Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us for the third 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:

45 – The USB Drive

Persistent birdsong penetrates the dense canopy. What bird is that? Jay doesn’t recognize its calls. It switches from buzzing to chirping to long melodic lines of warbling. Is that all one bird? Fascinating. It must be a mimic, like a mockingbird.

Jay opens his eyes. It is evening. The rain has stopped and their little hollow no longer drips maddeningly at arrhythmic intervals. Pradeep still sleeps beside him, their legs entangled for warmth.

“In my experience…” Jay mutters, his voice thick, “mockingbirds don’t sing at night. Just in the morning.”

“What’s that?” Pradeep’s voice is muffled. His face is tucked down, toward the pit of the hollow where redwood roots gather. He lifts his face. Jay is surprised to see how worn he looks, like he’s gained decades in the last couple days. Jay must look the same.

“Bird. Crazy song.” Jay pulls himself free. It’s too cold to lie here any longer. “We got to get moving, bro-him.”

“My legs. They really don’t want to.”

“Freeze our asses if we stay. Come on, Prad. Be the change you want to see…” Jay stands and grabs Pradeep’s upper arm, “…in the world!” And he hauls his groaning friend to his feet.

“Wow. I hate you for doing that.”

“Got to climb. Remember the plan? That’ll warm us up.”

“Perhaps I am not as cold as you. I could have stayed in that hole for another couple hours with no complaints.”

“Yeah, I’m freezing.” Now that he’s standing, Jay can see that it isn’t evening yet. The canopy just blocks most of the light. It is late afternoon and a golden glow suffuses the blue sky.

“Well we could just switch positions. I am still utterly exhausted.”

“We should hit this hill while we still got a little light.”

“It is true I don’t want to wait until morning. And now my phone is dead. No more flashlight.”

“Yeah mine too.”

“Fine then. Lead on. But don’t stop anywhere too long. Or I will pass out on my feet.”

“No doubt.” Jay surveys their surroundings, the pain of his many injuries making him feel like a badly-stitched-together golem. The sun is just setting over the far ridge, the meadow in shadow below with its low grassy hillocks, the very spot where they learned that they had dropped all the way into the wrong valley. Yep. There it is right there where his heart broke in fucking half. Good times. Anyway… After their tragic discovery they’d climbed up this way in a kind of daze, just to get away from it, and then they’d crapped out at the base of this tree. Said they’d just get a minute of shut-eye. That was like… six hours ago? Seven?

“The shadows…” Pradeep points at the nearby trees that are still lit by the setting sun. “From the shadows the sun is setting there,” he points at the slope across the meadow and then tracks a fair bit further south toward the equator. “We’re at like fortieth parallel so we’ve got to adjust the compass like so, and I’d say true west is about there. Hooray for one brief moment of sunshine.”

“Yeah, good call. That’s west. So north, east, south.” Jay rotates, pointing at each in turn. “Yeah. So I’m thinking that western ridge is the rim of the island. That west coast we’ve never seen.”

“Except Maahjabeen. In the first storm.”

“Right. But that’s like exactly the wrong way. We got to get back to our beach and our bunker and our… babes?”

“No. You will never call her a babe. She will tear your head right off. Yes, if the island is a clock, then the lagoon is at like 5:30 and we are currently at sort of… 7:30 or 8 on the dial?”

“Got to be. Which isn’t that far at all as crows fly. But you know it’s gonna be a fucking maze between here and there.”

“It always has been. You know, next time I take a posting on an island, I will make sure it is a flat sandbar. With one palm tree.”

“And a killer break. Come on, Prad. We’ll know more if we get up top here. We can chase the sun.”

“How… mythological.” Pradeep falls in line behind the limping, gasping Jay, who attacks the hillside with little forethought. “Wait. Wait. We can’t just charge this slope, Jay. We have to follow some contour lines. Bring us northeast for a bit first. Switchbacks.”

“Right on. Yeah. Get up top wherever. From the main ridge. We can get anywhere. On the island. In no time at all.”

“Yes. But climb. Out of the valleys. They are killing us.”

Then they speak no more, their energy turned to their poor feet and legs. Pradeep’s shins are covered in bruises. His climbing muscles scream with stiffness. But as he slowly warms up it all turns into a barely-tolerable throbbing ache and somehow he generates more mental fortitude from endocrine releases and conductive salts in cell walls and he keeps up with the mad Californian above.

