Austral

by Paul McAuley

  Mama had taught me how to read the way signs that marked certain secret trails and roads. Pairs of rounded stones meant you were supposed to turn left or right, depending on the location of the smaller stone. Pyramids of stones meant you were supposed to keep straight on. So I kept straight on past that pyramid, and straight on past the next, descending broken terraces of ice cut by ridges of rock running roughly north to south. A third way sign guided me between two of the ridges and the path deepened into a ravine that meandered between rising walls, fallen rocks littering the uneven floor among drifts raked by the wind that blew at our backs.

  The sign for the refuge was too obvious to miss. A column of flat blocks rising several metres out of the snow, dark rock and pale rock alternating like a stack of checker pieces. I stopped and looked all around and realised exactly where the refuge must be, realised that there was no way to get the skimmer up there.

  A shallow crevice split the cliff face from top to bottom, with a near-vertical stairway of handholds and narrow steps carved inside. The girl took one look at it, said that if I thought she was going to climb up a cliff in a snowstorm I was even crazier than I looked, and started crying.

  We were crowded together in the narrow chimney of the crevice, snow blowing around us, her sobbing, me telling her that she would freeze to death if she didn’t do what she was told, threatening to haul her up there by her hair if I had to. I was ready to do it, too. I was dog-tired, the knife cut in my shoulder was a bone-deep ache throbbing with my heartbeat, and I was still pissed off about the crappy move she’d tried to make back in Mayra Iturriaga’s hut. We were both trapped in that desperate situation, each loathing the other. As far as the girl was concerned, I was a monster who’d kidnapped her and dragged her halfway across the peninsula without caring if she lived or died. And I didn’t see that she was just a kid, scared and strung out. At that moment she was an aggravating burden, something I had to prod and pry to get moving.

  ‘There’s shelter at the top,’ I said. ‘Food and warmth. So quit complaining and start climbing.’

  I gave her the goggles so she could find her way up the stairway in darkness, climbed behind her with the flashlight clamped in my teeth and the heavy kitbag slung over my good shoulder. It was a hard scramble that topped out in a square little ledge hardly big enough for the both of us, the beginning of a narrow path that threaded along the cliff face above a sheer drop to the floor of the ravine, running out beyond the beam of my flashlight.

  ‘No way,’ the girl said. Wind-blown snow was whipping around us and she looked like she was about to start crying again.

  ‘It isn’t far now,’ I said, although I had no idea. ‘Just one more push. And it’s a lot easier than climbing back down.’

  I found a wire cable strung through eyebolts screwed into the rock, and we clutched this lifeline as we shuffled along the path, snow whirling around us, ceaseless wind plucking at our backs. We skirted a bulge of rock, edged down a steep slope to a crevice shielded by a low wall of unmortared stones. Inside, a rough gullet of stone sloped to a crawlway stoppered by a zippered sheet of black Kevlar. I squirmed through, played the beam of my flashlight over the walls of the refuge’s blunt cylinder, and was seized by a weird sense of, what do you call it, déjà vu, remembering how Mama and I had camped out in places like it during our trek southwards. When the girl scrambled in behind me I had to turn away so she wouldn’t see my foolish tears.

  A pushplate lit a broken string of lights set in the seam where the grubby white walls curved together overhead, and started a fan that stirred the damp cold air. There was a kitchen niche at one end of the refuge, a shower and a chemical toilet behind plastic screens at the other. A long table and a few plastic chairs, a box of kids’ toys. Eight shelf beds cut into the walls. Maybe one of the children who had once played with those toys had also drawn the naive little mural of a bright yellow sun beaming in a blue sky above a green line starred with big white flowers, a tundra or meadow where the stick figures of a man and a woman and two small children stood beside the slope-shouldered bulk of a mammoth.

  Bootprints were tracked everywhere in the even layer of dust that covered the floor. Someone had found the shelter after it had been abandoned. I hoped that trespasser had left a long time ago.

