by Paul McAuley
‘What it comes down to, Alberto wants to remind the world he exists,’ Keever said. ‘Talking the kind of talk about crime and punishment supporters of his party like to hear. Telling them that the present government is too soft, the work camps are more like holiday resorts, how he’ll toughen things up after National Unity wins the next election. The commandant’s office is in an uproar, trying to figure out how to deal with it. They can’t stop the Honourable Deputy coming, and they know he’s out to make trouble. They know he’ll be digging around for dirt he can use to cook up a scandal. And that if he doesn’t find any he’ll just make something up.’
Keever liked to give these little lectures, liked to prove that he knew more about any given topic than anyone else. It was a vital part of his business, one of the ways he overmastered people. Forget alpha male, he’d say. I’m the apex predator. I’m the one gets to suck the marrow from the bones of everyone else.
‘Man wants to stir up a serious political shitstorm,’ Mike Mike said.
‘Although that isn’t the only reason he’s coming here,’ Keever told me. ‘It isn’t even the real reason. Care to take a guess at what that might be?’
Still trying to process the news, I told him I couldn’t even begin.
‘The Honourable Deputy and me have some business needs settling,’ he said. ‘But the trouble he’ll cause just by coming here will be useful too.’
‘Man’s a wild card,’ Mike Mike said.
‘One that’ll divert attention away from me, as long as I play it right,’ Keever said. ‘And I think you can help me with that, Austral. You claim he’s your uncle.’
‘My half-uncle. Strictly speaking.’
‘And as I recall the two of you have never met.’
That derailed me for a second. As usual, Keever was two steps ahead.
‘He’s never troubled me,’ I said. ‘And I’ve never troubled him. Never needed nor wanted to.’
‘And he hasn’t reached out to you. Made contact ahead of this visit he’s planning.’
‘Like I said, this is the first I’ve heard.’
I could see what was coming, and I knew there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
‘That’s what I thought. Because if he knew you were working here, you can bet his people would have been all over it. And you can bet I would have heard about something like that. But I haven’t, not a peep. So what I’m thinking, his coming here, it’s a stroke of luck too good to be true,’ Keever said, and patted the bed beside him. ‘Sit down. Let me tell you how we’re going to make use of it.’
2
I first met Keever Bishop back in Star City, a cluster of broke-down apartment blocks on the west side of Esperanza, home to most of the peninsula’s husky community and a lively mix of welfare clients, refugees and former jailbirds. I moved there at age eighteen. Officially an adult, I’d been released from the orphanage and given a fone, a one-room efficiency and a work placement. For the first time in my life I was all on my own, and I thought it was wonderful. I was no longer living in a dorm, was no longer forced to abide by a million stupid rules and pay for my keep by working in farm stacks, could go anywhere I wanted whenever I wanted. An old friend of my grandmother’s, Alicia Whangapirita, reached out and offered me a job in some stinky fish-processing plant on the west coast, but I blew her off. I was done with all that business. I believed that I could find my own path in the world.
The work placement was supervisor of an assembly line in a manufactory that turned out pumps and centrifugal filters for greenhouse aquaponics. Eight hours a day in a windowless shed flooded with the dull red light droids found useful for some reason, noise-cancelling headphones clamped over my ears to muffle the industrial screech and clang, ticking off a quota of random quality checks. It was epically dull, no company but the droids, no hope of promotion. I quit after a month and kind of fell into a life of crime.
I’d taken to hanging out in a bar in a corner of my block, and that’s where I met Bryan Williams and was introduced to the pickpocketing business. Bryan was a skinny white guy in his early forties, old as dirt as far as I was concerned, and yeah, I know, an obvious father figure. He was kind of nervy when he wasn’t working, permanently sucking on a vape, fiddling with the elephant-seal-hair bracelet he wore for good luck, knuckle-rolling an ancient dollar coin, but when he was on the job he was awesomely smooth, enviably cool. A veritable Zen master of what he called the ancient art.
