Текст книги "2312"

Автор книги: Kim Stanley Robinson

Соавторы: Kim Stanley Robinson
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She went north, heading for a point of high ground marked by krummholz trees waist-high to her. She reached this prominence and stopped at the sight of a wolf pack on the other side. They had just landed, and were running around sniffing and nipping at each other, stopping short on occasion to howl and then run on again. They were amped up by the descent, no doubt about it. She knew just how they felt. It took them a while to pull themselves together and lope off to the east. They were gray with black or beige points and shag, and were looking svelte in their short summer coats. More broad-shouldered and square-headed than most dogs, they were still very similar in lots of ways. Wild dogs, self-organized: it was always kind of a disturbing thought. That they had turned out so well, so decent and playful, was a bit surprising to Swan, and reminded her that the wolves had come first and were wiser than dogs.

Now Swan was put to it to keep up with them, huffing and puffing fairly soon after she started her pursuit. No human could keep up with wolves running hard, but if you kept at it, they often stopped to have a look and sniff around, and then it was possible to keep them in sight, or catch up and relocate them again. A male howled and others replied, Swan among them. She would have to run a little bit harder if she wanted to stay part of it. That would be hard. She stayed in better shape off Earth than on, a small irony that was now making her grimace and resolve to do better.

These wolves were nine in number. They were big ones, with more streaks of black than white. Their fur bounced on them like hair as they ran. Their wolfish lope ate up ground, though it resembled a canter. Seeing them run, Swan howled to herself, oceans in her chest: they were free on Earth. That happiness could be so deep it hurt; another lesson in learning the world.

Ahead the pingos and kettles smoothed away, and a sheet of wheat covered the land. The wolves had hesitated at this sight, and Swan was able to slip around them to the south, behind the easternmost of the pingos. The wheat field beyond had been smoothed by laser to a plain tilting to the east about five meters in every kilometer. Flat land indeed—unreal—an artifact. A work of art, in its way. But soon to be reconfigured. Eight kilometers to the east another pingo outbreak was just visible, and another scrap of undeveloped taiga—undrained, too boggy to farm, more lake than land.

Swan pulled her wolf skin—a big old male’s skin, with head and paws still attached—out of her suit’s backpack. She draped it over her head so that it flowed down her back like a cape. She had clipped gold rings through the tips of its ears. Now she circled ahead of the pack, howled back at them. Then she ran as hard as she could to the east. She was chest deep in wheat, and could run between rows of it. Ahead to the east her colleagues were leading a herd of caribou by way of scent and cast-off antlers. The wheat had taken a beating where the herd had passed. She saw that they were following the shallow streambed of a creek almost erased by the laser-flat plowing. The half-buried streambed was still muddy, and her teammates were leading the herd away from that, paralleling it to the south. The scent of wolves would reach them soon, and then it would be no problem to keep them headed east, over low rise after low rise. They would go wherever seemed most distant from wolves, at least for a while. Eventually the two species would come to a predator/prey accommodation, but for now the big prey animals were no doubt still spooked, and prone to stampede. She saw signs of what she thought had been a small panic, and the bodies of several calves lay trampled in the middle of this zone. Swan turned to face the wolves now following her. She stood on a high point with the wolf’s head draped over hers and howled a warning. The pack stopped and stared at her, ears pointed and fur erect—they too were spooked. Their look now was not their famous long stare, Swan judged, but a real attempt to see better.

Still, they were on the hunt, and so after a while, on they came. Swan gave way, turned, retreated at speed. She had given the caribou some extra time to get past the little swale, so now she got out of the way as quickly as she could. From the north she chivvied the wolves from time to time over the next few hours, but for the most part she could barely keep up with them, and in the end could only follow sign. For a long time it was a slog through wheat following the caribou tracks. Once, she saw a line of giant red harvesters on the southern skyline.

That night most of the caribou were ahead of her and had formed a herd and were headed east. They were primed for migration, inclined to move. Then also the wolves and people and other predators were like beaters on a hunt, the people involved sometimes using sirens and scents and, as always, their own very disturbing presence. People were the top predator, even when wolves and lions and bears were around—as long as they stayed in packs, as wolves had taught them so long before—and had their tools in hand, in case push ever came to shove.

