“Oh, don’t be such a naysayer, Aubrey.”
“I’m not being a naysayer, Mom. But the last time I looked, neither of us had wings.”
“We don’t need wings,” she says. “We have neodymium.”
“We’ve got what?”
She holds up a black metallic disc with a hole in its center. “Magnets, Son. We sinter these out of neodymium powder down in Holocene II. They’re what make up the basis for our drone engines. We’ll need our engines, of course, so I cut this one out of the supply carrier this morning.”
I step toward her to get a closer look, but she jerks the magnet back and steps away from me.
“Do you have your strike-a-light in your pocket?” she asks. I nod that I do, and she shakes her head. “If there’s enough iron in that steel striker, this thing will rip it clean out of your pocket and maybe take my fingers off in the process.”
“They’re that strong?”
“They pull thirteen hundred times their own weight.”
“And how much does that magnet weigh?”
“About a pound and a half.”
“Well, holy hydrogen, if we get a few of those up there on that warhead, they’ll hold then for sure.”
“You see,” she says, “we don’t need wings after all.”
We start with the longest and strongest rope. My mother loops it through the magnet disc and ties a two half hitch. Then she moves anything metal as far as possible down the shore. She coils the rope at her feet and hands me the end for safekeeping. She swings the magnet in wide arcs, slowly letting out slack as I imagine rodeo riders might as they prepared to lasso a calf. Then, when the momentum is right, she releases the magnet and its trailing rope toward the missile. It misses and lands in the water with a splash. When she draws it up again, the rope comes nearly straight out of the water at the bank, answering our question about how deep the lake is. She twirls the magnet again and lets it fly. This time it hits its mark and clamps onto the warhead with an audible clank.
“You did it!” I shout.
By late afternoon we’ve got two ropes and a cable strung between the warhead and the horn of rock at the edge of the randkluft, plus a harness and pulley system to carry us out to work. My mother goes first, sliding herself out along the cable with an ice screw she made from a steel spring.
“Why do we need that?” I ask.
“Because we need something to attach to when we’re out here working,” she says, as she twists it into the ceiling next to the warhead. “You have to remember that we’re cutting the warhead free. We don’t want to drop with it when it falls.”
“But doesn’t that create another problem, then? Once the warhead falls with its ropes, won’t you just be hanging out there over the lake with no way to get back?”
“Actually,” she says, looking down at me, “I was kind of hoping you’d make the final cut.”
“Well, wouldn’t I be hanging out there then?”
“Sure”—she shrugs—“but you can swim.”
“You want me to drop into that cold, black water?”
“Unless maybe you’ve grown those wings you were talking about,” she says.
When the day’s work is finished, we sit on the shore in the dim blue light leaking in from the various openings above and eat cold jerky and drink cold tea. We marvel together at the crazy architecture of wires and rope we’ve managed to thread together between the missile and the crater edge. It looks like some circus performance in the making.
“Tomorrow we’ll start cutting,” my mother says.
“You think that little torch has what it takes?”
“It’s going to have to,” she answers. “That damn warhead is coming down if I have to hang up there for the next hundred years and chip away at it with my fingernails.”
This night is the quietest night I’ve ever spent. So quiet I can hardly sleep. We lie wrapped in our furs on the shore. Not one draft of wind or even a drip of water is audible in all that darkness above. The silence is so complete that I find myself shifting in my bedding just to verify by the sound that I haven’t, in fact, gone deaf. When we wake, I understand the source of the silence. A pile of fresh snow lies on the lakeshore beneath our opening in the crater ceiling above. When we climb out the drift piled outside our randkluft is so deep that I have to scramble several feet up the rock face to even see above the snow. The sky is laden with gray clouds; the crater is laden with snow. Only the very top of our drone is visible.
For the next week we wait. My mother makes several trips out on the wire to inspect the missile, carrying with her a sharp stone and marking out with scrapes where she thinks we should cut. When it’s not snowing, I lie at the base of the opening and read my slate in the cold, gray light. By the fourth day the lamps are out of fuel, and we can no longer melt snow, so we fill our bottles in the lake. Then, on the morning of day five, just when our spirits are on the verge of breaking, we wake to the sound of dripping water everywhere and an amazing light show of golden sun reflecting through blue ice. We’re both anxious to get working again, but it’s another two days before the drone is completely freed from its prison of snow.
I’m prepared to push it to the edge of the randkluft, but to my relief, my mother hops in, fires it up, and taxis it across the crater, using the engines instead. The power cord is not quite long enough after all, but my mother cuts the cord from the welder and splices the two together. Then she connects the plasma torch to the drone and secures it to another pulley on one of the ropes. She carefully guides herself and her precarious assembly out over the lake to the missile. I sit nervously on the shore with my arms wrapped around my knees and watch. The compressor kicks on with a stutter, and she draws the blue bead of plasma along her score marks, sending a shower of orange sparks down to meet their rising reflections on the black surface of the still water. I know the nuke shouldn’t blow, but my guts still coil up with fear. Then again there’s little to worry about, I guess, because if it did somehow explode, I doubt we’d even know. We’d just be here and then we wouldn’t—which is a small comfort to me, knowing that the same goes for Hannah if this scheme of ours works. She’ll be caught up in whatever she’s doing, and then she’ll be vaporized into a memory. And aren’t memories what each of us is destined to become?
