Deesa loved the view. From the upper dome of the Visitor Center, a bubble of glass bulging out over the 1200 meters of air below, she could look straight across to the towers of Leopolis. It seemed she looked right at the upper floor balconies, into the blackly iridescent windows behind, though they were a good 10 kilometers away. The tall dark towers rose like vast, stubby, branchless trees, growing improbably out of the green plain. They looked organic, in fact; but that, after all, was the point.
Or she could look opposite the city, toward the Everwinter Range. She turned her glasses in that direction. The distant mountains leaped into her field of view, their glacier-clad flanks sparkling in the midmorning sun, the rock of the carved crags dark in contrast.
And she was going there! This afternoon! Well, not to the mountains, exactly, but into the Preserve. They’d finally gotten the authorization for the seismic network, and she was going along—her first trip into the Backcountry. Ryke had finagled it for her. He’d said it would be a good trip for both of them.
Of course, maybe someday, in 20 years or so when she was a Senior Warden, she could go there any time. But for now, she had to content herself with the occasional foray as a member of an authorized expedition. A trace of wistfulness crossed her features momentarily. Sure, she knew the land couldn’t tolerate hordes of people. If everyone could go into the Preserves, any time they wanted; well, they would hardly be Preserves, would they! But still . . . . What good was scenic country without someone to see it?
An incorrect thought, that! She’d better be careful to keep such opinions to herself if she even expected to keep her job at the Center, much less become a Warden. Otherwise her future excursions were liable to be confined to a park in Leopolis.
And Ryke would find someone else to take with him into the wilderness.
A nearly subliminal whoosh announced the ’lev. That would be the class due for today. At least she wouldn’t have to give the whole spiel this time. Some seismologist, a—she touched the stylus to her keypad—a Dr. Wylan Zamer was also riding out with the kids. He was supposed to go on the expedition, but he also was supposed to talk to the children. Well . . . rephrase that. She shouldn’t have to give the whole spiel this time, but sometimes these professors couldn’t explain how to tie shoelaces, much less scientific concepts. Especially to children. She’d just have to see.
She heard childish voices and laughter, accompanied by the more moderated tones of adults. Then a gaggle of ebullient schoolchildren burst into the room, accompanied by a harried-looking middle-aged woman and a bearded man. That must be Zamer, Deesa thought. He’s a lot younger than I thought he would be. The woman began, “Children, this is Wardmistress Nelfro. She and Dr. Zamer will tell you about the Center and about the Preserve.” She paused uncertainly, and then added, “Dr. Zamer?”
Zamer looked at the kids. “I think Wardmistress Nelfro should give her introduction. She knows the Center much better than I do.” He then turned toward Deesa and winked.
Well . . . indeed! That was not what she’d expected, either. Maybe he would be okay with the kids, after all. Gathering her suddenly scattered thoughts, Deesa launched into her standard greeting. “Welcome to the Visitor Center on the Great Scarp, the gate to the Everwinter Preserve. Here Nature has given us an utterly spectacular setting for showing us Her works. The Great Scarp is only one result of the marvelous geologic laboratory we have in our back yard. . . .”
The words were flowing easily now, but she’d done this so many times. I should have it down by now, she thought.
“We must treat this resource with respect and reverence. Take care of Nature, and She’ll take care of you.”
She ended with the rote slogan. There was a brief silence. “Um, any questions?” she asked. When there was no response, Deesa said, “Okay, I’ll hand it over to Dr. Zamer, who’ll tell you how the scarp got here. And lots of other interesting things.”
Zamer didn’t hesitate. “Okay, class, what is the scarp?” On hearing no reply, he continued, “It’s a crack in the crust. What we call a fault. One side’s moved up, and the other’s moved down.” He paused, grinning. “And we’re on the side that’s moved up.” He waved out at the gulf below. The children looked too, somewhat nervously following his gesture.
“Now, when do the sides move?”
A child ventured doubtfully, “Earthquakes?”
“Yes! That’s right. One earthquake at a time. Like an almost-stuck elevator, jerking its way up.” A smattering of giggles followed his reply. After all, everyone lived in Leopolis’s lofty towers.
“Anyone know what kind of rock the scarp is cut in?”
