How I envy her. The bear’s blood-heat and his teeth and claws have exposed and melted the flesh of my chest and belly. I can look down now as I shelter by a rock from the long ice-glittering shadows of the gathering sunlight. The dark frozen organs inside their cage, furred with ice.
I look up at the rim of the sky. Aagyuuk is rising. Across sixteen light years, Altair winks at me. While still I have time, I must catch the seal again.
The thaw is coming now, as Tirkiluk said it would once Aagyuuk had risen. There is faint light much of the day, and sudden flashes of the blazing rim of the sun through the clouds and glaciers that lie piled on the horizon. The wind is veering south. The seabirds are returning.
The ice in the bay booms now, and cracks like thunder. For Tirkiluk and Naigo, even though I know that there will be bitter storms to come, death has receded. She came out to see me today when the sun was sailing clear of the horizon and I was crouching in the ice-shadows where the cold wind drives deepest at the eastern end of the shore. She brought Naigo with her, gathered deep under her furs. She wept when she saw me, yet she held the child out for me to see. He slept despite the chill. Gently, I let the ragged claw of my remaining hand brush against his forehead, where the marks of birth have left his skin entirely. Then she drew him away, and held him to her breast and wept all the more. I would have wept with her, had I any tears left in me.
I went today to the place of bones. I’ve known for some time that it is where I should seek to avoid the gathering heat. I stood at the rim of the shadowed ravine with rags of my rotting flesh streaming in the wind, gazing down at those clean and serene skulls. But I know that the souls live elsewhere. They live on the wind, in the ice, and beneath the soft lids of Naigo sleeping eyes.
I write with difficulty now as the skin sloughs off my fingers like old seaweed. These pages are filthy from the mess I leave, and I can only go out when the wind veers north, or in the cold of the night. Why should I strive to continue now, anyway? I can think of no reason other than fear.
A wide crack has appeared in the sheet of ice that covered the bay. It runs like a road from the horizon right up to the shore. Somehow, I believe I can smell the sea on it, the salt breath of the ocean.
Must write before I lose fingers of remaining hand.
Went out onto the beach. As I gazed at the widening gap in the ice, the seal emerged from the wind-ripped water. She lumbered up across the rocks towards me, and stared without fear with the steam of life rising from her smooth dark pelt. I could only marvel and wonder, and feel a kind of love. She forgives, after all the times that her life has been taken. She turned then, and went back into the water, and dived in a smooth deep ripple.
I thought then I stood alone in the wind, yet when I looked behind me, Tirkiluk was there. A dark figure, standing just as I have stood so many times at the edge of this shore, looking out at the crystal mountains, the glacier, the bay. She let me hold her, and touch the baby again. I knew that we were saying goodbye, although there were no words.
I can hear the seal mewling on the midnight wind. She is out on the shore again. Calling. Waiting. All I must do now is stand, and lift these limbs, and walk down towards the glittering path of water that spreads out across the bay. And the seal will lead me to the place in the ocean where a lantern gleams, dark hair streams, and fingerless hands spread wide in an embrace.
From there, the rest of my journey should be easy.
From the log of John Farragar, Ship’s Captain, Queen of Erin. 12 May 1943.
Sailed 1200 hours Tuiak Bay SSE towards Neimaagen. A fire has destroyed Logos II Weatherbase, and a thorough search has revealed no trace of Science Officer Seymour. Have radioed Metrological Intelligence at Godalming and advised that he should be listed as missing, presumed dead.
Also advised Godalming that an Eskimo woman and infant survived amid the burnt-out wreckage. They are aboard with us now, and I have no reason to doubt that the truth of this sad matter is as the woman has told me:
Seymour befriended her when she was abandoned by her tribe, and the fire was caused by an accident with a lantern at the time broadcasts ceased. He died soon after from injuries caused by his attempts to recover supplies from the burning hut, and the body was subsequently taken by wolves. The later journals I have recovered are undated, and clearly the product of a sadly deranged mind. I would not wish them to reach the hands of his relatives, and I have thus taken the responsibility upon myself to have them destroyed in the ship’s furnace.
