The Race

by Nina Allan

  We have the Aurelia Claydon in common at least. It is a start.

  Dodie Taborow is from Lis, a district known as Jeunefille. Even if you were to take no notice of the clothes she wears – the shiny brown boots, the teal blue button-up jacket with the astrakhan collar – it is obvious from the way she speaks that she has money. I don’t hold this against her as I know Maud would, perhaps because I find her fascinating to look at. With her hands covered in rings and her faded glamour she’s like an aging film actress.

  As we sit drinking our first cups of coffee in the saloon, Dodie Taborow informs me that she’s been recently widowed.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. She tells me that her husband’s name was Wilson, and that he worked as the shop manager of a large iron-smelting works in Corton. When Dodie Taborow asks me who I am and where I am going I tell her I am a teacher and that I’m on my way to take up a position as a languages assistant in the city of Kontessa. This is what I’ve been told I should say, and it seems to work. It is clear that Dodie Taborow is not interested in me so much as in my possible suitability as a confidante. She soon stops questioning me about my provenance and moves on to other, more interesting subjects.

  “You’ve seen that poor girl,” she says, once she’s finished giving me the lowdown on Wilson’s coronary. “I think somebody said she was in a fire.”

  I know the woman she is talking about. I noticed her earlier when Djibril was giving us our walkaround. The right side of her face looks normal, but the left side has been mostly destroyed. What is left resembles a battlefield – a jumble of pinkish ridges and corrugated scar tissue. Her left eye is gone, the distended flap of her eyelid has been sewn closed over the socket. It is hard to tell how old she is. She is wearing a blue boiler suit and her long dark hair is plaited in a single braid. When I first saw her I assumed she was part of the crew.

  She is sitting by herself in a corner of the saloon, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper.

  “What’s her name, do you know?” I ask Dodie Taborow. I think it’s the first time I have asked her a question, rather than the other way around. The sight of the girl’s disfigured face fills me with horror, yet there is something else too, something behind the fear that is almost wonderment. The girl has clearly suffered terribly, yet still she is able to sit here, to read the paper and drink her coffee and get on with her life. What truths does she know? What thoughts is she having? I wonder if someone who has suffered as she has would hate people who have not suffered, or be indifferent to them.

  Is her calmness here in the saloon an act of heroism, or is it simply that she has no other choice? I notice the way Dodie Taborow stares at her, like a greedy magpie, and yet I sense she feels no pity. The girl is a subject for gossip, nothing more. What has happened to her has not happened to Dodie Taborow, and therefore does not properly exist. For Dodie Taborow there is not even a girl, not really, just the remains of a face, a thing of such extraordinary ugliness and wrongness it no longer belongs to the girl, but to the world, to be looked at and gawped over, like any other monstrosity.

  I feel I have to know the woman’s name. If I know her name she will be someone, and not just something.

  “I don’t know. Lin something, I think,” says Dodie Taborow.

  Lin. I can see at once how the name would suit her. A firm upright, strongly supported, like a tough green branch.

  I would like to talk to her but I have no idea how I might go about it. She seems so alone in her corner, but perhaps that’s what she wants. How can I know?

  There are other passengers still in the saloon: a bearded middle aged man with horn-rimmed glasses, two elderly ladies who I think are sisters, their narrow limbs strangely attenuated, like the limbs of spiders. The sisters talk together quietly in what I presume must be the Thalian language and this by itself makes me curious about them. I have resolved to become fluent in Thalian, to use the two months of this sea voyage to master its basics. I have brought several books to help me in this purpose – a parallel text edition of Saffron Valparaiso’s A Thalian Odyssey and a field guide to the wildlife and birds of the Indic Basin – even though Kay has told me there will be no need.

  “You’ll be living mainly inside the compound,” she said. “Everyone connected with the programme speaks Crimondn.”

