The noise of the forest seems to have fallen; it is like a song being sung in a lower key than usual. Silva’s precise footsteps sound loud on the soaked boards. She turns her gaze back up towards the canopy overhead, strains to discern some camouflaged shape amid the green. Then, there is a sound which could have been a human laugh or the call of a bird, and a cascade of warm liquid splashes down onto Silva’s upturned face. She splutters and stumbles, surrounded by a lemon ammonia reek. Urine! It has got into her eyes, her mouth. She is blind, fumbling along the hand-rail, retching uncontrollably. Luckily, Luis hears her curses and spittings, and comes out of the Retreat to investigate. He laughs as he hears her angry explanation, as she wrings her trembling wet hands and paws the front of her shirt.
Urine. Yes. Monkeys do that. Piss onto travellers. Monkeys.
Later, her hair and body washed in the primitive shower - luke-warm gritty water - her mouth well sluiced with mint mouthwash, Silva sits down at Canvey’s desk to work. Her head is wrapped in a towel, her body in a robe. Lal lurks somewhere in the room behind her, though wrapped in its own thoughts as usual.
Earlier, Silva asked it what it thought about Canvey’s notes on the subject of humanoid life-forms in the forest.
Lal was philosophical. ‘I would rule nothing out in this place. So much of this territory is uncatalogued, but then one would suppose the natives would know more about it, if it existed.’
‘Supposing they’d want to tell us,’ Silva added. ‘We are the despoilers, after all.’
‘I doubt whether everyone holds that view,’ Lal said, and then utilising its intuition banks, added, ‘Have you discovered some more evidence to support Canvey’s theory?’
Silva shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. Perhaps I’m looking too hard for evidence, and they do say that an obsessed seeker will inevitably find what they’re looking for... in one way or another.’
‘Whether they create it for themselves or not,’ Lal added. ‘Perhaps that explains Canvey’s notes. He was searching for a dream.’
Silva laughed. It amused her to hear the machine speak in that way.
‘I intend to work outdoors tonight,’ Lal said. ‘Will you be all right alone?’
It was the first time it had expressed concern for Silva’s welfare. She immediately became suspicious, defensive. ‘Of course I will! Why shouldn’t I be?’
Lal was impervious to waspishness. ‘Well, keep the bleeper by you anyway. I won’t be too far away.’
As Lal ambled, in its strange gliding gait, towards the screen door, Silva grabbed a limb that, in a human, would be an arm. ‘What do you know?’ she said, eyes narrowed.
‘Regarding what?’
‘Why are you suddenly bothered about my well being?’
Lal gently pulled away from her hold. ‘I am merely empathising with you. You are my close colleague. It is one of my utilities.’
Silva let it go.
The night presses down on Silva. She is trying to read some scrawling notes of Canvey’s, which at some time must have got wet. It is a difficult, rather pointless task. She has her hands over her ears, because she keeps tuning in on strange noises outside. Of course, these noises will have been there ever since she arrived; only now her active mind insists on applying labels to them. She can hear what sounds like whispered conversation in high, clicking voices, or conversation that’s coming from an old radio hidden just inside the forest. Occasionally, a howler monkey will roar like a drunken man. There are no lights outside.
Her arm is itching slightly. When she scratches the strange skin, some greasy, silver scales come off under her nails. Soft sores? No! Soft sores usually originate in the groin or armpits; moist areas. (But everywhere is moist in this climate!)
‘Oh, stop scaring yourself!’ Silva says out loud.
She turns a page. Canvey was writing in brown ink, a colour like dried blood. She realises she hasn’t been reading the words for some time; only scanning the pages while paying acute attention to her own agonised thoughts. Now, a few sentences seem to leap at her from the page. Above them are some notes on forest biomass; below a list of provisions Canvey once required from the research station downtrail. But the words in between, like a bolt of inspiration, stand out alone. Curling script. A feeling of ancient times.
“They come at night - though never seen. Dawn - they manifest, come through to me. Green dawn - time of the undying. Like water children; sleek as seals, or fish...’
