The Race (35 page)

“There’s a satellite connection in the radio room,” she explains. “Juuli let me use it. I didn’t tell her why I needed to and she didn’t ask.”

For a moment I can’t think who she’s talking about, then I realise she means Juuli Moyse, the woman with the short grey hair who works in the engine room.

“I’m not trying to be nosy or anything,” Lin says. “I’m worried about you, that’s all. I don’t like what’s going on.”

“I don’t think you’re being nosy,” I say, and I don’t, although to be honest I don’t feel comfortable with what she’s doing. She is trying to nurture my own small seedlings of doubt, trying to give me the idea that if I’ve been lied to about one thing there’s a good chance I’ve been lied to about everything else.

That what I’ve been told is not the truth about myself, but a convenient story for the benefit of others.

Lin is trying to help me prove that I don’t exist.

~*~

There was no internet at the Croft, because Peter Crumb forbade it. I don’t know if he knew you could go online for free at Asterwych library. Maud liked to sneak off there and surf the net sometimes, though I think it was more to prove that she could than because she wanted to.

“It’s boring, isn’t it, staring into a screen all day?” She said that after a while everything she read online began to sound invented, even the most ordinary facts started to take on the appearance of elaborate fantasies. Peter Crumb always said that the main reason he wouldn’t allow an online connection at the Croft was because the internet had stopped being independent decades ago, during the war with Thalia. The restrictions were meant to have been lifted once the war was over, but according to Peter Crumb many of them were still secretly in place.

He said the internet had become a vehicle for propaganda.

Caine thought he was probably right. Wolfe said that Peter Crumb was bullshitting us.

“He just wants to control what we know,” he said. “That’s all it is.”

I don’t know what to think, especially now. Everything I know about politicos is dismal and tiring.

If I refuse to comply with the programme, or ask questions about it, there is a chance that the protection I have always taken for granted will be withdrawn.

I have no idea how I might begin to live without it.

I know so little about the world, only that it is dangerous.

The word for freedom in Thalian is
liberta
.

~*~

Alec Maclane is gone, and our ship is saved. How much these two things are connected we may never know.

Not everyone watched. The Gillespies stayed below decks, and in the seconds before the whale dived I saw Nestor Felipe turn away and hide his face in both hands. Dodie lay crumpled against the deck like a broken doll. The Carola sisters were bending down to help her up. Their long grey dresses, drenched with seawater, clung about their legs like sodden newspaper.

The rest of us saw everything. I saw it all. Also I saw Lin Hamada, leaning against the guard rail and gazing down into the churning water like she was watching a movie.

Terror makes insects of us all, because it reminds us we can be nothing in less than a second.

~*~

There is no warning, no premonition of any kind. At this point in our voyage, we are six weeks out from Faslane and more than halfway across the Atlantic. The crossing has been much calmer than I expected. It is still rare for us to sight another ship, but the ocean is not entirely without traffic and we do sometimes see freight steamers like the
Aurelia Claydon
, and fishing factories, and on one occasion we pass close by an enormous grey vessel with an extended rear deck that Lin tells me is an aircraft carrier operated by the Thalian navy. The sight of the vast ship unnerves me, but it soon sails past. It flags up neutral codes, but other than that it’s as if the carrier hasn’t even noticed we are there.

There is no sign whatsoever of any whales.

I think of the file of statistics we made, Sarah and Maud and I, the macabre reports of sinkings and fatal collisions that we clipped from the newspapers. From what I can remember, most of the attacks happened in the eastern part of the Atlantic, on the routes processing out from Barane and Jonestown harbour. There have been sinkings to the west of Lilyat, just as there have been sinkings everywhere else in the Atlantic, just not as many.

There is a feeling, among the crew I think as well as the foot passengers, that we are out of the danger zone.

I am not saying that the search beams are not switched on every evening at seven-thirty as usual. Just that none of us are really expecting anything to happen.

When the siren finally sounds, there is a sense at first that this cannot be real, that it’s some kind of drill. It is around nine o’clock, and not fully dark yet. Most of us are in the saloon, dawdling over coffee or playing cards. For thirty seconds no one moves – there is just the heavy drone of the siren: parp-parp-PARP.

