The Weaver Fish

by Robert Edeson

  ‘See what we can hear,’ he said without elaboration. Anna warmed to the mystery, and the harmless contradiction of this.

  The seki fruit had been sitting at the front of the bonnet, mascot-like. Nicholas took it up, and turning the base into view, ran a finger around the stem.

  ‘If it is brown here, don’t eat it. They ferment inside. Send you crazy.’

  ‘Drunk?’

  ‘Insane.’

  Anna concealed slight bemusement. But by now Nicholas was peeling its skin, using a serrated knife from the hamper. Underneath, the flesh was a darker pink colour. He placed it on a cutting board and sliced a segment, meticulously guided it to the edge of the board, then lifted it toward her. This was done, Anna thought, with surprising solemnity. As she reached for it, he said, ‘Take it slowly.’

  He said ‘slowly’, she knew, but she heard ‘respectfully’. Raising it to her lips, her eyes were drawn to Nicholas. But in her mind she saw the Bishop of Bilbao at her first Communion, and this forest bread as long-abandoned Host.

  Nicholas watched her, saying nothing. Anna could feel his interest; she closed her eyes in protection of her other senses, of the exquisiteness of the moment, and in search of language. ‘Sacramento,’ she finally pronounced, softly. Nicholas smiled.

  Paulo was back in his office when he heard the vehicle. The weather had cleared and two hours of light remained. He hurried outside to find Nicholas pulling up in front of the accommodation huts. He had never met Anna Camenes but they had corresponded frequently by email since Edvard’s disappearance. They introduced themselves while Nicholas unloaded her bags, and Paulo led the way up some timber steps, pushing open a door to show Anna her living space.

  ‘Would you like me to come back in an hour or so to show you around?’ Paulo expected she would like some privacy to unpack and clean up.

  ‘I’d like you to show me around now,’ she said.

  Paulo was surprised, but also pleased. His slight apprehension about their meeting was quickly easing. Nicholas had moved the Land Rover to a large open hut and was unloading some stores from Madregalo. Paulo pointed.

  ‘That’s the canteen. We all eat together. Seven o’clock.’ He checked his watch. ‘No one dresses up. Come and I’ll introduce you to people.’

  They walked around the edge of the gravel clearing.

  ‘Paulo, was that Edvard’s room, where I am staying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She stopped. ‘Before the canteen, can you show me where he worked?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Paulo changed direction to cross the clearing, heading for the hut with a large aerial and a satellite dish on its roof. He pushed open the door.

  ‘You won’t find many things locked around here,’ he said.

  As they entered, Anna looked around, identifying Edvard’s desk. ‘This is it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. We shared the room. This is my lot.’ He gestured to a desk piled with papers.

  ‘May I use Edvard’s space while I’m here?’

  ‘I expected that you would. I tidied it, a little,’ he added.

  Anna smiled. She looked at a framed photograph of Edvard and herself taken at Chaucer Road.

  ‘Yes, I can see you must have. I’ll set myself up tomorrow. Shall we continue our tour?’

  When he had pulled the door shut, Paulo looked at her directly. ‘I was wondering if you would like to walk to the Edge before dinner. It’s beautiful in the evening. One of the great sights of the Ferendes. We often do it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna, supposing that ‘we’ had included Edvard.

  ‘Nicholas is interesting, a nice man.’ She expressed the appreciation without warning.

  ‘He is a very nice man,’ said Paulo. ‘What did you learn about him?’

  ‘He’s quite a linguist. He’s been here three years. He does odd jobs. Fetches groceries, maintains the computers as best he can, helps with the language recording. Parents elderly; a sister in England.’

  Paulo laughed. ‘I ask because you never discover much about Nicholas from Nicholas. We’ve all learnt that here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, he doesn’t just look after our computers; he’s a mathematician and the proverbial IT genius. All the linguistic analysis and statistical inference we do, he’s developed or improved most of it. He came three years ago as a volunteer.’

  ‘What’s his surname?’ interrupted Anna.

  ‘Misgivingston.’

  She immediately made the connection to the author list on several LDI publications.

