Austral

by Paul McAuley

  ‘I studied it for a school assignment. This was one of the places that shot reusable rocket planes into the stratosphere, where they dumped payloads of diamond dust. There’s a boundary between the stratosphere and the lower atmosphere – the place where we live, where weather happens? So the idea was, the dust would stay up there, create a thin layer wrapped around the world. It was supposed to reflect some of the sun’s light and heat back into space, like dust from big volcanic eruptions … I’m talking too much, aren’t I?’

  ‘It sounds like a neat idea. Shame it wasn’t given a proper chance. Science rarely survives contact with politics, so on.’

  Something Mama had liked to say. Without science and hard work, idealism is just words on the wind – that was another one of hers. Not to mention her all-time classic, reality is all we have.

  ‘It must have been amazing, working on something like this,’ the girl said. ‘Seeing those rocket planes go up.’

  ‘So what kind of thing will you build when you become an engineer?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I mean, I’m only fourteen.’

  ‘And bright with it. So I’m sure you have some idea.’

  She watched the shadowy skeletons of those big launch tracks swing past. ‘I think I could learn a lot from the way your people engineered ecosystems from the bottom up. It was another crazy mad big deal like Project LUCI or the Sahara Sea or whatever, but it was cheap, it used intensive labour instead of machines, and it was also about a way of living. I mean, look at you.’

  ‘Being a husky, it isn’t a lifestyle.’

  When the girl blushed, the dapples on her skin grew darker. ‘What I’m trying to say, you weren’t ever part of the greening work, but it’s still a big chunk of who you are.’

  ‘It runs in the family. My side of the family. For all the good it did.’

  ‘There’s all this dead tech,’ the girl said. ‘And there are the forests we walked through. Which has lasted?’

  She said that the ecopoet refuges were really a single settlement distributed down the length of the peninsula. She talked about clusters of connected villages. She talked about low impact cities that blended into the landscape. Managed wildernesses, submerged infrastructure, so on. She was nervous but she was also happy. She knew that she was close to the end of her ordeal. She knew that she was going home.

  As for me, if I was lucky, if things worked out, I’d get to live like a fugitive for the rest of my natural born. It was what Mama had been aiming at when we escaped from Deception Island, our long walk towards it had been the highlight of my dumb little life, but I wasn’t a kid any more. I knew how hard it was going to be. And then there was you.

  And then there was you.

  You know how you know you’ve grown up? When you begin to worry about the future, because you know things will be different there. That isn’t one of Mama’s, by the way. It’s all mine.

  The runabout followed the road past the seafood processing plant and trundled uphill and halted outside one of the derelict apartment blocks. I took the girl’s arm in a gentle grip and led her into the ruined foyer and up a flight of stairs to a dismal corridor lit by stark strip lights, and a stuffy overheated two-room apartment like the one Mama and I had stayed in, back when.

  The girl didn’t like the droid that stood outside the door like a CO outside a cell. And didn’t like it when I told her that I was going to leave her in the apartment until I’d had my little talk with her father.

  ‘You think you’ve won, don’t you?’ she said. ‘You think you’ll get away. But you won’t. People like you never do.’

  Then her little flare of anger winked out as suddenly as it had appeared and she apologised and said that she didn’t mean it.

  ‘Of course you did,’ I said. ‘Remember what I said about the princess? Did you try pushing the story in that direction?’

  She nodded. ‘While I was waiting for you to come back.’

  ‘How’s it working out?’

  ‘Isander found some people on the far side of the forest. They weren’t friendly at first, but then she cured a sick child.’

  ‘It’s the beginning of a glorious adventure. You’ll see.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Will you be all right?’

  ‘I’m a monster, remember? Monsters can take care of themselves.’

  ‘Until they run into a hero.’

  ‘If I see anyone looking even the faintest bit heroic coming towards me you can bet I’ll hightail it in the other direction.’

  ‘So this is what? Goodbye?’

