The Offset

by Calder Szewczak

  She shuts the steel door of the airlock and carries the book back to the room with the glove box, where the Archivist is waiting.

  “Pick out one of the capsules,” she tells him. “There’ll be a code on the bottom. Read it out to me.”

  As he does so, she opens the book and turns to the appendix at the back where the manual core measurements from the pilot are listed. It takes her a few moments to find the specific code because it is printed towards the end of the list that covers the cores collected in the fifth and final year of the pilot study. In the column alongside the code are a number of measurements. Jac scans across to the growth ring measurement. 1.256 millimetres.

  “Now I want you to measure the same core. We’ll confirm the measurement manually with microcalipers and then check it on the UVD and see if there’s still a discrepancy.”

  “Of course there’s still a discrepancy,” says the Archivist. “The UVD’s fucked. You confirmed that. When are you going to accept it?”

  “When I have sufficient proof,” Jac snaps. “Now take the measurement,” she adds, gesturing towards the glove box.

  With a few low curses, the Archivist takes the capsule to the glove box and opens it, plucking out the core. It’s a small cylinder of plant tissue, not more than two centimetres in length and greyish in appearance. Peering at the core through the screen of the glove box, he measures the thickness of the ring with a pair of microcalipers and reads out the measurement.

  “1.056 millimetres.”

  Jac pulls a face. “Are you sure?”

  “Are you questioning my ability to measure a goddamn growth ring? The original measurement must have been recorded incorrectly. A simple transcription error, that’s all.”

  “Then let’s try another.” She selects a different capsule from the case and checks the code against the table in the book. It is also in the section of cores collected in the final year of the project. Then she hands it to the Archivist. Once again, the measurement he takes with the microcalipers is smaller than that recorded in the appendix, even though this, too, would have first been taken by hand.

  There’s a pause. “Still think it’s a transcription error?” asks Jac.

  “Maybe,” says the Archivist, though his tone is not so confident as before. “We’ll have to check more of them to know for sure.”

  Jac can hardly argue with this. They work their way methodically through the rest of the cores in the crate. But for every core they try, the measurement the Archivist takes with the microcalipers does not match what has been recorded in the lab book.

  “How is this possible?” says Jac, slamming the book shut in exasperation.

  “Perhaps there’s a fault with these microcalipers?” says the Archivist. All his earlier anger has evaporated. Now he only sounds confused.

  “What, a fault that coincidentally replicates the same issue with the UVD? Because the error is exactly the same. You can see that, can’t you? The measurements aren’t just off randomly, they’re off by 0.2 millimetres every time. 0.2 millimetres smaller, to be precise.”

  “I know it’s unlikely. I just… can’t think of anything else.” He seems as stumped by his inability to think of a solution as he is by the error itself.

  Conceding the point, Jac finds another set of microcalipers and passes them over. But when he takes the measurement again, he gets the exact same result. He taps the microcalipers irritably against the side of the glove box.

  “Perhaps there’s a bug in the logging software?” he says. “One that alters the measurements after they’ve been entered into the database.”

  “That can’t be it,” she says. “The pilot project didn’t use the same logging software we use now. I don’t see how that could explain the same error being replicated across both sets of data.”

  “There has to be something,” he says with an increasing air of desperation. “That kind of systematic discrepancy, it only ever means one thing: instrumental malfunction. But if it’s not your goddamn UVD and it’s not the microcalipers and it’s not the logging software… it has to be something else.”

  “Maybe…”

  “Come on, think. There must be something we’ve missed, some part of the process that we haven’t properly considered. It’ll be something simple, just one factor that’s been the same ever since the pilot.”

