Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  * * *

  I instructed the taxi to transfer my baggage to the truck in staff parking, and continued into the Zoo with Chloe.

  We had a shared background, Chloe and me. We both started our careers with a love for the Zoo, and then joined it as volunteers and assistant keepers. During that time, we’d also helped out with research at CIRCE and gotten to know Judith quite well, even before we became regular staff members at CIRCE.

  From the airport to the Zoo, everything looked normal. Chloe said that things had calmed down in the last couple of weeks, but that the days after the Ashitaka news had been pretty bad. The Prime Minister came out personally to address the nation, and was now flying coast to coast to talk to people. Things were, on the surface, back to normal.

  But things were not normal. Even here at the Zoo, something here was amiss.

  At this time of day there would usually be crowds, milling on the grass, wrapped around the enclosures, walking three or four across on the pathways. Now, although there were, here and there, scattered individuals, the Zoo was empty.

  It was how things were after closing time, when the gates were closed and the last few stragglers left in their spinners. A quiet bereft of human sound descended on the Zoo, broken only by the volunteers and keepers on their evening rounds. Otherwise, the only sounds were the call of ibis, the trumpeting of elephants, the bray of zebras—the sounds of nature, untouched.

  I must have gasped or said something, because Chloe blinked and started cleaning her glasses again.

  “It’s been like this,” she said. “The only ones coming through now are things like school tours that have been booked in advance. Even those groups are smaller than usual.”

  “We should be okay for now,” I said. “The Foundation should see us through. What’s happening at the other zoos? What’s happening at Brantford, Jungle Cat, Toronto?”

  We sped by a habitat where our female black panther Parisa roamed. Panthers live in a variety of habitats—rainforest, woodlands, swamps, marshland, savannahs, mountains, and deserts, and even human settlements—more effectively than any other big cats. This habitat was a rainforest.

  “Some of the keepers at Toronto and the other zoos have already left, and the others are talking about leaving,” Chloe said. “It’s like everywhere else. People who can afford it have gone off-world, or they’re making plans to live their lives.”

  “Judith hasn’t gone off-world. What’s she saying?”

  “We have a mission,” Chloe said. “That’s what she’s saying.”

  “We do.”

  “Not everyone is listening now, Zara,” she answered. “A third of the volunteer staff haven’t come back. And one of the keepers, Erin, she’s gone.”

  Our spinner stopped at CIRCE.

  * * *

  The Canadian Institute for Research in Conservation Ecology, CIRCE, was situated in a three-story building with exterior walls of floor-to-ceiling glass, which housed laboratories and core facilities, staff offices, conference rooms, and an imaging facility with both computer tomographic and magnetic resonance imaging capability.

  Founded by an initial grant of $500M from the Weston Foundation, and with ties to universities in and around the Greater Toronto Area and elsewhere, CIRCE boasted cross-disciplinary research at the cutting edge of biotechnology.

  Teams in several research areas explored the conservation and perpetuation of species using some of the most advanced tools of biotechnology. Those tools were what led to some of the previously extinct species now roaming the grounds of the Zoo.

  But the core of CIRCE, the primary reason it was built, was its Cryopreservation Unit, and Project Noah. The project was casually referred to in some circles as Judith’s Ark.

  Chloe and I scanned our security cards, put on our gear, and stepped into the Cryo Unit.

  In many ways, Judith’s Ark reflected similar aims to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, an Arctic stronghold of the world’s seeds on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen about 1,300 kilometers from the North Pole.

  The vault was started to preserve duplicate plant seeds held in other gene banks worldwide, an attempt to make sure these seeds aren’t lost in the middle of regional crises.

  While there was some historical question of the Seed Vault’s integrity when it experienced flooding from heavy rain and melted snow, over the decades it had been upgraded so that the vault could now survive global crises without the human intervention.

  I’d worked on some of the latest modifications during my stint at the Gosling Research Institute, and had traveled to Svalbard to help install these.

  The Cryo Unit does work on cell extraction and culture technologies, alternate cryopreservation processes and fluids, innovative cooling mechanisms, compact and long-life power sources for cryo-conservation, and many other areas. Much of it is unglamorous research work.

  The Ark room is a chamber filled with a set of enormous steel reservoirs, with liquid nitrogen flowing into them through vacuum-insulated pipes. Behind it, a maze of pumps and machinery hum. The steel reservoirs, in turn, fed three medium-sized freezers, marked A, B, and C. These three freezers were the Ark itself.

  Chloe went to Freezer C. As she opened it with a gloved hand, our breaths and water vapor in the air condensed into wisps of white. She extracted a container which held several small vials.

  “Here’s your unicorn,” she said, tapping the container.

  “Amahle,” I said, exhaling.

  Her cells, cultured and divided into several vials. The cells that represented the blueprint of everything the rhino ever was.

  Over the last while, Chloe and others at the Cryo Unit worked to preserve what could be saved from the cells, two samples of each type, with the duplicates sent to the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research. In turn, San Diego regularly sent duplicates of its own collection, to help ensure any losses were minimized.