  ‘You’ll be back with your father in a couple of hours and I have places to go, people to meet. So yeah, this is goodbye. You take care, Kamilah. Build those cities. Do good. Don’t make any of the dumb choices I’ve made, or I swear I’ll come back to haunt you.’

  I wanted to hug her, but she had started to cry, and turned away from me because she was ashamed of her tears. So I hardened my heart, told her that there was no point trying to escape and locked the door behind me and went up to the roof, where it was just possible to make out the dim shape of a cargo drone squatting on the other side of a fenced children’s playground. Alicia had kept her word. Until that moment I hadn’t been sure that she would.

  It was the smallest model of cargo drone. Truck-sized, pods shaped like old-fashioned bullets bookending the slot of its empty cargo bay, two pairs of tilt rotors on stubby wings. It sort of reminded me of a pair of mating dragonflies locked together tail to tail, and looked about as fragile.

  After I squeezed into the cramped windowless passenger pod and dogged the hatch, the drone shivered itself awake and took off vertically. I unrolled the last of the disposable fones and synched it to the drone’s external cameras and watched the shadows of the apartment building and the ruins of Project LUCI fall away into the night. Then the view swung around, the hum of the drone’s rotors deepened, and its nose pitched down and it drove south, towards Square Bay.

  28

  A little over an hour into the flight the fone flashed an alert – a live feed showing a two-seater heli squatting in grey pre-dawn light near the wreck of Project LUCI’s payload assembly building. I zoomed in as a man in a blond full-length fur coat climbed out of one side of the heli’s bubble cabin and a husky woman, she had to be the negotiator, Sabrina Maxwell Bullrich, climbed out of the other. Dressed in cold weather gear overstrapped with equipment, she headed towards the runabout parked nearby, walking around it, raising one of its doors and bending to look inside.

  The feed came from the droid I’d parked under a slant of fallen roofing. I told the machine to start walking, aiming it towards the heli and its passengers. They were dumb and cheap, the droids. Alicia’s work crews donated to the community any which began to throw glitches, and kids used them to stage terminator duels. You can guess the kind of mayhem. Alicia called it acting out, said it was better that they smashed up a few disposable machines than each other.

  Anyway, the droid I was steering was one of Alicia’s rejects. One of her people had talked me through the steps to link it to the fone, so that if I was caught I could explain how I’d stolen it from the town’s sports centre. It had a bad limp and had lost gross motor control in both arms, but its cameras and voice-link were working fine, and that was all I needed.

  ‘Did you really think I’d surrender to you?’ I said, hearing the tinny echo of my words as the droid relayed them.

  Alberto Toomy was on it in three strides, his face filling its field of vision like an angry moon. ‘Where is she? Where is my daughter?’

  ‘I’ll lead you to her after we’ve had our little chat.’

  ‘Talk then,’ Alberto said. ‘Try to justify what you’ve done.’

  ‘There’s no way I can,’ I said. ‘And that isn’t what this is about.’

  I was lying in that cramped throbbing compartment somewhere high above the Bruce Plateau, squinting at the fone’s dinky screen, and I was
confronting my uncle face to face, and both were equally real.

  Alberto Toomy stepped back and I saw that Sabrina Maxwell Bullrich had come up behind him. She said, ‘Honourable Deputy Toomy has done everything you asked, Austral. Now it’s your turn.’

  ‘Kamilah is hurt,’ Alberto Toomy said. ‘She needs medical attention. She needs to come home. I’ll listen to whatever you have to say to me. If you have a grievance I’ll do my best to help. But please, for my daughter’s sake, let’s wind up this conversation as quickly as possible.’

  He stood stern and straight-backed in his long honey-coloured coat, arms folded across his chest, sleek black hair artfully disordered. The very picture of a distressed and exhausted father bravely challenging his daughter’s kidnapper. He knew that I would be recording this, and I had no doubt that he was recording it too.

  ‘What it’s about,’ I said, ‘is Keever Bishop.’

  Alberto Toomy pretended to think for a moment. ‘Your accomplice. The man who organised the escape from the work camp.’

