Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk

by James Lovegrove

  Meanwhile their mother ventured further out into the open, towards the thing that had lured her from her den: a caribou carcass. The guide, John Kunayak, had shot the reindeer the day before and laid it out as bait that morning. The scent of blood and meat must have been unbearably intoxicating for the she-wolf. It was a wonder she hadn’t appeared earlier. But then one of the animal kingdom’s life lessons was that you should be wary of food that came too easily. There was no such thing as a free lunch.

  She approached the carcass by a circuitous route, eyes constantly scanning the horizon. All at once she lunged for the caribou, seized a hindleg between her jaws and dragged the dead beast backwards. Within moments she had rejoined her brood, bringing them a banquet. The cubs set to work with relish, delving into the deer’s underside, tearing through the skin and gorging on the soft innards, while their mother gnawed on a haunch. Soon every wolf, big and small, was smeared in blood, its pelt pinkened. The caribou’s body twitched as it was devoured, as though somehow brought back to life.

  Eventually all had eaten their fill, and the she-wolf hauled what was left of the carcass off into the forest. Her cubs, bellies distended, waddled after her.

  The group of visitors had seen what they had been brought here to see. John Kunayak led them back to the Sno-Cat, a three-mile trek through knee-deep snow. Isaac, the eco-blogger, wheezed and struggled the entire way, demanding a rest stop every few hundred yards. He was not built for physical exertion, and the extreme cold was exacerbating his asthma. OwlHenry soon lost patience with him, calling him a fat, lazy mummy’s boy. Isaac retorted that at least he wasn’t a fucking tofu-eating scarecrow. The name-calling might have degenerated into a fistfight if Jakob hadn’t stepped in and separated the antagonists.

  “Here are your options,” he told them. “You can stop squabbling like a pair of babies, or I can klap you both round the ruddy head ’til I’ve knocked some sense into you, ja? Which is it to be?”

  Isaac and OwlHenry fell silent, like scolded schoolchildren.

  “That’s better,” said Jakob.

  It was two hours by Sno-Cat back to the oilfield, a noisy, jolting journey over rough terrain, but at least the vehicle’s cab was heated, blissfully so after the wind-chilled subzero temperatures of the Alaskan wilderness. Barnaby just so happened to be sitting next to Lydia. The seating was ungenerous, everyone squashed together all hugger-mugger. He felt her flesh pressing against his, her warmth permeating through the duck-down insulation of their Canada Goose pants and parkas. He concentrated on the landscape outside, making a show of ignoring her. On the rare occasions when he sneaked a sidelong glance at her, she was also ignoring him – yet she was smiling, too. Always smiling.

  SCAPEGOATING AND VICTIMISATION

  THE GLOCO DRILLING station covered twenty acres of permafrosted nowhere. Rigs and derricks hunched over one-storey cinderblock buildings, all surrounded by a chainlink fence four metres high and topped with razor wire to deter curious fauna, principally polar bears and grizzlies.

  The party of visitors ate dinner that night in the mess, surrounded by grizzled, boisterous roustabouts. Country music blared from the loudspeakers, and in the adjoining bar-cum-recreation-area football fans cheered a game on the TV and personal grudges were settled noisily over the pool table.

  The food was basic, hearty and none too wholesome. Every main course was meat-based and served with biscuits and gravy. OwlHenry had a hell of a time finding anything he could accept as edible, in the end resorting to a selection of the soggy, overcooked vegetable side dishes.

  “So we saw some wolves today,” said Isaac in his customary world-weary drawl. “Big whoop. What’s that meant to prove?”

  “The Alaskan grey wolf is an endangered species,” said Aletheia, the Goth documentarian, nibbling at her food like some eyelinered dormouse. “Humans have encroached on its habitat. We’re driving it to the brink of extinction.”

  “But not here,” said John Kunayak, who was a game warden with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and also employed by GloCo as the drilling station’s designated environmental-impact assessor. “Where we were this afternoon, that was grey wolf breeding territory. The forest is where several packs are known to mate and rear their young. Have done for countless generations. It also lies directly between this site and Valdez on the Kenai Peninsula, where the refineries and tanker port are. As in, if you drew a straight line between here and Valdez, it’d go smack dab through the middle of the forest.”

