Alison is watching you.
‘I’m going to give you some information,’ you say softly. ‘Don’t ask me how I know. Don’t ask me anything. Just listen.’
She nods. Alison is a good listener. Eventually the bottle is almost gone, and she falls asleep on the hay, half-wrapped in one of the many blankets she brought you because you needed to stay out here due to the ‘wingspan issue’.
She snores softly. You don’t sleep. You listen to the wind. It should have turned out differently. Ayeisha always said she would go to Kuè, even though most of her people were in New York. She got on well with your family there, brought the girls every year. Taught them to respect where they came from, even if she couldn’t fully understand your ways herself. Now your children are in danger, Ayeisha too. It’s as if you really did die in the forest, as if the oil men never found you and saved your life, as if you never helped Stevens steal from his own company. What good was anything you did? Pace came to Kuè and they poisoned the water, destroyed food sources. They created war where there had been none. They caused sickness. They pulled the strings that forced people out of their villages, threw leaders in jail, executed those who would resist – all from the safety of corporate headquarters. From telephones and helicopters. They educated you and made you an exile from your own country, so that you would marry an American and struggle to explain yourself to your own children.
How does a person resist this? Is violence the only way? Kisi’s very existence seems to prove that it’s the only way.
It’s not yet light when the black cars roll up. This is it.
The cars are disgorging serious-looking passengers, some of them bulky with Kevlar. These aren’t local police. You shake Alison awake; she’s bleary, but it doesn’t take her long to start moving.
‘Go out the back like we said. I’ll stall them.’
Alison staggers out to meet them. A megaphone orders her to put her hands up. She freezes, hands up in the air. There is a long moment of tense body language. Then the leader of the group nods and Alison’s hands come down. Men approach her and everyone shakes hands. Alison is pointing up to the hills. She brings them up to the barn, her clear soprano carrying easily to you at your vantage point.
‘Be careful,’ she says. ‘He could be watching us. He could be anywhere.’
‘This is Gunther Liedemann’s place? And he’s filling in for you in Edinburgh, is that right?’
‘Gunther doesn’t know anything. The guy . . . Dr Sorle? He said he’d go after my family if I didn’t cooperate. I brought him up here as he asked. I don’t know what he wanted with the place.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘Yesterday. He was on his phone. He took a gun and some food and a tent and he took off.’
‘What gun? Do you know if it was registered?’
‘I assume it was. Gunther keeps them for shooting. Not hand guns. He took a rifle.’
‘He left on foot?’
She nodded.
‘If you’ve been helping him you will be prosecuted.’
‘Look. I have a family. I have grandchildren. You can prosecute away. I was in a situation and I did what I had to do.’
The barn door rolls open and they are upon you.
‘It’s not necessary, Alison,’ you say, holding up your hands. ‘I have a family, too. Let them take me if that’s what they want.’
Dino battle BOOM
I brought Austen Stevens some water in a leaf. He found it hard to swallow. He was only whispering now.
‘He showed me where the ship is taking me. Wonderful things. Cities that are alive. Forests, and flying people. Underwater paradise it was all the future.’
‘I want you to understand something, Austen. The briefcase belongs to me. The man who looks like Dr Sorle stole it. He used Dr Sorle’s body. None of you have a claim on me.’
‘They wanted money. Everybody wants money. When are you taking me up?’
‘I’m not here for you,’ I told him. But it’s an effort. He coughed a laugh.
‘Course you are. I know people. You’re a helper. You’re a fixer. Just like that weakling doctor on the run from his own rage.’
‘He’s not weak,’ I said.
‘They rebuilt him. He told me. These whacked-out creatures fixed him up, and they’re going to fix me up. In the future. The ship is going to take me. Prepare the ship. What are you waiting for?’
