Analog SFF, September 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Smolin says: “I could only say the obvious: ‘Don't you think Einstein could have defended himself and explained his motivation to you?'

  "'Certainly,’ Dyson replied. ‘But I was much older before that thought occurred to me.’”

  The Trouble With Physics is Smolin's attempt to once again “only say the obvious."

  Copyright © 2009 Jeffery D. Kooistra

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novelette: THE LAST RESORT by Alec Nevala-Lee

  Both sides tend to see environmental issues in simplistic terms. But they're rarely that simple....

  I.

  The shotgun was not aimed directly at Helki, but its barrel was pointed in her direction, which was more than enough for her to take it personally. The man holding the gun, a tanned hiker whose cowboy hat bore a faded Yaqui emblem, looked at her with a pair of obsidian eyes. “You're the herpetologist?"

  "I'm a snake doctor,” Helki said lightly. “When I say that I'm a herpetologist, people sometimes get the wrong idea."

  This was an old joke, one that she occasionally brought out at cocktail parties, and she had hoped that it would lighten the mood. As it turned out, none of the hikers even cracked a smile. Helki felt even more ill at ease than before, although she would have found it hard to explain why. Glancing over at Victor, who stood a few feet away, she could see that he was wary as well.

  It was a few hours after dawn. Helki and Victor had been trudging through the forest, not far from where they had left the Land Rover, when, rounding a bend in the road, they had come across the three hikers. The bearded man in the cowboy hat leaned against the trunk of a lodgepole pine, the shotgun cradled loosely in his arms. A jeep and hybrid pickup were parked nearby. Two younger hikers were seated on the hood of the pickup, a boy and girl dressed in expensive outdoor gear. They seemed like college kids, in their late teens or early twenties, and both were watching her closely, as if wondering how far she could be trusted.

  "We've been following the approval process,” the man in the cowboy hat said, looking between Helki and Victor. “We knew that you were coming, but we didn't expect you so soon."

  "I'm impressed that you even heard about us,” Victor said, his voice friendly but guarded. Victor Murakami was one of Helki's oldest friends, and he cut an impressive figure in his Forest Service uniform, his tall, rangy presence making her feel more secure. “What brings you out here?"

  "We came for one last look at the lake,” the man in the cowboy hat said. “Soon all of this will be gone."

  With the barrel of his shotgun, he gestured at the trees, a movement that seemed to encompass the entire forest, with its ranks of lodgepole and mountain hemlock marching up the hillside. At this altitude, beyond the fire zone, mature pines cast a welcome shade across the clumps of monkey flower growing on either side of the road. Further up, above the gray pillars of the trees, towered the eastern ridge of the Sierra Nevada, its wooded mountains still crusted with snow. It was a warm day in early spring, the overcast sky casting a chalky light across the woods. Except for the background murmur of birds and insects, the forest was silent.

  The man's words, as well as the absence of any wool or leather in his clothes, made it easy for Helki to guess why he was here. Environmental groups had been protesting the proposed resort development for over a year now, and although Helki knew that their efforts were doomed to failure, their numbers inexplicably continued to rise. “You make it sound like the end of the world,” Helki said. “The forest will still be here when this is all over."

  The man in the cowboy hat shook his head. “The last round of appeals failed to make any difference. In a year, these woods will be nothing but ski resorts and second homes. It's only a matter of time."

  One of the younger hikers, a blond kid with a goatee, spoke up. “You're a forest officer,” he said to Victor. “Instead of oak and pine, we're getting condominiums and parking lots. Are you proud of this?"

  "My feelings aren't the point,” Victor said, although Helki could tell that he found the question presumptuous. “I'm an ecologist. If the development is environmentally sound, I need to say so."

  "But there's going to be a revised report. We saw it in the papers. That's why you're here today, isn't it?"

  "It isn't clear yet,” Victor said. “When the project was first proposed, we drafted an environmental impact statement. It's possible that it will need to be revised, but there hasn't been a final decision."

