Eclipse One

by Jonathan Strahan

  "Designed by Egerton Swartwout," remarked Viola. "Sounds like a German name, and it looks like Nazi architecture, isn't that ironic."

  "The Doughboys didn't fight Nazis. They were here in 1918, they fought one of the last great battles of the Great War, down there below—"

  Viola sighed and nodded. She knew all about the Doughboys of the American Expeditionary Force, their gallant part in licking Kaiser Bill; the various rationales suggested for that nickname (the dumpling shape of an Infantryman's buttons, the dust of battle, a derogatory reference to apprentice bakers' boys . . .) The Doughboys were the reason, or one of the reasons, for this pilgrimage to North Eastern France.

  The only other visitor was a stooped young man in mismatched tweed jacket and tan chinos, laden with camera equipment, who did not have kin remembered here, he was just interested in the AEF. So Aymon was in his element: pointing out his great-grandfather's name, explaining the strategic importance of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, General John J Pershing's objectives, the difficulties that beset the American boys, in their biggest operation on French soil—and Viola was released to gaze in peace at the landscape of what had been the "St Mihiel salient." The wooded ridges, the lush green, lake-dotted plain, the tide of forest lapping at its shore.

  Aymon remembered that his penchant for talking to strangers tended to get him into trouble with Viola, and he wanted her on his side, today of all days. He bid the young man from Kentucky a courteous goodbye, before he'd even scratched the surface of his knowledge, and came to join her.

  "It looks so peaceful now."

  "Did you know," said Viola, "this is still one of the most sparsely populated areas in Europe? Right here, practically next door to Paris, and all those big, packed, developed cities? It's a boneyard, a graveyard, a derelict munitions dump. I warned you. Didn't I warn you? The eastern flank of La Belle France is just battlefield after battlefield. Who'd want to come here, work here? How do you plan to attract the good people?"

  "Money," muttered Aymon. "Space, freedom, natural beauty. You're so wrong: this location is perfect. We'll be fighting them off with sticks—"

  Aymon Bock was an extremely wealthy man. He'd been loaded before he was thirty, avoided getting his fingers burned in a long career of daring start-ups; and finally, in what he still felt was youthful middle age, he wanted to give something back. He looked on the grinning slackers who were this generation's overnight billionaires, not with envy but with trepidation; and felt his long-ago hippie roots stirring. He meant to do something good, and since this region of France was (according to family legend) his ancestral home, he had chosen the forests of Argonne for the site of his Foundation. Having a French son-in-law also helped; though Jean-Raoul had been almost as hard to convince as Viola herself.

  "There's another Great War going on, Vi. The world's in crisis, don't you understand that? The Bock Foundation is going to be a beacon in the storm: here, where my people came from. I'm the one to do it, I know I am. I have the experience, the talent for spotting ventures that will fly, and for hiring the guys, the scientists, the technologists, who are really going places. I'm tired of all the defeatism, the denial and plain lies. It's time to get organised, pull together, and see this Global Warming, Climate Change bogey for what it is: a dazzling opportunity. A new industrial revolution."

  "You're such a romantic. If you want to be a war hero like your great-granddaddy was, why don't you set up a Sustainable Technology Centre in the Sudan? Or closer to home, in Down South, Black Hispanic USA, the newest Desperate Developing Nation on the block?"

  "I give a heap of money away to good causes, Vi. You know I do. But it's pouring water in a leaky bucket: and you know that too. A man like me, with my expertise, is better employed turning out new buckets."

  "Those Developing Nations," remarked Viola, heading for the steps, "can be such a hassle to deal with. Where there's human suffering there's dirty politics. Business dies, and God forbid Aymon Bock should get his fingers burned at last."

  "I'm doing this for you, too. It's going to reboot your career. You're going to design for me."

  "Now you're talking crazy. Designers have to be cool, and middle-aged women are not cool. Only youth is cool, in a woman."

  "That's ridiculous! That's antediluvian thinking, this is the Age of the Grey Tigress. What about Vivienne Westwood?"

  "She's in fashion and she's pushing seventy. Thanks a lot."

  "Hell, did I say the Bock Foundation? I misspoke myself. It's going to be the Viola Canning Bock Foundation."

