by Chris Walley
Over coffee, they shared news of families, friends, and jobs. Anya’s face brightened. “Oh, and while I remember, tonight—come over for a meal. The building over there, Narreza Tower. Fifth—that is, top—floor. It’s at my flat; my older sister is in town. You know Perena?”
“Yes, you introduced me at the beach once. The pilot?”
“Ah, a Near-Space Captain now. Anyway, Space Affairs is letting her off for the night, so she’s cooking. Theodore will be there too. You’ve met him?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Tree Man, you’ve been out in the bush too long. Theodore is a good friend of mine. He’s with Maritime Affairs, works on deep-sea currents. Anyway, you’d be more than welcome.”
“Thanks. But I’ve got a guest myself coming in from Aftarena. I’d better look after him. He’s from Ancient Earth—truly a long way from home.”
“Ancient Earth? Really, oh, you must bring him. Perena would like that. She finished her training there. But who is it?”
“One Verofaza Laertes Enand, sentinel.”
Anya wagged her head slowly and seriously as if reading a lot into the answer. “Ah, a sentinel. You are keeping interesting company. I’d heard we had one visiting. Bring him, though. What’s he doing?”
A good question, and one that I wonder if Vero can answer.
“Well, he’s writing a report. But it’s complicated. Ask him yourself, though.”
“Oh, I will.”
There was a pause and Anya glanced at the clock on the wall. “Time flies, I’m afraid. Now, your problem. Tell me about it.”
“It may be something or nothing. I’m involved professionally and also because it is family. I have an uncle at Herrandown, a Forward Colony up toward the Lannar Crater. It’s his eldest girl who says she saw it . . . this thing.”
“Yeah, the more I thought about it the stranger it became. She is sticking to the story, I take it?”
“Oh yes. I’m certain she believes in it. She did a drawing. Look at this.” He summoned up a scanned copy on his diary screen and turned it so Anya could see it.
Anya looked at it in silence, her bright blue eyes examining it carefully. Finally, she shook her head. “Like nothing in reality and precious little I’ve heard of in fiction. I’m no wiser. It’s more humanoid than I had thought. But what do you think, O great expert of the Great Northern Forest?” Merral noticed a searching look to her face that belied the teasing tone.
“Me? Well to be honest, I’m embarrassed by it. I really don’t know. I was set to dismiss it, but then we found that where she said she had seen it there was evidence that something had been there. Watching Herrandown. And it was a good surveillance spot.”
Anya looked at him with surprise. “Watching Herrandown? How far away?”
“Two kilometers.”
She shook a finger at him and grinned. “Oh, Merral, so it’s intelligent now. With long-distance vision. Some cockroach! We’d better evacuate the planet quick and blow the Gate behind us. That will give the human race forty years minimum to work on insecticides before it makes the next Assembly world. Assuming it doesn’t go faster than light too.”
Merral laughed.
Anya shook her head merrily. “Any other data? These samples . . .”
“The branches had been cut to clear the view. I got a sample.” He reached into his bag, pulled out the carefully wrapped sample, and handed it over to Anya. “The right angle cut is mine.”
She took the clear bag in her hands and held it up to the light. “You’ve looked at it?”
“Not really. It’s not my area. What do you see?”
“Not much. But let me look at it under a lens.” She got up and took it over to a desk where a large microscope stood. Merral got up and joined her as the cut piece of wood came into focus on the screen.
Anya peered at it. “Hmm. Need to do comparative studies. But it was a scissors action. From both sides at once; you can see the pressure points on either side. Could be a tool, I suppose. Tiny scoring or scratch marks. See there?” She pointed to part of the image. “Probably two finely serrated scissor blades. But big. That branch is five millimeters thick. Size of my little fingertip.”
She paused, puzzlement in her tone. “Let me see the girl’s sketch again.”
Merral called it up and Anya enlarged the area around the creature’s hands. “Odder still.” The note of puzzlement was deeper and darker now. “I had assumed that the hands were badly drawn. Let me get a printout.”
A few seconds later, they were peering over a sheet of paper.
“Look, Merral.”
“So?” he asked, noting that there were fingers sketched on each hand.
“The thumb.”
Merral looked again. “Odd,” he said. “It’s not really there. As a thumb that is. Just another long finger but oddly wider. Is it an accident of drawing?”
“I think not. See how they are symmetrical? Both hands are alike. It suggests a real memory. But interesting . . .”
“How so?”
Anya gave Merral a distant, abstracted smile and held up her right hand with the fingers aligned together. Then she swung her thumb in and out against the fingers in a snipping motion.
“I see,” said Merral, in surprise. “You think that . . . ?”
She shook her head so that her fine red hair flicked over her shoulders. “It must be coincidence.” She stared out of the window for a moment, then turned back to him. “No. I refuse to fuel silly ideas. I’ll get one of our animal people to look at it.”
She put it carefully down, but Merral noticed that her thoughtful look had not evaporated.
“What else?”
“Only this,” Merral said as he handed over the second specimen.
She looked at him in feigned bemusement. “No, no, Tree Man. That’s hair. Normally only mammals have it.”
