Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  Out in relatively clearer ocean Chauncie sat on the deck as the Inuit crew hustled around, pulling in the purposefully holed nets so that the trawler could speed up.

  In this light the ocean was gunmetal blue; he let his eyes rest on it, unaware of how long he stood there until Kulitak said, “Thinking of taking a dip?”

  “What? Oh, heh—no.” He turned away. There was no diving into these waters for a refreshing swim. Chauncie hadn’t known how precious such a simple act could be until he’d lost it.

  Kulitak grunted but said nothing more; Chauncie knew he understood that long stare, the moments of silent remembrance. These men he worked with cultivated an anger similar to his own: their Arctic was long gone, but their deepest instincts still expected it to be here, he was sure, the same way he expected the ocean to be a glitter of warm emeralds he could cup in his hand.

  Losing his childhood home, the island of Anegada, to the global climate disaster had been devastating, but sometimes Chauncie wondered whether Kulitak’s people hadn’t gotten the worse end of the disaster. As the seven seas became the eight seas and their land literally melted away, the Inuit faced an indignity that even Chauncie did not have to suffer: seeing companies, governments, and people flood in to claim what had once been theirs alone.

  He found it delicious fun to make money plinking at CarbonJohnnies for the Inuit. But it wasn’t big money—and he needed the big score.

  He needed to be able to cup those emeralds in his hands again. On rare occasions he’d wonder whether he was going to spend the rest of his life up here. If somebody told him that was his fate, he was pretty sure he’d take a last dive right there and then. He couldn’t go on like this forever.

  “Satellite data came back,” said Kulitak after a while. “The sulfur clouds are clearing up.” Chauncie glanced up and nodded. They couldn’t hide the trawler from satellite inspection right now. It was time to head back to port. As the ship got under way, Chauncie checked the sat phone.

  Maksim had indeed called. Five times.

  Kulitak saw his frown. “The Croat?”

  Chauncie clipped the sat phone back to his waistband. “You said it was a slow day; we’re not making much. And with the spill, it’s going to be a zoo. We could use a break.”

  His friend grimaced. “You don’t want to work with him. There’s money, but it’s not worth it. You come in the powerboat with me, the satellites can’t see our faces, we hit more CarbonJohnnies. I’ll bring sandwiches.”

  There was no way Chauncie was going to motor his way around the Arctic in a glorified rowboat. They’d get run over. By a trawler, a tanker, or any other ship ripping its way through the wide-open lanes of the Arctic Ocean. There was just too much traffic.

  “I’ll think about it,” Chauncie said as the sat phone vibrated yet again.

  Late the next evening, Chauncie entered the bridge of a rusted-out container ship that listed slightly to port. Long shadows leaned across the docks and cranes of Tuktoyaktuk, their promise of night destined to be unfulfilled.

  “Hey Max,” he said, and sat down hard on the armchair in the middle of the bridge. Chauncie rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t stopped to sleep yet. An easy error in the daylong sunlight. Insomnia snuck up on you, as your body kept thinking it was day. Run all-out for forty-eight hours and forget about your daily cycle, and you’d crash hard on day three. And the listing bridge made him feel even more off-balance and weary.

  “Took you damn long enough. I should get someone else, just to spite you.” Maksim muttered his reply from behind a large, ostentatious, and extraordinarily expensive real wooden desk. He was almost hidden behind the nine screens perched on it.

  Maksim was a slave to continuous partial attention: his eyes flicked from screen to screen, and he constantly tapped at the surface of the desk or flicked his hands at the screens. In response, people were being paid, currencies traded, stocks bought or sold.

  And that was the legitimate trade. Chauncie didn’t know much about Maksim’s other hobbies, but he could guess from the occasional exposed tattoo that Maksim was Russian Mafia.

  “Well, I’m here.”

  Maksim glanced up. “Yes. Yes you are. Good. Chauncie, you know why I give you so much business?”

  Chauncie sighed. He wasn’t sure he wanted to play this game. “No, why?”

