Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us for the second volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!

Audio for this episode:

28 – Just Getting Started

A tiny pocket beach of soft gray sand holds two figures intertwined on a blanket. The morning is warm. The wind is nonexistent. The sea murmurs instead of roars.

Maahjabeen kisses Pradeep’s hairline from one side to the other, little soft benedictions meant to quiet the unhappy buzzing in his skull. His latest extended outburst appears to be over and now he lies trembling in her arms, as spent as if he’d orgasmed.

Maahjabeen finally understands the reason for this quivering tension in him. Pradeep had been holding it close since the day before, when he had grown so withdrawn yesterday evening. She had almost bought, along with everyone else, his complaint after dinner that he was exhausted when he withdrew into his silent little pyramid, but she’d known something was bothering him. She’d assumed it was a touch of anxiety about their changing situation but this is much more than a touch. It is a storm, a flood of panic that has no basis in reality.

The idea that other hidden people live on this island—modern people with secret agendas—had been an idea he couldn’t dismiss. It had shocked him yesterday, it turns out, that everyone else hadn’t become as paranoid, as if they’d all rise up and beat the rushes from one end of the island to the next looking for spies or something. Now he thinks they’re all being wildly reckless because they were able to… what, change the subject? Realize there’s more than one thing to worry about out here? Celebrate Jay’s delicious catch and thank the Lisicans? All that should just be shelved until the mystery of the villagers who won’t get sick is solved?

“This is why you need God, dear one.” She nestles his face maternally in the holy space between a woman’s jaw, shoulder, and breast. She is cooing to him, watching the sea birds sailing above, petting his face. Satisfied with how his trembling is fading away, Maahjabeen is encouraged to continue. “It is too easy for you to fall into your own personal view of things. Your own reality. But when you know there is a single divine eye watching down on you, witnessing and judging every moment of the world around you…”

Pradeep lifts his head. His smile is tight and his laugh is staccato. “Ah hahaha. Maybe you don’t tell the guy with anxiety that there’s an all-seeing eye that sees everything he does, always judging him.”

“No, but He loves you!” Maahjabeen caresses Pradeep again. “It all comes from a place of love. Can’t you see that? It is where my love comes from. And you like my love, don’t you?”

Pradeep stares at her with helpless ardor. “I love your love.”

“It is the same love. That is all I am saying. And judgment is good. It keeps us living healthy, righteous lives. Lives with meaning. The scriptures contain all the wisdom one needs in life. It is like a guide book, a rule book our holy ancestors wrote down…”

She continues instructing him in the details of her faith. But he had stopped following after she had said it is the same love. Wait. Her idea of god’s love is the same as this incomprehensible and glorious love that she is showering on him? Well then, blimey. Sign him up. Maybe he’s ready for religion after all. He could never worship nearly anything he has ever discovered in this universe, except for this. This tapestry of honey in woman’s form. This love, as pure and infinite as the ocean. Yes, he will happily worship this. He buries his face deeper into her soft skin, this holy temple, letting the words soothe him, until he is dozing in her embrace.

Maahjabeen listens to the tide, her voice fading. Good. The more she talks the further she drifts from the essential core of her faith. Ultimately, she isn’t much of a religious scholar. She is not actually excited by the textual details of her religion. It is the culture that it provides and the mystical insights it unlocks within her, especially out here in the middle of nowhere. Oh, they couldn’t be more alone if they tried, just her and the man she loves. Who would ever need more than this? They could fish from their boats and build a driftwood hut up against the cliffs and live happily here forever, or at least until a storm wiped them all away…

Eh, what was that? Maahjabeen realizes her eyes have also closed and she starts back awake, Pradeep heavy in her arms. What did she hear? Feel? Sense somehow? What was it? The beach is empty. The kayaks, blue and yellow, still rest safely above the tideline. The sea remains calm. Out at sea, she glimpses a sheen of wide black skin rolling, just breaking the surface, on the far side of the waves. Ah, is that her orca spirit animal watching over her?

Yet her spine still itches of being watched. She needs to see up behind her on the cliff before she can settle. But that will mean dislodging Pradeep. “So sorry, love.” She slips out from under his embrace and is surprised that he doesn’t wake.

