by White, Gwynn
I knew, I understood, that I was flying without real direction. I knew that there were risks in simply flying into the launch site. I knew that there was a real risk I would be shot down, that I would never find Judith’s contact, that it would all end with me pulled from the aerojet screaming, with no one listening.
But it was the end. There were no other alternatives.
A meteor passed through the horizon, and then another.
Below me another ruined city came into view. A black wraith of smoke billowed up from the ground. A tower bridge was broken like a toothpick construction, its center bowed into the river.
After a while, I couldn’t take it anymore, and tilted up until the landscape blended into swaths of gray or brown.
Just over half an hour into the flight, the voice of the radio announcer took on a new timbre, of agitation, of panic.
The people had found a way in, he said. Ladders and bucket trucks and fire engines had been placed against the walls, and people were streaming into the compound. In an instant, the main gates were being opened from the inside, and the crowd was flowing into the launch site.
I tried to look for a video channel, and soon found it, the feed streaming from one of the cameras inside the launch site.
By that time there were hundreds, thousands of people overrunning the site. And now they swarmed over the launch pad, climbing their way up and around and over the towers and gantries. There were people climbing the stairs, climbing access ladders, to the very top of the ship.
I had no idea what they wanted to do, perhaps to get in the ship themselves, pry a hatch or window loose. It was insane. They must have known, they must have understood, that they were doing this without real direction, only because of the heat of the moment. They must know there was a real risk they would be shot, that they would be—
But it was the end. There were no other alternatives.
The hopelessness of both our situations shocked me, and for a moment I lost hope. I remembered my father’s last words to me, “You do what you have to do,” and I gunned the engines.
Suddenly, on the video, one of the platforms began to bend, from the sheer weight of humanity on it. The announcer on the radio saw it as well, and started shouting as if he were there, for people to get off.
Nothing we could do. In horror, we watched as the platform broke, and hundreds of people fell to their deaths or to the platform below.
Just as unexpectedly, the next platform broke as well, and two of the massive pieces attached to the ship swung down and battered the rocket booster next to it. A rupture appeared on its side, and smoke began billowing out of the crack.
Another platform broke, and another, and like the platforms above, swung like a titanic hammer into the booster. With people screaming, the gargantuan booster detached itself from the ship and fell into flames, engulfing the entire spacecraft.
It was over. Four hours before launch, the Artemis 2 was finished. Earth’s last hope was no more.
Part VII
Narwhal
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23
Course of the Narwhal
I took manual control of the Narwhal, and turned it around, back north.
At the same time, I turned off the feed from the outside world, radio, video, everything. I was flying in clouds, with the occasional streak of a meteor illuminating the distance.
Somewhere beyond our Moon, the Comet was coming. It was going to hit. And there was no way out.
It was the end. There were no other alternatives.
I thought of Chloe, I thought of how she made it, and that gave me comfort. Through her, and the work of CIRCE and the Zoo, half of the animal species in the Ark would survive. Perhaps that was enough.
A great peace descended on me.
I closed my eyes, and relaxed. The Narwhal tilted its nose down, ever so gently. I thought, if I just pushed down further, it would be over quickly, a death that I chose instead of a death that chose me.
The Chinese say that the main attribute of a dragon is strength. They also say that strength without the ability to bend with fortune leads to destruction.
Bend with fortune
“Damn it!” I said out loud. “There must be another way!”
Suddenly everyone who ever meant something to me came back to me—my father, my mother, Paul, Judith, Leia, Amahle, Parisa, Gwynn, Pavarti, all the keepers and staff and volunteers, and all the animals in the Zoo, and all the species in my Ark, my family of humans and animals, a chain of every living thing on this Earth.
That thought stuck with me. Every living thing.
And then it hit me.
Svalbard.
24
Only Human
I shook myself, pulled out of the dive.
I’d been to the Seed Vault at Svalbard before, during my work at the Gosling Institute for Biodiversity, helped install some of the integrity and automation measures that enhanced its viability as a stronghold for the world’s seeds.
It was remote, tectonically stable, cold, and a global landmark.
At around 1,300 kilometers from the North Pole, the surroundings are 60% covered in glaciers. The seed vault itself is cut 120 metres deep inside a sandstone mountain near Longyearbyen, the largest settlement on the island. Its location in the stone means the vault is kept at a natural -6°C, refrigerating the seeds to -18 °C.
With a permafrost environment, and multiplied by the long winter of the Comet, the cryo-mechanism keeping the Ark interior at −196 °C would be able to operate 25-35% more efficiently, extending the time the specimens could remain viable.
And if I could place the Ark there, I wouldn’t need a beacon or marker. Svalbard, the repository of genetics for plant life, would be the marker for our collection of for animal life.
Someday—even if I was the only human left on Earth, even if it was long after I was dead—someone would come looking for Svalbard.
They would find it, and they would find the Ark.
