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:

Book IV – Hypotenuse Of Hope

46 – Pork On The Barbie

In the Dzaadzitch village the next morning, Mandy and Miriam try to share gifts and make plans. With Morska Vidra beside her, Miriam watches a trio of younger villagers emerge from the cave mouth, bearing fish from the beach. “Oh, that’s a lovely catch. Now that you’ve got the lagoon to yourselves it’s fish every day, eh? You were just waiting for us to leave before you went back down there, weren’t you?”

But the villagers don’t engage with her. They are intent on their feast, exclaiming over the shining fish.

“What I was saying,” Mandy repeats loudly and slowly, trying to regain Morska Vidra’s attention, “is that if it’s okay with you guys we want to get out to the cliff tops daily. Day-lee. Understand?”

The silver fox appears, scrambling up the leg of one of the youths to sniff at his catch. They all speak to the fox with deference, waiting for its blessing. With a sneeze the fox gives it, darting away, and the villagers call out, pleased. They disperse to gather their fixings. The Mayor starts building a fire while others bring baskets filled with mash wrapped in green leaves.

“And do you have any rope?” Miriam extends an invisible line through her hands, trying to communicate the concept to him. But he hardly takes his eyes from the fish. “I want to drop down that shaft up there. Study the rocks. The layers and the history of the island? The rocks?” She points at the cliffs visible through the trees. “Hanging from a long rope, tied to something solid at the top?”

But before they can gain his approval, a young girl appears from the far side of the village. She passes between the huts and enters the village square, chanting to them all about something she just saw. The village falls silent. The Mayor stops building her fire and listens. The girl stops, turning back again and again, to poke at the air behind her with the tip of her thumb or her little pointed chin. The Mayor finally stands and says something. Then she points with her own thumb at Miriam and Mandy, directing the girl to them.

The girl skips forward, as light as a fawn on her feet. Her small dark eyes are alive with excitement and her black and gold curls bounce like springs. She chatters at Miriam and Mandy, fearless, then waits for their answer.

Morska Vidra turns to Miriam. She shrugs at him, confused. He pushes her gently toward the young girl.

“Aye. You want me to…? right.” Miriam bends over, the girl is quite small up close. “Hello, love. How can we help you?”

The girl slips her narrow hand into Miriam’s and pulls her forward. “Oh. Come with you?”

“Not alone.” Mandy starts, nervous as a rabbit, delaying Miriam with a hand on her elbow. “Never alone. Not after Amy.”

“And all the other disappearances. So come with me, please.”

“Uh, where?” Mandy peers doubtfully into the woods from which the girl emerged. “This is how we get in trouble, isn’t it?”

The girl pulls more firmly on Miriam, ignoring her resistance. But then she stops, trying a new tack. She places her other thumb against her chin. “Xaanach.”

“Shah-nock. Xaanach. Oh my god, I remember Flavia talking about you.” Miriam stops struggling and falls in step with the girl. “You’re the one who saved her from Wetchie ghuy, aren’t you?”

“Wetchie-ghuy…” Xaanach makes a horrid face. She tears at her own windpipe, then crosses her eyes and lolls her tongue out the side of her mouth. Then she laughs and pulls on Miriam again. “Pođi sa. Hwai.”

“Come on, Mandy. She hates him as much as we do. And she wants to show us something. We’ll be fine. At least we know she isn’t leading us to that sour old bastard.”

But Mandy really doesn’t have it in her. She’s here to climb the cliff behind her facing the sea, to reset her weather station, and that will take all her energy. She’s sure of it. With a groan she collapses against her companion instead. “I just don’t think I can do this any more, Miriam. I mean, honestly. I didn’t sign up to be, like, hunted. Russians on the beach, shamans in the trees. Come on.”

“Don’t fret, darling. We always have our golden childs with us.” Miriam indicates the patient figure standing outside the village, waiting for his two charges to return.

Giving in with a growl of supreme irritation, Mandy clenches her fists and follows, knowing with every step she takes that she is heading further into danger. “Why do we keep doing this?” she wonders aloud. “We know this is just going to be trouble but here we go again anyway.”

“Not sure what our other options are.” Miriam is committed to this course now and her long strides keep up with Xaanach’s happy bounding. “Come on, Mandy.”

