“How many are left?”
“Three.”
There had been five to begin with. I hadn’t even noticed the second one going down.
“If only I weren’t out of coolant, I’d—” Jong muttered some other incomprehensible thing after that.
In the helter-skelter swirl of blinking lights and god-whispers, Jong herself was transfigured. Not beautiful in the way of a court blossom but in the way of a gun: honed toward a single purpose. I knew then that I was doomed in another manner entirely. No romance between a fox and a human ever ended well. What could I do, after all? Persuade her to abandon her cataphract and run away with me into the forest, where I would feed her rabbits and squirrels? No; I would help her escape, then go my separate way.
Every time an alert sounded, every time a vibration thundered through the cataphract’s frame, I shivered. My tongue was bitten almost to bleeding. I could not remember the last time I had been this frightened.
You were right, Mother, I wanted to say. Better a small life in the woods, diminished though they were from the days before the great cities with their ugly high-rises, than the gnawing hunger that had driven me toward the humans and their beautiful clothes, their delicious shrimp crackers, their games of dice and yut and baduk. For the first time I understood that, as tempting as these things were, they came with a price: I could not obtain them without also entangling myself with human hearts, human quarrels, human loyalties.
A flicker at the edge of one of the screens caught my eye. “Behind us, to the right!” I said.
Jong made a complicated hooking motion with the joystick and the cataphract bent low. My vision swam. “Thank you,” she said.
“Tell me you have some plan beyond ‘keep running until everyone runs out of fuel,’” I said.
She chuckled. “You don’t know thing one about how a cataphract works, do you? Nuclear core. Fuel isn’t the issue.”
I ignored that. Nuclear physics was not typically a fox specialty, although my mother had allowed that astrology was all right. “Why do they want you so badly?”
I had not expected Jong to answer me. But she said, “There’s no more point keeping it a secret. I deserted.”
“Why?” A boom just ahead of us made me clutch the armrests as we tilted dangerously.
“I had a falling out with my commander,” Jong said. Her voice was so tranquil that we might have been sitting side by side on a porch, sipping rice wine. Her hands moved; moved again. A roaring of fire, far off. “Just two left. In any case, my commander liked power. Our squad was sworn to protect the interim government, not—not to play games with the nation’s politics.” She drew a deep breath. “I don’t suppose any of this makes sense to you.”
“Why are you telling me now?” I said.
“Because you might die here with me, and it’s not as if you can give away our location any more. They know who I am. It only seems fair.”
Typically human reasoning, but I appreciated the sentiment. “What good does deserting do you?” I supposed she might know state secrets, at that. But who was she deserting to?
“I just need to get to—” She shook her head. “If I can get to refuge, especially with this machine more or less intact, I have information the loyalists can make use of.” She was scrutinizing the infrared scan as she spoke.
“The Abalone Throne means that much to you?”
Another alert went off. Jong shut it down. “I’m going to bust a limb at this rate,” she said. “The Throne? No. It’s outlived its usefulness.” “You’re a parliamentarian, then.”
“Yes.”
This matter of monarchies and parliaments and factions was properly none of my business. All I had to do was keep my end of the bargain, and I could leave behind this vexing, heartbreaking woman and her passion for something as abstract as government.
Jong was about to add something to that when it happened. Afterwards I was only able to piece together fragments that didn’t fit together, like shards of a mirror dropped into a lake. A concussive blast. Being flung backwards, then sideways. A sudden, sharp pain in my side. (I’d broken a couple ribs, in spite of the restraints. But without them, the injuries would have been worse.) Jong’s sharp cry, truncated. The stink of panic.
The cataphract had stopped moving. The small gods roared. I moved my head; pain stabbed all the way through the back of my skull. “Jong?” I croaked.
Jong was breathing shallowly. Blood poured thickly from the cut on her face. I saw what had happened: the panel had flown out of my hands and struck her edge-on. The small gods had taken their payment, all right; mine hadn’t been enough. If only I had foreseen this—
“Fox,” Jong said in a weak voice.
