“A picture of your guy?”
I accessed my New Heretic files and placed a full facial scan of Gregor Makarios in the center of the circle. There he spun in the dim, warm space of the longhouse, the shaggy dark head inclining slightly to someone off camera, a smile creeping up through the beard only to snap back to tight lips as the clip repeated. In the background, flashes of light and the muted, tasteful clinking of fine stemware. An award function or some such equally banal thing, and possibly one of the last extant paparazzi clips in existence, dated just a few weeks before Makarios vanished. These details I hurried over, preferring to let the women watch and remember. If there was anything to remember. Their eyes were narrow and dark. Trace dabbed at a small piece of tech in his lap, uninterested.
“He’s missing,” I continued. “Since ’59. My editor thinks I can track him down, god knows why, and I’m with you now because a lead brought me here. When Gregor was a younger man, just a boy, really, he, well...” And just like that, I felt utterly absurd. Heat rose in my neck and cheeks and I stuttered. What the hell was I thinking. Thelma spoke again to Charlie.
“She says you don’t need to feel shame, not here. This isn’t the time or place for it.”
“Huh. What does she mean by that?” I turned to Thelma. “What do you mean by that?” She replied by raising a hand and urging me on. That universal gesture: continue, please.
“He thought he was a cryptozoologist. A monster hunter.” What did that make me? was my wry thought then. “Back when that kind of thing was popular.”
“Oh yeah, yeah, I know this one!” Trace cut in. “We’ve a serpent skulkin’ about the Archipelago. What’s it called, hold on. Right! The Orwell Worm. Funny, the old names.”
“How nice for you?”
“Thanks, mate. It’s all a laugh, right.”
“Sure.”
“Did he find one,” Thelma said.
“Find one? You mean, a monster?” They were using English now. Their tone and volume had not changed, but I found myself missing the softer syllables of the Xaayda-Kil tongue.
The other grandmother, Justice, cleared her throat. “A landotter person. Did he find one.” She said something to Charlie in Xaayda-Kil.
“She wants to know if I’ve told you about landotters.”
“Have you?”
“Yeah, no. And I’d rather not, to be completely fucking honest. For one thing, it’s nasty stuff, and I’m not sure it’s related. Your boy wanted sasquatch.”
“Sure, but—...”
Thelma began to speak, in Xaayda-Kil again. She closed her eyes as the words gently spilled from her mouth in a slow tumble. Charlie, after a moment, began translating.
“All right, guess you’ve triggered story time, Den. Here we go. Let’s see. Okay. A man had the same name as the chief of the landotters and the chief became jealous of him. So they ambushed him one day while he was hunting far from the village and carried him off. When the people realized what had happened, they became afraid, because once the landotter tribe had...marked? Decided on you, or something about you. Anyway, once you had been chosen, they would know your people and hunt them as well.
“The man lived in the ground for some time with the landotter chief and his people, learning. Learning of new things? To be a new thing? He learned their songs. That’s, like, standard. After a while, he was heard singing by another hunter, and the people came and dug him out. Then all of the people went to the landotter burrows, and they smoked the creatures out. One by one they were killed as they came up from the places below. Their chief, who came out last, was white.
“Around about that same time, traders arrived from the south in ships, but there were so many skins that the traders were unable to buy all of them.”
Thelma Kessler went quiet, and after a pause Charlie said, “I guess that’s it? Hold on.” She whispered something to the náan in Xaayda-Kil and received a whisper in return. “Yeah, that’s the story. Capitalist happy ending and all. Sorry about that.”
“No need,” I said. “I don’t see how it applies to Makarios, or me, but I’m curious why she thinks it was important I hear it.”
“Yeah, no, it’s weird. She might be napping, for all we know. Let me ask.” More whispering. “She’s awake. She says that’s the only story about them she knows. She thought you’d need to know about the landotter people, considering.”
“Considering what?” I said to Charlie, and then, irritated at the translating back and forth, and worried that I was missing something, I asked it of Thelma directly. “Considering what, Grandmother?”