  Viola laughed, touched in spite of herself. Say what you like about Aymon Bock, he could do irony: he could laugh at himself. She took an antique Hermès scarf from her $6,000 shoulder bag, and tied it over her hair, Grace Kelly style. He liked to drive the gun-metal Aston Martin he'd chosen for this trip with the top down, and the wind in his golf-tan wrinkles.

  Of course he did.

  She was a disappointment to her husband because she'd taken a career break, long ago, and never got around to mending it. She couldn't convince him that it would be madness for her to return to the fray: a wealthy woman, playing with her husband's newest toy. She'd be a laughing stock. But Ay's own "career" was in the same state. The money produced itself now, without Aymon's assistance: churning out mounds and mounds of cash, like that infernal salt mill in the fairytale. The moneymaker and his wife were over. They were on the downslope, and this eco-technology fantasy just proved it.

  "We're barely middle-aged," cried Aymon, as they drove away. "We have half our lives ahead!" And went off into one of his one-man brainstorms: Microgeneration. Virtual Tourism. The billions to be made in the development of efficient recycling. Get the basic patents, the ones that are going to change the entire world . . . We are both drowning, thought Viola, fully aware that her age was no excuse for anomie. We are both lost, we've always been lost. It's just that Ay doesn't know it. And deep inside her, like a tiny stone fetus curled around her heart, she felt what she might have been: shining, shining.

  Discontent was all she had left, her only proof that life could have been better, could have been wonderful—

  Down on the plain, when they finally reached the boundary of Aymon's new real estate, there was certainly a sense of crossing some kind of crucial border. The wide fields of ethanol-fated corn (where Aymon muttered about the dumb European energy policy, not yet woken up to the exploded concept of biofuels) gave way to water meadow; and then suddenly they faced a wall of trees. There was no signage. The road surface, equally suddenly, deteriorated to dirt, with a few scabby patches of asphalt.

  "Are you sure this is the right place?"

  Aymon had been enlarging on the fortunate partnership of Jean-Raoul and Madeleine. Their daughter the biochemist, brilliant and flighty, who'd taken up computer science as a sideline, currently spent her time modelling neurotransmitters, out in the wild blue yonder. Jean-Raoul Martigny, however, was a scientist with a sound business mind, always took Aymon's advice, understood that sustainable dies if it means non-profit-making.

  He paused in this pleasurable rant—leaving Maddy with her head in the clouds, Raoul with his feet on the ground—and punched up the help menus on the dashboard map.

  "Heck. Something's wrong with this—"

  The Aston Martin was a beautiful car, and as guilt-free as a classic performance roadster can well be, but its subsystems had proved unreliable. Or else there was something in the air, interfering with the signal . . . Aymon could feel the prickling heaviness, an electric storm on the way.

  There was an old man watching them from the edge of the trees.

  A welcome sight, in the ringing, silent emptiness of this countryside, where you could hardly believe that crowded old Western Europe was all around. Aymon had pulled up, meaning to try some diagnostics. He leaned out, and made his inquiry. The old fellow set down his axe—he really was carrying a long-handled, ancient-looking axe—and came ambling over, cautious of his joints as the Tin Woodsman.

 
"Hi," said Aymon, ever trustful of the universal power of the English language. "Would you mind telling us where we are, sir?"

  The old fellow stared at the foreign car as if he'd never seen anything like it, and said something that Aymon didn't catch at all, except that the word forêt was in there. Viola explained the problem, in her passable French. The Tin Woodsman scratched his seamed and bristly chin, peered into the car and looked long at their GPS screen, shaking his head and murmuring, a voluble excursion, presumably in the local dialect: from which Viola could only snag "unbelievable!" She tried again, and managed to learn that he'd never heard of the projected Bock Foundation, and didn't recognise the number of the minor Departmental Road they were looking for—

  "But there are roads through the forest?" she persisted, still in French.

  The old man looked completely blank, a senior moment, then he spoke again, in a careful, strangely accented English. "There are plenty of paths." He smiled. "Perhaps too many. You can go in, easily. But you may not come out." He nodded, pleased with his joke, and went back to his axe.

