by Paul McAuley
She wrenched free. ‘I won’t go with you. I won’t.’
‘You can’t stay here,’ I said. ‘And you aren’t able to look after yourself.’
I could hear a crackle of shots in the distance, guessed that the two parties had realised we were escaping and each was blaming the other. I grabbed the girl’s arm, something in the distance caught fire and lofted a plume of orange flame into the night, and we were running towards a couple of fishing boats. We were halfway there when a spotlight swung down the length of the harbour. Its beam lit up the cruiser, tracked sideways. I pulled the girl down, covering her with my body as it swung past. It splashed on a row of shipping containers, paused, then swung back and fixed on us. A man shouted something in the dark beyond the glare and I pulled the girl up and we were running again.
We’d almost reached the boats when she gasped, stumbled, and sprawled full length, the back of her windproof shedding a little flurry of insulation. Something small and angry cracked past, I realised that someone was shooting at us, realised that the girl had been hit, and scooped her up and ran headlong, jumping down into the nearest boat, breaking the lock of the wheelhouse with a kick, setting the girl down inside, telling her to stay put.
The boat was tied up with two hawsers, fore and aft. I had to scramble back onto the quay to free the hawser loops from their bollards, saw figures running towards me through the slant of the spotlight’s beam. Shouts. Shots. I scrambled back into the wheelhouse, punched the starter button. White water churned astern and I hauled the wheel hard over and aimed Noah’s pistol through the open door of the wheelhouse and shot up the other boat with explosive tags. It was burning in half a dozen places as I turned my stolen craft in a long curve, heading towards the entrance of the harbour and the open sea beyond.
The Happiest Days of My Life
Although Deception Island’s volcanic caldera is flooded by the sea, it’s still active, squatting as it does over a weak spot in the Earth’s skin where fingers of molten rock ooze up from deep pockets and chambers, breaking the surrounding rock, finding a way to the surface. I’ve already told you about digging spa pools in the warm sands of the island’s black beaches, how the ruins of the old whaling station and a couple of science stations were partly buried by mud flows and ash from a big eruption at the end of the last century, so on. Now I want to tell you how another eruption helped Mama and me escape. I want to tell you about the happiest days of my life.
In the years of our exile, cinder cones clustered on the east side of the island sometimes breathed out puffs of steam, and there were dozens of minor earthquakes that did no more than rattle the crockery. Little reminders that we were living on the slopes of a volcano, but nothing especially alarming until the water in Fumarole Bay began to steam and roil. A new vent had opened underwater, pumping out lava, pushing up a lumpy little island. A couple of days later, a big tremor shook everything on the island. There was a landslide on the western slopes of Stonethrow Ridge, a second vent cracked open on the flank of Mount Pond, throwing a plume of smoke and ash high into the sky, and after consulting with the authorities on the mainland the governor ordered an immediate evacuation of the island’s entire population.
By the time the ferry arrived ash was snowing everywhere on the island and the air was filled with an acrid haze of volcanic smog. Like the rest of the ecopoets, I wore goggles and had tied a folded triangle of cloth, wetted with milk to absorb the worst of the air’s smarting sting, over my mouth and nose. We’d been put to work at the research station in Whalers Bay, packing valuable equipment and rounding up the so-called killer whales, supervised by short-tempered mainland police armed with pistols and shock sticks and dressed in black coveralls and helmets, face masks with oval visors over snouty filters. One of us kids called them space pigs, and we took to making oinking noises whenever we passed one.
As far as we were concerned, the disaster was huge fun. A festival of cheerful anarchy, ecopoets mingling with lab staff and island security, all rules suspended. The killer whales were loaded one by one into padded transport slings and swung through the air onto the ferry’s rear deck, where they were wetted down with seawater sprays. It was midsummer and we worked all through the long evening, the sun glowering low in the hazy sky like a sore and inflamed eye. Slabs of sea mist hung above the bay and to the north and east the tall plume from the vent on Mount Pond leaned eastward, the root of a great thundercloud expanding across the ocean. A constant deep rumble thrummed in the air, the ground. You could feel it through the soles of your shoes.
