Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  “Not all,” he admitted. “But for the useable stuff, yeah.”

  A metallic bong bong bong sound came from the catwalk opposite the direction Nadine had taken. Moments later, Octav showed up. He was puffing, obviously spooked by the incredible drop but determined to help his boss. “Where is she?”

  “Never mind,” said Achille. “Have you got a walkie-talkie?” Octav nodded and handed it over.

  “Hello, hello?” Achille put the thing to his ear, other hand on his other ear, and paced up and down. Octav was staring at the balloons painted on the trailer.

  “What is that?” he said, assuming, it seemed, that Gennady would know.

  “Looks like they were expecting tourists. Base jumping off a solar updraft tower?” From up there, you’d be able to slide down the valley thermals to the river far below. “I guess it could be fun.”

  “I can’t get a signal,” said Achille. “You,” he said to Octav, “go after her!”

  “You can’t get a signal because you’re outside. They’re inside.” Gennady pointed at the door in the side of the tower as Octav pounded away along the catwalk. “Try again from next to the elevator.” Achille moved to the door and Gennady made to follow, but as Achille opened it, a plume of smoke poured out. “Oh, shit!”

  The tower had been designed to suck up air from the surrounding forest. It was already pulling in smoke from the fires Nadine had lit with her flares. And she was moving in a circle, trying to ensure that the entire bull’s-eye of whitened pines caught.

  “Yes! Yes!” Achille was gasping into the radio, ducking out of the smoke-filled tower every few seconds to breathe. “You have to do it now! The whole forest, yes!” He glanced at Gennady. “They’re trying to get to the trailer, but they’d have to fix the transformer first and there’s too much smoke, I don’t know if they’re going to make it.”

  Gennady looked down at the forest; lots of little spot fires were spreading and joining up into larger orange smears and lozenges. If Nadine made it all the way around, they’d be trapped at the center of a firestorm. “We’re stuck too.”

  “Maybe not.” Achille ran to the trailer, which turned out to be full of cardboard boxes. They rummaged among them, finding more flares—not useful—and safety harnesses, cables and crampons and—“Ha!” said Achille, holding up two parachutes.

  “Is that all?”

  The billionaire kicked around at the debris. “Yeah, you’d think there’d be more, but you know we never got this place up and running. These are probably the test units. Doesn’t matter; there’s one for me, one for you.”

  “Not Nadine?” Achille shot him an exasperated look. She was his own sister, but he obviously didn’t care. Gennady took the chute he offered, with disgust. He would, he decided, give it to Nadine when she came back around—if only to see the expression on Achille’s face.

  Achille was headed out the door. “What then?” asked Gennady. Nadine’s brother looked back, still exasperated. “Are you just going to walk away from your dream?”

  Achille shook his head. “The patents and designs are all I’ve got now. I can’t make a go selling the power from this place. It’s the fungus or nothing. So, look, this fire might eat the tower, but the wind is blowing in. The Rhizoctonia on the fringes will be okay. As soon as we’re on the ground, I’m going to bring in some trucks and haul away the remainder during the cleanup. I can still dump that all over Kafatos’s Goddamned forest. We lost the first hand, that’s all.”

  “But . . .” Gennady couldn’t believe he had to say it. “What about Nadine?”

  Achille crossed his arms, glowering at the fires. “This has been coming a long time. You know what the worst part is? I’d made her my heir again. Lucky thing I never told her, huh.”

  As they stepped outside, a deep groan came from the tower, and Gennady’s inner ear told him he was moving, even though his feet were firmly planted on the deck. Looking down, he saw they were ringed by fire now. The only reason the smoke and heat weren’t streaming up the side of the tower was because they were pouring through the open windmill apertures. Past the open door he could see only a wall of shuddering gray inside. The engineers and Bogdan must already be dead.

  The tower twisted again, and with a popping sound, sixteen feet of catwalk separated from the wall. It drooped, and just then, Nadine and Octav came around the tower’s curve, on the other side of it.

