Frostlands

by John Feffer

  Memories of the conflict that led to the schism flood back when I hear the accusatory tone in her voice. “I know that we haven’t always agreed, but—”

  “Arcadia is armed compound.” She spits this out as if it were a pebble in her porridge.

  “It’s a dangerous world, Ilona. We’re not in the middle of nowhere like you.”

  “This is not nowhere. This is somewhere. You could have come here, too. With us. But you were just like Zoltan. You would not give up on your toys.”

  “My toys?” This is too much. “I don’t have any toys. Are you are referring to my lab?”

  She’s not listening to me. It’s as if I’ve intruded on a dramatic monologue that began long before my visit. “We must to start over again. Without the diseases of that world out there. In that soil. The spores. The root rot. The planet cannot be transformed with guns. That is the lesson of the history.”

  “You can’t shut out the world. You have your connections, too. You have your VR.”

  “We don’t kill!” Ilona is shouting. “And now you are getting it back, yes? That is your urgent crisis, yes? Someone is attacking you. Of course!”

  The conversation is going off the rails. I need to bring it back to Zoltan. I need to find out if she knows something about him that I don’t.

  “Yes, yes, someone is attacking us. And I… I need to know if Zoltan is doing his best at the moment. I think maybe his mind is elsewhere. Maybe he is thinking of coming here.”

  “Rubbish! He will never come here.”

  “Or maybe he is thinking that you will return to Arcadia.”

  “Are you listening, woman? We would never return to Arcadia. You are infected. All of you are contaminated. From very start, but I never saw it then. I was blind. So was Aladar. We did not see it.”

  “See what?”

  “The infection.”

  “What infection?”

  “I have work to do.”

  “What do you mean ‘from the very start’?”

  “You must go.”

  “Ilona, please, I still need—”

  “You need nothing. You need to go. And you don’t come back.”

  With that, she throws her weeds at my face.

  I flinch. The weeds, of course, go right through me.

  But the words stick.

  Chapter Ten

  I am back in my own greenhouses, weeding my own carrot beds and thinking about what happened ten years ago. Arcadia had already weathered the dispute over the Captures. I thought we’d become more cohesive as a result, just as when a bone heals after a fracture and becomes stronger. That’s exactly how I put it at the meeting where we evaluated our decision to accept the Captures. Only much later did a more familiar and apt metaphor occur to me.

  Once, during our 2016 expedition in Antarctica, when my team was crossing a stretch in the Allan Hills region we’d traversed many times before, the snowmobile just in front of me suddenly disappeared from view. I must have looked down for a moment to wipe my nose or check the odometer. When I looked up, Miguel was gone, swallowed by the ice. I quickly squeezed the brakes so I too would not fall into the crevasse. The six of us gingerly stepped off of our vehicles and crept up to the jagged hole to see if there was anything we could do for our poor colleague.

  He had been lucky. He’d toppled onto a ledge as his snowmobile continued deeper into the fathomless darkness. His perch, however, was precarious, one leg hooked around a jagged outcropping of ice and the rest of him balanced on the narrow ledge. We attached a rope to the back of our most heavily loaded snowmobile and I, being the lightest, belayed down. Miguel had dislocated both shoulders and was barely conscious from a blow to the back of his head. I hugged him around the midsection and the machine pulled us up to safety.

  We’d taken that same route many times to our research site. Convinced of its solidity, we had simply followed our own tracks, confident that the past was our most reliable guide. But that section must have been a vulnerable ice bridge that our repeated trips had fatally weakened. It could have been any of us. Life in the frostlands is precarious.

  Our community, too, concealed hidden fractures. Arcadia had begun with singular purpose and unanimity about our general trajectory and the methods by which we would settle disagreements. That trajectory, however, assumed one thing: the relative stability of the world outside Arcadia’s walls. Yes, we were prepared for the rising temperatures, for the disruptions to the power grid and the food shortages. We recoiled from the prospect of something worse. We had no intention of trying to ride out a nuclear war or a pandemic. Survivalists we were not.

