Forever Shores

by Peter McNamara

  ‘Truly?’ I said.

  ‘Officially. Yes.’

  ‘Lady—’ Akita began.

  ‘Akita, enough! Officially, superficially, they serve Gerias.’

  ‘You are from Lostnest?’

  She inclined her head. ‘Yes. Will you let them disengage?’

  I felt foolish now, foolish again, reacting, overreacting. But Sen deserved it. This was all it knew. It had spoken. What happened now mattered.

  ‘Of course.’

  She spoke in dialect, hard quick words that sent Akita and his companion rushing off towards the rotors to help secure John Coyote. She spoke again and her two bodyguards turned away as well, began walking back to the town.

  Then she stepped closer, moved past me and turned so the sunlight lit her face and body, reached up and opened her sand-robes, opened her chemise, exposed her breasts, high and firm, the nipples erect with fear and emotion, perhaps just the cool wind from the ocean.

  ‘Do it quickly. I am not very brave.’

  I laid Sen along her chest, angled between her breasts ever so lightly. The blood came, just enough, in the straightest, thinnest line on her dusky skin.

  I sheathed the blade without wiping it.

  ‘That was kind,’ she said, replacing her garments. ‘I gentled you.’

  ‘You did, Lady.’

  ‘You were so angry.’

  ‘You know me?’

  ‘The Princes talk. Gerias is not so far away.’

  I glanced to the north-east. ‘You make the skypaintings.’

  ‘Sometimes I take the kite aloft. This was a chance.’

  ‘They’re very fine. I’d like such a chance.’

  ‘To make a skypainting?’

  ‘To go aloft.’

  ‘Where would you go?’

  ‘Anywhere. Take the Line into the sky.’

  ‘Captain, I am wearing shielding tech. You can say it.’

  ‘Then back to my ship. Back to where the other Captains are gathering.’

  ‘But that’s what they want. All the Coloured Captains together. You’ve been called to the Air.’

  ‘What!’ A deep hard weight settled in my heart.

  ‘It’s true. A group claim. The elevation of Anna was too much.’

  ‘Then I must keep away so that can’t happen. They need us all with our ships to make the claim. I would go back to Cape Bedlam then, so I can—’

  ‘Tartalen is at Azira. At the life-house there.’

  ‘You know this?’

  ‘Gerias is not so far away. I sometimes hear of Tartalen. I know Teny in Dinetah.’

  ‘What has that—?’ I stopped. ‘You know Teny?’

  ‘Of course. All the old stories of the Dineh. How coyote was struck by lightning. Twice. And new stories of the tribes, now being made. How no Gerias Kite could cross the continent without being struck from the sky. Unless …’ She hesitated, looking over at the town.

  ‘Lady?’

  ‘Let me show you the town.’

  ‘Lady, I know the town. I’ve been here before. Please finish what you were saying.’

  ‘It will be different this time, I promise. Let me show you.’

  It was strange to do, to go walking across the sand towards the chain of bale-fires with this Ab’O noble, towards the crusting of whitewashed buildings beyond the pillars of black smoke. To our left, the wind-farm rotors turned about themselves like great white birds never settling—whoop whoop whoop. Ahead, the black ferris pinwheeled against the golden sky like a stately old clock. On Pudding Hill coloured flags snapped in the wind on their tall poles. The pall of black smoke streamed into the sky above us, tipping over the land to the east, the black hand closing. And all the while the Ab’O townsfolk and Nationals came with their sand-dolls, feeding the fires.

  ‘We shouldn’t go too far,’ I said. ‘Especially now.’

  ‘Here will do. Captain, do you know the old Arabic word moumia?’

  ‘Moumia? Should I?’

  ‘It means pitch. The tribal dolls are covered with pitch.’

  It was like resuming my conversation with John Coyote from twenty, thirty minutes before. It made me look for him among the rotors, but he was nowhere to be seen. No, there he was!—racing towards the carnival on Black Point, to the great ferris there, still pursued by the four tribal custodians.

  ‘He’s a diversion.’

  ‘He is. We’re building an alibi.’

  ‘An alibi? And the other Dineh?’

  ‘Are in on it too. Peripherally. They don’t know everything yet.’

