by Paul McAuley
He took the blow on one muscular shoulder with unflinching stoicism, and in that moment I saw his life entire. Growing up in the rootless rag-tag tribe, an unloved stepchild bullied by the other kids for being different, forced to do every kind of menial work and normalising it the way kids do, the way I’d normalised life in exile on Deception Island.
‘I’m too easy on you,’ the judge told him, ‘and you take advantage of my kindness. Get along now, we’ll talk about this later.’
Levi glanced at me before he turned and walked away, and a kind of acknowledgement passed between us. I like to think that was the moment he decided to help me.
‘As for you,’ Judge Boudou said to me, ‘the people have come to an agreement.’
‘You’re going to get what you deserve,’ said the bravo I’d headbutted, Noah. His black eyes had developed nicely in the short while since I’d last seen him. One was swollen shut, shiny purple as a ripe plum.
‘We’re going to take you to Charlotte Bay,’ Judge Boudou said. ‘And hand you and the girl over to the police.’
‘Why take me to them when they could fly straight here?’
‘We won’t have them trespassing on our territory,’ Judge Boudou said smoothly. ‘The handover will take place on neutral ground.’
It was impossible to read anything in her wintery expression, and her daughter, Emzara, had a pretty good poker face too, but the truth was plain to see in Noah’s stupid smile. If they really were planning to take me to Charlotte Bay, it wasn’t to meet the police or anyone else in authority. I had already guessed what would be coming, but it was still a plunging shock.
‘What about the girl?’ I said.
‘If all goes well, she will soon be reunited with her father,’ Judge Boudou said.
‘And you’ll get the reward,’ I said.
‘We’ll get paid, don’t you worry,’ Noah said.
But not, I thought, by Honourable Deputy Alberto Toomy. I was scared and angry but stepped on the urge to call them on their lie, tell them that I knew what they were really planning to do. If I pretended to believe them, maybe they’d relax around me, grow careless, give me a window of opportunity
But I couldn’t resist a little jab, saying, ‘You took an awful long time debating what to do with me, when any right-thinking person would have known at once.’
‘Listen to the mouth on her,’ Noah said. ‘We should maybe sew it shut.’
Judge Boudou ignored him, telling me, ‘It was not the decision of any one person, but of us all. And before we made it, every different opinion had to be heard and debated. That’s how democracy works.’
‘I was brought up by ecopoets,’ I said. ‘I know all about democracy. And what I see here, it isn’t anything like it.’
The judge ignored that, too. ‘I hope that you’ll accept the punishment you deserve with the dignity and discipline that befits your uniform,’ she said. ‘We’re leaving tomorrow. I suggest that you spend the time between now and then reflecting on your sins.’
One of the bravos stayed behind to keep watch. I did my best to ignore her and paced around the stub of girder for a while, clockwise for three turns until the chain wound tight, then three turns anticlockwise to unwind it. Thinking of what I was facing, thinking of all the paths I should have taken instead of the one which had led me here. The dog bite had mostly stopped bleeding, but was throbbing with an unpleasant heat. I reckoned that I needed medical treatment the judge and her people weren’t about to give me, but that was the least of my worries.
Night quickly fell inside and outside the shell of the radar station. Windowlights came on in the little camp, the woman keeping watch was replaced by a man, and a little later two people walked out of the circle of vehicles towards me. Levi and the judge’s daughter, Emzara. Her beanbag shotgun was slung over her shoulder and she carried a flashlight, shining it in my face, telling me to sit still or else, telling the kid to give me my bedding and my supper.
Levi dropped a couple of blankets at my feet, then set down a plastic canister of water and a mug, saying quietly, ‘It’s yellow bean soup. Be careful. It’s hot.’
‘I told you not to speak to her,’ Emzara said, and cuffed him on the back of the head. He didn’t so much as blink, staring at me with a careful blank expression.
As they turned to go, I called after him. ‘Hey, Levi? I hope you find out your real name one day.’
