by Matt Bell
“I don’t know if anything we sent will be useful,” Noor says. “But we did what we could.”
“Tell him the rest,” Julie says. “Tell him what else you uploaded.”
“A lot of video,” Noor says. “A dozen hours of footage from Montana, from a week spent following the Earthtrust crews around.”
“Cal told me. The dronedozers, scraping the soil off the earth.”
Julie says, “Earthtrust is carting away the surface of the West, all the dead grass and dead trees, the dead animals. What can’t be gathered by hand can be dredged with machines, hauled to sorting facilities where the organic materials can be separated out. We’ve been calling the West a sacrifice zone for years, but what’s it a sacrifice for? Sacrifice zones used to mean making the present easy and cheap at someone else’s expense, but the West isn’t some fracking town with polluted wells, where we’re fine with someone else’s water being ruined as long as we get cheap natural gas. This is half a country we’re talking about. And who, right now, is gaining from it?”
“No one,” says Noor. “Not in the present.”
“But for what?” asks John. “What’s the goal?”
“We don’t know,” Noor says, giving Julie a conspiratorial glance. They’re trading lines, combining their pitch. “But sooner or later, your face is going to heal. Eventually the scanners will tell your old girlfriend you’re here, if they haven’t already.”
John touches his fading bruises, the yellowed flesh tender. “You want her to find me.”
“Mai’s already inside Earthtrust, but she has only so much access,” Julie says. “Noor might be able to hack a way into the Tower. Cal and I can shoot us a path, if we have to. But you might be able to enter at Eury Mirov’s side, ride her personal elevator right to the top, ask some questions from the throne room. Questions it would take us a year to answer might be revealed to you in a brag. You tell us what else Eury is planning, then we’ll work to stop it. We came for Pinatubo, and it’s surely the beginning. But there’s no way it’s the only goal.”
“What we want to know,” Noor says, “what Cal told us to tell you she needs you to find out, is what does Eury Mirov want with all that biomass?”
For once, John doesn’t have a clue. Whatever Eury is planning, it’s nothing she ever shared with him. Some new ambition, arrived only after he left. “And if she won’t tell me?”
“There’s more than one way to find out,” Julie says. “But you’re the best chance we have to do it without violence.”
Without violence. Julie the soldier, pitching John the pacifist. The sun tips toward the trees, the shadows shift and lengthen and swell. For a moment, they don’t speak, only rest together in the sweet-smelling air moving beneath the trees. Two weeks ago, they were deep in the Western Sacrifice Zone; now they’re reunited in this thriving place, seeing how life might flourish again on heavily managed earth, how data and technology might create a community, even if that goodness isn’t without cost, when everyone here has to give up their free will, the agency to make their days their own.
“We’re almost out of time,” John says. They need to be back in their assigned neighborhoods soon, need to be sure their pebbles don’t register outside their homes after curfew. “And I’ve got a long walk ahead of me.”
“Better you be where Earthtrust can find you,” Julie agrees, pushing him gently in the direction of the road. “Because sooner or later, Eury Mirov is coming to collect.”
“Before we go,” John says, flexing his hand, watching the colored lights scroll beneath the skin. “Have you seen Cal? Is she back?”
Julie says, “She’s here, John. But it’s better if she stays away. We want you to get caught. We don’t want Cal to get caught with you.”
John starts to object, but what else is there to say? There are no guarantees, only risks they should minimize if they can. The sunlight slants through the trees, red-winged blackbirds flit through the branches, the breeze carries the distant joys of happy Volunteers. Whatever they do next, John wants to do it without endangering the laughing people he hears, the people for whom this Farm has become a refuge. No matter how compromised it is, no matter how suspect Earthtrust’s motives are, it could be home enough for many. But if Eury can’t be convinced to abandon Pinatubo, then stopping its launch might mean dismantling Earthtrust, which might mean the end of the Farm—and if the Farm fell, where else could its people go?
