The limousine crawled up the highway into the suburbs of Rio and finally stopped behind the ruins of a shopping mall. There was a sleek yellow VTOL executive shuttle waiting for them when they arrived. The flight crew were huddled in the lee of a little quonset shelter, arguing in Italian.
James and Dan jumped out of the limo, opened the door, and hauled Max out. The rain was coming down so hard now that, when Max turned his face toward it, he felt like he was drowning. He was only able to make it across the dozen feet to the hatch of the shuttle because his two abductors-fans-surgeons-whatever-the-hell-they-were helped him.
“This is where we get off,” said James.
“Take it easy, Jim,” said Dan, smiling through the downpour. Max thought both fans looked relieved to be rid of him, and he didn’t blame them. Max sighed and turned to climb into the relative dark of the cabin.
“Max Fiddler.”
Max recognized that voice instantly. “Mimi?”
The shuttle’s cabin was a reinforced bubble affair, with round windows spread polka-dot across the walls and ceiling. The woman who was sitting inside was just a shadow against a rainy circle of slate-dark sky. “None other,” she said. “You look great.”
“Thank you,” said Max. “I feel like a drowned vole whose balls were cut off with rusty nail-clippers.”
“From what I hear about you lately, that’s got to be an improvement.” Although her face was still obscured in silhouette, there was a familiar smile in Mimi’s voice. It was a familiarity that chilled Max; he should never have gotten to know this woman so well. She patted the seat beside her. “Come sit by me,” she said.
Max hesitated.
“Oh Christ, Max, get some self-esteem. We’re going to be working together — the least you can do is sit beside me on the way out.”
“Alright.” Max sat down beside her as the hatch behind him swiveled shut and the sounds of the storm stepped back a few yards. With the storm farther and Mimi nearer, Max’s eyes adjusted and he got a good look at the woman behind the voice. The years had been far kinder to her than to him: the line of her jaw and cheek was as smooth, her wide brown eyes as intelligent, her mouth as wide and generous as ever; and her jet-black hair, although tied back in a thick pony tail, showed none of the grey that had begun to fleck Max’s thinning mane over the past few months. No, Dr. Mimi Coover looked every bit the innocent woman-child she had been when, as a young Canadian marine biologist, she first signed with Wylde’s Kingdom as technical consultant on the televised slaughter of the last three living St. Lawrence beluga whales.
“Prison seems to have agreed with you,” said Max.
“Careful, Maxie,” she said. “There but for the grace of God…”
“I meant it kindly,” said Max.
Mimi shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I didn’t actually serve much of my sentence; my skill set’s in short supply these days, and GET snapped me up pretty quickly for their oceanographics lab. Serving my sentence saving the environment I was so bent on destroying. And with only a little social engineering…” Max grimaced (“social engineering” was Mimi’s euphemism for “alcohol-assisted seduction”) “…gaining access to an otherwise classified library of abstracts and raw data you would not believe.”
“Lucky you,” said Max.
“You don’t know how lucky,” said Mimi. She flashed a wide, white-toothed smile with a larcenous glint that erased any illusion of innocence. “I’m putting us back on the map, Maxie. The things I’ve found…”
“I do not want to know,” said Max.
“Think,” said Mimi, “Nautilus.”
“What does an exercise machine have to do with anything?”
“Nautilus. You know — Captain Nemo? Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea? The giant—”
Max couldn’t hear what Mimi said next — the turbines had begun to cycle up for takeoff, and it took a second for the noise-dampers to kick in.
“—Well, I’ve found a nest of them!” finished Mimi. “A nest! Filled with hundreds of them! Hundreds, Max! Nobody’s been able to find more than one in nature, and here we’ve got a nest! Jerry is positively thrilled. That’s why he wanted you back — this is going to put Wylde’s Kingdom back on the charts.”
“Whatever,” said Max. “I’m tired.”
“Tired, hmm? We’ll see about that.” Mimi sidled closer as the VTOL lifted off the pad and started its queasy ascent over the storm. She rested her head on Max’s shoulder, and her hand fell on Max’s thigh. He could feel her fingernails through the cloth of his jeans. “You weren’t being literal about being a castrated rodent? Were you, Jim?”
