by E. J. Swift
Ramona knows all this and she knows that she will heed none of it. That is why she is taking things out of her pack, placing each item on the floor, checking it over, and then returning it. Because she also knows there are treatments that exist outside Patagonia, and that there are a few individuals who are wealthy enough to import those cures.
Northern cures.
I am not going to let you die, Ma.
She puts the letter away, folds the blankets and clips up the bunk.
Goodbye, room.
When Ramona was very young, her mother stepped on a poisonous snake. Her foot swelled up to twice its natural size, and her face was clenched in pain and fear. She could hardly speak. The children had to guess by her gestures what to do. It was Ramona who made the incision in the skin, and the poison seeped out.
When she was older, and Inés would say things like her body was an old husk of skin and bone and she might as well die, after all, what point was there for her to live when she had already buried two children, Ramona would remember the snake bite. When her mother bemoaned the fact that her only surviving child was a crazy one and used a flying machine – a flying machine, a Neon abomination that goes against every teaching of the Nazca – and that Inés should surely dig her own grave right now, Ramona would remember the relief that came to her mother’s face in the aftermath: Inés did not want life snatched away from her. She wanted to live.
A knock on the door, quiet, cautious. Ramona looks at her watch. The second hand ticks. It is only half past five; even Lygia would not be chasing her this early. She stands silently and does not answer.
The knock is repeated, a little louder this time.
‘Ramona? I have to talk to you.’
The voice is muffled but she recognizes the speaker: it’s the Antarctican, Taeo. What does he want?
She opens the door. Taeo is standing in the corridor. He looks dishevelled and very agitated. She can smell residues of the smoke on him.
‘What?’
‘Not out here,’ he hisses.
She checks the corridor in both directions. It is empty.
‘All right, come in,’ she says. ‘Make it quick.’
The Antarctican is tall with gangling limbs, and the small room looks even smaller with him in it. He looks at her pack, its contents strewn across the floor. He manoeuvres carefully around them.
‘You’re about to leave?’
‘Any minute.’
He nods.
‘About that favour …’
He takes something out of his pocket. It has the shape of a round, flat pebble and is entirely black. There are no distinguishing marks on its surface, but she knows, she knows it is a machine. You can’t see its workings. You can’t trust it. Involuntarily she draws back.
‘Don’t put that thing near me, please.’
‘I need you to take this to Panama,’ he says. ‘In your aeroplane.’
‘I’m not taking your filthy robotics anywhere. Don’t you have any respect? Don’t you know how we feel about those things?’
Already she can feel it, a physical, nauseating horror.
‘I know. I’m sorry,’ he says.
She wants to say: Your apologies are worthless, but the machine has such a hideous presence it seems to suck the words from her.
‘I’ll give you money.’
‘I don’t want your money.’
‘I’ll give you money, and the Antarctican network will help you to get medicine for your mother.’
She meets his gaze then. She can’t help it. His eyes are bloodshot and his face is creased with anxiety. She guesses he has hardly slept.
‘Antarctican medicine?’
‘Boreal medicine. That’s what you need, isn’t it? All you have to do is take this, and when you deliver it, tell them what I said. Antarcticans keep their word.’
The machine sits in his hand, smooth and solid against the lines of his palms. She stares at it in revulsion. Why is he doing this? Is it a test? A trap? Is he trying to set me up for something? What if he wants to track the plane, or steal it?
His hand trembles slightly. She can see the glisten of sweat there.
‘Who are you working for?’ she demands.
‘No one. Only the Republic.’
‘What is that machine?’
‘It’s a message. Please, Ramona. It’s very important that this information goes north.’
‘Important to the Republic, you mean. Important to your spies.’
‘To Patagonia as well.’
He tries to give her the machine but she flinches away. He puts it carefully on the table behind him, and instead takes out a wad of peso.
‘Whatever you need. I’ve got more.’
