No matter.
She went back to the interface. Lowered herself into the chair.
Tarsul tilted his head at her. “You seem different,” he said. His voice was curious. Maybe a shade wary.
I don’t know if I’ve given up on life or had a breakthrough, Kiu didn’t say. Maybe a breakdown. She grunted, vaguely, in reply.
“Are you well?” Tarsul asked.
“Fine. I’m always fine.”
She reached for the interface wires, and pulled them down toward her head.
Tarsul was hesitating, as though he had something he wasn’t sure he should say. Kiu paused with her hands on the wires, and raised an eyebrow she knew he couldn’t see.
Whatever internal line of thought had occupied Tarsul wended its way to a close. “I wish you luck,” he said.
“Huh,” Kiu responded.
Then she attached the connectors, breathed out, and opened up, and surrendered herself to going home.
Induction n.
1.
Provision of occupational health and safety training in a mining environment.
2.
i. Inducting ii. Inducing iii. Production of an electric or magnetic state by proximity of an electrified or magnetic object iv. Drawing of a fuel mixture into the cylinder(s) of an engine. v. Reasoning (from observed examples) that a general law exists.
1.
DON’T LEAVE ME, Christian had begged his father.
I’m not leaving you, Dad had promised. You’re just going to stay with Granny for a while.
Granny was tall. Her merry brown eyes and square, white-streaked haircut were high and far away, blocked by an oblong of flower-print dress and square-toed black shoes. Christian’s father had lifted him to be close to the friendly face, but Granny had made a lowering motion and said,
He’s old enough to walk, Godwin.
She took Christian’s hand in her rough, dry palm. They walked down the palm-tree lined road until there was no more road, and then they took their shoes off and walked in the sand. That was when Granny first told him about the Freezers.
We found de Freezers when I was three. Took a fishing boat to Scrub Island and found dem, all de children running loose. We were completely free. De ocean was blood-warm. De town pool was blood-warm. De Freezers were limestone, cold water sea-caves. Dey went way down. We’d hold our breath, see how far we could go before we’d pop up in a pocket of air.
Granny’s palm started to get sweaty. She swapped her shoes, stocking-stuffed, which she held by the heels, to her left hand, and Christian took her right. Now he was on the side of the sea. Pale topaz water lapped against the corpse of a broken umbrella.
Sandpipers ran from them, too light to leave footsteps in the sand.
I’m surprised nobody drowned, Granny went on. Our parents didn’t know about de caves. If a child didn’t come home, dey wouldn’t have known where to look. I was de smallest. My neighbour Viv looked after me. One time, dey all had to tie deir shirts together to get me out from a hole. Viv – his real name was Walter but he loved cricket and Viv Richards was Captain of de West Indies at dat time – always said dere was pirate gold, dat we’d find it if we went deep enough.
And Christian, who never spoke if he could help it, whispered,
Can we go to de Freezers, Granny?
’Fraid not, sweet boy, Granny answered, squeezing his hand. Like many things around here, dat place has long ago been eaten by de sea.
Granny’s mind has now been eaten by old age, according to Christian’s half-brother, Roy. Lung cancer, which she keeps forgetting she has, gnaws at the rest.
Christian stares out the window of the light aircraft, cowrie-brown knees wedged up against the seat in front. He listens to the whine of the engines; feels the roughness of the descent towards Anguilla’s single airstrip in the much-reduced Valley; gets a glimpse of the now-separate island which his child-self called home.
There’ll be no beach stroll to Granny’s house this time, even if his brittle bones could hold together the whole way. It’s different, seeing it in stark sunlight. Much worse than seeing it from space. The four ValleyPower rigs, once cornerstones of the long, leaf-shaped main island, still stand with their two hundred thousand ton concrete bases and hurricane-proof semi-circular shields, deriving over five hundred megawatts apiece from solar, wind and ocean thermal energy conversion.
Yet the towns supplied by the high voltage submarine cables are evacuated. Christian is here to convince Granny to leave. To force her if necessary.
