Perihelion Summer

by Greg Egan

  * * *

  Matt leaned out the door of the control room and swept the binoculars along the horizon to the south, but all he could see was choppy blue-gray water meeting the bruise of distant thunderclouds.

  “Nothing yet,” he reported. He lowered the binoculars and stepped back into the room.

  Arun turned away from the console, looking anxious now. “Maybe the signal’s not strong enough.” They’d tested it on one of the runabouts out to a distance of two kilometers from the Mandjet, but they didn’t want to crank it up any higher lest they make problems for other boats.

  “They might have varied the schedule,” Jožka suggested. Over the past two weeks, they’d seen one of the drones make roughly the same surveillance sweep every morning and afternoon, day after day—but though the precise times and routes had varied, it was getting close to the end of the window within which the thing had usually passed through the circle that their signal ought to have reached.

  “Maybe they changed the specs from the standard model,” Arun fretted. “They could be doing something more elaborate, with a base station to supplement the satellites.”

  “What base station would it be using out here?” Matt wondered.

  “Nothing’s listed. But maybe they set one up, just for the drones.”

  Yuki said, “Wouldn’t you have found it, when you swept the bands?”

  “Not if they’re restricting it for their own use. Without the right decryption key, it would just look like noise.”

  Matt could believe the private encryption part, but he was skeptical about anything so far offshore. A single GPS base station might cover a port or a harbor, but to cover the drones’ flight path would take a few hundred of them, on anchored buoys spread across the Arafura Sea.

  “If this thing’s smart enough not to be fooled,” Aaron began tentatively, “does that mean it’s smart enough to know we’re trying to fool it?”

  “That’s entirely possible,” Arun confirmed glumly. “Goulburn super-max, here we come.”

  Jožka started kneading Arun’s shoulders. Matt stepped out onto the deck and searched again.

  “Forget Goulburn!” he called back. “The pizza’s on its way.”

  Everyone ran out to join him, scrabbling for their turn with the binoculars. Matt was relieved, but the truth was they didn’t quite have confirmation yet; the drone might have wandered closer to the Mandjet than usual just by chance, not because it thought it was somewhere else.

  He returned to the control room and started up the engines, leaving Arun on the deck with the binoculars.

  “Go north!” Arun urged him.

  Matt complied. This was going to be tricky; they needed to lure the drone farther off-course, without knowing its precise intended route in advance. In principle, it should be simple enough to gradually increase the distance between its true location and the one it was inferring from the fake GPS signals, but if the drone thought it was heading for point X, they needed to ensure that the point Y that it really was approaching wouldn’t take it out of range of the Mandjet’s transmitter.

  A window on the console showed the fake coordinate grid overlaid on the real one, with the Mandjet’s true position included, courtesy of the dead zone for the fake signal that had been shaped to include their own GPS receiver. The same map was being mirrored on Arun’s phone, so he could fine-tune the divergence of the grids with a swipe of his thumb without even putting down the binoculars.

  “Northeast!” Arun shouted. Matt turned the engines, almost wishing that they’d made everything portable enough to put on a runabout, purely for the sake of greater speed. But even if it was easier to chase the drone, it would have been harder to keep it in view from a low, unstable platform.

  Over the next hour, they managed to keep up the dance: half shadowing the drone with the Mandjet, half tricking it into shadowing them back. Never going out of range, but never coming too close. Arun gradually slid the fake coordinate grid to the south; it was like slowly cranking an escalator in reverse, so a sufficiently dim robot would believe it was ascending what it took to be a stationary staircase much faster than it actually was.

  “If it thinks it’s over land, and it sees water . . .” Aaron mused.

  “Then we’re screwed.” Matt doubted that their adversary could reliably distinguish a turtle from a gun, but even the trashiest image-recognition system could tell the difference between red dust, green vegetation, and blue water.