In the middle of all this, a rumour spread that the governor’s residence was on fire. I saw a squad of police form up and march off, and a few moments later Mama emerged from the busy swirl of people and took my hand and told me to follow her.
As we slipped away from the research station, hurrying through the steady fall of ash, she told me what was going down. Told me that she was part of a crew of a couple of dozen ecopoets who were planning to escape, had set the fire as a diversion. We met up with the others at Fildes Point and under cover of the sea mist and general confusion scuttled half the fishing boats anchored there, climbed aboard the rest, and headed out through the channel at Neptune’s Bellows into the open sea. The only home I’d ever known soon disappeared below the horizon, but I was too excited to feel any pangs of sentiment or loss.
Mama and her friends had hacked limiters built into the navigation systems of the boats to prevent them from sailing more than ten kilometres from the island. They’d also sabotaged the comms of the ferry, the radio tower on Roland Hill, and the terminal of the undersea cable that linked the island with the mainland. The authorities didn’t learn about our escape until the ferry and its cargo of evacuees reached Livingston Island early the next morning, and by then our little fleet had scattered east and south in the brief night, each taking leave of the others as they ploughed their different courses.
Our stolen boat drove more or less due south, passing the sheer cliffs of Trinity Island and their swirling clouds of seabirds, heading towards landfall near Cape Herschel. There were seven of us aboard. Mama and me, Roxana Sanchez Jara and Laura Vega Garramuño, and their daughters, Astrid, Nelly and Conny. All three girls, like me, like most free ecopoet children born before arrest and exile, were huskies. Astrid was twelve, almost exactly my age. The twins, Nelly and Conny, were three years older. Sleepless and excited, we took turns standing at the bow in sea spray and cutting wind, keeping watch for ships, aircraft and drones. Once, we saw a pod of hourglass dolphins leaping above the waves with unchained exuberance. Once, a big white bird with sooty wings glided alongside our boat, matching its speed and course. A black-browed albatross according to Astrid, who knew all about birds. It accompanied us for several minutes before veering away towards some destination of its own, and I felt that the spirit of my father had briefly visited and blessed us.
Meanwhile, Mama, Roxana and Laura crowded in the little wheelhouse, steering the boat and discussing their plans, talking endlessly and reasonably as grown-ups did. Mama was possessed by determined purpose, telling me that it was our duty to evade capture and make our way south and find a place where we could start afresh. Our boat didn’t have enough charge to make it all the way down the length of the peninsula and it would be too easily spotted once news of our escape spread, so we would make landfall as soon as we could and hike the rest of the way. After lots were drawn it was decided that Mama and I would be put off first, and the others would travel a little further down the coast. Splitting up was the best way of evading the authorities, and we promised each other that we would meet up again below the Antarctic Circle.
I had spent most of my life on an island just twelve kilometres across. I had no real understanding of the world beyond, the hundreds of kilometres of trackless terrain we would have to cross on foot, how long it would take, how hard and dangerous it would be. All I knew was that nothing would ever be the same again, and I was filled to bursting with giddy eager anticipati
on. Like every child I sometimes liked to imagine that I was the heroine of a novela in which everyone else was a supporting player, and now I had been thrown into exactly that kind of grand adventure.
Mama and I waded ashore in a little cove west of the mouth of the Blériot River, and in the blue twilight of a midsummer midnight we hiked south and east through a Sitka spruce plantation. Orderly rows of dark green conical trees all the same size pressed close together above carpets of brown needles, nothing growing in their deep shade but frills of pale fungus on fallen branches. Mama grew ever more angry as we walked. The land uncovered by the retreat of the ice had been a chance to quicken new oases of life and watch them grow wild and strange, she said. From the first seeds of ecopoiesis to a complex web that discovered its own checks and balances as it was pushed and pulled by fluctuations in climate and the activity of keystone species. A great work of time that couldn’t be quantified in terms of profit, utility or any other human measure except, maybe, beauty. But the government had dispersed or exiled the land’s custodians, promises and vows made a century before had been broken, and commercial interests were displacing the new ecosystem’s emergent complexity with sterile industrial monocultures. A filthy craven betrayal of the ideals of a new country and its people, so on, Mama ranting in fine form, calling down curses on those responsible for this obscenity.