The Irihana Wave arrives in three months.
A ROBOTROLLEY COLLECTS his luggage.
The airport exit is blocked by fluorescent orange panels diverting new arrivals to a kind of classroom. Individual desks form parallel rows. While some passengers stand, bewildered, by Christian’s side, the Mexican and Barbadian labourers, their canvas bags hung with hearing protection and hard hats, settle into the seats with soft sighs.
A woman, six-foot seven with a shiny black beehive, drops heavy manuals, chunks of actual paper, on each desk.
“Dis an obligatory induction,” she announces when the last booklet is dispersed, “as de entirety of Anguilla is classified a restricted work site. Even if you don’t intend to approach de bore or de tailings, dere are heavy vehicles on de roads. Familiarise yourself with de risks. De Wave is not calculated to arrive before July, but dere is significant margin for error. In short, de island could explode at any time.”
One of the workers whispers an explosion sound at his hunched-over neighbour, making his clenched fists fly apart with spread fingers. She rolls her eyes at him and continues replacing her plane-friendly plimsolls with thick socks and steel-capped boots. An indulgent smile plays around the lips of the woman with the beehive; she waves a manicured hand at three slim openings with simple keypads and screens inside.
“Pass de examination,” she says, “and you may enter de site. Do not try to take de booklets out of dis room. De information is confidential.”
Christian flips to a random page. There, a diagram of the bore is labelled with its dimensions.
Bore width: 5 metre (m) (diameter)
Bore depth: 30 000m
Volume of displaced basalt: 2 355 000m³
Mass of displaced basalt: 7 088 550t
Volume to be vapourised, 50% = 1 177 500m³ of SiO2
(energy requirement 8 831 250 gigajoules (GJ))
On the opposite page, the font is large enough for preschoolers to read. Christian absorbs the information easily, impressionable as a preschooler, yet fails to react emotionally to its enormity; it’s been difficult to feel, to care about much, since re-entry.
The remaining 3 544 275t of slag (consisting chiefly of Al2O3, CaO, FeO and MgO) will be raised 30km to the surface. There, it will be moved by haul truck to form solid channels and barriers. These peaks and valleys will guide the flow of magma.
Density of basaltic magma is 2.65 to 280gm/cm³; less than the density of solid basalt (3.011gm/cm³). The main process is simply that the magma is more buoyant. When the Irihana Wave arrives, molten rock will rise until it reaches the surface, restoring the main island of Anguilla to pre-climate change twentieth century dimensions of 26km long x 5km wide. New average elevation will be 200m.
In the event that cooling has been miscalculated and magma flow slows or stops, the slag-extracting pumps inserted into the bore can be reversed; seawater can be pumped into the magma. Injection of hot, new magma into the asthenosphere by the Wave will have already caused gases to come out of solution. This enhances artificial decompression caused by drilling the bore. Adding water will increase explosive force even further to blast away early-forming solid plugs.
IMAGE NOT TO SCALE.
WHEN CHRISTIAN ESCAPES the induction, night is falling.
Roy’s driver waits for him on the other side, holding a smartpaper which reads MR. CHRISTIAN WATERS.
“Sorry,” Christian says. “I need to use the bathroom before we go.”
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“Very good, sir,” Roy’s driver says.
In the airport restroom, Christian defecates into a ValleyFresh modular waterless composting toilet. It’s the product that made his father’s fortune, taken up en masse when metropolitan sewerage systems were switched into reverse by rising tides. The capital raised was then ploughed into ValleyPower.
Christian is the oldest son. He should have inherited ValleyFresh and ValleyPower when his father and Roy’s mother, Lilah Spencer-Churchill, were killed in a light plane crash.
Christian didn’t want them.
Roy manages both companies these days. Like an ugly, hand-crocheted hat your embarrassing poor relations gave you for Christmas, which you have to wear, sometimes, for politeness’ sake.
2.i.
