Book Review: Riddley Walker

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980) 235 p.

This is another book, like Typee, that I’d been meaning to read after reading its inspired-by equivalent in my favourite book of all time, Cloud Atlas. The section “Sloosha’s Crossin” is largely derived from Russell Hoban’s classic post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker – particularly from its bizarre and fascinating use of language. I’ve had this on my shelf for a while, but Russell Hoban passed away last month, and I’ve developed a morbid habit of reading authors’ books after they die. Cards on the table, I’ve been meaning to re-read my beloved Discworld series for some time, but Terry Pratchett, well…

Anyway. Riddley Walker is set about 2000 years in the nuclear-devastated future, in a community in Kent that has regressed to Iron Age technology, and is written in first-person point of view by the titular twelve year-old “man,” in an English that has degenerated to a phoenetic level.

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kild a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.

Normally I read books in my mind in my own Australian accent, regardless of where or when they are set. I found I couldn’t read Riddley Walker in anything other than the accent of Hagrid from Harry Potter – West Country, right?

Hoban took five years to write this book, and said that by the end of it he had become a bad speller. Riddley’s language is primitive but consistent, with undeclared but definitive rules, and we later found out that literacy in his society is actually a closely guarded secret. It’s something of a through-the-looking-glass moment when we see his society’s religious text, handed down from shortly after the nuclear war, which is even more degenerate:

13. Eusa wuz angre he wuz in rayj & he kept pulin on the Littl Man the Addoms owt stretcht arms. The Littl Man the Addom he begun tu cum apart he cryd, I wan tu go I wan tu stay. Eusa sed, Tel mor. The Addom sed, I wan tu dark I wan tu lyt I wan tu day I wan tu nyt. Eusa sed, Tel mor. The Addom sed, I wan tu woman I wan tu man. Eusa sed, Tel mor. Addom sed, I wan tu plus I wan tu minus I wan tu big I wan tu littl I wan tu aul I wan tu nuthing.

The broken English, however carefully crafted, could easily be nothing more than a gimmick if Hoban wasn’t capable of telling a deeper story. Fortunately, he is. Riddley Walker is everything good post-apocalyptic fiction is supposed to be: creative, imaginative, gripping and literary. The language certainly slows the pace down and makes for difficult reading; normally a book of this size would take me half the time to read that it did. But once you grow used to it, you fall into the flow of the story, and find that Riddley regularly comes up with passages that – translated back into regular English – would not be out of place in a literary novel.

There wernt nothing terbel happening and yet there wer. Whats so terbel its just that knowing of the horrer in every thing. The horrer waiting. I dont know how to say it. Like say you myt get cut bad and all on a suddn there you are with your leg opent up and youre looking at the mussl fat and boan of it. You always knowit what wer unner the skin only you dont want to see that bloody meat and boan. Never mynd.

Riddley Walker is a difficult book to read and certainly not for everyone, but it is absolutely a classic of post-apocalyptic fiction, and deserves all the praise it receives.

Book Review: A Monster Calls

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (2011) 206 p.

Siobhan Dowd came up with the idea for this novel before dying of breast cancer, and passed it on to the children’s author Patrick Ness. In the introduction, Ness explains that he didn’t want the book to become a hamfisted attempt to imitate Dowd, and so used it as a seed for other ideas, writing his own book with the basic outline of what Dowd had given him. We’ll never know what Dowd would have written, but judging from the actual product, Ness made a good decision.

A Monster Calls follows Connor O’Malley, a boy growing up somewhere in the British Isles, who is watching his mother slowly die of cancer. Bullied at school, treated with unbearable sympathy by his teachers and peers, and estranged from his father who lives in America with a new wife and child, he has withdrawn into a private, alienated world of grief and anger. One night, at seven minutes past midnight, a monster visits Connor. It demands to know “the truth” from him, and begins to visit him regularly, telling him a series of stories. These stories are not the simple fairytales one would expect from stories with their structure. They are not fables about good and evil, but morally complex tales involving characters faced with difficult decisions. Connor dreads the passing of the stories, because the monster has told him that at the end of the telling, he expects to hear a story from Connor – by which he means “the truth.”

This is clearly, from the outset, an allegorical tale – but it’s not the allegory I expected, and it’s a deeper book than I thought it would be. It’s enhanced with dark, black-and-white, scratchy illustrations by Jim Kay, which are absolutely vital to the success of the book. They melt in and out of the text itself, lending a disturbing atmosphere that would be absent otherwise. The monster itself – a huge, bristling, spiked creature that spawns from a yew tree and is only ever seen in darkness – is foreboding and ominous, the drawcard of the book, just as Frank the rabbit is the drawcard of “Donnie Darko” or the Pale Man is the drawcard of “Pan’s Lanbyrinth.” They’re creepy, creative and fantastic, but not load-bearing. They’re surrounded by well-crafted stories that do them justice.

A Monster Calls is a perfect example of a book in that elusive category: children’s/YA books that can be enjoyed equally by adults. With the sparse text and frequent illustrations, it can be read in a couple of sittings – although ideally you’d read it on a dark and stormy night in a rural house in Ireland, not on a 38 degree day on the Sydenham line, like I did. It’s also, thanks to Jim Kay’s illustrations, one of those books that’s a pleasure to regard simply as an object. A Monster Calls is a dark, sad and profound story about coping with grief which I can recommend to anyone.

A Monster Calls at The Book Depository

Book Review: Shooting Stars And Flying Fish

Shooting Stars and Flying Fish by Nancy Knudsen (2011) 315 p.

I have a vague idea that I’d like to go sailing one day, largely for the travel rather than the sport, and so I read this book just to get a feel for that idea – also because I got a free proof copy from my old bookstore job. That essentially means that this is a light break from “real” reading, which I would normally review in a paragraph or two. Instead the author irritated me with her patronising and condescending attitudes towards foreign cultures, so this is going to be a rant about Orientalism. I feel like I have the right to dwell on this, because the book sure does.

Shooting Stars and Flying Fish is an account of Nancy Knudsen’s four-year sailing voyage with her husband Ted, leaving Sydney on their yacht Blackwattle and circumnivagating the globe through the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, Atlantic, Caribbean and Pacific. I suspect much of it, particularly the second half, is assembled from articles Knudsen wrote for Sail-World magazine; the chapters seem to have a brief, self-contained aspect to them. Knudsen’s writing is technically competent, and although she is prone to cliches and excessive adverbs, her writing is readable enough and certainly better than, say, Steve Crombie’s in Lost On Earth. (She does write the entire book in present tense, though, which is a pet peeve of mine.)

What mostly bothered me about Shooting Stars and Flying Fish was that it was very clearly, from the outset, going to be a travel memoir about rich people who leave behind stuffy jobs and discover How Stressed And Hassled People In The First World Are, and How Genuine And Happy The People In The Third World Are, and Who Is Truly The Most Fortunate, Am I Right?

I’ve written about this topic before, but I’m not sure I’ve come across as perfect an example of it as Knudsen’s blissfully naive (or editorially selective) travel writings. My choice example would be Eritrea, a country on the coast of Africa. Knudsen acknowledges that the country has seen war, and that the capital is largely in ruins, but then seems quite smitten with the place:

Among the dereliction, people walk with pride and patience… the shopkeepers greet us hospitably… We stop, like the locals, at the makeshift bars under the night sky, enjoying the bonhomie and music which defy their poor surroundings… We sit, included for a while in the warm embrace of the family…

Her husband offers this gem of originality:

“Look how they live. They have nothing. But, you know, they really have everything, everything in the world that is important.”

