Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean

by Kirsty Murray

  The confrontation is burned in my memory. I had expected the shouted warning, the security boat looming over us. I didn’t expect that we would be so roughly treated. They boarded us and dragged us up onto the deck of their boat. Natalia was yelling something in Russian. Some brute put a hand on her breast and she kicked him in the groin, and then things got bloody. The man who was holding me pulled my head back by my hair and twisted my arms behind me, avoiding my kicking feet. I looked wildly around me and saw through tears that Natalia was handcuffed, blood dripping from her nose, and Aarne and Fabio were both roughed up. Fabio looked furious; Aarne had a deceptive calm on his face, a hint of triumph. He was looking at Natalia, trying to say something with his eyes, and suddenly there was an answering triumph in her own gaze that she immediately covered up. I realised it then, of course. The nearest drone, tiny, stealthy and barely visible, had video-captured everything. I looked across the expanse of sea to the distant silhouette of our little ship, and saw the glow of the signal that meant: Webstorm Arctic Light unleashed.

  Fabio shouted for a superior officer. His Russian is pretty good, and it helps that he looks like a bear. I couldn’t understand what he or Natalia a moment later were saying, but I knew from our practice sessions. They were talking about the need to respect peaceful protesters’ rights, but also about why we were doing what we were doing. Both Fabio and Natalia are trained in oratory – even our brutish captors stopped in their tracks for a moment. Their speeches, via their state-of-the-art wrist computers, were going out to the world in real time.

  Ultimately some superior personage came and shouted at our captors, and brought a doctor to attend to Natalia and Fabio (later I learned they had cracked a rib of his – he was orating in quite a bit of pain). Then there was the hustle to get us to cells in the security boat, and finally to a truck onshore that would take us to the nearest big town.

  That’s how I ended up in prison.

  They separated Natalia and me at once. I was shut off from the light, from the sky, from space, crammed into a cell with a woman who stared at me without comprehension. Her hair was tangled around her face – she looked prematurely aged. In all the time I was there, she didn’t speak to me even once. The only noises she made were when she snored and when she wept. In the dining halls the women laughed at my poor Russian and teased me about the ‘Natalia’ I was seeking. The food smelled of shoe leather, and the steel doors clanged with a reverberating finality. In that cold, dark place, with the roaches and (I swear) rats running under my bunk, I had no space in my head for anything but despair and horror.

  In my third month there, I got sick with a stomach bug that was going around. Tossing in my bunk, or vomiting into the toilet, I longed with feverish desperation to get out, to go back home again, to Fahad Uncle and maybe even college, and to never, ever see the inside of a prison again.

  The Indian consulate sent me a lawyer, a pimply fellow with sly eyes who told me my best bet was to claim I was fifteen, not twenty. I could claim, he said, that my older accomplices had deceived me, manipulated me, forced me to go with them. I’d be out of here in no time. For a moment I thought he’d guessed my age, or close to it – I was sixteen, not fifteen – but my fake passport had taken him in. I stared at him. My stomach was still not recovered, and I was queasy. He mistook my sick, dazed, half-starved look for stupidity. He told me we needed to think through it carefully and he would be back next month.

  I lay in my bunk, holding my stomach and trying not to think about throwing up. I couldn’t imagine freedom. My cellmate sobbed inconsolably in her bed. I screamed at her, and she stopped and looked vacantly at me. That was worse than her sobbing. I broke down and cried and cried.

  An image came to me of the first time we’d field-tested one of the drones, over in northern Canada, before we set off on the Valiant. The camera had captured the slow collapse of a young polar bear onto the snowy tundra where it breathed its last frosted breaths, all skin and bone from starvation. That’s how I felt now, alone in the world, without hope. There was no point in trying to do anything. My mother had been wrong in trying, and Fahad Uncle, and my friends on the Valiant. The oil barons were too powerful. All I had to do when the lawyer came back was to turn against Natalia and the others, as he’d suggested. I thought about how angry Natalia had been with me for courting arrest, and wondered if she’d understand if I betrayed them.

