Terra Rose

She put her head to the cool porthole and felt the ship’s heartbeat juddering slightly through the plastic. Outside, the Zephyr was beginning to inch away from their starboard bow. In a few minutes the Terra Rose would cease its escort and Zephyr would continue on, her cargo of four thousand convicts bound for the dark beyond the Termination Shock, the heliopause, and the Kuiper Belt.

Zephyr had been in view for 35 hours, and she had no more tears to cry. She thought that perhaps she would cry when they turned on its ion thruster remotely, and began its acceleration out of this solar system and she finally lost it from view.

The hardest thing about heartbreak was the hours. Emotions are simply chemical surges; they spill and die back. It’s beyond our capacity to keep them going for long.

She closed her eyes. Six hundred years ago, she thought, they put convicts on ships and sent them off to the far side of the earth. Did families go to Portsmouth that sunny day in May 1787 and watch the fleet leave? They knew they would never see them again – unless they were also transported for life. How hard – impossible, to look at other people in the country which had sent them away – how hard it would have been to know that your sibling, your child, your parent, was the loose change of society, the expendable unit which could be gambled on a voyage which had to happen but for which no one would volunteer.

Cortes burned his boats on the shore of the New World to force his men to stay. The Terra Rose engineers had taken out Zephyr’s pilot programs and locked the ion engine in an engaged state. The ship would accelerate steadily, straight ahead, until it ran out of xenon, or collided with something. They had enough fuel to exit the Bow Shock and reach the interstellar space before the Oort Cloud. Either something – if anything was out there and looking – would notice that a craft had broken away from the training leash of our Sun and contact them, or they would make it to one of the rogue planets hidden within the Cloud. Or they would be struck by an icicle the size of Everest. Either way, their lives had been inconvenient, their deaths would be meaningless, and they might create the interstellar equivalent of Australia, which had been very good while it lasted.

Every leap of civilization had occurred through a dirty trick; their species was just so many Fagins sending cargoes of Oliver Twist out into the dark terrors. This was the truth that history could not afford to record, if there were to be any more history.

Almost imperceptibly Zephyr gathered speed. Her heart gave a knock; she put a hand to the window and tried to send love, and hope, and strength and all the other massless particles to her brother, taking a great leap forever away.

Outrigger

Wentworth’s birthday cake was carrot and some kind of expensive nut. Actually, there were two cakes – one in the shape of a 5 and another in the shape of a 0, which was gluten free. Before cake and toasts to another fifty healthy years, Bell suggested they play Boiling Frog, which Lila thought was in poor taste. But she said nothing.

Just to be absolutely sure, they played on the lower lawn, which was near the shelter. Went had the best position, next to the shelter doors.

‘Nothing’ll happen,’ Bell said to Lila, who was trying to partner with Went so that she was also next to the shelter.

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘It’d hardly be in their interests to nuke us if we’re the source of their air. You can’t be starving and belligerent.’

‘Pick a struggle,’ said Sascha, laughing. He was also trying to partner with Went.

They began playing in a distracted, half-hearted way. People kept missing their turns because they were looking at the western horizon, just visible over the houses and the dome of the local Plant. Residents had been warned that the two Injectors would take off at some point that day, and that they should remain in or close to their homes with access to an approved media stream. All leave for troops at Mountain Home had been cancelled, which had depleted Went’s birthday party.

‘How far behind us are they?’

‘Who, India?’

‘Coupla thousand years,’ someone said. There was laughter.

‘Delhi’s eleven and a half hours ahead of us,’ said Lila. ‘So it’s 1:30am there now.’

‘Won’t they at least wait till daylight?’

‘You probably don’t sleep much if you’re boiling and starving,’ she said.

‘Oh come on,’ said Bell, slipping a soft, tanned arm through Lila’s. ‘Let’s not do this now. Can we just have one beautiful afternoon and forget the shit out there?’ It was on the top of Lila’s lip to ask whether her sister in law meant ‘Let them eat cake’, but she shut up and played her turn.

She wondered what an Indian version of herself was doing at that moment. Her high school literature teacher once suggested that there are versions of us on every continent. He said that it was what kept us compassionate and, in a strange way, sane.

Lying in the hot darkness, hungry, probably thirsty. Cracked lips and stomach cramps, Lila thought. Would Indian Me be angry with them all? Could she imagine the North American version of herself, enjoying cake and games in the safe, well-fed stronghold of Mountain Home? Lila shied away from the idea of this unknown woman’s anger, her dying body, her wrecked country. Would she even be old enough to remember a monsoon? Wasn’t it a bit unreasonable to get angry about the eradication of something you had personally never known?

Bell was right: she should be present minded today. Cascadia and the other north American states – and south American, for that matter – had fairly and adequately compensated the affected eastern hemisphere nations for the monsoon thing, problem, disappearance, whatever you wanted to call it. If the aid never reached the people because of corruption, that wasn’t the fault of the aid-senders.\

The Outrigger project was a rational, feasable, and fast way to cool the planet. It had come at a huge cost – for everyone, she thought. She would have liked to have seen a blue sky once in her life, but it was impossible now. Their family used to take a summer vacation to the beach at Fort Worden and watch the Pacific waves lash the pine trees. Now the oceans were mostly empty gulfs of acid water. You fled inside when it rained, and the slurry from the sulfur injected into the stratosphere came down as acid rain.

Life was no longer pleasant, she thought, and if that sounds petulant so be it. Life’s meant to be pleasant, otherwise what’s the point? At least now Project Outrigger had made continued life possible. India would be saying exactly the same thing to us if they had come up with it.