  Achille and Nadine stared at one another over the gap, not speaking. Then Achille turned away with an angry shrug. “We have to go!” He began struggling into his parachute.

  Octav waved at Gennady. “Got any ideas?” Neither he nor Nadine was holding weapons. They’ve obviously realized their best chance for survival lay with one another.

  Gennady edged as close to the fallen section of catwalk as he dared. “Belts, straps, have you got anything like that?” Octav grabbed at his waist, nodded. “The tower’s support cables!” Gennady pointed at the nearest one, which leaned out from under the door. “We’re going to have to slide down those!” He could see that the cables’ anchors were outside the ring of fire, but that wouldn’t last long. “Pull up the floor mesh over one, and climb down to the cable anchor. Double up your belt and—hang on a second.” Octav’s belt would be worn through by friction before they got a hundred feet. Gennady ran into the trailer, which was better lit now by the rising sun, and tossed the boxes around. He found some broken metal strapping. Perfect. Coming out, he tossed a piece across to Octav. “Use that instead. Now get going!”

  As they disappeared around the curved wall, Achille darted from behind the trailer. “Coming?” he shouted as he ran to the railing.

  Gennady hesitated. He’d dropped his parachute by the trailer steps.

  It was clear what had to be done. There was only one way off this tower. Still, he just stood there, watching as Achille clumsily mounted the railing.

  Achille looked back. “Come on, what are you waiting for?”

  Images from the day were flashing through Gennady’s mind—and more, a vision of what could happen after the fire was over. He turned to look out over the endless skin of forest that filled the valley and spread beyond to the horizon.

  He’d spent his whole life cleaning up other people’s messes. There’d been the Chernobyl affair and that other nuclear disaster in Azerbaijan. He’d chased stolen nukes across two continents, and only just succeeded in hiding from the world a discovery that would allow any disgruntled tinkerer to build such weapons without needing enriched uranium or plutonium. He’d told himself all the while that he did these things to keep humanity safe. Yet it had never been the idea that people might die that had moved him. He was afraid for something else, and had been for so long now that he couldn’t imagine living without that fear.

  It was time to admit where his real allegiance lay.

  “I’m right behind you,” he said with a forced smile. And he watched Achille dive off the tower. He watched Nadine’s brother fall two hundred feet and open his chute. He watched the vortex of flame around the tower’s base yank the parachute in and down, and swallow it.

  Gennady picked up the last piece of metal strapping and, as the tower writhed again, ran along the catwalk opposite to the way Nadine and Octav had gone.

  * * * *

  He rolled over and staggered to his feet, coughing. A cloud of white was churning around him, propelled by a quickening gale. Overhead, the plastic sheeting that covered the dead forest flapped where he’d cut through it. The support cable made a perfectly straight line from the concrete block at his feet up to the distant tower—or was it straight? No, the thing was starting to curve. Achille’s tower, which was now in full sunlight, was curling away from the fire, as if unwilling to look at it anymore. Any second now, it might fall.

  Gennady raced around the perimeter of the fire as the sun touched the plastic ceiling. The flames were eating their way slowly outward, pushing against the wind. Gennady dodged fallen branches and avoided thick brambles, pausing now
and then to cough heavily, so it took him a few minutes to spot the support cable opposite the one he’d slid down. When it appeared, it was as an amber pen stroke against the predawn sky. The plastic greenhouse ceiling was broken where the cable pierced it, as it should be if bodies had broken through it on their way to the ground.

  As he approached the cable’s concrete anchor, he spotted Octav. The bodyguard was curled up on the ground, clutching his ankle.

  “Where’s Nadine?” Octav looked up as Gennady pounded up. He blinked, looked past Gennady, then they locked eyes.

  That look said, Where’s Achille?

  Neither said anything for a long moment. Then, “She fell off,” said Octav. “Back there.” He pointed into the fire.

  “How far—”

  “Go. You might find her.”

