Migration: Species Imperative #2 Page 10

  So that was it. Mac nodded triumphantly. “A decision about coming back. You’re not sure about working with Lee.”

  “How did you know?” He gave her such a soulful look, Mac had to stop herself from smiling.

  “Educated guess. Why?”

  “I’m a deep-sea fisher.” Case held out his hands. They were crisscrossed with a maze of white scars. Filleting knives, hooks. Even with gloves and the latest tech, harvesting wasn’t for the thin of skin. “Tidal ecosystems are interesting, I grant you, but not what I came here for.”

  Mac pursed her lips. Then asked: “Are you good at it? Harvesting, that is.”

  His pale eyes gleamed. “Wilsons have been heading out to the North Sea for thirteen generations. I’ve more family drowned than buried.” A hard shrug. “Why won’t Dr. Noyo just let me work with the Harvs? That’s where I belong, Mac. Isn’t it?”

  Ah. Not homesick. Intimidated. Mac put her hands behind her head and considered Lee’s troubled student. Just as well this had come to a head now, she decided. She had a feeling about this one; she didn’t want Base to lose him. “In your opinion, Case,” she said carefully, “from what you’ve seen so far, nothing else, does Lee’s line of research have any relevance whatsoever to harvesting?”

  Another shocked look. “Of course it does. He’s examining nutrient cycling within estuaries. Those are key feeding grounds for fish in transit, not to mention habitat and spawning nurseries. The list of species affected? Everything we’d want to haul aboard, as well as their primary food source and predators. You should see the prelims he’s done on the impact of mitigation upstream on the yield of . . .” Case’s passionate voice trailed away as he took in Mac’s rather smug smile. “You know all of this.”

  “I should,” she agreed calmly. “And you find his work interesting?”

  Case actually squirmed. “Yes, but that’s not the point, Mac. Lee, Uthami, the rest in the team—they’re experts at this stuff. Me? I don’t know anything.”

  “Yet.”

  “Sure, I could learn it. But in the meantime, I’m dead weight,” he protested. “What can I contribute? With the Harvs, at least I’d understand the terms—know what I was doing. I’m useless as a Misses.”

  Mac brought her arms down and leaned forward on her elbows, holding his eyes with hers. “Listen to me, Case. You know what a catalyst is, right?” At his nod, she continued: “Kammie and I share a fondness for them. Mind you, to her, being a chemist, catalysts are what make a reaction more likely to occur—in many instances, make it possible in the first place—without being consumed themselves. But here? In a place like this? Catalysts are those individuals who can connect different lines of research. They bring together ideas which wouldn’t meet otherwise. That’s crucial to what we do here.”

  He rolled his eyes. “And I felt inadequate before? You aren’t helping, Mac.”

  She sat up. “Yes, I am. Think about it, Case. You bring the perspective of a Harv, the knowledge of your deep-water fishing heritage, to the work in tidal systems. Every question you ask will have the unique value of coming from that knowledge. Bottom line? Lee and his team don’t know what you know, and they’ll benefit from your insights.” Mac grinned. “I admit there’s the chance you’ll drive Lee nuts—but I think his new lady love is already doing that.”

  There was something immensely satisfying about the stupefied look on the young man’s face. “You’re saying Kammie assigned me to Lee’s research team because I don’t have a clue about his work and he doesn’t have a clue about mine.”

  Mac nodded cheerfully. “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  “That’s not—I’m really—Mac?” He gave her a desperate look. “What do I do now?”

  “You go home,” she advised. “Spend some time on that open sea. Think to your heart’s content. Just be back here in three weeks, ’cause we have work to do this season, despite earthquakes and Norcoast.”

  Case stood when she did, then offered his hand. Mac took it, enjoying the feel of warm calluses, noticing the strength. “You believe I can do this,” he told her. Almost a question, as though he had to be sure.

  “I believe neither of us will know that until you try,” she said honestly. “I hope you will, Case.”

  His grip tightened before letting go, his freckles prominent on his very serious face. “I promise. Thank you.”