  "Let's go," snapped Viola. "We were heading in the right direction five minutes ago. And we have the paper maps. "

  "What a damned language," remarked Aymon, consolingly, as they passed into the embrace of the trees, and the world behind disappeared. "Don't feel bad. It's okay in print, but I can never understand a word when they start talking. Beyond restaurant dialogue, anyhow."

  "I understand French. I can't do quaint dialects."

  "Yeah, well. They always remember a little English in the end."

  The forest had a placid, timeless air of expectation: as if it had been waiting for them, and welcomed them with quiet satisfaction. The trees were poplar and ash, oak, beech and hazel, and other nameless European species. None of any great size. The understory was a mass of climbers, vines and briars and ferns: but there was nothing sinister, no dripping, ghostly lichens. Still no signage, and the GPS screen was a fuzz of grey. Aymon grinned at his wife, and took a turn at random down another of the dirt-paved tracks. He drove slowly, appreciating the experience. Strangely, although the driving surface was horrible, the broad verges were evenly shorn to the height of a healthy suburban lawn. Maybe the Tin Woodsman came down here regularly, on a horse-drawn mower—

  "Are you trying to get us lost? I should be throwing out a trail of breadcrumbs," Viola commented, uneasily.

  "I want to get a feel for the place. Never been here in the flesh before. We'll meet a landmark of some kind soon. If we don't, there's a compass on the dash. You're sure we have the right numéro in that map folder of yours?"

  Viola was not sure. She kept paper maps out of nostalgia for the old days, when she'd been the map-navigating queen of their travels; but she'd come to rely on that fickle modern technology . . . She decided, in the interests of marital harmony, that she wouldn't check the folder yet.

  Aymon had been noticing long, regular shapes among the trees by the roadside: mostly wrapped in some kind of tarp. Then he saw the numbered tags, like mailboxes without the mailbox, and it dawned on him that he was seeing cords of firewood. The forest belonged to the commune; to the local people. It was not farmed for timber, it was portioned out, household by household, for winter fuel: which was sound energy policy for a change. This was one of the rights he'd agreed to respect, for an interim period, while he investigated the issue. But now the woodpiles, the dismembered flesh of the wood laid out like that, right under the noses of the living trees, were somehow very disturbing. He found himself wondering how the forest felt about the arrangement. Death by inches, endlessly repeated. Reminded him of the story of the hillbilly with the three-legged pig.

  "A hog as good as that, you don't eat him all at once . . ."

  Viola felt nothing, except a practical concern about the coming storm—something in the air, not exactly oppressive, but electric. She looked up. The sun was invisible, the flowing band of sky was cloudless, a billowing deep blue canopy, a bride's train, a robe . . . At last they reached a crossing place where several tracks met, around an open green crown. Aymon pulled up, carefully parallel to the mown grass, as if he feared a sudden rush of traffic. The sun was still invisible, the electric sky without a cloud, the forest vistas unbroken. A jaybird flashed across the clearing and called loudly, one indignant note. They smiled at each other.

  "The old guy said we were 'À L'Orée de la Forêt de la Reine'," said Viola. "On the threshold of the Forest of the Queen. So we're in the right woods, unless there are multiple Queens' Forests around here. Which queen was it, Ay? When did she reign? What was her name?"

  "I don't remember. Could be Marie-Antoinette for all I know. The history's on file, it's in the documents, we can find out. Let's take a walk."

  "Not out of sight of the car."

  "Okay, okay . . . Hey, I have my pocket knife, I'll cut flashes on the trees. It's just a small, suburban, European forest, honey. It won't bite."

  "Oh no? I bet there are mosquitoes."

  "So bring your repellent."

  Aymon didn't suffer from mosquito bites. Viola hated them, and hated the smell of any effective repellent, but she shared his mood. There was something about this place that made you want to let go and drift . . . They took one of the tracks, deeper into the world of green. There were mosquitoes. She stopped to anoint her bare legs and stooped lower, curious about the texture of the turf. It didn't seem to have been mown recently, every shining blade was pristine, curved like a baby's fingernail—

  "What's the matter?"