“Actually,” said Max, “yes. Pretty literal.”
Max settled back in his seat as Mimi’s hand withdrew and she sighed. The old survival instinct, Max thought, was finally kicking in. It was about time.
The world looked better at ten thousand feet.
For one thing, Max could see the sun — and some uninterrupted blue sky. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen blue sky and taken it for granted. Atlantica and its bastard offspring had darkened the planet’s surface pretty effectively, and every time the clouds moved you went out and basked in it, melanoma be damned. It was tough to get worked up about something as trivial as skin cancer under the too-rare brightness of direct sunlight.
From up here, even Atlantica didn’t look so bad — clean white cotton-balls marching off forever, mixing into a vortex so wide you needed to be in orbit to see it for what it was: the beast that had wiped out close to half the Earth’s population over the past decade and set the other half on the fast track to a soggy and wind-ravaged stone age.
It was no wonder, thought Max, that Jerry Wylde’s star was waning under such a cloud: Atlantica had made the so-called Last Great White Hunter redundant.
In Jerry’s first season, Atlantica wasn’t charted as anything more than a grouping of hurricanes in the mid-Atlantic: Hurricane Colin, Hurricane Donald, Hurricane Elroy; then Freddy and Gerhardt and Helmut; Irving and Kenneth and Lothar; Marvin and Noel and Otto. Only when it persisted past the usual hurricane season, crested the alphabet at Zoe and survived past Christmas, did Weath-Net name it for what it was — Atlantica, Earth’s answer to Jupiter’s spot — the world’s first persistent superstorm.
Then, Jerry Wylde was already halfway through the 26-episode first season of Wylde’s Kingdom, building his studio on the S.S. Minnow, a loaded-down oil tanker anchored off British Columbia, and fending off subpoenas from a dozen different governments. With the help of Max and a team of zoologists, he had identified and exterminated eight species of animals that were headed that way anyway.
The first season was a good one for Max. He didn’t even mind being addressed only as Jim by everyone he saw: hell, in half a season he’d become more famous as Jerry Wylde’s athletic animal troubleshooter than he’d become in six seasons as Shoorsen’s pink-bellied second banana.
Jim did everything: jumped from helicopters into alligator-infested swamps, staged commando raids on lion prides, reprised his debut with the rhinos on an African veldt in the two-part special Rhino Revenge — this time armed with a Russian-built hammergun and benefiting from some heavy-duty air support. He even had his own line of action figures — which sold like hotcakes — and a prime spot in the Wylde’s Kingdom console game, which, although less successful than the show, still made Jerry Wylde a mint.
By the end of the show’s first season, Atlantica had taken a sizable chunk out of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and reduced the islands of the Caribbean to little more than a few depopulated atolls.
As Jerry and his crew were preparing for the second season with a trip to the fragile, still-icy regions of the Antarctic, the Global Ecological Trust was beginning to mobilize. It probably shouldn’t have surprised anyone that the multinational force sworn to restabi
lize the planetary ecosystem by persuasion or force should target Jerry Wylde and his nose-thumbing television program as public enemy number one.
One person it didn’t surprise was Jerry himself. It turned out he had good reason for locating his studios on board an oil tanker: when the GET gunboat pulled up alongside the S.S. Minnow, demanding Wylde surrender to the justice of the world court, Jerry asked hypothetically how many years they thought he’d get if he were to blow the stopcocks on the tanker’s two million barrels of crude oil and spread it all across the West Coast salmon beds — which he said would be easy to do before, as he put it, “you get a single one of your Greenpeace-surplus zodiacs into the water, you tree-hugging candy-ass dupes.”
Predictably, GET ordered the gunboat’s withdrawal, and the second season of Wylde’s Kingdom kicked off without further harassment — although Jerry was effectively Polanskied from GET-signatory nations ever after.
And so it went. Tidal waves exfoliated Hawaii and the Philippines after California made good on its century-old promise to slide into the ocean. Waters continued to rise, with the ever-swelling Atlantica egging them on. Meanwhile, Jerry and Jim slogged their way through season 2, then season 3, and then half of season 4.
