Austral

by Paul McAuley

  ‘He was being treated for a poisoned wound, last I knew. By a queen who was the sister of the man who poisoned him, the man he killed. The queen and her daughter, Isander. So far, it’s all been about him, hasn’t it? I thought it was supposed to be about her.’

  ‘It’s a long story. This is just the prologue.’

  ‘So do they fall in love, Tantris and Isander, while she’s looking after him?’

  ‘That comes later,’ the girl said. ‘First, Tantris has to kill a dragon.’

  During his convalescence, Tantris was charmed by the beauty and kindness of the princess, the younger Isander. Any ordinary man would have schemed to win her heart, but because he was a hero and unswervingly loyal to his monarch Tantris returned to Palmis as soon as he was well enough, and told King Marsche about her. The king was still in mourning for his wife, who had died two years before. Tantris believed that if he married Isander he would find happiness again, Palmis and Esland would become allies, peace would reign, so on. You could say that Tantris was being noble, giving up the opportunity of courting Isander for the greater good, except that he wasn’t in love with Isander. As far as he was concerned she was no more than a minor piece in the great game of politics and courtly intrigue.

  The major obstacle to this union was the death of Mordred and the sinking of most of his ironclads, but Tantris had a plan to fix that. A dragon was terrorising the west coast of Esland. He would slay it, take its head to King Geraine, and say that he had acted on the orders of his king. Geraine would forgive the death of Mordred and agree to the marriage of his daughter to King Marsche, and all would turn from the bitter past to the sweet future.

  Although it could fly and breathe fire, the dragon wasn’t an actual fairy tale dragon, but a mechanical monster got up by a wizard, grown feral and cruel after its creator died. Tantris sailed to Esland in Mordred’s ironclad, drove the dragon out of its mountain lair by bombarding it with the ship’s naval cannon, and faced it alone, armed only with his sword, because in stories like this heroes have to kill monsters up close and personal. After a fierce battle that lasted three days, he pinned the dragon’s tail with a silver nail, climbed onto its back while it shrieked and twisted, and sawed off its head.

  But he’d been badly hurt in the fight, raked by the dragon’s claws, scorched by its fire, poisoned by its breath. He was taken to a hospice in a nearby town, and a company of King Geraine’s men sent to investigate news of the dragon’s death found him there, and took him and his trophy to the capital of Esland.

  Tantris hadn’t counted on being wounded, or that once again he would be treated by Queen Isander and her daughter. Still, he stuck to his plan and explained that he was the loyal servant of the king of Palmis, whose idea it had been to slay the dragon, and when he asked King Geraine if he would give his daughter’s hand in marriage to King Marsche, Geraine quickly gave his assent.

  But Princess Isander had seen that a notch in Tantris’s sword exactly matched the splinter she’d found in Mordred’s skull when she and her mother had prepared his body for burial, and she also discovered that her uncle’s ironclad had been sighted off the coast of Esland before Tantris’s epic fight with the dragon. When she confronted Tantris and accused him of murdering Mordred and stealing his ship, the young knight explained that he’d killed him fairly in a duel, and Isander’s mother took his side. Like all good queens, she was a skilful diplomat, and knew that the marriage would benefit her family and their kingdom. Tantris enjoyed the king’s protection, she told Isander, and now that she was betrothed to King Marsche it was not her place to demand the execution of one of his knights.

  Isander had no say in who she married, the girl told me. It was that kind of story. She also told me that she had been able to choose what Isander did next, which was to give Tantris a drink laced with one of her mother’s subtle poisons.

  ‘I thought that if the king’s champion died, the marriage would be called off. And maybe something more interesting would happen. Instead, the queen recognised the symptoms of the poison and gave Tantris the antidote. The book cheated. It gave me a choice, but the choice didn’t make any difference to the story. Isander still ends up sailing towards Palmis and an arranged marriage, escorted by a man she hates because he murdered her uncle. I’m beginning to think that Daddy gave me this book because it’s another way of teaching me that a person can’t escape her duty. We argue about that all the time. I want to study geoengineering, but he says that there’s no point because I’m going to end up running the family business. The only way you can change things, according to him, is to make a lot of money first.’

