by Paul McAuley
He liked to believe that he was an outsider who’d made good, a larrikin who used his God-given cunning and guile to get one over on people who didn’t care for his rough and ready ways, thought they were better than him. But although he pretended to be indifferent to what he called the establishment, said that it was bloody typical of them to cut him loose after all the hard work he’d put in and the personal risks he’d taken, he was wounded by the chilly gulf that had opened up between himself and those he’d considered close personal friends. He vowed that he would make sure that his sons had all the benefits he lacked, and the rest of his life was consumed by wheeling and dealing. Making money was his way of proving to himself that he’d been in the right all along.
He rode out the so-called scandal manufactured by enemies who revealed that he not only had an illegitimate son who was a big wheel in the free ecopoet movement, but also a granddaughter who’d been illegally edited, turned into a so-called husky. Made no public comment after Salix was lost at sea when a freak storm sank his fishing boat. A few years later the sea also claimed Eddie. He was a passenger on a jet-wing that while en route to Buenos Aires vanished somewhere over the Drake Passage, and his body was never recovered.
17
I had just turned eight when my grandfather died in that jet-wing crash, vividly remember Mama’s frustration and anger when she gave me the news. She’d dearly wanted to punish Eddie Toomy. For refusing to help his son – my father, her husband – and for betraying the ecopoets, which as far as she was concerned had killed Salix, who wouldn’t have drowned in that storm off Deception Island if Eddie hadn’t pulled his fast one. But now Eddie had put himself beyond her reach, and she was angrier with him dead than when he’d been alive.
The girl, of course, refused to believe any of it. According to her, according to the Toomy family version of the story, the government had forced Eddie to become a double agent, threatening to reveal that he had a son who was a criminal fugitive if he didn’t co-operate with them.
‘And anyway, it wasn’t as if he did anything wrong,’ she said. ‘I mean, he helped to round up people who had rebelled against the rule of law. He was a hero, if you ask me. And talking of betrayal? After he helped the government, after he did everything he was asked, someone leaked the information about his links with the ecopoets to his enemies.’
She’d been indoctrinated with this spin all her life, truly believed that her grandfather had been an upright citizen blackmailed by the state and double-crossed by politicians. I couldn’t persuade her that, like the rest of Eddie’s stories, it was a pack of self-serving lies invented to justify his folly and selfishness.
‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ she said, stubborn to the last. ‘He’s dead. Everyone involved in that sad story is dead.’
She was young. She didn’t yet understand that the past is never past.
‘It should matter to you,’ I told her. ‘It’s how we ended up here. When you get home, ask Alberto to tell you what really happened in the campaign against the ecopoets. And if he can’t or won’t, a girl smart as you should be able to dig out the truth from police records, so forth.’
The girl held up her left wrist, the one with the orange fone-blocking bracelet locked around it. ‘If you take this off, I can ask my father right now.’
‘In all the excitement when we left the camp, I kind of forgot to bring along the gizmo that makes those things let go,’ I said. ‘And you should quit trying to pry it loose. You’ll only hurt yourself.’
‘You call him then.’
‘Right now he’d tell me anything I wanted to hear. Say anything to get his precious darling daughter back. And afterwards he’d change his story, claim I put the words in his mouth. Come to think of it,’ I said, ‘I bet he’s already changed those records. That’s what people like him do. Rewrite history to suit themselves, bury the bodies of people they wronged …’
There was a silence. I snapped branches and tossed the pieces on the fire. A galaxy of sparks whirled up into the dark and winked out. After a little while, the girl asked about my grandmother, if I knew where she’d gone, if she was still alive.
