by Paul McAuley
‘And I suppose you have a better idea.’
‘If Tantris really loved her, he would have fought those soldiers. Instead, because he surrenders without a fight, she realises that the potion must have worn off. That he really loves the king more than he loves her.’
‘That’s not bad,’ the girl said. ‘But what does she do about it?’
‘She also realises that if Tantris’s love for her is false, then her love for him must also be false. I can tell you why, too.’
‘All right. Why?’
‘Before those soldiers turned up, Isander and Tantris had been living together for three years. They’d built a home and settled down. They had an idyllic little life. But they didn’t have any children.’
‘It isn’t that kind of story,’ the girl said.
‘It isn’t the story that doesn’t allow them to have children. It’s Isander. She knows all about medicine and herbs. She knows how to cook up a potion that will prevent her from becoming pregnant, and that’s just what she did. Because, deep down, she knows that the love she and Tantris have for each other isn’t real … Why are you looking at me like that?’
The girl’s smile glimmered in the dim light of the wheelhouse. ‘Nothing. Just a passing thought. It doesn’t matter.’
‘What happened between Keever Bishop and me, it wasn’t anything like your story. And I definitely didn’t intend to get pregnant. It was a stupid mistake. An accident.’
‘Is that why you ran away? Because you didn’t want him to find out?’
‘If I told you that was why we ended up here, would you feel better about it? Would you be sympathetic?’
‘I don’t think you want anyone’s sympathy.’
‘I’ll tell you one thing I have in common with the princess in your story. Both of us know that we don’t need a man. Isander must have learnt about hunting and fishing from Tantris. And she knows how to grow plants for food, and how to find useful plants in the forest. She can look after herself. So instead of surrendering to those soldiers or rescuing Tantris, she takes off on her own. You told me that in the future, where this story happens, all the ice in Antarctica has melted. That there are new lands, all kinds of strange animals and people. Dragons, wizards, monsters. So why can’t Isander have adventures of her own, instead of doing what men want her to do? And in the end, when everyone knows that she’s a hero, maybe she can win back Tantris. She frees him from the dungeon where the king has been keeping him, and takes him off into the world so that they can have more adventures.’
The girl thought about that while the little boat heaved and rolled and plunged and spray shot out of the dark and smacked against the window of the wheelhouse. The engine vibrated under the floor. The deck. My bad shoulder and my bad arm hurt from wrestling with the wheel, but there was no way I was going to let the boat drive itself. Mike Mike or the police might hack it, steer it straight to where they were waiting for us.
Eventually, she said, ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? To escape everything. To have adventures.’
‘It’s hard to believe, I know, but I’m really the kind of girl who wants a little cottage and a garden. Somewhere quiet and peaceful, far from every sign of people,’ I said.
I was still nursing my foolish hopes. If I’d known then what was coming I would have turned the damn boat around and driven it back to Brabant Island and Agustyn Dos Santos Pistario’s little hut. Or given it its head, and let it take me where it would. Or found the fucking police and surrendered. But right there and then, sailing through the nightblack sea, I believed that I was doing the right thing.
When the shadow of the mainland appeared ahead of us I realised that I didn’t know how to find my way along the coast in the dark, had to briefly switch on the navigation system to get my bearings. Even then, the girl still didn’t get where we were going. At last, as we passed the little light shining at Portal Point, I gave in and told her.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.
‘I told you that we were going to the one place the police wouldn’t think of looking for us.’
I didn’t put into the harbour below the town. That would have been a recklessly stupid move, even for me. Instead, I headed across the mouth of the bay to the old docks south of Meusnier Point, edging past the foundered hulk of a bulk carrier ship, anchoring in the lee of the wreckage of a huge boom conveyor that reared out of the water like the backbone of a vanquished dragon.
The girl, when I told her that she had to wait below while I made arrangements to get in touch with her father, asked if she could come with me, promised that she’d keep quiet and cause no trouble.
‘You know why you can’t. It won’t take long. A couple of hours at most.’
‘Are you really going to talk to him?’
‘One way or another, Princess, I’m going to set you free. That’s why I came back here instead of heading south.’
It seemed to satisfy her. She gave me the number I could use to contact Alberto Toomy, clambered down into the crew cabin without any fuss. I bolted the hatch and set a couple of net weights on top of it for good measure before I paddled ashore in the life raft. I guess you could say that I had trust issues too.
25
The gash in my leg jabbed me at every other step as I hiked along the shoreside service road, the dog bite on my arm and the knife cut in my shoulder throbbed at different rhythms, but otherwise I felt pretty good. It was a cold clear night, the air zesty with the salt spray of waves slapping the breakwater, the moon’s skinny crescent tilted above the high ridge that curved around the bay, painting blue shadows on snowy crests. After a little while, I caught myself whistling some old childhood tune. Why not? I’d escaped from the True Citizens and Mike Mike’s crew, there were no signs of police drones or patrols, and I was on my way to ask an old family friend for a little help.
