by Paul McAuley
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Paz said, half teasing, half serious. ‘Maybe you could persuade him to take up our cause. Enrol him in the campaign for equal rights for edited people.’
‘Isn’t going to happen,’ Sage said.
‘It’s unlikely,’ Paz said. ‘But someone like Alberto Toomy admitting that we’re fully human could change everything.’
‘Isn’t ever going to happen,’ Sage said, with that dark stubborn frown we knew well.
We were crowded around a table in back of the mess, away from the boisterous crowd sharing the live stream of an ice hockey match in Charcot Stadium, O’Higgins. I was drinking steadily, beer with vodka chasers, scared shitless about the next day. Scared about what would happen if I did what Keever asked me to do. Scared about what would happen if I didn’t.
‘You could meet him yourself,’ I told Paz. ‘All you have to do is sign up for the security detail.’
I was only half-joking. If Paz stepped up to the Honourable Deputy, asked him to put in a good word for the husky nation, I might be spared.
‘A man like him wouldn’t talk to a no–account goon like me,’ Paz said. ‘But you’re family, Stral. You could just maybe pull it off.’
The hockey fans cheered loud and long, saving me from having to reply.
‘The least you can do is gouge him for some credit,’ Lola said. ‘Then we can hit Esperanza after this circus is over. Blow it big style. Or maybe he’ll take you in. Maybe he’ll give you a job, an apartment, all that good stuff you claim he stole from you. And we could come live with you.’
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘I’ll need someone to help me spend all the money you think I’ll be getting.’
‘We could be his bodyguards,’ Lola said. ‘Four huskies standing behind him in some kind of uniform, fully strapped? It would freak people’s heads. I wouldn’t even mind you were my boss.’
Paz said, ‘Why is it, whenever people think about us, even when we think about ourselves, it’s always some job involving muscle?’
‘Maybe because of gym rats like you,’ Sage said.
Paz clutched her chest with a mock shudder, as if she’d been shot with a taser taglet. ‘Did I ever tell you that before I became a CO, I wanted to be a lawyer?’
‘Only about a million times,’ Lola said.
‘It’s funny how you keep forgetting about it,’ Paz said. ‘I would have been a good one too. But along came the Exempted Labour Act and huskies couldn’t be lawyers any more. Just in case they were able to represent their own interests too well. Imagine the embarrassment that would have caused. So I started working as an investigator for poor old Murray Gibbs instead, and I guess even you, Lola, remember how that ended.’
We all knew how it had ended. How Paz had worked for a broke-ass attorney with whisky on his breath at nine in the morning, searching for strays and runaways, people who tried to duck out on debts or child support. How most of her assignments felt like they were grinding dirt into her soul, but sometimes she believed she might have done some good-helping kids who’d fallen into bad company, helping people in the husky community find what Murray called extra-legal solutions to disputes, so on. Then she came to work one day and the office was trashed and her boss had disappeared. There was a rumour that Murray had crossed someone in the police, but Paz knew better than to try to chase it down. Especially as one of her contacts passed on an anonymous tip that it might be best if she left town for a while. No point asking what would happen if she didn’t, so she joined the prison service, and that was that.
‘My point being, forget working close protection or whatever,’ Paz said. ‘Tell your uncle I’m up for all kinds of paralegal shit, Stral. Tell him I’d be damn good at it.’
It got us into talking about fantasy jobs. The jobs we really wanted to do, if only we could. If only we weren’t what we were. Paz wanted to be a judge, why not? Sage wanted to own a fishing boat – she knew the work, she’d be her own boss, she wouldn’t have to take shit from anyone any more. I thought of the Wheel, all my stupid plans and secrets, said that getting through life one day at a time was hard enough.
‘What about you, Lola?’ Paz said. ‘What’s your secret ambition, your heart’s desire?’
‘Maybe I’d just like an ordinary life,’ Lola said, which was so sad and funny and true that we all had to drink to it.
