“I don’t want to be here to see that,” Victor says, and he means both that he does not want it to happen and that he hopes not to be here if it does. The guests nod politely, their minds on departure: the canoes, the security checkpoint, the bus, the plane. The girl asks if she’ll get another jaguar stamp in her passport. He never did see a real jaguar, Victor thinks, and he won’t now, wherever he’s going next. But he feels no regret. Like the jaguars, he’s already gone.
Life Among the Terranauts
We all have our favorite places: Campbell lies on the beach while Esparza takes the dinghy out on the ocean; Park’s in the lab; Bhatnagar’s in the savanna. No one hangs out in the swamp, because that’s the bioremediation site. Wastewater treatment. I can appreciate the science, but I don’t want to hike there. Igor and I, we’re belowdecks. We roam the tunnels because they’re something real, real pipes, real intake and outflow and monitoring stations. We trade the bleached light aboveground, the desert sun pouring in past white-painted steel girders and triple-layered glass, for the concrete comfort of mechanism. We don’t need the labels—DESERT BASEMENT, UPPER RAIN FOREST, OCEAN FILTRATION—to know where we are. We have been in NovaTerra for 542 days and when I stand in the blast of air below the habitat-cooling system, I think I can last for the 188 that remain. At night Igor and I go to the North Lung and listen to our voices reverberate in the dark. It feels like a church, peaceful and echoing. A giant temple of nothing but air.
At dinnertime we meet in the habitat pod and take turns cooking meals. Bhatnagar makes beet soup and sorghum porridge. Campbell makes beet salad and sorghum patties. Park doesn’t even try; she slices raw beets and mashes raw sorghum and slops six tiny portions on six little plates. I hate beets. When I found out we were growing beets, I thought, Okay, because we were growing corn and sweet potatoes and rice and blueberries and we had mango trees in the rain forest and chickens and goats and pigs on the farm. But then the corn failed and the rice died and the potatoes got blight and bugs ate the blueberries. The fruit trees thrived until they pressed against the rain-forest ceiling and Mission Command ordered us to cut them down before they shattered the glass. Without the corn we couldn’t feed the animals, so we slaughtered and ate them as quickly as we could. We don’t have any freezers. I tried to dry meat in the ventilation system, but I just made NovaTerra smell like rotting pork for six weeks. Now I say, “I’m going to die if I eat one more beet.”
“I can make that happen,” Campbell says.
But I don’t really want to die. I just really, really, really want to leave.
Before dinner we put our heads down and take turns describing what we wish we were eating: sushi, spaghetti and meatballs, pad thai. It’s a ritual of terrible little prayers that never get answered, but we can’t seem to stop. Not even me, and I swore five years ago I’d never pray again for anything. Tonight, I ask for cheeseburgers.
During dinner we discuss what will happen if we run out of food completely. We talk about inputting our emergency exit codes, stumbling out into the Arizona air.
“We wouldn’t have to leave,” Igor says.
“What’s the other option?” Park asks. “Starve?”
“We’d eat each other,” Igor says, like this is obvious, and Park laughs. Then Esparza laughs and Bhatnagar and Campbell, and I realize that I’m the only one who knows that Igor isn’t joking. Then the four of them look at me so I laugh too, but it’s a stiff laugh. I’m trying to tell them, Oh, that crazy Igor, and I’m trying to tell Igor, I know you’re serious and I don’t approve. But I guess the laugh’s too good because Igor glares at me and runs his tongue over his chapped lips like he’s thinking, You first.
That night I lie in my dorm pod and wonder what I’d taste like. I hear Igor’s footsteps, then his fingernail scratching the door, our old code. I ignore him and he scratches harder until I let him in. “I’m really tired,” I whisper. Park’s next door; the others are just down the hall. NovaTerra wasn’t built for privacy.
“Do you think everyone thinks I’m going to eat them?” Igor asks, concerned. He sits on my bed, starlight behind him. The dorm pods have single round windows, like ship portholes. They look out over the swamp.
“I’m sure no one thinks you’re any weirder than usual,” I say. I stand while he hugs me and I feel his skull against my ribs, bone pressing bone. His hair’s gone limp and uneven—too many kitchen-shears haircuts, not enough soap or vitamins. My stomach growls loudly and I’m embarrassed, even though I shouldn’t be.
