by Paul McAuley
I was a skinny young thing, believe it or not. Tall, awkward, knock-kneed. And always hungry. Mama refused to work in the research station because it would be an act of collaboration, giving aid to the enemy, and she likewise refused to work as a guide for tourists. Her only income was from the charity of the other ecopoets and occasional work on one of the fishing boats, and she often found it hard to satisfy her daughter’s enormous appetite. At mealtimes she would sometimes declare that she’d eaten enough and push her plate towards me. And I would devour every scrap, only realising years later how much she had sacrificed to raise me.
I once read about a kind of bird that parasitises other birds by laying its egg in their nest. The hatchling parasite, burly and aggressive, pushes out its nest-mates one by one so that it can monopolise the food brought by the harried parents …
Faintly, far off, something was making a high-pitched whine. I felt a prickling stir of alarm and stepped out into the thin snowfall. Only a narrow section of the ravine floor was visible between the cliff walls. White snow. Black rocks. Nothing moving. But somewhere down below the unmistakable sound of motors was echoing off rock walls, coming closer.
‘There are six of them,’ I told the girl. ‘Six people on four skimmers. And one of them is Mayra Iturriaga. I got a good look at her when they parked up. I think she’s been here before. Maybe she was the one who stripped the place. Took everything except a box of kids’ toys, because she didn’t have any use for them. She guessed that we’d hole up here during the blizzard. As soon as it stopped blowing she rounded up some of her back-country friends and they headed out to catch themselves a nice little prize.’
‘Or she called the police,’ the girl said.
She was watching me stuff gear into my kitbag. Hope contesting with anxiety in her expression.
‘She isn’t the kind of person who’d ask the police for help. We don’t have any time,’ I said, snatching up the tight roll of the girl’s sleeping bag, ‘to talk this through. Grab your shit. Right now. You leave anything behind, you won’t be coming back for it.’
I hustled her through the hatch in back of the refuge into the dim little rock chapel, told her to start climbing the rubble slope.
‘What’s up there?’
She was standing on one foot, pulling a boot onto the other. Her cold weather gear dumped on the floor.
‘These places, they all have a back door,’ I said. ‘Get going. You can finish dressing later.’
I didn’t tell her that I hadn’t bothered to check if there really was a back door, where it led to. Or that Mayra Iturriaga and her pals probably knew about it, could have posted guards. All I knew, it was our only chance.
It was a hard scramble on hands and knees to the top of the slope, right under the belly of the ceiling, then a squeeze through a pipe lined with slick plastic to a narrow kettle carved out of the rock. Snow underfoot, a rim of light above, a ladder bolted to the wall. I climbed up, put my good shoulder against the flat lid at the top, heaved. It didn’t budge. I tried again, muscles straining, the ladder flexing and creaking. Nothing.
Below me, the girl said, ‘I’ve found some sort of lever.’
It was set inside a slot carved into the rock, gave a scant centimetre when I hauled on it. Something cracked like a pistol shot, a sifting of snow fell, and I jacked a leg against the wall and hauled again. The lever jerked down by degrees and above us a hatch creaked up, shedding more snow and revealing a crescent of milky daylight.
I scrambled through first, pistol out, heart racing in anticipation. I was in the middle of a circle of standing stones, all of them leaning inwards like the teeth of a moray eel. Nothing moving but a soft sifting of snowflakes. Beyond a gap in the stones, the ground slanted to an abrupt drop. That’s where the girl ran after she climbed out, and I chased her through knee-deep snow to the edge of the ravine.
The girl was shouting and waving her windproof jacket like a flag, trying to attract the attention of the people below. She gave a little scream when something sparked off one of the boulders and whanged away, and I broadsided her and knocked her into the snow and told her that she was a fucking fool.
‘They shot at me!’ She was lying on her back and looking up at me, snowflakes starring her eyelashes.
‘Didn’t I tell you they were the bad guys? Are you all right?’
‘I think you may have broken my tail bone. And you’re sort of crushing me.’
