Perihelion Summer

by Greg Egan

  Matt was close to gagging from the diesel fumes, so he took a few steps toward the ladder and Luís got the hint and accompanied him up onto the deck.

  Back in Timor, the Sophia could have limped home, under sail or towed by another boat, to be dragged onto the beach for repairs. But they were almost a thousand kilometers from land. None of the vessels could tow it all the way to Antarctica without the pair falling far behind the rest of the flotilla.

  Matt watched the kids burning off energy, chasing each other back and forth across the wildly tilting deck, shrieking with laughter every time they almost lost their balance. There were thirty people on the Sophia; if they all came onto the Mandjet it would be painfully crowded, but maybe they could be split up among the other boats.

  And the next time? And the next? Until half the boats in the flotilla were as packed as Thiru’s trawler had been?

  He turned to Luís. “There is one thing I could try. I’ve trained for it, but it was in calmer waters, with a stationary target.”

  Luís didn’t catch his meaning straight away, and Matt felt his courage deserting him. Maybe one of the other ex-Sunrise workers in the flotilla had done the same course. Matt scoured his brain for the faces of his fellow students, before they’d donned their helmets. Nuno had been there . . . but he’d taken his family north. Álvaro had been there . . . but Matt had no idea where he was now.

  “Ah!” Luís smiled. “You learned the underwater welding!”

  * * *

  Jožka put out a call to the whole flotilla to cut their engines, so the Sophia wouldn’t fall behind. Matt asked Arun to check the welding gear, to make sure the insulation was in good shape.

  “When you were doing this before, did you get a metallic taste in your mouth?” Arun inquired, peering at his multimeter as he probed the electrode holder.

  “I did,” Matt replied. “The instructor told us it could decompose our fillings, eventually. But I never planned on making a career of it.”

  “They didn’t tell you the trick to avoid that?”

  “What trick? Isn’t the seawater ionized . . . ?” Matt trailed off; he had no idea how that could make his saliva more acidic, given that he wouldn’t actually be gargling the ocean.

  Arun smiled. “The water’s got nothing to do with it. Just don’t let the power cable wrap across the back of your neck. Some divers do that to control it without using their hands, but when it’s that close, it can induce currents in your dental amalgam.”

  “Okay.” Matt had more pressing worries than the state of his fillings, but a toothache in Antarctica would be worth avoiding. “So am I going to get electrocuted, or not?”

  “Not if you’re careful. How are you going to keep yourself in place?”

  “Good question.”

  Matt didn’t have what he needed on the Mandjet, so he scrounged spare pieces of timber from across the flotilla. The frame would attach to the stern of the Sophia, reaching back under the hull to one side of the rudder to provide a fixed platform an arm’s length from the propeller. The ship didn’t come with a blueprint or a CAD file, but it was possible to infer most of the dimensions just by pacing things out, and when Luís surfaced after a round of preliminary repairs to pave the way for the welding, he was able to fill in the remaining details.

  By the time Matt was done it was late in the afternoon. He started up the air pump, put on his helmet and climbed down the frame into the water, trailing the same hose and cables he’d need when he did the job for real, but leaving the power supply disconnected.

  The hull dipped and rose with every passing wave, but its inertia and rigidity kept it from going with the flow entirely, and the residual tug of the water was more than enough to threaten to tear him loose. He held the frame tightly as he made his way around the turn, wondering if the whole plan was going to end up like brain surgery in a dodgem car, but by the time he reached the end—a little more sheltered, and a little closer to the center of the ship—the forces trying to dislodge him were beginning to seem almost manageable.

  Luís had already spent an hour in a web of ropes he’d slung between the rudder and the driveshaft, hammering out the dent in the propeller blade, more or less restoring its shape. All that remained was to weld the torn edges together.

  Matt inspected the surface; the metal was clean. He strapped himself to the chair at the end of the frame and checked his reach and stability, then he spoke into the intercom.

