Austral

by Paul McAuley

  ‘Fucking whelephant,’ he said thickly, his eyes wide and white in a mask of blood.

  ‘Yes, I am. And I kept Kamilah Toomy from you, so what does that make you?’ I said, and aimed a kick at him and missed and fell over, almost passed out from the pain of my broken shoulder.

  I was trying to push to my feet when a little galaxy of red stars blossomed on me, on Mike Mike, on the concrete around us. A very loud voice was saying something about surrendering. Mike Mike laced his hands on top of his head. Drones were hovering above us, silvery stars hung at different heights against the blue sky, a heli was racing low above the runway, and vehicles were pounding towards us from three different directions. My shoulder hurt like hell, something grated inside my chest with every breath, and even if I could have gotten back on my feet I was all out of road. So I sat where I was and waited for the circus to arrive.

  31

  Kamilah Toomy was the chief prosecution witness at my trial, but consistently refused to agree that I had ever meant her any harm. I don’t know what her father made of that. He gave his evidence and answered cross-examination questions without once looking at me, and when he left most of the stringers in the courtroom followed him, but not because they wanted to ask him about the trial. He had troubles of his own. Most of the sympathy he’d gained during the kidnapping of his eldest daughter had evaporated when Keever, quadriplegic, still facing extradition to Australia, had decided to hurt his former business associate as much as possible. There wasn’t enough hard evidence of their dealings – smoothing out snags in property deals, leaking confidential information about local development plans, so on – to prosecute Alberto Toomy. He’d been careful about that. But Keever’s testimony, underscored by my own small contribution, destroyed his reputation. He quit as an honourable deputy after he was fired from his Shadow Cabinet post, but the scandal tainted the National Unity Party. Their candidate lost the special election to replace him, and at the next general election they were roundly defeated, reduced to a powerless rump.

  There was, everyone said, change in the air.

  As for me, I was sentenced to fourteen years hard labour, spent the first three in a work camp at Cape Worsley. I was working on the Trans-Antarctic Railway again, but this time I was part of the convict labour force. It wasn’t so bad. I was assigned to one of the landscaping strings, the kind of work ecopoets had once done, the kind of work I had been born to do. Then the government put an end to the camps, and I did the rest of my jail time in a minimum security facility on the outskirts of O’Higgins, earning my keep in a print shop that made runabout shells. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t any kind of improvement.

  The police found the body of that crazy old woman, Mayra Iturriaga, buried in a snowdrift near the refuge south of Wolseley Buttress. She had been shot in the back of the head, and Mike Mike and the surviving members of his crew each had twenty years added to their sentences for that. Lola Contreras was given five years hard time for her part in Keever Bishop’s plot to kidnap Kamilah Toomy, reduced to just six months because she turned state witness against him. What happened to her after she was released I neither know nor care.

  My friends Paz Sandoval and Sage Ibarra were also arrested, and although they were released without charge they were promptly cashiered from the prison service. Paz wrote me several times after I was sentenced. She’d lost contact with Sage after Sage signed up as a deckhand on a North Korean deep sea trawler, and after trying and failing to make a go of a private detective business in Esperanza moved to Argentina – by then, travel restrictions for huskies had been lifted. Last I heard, she was a park ranger in the Staten Island Reserve, had married a husky woman name of Reya, and had two kids, both of them healthy husky girls.

  On her eighteenth birthday, Kamilah Toomy inherited a trust fund set up by her mother. She studied architecture in Chile and returned to the peninsula and set up her own practice. I don’t know if she followed that story of hers to the end, don’t know what happened to Princess Isander and Tantris. In one of the versions of the old tale on which it was based, Tantris married another woman and went to live in the duchy of his wife’s family, on the west coast of Palmis. Some years later he was mortally wounded in a battle with sea raiders, and he dispatched a messenger on a swift ship, asking Isander to come and tend to him. The ship was supposed to rig a white sail if Isander was on board when it returned, and a black sail if she wasn’t, but when it appeared at the horizon with a white sail, Tantris’s jealous wife told him the opposite. He died just before Isander made landfall, and soon afterwards she died too, of heartbreak. The jealous wife buried her outside the wall of the graveyard where Tantris was interred, but according to the story a white rose grew from Isander’s grave and from Tantris’s a green briar, and they met above the graveyard wall and twined in a true lovers’ knot, the white rose and the briar.

  It’s a nice enough ending, I guess, even though the two of them had to die before they could find peace together. I don’t yet know how my story will end, but I don’t suppose it’ll be anything like as neat as that.