  Maksim sipped at a sweaty glass of iced tea with a large wedge of lemon stuck on the rim. “Because even though you’re here for dirty jobs, you like the ones that let you poke back at the big guys. It means I understand you. It makes you a predictable asset. So I have a good one for you. You ready for the big one, Chauncie, the payday that lets you leave to do whatever it is you really want, rather than sitting around with little popguns and Styrofoam targets?”

  Chauncie felt a weird kick in his stomach. “What kind of big, Max?”

  Maksim had a small smile as he put the iced tea down. “Big.” He slowly turned a screen around to face Chauncie. There were a lot of zeros in that sum. Chauncie’s lips suddenly felt dry, and he nervously licked them.

  “That’s big.” He could retire. “What horrible thing will I have to do for that?”

  “It begins with you playing bodyguard for a scientist.”

  Uh-oh. As a rule, scientists and Russian Mafia didn’t mix well. “I’m really just guarding her, right?”

  Maksim looked annoyed. “If I wanted her dead, I wouldn’t have called you.” He pointed out the grimy windows. A windblown, ruddy-cheeked woman wrapped in a large “Hands around the World” parka stood at the rail. She was reading something off the screen of her phone.

  “That’s the scientist? Here?”

  “Yes. That is River Balleny. Was big into genetic archeology. She made a big find a couple years ago and patented the DNA for some big agricorporation for exotic livestock. Now she mainly verifies viability, authenticity, and then couriers the samples to Svalbard for various government missions out here.”

  “And she’s just looking for a good security type, in case some other company wants to hijack a sample of what she’s couriering? Which is why she came out to this rusted-out office of yours?”

  Maksim grinned over his screens. “Right.”

  Chauncie looked back at the walkway outside the bridge. River looked back, and then glanced away. She looked out of place, a moonfaced little girl who should be in a lab, sequencing bits and pieces sandwiched between slides. Certainly she shouldn’t be standing in the biting wind on the deck of thousands of tons of scrap metal. “So I steal what she’ll be couriering? Is that the big payday?”

  “No.” Maksim looked back down and tapped the desk. Another puppet somewhere in the world danced to his string pulls. “She’ll be given some seeds we could care less about. What we care about is the fact that she can get you into the Svalbard seed vault.”

  “And in there?”

  Maksim reached under his desk and gently set a small briefcase on the table. “This is a portable sequencer. Millions of research and development spent so that a genetic archeologist in the field could immediately do out on the open plains what used to take a lab team weeks or months to do. Couple it with a fat storage system, and we can digitize nature’s bounty in a few seconds.”

  Chauncie stared down at the case. “You can’t tell me those seeds haven’t already been sequenced. Aren’t they just there for insurance, in case civilization collapses totally?”

  “There are unique seeds at Svalbard,” said Maksim, shaking his head. “One-of-a-kind from extinct tropical plants; paleo-seeds. Sequencing them destroys the seed, and lots of green groups ganged up about ten years ago in a big court case to stop the unique ones being touched. Bad karma if the sequencing isn’t perfect, you know; you’d lose the entire species. Sequencing is almost foolproof now, but the legislation is . . . hard to reverse.

  “We want you to get into the seed vault and sequence as many of those rare and precious seeds as you can. They have security equipment all over the outside, but inside, it’s just s
torage area. No weapons, just move quick to gather the seeds and control the scientist while you gather the seeds. The more paleo-seeds the better. When you leave, with or without her, you get outside. You pull out the antenna, and you transmit everything. You leave Svalbard however you wish—charter a plane to be waiting for you, or the boat you get there with. We do not care. Once we have the information, we pay you. You leave the Arctic, find a warm place to settle down. Buy a nice house, and a nice woman. Enjoy this new life. Okay, we never see each other again. I’ll be sad, true, but maybe I’ll retire too, and neither of us cares. You understand?”

  Chauncie did. This was exactly the score he’d been looking for.

  He looked at the windblown geneticist and thought about what Maksim might not be telling him. Then he shook his head. “You know me, Max, this is too big. Way out of my comfort level. I’ll become internationally wanted. I’m not in that league.”