  ‘I didn’t realize.’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t have said. Every morning he works four hours solid on the net. Financial models, risk evaluation, derivative costing, net security, amazing stuff; he consults for banks and brokers all over the world. That’s how he’s been able to stay on here, and help out so much. They must pay him well, but he’s frugal personally. He’s much more generous with the rest of us than with himself.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she repeated.

  ‘He’s funded all our new computing hardware, lots of camera equipment that I’ll show you tomorrow. That Land Rover you came up in, and a second one, he bought. I once went with him into Banco Ferende in the centre of Madregalo and he was treated like a rock star. He was embarrassed. I thought there was an identity mix-up, but it was because he has all these big London– New York–type fees being deposited and not much to spend them on. By the way, he financed most of the search, made wheels turn locally. He won’t want you to know that. Some other big project costs, too.’

  Anna had always puzzled about the finances of this LDI station. As a trustee she saw all the statements, and read them responsibly. It always seemed that Edvard managed to run a mysteriously sophisticated, expensively idiosyncratic research programme on a very modest, essentially charitable budget. She wondered now what other quiet philanthropy might be occurring.

  The track widened into open space and they reached the plateau edge. Here was the docking station for Abel; tall steel columns rising from the ground, and from their summits nylon mesh and flaccid tethers falling back. On its forest perimeter were some lean-to shelters, with helium cylinders and other equipment on view. Paulo walked across to one where half a dozen canvas director’s chairs were stored against a support. He unfolded two, setting them up facing the ocean, and Anna and he sat down.

  They hadn’t spoken for several minutes; her thoughts had turned to Edvard, and not left him. She looked across the Abbott Plain to the Bergamot Sea. Daylight was beginning to leave the sky, and the water was much darker than she had glimpsed earlier in the day. Somewhere out there, it merged into the amorphous, treacherous South China Sea. And somewhere out there was the wreckage of a passionate experiment, and the remains of her friend.

  ‘I want to thank you for everything you did to find Edvard,’ Anna said unexpectedly. In many respects, she had come all this way to make that statement, personally.

  Paulo moved his head slightly in acknowledgement, still looking at the sea. That time had been unbearable.

  ‘What are your plans, Paulo?’

  ‘I hope to stay on. There’s really interesting material to study still.’

  Once spoken, his reply seemed more perfunctory, and rather facile, than he intended. He made no attempt to improve it. All the staff, all the volunteers, were wondering about the future, whether LDI would remain in the Ferendes.

  Anna was pleased to hear his reply. The station would need a new director, and Paulo was the obvious candidate. She kept that thought to herself.

  ‘I read your paper on criticality conditions for diphthong fission—Edvard sent me a pre-print. Very impressive.’

  Paulo’s face lightened. ‘Thank you. Actually, most of that work was Edvard’s.’

  Anna smiled. She knew if Edvard were sitting there he would be saying most of that work was Paulo’s.

  Paulo stood up. ‘We should get back for dinner.’ Anna looked again at the se
a, noticeably darker now.

  The next morning, Anna didn’t join them for breakfast, and Paulo thought she must be catching up on sleep. When he entered the office, he was surprised to find her at Edvard’s desk.

  ‘Good morning.’ She was cheerful but did not look up. ‘Email.’

  He had brought for himself a coffee from the canteen, and offered to get her one.

  ‘No, thank you. I’m nearly done here. Then can we meet for an update on the programme?’

  ‘At your disposal.’

  After a few minutes, Anna swung in her chair and said, ‘Would now be a good time?’

  Paulo turned from his computer. ‘Yes, of course.’ He reached for a two-sheet document from his desk. Beneath it lay exposed the Cambridge World Index extract. ‘I’ve prepared a brief research-in-progress report for you.’ He passed it to Anna and she read it through.

  ‘It’s very good. I think the governors will be pleased with this, and the publication record.’

  Paulo was relieved. Anna placed the report on her desk, then looked at Paulo.