  A hatch at the back opened onto a kind of chapel carved into raw rock, a seemingly bottomless hole in the floor on one side, a slope of rubble that climbed up through a broken slot in the ceiling on the other. A faint draught wafting down the slope suggested that it might lead to a hidden entrance somewhere above the cliffs, the kind of escape route common to refuges like these.

  A tripod had been erected over the hole and a cluster of nylon cords knotted at its apex dropped into the shaft, but when I hauled up the cords, hoping to find a cache of food frozen by the native cold of the rock, I found that they had all been cleanly cut. There was no food on the shelves of the refuge’s little kitchen either, no crockery or cooking equipment except for a battered aluminium pan. But the hotplate worked and when I turned the tap there was a distant groaning and clanking and at last brown water spat into the sink and began to run in a steady thin trickle. I brewed tea with plenty of sugar, and after we drank it and shared a chocolate bar from a ration pack the girl and I unrolled our sleeping bags onto a couple of musty shelf beds and crawled into them.

  When I woke, the refuge was faintly lit by bluish daylight shining through squares of plastic set in the ceiling, piped from some source set in the cliffs. The girl, sound asleep, curled inside her bag like a question mark, only her blonde hair showing. I felt a touch of shame, remembering how hard I’d pushed her the previous night, and left her there and went outside to check the weather.

  It was still snowing. Squatting at the mouth of the crevice, watching torrents of white flakes whirl past, the far side of the ravine barely visible, everything fading into hazy grey, was very different from watching snow fall harmlessly outside the triple-glazed window of my cozy efficiency in Star City, knowing that ploughs and sweepers would clear the streets and public transport, and the bustle of Esperanza’s underground walkways and malls would be completely untroubled by the weather. Even the fiercest blizzards were only a mild inconvenience in the city, but out in the back country you were hostage to something raw and elemental, inhumanly huge and indifferent. The blizzard wouldn’t care or notice if it killed me, and realising that, submitting to it, was dismaying, thrilling, liberating. Sexual, even.

  I remembered sheltering in the cabin with Mama as storms roared over Deception Island, and howled at the wind and the falling snow, howled wordlessly and happily, not caring at that moment if the blizzard didn’t stop blowing until it had buried the entire peninsula and the glaciers returned and scraped away every trace of humanity and carried the debris into the sea.

  It wasn’t anything to do with my edits or some kind of behaviour coded in genes borrowed from archaic humans, nature asserting itself over nurture. It was just ordinary human defiance, a scream of I am into the void of the uncaring world. I howled until I was hoarse and the snow whirled on unchecked, and for the first time since I’d driven through the work camp’s outer gate I felt truly free.

  There was nothing to do but hunker down and wait for the blizzard to blow itself out. Back in the refuge, the girl was awake, telling me that she didn’t think much of our new home.

  ‘Are they all like this? Is this how your people lived?’

  ‘This is just a kind of way station. There are much bigger places in the south, labs and dorms and so on. Hidden villages where free ecopoets lived and worked after the government ban.’

  That’s what Mama had told me, anyway. The places we’d stayed in had been much like this one, fitted into a crevice or dug into rock. One had been built into the blind end of a ravine, its concrete roof disguised by a litter of boulders. Basic quarters but warm and comfortable, with running water and battery packs that stored electricity produced by some combination of wind turbines, solar panels, a
nd thermoelectric generators.

  ‘Ecopoets were mostly nomads,’ I said. ‘Always on the move. You see that picture? The mammoth? The first ecopoets resurrected them from elephant stock and traits clipped from the genomes of pygmy mammoths that once lived on an island in Siberia. They were used to transport stuff from place to place. They helped with the landscaping, too. Moving rocks and such.’

  I was in a good mood, brewing tea and thawing a chunk of reindeer on the hotplate for breakfast, shrugging when the girl said she didn’t eat meat, telling her to break open a ration pack instead.

  ‘Can I have a shower?’

  ‘Why not?’

