Bruce named his price.
The man bought a dozen and went on to say, "I'm from the University of Michigan and—"
"You're here about my son's mastodons?"
"That's right. We were going to start tomorrow morning if that's all right with you."
That unassuming man with his plaid shirt that fit like a sack came with some college students, frail boys and bright eyed girls who lathered on sun-screen and spoke in quotations, roped off stream and hill and bank. They peeled off the bank like a rind, and moved with a balance of care and efficiency while Bruce watched from the top of the hill. Dakota was there in the midst of it, looking so much stronger and more alive than any of the students unzipping the creek. If they worked as they did with the body of his boy, the farm would always be fruitful. If Dakota became one of them, what discoveries could be had. His pity, and his jealousy, pulled him from the hill down into the valley, and Dr. Jansen led him about the work site for a week as they pulled out new bones and slabs of footprints. And at the end of the week he said, "Mr. Connell, we have found something remarkable. It seems that your son has uncovered a—well, a mastodon graveyard of sorts. We haven't seen one in this area, but it seems—from what we can tell, that there was a landslide here, from that hill into the gully, or the lake, which it was at the time. The mastodons would have been trapped in the sudden rise of the water and the mud. Their size did the rest of the work. What we have here are a lot of old skeletons, bigger skeletons, and calf skeletons. The specimen found in the 1920s, about four and a half kilometers from here, was merely a survivor of this herd, or so we're assuming. This is the real interesting stuff."
Dakota beamed and felt some new stage of life opening as a chrysalis. Bruce thought of the phrase "merely a survivor" and continued to think of it while Dr. Jansen suggested an offer for the acreage and merely a survivor was mixed with Platt's running jokes about buying a few acres. Then a number was mentioned, and the ever warming sun struck him; the mix was like whisky, burning and dizzying. Bruce was lost in a graveyard he did not know, and he staggered back to his home, Dakota and Dr. Jansen trailing behind.
* * *
The moon was full and hid nothing from the eyes of one walking through the damp grass. Bruce put his flashlight away and gave himself up to the lights God put in the sky, meant to be unchanging, though Dakota said they weren't. In a thousand years there will be a new North Star.
As they moved further into the woods, the voices of cicadas and tree frogs were added to by the faint hiss of the stream, now nearly dry from heat and widening. And, as Bruce stepped out from the woods and saw the water under the harsh moonlight, it looked like the Milky Way itself, with the bones of old gods protruding from the sand and bedrock. Bruce went down to them, under the tape and into the water. He laid there, his head tipped back, his shoulders relaxed, and the shallow frigid water moved over his ears. Why, he thought, was this so hard? It wasn't like selling to Platt. He had no intention of raising pigs. There was no risk but the loss of something loved; offering up this was offering his son on an altar. Bruce closed his eyes and saw the silt falling down around him, trapping him. He would stretch out his trunk to his neighbors, but they were crawling up the lower bank. A little calf was with them. Bruce brayed and struggled. He stomped and scrambled for a footing. The herd was rushing ahead, and the water was brown and thickening and swallowing.
When he opened his eyes he was sitting up straight, looking into the nasal cavity of a half-buried skull with a cracked jaw. It shone bluish-white, and the hole, deep black in the center, looked like a great vast eye filled with secrets. Like the giants in fairy tales, coming from the sky to raid and snatch up, it was something like that, but older and darker, and more real. This was not a giant, not simply a Cyclops incarnate, but a One-Eyed God against change and time, who battled with the water and the earth. Strong.
What would you do? Could you give it up?
The answer was plain. And so was the answer after that. They were loud in the silence.
The One-Eyed God was not merely a survivor.
The Sea Wall at Vancuuver Shoal, Keith Wilkinson
Note that the misspellings in this short story are intentional. From the author: "The story is set 1,000 years in the future...every language has a half-life."
* * *
Shmuul slipped into the ripplesuut, slid into Antrim Bay, and headed out along his usual route—280 degrees to the Shangri La marker, then southwest 224 to a point only he knew, then down. To make it official he'd asked someone from the ShoalSharks to meet him there. The skii was clear, the Westerlies light. Last niite's Southeast storm had left the air fresh.
