Alexis Latner - A Pillar of Stars by Night

Illustration by George H. Krauter

Dozing in his sleeping bag, Mark Willson heard a shrill, faint and unwelcome whine. Culex, as well as Saltmarsh and the Asian Tiger mosquitoes, thrived here, so he pulled the bag’s mosquito hood around his head. Just before he slid back into sleep, he vaguely realized that the sound was not a mosquito at all. It had an unpleasant metallic edge.

Later, a meadowlark singing woke Mark up for good. With a yawn, he turned his mind to the day ahead of him. He had work to do on his doctoral dissertation in ecology: “Restoration of a Coastal Tallgrass Prairie ” This morning he would do a species count in the J-3 plot of his grid of string laid across the grass. Writing up notes and analyzing data could wait for the heat of the afternoon.

His notebook computer trilled at him. The message window said CALL ECOL OFFICE.

Not yet, Mark thought.

urgent, the computer continued.

But it had said “urgent” two days ago, when the new department secretary wanted to know where he’d filed the Lepidoptera reference disk. He would call back later.

Mark walked out onto the porch of the study hut. Not to start work quite yet—he still had to eat breakfast and find his hat, essential under Earth’s frayed ozone layer. A pool of coral glowed in the eastern sky, the Sun rising on the little piece of prairie, silhouetting the warehouses in the large industrial district that started where the prairie grass stopped. A mile to the west, the Clear Lake City rail station gleamed in the early sunlight. Mark breathed deeply of air that smelled damp and green, like a healthy greenhouse. He loved spending the night in the study hut, waking up to mornings in this oasis of hope for life on Earth.

Sunflowers flanked the porch, taller than Mark although he had the advantage of standing on the porch floor. Helianthus giganteus, huge and hairy stalks festooned with sunburst blooms. They were volunteers: unlike most of the flowering grasses, they hadn’t been reintroduced here by ecologists, but showed up on their own. They were a resilient species. Even if the world grew still hotter and ecozones climbed to higher latitudes, with the sea flooding behind, H. giganteus would stalk northward along with its preferred climate.

Inconspicuous in a melee of sunflower leaves, a coffee cup belonging to Annetine van Leeuwen rested on the porch rail. The cup was genuine porcelain with a thin gold rim and a quaint Asian butterfly design. Mark smiled. Anna must have forgotten it before she left for Amsterdam to visit her relatives this summer. An entomologist, Anna had reintroduced butterflies, beetles and other insects to this scrap of prairie. Mark found an accumulation of coffee-tinted rainwater in Anna’s cup. He crouched to empty the water onto the bright blue dayflowers by the porch steps.

A shrill whine, like the mosquito he had thought he heard before he got up, pierced the air. Mark jerked his head up. That definitely was not a mosquito. It was machinery, and closer than the warehouses, hidden from his view by the tall grasses and sunflowers.

Mark ran along the cross-prairie trail toward the strident sound. Grasses whipped his legs.

A huge, orange, hydraulic monster was scything down the grass on the far edge of the prairie. The machine hit a stump and emitted another whine.

Mark dashed to the machine. He stepped in front of it.

The operator stopped it with a thunk and shouted at Mark in Spanglish. Man, are you crazy?!

Mark understood the Spanish-English pidgin. Racking his brain for usable words, Mark explained the situation in Spanglish. This place belongs to the University ; for to study flowers and birds and all! Don’t hurt the grass!

The machine operator explained in turn. The tide is high in Galveston , and she is red.

Red tide, the toxic bloom of microorganisms in the sea that had occurred more and more in the Gulf of Mexico as the Earth’s climate warmed. And melting polar ice made high tide on Galveston Island very high indeed.

The streets fill with dead fish and things. Stinking germs come in the houses of the people. People will get sick there. So they come here.

Mark recoiled in horror, realizing that the prairie had been designated as a refugee camp for people fleeing from a disease-ridden fish kill on Galveston Island.

Two uniformed men approached Mark over the carnage of mown grasses. Their uniforms were those of security contractors. “What are you doing here?” demanded one.

Mark fumbled for his identity card. “I work here. This is a university study area, and—”

“Not any more, it isn’t. Maybe you didn’t get the word. This real estate’s been appropriated for a refugee camp.”

Mark protested. “It already is a kind of refugee camp for the plants and animals here! The University—”

Running Mark’s identity license through his pocket computer, the security guard laughed. He flipped Mark’s license back at him. “People come first. And you’re an unauthorized civilian. Leave it, kid.”

“Why here?” Mark screamed.

“It’s the only piece of empty clean real estate in a hundred miles!” the other, older guard retorted. “You’re educated—don’t you know anything about politics?”

The machine operator shrugged at Mark, impassive.

Mark could collect his gear if he did so in five minutes. In ten, Mark stood on a buckled asphalt road outside of the fence around the prairie. Yellow tape strung along the fence said RESTRICTED—DO NOT ENTER. Mark clutched a flimsy computer printout, a trespass warning. If he tried to reenter the area he would be arrested. His hand, holding the printout, shook.

Mark turned away, stumbling on the road’s cracks and potholes. Weeds grew in the broken edges of the asphalt. Dandelions. Ragweed. Pepper-grass. In front of a particularly big and ugly warehouse, the roadside weeds were brown, treated with herbicide, dead, fringing a ditch filled with chalky water. There would be no frogs in the ditch. Frogs breathe with their whole skin, and when their world is poisoned, they die, and the ecosystem fells apart where the frogs should be.

Mark felt unfriendly eyes on him: guards at the front gate of the warehouse, sizing him up as undesirable. Mark avoided their gaze and their gate.

A red tide rose inside of him, echoing the sickness of the sea. It was his blood, and he heard it pounding in his ears. Tears, salty and hot, hurt the skin of his face, already sunburned because he had forgotten to put on his hat.

The Clear Lake railstation was busier and noisier than usual when Mark lugged his gear up the high stairs to the platform. Unloading a train of machinery and supplies in yellow wrappings, workers and a few peremptory officials crowded waiting passengers to the edges of the platform. The morning wind came up. It blew from the south, from the sick sea, and it stank.

The high-speed train took Mark north. The wide, smog-smeared city of Houston, with a beveled crown of an arcology that reared above the smog, flared on the horizon. Houston rapidly swelled and swallowed the train.

Mark got off at the South Main railstation and shuffled toward his home. When he reached the security gate of the graduate student apartment building and thumbed himself in, Mark realized that the red tide inside had receded. He didn’t feel angry any more. Instead, he felt like a beach littered with dead hopes and dreams.

His roommate was seated in an armchair in the living room, contemplating the antique picture on the wall. He waved a hand at the sound of Mark’s entrance without looking Mark’s way. Ev—who was, as of a few months ago when he had successfully defended his own doctoral dissertation in molecular biology, Dr. Evrett Reynolds—seemed preoccupied.