Perihelion Summer

by Greg Egan

  Thiru said, “No, brother, but we can go in my boat.”

  “What?”

  “It’s the best choice,” Thiru insisted. “There’s only ten people left on board. I can bring them here in half an hour, then we’ll go. What do you say?”

  Matt stopped walking. “Is this a trick?” If it was, Arun didn’t seem to have been in on it; he looked as shocked as Matt was.

  Thiru shook his head solemnly. “I’m not playing with you. All my family’s here, but it was hard to convince them. I know your situation.”

  The deck lurched, and Matt staggered. He almost lost his grip on the battery, but Jožka reached over and steadied it, taking half the weight as they eased it down together.

  Thiru said, “We do this the right way. Not in the small boat, that’s crazy.”

  12

  The trawler wasn’t slow, but it had to fight the current. Matt sat in the wheelhouse watching Thiru at the helm, steering by hand with his eyes flicking from compass to water, compensating for every sideways shove the endless rows of waves delivered.

  “Could be two days,” Thiru predicted.

  “Yeah.” Matt had not been expecting a shorter journey, but he didn’t want to dwell on the question of exactly what conditions on the ground could be endured for that long. “Do you ever hear from your village?” he asked.

  Thiru shook his head. “If they stayed, they’ll be dead. I took everyone who’d come with me.”

  Matt balked at the finality of this verdict. “Wasn’t there some kind of cold storage place, for the fish?”

  Thiru glanced at him irritably. “Yes, and it broke down two times a week. Maybe twenty people could stay alive in there—if they have enough supplies and a top-notch mechanic.” He added, “I tried to buy AC for my parents’ house. By then you couldn’t get it at any price. I had a good business, export quality. I always thought by this time I’d make my parents comfortable.” He turned to Matt again. “Why’d you build that thing? Did you know what was coming?”

  “Not when I started. It was just meant to be a fish farm.”

  Thiru said, “Some people think the Chinese government knew, ten years ago.”

  “I doubt that,” Matt replied. “You know the glass walls they’re building around the big cities in southern China?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think they would have let the glass factories waste their time making phone screens for ten years, when they could have got a head start on that project instead?”

  Thiru laughed. “Fair point.” Something ahead of them caught his eye. “What’s that?”

  Matt rose to his feet and approached the helm. A jagged white object a couple of meters across was bobbing in the water, barely rising above the surface but refusing to sink or break up as the waves crashed over it. “I think it’s ice.”

  Thiru nodded, smiling slightly. “We should grab it?”

  “It might break your net.”

  “I can fix the net.” He seemed as amused as if Matt had expressed a fear that they might get their hands dirty or their feet wet.

  “What can your winch pull?”

  Thiru took that question more seriously. “It rated fifty tons when it was new, but I’d only trust it for half that.”

  Matt guessed the miniature iceberg was protruding some thirty centimeters out of the water, which would make it three meters tall, and maybe twelve cubic meters in volume. “This could be eleven tons.” The trawler would have taken heavier catches than that, and though the weight would never have been so concentrated, the fish must have been packed with ice for the journey back, even if the blocks were smaller. “You think the floor of your hold is strong enough? If we lay it on its side, that’s two tons per square meter.”

  Thiru thought for a while, maybe doing some mental calculation comparing the loading with past catches. “We can do it,” he decided.

  When they drew closer, Thiru had Matt take the wheel then went out to cast the net. The iceberg was no longer in sight at all from where Matt stood; he relied on Thiru shouting instructions to keep the boat beside it. It was easy now to imagine how the Sophia had been damaged without anyone spotting the danger.

  Matt heard the net going in, and then a minute or so later the winch started groaning. He turned to see the dripping iceberg rise up from the water, shaped like a giant’s broken tooth. Thiru set the derrick turning and brought the prize around over the hold, then he started lowering it. The boat shuddered as the ice came to rest on the floor, but there was no ominous creaking to suggest that the structure was about to give way.

  Thiru dropped the net in and closed the hatch, then returned to the helm and took the wheel.

