by Paul McAuley
Like those barley fields, Mama said, every biome quickened after the retreat of the ice – salt marshes fringing the mouths of meltwater rivers, forests spread across valleys, alpine meadows on high rocky slopes, moss lawns in cirques which had once been tamped full of snow and ice a hundred metres deep – were human artifacts. But they weren’t parks or gardens, ever the same like so many pictures. They didn’t evolve in a linear predictable manner towards some stable end point, but were in a constant state of dynamic disequilibrium. It was not possible to completely describe the state of a biome at any particular moment, nor was it possible to predict future states, but you could sketch the broad limits of possibility, and because they weren’t as rich as natural ecosystems and changes driven by global warming were still ongoing, the biomes of the peninsula required a certain level of protection and management. Exactly how much protection, how much management, had been endlessly debated by ecopoets in their heyday, most favouring a light touch and the gradual introduction of new species to increase diversity and robustness. But after their caretakers had surrendered or had been rounded up, most of the biomes had been left to grow as they would, and it was a tribute to the clever designs of their initial states that they had survived as well as they had in the past couple of decades.
Anyway, Mama and I skirted those fields, wary of drones or cameras that might be watching over them, and hurried on into the forest on the far side. We were ragged and sunburnt and lean. We lived on what we could forage and catch. We avoided other people, made long detours around villages and settlements. I swam several times in the sea, in churning surf, among slicks of bull kelp, once among penguins that shot past me like torpedoes, trailing long wakes of silvery bubbles. Mama swam too, but never for very long – the water was too cold for her. We saw fish eagles play fighting above a fjord, locking claws and plunging towards the water and breaking apart at the last minute, over and again. And on our traverse of the Forbidden Plateau we descended into a crevasse and clambered over blocks fallen from ice bridges that curved overhead and found at its far end a cathedral vault and a tumble of ice descending into depths we did not dare to investigate, everything lit by a glow as blue and holy as radioactivity.
The days and days of walking blur together. It’s hard, now, to sort dreams from actual memories. I remember climbing to Mapple Valley’s high southern crest and seeing a panorama of parallel razorback ridges bare as the moon stretching away under the cloudless sky. I remember a circle of upright stones in a mossy chapel in the forest below the Forbidden Plateau, lit by a beam of sunlight slanting between the trees. The glass and concrete slab of some plutocrat’s back-country house cantilevered out from cliffs overlooking Wilhelmina Bay. The broken castle of an orphaned iceberg grounded on a rocky shore, with freshets of sparkling meltwater cascading down its fluted sides and a thick band of green algae tinting its wave-washed base. But did we really see, in the pass between Starbuck and Stubb Fjords, an albino reindeer poised near the thin spire of an elf stone named The Endless Song of the Air? Did we glimpse a pyramid set on a remote bastion of bare rock in the ice and snow of the Bruce Plateau? I’ve looked long and hard, but I’ve never been able to find it on maps or in satellite images. And did we really see people dancing naked in a circle around a huge bonfire in a forest glade near Tashtego Point? I can’t be certain that it wasn’t one of my dreams, but whether it was real or imaginary the memory of it still wakes the pulse of drums in my blood.
I’m trying to tell you how happy we were, Mama and me. Not only in those few moments indelibly fixed in memory, but also during the uneventful hours of walking through the forest and crossing meadows and hiking up long slopes of scree or snow, or when we rested beside a little campfire, taking turns to braid each other’s hair or simply sitting in companionable silence. The times we picked berries together in some sunny clearing or among the sliding stones of a mountainside, or spear-fished in icy rivers, or gathered sea moss and limpets from the salt-wet stones of the seashore.
Some old-time writer once claimed that happy families are all alike, while unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way. If that’s true, then happiness can be earned only by sacrificing or suppressing some part of whatever it is that makes us different, by unselfishly giving up our wants and desires and submitting to something larger than ourselves. Family. Society. God. But in those long summer days, walking south with Mama, it seemed to me that happiness was a gift that fell on us as lightly and freely as sunlight. It was as simple as lying on wiry turf with the sun warm and red on my closed eyes, or the heart-stopping shock of jumping into a meltwater pool. It was a gift the world gave you if you gave yourself to the world.