  It was the breakdown in order that we didn’t anticipate, the bandage of civilization peeling back from the festering wound of barbarous grievances. We scientists and poets and engineers and painters were ill equipped for one civil war, let alone many, or for the United States to break apart.

  It was only later, when I had time to peruse books on American history in our library, that I discovered how precarious this country had always been. I was astounded to learn that the Founding Fathers had only conjured America into existence through an elaborate bait-and-switch in 1778, promising the original thirteen fractious states that they would merely update the Articles of Confederation and then instead engineering a constitution for a brand-new federal authority. This could be considered the third of a Holy Trinity of original sins, along with the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. The essential tension between the states and the federal government never really went away. It simmered and exploded in the blue-gray standoff of the Civil War. It resurfaced in the black-white conflict of the civil rights era. And it came back one last time with a vengeance in the great red-blue conflicts of the 2010s and 2020s.

  E pluribus unum, out of many, one—that was the official slogan of the United States. But the pluribus never really reconciled themselves to the unum. They were just waiting for an excuse to rewind history: first reviving the racism of the twentieth century, then the military conflict of the nineteenth century, then the separately governed regions of the eighteenth century, and, finally, the tribalism of the very beginning. The entire history of the country flashed before its eyes in the last flickering moments of its demise.

  Arcadia was the last place I imagined such conflicts would reproduce themselves.

  The Horvaths were quiet, all three of them working without complaint and speaking to each other in Hungarian, a language no one else in the community understood. They were erratics, just like the rest of us. Erratics are the boulders that glaciers pick up at high altitudes and deposit down below as the ice melts away. Human history had plucked up all of us future Arcadians and transported us to our place of repose in northern Vermont. We were all from elsewhere. We were all misfits.

  But the Horvaths were perhaps the oddest of all. They refused to take up arms when Arcadia suffered those initial attacks in the early 2030s. This was a do-or-die moment, as violent fanatics threatened to overrun our community. There was no room for negotiations. The attackers would have killed us all without hesitation—indeed, two of our number did succumb to their injuries. Armed resistance was truly the only option. But the Horvaths insisted on their pacifism. They were prepared for martyrdom. Fortunately, the rest of us were not. We put the Horvaths to work in the makeshift infirmary and turned our attention to beating back the wolves.

  It’s impossible to know how a person will respond in a crisis. Some of our more competent members simply shut down. Others I’d considered flaky turned out to be quiet heroines. Thus did Arcadia jump to a different path altogether, guided by those like Anuradha and me who reacted with resolve to save the community, while other Original Members took a step back, mortified by their lack of grace under pressure. In the chaos of the moment, the Horvaths’ pacifism simply faded into the background, like any other philosophy that doesn’t accord with ongoing revelation. They continued to go about their business, and I thought they’d accommodated themselves to the
new reality.

  What choice did they, or the rest of us, have? The world outside our walls was falling apart. The coastal cities of Miami and New Orleans were no more. The Great Oregon Tsunami of 2019 had rendered large sections of the Pacific Northwest uninhabitable. Certain parts of the country—the Republic of Western Massachusetts, the anarchic commonwealth of Northern California—functioned as more or less independent entities. The very rich had walled themselves off in luxurious underground compounds and mountain redoubts. The Pentagon still maintained military para-states in and around missile installations and critical energy infrastructure. The “federal government” based in Kansas City had little influence beyond the Midwest Perimeter and the archipelago of Pentagon outposts around the country. Everywhere else, chaos reigned. We were exceptionally lucky to live in Arcadia, and I thought that we were all committed to improving our lot incrementally.

  When the break came, it took me completely by surprise. And because I wasn’t paying attention, I nearly fell into the crevasse along with the rest of the community. The rebellion had been brewing for some time—how long, I never found out. At one point, during the summer of 2041, the Horvaths and their co-conspirators attempted, through discussion and passive resistance, to take over Arcadia. They failed, though not without attracting several more families to their side. Ultimately we voted to cast them out. This was not as cruel as it sounds. They didn’t want to stay under anyone’s rule other than their own. We supplied them with the food, materials, and even technology to start their own community. We even gave them Emily, our AI at the time, to escort them to the location of their proposed Farm.

