Tamaruq (46 page)

The pilot drives up in an old army truck. The Alaskan wheels herself outside, one-handed, sniffing the air. Mig helps the pilot lift her into the truck. The nirvana feels soft and floppy in their arms. It gives Mig a strange sensation, to touch her. Perhaps he expected her to be made of something other than flesh. He loads up the back seat with provisions and jumps in himself. The pilot lifts the chair into the back of the truck.

‘Someone’s looking for you,’ the Alaskan tells the pilot.

‘Who?’

‘Xiomara. Did I mention she’s in town? She hasn’t forgiven you.’ The pilot doesn’t say anything, but she puts her foot down on the pedal and the army truck rackets through the town’s pedestrianized streets, the pilot driving fast and not speaking, the Alaskan hanging on to the door of the truck with her good hand. Mig is bounced about with the bags of food and water bottles. He doesn’t mind. It’s exhilarating, to be moving at such speed.

They drive out of the town, and the pilot takes them up the hill towards the mountains. Every few minutes she checks the mirror.

‘Mig, is anyone following us?’

He looks back at the road behind them. It’s empty.

‘Not yet.’

She drives faster anyway, taking reckless turns, pushing the truck higher into the mountain, where the forestry closes in upon the road, and through the other side where the trees reduce to a few isolated pines, until the road peters out into a rough track of fallen stones. The wheels of the truck scrape along the uneven terrain. They have reached a ridgeway.

The pilot cuts the engine.

‘We’ll have to walk from here.’

She pulls on her pack and lifts the Alaskan from the truck.

‘Mig, get our stuff. Rope it up – it’ll be easier for you to drag it. Quick as you can.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Down to the lake.’

The pilot goes first, carrying the Alaskan, the nirvana gripping with both arms around the pilot’s neck. They struggle down the slick dirt track. Mig can see the lake glinting ahead, a broad silver sheen like a plate of glass, reflecting the sky and the rising hills which surround it. He scans for the aeroplane but can’t see it. The bags are heavy. He stops for breath, panting, and glances back. Are Xiomara’s people behind them? No one following can fail to spot the truck parked up there.

The pilot reaches the bottom of the track and sets the Alaskan down. The Alaskan’s eyes dart about, taking in their surroundings. The lake is girdled with clumps of thick, lush reeds. An inflatable boat rests a few metres along the shore. She sees Mig puffing his way down the final few metres.

‘Well done,’ she tells the boy. Mig scowls, making it clear he doesn’t care for her approval, but says nothing. The pilot clambers back up the track and lifts the Alaskan’s chair from the truck.

‘Leave it,’ shouts the Alaskan. ‘You won’t get it in that boat.’

‘We might,’ the pilot shouts back. She manages to manoeuvre the chair awkwardly down the track.

This, thinks the Alaskan, is where things get interesting. Xiomara wants the pilot, but Xiomara is also beholden to the Alaskan, and the pilot and the Alaskan are now, to all external appearances, working together. A strike against the pilot is a strike against the Alaskan. Would Xiomara dare?

She keeps an eye on the track, the ridge, as Mig and the pilot help her into the inflatable boat, and the pilot pushes away from the shore, moving them further along the edges of the lake. The Alaskan can see the plane now. It’s a Boreal passenger plane, one that uses camo-tech, but camo-tech is visible if you know how to look for it, if you look not for the thing itself but for the intrusions the thing makes on the space around it. So the Alaskan can see where the branches of overhanging trees are pushed upwards at unnatural angles; she can see the oblong of lake where the water looks like water but not like water.

She glances back. Her chair sits on the shore of the lake, awaiting the second trip. Nothing on the ridge. The inflatable bumps against the side of the plane. Mig gasps. The boy’s never experienced anything like this before. The Alaskan used to be ferried by such airborne transports all across the northern hemisphere: planes and zeppelins, passage of the elite, the ultimate symbol of status. She hasn’t been inside an aeroplane in over half a century.

The pilot switches off the camo-tech so Mig can see the aircraft properly and they pass up the bags, one by one, the Alaskan grunting with the effort, the little boat rocking.

And then they hear a shout.

She looks back. Figures, on the ridge. They’ve been spotted.

‘Quick!’ shouts the pilot.

A shot disrupts the still waters of the lake. Their pursuers are scrambling down the track. Mig pulls himself into the plane.

