Best of all, Charley acquired a khorun exoskeleton fashioned for one of their olney slaves. The khoru were an avian race who’d invaded a neighboring planet in their system and enslaved its inhabitants, the olney, who resembled humans so closely that many xenologists wondered if interstellar panspermia was somehow involved (subsequent comparison of human and olney DNA have shown thatour physical similarities are only coincidental). The khorun homeworld had a higher surface gravity than the olney’s, so the khoru had to provide the means for their slaves to stand erect and move about. As luck would have it, a sorenta merchant had an exoskeleton big enough for Charley. It cost Charley his guitar, which he’d had for most of his life, but he considered it a fair deal. To the rest of us, it was another indication how seriously he was taking all this.
The day finally came when Charley decided he was ready. We returned to Terrania, where we disembarked at a less-used tram station at the far end of the eastern biopod. After making our way back to New Salem, we stayed overnight at Charley and Su’s seldom-used apartment above a hardware store in the town center. That evening, we drank wine and helped Charley pack. Even with a sixty-pound backpack, he was going to be travelling light, but the route he and Freddie had planned would take him through friendly hexes where he could count on acquiring food and water from the local residents. Hex’s other inhabiting races understood joyriding better than our own.
“Can’t we talk you out of this?” Genghis Bob said as we had a late dinner together. Chicken chili with cornbread: after so many weeks riding the rails, it felt strange to be eating human food again. The last supper, Marie called it. “Look, we’re impressed. You don’t have to prove to us you can –”
“I’m not trying to prove anything.” Charley was squatting beside his open pack, still trying to decide if he needed to bring two pairs of socks or if he could get by with just one. “This is something I really want to do... really need to do.”
“Why?” I asked. “Isn’t it enough to know that the pentagons exist and leave it at that?”
He raised his eyes and fixed me with a disbelieving stare. “Really, Jack? Really?” He shook his head. “Man, you might as well just stay home. Get off the rails, get a house, get married and raise kids. Get a normal life. It’s safer that way.”
My face burned. I knew what he was saying: you’re not cut out to be a joyrider. Su Mi Tu came to my defense. “He didn’t mean it that way, Charley. He just... we just... don’t see the point in what you’re doing. I love joyriding, too, but...”
Her voice trailed off, and she finished what she meant to say by reaching over to take Charley’s hand. He quietly held it for a few moments before replying. “It’s not just about joyriding. It’s about seeing something no one else has ever seen.” He smiled and looked at all of us. “Don’t worry, I’m coming back. And when I do, I’ll tell you what I saw... and make history as the first man to have seen it.”
APACHE CHARLEY LEFT the following morning, shortly after the sky let in the light of a sun that never rose or set.
We travelled with him by horse cart back to the tram station, where another bribe to the station guard got him to look the other way. The tribe watched as Charley summoned a tram. A silver pill glided into the station and stopped at the platform, and he took a few minutes to give each of us a last hug. Then he carried his pack through the tram’s open door, and through the windows we observed him entering the first of fourteen sets of danui coordinates into the control panel keypad. The door whispered shut, and Charley got in with a final wave before the tram shushed down the maglev track and through the maw of the transit tube.
The Holy Fools could have gone back out on the road again, but we didn’t. Our leader was gone, and even though we knew that it might be weeks or months before we heard from him again – if ever – we decided to remain in Terrania until we did. So we voted to disband and go our separate ways, at least for a while.
I slept on a friend’s couch for about a week until I found work in a vineyard in Nueva Italia that paid well enough for me to get a small apartment. The other employees liked hearing my travel stories, which is one thing that we brought back that the Janus Company couldn’t claim, patent, and sell. After a while I began to wonder whether I really wanted to do this anymore. Living the life of a wandering troubadour can be fun, but there’s much to be said for a steady job and a permanent home. Perhaps the time had come for me to do just that which Charley had accused me of wanting, and give up joyriding altogether.
I was still weighing this when, one afternoon while I was tying up grapevines, my phone chirped. It was Su Mi Tu with news I wanted to hear and also didn’t. Charley was back... but he was in the hospital and under arrest.
I dropped what I was doing and hurried across town to Terrania General, where the reception desk confirmed that Charley had been admitted as a patient. That itself took an effort; the receptionist had no record of anyone named Apache Charley, and it wasn’t until I carefully explained who he was and what he’d been doing that the clerk knew whom I was talking about.
In doing so, I learned something else: Charley’s real name.
I found Zeus Brandt lying in bed with his neck in a brace and an IV line feeding diluted sodium chloride into his arm. The constable standing outside the door let me in after Su Mi Tu – or rather, Sue Mosley – told him that I was a family friend. The other Holy Fools were on the way, but Zeus – Charley – quietly let me know that it would be best for everyone if we dropped our travelling names while we were here. The law had already busted one joyrider; no sense in letting them nab the rest of the tribe as well.
Charley told us what happened. There wasn’t much to tell. During nearly a month of travel, he’d made his way southward toward the equator. His weight had steadily increased although his body mass remained unchanged, and near the end he ran short of food and water. When he finally reached the pentagon he was dehydrated and barely able to walk or stand on his own. With the aid of the olney exoskeleton, though, he was able to disembark from the tram when it pulled into a station at his destination.