  She has assured me that the compound is enormous, almost the size of Asterwych and with as many citizens. The idea of living inside a compound disturbs me rather. Hearing the two sisters chatting companionably together, I realise I cannot think of anything I want less.

  As well as the bearded man, there is another, younger man named Alec Maclane. He is stout, but good looking. He is wearing a fine cashmere waistcoat and gold cufflinks. He looks the kind who could easily afford a hopper flight, if he wanted it, and I wonder what he’s doing, going by sea.

  Dodie Taborow leans close to whisper in my ear, confiding that Alec Maclane is rich but also unlucky.

  Unlucky in love? I wonder. Unlucky at cards?

  “He has a fatal disease,” Dodie says, then changes the subject. When later on that day I happen to see Maclane on deck I observe him closely, looking for signs of illness, but I see none. He has a curiously rolling gait, as if arthritis or rheumatism were causing him to favour one leg over the other, but other than that he seems perfectly healthy and I wonder if Dodie Taborow has been misinformed. Alec Maclane seems courteous and gentle and I rather like him. The other man, the bearded man, I do not like so much. There is something secretive about him. I haven’t found out his name yet and amazingly Dodie Taborow doesn’t know it either.

  “He looks like a government man, don’t you think? A politico?” She purses her lips as she looks at him, but whether with distaste or in fascination it’s hard to tell.

  “Let’s go on deck,” she says suddenly, and I agree at once. Djibril has already been in to tell us that the ship will be departing from port in half an hour. As we get up to leave, I notice the bearded man looking at me. I try to look away but it is too late – he catches my eye and I am forced to return his gaze.

  There is a flicker of something between us, and for a moment I wonder if he is using an implant. For some reason the idea repulses me. I tug my thoughts away, with some difficulty.

  It was like that with Kay, just sometimes. Each time it happened I found the experience similarly unpleasant, like catching her with her clothes off.

  Is the bearded man some sort of spy?

  I make up my mind to avoid him, as much as possible.

  ~*~

  We are on our way. I stand at the rail for a long time, gazing back at Faslane as it shrinks and dwindles, becoming first a green-grey smudge on the horizon and then disappearing altogether. We are still in the mouth of the loch, not in the open sea at all yet, but I feel cast adrift from my old life already. I can feel Dodie Taborow regarding me with curiosity. I wish she would stop.

  “Is this your first sea voyage?” she asks me. I say that it is. I realise she has been watching the receding coastline just as I have, and I wonder if this is a journey she had been intending to take with her husband Wilson, or if he was to have remained behind in any case, alive or dead.

  “I love the sea,” she says. “I sometimes wish I could stay at sea forever. Life would be simpler that way.”

  Her voice has taken on a wistful quality. I ask her why she is travelling to Brock Island. I wonder if the bluntness of my question might offend her, but if anything she seems pleased that I have brought up the subject.

  “I have a son who lives on Brock,” she says. “Duncan.” She is silent for some time, and I begin to think I must have upset her after all. Then she lets out a sigh. Pale sunlight envelops her hands, sparking her rings. “Duncan and Wilson had a terrible row. They haven’t spoken for ten years. Duncan doesn’t even know his father’s dead yet. I’m going to Brock to break the news. I know he’ll be devastated.”

  “Will he return with you to Crimond, do you think?”

  She l
aughs, a short, brittle sound, like a twig snapping.

  “Duncan will never leave Brock, not now,” she says. “He’s as stubborn as his father.” She turns her face into the wind. Her hair blows back from her forehead like a silver mane. Her profile is gaunt and somehow timeless and full of dignity, and to me at that moment she appears like a ship’s figurehead, or like an aging queen: faded but still full of vigour, still fighting her battles.

  “Fathers and sons, who needs them?” she says. “I wish I’d had a daughter. Like you.” She touches my hand where it rests upon the rail. “You’re very young to be travelling so far alone, Maree. What do your parents have to say about that?”

