Survival (4 page)

The city lights faded behind the radiance of the three-dimensional image floating in front of the pair, its network of wiring and data conduits peeled back to show the innermost workings of the device. Emily reached over and traced a series of components with one finger, turning them blue within the image.

“Happy now?”

“I will be when we know it works in the field,” Mac muttered, eyes devouring the modified image. “We'll set up right away.”

“After I settle in, you mean.”

“Settle?” Mac sputtered. “You're late, remember? We're moving out at dawn. The tents and my gear are already at the field station.”

“Kammie's right. You're a damned workaholic,” Emily bumped her good shoulder into Mac's. “A day at Base to unpack. Two.” The display gleamed in her dark eyes. “Not to mention a chance to look over this year's crop.”

Mac bumped her back. “The students are busy. As we'll be. The run won't wait—” She glanced at Emily's injured arm and sighed. “One day. We can run some sims . . .”

“Muchas gracias,”
Emily said dryly. “I trust you'll let me eat sometime in there?”

Grinning, Mac let the plaintive request be answered by the hum of the approaching t-lev.

No more barriers,
she thought with triumph.
No more delays. Nothing but the work.

Life didn't get much better.

2

 

 

 

“B
AH! THERE'S no sex in this one either.”

The offending book sailed over Mac's head, landed with a bounce, then began slithering down the massive curve of rock. She lunged for it, scraping both knees on wet granite in the process, and somehow managed to hook one finger in the carrystrap before the book sailed off the rock for the river several meters below. Sitting back, she caught her breath before glowering at Em. “At last we have the truth about Dr. Emily Mamani Sarmiento, consummate professional researcher from Venezuela, holder of more academic credentials than I knew existed. She's nothing but a randy teenager in disguise.”

“Nice catch.”

Mac's lips pressed together, then twitched into a grin. “And she's impossible.”

Emily tilted the brim of her rain hood enough to show Mac a raised eyebrow. “What I am is stuck on this rock, reduced to watching you, my dear Dr. Mackenzie Connor, also holder of innumerable awards which don't pay rent, chase lousy books that have no sex in them. Remind me again why I agreed to such suffering.”

Mac snorted, busy sorting through their pile of waterproof bags for one to protect the latest of Emily's rejects. Lee would not be pleased to find a member of his novel collection soaked and nonfunctional.
Ah
. There was the one from the sandwiches, consumed hours past. She shook the bag, and book, to remove most of the raindrops, before unzipping the one to shove in the other.

Mac made sure the bag was securely wedged in a crevice before turning her attention back to the river. She tucked her throbbing knees against her chest, and put her chin on a spot that seemed unscraped, her rain cape channeling the warm drizzle into tiny rivulets that converged on her bare feet. She wiggled her toes, playing with the water.

“I don't see why there has to be sex in everything you read,” Mac commented absently, her eyes sweeping the heave of dark water below with the patience of experience. She could relax now. They'd delayed at Base for two days, not one, while Emily fussed over her equipment, settled into her quarters, and charmed “her” new students. Mac's anxious complaints hadn't hurried her fellow scientist in the least.

Hard now to complain about Emily's lack of speed, after five days camped with no sign of salmon whatsoever. Em had been insufferably smug the first day; bored and smug the second; simply bored by the third. Mac was rather enjoying her discomfort.

“And I don't see why it has to rain here every hour of the day,” that worthy countered predictably. “This is worse than the Amazon.”

A bright little head suddenly popped out of the river depths, patterned in bold white and rich chestnut. The Harlequin bobbed for an instant in the midst of the maelstrom, the water's froth seeming to entertain it. Then it dove again, seeking its prey in the rapids. Mac smiled to herself. “The sun was out this morning,” she reminded Emily.

“Oh. Was that the sun? Tell my sleeping bag. Which, for your information, barely achieved damp status before we had to haul the gear back into the tents.” A rustle of synthrubber as Emily came to sit beside her.
With their hoods and capes, the two of them,
Mac decided,
must look like small yellow tents themselves
.

Emily was quiet for about thirty seconds. “How long before they get here?”

“When we see them—right there.” Mac pointed downstream, where the river wrapped itself around the base of a wall of rock and disappeared.

Below their toes, and the generous outcrop of granite beneath them, the Tannu River was over forty meters wide, in its mid-reach already swollen, powerful, and swift as it sped down the west side of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast. Along its surface, mist competed with the unceasing rain: some tossed where the river did its utmost to dislodge boulders and tumble gravel, some curling up along the eddies where the ice-cold glacial meltwater met the warm, saturated late-August air. The river always won. It had carved the sides of its valley into downward sheets of sheer rock, anchored at their base by the lushness of riparian rain forest, itself a thin line of green stitched to the water's edge by the pale gray of fallen tree trunks. The river's edge was a perilous place to grow.

Yet grow here life did, with a tenacity and determination Mac had long ago taken as personal inspiration. Cloud clung to the forests; the forest clung to any non-vertical surface, lining cliff tops as well as valley floors. Where trees couldn't survive, lichens and mosses latched themselves to rock face and crevice, nourishing the mountain goats who danced along the perpendicular cliffs.

The mountains' own relentless push skyward added force to the river. The river gladly tore at the mountains. Life thrived in the midst of geologic conflict. It was, Mac firmly believed, the most wonderful place on Earth.

And the ideal location for Field Station Six.

“I don't think it will be much longer, Em,” she assured her, relenting. “This afternoon, if I'm any judge.”

