Ghost Species
Page 23
Carla looks wild, terrified, either of Eve or of what she has said. Or both.
‘It was your friend that brought them here, wasn’t it? Sami. He told them about us, about the stores.’
Eve growls.
Carla takes a step back and shifts uneasily. ‘What the fuck are you?’
Eve turns back to Lukas. ‘Get out,’ she says quietly. ‘And tell me if they come back.’
An hour passes before Drago and the others arrive back. Eve stands in the doorway looking out as they carry the sacks and animals towards the cars. Nervously she counts the goats, only to realise Smilla is missing. Then she sees a small shape slung limply over Drago’s shoulder. She gasps, tears starting in her eyes, but does not move, her feet rooted to the spot. Once they are finished loading, Drago and two of the others walk back towards the house. As they set off Sami falls in a few steps behind them. Pushing the screen door open, Eve heads down to meet them. They stop, facing each other.
‘We’ll be back in a month,’ Drago says.
Eve doesn’t reply.
‘Hopefully this won’t be so difficult next time.’
When Eve remains silent he snorts. ‘Be like that, then. But this is how it’s going to be. You fuckers don’t get to sit up here with food while we starve. It’s time to share.’ He glances at the others. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
As they turn away Sami hangs back, staring at Eve. He looks pale, thin, frightened. Eve lets out a noise of disgust, but as she turns back towards the house he steps forward.
‘Eve,’ he says. ‘Wait.’
She looks back at him. ‘You told them,’ she says.
He flinches. ‘Please, Eve. You have to understand, I didn’t mean for this to happen.’
She turns to face him. ‘Is that why you came here? To spy on us? Were you working for them all along?’
He purses his lips and for a second Eve thinks she sees tears in his eyes. But then she remembers Lukas telling her that Sami wasn’t to be trusted, that he only cared about himself, and as she does the memory of Lukas’s ruined face flashes before her eyes. She advances on Sami.
‘It is, isn’t it? You came here for them, not for us. Not for me.’
Sami backs away.
‘Go away, Sami,’ she says. But as she turns away Sami speaks.
‘That night, in the cabin after the party. You told me something.’
She falls still. Sami takes a step towards her.
‘You remember?’ she says.
He nods. ‘I’m sorry. I was a dickhead. I shouldn’t have run off like that. It was just . . . just, I didn’t know what to think. I always knew you were different. But that . . .’
She sniffs. ‘I trusted you.’
‘I know.’
She shakes her head. ‘So, what? You’re here to tell me how sorry you are? That you didn’t mean to hurt me?’
Sami shakes his head. ‘It’s not like that.’
‘Then what is it like?’
‘I found something. Online. A story about an experiment in France.’
There is a moment’s silence. Then he takes another step forward. ‘You’re not the only one.’
The Silent World
At first she thinks it is some kind of tent, a bedraggled hide or rug stretched across poles; it is only as she draws closer that its shape resolves, revealing itself in all its mute ruination. One of Davis’s mammoths, its carcass foundered on the forest floor, skin stretched between its bones. As if at some unseen signal crows rise, their cries disturbing the air, and settle on nearby trees. They have survived. They always survive.
The smell is overpowering but she presses her sleeve to her face and forces herself to move closer. The rib cage is huge, half as tall again as she is, the scraps of flesh and skin that hang on it flapping in the wind, viscera coiled and bloated in a pool within. Its head is intact, the trunk splayed in front of it, the thick, mahogany-coloured hair matted with leaves, the black skin visible beneath it.
She knows the Foundation released mammoths in Lithuania, but how did it end up here, more than a thousand kilometres from that site? And what happened to it? She has heard stories about humans hunting the new beasts, killing them, but there are no signs of violence apart from the depredations of the birds. Perhaps it grew sick. Or hungry. Or perhaps this is where its kind have begun to bury their dead. Her arm still pressed to her face, she turns, scans the forest around her. Save for the crows watching her from the trees it is empty and silent.
Not so long ago this woodland would have been alive, information flowing through it like the wind that ripples through the leaves, a system that trembled on the edge of sentience. Back then these trees would have been filled with slow awareness, whispering to each other in patterns of electricity and biochemicals, a deep web connecting them not just to each other, but to past and future, a wordless remembering. Now, though, it is dead, the smell of it lingering like the stink of the mammoth carcass. Is there a word for that loss? A word that might name this rupture in the world? A word that might capture the way all that has happened has sundered this place from its past and left it storyless and alone?
