He woke, thinking about Eloise and Mark and their reasons for initiating the project.
In the morning the head of the space organization’s program for manned exploration was interviewed on TV about the astronaut selection process. He watched it on the laptop using his phone as modem. Even here the network was fast enough to stream broadcast and video.
“But is it right to spend all this money, technology, and brain power on sending people into space instead of feeding the billions who are starving, or giving the displaced new livelihoods and housing?” the TV host, a woman in her mid-fifties with brown hair cut in a thick bob, an ivory-colored silk blouse, and a large enamel necklace of daisies, asked.
He scoffed, doubting that the TV host had experienced much hunger or displacement herself.
The head of the space organization, a slim, middle-aged, salt-and-pepper-haired man in a dark suit, leaned close to the host, and winked. “Well, you know, we’re a lot cheaper to run than the defense program.”
The TV host smiled.
“We must of course reduce the hunger and poverty in the world, and help all those who have lost their homes in recent disasters, but the technology and discoveries from space find multiple uses in industry and innovation world-wide. The missions we have planned will benefit all people on Earth,” the head of the space organization concluded, and looked like he meant it.
13
ONCE THE NEIGHBORS STARTED ON THE TASK, they cleared the heather in a few weeks. Their heavy machinery rumbled and grated even through the night, with the beams from the vehicles’ headlights passing over the panorama window in the cabin like curious glances. When it was dark outside he averted his eyes from the farmers’ noisy illumination, and during the day he avoided looking at the abrupt changes they had effected on the moor. He regretted having allowed them to clear and plough the land around the cabin, but Mark and Eloise’s fields were so close, the razing would have been visible whether he had granted them permission or not.
As the heath grew increasingly brown and cultivated, his refusal to look at it mounted. If he didn’t see the moor while it was being cleared, but instead only looked at it again once it had become fully domesticated, the change might feel less abrupt. But after avoiding the heath for several days, one morning he had to see the newly born farmland for himself. He pulled on his running pants, t-shirt, and socks he hadn’t laundered in the kitchen sink yet, and his trainers. When he finally stood on the deck, the breeze was cold but the sun warmed his back. The sky was crisp and clear, the mountains below it the dark color of the ocean in the fall. The moor smelled of overturned earth and grass, as if spring had skipped winter and arrived early. He couldn’t remember the last time the sky had been clear in the city, and was glad he had relocated.
Before the cabin the exposed soil stretched brown and bare, only interrupted here and there by gray stones that resembled pale, hairless pates peeking up from the dirt. There were no paths or roads along the fields, so he decided to run across them. The route would be a few kilometers at least and give him a closer look at what the farmers had done. He breathed and yawned, stretched his arms, back, and legs. Then he stepped out onto the soft, wet soil. The trainers sank into the ground. The shoes would need a good rinse afterward, but it would be worth it. Besides, he had to be in shape in case he progressed in the astronaut selection. The yielding substrate would make it more difficult to keep his balance, and would slow him down, but it would also add to the exercise.
He began by walking briskly to get warm, before he stretched again at a cluster of slim birches on an unplowed mound a few hundred meters from the cabin. With the shortening of the days, the birches had turned yellow, which looked odd in the spring-like morning. The breeze nevertheless chilled his face and cleared his mind and he was glad he had decided to face the fields. He started running and focused on maintaining his balance in the soft soil to avoid sprains. Keeping a moderate pace, he passed the grooves and furrows Eloise and Mark’s machinery had created in the sea of brown. He ran in the direction his eyes usually traced behind the panorama window in the cabin, from south to north along the blue mountains. It felt good to finally follow that path with the rest of his body.
When the cabin had become small behind him, he turned and ran parallel with the fields. Mark and Eloise had mentioned barley, rye, even winter wheat. He imagined the heath ripe with tall, whispering grain. Would those crops really grow here? How did the farmers know the wheat would survive? What if the cold winters returned, or became even harsher, or the weather changed in some other, unexpected way? It was a risk, one the neighbors seemed eager, even desperate to take. He realized the documents Mark and Eloise had given him didn’t describe how the project was financed or how much it would cost. He had spotted in the papers the green and white logo of the bank in the town center, so he assumed they were involved. Eloise had also mentioned funding from the department of agriculture at the local university. The documentation included long-term climate models from the meteorological service and soil and mineral analyses from the national geological survey. But he doubted those institutions funded any external projects. He intended to ask Eloise and Mark about it, although it wouldn’t change anything. The investment had already been done, the financial gambit made. With the news reporting soaring food prices and shrinking crops on all continents, the project made sense, even good sense. But he nevertheless felt unsettled about it, like a warning he had received and then forgotten, the shadow of a Kraken passing beneath the surface.
His concerns about the project made him forget his surroundings until his thoughts shone in a lightless void, where there was no him or body or field or sky, only the thoughts standing sharply out from the silence that surrounded them. In the warm darkness something gleamed, like a spinning coin. When he became aware of it, the brightness rushed forward and engulfed him, like it had in the kitchen earlier.
The Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall had been discovered because of the extremely powerful gamma ray bursts that shot out from it and reached the Earth after millions of years. He had once watched an animation about how gamma ray bursts were created, how they surged forth from the center of a supernova as it imploded when the giant star’s multiple layers of pure elements collapsed in on each other. The unimaginably strong beam of energy ripped itself from the core of the star, jetting as close to the speed of light as it was possible to come. On the way the ray plumed outward like water from a fountainhead or the tip of a bullet blooming on impact, before it narrowed into a beam that pierced the surface at both ends of the now dead star and shot out as gigantic, swirling rays of pure gamma radiation.
“These explosions are so powerful,” the narrator of the video said, “that they are visible from the other side of the universe.”
Now it felt like a gamma ray burst went off inside him, exploding him in luminance, filling him, then jetting out his eyes and ears and mouth. Social inhibition and self-consciousness forgotten, he emitted a low shout and pitched into the soil. He couldn’t feel his body hit the ground, only that cold mud started seeping through his t-shirt and pants. When he tried to get up, he only became more soaked. Then all he knew was the supernova light.
The sun was vanishing. Since his back and side were drenched, it grew chilly. He registered the fading light and cooling temperature, but when he lifted his head and hands to get up, the gamma ray burst surged and pulled him down again.
The next time his eyes fluttered open one side of him was comfortable, while the other was cold. But the warmth that was there made the chill bearable and he thought he might not freeze to death after all. The sun had long since crept behind the mountains, yet the dusk was almost as blue and soft as it had been in the city in the summer. A wall of eyes were watching him, black, shiny orbs above short, stout beaks, belonging to small feathered bodies. He blinked. He must be dreaming. A flock of white and brown sparrows were sitting on his chest and belly and limbs, covering him like a blanket. There must be at least a hundr
ed of them, if not a hundred and fifty. When he lifted his head to look more closely at the birds they didn’t fly away as he thought they would, but rocked and swayed with his motions while they clutched his clothes and skin and calmly took him in.
Then the gray shingles and the black plastic gutter that edged the roof of the cabin were angled above him. He smelled like he did after he had killed Kaye’s owl, the earthy, coppery fragrance of unconcealed perspiration and sudden, violent death.
“How lucky we found you,” someone said nearby. A face he recognized as one of his neighbors was looking down at him, together with several others. He searched for Eloise and Mark, but they were not there.
“And lucky we hadn’t started manuring the fields yet,” another neighbor said and laughed.
14
“WE SAW A LARGE FLOCK OF SPARROWS BANK IN the air and had to go see what it was,” the neighbor closest to him said, whose name he couldn’t recall.
“You thought it might be someone trying to beat us to the sowing,” another one said.
“Shush,” the first neighbor replied.
“When we got closer the birds took to the air and then we saw you on the ground.”
“We thought you were dead!”
“Shhh!”
He looked at them. “Thank you for the help,” he said.
“Are you all right? Do you need help to get inside?”
“No,” he said. “I need to rinse off first.”
“You probably shouldn’t lie on the ground this time of year, it’s too cold.”
“And definitely not after we’ve sown or when the crops have started to grow!”
They helped him up, said goodbye, then retreated to the path that wound past the cabin and down to Mark and Eloise’s farm. Now he saw they were all wearing tall rubber boots and fluorescent-colored vests, and that one of them had what in the moonlit darkness looked like the barrel of a shotgun hanging over her arm. The neighbors mounted two four-wheeled motorbikes and drove off in a spray of sludge and soil and noise, leaving a deep hush behind them.
He stood, switched on the six-sided glass lantern in the corner of the deck’s railing. The solar-powered light flickered a little, then cast a weak yet steady shine over the mud-dappled planks. Almost immediately the flitting shadows of mosquitoes and other flying insects appeared in the corona from the lamp.
He was shivering so hard it was difficult to stand upright and he had to clench his jaws to keep them from clattering. He peered down his torso, passed his quivering hands over his ears and neck and throat, and stretched his tensed limbs to look for ticks and other pests that may have attached themselves from the soil. From his memory the scent of sand and sun lotion appeared, from days on the beach by the artificial lake in the city when he ignored his mother’s calls from the shore, staying in the water until his lips were purple and his body shook.
He smiled at the recollection, shuffled over to the tap on the wall and pushed one end of the rubber hose that lay coiled beneath it onto the spigot. Then he attached the other end to the shower head that hung on a hook high above the tap. When he stepped into the spray the water was so cold it made him gasp and intensified his shivering. He rinsed his hair and skin as well as the shaking allowed, turned the faucet off, and hurried inside, leaving his muddied trainers, running pants, and underwear like shed skin on the deck.
He was shaking too hard to light the firewood in the hearth. Instead he pulled all his clothes out of the backpack until he found the beach towel he had brought from the city. When his skin was dry and his hair dripping less, he wrapped the metal foil emergency blanket from his first aid kit around himself and curled up in the sleeping bag, pulling its broad top over his head. There, he shivered for hours until he fell asleep without noticing.
