by Matt Bell
By the time her armored town car reaches the new government-only airport in Syracuse—by the time a similar car is parking on the runway at Domodedovo—Eury is back aboard her near-empty jet, now beginning its descent into Brussels, where the European Union parliamentarians loyal to her wait for instructions.
For at least a little longer, she needs these allies. From the sky over Brussels, she can see the fires below, the European Quarter besieged, the automated factories bombed at the outskirts of the city, other crucial infrastructure destroyed. Beijing, Moscow, Syracuse, Brussels, all attacked in a matter of hours; the entire world is on fire hours before she plans to save the world from burning. A futile gesture. The only thing these terrorists are doing is increasing the difficulty of what must be done, what Eury will ensure is done, no matter what. On the plane’s satellite phone, she berates her commanders, speaking into all their earpieces at once. “The biomass,” she howls. “Stop the burning, recover the stock, keep the Towers safe.”
If the Towers blow, if the tanks beneath them explode, the future she dreams of is doomed. But for now there’s little else Eury can do herself but wait for Pinatubo to launch.
Separated by a thousand miles, Eury and John think more or less the same thoughts. They think: Not to act is still acting. You cannot win by refusing to play. Even if you play, you will likely lose. So you don’t play along, but you do act. You act, not knowing if what you choose is right. The past is unchangeable, the future unknown. You act, making the best choice you can in the present, the moment that is passing, that is now past.
Did you act while you could?
This close to the end, you might not get to know if you did the right thing.
A moment passes, a moment passes, a moment passes.
In how many of these fleeting moments did you do nothing?
The hatch to the atrium is cleverly concealed: despite having descended through it with Eury on his first visit to the penthouse, John rediscovers it only once Cal’s fist begins pounding from below. Standing above the sound, he squeezes his fist to switch to Eury’s profile, then watches as a square of the office’s wood floor lifts free.
John smiles as the hatch lifts, but his cheer fades when he sees Cal’s bloodied face, when he realizes Julie isn’t following behind. He offers Cal a hand, but she waves him off with her pistol. “The stairs go all the way to the top,” she says. “Just back up.”
Cal emerges slowly, wincing whenever she steps on her sore leg, holding her broken wrist to her stomach, clenching her pistol in her other hand. She’s covered in blood, hers and others’, her clothes sweat soaked and dusty, reeking of tear gas. There’s a story here John wants to hear, but he knows there’s no time: even as John’s querying Julie’s fate, he’s already squeezing his fist. With the purple light unlit, only the orange still steadily glows. He waves off Cal’s answer. How much death has Cal seen today? How much has she caused? What they’ve come here to do is impossible to fully apprehend: you can say the stratosphere, but there’s no way to experience it; you can discuss geoengineering forever without forming any emotional attachment. But Julie’s death, Noor’s death, Mai’s death, those are events local enough for John to feel, as are the other deaths they caused, the men and women who died trying to keep them from reaching this room before Pinatubo launches.
“This way,” he says, his face filthy, his mind tired but wholly engaged. “Less than ten minutes left.”
Cal follows him through the opulent office—all the organic finery, she thinks, this old growth made into a desk, the finest wood floors, the finest leathers, everything the best of the end of the real, while the Volunteers live in concrete cubes, wearing plastic clothes—and then John and Cal enter the launch chamber together, the more austere environment packed with computer consoles, dozens of telescreens showing the status of the other VACs, the myriad Pinatubo injection sites spread across the world. In all the other places under attack, everywhere the Volunteers rise up, that resistance, Cal sees, is already being suppressed.
Cal sets her pistol down on the ledge of one of the consoles, then snatches it up again when she sees E-5 standing expressionless in the center of the room, dressed exactly as Eury Mirov last appeared. How many times has she imagined raising her pistol to this woman’s head, ready to end her for what she did to Cal’s country, to Cal’s home, to the people and places and beings Cal loved, even the places she’d only dreamed of, the distant beauties of the world, the remote wonders she knew she’d never see, that she’d loved anyway?