Lights blinked on-off, on-off, in a crazed quilt. The cockpit looked like someone had upended a bucket full of unlucky constellations into it. “Jong,” I said. “Jong, are you all right?”
“My mission,” she said. Her eyes were too wide, shocky, the red-andamber of the status lights pooling in the enormous pupils. I could smell the death on her, hear the frantic pounding of her heart as her body destroyed itself. Internal bleeding, and a lot of it. “Fox, you have to finish my mission. Unless you’re also a physician?”
“Shh,” I said. “Shh.” I had avoided eating people in the medical professions not out of a sense of ethics but because, in the older days, physicians tended to have a solid grounding in the kinds of magics that threatened shapechanging foxes.
“I got one of them,” she said. Her voice sounded more and more thready. “That leaves one, and of course they’ll have called for reinforcements. If they have anyone else to spare. You have to—”
I could have howled my frustration. “I’ll carry you.”
Under other circumstances, that grimace would have been a laugh. “I’m dying, fox, do you think I can’t tell?”
“I don’t know the things you know,” I said desperately. “Even if this metal monstrosity of yours can still run, I can’t pilot it for you.” It was getting hard to breathe; a foul, stinging vapor was leaking into the cockpit. I hoped it wasn’t toxic.
“Then there’s no hope,” she whispered.
“Wait,” I said, remembering; hating myself. “There’s a way.”
The sudden flare of hope in Jong’s eyes cut me.
“I can eat you,” I said. “I can take the things you know with me, and seek your friends. But it might be better simply to die.”
“Do it,” she said. “And hurry. I assume it doesn’t do you any good to eat a corpse, or your kind would have a reputation as grave-thieves.”
I didn’t squander time on apologies. I had already unbuckled the harness, despite the pain of the broken ribs. I flowed back into fox-shape, and I tore out her throat so she wouldn’t suffer as I devoured her liver.
The smoke in the cockpit thickened, thinned. When it was gone, a pale tiger watched me from the rear of the cockpit. It seemed impossible that she could fit; but the shadows stretched out into an infinite vast space to accommodate her, and she did. I recognized her. In a hundred stolen lifetimes I would never fail to recognize her.
Shivering, human, mouth full of blood-tang, I looked down. The magic had given me one last gift: I wore a cataphract pilot’s suit in fox colors, russet and black. Then I met the tiger’s gaze.
I had broken the oath I had sworn upon the tiger-sage’s blood. Of course she came to hunt me.
“I had to do it,” I said, and stumbled to my feet, prepared to fight. I did not expect to last long against a tiger-sage, but for Jong’s sake I had to try.
“There’s no ‘have to’ about anything,” the tiger said lazily. “Every death is a choice, little not-a-fox. At any step you could have turned aside. Now—” She fell silent.
I snatched up Jong’s knife. Now that I no longer had sharp teeth and claws, it would have to do.
“Don’t bother with that,” the tiger said. She had all her teeth, and wasn’t shy about displaying them in a ferocious grin. “No curse I
could pronounce on you is more fitting than the one you have chosen for yourself.”
“It’s not a curse,” I said quietly.
“I’ll come back in nine years’ time,” the tiger said, “and we can discuss it then. Good luck with your one-person revolution.”
“I needn’t fight it alone,” I said. “This is your home, too.”
The tiger seemed to consider it. “Not a bad thought,” she said, “but maps and boundaries and nationalism are for humans, not for tigers.”
“If you change your mind,” I said, “I’m sure you can find me, in nine years’ time or otherwise.”
“Indeed,” the tiger said. “Farewell, little not-a-fox.”
“Thank you,” I said, but she was gone already.
I secured Jong’s ruined body in the copilot’s seat I had vacated, so it wouldn’t flop about during maneuvers, and strapped myself in. The cataphract was damaged, but not so badly damaged that I still couldn’t make a run for it. It was time to finish Jong’s mission.