  “Can you hear me up there?”

  Luís replied, “I hear you.”

  “Have you ever seen damage like this?”

  “Only in the shallow water. Hitting a reef, hitting rocks.”

  “You seen any ice around?” Matt asked.

  Luís laughed. “Not yet.”

  Matt hadn’t meant it as a joke. The water they were in was far from freezing, but all the extra sea ice that had formed over the new, deeper winter wouldn’t vanish overnight, and it might travel hundreds of kilometers north before it melted away completely.

  The hull began to execute a new kind of violent gyration; the waves weren’t just higher, there had to be a crosswind making them choppy.

  Luís said, “The weather’s getting crazy. Finish it tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, I’m coming up.”

  Luís invited Matt to stay on the Sophia overnight, sharing a meal with his family, sleeping on the deck beside his cousins. Matt gazed up at the stars for a while, but there was nothing restful about the way they traced Lissajous curves across his field of vision.

  “Your family’s in Australia?” Jorge whispered to Matt from his blanket a meter or so away. Matt supposed he was in his late teens; he looked younger, but he never came to school.

  “Yeah.”

  “How come you didn’t bring them with you?”

  “They thought they’d be safer where they are.”

  Jorge said, “I wanted my friends to come on the Sophia. But their parents wanted to stay in Timor-Leste.” His voice thickened as he spoke the last few words; Matt glanced over and saw his face contorted.

  Matt said, “Maybe they got out and went north.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  As far as Matt knew, no one in the flotilla had heard any news out of Dili for a week, but across the region people had been succumbing to the heat. Once the humidity was high enough to render perspiration ineffective, once shifting blood flow to the skin started damaging other organs and causing more harm than good, there was nothing the body could do to protect itself. Without air-conditioning, you were dead. The sick, the elderly, the children first, but in the end, everyone who couldn’t escape or conjure up some mechanical aid.

  “I know the grid’s hopeless in Dili,” Matt conceded, “but there are a lot of small generators.” It was no use invoking solar power when there was torrential rain. “And people will look out for each other, won’t they?”

  “They’ll try,” Jorge replied. But he sounded no more reassured than he would have been by the idea of solidarity in Hell.

  Matt glanced up at the sky again; the view was no less dizzying than before, but it seemed apt now. Everything was deranged, and it made no sense to seek tranquility.

  * * *

  An hour or so after dawn, Matt decided that the sea was unlikely to grow calmer. Luís joined him at the stern; they tested the intercom, then went through the protocol together.

  Matt said, “If I stop answering, shut off the power, pull out the leads, and come and get me.”

  “Okay.” Luís paused, then shook his head. “No, this isn’t right. I’m going to bring Rosa here.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “You want to be resuscitated by me, or her?” Luís grinned. “I know she’s scary, but swallow your pride.”

  He went to make a call on the radio. Matt sat on the deck, his hands shaking. There was no one else in sight; though only the driveshaft would be electrified, everyone on the boat had already been corralled into places where they couldn’t acc
identally touch any metal part that might end up live if things went awry.

  Twenty minutes later, Rosa arrived, clambering up from the runabout Yuki had driven from the Mandjet. She spoke to Luís and went belowdecks. “She’s going to check on the kids, but she’s there if we need her,” Luís explained.

  “Okay.”

  Luís started up the air pump. Matt put on his helmet and turned toward the water. Leaning over the stern as it rose up on a crest, he stared down into the approaching foam-flecked valley and tried to synchronize his expectations with the impending flows and forces. If he could take the whole Mandjet into his skull, this ought to be no harder.

  He climbed onto the frame and began to descend, but he’d barely placed a toe in the water when the stern dropped and the hull rose up in front of him, tipping him backward. He clung on tightly and waited for the angles to reverse; if he lost his hold and ended up adrift, he’d feel like some kind of half-drowned rodeo clown trying to scramble back into the saddle, and he could easily break a limb in the process.

