Tamaruq (50 page)

‘I survived it once. I don’t know what that means. I believe the answer lies with this city.’

‘Yes. I can see the scars on your face. We have been fortunate to keep redfleur outside of the Corporation’s zones, but our citizens abroad have not been so lucky. If you really have immunity, you have the potential to save millions of lives.’ She glances to the door. ‘There is not much time. The Boreals and the Antarcticans are on the brink of open warfare. I will have to make an announcement.’

The pilot says something urgently to the Alaskan, who clears her throat.

‘I’m afraid it’s not just the matter of Vikram Bai and his immunity. Or rather it is, but it goes deeper than that. Ramona Callejas has uncovered a Boreal experimentation site north of the belt. The experiments are kidnapped southerners. We have the diaries of the head scientist which suggest that this city was once used as an ancillary centre for genetic experimentation.’

The Alaskan nods towards Vikram.

‘It’s possible that this is linked to this man’s immunity.’

‘Or it’s something to do with Osiris itself,’ says Vikram. ‘Like the tea. I always wondered about the coral tea.’

Sosanya takes the news with more equanimity than might have been expected. Vikram wonders if anything would faze her.

‘We’ll need verification for what you are saying.’

The pilot leans forwards, tapping the table. ‘You can hear the diaries for yourself.’ The Alaskan translates. Sosanya nods.

‘An experimentation site?’ Her face wrinkles with disgust. ‘This will take days to unravel. For now, I need to make an announcement.’

The Alaskan coughs and Vikram says, ‘There are some conditions attached.’

‘You’d better state them quickly.’

‘The Alaskan requests Antarctican citizenship. El Tiburón,’ Vikram sees Sosanya’s eyebrows raise at the name but she says nothing, ‘requires international immunity. And you must promise to make a formal investigation into Tamaruq, the centre in the north.’

‘I can make this happen.’

The pilot speaks to him quickly, gesturing to Sosanya.

‘Ramona wants your personal guarantee that you will not let Tamaruq go. She wants to know that you will give your last breath if necessary to shut it down.’

Sosanya turns to the pilot.

‘I give you my word, Ramona Callejas.’

Ramona nods, apparently satisfied, and continues to watch the exchange closely.

‘Osiris gets independence,’ says Vikram. He glances at Linus and the western woman. ‘As a unified city.’

‘Agreed.’

Vikram looks around the table. His mouth feels dry.

‘Have I missed anything?’

No one speaks.

‘And you.’ Sosanya looks at him straight on. ‘Have you considered what this means? Your life will no longer belong to you.’

‘I won’t go with anyone,’ he says. ‘They can take my blood, samples, whatever they need, but I won’t be put in a laboratory.’

‘That is not what I meant. Yes, I can make this a condition, but what I meant is your life is not your own, at least for the immediate future, until your immunity is established and can be formulated into something usable. You will need to be protected. You will have no privacy. People will come here from all over the world, scientists, the curious. It is my duty as the leader of the Nuuk Alliance to act in the interests of global health but it is my duty under the same act to advise you as a citizen. Do you understand me?’

‘I understand.’

‘We will have to test others, of course. Regardless of the cause of your immunity, it seems clear to me that it’s related to the city. The more people we can find like you, the better our chances of brokering peace. For now, please stay here. None of you go anywhere. You’re under the protection of the Solar Corporation.’ She stands. ‘And now I have to avert a war between two hemispheres.’

‘There’s someone I need to see—’

Linus is also on his feet. ‘My sister—’

‘I will find out her status.’

When Sosanya has left the room there is a moment when nobody says anything and then they all start talking at once. Vikram’s attention turns to Linus Rechnov. He speaks quietly.

‘Can’t you find out? About Adelaide?’

‘Our comms are blocked during the summit.’

‘But she’s alive? Won’t someone just tell me that?’

‘She was this morning,’ says Linus.

Vikram struggles to keep the accusation out of his voice.

‘Did you know she got out the tower?’

‘No! Stars, no. I thought she was dead. When we got you out we looked for her, everywhere, like I told you. I wouldn’t have kept that from you.’ His voice is earnest. ‘My people died inside looking for her.’

