The Effort

by Claire Holroyde

  The only families who lived in the buildings along the road were headed by men like Ned, who served in the local militia. This was the only job the townsfolk were willing to support through taxes on their harvest of rice, corn, beans, cassava, pineapples, oranges, bananas, and melons. It was very dangerous, but it brought honor and paid a lot of produce.

  Zhen could remember the first time the three of them walked inside some of the abandoned buildings five months ago. Luckily, they wore clothes for the journey to Pedra Branca and could breathe through their sleeves, although they still choked on the stench of death. The three of them hiked out to the closest farmland and saw much of the same: entire families slaughtered with their bodies lying where they fell. They’re not fighting together, Gustavo had barely whispered. So they die a few at a time. Before the rest know to flee.

  With that, Gustavo had run to his parish and found the hidden key to the building, right where the priest had always left it. Gustavo rang the church bells until the townsfolk left their farms and gathered outside. They had prayed for the return of the priest and their God. But here they got a poet, an engineer, and a pilot with no plane. Many of the townsfolk wept in disappointment.

  Gustavo didn’t despair. He called the first of the townhalls. There were so many people they filled the pews and the street outside. Gustavo raised his voice so that it carried and told the townsfolk that if they didn’t make a stand and fight back, they would die. Raiders would go farm to farm and outnumber a single family. There needed to be a militia to patrol the town’s perimeter and ring the church bells to signal an attack. All the men would have to come running to fight. If they didn’t find safety in their numbers, they were doomed.

  “Are you sure you wish to stay in Pedra Branca?” Gustavo asked Zhen and Ned suddenly.

  The other two nodded vigorously as they walked. Ned looked to Zhen with shared understanding.

  “I’m so grateful,” Ned insisted. “Everyone I ever met in the first twenty-seven years of my life is probably dead…I’m only alive because of you and the others.”

  The Wayãpi were the most decent of peoples who had saved their lives at every turn. The warrior they encountered by the Eureupousine River had stayed his arrow. He was from an unknown tribe, but he understood enough of Gustavo’s words to know that the Oyapock River was their destination. He even hiked with them for half of a day to get them headed in the right direction and then pointed ahead with a frown that needed no translation: Leave these lands and don’t come back.

  Once the band of four found the Oyapock River, they followed it upstream until they reached a village of “Other Wayãpi,” as Gustavo called them, on the northern bank of French Guiana. This was the September after the deflection, and they were starving again. The Other Wayãpi remembered Gustavo and took in both him and his ragged friends with no complaint. It took Gustavo, Zhen, Ned, and Dewei a week to regain their strength and heal their blisters. The Other Wayãpi wove carrying baskets from palm leaves and fastened shoulder straps made of soft bark. They packed food that lasted well: bananas and kwaky, a grainy porridge made from cassava flour. They even wrapped smoking embers tightly in a waxy palm leaf so the group could take fire on their journey across the Oyapock River to the southern bank of Amapá, Brazil. It took them another month to reach Aramirã.

  “I’m so very grateful. But life in the village is a life for someone else,” Ned said. “It’s a life for you, Gustavo. And for Dewei, but not for me. Not for Zhen, either.”

  Ned was two meters tall—or “six-foot-four” as Ned insisted when they sparred over the metric system. His skin was pale and covered in dark hair. The Wayãpi stared and pointed up at his full beard and hairy chest, calves, and thighs. The names of Wayãpi adults were considered private and guarded carefully. Many had Brazilian names or nicknames that they answered to instead. Gustavo’s name wasn’t really Gustavo, but that was what everyone in the village called him. It wasn’t long before Ned caught on to his nickname.

  What’re they calling me? he asked Gustavo, and pointed to a group of men sitting on a log by a fire. Gustavo translated immediately: Big Ugly. That’s your nickname. Ned was taken aback. Why would you call me that? he asked the men directly. Gustavo translated English to Wayãpi. One of the men answered matter-of-factly and Gustavo translated back. He said, “Brazilians are all ugly.” I know you’re not Brazilian, Ned, but invaders have carried so many different flags over the generations. It’s just easier to lump you together sometimes.