  “So?” said Isaac.

  “So, oil pipelines tend to be laid in straight lines. Shortest, most economical route possible. They cut across country, only diverting around geographical features they can’t go over, like mountains or lakes. Most companies would have ploughed a pipeline right through those trees and not thought twice about it. The wolves would have been disturbed and would have quit the area. They’d have lost their ancestral lair. But GloCo didn’t do that. On my recommendation, they agreed to give the place a wide berth. The pipeline to Valdez runs a total of twenty-five miles out of its way, going round the forest in a big arc. It can’t even be seen by the wolves. That cost GloCo – how much was it, Mr Pollard?”

  “Not sure,” said Barnaby. “Couple of extra million at least.”

  “Couple of extra million it needn’t have spent – wasn’t obligated by law to spend. All for the sake of a bunch of wolves,” Kunayak concluded with an ironic grimace.

  “We’re supposed to be impressed?” said Isaac.

  “You have to admit it shows consideration,” Kunayak said.

  “But you’re still sucking oil out of Mother Earth and pumping it across hundreds of miles,” said Dorothea to Barnaby, “all in order to feed our insatiable appetite for petrochemical products. Saving a few wolves doesn’t mitigate the damage you’re doing to the world, filling the tanks of gas-guzzling cars, heating up the atmosphere with CO2 emissions...”

  “I’m not forcing people to drive their cars,” said Barnaby. “I’m not making anyone do anything. I’m just meeting market demand. If everyone stopped using oil tomorrow, I’d have no one to sell it to. I’d have to close down that arm of GloCo and try and make do with its other assets. Don’t blame me for giving people what they want.”

  “We have to blame somebody,” said OwlHenry. “Might as well be you.”

  “No,” said Barnaby, struggling to control his temper and keep stating his case calmly. “That’s not a rational argument, that’s just scapegoating and victimisation. You want a sea change in culture, a move away from humankind’s dependence on fossil fuels, fine. But it doesn’t start with me” – he pointed at himself – “it starts with you” – he pointed round the table – “and them” – the other diners, the roustabouts in their plaid shirts and jeans – “and everyone else. We’re all equally culpable, all seven billion of us. Singling me out as the problem achieves the opposite of what you’re after. It’s denying where the true responsibility lies. It’s placing the burden of guilt on one man’s shoulders when it should be shared universally. Besides –”

  Lydia interrupted him. “Don’t.”

  “Huh?”

  “I bet I know what you’re going to say next, Barnaby, and I’d suggest you don’t. It’s not likely to win you any friends.”

  “Oh? And what am I going to say?”

  “‘If it wasn’t me digging up the oil, it would be someone else,’ or words to that effect.”

  Barnaby blustered, but yes, that had been more or less the tack he had been intending to take. There was no denying it.

  “It doesn’t absolve you,” Lydia said. “It’s just a little bit childish, in fact. ‘I stole those doughnuts, but only because another boy would have if I hadn’t got there first.’ Rather than having the moral courage not to steal the doughnuts at all.”

  “It’s not stealing.”

  “Did you pay for the oil? Was it yours to start with?”

  “I paid for the land rights to drill for it. I’m the one taking the fina
ncial risk, fronting up the capital necessary to get the stuff out of the ground. That makes me its owner, doesn’t it? As much as anyone ever could be.”

  “No one owns anything,” said OwlHenry. “We just borrow whatever we have, for as long as we’re alive.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, spare us the hippy bollocks!” Barnaby couldn’t rein in his irritation any longer. “Get to grips with reality, Olly the Owl or whatever your stupid made-up name is. People own things. That’s how the world works. I have what’s mine, you have what’s yours. You wouldn’t want me to grab your shirt off you, that crappy smock thing you’re wearing – not that I’d want it. What’s it made of anyway? Hemp?” OwlHenry nodded. “Thought so. Hemp dyed the colour of turd. But if I did for some bizarre reason want it for myself, you’d never let me have it. Why would you? You need it so as not to be naked. Owning stuff is what make us human. It defines us. Those wolves we saw, they don’t own anything, and that’s why we’re better than them. That’s why we’re the dominant species and they’re on the endangered list. Because we possess, we have something to live for, a purpose: acquisition. Whereas they just exist.”