“Hungry?” he asks.
I roll my eyes. “If you’re going to keep me up, tell me a food story. Tell me what your family ate for dinner tonight.”
“I don’t know. Veal. Foie gras. The blood of the innocent. I don’t want to talk about them.”
“They’re family. Don’t be that way.”
“What do you think your parents ate?”
“Beets and sorghum, for all I know. We stopped eating meat when I was in high school. Illumination requires the body to be cleansed of animal protein.”
“So saith the Apostle,” Igor declaims, like he’s going to break out into a gospel solo.
“It’s not funny.”
“You said it wasn’t that bad, growing up.”
“It wasn’t,” I say, because I know Igor wouldn’t believe me if I tried to change my story now. But I’ve had a lot of time to think, and the more I think about the New World Apostles, the more I realize that it was that bad, all-day Sunday services becoming evening study and night prayers and weekend retreats and the way I’d grown up so afraid, thinking we were alone in the world, counting the handful of people in folding chairs who would survive the coming fire. Or the year I lobbied to attend regular school and spent the seventh grade staring at everyone who tried to speak to me, thinking, You’re going to hell, and you, and you, and you. Or the way suspicion crept in slowly, tentatively, that maybe not everyone would burn after all. And when doubt crept in, some of God crept out, and there was an empty space in my stomach that grew no matter what I filled it with. When I came to NovaTerra, I’d already been hungry for a long time.
“You should leave,” I tell Igor. “Really.”
“I just want things to work out. You and me. This whole place.”
“I know you do,” I say. “But you need to go now.”
If Igor eats me, I hope I taste like beets.
At the morning staff meeting, Bhatnagar’s in a mood. For the first six months I thought he was always in a mood, and then he got really pissy and I realized that the first six months he’d been on his best behavior. Bhatnagar was a navy doctor; he used to deploy on submarines for months at a time and figured this wouldn’t be that different. But on the ships they had vending machines, movie nights. Here he’s taken to looking out at the desert through the giant greenhouse grid of steel and glass and announcing, “All shore and no leave.”
He delivers the task list, which has Daily Maintenance (“harvest beets”) and Specials (“seasonal monsoon”). While he talks, Campbell cuts her fingernails with scissors. She’s our only agronomist and has been on Farm Daily Maintenance each of the last 543 days. Park heads to the lab, and Igor and I are stuck with the Special because Esparza’s taken off for his weekly boat ride.
Esparza’s the only local. His wife and dog live nearby and visit every Friday afternoon; Esparza’s mooniness afterward is how we remember what day it is. The clearest private approach, up to the wall but away from the visitor window and media lot, is to the ocean, so Esparza rows the dinghy into the little waves and bobs near the glass. His wife comes through the sage, their golden retriever bounding alongside. The animal sits and pants while his owners pretend they can read lips. Esparza used to hold up notes until we ran out of paper. Now there are smudges on the glass from their thwarted kisses, trails of drool from the dog.
“God, can you at least wipe off all the lip prints?” Campbell always complains on Friday evenings.
“With what?” Esparza asks, and
this is a fair question. Our towels have been depleted by the Great Kitchen Fire and the Regrettable Fertilizer Spill. Our jumpsuits aren’t lasting as long as projected and the last thing anyone wants is to have to look at one another naked. Campbell’s most prized possession is an oversize beach towel with electric-blue stripes. She dries off after the monthly shower, lies on it on the beach, says she will make a wrap dress out of it if and when the day comes. She keeps it locked in her dormitory safe, and yes, I know this because Igor and I broke into her pod once to look for it.
Igor, Bhatnagar, and I start dragging the fog machines cross-country, out of the rain forest and into the desert. It’s a long way, nearly the length of NovaTerra, and Bhatnagar curses when Igor disappears down the Swamp West stairwell. When we finally get both machines down the chaparral ridge, Igor’s there waiting, jumpsuit unzipped to his waist and palm fronds tied to his head. It’s time for the rain ceremony, he tells us.
“Are you serious?” Bhatnagar asks.
“You remember last year. We learned the dance by heart.”
