“But the way a squid or even an octopus’s beak is oriented, we would have seen something. Second, the water was too shallow. A giant squid would only be in the deep ocean, and it’s highly unlikely that, even if it did get to the surface, it would be so close to shore.”
“So maybe we’ve got to change our thinking to something that would be close to the shore,” Maria said.
“But I don’t see how something that big would be in water so shallow.”
“It’s not that shallow.”
“Shallow enough.”
A thought suddenly occurred to Maria. She probably would have had it earlier if she hadn’t been recovering from her episode. “It’s stationary.”
“Seemed to move pretty fast to me.”
“Sure, but it wasn’t going very far from the island. And we saw it in just the same area where Debbie Schmidt disappeared.”
“I don’t know if that really gives us much help.”
Maria snorted. “Maybe our problem is we’re being too logical. We’re trying to approach this from a scientific, real world perspective. Maybe we left that all behind one giant shark ago.”
“Now you’re the one sounding like Simon.”
“Ugh. I know.” She looked back down at the arm. “Speaking of which, one of us should try to find them. It’s kind of weird that they’ve both wandered off for this long. Are we done here?”
“I’d like to stay here and see if there’s anything more I can find, but if you want to get going, you could always talk to Merchant about pulling those strings and then go to the CDRS. Somewhere along the line, you’ll have to find the Gutsdorfs. Puerto Ayora may be a tourist trap, but in the end it’s not that big of a village.”
“Fine. Let’s pack the samples in a cooler and I’ll take them.”
“Maybe try to see a few sights while you’re out. This whole trip is supposed to be at least sort of relaxing for you, remember.”
Maria snorted. “Kevin, I think we lost all possibility of that last night.”
12
Despite her words, Maria looked forward to having some of the day to herself and enjoying the fact that she was here, even if the islands were slowly on their way away from the heart of scientific inquiry that she had expected and toward being a tourist trap. If nothing else, she could be a tourist, at least for a little while.
They were right that Merchant could pull some strings with the Charles Darwin Research Station, but one thing she couldn’t get from them was permission to film on their premises. Had the cast and crew of Sea Avenger come only six months earlier, the faculty at the CDRS probably would have been happy participate in anything that got their mission of preservation in front of the public. But the last people who had filmed there, apparently, had claimed they were part of a nature documentary, only for every scientist there to be surprised when the movie came out in limited release, heavily edited to make it seem like they all refuted the idea that evolution was true. As a result, the administrators at the CDRS were justifiably squirrely about the prospect of being on camera without more time for the filmmaker to be vetted. Maria would have thought Kevin’s name and clout were enough, but still she understood their wish to be careful. She knew full well the power of something filmed then manipulated by and for a public more interested in twenty-second clips on YouTube than an honest scientific process. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be the freaking Sea Avenger.
The people at the research station did give her a brief tour as a courtesy to a fellow scientist, though, for which she was grateful. She was surprised at how little they had to work with. This was the preeminent scientific organization on one of the most famous scientific sites in the world. And yet it was obvious that they were understaffed and underfunded. At one point, one of the workers showed her the cabinet-sized incubators used for tortoise eggs. The worker explained that the gender of the tortoises when they hatched was determined by the temperature- if they were kept at or slightly below eighty-four degrees, the hatchlings would be male. Anything over and they would be female. When Maria asked to see the system they used to accomplish the all-important task of ensuring there were equal numbers of males and females, the worker gave her a rueful smile and showed her a jury-rigged blow dryer on the cabinet’s top shelf.
The fact that she didn’t have any cameras following her, at the moment, brought up her mood as she exited the main building. Pretty much everything she had seen so far only served to further enhance her initial impression that she was standing in a world in a state of flux, not quite wilderness but far from metropolitan, part salt-of-the-earth folks trying to make their lives at the end of the world and part big business slowly seeping in to commodify it all and make a buck. On her way here, on a veranda outside a tiny hole-in-the-wall bar, a band of gray-haired older men had merrily playing away in a musical style Maria couldn’t identify. Across the street from it was a very new looking building advertising day cruises from one of the largest entertainment corporations in the world. She’d seen the cruise ship out in the harbor, where it dwarfed all the dilapidated but well-loved fishing boats. Now here she was, standing among tourists in a landscape that was only a few steps above desert as they waited for a bus to take them further up into the Isla Santa Cruz Highlands to see the namesakes of the islands, the giant tortoises.
Come on, Maria, this has always been one of your dreams, she thought to herself. Now that you’re here, what are you going to do with it?
Well, she sure as hell didn’t want to do any of the really touristy stuff like parasailing, that was for sure. This was the Galápagos, damn it. She wanted to see animals. She wanted that same inspiration that Darwin had felt when he’d come upon birds and lizards so unused to humans that they would let him come up to them and push them aside with little more an annoyed squawk. Darwin had even told a story in The Voyage of the Beagle of how he had thrown a marine iguana out to sea, only for it to swim directly back to him several times, since it had seen the water as far more dangerous than the peculiar primate creature that kept picking it up and throwing it for no apparent reason. She’d seen a few animals, of course. She’d even seen some of the islands’ better-known denizens. But the tortoises, the most iconic creatures on the whole of the islands, she hadn’t witnessed yet.
