Everything about my mother’s death came as a surprise. Except for the tidiness of it, I suppose. But nothing could have prepared me for the note she left.

  At first, I could feel only rage. Then sorrow. But over time, as the self-pity slowly flamed out, I came to appreciate what it had cost her to write it. I believe it was even harder for her to do this than it was to destroy herself. In its way, her breach of discretion was a declaration of loyalty. To me. At the cost of her life’s work. Not that I understood that then. It was a long time before it became clear. But, for good or ill – and I still think it was with the noblest of intentions – she’d always had a pre-existing and pre-eminent fealty. She’d been in the Service far longer than she’d been my mother. She’d lost a husband to the cause. She’d given up a son to it as well. That was the shape of her. This is who she was before I even knew her. She was probably my handler as much as my mother. She’d certainly been my first trainer. Which meant I was born to the Service. For all I know, she had been too. Perhaps my father as well.

  The contempt I felt in the wake of her death was something I couldn’t sustain. And although it stung to admit it, I came to see she was by far the superior operator. Harder than me. Better at deception. And her delusions and self-deceptions were no more egregious than my own. Perhaps they were the misapprehensions of age and isolation. I suspect she thought that what had once been true was true still. For like many of the old guard, the spooks and planners who’d spent the years of the turning point, our penultimate moment, wasting lives and assets trying to bend reality to the contours of the past, she had not been in the field for decades. I don’t blame her for that. And I recognize my own folly, the vanity that blinded me. She was not the only one who couldn’t see what was standing in front of her.

  I guess I’ll never know if my initial meeting with Sun was arranged. Whether everything it led to had been engineered in advance. A form of recruitment that makes me ill to consider. All I can do is cling to the pleasure and happiness Sun gave me. The way she enlarged the world for me. I suppose I could say the same about Ester. As long as I can resist thinking of her conception and life as merely instrumental. It’s a choice, I know, and perhaps another form of magical thinking. But I can’t allow my daughter’s existence to be explained as a form of intergenerational conscription. I refuse.

  Besides, I’ll never know. It’s conceivable now that the archives, the dossiers, the caches and capsules that set us free and bound us to action could be lost again, destroyed by revenants and revanchists. Dear God, I hope not.

  The note was propped on the table beside the holstered tool. It was written on a sheet of stiff card the size of my hand. On the front was a crayon drawing. A child’s rendering of a house on stilts. Sails, shutters, two hens in the yard and, in the background, a serrated horizon that was unmistakable.

  The card was faded and foxed, with a patina of grime over it, as if it had been kept and carried over many years.

  The words on the back were in pencil. In my mother’s hand. She’d pressed so hard her letters had embossed the naive drawing on the other side.

  S died 7 years ago. KIA.

  Served honourably, with distinction.

  E died, age 8. Leukaemia.

  This is all I have.

  I’m so sorry.

  At one time, for security reasons, I would have burnt that note. Destroyed it even before I cut my mother down. But I have it now, right here, in my tunic. I must have read it a thousand times trying to parse its implications. What did she mean – this was all she had? All she had to offer me? All the information about Sun and Ester she could deliver? Or was she referring to the artefact itself? Was this drawing all she had left of them for herself? I’ve spent years wondering. Fingered the thing till it’s pulpy. See? And I started obsessing about the picture as much as the words.

  Look, a kid’s drawing. This is home, comrade. I used to think it was Ester’s work. And maybe it is. As you can see, it’s taken a beating over the years. That’s a very well-travelled bit of card. But it already was when I found it. See the lines here? What’s that – water, sweat? It took me a while to see why my mother might have kept it so long. Then it dawned on me. Maybe I’d drawn it. Or maybe my father. Perhaps as a girl she drew it herself. The important thing is, she carried it. And now it’s me carrying it. We’ve consecrated it. Made it an icon, you understand? This was her gift to me. There’s love in that. Right?