  I lay awake. There was grime on the wall by my bunk, and words scratched out in Cyrillic that I couldn’t read, but I saw for the first time that someone had taken a hard object and made a crude drawing of a mountain range. It was a reminder that there was a world outside, and there were other people who remembered. I tumbled back in my mind to a certain summer in the Himalayas, when I was thirteen years old.

  Imagine me, a small, childish figure standing on an endless field littered with rocks and pebbles – what geologists call a moraine. It slopes up and up toward the ice wall, all the way to the distant white tongue of the glacier. I’m huddled in my parka against the unaccustomed cold, kicking at the rock at my feet. Fahad Uncle and his group are moving around and muttering incomprehensibly, the way scientists do when they are out in the field. This is the last glacier my mother visited before the sickness killed her a year ago. She had been determined to measure unrecorded glacier lengths in the north-eastern Himalayas, but she came back about halfway through the planned trip, because she was already sick. I will always remember how she looked at the sky through the hospital window – the murky, polluted city sky – but in her eyes was the light of the Himalayas, the light of sun on snow.

  This is the first time her team – now Fahad Uncle’s team – has visited this glacier, locally known as the Nilsaya.

  Kicking at pebbles, I feel suffused with my mother’s presence. The silence here is restful, punctuated only by the muted conversations of the scientists and the distant sharp cracks and groans of the glacier. Then I see, a little ahead of me, a marker protruding from the mess of rocks and pebbles: a metal stake with a tattered little flag atop it.

  I run up to it, shouting. The marker’s what they’ve been looking for. The place where the glacier’s front edge was, two years ago, as marked by my mother on that last trip.

  ‘Fahad Uncle! Fahad Uncle!’

  He’s been in my life longer than my father ever was. He has a calm, silent air, rather like a mountain. He gives my shoulder a gentle victory punch as his post-doc student retrieves my mother’s last marker and hands it to me.

  It’s a solemn moment, because I am holding the last thing she touched when she was still mostly whole. But it is also a bit of a shock for us because nobody thought the glacier would have retreated this much in such a short time. Here, where we are standing at this moment, is where that distant cliff of ice was, just two years ago. The remote-sensing equipment has confirmed what our eyes are telling us.

  I hold the marker in my hand, and look at the glint of sun on the glacier so far up the slope. My fears rise around me in a dark wave, and the dam breaks. I weep as though I will never stop.

  Fahad Uncle holds me, says, ‘Shaila, Shaila.’ What they don’t know is that I am crying not only for my mother, but for the whole world.

  That’s when I decide: I will join the fight. That is the moment that will bring me, a few eventful years later, to the Arctic. That’s before I know about prisons.

  The lawyer didn’t come back for two months, and then only because the webstorm had generated enough worldwide outrage. He told me the un had held a special session about Arctic drilling, and there were protests in the streets all over the world. In India, the youth climate movement was taking off as never before – they had stalled three coal power plants, and were clamouring for my release. My friends on the Valiant were on hunger strike. The lawyer related the news with an air of faint distaste, as though all this was beneath him. The thought that there were people outside trying to get me out made tears come into my eyes. When the lawyer
began outlining his strategy, I decided I hated his sly eyes and his condescension. With a spurt of my old anger I told him to get lost. I was breathing so hard, I thought I would pass out. But the anger did me some good – it cut through my despair. How I survived the remaining months, I don’t know, but it must have had something to do with my rage, and the memory of light.

  Yesterday they let us go. I spent eight months in a Russian prison, and my birthday present was my freedom. I stepped out of the courthouse, momentarily blinded by the bright-ness of the day. I breathed in great gulps of fresh air. There were red and yellow flowers blooming in the square. And there was Fahad Uncle, unfamiliar in a Russian-style hat, fighting through the crowds toward me, shouting and waving. After the tears and hugs, he handed me something.

  ‘You should have this,’ he said.

