Spring 2007 (19 page)

“They–” Gregor tenses. “What did they find?” He
knows about the big nuclear-powered Ekranoplan, the dragon of the Caspian,
searching the seven oceans for new worlds to conquer. He even knows about the
small fleet they’re trying to build at Archangelsk, the ruinous expense of it.
But this is new. “What did they find?”

Brundle grins humorlessly. “They found ruins. Then they
spent another eight weeks mapping the coastline. They’ve confirmed what they
found, they sent the State Department photographs, survey details–the
lot.” Brundle gestures at the Cuban War monument, the huge granite column
dominating the Mall, its shadow pointing towards the Capitol. “They found
Washington DC, in ruins. One hundred and forty thousand miles that way.” He
points due north. “They’re not total idiots, and it’s the first time they’ve
found one of their own species-transfer cognates. They might be well on their
way to understanding the truth, but luckily our comrades in Moscow have that
side of the affair under control. But they communicated their discovery to the
CIA before it could be suppressed, which raises certain headaches.

“We must make sure that nobody
here
asks
why.
So I want you to start by dealing with Sagan.”

Chapter Eleven:
Collecting
Jar

It’s noon, and the rippling heat haze turns the horizon
to fog in the distance. Maddy tries not to move too much: the cycads cast
imperfect shadows, and she can feel the Venetian blinds of light burning into
her pale skin. She sighs slightly as she hefts the heavy canvas sample bag out
of the back of the Land Rover: John will be needing it soon, once he’s finished
photographing the mock-termite nests. It’s their third field trip together,
their furthest dash into the outback, and she’s already getting used to working
with John. He’s surprisingly easy to get on with, because he’s so absorbed in
his work that he’s refreshingly free of social expectations. If she didn’t know
better she could almost let her guard down and start thinking of him as a
friend, not an employer.

The heat makes her mind drift: she tries to remember
what sparked her most recent quarrel with Bob, but it seems so distant and
irrelevant now–like home, like Bob arguing with her father, like their hurried
registry-office wedding and furtive emigration board hearing. All that makes
sense now is the stifling heat, the glare of not-sunlight, John working with
his camera out in the noonday sun where only mad dogs and Englishmen dare go.
Ah,
it was the washing.
Who was going to do the washing while Maddy was
away on the two-day field trip? Bob seemed to think he was doing her a favor,
cooking for himself and taking his clothes to the single over-used public
laundry. (Some year real soon now they’d get washing machines, but not yet…)
Bob seemed to think he was being big-hearted, not publicly getting jealous all
over her having a job that took her away from home with a male superior who was
notoriously single. Bob seemed to think he was some kind of progressive
liberated man, for putting up with a wife who had read Betty Freidan and didn’t
shave her armpits.
Fuck you, Bob,
she thinks tiredly, and tugs the heavy
strap of the sample case over her shoulder and turns to head in John’s
direction. There’ll be time to sort things out with Bob later. For now, she’s
got a job to do.

John is leaning over the battered camera, peering
through its viewfinder in search of…something. “What’s up?” she asks.

“Mock termites are up,” he says, very seriously. “See
the entrances?” The mock termites are what they’ve come to take a look
at–nobody’s reported on them from close up, but they’re very visible as
soon as you venture into the dusty plain. She peers at the foot of the termite
mound, a baked clay hump in the soil that seems to writhe with life. There are
little pipe-like holes, tunnels almost, emerging from the base of the mound,
and little black mock-termites dancing in and out of the holes in never-ending
streams. Little is relative–they’re almost as large as mice. “Don’t touch
them,” he warns.

“Are they poisonous?” asks Maddy.

“Don’t know, don’t want to find out this far from the
hospital. The fact that there are no vertebrates here–” he shrugs. “We
know they’re poisonous to other insectoida.”

Maddy puts the sample case down. “But nobody’s been
bitten, or died, or anything.”