‘You probably won’t get within spitting distance of old Alberto,’ Lola said to me, a little later. ‘But if you do, if he’s in any way sympathetic, all kidding aside, I hope you’ll remember to put in a good word for your friends.’
The fierceness in her look startled me.
‘What I hope, he won’t turn up,’ I said.
4
Independence Day dawned cool and dull under a sky sheeted edge to edge with low cloud. The cons were squared away in their blocks. No work for them today. Soldiers were busy around two double-decked wagons in the freight yard, unloading gleaming black rovers that would ferry the VIPs from place to place. And I was in my dress blues, heading to the 0700 security briefing with a pounding head, a raw stomach and a shaky sense of impending doom that steepened when I saw Lola sneak into a seat in the back row.
She’d been assigned to VIP security at the last minute. She worked for Keever. And sometimes two and two make four.
I was majorly upset that Keever had sent one of my friends to dog me, angry with Lola for agreeing to do it, but for a little while busy work pushed all that to the back of my mind. I was part of the group tasked with sweeping the freight yard. Checking track-laying machines, the printers that had extruded bridge components, hopper wagons loaded with gravel and hardcore, the enormous machine that had cut a tunnel through Ferguson Ridge. And the special train waiting to be switched to the main line, a sleek silver locomotive and two silver passenger cars levitating bare centimetres above the guideway track.
Helis carrying VIPs started to come in, buzzing overhead and settling on the square apron east of the camp, its parade of flags bowing and snapping in rotor downdraughts. I could see people climbing down, see them being greeted by the commandant’s staff, but it was too far away to make out who they were. One after the other they were driven off to the commandant’s quarters for a celebratory lunch and a round of speeches, while us COs completed the security checks and were given coffee and crackers and cardboard cups of chowder.
We wore dark blue service dress jackets and trousers, light blue shirts. Blue caps with polished black peaks, black boots. Shock sticks holstered at our hips. The mundanes had thermal long johns under their uniforms and stamped their feet and beat their arms across their chests and complained about the cold. A few flakes of snow were fluttering down and I could smell coming flurries on the chafing wind.
I tipped my chowder away when no one was looking. I’d thrown up my breakfast, was running on caffeine and nerves.
It was 1400 now, no sign yet that the VIPs were about to stir from the cosy fug of their lunch. I wondered if Keever was waiting in his room for everything to kick off, or was he out and about with Mike Mike, making last minute tweaks to his arrangements, chivvying cons, COs, whoever else was in on the breakout? I realised that I didn’t know very much about it. Nothing but the broad strokes, and the stupid script I was supposed to stick to. I spotted Lola among a little group of COs nearby and she met my gaze for a moment, eyes bright under the peak of her cap, before looking away.
At last, the bullet-nosed locomotive and its two passenger cars drew out of the loop onto the main line, halting a little way from the viewing platform. The red ribbon stretched across the tracks rippled in the breeze. The first of the bridges was small as a toy in the distance, its spotlit bow spans gleaming with unreal clarity in the fading daylight.
We made our final inspections and lined up in parade formation, two ranks, a short distance from the platform and the train. Word went around that the schedule for the ceremony had been pushed back because lunchtime speeches had overrun. It was past 1500 and a thin snow had begun
to fall, little scatters of hard granules blowing on the wind, when at last a convoy of black rovers came muscling down the access road. I looked over the heads of the guards in front of me, trying and failing to spot Alberto Toomy among the people being ushered to the platform. Small drones passed and repassed high overhead, slicing through gusts of snow. A platoon of soldiers in black and white uniform struck up a medley of ancient show tunes on polished brass instruments.
An electric ball of excitement and anxiety revolved inside my ribs. Everything was running late, I had lost sight of Lola, and there was still no sign of Honourable Deputy Alberto Toomy. Maybe he hadn’t come after all. Maybe he had made some kind of principled stand against attending the actual ceremony and was stirring up trouble by inspecting the blocks and asking awkward questions. And then I saw him. Saw Alberto Toomy step out of the last rover in the line, dressed in a pale yellow coat with a fur collar that flared at the back of his head, his hair sleek as a seal’s pelt. He turned to help a young girl climb down, and I knew at once who she was.
