Authors: Kat Ross
One morning, a month or so after Will first pulled the rowboat onto the beach, I walk out of my tent and find about thirty people waiting in the clearing. And that’s the first time I know, really know, that I’ll be OK. I have a purpose here. At least for a while.
That night, I eat dinner on a log with Charlie. I’ve been hanging out with him sometimes after class. He doesn’t seem to harbor any animosity towards me, not like some of the others who still see me as a pika. I’ve given up trying to hate Charlie and Nileen. Ditto my other students. Even Will, who tells me anything I want to know about a seed or root but clams up at the merest hint of a personal question.
I needed to hate them. Because if I didn’t, I’d have to be afraid for them.
Sometimes I wonder if Raven Rock has given up the search. But I know my father. He won’t let that happen, not ever.
I wonder this: If I begged him for their lives, will it make any difference?
Once or twice I’ve even wondered if I still want to be found.
For some reason, being with Charlie soothes down all those roiling, conflicted feelings. He likes to talk and is always kind and tolerant of my questions. When I ask about Banerjee, he tells me that she’s a defector from the Nu London army. Went to the surface on assignment, decided she just couldn’t go back. She survived on her own for nearly a year before hooking up with the group.
I always knew Banerjee was tough as bedrock but that amazes me. Not just that she made it alone, but that she did it as a pika, like me, knowing nothing about the surface. Clearly, the woman is on a whole other level of hardcore. She comes to watch my classes sometimes and seems satisfied with what she sees. I find myself craving her approval, the way I did the toughest instructors at the Academy. She has that effect on people, once you get past the scary bird-of-prey eyes.
I realize I still don’t understand the inner workings of the group so I ask Charlie if Banerjee’s word is law, like the commandant.
“More like the equivalent of an old-time mayor,” he explains as he reads the barometers and makes notes in a battered spiral notebook. “Her say counts for more, but we all vote on the big things.” Charlie looks up at me with watery blue eyes. “It’s not good when a few people have too much power. Bad decisions get made. I’ve been with a few other groups over the years, and this is the best one. Cause of her.”
“I remember you from the ship, Charlie,” I say. “You voted with Will to spare me. How come?”
Charlie puts the notebook away and stares into the fire. He’s one of the oldest people in the whole crew—definitely old enough that he remembers the Culling firsthand and ought to hate me even more than the rest.
“People are people,” he says finally. “Thinking otherwise is what got us into this mess in the first place. That and refusing to face reality when it was plain as day that all the cars and the factories and the power plants was wrecking the planet.” He laughs. “And throwing a young girl into the sea to die is still wrong, no matter how we got to live now. But Banerjee was just doing what she thought was right for the rest of us. You can’t fault her. I’ll tell you one thing. Life goes on. Some things bounce back, some things don’t. But life goes on. It always does. It’s
civilization
got left behind.”
I think about the island, the way new growth is moving in to fill the holes left by the superstorms.
“Nature abhors a vacuum,” I say. “Someone famous said that.”
Charlie smiles a sly old fox smile. “Aristotle, my dear.”
I grin back. “Why Charlie, I think you’re right.”
“I did go to proper school,” he says. “Till fifth grade anyway. Then I went to work as a picker in Jersey’s biggest e-waste dump, recycling bits of computers and cell phones and such. Maybe I’m lucky I didn’t end up there. Full of poison, that stuff was. Anyone picked long enough they got real sick. One guy was covered in these red bumps. It scared me.”
We’ve never talked about the Culling, about
before
. I was too shy to ask. But I feel like everything I thought I knew about the world and my place in it is starting to turn upside down. They’ve lied to us about so much. I’m afraid of what Charlie might tell me, but I need to know the truth.
“Where are you from?” I ask. “Originally.”
He looks up. “Little shantytown near old Atlantic City, nothing special. It’s gone now.”
I take a deep breath and say in a rush, “My grandparents all died before I was born. The first generation of elderly people didn’t do well underground. It was too much of a shock. And the history classes at the Academy were pretty dry, mostly the technical stuff, like the collapse of the oil economy in 2043, the final melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the mass migration from the coasts and the formation of the Intergovernmental Consortium.”
