Zenith

by Julie Bertagna

  Tuck imagines an island on the world’s ocean shaped like a Great Skua’s wing.

  So Mara has the ocean in her blood too. She lived surrounded by it on an island called Wing. That must be what draws him. Something gypsea about her. They have breathed the same salt winds. And she gives Tuck the unnerving sensation he had when he first sighted Land, as if she is a missing piece of something he hadn’t ever known he’d lost.

  Mol sniffs the air and tugs his hand. ‘It’s not so cold. The air’s turned soft and damp, like the breath above a mushroom bed.’

  ‘What’s a mushroom?’

  Mol giggles. ‘I suppose you don’t get mushrooms on the sea. They grow in dark Earth places. They’re good to eat.’

  Mol’s presence is solid and grounded; she settles him down. But Mara, ah, she’s like an ocean heartwind. Tuck knows the very one. The heartwind that would come at the far end of winter, in the deepest folds of night, and haunt the lagoon and the boat masts with whispers of summer. The one that unsettled him with its secrets and unknown scents and tucked dreams in the pockets of his windwrap. A wind that made him want.

  Tuck bangs into the person in front, who has stopped. He looks up ahead. The torch has stopped too, he can just see it, and Possil’s hazy, moon-white face in its flame. The tunnel suddenly opens out and with an intake of breath – as if he’s been underwater and just broken to the surface – Tuck steps into a wide cavern.

  The air is warm and thick with vapour clouds. Everything looks hazy and soft. Tuck stares around, amazed.

  The roof is as high as a boat mast and when the torchlight flickers up the walls of the cavern they glow like a fogged moon.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks Mol. Her hair shivers with the luminous glow.

  ‘A moon cave!’ She stares up through the steamy haze at the cavern roof. Crusts and fronds of rock hang down. ‘If I half-close my eyes they could almost be the branches of trees in moonlight.’

  Tuck looks at up at the dim-glowing fronds of rock. That’s what trees are like?

  There’s a crash of water. An explosion of splashes, shrieks and yells. Mol pushes past him, struggling out of her sealskin coat and the crackly layer of knotted plastic she wears underneath. She jumps into a steamy, bubbling pool that’s tucked into a nook of the cave.

  Tuck’s banging heart calms. Each lungful of warm air relaxes him and his Earth terror lifts.

  ‘Come in, Tuck!’ Mol shouts. ‘It’s lovely.’

  Mara is already sitting at the side of the pool, her feet in the water, her eyes closed. Rowan crashes in, soaking her and she laughs. The urchins are splashing up a storm. Tuck throws off his fears and his windwrap and under the strange, steamy moonglow, he plunges into the most blissful warmth he’s ever known.

  WORLD WIND

  ‘Come on then,’ says Fox.

  His tawny eyes and hair glint in the flickering lights of the Weave.

  She follows him off the broken bridge, down the ruined boulevards that stretch as far as she can see. Unravelling carcasses of data-worms slither across great heaps of cyberjunk. Fox takes her past the junk mountains into a wide boulevard stacked on each side with tumbledown towerstacks – sparking, crumbling Weavesites crammed with the rotting electronic data of the drowned world.

  ‘Don’t you remember this place?’

  Mara looks around her, at the flickering towerstacks, at the cracked and buzzing street name. After the cold, dark tunnels and the unearthliness of the moon cave, it’s a relief to plunge back into the familiar world of the Weave with Fox.

  BOULEVARD OF something, says the flickering ice-blue sign. Mara peers hard and sees that the unlit last word is DREAMS. A crack runs right through the word and the blue light has died in that part of the sign, as though the dream is dead.

  ‘This is the boulevard where I first saw you,’ says Fox.

  ‘It was?’

  Mara remembers the creeping Fox presence that haunted her Weave visits when she would zoom down the boulevards for fun, her realworld self safe in her bedroom in Wing. Now, that not-so-distant past seems like someone else’s life.

  Fox has stopped outside one of the Weavesites.

  ‘In here.’

  ‘WORLD WIND.’ Mara reads the faded name that flickers on the the towerstack.

  ‘It’s a wind that blows you all around the world.’ Fox pauses. ‘I found it the other night when you didn’t come. Spent half the night just wandering the Weave. Most of this boulevard’s rotted or dead, but this site’s ace. You ready? Here we go . . .’