It cost him to say that. His fingers were blue. He wasn’t long for it. I could feel his body all around me as a kind of projection. I could feel the child packed down inside him, deflated like a beach ball, squashed into a crumpled form no one could possibly identify with the grown man. I could discern the embryonic form of him, too, the burgeoning of life in all its majestic possibilities and surging insistence. I could feel the places where this man would tear easily and the places where a typhoon could not destroy him.
Empathy has a terrible alchemy. I felt it turn on me now, a tame animal gone wild. Empathy was no longer my friend, not when it worked on me so that I couldn’t hate this man.
I had gone too close to him. I dare anyone to look deeply inside a human being and see anything but a palace of miracles, hear any song but the song of defiance against entropy. For a moment – for more than a moment, if I am honest – I understood him. And whatever happened after, I can never forget that moment. It lives in me like the cavity in a tooth; the beginning of death.
He beckoned me closer. I put my ear to his mouth and he whispered a string of numbers. ‘Bank codes. I commit everything to memory.’
I hesitated. I was sweating. Maybe it wasn’t too late. I could pick him up in my arms, carry him down to the broken tree where I’d nearly lost myself yesterday, I could fly with him through the HD gates, out into the cosmos, following the passageways left by an unknown mind. Maybe by some miracle I could even find my way back to the origins of the Resistance. As the image took hold in my mind I began to realise that this was possible.
The wood of that tree held more than HD gates, though. It was a library spanning time and space. And it didn’t depend on the Resistance – something much more sophisticated had created it.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ Stevens rasped. ‘What are you, stupid?’
He batted at me feebly, his body twisting like he was having a fight in his dreams. His legs twitched. I bent and picked him up, and that’s when I felt hot breath on my neck.
I startled and jumped what felt like sixteen feet in the air, but was actually only a centimetre at most. As I turned, I saw gaping nostrils, a snout bigger than I was. A huge tongue came at me, purple and reeking of rot, flanked by two shards of teeth. I didn’t think for a moment. I just backed away fast.
The head came roving after me. The quetzlcoatlus was no longer ancient but perfectly at home in this time as it squeezed itself out from between the dark crevices of sandstone and unfurled its great bat wings. I backed away. It kept coming, moving up the rocks awkwardly using its folded wings as forelimbs driven forward by powerful hind legs. I nearly fell over backwards, trying to keep distance between myself and it.
It stopped.
The creature and I looked at each other. It was old. No: it was big. Much bigger than this projection of itself made it appear. From tail-tip to tooth it stretched across galaxies. It had been compiled of guiding principles and dark matter wells. No strong forces; only resonance, memory, the bond of family following its members for thousands of years that keeps sending back the same nose, the same temper, or in this case, the same wickedly curving claws.
My blood vessels were throbbing as my body ramped up for action. I could not outfly this thing and I certainly couldn’t outfight it. It opened its mouth slightly and made panting sounds like a dog on a hot day. I could see star nurseries though its tongue. I could see the most wonderful forest, a Sequoia city—
Then it sprang forward, swinging its great head so that I had to dodge fast. Its wings rose over me. I tripped over myself
backing away, and it turned its head from side to side, like a bird trying to decide the best way to pull a snail from a crack. It seized Austen Stevens in its long mouth and he was wrenched away from me.
His pain came racing at me like a sound wave on a taut string. It shook me. I ran beneath the shelter of the trees as the quetzlcoatlus threw its head back and crunched him, body parts hanging loose and flopping. Bones cracking with that same awful sound I’d heard on Holyrood. In daylight there was nothing mystical. The man was a meal. Almost no blood spilt. He went down headfirst.
With Austen Stevens dispatched in the span of a moment, the quetzlcoatlus bit into the oxygen tank; pressurised gas came hissing out into its mouth. Shaking its head like a dog that had eaten a wasp, the quetzlcoatlus turned and lurched across the rocks, then flung itself into the air. Still distracted by the hissing thing in its mouth, it glided low over the swamp for several hundred metres. In the gathering gloom I could just see its outline flickering past tall rock formations and over dark green swamp. Just as I dared take a step or two forward from cover, it turned again and circled back towards where I was crouched. Its heat signature passed over the trees growing on the edge of the lowland; then it veered out over the swamp, dropping lower. It had either swallowed the oxygen tank or dropped it.
