Transported

by Tim Jones

  They danced for about ten minutes, silent but for an occasional whispered apology, then she slipped from his arms and smiled at him.

  'I enjoyed that,' said Robinson.

  'Mmmm. I won't be long.'

  She headed off to the bathroom. Robinson's thought followed her. She was taking a while in there. Was she putting in a contraceptive? Dutch cap, pessary; there was a whole menagerie of them. Robinson always carried a couple of condoms in his wallet, just in case, but they were probably well past their use-by date by now. Anyway, he mustn't make assumptions. He knew he should sit still and relax, but he couldn't. He was clearing away the lunch things when she returned. She joined him, smiled at him, opened her mouth —

  'Tell me more about that exhibition of yours.'

  Disappointed, relieved, Robinson marshalled his thoughts. 'Well, we didn't think a bunch of maps would be enough to draw in the punters, so we've got a ride as well. It's based on the break-up of the North Larsen Ice Shelf back in '95. The Animation Research people did it for us — you know, the America's Cup people?'

  'That must have cost you. How does a provincial museum find that sort of money?'

  'Grants. There's still money in Dunedin if you know where to look. Anyway, they've done it from the perspective of someone standing on an ice floe a kilometre or so away from the edge of the shelf. You see these huge icebergs crashing down and floating towards you, towering over you, sliding right past your nose. They've built in the noise, the cold, the whole bit. Left me shaking the first time I tried it, and I knew what to expect. We're trying to flog it off to the Antarctic Centre in Christchurch once the exhibition closes.'

  'Sounds a lot more exciting than anything I get to do.'

  'But it's you who's in the right line of work. Know why?'

  'Let me guess. Global warming, so sea levels will keep rising, so maps will keep needing to be redrawn.'

  'Six metres if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet goes. And, you know, it might. They're very concerned about basal melting of the Pine Island Glacier at the moment, and . . .' She was looking at him quizzically. 'What?'

  'Just thinking what a strange man you are. We've had lunch, we've danced a little, you've got a plane to catch and what are you doing? Telling me about basal melting.'

  'Well, you asked about work . . .'

  'I'm a little nervous, too.'

  'I'm sorry about the dancing: it was like being back at school—'

  'The dancing was fine. Let's go back in the lounge, huh?'

  He followed her to the sofa. They sat side by side.

  'Was I really so boring?'

  'No, not boring. One day, we'll clear our diaries, and you can tell me all about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and how the Pine Island Glacier holds it in place, and how the Larsen B Ice Shelf broke up in a few weeks in 2002, and how people think the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is safe, but really it isn't, and if that goes we'll all be swimming to work. Agreed?'

  Robinson sagged like a deflated balloon, and she bent over and kissed him on the mouth, her lips warm and damp against his, her tongue chasing his into its lair. It was hard to breathe. She pushed him back against the cushions and straddled him, so that he was straining upwards into her through four layers of clothing. When he put his hands to her breasts, she kissed him all the harder. He rubbed her nipples through the cloth, thinking to hell with the plane, thinking oh please please. He was tugging down her trousers when she took her tongue out of his mouth, pulled away, stood up. Face pink, breath ragged, she smiled.

  'Time to go, Kevin.'

  'Time to go?'

  'Time to go. Or you'll miss your flight.'

  'But—'

  Five minutes later, he was in the car. Ten minutes after that, they were at the airport. He got in the queue while she brought the luggage on a trolley. Nearly five minutes till the boarding call. Could they find somewhere — the toilets, a baggage trolley, the stairs? His balls ached. She was talking: something about her holidays, something about writing.

  'I'll write tonight,' said Robinson, and he meant it. Pages and pages, as soon as he got home and turned on the computer. He would put on some music, type till his wrists ached and post it tomorrow. (Maybe he'd email it as well, to be on the safe side.)

  Would she write back? That was the question.

