Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final 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:

51 – Little Love Palace

“Is that Flavia?”

“Yes? Ah. Hello up there. Miriam? How…? Ehh… I must have taken a wrong turn. How do I get back to the village?”

Miriam stands on a rickety scaffold she’s built againt the inner wall of the mystery shaft that has been both burned and flooded. Just a meter or so above the concrete at its base, she peers at the naked rock that is revealed at this height, scoring it with a knife. “Well, in a better world, you’d just take a lift right here, pop out right up at the top and skip down to them. But no such luck. In this world you’ve got to go back out, take a left, and follow that left wall until you feel the tree’s litter under your feet. Then climb.”

“I am so excited. I have to tell Alonso.”

“Faith, seems like a long time since I heard those words. Weeks it feels like, since anyone has been excited. What is it?”

“I saved Plexity.”

“Well well well.” Miriam doesn’t know what to say. Nobody knows Alonso as well as her, and she’s pretty sure that he doesn’t yet consider it lost. Someone like Flavia using a phrase like that would make him defensive, make him distrust what she says next. But how to tell the prickly mathematician? Best to hear what else she has to say. “How?”

“I was working in the sub. With Triquet. Very nice. Very safe and productive, to be in a place with walls and doors again. And I was reviewing the profile for a large dataset with, well a kind of forbidden technology that Alonso says I shouldn’t use, but with it I noticed a growing structure in all the numbers. A kind of… Well. I am bad with the metaphors. It is a significant ordering of the data and it reveals a kind of meta-mechanism for the life here.”

“I see.”

But Flavia can tell Miriam doesn’t see. “No no no. This is what Plexity is all about. Mapping connections, yes? Well, at least that’s what we thought. But it might just be that the entire project is to reveal this one single process. It is… I mean… If it translates to the wider world we might have figured out an entire new dimension or process of life. It may answer so many questions.”

“Brilliant.” But in Miriam’s mind, these structures must be like hidden cratons in the mantle, only detectable with sophisticated seismic mapping. “So it’s like, what is it? A new molecule or, uh, metabolic pathway? I’m out of my depth here, love.”

“I have no idea. That is for Alonso and his geniuses to figure out. But no. Here is why it is important for us. So far, I’ve detected this kind of universal mathematical expression everywhere here. It is a signal that appears as soon as we put samples in any kind of context. Once the variables increase, we get this data signature. So. Having identified it, it was easy for me to create a, well a kind of compression algorithm. You know zip files? In your computer? How they are compressed so they have less data, but then you can un-compress them and they grow larger again? But for this, my new compression algorithm, well, it kind of packs much more of Plexity’s collections into a small space, and all that is really left is that new signal. It is the only tab hanging out. So then you get a whole series of these tabs, like millions and billions of them, and you are looking at vast amounts of data at a scale that we hadn’t even considered. And the dynamics, which are so important to Plexity, are preserved, and even revealed more clearly.”

“I have no idea what you mean, except that when you said that nothing is sticking out except the tabs, I thought of the label on a shirt. That’s kind of right, isn’t it? Shows where it was made, what it’s made from, eh?”

“Yes, sure. Billions of shirts.” Flavia doesn’t know how to extend that metaphor, nor does she care to try. “So anyway. Your husband will be very excited. I am not saying that we need to stop collecting, it’s that we probably already have a kind of working baseline of data and all the work we do now just refines the models and increases resolution. But it works, Miriam. Plexity works.”

“Cracker. He’ll be thrilled. So…” Miriam levers a fractured bit of peridotite into her collection bag. “What is it? The new dimension of life? If you had to guess.”

Flavia shrugs. “I have no idea. That is not my specialty at all. I just get paid to make the computers happy. What about you?”

“Beats me. The only thing that makes sense to me are rocks.”

Ξ

Maahjabeen has been paddling for a couple hours. And she wishes that it will never end. It’s a beautiful day, with a calm sea. Her pod of eleven? twelve? orcas dash ahead then circle back, leading the kayaks around the island counter-clockwise. Pradeep is right on her flank, Aziz cutting through the green water with ease, his huge smile responding to her brief glance.

“Hungry?” he calls out, fishing in a pocket for an energy bar.

“Starving.” But Maahjabeen doesn’t slacken her pace. “But the orcas are leading us somewhere. I’ll eat when we get there.”

