Stillicide

by Cynan Jones

  . . . old pipe maybe? Don’t know. It’s got kind of bust concretey edges. Definitely some sort of pipe.

  Swimming beetles. Insects on the water. Pond skaters, Gerridae. And whirligigs. That’s another name I love. ‘Whirligigs.’ Quite a few. Don’t like my shadow, shy little things. Imagine breathing through your bum! Different types of waterweed. Gnats!

  Gnats. What sort of gnats? Sylvicola? Macrocera?

  There’s a pile of chunks stacked up. Look more soily than concretey, really. Does that make sense?

  It’s clay. It’s a clay sewer pipe.

  It is sort of dug down to. As if the ground has collapsed a bit.

  The professor feels a kind of flutter in his centre. An expectation, that Ellie’s next few details will confirm the leap of imagination he’s not been able to prevent. That this ‘pipe’ is one of the many waterways they culverted, or co-opted as sewers, and built the growing city over, in the 1800s.

  There’s big old flag iris to one side. The stalks all dried out. It’s in the sun. Nearly midday now.

  Ellie, Ellie, tell me. Was the water running?

  Oh! Hang on.

  Even barely?

  That’s. Wow! Yes! It’s a skin . . .

  Exuvia . . .

  It has the look of a shrunk dragon. A frail ferocity to its proportions. The heavy intent of its head. Its front two pairs of legs extended forward, as if it reaches out to claim something.

  He places the cast skin on the plate of the field microscope. Focuses.

  The mud of the pool bottom has dried upon the skeleton, an arid silt. He cannot help but think of ash. A rebirth. The body split, the soul escaped on wings.

  There is something about the mud that gives the look of interruption. He recognises he is thinking of Pompeii. Perhaps because of Ellie’s mention of the Colosseum. Of people stopped mid-process.

  Again, the scientist, he thinks of souls. Of a great heat vaporising the essence from a body.

  The dorsal barbs, down to the penultimate section of the abdomen. The fact of the dried silt. He has pushed back the prospect. An intuition of its species he felt instantly.

  But as he sees the skin, magnified, it speaks to him as an artefact. Seems utterly sure of itself. It is.

  The barb on the ninth segment.

  Libellula fulva. ‘Scarce Chaser’. Dragonfly. Unmistakable.

  He looks to the date on the record he’s called up. The last recorded sighting. UK-wide. More than twenty years ago . . . On the drains of the Ouse Washes.

  It’s on the Red List of protected species. As he thought it might be.

  He gazes through the binocular field microscope.

  It’s not the same, to him, to use the digital scopes. He was drawn to things. Things had given him wonder, and he was a scientist because of that, not for the need to understand. He tried to instil that in his students.

  For him, the search was not answers, the search was for surprise.

  Does Ellie know? Does she know the significance of this?

  A dragonfly. A predator at the top point of a triangle. On the Red List. One of the few things the countries of the world agree on.

  If a Red List species is present in a place, no action can be carried out that will disturb it until it has been relocated or moved on.

  He dials Ellie. Needs to ask. Were there more exuviae? The water, was it running? Slowly? At all? But gets her ansaphone.

  Ellie here. Can’t talk right now. I’m walking against the Ice Dock project. You should be too. Leave a message if you want.

  Ellie, Ellie, he thinks. Were there more exuviae? Was the water running . . .?

  Turns back to her recording.

  Yay! Hopscotch. Kids must come out here to play.

  He goes, without any need for conscious navigation, to the specimen vault, to the section ‘Odonata’. Logs on, keys the species number. ‘Odonota’ – from the Greek belief that dragonflies had teeth . . . presses Confirm.

  The drawer emits a gentle beep and slides itself open.

  A few metres down the vault, the integral inspection light casts a knee-high glow, and he feels a hum as he crouches to see the specimen, as if he finds it in the field.

  There, vibrant under the light, Scarce Chaser. Libellula fulva. Male.

  The powder-blue pruinescence of its abdomen. A wingspan the length of his thumb. Brown pterostigma. Veins as frail as a leaf skeleton.

  He draws the hand lens from his chest pocket. His thumb tracing the comfortable scratch of the long-smoothed inscription on its case.

  From above, the dragonfly’s eyes are a bottomless blue-grey. Seem gauzed, like the veil of his bee-keeping suit.

  Dragonfly, he thinks. Savours their names. ‘Devil’s Darning Needle’. ‘Adderbolt’. ‘Ear Cutter’. Their strange helicopter movements, clicking as they take smaller insects in the air.

  It’s almost impossible for him not to think that this imago clambered from the very skin he holds. The skin he could not leave behind him on his desk. That it crawled somehow from the accumulated silt in which for two years it fed and grew, and that this bright thing in the drawer broke from it.

  That must happen. Mustn’t it? A dragonfly must land, sometimes, next to the skin of itself it crawled from.

  Can they know?