That was the last I saw of him. I don’t know if he stayed on with what survived of Judge Boudou’s little gang, if he was arrested and ended up in Star City or if he lit out into the back country. But I dearly hope to see him again one day, because I want to thank him for what I found at the bottom of that mug of soup.
22
Early morning, grey light infiltrating the spacey interior of the radar station and the camp beginning to stir, the girl brought me breakfast and an apology. She was escorted by a man who, while she set down a flask of tea and a bowl of cornmeal porridge in front of me, chatted with the bravo who had been guarding me in the last watch of the night.
It was piercingly cold in the draughty ruin, so cold I’d had trouble sleeping. Frost crackled on the blankets I’d wrapped around myself, and the bare centimetre of water left in the plastic canister had frozen solid. It was only a small consolation that my guard, swaddled in seal fur, boots resting on a stove’s cube, looked as miserable as I felt.
As I warmed my bound hands on the flask, the girl asked if I was OK.
‘As you see,’ I said.
‘You should drink that tea while it’s still hot.’
She was squatting on her heels in front of me. Her blonde hair was brushed and shining and there was a shine in her face too. A hopeful eager shine that I didn’t like at all.
‘I’ll save it for later,’ I said. I’d thrown up the soup in the night, wasn’t sure if my empty stomach could deal with a bowl of steaming mush.
‘I’m sorry it ended up like this,’ the girl said. ‘I asked Judge Boudou to let you go. I really did. I told her that you didn’t mean to harm me, that the gang chasing us were the real bad guys. But she said it was up to the police to decide that, and she’s going to take us to this town later today. Hand us over to the authorities there. I’ll put in a good word, I swear I will. And I’m sure my father won’t be too angry with you after I tell him what happened, why you had to get away. I mean, you’re family, sort of.’
‘You’re too sweet for this world,’ I said. I was trying to tamp down my anger at this foolishness, but it wasn’t easy. ‘Too sweet and too trusting. You think these people are going to help you, don’t you? You think they are law-abiding citizens. I bet you even think that Judge Boudou is some kind of judge.’
‘I know she isn’t a real judge. But she represents the law out here.’
I glanced at my guard and the girl’s escort, lowered my voice. ‘I’ll tell you exactly what she is. What her people are. See the sno-crawler over there? The one with the picture of the angry bird splashed across it? We had people in the work camp with tattoos like that. They call themselves True Citizens. They believe that they are upholding the old Antarctic Treaty. That it supersedes any laws made since then, that they are the true custodians of the land.’
‘They sound like ecopoets.’
‘Ecopoets didn’t believe that they were better than anyone else. And they did useful work. But the True Citizens, they’re just a bunch of malcontents who think they have the right to steal land from the government. They don’t call it stealing, of course. They call it adverse possession. They have a network of self-appointed judges who make rulings that have no meaning outside of their stupid fantasies. Judge Boudou, she’s one of them. And her people, these True Citizens, they aren’t in any way custodians of the land. They’re criminals, plain and simple.’
‘I’m not stupid,’ the girl said. ‘I know Judge Boudou and her people are probably doing this for the reward money. But as long as they do the right thing it doesn’t matter, does it?’
/> ‘Wake up, Princess. Look around you. Think it through. Did you sit in on that debate of theirs? Did you hear them agree to give us up to the police? Did the judge let you talk to your father? She didn’t, did she? Because she doesn’t want him to know where you are.’
‘She said it would all be sorted out by the police.’
‘She flat out lied is what she did. She and her people, they may work as foresters and such in summer, but in winter they turn to shadier kinds of business. Such as using the ice roads to move contraband. And one of the things Keever Bishop does, he runs a network that smuggles all kinds of shit up and down the west coast. Judge Boudou and her merry band of True Citizens probably don’t work for him directly – if they did, we’d have been handed over to him straight away. But they do business with him. They know him, they know that he wants you, and they know what he does to people who cross or cheat him. Mike Mike gave them a taste of that when he passed through, looking for us. So what they’re planning doesn’t have anything to do with turning us in to the police and claiming your father’s reward. No, they’re going to do what’s in their best interest, and sell us out to Keever.’