‘Come on Lila,’ her brother said. ‘I’ll be 51 by the time you’ve played our turn.’

‘Sorry,’ she said absently. She steered the drone upwards, towards the karst-coloured sky. When Outrigger started, she had wondered what would happen when the reflective blanket of sulfur dioxide began to disperse and need renewed. She had a poetic idea of cloud-shards, like pieces of broken mirror-glass, falling to earth. It was nonsense, of course. It was just interesting how your brain tried to find the good, the beautiful, in everything. She made a mental note to consider putting together a grant-application for a short study of this.

Four thousand injection flights a year were needed to maintain the stratospheric blanket that cooled the Earth. Outrigger countries contributed flights over their own airspace and that of opposition nations, for whose wrecked regional climates they contributed aid as compensation. And now these nations, led by a famine-crazed India, said that the next Outrigger base that launched an injector plane would feel the maximum prejudice of their anger.

The drone spun around Bell and Seanan, hovered indecisively, and then settled on Bell.

‘I’ll take this and then I’m going to put the candles on the cake,’ she said, laughing.

There was a sudden ripple and everyone turned on the lawn to the bulky plane climbing upwards from the Mountain Home Base.

‘My God,’ said Sascha, ‘They actually launched. I thought they’d hold off.’

‘The shelter,’ said Seanan, panicking.

‘We’ve still got time,’ Bell said. ‘They wouldn’t fire on us until the plane’s at the point of no return.’

There was a silence. ‘Cake,’ she said. ‘We should sing Happy Birthday, at least.’

And then, on the eastern horizon, a line of light, whiter than anything they had seen before, shot towards the injector plane, and all the city, and the houses, and the people at the party beneath their protective atmospheric blanket, were lit up like candles.

Temptress

The thought of it obsesses Terah, plagues him waking and sleeping. Sometimes he wonders if it’s because Canaan has a sea coast, lakes and rivers, which all call to the flood-loving part of his bloodline. He is, after all, only seven generations away from the Ark and the watery world of confusion and renewal.

But then, he thinks, if it’s simply water that my whole soul yearns for, why do I not head south a fortnight’s journey to the Gulf? There’s a living in the marshlands – maybe not for sheep, but I’m a man, I can learn. I can pole a boat or whatever they do there.

It’s not just water that calls him from dry Ur of the Chaldees. It is something more, the idea of Canaan.

His wives are sick of hearing about it. Even his children are now inoculated against this constant reference to There. When we get there…Over There it’s…Now, if we were There…

As the years wear on it becomes you. When you get There…because Terah knows that he will never see the place his children are bored with hearing about.

Except one. Abram, whom he married off to one of his cousins, Sarai. She hasn’t yet produced so much as a stillbirth. It grieves Terah that the only one captivated by the idea of Canaan is the one with no children to conquer it.

‘That’s why,’ Terah’s wife says, straining the milk as her husband sits, despondently watching her. ‘He only listens to your stories because he’s got nothing else to occupy him. One wife, no children, and a father full of dreams and visions.’

‘You make me sound like a child,’ Terah whines, like a child.

His wife puts the straining cloth in a clean pail and starts dealing with the curds. ‘Maybe not a child,’ she says. ‘A youth.’ Terah tuts and huffs but she realizes she’s onto something and must talk it all through. ‘You don’t really know what it’s like over there,’ she says. ‘It’s just the fact that it’s over there that draws you. Anywhere is better than where you are, and the further away the better because you’ll never have to test it – not at your age.’

Terah, who has just been called a geriatric, a callow youth, a malcontent, and a coward by a woman peacefully making cheese, stomps off. He comes to rest in the shade of a date palm and kicks it, wishing it were his wife, or perhaps his own father. Someone, anyone, upon whom he can vent his anger at being rumbled about his private paradise.

Canaan.

Around him, his children and grandchildren are dealing with flocks, with babies, with the business of minding their own business in this land, where their clan came two generations ago after wandering since they came off the Ark. It does not occur to him that Canaan is likely also full of people doing the same thing, who would resent – and forcibly eject – Terah’s clan. All he sees is the hateful here and now, and the temptress Over There.

And then Abram hoves into his father’s view, drifting, indecisive, as he always is. Terah’s eye gleams, like a fly spotting a rich pile of manure on which to settle and breed, and he calls his son.

Bosco

Dante goes into the woods. He is nine, and has returned from the May Day party where he has met another nine-year old, called Beatrice. The idea of her troubles him and he wants to think about it in the dim blue peace of Vallombrosa.

He sits at the foot of trees so dark they are almost black, and he knows that his feelings for her are neither pretty nor ones he could tell his confessor. All he knows is that Beatrice, who sat beside him and ate fava beans and fresh cheese, is the first person he has ever met who seemed entirely right and whole and perfect just as she was. This bothers him because he knows that no one is perfect, except Christ – and perhaps His holy mother – and that it is vaguely sinful to suggest that someone can be perfect without reference to Christ and His church.

But still, there it is, the image of the little girl, sinking deeper and deeper into his head the way dye soaks into cloth. The whole world and the eyes with which he sees it are perfused with her. The spring woods, too.

Beautiful Beatrice, whom he wishes to seize as a breeze seizes the new plants.

Silent Beatrice, who would not scream or tattle, and whose voice would emerge as a tumble of flowers from her lips.

Fruitful, blooming Beatrice, who is all the flowers of rhetoric and their heady perfume.

Maidenly, chaste Beatrice, for whom all his words are like the forest canopy: dark and tangled and obscure.