  More talk. Then his plane was called, and he stood to go. She stood with him, kissed him, rubbed her hand gently up his leg and across his groin, so that he approached the boarding counter holding his bag in front of him for modesty. They kissed again. 'I love you,' he said as he left her.

  She smiled. 'Write,' she said.

  He backed down the air bridge waving, swapped to a window seat, carried on waving like a maniac until the plane was airborne. He had seen her there, on the viewing platform, maybe. Magazine, snack, this is your captain speaking, we're flying at an altitude of twenty-five thousand feet into a slight south-westerly, those sitting on the right will get a good view of the Clarence River and the Seaward Kaikouras, we should arrive in Christchurch a little after . . . He listened with half an ear, playing with his biscuit wrapper, smiling out the window at the blue Antarctic sea.

  GOING UNDER

  Martin Fisher had never learned to swim. He had been a tall, scrawny boy, and always told enquirers that he'd never had enough blubber or trapped air to float. There was no physiological basis for this claim, and in truth he remembered school swimming lessons as painful occasions. He was scared of large groups of noisy children, always had been, still was. They splashed and yelled relentlessly. He hugged his thin, cold body and shrank back from the pool. The teachers enjoyed swimming time no more than he did, and had little sympathy for shirkers, so in the end he would climb down the slippery ladder into the pool and cling to the rail, kicking his legs reluctantly, until they were all called back to the changing rooms, where further humiliation waited to pounce.

  He grew from scrawny boy through big-boned adolescent to a solid young man whose waistline softly expanded as the years slid by. He enjoyed trips to the beach: throwing frisbees, soaking up the sun and even splashing in the cold Dunedin surf. After a good half-hour's splashing, he'd resolve to take those Adult Learn-To-Swim classes he'd been promising himself for years. But there was the thesis to finish and the world to save, and he never quite found the time.

  Early in the final year of his thesis, before he heard back from the Institute for Climatic Change in Boston, he travelled with some friends to Smaills Beach to soak up the sun and take advantage of the water. Martin lay in a sandy hollow at the top of the beach, just inside the sandhills, for a while, talking with his new flatmate Chris. But the sea looked inviting, and he dragged himself to his feet and down to the water's edge. He dipped his toe in, and decided the water was getting warmer by the year. Of course, seasonal fluctuations were always— Stop thinking, Martin, he told himself, and get in there! He advanced to calf-deep, to thigh- and hip-deep (having postponed the inevitable shock when the water first touched his balls); he savoured the ebb and surge of the streaming water.

  When the troughs of the swells were reaching his chest and the crests were lifting the hair from his neck as he turned to let them pass, he decided that he'd come far enough, and started back. Turning, he was caught off balance by a wave approaching the beach on an angle, warped by the longshore current. It washed him off the sandy hummock on which he had been standing and deposited him on the floor of a pit almost a metre deeper. The water climbed above his shoulders and his head. Only his frantically waving arm broke the surface.

  He had a couple of minutes to live. He leapt upwards; his head breached the surface, and he took a mouthful of foam and air. No one was nearby. He yelled, but the water swallowed his cry and surged into his lungs. Another jump, a half-breath, then a wave broke over his head and he was submerged again. A third jump; this time, he barely broke the surface before falling back.

  Martin was well under this time, and his legs were tiring. He tried to make the air in his lungs last an
d even had time to look about him. Despite his panic, he noticed the colour of the light — Steinlager green — and the undulations of the sea floor. I'm going to die here, he thought. Water and bubbles flashed before his eyes. He could feel himself fading. Well, one last jump for old times' sake . . .

  The current was an impartial thing. It had prowled that shore for ages, carving out headlands at the northern end of each beach, working with the waves to scour the bottom. It had swept him out of his depth, and with his life some thirty seconds from its end, as he tried one last jump for air, it swept him out of the pit and back onto higher ground. His head rose above water; he breathed raggedly, coughed up a specimen of the brine that had nearly claimed him, and staggered towards the shore. Through good luck or instinct, he avoided dropping down into another pit. Chris was running towards him. His other flatmates followed. Soon Martin was enfolded in comfort, succour, concern.