It was something they’d only rarely discussed, in all their years of planning. It’d been easier to imagine a victimless success from the abandoned Sacrifice Zone, already evacuated and uninhabited. There, he’d been able to free the land without hurting anyone else; at the Farm, nothing would be so morally simple, so bloodlessly clean.
Walking the tramways alone after leaving Noor and Julie, John admits to himself why he hasn’t tried to learn the names of any other Volunteers this past week, despite long days working alongside them, despite sharing meals and watching their children play. He knew he couldn’t risk knowing them, couldn’t risk his small circle of affection getting any larger, not so close to the end.
Risking Cal and Julie and Noor and Mai—risking Eury too—was already as high a price as he could bear.
C-433
The translucent photovoltaic bubble whirrs pleasantly over the frozen surface of the glacier, its gyroscopic floor leveling C as the craft pops and bobs over half-remembered ice ledges and ridges of snow-crusted rock. The memories are the remainder’s, but the remainder is C too, its multitudes continuing to collapse into him as he ages into his third week, offering knowledge he needs: he studies how to operate the bubble’s controls, either with the rung-summoned haptic console or through the rung itself, his every thought translatable into motion; he learns the double tap of the right temple below the right horn that overlays the AR display, then how to mute O’s captured voice when the keening becomes unbearable.
C navigates the glacial shelf with a combination of thought and automation, swerving the bubble around questionable stretches of thinner ice, avoiding obvious crevasses leading Below, into the dark world he no longer believes he’ll see. Passing the place where C-432 was fatally wounded, C-433 refuses to retrieve the abandoned winch. What would be the point? Even if he descended Below and retrieved something usable, he would have to return to the crawler to recycle it, and that he’d made sure he’d never be able to do again.
A choice made not for his sake but for the sake of the barkspot.
As the bubble veers west, C worries the new growth, his fingers polishing it into a smooth keloid of worn wood, one undeniably growing, spreading, multiplying. As he’d prepped a store of nutrient paste and the other supplies he’d need to leave the crawler, another barkspot had appeared lower on his neck, twice as wide as the first; while he readied and loaded the translucent photovoltaic bubble, another had grown on his left cheek, begun from a sore he felt forming inside his mouth, where he’d explored its sharp weight with his tongue. By the time he discovered how to download O into the bubble’s computer, leaving the crawler entirely uninhabited, there was bark beneath his temple, bark atop his left biceps, along the ridge of his left hip. Another, another, and another, all together making a constellation of wood creeping down his left side, while the original barkspot on his left shoulder tripled in size overnight before producing a single bumpy bud, a gnarled pea bulged atop the skin.
A bud, a word C barely managed to remember until, as he left the crawler forever, the bud burst open, C yelping with surprise as from his shoulder there spilled forth a tiny thorned branch bearing a single green leaf, the world’s longest winter granting this smallest of springs.
C-433 isn’t the best creature in his lineage, not the brightest nor the most whole. His skin itches everywhere, he frequently shakes with muscle tremors and disturbances of the bowels, his vision is poor and his hearing muffled; his bones are partly recycled plastics and metals, his loose joints rattle and scrape in their sockets without relief. But despite
all this creature’s weaknesses, there is boldness too. Before he left the crawler forever, he’d entered the Loom chamber, accompanied by O’s careening song playing as loud as the room’s speakers would permit. With the remainder’s complaints drowned out, he did what no other creature like him had dared, in however many unimaginable years they’d each inhabited the crawler:
C-433 lifted a rusted red fire axe in his clawed blue hands, the barely audible remainder screaming for him to stop as he set out to destroy the Loom.
At first the damage the axe did didn’t seem like much, hardly enough. After all, the Loom had been built to last, and C-433 was such a dismal creature. But then he remembered the organic recycling tube, its glass walls, without which the pink acid that had melted his hundreds of bodies would leak uselessly across the floor. With a single blow, he shattered the glass, the housing crashing apart into thousands of shards. Gingerly lifting his sensitive hoof over the sharp debris scattered everywhere, relying on his metal other to take the most dangerous steps, C-433 left without looking back.
