The Lost Prophecies (44 page)

‘No. I would have noticed. I wondered what religion she might be, as she was—’ Mrs Ackerley flushed ‘—of colour,’ she concluded, using the currently correct phrase.

‘You said earlier that she seemed quite nice when she arrived. Did something make you change your mind later?’

‘Yes. Sam. My little dog. I know people say pets eat scarce food, but it all comes off my rations.’

‘People can be too strict sometimes.’

‘He makes a lot of noise but it’s only to protect me. He doesn’t bite. I wouldn’t have mentioned it, only one of the other guests saw what happened and told the police when they interviewed him.’

Shiva leaned forward. This hadn’t made it to the report. ‘What
did
happen?’

‘One evening I was in here and I heard a yelp from the kitchen. I went in and poor Sam was cowering against the wall, howling. I could see he’d been kicked. And that Parvati woman was standing against the opposite wall, glaring at him. I shouted at her that he’s only a helpless little dog. She was apologetic, said she’d been brought up in Canada and they have problems with wild dogs out there. One had bitten her once. But when I came in she’d looked angry, not frightened. I would have asked her to go but I need the money. One of the other guests heard us shouting and came down. Like I said, he told the police later.’

‘Thank you. That’s interesting.’

‘Is it?’ She fixed him with puzzled eyes. ‘If she’s done something bad enough to have the police coming here time and again, what does hurting a little dog matter?’

‘Everything matters,’ Shiva answered, retreating into his clipped official voice.

When he left he needed to think, to order what Mrs Ackerley had told him. He walked across to the lake and sat on a bench under a eucalyptus tree, out of sight of the house. Nearby, a little boy and girl stood in the shallows fishing. They wore dirty kaftans and broad-brimmed straw hats, like Tom Sawyer. Mosquitoes darted around, and he hoped the children had put on their repellent. These lakes were malarial.

Parvati Karam had been self-contained, Mrs Ackerley had said. That fitted with the information they had found on the databases. Her parents had been strongly atheist, like most people these days. Shiva’s own parents had kept up the old Hindu customs through respect for tradition rather than real belief. A loner at school, Parvati had shown great mathematical ability and had gone to university in Alberta at sixteen. The interesting thing, Shiva remembered, was that at university she had joined the dog-hunting clubs. It was not only people who had fled northwards from the deserts of the old United States but dogs too, millions of pets that had formed predatory packs, reverting to old instincts. They were getting larger, reverting to their wolf ancestry, and in the many isolated settlements they were a major problem. Hunting them was encouraged. The reports said that Parvati Karam had headed a student team, which won prizes for the number of dogs they killed. Had she gained a fear of them that had led her to kick Mrs Ackerley’s pet? Or was it hate?

The dog hunting had stood out because otherwise Parvati’s life seemed so bland. She had worked on electronic security systems in Winnipeg after graduating. Three years ago she had been converted to the Shining Light Movement, and in 2133 she had taken up a new job in New Zealand. Within the Church she seemed to be just an ordinary member, going to church, joining the party, paying a tenth of her salary to the movement. No record of any official position in Church or party, no active involvement in the campaigns against sodomy or abortion or eating pork. Yet a few weeks ago she had come up quietly behind the watchman at the Birmingham museum and expertly felled him with a blow to the back of the neck that broke it. Shiva had seen the photographs, the look of surprise on the old man’s face. She would have learned techniques of stalking and killing in the dog hunts, he realized. He wondered if she had killed the man coldly, as though he too were a dog.

Across the lake a group of men pushed a boat into the water, unfurling a white sail. They carried fishing rods. Ripples spread across the water, making tiny waves at Shiva’s feet.

‘Them blastid men’ll scare the fish,’ the little girl said to the boy. They were very alike; they must be brother and sister.

‘Na, they’ll drive ’em this way. ’Ere, I’ve got one!’ he shouted excitedly.

A struggle began with a small carp that had taken the bait and was struggling fiercely out in the water. The little boy gripped the rod tightly while his sister waded into the warm shallows, grabbed the line and began hauling in the fish.

