an hour or so I handed the wheel to Ingo and went to the sundeck of the small pleasure craft we'd commandeered, the fastest we could find. The others were all lying there, lazing in the sunlight, stripped down to shorts and t- shirts.
We looked, I realised, like a bunch of American university students on Spring break. For the first time since I'd left the base, for the first time in five years in fact, I felt myself begin to relax. Haru was pissing over the side of the boat, watching the spray blow away in the wind, and for some reason that made me smile. There was something so young and male about it. Ingo always used the privy, carefully locking the door, and that made me smile too. Modesty seemed so redundant in this new world.
'You look a million miles away,' Kelis said, and I realised she'd been studying me for a while.
I shrugged. 'Just thinking.'
She smiled. 'Yeah, that can be tough sometimes.'
'It's strange for me, you know, being back among people. I don't think I'm quite used to it.' I didn't know why I told her that. She was hardly the poster child for opening up and sharing. Except that it was strange, being around other human beings again after so long, and I suddenly wanted to know them, really know them. To connect, to bond – all those terrible, psychobabble words. But humans are social animals, and I knew I'd lost something essential in the years I'd spent alone. The person who'd gone into the base would never have done the things that the person who came out of it did.
I wanted to blame the Voice, but I wasn't sure I could.
'It was strange for me too,' Soren said unexpectedly. 'When I was recruited. That was the hardest thing, being back in such a crowd.'
'Harder than the things she made you do?' I asked. 'The killing?' I think there was more curiosity than accusation in my voice and Soren didn't seem offended.
'For me, yes. I was home in Sweden, the village I'd lived my whole adult life. Tiny, cold, a fishing place on the north coast where the sea was always icy, even in midsummer.' The focus of his eyes pushed out as his attention pulled in, looking at memories I suspected he'd kept hidden away for years. Then he smiled self-consciously. 'Sorry, I forget what I was trying to say.'
'No,' I said, 'Don't stop. I'd like to know what it was like for you, before Queen M. I want to remember the world before the Cull.'
'Before the Cull?' He looked from me to Kelis. Something in her expression must have persuaded him to carry on because he suddenly shifted position, pulling his legs beneath him to get comfortable. I suppose somewhere inside we all want to be known. How else would therapists stay in business?
'Sweden was a very orderly country, you know? We weren't a nation that liked to get too excited about anything – we left that to the Danes. Orderly and neat and prosperous. I'd grown up in Malmo, down in the south, but as soon as I'd finished my degree I moved away. There were too many people in Malmo, too many tourists. It was too noisy, always full of traffic and the fog horns of the boats in the harbour. What's the point of living in a large country with a small population if you can't enjoy the peace?
'So I went north, away from everyone, where the winter nights were so long you barely saw the sun rise. I went as far north as I could until I was on the edge of the arctic circle, where I could watch the Northern Lights at midnight and listen to the never-ending sound of the sea. I bought myself a log house out in the forest, a fishing boat and an axe. And then I got myself a broadband connection and every day I worked with people I never had to see. Once a week I went into the shop, and that was the only time I saw another person, except maybe a few other fishing boats, far out at sea. People are much easier to enjoy, I think, if you don't have to actually talk to them. Out there I started liking my fellow country folk for the first time.
'Then the Cull struck and everyone was – well, you know how it was. But I thought, less people in this overcrowded world, why is that a bad thing? I suppose people died in the village but I hadn't known them before the Cull and I couldn't pretend that I cared. The shop emptied after a while but it was no big problem. I knew how to hunt and fish, and planting simple crops wasn't difficult. I had an axe and finding trees to use it on wasn't a problem either. There was only myself to feed. After three weeks, maybe four, the radio that I kept went silent and that was the end of it, I thought. Civilisation had collapsed, somewhere off-screen. But for me nothing really changed.
'It was so beautiful there. The trees are evergreen, all year round they look the same. Very dark, impenetrable as soon as you're away from the coast. The cliffs are grey rock, almost the same colour as the sea. I read a guidebook once. It called our coast forbidding, but I never understood that. What was forbidden there? It seems to me that it's only in a place like that you're allowed to be yourself, without other people telling you what you should be.
'And then Queen M came.' He shrugged, his face losing its faraway look. 'I guess you know the rest. Back to join the rest of humanity.'
'Or what was left of it,' Haru said, and I was sure the double meaning was deliberate. The remnants of humanity, and the remnants of their humanity.
Kelis looked at him through narrowed eyes. 'It's easy for you to be smug. Japan dodged the bullet while everyone else was bleeding out. It wasn't just the O-negs who were spared there, was it?'
'No,' Haru said, 'something in our genes saved most of us, in the good old Land of the Rising Sun.' He looked at Kelis, questioning, and she shrugged – meaning, why not? We've got ten hours to kill and what else is there to fill the time?
'OK,' he said. 'You want to hear my story? The thing you have to know about Japan is, we're a little like Soren. We don't really need anyone else. For years we were this closed island kingdom. Then along came the Western empires and we thought we might like to get an empire of our own. Everyone knows how that ended for us. So we went back to doing what we do best – minding our own business. I suppose you'd say we're the ultimate voyeurs. We like looking at other people and sometimes we like imitating them, but we don't want any actual contact.
'So when the Cull came and spared us, but took everyone else, it seemed like a sign. Shut yourselves in. Shut yourselves off. There wasn't much protest when the government locked the borders down tight. The economy was in a mess, of course – we relied on high-tech exports to buy low-tech imports. But China was just sitting there, no longer in any kind of position to fight us off, so we went in uninvited and got everything we needed. Then we just… carried on. You know the thing I noticed most? That there were no new Hollywood films. Nothing new from Spielberg, no big dumb action movies, no more X-Men. I stopped going to the cinema and that was the biggest way my life changed.
'Oh, there were deaths of course. A lot of them. But we buried them and we moved on. Only for me, I kept imagining the rest of the world. All my life I've been drawing the apocalypse. Giant robots… mutants and now here was a real apocalypse – the genuine article – and I was still a wage slave in a grey suit.
'So when there was a movement for colonisation, I joined – to go back out in the world. I took my son away from the security of Tokyo to New Zealand, where the government in its wisdom had voted to set up New Kyoto. I had to fight to take him, he was – well, he wasn't well. But they had trouble recruiting enough colonists and in the end they let us go. I remember how I felt on the flight, how excited I was. I watched the sea scrolling away beneath us and I thought that this was a real new beginning. I didn't imagine for a moment that I could be making a mistake.'
He smiled thinly and trailed off and I remembered what he'd told me about the son he left behind. 'And then Queen M took you and not him,' I said.
'Yeah.' He ran a hand back through his hair, messing up the spikes, already stiff with salt spray. 'I took him away from safety for no goddamn reason and then I just left him there, on his own.'
'He would have been looked after,' I said, 'by the other colonists.'
Haru just shrugged and looked away. I guess we all had our own burdens of guilt to carry, and no one to share them with.
When I looked at Ingo he stared back, blank and maybe a little challenging. 'You hope to know about my home?' he said and I realised I didn't even know where that was. He smiled mockingly and I could see that he knew that too.
'The Congo,' he told me. 'The Democratic Republic of Congo. For twenty years the West wanted to know nothing about my land. Four million people died in a war that no one noticed, and now you ask me for our history?'