Untouchable Beatrice, who is part of that shining, flourishing, joyous mystery that is women. All his short life, Dante has only watched girls, these half-wild, half-divine creatures, involved in some complicated dance from which the whole world comes, and feel confused and clumsy, and alone.

And yet, when he looks inside himself he perceives a spark of some changeful magic, some message from a Christless heaven, encouraging him into a dark and silvan place of pleasure and pagan passion.

There he sits in the dark wood, this little boy who will produce a vision of life’s comedy, until the light has wholly gone and he must make his own path home.

Red Stop

‘They called me Red, and in my life red has been life and good health and fire and blood. I got rid of a cursed birthright for a bowl of red stew, and I’ll make a new home in the red soil of this land.’

‘But to lose it all to your brother,’ she says.

Esau raises himself on one elbow and looks at her. ‘With some people you can see trouble coming years away. Like a sandstorm.’ He fondles her hair in the lamplight of their marriage bed and she – this third, and last, new wife, rubs her face on his shoulder. It is covered with hair, white now but once upon a time, fox-red. Privately she thinks he is like a goat or a hyrax, so hairy is he, and she is slightly sad that he is not younger and his hair redder. Still, she knows that she is no great prize, and is just glad to be married at last.

‘He sounds like an unhappy man.’

Esau snorts. ‘Of course he is. He has children with four women, all related and all hating each other. He has thirteen sons and they all want to be something special. He’s inherited my father’s ideas about having only one god, and my father’s strange dreams about voices and gods and malakim.’ Esau is careful not to suggest that there is madness in the family, but it’s clear that there is something in the men of his line, some mania which drives them to scorn their neighbours, murder their children, and be uneasy in their minds. It’s a difficult subject to broach, but he’s done it with the other two wives who accepted that he was the normal one, and who have borne him normal sons.

My great-grandfather was obsessed with this land. Even far off in his own place, in the dry Chaldees, he thought relentlessly of Canaan. He packed off his own son and sent him to look for it. On the way, my grandfather sold his wife as a whore. Then he got her back, and in their dotage they somehow became parents. When he went mad, my grandfather tried to murder his own son. My father spent his life waking in a sweat from dreams of the knife coming down and a lamb crying in the background.

Then my father had us, twins who had nothing in common except a desire to be rid of each other. I came in as my father was dying and saw them there, the three of them: my father’s hand on Jacob’s head, my mother’s hands on Jacob’s shoulders, making sure he got the blessing that should have been mine. And from under the goatskin he’d worn to trick a dying man’s hands, my brother looked at me. We had been adversaries since we were together in that hot red bag of blood within my mother. What was I going to do? Spend my life fighting him, or let it go and him with it?’

‘But your birthright -‘ she says.

‘Is what? Grazing rights in a land not ours. A god that sets us apart from our neighbours. The right to be buried in a cave we bought from foreigners, where we can lie with others of our mad little family, half distorted already with inbreeding.’ He snorts again. ‘Let him have it.’

‘It’s not really true,’ she says, ‘That you sold it for a bowl of lentils?’

‘It’s true that my brother saw I was hungry. I had worn myself out because our father liked meat, although there was none on his own bones. Jacob wouldn’t give me so much as a mess of potage without turning it to profit. I was young, I was bloody, I was tired, I was famished, and I saw that my twin would never cease ripping me off. I’d say a man wearing a goatskin to trick his dying father is no less than you’d expect. Why do you think I’ve tried to marry out of our tribe?’ He shakes his head. ‘It’s more accurate to say that Jacob offered me a bowl of lentils for this nightmare of our bloodline. In me, at least, the line of Abram and the madness they brought from Ur, calling it El, will stop. In me it will stop.’

Abecedarium 5: Space Zinnia

Above the surface, the Panoptes hung in Low Earth Orbit and a girl looked at her home through the cupola window. Botany in space provoked a lot more philosophy than did the single spider plant in her room at Darmstadt. Chosen for her skills as a pilot, the botany that Kelly was actually doing amounted to following one page of watering instructions, written by scientists who had never been higher than the top floor of an Arizona research centre. Despite the hostile environment, almost all the plants had flowered in their growth chambers. Everett, the mission medic, had some vegetables growing in plastic bags and his blog – Diary of a Space Zucchini – attracted a million hits a day, but Kelly had charge of the official experiment, the zinnia plants in their black plastic growth chambers which reminded her of body bags. From each pouch the seed leaf, then stem, more leaves, and finally flowers – like the flowers small children draw, unsubtle and happy – burst. Green of any shade was a source of psychological succour, but privately Kelly though the colour looked faded, like a fence exposed to the sun for too long. Hard rays – gamma, X, high-energy charged particles – struck everything all the time, machine-gunning the colour at an atomic level. In fact, the space flowers had been more successful than the control plants on Earth; micro vibrations had cracked the seed carapace and the ambient radiation encouraged initial growth.

Just a few days after flowering they had nearly died from an outbreak of mould. Kelly cried hot tears into her gamey sleeping bag – then duly noted down the crying event and the fluid loss in her log. Lennon, the mission psychologist (safely back in Houston), said she should ignore the watering instructions and do whatever she could to save the flowers. Monotony of stimulation, he said, was a negative stressor; he went on with his psychobabble while she watched the dying flowers circle the world at eighteen thousand miles an hour.

Nevertheless, she saved them from mould, and drought, and hard rays, and the competition from Everett’s blog-famous space zucchini. On Valentine’s Day she made a bouquet and posted a photo of it against the cupola window, breaking Everett’s blog record for most reactions – mostly positive.