  Gennady didn’t need any more urging. He let the white wind push him at the shimmering walls of orange light. As the banners of fire whipped up, they caught and tore the plastic sheeting that had canopied the forest for years, and they angrily pulled it down. Gennady looked for another break in that upper surface, hopefully close to the cable’s anchor, and after a moment, he spotted it. Nadine had left a clean incision in the plastic but had shaved a pine below that; branches and needles were strewn across the white pillows of Rhizoctonia and made Nadine herself easy to find.

  She blinked at him from where she lay on a mattress of fungi. She looked surprised, and for a moment, Gennady had the absurd thought that maybe his hair was all standing up or something. But then she said, “It doesn’t hurt.”

  He frowned, reached down, and pinched her ankle.

  “Ow!”

  “Fungus broke your fall.” He helped her up. The flames were being kept at bay by the inrushing wind, but the radiant heat was intense. “Get going.” He pushed her until she was trotting away from the fire.

  “What about you?”

  “Right behind you!”

  He followed, more slowly, until she disappeared into the swirling Rhizoctonia. Then he slowed and stopped, leaning over to brace his hands on his knees. He looked back at the fire.

  Sure, if Achille had been thinking, he would have known that the fire would suck in any parachute that came off the tower. Yet Gennady could have warned him, and didn’t. He’d murdered Achille; it was that simple.

  The wall of fire was mesmerizing and its heat like a wall pushing Gennady back. There must have been a lot of fires like this one the last time the Rhizoctonia roused itself to make a meal of the world. Achille had engineered special conditions under his greenhouse roof, but it wouldn’t need them once it got out. The whole northern hemisphere was a tinderbox, a dry feast waiting for the guest who would consume it all.

  Gennady squinted into the flames, waiting. He didn’t regret killing Achille. Given the choice between saving a human, or even humanity itself, and preserving the dark labyrinth of Khantayskoe, he’d chosen the forest. In doing that, he’d finally admitted his true loyalties and stepped over the border of the human. But that left him with nowhere to go. So, he simply stood and waited for the fire.

  Somebody grabbed his arm. Gennady jerked and turned to find Octav standing next to him. The bodyguard was using a long branch as a crutch. There was a surprising expression of concern on his face. “Come on!”

  “But, you see, I—”

  “I don’t care!” Octav had a good grip on him and was stronger than Gennady. Dazed, Gennady let himself be towed away from the fire, and in moments, a pale oval swam into sight between the upright boles of orange-painted pine: Nadine’s face.

  “Where’s Achille?” she called.

  Gennady waited until they were close enough that he didn’t have to yell. “He tried to use a parachute. The fire pulled him in.”

  Nadine looked down, seeming to crumple in on herself. “Oh, God, all those men, and, and Achille . . .” She staggered, nearly fell, then seemed to realize where they were. Gennady could feel the fire at his back.

  She inserted herself between Octav and Gennady, propelling them both in the direction of the lake at the bottom of the hill. “I’m sorry; I never meant any of this to happen,” she cried over the roar of the fire. “All I wanted was for him to go back to his original plan! It could still work.” She meant the towers, Gennady knew, and the carbon-negative power plants, and the scheme to sequester all that carbon under the plateau. Not the Rhizoctonia. Maybe she was right, but even though she was Achille’s heir and owner of the technologies that could save the world, she would never climb out from under what had just happened. She’d be in jail soon, and maybe for the rest of her life.

  There were options. Gennady found he was thinking coolly and rationally about those; his mind seemed to have been miraculously cleared, and of more than just the trauma of the past hour. He was waking up, it seemed, from something he’d thought of as his life, but which had only been a rough rehearsal of what he could become. He knew himself now, and the anxiety and hesitation that had dogged him since he was a child was simply gone.

  What was important was the patents, and the designs, the business plan, and the opportunities that might bring another tower to the plateau. It might not happen this year or next, but it would have to be soon. Someone had to take responsibility for the crawling disaster overtaking the world and do something about it.

  He would have to talk to Nadine about that inheritance, and about who would administer the fortune while she was in prison. He doubted she would object to what he had in mind.