Swan, stumbling along at the end of a very long day, began to feel the spirit of the pursuit fill her and lift her up like a body bra. She was Diana on the hunt, it was what they did as animals. She had done this so often inside terraria that it was hard to believe she was out at last, but there was the sky over them, and the wind keening past.

If the line of caribou migration was to be established for good, and the entire zone made into a habitat corridor, then the land itself would have to be changed, as it had been before. Again humans would be altering it. All Earth was a park now, a work of art, shaped by artists. This new alteration was just one more stroke of the brush.

The transformation of taiga into cropland had been a matter of shaving down high points and filling up low points, with the growth of new topsoil hastened by engineered bacteria. Thus it was pretty flat now, as if a sea surface with a slight groundswell. But with the freeze-thaw cycle and the permafrost melt, things had been unflattening. The passage of the caribou was enough to tear up the topsoil; where they had passed, it looked like a phalanx of tractors hauling spikes had churned through the wheat. Swan avoided their track for that reason, except for brief excursions into the muck to bury transponder beacons, and also to mark the soil with scents, and herbicides aimed at wheat. They were also seeding boreal forest. In some places they were blowing up the land, tossing the blankets of introduced soil aside to bring the original taiga bacteria back to the surface. All this had to be done while the caribou were far enough away that they were not scared from coming back; but there was a lot to do, so they were starting as soon as they could.

She slept those nights in her bodysuit, which had an aerogel mattress and blanket in its pockets to keep her warm, and enough food for a few days. Once or twice she checked in with her team, but she preferred to be by herself, unwolfish though that was, to track the wolves. She seldom had the pack in sight now, but she could track them by sign; the ground was soft, the paw prints of the nine frequent. Her own Group of Nine.

On the third morning, well before dawn, after a night of little sleep, she decided to rise and catch up to the pack if she could. In the dark and cold she hiked with a headlamp on, and saw the tracks on the ground best when she took the light off her head and held it near the ground and pointing forward.

About an hour before dawn she heard their howls ahead. It was their dawn chorus. Wolves howled at the sight of Venus rising, knowing the sun would come soon after. Swan saw what they were howling at, but by its relation to Orion knew it was not Venus, but Sirius. The wolves had been fooled yet again; the Pawnee had even named Sirius He-Who-Fools-the-Wolves for this very mistake. When Venus itself rose, about half an hour later, only one uneasy lupine astronomer spoke up again to howl that something was wrong. Swan laughed to hear it. Now other wolves farther to the west would be taking up the dawn howl. For a long time when dawn crossed North America, there had been a terminator zone of howling wolves running the length of the whole continent, moving west with the day. Now that might come back.

When it was light, she worked her way closer to them by tracking that uneasy astronomer. The wolves had apparently stayed on a pingo that night, and they yipped and barked gruffly as she approached; they didn’t want to leave, and they didn’t want her to get any nearer. Something was going on up there, she thought; one of them giving birth or something like that. She waited for them at a distance, and only when they had slunk off to the east did she climb the soft side of the pingo to check it out.

A sound stopped her cold; she saw nothing at first, but there was a little pond at the very top of the pingo, a kettle like the caldera of a miniature volcano. Noise from there—a whining—she walked up to the edge of it to look down. A young wolf, fur wet and muddy, was slinking along a narrow edge of clay rimming the water three or four meters below. Walls of the hole were vertical, even hollowed out and eaten back by the water at the bottom, which had a tint of turquoise in its muddy blue, as if it might be floored by the ice at the pingo’s core. The wolf pawed at the lined clay. A young male wolf. He looked up at her and she half extended a hand toward him, and with that the ground under her gave way, and despite her twist and leap she fell into the pond with a load of mud.

The wolf barked once and cringed away from her. She swam; she had not hit the bottom of the pond, despite plunging deeply in when she fell. She swam to the other side of the wall and climbed out onto a narrow ring of exposed mud, which went all the way around. It was like being inside a vase. Her fall hole had created a spout for it.

