7
I Give You the Moon
Justina Robson
The apocalypse was a terrible disappointment.
There was no great flood. Fire did not fall from the sky, not even a meteorite. You couldn’t even write the line, “Death stalked slowly in her cloak of many viruses, because Terminators always walk,” because although that was true it gave the event a lot more color and interest than it deserved. Even displayed in graphs and comparative charts with numbers and pulsating animated globs and fire-crisping maps it took thirty years to complete. It progressed by boring increments of boom and bust before fizzling out to inconvenient embers in the cities, where for ages its only sign was the sudden hacking cough of passersby to startle the occasional cat from its nap on the hot pavements. Millions died, several times, and nobody since had stopped banging on about it in case it wasn’t really over, though what their anxiety was going to do to fix it was anybody’s guess.
Jack took off his hat. The lesson that had filled his hearing and vision vanished. He set the hat down on the sand beside him and sat in the sudden quiet of the calm sea and the empty sky, not even a gull to see. The breeze boxed his ears with a random blather. A hundred meters to his left the old man who had been fishing when he started his lecture, was still fishing in exactly the same spot. As far as the eye could see in all directions, they were alone.
Behind them Jack felt the continental bulk of Africa sitting quietly, satisfied with whatever was going on. It had a cozy quality this afternoon, not so much at their backs as having their backs in a way that seemed to say that they were free to do what they wanted about whatever they thought important, silly little creatures, it would still be there regardless, no worries, until something happened to it far in the future that changed it into something new. But Jack wouldn’t see that, it was a problem for future Africa, though as Africa had no problem with it there was no problem at all. Continents were lucky that way.
Right now Jack’s problem was that he had to complete his history course before he could qualify for Viking Adventure. Jack had lived his whole life on this coastline and Viking Adventure would take him far away from it, through strange lands to the white North where the last ice still capped the planet. He longed to feel it, to taste it, to see how cold it was. Here on the beach the temperature was about 30°C and the idea of a glacier, a frozen river, a snowfield—felt like the most amazing thing there could be. Almost unbelievable that it existed. And the Vikings themselves, creatures of legend: he felt a kinship of a strange kind to them, savage travelers wandering their own coasts, fearless upon the sea in ships made by hand, out of wood—forests! Ah, to walk in a thick forest of trees, hunting deer, fending off wolves, spear in hand, and a helmet with horns on it, and a sword and shield, and big fur boots . . .
He bent down to pick up a shell half buried in the sand and studied it for a second. Chamber after chamber went spiraling away, around the bend, old fossil houses turned by a living lathe. That’s what Dad had said about them. He peered in, tried to see further, further into the past. If only the stupid lecture was as fascinating as a shell. If he put on his hat he could know all about it, maybe see through the shell itself into its secret vaults.
But it was nicer with the secret in it.
He dropped it back where he found it and walked up to the fisherman, taller than he was, thin like him, wearing a nearly identical blue cotton fishing hat in a size too big with the brim pulled low over his eyes. At his feet the rod was rooted in the sand, its curve moving idly; nothing on the line.
Darius watched the tide rolling slowly in. In another half an hour it would reach his feet and then it would be time to pack up for the day.
With the extra vision granted by his hat he was monitoring the levels of flow in the Eastern Atlantic Reactor. The huge machine lay at modest depth, sieving plastic from the Benguela Current as it bore northward up the coast; a scrubbing brush for seawater. The ominous name fitted its appearance, not its function. It was an old beast, a cage of steel and—ironically—plastic, holding a sequence of membrane filters and ferrofluid resonance chambers out into the flow. Its aquaplaned sides and solar-powered motors kept it positioned at the fastest run of water. It sat as one of a series, number twenty-one out of forty of its bony kind, strung down toward the Cape from Gabon. Far above, almost invisible in the sky, albatross gliders monitored his little patch and the whole of the Atlantic Sea Farm, guiding the cleaners away from pods of whales and other cetaceans, sending them to depth when storms threatened to disturb their balances. But a human was required to check, verify, and interpret their findings. Darius kept his line out, his eye on the inner workings of the filters during his shift. He cued a maintenance crew to make ready for a resupply and cleanup. Good old Twenty-One, another billion tons of water cleaned, another, better day for everyone. He felt fond of all his machines.
The line bobbed as the weights—packed instruments working to read all the sea’s secrets—rode the waves. There was no hook, no catch for fish. He’d caught dinner an hour ago and now he was only fishing for information.
Closer to home his cast of drone crabs were busy on the seabed, picking up man-made pollutants and logging notes of other debris they encountered as they patrolled. They periodically constructed buoyant cubes of garbage and floated them to the surface. The albatrosses noted the positions on their ever-changing charts and deployed pickup craft to return the casks for reprocessing at the nearest shore facility. It was automated. But some jobs were hard to automate and they popped up frequently, usually when crabs got stuck in and around wreckage. Then Darius would have to personally intervene and drive them out by hand—well, by hat, but everyone still said by hand like it was the days of controllers that you had to wiggle and press instead of hats that picked up your intentions and transformed them directly into processes elsewhere.
