The Weaver Fish (7 page)

‘Bloods for culture, coags, cross match, please Kelly, then antibiotics. ‘Did you examine his back?' he asked Anna.

‘Yes. Skin haemorrhage but no obvious injury.'

‘What do you make of this oedema?'

‘I was wondering if it might be anaphylactoid.'

Philip showed interest. ‘Kelly, let's set up adrenaline.'

He was still pumping, still looking at the monitor. ‘I wonder where he lost all that blood.'

He palpated the abdomen again. The skin was oedematous but the belly was soft. Max handed him a small printout of blood gas and biochemistry results.

‘Acidotic, renal failure, not surprisingly.' He stared at the man's head. ‘We should secure the airway before transfer.'

There was a note of ambivalence; with the grossly swollen neck it didn't look easy. Max already had an intubation tray prepared, and began to draw up the drugs. A few minutes later, an endotracheal tube was in place, and Philip was adjusting the settings on a portable ventilator.

‘Ready to go,' he said.

Max nodded and hurried to where he had previously signalled the pilot. A moment later they heard the rotors begin turning. Max continued on, returning shortly with a folding trolley.

‘Do you mind if we look through his pockets for ID?' said Anna.

‘Of course,' said Philip, and immediately Kelly examined them thoroughly, but found nothing.

‘Unknown male from Copio, then.' That was to be his medical identity.

‘Where will you take him, exactly?' It was Paulo who asked.

‘Madregalo General Hospital, ICU. We'll decide tonight if we need to ship him on. I'll update you this evening. Our team is here for another two weeks.'

They were transferring the patient to the transport trolley.

‘By the way, Anna, the colonel sends his best.' Not knowing exactly what this signified, Anna ignored it.

Kelly and Max positioned the ventilator, monitor and syringe pumps on the trolley, and each took one end. Philip walked beside it. Paulo and Nicholas helped by carrying the other cases. Within a few minutes, the aircraft lifted off and headed in the direction of the Edge.

Anna walked back to the canteen. Staff were tidying up the makeshift emergency area. The schoolchildren had been given meals in their classroom and were now well into afternoon lessons. Some volunteers were beginning a delayed lunch. She found Edvard's watch, briefly polished it on a towel, and put it in her pocket. Then she poured a coffee and walked outside. Paulo and Nicholas were standing on the gravel, looking at her.

‘Thanks for all the help you both gave. I'm sure he's in excellent hands now.' She paused to gauge their reaction. Paulo was the first to speak.

‘Do you really think it is Edvard?'

‘No. No, I don't, Paulo.'

In the following days, Anna spent much of her time at the Edge. Her imagination about Edvard's death was newly contaminated by contradictory threads of hope and pessimism. The fantasy of safe
Abel,
and the certain hopelessness of
Abel
destroyed, were alternately amplified and subsumed in the roar of the helicopter on its way to better patient care.

Philip Tersley had courteously kept her informed about the man's condition: he did not require transfer, his renal failure was improving without dialysis, he still needed assisted ventilation, and blood tests revealed a large titre of malaria parasites. He credited Anna with saving the patient's life. The police were told of the circumstances but no progress had been made with identification. Anna considered driving to Madregalo, but the
prospect of finding him unrecognisable was too painful. She didn't share this thought with the others.

Besides, there were new concerns at the station. Condors, which were rarely reported in the South Joseph, were being sighted as close as Copio. Along with all her unwelcome preoccupations, Anna had developed a new instinctual behaviour: whenever crossing the clearing, she looked upwards. And as far as they knew, the LDI members were the only people aware of the condors' apparently newfound aggressiveness. They wondered how best to convey this information to a people for whom the creature was generally auspicious.

Nicholas's connections in Madregalo reported the arrival of an important Chinese envoy, and more military attachés, but there were no stories about the condor attacks. Paulo surmised that officials in Beijing were displeased with the unexplained losses of men and matériel. He and Nicholas were keen to return to the north to examine developments, but were waiting for news from Philip. Their expectation was that as soon as the man from Copio recovered sufficiently, he would identify himself.

9

‘They're not birds, they're mosquitoes!' Edvard Tøssentern was beaming, like a man who has discovered that the Holy Grail was in his kitchen cupboard all along.

Paulo and Nicholas stared at him. Anna's look was diagnostic. She was quickly processing the more likely: a mosquito with a two-metre wingspan or that Edvard was ill.

