by Gwynn White
I tried to remember the numbers the engineer at the flying club had told me. 6,600 kilometers. No, that wasn’t right. 6,600 meters, not kilometers, was the Narwhal’s ceiling, not its range.
It had more than enough range to get to Iqaluit in Nunavut, or to Grise Ford, Canada’s northernmost community, he had said. That was a maximum range of about 4,630 kilometers.
I winced. 4,630 kilometers was not far enough, especially if I’d already used 500 kilometers of it.
Then I remembered another thing the engineer said: In glide mode from its ceiling, the Narwhal could travel thousands of kilometers.
I grabbed the computer, started sketching and doing some quick calculations. It would be close. My attempt to get to the Artemis site and flight back had used up about 500 kilometers of the available range. So—I could do a powered flight for about 4,000 kilometers, simultaneously climbing to the Narwhal’s maximum ceiling.
At the ceiling, I’d switch to glide mode, and try to make another couple of thousand kilometers towards Svalbard. When I was close enough, I’d switch again to powered flight to make a landing.
I pulled a map on the Narwhal’s control screen, and traced the flight path. I’d be over Greenland halfway through the journey, and aim to hit the altitude ceiling just after passing Greenland’s eastern coast. The glide itself would be mostly over the open waters of the Greenland Sea.
I’d be aiming at the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. I could try for Longyearbyen, the largest settlement on the island, or for the seed vault itself.
Undershoot the glide, and I’d fall into the Greenland Sea; overshoot and it’d be the Arctic Ocean.
But, if I could fly the Narwhal just right, there was a chance I could make it.
With 500 kilometers per hour for the powered part of the flight, and 150 for the glide, the total flight time would be eighteen hours.
I keyed in the details to the flight computer and set the course: Powered climb, glide, and a final powered landing.
The first three hours I flew over Canada, crossing the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, and finally Newfoundland and Labrador, until I reached the northeastern coast and the North Atlantic Ocean.
The next three hours was over the blue of the North Atlantic Ocean until I hit Greenland, and another two hours to cross Greenland itself.
25
Crocodile
I’d been flying just under eight hours when the Narwhal’s computer alerted me that I was just over the Greenland Sea, and at the target altitude. I double-checked the onboard maps with our location, and re-projected the glide towards Spitsbergen Island.
Outside, the world was covered with snow, and the occasional meteor shot through the whiteness.
I was three-quarters of the way there. Now for the glide.
The climb had been fine, totally under control. But my stomach tightened as verified altitude and engaged glide mode. The engines cut off, the Narwhal was totally silent as it dipped towards the Earth.
At the angle we were gliding, the sunlight on the snow was dazzling, and I had to intermittently close my eyes.
Suddenly I felt that peace come over me again, but not the resignation of death, the realization that I was close, so close.
I glided in silence, over the expanse of the Greenland Sea.
It would be ten more hours of silence.
I remembered a plaque on the wall in Judith’s office. It was a quotation from Jane Goodall, a twentieth-century scientist best known for her landmark sociological study of wild chimpanzees:
I don't have any idea of who or what God is. But I do believe in some great spiritual power. I feel it particularly when I'm out in nature. It's just something that's bigger and stronger than what I am or what anybody is. I feel it. And it's enough for me.
I would have liked to live in her century.
Towards the end of the glide time, the computer alerted me again.
I tuned my forward video screens, and Spitsbergen island appeared. I magnified the image, enhanced, scanned across the landscape. On the side of a snow mountain, a vertical slab of concrete. Svalbard.
The final powered descent. I locked the destination into the computer, checked my altitude, and flipped the engines back on.
No response.
As the plane glided on, I checked the hybrid gauges for the charge, but there was nothing there. I cursed under my breath and held on.
The plane hit the snow.
It lurched, skidded forward, then twisted around with the crunch of metal on rock.
Darkness.
In the distance, a great whale floats, serene, unmoving, unmoved.
A stag crosses the threshold of an altar, turning towards a casket.
Gazelles flee a watering hole as a lioness leaps from the bush.
Its legs stretched stiffly out from her body, a rhino lies on her side, her massive body, clad in its natural armor, splattered with mud and blood.
No stars. No stars.
This is the way the world ends.
If the Comet hits ocean, it ends in thunder. The enormous mass of the comet will rupture the water’s surface and send shock waves through the ocean as it hurtles toward the floor. When it hits, it will trigger a seizure of the Earth’s tectonic plates, flinging wave after wave of towering tsunamis to sweep against the continental shorelines, crashing against the walls of our cities and bringing them down like dominoes.
If the Comet falls on land, it ends in fire. Its hammer fall upon the Earth’s soft anvil will spark an eruption in flames, spreading from a crater of molten soil like a locust swarm. The inferno will burn everything in its wake, civilization’s towers crumbling under the weight of burning concrete on burning steel, a conflagration consuming everything in its path.
Near either pole, the Comet would obliterate the ice, sending a plume of snow and destruction raining far, like a hailstorm of judgment.