Pretty!!!

Post-Human Valentine’s Day – love you all, Space Cadets xxx

Per aspera ad zinnias 🙂

Proper to flowers? Proper to Man?

Quite who the last writer was she couldn’t work out – the account name was an alphanumeric jumble and the message was the only one in its history. Research on the strange choice of ‘proper’ revealed it to come from proprietas, an intrinsic quality essential and appropriate to the true being of a thing. Sunlight and soil to flowers, for example, or sky overhead and ground below to humans. To the proper quality of humans, the comment implied, the attempt to live in space was obscene, an affront against the fundamental limits proper to man. Under the heavens, not within them, she thought, tumbling around the planet, lest we discover that heaven is hydrogen, hard rays, and not much else.

Very positive results on the experiment and public engagement, Control wrote. When do you harvest the zucchini, Steve? Xeno-salad sounds good for dinner!

Young leaves unfurled from the growth chambers until she freed them from the black plastic prison. Zinnia flowers floated against the vacuum, their fragile rootlets looking for soil.

Opus

‘I went to The Stowe,’ Master Sharpe said, looking out of the little window to the ranks of mountains around them, ‘because I wanted to become wise, and to learn from wise people. And I left because I saw that this was not the point of the place, but rather -‘

‘- knowledge?’ said Alo.

‘Power,’ said Sharpe.

Guthmund gave a snigger, as if to say that the possibility of an island of scholars having any power was ridiculous. ‘You think, they’re useless scholars, the island is an island of books and dreams – how could they possibly have power?’ said Sharpe, ignoring Guthmund.

‘Because people – people like us, I mean – dream of The Stowe. We dream of sharing their dreams.’ Alo wished Guthmund was on one of the mountain peaks, far away from the little schoolroom, where he was annoying both him and his teacher.

Sharpe nodded. ‘Exactly. And Wisdom is not a dream, or made of dreams. Wisdom is a hard worker, with its sleeves rolled up, out in the world learning real things about real things.’

‘Can’t books be real things? And what’s written in them – isn’t knowledge a real thing?’

Master Sharpe smiled and paused slightly. ‘It’s because you make distinctions like this that you’ll enjoy The Stowe. But you must make honest distinctions. Do not mistake knowledge and wisdom for each other. Don’t split hairs in order to lie to yourself. I found myself doing that before I possessed the quality which makes Wisdom different from Knowledge.’

There was a silence. Guthmund kept fidgeting and sighing. Something, like a cord strung tight between two posts, thrummed between Alo and Master Sharpe. ‘Do you know what that thing is, Alo?’

Alo turned the two terms this way and that in his mind and could not discern any practical different. Somewhere in his thirst for more knowledge about more things there was a picture, a feeling, of The Stowe, with its towers and libraries, halls and colleges, full of powerful minds which could flip and turn the toys of thought however they pleased. He had dreamed of being in such a place, and learning how to master these toys, since he could remember. He did not want to hear that Master Sharpe, his only teacher, had found it vain and empty. Surely, if you learned enough, and you gained the approval of that place of immense age and strength, surely wisdom was whatever you decided it to be?

‘Time, master?’

Master Sharpe stared steadily at him, and Alo knew that his teacher had detected the deception and was disappointed in him. ‘Courage, Alo. What distinguishes wisdom from knowledge is courage. Knowing is only a matter of space in your head, and a powerful enough engine to manipulate the knowledge. Wisdom requires bravery.’ He sighed and turned away.

‘I wanted to write a great work, an opus sapientiae,’ he said. ‘One which would win me a fellowship and throw a light, like a candle in a dark room, on the link between the signs we make and the things themselves. It would show the game of lies and idols which lies behind words, and reveal the majesty of the world and how precious it is.’

‘Did you write it?’ said Alo eagerly. This opus sounded as if it would be worth the hard work of reading it. But Sharpe shook his head.

‘I found that I could not write it there. I was afraid – yes, Alo, even me – of the posturing and cruel characters. I was tired, and afraid, and alone. To write the truth, you need the truth all around you. I found that The Stowe was a place of reflections and echoes. Very little is created there, and much repeated. For every true opus there are a thousand empty commentaries and split hairs about it – knowledge, certainly, but not wisdom, and not new.’

‘But still,’ said Alo defensively, ‘you had to go to The Stowe to work that out. You had to satisfy yourself that it did not contain wisdom. So it was worth it in the end, surely?’

Master Sharpe smiled ruefully. ‘You have me there,’ he said. ‘I had to learn a great deal to discover that it was merely echoes of things said many, many generations ago – and that the people who wrote the Great Works, had not enjoyed the comfort and power of The Stowe, but were in the real world, and often poor, afraid, laughed at, and alone. Their work is taken by the scholars of The Stowe, who write empty commentaries on works they could never have created. They long to create, but they cannot relinquish the safety, the empty fame which precludes creation. And when I understood that, I left. It took courage, and I left heartsick and bereft.’

‘Perhaps I’ll be different,’ said Alo diffidently.

‘Perhaps,’ said his teacher. ‘At least you have my example before you.’

Pharaoh’s Gem

Samoikhin had an apartment on Ostozhenka and a neoclassical pile somewhere near Peredelkino, but Seleznev knew that he would be at the dacha in Barvika for the next week, and that this was where the gem was kept.

The idea of stealing the gem, referred to as the Pharaoh’s Gem because Samoikhin had a fetish for Egyptian antiquities, had been Kotov’s, and Kotov had procured the plans of the house, access codes, and one hour of the evening during which the security system would be turned off.