  He spent the next hour coughing up water and feeling wretched. By the time they passed the beachside dairy on the way home, though, he was feeling up to an ice cream.

  Two weeks later, he returned home from another hard day in his tiny carrel in the university library to find a letter from Boston. If you can finish your thesis in time, it said, we want you over here. For the next three months, Martin was no more to his flatmates than a pale shadow that flitted through the door at midnight and left by eight the next morning. Sometimes, they discovered, he'd get up a half-hour earlier and perform an imitation of housework before he went. A week before his departure, thesis complete, he apologised to his flatmates by throwing a big party, and staying around to clean up afterwards.

  Then the well-lit mills of American academia claimed him as their own. Over the next twenty years he had churned out papers, delivered lectures, secured tenure, seen the inside of a hundred conference centres and a hundred hotel rooms. At one such conference, 'Littoral Zone Submergence: First Results of the ICC Study', he had been invited to the bed of a geomorphologist from MIT. Such liaisons were traditional at scientific conferences, but this one led to an invitation to dinner back in Boston, and then to a relationship that lasted long enough for Martin to see Ana complete her PhD and secure a junior lectureship — in Wyoming.

  For the first time, his dedication to his career wavered. He could move to Wyoming; the university there would find a place for him, and he could continue, after a fashion, with his work. But the ICC was where it was at, one of the three major centres of climate change studies, consulted by the presidents of countries and corporations, a place where you might shape the future of the world. In the end, Ana went to Wyoming, and Martin traded favours to get himself on the ICC's next Antarctic team.

  Antarctica was swarming with scientists, tourists, and journalists doing solemn pieces to camera. Moves to restrict the number of people on the continent at any one time were afoot, and though Martin supported such restrictions, he was delighted to have the chance to preempt them. Walking along the Dry Valleys — imagining them repopulated with ferns, conifers, and thunder-footed lizards — was a fine antidote to nostalgia and regret. More ominous, though, was a visit to the edge of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to watch the icebergs calving, icebergs that would melt and add their water to the slowly swelling seas.

  Martin and Ana still saw each other at conferences. They made a point of going out for dinner when they got the chance. Sometimes, for old times' sake, they made love.

  And now here he was, Professor Martin Fisher, distinguished researcher, noted expatriate, back in New Zealand to chide the bureaucrats and condescend to the media. Here he was, walking down Centre Road to Smaills Beach.

  Things were certainly different from twenty years earlier. There were oranges growing here now, despite the wispy southerly that retained traces of its Antarctic origin. He plucked one from an overhanging branch and sampled it as he went along. The farmers of Otago weren't complaining about climate change, unless their land was so low-lying it had been reclaimed by the sea: the province had become the fruit-basket of the country, and Central Otago kiwifruit a worldwide delicacy. The air of self-satisfaction had been palpable from the moment he stepped off the plane. On hearing he'd been away so long, people's standard response was, 'You should see the weather forecasts now!' Dunedin was still colder than points north, but with much of the North Island now plagued by cyclones and the Ross River virus, that was a point in its favour.

  Well, he thought, they won't be smiling for long. He had put on his Jeremiah face a number of times for the media, and tomorrow he planned to give a good bollocking to the government's Inter-Agency Working Party on Climate Change Adaptation, who had invited him for their annual Hui Taumata. Any of a hundred local scientists would have done a fine job, but they evidently wanted the cachet of an international guest star to ensure good media coverage of their big meeting.

  So he was expected in Ngaruawahia tomorrow, but he'd flown over a week earlier to revisit old haunts. He'd started in Southland, where he was surprised to find Lumsden, the little town that bore him, struggling on with its wind turbines and its knick-knack shops. They still remembered him there, and remembered the small plane crash that had killed his parents. He didn't stay in Lumsden long.

