The ship’s bilges are being emptied at a canal-side treatment plant. Hoses poke above the deck plates, fat eels, coursing with effluent. Smaller hoses loop like streamers between ship and shore, sucking a fresh supply of clean water into the hold tanks. As the crew busy themselves with valves and gauges, boys are stationed at each attachment point, keeping an eye on the connections for signs they might blow — a foul and hazardous occurrence.
I help Nog lock off the taps as each tank is filled, dread sitting on my bones like canker. I hope he might yet say something reassuring, but he doesn’t.
~ * ~
After supper, Galley Ma keeps me back to help, Moth unable to do her usual chores and my captain busy with Family celebrations.
She seems distracted, wiping her workbench more times than it needs, and, when the other boys have been dismissed to quarters, leads me by the hand to her blue-green globe hidden in a flour bin and her picture books tucked behind the larder.
The Families blame the weather, she whispers, but it was they who broke us. Their combined force — the right hand of retribution — came down and squeezed the Grey Zone dry of hope. After that, it seemed we all became the shadows of our former selves, under the yoke, no will left other than to comply. But the memory of our unmaking holds the key to being made again, and so I say to you, use these well, and don’t let memory rot to nothing.
Then she does a surprising thing: draws me close and kisses my head, before sending me off to my master’s well-appointed cabin.
~ * ~
Perhaps it was events at the Thirteen sale, or the capture of the Kosciusko 12, but the captain seems to want more of my company about the ship. Her helmsman relieved of watch, I am allowed the privilege of nights with her on the bridge as she commands the laden vessel through black waters, navigating by pulsing shore beacons and direction markers set mid-canal.
It gets bitterly cold perched inside four screens of grimy glass; I shiver, and am slung one of her fur wraps. Cuddling into that warmth and familiar scent, I feel a lulling peace that resonates with the years I had before thirteen.
My Baron is impervious to the chill. Her face the shape of concentration, she works the wheelhouse instruments with deft assurance, and gradually, mesmerised by the pattern of her movements, I begin to imagine her hands are my own. We stay like that, hour after hour enveloped in the strange calm that night brings to the Grey Zone, and I think perhaps she feels it too: a companionate hiatus, brief respite from the disharmonious affairs of the Iron Families.
~ * ~
Boots clang on hatchway ladders; figures hurry past the cabin door. All the decks locked down, the boys are being summoned one by one for questioning. Moth, going to Galley Ma for comfort in the night, found her sprawled among her saucepans, dead.
Nog says the confessions extracted from the Kosciusko 12 had all led back to her. She must have known they would, and done the deed quickly before they came for her.
I feel as if the ship has tipped into a sickening lurch: Ma! Love’s mooring lost, the past’s last tether cut, and I cast adrift in a perpetual night. I squeeze tight against my chains in a corner of the cabin and thank Aditi that she’s been spared the Family’s punishments. But I have never seen the captain so distraught. Her fist lands hard against the panelling above me and dents it. She doesn’t seem to notice and lets fly again. The entire section splinters; her hand drips blood. I am frightened, even though I know it’s not aimed at me, or mine, but the unthinkable: her own Family.
I peek upwards.
They will pay, she mutters.
And then the realisation strikes me. Her passion — not one she has ever shown to me — is that for a true love: Galley Ma’s secret place inside my captain’s padlocked heart.
Distracted, all mood gone for play, she undoes my manacles and leaves.
I wait a count of one hundred then slip outside along the passage and to the galley. Its porthole deadlights are all latched. In the dark I stumble on a chaos of strewn pots, the place where the body had lain and is now removed; but I am not here for that, the empty shell of my beloved Ma. I am here to take possession of her globe and picture books before the Barons find them.
As I hurry Ma’s things back to the cabin, the ship’s bell sounds EYES PORT! And when her treasures are safely relocated, I climb reluctantly above deck.
The crew and boys are all eyes fixed on the giant shapes rearing portside in the fog. I scan anxiously for the captain.
Crake sidles up beside me. He points and sneers. What they brought back from Kosciusko is hanging over there.
The cranes have gone up and there are our angels, Ma’s intrepid relatives who’d escaped the slamming grip of the Iron Families to live in sunshine, hung in rows like coats on hooks, each neat brown pair of hands and feet limp below the sackcloth. No more our angels than the Families’ seditious enemy, now they are the dead — and decomposing with them, hope.
As we come alongside just beyond, Crake mocks again. Called out to a Family birthing, he clambers off the ship past Nog and swiftly disappears, a venal, hated man, into the suppurating twilight.
~ * ~
The captain gives the entire crew shore leave and goes to drown her sorrows on a girl barge. Nog, wanting to keep his infirmity well hid, volunteers to stay behind.
The ship sits in mist, its cargo off-loaded and abandoned on the wharf upcurrent from the spider-legged cranes still dangling their catch. The dark falls, a wet, clinging shroud; the canal wind cuts like garrotting wire. And we are huddled on the foredeck crying silently down on Moth, frail and folded, crushed beneath the fo’c’sle winch.