  “My parents are dead,” I reply. The words are out before I can examine them for flaws. It is surprising how thorny they sound when spoken aloud. “It’s all right,” I add quickly. “It happened ages ago. I was still a baby, really. I don’t remember them at all.” I can feel myself blushing. I feel embarrassed but I don’t know what about – it isn’t my fault that they are dead. Mostly I don’t want Dodie Taborow to feel sorry for me, and by a miracle she seems to understand that. We stand together in silence for a while, and then she asks me if I have anyone who will be meeting me when I get to Bonita.

  “One of the other teachers from the school is being sent to pick me up,” I say to her. “There’s no need to worry.”

  This at least is a truth of sorts. Kay has told me that someone from the programme will be waiting at the dockside to collect me. If by any chance this person is not there I am to go straight to the harbour office and they will put me in immediate contact with the compound’s administrators. There is indeed, as I have said to Dodie, nothing to worry about. I stand beside her at the rail, feeling the throb and hum of the ship’s engines passing into me through the soles of my feet. The sense of being in motion, of drawing away from one thing and heading towards another, is oddly restful. It occurs to me that even if my parents were still alive I might still be leaving them. It’s strange to think of that, like being given a secret glimpse of another world, and reminds me of an odd idea of Maud’s, about how the world we live in isn’t the real world, that the real world lies elsewhere, in a parallel dimension where the New War never happened and there are no such creatures as smartdogs. Maud said she’d read a story like that in a book somewhere, although she could never remember the title or the author and I privately suspected she had made it up herself. I found it amusing when she first told me about it but afterwards a shadow seemed to fall across me and I felt afraid. What if it were all true, after all? What if the person I knew as myself didn’t really exist? Suppose I’m just a template, a mirror-image of another girl in another world who even at this moment is begging me for her life back so she can stop having nightmares?

  A foolish idea perhaps, but still a powerful one. I do not like to dwell on it.

  “What did you mean, when you said you wished you could stay at sea forever?” I ask Dodie.

  “Oh, just that when you’re at sea it’s so much easier to exist without the need for things. You exist and you observe, but that’s the sum of it. Life tends to simplify itself rather beautifully.” She spreads her arms out along the deck rail and gazes down into the water below. The sea is bluish grey, the colour of steel. I notice that some of the other passengers have come out on deck, the two tall sisters and a man in a purple blazer and Alec Maclane. The sisters are wearing identical blue mackintoshes, though there is no sign of rain.

  I tell Dodie I have letters to write, and we agree to meet again for supper, in the saloon.

  I return to my cabin, where I try to write to Maud and find I cannot. Too much has happened already, too many new things that she will never see and never know about.

  Already our lives are diverging, irrevocably.

  Already she is like a figure in a dream.

  ~*~

  The programme’s main facility in Kontessa was originally set up by the military. Everyone assumed it was a centre for espionage, which it was, at least for a while, but once the war was over that all changed. The programme remained in Kontessa because it was easier to maintain privacy. The programme’s ongoing series of experiments into human and alt-human language systems is the most complex and far reaching work in applied linguistics ever undertaken. That’s what Kay told us, anyway.

  Kay always insisted that without people like us – Caine and Sarah and Garland and me – the programme would no longer exist. It would have been shut down in the aftermath of the war, along with all the other spy stations and radar communications centres and underground munitions facilities that were part of the machinery that kept the war running. Kay is one of those people who tend to talk about the war a great deal. Not that she is old enough to remember anything – it was over twenty years before she was born.

  Peter Crumb, the Croft’s programme administrator, has a Thalian mother. Kay used to have sex with Peter sometimes, up in his study on the second floor – I know because I heard them. As Peter Crumb’s room was directly above our bedroom it was sometimes hard not to. The idea of dried up Peter Crumb exercising his cock used to make me feel queasy, but I found it interesting to imagine Kay with her legs apart, gritting her teeth and seizing her pleasure like a dog tearing at a piece of gristle. It cut her down to size, somehow.

