by Matt Bell
When the new beetles take flight, C cries out first in alarm, then in delight. All this time, he’d thought a beetle was a thing that crawled.
The air fills with buzzing and clacking, bright music, the creaking of bark, a human voice expressing joyful surprise. The translucent photovoltaic bubble is tonight a globe full of life, life barely lit beneath a dim heat lamp but warm enough and temporarily safe within a sustenance of song, the bubble’s globe a glass world around which heavy wet snow falls and falls and falls.
C’s joy doesn’t last. When he wakes the following morning in silent gray light, he finds his flowers wilted, their blossoms drooping. A few beetles buzz the air, but without last night’s frenzied ardor; others litter the floor, their upturned bodies unmoving. Summoning the command console, he stares at the barely lit battery indicator, hopelessly willing its bar to fill. He can force the bubble forward, but if he empties the reserves, he’ll face the same fate as the inhabitants of the dark crawler crashed against the field of thorns; if he proceeds, he risks not just forward movement but heat and light, air and water. If he stays, the snow might bury the bubble, preventing it from charging.
Everything is running down: the bubble’s battery, C’s overtaken body, the dying beetles. He reaches out his good hand, sends a ping from the rung to call the nutrient tube snaking up from its port in the flooring, then sucks greedily at the paste’s thinnest gruel yet.
The weak sun remains masked behind dense clouds dumping more snow, the combination enough to keep the monoliths nearly silent, a grid of creaking, crackling speakers, the carved messages now obscured. C checks the craft’s battery level, notes the quick-dropping number. As long as the sun breaks through, there’ll be enough power to move forward safely. But at midmorning the clouds blacken, then spike with green lightning. The bubble steams as C wipes down its fogging glass in broad circles, trying to keep visibility clear, though all there is to see is more snow falling, drifts piling up around the bubble, forcing him to lift the craft higher into the air, expending more power to keep it from being buried.
It snows until dusk. And then it snows all night.
And in the morning, the second spent among the monoliths, it’s snowing still.
A whole day wasted. C’s furious with himself, but there’s nothing to do to fix his mistaken delay but hurry on, beginning too late through the eerie silence of the snow-covered monoliths, toward whatever next obstacle lies beyond.
The monolith grid fills a valley several kilometers deep, but at its far edge its uniformity breaks down: here some columns are toppled and shattered, while others are riddled with holes or bolted with cracks. The bubble exits the cramped valley into a wider bowl, a flat oval covered in fresh powder. The bubble’s radar sweeps the path ahead, offers C’s rung a provisional map: visibility is nearly nil, but C believes that if the snow lifted he’d find the entrance to Black Mountain across this last plane, buried in the hidden rock face. The only other features he can see are two mounds a hundred meters off, humps of earth whose purpose he can’t imagine.
C pilots the bubble slowly forward, O’s voice rising as they accelerate toward the mounds, then barking out sharp exhalations as the bubble’s repulsors begin to brown out, not all at once but in random sequence, the bubble’s battery no longer able to power all the repulsors continuously. The bubble lists and jostles, its gyroscopic floor tilts unsteadily. C leans against his tree side for balance and hears a sharp crack as the bark near his left knee breaks painfully. Somewhere below the kneecap, he’s bleeding sap; he grits his proper teeth against his plastic ones, rights his balance the best he can, and pushes on.
As the bubble approaches the twin earth mounds, he hears a new noise: a grinding, a clattering. He looks back and forth between the two mounds, O’s upset and upsetting voice making thought difficult. C watches as the top of each mound slowly rises, revealing the lid’s mechanism, and from within each mound a perforated barrel slowly comes into view, turning grindingly toward the bubble. Machine gun—the name comes quickly enough, its danger vivid even in C’s dim mind. Now he reconsiders the cracked and pitted monoliths he passed: as the machine-gun nests continue their creaking turn toward him, he imagines the last crawler’s inhabitants crossing the approach plane on foot, having navigated the field of thorns and braved the madness of the monoliths, only to be gunned down on this last stretch of open land, bullets riddling their bodies, clattering off the columns behind them.
