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- Herausgeber: Orenda Books
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
A young man and his young family set out on a perilous voyage across a devastated planet to uncover the origin of the events that set the world on its course to disaster … The prescient, deeply shocking prequel to the bestselling, critically acclaimed Climate Emergency thriller, The Forcing. `Paul Hardisty is a visionary´ Luke McCallin `A superbly handled tale of struggle and survival in a maimed world´ The Times `Paul Hardisty is a fine writer´ Lee Child ___________ Kweku Ashworth is a child of the cataclysm, born on a sailboat to parents fleeing the devastation in search for a refuge in the Southern Ocean. Growing up in a world forever changed, his only connection to the events that set the planet on its course to disaster were the stories his step-father, long-dead, recorded in his manuscript, The Forcing. But there are huge gaps in his stepfather's account, and when Kweku stumbles across a clandestine broadcast by someone close to the men who forced the globe into a climate catastrophe, he knows that it is time to find out for himself. Kweku and his young family set out on a perilous voyage across a devastated planet. What they find will challenge not only their faith in humanity, but their ability to stay alive. The devastating, nerve-shattering prequel to the critically acclaimed thriller The Forcing, a story of survival, hope, and the power of the human spirit in a world torn apart by climate change. ________ ***** `The cataclysmic climate-emergency thriller we all need to read … this is where it all begins. My heart was in my mouth every second of the way´ Reader Review `Compelling, concerning and completely engrossing … a book that demands your attention and your action. A must-read´ Jen Med's Book Reviews Praise for The Forcing `Provocative and insightful, visceral and terrifying´ SciFi Now `Announces Paul E. Hardisty as the true heir to John Christopher´ Tim Glister `A novel that might have actually predicted our future´ Ewan Morrison `The book I've been waiting and hoping for…´ Paul Waters `A riveting eco-thriller [that] paints a realistic picture of our future if society as a whole continues to ignore scientific warnings about global warming´ Crime Fiction Lover `Fierce, thoughtful, deeply humane and always compelling´ David Whish-Wilson
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iKweku Ashworth is a child of the cataclysm, born on a sailboat to parents fleeing the devastation in search for a refuge in the Southern Ocean. Growing up in a world forever changed, his only connection to the events that set the planet on its course to disaster were the stories his step-father, now long dead, recorded in his manuscript, The Forcing.
But there are huge gaps in his step-father’s account, and when Kweku stumbles across a clandestine broadcast by someone close to the men who forced the globe into a climate catastrophe, he knows that it is time to find out for himself.
Determined to learn what really happened, Kweku and his young family set out on a perilous voyage across a devastated planet. What they find will challenge not only their faith in humanity, but their ability to stay alive.
The Descent is the devastating, nerve-shattering prequel to the critically acclaimed thriller The Forcing, a story of survival, hope, and the power of the human spirit in a world torn apart by climate change.ii
iii
The Descent
PAUL E HARDISTY
Contents
1It is always the same. She lifts me up and spins me around, a whirling explosion of colour. The blue of the sky, her hair a wind-blown cloud of sunlight, the water of the lagoon that exquisite aquamarine of my dreams. Palm fronds sway in the ocean breeze and the sound they make is like breathing. There is someone else there with us, just out of reach, someone I should know, and there is a threshold there, right there, but each time I get close and try to cross, it moves away, beckoning me deeper. She glances sidelong, something hiding behind her smile, and then she faces me and her eyes have gone cold and black, and then there is nothing there at all, just two fathomless sockets in a screaming skull and I am sinking deeper and deeper and the urge to breathe comes and then the spasms as the consumed oxygen bonds and builds and I can see that bright-blue surface falling away above me, and I know that I am drowning.2
Ghosts
February 2024
The scientist squared the edges of his notes, adjusted his glasses and stared out at them with a nervous smile. It looked like he’d slept in his clothes, and he probably had. Though the room was AC cold, perspiration sheened his forehead and rolled like tears down his neck. He ran a finger under his too-tight collar and loosened his ill-matched tie. His name was James Trig, Professor James Trig, and he had a PhD in advanced computational simulation from MIT and several postdocs in atmospheric science and Earth-system dynamics. He looked fit, not the big, muscled gym type but the slender cyclist or runner’s build that I’ve always been partial to. At the time of the meeting, he was forty-two years old, married with two children ages twelve and ten. He’d been on the payroll now for over a year, but this was the first time they’d asked him for a briefing.
Yu Wan leaned back in his chair at the head of the table and lifted his index finger towards the ceiling, held it there until the only thing you could hear was the dull hum of the gardener’s leaf blower coming through the bulletproof picture windows from somewhere down by the lake. Then he turned his finger in an arc until its tip met the old-growth hardwood mahogany on the vertical.
‘Begin, Professor,’ he said. Wan’s voice was thin and he spoke very quietly so you had to listen hard to hear everything he said. And it was worth your while, because he hated repeating himself.
Trig cleared his throat and put up his first slide. It was a graph of global average surface temperature differences from the 1901 to 2000 average, going back to 1890. Before 1940, all the bars were blue, meaning negative, below the average. Between 1940 and 1975 some were blue, but lots were red – above the average. After 1975 they were all red, growing left to right like the skyline of a booming city, Dubai, say, or Shanghai.
Trig began. ‘This, gentlemen’ – for they were all men there, the ones who mattered – ‘is the very best data we have, collected and verified from the world’s leading science institutions. As you can see, global 6surface temperatures have been climbing inexorably for the past six decades and have accelerated markedly since 1981. The ten warmest years on record have been since 2010. And 2023, the year just gone, has now been officially declared the warmest year on record, beating last year, which beat the year before that.’
My boss coughed and pushed back his chair. ‘Yeah right,’ he said under his breath.
Trig glanced at my boss, moved to his next slide, a Mercator projection of the world coloured different shades of red and orange and yellow. It looked like one of my dad’s old lava lamps. The title was ‘Temperature Trends Since 1990’.