Pradeep puts the energy bar back in his pocket and takes up the paddle before he falls too far behind. She has such a strong stroke. And now she’s being carried away on the backs of cetaceans like a goddess of the sea. This is his beloved Maahjabeen in her element. He didn’t think he could love and admire her more. But he is so happy to be wrong.

“There. Look.” Maahjabeen turns back to him and uses her paddle to point ahead at the far northern horizon.

“Oh my god.” Pradeep finally clears the last point of the island’s eastern shoulder and sees the unbroken Pacific stretching to the north, turning gray at the horizon. It is the most profound sense of vastness that he has ever experienced. They really are the tiniest dot of terrestrial life on this great big water planet, aren’t they?

Now the orcas lead them past the unbroken cliffs of the east coast toward the north shore. Here, the currents get tricky, as a strong eastward swell tries to force them out into the open water. They have to paddle strongly at a corrective angle to make headway, their noses pointed nearly directly at shore. The orcas are patient, the currents seeming to not affect them, circling the laboring humans as they escape the current.

At one point, a juvenile orca rises silently beside Pradeep, blinking at him with a dark eye. It opens its toothed mouth like it’s greeting him, or laughing at him, and waves a pectoral fin. Is this what Maahjabeen meant when she said they spoke with her and welcomed her to their ocean? Pradeep bows his head. “Thank you. Uh. I am honored.”

The cliffs of the north shore are of a lighter gray, sharper and covered in darker trees. Pradeep frowns at them and shades his eyes from the glare to study the curve of their branches. “Is that…? I think it’s a whole forest of Sitka Spruce up there. Extraordinary. We didn’t even know they were here. Until now.”

“What, those trees?” Maahjabeen tries to share his enthusiasm. It is evidently important.

“Yes, that’s one of the main forest trees of the north. Oregon and Washington, Canada and Alaska. It’s all Sitka and Douglas Fir. But on this island we’ve now seen Sitka and firs and pines and even redwoods. All together. There is nowhere else on earth where these trees grow together. Sitkas aren’t found as far south as California and redwoods aren’t found as far north as Oregon. This is a dendrologist’s fairy tale. Amazing.”

“Okay, yes, Mahbub. Now I am very hungry.” Maahjabeen allows Pradeep to hand her an energy bar. She tears at it with sharp teeth under the gaze of the orcas. She figures they must approve, yes? They love to fasten their teeth in their prey and pull it apart. But maybe they’re disappointed in the lack of blood.

Fingers of gray rock break up the sea, leading to a ragged series of ridges descending from the island’s spine to the water. The orcas lead them between two of the wider fingers, which eventually curl into a tiny protected harbor, hardly large enough for the orcas and the boats to fit in. The orcas cycle in and out, cackling and blowing their blowholes, slapping their fins on the water. Their antics echo up the forbidding faces of the cliffs. This goes on for minutes.

Finally, the orcas all file out of the little harbor. But when Maahjabeen tries to follow them, their splendid matriarch stops and rolls on her side, chattering at the woman in the kayak.

“What is she trying to say?” Pradeep calls out.

“She say,” a hoary old voice from the cliff behind him answers, “you stay. Stay with old man.”

Pradeep yelps in surprise and backs his kayak around. There he is, a decrepit figure at the water’s edge. What in the world? Where did he come from? Perched at the base of the vertical cliffs, it is unclear how the man got there. At his age it’s unclear how he gets anywhere. A great mass of gray curls sits atop his dark and drawn face. His eyes are clouded orbs staring sightlessly over Pradeep’s head. He’s blind too?

Maahjabeen silently paddles up beside Pradeep. They regard the old man together. After a series of urgent glances and shrugs and glares, she ventures to say, “Thank you. Very nice to, uh, meet you. Is this your home?”

The man cocks his head upon hearing Maahjabeen’s voice. “A woman. Aahh.” A groan of pleasure rattles in his throat. “Yes. Home. Last home. Come.”

The old man makes no move. “Come…?” Pradeep echoes. “Come where?”

“Come. Come.” The old man waves them forward. The waves here lap harmlessly against the stone, tamed by the curving fingers of rock. So they can easily paddle right up alongside the spot he perches. As they near they can see the hidden notch behind him. He must have emerged from it.