It was three weeks after his medical evacuation and the four were in the LDI office, Edvard sitting at his desk. He sensed the misapprehension.

‘No, no, not one mosquito, millions. In formation,
en bloc,
cooperating. Mimicking a great bird. I know this—I've seen one close up. No eyes, no talons, no hard beak. They instantly disaggregate and reform. That's how a bullet can pass right through without disabling them. They can look invisible in a moment; who can see an individual mosquito at ten metres? And that's how they travel so easily through a dense forest canopy, say, or into that Chinese helicopter you described, through a small cockpit window. Then back in the coalesced state they adopt the aerodynamics of a bird; it's energy conserving, using the wind, gliding.'

Anna had to interrupt. Edvard had given a short account of his crash landing in the storm, but not everything that happened subsequently.

‘You've seen one close up? You were attacked by a condor?' She was not yet ready to reconceptualize the bird.

‘I was attacked by a condor-shaped mass of mosquitoes, Anna,' he corrected. ‘Think of the math, as Walter Reckles would say. Per insect we have about a milligram. Three, four, five million—that's
a mass up to five kilos, a lot of momentum when they hit you at the speed they can achieve flying like a bird.'

‘But to transfer that kinetic energy on impact they would need to be strongly cohered. How do they fit together?' It was Nicholas.

‘I don't know. We need to study them. Apart from some
Anopheles,
we assume that most of the mosquitoes around here are
Phulex irritans,
but we're almost certainly dealing with a different species. We know, at least, it has some anopheline character, as an efficient malaria vector. But to answer the question, it must have, I would imagine, thoracic appendages that can interlock, affording whatever structural rigidity, force transfer and control linkages they require to fly that way.'

Anna was only half listening; she was thinking more mathematics. She knew that a mosquito could typically double its weight with gorged blood. Three million insects meant three litres, more than half the adult human blood volume. That accounted for shock and anaemia. The coagulopathy, allergic oedema, infection and parasitic load were explained by the volume of total salivary injectate. She looked at Edvard. He was talking excitedly about the new research project, so characteristically removed from linguistics.

‘We don't capture a condor, we catch
Phulex.
Breed them in tanks, watch their development, study the integration mechanics. We'll get Walter's help with the flight science. Who's an entomologist?'

No one answered immediately, but there was no dissent. Then Nicholas spoke.

‘I suggest we do the project but keep it secret for now. We'll warn the villagers to use mosquito protection and insect repellent more carefully, just saying there is a worsening malaria problem. We won't mention the condor. So if the Chinese can't figure out what's happening to them and sustain more losses, they may scale down the logging and eventually leave. After all, the more swamp they create, the more condors they breed.'

Again, there was no dissent. Edvard looked delighted. It felt conspiratorial.

‘In that way,' continued Nicholas, ‘our condors may save the northern plain.'

Tøssentern looked at the office clock, calculating aloud the time zone in North America. Then he phoned Walter Reckles in New Mexico.

Reckles was on the first available flights, arriving at the LDI station two days later by chartered helicopter from Madregalo. Tøssentern had requested he bring some microscopes and entomology gear from the US. These were in a large box that the pilot helped unload and carry into the joint office. Apart from that, Reckles seemed to be travelling light, with a backpack and a large blue duffel bag secured by laces.

Tøssentern introduced Nicholas and Paulo. Then Reckles turned back and placed his hands on Tøssentern's shoulders in a brief hug.

‘My friend,' he said. ‘You had me worried.'

Anna had been standing back slightly. She had had a technical correspondence with Reckles, about
Abel'
s engineering, but she wasn't sure how he would have reacted to her earlier interview piece for
Aviation Reviews.
Perhaps it had been a little too sardonic. Reckles turned to her, smiling broadly.

‘It's a real pleasure to see you again...' Anna steeled herself for Miss or Honey.

‘Anna.'

That was nice. They shook hands. She decided to ask about the book, which had not yet appeared. He managed to convey his disappointment with grace.

‘Yeah. The book. The publisher's getting very particular. They want corroboration now. Expect me to drop ten kilometres on a salvaged 7T7 wing jettisoned from a Globemaster. Pilot it down with my bare hands and a borrowed neck-tie. They're very literal, publishers.'

‘What did you say to them?'

‘I said I wasn't an experimentalist.'

His green eyes, fixed on Anna, looked sad. She understood. That book, for Reckles, was something of a crusade for aviation safety, however bizarre. Quite abruptly, he brightened, and stepped toward his luggage by the door.