My boss coughed again, that thing he does when he’s not happy. I could see Trig’s Adam’s apple moving under the badly shaved skin of his neck as he swallowed once, then twice, then reached for a glass of water and drank.
We’d lured him away from a senior science position with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, enticed him with ten times his normal salary – which wasn’t that much, actually, I was surprised. He also got a nice new car, a house and unlimited first-class travel. He was, apparently, one of the world’s best at what he did. By then we had a lot of scientists on the payroll, but this guy was different, he knew his stuff, and unlike the others, he was not allowed to speak publicly about his work, or publish. That was the deal. We set him up in his own laboratory on a remote property on the West Coast, and gave him a budget so big that when we showed him the number I thought he was going to pass out. He’d come across enthusiastically.
‘This, ah …’ Trig stumbled, continued. ‘This shows the increase in temperatures up to 2023. The thing here is that warming is not the same everywhere on the planet. You can see that the Arctic is all red, and that the Northern Hemisphere, where most of the land is, has warmed much faster than the rest of the world.’
He fumbled with his laser pointer, and the red dot quivered on the ceiling then flashed across the wall before coming to rest on an area of white down at the southern part of Africa. The dot jumped with his pulse. His heart was racing.
‘Areas like the southern cone of Africa, the southern tip of 7Madagascar, the south-west coast of Australia, New Zealand, and parts of the Pacific have all warmed much less than the average and some not at all.’
By then I could tell from the veins in my boss’s neck that he’d had enough. He stood, put both his fists on the table and sent his gaze around the room. ‘Same old shit we’ve been hearing for forty years,’ he flexed.
‘Sit down, Derek,’ said Wan. You could barely hear him.
My boss stood there a moment, appealing to his colleagues with those glacier-blue eyes, finally fixing on Yu Wan.
Wan stared back hard, and for a moment neither moved and all we could hear was the hum of the projector and the leaf blower still at it somewhere further away now.
Then my boss smiled, that big, amazing smile that he has, that he seemed to be able to switch on whenever he needed it, that he could direct in a way that made you think it was only for you. I swear, people would literally fall in love with him after having that smile directed at them, even when he was trying to throw shade. Then he looked over at me. ‘Do I have anything better to do right now?’
‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘Nothing until this afternoon.’
He winked at me, just a flash of ice, that way he did.
I smiled, could feel the heat rising in my cheeks, such a girl thing to do.
My boss said: ‘Well, I guess I can stay then.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘But get to the punchline, would ya, Professor?’
Yu Wan shook his head and sighed like an annoyed and slightly embarrassed parent. After that Trig spoke quickly, skipping some slides altogether. And then he came to the punchline. Despite all the rhetoric and the efforts of the United Nations and the pledges of governments around the world – that got a laugh from the whole room – there was now little hope that the planet’s temperature could be kept within acceptable, safe limits.
‘And what does that mean for us?’ said Pierre Valliant in that strong French accent of his.
‘Well,’ said Trig, ‘in terms of the release of heat stored in the oceans —’ 8
‘No,’ said my boss, an expert in the art of interrupting. ‘Not the mumbo-science-jumbo. What does it mean for us?’
Trig glanced around the room, the laser-pointer-clicker hanging limp in his hand. ‘Well, I … if you’re asking about the economic consequences, it’s not really my area of expertise.’
‘Translate the physical,’ said Valliant. ‘Guess.’
‘Guess?’ stammered Trig.
Yu Wan nodded.
Trig took a deep breath. I could see his lungs rising and falling under his unironed and by now sweat-stained shirt. ‘Well, if things don’t change and emissions continue to track on their current course, widespread drought, fire, flood, significant changing of ecosystems, poleward shift of species that are able to move, extreme weather of all kinds, basically a lot more of what we’ve seen in the last few years.’
‘Seriously,’ said my boss. ‘How many degrees does this guy have? Can’t even understand a simple fucking question. Can someone please tell this egghead to get to the point?’
By now Trig was melting down. I’d seen my boss do that to people before, turn them into quivering masses of pure fear, and I was pretty sure that he enjoyed it. Power is such a turn-on for some people, I know.
Yu Wan raised his hand, shot my boss a warning look. ‘Please, Professor, continue.’
I could see Trig making a supreme effort to compose himself. Even then, his voice came out sounding as if someone was choking him with both hands. ‘Worst case,’ he rasped, ‘biological, social and economic collapse.’
He stopped there and everyone sat listening to the rattle of the AC and the interminable drone of that leaf blower.
Short-Wave
Two years to the day after Papa died, I read his manuscript over again from start to finish. It takes me the whole day and all of that night. I read until my eyes are burning and my heart is breaking.
The next morning, I walk up the hill to the little stone building that Lewis and I built the year Papa died. It was Lewis’s idea, doing this. He’d made successive trips to Albany, worked with a friend of his and brought back all the necessary components, including the five-metre antenna. Shortly after, we started the weekly readings. We’d both read Papa’s story about him and the others who were blamed for killing the old world that everyone seemed to love so much but not quite enough to save. And we decided that we needed to do whatever we could to tell whoever might be left out there about what he’d seen. Mum, too. It was her story as much as his.
From the top of the ridge, I can see all the way back down to Mum’s place and the cove where Providence rests head to wind on her mooring, the one Papa put in all those years ago when I was still just a little boy and we’d arrived here and decided to stay. Further out, the headland we call The Hope glows for a moment in the sun and then vanishes behind a veil of rain. I glance up at the antenna, open the door and then open the shutters.
I sit in front of the set, place Papa’s manuscript on the table in front of me, the one he called The Forcing. I open it at chapter nineteen, the part where Samantha Argent is executed. I turn on the transmitter, watch the dials come to life, position the microphone. We are broadcasting on 4.75 megahertz, bouncing our signal off the ionosphere and out to the world. A chapter a week is what we agreed on – pick a frequency and keep it there. And so far, we have heard absolutely nothing back.