Sitting up, she turns. There is nothing but the bleak cliff behind her. Maahjabeen studies the bare walls of it until she is satisfied that whatever may have regarded her is now gone. Perhaps it was the orca, watching over her. Or warning her…

Something uncanny fills Maahjabeen when she turns away from the cliffs. She swears she caught a glimpse, just before she turned, of a native person, of indeterminate age and gender, just a fat little golem of a person with graying ringlets and a multitude of fetishes hanging from their dark cloak in the shadows at the base of the cliff. But when she looks at the spot again she sees no one.

Maahjabeen frowns, reality fraying at the edges. She has always been happy to have a deep mystical connection to the great and grand forces of the universe but this witchy nonsense is creeping her out. Is it real or is it a figment of her imagination? Why would her brain ever do this to itself? She had been so happy, content, with Pradeep in her arms.

But what if it’s real…?

Maahjabeen turns away from the spot again, and once again catches the briefest glimpse of the same person, standing hunched at the base of the cliff where they hadn’t been a moment before. She snaps her gaze back, but no. Nothing.

Now Maahjabeen can’t tear her eyes from the spot. “Pradeep.” She nudges him. “Uhh. Baby? Can you give me a hand?” But for some reason, once again, he doesn’t wake up. She pokes him even harder. “Pradeep. Hey. I need you.”

A chill descends from the cliff, tendrils of fog whispering down from the sky. What is going on? Why can’t she wake Pradeep up? Something malevolent is looming over her from the cliffs above. It is that shaman, someone she’s never before seen. There must be another one of those horrible tunnels that connects to the interior and now this creature is here, raining curses down on them.

It is the power of the sky that the shaman invokes. Maahjabeen knows this intuitively, the cold forbidding sky. And she knows as well that she is not without her own power. She is a dedicated maiden of the sea. And the sea is right here. In fact, her protector lies just offshore!

Without another thought, Maahjabeen stands and runs barefoot, clad only in her panties and bra, to the edge of the water. The sand is dark and the air is cold against her back. She isn’t looking at the cliff but she can distinctly see in her mind’s eye the shaman lifting a staff from which hang more fetishes, ready to call on powers dark and dreadful to keep her from reaching the water. All she needs to do is touch mother ocean, and she will find shelter from the sky under her cold dark waves.

Then yes! Another sheen of black from the water and this time a white eyepatch! It is her orca! Her mighty orca! And no clever monkey of the land, regardless of their spells and tokens, can fight an orca and win! “Oh, thank you, God, for sending me an angel!”

Maahjabeen touches the ebbing tide. It is even colder than she recalled, and forcefully reminds her that it is no sanctuary for her. She needs the air to breathe. The cold will steal her life. As much as she might wish she is a mermaid, she is a human woman after all and she is destined to live and die on land. So she turns back, filled with the strength of her conviction that this edge of two worlds—no, three—between the land and the water and the sky, is where she belongs. And no shaman’s curses can dislodge her from it.

The water splashes her, again, running up her side. This is a big wave. She needs to drag Pradeep and the boats clear. Aziz and… and… what did Amy name her other boat?

The water runs up against her once more, covering her face and nostrils… She sputters, sitting up. Oh, no! They’re swamped!

She startles awake. It had been a dream. A horrible dream and now she’s really here on the beach. She’d fallen asleep on the blanket with Pradeep and the tide had come in. It had been the tide hitting her three? four times? before she’d finally woken up.

Dizzy, she pulls Pradeep to his feet. He is still groggy, in a stupor. The blanket twists in the flowing current around their feet. The water is so cold. Then the leading edge of the wave touches the cliff face and pulls back, dragging the kayaks toward the sea…

“No! La! La!” Maahjabeen squeals, pushing Pradeep toward the blue kayak, which founders on rocks near where she left it. But Firewater (of course that’s its name!) is racing out to sea on the top of the tide. She churns after it, unable to let the sea take her boat.

Maahjabeen stumbles in the retreating surf and it soaks her, shocking her with its frigidity. But the yellow kayak meets the next wave rushing in and it is pushed sideways, then pressed against the sand below as the water overtops the hatch and pours in.

“No!” Maahjabeen screams again, reaching the kayak and dragging on it before it is swamped entirely. The wave crashes around her, nearly knocking her from her feet. But she regains her footing and stubbornly hauls the kayak from the water.

Shivering, spent, she rejoins Pradeep, who is fully awake now and waiting for her with a dry towel. He scrubs her, murmuring tender words, and prepares both of them for a quick retreat back to camp.

The shock of the water and nearly losing her boat forces all other thoughts from her head. It is a long time before Maahjabeen ever thinks of her nightmare again.