The people who’d planted those regimented rows of spruce trees, built that house on an almost unaccessible cliff, harrowed and fertilised and planted those barley fields, constructed deer-proof fences around them, sprayed them with weedkiller – their version of civilisation was a constant struggle to impose order on a world that worked otherwise. Our version, the ecopoets’ version, was as meandering as a river following the contours of the landscape. It was not about getting but about letting go. Surrendering not to God or the artificial constraints of society, but to nature. That was the most important lesson Mama taught me. As we walked south I learned how to live in the world while taking the least from it and leaving only the faintest of footsteps, and I was so very happy.
We had begun our long hike at midsummer, and now summer was beginning to fade. We didn’t know it at the time, but all the other escapees had been recaptured. Roxana, Laura and their daughters had been caught by a police patrol three days after they had beached the stolen fishing boat in an inlet south of Portal Point. The rest had been picked up here and there. Two had gotten as far as Square Bay, where they’d been promptly betrayed by a police informant.
As for Mama and me, we turned west and cut across the Bruce Plateau, where a knifing wind blew sheets of ice crystals across undulating snow that stretched away in every direction and the horizon vanished in a glittering haze and the sun glimmered in a halo or temple of light with bright but heatless sundogs burning on either side. And under that spectral triple sun we came across the site of an ancient airplane crash. Most of the debris field was buried under a century of snow, but there was a long curve of aluminium fuselage polished by the wind, and a row of five seats standing on a hummock of ice as if planted there, blue fabric sunfaded, a tattered length of safety webbing flapping in the ceaseless wind. We passed the drum of an engine nacelle half-buried in ice, and looming beyond was the shattered tail, its fin upright as a tombstone and painted blue with a white star.
I felt a weird chill as we walked through the shadow of that forbidding marker, as if sensing the presence of the ghosts of passengers and aircrew, lingering traces of the sudden violence of their last ends. It clung to me long after the wreck had vanished into the haze of wind-blown ice crystals, and Mama felt it too. She couldn’t stop shivering when we made camp at the end of the day, even after I opened my coat and hugged her to my body’s heat. By the time we were coming down off the plateau, making our way through a narrow defile between blocks of wind-carved ice, the chill had sunk into her bones. That night, as we lay between two big erratics, it ignited into full-blown fever.
She forced herself to walk a few kilometres the next day, and the day after that. We were following the course of a shallow river that wound through boulder fields and a scrub of dwarf willow and black spruce when, in a stony clearing by a bend in the river, she sat down and couldn’t get up again. She hunched with a blanket shawled around her shoulders as waves of cold and heat passed through her. I brewed willow-bark tea and bathed her forehead with a towel soaked in icy river water, but nothing helped and soon she was in fever’s full grip.
I sat with her, sleepless and miserable and afraid. The unpeopled wilderness stretching all around, as uncaring as the stars spread across the clear dark sky.
Mama was quieter and weaker the next day, wrapped in both
our blankets and lying on a bower of dry moss inside the low arc of a windbreak I’d built from loose stones. I tried and failed to get her to eat, fed her sips of willow-bark tea laced with the last of our sugar. In a moment of lucidity, she told me that there was a settlement just a few kilometres away, where the river ran into a little bay, told me what she needed.
Late in the afternoon I built up the campfire and left a bottle of water and sticks of rabbit jerky within reach, kissed her, and set off downstream. Scrambling past a ladder of waterfalls, cutting through a scrubby forest of trees scarcely taller than me, I reached Holtedahl Bay shortly before sunset.
I waited until the brief night fell. The settlement’s clinic was a small white building, dark and quiet. I broke a window and climbed inside, forced open the dispensary cabinet and took all the painkillers, antipyretics and nanobiotics I could find. But as I slipped away through the settlement, moving from shadow to shadow, I was spotted by a sleepless man sitting on his porch, the alarm was raised, and after a brief frantic chase the settlement’s two police deputies caught up with me on the far side of the scrub forest. A search party set out to look for Mama after one of the deputies, a kindly woman with three kids of her own, had calmed me down and persuaded me to tell my story, but by then it was too late.