ELVES OF ANTARCTICA
Paul McAuley
PAUL MCAULEY (www.unlikelyworlds.co.uk) worked as a research biologist and university lecturer before becoming a full-time writer. He is the author of more than twenty novels, several collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella, and a BFI Film Classic monograph on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. His fiction has won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Sidewise Award, the British Fantasy Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His latest novel, Into Everywhere, was published by Gollancz in 2016; Austral, a novel about the post-global warming Antarctica featured in this story, is scheduled for 2017.
MIKE TORRES SAW his first elf stone three weeks after he moved to the Antarctic Peninsula. He was flying helos on supply runs from Square Bay on the Fallieres Coast to kelp farms in the fjords to the north, and in his free time had taken to hiking along the shore or into the bare hills beneath Mount Diamond’s pyramidal peak. Up there, he had terrific views of the rugged islands standing in the cold blue sea under the high summer sun, Mount Wilson and Mount Metcalf rising beyond the south side of the bay, and the entirety of the town stretched along the shore below. Its industrial sprawl and grids of trailer homes, the rake of its docks, the plantations of bladeless wind turbines, and the airfield with helos coming and going like bees, two or three blimps squatting in front of their hangars, and the runway where a cargo plane, an old Airbus Beluga maybe, or a Globemaster V with its six engines and tail tall as a five-storey building, might be preparing to make its lumbering run towards the sky. All of it ugly, intrusive and necessary: the industrial underbelly of a project that was attempting to prevent the collapse of Antarctica’s western ice sheet. It was serious business. It was saving the world. And Mike Torres was part of it.
He was a second-generation climate change refugee, born into the Marshall Islands diaspora community in Auckland. A big, quiet guy who’d survived a tough childhood – his father drinking himself to death, his mother taking two jobs to raise him and his sisters in their tiny central city apartment. Age sixteen, Mike had been part of a small all-city crew spraying tags everywhere on Auckland’s transport system; after his third conviction for criminal damage (a big throwie at Remuera Railway Station), a sympathetic magistrate had offered him a spell of workfare on a city farm instead of juvenile prison. He discovered that he loved the outdoor life, earned his helicopter pilot’s licence at one of the sheep stations on the high pastures of North Island, where little Robinson R33s were used to muster sheep, and five years later went to work for Big Green, one of the transnational ecological remediation companies, at the Lake Eyre Basin project in Australia.
Desalinated seawater had been pumped into the desert basin to create an inland sea, greening the land around it and removing a small fraction of the excess water that had swollen the world’s oceans; Big Green had a contract to establish shelter-belt forests to stabilise and protect the edge of the new farmland. Mike loved watching the machines at work: dozers, dumper trucks and 360 excavators that levelled the ground and spread topsoil; mechanical planters that set out rows of tree seedlings at machine-gun speed, and truck spades that transplanted semi-mature fishtail, atherton and curly palms, acacia, eucalyptus and sheoak trees. In one direction, stony scrub and fleets of sand dunes stretched towards dry mountains floating in heat shimmer; in the other, green checkerboards of rice paddies and date and oil palm plantations descended stepwise towards the shore of the sea. The white chip of a ferry ploughing a wake in blue water. A string of cargo blimps crossing the sky. Fleets of clouds strung at the horizon, generated by climate stations on artificial islands. Everything clean and fresh. A new world in the making.
Mike hauled supplies to the crews who ran the big machines and the gangers who managed the underplanting of shrubs and grasses, brought in engineers and replacement parts, flew key personnel and VIPs to and fro. He sent most of his pay packet home, part of it squirrelled into a savings account, part supporting his mother and his sisters, part tithed to the Marchallese Reclamation Movement, which planned to rebuild the nation by raising artificial islands above the drowned atoll of Majuro. A group of reclaimers had established a settlement there, occupying the top floors of the President’s house and a couple of office buildings they had stormproofed. Mike religiously watched their podcasts, and trawled archives that documented life before the flood, rifling through clips of beach parties, weddings, birthdays and fishing trips from old family videos, freezing and enlarging glimpses of the bustle of ordinary life. A farmer’s market, a KFC, a one-dollar store, a shoal of red taxis on Majuro’s main drag, kids playing football on a green field at the edge of the blue sea. Moments repossessed from the gone world.