He smiled. “Oh gosh, Anya, I’d forgotten that. But joking apart, I don’t recognize it, and I’ve seen all our wildlife. That’s my job. What’s odder still is that it was caught on an overhanging branch above the trail. About a meter seventy-five off the ground, so you can read that as a minimum height. It could have been an even larger creature if it had been stooping.”
Anya rubbed her forehead. “So this little anthropoid arthropod suddenly sprouts hair and doubles in size. Oh dear.”
Merral shrugged. “Oh, I know.”
Anya sucked her lower lip in. “So, we have two new beasts. The human cockroach and a big hairy thing.”
“That is a conclusion I’ve tried to avoid drawing.”
Anya put the sample down carefully and leaned back in her chair.
“I can see why. Of course, it could be that there was a monkey that sat on the back of the cockroach. There, have you considered that possibility?” She grinned at him.
“No.”
“Well, at least we can get the DNA out of this. Assuming it has any. I’ll give you the results tomorrow.”
She looked at the hair and then back at Merral. “Well, if it’s real, then we have a problem, to put it mildly. Everything we do depends on us knowing exactly what fauna we have here. We always worry about new strains, some new mutant mouse with an insatiable appetite perhaps, but a totally new mammal—let alone a physically impossible mega-arthropod—is totally off the scale. And if it’s a nightmare or a delusion we need to keep it in check. We don’t want people fearing new creatures. You are certain that it isn’t a joke or prank?”
Merral ran the question over again in his mind for the thousandth time. “Oh, Anya, I’m totally unsure. The whole thing says that she really saw something. But it just can’t be. And yet . . .”
In this room, with Anya’s blunt common sense, his fears seemed to almost vanish. Almost, but not quite. He hesitated.
Anya leaned slightly toward him. “There’s more than what you’ve told me, isn’t there?”
“Yes, but it’s not really biological. More spiritual or psychological. Something’s wrong,
though.”
“So you called in the sentinel?”
“Uh, no. A wrong guess there. He sort of wandered in. A coincidence. In fact, I’m not at all convinced that he can help. Maybe. What do you know of them?”
“Sentinels? A bit. They have contributed to the Reconstruction Debate. Genetic alteration or manipulation has always been an issue with them.”
“I hadn’t realized that.”
“They are concerned about anything that erodes the human.”
“Interesting. That fits with what little I know.”
“Anyway, bring your friend tonight.”
“I will. Just at this moment he may not be feeling like eating much. But by tonight things may be better.”
Anya looked at the clock. “Well, my meeting starts soon. I’ll drop these into the lab on the way over.”
She picked up the specimens and, apparently catching his unspoken question, answered, “Should have the results tomorrow morning. The whole mystery solved. Anyway, see you tonight. Top floor, Narreza Tower—say, seven-thirty? Cheers, Merral. Great to see you again.” She patted his shoulder gently. “It really is.”
Suddenly she was gone and Merral was left in the room. Feeling strangely elated, he echoed her statement in his mind with approval.
Yes, Anya, it is great to see you again.
Half an hour later Merral was back at the Planning Institute. There he had a light lunch and met some old colleagues with whom he shared routine news. Finding he still had time to pass before Vero arrived, he sat down in his room, switched his diary through to the wallscreen, and logged in to the Library. The traditional image of the interior of a vast, high-vaulted building with an almost infinite number of shelves appeared on the wall.
What to look up? Merral asked himself. He had so many questions, but where did he start? Psychological disturbances, perhaps? He pushed his finger on the diary as if to walk to the behavioral science section, but as the file-laden aisles with the ghostly figures of the other users sped past him, he began to have second thoughts. There was so much there. Even within the psychology section. Where to begin? He lifted off his finger and found himself halted in front of a bay of a dozen shelves packed with virtual datapaks. The top of the bay was clearly labeled “Assembly Psychology: The Years A.D. 4000–5220: Section 32, The Schools of the Varantid Worlds. Bay 510 out of 870.” With the renewed realization of exactly how much data there was available for him, Merral felt suddenly daunted. Access to all of humanity’s knowledge didn’t seem to help him.
Perhaps, he wondered, he should ask one of the virtual librarians about beetles? or sentinels? or Protocols and their abuses?
I don’t know where to begin. He exited the Library and switched off the link. He borrowed a canoe and for the next few hours paddled around the lake at the center of the Institute’s extensive grounds, enjoying Isterrane’s warmer climate and trying—and failing—to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
In midafternoon, alerted by a faint noise high above him, he looked up to see the gull-like long-haul flier come in to land, the wings extending fluidly outward into landing mode as he watched. He paddled over to land, handed back the canoe he’d borrowed, and went back to the center to wait.
Half an hour later Vero arrived. He lowered his heavy bag to the ground and gave Merral a hug. “Good to see you again. And very good to be on solid land,” he said with feeling.
“You’ll get used to our atmosphere’s fluctuations.”
Vero shuddered. “Fluctuations! There are gaping holes in your atmosphere. I doubt I’ll ever get used to it. Where can we talk?”
“My room?”
“No,” Vero said firmly. “I need fresh air. Let’s walk around the grounds.”
