Austral

by Paul McAuley

  First, though, we had to trek across the Cayley Valley and Blériot Basin and make a short traverse across the Herbert Plateau before descending to the west coast, following the path Mama and I had taken after we’d escaped Deception Island. Fifty or sixty kilometres. Two days on the skimmer. No more than three. Most of the way was through forest, we could stay hidden, live off the land, and maybe our mystery benefactor would help us again …

  With a full belly, good weather and a solid plan, anything seemed possible.

  The valley, scooped out by a secondary ice flow, ended in a steep drop to the pitted remnant of what had to be, by my reckoning, Lilienthal Glacier. A couple of way signs led to a path cut into the sheer cliffs above the glacier. Barely wide enough for the skimmer, which had retracted its skis and dropped two front wheels to negotiate the buckled and potholed surface, the path descended in a long slant that swayed around the bellying curves of the cliffs with no barrier to prevent us going over the edge, sometimes running under overhangs, sometimes through short tunnels. Another feat of ecopoet engineering, carved by drills and picks and explosives, part of their semi-secret network of trails and roads.

  The jolting ride set off a familiar queasiness. Pretty soon I had to stop the skimmer, clambering off a bare moment before I lost my breakfast. The girl watched as I stood doubled over the puddle of puke, hands on knees, teary-eyed, spitting, wiping a string of mucus from my mouth with the back of my hand.

  ‘You’ve been sick every day,’ she said.

  ‘I’m fine. It isn’t anything.’

  But I could see her adding one and one together and getting two.

  ‘My cousin was sick every morning when she was pregnant,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not your cousin.’

  ‘You kind of are,’ she said, with a bold knowing look I didn’t like. ‘How far along are you?’

  I told her to get back on the skimmer, we had a long way to go.

  ‘Two months? Three?’

  ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘If it’s why you ran away from the camp, I think it is.’

  ‘Shut up and get on the fucking skimmer.’

  She shut up. She got on the fucking skimmer. But I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it.

  The road levelled out beyond the face of the glacier, following a shoulder of rock and gravel that slanted down to a narrow meltwater lake. Mama and I had camped on the shore of a similar lake in a valley closer to the coast, fishing for char and whitefish, catching little black crayfish in the shallows, but the girl and I lacked lines and hooks, and most of all we lacked time. Mike Mike and his crew were hunting us, if they tracked us to the refuge they’d soon enough find the ecopoet road we needed to get on.

  We drove past the far end of the lake, followed an outflow river that meandered between shoals of snow-capped gravel and scattered stands of weather-bent trees. Skiing through snowy meadows, bumping across frozen streams that ran down the steep valley side towards the river, skirting piles of rocks.

  Quite soon the trees thickened into forest. A rugged snow-capped mountain, Baldwin Peak, rose above sheer slopes off to our left, the walls of the valley fell back on either side, and we turned south and left the river behind. As we detoured around a string of small kettle lakes I glimpsed a group of giant elk and slowed and stopped, and the girl and I watched as the bull, tall and knock-kneed, antlers shaped like ragged bat-wings and two metres wide, unhurriedly led his harem of cows and their calves off through a grove of dwarf cypress, disappearing into the deep shadows of the forest.

  The girl asked if my people had made them.

  ‘Ecopoets resurrected mammoths, but not giant elk. They were the work of a bunch of rich people who wanted to hunt them. As if the reindeer we introduced weren’t enough,’ I said, knowing that I was channelling Mama’s scorn.

  ‘They look as if they belong here, even so.’

  ‘The head of that bull will probably end up as a trophy in some city fool’s house.’

  ‘I thought we’d see more animals than this.’

  ‘Most of them have the good sense to keep away from people.’

  I waited to see what else the girl wanted to say, whether she’d bring up my condition again. But she fell silent, staring off into the shadows under the trees, and I restarted the skimmer and we drove on.

  Somewhat past noon we encountered a second river, running broad and shallow over a bed of white pebbles, faintly smoking in the frigid air. We crossed it easily and parked up on the far side and brewed tea, black with the last of the sugar stirred into it, and ate a scant lunch of shrivelled bearberries picked along the river’s edge. Sunlight sparkled on the water and on the far bank a Siberian larch clothed in flame-red leaves flared in the sombre shade of conifers. The sheltering hush of the forest was broken only by the rippling rush of the river and the creak of trees pinched by cold and the occasional soft slide of snow from an overloaded bough. It was as if we were the first or last people in the world.

  The piercing sweetness of the bearberries unlocked a tumble of vivid memories. The exiled huskies had a small co-op farm on Deception Island, and all the fish they could catch, but also planted secret gardens of bearberry, Eskimo potato and other edible wild plants to keep in touch with their traditions, a link to the way of life from which they’d been torn, which they vowed to somehow keep alive until the blessed day they could return to it.

  For Mama and the rest of the adults, the island was a prison, but for most of us kids it was the only home we knew. We hiked up to remnant glaciers that clung around the peaks of Mount Pond and Goddard Hill, stole eggs from the rookeries of chinstrap penguins at Baily Head, swam in Alburfera Lagoon, camped out in summer at Crater Lake, played on black sand beaches and among the ruins of the old science station and the old whaling station in Whalers Bay.