“And... well, there was nothing there.” Gazing up at us from the hospital bed, Charley shrugged and immediately winced in pain. “Oww. Shouldn’t have done that. Anyway, there was nothing but darkness. There was an atmosphere I could breathe, but no light at all. Total darkness as far as I could see. And then –”
He sighed. “A light came on in the ceiling just a few feet away, and two danui were standing there. Big, ugly bastards... like what you’d get if you crossed a tarantula with a lobster. They were wearing hjadd translators, and one of them said, ‘You’re not welcome here. Leave at once.’ Well, of course, I tried to reason with them, let them know I meant no harm, but they weren’t having any of it.”
The danui made short work of Apache Charley. Grasping his arms with their claws, they roughly pushed him back into the tram; in doing so, they caused him to twist his back. One of the danui then entered a few set of coordinates into the control pad. The doors shut and the tram returned to the tunnel.
In pain, fading in and out of consciousness, Charley spent the next twenty-eight hours aboard the tram as it travelled nonstop to another hexagon somewhere northwest of the danui pentagon. When it finally stopped, he found humans waiting for him. While Charley was in transit, the danui had contacted the Terrania government: a human has been caught trespassing where he shouldn’t be, and would we please send a ship to pick him at such-and-such coordinates? Thank you, and don’t let this happen again.
That was the end of Zeus Brandt’s career as Apache Charley the joyrider. He spent six months in jail, then got out and got a job as a consultant for the Janus Company. Yes, he went to work for them. Funny thing about Zeus: way back when, he’d been chief petty officer aboard the Montero, before he had a falling out with Andromeda Carson and the other vets of the first expedition.
None of us ever knew that. Guess he did have something to prove, after all.
He seems happy, though,
now that he and Sue have settled down. And he did make his mark on history as the first human to reach Hex’s equator. But I think he misses the old days.
So do we all.
I STOOD IN the center of the frozen Arctic lake, chipping at the ice with an ice chisel, a sharp-edged piece of steel attached to a five-foot-long handle. It was the middle of May, and the ice was still about a meter thick. I made an indentation large enough to hold a bundle of six explosive cartridges.
One cartridge in the bundle was primed with a number 6 electric blasting cap. I attached the lead wires to the cap, placed the cartridges in the crater I had made, then scraped the ice chips back into the hole to cover them. The afternoon sun would warm the surface and melt the snow a little. In the chill of the evening, it would refreeze, sealing the charge in place.
I walked north on the ice, unrolling the lead wires. The spruce trees that surrounded the lake tilted this way and that, leaning on each other like drunks at closing time. A drunken forest. The trees had grown in the permafrost, the permanently frozen soil of the Arctic Circle, and their roots were shallow. As the frozen soil had melted, the trees had abandoned their upright posture, beginning a slow motion fall toward the ground. As the permafrost melted, it released methane, the main component of natural gas.
I stopped to brush snow off the ice and chip another crater. Beneath the black ice I could see thousands of white blobs, as numerous as stars in the sky. Some were as big as my hand; some as big as my head. Each one was a bubble of methane released by the melting permafrost and trapped beneath the ice.
I looked up when I heard the crunch of footsteps in the snow. My friend Anaaya grinned at me. “You’re slow, Doctor Maggie. I’ve already finished the other side of the lake.”
Anaaya was the only person who insisted on the honorific. She was an old friend. We had been roommates in our freshman year at University of Alaska. She had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering; I had gone on to get a doctorate.
“Of course you’re faster,” I told her. “You actually know what you’re doing.”
“I’ll help you out, Doctor Slowpoke.”
It was a small lake, but it took us three hours working together to plant all the charges. When we were done, we surveyed our work from the lakeshore. The afternoon breeze was already blowing snow across the lake, erasing our footprints. The charges and the connecting wire were invisible beneath the snow and ice.
“No sign that we were ever here,” I said.
“We were never here,” she said. “Who would ever stop at this lake? No one. No fishing here, no hunting – no reason to stop. You’re on your way to check on a methane monitoring station; I’m looking into some reports of illegal trapping for my aunt.” Anaaya’s aunt was involved in tribal management. “All official business.”
Looking out over the lake at the drunken forest, tilted trees as far as the eye could see, I didn’t hesitate. “Of course.”
We returned to our snowmobiles and headed north to accomplish our official business.
TWO WEEKS LATER, the lake exploded. Our charges had cracked the ice and ignited the rising methane.
I wasn’t there to see it happen. No one was. But three satellites were perfectly positioned to capture the show. Two aerospace engineers – friends of friends who could not be traced to me – had independently calculated the orbits and set the ideal time for the explosion. They had done a good job. The satellite images were spectacular. A very impressive mushroom cloud. Trees for miles around the lake were blasted with ice shards.
An ecoterrorist, JollyGreen, took credit for the explosion, releasing a lengthy manifesto about the melting of the permafrost and the release of methane. JollyGreen was a sock puppet, of course. Not my sock puppet. The sock puppet of a friend of a friend of a friend with no connections back to me.
