A Crack in the Sky

by Mark Peter Hughes

  One of the things that unnerved him most out here was the silence. Throughout his entire life in the domes—even in the tower—there had always been background noise. The hum of machinery. The drone of blowers. Funbots. Crowds. Street sounds. But here there was barely anything. Just the wind and the soft crunch of his own footsteps.

  The sky too was unsettling. The sheer immensity of it. No adverts. No digital birds. Just blue and puffy gray, forever, in all directions. Never in his life had he felt so small.

  He was heading west, more or less, following the course of the sun—the actual sun, which blazed so impossibly bright and hot that it felt artificial to him. He’d been exposed to it so long, his skin hurt. Dust blew into his eyes and coated his throat. He tried not to think about water. There were no more puddles to drink from. They’d dried up quickly in the heat. For a while his mind had been playing tricks on him, making him see lakes in the distance, but always they disappeared as he got closer. For the past mile or so, he’d started to feel dizzy, and now he was aware that he was a little slower. It worried him. He was dehydrated and hungry, and his strength was beginning to fade.

  He slapped another bug biting at his neck, although he wasn’t sure why he bothered anymore. He wiped the sweat from his eyes.

  Eli …? Want to know what I was just dreaming about?

  All right. Tell me.

  Marilyn had spent much of the day unconscious. For long stretches she lay straining to breathe, cradled in his arm. Occasionally, though, she would awaken and do her best to keep him company. He was glad for the distraction. Now, in a signal that was barely a whisper, she recited:

  I sent a message to the fish:

  I told them “This is what I wish.”

  He smiled. It was from another Alice poem, yet another work of beautiful nonsense. He continued for her, this time speaking aloud as he stumbled through the dusty earth:

  “The little fishes of the sea,

  They sent an answer back to me.

  “The little fishes’ answer was

  ‘We cannot do it, Sir, because—’”

  She picked it up again, but already her signal was even weaker:

  I sent to them again to say

  “It will be better to obey.”

  The fishes answered, with a grin,

  “Why, what a temper you are in!”

  I told them once, I told them twice.…

  He waited, but then he realized she’d fallen unconscious again. So he finished the line aloud for her:

  “I told them once, I told them twice:

  They would not listen to advice.…”

  He couldn’t recall what came after that, and for a long time he tried to remember. It gave him something to do. A tumbleweed drifted past. Far away a tornado moved across the horizon.

  After several minutes her voice came to him again.

  There’s a good chance I’m going to die, my darling. You know that, don’t you?

  Eli stared hard into the distance. Other than the bugs and the brambles, they had seen nothing all day that was alive. No other plants. No animals. They hadn’t even come across a road.

  He didn’t answer. He kept walking.

  The shadows stretched long across the hard earth of the desert. Eli was moving much slower now, stumbling in a near delirium. His face and neck stung with the effect of sun exposure, and his lips were swollen. They felt as if they might crack open. His eyelids were growing heavier by the second, and he had to fight the urge to drop to the ground.

  His thoughts were muddling together. They darted from one random place to another until they ended up tangled in a disjointed swirl in his mind. One moment he would feel overcome with regret, and in the next a strange wave of euphoria would wash through him. It occurred to him that all his life he’d been under the influence of the CloudNet at some level, but out here, for the first time ever, he was finally free of it. The subtle tug on his thoughts, the constant temptation to think about something unimportant—it was gone. He’d always felt ashamed of wasting so much time with his imaginary adventures, but at least they had been his own dreams, not those of the CloudNet. Maybe shutting himself off with his storybooks had been his unconscious way of freeing himself all along. Now his imagination, unshackled and entirely his own, was all he had left. What had once seemed childish now felt beautiful and noble, the final resource nobody could take away.

  On the other hand, what good had it done him? The world was so much bigger, far more dangerous and unforgiving, than he’d ever realized. If only he’d paid more attention and recognized the dangers sooner, perhaps he could have done things differently. Maybe he wouldn’t have ended up like it appeared he was going to—dead of exhaustion out in the wasteland.

  There was no point in denying it anymore. There was nothing out here.

  Nothing except dust and emptiness. Thirst and death.

  Eventually his knees gave out. He collapsed on the ground. Still curled and gasping in his arm, Marilyn lay in the dirt by his head. He pulled her closer.

  I’m sorry. It wasn’t enough, he knew. It was all he could think to say.

  Her eyes were open. Her ragged little body strained for each breath. It’s all right, my love. It’s not your fault.

  With their heads pressed to the warm, hard earth, they watched the sun drop slowly into the horizon. The lower it sank, the wider it seemed to grow, its edges shimmering like the giant ball of fire Eli knew it really was. Little by little the entire sky took on new, brilliant shades that changed by the moment and reflected off the edges of the clouds—amber and pink, purple and silver—a breathtaking panorama of color. All along he’d thought the dome sky was the most beautiful sight in the world, but now he realized he was wrong. And all at once he began to have a feeling about the place the Foggers were searching for. Grandfather said InfiniCorp looked everywhere and didn’t find it, but now Eli was desperate to believe it was still out there. Maybe the company just hadn’t looked in the right place. Or maybe it wasn’t a place, exactly. Perhaps it was only a dream to aspire to, the possibility of a better world beyond the apocalypse. Maybe the Wild Orange Yonder was simply another word for hope.