Four hundred and thirty-three creatures named C had emerged from the Loom’s extruders, a lineage of approximate sameness producing a being who was both ancestor and descendant, a creature who hadn’t otherwise propagated, hadn’t made any mark except deprivation, who hadn’t evolved, hadn’t thrived, who’d done nothing but continue recursively, looping back, spiraling in, making himself and the world smaller and lesser with every turn. Now, with the Loom destroyed, C-433 commits himself fully: no matter what, he can never retreat. Unless he reaches Black Mountain, unless he protects the barkspot and delivers it to this one facility the map room suggested might still be populated, unless he finds there a way to save whatever tree the spreading bark might become, unless he accomplishes all this, he knows he’ll be the last of his line. He and his tree are saved together or doomed together. He leaves no other way.
From C’s perch at the center of the bubble, he surveys a landscape that in every direction is only gradations of bright white, dull gray, shiny blue. Before leaving, he’d cut down the map room’s wall-sized chart depicting the twelve crawler sites across the continent, plus Black Mountain far to the west. Unrolling its scroll, he tries to match the map generated by his rung with this plastic copy, but the two worlds lack enough correspondence for him to plot a route directly, and despite its autonomous systems the bubble cannot navigate itself—its sensors read satellite failure and unknown location when C tries to feed the haptic console the map’s coordinates. But the bubble can follow compass directions, so: west then. The local terrain the map suggests remains buried beneath the Ice, its topography surely reconfigured by the glacier; what lies beyond is impossible to guess. C steers the bubble west then southwest then west again, routing around icefalls and crevasses and rocky outcroppings looming skyward; he travels every day beneath a sky-spanning solar halo floating above the glacier’s surface, the pale orb of the sun ringed white against white as it moves across the sky; at night, he rests inside the motionless bubble, seeing through its curves dark sky-obscuring cloud cover only rarely broken by the dim pinpricks of stars, their distant light too dull to fully penetrate the atmosphere.
Without the advancement of the bark, how would C clock the passing of time? A new day passes, almost the same day that passed yesterday. So little distinguishes one kilometer of flat glacier from any other that novelty approaches zero. There are obstacles to avoid but all of a type, the bubble deviating from its heading to skirt unsteady surfaces, to swerve around icefalls and fields of broken stone; the bubble corrects course as soon as it can, turning west a dozen kilometers south of where it left its route. Floating a half-meter above the surface, the bubble leaves no trace of its passage, the ice remains unmarked in every direction C looks. His stomach rumbles but he rarely eats; every mouthful of nutrient paste strains his limited stores, while his stomach revolts at its nothing taste, the nausea that followed him out of the Loom seemingly permanent. Eating does nothing to forestall the cramps, leaving him doubled over atop his hooves, racked with croaking cries until his stomach unclenches. The barkspots advance day by day, C checks their progress after every rest: he touches the bark obsessively, careful to avoid handling the leafy stem too often, instead running his fingers over the rutted wrinkles of bark climbing the left side of his throat, his jaw, his stiffening cheeks. At the bark’s many edges, his skin furrows then hardens alarmingly, but for now any dismay he feels is tempered by the surprise of newness, of seeing a living thing striving to thrive.
The Ice is without ecosystem or community; C expects to find neither life nor civilization until he reaches Black Mountain. He has only the map room’s binders’ description of the world beyond the Ice to guide him, having memorized but barely understood their protocols for tilling the thawed earth, for how to use the Loom to replant the soil or repopulate a biome, all purest fantasies to this creature who’s never seen soil except in the caves and tunnels Below, who’s never seen any other living thing except these barkspots, his woody parasites.
