by Matt Bell
He still doesn’t understand, not exactly, but he’s also no longer sure he wants to. Already he tires of Eury’s self-aggrandizing explanations, her righteous justifications that have always made him feel small, unambitious. Which isn’t to say he’s not also attracted to her unending confidence, her enormous will. Unable to stop himself, he asks, “Ghost is some kind of organic robot? A cyborg?”
Eury laughs. “No, John. She’s a wolf. And the wolf is an incredible creature. The first wolves evolved four million years ago, and they’ve been exactly like the one we made Ghost from for three hundred thousand years. All their incredible history, all that survival—all we did to them was make sure some might survive, not now but later. In the meantime, yes, we did modify a few for our own uses. They’re sterile, of course, with trackers and other tech embedded, so they don’t escape to breed or otherwise contaminate the remaining biosphere. Wolves like Ghost are only for this world, the one that’s ending. Later they will just be wolves again, as unmodified as we can make them, freed of our wants and our uses.”
Again John’s curiosity overwhelms his reluctance. “Where are you storing the samples?” he asks. “Are they all here in Ohio?” Somewhere in the Tower, there must be a genetic library, DNA sequences, biological blueprints: instructions for how to populate a world. Whatever Eury first desired, whatever the Tower was originally designed to be, it has become an ark. An ark capable of destroying the world. An ark capable of saving it. Pinatubo and Ararat both.
Eury says, “We’ve designated gene repositories at various Earthtrust sites, here and abroad. We’re keeping DNA samples in cryofreeze, as well as digital copies of each scanned creature, in case the samples are lost. The costs in both space and processing power are immense, but Earthtrust brings in immense revenue.” She gestures around at the atrium, the Tower, the Farm beyond. “We are, after all, running most of a country here, and we’re absolutely integral to the success of many others. Earthtrust VACs prop up governments all over the world now, and at each of our VACs we’ve constructed a version of this facility, with the same capacity to house endangered specimens, sequence their genomes, and prepare them for reintroduction once conditions improve. Each is also part of Pinatubo, one of the many injection sites necessary to quickly achieve reliable stratospheric coverage.”
“And all those other nations signed on to this?” If so, Eury’s grown even more cunning than he’s imagined. She’d tried before, in the earliest days of Earthtrust, without success.
“No, no one has agreed,” Eury says. “Not even the United States. Truthfully, the time to act was fifty years ago. Now more radical measures are necessary. While Pinatubo cools the globe, we’ll deacidify the oceans, replant the forests, renew the soil. And when the work is done, we’ll put back the plants and animals. Although that part isn’t public, likely won’t be for years.” She mockingly throws up her hands. “The public still panics when someone clones a lab rat. How do you think they’ll react when they find out I’m ready to print an entire biosphere?”
“But you’re not ready to do that.” He’s sure of it. He’s sure he wants to be sure. “Because it’s impossible.”
“Because there are complications. That’s what Pinatubo is for: to slow down the crisis while we work. If we have another fifty years, another hundred, it’ll be enough.” Eury Mirov has never lacked for ambition. Never once has she flinched away from the biggest ideas, the boldest claims.
“Plus,” John says, “if your plan doesn’t work, you and a few friends can always move to Mars.”
Eury laughs. “The spaceport! Yes, possibly. Who knows? We’re building it. The scale of space travel we envision is incredibly expensive, incredibly difficult, and it will only become more so without a stable situation here to support and supply the effort. So yes, we have been working on terraforming technology, but we don’t have to go to Mars to give it a try.”
Her confidence! John has never once felt so sure of anything. Maybe Eury’s telling the truth, maybe everything she promises will soon be possible. He doesn’t know anymore, can’t think straight: even after years away, her charisma is as intoxicating as ever, her quicker intellect just as capable of overpowering his slow and careful reasoning.
She says, “John, after Pinatubo, we’ll terraform the earth back to what it was. Or else we’ll make it better.”
