The first episode of Raindrops is here

My screen saver was drunk. Instead of the elegant Lissajous figures the flying shapes usually executed, they were crashing into the screen boundary and staggering about before regaining their proper paths. Some instinct made me switch the sound back on, and I was treated to a chorus of the Wiffenpoofs’ Song punctuated by moans of “Ow-w-w!” whenever a shape collided with the screen boundary.

“Gentlemen songsters out on a spree -Ow-w-w-w!

Lord have mercy on such as we…. Ouch!

Ba, ba, ba-aa.”

*************

I couldn’t help laughing before I settled to the serious business of interrogating the tools I had left logging every system call since I’d reconnected to the Net.

“What on earth is going on?” Robin poked her head in, justifiably puzzled by the drunken chorus.

“Pretty much the same as in human immunology, I’d say. A small part of the colony was resistant to the ‘antibiotic’. A stimulus from outside helped to trigger re-infection, but now the colony consists entirely of the resistant strain. This is a new trick. Plenty of viruses pretend to be something else, but this is the first one to pretend to be dead.”

I put my feet up on the desk, leaned hard back in the chair, and closed my eyes. Robin waited.

“Let’s go to Tsodilo. You’ve got to go there anyway, and I need a nice long drive to give my subconscious time to do a triage of my thoughts on how to attack the problem. Semi-automatic activity like driving or washing dishes is quite an effective way of letting it get to work, and there’s more to do in the Hills than around here.”

“OK. It’ll give me longer to plan my shots, anyway.”

I had just invited myself into her workspace, an act which would normally profit neither of us since she is as unreachable as I am when she is busy. However, her schedule is partly governed by the position of the sun, whereas mine is completely arbitrary. I was betting on being able arrange to finish around the same time as she did.

I had to. Narayan had set the deadline.

* * * * *

The journey to the Tsodilo Hills was long and uneventful. Maun has had an international airport since the late nineteen-nineties, and the road around the southern end of the Delta is well-maintained blacktop.

There are still donkeys standing head-to head in the middle of the road, unmoving, in the full heat of the mid-day sun. You just have to drive round them, going on to the dirt if necessary.

There are goats, too, but they practise the pedestrian code better than most of the two-legged creatures and cross in an orderly manner – as long as some impatient idiot doesn’t blast his horn at them and make them scatter. I’ve seen more than one upside-down vehicle, usually the innocent party, caused by that kind of behaviour. Botswana is still a country where the survivors are defensive driving experts.

We set up camp by the Tsodilo Hills, and I left Robin working, getting a few background images in the evening light, while I switched my conscious mind back to my own problem. I thought about the immunologists and the way they were beginning to be watched every step of the way by moralists and religious fundamentalists as well as by scientists who were trying frantically to predict the wider effects of any new development.

The cyberworld was not without its external effects, but it was far more of a closed system, and the people who admitted to believing that some of its systems behaved so much like human beings that they must be sentient were generally living in closed systems themselves, paid for by state or private health insurance schemes.

If I let Narayan’s latest changeling turn my computer into a raving lunatic, and I sat and watched it die slowly, no-one would even try to sell the story to the tabloids.

If I created a new ‘drug’, my colleagues could test it in truly representative environments of increasing complexity. As long as they were not connected to the Net, nothing could accidentally slip through within the dimensions of the cyberworld.

There was still, however, the biggest threat to the stability of all ecological systems. Man.

However carefully we screened people and their movements, we could not be sure that someone in the team would not find a motive and a means to remove potentially dangerous code from the lab and introduce it to the real world. Perhaps there wasn’t so much difference between me and the immunologists, after all.

That thought kept me busy until three in the morning. Robin brought refreshments and refilled my coffee pot with freshly ground Mocha Java, then left me alone. She didn’t even wake when I crawled into my bag, and when I surfaced the next morning, she had already gone in search of images of the dawn. There would be birds, lizards, snakes, scorpions, dassies, and maybe even a hyaena to complement the rock paintings which were the theme of her assignment. I cooked and ate breakfast nervously, waiting for that flash of understanding that would turn last night’s work into another house of coffee-stained cards. It didn’t come. Maybe I’d got it right.

I crept into the Cruiser, where I had left the computer running all night, and inspected my patient. I’d left the machine hooked to the Net, with firewall disabled. It had been standing, chest bared, silhouetted against the skyline, inviting attack for about seven hours, and my screen saver was still producing the same beautiful geometric shapes dancing in ever-changing formation. I set off in search of Robin.

