The Earth Hearing

by Daniel Plonix

  “Do they have a ban on ivory trade?” asked a commissioner.

  “Indeed, Your Grace. It was set in place in 1989,” replied the director. “Naturally, after the ivory market went underground, the cost of ivory went up—tenfold.”

  “If anything, the situation with rhinos is even worse,” put in her deputy. “In Vietnam, the rumor that powdered rhino horn cures cancer spiked the horn’s price to the point that their value by weight is worth more than gold’s. As you can imagine, the Javan rhinos in Vietnam were decimated to the last.”

  “Cure for cancer, huh?” muttered the presiding chair darkly. “The horn consists of keratin. They could clip, grind, then ingest their own nails—obtaining the same meaningless outcome.”

  “Yes, Your Grace. But then again, lest we forget, this is Earth after all.” For a moment, the director’s mouth twisted in distaste. “In sub-Saharan Africa, notably in Malawi, albino human children are hunted or sold off by their parents for a tidy sum. Various body organs and limbs are hacked off to be used as potions in charms, believing to bring good fortune. And more to the point, a brisk trade is conducted in body parts of gorillas and bonobos in Nigeria to battle evil spirits and whatnot.”

  The director sighed. “I might as well mention pangolins, the scaly mammalian anteaters. In the last decade or so, over one million pangolins have been hunted down and captured, particularly by tribe members in the state of Assam in India. Their scales, also made from keratin, find their way to the Asian medicine markets in China and Vietnam. And in Nigeria, Chinese money have been driving the poachers to comb its forests, bringing the pangolin to the brink of local extinction.

  “Obviously, this extends beyond pangolins, elephants, and rhinos,” she said. “To satisfy the demands of the Southeast Asian market, countless poachers practically pick clean the forests of the world, collecting anything from porcupines to turtles to monkeys to parrots to otters to lemurs. Just to give you a sense of the scale of it, in the last five years almost two hundred thousand snares were removed by the authorities from just half a dozen protected areas within the Indochinese Peninsula. Forests that until recently were homes to tigers, gibbons, leopards, and bantengs sport no mammal larger than a household cat. In fact, we observed poachers ensnare the very last tiger in Laos, a few months back. And in the United States, people hold coyote-killing competitions where contestants vie to shoot the most animals.”

  “Are they cutting up coyotes’ claws to gain longevity?”

  The director of the Nature Survey Group shook her head. “They are slaughtering them—along with bobcats, foxes, and prairie dogs—for the fun of it. And for cash prizes.” She signaled to one of her team members, and momentarily a video of the Mar Piccolo lagoon sprung into view. “It’s southern Italy,” said the director. An operator maneuvered the cameras, until he located a fleet of small fishing boats sailing under the cover of night.

  The director continued, “Tens of millions of seahorses are captured each year—killed, ground up, and then consumed by some in China who believe that ingesting them excite sexual desire.” She added dryly, “Evidently, the decimation of seahorse populations is a small price to pay for a sizable erection.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I am afraid Terraneans regard their planet as a human preserve, the biosphere as nothing more than a storehouse of natural resources.” She bowed.

  The presiding chair returned the bow. “We thank you and your team for this evocative presentation.”

  The director bowed once again and left, trailed by her deputy and a few of her aides.

  Aratta and the seven commissioners stood as one and were making their way to the door, when the presiding chair glanced toward the wall and stopped. The others followed suit. “High Mistress Jilieth,” he called out, walking toward the woman seated on the floor. “I was unaware of your presence.”

  She looked up at him with her startling, yellow eyes. “I only teleported myself here in time to hear the tail end of what the director was saying.”

  “Anything you wish to add?” the presiding chair asked diplomatically, warily regarding the enigmatic, volatile woman.

  She hugged herself. “Not really.” She bit her lower lip. “I was just thinking that the majority of the large mammals were driven to extinction many thousands of years before High Mistress Hagar and Lord Aratta arrived.” She regarded the commissioner with a measure of sadness. “Yet, if those two had brought me in but one hundred years earlier, my team could have salvaged a lot more.” For an instant, her amber eyes smoldered with fire.

  Aratta gave an ironic smile and shook his head slightly.

  Jilieth added, seemingly to herself, “Why, the ancient forest of the Pacific Northwest was still intact back then, one of three forest remnants. Thousands of square miles of titanic coastal redwood trees.” She looked away and whispered, “But then they came for them, too—with double-­bit axes and two-man crosscut saws. In a forest possibly from the dinosaur era, some of the largest and most majestic trees on Earth were made into log houses, cut into railroad ties, and pulped into newspapers.”

  “Take us there,” one of the commissioners instructed a technician.

  Once again, the room dimmed, and a holographic projection of the forest filled the room.

  “As you can see, High Mistress Jilieth, there are patches of coastal redwood rainforests that have survived and are protected,” the chair said softly. “The fog, mosses, and ferns are still there. A few hundred years of growth, and a new generation of trees will take their places among the stately elders.”