‘You’re the one who is lying,’ the girl said indignantly. ‘If the judge and her people are as bad as you say, if they mean to do me harm, they would have chained me up like they chained you up.’
‘They chained me up because I’m a big bad husky, and they know I know what they really are. But you aren’t any kind of threat, Princess, and where would you go if you ran away, how long would you last? Now listen,’ I said, when the girl started to object. ‘Listen hard and listen good. There’s an easy way to discover who’s telling the truth. All you have to do is go find a skywave radio. I bet just about every vehicle in the camp is equipped with one, it’s how these people stay in touch with each other when they’re working different places in summer. Find a radio, switch it on, start talking. Put out a message to the police. Tell them who you are. Tell them we’re up on the west side of the Herbert Plateau, at the old radar station. And tell them to come quick, before we set out for Charlotte Bay.’
‘I know what you’re trying to do.’
‘I’m trying to save you.’
The girl shook her head. ‘You’re hoping to cause some kind of trouble so you can escape.’
‘We’re already in trouble. We’ve been in trouble ever since we stopped to help that damn mammoth.’
But I couldn’t make her see the truth. Judge Boudou had told her what she wanted to hear, and that was that. It ended up with me calling her a fool and her calling me a liar and flouncing off, with her escort trailing behind.
With nothing else to do, I drank the tea and ate the porridge, spilling half of it because it wasn’t easy, eating with my wrists bound together. I’d barely finished when four of them came for me. Noah, Emzara and two other bravos, a drone floating alongside them, the guard standing up and joining the party.
I’d been planning to co-operate, all meek and mild, hoping they’d go easy on me and maybe make a careless mistake I could exploit, but even as she walked towards me Emzara shot me with that damn beanbag gun. The round hammered into my chest and knocked me on my ass, and while I lay there, struggling to breathe, one of the bravos stepped up quickly and lightly and slapped a patch on the side of my neck.
Things went all woozy and loose after that. Blurred lights, distant voices. Shadows looming and receding. For a little while it seemed that I was back on the boat with Mama, pitching on the sea’s relentless swell as we fled Deception Island, but when I came to my senses, such as they were, I found myself lying inside a box or crate narrow as a coffin and printed from dirty grey plastic.
The lid was locked down tight, just a little light filtering around its edges. The unpadded floor jolted under my back. There was a rushing swaying sense of movement. My head ached, my chest ached, my whole body ached. My wrists were still tied together but they hadn’t bothered to bind my legs, and I pried at the heel of my left boot with the toe of the right and managed to lever it off and used my knee to trap it against the side of the crate. Wriggling back and forth, I worked it up onto my chest, caught it in my bound hands and shook it until Levi’s gift tumbled out of the slit in the lining where I’d hidden it.
It was a little knife about the length of my thumb – a sturdy sliver of glass with an edge flaked to razor sharpness, fabric wrapped around one end to make a handle. The kind of puñal cons make to protect themselves or settle a score. One like this, sometimes called a wolf claw, you make a fist and jam it between two fingers, use it to slash the face of your enemy or punch her in the throat or eye.
I caught it between my teeth and commenced to saw at the cord around my wrists. It took a long time. The vehicle was jolting down a steep gradient, taking sharp turns that banged me around inside the crate. I cut my lips a couple of times, swallowed blood, kept sawing. Sliced my wrists, the meat at the base of the joint of my thumb. At last I was through to the cord’s plastic core. I carefully nicked it, spat out the knife and managed to stick it under the flap of my jacket’s breast pocket, and captured my loose boot and worked it back onto my foot.
After that, I had nothing to do but brace myself against the rattling ride. The light prying at the edges of the crate’s lid grew ever dimmer. By the time the ride smoothed out and the vehicle picked up speed it was about as dark as midnight. I was certain that we were either in or were approaching a town, and it had to be Charlotte Bay because there weren’t any other settlements with paved roads within a day’s drive of the plateau.