  Next to him Marilyn wheezed.

  They lay watching the colors progress. After a while, something appeared out of the sky. It was a pale-feathered bird with black spots on its wings, and it landed on the ground just ahead of them. Taken aback, Eli stared. He held his breath as it picked at something beside a low clump of brush. He wondered where it had come from and how it had managed to survive out here in the emptiness. If there was one bird, perhaps there were others like it somewhere out there. Perhaps there was something to hope for after all.

  A few seconds later it flew away again. Barely able to lift his head, Eli followed its path into the sunset at the end of the world, one of the last, he supposed, to be witnessed by human eyes. Up ahead new storm clouds were already gathering. And yet he felt grateful to be alive. Grateful that he’d been here for this one brief, thrilling moment. With his cheek still in the dirt, his gaze stayed fixed on the dimming sky, so vast and orange and wild. It was beautiful—so beautiful it made his sides ache. His eyelids grew heavy again. He started to dream. He imagined a place where clean water was plentiful and storms didn’t kill. He imagined he could see shadows moving closer, the outlines of desert people in tattered environment suits, ambling toward him in the growing darkness.

  Already he was asleep.

  epilogue

  The nights grow ever darker and the days less welcoming. This year the season of rain seems to have no end. The six of us that remain have taken to hunting in pairs. We gather earlier each morning and we take turns keeping watch. We have had to wander deeper into the desert to escape the mutants and the highwaymen, but some of us are saying these terrors were no worse than what we face now. Better to take our chances with slave traders than to die of starvation in the wasteland.

  I was among those who said no to this, but now I am beginning to agree.
/>   Four days ago Rosalia and I found a boy collapsed in the desert. In his arm was a strange animal I have not seen before, although Rosalia claims it is not a mutant. We brought them back to the shelter. After some discussion it was decided that we would take them in, but only until they are strong enough to go out on their own. We no longer have resources enough to share outside our clan, as we once did. To be honest, I agreed to allow them among us only because Rosalia insisted, and because I believed they were going to die anyway. But it appears they are doing better now. Rosalia spends much of her time with them, whispering to them in their sleep and nursing them back to health. Even the animal. I tell her she is a fool but she does not listen.

  Some among us worry that finding a fallen stranger so far out in the nothing is a bad omen. But Rosalia is not one of them. Each day as the boy and the animal grow stronger, I have noticed her scanning the horizon more and more often. This morning I asked her what she was searching for and she told me there is a great storm brewing. It will not be long now, she said, but the old man of the desert knows that the ones we have been waiting for are with us at last.

  He will be here soon, she said. He’s coming for them.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Global warming remains a controversial issue. While most scientists agree that the world is warming at a faster-than-normal pace, and that humans are at least partially responsible for this warming, they disagree about the possible consequences for our environment. After reading Eli’s story, you may be wondering just how I came up with some of the crazy scenarios (Dome cities? Creepy mutants?) described in the book. Well, I’ll be honest with you: some of them might not be so crazy, if the world continues to heat up at its current pace. Others, however, are completely made up (this is a work of fiction, after all), and perhaps the majority are a murky mixture of fact and fiction. These ideas were inspired by real science pushed to an extreme and unlikely degree.

  When I first began to think about a fictional future in which the Earth is overheating, I called my scientist friend Dr. Julio Friedmann. I went to school with Julio—we met in kindergarten—and now he does climate and energy research for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, so he knows a lot about what’s real and what’s just hype in the climate change debate. Julio was generous with his time. He started by walking me through some of what scientists do and don’t know, and patiently brainstormed with me as we speculated on some extreme scenarios. What if the world really did get super warm, and very quickly? How might it all play out? What might it mean for the future of the planet? For humanity? I also did some reading on my own. A few of the ideas from this initial research ended up in A Crack in the Sky, but, as I said, I often exaggerated things.

  Here are some examples of where I did this:

  CO2 IN THE ATMOSPHERE

  The truth: Burning carbon-based fuels like oil, gasoline, and coal releases carbon dioxide—or CO2—into the atmosphere. Our planet can use this gas; rain forests, for instance, play an important role in absorbing CO2 and converting it back into oxygen. The oceans, too, absorb much of it. A certain amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is normal. Carbon dioxide helps regulate surface temperatures on the planet by trapping some of the sun’s heat as it reflects off the Earth and tries to get back out of the atmosphere—this is what we call the greenhouse effect. Currently, though, humans are changing the equilibrium of this process by creating so much CO2 (35 billion tons in 2008, and increasing every year) that the land and the ocean can’t absorb it all. Deforestation adds to the problem: extra CO2 builds up in the atmosphere because of the sudden absence of huge numbers of trees that would have naturally converted CO2 into oxygen and kept carbon in the soil. Scientists can tell what atmospheric CO2 concentration levels have been in the distant past by studying Antarctic ice samples. Not only has the global concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere been rising since preindustrial times, but today it is significantly higher than its natural range over the past 650,000 years.