Swan avoided looking at the wolf. She whistled and cooed like a dove, then a nightingale. She had never seen a wolf eating a bird of any kind, but just so he didn’t get any ideas, she added a short hawk’s cry. He was still trying to climb out; he was afraid of her. He fell back as the wet overhanging mud gave under his forepaws. He hit the water upside down and Swan reached out instinctively to help, but of course he was perfectly capable of twisting around and swimming back to the band of clay, and when he felt her touch he whipped around and bit her right hand, then swam desperately away. She shouted in pain and surprise. Her blood was in the water, in his mouth. The bite burned, and there was one puncture in the back of the hand that was going to well blood for a long time.

Her bodysuit, which was keeping everything but her head dry, had a first aid kit in its thigh pocket. She pulled it out and considered whether skin glue would work on a puncture wound. Well, it had to be tried. She punctured the tube and poured a lot of the glue into the dark red hole, then held a gauze pad to it hard. The gauze would be glued into the hole, but she could cut the excess away and leave the rest in there, and it would be all right.

The inner wall of the kettle was smooth except for some horizontal banding. How exactly was she going to get out? She reached into her pocket for her mobile, found that the pocket was empty. The pocket had been open, as she had been calling her colleagues pretty frequently. Well, they would notice her absence and GPS her. Possibly she could dive down to the bottom of the pond and recover the mobile, and possibly it would still be working after being submerged.

Actually neither of these seemed very likely. “Pauline, can you locate my mobile?”

“No.”

“Can you contact my team for me?”

“No. I am designed to be in contact with you alone, by way of a short-range airport function.”

“No radio?”

“No long-range radio transmitter, as you know.”

“As I shouldknow. You useless piece of crap.”

The wolf was growling, and Swan shut up. Briefly she cawed. “Hawk!” she cawed, thinking the young wolf might give her some space as a creature that spoke the crow language. She didn’t know what to do, really.

“Pauline, how can I get out of here?”

“I don’t know.” This, coming without even a slight delay, sounded faintly disapproving.

Swan moved around the circumferential band of mud, and the wolf moved with her to stay across the pond. If the higher ledges on this side held under her weight, then she might be able to climb out. She tested it, glancing at the wolf as she did. He was facing her but looking a bit to the side. It was quickly obvious that the mud of the wall was not going to hold her up. She needed sticks to carve steps, or to stick into the mud far enough to give her a hold. But the kettle had no sticks in it. Again she wondered about finding things at the bottom of the pond. But the water was frigid, and her bodysuit did not cover her head. And there was no way of telling how far down the bottom was, and whether there was anything down there anyway.

“Pauline, I’m afraid we’re stuck here.”

“Yes.”

Extracts (16)

It was never the official policy of any unit larger than the individual terrarium, and even those would seldom say anything explicit about their animals—where they were sending them, how many, by what transport, why—nothing. The assumption is that the coordination that obviously had to have happened was all kept offline, and is still not properly documented. Looking back, such an absence of public statement does not seem so surprising, because we are used to it now; but at the time it was a relatively new phenomenon, and there were widespread complaints that the disappearance of public policy statements meant they lived in sheer chaos. No order obtained in the solar system, the balkanization was complete; the story of humanity had for a time disappeared like a stream of meltwater on the surface of a glacier, falling into a moulin and running thereafter invisibly under the ice. No one controlled it; no one knew where it was going; no one even knew what was happening

from the very beginning there were people who argued that it was wrong in many different ways: that it was an ecological disaster, that most of the animals would die; that the land would be devastated, botanical communities wrecked, people endangered, their agriculture ruined. The images of the animals’ return could resemble World War II parachute attacks or alien invasion movies, and the fear of similar casualty rates created trauma in several places. During the descent some animals were shot out of the sky like shooting-range skeet. And yet on the whole down they came, landed, survived, endured. For a few weeks or months, therefore, it was all anyone spoke about, and all shouted at the tops of their lungs. And the massive flood of images was ambiguous, to say the least. Some cried invasion, but others cried reunion. Rewilding, assisted migration, the revolt of the beasts; and at some point it was called the reanimation, and that term got capitalized and gradually stuck and spread, superseding all the rest. And in the end it did not matter what name people gave it: the animals were there