Eury moves to John’s side again, this time to take the fur square from him, an object he didn’t even realize he was still clenching. Eury lays it down on the table, flipping it over to flatten it with a palm before returning it to its place: the back is too smooth, eerily lacking the connective tissues of real skin, but Eury doesn’t seem to notice, or if she notices she doesn’t care.
“Come on,” she says, walking back toward the penthouse stairs, Ghost already following at her heels. “Let me show you how Orpheus works.”
C-433
C spends one restless night atop the glacier’s sheer western wall, dreaming fitfully of abandoning the bubble to descend the cliffside hand over hoof, hacking holds into the Ice. Thanks to the remainder, weeks-old C already knows how to skillfully wield the ice axe, how to avoid the breakable crust of snow bridges covering crevasses, how to guard against shattering a seemingly solid wall. But despite all that knowledge, nearly every previous C died because of some presumably preventable mistake. And none of them also had to protect the barkspot, its branchlets, all the leafy emergent tree C’s sworn to deliver to whoever guards Black Mountain.
In C’s last dream before waking, he leaves the bubble behind, dooming the barkspots to wither and freeze and die; when he wakes up, sprawled and sore on the bubble’s floor, he stands to begin searching for routes the craft might be able to navigate, finding the tree’s burden even heavier than the day before. Shortly after dawn, he steers toward one possible route, manipulating the haptic controls carefully to guide the craft down a narrow chute dropping precipitously toward a landing spied from the level above. Next comes a series of ridges he wouldn’t trust to hold his weight but that he hopes provides enough surface for the craft’s repulsors to grip, the bubble bouncing above the unsteady ground. It takes an hour to plot a path to a broader shelf, a creaking expanse where he parks to study the route forward, a narrow way broken across the cracking surface of the Ice, which here splits into other chutes and moraines, boulder-strewn ravines leading down into ice caves, passages plummeting into crevasses, other topographical features C can’t summon the language to describe.
On a slim switchbacking slope at the glacier’s edge, a sudden gust of wind slams the craft against the inside wall of ice, the bubble’s gyroscopic floor responding quickly but not fast enough to keep C on his hooves. Instinctually, he grabs at the command console, a confusion of haptics and actual substance; he falls through it to hit the curved wall with the bark side of his body, sounding a loud cracking noise he hopes isn’t the bubble’s glass. Fallen leaves strew amid broken bits of branches; his good hand roams his stiffening tree side, uselessly pressing fallen patches of bark back into place. O’s song rises in alarm as the wind batters the bubble, the angry drone filling the air until C barks the command for mute more times than is strictly necessary.
The bubble quiets until the only sounds are the gusts rocking the exposed craft and C’s wheezing breath. Sap leaks from the bark half of his face, his left horn aches at its root. It’s dangerous to proceed but there’s no other choice: even if he wanted to reverse course, the slope he’s descended is angled too steeply for the bubble to climb back up.
C dismisses the command console, its pretense of solidity and control. He plants his hooves at the center of the bubble, pulls a deep breath into his battered chest, the lung on the bark side filling painfully slowly. The connection between C’s rung and the craft’s computer is invisibly wireless, but he imagines it as a silver tether tendriled between himself and the bubble, this globe in which he’s spent the majority of this short life. Take hold, he tells himself, and then he tries, reaching out with his
mind, wrapping a thought tight around the tether, and as he does so he feels the connection suddenly strengthen, the bubble’s controls becoming more responsive to his urgings than ever before.
C’s flesh is bruised and his bark is breaking, but he and his tree aren’t finished yet. The bubble shudders forward again. He adjusts his mind’s grip as fresh gusts thrash the craft against the ice wall, each impact threatening to bounce the bubble off its ledge. The slope is broken up by flatter shelves but the shelves are broken too, even the widest full of unsteady icefalls, spiked fields of blue and gray ice. The edges of the icefalls force the bubble’s repulsors to shake and the craft to wobble; the gyroscopic floor holds C as steady as it can but not steady enough. He stumbles, he rises, he despairs; visibility diminishes as the craft makes its way lower, the bubble dropping through a thick layer of cloud until C sees nothing, not with his open good eye, not with his bad one, stuck shut. He closes both eyes to rely on the bubble’s sensors instead, letting them feed data directly to his rung. The craft has short-range ice-penetrating radar and other arrays, their inputs synthesizable into a geometric model he thinks he can move through.