“Oh. You’ve returned to the land of the living. You look pleased with yourself, too. Have you fixed it, then?” She appeared round a pile of rocks, also looking satisfied, carrying a tripod and a large camera bag.

“I’ve done what I can here. Now it’s up to the guys at CSIR to check it out thoroughly before they release it to all the major nodes of the net. It’s going to be tough for them. That was no ordinary virus, and my fix is a first, too.”

“Can you explain in terms that I can understand?”

“Well, do you now what the term heuristic means?”

“Something to do with learning or adapting, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. My first attack on Naryan’s virus managed to identify it, and I thought it had cleaned out every trace of infection. When I connected back to the Net, I expected an identical invasion, which my code would have spotted and prevented. At first, nothing seemed to happen, then tiny bits of harmless-looking stuff were planted all over the place, at random intervals over several hours. Eventually, my monitors spotted a piece of code and waited to see what it would do when it managed to get itself executed.

“First, it collected together all the other bits that had arrive within the last few hours, and assembled a system called a neural net, and an engine to run it. This then found the pieces of the original virus which I had failed to clean out. From that evidence, it seems to have gained a few clues as to what I had failed to notice in the bits that survived, and rebuilt the virus to take advantage of this knowledge. It also added a few new mutations, giving it a good chance that something would survive the my next effort, even if I fixed my earlier omissions.”

“No wonder you were up half the night. How on earth did you produce something to fight a beast like that? It sounds worse than influenza.”

“A good parallel, except that ‘flu viruses don’t produce more than one or two serious mutations per year. Once it is out on the Net, this thing could be performing thousands of different mutations at a time – one in each computer it is attacking – and it could go on for ever. I had to play it at its own game. I’ve created a heuristic ‘antibiotic’ to fight it.

“In human immunology, I’d never even be allowed to test it, for fear that a still-imperfect version might be let loose on the world and run out of control. Even within the confines of the millions of systems linked together by the Internet, there is a significant risk that someone, somewhere, is running a system that my ‘cure’ could kill by mistake. All we can do is test it in ever-more comprehensive environments, then release it in an inactive state to each of the major nodes, with instructions on how to activate it and test it for the special characteristics of their own subnetworks. Meanwhile, we’ll ship my initial, non-heuristic fix out to try to stop the first invasion in its tracks. It should work for most people, but with several million systems out there, we’ll still find thousands who get re-infected with the mutating virus.”

“Just think. Even if your fix keeps it under control, this one new virus has added another increment to the cost of keeping every system healthy. Why do people do it?”

“Different people, different reasons. Most virus writers are pretty incompetent programmers, so it’s no good saying why don’t they use their talents in a proper job. I guess they’re all socially maladjusted to some degree – some of them seriously. Narayan is a rare case, though. His program is not state-of-the-art, but it is good solid competent stuff. “

(This is the kind of thing I was expecting from Narayan, so I’d given the concept a bit of thought already. Not so many years ago, animal and plant immunologists would respond to new forms of a pathogen by genetic manipulation of fermentation agents so that they produced a new antibiotic targeted at the new bug. Now they don’t do the redesign directly – they have developed heuristic cells which evolve new antibiotics when confronted with a new attacker, which they then use as templates in the traditional vats. I had developed a heuristic program which I had tested successfully against most of the currently known computer viruses, and I reckon Narayan may have got to know about it. He has created the first real challenge for me.)

Well, that’s it. Like many a person before me, I have been guilty of timidity in some of my forecasts (the size of hard disks on a system such as Pete’s, for a start), but some things are still to come, as far as I know. I’ll add a few tags to this post that should attract the geeks and professionals – I welcome informed comment and speculation.

Meanwhile, here are twow links – one directly connected with the subject matter, the other only vaguely so:

• The art of William Latham , whom I met while he was at IBM’s Winchester research lab, triggered the idea for Pete’s 3D image of the virus infection.
• Hyaena man . Vivienne Mackie, who contributed the Troglodyte Toour post to this blog, has a fascinating story here about a man who feeds hyaenas by hand.

Over to you. Criticise, create threads to related subjects, let’s have a bit of discussion.

The first episode of Raindrops is here Click on the RSS feed icon at top right to make sure you catch the next episode.

“Pete, you were just too tempting a target, nose in the air, catching flies and snoring away. I thought I’d forgotten to switch the engine off!” Her face was glowing under the tan, and her eyes were wide, sparkling. She played the game the same way as I did, letting us both simmer as long as possible.

