Mayet Ligad Yuhico
Excerpt
The Edge of the West Antarctic
Buckminster City,
Perrumal Antarctic Shelf
11 February 2056
As the small hand of the clock hit six, Brice turned to the window and saw a wave of metallic spike-droids rise from the ground outside. She counted backwards from ten, and when she reached zero, the spikes bloomed multi-layered metal petals and started turning in different directions. They looked like dancers performing ballet steps, she thought with amusement; one executing a deep plié to measure the temperature of the soil; another, a hundred pirouettes to record the ferocity of the wind. These were once tasks both her father and grandfather were responsible for, but for some time now, no human had been allowed outside the tundra and these droids had done most of the scientific work.
There was a sound behind her – an excited screech, and Brice turned away from the window. Eilish was jumping up and down as she did every day when the spike-droids emerged.
“Be careful, Eilish!” she said. “Come and sit beside me,” and she patted the broad windowsill she was perched upon. Eilish was the same size as she was and looked her exact age, which was six. She was wearing the same pajamas, pink with flowers. She patted down a few stray hairs sticking out on Eilish’s head, then checked her left leg. Made of glassinex, it had broken two weeks before, when she fell from the same windowsill. “If you break another leg, we’re in trouble,” she warned Eilish. “There are no spare parts coming to this side of the world any time soon. Which is a pain in the behind, because that’s what you’ll have to walk on if you break your other leg, so hobble carefully!” And then she laughed. Eilish grinned, and shook her head.
“I don’t know what you mean by hobble, Brice.” And Eilish tugged at her arm, but her attention had gone back to the view outside the window.
“Why don’t I see Fonteyn?” she said, then looked at Eilish with a furrowed brow. Boredom had led them to name the drones after famous ballerinas, and Fonteyn was their favorite. Eilish stood up and peered out the window as the drones did their magical pirouettes.
In the space just outside their window, tropical plants were lush, and fruit hung from trees, ripe for the picking. But beyond the glass-domed fortifications that surrounded the house and stretched overhead, the world was covered with ice. With relief, Brice spotted the missing droid. “There she is!” she said. Fonteyn was tall and graceful, and her job was testing the fortifications around the walls of their home.
Her happiness at seeing the droids vanished when she suddenly heard an eerie sound emerging from the bowels of the earth. Eilish clutched at her, fear evident in her expression.
The noises were scary, and, it seemed, growing scarier with each passing day. Her Grandpa Daelan said they sounded like the earth was a hungry monster opening its unquenchable stomach and, finding no food, grumbled and groaned. He was seated at his desk as always, deep into his notes. But she saw him take two noise protectors shaped like fat, orange buttons from a drawer and in one movement, stick them on the outside of both his ears.
“It’s just the sound monster, Grandpa,” she said, jumping from the windowsill, walking toward her grandfather and tugging at his orange buttons until they fell from his ears.
“The problem is if there’s a bigger monster than the sound monster beneath the earth,” he said. Brice turned to her father, Esteban, who smiled at her, but her mother Mira placed a finger to her lips and nodded toward her grandfather.
Uncle Avila, her father’s brother, was making himself a cup of tea in the kitchen. As usual, he scowled at the grumbling sounds. He had just finished university, and recently arrived for a short vacation with them in the Antarctic before pursuing graduate degrees in geology, the same track his father and brother had taken. He wasn’t as used to the sounds as everyone else, and found them more disturbing.
She loved her Grandpa Daelan’s attention. She pulled at his ears this time, and his gray-green eyes, which were so like her own, peered at her closely. Grandpa called them “Jordan River” eyes, after a body of water that flowed in Israel. All the men in her family had the same eyes and she was happy she shared something with them.
Abruptly, Grandfather Daelan pushed away from his desk and stood up.
“It’s time to leave,” he said. The room went quiet. Her normally dreamy scientist grandfather wasn’t prone to dramatic announcements.
But Daelan was clearly distraught. His hands hung by his side, jerking like helpless birds. “I wanted to wait to tell you tomorrow morning,” he said, “but I’ve just received disturbing reports on the ground. It’s too dangerous to stay here. Our work in the Antarctic is finished.”