Judging from Knudsen’s basic run-down, you get the impression that the Eritrea is a poor country, but one where people get by with what they can and appreciate the simple things in life. Except – whoops! – she forgot to mention it’s also a dictatorial one-party state with one of the most shocking human rights records on the planet. Eritreans have literally no rights, government kidnappings are common, female genital mutilation rates hover around 90%, and it ranks dead last on the Press Freedom Index – worse even than North Korea.

I’m not saying that living under a brutal Orwellian regime means that Eritreans are incapable of being happy about anything, though I expect it would certainly put a crimp in things. I’m just saying it might have been worth a sentence or two. Otherwise one might get the impression that Knudsen is sailing across the world without taking anything in, blissfully unaware of the realities of people’s lives, marvelling about how “simply” they live and how good that must be for their souls, before returning to her mod-con outfitted yacht.

But she can’t be entirely clueless. I mean, she did meet a teenager who told her he was planning on fleeing the country before being conscripted into the army for his seven-year stint as part the government’s military machine:

While it is easy to condemn this teenager for whose freedom so many have given their lives, it is also easy to understand a young soul who thinks of seven years as an eternity – indeed, it is exactly a third of his life so far.

Wait, what?

easy to condemn this teenager for whose freedom so many have given their lives

What? Who are you even talking about? Other soldiers in the Eritrean Army? “Harden up, Mohammed, it’s just seven years’ service to your evil government, it’ll build character, you young scamp!” Yes, I know she then says that it’s also “easy to understand,” but the fact that she even prefaced it with saying that it was “easy to condemn” – who the flying fuck would find it “easy to condemn” a teenager trying to escape becoming a tool of government oppression in a country with less human rights than North Korea?

Moving on. As Knudsen herself moves up the Red Sea, she is beset with doubt. Doubt about her simplistic and frankly embarassing perceptions of the Third World? No, doubt about whether she wants to return to the First World, where she fears that “there will be noise, tension, crowding, discord, pollution…” I’m sorry? Nancy Knudsen must have visited a very different Third World than I did. Some of kind of mirror-image Third World. Perhaps an oceanic Third World, where she moved about in a comfortable, modern, yacht that she could call her own, rather than one where she regularly had to slog through filth-strewn slums with thousands upon thousands of human beings who never shut up. I, too, remember how terrible it was to return to the First World, where people didn’t shit in the streets, where garbage was collected by government employees, where it wasn’t just a nicer place to be but also a place where people wouldn’t die of easily avoidable diseases simply because they had no choice but to live in their own filth.

Because that’s the crux of the matter, really. I can turn my nose up at the smells and chaos of the Third World, and that’s my albatross to carry, but the real problem is health and safety. These things have a real and visceral impact on the lives of people living in the Third World. It is not a snobbish Western conceit. It is a grim fact of life which means that people in the Third World have life expectancies in the 40s and 50s, skyrocketing infant mortality, rampaging famine, widespread AIDS and malaria, low literacy and education rates and very little chance of improving their lot in life.

That is why we send humanitarian missions there. That is why they try to leave their countries, immigrating en masse to the developed world in the hope of a better life. That is why they continue building coal plants despite knowing full well about global warming – because they don’t want their people to live in miserable poverty any longer. That is why I get so angry when wealthy Westerners like Nancy Knudsen coo about how “simple” and “happy” their lives are. Here is an observation she makes from the deck of her expensive yacht:

There’s still mist around – a brown mist to the north over Europe, that bastion of progress and modernity, and a pure white mist to the south over Africa, that backward continent that hasn’t learned properly yet how to poison the air it breathes.

I know I sure would prefer to be born in the Congo rather than Germany! Your chances of dying during childbirth are certainly no greater than one in five, and if you live to be twelve, you can look forward to a pleasant future career as a gun-toting rapist in the Lord’s Resistance Army!

Now, look. I’m not saying that everybody in the Third World lives a life of utter misery, that one is incapable of true happiness without modern conveniences (Nancy Knudsen would probably point to iPods and TVs and sports cars; I would point to electricity, clean drinking water and trained medical doctors.) Humans are resilient creatures and capable of being happy in difficult circumstances – particularly if they don’t know any better.

What I take issue with is Knudsen consistently painting all Third Worlders as always happy – and, conversely, all First Worlders as always unhappy (even if they don’t know it, because it hasn’t yet been pointed out them by the Enlightened Traveller). Maybe I take more of an issue with that, actually. It’s like seeing a self-help book titled “I Can Make You Happy.” Just because Nancy Knudsen wasn’t satisfied with her high-luxury but high-pressure life doesn’t mean every Westerner is unhappy with their life and their society. I’m willing to bet most people she met in Eritrea or Panama or wherever would have been quite happy to trade places with her.

This prevailing wisdom – this idea that, really, deep down, Third Worlders are better off than we are – smacks of self-denial. It’s a subconscious way of assuaging our guilt about living at the top apex of luxury in the world, the glory of our safe and convenient lifestyles built on the sweat and labour of the billions of people ground beneath the capitalist jackboot in the developing world. That’s a guilt that nobody who travels through poverty can escape, but there are better ways of dealing with it than constructing a fantasy in which poor people live lives free of modern “trappings,” while we languish under the burden of wealth and luxury which, somehow, prevents us from achieving “true” happiness.

True happiness has nothing to do with wealth or luxury. It’s a separate thing entirely. Living in the First World merely allows you to be safe, healthy and comfortable while you set out attaining it, because you aren’t hiding from the Janjaweed during your daily nine-mile trek to get drinking water. Read Shooting Stars and Flying Fish if you want to read an average travel memoir with healthy lashings of naive, condescending generalisations.

Shooting Stars and Flying Fish at The Book Depository

Book Review: Bliss

Bliss by Peter Carey (1981) 282p.

Peter Carey is one of the greatest living novelists, widely tipped to become both Australia’s next Nobel prize winner for literature and the first man to win three Booker prizes. In 2010 I read his second Booker-prize winner, True History of the Kelly Gang, and found it to be a good book that only grew stronger in my memory. So it seems like a good idea to read his entire canon.

Bliss is his first novel, following the unfortunate circumstances of Harry Joy, who has a heart attack one day and dies for nine minutes before being resuscitated. He comes back to find that his wife is cheating on him, his son is selling drugs and his advertising company has for years been promoting carcinogens. He believes himself to literally be in hell.

There’s a strange, semi-dreamlike feeling hanging over much of Bliss, as though you’re reading it through a clouded pane of glass. This is a stylistic choice; apparently many of Carey’s early works have an essence of magical realism to them. Certainly, Carey seems to draw inspiration from Borges and Marquez; South America is often mentioned, and the novel takes place in an unspecified tropical land which is probably Queensland, the prose thick with frangipani and jacarandas and banana trees.

I guess it’s a decent book. It’s the kind of novel that’s difficult to review, because I personally found it boring yet I know it’s objectively good. I still want to read more of Carey, and I own his next book, Illywhacker, but I may skip past that and read his Booker-winning Oscar and Lucinda or the intriguing Jack Maggs.

Top 10 Books Of 2011

2011 was my personal best year yet for books – 55, although that includes four graphic novels and two quarterly essays. Here’s my annual list of the best books I read for the year (not the best books that were published in the year).

10. A Little History of the World

What we call our fate is no more than our struggle in that great multitude of droplets in the rise and fall of one wave. But we must make use of that moment. It is worth the effort.