  Still, I didn’t think they would survive. They turned down our offer of a hovercar. They insisted on walking two hundred miles across exceedingly dangerous terrain, as if determined to create their own trail of tears. After Emily let us know of their successful journey, I still gave them only the slightest chance of surviving their first year. Yet they did, even with the root rot, even through losing Emily in their second year, and Aladar’s death when a tree toppled the wrong way.

  Ilona said that the problem with Arcadia “had been there from the beginning.” Was she rewriting history to justify the subsequent rebellion? Arcadia had not been armed in the early 2020s. None of us ever imagined then that guns would be necessary. We didn’t anticipate that the world would crack so easily. For all the time I’d spent around ice and all my experience with the unpredictability of glaciers, I was still shocked at the calamitous course of human events. In what followed, we discovered new things about ourselves. As did the Horvaths—they just didn’t talk about it with me.

  Now I know that Zoltan isn’t planning to help his mother take over Arcadia. The Farm has no such ambition, and he prefers our relative modernity. Still, I suspect some plan behind his plan, some genuine trajectory behind his feints. Although he clearly rejects the neo-Luddism of his parents, it’s not clear that he has similarly rejected the postmodern option of CRISPR. Could he feel that he’s hiding his light beneath a bushel at Arcadia when CRISPR could give him access to technology beyond compare?

  I remain deeply skeptical of his plan to ally with the Movement. I’m not even sure the Movement exists. It could be no more than a rumor that reflects a desperate desire for meaningful opposition to CRISPR and the other corporate conglomerates. According to Zoltan’s reports, the Movement is as ruthless in its methods as the forces it opposes. Or perhaps he’s only in touch with scammers, or even some catfishing counterfeit of CRISPR.

  For want of better, I’m grasping at the slenderest of straws—the possibility that my ex-husband is helping me from beyond the grave, offering me information that could bring down the house of CRISPR, a house built on sand. That’s what Julian is telling me, and that only he can supply the means to destroy it.

  I feel like one of those credulous Victorian biddies who were convinced by charlatan mediums that they could communicate with their dearly departed husbands.

  With a heavy heart, I prepare to go to Xinjiang for the next Ouija message from Julian.

  Chapter Eleven

  Transcript of conversation between Emmanuel Puig and Rachel Leopold, Yinchuan City, December 16, 2051

  Rachel Leopold: Did you find anything?

  Emmanuel Puig: It’s good to see you too.

  Rachel: I’m sorry. I have to meet Gordon in five minutes.

  Emmanuel: I thought you’d at least appreciate my avatar.

  Rachel: It’s a pleasure to finally talk with Albert Einstein. Now, did you find anything?

  Emmanuel: In his report, no. Our IT department did its best. There’s nothing there.

  Rachel: I’m sorry to hear that.

  Emmanuel: But there is something else.

  Rachel: What?

  Emmanuel: In the message you DM’ed me.

  Rachel: Wait, don’t tell me!

  Emmanuel: You don’t want to know?

  Rachel: I do want to know. But we have to be careful.

  Emmanuel: Remember, I’m Einstein. I’ve thought ahead. Our IT department wrote its interpretation on this piece of paper.

  Rachel: Wait, don’t—

  Emmanuel: It’s polarized in a way that only you can see it. Even I can’t read it. It’s keyed to the specific frequency of your avatar and yours alone.

  Rachel: Really? Okay, show me what you’ve got.

  Emmanuel: Does it make any sense?

  Rachel: Yes, it makes a lot of sense.

  Emmanuel: I’m glad that I can be of service. Now, if I could just ask you a few questions…

  Rachel: I have to meet Gordon in a—

  Emmanuel: Like I said, I’m preparing an annotated version of your husband’s final report. I just have a few questions.