* * *
Could I make it?
Svalbard was just over 5,500 kilometers away, and I had already headed 250 kilometers in the other direction, and back.
I tried to remember the numbers the engineer at the flying club had told me. 6,600 kilometers. No, that wasn’t right. 6,600 meters, not kilometers, was the Narwhal’s ceiling, not its range.
It had more than enough range to get to Iqaluit in Nunavut, or to Grise Ford, Canada’s northernmost community, he had said. That was a maximum range of about 4,630 kilometers.
I winced. 4,630 kilometers was not far enough, especially if I’d already used 500 kilometers of it.
Then I remembered another thing the engineer said: In glide mode from its ceiling, the Narwhal could travel thousands of kilometers.
I grabbed the computer, started sketching and doing some quick calculations. It would be close. My attempt to get to the Artemis site and flight back had used up about 500 kilometers of the available range. So—I could do a powered flight for about 4,000 kilometers, simultaneously climbing to the Narwhal’s maximum ceiling.
At the ceiling, I’d switch to glide mode, and try to make another couple of thousand kilometers towards Svalbard. When I was close enough, I’d switch again to powered flight to make a landing.
I pulled a map on the Narwhal’s control screen, and traced the flight path. I’d be over Greenland halfway through the journey, and aim to hit the altitude ceiling just after passing Greenland’s eastern coast. The glide itself would be mostly over the open waters of the Greenland Sea.
I’d be aiming at the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. I could tr
y for Longyearbyen, the largest settlement on the island, or for the seed vault itself.
Undershoot the glide, and I’d fall into the Greenland Sea; overshoot and it’d be the Arctic Ocean.
But, if I could fly the Narwhal just right, there was a chance I could make it.
* * *
With 500 kilometers per hour for the powered part of the flight, and 150 for the glide, the total flight time would be eighteen hours.
I keyed in the details to the flight computer and set the course: Powered climb, glide, and a final powered landing.
The first three hours I flew over Canada, crossing the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, and finally Newfoundland and Labrador, until I reached the northeastern coast and the North Atlantic Ocean.
The next three hours was over the blue of the North Atlantic Ocean until I hit Greenland, and another two hours to cross Greenland itself.
25
Crocodile
I’d been flying just under eight hours when the Narwhal’s computer alerted me that I was just over the Greenland Sea, and at the target altitude. I double-checked the onboard maps with our location, and re-projected the glide towards Spitsbergen Island.
Outside, the world was covered with snow, and the occasional meteor shot through the whiteness.
I was three-quarters of the way there. Now for the glide.
The climb had been fine, totally under control. But my stomach tightened as verified altitude and engaged glide mode. The engines cut off, the Narwhal was totally silent as it dipped towards the Earth.
At the angle we were gliding, the sunlight on the snow was dazzling, and I had to intermittently close my eyes.
Suddenly I felt that peace come over me again, but not the resignation of death, the realization that I was close, so close.
I glided in silence, over the expanse of the Greenland Sea.
It would be ten more hours of silence.
* * *
I remembered a plaque on the wall in Judith’s office. It was a quotation from Jane Goodall, a twentieth-century scientist best known for her landmark sociological study of wild chimpanzees:
I don't have any idea of who or what God is. But I do believe in some great spiritual power. I feel it particularly when I'm out in nature. It's just something that's bigger and stronger than what I am or what anybody is. I feel it. And it's enough for me.
I would have liked to live in her century.
* * *
Towards the end of the glide time, the computer alerted me again.
I tuned my forward video screens, and Spitsbergen island appeared. I magnified the image, enhanced, scanned across the landscape. On the side of a snow mountain, a vertical slab of concrete. Svalbard.
The final powered descent. I locked the destination into the computer, checked my altitude, and flipped the engines back on.
No response.
As the plane glided on, I checked the hybrid gauges for the charge, but there was nothing there. I cursed under my breath and held on.
The plane hit the snow.
It lurched, skidded forward, then twisted around with the crunch of metal on rock.
* * *
Darkness.
In the distance, a great whale floats, serene, unmoving, unmoved.
A stag crosses the threshold of an altar, turning towards a casket.
Gazelles flee a watering hole as a lioness leaps from the bush.
Its legs stretched stiffly out from her body, a rhino lies on her side, her massive body, clad in its natural armor, splattered with mud and blood.
No stars. No stars.
* * *
This is the way the world ends.
If the Comet hits ocean, it ends in thunder. The enormous mass of the comet will rupture the water’s surface and send shock waves through the ocean as it hurtles toward the floor. When it hits, it will trigger a seizure of the Earth’s tectonic plates, flinging wave after wave of towering tsunamis to sweep against the continental shorelines, crashing against the walls of our cities and bringing them down like dominoes.