As they pass the last huts and climb the forested slope behind them, Miriam examines the girl pulling her. There is something different about Xaanach, the particular weeds woven into her hair, the rattiness of her shift, her ebullience. And the way the Mayor spoke with her… There was a formality to it. It wasn’t how she speaks to any of her own people. Xaanach isn’t of the village. “Well, that must be right,” Miriam says to her aloud. “You pulled Flavia out of Wetchie ghuy’s hut in the middle of the night and by all accounts that’s like an hour or two from here. They wouldn’t let a… what are you, eight? nine year old girl? out alone, would they? All night, messing with the medicine man. Where the devil are your parents anyway? Just who are you, Xaanach?”

The girl stops and touches her chin with the tip of her thumb. “Xaanach.”

“Yes. Miriam.” She repeats the gesture on her own chin.

“Mandy. Nice to meet you. Please don’t hurt us.”

“Mee-yum. Man-dee. Hwai.” Xaanach waves them forward.

Somewhat mollified by the charming little pixie, Mandy allows herself to be led upward to the edge of a thicket. Down they go, crawling beneath its sharp branches, and out the other side to a rocky cliff face. Xaanach has been chanting this whole time, telling them all kinds of fascinating details about the world around them. Now she points at the cliff and finally releases Miriam’s wrist so they can both climb.

Mandy falls back and groans again. “I knew this was a bad idea.”

“It would be…” Miriam peers at the cliff, picking at it with a fingernail, “if Xaanach hadn’t just led us to a deposit of plagioclase feldspar. What is this doing at the surface? My my my.” She croons at the crystal admixture. “You’ll be changing my island models for sure. See, Mandy? This is already a beneficial side-journey.”

“Yeah… I’m not sure how much climbing I’m good for.”

“Look. Xaanach’s already vanished up there in that cleft. Seems like it’s just a few meters then pop.” Miriam hauls herself onto the stone wall, the fractured face offering plentiful hand and foot holds.

Xaanach’s little face re-appears above, calling out, “Mee-yum. Man-dee. Hwai.”

“Why are you so, like, brave about all this?” Mandy really wishes she could let go of all this irritation but her unresolved fight with Esquibel has made her crabby and defensive, dragging her mindset back to the first few weeks of this trip, when she couldn’t ever get anything done. “Aren’t you worried about where she’s taking us?”

“Aye, for certain I am. But listen to yourself. You seem to have this notion that there’s an option here that gives you everything you want, and that’s just not how things are out here, love. It’s not like we say no to Xaanach and then just get to choose how the day goes. This is a… I mean, like, if we dropped ourselves into Times Square and said we’re going to live here for eight weeks, we’d have to spend a fair bit of time negotiating with the locals and making sure everyone was fine with us being there, aye?”

“It’s just…” Mandy drops her hands, knowing she’s lost yet another fight. “This has nothing to do with atmospheric science, okay?” With a muttered curse she hauls herself up the cliff face.

At the top, they find themselves at the top of a slope that drops away into a nice wide valley interspersed with oak groves and green meadows. Far away, there is a lighter bit of emerald moving against the dark green carpet of bushes. It is Jay in his softshell jacket, picking his way through dense growth. His face is burned red by the sun and wind and he is limping, his hand at his side.

“Jay!” Mandy calls out.

He is quite far away, hundreds of meters. Jay stops, unable to locate the voice, or even tell if it was an auditory hallucination or not. He blinks at his surroundings. Where is he now? Traversing this wide bowl, coming down from a steep motherfucking gradient behind him where he nearly got wrecked in a minor landslide. Its aftermath prevented Pradeep from following at a healthy clip.

“Jay! Over here!” The voice is so thin. It’s got to be one of the crew, though. Up ahead? He shades his eyes, the overcast sky still bright enough to matter. Are those figures up there? He waves.

Within moments, Miriam and Mandy and a little Lisican girl are down in the meadow with him. They drape his arms over their shoulders, and even though it stretches his scar, he lets them support his weight. “I am so so so happy to see you. Swear I could like kiss you both.”

“Deal.” Miriam laughs and kisses his cheek. “Ah. Maybe a wash-up first then I’m all yours.”

Mandy frowns. “But where’s Pradeep?”

“Yeah, he needs more help than me. Back this way.” Jay tries to turn them all around. Reversing course is the one thing he really hates doing. But it doesn’t matter now. He found help at last.

They tell Jay about their days and nights of labor and the move to the pine camp inland. He exclaims, “No way!” a dozen times at the proper intervals, shocked that the Russians or someone like them really did land on their beach. “The lagoon’s out of bounds? Like for the whole rest of the trip? Just when we set up the gill net? Aw, man. That is a major major bummer.”