"Vancuuver Shoal has no monuments," someone from the Midden had told him once, but he'd been skeptical, took it as a challenge, and proved the Midden wrong. It had gained him some brief fame, local respect, and membership in the ShoalSharks. Then he'd faded into the slack backwaters of his city again.
He dropped the ripplesuut out of hyper speed above Kits Point and headed down toward the shoal. Everything was still in place, protected now by the regulations and the surveillance the Midden had set up, as they did for all new archaeological finds. So many things had been found under the water everywhere, but not much was of use, only of interest. The planet was aswim with shoal artists and archeologists.
After he'd discovered the wall, other explorers had surged into the area, looking almost exclusively east, back toward the city centre, to discover more. They'd found very little, but did find what some claimed to be the Kitsilano home of David Suzuuki, one of the early environmentalists who'd warned about the possibilities of oceanrise. They'd identified it by the double-profile sculpture of a Gemini Award with his name etched into it. Critics said corroborating evidence was needed. Most agreed that Suzuuki had lived around there though. Some called the area the Suzuuki-Barton Shoal, Barton being a skilled watercolourist largely unacknowledged in her time. Some of her paintings of the great northern valleys—Naas, Tatsenshini, Kispiox—were rumoured to be in the mountain villages far to the north, but this was Old Vancuuver and none of her work had survived the rise of the sea. Watercolours.
Few had believed in the science of the waterrise. Climatologists had predicted a maximum five meter rise in sea level after eight decades, but in the end, the oceans had risen sixty meters within two decades and had stayed that way for a thousand years, despite the radical downscaling of carbon emissions and sporadic global geo-engineering efforts to cool the planet, most instigated from China. Antrim had once been one hundred and forty meters above the sea, but now it was less than eighty. Broad shoals existed where once there had been city. Richmound was an underwater atoll known to have once been the location of an international airport graced with public art, including a bronze sculpture titled "The Jade Canoe," depicting an overloaded canuu of mythic animals and wide-eyed people.
A lot more had changed. Whole islands in Oceana had been lost, along with cities from every continent's shore—Miami, Calcutta, Amsterdam, Manila, Honolulu, Shanghai. World population had plummeted. There had been massive migrations inland from the coastal cities. Crops failed, species failed, and interior cultures had either strenuously resisted the flood of climate refugees or dramatically embraced them. Embracing had proved eventually to be not only the best ethical option, but also the most practical one. Immigrants brought high levels of complex skills, plus intense motivation, and these deeply informed what were to become the dominant social structures of the new era, structures that persisted to this day—the culture of science and the culture of the Sangha.
For several centuries after the Great Collapse, regionalism and anarchy reigned around the globe. Then the great huuman cultures of the East—Daoism and Confuucianism—began to take hold, and philosophies of balance—creation, contribution, connection, compassion—became the norm, tempered with varying combinations of pragmatism and science. Gradually, the melange of anarchy, skilled leadership, goodwill, and engineering brought them to where they
were now. And Shmuul, like so many others, was long steeped in gratitude for the wisdom the scientists and elders had brought to the Sanghas during that Great Turning.
The major urban political structure and job provider that had emerged along this particular coastline had been the Uunited Midden Authority, UMA, a vast bureaucratic organization accountable to the Great Uunited Sangha, and responsible to ensure systems for food, housing, practical employment, and social well-being. Shmuul liked to stay on the fringes of the UMA, judging his current capacity to contribute to a productive job-culture as minimal. The alternatives were the local Sanghas or the marginal agricultural communities like the Saturna Ruuminoffs and the Passage Island Solari. Some were generously libertarian, others just idiosyncratic, but collectively they provided creative options to balance the harmonic blandness that prevailed in the Sanghas.
From amongst these options, Shmuul reasoned that the local Sangha was his best bet for a sense of connection, compassion, and contribution. The creative part he could look after himself, or so he thought. Antrim was as good a Sangha as any. So he stayed where he'd been born and where his parents and grandparents had been born. But Sangha life was a bit tight for his Chaructur, like a ripplesuut one size too small. The ShoalSharks were a better psychic fit.
