by Paul McAuley
‘My grandfather made good use of that money,’ the girl said, grimly determined to defend the honour of the Toomy family. No doubt she’d been schooled about their fabulous achievements all her life, how they deserved their fortune because every cent had been earned by superhuman talent and honest hard work. ‘He built things, created jobs, gave to charity. You can’t tell me the people he took it from would have done any better.’
‘And while he was living the high life, he didn’t ever try to get in touch with Isabella,’ I said. ‘Not until years later, when he betrayed her, and their son, and the rest of the free ecopoets. Did he turn that into one of his funny stories, too?’
‘When two people split up,’ the girl said, ‘they tell different versions of what happened. They blame each other.’
I remembered her father’s string of girlfriends. Remembered that, like me, she’d lost her mother. Yeah, but she hadn’t been dumped in an orphanage or turned out into the world all alone. She’d been cushioned by all the advantages I’d been denied.
‘What happened, our grandfather split our family into two,’ I said. ‘One half rich, the other poor. One half on the square, the other persecuted for their beliefs. Like in a fairy tale or a novela.’
‘If this is a fairy tale, I suppose you think I’m the princess.’
‘Why not? And I’m the monster. The ogre. The outcast.’
‘Well you definitely did a bad thing,’ the girl said, with a cool look.
I tried to turn that into a joke. ‘And if you don’t do what I say, Princess, I’ll grind your bones to make my bread.’
Maybe it was the idea of bone-powder flour. Maybe it was the thought of bread, its thick yeasty odour … My queasiness thickened into nausea, rose past my heart, jumped into the back of my throat. I burped a shrimpy burp, barely had time to step behind a boulder before I doubled over and puked up my lunch. I coughed and spat and another spasm hit me and I puked again.
I’d looked up morning sickness when I started to lose my breakfast regularly. Apparently it could affect you any time of day in early pregnancy, and in some women it lasted all day long. I didn’t have it as bad as that, but it was still a fucking inconvenience.
As I ate a mouthful of snow to get rid of the taste, the girl told me that she could call for help if I unblocked her fone.
‘I’m not ill.’
‘It could be food poisoning.’
‘It isn’t anything. We should get moving, it’ll be dark soon.’
‘My father will give you what you want, I swear he will. He’ll make everything right.’
‘I don’t need his help. Or yours. Let’s get going, or we’ll be walking most of the rest of the way in the dark.’
A little further on the road began to climb steeply, slanting towards the terminal face of the glacier, rising above it, revealing a river of ice that, shattered by pressure ridges and tilted blocks and deep crevasses, curved away between the bare sides of the valley. Directly below, a massive blanket of snow-covered rubble spread across the glacier’s surface, and after the girl and I followed the road around the belly of a bluff I realised where that rubble had come from, what had happened.
A section of the cliffs had collapsed and the glacier’s slow steady flow had carried the leading edge of the debris beyond the landslip. It had left a scallop-shaped scar easily a kilometre long, and the road, the road, the road was gone.
Heartsick, I led the girl through a litter of fallen rocks to the splintered end of the road, an abrupt drop to a tumble of snow-dusted boulders and stone blocks. No way forward, no way to reach the refuge. Even if we could climb down there was no guarantee we could climb back up on the far side, and it would be impossibly difficult and dangerous to lead the girl across the churn of debris and the shattered surface of the glacier.
I howled. Actually howled. Howled and beat at a facet of broken rock with my fists, howled at the sky and howled into the echo of my howls coming back to me across the unforgiving ice. I couldn’t fucking believe it. Couldn’t believe my fucking luck. First the ute, now this. It was as if the entire world was conspiring against me.
The girl flinched away from me. I suppose I must have looked a sight. Wild with frustration. At the end, as they say, of my tether.
‘Don’t say a word,’ I told her. ‘Don’t say one fucking word.’