Kamilah Toomy, Alberto Toomy’s eldest daughter.
My cousin.
5
Once upon a time, not long after I was released from the orphanage, I set out to reconnoitre the headquarters of Pyxis, the construction company owned by the Toomy family. Riding the subway to the centre of Esperanza, I felt like the vengeful heroine of a novella, a splinter of ice in her heart, a vial of black poison concealed in her underwear. But when I entered the lobby of the city-centre skyscraper where Pyxis leased three floors hard reality displaced every trace of my silly fantasies. The space was dizzyingly tall, impossibly lux. Water sheeted down a three-storey cliff of backlit glass into a pool surrounded by tropical plants I had no names for, and giant panels displayed images of sailing ships stranded in pack ice, images of fur-clad explorers from the Heroic Age man-hauling sleds or gazing across stark white wilderness, looming above people in immaculate business gear scurrying to and fro on inscrutable errands, breezing through the security gates in front of banks of big bronze-doored elevators. They belonged there and I so didn’t, and not just because I was the only husky in the place.
I retreated into the underground passages and strip malls of CORE, let my fone guide me to an escalator that carried me up to a quiet little park under a dome, with a view across a six-lane avenue to the cluster of skyscrapers driven like nails into Esperanza’s heart. The air around them swarmed with signs and ads, synchronised waves of runabouts and bicycles washed along the avenue, a heli neatly touched down on the roof of a tower whose sheer sides were studded with the green blisters of pocket gardens, and I felt a kind of numb humiliation because there was nothing in that world of marvels that had anything to do with my scrappy, insignificant life.
If I’d been any kind of real heroine I would have dedicated myself there and then to finding a way of bringing down Pyxis, the Toomy family and the whole rotten system on which they had fattened. Instead, I sat on the rim of a planter and squeezed out a few self-pitying tears, thinking of Mama, our home on Deception Island, everything I’d lost, and at last, prompted more by hunger than conscious decision, headed back to the subway and Star City.
I didn’t attempt to breach Pyxis’s perimeter again, let alone try to find my way to the Toomy family’s estate east of the city, with its manicured heathland and stands of lenga beech, its faux modernist house with levels of glass and concrete stepping down the side of a rugged cove to the sea (my fone had found a piece about it in an architecture journal). That one time was enough to show me that Mama was right. The rich inhabit a world that barely intersects ours, as hard to reach as the gold at the end of the rainbow’s span.
But here were Alberto Toomy and his eldest daughter in the work camp, in my world, standing in a press of VIPs under the gull-wing canopy of the viewing platform. I couldn’t look away from them. The man who had inherited the wealth my father should have shared. His daughter, who enjoyed without thought the benefits of that wealth, the privilege it bought.
She was fourteen. Slender, pale and blonde. The woman she would become just beginning to bloom. Laying a hand on her father’s arm, saying something that made him smile.
The chairman of the construction consortium introduced the vice-president and the vice-president began his speech, his back turned to me and the other COs. If you want to know what he said you can look it up, but frankly it isn’t worth the effort. I mean, it wasn’t history in the making. It was nothing more than a blatant publicity stunt dressed up with patriotism, meant to impress the electorate and reassure the rest of the world that the new government was no less eager to exploit the peninsula’s resources than its predecessor.
The speech ended in a polite ripple of applause and the vice-president was handed an oversized pair of gold-plated scissors which he used to snip the red ribbon stretched across the tracks. More applause as wind caught the cut ribbon and blew its shimmering length out into the snowy air. The army band struck up that old old sleigh-ride tune and people began to file down the steps and move towards the train that would carry them across the bridges and back again.