  ‘Maybe he’s right.’

  ‘Except our business doesn’t have anything to do with making the world a better place. We don’t even build much, any more. It’s mostly about using money to make more money. Perhaps your people had the right idea when they tried to find another way of doing things.’

  ‘It didn’t do them any good in the end. Turns out that capitalism is unkillable because it kills every other system first.’

  It was the kind of thing the adults on Deception Island liked to say during their endless meetings and discussion circles. Maybe that was why capitalism always won out. There might be better alternatives, co-ops, syndicates, commons, so on, but while their members argued about ethics and the fine print of their charters and procedures, capitalism just got on with doing what it did, and gobbled them up.

  The girl was enjoying a moment of self-pity, saying, ‘People who don’t know any better think that rich people’s kids can do anything they want. But we can’t. We have to do what’s expected of us.’

  ‘You could always run away and become an engineer,’ I said. ‘Or anything else you want to be.’

  ‘You don’t know my father,’ the girl said. ‘When you try to talk to him about what you want, he turns it around to what you should do. About the responsibility of wealth and your obligations to the family and the family business. And you can’t argue with him, because according to him he’s always right. Even when he isn’t.’

  ‘Let me tell you a story,’ I said, tired of her poor-little-rich-girl act. I mean, try being actually poor. Try being an edited orphan everyone calls a monster.

  ‘If this is more made-up stuff about my grandfather doing terrible things,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to know.’

  ‘It’s also about Isabella. What happened after Eddie left her.’

  ‘Nothing good, I suppose.’

  ‘Exactly the opposite, in fact. At first, anyway.’

  Eddie Pulls A Fast One

  Isabella Schilling Morales was pregnant, the father of her child had run off to who knew where and hadn’t responded to any of her attempts to make contact, but she had her work, she had the support of the ecopoet community, and when her child was born she felt a kind of completion. Felt that a new and better part of her life was beginning. She no longer gave Eddie Toomy much thought, didn’t try to reach out one more time to tell him they had a son. As far as she was concerned, Eddie had defaulted on his parental rights. The baby was hers and that was that.

  She named him Salix, after the tough dwarf willows that were a vital part of heaths planted during the first stages of greening glacial till. Salix Gabriel Morales. From age three, he passed the long winters in the children’s house in Happy Valley, where Isabella had her lab and was also in charge of the greenhouses, now. Salix spent most of his time with his peers and teachers, a system of child-raising based on the old kibbutz model, but Isabella visited him for an hour or two every evening, sharing supper and his latest enthusiasms, putting him to bed and reading to him until he fell asleep. Summers, when she was working in the back country, he mostly lived in one of the children’s camps. A sturdy practical diligent boy who played with other kids his age and took his lessons outdoors in sunshine, rain or sleet, helping to make wildflower gardens, acquiring the basics of arithmetic by practical lessons, learning how the land had been shaped, words for every kind of snow and ic
e, the names of plants and insects and animals, so on.

  The ecopoets had proved that the world’s warming did not necessarily mean devastation and destruction. By helping life establish itself in new regions, encouraging it to spread and leaving it to develop as it would, they had created biomes with a total economic value estimated at more than thirty trillion dollars. But although their work was far from finished, although the ice was still retreating, still exposing tracts of virgin territory, their political and financial support was dwindling. Most of the peninsula’s population lived in Esperanza and O’Higgins and had little interest in the back country, transnats hit by the latest global recession had cut funding, and the Antarctic Authority, likewise strapped for cash, claimed that the peninsula’s forests, heaths and alpine meadows had become self-sustaining and could colonise freshly exposed areas without human intervention.