Bhatnagar looks uncomfortable. We all did a lot of things last year when we were a few hundred days younger and more enthusiastic. Igor is still very big on ceremonies. We are a new people, he says, a new society of Terranauts. We need our own ways.
“We’re scientists,” Bhatnagar argues, but Igor isn’t one, and this has been the general problem with him. He’s a philosopher, but, more important, he’s Mr. Karpov’s nephew. This is why we don’t call Igor by his last name—because Karpov already means the man who paid two hundred million dollars to build NovaTerra and is paying us one million dollars each to live here.
I spent the one-year celebration (beets and sorghum and bananas, with party hats made of rolled ferns) thinking, Half a million down, but of course it doesn’t work like that. If we come out early we don’t get anything. Karpov claimed he had hundreds of people desperate to do this for free, and there’d been so much media attention that I’m sure he wasn’t lying. The problem was that those people were mostly like Igor—or less sincere, more exhibitionistic versions of Igor—and Karpov needed people like Campbell the agronomist, Esparza the chemist, and Bhatnagar the navy doctor. He needed people like me, systems engineers trained to maintain oxygen levels in sealed environments.
The Karpov family fortune came from gold, from open-pit mines and slag heaps soaked in the diluted cyanide that separates metal from rock. A few years ago a Karpov mine reservoir collapsed in Romania and leaked a plume of cyanide sixteen hundred miles long into the Danube. It happened again in Guyana, and then twenty-six hundred people gathered in Guatemala to protest the opening of a new mine. Karpov told them that gold and cyanide were as natural as anything else on Earth, that even damaged habitats were self-regulating. That ecosystems were alive and could achieve and re-achieve homeostasis no matter what people like the Karpovs did to them. The Gaia hypothesis, Igor has always called it, and he believed in it like a religion, like someone in possession of pure revelation. I’ve seen that kind of faith before, and it probably should have made me run screaming. But instead he felt familiar. In the first months he even felt kind of true. Why should the Apostles be people of the past? I heard my parents whisper in my head. Why is it so impossible that one would appear to us now?
We all assumed that Karpov shared Igor’s sincerity, but as the months went by it occurred first to Campbell, then to Bhatnagar, then to Esparza and Park, and finally to me that all Karpov had done was promise us money and promise the Guatemalans proof that environmental equilibrium was not only possible but inevitable. He’d built a new world, but he didn’t seem interested in how well it worked as long as it could be endured.
We’d been chosen for fortitude, for pigheaded faith, as much as for skill. There was in all of us a streak of what ran so strongly through Igor. We had upset the equilibrium of our own lives on Old Earth, and we needed NovaTerra to put things right. Bhatnagar had gambling debts. Park had six-figure student loans. Esparza planned to buy a piece of local land, build the dream house that would convince his wife she could be happy in the desert. After he’d spent 543 days looking out at it like a hamster in a ball, we thought he might have changed his mind, but we didn’t ask. We were forbidden to mention the money to the media, and as time went by we even stopped mentioning it to one another. Every plan felt more and more distant, daydreams as unreachable as our food recitations. The more we talked about money, the hungrier we got. So we stopped.
Igor hops from foot to foot for a while, invoking the ability of the Gaia entity to inspire peaceful coexistence. Igor’s assigned role is to bring a spiritual dimension to life on NovaTerra, and his philosophy has been evolving in response to all the unanticipated events. Life on NovaTerra was never meant to contain mangoes, he said when we were asked to chop the trees down. Ditto meat and dairy. On day 104 of the beet-and-sorghum regime, Esparza and Park went down wrestling over the last papaya.
“On NovaTerra,” Igor proclaimed, “wanting the old life will only cause us pain.” Four failed crops in, this had become manifestly true, and we let him go on. “Old Earth cannot provide infinitely, and neither can the New. The usefulness of our project to the world lies not only in a new equilibrium, but in the redefining of our relationship to the Terra.” He climbed up on the dinner table and announced, “We must embrace our new identities as Terranauts.”
In the moment, this felt so true that Esparza and Park hugged. We were unhappy because we were old-fashioned humans, insatiable and needy; Terranauts would make peace with their surroundings, would create useful knowledge from predicament. This held us for a long time. This is what got Bhatnagar to dance a rain dance twelve months ago. Twelve days ago someone wrote Fuck Terranauts! on the bathroom wall.
