Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  “I walked on it yesterday when we flew up to prime the wells,” said Gennady. Octav hadn’t been along on that flight; he hadn’t seen what lay beyond that ruler-straight crest. “That plateau covers an area the size of Western Europe, and it’s so high, nothing can grow up there. This whole valley is just an erosion ditch in it.”

  Octav nodded, reluctantly intrigued. “Kinda strange place to build a power plant.”

  “Achille built here because the plateau’s made of basalt. When you pump hot carbonated water into basalt, it makes limestone, which permanently sequesters the carbon. All Achille has to do is keep fracking up top there and he’s got a continent-sized sponge to soak up all the excess CO2 on the planet. You could build a thousand towers like this all around the Putorana. It’s perfect for—” But Octav had clapped a hand on his shoulder.

  “Shht,” whispered the bodyguard. “Heard something.”

  Before Gennady could react, Octav was creeping up the steps with his gun drawn. “What do you think you’re doing?” Gennady hissed at the Lithuanian. “Put that thing away!”

  Octav waved at him to stay where he was. “Could be bears,” he called down in a hoarse—and not at all quiet—stage whisper. The word bears seemed to hang in the air for a second, like an echo that couldn’t find a wall to bounce off.

  Gennady started up after him, deliberately making as much noise as he could on the metal steps. “Bears are not arboreal; much less likely will they be foraging up in the scrubbers—” Octav reached the top of the steps and disappeared. Here, the hanging sheets of plastic made a bizarre drapery that completely filled the tower. Except for this little catwalk, the entire space was given over to them. It was kind of like being backstage in a large theater, except the curtains were white. Octav was hunched over, gun drawn, stepping slowly forward around the slow curve of the catwalk. This would have been a comical sight except that, about eight meters ahead of him, the curtains were swaying.

  “Octav, don’t—” The bodyguard lunged into the gloom.

  Gennady heard a scuffle and ran forward himself. Then, terribly, two gunshots like slaps echoed out and up and down.

  “No, what have you—” Gennady staggered to a stop and had to grab the railing for support; it creaked and gave a bit, and he suddenly realized how high up they were. Octav knelt just ahead, panting. He was reaching slowly out to prod a crumpled gray-and-brown shape.

  “Jssht!” said the walkie-talkie on Octav’s belt. More garbled vocal sounds spilled out of it, until Octav suddenly seemed to realize it was there and holstered his pistol with one hand while taking the walkie-talkie out with the other.

  “Octav,” he said. The walkie-talkie spat incoherent staticky noise into his ear. He nodded.

  “Everything’s okay,” he said. “Just shot a goose, is all. I guess we have dinner.”

  Then he turned to glare at Gennady. “You should have stayed where I told you!”

  Gennady ignored him. The white curtains swung, all of them now starting to rustle as if murmuring and pointing at Octav’s minor crime scene. More of the louvered doors had opened far below, and the updraft was starting. Shadow and sound began to paint the tower’s hollow spaces.

  Nadine would be hard to see now and impossible to hear. Hopefully, she’d noticed Octav’s shots; even now, if she had a grain of sense, she’d be on her way back to her truck.

  Gennady brushed past Octav. “If you’re done murdering the locals, I need to work.” The two did not speak again as Gennady tugged at the plastic and inspected the bolts mounting the scrubbers to the tower wall.

  * * * *

  A Siberian summer day lasts forever; but there came a point when the sun no longer lit the interior top of the tower. The last hundred meters up there were painted titanium white and reflected a lot of light down. Now, though, with the sky a dove gray shading to nameless pink, and the sun’s rays horizontal, Achille’s lads had to light the sodium lamps and admit it was evening.

  The lamps were the same kind you saw in parking lots all over the world. For Gennady, they completely stole the sense of mystery from the tower’s interior, making it as grim an industrial space as any he’d seen. For a while, he stood outside the control trailer with Octav and a couple of the engineers, trying to get used to the evil greenish yellow cast that everything had. Then he said, “I’m going to sleep outside.”