  I drove the body to the hamlet and informed the Association of my mother’s death, as I was obliged to do. Three men and a woman followed me out of the civil building to view her remains in the torrid sunlight. Their weather-ruined faces were familiar, but I didn’t know them by name. They were older factors and traders. Solemn, solicitous, and a little fearful. Not of me, I think, but of confronting the fact of the corpse. Also perhaps because it was my mother.

  I unshackled the tarp on the trailer and drew it back. I hadn’t hidden anything. The ligature weal around her throat was already yellow, almost brown. During this open-air examination, the filmlayer appeared at the side of the trailer. Our eyes met. His demeanour was difficult to read. He seemed sorrowful and shocked, but also suspicious.

  I told the others how I’d found her. It wasn’t necessary to add that an act of this sort was uncharacteristic or unexpected; they knew her well enough. I didn’t disclose the events that preceded her suicide. Or the note she left. Before leaving home, I’d burnt the webbing and groundsheet. I’d hidden the tool and the note. But I hewed as close to the truth as possible, recounting my homecoming after a long absence, her obvious agitation, and my discovery of her in the cellar on the third day.

  It was hard to know what they made of my story. Their consternation seemed to be complicated by the state of my face. I figured those who hadn’t already known what I was had to have been fitting things together now. The ones who remembered me as a boy would’ve struggled to recognize me. That day, I looked older than them.

  It wasn’t long before they’d seen enough. The heat was bad by then and the smell was travelling. Conscious that a crowd might gather, they sent me on my way.

  It took three hours to dig a new compost trench. Below the surface bulldust, the earth was baked so hard that the little digger struggled to penetrate. Under the strain, its battery soon failed. I pulled another from the truck and, when that was dead too, I used the one from my mother’s. The effort of hauling these packs in the sun was hardly better than doing the job by hand, which was how things ended anyway, because I needed to save some juice for the chipper. The whole procedure was an act of folly. I knew I should have left the job until morning, but I just couldn’t bear to leave her body exposed overnight.

  I finished out the hole with a mattock and a bar. Then I fetched the bins, fed the accumulated roots and cuttings through the chipper for the bedding layer. Set another pile in reserve. Put the body through, topped it with the blanket fill, and an hour after sunset I had the surface layer mounded.

  It wasn’t contempt that stopped me from staying out long enough to say some words over her. By then I was shivering and cramping, and only just lucid enough to get myself into one of the near-empty cisterns. I lay there until morning. How I didn’t drown, I’ll never know. I had just enough charge in me next day to climb out and get upstairs and under the fans. The things I dreamt and saw the next two days don’t bear talking about.

  And so I returned to being a plainsman and a homesteader.

  Nobody visited. And even once I was functional enough to return to trading in the market, no one from the Association or the Service approached me. I sensed the filmlayer’s presence often enough. And although I could detect no obvious signs of surveillance of the homestead, I didn’t doubt that I was being watched.

  Hamlet folks were only as careful around me as they’d been when my mother was alive. But I sensed that behind the mask of civility there lay a deep reservoir of disdain. I’d returned to take up the life I’d known since infancy. I was a high-value grower, an astute collector of water with large holdings. Within the diminished hamlet I was still, in that sense, indispensable. But I was also the bigamist whose mighty mother had killed herself for shame. In a less organized settlement, like one of those roadstead dorps without association, I’d have been burnt out and seen off. Or murdered in my bed. But even in death my mother afforded me protection.

  Months passed. Then seasons. Years. I kept to myself. Which was hardly new. But locally, I suppose, I became a more isolated and taciturn figure. I folded my mother’s holdings into mine. Which meant I was perpetually shorthanded. But instead of trading for labour, I adapted and simplified. Later, as conditions continued to deteriorate and more citizens moved away from the district, there was no safe or competent help to be had anyway. I streamlined again and again until the life I was leading bore little resemblance to the one I’d known as a boy. Things were much thinner. Every adjustment was a step backwards.

