Chapter Six
Cruising to Cape Town
The day of the cruise departure had finally arrived and Chantel wondered how she would survive 12 days on a boat knowing only Beren as company. She hoped that there would be other people she could converse with on the boat. As it turned out, she needn’t have worried so much. Beren turned out to be charming and affable company for the entire journey. Along the way he intrigued her with stories from an era long past. By the end of the journey she was unsure how many of the tales he told were real or pure embellishments from an imaginative mind. She had experienced before the amazing ability of Beren’s mind to expand and contract the truth. During his employment at Pangaea she had witnessed Beren encounter several situations to which he would apply his own reasoning and in trying to reason with his own reasoning he would eventually derive such a contorted version of the details that it was as if he were working on a different plane. His was a brilliant mind at work but the sheer brilliance of its ability consumed itself.
Chantel had no way of verifying whether the tales Beren told were the same as the annals of history captured in the books he had read in prison and at Sydney University. The only versions of history she was familiar with were those she had read from the Pangaea mainframe and this information was not very detailed. This world view was altogether different from the tales Beren spun of battles between empires and struggles for independence. Regardless, as implausible as his fables were, Chantel was enthralled with Beren’s story-telling. The scholarly approach to narration that Beren had adopted whilst working at the university, together with his restless passion for the pursuit of adventure mesmerised Chantel as he recounted a version of the past, from before the great mainframe disaster that was known only by him.
Beren described the division of the world into different continents and even further into individual countries. He explained how each race of purebloods occupied a different area in the world. He elucidated on the rising economic powers of various regions to form shifting blocks of influence and domination. He opined on the reasons for the rise and fall of each of the different civilisations and conjectured on the shifting focus of power from each resource rich area to the next. By the end of each day, Chantel’s mind was in overdrive as she basked in the fountain of Beren’s knowledge. She found almost incomprehensible the notion that so much had happened in the world before the formation of the global parliament. That the world had been splintered into arbitrary divisions dependent upon borders marked in the land was astonishing to her. Property was an ethereal concept in Chantel’s mind as well as in everyone else’s. Its existence was defined as much by the value given to it in one’s mind as anything else. The notion that people had fought wars and died for a piece of soil was baffling. But above all, it was Beren’s introduction to the world of slavery that captivated her the most.
“Freetown – as the name suggests was founded as the land of the free,” Beren explained. “After centuries of slave trading where dark skinned purebloods were transported to the farthest flung continents to be bought and sold, Freetown was birthed as a land where freed slaves could return to their home continent and start lives unto themselves.”
This didn’t make sense to Chantel. Why did people need to commemorate a place for freedom? Was not freedom an ideal that should have been granted upon them from birth? Why was Freetown necessary? It was like naming a place after humanity’s need to eat or to drink, the basic facets of survival. Chantel couldn’t understand why such a place had been established, in the name of freedom, when freedom was an aspect of life as integral as life itself. She didn’t understand it until Beren confused her further with three words.
“People were property,” he said simply.
Chantel was aghast.
“What do you mean? Yes, we are all property. We all have the physical features that define us. We can’t be not property because we exist as matter, not like a hologram or something like that. But property is something that is owned. And no one owns me but me.”
“Chantel, the world was a very different place five hundred years ago. There was none of your beloved Human Integrity Act or whatever you call it. These people lived off the land. They needed hard, cold labour to work the fields. The agricultural revolution had increased food production and gave humanity the ability to live off harvested grains and domestic livestock, but that sort of work needs a lot of hands and when the white purebloods crossed over the earth to the north eastern quadrant they found that they needed more labourers than there were willing to go with them.”
“Why not invent machines to work the land? One tractor on my parents’ farm is more capable than ten people.”
“Well that came later. The need to work the land though was just one reason why people were brought over no doubt. There was another more palpable premise behind it all. People are instinctively drawn to power and power in that age was determined by control. Control over people was a mechanism for retaining power. This was in a time and age when civilisations fought with each other for land and to occupy each other’s resources. Without land, a civilisation was without its means of survival, they were without their identity and stripping these people, these slaves of their land was a tactic to isolate and deprive them. That was why the slaves were extricated from their land and shipped far away to the farthest reaches of the earth, to subjugate and disorientate them.”
