Chapter Twelve
The secrets below
At the end of the corridor, with its temperamental lights that activated upon passing, Chantel came to a metal door that was constructed of a similar scrap metal to that which made up the rest of the ship. She figured from her position that this door would lead her into the very bottom of the hull. She suppressed the resurging feelings she had, reminiscent of the time in her youth, when despite her curiosity, she had been equally nervous, scared and apprehensive of entering the unknown. The thought of what lay inside the warehouse again made her want to vomit, but determined not to be paralysed by fear, she put her hand on the door. She opened it and found herself in an enormous brightly-lit cavern. What she saw in the cavity below stunned and shocked her.
She looked down into a huge chamber. Seated in rows of two flanking both sides of the ship, were scores of people all working together to power the movement of the vessel. Each pair of people was holding onto the rod of an oar. She watched as each person, in unison, swung backwards, bringing the oar with them until their bodies lay almost prostrate, then together like a well-oiled machine, she saw the entire room of people push their rods forward again until they came full circle. A monitor at the front of the room kept the pace, with the animated image on the screen directing the rowers as to the timing of the stroke. Powerful speakers somewhere in the room bellowed out the rhythm like the ominous banging of a tribal drum. There must have been at least sixty people down there, all moving together as one. She realised that this must have been what Julie had so vehemently protested against. Just at that moment she felt a hand on her shoulder and let out an instinctual scream. She turned around to see Julie.
“There you are, Chantel. I’ve been trying to find you all morning,” said Julie, looking concerned.
She gave Chantel an awkward embrace, making it obvious that she was unaccustomed to such intimacy, but wanted to express her affection in some way. Chantel was taken back.
“Julie, what is this all about? Who are these people? Why do they need to row like this?”
Julie sighed.
“This was why I left the Kazaa, Chantel. Look at them. All these people, poor unfortunate souls whose only crime was to be born into an unfortunate life. There they are, just trying to find a better one. Is it so wrong to want to change the hand dealt by destiny? Yet, these people are prisoners for trying. I fought so hard with Condor not to do this to them. He was right that this was the only option to make the ship run. Regardless, I couldn’t stand it…and left.”
Chantel could barely hear Julie over the banging of the drum. Julie’s voice, as she relayed this information softened and dimmed, like she was trying to tap into some deep reserve of energy by letting the past resurface in this way. Chantel looked over to see an anguished look of sorrow spread on Julie’s face as her eyes took in the scenario below, the masses of unhappy people toiling away in monotony. It made sense to Chantel now that they were the reason Julie felt that she could not remain on the ship, not the extraction process. The people deep in the pit were not perturbed at all by the presence of the two women. Chantel noticed Julie’s eyes moistening as she stared down with a mixture of horror and pity at the rows of people who continued rowing, oblivious to the spectators. Chantel could see there were whole families down there. She recognised the adolescent brother and sister that had shared the room with her and Beren the night before. They looked exhausted at this hour of the day and she figured they must have been rowing for a few hours. In order to balance out the strength of the rowers she could see children coupled with a parent, matched by a pair of similar size on the other side of the boat. Although the activity did not look entirely strenuous with so many pairs of hands sharing in the work, she could imagine that it would be tiring over a prolonged period.
“How long do they row for?” she asked Julie over the din of the drums.
Julie shrugged.
“Who knows how long the shifts are now? When Condor started using them for this, it was just a necessity. They would row for however long it took to get where we needed. People volunteered just to help us out. No one thought it was a big deal. Then when people complained that some were doing more than others, Condor started rostering shifts. They were only for an hour at a time to begin with, but as more and more people were needed, the volunteers dropped off and Condor made it one of the rules of the boat. As far as I know, it’s compulsory to do your shift now. If you don’t, Condor might decide to walk you off the plank. Compulsory for everyone that is, except for the Captain.”
Chantel looked inquiringly at Julie, who knew what her next question would be.
“Let’s go somewhere quieter to talk,” Julie said, intercepting any further questions before Chantel could fire them off.