  One of the engineers laughed. “After your run-in with the climbing bears? And you know, there really are wolves in this forest.”

  “No, no, I will be in one of the admin trailers.” Nobody had even opened those yet, and besides, he needed to find a spot where late-night comings and goings wouldn’t be noticed by these men.

  “First, you must try the goose!” While the others inspected and tested, Octav had cooked it over a barrel fire. He’d only made a few modest comments about the bird, but Gennady knew he was ridiculously proud of his kill, because he’d placed the barrel smack in the center of the hundred-meter-wide floor of the tower. He’d even dragged over a couple of railroad ties and set them up like logs around his campfire.

  Achille was down there now, peering at his air quality equipment, obviously debating whether he could lose his surgical mask. He waved up at them. “Come! Let’s eat!”

  Gennady followed the others reluctantly. He knew where this was headed: to the inevitable male bonding ritual. It came as no surprise at all when, as they tore into the simultaneously charred and raw goose, Achille waved at Gennady and said, “Now, this man! He’s a real celebrity! Octav, did you know what kind of adventurer you saved from this fierce beast?” He waved his drumstick in the air. Octav looked puzzled.

  “Gennady, here. Gennady fought the famous Dragon of Pripyat!” Of course the engineers knew the story, and smiled politely; but neither Octav nor Bogdan, the other bodyguard, knew it. “Tell us, Gennady!” Achille’s grin was challenging. “About the reactor and the devil guarding it.”

  “We know all about that,” protested an engineer. “I want to know about the Kashmiri incident. The one with the nuclear jet. Is it true you flew it into a mine?”

  “Well, yes,” Gennady admitted, “not myself, of course. It was just a drone.” Of course the attention was flattering, but it also made him uncomfortable, and over the years, he’d learned that the discomfort outweighed the flattery. He told them the story, but as soon as he could, he found a way to turn to Achille and say, “But these are just isolated incidents. Your whole career has been, well, something of an adventure itself, no?”

  That burst of eloquence had about exhausted his skills of social manipulation; luckily, Achille was eager to talk about himself. He and Nadine had inherited wealth, and Gennady had sensed yesterday that this weighed on him. He wanted to be a self-made man, but he wasn’t, so, he was using his inheritance recklessly, to see if he could achieve something great. He also had an impulsive urge to justify himself.

  He told them how, when he’d seen the sheer scale of the cap-and-trade and carbon-tax programs that were springing up across the globe, he’d decided to put all his chips into carbon air capture. “Because,” he explained, “it was a completely discredited approach.”

  “Wait,” said Octav, his brow crinkling. “You went into . . . that . . . because it had no credibility?” Achille nodded vigorously.

  “Decades of research, patents, and designs were just lying around, waiting to be snapped up. I was already building this place, but the carbon bubble was bursting as governments started pulling their fossil fuel subsidies. Here, the local price of petrol had gone through the roof as the Arctic oilfields went from profitable to red. But, you see, I had a plan.”

  The plan was to offer to offset CO2 emissions of industries anywhere on the planet from right there. Since Achille’s giant machines harvested greenhouse gases from the ambient atmosphere, it didn’t matter where they were—which meant he could sell offsets to airlines, mines in South America, or container ships burning bunker oil with equal ease.

  “But then Kaf
atos stole my market.”

  The Greek industrialist’s company, GreenCore, had bought up vast tracts of Siberian forest and had begun rolling out a cheaper biological alternative to Achille’s towers.

  “They do what? Some kind of fast-growing tree?” asked Gennady. He knew about the rivalry between Achille and Kafatos. It wasn’t just business; it was personal.

  Achille nodded. “Genetically modified lodgepole pines. Super-fast-growing, resistant to the pine beetle. They want to turn the forest itself into a carbon sponge. It’s as bad an idea as tampering with Mother Nature was—as oil was—in the first place,” he said, “and I intend to prove it.”