History is a huge, complex and difficult subject, which is why we often prefer to learn about it from blockbuster films or period dramas and thus come away somewhat misinformed. You are never going to get a comprehensive understanding of human history unless you dedicate your life to it, but if you have a merely casual interest, A Little History of the World is not a bad place to start. Commendable for his understanding that history is more about opinions, attitudes and how societies relate to each other than it is about dates and battles, Gombrich brings this book to life with the air of a scholarly grandfather telling his children a story by the fireplace.

A Little History of the World at The Book Depository

9. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

“Welcome to England!”

The concept of having thousands of fictional characters stuffed into one world didn’t greatly appeal to me as much as I thought it would, but the second volume of Alan Moore’s thought experiment is largely a retelling of War of the Worlds, and is terrifyingly brilliant. That means it’s largely piggybacking off the success of another work, but whatever. I do intend to read the original someday.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen at The Book Depository

8. The Testament of Jessie Lamb

I felt as flat and heavy as if a steamroller were on top of me. I just wanted it to end.

It can be diffcult – almost impossible – to writte a novel from a teenager’s perspective without it becoming an insufferable moanfest. And indeed, The Testament of Jessie Lamb features all the uncertainty and naivitie and foolishness and foot-stamping that one would expect from a novel narrated by a teenage girl. Yet it’s also a much darker novel, about the intersection between our acknowledgement that sacrifices must be made for the greater good, and our hostile unwillingness to actually let our loved ones make them. There’s also a darker, implicit undercurrent running through this book – or at least I thought there was – about Jessie’s real motives.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb at The Book Depository

7. The English Patient

Give me a map and I’ll build you a city. Give me a pencil and I’ll draw you a room in South Cairo, desert charts on the wall. Always the desert was among us. I could wake and raise my eyes to the map of old settlements along the Mediterranean coast – Gazala, Tobruk, Mersa Matruh – and south of that the hand-painted wadis, and surrounding those the shades of yellowness that we invaded, tried to lose ourselves in.

A difficult book to read after seeing the masterful film, since the scenes are often identical and the visual version plays itself out in your mind as you read. But Ondaatje’s novel is undoubtedly one of the finest of the last decade (I cannot understand why it shared the Booker with Sacred Hunger), a melancholy tale of desert exploration and forbidden love and Italian castles and bombs raining down on England. His lyrical prose style is, quite simply, beautiful.

The English Patient at The Book Depository

6. The Road To Wigan Pier

On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave. The place was beginning to depress me. It was not only the dirt, the smells and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping round and round, just like blackbeetles, in an endless muddle of slovened jobs and mean grievances. The most dreadful thing about people like the Brookers is the way that they say the same things over and over again. It gives you the feeling that they are not real people at all, but a kind of ghost forever rehearsing the same futile rigmarole.

Lord knows how a book about the miserable conditions of the working class in Depression-era North England managed to be funny, but somehow Orwell managed it. He also manages to be a spoilt Southern lad turning his nose up at the characteristics and mannerisms of the wretched poor without ever seeming like a jerk. The Road To Wigan Pier is, as always with his books, “both an excellent book and a valuable social document,” and the fact that Orwell can keep your interest even when discussing the vanished political situations of the 1930s is a testament to his ability as a writer.

The Road To Wigan Pier at The Book Depository

5. Homage To Catalonia

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal Weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen – all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

George Orwell went and fought for something he deeply believed in. As so often happens with things we deeply believe in, it became corrupted, and he became more gradually disillusioned with it until it came to the point where he was actually a fugitive and was forced to flee the country. Homage To Catalonia is a deeply political book, and can be difficult going for the modern reader, but like A Road To Wigan Pier it is well worth the effort. It contains not just an account of its own time, but a deeper examination of human experience. Being a stranger in a foreign land, watching your beliefs be compromised and corrupted by the subversion of powerful forces, and the final prescient remarks mixed in with the nostalgic joy of returning home.

Homage To Catalonia at The Book Depository

4. Maus

“I know this is insane, but sometimes I wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents, so I could really know what they lived through.”

We have reached saturation point with the Holocaust – with all of World War II, in fact. At least I have. The sights and sounds and facts and feelings have bombarded me my entire life, and the generation before me as well. It holds about as much reality to me as the War of the Ring, and stirs no emotion within me. This is a sad thing, but the answer is not yet more Holocaust and world War II stories.

The reason I found Maus to be so engaging was that it is not simply a Holocaust story, relying on its own historical weight for emotional punch, like so many Oscar bait movies. I’s about growing up as the son of a Holocaust survivor, about spending your whole life hearing about the horrors of something you can’t even imagine. It’s about dealing with someone who, despite being a victim of a terrible crime, is a bit of an asshole. It’s about coping with the long and far-reaching ramifications of something as huge and terrible of the Holocaust. It’s about having creative and financial success after writing a series of comic books about a genocide you never experienced. It’s about many, many things, all of them ripple effects of the 20th century’s greatest crime. Maus is an elegant, thoughtful and profoundly sad masterpiece.

Maus at The Book Depository

3. The Sisters Brothers

He stood there weeping and watching us go, while behind him Lucky Paul entered and collapsed the prospector’s tent, and I thought, “Here is another miserable mental image I will have to catalog and make room for.”

A very, very weird book, flippant and off-beat and darkly humourous and however many thousand adjectives various reviewers used to describe it. The best word, I believe, is “”unique. It is certainly a funny book, a dark comedy, and yet it is also entirely serious and, towards the end, even touching. It is undoubtedly a literary book, and one worthy of Booker shortlisting – better than The Sense of an Ending, certainly.

The Sisters Brothers at The Book Depository

2. The White Tiger

Now, what happens in your typical Murder Weekly story – or Hindi film, for that matter? A poor man kills a rich man. Good. Then he takes the money. Good. Then he gets dreams in which the dead man pursues him with bloody fingers, saying Mur-der-er, Mur-der-er.
Doesn’t happen like that in real life… The real nightmare you get is the other kind. You toss about in the bed dreaming that you haven’t done it – that you lost your nerve and let Mr. Ashok get away – that you’re still in Delhi, still the servant of another man, and then you wake up.

There are seven billion people in the world. One billion of those live in luxury in the developed regions of Europe, North America, Japan and Australia. Seven billion of those live in the less developed regions of Asia, Africa and South America, in circumstances ranging from the reasonably comfortable middle-class of China to the crushing, squalid poverty of Sudan.

This is not fair.

It’s an issue entirely separate from that of political oppression. If you were to pick the most wretched nation on Earth, you might well choose North Korea. But even in India – the world’s largest democracy, albeit a corrupt one – millions of people live in their own filth, with no hope of anything better. They live in an almost medieval world, which we cannot even imagine in our world of skyscrapers and frappucinos and iPhones.

The White Tiger is a novel about those worlds colliding. It’s not what I’d call an enjoyable story; it’s an allegory, a book with a definite point to it, and a book that I believe is absolutely essential reading, but which I will probably never read again. It’s a book about a man born into dire poverty who realises how bitterly unjust that fate is – and who, after much agonising soul-searching, murders an innocent man in order to lift himself out of that fate. I can’t sum it up any better than I did in my review:

Who among us truly knows what horrible things we would be capable of doing to escape Balram’s fate? Who among us has the right to judge him?

A dark and gripping novel about the greatest injustice that exists in our world.

The White Tiger at The Book Depository

1. Jamrach’s Menagerie

A mess of them like eels slipping wormily over one another in a muddy tussle over a foul carcass, a red and pink rag trailing festoons, the grinning head of which, half severed and hanging back, revealed it to be one of their own. Another watching, a huge thing, solid and impassive as a rock, huge, trunk-like legs planted before it.