Ξ

“Living my best life, yo.” Jay climbed this bay tree last night and a wide nook separating one of its primary limbs from the trunk was enough of a spot for him to curl up in and survive the cold. Yet somehow he’d slept well. Must have been all the wine and weed. His emergency bivy sure helped too. Now he rolls it up and stows it away, studying the soft gray dawn light through the trees.

He is fully stocked and prepared for once. His injuries no longer hamper him. He wears his best gear and carries a full pack. Now it’s time to finally take the measure of this fucking island.

Jay drops to the ground, his legs not quite working yet. He falls sideways with a laugh into the duff. Well, at least it’s a soft landing. He picks himself up to find a pair of children waiting patiently for him at the base of the tree. “Oh! Hey! What’s up?” Jay fishes for his mask as he stumbles back to a safe distance. They watch him impassively. The kids here have such fine, impish features that he can’t tell if they’re boys or girls or… or foxes. They both look like little kits, with yellowish eyes and pointed muzzles.

Jay pulls off his pack and finds a bag of dried banana chips. He chews a few, easing his hunger, and holds out the ziploc bag to the kids. They don’t reach for it, though. They just watch him. “Pretty tasty. You don’t know what you’re missing… No? Okay. More for me.” He puts the chips back in his pack, takes a long drink of water from a steel bottle, and swings his pack back on. “Okay now. Let’s get cracking. I’ve been waiting to do this for weeks!”

Jay steps out from under the low-hanging canopy of the tree to scout the gentle hillside. He and the kids are in the interior valley downslope from the village, with the stream and wider river at the bottom of this vale, unseen down below. It had been an excellent camping spot last night, quiet and safe. The boys he’d partied with, Ahkhaachooix and Tlél wugoot, had eventually gone to bed in the village at the end of the festivities and he’d wandered down here for some shuteye.

None of the other researchers know he is gone. They’d all been asleep when Jay and his new buddies had closed down the party at camp and retreated back through the tunnels to the village, where they’d found an even larger party celebrating the harvest the rest of the troop had brought from the sea.

The villagers had all been so happy and welcoming, feeding him from their own plates and everything. Jay was pretty sure his chill surfer zen vibe was what they needed, not more chattering scientist nerds and all their pet theories.

By the end of the night, Jay had realized this was the Tuzhit festival they’d been talking about. And that Tuzhit was a name. It was like an ancestor’s birthday or something. There had been tons of speeches and formal chants and things, but still no music.

“Yeah, I left them,” Jay confesses, turning back to the kids. “I mean, if I’d told the others I was coming they wouldn’t have let me, or they would have made me bring someone else, someone who doesn’t want to do everything I got to do out here. See, I’m like a shepherd. You know dogs? Woof woof? Like the fox. But a working dog, herding sheep. My buddy Nate had a shepherd mix, real cutie named Stewart, all black and white. And whenever we went on a hike with Stewart he’d disappear for like a full hour. And Nate would just shrug and say, he’ll be back, he’s just getting the lay of the land. And that’s how I am. I got to get the lay of the land. That dog would scour every inch of whatever hill or valley until he knew it as well as his backyard. Only then would he settle down and hike right next to us. That dude was legit.”

The kids are still only watching him.

Jay laughs at his wasted breath. “Uh. Good talk. So off I go. Don’t, uh… don’t stick beans up your nose or nothing.”

Jay cinches the waist belt on his pack. It’s got a good twelve kilos in here. He’ll feel it after a while for sure. Now off he goes to the bottom of the valley! He’d thought about checking in with the village before he set out, especially if there was any of that yummy mussels and aromatic leaf dish left over from last night. But he was afraid they’d try to talk him out of his walkabout too so it’s for the best that he just head out. He’ll take three days tops to really scout the canyons and perimeter before returning home. Then he’ll take whatever punishment Esquibel and Alonso and Amy come up with. But they’ll all gain the benefit of his discoveries.

He reaches the creekside where the villagers get their water. He could fill up here but his bottles are still full. Aw, shit. Those kids are following him. They’re like forty meters back up the trail, their golden curls speckled with dew. That’s the last thing he needs, a pair of kids to worry about. He flashes a shaka. “Hang loose, little buddies. But I got to do this on my own, you dig?”

They apparently do not dig. When he starts walking they follow again, trailing behind at a safe distance.