  The conversation wound down a bit after this motivational speech, but then one of the engineers looked around at the trembling shadows of the amphitheater in which they sat, and said, “Pretty spooky, eh?”

  “Siberia is all spooky,” Bogdan pointed out. “Never mind just here.”

  And that set them all off on ghost stories and legends of the deep forests. The locals used to believe Siberia was a middle world, halfway up a vast tree, with underworlds below and heavens above. Shamans rode their drums between the worlds, fighting the impossible strength of the gods with dogged courage and guile. They triumphed now and then, but in the end, the deep forest swallowed all human achievement like it would swallow a shout. What was human got lost in the green maze; what came out was changed and new.

  Bogdan knew a story about the “valley of death” and the strange round kheldyu—iron houses—that could be found half-buried in the permafrost here and there. There was a valley no one ever returned from; kheldyu had been glimpsed there by scouts on the surrounding heights.

  The engineers had their own tales, about lost Soviet-era expeditions. There were downed bombers loaded with nukes on hair trigger, which might go off at any moment. There were Chinese tunnel complexes, and lakes so radioactive that to stand on their shores for a half an hour meant dying within the week. (Well, that last story, at least, was perfectly true.)

  “Gennady, what about you?” All eyes turned to him. Gennady had relaxed a bit and was willing to talk; but he didn’t know any recent myths or legends. “All I can tell you,” Gennady said, “is that it’ll be poetic justice if we save the world by burying all our carbon here. Because what’s in this place nearly killed the whole world through global warming once already.”

  The engineers hadn’t heard about the plateau’s past. “This place—this thing,” said Gennady in his best ghost-story voice, “killed ninety percent of all life on Earth when it erupted. This supervolcano, called the Siberian Traps, caused the Permian extinction two hundred and fifty million years ago. Think about it: the place was here before the dinosaurs and it’s still here, still taller than mountain ranges and as wide as Europe.” There was nothing like it on Earth—older than the present continents, the Putorana was an ineradicable scar from the greatest dying the world had ever seen.

  So then they had to hear the story of the Permian extinction. Gennady did his best to convey the idea of an entire world dying, and of geologic forces so gargantuan and unstoppable that the first geologists to find this spot literally couldn’t imagine the scale of the apocalypse it represented. He was rewarded by some appreciative nods, particularly for his image of a slumbering monster that could indifferently destroy all life on the planet by just rolling over. The whole thing was too abstract for Octav and Bogdan, though, who were yawning.

  “Right.” Achille slapped his knees. “Tomorrow’s another busy day. Let’s turn in, everybody, and get a start at sun-up.”

  “Uh, boss,” said an engineer, “sunrise is at three a.m.”

  “Make it five, then.” Achille headed for the metal steps.

  Gennady repeated his intent to sleep in the admin trailer; to his relief, no one volunteered to do the same. When he stepped through the second door of the tower’s airlock, it was to find that although it was nearly midnight, the sun was still setting. He remembered seeing this effect before: the sun might dip below the horizon, but the lurid peach-and-rose-colored glow it painted on the sky wasn’t going to go away. That smear of dusk would just slide up and across the northern horizon over the next few hours, and then the sun would pop back up once it reached the east.

  That was helpful. The administration trailer needed a good airing-out, so he opened all its windows and sat on the front step for a while, waiting to see if anybody came out of the tower. The sunset inched northward. He checked his watch. Finally, with a sigh, he set off walking around the western curve of the structure. A flashlight was unnecessary, but he did bring the flare gun. Because, well, there might be bears.

  Nadine had done a pretty good job of hiding her truck among gnarled cedars and cobwebs of fungi on the north side of the tower. Either she’d been waiting for him, or she had some kind of proximity alarm, because he was still ten meters away when he heard the door slam. He stopped and waited. After a couple of minutes, she stood up out of the bushes, a black cutout on the red sky. “It’s just you,” she said unnecessarily.