  The Weavesite crackles and Mara gasps as she’s sucked into the whirl of a cyberstream. In the second it takes to yell Fox’s name, she has whooshed right through the cyberstream and shoots out into calm black space. She draws a breath, swallows, blinks.

  Looming up before her is a vast glowing gem.

  ‘Planet Earth,’ says a voice in her ear.

  They are floating in black space. Mara wants to grab Fox’s hand then remembers she can’t. She stares up at the amazing vision.

  ‘This is Earth?’

  She can hardly breathe as she takes in the beauty of the glowing, gem-like planet: the stunning blue of the oceans, the brown and green of its lands and ice-crusted mountains and white ice caps, all wrapped in swirls of cloud. It’s hard to believe that in realworld she is sitting in a cave deep in the mountains in the dark of winter at the tip of such a vivid world.

  Fox is watching her, not the planet. The glow of the Earth reflects in his cyber-eyes. But she can feel his real self looking at her. Can he feel her too?

  ‘But – but how is this possible?’ she whispers. ‘To see the Earth . . . ?’

  ‘Satellite images,’ says Fox. ‘Remember, the old satellites all round the Earth that hold the Weave? This is an image of the Earth taken from the moon, long ago. Look, there’s the date.’ Above them, a label hangs in the ether. ‘The Earth photographed from the moon, 20 July 1969.’

  Mara laughs. ‘People went to the moon? And I suppose it was made of cheese?’

  ‘Cheese?’ Fox looks at her askance.

  ‘When I was small,’ Mara explains, ‘my mum used to tell me the moon was made of cheese. People thought it was, once.’

  ‘Once upon a time,’ says Fox. ‘In a time out of mind.’

  They float in space, the bright Earth-gem in front of them, the words tingling between them.

  Mara breaks the spell.

  ‘People really did go to the moon?’

  ‘Once upon a time, they did.’ Fox’s voice drifts. He’s staring at Mara, and she knows he’s thinking of their once upon a time. He looks away and when he speaks it’s with a forced matter-of-factness. ‘OK, there’s a wind-shuttle here somewhere that we can navigate with and if I can just instruct my godgem—’

  The slow-spinning planet and the disorientating whirl of black space have begun to make Mara feel queasy.

  ‘Fox.’

  ‘–we can go for a whirl around the Earth.’

  Mara swallows her queasiness as a craft that looks like a shiny beetle with wings zooms towards them. They board the wind-shuttle and begin to orbit the Earth, crossing blue expanses of ocean, surfing the undulating plains and mountains of its lands, speckled with the cluttered mosaics of cities.

  Fox zooms in closer and now the occasional shock of noise, an image or a disembodied voice flashes up from the planet below.

  ‘What was that?’ gasps Mara, as a rumbling line of tanks appear and vanish.

  ‘Ti-anan-men Square.’ Fox reads the sign that flashed up with the tanks. ‘It’s old message flags. Historical stuff.’ He shrugs. ‘Don’t really know. Wind-shuttlers – people of the old world who used this site – left all sorts of blogs and flags and messages. Wow, did you see that?’

  A mushroom cloud billows up. In the distance, a tidal wave crashes on a raft of islands, obliterating the land. Ahead, cracks appear in the mountains and the Earth shudders.

  ‘Nuclear bomb, tsunami, earthquake.’ Fox reads the flags at eac
h event. They pass over the bombed ruins of several countries. Mara can’t read the messages on the tattered flags but a great wail of despair rises from the smoking remains.

  ‘Fox, stop, this is—’

  He veers away. Far beneath the wind-shuttle, a great wall crashes down.

  ‘–horrible.’

  A vast continent in the middle of the Earth seems dead. There are no noisy messages from the past here, just a mass of silent flags.

  HELP, they say, SEND AID and a solitary one, TOO LATE.

  ‘Stop,’ Mara pleads. ‘I’ve seen enough.’

  Fox nods, his mouth set in a grim line. He pulls the wind-shuttle back from the Earth. The planet looks calm and beautiful once more.

  ‘We’ll go North,’ he says, sounding shaken, and revs the craft to full speed.

  The empty blue of the ocean is a relief. Mara’s stomach settles a little as they zoom across it. She draws breath as the white-capped top of the world comes into view.

  ‘Is that really what the old world was like?’

