At the Edge of the Game (29 page)

Commotion
upstairs. Heathshade and family clumping around, making the ceiling shake and
the dusty lampshade sway.

The frost makes
it hard to look out over the rooftops, but it’s possible to tell that smoke is
rising in the distance. Heavy, black, oily smoke caught reluctantly, grudgingly
by the cold wind that curves over the huddled city structures.

The new snow is
deepening in the street. There’s going to be no summer. Some powerful ur-sense
is kicking in, tells me so. Same thing that makes birds fly south maybe.

The birds are
largely gone now. The ones that remain, or survive, are types I’ve never seen
before. What’s this brawny red-legged terror that goose-steps over the iced
roof slates so happily? Seen a few of them around lately. Soon the polar bears
will trek south on a frozen ocean, and make our living rooms their dens.

Now Heathshade
and co are coming down the stairs hurling curses at each other, including the child.
Helen waddles to the door ungainly with child.

‘Maybe we should
see what’s going on.’

‘Their
business.’

She ignores me,
opens the door. Already the three are on the bottom flight.

‘Marcus!’

‘Gotta go,’ he
says.

I can hear the
sound of the front door opening. She tries to follow them down, but is
incapable.

‘Come back in
here,’ I call.

‘They’re going!
They’ve got bags with them. Go down and find out what’s going on.’

Probably
should. I grab my coat.

I catch up with
them a little way down the road. Heathshade has a heavy pack on his shoulder,
is dragging the child along using a blue toy sledge. Daisy Carruth is carrying
a light pack, is wrapped up in many layers, the outermost of which is fur. Clueless.
You’d think Heathshade would know you wear fur on the inside.

But maybe he
just doesn’t care whether she’s warm or cold.

‘Mind your own
business, George.’

‘What are you
doing?’

‘Nothing.’

A distorted
radio voice emanates from inside one of his pockets.

‘What’s that?
The scanner?’

He grabs my
coat, pulls me close to him.

‘Keep your voice
down.’

‘What are you
doing, Marcus?’

‘All right.
There’s a supply ship out in the harbour, stuck in the ice. I’m going to be on
it when it goes.’

‘We all are,’
Daisy Carruth clarifies.

‘See ya, George.’

‘Wait a minute
–’

‘No. Fuck off.’

He pushes me
away. They depart.

But ahead of
them guns start firing. An APC speeds past at the junction, followed by
another. There’s a resounding thud, a grenade, and then the sound of shouting
men, and more shooting.

They turn around
and start heading up the hill instead.

He glares at me.
‘We’ll go the long way around.’

‘Let us go with
you.’

‘No.’

They turn onto
a sidestreet, out of sight.

The next day
I retrieved the flatboat and used it to cross over to the iceberg. I hauled
myself down the widest of the shafts melted through the ice by the probe
lasers. At the end of the shaft, Dexter had burned an opening through the
seaship’s thick hull. A probe awaited me within the dark interior of the
vessel. It guided me down a very narrow, curiously echoing corridor and in
through a doorway. This was the compartment where Dexter had died.

I dropped
some chemical flares on the floor. Dexter’s body was at the opposite end of the
room. Scattered over the floor were about a dozen mummified husks, the remains
of those who had died here ninety-eight millennia ago. Fragments of clothing
still remained, but most of the bodies were naked. Faces were still discernible
on most; wispy hair was still in place; browned teeth were bared through
desiccated lips. All the bodies were shrunken to the size of children.

I went to
Dexter. Rigour mortis had locked him into position, and it was difficult to
lift him. As I struggled with his inert bulk, I saw a necklace around the
nearest of the mummified corpses. I leaned over the body to remove it, and saw
that the arms held to the breast the miniscule shape of an infant. The necklace
held a locket. I snapped it open, breaking the door off its delicate hinges. Inside,
perfectly preserved, was a picture of a man and a woman smiling at each other
in that easy way possible only to the young. I sat against the wall, struck by
the surprise of this discovery.

That was
when I noticed the letter, folded into a square in the mother’s lap. ‘GEORGE’,
it said on the visible side. I summoned the probe and got it to image each
fragment as I turned it over to examine its contents. Words here and there were
still clearly visible. ‘…the smell in here…’ ‘…sing to her a lot…’ ‘…go to
sleep…’

The fragile
pieces did not hold together long. The resistance of the stagnant, stale air
was enough to crack each piece, and finally, by the time all the imaging was
done, all that was left was a little mound of very fine powder. Soon even that
would be gone. But I did have the images.

I slipped
the locket into Dexter’s shirt pocket. With a good deal of effort I managed to
get his body out to the flatboat and bring it ashore. I started the ship's
engines and guided the ship into the air. I flew slowly at first, in wide
circles around the iceberg, and then powered up to Mach 2. Back to the island I
went, never to return again to the iceberg.

Eventually,
whether that summer or the next, the berg would melt, and the boat would sink
to the bottom of the deep harbour. There the sea water would rust the hull and
dissolve the bodies. In a few years, all trace of the ancient vessel and those
who died aboard it, whoever they were, would be gone. That was how it should
be. All of them, including Dexter, belonged to another time. I should have gone
down with the ship myself.

This jury-rigged
apparatus is ingenious, even if I do say so myself. With Helen laying atop
three car tyres lashed together with rope, I find that I can haul her along the
snow and ice quite easily. As long as this harness holds, we will make okay
progress. Our desperate gambit commences on a positive note.

The bitter wind
is shoving us along the solid river ice, lending extra impetus. To the right
are the roofs and steeples of the city. The left bank is more wooded, though
the trees are denuded, dead, half-buried in snow.

‘Warm?’

She raises a
gloved thumb.

