Earth Thirst (7 page)

“Where are you?” he asks, and I know he's asking about the security of our conversation.

“I'm in a two-room house in the middle of Kangaroo Island,” I point out with a laugh. “I'm the only one for a couple of kilometers in any direction. It's pretty fucking secure.”

“Nothing is secure,” he says. “Your mission was compromised. Maybe from the beginning. Maybe from this end. I do not know how deep the infection goes.

“What infection? I thought this was an isolated mission.”

“As did I, but there is something amiss, something that goes back into our roots. Why was the reporter there?”

My hand tightens on the phone. “Which reporter?” I ask.

“Vanderhaven. She was on the boat…”

It's almost a question from him, but not quite, and I hesitate on the cusp of replying.

Callis and I have known each other for a long time. We've schemed our way into and out of a number of tight situations over the centuries. Typically, he plays the scoundrel role—the charming and devious one—while I play the silent and invisible heavy, and I've seen him extract information with an insouciant ease simply by leaving a sentence hanging, neglecting a final piece of punctuation that his listeners instinctively leap to supply. In doing so, they also tumble along a path he has arranged for them to take.

“Vanderhaven,” I reply. “The one who did the Beering story?”

“That was your job.”

“It was.”

“The Grove has been expressing some concern.”

“Now? That was two years ago. I've been in Mother's care since then. Up until about a month before we went to Adelaide and got on the boat.”

“Why was she on the boat, Silas?”

I glance around. The phone is on the wall outside the kitchen, and I'm standing at the mouth of a narrow hall that runs from the living room of the small cabin to the other rooms. There's a single entrance to this cabin, and I can see it from where I'm standing, but there are also windows in the rooms. The doors to the rooms are shut. If there's a good place to be standing in this cabin, I'm in it.

I am in an isolated location, and I am the only one in the house, but his questions have set off a survival check in my brain. I'm doing a tactical assessment of my location. Figuring out my exit strategy. Wondering about my security.

“I didn't say she was,” I reply carefully.

“There's a poison at work here,” he says. “I fear it may touch members of the Grove. I don't know who you can trust.”

“Suggestions?”

“Stay away from Arcadia. Be rootless.”

Rootless
. My breath catches in my throat. It's a hard word to hear. On my own, unable to return to Arcadia and to Mother's embrace. I have only the foul soil of the world to sustain me.

“Why?” I croak.

“The Grove is protecting its interests,” he says. “They started as soon as the story broke. It's been three weeks, Silas. We haven't heard from any of the team. We had to assume you were all lost, or compromised. The Grove doesn't want to lose the mission data, but they have to protect Arcadia.”

“Of course,” I say. I know the drill. We all do—the priority is always family. Arcadia must be protected. Nothing else matters. That is the price we pay. Rooted, we live forever. The rootless—those who can't return to Arcadia and Mother's embrace—they simply… die.

“Your assets have been reclaimed,” he says, a touch embarrassed, and I suspect the task of seizing my assets fell to him. Arcadia has managed to survive as long as it has by maintaining deep relationships with long-standing banking houses. It makes it easier for us to survive the ebb and flow of global finance, but it also means we are centrally managed. That much easier to excise the rootless from their allowances.

“Spend it on some tree farms, would you?” I ask.

“Gladly,” he laughs. “Silas,” he says, his voice becoming serious. “I'm not telling you to give up. Don't crawl off into the woods and let the humus have you. Stay hidden. Do you understand? It'll be the only way you can find out what is going on.”

“What is going on?” I ask.

He ignores my question. “Do you remember Victoria's Diamond Jubilee?” he asks.

“Vaguely,” I reply. We had been in London for the celebration, and he had dragged me into some scam involving gold from Witwatersrand. He had claimed it was an opportunity investment for Arcadia, but I hadn't entirely bought that line of bullshit. I had been right too; the other party had tried to cheat us, and a rather straight-forward enterprise had become complicated. And bloody.

“There was a party we attended. A masked ball.”