I read the chapter, slowly and clearly. The short waves can travel thousands of miles. It is only a matter of someone out there somewhere being able to pick them up. When I’m done, I sit a moment staring at the glowing dials, these vestiges of another world, another time, the sigh of the empty carrier wave coming to me over the headphones. 10
The electricity flowing through the transmitter is provided by a solar array Lewis set up nearby, another salvaged echo. I always marvel at my younger brother’s aptitude for anything mechanical. He’s a genius, I reckon, or near enough.
I am about to shut down when the frequency crackles. There is a moment of silence and then a heavily distorted voice is there in my head. I can’t make out what the voice is saying, but a moment later the signal clears up.
‘To the boys telling us the story of The Forcing. Keep going. People need to know … Here is my part.’
I see Lewis standing outside and I wave to him through the window, signal for him to come inside. He runs in. I take off the headphones and unplug the jack so we can both hear.
We sit enraptured as she speaks, her voice warbling across the reflected miles. She recounts events of almost half a century ago, the time of my parents. It is as if we are living it with her, and as we listen, we can hear the years in her voice, and in her words we can glimpse the young woman she once was.
After she is finished there is a pause, and then she says: ‘To whoever is broadcasting on this frequency. Please respond.’
‘We receive you,’ I blurt out. ‘This is Australia.’
The frequency wavers, clears. ‘Received, Australia. Thanks for your broadcasts. I thought I was alone.’
I key the microphone. ‘So did we. Who is this, please?’
Lewis is standing beside me, a big smile on his face, his hand on my shoulder.
‘That’s not important,’ comes the voice in reply. ‘Just know that what you are doing is very important … And very dangerous.’
‘Dangerous?’ I key back. ‘Dangerous how?’
‘They are listening.’
‘Who? Who is listening?’
We wait, the wave hissing over the speaker, but nothing comes back. The transmission is over.
March 2024
Three weeks before the Boss’s big flight, we took the Gulfstream G800 to Paris for the weekend. The trip was part business and part pleasure, although I was never sure if business was the pleasure for the Boss, and the stuff he did with his wife was the chore. It was that way with him, with all of those guys, just go wherever they wanted at a moment’s notice, the jet always waiting, ready to go, the rest of us lackeys left scrambling to organise accommodation and events and the whole business.
The Boss’s wife arrived at the airstrip in her own limo. He pulled up a while later in his new whip, a black Ferrari. It was a beautiful car. He’d even taken me for a ride in it a few times, those leather seats so soft on my bare legs and ass. That’s how he liked me, short skirts and pumps.
Before I am judged, in my defence I was very young, just out of college, armed with my shiny BA in psychology, working as a waitress in a swank restaurant in New York when we first met. He’d bought up the whole place for a big do, had flown in a bunch of politicians from Malaysia, all the dirty old men travelling without their wives, and he offered me ten thousand dollars just to be nice to these guys. You know, smile, wiggle my ass a bit when I walked, sit on their laps and put food in their mouths, that kind of thing. I had to slap one of them when he tried to grope me, but the Boss made it clear that I was off limits that way, and I could see they were all scared shitless of him, so there was no repeat. At the end of the night, he left me a card and told me to call him. There was a full-time job if I wanted it. A quarter of a mil a year. I told him to go fuck himself, not very smart but I was thinking no f’n way was this real. He just laughed that way he did, like there was nothing in the world that he couldn’t do, and well, there I was, flying to Paris in a private jet. That’s the way he was. He got what he wanted.
The flight was long, even with the flat bed. Somewhere over the Atlantic the pilot – Bryce Stephenson was him name – came back and we started chatting, the Boss and his wife asleep in their private room. He had a strong face and sandy hair with a cowlick in the front, and 12chestnut-coloured eyes. He looked quite young, maybe only a few years older than me. After a while he asked me if I wanted to sit up front a while, and I said yes. It was nice up there talking to him, watching him at the controls, his hands moving sure and deliberate across the panels, tweaking and pushing. I liked the way he spoke, very deliberate and confident, something gentle in the way he pronounced his vowels. I’d never really noticed him that way before. Strange how just one moment is sometimes all it takes.
When we landed in Paris the wife and her maid and bodyguard went to the hotel and the Boss and I and Paulo, his CFO, went straight to the meeting. We arrived in the armoured Merc and were led up to a plush conference room overlooking La Defense. I spent a lot of time in board rooms, back then.
There was a whole rank of them waiting for us, all suited up, short French guys mostly with greying hair and aquiline noses. They sat, ten of them, along one side of the board table, just the Boss and Paolo and me on the other. One of the guys smiled at me that way older guys do, and I looked away.
‘Gentlemen,’ the Boss began in English. He actually spoke perfect French, but as he’d told me on the way in, fuck ’em. ‘It is deeply disappointing to me that I have had to come all this way to look at your hangdog ugly fucking stupid faces.’
That got their attention. They squirmed in their seats and glanced at each other as if to deflect blame.
‘Can someone please explain why we are delayed? I need not remind you how much this is costing us.’ He cracked his knuckles. ‘Costing me.’
‘Five point three million US a day,’ said Paolo in his strangely inflectionless voice.
‘There you go,’ said the Boss. ‘One of you sorry fuckers’ annual salary, every goddam day.’
The man at the centre of the group, Breillard, the CEO, clasped his hands, bowed his head a moment and then looked up at us. ‘I take full responsibility,’ he said. ‘The approvals we thought we had secured have been withdrawn at the last minute.’
I could see the veins in the Boss’s neck starting to do their thing. ‘What kind of approvals?’ 13
‘Development approvals from the government of Niger.’
The Boss threw his head back and laughed. ‘Niger government? What the hell is that? We own those cunts.’
‘There is a new director there,’ said Breillard, visibly panicking. ‘He is not acquiescing. We’ve tried all the usual means. He says our project will contaminate the aquifer and the rivers. Thousands of people depend on that water.’
‘And will it?’
Breillard looked down the table and one of the younger guys nodded.
‘Yes.’
‘How much will it cost to fix?’ said Paolo.
