The Octomouths

Yarawi and Manqu waited eagerly for the tiny elevator to whisk their colleague back from the third story of the stack. Their view was limited to Rachel’s feet, seen through the steel grating that formed the floor of her conveyance. The father and daughter expected the family friend to pluck the single volume that the mammoth card catalog had indicated, then single-handedly transport the prize to the floor. To their surprise, they observed the aforementioned feet shift and shuffle in a manner that the lift and carriage of a single volume would never require.

The suspense built. Finally, they heard the soft shut of the elevator gate. The cage moved horizontally, then paused momentarily before beginning a smooth descent. When the gate opened at the ground floor, Rachel was not fully revealed, as cylinders of paper standing on their ends lined the sides of the cage and obscured all but the head of the intrepid library science graduate. In making her exit, Rachel had to gently kick aside some of her finds, as the entire floor-grating was crammed with books, papers, files, folios and photos.

Manqu reached forward into the tiny cage and retrieved some of the rolled-up documents. “Maps!” he said in recognition. “Quite a haul of them!”

“Yes, when I got up there, it turned out that call number referred to two whole shelves. Then there was a special case next to the shelves for the maps.”

“Hmmm...I think I don't like this,” Manqu muttered. “If they need all these maps to document what they're doing or planning, it must be not just dastardly, but dastardly on a big scale.”

“That surprises you, Dad?” Yarawi pointedly asked.

“Not at all- but one can always hope.” He took a deep breath and continued. “Let's get all this stuff over to where we can look at it properly.” Yarawi and Rachel shouldered the heavy tomes while their elder took the maps, and they crossed the aisle to the nearest of the elegant tables. “It's best to go over the documents right here in this library,” Manqu continued as they sat down. “If we ‘borrow’ them and they find we haven't returned them, we’ll get something worse than a heavy fine.”

Rachel scanned the piles that she had just brought down from the stacks and exclaimed, “We'll be here all night!”

“We already have! Don't worry, if we need to stay another night, I hid a secret stash of provisions in here, on one of my semi-janitorial rounds.”

“See, he thinks of everything,” Yarawi whispered to Rachel, her filial adoration clearly perceptible.

“... and while I admit these tables are rather hard, at least they give you a place you can stretch out if you need to,” Manqu continued, giving the highly polished, intricately grained dark mahogany surface an affectionate pat with his right hand, meanwhile stretching his left arm luxuriously. Rachel looked closely at him, but could not tell if he was being facetious.

Manqu drew the satchel of maps close and extracted them, one by one. He examined the labels on the outside of each roll carefully before pulling out the next. After he had read each description, he chose one to roll out, but the map, quite unwieldy at one and one half by two meters, started to roll back up. Rachel and Yarawi scrambled to weight the corners with some of the smaller books, and then leaned over to examine their find.

Rachel's first impression of the sheet brought mind a tapestry of fine brown and light blue strands threading their way through a white matrix. She and Yarawi looked up at Manqu with the same questioning glance. He acknowledged it by saying, “Now I'm even more worried. This is a map of the terminus of the khunu chhullunkhatamp, the largest known glacier in Pelea, in the Ollatambo’s land....” He paused and scanned it for a few more moments. “I’m really surprised the NP have anything this detailed of it.”

Once Manqu had identified the nature of the charted landform, Rachel could interpret the complex interweaving on the map. A sinuous, fluvial, attenuated and blue-striped gangly blob of white extended from upper left to the lower right of the sheet. The contour lines on the glacier were light blue, and where they bunched together they blended into a darker transverse stripe. Where they were so crowded they became tangled, Rachel knew there must be precipitous ice falls, and where the blue lines turned brown at the glacier's edge and the land-contours merged into a single heavy line, she visualized ice-cut perpendicular cliffs. Farther from the river of ice, a disorderly scrivening of brown indicated the jagged nature of the lofty ridges. Major peaks thrust above the general line of the saw-tooth were indicated by raggedly nested contours, with elevations marked with brown crosses at the bull’s eyes.

With awe, Rachel noted “6192 meters” attached to an unnamed pinnacle at the upper left corner of the sheet.