Jim probably could have stayed on for longer quite comfortably. The nice thing about working with Jerry was it didn’t require you to think much: Jerry had it all worked out. On Jerry’s advice, Jim fired his agent and lawyer, and let the Wylde’s Kingdom accountants look after him so he could concentrate on the work.
Max had been used to keeping himself in shape, but only as the camera demanded. Jim, on the other hand, had to not only look good, but be good. Sit-ups and weight-training with a Hollywood-refugee personal trainer wouldn’t cut mustard — so Jim spent his every waking moment not in the infirmary in the Minnow’s training maze with the former SAS team that made up Jerry’s personal guard.
So, yes, Jim probably would have continued in such a way indefinitely, a willing lapdog to the Wylde’s Kingdom entertainment machine, were it not for the arrival, in the middle of the fourth season, of the new crew of naturalist consultants led by Dr. Mimi Coover.
In I, Jerry, the ghostwriter professed not to have a clue about what drove the wedge between Jim and Jerry Wylde. A third of chapter 12 was devoted to a maudlin and accusatory meditation on the falling out: “Did I neglect Jim in some horrible, horrible way? Did I miss a single feeding, fail to exercise him, neglect his entertainments for even a second? Was I such an irritating seatmate on the trans-Atlantic flight of life that there was no other way?”
Ah, if only Jerry had known. Sitting on the shuttle, Max studiously avoided looking at Mimi — although he was hotly aware of her gaze on him. On board the Minnow he had fallen in love with her, and he had to admit he was deathly afraid of repeating the mistake here in the stratosphere.
As Jim, Max had lived the life of an aesthete. Between training and performance, there wasn’t much time remaining in his day for anything but sleep. Although Max later learned his inbox was overflowing with every imaginable kind of sexual offer, Jerry never gave Jim a chance to read a word of it.
So when one night Mimi stole down to Jim’s dressing room, dressed in nothing but a pair of retro-porn cutoff jeans and a lumberjack shirt with several of the buttons strategically removed, Jim was defenseless. And when she breathlessly informed him she had watched him in action since she was a child — spotting his heroic potential in the very first season of Look Out for Shoorsen!, then seeing it realized past even her pubescent dreams in Wylde’s Kingdom — Jim was lost to her.
Yet if it were as simple as that — a beautiful groupie, a secret rendezvous in the dressing room, followed by a few more secret rendezvous in the training room, on the bridge, in three of the Minnow’s lifeboats … just that, and Jim would have been fine. But Dr. Mimi Coover was more than a groupie. She was a marine biologist; the kind of marine biologist who would sign on board the Minnow to work for Jerry Wylde. And she had … ideas.
“Do you ever wonder,” she said one rainy night as they lay sweating underneath the tarpaulin of Lifeboat 6, “why Atlantica?”
“Yes,” said Jim immediately.
“And California? Why now?”
“They’d been predicting a quake like that for years,” said Jim, then, when he felt the sweat-damp skin of her thigh peel disappointedly from his own, added hastily: “But, yes, I do wonder why now.”
Mimi rolled over onto her stomach, propped up on her elbows so she looked down at Jim. “It’s true what you say, though. We have been predicting a massive, continent-splitting earthquake along the San Andreas fault — and for decades, not just years. Just like we’ve been anticipating a superstorm like Atlantica for years, and we’ve been warning about the rising of the oceans, and we’ve been worrying about mutant viruses like the ones vectoring across North America and Asia right now. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised?”
“Guess not,” said Jim.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” she continued, “that half the Earth’s population is drowned or starved or dead from disease; that the United Nations is gone, replaced by an ecologically overcompensating military machine that throws you in jail if your car doesn’t pass emission standards and shoots you without trial if you cut down a tree in your backyard. And I guess I shouldn’t be surprised Jerry Wylde and his throwback hunting show, which seems to be doing nothing but hastening the process of planetary death, is the ratings hit that it is.”
