Austral

by Paul McAuley

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

The great geoengineering projects have failed. The world is still warming, sea levels are still rising, and the Antarctic Peninsula is home to Earth's newest nation, with life quickened by ecopoets spreading across valleys and fjords exposed by the retreat of the ice. Austral Morales Ferrado, a child of the last generation of ecopoets, is a husky: an edited person adapted to the unforgiving climate of the far south, feared and despised by most of its population. She's been a convict, a corrections officer in a labour camp, and consort to a criminal, and now, out of desperation, she has committed the kidnapping of the century. But before she can collect the ransom and make a new life elsewhere, she must find a place of safety amongst the peninsula's forests and icy plateaus, and evade a criminal gang that has its own plans for the teenage girl she's taken hostage. Blending the story of Austral's flight with the fractured history of her family and its role in the colonisation of Antarctica, Austral is a vivid portrayal of a treacherous new world created by climate change, and shaped by the betrayals and mistakes of the past. Austral has been optioned for television by Circle of Confusion, the company who brought The Walking Dead and Locke and Key to the small screen. They've recruited award-winning screenwriter Elise McCredie ( Stateless) and director Erik Skjoldbjærg ( An Enemy of the People, Insomnia) to work on this exciting project. 'Paul McAuley's balanced grasp of science and literature, always a rare attribute in the writer of prose fiction, is combined with the equally rare ability to look at today's problems and know which are really problems, and what can be done about them.' William Gibson

Release date: October 19, 2017

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 432

Sample

My birth was a political act. Conceived in a laboratory dish by direct injection of a sperm into an egg, I was customised by a suite of targeted genes, grown inside a smart little chamber to a ball of about a hundred cells, and on the fifth day transferred to my mother’s uterus. I drew my first breath among the snows of the south, spent much of my childhood in exile on a volcanic island and most of the rest working in the farm stacks of a state orphanage. I’ve been a convict, a corrections officer and consort to a criminal, I committed the so-called kidnapping of the century, but first and foremost I’m a husky. An edited person. Something more than human, according to Mama and the other free ecopoets. A victim of discrimination and intersectional inequality, according to do-gooders trying to make excuses on my behalf. A remorseless monster driven by greed and an unreasoning lust for revenge, according to the news feeds which sucked my story to the bare marrow.

Truth is, the truth is way more complicated than the public record. I don’t mean to justify what I did. I broke plenty of laws and made some questionable choices, no doubt about that. But I wasn’t any kind of criminal mastermind and all I ever wanted was to claim a small portion of what was rightfully mine – just enough to pay for passage to my idea of heaven. The rest is blast and mudslinging by hypocrites and holy rollers who’ve never, ever had to question who they are or wonder about the shape of their lives, how they wound up in a dead end so early.

So this is my own account of what happened and why, as true as I can tell it. It’s your story, too. The story of how you came to be. How I tried to save you. And it’s the story of our family and the story of the peninsula, wound around each other like the rose and the briar in Kamilah Toomy’s fairy tale. As for what started all the fuss – frankly? It was an accident. Two lives crossing at the wrong moment. I didn’t plan on getting involved in kidnap and political scandal. At the time, I was trying to escape from a completely different kind of trouble.

This was at Kilometre 200, one of the work camps on the Trans-Antarctica Railway, the big post-independence project to link the cities at the northern end of the peninsula with settlements along the east coast and the mines in the Eternity Range and the Pensacola Mountains. The camp’s long gone, but if you care to look it up you’ll find it was south of Shortcut Col, close to the first of the three bowstring bridges that span the delta of the Eliason River. That’s where I was working, one of the corrections officers, when Alberto Toomy invited himself to the official opening of those bridges and my life went all to smash.