This time one child was definite. “Lava flows!”
Zamer grinned again, this time at the teacher. “Boy, you kids are smart!” He winked at the class while speaking. “That’s just what they are. Stacks and stacks of lava flows, piled up like a layer cake. When you look at the Scarp from the front you can see the layers.
“These are really big lava flows, too, class.” He paused for effect. “Huge lava flows. They cover hundreds of square kilometers, all in a few days.” He paused again. “They reach all the way to Leopolis—far beyond Leopolis, in fact. If you dug down in the farmland on the other side of the City, you’d find these same flows.” Again he waved toward the window, this time toward the distant towers.
“Dr. Zamer!” Another child’s voice piped up. “Could an eruption like that happen again?”
Zamer’s eyes twinkled. “Not only can it happen again, it’s going to happen again.” The children’s eyes widened, and a couple of the more imaginative looked around nervously. “In fact . . .” he paused again for effect . . . “it’s guaranteed to happen. Within the next hundred thousand years at the latest! In geologic time, that’s the same as the day after tomorrow—or even this afternoon.”
After the giggles of nervous relief had subsided, Zamer spoke again. “Look out to the north.” He gestured, the class obediently looking where he pointed.
“See where the maglev comes up? What happened to the scarp there?” Perhaps a kilometer away, the cliff slumped down into great hummocks of broken rock, like frozen waves sprawling toward Leopolis. The maglev route exploited the break, the graceful curves of the thin silvery track glinting here and there as it snaked back and forth among the huge mounds of debris, winding its way up to the rim.
“It’s broken,” some child said slowly.
Zamer smiled broadly. “It sure is! What do you think happened?”
“The cliff fell down?”
“The cliff did indeed fall down. Very good.” The child beamed. “The place where the maglev goes is a huge ancient landslide, the Great Slide. Thousands of years ago the whole scarp there just crumbled away.
“Any more questions? For me or Wardmistress Nelfro?”
After a pause a child raised her hand. “Wardmistress Nelfro! Why can’t we go into the Preserve?”
Deesa found herself echoing the standard reply, as she’d done to herself earlier that morning, but trying to make it convincing.
“The land can’t stand crowds of people. People don’t have to be everywhere, all the time. That was the mistake they made on Old Earth. We don’t want to make it again.”
The child subsided, though she frowned dubiously.
“Dr. Zamer!” Another hand shot up. “Could a landslide like that happen again?” Again the most imaginative children looked around nervously, suddenly made aware of the precarious placement of the building they stood in.
Dr. Zamer grinned. “It’s certain, class.” He paused dramatically. “Just like another eruption. Within the next hundred thousand years or so.” Then he winked at the class.
The kids giggled nervously again. They were interrupted by an unexpected jostling. Deesa felt as though someone had struck her behind her knees. She choked a shriek and spun around, only to lose her footing as the floor started dancing violently under her feet. She went sprawling, vaguely aware of glass splintering, falling around her like a burst of sharp hail. Automatically she brought her hands up to cover her head. The shaking seemed to last forever, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute before it finally eased off.
Several children were crying, mostly from fear or surprise. A couple, though, were obviously injured. Deesa ran over to them, glass shards crunching under her boots. First stop the bleeding . . . She started through the motions automatically and competently, mentally blessing her training. This was the first time she’d had to use it for real, but her hands seemed to know what to do without conscious thought.
Deesa heard a shriek from the teacher. She looked up, and gasped. One of the children was hanging out of the broken dome. Wide, terrified eyes looked back at her as the child’s hands, slippery with blood, scrabbled for a handhold among the glass shards, slowly sliding back all the while, suspended over the void below.
Deesa, horrified, felt frozen. Zamer, however, had also looked up at the teacher’s cry. He immediately rushed over, grabbed the girl’s forearms with both hands and heaved her back into the broken dome, stumbling as he threw himself backward. Zamer landed heavily on his back with an “oof!”, the sobbing child thudding onto his chest as he instinctively curled himself forward, trying to keep from banging his head back onto the floor as he fell. Deesa felt like her knees had turned to mush, even as the teacher, echoing the child’s frantic sobs, was reaching over to pull her away and hug her. Zamer, left supine on the floor, reached his hands back to push himself up to a sitting position, heedless of the broken glass covering the floor. He simply sat there, rubbing his lower back ruefully, seeming not to notice the blood now streaming from his hands. Then Deesa, finally freed from her temporary paralysis, ran over to help him to his feet—and to attend to his cuts.