Tirkiluk, the Eskimo woman, has asked to be landed at Kecskemet, where the tribe is very different to her own, and the wooded land is somewhat warmer and kinder. As the deviation from our course is small, I have agreed to her request. Her journey aboard the Queen should take little more than two days, but I am sure that by then we shall miss her.
Afterword
I was asked to do a zombie story for an anthology. Typically for me, I missed the deadline, and came up with something that probably wouldn’t have fitted anyway, although it explores my fascination with the boundary between life and death, along with lonely men in lonely places—many of which, outside of my imagination, I’ve never visited. The fact that I am so conscious of this great big world of which I know so little is one of the reasons that, despite supposedly being an SF writer I’ve rarely yet felt the need to go off planet. That, and a sense that good fiction generally makes the most of the familiar, the things already around us, and, perhaps, a failure of conviction on my part that our species will truly ever make it to the stars. So when I do go that way, as with ‘Isabel of the Fall’, the results tend to have a mythic quality.
I love harsh, icy environments, or at least the idea of them, and have read many books about polar exploration—especially the ones about ill-fated missions, such as Scott’s and Franklin’s. Tirkiluk, though, was my first and only Inuit character. The stuff I read about Inuit folklore in attempting to research my idea was refreshingly free of any undead references, which basically allowed me to go where I wanted. The weather wars idea came from a book called Bodyguard of Lies, which was one of the first to get to grips with the true story of British secret intelligence during the war, Enigma and all. Now, the story has been told many times, and it’s easy to forget just how long it was hushed up for, and how little we knew.
Grownups
BOBBY FINALLY GOT AROUND to asking Mum where babies came from on the evening of his seventh birthday. It had been hot all day and the grownups and a few of the older children who had come to his party were still outside on the lawn. He could hear their talk and evening birdsong through his open window as Mum closed the curtains. She leaned down to kiss his forehead. She’d been drinking since the first guests arrived before lunch and her breath smelt like windfall apples. Now seemed as good a time as any. As she turned towards the door, he asked his question. It came out as a whisper, but she heard, and frowned for a moment before she smiled.
“You children always want to know too soon,” she said. “I was the same, believe me, Bobby. But you must be patient. You really must.”
Bobby knew enough about grownups to realise that it was unwise to push too hard. So he forced himself to yawn and blink slowly so she would think he was truly sleepy. She patted his hand.
After his door had clicked shut, after her footsteps had padded down the stairs, Bobby slid out of bed. Ignoring the presents piled in the corner by the wardrobe—robots with sparking eyes, doll soldiers and submarines—he peered from the window. They lived at the edge of town, where rooftops dwindled to green hills and the silver curl of the river. He watched Mum emerge from the french windows onto the wide lawn below. She stooped to say something to Dad as he sat lazing in a deckchair with the other men, a beercan propped against his crotch. Then she took a taper from the urn beside the barbecue and touched it to the coals. She proceeded to light the lanterns hanging from the boughs of the cherry trees.
The whole garden filled with stars. After she had lit the last lantern, Mum put
the taper to her mouth and extinguished it with her tongue. Then she rejoined the women gossiping on the white wrought iron chairs. The remaining children were all leaving for home. Cars were starting up, turning out from the shaded drive. Bobby heard his brother Tony call goodnight to the grownups, and thunder up the stairs. He tensed in case Tony should decide to look in on him before he went to bed, but relaxed after the toilet had flushed and Tony’s bedroom door had slammed. It was almost night. Bobby knew that his window would show as no more than a darker square against the wall of the house. He widened the parting in the curtain.
He loved to watch the grownups when they thought they were alone. It was a different world. One day, Mum had told him often enough, one day sweet little Bobby you’ll understand it all, touching his skin as she spoke with papery fingers. But give it time my darling one, give it time. Being a grownup is more wonderful than you children could ever imagine. More wonderful. Yes, my darling. Kissing him on the forehead and each eye and then his mouth the way she did when she got especially tender.