It’s not all Eury Mirov’s fault. The problem is bigger than any one person, any one company or government: the problem belongs to every last person; until it’s solved everyone remains complicit, even if they resist.
Cal knows all this. But what she would’ve given to have had someone to punish.
“You,” Cal sneers, her face twisting, the snarl wrenching her bruises. She gestures with the pistol, stepping toward E—E recoils, alarmed—then puts the pistol down again. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I know you’re not her.”
But does she? Because despite this clone’s blankness, when she smiles it’s with Eury’s winning smile, when she speaks it’s in Eury’s hypnotically charismatic voice: “Only me,” she says. “I’m only me.”
“Eight minutes to go,” John says, pulling Cal’s attention away from E by gesturing for her to join him at the command console. “But there’s a problem.”
“Where are we at?” Cal asks, stepping to John’s side. The displays are swimming with numbers, video feeds, scrolls of code she can’t read. Warning lights flash from a dozen screens. “What’s next?”
“That’s just it,” he says. “I can’t stop it. There’s no kill switch. When Eury started the countdown three days ago, she’d already ensured it would happen. Short of blowing this control room—and probably every other, in every Tower—there’s no preventing the launch.” John lowers his gaze, shuffles his feet. “I’m sorry, Cal. I wanted it to be different.”
Cal lifts John’s face with her one good hand. Her grip leaves a mark, smearing dust and blood across his chin. “Old goat,” she says, offering him the crooked smile she knows he loves. “You’ve done everything exactly right. I don’t want you to stop it. I want you to make it better.”
At the end of the world, an argument ensues. It begins with Cal explaining what she wants John to do, what only he can do in the time they have remaining. Eury’s plan is to pause the warming of the planet long enough to buy Earthtrust and the other megacorporations and the last standing governments time to supposedly put in real reforms, to agree upon a way to reverse emissions, to stop carbon release and implement its capture.
“More time,” Cal spits. “For what? More efficiency? More conservation? More sustainability?” No increase in efficiency, she says, has ever resulted in a true decrease in total emissions; instead the more we saved, the more we used. “The one choice we never make is to leave the oil in the ground, to let the trees grow uncut, to let the water slosh in its aquifers. Once we have the capacity to use a resource, we use it all. We grow, whatever the cost. All one energy-efficient, water-conserving city means is that another city can be built. There is no such thing as sustainability as long as unlimited growth is the end goal. I say it’s time to stop growing. I say it’s time to force a contraction. Whatever humanity does next, it must never again be allowed to grow.”
Fifty years ago, Cal argues, there was a series of red lines that couldn’t be crossed, any number of points of no return after which civilization as we knew it would be doomed. But we crossed every one. We didn’t even slow down. The only thing lowering carbon emissions now is that so many people are dead from drought and disease, from the horrors of cities drowned or burned or shaken apart or otherwise made uninhabitable, from war and closed borders.
What if there was an alternative, Cal says. What if they forced Eury’s hand? “Give her twenty-five years, John,” says Cal. “Give us twenty-five years. No more solutions delayed
, promised by the end of next century. No more by 2150 the sea levels will be this and that height if we do nothing. No more ice deferred, no more pretending the present must be sacrificed for a distant better future never arriving. Make the present the last human world, unless we change everything about how we live, unless we do it together. We can’t keep pretending there’s nothing to do. We act or we do not.”
John went west to walk away, because he wanted to withdraw from the world; he came back because he hoped there might be a way to save it, if only he could put a hand on some truer lever of power. This is the room with the lever; this is his hand, poised atop it. All he has to do is decide whether to pull.
If he does nothing, Eury gets her way. Choosing nothing is a choice too.
