by Matt Bell
He flees across Wyoming, through Pinedale, Boulder, Farson, Eden, Reliance: empty, empty, empty, empty, empty. Wherever he passes a closed gas station, he ensures the underground tanks are off, then noisily pushes the pumps over with his truck; otherwise he lets the truck’s electric engine run solar, avoiding confrontation with any twitchy populations who might remain, anyone refusing to leave the Sacrifice Zone, anyone sneaking back in.
By late afternoon, he idles through the outskirts of Rock Springs, trawling between dust bowl fields and unpowered fast-food signs until he spies a signal he’d pretended he hadn’t been seeking, a direction and a number spray-painted in bright orange on the side of a burned-out diner. He pulls the truck into the trash-strewn back lot, kills the ignition, lets the engine tick to a stop. Window rolled down, he listens: no insects, no human voices, no sound but the hot wind. How many months has it been since he’s seen a blaze this fresh? He rubs his eyes, rolls shoulders sore from the road, opens the door, and steps out for a closer look. He’d recognize the graffiti’s hand style anywhere, the orange numerals two meters high obviously Cal’s, the arrow slashed below them making for a clear enough message pointing John forty-five kilometers east, even though the arrow points west instead: as Cal always says, sometimes the slightest, simplest misdirection is enough.
Tapping his foot, John scans the nearby buildings, the distant horizon. He listens again: nothing and no one, only the blowing dust, a distant creaking of rusting metal. No one now, but Cal was here, not so long ago. Cal wanting to see him, calling him back to her.
He drives, faster now, the dry ground along the roadside cracked as the concrete; following the blaze’s directions, he leaves the highway for surface roads, concrete giving way to dirt as he crosses more dead farmlands, fields of what was once barley and wheat and corn, now only hard clay punctured by toppled wind turbines, most of their masts felled not by human hands but by unpredictably violent weather. The kilometers tick by, and then there it is: another set of orange numerals and another misdirecting arrow, this time high on a fallen turbine’s bent blade.
He finds the next blaze twenty kilometers northeast, exactly as directed, and follows its order past more recently scorched splotches of infrastructure, bulldozed chain-link fences, a stretch of highway jackhammered vulnerable to erosion. The spray-painted distances keep going down, the blazes get smaller then disappear as the sun begins to set. Close now. He knows what to look for, even with less light left to find it: he turns onto a gravel road beckoning north, then follows a dirt road veering east toward a husk of a farmhouse beside an intact barn. He pulls in, parks beneath a leafless oak; he runs his fingers through his hair, scrubs his sunburned face with filthy hands. This time, when he rolls down the window, he hears clanging coming from the other side of the paint-stripped barn, a sound he follows to find Cal bent beneath the hood of her gray Jeep, her broad shoulders bunching with muscle.
Cal pauses her work, sets her wrench down carefully atop the oily mass of the engine. Even at rest she exudes an unruled energy: a violence in fatigue pants and a sleeveless undershirt. “Hello, old goat,” she says without turning.
It’s been months since John last saw her, longer since he was sure how she’d react to his affection, how he’d react to hers. He moves behind her, mirrors her posture, placing his hands beside hers on the lip of the hood, their hips close but not touching. Cal’s body coils beneath his, poised, tensioned but not tense; John smells motor oil and trace explosives, her sweat, his own. He shifts his hands to overlap hers, knows she’ll already have moved before he touches her. She twists beneath his leanness, her muscles rippling, and puts her mouth on his, mashing his lips beneath her teeth, then drives him to the ground, abruptly straddling him, her solid weight pinning his lean body to the clay exactly as he’d hoped she would.
C-432
The Earth Reset
C-432 urges the translucent photovoltaic bubble forward with a thought, moving the craft out of the crawler’s darkened hangar to drop onto the frozen crust of the Ice. Once outside, he shields his eyes against the sunlight, its pale glow reflected and doubled by every meter of the monotonous landscape, the glittery white flatness stretching endlessly beneath the low blanket of the heavy white sky, all this whiteness all he’s ever known, his every remembered life having been lived upon this high glacial shelf.