Shiva envied their closeness. Like Parvati Karam, he was an only child. Large families had been officially discouraged since the Catastrophe, with so little good land to feed the survivors. He wondered: had her childhood been as lonely as his, had she too been driven to succeed by parents whose future she represented? Shiva had also been an outsider, a small thin dark child in the Surrey town on the edge of Thames Bay. But he had wanted more than anything to belong. He had found his way in by attaching himself to children who were natural leaders, popular and charismatic, for charisma begins early. But often those leaders of playground gangs were cruel, and Shiva had always recoiled from cruelty, perhaps because he feared them turning on him. When he was sixteen the group he hung on to attacked and robbed an old woman; the leader of the group, Starkey, had planned it carefully. Shiva watched them while they divided up the money, then went and reported the crime to the headmaster. Starkey, a promising pupil, was expelled. Shiva’s own part was kept secret; he was awarded detention with the lesser offenders to defray suspicion at his own request. His path had been decided then. Sometimes he wondered what had happened to Starkey. Perhaps he was in prison like Marwood.

‘Buy a fish, mister?’ A voice at his elbow startled Shiva. The two urchins stood beside him, the little girl holding up the carp, the sun reflected from its golden scales.

‘No, thanks. I’m staying somewhere where they give you food.’

‘Only one euro. Off the ration.’

‘No. Thanks anyway. I have to go.’

He stood up and walked away. The sun was hot now, so he took his canvas hat from his pocket and put it on. Behind him the children argued about where to sell their fish.

Tonight he would send Parvati Karam his first e-mail. He had already done a genuine search on genealogical sites to find her, in case somehow she retraced his steps on her computer.

There were demonstrators at Birmingham airport; the few airports left in the world had permanent pickets. Shiva, watching the banners beyond the fenced-off enclosure, could understand their anger. Most agreed that the explosion of air travel in the years before the Catastrophe had hastened the warming. Now it was strictly rationed, limited mostly to politicians and diplomats who needed to travel to the Tasman Islands or Patagonia, and the scientists monitoring Antarctica. One could not get to the southern hemisphere by boat, for like the land the tropical seas were too hot for human survival. Luggage was limited on the plane; there had been no question of bringing his statue.

He entered the little airport building. It was hot and muggy outside and worse indoors. As he waited to be searched he looked through the far window. The plane was sitting on the tarmac. It seemed a small and fragile thing to take him so far. He looked around at the other passengers, mostly middle-aged and prosperous-looking.

When they took off and Shiva looked through the window, he felt the clutch of fear in his stomach they had warned him about. The world was spinning away, the city transformed into a patchwork of miniature houses in a sea of green.

‘First time?’ the passenger next to him asked sympathetically. He was a spare man with a grey beard, dressed less formally than most of the other passengers, a jacket over a white kaftan. ‘It’s a bit disorientating. At first.’

‘Yes. I suppose it’s a privilege, an experience.’

‘I’ve done it nine times. It’ll get boring. The refuelling stop in Tibet will come as a relief.’ The man sounded weary. ‘I’m a hydrologist, going to have another look at the Antarctic icecap. I’ll be taking a second flight down from Dunedin.’ He smiled sadly. ‘It’s hard on my wife and children.’

‘Are they in England?’

‘Leeds. Name’s Bill Allen, by the way.’

‘Shiva Moorthy. I’m a diplomat. Joining the embassy at Dunedin. Cultural attaché.’

‘Long posting?’

‘Couple of years.’ He changed the subject. ‘I hear the Antarctic rivers are still rising.’

Allen nodded. ‘Inevitable now the icecap’s melting faster – its area’s a fifth of what it was. It’ll be gone in a few decades, and then the sea will stabilize at last. But as the seas warm up down there, the heat’s releasing more methane from the seabed, like we had in the north last century.’ He looked at Shiva seriously. ‘We’re still not safe.’

‘Will we ever be?’

‘I don’t know.’ The scientist paused. ‘I saw a methane eruption from the air once, miles of sea frothing and bubbling, even burning in places, throwing all that stuff up into the atmosphere.’