  ‘So, the tribal dolls are covered with pitch. To help them burn.’

  Again I waited. Again I let her guide me through this her way.

  The Lady Dusein had brought us to within twenty metres of one of the fires. We stood watching as a family of Nationals: a mother, father and their two children, laid a daub, rag and wattle sand-doll on the pyre, obviously soaked with something highly flammable because the doll flared and stood almost erect before falling back into ruin. The family then stood aside to let an Ab’O family approach with their contribution. Two men carried a long black doll between them, did a three-count together and heaved it onto the flames.

  Dusein waited until it was done. ‘Did you know that there was a time in Egypt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when finding burial pits was so commonplace that mummies were used to fuel locomotives running along the Nile? Wood and coal were scarce, and pitch had been used in the embalming, so they burned like bundles of dried sticks.’

  ‘What’s this got—?’ But I grasped it in an instant. ‘These dolls? These dolls are corpses?’

  ‘Many of them. Most of them. From the old cryo crypts, Captain. The old failed forever crypts where so many Nationals went to escape the epidemics. The Cold People from when the arcologies were closed or abandoned. The spoiled ones.’

  ‘I knew there were crypts close by—’

  ‘At least nine on this section of coast. Seven of them failed decades ago.’

  ‘Then Colios—?’

  ‘Like so many renewal celebrations in history. Purging. Dealing with loss.’

  ‘But there were thousands of people! Hundreds of thousands!’

  ‘Millions, ultimately,’ Dusein said.

  We turned away from the fire, began walking back towards the Gerias Kite, not speaking until we were beside the mooring stanchion and the iron steps again.

  ‘Thank you for revealing this,’ I said. ‘You are very brave to do it.’

  She gave a fleeting smile, humourless, grim, then cocked her head, listening to a data-feed. ‘They’re bringing your friend. Are you serious about taking the Line into the sky?’

  ‘Tartalen is at Azira, you said.’

  ‘Would you? Take it aloft? Fly to Azira?’

  ‘How can I? It’s like you began to say. No Gerias Kite could hope to cross the continent.’

  ‘Unless an abducted consort were aboard.’

  I scarcely believed what I was hearing. ‘You would risk it?’

  ‘I risked your sword. That terrified me.’

  ‘You knew better.’

  ‘Hoped. You were very angry, very tired. You cared for your sword.’

  I had to smile. ‘Tell me the rest.’

  ‘Captain, I am here to risk it. I know John Coyote from Dinetah. I am in his cell.’

  Surprise after surprise. ‘His cell! But how—?’

  ‘Tom, I suggest you draw your gun and sword and “force” John and me aboard the kite.’

  It happened quickly then. The warriors arrived to see both gun and Chialis sword at their Lady’s throat, obeyed her clear instructions to move away without daring to risk drawing their laser batons. John came leaping and dancing over to the stanchion where we waited.

  ‘This becomes the top of the tower!’ he cried, still in character, and clambered up the iron steps to the flight deck. Dusein and I followed.

  In less than a minute, the land-anchors were free, the tether retrac
ted, and the Gerias Kite was sliding across the land, shearing the nearest smoke column at three hundred feet as it swung about, all the while climbing, flight-comp using the heat of the bale-fires as well as the wind to lift clear of the town and the ocean, swinging away from Cervantes.

  Perhaps farsight snipers could have hit us with the appropriate hi-tech, but we’d quickly donned matching flight coveralls with the hoods up and the masks in place, and John and I stood closely behind Dusein at the starboard rail so they dared not risk it. She was murmuring in dialect all the while, dissuading them from extreme action, insisting that she would be released unharmed once we had reached whatever destination I had in mind. The sats needed to be told, she repeated over and over. No sky-strike. Emergency privilege invoked.

  The kite seized the sky like a live thing, lifting us away from the smoke-blurred coastline, from the dubious haven of Cervantes with its rotors and funeral pyres and hidden, emptying crypts: two sane madmen and this brave lady on their magic bird, their flying carpet, their desperate chance.

  John Coyote had once again put aside his madness and stood at the control binnacle, as if the craft needed human assistance.