Jay pivots them on the slope, making a switchback that heads more properly east-by-southeast where they need to go. Contours are only helpful if they actually take you to your destination. Sometimes you got to just take a mountain on its own terms.

For an hour they climb, passing out of the redwoods and through a stand of madrones and rhododendrons, then oak and sorrel, and finally grasslands near the spine of the ridge, which is marked by jagged lines of dark brown rock. They achieve the summit while the setting sun is just visible hanging over the western horizon, now distant and dim and pink, bisected by a pair of thin clouds. The wind whips them up here, bringing the marine chill. Vast and immaculately empty, the ocean surrounds them.

Now Jay looks down to regard the island. They are indeed on a ridgeline that connects with a larger main ridge up behind them, perhaps another eight hundred meters higher. Wow. This island’s got some walls on it for sure. But if they manage to stay on the ridges then they can skip all the ups and downs and meandering mazes. “Yes. Here’s our shortcut, yo.”

Pradeep frowns at the higher ridge. “Due north? That far? May I remind you that we’re trying to go southeast?”

“Yeah but once you get up top it runs east-west. We get on that ridge and head east, then when we get to the right valley, we follow that like sub-ridge down and boom, we’re home by supper.”

“Yes, I think you’re right.”

“Man, I’m glad we agree about all this. Imagine if we were like fighting all the time. I’ve been in that situation before when—”

“Or if like one of us was high on acid.”

“Yeah yeah. That wasn’t my finest hour.” Jay picks his way along the spine of rocks, the slope they just climbed falling away before them. The ridge is broader than he expected and he doesn’t even see the far slope yet or into what it must descend. “Oh, no way!”

“What is it?” Pradeep steps past the outcrop Jay just vanished around and joins him in delight at the sight of a tiny waterfall, surrounded by lilies and ferns, splashing strongly from the recent rains. “Wow. That must be one full water table to get a waterfall going this strong this far up the slope. And I bet it’s quite clean.” Pradeep leans in and cups his hand under it. He lifts the cold water to his mouth and slurps. “Delicious.”

“Fuck yeah it is.” Jay is on all fours at the edge of the little pool below, drinking directly from it like a dog. “Best water ever.”

Movement. Pradeep cringes, his primal instincts unleashing anxiety that disperses the peace of this moment like a knife through smoke. He squawks, turning back the way they came, to confront one of the golden childs sneaking around the outcrop after them. “Oh. It’s just you. One of you.”

“What the…?” Jay rolls over, blinking at the silhouette of the golden childs against the bright sky. “Hey, what’s up, dude?”

“How long have you been following us?” The masked figure stops and drops their arms. The youth was obviously surprised to find his quarry here, but he shows no reaction to being caught out.

“Oh, that’s just swell. Do you think he started with us from the beginning? Like he secretly followed us through the tunnels and everything? Dude, you could have helped out sooo much, so many times. Do you even know we’re completely fucking lost and we’re just trying to get back? I mean, just show us the way. Which way…?What are some of their names? Uh, Lisica. Morska Vidra.”

“Yes. Let’s get some directions. Jidadaa. Wetchie-ghuy.” Pradeep points where Jay is pointing. “That way?”

The youth only watches them through his golden mask, their inscrutable bodyguard.

“Right.” Now Pradeep feels the urge to lead. “Let’s head out then.” He tries one last attempt at communication, pointing out their route. “We’re climbing the north ridgeline up there then heading west, and finally southeast. Back home, eh?”

But the youth hurries past them and turns to bar their way. He holds up his hands as if to block them.

“Oh, no way. You won’t let us climb that ridge? Why not?” In frustration Jay scrubs water into his hair and steps away from the pool. “ Come on, G money. We got to go that way. Got to.”

“Closed to foreigners?” Pradeep crosses the width of the spine to study the new valley that is revealed to the east and the main ridge overlooking it all. From this angle he can see a bit more of the ridge’s profile. Is that a thin filament of smoke he sees behind its central peak? “Aha. Look, Jay.”

“What? Where. A bird?”

“Smoke. I think.”

“Do not see it.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure I do. Just the briefest… Well, anyway, do you think that’s what our masked protector here is doing? Keeping us from crossing paths with whoever is up there?”

“I mean, their entire job is to protect us from Wetchie-ghuy and Sherman the shaman as far as I know. So… yeah.”