  ‘Paulo. I know that Edvard was interested in lots of things that could be viewed as, let’s say, tangential, to the linguistic research. Like the weaver fish, for example. But I want you to know that anything he was interested in, I am interested in; whatever he valued, I value. So I would like you to tell me about those interests. For one thing, it might help me make sense of all this.’ She waved at the papers on Edvard’s desk. ‘Also, I could possibly sort matters from the LDI point of view.’

  To Paulo, there was something angelic about these words. He decided to place his trust, fully, in this friend of Edvard.

  ‘Well, the really big thing, as you know, was the weaver fish. Out of that he became amazingly involved in aeronautics, getting the balloon design perfected, because he knew that was the best transport for studying them without disturbing the water. There were a few patentable ideas in Abel apparently. He corresponded a lot with an engineer in the States.’

  ‘Walter Reckles?’

  ‘You know about him?’

  ‘I met him on an unrelated matter. We also communicated about the crash. What else?’

  ‘The Chinese problem was really worrying him. And the rest of us.’

  ‘What’s the Chinese problem?’ asked Anna, imagining it was language related.

  ‘They’ve effectively colonized the north, ripping down the forests and shipping the timber out.’

  ‘Nicholas mentioned illegal logging on the drive up here. Is that the Chinese?’

  ‘Yes. Of course, they would claim that it’s legal, that they have an agreement with the Administration in Madregalo, and that they pay large concession fees. According to Nicholas’s informants in town, the agreement involved a hastily expanded Chinese legation and a few corrupt civil servants, and the so-called royalties are bribes and hush money. No one down there is aware of the scale of deforestation. The northern plain is virtually inaccessible. The Chinese have established a beachhead for their operation; it’s very military. No one from the Madregalo government goes there. There’s no monitoring. No controls.’ He paused. His voice had become emotional.

  ‘Do you literally mean “military”?’ asked Anna after a few seconds.

  ‘Definitely. It’s a nasty standover profit-making venture by the armed forces to enrich the generals. It happens all over, condoned racketeering; it’s the new hegemony.’

  ‘How do you know it’s so bad?’

  ‘We’ve been there and seen it. It’s about four hours by four-wheel drive. There are villages on the way where we do regular language studies, anyway. We first took a look in November last year. Since then, we have tried to get back monthly to audit the destruction. Nicholas takes serial photographs from a reference point on the plateau, and along with data from a laser range finder and GPS and some old topographical maps, he’s been able to create a program that accurately calculates the acreage of clearing. It’s bad. We’re putting together a dossier, but how best to use it I don’t yet know.’

  Paulo glanced at the files on his desk. ‘There was something else Edvard was interested in. There’s a local bird, a condor, native to the Ferendes. It has a sort of mythological significance but is actually very real. Have you heard of Rep’husela?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She was the virgin queen who brought these islands out of the darkness, and ruled for a thousand years. Her chariot was harnessed to a flock of condors. Anyway, there’ve been more condor sightings in recent months, reports from villagers mainly. I think Edvard was wondering if that was related to the clearing in the north. He had started a literature search on it, though all the material is historical and anecdotal. He also caught one on video from Abel last January; just a few seconds, unfortunately. Something about it intrigued him and he asked me for my thoughts. I confess I’ve looked at it a hundred times and I’m not sure I have any thoughts at all yet. I’ll show you.’ Paulo turned back to his computer and ran the video.

  Anna watched and said, ‘Again.’ It ran again, and again. ‘Can I have a copy on my machine?’

  ‘Sure. There’ll be one there already. I’ll find it for you.’

  ‘Before you do that, Paulo, when are you planning to drive north next?’

  ‘We should really check the situation in the next few days.’

  ‘I’d like to join you, if that would be all right.’

  At the end of the track, Nicholas turned the vehicle so that it faced back the way they had come, and switched off the motor. Paulo handed Anna a pair of binoculars, and the three walked the few metres to the edge of the plateau, still well concealed by the thinning forest. At this point the land fell sharply away, and they had an unconstrained vista of the forest plain about two hundred metres below. In the distance, five kilometres north, was the glistening water of Lunulate Bay.

