2256

BY THE YEAR 2256, BICHENO had become one of those places that exist chiefly as a longing, a remembered shimmer upon the far horizon of the heart, though thirty thousand souls now lived within its bounds and its lights were never permitted to go out.

Every Christmas the Mills family gathered on the fifth floor of the Lookout, one of nine resilience towers driven into the granite hill above the town during the hungry decades when the mainland burned, and its people came south seeking anywhere the summers might permit them to live. The apartment belonged to Nell Mills, who would reach her hundredth year in the autumn, the eldest of the living Mills and therefore the venerable keeper of the dead. Outside it was forty-one degrees, as it always was at Christmas now, and the windows had dimmed themselves against the sun's merciless gaze, so that the sea below lay the colour of weak tea, while the vents breathed a cool air perfumed with something the building called coastal heath, a fragrance none of them had ever encountered in the world, yet all of them believed in.

Below lay what remained of the town, and what progress's indifferent hand had made of it. The old streets had surrendered to the sea or vanished beneath the wall, a grey rampart tall as a house tracing the whole curve of the shore from what had once been the Gulch to what had once been Redbill, its summit traversed ceaselessly by maintenance trams that whispered like a breath forever held. Beyond it, to the very edge of sight, lay the Array: one hundred thousand floating batteries, black hexagons chained to one another and to the ocean floor, so that for twenty kilometres the sea was no longer a sea but a vast obsidian pavement rising and falling in slow, glittering respiration, the swell moving beneath it like a shudder beneath skin. Amongst them rode the wave machines, jointed yellow behemoths half a kilometre long, like serpents from some antique map, and nearer the wall stood the Nodders, rank upon rank of steel flaps that bowed to the ocean and rose again, an eternal congregation at some ceaseless service whose god had long been forgotten.

The Array illuminated half of Tasmania and, in the cold arithmetic of that century, had preserved more lives than anyone could count. At night its marker lights stretched in cerulean rows to the horizon, and the children thought it the most beautiful thing in the world, because it was the most beautiful thing they had ever beheld. Beneath everything resonated the Hum, the unending drone of the machines, so that no child born in Bicheno in that age had ever known silence. None mourned it, for one cannot miss what one has never known. That, Nell reflected, was the mercy of it, and also the whole of the trouble.

After dinner, as the light thickened into molten gold across the Array, Nell announced, as she announced every year, that the hour had come for Great-Great.

There were the customary groans, yet no one refused, for no one ever did. The family called him Great-Great, though the greats ran truly to seven or eight; somewhere around the fifth generation they had abandoned the counting and settled upon two, as though a man could journey only so far from you before he became, like God or the sea, simply distant. His name had been David Mills. He had fished for crays out of the Gulch in the 2020s and made, as everyone then made, brief films of his days, his children and his town, entrusting them to a thing called Instagram, a word that now meant nothing but the vessel that had carried him. Somebody had saved them, and somebody else had borne them from a dying flash drive to a living one, and so on across two hundred and thirty years, through the fires and the migrations and the raising of the wall, until the reels of David Mills were the most ancient thing the family possessed, surpassed only by the granite and the sea.

Mia, fourteen and nodding all day to some private melody within her lenses, sighed. “Nan, we've seen them, like, every year.”

“You've watched them,” Nell replied, her voice dry as summer grass. “That's not the same.”

Kieran dimmed the room, the wall darkened, and then it was 2026, and the sun was ascending from the sea.

It ascended as it always had, first crimson and then gold, yet it rose from a sea none of them had ever beheld: an empty sea, an unburdened sea, nothing upon its shining expanse from the boat to the rim of the world but light. The picture was tall and narrow, for people held their phones upright then, as though the world were something to be glimpsed through a crack in a door, and it rocked with the boat as the sunlight unfurled across the swell in a long road of beaten gold, while somewhere beyond the frame a man laughed softly to himself, the way a man laughs when he believes no one will ever hear.

“Office views,” said Great-Great, his voice warm and roughened with salt.

The reel lasted eleven seconds, and forty-three people had liked it.

Every year the children asked what that meant, and every year they could not believe the answer, as though the sun rising from an empty ocean were something a man might film on his way to work, and forty-three people might glance upon on their way to something else. Nell's gaze drifted to the window, where the dying light lay across the Array like light upon the scales of some immense dead fish, and the old ache stirred within her, the strangest ache of all, a longing for a place she had never stood, a time she had never lived, a life that had never been hers yet seemed, somehow, the only one she had ever truly wanted.

Then came the crays, a pot hauled streaming over the gunwale and tipped upon the deck, and the deck burst into life with armoured creatures, red-black and spined, their feelers longer than their bodies, waving and questing at the air, their tails slapping the boards in a frantic percussion.

“What are they?” asked Oscar, who was six.

“Crayfish,” said Nell. “People ate them.”