  Ned let it be known that he was a mix of Scottish, German, and Norwegian descent. (Although, Zhen had to admit, he might as well have been full Neanderthal from the Ice Age when physically compared to these Amerindians.) What’s more, Ned added in a raised voice, he had had to partake in diversity and inclusion training along with all other Coast Guard personnel—a course these Wayãpi had obviously skipped.

  Ned disappeared for a few days after that. Gustavo and Dewei grew worried, but Zhen asked that they give him some time alone in the forest. She had realized, with a tug on her heart, that Ned—a strapping and well-proportioned American white male—had never been an ugly outsider until this moment. And inside the isolated Wayãpi gene pool so perfectly adapted to the literal polar opposite environment, that is all Ned would ever be.

  They reached a gas station on the edge of town.

  “I hate this place,” Gustavo said.

  He stared down the abandoned store and empty pumps like an enemy. Zhen knew that this was where Gustavo’s twin brother was murdered. She and Ned said nothing as they kept walking. All of them had lost their real families, and only time could ease that pain.

  The asphalt paving soon ended, and they continued onto a red-dirt path and wide clearing that cut through the forest toward Wayãpi lands like a trailing wound. The unpaved road stopped just short of the village, constructed and then abandoned in the 1970s when the Brazilian government ran out of funding. This had saved the mostly secluded Wayãpi, while other tribes were exposed to the modern world and wiped out.

  Gustavo halted and pulled his T-shirt over his head. Zhen and Ned turned around to give him privacy as he took off all his clothes and tucked them into his canvas bag. When they turned back, Gustavo had tied cotton twine around his waist and draped two pieces of red fabric over his groin and buttocks.

  “I don’t think you’ll have any more attacks in the rain and flooding,” Gustavo said, “but stay alert.”

  Ned was already pretending to dust off one of his shoulders. Gustavo gave a half smile but looked to the pink and purple scars on the other man’s forearms and biceps. The deeper gashes had dark dots at the edges where Zhen had tried to stitch the flesh together with sutures and a curved needle from her first aid kit. The scars hidden under his shirt were even larger. At least they had healed without too much infection to leave Ned ready for the next raid.

  “Try and stay on the other side of a knife,” Gustavo said kindly, and he reached up to embrace the bravest of fighters.

  Ned hugged back hard and closed his eyes for a brief moment. You never knew when you would see someone again, if at all. Gustavo hugged Zhen next and promised to return to town when the rains stopped. She and Ned watched the back of Gustavo set off under a high noon sun. His long hair was still fully black, while Zhen’s was lightly streaked with strands of steel gray. He told them Wayãpi hair was always black: black at birth and black at death.

  By nightfall, Gustavo would arrive at his village, made safer now that the small town of Pedra Branca was willing to stand together and fight off raiders from the southeast. Gustavo’s village had his wife, formerly his brother’s wife but a widow no longer. It had Gustavo’s nephews, whom he had adopted as sons. This village had everything Gustavo had ever wanted.

  * * *

  AT DUSK, THERE was a visitor outside Zhen’s bedroom on the second floor of the parish. Zhen had used her chamber pot minutes before hearing the knock. She tried to breathe through her nose to determine how bad the smell was. Witho
ut modern amenities, they were faced with their animal nature again, noses rubbed in it.

  “Zhen?”

  It was Ned come to return the missing collection of poetry to the priest’s library now that the light had died. Ned had to report for a night shift with the militia, but still he lingered.

  “I, ah, when I came to pick out a book, I peeked at your little nest over there,” he said awkwardly, and pointed to a corner of the room where Zhen had collected cellphones, laptops, bedside radios with alarm clocks, car antennas, wires, and various other equipment, all under a plastic tarp.

  “Nest?” Zhen repeated.

  She smiled wide without covering her scars with her hand.

  “Yes! My nest for a xǐquè!”

  “What?”