My heart was trying to catch up with me and I could hear myself half-sobbing in shock. But nothing was over. The quetzlcoatlus passed the edge of a brake of tall trees, flying only a few metres from the surface of the swamp. There was a hot presence among the trees.
Something had been lying in wait there.
I saw the attacker late. It lunged from its hiding place between the trees and made a grab for the pterosaur. The quetzlcoatlus swerved and flapped wildly in an effort to gain altitude, but the predator charged out of cover and into the swamp, jaws snapping. It was a quadruped with powerful hindquarters, and its back was marked by a sail that made it appear even bigger. Spinosaurus, I believe.
The movements of these animals seemed painfully slow to me. The pterosaur seemed to hang in the air while the larger dinosaur seized its wing in its mouth and shook. The wing was rent off and the swamp echoed with a loud music of pain. The spinosaurus stood chewing on the wing for a while while the pterosaur, mortally wounded, flopped away into the swamp. Through the field of giant horsetails the spinosaurus pursued with slow deliberation.
I crept further down the rocks, keeping to the safety of their cracks but unable to tear my attention away. Everything was so big. There was so much of it all: flesh, bone, blood, pain.
The raptor grabbed the pterosaur by the tail and whipped its head back and forth like a dog killing a rabbit. The quetzlcoatlus went spinning through the air and landed in a large green patch devoid of horsetails, where a thin layer of pond weed lay on the ground. But the ground was not solid here. Still moving, the quetzlcoatlus began to sink into deep mire. The larger animal bounded after it, stepping from rock to rock to avoid being pulled down. It seized its meal by the head. Standing on an arm of drier land, the spinosaurus tugged the pterosaur’s neck to pull it free.
But the pterosaur wasn’t a pterosaur anymore.
It was a briefcase. A small thing that flashed between the predator’s teeth. In a heartbeat it disappeared into the mouth of the spinosaurus.
I wasn’t quite sure what happened at that point. Just when I thought the briefcase had been swallowed, the spinosaurus seemed to lift off the ground as though on a string. The briefcase must have done its game of changing up gravity, because the spinosaurus lurched off balance and pitched sideways into the mire. It struggled to pull itself out, but the swamp dragged it down. And down.
I watched for some time, convinced that eventually the creature would stop sinking – it had never occurred to me that the swamp could be so deep. But if there were pits in the earth even half as deep as the rock spires that stood up from the surface of the water, then what appeared to be an innocent green patch would be a death trap even to such a large animal as a spinosaurus.
It takes me a few moments to catch up with what has happened.
The briefcase that contains me is travelling down the gullet of a creature that is itself about to disappear in the Cretaceous swamp.
It almost sounds like a koan.
I hardly knew what I was doing. I ran barefoot across the still-warm stone, launching myself into the air. I hardly needed to beat my wings; the air itself carried me and I had only to point myself towards the trapped animal.
Leg feathers of the big predator had come loose in the struggle. There was a strange moment as I watched them drift in concave zigzags toward the surface of the water even as the huge animal struggled in the grip of the swamp. Half in a trance, I reached out and caught one. Inside the feather I heard echoes of star-spun civilisations, echoes floating up through the encoded gaps in the HD components of the engineered carbon wrapped around the cellulose, bedded down for what may turn out to be a very long night.
I circled in the air, avoiding the jaws that were snapping at me even now. I manoeuvred myself behind its neck and dropped on the right side of the spinosaurus’s back, grabbing hold of its sail ridges, scrabbling for a grip.
