Analog Science Fiction and Fact - January/February 2017 Read online

  Analog Science Fiction and Fact

  Kindle Edition, 2016 © Penny Publications

  * * *

  The Proving Ground

  Alec Nevala-Lee | 17370 words

  Perhaps... a message comes to the birds in autumn, like a warning. Winter is coming. Many of them will perish. And like people who, apprehensive of death before their time, drive themselves to work or folly, the birds do likewise; tomorrow we shall die.

  —Daphne du Maurier,

  “The Birds”

  I.

  Haley Kabua was clinging to the top of a wind tower when she saw the first bird. She had clipped her lanyard, which was attached by a strap to the back of her safety harness, to a strut on the lattice directly beneath the huge fiberglass rotors. As she braced her bare feet on the scaffold, thirty precarious meters above the beach, she knew without looking that the men on the sand below had halted to watch her climb. Only a few hours of daylight remained, but she forced herself not to hurry, knowing that any mistake she made might be her last.

  A pair of thick slings had been hitched to separate legs of the tower, about a third of the way down from the top. Each one ran to the closed hook on the boom of the crane behind her, which had raised the tower into place earlier that afternoon. Both of the chokers had to be released by hand. Reaching up, she unhooked the nearest shackle, letting the loosened sling hang down, and she was about to work her way around to the other when she realized that she was not alone.

  Haley tilted back her construction worker’s hat to get a better look at the bird, which was perched on the tail of the turbine. It was a tern, about the length of her forearm, with spotless white plumage and a black eye encircled by a ring of dark feathers that made it seem larger. At the moment, it was clinging to the fin of the tail section with its small blue feet, and it seemed to be staring directly at her, as if it had flown up to investigate this unexpected incursion.

  She glanced around. Along the eastern end of the island, six other wind towers were spaced about a hundred meters apart, their new blades shining. A seventh tower lay on the sand, where the workers had just finished bolting its sections together. There were no other birds in sight. Haley was perfectly aware that no terns had nested on Enyu in years, and the wind tower was well above the height at which they preferred to fly. And yet here it was.

  Haley waved at it. “Hey, get lost. You don’t want to be around when this starts up.”

  The bird tilted its head to one side. Haley returned her attention to the remaining choker on the scaffold. “Guess you like to live dangerously. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  She inched around to the second sling, the retractable strap on her harness automatically unspooling. Now she was facing toward the atoll, which formed a horseshoe thirty kilometers across, around the central lagoon. From where she stood at the southeast, she could see the full line of the reef, walkable when the tide was low, that stretched to the islet to the north, along with the seastead taking shape five hundred meters to its leeward side.

  Haley paused to drink it all in. The atoll provided few natural vantage points, with its highest elevation only ten meters above low tide, so she rarely had a chance to study the entire structure at once. Seeing it now, from as high above the islet as she would ever be, she felt the sight cut through her exhaustion. It was easy to grow obsessed by details while overlooking the larger picture, she thought, and it was that kind of blindness that had led them to this crisis in the first place.

  The seastead had not been designed for beauty, but it was beautiful nonetheless, with the kind of elegance that emerged as a logical conclusion of functionality and constraint. It consisted of a modular network of caissons floating on the surface of the water, with each concrete platform measuring fifty meters to a side. The colony had been designed to expand gradually. One day, there would be more, but now there were only five, a quincunx of four squares joined by a grid of covered walkways and flexible connections to the central hub.

  Each platform ascended in a series of smaller terraces, stepped like a ziggurat, with the highest level of the hub rising twenty meters above the lagoon. Their roofs had a tessellated look, with photovoltaic panels alternating with surfaces for catching rain. Half of the caisson facing her was devoted to a hydroponic greenhouse, with a floating dock on the adjacent platform, and the water on the sheltered side was covered in a grid of fish pens and bioreactors that reminded her of rows of a green quilt that had been flung across the sea.

  It was a work in progress, and it always looked to her as if someone had left an unfinished mosaic on the face of the ocean, spare tesserae and all. Haley, who had spent most of the last three years on the atoll trying to solve problems at sea level, was struck by how fragile it seemed from above, and as she gazed at the scattered human figures visible below, she felt shaken back into action. They had only four working hours left, and there was still one more turbine to go.

  Haley was reaching for the second choker when something struck the top of her hat. At first, she thought that a piece of the turbine had come loose, but when she looked up, all she saw was that the bird that had been perching on the tail section was no longer there.

  She heard the sound of wings. In the corner of her eye, there was a flash of white, and then the tern was beating against the back of her neck. She pivoted around, releasing one hand from the scaffold, and tried to bat it away. Instead, she felt a series of sharp pecks as it attacked her shoulders and arms, its feet scrabbling for purchase on the front of her shirt.

  The bird drew blood again and went for her eyes. As she attempted to duck out of its path, her foot slipped. She grabbed for the strut above her head and missed. An instant later, she was toppling back, the impossibly blue sky above the rotors filling her field of vision, and all other thoughts vanished, replaced by the logic of gravity. She tried to correct herself, failed, and fell.

