You don’t ever feel cursed, cast out? You know, exiled from the spring of living water and the shelter of the tree?

  Son, she said. The cave was a refuge. Of course. But every refuge is a form of captivity. We were cast out from the dark into the light, emerging from beneath the earth to be on it. We came down onto the plain into paradise, not from it.

  You really believe that?

  Of course. Plains life is not for everyone, but it’s where I found myself, how I’ve learnt to live. I’m used to it.

  Alone? Separate?

  We live in association. We’ve always been citizens. We contribute to the Co-op.

  We approve of it all, the collective life, but we don’t really inhabit it.

  She who plants and she who waters are one.

  Yes, I said. From each according to ability, to each according to need. I know. But is that how we live?

  The plain produces strong people. I’m not ashamed of that.

  And what of the weak? I asked.

  We exist to serve them.

  You really believe that? Still?

  I’ll always believe it. It’s why I stay.

  Why? Because it keeps you strong?

  As I said, it’s what I know. But, yes, it keeps me staunch.

  So you’d never leave?

  I can’t imagine wanting to.

  What about needing to?

  Oh, I don’t think of that. Son, you sound troubled.

  My head is scrambled, I said, truthfully enough. Too long on the road.

  You’ve done well, she said. You’ve worked hard to find good trade.

  I’m tired of it.

  I see that. But you’ll be out again before long. I know you. You’ll get restless.

  I’m weary of chasing junk.

  Remember the middens?

  Of course.

  People leave a trail. As long as folks exist, there’ll be stuff left behind. We should be glad to have the use of it. And grateful they didn’t sow the land with salt. That was the way of empires.

  You’ve been reading the sagas again, I see.

  A little, she admitted coyly. The evenings can drag. Remain true to yourselves but move ever upward, she quoted. At the ridgetop you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent.

  For everything that rises must converge.

  Well, she said, with evident pleasure. You are my son.

  I offered her a smile. But within myself, I felt unmoored and lonely.

  I’d almost begun to hope the day would never come, but of course it did, as I always knew it would. There was no chance they’d leave me hanging forever. One market day some nameless pigeon found me in the square and passed on a summons to meet at the wharf. I never went. Another met me on the road with a message to drive to the Nine Mile, but again I didn’t show. I was a volunteer – there was nothing mutinous in declining a meet. Even so, this was new territory for me. I figured if I withheld my labour, eventually I’d see where I stood, whether the Service was still the enterprise I’d joined as a recruit, or if it had degenerated into the kind of outfit that would compel me to serve.

  In the end, the old filmlayer came himself. His intervention began, ostensibly, as a visit to my mother. I observed his arrival from the shade under my winterhouse. I knew his truck, his hulking figure, the droop of his hat brim. There was the requisite performance of a trade errand – a carton of something he took up the stairs. I was waiting for him when he appeared later among the fruit trees in my growhouse.

  This is bold, I said.

  Well, he replied, batting his hat against his leg. You haven’t made it easy. Is there a problem?

  Probably. If you’re here.

  It’s a request, that’s all.

  I’m tired.

  Understood, he said. And you have doubts.

  But you have a message anyway.

  In two parts.

  Number one?

  There’ll be no more mopping up.

  For me personally, or in general?

  I’m just the pigeon, he said. I don’t know what you mean or what they mean.

  Okay, I said. And two?

  Your presence is requested for two days total.

  For work or talk?

  Exchange of information.

  I don’t have any.

  I imagine it’s the other way round. Something you might like to know.

  I thought you were just the messenger, I said.

  That’s all I know.

  Information. For me?

  They said it’s something that might change things for you. The shape of your life. Whatever that means.

  I stared at him, my heart leaping. He flogged his hat nervously and then shoved it back on his head.

  When?

  Day after tomorrow. Thirteen-hundred hours. The anthills.

  What if I don’t show?

  Well then, he said. You’re none the wiser and the hamlet gets more tomatoes.

  So I’m free to choose?

  Son, he growled. You were always free.

  I just stood there. Trying to understand him.

  I’ll collect you at dawn, he said, turning away. Told your mother I need you for a day or two.

  I’ll bet, I said, resuming the work of picking oranges.

  As he drove away I overturned a crate to sit a moment and think.

  You know, I’d always wondered, but didn’t dare believe it could be possible, if one day the Service might search for Sun on my behalf. They had the means, surely. And they had to know what losing her had cost me. This was how they were acknowledging my years of faithful service. My heart. Dear God, my spirit soared.

  The child wakes. And whimpers.

  Comrade, I say. She’s hungry.

  Not my problem.

  There’s food in my rig.

  Not anymore.

  It’ll be a long night with her wailing.

  She doesn’t make much noise.

  That’s what you think.

  The bowman sucks his teeth. Looks about himself. As if there might be counsel in all his drums and crates and coils of hose. Then he gets up, muttering imprecations. While he’s gone, I hold the child’s gaze and press a finger across my lips. The flicker of recognition, the moment of complicity, sends a charge through me.

  The bean mash is pretty good, I call after him.

  Away in the gloom, a clatter and a curse.