“The orcas. They knew he was here,” Maahjabeen breathes. “They called to him with their noise. Then he came.”

“Yes. Kéet. Black and white whale. Kéet know my name. Come.” The old man uncoils long limbs and stands. He is taller than nearly every other Lisican they’ve seen, with a spidery gray goatee depending from his pointed chin.

Something in his hair stirs. Eyes blink. There is a fox hidden in there, under the dreadlocks. It blinks rheumy eyes at them.

“What in the world…?” Pradeep paddles close and grabs an outcrop. This won’t be easy but he should be able to haul himself up onto the rock shelf without getting too wet or damaging Aziz.

“What in… the world…” The old man mimics Pradeep, stretching his mouth around the words. “Old language. Enga-lish. Forget, uh, most. Most not all. Understand?”

But Pradeep is busy with his efforts. “Hold on to me, babi?” he asks Maahjabeen, using the stability she provides to slip out and clamber onto the rocks. Then he lifts Aziz, finding no room for the boat anywhere here. He stands the big blue craft endwise, leaning it against the cliff, so he can help Maahjabeen out of Firewater. Then they lean the second boat beside the first.

“I don’t like that.” Maahjabeen frowns at the kayaks.

“Very precarious, yes.” Pradeep casts about for rocks. He finds several long dried strands of bull kelp that nearly do a good job of lashing the hulls together. But they won’t actually tie into a knot. More rocks help, pinning the tubes of seaweed down.

By the time they finish securing the kayaks, the old man is gone. They examine the fissure behind him. Yes, quite narrow, but cut upward at an angle in the fractured cliff face.

The passage never encloses them. It always remains open to the sky, just a deep cut zig-zagging its way deeper into the cliff. It ends in a tiny pocket of a valley, surrounded by thin streamer waterfalls and flowering trees.

A rude hut, only a meter in height, rests against the bare wall of a cliff. It is a filthy little hovel, perhaps the best a blind old man could do. He sits before it, cross-legged, waiting for them. He eats the green rind of an unripe fruit, revealing stained black and brown teeth. Maahjabeen grips Pradeep’s arm as they stand uncertainly before him. “Why?” Maahjabeen asks. “Why did the black and white whales bring us to you?”

But the old man just eats his fruit, grimacing at the bitterness.

“Is it to rescue you? Bring you back home? Which one is your home, anyway? Which village?”

“This home.” The old man indicates the hovel behind him.

“And you’re… doing okay?” Pradeep is unsure what he’s supposed to do here. “Survived the winter like this, did you?”

“On the north shore too,” Maahjabeen murmurs. “The storms must be fierce.”

“Storms bad here,” the old man agrees. “So bad nobody come. Leave all the nakée coast to Aan Eyagídi, human of the land.” He presses his hands against his hollow chest. The fox stirs around his neck, staring sullenly at the two intruders.

“Oh, you want to be here?” Pradeep frowns. “Alone. Is that your name? Ah-an Leen-giddy? Did I say it right?”

“No name. Title.”

“I see.” But Pradeep does not see. He wipes his hands on his shorts and shares a blank stare with Maahjabeen. She is even more out of her element than he is. “Well, since we’re here… Maybe we could give you a hand. Plant a garden. Uh. Build you a better house. You sure you don’t want to come back with us? See some of your people?”

“No people.”

“Right. So… Who…? I mean, what made you move? Did you used to have a… like a family somewhere?”

“No family. Storm doctor.”

Both Maahjabeen and Pradeep look to the sky. It is a ragged band of light high above, crowded on all sides by the towering cliffs. “Storm doctor…” Pradeep repeats, hoping that doing so will peel back a layer or two of confusion.

“Who taught you English?” Maahjabeen asks.

The old man smiles to hear her voice again. “Ahh. Woman.”

They wait for more of an answer but none is forthcoming. Pradeep shrugs. “Maybe he’s kind of deaf as well as blind.”

“No deaf.”

“Oh. Oops. Apologies.”

They stand there in an awkward silence. The old man is patient, waiting for them in a sense. But for what? He knows why they’re here? “So what is it? There something you want to tell us?”

This makes the old man laugh. He lifts his hands and spreads them in an expansive gesture. “All. Tell all.”

