Previous: Chapter 1. Winter
Chapter 2. Spring
Àrd-Dhìthreabh, April 2061
Suna paused at the foot of the embankment to take in the sight.
At low tide the beach of Àrd-Dhìthreabh was always looking its best, even on a bad day. But today, on this glorious spring afternoon, the light so pale and fresh it was almost sparkling, it was truly stunning: an uninterrupted stretch of sand as far as the eye could see, hundreds of metres wide, tall sand dunes on one side, the surf on the other, running in a shallow curve along the bay towards distant An Truthail, barely a smudge on the horizon. Sand dervishes seemed to form out of nothing, did their whirling dance and dissolved again into the beach. The sea surface was a hardly ruffled steel blue on which Eilean Arainn sailed at anchor, majestic with its tall snow-capped mountains. Suna had seen this sight hundreds of times but it still took her breath away.
As soon as she had gotten up she’d seen that it was one of the first truly nice mornings of spring, and on a whim she’d decided to give herself the day off. Roy had had a late shift and was still asleep. After breakfast she quickly made a few onigiri, left a note and set out along the beach. Instead of her usual morning run or walk, today she would go all the way to Àrd-Dhìthreabh. The tide looked just right.
Seals were basking on the rocks that were all that was left of the old Irbhinn harbour pier. Suna climbed halfway up the nearest dune and ate her lunch. Out here in the open food always tasted as good as anything, and she loved onigiri, but she still felt herself wishing for a simple slice of home-baked bread. But the wheat was growing thin, so bread was now a luxury. Maybe one day.
From her vantage point, she could see the remains of the old Inventors Bridge sticking like huge bleached bones out of the sand amongst a sea of dunes. She remembered how once, as a child, she’d set out to get to it. She’d sunk knee-deep into the loose sand but had kept wading. It was a strange sensation: the top layer of the sand was hot from the sun, but at her toes it was cool, almost cold. With every high step it repeated: hot, then cool, hot again, cool again. Up close you could still read some of the names punched in the ironwork: Maxwell, Kelvin. She suspected that memory might have been why, much later, she’d decided to study Physics.
Once, most of this had been water, the saltmarsh and mudflats at the confluence of the Garnock and Irvine rivers. Hundreds of years ago it had been the main port for Glasgow. Yaya had told her that in the late 2020s, the storm surge of a super-hurricane had breached the coast line at Stevenston, and the enormous amount of rain it had dropped had pushed the swollen Garnock and Irvine rivers through that breach. With the more arid climate, the old river courses had first turned into sand flats and later into dunes. It looked like a small desert, and that was appropriate for a place called Àrd-Dhìthreabh, which meant wilderness in Gaelic.
Her steps traced a shallow cycloid on the firm wet sand along the water, towards what in her mind was “Àrd-Dhìthreabh proper”, near the river mouth. A little game, walking along an imaginary periodic curve, as if she was a point on the spoke of a giant wheel. This was one of her favourites, she loved the twirling phase.
That place always sparked memories, and today was no exception. They had come here so often, it was Dad’s favourite place. Dad had been away for a long time now, making his slow way into the East, and before that he’d been in prison. And before that … she recalled feeling a kind of vague dread as a teenager, beyond the usual unease of that awkward age. There had been lots of subliminal signals from Dad, Papa and even Yaya. A kind of premonition. And then, in the pit of a dark and moonless night in October of 2050, there had been the raid. Papa had been incommunicado, away in Inbhir Èireann caring for Yayo with Yaya, who still insisted on living off-grid.
In that colourless hour before dawn, Dad had woken her and Muir and said, “Kids, the cops are coming to arrest me. Don’t worry, they won’t hurt you. Show them that you know your rights. Don’t say more than you should. It’s me they want. I’d better go down before they break down the door.” And with that he’d flipped on the lights, gone down the stairs and carefully opened the door, and from the landing they’d watched a team of heavily armoured poileas pouring into the hallway and pinning Dad to the floor. Suna in particular remembered how they’d shone their ultra-bright torches in her face, forcing her to shield her eyes, even though all the lights were on. And how they’d taped her mouth shut before she’d even had a chance to object.