And whether on water, or land, or fire, the Comet’s destruction will not end with its fall. Unless the effects were softened by water, the Comet would exhaust from its impact an avalanche of gases to poison our atmosphere, first sulfur dioxide, and then carbon dioxide.
Swirling up into the stratosphere, to where the Earth’s ozone layer enfolds us in a swath of protection, these gases will bring about a great cooling, a new ice age, and then a full and irrevocable transformation of the planet’s climate. Nearly all the plant and animal life that survived the first wave of death with the Comet’s impact will not survive. There would be an extinction like no other.
At sea, on land, in the polar ice: Where will you be when the Apocalypse comes?
All around me I hear the sounds of animals, the call of birds, the roar of lions. All this will be gone, silenced.
Earthquakes, tidal waves, wildfire, a poisoned atmosphere, and a winter that might as well last forever… Unless the Comet misses the Earth, it all ends the same.
But the Comet will not miss.
Its passage has, in the distant past, held back from cataclysm. Perhaps as little as a few tens of millions of miles separated it from a collision with the Earth—whisper-close in the grand clockwork of the Universe.
Instead, the Comet swung out again on its grand elliptical path, out and away from us, away again into the darkness.
Not this time.
So this is how it ends.
Darkness.
From somewhere in the darkness, a sound like the buzzing of bees, and then voices.
We’ll get her back up and running before you can say ‘member of the horse family’.
A merlin, you know, like the magician.
A falcon! Look at those wings!
I don’t know how much later, seconds, minutes, hours—but it was a persistent buzzing sound that roused me from darkness. When I opened my eyes, I was looking at the ceiling of the Narwhal.
Groaning, I tried to lift myself up. The exoskeleton implant in one leg didn’t respond, so my left leg was partially limp as I dragged myself upright. Pain shot throug
h the leg, like a bolt of lightning.
The buzzer was still going, but it didn’t sound like any of the Narwhal’s systems. I ignored it, found my backpack, and checked inside—the Ark was intact.
I sat back in relief, and saw where the buzzing that woke me had come from—it was my mother’s phone, which had been flung from my pocket in the crash.
I reached over. It was a new message, and an old one, and it was from Paul:
See you later, Zara-gator
I laughed and I cried, and began to key in a reply:
Svalbard in a while—
I stopped, suddenly realizing that it was my first message back to him, ever, and possibly my last. In an instant, I understood that the love he had for us, for me, had never diminished, no matter the distance. And neither did mine. It was only lost, and had to be found.
I finished my reply:
Crocodile
And then I sent it flying back, through the metal of the plane, through the Earth’s atmosphere, through space, back to him.
I zipped up the backpack and slung it over my shoulders.
Snow had fallen to cover the Narwhal’s windows, but when I opened the hatch and looked out, I could make out the outlines of the seed vault in the distance.
I swung myself down and landed in snow up to my knees. It was cold outside the plane, but I could access the vault’s monitoring station, and warmth, when I reached the site.
How long would that be—minutes? Hours? I wasn’t sure how much further it was. Move, I told my legs, move. The burden on my back was heavy, but I had to press on. My left leg felt ragged, burning with pain.
The snow continued to fall. Meteors shot overhead, in twos and threes.
I pulled myself towards the shadow that was the vault, so close now. I had counted on the cold, but I hadn’t planned on it for myself—oh, to have my jacket, my slate-gray eiderdown jacket—and it was cold, cold, so cold…
Now all around me the snow was luminous, luminous from the sun, luminous from the onrush of meteors. And now my hands were luminous, my face striped with light, striped like a zebra, dappled like a cheetah, luminous as lightning, luminous as hope, luminous as dreaming.
I fell into the snow, meters away from the entrance to the vault, into the snow, luminous, and cold.
Far away, as I begin dreaming, the Comet fell to Earth.
Epilogue
This is how it begins, in dreaming.
The dream is my chest rising and falling softly, my eyes closed in the slow liquid breathing of the fluorocarbon’s flow, I float in.
The dream is the sound of my heart beating, slowed by the cold into a trance for the journey, the desolate journey, the long journey away from a distant, devastated world, beating with the measured cadence of my breath.
The dream encircles, lost in the amniotic fluid that surrounds me, pummelled by eddies of oxygen molecules, the swirl of carbon dioxide, in and out, that invisible gaseous ebb and flow of life.
The dream sails down my shoulders, across the coastal ranges of her arms, down the outside shoals of her thighs, navigates the rivulet between my legs, surfed across the slope of my belly and the Aurora Borealis rise of my breasts.
The dream skims the curve of my throat, scales the cliffside of my chin, teeters at the precipice of my lips.
I dream of a blue world, a planet of oceans and a vastness of clouds, of being hurled into that vastness.
I feel the sledgehammer forces on my bones as the core propulsion stage engines and boosters of the primary launch system ignite and burn.
I dream of orbit, the expended external tanks unlatching from the inter-stage structures and floating into blackness.