Taking a step back, she sniffs the breeze: mingled with the reek of the mammoth’s carcass she smells smoke, from either the fires to the south or perhaps somewhere closer at hand. Yesterday she passed a campsite, a confused straggle of tents and structures made of packing containers and a handful of ruined trucks and cars, their wheels removed, windscreens stoved in. At first she considered stopping to ask for food, but the faces on the children were enough to tell her it was better to hurry on.
She has passed many such places on her journey. Although she has mostly avoided the cities and the towns, dissuaded by the roadblocks on their outskirts, the plumes of smoke rising above them, in the lands outside them life is changing, growing wilder. The roads are scattered with travellers and refugees, some in cars or on contraptions pulled by horses but most on foot, and here and there military and security patrol the roads. Yet these travellers are only part of the displaced. Elsewhere others live in old buildings, supporting themselves in ways she does not understand, dirty children roaming here and there, gangs of teenagers or men who seem to be hunting, even if they do not call it that, and two days ago she glimpsed people living in caves, a fire crackling in front of them, tattered clothes and tarpaulins spread between the trees to shield them.
History runs backwards. The beginning becomes the end.
She takes one last sniff and heads on. Although she has grown used to the smoke, its constant presence is a reminder of the speed with which things continue to change. This year the summer in these northern latitudes has lasted six months, the heat stretching on and on. With so many people on the move the trees are being felled, and fire is racing through what is left of the forests. The world is burning.
In the years since the Melt, the warming seems to have accelerated, although whether that is because the survivors have been torching the forests to make fields or because the feedbacks in the system are now too intense to hold back, nobody knows. Yet there is no longer any question that the planet is undergoing a transformation. Much of southern Europe is now deserted, as is south-west Australia, subequatorial Africa, India. To the north the ice is melting faster and faster. The deserts are spreading, growing. It is as if the entire planet is convulsing, slipping free of their models, their fantasies of control.
It has taken her nearly a year to make her way here. In the aftermath of Drago’s visit she helped nurse Lukas and do what they could to rebuild, though with so many of their supplies and livestock gone it was difficult to know where to begin. The mood of the group was different as well: the divisions between the different personalities more pronounced. One night Carla and Callum argued; the next morning he was gone. Meanwhile Tomas and Lukas became harder, more secretive. Eve found their disagreements exhausting and difficult to manage, a reminder of her own separateness. And so she did her best to keep to herself, to hold
their arguments at arm’s length. Yet even as she did, she could not put Sami’s words out of her mind, and so, one night a few weeks after Drago’s visit she sat down with a screen and used Lukas’s satellite connection to connect to the net.
The uplink was slow and unreliable, but eventually she found the article Sami had told her about. Armed with the name, she searched for more information, and finally sent a message to the journalist who wrote the article, explaining the situation and asking to know more. Weeks passed with no reply, until she decided it had never been true in the first place.
And then, one night three months after she began her search she logged on, waiting while the interface slowly loaded. It was a surprise it was there at all: for the past fortnight there had been almost no signal, an intimation of what might come next, of the darkness that was spreading. And then, as the inbox appeared, she saw a reply.
He asked for a photo, some proof she was who and what she said she was, so she sent him one, and he replied with a location. When she wrote back he did not answer, although she didn’t know if this was because something had happened or simply because the network had gone down.
After a fortnight she knew his answer was not coming. But by then a plan had begun to form in her head. She would go to him.
She had money, cash left to her by Kate, and so with Lukas’s help she found a boat heading north, across the Strait, a yacht skippered by a man who used to be a lawyer and now did runs to Melbourne. The day she left was hot and humid, high cloud and smoke discolouring the sky, and as they tacked out of the Derwent and into the ocean the sea’s surface was smooth, almost oily, but as they caught the wind and the boat knifed forward she felt her heart quicken.
As the boat travelled northward she sat, watching the coast pass. It was strange, seeing the island from this angle, the way the land folded up from the water, the scraps of towns in the inlets. The marks of human habitation were clearly visible in the boxy shapes of houses, the pale emptiness of the fields and paddocks, yet elsewhere the trees still grew dark and heavy, their solidity suggesting these other marks were just transitory.
When they rounded Cape Portland, the shape of Barren Island rising to the north, they changed course, tacking out, into the Strait. A tremor passed through her as the island shrank towards the horizon. Out here it was quiet, the only sound the wind, the smack of the waves, and as the day drew down and night fell she sat and watched the horizon, astonished by the size of the world.
That night she slept below decks, lulled to sleep by the sound of the water outside the hull lapping against her head, but deep in the night she was roused by a low, mournful sound, and for a time she lay in the dark of the cabin, listening, not sure what she was hearing, until all at once she realised it was whale song.
