by Greg Egan
His father lifted his head slightly, then managed to raise his shoulders a few centimetres off the ground by curving his spine. His mother took advantage of this immediately, bending her arms, moving her shoulders back, bracing herself more efficiently. With her arms stretched as far as they’d go, her whole upper body had been dead weight, but now the muscles in her back and arms could come into play. Prabir watched in joy and amazement as she pulled his father up, her arms closing around his back, until he was sitting.
She rested for a moment, catching her breath, repositioning her damaged foot. Prabir realised that his hands were shaking; he fought to steady them, to prepare himself for the task of stretcher-bearer.
Rajendra’s eyes were still closed, but he was smiling, his arms around Radha’s waist. She tightened her embrace, clasped her hands together behind him, and lifted him off the ground.
A wall of air knocked Prabir backwards on to the grass, then a soft rain of sand descended on him. He opened his mouth and tried to speak through the grit, but his ears were ringing and he couldn’t tell if any sound was emerging.
As he brushed his face clean with his arm, something beneath the sand scratched his forearm, then his face began to throb with pain. When he tried to open his eyes, it felt as if the point of a knife was being held against the lids.
He cried out, ‘Baba! Baba! Baba!’
He could feel the air resonating in his throat; he knew he was shouting at the top of his lungs. His father would hear him; that was all that mattered. His father would hear him, and come.
4
‘We’re going on a trip, Maddy! South, south, south! To the Tanimbar Islands!’ Prabir undressed her as he spoke, dropping her soiled clothes on the mattress of the cot. He didn’t think his mother would mind if he left them there unwashed; the whole point of the exercise was deciding what was important and what wasn’t. That was why he hadn’t wasted time burying the ‘bodies’ his parents had left in the garden; if something ever really did happen to them, they’d want him to think of Madhusree, rather than fussing over their meaningless remains.
He hoped his appearance wasn’t too alarming. He’d washed away all the dirt, but he’d given up trying to dig the metal from his skin, and simply drenched his face and chest with Betadine in the hope of warding off infection. Naturally, his parents had made sure that none of the shrapnel would penetrate too deeply; they would have calculated the size and placement of the charge so that no fragment would carry enough energy to harm him.
Madhusree had apparently cried herself dry in his absence. When she fingered a wound on Prabir’s face and he smacked her hand sharply, all she could manage was a whimpering sound, and even that soon faded. She remained sulky and irritable, but the idea of a trip seemed to intrigue her.
He carried her to the lavatory hut, wiped her backside, then cleaned her a bit more with moistened toilet paper.
‘Where’s Ma?’ she demanded.
‘I told you. South. On the Tanimbar Islands. She’s waiting for us there with Baba.’
Madhusree regarded him sceptically. ‘She didn’t.’
‘Didn’t what? Didn’t leave the island? Where is she then, smart-arse?’
Madhusree opened her mouth to reply, but she couldn’t hear her mother’s voice, so she had no ready answer.
Prabir said soothingly, ‘I know it was rough of them to sneak off without saying goodbye to you, but they had to do it that way. They wanted to see if I could look after you. If I do a good job, they’ll let me stay. If I don’t, I’ll have to go to boarding school. Sounds fair, doesn’t it?’
Madhusree shook her head unhappily, but Prabir suspected that this had more to do with the absence of Ma than the threat of him being sent away. He said, ‘Don’t worry, it won’t be for long. I worked out what they wanted, straight away. They want us to leave Teranesia.’
He took her back to his parents’ hut, put clean pants on her, then started packing the bag they used to carry her things when they went on the ferry. It was hard to decide what was essential. Warm clothes, obviously, in case they were still at sea when night fell, but what about nappies, lotions and powder? She’d been using the toilet for months now, climbing up on the steps his father had made for her, but how would she cope on the boat? He decided to bring her old potty along; nappies were too bulky, but he couldn’t expect her to piss over the side.
