“I didn’t realise that you are a nihilist.”
“I’m a realist. Instead of trying to go against the current, I go with the flow. Don’t fuck it up with ideas about rewinding clocks, Torres. Don’t hang your hopes on some dream,” Oscar said, half-singing that last sentence, having fun. “Don’t, in a nutshell, be so fucking serious about what you can’t get back.”
Mike wondered unhappily if Sarah was right. If Oscar was right. If he’d become obsessed about bringing back what had been lost. Yearning for something he’d never known, something he could never have. Obsessing, yeah, over his romantic ideas about the stones. Because who knew what they really meant? What they meant to the person who had chosen and named them, and carved them with runes?
But he was too stubborn to give all that up so easily. Rootless and unsettled, he hitched a helo ride north to the Danco Coast, landing at the end of a fjord pinched between steep ridges and hiking up a shallow winding river towards the site of a stone, one of the last on his list. If he got back into his groove, he told himself, maybe everything would be okay. Maybe everything would become clear, and he’d think of the things he should have said to Sarah and the things that he needed to say to Oscar, to himself.
And as he picked his way between boulders alongside the river, cold clean air blowing through him and clear water chattering over and around rocks and dropping in little waterfalls, with the steep sides of the U-shaped valley rising on either side to bare ridges stark against the empty blue sky and snow-capped mountains standing ahead, he did feel lifted out of himself, the slough of his merely human problems.
There was change here, like everywhere else—the river fed by melting ice, with kerbs of pillow moss along its stony banks, stretches of sedges and cotton grass, some kind of bird, a kite or hawk, rising in lazy circles on a thermal above a scree slope starred with yellow flowers, amazing to see a land-based predator in a place where a century ago every animal species had depended on the ocean for food – but the land was empty and its silence profound, and he was part of it, absorbed in it, in the rhythm of walking, with a goal ahead of him and everything else dwindling into insignificance.
The river grew shallower and slower, breaking up into still pools and streams trickling between shoals and banks of pebbles, and there was the elf stone, an oval ice-smoothed boulder three metres high bedded in black gravel, with runes carved around its waist. The Navel of Our Kingdom Under the Ice.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, a glacier had flowed through the valley, debouching onto the ice shelf that had filled the fjord. But warm sea currents had undercut and broken up the ice, and the glacier had retreated to the 300-metre contour. The elf stone was one of many erratics deposited by its retreat, standing more than a kilometre in front of a tumble of ice chunks sculpted into fantastic shapes and a pitted cliff of dirty ice, the edge of a frozen river of tumbled ice blocks and crevasses curving away between snow-capped ridges.
After pitching his tent on a shoulder of sandy gravel, Mike lay awake a long time, listening to the whisper of water over stone and the distant retorts and groans of the glacier. When he woke, the air had turned to freezing milk. An ice fog had descended, whiting everything out. The sun was a diffuse glow low in the east; there was a rime of ice on tufts of moss and grass; every sound was muffled.
Mike brewed coffee on his efficient little Tesla stove, ate two granola bars and a cup of porridge with honey and a chopped banana stirred into it, and broke camp and started the hike back along the river, taking it slowly in the thick chill fog. He wasn’t especially worried. Either the fog would lift and the helo would return and pick him up, or it wouldn’t, and he’d be stuck here for a day or two until a bigger helo with Instrumental Flight Rules equipment could be diverted. No big deal. He had enough supplies to wait it out, told himself that it was a kind of adventure, even though he could call for help on his phone at any time, and GPS meant that he couldn’t really get lost. Actually, he didn’t even need GPS. All he had to do was follow the river.
He had been hiking for a couple of hours when he heard movement behind and above him. A soft heavy tread, a sudden sough of breath. He stood still, listening intently. The tread grew closer, shadows loomed out of the fog, bigger than any man, and Mike felt a spike of unreasoning fear. Then the wind shifted, the fog swirled aside, and he saw the first of them.