After helping bundle the kids and their teacher—and the infirmary nurse who was going with them—back into the ’lev, Deesa came back in to the dome and looked at the mess. She shook her head. At least the maglev track hadn’t been broken. Although the earthquakes had been coming more frequently now, this was by far the strongest. She shook her head again, vaguely uneasy, and continued on to her office.
Zamer had borrowed the webster in her office and was querying the seismic center, his finger movements awkward from the bandages on his hands. She came over to watch.
“About a magnitude 6.5,” he said, answering her unspoken question.
“It had to be big, to break that glass! That’s not supposed to happen.” She shuddered again, remember the child who’d almost fallen.
“And it’s close.” Zamer had punched some commands into the qwerty and a seismogram trace appeared on the display. Deesa looked over his shoulder. “Look at that S wave arrival. Only a couple seconds behind the P wave.” He pointed to a pair of squiggles.
“Do you have a location?”
He keyed in more commands, then grimaced. “Not really. All we can say is the epicenter’s to the north, maybe 20 kilometers or so. And it’s shallow, but I can’t get a handle on the depth.” He turned and looked at her with a wry grin. “That’s the point of the expedition, after all. We need to set up a denser seismic net if we want to pinpoint these things.”
Deesa hesitated, wondering how to phrase what she wanted to say next. “Um,” she began. “That was . . . that was brave how you grabbed that girl who was about to fall.”
He looked up, seemingly a bit embarrassed, and shrugged slightly. “It’s what anyone would have done. I just happened to be closest.”
“Well, lots of people couldn’t have done it. I felt like my feet were nailed to the floor.” She found she was leaning over more closely than she’d intended, and drew back abruptly on hearing someone behind her. She turned quickly.
“Oh, Ryke!” Deesa said awkwardly. “This is Dr. Zamer. He’s the seismologist that’s coming with us into the Backcountry. He’s setting up the seismometer network.”
“Call me Wylan,” Zamer said. Ryke began to offer his hand, and then paused, seeing the bandages. “It’s okay,” Zamer continued. “Just a couple scratches.” They shook hands, eyeing each other. “I’m Ryke. Ryke Telow,” Ryke said. There was silence for a moment.
“Wylan rescued a little girl,” Deesa injected into the silence. “She almost fell out of the dome, but he grabbed her.”
Zamer looked embarrassed again. “Oh, it was nothing.”
“Doubly glad you’re here, then,” Ryke said after a short pause. “The permitting went slowly, but it looks like we’re heading out this afternoon. So your trip out won’t be wasted.”
“Maybe we should have headed out sooner,” Deesa interjected uneasily. She still felt unaccountably concerned. Apparently the morning’s quake had shaken her more than just physically.
Zamer laughed. “It’s okay, Deesa. We’re moving on geologic time, here. A day or two won’t matter.”
Ryke picked up the thread of his thought. “So some aquariums got sloshed in the City.” He waved his hand impatiently. “No big deal. The buildings can take it easily.”
Wylan agreed, “This is just a scientific question. We don’t need to cut corners.”
Ryke followed with, “Besides, the Primitivist needs to get in place, anyway. Until he flags where the sites will be, we can’t do anything.”
Primitivist. A member of the organization that took Leopolis’s philosophy to the extreme. Primitivists rejected all mechanization, even nanotechnology when they could. Most claimed they’d go back to being hunter-gatherers irrespective of the costs. They refused to ride a conveyance, even to save their lives . . . though that wasn’t often put to the test. By law, a Senior Warden had to supervise any expedition into the Preserve; and Primitivists were disproportionately represented among Wardens—especially Senior Wardens.
Deesa subsided, still uneasy but saying nothing, intimidated by the men’s dismissive attitude. Ryke looked at his watch. “Well, it’s about time for the ATV training session, anyway. Let’s wander over there. I need to get ready in any case.”