  “No, no.” Maksim slapped the table. “You are big-league now, Chauncie. You’ll do this. I know you’ll do this.”

  Chauncie laughed and leaned back in the chair. “Why?”

  “Because if you don’t”—Maksim also leaned back—“if you don’t, you will never forgive yourself when military contractors occupy Svalbard in two weeks, taking over the seed vault and blackmailing the world with it.”

  “You’ve got to be joking.” The idea that someone might trash Svalbard was ridiculous. Svalbard was the holiest of green holies, a bank for the world’s wealth of seeds, stored away in case of apocalypse. “That would be like bombing the Vatican.”

  “These are Russian mercenaries, my friend. Russia is dying. They never were cutting edge with biotech, ever since Lysenkoism in the Soviet days. The plague strains that ripped through their wheat fields last year killed their stock, and Western companies have patented nearly everything that grows. Russian farms are hostage to Monsanto patents, so they have no choice but to raid the seed bank. They can either sequence the unique strains themselves, in hopes of making hybrids that won’t get them sued for patent infringement in the world market, or they may threaten to destroy those unique seeds unless some key patents are annulled. I don’t know which exactly—but either way, the rare plants are doomed. They’ll sequence the DNA, discard everything but the unique genes . . . or burn the seed to put pressure on West. Either way—no more plant.”

  “Whereas if we do it . . .”

  “We take whole DNA of plant. Let them buy it from us; in twenty years we give whole DNA back to Svalbard when it’s no longer worth anything. It’s win-win—for us and plant.”

  “It’s the Russians behind the mercenaries? And no one knows about this.”

  “No one. No one but us.” Maksim laughed. “You will be hero to many, but more importantly, rich.”

  Chauncie sucked air through his teeth and mulled it all over. But he and Maksim already knew the answer.

  “What about travel expenses?”

  Maksim laughed. “You’re friends with those Indians—”

  “First Nations peoples—”

  “Whatever. Just get permission to use one of their trawlers. The company she’s couriering for is pretty good about security. They drop in by helicopter when you’re in transit to hand over the seeds. They’ll call with a location and time at the last minute, as long as you tell them what your course will be. A good faith payment is . . .” Maksim tapped a screen. “. . . now in your account. You can afford to hire them. Happy birthday.”

  “It’s not my birthday.”

  “Well, with this job, it is. And Chauncie?”

  “Yes, Max?”

  “You fuck it up, you won’t see another.”

  Chauncie wanted to say something in return, but it was no use. He knew Maksim wasn’t kidding. Anyway, Maksim had already turned his attention back to his screens. Chauncie was already taken care of, in his mind.

  For a moment, Chauncie considered turning Maksim down, still. Then he glanced out the windows, at a sea that would never be the right color—that would never cradle his body and ease the sorrow of his losses.

  He hefted the briefcase and stepped outside to introduce himself to River Balleny.

  The trawler beat through heavy seas, making for Svalbard. The sun rolled slowly around a sky drained of all but pastel colors, where towering clouds of dove gray and mauve hinted at a dusk that never came. You covered your porthole to make night for yourself, and stepped out of your stateroom seemingly into the same moment you had left. After years up here Chauncie could tell himself he was as used to the midnight sun as he was to heavy seas; but the new passenger, who was much on his mind, stayed in her cabin while the seas heaved.

  After two days the swells subsided, and for a while the ocean became calm as glass. Chauncie woke to a distant crackle from the radio room, and as he buttoned his shirt Kulitak pounded on his door. “I heard, I heard.”

  “It’s not just the helicopter,” Kulitak hissed. “The elders just contacted me over single sideband radio. We think Maksim’s dead.”

  “Think?” Chauncie looked down the tight corridor between the trawler’s cabins. The floorboards creaked under their feet as the ship twisted itself over large waves.

  “Several tons of sulfur particulates, arc welded into a solid lump, dropped from the stratosphere by a malfunctioning blimp. So they say. There’s nothing left of Maksim’s barge. It’s all pieces.”