“Why did you leave Pradeep behind?” Mandy’s worry grows. “Don’t you know we can’t do that any more?”

“Yeah…” How to communicate what the last day has been like? How they’ve woven their own paths, despite all their best attempts to stay together, across the southwest of the island? “It’s just, like, really choked with vegetation in there. Like really choked. Like, we haven’t seen a real trail in days.”

Jay leads them to another slope, this one carpeted with soaring Douglas firs like a proper Oregon forest. He just spent all morning coming down that way on feet and knees screaming with agony. It wasn’t that he’d put a lot of steps in, really, it was more that he just hadn’t been able to ever stop and rest them.

“Is Pradeep injured?” Miriam is starting to feel Jay’s weight. Just how far back are they going to have to go?

“Nah. Just… I get into a zone and… I should have waited but…” He shakes his head. There was so much he was going to tell these people! But now that he sees them, all the words he’d prepared in his endless hours of walking lack any meaning or power.

They walk under the tall firs, their brown needles carpeting the ground. After a few minutes of steady climbing, Jay stops.

On the slope ahead, a tableau:

Pradeep’s long dark form is face down on the hillside, unmoving. A golden childs stands on the far side of him, his back to Pradeep, arms raised. Wetchie-ghuy is crouched on a stone above, clutching a forked stick. Jidadaa is at a right angle to their stand-off, holding Wetchie-ghuy’s fetish. They are all stone still, so the newcomers also fall silent. No one speaks, not even Xaanach.

“Prad!” It is Jay who finally breaks the spell and charges forward, lumbering uphill with a bad limp.

Twitch. Wetchie-ghuy vanishes from the boulder.

In three bounds, the golden childs stands where Wetchie-ghuy had just crouched but the shaman is nowhere to be seen. Twitch. The golden childs also vanishes from view.

With a smile, Jidadaa turns to Miriam and Mandy. “Ah, hello, friends. Wetchie-ghuy, he almost gets this one,” she points at Pradeep, who still doesn’t move, “but we say no no no.”

Ξ

The racks that hold the solar panels were damaged in the move, struts now bent and bolts missing. Flavia tries to fix them with sticks and twine, but it is slow-going. She has placed the array at the edge of the trees facing the sun to the southeast. Finally she is able to make it sturdy, although it no longer has the ability to be adjusted. This will impact their recharge rate. Yet another thing to slow their research down.

Regardless of this frustrating task, Flavia likes it here in pine camp. Or, more precisely, she prefers it. She doesn’t actually like anything having to do with Lisica. She hasn’t felt any actual pleasures of satisfaction or desire since she left home. But that is probably due to the fact that home is Italy. She has heard this from Italian migrants before. Nowhere in the whole world is quite so warm, so bright, so emotional as the Italian Peninsula. Outside the borders of Her sea and mountains, people grow cold, the food bland and ingredients cheap. Even politics are more interesting and fierce in Italy than other countries, although they drive her crazy. But that’s the thing, other places don’t drive Flavia crazy. They only inconvenience her, like with these branches and this twine on this godforsaken frozen island in the middle of nowhere.

And yet, it is far better at pine camp than at the beach. That ocean wind had been driving her mad, the relentless movement of air that robbed her of peace and steadiness and the basic ability to think. Now, here in this protected valley, she can hear the songbirds trill instead of the waves boom, and she is mollified.

Flavia returns to camp. She checks her laptop to find it is now charging, the skeletal power network she has built for the camp now alive with solar-derived electricity. She loves technology that is so clean, with no moving parts. Moving parts are so… industrial revolution. Flavia likes her tech more elegant than that.

Alonso is at work in his camp chair, hunched over the laptop balanced on his knees. Now that she has checked off her first task of the day, it is time to move on to the second one before she gets hungry for lunch. Flavia locates an empty bin and turns it upside-down for it to be used as a chair. Then she places it facing Alonso and joins him at his platform, their knees nearly touching.

He is deep in Plexity. He grunts at her but his fingers don’t stop typing. She knows better than to interrupt him.

By the time Flavia arranges her laptop’s windows into her standard workflow, Alonso is able to break away.

“Yes, Flavia?”

“Buongiorno, Dottore. How are you?”

