his absences grew ever more frequent. He had a big row about being assigned to work in the soil factory again. And then Isabella told him that she was pregnant, and soon afterwards he left on the road train and didn’t come back.

  He texted Isabella from the airport in O’Higgins, told her where the road train was parked, explained that he’d snagged a job in Australia thanks to a tip from an old buddy. He needed some time away from the peninsula, he said, promised he’d be back in the spring with plenty of money, in time for the baby’s birth. Maybe he believed all that. Maybe he believed that he just needed to get away for a while, get his head straight. He was as good at lying to himself as he was at lying to everyone else. Anyway, that was it, he was gone.

  8

  The girl claimed that Eddie Toomy hadn’t known that his girlfriend was pregnant, said that he’d only found out about his son years later.

  ‘You’re trying to make out that he was selfish. But it was the other way around. Your grandmother didn’t care that he left. She had already used him to get what she wanted. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.’

  ‘The truth according to Eddie and his lawyers, back when his enemies were trying to smear him,’ I said.
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br />   ‘And of course you know he was lying,’ the girl said.

  We were following the ecopoet road, which was pinched between a lake of milky meltwater and tall cliffs that leaned back against the cold blue sky. The terminal face of the Albone Glacier stood at the far end of the lake, a wall of dirty ice gashed by deep fractures and topped with ragged spires and pinnacles that reflected splinters of bright sunshine. We’d made good time so far, but I was beginning to feel a nagging urgency. There were only a few hours of daylight left, we still had a way to go before we reached the refuge, and I was incubating a faint but distinct queasiness, was beginning to wish that I hadn’t eaten that tube of shrimp paste back at our rest stop.

  ‘I know that Isabella tried to reach out to Eddie after he ran off,’ I said. ‘She gave up because he’d shed all his social media. Made himself hard to find. He was good at that. Leaving people, severing all ties. He did it to his parents after he quit New Zealand for the peninsula. He did it to my grandmother, his friends at Lake Macleod …’

  ‘They were criminals,’ the girl said, with the theatrical exasperation of a child pointing out a fact that should have been obvious to everyone.

  ‘So was he.’

  ‘Not really. And only by accident. I didn’t know him, he died before I was born, but I know he used to tell funny stories about it.’

  ‘How he stole money that could have helped Isabella and their son, that sort of thing?’

  ‘If you take something from criminals, it isn’t really stealing.’

  ‘I reckon they’d see it differently.’

  I was thinking of Keever, thinking that as far as he was concerned I had stolen the girl from him. And of course I’d stolen you from him, too, although he didn’t know about that. And yes, I knew that the girl’s claim that Isabella hadn’t told Eddie about their son spookily echoed my decision to keep you a secret. But that didn’t have anything to do with selfishness. I’d chosen not to tell Keever for all the right reasons. To protect you. To save myself.