She had to see some, she decided, even if she had to pretend to be a clichéd tourist to do it.
She found the first tour group that advertised it would be going into the highlands and joined up. While she was waiting for the small bus that would take them to arrive, she heard someone calling her name from outside the tour office. When she poked her head outside, she saw Simon and Cindy Gutsdorf walking down the middle of the road. Even though this was one of the most important and traveled sites on the islands, the road was still dirt, and there wasn’t exactly a lot of traffic for them to avoid.
“Where the hell have you two been?” Maria asked. “Merchant has been getting salty without her jester to give her filler footage.”
“Don’t encourage him, please,” Cindy said. “He’s insufferable enough as it is without him getting it in his head that he’s the star of the thing.”
“Nah, I know how it works. The comic relief is never the hero.” He released a massive sigh that, despite her best attempt, Maria couldn’t decide if it was serious or intentionally ridiculous.
“Really, though, where were you?” Maria asked.
Cindy held up her hands to indicate the fresh open air of the island. “If we’re going to be here for a while, then we wanted to enjoy it. What about you?”
“Same. Want to join me? I was about to take one of the tours to the turtle sanctuary.”
“Why would you want to do that?” Simon asked. “You’re a TV star. Ish. You could probably get in without all the people.”
“Maybe I don’t want to play that particular card any-more than I have to.”
Maria was grateful when the small bus arrived and they all clamored on. She’d been on her feet, or rather foot, all morning and sh
e was ready for a break. Not long ago, this much exertion wouldn’t have tired her out at all. She found that walking around now, though, often used different muscles than she was used to, not to mention that, whether it was custom fitted for her or not, her prosthetic had a tendency to chafe something fierce when her stump was sweaty. The bus took them over a dirt road to an area back beyond the CDRS.
“Weren’t you just already talking to the people at the research station?” Cindy asked. “Even without acting the celebrity, couldn’t you have still just asked them to see the tortoises they have there? You wouldn’t have needed to go into the highlands for that.”
“Uh, they were friendly, but they didn’t seem to want me around for too long. They didn’t seem too keen on the idea that cameras might show up at any minute. And besides, I don’t want to see giant tortoises in enclosures. I want to see the ones that have been reintroduced to their rightful place on the island. I want to see them in their natural habitat. Wait. How did you know that I’d already talked to the people in the station?”
There was a pause before Cindy answered. It was barely noticeable, but Maria was sure it was there. “We ran into Kevin as we were going through the village. He told us the general direction to find you and what you were doing.”
“Huh,” Maria said. Something about this exchange bothered her, but she didn’t let it occupy too much space in her head. Instead, she took a strange glee in the way the bus bounced over the rougher patches of road. It almost felt like she was a kid again, on a field trip to some out of the way place to see something brand new and amazing for the first time.
The ride into the highlands took about half an hour, but to Maria, it was half an hour well spent. She’d thought Isla Niña was the Galápagos of her imagination, but that was a fairly barren rock. This was Isla Santa Cruz, the second largest island in the archipelago, and the farther they drove from Puerto Ayora, the more the land outside the windows transformed into something like the lost world of Darwin she’d always pictured. Although El Chato Tortoise Reserve, their destination, was an open area that tourists were allowed to move around freely, there was a man at the front talking in a heavy Ecuadorian accent and giving basic facts about the tortoises. Most of these Maria already knew, but every time he said something she didn’t, she felt giddy, like each random factoid was the ultimate pearl of wisdom. Although she had expected to wander off by herself, she decided to stick close by their tour guide and see what else she could pick up.
Hell, maybe this tourist thing wasn’t so bad after all.
The bus stopped in a patch of verdant semi-jungle and thick mist, which only added to Maria’s growing excitement as they all filed off the bus.
“It’s too bad none of the cameras are here,” Cindy said to her. “Merchant would probably kill for footage of you acting like this. You’re practically bouncing.”
“Oh hush,” Maria said. “Yeah, sure, sometimes you forget that the cameras are even there, but this is my time. I get to have a moment of joy that I don’t have to share with the rest of the world.”
“Please, follow me, there is much to show,” their tour guide said. He looked to be in his early twenties, very slim, and for some reason dressed more for what Maria would have considered an office setting than a walking tour of the Galápagos wilds. He did, however, at least have a nametag that simply identified him as Al from All Greatness Tours.
Maria frowned. She hadn’t paid much attention to which of the tour companies she’d gone with. She’d figured one was the same as any other. That name, though, seemed a little out of place.
Al led them down a few muddy inclines. Maria had trouble with some of them, but none of them were as difficult as her frustrating attempts to climb onto Isla Niña. In fact, Simon stumbled several times where Maria herself was able to keep her balance. It gave her a weird sense of satisfaction, the knowledge that, at least in some situation, she was getting so used to using one real leg and one fake that she could walk better than her companions with two legs each. It would just take time. She would get the hang of this.