  We went over the documentation for Amahle, as well as several other specimens that had come in during the time I was away—hawksbill turtle, red panda, sea lions, Malayan tiger, giant otter, South Andean deer, gaur, and Humboldt penguin.

  Inside the three freezers were all the individual animals of the Ark, nearly 40,000 individuals. They represented thousands of species and subspecies, and the decades-long work of hundreds of dedicated humans to preserve the diversity of life on Earth.

  * * *

  That night I took my Mom out to her favorite Japanese restaurant, Momiji. She hesitated, but as it was my first night back and she was in the mood for Japanese, accepted.

  My mother hadn’t been doing well recently, and although I tried in my mind to place it in relation to grief at the death of my father, I couldn’t trace it back to that. It was a more recent development.

  One night a couple of weeks before I left for South Africa, we were having dinner at Best Friend Chinese restaurant, when I noticed that she was slurring her speech. At any other time, in any other place, I’d have put it down to the wine—but we had nothing stronger than jasmine tea. Looking back on it now, she complained a bit about the toughness of the steamed chicken, and her difficulty swallowing, even though I found it beautifully done.

  My mother was 55 then, still working for the same law office she had for the last 29 years. The lawyers at her firm worked late into the night, and she’d continue working at home, her computer lighting her face late at night at the dining room table. I’d bring her coffee, but that night I noticed an awkwardness in the way Mom’s arm would hang, a clumsiness in her typing. Her posture was a bit off, and she was having difficulty keeping her right arm in position.

  When one day she tripped and fell on our carpeted floor, for no reason, I told her she should go see the doctor, and she’d gone during the time I was away.

  “So how did it go?” I asked.

  “Naomi wasn’t there, so I had to see another doctor,” she said.

  “Who wasn’t there, Dr. Satoshi?”

  She nodded. “The clini
c said she’d left, she and her husband. For Mars. They sold everything about a year ago to get a berth on a private ship. They waited, got word that it was ready. They just dropped everything and left.”

  I’d heard similar stories from Chloe and the others at the Zoo. People with the means and the connections finding ways off the planet. Space tourist companies converting their orbital yachts into long-distance transports. Cargo companies accepting human payload instead of consumer electronics goods.

  “So who did you see?”

  “A new doctor, just got there last month. Dr. Bishara. He had all my charts.”

  “And?”

  “He put me through some tests, then he scheduled me for some more at Sunnybrook Health Centre. We’ll get the results in a month.”

  I watched her closely at Momiji. She was very deliberate with her sushi, but she was content. Except for her comment about Dr. Satoshi, we didn’t talk about the Comet or the Ashitaka at all.

  * * *

  Over the next few months, my mother did go through several more tests for her undiagnosed symptoms, and I gathered they included—besides blood and urine tests—electromyograms, magnetic resonance imaging, a spinal tap and a muscle biopsy.

  She was still struggling, and once in a while complained about feeling weak in her knees and ankles, or about cramps in her shoulders and arms, and strangest of all, her tongue twitching.

  That last one scared me to no end, and I began collating all the symptoms I knew with an online diagnosis app.

  I confronted her with my fears, and she finally confessed.

  Dr. Bishara, that first day she saw him, had given a provisional diagnosis amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

  Known commonly as Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS was a type of motor neuron disease, where the nerve cells gradually break down and die. It begins with weakness or twitching in limbs, and eventually begins to affect control of the muscles needed to speak, move, eat, and breathe.

  Up to now, doctors had little idea why ALS occurs and to whom, although inherited genetics plays a role in some cases.

  The paralysis makes for a slow and painful degradation, beginning to affect control of the muscles a person needs to move, to speak, to eat, to breathe.

  A specialist she was referred to prescribed edaravone, which was supposed to slow down the degradation, but still contributed to her shortness of breath.

  It is not a cure. In fact, there is no known cure for ALS, and eventually, within four or five years, the disease is fatal.

  * * *

  Get out now. Military families are a priority. Take next possible ship out.

  That was Paul, leaving a message on my phone. Not one of his throwaway messages, just to keep in touch, to look like he cares, not another Hope your day’s been good.

  I glanced at Mom across from the granite island in the kitchen, where we were peeling and chopping potatoes to put in a beef stew. It was clear she’d gotten a similar message on hers.

  She looked at me, wiped her hands on her apron, and started a message back. She pressed SEND and laid her phone down on the granite, where I could read her response.

  I’m not going.

  In between bursts of messages, we finished cooking, ate our meal, washed our dishes, sat reading a book or watching television, completing the back and forth with Paul in their slow, interplanetary crawl.

  I fell asleep in front of the television. When I woke up, she had turned the television off, and she was watching me in the lamplight.

  “This weekend,” she said. “I want to fly with you.”

  And that was how, one day, I flew with my mother on an Aerolite Merlin, a step-up from my Aerolite Dragonfly trainer.