He’d been using another husky girl as a stall, but she’d gotten herself pregnant and I took her place. We sometimes trolled for marks in crowds outside sporting events or concerts, but did most of our work in the underground passages, access points and shopping arcades of CORE, the city under the city. I’d barge into a mark and Bryan would steady them and do his thing, or I’d bellow out that someone had snatched my shit, this big young husky in distress getting everyone’s attention, people patting their pockets to check their valuables, Bryan picking a couple of likely targets and moving in. He taught me how to stall someone by asking for directions while he did a walk-by touch to check the goods, how to bump and lift with or without the concealed hand, how to deal with a mark who felt the dip and started squealing. Nighttimes when pickings were slim we’d cruise for sleepers on the subway, snatch their stuff, rip their credit with a bootleg reader, and jump the capsule just before it moved off.
It wasn’t ever going to make us rich, but it was steady work and Bryan was good at it. He knew Keever Bishop slightly, and one time we had a drink with him in the bar, although when I told him about it several years later in Kilometre 200 Keever claimed that he didn’t remember. He didn’t recall taking my hand and giving me a palm reading either, a corny pick-up trick he barely needed to use given his reputation. He said that Bryan and me were the classic odd couple, very sweet to see, and although ours was basically a business relationship, we’d hardly ever slept together. Bryan didn’t contradict him and neither did I. I was hypnotised by his tickling touch and his cool unblinking gaze, trying to pretend that I wasn’t impressed and failing completely.
Keever had been born and raised in Star City, came back every so often to check on the street trade he still had a piece of, hang out at the bar and a couple of other places he owned, and do good works – dashing credit to people in need, sorting out petty disputes, subsidising a community centre, cleaning up the local park, organising repairs the city wouldn’t pay for, so on. Everyone in the bar knew him and knew his history, knew who he’d hurt or buried to get to where he was, and no one ever questioned his right to do as he pleased. He was like a leopard seal lazing in a penguin rookery. Lordly, dangerous, utterly at ease. After toying with Bryan and me for a couple of minutes he was suddenly up and off, glad-handing some old rogue who’d just come in, and Bryan took a long shuddering draw on his vape stick and told me to be careful, the man had a thing for huskies.
We’d had been working together for about a year by then, and Bryan had just gotten into snap, this military nano that tweaked your head, sharpened your reactions. He said that it soothed his nerves and honed his edge, but pretty soon he needed it just to maintain, and most everything he stole was funding his habit. That old sad story. He started to get careless, his carelessness got us arrested, and we both drew hard time because it was an election year and the government was trying to appease voters by acting tough on crime.
I was given six months because it was my first offence, Bryan copped three years and change. When I came out, the Progressive Democrat Union had ousted the National Unity Party, which had run the peninsula since before I was born. There was a lot of talk about new beginnings and letting in sunlight, a fresh chapter in history, so on, but as far as huskies were concerned it was meet the new boss, same as the old boss. We were still being squeezed by travel restrictions and selective labour laws, hassled by police stops and the insults and assaults of the ignorant and prejudiced, were still second-class citizens. Barely human.
Jail had been a shock, a reversion
to barracks life and compulsory work, this time in a fish farm, but I buckled down and kept a low profile, and when I was released a friendly CO suggested that I should apply for work in the prison service. There was a training programme for former prisoners, wards of the state and others who had experience of the wrong side of the justice system, and a shortage of husky applicants. Bulling cons was one of the few jobs we were actually encouraged to do, mainly because our kind were over-represented in the prison population.
I soon discovered that ex-con COs were paid half the wages of their straight counterparts and given the worst assignments, but I didn’t much care. It was steady work, and I was saving as much of my pay as I could because I wanted to escape the peninsula and find a place where people like me were treated like actual human beings.
