It was a fabulous summer. There were the usual problems with sinkholes and sleet storms and polar bears, but the robots worked well and I successfully expanded the area covered with the Fart Catcher to about twenty square miles. As autumn approached, it was all going very well. Until it all went very wrong.
I should have paid more attention to the news. While I’d been setting up partnerships and laying carpet and dodging polar bears, there had been a presidential election, a major change in congress, and a shift in national priorities. Hurricanes had wiped out New Orleans and a few other southern cities. Storm-driven waves were eroding beach bluffs and flooding US cities. Funding was being diverted to disaster relief. Franklin Station would shut down at the end of the season.
And somehow my work had come to the attention of new political appointees in charge of climate research. They were upset by my dealings with Renaldo and the Germans and Hehu and … oh, just about everybody who had been helping me out. Some of my partners were apparently on terrorist watch lists.
At least, that was one story. Some of my friends suggested that the concern about terrorism was a cover. What had really pissed people off was the success of my methane cracking—steel manufacturers did not like the possibilities offered by cheap availability of pure carbon.
Whatever the cause, I was in trouble. Jackson told me that Navy personnel who came to close down the station would be taking me into custody and charging me with a list of offenses including theft of government property and conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism. Jackson had been ordered to confine me to the station.
The day before the Navy ship was due to arrive, I left. At my request, Oki had packed a box of supplies—including all of the fresh carrots that were left in the greenhouse. Before hugging me goodbye, he quizzed me on my equipment. He listened carefully to a long list: silk long johns, qiviut underwear, a layer of wool, windproof coat and pants, parka, bunny boots, hat, hood, air filter to warm the air before it entered my lungs, a rifle for the polar bears, a popup shelter, and on and on.
“All right,” he said at last. “Stay warm, stay dry. Don’t get dehydrated and eat as many calories as you can stuff in your face—and you’ll be fine.” He hugged me goodbye.
It was a sunny day with a light wind. Two little farts accompanied me, dragging my gear on an improvised sled made of a plastic pallet I had found on the beach among the driftwood. In addition to the food and gear I had listed for Oki, I had a fiberglass kayak that had been left in the station’s storage by a seal researcher.
I took no satellite phone, no GPS, no electronics that might be used to find me. Such a strange feeling, leaving all that behind.
The muskoxen followed me—not out of affection, but in return for carrots that I dropped along the way. Their hooves completely obliterated my tracks and the marks left by my improvised sled and the little farts.
The hike to the shore was about a mile. When I reached the shore, I reset the little farts to return to the station. The muskoxen followed them, hoping for more carrots.
I abandoned the plastic pallet on the beach where I had found it, loaded the kayak, slid it into the water, and headed west for a place I knew.
A few years back, I had decided to retrace the steps of my favorite Arctic explorer, Ernest de Koven Leffingwell, a guy who never got a lot of press. Everyone paid attention to Peary and Amundsen and Scott. Big voyages, big funding. Leffingwell never had much funding and didn’t give a damn about reaching the North Pole.
He came up here in 1901 and fell in love with the Arctic. He spent nine summers and six winters up here, traveling around, making observations, keeping meticulous records. No fancy equipment—he had Inuit guides; he used dog sleds and small boats. He made the first map of the coastline worth looking at. He was the first person to explain ice wedges and the very first to pay any attention to the permafrost.
A few years back, I spent the better part of a summer retracing his journeys in this area. On that trip, I spent a week in an old prospector’s house where Leffingwell had wintered. Half sod-hut, half log cabin, it was still in pretty good shape. Good shelter, well-concealed, near the coast, and so obscure that only a dedicated permafrost researcher would know about it.
The wind was with me, but even so it was a long paddle down the coast to the small inlet where the cabin was located. I beached the kayak and dragged it and all my gear into the cabin. The wind had picked up and I knew it would erase my tracks.
Inside, out of the wind, I made myself at home and waited for the search to come and go. It was a long wait. When weather was calm, I could hear the search helicopter from miles away—the distinctive whup, whup, whup of their rotors warned me to take cover so searchers couldn’t spot me.
