Bantay

The electric jeepney left the paved road at Bangaan and began to climb, and Mara stopped looking at the screen.

There was no signal anyway. There had been none since the last switchback. But that was not why. It was the view. The jeepney was crawling up a track cut into the side of a mountain so steep that, out of the left-hand window, there was nothing at all: just air, and far below, a river the colour of milky tea, and on the other side of the valley another mountain, green from top to bottom, with a white cloud lying across its middle like a scarf. Below the cloud. Mara had never been above a cloud before, except in a plane.

"First time up?" said the driver, a young man in a rain jacket with a rosary hanging from the mirror, and solar panels on the jeepney roof that hummed when the sun came out.

"Yes," said Mara.

"Hold on, then," he said cheerfully, and took the next bend with one wheel over nothing.

It was the end of June, 2061. In Quezon City, three hundred kilometres south, it was forty-one degrees in the shade, and the flood barriers were up along the Pasig, and Mara's parents were packing for a two-year contract on a desalination plant in the Gulf. That was why Mara was here. For the summer, they had said. Maybe longer. With Apo Bugan, whom Mara had met exactly twice, at funerals, and who had sent one message in twelve years, at Christmas, that said Good. Come.

The track ended at a saddle in the ridge, where there was a concrete shelter and a charging post and a sign: BATAD. UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITE. PLEASE STAY ON THE PATHS. Beyond the saddle there was no road, only a stone path going down into the clouds.

"Forty minutes," said the driver, handing down Mara's bag. "Down is easy. Up will kill you." He grinned. "Welcome to Ifugao."

The path went down through pine trees and then through ferns and then through a band of cloud so thick that Mara could see only three steps ahead, wet and grey and silent, with water dripping off every leaf. And then the cloud thinned, and tore, and Mara came out underneath it, and stopped.

Below lay Batad.

It was a valley shaped like half a bowl, or a great green theatre, and the whole of the inside of it, from the river at the bottom to the forest at the top, was steps. Rice terraces. Hundreds of them, one above another, each a long curving ribbon of water and green rice, held up by a wall of stacked grey stones taller than a man, curving round the mountain and following every fold of it, so that the whole valley looked as if it had been drawn by a very patient giant with a fingertip, line after line, all the way up. The water in the terraces caught the light and flashed. The rice was heavy and golden on the lower steps and green on the upper ones. Little houses with steep roofs stood on stilts here and there among the steps. And everywhere, through all of it, came the sound of water, running, trickling, falling, from terrace to terrace, all the way down, like the valley was breathing.

Two thousand years, Mara's mother had said. Two thousand years, built by hand, with no machines, and still farmed.

And above it all, very small, hanging in the air over the terraces like dragonflies, Mara saw the drones.

There were a dozen of them that Mara could count, maybe more. Little white things the size of a dinner plate, with four rotors and a dark eye underneath, drifting slowly over the terraces, stopping, hovering, moving on. As Mara watched, one of them turned, and came gliding up the valley towards the path, and stopped in the air three metres away, at eye level, humming.

"Good afternoon," it said, in a calm, pleasant voice, neither a man's nor a woman's. "You are on the Batad heritage path. Please stay on the stones. The terrace walls are fragile. My name is Bantay. Welcome."

Mara walked on. A drone was a drone. There were ten thousand of them over Quezon City, delivering things and watching things and telling people to move along.

But this one followed, at a polite distance, humming, all the way down the path. And when Mara reached a fork in the stones and stopped, not knowing which way to go, it came gliding past, and stopped over the left-hand path, and waited, with its little light blinking green.

"Your grandmother's house is this way," it said. "She told me you were coming. Her words were: late, and in the wrong shoes." A pause. "You may ignore me. Most people your age do. But I will be here."

Mara looked at it for a moment. Then took the left-hand path.

Apo Bugan was sitting on the platform of her house, under the steep thatched roof, chewing betel, when Mara came down the last of the steps.

She was very small and very old, in a faded woven skirt and a man's T-shirt from a mobile-phone company that no longer existed, with her grey hair tied back and her bare feet hard and brown as the stones. Her teeth and lips were red from the betel. She looked at Mara for a long time without saying anything. Then she looked at Mara's feet. Then she spat, neatly, over the edge of the platform into the terrace below.

"Late," she said. "Wrong shoes." She stood up. "Good. Come. Eat."

Above them, the drone hung in the air for a moment over the house, humming. Then it turned, and went drifting off over the terraces into the evening, one small white eye among a dozen, watching the walls.