Jamrach’s Menagerie begins on an exciting wave of youthful exuberance, adventure and discovery, and plunges into an abyss of horrific misery. Eight-year old Jaffy Brown is rescued from an escaped tiger in Dickensian London, and is given a job tending to the menagerie of the tiger’s owner. A few years later he finds himself enlisted on a sea voyage to capture a Komodo dragon, forming bonds with his fellow teenage sailors and his best friend Tim as they get up to all manner of exciting escapades. The Azores, a whale hunt, tropical islands, the prize of the dragon…

…and everything collapses. Jaffy and his friends are embroiled in a living nightmare, every step and every page dragging them further along a hellish path of survival. In the hands of a lesser author this would seem like an incongruous twist. In the hands of Carol Birch, it struck me as realistic. We go through our lives, we enjoy ourselves, we have fun, and then disaster and terror and the explicit, visceral nature of the physical world we live in looms up out of nowhere. The routine of life masks that reality like our skin masks our organs.

I have never read a scene more heart-wrenching and gut-wrenching than that which occurs between Tim and Jaffy at the climax of this novel. I literally couldn’t put it down. Carol Birch was robbed of a Booker prize.

Jamrach’s Menagerie at The Book Depository

Pilot Light

‘We need a pilot,” Keiji said.

Johan laughed for very long time. Keiji sighed. Chase poured himself another scotch. The dogs were fighting over a rag toy in front of the fireplace. From the kitchen came the sound of clanking plates and running water as Anna Marie did the dishes.

“Are you done?” Keiji asked irritably, as Johan wiped tears from his eyes.

“You’re telling me,” the junkyard owner wheezed, “that you boys have been sitting out in my back forty fixing up that piece of crap for over a year and you never once thought you should try to find a pilot?”

“Yes,” Chase said sharply. “Quite stupid, don’t you think?”

“Do you know where we can find a pilot or not?” Keiji asked.

Johan shrugged, and reached down to scratch one of the dogs behind the ears. “You’d have to talk to someone else about that. I only go through captains and dealers. There’s listings on the net. Or you could try talking to the harbourmaster over Andapol way. But I’ll tell you now, boys, you’ll be stretching to find a pilot who knows how to fly the Swan.”

“What do you mean?”

Johan frowned. “When I call her an antique, I’m not joking. She was built in the Jovian War. Still has a stonewall interface. Pilots these days don’t know how to fly like that. They’re used to nanyte links, working direct with ATC and the ship’s AI. The Black Swan doesn’t even have an AI. Hell, I’m surpised stonewall is still legal.”

“That’s something you might have brought to my attention before you sold it to me,” Keiji said, rubbing his temples.

“Just install a new system,” Johan said. “You remodelled the entire engine room, didn’t you? Put those brand new McEwans in? This would be a snap after that.”

Keiji looked embarassed. “We’re running on a tight budget,” Chase said.

“So… how were you going to pay your pilot?”

 

 

Black Swan Story #03

PILOT LIGHT

The nameless twenty-four hour diner at the corner of Wutei Avenue and Bower Street was one of Aaru’s most enduring institutions: a classic American burger joint, with a long row of booths beneath wide glass windows, and a wait staff comprised entirely of surly single mothers. The food was bad and the atmosphere was worse. Keiji kept coming back to it simply to see which transgression against basic customer service would happen next.

It was late afternoon, the day after their dinner with Johan. He and Chase had spent the day apart, each of them researching and tracking down separate leads for pilots, and had arranged to meet at five o’clock. Chase was now an hour late. Keiji passed the time by scanning the net. He’d posted an employment ad on several sites the previous night, which had received zero replies after nearly twenty-four hours. He was beginning to feel somewhat depressed.

“Excuse me,” Keiji asked the waitress, “I ordered a cheeseburger, is that… coming soon?”

“Maybe,” she said.

He sighed, and looked out the window at the drizzly panorama of rain coats and umbrellas. Chase emerged from the throng of rush hour commuters with his hair slicked against his forehead. The bell above the door tinkled as he entered the diner, eyed the patrons at the counter, and slid into the seat opposite Keiji.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Fish market,” Chase said. “I thought somebody was following me, so I had to shake them.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Chase. It was a year ago. Nobody’s looking for you anymore.”

“Uh-huh. Can we swap seats? I want to face the door.”

Keiji rolled his eyes as they switched positions. “This is ridiculous.”

“Sure,” Chase said. “How did the harbourmaster’s office go?”

“Terribly. They kept me waiting for two hours and then I talked to an intern who laughed in my face when I said we needed a pilot who could fly stonewall. You?”

“Well,” Chase said, “I checked the Spacer’s Union, and they laughed at me too. One guy said nobody had flown a ship like ours since the Jovian War. And I realised he was right. There’s no point trying to hire somebody off the net or from a union. We’ll never find a guy that way. So,” and here he paused, with a smug grin on his face, “I went to the RSL.”

Keiji raised an eyebrow. “You went to the Retired Serviceman’s League.”

“Yeah. They have a Navy branch in Federation Quay. What? I thought it was a great idea.”

“There’s a problem with one of the three words in RSL,” Keiji said. “I’ll let you guess what it is.”

“So what if they’re retired? They still know how to fly. Maybe we can convince somebody to take it up again.”

“Well, fine,” Keiji said. “I don’t think it will work, but whatever, we can give it a shot. Did you find anyone who can fly stonewall? Anyone who’s willing to leave behind their pension check for a live-in job on a spaceship with a pair of twenty-something deadbeats?”

“Speak for yourself,” Chase said. “Anyway, I did one better than that – I found a guy who actually used to fly Anatidae class.” He opened his computer, and flashed the data over to Keiji.

“Asa Kingsford,” Keiji read aloud. “Born February 1st, 2121. Joined the Navy on his eighteenth birthday, graduated from flight school a year later, got assigned to the supply squadrons and spent six months flying the Whistling Duck between Ganymede and the asteroid bases. Honourable discharge after the war ended… what, that’s it? That’s all the flying this guy’s ever done?”

“That’s just his military record,” Chase said. “The guy I talked to at the RSL club said he kept flying freelance for ages.”

“I don’t know about this,” Keiji said. “I mean, yeah, he flew stonewall, but that was fifty years ago.”

“They still used it up until the sixties,” Chase said. “Look, we don’t have any alternatives, do we?”

“I guess not,” Keiji said. “I’ll give him a call.”

He punched in the pilot’s number, glancing up at the waitress as his cheeseburger arrived without any beef in it. “Uh, excuse me, I think you forgot… Oh! Hi, hello. Is this Asa Kingsford? My name’s Keiji DuVal. I’m the captain of a vessel called the Black Swan, and I’m looking for a pilot. I heard you used to fly one of her sister ships back in… uh, no. No, we got your number from the RSL club in Aaru. What? Uh, no.”

Chase ate some of Keiji’s fries, and studied the puzzled look on his face.

“No… no. Uh, about three years. She’s in a junkyard, but I’ve been fixing her up, and I’ve got her fully registered and licensed. Just need a pilot. Haha, yes, well we’ve been having a bit of trouble finding one. I haven’t upgraded the flight system, so she’s still stonewall. Engines are brand new… what? Uh… as soon as possible, I guess. As soon as we can get a pilot… yeah, absolutely. I’ll send you a map to the junkyard, we live in the ship, so we’re there all the time. Just ask the owner to take you out to us. Okay, great. See you then. Bye.”

He hung up, and looked at Chase. “That was weird.”

“Why?”

