The Race

by Nina Allan

  “Fuck,” she says. “That’s amazing.”

  “You believe me?” I am astounded at myself and a little frightened. I have never spoken to any outsider about the Croft, or about the programme. It does not matter that up until now I had no one to tell – the feeling of crossing a line is still so strong I can almost feel that line snapping, like a piece of fishing twine, its broken ends wrapping themselves painfully around my ankles.

  When we were small, Kay was always drumming it into us that we should never tell anyone how we lived or what we did. She hinted but never stated outright that if we broke this rule, people would come from Asterwych and force us to go to ordinary schools with ordinary children. The fear of being separated from one another, of having our home broken up or interfered with had its effect. We kept ourselves neatly locked up in an invisible cage.

  I didn’t plan to tell Lin Hamada about any of this. It just happened.

  Lin blinks her single eye then looks up at the ceiling.

  “Of course I believe you,” she says. “You’re like one of those dogs, aren’t you? You can’t tell lies.”

  “I can do what I want.” A small jolt of anger flashes through me and my heart is racing. Lin seems to be saying that I have no will of my own, that my will has been engineered out of me, and this makes me feel scornful. Is what I say true though? Can I do what I want?

  “I don’t mean that you can’t – just that the act of telling a lie would make you uncomfortable. It’s something you wouldn’t do unless you really had to. That’s true, isn’t it? I’m right about that?”

  I am sitting on Lin’s floor, with my back pressed up against the wooden storage unit that opens out to make the writing desk. The cabins are almost too small to accommodate two people at once, but here we are anyway. Lin’s cabin is as tidy as an ordnance cupboard and I find myself wondering if her life as a soldier – as a pilot – has boosted her awareness somehow, if it hasn’t made her just a tiny bit empathic.

  When I think about lying it makes me feel seasick, which is odd, because I haven’t been seasick once since coming on board.

  Is Lin right in what she says, or is it just the thought of lying to her?

  “Lying is pointless because it never leads anywhere,” I say, evading her. “It’s always a dead end.”

  “That depends on what you’re trying to achieve,” Lin says. Then she asks me if I had any choice about going to Thalia.

  My throat feels tight. I’m not sure how to answer her, because the truth is I don’t really know. I think of Wolfe, what happened to him. But surely Wolfe was different, too ill at the end to understand what he was doing?

  Kay told us Wolfe was dead, that he couldn’t have survived for much longer in any case, even if he’d stayed at the Croft.

  Caine always said that was bollocks, and Caine never swore. We didn’t discuss it though, it was all too awful. I try to imagine what might have happened if I’d said to Kay or to Peter Crumb that I didn’t want to be a part of the programme any more. An image comes to my mind, of myself, clearing tables and washing cups in Sarah’s mother’s coffee shop in Asterwych.

  Would that have been so terrible? The image has a strange fascination. I am surprised to discover that I do not find it entirely unpleasant.

  “The programme is what I’ve been trained for,” I say in the end. “It’s – my job.”

  “Most people still get to choose their jobs, though. Up to a point, anyway.”

  “Did you choose to be a soldier?”

  Lin laughs, an odd, harsh sound, like a crow cawing. “You’re joking. I was crazy for it. It was the only way I could think of to be free.”

  “Free of what?” As I ask my question I realise a strange thing: that I am unable to picture Lin Hamada as a child. Does she have brothers, sisters, parents? I cannot tell.

  “Free of the ground,” Lin says. She laughs again. “I am an impatient person. Impatience is my defining characteristic. I don’t like to wait – for anything. Being stuck in one place all the time – that would drive me insane.”

  I sense that she is saying what is true for her. I wonder what she will do, now that her injuries have made her unfit for life in the military. Once again she answers before I can ask.

  “I’m going to Brock,” she says. “I’ve landed a job flying their mail service. They don’t call it that, though – they call it intra-island communications. They have three beat-up Landseers they bought off the CAF and I get to captain the whole fleet.” She grins. “I’m even more beat to shit than the planes, so I guess we’re made for each other.”