I wasn’t ready to surrender. I wouldn’t ever surrender. It would mean giving birth to you in jail, nursing you in jail, giving you up to child services and a state orphanage, and there was no fucking way I was going to let that happen. So I had to find another route to the refuge, or at least find a place where we could hole up for the night. And I had to do it quickly because we had only a little daylight left, we were running out of time. I squashed the temptation to reboot my fone and ask her to find an alternate route – the way my luck was running that would lead the police straight to me. Then I remembered the bridge over the river, and told the girl that we were going to backtrack and make a slight detour.
She nodded tightly. She looked as if she was about to burst into tears. Which was pretty much how I felt.
The walk away from the glacier, following our tracks back down the ecopoet road as the sun sank towards the shoulder of the valley and shadows lengthened and the air grew colder, was like a retreat from a lost battle. We crossed the desolate truss bridge, edging past a gap where a chunk of decking had fallen away, the black river running fast below. Long fingers of cloud were reaching in from the west. More snow on the way. I could feel it. Way things were going it didn’t surprise me in the least.
The mining road, broken by ice heave and blanketed in snow, climbed in steep winding coils towards the notch of a pass. Several times on the long ascent I had to wait while the girl stood with her head down, hands on her knees, doing nothing but breathe. Gasping, puffing out great clouds of smoke. My anger was turning inward. I was beginning to blame myself for the fiasco, was afraid that I was taxing the girl beyond her limits, knew that the way to freedom and the Wheel was going to be so very much harder than I’d first thought. But I wasn’t about to give up. I was as stubborn as Mama, and far more desperate.
At last the road levelled out, cutting straight between tall bluffs. The girl and I slogged on through drifts of snow sculpted into ripples and waves, heads down against a freezing wind. We had climbed above the thousand metre contour, but the refuge was still more than twenty kilometres away, we had to find someplace to wait out the night as soon as possible, and now the girl stopped again. Sat down in the snow and said that she couldn’t walk any further.
She shook her head dumbly when I told her that she would freeze to death if she stayed where she was, refused to get up even when I yelled at her, so I swept her up into my arms and set off at a jog along the road. Stamping across snow pack, ploughing through drifts. Sweating inside my windproofs and uniform, my feet frozen, my face numb. Once, I tripped on a half-buried rock and banged down on my knees. The girl half woke, tried to struggle out of the cradle of my arms, but I held her tight and pushed to my feet and went on, and at last saw a crowd of tall slim spires strung along a ridge off to my left, stark against the last of the daylight. It was an old wind farm, most of its turbines motionless, frozen stiff, a few faintly groaning, vanes turning in the pitiless frigid breeze, as I trudged past with the girl’s awkward weight cradled against my chest. My legs and back ached, I was running on fumes, but was driven by a sharp pang of hope, knew that some kind of settlement must be nearby. Quite soon a short spur split off the road, curving towards a terraced amphitheatre cut into the flank of a low ridge and filled edge to edge with the bloody light of the setting sun. I followed the slant of the spur towards the floor of this open-pit mine, ducking through a broken gate, passing a tipper truck squatting on the rims of tyreless wheels taller than me. The rake of a conveyer belt. All kinds of abandoned machinery. Steep cones of tailings like a miniature mountain range. Everything still, everything shrouded in snow.
The place was de
serted, long abandoned, and that was fine by me. The last thing I needed was company, and there was shelter dead ahead, a single-storey shack with snow drifted high against one wall and plastic sheeting stretched across its roof and lashed down with a web of nylon cords. I shouldered its door open, set the girl down and looked around. A barricade of old-fashioned office furniture, steel shelving packed with tools, parts for machines that would never run again, chunks of dark-veined rock, cans and plastic trays full of screws and nails and bolts, everything dusted with frost.
I was dragging a desk across the floor to the middle of the room when the girl spoke, asking what this place was. She had sat up and was hugging herself, shuddering and shivering like an engine trying and failing to start.