There is a lot of it. Cash is untraceable, she thinks. It is enough money for bribes. In Cataveiro, she will need to pay people. She can’t pick up her pay packet without seeing Lygia, and if she sees Lygia she won’t get out of the Facility without breaking out.
Fuck.
She folds her arms. ‘Look, Taeo, this is how it works. Because, believe me, you’re not the first to try and use me as your personal courier. I don’t take anything unless I know what it is. Not packages, not messages, and absolutely not machines. Got it?’
He nods. ‘This is about our shipbuilding programme.’
‘Your military programme,’ she accuses.
A tremor crosses his face. She has touched a nerve, but has no time to dig deeper.
‘Please,’ he says. ‘You can’t want the Boreals down here any more than we do.’
‘Why would they come here?’
‘If they think there’s a weakness in our programme, if they think we’re falling behind—’
‘So what am I taking, some kind of bluff? That practically makes me an Antarctican agent. I don’t want anything to do with your secret war. My country doesn’t want anything to do with it.’
He says softly, ‘You know I don’t want anything to do with it either, but there isn’t always a choice.’
She looks at the cash. Are you this easily bought, Ramona?
But the medicine … If she can’t get to the right people in Cataveiro … it’s going to cost …
‘Do you promise your people will help me?’
Taeo looks hopeful. ‘I promise.’
‘What do Antarcticans swear by?’
Confusion crosses his face and then he says, ‘We don’t worship gods.’
Nor do I, she thinks impatiently. ‘Do you have family?’
Again, the tremor. ‘Yes.’
‘Then swear by them.’
Obediently, he says, ‘I swear by my family, my people will help you to find Boreal medicine.’
She takes a deep breath.
If you agree to do this, you have to carry it through. Now, or later, whether you find medicine in Cataveiro or not. It’s a promise.
‘All right. I’ll take your machine.’
The Antarctican cannot conceal his relief. She is reminded again of Inés and the snake bite. He takes out the machine. She steels herself. When it touches her hand the nausea rises again and she fights to swallow it down. Think how you felt when you first flew Colibrí.
But the plane is different. She could never explain to Taeo the feeling of sitting in the pilot seat for the first time, watching the instrument panel flicker into life. That despite the strangeness of the technology, the overwhelming sensation was of coming home. The feeling that her life had been leading up to this moment, and knowing, without knowing how, that the plane would respond to her. She puts her faith in Colibrí as she would another human being, and Colibrí has never let her down.
The Antarctican machine is alien. It is not physically heavy but it has a weight. A presence. She imagines it breathing out invisible feelers, casting about for something – someone – to latch on to. As if it knows she is here.
‘How will I find your people?’ she asks.
‘You won’t have to. Once you reach Panama, the holoma will guide them to you.’
/> The implications of this are too horrible to think about. Ramona wishes she hadn’t asked.
‘You’ll need to activate it,’ Taeo continues. ‘Here.’
He takes her hand and folds her fingers tightly around the machine. She closes her eyes, not wanting to see. Taeo says, ‘Restrict to activation,’ and she feels something, a kind of humming sensation, right in the centre of her palm.
‘All done,’ he says. ‘When you reach Panama, you’ll need to activate it. Hold it tightly in your hand for exactly ten seconds, then release it, then hold for another five. Until you do that, it’s like carrying a stone. It won’t do anything. I know Patagonians don’t like machines. I do respect that, even if I don’t understand it.’
‘What about to deactivate it?’
‘The reverse. Five seconds, then ten.’
‘It knows my hand?’
‘Yes.’
She puts the machine in the bottom of the pack. She does not want it anywhere near her skin. Taeo gives her the money and presses another wad on her, telling her to take whatever she needs. She stuffs that in too.
‘You’ve got a lot of gear,’ he says.
She glances at him. ‘Always carry your life with you, that’s my motto. Everything I need is in this pack. If I have to run, I can run.’
‘You’ll go straight to Panama?’ he says.
‘Yes,’ she lies.