First I heard about that, I was playing a game of basketball with my home girls. Two on two on a half-court marked out in chalk in a corner of the parking lot behind the staff quarters, the hoop and backboard bolted to the pole of a floodlight. Late April, the autumnal equinox a month past. Seven in the evening and already dark. A small snowfall blowing in from the sea, slanting through the floodlight’s glare and beginning to dust the asphalt. Drones were carving random loops in the black air above the cons’ barracks, hounds were dreaming machine dreams of old chases and take-downs in their lightless kennels, and off in the distance a train howled long and lonesome as it hauled construction materials towards the railhead at Kilometre 260, where some of our cons had already gone, where all of us in the camp would be moving after the engineering works around the bridges had been signed off.

We’d just finished our shift, another day driving our strings to complete pretty-work ahead of the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and were blowing off steam before dinner. Paz and me v. Lola and Sage. The four of us dressed in shorts, tank-tops and sneakers, making a lot of noise. The cold didn’t bother us. We were made for the cold. After warming up with jump shots before getting down to it, first to score twenty-one, no referee to call out fouls, we were sweating like racehorses.

Paz noticed that I was hanging back instead of barging in like I usually did, all shoulder checks and sharp elbows. In a brief time-out, while Sage trotted off to retrieve the ball from a far corner of the parking lot, she asked me if I was OK.

‘Never better,’ I said.

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘Because you’re looking kind of pinched.’

Paz Sandoval was thirty-four, almost exactly ten years older than me. Smart, strong, doggedly independent. She spent two hours each and every day pressing iron in the gym, took exactly zero shit from anyone. A few days before, a newb CO had made a remark to his newb pals as we’d brushed past them on the way to the canteen. Some dumb joke about mistaking us for men. Nothing we hadn’t heard a hundred times before. If it wasn’t that, it was our size, or whether our mothers had been seals or walruses. Not to mention the name-calling. Chanks. Buffarillos. Whelephants. Yetis. Shit I’d been hearing just about all my life. Yetis? It isn’t as if we have a pelt, like bears do. Paz didn’t have any hair at all. Part of her bodybuilding thing, like the protein shakes she drank at breakfast. She shaved her scalp every morning, too, oiled it so it shone dark as mahogany. Anyway, she grabbed that newb by the front of his shirt and pinned him against the wall and held him there, the soles of his polished black boots kicking a metre off the ground, until he apologised. You could straighten out newbs if you caught them early, she told us afterwards, but if you let them get away with any kind of shit they’d assume you’d given them permission to be assholes for the rest of their life.

It was Paz who’d brought the four of us together in our first days at Kilometre 200, back when we were living in trailers while the cons finished building the camp. The only husky COs on the roster, we’d bonded over a bottle of vodka flavoured with chilli and fish oil, which Paz claimed was the customary drink of the husky nation. When Sage said that she’d never heard of it before, Paz told her that we were the newest kids on the block, we made up our traditions as we went along. She flaunted her difference, said that mundanes mistrusted us because they were afraid, and they had plenty to be afraid about. We were made for the south, could survive where they couldn’t, and one day we’d take it from them. Meanwhile, she said, we had to look out for each other because no one else would, and we all swore an oath she worked up on the spot, and sealed it with a toast.

The point being, I looked up to Paz, I knew she’d always have my back, but lately I’d been keeping secrets from her, and from Sage and Lola too. Which was why, when she said I was looking kind of pinched, I felt a freezing caution, wondering if she had guessed what I was incubating, or knew about Keever’s plans.

I told her that something I’d eaten had disagreed with me, which was what I’d told my sergeant after she’d heard me barfing in the john the day before, and she said that she wasn’t surprised, what with the health food kick I’d been on lately.

‘Seaweed crackers and boiled rice might do for mundanes, kiddo, but people like us need real fuel.’

‘I reckon Stral’s on a diet,’ Lola said. She was a big blonde girl with a healthy glow in her cheeks, sharp blue eyes, and a jones for every kind of gossip and rumour. ‘Reckon her boyfriend’s been complaining that she’s too heavy for him.’

After I’d hooked up with Keever Bishop, Paz had told me that I was a damn fool, not because he was a con and I was a CO, that wasn’t uncommon in the camps, but because of who he was and what he could do. She was right to be concerned, but at the time I was too flattered and excited by Keever’s attention to see that. Lola, though, was just plain jealous, and never missed a chance to let me know.