‘According to our engineers, a new treatment plant and extra containment for the tailings ponds will cost about fifty million to build and another ten million or so a year to operate, low estimate,’ said the younger guy. Actually, he was about the same age as the Boss. ‘And it will take two years to put in place.’
Paolo pulled out his phone and tapped away for a couple of seconds. ‘Too much,’ he said. ‘NPV is only thirty million a quarter.’
The Boss sat very quiet, like he sometimes did, thinking things through. Then he leaned forward in his chair. ‘Tell me about this principled peckerhead standing in our way.’
Breillard looked to the younger guy again.
‘His name is Rudolphe Asisi, a local. Mid-thirties, married to a local woman, three kids under the age of ten. He’s smart – did a master’s degree in hydrology at Imperial College in London – and knows what he is talking about. Highly respected in the community. The locals trust him.’
‘Beautiful,’ said the Boss, running his hand through his thick, sandy-blond hair. ‘So goddamned frustrating. You offer people something that will transform their lives, and all they care about is some fucking river or some endangered useless tree frog. This project will bring jobs and prosperity to that blighted good-for-nothing hellhole. People, frankly, are idiots.’
The Boss paused a moment, turned his gaze on each of them in turn. He did it very deliberately, one after the other. ‘All you people,’ he said in a measured tone that surprised me, ‘you have one job. One. Get this over the line.’ 14
Breillard sat resigned, defeated.
The Boss stood up. Paolo and I did the same.
‘Get rid of him,’ said the Boss. ‘Make it an accident.’
We walked back to the limo, and that night the Boss took us all out to the Guy Savoy for a thirteen-course dinner and bottomless five-thousand-dollar-a-bottle champagne. During dinner he fingered me under the table with his wife right there across from us.
Mother
Maybe it’s because of the message on the short-wave. Or maybe it’s the anniversary of Papa’s death that has dredged this all up again, this feeling, these half-formed memories. Whatever it is, I wake in the morning from the dream, the one I have been having for years now. It’s hard to explain, but it’s more than some random feeling, or a vague sense of displacement. There are big holes in my life. I know that now. I can feel them, as real as the heart beating inside me.
I swim out to Providence, tied up on her mooring in our cove, and look through her log books, ranks of blue-bound hardcover volumes, the spines faded by decades of sun, the oldest frayed and worn, the ones yet to be used hard and crisp still, despite the years.
They go all the way back to her original owner, Daniel Menzels – to before the Repudiation, to before Papa stole her, or whatever he called what he did. But that’s another story. Papa’s entries begin in July 2039, the day he and Mum and Derek Argent escaped from a religious cult leader and his followers on the Gulf Coast of the United States. The days from then are numbered sequentially from one until day 124, when the log book is full, the entries detailed and precise in Papa’s neat, legible hand. And then nothing again until a new log book starts six years later, as if nothing has changed. Papa’s chronology is missing exactly 2,190 days. Everything from the moment they left Belize until they arrived here. Our whole transit across the Pacific, along the south coast of Australia. And then the log restarts: our trips as a family along this coast, those Lewis and I took alone, the solo trips I did as Papa got older, all recorded in book after book. But all of that time – those first five years aboard Providence, my birth, Lewis’s – all of it gone.
Later that afternoon, after a full day’s work with Lewis, cutting and hauling windfall from the forest behind the ridge, I walk down the hill and find Mum in her garden. I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I don’t even greet her. I just walk up to her and ask her. ‘What happened after you and Papa left Belize, Mum?’
She narrows her eyes, sets aside her hoe. 16
‘I know you were pregnant with me and that I was born on the boat. But other than that, you’ve told us almost nothing.’
I can still remember some of it, vague childhood memories of sitting at the bow, watching the dolphins ride the wave, the silver darts of flying fish springing from the water, the way the silver droplets dripped from their translucent wings. And then there are the dreams. And the nightmares.
She looks surprised, stands brushing dirt from her hands.
‘What happened, Mum? Something is missing. Something’s always been missing. I’ve felt it for a long time.’
But she just frowns and waves this away. ‘Nothing to tell,’ she says, closing up the way she does more and more now.
‘What happened to the Providence log books, Mum?’
She looks at me quizzically. ‘They’re not there?’
‘Yes, they are. But some are missing.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure, Mum, I’ve just gone through them. Those first five years of my life, gone.’
She looks out towards Providence swinging on her mooring. ‘Maybe they’re somewhere else,’ she says. ‘Maybe Papa was using them to write his book and forgot to put them back.’
‘Have you seen them?’
‘No. No, I haven’t. Not for a long time.’
And that’s it. She doesn’t know. I scour her house, the bookshelves, ask Lewis, swim back out to Providence and check again, look through all of the other shelves and the chart table, everywhere I can think of. Nothing.
The next morning, I walk to the place where Uncle Liberty’s mob camps in the season they call Makuru, when the first heavy rains start to fall. The trail is less well worn than it once was, but still clear enough, winding along the coast through shell hakea and catspaw heathland, across the six creek fords to Kwesi Point, then following our rough stone cairns up over the rounded granite headland and back down through the big valley trees to the camp. 17
The first time I did the trip I was seven years old. Uncle Liberty had arrived with news that his wife Jenny was going into labour. My mum had delivered Jennifer’s first baby, and she’d asked Mum to help her through it again. I had insisted on going with her. It was the height of summer, and hot. The dark sand of the path burned the soles of my feet, and the sun seemed determined to crush me into insignificance. Mum kept asking me if I wanted to go back, but I just told her no and kept trudging along on my stumpy little legs. In her telling of it, I was stoically resolute. In reality I was afraid of walking back alone. I can still remember the urgency in Mum’s voice as she urged me along, the impatience in her eyes as she glanced over her shoulder at me before surging ahead again on her long, powerful legs.
This time, eighteen years on, there is no one watching over me, no one pulling me along in her protective slipstream. I am alone. Squalls shake the wind-shaped peppermint and acacia, ruffle across the hills. Rain comes in angled sheets, passing over and then gone. I don’t rush, not like back then with Mum. I am thinking, taking my time, turning it all over in my head.