Daelan turned to the vast, barren, ice-covered landscape outside the window, as if unsure of his next words. “It’s February, and we have sunlight 24 hours a day. It’s the perfect time to move.”
He was trying to keep his tone light, but Buckminster and the land around it had been his own grandfather’s brutal, beloved place. This was not a decision he would make lightly.
The city had been named after Buckminster Fuller, who’d dreamed of a climate-controlled habitat in this part of the world. It was a man-made tropical paradise, a place where Brice went to school and played with her friends, the only home she’d ever known. Her grandfather’s words didn’t make sense to her. Why would he want to go?
“All signs show that the West Perrumal’s ice cap is on its last legs,” he said. “Soon Buckminster will descend into the sea water that underlies the ice.”
Brice had heard this talk before, though her parents had tried to keep it from her. Uncle Avila had been surprised and shocked when he’d arrived to find that the once-bustling city had been reduced to around fifty families. She’d heard her grandfather whisper the words “warming oceans,” and “catastrophic ice sheet collapse” before they’d seen her listening and stopped talking. Her family had visited Greenland last summer, and told her they were looking at it as an alternative home and a way to continue studying arctic habitats. The ice cap there was safer, she’d heard her father tell her mother, anchored on land. And she’d also heard her Grandpa say that their Antarctic home had an “Akiles Hill” whatever that meant.
Her grandfather turned back from the window and addressed her father. “Most are leaving before it destructs entirely. You have to go too.” He sounded agitated so she wrapped her arms around his waist.
“Is this the Akiles Hill, Grandpa?” she asked.
“Yes, my dearest. We will sink in seawater if we don’t do something now.”
She glanced at her father. He always knew the right words to say.
“I notice you didn’t include yourself, Dad,” her father said. “We can’t leave you here. You know that. We all go together. No one stays behind.” Esteban’s voice was direct, brooking no argument.
But her Uncle Avila didn’t seem to be taking Grandpa’s pronouncement seriously. “You haven’t recovered yet from the cancelling of the Buckminster Fuller scientific gathering last month. Don’t see monsters underneath the bed when there aren’t any, Dad,” Avila chided.
A group of scientists who’d wanted to copy the Buckminster type of enclosed city in Mars’s Antarctic had abruptly cancelled a long-planned symposium to be held in their city when her grandfather’s warnings were reported around the world. Everyone had noticed that her grandfather’s mood had turned dark when the event, his biggest project for years, had been called off.
But her grandfather shook his head. “The scientists were correct to cancel. Esteban and Mira, you have to think of Brice,” he said. Suddenly, all eyes focused on her. “She’s only six years old, son. Think about her future. Follow the warm waters. Go east to the Philippines in Concordia, in Palawan, where your mother was born.”
Her mother Mira, who was usually quiet during arguments, stepped toward her father-in-law. “Daelan, everyone in Buckminster understood the risks of living in this beautiful, fragile land. If we’ve all decided it’s time to go, then we will go together,” she said.
She took Daelan’s hand but he shook her off.
“We have practiced the Bubble transport drill every night,” he said, “but now, we must sleep inside it.” Daelan stood up, and with that motion, all arguments ceased.
Brice saw her father nod in agreement.
“It’s time to go to the Bubbles then, Brice and Eilish,” Mira said. Brice was determined to get to the Bubble first, and with an impish grin, Eilish started running after her. Mira caught Eilish’s hand and then hers and admonished them to walk slowly. She rolled her eyes, it was just another Bubble drill. Life would go on as usual, she thought, when it was over.
Their two large Bubbles were parked on the lower floor. Orb-shaped and twenty-one square meters in size, the Bubble was a dependable multi-terrain vehicle of transport for scientists in the Antarctic. Made of Aquameer, a flexible, industrial-grade, oxygen-permeable plastic that was lighter than water, they floated upright due to the water’s surface tension on their base. Not only were they aquatic, the Bubble also had wheels, which could come off as needed. At first, Bubbles were used mainly for hauling material in the Antarctic, as they were able to move from island to island in all kinds of terrain and weather conditions. But a few years before, some Bubble models had been revamped as survival vehicles after a scientist was caught riding one in a furious windstorm, and though his Bubble was spun a hundred miles from its original location, he survived unscathed. Its tough construction and circular shape guaranteed that its inhabitants would survive nearly any disaster on water, land, or snow.
