Sun Dance

www.grosvenorhousepublishing.co.uk

By the same author,

Isolation Shepherd

The Long Horizon

The Endless Tide

The Raven’s Wing (poetry)

‘Entanglement'.

Who better than a Gaelic speaking, retired headmistress with her family roots in Skye to gather the drift of this yarn and moreover, fathom my style of spelling. For many years Roddy MacKenzie and I have played for the annual Hogmanay dinner dance at the Lovat Arms Hotel in Beauly. Auld Lang Syne, a 2am. last waltz and we all drew breath, I raised my glass to a couple whom I noticed knew all the dances; Morag Foster and husband, Peter. During the course of conversation I admitted to the intention of writing a novel. In the spirit of the occasion the lady offered to proof read it. Fortunately I didn’t forget. Years passed. On making a hesitant phone call, greatly to my surprise and now my sincere appreciation, she took up the challenge. Her expertise was applied and much encouragement has followed, hence the decision to publish. Thank you, Morag.

To Robbie Fraser Thomson for the front cover design and by no means least to Jane for providing my writing den with the odd bottle of Highland Park.

Hand turned coilacks of hay, cured by sun and the faintest breeze, dotted a small field beside the sea. Meadow grass and wild flower lay brown and gathered. Hay fork and wooden rake stood propped. The air's merest breath came and went as if the long gentle swell which spread without a sound on the curving sands was the lung of the great ocean itself. And here, under the sun's burning orb, the sheep's fescue and honeyed clover, poppy and trefoil in the fragrance of their wilting yielded the scent of days wholesome and forgotten; for over the scatter of tiny crofting fields there hung the blueness of immense time and distance.

Generation upon generation had built each field's fertility by the toil of the foot plough and the seaweed fills of woven creel. Crop of the seabed, harvest of an ocean cycle, it was cast at the foot of shifting dunes by the curl of winter's gale; long, dark lines of nature's bounty, gathered and spread by hand, dried by the summer's warmth. Bent shoulders carried its wealth to fields that tasted the salt spray and trembled to the thud of a winter sea. Living fields, alive, nurtured as though of the family they looked towards an ocean rim which lay so wide and vast it curved before them as the arc of the earth mirrors the tip of a setting sun.

Land, sea, and livelihood, man and beast; century upon century; slow the steps of change. Since times of hut circle and stone arrowhead what happenings had truly broken the bond twixt man and his natural habitat? Sunshine or storm, each season brought its trials, demands of self reliance, be they of the hearth, of birth, or of death; yet in turn they gave a quiet joy to the spring fields of plough and sow, filled a harvest barn with happiness.

Rhythms of the natural world reached to the heart of a simple life. Set amidst the shore borne cries of another's existence it held the satisfaction of caring for the living soil, and an abiding love and respect for the sea. Always about their daily work was the beat of the tide; and of a night, be it a sliver of crescent above mainland hills or queen of the harvest the moon lay golden on the western horizon, then deepest of all the union of moon and tide brought an unspoken awareness of the endless circle of being within the cusp of space.

That summer's day wild blooms covered a sheep cropped machair which gave margin to the land. Purple violets, a swath of buttercup yellow and here and there in clusters of blue petals flecked with white the little speedwells hugged the soil. Young skylark crouched speckled backed beneath tussocks of maram grass and where winter gales had stripped the dunes ring plover chicks hid panting in nests of shingle. Amongst the winding trails of orange dulse and bladder wrack whose tangled lines marked the tides of spring, listless the gulls stood hunched and silent.

Down on the beach cattle idled away the heat of the day flicking sand on their backs and cudding. By and by the imperceptible swell of an Atlantic at rest would spread cooling ripples about their feet and as far as a horizon could draw the eye each meandering current was etched on the surface of an ocean in different shades of blue; few the strangers that came the way to intrude on the peace, or leave the footprint of progress.

Eachan MacKenzie had passed several days turning and coiling his hay. As the field lay just beyond sight of the kitchen window, not a few moments were spent ‘in meditation' on the sunny side of his largest coilack. Leaning hay rake against pitch fork he allowed sun and the merest breeze the privilege of his afternoon's work. Through a dip in the dunes he watched a making tide, and turning his head looked down the field to the tufts of grass where he'd stopped the mower to save a skylark's nest. He closed his eyes, and overhead the skylark sang.

Last on, the exhaling breath of tube doors squeezed rubber to rubber, squeezed commuters, body to body. Contacts unnatural and indifferent, stranger to stranger, two million on the move, rarely a nod of recognition. I forced my way, the last aboard.

A jolt. The rising note of acceleration. The flow of electro-magnetic particles. The smell of energy turned to motion. The rumble of speed, a pack of faces left to wait quickly blurred. Flitting particles of humanity on a speeding platform, a nebulous streak, waiting.

We are children of the sun, energy transmuted, wavelength into particle, atom into molecule, inorganic to organic; from the kinetic fields of space, the sun’s rays condensed into consciousness, became the seeking wavelength of imagination, prying into the unknown, unwrapping the layers of fresh understanding. Will this body of knowledge evaporate with the death of the human species, be crushed to a singularity by the swirling blackness of gravity; or will it escape, pass through the orifice, emerge and remain the corpus of our thoughts, a wavelength in the realms of space, to wait?

