At the Edge of Waking Page 5

  The relay tower is singing.

  November 27:

  The ice is always shaking now. New spires lean above our snow wall, mocking our defenses. Miguel cries and shouts words we can’t understand, words so hard to say they make him drool and choke on his tongue. The wind sings back whenever he calls. The sat phone has given nothing but static until today when it, too, sang, making Del throw the handset to the floor. The radio only howls static. The fog reeks of dead fish, algae, the sea. Everything is rimed in salt ice. Andy hovers over Miguel, trying to make him take another pill: Del threatened him with violence if he doesn’t shut up. I grabbed Del, dragged him to a chair, hugged him until he gave in and pulled me to his lap. We’re here now, all four of us together. None of us can bear to be alone.

  November 28:

  A new crevasse opened in the camp today, swallowing two tents and making a shambles of the snow wall. Is this an attack? Our eviction notice, Andy says, humor her badge of courage. But I wonder if they even notice us, if they even care. Atlantis is theirs now, and I suppose it always has been, through all those long cold ages at the heart of the southern pole. Now the earth is warming, the ancient ice is freed to move north, to melt—and then what? What of this ice city growing all around us like a crystal lab-grown from a seed? If the clues they’ve given us (deliberately? I do wonder) are true, then they are beings of water as much as of ice. It won’t happen quickly, but eventually, as the berg travels north out of the Southern Ocean and into the Atlantic or Pacific, it will all melt. Releasing . . . what? . . . into the warming seas of our world. Our world is an ocean world, our over-burdened continents merely islands in the vast waters of misnamed Earth. What will become of us when they have reclaimed their world?

  Del and Andy, in between increasingly desperate attempts to bring our sailor Miguel back from whatever alien mindscape he’s lost in, are concocting a scheme to get our inflatable lifeboat, included in our gear almost as a joke, down the ice cliffs to the water. Away from here, they reason, we should be able to make the sat phone work, light the radio beacon, call in a rescue. I have a fantasy—or did I dream it last night?—that the singing that surrounds us, stranger than the songs of seals or whales, has reached into orbit, filling satellite antenna-dishes the way it fills my ears, drowning human communication. I imagine that the first careless assault on human civilization has already begun, and that the powers—the human powers—of Earth are looking outward in terror, imagining an attack from the stars, never dreaming that it is already here, has always been here, now waking from its ice-bound slumber. It is we who have warmed the planet; we, perhaps, who have brought this upon ourselves. But brought what, I wonder? And when Andy appeals to me to help her and Del with their escape plan, I find I have nothing much to say. But I suppose I will have to say it before long: why should we leave—should we leave—just when things are getting interesting?

  Get beyond it, I’ll have to tell them, as I did when Cutter died. We have to look beyond.

  In the meantime, though, I’ll make a couple of backups, downloading this log and my video files onto flash drives that will fit into a waterproof container. My message in a bottle. Just in case.

  Brother of the Moon

  Our hero wakes in his sister’s bed. Last night’s vodka drains through him in sluggish ebb, leaving behind the silt of hangover, the unbrushed taste of guilt. He rolls onto his stomach, feeling the rumpled bed wallow a little on the last of the alcoholic waves, and opens his eyes. His sister sleeps with her curtains open. The tall window across from the bed is brilliant with a soft spring sunlight that slips past crumbled chimneys and ornate gables to shine on his sister’s hands. She has delicate little monkey’s paws, all tendon and brittle bone, that look even more fragile than usual edged by the morning light. Sitting cross-legged among the rumpled sheets, tough as an underfed orphan in the undershirt and sweatpants she uses as pajamas, our hero’s sister is flipping a worn golden coin. She is a princess. Our hero is a prince.

  The coin sparkles in a rising and falling blur. Our hero watches with bemusement and pleasure as his sister’s nimble hands catch the coin, display the winning face, send it spinning and winking through sunlight with the flick of a thumb. Our hero’s sister manipulates the coin, a relic of ancient times, with a skill our hero would never have guessed. It is the skill of a professional gambler who could stack a deck of cards in her sleep, which is mystifying. Our hero’s sister is not the gambling type. Our hero clears a sour vodka ghost from his throat.

