The Race (31 page)

The ocean is never just one colour. It is like a gigantic refractive prism, containing all colours. Large seabirds – I think they are called kittiwakes – follow the churning water in the wake of the ship. Sometimes they dive right into it, remaining beneath the surface for many seconds.

Further along the deck I catch sight of the two women Dodie Taborow referred to as the Carola sisters. They stand together at the rail, gaunt and grey as ash trees, feeding the kittiwakes with bread crusts, presumably left over from their supper. The gulls are in a lunacy of excitement, shearing through the air towards them, tearing the chunks of bread from the sisters’ hands.

The women don’t seem afraid though. Rather they seem thrilled by what is happening, gasping and exclaiming to one another in the rolling, curvaceous accents of the Thalian language.

As before, they are dressed plainly, in identical grey jersey dresses that appear to exaggerate their thinness. I wonder if they are pleased to be returning to Thalia, and what it was that brought them to Crimond in the first place.

There are many Thalians living in Crimond now, and vice versa, but these women are old enough to remember a time when it was still difficult to obtain a visa for travel between our two once warring countries. There are still those who feel uneasy, both with those who used to be the enemy and with themselves.

Kay once told me her father still had to leave the room when anything about the war came on the TV. His own father had died in the bombardment of Lis, and he could never forget it.

“There was a boy at my school who was Thalian – his name was Ecco,” Kay said. “Dad didn’t like me to say hello to him, even. We had some terrible arguments about it.”

I wonder if it’s because of her father’s prejudice that Kay feels she needs to talk about the war so much and so often. I stand still, gazing at the Carola sisters who have run out of bread for the kittiwakes and who are now staring out to sea instead, their hands clasped in front of them, craning their necks forward as if scanning the waves for a sight of something marvellous, wonder or horror. I would love to step forward and greet them in their language, but I feel too shy. I whisper to myself instead, trying out the few words of Thalian I have so far mastered and trying to pluck up the courage to approach them.

Do people in Bonita still say ‘by the Goddess’ or is that one of those quaint anachronisms only an ignorant tourist would come out with? I realise how little I know about their country, and feel embarrassed and ashamed at once.

“They were both whirligig pilots, how cool is that?”

The voice comes from directly behind me. I turn around quickly, startled. The voice that has spoken is unknown to me, but I recognise the face at once, how could I not? In reality it is just half a face, the ruined features of the woman called Lin who Dodie Taborow tells me has been in a fire.

Her single eye is the colour of mercury, and has the slanting appearance that normally marks a Chinoit or Korati ancestry. Her jaw is long and strong. Her mouth, which is mostly undamaged, is full-lipped and wide. She gazes at me steadfastly, without blinking. It’s as if she’s inviting me to look at her, challenging me to do so, and once I am over my embarrassment I find I cannot stop staring. It is impossible not to be fascinated by something so outside the set parameters of what a human face is supposed to look like.

I find myself wanting to touch her skin, to explore her face with my fingers, to learn what it means.

“My rig came down and there was a fire. My ejector seat fucked up – because of the heat, probably. I fainted briefly, and this side of my face became melted to the windshield. They had to cut most of it off to remove the plastic. That’s the deal.”

She speaks the words quickly and fluently, like part of a speech she’s learned or a theatre audition. She raises her remaining eyebrow: did I do okay?”

“I didn’t –,” I stammer inconclusively. I can feel myself blushing.

“I know you didn’t. No one does – that’s what pisses me off.”

I like her forthrightness, her lack of apology. It’s as if her words are cards in a high stakes game. She stands firmly upright, not turning aside. I like that, too.

“Is your name Lin?” I say to her. It’s the only question I feel I can ask without looking a fool.

“Yes it is, Lin Hamada. Don’t tell me people are bitching about me already?”

I can feel myself wanting to laugh and in the end I can’t stop myself.

“Of course not. Someone happened to mention your name, that’s all.”

“The lady with the rings, I bet?”

“Yes. She said you’d been in a fire.”