“Surely a home in one location is as good as a home in any other location. What does it matter what land it’s on?”
“It was racial as well. It was a mark of one race’s domination over another race. In that age of colonisation the colour of one’s skin would determine their destiny. The white purebloods had such a strong hold on power that of course they wanted to retain this and enslaving people was a method of asserting their power.”
“Why was it necessary to own another person? I mean we have the same practice in our century but it’s called gainful employment not slavery.”
“What is power if it is not asserted? It would only be a chalice for someone else to take over and control. Power, by its very right involves some element of suppression and what greater suppression is there than taking over, body and soul, the life of another person. Slavery was nothing more than power retention but it took centuries to abolish and even the laws abolishing the practice were only enacted after a bitter struggle against staunch opponents. John Clarkson and his compatriots finally got their way though and in 1792, he formed Freetown. That was the version of history I came across. Who knows if there are other versions out there that state the contrary?”
Chantel mulled over this information in her head. The waves lapped against the bow of the boat as it sliced through the water making gentle sucking noises. The wind rose and fell with the rhythm of the boat as it surmounted the crest of each wave and then lurched onwards bobbing with the tide. The ocean breezes conversed with the billowing sail as it remained puffed and taut above their heads. All around them the expanse of the ocean spoke to them in gurgles and splashes, plods and squelches. Then, as often happens with the rhythm of the world, there was an arrested silence; as if the ocean, wind and sky combined were drawing their collective breaths in a pregnant pause, digesting the information imparted. Even the whispering of the water seemed to stall for a moment as it took in the last words of Beren’s litany. The conversation was absorbed in a timeless hush.
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“What if it is the truth?” Chantel asked as she sun-baked on the deck of the boat, hands dragging in the water. “Do you think we should let people know?”
“Why for my dear Chantel? What difference would it make in the end?”
“But what if the same thing should happen again?”
“Well, what difference is knowing going to make? If it is destined to happen again, then destiny wills it so.”
Chantel turned to face Beren in disbelief.
“Can it be? The great, almighty Beren Marley. A law unto himself, a god
of his own making. Are you really telling me you still believe in destiny, after all you’ve been through?”
“Well why shouldn’t I Chantel? I’ve never tried to tempt fate.”
“Really. Hacking into all of the global five’s formats, getting sent to prison, being locked up – that isn’t tempting fate?”
“Ah, that wasn’t me tempting fate Chantel. That was me tempting the global five. Unfortunately for me, there are limitations on my abilities…especially when five of the most powerful entities on the planet join forces against one single person.”
“Yes, but no one else tries to rock their own boat like that.”
“But that’s precisely it, I was merely rocking my own boat…and maybe those also of the five most powerful entities in the known universe but I wasn’t rocking destiny’s boat. Once that ship has sailed, it’s gone.”
“So you are saying that slavery was the destiny of those people who were forced into it and if it was going to happen it would happen and you would accept it. You wouldn’t hack into some mainframe on one of your missions, you wouldn’t try to warn everyone by releasing one of your freedom files, and you would just sit back, relax and enjoy the claustrophobic, tortuous, chained and cramped ride for six months in the bottom hull of a ship to the other side of the world.”
“No. I’m just saying that there are more things in heaven and earth, my dear Chantel, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. One person cannot change destiny…unless of course it is that person’s destiny to change destiny,” Beren added as an afterthought.
“Okay, then. What about your accident? What about breaking your spine? Is that destiny?” Chantel huffed.
Beren glared at Chantel and she knew she had taken it one step too far. His paralysis was still a touchy subject which he was paradoxically flippant about at times while at other times, if one happened to touch the wrong nerve it would provoke a furious response. Chantel had inadvertently touched just that nerve. Wheeling his wheelchair perilously close to Chantel’s feet, Beren turned his back on her and rolled away. She knew it might be awhile before he decided to speak to her again. She also knew that with only a senile geriatric couple, a family of entertaining musicians and a few other stern-faced business-people as the other passengers on board the boat, he would be compelled to engage her company before too long.
