by Greg Egan
“Okay.” Matt went to look for Arun, trying not to dwell on his own clumsiness. He always managed to say the wrong thing to Rosa.
They hauled fifty liters of water to the runabout then went out and met up with the trawler. There was a name written on the side in a rotund script that Matt supposed was Tamil, but in any case was beyond his powers to turn into a string of phonemes. The deck was only three meters or so above the water line, but the sea was rough, and the only way on board was a rope ladder—which seemed to act as a pendulum driven by the waves, refusing to simply hang in place. After some shouted discussions with two of the fishermen, they worked out a way to winch up the containers and Rosa’s medical bag, rather than try to carry them on the ladder. Then they ascended with their hands free to help them fend off collisions with the hull, arriving only lightly bruised.
“I’m Suthan,” one of the men said. “My friend is Thiru.” The boarding party introduced themselves. The fishermen’s thick beards almost hid their sunken cheeks, but their T-shirts hung loosely on their shoulders.
“Thank you for the water,” Thiru said. “We had nothing.” Matt glanced across at the families camped on the deck beneath their makeshift awnings; by now almost everyone had a cup or bottle in their hand. But they all looked half-starved, and he could see at least five babies among them.
“We’ll bring some more soon,” Arun promised. “But if there’s anyone sick here, Rosa’s a doctor.”
Suthan turned to her and held a palm against his chest. “Thank you, Miss.”
While Suthan led Rosa across the deck toward a crying child, Matt surveyed the state of the boat. Structurally, it appeared to be in good shape; ten or twenty people, well supplied, could probably have completed the journey in it—if not in comfort, in reasonable safety.
“How long have you been at sea?” he asked Thiru.
“Five weeks.”
“Do you have food?”
“We catch some fish. There’s rice . . .” He gestured belowdecks. Matt could only assume that they’d been rationing the rice with an iron will, but if they tried to eke it out over the entire summer, from the way they looked now that wasn’t going to end well.
Arun said, “We have fresh vegetables.” He turned to Matt. “Do you know what’s in surplus at the moment?”
“Eggplants,” Matt replied. “Probably other things too.”
Thiru frowned in puzzlement. “Aubergine?” Arun tried. “Brinjal? Baingan?”
Thiru nodded. “Wambatu. Maybe we can trade.”
“You have dried chilies?” Arun asked.
“Yes.” Thiru opened a hatch and motioned to Arun to follow him belowdecks to inspect the goods, but when his feet reached the third or fourth rung of the ladder, Arun changed his mind and ascended. “It must be seventy down there,” he said. Thiru returned, dripping with sweat, and offered a small burlap sack to Arun, who inhaled from it cautiously then signaled his approval.
Rosa approached. “I’m going to need to take two adult patients and three children and their mothers back to the Mandjet. Nothing infectious, but it’s better if they’re not in such crowded conditions while they’re recovering.”
All three mothers proved strong enough to descend the rope ladder with their children secured in slings on their backs. Matt ferried them across and asked Yuki to show them to the clinic while he loaded some more water and returned. The two sick adults, a man and a woman, were not really ambulatory; after some long discussions, Arun took the woman down the ladder clinging to his back, and then the man was lowered on an improvised stretcher hanging from three ropes, with small teams of people above and below controlling his descent to keep him from striking the side of the trawler.
It was midmorning, and the heat was already unbearable; even the bright, broken reflection off the choppy water felt like a second sun. Matt had done nothing that would normally have taxed him, but as he untied the ropes holding the runabout to the trawler, he felt more spent than he ever had at the end of a twelve-hour shift.
“Bring on the icebergs,” Arun pleaded.
Matt winced. “Careful what you wish for.”
None of the patients had much English, so Thiru came with them to the Mandjet to translate. Matt spent the rest of the morning organizing cabins for the new arrivals; Rosa declared that she’d stay and watch over them for the next few days.
Matt called a crew meeting in the mess and brought everyone up to speed on the encounter. “We can’t just give these people food and water and send them on their way,” he argued. “Their boat’s intact, but it’s not safe with that many passengers.”
Yuki said, “So what do we do when the next boat’s falling apart, but we’ve already filled up all the cabins?”
“I don’t know. We’ll work out what’s possible at the time.” Matt understood the need to reserve some spare capacity for the most urgent situations, but the fact that the trawler wasn’t sinking didn’t stop it from being a disaster in the making.
“Not wanting to sound callous, but there might be some advantages for us,” Jožka suggested. “There are going to be other boats coming down from Sri Lanka. If we’re already on good terms with one, that could make it easier to get along with the others. We’ll have people to translate, people to vouch for us . . . it could preempt a lot of friction.”
Aaron said, “Can’t you use an app to translate?”
Jožka snorted. “The aim is not to start a war.”
Matt looked to Arun. “I’m in favor,” Arun said. “Assuming it’s up to us.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are a thousand other people who might have something to say.”
Matt was taken aback. “There was no agreement that they’d get to veto anything the Mandjet did. We don’t dictate what happens on the other boats.”