‘He likes me just the way I am,’ I told her. ‘Likes something to hold on to. You though, he’d need a saddle.’

‘And you know I’d give him the ride of his life,’ Lola said. ‘But don’t worry, as far as him and me are concerned, it’s strictly business.’

It was, too, as I’d soon find out. But I shouldn’t get ahead of the story.

‘Look at you two,’ Paz said. ‘Standing up to each other like bulldogs in the yard, waiting to see who’ll back down first.’

‘Save that shit for after the game,’ Sage said, bouncing the ball as she walked back to us. ‘Are we playing or are we playing?’

Paz took the ball out, immediately passed it to me, and Lola was waving her hands in my face, ragging me with the trash talk she was so good at. I faked left and went right, and the space in front of the hoop was clear. I took one bounce and three strides and lofted the ball. I remember it clearly because of what came after. That lovely moment when you’re in the air and the ball is rising towards the hoop. When everything is suspended. When anything is possible.

My feet slapped asphalt, the ball rattled the rim and bounced back, and Sage, small and quick and dark, stole it for two easy points. We were setting up again, Paz telling me she was going to whiz up one of her special shakes to give me back my edge, when Vincente Opazo walked up out of the shadows and said that I was wanted over at the block.

‘You can wait one minute,’ Lola said, ‘while we take two more points and the game.’

‘He wants a word,’ Vincente said, looking at me.

Paz walked up to him, bouncing the ball slowly and deliberately. ‘Are you trying to give us orders, Vincente?’

‘Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,’ Vincente said. He was your basic shlubby mundane, blue down jacket zipped tight against the cold, fists balled in his pockets, his watch cap pulled over his ears. Paz overtopped him by thirty centimetres and outclassed him in every way.

‘If you were anything like a real CO,’ she said, still bouncing the ball, ‘you’d be policing a string instead of running errands for King Con.’

Vincente did his best to ignore that, telling me, ‘He said right away.’

‘I better go,’ I said.

‘You aren’t even going to ask why?’ Lola said.

‘Vincente won’t know. He’s just an errand boy,’ Paz said, and caught the ball on the rebound and threw it over her shoulder. It smacked into the backboard with a sound like a pistol shot. ‘You want to run along, Stral, it’s your call.’

‘I guess it is,’ I said, and told Lola and Sage that I’d beat their asses tomorrow.

As we headed across the parking lot towards the south gate, Vincente swore he didn’t know what was up or why I was wanted, only that it was urgent. ‘It’s probably nothing. You know how Keever is.’

‘Better than you.’

I wanted to believe that this wasn’t anything – after all, this was hardly the first time Keever had sent someone to collect me. But I was already strung tight, what with the little secret I was incubating and there being just four days to go before everything kicked off, and this imperial summons had cranked up my anxiety by several notches. I hadn’t seen Keever for a couple of days, ever since one of his lawyers turned up on the wrong side of midnight and he’d told me to get dressed and leave so he could have a private one-on-one with her, and I was certain that he wanted more than just a word with me, was afraid that he’d found out about my secret. That he’d found out about you.

Like every other con at that hour Keever was locked down in his block, but he wasn’t in one of the dorms with the chumps, carnals and choros, the rows of bunk beds and oppressive heat and glaring lights, the restless clamour and rank odour, that prison smell you can never get used to. No, Keever had commandeered the infirmary cell of Block #3 for his own personal use, and that was where Vincente Opazo took me, the two of us passing through the gate in the perimeter wire and the block’s sally port without any of the guards questioning where I was going or why I was out of uniform. And before we get any further, yes, Keever is Keever Bishop. Your father. I’ll get to how we met soon enough. Meanwhile, picture him sitting on his bed (a steel-framed cot like the one I had in my room in the staff quarters, no bunk for him), bare-chested in gym shorts, talking with his numbers man, Mike Mike.