In the kitchen, he filled all six of her old baby bottles with fruit juice. She normally drank from a cup now, but when she was tired or moody his mother sometimes offered her a bottle, and it would make things easier on the boat. He grabbed three packs of the biscuits she ate, and a tin of powdered milk, then hesitated over her canned food. If they didn’t find their parents on the first night, they’d be camping out on land, so it wasn’t absurd to think about heating things in saucepans. He’d take the tiny methylated spirits cooker that they kept in case of power failure.
Madhusree followed him from hut to hut as he gathered everything they’d need into a pile at the edge of the kampung. It made him nervous to see her running about freely, but it would have slowed him down too much to carry her everywhere, and after visiting the kitchen and peering through the doorway of the butterfly hut, she could see for herself that Ma and Baba were no longer in the kampung. He resisted the urge to warn her sternly to keep away from the garden; if he didn’t mention it, she wouldn’t even think of going there.
When he dragged the motorboat out of the storage hut, Madhusree seemed finally to accept that they were leaving.
‘Ambon!’ she shouted.
‘No, not Ambon. The ferry’s not running. We’re going south, all by ourselves.’
The boat and its outboard motor were both made of ultralight carbon-fibre composites. Normally his father carried the motor in his arms, to and from the beach, while his mother carried the hull over her head. Prabir had planned to push the hull all the way to the beach, fully loaded, but his first exploratory shove was enough to convince him that he’d never succeed. He’d have to make at least four trips: the hull, the motor, fuel and water, then food, clothing and everything else.
‘Shit!’ He’d almost forgotten. He went back into the storage hut and pulled down the two smaller life jackets from their hooks on the wall. He stared uncomprehendingly at the two larger ones remaining, then he turned and walked out.
He couldn’t put Madhusree back in her cot; even if she didn’t start screaming, he wasn’t willing to leave her alone again. So he carried the hull to the beach with Madhusree following him on foot. The hull was incredibly light, but since his arms couldn’t quite stretch between the sides of the upturned boat at its centre of gravity, he either had to hold it nearer to the bow, where the sides were closer together – in which case he had to fight the unbalanced weight – or walk with his arms straight up and his palms supporting the floor of the boat, which was almost as awkward and tiring. He ended up alternating between the two methods, but he still had to stop and rest after ever-shorter stretches. This did have one advantage: Madhusree had no trouble keeping up with him.
He rested on the beach for a few minutes, then carried Madhusree back to the kampung and started out with the motor. A third of the way to the beach she sat down on the path and refused to walk any further. Prabir knelt down and coaxed her into putting her arms around his neck and clinging to his back with her legs. He usually hooked his arms under her legs when he carried her this way, reinforcing her grip and taking some of her weight, but the motor made that impossible. As her legs grew tired, she ended up virtually hanging on to him by her arms alone, and though Prabir leaned forward to try to shift some of her weight on to his back, by the time they reached the beach she was crying from exhaustion.
For a moment he was tempted to leave her on the beach – what harm could come to her, sleeping beneath a palm tree? – but then he wrapped her in his arms and trudged back to the kampung. He managed to hang the three bags of clothes and food from his neck and shoulders, leaving his arms free.
/> Down to the beach, back to the kampung. Two cans of fuel and two cans of water remained – each weighing about ten kilograms. He’d been fooling himself: even without Madhusree, he’d never have been able to move them all in one trip. Cradling her in his right arm, holding her against his side the way his mother did, he carried the cans to the beach one by one.
By the time he dropped the last can of fuel on to the sand beside the boat, it was almost three o’clock. Prabir dug his notepad out of one of the bags: it was fully charged, which meant eight hours’ normal operation, but the battery drained three times faster when the screen had to be electronically illuminated. Still, even if they were at sea in darkness he wouldn’t need the map constantly visible.