Fast-forming ice crackles across the bubble’s surface, the moisture of the cloud layer fogging the inside of its walls. C is terrified but knows he must not delay. He proceeds in fits and starts, trying to navigate the model the rung feeds him. The glacier creaks and whines, the craft hammers the wall with each new gust of wind. He listens to his heartbeat, he tracks the blood pulsing in his temples, he hears sap moving inside the bark overlaying his left ear.
C hears all this, but what he doesn’t hear is O’s voice.
He unmutes the song, flinching as it fills the bubble at an earsplitting, skin-crawling volume, O’s drone painfully repeating until C feels like a hammer is being rubbed against the contours of his skull.
O, he says, speaking not aloud but from somewhere inside the rung. I need your help.
What C needs is to pilot the craft down the glacial wall, through the layer of clouds, to the earth below, to whatever earth turns out to be—and whatever O is tries, whatever O is sings a new song meant to help, a song of passage, a song of escape, a song of flickering: the bubble falls; C falls inside it; the barkspot that’s long since become anything but a spot falls with him. As the bubble descends the glacier, C feels himself giving up control, giving in. The invisible tether between him and the bubble’s computer is still there, still thrumming with activity, but it’s no longer his conscious mind that guides the bubble’s movements along the narrow ice ledges, through the clouds frosting and freezing the bubble’s glass.
After a time, C realizes, it’s not O who helps him steer the bubble but somehow the tree, the tree that is or isn’t still him is rooted now to the craft’s computer, rooted through C by the tether he imagined. In the next moment the bubble breaks through the cloud layer, zooming frictionless and fast, leaving the icefalls for a rocky slope of gravel and frozen boulders and trickling water, the first truly flowing water C has ever seen, a sight he barely has time to register. The tree and the craft seek the safest way down in fits and starts; the bubble’s shell spins and spins, but this time the gyroscope keeps C on his feet. After hundreds of cycles lived atop the near flatness of the Ice, he enters a world of sudden altitude, of horrendous sucking gravity. The world below is an impossibility approaching at ever greater speed, rushing up to meet him, until, heart thudding, he feels the craft spin to a stop at the bottom of the glacial wall, the worst of the descent completed without any input from him.
C moves to the front of the bubble, puts his claws against the glass. With his breath steaming the curve, he stares at so much he cannot name, much of it unexpected, unprecedented, unbuttressed by anything in the remainder’s experience. For a moment the landscape shimmers, blurs, then he begins to see, to make sense: this is another world obscured by snow, visibility impeded by new flakes falling nearly sideways in the high winds, but unlike every other world C thinks he’s known, this one is not entirely frozen over.
For what he thinks is the first time in his life, in all the combined lives that constitute the remainder he carries, C looks upon the bare surface of the earth, exposed ground open to the air. So much of it monochrome, so much of it rock reduced to gravel along with everything else pulverized by the passing of the glacier, made broken stone dotted with black ice, covered by drifts of dirty gray snow. By the last light of today’s sun he spies his next destination looming on the horizon, a vision of something he believes he’s previously seen only in the fragments of the Below, twisted and shattered and ground down beneath the Ice. Like with the exposed earth, he cannot at first make sense of what he sees, but as he stares the word to name it rises up in him, naming the sight into solidity: what he sees is a city, shimmering in the far distance, no mirage or illusion but a city real enough, abandoned but not buried, a ruin reachable by following a cracked and shattered black expanse C will any moment now remember to name road.