Darius had come to the coast for the wrecks thirty years ago, before hats, in the days of hand controls. There had been no crabs then, only human workers and their various tools, on shore and boat, living a leisurely lifestyle on the fringes of the Blue Wild where they were tasked with policing, maintenance, cleanup, and reporting. This was during the slow buildup toward the international accords that finally came together to reclassify the globe’s seawater habitats into Blue Farm and Blue Wild. This piece of the Namibian coast, where desert met sea, was a part of the Wild now. Its beauty was reserved for what wildlife might come, and for small and regulated numbers of human visitors who paid in reward tokens or immense amounts of money for the privilege of spending a few days in one of the hotels. From there they fished and walked, or rode camels or robot hobbyhorses up and down the surf line, painted pictures, tried yoga, all the usual things people did when they wanted to feel they’d become closer to nature.
Darius had been a cleaner, then a builder, as they renovated some of the more stable shipwrecks into living quarters and luxury restaurants. After they were done he became a tour guide, both on shore and undersea, until he left that life for something that felt more like giving back. He had joined Blue Wild as a crab master when Hyundai had started up their part of the shore operations here, and now he fished the coast and monitored the drones. He lived in a little hut of his own during the week, where his son could visit him every few months, and come and ask questions, and stare impatiently at the sea, and not do his classes.
There he was now, coming up after just half an hour of study, hangdog expression, nearly as tall as Darius already and easy to recognize by his ungainly assortment of elbows, knees, hands, and feet. He was newly awkward in gait, hesitant in a way he’d never been a few years ago, even though he was the only other human on the beach for miles.
Darius missed that little boy. Always so happy. Free of care. The program for kindergarten was gentle like a soft breeze, full of the wonders of the world, none of the difficulties. Then the inescapable courses about the past had come and a serious, pondering heaviness had set in like bad weather. Could be his age a bit. It came and went.
At his age Darius had been in a very different world, a bricks-and-mortar school with papers and exams. He’d not liked it, had skipped as much as he dared to wander the street instead, despite the threat of capture and punishment. It was strange to think back on it, because now he couldn’t get enough of staying in touch with his interests, far and wide. The possibilities were endless in the connected world of daily lives, where you could dip in and out of someone’s experience a world away, see things through their hat, be in their moment. It was a time made for dreamers and drifters.
It was a miracle Jack had got this far really with that kind of background, but Darius was proud of him, because years ago Jack had got it into his head that he wanted to be a Viking and damned if the kid hadn’t stuck to it, limpet to its rock, clinging to that strange dream. He’d saved his tokens, taking extra learning credits, doing all he could to earn his place, and nobody could say no to it because he was going to buy the reward all by himself. It belonged to him and him alone.
Not like Darius hadn’t endorsed it. Because it was still education when you looked at it. It was history and learning how to live without modern conveniences, like humans did before the industrial age had wrecked the biosphere. And Jack’s mother, when she was alive, always said study and work for what you want. Never listen to other people. The world isn’t like it used to be. We’ve got the Accord that says anyone can learn, can’t be stopped, and tokens to buy things we’d never have thought of, and nobody can say no to us now for any reason. Stay at home, travel the world, be here, be this, that, the other. Do what you want to do. All you have to do is contribute and save. She’d been the Accord’s biggest fan, Marta, proud that her own mother had worked hard to see these new methods brought in, and that she was alive on the day it was signed up to, a global dedication. Yes, of course, at first it was hard going, took forty years to get it anything like functional, had to be frequently saved from ditching into various ideological and aggressive pits, but in spite of all the nationalisms and setbacks it was still alive. It gave a sense of possibility that hadn’t existed before and it delivered. Mostly.
He wanted so badly that it would deliver for Jack. Things must get better, he said to the Marta in his mind, they must. We have to make sure they do.
Darius thought Jack would have wanted the usual—days out, sports, extra tech—but Jack had come home one day from school with the Vikings book and that was that. What about something closer to home? Marta had said. What about Kaokoland? Beautiful animals to see. Heritage of our own to treasure. Even if it doesn’t seem as exotic as Europe, it’s still good.
But Jack sighed. He liked Kaokoland well enough, but these ferocious ancients had stolen his imagination right away with their wooden dragonships and their romance of conquest and discovery, their bravery in the face of sea and ice. Somehow they felt more wild and full of possibility.