Keever Bishop. Mr Snow. White hair cropped in a flat-top, narrow sideburns angling along his jaw line. Skin so pale it had a blue tint, no tattoos or mods, the zipper of a scar low on his belly where someone had shanked him ten years ago, back when he was still hustling on the street. He’d never had it fixed. Flaunted it like a trophy. Otherwise, he was fastidious about his appearance. He had to wear jeans and a denim shirt like the rest of the cons, but his gear was fresh each and every day, starched and ironed, and his work boots were spit-shined. His room was painted white, walls and floor and ceiling, and he kept it obsessively neat. He made his own bed, too. Hospital corners. I admired that stark simplicity, that precision. The discipline of it. And I liked to listen to him talk about his apartment – the one the government had tried to confiscate, claiming that he’d bought it with the proceeds of criminal activities, a move that had failed because, like the rest of his assets, it was owned by an offshore trust. It was fifty floors up in one of the towers in the best part of Esperanza, with views across the city to the Antarctic Sound. Five bedrooms, a hangar-sized living room with a media pit and live walls, tropical plants in a balcony greenhouse, the whole bit. I’d decided that when I got my own apartment in the Wheel I would have a greenhouse too, even though New Zealand was so lush plants grew anywhere and everywhere.

I didn’t love Keever Bishop. Let’s be clear about that. He was using me and I was using him. No, love didn’t come into it, but I definitely admired and respected him. He knew what he wanted and knew what he had to do to get it, and he was only slightly inconvenienced by being in jail. He had a sinecure in the maintenance depot, off the line and out of the weather, keeping tabs on his various interests on the outside and running his muling business – most of the drugs, vapes, patches, candy, fones, porn and what else went through him. He kept the COs sweet with kickbacks, slipped them a little extra on their kids’ birthdays, and didn’t complain whenever the camp commandant, in a feeble attempt to assert her authority, ordered them to turn over his room.

‘I can do more business while I’m in here than if I was on the outside,’ Keever told me more than once. ‘There aren’t any distractions, I don’t have to deal with every little thing, I can concentrate on taking it to the next level. It isn’t about making money any more. It’s about figuring out how to best use the money I already have.’

He didn’t need to dismiss Vincente – the man had already made himself scarce – and he didn’t ask me to sit down either. Leaning back on the bed and giving me a sleepy-eyed stare, saying, ‘Looking good in that kit, Austral. Nice glow on you.’

He always called me by my full name. Never Stral, like most everyone else.

‘I was playing basketball,’ I said, like he didn’t already know. I was numb with anticipation. Keever was smiling, though as usual you had to look hard to be sure, and it could have meant anything.

He said, ‘I have some news that might be of interest.’

I realised with a stab of relief was that this wasn’t about you, then wondered if it might be something to do with that lawyer who’d arrived in the middle of the night, wondered if Keever had somehow lodged another appeal, even though every avenue for appeal had been exhausted. Or maybe something had gone wrong with his plans, which meant that he wouldn’t be leaving any time soon, I’d have to confess before I started showing …

‘What it is,’ Keever said, ‘there’s going to be a last-minute guest at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Honourable Deputy Alberto Toomy. I see you didn’t know.’

‘This is the first I’ve heard,’ I said.

It was also, you can bet, just about the last thing I’d expected. I was wondering if this was some kind of trick, because why would Alberto Toomy want to come all the way out here to take part in what was basically an exercise in government propaganda?

‘I thought you might be keeping track of the man,’ Keever said. ‘Given he’s your rich uncle and all.’

‘Tell me this isn’t one of your weird jokes,’ I said, wishing that I’d never told Keever my family history. How one of the honourable deputies in the opposition party happened to be the half-brother of my father, so on.

‘It came down the wire an hour ago,’ Keever said. ‘Honourable Deputy Toomy claims that he has a right to attend, what with him being the Shadow Minister of Justice, and the railway being a project started by his party. Not to mention that his company supplies construction droids and skilled labour. He also claims that the prison service tried to stop him coming. Which isn’t true, but it makes a good story. And he wants a tour of the camp. Says that he wants to make sure the state is doing its best to rehabilitate cons through tough love and hard labour.’

