chasm. There they made a balloon of weirdest muck, the fine membrane of earth stretched tighter and tighter until a farmer, ploughing, penetrated the upper crust and was fired some thousands of feet into the air and fully two miles sideways, falling like a burning angel in the middle of the Beauville shanty. Behind him came a warm mist which itched, but nothing more.
That first Discharge Cloud stripped half the island of its pines and shrubs, and rippled the white stones of Beauville like waxworks too close to a flame.
Seven months later came the second Cloud: harmless to humans, but death to rodents, and the Beauville high valleys were filled with the stench of dead marmots. Seagulls and spiders grew fat on the corpses.
The third Cloud caused fish to change sex and provoked a wave of lust and licence across Mancreu. It was remembered for months as a very good party, but the children born of passionate couplings in the Cloud could not speak. A German specialist, flown in to study the matter, pronounced that the entire section of the brain dealing with language – Broca’s Area, he said – was missing. A grown woman, caught on the mountainside in the first exhalation of the Cloud, was thought to have lost all function in that region as well, but he could not find her to verify it. It was sad and frightening, he said, if true. All the same, his parent company was greatly interested by the Cloud as a treatment for sexual dysfunction, and filed patents.
The geologists said that the cauldron beneath Mancreu was still boiling, and showed no signs of emptying. The strange murk within was protean, they said. No telling what it would do next. Best to seal it up, if possible – but they had no suggestions as to how this might be achieved. One bold fellow also calculated that the amount of chemical released already exceeded what had been pumped in. He plumbed the depths with an improvised dipstick seven hundred yards long, and said he thought the solution was probably organic, even biological.
And so it proved. A team of Japanese xenobiologists – more used to guessing about the nature of life on other planets and studying strange fissures on the ocean floor – ascertained that the whole process had created a colony of bugs in the deep strata. These protozoa were transforming plain minerals into fuel for the ongoing chemical reaction, and other varieties of microbe then converted waste and water into food for the first. A perfect example of the magnificent adaptability of life, the scientists said. They were extremely impressed, almost to the point of being joyful. A worthy foe. Learned papers were written, but answers – solutions – came there none.
Indeed, the team was still here, a colony of perky boffins who lived apart in a village of seismographs and mobile centrifuges housed in a village of old-style Quonset huts and modern geodesic domes. Of all of them, the Sergeant only really knew the project chief, Kaiko Inoue, who came into Beauville by jeep every other Thursday and bought food and a few small bottles of imported whisky. The Japanese team loved whisky, had fetishised it beyond anything any Scot would ever think of, could name its lineages and recite the ideal chemical make-up of the peat and the perfect conditions for the casking, and had actually developed a special and very grave formal ceremony for its distribution. They had invited the Sergeant once, and he had sat on his heels for three hours and watched, at first with amusement and then impatience and then with a sort of awe as they moved through precise, elegant motions and the scent of the Talisker drifted up and entranced him. By the time he took his first sip it was like heaven and his aching muscles were absolutely forgotten, and that one glass without ice or water was the best he had ever had. Inoue had begun to make whisky here herself. She called it
Island End Uisge Beathe
, and it would only be drunk when Mancreu was in ashes. She would sit in
That first Discharge Cloud stripped half the island of its pines and shrubs, and rippled the white stones of Beauville like waxworks too close to a flame.
Seven months later came the second Cloud: harmless to humans, but death to rodents, and the Beauville high valleys were filled with the stench of dead marmots. Seagulls and spiders grew fat on the corpses.
The third Cloud caused fish to change sex and provoked a wave of lust and licence across Mancreu. It was remembered for months as a very good party, but the children born of passionate couplings in the Cloud could not speak. A German specialist, flown in to study the matter, pronounced that the entire section of the brain dealing with language – Broca’s Area, he said – was missing. A grown woman, caught on the mountainside in the first exhalation of the Cloud, was thought to have lost all function in that region as well, but he could not find her to verify it. It was sad and frightening, he said, if true. All the same, his parent company was greatly interested by the Cloud as a treatment for sexual dysfunction, and filed patents.
The geologists said that the cauldron beneath Mancreu was still boiling, and showed no signs of emptying. The strange murk within was protean, they said. No telling what it would do next. Best to seal it up, if possible – but they had no suggestions as to how this might be achieved. One bold fellow also calculated that the amount of chemical released already exceeded what had been pumped in. He plumbed the depths with an improvised dipstick seven hundred yards long, and said he thought the solution was probably organic, even biological.
And so it proved. A team of Japanese xenobiologists – more used to guessing about the nature of life on other planets and studying strange fissures on the ocean floor – ascertained that the whole process had created a colony of bugs in the deep strata. These protozoa were transforming plain minerals into fuel for the ongoing chemical reaction, and other varieties of microbe then converted waste and water into food for the first. A perfect example of the magnificent adaptability of life, the scientists said. They were extremely impressed, almost to the point of being joyful. A worthy foe. Learned papers were written, but answers – solutions – came there none.
Indeed, the team was still here, a colony of perky boffins who lived apart in a village of seismographs and mobile centrifuges housed in a village of old-style Quonset huts and modern geodesic domes. Of all of them, the Sergeant only really knew the project chief, Kaiko Inoue, who came into Beauville by jeep every other Thursday and bought food and a few small bottles of imported whisky. The Japanese team loved whisky, had fetishised it beyond anything any Scot would ever think of, could name its lineages and recite the ideal chemical make-up of the peat and the perfect conditions for the casking, and had actually developed a special and very grave formal ceremony for its distribution. They had invited the Sergeant once, and he had sat on his heels for three hours and watched, at first with amusement and then impatience and then with a sort of awe as they moved through precise, elegant motions and the scent of the Talisker drifted up and entranced him. By the time he took his first sip it was like heaven and his aching muscles were absolutely forgotten, and that one glass without ice or water was the best he had ever had. Inoue had begun to make whisky here herself. She called it
Island End Uisge Beathe
, and it would only be drunk when Mancreu was in ashes. She would sit in
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