by E. J. Swift
The pilot shakes her head.
‘I know what you’re trying to do. But I don’t care. This isn’t an option. Don’t you see? This isn’t a choice. I’ve made up my mind. I made up my mind when I went into that lab and almost got my ma killed. I’m going to Osiris.’
‘It’s a suicide mission,’ says the Alaskan.
‘I’m going with her,’ declares Mig.
‘And you should come with us,’ says the pilot. ‘We’ll need a navigator.’
‘I’ve never been to the sea city. What makes you think I can direct you there?’
The pilot taps a radio pointedly.
‘Don’t tell me you don’t know where it is.’
The Alaskan’s eyes gleam. ‘Sure you want an old nirvana with you on your little crusade?’
She notes the recognition spark in the pilot’s eyes at the word nirvana. Something has just clicked into place. But the pilot doesn’t flinch. She’s made of sterner stuff than that. The Alaskan respects that.
‘We’re going,’ repeats the pilot. ‘Mig here, and me, together. Are you with us?’
Getting the Alaskan to the plane is the problematic part. Ramona leaves Mig to stock up on provisions for the journey while she runs about town, trying to find one of the few drivers who can lend her a vehicle. The process is tedious and inevitably slowed by all the questions of people who want to know where she’s been, questions that Ramona cannot begin to answer. At last she tracks down an old army contact who says she can loan his truck for an hour.
She runs back to Arturo’s and finds Inés and her companions settled into a rhythm of steady drinking, surrounded by a rapt and growing audience. By the end of the day, each of the survivors will be famous across the archipelago. But the exhaustion on her mother’s face is evident.
Ramona slips through the crowd of spectators.
‘Ma, we need to get you a room.’
Inés shrugs her off.
‘No, no, no—’
‘You need to rest. I’ve spoken with Art. He’s going to put you up for now, until you’re strong enough to go home. Come on.’
She helps Inés climb the stairs, seeing with concern how slowly her mother moves, the extreme frailness of her body. In the relief of getting Inés to safety, she has almost forgotten that her mother is not safe at all; every day of the jinn is another day her immune system is defenceless. She tucks Inés into bed, wrapping the blankets securely around her, and places water and food at her bedside. There’s a radio in the room, and Ramona moves that too within easy reach of the bed. She lifts her mother’s wrist gently from the covers.
‘This is the first patch.’ She applies it carefully to her mother’s inner wrist. Inés twitches but does not protest. ‘Day one. It’s not going to be easy. You have to be strong. Promise me you’ll stay the course.’
Inés’s voice is a murmur.
‘Flying away, my little one?’
‘There’s something I have to do. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
‘You have it from me,’ says Inés.
‘What’s that?’
‘The going. You have it from me.’
‘Are you talking about the fugue?’
‘I don’t remember, Ramona. That is the thing.’ Her forehead crinkles. ‘I wake up in a place – oh, some places! and there is no memory. Where am I? How did I come to be here? Nothing. No places or people or things or… jaguars. Those journeys happened to a person who is not me. Sometimes I have a sense, in my stomach, a sense like my body has a memory that is not up here.’ She taps her head. ‘I have held this, I have done that. There are things I must have seen but… all I have is a fog.’
Ramona strokes her mother’s hand.
‘I’m so sorry, Ma. I didn’t know.’
‘No.’
‘I wish you’d said, before. You should have said.’
‘You ask me so many times. So I make up the stories. To have something… And now – now it’s your turn. Give me a story before you go. Maybe it’s my last.’
‘It won’t be your last. What story?’
‘Oh, any, I don’t care.’
‘All right. Let’s go with the parrot.’ Her mother smiles. ‘There was a parrot who lived in the jungle and rode on the back of the last jaguar,’ begins Ramona. ‘And as the years went by, the jungle grew smaller, and the animals grew fewer. But what most people don’t realize is their voices did not vanish with them. When an animal disappeared, its voice flew up into the atmosphere, and the parrot, spying the voice, flew up to catch it in its beak. Some of the voices were hard and reedy and some were soft and hissing but it didn’t matter to the parrot, it swallowed every single one. And when the jungle was gone the parrot had collected up all of the voices and had them safely in its stomach. But then a thing happened. The parrot…’ Ramona founders. This story should run off her tongue by rote, but the end is evading her; her mind has gone blank. ‘I’m sorry, Ma. I can’t think.’
