2312 (49 page)

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
should
know. 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.”

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

W
hen 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.

I
t 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.