  “You’re up early.”

  The coin blinks at him and drops into his sister’s hand. With her fingers closed around it, she leans over him and kisses his stubbled head.

  “You snore.”

  “I don’t,” he says. “Are you winning?”

  “It keeps coming up kings.” Her monkey’s hands toy with the coin, teasing the golden sunshine into our hero’s eyes. “Who were you with last night?”

  Our hero scrubs his tearing eyes with a fold of her sheet. The linen is soft and yellow with age and smells of his sister, comforting. “No one special. No one. I forget.”

  His sister’s face is like her hands, delicate, bony, feral. Our hero thinks she’s beautiful, and loves her with the conscious, deliberate tenderness of someone who has lost every important thing but one.

  “How do you know I snore?” he says. “You’re the woman who can sleep through bombs.”

  This is literal truth. When the New Army was taking the city and the two of them were traveling behind the artillery line, she proved she could sleep through anything. But she says, “Bombs don’t steal the covers,” and since our hero is lying on top of the blanket, fully dressed, with his shod feet hanging off the end of the bed, he understands that she was awakened by something other than him. It troubles him that he cannot guess what might have been troubling her. Or perhaps it is a deeper worry, that he can imagine what it might have been. He stretches out a hand and steals the coin from between her fingers. The gold is as warm and silky as her skin. The face of the king has been the same for five hundred years.

  “Granddad,” our hero says ironically.

  His sister sighs and stretches out beside him, stroking his head.

  “You need to shave,” she says.

  People have said they are too close. The new government has cited rumors of incest as one reason to edge our hero out of the public eye. The rumors are false, they have never been lovers. But perhaps it is more honest to say that if they are lovers, they have always been chaste. In any event, they are close. She rubs her palm back and forth across his scalp, and he knows how much she enjoys the feel of stubble just long enough to bend from prickly to soft, because he enjoys it so much himself. Her touch soothes his headache and he is on the verge of dropping off when a van mounted with loudspeakers rolls by in the narrow street below, announcing the retreat of the New Army—the new New Army, our hero thinks, remembering all the friends and rivals who have died—routed from the border in the south. The invasion has begun. Our hero squints to see the losing face of the coin against the mounting sun. The tree and moon of the vanished kingdom has been smoothed into clouds by generations of uncrowned monarchs’ hands.

  “One toss,” our hero’s sister says across the echoes of the retreating van. “If it comes up moons, I’ll go.”

  A knot of dread squeezes bile into our hero’s throat, but he does as she asks. She is the only person in the world he will obey, not because she rules him, but because he trusts her when he does not himself know what is right. This is often the case these days. Maybe there are no more rights left. Maybe there are only lesser wrongs. He props his head on his fist and flips the coin, catching it in his cupped palm. Moons. He makes a fist before his sister can see, and feels as if he is clenching his hand around his own heart. It’s a dreadful duty, a calamity whichever one of them goes, but he would rather be lost than lose her. Before she can pry his fingers open, he tosses the coin high into the golden light and catches it again with a flou
rish.

  “Kings,” he says. She looks at him, stricken, heart-sick, and he is glad of his lie.

  Walking north along the river our hero has the road to himself. No one will evacuate in the advent of this war. It is the last war, the death of the independent state, and in any case, Russia and the West have between them closed the borders: there is nowhere to go. Despite the years of infighting and politics, of failing idealism and the gradual debasement of his figurehead’s throne, our hero still reflects with nostalgic pride on the romanticism and ruthless practicality of the mercenary army-turned-government he and his sister had fought for, legitimized, defended. They had been conquerors and puppets. They had driven the unlikely alchemy that transformed an imposed dictatorship into the last true democracy in the world. They had been used and pushed aside when they were no longer useful, but they had been loyal. This seems odd to our hero as he walks north along the blue river. He has always put his loyalty in the service of necessity, hidden it behind a guise of practicality, and now he has to wonder what moral force, what instinct of worth has shaped the meaning of need. What need—whose need—sends him north, leaving his sister behind to wait for the end alone? He loves her more than ever, and hates her a little for believing his lie and letting him go.

