Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation

by Phoebe Wagner

  I moved to drop the trout in the gutting tub.

  “Double-check.”

  She leveled a bloodshot eye at me; grey iris nested in red webwork.

  I poked through organs with the tip of the buck knife.

  “She’s clean.”

  We kept our monsters alive, all male, and crossed fingers for anomalies, working to prove Winter’s dismal supposition. Her entire program hinged on verifying that the mutation generated in male reproductive tissue. With that much we could offer up a root, if not a reason, to secure further funding, maybe another two or three years’ worth. Dig in deep, maybe leave a lasting mark.

  It was a joke between Cade, Luce, Maia, and I that Winter recruited female candidates to symbolically reflect her hypothesis. These days I frequently suspected she really did believe that like follows like. That if she stocked her farm and lab with women, perhaps only the males of certain species would turn-up genetically twisted. That by virtue of our sex, we might bless the program with some sort of preternatural immunity against the blight spreading from watershed to watershed like kudzu across a berm. I came to think of it as Winter’s superstitious foolproofing. When you find yourself beyond understanding, wouldn’t it seem rational to adopt an irrational fallback philosophy?

  As above, so below. There are more things in heaven and earth. That sort of stuff.

  I felt blindly through water until I grasped the final fish, a white perch, and took up the knife.

  “Grab the specimen bucket,” she said.

  “It’s clean. Perch don’t demonstrate the malformation. They can’t. You said so.”

  Winter stood, kicking back the tub she sat on, and snatched the fish from me. She stood motionless, examining the perch as it pummeled her wrist. Her forearm’s striated scar tissue shimmered and flexed as she twisted the perch side-to-side, inspecting it closely.

  She’d been slit from elbow to bicep by a hibernating pike last summer.

  It had gone from sluggish to berserk seconds after she snatched it from the stasis pail. Fins and tail-barbs still ghosted by frost left an archipelago of lacerations halfway up her arm. Haloed in blood and greasy water, Winter’s subdermal looked like a slick, featureless pill brimming with enigmas and promise. Polymer and circuitry encasing the secrets of meat settled at the bottom of the bucket and blood obscured it from view. I couldn’t help but wonder what the last shred of data it had gathered was, or if it really mattered at all.

  She bled off and on for three hours. A person could die pretty quick from a bleed like that. Our isolation made us worry all the more. The farm is three miles from the town road. Six miles’ walk over pasture or down the intestinal coil of old back lanes to historic Burnt Tree and its crossroads, bar, inn, and corner store. Cade wanted to call the emergency technicians from the Burnt Tree Fire Department or at least drive her to the horse doctor on Brindle Road, but Winter had been vehement, almost volatile. Luce patched her with gauze and ice to slow the bleeding and we waited for it to clot.

  She was down for three days. When she woke she was furious to learn that Cade had called the horse doctor anyway.

  “Here we are,” Winter said. She shook the fish at me. “The bucket.”

  She was excited to the point of agitation. Her eyes were wide, and she gnawed her lower lip with her canines.

  “It’s a perch, they’re protogynous. They can’t develop the mutation.”

  “We thought so. All females, to start at least. Some sort of natural avoidance strategy: slipping from female to male as the population demands. An immunity. But this is tangible proof that that theory’s fucked.”

  She let the perch slip into the specimen bucket. At the addition of the interloping fish, brook trout seethed and slapped the surface with their bodies.

  Winter stood staring through water and lengthening shadows at the perch. In the gloaming her eyes seemed to shine. She trembled all over and clasped and unclasped her hands rapidly. What I had taken for excitement in the last shreds of day now looked more animal, more instinctual, in the incoming dusk. Fear.

  We each kept to our patterns. Luce was maybe in the hangar nursery, kitchen, garage, or house. Napping or taking measurements of our fresh-spawned fingerlings.

  Maia was out trawling our nexus of creeks and tributaries, checking the lines and seine nets. Cade was most likely walking the stonewalls along the northern corn plot where we lined the property with snares and cage traps. They studied the contingent species—heron, eagle, mink, muskrat, coyote, grey and red foxes—and chased off the occasional line poacher with warning shots, obtained names, addresses, and blood samples.