“I guess we aren’t taking the north ridge.”

Jay can’t stand the sight of the winding valley at the base of their ridge to the east. Its cleft is hidden in darkness. “Bro, if we drop into whatever canyon that is down there I guarantee you we won’t get out of it before nightfall.”

“Well, contours. Maybe we don’t need to stay up on the ridge. But maybe we don’t need to drop all the way down into the creeks. Maybe this golden childs will let us advance the way we want if we just drop a hundred meters or so below the top and get back in the trees. We can still follow the ridge, just in a more hidden way.”

“I don’t know.” The complaint sounds querulous to Jay’s own ears. “That’s a shit ton more climbing. But yeah. Not like they’re giving us a choice.” So much for being home by dinner. “Well. It is what it is. Lead on.”

Ξ

“You know what I’m thinking?” Amy asks Triquet, who builds a platform beside her in their new camp. Amy has already finished her own platform and tent and worries there is still so much to be done in the waning hours of this day.

“Uhh. Tea. Got to be something about tea. Like Earl Grey or Lapsang Souchong? None for me, thanks.”

“No.” Amy straightens, peering at the patchy sky. “Laundry.”

From the far side of the camp, Mandy calls out, “Oh my god, yes! I’ve got a whole load!”

“Where? Like in the river?” Triquet frowns at it, the impassable natural barrier with its fast-moving dark currents dividing this side of the island from the other. “I don’t think the Lisicans would like that. Don’t want anyone hucking a spear at my head.”

“No, I was thinking we could just climb up its bank here until we found a little tributary. So many streams are running right now. Don’t have to get anywhere near the main river. Just a tiny dab of biodegradable soap and some elbow grease and we might even get them to line dry before it gets too dark.”

“I wish,” Miriam sighs, erecting the tent on a new platform, “that we could wash our sleeping bags. They are so foul. But there’s no way they’ll ever dry out here and then what do we do at night?”

“I have thought that again and again.” Esquibel emerges from within her clean room. “I dream of turning my sleeping bag inside out and strip-cleaning its fabrics with alcohol.”

“Okay, crew.” Amy empties her big expedition backpack into her tent, returning the articles of dirty clothing and accessories she should wash back into it. “You guys keep working. I’ll be the washing machine and dryer. Put your things in there with any special instructions. I can’t promise perfection, but…”

“Oh, you’re the best. Thank you so much. I think the weather might even hold all night.” Mandy appears with a small handful of things, followed by Triquet and Miriam and Esquibel. Amy’s pack is quickly full. She’s glad the others aren’t here to take her up on the offer. Laundry by hand takes forever. With any more to wash, Amy wouldn’t get back until midnight.

“You sure… you’re okay going alone?” Triquet has returned to building their platform.

“Who says I’ll be alone?” Amy nods at the golden childs who stand deeper in the woods above. Five of them had re-appeared once the villagers had left, watching over the new camp from a distance. And as Amy hauls the pack onto her back and buckles the waistbelt, one of the crouching masked youths rises to follow her.

She aims for the north edge of the meadow, where it gives way to trees. The black rushing river to her right is even more swollen than before. There is a point on its bank where the meadow ends and the pines begin. Amy pauses here for a bit. Such a delicious spot for a wildlife biologist, the intersection of three biomes in one place—forest, meadow, and water. Insect and fungal life probably exists in this ten square meters that exists nowhere else. If she has time, she will certainly collect every sample she can. Why, it’s like Plexity in miniature. “No. Actually…” Amy stands, reasoning aloud. “It’s the opposite of Plexity, which is a closed system. This transition zone has no boundaries at all. Its openness is its main characteristic. Huh.” Keeping the river to her right, she climbs up the north slope, a suddenly difficult outcrop of soil and brown pine needles sliding under her boots. The river begins to gargle beside her, dropping from the hills she’s climbing to the flat of the meadow behind. Maybe up this way she’ll find more falls.

The golden childs hovers behind her like a concerned parent, waiting patiently for her to navigate this crumbling obstacle. Amy reaches for the base of a sapling and hauls herself upward. Finally, the top. A bank of budding Osmaronia cerasiformis greets her on this bluff, while the river is now hidden in a cut that is a good five meters below, making all kinds of noise.