  ‘Who also sent three people to kidnap your daughter during the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Her bodyguard managed to shoot two of them before the third, Lola Contreras, knocked him out. She would have taken Kamilah, but I stopped her. But I bet you know all about that, don’t you? Lola must have confessed everything to the authorities, and they would have told you.’

  ‘You’re claiming that you rescued my daughter?’

  ‘From Keever Bishop,’ I said. ‘Who had a very particular reason for wanting to get hold of her.’

  Alberto ignored that, saying, ‘But you didn’t rescue Kamilah, did you? You were also working for this Keever Bishop. Lola Contreras and several other correctional officers have given sworn statements that not only were you smuggling contraband into the work camp for him, but you were also his lover.’

  ‘I quit working for him the moment I realised he wanted to snatch your daughter,’ I said. ‘I stepped in and saved her from his bravos. And after that, yeah, I took off from the work camp and brought her along with me. I had to get as far away from Keever Bishop as possible, and I thought that I could use her to get the price of a ticket off the peninsula.’

  ‘Then you admit that you kidnapped her,’ Alberto said, and Sabrina put a hand on his arm. Warning him, perhaps, that he was going off script.

  ‘I don’t deny it. It should have been a simple trade, but things blew up when a crew working for Keever tried to take her back. Up on the Detroit Plateau the first time, and then in Charlotte Bay. I believe you met one of them when you visited Keever in the work camp,’ I said, working around to what I wanted to get out in the open. ‘A man called Mike Mike. That’s his jail handle. In the world he’s Michael Michelakis.’

  ‘I don’t know anyone by either of those names.’

  ‘But he knows you. And he knows about your business relationship with Keever Bishop. He told me all about it after I took down two of his bravos.’

  Alberto Toomy raised his eyebrows in a theatrical display of bafflement. ‘I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’

  Neither did I, exactly. Although Mike Mike had mentioned that Keever had something going with Alberto Toomy, he hadn’t given any details. But there was nothing to stop me taking a big fucking guess, and that’s what I did, putting it out there, hoping to needle my uncle into revealing something, hoping that maybe, just maybe, the police, the news feeds or anyone else who saw the recording of this conversation would follow it up. I wasn’t doing it for myself, for revenge or whatever. Really I wasn’t. I wanted to pay off my debt to Alicia by causing trouble for one of the enemies of the husky people.

  I said, ‘You were supposed to help Keever Bishop avoid extradition to Australia. And when that fell through, you were supposed to help with his escape from the work camp. Mike Mike told me that Keever was planning to use your daughter as leverage. To make sure that you wouldn’t try to wriggle out of the deal.’

  Like I said, I didn’t have much in the way of proof, but you have to admit that it was a nice little story. And as luck would have it, it turned out to be mostly true, although at the time there was no way of telling from Alberto’s stony expression that I’d hit close to the mark.

  ‘If you believe anything some no-account career criminal told you,’ he said, ‘you’re a bigger fool than I thought.’

  ‘It isn’t just Mike Mike. Your daughter told me that you talked to Keever a couple of hours before he escaped from the work camp.’

  ‘How could she know such a thing?’

  ‘Oh, that’s right. You left her at the lunch in the commandant’s quarters while you and Keever discussed your mutual business interests.’

  ‘There was no meeting. I inspected one of the blocks. I talked to a number of prisoners. If you’re trying to get me in trouble, I’m afraid that these wild ravings won’t do it.’

  ‘Because no one will believe a husky?’

  ‘Because you’re a criminal.’

  ‘I’m also your niece. And crime runs in the family, doesn’t it? Your father was involved with drug dealers, gun runners. He started his business empire with money he stole from them.’

  ‘It isn’t a secret that we are related. And it’s well known that my father liked to tell colourful tales that had only a glancing relation to the truth.’

  ‘Did he tell colourful tales about how he betrayed my grandmother and their son? His firstborn child. My father. My mother tried to talk to you about it, but you refused to listen. And you refused to help her, too.’

