The Real Read online

  Contents

  Smoke

  The Message

  Codebreaking

  Kaapstadt

  The Muara

  The Search

  The Gardags

  The Cathedral

  Moraes

  Jali's Ark

  Gone Again

  The Shade

  Questions

  Goodbye

  The Real

  Masha du Toit

  Copyright 2017 Masha du Toit

  Smoke

  The old dog dreamed of fire.

  Her paws twitched and her eyes blinked behind the lenses of her armoured mask. Smoke. The scent of it filled her dreams. She woke and raised her head, ears swivelled to catch the distant chirr-chirr of a dassie’s alarm cry.

  The overlapping plates of her armour scraped as she heaved herself up and walked, stiffly, to the cave mouth. Wrung with age though she was, she was still intimidating. Her head was massive, her neck and chest muscular. Her muzzle, under the permanent snarl of the armoured mask that hid most of her face, was touched with grey but her flanks and legs were brindle-dark. It was years since the teats on her sunken belly had been swollen with milk but they still showed the marks of motherhood.

  Behind her, deeper in the cave, her two sons lifted their heads. Their fur was longer than hers and their faces narrower and more wolf-like but they both had their mother’s size and colouring.

  They watched as she stood sniffing in the cave mouth.

  She could find no hint of human presence, nothing to explain the unease that had dragged her from her sleep. A hot wind raked the mountainside. Long grasses hissed, the fynbos rustled. A flight of tiny birds swept past, twittering urgently.

  The dog raised her nose to sniff the tapestry of scents—the sharp fragrance of the heath, the musk of the distant dassie colony, the scent of sun-warmed rock, of dust, dry grass, lichen. It was a cloudless morning but the sky seemed dull, the sun hazy.

  The dassie called again and this time the dog caught the smoke-scent and understood its message.

  Fire. Close and coming closer.

  She moved onto the rocky slope outside. Her sons followed close on her heels. For a moment the three of them stood, noses up, reading the messages on the smoky breeze. Then they went trotting down the slope and disappeared amid the grey-green-silver of the protea bushes.

  ¤¤¤

  “Ndlela, look!”

  Ndlela turned. His little sister, Isabeau, crouched at the fringe of the high tide mark. “Hard plastic!” She held her wind-whipped hair away from her eyes with a sandy hand. “I think it’s a whole bowl. Look.”

  He started back towards her. “Put your hat on,” he called, knowing she’d ignore him. By the time he reached her she’d cleared away most of the sand from around the bowl. Not using her hands, he was pleased to see, but a stick.

  Not everything you found washed up on the beach was safe to touch.

  “That’s pretty,” he said. “But it won’t be whole.”

  Half of a plastic bowl stuck out of the sand—translucent blue, scoured to a pearly finish.

  “Can I use the gloves?” Isabeau looked up at him, eyes narrowed against the sun. “I can’t do much more with this stick.”

  “Sure.” Ndlela dug around in his bag. “Here.”

  Isabeau slipped her small hands into the gloves. After more careful digging she pulled the bowl free of the sand.

  “Oh.”

  “Told you.” Ndlela crouched down next to her. As he’d expected, the lower half of the bowl was eaten away into a melted-looking lace. Isabeau held it up and considered it sadly. “Germs,” she said with disgust.

  “It’s still pretty.” Ndlela sat back on his heels. “It’s an unusual colour. We can cut it up into smaller pieces.”

  “Pieces don’t sell as well as a whole bowl.” Isabeau turned the bowl over and looked at the lacy plastic, her disappointment evaporating. “Why is it like this? I mean, why do the germs eat only bits of it?”

  Ndlela shrugged. “Crosshatch says that the bacteria doesn’t eat all kinds of plastic in the same way. Maybe they can only live buried in the sand, or when it’s damp.” He stood up. “That’s why we still find so much plastic stuff. Otherwise it would all be gone. Put your hat on. You’ll burn.”

  Isabeau made a wry face and jammed the broad brimmed hat onto her head. “It’s not fair.” She tucked her pale hair behind her ears. “You don’t have to wear a hat. Or this—” She plucked at the long sleeves of her shirt. “It’s hot!”