What Emily muttered to that was too low to compete with the river. Its thunder overwhelmed the rustle of leaves in the trees and the beat of rain on their gear. Waterfalls merely underscored its voice, wherever the mountains split to add their outflow from the snow pack and glaciers above.

They'd learned to shout over it. Mac raised her voice: “Pardon?”

“I should have taken Cannings' offer.”

Mac turned and stared. “Work with manatees? Whatever for?”

A grin lit the shadow of the rain hood. “At least they copulate.”

Mac threw up her hands. “As I said. You're impossible. Entertaining, but impossible.”

“I do my best—Look!”

Mac had seen for herself. Both women rose to their feet so quickly they had to grab one another for balance, then push off to run to the consoles attached to the stone. It was a race to pull the protective sheets, Mac winning. Of course, she had two good arms to use. Her eyes locked on the rising glow of the observation screen as it sparkled through the raindrops, the standby flicker of indicators transformed into a psychedelic polka as data roared into the collectors.

“I'm tracking 35—make that 240—make that upward of 5,000,” Emily's voice held a hint of excitement, but only a hint. She'd already taken control of the Tracer emitters from the autos, an operation demanding intense concentration as well as quick hands. This was her technology, the latest model to be tested away from her original site in the Sargasso Sea, with its convenient lack of cliff and forest. Emily had insisted on running extra simulations at Base, making adjustments to compensate for any slowing of her left arm by the cast, working to speed up the reaction time of the equipment and herself. A perfectionist in every way.

Mac made sure the incoming feeds were all active, then tore her eyes from the resulting display to look down the river for its source.

The Harlequin was looking, too. The bird stood onshore with a trio of its kind, as if preferring the stone to the unsure safety of the river—or at the very least showing disapproval of this novelty. The Tracer couldn't harm them, but they'd never seen anything like it before.
No one had,
Mac thought with triumph.

The Tracer. It was as if a translucent curtain made of rainbows and fairy dust had begun flowing upstream. It started in the air, three meters above the water surface, a distance Mac's surveys had indicated should be above the tallest of the protruding debris and boulders in the Tannu. It stretched from side to side across the valley; where it met the river's banks fading to a shadow that passed lightly over log, stone, and ducks. Within the roiling water, it was a wall moving ever forward.

On the screens, that wall sectioned the water column down to the gravel bottom. Invisible below the surface, this version of Emily's device was marked above for the convenience of air breathing observers.

Like curtain rings, a line of tiny aerial 'bots formed the Tracer's top edge, each projecting a portion of the scanning field downward into the river while obeying the directions provided by both proximity sensors and Emily. At the same time, they retrieved the data and beamed it to the equipment under Mac's rain-damp hands.

“Em—”

“I see it.” The correction was made before the line reached the upcoming bend in the valley, the curtain swinging more rapidly at its near reach to compensate. “How's it look?”

Mac ran her fingers over the screen, following the patterns shifting and surging across the display, feeling the cool droplets under her skin as if she stroked what they represented. “Better than sex.”

“You really need to get out more.” But the quip was automatic, Emily as captured by what was happening as Mac. For this was why Emily had picked Mac out of all the biologists eager for her expertise: to be here at this moment, to be part of life as it responded to the imperatives of its nature.

Within the curtain, behind it as far as the river showed itself, dorsal fins sliced the dark water, disappeared, rose again with a muscular heave. Rose-black bodies jostled in the shallows, then vanished before the eye could be sure what it saw. The water roared to the ocean; the first fall run of Chinook up the Tannu raced against it to their destiny.

And at Field Station Six, the leaders of that race had unknowingly activated the Tracer, an ambush undetectable by senses adapted to follow clues from water, light, air, and earth. Through this stretch of the Tannu, while the fish swam oblivious, the Tracer scanned and recorded the genetic code of every individual that passed through its curtain. The codes would be matched in the weeks to come with Mac's survey data from the past twelve years, compared to that from other rivers and other runs, to that of the resulting generation of smolts when they migrated back to the estuaries and ocean. Together, this data would test her hypotheses about the necessity for diversity, of the significance of strayed, hapless newcomers as well as those locked on course to their natal stream.

Mac felt a visceral thrill as she watched the scroll of code schooling in the depths and fighting the current. “How many?” she whispered. “How many of you are strangers; how many kin? What mix will it take for your species to endure another ten millennia? Tell me.”

Having proved her device could be activated by the leaders of the run, then follow to verify those individuals, Emily halted the Tracer at the point Mac had selected during the spring low-water survey, a deep area before the next major rapids upstream turned the water into a mass of gleaming rock and mad foam. The salmon paused there too, as if gathering their strength in its relative calm, but only for a moment, individuals exploding into the air with a powerful twist from head to tail. Dippers, short tailless birds that resembled gray balls on tiny stilts, bobbed up and down on the rocks, seemingly unperturbed by either shimmering curtain or the huge salmon leaping overhead.

Meanwhile, Emily was singing at the top of her lungs as she fine-tuned the Tracer. Something in Quechua, Mac judged, and likely bawdy as could be. She'd have to ask for a translation later, over some celebratory beer.

They were a good match. Mac smiled, grateful for every step of the process that had drawn Dr. Emily Mamani from one ocean and hemisphere to another, to come here and join her at Norcoast. There were never guarantees a scientist's personality would be as welcome as his or her abilities. Being trapped together for a field season brought out the worst in people; Mac had endured the consequences many times before. But Em had not only fit right in, she'd single-handedly turned the facility into a place where Saturday night meant a party about to happen.