many accused the terraria of fomenting revolution on Earth. Others called it an inoculation, and there were microbiologists who spoke of reverse transcription. The introduction of an inoculant into an empty ecological niche does indeed cause a revolution in the biome. Rapid change can be chaotic, traumatic. In this case animals did often die; their food was all eaten and then there were population crashes, scavengers did well, always predator and prey fluctuated wildly, and the plant life metamorphosed under their impact. Fields changed, forests changed, suburbs and cities changed. Eradication campaigns were met with fierce resistance and fierce support efforts. Sometimes it came to a kind of war of the animals, but people always led the charge on both sides

even in the moment of balkanization, Earth was central to history. An estimated twelve thousand terraria had been raising endangered animal populations for more than a century, strengthening genomic diversity as they did, and the whole point of the exercise had been to serve as a dispersed zoo or ark or inoculant bank, waiting for the right moment to reintroduce these creatures to their wounded home. That the moment had come struck some in the terraria as an overoptimistic assessment, but in the end almost all had agreed to heed the call, and they mounted a formidable armada

much of the organizational work for the reanimation was later traced to a working group associated with the seventh Lion of Mercury, who had died a few years previous to the event. Some Terran governments had been contacted, and those friendly to the idea had provided permits. Assisted migration was already a familiar concept, and invasive species had already rearranged the world anyway; people had struggled against the mass extinction without success, and much of Earth was now occupied by the toughest weeds and scavengers. There was talk of a coming world of seagulls and ants, cockroaches and crows, coyotes and rabbits—a star thistle world, depopulate and impoverished—a big broken factory farm. Reintroducing lost species was therefore welcome to many Terrans. That there would be inevitable political consequences was only to say it was a collective human action; those always have consequences

the twelve thousand terraria and a few score Terran states apparently agreed to execute the plan in the first half of 2312, but as most agreements were off the record, this is anecdotal only. For the most part the oral records of participants, made years later, are the only account

After the reanimation, problems on Earth became ecological and logistical, and focused on transport, dispersion, mitigation, compensation, and legal and physical defense. The reanimation itself was not the end of the story; indeed many decades were to pass before it was understood to have been a key moment in the eventual

WAHRAM AND SWAN

When Wahram heard that Swan had gone missing, he left Ottawa, where he had been in intense negotiations with the Canadian government over the unauthorized arrival of the animals, and flew north to Churchill, and just caught a night flight to Yellowknife, the staging area for the work on the habitat corridor that Swan had joined.

A short summer night had passed by that point, and it was well past dawn on the following day when a helicopter took him over the land where Swan’s transponder had her. By the time they got there, her team had already located her; but it was good to have a helicopter there, because it was impossible to approach the edge of the pingo summit pond without joining her in it. One of her rescuers had already decisively proved that, so now she was down there with another person and, apparently, a wolf. At least they had it outnumbered now, though some in the helo were saying that made it worse. In any case, they could lower a flexible ladder with a harness from the helicopter, from quite a height, though still not high enough to keep from terrifying the wolf—Wahram could see that looking down on it from above. The other person came up the ladder first and was deposited at the foot of the pingo; then Swan; she was red-eyed and looked wasted, but waved at Wahram, and by hand gestures indicated that they were to lower the ladder one more time. That the wolf would be able to use the ladder to escape, Wahram doubted; but the pilot lowered it anyway and, after a radioed consultation with the people below, flew slightly to the side, so that the ladder was draped against the wall. Even that seemed insufficient to Wahram, so he started in his seat when the wolf suddenly leaped once onto the ladder and again up to the rim and raced off down the hill.

Wahram told the pilot he wanted to be dropped off, so she descended on the wheat field next to the pingo, beating out an impromptu crop circle with her downdraft. Wahram climbed out of the helo, with its big blades blurring the air over him, and ran crouching until he was well clear of the contraption, which then gnashed and thwacked back into the sky.