“Grand.” But Pradeep isn’t sure it’s grand at all. This sounds like it will take quite a bit of time here. And the smell is already starting to get to him. “Well, let’s get started, Ah-an Leen-giddy. What do you most want to share?”

“Ehhh…” Now called upon, the old man casts about for words. “The sky. Crack open like egg. One, two, three time. Next after that, sky give birth.”

“Damn it, why does this always have to be so bloody esoteric?” Pradeep fights himself to silence after seeing the old man twitch in response to his irritation. “Sorry. It’s just… Why don’t any of you say, like, ‘Lisica has four hundred people. The capital is this village we call Ussiaxan. Our main industries are fishing and foraging.’ Like, what’s the demographics? The median income? Why can’t we just get the Wikipedia page for once? That’s all I’m asking. But okay. The sky cracks open one, two, three… Hey.” Pradeep thinks back to the artwork of the Milky Way in the cave. That was just this morning, although so much has happened since. “You mean you see the stars. The clouds crack open and you see the sky.”

“Clouds are eggshell. We are egg.”

“Oh, wow…” Pradeep falls back. “Lisica is… I mean, you hear that, babi? They believe they’re inside a gigantic egg and the whole island is just like waiting to be hatched. Fascinating.”

“Who taught you to speak to the whales?” Maahjabeen repeats her question but with a different subject, one more near to her heart. “And will you teach me?”

“Storm doctor. She teach me. I teach her. Yes.” The old man nods sagely at the empty air.

“Okay. I will teach you what I can.” Maahjabeen sits before him, trying to make herself comfortable. “What shall I teach?”

“English. She teach English.”

“If you like. Out of practice, eh?”

“First teacher.”

You’ve never had a teacher before? I’m your first?”

“No. She. She…”

“Ah. I think our new friend has trouble with past tense.” Pradeep sits beside Maahjabeen. “You had a teacher. A woman before. She taught you English?”

“Yes. Yes. She taughtet. Old language. When I am boy.”

“Oh, you learned English long ago? From a woman who…?”

“Yes. Miss Maureen. She my taught it.”

“Maureen Dowerd.” Pradeep sits up straight. “You knew her?”

“I think…” Maahjabeen reflects on this old man’s life. “Storm doctor… It’s like shaman, yes? Like, uh, what do we call them? Like Sherman. Well, that’s just our name for them. And Wetchie-ghuy.”

Now the old man’s face grows fearsome. A towering rage fills it and his hand shakes. He holds it out, pointed at Maahjabeen. “No Wetchie-ghuy. No. He is…” But the old man has no words.

“Wait.” Maahjabeen recalls Katrina’s words from her night with the village of the golden childs. “She said, she told us… There was an old shaman. And then Wetchie-ghuy like deposed him. Are you that shaman?”

The brittle fury in his eyes is all the answer they need.

“I see. That must have been… I mean…” Maahjabeen shares a wondering look with Pradeep. “It must have been like fifty years. Just how old are you, Aan? How long have you been here?”

He answers with a question of his own. “How many mothers? In Lisica?” Using the tip of his thumb, Aan Eyagídi indicates the interior of the island to the south. “How many now?”

“Ah. I know this.” Pradeep stirs, recalling what Jay told him of Kula and Jidadaa. “Fourteen. There have been fourteen mothers.”

“Four… teen…” The old man counts out the number on his fingers. “Yes?” He is so shaken his breath hardly makes words.

“Yes. Fourteen. Maybe fifteen by now. We haven’t met any young mothers ourselves yet but…”

Aan Eyagídi falls back against his lean-to with a despairing moan. The sudden weight tilts a wall of his hut and knocks it over.

The old man rolls away, then scrambles to his feet and, still moaning, wanders among the waterfalls, hands over his face.

“Is that what happened?” Pradeep asks Maahjabeen. “Wetchie-ghuy said he’d killed this old fellow but he’d really just locked him up in this little valley for ages, eh? And now we’ve ruined his house. Come on. Let’s see if we can help him…”

Pradeep bends to lift the fallen wall. The stench is really too much now. They should just completely disassemble this heap and like sanitize it before building him a better one.

Pradeep stops, holding a rough panel of bark. “Oh, dear.”

“What is it?” Maahjabeen appears at his shoulder, looking down at the ruins of the little hovel.