  The others had been on the plot longer than I had. Winter for four years, Maia and Luce thirty-one months, Cade nineteen.

  By now there was at least the semblance of an understanding between us and the residents of Burnt Tree’s outlying farms and cul-de-sacs. To them property lines, regardless of who owned them, were as physical as a ditch between road and dogwoods. Most residents gave our farm wide berth, driven by an instinctual response: heuristic, stewed in genetic memory.

  The others were trespassers. Cade distinguished them by their inverted response to warning signs: transgress and therefore adapt.

  “Better to shoot them,” Winter told us. We took it as a joke. We had to. “They poach enough trout, dine on them weekly, and in a generation—two at most—they’ll all be infertile.”

  Winter said we were making more work for ourselves in the long run: constant perimeter checks, walking the seines and line traps, the fliers and warnings posted at the library, church, bar, and town hall which we later found pulped along the county road or stuffed into trash cans.

  We didn’t even own the property; we leased it from a university dean once enamored with Winter’s project. These days there wasn’t much word from him, only the rent notices we received at the end of each month. Six more until the grant money dried up. Until we had to face a reckoning ravenous for tangible results. For a solution or the groundwork for one. We each felt the crush. It didn’t matter how many months or years we had sown in Winter’s project.

  So we kept our patterns constant. Did our tasks. Gathered our data. We were creatures of diligence. Creatures, at this point, and our work was our habitat. Fear of the repercussions of our work, or the cessation of it, our driving imperative.

  Winter crouched over the bucket.

  “Mouth like a shovel,” Winter said.

  “Shoveling mud,” I said.

  An old mnemonic device Winter had concocted. What you could repeat you could recall; what you could recall could save you from choosing or not choosing the wrong fish.

  She pointed at the perch with a shaking finger.

  “The signs are faint. He can’t have reached sexual maturity until very recently. You can see it most in the mandibles, ribs, and dorsal fin.”

  “Thickened, bones more pronounced, more brutal,” I said.

  Winter nodded. Something in the gene pool drove the development of heavier bone structure, giving the males of the species a shovel-like jaw. Regardless of genus, they began to settle predominantly on the bottom of river or creek beds, in silt and the fool’s maps of flood detritus.

  It wasn’t fish kill. Perhaps an adaptation to decreasing algae, insects, and prey species. Instead of offering death, Nature offered an alternative: a new class of bottom feeders fed on a steady influx of industrial contaminants.

  Then mammals fed on them.

  Foxes, muskrats, bears, weasels, birds manifested the mutation in a more subtle way. Infertility proved to be the most minor effect. The absence or overabundance of features, unformed organs, uniform cryptorchidism, cloacae and fistulas, each species kept to its own teratogenic misfire. Each bloodline killed off slowly, birth by birth.

  Winter hefted the specimen bucket and set off across the lawn. I paused, cleaned her buck knife with a rag, slipped it into my pocket.

  The cast-off wetware of perch and trout went into a lidded cylinder for Maia and Ca
de to lay out as bait along the creeks and fields.

  Gutted females glistened in their bucket, disrupted systems, products of a biome bred on fallout and runoff.

  I pressed my thumb against the subdermal biometer in my forearm, rubbed its twin implant nestled between tendons and veins where my clavicle met my shoulder. It was as if we all harbored parasitic twins beneath our skin, kept alive by the steady influx of blood pressure, pulse, body temperature.

  I wondered what hope or fear or intention meant to our subdermals. Or what my body looked like as a data stream.

  Blood seen through a skein of flesh is blue. A fish meets oxygen, it chokes to death. What is inescapable forces reaction, adaptation, or destruction. Necessity breeds emergence. It’s the same with all of us.

  §

  I left our gutted fish by the kitchen door, rapped on the oak frame, in case Luce was in the farmhouse, and headed for the corrugated hangar by the east woods.

  Winter had ducked out of sight, anomalies in hand.

  As I climbed the grassy swale between farmhouse and fields, a blue heron unfolded from the south-plot creeks, a limp shadow pinned in its beak.

