The Race (34 page)

The concept is alien to me, I suppose.

The word alien makes me think of Caine.

I wonder if we’re the aliens, after all. An alien race, forced to live inside a compound not because we’re valuable but because if people knew what we were we’d be driven out.

Lin is watching me out of her single eye. She looks concerned.

“I don’t think it’s funny, really,” she said. “But we were just kids. Kids can be cruel.”

“You have brothers?”

“Yes. Three of the buggers. You can imagine what our household was like.”

She tells me their names are Ken and Miki and Akio and that they’re all in the military. “We’re all a bit mad,” she says. “Especially when we get together. But I do love them.”

I wish I had a brother of my own. I can’t imagine what it feels like, to know that someone is bound to you by blood, by genes, that you’re together in the world almost as part of the same organism.

“Some of the old orthodox philosophers believe the Atlantic whales are gateways, did you know that?” Lin says. “Tunnels in space and time, junction boxes between one part of the universe and another. According to these philosophers, the people who are sacrificed don’t die, but are spewed out into a new world, as heroes. Completely wacko, but I kind of like it.”

I have never heard of this belief before, and I like it too, even though I know it cannot be true. It comforts me to think of Kollen Jonniter, sliding feet first into a new morning, his fight for air forgotten, his skin gleaming in the light of a different sun.

The most northerly of the Hoolish islands is called Sar-Dat. It lies at the very edge of the Atlantic whales’ summer breeding ground, the vast, semi-saline lake-ocean that in Crimond is known as the Arctic Race but that the Hools call the Hellen-Say, the Sea of Helen.

“I flew over it once,” Lin tells me. “It was so cold up there I thought my gears were going to freeze.”

~*~

The days on board seem very long. The further into the voyage, the further they seem to stretch out, like the white wings of kittiwakes, like the slatted foot-worn boards of sun-bleached jetties. The decks and companionways of the
Aurelia Claydon
have become our whole world.

The days are long because there is nothing to look at. The Atlantic stretches away on all sides, endless-seeming, making a nonsense of distance as well as time. Occasionally we catch sight of other ships, but this happens so rarely it would be easy to believe that we have lost our way somehow, that we’ve come unstuck from the real world and are sailing unknowingly towards a destination that will never appear.

The passengers are like a second crew now. We have developed between ourselves a version of that same camaraderie, that same mutual antagonism. Small wars break out. New alliances form and reform. Everyone is always hungry for the next piece of gossip.

Dodie Taborow is still spending all of her time with Alec Maclane. In spite of her expensive clothes and dominating laugh there is something brittle about Dodie, something fragile and faded and easily hurt. She makes me think of the women on the sewing patterns Maud and I found once, packed away in the attic of the Croft. The pattern templates were made out of tracing paper, carefully folded and each once sealed within a white paper packet. On the front of each packet was a drawing of what the pattern inside was for – a picture of a woman, blocked out in soft colours and wearing the dress or skirt or blouse the way it should look once all the pieces of the pattern had been sewn together. The clothes in the pictures looked so old fashioned they made Maud and me laugh. It was difficult to believe that anyone would ever have wanted to wear such things, let alone spend time in making them by hand. The faded women in the drawings all wore bright smiles, yet still they seemed sad. It was as if all they wanted was to be noticed, but they’d stopped believing inside that they ever would be.

Whenever I see Dodie now I think of those women, of those falling-apart sewing patterns in their faded envelopes, and I feel afraid for her. She’s obsessed with Maclane, I can feel it. I think of Maclane’s crisp linen shirts, the soft mound of his belly, the gold cufflinks – clink, clink – on the bedside table.

Can Dodie and Maclane really be lovers, or are they just friends?

I keep thinking something bad is going to happen. There’s nothing I can do to stop it though, even if I’m right. It’s none of my business.

