Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  “Come on, Lucy.” Timo felt like shit. He started to chase after her. “It’s not like that!”

  She glanced back. “Don’t even try, Timo.”

  Her expression was so scornful and disgusted that Timo faltered.

  He could almost hear his sister Amparo laughing at him. You got the eye for some things, little bro, but you are blind, blind, blind.

  She’ll cool off, he thought as he let her go.

  Except maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe he’d said some things that sounded a little too true. Said what he’d really thought of Lucy the Northerner in a way that couldn’t get smoothed over. Sometimes, things just broke. One second, you thought you had a connection with a person. Next second, you saw them too clear, and you just knew you were never going to drink a beer together, ever again.

  So go fix it, pendejo.

  With a groan, Timo went after her again.

  “Lucy!” he called. “Come on, girl. I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry . . .”

  At first, he thought she was going to ignore him, but then she turned.

  Timo felt a rush of relief. She was looking at him again. She was looking right at him, like before, when they’d still been getting along. She was going to forgive him. They were going to work it out. They were friends.

  But then he realized her expression was wrong. She looked dazed. Her sunburned skin had paled. And she was waving at him, waving furiously for him to join her.

  Another Texan? Already?

  Timo broke into a run, fumbling for his camera.

  He stopped short as he made it to the fence.

  “Timo?” Lucy whispered.

  “I see it.”

  He was already snapping pictures through the chain link, getting the story. He had the eye, and the story was right there in front of them. The biggest, luckiest break he’d ever get. Right place, right time, right team to cover the story. He was kneeling now, shooting as fast as he could, listening to the digital report of the electronic shutter, hearing money with every click.

  I got it, I got it, I got it, thinking that he was saying it to himself and then realizing he was speaking out loud. “I got it,” he said. “Don’t worry, I got it!”

  Lucy was turning in circles, looking dazed, staring back at the city. “We need to get ourselves assigned. We need to get supplies. . . . We need to trace this back. . . . We need to figure out who did it. . . . We need to get ourselves assigned!” She yanked out her phone and started dialing madly as Timo kept snapping pictures.

  Lucy’s voice was an urgent hum in the background as he changed angles and exposures.

  Lucy clicked off the cell. “We’re exclusive with Xinhua!”

  “Both of us?”

  She held up a warning finger. “Don’t even start up on me again.”

  Timo couldn’t help grinning. “Wouldn’t dream of it, partner.”

  Lucy began dictating the beginnings of her story into her phone, then broke off. “They want our first update in ten minutes; you think you’re up for that?”

  “In ten minutes, updates are going to be the least of our problems.”

  He was in the flow now, capturing the concrete canal and the dead Texan on the other side.

  The dogs leaped and jumped, tearing apart the man who had come looking for water.

  It was all there. The whole story, laid out.

  The man.

  The dogs.

  The fences.

  The Central Arizona Project.

  A whole big canal, drained of water. Nothing but a thin crust of rapidly drying mud at its bottom.

  Lucy had started dictating again. She’d turned to face the Phoenix sprawl, but Timo didn’t need to listen to her talk. He knew the story already—a whole city full of people going about their daily lives, none of them knowing that everything had changed.

  Timo kept shooting.

  * * *

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PAOLO BACIGALUPI is the bestselling author of the novels The Windup Girl, Ship Breaker, The Drowned Cities, Zombie Baseball Beatdown, and the collection Pump Six and Other Stories. He is a winner of the Michael L. Printz, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards, and was a National Book Award finalist. A new novel for young adults, The Doubt Factory, came out in 2014, and a new science fiction novel dealing with the effects of climate change, The Water Knife, was published in May 2015.

  THE MYTH OF RAIN

  SEANAN McGUIRE

  Female spotted owls have a call that doesn’t sound like it should come from a bird of prey. It’s high-pitched and unrealistic, like a squeaky toy that’s being squeezed just a little bit too hard. Lots of people who hear them in the woods don’t even realize that they’ve heard an owl. They assume it’s a bug, or a dog running wild through the evergreens, beloved chewy bone clenched tightly in its jaws.

  I held tight to the branch beneath me and adjusted my binoculars, trying to find the telltale barred plumage. The night scope I had was good, but I needed a positive ID before I moved. I had been tracking this female for the better part of two days. I was tired, and muddy, and covered in mosquito bites. Kathy had already radioed in to confirm that her team was done scooping, tagging, and crating all the Western pond turtles in her sector. They were moving on to assist Benet and his team with the search for Beller’s ground beetles. The stress there really belonged on the word “ground.” They were going to be on the ground. And I, and my team, would be staying in the trees for the foreseeable future.

  “Do birds, Julie,” I muttered, adjusting my binoculars again. “You like birds. You think they’re pretty. You should do birds. That way, you’ll be less miserable thinking about how all this is going to burn.”

  There was a flash of barred wings in the tree in front of me, feathers ruffled out as the female owl I had been tracking settled on the branch. I stopped talking and held my breath, tracking her slow, bobbing walk as she moved toward the main body of the tree.

