Tamaruq

by E. J. Swift

  The message from the daily scout report is unambiguous. Taeo Ybanez’s partner is in Patagonia, and she is looking for the Osirian.

  This unexpected development throws the camp into turmoil and presents Vikram with a new quandary. He had anticipated there might be repercussions from the holoma, but not this – not the woman in person. And it appears she is travelling with someone: another Antarctican exile, a man who has been in the country for over a decade, whose loyalties are questionable, to say the least. Shri’s presence, and the openness of her mission, creates a new danger. The longer she is out there, asking questions, making herself visible, the greater the possibility of attracting attention to their camp. She has already veered close to their island.

  Vikram gives instructions to leave her looking. They have a departure date from El Tiburón. They don’t have to hold out for much longer. He tries to shut out memories of Taeo, dead on his back, the lingering fumes of opium, the hologram of his partner, frozen. But they refuse to go quietly.

  ‘Please eat something,’ says Ivra. ‘I’m worried about you.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You have to eat. I can’t let you get sick.’

  ‘I’m not hungry, Ivra. Anyway, we should conserve what we have. Please, just leave me in peace.’

  She is thinking of Tuesday. That Tuesday, now the only Tuesday which matters. The word they used was accident, not suicide, but accident is easier to say: blameless, requiring no interrogation. How is she to know the truth? The truth is that Taeo changed, and she did not see it. She can only guess at when and how the process began. Was it standing in the room at the Facility, a space with four walls but in every other way the antithesis of home? Was it this whispering, allusive climate that did it? The way the trees communicate at night? Or exile to a place forgotten and insignificant where it is possible to become forgotten and insignificant, or realize that you always were, or at least come to believe it.

  Or further back: perhaps in the moment of crossing, the moment over water, caught between two countries. Or the morning of waking, to discover anew what he had done, the morning she stood over him and said tell me this is a terrible mistake, Taeo, tell me and even as he opened his eyes, bleary and bloodshot, she knew it was not and that the consequences would be severe and brutal. Or at the point of composing, drunk but in a state of what he claimed was clarity. Or before that. When he put his DNA to the super-ships contract. When they moved into the central, more affluent part of Vosti with credit from a job in Civilian Security. When Kadi was born and they looked at their tiny daughter covered in blood and mucus and felt for the first time the weight of responsibility for a lifetime beyond their own.

  She finds her thoughts turning to Cataveiro. When she first arrived in Patagonia the idea had seemed absurd, a lunatic’s cause. Now she can see how one might, suddenly, take flight, embark on the lunatic mission. That this might bring her closer to him.

  Ivra is studying her worriedly.

  ‘At least have some water,’ he presses.

  ‘They must be following us,’ she says. ‘Civilian Security. Our defenders. They said they’d be right behind me. But I’ve never seen them. Not a glimpse, not even during that storm. We might have died. Perhaps something’s happened. Perhaps they don’t need me any more and they’ve left us out here. Have you thought of that, Ivra? Have you considered that they’ve abandoned us, you and me both?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he says absently. ‘I used to believe in the Republic, you know. Then I realized they’d fucked over this country as much as the Boreals. Though the Boreals might still be worse. You know they have treatments, for what people here call the jinn, for the older redfleur strains? Price they put on it, you’ve got to be a tycoon to import that stuff.’

  She watches the wave caps ruffling the strait below.

  ‘You’ve got a thing for the Patagonians, don’t you, Ivra?’

  ‘I just see things how they are.’

  ‘You ever think about where you come from?’

  ‘My home town?’

  ‘I mean your family. Your ancestry, the old countries.’

  ‘Not before I came here. Then, maybe. But Brazil’s a desert now. I went once, to the edge. It’s true I felt something there, a call, I can’t explain it. Like I could walk out and keep on walking, like if I gave up my life for the desert it would give back something so… exquisite, it wouldn’t matter that I was dead.’

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ she says.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he says. ‘Nor do I.’

  ‘This country makes you think too much.’

  ‘It does something.’

  ‘She’s on the next island,’ says the scout. ‘She’s been there for the past twenty-four hours, on the beach. Just sitting there.’