Chantel followed Julie out of the chamber and back through the psychedelic corridor she had originally entered through. The flashing of the lights no longer made her dizzy as she passed, mainly because her head was spinning instead with the revelation of what was contained in the room below. She watched the back of Julie’s head, silhouetted against the lights flashing in the background and wondered what other secrets were buried in that memory of hers. The more she knew about Julie, the more Chantel was intrigued by her personality. Her beliefs represented a contradiction of terms. She was a ruthless salesperson while simultaneously adhering steadfastly to principles of justice. She was completely comfortable with being a pariah among her people, yet ached for her previous life as a Captain on a pirate ship. Chantel had no doubt that the crew on the ship was Julie’s family and that Condor was the love of her life. There was an almost mother-daughter relationship between Julie and Aunt Bessie; Aunt Bessie treating Julie as one of her own. For Julie to have had turned her back on that encircling fold of familial warmth must have been heartbreaking.
However, nothing represented the conflict of her personality more than her devotion to Condor. From their first meeting Chantel could deduce that this was a person of supreme importance to Julie. Their reunion the other night was like the eventual convergence of two rivers, whose paths were persuaded by the contours of the land to flow towards each other and embrace in a low-lying valley that would eventually lead to the sea. Chantel could feel that the energy pushing Julie and Condor together was part of nature itself; an ethereal force that existed in the currents of the water and the wind in the sails to reunite the two Captains in a rendezvous that was ultimately inevitable. Chantel now sensed Julie’s predicament. She had been guided by some higher principle to flee, to turn her back on a way of life that tormented the very fabric of her soul, yet such escape was only temporary. The world would conspire to return her to the fold.
They reached a room along the corridor which Julie deftly unlocked the door of and guided Chantel into, shutting the door closely behind her. As soon as the door clicked shut, Julie collapsed on a double bed that lay in the centre of the room and wept uncontrollably. Chantel rushed to comfort her friend and as Julie cried tears of grief and relief into Chantel’s lap; the as yet untold story of her life on the sea spilled out.
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Julie had been born on a pirate ship, similar to the Kazaa, to seafaring parents. At least that much of the story of Julie’s life told hitherto to Chantel could be confirmed as the truth. However, her childhood on the rough and tumble seas pretty much stopped there. Her parents, wanting a more stable existence for their daughter, deigned to settle on solid ground and moved to the port city of Abidjan. There Julie led a sheltered existence, growing up along the intersecting edges of an agricultural and a manufacturing zone. Her world was confined within the 20 kilometre radius of the port city where there were minimal avenues for amusement. One of the few things in which Julie gained solace was the Utopia chip implanted in her head when she was 9. The virtual reality games she played through the chip kept her imagination alive. She would gather constant delight from the fantasies she conjured of living in faraway places where each day was like
a new adventure. It was only when the game was switched off that she came plummeting back to the reality that her world in the port city was nothing more than a hotel, a school and a shopping centre. Upon being confronted with that realisation she retreated again into the surreal fabric of her alternate universe, far from the mundaneness of Abidjan. There she spent 17 listless years, nestled on an island in between the manufacturing zone, agricultural zone and the sea. Julie described her childhood as akin to growing up on the corner of a pyramid. Peering down the edges of the pyramid from her vantage point on the corner, she could see what was on each side in a two dimensional view, but she could never enter the different worlds so as to be able to experience them in a three dimensional sense. She remained stuck on the corner of where three planes intersected. Her virtual reality downloads provided the closest thing possible to any tangible appreciation she could have of another world.