  He shoved back his chair and strode away from the table in high dudgeon. It was only later, when he was in his meagrely furnished room in one of the accommodation blocks, listening to the arctic wind hiss between the buildings and pepper the window with snowflakes, that his anger began to simmer down.

  The bloody nerve of these people. Trying to undermine him. Him. Barnaby Pollard. One of the wealthiest, most successful men on the planet. Those ignorant, arrogant little troglodytes...

  But he mustn’t let them get to him. He must be magnanimous. He was a god, and gods must always learn to tolerate lesser beings.

  BORN AGAIN VIRGIN RAINFOREST

  THE NEXT DAY they exchanged the bitter cold of Alaska for the swelter and humidity of the tropics. Ecuador, to be precise, where the Gulfstream touched down at Lago Agrio Airport in the east of the country.

  The following morning, the group travelled upriver by motorised canoe into the western reaches of the Amazonian rainforest.

  The journalists were already sullen and tetchy, thanks to a combination of jet lag and the switch from one extreme of climate to another, but now illness started to take its toll as well. OwlHenry had come down with a severe cold, which he was treating with homeopathic remedies, to little avail, while Dorothea was suffering from an upset stomach – caused, she said, by the travel inoculations she had been given prior to leaving the UK, but more likely a result of her insistence on drinking tap water with her dinner at the hotel last night rather than the bottled water everyone else opted for. “If it’s good enough for the locals,” she had declared, “it’s good enough for me.” The upshot of this noble sentiment was a case of cramps and acute diarrhoea.

  Isaac and Aletheia had managed to avoid contracting any ailments, but were still tired and taciturn. Isaac had withdrawn into himself, emerging from his shell every so often to grumble or snipe. Aletheia was preoccupied with filming everything on her compact Contour+ HD camcorder, mediating the world through a lens.

  Of the five of them, only Lydia remained chirpy and upbeat.

  The two long canoes navigated various winding tributaries of the Amazon basin, passing Indian villages and the occasional private landing, consisting of a jetty, a deserted-looking colonial-style hacienda, and not much else.

  “There was a time when gringos came,” the head guide, Rodrigo, explained when asked about these houses. “They tried to carve out land for agriculture and start up rubber plantations, sugarcane farms, that sort of thing. It never lasted. The jungle was too much for them.” He chuckled. “The ones that didn’t die went mad.”

  “Mother Nature can be overwhelming,” said Lydia. “You think you can tame her, but at best you can only reach a truce with her.”

  “You said it, pretty lady,” said Rodrigo, beaming. “Never a truer word spoken.” He had taken an evident shine to Lydia, and had already asked twice if she was single, to which her only answer had been an ambiguous shrug.

  Barnaby’s feeling was that if Rodrigo wanted Lydia, he could have her. It puzzled him, however, that he should even care about another man’s interest in her. Were she His Type, he could understand being proprietorial about her, even jealous. But since she was not His Type, why did it require an effort to overlook someone else making a pass at her? Why couldn’t he simply be oblivious?

  The canoes put in on a shallow beach at a bend in the river. Everyone waded ashore and tramped inland for a mile or so, Rodrigo and the other guides cutting a path through the undergrowth with machetes.

  Eventually they arrived at a low-lying area, a shallow valley dominated by towering hardwood evergreens. The leaf canopy cut out all sunlight but for a few bright, piercing shafts. Birds warbled, a rippling chorus of competing song. Monkeys and macaques, unseen, hooted and shrieked. The air was thick with biting, stinging flies that seemed to find the insect-repellent gel everyone had slathered thickly on their skin alluring rather than offputting.

  “Virgin rainforest,” said Dorothea, with something like a sigh. “Magnificent. The lungs of the world.” Then she retreated behind a mahogany tree and voided her bowels, groaning with discomfort.