‘Stay right there.’
There were three boulders lined up along the edge of the drop, flattened ovals like waterworn pebbles, each about a metre long. Two half-buried in the fresh-fallen snow, the third standing proud on a pedestal stone. I knelt beside them, peeked over the edge. I was directly above the narrow ledge that led to the refuge, and realised why the boulders had been balanced there.
Voices floated up, faint but clear. Someone telling someone else to start fucking climbing. A third party saying that there was no sign of the beast woman. Who, I realised after a moment, must be me. I glimpsed a brief flurry of movement, Mayra Iturriaga clambering up the steep stair hacked into the ravine wall. In a couple of minutes she and her friends would be in the refuge. A couple of minutes after that they’d be crawling out of the back door.
I jumped up and linked my hands under the tail of the nearest boulder and heaved. It rocked very slightly on its pedestal stone and I heaved again, putting all my weight behind it, the knife wound in my shoulder waking up. Ice cracked, the boulder tilted forward, flipped over the edge so abruptly that I very nearly went with it. The girl grabbed the back of my jacket, steadying me, and someone shouted out below, a brief cry of anger that was cut off when the boulder struck the ledge with a tremendous bang and bounded away into the ravine.
The girl and I didn’t wait to see what happened next. We scrambled up the slope and ran straight through the circle of stones and kept running, out into the blank white landscape beyond.
13
We’d gone hardly any distance when our headlong flight was checked by a deep drift of powder snow. After we’d floundered out of the far side I told the girl to put on the rest of her cold weather gear and extracted a couple of snowshoe packs from my kitbag and tossed one to her. They unfolded with neat precision when we stepped onto them, extruding straps around our boots, gripping our ankles, and we set off again, heading along the contour line towards the pale silhouette of a saw-toothed ridge.
The girl soon fell behind, a small figure in baggy windproofs sinking up to her shins, her knees, as she ploughed through the snow, head cowled by the hood of her bodysuit. I burned with impatience while I waited for her to catch up, knowing that we had only a little time before our pursuers regrouped, knowing that she lacked my traits and fieldcraft. She was as tender and vulnerable as an unshelled hermit crab, and somehow I had to keep her safe and whole.
‘You’re trying to skate,’ I told her, when at last she reached me. ‘You need to use your ankles less and your knees more. Lift those snowshoes up with each step. Plant them firmly. Watch how I do.’
The girl soon got the idea, telling me as we slogged along that I’d never be able to catch her on skis.
‘Maybe we’ll find some at the next refuge,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll see who can catch who.’
‘Another hole in the ground? Where is it?’
‘Too far to reach today. See that ridge up ahead? We’ll find a sheltered spot and lay low, hide from Mayra Iturriaga and her friends. It’s only a couple of kilometres, but we need to get there soon as we can. So less talking and more walking.’
I was tempted to bring up my fone, ask for detailed maps and the best route to a safe place, ask about the weather, what the feeds were saying about the girl’s kidnapping, whether the police still believed Keever had taken her, where they were searching for him, if they’d caught him. But the risk of being tracked was too great, and my so-called deprived childhood on Deception Island meant that I hadn’t been hooked on instant access to everything and everywhere s
ince birth. I could navigate life without assistance and constant reassurance. I had the skills Mama had taught me and I was a rough tough husky, built for cold and hardship. It wasn’t much of an edge against a gang of armed bravos riding skimmers, but I hoped that it would be enough.
‘This isn’t the first time I’ve been out in the wilderness,’ the girl said. ‘We have a cabin on Joinville Island. I ski there all the time. Cross-country, slalom. Can you ski?’
‘I’m pretty sure I haven’t forgotten how.’
Mama and I had skied part of the way across country when we’d made our bid for freedom. I had a sudden clear memory of her standing on a pure white slope as she waited for me to catch up, leaning on her sticks, ski tips veed together. She’d taught me how to skate ski. Pushing from one ski to the other. Nose over knees over toes. ‘Elbows in close,’ she kept saying, until I’d got the hang of it. ‘Stop flailing.’ Hard on the thighs and shoulders, especially when you were aching from the exertions of the day before, but I’d never been happier.