Bhatnagar and I watch Igor chant and then plug the fog machines in. Some of the fiberglass boulders have outlets. The machines thunk to life and start choking out musty clouds. Igor stands with his arms outstretched, hitting the high note to his rain song; it’s a shrill, wild noise that carries under the glass, and the lemurs in the rain forest call out in response. He holds the note impossibly long and then lets it go with a gasp. A coyote howl answers from the desert, the real one, beyond the glass. Even Bhatnagar is still, watching Igor in the mist. There’s so much mold in the machines that the fog isn’t healthy to inhale, and Bhatnagar takes Igor by the elbow to lead him to higher ground. But Igor misunderstands and thinks he’s got a dance partner. He whirls him around so fast that Bhatnagar goes down hard on one knee, right on top of a cholla. Igor has the sense to run, palm fronds bobbing, even before Bhatnagar starts cursing him out.
I help Bhatnagar up, offer to walk him to the infirmary, but he shrugs me off. His knee is a porcupine of cactus needles, blood already seeping through his jumpsuit. “I’m fine,” he says. “Stay and monitor the monsoon.” Since he’s the only doctor we have, I let him limp away alone. I monitor the foul-smelling fog until the desert has received precipitation equivalent to a normal January monsoon in the Sonora. Then I unplug the machines and look for someone to help move them back before the rain forest dries out.
I can’t find Campbell, and Esparza is still in his boat, although no one’s making kissy faces. I pull Park out of the lab, which she isn’t happy about. NovaTerra was supposed to be her postdoc; she showed up with a zillion research projects, samples to collect and data sets to mine and articles to write. Then the crops started failing and Campbell yanked her off-task to work twelve-hour days on the farm. The crops died anyway and Park hasn’t been able to finish an article since she got here.
“Two years without a publication?” she says. “I’m toast. I’ll get out of this loony bin and never get hired.”
We pass a ventilation shaft disguised as an armadillo burrow and hear Bhatnagar shouting at Igor belowdecks. Park’s looking gray, gulping for air. There are hollows at her cheeks and neck.
“Maybe we should take a break,” I say.
“So you can rescue your boyfriend? What’d h
e do to piss Bhatnagar off so bad?” She grimaces and I can see blood on her gums and teeth. We take vitamin supplements, but they only do so much.
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Whatever.”
“Bhatnagar fell on a cholla. That’s all he’s yelling about.”
Park shrugs, wipes the sweat off her face with the sleeve of her blue jumpsuit.
“Igor’s never been my boyfriend.”
“He’s all yours whether you want him or not.” It takes her two tries to get the full sentence out, her head thrown back like that’ll make more room in her lungs. Her hair is in a sweaty, slack ponytail and I want to reach over and yank it as hard as I can.
“You don’t know anything about me,” I say.
“You don’t know anything about me either.”
We stand there and think about how this is mostly true. I wonder who her family is, what they’re like, where they are. I think about telling her that if she wants Igor she can have him, because as crazy as she thinks he is, he’s worse. But we just keep pulling the machines. In the rain forest the leaves are already yellowed.
I was taking classes at the local community college when my parents announced they were quitting their jobs and selling the house to live full time with the Community. I said that I liked college, that getting an education was important to me. I thought we’d have a discussion. But they smiled calmly—with illumination, the Apostles called that look of peace—and I knew they’d already chosen.
There wasn’t a phone out in the Community, and after a year they stopped writing letters. After two years I tried to visit but they weren’t there. A girl I’d known from the New World Apostolic Youth stopped me halfway up the forest two-track and said that they’d moved and that unless I was there on God’s business rather than family business, I had no business there at all. That was five years ago, and the only rumor I’ve heard was that they’re somewhere up in Idaho on a piece of land the Community bought cheap because the soil’s full of silver-mine tailings. They had to promise not to farm it and they were farming it anyway, killing themselves slowly. I don’t know if this is true. My old seventh-grade teacher looked me up because he thought I might know where his daughter had gone, but he’d heard more than I had. He dreamed aloud to me about hiring private investigators and lawyers, which was really dreaming about money neither of us had.
Life Among the Terranauts Page 19