  The ensuing pause had the potential to become awkward, but Case relaxed and smiled before it did. An unexpectedly mischievous smile. “So if I’m to try what Kammie says, will you do the same? Take a vacation?”

  Mac raised one eyebrow. “Eavesdropping?”

  “The door was open,” he said, appearing completely unrepentant.

  Grad students, she sighed to herself. “I’m considering it.”

  “You’re welcome to come home with me.” The young man blushed and added hastily: “Don’t worry. My parents and sister will be on the trawler, too.”

  One of the few times to be grateful Emily wasn’t around.

  Mac coughed. “I appreciate the offer, Case, but I’ll probably help Kammie with the courses she’s running. Or there’s a taxonomy conference in Brussels—”

  “When was the last time you took a vacation?”

  Mac found herself at a loss.

  “Aha!” Case crowed. “I bet you’ve never taken one. I bet you don’t even know how!”

  “Of course I do,” Mac huffed. “I haven’t bothered.”

  He gestured at her cluttered office. “So it’s true!”

  “What’s true?” she asked cautiously.

  “What they say. You really do live here all the time. Year in, year out. You don’t even bother with sleeping quarters.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with a passion for one’s work,” she said primly, then winced. No doubt about Emily’s response to that line. “Don’t you have a ride to catch, Mr. Wilson?”

  Unfortunately, grad students loved nothing more than a mission. Case, Mac realized glumly, happily relieved of his own conundrum, had his teeth firmly in this one.

  Which would have been fine, if it wasn’t her.

  “I promise to think about it, Case. Oh, no,” Mac forestalled his next outburst. “This is where I get to pull rank. End of argument.”

  He chewed on his lower lip, then nodded. “You promise, though.”

  “Go chop fish heads,” Mac suggested with a grin, making a shooing motion with her hands.

  She closed and, as an afterthought, locked the door to the terrace, before making one last walk-through of her office and lab. She opened cupboards. Counted Emily’s boxes of belongings. Found a hose clamp in the wrong drawer and put it with the rest.

  Strange, how final it felt.

  Mac shook off the foreboding. She was tired. Tired and thoroughly offended by the current state of things. Neither led to peace of mind.

  Of course, it didn’t help her mood to return to her office to find two black-garbed monoliths guarding her desk.

  They’d left their visors down for some unfathomable reason. It had to be hot in there, Mac thought, not for the first time. She scowled until, one after the other, they flipped them up on their helmets. The revealed faces shared a sheepish look. “Jones. Zimmerman,” she acknowledged, feeling uneasy. Nice guys; but they never came to her office like this. “What can I do for you?”

  “Hi, Mac,” Jones said. “We’re here to help you pack.”

  Mac reached down and grabbed her bag, holding it up for inspection. “Done.”

  Zimmerman, dark-skinned, dark-haired, and perpetually dark of mood, so far as Mac could tell, heaved a sigh, rattling something loose among the weapons clipped to various parts of his armor. “Told you we didn’t have time for supper, Sing-li.”

  “I thought you’d left by now,” Mac commented.

  “We’re waiting to take you to join the others at the university,” Jones informed her.

  Were they, now.

  Mac tightened her grip on the bag handle.
“Why?”

  The two exchanged looks, likely reflecting on other situations involving that question in that tone from Mac. “It’s a nice campus. Great facilities—”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “I do know the place. The point, gentlemen?”

  Jones managed to shrug his encased shoulders. “It’s a secure option, Mac,” he told her. “ ’Sephe’s already there, doing the prep work. After what’s happened—well, we all felt some extra precautions might be necessary. I know you won’t be happy about this, but—”

  “Why wouldn’t I be? Sounds perfectly reasonable,” Mac said blandly. “Just give me half an hour to locate the samples I’m taking from storage. One of the courses we’re teaching has an anatomy component. Where shall I meet you? Front entrance? Back here?”

  They probably should leave their visors down more often, Mac decided, amused by the war between suspicion and relief on their faces.

  Suspicion won. “We’ll come with you,” Zimmerman said. “Help you pack.”