By the time Bryan was paroled I was supervising cons in the farm stacks of a work camp on the outskirts of O’Higgins. I saw him just once, found that he was already back on the job and back on the shit. ‘Just a little now and then, to keep me sharp,’ he said, but I knew that there was no hope for him. He was stabbed to death during some stupid argument with a dealer a couple of months later, about the time I was sent south to Kilometre 200.
This was at the beginning of September, towards the end of winter. Temperatures never much above minus ten degrees Celsius, snowstorms, blank days of sea fret or low cloud, but whenever the weather cleared the views were tremendous. Kilometre 200 was at the edge of a basin that had once been the confluence of three glaciers, and after the ice retreated ecopoets planted forests along the courses of meltwater rivers running towards the Larsen Inlet. There was a range of snow-clad mountain peaks to the north. A curve of cold blue sea to the south and west. It was as clean and wild and empty as the dreams of the first days of settlement, when the peninsula’s potential hadn’t yet been wrecked by compromise and greed. The kind of country Mama and I had hiked across after our escape.
The camp was still being built when I arrived. My first job was supervising cons stringing wire around the perimeter of their prefab barracks. Contractors handled the trains, track-laying machines, construction droids, industrial printers, so on. Everything else – unloading and distribution of construction material, labour in a quarry and gravel plant at the foot of Holt Nunatak, landscaping the long embankment that curved towards the three bridges over the river delta – was done by convict labour. A good chunk of the peninsula’s population was in prison and it went against our pioneer spirit to allow men and women to laze around in cells when they could be doing something useful instead.
I was in charge of one of the strings of cons working on the embankment. We kept them at it in all but the worst weather. There were plenty of injuries, and a lot of frostbite. It wasn’t uncommon for a con to be missing a couple of fingers or a toe or three. There were suicides, too, and several cons were killed during escape attempts, even though they were tagged and there was nothing but wilderness all around. One time, a couple of COs captured a con trying to get across the wire, gave him the choice of being shot on the spot or making a run for it. They allowed him a fair head start, took bets on when the hounds would take him down. A shade under fifteen minutes, it turned out.
One death I specially remember happened a month or so after I arrived. After an epic snowstorm that shut down work for a couple of days, my string was one of half a dozen set to digging out construction materials stockpiled at the northern end of the first bridge. I didn’t hear the hue and cry until it was almost on me, looked up just as a man in an orange windproof ran past, pursued by a CO. I joined in, chasing the man past a group of cons who’d stopped work to watch the sport, chasing him out onto the bridge. We were closing in on him when a drone surfed in and smacked into his back and knocked him down. The two of us piled on and tried to pin him as he writhed like a landed fish. The other CO reeled back because he’d been kicked in the face, the con wrenched free of his windproof, leaving me holding it by a sleeve, and bounced to his feet and was off and running again, running straight out onto a stringer girder that ended between the second and third truss of the unfinished bridge.
He balanced there, no way forward, forty metres above a channel packed with jagged ice. I was shouting at him to give it up, still holding the damn windproof, when the drone dropped down and lit him up with its spots. He yelled something and jumped, and as he fell the drone riddled him with a burst of taglets.
I balled up the windproof and flung it after him. It blew sideways, settled in a leat of fast-running black water, was swept away under the ice. That’s probably what happened to the body, too. A couple of drones spent the rest of the day hunting for it but failed to find anything, the log entry blandly recorded the whole mess as a fatal injury incurred during an escape attempt, the con’s meagre possessions were packed up and mailed to his family, and that, as they say, was that.
When I told him the story, Keever said it was how it had to be, in the camps. The authorities couldn’t show any weakness because it might encourage a general uprising, like the one at the nickel mine in the Pensacola Mountains. Eighteen COs, three supervisors and more than a hundred cons dead, millions of dollars of damage to equipment and millions more in lost production, the army brought in to suppress the last of it.
‘Out here everything is either black or white,’ Keever said. ‘No half measures. You always know exactly what’s what.’