  Rachel: Email them to me. I promise to get back to you.

  Emmanuel: I would be most grateful!

  Chapter Twelve

  Gordon looks just like his father. If it weren’t for that unnerving resemblance—which he tries to conceal beneath a beard covering his weak chin, hair flopping down over his broad forehead, and sunglasses that obscure his hooded eyes—I would be tempted to believe that he’d been swapped at birth. Gordon is nothing like Julian—or me. He has always been obsessed with one thing only: making money. In this regard he’d been a child prodigy, creating apps and moneymaking websites and then a whole empire built of nothing but virtual merchandise and financial speculation.

  As a young man, Gordon went to China to double his fortune and watched it increase tenfold. Even when that country fell apart and he ended up in the splinter state of Ningxia, he profited from all the chaos. I honestly don’t know how he did it. He could draw money out of thin air much as our little machines sucked carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, except that he didn’t rely on chemistry or magic—just the sheer force of his will. I suppose he inherited his focus and determination from Julian. Even so, I don’t really see any traces of my former husband in his personality. Julian was a plodding herbivore, chewing the cud of his few original observations. My older son is a bird of prey, always attentive to tiny movements in his field of vision that he can turn to his carnivorous advantage.

  Though I’ve never visited Gordon in Ningxia, I’ve seen him quite regularly. He’s rich enough to visit Arcadia every few years—in person, not just via VR. An armored personnel carrier brings him and his three well-armed bodyguards from the Montreal airport to our humble community. He comes across like some combination of distant potentate and shaman. While his guards camp outside our walls, he drags inside an immense shipping container of gifts—the latest devices for the kids, new medicines that aren’t yet downloadable, cotton fabric to make into clothes. Then he stays up late regaling the community with tales of the heroes and villains of what were once the western reaches of China.

  Now he’s delighted to show me around Yinchuan City, the capital of Ningxia, even if only virtually.

  “Aurora DM’ed to let me know to expect a visit,” he says when we meet outside the Yinc
huan Museum of Contemporary Art. “I’ve set up a dinner at our favorite restaurant. You can’t eat anything even remotely like it in Arcadia. And you’ll be able to meet Ming-hwa. She’s eager to get to know you.”

  “I’m looking forward to it. Thank you for the hospitality, Gordon.”

  “As long as you downloaded that special program for your printer that I sent you, you should be able to get a close approximation of their lamb-and-cumin dish. It’s really quite—”

  “Didn’t you bring something similar on your last visit?”

  It hadn’t looked special, just an array of freeze-dried cubes. Reconstituted, however, the cubes created a Uyghur feast, from lamb-and-ginger dumplings to Eight Treasure Tea. It fed all 250 of us.

  “Oh, yes, of course. But that was just a taste. I want to give you the full experience. The music, the spectacle. Well, as much as you can get as an avatar.”

  Gordon is wealthy enough to enjoy real food three times a day. In fact, I don’t think he’s ever had to eat seaweed in any of its many permutations. He dresses in real leather and cotton. And he only travels by VR when air travel isn’t feasible. He lives as if civilization continues to bring all the riches of the world within reach. Thus have the wealthy always lived outside of time.

  Gordon walks me around the outside of the museum, a long white structure that hugs the nearby river.

  “The architect said he wanted to imitate the waves of the Yellow River,” Gordon explains, “and the rolling dunes of the desert.”

  It looks like three distinct piles of paper that some celestial thumb pressed down upon to create the undulations. From what I can see in the distance, this is a city full of such odd creations: a huge tilted nautilus shell; a skyscraper with multiple towers like a candelabra; a tall, thin sheet of red, rippling glass. In Arcadia, form strictly follows function. I’ve become unaccustomed to such enormous wastes of money and creativity, the kinds of postmodern potlatches by which local oligarchs prove their worth and display their wealth. I fear that Gordon may be one of them. His thumb-print can probably be found everywhere in this city. I don’t ask. I don’t want to know.