C should flee, but the bubble’s battery is depleted, his breathing is shallow, and his stomach empty. If he advances, the turning weapons might fire. If he retreats, he’ll die against the monoliths, with O’s voice torturing him until the bubble’s power dies, then the columns eternally singing their dirges over his spherical grave, keening on whenever the sun shines.
He pushes forward, the command bouncing from his rung to the bubble’s repulsors; when the craft lurches, he catches his balance with a second sick crunching in the trunk of his left leg, a spraying seep of blood-sap puddling the floor. Only a lucky failure of ancient machinery offers any jolt of hope: the leftmost machine gun slips its track, falls over uselessly. But the other continues to rise, tracking the bubble’s progress, tracking C, the human-enough being peering through the bubble’s translucent shell.
“There must be something we can do,” C says to the remainder, what little is left, its many voices so assimilated into his own personality that when it responds, isn’t it only C-433 answering himself, his frustrations accusing and angry, viscerally felt?
We never should have left. We could’ve lived forever, if only we hadn’t been you.
“No,” C says. “Or yes, but I don’t care. Because I chose this life. Because I choose it still.” The snowfall is unceasing, the way forward unsure, the destination close, the intervening danger present: with a thought transmitted through the rung, with a gesture of his right paw against the haptic console, C chooses again. He chooses whatever future might lie beyond this moment: Onward toward whatever happens next, toward the moment where his story ends, whether the machine gun fires, whether the machine gun does not. Through the dim light and the blowing snow, he watches the functional machine gun nest loom closer, its barrel spinning up, the ungreased sound of its revolutions audible across the last fifty meters, now the last forty. Any second now. The craft rocks forward unsteadily, its repulsors firing on one side and then the other—and then thirty meters from the machine-gun nests the repulsors fail completely, the translucent photovoltaic bubble dropping to the ground with a deafening crack.
O screams—O, whose existence is tied to the bubble and the battery and the data bank into which it’s been downloaded; O, who’s been so long disembodied, so long unable to speak in anything other than song—O screams a single unbroken note so brutally sustained C’s eardrums pop and his nose bleeds and his beetles rise into the air to buzz fiercely against the bubble’s curves. Outside the glass the machine gun spins its perforated barrel faster and faster, the belt feeding its chamber starting to vibrate with malice.
C’s fur crawls with fear, his leaves quiver atop their thorny branches, amid wavering purple grass. He closes his eyes, waits for the end—but then the machine gun’s barrel slows instead, emitting a rusty whine.
By the time C finally dares to look, the machine gun is still, its whine quieted. Now two figures appear from the far edge of visibility, both emitting a pale green light whose glows cuts through the snowstorm’s blank white accumulation, both exactly unlike anything C thinks he’s ever seen.
C’s never seen another mammal, much less another living person. He has, until this moment, thought that what it meant to be fully human was to be like him, with horns and claws, hooves and fur.
Before this, he never imagined he was the anomaly.
But then it’s not like either of the figures approaching the bubble is exactly human, not what was last meant by the word, in the long gone world that was.
Part Three
Eury
&nbs
p; At dawn Eury Mirov appears on every telescreen in the Farm, shaking hands in Syracuse, Brussels, Beijing: the American president, the president of the European Commission, the Chinese general secretary. Three geographically distant and asynchronous events presented as if simultaneous, a seeming impossibility even though the Chinese newscast and the American one are each labeled live in the corner of their feeds. One or both are surely erroneous, but so much news is misleading, if not outright faked, that it’s impossible to know which one might be wrong. In all three cities, Eury Mirov delivers the same speech, each video playing side by side, each Eury announcing the Pinatubo Project’s readiness with the same exacting precision, in the same well-practiced cadence. Her speech is grandiose, sweeping, promising everything but purposely vague, the most granular details unnecessary, she says.