Deesa looked at the ungainly contraption on the ground in front of her. Four ridiculously fat, knobby tires at the corners of a frame splayed out like a squashed bug; a wide (and uncomfortable-looking) bicycle saddle perched in the middle; a set of handlebars mounted above a bewildering array of switches, knobs, and dials . . . she’d seen an ATV before, of course, but never up close. They were only permitted for specialized purposes, and there weren’t many of them.
And now she was expected to learn to ride this thing! This afternoon. Before they headed out.
At least she had company. Most of the rest of the expedition had never been on an individual, powered vehicle before. She saw Zamer, too, on the other side of the semicircle around Ryke.
“Okay, everyone! Mount your machine! Sit astride in the middle and grab the handlebars. It’s just like a fat bicycle.” He did so himself, demonstrating on the ATV in the middle. “Now, before you do anything else, make sure your helmet’s on and it’s fastened.” He buckled his with a flourish.
She straddled her machine uncertainly. It was much too wide, and it sat down way too low, too. Even when she grabbed the handlebars it felt nothing like a bicycle. And she also wondered how to control it. A bike felt like part of your body. You definitely felt like a passenger on this thing, a superfluous ornament stuck on top.
Ryke was speaking again. “This ATV is a real simple machine. There’s no heads-up display or anything like that—just hardwired gages and switches.” He indicated a conspicuous rocker on the front panel. “Here’s the main power switch.” You’ve got a fuel gage to the left of it. The other gages show voltage and current. You’ve also got warning lights for each wheel motor, if it overheats or gets stuck or something. These lights . . .” he gestured again . . .” indicate the status of the fuel cells.” He continued on with his descriptions, Deesa trying to pay attention. With all the details, though, it was like trying to drink from a fire hose. She figured that if a mysterious light did come on she’d simply ask him.
“Don’t touch this.” Ryke finally indicated a big rocker switch under the handlebars. “That engages the rear steering too. You can turn a lot tighter, but it’s a lot easier to flip.”
“Okay, everyone. Got that?” There was no answer. Deesa thought with guilty glee that everyone else looked as dazed as she felt. Even Zamer looked uncertain. His technical expertise evidently didn’t translate over to the operation of wheeled vehicles.
Ryke waited a moment more, and then said, “Great! Let’s practice. It always makes a lot more sense when you do it. Go ahead and start your engines.”
Deesa obediently flipped the rocker switch. Some panel lights came on, and she heard a faint whine. “Now try going forward,” Ryke said.
Her sense of insecurity heightened a hundredfold when she experimentally twisted the power rheostat—called the “throttle,” for some incomprehensible reason—under her right hand. The vehicle jerked forward sharply, practically throwing her off backward. She twisted the control back hastily, and then almost flew over the handlebars instead as the machine halted. Her fingers tightened on them till her knuckles stood out whitely.
“Easy!” Ryke shouted. “Gently! Make smooth movements.” He demonstrated with his machine, rolling it forward gently and then backward.
She tried again, gingerly twisting the “throttle.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw her companions doing the same. Evidently everyone else had managed not to fall off, too.
She still felt like she was an ornament stuck precariously atop an awkward lump of metal. An awkward, willful lump of metal.
“Now try steering, to the left. Gently.” Cautiously she turned the handlebars. The machine turned obediently. They went through some simple maneuvers like that for a few minutes.
“Okay,” Ryke said. “Now the whole point of these machines is that they don’t need a smooth road. Head for those rocks.” He gestured down the slope in front of them toward a group of low boulders.
On arriving at the boulders, he said, “Okay, when you’re going up over rocks like this, lean into the slope. Use your weight. Don’t lean back because that pulls you off. Let the tires find their way. Don’t fight the machine, just guide it. Let it be part of you.”
Yeah, right, Deesa thought to herself. But she didn’t say anything.
“Also, it’s very important when you’re turning to lean into the turn. High-side, we call it. Centrifugal force makes you want to lean out. And that’s how people crash. You’re all carrying equipment we need. So don’t crash.” He grinned again.
Still grimly hanging onto the handlebars, she tried to lean forward, tried to lean into the turns, tried to make the machine “part of her” as Ryke made them practice what he preached.