He watched short films about exploration of the drowned ruins, feeds from web cams showing bright fish patrolling the reefs of sunken condos and shops. The reclaimers were attempting to construct a breakwater with fastgrowing edited corals, and posted plans for the village of floating houses, the next stage of the project. Mike dreamed of moving there one day, of making a new life in a new land, but places in the reclaimer community were fiercely contested. He’d had to dig into his savings to get his mother the stem cell therapy she needed for a heart problem, and one of his sisters became engaged, soon there would be a wedding to pay for. . . So when the contract at Lake Eyre finished, Mike signed up for a new project in the Antarctic Peninsula.
Lake Eyre had created a place where refugees from the drowning coasts could start afresh. The engineering projects run out of the Antarctic Peninsula were part of an attempt to preserve the continent’s last big ice sheet and prevent another catastrophic rise in ocean levels, the loss of half-drowned cities and land reclaimed from previous floods, and the displacement of more than sixty per cent of the world’s population. Factories and industrial plants on the peninsula supported a variety of massive geoengineering projects, from manufacturing fleets of autonomous high-albedo rafts that would cool ocean currents by reflecting sunlight, to creating a thin layer of dust in the lower stratosphere that would reflect a significant percentage of the sun’s light and heat back into space. One project was attempting to cool ice sheets by growing networks of superconducting threads that would syphon away geothermal heat. Another was attempting to protect glaciers from the heat of the sun by covering them in huge sheets of thermally reflective material.
Square Bay’s factories used biomass supplied by the kelp farms to manufacture the tough thin material used in the thermal blanket project. As a bonus, the fast-growing edited strains of kelp sequestered carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, contributing to attempts to reverse the rise in levels that had driven the warming in the first place. It was good work, no doubt, the sharp end of a massive effort to ameliorate the effects of two centuries of unchecked industrialisation and fossil carbon burning, but many thought that it was too little, too late. Damage caused by the great warming was visible everywhere on the Antarctic Penin
sula. Old shorelines drowned by rising sea levels, bare bones of mountains exposed by melting snow and ice, mines and factories, port cities and settlements spreading along the coast. . . There were traces of human influence everywhere Mike walked. Hiking trails with their blue markers and pyramidal cairns, scraps of litter, the mummified corpse of an albatross with a cache of plastic scraps in its belly, clumps of tough grasses growing between rocks, fell field meadows of mosses and sedge—even a few battered stands of dwarf alder and willow. Ecopoets licensed by the Antarctic Authority were spreading little polders and gardens everywhere as the ice and snow retreated. They had introduced arctic hares, arctic foxes and herds of reindeer and musk oxen further south. Resurrected dwarf mammoths, grazing tussock tundra in steep valleys snaking between the mountains.
Change everywhere.
One day, Mike followed a long rimrock trail to a triangulation point at a place called Pulpit Peak, fifteen kilometres south of the town. The pulpit of Pulpit Peak was a tall rock that stood at the edge of a cliff like the last tooth in a jaw, high above the blue eye of a meltwater lake. There was the usual trample of footprints in the apron of sandy gravel around it, the usual cairn of stones at the trail head, and something Mike hadn’t seen before, a line of angular characters incised into one face of the rock, strange letters or mathematical symbols with long tails or loops or little crowns that reminded him of something he couldn’t quite recall. And the triangulation point, a brass plate set in the polished face of a granite plinth, stated that it was thirty metres due north of its stated location ‘out of respect to local religious custom.’
“I checked it with my phone’s GPS,” Mike told his friend Oscar Manu that evening. They were at the Faraday Bar ’n’ Barbeque after a six-a-side soccer match, sitting on the terrace with their teammates under an awning that cracked like a whip in the chill breeze. “Sure enough, it was exactly thirty metres north of where it was supposed to be. And that writing? It’s elvish. A guy I knew back home, old roustabout there, had a tattoo in the same kind of script. Back in the day, he was an extra in those old fantasy movies, had it done as a memento.”
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven Page 57