Within it is a corpse. It is a soldier of some Asian nation, his face sunken in death. He wears a torn suit of black coveralls and a molle harness filled with small attached sacks and bags.

The corpse’s hands are crossed upon his breast like a pharoah. But instead of holding an ankh, this figure lying in state grips in their withered hands a cell phone.

Ξ

“We must make a decision.” Alonso’s voice is a satisfying rumble. Even if he has lost control of this entire situation, it doesn’t sound like it. He still speaks with confidence. That’s something, isn’t it?

They all look to him for further direction. Mandy and Esquibel. Miriam. Flavia. Jay and Katrina. And Jidadaa, who brought them this latest crisis. Why did she have to arrive now, just as Flavia was lifting his Plexity hopes with her stubborn use of cellular automata? Now he can’t even focus on the import of her words until he resolves this latest crisis. “Jidadaa…” Alonso continues. “How can we be certain the entire Ussiaxan village is now empty?”

“They go. All go. Into night hunter hills. I watch. They scared.”

“And you think this is our only chance to retrieve our lost thirty thousand dollar drone?”

Katrina and Mandy exchange a glance. “Well, that and, well, I was really thinking more about that cottage in the woods, mate. I mean, we can get the drone back, yeh, although I’m fairly certain that it’ll be broken beyond anything we can fix here. But that cottage. It’s where the Dandawu says all their treasures are kept. Jidadaa is sure of it. If we can sneak in there for a quick peek…”

“Must hurry.” Jidadaa looks from one to the other. “Ussiaxan people come back with shadow. Hide from sun today. Very scared. But with night they come back.”

“Are we really doing this?” Alonso looks soberly from one resolute face to the next. These weeks have transformed them all, hardened them, given them direction to their lives that is not so easy to surrender, even against spearpoints. “If they find any of us there they will kill us, yes?”

“Take you koox̱.” Jidadaa shrugs. “Maybe die.”

“Slavery or death. No thank you.” Flavia shakes her head. “My plan over the next eight days is to rework the Plexity data instead, as Alonso has agreed. I think, what I heard, is a tacit admission from him that we may want to depend less on a classic binary codebase? That we may be open to more experimental…?”

“I said what I said,” Alonso grouses. “Send your harmonics through the data and let me know what you discover. I am not ready to grant you any more than that at this moment.”

Flavia laughs wickedly and claps her hands. “Oh, you will not need to grant me anything at all. It is the data, signore dottore, who will show you. Ha. So count me out of your suicide mission. Go ruin your lives without me.”

“Thanks.” Katrina makes a face. “Feel like this is mine to do. I’m the one who lost the drone. I’m the one who talked with the Dandawu about the treasure house. Nobody else has to come.”

“If it is anyone’s mission, it is mine.” Esquibel looks steadily at the ground, unwilling to meet any of their gazes. She has not been able to properly present her mission with the Japanese agent after it was recklessly revealed by Mandy and Alonso at the beginning of this meeting. It had been a very ugly scene and now they trust her even less. It is all a tremendous mess, especially with the loss of the drone and the evacuation of the enemy village. “I will slip in and out, correct our mistakes, gather the drone—”

“By correcting the mistakes do you mean actually handing the Plexity data to the Japanese?” Alonso’s question is quiet.

Esquibel spreads her hands. “Those are my orders. I am a naval officer. There is no option here. I must follow those orders.”

“Well, can we give them an earlier version of it, perhaps?” Flavia opens up a folder of backups on her laptop. “I have a snapshot here from third April, when we were just getting started. We have barely any collections yet. Nothing for them to steal.”

“No.” Esquibel speaks haltingly, choosing her words with care. They don’t know she has already shared a version of Plexity from a full month past that. “There’s, uh, a strict agreement. If I don’t give them the entirety of Plexity, they’ll just come back for it.”

“Well then Flavia, perhaps you can insert a bit of self-destruct code,” Alonso asks, “so that it is only viable for like a week and then it eats itself, leaving nothing but—?”

Esquibel shoots to her feet, pleading with them. “Impossible! I am supposed to be establishing a long-lasting relationship here. Get in deep. Over years. I have to be trustworthy. I am sorry, Alonso, everyone. The American Defense Intelligence people are trying to develop me as an asset.”

