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.
Lorna paused, taking a breather after the climb up the cliff, thinking that Bradd would soon catch her up.
The windows of the institute building were lit from within, but every pane of glass was curtained so that it was impossible to see inside. Lorna knew that at this time some of the cartographers would still be bent over their drawing tablets and terminals, but most would have stopped work for the night. Some of them would have stayed behind to use the bar, but a lot of the staff simply went home at the end of the day. Lorna and her friend Patta were unusual in renting one of the institute’s small service flats inside the main building.
Beyond the Institute, the town, the inland heights of Meequa’s range of hills. Sometimes, people who worked in the Institute went on hill-walks up there in the heights, but because of the friable nature of the rocks the hills were not safe for climbing or exploring. Lorna herself had never been far inland from the coast. She preferred to leave the dark peaks a private mystery in the background of her life, an unexplored enigma.
The hills held other more tangible riddles too: Meequa was an important part of the network of military installations and bases found all over this sector of the Archipelago. Large areas of the hill country were forbidden to the public, even to members of the MCI staff, who were nominal collaborators in the drone project. Somewhere beyond the first range of peaks behind the town was the base to which the drones returned, where they landed, somewhere dark, unlit, controlled by computer robots, collecting and storing data, information that was more than just the mapped details that were passed on to the institute: military intelligence, mining data, probable oil reserves, weapons caches, sources of energy. None of that disagreeable practicality was any part of Lorna’s own enigma. She sensed a deeper, more personal absence because of her loss of Tomak.
Tomak’s disappearance was probably explained by the hidden interior of this island, rather than by the uncharted highlands of the other. But Meequa was for her an island like a thousand others in the Archipelago, harbouring a seashore mentality, a littoral culture, turning its back on the engine of military intention and strategy that powered the island economies from inland, looking instead outwards to the unmapped seas, carelessly idle in the warmth, languorous under the sun, dreaming in the days.
The drones went out again before dawn, whispering above the roofs of the town, heading out across the sea. By the time Lorna was awake they had all disappeared, but another swarm of drones sent out earlier would be returning in the evening. The drone journeys were long: the solar-powered batteries could keep the flimsy craft flying for days or weeks. Many never returned. Some were shot down by troops: the enemy, of course, but even friendly gunners were known to use the drones for target practice if they strayed too near a base or a fort. Others crashed when the software failed and they collided with each other or with something on the ground, while more ran out of energy when they strayed too far south or north, and became trapped in a night that was too long for their batteries to be revived by the coming of sunrise.
But there were others, and these were the ones that Lorna loved to dream about. People from all over the Archipelago told stories of drones that became trapped in their own software. They somehow wandered into an area of terrain, a range of hills, a stack of rocks, a pattern of islands that set up radar avoidance patterns in the directional controls, but also closed a loop from which the drone could never escape.
Lorna had heard of more than thirty islands which had acquired attendant drones, constantly touring or circling the mountain heights, or zooming along the seashore, or heading bravely out to sea only to be returned by the detected barrier of a neighbouring island. One pair of islands in the Aubrac Chain had fortuitously created a virtual figure-of-eight, around which the captured drone constantly flew, never escaping, day after day, night after night.
Sometimes Lorna imagined that if the mapping enterprise went on long enough, every island would eventually have its own drone, permanently circling with its flow of silent, silvered wings.
When she arrived in the office that morning she downloaded a fresh set of drone images for the general area of the Swirl — the date identifying them was nearly two and a half years earlier.
She began as usual with the preliminary scanning, which filtered out and discarded approximately ninety-five per cent of everything: these were the unworkable, unusable images of the surface of the open sea, or of unidentifiable patches of land, or were blurred by motion or simply out of focus.
The secondary level of search on the remainder involved the fragments that might be identifiable in some way, and therefore able to be matched with previously stored images: these were usually glimpses of shallower seas, lengths of reef, concentrations of fish, large isolated rocks, or on land surfaces they might be clear images of mountains, or part of a river, or dwellings, or even short stretches of coastline. There were scanning and matching