Her parents ran a small hotel in the port town and each day travellers would pass through with tales of their latest venture at sea or stories about the cattle they were raising deep inland. From each of these narratives, Julie pieced together her own version of what these different worlds must be like. The agricultural zones she imagined to be full of all sorts of creatures bred for harvest, together with plentiful supplies of fresh produce bound for the metropolis zones. The manufacturing zone she imagined to be a land where machines ran rampant and the entire space was filled with the industrial sheen of smoke stained metal. Her obsession with virtual reality games lent her a vivid imagination and she was constantly dreaming up fantasy worlds in an attempt to escape the rigours of living in a place that seemed to her like an island of stone in a sea of vibrancy and colour. Of all the transient characters that camped at her parents’ hotel from all parts of the world, the sailors captivated her the most. She was enrapt with their tales of journeying over miles of sea in whatever rickety boat could withstand the journey. She would take with a grain of salt the yearnings of the sailors when they described how lonely and bored they were on the sea and entreated her to travel with them. ‘They knew nothing about isolation’, she would think; ‘at least they were moving from place to place’. Nonetheless, she resisted the whimsical requests of sailors to whisk her away with them on the seas until she turned 18. Soon after her eighteenth birthday, she came to be captivated by Condor and could not resist the temptation of the sea any longer.
Condor was, even then, the most dashing of pirates. He was sailing a much smaller ship at that time, the Pedigree, which he had inherited from his parents. They were actually sea-faring folks but had drowned overboard in a storm several years earlier. Condor was no more than five years older than Julie. However, his worldliness and charm made him appear to her as if he were far older. It wasn’t long before Julie fell under his spell. Sneaking out of the hotel one balmy summer’s night, she said goodbye to the place which was the only place she had ever known for her entire life and boarded the vessel that would be her new home for the next ten years. Admittedly her initial years on the boat were tough. Condor could be as cruel and unforgiving as the sea that he had grown up on and his patience wore thin easily. She would have to remind him constantly that she knew nothing of the world, that she was ignorant of the myriad of places that lay beyond the waters and that she depended on him to learn more about these foreign environments. This seemed to earn Julie a temporary reprieve from Condor’s temper, at least in the initial years. Gradually they grew used to each other and Condor would let Julie captain the Pedigree, which was naturally a precursor to asking Julie to be his wife.
Julie fondly recounted the memory of her first few years after marriage as being filled with blissful happiness. She remembered the day that she and Condor decided to upgrade from the ship they were sailing to a larger vessel, one that they would make themselves. It would prove to be a massive turning point in their relationship. Prior to the Kazaa, Julie was always acutely aware that the Pedigree was his family heirloom, a relic from his parents that was his last remaining connection to them. Julie unsurprisingly yearned for a home that could be theirs to share without the ghosts of Condor’s parents looking down upon them in what she believed would be disdain. A new ship would be something they could build upon together. Julie described the numerous trips they took to the wasteland zone north of Abidjan to source the materials for their ship. By then they had accumulated a crew for the ship who were like a close knit team. They all worked together to trundle through the scraps of garbage in the wasteland zone and pounce upon the pieces of metal that could be salvaged and polished like precious stones to form the hull of the Kazaa. Chantel gasped in surprise at Julie’s description of life in the wasteland zone.
“Yes Chantel,” Julie explained. “The wasteland zone is just that – a land of waste.”
They had heard of whole communities that lived in the wasteland zones, forging out their lives in the garbage that was sent there from other regions. Julie and her crew never ventured too far into the wasteland to find out how these societies lived. They wanted to stay close to the water and most of these tribes were located deep inland. Occasionally some members of the wasteland communities would spot Julie’s crew foraging for scraps of garbage that could be recycled as part of a ship. They would venture down and attempt to barter goods that they hoped would be of value to these peculiar beings from the sea. It was on one such occurrence, by some strange coincidence, that they found Auntie Bessie.
Julie chuckled to herself as she recalled the look of shock on Condor’s face when, just as he was about to fire off a series of expletives at the scavenger straying from the wasteland zone, he realised that it was his long lost Auntie Bessie. Auntie Bessie, as much of a darling then as she still was to this day, recognised Condor immediately and embraced him close to her bosom in a way that only an older, bumbling woman could get away with. That was the only time Julie had ever seen Condor break down into tears. She watched him collapse as he told Auntie Bessie about his parents’ demise when he was barely an adolescent and how he had been in charge of the Pedigree ever since. Auntie Bessie was horrified that she had been oblivious to the death of her sister for so long and Julie could see that she was also shaken by Condor’s vulnerability when relaying this news. Whatever the circumstances that had elapsed since Condor last saw his Auntie Bessie, the invisible bond of family instantly retied itself between the two, making Condor a subject of Auntie Bessie’s instinctive nurturing.