Inés’s eyes are closed. For a terrible moment Ramona thinks she has slipped away while she was talking. Then she hears the soft hiss of an exhalation. Just sleeping. She presses her cheek to her mother’s chest, embracing her as best she can without disturbing her.
‘You’re safe now,’ she whispers. ‘Get some sleep.’
As Mig is on his way back to the Alaskan’s house a man steps directly in front of him, blocking his way. The man is heavy-set with a battered, pox-marked face and a tattoo at the edge of his eye. Mig, his arms full of bags, takes a step back.
‘Where you going with those, kid?’
‘Who wants to know?’
He darts to the side but the man moves and blocks him again.
‘I said where you going with those?’
Mig eyes the man’s frame warily, noting the way his jacket hangs. He is carrying a gun. Mig doesn’t like the look of this, he doesn’t like it at all.
‘To my employer.’
‘And who’s that?’
‘The Alaskan,’ he says boldly. He has no idea if the Alaskan’s name has the same effect here as it did in Cataveiro, but apparently she has made her mark in the few days they have been here, because the man hesitates.
‘And the pilot?’ he says.
‘What about her?’
A gaggle of young kids stream past them with minders in tow, heading for the harbour. The kids are jabbering away and the minders are hassled, struggling to keep the kids together. Mig notices they all have luggage. The town is evacuating. He uses the diversion to slip away, feeling the stranger’s eyes on his back as he hurries on.
He tells the Alaskan about the encounter.
‘He asked about the pilot. I think he’s looking for her.’
The Alaskan sighs.
‘It’s Xiomara. We have to be quick. Tell me, Mig, how is it that you always end up in the company of such dangerous people?’
None of them are as dangerous as you, thinks Mig, but now he looks at her again, something of the Alaskan’s menace seems to have diluted. She can’t force me to do what I don’t want, thinks Mig. And she knows it. For a moment, he almost feels pity.
‘She’ll be here soon,’ he says.
The pilot drives up in an old army truck. The Alaskan wheels herself outside, one-handed, sniffing the air. Mig helps the pilot lift her into the truck. The nirvana feels soft and floppy in their arms. It gives Mig a strange sensation, to touch her. Perhaps he expected her to be made of something other than flesh. He loads up the back seat with provisions and jumps in himself. The pilot lifts the chair into the back of the truck.
‘Someone’s looking for you,’ the Alaskan tells the pilot.
‘Who?’
‘Xiomara. Did I mention she’s in town? She hasn’t forgiven you.’ The pilot doesn’t say anything, but she puts her foot down on the pedal and the army truck rackets through the town’s pedestrianized streets, the pilot driving fast and not speaking, the Alaskan hanging on to the door of the truck with her good hand. Mig is bounced about with the bags of
food and water bottles. He doesn’t mind. It’s exhilarating, to be moving at such speed.
They drive out of the town, and the pilot takes them up the hill towards the mountains. Every few minutes she checks the mirror.
‘Mig, is anyone following us?’
He looks back at the road behind them. It’s empty.
‘Not yet.’
She drives faster anyway, taking reckless turns, pushing the truck higher into the mountain, where the forestry closes in upon the road, and through the other side where the trees reduce to a few isolated pines, until the road peters out into a rough track of fallen stones. The wheels of the truck scrape along the uneven terrain. They have reached a ridgeway.
The pilot cuts the engine.
‘We’ll have to walk from here.’
She pulls on her pack and lifts the Alaskan from the truck.
‘Mig, get our stuff. Rope it up – it’ll be easier for you to drag it. Quick as you can.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Down to the lake.’
The pilot goes first, carrying the Alaskan, the nirvana gripping with both arms around the pilot’s neck. They struggle down the slick dirt track. Mig can see the lake glinting ahead, a broad silver sheen like a plate of glass, reflecting the sky and the rising hills which surround it. He scans for the aeroplane but can’t see it. The bags are heavy. He stops for breath, panting, and glances back. Are Xiomara’s people behind them? No one following can fail to spot the truck parked up there.