When the wind was blowing, the helicopters didn’t fly. Then I would listen to the wind. Sometimes a gust would make the hut shudder so the boards creaked and groaned. More often a steady wind would make the walls vibrate, so I felt like I was shivering even when I wasn’t. The wind had been trying to tear the hut down for more than a hundred years.
In the first week, a bear found my hiding place, but I had my rifle. Bear meat, while not fine dining, is a good source of protein.
The nights grew longer and longer until the sun never rose. When the sun was just below the horizon, it wasn’t completely dark. It was like that time right after the sun sets, when the sky is the deepest possible blue. Imagine that deep blue moment stretching on and on. The blue light colored the entire world, reflecting from the snow and the water. I felt like I was swimming in the sky.
For me, that was the important moment. Not the brilliant golden flash of the lake’s explosion, but rather the cool, blue, liminal light where nothing seemed real and I was not sure what would become of the world.
I had to wait a long time for the searchers to give up and leave, but eventually I stopped hearing helicopters. I returned to the station for the winter, a long paddle followed by a long walk over the pack ice. It was so cold that I could feel the mucus freeze in my nose when I took a breath without my air filter on. The very act of breathing put me at risk of dehydration—since every bit of water vapor froze instantly, the air was bone dry.
The station had been stripped down, but my friends had left behind everything I needed. There was a stash of canned food in the kitchen. The hydrogen-powered generator in the greenhouse was still there.
The winter was cold and long and lonely. I grew potatoes under improvised grow-lights. I set up a still and perfected the finest hooch ever made in the Arctic Circle. Arctic Fire, I called it.
Satellite communication had been shut down when they closed the station, but I rigged a ham radio. When the ionosphere cooperated, I could catch news broadcasts. The news was never good: heat waves, drought, hurricanes, flooding, famine, disease.
I managed to contact a few friends and I told them I was all right. They told me that the Navy team had searched for me in all the safety huts and all known emergency shelters. They fixated on the largest of the sinkholes—the one that almost swallowed my crew. They spotted some marks at the edge that could have been made by a rope and figured a sinkhole offered a great hiding place. Down there, there’d be no wind, no bears.
It had taken their team a week to stage an expedition to the bottom to look for me. I’m glad they all got in and out all right. Dangerous place, a methane sinkhole. Not somewhere I’d like to spend a lot of time.
Come spring, finding me was no longer a priority for the US government. The Arctic winter was summer in the Antarctic, and there had been some major developments down south. The Western Antarctic ice sheet, which scientists had thought would remain stable for several more decades, had started collapsing in a most spectacular fashion. The top layers of the sheet had been melting each summer, exposing long-buried crevasses. One of those crevasses broke through the bottom of the ice shelf, and an iceberg the size of Connecticut broke loose. A few weeks later, another one, just as big, broke free. Then another.
> The icebergs were dramatic, but they weren’t the real problem. The Western ice shelf held back the glaciers on the Antarctic continent. Without it, those glaciers would flow into the sea. All told, that could add 30 million cubic kilometers of water, give or take a few million, to the world’s oceans. Faced with this threat, politicians were turning their attention to immediate construction projects to hold back the sea. A rogue scientist eating potatoes and polar bear meat in a closed research station was way down on anyone’s list of concerns.
With the return of the spring, Hehu arrived with ships laden with Fart Catcher net, methane cracking equipment, and empty tanks to be filled with hydrogen. That was thirty years ago.
Now we have the world as it is.
I sit in Jackson’s office. I still think of it as his, though he hasn’t been here for thirty years. I use it as my office now.
Hehu sits in the chair on the other side of the desk. It’s spring again and he has sailed north just as he has each spring for the last thirty years. But he hasn’t come alone. Each spring, a fleet of ships comes north to spend the summer in the Beaufort Sea. It is a ragtag fleet of cruise ships and barges and freighters and Navy ships, all repurposed for this new world, all laden with food and supplies for the station, all carrying folks eager to work on the annual methane harvest.