‘He’s telling the truth,’ says the western woman, Dien. ‘I was there when he found out. She was picked up by two of us. Two westerners, they’re with her now. Then she worked with us. She had a pseudonym. The Silverfish.’

‘Dien was with her,’ says Linus. ‘When it happened.’ He looks tiredly at Vikram. ‘I don’t understand what just happened. I don’t understand what you are, what this immunity is, what you’re talking about with this redfleur. But if it makes these people leave us alone then I’m eternally in your debt.’

‘I don’t know what I am either,’ says Vikram slowly. ‘But I know it’s something to do with Osiris. Maybe it’s related to what Ramona found. Maybe it’s something else. I might never know.’

‘Sometimes it’s best not to ask,’ says Dien abruptly.

Vikram wants to ask Dien if Adelaide has talked about him, about their time together, or how she felt about him, or the day she thought he died. He wants to ask all these things and more about the woman he doesn’t know. This other Adelaide. The Silverfish. What she’s done. Why she has become an emissary for the west. But looking at Dien’s exhausted face he knows she won’t have the strength to lie, and he’s not sure he is ready for the truth.

After that they sit and wait for Nkem Sosanya to return, no one having any more energy or desire for conversation. The sun through the window-wall casts a soporific warmth across the table. The room is one Linus Rechnov has sat in many times, for sub-committees and private meetings, meetings designed to flatter and persuade, meetings from which Linus usually emerged with a card in hand, but he doesn’t recognize it today, or the people in it, or the city outside. Even Vikram is a stranger now, not that Linus ever knew the man, or rather he knew him in order to use him, more than once, though not without honourable intentions. Honour is a foolish concept anyway, an ideal admirable in theory but in practice deeply problematic, almost impossible to uphold, and yet he’s going to need it now, if Osiris is to have a future. And somehow Vikram’s return has made that a possibility, when for months it has felt like there were none, only the abyss of his family’s legacy, a legacy that Adelaide, with the impossibility that is so fucking typical of his sister, has managed to subvert. By reincarnating only to get herself shot.

Across the table, Dien puts her head in her arms and sleeps, or seems to sleep. In her dream, or daydream, there is a line of trees. She grasps the branches of the first and levers herself up into the canopy, and then she swings to the next branch, and keeps on swinging, because the trees don’t stop, they continue, perhaps forever, and beneath them is a field of flowers. The blooms reach towards her feet, petals caressing her soles. She hears a cry. Let go, she tells herself. You have to let go. And she waits for the moment where her fingers will straighten.

Unnerved by the quietness of his companions, Mig goes to stand by a wall which is made entirely of window and taps the glass experimentally. It sounds like glass, tough and satisfying, and through it he marvels at the view. There are towers like nothing he has ever imagined, conical towers draped in greenery with shimmering tubes winding in and out of the towers like coral snakes, and when he looks down he can’t see the sea, or he sees something but it makes him dizzy just to look, never mind focus. When he looks up again he catches a glance of something perched like a statue on the tower opposite, something that might be Pilar’s spirit, there for a second then invisible again to the eye. Mig flattens his hand against the glass and puts his forehead against it too, staring at the tower’s peak, acknowledging that he’s seen her; he knows she’s here, looking out for him. Then he lets his gaze wander again and he sees a boat moving in the water, a long way down but fast, pleasingly fast, and Mig imagines himself on the boat with the wind in his face and everything that passes a blur. He likes the idea. He likes it a lot.

The Alaskan observes the boy goggling. It’s lucky for his sake she prepared him; if it weren’t for her telling him something about the world beyond Cataveiro his poor brain would have overloaded by now, he’d be catatonic with information. The rest of the party is certainly feeling the strain. The Alaskan assesses them critically and considers her options. Antarctican citizenship: yes, she’ll take it, if only as a safeguard, but Antarctica is almost too easy, too safe an option. The Alaskan can imagine life there. It will be comfortable, very comfortable, and she will have asylum, better protection than her own country ever offered, but she’ll always be a Boreal to them. Whereas here… Here it’s messy. There’s feuds and factions; it’s a city that does not yet know what it is or what it could become. Yes, the Alaskan can see that her particular set of skills could be put to use in Osiris. It’s only a shame she’ll never persuade the pilot to stay. It would have been nice, she muses, to have a private aircraft again.

