Then a face appeared in the trees above her, and another, and another. The faces had dark, intelligent, human eyes, but they were covered in long red fur.
They were great red apes.
Annalie had seen pictures of them but had never seen a live one. There were a few surviving in zoos, but it was believed that they had died out entirely in the wild. Annalie stared at them in astonishment. What on earth were they doing here, on an isolated island in the middle of nowhere? Pod had frozen in fear, but now she saw him looking about for something—a rock, a stick—his hand reaching for a weapon.
“Don’t!” she said. “They won’t hurt us if we don’t threaten them.” She hoped this was true. She knew they were likely to be territorial.
The trees around the mango tree started rustling. Apes were swinging in from all over. Most of them stayed up high, but two of the biggest swung down to the lowest branches, face to face with Annalie and Pod.
“Hello,” said one of the apes. The voice was strange, an electronic sing-song, and the accent was not Duxish. “We welcome you.”
“Can you help us?” said the second.
* * *
The island, it turned out, had been a wildlife sanctuary and scientific base. Before the Flood, apes had been rescued from zoos, bushmeat markets, and logging camps, and brought here to be observed, preserved, studied, and returned to at least a version of the wild.
Some of the apes had been caught up in the scientific fad for making animals talk. They had been fitted with headsets that translated their thoughts into words, and sent these words to vocal simulators housed in collars around their necks. The younger apes had not been born until after the Flood, but the older apes had handed the translator units down to a new generation so they could share their new language. The apes had created epic ballads about their ancestors and their many paths to this island, which they regarded as a little paradise on earth. These ballads could take all night to recite, but now the apes had a problem.
The collars used longlife batteries. The apes knew how to recharge them, but the science station had lost power after a storm the previous year, and they could no longer recharge their batteries. One by one, the collars were failing. There were now only two of them left, and the apes were desperate to recover their voices before it was too late.
They showed a wondering Annalie and Pod through what remained of the science station where they had grown up. Although the apes themselves preferred to live outdoors, they were proud of the place that had given them the gift of speech, and had looked after it carefully.
“Where did the scientists go?” Annalie asked.
“They leave after Flood, in boat,” the ape said. “They say they come back, but they don’t come.”
“Can you fix?” asked the second ape.
“Is it all right if I bring my brother here?” Annalie asked.
* * *
“You want to give a solar panel to some red apes?” Will said.
“We may not need to,” Annalie said. “Their equipment hasn’t been properly maintained for forty years—it may just need fixing. Won’t you come and have a look at it? If you get everything working again we won’t need to give them a solar panel.”
“But if we can’t fix it, we’ll have to give them something or they’re likely to tear our arms out of their sockets.”
“Come on,” Annalie wheedled. “They’re great red apes. They’re meant to be extinct. And they can talk! Don’t you want to at least meet them?”
Will had always been mad about animals, the wilder the better. As captain of the Sunfish he knew he ought to be guarding their precious supplies just in case, but this opportunity was something he couldn’t resist.
“Okay, let’s go,” he said.
Essie didn’t want to miss out either, so Will and Essie both got into the dinghy with Annalie and Pod, bringing Will’s toolbox and a few spare parts.
* * *
“So did this lab used to run on generator power?” Will asked, once the apes had showed him around.
“Yes!” the ape said. “The genny! Broken.”
“If we can just get you some power, you can recharge these batteries again,” Will said. “Then you’ll be able to speak.”
Will examined the generator, then clambered all around the station checking connections and cables, replacing a damaged solar cell, fixing this, repairing that. When he was done, he shouted to Pod, who was standing by the main switch. “Okay, try it now!”
Pod flicked the switch and the science station sprang back to life: power, lights, humming appliances.
The apes hooted excitedly.
“How did you know how to do all that?” Essie asked, impressed.
“Spinner taught me,” Will said casually, although he was secretly rather thrilled that he had been able to get it working again. He hadn’t been at all sure he’d be able to pull it off.
Annalie watched as the apes extracted batteries from their collars and put them in a charger, their great leathery fingers showing a surprising delicacy. The charging took a long time, but at last, at long last, the indicator light on the charger flipped from red to green. The batteries were ready. The apes put the batteries back in their collars and put them on.
“I speak!”
“Here I am!”
“I am me!”
Words began carolling out of the apes, and they began to sing and dance and hoot and roar, magnificently.
“Essie, do you know how to work those old computers?” Annalie asked. The scientists had left some of their computers behind—big blocky-looking antiques—and she had found microphones in the same supply cupboard as the battery chargers. “If they still work, we can show the apes how to record their songs and stories, and then none of it will be lost.”
It took Essie a while to find the right switch to turn the computer on, and longer again to wrestle with the unfamiliar operating system, while Annalie looked for a hole to plug the microphone into. Seeing this, one of the very oldest apes came to join them. “Recording,” she said. “Scientists make recording.”