Wrapping a blanket around herself she clambered up the stairs onto the deck. The stars were visible in places, the moonlight moving on the surface of the ocean, but there was no sign of the whales, only the sound of their cries echoing through the water. She remembered Lukas telling her they had been almost drowned out by the noise of human ships and industry, yet as the ocean emptied they were singing again. For a long time she stood, listening, trying to imagine those vast bodies moving weightlessly through the oceanic night, slipping and pulling as they rose towards the moonlight and then dove again. What were they saying, what meaning passed between them in this song? Was it for pleasure or was it simply to remind each other that they were here, that they were not alone? Only later did she wonder whether they had been crying out in hunger.
Outside Port Phillip they waited for the tide to change, then sailed in. Most of the docks had been lost beneath the water during the Melt, but new piers were already being constructed, crowded, makeshift arrangements built from old metal and timber.
She spent a week looking for passage out. There were still planes, but they were sporadic, mostly used by military and private security, meaning most people who tried to travel did so on container ships, which was how she did it eventually, finding a berth on a German freighter heading east towards Panama and then on, to Hamburg.
The northern summer had begun by the time they reached Germany. Hamburg was a maze of flooded wharves and drowned equipment. They docked at a floating wharf, dismounted into the city. The air smelled of wood fire and sewage. Shouldering her bag, she slipped away without goodbyes and headed south, taking a highway towards France.
She has been walking for almost a month. Long enough to see how much of the old world is gone, something of the new one that is growing. At night she has slept in the forest, beside roads, in abandoned barns. Sometimes she has walked with other travellers, standing aside to let the military vehicles roar by. They say there is war brewing further south, and to the east in India and Pakistan, but here it is mostly quiet.
Before she arrived she wondered whether she would know this place, whether its light and trees might speak to some ancestral memory of these northern lands, but although she sees beauty here sometimes, it has not sparked anything in her. Perhaps it would be different if it were living, if she could not feel the loneliness of it. Sometimes in the night she hears cries, the howling of wolves, the eerie call of an owl, but mostly what she feels is absence, the emptiness of a place almost devoid of life.
By the end of the lane the road dips, then rises again. Will they still be here? Has she come all this way for nothing? As she begins to climb again she feels her step slow, her legs trembling beneath her. And then ahead of her she hears a voice, speaking in French, a woman’s laugh. She comes to a halt, staring forward. Two figures are walking towards her. They are broad, powerful, their thick hair hanging loose over faces larger than those she knows. The woman sees her first, falling still, then the man. They are older than her, but not by much. Behind them a child, of three or maybe four. Eve opens her mouth but words do not emerge. She cannot speak. For a long moment nobody moves, then the woman steps forward and, grasping Eve’s hand, pulls her close.
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Acknowledgements
This novel has benefited from the input and assistance of a great many people. Although they may not have realised it at the time, Paul McAuley, Ben Ball, Delia Falconer, Melissa Ferguson, Garth Nix, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jonathan Strahan, Sean Williams and Geordie Williamson all offered ideas and perspectives that helped me find the book I was looking for; likewise Patrick Bradley, Craig Hargreaves, Jason Martin and Margaret Morgan provided advice and answered questions about security, technology and medicine. I am extremely grateful to all of them.
I am also indebted to Sophie Cunningham, Ashley Hay, Jane Rawson and Adam Roberts, all of whom read various drafts of the manuscript. Their insights helped make this a much better book than it might otherwise have been, and helped me keep faith at moments when I needed it most.
I also want to acknowledge my former agent, the late David Miller. David was my agent and my friend for almost two decades, and one of the kindest and funniest people I have ever known. His absence remains a source of continuing sadness.
Since David’s death I have been represented by Jennifer Hewson, now of Lutyens & Rubinstein, and Matthew Turner of Rogers, Coleridge & White. I am grateful to both of them for their consistently excellent advice and support, but I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Matthew, whose energy and enthusiasm for this novel has been deeply inspiring.
I would also like to thank everybody at Penguin Random House Australia, but particularly my editors, Rachel Scully and Claire de Medici, for their rigorousness and attention to detail, and my publisher, Meredith Curnow, for her thoughtful and illuminating questions.
And finally I would like to thank my partner, Mardi McConnochie, and my daughters, Annabelle and Lila. Their love and support is a constant reminder of what matters in the world.
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by James Bradley
Title Page
Imprint Page
&nb
sp; Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Prologue
Impossible Things
Foundling
Childhood
Homo Genocidus
I was a Teenage Neanderthal
Meltwater
The Forest
The Silent World
Acknowledgements