Dodie’s card parties in the saloon are now our main entertainment. In spite of what he said about being out of practice, Maclane turns out to have lost none of his talent. The game turns him from a considerate and courteous
gentilhomme
into a scheming Quest-demon. The Carola sisters, who play regularly at his table, are clearly enchanted with him. Dodie pleads with me to join their circle and although I am tempted because the game looks such fun I have to keep refusing. I know I am nowhere near good enough, and I don’t want to put in the hours of study and practice it would take to be able to play against Maclane and the others. I watch the games sometimes though – I find them thrilling. There is another man who plays very well, Dagon Krefeld. Dodie says he is a professor of mathematics, travelling to Bonita to take up a post at the university there. His skin is dry and wrinkled as a prune’s, but he has the gimlet eyes and wicked laugh of a TV vizier.

His main aim in life at the moment seems to be beating Alec Maclane at Quest. He hasn’t managed it yet, though he is getting closer. I think Krefeld is sleeping with one of the saloon staff, a young and handsome able seaman named Vicente.

Not all of the passengers have succumbed to the Quest craze, and for some the tedium of the voyage has found other outlets. A married couple, Pierpoint and Mol Gillespie, are now sleeping in separate cabins. I don’t know what’s happened between them, only that Pierpoint will now be leaving the ship at Brock. Mol is sailing on to Bonita as originally planned.

For the first three nights or so after leaving Lilyat’s waters people gather on the passenger deck after supper, to applaud as the search beams are switched on and to take part in what they call whale-watching parties. Whether these are meant as entertainment or surveillance I am not sure. No whales are spotted and the parties soon lose their novelty. Little by little the anxiety that marked the
Aurelia Claydon
’s passage into open ocean begins to disperse.

Even the idea of the whales is losing its fascination. It’s much more fun to join in the gossip surrounding Dodie’s card parties.

~*~

I am spending a lot of my time in studying Thalian. Nestor Felipe has lent me a grammar book, and I am using it to try and make sense of
A Thalian Odyssey
. To begin with I go right through the text, checking each word in the original against the Crimondn translation on the opposite page. When I feel ready I cover up the translation and look only at the original. It’s difficult at first, but the longer I persevere the easier it becomes, first to remember individual words and phrases, then to understand whole sentences. I have even begun to write out my own translations of my favourite passages, just for practice. At this stage I understand only about half of what I read, but every now and then I come across a line that stops me dead, that crushes the breath from my chest as if I’ve been punched. It’s at these moments that I know I’m improving, that I am understanding the poem as it is meant to be read.

When Nestor Felipe gives me the grammar book I thank him in Thalian. These are the first words of the language I have spoken aloud to anyone, except myself. The syllables feel bulky in my mouth, and I am afraid I’ve garbled them, but when Nestor Felipe nods and smiles I know that these few simple sounds at least have been uttered correctly.

When you take the trouble to learn another language, you are giving yourself the chance to see the miracle of communication in close up. For me, a Crimondn speaker since birth, a book is a book. That dumpy, single syllable is not just a word, it is in some sense the object itself, a sound-picture, the same as it would be for the smartdogs. For Saffron Valparaiso a book is a
livra
. We can grasp each other’s meaning, but we can never erase or replace one another’s sound-pictures. For me,
livra
can never
be
book, it can only
mean
book. It can only ever be a cipher, not the actual thing.

I once told Maud about a secret fear I had, that working with the smartdogs might eventually make me become unhooked from language, that words would not be words any more, they would just be sounds.

“Try it,” I say to her. I print the word ‘squirrel’ on a piece of paper in heavy black capitals, then tell her to speak the word aloud and keep saying it, to repeat the word fifty times, a hundred, without stopping. “At the end you won’t know what it means,” I say. “It’ll just be a sound. Even the letters on that piece of paper will stop making sense.”

Maud does what I say, repeating the word squirrel over and over again until she collapses on the bed. She’s laughing so hard she’s clutching her stomach. Her eyes are streaming with tears.

“What is it?” she says. “What the hell is a fucking
squirrel
?” Just speaking the word aloud sets her off again. She finds the whole thing hilarious, and I can understand why, but I still think it’s terrifying.

A smartdog needs no words. It can live without words quite easily. Words do not help it to run and hunt, to love and mate and feed and find shelter. They do not further clarify the cool of the rain on its back on a warm spring day. It’s not words that make a smartdog feel it could run forever.

Smartdogs sense the coming on of dawn or dusk hours before we can.

