Part IV. With headscarf and Hasselblad in the glens
Louise had been designed as a very large specimen of an already enormous species. This was necessary for the accommodation of the jockey, as I came to be known, though it was not a term I encouraged, and she outsized all known museum specimens - she was literally too big to see on display, even in that Mecca for the Megaloceros giganteus enthusiast - the Natural History Museum in Dublin. During the critical ascent of the north corrie my first concern had been with her ability to maintain hoof-holds on the precipitous face of the rock, but once she had demonstrated her skills, directly attributable to the marvellous ingenuity of my engineering team, I set that anxiety aside for another - her weight in relation to the environment in which we found ourselves. As a flesh and blood elk Louise would have weighed in at well over a metric tonne, my own relatively minor contribution of around 100 kilos could be offset against the natural mass of internal organs and fluids (during the ascent I had no time to assess the advantages of jettisoning her wastes) but as a technobot she weighed in as a sylph of the glens. A mere half tonne. As the hitchless ascent progressed my fears on that score receded until they became as negligible as the threat of the Old Man of Lochnagar's failed plumbing, but there was one thing, however, which still concerned me and that was the spread of her antlers, they held a record for the species at 18 feet, even to commit the figure to digits and letters astounds me, and consequently involved the otherwise streamlined and agile beast in a host of ambient obstacles and a glance at my visuals indicated that our route was crowned with a copse of Arran whitebeams, their presence here in itself an indication of some adventurous royal planting or quasi magical stray seeding, which would be impassable to Louise, unless she could leap over them.
A cursory scan of my diodes and of their function chart and I knew that I would have to risk all by depressing lemonchiffon 1, fortunately easily distinguishable from lemonchiffon 2 for lope and lemonchiffon 3 for lead change, but as my finger hovered over the relevant button I paused, my concentration interrupted by a strange, rather soothing sound that I interpreted as leaves and branches combing the flanks of the hull. Louise was breaching the whitebeams! My initial elation was compounded by a visual external check. Louise had folded back her antlers into a hare position so that they presented no catch hold. I felt proud and astonished and once more secure as if I were at home in my own four-poster Mary Tudor replica. But the implications of this manoeuvre began to sink in as Louise stood triumphant on the brink, her hind-quarters to the abyss, her face turned towards the general direction of Balmoral Castle tucked away in the distance in the embrace of the Dee, with the mid morning sun spangling the heather, and emitted an unearthly cry that I searched for in vain amongst my diodes. It sounded for all the world like a challenge. Doubts began to flood my mind. How far was I in charge of this extraordinary ungulate? I had given no command for such shape changes that had enabled us to penetrate the grove of Arran Whitebeams nor had I authorised the incautious baying and at a volume that, I hoped, would fall into the category of too-loud-to-hear. My fingers, as active, to paraphrase the Sage of Binham, as tumbling meal worms, searched and re-searched Louise's files. Yes, antler-fold was under azure 4, a colour that was to my eyes indistinguishable from grey, and the strange baying that had so disturbed me and that even now minutes after its emission was echoing back as if from the very castle walls, was to be found under the obscure diode cadmiumorange, which to my eyes was indistinguishable from chocolate 1 for canter, a diode that might well come in handy on the open stretches of moorland, one of the putative docking areas for HM's space fleet.
My sense of control had been eroded, though twice on the ascent we had been forced to pause by the sugar pink diode and I had physically depressed the insistent pulse, an action which gave me some sense of authority despite my having no off option to choose from; but the more I pondered the system at my fingertips the more I began to feel that I was a tool in the hands of some higher force. My thoughts went to HM in her chamber looking out towards the Dee, no doubt at this very moment absorbed in the selection of an oat cake, her presence a comfortable guarantee of normality, of a certain kind, of a world that knew no want that looked onto lawns and fountains backed by dense pine forests, a cultivated Pleistocene paradise on a planet in a golden orbit round a star that for now convulsed within itself and whose coronal mass ejections left us, for the time being, almost unscathed.
I selected an at rest stance (azure 3) for Louise and hoped that she would maintain it while I searched her files and then surveyed the terrain. I had engaged on this mission with the minimum of training. It seems foolish in retrospect that I should have undertaken to jockey Louise unnoticed into the private sphere of HM, while she was taking her hard earned rest from her royal rounds, though I had the precedent of other snoopers from the press who had successfully relayed reports on the thud of sporrans as their quarry retreated, and this gave me heart as I thought how much Louise added to the beauty of the moors and the crater lake of Lochnagar, and how much I myself, once descended from the pod, would be indistinguishable, to a distant observer, from HM caught quietly sketching on a shelf of rock above the plain.
Louise's language bank was my first shock. She was fluent in extinct Goidelic dialects as old as her living ancestors. Her Pritennic word bank included some novel uses for heather in ritual and quotidian service, and would have been of enormous value to antiquarian scholars if made public. It was possible that she thought in Brythonic! The choice of languages was exceptional, but it was somehow appropriate that she should express her inner feelings in the speech of the ancient Britons; that she could pass the Turing test with flying pennons was mind numbing. I felt like some insignificant ultimate representative of an about-to-be-bypassed species that was on the point of being crushed under the elegant hooves of an alien visitor, to become a mere smear on the margins of a tarn. And Louise's hooves, as elegant as ebony shoe trees, would be the perfect instruments for such genocide! I shifted uncomfortably in my techno hammock and thought of the external world. The time had come for me to make a little sortie in my headscarf and Swarovsky encrusted wellies for the purposes of natural relief - Louise had not been provided with such conveniences - and I thought a nice tongue sandwich with plenty of English mustard would set me up very well for the morning's efforts, so I disengaged my Hasselblad, slipped out of my harness and with a certain bravura flick of the wrist which reflected my inner confidence, I threw the switch for the lateral hatch. The cockpit was flooded with that pure, quasi arctic light which blesses the northern regions of the British Isles in late summer. Louise knelt to facilitate my descent (cyan/aqua) and I stepped out into a veritable earthly paradise.
I was standing on a granite pluton more than 400 million years old, looking down over an undulating landscape of glacial troughs and plateaux to the west. The glacial survivors are, of course, of great interest to all, but what really moved me and made me forget my tongue sandwich for the moment, was the evidence of royal planting, or rather of the delicate touch of a conserving hand, for here, in this unlikely environment were gathered all the threatened brassicoids, natterjack toads, Dukes of Burgundy and their Speckled Footmen, along with the Violet Click beetle and Shrill carder-bee in sheltering groves of rare whitebeams, zelkovas, and rowans.
In this remote spot I judged it unnecessary to proceed with my portable trompe l'oeil, and with Schafe k"nnen sicher weiden,/Wo ein guter Hirte wacht ringing in my ears (I prefer the Ignaz Friedman arrangement for piano) entirely forgetful of those human lice the hillwalkers and even of pressing natural needs, I ran joyful and carefree towards the tarn.
4