“He seemed pretty… suspicious. Then he warmed up and said he’d come out to meet us tomorrrow.”

“It didn’t sound like you talked about wages.”

“No. He didn’t seem to care. He was quite happy when I told him we wanted to leave as soon as possible…”

Chase laughed. “Oh, this should be good.”

#

The scheduled time for Kingsford’s job interview was noon. Keiji tried on several different outfits before settling on smart casual khakis and a tie. Chase tried his best not to laugh. They sat outside in the deckchairs in the shade of the ship, staring down the road towards the junkyard entrance and waiting.

Two o’clock came and went. “I’m calling him,” Keiji said.

“You’ll look desperate,” Chase said, cracking open his fourth beer.

“I am desperate.”

“He’s coming from Elysium City. Maybe he just didn’t realise how long it takes to get here.”

Keiji rang him anyway, and received no answer. He called again at four, and at six. He called Johan to check whether anybody had arrived at the main gate. Johan replied in the negative, and laughed at him.

“He just got held up,” Chase said, hurling his empty seventh beer bottle at the target they’d spraypainted on the rusting derelict opposite the Black Swan. It flew far wide and disappeared into the bushes. “It happens. Stop freaking out about it.”

“I’m not freaking out,” Keiji said. “This is important. It’s this guy or nothing, you realise.”

“No, it’s this guy or install a new flight system,” Chase said.

“You’re not the one who has to pay for it,” Keiji snapped.

“Chill out. We’ll get him. Call him again tomorrow and I’m sure he’ll just say he got lost on the way to Aaru.”

“How could somebody possibly get lost driving down the M2?”

“I dunno. He’s a pilot, not a navigator.”

#

Chase came down to the galley next morning to find Keiji staring at his computer screen. “Tell me you slept.”

“I’ve called him eight times!” Keiji said. “Eight! And I’ve messaged him! No response! Nothing!”

“Maybe he’s a little creeped out that his future employer has a crush on him,” Chase said, putting the kettle on.

“I do not have a crush on him.”

“Then why are you stalking him?”

“I’m not stalking him! I just want to know why he didn’t… aha!” A message icon had appeared on Keiji’s computer.

“Is that him?” Chase asked.

“No, I asked the RSL club for his address.”

“And they just gave it to you? Shit, what kind of….”

“Apartment 9A, 215 Maseru Street. Fantastic. Let’s go.” Keiji closed his computer, sprang from his seat and grabbed the keys to the jeep.

“Are you kidding me? First thing in the morning?”

Keiji gave him a look. “It’s one in the afternoon, you fucking sloth.”

“That’s… whatever. My point is, it’s a little weird that you’re hounding this guy because he didn’t show up to a job interview. It’s the kind of thing that might, y’know, put him off.”

“You didn’t talk to him. He was really eager. And now all of a sudden he’s just… disappeared. Radio silence. I just think something’s up.”

Chase sighed.

“Look, I’m your captain and this is my first executive order. We’re finding our pilot. Go put your shoes on.”

#

Elysium City, the fabled capital of Mars, sat inside the caldera of Elysium Mons at the centre of its namesake island continent. The highway from Aaru stretched gradually up and around the gentle slope of the extinct volcano, which rose fourteen kilometres into the upper atmosphere, the farmlands and orchards around them gradually replaced by redwood trees, then firs, then thick alpine grasses. Soon they were driving through a slanted landscape of nothing but bare red rock, but here the air became dangerously thin and regular traffic was funneled into a pressurised tunnel.

“I still say this is stupid,” Chase said.

“Duly noted,” Keiji replied.

“What are you even going to say to him?”

“I’m going to say we were in the neighbourhood and decided to drop by.”

“It’s an eight-hour drive. What could you possibly be in the neighbourhood for?”

“… A college reunion at ECU.”

“I thought you went to Marshall?”

“I did. But he doesn’t know that.”

“You’re wearing your Marshall sweatshirt right now.”

Keiji glanced down at the letters MARSHALL UNIVERSITY stencilled across his chest. “Shit. We’ll have to swap.”

Chase sighed. “Look, I’m not stupid. You think he’s in trouble with someone and needs to get off the planet quickly.”

“He wouldn’t be the first member of my crew who fits that description, would he?”

“Yeah, but you know I’m on the level, whereas he might be skipping town to avoid rape charges for all we know.”

“We’ll see.”

Chase gave up, and looked out the window. Emergency phones and overhead lights swept past with measured regularity as they gradually climbed up the tunnel towards the capital. Other cars slowly overtook them, or fell behind. Many were sports cars or limousines; probably senators and politicians returning from one last summer weekend on the beach in Aaru. After another few hours of driving through that murky world, the overhead lights rhythmically washing over the dashboard, the jeep emerged from the tunnel and into the city nestled in the caldera.

#

Elysium City had once been an administrative capital based in an impractical location on the sentimental whims of the first Martian president, but nearly a century later it was a city that had reached the limits of its growth. The caldera was only fourteen kilometres across, and skyscrapers and high rise apartment buildings were crammed into every bit of it, nestled right up against the caldera walls. Overhead, a glastic dome protected the city from the thin air and low temperatures; at the centre of the city, the Lake of Heaven provided the only gasp of open space amongst the forest of buildings.

Chase had been here once before, under more auspicious circumstances, arriving in a private ship rather than a dilapidated jeep. They’d approached the city from orbit, coming directly from Phobos, and he’d seen the huge column of light that burst out of the mountain’s summit before they crested the edge of the caldera, passed through the dome and saw the 24-hour neon spectacle laid out before them. Four million people crammed into an area the size of a single borough in Agassiz. It was an amazing city. Not somewhere he’d ever want to live, but an interesting place to visit.

Chase thought about how that first and last visit had ended, and realised his stomach was twisted.

#

EC was a planned city, streets and avenues radiating out from the central lake, all named after capital cities on Old Earth. The city planners and government officials had been quite biased towards their own ancestry, so while Washington Boulevard and Canberra Street and Ottowa Road were all important lakeside thoroughfares, the streets at the edge of the caldera – low-income zones full of tenements and ageing apartment buildings – were named Lome Street or Kigali Road or Bishkek Drive. Asa Kingsford’s apartment building was on Maseru Street, hugging the very caldera wall itself.

They parked the jeep in an asphalt lot behind a chainlink fence and ventured into the building. The elevator was out of order, so they climbed a stairwell that stank of rancid cooking, overhearing the occassional racuous argument in a foreign language. When they arrived at the apartment they found the door ajar, the wood around the handle splintered.

“Maybe we should go,” Keiji whispered.

“Oh, now you don’t want to see him?” Chase said. “We just drove eight hours, we’re not turning back now.” He pulled his Webley from the holster under his jacket, holding it in both hands and pointing it at the floor. Keiji looked at him as though he’d pulled a snake out of his armpit.

“Why the fuck do you have…” he started, but Chase shushed him, and gently pushed the door open.

The apartment consisted of only two rooms – a bathroom and a kitchen/living area with a fold-out bed. Both had been thoroughly ransacked, with drawers overturned and cupboards laid bare. Kingsford was nowhere to be seen, but once satisfied that the apartment was empty, Keiji turned on Chase again.

“What the fuck are you carrying a gun around for?”

“Protection,” Chase said. “And you know why. And since it looks like you were right, and your boyfriend is in a bit of trouble, you should be grateful.”

“I was assuming he was in trouble with the law!” Keiji hissed. “I don’t want you shooting a cop!”

“Last I checked, Mars was still a free planet. The police don’t just make people disappear like this.”

