Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (31 page)

Anise picked up another handful, let the grains trickle between her fingers and tried to picture what had happened in the minutes after the collision. The records showed the computer went off line. The bots, without direction, froze. Emergency lights with their own power supplies turned on. At the break, air would have been screaming: the deadly whistle that spelled death, only no one was awake to hear it. How did the plastic get into the crack?

She massaged her forehead. In the old stories, leprechauns would sometimes do a worthy family a favor. Every culture, it seemed, had stories of little people by various names: elves, fairies, peri, pooka, nymphs, dwarves, gnomes, brownies, goblins, nixes, kobold, trolls and gremlins.

In her dream, Yeats had asked where the creatures came from. Had they followed humanity from town to town, or did they generate spontaneously from the land? Old Earth was dead now or dying. Was it possible that something other than the thoroughly inventoried supplies, the carefully thought out stockpiles of embryos and tools and equipment was aboard
The Redeemer
?

How would it live?

Anise said, “You checked on air consumption like I asked?”

Sierra peeked over the top of one of the vats. “Yep. The numbers line up perfectly. Nothing is breathing on this ship that we don’t know about. Not only that, but nothing is eating, drinking or processing waste either. I suppose you’ll say that confirms a supernatural explanation.”

“I like the
idea
of the supernatural. That doesn’t mean I believe that’s what happened. How’d the plastic seal the breach?”

“Maybe there was plastic residue on the hull?”

Sierra’s tone showed that even she thought the explanation was weak. Anise shut the lid and relatched it.

“Ah, ha!” said Sierra. “Take a look at this.”

Anise hurried past the vats, squeezing between the last one and the storage lockers that made up the wall. Sierra was on her knees. “See,” she said, “there doesn’t have to be a supernatural component. Rationality rules.”

On the floor was a white pile of plastic, spilled from a small rupture at the back of the tank. Sierra said, “So, some of the plastic
wasn’t
in the vats.”

Anise dropped to her knees, pushed her finger into the gap, provoking a mini plastic avalanche. “Huh! It’s a long way from this room to the crack in the hull. How did it get from here to there?”

“One problem down, one to solve,” said Sierra triumphantly. “Maybe this time luck was on our side.”

“Luck of the Irish?” asked Anise.

Above Anise’s head, from an air vent, came a quick scratching, like twigs on metal. She looked up. “Did you hear that?”

Sierra looked up too. “No. What was it?”

Anise held her breath, waiting for the sound to repeat. “I don’t think it was a bot.” She contemplated the pile of plastic on the floor. “Normal maintenance should have caught this long ago.”

Sierra leaned her back against a locker. “Are you sure you heard something?” A distinct thump of thin metal rebounding echoed through the room, as if something weighty had moved in the air duct. Sierra jumped, then rubbed her arms, still looking up. “The bots are practically perfect. They never miss stuff.” She stood, holding her elbows tight, her arms close to her side as if she were cold.

“No, they shouldn’t. Let’s go back to my station. I want to check something.”

Before she closed the door to the module, Anise looked back into the room. It didn’t take much to picture faces in the dark, to see tiny fingers wrapped around the air vent where something hidden studied her.

Anise said, “We have to eliminate possibilities. First, is it possible that a Caretaker was awake during the collision?”

Sierra consulted her monitor. “According to the computer records, no.”

“Could the computer be wrong?”

“Not likely. Not only does the computer keep track where everyone is, but each sleep tank has its own start-up and shut-down history. I checked all fifty of our shift’s tanks, and also the one-hundred and fifty tanks from the other three shifts. No Caretaker was awake.”

“Is it possible there’s another person on board who never uses the sleep tanks?”

Sierra laughed. “He’d be over 2,600 years old.” She sobered. “I haven’t been able to think of a single explanation. Not only that, but I ran an analysis of duty logs since the trip started, and from nine-hundred years or so ago, the incidence of unexplainable phenomena began going up. Not just misplaced tools either. Clothing has been moved. Doors open that should be closed. Repairs made that weren’t ordered. All kinds of stuff. If you look into the public journals, there’s dozens of other odd reports too. Many crew members have recorded feelings like they’re being watched, or that something moved in the corner of their eye. It gives me the creeps. The computer monitors everything that happens on board, and it reports nothing. Maybe we do have gremlins.”