“In three days,” Eury explains, three times across three feeds, “Earthtrust will deliver a massive payload of sulfuric aerosols into the stratosphere, beginning the process of cooling our shared planet. We funded the research, we tested the results and designed the fail-safes, we have prepared ourselves to successfully lead the most audacious effort in human history. Our teams in each Earthtrust VAC—in Ohio, in Bavaria, in Overberg and Sichuan and the Punjab, in Chile and Brazil and so many other places—all have gathered the necessary materials, technology, and expertise.”
She presents no facts, no figures; offers no diagrams or video mock-ups. The only evidence on offer is Eury Mirov herself. Three times, she says, “By itself, this effort will not save the world. And still there will be sacrifices to come, there will be unforeseen hardships. But together with our Volunteers we will push back the danger to our civilization another hundred years, maybe more. We will give ourselves time to save our children and grandchildren; we can make time for our children and grandchildren to save themselves.”
What Eury doesn’t say is how geoengineering is a trap disguised as a solution. If Pinatubo succeeds, then yes, its stratospheric aerosol scattering will give humanity time to draw down new carbon emissions and to sequester what’s already in the atmosphere, after which the solar-blocking aerosols could safely be allowed to dissipate—but if carbon emissions continue to accumulate, as they have for three hundred years, then any disruption to Pinatubo might result in global temperatures quickly and irreversibly rising four or five or six degrees Celsius, causing every worst-case catastrophe to arrive everywhere at once.
What else Eury doesn’t say: even if Pinatubo works, our children will grow up beneath a white sky, the blue every human has known hidden above a cooling layer of glittering sulfates.
Two-thirds of the way through Eury’s speech, the Beijing feed is interrupted by an unheard commotion off-screen. The Chinese camera slides sideways, then falls over, leaving Eury speaking in Syracuse and Brussels while the feed between them blue-screens.
In the two remaining feeds, Eury says, “Ten years ago, governments everywhere believed it would soon become impossible to feed their populations, but Earthtrust found a way. Our engineered orchards of supertrees, our drought-resistant crops, our incredibly productive cattle and pigs who can be raised to twice the size on half the water, these were our gifts to your peoples. We’ve taken your refugees onto our farms, we’ve given them safe shelter, clean food and water, education and health care, meaningful work. Our Volunteers come from every country and practice every religion, but their differences do not exclude them from our united purpose, laboring to feed the world. And are you not fed? Whoever you are, wherever you are, our Volunteers put food on your table. While the rest of the world burned, our Volunteers regreened the earth they were given, making the soil beneath their feet productive again.”
All over the world people stop to watch Eury speak, Eury dressed in her monochromatic asymmetric cloak, futuristic clothing for a woman promising to make the future; Eury with her practiced gestures identical in the streams still broadcasting from Brussels and Syracuse; Eury locking eyes with the camera and smiling her famous Eury Mirov smile, saying, “One way or another, Earthtrust will always do what is necessary.”
In Brussels, the parliament of the European Union votes to denounce the plan, over the objections of certain members who have to be dragged from the chambers by EU soldiers, the representatives of the nations hardest hit by rising sea waters and other disasters screaming for Pinatubo’s necessity. In Syracuse, at an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, the Chinese and Russian ambassadors veto any chance for approval of the project, their vetoes loudly objected to by an unconvincing American president.
What’s left of television journalism explodes, speculation and righteous anger leaving twelve pundits on-screen at a time, everyone speaking over one another, no one listening.
An hour later, Eury appears again, her image pushing the angry screaming faces to the periphery. On the steps of the repurposed capitol in Syracuse, Eury speaks while behind her stands the American president, his hands clasped, head down, cowed. “The United States government,” she says, “in accordance with the terms of Earthtrust’s territorial governance agreement over the Western Sacrifice Zone and the continental Voluntary Agricultural Communities, has pledged its support for the America-first deployment of the Pinatubo Project. The rest of the world has three days to accept our offer, or else Earthtrust will proceed alone.”