While Jack dreamed of ice Darius felt uneasy about the trip, no denying that. He’d never been to Europe, and he felt an old anger about the past, couldn’t help it; not a personal one that is, for living folk who weren’t involved, but for all them that were, far away and invisible to him, hidden by history. They were in Europe, surely, still. And in the world of his anxieties he saw Jack would go there, idealistic, full of ideas about Vikings, and there would be some kind of unpleasant thing that was bubbling around inside that society, rising to the surface like crab-garbage. A face that didn’t fit, a strange voice, a wrong move in a place where you couldn’t know the customs enough and trouble would start. Well, he couldn’t know that for sure, but he felt worried about it. And instead of being useful Darius’d be on his beach, sifting for news of whales and dolphins, sharks and shoals, telling them all about his fears, wondering if they’d carry them to the cold waters of the North Sea and ask the seals how it was going these days in that place that was a home to all the old invaders.
Seals had no problems with nationality. Only with orcas. And the whims of fish. And humans of course.
Darius thinks of these things because he knows Jack has reached modern history and is covering the twentieth century and its various tides and reckonings. The weight of this knowledge is a burden in the body, not just the mind. It has heft to it, as if genes are a chain back through the ages, dragging the past and its unfinished business. Children shouldn’t have burdens. It irks him that he had to learn and his son had to learn about this. It might be better if Jack was protected from it. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. They said history must be known so it wasn’t repeated, but what was there to fight about without it?
The past was another world from which this one was born. An inadequate parent, but the only one. Some kind of shame makes Darius want to slither off into the sea.
He’s keenly aware that he keeps telling Jack to finish the history course. But he wishes the history course didn’t exist. He doesn’t want to be the witness to crushing disappointment, doesn’t want to have to feel that himself, again.
A crab is stuck. It has been cycling through its disengagement protocols for over an hour and now it has reached the point where it signals him for help. Its battery is a bit low. If he can’t get it out quickly he’ll have to bring up the others to recover it. It’s a long job and the sun has started to go down. And here’s Jack, silent and watchful because he’s not able to go on with his lesson.
Darius takes off his hat, holds it out. A boy should learn to do something useful.
“Want to drive this crab out of trouble for me?”
Jack’s eyes light up immediately. He thought he was going to get a telling off for failing. “Yeah!”
They switch hats.
Jack loves to drive the crabs, even though they don’t do anything other than grub along for waste material and even though they’re nothing like a game. They require a knowledge of the sand, the silt, the strange configurations of legs they can get into and how those things conspire to free you from a terrible trap. You free the machine from something it can’t figure out, just because you’re human and you’ll try all kinds of things until you win.
They’re a puzzle and sometimes you discover things that you didn’t know about too, because by accident you shiver and shake, try the legs in new patterns, dig with the claws and some miracle happens and you have a new move in your repertoire that you’d never have thought of without the accident. Plus, the crabs are important, very valuable, doing great work, and helping them makes him happy, like a good deed for the day. He’s good with the crabs, they’re a happy place.
This one is rammed nose down against some piece of steel from the wreck of a hulk, long scuppered. It’s too rusted and decayed for it to be worth stripping for steel. Instead it’s part of the diving school’s monthly advanced skills trips to deep waters. Jack’s been there. You can go into the rooms inside it. It is mostly buried in the thick silt of the continental shelf and even though the chances are incredibly thin, more thin than the lottery, Jack always hopes he’s going to find a diamond. You never know.
He sometimes looks for a hint of bronze or silver, a chunk of wood that might be from a Drakkar ship that came long ago, bearing Vikings. It’s silly. They didn’t come this far south. But they could have. If they’d wanted to. Nothing to stop them but the distance from home. He felt their urge to find, to discover, to get for themselves some piece of the world. But his world was pieced out.
The crab has only 15 percent battery left, and after a test of each possible operation there’s some fault with the left-side front legs too. The balloon of garbage attached to it has wedged hard between one of the skeleton’s ribs and a section of its skin. First thing is to seal that off, label it, tag it, and detach it. Even with that done it remains stuck, but at least it isn’t an anchor on the crab now.
Jack moves his arms and the crab, mapped into his nervous system by the hat, copies him gingerly, a little left, a little right, forward, back. There is no leverage that will move him backward he discovers. The efforts of the ordinary systems to get themselves out of trouble have, thanks to the garbage balloon, actually dug it deeper in.
A bloom of silt, pale clouds, covers the cameras, swirls and shuts him into a tiny world of fog and guesswork. He can feel, through his own muscles, just how the little robot is held fast by the weight of the ship, the thick density of the mud, its own peculiar shape. On the beach he can still feel sun on his skin as he weaves and dances, searching for a clue that his brain will find without him thinking about it, just because he’s an animal who understands how to deal with these things. It’s fun and today, boy, it’s difficult. Sweat runs down his brow and, without a hand to use, he shakes his head.
The crab twists itself deeper. Uh oh.