Swan ran to him and gave him a muddy hug. When he got the earplugs out of his ears, he asked how she was. She was fine, she said; had had a great time, had shared her hole with a wolf, and neither was the worse for it, just as one knew would be the case, but it was always good to get empirical confirmation in moments like that when push came to shove and one could get eaten…. She was a little manic, he saw. Dirty, she admitted, and hungry, and ready for a little break before getting back to the work. Wahram gestured at the helicopter, still chopping the air overhead, and when she agreed to the plan, he gestured for it to redescend, and they got in it. After that it was too loud to talk, and they waited until they got back to Yellowknife, her leaning against his shoulder and smiling as she slept right through the racket.

It figured that as the animals had been dropped on ten thousand sites, they would get opposition in some places; at least so it seemed in advance, although no one was sure of anything. In any case they worked as if they had only a few days of freedom to do so, and used helicopters like hoppers to move around, setting loose robotic sun-powered tractors, which hauled seeders that looked like the farming machinery one saw in photos from long before. Some of these planted trees two meters tall at a rate of sixty per hour until their supplies were exhausted. Thus the reanimation included a botanical element, and the tractors proved hard to stop. And few people tried.

Still there were incidents, and in Yellowknife as they ate they checked the stories coming in from around the world. It was everything from hosannas to artillery fire: cheered or denounced, and everything in between, from every possible source, including the U.N. Security Council, gathered in emergency session and yet at a loss. Orangutans back all over Southeast Asia, river dolphins in all their old river mouths, tigers in India and Siberia and Java, grizzly bears back in their old range in North America… was this not the alien invasion feared for so many centuries, come at last? It was unpermitted; it was disruptive; the animals included carnivores that could kill people; it had to be bad. Certainly it was confusing. And power, confused, was always dangerous.

But they also saw the Terran news noting that the animals were always landing in their original native habitats, shifted if necessary to adjust to climatic change since their disappearance. Also, that although they were not genetically modified organisms, an intense breeding effort in the terraria had created much more genetically diverse animals than the remnant Earthly populations. This was part of Wahram’s publicity packet information, so he was particularly pleased to see the media pick that up. Also the reports were noting that animals had for the most part come down in wilderness preserves, and in areas of hills, deserts, pasturage, and other least-human-impacted spaces—never in cities, and only once or twice in villages. A Colombian village that suffered an aerial invasion of sloths and jaguars had already renamed itself Macondo, and clearly would live to tell the tale.

For a while Swan slept on a couch in their impromptu conference center. Wahram found he was not comfortable letting her out of his sight. She was still acting very affectionately toward him, cast into some kind of ecstasy by her night spent with the wolf. Sleeping with her head on his leg. The poor thing looked emaciated still, somewhat as in the tunnel.

“I want to go back out,” she said now when she woke up. “Come with me. I want to follow the caribou again, and they need beaters. Maybe I’ll see my wolf too.”

“All right.”

He saw to the arrangements, and the next morning they joined the rest going north that day, and heloed out in a frost-steamed sunrise. “Look,” Swan said as the sun cracked the distant horizon, leaning over him to stare right into it.

“You can burn your eyes here too,” he said. “You can burn your eyes out even on Saturn.”

“I know, I know. I look without looking.”

The new light cracked in shards on the numberless patches of water spread on the land. Near the Thelon River they landed and got out, the helo buzzed away, and suddenly they were on the vast windy tundra, walking on variously crunchy or squishy ground, in some ways like the icy ground of Titan. Wahram upped the support of his body bra and tried to accustom himself to the give of the soggy land. For a while the act of walking over the broken ground of the semi-frozen caribou path felt like working in a waldo, and because of the body bra, in a way it was.

He straightened up and looked around. Sunlight mirrorflaked off water into his brain, and he adjusted the polarization in his glasses. Swan kept pulling down her glasses to look around with her naked eyes: sometimes she reeled, tears frozen on her cracked red cheeks, but she laughed or moaned orgasmically. Wahram only tried it once.