  “Yes, let’s go,” he said. “We have a lot to do and not much time.”

  * * *

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KARL SCHROEDER (kschroeder.com) was born into a Mennonite community in Manitoba, Canada, in 1962. He started writing at age fourteen, following in the footsteps of A. E. van Vogt, who came from the same Mennonite community. He moved to Toronto in 1986, and became a founding member of SF Canada (he was president from 1996–97). He sold early stories to Canadian magazines, and his first novel, The Claus Effect (with David Nickle) appeared in 1997. His first solo novel, Ventus, was published in 2000, and was followed by Permanence and Lady of Mazes. His most recent work includes the Virga series of science fiction novels (Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce, Pirate Sun, and The Sunless Countries) and hard SF space opera Lockstep. He also collaborated with Cory Doctorow on The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Science Fiction. Schroeder lives in East Toronto with his wife and daughter.

  THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR

  JEAN-LOUIS TRUDEL

  Northern Kujalleq Mountains

  What would they do without the guy from northern Ontario? Paul’s thoughts were stuck in a loop. The same question was popping up every few seconds, probably because his leg muscles were gobbling up most of his body’s oxygen. His brain just couldn’t phrase a proper answer when the cold September wind was freezing his cheekbones, his breath burned in his throat, and his legs drove him up the snowy slope. The bag with the medikit seemed to grow heavier with every step. Soon, it would drag him all the way back down the mountain.

  What would they do without the guy from northern Ontario? The others had nominated him on the spot. Sure, send Paul, he’s Canadian, he knows how to ski! Yeah, and he likes to play in the snow too. In the end, Francine had looked at him with those big, dark eyes of hers, and he’d been unable to say no.

  He couldn’t complain, not really. The Martian Underground had had its pick of young bacteriologists, but they wanted the one with actual winter experience. The guy from northern Ontario. He’d said yes, to the job in Greenland and to the rescue mission.

  Even with lightweight snowshoes, he sank a bit in the fresh snow as he leaned into the climb. Tomorrow, his muscles would ache. They didn’t use to, not when he snowshoed through the woods of Killarney Park or skied cross-country in the hills outside Sudbury. But he was almost thirty and he’d spent more time in the lab lately than in the field.

  He did wonder how the Old Man had fared coming out this way. He must have taken the l
ong way around, down to Narsarsuaq, and then down the coast, skirting the fjord, until he could walk up the valley formerly occupied by the Ikersuaq glacier. Four days at least. A long hike, but not a hard one even for Professor Emeritus Donald B. Hall, who was so old he remembered the twentieth century. Very little of it, actually, but enough to spin unlikely stories that entranced his graduate students.

  Early on, Paul had looked up some history sites and decided Old Man Hall was repeating tales he’d heard from his own teachers. Passing joints at a Beatles concert? Flying to Berlin to help tear down the Wall? His date of birth was confidential, but he couldn’t be that old, even with stem cell therapies.

  Not that he was going to get the chance to beat any records if Paul didn’t reach him in time. Every time Paul looked back, the sun seemed closer to the horizon. He only stopped once, to catch his breath. If he saved the Old Man’s life, he swore he would get the truth out of him about the one story he’d never managed to disprove or disbelieve.

  His heart pumping, Paul started to climb again. He still found patches of snow to plant his snowshoes in, but he was nearing the windswept summit. Sometimes, the synthetic treads clanked and slipped on the bare rock, and he lost his balance for a second, his arms windmilling.

  He was pondering whether or not to take off the snowshoes and rely on his boots the rest of the way when he saw the sign.

  PRIVATE PROPERTY.

  Paul frowned, worry fighting it out with disgust. The valley floor had been buried under the ice for millennia, and it had remained so well into the twenty-first century. And now, as stunted trees grew among the glacier rubble, it had already been claimed by outside interests. The sign was labeled in English, not in Kalaallisut or Danish. A number in a corner identified one of the companies owned by the Consortium that ran the seaports catering to the trans-Arctic trade.