Oscar regarded her with such pure horror that the whole room laughed, yet beneath the laughter lay a quieter sorrow, for no cray had walked this coast's reefs for a hundred and fifty years. The waters had warmed, the urchins had crept down from the north and grazed the kelp to bare stone, and the crays had departed as all things depart, south, and then nowhere. A broad, cracked hand lifted one towards the lens:

“Few beauties today” and its feelers waved at the Mills family across two centuries, as though it had something urgent to impart.

Then the boat nosed into the Gulch, that narrow emerald channel between the shore and Governors Island, gulls wheeling and crying in its wake, and there was a weatherboard shop with a hand-painted sign, and a parcel of fish and chips devoured upon a rock while the wind tore at the paper and a gull watched every chip with the bitter vigilance of a tax collector.

“Piss off,” Great-Great told it, with enormous affection, and tossed it one.

“That's the Gulch now,” Kieran told his son, and the boy turned towards the window, where the Gulch lay beneath its floodlights, a dominion of concrete and cranes, and Governor Island lay entombed beneath a grey substation humming with the captive strength of the sea. He looked from wall to window and back again, the way one looks from an old photograph to an aged face, searching for the one within the other, not finding it, and finding it.

What Nell craved most was the smell. The reels had preserved the light and the sound but not the smell, and she knew from her grandmother, who had it from hers, that there had been one: salt and diesel and old bait, kelp rotting sweetly upon the rocks, vinegar seeping through hot paper, the scrub on the hills after rain, sharp and clean as the inside of a lemon peel. No one living could say what it had truly been like. It had vanished as smells vanish, unnoticed in its going, and of all that time's cruel tide had carried away, she sometimes thought it the loss she grieved most deeply, because it was the one thing she could not even imagine.

Then came the blowhole, and the room fell into the hush it always kept for it.

A small girl in a purple puffa jacket stood upon lichen-orange granite, and before her the rock split asunder and the sea came surging up through it with a roar like the world clearing its ancient throat, hanging a moment in the air, white and colossal, before collapsing upon her. She screamed: not in fear but in a joy so complete it was almost fear's twin, and screamed again at the hole in the rock, and the hole roared back its primeval answer, and she sat down hard upon the wet rock with her boots in the air, laughing.

“Again!” she shouted. “Again!”

Beyond the frame Great-Great was laughing too, the picture trembling with it, and the sea rose and fell again in its eternal sonata, and the girl screamed at it as though it were a dragon slumbering beneath the rocks, and perhaps it was.

That was Sophie. Every Mills in the room had descended from that small, shrieking girl as a river descends from a spring in the hills, and not one of them had ever stood where she stood.

No one could, now. The blowhole had become Station Four. In the 2140s some engineer had perceived what the fishermen had always known without needing to speak it: that the blowhole was already a machine, a throat of air and water worked by the swell, and that if you capped it and set a turbine within that throat, it would breathe power. So they had capped it, and it was Kieran's station. He tended it and knew its every bolt, and in Christmases past he had told them how it sang when the great easterly swells came through, how you felt it through your boots in the control room, the whole rock heaving beneath you like some vast creature dreaming. He was proud of it, and had every reason to be.

This year he said nothing. He watched his ancestor scream joyfully at the very thing he spent his days keeping quiet, and then he rose and went into the kitchen, and for a long time they heard the tap running, a small and human sound against the Hum.

There were more, there were always more, and Nell made them witness every one.

A dark beach at dusk, and Great-Great whispering, “No torch, mate, you never put a light on 'em,” and out of the wash small shapes tumbling up like stones, and then the stones standing and shaking themselves and waddling up through the rocks in their dozens like old men wending home from the pub, braying their nocturnal hymn to one another in the dark.

“Every night,” Great-Great whispered, his voice hushed as a prayer. “Every single night, they come home.”

Oscar asked where they had gone, and no one could tell him, only that one year in the 2190s they had not come home, nor the year after, and in time people ceased going down at dusk to see.

Then the granite of this very hill, blotched with lichen so vividly orange it seemed painted by some exuberant hand. Three of those boulders still sat fenced in the forecourt below, grey now, beside a plaque explaining that they had once been orange. And Diamond Island at low tide, Great-Great's children splashing along a bar of white sand with the sea on either side of them, as though they walked upon the ocean itself; that sandbar was a causeway now, poured concrete that no tide on earth would ever cover it again.

Mia watched with her arms folded, for at fourteen it is a point of honour to remain unmoved by anything your great-grandmother loves, yet she was no longer watching her lenses. Near the end she spoke, to no one in particular.

“Why'd he film so much? Fish. Chips. His kids. He just filmed his whole life.”

“Because it was there,” Nell said, her voice soft as dusk. “Because it was all there, every day, and it cost nothing, and nobody told him it wouldn't always be. They had a saying back then. Today's the youngest you'll ever be. My nan had it on a tea towel.”

