Corvus

  'Know . . . don't know . . . none of it matters. It's a long time ago.' He went to the hob to stir the soup.

  It will always matter. And it will always matter that he won't talk about it. She watched him lifting the spoon to his lips for a taste. She watched him scoop coarse salt from the cellar with his fingers and fling it carelessly into the soup, then a second lot. A third.

  'Zach,' she said, as he delved once again into the salt. 'Whatever happened, it's not your fault.'

  He swung round, spraying a spoonful of hot broth across the floor. A few drops landed on the table, on her face.

  'You don't know what you're talking about!' he said.

  'Don't I?'

  For a moment she hears herself telling him, sees him holding her, feels him sponging off the dirty, sweaty traces with those beautiful fingers. He would never fingerprint a child with four-letter words, with fingers inked in secrets. Laura repeated Zach's words to herself, pondering: 'when the time comes . . .'

  'What you said before, does that mean you can have children?' she asked. 'I mean, someone told me that simus are . . . I don't know, sterile or have a low sperm count, or something.'

  'Why do you want to know? You're obviously not trying out for the team.'

  Laura folded her arms on the table and lowered her head, suddenly fighting back tears. It was time to ring her dad. At least he'd answer some of her questions, Max maybe a few more. As to the rest . . . Janey always said that if you weren't prepared to lose sometimes, you'd best stick to a bikini and sand in your crotch and a slobbering dog trying to wolf your cheese baps. And blokes like Tim and Damien, an Owen if you were lucky. Her hand crept to her neckline where Zach's chain lay like a golden rune against her skin. In rough seas it's much harder to hoist anchor; she fingered the links without hauling up the seal. Years from now would another wear it, its secrets undecipherable?

  Chapter 34

  Zach stumbles from the canoe, chastened by the ease with which Uakuak, despite his age, has pulled for hours against a sea becoming rougher and rougher, a surly headwind. They've beached near a camp from which several young boys erupt at a brisk trot to help drag the kayaks over the groundfast ice to safety. A necessary precaution, Angu explains, because the wind, already erratic, may shift direction and tumble debris about. 'Like feathers from moulting snow geese,' says Pani gleefully, with a child's delight in cataclysm.

  Even from a distance Zach can see that the hunters' camp is surprisingly good-sized. Still warmed by exertion, he hangs back until Pani takes his hand. 'Come on, Zach, I'm hungry.'

  As they approach the camp, some of the dogs rise so sluggishly to their feet, and some not at all, that Zach reckons they've just been fed. A rich meaty aroma wraps its fingers round his gut and tugs. Saliva spurts into his mouth, and he stops to sniff.

  'Fresh seal,' Pani says. 'Yum.'

  The large snowhouse is built like a spoked wheel, with a communal workroom at its hub and tunnels leading to private family quarters radiating outwards on all sides. At a guess, there are about forty people sharing the winter camp. Because he's a stranger, Zach learns from Pani, he's been given a small chamber of his own, one vacated in his honour by a young couple with a tiny infant. He washes and changes into the traditional clothes that Pani's big sister Nashuk offers him, her eyes as lively as her brother's. Pani reluctantly returns Zach's pocket knife, fascinated as any lad with a new gadget he's been allowed to play with.

  The day's hunt has been successful, so there's plenty of stew to go round. Zach eats with the men and older boys, then listens sleepily to the talk while they mend dog harnesses: the typical male-only jokes, the swapping of stories, a complaint or two, a long, detailed, occasionally derailed and increasingly heated back-and-forth about tomorrow's hunt which reveals a good deal about the social fabric of this little community. Newcomers are encroaching on traditional territory, rogue hunters, as yet unsighted, who don't scruple to slaughter dogs and leave their carcases strewn about. There's some mystery about the tracks, but Zach doesn't follow all the speculation. (Did someone really say rabbit head snow?) These outsiders appear to hunt with large birds of prey, since outsized feathers have been found twice near the remains. Egged on by Angu, a number of the younger men argue for an aggressive course of action, a trap or ambush. Uakuak has Pani fetch a black feather to show Zach, who, despite its striking length and exquisite indigo shimmer, is unable to identify its source. Perhaps now the old man will quietly drop his shaman nonsense. There are no sideways glances at Zach, no sly or provocative remarks, no cross-examination—no questions whatsoever, in fact. If the men are disappointed, they're too polite to make it obvious, and he returns their courtesy with a tale about a girlfriend, a pair of thermal pants, and a jealous wolf pup, only slightly exaggerated.