She hoped the practice was helping. It sure didn’t feel like it.
“Now, listen up!” Ryke waited till he had everyone’s attention, then continued. “Everyone follows exactly the path of the vehicle in front of them. We are minimizing damage to the land. That means we stay in main drainages and on marked trails. No cross-country travel. At all. Except in dire emergency.” He looked over the small group again. “Any questions?”
“What’s a dire emergency?”
“If you have to ask, it isn’t.” He softened the reply with a grin. “Anything else?” There was silence. “Okay, let’s head out. Mount and start engines.”
They headed northwest away from the Center, toward Slide Gap, where Slide Creek dropped steeply through a narrow canyon that cut across the first ridge parallel to the Great Scarp. The trail was easy at first. It went downhill, but not very steeply, and was wide, well-defined, and fairly smooth. At one point, though, Deesa caught a front wheel against a rock. The jolt nearly jerked the handlebars out of her hands, and she saw what Ryke had meant about keeping a firm grip. She’d probably have a bruise between her thumb and forefinger, too.
After a kilometer or so they reached the Gap. There large black basalt boulders, washed down and polished by innumerable floods, lay separated by stretches of dark sand and gravel. In spring the boulders would have been embraced by raging whitewater, but this late in the summer, the creek had dwindled to a set of trickles and disconnected pools. Everyone ahead of her was waiting at the creek. Deesa stopped too, this time with only minimal tendency to sail headfirst over her handlebars. In a few minutes the rest of the party caught up, including Zamer. He pulled up beside her and switched off. He smiled at her, but it seemed a bit strained. He’d obviously had no more experience riding an ATV than she.
Ryke was standing beside the lead ATV. He began, “Okay, hope you practiced on the way down, ’cause now it gets slower and harder.” He grinned. “From here, we’ll go up the drainage through the gap. It’s not only the least damaging way, it’s the only way. The ridge here is too steep to cross without building a trail . . . and we won’t do that!
“So. You’ll have to thread your way through the boulders. Watch your speed. And your balance.” With that he winked at Deesa.
He switched on his ATV and started up the watercourse. Deesa got in line behind. It was slow going: little flat stretches went quickly, the black gravel crunching under her wheels; but then came steep sections of boulders where she had to ease up, remembering to high-side, to lean toward the side that was tilted up while the big fat tires scrabbled for a purchase on the smooth rock. We could walk this fast, she thought. But she was enjoying it. It was cooler in the canyon, and even though her helmet was made of buckytube composites weighing barely a few grams, her scalp had already gotten itchy with sweat. The shade helped a lot. She liked having a chance to look to either side, too, at the black ledges above her with vegetation improbably perched in cracks and crannies. There was also a lot less dust, she noted, when you were going slowly.
At length the canyon flattened out and the drainage widened. They came almost to a T-junction where the main drainage veered abruptly left while a big side wash came in from the right. They turned left to follow the main drainage. Its grade became more shallow, with much longer stretches of smooth black gravel only occasionally interrupted by rocky bars or banks where Deesa had to slow down. Six or eight kilometers passed in a reverie, as her hands and eyes guided the ATV seemingly without conscious thought. Maybe she was getting the hang of it . . . part of her mind was surprised at herself.
She was jarred back to reality, though, when she almost rammed the machine ahead of hers. The expedition had slowed abruptly again as the main drainage swung sharply to the right, while a side drainage went straight ahead shallowly uphill. The main drainage now crossed the ridge to the northwest through another gap. Although it wasn’t as abrupt nor as tall as Slide Gap, they again had to slow down to ease through another boulder-choked canyon.
Another T-junction awaited them, with the main drainage now abruptly bending right. A gaunt figure waited there silently. Ryke, in the lead, pulled up by him and stopped. “Warden Drafer?” he asked, as he climbed off the ATV. The figure nodded briefly, ignoring Ryke’s outstretched hand.
“Which of you is Zamer?” Drafer asked without preamble, scowling. Zamer walked up, also proffering his right hand. Drafer just looked at his bandaged hand. “Injured yourself, eh? Serves you right for coming out here in the first place. You don’t take care of Nature . . . well, Nature won’t take care of you.”