  Come on, sweetheart, I thought, so fiercely that if I could have developed telepathy in that moment, I would have done it. Show me that you’re going home.

  The owl paused, looking around herself with a predator’s wariness. She didn’t need to wonder what kind of monsters lurked in the woods: she knew, because she was one of them. Her wings were silent and her talons were sharp, but there were still things that could hurt her.

  She had no idea how many things there were that could hurt her.

  Finally, the owl vanished into her tree, and I lowered my binoculars, beginning to inch my way back along the branch I had been perched upon. I knew where her nest was now. I could come back any time I needed to.

  There were monsters coming to these woods. I was going to do my best to save her.

  * * * *

  When the droughts hit the West Coast in the early teens, everyone said, “This too will pass.” Climate change was still up for debate in those days, at least in the eyes of people who had everything to gain by keeping the argument going for just a little longer, long enough for them to make their money and get the hell out of Dodge. Lots of beach houses got quietly sold during the back half of the decade. Lots of island resorts were traded in for ski lodges and mountain getaways. The signs were there, if you knew where to look for them.

  Trouble was, the spin machine was spinning as fast as it could, and when people pointed to the signs, the pundits said we were fear-mongering and telling lies and trying to discredit good American businessmen who were only doing what they did for the good of the country. A lot of money traded hands in those days, and even as people were starting to focus on eating local and recycling, they ignored the fact that the lakes were drying and the hills were burning and the whole great stretch of green that we had all depended upon for so long was becoming a fairy tale. The myth of rain in California.

  Thing about lies is that no matter how often you tell them and how much you believe them, they’re not going to become true. “Fake it until you make it” may work for public
speaking and falling in love, but it doesn’t stop climate change. By 2017, it was pretty clear who the liars were, and they weren’t the scientists holding up their charts and screaming for the support of the public. By 2019, it was even clearer that we’d listened to the lies too long. The tipping point was somewhere behind us, overlooked and hence forgotten. Maybe there had been a time when we could have reversed the damage and restored our planet to its natural equilibrium. Maybe not. It didn’t really matter anymore.

  The rich fled the places where the sun was too bright and the rain was too rare, and when the places they fled to dried up in turn, the rich fled farther, looking for some promised land that had managed to remain pristine while they were busy wrecking the world the rest of us had to live in. It was inevitable that their eyes would settle on the Pacific Northwest, where the trees were still green and the rain was still coming down.

  Global climate change hadn’t spared the Pacific Northwest. Everyone I knew from Seattle complained about how hot it was, even breaking seventy degrees in October. They complained about how blue their skies were and how much they missed the rain. And a few of them—the ones who understood what was about to happen—complained about the way the big corporations were sniffing around, the maggots moving on from the corpse of San Francisco, which they had already stripped down to dry bones.

  Without its ever-present rain, Seattle was a beautiful, tempting target, and Portland was even more so. They were still cool. They were still green. The changes that had done so much damage to the rest of the country had just made them more attractive to everyone else—especially the parts of everyone else who could afford to move on a whim. Forget the poor. Forget the disenfranchised. They were the ones who had done the least to destroy the world as we’d known it for so long, and now they were the ones being left behind.

  Oh, we fought. Because the thing was, Portland and Seattle and Vancouver, they were beautiful cities, with their own positive qualities . . . but what they weren’t was infinitely capable of expansion. There were protected wetlands and forests to every side, mountain microclimates and endangered species under the protection of the federal government. The Pacific Northwest was already full, sorry, and it wasn’t looking to double its population any time soon.

  But it was also the home to several large, thriving tech firms, which between them controlled more of the political figures in the area than anyone had ever considered. Some of these men and women had been the ones to put us into our current predicament, continuing to throw their money into economically and environmentally unsound practices because it was cheaper than the alternatives. Who cared if a few newts died when their ponds dried up, if it meant that microchip manufacturing could be outsourced for just a little bit longer? Who cared if a few houses wound up literally underwater, if it meant they could keep paying fines instead of fixing problems?

  And then, when they had to stop paying fines, when they had to start fixing problems, those same brave men and women turned their attention to getting rid of laws they didn’t like. Why did owls need entire forests for themselves? Yes, it was important to preserve species diversity, but that land was needed by humans, who would do more with it than simply leave it untouched and growing wild. There were DNA banks now, there were zoos and private collections, there were a hundred ways to wipe a creature out of the natural world without losing it forever. It was cruel, yes, but it was also necessary. How could they leave so much green and verdant land unused, when so many people were wanting?

  The environmentalists had lost the fight against industry and fossil fuel and men who spoke in voices that dripped money. They had failed to stop climate change in its infancy, and failed again in its childhood, and now that it was an angry adult, slamming its fists into every country in the world, there was no stopping it. They looked upon this newest fight, and knew they couldn’t win.

  Still, they fought—we fought. We used every delaying tactic in the world, and a few more that we made up on the spot. They played dirty, and so we played dirty. And in the end, they had more money and fewer morals, and they won. They won everything.

