‘It all comes out the same. Not French or Arabic or anything. Just Moitié. When he speaks English—’
She tutted. ‘Everyone here speaks English like the movies.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well. For the record, race is a superstition derived from the clinal distribution of characteristics. But Mancreu is not big and it is not homogeneous and if I had to guess I would say one of his parents was from a mountain family – old island people, that’s why his Moitié sounds that way, so integrated – and the other maybe a more recent arrival. And almost all of the mountain people – even when they move to Beauville – they christen their children at the Chapelle Sainte Roseline by the river, because Sainte Roseline has governance over evil spirits. And mountain people always have a lot of evil spirits.’ She grinned. ‘My grandmother is from the mountains. You would not believe how many ghosts you can get in a very small house.’
He stared at her. She raised her eyebrows briefly: Over to you. Go and make it happen, or don’t. He wondered if she dealt with all problems in the same way, this rapid reduction to a hinge point, and whether she ever found the clarity made things more difficult rather than less.
‘Thank you, Kaiko,’ he said.
‘You’re welcome, Lester,’ she replied.
She spent the next hour pointing out strange mutations. Twice, she stopped him and plucked a small sample of plant life. Nothing on Mancreu, the Sergeant began to realise, was quite the way it should be any more. They passed through an abandoned farm and she stopped him again to look at wheat, then took some of that, too. She wore stiff gloves made out of something space-aged and shiny. ‘Impenetrable to parasites,’ she said sternly. ‘You should get some.’ He sighed – of course, that story would be well known by now – and nodded.
Inoue softened her reproach with a smile, then bent to peer at another growth. He realised that she was talking to herself, proposing and dismissing courses of action, and felt flattered. He was seeing her in her most professional self. It was intimate – this was what made her Inoue – and it was oddly familiar. She saw things which were out of place and gathered them together in her mind to understand what made them so. It was not unlike what he had done in half a dozen bad places, reading the valleys and the weather and the movement of sheep: soothsaying with bullets. He found himself watching her skill with professional appreciation as they made their slow progress across the island. On the fourth and final stop he even started to spot things for her. She smiled again, with approval.
Then they arrived.
The Xenobiology Centre was a cluster of white geodesic domes and extremely engineered circular housing, fast to assemble and durable, but easy to pack up and transport. It bloomed from the rubble and grey sandy soil about three miles from the boundary fence of the old chemical plant, its back against the foothills. The white material was spotless, so that the whole facility looked eerily new and fungal. They had even landscaped it, with small trees and a gravel drive with parking.
Inoue’s team parted in front of her without fuss. They did not ask why she was bringing a clumping great sergeant into their hideaway. They didn’t ask anything at all, which as always suggested to him that they knew their jobs very well and were very professional people. They nodded to Inoue and to the Sergeant and got on with what they were doing, although in one case that seemed to involve drinking Coke and playing some sort of game involving elves. Inoue tutted. ‘Ichiro,’ she growled out of the side of her mouth. ‘A genius. I cannot come up with enough jobs to keep him busy, so I permitted the other interns to assign him their extra work.’
‘But he’s not working,’ the Sergeant said.
‘No,’ Inoue sighed. ‘He established a trading floor for basic tasks and cornered the market in coffee-making futures, and then the espresso machine very mysteriously broke down. So he is a task billionaire. He has calculated that if the others do all his chores and nothing else for seven thousand years, they will be free of the debt. And now he only works when something scientifically interesting is going on.’ She glanced at him. ‘Does this happen with soldiers?’
The Sergeant had been thinking of the boy, and wondering if he and Ichiro knew one another, and if they did, which of them acknowledged the other as the master. Or perhaps they were mortal foes. He shrugged. ‘Something like it, yes.’
‘And what do you do?’
‘I let it be known that I do not approve.’
Ichiro grinned at them, overhearing. He tapped the screen, and the elves were replaced by rows upon rows of data. He took his feet off the desk and leaned in, fascinated. Inoue nodded. ‘So long as the others have time for their academic work, I just keep him in information,’ she said, ‘and he is easy to live with. Come.’
Inoue led the way to the central desk, a round mica bench covered in paper and computer terminals which always made the Sergeant think of King Arthur, and leaned down over a keyboard. He kept his eyes to the front, looking over her back at a framed picture of a marmot on the wall so as not to appear interested in her bottom. It was small and well defined.
‘Lester,’ she said, drawing his gaze downwards to the screen.
On it was something he recognised as a false-colour image, a scan of some sort to which the computer was adding tints to differentiate shapes which otherwise would be indistinct. In his world that usually meant a night-vision camera, and a covert operation. This was different, all branches and fronds, blue and purple at the edges and angry red at the centre. He realised he was looking at the Mancreu Cauldron, a resonance image of the volcanic well from which the Discharge Clouds came, and there was really only one reason why she would show him that.
‘There’s a plume building, Lester,’ she said. ‘A very big one. I think they will finish this. I think this will frighten them.’
Around them the room was quiet. He wasn’t sure if it was quieter than it had been or if he was imagining it because it ought to be that way. He nodded, and then it occurred to him that he could ask her the big question about that, and she might actually know the answer, might tell him.
‘Will it work? Blowing up the island?’
‘No,’ Inoue replied. ‘It will scour the surface and if we are lucky a tectonic shift will seal the vents. But the bacteria will survive. That’s what they do. They already live in an extreme environment. They are protean. And it is possible that the vents will not seal and the bacteria will get into the sea. Again. So far they have not done well there, but that can change. If the chambers discharge directly into the ocean floor, for example, over time… And the radioactivity will increase the likelihood of mutation. It is a very bad plan.’ She sighed. ‘Waiting and learning would be much better. But you can’t tell governments that, it is not a good soundbite. And they don’t like it when science doesn’t give them what they have decided it should say. They have a sort of… a tame team, here somewhere, who tell them stories they do like. I may… I may have to say something anyway, although it will make me not popular.’
She moved her hand through the air. In someone else it would have been a vague motion, but Inoue’s most unconsidered gestures were precise, so her fingers traced a sharp little arc, twisting like wingfeathers. ‘Lester, when this gets out it will be bad. The island people believe they are ready to hear this, but they are not. And I think they will need you, but I think you are not ready either. Are you?’
He ought to say yes, of course, but he needed to find out about El Hierro. And the boy, the evacuation plan: that wasn’t done, either, not halfway done. And there were places on Mancreu he still hadn’t seen. He should run the Lucretia River path again in the sun, it was amazing. He’d have to find ways to stay in touch with people. With Beneseffe and even Kershaw. With Inoue.