  ‘I came from Dinetah on a dirigible,’ he said. ‘A great totemic whale of a thing. It felt like we were on the sky. This feels like we’re in it. Does that make sense?’

  I was at the port window, staring down, unable to look away. We were flying. ‘In it, yes. Part of it. I’m still coming to grips with it all.’

  ‘May you never,’ John said. ‘When this becomes commonplace, just a view, there is something wrong with the world.’

  And Dusein was there, veteran of such flights, though perhaps rarely so high.

  ‘Your wish has been granted, Tom,’ she said. ‘You’ve taken the Line into the sky.’

  ‘Let’s hope they allow it, Lady.’

  ‘Dusein.’

  ‘Dusein. It’s not a precedent they will want. We can only wait and see.’

  John Coyote left the binnacle. ‘So let’s go out and be in the sky.’

  ‘In a moment, John. The Lady—Dusein has something more to tell me. The rest of it.’

  John nodded, fitted his breather mask and left us, opened the cabin door and stepped out into the wind.

  ‘Please,’ I said.

  ‘Now you know what the sand-dolls are.’

  ‘What you said before. Mummies from the old crypts. The crypts that failed.’

  ‘Take it further.’

  ‘The tech failed. Was allowed to fail!’

  Dusein nodded. ‘And one step more.’

  ‘Is being shut down even now!’ I could scarcely believe it, could barely conceive of such a thing. Then, of course, could. It was so obvious, so inevitable. Settle the racial inequalities once and for all, everything from long-standing sovereignty squabbles over land-title and inheritance disputes to things like generational bank interest and the tenure of patents and copyrights.

  Who authorised it? I almost asked, but realised that it was something people always did. Just did. Out of envy, out of mischief and bravado, schoolyard dares and pranks becoming more, much more: getting even, part of payback, then clandestine policy. Custom. It was what John Coyote had said: no tombs remained intact from earlier societies; everything became scholarship: one man’s grave was another’s archaeology. What had he said? Nothing is sacred unless we both agree it is so.

  Nothing sacred. Ultimately.

  Then the other part of it grabbed.

  A systematic shutting down of the Cold People facilities. At Cervantes. Across Australia. Throughout the world. The rest of the cull. The other part. All anticipated by the plague techs and program designers, the architects of the scheme.

  Nowhere to hide.

  I had been to Krombi, had read the histories. So hard to kill one or two or five or even ten when you had their faces in front of you. So easy to kill the thousands, the tens and hundreds of thousands when they were faceless, just lines of identical cryo sleeves stretching off in long dark vaults, strings of numbers on watch screens, so easy to switch off systems, use terms like rationalising resources, downgrading status, implementing cutbacks and shut-downs. You could put all sorts of edges onto words. Words took whatever you gave them.

  ‘Tom?’ Dusein asked.

  There are times when it doesn’t do to think too much. There are times when it’s more important just to be.

  ‘John Coyote’s right,’ I said. ‘Let’s go out and be in the sky.’

  Coming Down

  To use the old American Imperial so often merged with traditional metric, Gerias Kites rarely travelled above three thousand feet. But they could go higher, and the main cabin could be adjusted for such high-altitude flight. Dusein pressurised and heated the kite’s interiors well before the craft levelled off at twelve thousand feet. When Tom, John and Dusein ventured out onto the promenades, they wore the insulated coveralls and special flight masks from the crew lockers. You did not ride a Gerias Kite—experience the act of flight first-hand—and not look down.

  With the kite running on automatic towards Azira far to the east, Tom did that again and again. Outside the arrowpoint compartment and main salon, narrow promenades ran in three directions across the kite’s upper surface, all flanked by sturdy handrails to which waist tethers were double-clipped for safety. One sky-walk ran over the low spine to the tail; the others followed the rim either side to the same destination, ran nearly the perimeter edge of the upper face to meet the spinal track. Taking those port and starboard walks was an exhilarating, terrifying thing to do and quite irresistible. You looked down on the great sweep of the land and on oblivion in the same instant.