  A month ago, seven years into my sentence, I was told that I was being released on account of good behaviour and successful completion of my rehabilitation programme. Also, I suspect, because of more kind words from Kamilah Toomy. After I had absorbed the news, I began to make this story in memory of you.

  I lost you when you were barely three months old. A miscarriage while I was recovering from my injuries in prison hospital. A routine check-up showed that there was no fetal heartbeat. Two days later a small operation removed you from my body.

  The doctors wouldn’t tell me if your death had been caused by a fatal incompatibility between husky and mundane genes, or by trauma from the crash of the tractor, the hardship of the trek, Keever’s sucker punch. Miscarriages are still quite common was all they said. And, don’t think of it as losing a child, it was just an embryo that failed to progress. But I know that you were female, that you would have been a girl child. A daughter.

  I also know that had you lived I would have been judged unfit to be a mother on account of serving a major stretch, and the authorities would have taken you from me and raised you in an orphanage or with a foster family, would have forbidden me to have any contact with you. Call me selfish, but I think that knowing you were alive but never having any news of you, knowing that it was impossible to ever meet or see you but always hoping that one day it might be otherwise, would have been a crueller punishment. The sting of a death recedes into the past, but hope claws us afresh each and every day. Even so, I like to believe that for your sake I could have endured it.

  As it is, when I lost you I felt that I’d also lost every chance of a better, brighter future. One of the nurses, meaning well, told me that it was my job to live on. And I have, hard though it often has been. I passed through the usual stations of grief, had to correct several scunners who called me out over you, was twice thrown in the hole for it and once was beaten so severely I ended up back in hospital. And believed that I deserved every moment of punishment.

  One day, it was about eighteen months later, a cold spring day early in November, I was riding back to camp on a flatbed truck with the rest of my string, all of us chained together, sprawling or sitting among our gear, when we passed the local elf stone. It was a skinny pillar high on the prow of a steep-sided ridge, standing small and sharp against the darkening sky, overlooking the wide curve the railway and the service road makes there.

  Everyone on the peninsula knows that elf stones were created by some old geezer back in the early days of settlement, a mad art project or some kind of elaborate prank. And everyone knows that the stories about elves and their stones were borrowed from Icelandic folklore about the Huldufólk. The hidden people. But none of that matters. Those stones, those stories, help to humanise our tough bleak land, help us believe that it’s possible to make our lives here, and that’s why we respect them, why the railway bent around that ridge.

 
There was nothing special about that particular day. We’d spent the shift spraying grass seed and fertiliser across a long stretch of geotextile slope protection, I was bone-tired, sticky with gunk that had blown back on the constant wind, had passed the spot where the elf stone stood (it’s called The Place Where The Wind Sings Itself To Sleep) a dozen times before. But in that moment it struck me that the way the railway bent around that damn stone was exactly like the way you had shaped my life. And it was then that I knew that you always would be a part of what I was, a hard fact I couldn’t shift or erase, and I felt, I don’t know what to call it, it wasn’t exactly relief or comfort, but maybe it was a kind of acceptance. And maybe that moment was the seed from which this account grew. This story of how you came into the world and left it so early, as true as I could make it, as true as I remember. The memorial I wasn’t able to give you when you passed. A confession made without hope or expectation of forgiveness.

  As for me, I’ve long ago given up my stupid idea of finding some kind of nirvana on the Wheel. When they hand me my papers and the prison gate slams shut behind me I’m heading south again.

  Alicia Whangapirita was interrogated by the police after I was arrested, but she stuck to the story that I’d stolen the cargo drone and hacked the runabout and the droids, and they didn’t have enough evidence to charge her with aiding and abetting. She also claimed that she didn’t have anything to do with hijacking the cargo drone which had dropped its load with pinpoint precision, saving me from Keever. I reckon she was telling the truth. Someone else had been watching over me. The same person who’d taken down Mike Mike’s drone and left that hare outside the shelter.

  One day, maybe, I’ll find out who it was. Like I’ve already said, I believe that my grandmother died soon after she escaped the government’s attempt to round up the free ecopoets, if only because it’s too cruel to think that she survived but never ever tried to reach out to her son, or to Mama, or to me. But it’s possible that her legacy somehow endures.

  I’ve thought a lot about the story I told Levi. How his mother might have been part of a group of ecopoets living wild and free in the far south, growing crops in greenhouses buried under the ice, catching fish, hunting seals, pretending to be half-and-halfs when they visit the settlements and towns of the north, monitoring the old places they were forced to abandon, keeping watch for stray huskies they could recruit. How someone like that might have decided to help me after I’d been spotted sheltering in that refuge, so on. I can’t see why it can’t be true, still wonder if Levi ever got up the courage to leave the True Citizens and set out to search for his real family.