  ‘She’s a problem,’ says the Alaskan. ‘You need to deal with her.’

  ‘You can’t bring her here,’ says Mig furiously.

  ‘I didn’t say bring her here,’ says the Alaskan. ‘I said deal with her.’

  ‘So you want to kill her?’ Mig turns to Vikram, his eyes bright with rage and hurt. ‘That’s what she means. It’s what she does!’

  The Alaskan rolls her eyes. Mig can see what she’s doing. Bending them, playing them like cards. Don’t listen to him, she seems to say. He’s only a boy. What does he know?

  ‘Nobody’s going to kill anyone,’ says Vikram. ‘She’s not to be harmed. That’s an order.’ He sits in thought. ‘If she’s still there tomorrow I’ll go to her. But not on the beach. Get her somewhere out of sight.’

  Mig slouches away. This is a ridiculous plan. He goes to sit by his radio hub, an activity which usually calms him, or at least offers a distraction. He fiddles with the dials, trying to find a better signal. There is never a good signal here. He misses the music stations, the samba and the tango and the drums. You can’t get a murmur out of Station Cataveiro. He has spent hours trying to trap a station that might play the recording of Pilar’s last fado, but he’s never heard it, not once, though he knows it’s out there and others have, have spoken of the beautiful voice, a voice of angels, like nothing you’ve heard before. Is this Pilar’s last laugh? Her voice is like a spirit that loiters just behind your shoulder but disappears in the moment you turn, giggling to itself, pleased with the joke.

  He hasn’t been long at the hub when he hears the unmistakeable sound of the Alaskan wheeling across the ground towards him. Mig stiffens. He keeps his back turned and concentrates on the radio he is working with.

  The Alaskan rolls to a halt.

  ‘What a neat little setup, Mig,’ she says. ‘Funnily enough, it reminds me of the one we had in Cataveiro.’

  Ignore her, he tells himself fiercely. Ignore the freak.

  ‘And how are you enjoying being the Osirian’s shrimp?’ she continues.

  How he hates that voice. He shouldn’t respond, he knows he shouldn’t – but he can’t help himself.

  ‘I’m not his shrimp.’

  ‘As you say,’ says the Alaskan. ‘As you say.’

  Mig resists the urge to get the rope and throttle her there and then.

  ‘I’m working,’ he says instead.

  ‘And I’m sitting.’

  ‘You can sit somewhere else.’

  ‘I’m nicely accommodated just here, in this… charming patch of dirt.’

  Her eyes glint, the way they do when she is sparring with some unfortunate in her debt. She is enjoying his discomfort.

  ‘You left me alone in Cataveiro, Mig,’ she says. ‘Left me to die, like a rat in a trap.’

  ‘You didn’t though, did you?’ he says savagely. ‘You didn’t die.’

  He turns his back but there is no point in trying to work the radios with the Alaskan lurking a pace away; equally he does not want to move, to leave the radios in her proximity and concede that she has won, so he sits in seething silence, making a show of listening to the spluttery signal, until he notices someone is watching them. Watching, but pretending n
ot to. It’s one of the sailors who came with them to meet the pirate.

  Deliberately now, Mig gets up and goes to join the sailor.

  ‘Is it true, what the pirate said? That she’s a…’ the sailor hesitates. ‘A nirvana?’

  ‘She told me herself,’ says Mig. ‘You should stay away from her.’

  ‘Vikram trusts her.’

  ‘Vikram doesn’t know her. I do.’

  The Alaskan remains by the radios, her head tipped back to absorb every available ray of the sunlight. A smile on her sagging face.

  ‘You think she’d betray us?’ asks the sailor.

  ‘Those monsters you were talking about? The blood-suckers?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘That’s her,’ says Mig. ‘That’s what she is.’

  Shri Nayar. Vikram recognizes her straight away, although she looks different from the woman in the holoma, lesser somehow, drained and exhausted. She is barely able to sit upright. The Antarctican exile hovers protectively nearby.

  ‘I’m Vikram Bai,’ he says. ‘I know you’re looking for me.’