  For a while I entertained fantasies of working alongside sims. I’d begun to hear stories of refugees, and I suspected some of those would be simulacra. I imagined offering sanctuary to them. I could envisage a fellowship of emancipated subjects with whom I could labour as an equal, and to whom I’d leave the homestead in my old age. The sims I met in the oil deserts had craved honourable treatment above all else. In return they’d offered peace and utility. Workers like them didn’t need water or food, and yet they could harvest and grow both, and I had a notion that by trading in these staples, they might find status as citizens and free people. It occurred to me that all the mines of the east and north that had once supplied the districts beyond, and built the cities of the south, might be reactivated with their labour, so long as it wasn’t pressed. For that kind of work – in heat and anoxic spaces – they had no human peers. They’d be invaluable citizens. Well, such was my fancy. And my vanity, I suppose. That’s how cloistered my life was during those years. And how self-deceiving I remained. I hadn’t registered how far and how quickly the world had moved on.

  I was nobody’s saviour – I’d already proven that in more ways than I cared to remember. And eventually I sensed my fears about the Service’s strategic blunder were not misplaced. Because until I met this child here – and more to the point, her guardian – I’d long heard gossip in the market square of invincible mercenaries, piracy at sea. And, later on, talk of a trade in the east for concubine devices and facsimile children. So the thought that any sim would see a battle-scarred veteran like me as an ally, let alone a benefactor, was laughable.

  Such is a fellow’s ongoing capacity for self-delusion. And that denial of reality extended to something as basic as the weather. I told myself we were in a cycle, a bout of extremes that would soon correct itself. As if I’d never been educated. As if everything I’d witnessed stood for nothing. The fact is, I wanted the world to be steady. I couldn’t let it be otherwise.

  But the seasons were volatile. The air itself untrustworthy. As the humidity crept up, work became less and less safe. Many days the heat was intense but the sky so turbid and windless it was hardly possible to run pumps or fans. My batteries grew sclerotic. Over time, stars died in the night sky. Until the only lights visible between dusk and dawn were the ancient gas fires on the seaward horizon.

  It was bad enough I had to work harder and for shorter periods for poorer results. But the things that had once made life bearable, like walking in the ranges or along the western shore during winter, were possible less and less frequently, until eventually I realized they were just things I remembered doing.

  Life on the plain was becoming unviable. At some level I must have known this. I didn’t want to live twelve months of the year underground. Even having that thought should have been a signal. I was living through the end of the steady years. And I was the last of my kind on the plain. I just couldn’t admit it to myself.

  In those final years, there was one annual excursion I refused to forgo. One remaining ritual for which I was prepared to suffer. Each winter, at the solstice, I went to the water cave.

  For an hour or so, down in that dank hole, I felt different. The world itself felt different. I don’t quite know how to explain this. I felt overborne. Claimed. Not by blood or clan. By everything. Things themselves. Life, I suppose. You can go ahead and laugh, comrade. But what I felt down there was not the tragedy of things, but the blessing in it. Maybe I’d got sentimental. Probably I was over-invested in that hole in the ground. And a little heat-tapped. But down there I felt awe. To be in the presence of ancient life. To feel the afterglow of that mighty force. It felt holy. Yes, I get the pun.

  And you could give a shit, I know, but I don’t want you to get the idea this feeling was about my people. Or any people at all. What moved me there was not human. It was the story of that great fig tree. Written in stone. Of how long and how well it had fought. To find water. And to give life for as long as life was there to be made and given.

  Now those days were gone. In this district, the potential for life was extinguished. But here, for one day of the year, I could allow myself to own what I knew. That the people of the plain would soon go the way of our tree. And, before long, I’d become an exile and a refugee.

  I still wonder if there’s anyone alive who knows how close we were to liberation. How near we came to a clean shot for the world and its people. A source of torment, that. Because the closer we were, the crueller it feels.

  You’ve been on the road, comrade. You’ve seen the leached-out look in the faces of old hands. The loss of purpose, honour. Don’t look away – I’m not pointing the finger. I’ve seen my reflection. I know what I look like.