  I unwound the cloth from the small bundle he handed me. A battered little metal marker, the tattered flag. My mother’s last scientific act: the stake in the ground, the declaring of a boundary, a catastrophe, a limit. But also, maybe, a gauntlet.

  We walked together towards the taxi stand. My mobile phone (recently returned to me) beeped: a message from Captain Bill on the Valiant, congratulating me on my release. An unspoken question hung in the air. I thought of the sun on snow, and felt my mother beside me as though she had never left.

  I took a deep breath. I would go home for a while, remember how to live in the world again. And then—

  I’ll be back, I texted him, and followed Fahad Uncle to the taxi.

  The Blooming

  A story in the form of a play script

  Manjula Padmanabhan

  and Kirsty Murray

  CHARACTERS:

  SCHAUM – teenage dweller of the distant planet MaggiNoo, looks like an enormous mass of softly quivering, translucent tentacles. Study Partner of JERK.

  JERK – spotty-faced human teenager, daughter of Colonial Federation Officer. Wears slime-wrap sheath, hair made up in purple cones.

  LEX & LOU – acrobatic, child-sized human clones, wearing shimmering grey one-piece suits.

  CHORUS (THE HERD) – human clones who have outlived their work potential. They are dressed in drab grey overalls, and wander the planet chanting rhymes.

  [SFX: water dripping, crackling, electronic buzzing]

  The stage is bathed in indigo light. Tiny random flashes ripple continuously across the room like horizontal lightning.

  The walls, floor and ceiling are soft and knobbly, filled with giant protrusions that hang down from above and thrust up from below and on all sides.

  At stage-front is a gigantic flat panel, six metres wide, four metres tall. It’s a dual screen communication monitor. The side facing the audience is idle. SCHAUM is facing the audience seated behind the panel and partially obscured from view. All we see is a mound of delicate tentacles, tapering towards pale pink tips.

  The indigo light that bathes the room emanates from SCHAUM’s side of the monitor.

  SCHAUM: (speaking through a translator-bot) Oooh … (crackles, static) … I can’t do this. My Study Partner’s late. Again. She has no regard for my time. She disrespects me in every way. Why must we work together? Why pretend that we can ever be friends? Of course we cannot! She hates me for being soft-bodied and intuitive, for my intangible pleasures and multi-sensory abilities. I hate her for her bony limbs, her clumsy, rigid reasoning processes, her tiny pinhole eyes. Everything about these vertebrates—

  Offstage – laughter. LEX cartwheels onto the stage, stops in front of the panel, does a series of handsprings followed by a pratfall, then lies completely still.

  SCHAUM: (raising a tentacle or two, to scan the intruder using its sensitive tips) Hah! With any luck it has snapped its flimsy little neck.

  LOU slopes out of the shadows and kneels down beside the prostrate LEX. Pats her cheek and gently brushes her fringe to one side.

  LOU: Get up! Don’t tease Noodle Head.

  LEX: (sits up, grinning) Awww. You’re no fun. I wanted to make it panic!

  LOU: It hardly sounds like it’s panicking.

  LEX: It said that we’re clumsy. I can understand it thinking that about Big-Ups like Jerk – but you and me? Nahhh.

  The monitor blinks on. An image of JERK appears, enormously enlarged.

  JERK: Hey, NOODLE-LIMBS – I heard what you said. And guess what? I’m going to report you for cultural intolerance! We vertebrates are only your humble colonisers, you know? And guess why? Cos these bony limbs you hate so much can STOMP your entire wriggling mass to PULP!!

  SCHAUM: (crackling) BOTTOM-FEEDERS! POTTY-SUCKERS! (static) If not for our invaluable dung, which your worthless species can use as rocket fuel, you wouldn’t be within twelve hundred light years of us!

  LOU: (whispering) Sheesh! Seems like we’ve wandered into the insult Olympics …

  LEX: (not bothering to whisper) Never mind them – c’mon, let’s practise cartwheels.

