Stillicide

by Cynan Jones

  I’d never heard the word before. Stillicide. Water falling, in drops. I challenge myself to get it into a sentence for the pressies.

  ‘Will the Ice Dock only serve the city?’ I notice the journalist who asks this wears a blouse the colour of the chaffinch’s breast. I’ve been practising the answer.

  ‘Steven?’ Alan invites.

  ‘Yes. Despite the impression, there is actually quite a lot of water to go round. Particularly in the summer.’ I make a joke. ‘When’s the last time you had a barbecue in August?

  ‘There’s a lot of rain. And we’re an island, so we’re surrounded by water we could desalinate. But on a large scale, and for so many people, the energy required is prohibitive. When the sun comes out it’s hot. But it doesn’t come out enough. It’s a case, for the smaller communities, of properly managing the water they do have.’

  ‘So it’s not the fact you can’t really own seawater, and so can’t make enough money from desalination?’ The question comes from Colin. He looks like he eats a lot of kale but not because he likes it.

  ‘No,’ I disabuse him. ‘It’s simply the quantity of people in the city, and what that process would take; and, of course, the quantity of water required for the superfarms that feed us.

  ‘We only drink a relatively small fraction of the supply. Agriculture uses seventy per cent. It’s likely part of that draw, over and above the in-transit stillicide (yay!), will be serviced by the Water Train.’

  ‘The term “they” was used earlier, but the corporation own the train as well. Right?’ Colin, again.

  ‘We manage the technical operation of the train. It’s owned by the city,’ Alan clarifies.

  ‘Which is why the Metropolitan Police patrol the line.’

  ‘Correct. But we’re here to talk about the Ice Dock. Not the Water Train.’

  ‘Of course,’ Alan picks up, ‘the project does mean sacrifices’ (why use that word?). ‘Not just the Dock itself. The tipping basin the tugs will tow it to, and the conveyor-way to bring the berg into the Dock. All this means moving people. But we’re trying to water millions here – and the other benefits that come with this. Some of us’ (and why use ‘us’?), ‘will have to “take one for the team”.’

  I see the pressies wince at this, but how else can you put it?

  Even from primary school science they should know. The weight displaced by a floating object equals the weight of that floating object.

  What does an average family weigh?

  ‘Perhaps we should bring Ms Williams in here,’ I suggest, and Alan invites the Spokesperson for Westminster to speak.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Ms Williams says. ‘Government is supporting smaller cities, as well as here.’ I thought we’d moved on from that question, but. ‘Plans for extra reservoirs are already significantly progressed.’

  ‘And people displaced, again.’ Colin gives Ms Williams no time to answer. ‘As in the 1950s and 60s. Whole communities.’

  ‘You’re talking about the bombings then, of dams in Wales that watered Northern and Midland cities.’

  ‘I’m surprised you know. Causing political tension. Militant factions. Just as with the Water Train.’

  I have the weird conviction Ms Williams is going to swallow Colin, flick out her tongue like a chameleon, and gulp him down in one.

  ‘There are always people who will look to destabilise society,’ she says. (She should have said derail.) ‘To create division.’

  ‘When they’re pushed to,’ Colin says, as if he’s proud of them.

  ‘Often because it serves them.’ Ms Williams seems unflapped. ‘Unfortunately, people will need to be displaced again. But in the case of hillside communities we are rebuilding new settlements. For them to relocate to. Most of them within short distances of their existing homes.’

  ‘Shanty towns! Out of rusty metal boxes.’ Colin must be hard to live with.

  ‘The re-use of containers from the decommissioned shipping yards provides a cost-effective and flexible solution with low eco-impact.’

  ‘But you’re still displacing families that have lived in a place for generations. Just as with the Ice Dock.’

  ‘Yes. But this is unavoidable. We live in a society. It isn’t always possible to take into account every individual. Policy always aims to arrive at a solution which helps the greatest number.’

  Here it comes, from Colin . . .

  ‘By definition, then, the cities.’

  . . . Setting me up perfectly.

  ‘But this is a key aspect,’ I interject, ‘of this Ice Dock project. It will serve the city from within the city. This won’t mean a community of farmers having their way of life destroyed so a distant town can have water. The people affected are from within the community that will benefit. It’s time for the city to take responsibility for itself.’

  My silver bullet fired I look at the display cases around the room. A beautiful desiccated shoe, the archaeological finds uncovered during the build; the mural of the Dock site through the ages: the tower blocks flattened; Victorian causeways, a medieval bustle; a Saxon settlement upon the fen. The stadium suddenly disappeared, as if it’s lifted into space. They all look somehow interchangeable, these times, and humanised. Then there is the big white hole.

  Ms Williams speaks passionately, is animated. She looks like a puppet, except she has no strings. Just the muscle memory that’s got her where she is.

  We see another glorious digigram. A canopy of prisms focus sunlight on the ice. And Susan brings in glasses of cool ice water.

  ‘We want it to be cheap, and available to all,’ says Alan. ‘And municipal subsidies will help. The Mayor and most people in the city are fully behind the Dock.’