“Not that we know of.” He folds back the lid of the case
and she shivers, abruptly cold, imagining bleached bones lying unburied in the
long grass of the inland plain, where no humans will live for centuries to
come. “It’s essential to take care out here. We could be missing for days
before anyone noticed, and a search party wouldn’t necessarily find us, even
with the journey plan we filed.”

“Okay.” She watches as he takes out an empty sample jar
and a label and carefully notes down time and date, distance and direction from
the milestone at the heart of Fort Eisenhower.
Thirty six miles.
They
might as well be on another planet. “You’re taking samples?”

He glances round: “of course.” Then he reaches into the
side pocket of the bag and removes a pair of heavy gloves, which he proceeds to
put on, and a trowel. “If you could put the case down over there?”

Maddy glances inside the case as he kneels down by the
mock termite mound. It’s full of jars with blank labels, neatly segregated,
impassable quarantine zones for improbable species. She looks round. John is
busy with the mock-termite mound. He’s neatly lopped the top off it: inside,
the earth is a squirming mass of–things. Black things, white things like
bits of string, and a pulp of half-decayed vegetable matter that smells damply
of humus. He probes the mound delicately with the trowel, seeking something.
“Look,” he calls over his shoulder. “It’s a queen!”

Maddy hurries over. “Really?” she asks. Following his
gloved finger, she sees something the size of her left forearm, white and
glistening. It twitches, expelling something round, and she feels her gorge
rise. “Ugh!”

“It’s just a happy mother,” John says calmly. He lowers
the trowel, works it in under the queen and lifts her–and a collection of
hangers-on, courtiers and bodyguards alike–over the jar. He tips, he
shakes, and he twists the lid into place. Maddy stares at the chaos within.
What is it like to be a mock termite, suddenly snatched up and transplanted to
a mockery of home? What’s it like to see the sun in an electric light bulb, to
go about your business, blindly pumping out eggs and eating and foraging for
leaves, under the eyes of inscrutable collectors? She wonders if Bob would understand
if she tried to tell him. John stands up and lowers the glass jar into the
sample case, then freezes. “Ouch,” he says, and pulls his left glove off.

“Ouch.” He says it again, more slowly. “I missed a small
one. Maddy, medical kit, please. Atropine and neostigmine.”

She sees his eyes, pinprick pupils in the noonday glare,
and dashes to the Land Rover. The medical kit, olive green with a red cross on
a white circle, seems to mock her: she rushes it over to John, who is now
sitting calmly on the ground next to the sample case. “What do you need?” she
asks.

John tries to point, but his gloved hand is shaking
wildly. He tries to pull it off, but the swollen muscles resist attempts to
loosen the glove. “Atropine–” A white cylinder, with a red arrow on one
side: she quickly reads the label, then pushes it hard against his thigh, feels
something spring-loaded explode inside it. John stiffens, then tries to stand
up, the automatic syringe still hanging from his leg. He staggers stiff-legged
towards the Land Rover and slumps into the passenger seat.

“Wait!” she demands. Tries to feel his wrist: “how many
of them bit you?”

His eyes roll. “Just one. Silly of me. No vertebrates.”
Then he leans back. “I’m going to try and hold on. Your first aid training.”

Maddy gets the glove off, exposing fingers like angry
red sausages: but she can’t find the wound on his left hand, can’t find
anything to suck the poison out of. John’s breathing is labored and he
twitches: he needs the hospital but it’s at least a four hour drive away and
she can’t look after him while she drives. So she puts another syringe load of
atropine into his leg and waits with him for five minutes while he struggles
for breath hoarsely, then follows up with adrenalin and anything else she can
think of that’s good for handling anaphylactic shock. “Get us back,” he manages
to wheeze at her between emphysemic gasps. “Samples too.”

After she gets him into the load bed of the truck, she
dashes over to the mock termite mound with the spare petrol can. She splashes the
best part of a gallon of fuel over the heap, coughing with the stink: she caps
the jerry can, drags it away from the mound, then strikes a match and throws it
flickering at the disordered insect kingdom. There’s a soft whump as the
igniting gas sets the mound aflame: small shapes writhe and crisp beneath an
empty blue sky pierced by the glaring pinprick of S Doradus. Maddy doesn’t stay
to watch. She hauls the heavy sample case back to the Land Rover, loads it into
the trunk alongside John, and scurries back towards town as fast as she can.