The next morning he went outside in the cold sunlight to rinse the clothes on the deck in the improvised shower and hang them to dry over the banister. Inside he rolled the clothes he had pulled out up again and stuffed them into the backpack. Then he found Eloise and Mark’s phone number in the project folder and invited them over.
This time, when Mark and Eloise arrived with the other neighbors and squashed together on the sofa, he had clean cups and teaspoons, hot tea, and a bowl with lumps of refined sugar waiting for them.
“I thought you only fertilized in the spring,” he said when the small talk was out of the way.
“Usually,” Eloise said. “But the soil is so virgin we thought we’d give it a boost by fertilizing it lightly and turn it once more before the frost, to prepare it for the spring.”
“You must till the land again then?” he said.
“Yes,” Mark said, “because there’s always frost in the winter, even if it doesn’t snow.”
“Does it snow much here?”
“Lots, or it used to. Now we’re lucky if we have a week of white in the winter.”
“It’s made the animals confused, bears come out of their dens in January and butterflies start swarming in March. The rabbits have almost disappeared because their white coat now gives them away instead of camouflaging them.”
“You snared several mottled rabbits last December, didn’t you?”
The neighbor who had done this nodded. “They looked like they didn’t know whether it was winter or spring.”
“Do you really think wheat will grow here?” he said. “At this latitude and elevation?”
The tea cups clinked, lowered almost simultaneously.
“Haven’t you read the papers?” Eloise said. “We had meteorologists at the local university compare the temperatures of the past decades with the newest projections from climate scientists and plant experts, proper research, mind you. We even received a grant from the ministry for agriculture as a special project.”
So that’s where the funding for the seeds and the fertilizer and the four-wheeled motorbikes came from. He looked at them. “And you also made personal investments into this?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“It’s a small town,” he lied. It was worth a try, there had to be lots of gossip around about the project.
Mark nodded. “Most of us have put our savings into it, we refinanced our farm. We’ll be all right.”
“Well worth the labor to get away from lumber and wood pulp production if you ask me,” Eloise said. “Those are no longer viable.”
“No pain, no gain?” he said.
“No risk, no gain,” Eloise replied. “Those who are not too risk adverse may find the changes in weather profitable and opening up new possibilities. And why not, it’s our moor, our land.”
He nodded and looked down into his tea. “But what if the weather changes again?”
“How? And to what?” Eloise nearly yelled.
15
HE DREAMED HE WAS GIVEN A KNIFE FROM HIS father’s country, a traditionally crafted dagger with the short handle wrapped tightly in ordered loops of black cotton, the bronze silhouette of a dragon spiraling among clouds secured inside it. The knife’s guard was a thin disc of steel with an intricate, curling pattern of negative space.
He took the knife with his right hand, held it horizontally, and with the left hand pulled back the lacquered wooden sheath. The steel in the single-edged blade had tiny particles that sparkled like sunlight on snow, or the galaxy clusters in the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, so luminous he had to squint against them, even inside the dream.
At first, he was enthralled by the beauty of the knife and the ancient craftsmanship with which it had been made, but then he realized it had been made for killing, to assassinate someone specific, and that knowledge hit him like a punch to the gut.
He woke up regretting what he had done the past months, getting involved with Kaye, killing the owl, leaving Michael and his family, buying the cabin, being pulled into the neighbors’ agrarian project. The remorse sat like lead in his bones. Other thoughts rushed past like water around a boulder in a river. He was anchored by regret, everything else was fluid.
In his inbox was a note from the space organization. His application to the astronaut training program had made it out of the initial round and the organization required more information and tests. Attached to the mail was the medical form for a private piloting license, necessary for the second round of selection. He needed a physician to do a general examination and the electrocardiogram test that was required for the certificate, plus sign the form which asked if he had any kind of heart or circulatory disease, high blood pressure, asthma, diabetes, and a whole list of other ailments. Previous pilot or scuba diving licenses could be submitted instead, provided they had not been issued more than two years in the past, making his scuba diving license too old to use. He had to find a local physician who would see him and sign the license as soon as possible, otherwise he would have to find a doctor in the city and take the train back. When he realized he might have to return home, he almost grabbed his backpack to start on the hike to the concrete platform where the rail tracks reached into the pine forest in both directions.
Instead, he got up on legs that were asleep from sitting on the floor for too long, limped to the firewood he had stacked in the now completed northwestern corner of the living room and brought two of the logs and a twig with him to the hearth. He placed the logs on the ashes, fetched the lighter from the top drawer in the kitchen, and lit the twig, let it burn a little, before he put the flame to the logs so they caught fire too. The new warmth made him shiver and he moved as close to the hearth as possible and stared into the flames for a long while.
As he had suspected, none of the local physicians listed online were authorized to sign the medical test that the space organization required.
“The closest person who can issue certificates is on the coast,” they informed him when he called the doctors’ offices, giving him the name of a small town two stops closer on the rail line than his home city. He’d save little more than an hour’s travel by going there. But since he didn’t trust himself to not give everything up and flee back to Michael and the apartment once he was home, he decided to go to the coast instead. He found the doctor the local physicians had mentioned online, phoned her office, and scheduled an appointment later in the week.
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