Pathfinder (6 page)

But her mother stops her on the stairs with a soft hand and a twinkle in her eye. “Didn't you hear what I said, sleepyhead?”

“You said—” Mara grumps then stops and catches the twinkle. “
Outside?
I can go outside? Can I?”

“Five minutes, that's all. It's just a break in the clouds.”

Mara doesn't care. She'll spin out every second. She thumps downstairs and when she opens the front door she walks straight into a fluttering red and yellow cloud. Mara blinks, then laughs as they tickle her face and hair. Butterflies! She watches them flutter off to dance among the windmill blades.

She is astonished at the warmth in the wind and the hot, plump raindrops. The thick stone walls of the cottage haven't let in a hint of summertime. But the sky is low and dark, an evening sky at midday that meets a sea of rainbows and frothy white horses. The northern islands are lost in steamy mist. Mara remembers what Tain said and feels a sudden dread at what the gathering heat must be doing to the great meltdown at the Earth's two poles.

When Tain was a boy, the Arctic meltdown turned the northern seas cold and Wing suffered biting ice-winds all year round, though the rest of the world was warming up. The polar ice sheets that once reflected the sun's rays back into space must have shrunk drastically, reasons Tain, and Wing bakes in burning summers now that heat is trapped on Earth.

Mara forces herself to look and see how far the ocean has now risen. A lot, she concludes. The storm season has made a wreckage of the fields of windmills and solar panels. Twisted blades and shards of solar panels lie scattered all across the hills. But the old red phone booth, that relic from another time, is still standing on the humpback road bridge. The bent bus-stop sign is gone though. If the sea reaches the phone booth, then we're in serious trouble, she decides. Surely it can't—yet she finds herself imagining the last cliffs of polar ice, frozen for eons, cracking and sliding into a massive blue meltdown that will swell the ocean till the waves surge up and swallow the phone booth.

Mara turns back to face the land and sees the fleet of boats that are harbored in a sheltered fold of hill above the windmills. She shivers at the sight, despite the muggy heat.

Her father struggles past with two steaming buckets of milk.

“Not another burned loaf,” he cries, clattering the milk pails on the stone steps of the cottage. “Don't tell me—you were plugged into that cyberwizz.”

“Sorry.” Mara smiles ruefully. Her father is well acquainted with her talent at bread burning. “Um, Dad,” she begins, then wonders how to break the news of her amazing discovery to him. Will he listen?

But Coll unwittingly helps her out. “What's this New World fairy story Corey says you were telling him this morning?” he asks as he heads back to the barn. “Giant cities above the sea—he's been talking of nothing else all morning.”

Mara bites her lip. Corey had crawled into bed beside her somewhere around dawn this morning, just as she had unplugged from a whole night spent searching the Weave
ruins. She couldn't sleep, too excited by her incredible discovery, and ended up telling Corey what she had found.

“It's not a fairy story, Dad.”

Coll shakes his head as Mara follows him into the barn.

“I know the myths, Mara, but that's all they are. Don't upset your little brother any more than he already is.”

“He's upset by the storm, not by me,” counters Mara. “And the New World's not a myth,” she ventures. “Tain says it's real. He saw the cities on television when he was young—giant cities. He saw them being built.”

“I'm sure he did, but they'd never have survived this.” Coll struggles to close the barn door against a punching fist of wind and Mara lends her weight. Then he stops to rub the sweat from his brow and stares around him in the gloom of the barn as if he's just woken from a dream. “But the way things are going, I'm almost ready to believe in anything.”

“Dad,” Mara says cautiously, because it's unlikely her practical, down-to-earth father will listen. “I need to talk to you about—about this New World.” Amazingly, he
is
listening, so Mara takes her chance. “I used to think it was just a fairy story too but I've been searching for info on my cyberwizz for weeks and weeks now, and I think—I mean, I've found stuff that makes me
sure
that it exists. It's incredible. Really, Dad. I can show you. They built it so that it would survive all this.”

Her voice throbs with excitement. Her dark eyes plead with her father. He sighs.

“Oh, come on now,” he says, gently dismissive, tucking wayward strands of her dark hair behind her ear. And yet he looks at her as if he wants to believe her.

“Dad, please. Just have a look at what I've found.”

Coll looks at his daughter long and hard. Then smiles wryly at the stubborn determination in her face.

“Well, we'll see. Show me tonight,” he says. “Right now I've got the milking to finish, then I'll have to try and fix up the roof and the barn and that's just for starters. Don't go far and make sure you get back in the house as soon as the storm starts up again.”

Mara nods, amazed. She hasn't tried to tell her parents anything about the New World till now, until she had real evidence, because she was sure they'd never take her seriously. Dad never would have before. Things must be getting desperate, Mara decides. She studies the storm damage as she crumbles the burned loaf for the chickens. The solar panel is almost completely detached from the cottage roof and there are places in the barn where the gale has ripped the wood from the thick nails that have held it for decades. It's always been like this. No one ever has time to make plans for the future when there's bread to bake and a roof to fix and a hundred other things to do.

And this storm season has been the longest, fiercest she has ever known.

Mara glances once again at the ominous fleet that sits above the field of windmills. All the island's boats are perched there, their hulls like the bodies of great birds, ready and waiting to fly.

Are we near the edge of summer yet, Mara wonders desperately, or just trapped in the dead eye of the storm?

Mara groans as Rosemary ladles out yet another bowl of murky green soup. She is hungry all the time yet can barely stomach the food her mother serves up.

“I never want to eat another mouthful of cabbage as long as I live.”