Callejas herself is deep in thought. Troubled, thinks the Alaskan. She’ll always be troubled now, although in fact Ramona’s thoughts are with her mother, as she counts the hours in her head since Inés took the first patch. It’s only the second day of the course. It feels like she has been away for weeks. She cannot bear to think of her mother alone for a moment longer, or of the dreadful possibility that Inés might not be strong enough to endure the next twenty-eight days. As soon as the Solar Corporation leader has tied up the mess here, and she knows that Tamaruq is in someone else’s hands, she’ll be out of this strange city, and at Inés’s side, and she won’t leave her until the course is done. Whatever happens.

You just have to wait for me, Ma. I won’t be long now. I promise.

And then, my lucky one?

I don’t know, Ma. I don’t know. I don’t have a plan. I never did. Does anyone, really? Do these people in here? Do you?

But something tugs at her.
Colibrí
, in the Amazon Desert, the sun scorching on the broken fuselage, the soft piling dunes. She restored the plane once.

The sun moves and a stripe of morning light falls across Karis’s face, making him squint. When he glances across to the window-wall, where the boy is drawing shapes on the bufferglass, he sees the unmistakable shape of a fin to the east, slicing through the waterways, a severe and unflinching line as the shark heads towards the edge of the city, as though it wants to be witnessed leaving. Karis thinks of the Bokolu. He realizes with a jolt of regret that he will never finish that game. Even if he makes it back home, he can’t go back to Tua’pala. This, and other aspects of his life, will have changed too greatly. A part of him will always be left with the elusive Bokolu just in his sights, knowing the creature has met his eye, knowing they have seen one another, acknowledged one another, but unable either to advance or retreat.

When he looks back at the ocean, he can no longer make out the fin, and wonders if he imagined it after all. The shark is far away now; it passes the easternmost structure and dives. Building speed, it continues, out towards the ring-net, where the Atum Shelf drops away and the open waters beckon, deep and impenetrable. There is a still a gap. The shark slips through. Now there is a voice, an irresistible voice that sings of sleep and dreams to come, and with a flick of its tail, the shark is gone.

Sosanya returns. The mood in the room sharpens, immediately alert.

‘We have a ceasefire,’ she says. ‘Testings for immunity will commence as soon as the conditions are suitable.’ She looks around the table, acknowledging each of them. ‘This is a good outcome. We’ve made progress today.’

‘And Adelaide?’ asks Dien.

Vikram looks to Sosanya and her face gives him his answer before she speaks.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘Adelaide Rechnov died thirty minutes ago. The surgeons did everything they could. She wasn’t in pain.’

He turns away, from her, from the sudden, unbearable sympathy in the room, from Linus’s agonized face. His throat is strangled. There’s a wail of anguish inside him but it won’t come out; something is blocking it.

He’s too late.

In the central part of the city, the border is gone. The posts which supported it protrude starkly at intervals along the waterway, stripped of the netting which for so many years has obscured one side of the city from the other. Some of them bear banners which lift and flutter in the wind, the slogans now faded but the banners clinging tenuously on.

It is not difficult to find the site. The flowers have mostly faded, and some are beginning to rot, but the salt tins tied to the post make it impossible to miss; salt tins in their hundreds, tier upon tier of them, cheap and precious, worn and new. A temporary raft rack has been built out to the memorial. Two other visitors are ahead of Vikram, and he cuts the motor, holding back. A man and a woman stand quietly. The woman has a salt tin and while Vikram waits the woman opens the tin and throws the salt over her shoulder, and hands it to the man to do the same. Then the man closes the tin and the woman attaches it carefully to the border post. They walk back along the raft rack to an old blue and white striped boat.

Untying the boat they nod, briefly, to Vikram.

He approaches the memorial, aware of his Solar Corporation escort, who is never more than a few metres away. He looks about, trying to imagine the scene. Dien has told him about that night. The two crowds. The lights in the sky, the shouts and the banners and the lasers and axes tearing down the border, the jubilation in the air. Adelaide, standing upright, shouting with the westerners. He tries to imagine it, but the sky is misted, the sea is sullen and there’s nothing here but a post with some tins attached.