  The drone was still heading fake-north, though, far from land, eager to scan the ocean for approaching vessels from Indonesia. It thought it was halfway to the Maluku Islands, when in truth it was farther east, and nowhere near that far north.

  It was also skimming lower over the water than it realized. “My, what big waves you have, Grandma!” Matt joked in his best Bugs Bunny voice.

  “Now you’re getting creepy,” Yuki replied.

  “Sorry.” But if the drone’s algorithms were taking the fake-GPS altitude seriously, they might well be logging reports of perilous seas.

  “Okay, this is our best chance!” Arun decided. Matt cut the engines and headed out of the cabin with Jožka.

  “Be careful,” Arun urged her.

  “Always.”

  She and Matt boarded separate runabouts and set out to meet the drone. It was gaining on the Mandjet now, but so low there was no chance of it seeing the craft. Matt slipped on an improvised balaclava, just in case he ended up in view; he glanced across the water and saw that Jožka was already wearing hers. If the drone’s vision was being monitored in real time by a human, the ruse might soon be up, but he doubted that anyone was bothering; it wasn’t a military device in a war zone, just an expensive stunt by the government’s most profligate chest-beaters.

  Arun brought the drone down as low as he dared: it looked like about six meters. Matt approached on the left, Jožka on the right. As they were about to pass it, they turned the boats around and started keeping pace with it, escorting it on either side.

  Matt took the rope in his hands and looked to the side. Jožka nodded once, twice, thrice.

  They threw their ropes together, aiming the loops at the curved feet of the landing frame. Jožka’s hit its mark and she tightened it, but Matt’s fell to the water. “Fuck.” Jožka moved closer to the drone and played out some rope while Matt recovered and tried again. This time, he snagged the foot. He pulled back on the rope to secure the loop; he could feel the ratchets clicking. Then he heaved forty kilograms of ballast over the side of the runabout and it disappeared into the water, taking his rope with it.

  Jožka gunned her motor and her runabout shot ahead. The drone plummeted, then hung a meter or so above the water like a strange parasailing robot, its four rotors struggling to keep it aloft against these inexplicable forces. But even as Jožka accelerated, it remained stubbornly airborne, refusing to be dunked. They’d misjudged the ballast.

  Matt caught up with her and came alongside.

  “I’m going in to try to weigh it down!” he shouted.

  She hesitated for a moment, then nodded assent.

  “On three, cut your motor for twenty seconds, then straight ahead as fast as you can!”

  Matt counted, shut off his own outboard, then dived into the water. He wished he’d brought goggles, but he could see sunlight penetrating the green haze below the rolling surface. He swam a few strokes, reluctant to surface just to orient himself, then he spotted the silhouette of the vertical rope ahead. He propelled himself forward, unsure how much time had passed, and managed to grab the rope half a second before Jožka reached twenty.

  As he ascended the rope, he felt its aerial support drop a little, but he was so buoyant himself that the change was probably all down to Jožka. The drone would almost certainly be raising alarms now, sending a distress signal to a satellite.

  He broke the surface and reached for the landing frame, failed, climbed farther up the rope, then managed to grab hold of the metal. As he hoisted himself up, unsup
ported by the water now, the drone tipped and part of it entered the ocean.

  The rotors weren’t submerged, but they stopped spinning immediately. Matt waited cautiously for half a minute or so to see if they’d restart, then he clambered up past them and perched between the photovoltaic panel and the satellite antenna. Arun had sworn that the thing could survive hours of immersion without damage, but they needed to sever communications as rapidly as possible. Even with Matt’s weight centered, the rotors shut off and the ballast pulling down, the thing had enough buoyancy not to go fully beneath the waves. But as water sloshed around Matt’s knees, he scooped handfuls into the small dish antenna, hoping that would be enough to silence it.

  He looked up ahead past the skiing rope and Jožka’s bank-heist getaway driver tableau. They were almost back at the Mandjet.

  As they were arriving, Arun climbed down the ladder to the docking pen, looking anxious. He helped Jožka tie up the runabout, then he jumped into the ocean and swam out to inspect the drone.