“Leprechauns,” Anise said absently. “We’re missing a bet, here. There’s a factor we’re overlooking. I’m going to put some equipment together. Come back tomorrow. I’ll need your help again.”

Sierra looked pained. “Yatmaso says we go back into the sleep pods in two days. I don’t like the idea of leaving the ship to ghosts and other slithery creatures while I’m unconscious. Do you think they come look at us?” She shivered.

“Now look at who’s not being rational.”

“It’s your fault. I’ve examined the computer records, the bot work schedules, and every anomalous occurrence on the ship in the last nine hundred years. It doesn’t make sense. If there was something else on board, there would be computer records, but there’s nothing there.
Something
put the plastic into the breach, and the best explanation is your leprechauns. We’re on a possessed or infested ship.” Sierra tightened her hands until her knuckles whitened bright as paper. “I’m not sleeping tonight. I’m not sleeping ever again.”

“Come back tomorrow.” Anise put her hand on Sierra’s shoulder, whose muscles were rock tight and trembling.

After Sierra left, Anise gathered her supplies. First, to the kitchen for bread and cheese, and then to the electronics warehouse. Finally she visited cryogenic storage, where drawer after drawer of frozen, fertilized ovum waited for their test tube births. She searched for over an hour, opening one drawer after another until she found what she’d been looking for.

As she set up the equipment in the access crawlway, near where she’d discovered the sealed crack, she remembered that Yeats wrote once, “I have been told that the people of Faery cannot even play at hurley unless they have on either side some mortal. . . . Without mortal help they are shadowy and cannot even strike the balls.”

When Sierra entered the room, it was clear she hadn’t been sleeping. Her face was haggard and her hair uncombed. “I ran a zillion scenarios on the computer last night, and none of them add up to an explanation. It’s not rational.”

Anise smiled. For the first time in days she felt both excited and relaxed. “I have some recorded video I want you to watch. Take a seat.”

Sierra collapsed on a chair. “If it’s more that a couple minutes, I’ll drift right off.”

“Oh, I think you’ll stay awake for this.” Sierra pressed a button that flashed an image onto her desk monitor.

Sierra leaned forward. “What’s that? It looks like bread and something else.”

“Cheese.” Anise forwarded the image, keeping an eye on the time record. “Watch close.”

Sierra shook her head, puzzled. “Where is this? Why’s it so poorly lit?”

“The maintenance crawlway.”

“There isn’t a camera there. Is that from a bot?”

“No. It’s one I rigged up to transmit its images straight to here. Hush, now.”

The two women studied the screen.

“There!” said Anise. A long, fuzzy, shadowed shape reached from one side of the image, grabbed a piece of bread, then disappeared.

“What the hell was that?” Sierra gripped the desk’s edge, her face only inches from the monitor. Anise hadn’t seen her get out of her chair.

“Wait, there’s more.”

This time the movement was slower. Whatever it was was too close to the camera to be clearly focused. It blocked the image, turning the screen black. Then, it turned, sitting beside the cheese, still dark and nebulous until it stood, the rest of the bread and cheese in its arms. It looked toward the camera as if sensing the spying presence. For an instant the light was right, and the creature’s eyes were clear, its large, round head distinct. It vanished again.

Sierra gasped. “Is that a . . . leprechaun?”

Anise laughed. “No, it’s a mouse. Or its great, great, great grandfather was a mouse a thousand years ago or so, a couple thousand generations ago.”

“A mouse! What do you mean? It’s a foot-and-a-half tall if it’s an inch.” Sierra touched the monitor where Anise had backed up the image to the face in the dark, its arms full of cheese and bread.

“I went over all the data you did last night. The absence of evidence. No video of anything untoward. No record of increased air, food or water consumption. Nothing that indicated the presence of other beings onboard the ship, and yet it was clear that we weren’t alone. You know what was in common in all my negative searches?”

Sierra looked baffled. “No.”