Swamp water splashed into my eyes and mouth. The animal was making deep grunting moans as it struggled, and as it retched I was nearly dislodged. I found some loose skin on its great neck and hung on with my fingers. Squeezing and pulling and beating my wings all at once took every scrap of my concentration as I worked to get in a position to pull the jaws open. I climbed on the back of its head, past the ear holes, between the eyes. I stamped a foot into one eye but it shut its eyelid before I could blind it. All this while it was tossing its head wildly; I bounced off again and again and would have been tossed into its mouth if my wings hadn’t saved me and allowed me to regain my position. Finally, lying on my belly with my head hanging over the end of its nose I tried to pull its head back, force its jaws open.
The thing was so strong. My heart boomed. The small muscles in my eyes wobbled with effort. Blood surged through me, chemical interactions blooming. My bare feet slipped on its upper gums as I sought purchase.
Even with most of its body in the grip of the swamp it threw itself around with tremendous force. Sinking faster now.
Suddenly it jerked its head to one side and I didn’t have a good enough grip to hold my position, so I found myself being spun around to the creature’s ventral side. I saw its vertical bloodshot eye at close range. Its mouth was snapping randomly with teeth the size of carving knives and it got a piece of my right wing. Feathers flew. I let go with one arm and bludgeoned the soft underside of its neck with my forearm, because I could see the corner of the briefcase still lodged in its throat. The spinosaurus was trying to regurgitate the briefcase.
I could see it and I was going to get it. I dived past the stinking grey teeth and wrestled the tongue aside, reaching for the handle.
My wings were splayed to either side but I was in its mouth. Teeth had penetrated one of my thighs and were beginning to grind me. The stinking tongue crushed air from my lungs and forced me against the cartilaginous roof of the mouth as it tried to get me in a better position for chewing.
I reached down the throat and got the handle of the briefcase. Not enough.
The thing was choking. Now it couldn’t swallow the briefcase down, because of me. It couldn’t breathe.
The struggling became weaker. Most of the dinosaur’s body was under the surface of the swamp, now. It was losing consciousness, going lax. My wings thrashed, every muscle in my body surging with effort – now my blood was running down its throat. Death was going to swallow the whole shebang in a matter of moments.
I felt my wing breaking. The briefcase cracked open. My fingertips went in.
Sometimes even a fingertip is enough.
Speaking of zoologists
Alison didn’t tell Gunther she was back in town right away. The whole thing had been such a cock-up – all the way out there only for Dr Sorle to gi
ve himself up. She was still surrounded by a feeling of unreality. The black cars, the (almost all) men, the smooth way they had taken Dr Sorle. The feeble way she’d let their dogs search for and take the briefcase without a warrant; that had been stupid of her. How they’d refused a cup of tea. What kind of person refuses tea?
She was jumpy and shaky and went straight to the pub. When Pearl’s phone rang a second time she almost let it go to voicemail. But it was that scientist guy from the university.
Come on Ali, she told herself. Do something right.
‘Hello? Pearl’s phone.’
‘I wondered if you’d thought about what I said,’ the bloke began. ‘Only I thought maybe we could have a drink, talk about things.’
A drink.
‘Yes!’ she shouted down the phone. ‘Let’s have a drink. Can you come now?’
A chubby, brown-haired man carrying a baby in a sling turned up half an hour later. He smiled hesitantly at Alison.
‘Jerry,’ Alison said, standing. There was a small bustle as the two of them apologised to one another for bringing a baby in a pub at night. The baby was asleep.
‘It’s all right,’ Jerry said. ‘It’s why I could have shared remotely with you, but maybe it’s better to talk in person, anyway. When the data came through from Seoul I was told to handle everything in confidence.’
Seoul? That didn’t match with what Pearl had said.
Alison procured drinks and they went to a quiet table at the back. A group of uni students were playing snooker with dead seriousness.
‘My colleague Joon Il Kwon sent me the frozen sample by express,’ he explained.
‘You mean Marquita?’ Alison said. The blank look on Jerry’s face said it all. For the second time that day, Alison felt she was in an episode of Get Smart, and it was her nose the doors were slamming on. ‘OK, never mind. Please tell me what you came up with.’
Occupy Me Page 19