  She was startled at the edge on his voice. Was the forest, like Viola, a disappointment? Or was he spooked? She felt a little spooked herself: the enticing lethargy had a thread of tension in it, a tug of adrenalin. An insect, a butterfly with pretty marbled wings, looked up at her from the grassblades under her nose, and seemed to wink one of its faceted eyes.

  What the hell—?

  "A butterfly. A really tiny one, very pretty. It's gone now."

  "I wonder who does the mowing," muttered Aymon. "And why. What for? I don't see this as a picnic spot—"

  But the reproach of the living harvest, those piles of dead limbs, had aroused his defiance, so he proposed they leave the path. Viola followed him without a murmur, though she was hardly dressed for it. She prided herself on her docility: it was one way of dealing with constant low-level despair. Aymon could complain of her negativity, her lack of enthusiasm, her sarcasm. He could never call her high maintenance.

  She picked her way, getting scratched, hoping this would soon be over. Aymon kept stopping and peering at bark, examining leaves. She knew he was looking for an unusual bug to match the "pretty butterfly" he'd missed. It was one of his strengths, maybe all wealthy men were the same. He was always playing to win, every second, on every scale. It could be exhausting. But it was Viola who first noticed that the leaf mould underfoot was alive with hopping, creeping dark-skinned little frogs.

  "My God," said Aymon.

  "So many of them—" whispered Viola, horrified, afraid to take another step, repulsed at the thought of carnage on her shoe soles.

  "My God," breathed Aymon again. "Now I call that a good omen. So much for the worldwide catastrophic decline of amphibians."

  He managed to catch one of the critters without crushing it, and held it up to his eye, threadlike limbs dangling. It had a pointed snout, and two green stripes down its crooked back that glittered when they caught the light and disappeared in shadow. Its irises were striated gold around the slippery, bulging pupils. The frog grinned toothlessly, and Aymon laughed. His unease vanished. He felt innocent and adventurous, like a little boy—

  "These little guys are having a ball."

  "My watch has stopped," announced Viola, rummaging in her oversized, arm-and-a-leg purse. "Damn, and my cell seems to have run out of charge, however that happened. What time is it?"

  "About midafternoon. It doesn't matter, does it?"

  She looked up. He'd dropped the frog and his hands w
ere dug so deeply into his pants pockets that both his wrists were hidden. She guessed at once that his watch had stopped too, and a chill ran down her spine.

  "Where's your cell, Ay?"

  "Calm down, honey, what's the panic? It's in the car."

  They could not see the car. Every direction looked the same.

  Something has happened, thought Viola. I felt it, when we drove in here. Wild thoughts went through her mind. Hostage-takers with some kind of ray, killing their digital communications. Electromagnetic Pulse, the Third World War, UFOs, a natural disaster—

  "We left the fucking car wide open," she said. "These trees all look identical, and there's just about to be a cloudburst."

  "We can retrace our steps. You stay where you are, marking our last known position, I'll cast around for our footprints."

  He cast about, examining the leaf mould and the creepers. Viola doubted if even Aymon could suddenly acquire finely honed tracker skills, from nowhere. She stayed put because she hated the idea of taking another step into chaos, and stared all around her: intently, slowly—

  "Aymon! There's light over there! Sunlight, it must be the clearing where we left the car!"

  "No, it's not, honey. It can't be. You're pointing downhill, we were coming downhill. We left the car on kind of a hilltop, don't you remember?"

  "I can see buildings."

  She was right. Aymon could see the leaf-broken outlines too: hard to say what kind of buildings, they could be in ruin . . . Defiantly, silently daring her to laugh, he took out his pocket knife and sliced a rectangle of white bark from the pink flesh of a birch tree beside him. "I'm going to go on doing that. So we can get back to here, whatever else."

  "Go ahead. Be a vandal."

  The sunlight lay over the valley of a clear brown stream that ran between beds of flowering rushes. Fine trees, untrammelled by close neighbours, grew on the natural turf on either side. There was a footpath, well-maintained if not well-trodden, and the buildings they'd seen were close. They saw white weatherboard and cranky little gabled roofs, a crooked white wooden bridge, the glimmer and the laughter of a modest weir—