  “Xǐquè. It is the name of a bird. They are curious collectors. I think they line their nests with shiny objects.”

  “Magpie?” Ned guessed.

  Zhen nodded and said that the English word sounded right, but she wasn’t sure.

  “I have a favor,” Zhen said, suddenly remembering. “There’s a large satellite dish high up on the roof of a building. I’d like you to get it for me without breaking your neck.”

  Ned clapped his hands together with excitement.

  “Yes ma’am. Do you think any satellites are still working?”

  “As you say, only one way to find out.”

  Ned laughed and said, yes, he did say that.

  “You think four years is enough for the great human race to get their act together?”

  “No,” Zhen admitted. “But maybe someday? I wonder what that would even look like. Have we seen it in a past civilization, or would it be something new?”

  Zhen sighed as she tried to skim her knowledge of the last several millennia. So much went wrong, she had to admit, but so much went right. How could they bring back the good without making the same mistakes all over again?

  “Maybe that someday when we do get our act together,” Ned said, “maybe that will be the day when I help Dr. Zhen Liu get to where she is needed most?”

  But they were in the most remote forest left on the planet. It was a natural barrier that protected them from grave danger, but it was also a barrier blocking the way back to what was once modern civilization. They had crossed that barrier once, but they had Gustavo as a guide, the Wayãpi villages by the Oyapock River as safe havens, and a lot of luck to keep from starving along the way.

  “They’ll need someone like you. Whoever they is,” Ned continued. “But the journey will be so dangerous. You’ll need me, and I’ll need a mission. You got to be the hero. I want my turn.”

  “You are already a hero,” Zhen said simply.

  Ned bowed his head. That he didn’t protest with false modesty meant that he knew it was true. Zhen walked over and lifted the tarp covering her collection. Her fingers itched to get to them. Soon…

  The lead engineer from the Effort in French Guiana always referred to scenarios of the future. As Zhen saw it, her magpie nest had several. Scenario 1, worst case, Zhen would enjoy moments of nostalgia as she touched and tinkered with these artifacts of great human endeavor. Scenario 2, Zhen could build two short-range radios so that the town could warn the Wayãpi village in Aramirã of attacks. Scenario 3, the best of the possibilities, Zhen could build a radio strong enough to bounce off the ionosphere so she could listen for others. She would listen for Ben Schwartz, Amy Kowalski, Love Mwangi, Jin-soo Lee, and all the others. The Defense Effort for Comet UD3 had completed its mission, but would there be any survivors who could join a new effort for a new world?

  Ned squatted beside Zhen and picked up a cellphone with a dead battery.

  “The professor on the show Gilligan’s Island jiggered a battery out of coconut shells, seawater, pennies, and, like, hairpins.”

  “What?”

  “It was a joke,” Ned said quickly. “Sorry about the American pop culture. I mean to say, Imagine what you could do with all this crap on your floor! Dewei said you’re a genius that can solve the impossible. You did it at the Effort.”

  “I didn’t save the Earth with my brain,” Zhen said. “I saved it with diplomacy.”

  She giggled at Ned’s baffled expression.

  “Deus ex machina,” Zhen whispered with a sudden glow. “That’s what they called me…”

  EPILOGUE

  The Second Dark Ages

  Atka Island, Alaska

  IN THE END, modern civilization was not undone by a comet, but by its very threat. No one knew how much the human population dwindled by the Second Dark Ages. The only communications were from hunters and fishermen, who all described the same hardships. Complications from childbirth were killers, and infant mortality was high. These dangers were almost lucky, because they only applied to the fertile. I was lucky to be born so soon. My mother was even luckier. She told me her childbearing hips were finally good for something.

  I was an only child. Both my parents claimed that this was for the best. My mother said that feeding another child would have been too difficult. My father said that he didn’t want to risk losing his wife. Still, it wasn’t a choice. My mother was once a scientist. She told me our rainwater wasn’t clean. It only looked clear because I couldn’t see the chemicals and pollutants with my eyes. My mother said she could taste them and often gave a saying from the Known World: You reap what you sow.