  Walking in the sunshine intensifies his hangover thirst. He feels gritty and unkempt, with a sour gut and a spike through his temples, but his worn army boots hug his feet like old friends, and it is good to be on the move, good to have a destination and a goal. He hopes the security service doesn’t give his sister too much grief when they realize he is gone.

  There is little traffic after a year of oil embargoes. There are pedestrians, a few horse carts, peasants working their fields with mattock and hoe. Peasants who will watch the invasion on satellite feed, who will email reports to relatives in Frankfurt and London and Montreal, who will tell one another with pride and a languorous despair that they are sticking it out to the end. A young man wearing a billed cap with the logo of an American sports team dips his hand into the bag slung across his back and casts his seed with a sweeping gesture, a generous, open-handed gesture that answers the question why with a serene and simple because. He pauses between casts to raise his hand to our hero passing on the road. Our hero answers with an abbreviated wave and turns his head away, afraid of being recognized, afraid of being seen with tears in his eyes. Settling into the mud of the ditch between the river and the road lies the burned-out carcass of an army jeep, and there it all is, the present, the future, the past. A blackbird perches on the machine gun mount and sings its three note song. It is an image with all the solace of a graveyard.

  Our hero walks off his hangover and an old vitality begins to well up through the sluggish residue left by weeks, months, of dissolution. He has relaxed into the journey, and the bolt of adrenaline he suffers when he sees the checkpoint ahead feels like a sudden dose of poison. His stride falters, losing the rhythm of certainty, but he does not stop or turn aside. The checkpoint has of course been sited to give the illegitimate traveler minimum opportunities for escape. He has papers, but he is afraid of being the victim of love or hate. He tells himself he is only afraid of being stopped, but does not believe his own lie.

  The soldiers are young, volunteers in the new New Army, dressed in flak jackets and running shoes and jeans. One of them is a woman. She is younger than our hero’s sister, with blond hair instead of black, brown eyes instead of blue, but she has a solemn, determined self-sufficiency our hero recognizes with a pang, though his sister is much more casual about her courage now. She is more casual about death, both our hero’s and her own, and he suspects she has learned to think historically while he still sees the faces of the living and the dead.

  Young woman, he thinks at her in a stern Victorian uncle’s voice, you are becoming historical, which is a joke that would make her smile.

  “Where are you going?” the young sergeant asks.

  “North,” our hero says.

  “Away from the border.”

  This statement is indisputably true. The peacableness with which our hero answers the young people’s hostility is not.

  “Yes,” he says mildly, “I have business there.”

  “Business.” The sergeant’s sneer is implicit behind the mask of his face. The bland, deadly façade of a brutal bureaucracy comes naturally to the nation’s youth, they have been raised to it. It was the look of freedom that had been, briefly, imposed.

  Our hero does not respond to the sergeant’s echo. His mouth grows wet with a desire for vodka, and he has a fantasy, rich though fleeting, of walking into the shade of the soldiers’ APC with his arm around the young woman’s shoulders, hunkering down to pass a bottle around, to educate and uplift them with stories of the Homecoming War. That would be so much better than this. He unbuttons his shirt pocket and takes out his identity papers. The sergeant ignores them.

  “We know who you are,” he says. “What business can you have away from the capital at such a time?”

  This is not an easy question to answer honestly. Our hero does not want to lie, yet claiming an urgent war-related mission in the face of no vehicle, no companions, no standing in the government, is impossible. After too long a silence, our hero says, “I am going to the old capital. It is my ancestral home. I will fight my war from there.”