“There was?” I have the same memory problems as Callis—all Arcadians did—and the older memories suffered the most. But Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee had only been a little over a hundred years ago.

“I met a woman there, a banker's daughter. She introduced me to her father. I made a small investment with him before we left London.”

“Ah,” I say, suddenly understanding why he was telling me this. “And this investment has been quietly maturing ever since, hasn't it?”

“The bank has a branch in Adelaide,” he says. He tells me the name of the bank. “They'll be expecting you.”

“And then what?” I ask.

“Find out what happened,” he says. “Find the reporter.”

Mere.

A strange emotion tugs at me. “And then what?” I repeat, at a loss of what else to say.

“Help me find the root of this poison before it infects all of Arcadia,” he says.

What other choice do I have, really? The rootless die after a while. They can't find soil that will nourish them, and the other method of staying alive is bloody.

It never ends well.

He gives me a different number to reach him at—a private line I can call directly. After I hang up, I scour the house, looking for a source of useful news. Fortunately, the caretaker is one of those who prefers to thumb through a paper over breakfast rather than scan a newsfeed on a computer. I find a stack of newspapers in a recycling bin in the spare bedroom, but there's only a week's worth. If there was a story to be found in the Southern Ocean, the world has moved on already.

Australian elections are coming up and the front-runner has just been caught in the sort of scandal that would derail a US candidate, but as Down Under isn't as tightly wound as North America, the media has to work pretty hard to make the story seem worthy of the attention they're giving it. Piracy is up along the Somalian coast. People are still killing each other in Central Africa. Countries in the Middle East are changing governments. Again. Though it has been a long time since much dramatic change swept across Outremer. It used to take centuries for these lands to change hands, and now it is a matter of decades. A pipeline rupture near the Black Sea has caught the media's fancy as well as a story about infidelity between a Hollywood power couple. Based on the amount of column inches devoted to each story, it's hard to gauge which is the worse disaster, though I suspect the Hollywood couple's agents are milking the story a bit as neither has had a decent hit in the last five years.

The ecological and environmental impact of the pipeline rupture makes me want to run back to the woods and hide underground, but that's been the reaction for decades now and what has it gotten us? Arcadia weeps as the world dies a little bit more, and we're all incrementally closer to death. All of us.

Some more quickly than others.

There are scabs on the knuckles of my right hand and, compulsively, I pick one off. There is no blood, but the flesh underneath is pale.

“Careful,” I whisper to myself, “you could scar.”

Wouldn't that be a novelty?

I could bury myself beneath the roots of any of the cypress out there and wait for the world to change again. Would I wake up or would the chemical poison in my blood kill me while I slept? Would my decaying corpse end up poisoning the tree that was wrapped around me?

That's what Callis had warned me about. Poison, getting at the roots. Killing Mother, the Grove, Arcadia—everything.

Crawling into the ground and waiting for the end wasn't a soldier's death, anyway. I have fought on Mother's behalf for a very long time. My head is filled with half-remembered dreams of a thousand wars. I've been a good soldier. I deserve something more.

Who backed Kyodo Kujira? What does Prime Earth know? What happened to the
Cetacean Liberty
?

Mere will know how to find the answers.

NINE

E
verything but the forward prow of the
Cetacean Liberty
is wrapped up tight in white plastic wrap, and it lolls in the water like a burn victim soaking in a saline bath. A harbor patrol car is parked on the dock nearby, and only one of its two occupants is awake. The other has his seat levered halfway back, his cap pulled down low on his face to block out the half-dozen mercury vapor lights permanently trained on the shrink-wrapped boat. The light reflects harshly off the white wrap, and there isn't a shadow anywhere within thirty yards of the
Cetacean Liberty
.

Either Prime Earth or the South Australian government has turned the boat into a floating art installation—a minimalist
tabula rasa
that waits for meaning to be imprinted upon its slick nakedness. What do we see when we look upon this abstract symbol? This bleached blot, waiting for its Rorschach stain.

I don't loiter, but I do make a second pass, walking in the opposite direction. The guy in the car doesn't even look up from his phone. The other one continues to sleep.