The high forehead and small brown eyes, the tear-drop ears with their elongated hair-rimmed lobes. The questing trunk. The shaggy pelt blended from shades of auburn and chocolate. Sturdy legs footing carefully on loose stones.
One by one, the SUV-sized mammoths trod past, five, seven, ten of them. At the end of the procession came a female with her young calf trotting beside her, trunk curled like a question mark, dissolving like the rest into the mist, leaving behind a musky scent and dinnerplate-sized footprints slowly filling with water in the gravel along the edge of the river.
And now another figure materialised out of the thinning fog, and a man’s voice said, “Are you lost, friend?”
“I know exactly where I am,” Mike said, resenting the implication that he was somehow in the wrong place. Trespassing. “What about you?”
“At the moment, I’m following the mammoths.” The figure resolved into a slight man in his sixties, dressed in a red parka with a fur-trimmed hood, wind-proof trousers, boots. He had some kind of British accent, a neat salt-and-pepper beard, skin darkened by sun exposure but still pale at the roots of his widow’s peak.
“You’re in charge of them?” Mike said, wondering if the man was an ecopoet, wondering if there were others like him nearby.
“Oh, hardly,” the man said, and introduced himself: Will Colgate. “May we walk on? My friends are getting away.”
As they walked alongside the river, Will Colgate explained that he was studying the mammoths’ behaviour, what they ate, where they went, and so on. “They need to eat a lot, so they cover a lot of territory. Yesterday they were ten kilometres south of here. Tomorrow they’ll be ten kilometres north. Or more.”
“So you’re a scientist,” Mike said. He hadn’t been scared, not exactly, but he felt a little knot in his chest relax.
“Oh, no. No, I’m just an amateur. A naturalist, in the old tradition. Back in O’Higgins I’m a plumber,” Will Colgate said. Adding: “I think I know why you’re here.”
“You do?”
“Only one reason why people would come here. To such an out-of-the-way place. You’re a stoner.”
“I’m interested in them,” Mike admitted. “Why they are where they are. What they mean.”
“Figured that out yet?”
Will Colgate had a sharp edge to his grandfatherly air.
“I think maybe they’re memorials,” Mike said. “Markers commemorating what was, and what will come again.”
“Interesting. I once met someone, you know, who claimed she’d made them. She was a member of one of the seed-bombing crews. They take balls of clay and nutrients and seeds, so-called green bullets, and scatter them as they walk. Most of the seeds never germinate, of course, and most of the ones that do soon die. But enough thrive... Some of those willows might be theirs,” Will Colgate said, pointing to a ghostly little island of shrubs standing knee-high in the river’s flow.
“This woman you met—she really made the stones?”
“That’s what she said. But she isn’t the only one to lay claim to them, so who knows?”
Mike said shyly, “I think he or she may have been a helo pilot.”
Will Colgate seemed to like the idea. “Of course, an awful lot of people use helicopters here. They’re like taxis. When I was a geologist, back in the day, working for Rio Tinto, I was flown everywhere to check out likely lodes. Gave that up and went native, and here I still am. Place can get under your skin, can’t it?”
“Yeah, it can.”
They walked on for a while in companionable silence. Mike could hear, faintly, the tread of the mammoths up ahead. More a vibration coming
up through the soles of his boots than actual sound.
Will Colgate said, “If you were going to mark up one of those stones with runes, all you’d need is an automatic cutter. Neat little thing, fits into a rucksack. Programme it, tack it in place, it would do the job in twenty minutes. Chap I know in O’Higgins uses one to carve gravestones.”
“You’d also need to know which places to choose, which stones,” Mike said. “How each relates to the other.”
“Mmm. But perhaps it started as a joke that slowly became serious. That gained its meaning in the making. The land will do that to you.”