Darius went back to the sunshade of the solar tent and sat down to make a brew. Just out of interest and not because he was prying, he put on Jack’s hat and glanced at the last lesson. Apocalyptic Times, 2020–2030. Yeah, that was a long course, long and the subject of a lot of argument and opinion, so much so that any effort to make a cohesive grab at the whole picture was exhausting. No wonder Jack was struggling. But you have to struggle or you don’t get through it and the big picture is important, the one they all lived by now.
He figured his way through the menus of the lesser hat until he was able to send a personal call out to Windhoek. He was put on a timer and spent the wait fixing the teabags and the mugs, a place for Jack to sit when he was done, a snack from the cooler.
Then Esther answers. “Hi, Darius!” She beams. They say that—someone’s smile beams—but it had just been a figure of speech to him until he saw her smile and then he understood. It had beams, like joyful lasers that cut straight through everything to a simpler world in which all things are right. It puts him right, straight away. Everything is all right. Although he suspects she’s like this with everyone, he’s delighted, though it’s a guilty pleasure. Even though Jack’s mother is long gone always the guilty twinge. Well, you live with these things.
“Hey, Esther.” An awkward moment, will he say anything? “How’s everything?” He won’t. A disappointed feeling, but there’s still hope, of a kind, they do have reason to chat. Esther is the lead local coordinator of Special Cleaning, which tracks the prevalence of biohostile chemicals in their precinct. Darius files reports for her department. There’s a perfectly good channel that doesn’t require personal contact, but they had met at a dinner hosted for a few award winners when he had won a Blue Wild Commendation and she had been at the same table and he’d had some wine and forgotten to ask what she did until the end of the night, by which time they’d already been talking for hours. So he hadn’t been scared off in time, and now there was a thing he had to deal with here, a dance he had to do, without knowing the steps.
If she detected any awkwardness in him she showed no sign of it.
“Ah, you know, I think soon I’ll be out of a job. The clean up on the southern coast is so good now we’re getting numbers that are almost neutral.” She beamed, and he smiled back. It was a good feeling, and not just because of the feedback in the hat, subtly beavering away to reinforce the appeal of otherwise mundane tasks, but because every success against the desecration was a step forward on his own personal sense of value. “But it also means I have less points,” she said. “Do you know, I think I’ll never reach my goal. A few years ago when things were still bad I was doing really well, but now unless I move on to some other position—I did a few sums and it could be another ten years before I have enough credit.” She sighed and did a dramatic shrug.
Darius felt a pang of concern. Would she really go? It had been—lord, it had been nearly a year since the dinner and he was still pussyfooting around like a kid. But he’d done it for so long that he felt sure he was solid friendzone material. Nothing else.
“How are you doing out there? How’s Jack?”
“Oh, he’s great. Just digging a crab out for me. Doing really well. School’s a bit of a struggle.”
“Still the Vikings?”
“Just one credit short.”
They both paused. One credit short of a major achievement was a huge deal. They’d bonded at their dinner party because they’d both been people with long term savings—the annotated fruits of a lifetime building up in their banks; Darius because he was happy out on the shore and had wasted no time explaining how wonderful it was to be out alone with nature, working on his favorite things. He wouldn’t give it up for the world. And Esther said she was saving for the moon. Not the whole thing. For the trip to the Moon, a walk on the surface, a two-day stay at the hotel, and then back again. In the grand scheme of all the things one could save for—and they were too many to scroll through in a day—this was the most expensive. For an average person it would take a saved credit lifetime of more than thirty years’ human-advancing, world-tending achievement.
Esther had been on track for that, head down and full steam, she said at the dinner, but then, time began to tell. The years pass, not always as you expect, she said, looking into her wine glass. And then she’d laughed and made a joke and Darius had said well, he’d lost count because he never wanted to do anything but stay where he was, the coast was a perfect place, a liminal place, did she know what that was? Oh yes. Esther was up on liminal things, the in-between, the meeting place of one thing and another, a very Namibia thing. Oh, they had a wonderful night talking.
And now, Jack, of all of them, was going to make his grade and cash in. And Esther was short and Darius wasn’t bothering, but Jack was going to make it and both of them felt how special it was, how rare. Most people settled for a series of little rewards.
“We must do something,” Esther said from her office.
“Special. Yes.” Darius was slower to react because it hadn’t occurred to him that he should make it more special than it already was. How could it be even more? But now, in Esther’s conviction, he realized that as a parent it was his business to mark it as such with a gesture. The ghost of Jack’s mother waited in the background, wishing him on. But what? He’d given it no thought until now, and he felt ashamed suddenly, stupid, but also, and more importantly, at a loss.
“I know!” Esther said suddenly with a snap of her fingers, always bubbling and never more so than now. “Leave it to me. When will he finish?”
“I’m not sure exactly. Today. Maybe tomorrow.”
“I need to go check the charts and call a friend. I had an idea. I can’t tell you now in case it doesn’t work out but keep me posted! Oh . . . was there something you wanted to say? I mean, you called me.”
