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 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.”
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