The pilot reaches the bottom of the track and sets the Alaskan down. The Alaskan’s eyes dart about, taking in their surroundings. The lake is girdled with clumps of thick, lush reeds. An inflatable boat rests a few metres along the shore. She sees Mig puffing his way down the final few metres.
‘Well done,’ she tells the boy. Mig scowls, making it clear he doesn’t care for her approval, but says nothing. The pilot clambers back up the track and lifts the Alaskan’s chair from the truck.
‘Leave it,’ shouts the Alaskan. ‘You won’t get it in that boat.’
‘We might,’ the pilot shouts back. She manages to manoeuvre the chair awkwardly down the track.
This, thinks the Alaskan, is where things get interesting. Xiomara wants the pilot, but Xiomara is also beholden to the Alaskan, and the pilot and the Alaskan are now, to all external appearances, working together. A strike against the pilot is a strike against the Alaskan. Would Xiomara dare?
She keeps an eye on the track, the ridge, as Mig and the pilot help her into the inflatable boat, and the pilot pushes away from the shore, moving them further along the edges of the lake. The Alaskan can see the plane now. It’s a Boreal passenger plane, one that uses camo-tech, but camo-tech is visible if you know how to look for it, if you look not for the thing itself but for the intrusions the thing makes on the space around it. So the Alaskan can see where the branches of overhanging trees are pushed upwards at unnatural angles; she can see the oblong of lake where the water looks like water but not like water.
She glances back. Her chair sits on the shore of the lake, awaiting the second trip. Nothing on the ridge. The inflatable bumps against the side of the plane. Mig gasps. The boy’s never experienced anything like this before. The Alaskan used to be ferried by such airborne transports all across the northern hemisphere: planes and zeppelins, passage of the elite, the ultimate symbol of status. She hasn’t been inside an aeroplane in over half a century.
The pilot switches off the camo-tech so Mig can see the aircraft properly and they pass up the bags, one by one, the Alaskan grunting with the effort, the little boat rocking.
And then they hear a shout.
She looks back. Figures, on the ridge. They’ve been spotted.
‘Quick!’ shouts the pilot.
A shot disrupts the still waters of the lake. Their pursuers are scrambling down the track. Mig pulls himself into the plane.
‘Watch out!’
The Alaskan bends awkwardly forwards. A second shot hits the inflatable. She hears the hiss of escaping air. The boat begins to crumple around her. She can’t swim, and the bastards shooting at them know it. A trickle of water licks at her shoes.
The pilot reaches down and grabs the Alaskan under the arms. The Alaskan can feel the strength in the pilot’s shoulders, hears her gasping with the strain. Water is puddling inside the boat as the Alaskan is pulled inside the cockpit. She collapses against the interior, breathless with exertion and indignation. The pilot reaches past her and slams the hatch shut.
Xiomara’s lackeys have reached the shore. The chair is kicked aside. One of them begins to wade into the lake, raising their rifle. The pilot powers up the plane’s engines. Shot after shot glances off the cockpit windshield as the plane turns with painful slowness and begins to taxi over the water. The Alaskan feels the hum of the engines between her shoulder blades. She feels the base of power surge with the sudden resistance between plane and water, as the pilot prepares for take-off. She remembers a hundred take-offs, the specifics of each one presenting themselves to her with a pristine clarity – the weather and the mood she was experiencing and the greeting of the cabin assistant – these hundred take-offs lined up alongside one another, in preparation for a hundred destinations, a hundred goals which the Alaskan accomplished successfully, every time, because nirvanas, if they are not found out, inevitably are to be found operating at the highest levels of society, and that is where the Alaskan was, and she was good at it.
The plane lifts into the air. The pilot’s concentration is absolute. Her mind and muscles and the plane are locked in a flawless symbiosis, the pilot an extension of the machine. Mig is crouched between the pilot seat and the co-pilot seat, his eyes wide with astonishment, his breath on hold, as the world drops away.
The Alaskan sees Xiomara’s lackeys shrink to dots and vanish. As they gain height the archipelago separates into a patchwork, blue sea channels and dense green islands laced with cloud. Xiomara has defied her, outright. The Alaskan is reeling with the shock of it.