Reefie's is a noisy pub three blocks away, and after I enter and gauge my choices, I head for the bar and find an open spot next to a guy drinking alone. A half-dozen plasma screen TVs are competing for the patrons' attention with three different football games (two of the three are broadcasting Australian games), a pair of soccer games, and a US basketball game. Lakers versus someone else—no one seems to care, including the network that is broadcasting the game.

The bartender, a well-groomed man with precision-razored stubble, flips a coaster on the bar in front of me and I order a beer. “A lager. Whatever you've got on tap that isn't the tourist beer.” He squints at me for a second, trying to gauge if I'm trying to be a smart-ass, and when I put a bill on the bar, he stops wondering.

“Not a fan of the local?” The man sitting next to me stinks of fish, and his blond hair has been permanently stiffened by sea and sky.

“It's like that American coffee company,” I reply. “You can get it anywhere, but that doesn't make it good.”

He chuckles and raises his pint glass in my direction. I clink my glass off his, notice how empty his is compared to mine, and catch the bartender's eye. “Thanks, mate,” he says when another full pint is deposited in front of him. “So, journalist or investigator?” he asks.

“Excuse me?”

“If you're looking to chat me up, you're bad at picking out men who might be your type.”

“Was I trying to pick you up?” I ask.

My answer confuses him for a second, though it isn't hard to confuse him in his state. “I ain't got much else to offer,” he says, “and I don't believe in random charity.”

“And the world is a poorer place for it,” I say.

“Which are you?” He squints at me. “Angling for a payout or writing a story?”

“Journalist,” I say, figuring that's the answer he's looking for.

He nods and sticks out a hand. “I'm Ted.”

“Silas.” His hand is calloused, rough from the nets and a fishing knife. “You want to tell me something about that boat out there?”

He grins. We both know which boat I'm referring to. “Aye,” he says, “I can tell you a story or two.” He takes a long pull from his glass, moistening his tongue and making me wait a few seconds. Ted is a garrulous local, pre-greased by the media, and a bit of a drunk; he knows the routine and is happy to play along. I'm a good listener, and I have a pocket full of money taken from the caretaker's wallet.

We're going to be good friends.

* * *

Ted takes me back about two and a half weeks when stories began circulating among the fishing boats out of Adelaide that something had happened out on the water. A few days later the
Cetacean Liberty
was found, adrift, in the Great Australian Bight. She had suffered a fire, and all of her life boats were gone. The Royal Australian Navy flooded the Bight with ships and found a few drifting life boats. What survivors were in them were suffering from burns in addition to exposure and dehydration.

Ted doesn't know how many survived, but it doesn't sound like many.

The
Cetacean Liberty
was towed back to Adelaide and wrapped up tight. Prime Earth's management—back in San Diego and quick to point out that they are miles and miles from any sort of altercation in the Southern Ocean—stuffed their fingers in their ears and pretended nothing had happened other than an unfortunate galley fire.

Ted tries to milk me for a few drinks, but once I establish that he knows nothing about the whaling fleet, it's clear he isn't quite the fount of knowledge that he thinks he is, which makes sense, given the lack of ongoing speculation I hadn't seen in the local papers. The media did their routine of scrounging for scraps, looking for some morsel that they can worry long enough to show an upward trend in their readership metrics at their next quarterly shareholder meeting. But without some immediate scandal to keep their audiences' attention, their corporate overlords will simply can the stories. The story is lacking a champion, someone like Meredith Vanderhaven, to keep it alive. It dies with a whimper, a final update buried on the back page of the local news section, and the conspiracy community wanders off, looking for something with a bit more meat on it.

No one cares.

Much like this crowd's attitude toward the Lakers' game.

The world is a big place. It's easy to get lost.

* * *

I go to ground at a cheap hotel, spending half of what remains from the money I took from the caretaker's wallet. I had gotten to Adelaide too late to visit Callis's bank, and after spending most of a day and part of the previous night in wait mode, I had gone down to the docks. I had to do something; the night was too precious a time to waste.