  He wants to pick it up and set it on his finger. But does not.

  And suddenly and certainly he understands he’s going out there. Now. Out to the site where this was found.

  That he’ll pack his field bag in a rush and go. Take the sampling rods, and nets.

  That he will lie down on his belly and plunge his arm into the water.

  This species lays its eggs in running water . . . The larvae two years in the silt. Before they clamber up and split.

  And if the water is running, it is possible the egg or larva was just carried to the spot. To the break in the pipe. That it’s simply an anomaly.

  But the Red List is the Red List. And if there are eggs, or larvae there, work at the site will have to pause.

  It wasn’t that he was against the Ice Dock. He understood necessity.

  But, what this specimen could represent. How it could fire people’s engagement.

  A silverfish under a mat. A marigold established in the crack of a kerb. The belligerent will of a thing to exist.

  Give Nature space, and she will take it.

  What a story it would make.

  What half a million people on the march will not achieve, a tiny insect might.

  A dragonfly could stop an iceberg.

  For a while at least.

  ROOFTOP

  When the service door opened, a falcon burst away from the gun baffle. A brief blur that seemed to stay in the air long after it was gone. Leave the space it occupied more present. The way the doctor’s words had hung there in the air.

  ‘Keen eyes,’ said the constable who had brought Branner up in the access lift.

  Branner nodded; then he checked his rifle and stepped onto the roof.

  He knew he’d see her ward from here. Did not look towards the hospital.

  He’d asked to be posted out of the city. To spend a few days at the Water Train line. To find some space, to try to settle with things.

  ‘We’ll need you for the protest, though. You can go out to the line for the next rota. If the Super clears it.’

  A few more days, thought Branner. Then I’ll be out there. There’ll be some time to set things straight in my head.

  ‘You go,’ said his wife. She understood.

  The transparent shell of the baffle deflected the cool wind. Deepened Branner’s feeling he was in a bubble.

  The dream, recurring night after night, now seemed an intuition. After the doctor’s news.

  With his feet off the roof Branner seemed to float, rode a momentary swoon of vertigo.

  Let the process take over, he coached himself. Use the process.

  He set the rifle in the rest. Checked the pneumatics. Steered the baffle left, right, nodd
ed and tipped it with the foot pedals.

  Let the spin of unease pass.

  He clipped the umbilica from the rifle to his chestconnect, felt, for a very strange moment, he attached a line to his heart. Then he engaged the comms and spoke into the headset. ‘In place.’

  There was endless movement below, between the solid, impassive buildings.

  On the distant flat roofs Fillic sheets caught the afternoon light.

  Branner took things in. The resting meter of the city.

  Ahead of him the bridges, on which the protest would converge to cross the empty river channel over to the Ice Dock.

  Behind him the hospital.

  Left of the bridge the Ice Dock itself. Dust from the construction work within lifting from it like faint smoke.

  Between the dry riverbed and the Dock was derelict ground. Bulldozered leftovers of cleared buildings piled around the site.

  Branner scoped the area. A huge space but dwarfed by the Dock. The land of the old park behind.

  Despite the high fences, there were signs of people. Spent fires. A hopscotch court. Graffiti.

  Untidy patches of silver-grey scrub.

  The broken opening in the waste ground caught him unawares. A memory that flipped his stomach. The dark opening like a section of blown-out pipe.

  It brought a sudden bile of adrenalin into Branner’s mouth. His pulse thickened and he felt the walls of detachment shudder.

  What was it?

  He increased the magnification of his scope. It looked as if something heavy had fallen through the floor.

  From the sporadic growth around it, Branner sensed the hole held water.

  He felt the adrenalin turn soupy inside him.

  Tried to call up a sharpness, to cut through the film that, since this morning, the doctor’s words had created between him and the rest of the world.

  He wanted a jolt. Some flash to bring him back to earth. Hoped quietly for a crisis. Something that would require his whole mind.

  A soft pulse in the chestconnect directed Branner to check the sectors he hadn’t yet. He swung the baffle. Had to. And there some quarter-of-a-mile away was the hospital. Like a cliff.

  Through the scope he saw the square-looking white beds. The uniforms of the senior nurses the same blue as his police marksman cap. Not like the pale blue she’d worn the first time they met. Sewing up the wound in his jaw.

  Branner wanted to stare the hospital down. Had the insane thought he could shoot the building dead and put an end to things. That if he killed the building, all the illness in it would be done.

  There was the falcon again, on the building’s roof. A bolt-black silhouette the size of a bullet casing, against the pale squat structures of the windtwist generators.

  He eyed it in the scope. Brought it bold and tangible. Alive with colour, detailed. Close. Then, as if aware of him, it dipped off the ledge, the sudden engine of its shoulders driving it into the sky and out amongst the buildings.

  Branner turned away from the hospital. A scruffy dog trotted across the waste ground, stopped briefly and periodically to sniff, to mark. Went instinctively to the broken shallow and lowered its head to drink. Water.

