As a precaution against the security staff coming across her and challenging her for being on the beach at that time, Lorna always took the tabulator down to the beach with her, but this evening, as on most evenings, she did not switch it on.
The tabulator hung on its strap against her side. She could feel it vibrating gently in stand-by mode as it responded to the locating pulse of each of the incoming machines, separately identified. In this mode the tabulator’s detection of the drones was numericaclass="underline" so many of them recognized and logged, so many accounted for. She would return to evaluating the more complex quantified results the next morning, after they had been downloaded at the base and sent along the landline to the MCI’s computers.
In the chartroom the staff would view the coverage of the ocean, then become absorbed in the task of tracing each drone back to its launch point, using the satellite returns to analyse its route. Working with the other cartographers, Lorna then laboriously transferred the images to the master data store. But even with a full complement of staff they were endlessly running behind — they were still trying to untangle the reports from more than two years before. Tonight’s mapping data would probably not be properly evaluated for another two years or more. Gradually, the backlog was increasing.
Lorna should have left the MCI and Meequa Island several months earlier, at the end of her contract, but she felt trapped by Tomak’s sudden disappearance. How could she leave until she knew what had become of him? Patta, her roommate, obviously thought it was time for her to move on, but that was for Lorna irrational and impossible. Tomak had left her with so many things unsaid, so many personal decisions unmade.
She still ached with love for him. Why had he left her that way? It was impossible to re-adjust until she found out what had happened.
She stared across the sea, under the scattering of drone lights, at the dark offshore island where Tomak had been posted. This was the real reason she came down to the beach every evening whenever she could, but it was becoming a habit. No longer a hope. Silence was the cruellest burden.
The other island had a name: Tremm, named after the mythological companion of Meequa, who was the bearer of messages. Tremm was Meequa’s outrider, the guard, the protector, the fast wanderer who passes. But the island which carried his name was dark and low against the twilit horizon, stolid and heavy-looking, as much unlike a fast-moving wanderer as it was possible to imagine. Tremm was directly opposite the cove, an hour or more by boat from Meequa, across the shallow strait, and whenever the drones swarmed in she would see the paths of their LEDs veering to one side or the other of the island.
Tremm had been charted years before, but ironically it was one whose details were the least known because of the secrecy that surrounded it. It was one of several closed islands in the vicinity of Meequa, taken over by the military many decades before. The drones were programed to avoid it. No one could go near it without permission. Anyone who did go there had to sign security pledges, and never spoke about the use the island was put to. Most rarely admitted they had even been on the place. Officially it had ceased to exist. Even to look at it was, in theory, to break military law, although the civilian cartographers at the MCI, and the ordinary people who lived in the town, could and did use this beach.
On the map of the Midway Sea Tremm did not exist. No island was drawn in its place. It was shown as an area of the sea, a dishonestly blank zone south of Meequa. Someone had fancifully added oceanic depths, and blue contour lines. The legend said in small blue letters: DANGER
Gradually, the chart of the Dream Archipelago was taking shape, but because the drones were self-guided on reactive principles (programmed to avoid each other and solid objects, rather than seek out certain targets) most of their data was produced along randomized paths and therefore much of it overlapped. The returns inevitably revealed unidentifiable stretches of ocean.
Digital images of land, or better still of coastline, were comparatively rare, a fact which often surprised visitors to the mapping institute. To most people, the sea seemed crowded with so many islands that it was unbelievable that it would be difficult to chart the areas of land. However, less than five per cent of the Midway Sea was solid land, the rest being ocean, lagoons, rocky shallows, beaches, and so on. This percentage was a working assumption. The actual figure would not be known until the mapping was complete. Satellite images, invariably unreliable because of the temporal distortion zones, had provided the working estimate, but drawing detailed, reliable maps was a matter of urgency.
At least the MCI was well funded. People who ran wars needed maps.
The terrain of many of the islands, viewed from above, was unbroken forest, or unexceptional farmland with few distinguishing features. Many islands were desert. Where there were rivers they were usually short or narrow, or both, or overhung with foliage. Lakes were few. Mountain ranges were also a problem for a technical reason: the drones had a maximum working altitude, and when they approached that ceiling they were programmed to veer off. Coastlines were always more satisfactory to work with: the ports, peninsulas, cliffs, fort installations and river estuaries could usually be identified and located to particular known islands or even existing maps made by the locals.
The drones were programmed to detect and map roads, towns, railway lines, airfields, factories, homes, sources of pollution, and many more man-made objects. Mostly they found traces of sea.
Progress was therefore infinitesimally slow. When she began working in the Meequa Cartographic Institute as a young graduate, Lorna had imagined they would be mapping the whole shape and extent of the Dream Archipelago. As she quickly discovered, this gigantic task was still barely started, buried under an ever-growing mound of data. The only reliable trace they had was the individual path taken by each drone on each trip, and although this could be tracked against satellite data and computer records the amount of overlap and sheer number of indistinguishable images was overwhelming them.
More recently, as her youthful idealism was replaced by experience, she had found herself following the example of her colleagues. She started to concentrate on a single group of islands, ignoring all other data or passing it to colleagues.
Her chosen speciality was the cluster of cays, skerries and small islands in the southern seas close to Paneron, known informally as the Swirl, which comprised more than seven hundred different named places. Her first task had been to tabulate the names, itself a mammoth task. Many names were duplicated, many islands were named in different ways, and throughout the Archipelago, the Swirl being no different, local patois would use a locally recognized name while the inhabitants of other islands, some of them adjacent, knew the island by a different name. At least half of the known islands in the Swirl had no discernible name at all, yet her database had already passed five thousand separate names for the islands.
No one at the MCI had been to Paneron or the Swirl, no one at the MCI even knew anyone else who had been there. There were no formerly existing aerial photographs or drawings of the Swirl, and of course no charts were available. The satellite images, randomly distorted as always, suggested a spiral of islands, those towards the centre made to look larger than they probably were, those on the outer fringes smaller, and the rest warped in proportions whose extent could not be calculated.
A hundred books described the Swirl, but some of the accounts were only vague or lyrical, while most of the rest were written in the seductive rhythms of Archipelagian literature. A collection of seafarers’ yarns, told in archaic marine argot, happened to have become one of Lorna’s most reliable guides. Sailors were used to navigating, measuring, keeping logs, for all their fanciful stories of monsters and mighty tempests. Names were the only certainties — the culture of the islands was oral and textual, not visual.