The old woman gave me a wry look and her wrinkles deepened in the strange virtual half-light of the chatroom. “Considering your connection to them. Considering that there are landotters outside.”
Ray Trace looked up from his glowing lap. “Say what now? Who’s where?”
“Not here, Ray,” Charlie snapped. “Obviously.”
I couldn’t help glancing behind me, even so, at the darkness moving between the trees, the low fog clutching at their tops. “Well, what does she mean by outside, then?” I asked.
“She means outside outside. The spirit world.”
“Yes,” said the old woman. “On the border between here and there. What did you call them again, Charlie? The conceptual spaces.” She winked at me. “Charlie has always been clever.”
Charlie looked vaguely embarrassed. “I wrote a paper on it. Noönet space as a fastbreed noetic reactor. Don’t worry about it, it was practically a gag...”
“Ah. Could I see them? Are they the ancestors, these landotters?” Both grandmothers shook their heads; Justice held up her pale palms in swift denial and spoke in Xaayda-Kil, swiftly, phonemes tumbling from her lips in a rapid flow. Charlie sighed.
“No, and no, she says.” She clapped her hands to her knees. “Look. This is getting off track. Grandmothers, Den’s friend here. Mr. Makarios.” Charlie pointed at Gregor’s spinning mug. “Any thoughts there? Can you recall him?”
Justice nodded, and leaned in to Thelma, speaking in English. “Didn’t Noakes say he had a famous face book one of his machines?”
“Bill Noakes?” Charlie asked. She turned to me. “He runs transport drones up and down the coast. Work crews, mostly. The occasional lookie-loo. Apocalypse pornographers love it.” She spread her hands like a carnival showman. “Watch the final violation of nature in real time!”
“Can I talk to him?” She nodded and spoke a few words in Xaayda-Kil to the grandmothers. Nodding, their faces peaceful, the old women faded from view. Thelma held up a palm to me in what may have been benediction; I waved back, and immediately felt stupid. Ray Trace left as well, but the Brit preferred a more pyrotechnic exit, a silent shower of static and sparks.
“God, what an asshole,” Charlie huffed.
“Yeah, interesting,” I offered.
“I swear that’s not even him sometimes. He’s fixated on this place, can’t stand to be away for too long, and I’m pretty sure he sends clones in to hold space and report back when he can’t be here in person. Not that I can tell the difference; he’s dumb as a post in any form.”
“Huh.”
“Anyway, screw a Trace, let’s find you a Noakes.” Charlie closed her eyes and started calling around. I took the moment to step outside for some light. The sun was high in the sky, a dirty ball of off-white in clouds like old linen. Frayed ribbons of mist wound their way through the trees, hiding and revealing at the same time. I thought about landotters under the ground, in the trees. Outside.
“Got him,” Charlie said. “Can I show him your guy?”
“Yeah, of course. Is he free to talk?”
Noakes flashcut into view, there in the real fake longhouse, occupying the space made vacant by the grandmothers with his bearded bulk and unsteady towers of surrounding gear. Charlie made introductions. His office, I presumed out loud.
“Cockpit, more like. Excuse the mess. Good to meet you.”
“You as well. Mrs.
Ruth said she thinks you might have seen this person?” I brought up the scan again, set it to turning. Noakes narrowed his dark, deep-set eyes.
“Well. Justice said that? Jesus, that bat has a memory. That’s that Makarios person, isn’t it? The futurist?”
“Among other things, yes. You recognize him.”
Noakes grunted and looked away from the scan, to his own unseen screens. Tapping a joystick with the hairy back of his right hand, he reached over to a small keyboard with his left and punched at the keys.
“Yeah, I recognize the guy. More to the point, I flew him somewhere back in...hold on, I’m just bringing the flight data up. Which year was that?” More tapping on the board, then a violent twist of his neck and the sound of Noakes spitting off camera. “Those guys have a lot to answer for, eh?”
“How do you mean?”
“Makarios. Wasn’t he the guy behind that thing in Singapore? And Kuwait? I mean, Jesus Christ.”
Charlie looked at me and shrugged, her eyes wide.