JollyGreen’s basic message was this: Earth’s average global surface temperature was increasing and the Arctic was heating up faster than the rest of the planet. The permafrost was melting and releasing methane, which was twenty times better at trapping the sun’s heat than carbon dioxide. More methane meant more warming. That meant more permafrost melting, which meant more methane and more warming... and so on in a positive feedback loop with negative consequences.
“The human race is already screwed because of climate change,” he wrote. “There’ll be flooding, famine, drought, and more. Too late to turn all that around, but it can get worse. If all the permafrost melts, we are royally screwed. Mass extinctions, mass die-off of phytoplankton and disruption of the ocean’s ecosystems, wildfires on land. Nowhere to run; nowhere to hide.”
For the next few days, news programs featured Arctic researchers explaining the consequences of climate change north of the Arctic Circle. Some of my former colleagues at the University of Alaska were quizzed on camera about the permafrost and methane in Arctic lakes. Several cited my work. Yes, they said, the permafrost was melting, methane constantly bubbled up under Arctic lakes. None of this was secret information.
I was not among the scientists interviewed. I heard that a couple of reporters trying to find a way to contact me put pressure on the PR department at the university, but no one gave me up. They just said I was no longer affiliated with the university.
A month later, after the explosion had faded from the news cycle, the National Science Foundation called me. I was about 100 miles away from the exploding lake, making coffee over a driftwood fire in Ivvavik National Park, Canada’s least visited national park. I had spent the month living in a qarmaq, a sod-roofed hut built decades before by an Inuit family to serve as a winter camp. It was just large enough for me, Claire, and Marina – grad students who had elected to spend the summer getting a little field experience working with me. The qarmaq was conveniently situated right beside the one-acre plot where I was testing a unique method of capturing methane released by melting permafrost.
Here there were no spruce trees to betray the softening of the soil beneath the surface. Low grasses and shrubs grew in a boggy landscape. Nestled among the plants were carbon fiber tubes, woven together to make a very loose mat. In some areas, the fibers had been trampled into the soil by a passing herd of reindeer.
A year before, I had submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation about this pilot project. I had called this tangle of carbon fiber tubes a ‘methane sequestering mat.’ When NSF turned down my grant proposal, I had posted the project on a crowd-funding site, where I referred to it as a ‘fart catcher.’ Crowd-funding had financed my one-acre pilot project.
It was a warm day by Arctic standards – slightly above freezing. I wore hiking boots with two pairs of wool socks, rather than the large white bunny boots – rubber inside and out with thick insulation between the waterproof layers – that were necessary in the winter. I could breathe without a filter to warm the air before it reached my lungs. Practically balmy.
I was talking with Claire and Marina about plans for the day when the satellite phone rang. The call was from an NSF program officer, the same guy who had turned down my grant proposal. But that had been before the lake exploded, before permafrost became – ever so briefly – the star of the 24/7 news cycle, before some members of Congress began calling for zero methane emissions in the Arctic.
NSF was adding a new initiative that focused on methane emission from the melting permafrost. The program officer had called my house in Fairbanks and persuaded the house sitter to give him the number of my satellite phone. He wanted to discuss my proposal for a methane-sequestering mat.
Sitting on a camp stool by the driftwood fire, looking out over the tundra and the tangle of carbon fibers, I told the program officer about results to date from my crowd-funded prototype. Knowing that this program officer had an engineering background, I focused on how the project made use of recent innovations in nanotechnology – the carbon fiber tubes, the low pressure methane-hydrate storage tank made possible by advances in carbon nanotube technology. I recited numbers �
� emission rates, kilograms of methane recovered. It was a cordial and productive conversation.
NINE MONTHS LATER, I landed at Franklin Research Station. Built of recycled shipping containers and located on the coastal tundra just outside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the station was a low rust-colored box surrounded by ice. To the north, the Beaufort Sea – a plain of ice stretching away to meet the blue sky. To the south, the Brooks Range – mountains that looked as if they had been sculpted from snow, not just covered by it. I had been lucky to fly in during a calm spell. March was the start of the Arctic research season, but the weather was always dicey.
“Welcome to your home away from home,” the pilot called out as he turned the plane’s nose into the wind and brought it down smoothly on the ice-covered runway.
“Happy to be here,” I said sincerely.
A few hours later, after unpacking my gear, I repeated that sentiment as I met with Jackson Hanks, the head of operations at the station. I had done my research on the man. He was twenty years my senior. A biologist by training, but he had been head of operations here for more than a decade, while station managers had come and gone.
A former colleague from my university days who had spent a summer at Franklin Station provided me with more detailed information than Google ever could: “That guy? He’ll never go rogue. He knows how to work the system. He’s never the leader but always in charge. He keeps his head down and knows where all the bodies are buried.”
Oki, the head cook at Franklin Station, was a distant cousin of my friend Anaaya. He had provided even more important information: what Jackson Hanks liked to drink.
I arrived in Jackson’s office with a bottle of bourbon. “A gift from the south,” I said, as I set it on his desk. “My sources say it’s your favorite brand.”
Bridging Infinity Page 24
