“I don’t know.” I wish we could settle on a topic of conversation other than water. “I should go and find Ramatou.”
“You work too hard,” Busuke says, as if I have a choice.
The camp used to confuse me, but now I could walk its maze of prefabs and tents blindfolded. Tonight the stars are out. Plump and yellow, two thirds full, the Moon swims over the tents, rippling in heat. A fat Moon brings out the worst in people, my mother used to say. But I’m not superstitious. It’s just a rock with people on it.
My lenses tint it, tracing geopolitical boundaries. America, Russia, China and India have the biggest claims, but there is a little swatch of Africa up there, and it gladdens me. I often show it to my daughter, as if to say, we can be more than this. This camp does not have to define you. You could do great things. Walk on the Moon, one day.
I catch the rise of a swift bright star. It turns out to be a Japanese orbital power satellite, under assembly. I have heard about these stations. When they are built, when they are boosted to higher orbits, the satellites’ mirrors will cup the Sun’s light and pour it down to Earth. The energy will be used to do useful things like the supplying of power to coastal desalination plants. Then we will be drowning in water.
It bothers me that I never seen the power station before.
I collect my daughter from Ramatou. Eunice is in a bad mood, hungry and restless. I show her the Moon but she is beyond distraction. There is no food at the nearest dispensary, but we catch a shred of a rumour about food in green sector. We are not meant to cross into that part of the camp, but we have done it before and no one has questioned us. Along the way Eunice can tell me how her day in school went, and I will tell her something of mine, of the poor people on the Adriatic coast.
LATER, WHEN SHE is asleep, I drift to the community tent. The mob has simmered down since earlier, but the place is still busier than usual.
I push my way through fellow refugees, until I am within sight of the water thief. They have her on a makeshift bed, a table with a mattress on, hemmed by white-coated peacekeepers and green-outfitted nurses. There is a doctor present now, a young Lebanese man. From his confident and authoritative demeanour, he must be on his first posting. It won’t last. The long-stagers are nervous and jittery.
There are also three mantises. The medical robots are spindly but fearsome things, with too many limbs. Usually there is a doctor at the other end, assisting the robot via a virching link, but not always. These are very complex, expensive machines and they can operate themselves.
This woman hasn’t just been roughed up a bit. She has been beaten to the edge of death. One of the human medics changes the bag on a medical drip. The thief is unconscious, head lolling away from me. She doesn’t look much older than Eunice. Her skin is a sea of bruises, burns and cuts.
“They are going to vote,” says Busuke, sidling up.
“Of course. Voting is what we do. If there is something to vote on, we vote.”
I weary of our endless swirling micro-democracy. It is as if, while the great institutions of the world falter, we are obliged to reenact them in miniature here. A week doesn’t go by when the black and white balls aren’t drawn out for something.
“It’s not about life and death,” Busuke insists. “We’re not going to kill this woman. Just withhold excessive treatment.”
“Which wouldn’t be the same.”
“Why should the robots and doctors fuss over her, when they’re needed elsewhere? And that medicine.”
“They should have done us all a favour,” I say. “Killed her outright, when they caught her.”
It is brutal, but in that moment I mean it.
IN THE MORNING I catch sight of a screen, propped up on a pile of medical supply boxes. It shows a confusion of gleaming lines, racing to perspective points. Glittery shards, people and machines moving in weightlessness. The indigo curve of the Earth, seen from above the atmosphere. Below, perfectly cloudless, is Africa, turning out of night. I think of waving to myself.
It turns out—I learn this in pieces, not all at once—that there has been an accident on the Japanese power station. An Indian tug has crashed into it, and now there is a race to rescue the construction workers. Of course much of the work is being done by robots, but there are still dozens of men and women involved. Later that I learn that the tug caused the station to tilt from its normal alignment, meaning that its mirrors were much brighter as seen from Earth.
There is a saying about ill winds. I would be lying if I said I did not wonder what good this calamity can do for me.
WHEN I SQUAT down before my wise purple eye and enter global workspace, Prakash is distracted. He has been rushed off his feet, brokering assignments. I dare ask if there is work for me in orbit.
“They need help,” Prakash admits. “But remind me, Soya. What is your accumulated experience in space operations? How many hours logged, with both timelag and weightlessness?”
His question is rhetorical, but I furnish an honest answer. “Nothing. Zero hours. As you know.”
“Well, then.”
“It’s an emergency. No one quibbled about my experience on the Adriatic seawall.”
“That was different. Orbital operations are a world away from anything you know.” Prakash pauses—his attention is elsewhere today. “I still have work for you. The world has not stopped turning, just because of this unfortunate business.”
Today’s offered assignments: helping a construction robot at the Sarahan solar mirror project. Assisting a barnacle-scraper, on the belly of a Chinese supertanker. Running manual override on a tunnel project in the Tasman Straits.
I spurn these insults; settle finally for a low remuneration but high skills dividend job, helping one robot perform a delicate repair on another, at one of the Antarctic construction projects. It is a miserable, sodium-lit nightscape, barely inhabited. We are supposed to live in such places, when they are ready.
What matters is that it is work.
BUT I AM not even half way through the task when something goes wrong. A moment of nothing and then I am elsewhere. A bright parched landscape, blazing white under a sky that is a deep, pitiless black.
I voice a question to myself, aloud, thinking that someone, somewhere, may have the decency to answer.
“Where am I?”
I try to look around, and nothing happens. Then the view does indeed begin to track, and this landscape, weird as it is, strikes familiar notes. The ground undulates toward a treeless horizon, strewn with boulders and stones. Soft-contoured hills rise at an indeterminate distance. There are no crags, no animals or vegetation. Save for a kind of fence, stretching from one horizon to the other, there is no indication that humans have ever been there.
Then I see the body.
It is lying quite close by, and wearing a spacesuit.
I command the view to stop tracking. Again there is a delay before my intentions have effect.
It—he or she, I cannot decide—is lying on their back, arms at their side, legs slightly spread. Their visored face mirrors the sky. They could have been dropped there, like a discarded doll.
I take another look at that fence. It is a thick metal tube, wide enough that one might easily crawl through it, and it is supported above the ground on many ‘A’-shaped frames. There are joints in the tube, where one piece connects to another. I feel silly for not realising that it is a pipeline, not a fence.
I make my robot advance. My own shadow pushes ahead of me, jagged and mechanical. Whatever I am, I must be as large as a truck.