Her influence in Patagonia is waning.
The ocean to the east is as empty as the desert. The Alaskan gives Ramona co-ordinates for the sea city and the pilot obeys, locking the plane on a course which the Alaskan promises will take them directly there – to the war zone, as she says, with a reptilian glint in her black eyes which Ramona can’t interpret, which could mean any number of things, none of which Ramona is keen to imagine.
The Alaskan shows her how to use some of the plane’s robotic functions. She doesn’t like it, but she lets the Alaskan fiddle with the controls. Even if she wanted to, she doesn’t have the energy to resist. Mig watches suspiciously.
‘What’s that for?’
‘I’m putting a coded call out to El Tiburón,’ says the Alaskan.
‘How are you doing that?’
‘You wouldn’t understand if I told you, boy.’
‘I want to know.’
Ramona half-listens as the Alaskan explains her workings to Mig, the boy asking questions, the nirvana replying, their conversation a soothing circuitry as the sea passes by beneath them, dappled and wrinkled but unmarked by any other travellers. There is nothing but sea and sky, gunmetal grey and white and blue and the intermittent lance of the late afternoon sun. Cloud cover is altocumulus. Wind speed is moderate. Forget the war zone, it’s the weather that concerns Ramona. If they hit a storm, there is no shortcut back to land. They could land on water, of course, but an ocean in a storm is no more comfort than a swamp in the uninhabitable zone. Ramona keeps one eye ahead and the other behind them, wary of building cumulus. She’s afraid that her tiredness is going to affect her concentration.
As day folds into night, the plane glides on over the dark sea. Ramona checks the plane’s charge and despite her exhaustion, decides to press on for another hour. Back in the passenger hold, Mig is stretched out, asleep, but beside Ramona the Alaskan is wide awake, a blanket spread over her legs, the fingers of her good hand supporting her d
amaged wrist. Other than the pinprick of stars, the only light comes from the console. The Alaskan’s eyes are bright with it, a hard obsidian glitter, but the rest of her face is slack, and softened by the greenish glow. The plane is almost silent. Cocooned by the night sky, so far from anyone or anywhere, their aloneness feels infinite.
‘I would offer to relieve you,’ says the Alaskan. ‘But I can’t work the pedals.’
‘You know how to fly?’
‘I know the manual. That would suffice. If circumstances were different.’
‘I’ll set down soon. I have to sleep.’
‘Then I’ll keep a weather watch for you. I don’t need to sleep tonight.’
Ramona believes her. The Alaskan’s body might betray her age, but her face is perpetually alert. She wonders if it is even possible for the Alaskan to let her brain relax. Do nirvanas have dreams like other people do? Nightmares?
‘I’ll splint your wrist for you,’ she says. ‘When I’ve set down. You can’t leave it like that.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Who were you?’ Ramona asks. ‘Before you came to my country, who were you?’
‘I was a negotiator.’
‘That shouldn’t surprise me.’
‘I was the best,’ says the Alaskan simply.
‘What did you negotiate?’
‘Energy. Land. Contracts with the Solar Corporation.’ The Alaskan’s voice rasps like the strike of a match. ‘They gave me the trickiest deals. They knew I could get results.’
‘And in all these negotiations, you never heard anything about the experiments? The genetic engineering?’
‘There were rumours.’ The Alaskan turns her face to the dark glass of the windshield. ‘The name you told me. Tamaruq. I remember hearing that word. Once, maybe twice. But it is easy for people to choose not to believe. How do you think I survived as long as I did?’
‘I thought nirvanas were protected in the Boreal States.’
The Alaskan chuckles. ‘If you mean there is a law, then yes, we are protected. But as you’ve seen for yourself, the law is an ethereal thing. Slippery. Very slippery. Malleable, one might say.’ The Alaskan gazes out into the night sky. One part of her brain counts and names the southern constellations, an automatic process from which no conclusions are drawn. Just information. Gathered like dust. Dispersed like dust. ‘This world is an ugly place, Callejas. Most people prefer to keep the demons at their back and forget they’re wading through shit up to their ankles. True happiness, if such a state exists, can only be obtained through ignorance.’