Mama believed that Isabella had gone further south. To Palmer Land, or even the mainland. That’s where we’d been heading after we escaped. Trying to find a Shangri-La that probably didn’t exist. But I don’t know anyone who saw or met Isabella after the police broke up the last of the free ecopoets, she didn’t ever try to get in touch with my parents after they were arrested, and although I guess there’s some small chance that she’s living like a hermit in some remote refuge, dressed in a sealskin coat and handstitched mukluks, cooking seal steaks or a butterflied penguin over a blubber fire, she most likely died years back. Frozen at the bottom of a crevasse, maybe, or buried by her fellow refugees in a remote and secret grave. I like to think that grave has a view of a sea where bergs still sail, that in the brief summer thaw it’s covered with wild flowers. I like to think that it’s a far better resting place than the trench in the potter’s field where Mama was dumped in a cardboard coffin.
I told the girl all that, told her that we both knew who was responsible. I knew it wasn’t her fault, but I couldn’t help blaming her. Like wading in the shallows of a lake and kicking up stinking black mud, talking about the past had stirred all kinds of bad memories and feelings.
She shook her head very slightly. Looking at the fire, not at me. She’d withdrawn, become unreachable. The way Mama sometimes did.
‘We should get some sleep,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow’s another day, and all the rest of that shit.’
We lay back to back in the crude little shelter and I fell asleep thinking of everything that could go wrong on the way to Charlotte Bay, everything that could go wrong when I got there. I thought of the woman who’d helped Mama and me. Alicia Whangapirita. A kindly grey-haired woman who’d worn lots of necklaces – she’d given one of them to me when Mama and I had stayed with her. Black stone beads on a waxed cotton thread. The police confiscated it when I was arrested, and although they told me I’d get it back of course I never did. She had worked in my grandmother’s lab back in the day, and although she’d chosen to come in out of the cold during the government amnesty she’d remained sympathetic to the free ecopoet cause, had helped to smuggle supplies, so on.
Would she be happy to see me again? Probably not. The girl’s kidnap must be all over the feeds, no way would anyone with any sense want to have anything to do with me. But I couldn’t stay out here, not with Mike Mike and his bravos looking for me, and all I needed was a place to hole up, somewhere I could stash the girl while I set up her ransom …
When I woke, dull light was filtering through the shelter’s pine-bough roof. The fire was out and the girl was foraging along the edge of the stream, coming back with a couple of fistfuls of twigs and leaves, saying there’d been no gift this morning from elves or whatever and she couldn’t find any berries either, so she was going to make biscuits. Could I eat biscuits?
She was anxious. Conciliatory. Perhaps she was beginning to believe the truth about Eddie Toomy, or was at least beginning to understand my point of view. More likely she was trying to appease the crazy monster holding her prisoner in this God-forsaken wolf-haunted wilderness, who yawned and scratched at her wounded shoulder, and told her that she better not have disturbed any of the fucking traps.
I found a collared lemming strangled in one of the wire snares, a little puffball in its white winter coat. They’d been edited, lemmings, could freeze solid in winter and thaw out and be ready to go in spring. Sometimes, when the snow started to melt in spring, so many of them appeared all at once it was if they’d fallen from the sky.
The girl was pretending to be very interested in watching the food printer hum and chuckle to itself as it digested her offering. I built a small fire in the previous night’s ashes, put on a pot of snow to melt and boil. Used my knife, thumb close to the point, to shuck the lemming’s fur suit, gutted it with my little finger, popped
it into my mouth. Nutty flesh, crunchy little bones. Another taste of my childhood. Someone had introduced a species of subarctic mice to Deception Island and in winter they would come into our one-room house, looking for shelter. If we don’t eat them we’ll be overrun, Mama used to say. We’re part of the ecosystem’s regulatory mechanism.
The girl gave me a frank look of disgust. I told her that she’d eat lemmings if she didn’t have any other food. That she’d eat a boiled shoe if she was hungry enough.
‘A person can survive on these biscuits,’ she said primly, pulling a ragged wafer from the printer’s slot. ‘They contain all the essential nutrients.’
‘That’s fine, until that little gadget breaks down. As machines tend to do, out here. Also, you know why reindeer never get anything done? It’s because they have to spend all day eating grass and lichen to stay alive.’