‘Somewhere we can rest up a while,’ I said, and tipped the desk on its side. ‘Show me your fingers and your feet. I want to check for frostbite.’
‘My suit keeps me warm,’ the girl said.
‘It redistributes the heat you make when you move about. But you weren’t moving much for the last couple of hours because I was carrying you.’
‘Whose fault was that?’
‘Let me see.’
I had to pin her down, pulled off her gloves and boots, pulled down the hood of her bodysuit. No patches of dead whiteness on her fingers and toes, none on her ears. While she put on her socks and boots, glaring at me, I dragged another desk across the room, tipped it over so its legs meshed with the legs of the first, found a couple of filthy frost-stiffened blankets in a nest of rags in one corner and used them to improvise a tent. I told the girl to crawl inside and climb into her sleeping bag, and set the stove beside her and switched it on.
‘It stinks in here,’ she said. ‘It smells like something died.’
‘It’s dry. And soon it’ll be warm. We’ll rest up tonight, head out at first light.’
‘I won’t walk any further. I don’t care what you do to me. I won’t.’
She was in a filthy mood, and like any angry teenager was channelling the tantrums of her much younger self. I told her that we’d both feel better after I’d brewed some tea, and went outside to collect clean snow.
The sun had set and the last of its light was fading towards the horizon, glowing red under clouds that covered half the sky. I followed my footprints back up the road to the broken gate at the entrance to the mine and climbed a hump of rock and looked all around, seeing nothing moving in the snowscape. Lucky, I thought. Lucky lucky lucky.
I’d been planning to stash the girl in the ecopoet refuge, but now I thought that this mine would do just as well. First thing next morning I’d call her father and negotiate the ransom. After he paid up I’d tell him where the girl was and make my escape across the Detroit Plateau. And if he called my bluff, fuck it, I’d tell him anyway.
The decision calmed me. I rehearsed what I needed to tell the girl and packed snow into a thick hard slab and carried it back to the shack. It was dark inside, a spark of light shining in the little tent I’d made between the upturned desks. When I set down the slab of snow and lifted the edge of one of the blankets, the girl, snug in her sleeping bag, looked up from the luminous rectangle she’d been studying.
Instantly furious, I tore it from her grip, flapped it in her face.
‘What is this? What have you been doing?’
It was a slim, hand-sized tablet. One side sheathed in black leather, text printed on the pearlescent surface of the other. Isander locked herself in the library and read long into the night about poisons.
‘It’s a book, only a book,’ she said, snatching at it. I caught her wrist and in the brief struggle the makeshift tent collapsed around us. I reared up from the wreckage, holding the book out of the girl’s reach, and that’s when the door of the hut banged open and a shaggy creature stamped in and pointed a rifle at us and told us to put up our Christ-be-damned hands.
9
The intruder was a woman in her fifties or sixties, standing four-square and stinking in a long coat of badly cured reindeer hide, her hunting rifle jacked against her left hip. She was only a metre and a half tall but looked like she could fell an aurochs with a single blow, glaring at the girl and me with furious suspicion, demanding to know what we were doing in Young Old’s place.
‘Young Old?’ I said.
‘What I called him. Young because he wasn’t much older than this girl. Old because his name was Oldin. Oldin Andersen. Young Old. Which hand do you favour?’
‘The right.’
I wasn’t inclined to ask the woman why she wanted to know. Her rifle was the kind that fired lead bullets kicked by percussively ignited explosive – back-country hunters claimed that they were more reliable than modern weapons, whose power packs were too quickly drained by the cold. This one had a polished wooden stock and a telescopic sight. I could have fitted my thumb into its bore.
‘Why don’t you use your left hand to ease out any weapons you got,’ the woman said. ‘Toss them on the floor.’
I dropped my pistol and shock stick at my feet, asked if Young Old was still around.