“Well, let’s see what you do at the crossing.” Jay enters the wide bowl of the river valley. Blossoms cover the grasses with fields of yellow, white, and purple. “Beauty. Spring has sprung for sure.” Jay walks through the meadow, hands trailing along the tops of flowers. Soon his palms are coated in golden pollen. He turns back to the kids to show them his hands. “I am the King of Hayfever!”

But still they only watch.

“Quite the day. Pretty warm inland.” Jay takes off his pack at the riverbank and strips off a sweater. He studies the crossing as he stows the sweater and puts his pack back on. The river is blue-black, as wide as a four-lane road, with steep banks on both sides. He knows from his previous exploration that there’s no easy way across. He’ll just have to use his ingenuity.

“Well… I could drop a couple trees and use them as a bridge. But somehow, I doubt your folks would be happy about that. I could, let’s see… I’ve got an inflatable pillow here. Maybe I can use it like a floaty.” He scrambles down the muddy bank to the water, where he dips a hand in it. Super cold. Much colder than expected. He pulls back with a hiss. “Yeah, homie ain’t swimming across that, no sir. And it looks like there’s a deep current in there.” He scrambles back up to the top of the bank to pull a buck knife from his pack.

The meadow behind him is now empty. “Well at least the kids are gone.” He sighs, knowing it was his interaction with this taboo river that got them to take off. This couldn’t be a wise thing, to mess with the DMZ between two warring villages. But Jay has never been too wise. He needs to see what is on the far side. It’s like a biological compulsion driving him.

He retreats to the woods and takes down a good forty fir saplings, all of them about as wide as a pool cue and as tall as his body. He trims their branches off and bundles them with twine into a heavy raft, two layers thick. Then he notches the saplings so he can lay crosspieces for more support. The work is arduous and soon he’s sweating. He takes off his windshirt and another layer. Now he’s barechested in the humid morning, just a man and his knife. Collecting the trimmed branches, he ties them atop it as a thick green deck. Finally, after an hour or more, he drags the completed vessel to the edge of the bank. One last sapling, a long pole, will be his only steering device. All he has to do is cross no more than thirty meters of river to get to the far side…

He puts on his pack and pushes the raft mostly into the river. The unseen current pulls at it and Jay has to hold it and dig his pole into the mud at the same time to keep the raft from being carried away. He crawls out onto it as the current pulls it free from shore. With a mighty shove from his pole he attempts to get the raft out toward the center of the river.

Jay gathers the pole and pushes it down below him. But he can’t find the bottom. It is already over two meters deep here. Now he just waves the pole ineffectually about as the raft starts to spin. “Uh oh. This is the… I guess this is why you don’t cross rivers solo…”

He can’t get the raft to cross any more of the river. It takes him downstream at an increasing clip, a good five meters from the shore he left, pushing him past the bare bank on the far side down to where it’s far more overgrown. Jay keeps trying with the pole, hoping to find anything to push down there. But it’s deep, even deeper than this nearly three meters of sapling and his extended arm up to the elbow. He lies down, reaches his furthest into the black water with it, pulls it back, nearly topples as the raft rocks, and accidentally drops the pole. It floats away out of reach.

“Aaagggh.” Now he has no way to steer. With his frozen hands he paddles, trying to make of the raft a giant surfboard. Face down on the wet boughs, Jay paddles with his deepest, strongest stroke, first on one side, then the other. In this way, he is able to push the raft across the river as it carries him even further downstream. Now he is in the trees where they overhang the far bank.

Scrambling to his knees, Jay snares a drooping branch. It looks like some kid of willow variant. He’ll have to study it more closely after he saves himself. He slowly draws the raft toward the far bank, afraid the branch will snap, but it doesn’t. He pulls up to a mess of bracken that prevents the raft from reaching solid ground.

Jay tests the bracken. It is storm-wrack, decaying logs and branches dragged downriver to rest here against the bank, until the next storm dislodges it and pushes it further down. He can’t stand on it. It sinks beneath his weight. And the bank is still out of reach. “This is how you get tangled and pulled under and drowned, homeslice.” He can’t get out here. It’s impossible. Giving up on this exit point, he liberates a splintered limb that is wide enough to have its broken end serve as an oar.

Jay pushes away from the willow and its false bank and paddles madly for another spot further downriver. Finally, he reaches it, tumbling off the raft onto the muddy slope and nearly falling back in. Only pushing himself from the water with the oar saves him. But the raft is lost, spinning away in the current out of view.