I would have loved, right then, to have been able to run down a deer and bite out its throat, like the monster the girl so obviously thought I was. But the idea of a gush of hot salty blood triggered a wire to my belly and it tried to turn itself inside out and I leaned sideways and threw up the mashed lemming. I made a joke about having eaten too quickly, staring hard at the girl, daring her to say something, anything, about my condition, about you, and boiled up willow bark tea to ease the cramp in my stomach, the tender ache in my shoulder. I was sipping tea and cautiously nibbling at a biscuit and thinking of you when the girl suddenly stood up.
‘Listen,’ she said.
I didn’t hear anything at first. Then a faint bugling, like a trumpet blown flat. It wasn’t wolves this time. It was a mammoth, calling in distress somewhere on the slope above us.
18
The mammoth stood at bay above a bend of the stream, backed into a clump of boulders while three wolves prowled up and down in front of it. The wolves turning to look at the skimmer when I braked a few hundred metres away, but standing their ground. They were long and lean and raggedy, probably young males who’d split off from the main pack. Mostly grey and white. Touches of auburn on their ears and muzzles. Yellow eyes. You wouldn’t ever mistake one for any breed of dog.
‘We have to do something,’ the girl said.
‘This is kind of between the mammoth and the wolves,’ I said.
‘They want to kill it.’
‘That’s what they do,’ I said, and explained that wolves generally didn’t attack frontally, they were trying to force the mammoth into making a run for it so they could give chase and bring it down. ‘If it has any sense it’ll stay where it is until they lose interest. But if it panics, then that’s that. Either way, there’s nothing we can do to help, and we have places to go, things to do.’
The wolves had decided that we weren’t a threat and had turned their attention back to the mammoth. One of them, the biggest, made a quick feint towards the boulders, pranced away in a flurry of snow when the mammoth hooked low with its curled tusks. It was about a metre and a half tall at the shoulder, with a sloping back and a barrel belly and a thick coat of coarse strawberry blond hair that hung in a kind of matted skirt around the solid pillars of its legs. It was favouring one of its hind legs and there were vivid spatters of blood on the apron of trampled snow around it.
‘It’s hurt,’ the girl said, and, I still can’t believe it, jumped down into calf-deep snow and stepped forward, shouting and clapping her hands.
The wolves turned to stare at her, heads low, haunches high. I drew my pistol and swung off the skimmer and spread my arms and stamped my feet. In the stretching moment of silence I could feel my pulse butterflying in my throat. Then the biggest wolf turned with a smooth flowing motion and the others followed, all three running flat out across the snow, vanishing around a rake of black rock.
The mammoth watched the girl sidelong as she stepped towards it, its eye small and brown under the bulge of its forehead. Eyelashes to die for. It was emitting a kind of rumbling snore. I could feel it in the soles of my feet.
The girl jumped when I laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s a wild animal,’ I said. ‘Dangerous as any wolf.’
She shrugged away from me and took another step, holding out her hand. The mammoth’s trunk quested towards her snakewise, snatched something from her open palm, fed it to its mouth.
‘I was saving a biscuit,’ the girl told me with a silly smile.
‘This is absolutely none of our business.’
The girl ignored me. The flexible tip of the mammoth’s trunk was snuffling her palm, the pockets of her windproof jacket.
‘Look at its ear,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that some kind of tag? It must belong to someone.’
It was a thick oblong of plastic clipped about where a person would wear an earring. Someone owned the fucking beast all right. And would almost certainly be looking for it.
‘They should have taken better care of it,’ I said, and grabbed the girl’s wrist, told her when she tried to pull away that if she didn’t get back on the skimmer I’d leave her for the wolves.
‘They might be the people who took out the drone and gave you that hare,’ the girl said. ‘It might lead us to them.’
I should have ignored her. I should have tied her up and slung her across the saddle of the skimmer, left the mammoth to the tender mercy of the wolves. But I was hungry and tired, I wasn’t thinking straight, and although I doubted that the mammoth had anything to do with our mysterious benefactors (I still favoured Paz and Sage), I reckoned that its owners would most definitely owe us a favour if we stepped in. I mean, how was I to know that it would get us into so much trouble?
