Kim Robinson - New York 2140

She filmed the pickup trucks that were going to convey her transpolar emigrants from the jail to the Assisted Migration . These were very hefty pickup trucks, with snow tires taller than she was. Polar bears did not hibernate, she was told, so during their trip south they would be confined to the big animal rooms at the stern end of the airship’s gondola, configured to make a single big enclosure. Apparently it had been decided that they would tolerate the voyage better if they were accommodated communally. Amelia’s producers had prepared the room in advance of departure and stocked the craft’s freezers and refrigerators with the seal steaks needed to feed them en route.

As the local program officers used a crane to hoist the drugged and netted bears into the pickup truck, then drove them over to the airship, Amelia filmed and spoke her voice-over, ad-libbing in the knowledge that later editing would change it all anyway. “Some people seem to not understand what a problem extinction is! Hard to imagine that, but it’s clearly true, because we haven’t been able to get everyone to agree that moving some polar bears back into a truly polar environment is their last chance for survival in the wild. Twenty bears are going to be transported eventually, that’s about ten percent of all the polar bears left in the wild. I’ll be taking six of them. So, if by doing that we help get them past this moment into a viable future, their genetic bottleneck from this century is going to be as skinny as a lifestraw, but it’s better than extinction, right? It’s either this or the end, so I say, load ’em up and ship ’em out!”

The bears, sedated and netted, looked disheveled and yellowy. The huge pickups backed up to the stern bay door of her airship’s gondola, where a little portable crane was wheeled up and used to lift one netted bear at a time onto a small forklift, which was dwarfed by its load but held the ground well enough to hum up the ramp into the animals’ room. During their trip the room would be kept at arctic temperatures, and everything a polar bear might want in autumn was on board. The trip south was scheduled to take two weeks, weather permitting.

Soon after the bears were on board they were ready for liftoff. Frans slung their hook and off they went, rising a bit slower than usual, being some five tons heavier.

A week later they ran into a tropical storm coming north from Trinidad and Tobago, and Amelia asked Frans to head for the west fringe of the storm’s circulation, which would give her viewers a dramatic edge-on view of what might become a hurricane, while also pushing them southward in its counterclockwise flow. The storm was now named Harold, which was Amelia’s younger brother’s name, so she started calling the storm Little Brother. As a totality it was moving north at about twenty kilometers an hour, but its western edge was whirlpooling such that its winds pushed southward at about two hundred kilometers an hour. “That gives us a net assist south of about a hundred and eighty kilometers per hour,” Amelia informed her future audience, “which is great, even if it only lasts for a few hours. Because the natives are getting a little restless, it seems to me.”

She said this with her usual moue of tolerant dismay, her raised eyebrows and bugged-out eyes giving her a Lucille Ball look, always good. The camera flies buzzing around her would add to the effect with their fish-eye lenses.

The bears were supposed to be entering into their winter mode, which was not hibernation but rather a state that made them kind of like zombie bears, as one of the program officers in Churchill had put it. But it sure didn’t sound like it to Amelia. From aft came subsonic, stomach-vibrating, vaguely leonine roars, and also barks suggestive of the Hound of the Baskervilles. “Unhappy polar bears?” she asked. “Are they looking out the windows at the storm? Are they hungry? They seem so upset!”

Then they were caught by the outer edge of Harold, and for almost ten minutes the noise of the wind was tremendous. They were buffeted hard, and whether the bears were still complaining was hard to tell, as it was too loud to hear anything, but Amelia’s stomach was still vibrating like a drumhead next to another drum getting hammered, so it seemed like they probably were. “Hold on, folks!” Amelia said loudly. “You know what this is like—the airship is going to be loud until it gets up to speed. Of course there’s hardly any resistance to us speeding up; it’s not like a ship on the ocean, which took me a while to understand, because up here we basically move with the wind, so the wind doesn’t fly by us, like it would a ship or even an airplane. If we shut down our turbines, we just get carried along with whatever wind there is. That’s why we can fly in hurricanes without danger, as long as we don’t try to go anywhere other than where it wants us to go. Just bob along like a cork on a stream, slow or fast, doesn’t matter to us. Right, Frans?”

Although this time it was pretty bumpy. There was turbulence as the whirlpool of wind interacted with the slower air around it; things would go better when they moved a bit farther into the hurricane, as Amelia explained, not for the first time. Even so, it would still stay a little bumpy; they were in clouds, and a cloud was like a diffuse lake, with some choppiness in it created by the variable distribution of water droplets, so that even when they were pulled to the ambient wind speed and were flowing in the flow, they were also deep in cloud, and the quick shuddering vibration and occasional dip or swing meant the sense of speed was still there, even though they couldn’t see anything. “This bumpiness is part of the laminar flow,” Amelia narrated. “The cloud itself is shimmying!”

Although maybe it was just the airship, flexing its aerogel frame. Amelia felt sure it was not usually this bumpy inside clouds, even hurricane clouds. They weren’t resisting the wind, weren’t trying to crab out of the storm; just riding the flow, with Frans trying to modulate the up-and-down of the clouds’ internal waves. And yet still they were rocking hard, irregularly, both up and down and side to side.

“I don’t know,” Amelia announced, “it doesn’t make sense, but I’m wondering if this rocking is being caused by the bears?”

It didn’t seem likely, but nothing else seemed more likely. Probably the bears weren’t throwing themselves from side to side in an organized manner; anyway, she hoped not. They weighed some eight hundred pounds each, so even without coordinating their motions, even just banging about, or perhaps fighting each other, throwing each other around like sumo wrestlers—yes, they would certainly have enough mass to rock the boat. The airship was only semirigid at best, and highly sensitive to internal shifts of weight. So, if they were carrying an enraged cargo… “Bears and bears and bears, oh my!”

She went back down the central hallway to take a look. There was a window in the hallway door to the animals’ half of the gondola, so she grabbed a hairclip camera and clipped it to her hair, and looked in to see how they were doing.

The first thing she saw was blood. “Oh no!” Red on the walls, some of it spattered drops, some of it claw marks. “Frans, what’s going on here!”

“All systems normal,” Frans reported.

“What do you mean! Take a look!”

“Look where?”

“In the bears’ room!”

Amelia went to the tool closet in the hall, opened it, and took a tranquilizer dart gun from the mounting on the back wall. Returning to the hall door and looking through the window, she saw nothing, so she unlocked the door and was immediately knocked back as the door burst open into her. Bloodied white giants ran past her like dogs, like immense albino Labrador retrievers, or big men in ill-fitting white fur coats running on all fours. She lay sprawled against the far wall, playing dead, and luckily did not catch any of the creatures’ attention. She shot one with a trank dart in the haunch as it ran forward along the hall toward the bridge, then when they were out of sight she scrambled to her feet and ran to the tool closet. She leaped in and pulled the door closed after her, twisted the handle latch into place on the inside, and right after that heard the door thumped hard on the outside. Great big paw whacking it! Whacking it hard!