  “How long do you think it was broadcasting?” he asked Matt. He was treading water, wearing a wrench attached to a cord around his neck.

  “Maybe two minutes.”

  Arun thought it over. “We’ll be fine. Even if someone works out exactly what happened, they won’t know exactly where.”

  He got the wrench free and tossed it to Matt. Matt removed the satellite dish, then loosened each of the cores of the rotors. He glanced up at Arun, who was grinning now.

  “Can we keep it?” Arun pleaded. “I promise I’ll look after it.”

  “Sorry, this one already has a home.”

  Matt climbed off into the water; the drone bobbed up but the rotors stayed quiet. He swam away, then followed Arun back to the docking pen and the three of them hauled in the catch.

  * * *

  Matt said, “I hope they’re clear that this thing isn’t a weapon.” The drone could play recorded warnings, and log video of incursions onto its new owners’ land, but if people chose to ignore it, no one could flick a switch and smite their foes from afar.

  Eduardo smiled and adjusted the ropes on the tarpaulin. “They’re clear, but they don’t want everyone to know that. They’re going to stick a fake gun on it, and stage something where it looks like it kills a pig.”

  Matt wasn’t sure what to make of that, but if the robotic scarecrow was as much a placebo for the coffee growers as a nocebo for any would-be trespassers, so long as it left people feeling secure enough to join the flotilla he’d be satisfied that it had been worth the risk.

  “Are we close?” he asked.

  “We’re close,” Eduardo confirmed.

  Matt wanted to ask him about a dozen of their mutual friends from the rigs, but he was afraid to hear the answer, sorting the men into categories: who was coming south, who was aiming for China, who was staying put. He couldn’t predict anyone’s fate, or change anyone’s mind, but the three strategies could not all turn out equally well.

  “I’ll call you soon,” Eduardo said.

  “Okay.”

  Matt clambered over the side of the fishing boat, into the runabout where Arun was waiting.

  As they headed back toward the Mandjet, Arun said, “Two of my cousins died last week. I just heard the news this morning.”

  “Jesus. What happened?”

  “They were up in Kashmir, trying to make arrangements to take their families there for the summer. The police found their bodies by the side of the road. Their wallets were gone, but the staff from the hotel they were staying in ID’d them.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Arun said, “I keep trying to tell myself that there’s a solution for everyone. But how many people can relocate to another city, let alone cross into China?”

  “I don’t know.” Matt struggled to find something positive to say. If there was any way that the rest of Arun’s family could have joined the ones who were already in Tasmania, they would have done it by now.

  Arun turned to him and declared, almost calmly, “Half the country’s going to die in the next few months. Six or seven hundred million people.”

  Matt wanted to protest, but however vehement his gut response there was nothing he could say to refute the prediction. And Arun didn’t seem to expect a reply.

  When they entered the docking pen, Matt squinted back across the water. Eduardo’s boat had almost vanished from sight. It was still early, but the sun was starting to bite.

  “Antarctica, then,” Arun said.

  “Antarctica,” Matt replied.

  PART THREE

  10

  Matt slept late and woke to the sound of the children arriving for school, talking and laughing among themselves as they delivered scraps from their boats into the compost. He walked out onto the deck and gazed down at the ocean; the cheerful yellow “ônibus escolar” was heading away from the Mandjet to pick up another group. In the distance, a dozen or so members of the flotilla appeared almost motionless, notwithstanding their visible wakes and trailing diesel plumes. It had taken a while for everyone to learn to match each other’s pace, but the system they’d hammered out finally seemed to be working, with no stragglers and no impatient vanguard breaking away from the pack.

  It was almost seven o’clock. Matt felt like he’d spent the night basting in sweat, but there was no point showering before he’d cleaned up the spillage around the hatch to the compost heap and redistributed the contents within. The kids did their best, but the moldy vegetable peel and fish bones really needed to be stirred in.

