COLLECTING
JAR
It’s noon, and the
rippling heat haze turns the horizon to fog in the distance. Maddy
tries not to move too much: the cycads cast imperfect shadows, and
she can feel the Venetian blinds of light burning into her pale
skin. She sighs slightly as she hefts the heavy canvas sample bag
out of the back of the Land Rover: John will be needing it soon,
once he’s finished photographing the mock-termite nests. It’s their
third field trip together, their farthest dash into the outback,
and she’s already getting used to working with John. He’s
surprisingly easy to get on with because he’s so absorbed in his
work that he’s refreshingly free of social expectations. If she
didn’t know better, she could almost let her guard down and start
thinking of him as a friend, not an employer.
The heat makes her
mind drift: she tries to remember what sparked her most recent
quarrel with Bob, but it seems so distant and irrelevant now—like
home, like Bob arguing with her father, like their hurried
courthouse wedding and furtive emigration-board hearing. All that
makes sense now is the stifling heat, the glare of not-sunlight,
John working with his camera out in the noonday sun where only mad
dogs and Englishmen dare go. Ah, it was the
washing. Who was going to do the washing while Maddy was
away on the two-day field trip? Bob seemed to think he was doing
her a favor, cooking for himself and taking his clothes to the
single over-used public laundry. (Some year real soon now they’d
get washing machines, but not yet . . . ) Bob seemed to think he
was being bighearted, not publicly getting jealous over her having
a job that took her away from home with a male superior who was
notoriously single. Bob seemed to think he was some kind of
progressive liberated man for putting up with a wife who had read
Betty Friedan and didn’t shave her armpits. Fuck you, Bob, she thinks tiredly, and tugs the
heavy strap of the sample case over her shoulder and turns to head
in John’s direction. There’ll be time to sort things out with Bob
later. For now, she’s got a job to do.
John is leaning over
the battered camera, peering through its viewfinder in search of .
. . something. “What’s up?” she asks.
“Mock-termites are
up,” he says, very seriously. “See the entrances?” The
mock-termites are what they’ve come to take a look at—nobody’s
reported on them from close-up, but they’re very visible as soon as
you venture into the dusty plain. She peers at the foot of the
termite mound, a baked-clay hump in the soil that seems to writhe
with life. There are little pipelike holes, tunnels almost,
emerging from the base of the mound, and little black mock-termites
dancing in and out of the holes in never-ending streams. Little is
relative—they’re almost as large as mice. “Don’t touch them,” he
warns.
“Are they poisonous?”
asks Maddy.
“Don’t know, don’t
want to find out this far from the hospital. The fact that there
are no vertebrates here—” He shrugs. “We know they’re poisonous to
other insectoida.”
Maddy puts the sample
case down. “But nobody’s been bitten, or died, or
anything.”
“Not that we know
of.” He folds back the lid of the case and she shivers, abruptly
cold, imagining bleached bones lying unburied in the long grass of
the inland plain, where no humans will live for centuries to come.
“It’s essential to take care out here. We could be missing for days
before anyone noticed, and a search party wouldn’t necessarily find
us, even with the journey plan we filed.”
“Okay.” She watches
as he takes out an empty sample jar and a label and carefully notes
down time and date, distance and direction from the milestone at
the heart of Fort Eisenhower. Thirty-six
miles. They might as well be on another planet. “You’re
taking samples?”
He glances round. “Of
course.” Then he reaches into the side pocket of the bag and
removes a pair of heavy gloves, which he proceeds to put on, and a
trowel. “If you could put the case down over there?”
Maddy glances inside
the case as he kneels down by the mock-termite mound. It’s full of
jars with blank labels, neatly segregated, impassable quarantine
zones for improbable species. She looks round. John is busy with
the mock-termite mound. He’s neatly lopped the top off it: inside,
the earth is a squirming mass of—things. Black things, white things
like bits of string, and a pulp of half-decayed vegetable matter
that smells damply of humus. He probes the mound delicately with
the trowel, seeking something. “Look,” he calls over his shoulder.
“It’s a queen!”
Maddy hurries over.
“Really?” she asks. Following his gloved finger, she sees something
the size of her left forearm, white and glistening. It twitches,
expelling something round, and she feels her gorge rise.
“Ugh!”
“It’s just a happy
mother,” John says calmly. He lowers the trowel, works it in under
the queen and lifts her—and a collection of hangers-on, courtiers
and bodyguards alike—over the jar. He tips, he shakes, and he
twists the lid into place. Maddy stares at the chaos within. What
is it like to be a mock-termite, suddenly snatched up and
transplanted to a mockery of home? What’s it like to see the sun in
an electric lightbulb, to go about your business, blindly pumping
out eggs and eating and foraging for leaves, under the eyes of
inscrutable collectors? She wonders if Bob would understand if she
tried to tell him. John stands up and lowers the glass jar into the
sample case, then freezes. “Ouch,” he says, and pulls his left
glove off.
“Ouch.” He says it
again, more slowly. “I missed a small one. Maddy, medical kit,
please. Atropine and neostigmine.”
She sees his eyes,
pinprick pupils in the noonday glare, and dashes to the Land Rover.
The medical kit, olive green with a red cross on a white circle,
seems to mock her: she rushes it over to John, who is now sitting
calmly on the ground next to the sample case. “What do you need?”
she asks.
John tries to point,
but his gloved hand is shaking wildly. He tries to pull it off, but
the swollen muscles resist attempts to loosen the glove.
“Atropine—” A white cylinder, with a red arrow on one side: she
quickly reads the label, then pushes it hard against his thigh,
feels something spring-loaded explode inside it. John stiffens,
then tries to stand up, the automatic syringe still hanging from
his leg. He staggers stiff-legged toward the Land Rover and slumps
into the passenger seat.
“Wait!” she demands.
Tries to feel his wrist. “How many of them bit you?”
His eyes roll. “Just
one. Silly of me. No vertebrates.” Then he leans back. “I’m going
to try and hold on. Your first-aid training.”
Maddy gets the glove
off, exposing fingers like angry red sausages: but she can’t find
the wound on his left hand, can’t find anything to suck the poison
out of. John’s breathing is labored and he twitches: he needs the
hospital, but it’s at least a four-hour drive away and she can’t
look after him while she drives. So she puts another syringe load
of atropine into his leg and waits with him for five minutes while
he struggles for breath hoarsely, then follows up with Adrenalin
and anything else she can think of that’s good for handling
anaphylactic shock. “Get us back,” he manages to wheeze at her
between emphy semic gasps. “Samples too.”
After she gets him
into the load bed of the truck, she dashes over to the mock-termite
mound with the spare petrol can. She splashes the best part of a
gallon of fuel over the heap, coughing with the stink: she caps the
jerry can, drags it away from the mound, then strikes a match and
throws it flickering at the disordered insect kingdom. There’s a
soft whump as the igniting gas sets the mound aflame: small shapes
writhe and crisp beneath an empty blue sky pierced by the glaring
pinprick of S Doradus. Maddy doesn’t stay to watch. She hauls the
heavy sample case back to the Land Rover, loads it into the trunk
alongside John, and scurries back toward town as fast as she
can.
She’s almost ten
miles away before she remembers the camera, left staring in
cyclopean isolation at the scorched remains of the dead
colony.