  There was a little cemetery above the beach there, excavated from ash that had buried it in the last eruption. Crosses and headstones carved with antique names, all of them men. Back then, our schoolteacher Dr Herrara told us, the only permanent inhabitants of Antarctica were the dead, lying in cold and lonely graves far from home. We liked to frighten each other with tales of ghosts hungry for warm blood, and the demonic Mr Bones who, with long talons and eyes burning red in his skull face, stalked and snatched unwary children and boiled them to fat and bones in an old try-pot.

  Deception Island is a volcanic caldera that’s been breached and flooded by the sea, creating a natural harbour some seven kilometres across inside a horseshoe of high ridges and peaks. There’s a single narrow entrance, Neptune’s Bellows – an artificial channel actually, because the original was stopped up by mudflows and rock slides triggered by a big eruption at the end of the last century. So the bay inside, Port Foster, is nicely sheltered and the interior of the island has its own microclimate. Even before global warming changed everything, meadows of mosses and liverworts grew on its stony slopes. Volcanic heat percolates up through the sand of the beach at Whalers Bay and in a tradition more than a century old us kids liked to dig natural spa pools where we’d lounge and splash all day like so many seals.

  I remember lying with the others in one of those pools, water steaming in the crisp night air, the lights of the research station glimmering on the far side of the bay and the stars and the luminous wash of the Milky Way spread overhead. I remember watching the great tall curtains of the Southern Lights shimmering and flickering green and white and violet above Mount Pond, remember being gripped by the banal yet profound enlightenment which at some point occurs to every kid. Amazement at being who I was, alive at that particular time in that particular place out of the mind-breaking infinity of times and places in the whole wide universe. Feeling special and small at the same time. Wondering if someone like me was somewhere out there, looking up at a sky where our sun was only another star.

  The island’s harbour was a stopover for cruise ships from Chile, Argentina and New Zealand, and visitors came over from the peninsula too, to hike
the trails, explore the ruins, and gawk at the wildlife. Especially the killer whales – the so-called killer whales, as Mama called them, because they were actually edited dolphins about half the size of actual orcas, and after four or five generations were still being tweaked to more closely resemble the real thing. There were virtual tourists, too, and some of the adults and kids (but never Mama, never me) acted as their guides, wearing spex so the tourists could see what they saw and tell them what to look at and where to go.

  Many tourists believed that our village was one of the attractions, wanted to go poking around in our homes as if we were some kind of, you know, anthropological curiosity. The last of the wild humans. Mama usually chased them off, but when she was in one of her good moods she sometimes liked to buttonhole the intruders, actual or virtual, and lecture them on the stupidity and unfairness that was still ruining the world, and the righteousness of the free ecopoets’ cause.

  My mother. Aury Vergara Ferrado. I haven’t really told you much about her, have I? She was a firebrand back in the day, a political activist born into an ordinary middle-class family in Santiago. She quit school at the age of sixteen and went off to join a tree-planting project, one of the attempts to stop the spread of the Atacama Desert, knocked around in the so-called green underground for a couple of years, and quit Chile when she heard that the police were planning to round up her and a crew of activists who’d been campaigning against the construction of mansions and ranches by wealthy climate change refugees in Tierra del Fuego.

  By then, the peninsula’s government had outlawed ecopoets and their work. Most had accepted the terms of the amnesty, but a few held out, disappearing into the back country. Aury helped to organise supply routes to refuges and holdfasts below the Antarctic Circle, eventually used her contacts to get herself smuggled to the peninsula, where she joined the rebels.

  She hooked up with my father in a summer camp for a crew planting out alpine meadows on the steep hillsides above Sölch Fjord. It wasn’t love at first sight, like with Isabella and Eddie. Aury and Salix already knew each other because Aury had spent the previous winter in the refuge where my grandmother had set up her new lab. She told me that she was first attracted to Salix by his work ethic, but knowing Mama as I do, I reckon there was an element of political calculation too. Although Salix hadn’t inherited Isabella’s aptitude for science, was a general pool labourer in summer and supervised the refuge’s water recycling system in winter, he was his mother’s son and had a certain standing among the free ecopoets.

  But love or something like it blossomed, as they say, in the long days of hard work and the gatherings around campfires in the white nights of midsummer. Aury and Salix were married the next winter, and a couple of years later I was born. Another political act. Mama swore it had been a joint decision to engineer me, make me a husky, but I’m pretty sure my father didn’t have much choice in the matter.

  And listen. Mama may have been stubborn and obsessive, bitter and wounded, given to sudden rages and days of brooding black silence, but she was an indefatigable soldier in the struggle for environmental reparations and social justice, and she was dead right about one thing. Us huskies are something new in the world. So new we haven’t yet learned how to define ourselves, which is why, after Mama died, I too often measured my worth by the standards of mundanes, when like Paz I should have accepted who I was and flaunted my difference.

  After the escape from the island and everything else, too many people told me I was a monster. Some of them kids in the orphanage who didn’t know better, but plenty of adults too. So that’s what I became. That was the shell I grew. The mask I wore. My secret superpower. I was a thief, a convict, and an institutional thug, and then I snatched an innocent girl and took her into the deep dark forests of the back country.