  I have seen Brock Island on the map. It is shoe-shaped, a large and mountainous island that was once a part of the Thalian mainland but split off after an earthquake thousands of years ago. Before the war, Brock used to be a Crimondn colony. It’s governed by Thalia now, but its links to Crimond are still strong – half the population is Crimondn. I think it must be a strange place to live, neither one thing nor the other. I’ve heard also that it rains a lot.

  “It’ll be great,” Lin is saying. “It’ll make a nice change, not having people trying to shoot me down all the time. Not at first anyway.”

  I grin back, but weakly. I know this sounds foolish, but already I am feeling her absence, the loss of her. Like the loss of Maud, only worse, because Lin is here with me now and Maud is gone.

  “There’s one of those deep space research centres in Kontessa, isn’t there?” Lin says, changing the subject away from herself and back to me. “All those supercomputers or whatever. Government boffins staring through telescopes and drawing big salaries and never getting anywhere?”

  I feel surprised and a little shocked by how much she knows. Kay always liked to make out that no one outside of the programme knew about the programme, but clearly either Kay knows as little about what goes on in the world as I do, or she was lying. It’s hard to decide which. Caine knew about the research station, for a start. One of his ideas – one of the things he used to talk about when we were out on the roof – was that they’d been picking up transmissions from space they couldn’t decode.

  “That’s where we come in,” he said. “To them we’re just another type of software. Expensive and temperamental software, too.”

  “So you think the compound could still be a spy station?” Sarah said.

  “I don’t think it’s as much spying yet as monitoring,” Caine replied. “All I know is that they need us, because we have different ways of understanding language. Different from their own, I mean. We’re freaks, basically. If we weren’t so useful to them they’d probably be hunting us down and shooting us.”

  When Sarah asked Caine who ‘they’ were exactly, he just shrugged as if that wasn’t the point. “The people in control,” he said. “There’s always someone, and it doesn’t matter whose side they’re working for, they’re always the same.”

  Could Lin be one of them? A secret spy?

  If Lin were a spy I would know, and I know she is not.

  “Do you believe what he said? Your Caine?” Lin says. “Do you believe that the compound has been receiving transmissions from alien beings?”

  I shake my head slowly. I’m not saying no exactly, just that I don’t know. And Caine was never ‘my’ Caine, ever, no matter what I might have liked to imagine.

  At the Croft we were taught the art of focus, to concentrate hard on solving small and intricate problems. The larger, outside questions were for other people. I have always known that smartdogs were originally developed as weapons of war. But all that was a long time ago.

  It’s easier to accept that as the truth, because to believe anything different would be too awful.

  If we are running the smartdogs, who’s running us?

  Again the vision comes to me, the sudden image of myself, cleaning tables in the cafe in Asterwych.

  It means the freedom of knowing that no one is watching me, that no one cares who I am or what I can do.

  “I don’t know what to believe an
y more,” I say to Lin. “That’s the problem.”

  “Well, I guess you’ll find out when you get there,” Lin says. She flips over on to her side and slides down from her bunk. Her face is turned away from me, and I wonder for a moment if she is angry, angry at my naiveté, impatient with my lack of curiosity. I wouldn’t blame her if she were – I feel angry at myself. But then I see she is just searching for something in one of the under-bunk drawers.

  “Do you know this record?” she says. “Have you heard it before?” She is holding something out to me, a compact disc. There is a picture on the front, a brightly coloured clockwork rooster made from tin. I like the picture but I don’t know the album, which is by an artist called Paula Komedia. I shake my head. I have never cared all that much about music. Maud used to listen to bands on the radio but I could never get into them. I could never decode their significance. Caine used to go to Peter Crumb’s room sometimes and listen to records with him, symphonies and concertos, choral works by composers I’d never heard of.

  It occurs to me suddenly that Caine and Peter Crumb might have been lovers.

  Is that how Caine came to know so much? Through his lover, Peter? Peter Crumb with his haunted expression and watchful eyes?

  The thought pierces me like a piton. I don’t know now if I will ever find the strength to tug it out of me.

  “I first heard this on my base,” Lin said. “Paula Komedia is massive in Thalia.”