  He looks deeply into the sergeant’s eyes, and for a moment he thinks the old mystique has come alive, the old ideals of courage, nobility, adventure rising between them like a bridge of understanding, or of hope. But this young man was bred with disillusionment in his bones, and the moment dies.

  “Give me your papers,” the sergeant says with the blunt and sullen anger of disappointment. “I will have to call it in.”

  As if she is summoned by his need, Colonel Vronskaya appears with a blast of fury for the recruits and a bottle for our hero. She embraces him with a powerful cushioned grip like a farmwife’s, and then stands with her hands clenched on his shoulders to study him in the strong spring sun. She is not handsome at close quarters, Martiana Vronskaya. Her eyes are too close-set, too deep-set, too small for her flat, spider-veined face. Our hero leans into her regard, reassured by the familiar hard and humorous clarity of the old New Army, practical, piratical, and oddly moral in her amorality.

  “Jesus fuck, you seedy son of a bitch,” she says, shaking him. “This is the face we followed to victory?”

  “Hell no,” our hero says, “but it’s the same ass.”

  “I wish I could say the same.”

  Vronskaya leads him to her car, a Japanese SUV rigged out in scavenged armor plate, and pulls a bottle of Ukrainian rotgut from a pocket of her bulging map case. They sit together on the back seat, passing the bottle between them as they talk. The river eases by, blue riffled by white around the ruins of a bridge.

  “That river was like a sewer when we came. Shit brown,” Vronskaya says, and our hero braces himself for some heavy-handed nostalgia. But his companion stops there, and he feels a youthful apprehension rising through him. He can feel her tension, and knows she is also braced for something hard. Thinking to make it easier on them both, he nudges her arm with the bottle and says, “You still shooting deserters these days?”

  Vronskaya cuts loose with an explosive breath and says, “Hell no, we just kick their asses back to the front.”

  “It might be easier to tell them to sit down and wait.”

  “Fuck,” Vronskaya says in agreement. She finally takes the bottle and drinks, passes it back. He drinks. She says, “Is that what you’re doing? Looking for a good place to wait?”

  “Pick your ground and defend it to the end.”

  “Lousy strategy, my friend. Lousy fucking strategy.”

  “You have a better one to offer?”

  “No.”

  She drinks. He does. The rotgut burns going down, a welcome heat.

  “Go ahead,” he says. “Ask your questions.”

  “What,” she says, “you think your
crazy sister is the only one who remembers her babya’s stories? Okay, okay.” He had made a sudden move. “She’s not crazy. She’s not here, so she’s not crazy. But don’t tell me this isn’t her idea.”

  “It isn’t anyone’s idea,” our hero says, grandiose with vodka in his veins. “It’s fate.”

  “Sure. Your fate.”

  “You’d be happy to see us both on this road? You want us both to die?”

  “No.” Vronskaya speaks with leaden patience. “I don’t want you both to die.”

  Our hero slams out of the SUV, startling the checkpoint guards, startling himself. Mindful of weapons in nervous hands he smoothes his hands over his head, feeling the stubble pull at his sunburned scalp. Vronskaya heaves herself out of the car.

  “Jesus fuck,” she says, “you’re serious. You’re really going to do this thing.”

  “If you have any better ideas . . . ” our hero says, too tense to give it the right ironic lilt.

  “Sure I have better ideas. Fight and die with your old comrades instead of skulking off like a sick dog who’s not allowed to die in his mistress’s house.”

  “You never liked her,” our hero accuses.

  “No, I never did. Have you ever asked her what she thinks of me? Of any of us?”

  “She loves you better than you know,” he says, looking into Vronskaya’s eyes.

  “Me? The country, maybe, I’ll grant you that. Me, she doesn’t give a shit for, and never has. Or—” But Vronskaya’s gaze slips aside.

  Or you. But our hero knows that’s not true, and knows that Vronskaya knows, so he can let it go. He says, “Will you believe me? This isn’t her idea. I was the one who wouldn’t let her go.”