Brice and Eilish ran into one of the Bubbles and plopped themselves amidst their toys and clothes.
“Hey Eilish, want to hear a scary story?” She looked around and her mother was not near. Eilish picked up a globe but Brice grabbed it. It was her favorite toy. The complete reversal of the magnetic poles of the earth was a non-stop focus of work and discussion for her family. North was becoming South, and the South Pole was becoming the North. Her father had said it had happened many, many times in history, without major effect on the earth. But in recent years, the magnetic poles had weakened due to climate change, and with that came a possibility of a cataclysmic pole reversal causing a shift of the equator, followed by massive ice-melt and global flooding. But always, in her stories to Eilish, if massive flooding happened, her family would ride the waters using surfboards, not Bubbles. They would ride hand-in-hand like champions, their own family flags unfurled. They would go past the glorious ice sheets, riding back to Buckminster with prizes in hand, winning first place in her mind’s imaginary race.
Her thoughts were interrupted when she saw Avila in the other Bubble. He was trying to get her attention when he stuck his tongue out and started jumping up and down like a gorilla. She collapsed with laughter. She in turn stuck out her tongue, bulged her cheeks, and did some high-spirited jumping jacks copying his movements.
When her parents joined her inside the Bubble, they were whispering together in a serious tone. She winked at her uncle and sat on the floor, where she pretended to read a book.
“Have you heard about the Moores?” her mother said. “I heard they took just the clothes on their backs.” Her ears perked up. Dr. Philip Moore and his wife Simone were her grandfather Daelan’s best friends, and Dr. Philip had helped co-write the Polar Shift Theory with him. Their daughter Julia was her best friend, but she hadn’t seen her in the past few days. She thought it had been because Julia was not allowed to go to school anymore.
“I wish I could have stopped them,” she heard her mother whisper, “and explain that polar shifting has occurred many times in Earth’s history. But it wouldn’t have helped. No one wanted to stay. And now they are all gone.”
“Except us,” Esteban said, shaking his head. A loud noise interrupted him.
The sounds beneath the earth had changed. They were high-pitched and groaning, as if everything below the sea bed was collapsing.
Her mother screamed. Was this the Reckoning she had heard her family whisper about? Was this the moment the ice would succumb to the ocean, tipping everyone on it into the sea?
The sound came again, even louder. Esteban and Avila left their Bubbles and ran to the basement’s floor-to-ceiling windows. Outside was a puzzling sight. The homes surrounding them had been scattered across the landscape, but now seemed jammed together. How could that possibly be? There could be just one explanation. A giant wave had unmoored the ice, scouring it from below, unhinging any structure rooted above. When the wave hit land, the houses would be thrown like discarded toys. He could actually see the sheet of ice rippling. The frozen wave it created was approaching his own beloved home.
“Take the wheels off the Bubbles,” her father commanded Avila. “I’m getting Father.”
As he raced toward the door that led into the house, Daelan appeared. Esteban pulled his father close.
And then the wave hit.
Her father and grandfather were thrown into the air as rocks, stones, and debris rained down. From the safety of their Bubble, she and Eilish looked on in horror. Her father landed near the Bubble, and clawed through the debris toward its door. Her mother and Eilish pulled him inside.
“Where’s Grandfather?” Brice screamed. Her father’s forehead was covered in blood. As she reached for him, a wave of frigid water burst through the house’s walls. And then the roof opened up, and they were all swept away by the swirling waves.
Daelan O’Rourke was swept away by the water and the wreckage of the house he’d lived in. The ice shelf he had devoted his whole life to investigating had become his burial place.
The Bubble vessels containing his family were pushed out to sea by the churning, groaning water monster. Daelan’s fears about the end of the Antarctic had come true. But his projections for a new global landscape were inaccurate. Things were going to be far worse than he could ever have imagined.
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An accident wipes away much of Auberon Wallace's memories of her young adulthood, but her mother's dying wish is to bring them back. Auberon has fourteen days to read an old box of letters, otherwise the letters will be burned alongside a valuable 1790 George Romney painting. Will reading the letters bring back her past, or push it away further?
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