  I watch her as she inserts the disc into the wall slot. All the cabins have CD/DVD players, though I have not used mine because I have nothing to play on it. First there is silence, then three descending notes on a guitar. The notes repeat themselves, whispering, echoing, hesitating on the brink then plunging downwards into what sounds like a storm-wind of other instruments. I can pick out the sound of a flute, an accordion, a bassviol, some kind of percussion instrument that might be a tambourine. It’s cacophony, and yet it makes sense, because out of the maelstrom rises the firm and strident voice of Paula Komedia. Paula Komedia’s voice is silvery and sinuous, curving up and around the other sounds, binding them fast. Now and then it cracks wide open on a high note, gusting fire. I cannot decide if the music is ugly or beautiful, only that I want to go on hearing it.

  There is a liner sheet with the lyrics, strange songs about wild horses roaming the pampas, an abandoned finca, a woman who flies her aeroplane into the sun.

  What Komedia’s music reminds me most of is Limlasker, running.

  “She wrote all the songs herself,” Lin says. She is listening with her eyes closed, and now that she is at rest, sunk within herself and not noticing me, I find I am able to see the whole truth of her face and not just its destruction. The unhurt parts rise out of the ruins, like the wreckage of an aircraft, crashed in bleak moorland. I want to touch her cheek to say how sorry I am, that this terrible thing has happened to her, but I can sense she wouldn’t want this, not the saying sorry part anyway. She is who she is now – what is there to apologise for? “The lyrics are based on the Thalian Odyssey. Do you know it?”

  “I have a copy, in my cabin. I haven’t read it yet though.” I am glad, relieved to be able to say I have at least heard of it. I know that A Thalian Odyssesy is supposed to be one of the greatest works of literature in the world. Its author, Saffron Valparaiso, was middle aged by the time she finally completed it. She was a poet, then a soldier, then a teacher and then finally a poet again. She was killed, near the end of the war, by a terrorist bomb.

  Valparaiso’s work was banned in Crimond for many years.

  ~*~

  We are docked at Lilyat and will remain here all day.

  The sun pours down on the decks of the Aurelia Claydon like spilled yellow paint. After Lilyat we will be continuously at sea for almost two months, and so everyone is taking the opportunity to go ashore. Except it seems for Alec Maclane, who will remain on board.

  Dodie Taborow explains that the sun doesn’t agree with him.

  “He can’t walk all that far, in any case,” Dodie adds. “Because of his illness, I mean.”

  I still don’t know what’s supposed to be wrong with Alec Maclane. What I do know is that Dodie has become very attached to him. She hurries to his cabin half a dozen times a day taking him small treats – a magazine, a packet of halva, beef tea in a special mug made from Chinoit porcelain – and when she’s not with him in his cabin they’re together in the saloon or walking on deck. In the evenings before supper they have cocktails served to their table, called Martinis. Dodie always seems to be on a kind of high when Maclane is around, sparkling with nervous energy in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable without knowing why.

  I keep wondering if it’s true that Maclane is sick. I wonder if perhaps Dodie believes that he will die soon, and that perhaps if she is good to him he’ll leave her his money. Dodie has money of her own, I know that, but Maclane is in another league. Maclane is what Maud would call a seriously fat cat.

  If I could make myself believe that was all, I would feel less worried. The thing is, I can sense that Dodie really likes Maclane, that she hopes her life will be changed for the better because of him. I don’t mean money. Dodie is different from when she first came on board, less sad and less careful. She has let down her guard and this makes me afraid for her. Afraid that she will be hurt, or else made to look a fool. I’m not sure which would be worse for her.

  I have read that Lilyat is one of the biggest seaports on this side of the world. Also it is the last stop on the map of Evror. West of Lilyat there is nothing, just the Atlantic, until you wash up on the shores of Brock Island. The Atlantic seems to be everywhere in Lilyat – because the city sits on such a steep gradient, the ocean can be glimpsed between the buildings from most places. There is a strong reek of brine, which reminds me of my walks with Maud to the Offshore to buy winkles and crab cakes. There are many kiosks along the harbour front, selling sun hats and fish patties, iced lemonade. I stand on the quayside, alone for a moment while I wait for Dodie to finish arguing with one of the taxi drivers. They are solidly built, these drivers, men for the most part, smelling strongly of tobacco and garlic and their own sharp body odour.