Zamer obviously was choking back a tart reply. He succeeded in merely responding mildly, “Where are we to go?”
Drafer pointed up the side drainage. “Follow the drainage up. I’ve flagged where the seismometer”—he spat the word out—“is to be installed. Remove the flagging when you return.” He glared at them again. “And make sure you only drive those damned machines where you’re supposed to! I will meet you at the camp site.”
He turned and started up the main drainage. Seeing Deesa, he stopped directly in front of her. “Wardmistress Nelfro,” he said. Deesa almost gagged at the overpowering reek of unwashed body, but she tried not to show her distaste. Many Senior Wardens were particularly sensitive about their odor. It was natural, after all—and rejecting what was natural obviously cast doubt on your fitness to be a guardian of Nature’s wonders, as represented in the Preserve. Jarvas Drafer was an important Warden. It wouldn’t do to get crosswise with him.
“Yes, Wardmaster,” she managed to say.
“You are responsible to make sure that there is no unauthorized damage to the land!”
Deesa gulped. “Yes, Wardmaster. Goddess bless.”
“Goddess bless.” He turned again and stalked off.
Every muscle ached, even muscles she hadn’t known she had. Deesa painfully and stiffly climbed off the ATV, doing her best to move as little as possible. How was it possible to be so sore when the machine was doing all the work? Sure, she’d ridden bicycles, sometimes for tens of kilometers, but you expected to be sore and fatigued then. After all, your muscles were powering the bike. Here, though, all she’d done was hang on.
She parked the ATV as she’d been shown—wheels braked, power off, steering locked—and then had a sudden thought. She dug out the pad for her sleeping bag from the equipment stashed on the back. Sitting on the ground—especially when it probably involved lying back against rocks—seemed particularly unattractive right now. Clutching her cushion, she then staggered over to the campfire. A part of her mind noted that most of the party seemed to be as sore as she was. Only Ryke and a handful of the senior people seemed to be moving perfectly freely.
“How ya doin’, pilgrim!”
“Not so well,” she choked out, trying to be civil. She found Ryke’s cheerfulness jarring.
“Here,” he presented a pill with a flourish. “An anti-inflammatory. Shuts down all the complaining muscles.”
That was better than cheerful words. She gulped the pill.
Wylan walked up too. “Ryke, could I get one of those?”
“Sure.” Ryke dug out another pill.
For all that he’d wanted an anti-inflammatory, too, Wylan seemed incomprehensibly cheerful. Deesa soon found out why.
“We’ll actually get some new data, now. Get a handle on where the quakes are located.” Wylan said.
“Of course, the ridges-and-gaps topography is a pain,” he continued conversationally. “We could’ve been here hours ago.” The silence lengthened briefly, and then Ryke said, “Okay, I’ll ask.”
“The ridges are where the surface layers have buckled over faults underneath. And those faults are all parallel to the Great Scarp. But the overall slope of the land is toward the Great Scarp. So the grain of the land lies at right angles to the ridges.”
Deesa shifted around atop her pad, half listening. It did feel good just to lie back in the cushion.
“That’s why we’re having to zigzag. The drainages don’t cut straight across the ridges. They run between them, and just cut across once in a while. Those are those little canyons we came through, what we call water gaps.”
Ryke evidently was paying more attention than she was. “So, are these parallel faults the problem?”
“I think one—or maybe more—of them is where the earthquakes we’ve been having are happening, yes. But I can’t tell which—if any—because our locations have been so poor.”
“What would it mean if the quakes have all been along one fault?”
“Dunno, really. That’s part of why we’re here. Maybe the activity has shifted off the Great Scarp itself. Maybe something else is happening. But now maybe we’ll know.”
Obviously Ryke was finding Zamer’s enthusiasm more infectious than she was. As were some of the others who’d wandered up: Zamer was now lecturing delightedly, the center of interested attention. For her, though, the buzz of conversation was becoming background noise—an almost soothing hum. Soon, despite her soreness—and despite missing dinner—she fell into an exhausted sleep atop her pad.
Even the earthquake later that night didn’t wake her up.
Morning dawned bright and much too early. Deesa blinked drowsily. She lay underneath a tree, vaguely noting the radial pattern of the branches, sticking out stiffly from the trunk.
