2312

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-yull is 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.”

“They can pull my plow,” one said sourly. Most of these people spoke Russian to each other, and Wahram struggled to hear voices using English. When they spoke to Swan, they spoke in English. She was talking again about the horizontal brothers and sisters. Many who listened were sufficiently high on vodka and other substances that their eyes shone, their cheeks were red. They liked arguing with Swan; they liked being tongue-lashed by her. They had looked the same in 1905, no doubt, or 1789, or 1776. It could have been a room anywhere, anytime. It reminded him of the corner pub in his neighborhood of the bulge.

“We’re part of a family,” Swan was insisting now, going maudlin. “The mammal family.”

“Mammals are an order,” someone objected.

“Mammals are a class,” someone else corrected.

“We are the class of mammals,” Swan exclaimed, “and the order is to suckle and to love!” Cheers to this. “It’s that or die. Our horizontal brothers and sisters. We need them, we need all of them, we’re part of them and they’re part of us! Without them we’re just—just—”

“Poor forked radishes!”

“Brains and fingertips!”

“Worms in a bottle!”

“Yes!” Swan said. “Exactly.”

“Like spacers in space,” someone added.

They laughed at that, and she did too. “It’s true,” she cried. “But here we are! I’m on Earth, right now.” Her cheeks burned and she looked around at them; she stood on a bench and caught them up: “We’re on Earth! You have no idea what a privilege that is. You fucking moles! You’re home! You can take all the spacer habitats together and they’d still be nothing compared to this world! This is home.”

Cheers. Though it seemed to Wahram, as he caught Swan falling off her bench toward the bar, that what she had said wasn’t really true, not anymore—not with Mars up there, and Venus and Titan coming on board. Maybe it hadn’t been true since the diaspora. So they cheered her for being wrong, for flattering them, for buying the drinks and catching them all up in a moment of enthusiasm. They were cheering for this moment itself, detached from anything else. Night in a pub in Ottawa, with drunks singing in Russian. This moment of the storm.

They went back out with visas, in case they got stopped again by the Mounties, and rejoined the beater line for the caribou migration. No one stopped them in Yellowknife, and no one they spoke with knew what had happened before. In a couple of days they were back in their field routine, which made Wahram happy. He was used to the walking now, had adjusted his bodysuit to it, and got a lot of pleasure from watching Swan on the hunt. She was always ahead, but then again she looked good from behind. Diana on the hunt.

In the dining tent at night they were hearing more often from reports worldwide that people were finding the reappearance of animals in their world hard to handle. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! People were unused to being potential prey for big predators lurking right at the edge of town. It was enough to make them band together. Those who used to go out on their own now usually found company. Some who didn’t got eaten, and the rest shivered and complained and then sought out friends or strangers to walk with, not just at night but in the broad light of day. This was standard practice already in the terraria; going out alone was a luxury, a kind of decadence—or an adventure undertaken with a sense of the risk involved, as with Swan. It was obvious if you had grown up with it, oppressive if you hadn’t: out in the woods, humans needed to stick together.

Quickly too the animals were learning how dangerous people were. In fact many more animals were dying than people in the new encounters, which was no surprise to anyone. But it was a robust inoculant, and would prevail.

The two of them went out one morning with extra bags of gear, because Swan wanted to range farther than they could in a day and still get back to the dining tent. The caribou had massed on the banks of the Thelon River at a ford new to them, and she wanted to get around to the north side of them, to observe and to discourage the beasts from heading north in the shallows on the west side, looking for a better ford; they were already at the best spot, a place that the archeologists said had been used by caribou in the past.

So they walked north. At a certain point they crossed the caribou track. The ground was chewed into a sea of chaotic brown sastrugi; every step had to be made carefully. Swan was faster than Wahram by an even larger margin than usual, but he was determined not to hurry. A couple of times the corpse of a caribou drove the point home: falls could be dangerous. There were knee-high clumps of semi-frozen mud to contend with, and they made him nervous. He could scarcely stand to watch the way she waltzed over them. But she made no mistakes; and he had to keep his gaze on his feet. It didn’t matter how far she got ahead.