Manqu’s attention was at the far lower right of the sheet. He looked closely at the only non-blue or brown color on the map, a cluster of angular purple rectangles with radiating dashed lines.

“Damn, I can't believe they're doing this,” he muttered as he contemplated. Yarawi and Rachel immediately came over to his corner and gently coaxed him to explain.

“Purple means added since the last main edition of the map. They're building something new in a place where there have never been any buildings ... I mean never ...”

Yarawi was looking closely at some of the symbols in the corner. “These dotted lines seem to go into the glacier,” she observed.

“I hate to say it, but I'm afraid that's what they do,” her father answered. “It seems we're dealing with a outrageously mammoth and perhaps ultra-sophisticated tap. It makes sense if you’re a sociopath-take out water in one place, put it back from another .”

There was silence as the implications sunk in. “How could they actually build something up there?” Yarawi wondered. “I thought the NP had never even been up there.”

“That's what I thought too-until now,” Manqu answered grimly. He paused and added, “Well, regardless of how they do it, it seems they've done it-unless this whole map is some sort of ruse... But if it’s a ruse, why would they store it in the maximum security library?”

“Perhaps if we read some of the other documents?” Rachel suggested gently.

“Great point,” their leader affirmed. “Especially after you lugged them all the way down here, it would be a shame to ignore them. You probably already glanced at their titles while you were taking them down-any idea where we should start?”

“Let's see ... There's one that seemed to be some sort of summary.” Rachel looked through the various volumes that were spread out and piled up on the mahogany table top. “Oh, here ...” she murmured, selecting a type-script of white letters on dark blue paper. She placed it where all could read the title page:

An Innovative Approach to Hydrosecurity Using Long-Distance Transport of Frozen Assets: A Progress Report

“That they say ‘progress’ means they're already doing it,” Manqu said glumly. “I bet they have some pictures ... Flip to the end,” he suggested. Rachel complied, and what they saw horrified the trio:

A metal sucker with accordion-like folds extended to dig mechanical jaws into a blue-white ice face above a turquoise meltwater lake. Along with seven other identical tentacles, it radiated from a dome on the opposite shore, studded with multiple eye-like windows behind which tiny hominid controllers could be discerned. A multitude of domes were arrayed on the gravel beach, some larger, some smaller, but each with its set of prehensile tubes sagging over the water and then rising up again to wound the glacier’s snout, fixing the teeth of its terminal appendage into the ice-face. The dark metal tentacles contrasted with the shining ice face, and Rachel had the sudden vision of a school of lampreys all fastened to a pristine white shark.

The photograph was vivid enough that its viewers shuddered in concert with our heroine, as all could virtually hear the gurgling and sucking as the essence of the glacier was siphoned off.

Manqu ended the shocked silence by saying, “If you had any questions about why they make these documents so hard to find, you probably understand it now.”

Yarawi’s eyes were wet and her voice quavered. “Is there anything we can do? They have all those horrible huge machines and devices and it's just us ...” She looked at each of her companions in turn.

The comforting father suddenly appeared to rally support for his daughter. “There’s more than just us,” he assured her. “You know Catari and my other friends from the Sierra that come over a couple of times per month. We all still keep in touch with our old stomping grounds, if you want to call them that. For example, Catari is Ollatambo, and I'd be flabbergasted if he didn't already know about this atrocity.” He gestured at the type-script on the table. “The NP may have powerful machines and money at their disposal, but usually that doesn't stand up to knowledge over the long run, and when it comes to the Sierra, that's what we have.”

A LURCH! almost threw all three out of their chairs. Lights went off, then came back on before anyone could react. Manqu’s left hand was held to his forehead, marked by blood. All the carefully gathered books had crashed helter-skelter to the floor, and the huge atlas that had been pitched from an upper shelf to wound Manqu with its sturdy corner lay stained and akimbo next to the elder’s chair. The victim’s eyes were wide, but not from his injury.

“I can't believe it,” he confessed. “They're starting the truck ... After it's been sitting here for a decade!”

The three exchanged glances of apprehension. Truly, no one knew where they would end up.