Then we hear the sound of running footsteps outside in the companionway.

“Oh my God,” says Mol Gillespie. She is sitting on the couch in the corner, doing a crossword out of one of her puzzle books. “It’s a convoy. It’s really happening.”

Her words seem to break the spell. Everyone stops what they are doing and makes a run for the door.

~*~

The fore and aft search beams light up the water for a mile around. The name of the crew member on watch is Marianne Roach, a deck steward on her first tour of duty.

Her reason for sounding the siren is obvious. It’s as if the passage of the
Aurelia Claydon
has suddenly become obstructed by a range of hills.

It is impossible to say how many whales there are in total. There have been convoys recorded that stretch for hundreds of miles. In a convoy of that size there might be three-dozen whales, perhaps more. From where we’re standing on the passenger deck we can see three long, slipper-shaped mounds of blackness, thrusting up through the surface of the water like small dark islands. We have no idea what might be happening on the other side of the ship, but Lin is able to tell me afterwards that Juuli Moyse said we were surrounded on all sides.

“She spotted four to starboard, definitely,” Lin says. “And it looked like three following. She saw them through the drive room periscope.”

There is no sign, as yet, of the baer-whale. We stand together at the rail, staring out at the water and waiting to see what action will be taken. Some captains choose to kill their engines and angle up their search beams, to let their ships hang silently in the water. Their hope is that the whales will ignore them and glide harmlessly past. Once the convoy is ahead of them they alter their course slightly, allowing the route of the ship and route of the whales to safely diverge.

Others will open the engines full throttle and try to get ahead of the baer-whale. Of the number of ships sunk each year by whale convoys, the number that hold their position and the number that run are roughly equal.

The captain of the
Aurelia Claydon
opts to hold. There is a sound like a muffled cough and then the engines fall silent. It is only then that I realise how much I’ve come to take the sound they make for granted, the constant hum beneath my feet, the sensation of movement. Its sudden absence is unnerving. It’s as if the ship has stopped breathing.

I can hear footsteps clanging on the upper decks, the shouted instructions of one crew member to another, the faint slap-slapping of the ocean against the ship’s plump flanks. Normally the sound of the engines makes that inaudible. I keep expecting Djibril or one of the other stewards to appear, to give us instructions on what we should do, but no one comes. There is a breathless silence among the passengers, as if we’re afraid to raise our voices, in case we are heard.

Then suddenly Dagon Krefeld raises his arm. “The baer!” Fear and excitement lend his normally melodious speaking voice an edge of coarseness. We all press forward against the guard rail, looking to where he is pointing. At first I can see nothing, just the foaming water. Then the baer-whale raises his tail like a gigantic flag.

The tail is vast, wide as a street maybe. Its upward movement, like an underwater earthquake, causes a miniature tidal wave. The
Aurelia Claydon
rocks under the force of its impact and for a second I am convinced we will capsize but it doesn’t happen. All I can see now is that tail, impossible, ship-sized. Beyond the glare of the searchlights the night is dark, but that tail is blacker still. It’s as if someone has torn a hole in the sky.

Then the baer-whale slams the tail down upon the sea’s quaking surface and pulls it under. There are more and more violent shock waves, and then it is gone. I release my pent-up breath, thinking that the baer-whale has dived deep, away from the surface and away from our ship. Then I gasp again in horror at what Dagon Krefeld and Ana Carola and everyone else has already seen: the steady line of ripples, a hump-shaped displacement of water rushing towards us, crossing the distance so quickly and so near-invisibly it’s as if we’re about to be attacked by a ghost.

“It’s coming alongside,” yells Nestor Felipe. He points, and it’s like something is tunnelling through the water to get to us, a giant rat beneath a giant black hearthrug. Everyone but Lin Hamada and the Carola sisters scrambles back from the rail.

“Where the hell’s the damned crew?” says Nestor Felipe. I see that his teeth are chattering, and I realise from his voice that he’s afraid, more afraid than I am even. A sense of unreality has descended upon me, like a dome of glass. I can see but I can’t feel, not for the moment, and in this way I am protected from the worst of my terror.