“Okay.” Arun hesitated. “But I still think we should consult on this. Sound it out with Eduardo and let him talk to people, so it doesn’t just fall from the sky.”
Matt still felt ambivalent. It was hard enough for the four of them to reach consensus; subjecting the Mandjet to the communal will of the entire flotilla would be unmanageable. But he called Eduardo and broached the subject.
“Give me a few days to smooth the waters,” Eduardo said. “It’s the right thing to do, but . . . you know. Better not to bruise any egos.”
When Eduardo signed off, Matt tried calling Selena, but he had no more luck than before. If the towers were failing, maybe the landlines were still working. He dialed the front desk at the law firm where she worked.
“The number you have called is not in service,” a cheerful inhuman voice explained. Matt checked the company’s website; all the details still matched the ones on his phone.
In two days, the Mandjet would be due west of Perth. If his family needed to evacuate, that would be the time to do it. Selena had kept reassuring him that everything was fine and they were happy staying put—but that had been before the government went bankrupt and the currency turned to toilet paper.
And if they needed to get out, but still balked at the Antarctic option? Matt went to the Qantas website and searched for flights from Perth to Hobart. They were booked solid for the next six months, and the other airlines were no different.
Out of curiosity, he checked for flights to Europe. Here, it wasn’t a matter of the seats being taken; there were no flights scheduled at all. Nothing to Tokyo, either. Even Yuki and Jožka could not have flown home, notwithstanding their rights as citizens; the political barriers had hardened into something more logistical. He changed the departure site to Cape Town, then Buenos Aires; it made no difference, there was still nothing crossing the equator.
Matt wasn’t sure why he was so discomfited by this revelation; when tens of thousands of people were dying every day in border camps, he wasn’t going to shed tears for the death of business class. Maybe he’d been clinging to a kind of comforting cynicism, in which the problems of the world still stemmed, in the end, from the sam
e root causes as ever. But if no amount of money and no favored passport could carry you north, then nor would any enlightened rearrangement of those merely human things suffice. Nations could rise and fall, merging or melting away like clouds, but the heat would dictate its own borders.
* * *
It was almost midnight when Selena called. Matt had been drifting in and out of sleep, dragged back toward consciousness every time his dreaming mind found a new, nagging metaphor to alert him to the heat he was trying to ignore. When his ring tone bludgeoned him awake, for a moment he was sure it was just another synesthetic rendition of the prickling of his skin and the suffocating weight of the humid air.
“What’s happening?” he rasped. “I thought you were all dead.”
He hadn’t meant to say anything of the kind, but Selena just took it as hyperbole, or sarcasm. “The phones are playing up here.”
“Even at your office?”
The line went silent for a second, but she hadn’t been cut off. “The firm closed down last week, but I’d been expecting that for a while. Don’t freak out, I still have money in the bank.”
“What kind of money in what kind of bank?” Matt had converted his last thousand Australian dollars to a US-dollar PayPal balance a month ago, so at least he’d be able to keep up the payments on the satellite link for a while.
“Just trust me,” she replied. “Ninety percent of my job was financial instruments.”
“So, not in the Cayman Islands?”
“We’re going to be all right,” Selena insisted. “We’ve stockpiled food, the PV is putting out more than we can use and the aircon’s still doing its thing.”
“What about water?” Matt had checked the dam levels on the web, and they weren’t great, but the desalination plant was still operating.
“Nothing in the rainwater tank, obviously, but there’s a total ban on garden use, and a twenty-thousand-dollar fine for flushing with anything but gray water or showering for longer than three minutes. That ought to leave us with plenty to drink.”
“So your life now is sitting at home with your parents, with the windows closed, going stir-crazy?”
“That’s rich, from someone stuck on a boat.”
“This boat’s going places. You should come and see the penguins, before they all roast.”
“No thanks.”
Matt said, “What happens if your power supply fails?”
“We’re still on good terms with the neighbors. We could stay with them while we wait to get it fixed.”
“Even if that takes months?”
Selena groaned. “And what happens if your own machines break down? Do you have an infinite supply of spare parts, for everything?”
“No.” And there was no point demanding to know what she was going to do for food once the freezer was empty, when he couldn’t swear that the Mandjet would come through the summer with its fish stocks and garden intact.
He said, “Just promise me—”
The connection cut out. Matt tried calling back, redialing the number every five minutes for more than an hour, but all he got was the same error message.
* * *
Eduardo came back with an answer: the powers that be were prepared to invite the Sri Lankans into the flotilla. “Maybe you can talk to them informally, first, just to see if they actually want to join us. If they do, I’ll bring the old men there and we can make it official.”
Matt found Thiru in the clinic and took him aside. “We’ve talked it over, and we’re hoping your group will stay with us for the rest of the journey.”
Thiru looked puzzled. “Why?”
Matt said, “Hundreds of boats will be coming from Sri Lanka. What if we need to trade with them, or form some kind of alliance? If we don’t have any Tamil or Sinhala speakers among us, all of that could be much harder.”
Thiru considered this. “Let me talk to my friends.”
