The Islanders (22 page)

As a precaution against the security staff coming across her and challenging her for being on the beach at that time, Lorna always took the tabulator down to the beach with her, but this evening, as on most evenings, she did not switch it on.

The tabulator hung on its strap against her side. She could feel it vibrating gently in stand-by mode as it responded to the locating pulse of each of the incoming machines, separately identified. In this mode the tabulator’s detection of the drones was numerical: so many of them recognized and logged, so many accounted for. She would return to evaluating the more complex quantified results the next morning, after they had been downloaded at the base and sent along the landline to the MCI’s computers.

In the chartroom the staff would view the coverage of the ocean, then become absorbed in the task of tracing each drone back to its launch point, using the satellite returns to analyse its route. Working with the other cartographers, Lorna then laboriously transferred the images to the master data store. But even with a full complement of staff they were endlessly running behind – they were still trying to untangle the reports from more than two years before. Tonight’s mapping data would probably not be properly evaluated for another two years or more. Gradually, the backlog was increasing.

Lorna should have left the MCI and Meequa Island several months earlier, at the end of her contract, but she felt trapped by Tomak’s sudden disappearance. How could she leave until she knew what had become of him? Patta, her roommate, obviously thought it was time for her to move on, but that was for Lorna irrational and impossible. Tomak had left her with so many things unsaid, so many personal decisions unmade.

She still ached with love for him. Why had he left her that way? It was impossible to re-adjust until she found out what had happened.

She stared across the sea, under the scattering of drone lights, at the dark offshore island where Tomak had been posted. This was the real reason she came down to the beach every evening whenever she could, but it was becoming a habit. No longer a hope. Silence was the cruellest burden.

The other island had a name: Tremm, named after the mythological companion of Meequa, who was the bearer of messages. Tremm was Meequa’s outrider, the guard, the protector, the fast wanderer who passes. But the island which carried his name was dark and low against the twilit horizon, stolid and heavy-looking, as much unlike a fast-moving wanderer as it was possible to imagine. Tremm was directly opposite the cove, an hour or more by boat from Meequa, across the shallow strait, and whenever the drones swarmed in she would see the paths of their LEDs veering to one side or the other of the island.

Tremm had been charted years before, but ironically it was one whose details were the least known because of the secrecy that surrounded it. It was one of several closed islands in the vicinity of Meequa, taken over by the military many decades before. The drones were programed to avoid it. No one could go near it without permission. Anyone who did go there had to sign security pledges, and never spoke about the use the island was put to. Most rarely admitted they had even been on the place. Officially it had ceased to exist. Even to look at it was, in theory, to break military law, although the civilian cartographers at the MCI, and the ordinary people who lived in the town, could and did use this beach.

On the map of the Midway Sea Tremm did not exist. No island was drawn in its place. It was shown as an area of the sea, a dishonestly blank zone south of Meequa. Someone had fancifully added oceanic depths, and blue contour lines. The legend said in small blue letters:
DANGER

Gradually, the chart of the Dream Archipelago was taking shape, but because the drones were self-guided on reactive principles (programmed to avoid each other and solid objects, rather than seek out certain targets) most of their data was produced along randomized paths and therefore much of it overlapped. The returns inevitably revealed unidentifiable stretches of ocean.

Digital images of land, or better still of coastline, were comparatively rare, a fact which often surprised visitors to the mapping institute. To most people, the sea seemed crowded with so many islands that it was unbelievable that it would be difficult to chart the areas of land. However, less than five per cent of the Midway Sea was solid land, the rest being ocean, lagoons, rocky shallows, beaches, and so on. This percentage was a working assumption. The actual figure would not be known until the mapping was complete. Satellite images, invariably unreliable because of the temporal distortion zones, had provided the working estimate, but drawing detailed, reliable maps was a matter of urgency.

At least the MCI was well funded. People who ran wars needed maps.

The terrain of many of the islands, viewed from above, was unbroken forest, or unexceptional farmland with few distinguishing features. Many islands were desert. Where there were rivers they were usually short or narrow, or both, or overhung with foliage. Lakes were few. Mountain ranges were also a problem for a technical reason: the drones had a maximum working altitude, and when they approached that ceiling they were programmed to veer off. Coastlines were always more satisfactory to work with: the ports, peninsulas, cliffs, fort installations and river estuaries could usually be identified and located to particular known islands or even existing maps made by the locals.

The drones were programmed to detect and map roads, towns, railway lines, airfields, factories, homes, sources of pollution, and many more man-made objects. Mostly they found traces of sea.

Progress was therefore infinitesimally slow. When she began working in the Meequa Cartographic Institute as a young graduate, Lorna had imagined they would be mapping the whole shape and extent of the Dream Archipelago. As she quickly discovered, this gigantic task was still barely started, buried under an ever-growing mound of data. The only reliable trace they had was the individual path taken by each drone on each trip, and although this could be tracked against satellite data and computer records the amount of overlap and sheer number of indistinguishable images was overwhelming them.

More recently, as her youthful idealism was replaced by experience, she had found herself following the example of her colleagues. She started to concentrate on a single group of islands, ignoring all other data or passing it to colleagues.

Her chosen speciality was the cluster of cays, skerries and small islands in the southern seas close to Paneron, known informally as the Swirl, which comprised more than seven hundred different named places. Her first task had been to tabulate the names, itself a mammoth task. Many names were duplicated, many islands were named in different ways, and throughout the Archipelago, the Swirl being no different, local patois would use a locally recognized name while the inhabitants of other islands, some of them adjacent, knew the island by a different name. At least half of the known islands in the Swirl had no discernible name at all, yet her database had already passed five thousand separate names for the islands.