  In the morning we’ll get out, I whisper to the child. Everything’ll be fine. But you have to promise me. If you find our rig, if you see the vehicle, remember what I told you. About what’s in the door. The tool. Don’t touch it. Don’t go for it. You understand?

  She looks up at me. She stinks. And so do I.

  You hear?

  She blinks.

  The bowman’s footfalls approach.

  Please, I whisper to her.

  Well, I’ll give you this, he says. Your stuff tastes better than mine.

  I’ll show you how to make it.

  I’ll figure it out.

  He opens the gate a little way, blocks the gap with his hip, and shoves two dixies through.

  Thank you, I say. Decent of you. Talk about singing for my supper.

  Jesus, he says. Enough with the singing.

  You know, if I’m brutally honest – and why not, I’ve got nothing to lose except a bit of dignity – I wonder if it wasn’t just that I’d given up hope of ever finding Sun and Ester. For years I’d trained myself never to think of them. Because of how it ate me up, rendered me unsafe and unsound. In the field. At home. Until I just didn’t. Think of them, I mean. What does that say about a man? Doesn’t that interest you at all? Why look at me like that? Unless you know the feeling. I’m sorry. I see I’ve hit a nerve.

  He sits down slowly. The moment passes. I set the thought aside, this morsel of intel, in the hope it’ll come in handy later in the night.

  The girl has already wolfed her mash and licked the dixy. I give her mine. And when she’s finished, she’s too tired and sated to bridle when I wipe the mealy smear from her chin.

  She’s on the nose, says the bowman, watching in open fascination as she drifts back to sleep.

  She’s exhausted. She needs a wash.

  You wash her?

  She washes herself. She’s been trained.

  We’ll see about it, he says. In the morning.

  Well, anyway, thank you for the grub.

  You didn’t even eat.

  I serve the child.

  What’s that, the sagas?

  No. Just something someone said.

  Kid have a name?

  I assume so. I’m hoping, eventually, she’ll tell me.

  I can’t figure you.

  But you’re listening, I say.

  You’re such a bloody liar, he says in a tone of rueful wonder.

  I shrug.

  Where’d you say you found her?

  I’m getting to that. I thought you wanted to know about Utah.

  You keep fucking around, going sideways.

  Sometimes, to go forward, you need to make a detour.

  To do what? Cover your tracks? Play for time? You think someone’s coming to spring you?

  No, I say. Nobody’s coming to save me.

  So get on with it.

  I’m getting there.

  The hell you are.

  This is it, I say. I’m telling you how it was. How it went.

  Okay. So I went to the termite mounds. As ordered. Requested. With the filmlayer. And the moment the stat hove into view, flashing like a daytime star, he limped back to his truck and drove off. Left me waiting there in the sun. Alone. Without kit.

  The blimp banked upwind, began to descend. Everything about this meet was irregular. Never before had I seen an air asset land so close to home without the cover of darkness. It was unsettling. Exciting, too, I suppose. Because it seemed possible I might be the cause of it. Which goes to show how disconnected and self-absorbed I was in that moment.

  Once we were aloft and I’d had time to take in the other operators, arrayed in field dress along the benches of the gondola, I could register their undisguised curiosity. They were young. None greeted me. I was just an old cove in tattered civvies, a puzzle that’d remain unsolved.

  From the peninsula, we flew east. Across the bight of the gulf. Over the salt pans beyond. Across the pink dunes that marched inland in waves. Past the black and burgundy mesas of the mining lands until, eventually, we reached the freckled edge of the desert where the superheated air was blocky and jagged, and the gondola shuddered and shimmied in the turbulence. As we pressed further into that mosaic of golden spinifex and red dirt, we began to lose altitude. The company stirred. Operators snugged webbing and reached for hats and scarves. Some daubed paste on their noses and cheeks.

  I didn’t detect the encampment until our final approach. All I saw was a tawny scour. Like a flood wash. All the huts and tents and machines were expertly latticed.

  On the ground I was met by a woman from Planning who led me away from the company. We ducked under the lattice edge and strode through the grid of shadows cast by the vaulted camo ceiling. She said nothing as we crossed the camp, passing squads of drilling operators. At the head of a long, cowled tent, she handed me over to a bung-eyed orderly. He led me into a kind of antechamber, asked for the supplementary password the filmlayer had provided, and once satisfied he took me down a narrow hall and into a longer space that looked like a briefing room. The air was cooled in there. Chart stands stood by the walls, every one of them shrouded. Chairs were stacked at one end. There was a large trestle table at the other. And on that lay a dossier as thick as a ration box.

  The orderly left me there without instruction.

  And so I waited.

  To calm myself and to overcome the tempting presence of the file, I took in the details of the room. Alongside the table, powered down and half draped in a field blanket, was a viewing screen. Behind that stood a blast-proof cabinet. To one side, a tilted map deck with the charts covered. Lying on the cabinet were two small comms pieces. All this kit was exotic fruit for the rank and file, but the viewer was familiar from Induction and Basic, and most of the rest I’d seen at staging posts and Planning hubs in the rear.