“Deesa!”
She finally awoke. Ryke stood there with a cup of something hot. “Rise and shine! Lots to do today.”
She accepted the cup gratefully, noted as she sat up that Ryke’s pill seemed to have done its job.
“Just leave your stuff. This’ll be our base camp for a couple days. Then we’ll move to a new camp closer to the mountains.”
Zamer had drifted up, quietly nursing a cup of his own.
“Why so quiet, Wylan?” Deesa asked. I though I wasn’t a morning person!”
Ryke said, joshingly, “Wylan was up half the night looking at his new data. No wonder he’s quiet now.”
Zamer replied, with a flash of irritation, “You may be very happy I was looking at data. Somebody needs to be looking at it. Soon.”
Taken aback at Zamer’s vehemence, Deesa and Ryke looked at each other. “What’s wrong?”
“I think I may have been very wrong, that’s what. It doesn’t look like we’re going to have to wait a hundred thousand years.”
“What do you mean?” they said together.
“We didn’t have the net coverage to tell—we still don’t—but it looks like some of those quakes might be harmonic tremors. And if they are, it probably means we’ve got a body of magma floating up through the crust below us. Like a bubble in a beer.”
That image struck Deesa forcefully.
“And we’ve still got to wait for Drafer to go set his little flags. As though it would make any damn difference.” Zamer tossed off the rest of his cup and shook out the remaining drops. “Let’s get going. Maybe I’m wrong again.”
Another small earthquake shook the camp while they were packing the equipment to leave. They hardly noticed.
By afternoon they found themselves working their way up a side wash, a narrow clough between steep ridges, following a trail of bright flagging tape. This was the fifth?—sixth?—installation they’d done today. Deesa’d lost track. The day had turned into a blur of driving, unloading, hooking up, testing . . . it was surprising how quickly the novelty had worn off. Anything can become just a job, she supposed. What she found most disturbing, though, was Zamer’s taciturnity. After that outburst this morning he’d hardly said a word, other than the brief instructions necessary to get the seismometers emplaced and running. His morose mood was contagious.
Drafer was here. He’d set out early, on foot, to mark the locations, and they’d finally caught up to him. As was his wont, he barely acknowledged their existence as the ATVs drove up. They parked at the place where he’d flagged for them to do so. Deesa pulled up, and in a set of moves that had become surprisingly habitual, shut off the motor, fixed the wheels, and began to get off.
“You. Girl! What are you doing!” Startled, Deesa paused in the very act of dismounting her machine. Drafer stalked toward her, stopped directly in front of her, the rank stench of his unwashed body thick in her nostrils. He’s doing that deliberately, she realized. He’s trying to make me recoil as he invades my space. It’s a power game.
“Wha . . . what?” she asked. In answer he pointed to her ATV. A few green shoots poked from beneath the right front tire.
“You don’t just drive over a bush. You should be setting an example!”
Deesa fumbled for a reply, “But you said it was okay! There’s your marker.”
“Those are just guides, subject to a little common sense from the people following them. You’re supposed to be a Warden. You should be especially careful!
“I’m going to file this. That’s the problem with female wardens. They don’t care about Nature. They see Her as a competitor.”
Deesa was taken aback so completely she didn’t know what to say. Shock and anger were tempered by caution, a recognition that Drafer could easily destroy her career. She tried to frame a reply, “But . . .”
Zamer had been listening, obviously impatient to get the installation done. But when he spoke it caught them both by surprise.
“You old fool!” Drafer turned at the interruption, thunderstruck. No one talked to a Senior Warden like that. But not only had Zamer spoken like that, he continued without a pause. “This whole business could blow up at any moment and you’re carrying on about a single bush. Let’s get this done and let’s get out of here.” He turned abruptly and went back to his ATV, undoing the lashings on the stowed equipment with unnecessary violence.
As if to punctuate, another little tremor spilled some boulders down off the ridge above them. They crashed down through the brush, eventually coming to rest not 10 meters away.
Zamer looked up briefly. “Oh, and tell Nature not to smash the bushes, while you’re at it.”
Drafer looked as though he would say something, but surprisingly held his tongue…
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