  His earnestness is, Jac thinks, a mark of the situation’s gravity. He’s not even pausing to sneer or throw her a few barbed comments as is his habitual manner. She reconsiders the problem, mentally sifting back through everything she has discovered: the unexplained variations, the discrepancies between the recorded measurements and what they have observed from the samples themselves. The Archivist is right: there has to be a way of explaining it all, a single factor that accounts for everything else. Of course, there is one simple explanation that accounts for everything, one way of reconciling the variations and discrepancies, but it’s too ridiculous for words. Unless…

  All at once, Occam’s razor slashes through her doubts. She just hasn’t been able to see it before now.

  If the problem isn’t with the tools she’s using, then it can only be with the trees themselves. The trees simply aren’t the same size as the recorded measurements say they are. Each of them is exactly 0.2 millimetres smaller than it should be. Of eleven billion trees the Borlaug has planted in Greenland, not one has grown as much as they thought – not one has ever grown as much as they thought. It goes right back to the beginning, to the start of the pilot. How can she not have spotted it before? She swears under her breath, not quite daring to believe it but knowing that it is the truth, the only explanation that, finally, makes sense of everything.

  The trees in Greenland are dying.

  22

  As they turn out of the plaza, Alix steps out into Euston Road to hail an oncoming rickshaw. Miri stares. The Warren isn’t more than a twenty minute walk away. And even if it were further, catching a rickshaw would never have occurred to her; for two years it’s been walking or nothing. In that time, she’s got to know a few riders personally and seen for herself how hard their work is and how they get treated by their customers.

  The rickshaw pulls up beside them and Miri hangs back. “I’d rather walk,” she says. Her mother grumbles an indistinct reply and tries to persuade her to get into the cab, fanning her face with her hand.

  “Is the heat really that bad?” Miri asks.

  “It’s not that,” Alix replies. “But I’m not as young as you are and not as fit as I once was. We’ve been on our feet for hours.”

  “Alright then, why don’t we sit down somewhere and take a break?”

  After a brief negotiation, Alix agrees. With profuse apologies, they send the rickshaw on its way with an empty cab and set about finding somewhere to get a drink. Although Miri is well acquainted with several bars, none of her regular haunts are nearby and, besides, they’re not the sort of places she’d take her mother. After a moment’s thought, Alix suggests a pub that she and Jac sometimes go to called the Stammering Cobbler that’s not far from where they are now.

  Despite the close proximity to the Borlaug, it turns out to be more down to earth than Miri’s expecting: a small, dimly lit room with a handful of mismatched chairs and tables. In the centre is an old-fashioned wooden counter, atop which a few round-bellied caskets lie on their sides. Apart from the bartender, there are only a couple of people there. Alix tells Miri to pick a table while she orders, and Miri plumps for one in the corner, taking the chair nearest the wall so she can stare out across the room. She plucks the white rat from where it has nestled in the crook of her arm and lets it race around the table, the fleshy ear on its back quivering as it runs, the burn red and oozing.

  A moment later, Alix appears bearing two long drafts of pale gold ale. The glasses are so full that the ale slops over the sides when she sets them down.

  “Cheers,” she says, tapping her glass lightly against Miri’s.

  For a moment, it’s violently
strange to be sitting across from her mother in a pub. Everything about it, from Alix’s disarrayed appearance – her hair wild from the humidity, her camisole half-drenched with sweat and clinging to her skin – to the choice of refreshment seems wrong. Her mother doesn’t drink pints. As she recalls, both Alix and Jac prefer gin to beer. Not that she had many occasions to observe her mothers in such a public setting as a restaurant or bar. Growing up, the three of them rarely dined out together. Jac’s fans made it impossible, never fearing to approach them, to disturb their meal, intent on wringing Jac’s hand and gushing copious thanks to her for “saving the world”. Jac would always reply with the same feeble joke that made Miri squirm in her seat: “Don’t thank me, thank the trees!” Now that Jac isn’t here, at least they will be spared the embarrassment. Miri and Alix are anonymous, entirely unremarkable. Suddenly her perspective shifts, lurching around to consider what they must look like to the bartender, to the other customers sat hunched over their pint glasses: two women sharing a drink, perhaps related, perhaps not. Well, two women and a halfmutant rat.