The river broadened, running over a pavement of rock deeply scored by the ice. Mike smelt the sea on the fog, heard a splashing of water and a distant hoarse bugling that raised hairs on the back of his neck. And then he and Will Colgate arrived at the place where the river tumbled down a stony shore, and saw, dimly through thick curtains of mist, that the mammoths had waded waist-deep into the sea. Several were squirting water over themselves; others grazing on kelp, tugging long slippery strands from a jut of black rocks, munching them like spaghetti.
“The place of the meeting of ice and water,” Will Colgate said. “As it once was. By the time I got here, the river was already running, although back then the ice was about where that stone is now.”
“Are you really a plumber?”
“Fully certified. Although I’ve been all kinds of things in my time.”
“Including making gravestones?”
“People are mostly cremated now. When they aren’t shipped back to the World. Laser engraved brass markers, or modded resin with soulcatcher chips that talk to your phone. It isn’t the same,” Will Colgate said, and stepped towards the edge of the sea and turned back and called out gleefully. “Isn’t that a lovely sight?”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
The mammoths were intruders, creatures from another time and place, but the sight of them at play lifted Mike’s heart. While the old man videoed them, walking up and down at the water’s edge to get better angles, Mike called the helo crew. They were grounded. Everyone along the coast without IFR was grounded, waiting for the fog to lift. Mike told them it didn’t matter. He squatted on coarse black sand rucked by the tread of heavy feet, strangely happy. After a while, Will came back and rummaged in his backpack and set a pan of water on a little hotplate.
“Time for a cuppa, I think.”
They drank green tea. Will said that there was a theory that the mammoths bathed in the sea to get rid of parasites. “Another claims that seaweed gives them essential minerals and nutrients they can’t find on land. But perhaps they come here to have fun. I mean, that’s what it looks like, doesn’t it?”
“Are there other people like you?”
Will gave the question serious consideration, said, “Despite the warming, you know, it is still very difficult to live off the land. Not impossible with the right technology, but you can’t really go the full primitive. You know, as in stories about feral ecopoets. Stone-tipped spears and such. I suppose it might be possible in a hundred or so years, when it will be warmer and greener, but why would anyone want to do such a foolish thing?”
“Maybe by then the ice will have come back.”
“Despite all our heroic efforts, I don’t think we will be able to preserve the ice cap. Not all of it. Not as it is. In a thousand years, yes, who knows, the ice may return. But right now we have the beginnings of something new. We’ve helped it along. Accelerated it. We’ve lost much along the way, but we’ve gained much, too. Like the mammoths. Although, of course, they aren’t really mammoths, and mammoths never lived in the Antarctic.”
“I know,” Mike said, but Will was the kind of earnest pedagogue who couldn’t be derailed.
“They are mostly elephant, with parts of the mammoth genome added,” he said. “The tusks, the shaggy coat, small ears to minimise heat loss, a pad of fat behind the skull to insulate the brain and provide a store of food in winter, altered circadian clocks to cope with permanent darkness in winter, permanent day in summer... Traits clipped from a remnant population of dwarf mammoths that survived on an island in the Siberian Arctic until about four thousand years ago. The species hasn’t been reborn, but it has contributed to something new. All of this is new, and precious, and fragile. Which is why we shouldn’t try to live out here just yet.”
“Who is this ‘we’?”
“Oh, you know, people like me,” Will said vaguely. “Natural history enthusiasts you might say. We live in cities and settlements, spend as much time as we can in the wild, but we try not to disturb or despoil it with our presence. The mammoths aren’t ours, by the way. They’re an authority project, like the arctic hares and foxes. Like the reindeer. But smaller things, insects and plants, the mycorrhizal fungi that help plant roots take up essential nutrients, soil microbes, and so on – we try to give a helping hand. Bees are a particular problem. It’s too early for them, some say, but there’s a species of solitary bee from the Orkneys, in Scotland, that’s quite promising...” Will blinked at Mike. “Forgive me. I do rattle on about my work sometimes.”