Julie wasn’t quite sure what happened after that tearful reunion. Auntie Bessie and Condor disappeared into the wasteland together for several days. By the time they emerged, Julie had been driven almost frantic with worry. Condor mentioned that Auntie Bessie would live with them on the ship and not a word more was uttered on the issue. Since that time, Auntie Bessie was like a fixture on the Kazaa, the ship that she eventually helped Julie and Condor to build. She became like a mother figure to both Julie and Condor. For the time anyway, the family was complete.
By working steadfastly with their busy team of would-be pirates, Julie and Condor eventually scraped together the pieces needed to build the Kazaa and the moment was ready for the ship’s maiden voyage. Julie didn’t know what came of the Pedigree after that. She recalled Condor looking forlornly at the ship as it remained anchored in the bay of the wasteland zone while they sailed away on the Kazaa. As it disappeared from sight he withdrew and retreated into the bottom cabins of the Kazaa for hours, leaving her to steer the Kazaa out on the open ocean. She remembered that experience as the most exhilarating one she had ever had. Without Condor’s reprimanding supervision, she could take her own risks with the vessel, buffeting it against the winds to build up momentum and then turning it sharply to catch the currents so that it travelled as lightly on the water as the mist hovering above the waves. The Kazaa sailed beautifully. She was awestruck with how magnificent the thing they had created turned out to be.
Julie was much happier on the Kazaa than she had been on the Pedigree. Each passing day she grew p
rouder of the ship’s accomplishments as if they were a direct reflection on her, the mother of the ship. For the next few years, Julie and Condor crisscrossed the oceans transporting and bartering any goods they could get their hands on both legitimately and through illegitimate means. They found that their most profitable trade by far was people transportation. Whether for a holiday or business, Julie and Condor could name their price for passage on the Kazaa. With few other ships out there at that time willing to roam the ocean so wantonly and with airline ticket prices soaring, hitching a ride on a pirate ship was a perfectly sensible option. However, as the years rolled on, the pickings started to slim. More massive cruise liners were being built and passengers no longer wanted to weather the risk of being ferried across the waters by pirates. The crew of the Kazaa eventually had to resort to more technological terms of trade and they stumbled upon a breakthrough when they discovered another pirate ship using sonar communications.
The focus of Kazaa’s operations immediately changed course and the CCC in the centre of the vessel was set up. Of course, venturing into the black market business of intellectual property interception was not without risk. The crew of the Kazaa soon found that the meagre supply of electricity they could harness from the sun and waves was not sufficient to power the engines on the ship, with the CCC taking up so much energy. They had to resort to more traditional means to propulsion.
Chantel could guess how the story progressed from here. Grief-stricken, Julie described how they travelled to the wasteland zone to reconfigure the Kazaa to include the rowing benches. Condor would not return to the same place where they had originally built the ship so they visited a different wasteland zone, which was similarly compacted with mounds of garbage. Julie wondered how much waste there was in the world if so many areas in the wasteland zones were covered with refuse. She had rarely studied a map of the world now that navigation of the ship was done almost entirely by GPS coordinates but she could remember from her schooling days that the wasteland zones represented a significant proportion of land mass on the globe. Scavenging again through the trash, they managed to find long sticks and other scraps that could be fashioned into oars. The crew would take turns to row the boat when necessary to escape detection from the global police or when travelling against the currents. However, each time they were required to do so, the Captains could sense the dissent coming from their team members and eventually, to prevent a mutiny, other options had to be canvassed.