“Smelly soup,” Corey agrees, but he tucks in hungrily.

For the last month they have existed on a meager ration of eggs, cabbage soup, and potato bread. There's a small but dwindling supply of milk and cheese but the sheep and goats are reacting badly to such a long season spent in a dark barn with rations of mulch and hay instead of fresh pasture. Grain stores are frighteningly low and supplies of preserved fruit and vegetables are all eaten. If the storm lasts much longer they will have to start slaughtering precious livestock for food—but even that won't last long as they have so few animals.

Every night Mara tells her little brother a bedtime story. Corey always wants the
Three Little Pigs
or
Jack the Giant Killer
, and tonight as the story ends he touches the wall beside his bed.

“We've got a house of stone,” he declares. “We're safe, aren't we?”

His bedtime story is the cocoon he builds for himself
each night before he goes to sleep. He seems to have grown more babyish, younger than his six years, huddled inside himself to hide from the wolfish howl of the storm and its giant strength. While Mara feels she has, all of a sudden, grown up.

Once Corey is settled, Mara joins her parents. It's too warm to burn a fire, yet out of habit they sit around the dead grate and now they too cocoon themselves in stories to pass the evening. Sometimes Mara is hit by the strangest feeling that some part of her is already in the future, looking back on this lost scene with an aching heart. Tonight, Rosemary tells the flood legend of Noah and the ark, an ancient tale that is carved into the stone walls of Wing's church. Since their own great flood, few on the island have kept faith with the old religion and the church stands abandoned, but the richness of its stories has lived on among the people, passed down by the old ones and enjoyed as folklore on the long, stormy evenings.

Once the story is happily ended Rosemary looks at Mara hesitantly, then speaks her mind.

“I see we've got our own arks ready up on the hill,” she says to Coll. “Are we supposed to be going somewhere in them?”

Now Coll looks at Mara. “There's to be an island meeting about that in the church, just as soon as there's a decent break in the weather. Tain's organized it.”

“Tain wasn't out in the storm?” says Rosemary, concerned.

“He called around to all the farms and the village during the lull in the weather.”

“What's going to happen?” Mara whispers, though she's not sure if she wants to hear.

Coll hesitates and doesn't answer directly. “I spoke to
Tain about what you told me, Mara. Maybe you can help. Tell me what you found.”

“How can Mara help with this?” says her mother. “She's just a child.”

“I'm not,” Mara retorts, then begins to tell her story about the New World that lies way out in cyberspace, far beyond the Weave.

When she is finished her mother sighs and smiles.

“It's just a dream, Marabell. It's not real. I've heard Tain talk about the New World but it's just a myth, a story made from wishful thinking.” Rosemary stares at Mara with recognition in her eyes. “Believe it or not, I do remember what it's like to be fifteen and full of dreams. Real life keeps getting in the way.”

Mara smiles. “No more burned bread,” she promises. “But this dream is real, Mom. Wait. Wait till you see what I found.”

She runs upstairs and grabs her cyberwizz, then stands on a chair to lift a dusty, old screen laptop computer down from the top of her wardrobe. She hopes she can remember how to reassemble the homemade connection that she designed to pass the time during last winter's storm season.

“Where did you find
that
old thing?” laughs Coll, raising his eyebrows at the laptop, when she bursts back into the living room.

“What are you going to do?” murmurs Rosemary.

“The impossible,” grins Mara, as she struggles with wires and magnets.

Like the rest of the islanders, her parents have no use for the old technology that used to be commonplace in the world. They look at each other and shake their heads in bemusement as Mara connects the laptop to her cyberwizz. She picks up the globe of the cyberwizz, and it tingles to
life at her touch. She scribbles a series of commands on its electropad. Grudgingly, the old laptop powers up. Mara finds it awkward to tap on the big, flat keyboard and it is grindingly slow, but it's a reliable old machine. Frowning in deep concentration, she slips on her halo and enters the Weave. Then zips through site after site, following a complex trail of links that eventually lead her to the hidden basement site in one of the tumbledown towerstacks that, after weeks of trawling and searching through the rot of the Weave ruins, she found at last, late last night.

It's the vital evidence she needs that the New World is real.

Coll and Rosemary watch as she scans newsreels from the beginning of the Century of Storms. Images of floods and tempests and global destruction fill the screen. Mara is shocked to the core, every bit as shaken as she was when she first viewed it last night. It all happened years ago, long before she was born, in faraway places. But now the same thing is happening on her very doorstep. She cannot look away or dismiss it. She must pay attention.

While her parents murmur to each other, Mara draws a sharp breath as she reads the text that scrolls along the bottom of the screen—the final message on the Weavesite. Somehow, in her euphoric excitement last night, she never saw it. Now Mara is dumbfounded by what she reads.

Above the scrolling text, the on-screen simulation shows a cluster of towers, colossal trunks of towers, rising out of the flooded ruins of an old city. Now a vast geometric construction—tiers and branching networks—begins to grow out of the central trunk, cresting higher and higher into the sky, mapping the airspace between the towers with amazingly complex patterns, while massive roots bore down through the seabed, deep into the Earth.

Mara's parents gaze in astonishment at the vast structure that rises out of the ocean—a giant city in the sky.

“Impossible,” says Coll. “It would blow down. How could it withstand a storm?”

Mara drags her eyes from the terrible message on the scrolling text and stares blankly at her father.

“The SOS,” she whispers. “Did you see it?”

“That was all long ago, Mara,” murmurs her mother, uncomfortably. “Never mind that now.”

“But—”