  He basks in their laughter, some of it undoubtedly relief that, at least for the moment, tempers have been diffused. In this crowded, smoky, noisy, almost festive room, constructed from little more than ice, how easy it is to be seduced by hospitality and warmth, by simple acceptance! Through the long years at the Foundation he'd carried mistrust in his back pocket. Friendships would struggle to survive among the tensions and rivalries and loneliness, the undercurrents and homesickness, part boarding school and part something else entirely. Adult hypocrisy is destructive to kids, but nothing like the harm that comes from treating them like lumps of clay, malleable but inanimate. And a touch rank. You need to matter.

  One thing he's never done is fool himself. The Janus don't want Zach, they want Corvus. They want a leader and a hero and a legend. They want a fantasy.

  But dreams matter.

  Pani tugs at his sleeve. 'Come on,' he whispers, 'they're going to play games just now. If you tell them you're tired, you can teach me some more songs.' He remembers his manners. 'Please, Zach, if you don't mind.'

  Zach suppresses a bubble of laughter. The boy's face is so earnest.

  'Aren't you tired too? You've been out all day.' Pani's eyes light up when Zach adds, 'Paddling the kayak as hard as your dad.'

  'I'm strong!' Pani boasts, then immediately looks contrite. 'I mean, I'm not really anything special, I can't even handle more than three dogs at once, all the other boys are stronger than me, even most of the girls.' He glances round, then drops his voice. 'Don't tell Grandfather I was bragging, please.'

  Laura hadn't told him how she felt about children. Not the sort of thing you talk about at their age—and not with an auger.

  Zach makes his excuses to the elders. Considerably taller than his hosts, he tries to ignore the ache in his stiffening muscles as he hunches over to follow Pani through the tunnel, wondering whether he will ever stand under a hot shower again. At the entrance to Zach's quarters, Pani lifts aside the caribou-skin hangings which serve as a door. The iglu ought to be warm and softly lit, since Nashuk left a kudlik burning, but as Pani steps into the room he squawks in surprise and grabs at Zach's arm.

  'What's wrong?' Zach asks, but in a moment his eyes have adjusted to the bright glare. Fatigue forgotten, he motions for Pani to remain by the curtain and approaches the slab of ice on which his clarinet rests.

  'It's beautiful,' Pani whispers.

  When Zach glances back, the transformation—or illusion—is complete. The skin hangings have disappeared, and the two of them are standing in a circle of free-standing ice columns at least three times Zach's height, each as flawless as the next. As far as he can tell, they're spaced at equal intervals from one another. Slowly he swivels in place, marvelling, speculating, their strange perfection suggestive of something deeply mathematical—Sean once said that the difference between man and machine is creative pattern matching ('You've got to teach those silicon buggers what to look for, no?'), and the difference between a good musician and a great one, knowing when (and how) to subvert the pattern. Zach counts, then puzzled, makes a second pass. After two further attempts in which he positions Pani by one of the pillars as a place marker, he gives up in defeat. Either their number isn't const
ant, or there's some other principle at work here.

  'Where are we?' asks Pani, returning to Zach's side.

  'I wish I knew,' Zach answers. 'But I don't think we're in any danger.'

  The temperature, though cool, is perfectly comfortable, and the air wears the crispness of freshly laundered clothes, with a hint of bleach. Underneath their feet is a layer of hard-packed snow which extends in all directions. The landscape, flat and featureless, bears no resemblance to any place he's ever encountered, particularly because there is no sky and no horizon, no depth and no gradient. He's reminded of the whiteouts on training sessions and once on a previous run, but for the pervasive blue colour. And in a whiteout, visibility is almost zero, whereas here you seem to be able to see forever.

  'Stay here,' Zach says.

  His tattoo is itching, and he knuckles his chest as he walks beyond the perimeter of the ring, stopping to brush the nearest pillar cautiously with his fingertips—cold, but no jolt of electricity, no sudden revelations, no transubstantiation. Ice.

