Missile Gap by Charles Stross

Author:Charles Stross [Stross Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: sf
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2005-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven: 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 furthest 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 registry-office 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 big-hearted, not publicly getting jealous all 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 Freidan 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 pipe-like 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.

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