‘Let’s say we rescue it,’ I said. ‘And let’s say we find the people it belongs to. I have to be sure that you won’t say anything about how we came to be out here.’
‘I mustn’t tell them that you kidnapped me, you mean.’
‘I’m serious. I want you to give me your word that you’ll behave. If you won’t, that’s it, we’re going to leave your little friend behind.’
After a moment, she nodded.
‘I need a bit more than that,’ I said, and pulled the glove from my right hand and spat on my palm and stuck it out. ‘You do the same, we shake, it seals the deal. In the city, you sign a contract. This is how we do it out here.’
I’d just made it up, but like Paz said, we were a new thing, and that gave us the right to invent our own traditions.
The girl, her gaze locked with mine, pulled off her glove and spat, dry and delicate as a cat sneezing, and we shook hands.
‘So this is what’s going to happen,’ I said. ‘If we can get your new friend to follow us, we’ll lead it up out of the basin and cut across the Herbert Plateau. There’s an old tree nursery on a road that cuts down from the west side of the plateau to the coast. If we haven’t found the mammoth’s owners by the time we get there, that’s where we’ll leave it. OK?’
‘OK.’
She didn’t look very happy, but it wasn’t as if she had a choice.
‘Good. Now let’s get going before the damn wolves change their minds.’
We hadn’t gone much more than a kilometre when the wolves came back. I told the girl to hang on, made a sharp U-turn, and cut past the mammoth and drove straight at them. All three immediately turned as one and plunged away downhill, vanishing into a thin line of trees.
‘They won’t go far,’ I said, as we drove back to where the mammoth had stopped, its wounded hind leg crooked up. ‘They’ll keep following us, hoping we’ll make a mistake or get tired. It’s what they do.’
‘They’re clever.’
‘They’re ruthless. They have to be.’
The three wolves returned to the chase a couple of kilometres further on. Rather, they’d been there all along, but had grown bold enough to show themselves again.
I stopped the skimmer and aimed my pistol at their leader, hoping to bring him down with a taser taglet. But he was canny enough to stay out of range, so in the end I shot a tree instead. Shot it with two explosive tag
lets and set it on fire. It burned quickly, snow on its branches hissing to steam as flames wrapped it from base to crown, sending up a spire of white smoke that was a perfect sign for anyone looking for us.
The wolves scattered but soon returned again, trailing us with canny persistence, never getting close enough to shoot. No sign of the mammoth’s owners, no sign of any help from the sky. Maybe the owners of that predator drone had lost track of us in the forest. Maybe we were finally out of range. Whatever, we were on our own, the damn wolves weren’t ever going to give up, the mammoth was limping badly, and every time it stopped to rest its wounded leg the wolves stopped too, watching with intense concentration until, after some chivvying from the girl, it started walking again.
In this fashion we travelled six kilometres in as many hours. Mounting the long slope of Blériot Basin’s southern flank as the grey sky darkened, the mammoth limping, halting, limping on. The girl and I driving alongside it on the skimmer, the wolves following some way behind. A grim little procession climbing above the treeline, plodding through wind-sculpted snow, across bare slopes of scree, until at last, just after sunset, I cut towards an outcrop of boulders that stood on a flat setback below the crest of a ridge.
That’s where we made camp. I helped the girl herd the mammoth into the lee of the boulders and parked the skimmer in front of it, and we were more or less back where we had started. We couldn’t build a fire because there weren’t any trees on the bare slope, and we didn’t have any food either, not even lichen or grass we could turn into cardboard biscuits. I used the stove, by then down to a quarter of its full charge, to melt a pan of snow and brew tea. The wolves sprawled together in a hollow some way down the slope, hard to see in the twilight. The basin spread beyond, the lights of those greenhouses twinkling at the horizon. We really hadn’t come very far.
‘Maybe they’ll give up in the night,’ the girl said.