‘Watch out!’

The Alaskan bends awkwardly forwards. A second shot hits the inflatable. She hears the hiss of escaping air. The boat begins to crumple around her. She can’t swim, and the bastards shooting at them know it. A trickle of water licks at her shoes.

The pilot reaches down and grabs the Alaskan under the arms. The Alaskan can feel the strength in the pilot’s shoulders, hears her gasping with the strain. Water is puddling inside the boat as the Alaskan is pulled inside the cockpit. She collapses against the interior, breathless with exertion and indignation. The pilot reaches past her and slams the hatch shut.

Xiomara’s lackeys have reached the shore. The chair is kicked aside. One of them begins to wade into the lake, raising their rifle. The pilot powers up the plane’s engines. Shot after shot glances off the cockpit windshield as the plane turns with painful slowness and begins to taxi over the water. The Alaskan feels the hum of the engines between her shoulder blades. She feels the base of power surge with the sudden resistance between plane and water, as the pilot prepares for take-off. She remembers a hundred take-offs, the specifics of each one presenting themselves to her with a pristine clarity – the weather and the mood she was experiencing and the greeting of the cabin assistant – these hundred take-offs lined up alongside one another, in preparation for a hundred destinations, a hundred goals which the Alaskan accomplished successfully, every time, because nirvanas, if they are not found out, inevitably are to be found operating at the highest levels of society, and that is where the Alaskan was, and she was good at it.

The plane lifts into the air. The pilot’s concentration is absolute. Her mind and muscles and the plane are locked in a flawless symbiosis, the pilot an extension of the machine. Mig is crouched between the pilot seat and the co-pilot seat, his eyes wide with astonishment, his breath on hold, as the world drops away.

The Alaskan sees Xiomara’s lackeys shrink to dots and vanish. As they gain height the archipelago separates into a patchwork, blue sea channels and dense green islands laced with cloud. Xiomara has defied her, outright. The Alaskan is reeling with the shock of it.

Her influence in Patagonia is waning.

The ocean to the east is as empty as the desert. The Alaskan gives Ramona co-ordinates for the sea city and the pilot obeys, locking the plane on a course which the Alaskan promises will take them directly there – to the war zone, as she says, with a reptilian glint in her black eyes which Ramona can’t interpret, which could mean any number of things, none of which Ramona is keen to imagine.

The Alaskan shows her how to use some of the plane’s robotic functions. She doesn’t like it, but she lets the Alaskan fiddle with the controls. Even if she wanted to, she doesn’t have the energy to resist. Mig watches suspiciously.

‘What’s that for?’

‘I’m putting a coded call out to El Tiburón,’ says the Alaskan.

‘How are you doing that?’

‘You wouldn’t understand if I told you, boy.’

‘I want to know.’

Ramona half-listens as the Alaskan explains her workings to Mig, the boy asking questions, the nirvana replying, their conversation a soothing circuitry as the sea passes by beneath them, dappled and wrinkled but unmarked by any other travellers. There is nothing but sea and sky, gunmetal grey and white and blue and the intermittent lance of the late afternoon sun. Cloud cover is altocumulus. Wind speed is moderate. Forget the war zone, it’s the weather that concerns Ramona. If they hit a storm, there is no shortcut back to land. They could land on water, of course, but an ocean in a storm is no more comfort than a swamp in the uninhabitable zone. Ramona keeps one eye ahead and the other behind them, wary of building cumulus. She’s afraid that her tiredness is going to affect her concentration.

As day folds into night, the plane glides on over the dark sea. Ramona checks the plane’s charge and despite her exhaustion, decides to press on for another hour. Back in the passenger hold, Mig is stretched out, asleep, but beside Ramona the Alaskan is wide awake, a blanket spread over her legs, the fingers of her good hand supporting her damaged wrist. Other than the pinprick of stars, the only light comes from the console. The Alaskan’s eyes are bright with it, a hard obsidian glitter, but the rest of her face is slack, and softened by the greenish glow. The plane is almost silent. Cocooned by the night sky, so far from anyone or anywhere, their aloneness feels infinite.

‘I would offer to relieve you,’ says the Alaskan. ‘But I can’t work the pedals.’

‘You know how to fly?’

‘I know the manual. That would suffice. If circumstances were different.’

‘I’ll set down soon. I have to sleep.’