The girl was talking about a skiing holiday in New Zealand, a place called Treble Cone on the South Island. I felt a sting of jealousy, thinking of the Wheel. Of sitting at the panoramic window of one of its restaurants with you, watching the harbour fall away as we rose into a warm evening sky. A future that seemed as distant as the moon.
‘They have to use snow machines most years,’ the girl said. ‘And the runs aren’t anywhere as long as they used to be. But there are some real whooshy ones.’
She was breathless, babbling, high on adrenaline and the animal exhilaration of the chase. She told me about the runs she liked best, comparing their merits. She told me that she wanted to go wild skiing on Cordillera Darwin in Tierra del Fuego, explained that you were deposited on a mountain slope by heli, skied to a pick-up point, and were ferried back to a cosy cabin.
‘Daddy says he won’t let me go. But I swear that it will be my present to myself on my eighteenth birthday.’
I remembered how her mother and brother had died, caught in an avalanche while skiing in the back country. Wondered if the girl wanted to prove something to herself.
‘Daddy thinks it’s a waste of time,’ she said. ‘Because I’m not good enough to win competitions or make the national team or whatever. He doesn’t see the point of doing anything for fun.’
She’d hardly ever mentioned her father, I realised, except to make a threat or to appeal to my better nature.
She said, ‘See, that’s the downside of being who I am. The expectations I have to live up to. My father’s ambitions for me.’
‘Poor little rich girl,’ I said.
It was a cheap shot, but she took it seriously. ‘I know how it sounds. But it isn’t always as easy as you might think. And I definitely don’t always get to do what I want.’
‘Yeah, you only get to ski in New Zealand.’
‘I’m supposed to take charge of our business one day. Because I’m the oldest. As if that’s a qualification for anything. As if Essie – my little sister, Esmeralda? As if she couldn’t do it just as well. If not better. I’m not interested in business. Or politics. I want to be an engineer. Daddy thinks it’s a phase. He indulges me. Like I’m still a little kid. But it isn’t a phase. It’s really what I want to do. It’s my passion,’ the girl said, with a breathless imitation of the melodramatic delivery of novela stars. An imitation, maybe, of her daddy’s glamorous girlfriend.
‘You like big machines,’ I said. ‘Which is how we met.’
The girl ignored the jibe, saying seriously, ‘I want to get into geoengineering, as a matter of fact.’
‘They tried that last century. It didn’t work out so well.’
‘There was nothing wrong with the ideas. Or the engineering. The engineering was sound. And it worked, sort of. All the different projects, they cut about two degrees off the rise in global temperature. But the world is still broken, it’s still getting warmer. It still needs to be fixed.’
‘Or all the ice will melt, like in your story.’
‘We can still stop that. It isn’t too late, and we know what to do. But it will be hard work. And it will take centuries.’
‘You sound just like an ecopoet.’
I was amused by her earnest idealism, so pure, so untainted by experience.
‘I have to live in the future,’ she said. ‘So why wouldn’t I want to make it a better place?’
We walked on. Stomping through drifts of powder snow, shuffling over hardpack firn. Light flurries blowing from the white sky. The white land rising and falling in long low waves, crevasses cutting through the troughs between. Small crevasses, cracks no more than a hand’s breadth across, were buried in fresh-fallen snow and a couple of times the snow gave way and I fell to my hands and knees or barked my shins on a rim of hard ice. Larger crevasses were meandering paths bridged by snow that packed them as they widened, and the girl and I had to stop at each one and probe the surface to make sure it would take our weight before we could cross. And some had grown so large that the snow bridges had collapsed, revealing blue depths floored with tumbled ice blocks, and we had to cut east or west to get around them.
All of this meant that we were making far less progress than I liked. And the girl was beginning to flag, we had to keep stopping so she could get her wind back.