‘Thank you. Thank you, Ramona. I can’t – I can’t explain how important this is.’
His eyes are imploring, like a child’s; he wants her to believe him. Perhaps it is this that convinces her he is telling the truth. Anyway, she has made the decision now. She has to believe him.
When Taeo has gone she packs the rest of her belongings quickly. She is at the energy room by six. She signs out a couple of spare battery cells for the plane, exchanging a few pleasantries with the sleepy attendant. They treble the weight of her pack. The canteen is not yet open but she goes down to the kitchen and begs a quick breakfast from the head cook, whose daughter she flew to the inland hospital three years ago for an emergency operation. She wolfs the food standing, watching the cooks prepare the morning’s offerings. Pans clang, eggs sizzle in oil. The rich protein smell diffuses through the kitchen.
The cook catches her looking and taps her shoulder. ‘You want some chicken for the road?’
She shakes her head. ‘I had meat on Tuesday.’
He laughs. ‘You’re too conscientious. Here’s your lunch box: all local, nothing northern, no lab meat. You’re going somewhere, aren’t you? You’ve got the look. Don’t worry, we won’t tell Lygia we’ve seen you.’
The Facility is still quiet as she climbs the back stairway, her shoulders straining with the weight of the pack. She thinks, not for the first time, that departures have always characterized her life, one after another after another.
Up on the roof she cannot see anything: not the mountains, not the ocean or the island across the strait. Tierra del Fuego is entirely swathed in fog. This is a good day for pirates.
She hopes the shipping fleet is not delayed for that reason.
I wish I’d seen you before I left, Félix. I would have liked to tell you about Cerro Blanco, about the boy. About my mother. I wish I could have talked through my plan with you.
She has calculated the route. Seven and a half thousand kilometres. Six to seven days’ flying if conditions are clear, and she will have to take breaks in between flights.
Half a day to Cataveiro: city of festering dreams. If her luck is good, she will find some rich corporation owner who has medicine. If not, she’ll continue north, across poppy country, beyond the forty degree latitude line where the world empties out, through the stormlands, heading north-east to the sliding city and Inés. She’ll leave supplies with Carla, painkillers and antibiotics, and then continue north, over the highlands of ancient Brazil, veering east to the coast where there is an outside chance she will coincide with Félix as he sails north on the Aires.
Finally her mission will take her across the vast unchartered breadth of the Amazon Desert.
And so to the Panama Exchange.
She unloads the spare cells into the plane’s hull, and pulls on her flight coat and her parachute. She leaves the hatch open until the last moment, straining for external sounds. No one could possibly see her up here in the fog, but she has an unaccountable sense of something out there, watching.
Inside her boots, she can still feel grains of desert sand.
She starts the engines. No gravelly noises, everything sounds as it should. Good. Taeo did the job. The plane eases across the roof, and she sends a silent please to the monkey and the spider and the hummingbird that is drawn on the plane to preserve her life for another journey. They taxi along the roof. In this fog she is completely blind, but a screen on the instrument panel uses echolocation to draw the topography of the land in green blinking lines. She feels a surge in electrical power with the sudden resistance between plane and ground: Colibrí’s eagerness to be airborne again. They coast forwards. Momentum pins her to the chair. The plane lifts a fraction, drops, and pulls clear with a wrench that zips up her spine.
She keeps a firm hold on the yoke, lifting up through the mist. Whiteness layered upon whiteness. Five hundred metres. Eight hundred metres. She shoots out suddenly above the fog and the island is below her, the mountain peaks rising above their white swaddling. The joy that bubbles in her chest should be tempered, with fear for her mother, with anxiety that she has got away so easily and for the consequences which are bound to follow. But in these first few minutes of flying, everything else disappears in the knowledge that the skies are hers, for a time.
She increases altitude, and points the plane north, for Cataveiro.