“Did you make recordings?” Annalie asked.
“Yes. As a youngling.”
Essie was still trying to make sense of the interface. “Where do you suppose they’ve hidden the apps on this thing?” she asked.
“Your department,” Annalie said ruefully.
A red arm reached past Essie and a long, strong finger began to type, slowly and steadily. To Essie’s astonishment, the recording program opened.
“I can’t believe you remember the key command after all this time,” she said.
“We don’t forget,” the ape said.
Essie turned and found herself gazing into the old ape’s eyes. They were dark, solemn, but also very lively; for a moment she felt a deep sense of kinship and affinity with the old ape, as if she were an eccentric long-lost aunt.
* * *
When they left the island of the great red apes, celebrations were in full swing.
“Do you think they’ll be all right?” Essie asked, as they sailed away.
“They’ve done okay so far,” Annalie said. “So long as the generator doesn’t die on them again.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me if they worked out how to fix it all for themselves,” Will said. “Did you see how they watched me? They’re pretty smart.”
Only Graham was unimpressed. “Monkeys?” he squawked derisively. “How smart can they be?”
Breaking the code
All the next week, they sailed quietly through empty ocean.
Annalie spent her time trying to crack the code Spinner had left for her in her favorite book. She knew there were some tricks to decoding a message. You could look for three-letter words that appeared a lot—they’d probably be either “the” or “and”. One-letter words at the beginning of a sentence were probably
“I”. In the middle of a sentence, they were more likely to be “a”. Starting with these clues, she tried to build a key, but she got nowhere. There were three-letter words in the document, but she couldn’t work out which might be “the” and which might be “and”—if that was even what they were. And if the code was, in fact, a list of names and addresses, these tricks would not be any use to her at all.
Essie sat down with her and looked at the jumble of letters. “Making progress?”
Annalie shook her head. “Not really.”
“I was never very good at this kind of puzzle,” Essie said.
“Codes are often pretty simple,” Annalie said. “You just need a key to unlock them. There are simple codes, where you just shift all the letters round by one or two. You know: A becomes B, B becomes C, that sort of thing. They’re easy to use, but they’re also easy to crack, so they’re not really very good as codes if you want to keep something secret.”
“You don’t suppose this is one of them?” Essie asked.
“I don’t think so,” Annalie said. “It could be a random code. You reassign all the letters of the alphabet randomly, without following a pattern.”
“How do you crack those?”
“Well, really you need the key.”
“Oh.”
“Although sometimes it isn’t random,” Annalie said. “Sometimes another document is the key.” Inspired, she jumped up. “Where’s the book?”
“What book? You mean the one we found this in? On my bunk.”
Annalie raced to fetch the book and began jotting and circling letters excitedly. “There’s a kind of code where you start with the first letter of a book,” she explained. “That first letter becomes A, the next new letter is B, and so on, until you’ve gone all the way through the alphabet. It’s a random code, completely unbreakable, unless you have the book in front of you.”
Annalie worked her way through the pages until she had a complete key.
Then she set to work decoding the message.
Finally, she sat back. “It’s a list of names and addresses,” she said.
There were four names on the list: two men and two women, and the addresses were widely dispersed. One was on the east side of the Moon Islands; another was beyond the Islands in one of the far eastern nations; another was on a mountain in the far north; and the last address was in the island continent in the south, which had closed its borders decades ago.
“Do you know who any of these people are?” Essie asked.
Annalie puzzled over them. “I don’t think so.”
They showed the list to the boys. Will didn’t recognize any of the names, but he was interested by the fact that one of the addresses lay in the Moon Islands.
“Maybe that’s where Spinner’s going,” he suggested.
“I thought you thought he was going to see Uncle Art,” said Annalie.
“I didn’t know about this, though, did I?” he said, still studying the list. “What’s the one thing you notice about all these addresses?”
“They’re all in terrible places?” Essie suggested.
“Exactly,” Will said. “And most of them aren’t even proper addresses. They’re directions for how to get to places. Whoever these people are, they’re living in places that are really hard to find.” He thought for a moment. “Hey Annalie, get the charts, will you?”
Annalie went and got the sat nav. Will opened the giant world chart and found the approximate locations of the four addresses. They were almost as far flung as it was possible for them to be, with thousands upon thousands of miles between them.
“I’m pretty sure,” Will said, “that we’ve never been to any of these places.”
“No,” Annalie agreed, “and that’s kind of surprising, because we’ve been to a lot of places with Spinner.”
“Almost like he was staying away from them,” Essie said.
They were silent for a moment, looking at each other.
“Who are these people?” Annalie asked.
“And why was it so important to keep their names and addresses a secret?” Will asked.
“The first time Beckett came to see me he wanted the names of Spinner’s friends and where they lived,” Annalie said.