“That's grim.”

“It is,” Nell agreed. “But it's true of places too, and nobody ever says so. Today's the youngest this place will ever be. My grandmother reckoned Bicheno was finished when they built the wall. Her grandmother reckoned it was finished when the penguins went.” She nodded towards the wall, where Great-Great stood frozen mid-laugh upon the sand. “And his father would've reckoned it was finished when the kelp went. Every one of them stood on the beach mourning what had gone before them, and never once looked down at what was coming up out of the surf at their feet.”

“So it only gets worse.”

“It only gets different,” said Nell, “which mostly is worse. But it means right now is the best it'll ever be again.” She lifted her thin, spotted hand toward the window, where the Array was deepening to violet in the dusk, and the first cerulean lights were blooming in their rows across the darkening water. “Some girl in two hundred years will look at a picture of that, love, and her heart will break.”

Mia gazed out at the Array and could not imagine it, and Nell knew she could not, for no one ever can. That is the way of it, the oldest entry in time's long and sorrowful ledger: we are all of us dwelling inside someone else's lost paradise, and we cannot see it, because we are standing in it.

Kieran returned with his eyes reddened, sat, and rested his hand upon his son's head, and Nell said softly, “Last one.”

It was always the last. After it, the account fell silent and remained so, and why, nobody knew; the family's knowledge of David Mills ended there, at the very edge of all that had been saved. It was dated the eleventh of October, 2026, and it was night, and it was Redbill.

For a moment the wall lay almost black. Then the sky emerged from the darkness, not the sky that hung over Bicheno now, bleached to a pallid smear by the glare of the towers, but a celestial vault so crowded with stars there seemed more light within it than dark, and across it, from one corner of the narrow frame to the other, flowed the great pale river of the galaxy. The children gasped, as they always did, for they had never seen it. Then the picture tilted down towards the water.

And the sea was ablaze.

Every wave, as it rose and curled and broke, ignited from within with a blue so cold and so alive that even now, after a hundred Christmases, Nell felt her breath falter in her chest. The waves broke in light. The light raced along the shore in long incandescent lines and sank into the sand and died, and came again, and died again, the whole beach breathing in some ancient, luminous rhythm. It was the plankton, the scientists said, minuscule creatures that glowed when disturbed, which had ridden south upon the warming currents and departed again when the waters grew too warm even for them, a symptom, they said. A beauty and a wound, Nell thought, and perhaps the two always arrive together.

In the burning shallows ran three children, and wherever their feet fell the sand flared blue beneath them, so that they left trails of stars in their wake, as though they were running across the very heavens. Sophie stamped, and the light burst around her ankles, and she shrieked, and her brothers kicked the water skyward in sprays of blue fire, while David's voice wove through it all, breathless with laughter.

“Look at that! Look at you, look at you lot!”

Then he stopped filming, and you could see the very moment it happened. The picture lurched and filled with stars and blue blur and a glimpse of his own bare foot, and Sophie's voice rang out: “Dad, come in, come in!”

And he murmured, half to himself, “Bugger it,” and the phone went into his pocket, and it was over.

Beneath it lay the line of text they read aloud together every year, as other families once said grace, six words he must have typed later that night, wet and salted and weary, his children asleep, without a second's thought.

doesn't get any better than this

Nineteen people had liked it.

Later, when the others had gone, Mia stepped out onto the balcony, and the night struck her like the breath of an oven. Below, the Array stretched away beneath its blue lights to the end of the world, rising and falling in its slow mechanical lament, the nodders bowing, the Hum rising through the rail into her hands. It was beautiful, and it would pass too, she understood now, or become something she could not imagine, and some girl she would never meet would look upon a picture of it and grieve. She took no picture. She only looked, as though looking were a thing you could do with your whole body, your whole heart, your very being, while the dark sea breathed beneath its iron scales and the stars, faint and few, kept their ancient vigil overhead.

***

B I C H E N O, 2 0 2 6

FAR BELOW HER AND FAR behind her, two hundred and thirty years down the dark, a man stands at Redbill with a phone in his hand and the cold sea swirling around his shins. Out on Diamond Island the penguins are coming home up the rocks, and the crays are walking the reef in the dark, and past the point a whale is travelling south, singing its ancient hymn, while the blowhole roars upon the granite where nobody stands, and the lichen burns orange on the hill, and the whole empty ocean runs out to the edge of the world with nothing upon it but stars. He does not know that any of it is ending. Nobody ever does, and that is the mercy of it.

“Dad,” his daughter calls, her voice bright as a bell across the water. “Come in.”

He puts the phone away.

It doesn't get any better than this, he thinks, and he is right, and he will never know how right, and he runs into the burning sea, into the eternal dance of light and water, into the one night that would outlast them all.