There was never a very long thread to any personal history. Shmuul knew ancestors as far back as grandparents, and then it was just population. He knew that he was as much a product of ingested knowledge as he was of his geenpuul or his social context. His Chaructur, like everyone else's, was pretty much determined by the unpredictable outcome of geen combinations from parents, some of them tailored, plus the ingestion of knowledge through chemical messages sent to the millions of brain receptors through the blood stream. This was an applied science anticipated by Nicholas Negroponte several decades before the great flood, and made commonplace afterward as a tool of species survival. With this strong genetic and psycho-nutrient base structure, each Chaructur was simply allowed to emerge according to its own patterns within the nurturing context of the local Sangha, which was in turn nurtured by the Great Uunited Sangha and, recently, as a result of the intergalactic starprobes, also supported by the Sangha of All Sentients. "GUS" and "SAS," or "Salsa", as they were affectionately known, were like ancient ones serving to foster each Chaructur in the discovery of a unique right way. That was the teaching. That was the ingestion. That was his experience.
The Midden Authority's Old Vancuuver offices were located in mountain retreats a few kilometers inland from Antrim. With Nuutransport and oceanrise, the old ocean ports had become cultural backwaters, but art and archi-tuurism had been encouraged by the Midden, and tuurists, mostly from China, were now coming in large numbers to see the Glittercast.
The Shangri La Glittercast was the long debris field left when the glass towers of Old Vancuuver had come crashing down. The Shangri La had been a hotel named after an earlier mythic place of peace and beauty. Art pieces from a thousand years before had been preserved, along with remnants of the fallen buildings. The Vancuuver Shoal had been unimportant for so long after the Great Turning that when the Glittercast was first explored there was enough good government established regionally and globally to prevent it from being pillaged. The great debris field, along with the art discovered there, had been set aside as a World Heritage Site and Archaeological Study Destination.
Folded in with all the glass that still sparkled beneath the tropical, aqua waters, archaeologists had found many remains of sculptures and murals. The ancient electronic database of the City of Vancouver public art registry told them quite a lot about what to expect—the tile murals of Jordi Bonet, similar to those near L'Anse Aux Meadow in Nuufoundland; the Digital Orca and Infinite Tire sculptures by Douglas Coupland; the Komagata Maru Memorial; Kougioumtzis's Nike, Goddess of Victory, modeled after the even more ancient marble remnant in Paris known as the Winged Victory of Samothrace; hundreds of small details carved in stone from the old Marine Building; and an intact bronze statue of Themis, Goddess of Justice, blindfolded and with scroll rather than sword in hand, found in a deep pool of green glass shards believed to have been the transparent roof of the courthouse of the ancient city.
Nearby, but technically outside the Glittercast, was BeeSee Place, the name generally construed to be a corruption of busy place. The consensus was that it had been a large farmuurs' market for the exchange of organic food in the last days before the Great Collapse, a time when frantic efforts were being made to pull back from excessive carbon emissions. A local contrarian group claimed that BeeSee Place had been a coliseum for sporting events, like in the times of Nero. Shmuul thought that the truth about that kind of large, heavily-constructed place would have been retained after the collapse, but it hadn't been. Often, it seemed, it was the smaller remnants that were remembered with least contention—the Dale Chihuuly blown glass bowl, for example, that had survived intact inside its protective case in the middle of the Glittercast. Near it were two boulders, one granite and another, identical in form, cast in bronze—the latter badly eroded—and a fragment of a quotation from Leonardo Da Vinci cut in granite. The glass bowl was unscathed after centuries under salt water. Many other works recorded in the Registry were missing: Douglas Coupland's four metal statues of a local hero, Terry Fox, and further west and deeper down, a large comedic assembly, also in metal, by Yue Minjun.
Shmuul wasn't much interested in the archeology or art of the Glittercast, though. His Chaructur told him to explore the margins, and the ShoalSharks helped him do that with skill and grace—encouraging him, celebrating his successes, ribbing him—and that was all anyone could ask of a community, or so both Confuucian and Sanghan Dharmas taught. The ShoalSharks were looked at with some bemusement by both the conservative Sanghas and the more radical rural communities, but the Sharks liked that marginalization. It was their place, and it was Shmuul's place. Sanghas were communities of comfort, and Gangs were communities of comfort, too.