‘He came here about ten years ago. Wanted to break down the old machines for scrap, but there wasn’t any money in it so he left. You’re one of them that escaped from the work camp on that goddamned railway. I heard all about it on the skywave.’
‘She escaped,’ the girl said. ‘I’m Kamilah Toomy. My father is Alberto Toomy. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? The Honourable Deputy?’
The woman ignored her and said to me, ‘The skywave said a bunch of you broke out. And the feds are offering a fat reward for your recapture. So the question is, can you make it worth my while not to hand you over to them?’
I told her that I actually was a fed, a corrections officer, asked for permission to open my windproof.
‘Use your left hand. Do it nice and slow.’
I did it nice and slow, but the woman wasn’t impressed by my uniform jacket, claimed that I could have stolen it. ‘And this is the first time I’ve heard of a husky working for the feds.’
‘Check out the photo on my ID,’ I said, tapping the tag on my chest.
The woman squinted at it, said, ‘Suppose I believe you. I’m not saying I do. Far from it. But if you are what you say you are, what are you doing out here with this girl?’
‘I rescued her.’
‘She’s lying,’ the girl said. ‘Let me call my father—’
She shut up when the rifle dipped towards her.
‘I’ll get to you in a bit, pretty miss,’ the woman said, and told me to say my piece.
‘There was a big ceremony at the work camp yesterday,’ I said. ‘The official opening of the bridges we’ve been building. You may have seen some helis heading that way.’
The woman allowed that she might have noticed some extra sky traffic.
‘The helis were bringing in VIPs. Very important people. Including this girl and her father. Who really is an honourable deputy, by the way. They came for the ceremony, and a riot kicked off right in the middle of it. Convicts broke out of their blocks, a couple of them tried to take this girl hostage, I stepped in and saved her. As for how we ended up here, well, I discovered the hard way that it isn’t easy working for the service when you’re a husky. I’d had enough, frankly, and decided to use the confusion of the riot to slip away. I broke my contract, but that doesn’t make me a fugitive from justice.’
‘Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t,’ the woman said. ‘But here’s the thing. I can’t think of any good reason why you would want to bring that girl along with you.’
‘It was kind of an accident,’ I said.
‘It was not,’ the girl said.
‘Didn’t I tell you to wait your turn?’ the woman told her.
I said, ‘I’ve been trying to figure out how to return her to her father without getting into trouble. And I think you can help me.’
‘Why should I do that?’
‘If you help me, I’ll make sure you get the reward for her safe retu
rn.’
‘If there’s any reward, I can get that myself. And I’ll get a reward for handing you over, too.’
‘There isn’t any reward for handing me over. I’m not worth a thing to the authorities.’
‘Well, I guess I’ll have to ask them about that.’
‘Go ahead. But as soon as they know where we are, they’ll come and take us away. And when they get the money from the girl’s father, do you think they’ll share it with you? We’re talking about feds. Who take from people like us with both hands, but don’t ever give anything back.’
I watched the woman think about that. She said, ‘I still don’t see why I couldn’t just talk to her father myself.’
‘That would complicate things,’ I said. ‘Because I’ve already talked to him.’
‘No she hasn’t,’ the girl said. ‘It’s another lie.’
I looked at her. ‘When I went outside just now, how long was I away? Fifteen minutes? Twenty?’
The girl shrugged.
‘It was a lot longer than I needed to grab some snow to make our tea. I called her father,’ I told the woman. ‘Let him know I had his daughter. I can arrange it so you can hand her over and collect the reward directly. A deal that doesn’t involve the authorities.’
‘I still don’t see why I can’t do that myself,’ the woman said.
‘First, you’ll need his private number. Second, he’ll think you had something to do with taking the girl. But if you let me make the arrangements, I can fix it so he’ll get his daughter back and you’ll get the reward.’
I know. A five-year-old could have spun a better story. But I was thinking on my feet with that damn rifle pointing at me, and it got the woman’s attention.