Amy pushes her way through the dense woody branches and wins through to a cloistered glade of clover and vetch, coated in rain. No more than a dozen paces wide, it is like a little chapel of light and life. The scene is so idyllic and pure that she doesn’t want to disturb it. Perhaps she should be like those Shinto monks who apologize to each creature they crush before taking a step.

The little glade bespells her. Unlike the transition zone below, this remote notch is far removed from the rhythms of the world. Purple blossoms and green leaves glow in the light of the setting sun. A pair of green-tailed towhees flicker in the branches of the pines above. Quiet and peace reign here. If she wasn’t the product of a modern education she would swear the glade is sentient.

During Amy’s childhood, Shinto had been a kind of strict folklore tradition she’d learned to hate. The rites and details of the rituals had seemed to always obscure the life it was supposedly praising. In Shinto, Japan has a mythological dimension, with gods and demons and fairies hiding in glens like this one. But Shinto is immutably Japanese, so there can be no such thing as a Lisican version of Shinto. It must just be its own magic here, its own unique power connected to place with its own secret name.

Amy has been pursuing this elusive nature of nature her entire life. Back in the 80s she had really gotten into complexity theory and for an entire generation the concept of emergent behavior was her specialty. Once complex systems reach a critical mass then new harmonics emerge, new behaviors and effects that are not always predictable based on the inputs, like steam from a kettle or human consciousness itself. Has that happened here in this glade? Has it… embodied somehow the essence of its nature? Does it have a giggling sylph or dryad hiding in the pines?

This elusive emergent property is the phenomenon of life itself, a rare miracle in the universe, firmly affixed to this tiny green and blue rock hurtling through the void. The study of emergence is the end result of the connections Plexity is trying to make. This is the evanescent heart of the matter here. Each scoop of dirt and rock that took billions of years to become soil and life has made unique interactions manifest in higher orders such as birds sipping nectar from beckoning flowers. And their song is its secret name…

Dark eyes stare back at Amy from within the stand of sword ferns across the glade. Wide and staring, round and beady… The inexact descriptors echo through her mind as she goes still. Yellow. Shiny. Quite certainly inhuman, perhaps canine? Oh, it’s a fox. Is that Morska Vidra’s fox? No… This one has a reddish lip and a narrow snout. The ears are different too, now that she can see them.

The little silver fox slowly waddles out from under the fern boughs onto the clover. Its belly is swollen and at first Amy thinks it’s diseased. Then she realizes she’s looking at a vixen, a female, and that she’s very pregnant.

This is wildly unheard of behavior. Foxes expecting litters like this will generally withdraw and be impossible to find. For one to seek her out is… preposterous. But then again, why do animals hide themselves to give birth? To protect against predators. If there are no predators of foxes on Lisica, then she can build a nest wherever she pleases. Astounding. But this one needs something from her? The pregnancy isn’t going well? Some veterinary surgery will be required out here in the middle of nowhere with no proper tools?

The vixen looks gravely at Amy with her yellow eyes. Then she turns and heads to the edge of the glade away from the creek, uphill. She pauses before she disappears once again into the ferns.

“You’re asking me…? Oh. You want me to come with you. Uh. Yeah. Hold on. I’ll just leave the bag here for a sec.”

Amy unbuckles the expedition backpack, trying to think if there’s anything she can use as rags if she finds herself attending a birth here. She snags a pair of someone’s socks from the top of it before closing it back up and resting it beside the bole of an old stump. There will be some crawling ahead, of that she is sure. Good thing her phone is fully charged if she needs light.

Ducking into the bushes, Amy disappears from view. After a long moment the fronds of the ferns stop shaking and return to stillness. Lavender butterflies flit across the opening. The towhees begin to sing again.

A moment later, the golden childs appears, looking for her. They find the backpack filled with dirty clothes and nothing else.

Ξ

Miriam finds Alonso in the meadow, studying the far hills. He has just enraged Maahjabeen again, who is stomping away from him back through the grass to what they’ve started calling pine camp.

Maahjabeen’s face is dark and her eyes are full of fire. She scowls at Miriam as she passes her. “Your husband can be so mean. He doesn’t have to be so mean.”

“Mean? Alonso?” Miriam blinks at her, but Maahjabeen doesn’t stop to hear her answer. She is too angry. “My Alonso? Never.”

Miriam joins her husband in the meadow. “You’re standing.”

“I am, aren’t I?” Alonso is preoccupied, though. Fighting with Maahjabeen always leaves such a bad taste in his mouth.