“Ah. Um. Nothing special. Just checking in.” What an idiot. He was still blundering about in the mire of finding a gift. Years of sun, sea, sand, and wreckage had addled his mind. He was more place than person. He had a distinct sense of groping about, trying to put bits of himself back together, weave a self from the flotsam to make something that could sail.
“Well if you think of anything,” she said and then she blinked away before he had a chance to reply.
He was left sitting in the hut, looking at Jack do the comical, awkward dance of the sand crab tango, feeling alone and foolish. God save us from old men, he thought. He should help Jack.
He tuned into the pole and line, to catch the feed.
By using the crab’s siphon to pump water around it at high speed and then working the legs and pinchers together Jack had figured out that he could get the silt to loosen into a thick soup. Any pauses had it quickly solidifying again but he felt sure that if he could just keep going long enough he could dig down, flip over, and get out facing the other way. The contortions he had to figure out, recorded for other crab operators to laugh over later, made him feel like those yogis who could get both legs behind their heads and then stand on their hands. He was nowhere near that, but it felt like it, and he was trying not to laugh and blush at the same time as sweat ran down his nose and into his eyes. Butt in the air, his mind kept trying to frighten him off with dire warnings of complete humiliation and the distant seal colony started honking at the same time, which completed the circus just as the battery warning started to pump out its red alert.
Hot on the beach Jack danced like a crazed beetle.
Deep in the chill of the silt the crab spasmed and wrenched itself about, siphon spraying wildly at top volume. Muck and murk ballooned into vast fallout and there, on the camera for a moment he saw something shiny, with a gleam of wan light from the crab’s headers reflecting off something that looked like the rim of an embossed treasure. Then it was lost in the whirl and darkness as the crab reached a depth that gave it space to turn beneath the old stanchion. With smooth agility, it flipped and swiftly worked itself upward, outgassing spare air from its lift canisters in jets to either side.
The battery red filled his vision but it was fine. As the power died the emergency buoy deployed in a burst of bubbles and the old drone was safe on its spidery line, towed to the surface to await repair.
Jack took off his father’s hat and found himself sitting on the burning hot sand, breathing heavily. A few meters away the rod and line bent caringly toward the tide. He got to his hands and knees and then to his feet and staggered forward into the oncoming surf. The cold water iced his feet and shot straight to his brain. It was bliss.
“That,” said his Dad’s voice from behind him, full of amusement, “was epic.”
Jack groaned and then laughed. He’d be the stock instaclip all week, all year maybe. But it couldn’t spoil the feeling of victory and the sudden lurch of surprise at that silver metal edge buried so deep. “Did you see the treasure?”
“Treasure?”
“There was something under the ship. About two meters down. Metal. Old.”
He turned and saw his Dad picking up his hat, holding Jack’s out toward him. “I’ll take another look. But first, what about this history course?”
“Man . . .” There was nothing like a parent to remind you that things sucked.
“I thought maybe since you were so good at fixing my problem I could help you with yours. Do it together?”
“And I get to say what I think and you don’t try to fix it?”
His Dad took a breath and then shut his mouth, lips firmly closed for a second. “Okay.”
“Okay then.” Jack sighed heavily and took his hat back. They had their tea first, then walked along the shore together toward the black seal splodges massed to the north, the soft roaring ocean to their left and the gentle roll of the beach dunes to the right. The hats said there were no visiting lions near enough to cause any trouble, the prides that had come thanks to the drought were at the desalination rig to their south, taking advantage of its free fresh water and the shade of the palms that had been planted around it. Later they’d be moving north too, looking for a seal dining opportunity, but history wouldn’t take that long, hopefully.
The AR feed began, a formal rectangle of TV in the top right of their vision, a voice in the mind, a narrator who somehow managed to make it sound as though they were both familiar with these old ideas but still thrilled by them: “Humans have evolved to adapt because we are constantly fighting ourselves through the huge systems of ideas that we generate about everything we touch. We are our own arms race. The pandemics of the early twenty-second century brought exterior focus on our planet to the fore at a critical point in time, when the internet and machine learning tools were capable of creating new environments, making old methods of governance and trade obsolete. Today’s massively gamified system of logistics that covers the globe emerged from the shopping habits and trends of that period in time. And from there we can trace those roots right back through to the very earliest periods of human endeavor . . .”
At last they’d stopped doing war, genocide, religious stupidity, greed and tragedy and all the things about human behavior that made you want to bury your head.
“. . . although it wasn’t until the repeated decimation of the population and the loss of almost all recognizable civilized institutions in economics and infrastructure caused by a combination of disease and climate change that corporate delivery systems and data analytics ended previous forms of party political representation . . .”
Oh no, right. Before the rising, the fall to the bottom.