“Eh.” He makes a face. “You really don’t want to know. Really. I mean, I feel like… I’m a chef who has to feed two hundred people tonight and only half my ingredients have been delivered. Not even half. Just a tenth. Just… the eggs. And some water. Feh. What am I supposed to make with that?” He shakes his head in despair. “No, I am not looking for your pity. I understand that it is my fault. What I asked of the team here is impossible. The sheer number of unique inputs required is staggering. But Plexity is… I mean, I have to keep working on it. Can’t you see? Nothing else matters. Not really. As soon as I had the epiphany about it in the gulag and I saw it in all its glory, what it could become and the answers it could provide, then there was no point in ever working on anything else. Because the fundamental answers to nearly every problem can be found in Plexity, in its connections, in the web of life. So. How am I? Not very well, thank you. I just keep banging my head against this very firmly shut door, trying to salvage something from our six weeks in that lagoon. But the gaps in the data are too large. I can’t establish any of the baselines necessary to derive meaningful measurements. You of all people must understand what I mean.”

Flavia only stares at Alonso, mute. If she was the one feeling such frustration, any possible response he made would only end with shouting. She would lash out with all that anger. And she doesn’t need to be Alonso’s target, so she keeps her mouth shut.

Alonso nods, bitter. “Of course you do. This is what you’ve been trying to tell me since we got here. And now,” he gestures at his screen, “it is all ashes. Worse than ashes. At least ashes used to be wood, and when you burned them, the fires warmed you. This… this was all just a fool’s errand, with no benefit in the least. Just chasing our tails for six weeks.”

Flavia shrugs. “The American generals will not think so.”

“You don’t know. I got us here with some very big promises. Bold promises of what Plexity will be able to do.”

“Oh, yes? Like what? How would the military even use it?”

“Well, they had those two biologist contractors who were very impressed with the scalable resolution we should be able to offer. They could see its promise, especially at macro levels. With enough collectors and boots on the ground, they are certainly right. In the end Plexity will still probably be what I was able to promise. I will just never be the person who is seeing it. They will cast me aside and it will be someone else who—”

“Wait, wait.” Flavia holds up an urgent hand. “Cast aside? Are you telling me you don’t own the rights to Plexity any more?”

Alonso does not look up from his screen.

Her head rocks back, the implications hitting her like a truck. “Are you telling me all this work we are doing is for the American military, for a new technological platform that the American military will control? Ai, Alonso…”

“It is a very generous license they have given us for academic use and publishing.” His voice is quiet. “It is not something I wanted, for sure. And… they said it was a change in the contract that came down from the top at the last second, but no, I didn’t believe them. They probably knew how they were going to play me all along. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been in a bargaining situation where the terms were changed just as I was about to sign. But what could I do? I had to sign the rights away. I had no leverage.”

Flavia slams her open hand down onto her knee. “You say no. You walk away when that happens.”

Tears spring into his eyes and Alonso holds his shaking hands out, pleading. “But I couldn’t walk. Flavia, I was in their hospital, after they had rescued me. And healed me. And their scientists said I could be of use. You don’t know. After five years, hearing those words… Being of use. Nothing sounded better.”

Flavia shakes her head, disgusted by the machinations of large bureaucracies. Che pazzo. She had been about to make his day brighter by proposing a new approach to Plexity, a modest way to salvage what they could of their enormous project. Flavia thought they might use the data they’d already collected as a massive filter for what they found next, screening every life form and compound from pine camp against what they’d found before in the lagoon, focusing on the scientifically-significant differences between biomes instead of the connections, per se. Then they might at least return with a handful of deep insights for their masters. But now she knows how much her masters the military men are. No. She will not work for them, not when they will enjoy all the data and share nothing with the wider academic world. Flavia has refused all military industrial complex work during her career and she has no intention of starting now. “But Alonso… The problem, as I’m sure you know, is that this… ehh, we should have known that… Well. I guess this just forces us to realize what the end-result of all this data collection will be. You must realize if we find anything too valuable with Plexity it will never be published, yes? It will disappear into their black budgets. Let us show them a failure instead. Or at most just the smallest amount of progress. We need to be thinking much much more strategically about what we are doing on this project. And you need to share with us the terms of your ‘generous academic license’ so we can figure out what we can tell them and what we cannot. Oh, Alonso. Were you really going to give them a fully-operational Plexity? And expect them to keep their promises about what you would be able to share?”