“What did you do to her this time?”

“Told her to stop making preparations to live in the sea cave and help us find missing people first and make this camp here.”

“You monster.”

“And I didn’t tell her she couldn’t do it. Oh, no. She would have killed me for that. I just told her to stop making it her top priority, especially when she will need help. We have no time to spare Amy or whoever for a dangerous kayak adventure. Not now.”

“She said living inland makes her crazy. I guess this is what she meant.” Miriam studies Alonso. Despite his current displeasure he is standing straight again and his shoulders have settled. This is how she always knew him before, but these last six weeks have been life with a fat old man hunched over his pain. Now he is starting to regain himself. Miriam never thought he might recover quite so quickly. “How’s the… what is it? Peanut butter and banana leaves treatment? How’s the wrap?”

“Not banana. Amy said maybe lily. It feels very odd. Warm, like warmer than it should, all the way inside. There is definitely an active compound or two in the Mayor’s treatment. I just hope there aren’t any serious side effects.”

“How long are you meant to leave it on?”

“I have no idea.”

They both laugh, a careworn sound. With a sigh, Alonso pulls Miriam close and they lean against each other, foreheads touching. The sky is filling once again with clouds, about to obscure the evening star. When it vanishes behind the rolling bank of gray the air begins to chill and they turn back, arm-in-arm, to camp.

There they find more arguing. Mandy storms from the clean room carrying her own bag. “She’s too much! I can’t take it any more. I’ll just—”

“You don’t have to like break up with me,” Esquibel exits as well, standing in the slit door entrance holding a white hand towel, “just because I asked you to move a few things that—”

“You’re hounding me! You’re always hounding me!” Mandy finds her own platform and drops her things on it. Now she’ll need to put up her own tent. At least maybe she can do it in peace.

“Well pardon me for being a doctor in a medical clinic!” Holding her hands up, Esquibel makes a visible effort to rein in her temper. “Perhaps I could have said it more nicely, and for that I am sorry, dearest Mandy, but please don’t make me apologize out here in front of everybody. It isn’t…”

“I’m not making you do a single thing. Ever notice that?” Mandy doesn’t know where this monumental irritation has come from. But she just can’t take the constant badgering and criticism any more. She needs her own space.

“You are…” Esquibel lifts a helpless hand and lets it drop, “…a wonderful partner. It is true. I am sorry.”

“Oh, Mandy loves you. It’s just, I think what she’s trying to say is that sometimes you…” Katrina offers in a helpful voice.

But Esquibel blazes once more. “Oh, don’t you dare put yourself in the middle of this. Not you.”

Katrina retreats, stung, the light of innocence dying in her eyes.

Miriam calls out, “Ladies, ladies. Please don’t let your frustration and exhaustion turn things sour. It’s just been a long few days. We’re frightened and at the ends of our ropes. That’s all. Things will be better after a nice hot dinner and full night’s rest.”

“Right. I can’t build my tent.” Mandy drops its aluminum poles with a clatter and stands, still quivering with indignation. “I have to cook dinner. Amy can’t. Jay isn’t even fucking here. It’s all on me. God! How did I end up with so much still to do?”

“I’ll put up your tent, sweetie,” Triquet offers. “I’d help you in the kitchen too but I’m not…”

“I can help in the kitchen.” Alonso moves toward it. He is not without pain and stiffness, but it is not corroding him. There is no timer on him standing up anymore. Now he has stamina. “Where is Amy, anyway?”

“Doing laundry.”

“Ohh… I have a few things… Where is she?”

Miriam points upstream. It is getting dark now and the slope is obscured in shadow. “Somewhere up there.”

“Well. Then I will wait until morning. Coming, Mandy. I will be your prep cook and dishwasher.”

Ξ

“So, this time we are neighbors, eh?” Flavia finally finishes putting her platform together, wrapping twine around the sawn pine branches and testing it with her feet. She smiles at Triquet. “Perhaps that means I can borrow some of your fabulous clothes.”

“Whenever you want, girlfriend.”

They work side-by-side for a long while in companionable silence. Triquet reaches for something more to say. Flavia is pretty much the only one Triquet hasn’t established a deeper relationship with and all they know of her is that she’s an Italian nerd who spends the whole day on her laptop. “You know, I have a cousin who’s a research math professor. Smart as a whip.”