  Maud used to listen to them quite openly, even placing a glass against the ceiling so she could hear better.

  “Can you even bear to think of it?” she would say. “The two of them rutting away like pigs in a mud bath?” She would make this token protest then dissolve into giggles. I think Maud might have had a crush on Peter Crumb for a while, God knows why. He was attractive in a way I suppose, with his high cheekbones and silver hair, kind of haunted-looking, but for me there was always something a bit creepy about him.

  Once, while we were doing it, I told Maud she should imagine that I was Peter. I thought she’d squeal with disgust or burst out laughing but she came instead, almost at once, just like that.

  ~*~

  Everyone knows that the smartdogs were first developed in Crimond, but it was in Thalia, at the facility in Kontessa, that scientists began to do detailed research into how smartdogs think. The original experiments all involved Petronella del Toro. She was already in her twenties when they discovered her, a lab technician working at the facility and the first of what the scientists liked to refer to as a new race of natural empaths. Petronella was able to communicate with smartdogs without the aid of an implant. The scientists recognise the value of the work they did with Petronella but nowadays they generally prefer to work with children. They say a child’s ability is the purest, because it’s instinctive rather than learned. Also, a child is easier to nurture and to train in the ways of the programme.

  I cannot remember a time before I spoke with smartdogs – that’s why I was recruited into the programme. I’ve known about the programme since I was eight. Kay says we’re working to improve the world and I’ve never found any reason not to believe her.

  Wolfe thought that Kay and Peter Crumb and the rest of them were all lying to us, which I guess is why he ran away. None of us knew what he was planning, not even Caine, who loved Wolfe like a brother. After Wolfe left, Caine changed. I don’t mean he changed towards the rest of us – he was always the kindest, least selfish person you can imagine – but he became more turned in on himself and less happy. He began asking questions about the programme, about the Kontessa facility and what it might really be for.

  “It’s not just about the smartdogs,” he said once to me and Garland and Sarah. “There has to be more to it, or why all this secrecy?”

  This was the summer before he went, he and Sarah. The nights were very warm, and throughout June until the middle of August it never quite got dark. I would wait until Maud was asleep, then sneak outside and join Sarah and Caine and Garland on the roof of the coal store. We’d take blankets up there, and cushions. Sometimes Sarah and Garland would smoke cigarettes they’d bought secretly in As
terwych. They were careful always to gather up the butts and hide them until they could dispose of them in a waste bin on their next trip to town. They knew Kay would go crazy if she found out.

  Caine didn’t smoke. He talked to us about his ideas instead. We liked to listen to him because he was Caine, but I don’t think any of the three of us took what he said all that seriously. Somehow, Caine had got hold of the idea that what the programme was really about was the analysis and decoding of alien language systems.

  The first time Caine used the word alien Sarah burst out laughing. When she saw he wasn’t joking, she turned the laugh into a cough, then quickly stubbed out her cigarette against the roof tiles.

  “I’m not talking about little green men,” Caine explained patiently. “I mean alien as in different from us. AI is an alien language, so is computer code, so is anything non-human or even alt-human. We have no idea what else is out there and neither have the scientists. We’re all in the dark here – but we’re even more in the dark than they are, because they’re not telling us the whole story. They say we’re a new race and that they have a duty to protect us, but that doesn’t give them the right to treat us like children. Without us, there’d be no programme. Surely we have the right to know what all this is for?”

  Caine was the eldest of our group. I’d also say he was the most gifted. He could speak three different languages fluently and knew the rudiments of half a dozen others. He never boasted about it though, or about anything. His parents were both killed in a house fire. I was stupidly in love with him for a while. I’m sure he knew, but he never said anything because he knew how terribly it would embarrass me. Caine would never hurt a soul. He was Caine.

  “But even if what you say about the alien languages is true,” Garland said. “What’s so bad about that?”