By the time I reach Kwesi Point, a rocky promontory about halfway from our bay to Uncle Liberty’s camp, the sun has passed its zenith and glows diffuse behind the clouds. Mum named this place after Aunty Jenny’s first baby, on the day he was born. But she also named it after my father. He came from a place called Ghana, in Africa, and died in a place called Brownwood, in Texas, six months before I was born. Kwesi was his name – ‘Born on Sunday’ in Ashanti, the language of his people. I am Kweku, which means ‘Born on Wednesday’.
And it’s there, staring out across the bay, that I decide to write this history. This is for him, for both of them, the father I never knew and the one who raised me. And this is the first step.
By the time I reach the camp’s outer picket it is dark. The rain has stopped and stars shine down through the bands of slow-moving cloud. I can see the lights of the camp through the trees, smell woodsmoke and meat cooking.
‘Hey there, young fella.’
I look in the direction of the voice. A man is standing in the star shadow of a huge jarrah. I step closer, peer into the darkness. 18
It is Uncle Liberty, twirling the base of his spear in the root soil.
‘Uncle. Hello.’ I’d learned never to be surprised by Uncle Liberty’s appearances and equally sudden departures.
He leans forward slightly so that one side of his face catches the faint firelight from the camp. His beard is longer than when I saw him last, the hollows under his cheekbones deeper. ‘Been expectin’ ya.’
‘Anniversary of Papa’s death.’
‘Yes, I know. We don’t talk about such.’
‘I know, Uncle. But we do.’
‘His time. We all got one. Mine coming soon.’
‘If you want to live …’
‘…You gotta die.’
One of Uncle Liberty’s favourite sayings. I’d heard it since I was young, he and Papa reciting it like that, as a couplet.
‘He was a good man, your papa. Too few of them nowadays.’
‘He always said the same about you.’
Uncle Liberty straightens. It is a careful, deliberate motion, as with everything he does. His face recedes into darkness. Insects thrum and tick. A boobook owl calls, somewhere close. For a moment I think Uncle Liberty is gone, heard the news he needed, nothing more required, on his way.
‘I know why you’re here, young fella. Know you got questions. Your papa told me about you. Gonna write the next history of the world, a young Herodotus for our times.’
I smile, embarrassed as only parents can make you. ‘It may take a while.’
‘Well, I got as much time as I got.’
We walk into camp. A few old steel shipping containers converted into dwellings, grafted with plankboard and tin-roofed porches. The large stone house Liberty and Papa built together one year. Solar panels about, a few electric lights showing through the cut windows, all of it shaded by big, old trees, set in a henge of granite boulders.
Uncle Liberty motions me to sit by the fire. ‘Eat first,’ he says. ‘Then we’ll talk.’
A young boy brings me a cup of water and a plate of grilled roo, some fresh greens. Some of the elders come and sit with us, watch me eat. 19
‘Teacher and the doctor’s boy,’ says Uncle Liberty. The elders nod. ‘So, questions, young fella.’
‘Yes, Uncle. About my mother.’
Liberty stares into the fire a long while, nods. ‘A good woman. Strong. Smart.’
‘Yes.’
‘Stubborn.’
‘Yes.’
More so over the last year, worse once Papa started going downhill. Lately we’d started to notice her memory failing, something that had never happened before.
‘So.’
Walking here, through the forests and along the rocky coast, I considered this so. This question. So, young fella, what do you want to know? And now that I am here, I’m not sure anymore. Is there even a question, or is it all just something my imagination has dredged up?
Uncle Liberty listens as I tell the story of the log books, stroking his silvery beard, turning the base of his spear in little half-twists in the dirt between his bare feet, leaning in occasionally to add another piece of wood to the fire.
‘What’s she hiding, Uncle? Her and Papa.’
Liberty considers this until the last log burns down to a glowing coal. ‘Stay the night, young fella. Tomorrow there is something I need to show you.’
April 2024
Three days before the launch, Bryce flew the wife and a few of us support staff down to the Boss’s spaceport complex in Arizona. The Boss and the other crew had been in isolation there for two weeks already, getting ready. I was in the cockpit when Bryce did a low turn around the launch site, the rocket there on its pad ready to go. It was so close I could see the technicians on the upper platform working on the crew capsule. For a moment I thought our wingtip would clip the tower and I gasped, but Bryce just smiled, took his hand off the throttle and reached back to where I was in the jumpseat. He laced his fingers in mine. Those few moments, my God, I never wanted them to end.
When I came back into the main cabin the wife was staring at me.
‘Don’t you have work to do?’ she said. I could tell by the way she narrowed her eyes under those fake eyelashes and by the tone of her voice that she didn’t like me. She’d never liked me.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ I mumbled, demure, eyes to the ground. ‘Sorry, ma’am.’ That’s my job. I do what I’m told. Like everyone else here. Whatever it is, just shut up and do it. No excuses.
With Bryce’s sexy voice over the intercom telling us to prepare for landing, I went to my seat, strapped in. From the window I could see the desert big and brown and super flat for as far as there was, and the white buildings of the spaceport complex coming into view, the airstrip running alongside, and the big blue rocket aimed at the sky, ready to go. To be honest it looked more like a huge boner than anything else.
I handled all of the correspondence for this project. Paolo never liked it, said there was no way we would ever make a profit from it, competing against the government space organisations, NASA and ESA and the like. The Russians and the Chinese, too, were putting up satellites for cheap money, all subsidised by taxpayers, of course. But the Boss was adamant. He wanted his own space programme, kept talking about going to Mars, maybe putting a base on the moon. Anyone else, you’d call them downright crazy. But not him. It cost him plenty, but he didn’t 21care. It was the one project that was given a blank cheque. Until the alpha project, of course, but that came later.
Bryce put the Gulfstream down so you didn’t even know you were rolling on the ground until you heard the thrust-reversers going and the dust billowing back around us. Up in the cockpit he’d told me that he used to land planes on carriers for the navy. I stepped off the jet into desert air so hot and dry I could feel it pulling the moisture from my skin.