  Gennady shrugged. “Do I ever bring friends?”

  “Good point.” The silhouette made a motion he interpreted as the holstering of a pistol. He strolled over while she untangled herself from the bushes.

  “Come back to the trailer,” he said. “I have chairs.”

  “I’m sleeping here.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “. . . Okay.” They crunched back over the gravel. Halfway there, Nadine said, “Seriously, Gennady. You and Achille?”

  “What is the problem?” He spread his hands, distorting the long shadow that leaned ahead of him. “He is restarting his carbon air capture project. That’s a good thing, no?”

  She stopped walking. “That’s what you think he’s doing?”

  What did that mean? “Let’s see. It’s what he says he’s doing. It’s what the press releases say. It’s what everybody else thinks he’s doing. . . . What else could he be up to?”

  “Everybody asks that question.” She kicked at the gravel angrily. “But nobody sees what he’s doing! You know—” She laughed bitterly. “When I told my team at the IAEA what he was up to, they just laughed at me. And you know what? I thought about calling you. I figured, Gennady knows how these things go. He’d understand. But you don’t get it either, do you?”

  “You know I am not smart man. I need thing explained to me.”

  She was silent until they reached the admin trailer. Once inside, she said, “Close those,” with a nod at the windows. “I don’t want any of that shit in here with us.”

  She must mean the mold. As Gennady went around shutting things up, Nadine sat down at the tiny table. After a longing look at the mothballed coffee machine, she steepled her hands and said, “I suppose you saw the pictures.”

  “That the paparazzi took of you two at the Paris café? There were a few, if I recall.”

  She grimaced. “I particularly like the one that shows Kafatos punching Achille in the face.”

  Gennady nodded pensively. It had been two years since Achille came across his sister having dinner with Kafatos, his biggest business rival. The punch was famous, and the whole incident had burned through the internet in a day or two, to be instantly forgotten in the wake of the next scandal.

  “Achille and I haven’t spoken since. He’s even taken me out of his will—you know he was the sole heir, right?”

  Gennady nodded. “I figured that was why you went to work at the IAEA.”

  “No, I did that out of idealism, but . . . Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I knew all about Achille’s little rivalry with the Greek shithead, but something about it didn’t add up. Achille was lying to me, so I went to Kafatos to see if he knew why. He didn’t, so the whole café incident was a complete waste. But I eventually did get the story from one of Achille’s engineers.”

  “Let me guess. It’s something to do with the tower?”

  She shrugged. “It never crossed my mind. When Achille came up with
the plan for this place, I guess it was eight years ago, it seemed to make sense. He knew about the Permian, and he talked about how he was going to ‘redeem’ the site of the greatest extinction in history by using it to not just stop but completely reverse global warming. The whole blowup with Kafatos happened because GreenCore bought up about a million square kilometers of forest just east of Achille’s site. Kafatos has been genetically engineering pines to soak up the carbon, but you know that.” She took a deep breath. “You also know there’s no economic reason to reopen the tower.”

  Gennady blinked at her. “They told me there was; that was why we were here. Told me the market had turned . . .”

  She sent him a look of complete incredulity, then that look changed, and suddenly Nadine stood up. Gennady opened his mouth to ask what was wrong, just as one of the windows rattled loosely in its mount. Nadine was staring out the window, a look of horror on her face.

  A deep vibration made the plywood floor buzz. The glass rattled again.

  “He’s opening the windows!” Nadine ran for the door. Gennady peered outside.

  “Surely not all of them . . .” But all the black circles he could see from here were changing, letting out a trickle of sodium-lamp light.

  By the time he got outside, she was gone—off and running around the tower in the direction of her truck. Gennady shifted from foot to foot, trying to decide whether to follow.

  Her story hadn’t made sense, but still, he paused for a moment to gaze up at the tower. In the deep sunset light of the midsummer night, it looked like a rifle barrel aimed at the sky.