  Once he was immersed he made his way quickly along the frame and strapped himself into the chair. He’d remembered to turn in the right direction, so the hose and cables hadn’t ended up tangled. “Can you hear me?” he asked Luís.

  “Loud and clear.”

  “I’m just getting organized.”

  “No rush.”

  Matt switched on the lamp at the side of his helmet and reached up toward the damaged propeller, getting a feel for the disposition of his joints and muscles that he’d need to maintain throughout the weld. He shifted in the chair, trying to find the most comfortable posture to work from, and when the water dragged him askew he forced himself back into place and tightened the straps.

  He unclipped the electrode holder from his belt and reached out again toward the propeller. Even with a gloved hand, the sight of the bare electrode protruding just centimeters above his grip was unsettling. The current would flow from the power supply on deck through the cable that snaked down to the engine room, along the drive shaft into the propeller, then jump the arc to the electrode and return through the cable that Matt had dutifully kept from curling around the back of his neck. So long as that circuit remained available, the flow of charge had no reason to enter his body. He’d done this before and survived; he wasn’t going to start regressing to some superstitious vision of electric power as a malicious force that would reach out through the seawater, spurning the path of least resistance, like a leopard abandoning a perfectly delicious dead gazelle to pursue him if he dared to catch its eye.

  Matt forced himself to breathe slowly, then spent a minute checking that he really did know which way the water would be tugging on him, second by second. The real danger would come if he lost control of the electrode and grabbed it in the wrong place before he had time to think.

  He lowered the visor over his helmet then turned the lamp up to full strength; the beam was powerful enough to let him see the propeller through the protective shield. He moved the tip of the electrode into place, just above the start of the break in the metal.

  “Power on,” he said.

  The arc lit up and the water all but vanished, bleached into crystalline transparency. In the periphery of his vision, he saw the unstoppable flow dragging bubbles and swirling debris through the stark radiance, but he shut out the light show and focused on the tiny, tamed sun that was oozing liquid metal into the propeller’s wound.

  He traced the torn edge slowly. It was impossible to see what was happening at the point of the arc itself, but the fresh surface it was leaving behind looked smooth and clean and whole. The electrode holder was warm from the current; Matt could feel it through his glove. But unless the waves tossed the Sophia so high that the propeller came out of the water, the ocean would keep carrying the heat away.

  After a few minutes, his forearm began to cramp. “Power off,” he said, and the arc vanished.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Matt rubbed his arm and inspected the propeller. He was about one-sixth of the way down the first edge, and so far he hadn’t screwed up.

  He shifted the electrode holder to his left hand and waggled his arm, then let it hang in the water, tugged at by the flow as the stern descended. If he kept his focus, and kept a steady hand, he could do this twelve more times.

  * * *

  When Luís started up the engine, Matt stood beside him in silence, straining his ears. There weren’t going to be any X-rays of these welds, or neutron diffraction analyses to grade them. The repair would hold good until it didn’t, a success until it failed.

  After a few minutes with nothing but the ordinary throb and hiss of the engine, Luís’s tentative smile broadened. He turned to Matt and shook his hand. “Good job.”

  “You too.”

  “Let’s hope it’s the last time.”

  Matt said, “Just keep a lookout for the ice.”

  Yuki came and picked up Matt and Rosa, then dropped Rosa off at her own boat. The waves were no tamer than the day before, but Matt found them less daunting, having survived a prolonged dunking with live wires.

  Yuki was quiet as they approached the Mandjet. “How are things with your family?” Matt asked.

  “They’re fine,” she replied. “My mother’s teaching Japanese to Filipino refugees. She said it makes her feel more useful than any of the jobs she did before.”

  “That’s good.” Matt waited, resisting an urge to fill the silence.

  “To be honest,” Yuki added, “I wish I was there with her. When we first headed north to get out of the cold, I thought we’d keep going: we’d carry a few passengers up to Siberia, and I could get off on the way back. But then the plan turned out differently. I should have left when we were in Darwin, but I felt bad at the thought of walking out on everyone.”