The Boss’s chief of staff was there at the base of the stairs with a file in his hand. ‘Boss wants to talk to you right away,’ he said. ‘Wants a briefing on Niger.’
I stepped into the limo, did a rush over with moisturiser and foundation using the mirror in the rear console, and ten minutes later I was waiting in the secure interview room, staring at a pane of sealed, bulletproof glass, beyond which was a room with a few armchairs upholstered in hideous orange and a full-length mirror set in one wall.
Five minutes passed, then ten. After half an hour I was getting a little pissed off, but I wasn’t worried. The Boss liked to keep people waiting. In this case, even himself. I got out my phone, scrolled TikTok awhile. There was this one video of a super-cute puppy that could surf. No kidding. It just stood there balancing on the board, its little legs adjusting as the wave surged and carried him/her along.
Finally, the Boss came in. He was wearing a blue jumpsuit like you see astronauts wear on TV, with mission patches on the shoulders and his name on his breast in big white letters, so the cameras would have no doubt who was under the helmet.
He sat down, made a point of checking out my legs, smiled at me. ‘So, tell me.’
‘It’s done,’ I said, marvelling at the power surrounding me. ‘It was pretty routine. Breillard reports that permits have been expedited and construction has started.’
The Boss nodded. ‘And the river? The aquifer?’
‘All dealt with. The official reports now show acceptable levels of heavy metals, neutral pH. No health risk.’
‘Paolo happy?’ But before he’d even finished asking the question, I could see he’d already moved on, dismissed the entire conversation 22from his mind. It was a thing he did, and it drove people crazy, and he knew it.
‘Very,’ I said, but he wasn’t listening.
He turned side on to me, stood tall, or as tall as he could – he wasn’t much taller than me – and said: ‘What do you think?’
‘The suit?’ I asked.
‘Yes, the suit. Nice, eh? Designed the mission patch myself.’
I pretended to look at it. ‘Yeah, super nice, Boss. Awesome.’
‘You looking forward to the launch?’ he said, checking himself out in the mirror.
‘Sure am,’ I replied, injecting excitement into my voice even though he was no longer listening. I turned to leave.
‘How did he die?’
I stopped, faced back up to the glass, the Boss still there admiring himself in his jumpsuit. ‘Sorry, Boss?’
‘I said, how did he die?’
‘Who?’
‘Asisi. Rudolphe Asisi, RIP.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘His car drove off the road into a deep gorge near the mine site. The impact crushed his sternum and broke his neck.’
The Boss nodded and turned away, walked out of the interview room and I went outside and put on my hat against the sun while I waited for the limo.
Sister
I sleep badly, harried by dreams of loss, of things absent but indeterminate. Like an echo bounced from too many surfaces. Running through the darkness, hushed, strained, frightened voices whispering indecipherable words, a gate opening and then closing quickly behind me.
Under an overcast pre-dawn sky, I find Uncle Liberty’s son Kwesi standing near the fire with a cup of tea. He offers me one and stands looking at the rekindled morning flames.
‘How’s Lewis?’ he says.
‘He’s good. Mandy’s pregnant again.’
‘I heard. Don’t see much of him these days.’
‘Busy with the family, running the farm. I’ll tell him you asked.’
‘Thanks.’
‘How are you travelling?’
‘Okay. Dad’s slowing down. I have to help him a lot now. Still won’t wear clothes. Just them Eagles shorts. And they ain’t played a game since long before I was born.’
I smile. Uncle Liberty’s tolerance of the cold is legend hereabouts. His love for this thing he calls footy, too. He was a good player back then, some say. Back when things like that mattered.
‘Any news on your other brother, the one Dad says is some big president up north?’ Kwesi asks.
The name we saw in that Albany newspaper two years ago was Armstrong. Lachie Armstrong. Papa’s son was Lachie Ashworth. Close but not that close.
‘We’ve heard his name on the radio a few times since. Ashworth. Yeah, it’s him.’
Kwesi whistles. ‘Big stuff, for sure. Not my thing, mind you, politics. For me, here is enough.’
‘Lewis says the same. Enough to worry about here.’ I put my hand on Kwesi’s shoulder, sip my tea.
Uncle Liberty joins us. ‘Get the skiff ready, son,’ he says. ‘Fish ain’t gonna catch themselves.’ 24
Kwesi smiles at me in happy tolerance, one young man to another, flicks the dregs of his tea into the fire and starts towards the water.
‘Good boy, that boy,’ I say.
Liberty smiles. His teeth are still strong, a full set, dull oyster-shell white. ‘Sure is. Lookin’ after me now. Way it is. Everyone takes his turn.’
I nod, thinking about my own parents, alive and dead.
‘Got somethin’ to show ya, young feller.’ Liberty turns and starts towards the trees.
He is old, but he is still quick, padding barefoot across the sand and through the scrub sheoak, gripping his way up the rounded granite headlands, slipping through the thick valley stands of marri and jarrah, fording the creeks back towards our cove. I have to work hard to keep up.
And then just past Kwesi Point he turns inland. I follow as we climb to the top of the ridge that runs along the coast, curving back towards our cove, the distant point of The Hope visible now across the sound. We follow the rock-strewn razor edge north until we come to a small, grassy clearing surrounded on three sides by granite pillars.
Uncle Liberty stands in the clearing with the pillars to his back and looks out across the bay. A few clouds scuttle across the horizon, but the rain of the last few days has passed and the sea breeze comes cool up the wildflower hillfront to meet us. I stand next to him and scan the horizon.
‘So.’
‘Was this what you wanted to show me, Uncle?’
‘Yep.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Liberty taps the base of his spear on a small, flat rock at his feet. The rock is about the size of one of Providence’s log books, maybe a bit bigger. ‘This,’ he says.
‘A rock.’
‘What’s under it.’
I look at him, back down at the rock. ‘What is under it?’
‘A little fella.’
I swallow: ‘Yours?’