Sodden, frozen, and a bit scared, Jay crawls up the far bank. The fir needles are fragrant and their points prick his palms. There’s no going back now. At least, not for a while. The thought of building another raft and putting himself through that ordeal again is enough to nearly make him give up on life.

“But first… the rest of the fucking island.” Standing, he brushes the needles from his wet pantlegs and exits the dark woods. He wants to get back to the meadow on this side and all its flowers.

The ground here beneath the brown needles is crumbled and hollow, as if it’s a home for a warren of ground squirrels or gophers. Mushrooms, pale yellow and golden, peek out from where they lift the topsoil above them. Some could be chanterelles. Maybe Cantharellus pallens. Jay stops to inspect them. Yes! A big chunk of a fresh one, as big as his fist, he levers out of the ground with his knife. Oh, what he would do for a stick of butter and a head of garlic. Well. He’ll just have to build a fire and roast this bad boy all by itself. Maybe with some bay leaves… He wishes he’d known what the fragrant leaves were he ate with the mussels last night but he only saw them after they’d been cooked and mashed.

Ha. Those nerds are sure going to miss his cooking. Watch, he’s going to return with like a buck slung over his shoulder, shouting, “We feast!” Jay cries it aloud as he steps out into the meadow.

He sees movement among the waving blossoms. “Whoa. No way.” There are people out there. Three, no, four. Small and slender, their faces are covered in featureless masks of golden pollen, standing among the flowers, waving their dark arms in slow imitation of tree limbs in the wind.

His words echo across the silent meadow and draw their faces toward him. Their faces are blank, smooth, entirely covered in pollen. “What the…? Okay, I was wrong. You motherfuckers are the kings of the hayfever. Those masks are sick. How the hell are y’all even breathing?”

He’s never seen humans stand like this, nor move their limbs in such odd unjointed ways. Jay looks back at the woods, thinking it may be his refuge. Maybe not. He turns back to the pollen people.

“So they say struck dumb, like that’s a thing, you know? But the thing is I’m already dumb and I can’t seem to shut up so I don’t know what to call that.” Jay realizes he’s blithering. But he can’t stop. “You all, uh, I mean, we’re all carbon-based life forms here, right? I mean, right? We’re all mammals? Or are some of us, I don’t know, like actually plant-based or…?”

One of them sways toward him, its movements more like those of a sapling’s stalk than an animal’s muscles.

“Okay. Now that is creeping me out. No way, dude. No way. I can’t accept that this is real. There aren’t like—”

A bird’s sharp trill, from further in up away from the river, gets the four golden figures to suddenly turn and dash, totally human, and race downriver past him, one giggling and tearing her wood mask from her face as she goes.

Now Jay quivers with astonishment. They are people after all. I mean, of course they are. Golden plant people don’t exist. Pollen faced people… He shivers. But he can’t ignore the fact that they’re fleeing from someone. Someone is coming. Jay should himself follow them. He hurries back into the woods.

A trio of hunters, two young men and a woman, glide into the meadow. They hold short two-prong spears and carry javelins on their backs. Dressed in hide tunics and leggings that have been blackened and softened by grease, they make no noise as they study the tracks of the pollen people through the trampled flowers.

Now they are coming this way. Jay hides behind the wide trunk of a redwood. This is stupid. They’re going to find him. And if they’re surprised then they might be more dangerous. There’s only one way to play this. He steps out, arms up, and faces them.

The three hunters stop, frozen mid-stride. They are low to the ground, like wolves on a kill.

Jay laughs nervously. “H-h-hey. I mean, hi there. It’s just me. Dancing in the flowers. Nobody else. Remember me? From before? With the smoke and the fire?”

They make a silent decision and arrow toward him again. The two behind split off to the left and right to flank Jay. Their faces are closed, their eyes dark and sharp as fangs.

“Hey now.” Jay has been in more than his share of scrapes and can tell where this is heading. He puts his back to the redwood and stands tall, which is much taller than them. Hands up, he swings his pack off. “Let’s not do this, folks. Nobody needs to get hurt.”

But they obviously disagree. The three hunters move in a coordinated rhythm to within ten paces of him.

They’ve fought men before. Jay realizes this as he cracks a knuckle against the hardness of his phone in the front pocket of his pants. Fumbling at his hip, he might need to whip out his buck knife here. But he has a better idea instead.

Jay pulls out his phone and holds it up. “Oh, you want some of this? You want to try me and my badass twenty-first century wizardry? Then smile.”