  Protection for endangered species and habitats wasn’t as important as space for homes and cities and jobs. Commerce and trade were coming to the Pacific Northwest whether we wanted them or not, despite our protests that they had been here all along. State legislators looked at a sky that was black with crows and said, “The wildlife is doing fine without our help.” They didn’t see the complicated web of systems that set those crows in flight.

  We argued. We bartered. We stalled.

  We won. A small battle, not the war; a small victory, more of a sop to bleeding-heart environmentalists than anything real.

  We got a year.

  * * * *

  I reached base camp two hours after sunrise. My owl was long since asleep in her hole, waiting out the hours of daylight. Hunting nocturnal predators means late nights followed by long days: I’d go back around noon with a team, and we’d extract her from her nest, stuffing her into a carrier that was more than large enough for her needs, but that would seem too small to a creature who was used to having the entire sky beneath her wings. I wondered if owls were claustrophobic. I forced myself to stop just as quickly. It didn’t matter—it couldn’t matter—because we were running out of time.

  Benet sat at one of the camp tables with his eyes closed and a mug of tea slowly cooling next to his hand. A small plastic tank rested on the table in front of him. Something moved inside. I squinted. Three large skink-like lizards were stacked atop each other like children’s toys, their spade-shaped heads twitching from side to side as they watched for danger.

  “Alligator lizards?” I asked.

  “Northern alligator lizards,” said Benet. He didn’t open his eyes. “They don’t like deserts. They do like streams and mud. No one’s seen one in California for ten years. They went from Least Concern to Presumed Extinct in less than a decade.”

  Crap. “Where did you find them?”

  “I flipped over a log looking for beetles, and there they were. They must have been eating the things I was supposed to save.” He opened his eyes, fixing me with a look that was equal parts misery and despair. “I didn’t know that they were here. I haven’t been watching for them—no one has. Their habitat never extended this far up before. How are we supposed to save this ecosystem if we don’t even know what’s in it? We’re going to fail.”

  “We’ve known that since day one,” I said. He blinked, expression shifting toward betrayal, and I sighed. “There was no way we could save everything that needed to be saved. We’d need a country, not just a compound. The Arks will preserve, but they’ll be incomplete. We know that. Maybe in three generations, the people working them will be able to pretend that they give an accurate look at what life was like before we clear-cut the planet. Maybe in six generations, we’ll be planting again, and this will be the basis for an ecosystem all its own. But we’re going to fail, if you define success as ‘we saved everything.’ ” I shook my head. “Something has to burn. When the world catches fire, something has to burn.”

  “You’re our resident little ray of sunshine, aren’t you?” asked Kathy, walking in with a crate under her arm. She deposited it in the cryo freezer next to the door. Those poor turtles would never know what had hit them. “How went the owl search?”

  “I finally found out where the last lady owl has been nesting during the day; I’m going to grab the extraction team and go pry her out around noon,” I said. The skin around Kathy’s eyes tightened, her lips thinning as she pressed them together in an expression that was not a frown, not quite; she wasn’t letting it get that far.

  I had no such restraint. I frowned, eyeing her sidelong. “What’s wrong?”

  “Remember last week’s report, where you confirmed removal of eight owls from the sectors you’d been assigned?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, feeling my heart sink toward my toes.

  “Some people think that’s sufficien
t genetic diversity to preserve the species,” she said. “Julie, I’m so sorry.”

  My heart sank further. “How much of my territory are they seizing early?”

  She shook her head. That was enough of an answer, really, but I still wanted to hear her say it; I wanted to know how shortsighted the people who were supposedly in charge were going to be. So I waited, just looking at her, until she said, “They’re taking the whole thing. They say that the construction crews are running ahead of schedule, and we’ve taken in so many refugees from Southern California—”

  “Vultures, you mean,” I said, breaking in. “They killed their state, and now they’re coming for ours. This should be against the law.”

  “It was against the law, remember?” She didn’t bother to conceal her bitterness. We were all among friends there. There had been some concern about spies initially, the environmental equivalent of industrial espionage, but we had all eventually realized that we didn’t care. If they were getting their hands dirty with the rest of us, they could carry as many tales of angry, resentful environmentalists back to their bosses as they liked. It wasn’t like anyone was going to be shocked by the depths of our anger. We were trying to save the remains of the natural world, and they were still lighting matches.

  “Fine,” I said. That didn’t seem like enough, so I repeated it: “Fine. How long do we have? The insect teams have barely started their sweeps, and you know the remaining mammalian populations are migratory; we need to do a full underbrush check to make sure they’re not in my territory.”

  “There isn’t going to be time for that.”

  The world seemed to slow and crystallize. I heard Benet’s chair scrape against the floor as he rose and moved to stand beside me, leaving his alligator lizards on the table. Kathy looked at me solemnly, and the pity in her eyes was one more match for the pyre that was being built, one fallen evergreen at a time, in the wasteland of my soul.