Austral

by Paul McAuley

  Tantris was leading Mordred into a trap, of course. He steered the stolen ironclad into a narrow strait between two islands and when Mordred’s ships followed, threading one after the other between looming cliffs, cannon set along the clifftops on either side blasted them with pitiless fire (‘That’s what the book calls it,’ the girl said). Only Mordred’s flagship survived the bombardment. When it wallowed out of the strait, holed beneath the waterline, the survivors among its crew manning pumps and fighting fires below decks, the stolen ironclad cut across its bow and Tantris hailed Mordred and challenged him to a duel. Mordred accepted at once. He was a cunning and experienced swordsman, believed that he could easily defeat a callow youth. And besides, as far as he was concerned it was a matter of honour.

  The duel was held on a small grassy island as flat as a table. As the summer sun circled the horizon, the two men fought from one side to the other and back again. Tantris cut Mordred’s loose shirt to ribbons and inflicted a dozen superficial wounds, but when he pressed an especially fierce and close attack Mordred stabbed him in the thigh with a concealed dagger and told him that the blade was painted with a slow poison and only his sister possessed the antidote. I intend to kill you here and now, Mordred said, but in the unlikely event that you triumph I will still have my revenge, because you will suffer a slow agonising death with no hope of a cure.

  His taunt was meant to sap his opponent’s courage, but Tantris was infuriated by this treachery and fought on with redoubled strength and speed. The two men clashed and parted over and again, their blood sprinkling the wiry turf like dew, and when they met for the final time, at the dead centre of the island, Tantris struck Mordred with a hammer blow that killed him on the spot and left a sliver of sword blade embedded in his skull.

  Tantris was feted as a hero when he returned to the court of King Marsche, but his wound would not heal and even the king’s own physician could not help him. It seemed that Mordred had told the truth when he’d claimed that only his sister, Queen Isander, possessed the antidote. Tantris knew that the queen would refuse to help the man who had killed her brother, so he and a few friends set off for Esland, and near the harbour of its capital city Tantris cast himself adrift in a small boat with a little food and water, and a harp. He was found by fishermen and claimed to be a shipwrecked minstrel called Tristan, the only survivor of an attack by sea raiders. News of his skill as a harpist quickly spread through the town to the court. He was summoned to play by Queen Isander, and with the help of her daughter, who was also called Isander, she cured his poisoned wound. And that was how Isander met Tantris, the girl said, and the real story began.

  ‘It seems more complicated than it needs to be,’ I said. ‘Why do mother and daughter have the same name? Why didn’t Mordred’s death start a war? And if this so-called hero was dying, how did he have the energy and time to pull off that trick to get the attention of the queen?’

  ‘Because it’s that kind of story, I suppose,’ the girl said.

  ‘The real world is sad enough without trying to make it sadder with silly stories,’ I said. ‘You read your book if you want. I’m going to check the lay of the land.’

  ‘I thought you had a plan.’

  ‘I know what I need to do. Don’t worry about that.’

  It was snowing as hard as ever. Contacting Alberto Toomy and beginning ransom negotiations would have to wait. I dozed for the rest of the day, woke as hungry as a hunter, and cooked up a mess of food. Noodles mixed with freeze-dried vegetables from a ration pack, a couple of the sprouting onions I’d taken from Mayra Iturriaga. Tomato sauce from a squeeze tube and chunks of broiled reindeer meat that the girl refused to touch – you would have thought that I had suggested she try succulent leg of baby. She also refused to eat her share of the chumbeque I cut in half for dessert.

  We had just one ration pack left.

  ‘There isn’t much else,’ I said. ‘I can’t forage in this blizzard. And anyway, nothing grows up here except for some lichens. Even the printer couldn’t make anything worth eating from them.’

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  ‘You need to eat. You don’t have any fat on you.’

  ‘I said I’ll manage.’

  I suppose it was a form of defiance.

  When she picked up her book, I said that I’d tell her a real story that was far better than any make-believe.