  ‘It’s not all like that,’ says Fox. ‘I promise. We must’ve been at the wrong altitude and picked up all the bad stuff. There are loads of amazing things too. Just wait.’

  ‘. . . ice caps melting twice as fast as feared . . .’ A disembodied voice crackles in the ether then fades.

  ‘What was that?’ Mara almost grabs Fox by the arm. ‘Go back.’

  Fox pulls the wind-shuttle into reverse and tracks the lone voice.

  ‘. . . we may be on the edge . . . not much time left . . .’

  The voice seems to be coming from one of the satellites marked NASA. This one hangs above the northern hemisphere.

  ‘. . . all countries must stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide . . . can’t wait, must act . . . flooded Earth would be an alien planet . . . armadas of icebergs, rising oceans . . . the end of civilization . . . how long have we got?’

  Fox revs the wind-shuttle.

  ‘They knew,’ says Mara.

  Another surge of nausea hits her.

  Fox leans closer. ‘It was a hundred years ago, Mara. It’s history.’

  ‘But they knew. They could’ve done something but they didn’t. They knew. They didn’t think about the future, did they? They never thought about us.’

  The nausea turns violent. Mara doesn’t know whether it’s Fox’s zip-zooming navigation or all those terrible message flags from history, but she needs to get back to realworld, fast.

  ‘Fox. Stop.’

  His electronic eyes flash at her.

  ‘I need to go back.’

  ‘Go back? Where?’

  ‘Home. I mean, realworld. Out of here.’

  ‘Why?’

  He looks as if he’ll grab her if she tries to leave. Then remembers he can’t.

  ‘Mara, there’s beautiful stuff too – the Grand Canyon and the Great Wall of China. The patterns of the old world cities are stunning. I’ve seen things that are more amazing than anything in the Noos. The sun rising over the Himalayas. A massive river that slides through a jungle like a silver snake. A land full of castles and towers and forests and lakes. A million pink flamingos sweeping across a lake like a flame. And elephants – Mara, elephants and animals you can’t imagine were ever real. A black pool of penguins on an ice shelf at the bottom of the world. And I was going to show you Greenland. We’re nearly there.’

  ‘I need to go. I’m sorry.’

  He looks at her blankly as she exits the wind-shuttle and spins away through black space into the crackling cyberstream.

  Just in time, Mara yanks the halo from her eyes and crashes back into realworld. And promptly throws up.

  ‘Mara?’

  Mol puts a cool hand on Mara’s forehead. ‘No fever. What’s wrong?’

  ‘All this seaweed and fish. Doesn’t agree with me,’ Mara croaks. She goes over to the hot spring to scrub herself clean. Poor Fox. She remembers the bewilderment in his eyes.

  ‘But you’re an island girl,’ says Mol. ‘You must have eaten lots of seaweed and fish.’

  Mara lies down on her seaweed mat. Mol is right, but she’s too sick to try to answer. She closes her eyes and tries to quell the queasiness by imagining she has zipped out of realworld and is with Fox again, gazing at the vast, glowing gem that is Earth.

  THE WRECK OF THE WORLD

  Mara yawns and stretches, soothed from a long dip in the hot spring after a sleep so deep it might have lasted a month. As she dries herself on one of the scratchy seaweed mats, she sees Tuck studying a dim nook of the cave by the light of a torch flame. There’s an intensity about the way he is peering at the wall that makes Mara go over. For the first time she sees there are carvings etched in the rock.

  ‘There were rock carvings on Wing,’ she remembers. ‘Circles and spirals all over the standing stones. Ancient stuff – nobody knew what it meant.’

  ‘These are old but not ancient.’

  Tuck rubs the words that are carved into the rock and shows her the charcoal stain on his fingertip. Mara hears the tremble on his breath. She looks at the words in the rock.

  The wreck of the world.

  Mara takes the torch from Tuck.

  The carving shows a vision of the sun beating down on what must have been a great city. There are towering buildings, streets crammed with cars and people, a sky criss-crossed with winged objects and their smoky trails. Mara remembers the broken bird on the mountain. Planes. Beside the city, tall chimneys in a field belch a dirty cloud. Mara moves the torch flame along the wall. The city seems unaware of what is rolling towards it – a wave, seething with people and animals and the debris of a destroyed city. Mara peers into the wave. Carved into the great swirl of water are what look like bits of paper, each one marked with (Mara peers even closer to be sure) the very same sign that is branded on her arm.