She’s almost ten miles away before she remembers the
camera, left staring in cyclopean isolation at the scorched remains of the dead
colony

Chapter Twelve:
Homeward
Bound

The big ground effect ship rumbles softly as it cruises
across the endless expanse of the Dzerzhinsky Ocean at nearly three hundred
knots, homeward bound at last. Misha sits in his cubby-hole–as shipboard
political officer he rates an office of his own–and sweats over his
report with the aid of a glass of Polish pear schnapps. Radio can’t punch
through more than a few thousand miles of air directly, however powerful the
transmitters; on earth they used to bounce signals off the ionosphere or the
moon, but that doesn’t work here–the other disks are too far away to use
as relays. There’s a chain of transceiver buoys marching out across the ocean
at two thousand kilometer intervals, but the equipment is a pig to maintain,
very expensive to build, and nobody is even joking about stringing undersea
cables across a million kilometers of sea floor. Misha’s problem is that the
expedition, himself included, is effectively stranded back in the eighteenth
century, without even the telegraph to tie civilization together–which is
a pretty pickle to find yourself in when you’re the bearer of news that will
make the Politburo shit a brick. He desperately wants to be able to boost this
up the ladder a bit, but instead it’s going to be his name and his alone on the
masthead.

“Bastards. Why couldn’t they give us a signal rocket or
two?” He gulps back what’s left of the schnapps and winds a fresh sandwich of
paper and carbon into his top-secret-eyes-only typewriter.

“Because it would weigh too much, Misha,” the captain
says right behind his left shoulder, causing him to jump and bang his head on
the overhead locker.

When Misha stops swearing and Gagarin stops chuckling,
the Party man carefully turns his stack of typescript face down on the desk
then politely gestures the captain into his office. “What can I do for you,
boss? And what do you mean, they’re too heavy?”

Gagarin shrugs. “We looked into it. Sure, we could put a
tape recorder and a transmitter into an ICBM and shoot it up to twenty thousand
kilometers. Trouble is, it’d fall down again in an hour or so. The fastest we
could squirt the message, it would cost about ten rubles a character–more
to the point, even a lightweight rocket would weigh as much as our entire
payload. Maybe in ten years.” He sits down. “How are you doing with that
report?”

Misha sighs. “How am I going to explain to Brezhnev that
the Americans aren’t the only mad bastards with hydrogen bombs out here? That
we’ve found the new world and the new world is just like the old world, except
it glows in the dark? And the only communists we’ve found so far are termites
with guns?” For a moment he looks haggard. “It’s been nice knowing you, Yuri.”

“Come on! It can’t be that bad–” Gagarin’s
normally sunny disposition is clouded.

“You try and figure out how to break the news to them.”
After identifying the first set of ruins, they’d sent one of their MiGs out,
loaded with camera pods and fuel: a thousand kilometers inland it had seen the
same ominous story of nuclear annihilation visited on an alien civilization:
ruins of airports, railroads, cities, factories. A familiar topography in
unfamiliar form.

This was New York–once, thousands of years before
a giant stamped the bottom of Manhattan island into the sea bed–and that
was once Washington DC. Sure there’d been extra skyscrapers, but they’d hardly
needed the subsequent coastal cruise to be sure that what they were looking at
was the same continent as the old capitalist enemy, thousands of years and
millions of kilometers beyond a nuclear war. “We’re running away like a dog
that’s seen the devil ride out, hoping that he doesn’t see us and follow us
home for a new winter hat.”

Gagarin frowns. “Excuse me?” He points to the bottle of
pear schnapps.

“You are my guest.” Misha pours the First Cosmonaut a
glass then tops up his own. “It opens certain ideological conflicts, Yuri. And
nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news.”

“Ideological–such as?”