“Rubbish! Anyway you snore louder than I do.”

I came back with a couple of cool beers, and we sat sipping quietly, studiously avoiding further physical contact. I saw that she had parked a long way off, downwind of my vehicle. She had treated me just like a game photography target when she first saw my Cruiser, pulling up and viewing the scene through binoculars before deciding to get out and stalk me on foot. With a Ranger covering her, she’d once taken a lucrative close-up of the flies on a sleeping lion’s nose like that – but she hadn’t tipped him out of bed afterwards.

“I should make you walk back alone, but I need to stretch my legs. Let’s go and get your Landy.”

We covered about a kilometre at a steady pace, exchanging general news and gossip as we went, but I didn’t mention Narayan’s challenge. Her Land Rover (like my vehicle, a diesel) was pretty warm inside, but cooled off as we drove back.

“I’ve got something cooking – tell you all about it at Baines’ Baobabs. Just let me shut down and we’ll be off.”

My tools had collected a lot of stats, but hadn’t yet come up with any clues that might help me find either a prophylactic or an antidote. I shut the system down and we drove off at a leisurely pace, passing round the northern edge of the salt pans and heading south to our chosen campsite.

It gets cold at night in the Kalahari, and humans are not the only inhabitants. We put the vehicles together with side awnings touching, chucked sleeping bags in a corner, then lit a fire at each end to discourage hyaenas and other prowlers from entering the space between the vehicles. We slouched lazily on the ground, leaning over to reach anything we needed.

“We’d both be out of a job without today’s technology, but it’s relaxing to abandon it when it doesn’t buy you anything,” I said, rearranging the cooking fire to reduce the last of the unburnt wood to glowing coals before putting a selection of small, juicy bits of meat on the blackened sheet of metal I had balanced on three small rocks.

“Mm-mm. It’s nice to live in a land where just occasionally we don’t feel guilty if we make a real fire, instead of lighting up the skottel braai. I hate having to clean that gas-powered wok before you can pack it away, and you can do a lot more with a real fire, anyway.” Robin placed some small, foil-wrapped potatoes at the edge of the fire and turned the meat. The sun was setting, so I rolled back the awnings. Jupiter and Venus were already visible.

We ate quietly, adding pieces of marinated meat to the grill from time to time, crunching salad and sipping diluted fruit juice or wine as the mood took us. I didn’t even bother to light the kerosene lantern.

“Pete, why do you take your computers into the bush with you? Wouldn’t it be easier to get away from them if you left them at home?”

“I’ve got friends that tried that. Trouble is there are times when you decide not to go back just yet. Do that too often, and even as a freelance you’re out of work. Also, a lot of my intrinsic worth is in the tools I’ve designed. If I get an inspiration, I get very frustrated if I can’t work on it there and then.”

“You don’t have to tell me about those moments. You get downright bloody antisocial when they come on!”

“True. And you’re the only person who not only understands what’s going on, but is prepared to wait quietly until I come back to the real world.”

I kissed her lightly on the forehead and got punched in return. I almost heard the click as the tension ratcheted up another notch.

“Anyway, I don’t actually spend a big fraction of my time playing with my machines. I am what I am because I design powerful tools which do the job for me. Just about the only time I switch off from reality for days on end is when I’m creating a new tool. I’m a bit like a manager of people, delegating jobs to ‘agents’ that I trust, and either checking up now and then, or waiting until they interrupt me. Take this virus I’m chasing: at the moment it’s a personal challenge. No-one has asked me to tackle it yet, but they sure as hell will when Narayan lets it loose. By then, I hope to be close to having an antidote.”

We sat chatting aimlessly, sipping wine and enjoying the isolation. Now and then, one of us crawled away to feed a fire.

I had just rebuilt one fire to my satisfaction when my scalp started to tingle and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I sensed something close behind me, breathing almost soundlessly. I turned my head slowly, careful to avoid challenging body language.

In the flickering firelight I saw a face, lips drawn slightly back, eyes wide, and a body tensed for attack. I rolled to one side, away from the fire, and dragged her with me, laughing. The simmering dish boiled over in cheerful ecstasy.

It was quite a while before we separated, cooling rapidly in the night air, and started to prepare for sleep.

“I’m not sharing a double bag. I know I can’t lose my share of the covers completely like I do with duvets and blankets, but it still doesn’t work. When you turn over and drag the bag with you, I’ll dream I’m being rolled up in a carpet.”

She laughed. “At least we can’t fall off the roof from here!”