Jack found himself gazing out to sea, across the huge expanse of the Atlantic, breakers whitecapping far offshore and rolling to paw at his ankles. The wind whipped around his head, tugging the hat as if suggesting he throw it away. The voice and the other images might as well not have been there.
He felt his dad nudge him, the prompt at the thought level, connecting one dot to another just enough for Jack to see what it was that the old man was getting at.
Before you learn to turn over, you have to really get stuck.
His ideas took shape.
Things were impossible and awful, and then, bit by bit, you did things until you got free of the past. He grinned as he combined that thought with his afternoon of crab wrangling, and put that down as part of his final essay. He thought of the metal shine. You never knew what you might find.
Esther put a call in to Julia. The local times were close enough she didn’t have to give it a second thought, even though Julia was thousands of miles north in England. Julia was busy but she’d left her feed on Browse. For Esther it was almost time to finish for the day, so she put her feet up and allowed herself a surf in Julia’s afternoon as she waited.
Julia lived at the top of a high-rise, one of a few in the city center, and it had great views but Esther most enjoyed the fact that instead of the old city palette of concrete, glass, and steel here nearly everything was greened over, and if it wasn’t green, it was some interesting Victorian brick and stone arcade or frontage, with only a few strategically left long lines of modern architecture.
The recovery strategy for Northern Europe post loss had been to withdraw to the cities, using them as much tighter hubs than in the past: heat was effectively conserved and distribution of supplies better managed. Those buildings that were basically large glasshouses had been converted to vegetable factories, planters on a massive scale, while older structures were remodeled into contemporary housing. Even with fairly generous portions offered, this still meant that the remaining population had abandoned almost all suburban structures and those areas were being reclaimed and rewilded. Julia was part of an aquatic group that specialized in the restoration of natural waterways and the decontamination of groundwaters, and she and Esther had been in many of the same circles for years.
Esther was able to view what she wanted through Julia’s hat, although in this case it wasn’t a hat, it was a headset shaped like a hairband, the one with the glitter disco boppers on the head if she wasn’t mistaken. She could see the tiny colored reflections of the sunlight glancing off the boppers onto the rich leafy surrounds of Julia’s balcony where figs and grapes twined in trained profusion over whatever lay beneath. As Julia worked she was idly nipping the tips out of her tomatoes and feeling the mulch for moisture. Across the road on another tall building, which Esther thought had been a bank, she could see small birds fighting and darting in and out through a temperate rainforest that clung to the wall, watered by misters concealed by the leaves.
Data from Julia’s headset showed Esther what everything was, how it had got there, what it was for. She glimpsed the river, boats upon it, low and long, and the canal, and then beyond them the brickwork of mills and the yards by the railway where all the dismantled buildings were sorted for scrap. There was a green run that crossed the human landscape, cutting through the city, where people rode horses in the daytime. Somewhere south of here there was a park for driving cars and riding bikes, racing and all kinds of things. What used to be in a preserve and what had been everywhere had reversed their positions.
Whatever Julia had been preoccupied with finished and her line cleared. She noticed Esther’s arrival with a quick straighten up and an “Ow!” as her lower back twinged. “Hello. What brings you in today? Did you figure out if we owe you a water credit?”
“Ah no, that’s still pending a review. You’re good for it at least for another month and if you do get called for it then it’s only going to be some rig supplies. The Chinese covered us for a year in exchange for extra solar. This is more a personal call. You used to be in with the Venturers set, Julia. Were there Black Vikings? Did they get to Africa?”
Julia looked out over the city center. Cloud was coming in from the west but the white stone of the old hotel near the station was glowing with oncoming sunset and there wouldn’t be rain today. A mercy. The river was at bursting point. She swung her mind around toward the piece of her that used to deal with the Northern Britain retreats when she was an apprentice. She’d managed their resources and immigration as they took on and left off people who were touring. The British base for the permanent “Viking” population was at Lindisfarne, but they had places all along the coasts. “Black Vikings. Why are you asking me?”
“I thought you were the expert.” Esther had a cheeky voice on, one that Julia always felt was the audio equivalent of having someone pinch your bottom.
“Not like entire groups of African Vikings,” she said after a moment’s pause for reference in the Venturer’s Database. “But there were colored Vikings. So definitely possible. Even if there weren’t any we’ve got about thirty Black Vikings now on the Northward rotation so you won’t feel out of place, and . . . why are you asking? Are you trading in your Moon Ticket?”
“Ah, I . . .” Esther explained about Jack. She may have dwelled a bit on Darius, more than strictly necessary. She ended with, “. . . and you worked on admin for the Venturers, didn’t you?”
“It was ages ago,” Julia said.
“But I have this idea,” Esther went on, getting what she really wanted with good-natured determination, “because I heard him talking about it . . .”
“Esther, have you been spying on Darius?”