  The little black panels, however, I’d only seen in strongholds. They were crim tech and supposed to operate over vast distances, but I was told they often didn’t function because we’d destroyed much of the infrastructure that linked them. I’d seized and bagged a couple of these devices on the Utah job, had lost them with all the rest of the kit and crew. It was queer to see these here. There was something sinister about them lying in the open like this. It was almost as if they were on display. To instil a sense of awe. Or give some other arcane signal. And now I thought about it, everything in the room suggested elements higher than Supply and Planning. This felt like the province of Intel. And that freshened my hopes. But also my agitation.

  The presence of the dossier really didn’t help. For someone to have left it in plain sight of an unsupervised operator – this was an extraordinary lapse. I’d never encountered such a breach of security.

  I stepped back from the table. Retreated to the very centre of the room. And to defend myself against any charge of impropriety, I averted my gaze. Then I turned my back entirely. But the discomfort persisted. The presence of that file was more disturbing than any bit of clan gear. The discordance of it caused my mind to fizz and seethe. I shouldn’t be allowed to stand alone in a room with it, let alone be directed to do so. None of this could be accidental. It felt like a provocation. A test.

  I looked back at it. This block of documents. A swatch of yellow sprouted from its edge. Like some kind of tag or marker. When I turned away, the afterglow of that colour burnt in my vision.

  I stood there several more minutes. Nobody came. I looked again at the table and the huge folder. No. This wasn’t an oversight, and nor was it a test, let alone a trap. This had to be the information I’d been promised.

  Outside, overhead, the stat I’d come in on whined and faded off into the distance. In the next room I could hear voices. People speaking in hushed tones. Perhaps this was how Intel types communicated. It seemed likely they were aware of my presence. Possibly even observing me.

  I thought of Sun. And Ester, whose infant face brought a shiver of angst. Would she know me? God, would I even recognize her?

  The prospect of knowing, the hunger – it was too much. I strode across, hesitated, then bent over the dossier. On the buff cover there was nothing to identify the contents except a long number. And that yellow flash – it was a docket. It was tipped in two-thirds of the way down the stack of docs. Written on it was my codename. Which I registered with a jab because I’d never seen it written before, had never even uttered it.

  Then I did what I was trained never to do. I opened the dossier. Without authorization. Where the yellow tag protruded.

  Instantly it felt as if I’d made a terrible mistake. Sun’s name was nowhere here. There was no description or detail pertaining to her or Ester. Nothing about their lives or whereabouts. It seemed to be just a mission file, a list of planning actions, materiel movements, personnel mobilizations, intel assets. I scanned pages more hurriedly, growing ever more frustrated and furious. Until I stumbled on a word I recognized. In capital letters. Which gave me a jolt. Like a boot from a battery cable. Jesus, I’d sung that word. It was a name with a legendary aura. And it kept appearing, page after page. Alongside certain details that struck me as faintly familiar. And then very bloody familiar.

  Fuck me, I thought. Surely not.

  I took it in rapidly at first. In gulps and grabs. Then I extricated myself. Physically stepped back. To get control of myself. Then I started over, right from the top of the pile, reading it all, quickly, carefully, front to back, with my head nearly fit to detonate. It took the best part of an hour. Which was, I gather, exactly what had been expected of me.

  And I don’t know how to explain the feeling I was left with. For what does it mean to be heartbroken and euphoric in the same instant? I’ve had a long time to think on that, because this clash of feelings has never dissipated. I’ve never resolved it.

  But I’m not a fool. I soon grasped the point of this exercise. Which was, in its execution, both generous and cynical. Not to mention unspeakably cruel.

  Nothing specific had been promised to me. I’d done that bit of misdirection myself. I’d produced the fantasy of a reunion. Or at least the prospect of material information about Sun and Ester. They hadn’t dangled it in front of me. They hadn’t even mentioned it. And perhaps they hadn’t anticipated where my mind would go. Maybe they hadn’t exploited this weakness, the likely misapprehension. But they knew so much about me. It’s impossible to imagine any of it was accidental.

  What I could see, and what I do know for certain, is that the entire exercise was an opportunity to deliver a kind of veiled acknowledgement. A secret tip of the hat to me. And to the comrades who did the job up there in the former Republic of Utah. Which, in itself, was extraordinary. It was unheard of for the Service to burden an operator with knowledge about a job, to reveal the identity of an object; even after the fact, it broke every protocol. Operationally and psychologically. There were damn good reasons for such protective measures.

  But this breach – it was more than just a gesture to give credit where it was due. It took me a minute or two to absorb it, but it was soon clear enough. This was an attempt to exploit my pride. Because conferring such a singular honour, granting me a sense of historic achievement, what else could it be but an extraordinary form of inducement? They’d been observing me. All my life they’d been watching – I knew that. And since the sudden upturn in failed missions and my episode of insubordination over the gas failures, they’d been monitoring my state of mind. Exactly how, I couldn’t know. Perhaps they’d been concerned my disquiet might spill over into treachery. My no-shows had probably been a cause for worry. After such long and exemplary service, I was becoming a disappointment, even a risk. And yet they still wanted something from me. That had to be it.