“WELL,” ROY SAYS, staring. “I never expected to see you again. Weren’t you supposed to plant the seeds of the human race beyond the solar system?”
The scotch in his glass is the colour of his skin. Impeccably dressed, even at this late hour, Roy wears light-bending fabrics which accentuate his shoulders, slim his waist and give the subtle impression of added height.
A straight fall of fringe brushes the noble brow where Christian can easily imagine Roy’s coronet resting; he’s a baronet or something; his mother’s brother a duke. Yet he pretended to be pleased when they inducted him into the Anguilla Hall of Fame for his services to hygiene, handing over a plastic pageant crown.
“Here I am,” Christian says, leaning back into a carved walnut armchair. It’s at least two centuries old, one of the few antiques in the manor that hasn’t yet been wrapped for transport to London. There, Roy has another house – or rather, four houses sutured into one giant Frankenhouse – where he’ll wait out the rebirth of Anguilla in his image.
“You look terrible,” Roy observes. Christian accepts a glass of water with a tremor in his wasted hand.
“Ten years in low gravity,” he says. “They solved the cancer problem but not that one.” He’s no longer angry with Roy for failing to supply Granny with costly neoplasia preventatives. Anger slips away so easily; an ice cube melting in his hand.
“It’s not catching?” A delicate pause before Roy’s final word.
“No.” Christian fishes the ice cube out with his left hand. Then, careful of the crystal against his chipped teeth, he downs the contents of the glass. “There’s no space plague. The habitat leaked, that’s all. We had to abandon it. The mission, too. So the engineers said.”
“Engineers!” Roy attempts bracing brotherly camaraderie. “You’ll want to watch that bothersome breed.”
But Roy is a stranger.
“I didn’t mean to force myself on you.” Christian fights the urge to close his eyes. “I was going straight to Granny’s but there was this thing at the airport. It took forever.”
“My lawyers advised me on it,” Roy says, and now his eyes are cold; he’s the owner of all the power, the fresh water and the land. Not to mention the toilets.
“Lawyers. You’ll want to watch them. They advised me to sign away all my inheritance.”
“Because you were never coming back!” Roy’s eyes bulge.
“Here I am,” Christian says again, softly.
Roy scrabbles about at a polished rosewood writing desk. His computer, embedded, spits out permanent paper from a hidden cavity. He puts his palm to the paper, switching on an art deco lamp, but when Christian shows no sign of getting out of the armchair, he brings it to him.
“You want half of what father left behind? Here you are. I can’t give you any part of the main island, it belongs to the corporation. So do the two rigs in Limestone and Auntie Dol. But the other two rigs, Sherricks and Windward Point, are still mine. You can have Windward Point and Scrub Island to go with it. Scrub Island is where your mother is buried, after all, isn’t it?”
ii.
IN THE MORNING, Roy’s driver offers to take Christian in a luxury private yacht from the island once called Anguilla, now called Valley Island, to the island now called White Hill Island, which overlooks the submerged township of Island Harbour.
Christian prefers to take the ferry.
He sits by an outside rail, the wind of their passage stinging his eyes. The engine screams defiance against the suck of the swell, sea birds hover over the white wake, but the briny dry makes him feel like he’s crossing a Saharan saltpan; like the sea is a mirage all around.
Walls of slag sticking straight up out of the water and the rumble of monstrous, self-driving trucks recede. The ferry deftly avoids barges heaped with more slag and pale yellow sand. It detours around shallow reefs of hotel balconies crusted with cunjevoi.
Christian sees them clearly through the water.
When he disembarks at the church, ocean foam lapping at its arched white entryway, the robotrolley obediently brings his luggage, trundling at his heels like a dog. The shoreline is changed but the sheltered nook where Granny’s house perches on tall wooden stilts is the same.
A narrow, uneven staircase rises to a small, shingled house. It has a peaked roof, balcony railings alternating turquoise and white. In contrast to Roy’s glass-sealed, climate-controlled mansion, Granny’s house is open to the trade winds with more shutters than solid walls.
