- Ismen, it's great to see you!, I cheered. - How did your trip to the Parallel Rivers go? I mean, except the equipment problem. I hope you had good time there.
- Yes, it was very nice there. The canyons are beautiful and cool during midday, and sunsets are just great. It was also great to be able to swim for a change.
- So, it was like a vacation or what, said Enembe. Ismen knew well enough not to catch Enembes bait and start arguing about who is having it the easiest.
- Well, I had to take those river sediment samples anyway. But more importantly, I could collect and analyze the water samples, and I also made an analysis of the water cycle and water flow in the cathcment area. It seems that the water flow or pumping capacity is not a limiting factor for irrigation. However, the sulphate concentration is highish, so we must be very careful for not to overirrigate, because the accumulating salt would ruin the fields. The best option would probably be pot cultivations.
- OK, that's promising, and with our good results from the outer fields we can soon start planning for a real production-scale systems, I said. - But what about weather? Was there anything special?
- Oh, no. The weather was just the normal sunshine.
- Are you sure there was no snow? Or frost during the nights?
- What, snow? There's never snow here. Why would there be snow?
We told Ismen everything we knew about the snow and ex-floating rocks and the abandoned village and re-appearance of the villagers and disappearance of the snow and Khorixas' strange double-slit hypothesis and missing Svetlana. Ismen listened carefully and asked a few questions and scratched his head. After we had told him everything, he remained silent for a long time. Finally he asked:
- So, are you now saying that there are two separate realisations of the world, one with snow and one without?
- We don't really know, I said. - But we haven't been able to develop another explanation.
- And for some mysterious reason you switched from the snow-world to this one, and Svetlana is stuck there?
That thought had not occured to me, and I was shocked to think that she would be there all alone. As far as we knew, the three of us were the only people in the snow-world, and now we were no longer there. I had just thought that the snow-world was just some kind of temporary anomaly that disappeared during the night and everything went back to normal. But if it was permanent and Svetlana was there, that would explain why we havent seen her for two days.
- Well, Svetlana is either there or she is here, Enembe said. - We need to figure out a way to find out which is the case. When we switched to the real world -- I really like to think that this one without snow is the real one -- all our clothes and the wheelbarrel and the broken electric cord we had with us switched as well. This implies that the snow-world was just a limited spatio-temporal anomaly that lasted for a few days temporally and from here to the village but not to the Parallel Rivers spatially. Then it disappeared and everything we had just moved with us. That would include Svetlana. She is here somewhere.
- But the badger was not there, and the hole seemed quite inhabited. That implies that some things that were moved during the snow-world did not switch but remained there -- or vanished, I said, worrying.
Enembe fell silent and seemed displeased. Then, without a warning, he jumped up and rushed to the roor.
- Enembe, where are you going? I shouted after him but he did not reply. I rushed after him, and so did Ismen.
Enembe went outside and switched on his pocket lamp. I didn't have mine with me, so I tried to walk carefully after him and not to bump into anything. After just a few meters I thought I saw something from the corner of my eye, a dark shadow. I turned around but only saw Ismen walking behind me. Enembe was pointing to different directions with his lamp but obviously did not see whatever he was looking for.
A shadow again, now on my other side. I turned but saw nothing. I also heard nothing, no footsteps nor a rattle of sand. Enembe was heading toward the hill. His dark clothes and dark skin made him almost invisible in the night, but his light made him easy to track. Suddenly he stopped and pointed around his feet with the light. After a second of thinking, he started heading back to the hub, or more precisely, to the barn. I caught him at the barn door.
- Show me the light, he said giving the pocket light to me. I took it and pointed it toward the door while he opened it and walked in. Ismen was now just behind me.
He went directly to a shelf. There were two plastic sheets, and he took the leftmost from its corners, lifted it up and let it unfold in front of him. A small squeak came out of the sheet as a few mice dropped onto the barn floor and scurried out of the door. I pointed the light to them, and once again, I saw the shadow. It came down from the dark night sky and just above a mouse touched the ground with amazing precision. It flapped its wings twice, just to duck again, and within less than a second, an owl had captured another mouse in its other claw. Without making any sound, the owl flapped again, raised into the air as easily as if it was weightless, and disappeared in the quiet desert night.
Enembe cursed. Ismen looked at him, not understanding anything about anything.
- This is more complicated than we thought, Enembe said. - Look, we built a snow pile over there to collect water, and we used that plastic sheet to do it. He pointed the one on the shelf. - And this sheet had a mouse nest, just like it had now, and we burned it because it had mouse shit all over it. And here it is, as if we never did any of those things. Things did not automatically just switch into the real world when the snow-world collapsed. Or maybe it did not collapse at all. It may still be out there as it was, and the two of us and our wheelbarrel is the only thing that has switched back. Svetlana is probably there all alone.
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Your topic for tomorrow is Sticky.
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