Bobby gazed down at the grownups. They had that loose look that came when the wine and the beer had gone down well and there was more to come, when the night was warm and the stars mirrored the lanterns. Dad raised his can from his crotch to his lips. One of the men beside him made a joke and the beer spluttered down Dad’s chin, gleaming for a moment before he wiped it away. The men always talked like this, loud between bursts of silence, whilst the women’s voices—laughing serious sad—brushed soft against the night. Over by the trellis archway that led by the bins to the front, half a dozen uncles sat in the specially wide deckchairs that Dad kept for them behind the mower in the shed.
Bobby couldn’t help staring at the uncles. They were all grossly fat. There was Uncle Stan, Uncle Harold, and of course his own Uncle Lew. Bobby saw with a certain pride that Lew was the biggest. His tie was loose and his best shirt strained like a full sail across his belly. Like all the uncles, Lew lived alone, but Dad or the father of one of the other families he was uncle to was always ready to take the car down on a Saturday morning, paint the windows of his house or see to the lawn. In many ways, Bobby thought it was an ideal life. People respected uncles. Even more than their girth required, they stepped aside from them in the street. But at the same time, his parents were often edgy when Lew was around, uncharacteristically eager to please. Sometimes, late in the night, Bobby had heard the unmistakable clatter of his van on the gravel out front, Mum and Dad’s voices whispering softly excited in the hall. Gazing at Lew seated with the other uncles, Bobby remembered how he had dragged him to the moist folds of his belly, rumbling Won’t You Just Look At This Sweet Kid? His yeasty aroma came back like the aftertaste of bad cooking.
Someone turned the record player on in the lounge. Sibilant music drifted like smoke. Some of the grownups began to dance. Women in white dresses blossomed as they turned, and the men were darkly quick. The music and the sigh of their movement brushed against the humid night, coaxed the glow of the lanterns, silvered the rooftops and the stars.
The dancing quickened, seeking a faster rhythm inside the slow beat. Bobby’s eyes fizzed with sleep. He thought he saw grownups floating heartbeat on heartbeat above the lawn. Soon, they were leaping over the lanterned cherry trees, flying, pressing close to his window with smiles and waves, beckoning him to join them. Come out and play, Bobby, out here amid the stars. The men darted like eels, the women did high kicks across the rooftop, their dresses billowing coral frills over their heads. The uncles bobbed around the chimney like huge balloons.
When Bobby awoke, the lanterns were out. There was only darkness, summer chill.
As he crawled back to bed, a sudden sound made him freeze. Deep and feral, some kind of agony that was neither pain nor grief, it started loud then came down by notches to a stuttering sob. Bobby unfroze when it ended and hauled the blankets up to his chin. Through the bedroom wall, he could hear the faint mutter of Dad’s voice, Mum’s half-questioning reply. Then Uncle Lew saying goodnight. Slow footsteps down the stairs. The front door slam. Clatter of an engine coming to life.
Sigh of gravel.
Silence.
Bobby stood at the far bank of the river. His hands clenched and unclenched. Three years had passed. He was now ten; his bother Tony was sixteen.
Tony was out on the river, atop the oildrum raft that he and the other kids of his age had been building all summer. The wide sweep that cut between the fields and the gasometers into town had narrowed in the drought heat. Tony was angling a pole through the sucking silt to get to the deeper current. He was absorbed, alone; he hadn’t noticed Bobby standing on the fissured mud of the bank. Earlier in the summer, there would have been a crowd of Tony’s friends out there, shouting and diving, sitting with their heels clutched in brown hands, chasing Bobby away with shouts or grabbing them with terrible threats that usually ended in a simple ducking or just laughter, some in cutoff shorts, their backs freckled pink from peeling sunburn, some sleekly naked, those odd dark patches of hair showing under their arms and bellies. Maggie Brown with a barking voice you could hear half a mile off, Pete Thorn who kept pigeons and always seemed to watch, never said anything, maybe Johnnie Redhead and his sidekicks, even Trev Lee if his hay fever, asthma and psoriasis hadn’t kept him inside, the twin McDonald sisters whom no one could tell apart…
Now Tony was alone.
“Hey!” Bobby yelled, not wanting to break into his brother’s isolation, knowing he had to. “Hey, Tony!”