‘I've brought something for you all, folks.' He unlaced the duffel bag and pulled out four Reckles Texan hats.

‘No need to worry, one size fits all. But Anna, this one's probably best for you.' He handed it to her, with that broad smile again, the green eyes now delighted and generous.

Anna was thrilled; she had read about these somewhere, but never actually seen one. She thanked him warmly, and put it on. Reckles politely adjusted its angle on her head.

‘Like that. If it blows away, it wasn't on correctly. I hope there's wind around here.'

‘We have big winds down at the Edge. That's a place we like to walk to. We could go there this evening,' said Anna.

The others were all trying on their hats, murmuring their appreciation, with Reckles providing fine adjustment. He had his own, in the bottom of the duffel. From then on, they wore them everywhere, every day. It was a token of membership of their secret
Phulex
fellowship.

The more Anna worked with Walter Reckles, the more she liked him. She had known that he was charming and clever. She had seen how he was more the theorist than pragmatist, and that certainly wasn't to be criticized. But in his time at the LDI station, she came to appreciate his infectious idealism, a tangential eclecticism for interesting things, and tireless enthusiasm for their project. Unsurprisingly, he seemed very content inhabiting the abstract world of models and simulation. He was very like Edvard in all sorts of ways.

Anna, as the only one with a biological background, had been voted entomologist. Paulo helped her set up the breeding tanks with high-speed video. They also used low magnification light microscopy to examine specimens at various grades of maturity. Edvard had guessed correctly. Transverse thoracic appendages developed which had no equivalent organ in any other recorded species. There also seemed to be serrations of the proboscis that were probably involved in linkage.

The breakthrough was capturing on video just two mosquitoes joined in parallel. They were powering flight with one outer wing each, their medial wings locked together to form a semi-rigid
aerofoil. The video caught the altered flight for a few seconds, some glide, and their disengagement. Walter was delighted; even from that brief vision, he could adduce some rough parameter constraints that assisted in model development.

They hoped to witness larger aggregates, but this didn't happen. Paulo suggested that the mosquitoes might need air currents to stimulate the behaviour, and so it proved. When he built a new breeding aquarium with netted ends exposed to natural wind, aggregates of up to a hundred or so insects formed and dispersed with surprising frequency. In those numbers, they didn't take the condor form, of course, but video playback in slow motion showed their disposition within the aggregate, and clarified some of the mechanics of assembly. This confirmed Walter's expectation that any stable aggregation with a tensioned flight surface required individuals to occupy all axial degrees of freedom, and specifically, that aggregated
Phulex
obtained the required flight properties by adopting fullerene architectures as basic structural units.

The observation was an enormous boost to theory development. With a model explaining structural integrity, rigidity and flexibility, they could move on to the problem of energetics, essentially how the graceful wing movements in the aggregated form could be powered from many millions of high frequency, oscillatory insect flight muscles.

Their pace of work was frenetic, driven partly by intrinsic intellectual urgency and partly by the unstated realization that everyone had other commitments that could not be postponed indefinitely. Reckles needed to return to his company and family, Nicholas had agreed to take up a temporary consultancy with a bank in Australia, and Anna was increasingly missed at the Compton Institute. She was also concerned that Edvard was not best situated for his convalescence; he had missed two visits to Madregalo for follow-up tests, solely because the logistics of travelling there were so difficult. Looking after him would be much easier at home in Cambridge.

By the time Reckles left, four weeks after he had arrived, they had a reasonable first draft of their paper. The plan was for Paulo to visit the northern plain and obtain video of the condors in
flight, which would be sent to Flight Control for analysis. Anna and Edvard left the following week, while Nicholas remained to finalize some of his LDI work before his own departure to Perth.

There exists, in a rusting filing cabinet somewhere in the South Joseph, a notarized
manuscript
authored by Tøssentern, Cinnamonte, Misgivingston, Reckles and Camenes, awaiting its timely submission to
Nature.
Modestly entitled
‘Phulex
allotropy', it is the first fully scientific account of
Condorasiaticus fugax,
therein renamed
Phulex coalescens condorformis.
And when it is published, the Republic of Ferendes will find that its majestic national emblem is really a mosquito, and the heroic Queen Rep'husela was ever in danger of falling from the sky.

Historians of science should note that the special properties of fullerene geometry were exploited by
Phulex
long before the invention of the geodesic dome. Of course, the element carbon has priority over both.