  There was only a trickle of cold brown water, but the girl didn’t complain. Saying, as she dried herself with a towel stiff as a scrap of cardboard, that it reminded her of an English boarding school she’d been sent to for a year. The patches that dappled her pale skin weren’t just on her face, but all over. Pale cream and butterscotch.

  There are two kinds of beauty. The kind that’s carefully cultivated and preened, and the kind that’s unforced, unadorned, worn as carelessly as good health. The girl’s was the second kind. Created by a fortunate combination of genes, improved by a little careful editing. Her dappled skin didn’t have anything to do with editing, though. It was a fashion trait created by a reversible spray-on retroviral treatment that enhanced her beauty, gave her an exotic lustre. As if she was of some ancient unfallen race, like the elves of the peninsula’s myths.

  This slender girl, my cousin. I could see a little of my father in her father’s face, but nothing of me in hers, even though she shared one quarter of my genes. A little under one quarter, because of the editing which had made me what I was. If you’d seen us together I wouldn’t have blamed you for thinking that we were from two different species. People are sensitive to small variations from what they consider to be the norm, and while the girl was long-legged, lithe and lovely, I was a hulking troll got up from seal leather and patches of yak fur, the cruel captor of a fair maiden I’d lured to my underground lair.

  After she’d eaten, no more than jam scraped across crackers and a scant handful of dried fruit from one of the ration packs, the girl asked if she could have her book back. I’d forgotten about the damn thing, found it at the bottom of the kitbag, told her that she could have it as long as she didn’t use it to call anyone, a little joke she took seriously.

  ‘I told you. It’s just a book.’

  ‘What kind of book?’

  ‘The kind that tells a story. It’s harmless, really it is.’

  ‘What kind of story?’

  We were sitting on brittle chairs either side of the table. The girl in her bodysuit, which was imitating the dingy white of the walls, me in my uniform shirt and trousers, trapping the book under the flat of my hand. There was a map drawn in green on its black leather cover, a scatter of big and small islands I didn’t recognise.

  ‘You’ll think it’s stupid,’ the girl said.

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘It’s set in the future,’ she said, with the weary patience that teenagers use to disguise their embarrassment. ‘Right here in Antarctica, after all the ice has melted.’

  ‘All of it? Is that possible?’

  ‘Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it can’t happen.’

  It seemed that the map on the cover of the book was a map of Antarctica in this far future. The peninsula broken into a string of skinny islands, much of West Antarctica drowned and the Transantarctic Mountains standing straight up from the sea, and the bulk of the continent broken by huge bays and inlets, with grassy plains in the east and mountains and forests in the north.

  The islands and the mainland were divided into kingdoms with intricate arrays of kings and queens, princes and princesses, barons and knights. There were strange animals descended from species which had been edited in the deep past, magicians with mechanical servants and the ability to shape the weather and control animals and plants, and elves that lived in the forests, either descended from edited human stock or members of a hidden race that had emerged after the ice had gone. It was a place of courtly intrigue and wars, magic and mystery.

  ‘“Green and fair and lovely,” it says in the book,’ the girl said. ‘Although nights in winter are just as long and dark as they are now.’

  ‘And does it snow at all, in winter?’

  It was hard to imagine the whole continent without snow and ice. But I suppose that a hundred or two hundred years ago it would have been hard to imagine the peninsula with cities and settlements, forested valleys and fjords where glaciers had once flowed, and wolves and mammoths and elf stones.

  ‘Ogres are supposed to live up in the mountains,’ the girl said. ‘Maybe that’s what your people became.’

  ‘Or maybe they became the people who live in these magic kingdoms, and your kind of people are long gone. What’s it about, the story?’

  ‘There’s a princess, and a hero. At least, I think he’s supposed to be a hero. They’re from two rival kingdoms and they’re enemies because the hero killed the princess’s uncle. She wants to kill him, but instead they accidentally fall in love.’