‘Man’s a righteous crusader,’ Mike Mike said.

He was a big soft-spoken man with a shaved head and a neat goatee, serving an L note for a double homicide. He managed Keever’s business inside the wire, kept every debit and credit locked inside his head, dealt with those who couldn’t pay what they owed. I liked him, liked to think that he liked me. We had something in common, anyhow. We both had to keep Keever happy at all times.

‘What it comes down to, Alberto wants to remind the world he exists,’ Keever said. ‘Talking the kind of talk about crime and punishment supporters of his party like to hear. Telling them that the present government is too soft, the work camps are more like holiday resorts, how he’ll toughen things up after National Unity wins the next election. The commandant’s office is in an uproar, trying to figure out how to deal with it. They can’t stop the Honourable Deputy coming, and they know he’s out to make trouble. They know he’ll be digging around for dirt he can use to cook up a scandal. And that if he doesn’t find any he’ll just make something up.’

Keever liked to give these little lectures, liked to prove that he knew more about any given topic than anyone else. It was a vital part of his business, one of the ways he overmastered people. Forget alpha male, he’d say. I’m the apex predator. I’m the one gets to suck the marrow from the bones of everyone else.

‘Man wants to stir up a serious political shitstorm,’ Mike Mike said.

‘Although that isn’t the only reason he’s coming here,’ Keever told me. ‘It isn’t even the real reason. Care to take a guess at what that might be?’

Still trying to process the news, I told him I couldn’t even begin.

‘The Honourable Deputy and me have some business needs settling,’ he said. ‘But the trouble he’ll cause just by coming here will be useful too.’

‘Man’s a wild card,’ Mike Mike said.

‘One that’ll divert attention away from me, as long as I play it right,’ Keever said. ‘And I think you can help me with that, Austral. You claim he’s your uncle.’

‘My half-uncle. Strictly speaking.’

‘And as I recall the two of you have never met.’

That derailed me for a second. As usual, Keever was two steps ahead.

‘He’s never troubled me,’ I said. ‘And I’ve never troubled him. Never needed nor wanted to.’

‘And he hasn’t reached out to you. Made contact ahead of this visit he’s planning.’

‘Like I said, this is the first I’ve heard.’

I could see what was coming, and I knew there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

‘That’s what I thought. Because if he knew you were working here, you can bet his people would have been all over it. And you can bet I would have heard about something like that. But I haven’t, not a peep. So what I’m thinking, his coming here, it’s a stroke of luck too good to be true,’ Keever said, and patted the bed beside him. ‘Sit down. Let me tell you how we’re going to make use of it.’

I first met Keever Bishop back in Star City, a cluster of broke-down apartment blocks on the west side of Esperanza, home to most of the peninsula’s husky community and a lively mix of welfare clients, refugees and former jailbirds. I moved there at age eighteen. Officially an adult, I’d been released from the orphanage and given a fone, a one-room efficiency and a work placement. For the first time in my life I was all on my own, and I thought it was wonderful. I was no longer living in a dorm, was no longer forced to abide by a million stupid rules and pay for my keep by working in farm stacks, could go anywhere I wanted whenever I wanted. An old friend of my grandmother’s, Alicia Whangapirita, reached out and offered me a job in some stinky fish-processing plant on the west coast, but I blew her off. I was done with all that business. I believed that I could find my own path in the world.

The work placement was supervisor of an assembly line in a manufactory that turned out pumps and centrifugal filters for greenhouse aquaponics. Eight hours a day in a windowless shed flooded with the dull red light droids found useful for some reason, noise-cancelling headphones clamped over my ears to muffle the industrial screech and clang, ticking off a quota of random quality checks. It was epically dull, no company but the droids, no hope of promotion. I quit after a month and kind of fell into a life of crime.