  “Pieces . . .” Chauncie instinctively looked up toward the deck, as if expecting something similar to destroy them on the spot.

  “I told you, you don’t get involved with that man. You’re out here playing a game that will get you killed. Get out now.”

  Chauncie braced himself in the tiny space as the trawler lurched. “It’s too late now. They don’t let you back out this late in the game.” He thought about the private army moving out there somewhere, getting ready to take over the vault. All at the behest of another nation assuming it could just snatch that which belonged to all.

  They still had time.

  “Come on, let’s get that package. She’ll fall overboard if we don’t help her out.”

  They stepped on deck to find River Balleny already there. She was staring up at the dragonfly shape of an approaching helicopter, which was framed by rose-tinted puffballs in the pale, drawn sky. She said nothing, but turned to grin excitedly at the two men as the helicopter’s shuddering voice rose to a crescendo.

  The wash from its blades scoured the deck. Kulitak, clothes flapping, stepped into the center of the deck and raised his hands. Dangling at the bottom of a hundred feet of nylon rope, a small plastic drum wrapped in fluorescent green duct tape swung dangerously past his head, twirled, and came back. On the third pass he grabbed it and somebody cut the rope in the helicopter. The snaking fall of the line nearly pulled the drum out of Kulitak’s hands; by the time he’d wrestled his package loose the helicopter was a receding dot. River walked out to help him, and after a moment’s hesitation, Chauncie followed.

  “The fuck is this?” The empty drum at his feet, Kulitak was holding a small plastic bag up to the sunlight. River reached up to take it from him.

  “It’s your past,” she said. “And our future.” She took the package inside without another glance at the men.

  They found her sitting at the cleaver-hacked table in the galley, peering at the bag. “Those seem to mean a lot to you,” he said as he slid in opposite her.

  Opening the bag carefully, River rolled a couple of tiny orange seeds onto the tabletop. “Paleo-seeds,” she mused. “It looks like mountain aven, but according to the manifest”—she tapped a sheet of paper that had been tightly wadded and stuffed into the bag—“it’s at least thirty thousand years old.”

  Chauncie picked one up gingerly between his fingertips. “And that makes it different?”

  She nodded. “Maybe not. But it’s best to err on the side of caution. Have you ever been to the seed vault?” He shook his head.

  “When I was a girl I had a model of Noah’s
ark in my bedroom,” she said. “You could pop the roof open and see little giraffes and lions and stuff. Later I thought that was the dumbest story in the Bible—but the seed vault at Svalbard really is the ark. Only for plants, not animals.”

  “Where’d you grow up?”

  “Valley, Nebraska,” she said. “Before the water table collapsed. You?”

  “British Virgin Islands: Anegada.”

  She sucked in a breath. “It’s gone. Oh, that must have been terrible for you.”

  He shrugged. “It was a slow death. It took long enough for the sea to rise and sink the island that I was able to make my peace with it; but my wife . . .” How to compress those agonizing years into some statement that would make sense to this woman, yet not do an injustice to the complexity of it all? All he could think of to say was, “It killed her.” He looked down.

  River surprised him by simply nodding, as if she really did understand. She put her hand out, palm up, and he laid the seed in it. “We all seem to end up here,” she mused, “when our lands go away. Nebraska’s a dust bowl now. Anegada’s under the waves. We come up here to make sure nobody else has to experience that.”

  He nodded; if anybody asked him flat out, Chauncie would say that Anegada hadn’t mattered, that he’d come to the Arctic for the money. Somehow he didn’t think River would buy that line.

  “Of course it’s a disaster,” she went on, “losing the Arctic ice cap, having the tundra melt and outgas all that methane and stuff. But every now and then there’s these little rays of hope, like when somebody finds ancient seeds that have been frozen since the last glaciation.” She sealed the baggie. “Part of our genetic heritage, maybe the basis for new crops or cancer drugs or who knows? A little lifeboat—once it’s safely at Svalbard.”