  “Now we have fucking AC,” he said.

  * * *

  The next morning the heat was brutal. They’d come as far west as they needed to and were heading due north, nudging the sun a little higher with every kilometer they traversed. Thiru had been up all night, and he agreed to go and sleep in the hold for a while and let Matt take the wheel.

  Matt hadn’t expected to sleep much himself, but though he’d felt himself shudder and twitch in his dreams, he’d barely woken. Now that he was traveling in the right direction, the panic he’d felt on the Mandjet had subsided. He trusted Selena; if it was humanly possible for the three of them to get out of harm’s way, she would have made it happen. And even if a tenth of the city was in flames, even if the grid was down everywhere, there’d still be hundreds of thousands of houses with air conditioners and power of their own.

  The wind had fallen away, leaving a steady corrugation of three-meter waves rolling in from the west. Small ships passed by in the distance, alone or in flotillas, heading south. Overhead, the sky was a desert: no clouds, no birds, no aircraft. Matt swigged water dutifully as he steered, two mouthfuls every five minutes by the clock on the helm. As soon as he swallowed, an equivalent quantity of moisture oozed from his skin and ran down his body, but in the still, humid air he could only feel it through its flow; its temperature was no different from his own. Sometimes he felt compelled to look down and reassure himself that the fluid dripping from his calves, every bit as warm as the blood in his veins, really was transparent.

  Around noon, Thiru appeared, and Matt retreated to the hold, which stank like a decade’s worth of shrimp but was gloriously cool. Once the hatch was closed it was too dark to see anything; the steady drip from the melting iceberg started out distracting but soon turned soporific.

  When he woke he climbed out to find that it was evening, but the heat had barely abated. The open sky made the closeness of the air more shocking; how was it possible to swelter without a blanket of clouds, when the space between the stars was just a few degrees from absolute zero?

  He greeted Thiru. “I’ll take over, if you want a rest,” he offered.

  “First I’ll cook.”

  Matt hadn’t eaten all day, and the thought of food made him queasy, but when Thiru returned with some kind of vegetable pilau his nausea vanished and he joined in gratefully.

  “How far is your home from the coast?” Thiru asked.

  “A long way,” Matt replied, “but not far from the river.” He was about to promise that the water levels would pose no threat of the trawler’s hull scraping the riverbed, but he was no longer sure that that was true. “If we get there by sunset tomorrow, I’ll aim to be back by dawn. If I’m not, you should leave without me.” If he hadn’t found his family by then, he’d have to take shelter during the daylight hours anyway, and he couldn’t ask Thiru to hang around indefinitely while his sole protection from the heat dripped away.

  “What happens if you stay?” Thiru asked.

  “I’ll keep looking, then try to find another boat we can leave on.” Matt doubted that Selena would have enough money left to buy them a place, but maybe his experience on the water would carry some weight. “Catch up with the Mandjet, if possible.”

  Thiru nodded, then took the empty plates away. Matt heard him bustling about for a
while, then go down into the hold.

  He stood at the helm, trying to stay alert by guessing the next star to rise in the north; he’d thought he knew the constellations well enough, but picturing the way the horizon swept over them to reveal the hidden portions wasn’t easy.

  There were lights on the water, far away, always receding in the end. Near midnight, a half-moon appeared in the east, but the angle of the waves kept it aloof, and it left no silver trail across the ocean.

  * * *

  It was midafternoon when Matt saw the yacht approaching, and he managed to raise it on the VHF. The respondent identified herself as Veronica and her ship as the Blue Dahlia.

  “I’m heading for Perth,” Matt explained. “Do you know the situation there? Over.”

  “Sorry, no,” Veronica replied. “We’re coming from Bunbury. The grid’s out there, and the batteries are failing. Over.”

  “Why are the batteries failing? Over.”

  “From the heat. People have been trying to move them indoors to keep them cool, but you need the right skills. Our neighbors ended up wrecking their system—and we were on the grid ourselves, so we’d been staying with them. The whole place is going to shit. We’re trying for New Zealand. Over.”