Alonso shrugs. “Look, those biologists were the only ones in the room who understood anything of what I was saying. The others didn’t have a clue. They could just tell the eggheads were very impressed and the general in charge really trusted both them and Colonel Baitgie. So I thought maybe I’d go back and if I’m lucky the contractors wouldn’t be there and I’m presenting to a room full of nothing but morons in uniform. Even Baitgie wouldn’t really understand Plexity’s implications if I kept it technical enough. They would just say, ‘Yes, great job. Mission accomplished,’ and I would leave with all my licenses and prototypes intact. And sure, maybe that is a little naive, but it is the best I was able to do.”

They stare at each other, two individuals trapped in the decisions they’d made with their lives. Neither feel there are any options for them to change their circumstances. Neither see any way forward.

The corner of Alonso’s mouth twitches. “This is when Amy is supposed to swing between us with an offer of tea. I miss her very much. Do you think she is okay?”

Flavia knows Alonso means that he wants her insight into what Wetchie-ghuy must be doing to Amy. It must be Wetchie-ghuy who took her, despite the efforts of the golden childs and their retreat to the pine camp. And nobody knows more about Wetchie-ghuy’s enslavement than Flavia. So Alonso wants her to relive that madness. She shivers and shakes it off. No. She won’t. “I have no idea, Alonso. I just hope they are a very happy couple.”

“Esquibel…!” A distant voice comes from the meadow near the creek. “Maahjabeen…! Esquibel…!”

“Is that Miriam?” Alonso tries to twist in his chair but his legs have fallen asleep. With a grimace he gets them working again and he stands. Flavia rises beside him.

“Who is calling my name?” Esquibel pokes her head out of the plastic slit door of the clean room. “Who is that?”

Maahjabeen emerges from her tent and stands atop her platform, shading her eyes. She squawks. “That is Pradeep! Alhamdulillah! They have Pradeep! Come!”

She rushes through the trees to him, Esquibel on her heels.

Miriam and Mandy drag Pradeep’s black-clad body through the grasses toward the camp on a crude travois, Jay limping beside them. There is no sign of Xaanach nor the golden childs who left with them.

Maahjabeen throws herself down beside them when they are still fifty paces from camp. Pradeep is unconscious, his head lolled to one side. She gathers him with a sob in her arms and holds him. “What is it? What happened to him?”

“Wetchie-ghuy…” Miriam is gasping. It has been a long journey. “He did something horrid to him, some voodoo bullshit…”

Maahjabeen wails and hauls on Pradeep, pulling his slack torso forward and tugging at his clothes. Alonso arrives, hurried across the meadow by Triquet and Flavia’s strong arms.

“No, there’s no fox or whatever on his tailbone.” Mandy reels away from her handle of the travois, her palms burning, her arms exhausted. She shakes her arms and groans. “We checked.”

“And Jidadaa told us,” Miriam adds, “that the fox was a symbol of the other one anyway, not Wetchie-ghuy. That Sherman the shaman. They’re the one who poisons people and puts the stamp on our spines, not Wetchie-ghuy. She told us a lot.”

“Then what is it?” Maahjabeen kisses Pradeep’s slack face, trying to transfer her love into him like she did before, when he was dying of that cold mud. She chafes his frozen hands.

“Uh…” Miriam shares a furtive look with Jay. “Well, according to Jidadaa, she said Wetchie-ghuy took Pradeep’s soul.”

“Not true.” Jay’s first words are a rasp. “I bought it back from him with a joint. Fair deal. Pradeep doesn’t belong to Wetchie-ghuy any more. He smoked that whole reefer to his head.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Triquet can’t make sense of any part of Jay’s statement.

Jay tries to recap but his head is buzzing with fatigue. His own words echo in his skull. “Pradeep knew that Wetchie-ghuy had claimed him and the first time that old asshole showed up he was just going to like go with him. But I made a deal to give him my weed instead and that’s when Wetchie-ghuy started smoking like a chimney and he just went apeshit and attacked me. Then…”

Jay falls silent, remembering what the golden man had begged of him all those nights before in the tunnels: Kill Wetchie-ghuy. Jay is lidass. It is his destiny. But he turned his back on that, didn’t he? And now his buddy got taken instead, despite all Jay’s best efforts. He failed Pradeep. He was supposed to take care of him, defend him from Wetchie-ghuy even if it meant killing the old man. As if Jay’s actually capable of taking a life. As if he could actually get his hands on the old man. And what that would have done to Jay, all that blood on his hands… Well. Looks like it’s one soul or another, Jay’s or Pradeep’s. That’s the price Lisica is demanding.