The launch can’t be stopped, but it can be subverted, just this once, from here, right now. John stands with his back to Cal, his hands floating over the main console’s keyboard, his gaze flitting from screen to screen, each monitor depicting one of the Towers waiting to send up its nanoswarms as fast as their production facilities can print them, all working from the final designs he uploaded late last night. He wishes he had more time but more time is not coming. There are exactly three minutes left, then there’s less. Always less. Every noncommittal breath, every vacillating utterance, every frustrated gesture, every wavering thought: the only result of inaction is less time.
No matter what you do, there will never be more time left to act than there is now.
“You lied to me,” John says. He turns toward Cal, toward E-5 standing beside her. “You said we could stop Earthtrust, that in doing so we’d save the world. Now you want me to end it.”
“With or without you, this world ends,” Cal says. “But you can choose how. You can choose not to let anyone escape the common fate: either we all save each other, or else no one gets saved.”
If John’s going to change the nanoswarm parameters, there isn’t much time left. Once Pinatubo is launched, the stratospheric nanoswarm will continue to refine itself without outside interference, all its decisions made by the hive mind above the clouds. Whatever he does or doesn’t do next locks humanity into the future he chooses. It’d be easy enough to reprogram the nanoswarms to do what Cal asks, easy enough to hide what he’s done until it’s too late to stop it. Initially the effect would seem the same as in Eury’s plan, but then would come a rapid thickening of the solar-blocking layer, set to commence after a mere quarter century, with only a total global carbon drawdown able to prevent the worst outcome.
And if the world isn’t ready, if we won’t or can’t work together, if humanity does nothing to save itself in the next twenty-five years?
Then the nanoswarms will block enough solar radiation to trigger a global ice age capable of wiping humanity off the planet’s surface, summoning new glaciers to reset the earth for however many centuries it takes for the man-made greenhouse gases already trapped in the atmosphere to dissipate.
“Always,” Cal says, “there will be life, no matter what we choose. All we’re discussing is whose lives get saved, all we’re deciding is how good those lives will be. Human or nonhuman, animal or plant, it doesn’t matter to Eury Mirov. She guarantees only the steady diminishment of the shared world, only the suffering of the many until the planet is ready to be given to the few. I say abundance or nothingness, abundance or nothingness for all.”
Two minutes.
Then a little less.
John curses, John plants his fists against his eyes and pushes until he sees stars.
The choice is his. Ten billion people alive on the earth, and only he can decide.
In his mind, in the starry flicker behind his fists, he grips the lever he’s always imagined.
He chooses.
He pulls the lever all the way down.
Chapman
The witches arrive at sunrise. Now here again are their inhuman voices, rolling fog and growing moss, the cracking of eggshells, the wet speech of aquifers collapsing, the scraping of rock on rock like the gnashing of teeth, the crackling lashing of tectonic tongues. Even as Chapman’s fear threatens to paralyze him, pity wells in his heart at the reduced creatures the witches have become: in the myth, they were regal and grave, beautiful beyond words; twenty years ago they were entrancing even at their most terrifying, their abundant bodies attractive in their fleshy thickness, their feral faces muddied and bloodied but beguiling too; now all three have become gaunt and drawn, their old voluptuousness sagged into want and wreck.
Despite whatever kinship they might share, Chapman has never understood the complaints of their inhuman voices. He wishes he could, but being a man has cost him almost all of being an animal. If only he hadn’t had Nathaniel, if only he hadn’t plowed the Territory under in search of his Tree, if only the witches had come to him earlier, before he was Chapman, maybe then the unnamed faun and the nameless witches could have been wild together, wildness incarnate.
“I want to understand you,” he says, speaking truthfully. “I want to know what you want.
“I want to help you, but you killed my brother,” he says, and this too is true. They’ve accused Chapman before; now he accuses them, but as he speaks he doubts.
Only the singer they bear with them always has not been further wounded by linear time. His face remains the same sallow shape, its features just as sunken into cheeks pancaked with dust or makeup; his voice rises and falls in the same sonorous drone Chapman’s heard in so many dreams. As his song fills the air, Chapman and Nathaniel’s last nursery begins to shift, the planted soil shimmering then flickering, the dirt becoming grass becoming gravel, then blacktop, then asphalt, then every surface appearing at once, all together making a rippling band of changeable earth upon which the witches paw their clawed and taloned feet, still making their last accusations in overlapping cries of fog and moss and shell.