  Matt doubted things were much better there, least of all for new arrivals, but he wasn’t going to start second-guessing other people’s choices. “Good luck. Over and out.”

  As the Blue Dahlia passed to the west, it came close enough for Matt to see the empty deck gleaming in the sun; most of the passengers would be below in air-conditioned cabins. He felt a twinge, not so much of jealousy, as remorse; if he’d built some kind of luxury yacht instead of the Mandjet, maybe his family would have been lured to safety on it months ago.

  Thiru rose and joined him at the helm. Matt doubted he could get any sleep himself, now that they were so close to their destination, but Thiru persuaded him to go and cool off for a few hours anyway. The iceberg had lost about a quarter of its volume, and Matt spent ten minutes pumping out the pool of tepid water it had left on the floor of the hold, worried that it might be accelerating the melting.

  When he came back on deck it was growing dark, and the GPS put them a couple of kilometers from the mouth of the river. Matt could see no lights from the shore, where the port’s gantries were usually studded with flashing beacons. In the distance a curtain of black smoke filled the eastern sky, stretching halfway to the zenith. An orange glow reached up into the pall; the fire was somewhere over the horizon, but still powerful enough to make itself seen.

  They sailed into the inner harbor. A handful of navigation lights remained active, blinking at the water’s edge, but behind them all the loading bays and warehouses were blacked out completely. Matt could see the outlines of cranes, shipping containers and trucks in the starlight, but nothing was moving, and there was not so much as a lit cigarette glowing above the silent concrete and asphalt. They took the bend slowly; the trawler’s own lights were on high, but they only reached so far into the gloom.

  Once they cleared the port, there were patches of intermittent brightness in the distance: a few shops or houses still with power, glimpsed between the dark buildings in the foreground. All Matt could make out on the streets near the riverbank were the silhouettes of cars, parked or abandoned. Far away, a group of people were shouting. The tone was angry and urgent, but none of the words were clear.

  Something caught his eye, bobbing along in the expanse of water lit up by the trawler. It resolved into a pale-skinned, blue-tinged corpse, facedown, arms flopping gently. The shirtless back bore an elaborate tattoo, words in some Gothic script now too wrinkled to decipher. Matt thought of asking Thiru to help him retrieve the body so they could deliver it to the appropriate authorities, if any still existed. But if they took on that task, they might never be done with it.

  Farther north, peering into the wealthy riverside suburbs, Matt saw more oases of light—a sign of better batteries, or more robust components, or perhaps just the resources to ensure that whatever the system, it was kept cool. He and Arun had spent three days at the start of winter reinstalling his parents’ power wall indoors, and even Arun had teased him for his zealousness. But now the whole thing was probably lost to the flames.

  A few people had gathered on Pelican Point. They were quiet and still, and it was too dark to get any sense of their demeanor, but they were healthy enough to stand upright. Maybe they’d wandered out of their homes at sunset in the hope of catching a breeze off the water. Maybe they’d found a way to get through the daylight hours without electricity, retreating to underground bunkers with caches of hoarded ice packed in Styrofoam.

  “Drink,” Thiru urged him.

  “Yeah.” Matt took a swig from his water bottle; he’d let himself grow parched.

  They sailed on, toward the center of the city. On the eastern shore a handful of cars sped down the Kwinana Freeway; it looked like the traffic at three in the morning, not eight at night. As they approached the Causeway, Matt saw a group of people crossing on foot. A woman leaned over the rails and called down to them, “Got a light?”

  On the western skyline, near the top of a single office building among a dozen dark companions, random portions of five successive stories were illuminated, as if an attempt to spell out some pixelated public service message with a grid of bright windows had succumbed to a computer crash. Matt saw more people on the riverbank, some wading in the shallows. The water around the trawler was a putrid green now, and stank of something that had bloomed and died.

  “Show me all the jetties,” Thiru said. “I can see a few, but maybe I’m missing some.”

  “We still have a way to go.”