He takes a photo with a flash. The three hunters yelp, like dogs in a thunderstorm, and freeze again, hunching lower.

“Oh, you like that? Yeah. That’s right, dude. I’m stealing your fucking soul.” He takes another flash photo and another, one for each. “Sorry. That was racist. Lots of, uh, assumptions in that one. But check it out! I hold the power of lightning and thunder!”

Jay turns the volume of his phone up high as the opening chords of Cerebral Bore’s Maniacal Miscreation begin. Banging his head, he advances on them, howling, “Carve a path unto obsidian – insane creation of an abscessed mind…! Maniacal Miscreation!” But these last two words are shouted at their retreating backs. They broke and ran when the guitar went full heavy metal. In the quiet meadow the phone is startlingly loud. Now the hunters must be racing back to tell all their friends and relations about the giant pale magic man and the power he holds in his hand.

Jay turns off the music. His hands are shaking. “Well so much for the fucking prime directive. Couldn’t have interfered more. Uhh. Now what do I do?” His imagination goes wild, afraid the entire countryside will rise up against him, to hunt him down and make an example of his trespass, his head on a pike for all to see.

But if he returns now, will the hunters follow him back across the river and start a war with the village he knows? And with all the talk of spies and geopolitics his mind tolls like a bell, as big as the whole globe. Are the good Lisicans like the American village and these psychos are like the Russian village? Would they start a fight here that spirals outward to engulf everyone else? Did Jay just start World War Three?

“Okay. Okay, get a grip, dude.” Jay fishes in his pack for his smoke kit. He pulls out a joint, one of his nighttime indica sleep sticks. But he needs to calm the fuck down. Lighting it, he takes a deep drag and releases a billow of smoke. “Can’t go back. Can’t go on…” Cause, like, what would he even do here? Let’s say, him and his brass balls are able to spook these straight killers for a while with his light and music show, then what? He’d have to like take over the whole tribe to keep them from eventually attacking him. And that’d be that whole Kipling morality tale all over again. No thank you. It always ends badly for the man who would be king.

Then Jay recalls the pollen people, laughing with abandon even as they passed him, fleeing from the hunters. Who are they? “Well, bro,” Jay tells himself, “looks like it’s time to find out.”

Ξ

“Tuzhit is a name!” Katrina runs through the camp in the middle of the day, calling out in triumph. “It’s like an ancestral proper name and they were planning a Tuzhit festival! That’s what they were telling us! The clouds and the wind needed to be all…” She stops in the center of the camp as heads begin to peek out of tents. Katrina searches for the word. “Uh… Propitious! Auspicious! Delicious! They were waiting for all the factors to be right and our fire nearly ruined that.”

“Okay. And who is Tuzhit?” Alonso has decided this will be his gossip, his guilty pleasure. He will be as excited about the Lisicans as people get about celebrities. But it isn’t as easy to care as he thought it would be. These damn villagers would ruin Plexity yet.

“Not Eyat, that’s for sure. Not a single Tuzhit in any Eyat list I can find. Nothing even close, except for, uh, ‘adon kadushidán, which means we like to go hunting (and we go frequently).’ But check it out. In Slavic languages, tuzhit means to mourn or grieve. So maybe it wasn’t their actual name when they were alive, the ancestor they’re celebrating, maybe it was who they were to these people. And they mourn for them. So it’s a sad day, I guess.”

“Squid salad for lunch!” Mandy arrives with platters. The baby squid the Lisicans had caught for them have stored just fine in cold water over the last twelve hours. Now they are little dollops of chewy and crunchy protein atop three types of seaweed with a balsamic dressing.

“I recorded that long speech the Mayor gave us. Remember?” Katrina appeals to Triquet, who nods. “It was super long and dense and I’ve been pulling it apart. But the verb tenses are just appalling. They’re so complex. And this is some like basic knock-off version of Eyat. Not even the full intricacies. But putting sentences together is like chasing your tail. They all sound like, ‘Of the low-status man who approached you yesterday, the question shall be asked to you in the morning, who are an older woman of a higher-status inland community, who is in the habit of hearing from your clan…’ And by then I forget it’s a question. Just crazy stuff like that. But I’m definitely getting strong impressions. You know what I mean? Patterns.”

“And where are these patterns leading us?” Alonso swore to himself he’d be less crabby about this subject but now that it is here again he can’t help himself. “Their oral histories will fill every moment of our time here if we are not careful. I’ve heard how much they talk.”