He nods slowly. “Yeah, I remember some of that.”
“How old were you when it happened?” I ask.
“Sure you want to talk about this?”
“If you don’t mind.”
So Charlie tells me. How he was thirty when the first superstorm landed, that would be Megaera, and the government gave up any pretense of governing and put everything into building the underground cities. How all the infrastructure – highways, bridges, airports, the whole electrical grid – was already shot from decades of one hundred and twenty degree heatwaves, catastrophic flooding in some places and record-breaking drought in others. The starvation and the riots. The national lottery that used social security numbers to decide who got a place in the evacuation.
How National Guard tanks dispersed the crowds at the entry points leading down, because people panicked at the end and refused to believe they would be left behind. How his sister was shot right next to him, and he almost drowned when the tsunami came but managed to climb onto the roof of a high office building where a chopper picked him up. Private charter pilot, scouting for survivors.
“Sea levels had been rising for a while already,” Charlie says. “But the end came so sudden, faster than anyone expected. It’s funny, I remember being a little kid and seeing all the beachfront mansions on the Jersey shore and wishing I’d get rich enough to buy one someday. Then we started getting hit regular by canes, and nobody wanted to live there no more. The rich people moved inland and the cheapest shacks you could find were right beachfront. Didn’t matter that they got knocked down every season, we’d just build ’em back up again.”
He rises to get a bowl of soup and toss another log on the fire. We don’t need the warmth but the light is cheery. “The ones who made it afterwards were the ones who found boats and learned to read the weather,” Charlie says. “Cause the flooding was bad, but the storms were worse. Much worse. Now the young ones here, they don’t remember any of that. Never had a country, don’t even know what it means. I think some of ’em don’t believe there ever used to be airplanes and televisions and cars. Think I’m making it up.”
“They don’t talk about it much anymore,” I say, feeling physically ill. Charlie’s story is a far cry from the sanitized version of history we were fed at school. “My people, I mean. They call it the Transition, and pretend there was no choice.”
“Well, maybe there wasn’t,” Charlie says, “though everyone knew it was rigged. Sure, they took some poorer folks to do the hard work. That’s who won the so-called lottery. But most of the spaces were already taken, either through political influence or straight-up bought and paid for. The scientists, I understand. They were needed. Hell, they’d been warning us about what was coming for decades and no one listened. But when push came to shove, weren’t no congressmen or billionaires left out in the rain. It was the same all over. We got people in our group from everywhere in the world you can think of, though that’s one thing that changed real quick. Don’t matter now what color you are, man or woman, long as you pull your weight and fit in.”
I try to imagine the billions of people and how the end must have been for them but the magnitude is just too enormous to grasp. “How many survived?” I ask quietly.
Charlie thinks on this for a minute. “Can’t say exactly. I only know the eight hundred miles or so we claim as our range. There ain’t many, but there’s enough. We communicate with a few other groups by short-wave. When we have a meet-up, sometimes we’ll pick up new folks, or folks will leave. They’re free to do so. If they got a special skill, like Will, they just need to ’prentice someone else before moving on.”
“Is the whole world like this? Just islands?”
Charlie laughs. “Oh no. There’s plenty of bigger land, some of it right nearby, but trust me, you don’t want to get stuck there when a cane hits. Ain’t nowhere to hide. Better to keep moving. I’ll tell you one place nobody goes though, and that’s up north. Toad country. Ships sail too far, they don’t come back.”
The fire burns low and we’re quiet for a while. Charlie moves to stand, then turns to me. “Tell me something,” he says. “Did you like living down below?”
Like? There wasn’t anything else. I consider it for a moment.
“Not really,” I say, and I realize that’s it’s the truth.
“Hard to imagine,” Charlie says. “I’ve seen some bad stuff, but I’d still rather have the sun. People just aren’t built to live like earthworms.” He smiles, and his homely, weathered face is almost handsome.