I’d taken to hanging out in a bar in a corner of my block, and that’s where I met Bryan Williams and was introduced to the pickpocketing business. Bryan was a skinny white guy in his early forties, old as dirt as far as I was concerned, and yeah, I know, an obvious father figure. He was kind of nervy when he wasn’t working, permanently sucking on a vape, fiddling with the elephant-seal-hair bracelet he wore for good luck, knuckle-rolling an ancient dollar coin, but when he was on the job he was awesomely smooth, enviably cool. A veritable Zen master of what he called the ancient art.

He’d been using another husky girl as a stall, but she’d gotten herself pregnant and I took her place. We sometimes trolled for marks in crowds outside sporting events or concerts, but did most of our work in the underground passages, access points and shopping arcades of CORE, the city under the city. I’d barge into a mark and Bryan would steady them and do his thing, or I’d bellow out that someone had snatched my shit, this big young husky in distress getting everyone’s attention, people patting their pockets to check their valuables, Bryan picking a couple of likely targets and moving in. He taught me how to stall someone by asking for directions while he did a walk-by touch to check the goods, how to bump and lift with or without the concealed hand, how to deal with a mark who felt the dip and started squealing. Nighttimes when pickings were slim we’d cruise for sleepers on the subway, snatch their stuff, rip their credit with a bootleg reader, and jump the capsule just before it moved off.

It wasn’t ever going to make us rich, but it was steady work and Bryan was good at it. He knew Keever Bishop slightly, and one time we had a drink with him in the bar, although when I told him about it several years later in Kilometre 200 Keever claimed that he didn’t remember. He didn’t recall taking my hand and giving me a palm reading either, a corny pick-up trick he barely needed to use given his reputation. He said that Bryan and me were the classic odd couple, very sweet to see, and although ours was basically a business relationship, we’d hardly ever slept together. Bryan didn’t contradict him and neither did I. I was hypnotised by his tickling touch and his cool unblinking gaze, trying to pretend that I wasn’t impressed and failing completely.

Keever had been born and raised in Star City, came back every so often to check on the street trade he still had a piece of, hang out at the bar and a couple of other places he owned, and do good works – dashing credit to people in need, sorting out petty disputes, subsidising a community centre, cleaning up the local park, organising repairs the city wouldn’t pay for, so on. Everyone in the bar knew him and knew his history, knew who he’d hurt or buried to get to where he was, and no one ever questioned his right to do as he pleased. He was like a leopard seal lazing in a penguin rookery. Lordly, dangerous, utterly at ease. After toying with Bryan and me for a couple of minutes he was suddenly up and off, glad-handing some old rogue who’d just come in, and Bryan took a long shuddering draw on his vape stick and told me to be careful, the man had a thing for huskies.

We’d had been working together for about a year by then, and Bryan had just gotten into snap, this military nano that tweaked your head, sharpened your reactions. He said that it soothed his nerves and honed his edge, but pretty soon he needed it just to maintain, and most everything he stole was funding his habit. That old sad story. He started to get careless, his carelessness got us arrested, and we both drew hard time because it was an election year and the government was trying to appease voters by acting tough on crime.

I was given six months because it was my first offence, Bryan copped three years and change. When I came out, the Progressive Democrat Union had ousted the National Unity Party, which had run the peninsula since before I was born. There was a lot of talk about new beginnings and letting in sunlight, a fresh chapter in history, so on, but as far as huskies were concerned it was meet the new boss, same as the old boss. We were still being squeezed by travel restrictions and selective labour laws, hassled by police stops and the insults and assaults of the ignorant and prejudiced, were still second-class citizens. Barely human.

Jail had been a shock, a reversion to barracks life and compulsory work, this time in a fish farm, but I buckled down and kept a low profile, and when I was released a friendly CO suggested that I should apply for work in the prison service. There was a training programme for former prisoners, wards of the state and others who had experience of the wrong side of the justice system, and a shortage of husky applicants. Bulling cons was one of the few jobs we were actually encouraged to do, mainly because our kind were over-represented in the prison population.

I soon discovered that ex-con COs were paid half the wages of their straight counterparts and given the worst assignments, but I didn’t much car. . .