“No more future,” Chapman says, covering his ears against the battering waves of song. “Shut him up and we’ll talk.”
He knows the witches won’t be women for long, that what they are is never exactly women. Already their shapes churn and warp. The witch holding the beheaded singer finishes her shift first, abandoning her passenger to the dirt as her hands vanish, his singing unceasing even though his face is pressed against the tilled earth: the vulture the witch becomes takes to the air on wings missing too many feathers, its flight made difficult despite its impressive flapping; then the grizzly bear with its threadbare fur appears, its enormous bones straining sharply at its stretched skin; and finally the panther, slinking close to the ground, a once graceful predator now stumbling side to side, its tail dragging in the dirt as its transformation finishes, the witch inside the panther struggling to find her footing.
Chapman is half man and half animal, all his life there has been danger in thresholds, in in-betweens: the twilight hour of dusk and dawn, the faded but not gone dribble of the last dream before waking, this just-planted nursery, where no seed has yet sprouted, neither settled nor wild. Now, as the sun fully breaches the eastern horizon, the present collapses, the future arrives, the flicker flickers. At once the witches cross over from the wild forest into the nursery, the bear charging first, bounding across the nursery even faster than Chapman expected, then rearing up on its hind legs to swing a clawed paw at Chapman’s horned head. Chapman ducks but too slowly, his present body divorced from the preternatural speed he once enjoyed, the paddle of the bear’s paw smacking his unbroken horn, spinning him around on his hooves. As he spins, he lashes out with his own claws, raking them across the bear’s softer underbelly. It’s not a deep wound, he sees, only a slim new hurt—but as the bear’s body moves past he smells all the other hurts the bear already suffers, the traumas carried in its rotten flesh, its sloughing fur.
He expects the panther to make its pass next, but it’s the vulture who comes, diving with outstretched talons for Chapman’s eyes; he turns his face aside, the talons ribboning one cheek before he catches one of the vulture’s incredibl
e wings, his hands tearing and twisting. Feathers snap free, hollow bones break, the vulture’s momentum carries it spiraling away, its crimson head squawking, its sharp beak snapping around the furious wobble of its darting tongue. Now comes the panther’s expected charge, the lean black shape leaping across the tilled earth, each bound faster, more graceful.
Of the witch-beasts, the panther is the least injured, the most dangerous; Chapman swipes blood from his torn cheek and squares his body against it. He’s spent ten years hiding from these women, these beasts, from whatever else they might be. By the singer’s song they’d shown him where they’d come from, the same story from which he’d emerged: like him, they’ve shaken off the myth of their birth; unlike him they’ve become protectors of the land, fates no longer, now only furies, whose anger is provoked by every clear-cut, every burn, every dammed river or diverted stream, every livestock species treasured by man, every invasive pest accidentally introduced that wiped out something uniquely native, every destroyer of whatever small gods lived and thrived in any particular place. Even if he’d cleared no ground and planted no trees, Chapman couldn’t have ended his complicity, could not have exited the story inside which he and Nathaniel had lived, not as long as he lived a life dependent on all this human destruction, not as long as he chose his brother over the world.
The panther is faster than he expects. He misses his dodge and the beast bowls him over, digging its claws into his bare shoulders—but Chapman’s the equal now of this witch in cat’s clothing, her great shape not broken by the damage men have done but injured enough to give him a chance. The panther pushes its claws into Chapman, but the faun is clawed too, his whole horn and sharp teeth equally dangerous. The great cat screeches, leaps away; now the bear circles in one direction, the panther in the other. Chapman turns at the center of their stalking, trying to keep both beasts in view, while the broken-winged vulture hops at the melee’s outer orbit, screeching its complaint, snapping its beak uselessly in his direction.