I like to think now that Mama had willed it. That she had sent me on a futile mission so that she could die alone in the wild back country she loved rather than be recaptured and spend the rest of her life in prison. But at the time I believed that I had failed her.
Soon enough the state police arrived, and I was flown to Esperanza along with Mama’s body. The eruption that had caused the evacuation was still rumbling along. Much of Deception Island was covered in ash and gashed by rock falls and mudslides, and the exiled ecopoets had been scattered among settlements on the South Shetland Islands. Although my lawyer argued that I should to be returned to my community, although three families volunteered to take me in, I was made a ward of the court and transferred from juvenile prison to the state orphanage in Esperanza. And that’s where I became a monster.
I told my friends in Kilometre 200 about it once, during one of our vodka-fuelled bonding sessions.
‘My first night in the dormitory, everyone stared at me but no one stepped forward to help or say hello. I was the only husky, rumour was I was some sort of criminal, and I was also the new fish. They were all waiting to see how I’d measure up to the girl who’d appointed herself alpha bitch. Pilar Guzman. She was a mundane, three years older than me, ten centimetres taller, twenty, twenty-five kilos heavier. A hefty girl. Not too bright, but used to getting her own way. So just before lights out, I was getting ready for bed and found someone had pissed on my sheets. Pilar and her crew of acolytes were watching. Making comments. Making sure I knew who’d done it. Because, of course, they wanted to see what I’d do.’
‘They weren’t exactly endowed with imagination, were they?’ Lola said.
‘Bullies have their traditions, like everyone else,’ Sage said.
‘So what did you do?’ Paz said.
‘Stripped the bed and flipped the mattress. Went to sleep.’
‘You didn’t stand up to this Pilar creature,’ Lola said. ‘So I know that wasn’t the end of it.’
‘Of course it wasn’t. The next day, Pilar and three of her toadies cornered me after the evening meal. The toadies braced me while Pilar slapped me around, told me I was going to do her share of the chores, run errands for her, so on. And when I got back to the dormitory I found that they’d soaked my bed in piss again. Both sides of the mattress this time.’
‘So then you beat her up,’ Lola said.
‘I slept on the floor. And the next morning, in the bathroom, I waited until Pilar went into one of the stalls to do her business. They had doors on the toilet stalls, but they didn’t meet the ground. I reached underneath and grabbed her legs and pulled. Pulled her all the way out of there. She was knocked silly when her head hit the toilet bowl. Bleeding from a scalp wound, a lot of blood on the white tile floor. Everyone watching, no one trying to interfere.’
‘You showed them who you were,’ Lola said.
‘I didn’t have the sense to stop there,’ I said. ‘After I pulled Pilar out, I kicked open the door and grabbed her by the neck and stuffed her head in the toilet bowl. She was still struggling, but not so much any more, when two orderlies banged in. They had to use their shock sticks before they could pull me off her. I got thirty days solitary for that.’
‘Tell me this has a happy ending,’ Paz said. ‘Tell me that when you came out no one bothered you again.’
‘They called me a monster. All the usual names. The other girls, even some of the guards. But yeah, no one much bothered me. I didn’t mind at first, and by the time I realised that it was kind of lonely, I’d sort of grown into the role.’
‘We’ve all been there,’ Sage said. ‘We’ve all been called a monster or a freak by people who should have known better.’
‘You didn’t get your own crew?’ Lola said. ‘A reputation like that, you could have ruled the place.’
‘I wasn’t into that kind of thing,’ I said. ‘The pecking order, whatever. I was outside all that. I’d become … What’s the word when you quietly put up with shit?’
‘Stupid,’ Lola said.
‘Stoical,’ Sage said.
‘Yeah, that,’ I said. ‘I was stoical.’