  ‘If this is about what my grandfather did in Australia, how he found that money, I know all about it,’ the girl said. ‘So there’s no point making up more lies about him.’

  ‘Let’s see.’

  Drugs, Guns and Money

  So Eddie Toomy left Isabella Morales and the Antarctic Peninsula for Western Australia and Lake Macleod, where rising sea levels had washed away salt beds and flooded permanent ponds, and Big Green, one of the ecoremediation transnats, was farming fast-growing strains of kelp on thousands of hectares of rafts. Some of the harvest was processed to extract algin and biochemicals for the food and pharmaceutical industries, but most of it was packaged and sold for human consumption, or used as an additive for animal feed or fertiliser for farmlands reclaimed from the desert. There were also shrimp and shellfish farms and a thriving fishing industry, and desalinated water was pumped into a chain of freshwater lakes that irrigated the farmlands and created a more temperate microclimate.

  To begin with, Eddie drove one of the road trains that trucked dirt from a soil factory and saplings from tree nurseries to the desert edge, where tens of thousands of acacias and eucalypts were being planted out in shelter belts to stabilise the boundary of the reclaimed land. Eddie’s rig, BE-7-T-1, inevitably nicknamed Betty, mostly ran herself, but Eddie took over whenever her AI became conflicted, supervised loading and unloading, and handled the paperwork and routine maintenance. He loved riding in Betty’s high cab, keeping tabs on her indicators and watching the road and the scenery unravel. The vibrant green fields and belts of trees. The red desert. The intense turquoise of the new lakes under the hot blue sky.

  It didn’t occur to him to tell Isabella Morales where he was or what he was doing. He’d convinced himself that she had driven him away with her unreasonable expectation that he would dedicate the rest of his life to hard labour in the howling boonies while sharing everything with everyone else. Bugger that. He missed her now and then – a woman like that, who wouldn’t? When his contract with Big Green was ended, he’d return to the peninsula flush with credit, and maybe they could work something out. But no way was he going back to being ordered about like a bloody bogan, living in communal poverty like some kind of monk. He was done with all that.

  Big Green’s workforce was half local and half the usual global stew, most of them under thirty. They worked hard and played hard. Eddie had to ride Betty ever further from the depot as the long ribbon of the shelter belt extended, and soon was overnighting in work camps. The commissary supplied ration packs, and the crews were adept at scrounging up extra food from farm workers. There were cases of beer, mah-jong and poker schools, pick-up games of football or volleyball, music from a guitar or two. And plenty of sex, too, especially for someone with Eddie’s good looks, aw-shucks charm and polyamorous adaptability.

  Quite soon, he fell into working for people who sold drugs to crews at the camps and workers in the kelp farms. It was an easy way to make money on the side, and no one got hurt. The gang which controlled the drug trade was also involved in theft of produce and goods from the farms and factories in the Lake Macleod development zone – oysters and abalone, rock lobsters, nanobiotics, high-end pharmaceuticals, so on – but the companies wrote it off as wastage and besides, it wasn’t anything in the grand scheme of things. Billions of dollars flowed from governments to transnats and smaller companies, and everyone at every level was on the take, from government ministers pocketing kickbacks and suits awarding themselves excessive bonuses, to loaders who leaked inventory from warehouses, and drivers like Eddie who rendezvoused with gang members in the middle of nowhere, the lo
gs of their road trains overwritten by a hack that seamlessly plugged the gap in travel records while cargo that wasn’t on the manifest was offloaded. So everything was sweet as, until one day, about eighteen months into his stint at Lake Macleod, Eddie was asked to do a special job by his crew boss.

  This was a leathery American guy, Leo Fowler, a veteran of the Rain Wars which had kicked off after a massive cloud-seeding project Texas deployed to boost rainfall had caused droughts in neighbouring Mexican states. The badge of Leo’s unit, the Battling ’88s, was tattooed on the back of his right hand, and his left eye was a prosthetic bedded in a web of scar tissue. He said that it was way better than the original or anything grown in a tank. It let him see in the dark and spy on shit ten kilometres away. It let him see into the souls of men and know whether they were telling the truth or talking trash.