I move quickly to his side and take his hand. His fingers tighten around mine, a panicky, reflexive grip that hurts my knuckles. When he looks down and sees who it is he seems reassured at once, and a little calmer.

“Do you know,” he says. “I always dreamed of seeing one of these creatures for myself. Now I wish I’d never wished that. Do you think it might be all that wishing that helped them find us?”

I search his face for signs that he is joking and do not find them. His expression is blank and white as a frightened child’s.

“I don’t believe in such things,” I say. “The old orthodoxies. The whales would still be here, whether we were or not.”

I gaze down at the water. The baer-whale appears to be circling now, some two-hundred metres from our starboard flank perhaps, cutting steep runnels in the black water. From time to time it lifts the front of its head, a blunt, featureless mass that is like a vast brick wall. Its movements seem indecisive, ragged, almost a taunt. Suddenly I have a horrible realisation: the baer-whale is trying to make up its mind whether to ram us.

A sick, wet panic comes over me at the thought of that blunt head, like a thousand-ton mallet, striking the side of the ship and keeling us over. I imagine flying through the darkness, hard objects striking my head, the freezing, angled catch of the viscous water.

Is this the end? I realise I cannot imagine anything beyond the moment of hitting the sea’s surface, just a sense of not being able to breathe, then a gut-churning, endless horror that I cannot dwell on.

Strangely, I think of Maud, her tangled hair and damp pubes, her schoolgirl laugh.

Tomorrow we’ll be an item on the news and nothing more.

I fix my eyes on Lin, who is still at the rail. Something about her stance – its straightness? – seems exultant, stern as the night sky and yet riotous as revolution, filled with sweat and smoking gunshots and ravishing song.

Lin Hamada does not seem frightened, not at all.

Further out to sea, beyond the pacing baer-whale, the dark shapes of its brothers and sisters lie in wait.

“Could you speak to them?” says Nestor Felipe. “Do you think you could try?”

He speaks so quietly I wonder if I’ve misheard him, if I’ve imagined the words inside my own head. And yet I grasp the sense of what he’s saying almost at once.

He’s asking me to make contact with the whales, to try and persuade them not to attack us, to assure them that we mean them no harm.

His knowledge of me explodes inside me like a thunderbolt. He knows what I am, then. But how?

As for his question, I don’t know how to answer. I gape at him, wide-eyed.

“I don’t know,” I say. I have not, until this moment, even considered it. My mind is clamped tight with fear. It’s said that fear sharpens the senses but it deadens them, too. When you’re frightened nothing makes sense except the need to escape.

Is the baer-whale even aware of us as living creatures, or is the
Aurelia Claydon
, with her rasping engines and buzzing radio emissions, its infuriating light beams, as insignificant and maddening as a hornet?

Can I make the baer-whale perceive us, as we really are?

The deck is slopping ankle-deep in water but I barely notice. It takes a conscious effort to open my senses but somehow I do it, I make that leap, and suddenly it’s as if I’m waking in another world.

Suddenly I’m in a splinter of nowhere. I gather the sound-pictures inside my head and fling them outwards, images of the sea in all her vastness, and of ourselves and the ship upon it, travelling westwards, like the whales. I grasp for an image of the baer-whale himself, a beast so vast and so powerful he is hard for us to comprehend.

I see you
, I mind-speak.
And I am speaking to you – my name is Maree, maree, maree, like the call of the gulls
.

I try to welcome him into our world. What a fool I am.

For a short while there is nothing, just the gusting wind, the crash and crump of broken deckchairs sliding in a muddled heap across the soaking boards.

Then I hear him laughing inside my head. His great mind, like an open hand, flaps lazily at my song, perhaps to dispel it, then he turns his back on me and for a cold and endless moment I can sense the truth.

The baer-whale doesn’t give a damn what I am thinking. The idea that I am thinking at all is an amusement to him. He cares as little for my song as the captain of the
Aurelia Claydon
might care for the thoughts of a tuna fish or a flounder.