We stopped now and then to uproot saplings planted in transparent protective tubes, or to ring-bark older trees. Mama showing me how to strip away bands of living bark, cutting off the flow of water and mineral nutrients upwards and the flow of sugars downwards, so that the tops of the trees would die of thirst and the roots would die of starvation. These token acts of sabotage gave her a grim satisfaction. If we could kill the entire plantation, she said, the forest would grow over the scar in a few decades, the little unmakers, wood-boring beetles, saprophytic fungi and all the rest, would remove every last trace of the corpses of these alien intruders, and all would be as it should be once again.
We hid in a ditch when the mechanised brontosaurus of a tractor rig roared past, then rose up and went on, leaving the plantation behind and plunging into scrub that straggled among marsh and strings of little lakes and streams that less than two decades later would be gone, the streams diverted, the marshes drained, the lakes filled in, the scrub bulldozed and ploughed under and replaced by ordered squares of edited trees. Our little act of defiance leaving no trace except in my memory.
But back then most of Blériot Basin was still a wilderness growing according to its own logic, and after we climbed slopes still raw with the scrape marks of lost ice I saw for the first time an actual forest. There had been a windbreak of stunted Guaitecas cypress around the garden of the governor’s residence on Deception Island, and clumps of dwarf birch and willow huddled in spots sheltered from the salt-laden gales that overswept the island for more than half the year, but here were trees growing wild for as far as I could see.
Mama named each species, told me about their individual virtues, explained how seedlings had been raised in nurseries and planted out by hand. A person could plant between five hundred and two thousand seedlings every day, she said, carrying them in sacks slung over their shoulders, using a spade to pry at the stony ground and inserting each one with a sprinkling of enriched soil from the soil factory. She told me that everything growing there, every tree, every bush and blade of grass, was rooted in the work of generations of ecopoets, and almost all of the animals, from worms to reindeer and wolves, likewise owed their existence to people who had designed and quickened intricate webs of species and left them to find their own balance. She talked about life in the bush camps, the songs and the stories and the camaraderie of common purpose, seemed happier than she’d been for a long long time.
I’d become used to her long silences and unpredictable sudden bursts of anger, the way she had of turning from me, becoming remote and unreachable even when we were jammed together in our little house by bad weather. I didn’t understand then that she was too often caught in the jaws of depression’s black dog. She had lost her freedom and her husband, was raising a child whose future was uncertain, who would be persecuted everywhere outside the island community. The bitter taste of failure, the lash of self-blame, self-hatred – she shed all of that in the first days as we walked south. It was like watching a flower open to the sun. Although she was only thirty-two when we escaped she had always seemed much older. Careworn. But in those first days of freedom she began to look her true age. Smiling easily, laughing, full of energy.
She was happy and so was I. Alive to every moment, greedily absorbing novelty as only a child can.
Mama believed that we might find free ecopoets living in the far south, told me that we might even find my grandmother, told me every detail of the shelter we would build. There was plenty of work to do, she said. The ice was still melting, exposing land that could be seeded with new life. There would be new species to be edited and introduced. Campaigns against atrocities like the spruce plantation to be organised and executed. She and her friends had made all kinds of plans during the long years of exile. Now she could begin to think about making them come true.
So we headed out across Blériot Basin, climbing a steep slope to the permanent ice and snow of the Herbert Plateau, cutting west and descending through a pass where a white-water river rushed in wild spate around huge boulders. Making our way through wooded slopes to Charlotte Bay, where we were given supplies and the gift of a short hop to Flandres Bay. And we skied up long slopes from Flandres Bay and crossed the Forbidden Plateau to the wild, sparsely populated east coast and hiked south, making our way across a series of parallel valleys and mountainous ridges and at last turning towards the west coast again.