Suna involuntarily winced at the memory, and for a while focused on the beach, marvelling as always at the sheer number of shells, in some places so dense they painted the dark sand a bright white. If the populations remained sustainable, the beach would get whiter and whiter. The thought appealed to her. It made her think of the hoshizuna, the sand on some beaches of the Ryūkyū islands that was made up of countless tiny star-shaped skeletons of single-celled organisms. Star sand, what a beautiful word.
It had been Yaya and Yayo who had taught them their rights. They remembered the bad times and Suna knew they had been permanently scarred by them, although she didn’t know what had happened. They never talked about it. Yaya had drilled it into them: “Kids, in Scotland we still have some laws and the cops still mostly follow them, but only if you show you know your rights. If they arrest you, the law says they must inform your parents that you’re in police custody, even if you don’t ask them to. And they can’t interview you without one of your parents or close family present. But you must ask them, else they will just assign you some social worker. If Seumas or Diederik can’t be there, you should ask for me or Yayo. Until one of us is there and there is a solicitor, you should say nothing at all.”
Suna had recalled those lessons. The cops had started asking questions as soon as they got to the police station, but all she told them was to get Papa or Yaya. She had no doubt that Muir would do the same. They had locked her in a windowless room with a chair and a table and the kind of very bright lighting that still manages to look dim, and left her alone for a long time. A few times someone had brought some food and drink. Shortly after the third meal, they had taken her to a similar, somewhat larger room where there had been several cops, but also Muir and Yaya and a woman who had introduced herself as their solicitor.
They’d asked both of them some questions which had seemed rather perfunctory, and let them go. Back home, Yaya told them the local cops had come to her house in Inbhir Èireann early in the morning and arrested Papa. “Then they came back and told me the presence of me or Yayo was required in Glasgow because they wanted to interview both of you. I inferred they’d arrested Diederik as well. I kicked a fuss because I couldn’t leave Yayo alone, so they had to send over a nurse to look after him. When I finally got to the police station in Glasgow, the solicitor informed me that Diederik had already made a full confession. So they only asked you a few things to check and let you go.” They’d let Papa go soon after as well.
As so often when Suna was absorbed in such recollections, the river embankment appeared much sooner than she’d expected. She climbed onto it and stood for a while looking at the dike that kept the river mouth in place. It had been constructed nearly half a century ago by a Belgian company and was made entirely of lime-treated soil. No concrete at all, and it had proven entirely erosion resistant. That approach was now common, but this dike had been the first of its kind in Scotland. It was covered with machair between copses of ash trees. This early in the season, the ashes were still bare but the turf was already carpeted with dense clusters of lovely primroses. Soon it would explode into a riot of colour and scent.
The trial had been a strange affair.
Dad had at the time been up to something, Suna had been sure of that. But she still had no idea what it had been. But whatever it was, it couldn’t be what Dad had confessed to, even though apparently there was incontrovertible evidence, a geo-located IPv6 address trail leading right to their house. But the IT wizard in the house was Papa, not Dad. Then again, even Dad would never have been so careless to leave a trail like that. And Papa wouldn’t have let him.
But Papa must have had a totally watertight alibi, they didn’t even charge him. Apparently, this was about some cyber crime dating back to 2034, before Muir and Suna were even born. But the police had all the records, and it was beyond doubt that at the time of the events Papa had been with Yaya and Yayo, firmly off-grid. How the police could be so sure was a mystery, but Yaya had told them that in those bad days, surveillance was at its peak.
Still, there was something wrong about the whole thing. Dad was no elite hacker, the best he could do was some scripts for his DNA sequencer. He could never have pulled off such a thing. Papa could have done it, especially with Yaya’s help. But that had apparently been ruled out entirely. It was all very odd.
After a brief trial behind closed doors, Dad was sentenced to ten years in prison, but the solicitor had assured them that he’d have to serve five years at most.
Suna sighed and shook her head. She had been over this much too often. Today was too beautiful a day for all that. She put it out of her head and focused on the epicycles instead. Tracing her graceful periodic arcs onto the wet sand, she slowly made her way back along the beach towards Bàrr Fhasaidh.
Next: Chapter 3. Summer