The Offset

by Calder Szewczak

  Miri considers this, repressing the urge to flatly refuse anything that requires Jac’s assistance. “Then what?” she asks.

  “You could return it.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Well,” says Alix, “for one thing, it’s clearly a valuable piece of research. Just think of all the resources that went into making that rat, all of which will have been completely wasted if the thing is never returned and the experiment never completed. For another, you’ll have a hard time finding somewhere safe to release it. The creature won’t last long on its own.”

  “But it’s not on its own. Not now, anyway.”

  Alix sighs. “What do you know about looking after a rat? And one like that probably requires special care. Honestly, Miri, you might be doing more harm than good keeping hold of it.”

  This catches Miri short. She hadn’t thought of that. The idea of being locked up and experimented on is so instinctively wrong that she didn’t stop to question whether or not it might actually be better for the rat. Alix is right. Depending on what’s been done to it, the creature might need specific food or medication to survive – though for now it seems healthy enough, except for the monstrous ear growing from its back.

  All the same, the thought of giving up the rat makes her feel sick to her stomach. Its trust in her – however undeserved – seems so complete that she can’t help but think returning it to a laboratory would be a savage betrayal, a gross misuse of the physical power she has over the small creature. She could be the first human – the first living thing – to ever touch it. Not prod at it with a syringe or rubber-gloved hand, but to actually touch it with care and affection. Maybe the rat thinks Miri is its mother. She doesn’t voice any of this to Alix. Instead, she says only, “I’ll think about it.”

  Suddenly, the rat squirms free of her hold and races along Miri’s leg. She grabs it easily, circling her fingers around its body. The motion reminds her eerily of the curling filterweed in the cell and how effortlessly it trapped the aphid. Then an idea occurs to Miri and she twists round at the hips to address her mother directly. “You know, you could always plant some filterweed on the terrace.”

  Alix frowns as the strip of hair she’d been holding slips from her fingers. “Keep still, won’t you?” She gently nudges Miri to turn back around and then resumes her work on the half-completed braid. “And why would I want to plant filterweed on my lovely terrace?”

  “To help protect your plants from the dragonflies,” Miri says, or is about to say, thinking to tell Alix about the filterweed she saw in the cell, how there must be a new carnivorous variant. But she catches herself just in time. Bringing up her arrest is the last thing either of them need right now, not if she doesn’t want to threaten what little peace has started to grow between them. “Never mind,” she mutters.

  Alix is barely paying attention. With a few swift turns of her wrists, she announces that she is done. Shifting the rat so she can hold it in one hand, Miri raises the other to lightly pat the back of her head, tracing the tight plait with her fingers. She turns automatically where she sits so her mother can admire the effects of her handiwork from the front. With a soft smile, Alix reaches forward to tuck a loose strand of hair behind Miri’s ear.

  “I’ve been so worried about you,” Alix says, her voice barely louder than a whisper.

  “I know.” There isn’t anything else to say. Even now, seeing so clearly the anguish that it has caused her mother, Miri cannot regret leaving home.

  Pulling away from Alix, she sets the rat down to run free across the floorboards. Then she pulls the cushion out from beneath her and places it on the sofa. Her legs and back ache after sitting still for so long, and she stands so that she can twist and turn on the spot, easing out the stiffness.

  “What were you doing at the shrine yesterday?”

  The question is sudden but not altogether unexpected. Up until now, Miri’s hardly been in a state to talk about anything serious. While it’s only natural that Alix wants to know, Miri’s not sure she can explain it – not without hurting her.

  “There was an Offset,” she says simply. “I went to watch.”

  Hearing that, Alix falls still for a moment and Miri knows why. When she was growing up, her mothers refused to take her to a single Offset, not even to those of family friends. They argued that such occasions were not to be taken lightly nor to be enjoyed as a form of mass entertainment. While Miri doesn’t disagree with this, the cruel vindictive voice in her head tells her another story: that her mothers didn’t want her to watch an execution because it would mean ceding control. It would allow her to experience the Offset entirely for herself, without the filter of their own explanations and rationale.

  Whatever the truth of the matter, Miri has seen enough executions by now to make up her own mind. Generally, she thinks, they are to be avoided – although this is more on account of her reluctance to find herself among a crowd rather than any particular squeamishness on her part. What drew her to the Offset yesterday wasn’t a ghoulish desire for entertainment, but something deeper: an urgent need to test herself, now that her own Offset is looming. Yesterday she watched a woman die in great pain, all the while imagining Jac in her place. It dispelled any lingering doubts she might have about whether her decision is the right one.

  “What happened?” asks Alix, pulling her glasses from her face and letting them hang on the chain, side-stepping the argument about whether Miri should have been there in the first place.

  Miri thinks of the woman bursting into flames. “Something went wrong. I don’t know what. A malfunction of some kind.”

  “I heard,” says Alix.

  “But otherwise it was pretty standard. A mother-father family. The mother was Offset.”

  “It’s always the way. The mother takes the punishment, even though the crime is not of her making alone.”