Flavia laughs, bitter. “This is the impossible part now, Esquibel. Because you have told all of us and your cover is blown.”

“I told you nothing!” Esquibel hisses, losing her temper. “It was Katrina, putting clues together! Gah. You reckless civilians and your stupid plans ruined everything! Now I must depend upon the discretion of you all or I will be arrested or maybe killed. By the Americans or the Japanese or even the Kenyans. Understand? Once I am compromised, my entire life is basically over. I am already in too deep.”

“I am sorry,” Alonso tells Esquibel, “but I cannot play a part in this. It is Plexity. It is too precious to steal.”

“You knew the risks, Doctor Daine.” Flavia doesn’t even look up from her laptop. “I do not have any sympathy for you. I have been a victim of corporate espionage before. A whole year of my life wasted. It is why I got back into academia. Now you will do it to me again? No.”

Esquibel is devastated. Here is the bill coming due. She knew that she was playing a dangerous game, certainly, but she was only motivated to save those she loves. But now she can see that her loved ones will not do the favor of reciprocating any of the trust and support she has given them. They truly are the most spoiled and self-involved people she has ever known.

“I’ll go with you, Skeebee.” Mandy’s voice is soft but resolute. “I’ll keep you safe.”

Oh, this is an offer she had no right to hope for. Tears spring into Esquibel’s eyes. “You—you will…?” This is a miracle beyond imagining, that Mandy would forgive her and stand with her against all others. “Oh, Mandy G…”

“She had really bad student loans,” Mandy explains to the others. “Poor Esquibel was never given much choice, were you?”

Esquibel realizes her only hope is to beg for their forgiveness. “No. Again and again. I needed to make terrible choices to escape my past. And it has all led me here.”

“You will go to the village, and I hope you find your Japanese spy.” Alonso speaks with conviction, trying to fuse the separate strands of this scattered mess into a single line. “You will speak with them, and tell them what has happened. The truth. Tell them everything if you like. I don’t care. Just explain why they are not getting Plexity and why they must leave us alone. Beyond that, how the Japanese and the Americans handle it is not my concern. And, in the end, Doctor Daine, it is not yours any longer as well. You have been relieved of the responsibility of that decision. Tell them that and then, well, we let the cards fall where they may, yes?”

It is a solution Esquibel cannot accept, but she realizes it is the best offer she will get at the moment. She drops her head and meekly nods. “Yes.”

“I just can’t for the life of me figure out,” Miriam wonders, “what it is about Plexity that is making the Japanese of all people want it so bad?”

“My contact…” Esquibel figures there’s no harm in telling them this much. “He reached out to me before Alonso was even released from the gulag. Their recruitment of me started before Plexity did. It isn’t the specific data so much as how it compromises me and makes me theirs. This is the bridge I can’t ever cross back.”

“Yeh, I’m still going too.” Katrina stands, brushing her lap clean of crumbs. “Curiosity’s about to kill this cat. If I don’t ever get a peek inside that treasure house I’ll die unhappy. You say we’ve got til nightfall, Jidadaa? Like nine hours? And we need like what, four? That should be fine, shouldn’t it?”

“If you can even get across the creek.” Jay stands. “That’s why I’m coming too. I’m the only one who—”

“No,” Esquibel and Mandy say in unison.

“No,” Katrina echoes, a half beat behind.

“No no.” Alonso waves the idea away.

“Damn, people…” Jay shakes his head, sad. “I knew I wasn’t popular here but I am the only one who’s gotten across that creek. And it ain’t easy. What if I—?”

Miriam interrupts him. “No.”

But Jidadaa claps her hands. “Jay come! Me and Jay!”

“No. Not Jay. Just you, Jidadaa.” Esquibel pulls her by the wrist into the circle of four women. “Let’s have your boyfriend recover a bit from all his injuries first.”

Ξ

Jay has spent most of his life in solitude. He has his surfer buds, for sure, and a whole host of other friends and families spread across the world, but when he looks at his life in totality, he’s alone way more often than not. So he doesn’t need any of the others here at this camp. He’s perfectly fine all by himself. Fuck em.

Wandering the pines above pine camp, he realizes for the first time that they aren’t being patrolled any longer by the golden childs. In fact, he hasn’t seen a single pollen mask since the storm blew them off. Their season is indeed over.

