Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

Today the plan had been to send a small group out in the buggies to explore the grounds to the south of us. I had been eager to leave the ship, but at the last minute one of the coopers decided he wanted to go, and I was forced into another eight hours of watching the sand from the hoop-rig near the stern. The buggies—we have four of them, small six-wheeled dune crawlers, each equipped with shock-prongs and a large sand-visor—zipped over the sand and away from the Halcyon with the buzzing speed of small insects. No one waved.

Of the dirwhals I have yet to see I know this: they are large beasts, well toothed, long and finned, with a wide head that tapers to a flat tail, but their skin is the color of coal, which makes them easy to spot against the dunes. They have been known to attack shipper-tanks, but they are no match for the ordnance in our bomb-lances, and accounts of dirwhal aggression are at this point little more than spook stories, things of the past. It’s possible they’ve evolved to fear and avoid us. It’s more likely, though, that as their numbers have dwindled they have simply moved farther out into the basin, and as a result the hunting strategy aboard the Halcyon is straightforward: wherever they go, we follow.

In the spotter’s manual, there is a color page delineating dirwhals by genus. Eight of twelve are crossed out, and two of the remaining four don’t render into usable energy. According to the timeline provided, hunting began in earnest forty-seven years after the Shift—the same year the Gulf drained and Further North refroze—and it’s taken us all of three generations to thin out what at first seemed an unlimited resource and the solution to all our energy problems. They are known to burrow under the sand to avoid the sun, but they sleep and feed on the surface. It’s been established that running an electrical current through the sand rouses them, but each day we send buggies to plunge a charge, and so far the pronging has yet to reveal anything at all.

Months ago, I telecomped my sister—yes, you, Tuva—that things here weren’t so different from home: no perceivable seasons, weather that drives you into yourself, the illusion of unlimited space, shifting loyalties, petty grievances that burrow and sprout unexpectedly into meadows of resentment. That’s nice of you to say, my father comped back. I asked to speak directly to you, and he told me you weren’t interested in coming on the line.

I could have insisted. I could have explained myself more clearly. Instead I cut the connection. Later, Renaldo told me I had a message. It read: Everything is worse . I stared at your message for an hour, typing and erasing different versions of a single apology before giving up and resolving that tomorrow, or the next day, I would try again. I never did. Weeks went by. Months. And now I’ve been informed that we are out of range for communication with anyone outside of the basin.

Of note: there is no wind here in the Gulf, and the stillness is eerie. Yesterday, Renaldo mentioned that up in the hoop-rig, high above the deck and away from the engine noise, he had the sensation that we were the only moving thing for miles. It felt, he said, like he was the last man in the universe, cut loose from the earth, drifting through a painting.

january 15

This morning, Captain Tonker summoned all hands to the aft-deck. We gathered, and he stood above us on the bridge, brow furrowed against the sun. He’s a terse man, not given to conversation. He’s made it clear that he will brook neither dissent nor opinion. Those of us in the bow see him rarely. But what he had come to tell us was now that we were moving farther and farther into the basin, those on watch were to be spotting for two things: dirwhals, and other shipper-tanks, which, given our current location, would most likely belong to the Firsties. A collective groan, followed by hissing, went up among the crew. Protection kooks, someone explained to me when I asked who the Firsties were. Bushard added: kamikaze environmentalists; degenerates; cultists; criminals. Captain Tonker held up his hand for silence.

Their aim, he said, is to put us out of a job. Shipper-tanks have been dodging Firsties for years, and between them and Captain Tonker it’s a pointed circle of antagonism. He went on to explain that as the number of dirwhals has decreased, the number of preservationists active in the dunes has tripled, and their aim is the disruption—sabotage—of expeditions like ours, either by the violent immobilization of licensed shipper-tanks or by provoking us into firing on them. The law is on our side, he said, but they care nothing for the law. He ground his fist in his palm, and asked us how we felt about such heartlessness? So, his order: spot the Firsties, and report them, but under no circumstances were we to engage, even if provoked. They had cameras, they wanted us to fire on them, and they would stop at nothing to manufacture an incident, even if it came at great cost to their organization. He asked us if we understood. We answered: yes, of course.

No one knows how old Captain Tonker is, but we know from the coopers that as a young man he’d been mate aboard a small fleet of shipper-tanks during the Great Hunt of ’78: the hinge-creak moment when it became clear just how lucrative the dunes could be. He’d been aboard a buggy doing a routine sand-prong, and whatever charge they sent down roused the earth itself. An entire dirwhal colony came to the surface. The lances were still rudimentary in those days—plagued by poor penetration and ordnance malfunction—but it didn’t matter: by the end of the second day, so much unrendered viscera had been spilled that his buggy had trouble finding traction in the sand. They were cutting and cooking for weeks. Flames licked the tryworks and illuminated the night sand, where the dead dirwhals were rolled together like pallets of log, awaiting their turn at the cutting platform. They were their own sun, a pulsar of energy that incinerated for twenty-four hours a day, and even so some of the dirwhals they lanced fell rotten before the buggies could pull them to the docks. The voyage had lasted all of two months, and taken them no more than two hundred miles into the Gulf. With the payout he got, he bought an island off the Canadian coast. Afterward he was made captain, and rechristened his ship the Halcyon .

“Ah, the good old days,” Bushard said when he heard the story. “Renaldo, answer me this: where have all the flowers gone?”

Renaldo shrugged. “Tonker’s got ’em all,” someone said back.

Four weeks have passed since my last entry. Every day we wake up, scan the dunes from the deck of the Halcyon for movement, and see none. The only news delivered on Thursday came after Renaldo ran a lance check and discovered that half of them were temporarily inoperable on account of disuse. “That matters why ?” Tom, one of the coopers, had the misfortune of saying as Captain Tonker emerged from the steerage. To our great pleasure, he was demoted on the spot; to our displeasure, he now sleeps with the rest of us in the bow. “Every downside has a downside,” Renaldo told him when he complained that he was sick of sleeping with those of us he considered below his station. “Welcome to the melting pot.”

january 29

Tuva, a question: How long do you stare at something before you realize it isn’t going to change? How long before you understand your own misfortune to be something other than a series of bad breaks? Here is my memory of home: long, dark days; a small-efficiency trailer; an expanse of frozen tundra; my inability to set anything in the right direction; a growing desperation that would not quiet. During the winter we slept in our boots. Our father moved us there, following a job, from Vancouver: you were five, and I was six. Every morning, he kicked around the kitchen, then put on his goggles and one-piece and hopped the bus that took him to the upland digging grounds, where he worked on a crew that removed layers of barely melted permafrost using outdated and rusty scalping equipment.