Madhusree had grown resentful; she’d never been dragged back and forth like this for the sake of a boat trip before. She sat in the shade at the edge of the beach, calling for Ma every minute or two. Prabir replied soothingly, but equally mechanically, ‘We’re going to Ma.’
The notepad’s GPS software included a respectable world map, but Teranesia wasn’t on it; as far as the software was concerned they were already in the middle of the Banda Sea. The Tanimbar Islands were shown, but the smaller islands in the group were just blobs of two or three pixels, and the coastlines of the larger ones appeared crudely rendered, as if they’d been extracted automatically from a satellite image or a cheap printed map. With access to the net Prabir could have substituted the official navigation chart for the region, complete with water depths and information on currents; he’d viewed it a dozen times, but never thought to keep a copy in his notepad. But there was no use dwelling on that. At least Jakarta hadn’t been able to block the GPS signals; if he’d been left with dead reckoning, the sun and the stars, he would have been afraid to leave the island at all.
He fitted the motor to the hull, filled the fuel tank, then dragged the empty boat into the shallows. An image came to him suddenly, from a video his parents had watched back in Calcutta; he’d been asleep in his mother’s arms for most of it, but he’d woken near the end. A man on a deserted beach had tried to drag a wooden boat into the ocean, to make his escape from some war or revolution. But the boat had been too large, too heavy, and no matter how he strove it had remained firmly beached. Prabir shuddered at the memory, but at least he knew they wouldn’t share that fate. Whatever else happened, they wouldn’t be stranded.
He loaded everything into the boat. It sank dismayingly low in the water, but his parents’ combined weight must have been more than the weight of these provisions, and the boat had carried the whole family safely out to the ferry dozens of times. He fetched Madhusree; she didn’t struggle or complain as he fitted her life jacket, merely glaring at him suspiciously.
Prabir put her in the boat, then climbed in himself and stood looking back across the beach. He wouldn’t be gone long; if he completed the test his parents would have no reason to send him away, and everything would be back to normal within a couple of days. The poisoned chrysalis would be forgiven; it was only one butterfly out of all the thousands on the island. Anything could be forgiven if he proved he was capable of getting Madhusree to safety.
He started the motor. The boat rose up in the water and sped away from the beach, like an amphibious creature suddenly revived from a dormant state. Having the tiller firmly in his hand gave Prabir no immediate sense of control; he’d never been allowed to steer the boat. Nervously, he shifted the tiller back and forth a few degrees. The boat responded smoothly enough, turning more readily than he’d anticipated. This was encouraging, though it made his balance seem all the more precarious; if he stumbled and made the boat swerve sharply, the acceleration might knock him right off his feet.
He had to remain standing to watch for the gap in the reef. Prabir was used to recognising the gap as they passed through it, when safe passage was a fait accompli. The breaking waves approached with alarming speed; he hunted for a stretch of darker water, leading to a region where the waves raised less foam. He spotted one candidate, but he had no clear memories of the approach to confirm his choice, and the signs were far from convincing.
Madhusree looked up at him, disoriented, rubbing her eyes. ‘Baba should!’ she exclaimed accusingly. When Prabir ignored her she started crying. Tears flooded down her face, but Prabir was unmoved; she could make the slightest fit of pique sound like gut-wrenching anguish. He’d done it himself, countless times. He could remember that much very clearly.
‘Shut up, Maddy,’ he suggested mildly. ‘You’re not fooling anyone.’ She redoubled her efforts, and gave herself hiccups. Now Prabir felt sorry for her; hiccups were awful.
They were approaching the reef. The channel he’d picked looked more promising than ever, but now that he had a target to aim for, steering was proving to be harder than he’d realised. The boat was headed too far to the left; he struggled to picture their motion from above, and the turning arc that would neatly convert their present course into the one they needed.
He glanced down at his notepad on the floor of the boat. He hadn’t thought he’d have any use for it until they hit the open sea; the software knew nothing of the reef, and at the present magnification the record of their entire journey so far was just a speck. But it was the map that was crude, not the navigation system. The commercial GPS that had superseded the US military version gave unencrypted signals that resolved the receiver’s position to the nearest centimetre.