  The dog looked feral. It had the thick head and shoulders of an aggressive dog, but an energetic gait.

  The dog brought scale to the ground. The fallaway section looked some three to four metres in length and half that wide.

  Branner watched the dog, the skin around the scar on his jaw tacking slightly against the rifle stock.

  It had a calm certainty. Dipped its head to drink again.

  A little way from the pool sparrows folded in the dust.

  The thin needling cry of a swift scratched the air.

  They had hoped for rain, to diminish somewhat any casual enthusiasm for the protest. But the sun had got stronger through the afternoon, and the heat began to come up off the roof and catch under the hood.

  Branner took some of his water ration.

  ‘Baffle nine,’ came Control.

  ‘Check,’ said Branner.

  There was the soft white noise of electric traffic, filtered through the city. The sun flashed on the perimeter fence below.

  Then Branner saw a small boy clamber through the failure in the panel and run, in a headlong way, towards the dog. The boy too looked feral. He would be seven or eight, guessed Branner.

  Before the boy could get to the dog, the dog bounded away. Then stopped. Turned.

  Barks reached Branner out of synch with the snaps of the dog’s jaw.

  The dog was playing, but the boy seemed distraught. Gave loose, frustrated flaps of his arms, as if he tried uselessly to leave the ground.

  The dog was delighted. Rolled in the dust. Stretched in the sun. Approached.

  But every time the young boy took a step, the dog ran away.

  In the end, the boy sat down in the dirt.

  Branner saw the fence ripple again. The second boy had snagged his clothing. His face, in the globe of Branner’s scope, was angry and flushed. No more than a few years older than the first boy. He looked asthmatic, Branner thought.

  There was some chatter on the comms, but Branner kept his focus on this second boy. The boy had torn his football shirt getting through the fence and shouted across the waste ground. He clenched and unclenched his fists as he walked.

  It was clear the boys were brothers.

  When the younger brother got up from the dirt, the older brother held him by the arm, and the dog barked once, percussively, as if something had been dropped.

  Then the smaller boy began to bawl words into the other’s face. It seemed to pummel the older boy.

  It was strange to see. Not hearing anything, at the distance Branner was from them.

  Something, then, came across the children.

  The dog became compressed and stiff, stared tensely past the boys. Growled, inaudibly to Branner. The minutest shake. Then it uncoiled and hammered off towards the empty river.

  Branner looked to see what had caused the dog to spook. The younger boy already ran and shouted after it. The older pleading, hardly able to lift his feet.

  Branner leant to the scope and went about a rhythmic grid check, sure he’d see another dog. Or people. Did not. Checked the waste ground patch by patch.

  When he looked up, having done so, both the boys were gone.

  People threaded onto the bridge. Surchins larked in the concrete channel below.

  Branner looked to recognise the two brothers amongst them but did not. He looked for the dog.

  The light gleamed off the mica held in the dry sandy mud.

  The soft crunching chant of the protest came to him now, guided between the buildings, filling the streets ahead of the marchers.

  It brought Branner the sense of something rolling, clanking towards him. He saw the bridge like a funnel.

  When he looked back at the waste ground, as if he sensed him first, Branner saw the man.

  He lay on his belly, an arm outstretched in the water. Branner’s stomach twisted again, upturned.

  Light bounced from the weapon the injured man had dropped. It seemed he tried to drag himself.

  Branner feared, for a horrible moment, that he’d had some sort of absence, during which he’d shot the man. The way the man lay prone.

  He felt a sort of clatter in his brain. The off-synch patter of the protest growing more defined; the travel of the Overland that passed along the bridge.

  From the deep hollow inside himself, Branner heard the doctor’s words begin again to knock and rattle. An expectation; some object tumbling closer.

  A wash of adrenalin came with a taste like the metal smell of sundered iron. And his body braced.

  He waited for this morning’s news to reach him.

  The horrible moment, waiting for the doctor’s words to detonate.

  ‘Baffle nine.’ Comms call cutting through the chemical flood.

  ‘Check,’ said Branner.

  But he was back, now, the
re. His first posting. Barely old enough to leave the base. Pulling bodies from the pooling water of the sabotaged pipeline.

  How they’d stood there, helpless, listening, the next bomb pinging and clanging towards them down the pipe.

  It was that day. That day at the pipe you met.

  He brought his eyes down onto the protest. Went for the safety of the scope. But.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m not fully with this, sir.’

  ‘Branner?’

  ‘I’m not focused, sir.’

  ‘We can’t bring you down now. Are you fit for a shot?’

  ‘I don’t think so, sir.’

  ‘You’ve got the bridge, John. There’s a reason it’s you up there.’

  ‘She’s not going to come through.’

  For a moment all he could acknowledge was the sky, the wide sky.

  ‘Switch off your gun, Branner.’

  ‘It’s okay. I’ve said it now.’