6 ¦
THE MORNING WHITENESS dampens his hearing, uneasily melding the mutterings of the fishermen as they prepare their nets half-blind with the sound of hulls knocking against the sea walls and motors heading out to the Atlantic. A man coughs, hoarse, intermittent. The tension in the air is palpable. Taeo cannot tell if it is last night’s news, or simply the effect of the fog which obscures everything beyond a couple of metres. As he clambers past his boatman into the rocking well of the boat he sees the man’s face clearly. The Patagonian wears a sullen expression, despite his hefty bribe.
‘Let’s go,’ Taeo says.
As they edge away, Taeo thinks he hears a shout, swiftly muted. He looks back at the jetty where he was stood just moments ago and sees a dark shape, like a figure. He cannot make out a face or even limbs, but he is filled with the certainty that someone is watching him leave. For several minutes he is panic-stricken, unable to move or speak.
He tries to say something to the boatman but by the time he has gathered his composure the fog has swallowed up the figure and it is too late. He must have imagined it. Remnants of the opium are in his blood. It is making him shaky; he cannot let it compromise him. There was no one there. This country is like that, full of whispers and deceptions and the sense that the world might move away altogether, were you to turn your back at the wrong moment. There is too much history here.
‘How long will it take?’ he asks the boatman.
The man shrugs. ‘Depends on the weather.’
The boat moves steadily down the strait between Tierra del Fuego and the small island to the south, or so Taeo supposes, judging by motion alone. He can see the edges of the boat on either side and the impassive back of the boatman at the helm. He can hear the waves but he has no sense of how far they are from the shore, or where the horizon lies. The sensation is disorientating. He draws a long breath and focuses on the bag sitting at his feet. Carry your life with you, said the pilot, and he threw all sorts of things in here, some food supplies, spare clothes, his stash, the pipe, and of course the holoma from Shri. He wasn’t going to leave any of that in the Facility. You never know who might be interested in the contents of his room.
He thinks about what he might find today. There are many
stories about the lost city. Osiris is the keeper of all the ocean’s dead, for example. The dead cling to the ruins of shining towers, swimming from one to another like rotting mermaids. The city was sunk, its people live in flooded chambers below the surface and they consort with fish, as fish: their bodies have changed, adapted to their new environment. Another story says that the people of Osiris have learned to fly. They circle the city as vengeful angels, feasting upon any crew who sails within miles.
Those are the stories, gleefully recounted by children. However, there are statistics relating to Osiris. Statistics that are impossible to ignore. Taeo has never seen them in person, but he knows, as every Antarctican adult knows but rarely discusses, that the Republic monitors the sea city with long-range instruments. That duty will be carried out by a special unit of Civilian Security.
Which is he to believe in, the stories or the statistics? As an engineer, the answer should be clear, but out here it feels as though a part of his mind has been hijacked; the stories are more powerful, and in the fog they multiply. He grips the side of the boat as they enter choppier water. Glancing over the side, he half-expects to see putrescent limbs emerging from the water, scaled hands curling up to grab at his.
He’s being fanciful. Shri would laugh. This is not like him.
He takes a flask of coffee from his pack and pours himself a mug. He drinks quickly, ignoring the burning sensation on his tongue. Pull yourself together.
It is a relief when the fog finally begins to clear. They are not far from the coast after all. The boatman steers close to its rugged sage and purple shoulders. To the south is open ocean; they have left the other island behind.
He should feel worried, wary of what lies ahead, for the last thing the Republic needs is Osiris to reappear on the map. Ivra is right: the Boreal States will be quick to react, and it will be difficult, if not impossible, for the diplomats to convince them that the Republic has been unaware of the sea city’s operations these past fifty years. But disaster brings opportunity to the few. Taeo is the few; the Republic has made him that.
He sits impatiently through the rest of the journey, watching as the mist rolls back and vanishes, leaving behind a sparkling silver plain which is broken only by the white tail of their boat. He can feel the caffeine jittering through his body, chasing out the last traces of the opiates. He is ready for whatever they find.