I haven’t seen any animals yet, but there sure are lots of bugs. By dusk, the clouds of mosquitoes usually drive everyone into their tents. Sometimes though, if there’s a breeze, people will sit out and tell stories. Some are like myths, and involve sea serpents or mer-people or underwater cities made of coral and gold. Others recount narrow escapes from the hypercanes, and the rogue waves, hundreds of feet high, that can appear out of nowhere on a calm day and swallow a fleet whole. My favorites are the ghost stories, set in the watery, skeletal remains of megacities like Jakarta and Shanghai and Houston.
One evening, about ten of us are sitting around the fire when Nileen turns to me.
“Your turn,” she says, arching her thick black eyebrows.
I try to say no, but she starts nagging and the rest join in until I throw up my hands.
“OK, let me think.”
“Something romantic,” declares Fatima, who used to be quiet around me and now, like Nileen, views me as a font of information on the sweet pika life.
“Pish,” Nileen says. “I want adventure.”
“Blood and guts,” urges the kid with the unpronounceable name.
“But funny too,” Ezzie chimes in.
I think hard for a minute, and then it comes to me. Ancient, but still a classic.
“A long time ago,” I say, “in a galaxy far, far away. . .”
I’m just getting to the part where Luke’s fighting the beast in the trash compactor when I see movement at the edge of the fire. It’s Will. He’s never joined us before, and his presence throws me off a little. I stumble over my words, but quickly regain my composure and tell the rest with relish, including a James Earl Jones impression that’s not half bad.
Everyone got a bit of what they wanted, so they’re happy. As usual, Will’s harder to read. I did see him actually smile a couple of times. And his eyes never left me, though I pretended not to notice. When it’s over, he vanishes back into his tent without a word. Nileen watches him go, but the scowl on my face discourages her from commenting.
Then lightning splits the sky and we kick dirt over the fire and scatter for our tents. The air is thick and heavy, the way it gets before a big storm. Charlie told me there used to be something called seasons in these parts, and that every year a bitter cold would come and all the plants and trees would die and then be reborn. Now there’s just hot and hotter.
Later that night, when the rains finally come and I’m lying on my cot with nothing to do but stare into space and worry about what’s going to happen to me, what’s going to happen to all of us, the door flap rustles. Will ducks in, wearing an army-issue poncho with water streaming down the sides. The flickering candlelight reveals an enormous lump in the front, which turns out to be a stack of books. From the way he handles them, taking care not to let a single drop touch the covers, I can see they are precious to him and I feel oddly moved that he risked bringing them over in the downpour.
“I brought your homework,” he says, setting them down on the foot of my cot.
“My homework?”
“Yes. You have to study hard if you’re going to learn how to be a physic. It takes years, you know. You’re lucky to have me as a mentor. I had to train myself.”
I don’t know if it’s the knowledge that we probably won’t have weeks together, let alone years, or if it’s just his arrogance in assuming I should be grateful when he only tolerates me because Banerjee ordered him to, but something in me snaps.
“How typically humble of you,” I say.
“If you don’t want them, that’s fine,” he says evenly, picking up the books and turning to go.
What’s wrong with me? I know he’s trying to be nice. Why am I compelled to poke him with a sharp stick every time I see him?
“Wait!”
He stops but doesn’t put the books back.
“I’m sorry. Yes, please, I’ll take them. I just don’t know why you think I’m cut out to be a physic.” I laugh hollowly. “I’m a killer. That’s what I’m good at.”
Will looks at me for a long moment. Then he sets the books down.
“You should start with this one, it gives a basic overview of herbal medicine,” he says, handing me a heavy hardcover. “For the others, focus mainly on the equatorial zones. The books are old, and these latitudes are much warmer now, so we’re seeing a lot of the species that used to be much farther south.”
“OK.” I glance down at the book. The title, in spidery black letters, is
An Encyclopaedia of Vintage Remedies
. It seems strange reading words on real paper, with pages that I have to turn by hand. But I like the heft of it, and the way it feels in my palm.
“Thanks.”
He nods. “Goodnight, Jansin.”
I read until my single candle burns too low to see anymore.
Ironically, the technological advances that made the Transition possible proved to be a high-water mark. Humanity’s ambitions narrowed to a single imperative: survival
.