“Only for research purposes. He’s always in Browse anyway. It’s an open channel. Mostly just the sea to be honest, and sometimes some sand. He thinks about a lot. This morning he caught a . . . No, no. Anyway, listen to me. Going on The Ventures at Jack’s level will only give him a week with them. I was thinking a whole summer would be good but it’s a long way from home . . .”
Julia listened, twirling a tomato leaf, and at the end of Esther’s plan she said, “That is some package of extras right there, Esther. Long haul. I mean. It’s a lovely thought. But I can’t authorize that kind of excess. Even if I was the admin. Which I’m not. I . . .”
“I can give you the extra. I’ve got my eye on a new job.”
“I thought you were short of credits. This would be—I don’t know. Some massive amount.”
“I am. I was. No, I’ve thought about this a lot, Julia. I want to do this. I did want to go to the moon . . . but it’s more important to give something special to someone whose life will really be helped by it, rather than spend it all on yourself, isn’t it? And I’ve got so many saved up, there’s loads I can still do.”
Julia, friendship radar now tuned in to its very sharpest setting, reviewed the information that Esther was sending her. There were strict rules about credit trading, particularly when it involved large amounts, but it was possible to make gifts sometimes, for certain things. “Are you sure, Ess? You’ll never make up that much in any job I can think of.”
“It’s cool,” Esther said. “There’s a position managing the solar panel farms in the desert. They grow a lot of crops in the shade there now. We’ve started a vineyard. There’ll be wine. You can come and taste it. And it’s too late for me to have a child now. This is like having one. You know? Lots of people sponsor. This is just me doing that. I mean I could die tomorrow and then I’d just have left it all to the national pool, so this way at least I get to do what I want.”
Ten years of savings, she was talking about. And Julia knew about the sudden leap of age coming at you because she was ahead of Esther by ten years and yes, priorities do change. Dreams become other. She’d rather liked the idea of Esther on the moon, goddess of all she surveyed. But lately there was news of war again in the Middle East, as people never did let go of their grievances that easily. The idea of more conflicts had tired her out. Tired everyone out in her social world, as if all they had done in laying the ground for mass cooperation was to be wasted again. A few attacks in the right place often disrupted communications, made the heart race with fear that a piece of the world was going to be lost, or all of it, in some reversion to older ways. It had a way of sharpening the mind.
“I’ll sort out the forms,” Julia said. “He’ll need vaccinations. Up to date . . .”
“Thanks,” Esther said quietly, cutting off Julia’s dedicated and accurate information dump. “Thank you. I owe you one.”
“It’s not going to be instant.”
“That’s OK. Better do it right.”
“And Esther.”
“Hm?”
“If you’ve waited this long for a date and you’re trying this hard maybe you should take the initiative, you know? Call when it’s not about work.”
Airy, happy, dismissive—“This isn’t me trying. I don’t have to try. This is for Jack.”
“Right. As you say. I mean, we’re all Browsing. No special reasons. Just on random. You could get anyone, anywhere in the world. Skydivers, rocket scientists, tennis stars, models, geniuses . . .”
Esther hung up on her with the air of a proudly pleased/displeased fairy queen.
Well, she deserved it for the butt-pinching tone, Julia thought, taking up her feed spray and moving slowly along, one plant at a time, through her personal jungle. She felt a moment’s sadness for the loss of Esther’s dream. How her eyes used to light up and her voice would shine as she spoke of the moon: she’d reach its silver sands (never cheese dust for Esther, silver sands, like a fantasy novel) and stand there in the footprints of the first ones, and look down to see the Earth at last entire.
She had a way with words, Esther, and a way with dreams. It seemed wrong to let her give it away, but then again, it was just like her to do that, because she knew what it felt like to have such a thing in the first place.
Julia’s own ambitions had been far more parochial and she’d achieved them early, netting her position at the top of this garden tower and a comfortable pastime that made her feel she did good. She could take part vicariously in space travel and the derring-do going on about the globe at any time, thanks to people leaving their lives up for Browsing. She’d never felt the need to actually go in person. And the Viking Venture—that was hard off-grid living for someone used to a cozy life. She’d tried it for a few days and hated it with a passion. So much mud, and rain, and wind, and no thermal underwear.
“I hope you like it,” she said aloud to Jack, shaking her head. People didn’t know what they were in for. But you could always bail out. It was for fun after all.
The cold currents of the southern Atlantic drive north up the coast of Namibia. Their bitter temperatures keep the water rich with nutrients and provide a home for fish that are as long-lived as people, and as slow to mature. They also bring thick fog all along the sea and the shore, cutting out light, tamping down sound, turning everything into a softer form of itself.
It’s been weeks since Jack turned in his painstaking essay, forming unwanted and exam-friendly opinions on information equity, stakeholder education, and all the reward and response systems that now dominate the connected human world as if they are rats in an endless maze, pressing levers for food, learning special tricks for the hell of it. Day after day he waits for news of when he can go, patiently, helping Darius with the fish counts and the water samples and the management of the crabs. His dad’s life is boring. But it’s peaceful. And he did pass. He got his credit. He’s on his way. Eventually. But all this waiting is hard.