Ten past five, flight at seven. A lean forty-six year old physicist, I led a research team at Geneva’s Fast Particle Reactor. Our work lay at the heart of the search for the ultimate relationship between mass and energy. By creating an immensely strong magnetic field and smashing together fundamental particles we sought to penetrate the fabric of a universe controlled by the ghostly hand of gravity; a force so weak, yet its effect all powerful. Standing before a screen watching the pattern created by disintegrating atoms dreamlike I’d wondered, could an understanding of particle entanglement be the key which would unlock the secret of time, the vital knowledge which could gain entry to dimensions beyond the grip of gravity, the circle of a reality where past and future are as one; for within the universe of entangled particles, though light years may set them apart, the force that binds them is mysterious as the nature of existence itself.

I was heading home to Switzerland having had what I’d expected to be a private interview in Downing Street with the U.K.’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir Joshua Goldberg. The fact of being called to Number 10 had surprised me. No matter, they checked identity and showed me into an ante-room; thick damask curtains, two leather topped desks, three solid mahogany doors, and in keeping with the nation’s peck order, an un-smiling portrait of the Queen hung on a richly panelled wall.

Sir Joshua padded in, his Hong-Kong pin-stripe suit perfectly tailored to fit a squat barrel on legs. His large round balding head, its dome burnished by high living, sat hunched on shoulders without any obvious neck. Nor was there a jaw line, rather two pouches which boasted crinkly grey sideburns. A flaccid handshake drew my attention to hands soft and exquisitely manicured. From under thick black eyebrows, small dark eyes gave an impression of not wishing to expose the thinking behind their unfocused greeting. As the interview developed they matched his evasive demeanor. I was addressing a man whose judgment influenced political thinking at the highest level, an awareness which, on reflection perhaps accounted for my starchy delivery.

In a perfunctory manner Goldberg flicked to the summary of my research paper, “I can read, so please be brief. Carry on.” His eyes remained on the desk. I began a broad outline of its content.

“I’m sure, Sir Joshua you are alert to the fact that during the past thirty years of nuclear production the operators of these facilities have been steadily enriching their uranium fuel to increase what they call the ‘burn up’ factor. Indeed during this period they have improved the daily gigawatt output of power per ton of uranium used by about fifty percent.”

Head to one side, elbow on the desk, with an air of impatience he drummed elegant fingers on its rich maroon leather surface. Looking sideways at the carpet he gave a non-committal grunt. I hurried to the main thrust of my paper, “Much higher temperatures are generated in the radio-active waste from this high ‘burn up’ residue.” I repeated, “in fact, much, much higher,”

He shrugged his heavy shoulders but said nothing. I drove home my point. “Enriched uranium with this level of efficiency can create a waste which is fifty percent more radio-active. Indeed this highly corrosive material is of considerable danger to the cladding of existing reactors. Any loss of their cooling water could trigger rapid oxidation and a possible explosive spillage of plutonium into the facility itself. As you will be aware Sir Joshua, the lifespan of these radio-active materials far exceeds the timescale of the unpredictable environmental changes we face. Even some of today’s nuclear plants may be under threat from climate change, rising sea levels, pressures on rock formations and so forth. Waste storage definitely faces the same problems. Should these unstable environmental conditions occasion wider leakage, then most certainly it would lead to widespread……”

Without looking up, the Chief Scientist interrupted me in a rasping tone. “The wider environmental issue is not the concern of your report. Kindly confine your comment to what it has to tell me. Please give me its specifics.”

I blushed at this rebuff, heart beating, anger rising. “Well, Sir Joshua, let me tell you, if the proposed extra nuclear plants go ahead in UK then the storage facilities you propose, on current design, are totally inadequate. I consider it to be unacceptable risk taking which I must say smacks of cost cutting.”

His eyes remained on the desk, the bald dome in front of me reddened.

Time to make an impact, drive home my second concern. “Frankly, these mini-nuclear plants, these encapsulated units, may be no more than 10 mega watt output, but I understand they are currently under construction by American and Japanese manufactures and are set to come on stream in the next few years. They will be sold worldwide. Nuclear packages, shipped round the world.”

The man’s shoulders stiffened. I carried on. “Developing countries may well lack handling expertise, and as for security, won’t you consider the global proliferation of radio active material could be a Godsend to insurgents?”

Goldberg looked up. For the first time, our eyes met. A second- no more. I looked into dark rimmed, black orbs filled with venom. They slid to one side. He penned a note and tossed it towards a secretary, who hurried from the room.

Resorting to insolence, if not intellectual arrogance I went on, “Anyway, back to waste storage. This is not sardines you’re dealing with, Sir Joshua, this stuff doesn’t pack easily. The underground storage you have in mind may not cope with the heat engendered and containers will be in danger of rupture. At the very least any break down would leak into surrounding rock strata and I’m sure I don’t need to remind you it remains dangerous for tens of thousands of years. However as a physicist, involved in the behavior of particles subjected to the pressures of intense radio-activity, I must warn you that under certain conditions the release of energy is, to put it mildly, dramatic.”

I continued with the details from my paper highlighting the disastrous contamination which might result due to underestimating the potential of the material involved.