If the Comet falls on land, it ends in fire. Its hammer fall upon the Earth’s soft anvil will spark an eruption in flames, spreading from a crater of molten soil like a locust swarm. The inferno will burn everything in its wake, civilization’s towers crumbling under the weight of burning concrete on burning steel, a conflagration consuming everything in its path.
Near either pole, the Comet would obliterate the ice, sending a plume of snow and destruction raining far, like a hailstorm of judgment.
And whether on water, or land, or fire, the Comet’s destruction will not end with its fall. Unless the effects were softened by water, the Comet would exhaust from its impact an avalanche of gases to poison our atmosphere, first sulfur dioxide, and then carbon dioxide.
Swirling up into the stratosphere, to where the Earth’s ozone layer enfolds us in a swath of protection, these gases will bring about a great cooling, a new ice age, and then a full and irrevocable transformation of the planet’s climate. Nearly all the plant and animal life that survived the first wave of death with the Comet’s impact will not survive. There would be an extinction like no other.
At sea, on land, in the polar ice: Where will you be when the Apocalypse comes?
All around me I hear the sounds of animals, the call of birds, the roar of lions. All this will be gone, silenced.
Earthquakes, tidal waves, wildfire, a poisoned atmosphere, and a winter that might as well last forever… Unless the Comet misses the Earth, it all ends the same.
But the Comet will not miss.
Its passage has, in the distant past, held back from cataclysm. Perhaps as little as a few tens of millions of miles separated it from a collision with the Earth—whisper-close in the grand clockwork of the Universe.
Instead, the Comet swung out again on its grand elliptical path, out and away from us, away again into the darkness.
Not this time.
So this is how it ends.
* * *
Darkness.
From somewhere in the darkness, a sound like the buzzing of bees, and then voices.
We’ll get her back up and running before you can say ‘member of the horse family’.
A merlin, you know, like the magician.
A falcon! Look at those wings!
* * *
I don’t know how much later, seconds, minutes, hours—but it was a persistent buzzing sound that roused me from darkness. When I opened my eyes, I was looking at the ceiling of the Narwhal.
Groaning, I tried to lift myself up. The exoskeleton implant in one leg didn’t respond, so my left leg was partially limp as I dragged myself upright. Pain shot through the leg, like a bolt of lightning.
The buzzer was still going, but it didn’t sound like any of the Narwhal’s systems. I ignored it, found my backpack, and checked inside—the Ark was intact.
I sat back in relief, and saw where the buzzing that woke me had come from—it was my mother’s phone, which had been flung from my pocket in the crash.
I reached over. It was a new message, and an old one, and it was from Paul:
See you later, Zara-gator
I laughed and I cried, and began to key in a reply:
Svalbard in a while—
I stopped, suddenly realizing that it was my first message back to him, ever, and possibly my last. In an instant, I understood that the love he had for us, for me, had never diminished, no matter the distance. And neither did mine. It was only lost, and had to be found.
I finished my reply:
Crocodile
And then I sent it flying back, through the metal of the plane, through the Earth’s atmosphere, through space, back to him.
* * *
I zipped up the backpack and slung it over my shoulders.
Snow had fallen to cover the Narwhal’s windows, but when I opened the hatch and looked out, I could make out the outlines of the seed vault in the distance.
I swung myself down
and landed in snow up to my knees. It was cold outside the plane, but I could access the vault’s monitoring station, and warmth, when I reached the site.
How long would that be—minutes? Hours? I wasn’t sure how much further it was. Move, I told my legs, move. The burden on my back was heavy, but I had to press on. My left leg felt ragged, burning with pain.
The snow continued to fall. Meteors shot overhead, in twos and threes.
I pulled myself towards the shadow that was the vault, so close now. I had counted on the cold, but I hadn’t planned on it for myself—oh, to have my jacket, my slate-gray eiderdown jacket—and it was cold, cold, so cold…
Now all around me the snow was luminous, luminous from the sun, luminous from the onrush of meteors. And now my hands were luminous, my face striped with light, striped like a zebra, dappled like a cheetah, luminous as lightning, luminous as hope, luminous as dreaming.
I fell into the snow, meters away from the entrance to the vault, into the snow, luminous, and cold.
* * *
Far away, as I begin dreaming, the Comet fell to Earth.
Epilogue
This is how it begins, in dreaming.
The dream is my chest rising and falling softly, my eyes closed in the slow liquid breathing of the fluorocarbon’s flow, I float in.
The dream is the sound of my heart beating, slowed by the cold into a trance for the journey, the desolate journey, the long journey away from a distant, devastated world, beating with the measured cadence of my breath.
The dream encircles, lost in the amniotic fluid that surrounds me, pummelled by eddies of oxygen molecules, the swirl of carbon dioxide, in and out, that invisible gaseous ebb and flow of life.
The dream sails down my shoulders, across the coastal ranges of her arms, down the outside shoals of her thighs, navigates the rivulet between my legs, surfed across the slope of my belly and the Aurora Borealis rise of my breasts.