Flavia isn’t too excited by this awkward small talk but she does appreciate the effort. “Oh? What does she study?”

“Uh. Mainly insurance? She wrote a book called ‘The Hidden History of Deductibles.’ Fascinating stuff, I’m sure.”

“Well, it can be. There is good work being done characterizing human behavior using maths. When done properly, it is actually kind of scary. We really aren’t that much more complex than a paramecium, if you get right down to it. People can be reduced to a few simple equations and interactions no problem. ”

But for a humanist such as Triquet this is a bit much. “We can? Just a few? I always thought I was a bit more… I don’t know, mystifying than that. I mean, in my case, I got a little coy with my internal motivations years ago when everyone tried to convince me that my choices don’t make sense.”

“Oh, they do. You are just… Triquet my friend you are outside the frame of reference. I would say most researchers are running maths simulations that you do not properly fit into. But the problem is not with the maths, it’s with their definitions.”

Triquet makes a face. This reductionism doesn’t sit right with them. As an archaeologist, the historical record of humanity is a rich and bewildering tapestry of unique characters and actions that can never be so neatly encapsulated. “So you’re telling me that all my behavior is… computable? That the reason I built a platform here as opposed to against another tree—say, that one—is just a basic function of mathematics?”

Flavia shrugs and pushes her hair from her face, taking a break from erecting her tent. “I mean, sure. Don’t you see? There are a finite number of factors that caused you to choose that tree. Each factor has values that can be assigned and those values…”

“But what if some of those factors remain hidden? Maybe I don’t quite know why I chose this tree. Maybe my father was killed by an oak tree and I’ve like subconsciously avoided them for years.”

“Your knowledge of the factors that shape your decision are not necessary for computation to occur. The calculations still happen independently of your self-regard.” She suppresses a sigh. To Flavia, this ontological perspective is painfully self-evident and at this point in her life, automatic. But she has also had enough of these conversations to know how unpopular they are. “Look. A lot of people thinks this means we must live in a horrible clockwork universe without free will, but I am not saying that. I am just saying these maths are the tools we use to make our way in the world. But there is no destined solution these tools are leading you toward. They are just another way we make decisions and express them.”

Triquet shrugs agreeably. “Okay. Then let’s say we’re able to identify all these factors that make me choose this particular pine tree to build my platform around. It makes sense, your numbers all add up, and the results are clear. But what if, at the last moment, I decide to randomly choose another tree. What if I stop what I’m doing for no reason at all, and just build a platform around this little sapling instead? Then what?”

Flavia narrows her eyes and expels her breath through her nose, trying not to groan aloud in exasperation. Why must maths be so hard for people to understand? “It is still a rational expression. Even if it is randomly generated. Especially if it is. If you roll the dice for your decision, that is very simple arithmetic. We generate random values all the time in my field.”

“But it isn’t rolling dice, it’s…” Triquet puts their hand to their heart, trying to find words for the chaotic welter of emotions and desires that flow through them. “My heart isn’t made of numbers. It’s made of feelings, many of them contradictory, yeah? I’m afraid that all you…” Ah, but how to mention ‘computer nerds’ without hurting her feelings? “It’s just that life isn’t as neat as you want it to be. Look at the golden childs. Why are they protecting us? Some kind of prophecy? Why do they believe in the prophecy? Faith, I guess. But how do you measure faith? How do you turn it into a quadratic equation or whatever? Don’t you feel like you’d miss out on essential elements of the whole thing?”

Flavia shakes her head no. “Quadratic equations are not the best tool for these jobs because they are univariate. No. Listen. This is a linguistic thing I know. The ‘es’ in ‘essential’ is one of the oldest roots in Indo-European languages, from thousands of years before the Latin ‘essentialis.’ It means ‘to be.’ So our essence is that which makes us be. Not how we imagine ourselves in a different universe based on magical thinking, not how we wish to be, but how we are in this physical world. The physical world can only be described by physics, which means maths, so…” she shrugs, “I do not know what to tell you except this is starting to sound like the arguments I have with Maahjabeen about god.”