  Call me a crazy old romantic, but I’m heading south to look for him, for them. If I fail, if I can’t find any free ecopoets out there, maybe I’ll end up like Agustyn Dos Santos Pistario, living out the rest of my life in splendid solitude on some cold and otherwise uninhabited shore, but however it pans out I think I’ll be content. I was made for the south, after all. And as someone else in some other story once said, there’s too much civilisation around here for my taste.

  One last story. One last last story. This one from the time when Mama and me were travelling south after our escape from Deception Island. A nation of two, living free and easy in the forests and meadows of Antarctica.

  Perhaps you remember that after we had been given a ride to Flandres Bay we crossed from the west coast to the east. Skiing over the white breast of the Forbidden Plateau, descending towards Crane Bay. It was while we were making that descent that I came across a small bird lying under a crackling sheet of frost. Frozen hard. Eyes white stones. I wanted to bury it, but my mother took it from me and briefly studied it, said that it was a rufous-collared sparrow and told me to stow it in the inside pocket of my insulated jacket.

  ‘You’ll see,’ she said, when I asked why. ‘A little bit of ecopoet magic.’

  So I carried the bird as she asked, and as we went on a cold star of meltwater grew at my breast and warmed and dried. The sun circled behind us, dipping towards the horizon, and we unclipped our skis and hiked down a steep defile beside a tumble of ice, leaving the high country behind, making camp in a hanging valley where a cushion heath spread among stones dappled with yellow lichen. Mama was stirring soup over a little fire when I felt something twitch at my breast. It was as if a second heart had started to beat, quicker and lighter than my own.

  The bird had woken up. As I cupped it in my hand, Mama told me that this small magic was my grandmother’s doing. Years back Isabella had edited several species of songbirds so that they could survive freezing, released them into the wild to live and flourish as best they could. This one had probably lost its way and fallen and frozen through and through, but the warmth of my body had revived it.

  The dry crispness of its feathers, the scratch of its tiny claws on my skin, its bright black eyes. White bars on wings that fluttered ever more strongly against my fingers.

  Mama didn’t need to tell me what I had to do.

  We walked up a slant of stone, Mama and me, and at the lip, high above the milky eye of a meltwater lake, I opened my hands. The bird stood on my palm for a moment, then gathered itself and launched into the air, and with a swift eager bobbing flight dwindled away into the luminous sky of austral summer’s midnight.

  Acknowledgements

  Some novels have especially long periods of inception before they begin to grow and flower. The seed for this one was planted way back in May 1997, at a seminar about science and science fiction held in the Abisko research station above the Arctic Circle in Sweden, and particularly during a train ride that descended from the snow-bound Arctic plateau through forested fjords to the Norwegian coast. My thanks to John L. Casti and Anders Karlqvist for inviting me to participate, and the Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research for financial support.

  Oliver Morton coined Project LUCI’s name in a tweet; I’m grateful for his permission to use it here. His book The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World hugely informed my thinking about the geopolitics of big fixes for the planet’s climate.

  Thanks also to my agent Simon Kavanagh for firefighting and help in giving Austral shape and form, and to Marcus Gipps and Craig Leyenaar for editorial support. Stephen Baxter read an early draft of the book and made many useful suggestions, and he and Alastair Reynolds read the final draft and flagged up further crucial fixes. My gratitude to them both for their timely help. Thanks also to Pat Cadigan, Judith and John Clute, Jo Fletcher, Barry and Judith Forshaw, William Gibson, Josephine Hawtrey-Woore, Simon Hawtrey-Woore, Stephen Jones, Sherif Mehmet, Kim Newman, Josette Reynolds, Russell Schechter, Jack Womack, and to the staff of the Marie Curie Hospice, Hampstead.

  Also by Paul McAuley from Gollancz:

  400 Billion Stars

  Cowboy Angels

  Eternal Light

  Fairyland

  Pasquale’s Angel

  Red Dust

  The Quiet War

  Gardens of the Sun

  In the Mouth of the Whale

  Evening’s Empires

  Something Coming Through

  Into Everywhere

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Gollancz

  an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  This eBook first published in 2017 by Gollancz.

  Copyright © Paul McAuley 2017

  The moral right of Paul McAuley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  All the characters i
n this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (eBook) 978 1 473 21733 1

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  www.gollancz.co.uk

  www.unlikelyworlds.co.uk