The next morning, a dozen Timorese and a dozen Sri Lankans squeezed into the mess, with Eduardo and Suthan translating and the crew of the Mandjet looking on. Matt listened to the speeches, as florid as those of any diplomatic summit, but he wasn’t in the mood to be cynical, and he believed both parties were sincere.
Jožka turned to him and whispered, “Welcome to the Republic of the South.”
“Can we build our capital at the pole?”
“Maybe just the Summer Palace.”
Matt smiled. Republic or not, here they were: all eleven hundred of them, still afloat. And beside them in the distance, who knew how many thousands of boats.
But however vast the fleet, however crowded the decks and holds of every fleeing vessel, they would always be outnumbered by the ones they’d left behind.
11
Matt could judge the height of the waves without leaving his bunk, or even opening his eyes. As his segment of the Mandjet seesawed between its pivots, tilting the cabin and agitating some spirit level in his inner ear, the whole geometry of the structure played out in his mind’s eye, a ship in a bottle come to life inside his skull. All he had to do was compare the waves he saw with the scale of the pontoons that were riding them, to arrive at the result: seven meters.
He opened his eyes. It was almost dawn. There’d be no school again today for the Timorese; it wasn’t worth the risk of someone getting hurt moving from vessel to vessel. But Hélia had been giving classes in English to the ten Sri Lankan children permanently on board, and she’d moved into a cabin of her own so she wouldn’t have to keep making the crossing.
Matt got up and took a shower. For the first time in a long while, the seawater felt cool on his skin, and when he turned off the flow and stood in the wind it dried him in seconds by sheer force, not heat. He was starting to believe that latitude alone really could save their lives.
There were low clouds in the east, turning the sunrise red over the gray ocean. He could see two unfamiliar boats in the distance among the flotilla, so he went to join Jožka in the control room.
“Do we know who they are?” he asked.
“Indonesians,” she replied. “They talked on the radio with Martinho’s boat; they’re not wanting to trade anything, they’re just passing through.”
“Okay.” Matt was never sure if he was over-sensitive to Indonesian-Timorese tensions; there’d been a couple of Sumatran workers on the rigs, and they’d got on well enough with all of their colleagues. But it was hard to imagine Martinho effusively welcoming a boatload of his former enemies into the flotilla.
Matt made his way to the mess, keeping one hand cupped around the safety rail so he could grab it in an instant if the slant of the deck threatened his footing. The mess was already packed with boisterous children and their parents, but when he hung back at the doorway some of the kids came and dragged him in, tugging at his hands and bombarding him with questions.
“Why did you make your ship like a circle?” Sundara asked.
“To hold the fish in the middle.”
“Why don’t they just swim away underneath?”
“There’s a net underneath.”
“So why do you need the ship around them? Why not just the net?”
“That would work, too,” Matt conceded. “But this way, there’s more room for people. And it’s easier to get electricity from the waves.”
Thiru approached and spoke in Tamil to his nephew, who turned to Matt. “Am I pestering you, sir?”
“No, it’s all right.”
Thiru led Matt over to his table and gestured to him to share the food already laid out.
“We have bananas?” Matt couldn’t process this. “Who did we get bananas from?”
“Madagascans,” Thiru replied matter-of-factly. “They had too many of them. We gave them potatoes in exchange.”
This was the first Matt had heard of that encounter. “How long will they last?”
Thiru pointed to some fried ones on another plate. “Those were a bit . . .” He rocked his hand. “But the rest we can make into flour.”
His phone rang in his pocket; it was Jožka.
“The Sophia’s asking for help,” she said. “Can you handle it? Eduardo’s already working on another ship.”
“All right, tell them I’ll be out there in fifteen minutes.”
Matt excused himself and went to fetch his tools. As the deck rocked beneath him, he could hear the pontoons creaking from the stress. How many cycles of this much flexure was the fiberglass rated for? He was sure it had added up to decades when he’d first sat down to work on the design, but none of the actual numbers were coming back to him.
In the runabout, the wind brought the spray in like a rainstorm on a roller coaster, and the sight of each approaching crest towering over him summoned up a visceral dread that nothing he’d endured in the past could really neutralize. He had never been in a vessel so mismatched with the ocean around it. He slapped his chest to remind himself that he hadn’t forgotten his life jacket.
When he reached the Sophia, Luís threw a rope down, but when Matt had secured his end he found the runabout bashing itself against the side of the larger boat, with enough violence to do damage.
Luís shouted, “We need to bring it up on deck!”
He threw down two more ropes, and Matt attached them to the bow and stern. Then he put on the backpack with his tools and climbed the middle rope the short distance to the deck. Luís called a friend over to help, and the three of them winched the runabout up from the water.
Matt’s legs were trembling. “Well, that was fun.”
Luís led Matt down to the engine room, where his hopes to have escaped the heat proved premature.
“Do you want to start it up?” Matt asked.
Luís obliged. Matt listened carefully to the shuddering sound, gingerly placing a hand on the driveshaft casing.
“It’s not the engine or the driveshaft,” he declared glumly. “It’s the propeller.”
Luís didn’t seem surprised; he’d probably just been seeking a second opinion. “So what can we do?”