“And she’s right. But that’s very old news now, therefore boring. Do you feel like getting a coffee? I can’t believe how good the coffee is on board this tub.”

“I’d like that a lot,” I say. It is very nearly dark now. I see that the Carola sisters have gone inside already, that I am standing alone on the deck with Lin Hamada. The kittiwakes have gone too, flown away into the darkness to who-knows-where. I hear the thump-thump-thump of the ship’s engines, the endless rapid churning of the sea beneath.

“Was it true what you said?” I ask Lin Hamada. “About the sisters being helicopter pilots?” I know that ‘whirligig’ means helicopter – it is the word they use on TV and in the newspapers. It is the kind of word – like ‘collateral’ and ‘incoming’ – that people use when they want to make it sound like they understand militia-talk, even when many of them have never laid eyes on a helicopter or even on an aeroplane or an ordinary hopper. These flying machines are like mythical beasts – everyone knows what they look like but few people have ever seen them in the wild.

What Lin has told me about the Carola sisters seems impossible. I am already longing for it to be true.

“They haven’t seen active service for a long time, but yes, they were both commissioned officers in the air corps. They gave a flying demo at my airbase once. They were pretty awesome.”

Every now and then you might see a hopper passing over Asterwych, flying so high it’s just a speck, a black dot in the side of a cloud, a distant murmur of engines. I know from books and from TV that airplanes, like roadcars, were once a common form of transport for ordinary people. Now they mostly mean big business, or war. I have never seen an aeroplane close to.

~*~

A smartdog is more intuitive than a human being. It takes its empathic abilities for granted, the same way we take it for granted that we can talk.

For a smartdog, there is no dividing line between thought and emotion. An emotion is a kind of thought, and a thought is just an inside picture of an emotion.

Most lay people think that smartdogs don’t know the difference between truth and lies, that for a smartdog the definition of truth is the word of its runner.

All of this is wrong. Nearly all smartdogs will know at once if their runner is lying to them. It is true that they don’t have an abstract understanding of these concepts in the way that people do – for a smartdog the truth is ‘as things are’ and a lie is ‘something else’ – but a smartdog will obey a runner who is lying not because it can’t tell the difference, but because it believes the runner must have a reason for lying.

A smartdog has no concept of death. It fears pain, incarceration, being attacked, separation from its runner. But there is no cipher for death itself within its lexicon, no image-word-emotion that can encompass it.

When a smartdog embarks on a mission it does not think about what has been strapped to it. It thinks about what its runner has asked it to do, which is to carry a certain burden from one place to another. It does not fear being blown up – it fears being unable to complete the mission and so displeasing its runner.

There have been many instances of runners refusing to comply with military objectives, refusing to lie to their dogs, refusing to send a dog on a mission that will ultimately result in its destruction.

Demonstrations of this kind of obstructive behaviour usually result in the runner being dismissed from the programme. In some cases, runners have had their implants forcibly removed.

So far there has been only one recorded case of a smartdog refusing a mission. The dog’s name was Pathfinder, her mission was to carry a short range thermonuclear device into an armaments facility on the outskirts of Condiaz. There were a thousand civilian employees working on site at the time.

Pathfinder did not have sufficient understanding of her situation to realise that the bomb she carried could be detonated anywhere and at any time. It became clear she believed that the weapon could only be triggered by her entering the armaments compound. She was within half a mile of her target when she veered off course and headed out into the desert. In spite of repeated interventions from her runner, she refused to return.

The mission’s controllers eventually gave up on her. They detonated the bomb in the desert and repeated the mission a week later with a different smartdog. The dog, Moonrise Kingdom, carried the device right into the compound where it was successfully detonated. It was not discovered until afterwards that the earlier attempt had triggered the spycams, and the compound staff and most of their equipment had been relocated.

Garland, who will be leaving the Croft next summer, once said something strange. He said we were in danger because as far as the scientists who ran the programme were concerned we were unreliable.

“If they could do what they do without us, then they would,” he said. “They would love it if they could replace us with machines.”