  That shiny black orb and its blue, human counterpart fixing on Eddie as the crew boss told him that he had been volunteered for a special road trip out into the countryside.

  ‘What kind of road trip?’

  ‘The kind where you pick up something from buddies of mine and keep your mouth shut. I know you know how it goes.’

  Eddie said that he was pretty sure that he did. Leo ran the gang then ran the local drug trade.

  The man squeezed his shoulder, a hard but not unfriendly grip. ‘Did you really think this was going to be all about hauling booze and kick and smoke, or offloading cases of prawns? You’re a smart guy, Eddie. Do right by me on this thing, I might could move you up to the next level. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ Eddie said, although he had the beginnings of a bad feeling about this road trip, and the last thing he wanted was any kind of promotion.

  ‘Us white men have to stick together,’ Leo said. ‘Am I right or am I right? Now let’s go check out your ride.’

  Despite his bad feeling, Eddie felt a eager little kick when he saw the ride – an all-terrain Land Cruiser with three axles, one in front, two in the rear, ribbed mesh tyres and a transmission that could out-pull a pair of elephants. A rough tough muscle car that was going to be a lot of fun to drive.

  He said, ‘I guess we’re in for a little off-roading.’

  ‘Not me,’ Leo said. ‘I have better things to do than tool around in the fucking heat and bull dust. You’re going out with a buddy of mine, good old boy name of Brandon Birdwell. He shipped in just a couple of days back, I don’t believe you’ve met him yet. He’s hard ass, but long as you do what he says you and him should get along just fine.’

  Eddie was introduced to this Brandon Birdwell in the bar where Americans working for Big Green hung out, most of them veterans of the Rain Wars and brush-fire conflicts which had followed the breakup of the Republic. Pictures of motorcycles, military hardware, cowboys and sports stars on the walls, battle flags hanging from the ceiling, screens blasting out old-time rebel music and cut-ups of combat footage. Nostalgia for a simplified and deeply nativist version of history, a past that had never existed except in the mythologies of people, mostly male, mostly white, mostly straight, who found the modern world too complicated. Eddie tried not to be judgemental, but he always picked up a sour vibe in there, a mix of brash masculinity and thin-skinned butt hurt.

  Brandon Birdwell looked right at home, a taciturn fellow in his forties wearing a white straw Stetson with a dent in its crown, shirtless under an unzipped camo jacket, a big tattoo of an eagle clutching burning brands in its talons spread across his bony chest. He was sitting at a table with two young toughs, gave Leo a complicated handshake involving knuckles and fingertips, studied Eddie dubiously as Leo explained that this was a reliable kid who could drive anything anywhere, no questions asked.

  Brandon and his two sidekicks looked so exactly like the bad guys in some stupid action saga it wasn’t even funny, but Eddie couldn’t see any way of backing out of the job without Leo going Biblical on him. Had no choice but to turn up the next morning at zero dark thirty and, with Brandon Birdwell riding shotgun and the two sidekicks crammed in back, aim the big Land Cruiser north.

  ‘All you need to do is drive where I tell you and keep your mouth shut,’ Brandon told Eddie, and pulled a big chromed pistol from the duffel bag, stuffed tight as a punchbag, clamped between his knees. The pistol had a long barrel and a laser sight that steered its smart bullets to their target. Brandon made an elaborate display of checking it and aiming at a passing truck before jamming it under his thighs, and when Eddie asked exactly where they were going said that it was a simple pickup job, that was all he needed to know.

  ‘Leo likes you, but we only just met. Far as I’m concerned, you’re on probation,’ Brandon added, and told his seat to ease back and pulled the brim of his Stetson low over his mirrored sunglasses and seemed to fall asleep.