At every halt I turned and studied the horizon for signs of pursuit. The girl kept looking backwards too, maybe still hoping for some kind of rescue, a platoon of state police skimmers slamming over a rise or a heli cruising towards us under the lid of low cloud, and she was the one who spotted the drone. Calling out, pointing to the sky off to our left where a small steady speck hung under the low clouds. I fumbled out the goggles I’d taken from Mayra Iturriaga, but even with their field-glasses app it was hard to make out much.
‘It’s one of theirs, isn’t it?’ the girl said. ‘The bad guys.’
‘It could be anyone’s. The police, a hunter looking for elk or reindeer …’
I turned a full circle, saw nothing but snow hummocking away in every direction.
‘They must have seen us,’ the girl said.
‘Won’t do them any good if they can’t catch up with us. We’re getting close to the ridge and it’ll be dark soon, we can give them the slip then.’
But it was impossible to ignore the drone as we went on, hard not to look back at it, and the ice began to slope downward and broken pressure ridges cut across our path, so at last we had to turn south, away from the ridge and the hope of safety. This was where the icy dome of the plateau ran up against the flank of half-buried mountains, pushing through here and there to feed glacier stubs that had once flowed all the way down to the west coast. The girl and I were following a broad hummock of blue ice mostly blown clear of snow, trying to find a way around a chaos of tilted ice slabs and crevasses, when I saw a glint of movement off to the west. It was another drone, this one maybe a kilometre away, skimming along the slope above us, hunting this way and that in short jagged bursts. The first drone was as motionless as ever, a dim speck nailed in the sky’s pale dome.
The girl and I crouched in a trough between two low ridges. I pulled out a couple of foil blankets, told the girl to wrap herself in one and wrapped myself in the other, and we lay on our bellies, shoulder to shoulder, and watched the drones. One high, one low.
‘It won’t spot us as long as we keep still,’ I said, although I knew there wasn’t much hope. The blankets insulated us somewhat, but in infrared we must have looked like a couple of fallen stars burning on the frigid ice.
‘If the bad guys are running the first drone, who is running the second?’
‘They could be running both of them. The first could be a spotter, the other one armed in some way.’
The second drone was still moving erratically, as if tracking our footprints. Losing the trail when it crossed bare ice, searching to and fro before picking it up again. Coming closer, hunting back and forth above a tumble of ice blocks. I unshippe
d my pistol, dialled it to explosive taglets, tried to track the little machine as it zigged and zagged. And something swooped out of the sky, falling so fast that I glimpsed it only as a kind of after-image. It was the first drone, racing straight at the second, firing something, a net that struck and folded around its prey. I jumped up, shading my eyes, watching as it rose in a long arc, towing the captured drone behind it, dwindling southwards.
‘That was my father,’ the girl said. She was standing too, clutching her foil blanket around herself as she stared at the blank sky, grinning like the fox that knows where the mouse lives. ‘My father and his people. They’re watching us. They’re protecting us. They know where we are.’
‘Whoever it was, we can’t stay here,’ I said. ‘We need to find shelter before you freeze to death. And if the bad guys were running that drone, the one that got snatched, they’re probably right behind us.’
She tried to argue, of course. She believed that help was close at hand, tried to stand her ground. I had to threaten to sling her over my shoulder to get her moving again.
‘You don’t want to face the fact that you’ve lost,’ she said.
‘I’ll give in when your father walks up and puts a pistol to my head,’ I said. ‘Until then, you’re going to do exactly what I tell you.’
The stretch of bare ice grew narrower, gave way to snow. Below us, slumps of ice and rakes of bare rock slanted towards the frozen ridges and ripples of a glacier. The sky was darkening and it was steadily growing colder. We’d have to find somewhere to rest up soon, even if it was no more than a snow hole. I was searching for a way to reach an island of rock directly below us, thinking that there might be some small chance of shelter in its lee, when I heard the faint buzz of a motor, saw a speck moving across the long slope. A skimmer, no more than two kilometres away and leaning in a wide curve, heading straight for us.
