I was no longer able to see the controls, let alone distinguish the colour coded diodes and was thus forced to attempt a tactile, essentially experimental, manipulation of the switches and buttons. I kept being met with the infuriating placidity of the Torontan masseuse, as I dubbed her - her voice positively ringing with schadenfreude: "That manoeuvre is not allowed!" Her tone insultingly implying that I had attempted to engage with some very private part of her person. "Manual override!" I declared in the hopes that there might somewhere in Louise be a vocal command link, but all I succeeded in doing was to activate Winged Worlds' evangelist so that now doubly muffled but still audible through the ever increasing influx of damp heather I caught: "Liquid nitrogen, the streamlined solution for dissolution. Watch in awe as your loved ones turn to dust!" At last by pure good fortune, otherwise I would have been smothered and presumably Louise would have continued to browse until shut down by the internal pressure, I opened an escape hatch. Unfortunately not the main lateral door but the emergency dorsal exit which, though better than nothing, meant that I was forced to heave large bundles of heather upwards and outwards, presenting some risk to the delicate control system. Only by unremitting effort was I able to clear enough space to disable the browsing function, clean up the cockpit and return Louise's external appearance to normal. Finally I was able to relax. I put Louise onto automatic roaming and settled down to examine my data.
Our little crisis had not gone unobserved. A line of cervids stood rooted to the spot at a distance of approximately 150 metres, at a slight elevation relative to our position. They were red deer, Cervus elaphus, a distant relative of Louise through the wapiti, and I noticed several very large males, their antlers already sporting crowns, and wondered with a shudder if this group were to fall into the category of so-called stalking stags. My reliance on the too big-to-see strategy might fail when Louise was viewed through telescopic sights. One reassuring thought occurred to me - her palmate antlers would mark her out as a deer apart, and her extinct status would surely offer her some protection from any irresponsible, trigger insensitive cullers. Our audience appeared to be testing the winds for scents so I obligingly depressed the papayawhip diode for pheromone, hoping that by so doing I might obtain a measure of acceptance from the herd, and by keeping some distance from them yet following in their tracks, find the safest route into the home grounds of the Balmoral estate. This was not to be so. Whatever the delicate balance of the chemical recipe Louise disposed of, its affect on the herd was devastating. They began to sneeze violently, then to rear in unison while hoofing their muzzles as if for all the world trying to rid themselves of some noxious substance, and finally they scattered to all points of the compass except Louise's, to be seen no more. So ended my first close encounter on the estate.
An analysis of the debris from Louise's foraging turned up some unusual specimens which surely told of a royal planter with exceptional resources to hand - maybe even extraterrestrial ones. There were traces of the Lundy cabbage weevil indicating an unusually large colony of the primitive brassicoids somewhere in the vicinity. Was I to find a lost world at Lochnagar's tarn? The possibilities were exciting. Perhaps even the Depressed River Mussel was present in the Dee as far up water as the estate, indicating how far conservation can go. I was most excited to find the remains of a Speckled Footman listed in the analysis. This creature was far outside its normal range and, to my mind, was pointing an accusatory finger at anthropic global warming trends. Even more exciting was the discovery that Louise had harvested, quite unwittingly, a number of extinct species including the Black-backed meadow ant, Formica pratensis, another indicator, to my mind, that we were entering a strange realm where time, species and planetary conditions were braided into an exotic plait as remarkable in their way as the Buckquoy spindle-whorl.
I turned Louise towards the north corrie where we were to attempt the ascent by a less frequented route - my main concern at this point was not to run point blank into a party of hillwalkers who, even if they should be royal residents of the castle with their guests, which was most likely at this time of the year, I could not rely on my too-big-to-see strategy at distances between 10 and 60 metres. A head-on encounter in which the other party actually collides with Louise would automatically result in a reinterpretation of the data on their part, so that Louise could successfully pass for a boulder or gnarled juniper grove. At a distance she would similarly be uninterpretable to the untrained eye, but at a medium distance there was the full danger that she would be seen, recognised, and her position reported to those who would be able to take immediate action. I felt that it would be the irony of ironies if David himself were to be expressed to Louise's coordinates and while I was in the very act of stalking my quarry his hushed tones might be being relayed live on national media and across the globe. The idea made me feel slightly uncomfortable about Louise's lack of male genitalia, a factor that would surely be exposed by such a veteran commentator on the natural world: "This magnificent beast, seen here for the first time since the last ice age 12,000 years ago, has made a guest appearance at the royal estate where I have been given the privilege of concealing myself in a royal hide." Imagine his public humiliation if Louise should be exposed as a product of modern engineering. No, I think it would be in his interests to maintain the deception through thick and thin, and with that thought in my mind I was able to begin the ascent unafraid.
Though I seemed to be in control of Louise's movements, and technically speaking I could turn her functions on and off, make her reverse (like Gregory XI's mule), scream, bellow, swivel her ears or browse (though I felt that this feature should not be engaged before her entire digestive system had been restructured) and excrete large quantities of wastes, I was not in control of the immediate details of her progress, where exactly she placed her hooves, how she surmounted difficult terrain, even her choice of route and thus it was that I found myself in a perilous position indeed, absorbed as I was in poring over her forage data with it's amazing finds. Suddenly I found myself tilted literally heels over head, shaken out of my abstraction too late to redirect my artiodactylid vehicle. A glance at my visuals revealed all. The intrepid but misguided beast, I was beginning to think she had a life and personality of her own, was scaling the cliffs of the corrie at terrible risk to herself, the whole project, but perhaps most important of all, to my own personal safety. There was nothing I could do. She must scale or crash, but in such a position my heart was almost literally in my mouth.
The ascent was interminable. I was in terror of falling debris, of a missed footing, even of an attack by golden eagles in the event of our disturbing a nest. It is easy to say now that I shouldn't have worried from the cocoon and relative safety of the home environment. On the corrie it was another matter. I kept my eyes glued to the approaching cliff lip hoping and praying that
Louise would scramble over the top and we would be able to gaze at the Cac Carn Beag (the small cairn of faeces) that marked the summit. With every twist and thrust of her body I was whipped through more contortions than a porno star, and yet I remained astonished at the skill of the engineers who had designed and built a mechanical beast capable of free climbing a vertical surface. I thanked my lucky stars that the mountain consisted of hard-weathering granite and not some crumbly limestone that would have given way beneath Louise's weight and sent us tumbling antlers over hooves to destruction.
4