Seleznev had never required a whole hour before, but he had always known exactly what he was looking for and usually had reference photos or even, in one case, an isotopic marker to make things easier. He had nothing except Kotov’s word that the gem was in the same and that the safe was in the study and could be opened without too much difficulty.

Seleznev sincerely hoped so. Samoikhin had made his money in the chaos of the 90s and still took a bandit’s approach to retribution, burning the homes, cars, and families of those who crossed him. Normally Seleznev would not have been lured back into the field for a job as sketchy as this but he had recently discovered a primary cancer on one lung, with secondaries scattered across the lung peripheries. The x-rays had looked like a monochrome Christmas tree. He wanted to die quickly and in comfort: in Russia speed and comfort passed for compassion, and all of it cost money.

This was why he had hiked wheezily through five miles of pine forest along the south bank of the Moskva, and scaled the wall of Samoikhin’s laughably-named dacha. When Seleznev had been a child he had stayed in a state-owned dacha for several summers – a real wooden one, with three other fortunate families, taking turns making meals, picking vegetables from the plot, and playing in the woods around the house. Samoikhin’s version of the traditional Russian summer home looked like an airliner and had been designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. It had a helipad and an Olympic swimming pool, and a separate wing which housed Samoikhin’s collection of Egyptian antiquities.

The gem, Kotov had assured him, was not in the collection wing, but in the safe in the main house, which Seleznev had entered four minutes previously, and up the main staircase of which he was climbing quietly. Samoikhin was at an Alla Pugacheva Charity concert for the war effort against Ukraine and would not be home until midnight, if at all.

Kotov had gathered most of his information about the gem in his capacity as Samoikhin’s banker. He knew that the gem was insured for over ten million US dollars, and was Samoikhin’s pride and job. Seleznev had demanded two million for stealing it, and Kotov would either sell the thing or ransom it, depending on Samoikhin’s reaction to its loss.

The staircase was one of the floating kind, with slats of clear perspex anchored to the wall at once side and hovering in space at the other. It reminded Seleznev that Samoikhin did not drink. No drunk could navigate the staircase without breaking a leg. He reached the top and turned left down the corridor which led to Samoikhin’s private quarters, his feet sinking almost an inch into the carpet pile.

As part of Kotov’s guaranteed one-hour shut-down of the house’s security, the motion-sensitive lights did not come on, and Seleznev slowed as he passed a massive bulk against the corridor wall. He turned his torch on it, expecting a chest or sideboard, but saw a long, cold statue, carved horizontally, lying on top of a bigger bulk of stone. It was an effigy of a man, with a winged thing carved on his chest.

There was a sudden movement from behind the effigy’s head: Seleznev’s heart banged in his chest and a small striped cat leapt out into the torchlight, stretching and yawning. Seleznev had a soft spot for cats: their mercenary behaviour and quick transition from lithe beauty to savagery reflected something reassuringly Russian. He extended a gloved index finger and the cat ran a furred cheek along it. In the striped fur of the cat’s neck Seleznev saw a twinkle of gold. The cat wore a collar of small gold links like wings. From the centre dangled a pendent like a beetle. He turned it over. TА МИУ. He took the collar off the cat and examined it in the light of the torch. The first wing was stamped KΦ. He pocketed the collar, of which the cat seemed happy to be rid. He stroked the neat little heat and turned away.

Only one item in Samoikhin’s private study was illuminated, though by what means, Seleznev could not determine. Several LEDS embedded on a plinth threw beams onto a small limestone chest which looked like the sarcophagus of an infant. Perhaps not a baby, Seleznev thought: the reliefs carved on the front showed a cat sitting at a dinner table covered in food. The safe was, rather conventionally, behind a framed papyrus which looked to Seleznev like the knock offs that freezing illegal Chinese sold on blankets outside Red Square.

The little tabby from the corridor whispered around his legs. Seleznev made an indistinct kissing noise at it from beneath his mask, and lifted the frame from the wall. The safe behind it was a classic Rosengren, at least a century old. Seleznev felt a twinge of misgiving. It seemed unlikely that a biznizman of Samoikhin’s ilk would keep his treasured possession in something so easily opened.

He had it open within six minutes, which he blamed on lack of practice, and looked inside. As he shone the torch into the safe, two things happened: the sound of approaching helicopter rotors reached him, and the cat jumped onto his shoulder to look inside the inviting box. Panicking, Seleznev looked at his watch – he had another 42 minutes of Kotov’s promised sixty, and midnight was ninety minutes away. Clearly Samoikhin had decided that an evening with the cat and dead Egyptians was more attractive than Alla Pugacheva and Millions of Scarlet Roses.

He shooed the cat off, reached into the safe, and withdrew all the contents, which amounted to three bundles of documents. He patted around the safe and shone the torch inside, looking for concealed panels, but there was nothing: no casket, no jewel box, nothing but the papers which he shovelled into his backpack.

He shut the safe and replaced the frame, cursing Kotov. He was on his way out of the study when it occurred to him to check the sarcophagus. Samoikhin had troubled to give the plinth a separate power source: it might conceal or even be, the real safe.

He lifted the limestone lid gingerly. A smell of dust and something, spiced and unpleasant, drifted into the study’s still, luxurious air. The form of a mummified cat lay on the bottom. Seleznev was unwilling to touch it, and replaced the lif. At his feet the little tabby gave a meow. He shifted the box with some difficulty, but there was nothing on the plinth beneath it. Kotov had evidently been a fool. Seleznev blew the cat another kiss and nipped down the stairs as the helo’s lights came over the final rank of trees.