  "And if you decide that a problem exists, will the development be ordered to cease?"

  "Unfortunately, that isn't my call,” Victor said. “It's up to the county commission."

  The blond hiker sighed. “See, that's precisely the problem. Have you ever been to a meeting of the county commission? Half of the commissioners have ties to the resort industry. Another half own property that will double in value if this development takes place. They all have conflicts of interest, but they don't seem very eager to recuse themselves. If there's money to be made, a handful of snakes aren't going to make a difference."

  At the mention of snakes, the girl made a face and turned to the man in the cowboy hat. “Russell, remember—"

  The man in the cowboy hat gave her a sharp look, which silenced her immediately. Helki could tell that he held a great deal of sway over his younger companions, especially the girl, and that he was annoyed that his name had been revealed. “You've been to the lake,” Helki said. “Have you seen any snakes?"

  Russell pointed up the trail with his shotgun. “Over the ridge. You can't miss them."

  "Not even if you try,” the blond hiker said. “Listen, do me a favor. After you've seen the snakes, come back and let me know if they'll make any difference. If I thought that the county commission would take any of this seriously, I'd have asked them to come out here a long time ago, but I know better. They aren't bad people, maybe, but they lack imagination. They won't act until the day of reckoning. And when it happens, they'll say that no one could have seen it coming."

  Helki wanted to challenge this easy cynicism, which expressed a lack of imagination of its own, but she knew that his vision of the future was essentially correct. Lake Molluk, a crater lake ten miles to the east, had already been transformed into a ski resort, complete with luxury condos and video arcades, and its owners hoped to do the same to Lake Yomigo, its undeveloped twin, which lay over the ridge ahead. You didn't need to be a radical environmentalist to have mixed feelings about this kind of development. Even if the resort turned out to be permissible from an environmental standpoint, from an aesthetic point of view, it could only be a disaster.

  Victor made a show of checking his watch. “Helki, we really should be on our way."

  "Helki,” the girl hiker said, addressing her for the first time. “That's a lovely name."

  "Thanks,” Helki said, regarding her with a biologist's eye. The girl was slim, pretty, and could have been anywhere from fifteen to twenty. Helki was reminded of the time in her own life, not so very long ago, when she had been angry, idealistic, and too immature to understand the need for compromise.

  Russell was regarding Helki with evident interest. “That's a Miwok name, isn't it?"

  "That's right,” Helki said, hoping that Russell would not take this as evidence that they had anything else in common. She wondered again what he was doing here. If the young hikers were two peas in a pod, Russell was an anomaly. The shotgun, in particular, struck her as an incongruous element. Helki pointed to it. “Were you out here hunting, too?"

  Russell grinned at this, as if sharing a good joke. “It isn't loaded. I carry it in case we run into Homo sapiens nimrodamericanus. Hunters leave you alone if they think you're one of them."

  Helki only nodded. Looking more closely at the shotgun, she saw that a strip of white bandage tape had been laid along the barrel, a modification designed to aid sighting in poor lighting conditions. It was the sign of a man who knew how to use a shotgun as a defensive weapon, not merely for hunting or sh
ow, and it bothered her. She thought about asking to see a permit, but decided to let it go.

  After exchanging a few more guarded words, the two groups parted ways. Helki and Victor continued up the hill, heading for the spur that overlooked the lake. As she walked away, Helki found, somewhat to her surprise, that she was furious. She didn't blame the hikers for feeling bitter about what was happening to the lake and forest, but it stung to be treated like one of the enemy. A quisling. Now that the encounter was over, Helki imagined herself saying all the right things, eloquently arguing that working within the system was the only way to make a meaningful difference. Deep down, however, she knew that such an argument would not go far with the hikers, no matter how convincingly it was worded.

  They took a switchback trail that diverged from the main road, heading up the hillside. As soon as the pines had blocked the hikers from view, Victor spoke. “Did you see what was hanging from the truck's rearview mirror?"