I didn’t think that the poor son of a bitch could have known that he’d be denied his chosen manner of dying when he’d made his suicide leap, but although I hadn’t been hooked up with Keever for very long I already knew better than to contradict him.
How he’d ended up in jail, he’d been trying to give up the street life, trying to become a respectable businessman, but had been sucked into some kind of crooked cleverness involving tax evasion and the financing of a new football stadium. He claimed to find it amusing that, given all the nasty stuff he’d done to get to the point where he could think about going over to the other side, he’d been sent down for white-collar crime. But then a piece of that nasty stuff caught up with him, and that was why he was planning to escape.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again.
At the first lock-up Keever was sent to, straight jail rather than a work camp, one of his rivals organised a serious attempt to assassinate him. None of the other jails around and about Esperanza and O’Higgins were any safer – Keever had plenty of enemies – so he chose a work camp outside their reach, run by a commandant who’d been appointed by a politician who owed him several favours. Keever didn’t ever tell me the name of that politician, but I reckon you can work out who it was.
Anyway, that’s why the camp administration let Keever do whatever he wanted, as long as it didn’t interfere with construction work. He had his own room. He had his crew – Mike Mike, half a dozen bodyguards and enforcers, a guy who cooked for him so that he didn’t have to eat jail chow, so on. And he had his various business interests inside the wire, which he ran more for amusement than profit. The gambling circles, the trade in bootleg liquor, the contraband goods which COs purchased while on leave in Esperanza, O’Higgins or Port Sjörgren, and smuggled through the wire.
I started to work in the contraband biz because I wanted to build up my escape fund as quickly as possible. After Mama and I got away from Deception Island, we’d tried and failed to trek all the way down the spine of the peninsula to the mainland, hoping to find a clandestine community of ecopoets that according to fable and rumour was hidden somewhere in the far south. I thought that I could do better this time around. I dreamed of getting all the way to New Zealand, where edited people had the same rights as everyone else. I dreamed of escaping the ruins of my life and making a fresh start.
I even knew where I wanted to live – this big ring-shaped wind turbine called the Wheel, which stood in the flooded margin of Auckland’s Waitematā Harbour, with apartments set one above the other in its revolving outer rim. I had dozens of pictures of it stored in my fone. My
favourite, a night shot, showed the Wheel rising above its reflection in black water, the shaped fog of charged water droplets that it used to generate electricity glowing blue and pink in its hub. It looked like the very gateway to Heaven.
Edited people needed permits to travel inside the peninsula, and weren’t allowed to travel outside it at all, but I’d heard about a people-smuggling operation working out of Square Bay, and some months back, on leave in Esperanza, I’d met a woman, friend of a friend, who told me how much it would cost, where I should stay when I got to Square Bay, the café where I should hang out so that the smugglers could check me over.
That was all I had. You couldn’t look up these people anywhere. You couldn’t reach out to them. You had to go to their place of business and wait for them to make contact. If they ever did. The fee for transporting me to New Zealand was pretty fucking outrageous, it would have taken five or six years to save that much on nothing but a CO’s salary, but I knew that some of the other guards were making out like bandits from Keever Bishop’s contraband business, and reckoned that it was worth the risk. So I started muling shit across the wire, and a couple of weeks later Keever sent word that he wanted to meet me.
Like I already said, I was flattered by his attention. Keever told me all kinds of pretty lies about why he’d chosen me to be his baby on the inside, and I chose to believe them. Now, of course, I want to shake some sense into my younger self. Pin her against a wall and give her some straight talk. Tell her that she was being used, tell her that if she was hoping to find stability, someone who could give her chaotic life some shape, she was looking in the wrong place. Not that it would have done any good. She would have told me that she wasn’t in love with Keever, no way, but she admired his unshakeable self-belief and liked it when he told her that he loved his big strong girl, liked that he made her feel special. There was no end to my naivety back then.