‘But you’re not that little girl any more,’ Paz said. ‘And you’re with friends now. One for all, all for one, right?’
We drank to that, clinking glasses, knocking back scorching shots. And yes, I was happy then, among people like me, sharing our stories. For the longest time after Mama died I was gripped by the bottomless ache of that loss, by guilt, by my very own black dog. Poor Mama. Poor me. I thought that I deserved the state orphanage. That working in its stacks, in the termite colonies that turned waste paper and wood into protein, packing printed chicken steaks, so on, was a kind of penance. I thought that I deserved a life filled edge to edge with misery, like that plantation crammed with spruce trees, no other life possible in the darkness underneath.
Those six years in the orphanage weren’t all bad, after I was let out I had some high old times hanging out in Star City, working with Bryan, and life was pretty fine after I became a CO. Before I got mixed up with Keever, anyway. But nothing was ever as good as walking through the forests and meadows of the back country, Mama telling me stories about their creation, the hand-to-mouth fugitive existence we shared. Those were the happiest days of my life, and the point of this, what I’m trying to tell you, is that above and beyond wanting to escape the silly trap I’d made of my life, I did what I did because I wanted the two of us to share something like that. Because I had the stupid idea that somehow I could find my way back to that summer, those wild gardens, those days overflowing with the unqualified bliss of being alive and free in the land our people had quickened.
23
The girl, dazed and groggy, didn’t seem to be particularly upset when I told her what had happened. Told her she’d been shot. I was steering the stolen boat through the dark sea and she was sitting on the pitching floor of the wheelhouse, poking a finger in the hole in the back of her windproof jacket, telling me that she remembered running, remembered bright light all around. ‘And then I tripped, and you were carrying me …’
There was a hole in the back of the short white jacket she wore under the windproof, too, and a hand-sized dark spot, like a bruise, in the smooth pale grey material of her bodysuit, but no sign of a penetration wound, no blood.
‘A stray round knocked you down. I think it only grazed you, or maybe ricocheted off the ground, gave you a little love tap. I picked you up and carried you the rest of the way. Saved your ass again, but no need to thank me,’ I said, trying to turn it into a joke, trying to make out it was nothing while thinking about how much worse it could have been. She’d been in my care and I’d failed her in the worst possible way
.
When I’d switched on the overhead light so that I could look her over, I’d been confronted by my reflection in the dark mirror of the wheelhouse’s wraparound window. Ashen skin and a bristling cap of jet-black hair. The crag of my brow overshadowing my bruised eyes, the squashed bulb of my snout. I was strung-out, sleepless, crashing after an adrenaline high. I looked like a mugshot of my own ghost.
The girl winced as she probed her back. ‘My bodysuit is supposed to be bulletproof,’ she said. ‘It must have saved me.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘A little. When I breathe in.’
‘I’ll check you out properly when I’m sure we aren’t being followed,’ I said, and switched off the light. The boat would show up on the radar and sonar of anyone tracking us, but no sense in making things too easy for them.
The girl said, ‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Someplace safe. Just hang in there.’
Behind us, the lights of Charlotte Bay dwindled into the vast night. No sign of pursuit. No searchlights stabbing out of the dark, no drones swooping down, blaring threats and commands. Maybe the True Citizens and Mike Mike’s crew had shot each other to pieces. Or maybe the firefight had attracted the attention of the local police, the survivors were either in custody or on the run …
I heaved to off Portal Point and after a brief search found a first aid kit in the crew cabin. Apart from a spectacular bruise developing across the small of her back, the girl seemed unhurt. The kit’s diagnostic wand told me in a prissy voice that it could not detect any internal bleeding, but recommended that the patient should be properly examined by a suitably qualified person.
‘Did you hear that?’ the girl said. ‘You have to take me to a hospital.’
She was sitting on the edge of a bunk, braced against the boat’s rocking sway with one hand, fastening her bodysuit with the other. Her fingers moving slowly. Trembling. Butterscotch dapples sharp-edged on her bloodless face. Shock finally settling in.