  But I didn’t know any different; water tasted like water. The Known World wasn’t known to me or any of the other children born in the dark; it existed in the survivors only. On bad days, comet refugees on Atka suffered nightmares, post-traumatic stress disorder, and even the catatonia. On good days, some hummed the melodies of pop songs and spoke of professional sports teams and reality television. Remember? they asked, as they slid their index fingers across their flat palms, scrolling through news feeds on make-believe smartphones. Some even drove make-believe cars while make-believe texting and crashing into a make-believe pile-up. My mother had another saying from the Known World: Old habits die hard.

  I loved to listen to talk about the Known World. During the long Alaskan nights of winter, our community usually gathered in the school gym, nestled together under sealskin blankets with stone oil lamps burning by our feet. The other children were noisy, but I was silent so I could hear. My mother said I was like my father, Jack, a keen observer who used to capture photographic images. She asked if I was taking pictures in my head as I stared. Maybe?

  The adults talked about democracy, the internet, slavery, war and peace, the Constitution, books, plays, songs and solid gold albums, movies, poems, and museums with all our artifacts kept safe inside. My mother taught me about science and chemistry. My father taught me about photography, journalism, recorded history, and manufactured propaganda. Their stories became my stories.

  I was eleven years old when the Message Bottle washed up on the shores of Atka Island. The message was written in Russian that no one could translate, but it was the first we had heard from survivors outside of the Aleutians. The Message Bottle was all we talked about for many moons. What would happen when pockets of survivors found each other? What did they want to be as they came out of the dark?

  They say that each new age dreams up the next. My parents wondered out loud if our future wasn’t so unknown; perhaps we all knew exactly what it should be if only we could embrace it and let go of the comforts of the past, selfish as they were. As new leaders would be elected, as new dictators and warlords cleared a bloody path to the top, as more and more children were born in an era not to be taken for granted—it would become time to decide what to do with that second chance. We would die by our decisions and mistakes, or live to tell our stories.

  Author’s Note

  I researched and wrote this story on weekends when my time was my own. The details won’t be perfect, much as I want them to be.

  I must give credit to the volunteers at Wikipedia who started me off with a basic understanding of just about everything. For deeper
dives, I searched the best news outlets for English speakers: The Economist, NPR, BBC News, The Guardian, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, HuffPost, NBC News, International Business Times, Slate, and The New York Times. If there is a heaven, journalists from these publications should have reserved parking at the gates because there is no democracy without a free press.

  The Defense Effort for Comet UD3 pulled from existing theories and collaborations toward planetary defense. The original HAIV (Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle) model belongs to Dr. Bong Wie and his team at the Asteroid Deflection Research Center Department of Aerospace Engineering at Iowa State University. The Post–Cold War collaboration between American and Russian nuclear physicists was best described by one of its participants, Dr. Siegfried S. Hecker. I named the character Dr. “Ziggy” Divjak from the Effort’s scientific core in his honor.

  I have never boarded a polar icebreaker, but I learned from those who documented their experiences on Healy’s scientific expeditions, especially Dr. Katlin Bowman, Alan Guo, and Bill Schmoker. I have never been to the Amazon or witnessed firsthand its environmental devastation, genocide, and assimilation of Indigenous peoples like the Wayãpi. I was largely informed by two books written by two phenomenal individuals: Getting to Know Waiwai: An Amazonian Ethnography by Alan Tormaid Campbell and Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World by Kevin Bales.

  José “Zé” Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife, Maria do Espírito Santo, were sustainable farmers that were murdered together in 2011. The killings were announced, as they were in the story, in the Brazilian Senate as it debated proposed changes to its Forest Code. An article in The New Yorker by Jon Lee Anderson titled “Murder in the Amazon” recounted how a block of “ruralistas” senators booed when a legislator called for an investigation into the murders. I quoted an unnamed senator: “If the Amazon is the lungs of the world, then the world must pay us to breathe.” This statement was actually made by a senator from Rondônia in an interview with NPR’s Lourdes Garcia-Navarro.