  Despite the cutbacks, many ecopoets refused to quit the peninsula after their visas and contracts expired. They believed that they were the first true natives of the biomes they had quickened. They rebelled against the Authority’s attempts to restrict their work, there was talk of self-determination and living off the land, and a vocal minority wanted to give prospective parents the chance to edit their children with a package of traits that would adapt them to the harsh climate of the new lands of the south.

  Isabella had strong sympathies with these self-styled free ecopoets. As far as she was concerned, too much of her time was taken up with writing up proposals and dealing with administrative duties and committee work instead of working in the field. Every project was constrained by a thousand petty regulations and the Antarctic Authority’s nit-picking tick-box bureaucracy, and in the ecopoet community debates about ongoing work and future projects were too often stalled by emotion and ideology, the tyranny of special interest groups, and the innate conservatism of the old guard.

  In the past ten years, for instance, only two proposals to introduce new bird species had been approved – burrowing owls, to control numbers of grassland shrews, voles and mice, and Magellanic woodpeckers, to deal with infestations of wood-boring beetles which were spreading through the forests. Isabella supported a plan to introduce species of songbird into the peninsula’s songless forests, salt marshes and meadows, had helped to design an edit that would allow small birds to survive freezing during the long winters. A similar edit, based on traits possessed by Arctic woolly bear caterpillars, which spent most of their lives deep frozen, briefly thawing in summer to feed before freezing again, repeating this cycle for six or seven years until they had grown large enough to pupate and transform into adult moths, had been used in several species of butterflies introduced to alpine meadows, but after several interminable debates the oversight committee rejected Isabella’s plan to trial it in a small number of South Georgia pipits. No use pointing out that songbirds would contribute to ecosystem diversity and create new niches, or arguing about their aesthetic qualities. The committee ruled that it was a frivolous exercise that would divert scarce resources from conservation of native birds, and told Isabella that in fifty or a hundred years birds from Tierra del Fuego, Islas Malvinas and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands would almost certainly begin to colonise the peninsula, there was no need to interfere with a perfectly natural process.

  Steering new projects through the reefs and hazards of ecopoet politics and Antarctic Authority bureaucracy, managing ongoing projects, chairing meetings that settled disputes and smoothed snags in the daily running of settlements, so on, took up most of Isabella’s time. She knew that she wasn’t seeing her son as often as she should, and to make up for it she took Salix with her when she returned to Chile for the first and last time since she’d left for the peninsula.

  Like the rising generation of ecopoets, many of the younger citizens of the peninsula chafed under the rule of the Antarctic Authority. A new political movement, the Independent Democratic Alliance, won control of municipal councils in Esperanza and O’Higgins and with the tacit support of Argentina and Chile began to campaign for independence from the rule of the Antarctic Authority. The majority of the peninsula’s permanent inhabitants were originally from Argentina and Chile, their first language was Spanish and their culture was largely Hispanic, and the two countries were the principal investors in the peninsula’s mining and fishing industries. An end to exploitation of the south by the old countries of the north! The south for the peoples of the south!

  Isabella was a member of the delegation that represented the ecopoets in talks about the peninsula’s independence, a process that had been ongoing for two years, no end in sight. Despite an endless round of committee meetings, presentations, discussion groups and press events, she found time to visit the laboratories of scientists who’d worked with her on various projects, to take Salix on excursions to one of the reconstructed beaches, the Preservar la Vida Silvestre Nacional, with its famous collection of rare and resurrected species, the Parque Metropolitano and the summit of Cerro San Cristóbal, and to spend a long weekend with her parents.

  Salix found the visit confusing and tiresome. There were too many people and too many buildings, it was too green, too warm, too wet, and he had little in common with his grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins. The lingua franca of the ecopoets was English, the lingua franca of science. Salix had difficulty following his cousins’ machine-gun Spanish, and couldn’t understand why different members of the same family lived in separate houses and apartments, why they didn’t share their stuff, why they had so much of it. It was as if he had landed on an alien planet with completely different customs and climate, and after eight years’ absence Isabella felt much the same. She had lived most of her adult life on the peninsula. It was her home, now and forever.

