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.”
I n 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.
T hey 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.
I n 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.
T he 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