Something — a wall — breaks suddenly in me, and I race below as if pursued by death itself to drag the heavy pelts and fat silk pillows back from my stash, and spin the globe.
Countries blur with sea.
I stop the vivid blue-green swirl with a finger and peer close: a pair of smaller islands southeast of ours. Closer. Aotearoa: home to the Iron Families’ long-time opponents, rumoured to have helped orchestrate the Kyoto uprising.
As I measure the distance in finger widths, thinking of Nog’s boat and the locks that lead to ocean, Aggi rests a shimmery hand on mine.
You’ll drown, she says, and be eaten by fish —
Is that so bad? I interject.
She traces my most recent scar. — Unless you take the ship.
The ship’s boys are for it. Already, without Galley Ma — her subtle protection not fully realised until now — the crew, egged on by Crake, have been inflicting punishments at every opportunity. The boys, suffering, feel Ma’s absence as keenly as those icy winds that luge between the levee walls. But worse — far worse, Moth, our littlest and most recent to fall foul of the Barons’ casual cruelty, was adored.
I go to Nog.
Knowing his time is as short as ours, I tell him what I plan to do then ask, Would you rather be sent to the filthy bottom of a canal by Crake, or come with us and be joined forever with the sea?
His face is a rumpled spread of seams and stubble; pain has made bruises of his eyes. He winces as his bad leg briefly takes some weight. Resting gratefully against the bulkhead he makes his decision for his heart’s first love.
With Nog on lookout for the crew’s return, we assemble in the galley to make fast our plan.
How will we manage the ship? Binn, the pluckiest, asks after I’ve shown them Aotearoa on the globe.
Eight is enough, I answer. And between us we have all the skill we need. If we can slip unnoticed through an outer lock, we’ll be away and won’t be followed.
They know the sea locks are generally unattended, being used infrequently, and only for the long hauls north or south, the Families much preferring to hop between their territories in calmer and more manageable waters.
Who’ll steer? Binn asks for them all.
I’ve spent some hours in the captain’s company at the helm, I say, not mentioning that Aggi (whose enquiring mind had ever risked and learnt much more tha
n me) will instruct.
Last minute, the boys waver between sure purgatory and uncertain fate until I remind them of Galley Ma’s final admonition, and then they draw toward the plan as if to a distant saving light, while I wish I could feel even small measure of the confidence I pretend.
And so we loose the mooring lines from their bollards and let the nightship drift, a sullen juggernaut, downcanal towards an outer lock as the boys launch one last defiance, sending Crake’s belongings tumbling overboard.
~ * ~
The ship pitches horribly, most boys are sick; its bearings set southeast and our sights toward the hope of land, I have had to lash the wheel to stop it spinning like a gyro through my grasp. But past the anchor winch and Gatling gun, Aggi leans, a five-point star above the prow, hair flying, face pressed to the wind.
Nog is dying. Laid in his dinghy roped secure on the foredeck, he is being rocked like baby with the ship and smiling up at sky. From my navigator’s storm-battered eyrie I look out beyond each terrifying lift and plunge to what he sees: not the fogbound night of moonless waters, but the wild pale breaking blue of day.
* * * *
Kim Westwood was born in Sydney, Australia, and spent her childhood in New Zealand. She realized she might be a bit speculative when her first story ‘The Oracle’ won a 2002 Aurealis Award. Since then there’s been more speculation, much of it with an apocalyptic air. Her stories have been chosen for Year’s Best anthologies in Australia and the US, and for ABC radio broadcast. She is the recipient of a prestigious Varuna Writer’s Fellowship for her first novel, The Daughters of Moab. Her second novel, The Courier’s New Bicycle, will be published by HarperCollins in 2011.
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* * *
Fearless Flying Apartment People
GEOFFREY MALONEY
When I was a young kid I knew I’d never grow up to be an apartment person. Such dizzy heights were beyond my comprehension. On Sundays, when mum and dad usually after a heavy night of drinking used to take me into the city, I’d stare up at the apartment people’s abodes, soaring way up into the sky, with their neat little balconies thrusting precariously into space. Imagine, I would think, with a mixture of envy and awe, to be sitting up there in the air like that, perched on one of those thin concrete ledges.
I asked mum: “How could they do it?” She thought I’d meant afford it and replied: “They have lots of money.” But dad picked up on what I meant - I think he’d always had a fear of heights; you should have seen him on the suspended escalators in the hyperdome. He always stood in the middle and stared dead ahead. He never once let his eyes wander to the sides and that awful drop below. “They’re fearless,” dad said and then, as if not to contradict mum, added, “wealthy and fearless.”
Sometimes you hear things funny and when you hear things funny you understand things funny too. So I didn’t think that ‘fearless’ sounded like it had anything to do with ‘fear’. It sounded like a completely different word to me and I imagined that it had something to do with flying, which explained to my fresh young mind why apartment people could live up so high. It didn’t matter to them if their balconies cracked and fell apart one evening while they were eating their dinner; they’d just fly away as the concrete rubble came tumbling down into the street and all of us below ran and ducked for cover. It all seemed to make perfect sense at the time, and that became the fact of the matter for me for quite a while.