No one at the MCI had been to Paneron or the Swirl, no one at the MCI even knew anyone else who had been there. There were no formerly existing aerial photographs or drawings of the Swirl, and of course no charts were available. The satellite images, randomly distorted as always, suggested a spiral of islands, those towards the centre made to look larger than they probably were, those on the outer fringes smaller, and the rest warped in proportions whose extent could not be calculated.

A hundred books described the Swirl, but some of the accounts were only vague or lyrical, while most of the rest were written in the seductive rhythms of Archipelagian literature. A collection of seafarers’ yarns, told in archaic marine argot, happened to have become one of Lorna’s most reliable guides. Sailors were used to navigating, measuring, keeping logs, for all their fanciful stories of monsters and mighty tempests. Names were the only certainties – the culture of the islands was oral and textual, not visual.

Occasionally, one of the drones passed over an area of tiny islands and crags, and every now and again Lorna could make a matching identification and fit one more piece into her slowly shaping jigsaw.

Out of the known seven hundred she had so far charted three Swirl islands.

Such was the task. She knew that even if she lived to be an old lady, and worked in the MCI until the end of her life, no more than a quarter of the islands of the Archipelago would by then have been mapped. Maybe all of the Swirl would have been completed, perhaps many of the large islands elsewhere. But not all. Even by then.

She and the other cartographers had only charted a little over two thousand accredited islands. Another five thousand maps were in preparation. Beyond these were at least ten or twenty thousand more islands of unknown size, importance or position. The entirety of the task was still dauntingly unimaginable.

As the last of the loose formations of drones passed quietly overhead, Lorna walked across the shingly beach to a spur of smooth rock. The pebbles crunched and ground beneath her feet. She balanced the case of the tabulator against the outcrop, then leaned back on the sloping surface that faced the sea. She let her hands swing at her side.

Tomak had been away, presumably still on Tremm, for nearly two years. Never once in those months had she received any communication from him.

He warned her before he left.

‘They mute the islands they use,’ he said. ‘Tremm is shrouded.’

‘But there must be a way to call.’

‘It’s enclosed in a communications shroud. No sounds or transmissions enter or leave. No one without authority is allowed on, no one is allowed to leave.’

‘Then why should you go there?’

‘You know I can’t tell you.’

‘Then please don’t go.’

She had implored him throughout their last three weeks together, but one evening, after they had stood together on the beach to watch the drones flying in, he had been taken in a motor-lighter to a small ship waiting offshore. Before that final evening they spent a short holiday together, a tearful and frustrating experience for Lorna, but Tomak said only that he was unable to resist the force of military law. He promised that he would return as soon as he could, but so far he had not.

As a civilian she was abruptly excluded from his life. Not long after he departed, feeling betrayed by him, feeling abandoned, deep in loneliness, she took a kind of unintended revenge on him. Her physical affair with one of the graphics assistants had not lasted for long, and afterwards she felt a sense of crushing guilt and abhorrence at her own selfishness. Bradd Iskilip, the man in question, was still working in the institute, but whatever there had been between them was emphatically over. It already felt like a long time ago to her, although not nearly as long ago as Tomak’s departure. More than anything she wanted Tomak to return so that she could quietly, silently, close the error for good.

As the darkness of the sky deepened, she took her binoculars from their case and held them to her eyes. She focused on the dark jagged bulk of Tremm, knowing that if one of the patrols happened to come along the beach and spot her she would be in serious trouble. Her status at the mapping centre would be small protection.

At first she could make out little of the island in the dark, its steep mountainous sides almost at one with the sky. Then, as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she could discern the central mountains. Five of the highest peaks were visible from this shore.

Her practised cartographer’s eye made an inward plan: the five peaks that could be seen, the three that were out of sight beyond those, the plain on the north side facing her, the rolling terrain on the far side, somewhere a town on the coast. The contours and features taunted her, because she would never be able to check them or plot them. D
ANGER
, it said where Tremm stood.

The first of the fireflies glowed so quickly she almost missed it. She held the glasses steady, hoping for another. After a few minutes she saw a second one, then almost immediately a third. She reduced the focal length minutely, widening the field.

Bursts of light were appearing on the dark slopes of the distant island, a sudden silent flaring, like miniature explosions too distant to be heard. So far away from her, with no hint of the size. She began counting them, as she often did – she had spent so long quantifying data, so to her it was an automatic reflex.

Double figures in the first minute, then a pause. Twenty-five more followed swiftly, followed by another pause so long she thought the display had ended. Then a final outburst of flaring lights, always white and intense, now clustered together, almost a stream of lights, but there was no discernible pattern.

When she lowered the binoculars, she discovered someone was standing a short distance away from her. It was a man, his shape just visible against the white curve of the waters’s edge. She had not heard him walking across the shingle.

Swiftly, she moved the hand holding the binoculars, trying to slip them down out of sight. Just in case he had not noticed them, although of course he had.

‘May I look too?’

‘You know it’s illegal,’ she said. She recognized his voice, of course. Relief, irritation, both coursed briefly through her.

‘So do you.’

‘I was monitoring the drones.’ She touched the side of the tabulator.

‘Oh yes, of course.’ He stepped away from her, lowering his head, staring down at the surface of the beach. ‘You would have to say that. I know why you’re really here.’