“No idea where it’s headed, frankly.” Katrina’s assessment is sober and a bit worried. “But you’re right. An entire university department of anthropologists and ethno-linguists could spend their whole careers studying the Lisicans. This is definitely tip of the iceberg stuff. It’s just… I think we need to know as much about them as we can, just to learn if we are safe.”

“I agree.” Esquibel has been listening from the door of the bunker and now she enters the camp. “Learning a bit about their language and culture is a good step in that direction. I don’t see how you can argue against that.”

But Alonso, despite their reasonable pleas, becomes irritable. “Fucking human intervention, everywhere I turn. You must understand how this is for me. My dream… my visions of Plexity were the only thing keeping me alive. For years. I mean, I would be locked in a concrete box for days, so small I couldn’t even sit up. Face down. Cold like you’ve never known. In my delirium I built Plexity, the greatest experiment in modern life sciences. But it requires an isolated, stable, and natural setting. Just for its first iteration. Then it can be adapted for use everywhere.”

Katrina spreads her hands. “I don’t know what to tell you. All indications point to the Lisicans being here way before we were even born. Like they’re pretty much neolithic. They don’t have any modern items except for a couple old photos. They’re as much a part of this island as… I don’t know… the foxes.”’

“And what do you mean by ‘natural,’ Doctor Alonso?” Esquibel frowns. “Your use of the term seems more emotional than rational, if I may be so blunt.”

“Of course it is!” Alonso fights down sudden tears. “I told you I was face down in a pit fighting for my life for five years, did I not?”

Quietly, Amy answers for him. “This is an old argument between Sergio Alonso and me, Doctor Daine. In Japan we are taught that there is no division between the world of forests and animals and the world of humans. It’s all the same world. Or, more properly from a Shinto point of view, it’s all Japan. The skyscrapers are as much an expression of natural processes as, I don’t know, termite mounds or volcanoes. The division of humans from the world around them is pretty much a post-industrial Western idea. A lot of the Romantics in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, you know, with their fables of the dark haunted woods and people fleeing sweatshops and industrialization to find their spirit in idealized Nature. Yeah, that’s a very Snow White way of looking at the world.”

Alonso has regained his equilibrium during her long speech. “That is all very well and good, Ames. But you don’t know how much an inclusion of the human parameters into Plexity will, I mean, it’s multiplying every single factor by at least two orders of magnitude. It will break the model.”

Amy shrugs, knowing that all she can do is present the facts. “The model’s already broken, Lonzo. We just saw them carry away like fifty kilos of sea life and all those bushels of bay and wild onion. The broad leaf they harvested is unknown. I think the lily family. But the point is they’re gardening here. They’re hunting and fishing on a regular basis. This automatically changes all the readings we get. If our focus is the interconnected model, then, yeah. If they aren’t included then you’re just modeling a… fantasy.”

Alonso’s eye twitches. These are deep roots in him, fibers of conviction intertwined with his own sinews and bones about how this must be. He obsessed for far too long and Plexity became far too important for him to get this close to realizing it and having it slip away. But he knows how he looks. He just can’t seem to muster the leader’s trait of giving a shit about these Lisicans. Instead, blind in his own misery, he flings an arm back to where he know his wife sits behind him. “Mirrie. What am I supposed to do?”

“You silly sod.” She swats him. “Look around you. Brilliant minds everywhere. You don’t need to do anything. You’ve already assembled the team. Now you get to sit back and watch them solve this problem. It’s your vision, yes. But now it’s all of ours, too. It’s our daily lives, Zo. And it’s why we’re here.”

“Yes…” Flavia stands, lifting her laptop. “I am already writing a few notes about ways I think we can scale human factors without looking at a logarithmic expansion of computation. It is the same type of problem as the circadian rhythm cycle we were able to detect in the data, then nearly automate. Training the model with the new variables will be the hard part, then getting it up and running should be, well, still pretty hard, but doable.”

“I disagree.” Katrina holds up an index finger. “I think the hard part will be defining terms and variables of the Lisicans to begin with. I mean, I assume you’re going to start with things like calorie requirements and daily subsistence impacts on their ecosystems, but, I mean, we don’t even understand who these people are yet, or why they do nearly anything they do. They just had this festival, which was a major impact on their environment, and we don’t even know a thing about it. As far as we know it might be the season of festivals and it’s all night every night now til winter.”