  Two months after Isabella and Salix returned from Chile, the talks broke down and the peninsula made a unilateral declaration of independence. Within a week, the offices of the Antarctic Authority had been shut down and the pro tem government of the Republic of Antarctica had been established. Argentina and Chile signed treaties with the new nation and loaned warships and troops to defend its borders, but neither the other member countries of the Antarctic Authority nor the UN made any serious objections, and most of the transnats with interests in the peninsula were swayed by promises to relax controls over mining, oil and gas extraction, and fishing. The Independent Democratic Alliance won a sweeping majority in elections for a new government, the transition to self-rule was smooth and mostly trouble-free, capped by a week of fireworks, parades and concerts in the peninsula’s two cities, and the focus of the global media moved on.

  Although they had given the independence movement unqualified support, the ecopoets quickly realised that the new regime had little love for them or their work. According to the new government, the peninsula was no longer a frontier land, was making the transition to a mature democracy. The ecopoets had done much useful work in the past but had become an unaccountable elite that believed themselves above the law, wanted to control access to land that belonged to everyone, were tinkering with plants and animals without proper oversight, and even had plans to alter the genomes of their children. It was time to open up the back country for everyone, to take direct control of greening the land and begin a programme to integrate the ecopoet community into the mainstream of society.

  Within a year, the government passed a Land Act that created four national parks and required every ecopoet to register with a new agency and comply with its regulations. Most ecopoets co-operated, believing that they could negotiate some kind of agreement that would allow them to continue their work, but Isabella and a significant minority of the rising generation believed the Land Act was only the overture of a plan to shut them down, confiscate everything they had created, and turn the land over to the same kind of short-term interests which had driven uncontrolled industrialisation, plundering of mineral and biological resources, burning of fossil fuels, and all the other venalities and stupidities which had contrib
uted to global warming and climate change.

  While Isabella and her comrades were making plans to defy the government and continue their work in any way they could, carpetbaggers like Eddie Toomy were moving into the cities of the north. Back in the twentieth century, Esperanza had been one of the first civilian settlements in Antarctica, a key element in Argentina’s efforts to claim sovereignty. Women and children had lived there all year round and it was the birthplace of Emilio Marcos Palma, the first person born on the continent. Part of the original site is underwater now, flooded by the sea-level rise. The rest, including two of the original red-painted buildings, a grotto dedicated to the Virgin of Lujan and a stele commemorating the deaths of early explorers, has been relocated to a little heritage park behind the Paseo, a seawall topped with an esplanade and a four-lane highway.

  When Emilio Palma was born (there’s a statue of him on the esplanade, his heel rubbed smooth by couples hoping for a baby), there were only fifty permanent inhabitants in Esperanza. Now there were close to a hundred thousand, and more were arriving every day. Eddie Toomy set up brassplate companies fronting for outside interests, used the fees and the money from the sale of the crab farm to buy rental apartments, then got into building them himself. Within a year, he was employing two dozen people. He was still a hustler with little interest in the niceties of accountancy or planning law, but he was smart enough to realise that he needed to diversify. The peninsula was dependent on food imports from Chile, Argentina and New Zealand, and the government was giving tax breaks to local producers to promote self-sufficiency. Eddie purchased a controlling interest in a small greenhouse farm, then moved into aquaculture, taking advantage of a relaxation in the licensing regime to set up fish and kelp farms along the east and west coasts, winning contracts to supply new factories and mining towns.

  Soon, he was a millionaire many times over, married with two kids, Alberto and Amalia. He donated money to several of Esperanza’s schools, helped to found one of its hospitals, was an early supporter of the up-and-coming National Unity Party and a regular guest on news feed panels. A plain-speaking self-made bloke who preferred common sense to the opinions of experts, one of the peninsula’s success stories.