‘Not mine.’ 25
I say nothing, try to compute.
‘When you arrived here, all them years ago. There was five of you.’
‘Five? No, Uncle. Four.’
‘You, Lewis just a little capper, your mum, Teacher. And one more.’
‘No, Uncle. You’re wrong. I would remember.’
‘Your mum. She was pregnant.’
I think about this for a while, looking out across the water.
‘You had a baby sister. Healthy. Strong.’
I wait for him to continue, spinning unsteady.
‘And then one day, she was gone. Your mum, Teacher, they said she died. Told me not to tell no one.’
Another silence, longer this time. Just the ruffle of the breeze blowing through the trees.
‘Don’t know they ever gave her a name.’
‘Jesus,’ I say. Hardly sufficient.
‘It was a long time ago.’
I am still trying to process all of this, still trying to understand.
‘Found her one day walking up here with the baby. Middle of a storm. Just the two of ’em. Cold it was. The baby crying. She wailing at the sky like a crazy woman, pulling her hair, near naked, soaked.’
Liberty goes quiet, just stands there tapping the base of his spear on the little slab.
‘Uncle Liberty.’
He points to the thick clutch of acacia just beyond the pillars. ‘I was there, watching her. Not sure what to do, women’s business. You all so new here. Her carryin’ on like that. Then she starts down towards the creek, the both of them still crying and wailing to raise the spirits. Last thing I see she has the baby at her breast. And then it all goes quiet.’
‘The baby must have been crook, feverish.’
‘Maybe.’
Uncle Liberty taps away on the stone, hardwood on Cambrian granite, resonant and hollow. ‘When she came back, the baby was limp in her arms,’ says Liberty. ‘I watched her dig out a hole, right here. Used a stick. The baby set in the grass next to her, on its back as if it was looking up into the rain. No sound but her scraping and the rain in the trees. Me standing there watching this.’ 26
I am hearing the words, but not understanding.
‘Then she put the little tacker in the hole, pushed the dirt back in with her hands, and put this here stone on her. Like I said. Long time ago. Can still see it clear. So I’ve told you.’
May 2024
In the end, he had to settle for the flight being livestreamed on Maddisson’s network. Yu Wan wouldn’t broadcast it on his, was against the whole thing from the beginning. He didn’t like the way the Boss flaunted it. Still, a hundred million people watched, all over the world. But the Boss was furious. He’d hoped for ten times that.
And Yu Wan was right. While the Boss was up there, a huge hurricane developed in the Atlantic, way earlier and faster than anyone had ever seen before, and within days it was bearing down on the East Coast. Bermuda was destroyed. I saw pictures of it on TV. It was as if the whole place had been bulldozed into the sea. Lots of people died, they still don’t know how many. We all watched horrified as it gained strength and came straight for New York. Everyone called it unprecedented. You heard that word a lot those days. I remember sitting up in the Boss’s Manhattan penthouse looking out over the city, all those huge buildings, and thinking there is no way this thing could ever hurt this city. The storm was so big the Boss had to stay up there in orbit looking down at it for an extra four days. The hurricane grabbed all the headlines and he barely got a mention in any of the mainstream press until after he got back.
I’d never seen anything like it, and hope I never have to again. I sat up there on the fifty-second floor and watched the wind rip up trees and tear roofs off buildings and send street signs flying like giant deformed frisbees down Park Avenue. And then the rain came and the streets flooded and the power went out. At first it was kinda fun, up there with the maids and the butler and the chef, all of us staff with the run of the place. We lit candles and drank champagne and the chef made us fabulous meals, and after the fresh food ran out, we ate oysters and pâté from tins.
But then, after the third day, we knew it was bad. I mean really bad. There was not a street or road we could see that wasn’t underwater, and at night the city was so black, just a few lights like stars scattered around. We used our phones to follow what was going on, people posting like crazy, videos and more and more calls for help. We knew 28people were dying. Thank God the Boss had installed a separate battery system, so we had power for essentials like phones and the office communications and keeping the champagne cold.
On the fourth day, I got a call from the Boss.
‘How’s my penthouse?’
‘Moving,’ I said.
‘Don’t play smart. It doesn’t suit you.’
‘I’m not, Boss. The wind is so strong the building is literally swaying. I’m getting seasick.’
‘I’m looking down at it right now. But the desert is clear. We’re landing tomorrow. Get down there to meet me.’
I checked myself, didn’t say what I was thinking. That time in the restaurant under the table was the first time he’d touched me, and by now I knew he really had the hots for me. ‘I don’t think that is going to be possible, Boss,’ I said. ‘The whole city is underwater. The airport, too.’
‘I’ve been up here a week now,’ he said. I could hear him cursing under his breath.
I said nothing, just let the line hang. What was I supposed to say? He was a man of large appetites.
‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘Call Asteroid and tell her to get her big ass to the spaceport. Tell her to wear that red dress I got her in Paris.’
Asteroid was his nickname for Astrid, a blonde he’d met on a business trip in Sweden a couple of years ago. He paid her three hundred thousand a year and set her up in a fancy apartment in Miami Beach, and all she had to do was fuck. Okay, she was beautiful, curvy everywhere and with skin any girl would die for. I mean this girl was thicc. Sometimes life just isn’t fair. 29
‘Will do, Boss.’
‘And make sure you reschedule my meeting with that moron Bragg. The campaign is heating up, and I want him to know whose side he’s on.’
‘He’s here in New York, too, Boss. So he’s not going anywhere. I’ll set up something for Wyoming, at the ranch, for the week after next.’
‘Good. You can use the chopper to get him to an airstrip that’s working. Have Stephenson meet you there.’
‘Will do, Boss.’
‘And tell Samantha to prepare the paperwork for Pharma.’
We were launching his next new venture in August, a huge investment into pharmaceuticals. He’d already raided the largest and most successful competitors, hired away their top guys, and bought up several up-and-coming smaller firms. He was waiting for the publicity from the space flight to consolidate before he announced this major new effort to improve people’s lives.