“The computer. All my questions went through the computer. All the searches went through the computer. What tipped me off was the numbers on the collision. When I did them by hand, there was enough force from the collision to produce the crack we found, but the computer kept giving me smaller numbers. The computer didn’t want us to find the crack.”

“You think the computer
made
the leprechauns?”

“I know so. From mice embryo. I found the empty capsules in the cryogenics room. When I confronted the computer with the evidence, all sorts of blocked files tumbled free. There’s a complete record of the breeding program. There’s a leprechan nursery deep in the maintenance shafts where the bots can get to, but we wouldn’t go. All the consumable records had been faked to hide their existence.”

Sierra sat again. Her gaze wandered around the room. Anise guessed she was searching for something to say.

“Why would the computer do it?” Sierra paused. “Oh, give me a second. It must have calculated the possibility of just the situation we faced, where all the power would be down. The computer’s designed to operate without our input. It decided that a sentient work force that was always awake was necessary.” She laughed. “And the computer was right. We’re alive today because the leprechauns poured plastic into the breach. God, that’s brilliant. How smart do you think they are? How does the computer communicate with them? The biology people are going to have a field day with this. Have you told Yatmaso? I can’t wait to see his face.”

Sierra rushed from the room before Anise could speak. She looked at the Irish landscape mounted on her wall and remembered how old and spirit-haunted the stones of Grianan of Aileach felt beneath her hand on that last trip. She said to the empty room, “What’s more interesting is not what the computer did, but why it hid it. Maybe it grew bored, like any other god, and thought it would make some wee people to entertain it.”

She shut her eyes and sighed. There was a rational explanation, full of wonder to be sure, but rational just the same. It was a long way from Ireland, a long way from the Emerald Isle.

He sadness lasted for a moment until, suddenly, she knew she wasn’t alone in the room. Her eyes flew open and caught a shadow moving on the wall. From behind her, she heard a familiar laugh, high and light and tinkling in the air, but when she turned, there was nothing.

Howl Above
the
Din

S
haron braced the door against the wind with her foot. “So what’s up with the wolves anyway? It’s spooky, them disappearing on the night Fitz took his dive.”

Dr. Roman closed his notebook and placed it exactly in the center of the desk. Sharon leaned against the door jamb, her flannel shirt unbuttoned one button too many as always. She added sarcastically, “You know he spent his last night outside the enclosure with the wolves, again.”

“He could do that, Sharon. Dr. Fitzgerald was an expert in wolf intelligences. You, however, are only a grad student on loan from Environmental Science.”

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Roman automatically categorized the gesture: covering the mouth suggested the person was lying or felt she was being lied to. “He was naked,” she said, “again. He thought he was that weird Farley Mowat guy from the old movie about wolves. Don’t you think that was a little twisted? Not to speak ill of the dead, but he wasn’t right.”

Roman placed his fingertips on the edges of the notebook and moved it a micrometer, aware that not making eye contact also suggested lying or evasiveness. He pressed the notebook hard enough that it bowed slightly in the middle. “Your job is in front of the computer researching the records or taking notes, not critiquing Fitzgerald’s methods. He was patterning adaptive behavior for them.”

She “hmphed” loudly. “
His
pattern. Not a wolf pattern, or a coyote one either. Either he wanted to be a wolf, or he wanted the wolves to be him. Check the transmission records. He transmitted
himself
. It wasn’t ethical. And you can pretend to defend him if you want, but I didn’t see
you
spending any extra time with him the last couple of months.”

Roman closed his eyes and counted slowly backward from five. The notebook relaxed: he could feel the edges uncrinkling beneath his fingers. “Six months is a long stay on an island. Maybe we all are a little twisted.”

“And that’s another thing: Fitz’s ‘geo-psionic’ isolation. Nobody bought that theory in academia. They laughed at him at the university. In the meantime, I haven’t had a date since November. Wolves only go into heat once a year, but they’re getting laid more often than I am. This might as well be a monastery.”

Wind pushed Sharon’s light hair around her face and into her eyes. A poster of canis lupus on the wall fluttered. Behind her, the sun sharply outlined the wind-warped yews bending away from the Pacific, their gnarled limbs stretching perpetually inland.