Al chattered amiably as he led them past a lava tube, a large hole extending at a slight angle into the ground. The opening was so overgrown with vegetation that Maria almost didn’t see it, but once she looked past the plants, she could see that it ran deep. As Al explained, and Maria already knew, these tubes could be found all over the islands, having been formed by the same volcanoes that brought the Galápagos into existence. There were probably quite a few, in remote places, that no one had even discovered yet.
“Some say these tubes are millions of years old,” Al said. Something about the way he said it made clear that he wasn’t a fan of the idea. Before anyone could ask him to talk about it further, though, he was again leading them away.
Then they reached a large, flat expanse of land. And there, slowly hobbling through the mists, were giants.
Maria stopped in her tracks, her breath caught in her throat. The first tortoise she saw lumbered in her general direction for a moment before it stopped and snaked its head out to rip off a number of leaves from a nearby bush. She’d known intellectually that the tortoises were enormous, but that knowing was different than seeing it for herself. From the bottom of its feet to the top of its shell the tortoise was taller than her hips. Its long slender neck was comparable to her forearm. Her mind wanted to reject the idea that such a large, unwieldy creature could move, yet move it did, its stubby legs patiently finding their footing as it walked closer in search of more food.
“It’s magnificent,” Maria whispered.
“Eh. I’ve seen bigger,” Simon said.
“Oh yeah? Where?” Cindy asked.
“Um, it was on a television show.”
“Fictional?”
“Yes. So? What does it matter? I’ve still seen bigger.”
“You two really have a knack for ruining any moment, you know that?” Maria asked. She didn’t look at either of them, though. The tortoise had plodded its way to be only fifteen feet from them now, and still it didn’t seem to notice or care about their presence. She remembered another story Darwin had told about what had happened when he got close enough to one of the tortoises. It had hissed and abruptly pulled itself all the way into its shell. Darwin had then climbed on its back, rapped on the back of the shell, and the tortoise had come back out to go about its business, carrying Darwin around as though the man weren’t even there. Maria doubted that anything like that would ever be allowed, but the child in her could fantasize.
Their guide Al came up next to Maria along with the rest of the tour group. “Here is a saddleback tortoise, called because of the distinct saddle shape of its shell, instead of a dome like some others. There are multiple subspecies of giant tortoise on the islands. You will find many different types here in the highlands because of the breeding efforts of the research station, but when Charles Darwin first came to the islands, the local governor boasted that he tell which island a tortoise had come from just by the shape of its shell. There are many who have treated this as further proof of Darwin’s ideas about evolution.”
Something about the tortoise seemed eerily familiar. Maria was so busy trying to figure out what it was that she almost missed what the tour guide said next. “Of course, it is now a well-known fact that Darwin was wrong.”
Wait, what?
Maria looked around at her fellow tourists. One or two nodded their heads, but most looked just as confused as her. “I’m sorry, what do you mean by that?” Maria asked.
“We know now that the complexity of life is too great to have happened through an evolutionary process. While Darwin did his best with the information he had, we now see all the many ways in which his thinking was flawed.”
“Um, no we don’t,” Maria said.
“Ma’am, please. I am an expert. I know what I am talking about.”
“And I’m an actual biologist, and just because there were a few holes in Darwin’s methodology doesn’t mean that others didn�
��t come along and fill them in. Natural selection can be observed in a human’s lifetime, and has been seen right here on the islands using the finches.”
Al straightened up. “Ma’am, you are being disruptive and interfering with the enjoyment of the others. If you do not stop, I will have to ask you to go back to the bus and wait.”
“But what you’re saying is actual, provable nonsense.”
“Ma’am, you must go back to the bus. If not, I will be forced to call the police when we get back to Puerto Ayora.”
“Uh, and what law am I breaking? This is… is…” She trailed off as the tortoise’s neck extended to reach a leaf high on a nearby bush.
“Ma’am?”
“I… I guess I’ll go back to the bus,” she said. All the fight was gone from her voice, and she sounded distant even to herself. She took a step back, trying to go back in the direction of the bus without taking her eyes off the tortoise. She stumbled, and Simon had to catch her, but she barely noticed.
She was too entranced by the tortoise’s long, wrinkly neck, the way it seemed to unbunch as the creature extended its head, and the tough, beak-like mouth it used to rip off the leaves.
As much as she had wanted to come out here and see the tortoises, she was suddenly anxious to get back to Puerto Ayora and Kevin.
Because she thought she knew now what might be living in the waters of Isla Niña.
13
“A tortoise?” Merchant asked, her voice halfway between disbelief and giddy glee. Maria was sure she was having visions of ridiculously high ratings dancing through her head. “You think Mrs. Schmidt was eaten by a giant, mutant tortoise?”
They were all gathered in Sea Avenger’s bungalow command center. Immediately after the bus had dropped them off back in Puerto Ayora, Maria had run (it wasn’t until later that she realized this was the first time she had run since she’d lost her leg, and she was surprised by the ease with which she’d accomplished it) back to the bungalow and ordered everyone to gather around. Ernesto was here, and Kevin had arrived with Monica and Gutierrez shortly before Maria and the Gutsdorfs. They were gathered in a loose circle, with all the camera people and sound engineers and general production hangers-on trying to make sure they captured every moment of this meeting without actually getting in the shot.
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