  I did it only because I wanted to escape my past. Because I wanted to start over. Because I thought that I could find a place where what I was, what I’d been made to be, wouldn’t matter. Even to myself. And I did it for you. I did it for us. For the future we deserved to share. I took you with me just as Mama took me with her when we escaped from the island, and I was determined to succeed where Mama had failed. I don’t care if it sounds like magical thinking or self-justification. I know the truth. I did what I did to save you from a world that hated and feared people like us.

  16

  Close to the end of the day the girl and I drove up out of the forest and crossed the broad snow-covered saddle between the Cayley Valley and Blériot Basin. A solitary peak stood off to the north, hard pinkish light glowing on its flanks, and the wind blew cold and clean and the last of the sunlight turned the snow crust’s icy lace into a carpet of diamonds.

  We’re simple creatures. A change in the weather or a glimpse of a distant panorama can transform our mood in an instant. Looking across snowy ridges towards that mountain peak I was struck head to toe by a tingling charge of exhilaration. We had escaped, I was about to take up the path Mama and I had once followed, and this time it would all come right.

  But as we descended between stark bluffs towards Blériot Basin I saw that much of the forest through which Mama had led me all those years ago had been replaced by square regiments of dark green conifers and a loose grid of access roads. A rocky hill rose from these plantations like a besieged castle. Further off, the lights of a cluster of greenhouse domes shone small and distinct at the mouth of the Blériot River, and a dab of white smoke feathered from the tall chimneys of some kind of processing plant.

  I quickly disabused the girl when she pointed to the settlement and asked if that was where we were going. My brief euphoria had been displaced by nervy apprehension. When I spotted something glinting high in the darkening sky, heading north above the basin, I thought for a moment it might be a police heli or some kind of military craft, then realised that it was one of the cargo drones which transported fresh seafood from the coastal fishing villages to the cities. Still, I felt horribly exposed as we drove on in blue twilight, over stony slopes and through threadbare meadows at the eastern edge of the basin. There was entirely too much civilisation here for my liking, a good chance that we might run into a crew of foresters, a security patrol, a stray hiker …

  We stopped for the night in the cover of a patch of trees growing alongside a swift little stream. I constructed a half-circle of loose stones and the girl helped me pack the chinks with snow and roof it with cut branches. While she warmed herself in front of the fire I’d lit in front of our little shelter, I foraged along the bank of the stream, finding patches of trampled snow where reindeer had snouted for moss and lichen, no sign of any other life except for a small bird that, scared up from a clump of dead grass, whirred away above the water and was quickly lost in the twilight.

  I picked leaves from low tangles of box-leaf barberry and dwarf willow and winter’s bark, dug up willow roots, set out the wire loop traps I’d taken from the refuge. When I returned to the shelter the girl was sitting by the fire in her sleeping bag, reading her book. I stuffed the leaves into the printer and chopped the willow roots into a pan of melted snow water, and it was while we were waiting for this to boil that we heard the wolves.

  A pack calling each to each somewhere far off in the dark, the alpha male baying his long rising note, the rest pitching in with a chorus of howls and yips. A spooky lonesome carol that threaded a silver wire in my blood, the girl looking at me as it broke into scattered barks and fell silent.

  ‘They’ll be following elk and reindeer migrating north for the winter,’ I told her. ‘They won’t be interested in us.’

  I’d seen wolves hunting, once upon a time. Mama and I had been traversing a ridge when we’d spotted them in the snowy valley below, circling a small group of reindeer, charging at them and cutting away until the reindeer panicked and broke into a run. The wolves raced alongside them, looking for any weakness, and at last one chased down a calf which had become separated from its mother, grabbing a hind leg in its jaws and holding on as t
he calf kicked a circle in the snow. The other wolves swarmed in, one tore out the calf’s throat, and that was that.

  Remembering something Mama had said back then, I told the girl, ‘If they do come at us, stand your ground and spread your arms. As long as you look much bigger than them, look like you mean to do them some hurt, they’ll think twice about attacking.’

  ‘I thought you said wolves didn’t attack people,’ she said.

  She was sitting very still, looking across the little fire towards the trees on the other side of the stream, dark against the dark sky. The night was quiet again, but now that we knew what was out there the quality of that silence had changed.

  ‘It’s good advice in general,’ I said.

  As we ate a bare supper of tasteless printer biscuits and boiled willow roots, I tried to take the girl’s mind off her predicament, asked her how the book’s story was going, whether the prince and princess had married yet.

  ‘If you’re going to make fun of it there isn’t much point telling you any more.’

  ‘We’re sitting in front of a campfire in a dark wood. Exactly the kind of place where people tell each other stories. And you won’t get another chance. Tomorrow we’ll get to somewhere safe, and I’ll fone your father and arrange to get you back to him.’

  ‘Where you’re going to ransom me, in other words.’

  ‘Think of it as my reward for saving you. Like this prince saving the princess in your story.’

  ‘Tantris isn’t a prince. And it isn’t that kind of story either.’