The bubble has an array of sensors, but mostly they tell C what he already knows: the flatness of the glacier, its only occasional changes in elevation, the predicted time of sunrise and sunset, the cycle of the moon. C navigates a narrow valley of blued ice, the bubble’s glass scraping as he squeezes around tight corners; he zooms quickly across a snowless expanse lacking either obstacle or landmark. He accomplishes other crossings, makes other passages through and across and over features he can’t name. Much of what he sees meets in him a profound ignorance, a lack of language for the conditions he traverses: wherever the first C originated, he must not have needed to name the many kinds of snow, hadn’t had to learn to read the dangers lurking in slight variations in glacial conditions.
C travels hundreds of kilometers without the landscape appreciably changing; wherever he goes, his ignorance travels along. The Ice offers no quarter, only its expanse. The bubble’s computer and the rung in C’s neck conspire to keep the bubble on a generally westward trajectory, toward where the map scroll suggests he’ll find Black Mountain. The days pass slowly, offering few prompts or triggers for C’s memories; he becomes restless, walking circles around the constrained space of the gyroscopic floor. As time seems to stall, he combats his melancholy by focusing on the barest signs of progress: the digital odometer on the command console, its number slowly climbing; the inexorable march of the barkspots, the once discrete keloids growing together into inflexible stretches, wood slowly overtaking the surface of his skin.
With no one to talk to, C’s facial expression rarely changes; he doesn’t realize it’s become difficult to speak until the bark’s weight begins dragging down the left side of his face. He struggles to choke down his next mouthful of nutrient paste, his feeding tube clenched in one panicky fist. Paste dribbles from his lips and he starts again, forcing himself to swallow carefully, working around some obstruction, his throat restricted by the hardening barkflesh running now from temple to shoulder, cheek to jowl.
The next day he wakes to discover he can no longer fully open his left eye, his expression forced into a squint by the bark covering his cheekbone, the wood dully warm to the touch. Before noon, the eye disappears completely behind another patch of fast-growing black bark, and now C panics, what joy and surprise he once felt having fled in an instant. He summons his toolbox from the cargo container beneath the bubble’s floor, his left hand shaking as he retrieves an orange-handled knife, its edge pitted with rust. Clenching it tightly, C musters what courage he has, then places the blade against a low ledge of bark, at the edge of where it’s slowly advanced across his right forearm. With a trembling grip, he slides the blade along the base of the bark’s farthest growth, seeking a protruding lip under which he can slip the knife, something like the edge of a scab lifting away from the skin.
He expects pain, but the first stretch of bark comes off easily, falling to the floor in woody chunks. Where the bark was, the skin beneath is reddened, raw, but un
deniably skin, a reassuring sight—but then when C moves the blade farther in that differentiation disappears. Where the bark’s too stubborn to flake away from the flesh, he tries to cut into it from above, setting the unserrated blade to sawing at a stretch of bark farther up the forearm, near his stiffened elbow.
This time the hurt comes immediately, as soon as the blade bites the barkspot.
As C moans, O’s voice cries its own painful song, O’s old complaint merging with C’s new one. He presses down again, angrily sawing until he can’t take any more pain; when he yanks the knife free a red sap pulses from the wound, oozing down his arm.
Blood and not blood. Creature and tree, leaking together.
C drops the knife to apply pressure to the cut, but the wound is not flesh, the skin not skin. The sap globs through his fingers, not clotting as blood would, only hardening as sap does.
Afterward, C’s good hand is sticky and filthy, his cut arm is covered with the reddish amber of his blood-sap, hardening into the crevices of the cut bark. Still, the operation is at least partially a success. He might never be able to reverse the tree’s growth, but at least he’s learned to prune it. Day after day, he’ll have to trim the bark back from his arm and face and neck, flaking away new growths to slow the bark’s advance.
If this tree has made C’s body into its earth, then when he is finished, he tells it, it can have all of him it wants. It’s a ridiculous statement but he doesn’t know why. He’s too new a creature, the coming of the barkspots too novel an event. He doesn’t understand that nothing truly wild was ever controlled without pain, that no living world was ever conquered without consequence.