  Tom never tired of it: the clear chill blue enclosing on all sides but one, and that one swelling out, merging, lifting up, it seemed, to become almost everything. Far above the sats moved, tracked and waited, holding back their fire. Below, the land came to meet him, displayed and fell behind, like an ever-cycling diorama left running, like some errant image play of the eternally turning rotors at Cervantes.

  Twelve thousand feet wasn’t enough. Dusein took the kite higher, adjusted the controls so they rose through the brilliant day.

  ‘You need to see this, Tom,’ she said through her breather mask when she joined him at the rail, standing close in the chill white-noise silence of the upper air.

  Tom didn’t ask what. Instead, he repeated the question which had marked their flight.

  ‘Nothing else, really?’

  Dusein knew immediately what he meant.

  ‘We have no reason to withhold anything, Tom. You know what we know. Scribed DNA. A test case. Something very important. Any further surprises will come from you now. What you can discover.’

  ‘Hardly comforting, Dusein.’

  ‘It’s a time when nothing is enough, I know. But it’s important. Whatever it is, at least we know that.’

  ‘Well, I’m grateful to both of you. For all this.’ Tom smiled behind his breather mask and gestured out at the day. ‘For all this.’

  The kite levelled at eighteen thousand feet. Now the salt-lakes were mandalas, fractals, scattered mandelbrots endlessly flaring across the land. Now it held steady between layers of cloud, with streaks of cirrus above and clumps of cumulus below: ghost scimitars over fists of coral.

  The land was barely grasped as real. For hours there was the spread of old reds, washed browns, tans and greys reaching to the horizon, set off with smears of pink and white, streaks of dusty black, fragile twists of aqua as inexplicable as dreams. Then half an hour would pass where those same washed colours turned rufous and raw, as if the land smouldered deep down with bits of ancient fire. Then back it went to the reds and worn browns, the tans, taupes and ochres, the gamboge and gilded greys, all of it marred by old ranges and watercourses, so many pulled threads in a pauper’s drab. Yes, snatching ways to tell it, as if dusty cloth had been dropped upon a vast table. Ancient aviators must have seized on that allusion again and again. And no better
: as if an antique film-loop had been left to simulate the world. You watched, knowing that every comparison had already been made, already existed in the forgotten history of the world. You stared and stared, struggling to make it more, to find some adequate way for words to render it.

  And just when the cold, when the brilliant air and the slow transitions stole focus, more salt-lakes came at you, more twists of infinity building, spiralling, closing on themselves like signatures, cartouches, tricked-up promises, anything to keep you at the rail one minute longer. It got so the cold seemed to have always been there, and that the world had never been warm.

  Even when the others went in, Tom continued to slide the clips of his tethers along the rails, peering down in case there was something, anything. Needing it to be down, in fact. His land, seen as gods see, as the sats did. That was when he noticed they were descending, that the scattered knots of cloud were growing larger, rising to meet him, it seemed. Dusein was bringing them to where the world was meaningful again.

  ‘Patterning, you told the Dineh,’ she said when he entered the cabin at last. ‘You need to go much higher, to the sat and gragen orbits, or stay lower for it to be truly real. The middle loses meaning.’

  Tom went to the arrowpoint window, sat in one of the big viewing chairs at the underview and looked down. She was right. There were better rewards at seven thousand feet. The moraines, the maimed roil of desert fastness, had substance again, appropriate dimension. And still they descended. At four thousand Tom saw charvis engaged, mirror-flash and hard fire, arcs of crackling light, and felt the familiar ache, knowing what it would be like to be at the point of such a storm. He looked for Dusein to tell her so, but saw she was with John at the controls, intent on cell business most likely, discussing strategies.

  Discussing his role at such a time too, no doubt. He was being factored in, of course, made part of elaborate projections and contingencies, though not even John Coyote asked what their Blue Captain intended, in case it seemed opportunist. There was that between them at least. Not once did they treat him as the means to a preferred end. They allowed. Greatest gift.

  The salt lakes moved below like coins, white into silver, and vanished beneath. It made Tom consider endings again then. His. Theirs. Things out of view. Even now bale-fires dirtied the sky. Cold People were dying. The world moved on. Even now the Captains were gathering, praying he’d keep away, hoping he’d return to complete whatever it was they made—were still trying to make—between them. Their place in the world.