Now Earthtrust proves it’s become one of the world’s superpowers, an empire dispersed, based everywhere and nowhere. The company’s agreements overseas are substantially the same as in the United States: each VAC is in practice a sovereign land governed by its own laws and rights, not answerable to the host country from which it was carved. And because there’s no nation left that can grow enough food to feed its people without Eury Mirov’s help, any country that attacks the VAC inside its border dooms its food supply.
On every telescreen in the Farm—on every screen in all the VACs she controls, in all the territories she’s conquered across the world—Eury Mirov beams while the American president cringes, red-faced, hair amiss, beaten.
Raising one black-gloved hand, Eury brandishes an unnecessary prop, a red button set in chromed steel, brought along to sell the moment’s drama. “In three days,” she says, “we save the world.”
At the press of the button, a timer appears in the corner of each feed, the countdown quickly spreading to every other channel, pushed to every screen worldwide.
In three days, Eury promises, the world changes forever.
Chapman
The first spring of Nathaniel’s last decade, he and Chapman gather their seeds from a cider mill only miles from the Worth homestead. For the first time, they compete for supplies with other apple planters, winter-worn cash-poor homesteaders going directly to the source. In the mill’s yard, Nathaniel shouts curses at a rival arrived early, a black-eyed man half his age and twice his size; for his trouble Nathaniel gets shoved down in the muddy lot. With his faunness hidden inside his human skin, Chapman’s nervous, unsure in a fight. He’s never hurt a man in his life, but at least as a faun he’d had the latent strength of his claws, the ready power of a hooved kick or a toss of the horns. As a man he is only calloused hands, wiry muscle, unremarkable in this state where every man’s body might be reduced to callouses and scars, his spirit made a pragmatic meanness born of desperation, fed by greed.
Chapman pulls the attacker off his brother, but the man’s already gathered the best of the mill’s offerings. The brothers content themselves with what remains, less viable seeds shattered by the millstone, reluctantly dug from the stinking shoveled piles of already-rotted pomace.
“It’s not enough,” Nathaniel says, looking into the ruin of apple flesh inside his half-filled bag. “Barely enough seeds for a single planting.”
“That lack gives us time to tend last year’s nurseries,” Chapman soothes, thinking of all the trees he’s not yet tested, all their untasted apples going to waste. “And then on the way back, we’ll collect what we know we’re owed.”
Nathaniel scowls, but at least it’s a plan. A single nursery, planted as far west as they can manage, then a loop through the orchards Nathaniel sowed while Chapman was missing. And all the while, Chapman can search for his Tree, safely avoiding his pursuers, who cannot seem to find him in his human form. It’s a good plan, he thinks, as they begin again their yearly pilgrimage, but now there’s less forest waiting, now there are fewer isolated campfires in sheltered dales, now many trees they once knew almost by name have gone missing, cut down for log cabins and general stores, for millhouses and mine outbuildings, or else burned to make space for cornfields and barley, grazing grasses for cattle or sheep, pigs or goats.
“This,” Nathaniel says, surveying the still-new State before them, “this, brother, is where we’ll make our fortune”—but before he’s finished speaking another settler burdened with his own heavily laden pack shoulders by, pushing Nathaniel roughly aside, transforming his accustomed speech into a furious stammer.
That first night, Chapman lies restless on his bedroll, trying to will himself to sleep, to dream of the Worths’ sweet laughter, their kind words. Instead, one of the witching women appears, a nightmare crouched low over spindly legs, her gums smacking, yellow teeth clacking woodenly around missing others, her shape hunched and bulging. The witch’s skin is wet with perspiration or precipitation, her mane of hair falling over a topography of flesh, mountains of engorged breasts and a sunken valley of belly, her shape less a body than a landscape; a blizzard begins, piling white and clean atop the witch’s shoulders, blessing the scene Chapman dreams with a false holiness, as if such a creature as the witch could be beautiful, as if such a monster could be innocent as the driven snow.