by Chris Walley
It was not that Isabella regularly mentioned the matter of their commitment; it was just that she always seemed to hint at it. Merral preferred not to raise the subject, hoping against hope that it would go away. Yet it didn’t; the question of their commitment always seemed to be there between them. In his darker moments, Merral wondered if Isabella was doing, by accident or intent, what she had done with the intruders and employing slow, subtle pressure on him to yield and agree with her point of view. The effect was a renewed tension between them.
One other oddity was that he had spent more time than usual in the simulated world of his castle tree. Frequently, Merral entered the silent realm where his great tree stood before going to bed. He found a strange relaxation in drifting around in between the branches as, in speeded-up time, the clouds flew by overhead and the sun glided across the sky. He had decided that it was time for the tree to breed and had prepared those modifications to the program that would allow his tree to bear male and female flowers that his insects could pollinate. Eventually, he decided, he would make both male and female trees, but for the moment, his only specimen would have to be a hermaphrodite. Yet something about the growing intensity of his involvement with his personal creation troubled him. The sense of relief and release Merral felt as he entered the simulation was something that he had never experienced before. Was it, perhaps, an escape?
“Time is not on our side,” Vero had said, and his words seemed to haunt Merral. Yet the one thing he could do that might change matters—find the ship—seemed to be impossible.
Merral frowned. Despite all his hours of poring over images on screens and printouts of various sizes, shapes, colors, and resolutions, he had made no progress. Indeed, in strange and unpleasant moments of mental darkness, he had even begun to wonder if what he sought existed. Clearly, if there was anything, it was hidden. Such a situation was, of course, quite logical; if the intruders were warlike, then one of the skills they would have mastered was camouflage. Satellite surveillance was a very old art and, he presumed, proficiency in avoiding it equally ancient.
Deeply troubled by his thoughts, Merral looked over the water to where, at the edge of his view, the outer houses of Ynysmant clustered round the lake margin. I’m losing the battle; things are going downhill fast.
He turned away from the window; this was getting him nowhere. He wondered whether he should travel to Isterrane to talk with Vero. He had heard nothing from him since the announcement of Brenito’s death. He needed to clear his mind. Sticking a note on his door, he left the office complex, walked past the stables, and paused at the paddock fence, watching the horses. After a minute, Graceful came over to see him, and he stroked her head for a few minutes, feeling the grit in her mane and wondering at the changes that had happened in the months since he had ridden her into Herrandown that cold winter’s evening.
Then Merral walked slowly up the grassy rise, trying to minimize the intake of dust into his lungs. Halfway up the slope he found an empty wooden seat overlooking the lake. He sat on it and tried to think. What am I doing so wrong that I cannot find this craft?
As he struggled with his thoughts, his attention was caught by the slow elevation of a hydraulic access platform down by the engineering complex. It was the time of year when the equipment that would be used over the summer was checked. He sighed; all the equipment and technology that he had used had failed him. Then, as he looked over the dust-tinted clouds of white and pink blossoms on the trees below him, the idea came to him that it might be the technology that was the problem. He gnawed away at the idea, progressively becoming more enthusiastic about it. After all, he had to recognize that it was in the area of technology that the intruders were superior. If there was a way of masking a ship’s presence, they would know how to do it, and he, novice that he was, was not going to penetrate such a mask.
Merral sensed a glimmer of progress. Perhaps, I now know what I have been doing wrong. He tried to think of an alternative.
His thoughts were interrupted by a handsome male Menayan bullfinch that landed on a nearby apple tree bough and began to nip at the blossom. Merral leaned forward to watch it, struck by its confident manner and its glorious breeding plumage of glossy red and black.
The animals could detect them.
Merral sat bolt upright, his discouragement suddenly ebbing away at the thought. He remembered how he and Vero had found the woods so quiet and lifeless on the way up the Lannar River. Other birds had fled the dreadful buzzard—half machine and half corpse—that had watched them as they made their way northward. He remembered how Barrand’s dogs had been uneasy at Herrandown and how Spotback had pursued the two creatures northward and paid for it. Perhaps, he asked himself with mounting eagerness, the intruders’ weakness lay here?
Agitated, Merral rose and walked to the summit of the hill overlooking the Institute, trying to pursue this line of thought. He smiled at the idea of leading a team of dogs across the length and breadth of the Lannar Crater. That was hardly practical, yet there might be something in the principle.
It was a pity, he reflected, as he finally stopped on the smooth, grassy summit, that the wildlife of the crater area was so poorly known. He looked northward thoughtfully, hoping to see the Rim Ranges in the distance, but the grimy air had hidden their peaks. He went through what he knew: herds of caribou migrated across the area, their numbers kept in balance by wolves. There were brown bears, beavers, long-tailed otters, and many other smaller mammals. Of course, there were also various birds, and many ducks and waders migrated in and nested in the swamps. The problem was that few people ventured regularly up to study them. There was just too much to do farther south. Yet there was some data and some of that, Merral realized, was in the Institute itself.
He hurried back down and went straight to the office of Lesley Manalfi, the ornithologist.
