“What does that mean?”
“Dr. Hu is not on Stromness. You would know as much if you had coordinated with him. But you didn’t. Instead you made an impulsive plan, spur of the moment, to visit a place with which you have good associations. Something’s troubling you. You are aware that you might be starting to go epi. You won’t discuss it with ‘Doc’ until you are face-to-face with him, in a place where you feel safe. It must be something you observed on the surface. Something unexpected.”
Telling Ariane Casablancova to read Kath Two’s report wouldn’t help. Probably she had already perused it several times. She wanted to hear the story fresh.
“I might have seen a human,” Kath Two said.
“Might?”
“It was a glimpse. From a distance.”
“Not another surveyor — or else you wouldn’t see anything remarkable in it.”
“Surveyors wear bright clothes, for visibility.”
“Beled didn’t.”
“When he was passing near the RIZ, no, of course not. I’m speaking in general.”
“Go on.”
“This person was wearing the opposite. Sort of like—”
“Like what?”
“You ever see pre-Zero videos with hunters? They used to wear clothes that would make them less visible.”
“Camouflage,” Ariane said.
“Yeah. I think this person was in camouflage.”
“Not a surveyor, then.”
“So — military, perhaps?” Kath Two asked. “But the only purpose of military is to fight other military. And I’m pretty sure there’s no other military down there. Unless there’s been some kind of infraction. But if there’d been an infraction, I’d have been warned of it before I was dropped. Hell, they’d have sent a Thor after me.”
“Did it occur to you that it might be a fresh infraction? Which you were the first to notice?”
The question kind of hung there. Ariane’s implication was clear. If Kath Two had witnessed anything of the sort, she ought to have reported it immediately instead of sleeping for ten hours and then making a harebrained effort to find Doc in a place where he wasn’t.
“No,” she said. “That’s not what this was.”
“How do you know?”
“I was making passes over the lake for a long time. I was clearly visible. Anyone who was there for no good reason would have simply hidden in the trees until I was gone. That’s not what this person did. They were down near the shore in a place where they could get a clear view of what I was doing. Like—”
“Like what?” Ariane asked.
“Like they were gawking.”
After a long silence, Ariane repeated the word, “Gawking.”
“Yeah.” Until this point, Kath Two had felt uncomfortable under Ariane’s gaze, but now she looked directly into the great penetrating eyes for a while.
“When this person moved,” Ariane said, “did you get any sense as to posture and gait?”
“I don’t think it was a Neoander,” Kath Two said, shaking her head. “That I would have reported.”
Ariane blinked and said, “The simplest explanation is, of course. .”
“An Indigen. Which is the possibility I discussed with Beled.” She was feeling a little on the defensive now. “But what would one be doing there? So far from the nearest RIZ.”
“It is a mystery.”
“Yes.”
“That explains why you broke profile,” Ariane said, nodding.
“I don’t even know what ‘broke profile’ means to you people.”
“Did you ever get the sense that you were being watched? Followed?”
Ariane Casablancova had the damnable habit of asking good questions.
“You have to assume, when you’re down there, that—”
“That you are not going unnoticed by local megafauna. Of course.”
“Over time, hiking solo, trying to be aware of that, it can make you sort of, I don’t know—” She didn’t want to use the word “paranoid” around a Julian, since it was a racially charged word. Ariane seemed to sense this, and found it ever so slightly amusing. She leaned forward slightly, trying to help Kath Two over the sticky place.
“You develop a heightened awareness. Perhaps, to be safe, you interpret the sounds of the wilderness—”
“In the most conservative possible way, yeah. Like, the morning of my departure I was awakened by patches of light moving around on my tent. I thought for a minute that it might be caused by the movement of a large animal, passing between me and the sun. Then I emerged from the tent and saw that it had just been my imagination, that the light was shining between tree branches that were moving in the wind.”
“Interesting! That heightened awareness of things, over a long enough span of time, does seem just like the sort of stimulus that could trigger an epigenetic shift in a Moiran,” Ariane said.
“The thought had occurred to me.”
“You didn’t mention it in your report.”
This was the first time Ariane had come out and admitted that she’d read the report, and so it pulled Kath Two up short.
She was distracted by a large Teklan entering the café with a green bracelet on his wrist. But it wasn’t Beled. Just another surveyor, recently arrived, perhaps part of the same dragnet.
Obviously Beled had filed a very complete report, including his conversation with Kath Two on the flivver. From another type of person she might have found this an irritating indiscretion, but for a Teklan it was to be expected.
“I didn’t mention it in my report,” Kath Two said, “because in my judgment it was only my imagination, not a genuine, reportable Survey event.”
“If you don’t object to my going all juju—” This was a self-deprecating term for Julian-style cognition.
“Go ahead.”
“Perhaps your initial impression was correct, and it was, in fact, caused by a large animal — a human — passing between you and the sun. A mistake committed by someone who was watching you furtively. And when he — I’ll call him a he — noticed his shadow on your tent, he realized he’d blundered, and withdrew down the slope into the woods, and watched you from there.”
“It is entirely possible,” Kath Two said. Out of politeness she refrained from adding that it was the kind of thing that could only have been spun from a Julian mind.
“How has your sleep been since then?”
“Very sporadic and jet laggy, which is why I’m here. I think it is possible that I might have started to go epi on the last day, but now that I’m back in civilization my system is confused, and the shift is being aborted.” Here, Kath Two might have reached up to feel her own face had she been sitting across the table from a Moiran friend. Do I look different? But Ariane would have no way of knowing the answer.
Kath Two added, “I’ve been sleeping with Beled. I think that is helping pull me back.”
“Very well. I hope your adjustment — whether or not it includes becoming Kath Amalthova Three — is a smooth one.”
“Am I free to leave?”
“It’s not my decision. Your status remains indefinite.”
“Afraid I’ll blab about it?”
“It’s not for me to be afraid about such things. My personal advice? Don’t blab about it. But you know your rights. You can’t be detained just because you think you might have seen a camouflaged gawker in the middle of nowhere.” Ariane seemed to consider her next move before adding, “Otherwise you’d see a lot more Survey people bottled up in this café.”
ARIANE WAS RIGHT ABOUT DOC. HE HAD LEFT HIS HOME IN THE misty campus of Stromness — a habitat in the predominantly Ivyn part of the ring, consisting entirely of university — and was en route to Cradle. Along the way he was spending a bit of time on the Great Chain. So when Kath Two finally took the obvious step of getting in touch with him directly, he responded within a few minutes and told her where he could be found.