Words are for those who build cities, who build whirligigs and smartweapons and flame throwers.

Words are for writing journals and counting the days, for understanding the purple-shaded, time-driven rhythms of
A Thalian Odyssey
.

Words are what humans are, even more than flesh.

If Nestor Felipe is not a good man, he hides it well, which is something I am not used to in ordinary people. Could Nestor Felipe be like Caine or like Sarah, like Margery Kim who Caine said was like a sister to him but who left for Thalia before I could get to know her?

Could he be like me? I don’t think so, but if Felipe is a spy he has a funny way of going about it.

His tea-coloured eyes seem full of thoughtful amusement, at the world or at himself, I don’t know which. His horn-rimmed glasses and slight pot belly make me think of Detective Selkirk, in Iris Mottram’s
Selkirk
books. Which makes him more or less the opposite of Peter Crumb.

~*~

I spend time with Lin Hamada every day.

We eat our meals together in the saloon. Afterwards we will sometimes go up to the passenger deck for an hour or so, to look at the sea and exchange news, such that it is, of the things we’ve seen or done during the day. With all the days being the same it is surprising how much we find to talk about. Every so often we spend the whole day together. It’s not something we plan – it’s more like we forget to move apart.

“Lin seems like a nice girl,” Dodie says to me. I don’t see so much of Dodie now – she’s either with Alec Maclane or playing cards – but when I do she is the same as ever. She is a gossip, I know that, but not of the kind who enjoys hurting people. What Dodie enjoys is
information
, for its own sake, the possession of secrets.

When she says to me that Lin seems nice, I know that what she wants is for me to give up some piece of information about Lin in return, some piece of private knowledge. Most of all she wants to know exactly what it was that happened to Lin’s face.

She still thinks that Lin’s face is the most important thing about her. If I were to deny that, she would find it astounding.

“She is, very nice,” I say. “I like her a lot.”

She nods, conceding defeat. “I’m glad you’ve found a friend, Maree. It’s not good for you to be with old people all the time.” Perhaps she’s bored with the subject already. Most likely she simply accepts that as Lin’s friend I’m reluctant to gossip about her. Either way she doesn’t press me any further.

A little later I see her walking arm in arm along the deck with Alec Maclane.

~*~

When I was fourteen I thought I was in love with Maud. By the time I reached the age of sixteen I was beginning to realise that I was just passing the time with her, that in spite of all the sex we were having we were more like sisters than lovers. That our closeness was to do with chance, with our constant and inescapable physical nearness to one another. There was no deeper connection, not really.

I could never let Maud learn this, or guess that the only thing that kept me from breaking up with her was knowing that I would be leaving soon in any case, that we were destined to be parted anyway.

Leaving her was still awful, though. Those emotions were real.

I have not written her a single word since we set out from Faslane.

My love for Caine was something different, an infatuation that could never have lasted, I see that now. We’re worlds apart – he is as distant from me as I was from Maud.

The question now is: am I falling in love with Lin Hamada?

It’s a question I don’t want an answer to. Loving Lin can bring only pain, and I want the time that remains to us to pass without any feeling other than the contentment that comes from being in one another’s company. It should be enough just to be near her, day by day, to let the future feel as distant as the shores of Thalia.

“Are you really going to do it?” Lin says to me. “Do you really mean to sign your life over to these people, no questions asked? You don’t even know who they are.”

She means the people who run the compound in Kontessa, who are in charge of the programme. It’s true that I don’t know, that I have put my trust in them only because Kay and Peter Crumb have trained me to do so. But then Kay also encouraged me to put my trust in her story about the tramway crash that killed my parents, and so far as I’ve been able to discover that never happened. I tell Lin I don’t know what I am going to do, that I need time to decide, words that sound reasonable enough when I say them but that afterwards – when I’m alone in my cabin – seem shaky and unreal, even cowardly. I cannot imagine not going to Kontessa, because I cannot imagine what will happen to me if I don’t. Perhaps I am afraid to. The word freedom sounds exciting when you say it, but it has implications. When I tell Lin what Kay said about the tramway crash she doesn’t say much of anything. But three days later she tells me she’s been looking online and she can’t find any record of it, either.