Emerging from the crawler’s shadow, he taps his right temple twice, just below the first tight spiral of his right horn: at his touch, an overlay tints the bubble’s curved glass hull, bright-colored flags winking into view to augment his vision. Each flag marks an entrance to the Below, some place where another C descended, while inside C-432’s skull the voices of the remainder enumerate what those predecessors found there, down in that deep zone continually covered over and crumpled and only sometimes exposed again by the always-advancing glacier, its massive moving weight having long since buried beneath itself the world that was, now battered and bent into a slowly dispersing layer of rubbled wreckage.
The Ice moves as one mass but the mass is not homogenous. Its surface is shaped by precipitation and ablation, but underneath it’s made of many frozen planes, shelves exerting incredible pressures against one another, a tectonics of ice causing stress fractures and sheer cleavings to continually open new crevasses to the air, their jagged breaks sometimes plummeting deep into the interior. As the bubble zips across this changeable landscape, C watches through the bubble’s shell, the virtual flags whizzing by as the frictionless craft zooms onward, following a path relayed instantly from the rung at the base of his neck to the unseen repulsors keeping the craft afloat. Thirty kilometers out from the crawler, an alert arrives from the bubble’s sensor array: there’s a newly opened crevasse several kilometers away, offering a possibly stable access. As the bubble closes the distance, C checks the remainder’s memories, then scans the bubble’s records of other descents in this area: just because this crevasse opened recently doesn’t mean there wasn’t once another nearby, where some other C descended via some passage since collapsed. A new entrance to the Below is a welcome discovery, but he can’t afford to chance exploring some previously spelunked wreckage.
There are no mundane descents beneath the Ice, every minute C spends Below too potentially deadly to risk death for the promise of nothing. The recombinant remainder is a cowardly voice in C’s head: it urges caution, safety, restraint, cowardice, though individual cycles haven’t always been so circumspect. Today it gets no argument from C-432. He’s lived a long cycle, longer than most, but he’s not stronger or smarter than his most recent predecessors, only more risk-averse.
However successful C-432 has been, he must know he’s a diminishment: cycle after cycle, the mind goes on but the body grows fallible. The remainder dimly recalls other, better bodies, capable of traveling the bitter landscape on foot, C’s then brown fur caking with dirty slush, the skin below blackening with frostbite but always replaceable, even before C’s epidermis became polymer and plastic, neither susceptible to pain like proper skin nor recovering from damage as real skin might have. Now, with his blue fur so thinned it no longer fully protects him from the cold, he dons a heavy cloak, faded with use and age; he covers his furred face with protective goggles, then tugs on scavenged gloves that snag over his plastinate claws.
Exiting the bubble’s quiet, C listens to the kilometers-high sheet of the Ice shifting and settling: beneath him lies the secret movements of cold against cold, so much frozen water compacted and crackling, creating both the icefalls breaking up the landscape and the passages leading through the glacial crust, toward the pitch-blue dark of the Below. Approaching this newest entrance, he tests the crevasse’s stability before dragging his portable winch from the bubble to a spot mere meters from the lip of the drop, securing the machine with a whir of gear-driven screws.
So far, C has survived every expedition below the Ice, depending on how precisely you define survive, on how precisely you define C. He remembers more descents than an
y one life could contain, discrete experiences crushed together by sheer volume, a conglomerate dream of all the lost places he’s been.
He has hundreds of cycles’ worth of memories already; if he brings back only more memories, it will not be enough.
C descends. Secure in his harness, he works the oversized buttons of the winch’s control dongle, setting himself dropping steadily upon the cable, kicking his hooves gently against the crevasse wall. After he falls below the last of the sunlight, he allows himself a moment’s blindness in the glacier’s dark interior before he reaches up to click on his headlamp, its narrow beam failing to illuminate much past his gloved hand steadying the cable, his dangling hooves, the harness straps digging into his furred thighs.
C presses the dongle’s down button again; above him, the winch whirs. His hooves continue their slow tracking down the near wall of the crevasse even as the one behind him falls away, disappears into the dark: after another thirty meters, turning his head reveals no other surfaces close enough to reflect the headlamp’s beam. This is the rarest and best kind of crevasse, one opening as C falls, offering a deeper descent than others. A lucky find, these days, and necessary too. In the past, C could sometimes avoid entering the glacier: despite the static appearance of its flatness, the massive moving pressures under the Ice frequently surfaced crushed boulders and frozen dirt, whole acres of concrete rubble and shattered plastic and the occasional bent wreck of crumpled steel, and occasionally even some rarer, better finds, once even the shriveled corpse of some unidentifiable creature, its thin skin mummified brown, peeling like paper when that cycle’s C unstuck it from the cold. But in recent years—in recent decades—he’s had no such luck: the surface of the Ice appears unchanged, but the once rich reserves beneath his crawler have undeniably begun running dry.