  “A few intact pockets. Somewhat under two hundred square miles in all. But yes,” Jilieth whispered. “Maybe, yes.”

  Aratta pressed a hand against his ear for a moment, listening to some private communication. “Your Graces, the elevators with the Earth people have just reached the surface,” he announced. “I’d better go.” He bowed and then vanished.

  Chapter 44

  The three large freight elevators jerked to a stop, completing their long upward journey to the world’s surface. Their walls fell outward with loud clanks, raising puffs of yellow-parchment dust, and were left standing with only their frames and roofs.

  The hundred or so bewildered Earth people stumbled out, and the metal walls sprung back up. Moments later, the elevators plunged downward and—impossibly—a layer of earth materialized over them, without a trace anything stood there a short time prior.

  Susan pushed through the throng of people and stared. Grass and sparse trees spread out to impossible distances. Far away, at great intervals, spine-like ridges punctured the horizon. Land. Land was everywhere, filling the view and arcing up to eventually become the sky above them. The air felt thick and warm, with a whiff of something foreign.

  “You are inside a shell,” a gruff, disembodied voice boomed, seemingly coming from all directions at once. The hundred people glanced wildly about but saw no one.

  “You’re inside a construct—vast beyond your ability to comprehend,” the same disembodied voice blared. “A hollow sphere with a tiny dwarf sun at its core.”

  At that, those who hadn’t looked up finally did. Above them, a weak sun shone ivory-peach at the center of the hollow sphere, tens of millions of miles away. “You could drop Earth down here, and it would bounce about like a tennis ball in a squash court—a squash court with a surface area of eight football fields.”

  And suddenly he was there, standing on a boulder nearby, facing them. “We call this world the Reservation,” he said. “The Res, for short. Albeit old-timers here have other names for it, too.”

  He jerked his thumb toward his massive chest. “I am Vito the Barber. Along with Fat Frank and Big Carlo, I formed this construct.”

  Here, Vito the Barber did not look anything like how Lee had seen him. On the Reservation, he manifested as a humanoid hulk, eight feet tall, with bronzed, pitted skin, and scarification on his gleam
ing head. With no visible neck, his giant head seemed to rest on two immense, broad shoulders. A shark tooth was strung on a chain across his bare chest. His eyes had purple irises and were deep-set.

  Rafirre was standing at his side.

  The massive head turned their way, finally deigning to study them. “This is you,” he said in a voice tinged with gravel crunching under tank chains. “You have spread throughout your planet. You shit. You destroy.” His purple eyes roved through the dazed-looking crowd. “The commissioners are investigating what you have been doing and what you are about. You are to tell them why you are not going to screw up things further. They decide.

  “You have been wondering what happens if they rule unfavorably. Well, you come here. If they tell me you go, you go. If they tell me you stay on Earth, you get to stay.” He nodded toward Rafirre. “Along with his team of hundreds of compatriots, the Chief Examiner has been making the case why you should be deported.”

  He paused to let his words sink in. “In the event you get an eviction notice, we have tens of thousands of people standing at the ready. They will spend a few decades cleaning up your shit after you are gone from Earth. I refer to all the goddamn asphalt and concrete on the land, the antibiotics and antidepressants in the rivers, the carbon dioxide from your burned gasoline in the air. There are dams to blow up, oil tankers to dissolve with acid, and strip-mined areas to rehabilitate.”

  He bowed his head to Aratta, who stood somewhere farther out, apart from the gathered group. “Lord Aratta’Gwa’Nar, High Mistress Hagar’Racina, and Puddeck have monitored that world of yours for a few centuries. They have been providing expert testimony before they move on to their next assignment: another planet to monitor and alert us if they crap up.”

  For a moment, the Barber surveyed the far-off vista.

  Then he was back looking at them. “If you get relocated,” he said, “there are a few things you need to understand.

  “This is a controlled environment. The temperature is constant, and the weather is always the same. Land is all there is, and its composition is relatively uniform. No lakes or seas, but we have a very dense network of fast-moving creeks, bearing fresh water and keeping things sanitary.

  “This world contains a few hundred billion people from dozens of parallel planets, who populate a few sections. Mostly, though, it is an impossibly vast, empty land that can and will accommodate many more who don’t give rat’s ass, who never balanced the checkbook, and who figured tomorrow would take care of itself.

  “When it comes to flora and fauna, you can bring down whatever you want, however often you want. Just the way you like it. You won’t be able to hunt here things to extinction any more than you can decimate gnats or flies by swatting them.” He was smirking. “It’s all running on spores; things sprout and come right back up.

  “We have here engineered plants that more than provide for all your nutritional needs, and grow almost as fast as they can be chopped down.” He held up one hand and began counting down on his fingers. “We have rodents that taste like chicken, and we have horse-like creatures that taste like goat’s ass. Food is not going to be a problem—unless you go out of your way to make it inaccessible to some, which I am sure some of you will try to do. I can appreciate the need to come up with fun ways to torment each other in order to pass the time.”