  Mac smiled. “Perfect.” She slipped her arms into the shoulder straps of her bag, and waved her “helpers” onward.

  Mac had no idea what Kammie and the University of British Columbia would make of five preserved orca heads, two bottles of giant squid eyes, and fifty-three huge, “too good to discard but on the way to rancid” clumps of mutually cemented rock barnacles. If they got there.

  As expected, however, her “samples” made admirably awkward burdens for two overly helpful Ministry guards.

  By the second load, they’d begun working together, leaving her to pull out the next load from the stas-unit in Pod Four.

  By the third, Mac was no longer at the stas-unit, but on her way to Kitimat, having squeezed herself and her bag in with a bunch of homebound and very happy Preds students, much to the delight of Case Wilson.

  “Vacation, here I come,” she told him, dropping into the tiny space they’d cleared her for a seat.

  She hoped the universe would behave itself while she was away.

  - Encounter -

  OEISHT WALKED restlessly up the hillside, each step bringing front legs forward, brace, then drawing the hind set through. The rhythm was soothing and efficient. Oeisht covered ground rapidly, each step a surge of muscle and bone.

  Behind oeisht, on the lower third of the slope, aisht huddled in the homes of the settlement, isht of every life stage safe in their pouches.

  Safe. Was there meaning to the word? This far from kin, oeisht panted with despair. Oeisht had seen for oeishtself the desecration of the farmland in the next valley to this. A single isht had survived, jammed inside a hollow roof pipe, the only living thing between the hills of scoured rock. Too young to grieve; too young to have concepts for what had happened.

  But Others knew. Others had sent urgent messages. Travelers, the infertile aisht, restless, always seeking, ever curious, had interpreted their meaning for those who dwelt within the Pouch of their kind.

  Oeisht let the latest swing forward of his hinds stop, easing to his haunches. By the new thinking, the Pouch was far larger than this one place. Oeisht, aisht, and isht lived on a world within its star system, that star within a cluster of stars, that cluster, within others. Oeisht wasn’t a theologian, but this new concept, that the dark sky of night was itself the inner folds encompassing the universe, had a good feel, a comfort to it.

  Oeisht had come to the hilltop for comfort. Now, oeisht gazed upward, elongating and thinning oeisht’s eyestalks to sharpen the focus of the stars winking above. Each, if aisht were to be believed, might have worlds, worlds with those who had eyes looking toward oeisht. Oeisht, out of sight of aisht, who might think oeisht foolish, flared ears in greeting. Then, oeisht crouched, retracting ears and eyestalks.

  The stars were wrong.

  The stars were coming closer.

  Oeisht leaped to all fours, surging downslope in prodigious leaps, moaning oeisht’s despair.

  The stars were faster.

  And they brought the Dhryn.

  It is the way of the Great Journey that what can be gathered cannot satisfy. That which is Dhryn cannot be filled.

  That which is Dhryn . . . hungers.

  Only at Haven, will there be enough.

  All that is Dhryn must move.

  Or all that is Dhryn will end.

  - 5 -

  REST AND RECRIMINATION

  MAC COULD SEE them all now. Case, triumphant. Kammie, openly smug. The Ministry’s finest probably still explaining the presence of orca heads and the absence of hers on campus. Her father, who’d let her pretend this trip had been her idea all along.

  “Vacation, hah!” Mac grumbled to herself, staring out the window of the public lev. “Bet I last two days before I’m bored sick or resorting to chocolate.”

  Since she’d been one of the last to leave, there hadn’t been an onerous round of good-byes. Suited her mood. They wanted her gone for three weeks? Fine. She’d go.

  From Kitimat, Mac had caught a public lev to White-horse, another to Ottawa—in which having two seats to herself meant room to nap—and this last to North Bay, where she’d stood for the final leg to let a family with young twins and even younger kitten sit, or rather squirm.

  Par for the course. Weren’t vacations supposed to be relaxing? So far, Mac hadn’t seen any evidence of it. Other things, yes. Vidbots hovered everywhere, in the doorways and passages of transit lounges and hotels, even hung from the ceilings of stores and restaurants. Governments swore those in public areas were reactive and nonrecording, keyed to switch on only if a disturbance was detected or during special events to provide news feeds. Rights groups kept testing that claim; the average person hardly noticed the things anymore.