Some ships are equipped with methane cracking facilities; others carry empty hydrogen tanks or empty holds. Each ship has its own unique community and culture—some grow tanks of algae; others grow forests; some grow pot farms. Some are environmentally based communities with overtones of Native American cultures; some are party boats with overtones of Burning-Man culture.
They call themselves the Sunseekers. I call them the summer people. The winter doesn’t exist for them—not really. It is always summer where they are.
I pour Hehu a glass of my Arctic Fire. “You make the best hooch in the Arctic Circle,” he says.
I smile. I didn’t make this hooch by myself. The station staff, all of them young and smart, do the hard work to keep the station running, monitoring the fart catcher, tending the muskoxen and reindeer, making high octane booze, and preparing for the Sunseeker Fleet’s arrival.
When the ships arrive in the Arctic, there is a great celebration always with much singing and dancing. They celebrate the summer methane harvest and they treated me like a hero.
All summer long, the Sunseeker ships crisscross the ice-free Arctic ocean, visiting fart-catcher projects in Norway, Greenland, Siberia, Canada. Each autumn, the ships take away tanks of hydrogen and holds filled with pure powdered carbon.
The Sunseekers are a cheerful lot. And why wouldn’t they be? This is a fine new world, a utopian future, a happy ending. As the permafrost melts, they capture the methane. As the oceans rise, they build more ships.
To them, it seems so natural that half the world’s remaining population lives in nomadic floating colonies. Most of them didn’t know any of the people who died in droughts and floods, heat waves and blizzards. They didn’t know all those who suffered disease and famine.
Jackson died of dengue fever when disease-carrying mosquitos brought that disease to the American South, a shift made possible by warmer temperatures and increased rain. Katrin starved in the European famine—caused by unseasonable snowstorms resulting from the slowing of the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift, ocean currents that kept Europe warm. Renaldo drowned in a flood that wiped out São Paulo, the result of a monster storm. Just one extreme weather event among hundreds.
They all died. Billions of people died. Not millions—billions. It took all those deaths to bring the world population down to a more sustainable level and let us reach this happy ending.
This isn’t the way I thought it would work out when I set out to save the world. All those square-jawed heroes of the old science fiction stories had it wrong. You can’t save the world as we know it. I did what I could, and I did some good in the world. But you can’t save the world without changing it.
“A toast,” Hehu said, lifting his glass. “To the future.”
I nodded and lifted my glass. “To the future. There’s no stopping it.”
The Art of Space Travel
NINA ALLEN
The problem with an obsessive, lifelong search is that sometimes you actually find what you’re looking for.…
Nina Allan’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year #6, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2013, and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women. Her novella Spin, a science fictional re-imagining of the Arachne myth, won the BSFA Award in 2014, and her story-cycle The Silver Wind was awarded the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire in the same year. Her debut novel The Race was a finalist for the 2015 BSFA Award, the Kitschies Red Tentacle, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her second novel, The Rift, will be out in 2017. Find her blog, The Spider’s House, at www.ninaallan.co.uk. She also writes a column for Interzone.
Magic spells are chains of words, nothing more. Words that help you imagine a different future and create a shape for it, that help you see what it might be like, and so make it happen. Sometimes when I read about our struggle to land people on Mars, that’s how the words seem to me—like an ancient incantation, and as deeply unfathomable, a set of mystical words, placed carefully in order and then repeated as a magical chant to bring about a future we have yet to imagine.
The Edison Star Heathrow has sixteen floors, 382 bedrooms, twenty private penthouse apartments, and one presidential suite. It is situated on the northern stretch of the airport perimeter road, and operates its own private shuttle bus to ferry patrons to and from the five terminals. We have a press lounge and a flight lounge and conference facilities. As head of housekeeping, it’s my job to make sure things run smoothly behind the scenes. My job is hard work but I enjoy it, by and large. Some days are more demanding than others.