Prabir shouted, ‘Notepad: zoom in. More … more … stop!’ The speck became a crooked line against a blank background; all landmarks had vanished from the screen, but the magnified trail of the boat itself gave him his bearings. He glanced back towards the beach, then compared how far they’d come with the distance remaining to the reef. The image at his feet made perfect sense now; he could place the channel on it in his mind’s eye.
He leant gently on the tiller, and observed the effect: in reality, and on the map. The curve was still too shallow; he nudged the tiller, watching the growing arc and visualising its extension.
The boat shot through the reef without a bump, without a scratch. Prabir was overcome with pride and happiness. He could do this, it wasn’t beyond him. He’d be reunited with his parents soon – and whether it was midnight or dawn when he finally tracked them down, it would be long before they’d expected him. They’d teasingly beg his forgiveness for ever doubting him, then they’d take him in their arms and spin him around, lifting him up towards the sky.
His elation lasted until sunset.
By daylight, everything worked as planned. The sea felt far rougher than it did from the ferry – and in bad weather it might have been suicidal to attempt the crossing in such a small vessel – but it was still musim teduh, the calm season, and for all its relentless lurching the boat didn’t take much water. Setting the right course was a matter of trial and error – quite apart from the current, the waves themselves seemed to deflect the boat as it cut across them – but by the time Teranesia’s volcanic peak had shrunk to insignificance the GPS software showed that they were making steady progress south-south-east, at about ten kilometres an hour.
Once she’d recovered from the shock of finding herself at sea – with no Ma, no Baba, no ferry full of strangers, and no real conception of where they were headed – Madhusree grew positively entranced by the experience. The expression of delight on her face reminded Prabir of the way he felt in the middle of a wonderfully surreal dream. He was nauseous himself, but her fearlessness shamed him into stoicism. Madhusree sucked her bottles of fruit juice, ate a whole packet of biscuits, and used her potty without complaint. Prabir had no appetite, but he drank plenty of water, and urinated overboard to Madhusree’s scandalised laughter.
As darkness fell, the wind rose and the waves grew higher. Madhusree vomited as Prabir was dressing her against the chill, and from that moment her mood worsened steadily. His shallow wounds were aching and itching; he wanted the metal out, whether it was harming him or not.
When Madhu
sree fell fitfully asleep, Prabir felt a strong urge to hold her. He picked her up and wrapped her in a blanket, but there seemed to be no way to keep his hand on the tiller that wouldn’t make them both uncomfortable, so he laid her down again gently. He watched her for a while, half wishing she’d wake and keep him company. But she needed to sleep – and a few hours alone was a small price to pay to save himself from years of exile.
The blackness around the boat was impenetrable, untouched by the dazzling hemisphere of stars, but Prabir felt no sense of physical danger lurking in the gloom. The chance of an encounter with a pirate ship or any vessel involved in the war seemed slender. He’d glimpsed a couple of small sharks by daylight, but as far as he could tell they’d been passing by, uninterested in pursuit. And though he knew that the boat might yet meet a wave large enough to overturn it, there was no point worrying about that.
It was the dark water itself, stretching to the horizon – and for all he knew as far beneath him – that chilled him with its emptiness. There was nothing to recognise, nothing to remember. The monotony of the view and the chugging of the motor could never have made him drowsy; his whole body had forsworn the possibility of sleep. But even wakefulness here felt blank and senseless, robbed of everything that made it worthwhile.
He glanced down at Madhusree, and hoped she was dreaming. Strange, complicated dreams.
The moon rose, swollen and yellow, not quite half full. With nothing else in sight it was hard not to stare at it, though its glare made his eyes water. The sea around the boat became visible for forty or fifty metres, but it looked as unreal as the jungle looked at the edge of the light from the kampung.