  “I know, but if you don’t find your family close to where I leave you, you’ll come back this way looking for them, right? If I sail in the morning without you, I can check all the jetties along the way.”

  “Okay.” Matt was ashamed that he hadn’t thought of the plan himself. As he pointed to an inconspicuous wooden protrusion near a small playground, he said, “Would you recognize me from this distance, if I was standing there at dawn?”

  “I can come closer.”

  Matt said nothing, but maybe Thiru thought better of tempting fate. He opened a cabinet under the map table and took out a bundle of folded cloth.

  “Hang this from the jetty, and I’ll know it’s you.”

  Matt unfolded it enough to see what it was, then stuffed it in his backpack. “Either that, or a stranded Sri Lankan cricket fan.”

  Thiru laughed. “I hope not. He might want to talk for the whole journey, and cricket is a very boring game.”

  * * *

  As they approached the Garratt Road Bridge, the diffuse orange glow in the northeast acquired a brighter layer of actual flames. Matt couldn’t see down to their base to discover exactly what was burning, but considering his location it seemed likely that the source was most of Guildford. The parkland that wound through the suburb would hardly have been lush with new growth after the punishing winter, but if the heat had been enough to dry out every dead tree to its core, then even without an abundance of leaf litter there would have been plenty of fuel.

  “That’s where they lived,” he told Thiru, gesturing toward the conflagration.

  “So they would have left for safety. You know where? Some relatives, some friends?”

  “I have a cousin. A long way away, though, and maybe his own house wasn’t in good shape.” Matt couldn’t read their minds. All he could do was try to retrace their journey, and hope he picked up some clue along the way.

  There was a jetty just past the bridge, on the northern bank of the river. Thiru brought the trawler close enough for Matt to jump down onto the creaking boards.

  “See you in the morning, maybe,” Matt called back to him. Thiru raised a hand and Matt turned away.

  The jetty abutted a concrete path that led to a rowing club. Matt skirted the building and crossed the empty car park. The daytime heat baked into
the asphalt was still palpable, and wads of softened tar stuck to the soles of his shoes like discarded chewing gum.

  Once he was on a public street he quickly got off the blacktop onto the sandy verge. As he strode north, he passed a small forest of skeletal trees to his left, in what must once have been a park. The houses around him were dark and silent; he could hear no traffic nearby, or insects. But the darkness seemed to breathe and hum, with a spectrum of buzzes and susurrations that felt close, but impossible to localize. Matt took out his water bottle and drank; as he swallowed, all of the phantom sounds vanished.

  It could not have been more than a kilometer from the riverbank to the street’s fourth intersection—where it met his target, Guildford Road—but he arrived as short of breath as if he’d charged straight up a steep hill. He took another mouthful of water and felt the sweat dribble uselessly down his limbs and torso. He was no longer sure that it had been wise to sleep in the hold beside the ice; it might have spared him some of the cumulative effects of heat stress, but it had also robbed him of the chance to acclimate. For a moment he felt light-headed, as if that imaginary hill had been somewhere in the Andes and he was about to succumb to altitude sickness, but it passed.

  He set off westward. This was the route Selena and his parents would have started out on, whatever their ultimate destination. He turned and glanced back toward the fire; amid the flames, he could see glowing embers juggled by the updraft. If there were water trucks trying to hold back the front, they’d either be spread so thin that they’d have no effect at all, or concentrated on saving a handful of chosen areas, elsewhere. The air was mercifully still, and maybe the fire had encountered a couple of northbound roads blocking its way, but it wouldn’t take much of a wind to carry its seeds across four lanes.

  Ahead of him the roadside was strewn with cars, but he could see nothing moving, and no break in the darkness. No one would have willingly lingered this close to the fire, and he would have hoped that either Selena’s car or his parents’ was working when they had to flee, but on all the evidence neither old-style nor electric had been coping well with the conditions, and fuel had probably been in short supply for weeks. Even if they’d wanted to reach Leo’s house, or some other distant sanctuary, they might have had to settle for something closer.