“It’s a shame Pradeep isn’t here.” Amy tries to recall his words. “He and I had an interesting talk about this once and he said that if aliens were up above looking down on us in spaceships, they wouldn’t need to know our pop culture references and historical traditions to understand us. He believes all the internal narrative stuff and even a lot of scientific defense of cultural expression are overblown. He said it could all be measured by caloric output, all the wars and the famines and the building of cities, and the culture could be inferred with mathematical modeling. The reasons behind all our activity are only discernible at this huge macro scale.”

“I was just thinking the same thing!” Flavia turns to the lagoon, pointing at it. “Where is Jay? He was right. We are nothing but our structures! We are coral reefs! Our lives are too short to see it!”

Triquet crows, “Yipee! History wins again!”

Alonso laughs, rueful. “Thank you, my friends, for helping me lift my spirits. I do not mean to be so… It may be true that I began the leadership of this mission a few months or years earlier than I should have. But the opportunity presented itself and here we are.”

Esquibel opens a bin and takes out a tray filled with a variety of pills. “Here. Just a few supplements. Electrolytes and a B-complex. I think that MDMA therapy you did is still making you miserable. Your lows are much lower these last couple days.” She hands the pills to him and he dutifully swallows them dry as she monitors his pulse. “I cannot say it was a successful experiment.”

“What, the drug trip? The… the molly?” Alonso says the word with such innocence that Katrina snickers. “No. I think it was very helpful. It was like Mandy’s hands on my feet. Very scary at first but now I can see the utility. Maybe we do it again soon, yes?”

Katrina and Mandy share a surprised sidelong glance. “Uhh… yeh, sure thing. All of it? The double dose and the, oh, what’s it called, Mandy?”

“The massage?” Mandy flexes her fingers. “Tui na.”

“Yes,” Alonso points at her, “that.”

“Huh.” Katrina giggles. “That was a quick turnaround.”

“Well, that is what we are saying, is it not?” Now Alonso feels like there is a path of virtue ahead and he is damned if he will let it slip away. “We all recognize now that I am failing as a leader and you are both offering means for me to heal. It terrifies me, to be honest. You have no idea. But if your therapies mean I can still effectively run this mission then I will do anything. Anything.”

Now Katrina can’t help but spoil his dramatic words with a suppressed snort of laughter. “La, if me mates could see me now. The brave middle-aged bloke willing to do anything, include rolling on molly like a rave kid at a candy store. Uh, most of us don’t even need an excuse to roll like every weekend?”

Now they all laugh, in a minor key that suggests they appreciate the joke without really understanding what a fiend Katrina is, and what an unmitigated delight her many trips have been, showering herself with light and love in a thousand ways, which has changed her forever into a much better person, tiny lines of white powder stitching her heart like ritual scarification.

“Ultimately,” Katrina lifts Alonso’s hand and kisses it, “we can all agree that we just need more study, across the board. Fungus and plant and animal. Wind and sun and sea. You’ve given us this brilliant tool to work on it. Nobody thought we’d actually be able to finish it, whatever that means, by the time we left.”

“I just want a functioning prototype. Flavia’s bootstrap method is automating more and more processes so I believe if we are able to finally get a critical mass—”

“But what is that?” Miriam pounces a bit too quickly, but she has to get a word in before he skips ahead. “Slow down. Give the team numbers, Zo. Like in terms of samples. How many are we aiming for and how many do we already have? We’re nearly halfway through our time here, although we’ve only been seriously collecting for, what, ten days? So what are those numbers?”

“Ehh, let’s see.” He accesses the administrative dashboard for Plexity on his laptop and finds the appropriate values. “We have collected 8157 inputs of all types, including secondary readings and observations. 4338 samples from the Dyson readers. And it has been eleven days since the first samples were logged.”

“And how many do you need for your critical mass?”

“The data scientist in me has always believed Plexity will finally start to resolve into a clear and useful model at 100,000.”

“A hundred thousand samples? Oy vey.” Amy swoons. “That’s like a hundred times more than I’ve ever done, even in the widest assays. Good thing I brought Jay. He’s picking up like another thousand as we speak.”

“A hundred… thousand?” Miriam shakes her head. It is such a tremendous amount of work the idea of it makes her ill. “You can’t be serious, Zo. There’s not a single conceivable way…”

“Sure there is, Mirrie.” Alonso waves his cane in the air like a general marshaling his troops. “We are already four percent of the way there! And we are just getting started!”