The Kazaa again delved into the people transportation trade. However, this time the commuters were not vacationers or business people; the crew of the Kazaa were left with no other choice but to target people who wanted to migrate. Most of the people they encountered were from the manufacturing zones and seeking passage to the metropolis zones. The crew nicknamed these people the ‘hippo fairies’ because they would often lie in wait, submerged in the water near the port until a pirate ship came near. Once a pirate ship was within sight they would quickly rise up on electrically powered hovercraft, which could spring out of the water and fly to the ship in a momentary burst of energy before the battery gave out, leaving the engine to splutter and die. Condor learned that just by going to the right ports he could have dozens of hippo fairies crashing onto his deck each night. Often the people arriving on the ship would have no means of paying their own way or even any goods to trade, except for the buffeted hovercraft that they arrived on. This was of no matter. The Kazaa wasn’t seeking payment from these people, but the labour they could provide. As the hippo fairies would plead for safe passage to the closest metropolis zone, realising that they could offer nothing in return, Condor played it cool by suggesting that there was certainly a means by which they could pay for their journey.
Just as Julie had alluded to before in the rowing room, the hippo fairies were initially used purely out of necessity. Only a few hippo fairies were taken on board in the beginning, as was deemed necessary for powering the ship. Eventually this number grew as the CCC required more and more energy and the ship had to keep moving to generate electricity from the turbines below the hull. Eventually, a steady supply of hippo fairies were accepted on board and they slipped into a routine almost as drudgerous as the life they had escaped. Most of them knew at the time that they bounded onto the ship that they would be taken for a journey outside of their control and with no guarantee of ever reaching their destination. This was a risk most of them were willing to take. A significant proportion of the hippo fairies were not averse to the daily routine of rowing. However, Condor was not able to give any of them any guarantee of when they would reach their destination. Some might stay on the ship for months, others could be stuck on the ship for years. Julie tried to contest the use of the hippo fairies on the Kazaa but she was overruled by the other crew on board the ship who were relieved that they would not have to perform the labour themselves.
Gradually, Julie began to feel ill at ease on the ship that she helped to build. She no longer sensed her heart leap with pride as the Kazaa strode out on the water. She knew that the reason the ship glided with such elegance was because it was propelled by the rotating oars of the hippo fairies beneath. She reminisced of the time when she could bask in the glory of the Kazaa’s streamlined majesty. Those memories felt tainted now. Instead she would feel a sense of shame when the Kazaa soared on the waves, knowing that it meant the rowers below were going into hyper-drive. Eventually she sank into a deep depression with the belief that everything she had worked so hard to build had become tarnished with the cruel stroke of exploitation. She knew then that she had to leave. She pried herself away from the Kazaa one night when it was docked in the city of Cape Town. The first few years were tough for Julie. She worked as a crewperson on various ships coming and going from the metropolis until she could save enough money to put down a deposit for the Saharan. Once she had her own vessel again, she found once more like there was a spark in the future and she had been sailing ever since.
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Julie slumped with exhaustion after relaying the mammoth tale of her life. Chantel could almost feel Julie physically deflating with relief as the burden of her past was released like air escaping from a balloon. Chantel tried to imagine what it must have been like for Julie, having been raised with such a sheltered upbringing to be suddenly thrust out on the equivocal world of the sea not once but twice on her own. The few adventures of Chantel’s life paled in comparison to what Julie had been through. Chantel thought about the hippo fairies living their lives in a routine of rowing and other ship duties. She thought about the ridiculous name given to the migrants by the ship’s crew, a term used purely to ridicule and belittle the people. Most of all she thought of Condor and what sort of person he was. Beren obviously thought he was a decent guy. Chantel had never been convinced about Condor but she never thought that he was in any way evil. Regardless of what she had been told, Chantel still didn’t think Condor was an evil man. Opportunistic perhaps, but not quite evil.
With her mind bursting with information, Chantel thought again of the purebloods she saw on the glitch and wondered if their fate was the same as that of the hippo fairies. She recognised the same look of resignation on the faces of the hippo fairies and the purebloods. However, the hippo fairies retained a glimmer of hope in their eyes that the purebloods did not have. She wondered if she would ever see them in real life. As the reality dawned on her that her hijacking on the Kazaa had thrown her completely off the original intention of her journey, she realised that the possibility of her actually seeing the purebloods was becoming more and more remote.