“Fantastic,” Keiji said. “Fantastic.”

“Hey, you were the one so keen to come rescue him,” Chase said, holstering the gun. “Don’t freak out now.”

“So who do you think it is?”

Chase snorted. “In a city this big? Any one of a dozen different groups. But we don’t have a chance of finding him.”

“So what do we do?”

“We go home,” Chase said.

Keiji didn’t say anything. “Shouldn’t we at least report this to the police?”

“They’ll find it for themselves sooner or later,” Chase replied. “Come on. We’ll get some dinner and then go home.”

#

They ate at an al fresco restaurant on the boardwalk at the edge of the Lake of Heaven, the chatter and clink of wine glasses drifting out over the city lights shimmering in the dark water. Chase could recognise quite a few of the other diners, including several MPs and the Attorney-General, and was feeling uneasy. Keiji had reccomended it, from one of his own trips to the capital, and Chase had agreed because he didn’t dare return to anywhere he’d previously been. Now he was wondering why they couldn’t just east at a cheap Chinese hole-in-the-wall out in Kingsford’s shitty neighbourhood.

“What are you doing?” he said irritably, after they’d placed orders.

Keiji had been scrolling through his computer ever since they’d arrived. “Just sending a few messages.”

“We can start looking for a new pilot tomorrow.”

“I’m not looking for a new pilot.”

“Then what are you doing?”

Keiji glanced up at him. “Well. I figured obviously whoever has him isn’t going to answer his phone. But messages are a different thing entirely.”

He flashed a file over to Chase, who opened it on his own computer. A message log.

- Is he still alive?

- I need him. Willing to pay.

- How much?

- How much does he owe?

“How do you know he owes them money?” Chase asked.

“I don’t.”

- He owes more than money.

- Will pay twice what he owes financially.

- $300 000?

- Acceptable

- Come to the Crown Restaurant, 37th floor, Rasmussen Tower. Ask for Mr. Ackerman.

Chase stared at the messages in disbelief. “Are you out of your mind?” he hissed.

“What?”

“Do you even have three hundred grand?”

“You know I do.”

Chase pinched the bridge of his nose. “Alright, let me rephrase that,” he said. “Can you afford to give away three hundred grand? And still launch a fucking spaceship afterwards?”

“Well, I’m not saying it wouldn’t be tight for a while,” Keiji said. “But, yeah, it’s possible. And I would expect Kingsford to work that off.”

“You don’t even…” Chase realised he was shouting, and lowered his voice as various members of Mars’ political elite glanced over at him. “You don’t even know what he did!” he hissed. “You don’t know what kind of a person he is! And you’re putting our savings on the line for him!”

“My savings,” Keiji said sharply. “And I know exactly what kind of a person he is. He is a stonewall pilot. He is possibly the last stonewall pilot on this entire planet. And that is all that matters to me, at the moment.”

“Fine,” Chase said. “But you have no idea what you’re fucking doing. You want to waltz into a meeting with an organised crime syndicate and tell them you’ll give them three hundred grand? And you think that’ll go perfectly OK?”

“Well, this is more your area of expertise, isn’t it?”

Chase sighed. “Alright, first of all, message them again. Tell them you’re not meeting them at the restaurant, you’ll meet them at a public area. They’ll bring Kingsford, and we’ll… how the hell do you even plan to give away that much money? Huge transactions like that get flagged and sent to the feds.”

“Not with my bank,” Keiji said. “Which public area?”

Chase thought for a moment. “The Grand Circus?”

#

In a volcanic caldera with limited landspace, Elysium City had long ago become a city of towering skyscrapers, glittering spires of glass and steel that rose all the way up to the pressure bubble. Walkways and high concourses had been developed between buildings to relieve ground traffic; they were joined by elevated trains and highways. Many citizens spent the bulk of their lives up in the air, going weeks at a time without needing to venture down to the ground.

The Grand Circus was the greatest and most famed of the city’s elevated roads, a pedestrian mall running in a tight ring around the Lake of Heaven, thirty storeys above the ground, lined with shops and restaurants and townhouses. The southern half, above Tokyo Road, was in the wealthiest part of the city and reflected the tastes of the locals: cigar shops, fine suits, massage parlours and jewellery stores.

It was not a place that suited casual browsing, and Chase was regretting choosing it for the meeting. He was walking slowly up and down along the inner end, pretending to be window shopping, but really keeping an eye on Keiji, who was loitering about a fountain in the middle of the concourse. The more he looked at Keiji – dressed in his work boots and jeans and university sweatshirt – the more uneasy he felt.

He was surprised. In contrast to himself, he had always thought of Keiji as a fairly law-abiding person. Not naïvely so – in fact, Chase sometimes suspected Keiji had taken him in because he knew he would need somebody willing to get dirty hands from time to time – but certainly not somebody willing to hand over $300,000 to a crime sydnicate.

“Not at my bank,” he’d said. What was that supposed to mean? Keiji’s family was loaded, Chase knew that. But they weren’t involved in anything sketchy. At least, nothing society officially condemned as sketchy.

He moved on to the next store, which sold fine wines. Keiji was still hanging out by the fountain. It was eleven o’clock on a weeknight, but in a city of this size, the arcade was still bustling with shoppers. That would make it hard for any thugs to pick Chase out, but it would also make it hard for him to pick them out. And he was pretty sure they’d have more than one.

“You ready to call this off yet?” Chase whispered into his computer. Keiji had opened a permanent audio link for the appointment.

“No,” Keiji said. “I can wait all night.”

“You know, you better hope these are serious people,” Chase said. “You better hope these guys are Mangala Tong or something.”

“Why?”

“Because for a serious group, three hundred grand is nothing. It’s a quick little deal that they won’t make a fuss about. A little group, though… they’ll be more highly strung.”

“We’ll be fine.”

“Wait,” Chase said. “Heads up, I think… yeah, look behind you.”

Approaching from the east was a group of three men, different from the crowd in that they surged forward with a purpose rather than strolling and wandering and looking in windows. One middle-aged Asian man in a suit, one fairly old man looking half-drunk, and one broad-shouldered man who was probably a bodyguard.

“You would be Mr. Kingsford’s mysterious benefactor?” the suited man asked, as the group arrived at the fountain. Chase held up a bottle of red wine, pretending to take intense interest but really peering past it to study the face of the man in the suit. It was familiar; he couldn’t put a name to it, but he definitely knew it.

“Yes.”

“This is him,” the suited man replied, nodding over at his half-drunk cohort. He wasn’t, Chase realised, drunk at all – they’d given him some kind of sedative. “Out of curiosity, why is he worth so much to you?”

“Because he’s a pilot,” Keiji said, before Chase could tell him not to.

“I see. Well. Do you have the money?”

“Three hundred thousand dollars, already transferred into a dummy account on Lucia. You give me Kingsford, I give you the access codes.”

The suited man looked half-amused and half-displeased. “We agreed on six hundred thousand dollars.”

“No we didn’t.”

“Yes,” he said patiently, “we did. You agreed to pay twice of what Mr. Kingsford owes us. I told you he owed us three hundred thousand dollars. Two times three hundred thousand is six…”

“I know what it is,” Keiji snapped. “You should have been more clear.”

Chase left the store and started slowly picking his way through the crowds towards the fountain. He could remember the man’s name, now: Cuong. A bit player when he’d last been here. Maybe still a bit player being sent on an errand, or maybe a hands-on manager. Would the man even remember him?

“Apologies,” Cuong said smoothly. “Nonetheless, I require six hundred thousand dollars in exchange for Mr. Kingsford’s freedom.”