Alberto Toomy and his daughter were shadowed by a neat man in a black one-piece suit, no doubt personal security. The three of them briefly stopped, people moving past them on either side, and then Toomy’s daughter and the bodyguard cut away from the herd and headed off towards the fan of sidings where the construction machines were parked.
It was almost 1600.
Any moment now Keever’s main event would kick off.
The sergeant in charge of my squad gave the order to break ranks and go to our positions. According to Keever’s script, I was supposed to bull my way through the crowd of VIPs, beard Alberto Toomy and tell him and everyone else who I was. Instead, I set off at a slant towards the girl and her bodyguard.
You could say that I was rebelling against Keever, in full knowledge of the consequences. You could say (as the prosecution did, at my trial) that I was acting on fantasies of revenge I’d cultivated for years. All I know is that I believed that Kamilah Toomy was the kind of person I could have been in another life, if our grandfather had gone down a different road, if I’d been born into the square side of the family, if I wasn’t a husky. I wanted to see her close and plain. I wanted to ask her what it was like being her, wanted her to know what it was like being me. It was stronger than mere curiosity. It felt as if all of my life had been leading up to that moment. Everything else dropped away. I was floating on a saintly, righteous calm.
Then Lola caught up with me and grabbed my arm, forcing me to stop and turn to her.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ she said, white around the eyes with anxiety. ‘You’re going the wrong way.’
‘How much did Keever pay you to make sure I do what he wants?’
‘I’m here to back you up is all.’
‘Remember the oath we swore? One for all, all for one, so on? You want to back me up, let me do what I need to do.’
‘That was just some shit Paz made up. And we don’t have time for this,’ Lola said, pointing towards the train. Alberto Toomy was waiting his turn to climb aboard the second carriage, chatting amiably with a woman in a red coat that appeared to have been woven from feathers.
‘I hope Keever paid you up front,’ I said. ‘Because good luck getting it out of him after this.’
‘As if you didn’t get anything out of being his baby,’ Lola said. ‘We have a bare minute before the fucker gets on that train, so let’s just do this.’
‘Try and make me.’
For a moment we stood glaring at each other. I was ready to hurt Lola, she saw it and let go of my arm, and I went on towards the girl and her bodyguard, walking fast, glancing back just once to see Lola talking to the falling snow, no doubt telling Keever or Mike Mike about my defection. I didn’t care. In that moment what I wanted to do counted for more than anything else. And it felt right, felt as if a hand was at my back, urging me along.
The bodyguard
positioned himself in front of the girl and asked me what I wanted. I told him that I needed to know where he was going, staring straight at him rather than the girl.
‘We have permission,’ he said. He was in his forties, had a stern shuttered face, all angles and planes, that looked like it had been hacked from stone. Flakes of snow were settling in his hair, on the boxy shoulders of his black one-piece.
‘You’ve strayed outside the security envelope,’ I said, trying to sound cool and professional even though I was making it up as I went along.
The girl spoke up, saying, ‘It’s all right. My father said I could see the machines.’
Her pale face was dappled with random butterscotch patches. A white fur hat, sunshine-coloured hair spilling across the shoulders of a short white jacket buckled over a pale grey bodysuit.
‘We have permission,’ the bodyguard said again, and glanced past me for a moment.
I knew that Lola was coming towards us, said to the girl, ‘The machine over there, the long yellow one? Do you know what it does?’
‘It’s a bridge girder erector. An old design, but very functional.’
‘I see that you know something about them.’
‘I’m going to be an engineer.’
She had the absolute confidence of someone who never had to struggle for anything she wanted. When she glanced at my ID tag I felt a prickle of caution, wondering if she’d recognise my name, but then she was looking at Lola, who was approaching at a steady trot.
Across the tracks the train sounded its horn and began to glide away towards the first bridge. The military band was playing some silly spritely tune. It was too late to confront Alberto Toomy, too late to get with Keever’s script, and I didn’t care.
‘That one, the girder erector, I’ve seen it in action,’ I told the girl. ‘It’s pretty amazing.’