What a trip. They’re on like some twenty-one year epicycle, only reappearing when the time is right. This is the mindset of big wave surfing, where sometimes years can pass before the conditions line up just right. You just got to keep your bag packed and schedule clear. “Keep your mind zen, bro.”

But he isn’t sure what zen gains him here this afternoon. Pradeep is gone again. Triquet is back in the sub. Now four more of them are about to dip. And Jay’s got a real bad feeling about that Ussiaxan village. His hand grips his left side, where one of their young hunters scored it. Why do any of them got to be so aggro? This is paradise. They got everything they need.

Pine camp below is peaceful. At the kitchen tables, Mandy is making them snacks for their mission, like it’s a family picnic. Esquibel is filling a huge black backpack with all kinds of shit. Like any amount of gear will help against sixty spearmen. They don’t know how fast those dudes move! How intent they are on running these outsiders through…

Crazy how this narrow band of water can so completely divide two sides of the same family here. They really let their fights get in their way, didn’t they? They could be one big happy laughing tribe here on the meadow but no. Fools always got to wreck it. They tell their whack stories. Sing their songs…

No. No songs here. They write those prophet poems. Jidadaa said there’s like seventeen of them on the island. Some bad and some good. It’s time for him to hear these poems, Jay is pretty sure. If he’s being forced to choose between the Lisicans, then he’ll like bro down with the nicer ones and throw down with the others. Damn. That’s a nice refrain. Too bad they don’t have music here. Jay could… “Heh.” The idea pops fully-formed into his brain. “Write my own prophet poem. Make my own destiny. Bro down with the best. Throw down with the rest. Heh.”

He starts idly beatboxing, wandering through the grove. These are mostly Shore Pine and Monterey Pine but there’s some real beautiful Sugar Pines mixed in here. Such a weird and unique coniferous amalgamation.

“It’s all about the birds. Yeah. Yeah.
I said it’s all about the words. I’m spitting.
And it’s all about the trees. I’m seeing.
How they got across the seas. I’m saying.

“Now here’s a little tale about a storm and a bird and a seed
And how one carried the other to a land he’d never seen.
This bird he carried a seed from a pine he’d been eating
and when he dropped a deuce on the island he started seeding
it with pines and firs and brambly burrs from across the world
and his brothers and the others flew in to meet some girls
and that’s how their song got all mixed up together,
they never would have found each other if it wasn’t for bad weather.
And now that they’re here getting weird dropping deuces,
they found that the ground gives them options so he chooses
to stay, never fly away, live out his days on the cliffs with his eggs
and the partner he has claimed in a monogamous marital state.”

But his song, never long, now starts to always go wrong,
and his little bird brain can’t explain how he doesn’t belong
to all the tribalism and hate and whack shit they create
here in the land of plenty, where birds eat rich and wreck their fate.
It’s the song that you sing, the way you think about everything
that keeps you from having the wind beneath your wings,
it’s the poem you write, mad prophets with spite
that fills you with the envy that keeps you up at night.

“So we fighting for the future with our poems? I’m your teacher,
your lyricist and linguist, my lexicology I’ll feature.
You tell me that each part of this land is a verse?
Then you tell me who’s good and which one of them’s worse?
And you want me to cap one and take him off in a hearse?
And skin his ass and bring him right back as a purse?
And I say nay, no way, Wetchie-ghuy, just go away.
And Sherman, you’re vermin, let the fox finally catch you, and
these shamans need a lesson about the end of Rasputin.”

“It’s all about the birds. Yeah. Yeah.
I said it’s all about the words. I’m spitting.
And it’s all about the trees. I’m seeing.
How they got across the seas. I’m saying.

“Lisica lost me, you tossed me and broke me.
Took my health and my wealth, made my voice super croaky.
But I can still sing, which is better than what you got,
this prophet poem is flowing. Listen up. It’s my last shot.”

Jay passes deeper into the trees, just warming up. This is an epic rhyme. Homer ain’t got shit on him. The bars just keep dropping from his mouth like they’ve been waiting for him to discover them in there.

He passes into the gloom, birds taking wing when they hear his emphatic verses. Behind him, trailing enthralled, Jidadaa absorbs every word.