“You don’t get to renegotiate like that!”

Chase quickened his pace.

“I am not renegotiating. Those were the original terms. If you don’t like them, the offer is off the table, and I will bid you a good evening.”

“Well, hang on. Maybe we can…”

It was at that point, about twenty metres from the fountain, that Chase suddenly felt a gun in his back.

“Easy, boy,” said a voice. “Don’t move. Mr. Cuong? I’ve picked up a familiar face…”

All eyes at the fountain were suddenly on Chase as he was walked up to join the meeting. Chase turned to glance at his captor; a low-level henchman whose face he didn’t recognise. Cuong’s eyes suddenly narrowed.

“What is this?” he demanded. “A trap?”

“No,” Chase said. “I don’t work for them anymore.”

“Who do you work for?”

“Oh, shit,” Keiji said.

“Him,” Chase said. “We’re not trying to screw you over. It was just a misunderstanding. Keiji, are you willing to pay six or not?”

“Uh,” Keiji said. “I don’t… it’s just, uh…”

“Shut up,” Cuong snapped. “I don’t believe this. This is bullshit. You’re both coming with us.”

“We’re not going anywhere with you,” Chase said.

“You have a gun in your back.”

“Yes,” Chase replied. “With a jacket draped over it. This is the Grand Circus. There are people everywhere. There are cameras and scanners everywhere. The headquarters of the federal police are about two kilometres away. You really want to start a fight here and now? Who has more to lose from that?”

Chase’s nerves were on fire. He could taste the moment delicately: his own adrenaline, Keiji confused and out of his depth beside him, Kingsford swaying and oblivious to everything around him, Cuong staring at him with anger and suspicion, the bodyguards carefully sizeing the moment up, shoppers milling about them and teenage couples flicking coins into the fountain and businessman emerging from after-work drinks at bars, all of them oblivious to the drama playing out in their midst. His muscles were coiled, ready to attack the man behind him, ready for the situation to erupt into chaos.

“If what I heard about you a few years ago was true, then you do,” Cuong said. “You’re coming with us.”

Chase whirled around and punched his captor in the face, grabbing his wrist at the same time to push the gun away. A few shots went off before he could knock it out of the man’s hands, barking out above the hubbub of conversation. Cuong and his other bodyguard darted for cover, pulling out their own weapons. Screams and and shouts rang out as the people around them began to flee, and a tsunami of panic swept down the arcade. Security shutters were activating and sliding down across storefronts all around them.

Chase had knocked his captor to the ground, a lucky strike, and scrambled for the man’s abandoned gun rather than draw his own in a public arena and risk having it tracked down from ballistics. Cuong had dropped backwards into the fountain, behind the low stone wall for cover – his bodyguard was scurrying to take shelter behind a set of rubbish bins. Chase fired a few shots at him that went wide, throwing his head around, looking for Keiji. The pilot, still drugged and woozy, had dropped onto all fours when the fight broke out – now, still vaguely aware of something bad happening, he was crawling in Chase’s direction.

“Keiji!” Chase yelled. “Keiji!”

Cuong suddenly darted out of the fountain, wet suit plastered to his body, and began dashing away from them down the concourse, towards the fleeing pedestrians. Chase levelled his gun at him, but before he could squeeze the trigger, Cuong yanked something from his jacket and dropped it in a sudden burst of light and sound.

Chase’s computer instantly went wild, coated in useless streams of nonsense data, and he winced against the ringing in his ears. He lowered the gun and watched Cuong and his remaining bodyguard sprint away, breathing heavily. A few people who were too shocked or confused to run away were staring at him, and he quickly tucked the gun inside his jacket. Keiji emerged from a landscaping display in a rustle of leaves.

“What the hell was that?” he demanded.

“A scrambler,” Chase said, grabbing Asa by the arm and pulling him to his feet. The pilot moaned in disorientation. “It fucks up all the electronics in the area, so the security sensors can’t…”

“I know what a scrambler is!” Keiji shouted. “I mean what the hell happened? Why did he know you? You said it was Agassiz you had to worry about! That’s on the other side of the fucking planet!”

“Oh, I got around,” Chase said tersely. He was trying to remember the layout of the Circus. The storefronts were now two blank walls of security shutters, and the last few pedestrian stragglers had fled the scene. The mall was deserted. There were escalators in the direction Cuong had fled, and elevators the other way. Which was more likely to have a response team coming up it?

“You got around,” Keiji said bitterly. “You could have warned me.”

Chase ignored him, and started running down the Circus, dragging the stumbling pilot behind him. Keiji followed in his wake, still fuming. Past the gleaming chrome doors, where the display showed an elevator at full occupancy rising up to meet them, probably bearing first responders. He went on past them to the display windows.

No doubt the architect had planned for the the glass windows of the Circus to display a splendid view of the city, but the reality of urban planning in a constricted city like EC had caught up with it, and the skywalk was now treated to a lovely view of the neighbouring offices. Between the buildings was a gap of about four metres, which Chase thought would be jumpable if they aimed for the next floor down. He levelled the thug’s cheap pistol at the glass and fired.

After the sound of cascading glass died away, the noise of the city began to seep in – honking cars, the whoosh of displaced air from a passing monorail, and the police sirens. Chase glanced down, a dizzying birds-eye view of several police cars at the edge of the road ten storeys below.

“You first, buddy,” he said, grabbing the pilot by the back of his shirt and hurling him across the gap into the office. Kingsford managed to overcome his drug-addled stupor long enough to shriek, before gasping in pain as he tumbled onto the carpeting one level below.

Chase turned to glance at Keiji, whose glare clearly read: “I would be screaming my head off at you if the cops weren’t five seconds behind us.”

They leaped across the gap together, cutting their hands on the broken glass as they landed heavily on all fours inside the office. Each of them grabbed one of Kingsford’s arms and hurried him along, away from the window, deeper into the maze of cubicles and desks and conference rooms.

A few moments later, a trio of beat cops burst out of the elevator, carefully covering each other with drawn handguns and moving down the Circus. Their colleagues on street level had reported seeing the fugitives leap into the skyscraper, and had immediately started making their way up the building after sealing off the ground exits.

But in Elysium City, the ground was only one of a hundred ways out.

#

“Who are you?” Kingsford croaked.

Chase turned around in the passenger seat. It had been four hours since their escape from Elysium City, and they were halfway back down the mountain to Aaru. It was still a few hours before dawn, and the car was illuminated only by the lights of the dashboard and the regular flick of the streetlights. After the chaos, Kingsford had slipped back into his drugged stupor. Keiji and Chase had tossed him in the backseat, burned out of Elysium City as fast as possible, and started shouting at each other.

“My name’s Keiji DuVal,” Keiji said, glancing in the rear-view mirror. “Captain of the Black Swan. This is Chase Benson, first mate. You missed a job interview with us yesterday.”

Kingsford sat up slowly, pinching the bridge of his nose and putting a hand on the shoulder of the driver’s seat. “Aw… yeah,” he mumbled. “Sorry, I… God, what happened to me?”

“We came to see you in Elysium City,” Chase said. “Only someone else had come to see you first.”

“Yeah…,” Kingsford muttered. “Yeah… I don’t really remember a lot.”

“They drugged you with something,” Keiji said. “We offered a trade but the meeting didn’t exactly go to plan. Not that we had much of a plan in the first place.”

“Oh, don’t start this again,” Chase said. “It was your goddamn idea to roll in there in the first place. If it wasn’t for me you’d be back up there on a meathook in a freezer.”

“What exactly happened?” Kingsford asked hoarsely.