  For the last three days, he'd been wandering around Dunedin, watching the traditional passive aggression between students and lecturers play itself out, climbing Flagstaff and trying once more to spot the hills south of Clinton. He had left today's pilgrimage till last, but here he was, walking down Centre Road in the autumn sunshine, heading for Smaills Beach.

  But why?

  He stopped walking, wandered over to a fencepost, and stood staring south-west at the city while he tried to answer the question. There was something waiting for him at the beach, he felt. Something unfinished.

  As he neared the bottom of the hill, where the road expired in a cluster of derelict houses, the noonday sun eluded the clouds to shine on the waters below. There was no doubt about it: the mean sea level was higher. The beach had been driven back inland, and the lowest of the old houses was almost buried beneath the dunes.

  He worked his way down the lupin-covered slope and through the tough marram grass that covered the dunes, smelling the sea air, hearing the cries of gulls that might have circled above his head on the lonely Southland beaches of childhood.

  When he surmounted the last line of dunes and stood on the beach itself, he felt deflated. He had wanted the waves to be angry, to roar and growl, to hurl themselves at the beach in their efforts to claw him back; but the sun shone, the surf was gentle, and the voice of the deep was the merest mutter of foam. The only inhabitant of the beach to take the slightest interest in him was a small black-andwhite dog, perhaps part-spaniel, that appeared from his left, bounding along with its tail and ears flying. Even it ignored him until he picked up a stick and motioned to throw; then the dog bounced around him, running away, turning back, scrawling circles of anticipation in the sand. As he raised the stick high above his head, the dog's owner hove into view. 'Fang!' she called.

  Fang hesitated for a moment, torn between the lure of the stick and the wrath of its mistress, then turned and trotted away with one last reproachful glance over its shoulder. The young woman shielded her eyes from the sun, looking at him. He waved, but she turned away, following Fang down the beach towards Tomahawk.

  Martin was alone on Smaills Beach.

  He started to walk towards the headland at the northern end of the beach, wondering whether the stream was still there. It was, but it now flowed out through a stopbank that protected the fields behind. Someone — maybe the farming family that used to live here — had put a lot of work into that bank, but it had not been maintained lately, and the cracks were beginning to show. Soon the abandoned fields would become swamp and then lagoon. Mangroves would grow here for a while, until the sea rose too high even for them.

  That was the news he had for the officials and the politicians, with all their 'business as usual' and their 'leastcost mitigation'. It wa
s too late for all that. The remaining fossil fuels were still being burnt, too many hectares of forest and forest soil had gone, and emissions trading had turned out to be just an expensive shell game. The rate of temperature increase was itself increasing. Things were bad, and they were going to get much worse.

  He distrusted such bald prognoses even as he made them. Nature had a way of imposing limits; there might be some self-correcting mechanism as yet undiscovered. It would have to be dramatic to have much effect; perhaps the whole West Antarctic Ice Sheet would cease to burden the weary continent and would slide off into the Southern Ocean, lowering sea temperatures and setting in motion a new ice age. Perhaps there'd be a nicely calibrated nuclear war that threw just enough dust into the atmosphere to offset the increased CO2. Perhaps benevolent aliens were coming Earth's way at the speed of light, ready and willing to fix up the mess humanity had made of the planet.

  Perhaps not. He didn't see any virtue in shading the truth. In less than a century, large areas of the earth would be unfit for human habitation. Let them set up a working party to deal with that.

  He turned from the stream and started back down the beach, kicking at the driftwood. An old song circled his head, something about running. Footsteps in sand. He peered back up the hill for a moment, then stopped and turned his gaze to the sea.

  As he stood there, looking south by east, the clouds that had been building since noon covered the sun once again, and soon a fine drizzle began to fall. At the other end of the beach, Fang's owner decided she'd had enough exercise for today and headed for cover.

  Martin didn't notice the rain. He had stopped noticing much of anything but the rise and fall of the surf, the patient song of the waves. He stood for a full ten minutes, disconnected.