Ξ

Pradeep glides up onto the shallow rocky beach and pops out of the hull, dragging Aziz clear of the surf line. Ta da. That was neatly done. He turns back to Maahjabeen, still on the water, hoping she’d seen how deftly he moved after hours stuck in the boat. But her face is preoccupied, bruised with memory. Ah, right. She hasn’t seen this western beach since her ordeal with the first storm. Patience. His patience is what she will need here.

She pulls herself out of Firewater and totters up the beach, dragging her boat. “Bring them… higher…” Her voice is distracted, her stamina spent. Preying on her weakness, shards of trauma lance her, half-remembered black and gray images from those long deadly days. Hypothermia. Starvation. Hopelessness. She loses track of what she was saying, then finds it again. She shakes herself like a dog and stares at Pradeep, who watches her with concern. “Big sleeper waves here. At least, last time. Get them on this shelf.”

They carry the boats over the rough sand and lift them up the small bluff at the back of the beach. From here Pradeep sees the second bunker for the first time, hidden back in the trees. It is more dilapidated than he expected, a smaller building that is nothing more than maybe two-and-a-half concrete and timber walls stained green and brown. He picks his way toward it.

Now Pradeep feels the exhaustion. They’ve nearly paddled all the way around the island today. Something like twelve kilometers. Started at like five-thirty on the dial and gotten all the way around to nine o’clock. Just an epic amount of boating. When they’d left the old man, the orcas were gone and the current back to the east was impassable. So they’d surrendered to it and let it carry them around the island to the west, discovering on their way perhaps the largest prominence on the entire island, a bare peak looming above the northwest coast. Then they’d gotten into all those seastacks and finally, about an hour longer than he felt he could go, this beach.

“Do you think your housemates are still in there?” Pradeep turns to ask Maahjabeen. But she is back at the boats, making no move to join him. She watches the water instead, her face closed, arms crossed. He returns to her. “Ah, babi, what is it?”

“Not my favorite beach.” She leans her head against him.

“Understood. But I’m afraid we might need to spend another night on it. It’s getting late and I don’t think I can… I mean… How are you? What is your plan?”

“No plan. I just… miss the orcas.” Maahjabeen knows she has been part of some mythic day, and that it is drawing to a close. The currents had carried her out of their magical realm back to the ordinary, the cruel and ugly. The bunker with that broken femur poking into the air.

Pradeep kisses the top of her head. “Ah. Yes. That was magic. So I have to confess my weakness to you. I’m afraid my arms are about to fall off. I don’t think I can paddle all the way back to the sea cave without a break. That’s probably, what, another few hours? I’m not even totally sure where we are here.”

Maahjabeen lifts her hand and points down the coast to the south. “Down the coast is another maybe three kilometers to the lagoon and our first camp. That is all. But no. I can’t paddle any more. We need food. Do we have any? Maybe we can fish or find some shellfish. Can we make a fire?”

“Esquibel would say no. Maybe in the bunker?”

Maahjabeen shivers. “Ehhh. Maybe we can sleep on the beach?”

“Not in the bunker? Because of the bodies?”

She nods.

But he is intrigued by them. He turns back to the overgrown ruins, pulling out his phone. “Let me just take a quick peek.”

When Maahjabeen was here before it was the middle of a storm and she was preoccupied with her own survival. Now, with the care of a clinician, Pradeep enters the structure, recording a video. The gray light illuminates moss and lichen all over the walls, ferns growing from the top of rotten timber posts. Birds flit in the eaves above, nothing too large nearby that he can tell.

He steps over a fallen sapling and ducks through the narrow door. Quite a mean little space, no more than three meters by five. The windows were narrow. With a roof and another couple walls it must have been a dark little cramped bunker. Ah, there are the bodies, their uniforms the same color as the dead leaves covering them. Pradeep bends over them to do his examination.

Outside, Maahjabeen pulls packets of ramen from her dry bag. She doesn’t care what Esquibel thinks about a fire. She will never know they had one here. And dry wood is in abundance. The latest storms have brought a great amount of wreckage to the high tide line and it’s been enough time for the smaller pieces to dry.

Pradeep rejoins her as she’s making a hasty yurt out of the limbs and branches nearby. “That’s right, my babi,” he laughs. “We’ll build our own little love palace.”