  The snake on a stick.

  Mara tries to think what the sign could mean but she has no idea.

  The torch flame flickers on a bus full of people. The luminous cave wall makes them glow like ghosts. Yet the carving is so detailed that Mara can see the open, screaming mouths of the people as the great wave threatens to swallow the bus. She remembers the wrecked bus the urchins played in on the remains of a sunken bridge in the netherworld.

  It’s as if the world is a wrecked ship and all that is left is the flotsam of the past.

  Mara drops the torch and leans her head against the rock wall, nauseous once again. Her imagination reels with the horror of what it must have been like.

  A hand pulls up her chin. The wet lip of a bottle touches her lips.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she mutters crossly.

  Tuck picks up the torch from the floor and blows gently on it to revive the flame. ‘You not goin’ to sick up on me again?’ he teases.

  Mara shakes her head and manages a smile. She takes a gulp from Tuck’s water bottle, catching his eye as she hands it back.

  ‘What’s sickening you?’ he asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ she retorts. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’

  ‘You’re sick a lot.’

  ‘The sea made me sick. Now the food—’

  ‘You’ve been Landed a while now,’ Tuck persists. ‘Two, three moons?’

  Even the rise and fall of his gypsea voice makes her feel seasick.

  ‘How do I know? It’s all this fish and seaweed, it’s turning my stomach. And the eggs.’

  Mara steers her thoughts back to the carvings on the cave wall. Even they are preferable to the thought of an egg.

  But, like Mol, Tuck won’t swallow that.

  ‘An ocean girl from an island can’t tummy fish and eggs?’

  Tears prickle Mara’s eyes. ‘I don’t know what it is.’ She takes back the torch, scrubs her eyes with her sleeve. ‘Let me see the rest of this.’

  Beyond the great wave is a carving of a child. The hair suggests it’s a girl. Mara peers closer and traces the faint outline of a halo around the child’s head.

  ‘I
t’s your magic machine.’ There’s a crackle of excitement in Tuck’s voice as he points. ‘See?’

  Mara stares at the cave wall, unnerved. The child is cradling a globe. Ah, but it’s not her globe. Mara touches the intricate patterns carved into the child’s globe and knows what it is.

  ‘It’s the Earth.’

  ‘The Earth?’ Tuck’s eyes glitter. The torch flame catches the salt crystals that seem to be ingrained forever in his hair, on his eyelashes, even in the down of his face. ‘It really is round like Grumpa said.’

  Mara nods. She runs across the cave to dig out her backpack from the heap of mats that are her bed. She has had an idea. ‘Tuck, listen . . .’

  She hesitates. What would happen if they bumped into Fox? But would they? It’s hard enough to find him when she wants to. She has been trying endlessly to find him in the Weave to explain about her odd exit from the World Wind. But she can no longer gauge, so deep in the mountain in this season of endless night, whether long days or even weeks have passed since then. It’s long enough for her nails to have grown again though she keeps chewing them down to the quick. Surely they are unlikely to bump into Fox if she avoids the bridge.

  Anyway, Tuck is just a friend, isn’t he?

  ‘I’ll show you the Earth,’ she decides.

  Tuck looks blank, of course, and she tries to explain. ‘It’s a place I can go with the cyberwizz, a site that shows the Earth the way it used to be. People took pictures of it from the moon over a hundred years ago.’

  Now Tuck looks at her as if she’s crazy. Mara laughs.

  ‘That’s what I thought but it’s true. People once went to the moon.’

  ‘They had wings?’ Now he’s laughing with her.

  Mara pulls the cyberwizz from her bag and begins to power it up.

  ‘Oh no.’

  The globe should charge up right away, at a touch, but it takes a long, dead moment to work up a pitiful glow. Mara’s heart sinks. The power is running out. The solar rods inside the globe need a blast of sun, but she is deep inside a mountain and the outside world is in the thick of the longest night of the Far North, a night that spans the whole winter, without a glimpse of sun. Blankets of icy fog make it hard to see the moon or the stars from the cave mouth. It’s impossible to keep track of time. Finding midnight, that single point in the night, when the world around her is all night, has become a blind guess in the dark.