“No, I’m not like a religious…” Triquet objects, then falls silent, realizing that the subjectivity they are championing will eventually lead to that spiritual conclusion. Religion. Myth. Magic. Triquet’s always given a kind of formal academic honor to those concepts, making sure that they are properly respectful of the cultures they study without needing to make a final decision about whether those myths and religions are actually provably true. But if it came down to it, does Triquet actually believe in any of the the ritual traditions their subjects practice? When the Yanomami of Brazil eat their hallucinogenic Yopo plants do they really gain access to hekura spirits that rule the physical world? When orphans in Crimea have nightmares about Baba Yaga does the old crone actually manifest or is it just their imagination? And what about those beliefs that conflict, such as when sects of Christianity turn on each other like in, oh, The Hundred Years War? Are both of their interpretations of the Bible true? Neither? Can two contradictory things be true at the same time? Can things be true only on the local or individual level? Perhaps acts of faith are the opposite of universal, especially in this age of tribalism. “I have always…” Triquet gathers their thoughts, sitting on the end of their platform struggling to put their unstated policy into words. “I guess the way I try to think about it is that we are each of us different kinds of magicians.”

“What? No.”

“Yes! Haven’t you ever thought of things this way? I had Dia, an old great-aunt who swore she had dreams that could tell the future. Did you have anybody in your family like that growing up?”

“Of course. In Italy, anyone over the age of sixty has some kind of supernatural power.”

“Right. And our first reaction to Dia’s dreams would always be disbelief. Cynicism. My parents would argue with her about her crackpot soothsaying dreams and astrology readings long after dinner was over. And at first I was on my parents’ side.”

“Only at first? Then what?”

“Then it occurred to me one day that maybe universal laws just aren’t so universal. I know that my dreams can’t tell the future. But can I really authoritatively assert that nobody’s dreams can tell the future? Maybe that’s just the kind of magic that Dia can practice. My magic is, like, in my costumes. I can turn an entire party on its head by showing up dressed as Cher. And I don’t mean that it’s the sequins and lipstick. It’s that I cast a spell, honey, and people fall under that spell and it really works. What’s your magic?”

“My magic? Eh.” Flavia tries to forcibly shift her perspective for the sake of this conversation. “Alonso with his big Cuban family magic. Katrina with her DJ magic. I mean, aren’t those just other words for wine and drugs?”

“You know there’s more to it than that.”

“Is there? I am Flavia. I have no magic. Full stop. I am entirely a creature made of numbers. Is that magical to you? Because to me it is not. It is just like graduate-level seminar statistics. These things you are talking about are mathematical probabilities, not voodoo.”

“The point I’m trying to make is that, in my humble estimation, I can’t be certain of the empirical universality of anything. Sure, every star we’ve discovered so far fuses hydrogen into heavier elements. But does that mean all stars will, everywhere, forever? I can’t know that, so I have to stay humble and not get tempted by calling things absolutes. Ultimately my subjectivity trumps all. I mean, I can’t be a religious worshipper because I have no faith. But for those who do, maybe their universe is truly so different that I honestly can’t speak to whether they are actually talking to their god or not. I just don’t have that talent. But I do have other talents. You have your numbers, but that doesn’t preclude Maahjabeen’s access to Allah or whatever. That’s just her own inimitable talent. The Lisicans. They live in such a different reality we can’t just slap our Western number system, our analytics, on them and say we get it. We’ve been trying to understand their life and culture for six fucking weeks and gotten no closer.”

“Maybe they have their own maths.”

This stops both of them, the notion that all Lisican behavior might be described by an indigenous mathematical structure that is separate and unique from the numerical traditions they know.

Triquet rubs their chin, mind sparking with half-formed insights. “Well there’s another career’s worth of study right there. No, it’s just that I’ve always given space to people and their traditions. Respecting them allows us to see more of the humanity in our subjects. In other words, post-colonial guilt, and lots of it. See, to me, the very definition of humanity is something that transcends math and science. This is why in every one of our cultures we talk of spirit and soul. There is something else to it, in ways that we all interpret in our own unique subjective ways. I mean, we had some pretty wise ancestors and they tried to teach us things, yeah? So like celebrate diversity, sister. We are all of us, all eight billion humans, individuals with unique patterns and points of view.”

Flavia laughs. “Or, as your aunt the insurance researcher has proven, we are no more than five major personality types with billions of us fundamentally identical. Not that there is anything wrong with that… That is how biological agents interact with environments to create what look like unique phenomena, but are really just the same base integers in different combinations, and our own ability to remember these patterns or even correctly identify them is very bad because really we are still just a bunch of apes.”