Chapman
The Worth homestead at Splitlip Creek is a simple clapboard cabin, a few plain rooms organized around a stone chimney, a house not unlike the one where Chapman and Nathaniel were born, a home only Nathaniel remembers. A narrow stream bounds the back of the Worths’ claim, the land a combination of natural meadow and clear-cut forest, the latter dotted with unpulled stumps. Behind the house, on the other side of a pen with three goats and a crooked chicken coop, wait thirty mature trees, grown right where Chapman remembers planting them, their ungathered fruit now heavy on the stem. It’s all Chapman can do not to rush to taste their apples. Instead he concentrates on his shape, tries to keep his faunness tucked within, his hooves vanished inside feet encased in too-stiff shoes, his injury hidden beneath a linen not well enough woven to stop him scratching at his skin.
Nathaniel, worrying at the strain on Chapman’s face, touches his brother’s hand softly. “No one will suspect,” he says. “The Worths will gladly open their home to you, the brother I thought I’d lost forever. The second winter without you, I went east to look for our father, our sisters. But our father is dead, our sisters married and dispersed, the town transformed. So many people crowded along cobblestone avenues, row houses where our farm used to be.” He pauses, his mustache trembling. “I despaired at how impoverished I was, how there was no one anywhere who knew me. But when I came back across Ohio I discovered the Worths working this land we’d planted.”
This was how the family had paid Nathaniel for the trees he planted: not with dollars but with a warm room where he might wait out his winter days. “You did well, brother,” Chapman says, putting an arm around Nathaniel’s stooped shoulders, their physical affection easier now that their shapes are aligned.
Nathaniel beams, then waves Chapman onward toward the cozily lit house. “Come and meet my friends, dear brother, and let them be your friends too.”
The Worths are Jasper, hale and clean-shaven, ten years younger than Nathaniel, dressed in a felt-brimmed hat and wash-grayed shirt and trousers; his talented wife, Grace, her dark hair braided in tight plaits, her skin freckled everywhere it escapes her long-sleeved dress; their clever daughter, Eliza, two years old, black haired and pale, sick with a cough the day the brothers arrive, secure in Grace’s arms when Jasper opens the door.
“Come in, Nathaniel, come in,” Jasper Worth says, hurrying the brothers into the house’s main room, a cozy square of wood made of boards and logs Jasper cut, furnished with furniture he made himself, warmed by a potbelly stove radiating heat from the kitchen. “Bring your friend with you,” Jasper says—and for the first time in their lives, Nathaniel has to introduce Chapman to someone else.
“This is my brother,” Nathaniel explains, his voice cracking, his smile loosening the dirt lining his wrinkles. “This is the lost brother I was telling you about.”
“The prodigal returns,” Jasper exclaims. “Come in, come in, brothers, and let us celebrate your safe arrival.”
Jasper and Nathaniel take their a
ccustomed seats at the table, while Grace proudly shows her new guest the household she and her husband have made, baby Eliza carried along on her hip. She narrates the making of their household, showing curious Chapman the artifacts of her clever industry, of her husband’s tireless endeavors: a rough-edged table hewed while Jasper learned his woodcraft, covered by a linen tablecloth she sewed last winter, made of finer fiber and with better skill than the one it replaced; the matching chairs are likewise draped with quilts Grace knitted, there being no stitch of fabric here she didn’t sew herself. Elsewhere there’s a larder stocked with salted meat her husband butchered, sacks of flour milled from their slim stand of wheat, jars of preserved beets, a cask of cider fermented from their trees.
“Nathaniel planted the apples,” Grace says, smiling. “We’re so thankful for his having preceded us here, for having prepared for us this place.”
“I was here too,” Chapman stammers, unable to keep from claiming his share of the credit. “Ten years ago my brother and I planted this land together.” He remembers the sparkling creek bed, the hot spring sun, the first nursery planted his last season, before the ditchdiggers and the long night. This land was a place of promise then; through Grace’s eyes, he sees it still is.
“I’m sorry,” Grace says, frowning. “I didn’t know.”