  Her lanyard caught her. With a jerk, the strap grew taut, the harness seizing her painfully around the armpits as she smacked against the side of the tower. Her hat came off her head. For an instant, the clip was only thing holding her in place, and as she heard the metal straining, vividly picturing what would happen if it broke, her hand groped back of its own accord and closed around one of the struts.

  Haley found a toehold, dimly aware of the shouts coming from below. Ignoring them, she regained her footing, her heart juddering, and saw the tern fly off toward the water. Blood was trickling down her arms from five or six shallow cuts where the bird had broken the skin.

  Someone was calling to her. It was Giff, one of the other colonists, his hands cupped around his mouth. “You okay?”

  She dared a look down. The men had gathered at the foot of the tower, their dark faces craning upward. As her pulse slowed, she saw two unfamiliar figures standing nearby. They were visitors, members of the research team that had been surveying the atoll from offshore for most of the last three months, and her fear gave way to a sudden irritation that they had witnessed her moment of weakness. She found her voice. “I’m fine. Just give me a minute.”

  Haley took another second to collect herself, then turned slowly around until she was facing the tower again. Extending a hand, she undid the final choker, allowing the hoisting line on the crane to hang free. She checked herself to see if she was ready to come down in a dignified fashion, and she found that she was. Then she descended, hand over hand, securing her lanyards alternately as she went. The bird that had attacked her was nowhere in sight.

  A second later, she was on the sand. As she unclipped the safety strap, Giff came up with her hat. “I
’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “It was nothing.” Haley plucked the hat from his outstretched hand. Giff was in his early twenties, a full decade younger than she was, and although they had been working together on this project for many weeks, she had begun to sense only recently that his interest in her was more than strictly professional. She forced herself to speak sharply. “We don’t have to stop. I’ll just be a second. Get over to the last tower, and I’ll meet you there.”

  Giff looked as if he wanted to say something more, but in the end, he only left along with the others, who had briefly paused to watch as she came down. Haley made sure that they were all on their way, then pulled off her harness, letting it fall to the ground by the tower.

  It was a hundred paces to the shore. Haley knelt in the surf to rinse her cuts, the salt stinging, and was about to head back when she heard a voice with a Dutch accent. “You should probably use this.”

  Haley turned just in time to catch the nylon pouch of a medical kit. The man who had tossed it was standing a few steps away. It was one of the two visitors who had come over to observe, and when he smiled, the look that he gave her was almost shy. “In case of infection, you know.”

  “Thanks,” Haley said. She brought the kit over to the shaded part of the beach where the crew had left its gear. The man followed without speaking, keeping at arm’s length at all times. He was about her age, tall and bearded, with light blue eyes and a hint of sunburn. His companion, a woman in her late forties, maintained her distance, standing at the point where the sand gave way to scrub.

  Haley sat down, grateful to see that the visitor did not seem inclined to volunteer further assistance. As she opened the kit, he motioned toward the spot beside her. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Be my guest.” She tore open an antiseptic swab with her teeth. “You must be Visser. Or at least that’s what I’ve heard them call you.”

  “I’m sure they have other names for me,” Visser said. “My friends call me Stefan. You must be Haley Kabua. I’m surprised it’s taken us this long to meet. My colleagues and I have heard a lot about you.” He nodded at the tower. “You ever have problems with birds before?”

  Haley wound a length of gauze around her arm. His full name struck her as familiar, but she wasn’t sure from where. “Not really. The terns don’t nest here. That’s why we chose it for the wind farm.”

  “I can see why.” Visser sat on the sand. “What do you think happened up there?”

  She taped a dressing in place. “Maybe they don’t like us nosing in their business.”

  Haley watched for his reaction. She sensed a spark of attraction here, although she was hardly at her best, her hair sweaty and matted, her jeans cut off below the knees. As for Visser, she recognized the type from the tourists who had come out to the atoll in the years before the dive operation shut down. Everything about him spoke of healthy swims, morning runs, and exercise instead of real labor. She returned the kit. “I have to get back to work. If you’re not too busy, you can come.”

  She saw that the offer surprised him, and she wondered if he understood it. All that anyone knew about his research team was that it was connected in some undefined way to the Deventer Group, the corporation that was helping to finance the seastead, and she had learned a long time ago that if you didn’t know what someone else was doing, it was best to keep them close until you did. Visser glanced at his colleague. “Let me talk to Jansen.”

  Haley waited as he went over to his companion, who had been visibly sizing her up. Jansen cut a more interesting figure than Visser, with the look of a woman who had spent much of her life outdoors, her blond hair bleached nearly white. After they had conferred, Visser approached again. “You have me for two hours. Our boat is by Romurikku. We’ll take the dinghy back when we’re done.”

  Looking over at Jansen, Haley saw that she was studying the turbines, marking something down on a folded map. She indicated the workers. “You can pitch in. Hope you’re good with your hands.”

  They headed together for the last tower, which lay on the coral sand near the airstrip a hundred meters away. As she drew closer, Haley saw that the men were connecting the guy cables and unrolling them along the ground. Behind them, a diesel engine roared to life, and the construction crane began to crawl slowly along the beach. It was a chain-driven relic without a cab, leaving the driver exposed on a swivel seat. Visser whistled. “That’s quite the antique.”