Just over a year ago, our uninhibited bedroom antics had left us trapped in the tangled remains of a collapsed roof-top tent, hanging halfway up the side of our vehicle. Her sense of humour, coupled with the calm competence that helped us to get out of the situation without further damage to the tent, earned her the niche in my life which she now enjoyed.

We parked our individually-zipped bags side by side, touching, and drifted off to sleep under the stars.

* * *

“Think, man, think!” Someone was shining a light in my eyes, and somewhere in the shadows a big cat was half-purring, half-growling. I woke with the hair standing up on the back of my neck, then calmed down as I saw the full moon. Robin, on her back, was snoring gently. I rolled her over and she sighed and went quiet. I could hear a jackal howling far away, but the night was peaceful.

I dragged myself over to the remains of the fire near our heads and added wood. I was wide awake now, and my mind was racing. I dressed silently, crept into the Cruiser and started up my computer. It was three-thirty.

Three quarters of an hour later, I’d got the bones of an idea designed and was ready to implement it when Robin appeared with a mug of steaming chocolate, put it beside me without a word, and started to walk away. I turned round.

“No! Stay. I’m ready for a break – and thanks. I need something to raise my blood sugar level a bit. It’s still quite chilly and I’m beginning to have a relapse.” I hadn’t heard her get up, see the light on in my vehicle, and start heating water over the now cheerfully blazing fire….

“Could you eat toast if I made some?”

“With peanut butter.”

She slipped quietly out again. I sipped chocolate and started coding (well, building something out of a pile of Lego bricks would be a better analogy, but old terms die hard). By the time the toast arrived I was watching with satisfaction as the white fungus on my representation of the infection withered away, leaving the original ‘coral’ clean and undamaged.

It looked as if I had successfully cleaned my screen saver and got rid of the virus. I tried running it, and it worked. Beautiful Euclidean solids followed complex three-dimensional paths, casting shadows as they went. Sometimes two solids would merge for a while, creating a more complex entity, then they would separate again. I hit a key, and they started to leave a trail which eventually became an ornate turk’s head made of gold and studded with rubies and emeralds.

“Mm-mm. Just what I needed.” She smiled and part of me squeezed her hand. The rest was still lost in another world.

“So far so good. Now let’s see if I can spot the little bugger if I open the gate and let it in again.”

I switched on the satellite modem and connected to the Net for the first time since the invasion. Two minutes later, the connection was closed automatically and a message appeared, flashing steadily. NET VIRUS NARAYAN’S DRY ROT HAS INVADED. DOC SMITH HAS DISABLED YOUR NET CONNECTION AND IS CHECKING FOR DAMAGE. DO NOT RECONNECT UNTIL I TELL YOU IT IS SAFE TO DO SO.

“Looks as if you have succeeded, Pete. Well done!”

“I’m not so sure. That was difficult, but not clever enough for Narayan to challenge me the way he did.”

OK. ALL CLEAN. SHALL I RE-ESTABLISH YOUR NET CONNECTION?

I hit the ENTER key and stood up. “Let’s have breakfast outside while we wait and see.”

The sun, blood-red while it was filtered by the dust haze, was bright now and the air was warming rapidly. We ate and chatted lazily, watching the birds rise on the first thermals of the day. Robin had stocked up, so she didn’t need to leave for Tsodilo Hills until first light tomorrow.

I was debating whether to go with her. It all depended whether I could crack this thing completely by the end of today. I didn’t know what other facets of the virus I had not yet seen, but I was certain that I’d only countered the obvious attack so far.

Encryption and polymorphism had been around for years now. Narayan must have found something more devious. I got up, stretched, and went back into the Cruiser.

“Uh-oh. It’s back. Or it’s told its friends.”

My screen saver was drunk. Instead of the elegant Lissajous figures the flying shapes usually executed, they were crashing into the screen boundary and staggering about before regaining their proper paths. Some instinct made me switch the sound back on, and I was treated to a chorus of the Wiffenpoofs’ Song punctuated by moans of “Ow-w-w!” whenever a shape collided with the screen boundary.

“Gentlemen songsters out on a spree -Ow-w-w-w!

Lord have mercy on such as we…. Ouch!

Ba, ba, ba-aa.”

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About this story

Several years ago, when I was trying to learn to write, I produced this light-hearted short story with a near future sci-fi theme. Some aspects of it are now commonplace, but the main premise is still (thankfully) fictitious to the best of my knowledge.

One very kind person flattered me by criticising it mercilessly as if it were a piece of serious literature, but I don’t think I’ll ever get round to rewriting it with her criticisms in mind.