  We break up the formal session.

  The digigram loops its gorgeous graphics, plays a quiet music, symphonic in its way like the soundtrack of the nature discs.

  Another screen gives us a live feed of work in progress at the Dock site. Men busy at the concrete face of the bay, dust rising about them like a smoke. They look more to be attacking the structure than progressing it. Smugglers and bandits, garbed in totem clothes.

  ‘Your background is in oil,’ I hear Colin pointedly ask Alan. ‘Then you moved into renewables.’

  ‘That was some time ago,’ says Alan. Most backgrounds are, I think.

  Alan suggests, ‘Let’s go up to the roof.’

  We look over the city, pleasantly drinking our ice waters. The light bends on the solar glass.

  Flowers tumble in the gutters.

  I can see, from here, some of the homes that will be bulldozed. Beyond them, the great arena of the Dock.

  The colourful patches of the shacks in the emptied canals.

  The police baffles positioned on the rooftops that overlook the route of the march. The blue caps of the ‘Peepers’, as we call the marksmen.

  The journalist wearing the chaffinch blouse finds herself beside me. I’m staying away from Colin.

  ‘We give a lot,’ I take the opportunity to tell her, as she takes in the city from this height. ‘That’s hard to see sometimes. From ground level.’

  I nod out at the rooftop gardens. One nearby blatant with multi-coloured flowers. ‘It’s great how buildings’ residents have come together to make this happen.’

  ‘A lot’s got from alittlement.’ The journalist beams as she provides the jingle. Sips.

  Just below, a rooftop lush with summer vegetable beds.

  Below this, in the square outside the building, a crowd no bigger than my palm from here, protestors now have gathered. To picket the office before they head on to the Dock. It’s clever of Alan to bring us up here. The march looks dull and diminished. Below the gardens, and the space. The placards too small from this distance to read.

  Colin the Skinny has buttonholed poor Ms Williams.

  ‘We’re doing something historic here.’

  ‘While making a lot of money.’

  ‘By doing something that will benefit this city for a v
ery long time.’

  Clearly he has no sense of wonder.

  ‘And Government won’t be making any money. Everyone has access to water, rationed as it may be. But there’s only going to be more of us. The icebergs are a ready form of fresh water, and have been very effective in supplying smaller cities on a more modest scale. The current supply is not enough.’

  As if in defence of itself, then, far away, and muffled, we hear the Water Train. Its deep boom as it enters the outskirts of the city.

  ‘It’s easy to paint us as the bad guys,’ I say quietly. Like I’m not trying to make a great big point. To make it clear I am talking more personally to the chaffinch journalist beside me.

  ‘There’s a lot of grumbling,’ I say. ‘But look.’

  The rooftops, bright with colour.

  ‘People get on with it. People have always got on with it. Dystopia is as ridiculous a concept as Utopia. Ultimately, we’re animals,’ I say, thinking of the nature discs. ‘And animals find ways.’

  The light snaps along the drained riverbed. A bolt of silver ribbon.

  I am always astonished from this height, to see how fast new buildings come up. To either side, of course, of the great space of the Dock.

  I breathe in. Feel something of the settlement the nature programmes bring. Watch the faint shift of the vapournets on the aircon units.

  A slight flutter, like the barest movement inside a chrysalis, as it nears its time to hatch.

  The march is underway. Penguins on the move. The chants the walkers call out reach us incoherent and delayed, so the mouths of the walkers, opening and closing, look more to gasp than shout.

  ‘Once you change the idea of what constitutes the ground, we have so much space. You just can’t see it from below.’

  The journalist beside me traces the drops of condensation beaded on her glass.

  ‘I’ve never heard that word, stillicide, before,’ she says.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Nor had I.’

  DRAGONFLY

  The professor left the failed hive until last.

  The bees were dead around it, curled like dropped alder catkins.

  He put the samples into the case. At least the majority of the colonies were healthy. Drawing the honey from them he was reassured by the tight pats on his suit as the returners knocked busily into him.

  The fiddly work of fitting tracking wires to the bees was paying off. They could analyse the pollen in the honey in each hive and work out what was growing where. The results had been surprising. All very well, the doom and gloom. But the array of flowering species was astonishing. The city might be grey at ground level, but its rooftops were spectacular with bursts of life and colour. Mostly, the bees weren’t even travelling very far.

  The failed hive, though, was quiet. The professor took off his hood.

  He fingered the dead bees.

  The Urbee project was a great success, but there were these troubling random failures.

  He knocked the water condensers fitted round the air duct units to check they were working. Watched the bright water work its way along into the vegetable beds.

  The courgette plants were celebrant with shameless yellow flowers. He smiled to see the minute pollen beetles in amongst them.

  Below, on the streets, he could see the growing crowd gathering to march against the increased scale of the Ice Dock.

  Most of his students had absented themselves today. Some, with excuses he wished he could frame. Others had simply been honest. They wanted to walk in protest. And why not, he privately thought.