  He scowled at the group of people. “Don’t get really stupid in matters of sanitation, and you won’t need to worry about diseases. Oh, yes. No mosquitoes here.” He turned to the Examiner. “Ain’t that right, Rafirre?”

  “Sure thing, Vito.” They fist-bumped. “You guys complained, so I took those buggers out. I did right by you,” the Earth people could hear Vito say. And then he redirected his attention back to the aghast Terraneans in front of him.

  “When you check out from Earth, you will be required to take all your belongings with you—your clothes, your grandfather Billy’s vinyl record collection, and Aunt Esther’s jewelry and china. All these knickknacks will have to go, one way or another. However, we will screen for contraband. This includes sarin gas, anthrax spores, explosives, firearms. Shit like that.

  “I run here a stone-, leather-, and fiber-based world. This mainly comes down to granite, limestone and sandstone; fiber and lumber; animal hides; and various resins that provide elasticity, adhesion, or can function as hardening agents.

  “That being said, you will be allowed to haul from Earth low-tech metal artifacts, from cooking pots to hunting knives. Yet, before they dock, they will get chemically treated. This means they will keep their form and characteristics but, when they wear out, break, or grow dull, that’ll be it. They cannot be re-forged. If you try to melt them, they will dissolve and reform as a glassy, hyper-brittle slug.”

  The large man fell silent.

  “Is this some sort of test?” Susan called out eventually, red-faced.

  “What about our rights?” demanded Heather.

  “How are we expected to build a civilization in Stone Age conditions?” asked Wang Lei, waving his glasses about.

  “You are not expected to,” the Barber deigned to reply to that last question. “If you are relocated here, it means the time for expectations is over. We expect nothing from you and made sure it’s gonna stay this way. This world does not have the raw materials with which you can foul the nest.

  “The Res is the end of the journey for your people. That’s where you are going to live, reproduce, and die, and repeat this cycle in perpetuity. Wash, rinse, repeat. There is no day and there is no night. It is always midday here, and there is no ‘next thing.’ There is just the Res.” That last word seemed to oddly reverberate and hung suspended in the air.

  “You were brought up to the surface so you can see and report back to your leaders.” For a moment, his belly shook with silent laughter. “This was meant as a joke—the part about your ‘leaders.’” He sobered up. “Yet the rest was said in earnest. Take this information back to Earth. We want to light a fire under your asses so you realize the true stakes involved and put together the best defense case you can. You have ten days. But, unless you want to experience a breakdown of basic services throughout your world, I advise…discretion. Some of your people should be informed of what may befall humanity, but it would be a bad idea to make this information public.” The giant man leaped down with a thud, raising a small cloud of dust.

  He glowered at them. “Understand that if in the next few days you apes get out of control down on Earth, the hearing is over, and we haul your sorry asses to the Res faster than you can imagine possible.”

  In a single leap, the Barber was back on top of the boulder. He perched on the rock, gazing at them.

  “This world has a couple of ferocious predators,” he stated. “They will get that old heart pumping. But primarily they are here to cull the morons and losers, making sure we won’t have a human infestation on our hands in the next few millennia. The space may be vast beyond human comprehension, but it is not limitless. We average a group of humans—a couple o’ billion each new group—every decade or so, and need to keep the numbers at least somewhat in check.

  “Due to your large numbers, I will allocate you two full grid sections. I will open sections fifty-seven and sixty-seven. They are adjoined. Each grid section is roughly one hundred million square kilometers. Those two are yours, if you can hold onto them.

  “These grids are about one-year ride away from the nearest human cluster. But a year is all you have before hundreds of millions of marauders sweep through your territory.” A suggestion of a smile creased his granite-like face. “You will be the most exciting thing that’s happened here in a decade, when the last group arrived.

  “Listen up, people! No need to sacrifice anything; help is not coming. Nonetheless, in case you guys are into worship and stuff, then tell your kids…it’s Vito the Barber.” He was suddenly holding aloft a gigantic straight razor i
n one hand.

  Rafirre said in a pleading tone, “I told them, Vito. I told them it is not a sword. I honestly told them.”

  Vito grimaced. “You people, does that look like a sword to you?” He gave it a slow half turn. If your grandkids want to build a statue to Vito the Barber, he is to sport a straight razor.” The giant posed. “Like this is good.” After a moment or two, he made the giant razor disappear.

  Some of the Earth people gaped open-mouthed. Others looked slightly ill.

  “For those of you who are members of the first-class cabin back on Earth, the Res will be a setback,” Vito declared. “For your descendants, however, it will just be reality. The accounts you bring with you of Earth will turn to stories in later generations. Through time, the stories will turn to myths.”

  The Barber studied them. “You are all in varying stages of shock. This is normal and will wear off,” he said. “If I were to transport you back now, the sense of unreality would be even more acute. You will stay here for a few solid hours. It will rub things in and take the edge off.