Tony poled once more towards the current. The drums shook, tensed against their bindings, then inched towards the main sweep of the river.
“Hey Tony, Mum says you’ve got to come home right now.”
“Alright, alright.”
Tony let go of the pole, jumped down into the water. It came just below his naked waist. He waded out clumsily, falling on hands and knees. He crouched to wash himself clean in a cool eddy where the water met the shore, then shook himself like a dog. He grabbed his shorts from the branch of a dead willow and hauled them on.
“Why didn’t you just come?” Bobby asked. “You must have known it was time. The doc’s waiting at home to give you your tests.”
Tony slicked back his hair. They both stared at the ground. The river still dripped from Tony’s chin, made tiny craters in the sand. Bobby noticed that Tony hadn’t shaved, which was a bad sign in itself. Out on the river, the raft suddenly bobbed free, floating high on the quick current.
Tony shook his head. “Never did that when I was on it. Seemed like a great idea, you know? Then you spend the whole summer trying to pole out the thing of the mud.”
Around them, the bank was littered with the spoor of summer habitation. The blackened ruin of a bonfire, stones laid out in the shape of a skull, crisp packets, an old flap of canvas propped up like a tent, ringpull cans and cigarette butts, a solitary shoe. Bobby had his own friends—his own special places—and he came to this spot rarely and on sufferance. But still, he loved his brother and was old enough to have some idea of how it must feel to leave childhood behind. But he told himself that most of it had gone already. Tony was the last; Pete and Maggie and the McDonald twins had grown up. Almost all the others too. That left just Trev Lee who had locked himself in the bathroom and swallowed a bottle of bleach whilst her parents hammered at the door.
Tony made a movement that looked as though it might end in a hug. But he slapped Bobby’s head instead, almost hard enough to hurt. They always acted with each other as though they were tough; it was too late now to start changing the rules.
They followed the path through the still heat of the woods to the main road. It was midday. The shimmering tarmac cut between yellow fields towards town. Occasionally, a car or truck would appear in the distance, floating silent on heat ghosts before the roar and the smell suddenly broke past them, whipping dust into their faces. Bobby gazed at stalking pylons, ragged fences, the litter-strew edges of the countryside; it was the map of his own childhood
. It was Tony’s too—but Tony only stared at the verge. It was plain that he was tired of living on the cliffedge of growing up.
Tony looked half a grownup already, graceful, clumsy, self absorbed. He hadn’t been his true self through all this later part of the summer, or at least not since Joan Trackett had grown up. Joan had a fierce crop of hair and protruding eyes; she had come to the area with her parents about six years before. Bobby knew that she and Tony had been having sex since at least last winter and maybe before. He’d actually stumbled across them one day in spring lying on a dumped mattress in the east fields up beyond the waste tip, hidden amid the bracken in a corner that the farmer hadn’t bothered to plough. Tony had chased him away, alternately gripping the open waistband of his jeans and waving his fists. But that evening Tony had let Bobby play with his collection of model cars, which was a big concession even though Bobby knew that Tony had mostly lost interest in them already. They had sat together in Tony’s bedroom that smelled of peppermint and socks. I guess you know what Joan and I were doing, he had said. Bobby nodded, circling a black V8 limo with a missing tyre around the whorls and dustballs of the carpet. It’s no big deal, Tony said, picking at a scab on his chin. But his eyes had gone blank with puzzlement, as though he couldn’t remember something important.
Bobby looked up at Tony as they walked along the road. He was going to miss his big brother. He even wanted to say it, although he knew he wouldn’t find the words. Maybe he’d catch up with him again when he turned grownup himself, but that seemed a long way off. At least five summers.
The fields ended. The road led into Avenues, Drives and Crofts that meandered a hundred different ways towards home.
The doctor’s red estate car was parked under the shade of the poplar in their drive.
“You don’t make people wait,” Mum said, her breath short with impatience, shooing them both quickly down the hallway into the kitchen. “I’m disappointed in you, Tony. You too, Bobby. You’re both old enough to know better.” She opened the fridge and took out a tumbler of bitter milk. “And Tony, you didn’t drink this at breakfast.”
Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod Page 34