  Granted, they had picked a site that meant the impact on homes was limited. But the Mayor had recently announced they’d also need to clear the flanks of the approach channel. More families would be relocated. It’s how they worked. Once a thing was underway, it was very hard to stop. It was a bullying in some ways.

  The professor noted the gun baffle on the building roof across the river, sited to overlook the bridge. On its transparent hood, the varnish of its baffle number caught the sun. Baffle three. The dark blue cap of the rifleman as he moved about the roof looked something like a lycaenid butterfly, the professor thought. Purple Hairstreak. In this light.

  The professor wasn’t sure what one police marksman would be able to do if something did happen while the protest was in sway. Better to have him there than not though, he supposed.

  He knew the science of why animals formed groups. But it seemed madness, to him. A crowd was a condensed target, should anybody want to cause them harm.

  Better to be better at being a one.

  There was a hiss from his comms button.

  ‘Hello.’ He pressed the patch.

  ‘There’s a parcel for you here, professor.’

  With the large bulb of her cycle helmet and the bright material of her clothes, the courier looked like a bee herself. Or, perhaps more a wasp. The way she tapered at the waist.

  The professor eyed the parcel, set there on the desk, as he clambered from his bee-keeping suit.

  ‘I hear you on the radio,’ said the courier.

  Despite himself, the professor couldn’t help a little smile. He was unsure about being wheeled out. About being the face of the city’s environmental push. Afraid it would mean he had to compromise his opinion. But it had worked well. The rooftops. The diversity. The insect hatcheries in the park.

  ‘I’ve got a gutter garden on my building,’ the courier said, excitedly. ‘We group-funded.’

  ‘That’s good to know.’

  ‘And we’re going to get an alittlement on the roof!’

  The professor looked at the package on the desk. An itch in his fingers.

  ‘They’ll make a difference.’

  ‘A lot’s got from alittlement,’ the courier smiled, reeling off the jingle. People called it to him on the street! ‘I love your accent,’ she said.

  That offsided him somewhat.

  ‘Where are you from?’ the wasp girl asked.

  ‘North East,’ said the professor. ‘Near Redcar.’

  The package, small as it was, gave the impression it was waiting for him to succumb to its attention with the patient way some cats have.

  ‘There’s an ice dock up there, isn’t there?’

  ‘One of the small ones,’ the professor answered.

  Incidental report. Student 512. Posting area non-applicable. Independent study. Dock development area, grid ref TQ 381837. Solo. Verification location-tagged visual evidence, embedded.

  Ellie’s voice. Always such a bounce to it.

  Attendant material, specimen. One. Cast skin, larval exoskeleton . . .

  Exuvia, he can’t help correcting her. It’s an exuvia . . .

  The extraordinary husk, barely an inch long and caught as if alive in the tube,

  . . . Odonata. Species unconfirmed. Dated as report.

  The professor back-swipes.

  Species unconfirmed. Dated as report.

  Ellie sent the specimen from a development area near the Dock site. Part of the ground that will become the tow-track along which the iceberg will travel, up from the re-flooded river. The area cleared some two years now. A ‘guerrilla’ expedition, Ellie jokes, under her own steam.

  . . . There’s mallow. White dead-nettle. Clematis (vitalba) establishing. ‘Old Man’s Beard’. I love that name. Wild clary. Hoverflies, good sign! Can’t see it, but there’s a dove somewhere.

  Ellie holds the recorder up to catch the coo, but it’s faint, barely perceptible.

  Cultivated roses. Hey! A comma. That’s beautiful. On a white buddleia. Some of your bees are here. I can spot their little wires.

  The professor back-swipes again, to where she says, ‘a comma’.

  Taps his finger further down the line of the recording.

  . . . Ice Dock’s huge. Sort of in the distance but sort of not. It looks like pictures of the Colosseum!

  Taps again.

  . . . pile of dust and earth with bits of broken brick in it. But. So many grasse
s. Sainfoin. Oh! Campanula. ‘Bellflowers’. They’re so pretty, look. You can eat these, you know. Of course you know.

  There are small rustles as she bends to pick a leaf.

  Eeek . . . Stealing from a witch’s garden . . . Mmm . . . I can see why Rapunzel’s mum went mad for it . . . Turnipy.

  The professor pauses the report, picks up the tube.

  The package on the desk, split open down its middle just like the specimen. This thing of wonder he holds in his hand emerged from it; and he is startled. As if he has actually watched it climb from the wrapping and come to him.

  Dehiscent, he thinks. Can I use that word for this?

  No, that’s only plants. The splitting along a built-in line of weakness in a structure.

  An unscientific nervousness starts in the professor’s middle as he looks at the exuvia.

  Even with his naked eye he can see. A dragonfly larva in the last instar. The abdominal barb, he’s sure, on the ninth segment. But the segments are tricky to count with the eye. And just one skin.

  If it’s what he thinks it is, they emerge to hatch en masse. So.

  There must have been more . . .

  He forwards to the time stamp Ellie’s given in her handwritten note. Odd to find the fact she’s scribbled to him with an old-fashioned pen more personal somehow than listening to her voice.