He met Kotov in a cafe in Patriarshiye Prudy and handed over the documents silently.

‘Where is it?’

He shrugged. ‘Wasn’t there. Whatever it was.’

Kotov narrowed his eyes. ‘What’s this?’ he shoved irritably at the documents.

‘Everything that was in the safe. No gems, no jewellery, nothing. Just paper.’

Like Samoikhin, Kotov had been a market stall trader in the 90s and had also worked his way up to dachas in Barvika over a mountain of bodies. ‘If you’re double-crossing me, I’ll kill you.’

‘I’m already dying. So fuck you and your wild goose chases. Next time get someone who’ll work for fairytales.’

Kotov opened the first folder. It contained Samoikhin’s birth certificate, army service record, marriage and divorce documents, deeds to his several properties, and permits for various weapons.

The second file contained twelve photographs from various angles of the limestone sarcophagus. The images showed it in situ in a tomb, and against a black background – a museum or insurance image.

The third file contained documents in a foreign script. The letterhead said Sooam Biotech, with a nondescript logo of horizontal lines in blue and green. Kotov flicked through them. ‘Korean,’ he said. ‘Something scientific.’ There was an English summary page, which Seleznev had attempted to read with the aid of Google translate, and given up.

Kotov’s face, as he read the document, was almost worth Seleznev’s lost two million. ‘What is it?’ Seleznev said impatiently.

Kotov shook his head and pulled out his phone. There was a prolonged period of searching, gasping, and half-laughs of incredulity. Finally he looked at Seleznev. ‘Was there a cat?’ he said.

‘Yes. A tabby thing. Friendly. Wanted to jump into the safe.’

‘It was a clone.’

‘A clone? Like a robot?’

Kotov opened the second file and took out one of the photos. ‘This coffin thing was stolen from a museum in Cairo about five years ago. It had the body of a cat in it. A mummy. Cat mummy.’

‘I saw it. I thought the box was the safe. The cat body was inside.’

‘Well, the cat belonged to some Egyptian prince, like – my God, like, three and a half thousand years ago. Samoikhin had it stolen and then he had the fucking cat cloned. The cat was a clone of an ancient Egyptian prince’s cat. You have got to be kidding me.’

‘His gem,’ said Seleznev flatly. ‘His gem was that cat.’ He suddenly saw little tabby in Samoikhin’s ultra-luxe dacha, sleeping beside the effigy of its long-dead owner.

‘It says here it was called Ta-Miu.’ Kotov looked at the papers again. ‘He kept the name then. Jesus. What a nut.’ He used several profanities and heaved a sigh. His face recovered its usual impassive surliness. ‘Can’t be helped,’ he said. ‘Some things come to nothing.’

‘My fee doesn’t. I’ll expect that money. Or Samoikhin will find out he can’t trust his banker.’

Kotov shrugged.

Outside, a street full of expat Americans were pushing babies towards afternoon naps in their gated compounds. Seleznev felt in his pocket for the collar he had taken from Ta-Miu’s soft neck and decided he would go to chemo in an Uber.

Plunge

My wedding day was one of the worst days of my life. I knew that I wasn’t – and probably never would be – the marrying kind. By that I mean someone who can make public promises, to stand on that pinhead of time and swear that you know what the future holds in terms of who you’ll be in the years to come. I’m still a different person between breakfast and lunch. Admittedly, the rate of change is slowing down but I must have been mad to put myself on the precipice of a wedding.

I should clarify here that I’m not bad at relationships. I’ve been with my long-suffering boyfriend for nearly thirteen years and am in my fourth year at the same workplace. I’m bad at promises and contracts, probably because they’ve never worked out in my favour, and possibly because I have the instincts of a puppy when I feel restrained – I strain and heave and pull away.

I don’t believe I’m the only person to feel this about my wedding day, although instead of getting sensibly drunk to cover my rank terror at what I’d just done, I articulated them at length and high volume in the car outside McDonalds. The marriage was around five hours old and I was completely traumatized by the experience of the vows.

There’s a reason people call marrying ‘taking the plunge’. Think of what you fear when you’re on the ten-meter board. Dying. Worse, being injured so badly that you’ll never walk again. That you’ll lose your freedom, become dependent. You suddenly realize how frail you are, how exposed. But other eyes are on you, waiting for the spectacle, expecting their five-minute slice of vicarious happiness. And you’re too much of a coward to say that you’ve had second thoughts, and that what had seemed boring and sterile is really safety, the known, even sanity of a kind. So you take the plunge, and you strike the hard reality of yourself, and you break and break and break.

I was an awful wife – I’ve been a pretty good ex-wife in that I’ve left him totally alone for the last fifteen years – and am now a not-too-terrible girlfriend. This is because I love him enough not to marry him.

White Whisper

Lila kept shrugging, which irritated him. He had to remind himself that his daughter was only thirteen and had no mother. Not that the biologists had identified any stronger tendency in girls to suffer from this nostos, which was currently driving both him and Lila mad.

‘You keep calling it home, but you were born here,’ he said. ‘You’ve never even been topside and you’re going on about somewhere completely….completely….’ He threw his hands up.

She shrugged again, miserable. They both longed to go to their respective bunks and cry.

‘OK,’ she said in a tremulous voice. ‘Can I go topside? Can I just look? Maybe I’ll see it in the sky and be put off. You’re making it sound like I want to be like this and I don’t. It’s horrible.’

