It’s not the same, to him, to use the digital scopes. He was drawn to things. Things had given him wonder, and he was a scientist because of that, not for the need to understand. He tried to instil that in his students.
For him, the search was not answers, the search was for surprise.
Does Ellie know? Does she know the significance of this?
A dragonfly. A predator at the top point of a triangle. On the Red List. One of the few things the countries of the world agree on.
If a Red List species is present in a place, no action can be carried out that will disturb it until it has been relocated or moved on.
He dials Ellie. Needs to ask. Were there more exuviae? The water, was it running? Slowly? At all? But gets her ansaphone.
Ellie here. Can’t talk right now. I’m walking against the Ice Dock project. You should be too. Leave a message if you want.
Ellie, Ellie, he thinks. Were there more exuviae? Was the water running . . .?
Turns back to her recording.
Yay! Hopscotch. Kids must come out here to play.
He goes, without any need for conscious navigation, to the specimen vault, to the section ‘Odonata’. Logs on, keys the species number. ‘Odonota’ – from the Greek belief that dragonflies had teeth . . . presses Confirm.
The drawer emits a gentle beep and slides itself open.
A few metres down the vault, the integral inspection light casts a knee-high glow, and he feels a hum as he crouches to see the specimen, as if he finds it in the field.
There, vibrant under the light, Scarce Chaser. Libellula fulva. Male.
The powder-blue pruinescence of its abdomen. A wingspan the length of his thumb. Brown pterostigma. Veins as frail as a leaf skeleton.
He draws the hand lens from his chest pocket. His thumb tracing the comfortable scratch of the long-smoothed inscription on its case.
From above, the dragonfly’s eyes are a bottomless blue-grey. Seem gauzed, like the veil of his bee-keeping suit.
Dragonfly, he thinks. Savours their names. ‘Devil’s Darning Needle’. ‘Adderbolt’. ‘Ear Cutter’. Their strange helicopter movements, clicking as they take smaller insects in the air.
It’s almost impossible for him not to think that this imago clambered from the very skin he holds. The skin he could not leave behind him on his desk. That it crawled somehow from the accumulated silt in which for two years it fed and grew, and that this bright thing in the drawer broke from it.
That must happen. Mustn’t it? A dragonfly must land, sometimes, next to the skin of itself it crawled from.
Can they know?
He wants to pick it up and set it on his finger. But does not.
And suddenly and certainly he understands he’s going out there. Now. Out to the site where this was found.
That he’ll pack his field bag in a rush and go. Take the sampling rods, and nets.
That he will lie down on his belly and plunge his arm into the water.
This species lays its eggs in running water . . . The larvae two years in the silt. Before they clamber up and split.
And if the water is running, it is possible the egg or larva was just carried to the spot. To the break in the pipe. That it’s simply an anomaly.
But the Red List is the Red List. And if there are eggs, or larvae there, work at the site will have to pause.
It wasn’t that he was against the Ice Dock. He understood necessity.
But, what this specimen could represent. How it could fire people’s engagement.
A silverfish under a mat. A marigold established in the crack of a kerb. The belligerent will of a thing to exist.
Give Nature space, and she will take it.
What a story it would make.
What half a million people on the march will not achieve, a tiny insect might.
A dragonfly could stop an iceberg.
For a while at least.
ROOFTOP
When the service door opened, a falcon burst away from the gun baffle. A brief blur that seemed to stay in the air long after it was gone. Leave the space it occupied more present. The way the doctor’s words had hung there in the air.
‘Keen eyes,’ said the constable who had brought Branner up in the access lift.
Branner nodded; then he checked his rifle and stepped onto the roof.
He knew he’d see her ward from here. Did not look towards the hospital.
He’d asked to be posted out of the city. To spend a few days at the Water Train line. To find some space, to try to settle with things.
‘We’ll need you for the protest, though. You can go out to the line for the next rota. If the Super clears it.’
A few more days, thought Branner. Then I’ll be out there. There’ll be some time to set things straight in my head.
‘You go,’ said his wife. She understood.
The transparent shell of the baffle deflected the cool wind. Deepened Branner’s feeling he was in a bubble.
The dream, recurring night after night, now seemed an intuition. After the doctor’s news.
With his feet off the roof Branner seemed to float, rode a momentary swoon of vertigo.
Let the process take over, he coached himself. Use the process.
He set the rifle in the rest. Checked the pneumatics. Steered the baffle left, right, nodded and tipped it with the foot pedals.
Let the spin of unease pass.
He clipped the umbilica from the rifle to his chestconnect, felt, for a very strange moment, he attached a line to his heart. Then he engaged the comms and spoke into the headset. ‘In place.’
There was endless movement below, between the solid, impassive buildings.
On the distant flat roofs Fillic sheets caught the afternoon light.
Branner took things in. The resting meter of the city.
Ahead of him the bridges, on which the protest would converge to cross the empty river channel over to the Ice Dock.
Behind him the hospital.
Left of the bridge the Ice Dock itself. Dust from the construction work within lifting from it like faint smoke.
Between the dry riverbed and the Dock was derelict ground. Bulldozered leftovers of cleared buildings piled around the site.
Branner scoped the area. A huge space but dwarfed by the Dock. The land of the old park behind.
Despite the high fences, there were signs of people. Spent fires. A hopscotch court. Graffiti.
Untidy patches of silver-grey scrub.
The broken opening in the waste ground caught him unawares. A memory that flipped his stomach. The dark opening like a section of blown-out pipe.
It brought a sudden bile of adrenalin into Branner’s mouth. His pulse thickened and he felt the walls of detachment shudder.
What was it?
He increased the magnification of his scope. It looked as if something heavy had fallen through the floor.
From the sporadic growth around it, Branner sensed the hole held water.
He felt the adrenalin turn soupy inside him.