  Frail and beautiful, she took in the vistas I showed her, the troubles of Earth far beneath us, the terror of the Comet still far away. As we neared Glen Eden, I went lower so we could see all the habitats—the Arctic icecap, African the savannah, the Australian outback.

  I showed her the world, in all its beauty, in miniature.

  And that was when she told me she wanted to die.

  Part IV

  Stag

  For Immediate Broadcast M5 50 85

  Multi-Spectral Imager Spots Comet on Flyby

  Multi-spectral images of Comet C/21B9 M2 DEMOS were obtained in the early morning hours via the UEF’s Antigone spacecraft on a flyby. The images reveal an oval-shaped core that appears to rotate about once every twelve hours. The multi-spectral images have resolutions as fine as 25 feet (7.5 meters) per pixel.

  Comet C/21B9 M2 DEMOS was discovered by researchers with the Deep Ecliptic Multi-Object Survey (DEMOS) at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.

  The comet is expected to intersect Earth’s orbit with an estimated error of plus or minus less than approximately 1 million kilometers, or more than twice the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The encounter is expected to result in an impact, the effects of which would be mitigated upon impact with water, such as the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean.

  Since the surface are of the Earth is presented as 71% water, it is expected that the effects of an impact by Comet C/21B9 M2 DEMOS will be minimized in terms of severity, and will allow a measured response by authorities.

  The diameter of the comet’s primary mass has been estimated by DEMOS to measure approximately 40 kilometers across. Other multi-spectral observations of the comet have also been conducted, and are anticipated to provide images with even higher resolution.

  Multi-spectral imaging has been used to observe thousands of comets and asteroids. When these natural remnants from the early universe pass in the vicinity of our solar system, deep space multi-spectral imaging is a powerful technique for more precise determination of their trajectories, as well as to determine their material properties, including size, shape, rotation, surface features, roughness, and any other physical characteristics that may be of interest to scientists.

  14

  One Bee

  The first of the civilian ships left early the next year. They were re-purposed military transports, on rotation from the nearest bases, drives charged to a level just enough for a round-trip to the inner colonies.

  Paul had been right about military families getting priority on these first transports. It was a lottery system, but that lottery only included immediate families of those whose sons or daughters, mothers or fathers, were serving on remote systems.

  Mother had told him she wouldn’t go, that it was pointless because she had ALS, that she should give up the berth to someone else, if she was chosen.

  By the middle of the year, only five civilian ships had left. With a capacity of 50,000 per ship, that was less than a hundredth of a percent of the Earth’s population, one bee in a hive of 10,000.

  In the end our names weren’t selected, so it was a moot point.

  15

  Grevy’s Zebra

  On the Merlin, when we were flying over Glen Eden before she told me she wanted to die, she told me she loved me.

  That outright expression of affection was something that was not raised to express. But she told me she was afraid that soon she would lose the ability to even do that. So, she made sure.

  We talked much more in the next few weeks. She quit her job at the law firm—there wasn’t much point—and most days she had time to come with me to the Zoo.

  Following Erin, a few more of our keepers left—but most of them stayed, finding some continuing meaning in their lives in caring for the animals, even though the number of visitors had dropped precipitously.

  In between data runs and at lunchtime, I pushed Mom in a wheelchair through paths that were now nearly empty. I stopped for her to watch Leia in the zebra habitat, or at another of the many habitats, or in one of the picnic areas, finding in the time together and the conversation a reason to continue for a while.

  Pain is almost never the reason people ask to die. More often, it’s fear—the fear of the loss of independence, or the loss of dignity, or the abili
ty to have an acceptable quality of life. Beneath it all, there is always an illness, an ailment, and there may be excruciating physical pain—but what really hurts is the existential suffering.

  That was how I summed it up, what my mother told me.

  My mother knew friends who had gone through similar things, their bodies slowly failing them. Susan, a woman in her yoga class who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, who had lost the use of her arms and legs. Daisy, an administrative assistant at her firm, who could no longer speak.

  She didn’t want to become like them, didn’t want the slow decline of what was essential to life. If only, she said in a moment of weakness, if only the Comet would come sooner.

  We continued to talk. Mom knew she had to convince me, because she needed me to do things for her now, and because she knew that I wasn’t yet strong enough to do those things. If only I had been stronger sooner.

  * * *

  Only a few months after my Mom’s diagnosis, I had to bring her to the hospital. When she was released, she couldn’t take care of herself any longer; I took leave from CIRCE to look after her.

  It was painful to watch. The woman who had raised me, was my rock, comforted me through my father’s death, through my brother’s departure, through everything—reduced to a willow’s shadow of herself.

  She was far from old, but I would have to bring her to the bathroom every morning and every night, watch the horror of awareness on her face as I had to clean her up.

  She grew even thinner and more impatient with herself. Her legs collapsed if she tried to stand up, and she no longer had much use in her arms.

  She would struggle for breath as she sought to tell me something, choke on the mucus building up in her throat.