  Helki tried to remember, but saw only the vague image of a pendant. “No, what?"

  "It was a little emblem, like something from a charm bracelet. A monkey wrench."

  Helki considered the news in silence. Among certain environmental activists, a monkey wrench was a symbol of direct action. Usually this meant nothing more dangerous than protests and picket lines, but it could also mean blockades and fire bombs. “You think they're planning something?"

  "Maybe.” Victor glanced back, as if to make sure that they weren't being overheard. “There have been a number of protests over the proposed development. Arson. Tree spiking. That sort of thing."

  "Should we report it?"

  "I'm not sure yet. After all, there's no evidence that they're planning anything. All we know is that they're opposed to the ski resort, and there's nothing wrong with that.” Victor smiled. “If anything, I envy their certainty. I wish that I had that kind of passion these days."

  "It's a class privilege,” Helki said. “It's easy to care about the planet when you've never had to worry about anything else."

  Victor marched up the trail, which was sandy and laden with pumice. “I seem to remember that both of us were promising activists back in the day, and I wasn't exactly a trust fund baby. Neither were you."

  Helki granted the point. “And what happened? I grew up, got married, and became a government consultant. My conscience is clear. But those kids were looking at me as if I were the worst kind of sellout."

  "You learned to work within the system, that's all. I made the same choice.” Victor gave her a rueful grin. “I don't think that it was just an excuse for cowardice. Of course, I could be wrong."

  Helki knew that this remark concealed a deeper set of concerns. Victor often spoke of his mixed feelings towards the Forest Service, which was notoriously inclined to bend over backwards to cooperate with local development interests. Although he claimed to have come to terms with the political realities of his work, Helki suspected that he would leave for good one day.

  Before she could ask him about this, however, she became aware of a rustling noise coming from beyond the ridge, a sound like the murmur of dry leaves. “Hold it,” Helki said. “We're close."

  They halted. The crest of the hillside was a few steps away, a row of trees outlined against the sky. Here the mountain hemlock had fallen back, leaving only lodgepoles and white pine, their bark the color of cinnamon where the trunks were exposed to the wind. Victor paused at the edge of the trail, one foot propped on a mossy stone. “So what do we do now?"

  "We tread softly.” Helki sat on a fallen pine beside the footpath, its scaly gray trunk like a monumental spinal column. Indian paintbrush covered the ground to either side, the dense clumps of stems topped with spikes the color of blood. From her pack, she took a pair of soft shoes. After changing out of her hiking boots, she removed two pillowcases from her pack and draped them over her arm.

  They ascended the spur, which disclosed a spectacular view of the surrounding forest. In the distance stood the mountain itself, a lava dome complex on the southwestern edge of Long Valley Caldera. Despite the warm weather, its slopes were covered in a sparkling layer of snow. In the basin at the foot of the mountain lay Lake Yomigo, a limpid crater lake nearly a mile across, surrounded by a maze of use paths. Miwok legend regarded the lake as a haunted place, but in the daylight, it was nothing more than one of many gorgeous landscapes in this part of the Sierra Nevada.

  For the moment, however, Helki saw none of these things, her attention fixed on the ground. The lee side of the hill ran three hundred yards down to the edge of the lake, its surface covered with fissured boulders. The slope was steep and uneven, a broad apron of gray talus and scree, and Helki had to work to keep her balance as she made her way towards the living, squirming carpet at her feet.

  The ground was moving. It rippled and writhed in ropy lines, undulating in a sea of olive green. From where they stood to the edge of the lake, the hill was covered with thousands of slender bodies.

  "Garter snakes,” Helki said. For a long moment, she could say nothing else, her heart pounding with exhilaration. There were at least five thousand garter snakes on the hillside. They had been sleeping through the winter, their blood as thick as strawberry jam, and now they were emerging from brumation, gathering to reproduce and migrate. “Isn't it wonderful?"