But the others aren’t listening to him any more. They’ve moved on without him, hurrying back to camp, Esquibel racing ahead. Jay stops and looks around, his face bitter. Well here it is. This is the meadow he’s been seeking for days, this broad expanse from weeks before where he first saw the golden childs and the Katóok tribe and all the rest. And now the crew lives here, up in the trees a good hundred paces from the creek. Well well well. Plenty of places to hang a hammock, for sure. Almost back to normal.

But now they said Amy’s gone. The one person he’s closest to in like his whole life right now. Man, she’s not just a boss. She’s his mentor and friend and guide. Without her, Jay wouldn’t even be in grad school, and he knows it.

“If I’d killed Wetchie-ghuy when I saw him… Pradeep and Amy would both be here.” He shakes his head in wonder at the surreal nature of the universe. Him. A killer. And not of just anyone, a shaman of an endangered Pacific Island tribe. At the request of another shaman from another endangered tribe… I mean, that’s who that golden man was, yeah? A third shaman? But so far him and his kids have been good to the team, watching over them and protecting them, for whatever reason. He was the one to beg Jay to kill Wetchie-ghuy. He must have known what was coming.

“I got to talk to that dude again. Maybe with Katrina in tow. Get some answers.” Jay shakes his head at how much they are up against. He takes one last look at the cold gray sky before stepping under the trees. “That’s what we need now. Answers. Information war, my peeps. It’s where we at.”

Ξ

Maahjabeen hurries from her tent back to the clean room, her head empty. She realizes distantly that for the first time in memory she has no thought of the sea. Or of God. Only Pradeep fills her heart and soul. She knows it is blasphemy but she is quite close to not caring. Maahjabeen has never known love before. She thought she had, but those were the first tottering steps of a child compared to the—the splendid dances they share. And love is all.

These disquieting revelations about her true nature almost make her stumble. She isn’t pious after all, but an imperfect creature of passions both romantic and sexual. Yet she hurries on regardless, back to the clean room with a clutch of socks, to give Pradeep a bit of a sponge bath and make him more comfortable, even in a coma.

She slips through the plastic slit, relieved to find the clean room empty of others. Only Pradeep is here, covered in blankets, an IV drip feeding him, and his eyes are open!

Maahjabeen rushes to him and covers his face with kisses. He only stares at the ceiling, hardly responsive. “Pradeep! Pradeep…!”

“Yes.” The word is like a pebble dropped into a pond, cold and inert. His eyes remain distant.

Maahjabeen pulls back. “What is it? Are you okay?”

“No.” He says it in the same empty way. His eyes do not move from their point on the ceiling.

“What is it? What is it, Mahbub?” She encircles him in her arms, pressing his slack face against her. But when he doesn’t respond she holds him at arm’s length again. “Tell me. Is it the cold mud?”

“No.”

She frowns. He doesn’t struggle. He is awake, just merely not present. And he apparently only answers yes and no questions. “Is it something else?”

“No.” Wherever she moves his head it stays, same with his arms and body. They are all heavy and inanimate.

“It’s… nothing else?” Unlike all the atheists here, Maahjabeen knows it is the soul that animates the body. So when she heard that Wetchie-ghuy had claimed Pradeep’s, she’d taken it quite seriously. And now, this dispassion is what one would expect of a man whose soul has been taken. He is nothing now but a golem. “Nothing at all in there…?”

Maahjabeen grabs his hand and spreads both hers and his against his chest over his heart. He blinks. “Yes.”

“Oh, where is it, Lord? Where has he taken it?” Maahjabeen laces her fingers with Pradeep’s and kneels by his side, in prayer.

This is how Esquibel finds them a timeless interlude later. She puts the packages she carries down and crosses to the cot. “Eh, he is awake. I knew he just needed some rest and fluids. How are you, Pradeep? Eh?” Esquibel is surprised by the storm in Maahjabeen’s eyes. She had expected to find relief there. “What is wrong?”

“He can only answer yes and no questions!” After this inexplicable statement, Maahjabeen dissolves into tears.

Puzzled, Esquibel turns to Pradeep. “Nonsense. He is just tired. How are you feeling? Can you tell me your name?”

Pradeep looks dully ahead, into the middle distance.

Esquibel takes out her phone and shines its light into Pradeep’s eyes. He has no pupil reflex, none at all. No reaction to the light response test, the swinging flashlight test, nor the near response test. Both pupils remain unchanged, with a median pupillary aperture, despite any stimulus. She leans into his field of view, frowning. “Can you… can you see me?”

“Yes.”