Her father hesitated. On the one hand he understood her bursting desire to get out of the lava tubes and go virtually anywhere else. There was no point in educating them about the old, Terran, world, or the immensity of the Martian one if you stomped on their natural desire to see either. Maybe letting her go topside would nip this longing for Earth in the bud.

‘We’re down here for a reason,’ he said carefully. ‘It’s nearly twice as hot, topside. We get about 300μSv down here – ‘

‘ – compared to five or six hundred up there,’ she said. ‘I know that. I don’t fancy being burned to some kind of tumour-crisp either. But what do I do? I can’t sleep. I see Earth in my dreams – and not pictures from lessons. Places I don’t know, with a feeling I’ve never had before, and I wake up absolutely sure thatI must go. Like, as sure as when you wake up and need to pee. It’s that bad. So what do I do, Dad? How am I supposed to bear this genetic…’ He thought she was going to say curse, but she pulled herself back. ‘…problem you’ve given me?’

In fact, they did not know that there was any genetic logic which accounted for the feeling. The only established fact was that the onset was with puberty. In the public meeting which the colony executive had called to address it, some biologists referred to it as philopatry. Others said it was just the normal desire of teenagers to explore more interesting places than they had known. No one could call the colony at Hadriacus Mons interesting. It filled the largest lava tube left by a long-ago eruption and sheltered four thousand colonists from surface radiation. The 238 pressurised bubbles and pods which made up the Hadriacus colony protected against radiation, temperature fluctuation, micrometeorites and surface dust. They were not proof against the white whisper that tormented around 30 percent – a number which appeared to be growing – of people with a desperation to see and feel Earth. In half the cases it had led to abandonment of the colony and almost certain suicide in the wildlands of Arcadia Planitia.

Humans, the biologists assured everyone, did not have some kind of philopatric need to return to a certain place to mate or breed – self-evidently, since Hadriacus was in its third generation of native-born inhabitants. What the affected souls were feeling was psychological, and might be called nostos, the same force which had drawn Odysseus back to Ithaca despite the infinite challenges thrown in his way by angry gods. The whole thing, being psychological, could be cured by doubling down on commitment to the colony. More, harder, work made you sleep instead of suffering the torments of homesickness for a place your very skin had never known.

To foster this focus on the here and now, a new taboo was evolved. The topic of the Terran past was avoided and the term home was understood to mean the three levels of pods and bubbles in Hadriacus, not the imagined viridium of a planet which their species had rendered almost uninhabitable.

But the white whisper of nostos continued. It did not seem to matter that the colonists had undergone genetic enhancement to assist their life in high radiation. The insertion of tardigrade DNA had rendered them something other than human. There were still those who, when growth made them ready to breed, escaped the tube town and had to be retrieved from the topside landing sites where they milled around in the ambient rads, looking for a way back to Earth like disoriented migratory birds.

Others got further, and their radioactive bodies had to be left on whatever elevation they had died upon, attempting to get closer to the blue-green siren that hung low in the Martian sky.

He looked at his daughter and felt a pulse of guilt. She – her genes, her cells, her muscles and mind – wanted to be standing in a field on Earth, beneath the blue sky of that planet, in its atmosphere. Never mind that the same human genes and drives had made it necessary to strike out for new, un-ruined worlds. He had never felt the pull home that she felt. Home for him was Hadriacus, his pod, the other colonists. He had willingly adapted himself to fit in where he had been born.

He wanted to explain to her that the executive were evaluating whether the problem of homesickness wasn’t really an affront to the whole colony project. Humans were infinitely adaptable. They had to be to fulfil the mandate of exploring the cosmos, which was as close to a God-given right as a mostly atheistic colony got. The notion that our species was limited by a concept as nebulous as home was weak, stupid, and traitorous. Those who had tried to leave were saboteurs. By assigning them to this category it became licit to kill them – mercifully, of course, since pain and misery were other kingdoms over which Science had triumphed. But they were buried separately, just to be sure that this longing for home wasn’t catching.

‘Fine,’ he said, defeated. ‘I’ll apply for a topside pass. Maybe the sight of the place will cure you.’

She bowed her head gratefully and he prepared to lose his daughter.

Abecedarium: Mayday Morning

Always, on the first day of May, the boys climbed to the top of the tower and sang to the rising sun. But the year the war started, there was an unusual haze in the dawn air. Closing around the crenellations, the haze cut off from view the choristers’ heads, resting on immaculate starched ruffs and surplices. Down on the bridge below the tower the watching crowd smiled complacently and listened to the pure high strains of boyish voices. Every Mayday for a thousand years – longer even than the tower had been around – the same thing had happened. For every May Day there had been a dawn, a choir, a hymn. God, in the person of Eostre, Primavera, or Christ, was given their due.

High on their sandstone fastness, the boys’ voices faded away. It sounded as though the haze had muffled and then cut them off, like a heavy door closing gradually. Just as the revellers below began to exchange glances, the haze thinned and vanished: the choristers were gone.

K-16 fighters appeared in a sonic boom, screeched across the dawn sky and vanished into the opposite boom-envelope east of the town. Like a theatre curtain sweeping aside an old scene and all its props, the people on the bridge and the crowd which had spilled along The High rushed for cover in one body.

Mere seconds later the tower, the college beneath it, and the bridge, were thrown into shadow as a vast ship materialized from the upper atmosphere and began descending upon the town. Now the war, which had seemed far away and unreal, had come to them, had come to history – as the town determined it.