Quite soon, the wreckage of one of the big geoengineering projects from the last century loomed out of the moonlit dark. A tank farm, concrete bunkers, a bouquet of radar dishes, and three colossal rail-guided launch tracks aimed out to sea, concrete blast pads reared up behind them like the gravestones of giants. A little further on, I saw that the launch control tower had burned down and one end of the payload assembly building had collapsed, presumably wrecked by storms in the years since Mama and I had passed through Charlotte Bay.
I remembered sitting at a window in the apartment where we’d been stashed by our host, looking out at these ruins while Mama told me that the project hadn’t failed because its science and engineering were unsound, but because it was too big and expensive, had been started too late, and had taken too long to show any results. The people who’d designed it had been thinking in terms of a century or more, she said, but the politicians who’d had to approve the enormous costs couldn’t see any further than the next election cycle. If the planet had been run by a world government able to ruthlessly mobilise people and resources, global warming and climate change might have been reversed. Instead, efforts to fix them had been doomed by the same short-sightedness and competing national interests and jealousies which had delayed attempts to cut the amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere, the same compromises and half-measures which had shut down the work of ecopoets and driven them into exile. We’re going to leave all of that behind, Mama had told me. We’re going to find a better way of living.
It wasn’t Mama’s fault that her plans had turned out to be as futile as any of those old geoengineering projects. I mean, we’d almost made it. It was just rotten bad luck she’d fallen ill on the last stretch. As I walked through those ruins I believed things would be different this time. That I still had a good chance of reaching New Zealand and making a new life there, with you.
The service road joined a two-lane highway that ran past the town’s seafood processing plant, its loading bays lit up, white steam feathering from a tall aluminium chimney. Beyond it, the lights of Charlotte Bay sprawled across the slope rising
above the harbour. I climbed a steep street, passing shuttered industrial units, empty lots colonised by fireweed, blighted half-empty or abandoned apartment buildings. The place hadn’t much changed since Mama and I had briefly stayed there, but back then I’d been a kid who’d grown up on an island where there were no buildings with a third storey, and I’d thought that Charlotte Bay was a glittering metropolis.
The bar where Mama and I had first met up with her friend was further back from the harbour than I remembered, tucked into the ground floor of a low-rise apartment block. No sign, just a frontage of ribbed black resin under the overhang of a walkway, the small red light over the door barely bright enough to read the liquor licence posted there.
It was a little after midnight, but the joint was still busy. It was a little like walking into a den of shaved, beautifully ugly bears, because everyone in the place – the bartender, people watching a screen showing horse racing in Christchurch, a scattering of singletons and couples, including two young guys who were getting into some serious personal pornography in a dark corner – was a husky. It was strange, being among my people again. It almost felt like coming home.
I’d like to say that the brief hush that fell when I entered was down to my notoriety or commanding presence, but most likely it was because I was a stranger in a town short on strangers, a vagrant dressed in a filthy uniform and salt-stained windproof. Doing my best to ignore a variety of stares and comments, I went up to the bar, with its heavy mesh screen and slot where drinks were served, and told the guy behind it I wanted to talk to Alicia Whangapirita.
‘I don’t know her.’
‘I think you do – her name’s on the liquor licence. Tell her that Aury’s daughter wants to meet up. I’ll take a glass of tea, black, plenty of sugar, while I’m waiting for her. And what are you serving by way of food?’
I was working my way through a big plate of fried squid doused in vinegar when a young woman and a pair of young men, all three of them huskies in civilian clothes, banged through the door. They crossed the bar in a flanking move, the two bravos moving either side of my table and the woman standing just out of reach, telling me that I was coming with her.
I looked her up and down, taking my time, trying to seem cool and unflustered. I knew that she and her friends weren’t plain-clothes state police because the state police didn’t employ huskies, but it was possible that Alicia had ratted me out to some kind of local militia.
‘And why should I do anything you ask?’ I said.
‘For one thing, I run this place,’ the woman said.
She was about my age and my height, as seriously muscled as Paz. Dusty brown skin, ebony hair in glistening ringlets. A crude black-ink tattoo, a skull with roses sprawling from its eye sockets was half-hidden by the collar of her sealskin jacket.
‘I came here to talk with the owner, not her hireling,’ I said.
‘And I want you to come with me,’ the woman said. ‘Do I have to tell you there are two ways we can do this?’
After the bar’s cosy fug, the freezing black air was like a dash of water in my face. I was hustled to a runabout, told to spreadeagle against it. The woman patted me down quickly and thoroughly, taking Noah’s pistol, finding Levi’s little glass knife tucked in my jacket pocket, then locked a bracelet around my wrist to block the fone that had already been blocked. When I pointed this out, the woman shrugged and told me to get in the runabout.
‘This isn’t exactly the kind of reception I had in mind,’ I said, ‘when I decided to pay a visit to an old friend.’
‘What makes you think you have any friends here?’ the woman said. ‘Just get in the damn car.’
I got in the damn car. The four of us made a close fit. As it drove us across town, I asked the bravos if any of them remembered me.
‘Last time I was here, I hung out with a gang of kids about my age. They showed me the secret places they had in the ruins of that old project, their hideouts and such. We had some fine fun.’
The woman, jammed beside me in the rear seat, said it must have been before her time.
