Peter Watts - Beyond the Rift

The volunteers’ shelter squatted in the distance like a circus tent at Armageddon. A tired-looking woman inside had given us shovels and pitchforks, and directed us to the nearest pile of unmanned debris. We began to pitch pieces of someone’s life into an enormous blue dumpster. Anne and I worked side by side, stopping occasionally to pass Jessica back and forth.

I wondered what new treasures I was about to unearth. Some priceless family heirloom, miraculously spared? A complete collection of Jethro Tull CDs? Just a game, of course; the whole area had been combed, the owners had come and despaired of salvage, there was only wreckage beneath the wreckage. Still, every now and then I thought I saw something shining in the dirt, a bottle cap or a gum wrapper or a Rolex—

My pitchfork punched through a chunk of plaster and slid into something soft. It dropped suddenly under my weight, as if lubricated. It stopped.

I heard the muted hiss of escaping gas. Something smelled, very faintly, of rotten meat.

This isn’t what I think it is. The crews have already been here. They used trained dogs and infrared scopes and they’ve already found all the bodies, they couldn’t have missed anything, there’s nothing here but wood and plaster and cement—

I tightened my grip on the pitchfork, pulled up on the shaft. The tines rose up from the plaster, slick, dark, wet.

Anne was laughing. I couldn’t believe it. I looked up, but she wasn’t looking at me or the pitchfork or the coagulating stain. She was looking across the wreckage to a Ford pickup, loaded with locals and their rifles, inching its way down a pathway cleared in the road.

“Get a load of the bumper,” she said, oblivious to my discovery.

There was a bumper sticker on the driver’s side. I saw the caricature of a storm cloud, inside the classic red circle with diagonal slash. And a slogan.

A warning, to whom it may concern: Clouds, we’re gonna kick your ass.

Jess takes off the headphones as I join her. She touches a button on the receiver. Cryptic wails, oddly familiar, rise from a speaker on the front of the device. We sit for a moment without speaking, letting the sounds wash over us.

Everything about her is so pale. I can barely see her eyebrows.

“Do they know where it’s headed?” Jess asks at last.

I shake my head. “There’s Hanford, but they’ve never gone after a reactor before. They say it might be trying to get up enough steam to go over the mountains. Maybe it’s going after Vancouver or SeaTac again.” I tap the box on her knees. “Hey, it might be laying plans even as we speak. You’ve been listening to that thing long enough, you should know what it’s saying by now.”

A distant flicker of sheet lightning strobes on the horizon. From Jessica’s receiver, a dozen voices wail a discordant crescendo.

“Or you could even talk to it,” I continue. “I saw the other day, they’ve got two-ways now. Like yours, only you can send as well as receive.”

Jess fingers the volume control. “It’s just a gimmick, Dad. These things couldn’t put out enough power to get heard over all the other stuff in the air. TV, and radio, and…” She cocks her head at the sounds coming from the speaker. “Besides, nobody understands what they’re saying anyway.”

“Ah, but they could understand us ,” I say, trying for a touch of mock drama.

“Think so?” Her voice is expressionless, indifferent.

I push on anyway. Talking at least helps paper over my fear a bit. “Sure. The big ones could understand, anyway. A storm this size must have an IQ in the six digits, easy.”

“I suppose,” Jess says.

Inside, something tears a little. “Doesn’t it matter to you?”

She just looks at me.

“Don’t you want to know?” I say. “We’re sitting here underneath this huge thing that nobody understands, we don’t know what it’s doing or why, and you sit there listening while it shouts at itself and you don’t seem to care that it changed everything overnight—”

But of course, she doesn’t remember that. Her memory doesn’t go back to when we thought that clouds were just…clouds. She never knew what it was like to rule the world, and she never expects to.

My daughter is indifferent to defeat.

Suddenly, unbearably, I just want to hold her. God Jess, I’m sorry we messed up so badly. With effort, I control myself. “I just wish you could remember the way it was.”

“Why?” she asks. “What was so different?”

I look at her, astonished. “Everything!”

“It doesn’t sound like it. They say we never understood the weather. There were hurricanes and tornadoes even before, and sometimes they’d smash whole cities, and nobody could stop them then either. So what if it happens because the sky’s alive, or just because it’s, you know, random?”

Because your mother is dead, Jess, and after all these years I still don’t know what killed her. Was it just blind chance? Was it the reflex of some slow, stupid animal that was only scratching an itch?

Can the sky commit murder?

“It matters,” is all I tell her. Even if it doesn’t make a difference.

The front is almost directly overhead now, like the mouth of a great black cave crawling across the heavens. West, all is clear. Above, the squall line tears the sky into jagged halves.

East, the world is a dark, murky green.

I feel so vulnerable out here. I glance back over my shoulder. The armoured house crouches at our backs, only the biggest trees left to keep it company. It’s been eight years and the storms still haven’t managed to dig us out. They got Mexico City, and Berlin, and the whole damn golden horseshoe, but our little house hangs in there like a festering cyst embedded in the landscape.

Then again, they probably just haven’t noticed us yet.

Reprieved. The thing in the sky had gone to sleep, at least in our corner of the world. The source of its awareness—sources, rather, for they were legion—had convected into the stratosphere and frozen, a billion crystalline motes of suspended intellect. By the time they came back down they’d be on the other side of the world, and it would take days for the rest of the collective conscious to fill the gap.

We used the time to ready our defences. I was inspecting the exoskeleton the contractors had just grafted onto the house. Anne was around front, checking the storm shutters. Our home had become monstrous, an angular fortress studded with steel beams and lightning rods. A few years earlier we would have sued anyone who did this to us. Today, we had gone into hock to pay for the retrofit.

I looked up at a faint roar from overhead. The sun reflected off a cluster of tiny cruciform shapes drawing contrails across the sky.

Cloud seeders. A common enough sight. In those days we still thought we could fight back.

“They won’t work,” Jess said seriously at my elbow.

I look down, startled. “Hey, Jess. Didn’t see you sneaking up on me.”

“They’re just getting the clouds mad,” she said, with all the certainty a four-year-old can muster. She squinted up into the blue expanse. “They’re just trying to kill the, um, the messenger.”

I squatted down, regarded her eye to eye. “And who told you that?” Not her mother, anyway.

“That woman. Talking to Mom.”

Not just a woman, I saw as I rounded the corner into the front yard. A couple: early twenties, mildly scruffy, both bearing slogans on their t-shirts. Love Your Mother the woman’s chest told me, over a decal of the earth from lunar orbit. The man’s shirt was more verbose: Unlimited growth, the creed of carcinoma . No room for a picture on that one.