  “There might be flights again, in autumn,” Matt suggested.

  “From where?”

  “Perth.”

  Yuki laughed. “You really think Perth will have a functioning airport three months from now?”

  Matt didn’t know what he believed. “Hobart, then. Or Christchurch. The current’s taking us east anyway. Maybe we’ll loop back to Dili along the Pacific route.”

  “Maybe.” Yuki made it sound as if he might as well have been discussing Santa’s delivery plans.

  “So will you take Aaron to Japan with you?” Matt asked. “I guess you could apply for some kind of spouse visa—?”

  Yuki turned to him with an expression of incredulity. He said, “Okay, so we’ll find a way to get him to his parents in Cobar.”

  They reached the Mandjet and spent fifteen minutes trying to get the runabout tied up, while the waves seemed intent on ejecting it from the docking pen. Matt went to his cabin and sat on his bunk, then picked up his phone to check for news from Perth.

  Lightning had started a fire overnight, in the hills that wrapped the eastern rim of the city. It had spread west rapidly, incinerating bushland and thousands of homes. The news sites were all showing the same satellite image, with charred, smoke-shrouded ground all the way to Midland, a few kilometers from his parents’ house.

  Matt tried contacting Selena by every method he could think of, but all he got was a new set of error messages. He switched back to the news. There didn’t seem to be any professional journalists covering the fire on the ground, but the sites had pulled clips off the social media of a handful of people with satellite phones. The scenes were all flames and chaos; there were no images of evacuees being tended to in air-conditioned safety. On Twitter, almost everything tagged #PerthFire was a plea from an anxious relative elsewhere for someone in the fire zone to get in touch.

  He sat pawing at the screen, trying to find some magic combination of taps and swipes that would make the problem tractable. Then he snapped out of the trance and rose to his feet. He stuffed two pairs of shoes and a wide-brimmed hat into his backpack, then headed for the workshop.

  He chos
e a three-kilowatt-hour battery, the largest he could carry unaided, a photovoltaic panel about half a meter on each side, and the leads he’d need to make everything work. Then he lugged it all to the mess and filled a ten-liter bottle with water. The families were eating lunch; Matt felt the children’s hands snatch at his wrists, but he was deaf to whatever they were saying.

  On his way to the runabout, he saw Jožka approaching in the opposite direction.

  “Do you need a hand?” Jožka asked, eyeing his unwieldy baggage.

  “No thanks.”

  “Where are you off to?”

  “Home.”

  “What?”

  Matt brushed past her.

  “What’s happening? Matt?” She caught up with him. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “There’s been a fire,” he replied brusquely, wishing he could outpace her, but it was all that he could do to keep his balance. “The whole city’s falling apart. I need to bring them here.”

  “All right.” Jožka edged ahead of him. “So how are you planning on getting there?”

  “I’m taking one of the runabouts.”

  “Okay.” She glanced away, and seemed to make eye contact with someone behind them, but Matt was too weighed down to follow her gaze. She said, “Do you really think it will go the distance?”

  “I can keep charging it. I’ve got everything I need.”

  “I’m not talking about power, I’m talking about the waves.”

  Matt said, “I just came here through the waves. Ask Yuki.”

  “You came a few hundred meters. That’s not the same thing.”

  “Yes it is. You just repeat it and repeat it.”

  Jožka looked back again, then Arun and Thiru appeared in some kind of flanking maneuver.

  “Matt, talk to me,” Arun pleaded. “We can work something out. If you do it like this, you’re either going to drown before you get there, or the four of you will drown coming back.”

  “Work what out?” Matt retorted. “Do you think the whole flotilla is going to turn around and sail into the heat, just so I can look for my family?” Even if he’d asked for the Mandjet alone, that would have meant killing all the cobia.