  Mac did. They weren’t allowed in Castle Inlet. Away from that refuge, she resented their little shadows, felt their presence like weights on her shoulders, knew a steady anger that they kept watch on her family.

  She liked the devices even less, having been tracked by one on the Dhryn world. Emily’s trick.

  Then there was the pace. Mac was used to taking transit off-hours and to odd locations. Now, she was forced to join the brunt of the Human stampede. Worse than students heading to supper on Pizza Tuesdays. Her initial curiosity over why all of these people had somehow picked her route to follow soon changed to a frantic hope they’d all go somewhere else entirely.

  Fortunately for her sanity—and peace aboard public transit—by the time she reached North Bay everything eased to a civil crawl. The station received only one lev an hour, so she disembarked to welcome, open space. No more elbows and backpacks threatening her nose. Even better, the ever present vidbots became scarce, then nonexistent. Not much to watch in the northern woods, and fewer places where being watched was permitted. Part of the charm.

  From the station, Mac shared a ride with a group of cottagers just in from Toronto to the Misty River Cottage Association docks. The courtesy ferry was, as always, nowhere to be seen, so the cottagers shared their picnic with Mac while they waited, along with their eagerness to check on their respective properties after the long winter. Ice breakup north of Algonquin had been two weeks later than predicted; relying on such predictions, Mac agreed with the cottagers, was about as smart as feeding bears from your porch.

  They were pleasant, cheerful people, intent on leaving their mundane lives behind while “up at the lake.”

  Much as she hated to admit it, Mac began to warm to the concept. Maybe this enforced vacation wasn’t such a bad idea. Each stage of her journey had seemed to lift a layer of dread from Mac’s shoulders. Each took her farther from what might be, back to a time when her biggest concern had been getting Sam to notice she was a girl. That, and making it into the school of her choice.

  She had a new definition of life crisis now.

  The ferry arrived midafternoon, an actual float-on-water boat with an equally quaint waterjet engine that purred quietly to itself as its operator brought it to dock. Wide and low to allow room for cottagers and what
ever paraphernalia was going up with them this year, the ferry’s only protection from the elements was an awning over its stern half. The awning and seat cushions had once boasted vivid red, purple, and yellow stripes, now mellowed to pastel by sun and time.

  The sun, as suited mid-May, was set to brilliant, as if it had forgotten all about spring and gone straight to summer. Mac drank in the intense blue of the sky, marked only by a few puffy white clouds stuck behind the low rolling hills to every side. The ferry headed upriver, loaded with carryalls of food and other supplies, bits of cottage-ready furniture, and a stack of mem-wood for a tree house that would be a surprise for a trio of lucky great-grandchildren.

  They chugged peacefully alongside tilting cedars, reflections mingled with the lichen-stained boulders of the shoreline. The forest had a manicured look, branches starting a tidy two meters or so up every leaning trunk. Not the work of a gardener, just the heavy snow pack pressing lower branches down until they snapped. There were still patches of dirty white snow here and there in the shadows, the remnants of deeper drifts that grudgingly melted away.

  Mac sat on the bow, bare feet dangling to either side despite the occasional splash of still-cold water, elbows on the gunnel so she could lean forward with her chin in her hands. The sun was warm on her back; the ferry slow enough she could see the river bottom clearly. Mac watched for turtle scrapes and schools of darting minnows, counted mussel beds and spied the tail of a pike, lurking beneath a sunken log. A beaver nosed by, bubbles streaming from its fur, staring up at Mac before ducking below the surface.

  She smiled.

  The river took a wide bend, then they were at the lock to Little Misty Lake. Rapids tumbled white and busy beside the structure which lifted water and shipping more peacefully between levels. Like much in this part of the world, the lock was revered as an antique worth saving and considered a hopeless and expensive bottleneck to progress. Usually at the same time, by the same people.