  “Yes, yes, all very lovely,” said Isaac tersely. He wiped sweat from his bulbous forehead. “But all said and done, it’s just a patch of rainforest.”

  “Rainforests are disappearing,” Aletheia piped up from behind her camera. “An area the size of Wales every year. Logging and agriculture are eroding them away. Soon they’ll all be gone, and then where are we going to get our oxygen from?”

  “From phytoplankton in the oceans,” said Barnaby. “Fully half the world’s oxygen comes from plankton photosynthesis, maybe even more. Also, your Wales statistic isn’t quite correct. Yes, rainforests are getting chopped down, but what many people don’t take into account is how quickly they can regrow. Take this spot, for instance.” Now was the moment to play his ace. “Would you believe me if I said that eight years ago there was a GloCo oil extraction plant situated right here?”

  The journalists looked dubious.

  “Tell them, Rodrigo.”

  “It’s true. Señor Pollard isn’t lying. I used to work here. There were prefab building units, rigs, a two-track mud road all the way down to the river. We pulled tens of million of barrels out of the ground.”

  “It wasn’t the most lucrative field I’ve ever exploited,” said Barnaby. “The infrastructure and transport costs ate into the profits, and then the global oil price took one of its periodic dips and we were starting to lose money, so in the end we shut up shop and pulled out because it wasn’t viable any more. We dismantled everything, loaded it onto barges and took it away, and now look.” He gestured at the rampant greenery all around. “You’d never know we’d ever been.”

  “I call bullshit,” said Isaac.

  “That’s your prerogative. Rodrigo? Why don’t you show them the wellhead cap?”

  Rodrigo and the other guides got busy hacking away at a huge clump of lianas and vines until they had exposed a flat round concrete plug set into the ground, one foot high and six feet in diameter, like some ancient, forgotten altar. A small tarnished plaque in the centre bore the GloCo logo: the world held between two hands, superimposed over the initials GC.

  “That’s all that’s left,” Barnaby said. “The only sign that this was once a GloCo site. A few more years, and even that will be gone from sight, buried beneath leaf mould and soil.”

  “All this grew up in just eight years?” said OwlHenry, his consonants blunted by his blocked nose.

  “The jungle comes back fast,” said Rodrigo. “Left to its own devices, it soon reclaims what was taken from it. You could say it’s a quick healer.”

  “What about indigenous tribes?” said Dorothea. “I bet they weren’t happy about oil prospectors coming along and churning up their ancestral home.”

  “On the contrary,” said Ba
rnaby. “Most of the manual labourers we employed were locals. Rodrigo himself is half Indian.”

  “My mother belongs to the Oriente Quichua. And my people were glad of the income. Me especially. I saved what I earned, and it paid for me to study at San Francisco de Quito University. I now have a degree and am a professional geologist.”

  “So am I still the bad guy?” said Barnaby.

  There was a pause, then Lydia said, “Jury’s out.”

  HARMONIOUS COEXISTENCE

  BACK AT THEIR hotel that evening, Lydia joined Barnaby on the verandah. Built into hillside, the place boasted views over a part of the rainforest that was preserved as a national park. Wisps of evening steam clung to the treetops. The rumpus of the daytime fauna was quietening down, but the nocturnal animals were tuning up and finding their voices.

  “My colleagues are all tucked up in bed,” Lydia said. “Need their rest and recuperation, poor things.”

  “How come you’ve stayed in such good health?” he asked.

  “Clean living. Sturdy constitution. No neuroses. You?”

  “I’m one of the ultra-rich. Haven’t you heard? We don’t get ill.”

  She laughed. He was weirdly gratified that he had amused her.

  “And,” he added, “I’m used to flying around the world, flitting between time zones and waking up in all sorts of odd places. Drink?”

  He was working his way through a bottle of Ecuadorian Pinot Noir, astringent but palatable.

  “The local rotgut? Don’t mind if I do.”

  He filled a glass for her. “Be warned: it takes a few sips to get used to. They say you can’t make decent wine on the equator, because grapevines need cold winters to help produce better, hardier fruit. They’re right.”

  “Well played today, by the way,” she said.

  “You think so?”