Lesley ran his fingers through his wide, straggly, and graying red moustache as Merral asked him about any bird oddities in the Lannar Crater. One of his fingers bore a large pink bandage.
On a shelf above them, a female chaffinch hopped about watching them cautiously. In the background Merral could hear chirping and cawing from the adjacent room. Lesley had a reputation for being able to heal injured birds, and in spring and autumn his laboratory was often the home of exhausted migrants that had been brought in.
“Oddities, my boy? What sort of oddities?” Lesley asked.
“Signs that animals are avoiding an area. Please don’t ask why.”
“Avoiding an area?” Lesley repeated in perplexed tones. “Well, the Lannar’s not really my patch,” he said, looking at Merral with good-natured puzzlement. “The only studies are by remote means. But, strange to tell, I did see something from a satellite run only the other day. Where was it?”
He flicked his bandaged finger over the touchpad below the deskscreen. “Yes, that’s it. There’s a lake; formally unnamed as yet, but it’s Fallambet Lake Five on the maps. There’s always a lot of Cygnus cygnus, that’s the Whooper Swan—the Farholme subspecies, of course—breeding around the northern tip. You see, we can keep a tag on them because they are big enough and white enough to be easy to count on remote imagery.”
He muttered under his breath quietly as he looked at the screen. Above them, in a flutter of wings, the chaffinch flew unsteadily across to the other side of the room.
“And?” asked Merral, aware that Lesley had turned to watch the bird.
“Now that is good; it’s only today that she has been flying at all. And what? Oh yes, this year the image shows none breeding. Not there.”
Merral felt a tingle of excitement. “Which means what?”
Lesley twirled the end of his moustache and smiled up at Merral. “Well, without checking on the ground, it’s hard to say. And you know, probably better than all of us, that the area is rapidly changing. Perhaps the water quality may have altered in some way that has affected the ecology. Whatever the cause, they’ve moved elsewhere.”
�
�Could it be, perhaps . . . disturbance?”
“Disturbance by what, my boy?” The brown eyes glinted.
“Oh, anything,” Merral said, realizing as he spoke that he was deliberately trying to sound vague. “A methane seep? hot springs?”
“Hmm. But yes, it’s possible.”
“How long have they been breeding there?”
“Oh, regular records go back three hundred years. Plus. This is the first year with no breeding pairs.”
“And could it be the bad weather?”
“Possibly—” Lesley checked the screen—“but . . . no, elsewhere they are still nesting farther north.”
“Do you have an image of the lake there?”
“Yes, certainly. Here.” He swung the screen around.
Merral glanced at it, recognizing a dumbbell-shaped lake near the center of the crater that he had already looked at in his search. He checked the scale; along its longer northern axis it was barely ten kilometers long and less than half that at its widest part. In the middle, where a small delta had built out from the western side, it was no more than a kilometer wide. There were extensive reed areas around the northern margins and clumps of firs elsewhere; otherwise the surroundings were rolling sands with coarse grass patches. There was nothing striking in any way about it.
Merral, conscious that Lesley was looking at him, tore his glance away and got to his feet. “Thanks. Well, I must go. . . . Fallambet Lake Five . . . very interesting. And that’s the only data you have for the area?”
Lesley looked curiously at him. “Well, we have the bird migration pathways, of course. A lot of species breed in the Lannar area.”
“Of course. I should have remembered that.”
“Well, we don’t do too much with the data. At the moment. We plot them as routine; there’re, oh, probably about a thousand tagged birds of a dozen species. As you know, the rings transmit the position fairly accurately, so we have a good idea of the flight paths.”
“Could I interpret the data?”
“Even a forester can do it, my boy. It’s in standard map format; the routes are for spring and autumn each year. You want the files? I’ll send them over to you.” His finger moved over the touchpad.
“Yes . . . but wait. I’ll call them up from you.”
“As you wish. But can I ask—?”
I’d better get used to this. “Sorry, Lesley, it’s a special project. It’s confidential.”
Lesley’s expression was suddenly one of surprise. “Confidential? That’s a strange word. Who says it’s confidential?”
“Uh, I’m probably not supposed to tell you that.”
“Huh?” The eyes widened further. “You mean the reason why it’s confidential is confidential itself?”
Struck by the logic of the question, Merral hesitated. “Hmm, I hadn’t thought about it that way. It is a bit odd. Sorry. I really am.” He moved toward the door.
The ornithologist shrugged. “You know, five weeks ago this was a normal Made World. Now I’m really beginning to wonder. Things are going crazy here. The Gate. You. The hawk.”
“I’m sorry,” Merral said, feeling unhappy that he couldn’t explain to a colleague more about what was going on. Suddenly, Lesley’s final word registered with him. “The hawk?”
The ornithologist grimaced and waved his bandaged finger. “Oh, I thought everybody knew. One of the Levant sparrowhawks I was checking on yesterday suddenly had a go at me. It took a chunk out of my finger with a claw.”
“I’m sorry, Lesley. Serious?”
“No, but I’ll have a scar. . . . But I felt stupid, really. Thirty years of handling birds, I know what I’m doing. Or I thought I did. Weird though. It behaved as though it was scared of me. They don’t do that.”