Later on I grew up like all the other kids. I’d been hoping that I wouldn’t, thinking I might somehow have got lucky and become the first kid ever who lacked the growing-up gene. Yeah, well, maybe one day there might be some kid who does get lucky and finds that he doesn’t have to grow up, but sadly that kid wasn’t me. So, despite the hoping, I grew up and eventually got myself a job in an office on the thirteenth floor of a city skyscraper. I guess I must have inherited dad’s fear-of-height gene because the idea of working on the thirteenth floor filled me with some trepidation. Apart from riding on the escalators in the hyperdome with mum and dad when we went shopping on Sundays, the highest up I’d ever been was climbing the old Poinciana tree in our backyard. I only did it the once, and it was an experience I’d never care to repeat. Going up was easy. It didn’t worry me none; I made sure I never looked down as I was climbing, but once I was up there on the tallest branch, I was clutching it for dear life, totally unable to think of how I was going to get down again. Other kids - the sort that couldn’t wait to grow up - would have been hollering out their triumph for all the neighbours to come look see, but not me. I still don’t know how I got down from the top of that tree and, to this day, I can’t understand why I’m not still up there.
Anyway, the old guy who recruited me for the office job picked up I was in two minds about accepting his offer even though the pay was okay, because he asked me if I was superstitious about the number thirteen. I assured him I wasn’t. “That’s good,” he said, “because a lot of people are these days. Reckon the number thirteen’s unlucky, same as black cats or walking under a ladder. You know, all those old superstitions, they’re making a bit of a comeback.”
I told him I hadn’t really noticed anything funny going on with black cats and ladders, but I’d be sure to keep an eye out for it. Then I blurted out the truth that I sort of thought the thirteenth floor was a little high up. He seemed to weigh this up a bit, then he told me he could get me an office in the centre of the building, and that because you rode up and down inside lifts all day, you wouldn’t even know you were so high up unless you decided to look out the windows. “Which lots of people do,” he said.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, mostly it’s because they like watching the apartment people. You get a good view of a lot of their balconies from up on the thirteenth floor, and those apartment people, especially the ladies, they aren’t like other people, you know.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Those apartment people, they’ve got so much money that the ladies don’t have nothing to do all day, but sun themselves on their balconies in the nudie.”
“Really!” I said.
“Yes, indeed,” he said. “In the total nud-ee.”
Well, they were recruiting us kids young back then, on account of all the older people who were living longer, but didn’t want to work anymore. So I couldn’t have been much more than fifteen when I applied for that job, and the idea of seeing all those apartment ladies lying around on their balconies in the nudie was enough to seal the deal for me, thirteenth floor or no thirteenth floor.
But, as with all jobs, it didn’t turn out to be quite as good as it was cracked up to be. The old guy was right about me getting an inside office and not realizing I was so high up in the air, so that aspect of my employment didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. He was wrong though about the apartment ladies. Well, not so much as wrong. It was just that the apartments were too far away, right down by the river, and it was hard to get a good enough view, except through a telescope which wasn’t quite the same as stealing a casual glance out of the window when you were supposed to be working. But, after I’d been there several months, the word went around the office that they were going to start work on an apartment block right next door to us. So instead of gazing down on the old tin roof of Bailey’s Wool Warehouse - which had been built way back in the olden days - pretty soon we’d be gazing out onto our very own apartment people. The blokes in the office thought that this was pretty grand - most of them had been given the same recruitment pitch I had - but the ladies, particularly the younger ones, like Cheryl and Angela, who were still wearing braces, complained that the new apartment block would ruin their view of the river and the green hills beyond. Trent, who was about the only real pal I had in the office, said that was easy for them to say. After all, he reckoned, if they wanted to see real live nudie women, all they had to do was look in the mirror after they showered in the morning. I could see the logic in that.
Well, the apartment building went up and the guys were there by the windows every day, watching them pour the concrete slabs. “Whoa, pouring the concrete today,” Kev and Brian would call out, and Trent and I would go and have a look, just so they knew we were playing our part. I soon realized that for some blokes the pouring of a concrete slab was just as exciting as the possibility of seeing nudie women. I couldn’t see the sense in that at all, and Trent couldn’t either. Every time that Brian and Kev alerted us to a new round of concrete pouring, he would whip the hunting horn he always wore off his belt, raise it to his lips and give two short blasts. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he would cry, “I wish to announce that a remarkable session of highly-skilled concrete pouring will be taking place today in the apartment block being erected next door. Angela assures me that window seats are selling fast.”
Finally, after far too many months, the building was completed with all its steel beams, reinforced concrete, tinted glass windows and open balconies. We waited for the apartment people to move in, especially the wealthy ladies with the wonderful bodies who frolicked in the swimming pool of their apartment block every day.
The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05 Page 14