  Paulo raised his binoculars, motioning to Anna to do the same, and began a systematic description of what he could see. ‘Five ships, two naval, three freighters, larger than last time. Several landing vessels on the shore. Huge transport centre, maybe twenty logging trucks, tractors, dozers, cranes.’

  He lowered the glasses to look at Nicholas. ‘The skids have been doubled at least. The log stacks are much bigger. They seem to have built some kind of wharf or jetty. Look how much the clearing’s advanced.’ He passed the binoculars to Nicholas, who had been positioning a camera tripod over a previously placed survey peg.

  ‘That big covered structure is a mill, Anna,’ explained Paulo, ‘and the smoke you can see just east of it is from burning offcuts.’

  As far as Anna could see, the plain before them was crisscrossed with tracks connecting large areas of forest clearing. Many of these were now swampy wasteland, acres of marsh water reflecting dirtily the clear sky.

  ‘They push through to the best timber—that’s mostly over here where there’s run-off from the escarpment. That closest patch is new,’ continued Paulo.

  Directly below them was an enormous clearing with a logging track leading straight back towards the mill, though in many places it was obscured by uncut forest.

  Paulo spoke again to Anna. ‘Last January, Edvard and I camped over for three nights to monitor the shipping activity. The mill works through the night. They seemed to load a freighter in two days.’

  ‘If that’s a deep-water jetty they’re building it will be much faster than using tenders.’ Nicholas had returned the binoculars to Paulo and was studying the scene through a telephoto lens. ‘The whole northern plain could be marshland in five years.’ There was a quiet indignation in his voice.

  Paulo had resumed surveying the scene. ‘I see a vehicle coming towards us, Nicholas. About halfway between this clearing and the next.’

  Nicholas redirected his telephoto lens. ‘I have it. Not logging. Army. Personnel carrier, maybe.’

  ‘Not after us, I hope’, said Anna.

  Paulo was reassuring. ‘We’re too well hidden for them to see. Anyway, they can’t get u
p here in that.’ He was still looking through binoculars, and suddenly pointed below them. ‘Anna! See the condor!’

  ‘Fantastic!’ She picked it up flying low over a swamp, first seeing its reflection. Then it gained height effortlessly, almost to their level, the famed iridescence of its feathers giving coloured scintillations in the sunlight.

  ‘There are some more. Five. Amazing.’ Paulo was excited.

  ‘They must have taken off from the cliffs beneath us,’ said Nicholas. ‘I wonder if all this habitat destruction is leaving them exposed and displaced. Angry, too, I would think.’

  Angry. Anna watched anew. Yes, they were beautiful, they were graceful. But from the propitious to the sinister was a small step of imagination.

  ‘Do they attack people?’

  Nicholas looked at her, shocked. ‘No, no. Rodents, small mammals, other birds.’

  The military vehicle entered the clearing and continued a further quarter kilometre, bucking wildly as its six-wheel drive tyres splashed in the uneven, poorly drained ground. It stopped at a point where the track was essentially a raised causeway between two large swamps. A door opened and two men, dressed in sailors’ kit, jumped out. Both were carrying rifles. One walked forward about ten metres, the second falling behind, staying closer to the vehicle. They were looking upwards.

  ‘What are they up to?’ asked Anna.

  ‘I would guess their commanding officer requires something special for the table,’ said Nicholas bitterly.

  ‘Heraldic stew,’ murmured Paulo.

  The condors had grouped above the sailors, circling. Both men raised their rifles and fired several rounds rapidly. The birds seemed unperturbed. One had been flying more slowly, drifting downwards in a diminishing spiral. The subtle loss of altitude would not have been evident to the men below, but from the perspective of the cliff top it was obvious. Suddenly, it dived sharply, not directly at either man, but between them. A few metres above the ground it levelled out with astonishing agility, beating its muscular wings quickly to launch at the furthest man. It flew directly into his chest, knocking him off balance. He stumbled backward, dropping the rifle, his arms flailing defensively. Enormous wings spread open, seeming to wrap around him, and he collapsed to the ground, buried in plumage. A brief, convulsive movement in that iridescent surface of embracing blackness was the only sign of struggle.