“Well, we tried to pay them off in exchange for your safety, but things didn’t go to plan and we had a shootout on the Grand Circus,” Keiji said.

“What?”

“It was not a shootout!” Chase said. “They didn’t even shoot back, they just ran off!”

“Marvellous,” Keiji replied. “That will look good at the arraignment.”

“Look,” Chase said, “I’ll admit that it was in a pretty bad place, but trust me, ‘shots fired’ isn’t the most pressing thing on a detective’s to-do list. Nobody was injured, except that guy I punched – and there’s no way he’ll talk to the cops – and we didn’t even do that much property damage! So chill the fuck out.”

“Anyway, Mr. Kingsford,” Keiji said, glancing in the rearview mirror again, “we still have a position available, if the ship isn’t surrounded by a police cordon when we get back.”

“I think you can let me out right here,” Kingsford said.

Before Keiji could reply, Chase twisted around in his seat, glared at the pilot, and said: “I nearly got shot for you tonight, Mr. Kingsford, and my friend was willing to spend three hundred thousand dollars to secure your liberty. I think you owe us the courtesy of at least attending that job interview, which, by the way, you are now fifty-one hours late for. Why was that, anyway? Oh, I know about the debt collectors and all – I was there, with the shooting and the violence and the police and all that. I mean to say, why were you in trouble in the first place? Gambling? Or something else? Three hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money, and as I recall your Vietnamese friend told us you owed him “more than that.” So it seems, to me, that maybe you should spend a little more time considering an offer of a free ride on a private vessel off the planet.”

He turned back around. Kingsford glowered at him in the rear-view mirror. Chase turned the radio on.

#

“Alright. You’ve got me. I’m a gambler. Three hundred thousand might seem like a crazy amount, but you’d be surprised how quick it can mount up, with interest and all. I owe those boys money I can’t pay, and I could do with a quick way of getting out of here. But – now, I don’t mean to be rude – but this thing is a piece of shit.”

It was six o’clock in the morning, and the sun was peeking up over the pine trees. The three of them were standing on the flight deck of the Black Swan, sipping cups of coffee. Kingsford had spent the hour since they’d returned doing a thorough systems check on the ship, his eyebrows raising further with every passing minute.

“Look…” Keiji said.

“Ah ah ah,” Kingsford said, holding a hand up. “Now it’s not that it can’t fly, it’s that it shouldn’t. You’ve brought the systems up to the bare minimum safety requirements. You’ve cobbled brand new engines onto old parts without bothering to thread them properly. Your flight systems are a mess – a workable mess, but still a mess. You’re using very cheap, low-grade Ionese coolant. And you’ve got a cat onboard! Do you realise how much bad luck that is?”

“I heard good,” Keiji said, confused.

“God, no! You’re thinking of ocean ships.” Kingsford sighed, and took a long draught of coffee. “I understand you’re eager to leave, but as things stand I doubt we’d make it to Phobos. I reckon we spend another week or three to bring her up to scratch.”

“Well…” Keiji said reluctantly. “I guess that wouldn’t be too bad. I did have my doubts about the engine threading, and…”

“Oh, shit,” Chase said, staring out the windows. Keiji and Kingsford turned their gaze to match his. Down below, by the cold ashes of the campfire and the barbecue and the ratty folding chairs, a pair of black sedans had pulled up, and were disgorging a number of large men holding shotguns and pistols. One figure was immediately apparent, smaller than the others – Cuong.

Keiji immediately slammed his hand down on the cargo hatch controls.The doors groaned closed with a flaking of rust, a few of Cuong’s men slamming their hands against it in frustration as they failed to make it through in time. They began to fan out, surrounding the ship, searching for another way in.

Keiji’s computer beeped with an incoming call. It was Kingsford’s number, but the pilot’s computer was still in Cuong’s possession. He was standing by his car staring up at the flight deck windows and waving it at them.

Keiji answered it, and before the man could speak he said “You won’t get in. It’s a spaceship, so, it’s airtight.”

“We’ll try anyway,’ Cuong said calmly. “How much food and water do you have in there?” He looked around the junkyard. “This is a very deserted place. Why, someone could be here for months and nobody would ever know.”

Keiji muted his computer for a minute and glanced at Chase. “Call Johan and see if he’s OK. Get him to call the… shit. Well, at least tell him and Anna Marie to get to Aaru.”

He returned his attention to Cuong. “What do you want?”

“I’ll give you one guess.”

“We don’t have him,” Keiji lied. “He kept trying to get away from us in EC and with the cops after us we didn’t have the patience to chase him.”

Cuong snorted, and flashed a data-map to Keiji’s computer. “Don’t waste my time. How do you think we found you?”

Keiji whipped his head around to glare at Kingsford. “They put a tracker on you!”

“Well that’s not my fault!”

In the corner, Chase was on the phone to their landlord. “No.. it wasn’t… look… oh, fine! Call the cops!” He turned to look at them. “Yeah, Smitty’s calling the police. We have maybe twenty minutes.”

Keiji ran his fingers through his hair. “Fantastic. And they’ll show up, arrest these assholes, and then arrest us. Great.”

“No,” Chase said slowly. “We can be gone by then.”

They both glanced at Kingsford. He’d put his coffee cup down and was sighing gently. “Jesus. Alright. But we’re stopping in at the first place we can for an overhaul, alright?”

They strapped themselves into the flight deck chairs, and Kingsford took an uneasy seat at the nose. He began flicking switches on the panels, booting up the computers, running air-traffic scans and warming up the engines. A shudder ran through the long-dormant deckplates as the engines came online, and whined with a slow but quickening rotation.

“You really think this thing will fly?” Cuong sneered.

“Engines showing 94% capacity,” Kingsford reported. “Air traffic route requested over the Amazonis Sea. Launch trajectory fully plotted.”

Keiji peered out the windows. With the engines whirring at full speed, kicking up dust and long-dormant pine needles, Cuong’s men had re-evaluated their opinion of the ship. Some had piled back into the cars, others were fleeing on foot. Either they were worried they might be caught in the take-off burn, or they thought the ship might actually explode. Keiji wasn’t entirely sure it wouldn’t. His stomach was wracked with nausea.

“All systems nominal,” Kingsford said. “Awaiting clearance for take-off.” For a moment Keiji thought he was on the wire to ATC, before realising the pilot was talking to him. Awaiting captain’s orders.

“Go,” he said, and felt a sudden shifting sadness and elation as the Black Swan strained to lift free of the earth; as she rose into the air, the camp chairs and grey ashes blown away in the downdraft; as she rotated and shifted her nose to the northeast; as the boneyard gave way beneath them, those ranked rows of derelict spacecraft looking so prim and proper; as they passed over the barbed wire fence and the pine forest and the sand dunes and the blue and violet reefs; as the ship lifted away, as the ground and sea disappeared, the flight deck filled with the bright light of the rising sun.

They rose higher and higher, the engines giving off a muted roar, the distant waves of the Boreal Ocean below them like ripples in a sheet of tinfoil. Keiji caught a glimpse of whaling fleets and floating towns, feeling the sudden nostalgic regret of the only world he’d ever known. Chase, on the starboard windows, saw the distant world-breaking summit of Olympus Mons, and felt an overwhelming sense of relief, as though he had been reprieved of an awful fate he hadn’t even known had existed. Kingsford, staring directly ahead into a map of trajectories and curves and statistical readings laid out on the flight panel, could only marvel at how suddenly his life had changed.

Blue faded to black, as the Black Swan rose above the sky and carried her crew into space.