  To reach Ultima Thule, the ancients believed, would be to command the most northern place on earth, the most remote. For centuries it was dreamt of, searched for, evoked, feared. Like all such grails—or Arctic mirages, depending on your place in history, your temperament—Thule claimed hundreds, maybe thousands of lives, most of them unrecorded. Now with the Poles mapped and melting, and ice hotels offering package tours and honeymoon suites, Thule has retreated from myth to cyberspace: 'We finally own reality,' Zhou said in his acceptance speech for the Wolf Prize.

  A few paces beyond the columns Zach glances back to check on Pani, who has picked up the clarinet. 'Go ahead, blow it a bit,' Zach says, hoping to keep the boy from straying while he himself investigates. When he hears the first notes of Let It Be, which he'd played for Pani at their first meeting, he looks over his shoulder to flash appreciation, but his smile fades as soon as he realises that he hasn't covered any distance. He turns on his heel and tries walking backwards away from the circle, but his eyes tell him that he's merely moving in place. Then he notices the cylinders of ice. Originally clear, they're now slightly cloudy, and a fine network of cracks is beginning to appear on their surface the way a frozen puddle fractures underfoot.

  'Stop!' he shouts, already halfway across the intervening space.

  The columns return to their pristine state as soon as Pani removes the clarinet from his mouth. He hands it to Zach, who licks his lips the way he usually does before preparing to play, then licks and licks again. Pani watches him without a word. Finally Zach raises the clarinet and blows a single note, his eyes on the columns. When nothing happens, he plays a C-major scale in one octave, very softly. This time the ice begins to glow with a distinctive lemony smell—no, that can't be right. He takes a deep breath and tries a chromatic scale. The rainbow of sensations along his skin brings tears to his eyes, and he's afraid if he doesn't stop he'll embarrass Pani with an erection. 'I want to memorise your skin,' Laura said, 'but every day—every minute—it's different. Always yours, yet always different. I'm going to need a very long time to try.'

  Zach reaches below his neckline for Laura's pendant, whose chain is tangled with Angu's leather thong. Encircling both ivory and gold, his fingers tingle—a dread of failure transcribed in bits.

  'Her spirit sings,' Pani says. 'She must be very beautiful.'

  'Yes, very.' Then after a moment of disorientation, 'Who?'

  'The White Seal. She always chooses a powerful shaman.'

  'Yeah, well, you've got a good imagination. I'm not a shaman.'

  'But you've brought us here.' Pani sweeps his arm in a wide arc. 'And your music changes the patterns in the ice.'

  'Yours did too.'

  'Maybe Grandmother is right. Tornarssuk often visits me in my dreams.'

  Zach looks swiftly round, but if the air stirred his hair, it was from an imperceptible source.

  'A polar bear talks to you?'

  Pani can't quite suppress the note of pride. 'It's a sign. A powerful white bear will come to swallow me so that I can travel to the spirit realm and be reborn.' Then shrewdly, 'You've also seen Tornarssuk.'

  'Not in that way.'

  'Yes, in that way,' Pani insists in a manner which adds years to his age. 'You're a stranger, you don't know the legends. While you were playing, your skin changed.'

  'My skin?'

  'Your spirit skin. Everyone has one, but yours is very strong.' Pani squints at Zach. 'Right now it's salty orange like char roe.'

  'I hope your family doesn't decide to roast me.'

  'You shouldn't joke about spirit matters!' Then his eyes glint. 'But of course, a shaman follows other rules.' His grin lacks only the telltale ring of chocolate. 'When I've done something they don't like, it's kind of useful.'

  Zach laughs, then opens his hand to show Pani the pendants. 'Do you really hear her?'

  Pani nods.

  'Then I'll need your help to find her.'

  'She'll be my Seal if I sing her, not yours. She's different for each of us.'

  Zach doesn't know what to say to this—doesn't even know if they're speaking the same language. In the last century technology had driven most shamanic societies to extinction—occasionally underground. And now Wu's theorems have rendered non-scientific models of consciousness entirely anachronistic: stuff for the historians and cultural anthropologists and odd fringe group (homo sapiens is a notorious recidivist), though the big-time religions have managed to hang on through some curious rationalisations. Bizarre rationalisations, which at the Foundation were always good for a laugh at mealtime—without warning, Axel winks at him in that cocky way he had before Martens and Jiao and that cold bitch Malovich ground away his 'rough edges'. A few kids had shattered beneath the rasp and file of discipline. We're simus, for godsake. Why have we taken it?