  “I’m just gifted in that way.” Ndlela held out his bare arms, turning them as though showing off his dark skin. “I just got that natural sunblock.”

  Isabeau gave a snort of laughter and fell into step beside him. “Where’s Robby?”

  “He’s waiting for us by the river. He’s been rolling in something stinky.”

  “Ugh! Dogs. Honestly.”

  Ndlela smiled. Sometimes Isabeau sounded so exactly like their mother.

  Isabeau was only two years younger than him, eight to his ten, but he felt immeasurably older. Still, she was growing fast and he had the uneasy suspicion that before too long she’d be the taller one. He put this unpleasant thought firmly aside and hitched his bag higher on his shoulder.

  Up the coast was the river mouth, a network of ever-changing, shallow channels that shone in the early morning sun. Inland, fringing the river, was a swampy stretch of wetlands. Grass, reeds, mud-edged pools, and beyond that, the dunes with their covering of hardy beach plants.

  To the left was a wide expanse of damp sand and further out, the sea, sparkling silver and pastel blue so bright Ndlela had to squint to see the horizon. He turned and walked backward for a few steps, spotting, as was his habit, the silhouette of the Ishtar gate rising from the deep water beyond Kaapstadt harbour. He never quite got used to it, or to the thought of what it led to. The portal to the Babylon Eye. And beyond that, the Strangeworld.

  He’d dreamed about the Strange often enough, conjuring up magnificent cities with white towers and fluttering pennants like something from a fairy tale. By contrast, Kaapstadt, on the far side of the bay, seemed mundane. Above it was the familiar shape of Table Mountain, shrouded in more than the usual fug of smoke.

  “Looks like there’s another fire on the mountain.” Ndlela pointed. “Look at all that smoke.”

  “You can smell it, a bit.” Isabeau turned to look. “Must be a big one.”

  Ndlela checked the progress of the retreating waves again. It would be a long time till the tide turned but you could never be too careful. The Muara is no place for fools, that’s what their mother always said, and it was true. The landscape was a testament to the destructive power of the ocean.

  The sand by the river mouth was smooth enough. But everywhere else rose hummocks and ridges, crumbling walls, piles of brick, roof tiles, and half buried slabs of concrete. Years ago this had been a neighbourhood with houses, shops, hotels, streets and cars. The river had taken a different course then and the shoreline had been much farther away. That was before the weather broke and the waters rose.

  Ndlela often tried to picture what it must have been like before the storms swept away the pleasant beaches and battered down the houses, ripping up trees and street lights, all in one terrible night.

  Once upon a time the people who’d lived here had had electricity to light their rooms and cool their fridges. There had been fresh water flowing along pipes, available at the twist of a tap, and shops that sold food.

  Isabeau grabbed Ndlela’s arm. “Look, I told you, didn’t I tell you?” She was looking beyond the river mouth. “I thought I heard engines last night. Look! There by the circus. Tracks. See?”

  She was right. Curving tracks marked the flat expanse of sand on the fa
r side of the river.

  “Looks like bike tracks.” Ndlela squinted in an attempt to see better.

  “It’s the circus.” Isabeau pointed. “See? There’s somebody on the wall there.”

  “Where? I don’t see anyone.”

  The tracks curved across the beach all the way to the group house that crouched on an outcrop of rocks right at the edge of the sea. This was not one of the original ruined buildings but more recent,constructed well after the storm. Ndlela didn’t know who built it or why, but recently it had become the occasional haunt of a travelling circus who drew their audience from nearby Kaapstadt.

  “Come! Let’s go say hello.” Isabeau headed towards the stepping stones that crossed the river mouth.

  “Wait, Isabeau!”

  “But it’s the circus people!” Isabeau strode on, one hand on her hat to stop the wind from snatching at it.

  “No.” Ndlela made a grab for her arm but she dodged away. “Issy, listen. We don’t know who that is.”

  “We do! Only the circus ever goes there. There’s never been anyone else.”

  “That we know of.” Ndlela got hold of her hand. “Those are sand-bike tracks. The circus always come with trucks. I don’t see any trucks, do you?”