  Then, all at once, it is the most ordinary thing in the world to be there with Alix. She picks up her glass and drinks.

  The ale is surprisingly good, crisp and refreshing. On her practically empty stomach, just a few mouthfuls are enough to make Miri’s head spin, but she keeps sipping away, determinedly keeping pace with her mother, who has already put away a quarter of what’s in her glass.

  “What happened to the rat?” asks Alix with a sudden frown of consternation as her eyes fall on the red welt at the base of the ear on its back.

  “Nothing,” says Miri.

  “It looks like a burn mark.”

  “It will heal.”

  Alix sucks air through her teeth. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Burns are prime sites for infection. It’s much harder for the skin to perform a protective barrier. You’d be surprised how many people we had come into the hospital who had contracted sepsis after scalding themselves with boiling water.”

  Miri hasn’t heard that before. She thoughtfully chews at a piece of dry skin on her bottom lip and looks again at the rat. The burn is bad – a blistered, watery bulge – but she can’t bear to think about it, can’t bear to think about any of it now. Eager to move the conversation along, Miri lunges for the nearest topic that presents itself, one that she has been carefully avoiding all day.

  “Do you miss working at the hospital?”

  “All the time,” says Alix heavily. “I mean, there are parts of it I’m happy to do without. I don’t miss the long hours. I don’t miss being bone-tired all the time. But it feels like I haven’t done a single useful thing since I left.”

  “It must have been hard, though. Dealing with some of the cases that came in.”

  “Sure,” says Alix. “There were some people who came in that we couldn’t do anything for, that we didn’t even begin to have the resources to help. And those days were hard. Really hard. But for every patient we saved, it was worth it.”

  Miri nods. Even on Alix’s worst day in the hospital, Miri never once saw her break down.

  “Of course,” she adds, “it’s the difficult cases that tend to stay with you. There was one we had… a seven year-old girl from Dorset. Marburg virus. Ever heard of it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a nasty one. Awful.” She shakes her head. “First case we’d seen. Comes from North Africa, originally. Highly infectious. Carried by certain species of African bat. Bats aren’t usually migratory of course, but these days…” she trails off.

  “The girl had this virus?” Miri prompts.

  Alix blinks. “Yes. I had the story from her dad. She caught a bat and ate it. Well, you could see they were both half-starved to death. You know what it’s like in the Counties. Unluckily for her, the bat was Marburg positive. At first, she suffered high fever, acute vomiting, painful rashes. Her family applied for a visa to bring her to London… I think they were denied at first, maybe a few times after that as well. By the time they were finally permitted to bring her to Ormond Street, she was passing colon tissue in her diarrhoea. We had to put her straight into isolation on the ICU. In the first few hours, she developed oedema of the hands and feet, haemorrhaging from the mucus membranes, haemorrhaging from everywhere. You should’ve seen the state of her injection sites, she wouldn’t stop bleeding when we tried to put in a line.”

  Alix pauses to take a deep drink from her glass. “Of course, we had to do everything through a plastic screen. It wasn’t so much that it made the work harder, it was more that it kept her isolated and cut off. I’ve never seen anyone more alone. I couldn’t properly explain to her what I was doing or why. I couldn’t even stroke her face or show her a smile because I was covered in protective overalls from head to toe.”

  She lowers her gaze to the table, takes another slow drink. “Then she started having convulsions that we couldn’t stop. Her dad just stood there on the other side of the plastic with us and watched while we ran around the hospital bed, trying not to say out loud how long we thought she had left, because he’d hear us. The poor man. He couldn’t even touch his dying little girl.”

  Miri wants to tell her to stop but can’t seem to engage her tongue.