I’ve published it in full on the net a couple of times, but I doubt if more than thirty people have seen it, so I’m re-publishing it here as a 4-part serial to make it a better fit with the short attention span we have all developed. I have also added references to a few bits of supporting material to help those to whom various aspects of the story will be unfamiliar.

UPDATE: It has become a 3-part serial because that seemed to work better.

Episode 1 – gone bush

The window shrank slowly to an icon. Excess water dribbled out of it, forming a puddle through which I read the message:

“THIS ONE’S FOR YOU, PETE SMITH. I’M GIVING YOU 48 HOURS START BEFORE I LET IT LOOSE ON THE REST OF THE WORLD. SORRY IF I’VE INTERRUPTED ANYTHING. NARAYAN.”

I switched off the modem and went outside the modified Land Cruiser to brew a coffee and think in the shade of the awning. The virus must have been sitting out there on the Net waiting for me, and only me, to sign on. I didn’t plan to let any other component of it make contact until I was ready.

Inside the Cruiser, my satellite phone rang. Caller identification was the first sensible facility they’d added to communications networks, and I’d made full use of it once it could be tied to automatic call screening. My ‘gone bush’ profile was running, and that only accepted calls from one source. I reached through the doorway and extracted the handset.

“Hi, Robin.”

“Hi, Pete. I’ve got five days’ peace and a Tsodilo commission. Are you accepting company? If so, where are you?”

“Your SatPhone’s the only number I haven’t barred. Where are you?”

“Small Qango Hill.”

I nodded. Some customer was going to get a better-than-average set of photographs of Botswana’s ancient rock paintings. The Tsodilo Hills by the Okavango Panhandle are the best-known and most prolific source, but Small Qango Hill is one of a group of rocky outcrops in the Savuti area of Chobe National Park, which also boasts a number of less well-known ones.

“OK. See you this evening. I’m just leaving Nxai Pan.” Instead of naming the small, bare campsite of which I was the sole occupant, I gave her a GPS position for a rendezvous later in the day.

She laughed. “I don’t even have to look that up. See you at the airstrip around 15:00. I have to restock in Maun. I presume we’re camping at Baines’ Baobabs.”

Robin was right on both counts. The daughter of a trading family, she’d been born in Botswana only a few years after it stopped being the Bechuanaland Protectorate, and had spent most of her school holidays in the bush with her parents. These days, well-equipped and carrying both a satellite phone and a GPS, some of the most dangerous hazards she faced were donkeys, cattle and other drivers while she was batting along the blacktop to Maun and across to the turnoff to Kudiakam Pan. If she’d had the time, she’d probably have driven all the way along the bush tracks instead.

I went back into the Cruiser and started running my virus analysing tools against Narayan’s invader. Like many of the top-of-the-range workstations around these days, it had multiple processors, but unlike them, I had the means of booting up one processor independently, with a diagnostic operating system that resided only in ROM and on CD. The operating system and the complete tool set were on read-only media and therefore immune from infection. It was just like running an external monitoring device.

First I checked all the known executable code. Nothing amiss. Then I looked at the macros and other forms of imbedded code in word processors, spreadsheets, presentation designers, appointment schedulers, drawing programs, and even the small set of advanced games I had on my system. Nothing. This was beginning to look like a real challenge.

Banging your head against a wall usually incapacitates you long before it causes any noticeable damage to the wall. It was time to take a break and stand back from the problem a bit, so I left one of my tools hunting through a hundred gigabytes of hard disk for anything that looked like a string of machine code while I took a drink, a sandwich and a pair of binoculars and went over to the shady side of a rocky outcrop known locally as a koppie.

A family of dassies (rock hyrax), looking like fat charcoal-grey guinea-pigs, scuttled back behind the nearest rocks as I approached. The ones higher up remained, watching me. Several brightly-coloured lizards were playing statues in the crevices. I finished my sandwich and swung the binoculars up to focus on a white speck circling high above an area sparsely scattered with stunted thorny acacias. Only a select few species of raptors hunt in this arid territory, and my guess was confirmed when the binoculars revealed broad, white wings with thin black bars along the trailing edge, white underbody and black head. A black-breasted snake eagle. Better than last week, when the white speck riding a thermal with a strange, dancing motion had turned out to be Botswana’s national flower – one of the polythene supermarket bags that adorn the thorn bushes around all inhabited areas.