Perhaps that’s what they’re trying to do anyway – perhaps Caine was right. A couple of days after Garland said what he said I had a nightmare, about a computer trying to smartread a smartdog, and getting everything wrong.

~*~

Lin is lying on her back on her bunk, her long body stretched full length, her hands behind her head. She is lying so that the bad side of her face is turned into the pillow. I don’t know if this is the most comfortable position for her or if it is something she does automatically, without thinking. Her feet are bare. They are long-toed and hard-looking, like the roots of young trees.

“Fuck,” she says. “That’s amazing.”

“You believe me?” I am astounded at myself and a little frightened. I have never spoken to any outsider about the Croft, or about the programme. It does not matter that up until now I had no one to tell – the feeling of crossing a line is still so strong I can almost feel that line snapping, like a piece of fishing twine, its broken ends wrapping themselves painfully around my ankles.

When we were small, Kay was always drumming it into us that we should never tell anyone how we lived or what we did. She hinted but never stated outright that if we broke this rule, people would come from Asterwych and force us to go to ordinary schools with ordinary children. The fear of being separated from one another, of having our home broken up or interfered with had its effect. We kept ourselves neatly locked up in an invisible cage.

I didn’t plan to tell Lin Hamada about any of this. It just happened.

Lin blinks her single eye then looks up at the ceiling.

“Of course I believe you,” she says. “You’re like one of those dogs, aren’t you? You can’t tell lies.”

“I can do what I want.” A small jolt of anger flashes through me and my heart is racing. Lin seems to be saying that I have no will of my own, that my will has been engineered out of me, and this makes me feel scornful. Is what I say true though? Can I do what I want?

“I don’t mean that you can’t – just that the act of telling a lie would make you uncomfortable. It’s something you wouldn’t do unless you really had to. That’s true, isn’t it? I’m right about that?”

I am sitting on Lin’s floor, with my back pressed up against the wooden storage unit that opens out to make the writing desk. The cabins are almost too small to accommodate two people at once, but here we are anyway. Lin’s cabin is as tidy as an ordnance cupboard and I find myself wondering if her life as a soldier – as a pilot – has boosted her awareness somehow, if it hasn’t made her just a tiny bit empathic.

When I think about lying it makes me feel seasick, which is odd, because I haven’t been seasick once since coming on board.

Is Lin right in what she says, or is it just the thought of lying to
her
?

“Lying is pointless because it never leads anywhere,” I say, evading her. “It’s always a dead end.”

“That depends on what you’re trying to achieve,” Lin says. Then she asks me if I had any choice about going to Thalia.

My throat feels tight. I’m not sure how to answer her, because the truth is I don’t really know. I think of Wolfe, what happened to him. But surely Wolfe was different, too ill at the end to understand what he was doing?

Kay told us Wolfe was dead, that he couldn’t have survived for much longer in any case, even if he’d stayed at the Croft.

Caine always said that was bollocks, and Caine never swore. We didn’t discuss it though, it was all too awful. I try to imagine what might have happened if I’d said to Kay or to Peter Crumb that I didn’t want to be a part of the programme any more. An image comes to my mind, of myself, clearing tables and washing cups in Sarah’s mother’s coffee shop in Asterwych.

Would that have been so terrible? The image has a strange fascination. I am surprised to discover that I do not find it entirely unpleasant.

“The programme is what I’ve been trained for,” I say in the end. “It’s – my job.”

“Most people still get to choose their jobs, though. Up to a point, anyway.”

“Did you choose to be a soldier?”

Lin laughs, an odd, harsh sound, like a crow cawing. “You’re joking. I was crazy for it. It was the only way I could think of to be free.”

“Free of what?” As I ask my question I realise a strange thing: that I am unable to picture Lin Hamada as a child. Does she have brothers, sisters, parents? I cannot tell.

“Free of the ground,” Lin says. She laughs again. “I am an impatient person. Impatience is my defining characteristic. I don’t like to wait – for anything. Being stuck in one place all the time – that would drive me insane.”