Oh, she doesn’t like the sound of Pradeep’s voice at all. Cold as a corpse. Frowning, Esquibel finds his pulse. It is like… footsteps in sand. Not weak, just… contained, with no real resonance to it, like a machine is pumping his heart instead of contractile muscle. She passes a hand over his brow. “Can you tell me what the day of the week is?” Silence. Esquibel tells Maahjabeen lightly, “I’d have been surprised if he knew it. I’d have to check to know, myself.” Then back to Pradeep, “So can you tell me your name?”

He only stares ahead. She snaps his fingers beneath his nose. No reaction. She taps the sharp edge of her phone against the patellar tendon of his knee. No reflex response. “What in the world?”

“Pradeep,” Maahjabeen forces out his name from between sobs. “Tell us, Mahbub. Do you have a soul?”

He turns his hollow eyes to them. “No.”

An icy chill runs down Esquibel’s spine. Forcefully, she shakes her head in cynical rejection of it. “These god damn medicine men and their hallucinogens, I swear. But this one seems to be more of a dissociative, I would guess. Shutting down the perfectly good brains of my colleagues. Why don’t any of these dangerous substances come with antidotes?”

“Oh… They do.” Maahjabeen remembers Pradeep telling her of how she had been brought back by a foul-smelling concoction of rotten black leaves when she was suffering. “That girl. Jidadaa. She brought me those herbs. We need her to…”

But Esquibel is shaking her head. “No. No more drugs on top of drugs. And Jidadaa was already with Pradeep, anyway. She saw what had happened to him and she was the one who said he had a, what? A soul-ectomy? Some kind of metaphysical amputation? So she obviously can’t be of any more use.”

“Then this is a matter of faith.” Maahjabeen resumes her prayer.

But Esquibel interrupts it with a firm hand. “No, this is the time for modern medical interventions. I was too worried about contra-indications and unknown side-effects when you were both poisoned but with hindsight I don’t think being so tentative did anyone any favors. So this time I will respond more strongly. First, deactivated charcoal, and then perhaps some epinephrine.” She puts a hand on Pradeep’s arm. “Are you in pain?”

“No.”

“Well that’s a relief. Maahjabeen, I need you to do your religious practice somewhere else. Here is where his monitor must go.”

“There is nothing medically wrong with him.”

“Oh, here we go again.” Esquibel rears back, hands on hips, about to deliver another lecture on the dangers of superstitious thinking, when she is caught by the torment in Maahjabeen’s face. It reminds her of the day workers she used to see in Kenya when she was a resident, the young women with hopeless eyes and faces worn twice their age from brutal lives in factories and workhouses. And that forces her to recall what originally made her become a doctor: to ease suffering. The world is filled with so much of it. Palliative care is the best one can do for the bleeding world.

With a sigh, Esquibel rearranges the clean room so the monitor can be placed on Pradeep’s other side. She drapes a blanket around Maahjabeen’s shoulders, pats her bowed head, and leaves the two lovers alone.

Ξ

“What if I grab your hand? What then?” Katrina reaches for the hand of the golden childs accompanying her. The youth pulls away and she is delighted by his meekness. It is one of the only really human responses she’s ever seen from them.

They sit in a narrow cleft of gray stone, a fissure running down into the next valley to the northwest of pine camp. Katrina needs to be alone today, as much as is safe, and at first the golden childs gave her the solitude she craved. But the knots in her mind became no less untangled. Finally, surrendering to the impossibility that she could find any solutions to her troubles, she’d set a bit of an ambush here for the golden childs following her. She needs to talk to someone about this.

“A ty govorish’ po russki?” The youth just hides quietly behind his bloody golden mask and doesn’t say a word. “Okay, can you speak any language besides Russian? And I know you can speak behind your mask. The golden man did. Zolotoy chelovek sdela.”

Katrina takes a deep breath, trying to clear her head. “Why does your chief speak Russian, though? They must come here often. But not to the south? Not to the beach? The Russians must have some other way to access the interior of the island? One the Yanks don’t know? Okay, but why? Listening post… Regional base… Look. Mr. Singlung He was my sponsor for the Singapore Conferences and he used to go on and on about maritime supremacy being the foundation of regional hegemons. But the Americans must have known the Russians were here. They must. Their own little Cold War, yeh? Right here in paradise, murdering each other in their sleep. God, the spooks always think they’re so fucking clever…”

She tosses a rock from her perch in the fissure down the slope into the bushes below. A cluster of dark birds wing away.