‘Then I’ll keep a weather watch for you. I don’t need to sleep tonight.’

Ramona believes her. The Alaskan’s body might betray her age, but her face is perpetually alert. She wonders if it is even possible for the Alaskan to let her brain relax. Do nirvanas have dreams like other people do? Nightmares?

‘I’ll splint your wrist for you,’ she says. ‘When I’ve set down. You can’t leave it like that.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Who were you?’ Ramona asks. ‘Before you came to my country, who were you?’

‘I was a negotiator.’

‘That shouldn’t surprise me.’

‘I was the best,’ says the Alaskan simply.

‘What did you negotiate?’

‘Energy. Land. Contracts with the Solar Corporation.’ The Alaskan’s voice rasps like the strike of a match. ‘They gave me the trickiest deals. They knew I could get results.’

‘And in all these negotiations, you never heard anything about the experiments? The genetic engineering?’

‘There were rumours.’ The Alaskan turns her face to the dark glass of the windshield. ‘The name you told me. Tamaruq. I remember hearing that word. Once, maybe twice. But it is easy for people to choose not to believe. How do you think I survived as long as I did?’

‘I thought nirvanas were protected in the Boreal States.’

The Alaskan chuckles. ‘If you mean there is a law, then yes, we are protected. But as you’ve seen for yourself, the law is an ethereal thing. Slippery. Very slippery. Malleable, one might say.’ The Alaskan gazes out into the night sky. One part of her brain counts and names the southern constellations, an automatic process from which no conclusions are drawn. Just information. Gathered like dust. Dispersed like dust. ‘This world is an ugly place, Callejas. Most people prefer to keep the demons at their back and forget they’re wading through shit up to their ankles. True happiness, if such a state exists, can only be obtained through ignorance.’

‘You believe that?’

‘That is the truth.’

‘Then you must be very unhappy.’

‘I am what I am.’

‘I never really believed in nirvanas,’ says Ramona. ‘I thought they were just a story. Something made up, to frighten children.’

‘Everything’s a story,’ the Alaskan replies. ‘A simple methodology to process chaos. You will tell yourself a story about what you have seen and done in the desert. You’ll tell yourself you did what you could. That your choices were bound. That there was a certain – inevitability – to your actions.’

Ramona’s anger flares. ‘And you don’t think I did? What I could?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I think. What matters is the story that is told. You will need yours, I think.’

Something flickers up ahead. For an alarming moment Ramona thinks it is lightning, but then she realizes the light is green, not white. As she watches, the sky to the south transforms into an amphitheatre of colour. Vaults of green and gold cavort across the sky, flickering in and out of being. Ramona has never seen anything so eerily beautiful. It feels as though a performance is being staged entirely for them. She leans back and nudges Mig awake.

‘You should see this, kid.’

‘Aurora australis,’ says the Alaskan. ‘The southern lights.’

‘I’ll use the light to land,’ says Ramona. Exhaustion is crashing around her, taking out her senses one by one. She cannot resist it any longer. ‘And I’ll do your wrist.’

Late the next morning they reach their destination. The Alaskan, the pilot, and Mig watch as the city emerges from the horizon. For hours it has been a steady line, grey bleeding into blue bleeding into grey. Then something indistinguishable, a smudge or a blur interrupting the line, an emergent structure, mathematical edges gradually coalescing into form. They see the conical silver towers pointing skywards, woven together with fibres of shuttle lines and delicate bridges. Blips appear on the radar of the console as ships and submarines come into the aeroplane’s range. The Alaskan fiddles with the console’s settings, her head tipped to one side, listening, and the channel crackles with the static of conflicting signals. Mig crouches at the window. This is Vikram’s city. This metallic fortress. All at once it fits, that sense of
special
, because to come from a place like this you’d have to be something different, something extraordinary.

‘We need a landing point,’ says Ramona. The Alaskan nods, and holds up her hand – wait a moment. They are approaching the city from the south-west. Ramona banks and takes the plane around its western flank, where the towers are less impressive; dull-faced, they don’t reflect the sun. Some are derelict, cracked open to the sky, some bear the marks of recent attacks, and on the edges of the city, hundreds of small boats are packed tightly together. When they curve to the north, the city changes again, turning back to silver, although now they are closer Ramona can see that this part of the city has also suffered damage in the recent battle.