  Isabeau stood on tiptoes, looking at the buildings. “No,” she said, a little sulkily. “No trucks. But maybe those are still coming?”

  “Maybe.”

  Then they both stepped back to avoid the splash as Robby came charging at them through the shallows of the river.

  “Hey, Robby,” Isabeau smiled as the dog butted at her knees with his big, blunt head. She pulled at one of his scarred ears and Robby shut his eyes, tongue lolling in pleasure. “Man. You were right.” Isabeau wiped her hand on her trousers in disgust. “He really does stink.”

  “We better get going, if we want to do another pass along the shore before the tide turns,” said Ndlela.

  “Okay. I guess.” Isabeau knew better than to argue about the tide. Their mother had made her promise to obey Ndlela while they were out on the Muara.

  “Tell you what,” said Ndlela. “We can look at the circus through the scope, when we get home.”

  “Oh! Good idea.” The thought of the scope cheered Isabeau and to Ndlela’s relief, she stopped edging towards the river. They turned and walked back the way they’d come. Robby went on ahead, his skinny tail sticking up like an aerial, his nose snuffling at promising patches of sand and seaweed.

  “We can ask Noor when she comes back.” Isabeau picked up a fragment of netting but dropped it again when she saw that it was rotting and had unravelled past repair. “Maybe she’ll know. But I’m sure it’s the circus. Who else could it be?”

  Ndlela looked back at the building on its rocky outcrop. Isabeau was right. Somebody stood on the perimeter wall. A man, Ndlela thought, although it was too far away to be sure.

  Is he watching us?

  It was a relief when they reached a ruined walls and stepped behind it, out of view.

  I just wanted to get out of the sun, Ndlela told himself. No reason to worry about that guy seeing us, is there?

  ¤¤¤

  Elke stood looking down at the Zero level of the Babylon Eye. The stall keepers were setting out their wares and people bustled past in all directions—tourist groups, messengers on skateboards, office workers clipping along on hard-heeled shoes, can workers pushing trolleys towards the realside gate.

  Out in the middle of Zero level a new garden was taking shape. It was little more than a large, roughly oval space marked out in lengths of tape. Elke had watched its progress with interest during the past few days while the workers spread out layers of gravel, sand, and soil. Now, it seemed, they were getting ready to put in the plants.

  The supervisor was a broad-shouldered woman. Her feathery tattoos marked her as a high-ranking eidolon lady but she showed no hesitation in getting involved with the work, stepping in to help manoeuvre a delicate-looking tree as the workers unloaded it from a trolley.

  The woman grasped the trunk and swung the tree smoothly to the ground, unaware or uncaring of the twigs that snagged at her formal jacket. When the tree was safely in place, she knelt to examine its cloth-wrapped roots.

  Elke leaned on the railing and tried to pick out which of the plants were realworld, and which were from the Strange. It’s going to look grand, when it’s finished. Like a little indoor forest.

  A series of clangs echoed through the space. Workers were loading cans onto the train. Soon it would be going through the portal to the Ishtar gate bearing strangeside goods into the Real world. The customs whistle blew—the sniffer dogs had completed their search. Next would be the signal that the carillon operators were about to open the portal.

  Elke dropped a hand to Meisje’s head, stroking her ears. Even a normal dog could hear the carillon. A gardag like Meisje, all her senses enhanced by stranger-tech, would be even more sensitive to the sound.

  Meisje leaned against Elke’s leg. She was an eye-catching dog, a White Shepherd, with the large ears and dark eyes of that breed. She was a gardag but, unlike most gardags no external armour clad her body and no visible lenses shielded her eyes.

  When the klaxon sounded, Elke gave Meisje a last pat and started walking to the stairs that led down to Zero. A crowd of office workers surrounded her, heading to work or coming off their night shift.

  On Zero level Elke wove her way through the stalls, averting her eyes from the decapitated heads in their glass boxes, the ghastly reminders of the harsh law in the Eye. The new garden filled the air with the scent of freshly turned soil.

  A party of tourists who had just emerged through the portal from the Real stood on a walkway overhead, taking in the view.