The winch’s spool contains five hundred meters of cable, but from his end C can’t measure how far he’s dropped. In the lamplit crevasse, distance becomes ever more impossible to judge, sight reduced to a single beam of light, sound to his scrabbling hooves on the rocky ice, the huffing echoes of his breathing, the free water coursing inside the glacier, its gurgling trickle moving below the frozen surface. He descends until the wall slopes suddenly away from him, leaving him dangling free, spinning in his harness straps. C panics, yelps out, the sound echoing off the invisible ice. With his free hand, he grips the cable until his harness stops spinning; then he continues his descent, dropping meter by meter into the freezing unknown.
How long before his hooves touch any surface? C can’t guess the likely span of his descent, he can only await its end; some time later there’s a surface reflecting his light back up at him, then solid frozen ground beneath his grateful hooves. He slips off his harness one leg at a time, stepping away from the cable before fully considering the chamber he’s found, this pocket of stale air carried along unbroken underneath the Ice.
The cave is cramped and low, but as C explores the contours of its walls he feels it funneling to one side, elongating toward a cramped tunnel. He hesitates at the tunnel’s lip, listens for how fast the nervous clicking of his hooves comes echoing back, the sound dulled by the passage’s uncertain length. On the surface, there is only the flatness of the Ice, novelty reduced nearly to zero, even its dangers long known; down here, beneath the great weight of the glacier, C knows he might find anything at all buried and frozen, much of it unnamable, unrecognizable, all of it the end of a world crushed and graveled and dispersed, ground down to finest grains.
There are many kinds of fears in C’s heart but only one that rules: if the tunnel becomes tunnels, then C might easily become lost; if he becomes lost and can’t make his way back to the cable, then he’ll die Below.
No matter what happens, no matter how badly he’s hurt, he must never die anywhere but in the crawler.
C’s headlamp barely cuts the darkness, rendering everything a flat grayscale except the occasional glimmering glitters of trapped particulate. As he proceeds, the tunnel slants down and away in a crooked, uneven break, evidence of some obstacle farther in, a stubborn obstruction the Ice couldn’t shove aside. He carries his ice axe in one hand, occasionally breaking his light beam with the other, because seeing his glove is better than seeing only more dark. The cold within the tunnel is an immense force; his breath fogs and freezes, his skin aches then burns, a painful tingling digging ever deeper into his muscles and bones.
Despite taking care, C finds the first sign of buried biomass not with his eyes but with his hooves, its surprise sending him tripping down the tunnel. He turns back to find a series of black roots wormed up from the floor, some as thick as his forearm, clutching in their wooden grips broken rocks and stuck gravel, captured dirt. It’s not so much a tree as an inverted stump, but near it C sees the sign of more buried wood, frozen hard as stone. He circles the exposed root ball, then sends his light back the way he came. How far is he from the cable, the winch, the free air above? It’s never easy to tell, once he’s stepped away.
To strike the ice is to court further danger—chancing the tunnel’s cave-in, the collapse of the crevasse—but if C wants to go on he needs to take as much of the buried tree with him as he can. He swings his axe at the root’s base. His shoulders shudder from the impact, but the ice is unmoved. He waits, listens. When nothing happens he strikes again. The risk is enormous but the possible reward great, if he can dig free this root ball, if he can discover more tree beneath it, if he can extract its entirety back to the crawler. While he works, the remainder remembers: years ago another C found a field of such stumps at the bottom of a recently opened crevasse, a long-lasting breakage wide enough that its contents could be cataloged from the surface. The best find in a dozen cycles, enough biomass that the next C was an improvement on his predecessor, a rare reversal of the entropy of their many stacked lives.