At last the vehicle stopped. I heard muffled voices. Someone laughing. I lay still and quiet, trying and failing to make out the conversation. After a little while the crate slid out and down, dropped to the ground with a bone-rattling bump. The lid cracked open, hinged aside. Cold air and lamp-lit twilight, Noah looming above me, stepping back, telling me to get out.
He aimed a pistol at me as I stood up, a pair of bravos and the girl at his back. She was hunched in her windproofs, pinched and miserable, glancing at me and glancing away. I had to resist the urge to tell her I told you so.
My crate had been dragged out of the back of a battered old land cruiser. A harbour partly lit by industrial arc lights stretched into darkness. Strange to see a place with no trace of snow. The bracing smell of the sea filling the air, the faint musical clatter of wires and stays of boats rocking at anchor, a sprinkling of lights defining the contours of a steep hillside. It was Charlotte Bay all right, but there was no sign of the police. Instead, Noah helpfully pointed out a bunch of vehicles parked up by a low square building at the far end of the harbour. According to him, that was where Judge Boudou was handling the final negotiations for the exchange.
‘I didn’t want you to miss what’s going down,’ Noah said. ‘Oh, but your fone doesn’t work any more. That’s OK. Take a look right here.’
He stuck a hand-sized scrap of screenpaper on the flank of the land cruiser. It showed an unsteady feed from someone’s eyecam, Judge Boudou talking with a big man in a long quilted coat, its fur collar turned up around his shaved head.
Mike Mike. It was a shock to see him in civilian clothes, in the open air. Several men and women were ranged behind him, dressed in hooded red jackets, machine-pistols and shotguns slung on their shoulders.
‘They’ll come and get you and the girl as soon as they’ve transferred the credit,’ Noah said. ‘Won’t be long now.’
I pretended to be interested in what the scrap of paper was showing. ‘So your mother and sister are fronting the deal. Doing the important work while you babysit me. It must be hard, pendejo, knowing your sister is smarter than you. Knowing you’ll never be worth much of anything.’
Noah tried to laugh this off, asking the others to imagine how scared this she-whelephant must be, running off her mouth like this.
And yes, I was scared, but I was also trying to channel Lola, who always had a good line in insults and trash talk. I was trying to get under Noah’s sk
in, to provoke him the way seasoned cons provoked new arrivals, getting in their faces and disrespecting them, forcing them to fight or forever be labelled a weak-ass punk.
‘Listen and learn,’ I said, ‘because it’s plain to see none of you know what you’re doing. You should have held me some place safe until you got paid, then told the other party where to find me. Instead, I’m out here in the open, where they can snatch me any time they want. A basic amateur mistake. But that’s exactly what you are, isn’t it? A bunch of amateurs.’
Noah glared at me with his one good eye, saying, ‘As if you know anything about it.’
‘Why we’re here, I’m in the kidnapping business too. Does your mother have false teeth?’
‘I think you should shut up now,’ Noah said.
‘Because I don’t see any negotiations there,’ I said. ‘I see an old woman about to go down on her knees in front of that big guy. She has false teeth, she can spit them out and really get to work.’
He came at me then, roaring, aiming to pistol-whip me to my knees, and I jerked my wrists apart and snapped the nicked cord that bound them and spun him into a neck lock. He was a big man, but I was bigger, I was stronger and, this was what really counted, I was pretty damn desperate. As he bucked against me, one of his bravos tried to put me down with a beanbag round, but I saw the gun come up and wrenched Noah in front of me and the round hit him in the face with a sound a cabbage makes when it hits the floor of a farm stack from twenty stories up. He went limp and I grabbed his pistol and shot the man who’d shot him. Hit him in the leg with a ballistic tag. He sat down hard and I put the pistol on the other bravo, who took a step backwards and raised his hands.
I disarmed them, locked them in the land cruiser. As we hurried towards the water’s edge, the girl, breathless and close to tears, wanted to know why we hadn’t just driven away.
‘Because there’s only one road in or out of this town, and knowing Mike Mike he’ll have posted someone to watch it. But it’s OK. I have a plan.’