“Finally, something we can agree on.” Triquet scratches their ribs in caricature of a primate. “Oo oo. Aah aah.”

Ξ

In the middle of the night her eyes open, belatedly realizing Amy never came back from doing laundry. Is that true? She’s pretty sure it is. Casting off her sleeping bag with a silent curse, she slips from her tent with her phone in hand. She pads over to Amy’s tent and shines its light within. Yep, still empty.

But someone is awake. Through the trees she can see their dim silhouette out on the meadow, standing tall and silent in the gloom. Stepping closer, she turns the light off and peers through the obscuring branches to see if it is who she fears it might be.

Clouds stripe the sky, their edges lit by an intermittent moon. Shadows roll across the meadow. When they retreat the figure is gone. No… Just crouching, closer to the trees now. And someone else is with them, a small dark figure dressed all in black.

She eases forward to see what they’re doing. Their heads lean together for a long moment and then the second figure rises to a crouch and scurries away. But this is no native, and definitely no one in her crew. They move like some lethal video game character, like an assassin or a spy. After a moment they are swallowed by the shadows. The second figure stands, tall and dark.

Esquibel.

Wrapping her black coat around herself, Esquibel steps quietly back into camp. She wishes for nothing more than a long hot shower to wash all this grime away. But she will not have one of those for two more weeks. She must stay filthy until then.

Stepping from the quiet grasses of the meadow to the dry twigs and needles of the pine forest requires all her care. She takes it extremely slowly, lifting and dropping each foot in slow motion. The camp is ahead, cloaked in darkness. If she can just get back to her cot in the clean room she will know she is home free.

It had taken so much nattering of Mandy to get her to leave her side tonight the pangs of guilt poke at her, again and again. Well. She is doing all this for Mandy and the others. Someday they will hear of her sacrifices and maybe understand. And now that it is over she can go back to treating Mandy like the princess she is.

Resisting an impulse to cross the camp and join Mandy’s lovely sleeping form right now, Esquibel takes another careful step.

Wait. Someone is there, in the darkness, watching her. Esquibel is sure of it. She can’t see a figure but she knows deep in her bones they are there. She stops, like a fool, her hand straying to the back of her waistband, and stares at where their eyes must be.

“Identify yourself.” Esquibel’s whisper tries to sound forceful without waking anyone else up.

But whoever it is doesn’t speak or move. They only dwell in the center of the darkness. She can’t even see their eyes.

Esquibel hesitates. Is it one of the golden childs crouching in the bushes? Almost certainly. Or maybe one of those odious shamans who are causing so much trouble. “Go ahead. Just try to kidnap me,” she mutters. “Just try it.”

Still no movement. She can see nothing but the dark. It’s just a presence she can sense, an unbearable prickling a millimeter under her skin. Someone is there. Isn’t there?

Or is it just her imagination? Another dimension of her rampant guilt? No, there is no one there, surely. She took every precaution. These people are all dead tired. None of them are awake. And none of them crouch in the dark like this, like a panther… No. This is just her fear of being found out.

“It isn’t what you think,” she mutters, surprised at how much she needs to confess to this knot of darkness. “I am not doing this for myself, but for those I love. I am not a traitor.”

This is the one thing Esquibel told herself she could never do. Say the words aloud. As long as she keeps them within the confines of her own skull she is safe, never to be discovered. But she didn’t know how difficult that would be, how it would contort every one of her thoughts and actions to hide the little secret inside, like that one unknown dark sliver Pradeep found in the knot of seaweed. She is bloated by her secret and just needs the relief of the pressure. Just a bit, just by whispering her secret to a spot of darkness.

“The money is good but it’s not about that. We’re playing a very deep game here. A very necessary game with geopolitical interests. And besides, it’s just the Japanese. They’re harmless.”

The darkness absorbs the sentences. But a bitter judgment still somehow emanates from it. Esquibel can tell her words are insufficient. Espionage is espionage, no matter how you cut it. Ah, well. She feels no better for confessing. “What a bloody mess.”

Esquibel shakes her head and finally drops her hand from her waistband. She steps past the knot of darkness feeling wretched and misunderstood. Thoughts of her cold hard cot fill her head. Yes, oblivion is all she can hope for now.

And then, to her utter dreadful surprise, a whisper emerges from the darkness, a voice she knows. “Fucking hell. I knew you were up to something. Well, guess what. I switched the USB drive.”