Sierra looked baffled. “No.”
“The computer. All my questions went through the computer. All the searches went through the computer. What tipped me off was the numbers on the collision. When I did them by hand, there was enough force from the collision to produce the crack we found, but the computer kept giving me smaller numbers. The computer didn’t want us to find the crack.”
“You think the computer made the leprechauns?”
“I know so. From mice embryo. I found the empty capsules in the cryogenics room. When I confronted the computer with the evidence, all sorts of blocked files tumbled free. There’s a complete record of the breeding program. There’s a leprechan nursery deep in the maintenance shafts where the bots can get to, but we wouldn’t go. All the consumable records had been faked to hide their existence.”
Sierra sat again. Her gaze wandered around the room. Anise guessed she was searching for something to say.
“Why would the computer do it?” Sierra paused. “Oh, give me a second. It must have calculated the possibility of just the situation we faced, where all the power would be down. The computer’s designed to operate without our input. It decided that a sentient work force that was always awake was necessary.” She laughed. “And the computer was right. We’re alive today because the leprechauns poured plastic into the breach. God, that’s brilliant. How smart do you think they are? How does the computer communicate with them? The biology people are going to have a field day with this. Have you told Yatmaso? I can’t wait to see his face.”
Sierra rushed from the room before Anise could speak. She looked at the Irish landscape mounted on her wall and remembered how old and spirit-haunted the stones of Grianan of Aileach felt beneath her hand on that last trip. She said to the empty room, “What’s more interesting is not what the computer did, but why it hid it. Maybe it grew bored, like any other god, and thought it would make some wee people to entertain it.”
She shut her eyes and sighed. There was a rational explanation, full of wonder to be sure, but rational just the same. It was a long way from Ireland, a long way from the Emerald Isle.
He sadness lasted for a moment until, suddenly, she knew she wasn’t alone in the room. Her eyes flew open and caught a shadow moving on the wall. From behind her, she heard a familiar laugh, high and light and tinkling in the air, but when she turned, there was nothing.
HOWL ABOVE THE DIN
Sharon braced the door against the wind with her foot. “So what’s up with the wolves anyway? It’s spooky, them disappearing on the night Fitz took his dive.”
Dr. Roman closed his notebook and placed it exactly in the center of the desk. Sharon leaned against the door jamb, her flannel shirt unbuttoned one button too many as always. She added sarcastically, “You know he spent his last night outside the enclosure with the wolves, again.”
“He could do that, Sharon. Dr. Fitzgerald was an expert in wolf intelligences. You, however, are only a grad student on loan from Environmental Science.”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Roman automatically categorized the gesture: covering the mouth suggested the person was lying or felt she was being lied to. “He was naked,” she said, “again. He thought he was that weird Farley Mowat guy from the old movie about wolves. Don’t you think that was a little twisted? Not to speak ill of the dead, but he wasn’t right.”
Roman placed his fingertips on the edges of the notebook and moved it a micrometer, aware that not making eye contact also suggested lying or evasiveness. He pressed the notebook hard enough that it bowed slightly in the middle. “Your job is in front of the computer researching the records or taking notes, not critiquing Fitzgerald’s methods. He was patterning adaptive behavior for them.”
She “hmphed” loudly. “His pattern. Not a wolf pattern, or a coyote one either. Either he wanted to be a wolf, or he wanted the wolves to be him. Check the transmission records. He transmitted himself. It wasn’t ethical. And you can pretend to defend him if you want, but I didn’t see you spending any extra time with him the last couple of months.”
Roman closed his eyes and counted slowly backward from five. The notebook relaxed: he could feel the edges uncrinkling beneath his fingers. “Six months is a long stay on an island. Maybe we all are a little twisted.”
“And that’s another thing: Fitz’s ‘geo-psionic’ isolation. Nobody bought that theory in academia. They laughed at him at the university. In the meantime, I haven’t had a date since November. Wolves only go into heat once a year, but they’re getting laid more often than I am. This might as well be a monastery.”
Wind pushed Sharon’s light hair around her face and into her eyes. A poster of canis lupus on the wall fluttered. Behind her, the sun sharply outlined the wind-warped yews bending away from the Pacific, their gnarled limbs stretching perpetually inland.
“Well, your time is almost up now,” said Roman. “The ferry will be here this evening.”
“You know what else? I haven’t heard the wolves since he died either. A terrible ruckus that night, then nothing. Not a howl, a bark or a whine. Nothing. It’s creeping me out. I’ll bet Fitz was right: they got tired of the limited space and tried to swim to the mainland.” She tucked her hands into her back pockets and headed toward the Quonset hut that held her quarters and the communication/computer facilities.
Roman stepped to the door; the island spread below him. The wind beat hardest here, and almost never stopped, but he had liked the view. In front of him, the west-facing cliffs and their sentinel yews sheltered the island from the worst of the wind. On the narrow gravel beach a hundred feet below, waves ground and hissed. Roman avoided looking at the point of rock at the cliff’s edge where they’d found Fitzgerald’s abandoned equipment and the note only Roman had read. He pressed his hand to his back pocket where he felt the slight bulge of Fitzgerald’s last words. Now, every plant reminded him of Fitzgerald, every rock, the sweep of sand, the sound of wind over them all, and he wanted to apologize to them. It’s my fault, he thought, and he blinked his eyes against the weight of memory.
“It can’t be done,” he said to himself. “It’s thirty miles to the coast, and wolves don’t behave like that.”
Roman watched as Sharon trudged down the trail to her hut, fifty yards away, her head tucked to her shoulder to resist the wind. Beyond the hut, the research center rose out of a stand of dwarf Oregon Pine. It housed the lab and the tunnel exits from the research compound into the wolf reserve. Like the other two buildings on the island, its sides were deeply rust-streaked. On storm days, salt spray lashed over the cliffs and dampened everything, corroding the two ATV’s so badly that now the researchers walked everywhere. Fortunately, Roman thought, the northeast corner of the island, at the extreme end of the reserve, was only a half-dozen miles away.
Roman scanned the island. Salt-grass meadows and stands of cedar, yew and pine threaded with trails dotted the sloping bowl of land, which held the rare wolf pack. As far as he knew, it was the largest collection of wolves on the planet; all the rest were relegated to zoos. Crowding had eliminated the last wilderness areas years ago. There were no free wolves.
On an island this size, if he had to, he could hike anywhere in an hour or two. And he preferred it that way. A couple of times a week he would enter the reserve through one of the tunnels and wander, glorying in the space, the solitude. No buildings. No roads. No clatter of machinery. He’d sit in one of the meadows, a twisted pine to his back and watch the wind rush over the salt grass unencumbered.