Silva reads the words several times. She cannot help feeling that Canvey must have woken up momentarily from a lethargic state, became truly alive, to write them.
Silva can feel her heart bumping. Sitting there alone in the modest halo of the hurricane lamp, there can be no question of disbelieving what Canvey wrote. He meant it. He’d seen what he wrote about.
At first light, a flock of birds known as the guardabarrancas, the guardians of the ravine, wake Silva with their tinkling song. It sounds as if a thousand wind chimes are being subtly excited by a tantalising breeze. The light, when Silva opens her eyes, is opalescent, glowing. Gold-green radiance falls in spears across her bed, shining motes held in the beams. The air is cool, caressing, and has a sparkling taste, like fern wine. Silva is caught in a transient moment of pure Earth beauty, those times when the planet unveils itself, when it does not realise it is being observed by a member of the hungry race it spawned. Silva stretches languorously, ignorant of the moment, simply being it, when she becomes aware of an unfamiliar shape in the room. She realises someone is standing among the long coats - most of them Canvey’s, one hers - that hang near the door.
‘Lal,’ Silva says, and props herself up on her elbows in the bed.
The shape moves forward a pace from the shadows. It is slim, green, alien; not Lal at all. Silva thinks: Should I scream, jump up, find a weapon, or wake up? These thoughts are quite lucid and calm.
Instead, she does nothing but observe.
The figure, though uncomfortably unfamiliar and impossible to categorise, has a sleek, streamlined beauty. There is a feeling about it of extreme age, yet vibrant youthfulness. It is hairless, and apparently sexless, though reminiscent of both genders. Muscular yet slight. Its eyes are a phosphorescent vivid green, like quetzal feathers. Despite its alien appearance, Silva is very much aware of its consummate Earthly origin. It is like the tinkling birdsong, the wild hazardous beauty of the forest, the magical light, made flesh. Like Silva, it is ageless.
We are kin... in a way, Silva thinks. There is no fear inside her, only a huge sense of expectancy.
Her visitor extends an arm; too long, out of proportion. It opens its mouth as if it is shaping words, but no sound comes out. It is encased by the ancient gold light of the cloud forest.
Then, the moment of pure beauty is ended, and the light changes, the birds lift from the trees in a ravening crowd, their song disordered.
Silva blinks into the shadows that are left behind. There is no one in the room with her.
Alcestis calls midmorning.
‘Can you believe it? Rod’s going to be working just a hundred or so clicks away from you. Isn’t that a coincidence?’ Alcestis laughs. Today, she is very much ‘at home’, her hair tied up in a girlish knot on top of her head, peacock blue silk kimono hanging open to reveal the upper curves of a chest that is deeply tanned, but the skin is beginning to crinkle, like the most delicate tissue paper.
‘Who’s Rod?’ Silva asks. She cannot help sounding cold because she hasn’t forgiven Alcestis for the previous conversation they had.
‘I’ve been seeing him.... Oh, he’s inconsequential! The important thing is that I’ve invited myself out there with him! Silva, I’ll be able to visit you!’
Silva is stunned by these words. Alcestis sounds like an excited teenager. She has not suggested a meeting since... since Silva hit twenty-five and Alcestis hit thirty. A parting of the ways. Tacit veil drawn over their association, the friendship mutating into whispers through the veil.
‘Here??
?? Silva’s voice sounds choked.
‘There!’
‘When?’
Alcestis pulls a face, shrugs. ‘Oh, a few days’ time. Can’t specify exactly when. I’ll have a look around... I’m interested in Rod’s field, after all. Maybe I’ll play the entertaining companion for a while before scrounging some company transport and heading up to see you.’
‘It’s not an easy journey,’ Silva says.
‘No, it isn’t,’ Alcestis agrees blithely.
‘It’s really very boring here…’
‘You’re trying to put me off, aren’t you?’ Alcestis utters another laugh, almost convincingly.