  Miri’s ears prick up at that. It’s the first time that she’s ever heard Alix refer to procreation as a crime. Although Alix has always claimed that she and Jac understood exactly the consequences of what they were doing when they had Miri, she’s only ever spoken of the Offset as a necessary sacrifice made on behalf of the child rather than as a punishment for the sins of the parents.

  Before Miri can say something to this effect, Alix interrupts her thoughts: “What have you been doing all this time, Miri? Where have you been?”

  She looks at her mother: Alix’s face is lined with worry and her eyes shine with tears. Miri feels something inside her cave. She doesn’t want to add to Alix’s pain. But the life she has forged for herself in the last two years is hers alone. She isn’t ready to share it with anyone else. Not yet.

  “I’ve… been a world away from here,” she says eventually. “That’s all.”

  “Hmm. Not so far away,” says Alix.

  Miri is about to ask what she means by that, but Alix gets up from the sofa and disappears into the hall. When she returns, she’s clutching a handful of postcards. Miri recognises them immediately – they’re hers. The pile contains every postcard she sent home in the last two years.

  Alix peels the uppermost card off the stack. It bears an image of the sunken wharf at Lake Canary, photographed at dusk from the north of the city, looking out towards the dark of the Greenwich Enclave beyond. On the back, Miri knows, will be a brief message pointedly addressed to Alix alone that explains – in the vaguest terms possible – that she is safe and well.

  “Why were you in hospital?” asks Alix, scanning the back of the card.

  Miri groans silently. She should never have mentioned that when she wrote the postcard. “I had pneumonia,” she admits. “It was nothing. I’m fine now.”

  “I knew you weren’t looking after yourself,” says Alix. “You’re not eating properly, you’re clearly anaemic… If you’re going to live like this can’t you at least think of your health? For my sake?”

  “I’m sorry, Mum,” says Miri weakly. “I’m sorry for everything.”

&nbs
p; They both know this isn’t strictly true. But even so, a part of her can’t help but think: I could deal with this. I could deal with her. If it was only her. If it was just Alix at home, maybe I never would have left.

  “At least you’re here now,” says Alix, softening once more. “But we do need to talk.”

  Miri slumps back against the sofa cushion. She supposes it was a matter of time before Alix drew her into discussing the upcoming Offset again. It looms large between them, impossible to ignore.

  “Please, Miri. Just hear me out, won’t you? It can’t hurt to listen.” When Miri doesn’t stop her, she takes her chance and presses on. “This is about more than just our family. Your mother, she… I know you’ve been told this before, but I’m not sure if you believe it. So please, Miri, if there’s any doubt in your mind… Project Salix is the only thing standing between us and extinction. Without your mother, there is no Project Salix, whatever the Borlaug might like to think. It’s as simple as that.”

  Miri shrugs like it doesn’t matter in the slightest. She’s heard this all before. “I don’t care. This is my decision to make and no one else’s. I’m not going to nominate you. You aren’t the reason why I left. She is.”

  “You’ve really made up your mind, then?”

  “Yes.”

  Alix opens her mouth and then closes it again. “Perhaps one day when you have your own child, you’ll understand the sacrifices your mother has made for you. That we both have. What?” she adds. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Miri shakes her head in quiet disbelief. She is never going to have a child; she is never going to do to another living being what her parents have done to her. They knowingly condemned her to life on a dying planet in full knowledge of what that would mean and the hardships she would have to face.

  She wishes her mother could understand that, but it seems entirely beyond her. Sometimes the gap between them is so vast that Miri struggles to see how it will ever be bridged.

  11

  At first, Jac considers insisting some other staff member be found, but she is keenly aware of the seconds slipping by. Already an hour has passed since she arrived at the testing facility, and she doesn’t have much time.

  “Did you volunteer for this?” she asks quietly as she follows the Archivist from the Facility Manager’s office.

  “Think I was that desperate for a chance to see the woman who saved the world? Don’t flatter yourself,” he says with disdain. “I was the only one who could be spared.”

  Jac is not entirely sure she believes this. If she knows anything about the Archivist, it’s that he enjoys holding a grudge and wouldn’t miss the opportunity to make her life difficult. As far as she knows, he has never forgiven her for taking the directorship that should – in his mind anyway – irrefutably and undeniably have been his. Jac wonders how the Inbhir Nis team can bear to tolerate him; she had certainly detested every moment of working with him in London before she had him relocated.

  As if to prove her point, he begins channelling his palpable resentment into sneering at his fellow members of staff who, as Jac passes them, stop what they’re doing to nudge one another and point excitedly in her direction. Jac smiles and doles out a few cordial greetings.

  “Fascinating paper on the abiotic stress adaptation of large-subunit ribosomal proteins,” she says to one woman whom she recognises. “Well done indeed. Especially with the optimisation of the Yonath-Ramakrishnan protocol for crystallisation.”

  “Surprised it made it through peer review with those R-free factors,” says the Archivist dismissively.

  Jac ignores him, spotting another familiar face. “And you! Excellent work on the new electrospray nozzle,” she says.