“They didn’t—,” Merral sighed. “You know, Lesley, I’m hearing—and using—the past tense far too much these days.”
Before he had to explain any more, he left the ornithologist and walked past his office to the empty teaching lab. There, without giving his name to the network, he accessed Lesley’s data.
Feeling as if he was holding his breath, Merral scanned the migration routes of the twelve species over the last dozen years. Of the twelve species he had the data for, ten regularly migrated north over the feature labeled Fallambet Lake Five.
But not this year.
This year things were different. Most species had swung west round the lake, while a few had gone east. None had gone over.
An hour later, Merral had acquired from one of the mammal biologists the remotely tracked caribou migration routes in the Lannar Crater and was plotting them on his computer. When he overlaid this spring’s routes on those of years past, he saw a sudden, sharp, and unprecedented diversion near the middle of the crater. When Merral flicked on the underlying topographic map, it was with an enormous sense of relief and satisfaction that he saw a blue figure-eight shape with the words Fallambet Lake Five printed next to it.
His search area was now down to under a hundred square kilometers, and Merral knew that, if necessary, he could map every boulder and tree of that.
On the following evening, Merral found the Intruder ship at last.
He felt it was a strange irony that, in the end, the final thing that allowed him to pinpoint the precise site was not the birds or animals, but his own trees. As he scanned the image of the eastern lakeside for what he felt was the fiftieth time, a clump of five firs next to the water’s edge arrested his attention. Their tops had snapped off—a common enough result of an ice storm. In this case, though, the broken crests all pointed northward, and Merral knew that no ice storm ever came out of the south.
He then focused on the rock- and boulder-strewn area of the lakeside to the north of the five decapitated trunks. Visually, he could see nothing unnatural, but juggling and merging images of thermal, magnetic, and gravity data at maximum enhancement showed a smooth and regular ellipse, some hundred meters long and forty wide, just to the east of the water’s edge and running parallel to it.
Examining the images in visual wavelengths, even with those that had a resolution capable of picking up a boulder the size of a man’s head, Merral could see nothing unusual. Rubbing his weary eyes, he peered again at the visual images taken before and after the landing, trying to spot differences. He stared at the earlier of the two images, taken ten weeks before the landing date, trying to register every boulder and shrub in his mind. The features were simple: there was the lake strand, and some hundred meters away, and more or less parallel to it, a steep cliff the height of a three-story house that had been cut in the gravels. Eroded, Merral decided, by the lake at some higher water level. He turned to the subsequent image, taken nine weeks ago, and saw the same cliff. With a sudden thrill he realized it had moved. But his excitement quickly ebbed as he realized that it was probably nothing more than natural erosion.
Discouraged, Merral flicked the image backward and forward on the screen. Then it dawned on him that the cliff had indeed moved, but toward the lake and not away from it.
“It can’t do that!” he said aloud.
The cliff was now only fifty meters from the shoreline. Somehow, between the taking of the two images, an extension to the cliff had been created. He rapidly superimposed all the other data on the images and found that the new extension to the cliff exactly covered the long ellipse of the anomalies.
“Thank you, Lord,” he said aloud.
Merral looked at the time and realized that he had missed the last flight of the day. Deciding that he would travel out on the dawn flight, he called the airport office, booked a seat for the earliest flight, and got them to call Vero and tell him the arrival time. Then he printed off the data, downloaded it onto a datapak, and locked everything else away in the cupboard.
It had taken him almost four weeks, but he had, at last, found the intruder ship. That, however, raised a new and troubling question:
What were they going to do about it?
30
; The next morning the continuing dust storm delayed the flight, and Merral and the other passengers had to stand around in the terminal and talk as the latest meteorological data was checked. As he stood there watching a sun so muted that it was no more than a hazy, coppery glow in the clouds, Merral realized how impatient he was to be at Isterrane and to talk with Vero and the others. He wanted to share what he knew and to talk over his fears.
He also realized that he was particularly looking forward to seeing Anya. Merral found this feeling of anticipation troubling. Surely, he thought, I ought only to feel such an excitement with Isabella? After all, although Isabella clearly saw their relationship as being further advanced than he did, she and he were linked together. Yet Merral sensed that although he was still fond of her, he didn’t delight in her presence in the way that perhaps he ought to. In fact, he realized he had been thinking a lot about Anya; indeed, over the past week or so, he had frequently found himself unfavorably comparing Isabella’s subtle and roundabout manner with Anya’s bluff openness. He found his pleasing thoughts about Anya perturbing. In what he now—rather worryingly— saw as his “old world,” feelings and choices had worked in harmony; somehow you both chose whom you loved and fell in love with them. The two sides of a personality worked together. Now though, he sensed, a conflict was possible; the feelings of the heart and the choice of the head might not automatically come together.
Merral walked around to the window overlooking the landing strip. Through the heavy air, almost brown with fine dust, he could see the tanker filling the short-haul passenger flier with hydrogen. As he stood there, he was suddenly aware of a conversation from two men seated a few meters away.