‘We haven’t seen one another for so long.’
‘I want to see you, Sil.’
Silva is thrown into a panic by the threat of Alcestis’ impending visit. She gets Luis to drive her down to the doctor’s surgery in the village again. The doctor is a small Spanish woman, who to Silva looks as if she should be the heroine of a romantic novel.
Silva grins as she extends her arm for examination. ‘Can’t you just scrape this stuff off?’
The doctor ignores the suggestion. ‘Any pain?’
‘No.’
‘Itching?’
‘A little.’
‘Try this ointment.’
‘Haven’t I tried this before?’
‘No.’
Silva sighs. ‘What is it? You must have some idea.’
The doctor shakes her small, perfect head. ‘I’ve seen nothing like it. At least it isn’t spreading.’
Silva clears her throat and utters the words she hates. ‘Could it be... cancerous?’
The doctor glances at her sharply. She knows nothing of Silva’s background. ‘If it is, I’ve never seen cancer like it before. I’m fairly sure it’s a simple fungal infection.’ She hesitates. ‘I could send a tissue sample down to the research station, if you’re worried.’
Silva stares at her arm for a moment, sucking her upper lip. ‘Perhaps... Yes. Do.’ She wonders whether she should mention what she saw that morning standing in her room, but decides against it. It could have been a hallucination, another terrifying symptom of an unspecified decline bubbling through, but she doesn’t think it was. She doesn’t feel it was. But then, of course, she’d make herself think that. The alternative is too horrible. She doesn’t want to discuss it.
On the way back to the Retreat, partially comforted by having been touched by medical hands, Silva carefully interrogates Luis about Canvey. Luis manoeuvres the four-wheel drive vehicle with the panache of a rebellious teenager in his first car. Silva hangs on grimly to the roll bar.
‘Canvey had some pretty weird ideas about what lived in the jungle,’ she says, as introduction. ‘Have you bothered to read any of his stuff while you’ve worked with it?’
Luis curls his lip and shakes his head. ‘No. He was a strange man. But these genius types often are, aren’t they?’
Luis was educated in the city. Although born in a local village, his manners are very urbane, his speech barely accented. Now he works for Virichem, flitting between isolated research retreats. He has many skills in advanced technology, but is still essentially just a handyman.
‘Perhaps it drove Canvey mad, living here alone,’ Silva says.
‘He wasn’t mad,’ Luis answers shortly. ‘He just didn’t want to be an old man.’
‘Did you know him well?’
‘He was a very nice person.’
Silva realises this avenue of enquiry is going to be unproductive. ‘I wonder where he got these ideas about green-skinned people that live hidden in the forest...’ There is no response. ‘Is that a well-known legend?’
‘This land is alive with legends,’ Luis answers, with the pride of a man who has secrets the interloper can never penetrate. ‘There are whole cities buried beneath the vines. Deserted now, of course, but who knows what race once lived in them.’
‘Any of these ruins near here?’
‘No. Not that have been uncovered anyway.’
‘Do you believe the green-skinned people exist, Luis?’
He grins at her as he savagely changes gear. Silva’s head makes abrupt and painful contact with the roll bar. ‘Now what kind of question is that?’ Luis says, grinning, and shakes his head.
She wonders what he’d say if she told him she thought she’d seen one of these people. She wants to believe that, because of his vague answers, Luis knows more than he lets on, but perhaps she is deluding herself, seeing evidence where there is none. Already her memory of the visitation is dimming. It’s hard to believe she didn’t dream it.
In the dawn, they come to her again - three of them this time. Silva slips from her bed and follows them out of the Retreat, acquiescing to, rather than obeying, their soft, insistent beckoning. Outside the air is radiant and the song of the guardabarrancas is a fountain of sound. Silva can see a golden walkway, a mist of gleaming rays, leading into the forest. She can walk upon it. It vanishes down through the thick foliage, down the side of the ravine. I am dreaming, Silva thinks, and keeps on walking. She passes the still form of a great sloth hanging from a low branch. She has never seen one this close before. Its fur is green with algae, and inhabited by silver moths. A ribbon of data, remembered from Canvey’s notes, which she read the day before, passes across her mind. ‘The majority of animals survive in this landscape by specialising... sometimes they are invisible to the casual observer...’