“Multi-polar. A multi-polar island, with at least four axes. The way I see it you got your Americans here…” Katrina places a jagged piece of quartz in the dust at her feet. “Your Russians. Your Lisicans, who can be further divided into the competing villages and shamans with all their different agendas…” Then she picks up a small flat stone. “And the Japanese.”

Katrina watches the golden childs to see if the word triggers any reaction. But the pollen-laden mask remains impassive.

“I said what I said. She told me last night it was the Japanese. I told her that I hope they like show tunes because that’s all I put on the USB stick she gave them. She said I didn’t understand.” Katrina pushes herself again to her feet. “Thought she was going to kill me then. Wouldn’t take her hand from her gun. So I didn’t push it. But Christ how many players are there at this table? We thought Lisica was all remote and empty but now we can hardly spend a day without finding a whole new nationality has arrived. What, do you get the Hawaiians here too?”

Katrina entertains herself with images of barechested Polynesians paddling longboats through the waves at the mouth of the lagoon.

She sighs, studying the youth. “You’re a good bloke. Don’t talk too much. I like that in a man. But the big problem is what am I going to do? Should I tell Alonso? Mandy? I mean, yeh, I definitely will. I don’t hold any allegiances to Esquibel. Kind of a bitch, to be honest. But I don’t need to like ruin her life with one ill-considered confession to the wrong people at the wrong time…”

Katrina reflects on how it had ended last night in the dark. They had been so close, whispering urgently in each other’s ears, gripping each other. Full darkness. The only sensations were Esquibel’s stale exhalations against her cheek and her strong hand encircling Katrina’s arm. She had just finished a breathless tale of subterfuge, insisting that selling the Plexity secrets to the Japanese had been an order from her superiors. She shared how it had all started six months before, when a very nice elderly Japanese naval officer had made an initial contact with Esquibel at a medical conference in Jakarta. He’d made an offer so oblique she didn’t even understand what he was asking until she’d had time to consider it. But when she did she’d gone straight to the spooks at Langley and they’d ordered her to keep quiet and string the Japanese intelligence agency along. They told her the Plexity data wasn’t significant but sharing it would build trust. She was one of the good guys, she swore. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, but Katrina had to understand that they must keep up appearances.

It occurs to Katrina now that Esquibel might have very well killed her and hidden the body in pursuit of her mission’s goals. Yet what stopped her most likely wasn’t decency but the presence of the golden childs, four of them crouched at the edge of camp. So instead she implored Katrina to forget what she’d seen and to keep her mouth shut. Otherwise there might be a real nasty mess when they got picked up in two weeks. If, say, at the Air Force debriefing, Katrina suddenly starts going on about a Japanese soldier in the night then all kinds of hell could break loose. Be discreet, Esquibel had begged her. I love you all and I am here to protect you, she’d finally confessed, emotion choking her voice. Then she’d stepped close, a leg sliding between Katrina’s to press up intimately against her, and kissed her. Then she’d repeated, “I do love you, Katrina,” which put her in a state of wordless shock, before Esquibel had disengaged and slipped off into the cold dark night.

Katrina hadn’t slept a wink since then.

She picks up the dark flat rock that signifies the Japanese. “Just… like… We got enough going on here, folks. Don’t come back and everything will be fine.” She tosses the rock into the bushes below.

This time, the rock hits an animal in the bushes and it squeals, a dreadful baritone rattle. The bushes shake with violence.

Now the golden childs beside Katrina stirs. He leaps forward and puts himself between the creature in the bushes and her. The animal storms out from under the branches, still outraged. A boar. It’s a huge boar, like the size of a moped. And not much slower. It charges up the slope toward them with dreadful speed.

“Climb. I’ll climb.” Katrina hears her own breathless words in her ear. They sound faint and weak and tardy. This monster and its ragged tusks are going to wreck them both. She hauls herself onto the fissure’s wall, trying to swing herself up and clear of the ground below. But she isn’t fast enough. The boar is beneath them now, tossing its head against the golden childs.

The youth leaps at the last instant, clear of the splintered tusks, and lands on the opposite wall of the fissure. He scrambles up before the boar can turn and charge again.

“There’s boars…” Katrina pants, over and over, “boars here on Lisica. There’s boars… on Lisica…” Finally she climbs to a safe perch and crouches there. The golden childs pulls himself up, nearly to the top edge of the cliff. “When were you ever going to tell me? Come on, then. Time for some pork on the barbie.”