Every environment is full of adaptive systems competing to establish themselves, some that we would classify as intelligent, others not. Once, I’d tried to get a grant to research the possibility that the world’s polyethylene molecules have become a complex adaptive system, which has managed to outsource its own species reproduction to the collective skills of humanity and its machines. The Faculty, smarting under the lashes of a media investigation into wastage of funds on trivial and irrelevant research, accused me of making a deliberate and offensive joke. I still believe that, even if that specific hypothesis was invalid, my research would have made valuable contributions to the domain of artificial intelligence.

I returned to the Cruiser. My scanner had found a pattern, or rather a pattern of patterns. A piece of dynamic art that I used as a screen saver was infected.

My tools represent very complex relationships as coloured three-dimensional models, and they were showing me an image that looked like multi-coloured coral with a white fungus growing all over it. Little white blobs were connected by fine threads that covered the surface of the coral, which represented my screen saver. Each blob represented a small segment of virus code, and each thread showed a link to another segment. Creating a tool to purge a system of this brute wasn’t going to be easy, and I still didn’t know how it had got in.

Although I can make pretty wild lateral jumps in live brainstorming sessions, my subconscious regularly does a better job, and it doesn’t give me a headache, either. I decided it was a good time to leave the campsite.

All my equipment was firmly clamped in shock-proof mountings, so I didn’t need to pack. All I did was shut down and power off, leaving only the SatPhone active. Two minutes later, I was under way, sometimes clattering along on hard corrugations, and at other times crawling through soft sand in low ratio four-wheel drive.

It was fairly hot – about forty-five Celsius – and very dry, but I always drive with the windows open and enjoy direct contact with the shimmering heat outside. If you drink plenty of water, dry heat is easy to tolerate, and although the Cruiser would happily travel at 140 kph over the hard, corrugated stretches of road with the windows shut and the aircon going full blast, that’s not my idea of fun. I don’t go into the bush to behave like a highway commuter, and in any case, even with the 200 litres of diesel that she carries, the disastrous effect on fuel consumption would mean an unwelcome detour into civilisation to fill up before I tackled each really long stage.

There’s not much to see out here in the middle of the day, but I enjoy the horizon-to-horizon view of sparse, stunted scrub. If you get out and walk, use good binoculars, and poke around under stones, there’s plenty of life; but only the birds and the smaller creatures are still active. The sort of beast you can see easily from a vehicle conserves its energy for the cooler periods around dawn and dusk: I kept rolling, arriving at the empty airstrip in the early afternoon.

I didn’t want to leave the engine running, but even minimal air-conditioning plus computer and communications gear would run my batteries pretty low over the next two hours, so I started up the auxiliary generator before settling down in front of my keyboard with a long, cool drink to hand. I stared at the fungus-covered coral image and let my mind wander.

My subconscious had covered a lot of ground already – I found myself remembering articles about human immunology, and remarking how what had once seemed almost magic had turned into an incredibly mechanical process, with funny-shaped bits fitting neatly into funny-shaped holes, and researchers finding harmless things which either latched onto the funny-shaped bits or bunged up the funny-shaped holes. Maybe I could find something common about the sites each part of this new invader chose to inhabit: I carefully tweaked some of my tools and set them loose again, then went outside to pull out the Cruiser’s side awning and set my table and chair under it.

I tried reading but I was feeling fidgety, so I went for a walk, carefully examining the ground, looking for the plants whose tubers provide a foul-tasting but life-saving source of water, and trying to read small animal tracks as I went. It kept me engrossed for a while, but I had risen early and the heat was making me sleepy. I returned to the awning, erected a camp bed, and lay on it. The warm breeze that sprang up lulled me to sleep, and was directly responsible for my rude awakening half an hour later, when I was tipped out of bed.

I lay perfectly still, eyes closed, listening and smelling, piecing together what had happened, taking great care not to excite whatever was responsible. Then I grabbed Robin’s legs and capsized her, triggering a noisy wrestling match which lasted for several minutes.

“Pax! It’s not fair that I’m ten times as ticklish as you! Let’s get something to drink.” I struggled free and stood up, panting, determined to prolong the tension as long as I could.

“Pete, you were just too tempting a target, nose in the air, catching flies and snoring away. I thought I’d forgotten to switch the engine off!” Her face was glowing under the tan, and her eyes were wide, sparkling. She played the game the same way as I did, letting us both simmer as long as possible.

Chobe maps

• Baines Baobabs. The brilliant white is Kudiakam salt pan.
• Savuti camp. Small Qango is near here.
• Makgadikgadi Pans

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