Mike smiled, because the guy really was a little like a pixie from a children’s storybook. Kindly and fey, a herder of bees and ants, a friend of magical giants, an embodiment of this time, this place.
“I have trouble accepting all the changes,” he said. “I shouldn’t really like the mammoths. But I can’t help thinking they seem so at home.”
And with a kind of click he realised that he felt at home too. Here on the foggy beach, by one of the rivers of Antarctica, with creatures got up from a dream sporting in the iceless sea. In this new land emerging from the deep freeze, where anything could be possible. Mammoths, bees, elves... Life finding new ways to live.
Presently, the mammoths came up from the water, out of the fog, long hair pasted flat, steam rising from the muscular slopes of their backs as they used their trunks to grub at seaweed along the strandline. Will followed them with his camera as they disappeared into the fog again, and Mike stood up and started to undress. Leave on his skinsuit? No, he needed to be naked. The air was chill on his skin, the sand cold underfoot as he walked towards the water. He heard Will call out to him, and then he was running, splashing through icy water, the shock of it when he plunged into the rolling waves almost stopping his heart. He swam out only a little way before he turned back, but it was enough to wash himself clean.
DISPATCHES FROM THE CRADLE: THE HERMIT – FORTY-EIGHT HOURS IN THE SEA OF MASSACHUSETTS
– KEN LIU –
BEFORE SHE BECAME a hermit, Asa
Nonetheless, I will tell you that she was responsible for United Planet’s public offering thirty years ago, at the time the biggest single pooling of resources by any individual or corporate entity in history. She was, in large measure, responsible for convincing a wearied humanity scattered across three planets, a moon, and a dozen asteroid habitats to continue to invest in the Grand Task—the terraforming of both Earth and Mars.
Does telling you what she has done explain who she is? I’m not sure. From cradle to grave, everything we do is motivated by the need to answer one question: who am I? she wrote. But the answer to the question has always been obvious: stop striving; accept.
A few days after she became the youngest chief managing director for JPMCS, on Solar Epoch 22385200, she handed in her resignation, divorced her husbands and wives, liquidated all her assets, placed the bulk of the proceeds into trusts for her children, and then departed for the Old Blue on a one-way ticket.
Once she arrived on Earth, she made her way to the port town of Acton in the Federation
of Maritime Provinces and States, where she purchased a survival habitat kit, one identical to the millions used by refugee communities all over the planet, and put the pieces together herself using only two common laborer automata, eschewing offers of aid from other inhabitants of the city. Then she set herself afloat like a piece of driftwood, alone on the seven seas, much to the consternation of her family, friends, and colleagues.
“Given how she was dressed, we thought she was here to buy a vacation villa,” said Edgar Baker, the man who sold Asa her habitat. “Plenty of bankers and executives like to come here in winter to dive for treasure and enjoy the sun, but she didn’t want me to show her any of the vacant houses, several of which have excellent private beaches.”
(Despite the rather transparent ploy, I’ve decided to leave in Baker’s little plug. I can attest that Acton is an excellent vacation spot, with several good restaurants in town serving traditional New England fare—though the lobsters are farmed, not wild. Conservationists are uncertain if the extinct wild lobster will ever make a comeback in the waters off New England as they have never adapted to the warmer seas. The crustaceans that survived global warming were generally smaller in size.)
A consortium of her former spouses sued to have Asa declared mentally incompetent and reverse her financial dispositions. For a while the case provided juicy gossip that filled the XP-stations, but Asa managed to make the case go away quickly with some undisclosed settlements. “They understand now that I just want to be left alone,” she was quoted as saying after the case was dismissed—that was probably true, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt that she could afford the best lawyers.
Yesterday I came here to live. With this first entry in her journal, Asa began her seaborne life over the sunken metropolis of Boston on Solar Epoch 22385302, which, if you’re familiar with the old Gregorian Calendar, was July 5, 2645.
The words were not original, of course. Henry David Thoreau wrote them first exactly eight hundred years earlier in a suburb of Boston.
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