  Her eyes raise slowly to meet his. She has the gaze of a woman who is broken. He sees the depth of despair there and recognizes her loss for his own. Too quickly he remembers Taeo’s corpse, with the bruises he had inflicted upon the other man still visible on the rigid flesh. He remembers the hologram of Shri, how Taeo’s last thought had been for his partner back home.

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ he says. ‘You’re a danger to us. I’ve come to ask you to leave.’

  Shri does not answer.

  ‘You need to leave – today,’ he says. ‘You’re putting my camp in danger. You may not realize it, but you are.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘They’ve abandoned us. There’s no one out there.’

  Her gaze slides away.

  ‘There’s no one,’ she says.

  Stars help him but she reminds him of Adelaide, Adelaide as he found her in the unremembered quarters, barely alive, those last few hours they spent together. He knows what it is to lose someone you love. With difficulty, Vikram resists the comparison. He reminds himself of the blood tracker they used in Osiris. What if the Antarcticans are using something similar?

  ‘Shri. Please understand. I can’t help you. I can’t bring Taeo back to you. You need to go home.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ she whispers. ‘What happened to my man?’

  ‘He missed you,’ says Vikram.

  She starts to cry.

  ‘Please, take me with you,’ she implores. ‘Please.’

  Vikram debates. Everything that is logical tells him it’s madness to let this woman near the camp. But in thirty-six hours, they’ll be meeting the pirate. He’ll be off the archipelago, the camp will disperse. What is more dangerous, to take Shri with him or to leave her here? Sometimes, he thinks, you just have to go with what your gut tells you.

  ‘I need to check you’re not carrying anything,’ he says.

  She nods. The women in the party take Shri aside and strip-search her while Vikram and the men search Ivra. He submits resignedly. The women shout back – ‘She’s clean!’

  Reassured, they give the two Antarcticans fresh clothes. Everything they are wearing or carrying is confiscated. Vikram instructs one of the sailors in the team to take the bundle out to sea and dump it.

  Thirty-six hours. Thirty-six hours, and he’ll be on his way. Vikram wishes it were tonight. They can’t afford to wait.

  The camp is chaotic with preparations. A select delegation will be travelling with Vikram to Osiris; the others are free to stay or move on, but most have elected to maintain their small community, although Vikram has advised them to relocate. The atmosphere is excited, almost delirious with a sense of imminent discovery. Osiris will have the answers they seek. The agreement with El Tiburón has only reinforced Vikram’s status and the Alaskan’s role in securing it seems to have outweighed the revelation of her secret identity. Mig has seen her, laughing and joking with the inhabitants of the camp, with all the insouciance of a woman without a past, a woman who has never owned a book of those in debt to her, or arranged the release of mass murderers from prison.

  Only Mig does not share in the enthusiasm. He can’t.

  As if it weren’t bad enough having the Alaskan on site there’s now the Tarkie woman as well, who arrived with a Tarkie spy in tow, a man who upon seeing the camp looked like he might burst into tears, a man so obviously broken Mig can only think of him as a liability, and he told Vikram so – told him explicitly that Mig wouldn’t have him in any crew of his, wouldn’t task him to pickpocket a five-year-old. But Vikram barely listened. He was too distracted by the woman. They entered the camp together, something protective in the way Vikram showed Shri around, shielding her from questions.

  Mig doesn’t like it. He doesn’t trust the Alaskan and he doesn’t trust the murdering bastard of a pirate with his too-soft voice and he doesn’t trust this woman, Shri Nayar. Mig is beginning to wonder if he’s backed the wrong man, if that sense of special that first drew him to the Osirian is going to turn out to be nothing more than Vikram’s downfall. Back when it was just the two of them, Vikram would have listened.

  The Alaskan’s words gnaw at him. Mig isn’t anyone’s shrimp.

  And soon enough, she’ll find that out for herself.

  Vikram lies on the cabin bedroll running every last detail through his head. Everything is in place for their departure. El Tiburón is to collect them at dawn. He can think of nothing he has missed.