They talked a little more, about Antarctica and Dr Allen’s family and Shiva’s fictional job. Shiva used the scientist as a practice run for the story he would tell Parvati Karam, and related his fictional background in the civil service. After a while Dr Allen said there were papers he must study and left Shiva to look out of the window. They passed high over the fields of Germany, through a brief interlude of scrub, then into the great brown desert. Endless stony plains and mountains, the dried-up Danube and its tributaries visible as dry veins and arteries. He saw the jumble of an abandoned city beside it – Budapest, perhaps. Already it was hard to believe there were once great cities here. In time, as they crumbled away, perhaps people would forget they ever existed. He turned away.

Dr Allen had fallen asleep over his papers. Shiva reached into the bag he carried on his lap and brought out his copy of the Black Book. He had studied it carefully over the last few weeks, reading through the verses of prophecy. In the original book, which had been carbon dated to the seventh century, the verses had been in Latin. He was surprised that they still rhymed in English; surely the translator must have interfered with the verses’ meaning. Most of the prophecies related to events in medieval and Stuart England, and all of them, the believers said, had come true. The verses seemed to Shiva to be no more precise than the rambling incoherences of the Book of Revelation, which he had read as part of his preparation. He read once more the final verse of the Black Book, which the Shining Light people said applied to the present day:

When it was first discovered, the book had been no more than a curiosity, until the Shining Light Movement had declared that the earlier prophecies coincided with real events, and that this showed that the book had been inspired by God. And this year, 2135, was five hundred and thirty years since the Gunpowder Plot that was the subject of the previous prophecy.

‘And at the end a sun-bright fire of blood.’ It sounded like a nuclear holocaust. But as Commissioner Williams had said, there was no nuclear power in the Tasman Islands – old arsenals enough in the north, but none down there and no way of getting nuclear equipment. The only physical communication with the north was flights like this one, every passenger rigorously searched – but for explosives, not books, which was how Parvati Karam had got away with the original Black Book. The Shining Light Movement firmly believed that the world would end this year but claimed not to know exactly how. That would be for God to reveal. But then why recruit these scientists and engineers? What were they planning? Shiva looked down at the cover of the book.

They were over blue water now, the plane casting a tiny shadow on the sea. There was an island in the distance – the Crimea, an isolated desert crag in the centre of the vastly extended Black Sea. Shiva returned his copy of the book to his bag. He thought about the religious dogma he had had to read about in these last weeks. In the years before the Catastrophe, fanaticism had been everywhere, in Islam and Christianity and Hinduism and in a secular faith too: the blind belief in pseudo-scientific free-market theories that had succeeded Communism. The globalizers had believed in endless growth, that in some mystic way technologies to defeat global warming would appear. Like Marx, they had talked of the inevitable destiny of mankind. Their dogmas, like their world, were dead now, and they were hated for the blindness their ideas had brought. Humanity was tired of faith; the world today was a practical place; it had to be if humanity was to survive. But now Shiva wondered whether perhaps that practicality was only skin deep, perhaps always had been, the urge for the simplicities of faith always ready to surface. Outside, the colours changed, from blue sea to the grey moonscape of the Caucasus.

The face of the murdered old watchman came to Shiva’s mind. He had been a breadwinner, supporting two grandchildren in a crumbling Birmingham terrace. His life had been snuffed out like an ant’s. Shiva promised himself that whatever else transpired in the Tasmans he would see Parvati Karam arrested and tried for his murder.

It was getting dark when they landed to refuel in Tibet, on the airstrip that had once served Lhasa. Here, at the southern end of the vast desert that stretched to the Chinese settlements in Siberia, a group of guards drawn from all over the world kept permanent watch over stores of aircraft fuel. Ten years ago a group of eco-warriors had got on to a scheduled flight and had managed to blow up the fuel dump. Nowadays the passengers were herded into a secure outbuilding while the plane refuelled.

Walking from the aircraft to the building, Shiva was amazed by the clearness and coldness of the air. In the distance, between a dried-out riverbed and huge mountains, he saw the ghostly jumble of deserted Lhasa and, above it, the old Potala Palace, tier upon tier of empty windows. He felt a sense of wonder at the journey he was making and was conscious of the huge distance he was from England, from all that he knew. The sun set behind the mountains, and the long shadows merged into darkness.