“What did you tell him?”
“I made stuff up,” Annalie said. “I knew there was something not right about him.”
“Do you think,” Will said, “that this list is what the Admiralty’s looking for?”
Annalie nodded. “We have to keep it safe.”
“So what does this mean for us?” Essie asked. “Are we going to try and find the people on this list instead?”
Will and Annalie looked at each other, considering. “We don’t know who they are,” Annalie said.
“They must be important,” Will said.
“But maybe not in a good way,” Annalie said.
“If we ever find an island with some signal I can search them,” Essie said. “See if there’s any info about them on the links. It might help us work out where to go.”
“Good idea,” Annalie said.
“You may not find much,” Will said. “I bet there’s not much about Spinner.”
“Everyone’s on the links somewhere,” Essie said airily.
“Well, for now we know nothing about these people,” Annalie said. “I don’t think we should go looking for them just yet. We know Uncle Art, we know we can trust him. I think we should stick to the original plan and go and find him. Will, do you agree?”
“Yeah,” Will said, nodding. His mind was still stuck on the idea that this list might not be a list of friends after all. But if they weren’t Spinner’s friends, who were they?
“Hey,” Pod said. “Maybe Graham knows them.”
Annalie was embarrassed it hadn’t even occurred to her to ask.
“Hey Graham, come here. We want to ask you something,” Pod said.
Graham flew obligingly down to the table. “Do you remember someone called Dan Gari?” Will asked. “Might have been an old friend of Spinner’s?”
Graham fluffed his feathers up. “Who?”
“Dan,” Pod said. “Gari.”
Gaham rarked, then said, “Danny Boy.”
“Who is Danny Boy?” Pod asked.
“Danny Boy very grumpy. Didn’t like Graham,” Graham said. “Called Graham Birdbrain. Graham break one instrument, Danny Boy never forgive.”
“What kind of instrument?” Annalie asked.
“Musical instrument?” asked Pod.
Graham made a rude noise. “No. Science.”
“Danny Boy was a scientist?”
Graham bobbed up and down.
“What about Sola Prentice?” Annalie asked, moving to the next name on the list.
“Sola,” Graham said. “They call her Sun.”
“Of course they did,” Will said dryly.
“Long hair, like a rope. Sun very sweet. Always say ‘Hello, Graham! Like a biscuit, Graham?’”
“And was she a friend of Spinner’s too?”
“Yes. Good friend. Always had good biscuits.”
Pod took the hint and got Graham a biscuit.
“Pod good friend too,” Graham said, stroking him briefly with his head.
“What about the other two?” Annalie asked. “Ganaman Kiveshalan and Sujana Kieferdottar?”
“Can’t talk,” Graham said, spraying crumbs. “Eating.”
They waited while Graham finished his biscuit. “Vesh and Suj. Vesh had cowboy hat. Suj big fat lady. All Spinner friends. At night we sit and look at the sky. Lots of stars. Sing songs, Spinner play. Vesh used to say ‘nothing else to do out here’.”
“How come we never met any of them?” asked Annalie.
“Long time ago. We live in the desert then,” Graham said. “All
ie and Will not born. Then one day Spinner and Graham leave. Never see desert friends again.”
“What was Spinner doing in the desert?” Annalie asked.
“Work,” Graham said.
“Like, fixing stuff?” Will suggested.
“Was it anything to do with the Department of Scientific Inquiry?” asked Annalie. This was the department Beckett belonged to; he’d said Spinner had worked for them as well.
“Just work,” Graham said huffily, annoyed by a question he couldn’t answer.
They looked at each other. “Well, at least we know they were all friends once,” Essie said.
“And that one of them wore a cowboy hat,” Will said. “It’s not a lot to go on, is it?”
“Maybe Uncle Art will know more,” Annalie said. “When we get there, we can ask him.”
“When we get there, we can ask Spinner himself,” Will said.
* * *
Later that evening Will was standing watch when Pod came and joined him on deck. The stars were out and they looked up into them in silence for a while.
“Your dad,” Pod said finally. “He a bad man?”
“No,” Will said. “He’s a good man. But he’s in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“The Admiralty are after him. They say he stole something, but he didn’t. He’s hiding out here in the Islands and we’re on our way to meet him.” Will couldn’t help noticing it all sounded much clearer and more definite when he said it than it actually was.
“This is a bad place,” Pod said. “Moon Islands. A bad place full of bad people. Why did he make you come out here?”
“He didn’t make us come,” Will said. “We decided to come.”
“We?”
“Me and Annalie. Essie wasn’t meant to come, that was more of an accident.”
“You’re not safe out here. You got no idea,” Pod said. “Why’d you want to come?”
“The Admiralty took our boat,” Will said. “We had to get it back and give it back to our Dad.”
The Flooded Earth Page 15