“I think you’re thinking of Aldo Tusk, Mr. Noakes,” I said. “He was Gregor Makarios’s boss at one time.”
“Ah, it’s just Bill. Who can tell those people apart these days anyway? The point three percent. Fuck ’em all, I say.”
“Fuck them all, Bill. Sure. Makarios?”
“Yeah, I flew him. This was back a ways. Lessee, hoo, 2059, 19 May.” There had been no record of this trip in my research, so either it was part of the deep scrubbing Makarios had done on his digital self or he had used false identification. Noakes confirmed the latter.
“Still, it was him. I was just starting out, then. Two barely working machines and a metric shit ton of debt. I was happy to get any work, and he paid up front. Flew him there and brought him back again, which I can tell you wasn’t cheap. After that...” Noakes shrugged.
“Where did he go? With you, I mean. Where’d you fly him, Bill?” He tapped keys again and replaced his own image with a relief map. Colored lines, symbols, and streams of code floated within, interacting with each other, growing brighter or fading entirely. Noakes highlighted one spot, at the head of a fjord.
“Flew him across to the mainland and dropped him here. Picked him up at roughly the same spot when he called.”
“Why there?” As far as I could tell, there was nothing to see at the spot.
“Well, he wanted me to take him up to the old facility but I was like, naw, that’d be irresponsible of me. Understand, I’m a decent enough pilot now, and with the good machines I can afford I’d make the trip these days without hesitation, but at the time I wasn’t up for it. Landing area was way too tight, for one thing. Real overgrown up there.”
“Wait. The old facility?”
Noakes rotated the map and we descended into the satellite detail of the thing. A chaotic cluster of structures appeared, gleaming white in the greens and blacks of the forest.
“That old facility. Don’t ask me what it’s supposed to be. Been there forever, abandoned for at least half as long. He was fine with the hike, this Makarios. Paid up front, remember. Probably knew he couldn’t get the same deal with anyone else.” Noakes turned again to judiciously remove another obstruction from his throat. “Anyway, why you interested in this guy?”
This was the second lead on Gregor’s possible whereabouts and unlike the one that had brought me here, this lead felt real. This lead had witnesses, and new information, attached to it. I jumped on it with an alacrity that surprised everyone there, myself included.
“I need to get there, Bill. That facility.”
“Okay, sure, and when were you thinking of travel, Mr. Secord?”
“Today. Tomorrow?”
The map vanished and Noakes was back, visibly agitated but laughing. “Tomorrow? Oh well now I would but y’see I’m booked through to lemme check here right next spring I’m booked through to April.”
“You didn’t even look.” It was true. His previously mobile hands were holding his trembling paunch as he settled into an amused chuckle.
“That’s right. Because I’m booked through. To next April. Spah-ring. Such as it is.”
Charlie cut in. “C’mon Bill, you must have something available, it’s only a couple of hours.”
“Jesus, Charlie, you know the route, take him over in your fucking canoe if it’s so important!”
“Zodiac, ya basic racist.” Charlie visibly darkened in the gloom. “It’s fifty clicks across. No.”
Noakes leaned in to me. “See, she doesn’t wanna do it because Hecate Strait is super dangerous for small craft. Shallow, too shallow, in all the worst spots, and deep as fuck everywhere else. Storms five days outta seven. This is why you need a pilot. Unless you can fly a drone, Mr. Secord?”
“I can’t.”
“Well, there ya go then.”
“He barely does anything anyway,” Charlie fumed. “It’s all automatic. Fondles that fucking dildo, mostly.”
“I pilot nine drones at a time, Charlie. Show some respect.”
“Yeah, preprogrammed units. You said it yourself, old man. You can afford the good machines these days so pull the other one.”
While they argued, I accessed my budget with New Heretic accounting. I’d barely touched the thing on the trip north, had spent maybe a thousand and change on the gear I’d need. Maybe I’d maxed it out already, but then again, I knew Wilder could be generous at times, especially if he thought a story might end up being exclusive. I hadn’t actually checked the damn thing before this moment, and couldn’t help letting out a low whistle at the numbers. This was one of those times.