The fog burns off by midmorning, usually, but today it’s lingered, keeping the temperature chilly. Darius has an early start—and Jack is with him, yawning, and complaining, because they’ve searched that wreck every day and found nothing and he thinks he imagined that metal, or that it was some Coke can or other worthless nonsense. The sea is always doing strange things with its belongings when you’re not looking.
But today he’s looking at the fog and it’s rolling in lightly off the sea, propelled by the wave action. It’s thinning, and here and there patches of clear air appear and among them suddenly, offshore, a silhouette.
It has a smooth upward curve, like the bold sweep of an axe, and a triangular, proud head, bent at the neck, and a long, long body that rides just clear of the waves and he can see and then not see the unmistakable red and white of a huge single sail across its back.
It’s a Drakkar longship. Only five thousand miles off course. Give or take. But it’s definitely there. The oars are creaking and their dip-splash is cautious as they creep in, closer, closer. He’s not sure he’s awake. Maybe someone is messing with his hat. He takes it off. But the ship is still there. Dip. Splash.
“Dad! Dad!”
“I see it.” Dad seems less surprised than he ought to.
Jack realizes suddenly it’s real, not a dream. It’s actually there. It’s come for him.
“But it’s not on the itinerary,” he says, knowing the route of their journey by heart. (It goes Greenland, England, Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, Spain, and then back again in a constant tour stopped only by weather and acts of cosmic disaster such as satellite failure.)
The Drakkar moves closer. Oars feather it about. In the prow stands a tall man mantled in grey fur. His long dreadlocks are bound in silver and bronze. He has an axe in his belt. He raises his arm.
Jack stands like an idiot, a fish gasping for air, until Denzel Ironsides gets out of the ship with a leap that owes a lot to faith and drama, and only a bit to hat-advice. But he lands it, thigh-deep, with the Drakkar dicing with death behind him as it checks its draft against the sands. He has to yomp through the shallows for quite a while before he reaches the beach; six feet and six inches of solid warrior. He doesn’t have a helmet with horns on, of course, because those aren’t authentic. But he does have a horn and as he grins and stamps his way up to Jack he stops and puts it to his lips and it sounds out a strong, lonely braying that shoos away the last of the fog.
Half a mile north the seals begin honking.
Jack turns to Darius at the sound of the call and his face is transformed completely into absolute joy.
The Vikings have come. All of them.
In a ship.
For him.
For this moment Darius would have spent everything. But he didn’t. He doesn’t know how it happened.
Then, after a minute’s thought, he does.
“Here we are,” Darius said, gesturing at the small shack that served as his major outpost.
Esther, dressed in her best, still cool from the car ride out, held her scarf firmly against the wind, and stepped indoors out of the brilliant sunlight. “This is very bijou,” she said after a moment. “More bijou than I imagined.” She sat down in the best chair at the box table where it was set with the finest wooden tableware, and Darius fetched tonic water out of the cooler. The fish was on the barbecue. The bread was sliced. They had an excellent view of the sea, which was calm, and only the odd whiff from the seal colony.
“I want to thank you,” he said, “for what you did.”
“Oh, it was nothing,” she waved her hand, surveying the beach as if it was paradise. If it hadn’t been a minute ago, it now rearranged itself that way in her presence.
He took out the shell that Jack had found a few days before and set it in front of her. “For you.”
It was a worn conch, rather white and scrubbed by the sea to the point of losing its projections, but as she picked it up it was cued to his AR memory feed. As he looked at the shell she would see the video postcards Jack had sent from his travels northward, and the brave (and sometimes hair-raising) voyage of The Sea Stallion II, which, after its dramatic entrance, had taken a blimp cargo-lifter long-haul flight to Algiers, before resuming its usual route for this time of year, plowing steadily up the European coast, pausing often to “raid” scenic places.
They enjoyed looking over them together for a few minutes and then she saw what else he had put in the shell.
She blinked, looked at him. “So much time,” she said.
“I’m not using them and I probably never will,” he said, suddenly shy. “There’s enough for you to buy your ticket.”
She paused, blinking. She put her hand on his hand. “But there’s not enough for two.”
He smiled. “I can wait down here.”
Her face, normally so cheerful, was teary and upset, so much so he wondered if he’d made some kind of mistake.
“It’s too much!” she said, blotting her face with her scarf.
“Not enough,” he said decisively, raised his chipped cup to her, and they clinked. They sipped. The tension broke.
“Thank God I wasn’t saving for Mars!” she said. “You could die before I got back.”
“Are they even going to Mars yet?” he asked.
“Yes, later this year . . .” and the conversation was off again, easy as the rollers moving away down the beach.