  The fiction: In Eli’s fictional future the situation is so dire that the amount of excess carbon in the atmosphere measures a whopping 980 CO2-equivalent units per million (let’s call that parts per million, or ppm). By way of comparison, today, as I write this, it’s at about 385 ppm. It appears that at 450 ppm, major habitat loss may be inevitable, but questions of exactly what might happen to our environment at specific CO2 concentrations are hotly debated. In any case, saturating our atmosphere to the level described in Eli’s story would require about three hundred years of today’s emissions, or one hundred years if our emissions continue to grow at the current rate.

  WARMING CLIMATE

  The truth: The Earth is billions of years old, and climate change—including periods of warming and cooling—is a natural part of its history. The concern of many scientists today isn’t that climate change is happening, it’s the rate at which it seems to be happening now. Global temperature records show that the Earth has warmed, on average, by more than half a degree centigrade over the past century. That might not seem like much, but even a small change in average temperature can have a big impact on things like biodiversity, agriculture, and the oceans. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the rate of warming since the 1970s has been about three times greater than the rate over the last hundred years. Seven of the eight warmest years on record (since 1850) have happened since 2001. Many of the world’s leading climatologists think this rise in temperature has been caused in large part by man-made greenhouse gases, like CO2, in the atmosphere.

  The fiction: In the future imagined in this story, the Earth has warmed to a drastic degree. The polar ice caps have melted, entire ecosystems have collapsed, previously fertile land has turned to desert, and the remaining resources are dwindling away. While it would be difficult to predict the real distribution of warm and cool geographical zones, Eli’s world has clearly undergone a sweeping transformation, an overall warming well beyond what is currently predicted for the near future.

  RISING SEA LEVELS

  The truth: Sea levels rise because of two things—water warming, which causes the oceans to swell and expand onto land, and melting of ice from landmasses. Using current information to estimate future CO2 emissions, many scientists—including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—are predicting that the oceans could rise by three to six feet by 2100, which would potentially displace tens of millions of people and cost trillions of U.S. dollars in damage. There is evidence to suggest that sea levels could rise faster, perhaps ten or fifteen feet by 2100, because more land-based glaciers seem to be melting than we once realized.

  The fiction: In A Crack in the Sky, ocean levels have risen by about sixty meters, an increase that could theoretically result from a melt that included all of the mountain glaciers worldwide, all of Greenland, all the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and about half of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. That rise would completely submerge Florida, much of the Mississippi River Valley, the central valley in California, and many coastal cities. This is an extreme scenario, highly unlikely in the next hundred years, and has not happened, as far as we can tell, in the last thirty million years of Earth’s history.

  ACIDIFICATION OF THE OCEAN

  The truth: CO2 that enters the atmosphere and is absorbed by the ocean becomes carbonic acid, which in turn lowers the pH, meaning that the ocean becomes more acidic. Over the last century, the average pH of the surface of the ocean has dropped measurably. There is evidence that acidification may already be negatively affecting the way some animals make their shells, including microscopic animals (zooplankton like foraminifera) at the base of the food chain, coral (which are both food and habitat), and others (like cuttlefish) that are the staple diet of many large marine animals. If acidification continues, by 2050 key components of the marine food chain may be permanently lost.

  The fiction: For my novel I took this idea and amped it way up. The Gulf of Mexico over which Eli and Tabitha find themselves is an ocean tha
t smells bad and is tinged with red due to the proliferation of algae. This would indicate a sea destroyed, a far-flung, grim depiction of acidification and deoxygenation combined.

  SICKNESS AND MASS EXTINCTIONS

  The truth: Climate change threatens the existence of thousands of species when environments change too swiftly for them to adapt. Polar bears are often cited as examples of animals struggling to survive as the Arctic ice melts, but there are many other species all around the world that could potentially die off with the loss of their habitats, food, or water. Others could perish as higher temperatures give rise to destructive parasites such as the mountain pine beetle. Pine beetle infestations have been increasing dramatically in recent years and have already resulted in the destruction of millions of acres of forest in western parts of the United States and Canada. Warming temperatures may also increase the ranges of infectious diseases such as yellow fever, malaria, West Nile virus, and Lyme disease.

  The fiction: My novel describes an imaginary future in which this destructive potential is played out to the max. Most of the human population has been killed off by a fast-moving, deadly illness—the Great Sickness. The remaining Outsiders live in a desolate wilderness that has suffered mass extinctions of much of its plant and animal life. Add this to the violent hurricanes, heat, floods, and droughts, and you end up with a harsh landscape indeed, a wasteland where only the strong and resourceful survive.