  ‘I’m afraid that you have that the wrong way round. Your mother didn’t try to talk to me. I tried to talk to her. I reached out to her several times, but she refused to accept my offers of help.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘I have copies of our correspondence, such as it is. And the authorities will have copies too, because they monitored all communications to the ecopoets exiled on Deception Island. I’m sorry, Austral. I truly am. Because if this is about trying to get some kind of revenge because you blame me for how your life turned out, you should know that your mother made it very clear that she didn’t want to have anything to do with me, and didn’t want me to have anything to do with you, either. And if she told you differently, well, I’m sure she had her reasons.’

  You could have rendered down Alberto Toomy’s oleaginous smile and deep-fried a whale in it.

  ‘I was in a state orphanage for six years,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you help me then?’

  ‘Perhaps I should have reached out to you. I admit that. But your mother had consistently refused my help, I was starting out in politics and your side of the family had already caused me embarrassment, and I confess that I took bad advice. But now I have to wonder,’ Alberto Toomy said, ‘why you didn’t reach out to me. Was it because of the stories your mother told about my father? The resentment and anger she felt towards him, which you obviously feel as well? All I ask now is that you don’t make Kamilah suffer for it. Whatever bad blood there is between us, let it end here.’

  I didn’t believe a word of it, but it was a devilishly cunning piece of spin.

  ‘Your daughter’s a fine brave kid.’ I said. ‘Her father may be a rotten excuse for a politician, but she’s on the square.’

  ‘I’m not a criminal, Austral. And I don’t associate with criminals.’

  ‘Keever Bishop would disagree.’

  There was that smile again. ‘Mr Bishop appears to have escaped from the peninsula. I doubt that we’ll be hearing from him any time soon.’

  ‘And I guess you think that no one will believe anything someone like him says about someone like you. An honourable deputy. The Shadow Minister of Justice. Heir to a fortune, so on. But if you think you’re going to get away with this, think again. Keever prefers a hands-on approach when he’s dealing with people who’ve upset him. And because he isn’t the kind of man who forgives or forgets, he’s going to catch up with you sooner or later.’

  ‘Now you�
�re threatening me.’

  ‘Did Keever ever tell you the story about the moray eels? You should give serious thought to beefing up your security, Uncle.’

  ‘Fortunately, I have done nothing that needs to be forgiven. Apart, perhaps, from failing to reach out to you after your mother died. And now we’ve had our little conversation, it’s time you honoured our agreement and told me where Kamilah is.’

  Well, he was right about that. I’d put everything I knew about my uncle’s involvement with Keever Bishop on the record, for all the good it would do, and now I had to do the right thing by the girl.

  I told Alberto Toomy and Sabrina Maxwell Bullrich to get in the runabout, and it drove them through the ruins of Project LUCI to the abandoned apartment building. A second droid was waiting on the steps to the entrance, and I used its rear-facing camera to watch them follow it through the ruin of the lobby.

  There’s this saying, ghosts in the staircase kind of thing, about coming up with a killer exit line too late, when you’re already walking away from some kind of humiliation. This sort of felt like that, except I hadn’t walked away from it yet, was trying and failing to come up with something cute while steering the droid that was leading them up the stairs, and now down the dingy hall.

  ‘In my experience? Things catch up with people sooner or later,’ I said. ‘I don’t just mean Keever Bishop. There’s our family history, too. All the miseries our parents and grandparents handed down. I plan to get away from all that and start over. And I hope that Kamilah finds a way of getting out too. But you, Uncle, it made you what you are. You can’t ever escape it.’

  Alberto Toomy didn’t reply to that, simply gave the droid a patient, weary look. As far as he was concerned this was almost over, so anything I said was irrelevant. And then Kamilah, she must have heard us coming, was shouting behind the closed door, and her father pushed past the droid and rattled the door, kicked it, calling her name.

  Sabrina turned to the droid. ‘You have to unlock it, Austral.’

  But the damn key was in my pocket and I was flying south inside the cargo drone, so all I could do was watch as Sabrina told Kamilah to stand well back from the door, squaring up to it and rearing back and kicking it under the lock. It slammed open and Kamilah was there.