  I thought that it sounded exactly like the kind of thing silly little rich girls like her would be keen on, said that it seemed complicated.

  ‘It’s based on an old opera. I saw a performance of it a year ago, in Montevideo.’

  The casual way she said that, as if it was no big deal to leave the peninsula.

  I said, ‘If you know the story, why do you need to read this book?’

  ‘I know the opera. The book is different. I mean, it’s the same basic story, but the details are different. And you have to make choices for the character you’re following, and that changes the story.’

  ‘Which character are you following?’

  ‘Princess Isander.’

  ‘A princess. Of course you are.’

  ‘She’s the daughter of King Geraine, the ruler of Esland, the biggest of the western islands. Smaller kingdoms around and about owe him allegiance and pay tribute.’

  ‘So she’s the daughter of a powerful man. Just like you.’

  ‘Her family is powerful, but she isn’t, especially. It’s like in the old days, when men ruled and women served. Even princesses and queens. Isander has some dire skills, but she’s basically sitting around waiting to be married off.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound very true to life. Everyone knows that women are stronger than men. And cleverer too.’

  ‘The point of the story, if you follow it as Isander, is that you can help her overcome her circumstances by making the right choices. You can help her be true to herself, rather than be forced to become what her father and everyone else expects her to be.’

  I let the girl talk. It passed the time, the silly story seemed important to her, and I was happy to watch her grow ever more confident in its telling. I’d put her through some hard adventuring – the crash and the hike, Mayra Iturriaga and the long ride through the frigid night – but she was a resilient kid, stronger than she looked. Like me, she’d lost her mother. That toughens you, for sure. It makes you grow up fast. It teaches you that the world is a hard uncertain place where nothing is forever. Anyway, we’d had our troubles on the way here but she’d pulled through, no real harm done. She was going to be OK.

  She told me that the chief male actor in the story, Tantris, served in the court of King Marsche, the ruler of Palmis, the southernmost island in the chain that the peninsula might become in a dozen or a hundred centuries, with the world as warm as it had once been in the long ago when dinosaurs had stalked through the forests of the south pole. Tantris was the youngest knight of the court, a fine sailor, an expert swordsman and hunter, and an accomplished harp player. One of those unbearable people who are not only good at everything they do but also unerringly choose to do the right thing every time. In the opera, doing the right thing led to tragedy, the girl said, but she was going to make it come out diffe
rently.

  ‘Some stories have sad endings no matter what,’ I said.

  ‘This one doesn’t have to be like that,’ the girl said.

  The annual tribute King Marsche had to pay to Esland was collected by Mordred, the brother of King Geraine’s wife, who sailed up the west coast of Palmis every midsummer with a small fleet of ironclad ships, plundering the coffers of nobility and merchants in towns along the way before he reached the capital. Mordred’s ironclad steamships outclassed any in Palmis’s navy, but Tantris, vowing to put an end to this piracy, got up a plan and presented it to King Marsche.

  That midsummer, Mordred’s little fleet of ironclads was as usual anchored in the harbour of Ryne, the most southerly of Palmis’s towns and Mordred’s first port of call on his way to the court of King Marsche. While Mordred and his captains were being entertained in the house of the Duke of Ryne, a crew of handpicked men and women led by Tantris crossed the harbour in rowboats with muffled oars. They swarmed aboard the smallest of the ironclads and subdued its crew, tied them up and cast them adrift in the rowboats, and set out to sea in the stolen ship.

  When Mordred ordered his captains to raise anchor and give chase, two of his ships immediately ran into mines that Tantris had planted at the harbour entrance. Enraged beyond reason, Mordred told the rest to sail on without stopping to pick up survivors, and they chased the stolen ironclad towards an archipelago of small islands scattered beyond the southern tip of Palmis. Remembering how Mama and I had escaped Deception Island and sailed past Trinity Island and several smaller islands to reach the Davis Coast, I believed that I could picture the scene, although according to the girl the islands in the story were thickly wooded or covered with green meadows and bogs.