  LEX & LOU begin cavorting about.

  JERK: Hey! Who let you in here, you undersized squirts? You’re distracting my Study Partner. If you’re not careful, Laksa-limbs will imprint you and we’ll all be reported—

  LEX: Imprint? Squash us, you mean?

  JERK: No, you ignoramus! The MaggiNoos have mind-control. Get too close to one of ‘em and you’ll become its slave, following it around like a brainless duckling!

  SCHAUM: (crackles) Huh! Why would I bother to imprint vertebrates? You have no qualities that we admire, no cultural insights to share with us—

  Just then, the CHORUS shuffle onstage, six from stage left, six from stage right, slow-moving and hesitant.

  JERK: Ohhhh … no, no, NO! Here comes the Idiot Herd! Now we’ll never get this assignment finished tonight!

  The screen flickers and breaks into pixels. JERK fades from view.

  SCHAUM: Oi! She’s gone again – and why are the noise-makers here? Why doesn’t anyone explain anything? Ohhhhh! VERTEBRATES! Hateful, despicable …

  CHORUS: (singing in unison in a flat monotone to the tune of ‘Girls and boys come out to play’) Boys and girls come out to play, the moon doth shine as bright as day, leave your supper and leave your sleep, and come with your playmates into the street …

  SCHAUM: … cruel … (soft hiccuping sobs) … inconsiderate …

  LEX: (frowning) Do you ever wonder why they sing that song?

  LOU: Not really. They creep me out.

  LEX: I hope we don’t wind up like them—

  LOU: Does it makes you wonder what will happen to us?

  LEX: What do you mean?

  LOU: You know, are we going to turn into boys? Or girls? Or wind up in The Herd?

  LEX and LOU turn to stare at the CHORUS as the two groups pass each other and exit on opposite sides, continuing to sing all the while.

  SCHAUM: (addressing no one in particular) First, they occupy our planet for their benefit but pretend we’re all working together for Universal Peace. Then they force us to study together to share cultural knowledge but they’re rude and threatening. Then (sobs) they permit noisy performers to wander at will through our homes, frightening us with their stamping feet! Now I’m a mass of nerves and my Study Partner’s vanished and the assignment will not be completed at all. But who will suffer? Who will be punished? Me! Only me!

  LEX: (finally noticing SCHAUM’s distress) Eh? Hey, hey, hey! Wait. (to LOU) Noodle-Head is crying.

  LOU: That’s not right. We should help it – or her, rather. She is a her isn’t she?

  LEX: Oh, that’s right! The MaggiNoodlies are all-female. (with a bounce she leaps up and perches along the top edge of the panel) Yoo-hoo! Noodlie-doo? Up here. Look. Don’t cry. Maybe we can help you?

  LOU: (also bouncing up) We vertebrates aren’t all the same, you know. Some of us can even be nice.

  LEX: Like us, for instance. We’re nice. Unlike the Big-Ups.

  SCHAUM: Ohhh. Why should I belie
ve you? Body shape IS destiny. You lot, with your rigid internal structures, are INCAPABLE of flexibility, tact and understanding. Whereas we … (gives way to grief)

  LOU & LEX stand together, staring down towards SCHAUM from their perch atop the panel.

  LOU: (to LEX) Y’know? I feel like we should give her a hug.

  LEX: —but which bit of her is huggable? (she jumps down off the panel)

  LOU: Wait for me! (jumps down as well)

  The monitor flickers as JERK returns.

  JERK: What? You’re still here? Go away – scat! You don’t have permission to be inside my study zone. You’re distracting my study specimen.

  LOU: Schaum isn’t a specimen. She has feelings and you’ve been mean and made her cry.

  LEX: We want to hug her and help her to feel better.

  JERK: Forget it! Feelings are for higher beings – like us. These creatures are more like worms, or bugs or … or … jellyfish. That’s why we’re superior to them. Coz we have two genders and real parents and nice, hard skeletons.