‘Twelve years ago, give or take. The town hasn’t changed that much, from what I can see. Though it seems smaller, somehow.’
‘It isn’t like Esperanza, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Did Alicia tell you I used to live in Esperanza? How is she, by the way?’
‘We aren’t here to answer questions,’ the woman said. ‘We’re here to keep you from causing any more trouble.’
The runabout pulled up outside a ruined apartment building at the north-western edge of town, part of a cluster of long low blocks built more than seventy years before to house people working on the old climate engineering project. Its face was covered in a mesh of scaffolding and the windows of its apartments were black and empty, but its lobby was lit up like Christmas. It was exactly the kind of place where small-town vigilantes dealt out summary justice to troublesome strangers, and I confess that I felt a scrape of apprehension as I was hustled towards it.
Clean orange and yellow walls inside, the smell of fresh paint thick in the warm air, and Alicia Whangapirita, imagine my relief when I saw her, sitting on a stool among folded drop cloths and paint cartons. An honour guard of cheap plastic droids stood motionless on tripod legs behind her, painting wands aimed at the floor.
She ignored my attempt at a breezy greeting, long time no see, so on, saying, ‘The state police are looking for you after that gunfight down at the harbour. You and the girl you kidnapped.’
She was a tall woman with a square handsome face, her hair cut a lot shorter than I remembered, and turned snow-white. A dozen or more necklaces, stone beads, glass beads, woven wire, fine silver chains, overlapped on the breast of her pale blue sweater. Gifts from the kids she’d helped out over the years.
When I started to explain that it wasn’t exactly what you could call a kidnapping she gave me a severe look that reminded me of the times I’d been called up in front of the orphanage’s manager. ‘You stole one of Sunny Pang’s boats. And burned the other to the waterline.’
‘The one I borrowed, I brought it back. The other, that was down to the people who were trying to catch me.’
I know, I know. It wasn’t exactly true. But if they hadn’t been chasing me, I wouldn’t have had to set fire to the other boat. And how I was thinking, Mr Pang would have a better chance of winning compensation from Keever Bishop than from me.
‘A day later,’ Alicia said implacably, ‘you put out a call for me on the skywave net. Which the police could have overheard. Which could have put me right in the middle of your hot mess.’
‘I couldn’t think how else to find out if you were still living here.’
‘And then you came back here, and put yourself on display in my bar.’
‘Because I thought I might find you there. And I kind of did,’ I said, with a smile that Alicia didn’t return.
‘This town is home to more than two thousand decent, hard-working people,’ she said. ‘Many of them former ecopoets. We were dumped here after the amnesty and we’ve done our best to make a go of it. We built up the fishing industry. We take in husky children who have nowhere else to go. We just won a grant to renovate disused buildings and generally spruce up the place. And your criminal foolishness could undo all of it.’
‘If I made a mistake coming here, let me go on my way. You won’t hear from me again.’
‘Do you know why I decided to have this conversation?’ Alicia said. ‘It doesn’t have anything to do with you, or the help I gave your mother that one time, or my friendship with your grandmother. It’s about making sure that you do the right thing, right now, and let that girl go.’
‘Well, that’s partly why I came here. Because I really do want to get her back to her father.’
‘You don’t need my help with that. All you have to do is surrender to the police.’
‘If you let me explain how it all happened, you’ll see that it isn’t quite that simple.’
Alicia gave me another hard look, then said, ‘I’ll give you five minutes. For the memory of your mother.’
It took a little longer than that to explain about Keever Bishop, his escape plans and his involvement with Alberto Toomy. How Alberto may have been planning to welch on their so-called business arrangement, which was why Keever wanted to kidnap his daughter, why I’d been ordered to embarrass him at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
‘Keever knew there was bad blood between my family and the Toomys,’ I said. ‘He wanted me to confront Alberto and cause some kind of diversion. But I didn’t do what I was told. I didn’t go anywhere near Alberto because I was too busy rescuing his daughter from Keever’s bravos.’
‘You didn’t rescue her,’ Alicia said. ‘You kidnapped her.’
‘It didn’t start out that way, but I guess that’s what it turned into. I got the idea that I could get money to buy passage off the peninsula. Not even very much money, as far as Alberto Toomy is concerned.’
‘And you thought I would help you with this mad scheme?’ Alicia said. ‘Because I once helped you and your mother? Child, you’re either terribly naive or seriously deluded.’
‘Here’s why you should,’ I said. ‘You have two sons, both of them huskies. I remember playing with them when I was last here. Your bar, everyone in there was a husky. And you told me that you’ve been taking in husky kids, too. Some of them, I bet, from state orphanages. The woman standing behind me, I know she’s done time in one. That tattoo on her neck, the skull with roses growing out of its eye sockets? Some of the older kids in the state orphanage I was sent to after my mother died, they gave each other tattoos like that. They used squid ink they stole from the aquaculture stacks.’
There was a small silence. The leather jacket of the woman at my back creaked as she shifted her stance.
Alicia said, ‘I tried to help you after your mother died. I made an application to foster you, but it was refused. As were my requests to visit you. I tried again to reach out to you when you left the orphanage, but you never replied.’