Only the few who were by the river, the canal, and the various streams which ran here and there throughout colleges, streets, libraries, and churches, escaped by diving in. Professors, half-dressed in their sets, stallholders opening in the covered market, runners circling the track chasing the four-minute mile, all vanished just as the choristers had dematerialized. Quiet descended on the town: the ship continued to hover, like a dark-radiating sun, far above them.

Running water was the only protection against the enemy; submergence in a deep body of moving water seemed to cause their scanners to pass over. Some kinds of animals, all birds and insects, and most aquatic life were all left untouched. The only victims of the haze that thickened and swallowed its victims were humans and species created by them: cats, dogs, chickens, sheep, some kinds of goats.

Under the huge bowl of shadow, the town gave a convulsive shudder as every electrical item, every millimeter of fibre optic cable, the entire Hadron Collider in the nearby science park, was subjected to a pulse which shattered them into slivers. Various sounds suggested fires breaking out, but no sirens emitted calls for help, and over the course of several minutes the shadow lifted and the ship dematerialized.

Wet, shivering folk who had been May Day revellers only moments before emerged from the waters like Tiktaalik creeping onto land for the first time. Xerograph-like shadows were strewn everywhere an organic body had been – on pavements, in doorways, looking out of windows, there were human-shaped reliefs where some black ash or powder clung to the charged surface.

Yesterday the town had swarmed with more life than a petri-dish, and this perhaps accounted for the deep clean. Zymotic disease had to be treated swiftly, firmly, and finally – even in Oxford.

China White

Han Liu held his hands up to the barred window and inspected the cracked skin. Prisoners did not get gloves when they worked in the salt and shrimp ponds. His hands bled and itched all night.

A brown dawn was emerging over the Nanpu mudflats beyond the prison. Until the haze of mud, suspended salt, and petrochemicals thickened into day you could see the ghostly outline of a drilling platform far out at the entrance to the Bohai Sea.

Flocks of wader birds wheeled and settled, took flight again and alighted in new spots on the tidal ripples. From his cell they looked like strokes on a traditional painting: the suggestion of birds, the idea of a landscape. If you painted thick black bars in the foreground you had modern China: misty ideas covering a wide stretch of paper, seen imperfectly from behind very real barriers.

He plunged his hands into the mud bucket in the corner. When mud dried on your clothes you brushed it into a bucket, added water and made a primitive mudbath to soothe the cracking. It was better to bear it and let the skin toughen if you could, but you still scratched when you slept.

It was the worst part of working on the ponds. Otherwise it was fairly peaceful. Wader birds came to the shrimp ponds when the prisoners were on a break. Yang Haoran told him the names of some of the birds. There was the hongfu binyu, which had a brown speckled back and a breast the colour of autumn leaves, and the shao ziuyu which had a bill shaped like a three-pointed spear. He liked the small speckled one called huiban heng. There was nothing special about it, just a small chunky bird with short, capable legs and a neat head. The speckled feathers reminded him of the haze that hung always over the Bohai Bay. It was small, tough, opportunistic. Yang said that it only stopped there on its way to the Arctic.

‘From where?’ Han said.

Yang shrugged. ‘Somewhere south. Maybe even Australia.’

Han did not believe this. The distance was… he tried to imagine it and gave up. Incalculable kilometers. Impossible stamina in something so tiny.

He wondered why it would stop there, where it was so likely to be shot, or poisoned, or trapped. Because it had no alternative, he decided. Because all the bird really was, under the skin, was a flight plan with wings, just an urge in the blood and nothing else, passed down through generations.

Yang said that the Yellow Sea lay on a flight line that ran from the Arctic to Australia. It was vital, he said, to the survival of these tiny birds, which no one noticed or cared about as China drove into the future, with its scams and lies and rotten-tail cities.

Before, Han had been a razor clam fisher. He had been at liberty to spend all day poking a stick in the mud, feeling for a clam, then hauling it up with a hooked wire. Then another fisher had died nearby and he had been unable to help him because they were both stuck in frozen mud. The state had relieved him of his liberty and put him to work on the same mudflats, raking sand instead of hauling razor clams. It was the way things went. He had not expected anything different from life.

When you looked into the small black eye of the huiban heng wader bird, though, you saw profound understanding, the remoteness of the elite athlete, the detachment of something which knew the whole earth as a single entity. Sometimes he lay on his bunk and thought about the birds’ incredible stamina, their toughness, their compulsion to repeat routines which had sustained them before. They were like the Chinese, he thought. Those qualities which were so admirable in the birds were the same qualities that different governments had relied on in the people. But where they brought the birds a kind of freedom, they locked the people into a perpetual dull gamble against a world that was trying to kill them. Still, it was in the blood and there did not seem to be any other way to live.

Sometimes he called out to the birds as he raked and pressed salt in the ponds.

Where have you come from?

Where are you headed?

Don’t you ever feel like giving up?

Stay here with me! We’ll feed you and keep you warm.

Yang said that the whole region was slowly being taken back by rising water levels. In thirty years, he said, a hundred million people would be at risk. Han could not imagine that many people. He doubted the government would let the sea take anything back. Nature was there to be ripped off, like a stupid customer. This was largely why China was 1.4 billion people living in polluted chaos – because it was part of their history to believe that they were bigger than, and separate from, the natural world. The government solution to the rising sea would probably double the problem, kill even more people, and be damn ugly as well.

Han Liu pulled his hands from the mud bucket and looked out of the window again. Brown haze had swallowed many of the birds. The PetroChina logo on the drilling platform had vanished too. Day, of a kind, had emerged.