  He is desperate to get going. The camp has been a strange place, not unhappy, but a place where he has struggled with himself, where he still struggles to reconcile a destiny over which he feels no control. There are moments when he has felt himself enjoying the sense of authority, and if it weren’t for the odd combination of Mig and the Alaskan to keep him grounded, he might have found himself a little too comfortable. A false king in a false empire.

  Despite everything Mig has told him of the Alaskan’s misdeeds, he feels an affinity for the old woman. He is still in two minds about what to do with Mig. It feels wrong to take the boy with him, on a journey whose only certainty is danger and where there is no guarantee of survival, even if they make it back to Osiris – but it feels wrong to leave him behind. Or is he just being selfish? Knowing he wants to keep the boy with him, when the responsible thing would be to make Mig stay in Patagonia, in safety. But is it fair to deny him the choice?

  He is never going to sleep. There is too much anticipation in the air. All of the hopes and worries of his renegade camp seem to crowd the atmosphere, leaching out the oxygen. His chest feels as tight as if he is standing at the top of an Osirian tower.

  Resigned, Vikram gets up and pulls on his boots, shutting the cabin door gently behind him. He walks through the camp, passing the tents at the edge of the clearing with their sleeping occupants, and moving into the trees. The forest canopy filters out the starlight, and it is almost completely dark, but Vikram doesn’t need light. The Alaskan’s cabin, with its untrustworthy occupant, is still and silent.

  He has no way of knowing whether she has told him the truth. He only knows what he has seen: the acquiescence of the pirate. They are not people he would choose to ally himself with, but he lost the luxury of choice a long time ago.

  He goes beyond the camp, slowly treading its perimeter. He feels a wave of gratitude towards the forest, which has been kind, granting them refuge, keeping them safe at a time when they had nothing. The forest has allowed him to regroup. To build something. Some of the camp may stay, but not forever, and once they have departed it will return to what it was, silver-barked, murmuring trees and the undisturbed floor of the forest, soft with mulch, gently composting. There will be no trace of the nights that have passed here, the impassioned discussions, the plans, the uncomplicated fervour of those who found him, who found in this place a mission to distract from their own grief. All that will be gone.

  Vikram stops to
exchange a few words with the sentries, who seem unsurprised to see him. Their mood is quiet but confident. He wonders what they will do when tomorrow is over, and when he – if he – is on the seas, bound for Osiris. A part of him wants to ask but he holds back, acknowledging the transient nature of their meeting, the way lives cross and have importance to one another and then move on, with nothing known of before or after, and no likelihood of meeting again. He leaves the sentries to their posts.

  He has an irrepressible urge to see the sky as he would see it from the sea, uncluttered by the topography of land. He clambers up into a tree not far from the clearing. The sensation of lifting himself into this growing thing remains one of his greatest pleasures: one of the rare and treasured moments which feels like it belongs solely to him. He climbs as high as his weight permits.

  The southern constellations are bright and clear. The upper part of the tree lofts in a gust of wind and for a moment it is possible to imagine himself back in Osiris, lying on a raft rack or a western bridge with the sea moving somewhere beneath him, the constant, ever-shifting motion of the waves. A memory comes to him: his friends Nils and Drake, both drunk, supporting one another as they staggered over a bridge, the southern lights radiating above them, Drake pointing up to the sky.

  Aurora australis.

  How do you know? he had said, or something like that, not realizing, having no inkling of just how much they did not know. Of a world they had imagined only in ground-dreams. If Vikram succeeds in returning to Osiris, his mission will not be confined to redfleur: he intends to find out what they did not know. To discover who has told them these lies. He will fish the culprits out, one by one, at sea or on land. This he promises himself. This he will do, for Nils and Drake. For Adelaide, the woman he loved. For Adelaide, who never knew the truth about the city that killed her.

  Lost in thought, it is only because of his vantage point in the tree that Vikram notices movement in the camp. The flap of a tent peels open and the Antarctican woman crawls out, moving with slow and clearly deliberate stealth. She doesn’t zip the door to the tent closed, and Vikram realizes she must have left it open all night, precisely so as not to alert anyone with the distinctive sound. As he watches, the woman straightens, hugs her coat around her body, and sets off into the cover of the trees.