  One of the sidekicks gave Eddie directions. They drove past the pipework and tanks of the biofuel plant, cut around the northern end of Lake Macleod and joined the Minilya-Exmouth road, speeding across dusty flatlands and after a couple of hours turning onto an old highway that ran along the east edge of Exmouth Gulf. Seared bush stretching away on one side, glimpses of the blue sea on the other. It was June. Midwinter. Forty degrees in the shade. Once, one of the sidekicks buzzed down a window and took a pot-shot at a roo, and the hard crack right by his ear made Eddie brake out of instinct. Brandon stirred, told the two cowboys in back to stop fucking around, and seemed to go back to sleep again.

  The road ended at the ruins of a big solar salt plant that stretched for thirty kilometres along the gulf coast. The place had once exported salt for the Chinese plastics and petrochemical industries, but rising sea levels had long ago drowned its evaporation beds. Mangroves growing on submerged ridges outlined the rectangular patterns of flooded beds, a patchwork pattern stretching away into the mirror dance of heat haze. A few stretches of the elevated pipes which had fed seawater into the beds still stood here and there. The rusting remains of an excavator tilted nose down in muddy shallows.

  Brandon directed Eddie along a rough track to the shell of a square concrete building that stood atop a low promontory. Directly below was a ruined quay with several long jetties jutting into a channel that ran towards the open waters of the gulf. Eddie and the others waited out the rest of the day there, in furnace heat and relentless sunlight. Around noon Brandon and his two mates broke open MRE packs, but Eddie passed. His stomach was too delicate. Brandon gave him the side-eye but said nothing.

  The sidekicks were dressed in camo T-shirts and pants that mimicked the dirty colour of the concrete block wall they were squatting against, brushing flies off their faces and talking shit about people they worked with and actions they’d been in, people they’d fucked or were planning to fuck, so on. There were millions of these young fellas loose in the world, shaped and tempered by uprisings, rebellions, insurgencies, civil wars, resource wars, wars against other tribes or religions, wars against refugees or countries that attempted to turn back refugees … Those who survived, who weren’t obviously crazy or crippled by PTSD, were often recruited by companies that provided security for transnats. Small private armies working at arm’s length to provide their clients with a fig leaf of plausible deniability if things went sideways, guarding installations and key personnel, overseeing local workforces, augmenting the police and armed forces of compliant governments, fighting rebels enraged by the exploitation of their country, dealing with riots sparked by massacres of striking workers, industrial accidents, or wild weather that left local people homeless and starving.

  Eddie gathered that the sidekicks were both from Alaska, had done gigs for the company that regulated merchant shipping in the Northwest Passage and for Big Green’s Sahara Sea project before coming to Australia. He wondered about Brandon Birdwell’s background, but the man seemed to be asleep again, stretched out in a patch of shade, his head pillowed on his duffel bag, hat over his face, hands knitted over the eagle tattoo on his chest. And anyway, Eddie was frankly too scared of him to ask.

  The sidekick
s grew restless after sunset. Checking and rechecking their weapons. Walking about the promontory. Staring out towards the open waters of the gulf, where the riding lights of tankers and supply ships were strung along the deep-water channel and the electric glow of the town of Learmouth shimmered at the remote horizon. There had been coral reefs, salt marshes and mangrove belts rich in bird life along this shore once upon a time, the whole gulf had been protected by strict environmental laws, but the reefs had been bleached and killed by thermal stress, the marshes and mangroves had been wrecked by weather bombs and drowned by rising sea levels, and the petrochemical industry had moved in to exploit offshore gas and oil fields.

  At last, as a thin crescent moon rose over the gulf and the first stars blossomed in the darkening sky, Brandon stirred and made a short fone call, announced that it was on. More MREs were shared around, Eddie managing to choke down some chili and macaroni. He hung back as Brandon and the two sidekicks kept watch, scanning the dark channel and open water beyond with field glasses and night sights. Told himself that this was just some kind of test. A routine pickup of whatever clandestine shit Leo was peddling on the side. Because if this was something serious, seriously dangerous, Leo wouldn’t have sent out a novice like him.

  At last there was the sound of a motor out in the night. A boat making its way down the channel, barely visible by starlight and the moon’s bone-white sliver.