Days of endless light. The sun briefly dipping below the horizon after midnight and almost immediately rising again. It was warm enough to sleep out in the open – when we needed to sleep. The long days and brief white nights confounded our internal clocks and we often walked until two or three in the morning. It was the same with everyone else. Our first night after leaving the boat, in the scrub forest of Blériot Basin, we were woken by the distant crackle of gunshots, and the next day found the decapitated carcass of a giant elk, its head and great spread of antlers taken as a trophy by some wealthy hunter. In Charlotte Bay kids played outside way after midnight, and cafés and bars never seemed to close. Up on the Forbidden Plateau we saw three skimmers chase each other across the snow in midnight’s spectral twilight. Everywhere on the peninsula people were making the most of the brief summer.
We walked every day. Ten kilometres, twenty. Stopping now and then to pick berries or dig for tubers, to nap for a couple of hours in some sunny spot before moving on. I was young and strong and sturdy, and despite her new energy and purpose Mama sometimes struggled to keep up with me. She taught me how to choose a good site to make camp, how to find the runs that small animals used in the undergrowth, and make wire-loop traps and set them just so. She taught me how to light fires with a fire plough, a bow and drill, with a lens shaped from clear ice. How to build a shelter by notching a young tree’s trunk and bending and staking it to form a ridge pole and weaving walls on either side from cut branches. Now and then we’d sleep in one of the old ecopoet refuges. I’ve already told you about the one tucked into a ravine, its flat roof covered in boulders. There was another hidden behind a waterfall, and one cut into a ledge high on a slope with views down the length of Andvord Fjord, steep slopes crowded with trees rising on either side of a crooked sleeve of vivid blue water, sparkling waterfalls unravelling past cliffs, and a little cluster of black roofs, the fishing village of Puerto Constitución, gleaming at the shore near the fjord’s mouth.
There was a sadness to those old refuges. An echo of lives lived and long lost. Like the abandoned winter station we found in Green Valley, where volunteer saplings grew among raised vegetable beds in smashed greenhouses, army graffiti was scrawled on the walls of wrecked labs, and the broke
n foundations of a cluster of cabins long ago burnt to the ground were smothered in drifts of blue-berried honeysuckle. We spent a day there while Mama picked over the ruins, possessed by the ghost of her black dog, and I thoughtlessly gorged on raspberries growing wild in a walled garden and fell asleep on a cracked slab of concrete in the warm sunlight.
There were old gardens scattered throughout the coastal forests. Some bounded by rough stone walls overgrown with moss and ferns, others squares or rectangles scratched into stony earth on slopes that faced south-east and caught the most sunlight, or patchworked around huts built of earth-chinked stones and roofed with plastic sheeting weighted down with rocks and wired to rotted batteries that had once stored electricity generated by solar paint. Most of these plots were overgrown with weeds, only a few edible plants remaining, but occasionally we came across fields that had been cleared and replanted with neat rows of crops. White lupins, blueberries and lingonberries, sea kale, the inevitable Eskimo potato.
Once, we came across several square fields of dwarf barley etched on a hillside. Wire fences to keep out reindeer, a gravel road wandering down into the forest. Mama froze at the sight of them, said that while the replanted fields were mostly likely cultivated by half-and-halfs, these were something else. Some kind of experiment left to grow over summer. Like the spruce plantation it was a stupid waste of land, a reversion to the bad old days of the oil age when agriculture had been dominated by monocultures that used more energy, in the form of fertiliser and fuel for machines, than was harvested. People never learned, Mama said. Especially the rich, who made fetishes of things that other people couldn’t afford. That barley would probably be used to make bread sold for silly amounts of money, or to brew rare expensive beer drunk by the same kind of people who used ice ten thousand years old, brought up from deep cores in glaciers on the mainland, to chill their drinks.