“Fine, leave your bag in the office here. Incidentally, you are invited to a meal tonight. Let me tell you about it. . . .”
Once out under the trees, Vero turned to Merral, his brown eyes wide and solemn. “Look, I’m taking this seriously. I want you to tell me everything that has happened at Herrandown. Everything, every detail. In order. I’ll just listen, although I may need to take a record later.”
So for the next hour Merral found himself recounting first the request for help from his uncle and aunt, and then the details of his and Isabella’s visit to Herrandown. Vero listened and nodded and occasionally asked for a clarification or a repetition. When Merral described the discovery that the site where the creature had been seen overlooked the settlement, Vero looked at him in an agitated way. “You’re sure? Overlooking all of them?”
“Of course. It was what made me think there might be something in it.”
“Yes. It raises a number of issues. . . .” His face acquired a worried look and for a moment he seemed to be on the point of saying something. “No . . . ,” he said, as if addressing himself. “We will discuss that issue later. Continue.”
A second point that excited a particular interest was the conversation that Merral had overheard between his uncle and his aunt. It was something that Merral had felt reluctant to mention; in the end he decided that he had to. Besides which, the business had so troubled him that he was glad to share it with someone. Vero frowned darkly when it was described to him and asked for it to be repeated. At the end of the repetition there was a silence in which Vero just shook his head sadly.
Merral broke the silence. “Vero, I almost can’t believe I heard it. A noisy, aggressive dispute between husband and wife. Repeating it now, it sounds incredible. Can I be making it up?”
They had stopped walking and Vero rubbed his face wearily with his hand. “You have every right to be disturbed by it, my friend. No, you can’t be making it up. For me, it is in its way all too familiar, I’m afraid. As a sentinel we are encouraged, no—required is better—to study personal relationships before the Great Intervention. You, of course, have the Scriptures too, so you know something of this, but we have to look at such things in more . . . depth.” He looked embarrassed and after a brief hesitation, went on. “If depth is the word. No one now would read or watch such things out of choice but it does—we believe—no real harm under controlled conditions. So what you heard is familiar to me.” He rubbed his long fingers through his tight-curled hair. “Familiar, but no less worrying.”
Merral then told how his uncle had reacted when confronted with the question of modifying the re-created voices. He and Vero had stopped on a wooden bridge over a stream that fed into the lake and were leaning over it, staring down into the clear water and watching the trout dart about below them.
“So Barrand then replied, ‘We need to remember something. The Technology Protocols were made by men, not God. They’re not Scripture.’ ”
Vero seemed to jolt upright as if an electric current had been applied to him. “He said what?”
“That ‘the Technology Protocols were made by men not God. They’re not Scripture.’ ”
Merral saw that Vero was giving him a look that seemed close to incredulity. There was a long silence and then he spoke very slowly and softly. “That was said by another. But a very long time ago. . . .” He shook his head as if stunned. “Extraordinary! Very alarming! But go on.”
They set off walking again and eventually, with the account of young Thomas’s injunction to kill whatever he found, Merral ended his tale.
“Can you believe it, Vero?”
There was a long sigh from Vero. “Believe it? Yes, I think I can. But I can’t explain it.” Then he fell silent.
A six-legged transporter robot carrying flasks paused deferentially to let them walk past. “So now tell me, what do you think? And what am I supposed to think?”
Vero stopped and turned to Merral. “As to what you think, you must decide that. For myself, I think many things. Before you told me all this, I was going to say that I was worried that it was serious. And now I know that it is serious. But there are questions.”
“Such as?”
“Everything. What’s happening? Why? Why there? More importan
tly, what do I do?”
“Isn’t that easy? Don’t you just call your people on Ancient Earth?”
“Yes, I have considered that. I am close to doing it.” His face radiated unease. “But there are problems. Supposing we have a full-threat evaluation team come in and I am wrong? We will have done damage to your uncle and his family, damage to Herrandown, and damage to the sentinels.” He sighed. “The problem on The Vellant that I mentioned did us some harm. And the other cases. There is an old, old story about the boy who cried wolf. You have heard of it.”
“Indeed.”
They were standing near a fence overlooking the lake. Vero tapped the wood impatiently. “But you see, it’s all so different from anything we might have expected.”
“Which was?”
“We have been looking for a slow shift in opinions, for subtle changes across a world. So small that only statistics would show. Not for a sudden, isolated event like this. Least of all one with such bizarre manifestations. No, it’s too strange. I need more evidence.”
He drummed his hands on the fence and stared over the water before looking at Merral with sharp, inquiring eyes.
“When do you get the results back from Anya?”
“Tomorrow morning, she said. Why?”
“What I think is this . . . no, wait. Can you get me a large display of the area? A remote image—decent scale.”
Merral gestured to his diary but Vero shook his head. “No, something bigger, projected would do. I need to visualize the area.”
“No problem. There’s a free office near my room. I can call up the most recent satellite image—that would be last week’s—and overlay places on it.”
“Good.” Vero shivered slightly. “I feel it’s getting cool outside here. Let’s go inside. I think my blood got used to the tropics.”