  She looked back at Victor, who had remained at the top of the hill. He seemed pale, with a forced smile on his face, as if he had not fully understood what they had come here to observe. “Yeah,” Victor said. “It's great."

  Helki was already scooping up handfuls of snakes and tossing them into a pillowcase. Their bodies were soft and cool, a curious blend of suppleness and rigidity. She handed a second pillowcase to Victor, who had picked his way carefully down the steep palisades of granite and loose stone. “I need to get a hundred snakes for marking,” Helki said. “Be sure to get some females. You can tell them apart from the males because they're twice as long."

  Victor picked up a snake, holding it gingerly behind the head. “Have you ever seen anything like this?"

  "Not around here,” Helki said, pausing to examine one of the snakes more closely. It was slender, eighteen inches long, with keeled dorsal scales. A yellow ribbon ran along its dark green back, a pale stripe on either side. “You need to go to Manitoba to see this sort of thing. At Narcisse, you'll sometimes see twenty thousand snakes at a time, but I've never seen it in California."

  As she spoke, she grew increasingly excited. She would need to review the literature to be sure, but she was fairly certain that this behavior was unprecedented in Thamnophis elegans. The snakes were forming mating balls, a hundred males clustering around a single female. After being impregnated, the female would escape, heading for her spring feeding grounds, and the mating ball would disperse, the males scattering in all directions in search of another willing prospect.

  Helki saw that Victor was no longer collecting snakes. He was standing on one of the boulders, seized, it seemed, by an attack of ophidiphobia. Helki was amused by this, but also concerned. She knew that he had to keep him talking. “Admit it. This is more fun than a day at the office."

  Victor nodded weakly, knelt, and managed to stuff a handful of snakes into the pillowcase that was writhing in his hands. “It beats dealing with the resort companies. At least the snakes don't have lawyers."

  "Well, I don't know about that,” Helki said. “We still haven't checked underground."

  Helki finished filling her pillowcase. Taking a marker from her pocket, she removed the captured snakes one at a time, tagging each one on the belly with a purple stripe. After each snake had been marked, it was let go. As she worked, she kept a mental tally of how many she had released. Tomorrow, she would collect another sample, and by counting the number of tagged snakes that reappeared in the second lot, she could arrive at a rough estimate of the total population.

  As Helki marked the snakes, her eyes kept returning to the mountain and lake. It occurred to her that the appearan
ce of mating balls, which was unprecedented in this area, might have been caused by a drop in the average temperature. “What kind of weather have you been having?” Helki asked. “A cold winter?"

  Victor handed her his pillowcase, which was only halfway full. He seemed glad to be rid of it. “No, it was unusually mild. Not a lot of snowfall. I can look up the records, if you like."

  Helki pointed toward the mountain, the lower slopes of which were frosted in snow. “So this is artificial?"

  "Not exactly,” Victor said. “It's too expensive for the resort to depend exclusively on snowmaking, so they've developed ways of preserving the natural snowfall.” He pointed to a wooden building on the far shore of the lake, close to the water's edge. “They installed a cooling station last year. It pumps cold water out of the lake and runs it through pipes in the mountainside, which lowers the ground temperature and keeps the snow from melting."

  Helki was surprised by this. “I didn't realize that the slopes were already operating."

  "They aren't,” Victor said. “The resort owners don't want to start construction until they're sure about the location. They've been doing a dry run of the cooling system for a few months. They did the same thing at the resort at Lake Molluk. Before they installed the cooling system there, snow preservation was lousy. That's why the area wasn't developed until recently."

  "What about environmental factors? It doesn't affect the ecology of the lake?"

  "They've passed all of the regulatory hurdles. The system is a closed loop. When the water returns to the lake, it may be a few degrees warmer, but the overall temperature of the lake remains constant.” Victor paused. “Do you think this has something to do with the increase in the snake population?"

  "We have to consider the possibility.” Helki looked at the snakes, trying to imagine what might have caused the increase in numbers. “You said that the cooling system was installed last year?"