  The sun here is bright as a sword, dangerous and opulent as laudanum. The people seem bold and cheerful. They chatter together in excited voices. Many of the older women are brightly dressed. Their shawls, made from coloured cotton, remind me of the outspread wings of burnet moths, resting on heather.

  The younger women wear vests and jeans like my own only newer and more fashionable. Their black hair is plaited into thick braids that dangle between their shoulder blades like glossy silk ropes.

  Dodie tells me she has visited Lilyat before, several times, with her husband Wilson. The price of a cab has clearly gone up since she was last here.

  “He’s charging me a fortune,” she grumbles. “Let’s take the tramway.”

  I am glad that Dodie knows which platform we should be waiting on, the local price of tokens and how many stops it takes before we get to the centre. It means I can float along without feeling anxious, watching this city as it unscrolls itself around me, the gleaming rails of the tramway, clawing their way up the tilted streets like ladders, scrabbling to find a foothold on the dusty cobbles.

  The only city I have visited before this is Inverness. It is hard to find any equation between the two.

  “It’s not too bad here if you don’t mind the hills,” Dodie says. She’s wearing a smart linen suit with a lemon-coloured blouse, a wide-brimmed straw hat which she calls a boater. I realise how out of place she looks here, how foreign.

  “I don’t mind at all,” I say to her. “I’m used to climbing.” This is the truth. We get off the tramway at one end of a wide, smoothly paved shopping street that Dodie tells me is where everyone who visits Lilyat comes to shop for the leather goods and jewellery for which the city is famous. We move slowly along, gazing into the windows of the various boutiques, those facing the street itself and those on the smaller, narr
ower alleyways that surround it. This single commercial district of Lilyat seems to me bigger than the whole of Asterwych put together. The goods on display – leather handbags and wallets, pearl-handled penknives, silk scarves in a variety of colours – entrance me. I stand still, gawping foolishly at a silver broach in the form of a bumble bee. The insect’s body is carved from amber, its outspread wings are fashioned from the twisted-together strands of silver wires. The sight of it makes me ache inside. It’s like the feeling of falling in love, or the first dim-witted awareness of a slow-acting poison.

  I don’t normally care a damn for owning things, but I care about this.

  “Have it!” Dodie exclaims. She insists on paying for the broach, seems almost as excited by the prospect of buying it as I am. We enter the shop. Dodie scrabbles in her handbag for coins, laughs with what seems like happy relief as I hand them over. The broach’s seller is a middle-aged woman. Her still-black hair is combed behind her ears, so smoothly it has a sheen to it, like silk or fresh paint. She places the silver bee in a small cardboard carton, then wraps the whole thing quickly and expertly in a piece of red crepe paper. She speaks some words to me, words I cannot understand because they are in Espinol. I find myself blushing hot red. Supposedly I am an expert in linguistics, yet in the everyday languages of Evror I am as good as dumb.

  “She’s saying the broach will bring you luck,” says Dodie, who I know speaks Espinol and Farrish very well. She smiles broadly at the woman, then turns back in my direction and raises an eyebrow. I do not like that raised eyebrow, which seems both to mock the woman and decline the good luck. I reach forward to take the wrapped box. My fingers brush the woman’s skin, and for a moment our different warmths merge, becoming one.

  “Obri-gada,” I offer hesitantly. The woman smiles. Dodie is already making her way back out on to the street.

  We have lunch at midday, in a cobbled courtyard crowded with small round tables and ironwork chairs. A large yellow dog lies asleep in the shadowed angle of the wall. I order a dish made from potatoes and sliced sausage and a vegetable I’ve never tasted before called aubergine. The food is delicious, strongly flavoured, and I feel full very quickly. Dodie appears to eat very little, though she fills her wine glass again and again from the carafe on the table. She looks down at her uneaten meal, and I know suddenly and without any doubt that she is thinking of her son, Duncan. I wonder what makes it so hard for her to speak of him aloud. Is he injured, or in prison, or sick in his mind? I would like answers to these questions, but I don’t wish to pry. I sense that Dodie’s most valued possession is her pride.