When they reached unshattered ground north of the migration path, Swan led him east. “Look,” Swan said, pointing. “Wolves. They’re waiting to see how the crossing goes.”

Wahram had become aware that Swan loved wolves, so he said nothing about the bloodthirsty nature of scavengers. Everyone had to eat, after all.

The caribou were massed on the near shore of the ford, about half a kilometer away. Swan wanted to be seen by the beasts, so she hiked up a short bluff overlooking the riverbed, which was a broad gravel wash, crisscrossed by river channels braiding in it; the entire wash was a maze of old lines of rounded rocks and the curved black dips of dried oxbows. Much of it would not be good footing for the caribou, and Wahram could see why Swan wanted them to cross at the ford, where solid permafrost soil made a flat brown-and-green road on both sides.

“Look, the first ones are trying it.”

Wahram joined her side and looked south. Hundreds of caribou were massed on their side of the river, tossing their antlers and bellowing. The large males at the front were testing the river with forelegs, pawing at it, and then one made a break and several others followed immediately, splashing knee-deep in water for the most part, then abruptly going in to the chest, spraying big waves before them.

“Uh-oh,” Swan said. “It’s deep there.”

But the leaders walked or swam on, working hard, and soon they surged back up to knee depth and smashed the water white on their way out. On the far shore they looked back and bellowed. By this time more of them were in the water, and the mass began to move slowly forward, funneling as those on the sides tried to get to the center. They wanted to bunch together, Wahram saw. “That drop-off will be the trouble spot,” Swan predicted, and it was so; as the beasts hit the water some bellowed and tried to turn back, but were shoved and even nipped until they carried on; but that made for a jammed crowd back in the shallows, and the uproar of their bellowing was loud over the already big noise of the river sluicing through its infinity of rocks. A few beasts on the left flank turned and began to head north, but Swan jumped up and down and waved her arms, and Wahram took a little compressed air horn she offered him and let off a couple of blasts. It was loud in a high and urgent way, but he thought it was Swan’s violent motion that turned the beasts back; and at that point the logjam of beasts at the deep point of the ford swam forward together, and soon the breakaway was forgotten and the whole herd was powering across in a storm of white water and steaming brown bodies. It took most of an hour. There were some accidents, some broken limbs, and even drownings, but there was never again any pause in the herd.

Swan watched closely, pointing out a line of wolves on the bank downstream, snagging drowned caribou calves with their teeth and dragging them in teams back up out of the water. It was only at that point that the river ran with ribbons of red.

“Will the wolves cross too?” Wahram asked.

“I don’t know. In the terraria they often would, but the streams aren’t as big as this. You know—you see it inside a terrarium and it’s great, but this is different. I wonder if they think so too. I mean, they’ve done this a lot, but always looking up at the land. They’ve never been out under the sky. I wonder what they think of the sky! Don’t you wonder?”

“Hmm,” Wahram said, considering it. Even to him the sight of the Terran sky was almost inconceivably odd. “It must look strange. They must have a sense of space, they’re migrating creatures, after all. They migrate in the terraria. So they must know this is different. From the inside of a cylinder to the outside of a sphere—no, if they feel that—” He shook his head.

“I think they seem more panicked than usual. More wild.”

“Maybe so. How are we ourselves going to get across?”

“We swim! No, not really. Our aerogels will work as rafts, we’ll float across. If we’re lucky!”

She led him down to the ford, where the scent of the caribou was strong, and strips of fur eddied in the shallows. The wind poured through him, and he could feel his lungs etched as cold shapes, pulsing and alive. “Come on,” she said, “we have to get out of here before the wolves get here to clean up on the poor dead babies.”

“All right, but show me how.”

“Your mattress is your raft, we each have one. It’s kind of like a coracle of aerogel, so it’s hard to see but you’ll float in it fine. If you tip over you have to hold on to it, or else swim fast.”

“I’ll hope not to tip over.”