When my mother’s arms are tired, we trade places.
It’s a funny feeling hanging from an ice screw above an underground lake and cutting a nuclear warhead with an electric torch. We’re cutting just beyond the last of the bolts that secure the warhead to the rocket with the plasma set at full amperage, just hoping that it cuts deep enough to free it.
On the morning of our third day working with the torch, just as my mother is beginning to worry over the drone’s battery, I’m out cutting when there’s a loud peel of metal, and the warhead pulls partly free from the rocket’s casing. I freeze there on the ice screw, my feet dangling above the lake.
“You’ve got to keep cutting,” my mother says. “You can’t come back now on the line; it’s too risky.”
“You sure this thing won’t explode when it drops?”
“It’s set to go off with an interior altimeter, Son.”
“What if that altitude is just another few meters?”
“Aubrey, trust me. It won’t go off.”
“Okay,” I say. “I sure hope you’re right.”
Nothing more happens for the next several hours as I make the final cuts. The harness begins to synch into my legs. My shoulders ache, and my arms seem to be made of lead. Then there’s a loud crack, followed by a snap as the cable goes taut and the warhead drops free and swings beneath me on its lines and slams into the shore just on the edge of the lake. Time seems to stop. I dangle from the ice screw with the torch hissing in my hand and stare with wonder at this thing we’ve set free. My mother looks at me, and we’re momentarily connected in a strange federation of relief and fear. I turn the torch off, and the cavern goes silent.
“What do I do
with this thing?” I ask, indicating the torch.
“Just let it hang there,” she says. “We won’t need it now.”
I look down at the black water. For some reason I’m afraid to drop into it. It’s not just because I know it’s cold, but because I’m worried I might sink to the very heart of the mountain. I hoist myself up for slack and pull my legs free from the harness until I’m just hanging from the screw by my hands. The shock of the cold water sends me paddling for the shore as if I’m being chased by something. My mother reaches me a hand, pulls me out, and wraps me in a dry fur. I sit there on the bank, shivering as she rubs warmth back into my limbs.
We both keep stealing glances at the warhead lying beside us and my mother keeps saying over and over again, “We did it, Son. We really did it.”
The next day we haul it up. It’s even heavier than I had thought, and it is no small feat of engineering for the two of us. Yet between the ropes, the pulleys, and the pulling power of the drone’s engines, we hoist it out and over the edge until it’s lying in the bright sunlight like some horrible, indigestible relic of war ejected from the bowels of the earth. It’s no smaller task loading it into the carrier. Another centimeter or two larger and it would never even fit. But by late afternoon we have the warhead sealed safely inside and the drone parked at the far end of the glacier for the best possible shot at picking up enough speed to take off with the added weight.
Ready or not, neither of us suggests going right away.
Instead we sit in the afternoon sun on the eastern edge of the crater rim and look off past the river and the evergreens toward the distant blue sparkle of the lake. We both know it may never look the same again. My mother seems relaxed and content but also somewhat sad. I watch her face, trying my best to read the clouds of thought crossing her dark eyes.
“Hey, Mom, can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” she says, as if waking from a dream. “What is it?”
“If this works, how do we go forward from here?”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“I mean how do we start over again and make sure people don’t end up making the same terrible mess of things? How do we make sure that this is the last bomb and not just the one that paves the way for future wars?”
“Those are good questions, Son. And the fact that you’re even asking them tells me that you’re ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“Ready to lead the new state of nature.”
“A state of nature?”
She turns and trains her eyes on me and says, “I’ve been asking myself those same questions for a long time, Aubrey. It seems to me that even the most atrocious horrors are born out of some truth. Radcliffe wasn’t completely wrong.”
“What do you mean, Radcliffe wasn’t wrong?”
“Every other animal has external checks on its population. Humans need one too. But it needs to come from us.”
“I don’t understand how you’d do that, though.”
“Well, even in the most primitive states of nature, humans give up certain freedoms in order to enjoy those same freedoms from others. If you murder someone you can expect their tribe to take revenge, and so on and so forth. Unspoken agreements are created. But now we need to make a collective agreement. Once a stable population is established, no one should have the right to more children than it takes to replace themselves. And no one should have the right to destroy the planet’s resources for future people who haven’t had a chance to enjoy them yet. Our knowledge and technology is advanced beyond that now.”
“But who gets to decide that, Mom?”
She waves my comment away. “Someone has to.”
“Isn’t that the same thinking that got us here?” I ask.
“Oh, Son. I wish things were so simple. You’re ready but you still have a lot to learn. Everything I know and believe is in that reading slate of yours under the title State of Nature.”
“You wrote a book?”
She shrugs. “More of a long essay, really.” When she sees the shocked look on my face, she adds, “What did you think I was working on at that silly computer all the time?”
“Mom, how come you didn’t tell me any of this?”
“It wasn’t time. And now isn’t the time to talk about it either. Let’s just sit here quietly and enjoy the view.”