  “There was nothing we could do. No treatment or medication we could give her because no one had thought to develop that kind of medication while we still had the chance. Marburg isn’t supposed to affect the children up here, it’s only the little girls down in Africa who are supposed to bleed and swell and convulse to death. We couldn’t even give her anything decent for the pain because of the clotting… All the while she was begging for water; she was so thirsty the only thing she could say was ‘I need a drink, I need a drink.’ I had to try and tell her that I could only administer liquids through a line, but when I got anywhere near her bleeding arms with the IV she started crying…” she shudders and falters in her telling.

  “Like I say,” Alix continues, raising her eyes again to Miri, “it’s the difficult cases that stay with you. That was one of the worst. All the same, I wish I’d never left.”

  “Then why did you?”

  For a moment Alix holds Miri’s gaze with her own, then she drops her eyes to her lap. “I had to. When you left… it destroyed me, Miri. I managed to hold it together for a couple of months, but I – it got pretty bad. Soon, I was as much a danger to the patients as I was to myself. Everyone agreed it would be best if I retired early. They were probably right. I mean, of course they were. I’ve come a long way since then, but there are still rough days. It’s like I’ve been picking up the pieces ever since.”

  23

  Alix groans with the pain of another contraction. Her hair is plastered to her forehead with sweat. “I can’t do this,” she gasps.

  “You can,” says Jac, clutching her hand. “Just breathe.”

  “It’s too much, I can’t, I can’t–”

  It’s the day their countdown begins. Jac is sitting in the cab of an armoured rickshaw with a heavily pregnant Alix. They are outside the maternity wing of the university hospital, an elegant construction of white tiles and tinted glass floodlit from below. Beyond the high roof, the sky is dark; the distant stars just discernible through a thin layer of smog. A strong gust of wind rattles the cab, briefly drowning out the clamour of angry shouts that echo around the hospital complex.

  “Traitors!” the crowd jeers. “Murderers!”

  Jac leans over to peer through the small, high window of reinforced glass set in the front of the cab. Through the wire grille, she can make out the rickshaw rider ahead – dressed in a heavy uniform complete with helmet and stab vest and standing up on the pedals, ready to take off at any moment. Beyond is an angry mob, fists raised, faces contorted into animal snarls. They’ve been kettled into a side alley by a cordon of hospital guards standing with linked arms to form a tight human chain. The Activists are growing more daring and savage in their attempts to break through. It doesn’t look like the
cordon will hold for long.

  One of the Activists clashes angrily with a hospital guard, gesticulating wildly with a placard. It shows the female reproductive organs, crudely drawn, with a large red line slashing through it like a knife. Beneath it in a barely legible cursive reads the common slogan: “Say no to life.” Jac puts out a hand to the side of the rickshaw cab, desperately glad of the thick reinforced steel walls.

  “I can feel a pressure there, Jac. I think she’s coming now…”

  “Hold it in! You can’t have her here, Alix. Just… hold it in.”

  Their plan was to wait in the cab until the pigsuits arrived to disperse the crowd, but Alix is running out of time and it seems like the cordon might give way at any minute. They radio this through to the hospital and an alternative plan is quickly agreed.

  Within minutes, a porter wearing a bright-red Kevlar vest appears on the hospital steps – an extra body to shield Alix if the cordon breaks – and hurries down to the rickshaw.

  “Someone’s coming!” Jac shouts, and then, in what she hopes is a more soothing voice: “Just breathe.”

  Reaching the rickshaw, the porter opens the door. “Ready to have a baby?” they boom, taking Alix by the shoulders and half-supporting, half-dragging her from the passenger seat.

  “Just get her to safety!” Jac shouts. “She says the baby’s coming now!”

  Impervious to Jac’s panic, the porter strikes up a conversational patter. If they’re attempting to drown out the screams of the Activists, their words are about as effective as bows and arrows against lightning. Closer now, the faces beyond the cordon are red and crazed with anger. Jac catches sight of the ouroboros.

  “What’s your birth plan?” the porter asks quickly. “How are you feeling? What are you hoping for; blonde like you or brunette like the wife? Not that it matters!”

  “Eighteen years and you’ll pay!” screams the crowd.