  The heron arched, adjusted to the flow of air currents, and set off north following the path of water below. With Maia creekside its plummet was inevitable and out-paced the report of her 30.06. Rhododendron and pine swallowed the baffled coil of feather and bone. Tainted, more than likely. Compromised.

  Trajectory was a tricky thing a mile off but we’d collect it in the end. I mentally mapped where it could have fallen, in case Maia lost track of it. Made a note of a few locations it might have fallen to.

  Winter squatted by the last specimen tank. The scarce illumination in the hangar came from eerie fluorescents strained through water and the brutish shadows of fish. It was the only empty tank in a line of eleven. She had written PERCH in black marker on a strip of masking tape. The label stared like a blind eye.

  She dragged her bandana across her arms and hands.

  “You can never get the smell off you.”

  Even in here the tainted watershed spread its tributaries; the hangar was half-mired in the ever-cloying odor of standing water and blood. Each shelf, bottle, bucket, test tube brimmed with silt-smell, dusk, and inescapable creeks.

  The perch took to the bottom like an insult to an ear.

  “Unnatural,” I said.

  “Renatured,” Winter said. She looked down the line of tanks.

  She dug in her pocket and pulled out a dead bird, a fresh-killed blue jay.

  As it sunk she traced its fall with her forefinger. The body’s urge to reduce succinctly displayed by simple descent.

  Small cupolas of ribs and skulls, half-furled in feather, flesh, and algae blooms, dotted the mud tangled tank bottom. The feeding perch, another ghost to populate our aftermath. All the proof we needed to know we knew exactly nothing.

  I wiped creek water from my palms onto my jeans, wondering if superstition could infect.

  Another gunshot took flight from the north.

  “Heron or poacher?” I said.

  Winter tapped the glass and shrugged. The perch regarded her with alien eyes. I tried to unearth shared ancestry in its look. There was none. We had adapted, they stayed put.

  “Does it matter?” I said.

  Winter walked down the row of tanks.

  “Does any of this matter? If this is a numbers game, we’re losing. We’re not working to solve anything are we? Only looking to prove that in the long run we’re screwed.”

  She stopped at the door.

  “Lock up when you leave,” she said.

  Winter studied the verge where asphalt morphed into dirt. I zipped my coat and joined her. Behind us the dull gazes of our specimens tangled the dark hangar like flood debris.

  I locked them away.

  Winter’s hooked scars shone with slanting sunlight. Her folded buck knife worried my thigh. I’d keep it for now, for my tasks, those assigned and those I’d keep secret. Winter could bear to lose her knife for a few days.

  I pressed my thumb into the subdermal in my forearm. How would resignation read in biometrics? I tried to imagine Winter as it would. As an electric mass reacting to and shrugging away from the world, reading everything through a sheath of membrane. Not at all Winter and fundamentally her.

  The world didn’t feel unutterably different. The sun had disappeared and autumn settled in for the night. Tomorrow would be unseasonable and hot, or it wouldn’t, the next season blurring the borders as seamlessly as a hand disrupting a stream’s surface.

  A third shot took to our ears like a derelict to open water. The horizon bristled with its intractable presence, with pines and hybrid chestnuts and all the creeks we couldn’t see from here.

  Eight Cities

  Iona Sharma

  They’ve done some rough arithmetic, some ABCs and ka-kha-ga. Then Kim’s Game—given a tray of objects and one minute to look, how many could they write down and remember—and now the children are dropping things over the edge of the boat.

  “Which falls faster?” Nagin asks, her bare feet stirring the water. “The big stone, or the small one?”

  “The big one,” says the nearest child, puffed up with its own cleverness. Nagin never learns their names, but they love hers, calling, Nagin, Nagin, when they see a snake slide through the murk.

  “No,” Nagin says, gentle. “Look. Look.”

  The two pebbles leave her cupped hands and hit the water at exactly the same time. The impacts shatter her reflection, each scattered droplet carrying its own load of sunlight. Nagin is breathless, broadsided by the beauty of it, her ears ringing, the hair on the back of her neck prickling despite the noonday sun. The child mutters to a friend; the friend mutters knowingly back.