  “Good morning,” Hélia said, walking past on her way to the shaded stretch of deck where the children were gathering. Matt mumbled something incoherent, embarrassed by his stench and half-nakedness.

  He returned to his cabin to wait for the last of the arrivals so he could go and clean up. He sat on his bed, swigging water and checking the news on his phone.

  Singapore had recently finished enclosing itself in toughened photovoltaic glass, and was now entirely climate-controlled; the event was being marked with a public holiday, to be known as Thirty Degree Day. Dubai had embarked on a similar plan, but Shanghai was opting for a multitude of smaller domes.

  The week’s tally for drownings in the Mediterranean had reached four digits, and five in the South China Sea. There were reports of fleets moving south from Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar—but South Africa was already hosting three times its usual population, while struggling with shortages and outbreaks of disease. There’d be no sanctuary there, just crowded camps full of parched, famished people. The only thing those boats could do was keep heading south.

  Overnight, the credit-rating agencies had downgraded Australian government debt to junk status, and the Australian dollar had responded with a 60 percent drop in value. Matt tried calling Selena, but the number didn’t even ring; the satellite link trilled three ascending tones, then a synthetic voice began chanting a sequence of digits that must have been an error code. He composed a short email; it didn’t bounce, but he received no immediate reply.

  He heard the class starting, with the children greeting Hélia in unison. He went to deal with the compost, then took a shower, dressed, and headed for the mess, taking the long way around so as not to disrupt the lesson.

  By the time he arrived, he was drenched in sweat again. The crew had finished breakfast, but everyone was still sitting around in a stupor, except for Jožka, who was on watch. “Anyone got through to an Australian number lately?” Matt asked.

  “I’ve had no luck all week,” Aaron replied.

  Arun said, “I’ve got through to Launceston, but I heard that a lot of the towers on the mainland are out.”

  “Just from the heat?” Perth had had a run in the low fifties, but if that was unprecedented for the city itself it wasn’t much worse than the highest temperatures remote towers in the state’s northwest would have faced pre-Taraxippus.

  “I think it’s a matter of breakdown rates versus the rate of repairs,” A
run replied. “Maybe the crews are struggling to keep up—and they might be facing parts shortages.”

  “Yeah.”

  In the silence, Matt could hear the class again. “There’s one skill we’ll all have for life now,” Yuki joked. “Multiplication tables in Portuguese.”

  “They sound happy,” Aaron said. “Don’t you think?”

  The last reports from Dili had put the temperature in the mid-fifties, even with the constant rain. The children who had come south were doing well, so far, but they were one in a thousand.

  * * *

  Matt was on watch in the control room when Eduardo called on the VHF.

  “We have visitors,” he said. “One boat out of Sri Lanka. They’re asking for drinking water. Over.”

  “Okay. Can you spare it from your own stock, and top up from here later? Over.” That seemed simpler than having the Sri Lankan boat try to rendezvous with the Mandjet.

  “No, they’re down to nothing, and they have sixty people on board. They’re going to need more than I have here.” Eduardo hesitated. “I don’t think they’re in great shape. Maybe you can ask Rosa if she’ll take a look at them? Over.”

  “Okay. Send them through. Over and out.”

  Matt stepped out with the binoculars and watched the pale blue vessel approaching. It looked like a small commercial fishing trawler, but even from a distance it was clear that there were people on every square meter of the deck, lying or sitting beneath a patchwork of shade-cloths.

  Rosa usually came on board the Mandjet with the children from her boat, unless she’d been called to a home visit. Matt found her in the clinic and explained the situation.

  “Sixty people?” she muttered. “What were they thinking?” She picked up her bag. “You’d better bring Arun.”

  Matt was perplexed. “Why? They don’t speak Hindi in Sri Lanka.”

  Rosa stared at him irritably. “I do know that, thank you. And don’t take offense, but I’d like a second bodyguard before I step onto a boat with that many strangers.”