‘I have the search image,’ Silva murmurs. ‘Now I can see.’
The people of the green lead her downwards, to the heart of the dead volcano.
She stands upon a wide grey slab, gilded by lichens. A crowd of Canvey’s dream people sway around her like blades of grass or stripes of viridian water; insubstantial. They reach out to touch her skin, nodding their small heads to one another, but she cannot feel their touch. One of them fingers her patch of scaly skin and recoils, as if burned. It flushes a deeper green, and communicates without speech, in an agitated way to its companions.
‘They believe I am the future of humanity,’ Silva thinks. ‘And I am not.’ She feels they are pleased, even excited, by the phenomenon of her. How long have they been here? Are they recent blossomings of the humid, breathing green or the last remnants of an ancient breed? Silva does not know how to reach them. She feels too dazed to think rationally, too tired to lift an arm.
Alcestis takes charge as soon as she arrives, striding into the Retreat, throwing down her travelling bag, standing with hands on hips to address the two men, who look up at her with resentful suspicion.
‘It stinks in here!’ she announces, by way of greeting. ‘Where’s Silva?’
Jesus resumes his work with deliberate slowness, leaving Luis, whom he knows can handle these city types, to answer the woman’s question.
‘She’s not here.’
‘Then where can I find her?’
Luis shrugs. ‘She’s probably outside.’
‘You’re not being very helpful,’ Alcestis growls.
‘I don’t know where Ms Merin is,’ Luis responds politely. ‘She is under no obligation to report her movements to us. Can I be of assistance to you, Ms... ?’
‘I’m here to see Silva.’ Alcestis turns a complete circle on the spot, appraising the Retreat. ‘This place is falling apart. It smells like old mushrooms. How could anyone live here voluntarily?’
Luis is aware the question is rhetorical. ‘The job is nearly done,’ he says.
Alcestis raises her brows. ‘So quickly? When I spoke to Silva a week ago, she implied there was quite some ground to cover yet.’
Luis clears his throat, and pointedly drops his eyes from Alcestis’ stare. ‘It appears Ms Merin has discarded a large amount of material she felt was superfluous.’ He shrugs. ‘There was little here worth saving anyway.’
Luis and Jesus do not know when Silva will be back. They say they haven’t seen much of her for the past few days. Alcestis makes direct enquiries about her friend’s h
ealth, but all the men will say is that Silva made two visits to the doctor downtrail. She does not, in their opinion, look ill.
When Lal makes an appearance soon afterwards, Alcestis does not find it at all helpful. The biomech is intent only on telling her about the research it has been conducting. ‘The evolutionary thrust in this area is towards a vast variety of species, with a wide area of dispersal. There is no spring protein pulse in the neotropics, therefore...’
‘Excuse me,’ Alcestis interrupts. ‘This is no doubt very interesting, but I’m more concerned about Silva. Where is she and how is she?’
‘Some varieties of species have yet to be discovered by us,’ Lal finishes. ‘Silva will be back at sunfall. She has adopted this habit recently. As to her physical condition, I would say this locality causes her stress. She is not sleeping well.’
As it is early in the day, Alcestis decides to drive down to the village and speak to the doctor there. Before making this visit, before badgering her casual lover Rod into letting her come over here with him, she had wheedled her way into getting her hands on the case notes of previous longevity experiment subjects. Deterioration of their condition had begun with skin cancer; rapid aging had followed, accompanied by dementia, and paranoid hallucination. To her mind, Silva is very much in danger of going the same way. Alcestis has remained alert to the nuances of Silva’s voice, even though she has refused to see her. The woman she spoke to recently was not the Silva she remembered. There had been a vagueness about her, which Alcestis felt camouflaged a kind of panic.