Despite his somewhat solitary preferences, Shmuul knew he was a social animal as much as any other huuman. He nestled first in one band, then another, and amongst these magnetic fields he explored.
expect yourself
only to connect
the inner fires
—that's what the Sanghan Dharmas taught.
check your pressures
your compasses
your intuitions
—that's what the ShoalSharks taught.
One of the best routes into the main ruins of Old Vancuuver was along the Canada Liine. Its remnants stretched from Richmound all the way to the Glittercast. The middle part, where it dipped beneath the seabed and under Littlemount Atoll, was best, for in this ancient tunnel they had found remnants of old trains and undisturbed skeletons of the city's inhabitants. Some of these artifacts had been preserved as part of the museum: corroded fragments of trains and tracks, tools, and zippers and buttons of the pre-huumans whose stubborn individualism and limited ethics had provoked the collapse. Despite the apparent moral weakness of the time, the balance of evidence suggested that the pre-huumans hadn't been that different from modern huumans. Ethics wasn't studied in the school system then, so the moral weakness was predictable and foreshadowed by cruel wars and exploitation of whole cultures. The earlier civilization also didn't have the benefits of cognitive ingestion, nor very much geen manipulation, but otherwise they ate, drank, made love, made objects, and tried to make sense of the universe they saw, just as modern huumans did.
The tunnels in this small, provincial, coastal city weren't as inspired as those in some places on the planet. The Canada Liine wasn't the Tunnelbana; the murals found under the Glittercast weren't by Keith Haring, Chris Pape, or Diego Rivera; and the tunnels hadn't the solemnity of the New York Freedom Tunnel, now also under water—but they had a simple integrity, a kind of Zen quality comfortable to the Westcoast Sanghan tradition. Old Vancuuver's tunnels and stations were modest. Cambie City Hall Station wasn't Moscow's Mayakovskaya o
r Dostoevskaya, Waterfront Station wasn't Stockholm's T-Centralen, Richmond Brighouse wasn't the Universadad de Chile in Santiago, Yaletown Roundhouse wasn't the Kraaiennest in Amsterdam, and certainly Olympic Village wasn't Narcissus Quagliata's Formosa Boulevard Station in Kaohsiung. Shmuul liked the austere, minimalist aesthetics of this tiny Canada Liine. It had a kind of rustic elegance that told about the values and aspirations of its creators. Beyond the Glittercast and the Canada Liine, not much of consequence remained of Old Vancuuver.
Shmuul had found the faded mural wall just by poking around in the shallow Kitsilano Shoals. There was no reason to expect more murals, and not there of all places—a lowland of former dwellings submerged by the Great Collapse. Without the light analysis technology of the annatuul developed for the Higherground Starprobes Program, combined with the particular slant of late afternoon light that day, he wouldn't have seen them at all. What he did find confused him, but the annatuul quickly told him there were layers of paint on a low wall sunk into the mud of the shallow bay. And the annatuul also told him that there were constructed images in each of the several layers. To the naked eye it was just a discoloured wall, badly eroded, but the technology took those few scraps of information, assessed the age and materials used, and reconstructed in vivid colours dozens of separate images that had been layered on the walls in a short span of decades centuries in the past.
Shmuul had taken the images to Tanka—an archeologist and a flutterat—because she was smart, but most of all because he trusted her. She consulted with the Shark leadership, then took the mural data to the Saturna Ruumanoff scholars, her people. At first, Shmuul was annoyed, but then realized that without some scholarly help they wouldn't know what they had. They knew they would have to report it eventually to the Midden Authority and the Antrim Sangha, and also knew the Ruumanoffs would try to claim it and find a way to gain from it, maybe barter it for a star trip. But Shmuul and Tanka were gang-smart and knew how to purge their suits and tools of memories, so despite the satellite tracking only they knew where the murals were.
Winds of Change: Short Stories about Our Climate Page 22