She puts her arm around me. We sit together and watch the sky turn red and the lake reflect it back like a molten pool of fire in the center of all those pink mountains and dark trees. There will be plenty of time tomorrow to think of bombs, and of new states of nature, but right now all I want to think about is how safe and warm it feels sitting here next to my mom.
“I’m really sorry that I wasn’t there for you growing up,” she eventually says.
“It’s okay,” I say. “You’re here for me now.”
She nods but doesn’t respond.
“I love you, Mom.”
At first I think she doesn’t hear me, but a minute later she squeezes me tighter and says, “I love you too, Son.”
CHAPTER 32
No, Mother, No
I dream that my mother kisses me goodbye.
I wake and the dream was real. My mother is gone.
I’ve never moved as quickly as I do now, casting off my bedding, racing for the randkluft, climbing the rope. I roll out into the dim-blue dawn just in time to see the drone skating across the crater, engines laboring loudly under the warhead’s weight, skis kicking up chunks of ice. I run after it and watch with horror and disbelief as the drone hits the upward slope of the far crater edge, launches out, and falls down out of sight.
“No, Mother, no!”
Only my breathless cry chases the drone now.
I reach the edge and look over to see the drone fighting to pull out of its heavy downward glide. I know if it gets too low, the nuke will detonate. But the drone eventually levels out. The glacier falls away beneath it. I don’t know whether to cheer, curse, or cry. I stand silently by and watch the drone shrink into the distance and disappear from my sight over the dark treetops. I shake my head.
“Why, Mother, why?”
Wind whistling in the crevasses is the only answer I hear.
Despite the cold, I don’t dare go back for my fur. I just sit on the crater’s edge and look out toward the lake and the paling blue sky and pray that she delivers the bomb and comes safely back for me. An intolerable fear keeps telling me otherwise, but I push it from my mind. The minutes tick past; the waiting becomes unbearable. I count to a hundred and back to zero, then start again. Why, I don’t know—maybe just to mark out with some arbitrary number the last moment of this world as I’ve come to know it; this last bit of hope for my mother’s safe return that I cling to with every breath.
The sun has yet to rise, but on my count of sixty-five, it is suddenly there in front of me, with such white-hot brilliance that I instinctively raise my hands to cover my eyes. I can see every bone of my fingers intricately set in the red-glowing flesh that surrounds them. Only when the light and the heat have faded do I remove my hands and look with terrific awe at the ball of orange fire above the lake. The fire fades, consumed by an enormous black and blue-glowing cloud, the edges stitched with a dazzling display of electricity. Then the top blows off, and a thick column of black smoke rises, mushrooms, and rises again until its three times as high as I now sit, and the top of it is dragged away east in the jet stream.
Thirty seconds later the shockwave hits.
I see it advancing across the treetops like a hurricane wind. When it reaches the slopes, it brings with it a continuous crash of thunder that rumbles, cracks, and echoes back from the surrounding peaks with such an awesome noise that I sit open-mouthed in awe and face down the hot breeze, just listening. I can hear the clack of falling ice and the soft resound of distant avalanches long after the wave has passed.
The black mushroom cloud seems fixed in place above the lake, as if it were now a permanent scar on that
horizon. and I know in my head and in my heart that no one, and I mean no one, could have flown that drone low enough to drop that bomb and then have had enough time left to escape its terrible unleashing. Hannah, the professor, and my mother are all mixed together now with the same decaying particles of radioactive waste rising above the lake and into the blue morning sky. Here one moment; not a single distinguishable cell left the next.
I sit for a long time and watch the cloud form, rise, and change shape. I sit until the other sun rises and catches the floating particulate in a rainbow of light that would move me to tears for its beauty on any other morning than this. I sit until the sun is high in the sky and the radioactive cloud has been pulled away further east, leaving the site of its destruction almost visible through the haze—the blast radius, the scorched trees, the draining lake. I sit until the sun is at my back; the snow melts around me and soaks my clothing through. I sit until the sun finally sets and the scene that I still can’t quite believe fades once again from my view, retreating into the blue out of which it had come like some apocalyptic vision visited on the world from humankind’s collective nightmares.
When I sat with her here yesterday she knew, she knew. And now I know it too. She’s never coming back.
When I finally rise from the crater edge, my legs walk themselves to the rope. I somehow descend into the dark cavern below without really even wanting to. I walk the shore blind and find my mother’s bed by memory and curl up on it. I bury my nose in the damp and musty furs and smell them for any lingering scent of her that might remain. But even that seems too much to ask of this cruel world.
I know I sleep at some point because I wake in the pitch black of night. It takes me several moments searching my foggy mind to recall the horror of exactly where I am and why. My father and my mother gone. Jimmy far, far away. Even the thought of Hannah and the professor being dead leaves me more saddened than glad. Everyone and everything that I’ve ever loved is gone or at least unreachable to me now. I lie in the dark crater of the mountain and turn these thoughts over again and again in my mind as one might turn over an interesting stone. But there’s no joy in this inspection. No, no joy at all. Only the cold hard reality of a pill too big and too jagged to swallow. It’s just me left here all alone.
State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy Page 26