“You’re going to go blind,” he told her.

“They used to do it all the time! They used to live without any glasses!”

“I believe the Inuit protected their eyes,” he groused. “Strips of leather or some such thing. Anyway, it was something to withstand. They were stunted by life up here, held back from full humanity by their own harsh planet.”

She hooted at this and threw a snowball at him. “How you lie! We are bubbles of Earth! Bubbles of Earth!”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “ Lark Rise to Candleford. We were taught it too. ‘When alone in the fields, with no one to see them, they would hop, skip, and jump, touching the ground as lightly as possible and crying, “We are bubbles of Earth! Bubbles of Earth! Bubbles of Earth!” ’ ”

“Exactly! You were brought up Unitarian?”

“Aren’t we all? But no, I read it in Crowley. And I can’t hop, skip, or jump in this g. I would trip and fall.”

“Oh come on, get tough.” She regarded him. “You must weigh a lot here. But you’ve been here a long time, you should be used to it.”

“I haven’t been doing much walking, I confess. My work has been more sedentary.”

“Recreating Florida, sedentary? Then it’s good you’re out here.”

She was happy. He stumped along comfortably enough; he had been exaggerating the impact of the g, just to annoy her. Now the cold air and the sunlight were giving the day a kind of crystalline quality. “It is good,” he admitted.

So they walked the southern edge of the caribou’s route east, and Swan planted transponders and photographed tracks and took soil and fecal samples. In the evenings they gathered with other trackers at a big dining tent set up daily in a new position. In the short nights they lay on cots in the same tent and caught a few hours of sleep before eating and heading out again. After the third day of the beat they had to deal with the helicoptered arrival of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who arrested them and flew them to Ottawa.

“No way!” Swan cried as they watched the land unfurl below them. “We weren’t even in Canada!”

“Actually we were.”

The vast fields of wheat at midday looked very different than they had during their recent morning trip out. “Look at that!” Swan exclaimed at one point, gesturing down with disdain. “It looks like an algae bloom on a pond.”

In Ottawa, when they were released from custody, Swan took Wahram to the Mercury House to clean up and try to find out what was happening. News of the reanimation was still all over, and there were too many stories to tell, because everyone in the world was telling their story at once, in the usual manner but even more so; so it was hard for them to find out their own story—specifically, why they had been arrested. They had been released without charge, and no one in Ottawa seemed to know anything about why they had been pulled in.

On the newsfeeds clusters had already formed, one could watch images arranged alphabetically by animal or region or several other categories—worst landings, animal actions beautiful or comic, human cruelties against animals, animal aggression against humans, and so forth. They watched the screens in the dining hall as they ate, and afterward walked the narrow streets by the blackish river and canal system, dropping in on pubs here and there to have a drink and see more. Soon enough Swan was getting in drunken arguments with other patrons; she made no secret of her spacer origins, which would have been hard to do anyway, given the way she looked, and the graceful but stylized way she moved in her body bra. Wahram thought people looked up at her with a bit of fear in their gazes. “A round on the Mercury House, that’s where I’m from,” she would declare when people got pissy, which of course helped, but wasn’t a complete solution.

“You people should be happy the animals are back,” she would tell them. “You’ve been cut off from them for so long you’ve forgotten how great they are. They’re our horizontal brothers and sisters, enslaved as living meat, and when that can happen to them it can happen to you too, and it has. You people are meat! It stinks!”

Catcalls and ugly rumbling disagreement would greet this.

“At some point you have to get it!” Swan would shout, overriding the various objections filling the air. “No one can be happy until everyone is safe!”

“ Heppy,” one of them said, voice dripping with Slavic scorn. “What’s heppy? We need food. The farms in the north give us food.”

“You need soil,” Swan said, making it a long word with two syllables. “ Soy-yullis your food. Sheer total biomass is your food! The animals help make biomass. You can’t do without them. You’re hanging on by eating oil. You’re eating your seed corn. If it weren’t for the food coming down the elevators from space, half of you would starve and the other half kill each other. That’s the truth, you know it is! So what do you need? Animals.”