The roots are stubbornly resilient, surprisingly fragile: at first solidly stuck, then crumbling free. Every scrap is useful, every splinter worth retrieving. C removes a tarp from his backpack, loads whatever he can pry from the ice onto the plastic sheet. He hacks a depression around the root ball, unearthing more trunk farther down, more tree, possibly more trees. The glacier is capable of gathering anything in its path, and if it’s gathered a forest—
Greed clumps in C’s gut, churns him dumb. The ice beneath his hooves melts slightly, body heat and the friction of his steps leaving a scrim of water, making each movement more treacherous than the one before. When the tarp is nearly too heavy to drag, C wraps the edges over the precious wood, then loops nylon cord through the tarp’s stainless steel eyelets.
So much is left behind, the remainder complains, but there’s danger in being away from the crawler after the sun sets, the temperature at night far lower than during the day, the translucent photovoltaic bubble unable to run far without sunlight. C hurries, the heavy load compressing his spine, his hooves scrabbling for leverage. By the time he reaches the chamber where the cable waits, C’s back is hunched, his breath comes in wheezes. His hands shake as he regathers the four corners of the tarp and secures them into a bulky pouch, attaching the tarp’s eyelets to a carabiner dangling from the bottom of the safety harness.
He straps himself in next, then clutches the dongle, pressing the button to begin his ascent. His cargo follows, the tarp’s weight spinning in the open air. On reaching the high wall of the crevasse, relief washes through C, the icy chill against his scrabbling hooves an improvement over the uncertainty of floating free—but then the cargo tarp snags a lone outcropping set in the smooth wall, one of the bony roots within catching beneath an unseen ledge.
C curses, jams the up button to try to force the tarp free. When that fails, he plants his hooves on the ice, then leans back and pulls at the tarp, lifting with his legs. When the tarp slides from his gloved fingers, he wipes steam from inside his goggles, then pockets his gloves. He digs his claws into the tarp, regathers the loose plastic into his fists. He squats and kicks away from the wall, levera
ging his flailing weight: if he can yank hard enough the frozen root might shatter and free the rest.
He pries, he pulls, he kicks, he jumps again, senses the frozen wood starting to break—and then the whole tarp comes loose at once while C is at the farthest point of a leap away from the wall. The momentum throws him, he loses control, the tarp slips from his grip as its weight jerks him sideways; when he swings back toward the wall he strikes it horns first. Dazed, he barely has time to register the spiderweb of cracks spiraling out before the loaded tarp hits too, the second impact shattering the already cracking wall, the ice above coming apart fast, loosing a hail of fist-sized chunks and razor-sharp spikes.
Afterward, there’s only the sound of his terrified huffing, of the cable’s friction against the slowly spinning safety harness; C’s face bleeds, his knee aches, he’s covered in cuts and contusions. He reaches up to stop the cable’s rotation, twisting himself toward the collapsed wall, its tentatively solid surface now impossible to reach until he climbs another twenty meters.
C secures the cargo tarp, then restarts the winch’s spinning. Almost there, he thinks, just a little higher. But he rises only another five meters before the next loud crack sounds above him. In a panic, he aims his headlamp upward just in time to see more ice collapsing, not the wall before him this time but the one behind, its weight falling not in broken chunks but in one solid pillar that slams him face-first against the fractured wall, a vast expanse of blue-white ice solid enough to knock him dumb.
Chapman
What makes an orchard? Nothing more than apple seeds and dank, dark earth, plus the labors and hopes of men: every seed the brothers plant is a dream of a tree grown, every completed nursery a belief in a more productive future. Upon their chosen plot, they drag the horizontal blade of their two-man saw through an oak’s stubborn heart, the steel passing from faun to man and back again. They make the cut close to the ground, aiming to leave as little stump as possible, even though the brothers will abandon the stumps to rot, their roots softening until more permanent settlers arrive to pull them. Whenever he pauses to wipe sweat from his sunburned brow, Nathaniel resumes again his endlessly repeated cant, the ever-evolving speech Chapman has heard beginning to end countless times. “The wilderness must be pushed back,” he says, before decrying the unruly contours of the Territory’s fish-rich lakes and malaria-ridden swamps, its many waterways waiting to be straightened and smoothed. He details the surveyor’s grid being laid down over the future shape of each of this new country’s settlements, each plot platted out, the first footholds for future states to be divided into holdings fit to be owned by new American men, each a kingdom exactly equal to the quality of the man’s efforts. Everywhere there will be newly productive farms and innovative industries, new concerns for timbering and the mining of coal and copper amid pastures cut from the forests, fruiting orchards replacing uninhabitable swamplands.