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.
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.
“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