Mimi got up and pulled the tarpaulin back. Cool, sharp rain pummelled down on their naked bodies, and Mimi swivelled her long legs over the gunwale and jumped onto the Minnow’s deck. No slouch in the jumping department himself, Jim followed easily. But Mimi was still halfway to the nearest hatch.
“I’m sorry!” he shouted, feet slapping the metal deck plates as he hurried to catch up with her. Mimi stopped and turned.
“For what?” she demanded.
“For—” Jim paused, searching for some kind of culpability “—for hastening the planetary death!”
Mimi laughed, and threw her arms around him. “Hastening the process of planetary death, is what I said. God, Jim, you are so malleable. You’re like the soft top of a little baby’s skull — I could draw a happy face there with my finger, and it would stay that way until the day you died.”
Jim’s mouth opened and closed, but no words came out — his mind was filled then with the horrifying image of Mimi’s thin finger digging happy-face furrows on newborns’ heads. Her flesh suddenly felt as cold and clammy as the fish she studied. But she only held him tighter when he tried to pulled away.
“Here’s the secret,” she whispered. “The world is dying, Jim. It’s a terminal case — the life that’s infested it, become it, has run its course, and the world is reverting to its older, more natural geological state — joining its stately brethren of rocks and ice and gas-balls circling the sun. The world’s dying, and the world knows it. It’s obvious, and we should welcome it.”
Jim reached up and pulled Mimi’s arm from his shoulder. He stepped back. Mimi was grinning at him through black strands of hair washed over her face like seaweed in the storm.
“No way,” said Jim.
“Oh, don’t be stupid, Jim,” she shouted. “The world is ending — Jerry Wylde is finishing it off, and you’re right there with him! And now so am I! Centre stage!” She threw her head back so the rain ran into her eyes, her mouth. Lightning flashed paparazzi-silver across her naked body, made an apparition of her — ribs standing out in sharp relief, eyes shadowed into black and unknowable pits, mouth wide and streaming water as her head came back down to look at him.
“Centre stage,” said Jim.
“Centre stage,” repeated Mimi. “Good, Jim. You’re catching on.”
She took two more steps forward, and her hand came to rest on Jim’s bare buttock. The tips of her f
ingers pressed furrows into the muscle there. “Let’s make a baby,” she hissed through bared teeth.
Jim thought about that for a minute; and thinking about procreating made him think about too many other things he’d never, ever considered. The inevitability of the end of the world. Jerry Wylde’s complicity in that end. His own complicity. Mimi Coover’s sharp fingertips digging drawings into their baby’s skull. Jerry Wylde filming it for season 5.
A sudden wave of conscience and self-loathing flooded him, like a tsunami over a Thai whorehouse.
Jim reached around, grabbed Mimi’s wrist, and pulled her hand off his behind. “Forget it,” he said. “I’m out of here.”
Within a week, Jim was indeed out of there — gone without a trace, in fact — and Max Fiddler was alone in Lifeboat 6, firing off the last of his signal flares calling for someone — anyone, in the thinning population of the dying planet — to rescue him from the storm-swollen waves of the rising sea.
Episode 2: A Night at the Zoo
The shuttle dropped from the stratosphere and lanced back through the cloudy flesh of Atlantica. The cabin pitched and went dark for a second before the lights came up.
“Where are we going?” said Max.
Mimi clapped. “A question! The eunuch vole wonders after its fate!”
Max shrugged. “The world is ending, and we might as well welcome it. That doesn’t rule out curiosity.”
“Fair enough.” Mimi grinned. “We’re going to the top of a mountain.”
He raised his eyebrows. “That’s interesting,” said Max. “Jerry finally sold his tanker?”
Mimi’s smile broke into a laugh. She mimed a firing handgun with her forefinger. “Gotcha,” she said. “It’s a sea mountain. On the Eastern Scotian Shelf.”
Max blinked.
“Near Nova Scotia?”
“So we are going to the Minnow?”
“Where else?” said Mimi. “Oh, you are going to love this, Maxie.”
The shuttle banked on its descent, and Max thought he could see lights below them in a tanker-shaped oval, shining through the thinning cloud and thick sheet of rain.
Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction Page 27