It was all just rumours at first, but last week it became official: Zhanna Sorokina and Vinnie Cameron will be spending a night here at the hotel before flying out to join the rest of the Mars crew in China. Suddenly the Edison Star is the place to be. The public bar and the flight lounge have been jammed ever since the announcement. There’s still a fortnight to go before the astronauts arrive, but that doesn’t seem to be putting the punters off one little bit. It’s cool to be seen here, apparently. Which is ironic, given that we weren’t even the mission sponsors’ first choice of hotel. That was the Marriott International, only it turned out that Vinnie Cameron had his eighteenth here, or his graduation party or something. He wanted to stay at the Edison Star and so that’s what’s happening.
I guess they thought it would be churlish to deny him, considering.
The first result of the change of plan is that the Marriott hates us. The second is that Benny’s on meltdown twenty-four hours a day now instead of the usual sixteen. I can’t imagine how he’s going to cope when the big guns arrive.
“Perhaps he’ll just explode,” says Ludmilla Khan—she’s the third-floor super. A dreamy expression comes into her eyes, as if she’s picturing the scene in her mind and kind of liking it. “Spontaneous combustion, like you see in the movies. The rest of us running around him flapping like headless chickens.”
She makes me laugh, Ludmilla, which is a good thing. I think there’s every chance that Benny would drive me over the edge if I didn’t see the funny side. Benny’s a great boss, don’t get me wrong—we get on fine most of the time. I just wish he wasn’t getting so uptight about the bloody astronauts. I mean, Jesus, it’s only the one night and then they’ll be gone. Fourteen hours of media frenzy and then we’re last week’s news.
Probably I’m being mean, though. This is Benny’s big moment, after all, when he gets to show off the Edison Star to the world at large and himself as the big guvnor man at the heart of it all. There’s something a bit sad about Benny underneath all his bullshit. I don’t mean sad in the sense of pathetic, I mean genuinely sad, so
rrowful and bemused at the same time, as if he’d been kidnapped out of one life and set to work in another. And it’s not as if he doesn’t work hard. He’s beginning to show his age now, just a little. He’s balding on top, and his suits are getting too tight for him. He wears beautiful suits, Benny does, well cut and modern and just that teeny bit more expensive than he can really afford. Benny might be manager of the Edison Star, but you can tell by his suits that he still wishes he owned it. You can see it every time he steps out of the lift and into the lobby. That swagger, and then the small hesitation.
It’s as if he’s remembering where he came from, how far there is to fall, and feeling scared.
My mother, Moolie, claims to know Benny Conway from way back, from the time he first came to this country as a student, jetting in from Freetown or Yaoundé, one of those African cities to the west that still make it reasonably easy for ordinary civilians to fly in and out.
“He had a cardboard suitcase and an army surplus rucksack. He was wearing fake Levi’s and a gold watch. He sold the watch for rent money the first day he was here. He still called himself Benyamin then, Benyamin Kwame.”
When I ask Moolie how she can know this, she clams up, or changes her story, or claims she doesn’t know who I’m talking about. I don’t think it’s even Benny she’s remembering, it can’t be, or not the Benny Conway who’s my boss, anyway. She’s confusing the names, probably, getting one memory mixed up with another the way she so often does now.
Either that, or she just made it up.
Benny slips me extra money sometimes. I know I shouldn’t accept it but I do, mainly because he insists the money is for Moolie, to help me look after her. “It must be tough, having to care for her all by yourself,” Benny says, just before he forces the folded-over banknotes on me, scrunching them into my hands like so many dead leaves. How he came to know about Moolie in the first place, I have no idea. There’s a chance Ludmilla Khan told him, I suppose, or Antony Ghosh, the guy who oversees our linen contract. Both of them are friends of mine, but you can imagine the temptation to gossip in a fish tank like this. I take the money because I tell myself I’ve earned it and I can’t afford not to, also because maybe Benny really is just sorry for Moolie and this is his way of saying so, even though I’ve told him enough times that it’s not so much a question of looking after Moolie as looking out for her. Making sure she remembers to eat, stuff like that. It’s the ordinary stuff she forgets, you see. During her bad patches her short-term memory becomes so unreliable that every day for her is like the beginning of a whole new lifetime.
The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 54