“How much respect would it take to rent a drone and a preset flight, Mr. Noakes? Paid up front?”
***
Later that night, I got Charlie to tell me about landotters.
“I can’t stop thinking about that story your náan told.”
“She’s something, huh.” Charlie turned to me on the bed, burrowing. “Still gets a kick out of scaring white men.”
“She color blind, then? Because last time I checked in the mirror...”
“I meant the British guy. Ray. But maybe you, too. You know what I mean. SoCal. The archipelagos. Tech people in general.”
“Yeah. I guess I do.” I placed two fingers under her chin, trying to line up our lips for a kiss but she turned away. Suddenly, a chill space opened up between us, and she ceased her burrowing. Rebuffed, I pressed on with my reminiscence. “Their chief, who came out last, was white. Love that commentary. So what about them? Landotters.”
“They’re a cultural artifact. I’ve come to think of them as memetic organisms? In the beginning, which is to say, in the pre-history, the PNW cultures saw them as an aquatic people. Pugwis, they were called, mostly, though there were lots of different names. Same creature, basically. You can track their development through the myth systems of all the nations round here, if you’ve got time.”
“Do we?”
“Nah. Basically, though, they went from fish people serving a chief under the sea, to the embodied spirits of the drowned, roaming the shoreline and the trees. Landotters proper. When they come correct, you can tell what they are: all black eyes, every tooth sharp. Dogs and iron protect against their magic, but not well. You a dog person?”
“Not especially. There’s an ancient PARO at the crèche that’s cat shaped?” Thinking about the crèche in Charlie’s presence smarted a bit. “What kind of magic?”
“Oh, soul stealing, mostly. Or not exactly that. More a removal of the target person from a cycle of rebirth? Into the ground with the landotters the victim goes, to become a landotter themselves.”
“Reincarnation? I had no idea that was a thing up here.”
“It’s not like the stuff from the east. Or all that well-developed. It’s a kidnapping, sort of, but not just from the village. From everything, from the world. A landotter decides it wants you, or recognizes something in you that marks you as theirs, and then it lures you out of the world. You become landotter. Y
ou’ll never die, but you’re not alive either. Your body, your shape, is fluid, but your spirit is locked. It’s pretty gross, actually. A terrible fate, much feared.”
“Jesus.”
Charlie laughed. “Speaking of, when white colonizers showed up here with their fresh take on things, the landotter changed again. We’re versatile, we’ll assimilate anything. They were already hiding in the woods, the landotter people, so when Spaniards told tales of apes, monkeys and so on, guess what we ended up with?”
She meant sasquatch, of course, and the revelation must have shown on my face.
“Yeah. So, then the kidnapping became a literal thing and now you’ve got the dsonoqua roaming the trees with her cedar basket, whistling for children to take home and eat. Probably some European fairy tales in there, too.”
“If you go down to the woods today...” I sang, badly. Charlie sat up, punched me in the bicep.
“That’s you, negro. Tomorrow. A black man camping. These are the end times.”
“So racist, Charlie.” I tried to tell her about a summer camp childhood and the gap year I spent tree planting in the Klamath Mountains but before I could get two sentences in she stopped me with her mouth, and afterwards there came a crushing sleep.
***
The drone Bill Noakes provided was basic but serviceable, with a partially enclosed cockpit, and a full body sling for seating. Space was tight and comfort was not a priority; the upholstery on the seat and harness was worn out and the padding an afterthought. My backpack kept rolling forward into my lumbar spine at every dip or shudder. Charlie had grimaced when she saw the unit, then made a face as she used a sleeve to wipe at a green coating of dead algae on the hull, but ultimately shrugged it off.
“Bill’s a good guy,” she said, scraping the gunk from her clothes. “He wouldn’t knowingly put you in danger.” I didn’t know how to take that, exactly, but as it turned out, she was right. A brief orientation and a consult with the onboard GPS later, and Noakes had me humming across Hecate Strait, promising to check in every quarter hour to make course corrections.
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