  Why hasn't he tried to find out what happened to Axel?

  Axel, who'd replaced Donald as their roommate. Axel, who played poker like a pro. Axel, who started an investment club—invitation only—with first-year returns which might have been beginner's luck if the second and, sadly, final year hadn't provided Zach with a portfolio he's been smart enough to hang onto. Axel, who in that second year took to mumbling right before he fell asleep, nothing Zach could make out. The cantillated rhythm of it though. In sleep Axel's eyes would flicker wildly beneath lids of delicate veined glass. And Gould was loyal enough to keep his mouth shut, and plainly unwilling to risk his stake in their roommate's market savvy, even when Zach ended up, night for night, crooning lullabies in a half-forgotten tongue, guttural yet magical like all the secret languages of childhood.

  (Another of those shameful secrets—afterwards, he missed comforting the tormented boy.)

  Zach shifts his gaze to an imaginary point in the distance, or what ought to be distance. His earliest memories are of music—sometimes lilting, sometimes mawkish, sometimes discordant; never less than enthralling. His mother sang at bedtime or at work: certain songs ambush him even now with a frisson of pure feeling, of longing primal and inexplicable. At once he hears the voice, the glorious liquid voice of the cello which drew him away from the stall and through the small rutted carpark, past the rusting postbox with its dangling door, down the flagged path, and into the ramshackle farmhouse itself. 'It's the Adagio from the Haydn Concerto in C,' Marc said. 'Do you want to hear it from the beginning?' Nobody in his home played a string instrument, and Oupa's recorder would only come out on special occasions. Once he was allowed to cycle on his own, he followed the sinuous melodic trail to the farm, several kilometres distant. Two men, sapiens both, yet they didn't mind his visits. Sean gave him his first clarinet, taught him the rudiments of wind technique and theory. They continued to play duets long after Zach's skill outstripped his mentor's. Men who deserved a better end. For a short time in the latter half of the twentieth century, homosexuality was tolerated, even welcomed. He's often wondered if the reversal of public sentiment had anything to do with the advent of au
gmented cognition.

  Zach snicks his tongue in annoyance. There's something refractive about the illusion of infinite distance that is forcing his eye inward, as though to generate a vanishing point within himself. He's always depended on the extraordinary accuracy of his senses, with hearing quite possibly the last he'd relinquish voluntarily. But what happens when far becomes near? Or cold becomes sweet or noisy or heavy? Or all of them? Or none? He rubs two fingers over his tattoo, then drops his hand in dismay when he hears the itching in his through his beyond his skin.

  'You see,' Pani says. 'Shamans speak in music.'

  'I promise you, Pani, I'm not a shaman.'

  'It's all right, I won't tell anyone if you want to keep it secret.'

  'And I won't teach you another note if you persist in transposing me into a different key.'

  'What's that?'

  'Listen carefully, I'm going to try something.' Fixing his gaze on the nearest column, he raises the clarinet to his mouth.

  There is no flash of blinding light, no roll of thunder. Lev simply steps from the ice. A Lev for each pillar, astonishingly, but then Zach blinks and the multiplicity is gone.

  'Tornarssuk,' Pani breathes.

  Don't mock him, Zach begs Lev silently. And indeed Lev acknowledges Pani's awe with an easy, almost indulgent grace. Teachers ought to be screened for downright decency; parents too. Something tells Zach that this man—man?—would consider it an honour to be called a teacher. He smiles at Pani, then strides to the caribou hangings as though their reappearance were perfectly natural.

  'Your family will soon start fretting. Go back now,' Lev says, parting the skins. 'Your turn will come.'

  Pani has trouble wearing solemnity for long. As he bows, his eyes fillip a look of delight and mischief and smugness at Zach before slipping into the access tunnel. Lev adjusts the pelts so that there is no crack for a draught to penetrate, while Zach, to dispel the feeling of sway and dip, the slight sense of vertigo, closes his eyes and runs a hand over the clarinet, not trusting his eyesight. Not quite trusting his fingers either.