The dirt beneath the house, once the shady refuge of piglets and hens, appears to be sporting rows of odd concrete mushrooms. Only, when Christian gets closer, he realises they are foot-long stakes, driven into the dirt, each one topped with a white or orange hard hat.
Each hat has a name and dates of birth and death scrawled on the plastic in black marker. Some of the hats are cracked or crushed. Some of them are stained. All of the death-dates fall within the past three months.
“Granny,” he calls in a calm voice, once again strangely unengaged by the appearance of an apparent graveyard. But no, the hats are packed too close together for bodies to be buried there. A memorial, then.
The woman who wanders nonchalantly out onto the balcony, skin like copper-toned Tahitian pearl, is more stooped than he remembers, though her movement is less hindered than his; she always had good strong bones. A straw hat shades Granny’s face. Long hoop-earrings with bits of shell and sea-glass rattle at her collarbones.
“Godwin, dat you?” she calls suspiciously, interrupted by coughing.
“It’s Christian!”
“Christian!” She throws her arms wide. “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory dat far outweighs dem all! Our saviour’s brought you home from de stars, sweet boy!” She hesitates. “I can’t get down de steps easily. Come here to me.”
Christian leaves the robotrolley measuring step size with its sensors and scales the balcony with frustrating slowness, hands on both railings. He wants to squeeze her but is wary of hurting himself.
“Your Granny not so frail,” she scolds him when he pulls away, but she bites her lip to keep from coughing again. They beam at each other for so long that Christian’s face hurts. Then she glances down the hillside and says something that makes his heart hurt. “Jeezum bread, but will you look at dat? De whole beach missing, Christian. You ever seen anything like dat?” She shakes her head in astonishment. “All de sand gone. Dat hurricane must have been a terrible one. What was it called?”
“Come inside, Granny,” Christian says. The robot is half way up the staircase. “Show me my old room. I’ve never slept so peacefully as here.” Not even in the cold and quiet of space.
In his old room, a stranger in beige overalls looks up from an expanse of glowing smartpaper unrolled across the bed. Her skin is the colour of kelp forests. A greenstone pendant hangs around her neck. Black hair is trapped in a neat bun at her nape. Her thighs spread like steak under a spatula over the sheets; she’s almost as wide as she is tall, and big-breasted.
Her brown eyes measure him, top to toe.
“You’re the grandson,” she says, corner of her mouth twitching upwards. “The astronaut.”
“I’m sorry
but I’m not sure who you are, ma’am,” Christian says, shocked back to schoolboy manners simply by being in the room. Granny has bustled away behind him to fetch clean towels.
“I’m Maata Irihana,” she says, “Chief Geotechnical Engineer. Your grandmother seized hold of me in the fruit market and insisted I abandon my portable on-site office and stay with her. Also, I think she needed someone to carry the very large bag of rice she’d just finished haggling down.”
Irihana, Christian thinks, blinking. I know that name.
“The oncology nurses come twice a week to check on her,” Maata goes on, “but it’s palliative care only. She can’t remember that she has cancer. Thinks it’s a cold. They told me she has weeks to live. I’m so sorry.”
Christian steps back from her.
“I came to convince her,” he says, “to come with me to London.”
“Then you’ve come for nothing.”
He realises what he’s really come for even as he articulates it.
“I came to see her and the island one last time.”
The corner of Maata’s mouth twitches again.
“Better.”
“I’ll let you get back to it, then,” Christian says, lingering in the room, wanting her to offer it to him even as it sinks in that every surface is covered in smartpaper. Wires connecting them to the single power socket twist in snarls around the bedposts.
“I work remotely from here,” Maata says. “On the Anguilla project and also one I’m due to start in Morocco when this one is done. Twice a week, when the nurses come to take care of your grandmother, I go to the bore site to supervise some. Pick up some shopping, but the main reason is to meet with the corporation chair. Your brother, Roy.”
Bridging Infinity Page 29