  But remember how it felt, being part of a project, clearing the way for something better? Yes, we’re hiding in a hole. But why should you and I preside over the extinction of an idea? Don’t you want to be civilized? Isn’t that worth a crack?

  The bowman shrugs. Twists his beard.

  Maybe it was a mistake, I say. Trying to purify the world one dead body at a time.

  You, he says. You want to purify it one good deed at a time.

  Beats storage, I tell him. It beats hiding. Don’t you think?

  It went the way of every cataclysm. Slowly. Imperceptibly. Then all of a sudden.

  The first thing I noticed was the absence of that old feeling of being watched. Who knows how long it had been before I copped on, but the sense of being monitored simply evaporated.

  Not long after that, I registered the filmlayer’s disappearance from the hamlet. His workshop was shuttered, his flatbed gone. I didn’t ask after him. Nobody at the market mentioned his departure. Trade had declined steeply by then. Departures from the hamlet had become commonplace. Few freighters left or arrived at the broken-backed wharf anymore. Trucks bringing trade from the south grew scarce. The influence of the Co-op and the Association seemed to decay. Then came the first super summer. A February of five cyclones. Losses were grievous. A sense of disquiet stalked the hamlet. More homesteaders abandoned their compounds and fled south.

  On market days, the gossip was febrile. It was said in the midwest whole districts were falling into ruin as citizens feuded over water. Further south, hamlets had forsaken fair trade and turned to raiding. The cities were teeming with refugees and had closed their gates against incomers seeking order and shelter. Drinking water was no longer provided by the Association. All reservoirs were in the hands of mercantile cartels.

  It was hard to test the veracity of such stories. The only traders coming up the peninsula now were chancers and rogues, people whose word you weren’t likely to trust, but the fact that these were the only kind of folk to venture our way seemed evidence enough that things were not well in the south.

  My mind grew sluggish. Even with the abbreviated workdays, once I’d retreated to the misters two hours after sunrise, I could sense how addled my thoughts had become. I made fundamental mistakes, injured myself, broke things, lost entire plantings. There were days when I couldn’t function at all. As everything accelerated around me, I sensed I’d been overtaken, but I couldn’t identify the point at which I’d been left behind.

  Most of that final season is a blur. But the plumes of dust are indelible in my memory. Not just the vile red twisters with their vanguards of dry lightning. Out on the road, there was a steady exodus underway.

  The decision to leave, once I finally made it, resolved itself and became solid in a few seconds, but it took me a week to load the vehicle and trailer. I did it feebly, in stages, by night. And it felt shameful. To leave water in the ground and good food standing in the growhouses. To wheel around in the compound and put the land behind me forever. That constituted a failure beyond redemption.

  I made no farewells in the hamlet. Just drove out and headed south.

  Down along the peninsula, conditions were worse than I’d imagined, and on the mainland there was an air of desperation and early signs of disorder. Begging at roadsteads. Pitiful attempts at banditry. It had been years since I’d ventured more than an hour or two from home. It was soon evident that life on the road was so much more perilous than it had been when I was a regular traveller. I was glad of my training. And the reassurance of a Service-issue tool.

  Travelling alone had its downsides and advantages. There was nobody watching my back, but I had no other mouths to water and feed. On the trailer I had a maker and reservoir as well as a small refrigeration unit. Around and over these I’d built a miniature pod for staples with a hard-shell cowl to keep the wind from burning the plants underway.

  Both the truck and trailer were skinned in film, roofed with panels and powered by H-packs, which made it a heavy rig. To supplement the arrays on the cab roof and trailer, I’d rigged a few more drum turbines to keep the batteries charging at every possible opportunity. In terms of food and water, I was as close to self-sufficient as I could hope to be in the circumstances. If I was frugal and lucky with the weather, I might even generate a small surplus for trade. I still carried good kit and appliances for salvage and fabrication, including the metal-cutter. And beneath the interior skin of the driver’s-side door, despite my misgivings, I’d wired in a charging cradle for the tool my mother had been hiding. Going armed in my own country – it was supposed to be a sort of insurance, but it felt like another form of surrender.