  When the Archivist opens his mouth to voice another criticism, Jac shoots him a warning look and he thankfully keeps it to himself. Not for the first time does she regret that she cannot have the man fired. At least, not without major reprisals. While she would normally hate to lose so skilled a worker, in his case it would almost certainly be worth it. But the Archivist has powerful connections in this neck of the woods, and Alba’s political class wouldn’t take the dismissal of one of their more prominent scientists lightly.

  Still, observing the dark glances that are cast in his direction, Jac wonders whether firing him wouldn’t be worth the risk. Then again, after the mess with the liquid nitrogen supply contract…

  Her expression sours. It’s the last thing she wants to be thinking about. Awarding the contract to a supplier in the Amber Valley was a mistake, one that had gone down badly with the locals in Inbhir Nis. There were riots outside the facility for weeks. Jac held firm, but the Board forced her hand in the end. Reluctantly, she granted the contract to an Alban-based company instead – causing a headache and a small fortune in contractual breakage fees – but the damage was already done, and the Albans still regard her Institute with suspicion. The prospect of provoking further hostilities doesn’t bear contemplating.

  Crossing the secure computing terminal, Jac glimpses large windows that overlook an expanse of the steel-grey North Sea. The vastness of it captivates her and she stops briefly to peer out.

  “Looking for the NAX?” asks the Archivist, his lip curling.

  “Hardly,” she says. The North Atlantic Xylem is a pneumatic cargo pipe that stretches from Alba to Greenland and lies many miles below the sea’s surface. It is all that remains of a vast network that once carried passengers and freight across the world. That was before the Bogotá Accord, of course. Even after that, this one line of the NAX continued to operate for many years – bringing fuel from the oil fields of Greenland – until it was finally mothballed. Reinstating its use for Project Salix had been something of an early triumph for the Borlaug.

  Once used to bring fuel from the oil fields of Greenland, its sole purpose now is to ferry samples between the Inbhir Nis facility and the final station in Greenland. The cargo pods travel at incredible speeds, turning a distance of nearly a thousand miles into a journey that takes no more than a few hours. It’s a remarkable feat of old-world engineering, though one that is not, of course, visible from above the sea’s surface. There is a command centre, she knows, buried somewhere deep below the facility at the bottom of an eighty-metre mineshaft. As much as she’d like to see it again, it will not feature in her inspection today.

  Once they have crossed the length of the terminal, the Archivist leads her through a maze of corridors until they come to the airlock in the outer wall of the annexe. The door appears to be solid steel and is set into a concrete recess. Either side of it are signs not dissimilar to the ones Jac saw at the facility perimeter attached to the chain-link fence, the black-and-yellow trefoil glaring sternly at them from the grey wall. Above the door, a green light tells them it’s safe to enter.

  “Were you here the day of the incident?” she asks, her need for information outweighing her desire to remain silent.

  The Archivist scans his ID card on the reader beside the door. “When that idiot got drunk and broke in? No.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “A little.”

  There’s a metallic clunk and then the door slides open, rising up into the wall like a shutter. The Archivist steps over the threshold and Jac follows suit. Now they are in a narrow chamber barely larger than a cupboard. There is a steel door ahead of them that, save for the warning red of the LEDs that run the length of its sides, is identical to the one behind.

  “You don’t seem very upset.”

  The Archivist shrugs. “Neither do you.”

  “He’s not one of my colleagues.”

  “Like I say, I only knew him a little. He is one of your employees, though. Some might say you have a duty of care. Not that you seem remotely concerned by that. Then again, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “If you’ve got something to say–”

  “What, me? I wouldn’t dream of criticising the great Jac Boltanski. Just look where it got me the last time.�
� He presses a button and the door behind them slowly descends. Only when it is firmly shut do the LEDs blink and change to green. “I’m still waiting for an apology,” he says.

  “For what, exactly? I acted as I saw fit given the circumstances. Anyone would have done the same in my position, even you.”

  He snorts. “Forgive me, but I’ve never been so threatened by the competition that I felt the need to have them relegated to the back of beyond.”

  The idea that he counts himself as her competition is laughable, or would be if it was the first time she had heard this claim. He is not the only one who thinks he could do her job, despite being supremely unqualified to do so.

  “That’s not what happened and you know it. HR had more complaints about you than the rest of the staff put together. It was starting to cause serious problems. That’s why I had you moved here,” she says. It’s not a lie, not exactly, but it’s not the entire truth either. “Besides, I thought you’d be glad,” she continues. “You always were going on about how much you missed life in Alba. And I can completely understand. It is beautiful up here. The air–”

  “That’s not going to work on me, Boltanski,” he says, pressing a second button that makes the door ahead open, rising in just the same way as the first. “I know what you really think about us Albans. We get in the way. That’s why you didn’t want me down in London. Scared the powers-that-be would see my worth.” He steps out of the airlock into the cleanroom beyond. A low bench runs along one wall and, above it, a row of empty hooks. There are more hooks on the opposite wall, and from these hang several hazmat suits, lurid and lime-coloured.

  “Do I need to remind you I am the powers-that-be?” says Jac. “If you’re not up to the job, I’ll get the Facility Manager to assign me someone else.”

  “If you’re too intimidated to deal with having me as your chaperone, that’s your call.”