What ill-adapted
creatures we are. Effort makes one sweat even in the cold. When I stop moving,
the sweat will cool, may freeze on my body, rendering me a goner.

The fighting was
over by the time we left. Seems like one of the factions was wiped out
completely. Bodies and blood all over the ice back there. Thought that the
soldiers on the quay would stop us heading out towards the harbour, but they
don’t seem to care. Surely they know about the ship. They must figure that
staying put is a better bet. Cannot agree. This is a dead country. The time has
come to get the hell out.

My eyes are
playing tricks. I blink at it at something small up ahead. No, it’s actually
real - a dog. A skeletal collie whimpering and wriggling, spread over the ice
like an immobile seal, bits of ice frozen into its fur. Lacking that key
hardness attribute, I will not just walk past. Placing my hand on top of the
animal’s head may in some way comfort it. My knife sinks into the back of its
neck incredibly easily and, brain separated decisively from spinal column, it
simply closes its eyes and is dead. No blood or anything.

No point in
thinking about the calorific value of the carcass. Got to keep moving.

The wind
suddenly gets stronger, whips up clouds of white. Bare, blasted hills on both
sides, nothing ahead.

This inchoate
haze is the edge of the game, a place we’re not supposed to see, the boundary where
the developers have put a barrier we can’t cross. Keep going this way and we’ll
be pushed sideways, get nowhere, have to return to the field of play.

 In the whipping
wind even the sound of my own panting fails to register. Can’t really feel my
legs. Walking happening entirely through the good offices of the medulla
oblongata. Concept of origin and destination remoter than maybe is advisable.
Concentrate. Make neckache be a mantra. Anchor right in the now. Perceive
spreading crystal bits, keening chords in the turbulent air, sea scent. Go
deeper than that, to where the weightless weight of the moment is palpable.
Observe how the world works, how earth, air and sky interface, how we are stuck
in the middle of that. Feel how curious it is to stand on a surface. Such an
arbitrary way to exist. Of all the rare phenomena in the Cosmos. Or perhaps not
so solid, or how would I have dug Dexter’s grave? I tried to be solemn about
it, do it with sufficient ceremony to honour his unusual life. Being alone,
though, it was difficult. Nothing seemed real. And I couldn't decide what he
had meant to me, whether I had even liked him or not. I didn't know if he had
been my friend. In a situation like ours, perhaps the word simply didn't apply.

Now I have time
to think about the choices facing me. With the
Unquiet Spirit
I can go
almost anywhere I desire. Pandora’s box is open.

I’ve managed to
access the ship's records of Dexter’s voyage to the Betelgeuse Nebula. It was
not the exotic wonders he encountered that touched me so much as the
commonplace beauties, those so familiar and yet so inconceivably distant. I had
seen those same beauties on my own voyage to a completely different part of the
Galaxy. How could rainclouds, volcanoes, forests, rivers, bolts of lightning, flocks
of flying creatures, desert vistas, craters, cliffs, coastlines on worlds
separated by thousands of light years be so similar, share the same
magnificence? Yet they did, manifestly.

I have rejected
the notion of embarking on another great interstellar voyage, crossing the
Galaxy and never turning back. I don’t doubt that the ship and its relativistic
boosters are still up to the job. I could escape the world forever, create a
future free of the legacies of human toil. But there is a far better option. I
shall travel great circuits of the local group of stars, returning to the Earth
every few years of ship time, every few thousand years of Earth time. There
must still be many humans scattered throughout space and time. As the millennia
and aeons unfold, relativistic space explorers will continue to return to the
earth. Generally, they’ll appear a few at a time and have experiences similar
to those of myself and Dexter, but I don’t think it unlikely that at some
juncture sufficient numbers will come together to restart a full-scale human
society. The loud city streets of ancient times will live again. I can’t quite
recall the peculiar desperation that drove me from the world when last it was
filled with humans. How good it would be to have that back again.

A physical
realignment is underway in my brain. Gone is that feeling of pacing the walls
of a cage. Ahead of me is an infinite trail, an open, unlimited expanse. Or is
it? Why, then, should I stumble? Have I in fact hit the edge of the game, the
boundary force field?

‘George!’

‘Sorry.’

Struggle up out
of piled snow. Wandered into dead thicket at the Suir’s edge.

The course of
the river has veered south, and ahead it widens out, merges into the
three-rivered harbour and then the sea.

Our goal is visible
as a dark shape away to the indistinct horizon. That better be it anyway. Also
ahead: several other trudging groups. We’re not the only civilians hoping to
secure a berth.

We’ve lost the
assistance of the strong blasting airflow. The wind buffets like it’s trying to
knock some sense into us, but it’s a bit late for that. Important thing is to
keep moving, not forgetting to judiciously look back from time to time to make
sure Helen hasn’t fallen out of her tyre chariot.

Arms and legs
move of their own volition, autopiloting while I concentrate on enduring pain
in neck, shoulders, back. I may never stand up straight again.

Just keep going.
Another bit and we’ll be there.

Dozens of people
are already at the edge of the ice, staring the fifty metres across dark water
to the rusted mass of the Italian ship. Also vehicles, crates, sacks, parka-ed
men with guns. Beyond is a naval vessel. Must have come to the rescue of these
fellas.

The harness
snaps. All my weight goes through my wrists into the unyielding sea ice, which
sends it right back as agony shooting up my arms.

Don’t want to
rise again. But Helen groans. Focus returns.

I touch her pale
face with a de-gloved hand, and drag her off the tyres, gently as I can, get my
arms under her. Ergs flow from somewhere, and I lift her up.

Close enough to
feel the shake of the ship’s foghorn when it sounds.

Stumbling
forward now. Got to keep upright, rise above the lactic acid fire, the
crunching vertebral compression, the rupture of alveoli.