  Nagin waits for it to pass and says, “You see. You don’t need to guess, or believe. You only have to look.”

  They all look at her, caught between understanding and doubt. One of them picks two more pebbles out of the bucket provided and drops them in the water. Nagin smiles.

  And then another child—who might have been there before and might not; to Nagin the children are indistinguishable, but inevitable as the weather—is bouncing along from boat to boat, making them all rock gently in their ropes, the floating lanterns slipping in and out of line. “Naginji! Raonaid-auntie is here!”

  It’s delighted to be the bearer of good news. Nagin turns, ready to tell the child that it must be mistaken, that Raonaid left two months ago and can’t be back so soon, and then remembers her own advice and looks up.

  “They told me you’ve run mad,” Raonaid says, disapproving. Rather than wade, she has come out to the rath-bazaar in a small courier boat, the pole creeping silently through the water.

  “I have not run mad,” Nagin says. “And that’s not what they told you.”

  “She keeps crying all the time,” pipes up the herald-child. Nagin sighs and throws another pebble into the water, listening for the splash.

  “Is that so,” Raonaid murmurs. She still sounds disapproving, the light washing her skin through to harsh bones. Nagin wonders what is going undelivered because of Raonaid’s precipitate return; how many people are watching the horizon, waiting for news. Raonaid was once a diplomatic messenger, carrying the great messages of state. These days she carries the state itself.

  “What did they tell you really?” Nagin asks, wishing for a moment that she had never spoken of it to anyone, and then she’s just happy, again, joy like pain cracking open her bones.

  “That you’ve found God,” Raonaid says, worry and disbelief in her voice, and Nagin doesn’t doubt that she heard and dropped everything, because she thought Nagin needed her.

  §

  Dilli-rath-bazaar-ki, Delhi of the night markets. They climb out of the courier boat as the water becomes too shallow for it, and Nagin considers if she and this city she was born in are undergoing transformation together. When she was born, it was the most populous metropolitan conur
bation in the world, frenetic, smoky, desert-dry. As Raonaid leads the way through quiet streets, cheery with sun-faded paint, Nagin feels the great stillness of a place she never knew in youth.

  “Well?” Raonaid says, at last. “Have you really . . . found religion, Nagin?”

  Nagin hesitates over her answer, her attention caught elsewhere. A boy is taking his bath by the pump, a striped plastic mug in hand. He ought to move swiftly in the crisp, luminous chill, but he reaches into a gulmohar tree for the pleasure of touching its leaves. The branch springs away from his grip, and he lets the water splash on his head, gleaming on polished skin. Nagin’s father taught her of Brahman, the unknowable creator, of atman, the imperishable within all life, and after all these years she is stilled by it, the tenable divine.

  “Yes,” she says, her voice cracking. Raonaid gives her an exasperated look. “I’m fine.”

  “Nagin,” Raonaid says, and spits at the gutter in annoyance at the name. “I wish you wouldn’t let them call you that. It’s insulting.”

  It’s not meant as insult, Nagin is sure; cobras are quick and clever. The rath-bazaar-wallas give her the name for the striped hood she often wears, and her eyes, the irises nearly black. “I like it.”

  “You would,” Raonaid says. “Nagin, for God’s sake, do you never come home?”

  They claimed this space after the city was drained of people. There are bare lightbulbs wired across the ceiling, thick blankets on the jhula hanging over the verandah. But in these days of Raonaid’s absence and her own becoming, Nagin has preferred the rock of the boats beneath her feet, and the dust here is thick. She says nothing, unwilling to attract further ire. Raonaid moves to wipe down the jhula and sets it in vicious motion instead, the ropes twisting above. She hooks it out of the way and tips the contents of her canvas bag on the floor. Nagin looks without comment at Raonaid’s talismans and shibboleths. An old two-anna coin amid the shrapnel of more recent currency. A ration book. A bound volume of the last Government of India Act. A gazette in scrappy printing with a modern seal. All the things she carries to the remote places, the villages which have not seen a stranger in her lifetime.