Occasionally, one of the drones passed over an area of tiny islands and crags, and every now and again Lorna could make a matching identification and fit one more piece into her slowly shaping jigsaw.
Out of the known seven hundred she had so far charted three Swirl islands.
Such was the task. She knew that even if she lived to be an old lady, and worked in the MCI until the end of her life, no more than a quarter of the islands of the Archipelago would by then have been mapped. Maybe all of the Swirl would have been completed, perhaps many of the large islands elsewhere. But not all. Even by then.
She and the other cartographers had only charted a little over two thousand accredited islands. Another five thousand maps were in preparation. Beyond these were at least ten or twenty thousand more islands of unknown size, importance or position. The entirety of the task was still dauntingly unimaginable.
As the last of the loose formations of drones passed quietly overhead, Lorna walked across the shingly beach to a spur of smooth rock. The pebbles crunched and ground beneath her feet. She balanced the case of the tabulator against the outcrop, then leaned back on the sloping surface that faced the sea. She let her hands swing at her side.
Tomak had been away, presumably still on Tremm, for nearly two years. Never once in those months had she received any communication from him.
He warned her before he left.
‘They mute the islands they use,’ he said. ‘Tremm is shrouded.’
‘But there must be a way to call.’
‘It’s enclosed in a communications shroud. No sounds or transmissions enter or leave. No one without authority is allowed on, no one is allowed to leave.’
‘Then why should you go there?’
‘You know I can’t tell you.’
‘Then please don’t go.’
She had implored him throughout their last three weeks together, but one evening, after they had stood together on the beach to watch the drones flying in, he had been taken in a motor-lighter to a small ship waiting offshore. Before that final evening they spent a short holiday together, a tearful and frustrating experience for Lorna, but Tomak said only that he was unable to resist the force of military law. He promised that he would return as soon as he could, but so far he had not.
As a civilian she was abruptly excluded from his life. Not long after he departed, feeling betrayed by him, feeling abandoned, deep in loneliness, she took a kind of unintended revenge on him. Her physical affair with one of the graphics assistants had not lasted for long, and afterwards she felt a sense of crushing guilt and abhorrence at her own selfishness. Bradd Iskilip, the man in question, was still working in the institute, but whatever there had been between them was emphatically over. It already felt like a long time ago to her, although not nearly as long ago as Tomak’s departure. More than anything she wanted Tomak to return so that she could quietly, silently, close the error for good.
As the darkness of the sky deepened, she took her binoculars from their case and held them to her eyes. She focused on the dark jagged bulk of Tremm, knowing that if one of the patrols happened to come along the beach and spot her she would be in serious trouble. Her status at the mapping centre would be small protection.
At first she could make out little of the island in the dark, its steep mountainous sides almost at one with the sky. Then, as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she could discern the central mountains. Five of the highest peaks were visible from this shore.
Her practised cartographer’s eye made an inward plan: the five peaks that could be seen, the three that were out of sight beyond those, the plain on the north side facing her, the rolling terrain on the far side, somewhere a town on the coast. The contours and features taunted her, because she would never be able to check them or plot them. DANGER, it said where Tremm stood.
The first of the fireflies glowed so quickly she almost missed it. She held the glasses steady, hoping for another. After a few minutes she saw a second one, then almost immediately a third. She reduced the focal length minutely, widening the field.
Bursts of light were appearing on the dark slopes of the distant island, a sudden silent flaring, like miniature explosions too distant to be heard. So far away from her, with no hint of the size. She began counting them, as she often did — she had spent so long quantifying data, so to her it was an automatic reflex.
Double figures in the first minute, then a pause. Twenty-five more followed swiftly, followed by another pause so long she thought the display had ended. Then a final outburst of flaring lights, always white and intense, now clustered together, almost a stream of lights, but there was no discernible pattern.
When she lowered the binoculars, she discovered someone was standing a short distance away from her. It was a man, his shape just visible against the white curve of the waters’s edge. She had not heard him walking across the shingle.
Swiftly, she moved the hand holding the binoculars, trying to slip them down out of sight. Just in case he had not noticed them, although of course he had.
‘May I look too?’
‘You know it’s illegal,’ she said. She recognized his voice, of course. Relief, irritation, both coursed briefly through her.
‘So do you.’
‘I was monitoring the drones.’ She touched the side of the tabulator.
‘Oh yes, of course.’ He stepped away from her, lowering his head, staring down at the surface of the beach. ‘You would have to say that. I know why you’re really here.’
‘Leave me alone, Bradd,’ she said.
‘As you wish. Do you know what causes the flares?’
‘No. Do you?’
‘I see you most evenings, looking across.’
‘Then you must be looking too.’ He was stepping to and fro in an agitated way, but somehow he was managing not to make any sound on the shingle. ‘They’re something to do with the military. Or the drones.’
‘Same thing.’
‘The drones are ours.’
‘We use the data from them. That’s not the same as controlling them. If you or anyone else at the Institute had the freedom to decide about using them, would you make them steer at random? Why do they avoid the places we want to see rather than fly over them? You know who finances them.’
She wanted to get away from him, but he had contrived to stand between her and the shortest way back to the steps. She eased the tabulator strap over her shoulder, then walked down across the shingle, going around him. It was getting too dark now to make out details, only shapes, but she knew where he was and she also knew how he would be looking at her.
Her feet crunched on the shingle again, a curiously hollow sound, as if there were just a shallow layer of pebbles above a cavern. She heard Bradd behind her.
As she started to climb back towards the top of the cliff, she took one last look out to sea, towards Tremm. Without using the binoculars it was impossible to be certain, but she felt sure the flares were continuing. She paused, looked back down. Bradd must still be there but it was too dark to see.
She raised the binoculars to her eyes but now Tremm was once again a dark shape. That familiar blankness, unrevealing of anything except the one quality that could not be hidden: its real presence, there across the strait.
At the top of the steps lay the unkept garden that surrounded the Institute, and in the dark the breeze from the sea was more of a presence. It mingled with the scents of the night-fragranced flowers that grew wildly everywhere, slowly cooling as the short night began. Beyond the main bulk of the building, in the valley below that opened out into Meequa Port, the lights of the town were visible, a ribbon of electrical dazzle that followed the course of the river.