There was a moment of silence, always a sign that he was changing gears.
‘And you might want to review your terms of employment,’ he said, ‘before you get on that plane.’
I sat a moment, completely nonplussed. ‘Sorry, Boss?’
‘Have a look at clause sixteen.’
Before I could answer or ask what he meant, he terminated the transmission. I went back to the living room and sat with the others and watched the city flood.
Juliette
The next day I walk home from Liberty’s camp. Rain pelts the hills, washing across the sound in wind-driven sheets. I detour up the ridge to the little grave and stand there a while thinking about everything, then I cut across the valley to the place where we buried Papa.
Everything I know is here, these rocky hills, the fishing grounds in the lee of The Hope, this lonely stretch of coastline much changed, all that accumulated inertia playing out still. But there was a world out there once, the world my mother and father lived in, Uncle Liberty too, in a time before the descent, when all of our possible futures lay spread before us like an ocean.
By the time I get home I am soaked. Darkness has come, and for a while the rain relents and stars pulse cold and distant between the clouds. I walk the pathway from our cove up past our vegetable plots towards the little stone house Papa and I built for Juliette and me after we married.
It’s almost six years now since I first saw her on that street in Albany, outside the orphanage. She was seventeen, standing there with her friend Mandy, both of them in long dresses, shoulders bare, carrying baskets under their arms, looking as if they were off to a picnic or something. It was summer, hot, and the sea breeze blew in across the sound, whipping the skirts of their dresses around their ankles. And then she laughed, open-mouthed, and the sound of it carried on the wind and it was like a scattering of light, a melody of photons flung across the universe. Strange how one moment can change your life.
Warm yellow light glows in the windows. Smoke drifts from the chimney, that sharp home pang of burning jarrah and hot food. She greets me at the door, that same liquid embrace that always fills my senses. She takes my coat and shakes it out, hangs it on the peg in the wet room. I can see Leo sitting at the table by the fire, eating his supper. Julie puts her arms around my neck and kisses me and I kiss her back. I put my arms around her waist and pull her close, hold her like that for a long time. 31
Later, lying in the darkness beside her, I tell her what I learned from Liberty – all of it. She listens quietly, as she does, taking it in.
‘Have you asked your mum about it?’ she whispers.
‘Not yet. I came straight home.’
‘You need to, before you reach any conclusions.’
‘I do. But I’m afraid. She’s so fragile now. She might not even remember.’
‘Something like that she’ll remember, Kwe, believe me. It’s only a matter of how much she wants to tell you. If it’s true, then she’s kept it a secret all these years. Maybe it’s better that way, to let the past be. Maybe it needs to stay a secret.’
I think about this a while. ‘Maybe. But it’s all we have, the past. It’s who we are.’
Julie takes my hand, squeezes it. ‘This is your mother’s past, Kwe. Hers. Not Liberty’s. Not yours. Maybe you just need to respect that. If she wants to tell you one day, she will.’
‘You’re right, I know. But I can’t help feeling there’s more to this. Something important. This and the missing logs. She’s hiding something from me and Lewis, from all of us, and I need to know why.’
The next day there is work to do, and for days after, and I am happy for it, losing myself in the familiar tasks that have helped keep us alive here on this remote and largely abandoned coast on an emptied continent. Lewis and I in our saw shed, the two of us working the big cross-cut saw for hours until our shoulders and backs ache. We talk about short-wave woman’s warning.
‘All the way down here, in the middle of nowhere,’ says Lewis. ‘I think we’re okay.’
‘Let’s keep Papa’s gun handy,’ I say, ‘just in case.’
We keep sawing, and later I split some of our stored logs and stack them for the fires. But I don’t tell Lewis about the grave, or about what Liberty said. That evening we do our regular transmission of The Forcing, the next couple of short chapters, and listen to the woman’s next instalment. After, we hang on for a while, thinking she might resume contact, but there is only the hiss of that empty band, all those photons ionising the atmosphere.
And then on the Saturday we all go to Mum’s for lunch, as we always 32do. Me and Juliette and Leo, Lewis and Mandy and their little Becky. Mum has cooked up a feast, as usual, a nice emperor that Lewis caught, grilled up with onions and wild garlic and potatoes. The rain stops and the sun comes out, and after the meal we all go for a walk up to Chicken-Head Rock so we can look out over the sound and watch the whales playing in the deeper water beyond our cove. The kids take turns with the binoculars.
And then everyone starts heading back down. I ask Juliette to go on ahead with Leo, and then Mandy and Lewis with Becky, and soon it is just Mum and me up there. She takes my arm, leans in against me. She is older now, but still strong and fit. I stand beside her, tracing the ridgeline I walked a few days ago with Uncle Liberty, finding the three pillars, the rocky creek gully visible just beyond.
‘What happened up there, Mum?’
She looks up at me. ‘What happened where?’
I point. ‘Up there, Mum. On the ridge. When we first arrived.’
She is quiet a long time, holding my arm. And then she sighs. ‘Oh Lewis, what do you mean?’
‘Not Lewis, Mum. Kweku.’
‘Yes, of course. Pardon, mon chou.’
Mum spoke French, her mother tongue, to us when we were growing up, and even now reverts to it when we are alone.
‘I mean the baby you had after we arrived here. The one that’s buried up there.’
She lets go of my arm and takes a step back. ‘I don’t know what you mean, Lewis.’
‘Kweku, Mum. Are you telling me it didn’t happen?’
‘Where did you get this idea? There’s nothing up there. Nothing.’
‘Uncle Liberty told me.’
‘Uncle Liberty. You spoke to him?’
‘Yes, Mum. I did. That’s what he said.’
‘Uncle Liberty. How is he?’
‘Why would he tell me that, Mum?’
‘Tell you what, dear?’ Her eyes are clear, that same autumn gold, but clouded with confusion.
‘Nothing, Mum. Nothing.’ 33
She takes my arm again, smiles as if nothing was said. ‘Let’s go back now, Lewis. I’m cold.’
We start back down the hill.