  “It’s tougher than it looks,” Haley said. “There’s a lot of stuff in the supply outbuildings. Trucks, milling machines, backhoes, forklifts. Most of it isn’t usable. The salt water wastes the steel. But we were able to refit some of it. This is a shoestring operation, so it came in handy. We have to make do with what we have. When I first got here, it was a real mess.”

  Visser appeared to latch onto this last detail. “You weren’t born on the islands?”

  “Springdale, Arkansas. Ever been there?” When he shook his head, she gestured for him to follow. “You aren’t missing much. A lot of Marshallese live there. My parents worked at the poultry plant. Here, help me with this.”

  Haley showed him the armored electrical cable. Visser took up position beside her as she fed it through the center of the lattices, pacing down the length of the tower. “What brought you all the way out here?”

  “I didn’t feel like killing chickens,” Haley said. “At least with wind turbines, you get to slaughter the birds one at a time.”

  Visser cracked a smile. As she hooked the cable to the disconnect switch at the tower’s base, he assisted as necessary, listening to her instructions and coming forward only when asked. Haley had positioned herself to keep an eye on Jansen, who was taking photographs of the row of turbines. “Your friend can come over if she likes. She seems interested.”

  “We’re doing a survey of the atoll. Infrastructure plays a big role, especially this close to the reef.” Visser watched as the crane inched into place. “I wanted to ask about that. These wind towers weren’t part of the original proposal. Someone took money out of the budget to pay for them. Why put them up at all?”

  Haley noticed that Giff was doing a bad job of pretending not to eavesdrop. “Are you asking for yourself, or as an employee of Deventer?”

  “I’m not an employee. Deventer pays me as a consultant. It’s just us two talking.”

  Looking at his handsome, privileged face, Haley saw that he had no idea of what she had sacrificed to get the towers or what they really represented. “We need power. Wind happens to be a good way to generate it.”

  “But the islanders did fine without wind power before. Even over on Majuro.”

  “I know. It’s silly, right?” Haley watched as the crane eased itself into line with the concrete base on which the tower would be fixed. “We could just run everything on generators. Ship in the diesel. It’s not like we don’t have the money. That’s why we’re here in the first place. It qualifies us for reparations. A trust fund. They could probably spare some of it to keep the lights on.” She continued to study the crane. “I’ve told you where I’m from. What about you?”

  “You probably haven’t heard of it,” Visser said. “A charming city called Leiden.”

  “That’s where Rembrandt was born, isn’t it?” Haley deflected his curious look. “You have dikes there?”

  Visser seemed to sense where she was going with this. “Of course. Otherwise—” “—the sea would swallow you up,” Haley finished. “But why not just pack it in? Pull up stakes and join the Germans. It would be easier.”

  Visser silently acknowledged her point. Haley turned back to the tower. “Well, that’s my answer, too. You care about your independence. So do we. I didn’t come here for a handout. Relying on the outside is the kind of thinking that got us into this predicament. You, me, and everyone.”

  “I can’t argue with that,” Visser said. “Whoever arranged to put up these towers must have wanted to make a statement.”

  “You may b
e onto something there.” Haley turned away. “The towers were my idea.”

  Leaving him on that line, she went to the crane, which had parked itself downwind from the tower. Visser watched as the work crew cinched a strap a third of the way down the scaffold, then lifted one end until it was the height of a man’s chest. As the workers brought timbers to prop it up, Haley signaled to Visser. “You can give them a hand, if you like.”

  Visser pitched in as they raised the top of the tower, then stood back as the crane was unhooked and rigged to the powerhead. They hoisted it up, the men guiding it into position and bolting it into place. Haley had wanted to show Visser how professional they were, and she was gratified by how efficient the process had become, with most of the work carried out without speaking.

  Once the electrical connections had been made, she waited as the men mounted the fiberglass blades one at a time. When they were finished, she waved at the driver of the crane, a younger colonist named Amata. “Ready?”

  Amata grinned. As the crane engaged, lifting the tower upright, the men took up places on all sides, using the guy wires as tethers as they maneuvered it to the base pad. Haley ended up standing next to Giff. Grasping the base section to align it with the pier, Giff shot a look at Visser, who was watching from a safe distance, and spoke in Marshallese. “What did he want?”

  Haley detected a hint of jealousy. She held the legs of the tower as the crane lowered it onto its pin. “You know the type. He can’t believe we can do anything on our own. So keep your mind on your work.”

  Giff only turned back to the scaffold. As soon as it was in place, the workers ran the guy lines to turnbuckles that had been anchored deep in the sand. Haley locked each one with clips as the men pulled the wires taut. Using a rusted transit level on a tripod, Giff checked to make sure that the tower was as close to vertical as possible, signaling to the others to tighten or loosen the guys accordingly. When they were done, all that remained was for someone to climb the scaffold and release the rigging. Haley saw the others looking at her. “I’ll do it.”