“That’s for sure! This water is freezing. Here, take this branch to paddle. I think the thing to do is to walk out as far as you’re comfortable, then get in and let yourself be taken downstream, and paddle when you can for the far shore. We don’t need to be in any hurry, because the first curve of the river downstream will put us over near the other side anyway. And you’ll feel it when you’re over the shallows on the other side. Follow me, you’ll see.”

So he did; but he bounced on the water, and his raft felt too small, and the deepest part of the current swept him by Swan, who was laughing at him; then he paddled hard. She caught up with him, paddling in circles, and shouted to him, “Put your head under the water!”

“No!” he exclaimed indignantly, but she laughed and shouted back, “Put at least one ear under the water, you have to hear it! Listen to it underwater!”

And she leaned out from her coracle and ducked her head under for a few moments, then pulled out sputtering and laughing. “Try it!” she commanded. “You have to hear!”

So gingerly he leaned out and stuck his right ear under the dancing surface of the water, holding his breath, and was astonished to find that he had immersed himself in a loud electric clicking utterly unlike anything he had heard before in his life. He pulled his ear out, heard the rush of the world, then stuck his whole head back in, holding his breath, and heard with both ears that electrifying clicking and clacking sound, which must have been the sound of stones rolling hard over the river bottom, thrown along by the rapid current.

He pulled out, blowing like a walrus. Swan was laughing at him and shaking her head like a dog. “How’s that for music!” she shouted. Then Wahram’s coracle scraped the shallows on the other side and he jumped out, but tripped and fell. He was just able to grab the little raft as he splashed and clambered to his feet, then sloshed up to dry land. Not elegant at all, but he was still alive, and his bodysuit kept him dry and warm—now that was the technological sublime. And they were on the far shore.

Swan found a high point above the river and pitched their tent just before dark. The tent was a single big shell, transparent and bouncy on transparent tent poles. Their rafts would serve as their beds. They sat outside the door of the tent and Swan cooked them first a soup made from powder, then pasta with a pesto and Gorgonzola sauce. Finally chocolates for dessert, and a little flask of cognac.

It was still twilight when they were done, though the sun had set an hour before. The tent flapped in the wind, and the immense sluicing of the river over its rocks rumbled up out of the ground and filled the air. They had been going for eighteen hours straight, and when Swan said, “Time for bed,” Wahram nodded and yawned. The sleeping bags she pulled from their backpacks were also aerogels and resembled the mattress rafts, as well as their tent material, and for that matter the bubbles they had drifted down in—all aerogels, hard to see, light, squishy, warm. “But we’ll still be cold unless we sleep together,” Swan said, crawling into his bag beside him and pulling both bags over them.

“Ah yes,” Wahram said. “I’m sure.”

In the semidarkness he could afford a smile. She kissed him, though, and caught him in the act.

“What,” she said.

“Nothing.”

She rolled onto him, and their combined weight caused his back to touch the ground under his mattress. It was a chill touch and he had to mention it. “We may have to stay side to side.”

“Hell no,” Swan said, and squiggled out of the bag. “Here, get up a second, let’s put my bag under the mattress. That should do it.”

It did. By then they were cold. She got the top of his bag over them properly and climbed onto him, shivering; and after a tight hug she shifted around and started kissing him again. Her mouth was warm. She was a good kisser, passionate and playful. Her penis, so much littler than his, was nevertheless poking his belly, feeling something like a belt buckle gone awry. He too was fully aroused, and getting happier by the second.

Now it was said that their particular combination of genders was the perfect match, a complete experience, “the double lock and key,” all possible pleasures at once; but Wahram had always found it rather complicated. As with most wombmen, his little vagina was located far enough down in his pubic hair that his own erection blocked access to it; the best way to engage there once he was aroused was for the one with the big vagina to slide down onto the big penis most of the way, then lean out but also back in, in a somewhat acrobatic move for both partners. Then with luck the little join could be made, and the double lock and key accomplished, after which the usual movements would work perfectly well, and some fancier back-and-forths also.

Swan turned out to be perfectly adept at the join, and after that she laughed and kissed him again. They warmed up pretty fast.