  “…behold the Babylon Eye, the portal between the Real world and the Strange.” The tour guide’s amplified voice clanged tinnily amid the din of the Zero level. “Border post, trade route, tourist Mecca, a city and a gate, the Eye is all of these things and more…”

  The noise faded as Elke took the stairs down to Short Storage. This was where Dolly’s office nestled between the stacks of the enormous container-cans. The door to the office was half open. Voices sounded inside—Dolly’s sharp, precise tones, and a deeper rumble.

  Ncita must have dropped in for a visit. Elke knocked and pushed the door open, edging around it when it wouldn’t open any further.

  The floor of the tiny office was covered with stacks of files and papers. Constable Wozniak was on his knees sorting through them. Hoofdinspecteur Dolly Ngcobo stood behind her desk, getting something down from a shelf.

  Several grey boxes stood on Dolly’s desk, their lids secured with straps. Elke’s eyes widened at the sight. She knew what they contained. Hardflasks with contraband substances— biologicals and drugs that had been smuggled into the Eye from the Strange, and intercepted by the Eye authorities.

  What were those doing out here on Dolly’s desk?

  “Veraart!” Inspecteur Ncita sat on a folding chair pushed right back against the filing cabinets.

  “Hi, boss.” Elke snapped off a mock salute, which brought a smile to Ncita’s eyes. It was an old game between them. It had been many years since he’d really been her boss, back when she’d worked with armoured dogs in the Egoli gardag unit. Now she and Meisje were a gardag unit all on their own, policing the corridors of the Babylon Eye.

  Her present boss, Hoofdinspecteur Dolly, turned at the sound of Elke’s voice.

  “Ah!” She dusted her hands together. “Constable Veraart. Good timing. Make that dog of yours wait outside. She’ll just knock things over.”

  Meisje, who’d been pressing against Elke’s legs, backed away without any signal from Elke and left the office, radiating displeasure. Being a gardag, she could understand Dolly’s words perfectly well. Being Meisje, she didn’t approve of the suggestion that she would be anything less than graceful.

  “What’s going on?” Elke scanned the chaos of documents and boxes. When nobody respon
ded she turned a questioning look at Ncita.

  “It’s the commission,” he said. “They’re calling Dolly and me in for a chat.” He gave an almost imperceptible tilt of the head and Elke noticed the fourth person in the office, by the filing cabinets behind the door. A neatly dressed young man with the tattoos of a high-ranking eidolon.

  “Herr-eid Argent,” said Ncita. “This is Constable Elke Veraart.”

  The door and several piles of papers made it impossible for Elke to reach over and shake the man’s hand, so she bowed in greeting. “Good morning. Nice to meet you.”

  Herr-eid Argent closed his eyes and inclined his head in brief acknowledgement.

  “I’ve been showing Herr-eid Argent how we run things here,” said Dolly. “He’s standing in for me while I’m with the commission.” She met Elke’s eyes, her expression bland. “I rely on you to give him any help he needs. Officially he has the same status that I have for as long as I’m away.”

  “They’ll need you for that long?” said Elke.

  “The commission is taking this investigation very seriously,” said Herr-eid Argent stiffly. “The illegal trade of contraband that has been flooding through the Eye has reached epidemic proportions and is in desperate need of independent investigation. I’m sure we all agree that this process should be as thorough as possible.”

  Elke started to grin but saw from the man’s expression that his pedantic tone was not a joke after all. She opened her mouth to respond but Ncita forestalled her.

  “Our hearing should take a couple of days,” he said. “They’re talking to both of us and they want to go over all the paperwork for the last ten years or more. That stuff takes time.” He fiddled with an unlit cigarette, taking it out of his pocket, rolling it between his fingers, then putting it back. Ncita was a chain smoker but even he knew that smoking in a closed system like the Eye was not a good idea.

  “But you’ll still be around, won’t you?” said Elke, turning back to Dolly.

  “Not at all. The entire process is closed,” said Dolly. “I’m not allowed to be in contact with anyone while I’m giving evidence. I won’t even be living in my own place.”