I dream of the secondary solid rocket boosters with their multiple segments, each thrusting at twenty million foot-pounds, hurling her farther into the void. She dreams of the cryogenic propulsion stages, the re-ignition of the upper-stage engines and advanced boosters, the quad nuclear thermal rocket engines gunning with the tremor of a thunderclap.
I dream of a gaseous planet, larger than my home, a great world of liquid and gas without a surface, swirling in tremendous cyclones and lightning storms. Across its face range clouds of ammonia crystals, banded in zones of light and darkness.
I dream of an ice moon, smaller than my Moon, a moon of silicate rock with an upper crust of frozen water and a salty liquid ocean underneath the ice. Its surface is spiked with icy penitentes carved by sunlight from fissures in the ice. Dark streaks of lineae cross and re-cross across the globe, fractured ridges in the ice from its plate tectonics and the tidal flexing of its mother planet.
I dream of a world of oceans and a vastness of clouds, a blue planet.
One day I will wake.
Gravity will reclaim this ship of my dream, and all around me the fluorocarbon mixture will swirl away like a whirlpool at my feet.
My eyes will open, and the dream I am dreaming will end, the frayed edges of the filmstrip flapping like the end of a cinematic reel.
I will sit, panting, regurgitating the last of the amniotic fluid from my lungs.
I will sit, look around me, watch the others raising the lids on their enclosures, fighting their sleep, rising, eyes closed and open, exhausted and dazed, some still lying in a dream.
I will go out from the ship of my dream, out to the blue planet.
And there will be that peaceable kingdom, where I shall put my hands upon the head of the ram, where clouds of doves feed on the clovers of the plain, where the wolf grazes with the lamb.
And this is how we will begin.
THE END
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About the Author
Samuel Peralta is a physicist and storyteller. His writing has been spotlighted in Best American Poetry, selected for Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and has won multiple awards, including the Palanca Award for Literature. He is the creator and series editor of the acclaimed Future Chronicles collection of speculative anthologies, with over a score of bestselling titles. Apart from his publishing projects, he remains heavily involved in the high-technology industry, and is an ardent supporter and producer of independent films.
The Zoo at the End of the World is his first novel, and the premier title in his series The Year of the Comet.
Read More from Samuel Peralta
www.samuelperalta.com
The following is the novel “IRON TAMER” by Tom Shutt. We hope you’ll enjoy it and check out his other work.
Please note that during the writing of this novel, Tom Shutt passed away and was unable to finish Iron Tamer. To honor Tom, the Dominion Rising authors wanted to include his novel in the set as a 23rd Bonus Novel. Rest in peace, dear friend.
Iron Tamer
A Special Feature
Tom Shutt
“A boy discovers his skill with iron goes far beyond the forge.”
Mal, a cursed boy from the town of Point, is convicted of killing a forest spriggan and sentenced to take the deathly mountain walk with a thief girl named Arwin.
They live, but with no coin or food, they reluctantly band together to survive. When Mal narrowly escapes capture from the law by unexpectedly manipulating iron with magic, he draws the attention of the Empire’s highest guard—dangerous men. A skilled, royal tracker is on Mal’s tail and will stop at nothing to track him down.
1
Mal!”
The sound of my name being called woke me from my restless slumber, and I lurched up in my cot. That turned out to be a bad idea, as I smacked the ridge of my brow squarely against a solid oak beam, and stars danced in my vision as I staggered to my feet.
“Mal!” called out Answorth again, louder this time. He’d wake half the village before he’d bother with the effort of walking a dozen feet t
o retrieve me himself. Of course, it could very well have been my curse that was the reason for him staying away.
A dirty pewter plate hung in place of a true mirror, seeing as how glass was difficult to come by this deep in the mountains, but it did a well-enough job in its own right. Like my name, the face that stared back now didn’t belong to me. Not knowing my true face seemed to be another aspect of the curse, but it was one I could live with. A grim-faced, hawk-eyed, scary-looking man tracked my movements as I got dressed.
“If you aren’t out here in the next five seconds, boy, then I’ll have your teeth!” Answorth threatened.
That’s a weird thing for him to want, I thought. But it would be next to impossible to eat the game we hunted without teeth, so I figured it was a fair enough suggestion to get me moving. I left my small, bare room, parting the sheer curtain of cloth that kept me separated from everyone else.
Answorth, a lumpy mound of fat and muscle that somehow constituted a grown man, was resting on his favorite chair next to the fire, which he was coaxing to life with increasingly larger sticks and bramble. I say ‘resting’ because the exercise of rolling out of bed had apparently left him breathless. Small clouds escaped his lips with each labored exhale, and his strained lungs seemed to suck in air like a river trout gasping for water.
“I can tend to the fire,” I offered, “if you need to go join the others for the hunt.”
“Shut it, you cheeky little bastard,” Answorth growled, his mustache vibrating with each word. He obviously wasn’t going anywhere fast. “Because of you, we might not get any meat this week.”