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The ocean was a strange place to someone who had only ever known land. The constant motion of the boat made Chantel feel horribly giddy. The smell of the sea cast a sickly taste in her mouth and the salt residue from the water found its way onto every inch of her body, drying up her skin and tangling her straightened hair. She found herself peering into the not quite blue of the water and straining to spot any signs of wildlife under the sea. It was pointless. For the entire journey she saw only water and more water. Keeping her eyes on the horizon had therapeutic benefits at least and allowed her to calm her mind. Being in the midst of the ocean, Chantel had no connectivity on her hard drive to the Pangaea mainframe. She tried watching a few re-runs of movies she had seen previously but quickly grew bored of the repeat entertainment. She could not keep her attention focussed and her mind constantly wandered off track. In addition, viewing entertainment as a hologram quickly made her feel even queasier. She contented herself with staring at the waves as they persistently frothed into tiny white peaks only to be subsumed again into the expanse of the ocean. Here was a place where Chantel felt beyond the reach of civilisation, where she could not even access the mainframe to keep abreast of what was happening in the world, where she could not even use her payment chip on board the boat. The ocean was the last vestige of open space impervious to global five infiltration. She resigned herself to the fact that she was as isolated from the world as she had ever been before on this boat.
Chantel spent the nights on the boat at unease. As darkness fell the wind died down to a mere whimper, with barely enough energy to inflate the boat’s sails. The boat chugged along relying upon the electronic motor and ocean currents, travelling with less buoyancy than it did when relying upon the wind and slicing through the water instead of bounding over the top of the waves. The constant murmur of the engines only accentuated the disquiet Chantel felt as the sounds of the boat drowned out the noises emanating from the ocean. The lights of the boat were dimmed to conserve electricity for the motor; the ambient light reflecting upon the waves in a ghostly haze. Darkness extended beyond the glow from the boat stretching out to where the sea would meet the sky on the shapeless horizon. Chantel’s deep sense of paranoia shirked at the thought of such emptiness.
From Sydney, the boat headed south and then west, hugging the coastline the entire way. Chantel watched the boat navigate around a huge land mass tracing along its entire southern border. She watched the cliffs fade in and out of view as the boat hovered along the outer circumference of the land and wondered what sort of zones lay beyond the shore. Occasionally they would come within sight of the beaches that dotted the coast, each one collecting piles and piles of rubbish that had been dumped upon it by the crashing waves. The bright, garish colours of the discarded food containers, drink bottles and other disposables attracted the attention of passing seagulls that swarmed around the rubbish piles squabbling and squawking over their precious finds in the garbage. Chantel was grateful for the break in monotony from the otherwise congruent landscape of the sea and would stare wistfully at the land, as polluted as it was, yearning for the solidity of soil.
The first port stop the boat made was at a small, dusty harbour on the other side of the land mass that Sydney was situated upon. The first night’s stopover at the port unveiled no surprises. The port town bordered upon a wasteland zone and as a result, passengers were prohibited from disembarking off the boat. By this stage, after four or so days of experiencing the unrelenting rocking of the boat, Chantel was craving some stability. Stability would have to wait though as the night spent at port was just enough time to restock. Before she knew it the boat was continuing its journey on the deep, blue ocean.
The seven day journey across the Indian Ocean was the most monumental journey Chantel had ever embarked upon and the most uneventful. The sheer expanse of the ocean was daunting to Chantel. Never before had she felt so humbled than when standing at the bow of the boat looking out across a horizon that gaped miles away from one end to the other of her vision. Never before had she seen such a deep expanse of nothing. Never before had she experienced so great a range of space unoccupied by land and without structure. She could not imagine that there were places on earth such as this that had not been built upon, or harvested, or mined. The ocean was the largest expanse of empty space she had ever seen.
The second port stop was in a slightly more salubrious location. The port was on the edge of the agricultural zone and this at least allowed the passengers to walk around the port district and explore the area. The port town was small. It consisted of only a few tourist oriented restaurants and the obligatory pub. By this stage, Beren was on speaking terms with Chantel again and they had a rowdy night downing drinks together. They instantly regretted such a night of revelry upon resuming their journey the day afterwards worse for wear. It was with bitter experience that they discovered how recovering from a hangover on an undulating boat was one of life’s most extreme discomforts. The rest of the boat trip was spent staring at the sky in an attempt to steady the swaying in their minds. The boat continued carving its way listlessly through the water.
At last, Chantel could see the fluorescent tipped towers of a metropolis peering over the horizon and she knew they had finally reached Cape Town.