24 - REMY

Spring 21, Sector Annum 106, 10h30

Gregorian Calendar: April 9

 

 

The outsiders come and go as fluidly as water. Soo-Sun disappeared as soon as we mounted our horses and began our trek up the forested mountain. Osprey decided not to join us, much to Soren’s disappointment. It’s me, Vale, Miah, Soren, Chariya, and Squall. We’ve been riding in silence for well over two hours. At first, the further we went, the darker and deeper the forest became. But then the trail sloped upwards, and the trees have been changing, growing closer together but taller and thinner. The trail is steep and slow going for the horses. The air is moist, with that wet earth smell that I find myself taking deep breaths of every few minutes. We can’t have covered more than nine or ten kilometers at most, and I’m amazed at how the flora has shifted so dramatically in such a short distance. It must be the elevation.

I sniff the air as the wind changes direction, and then notice the sound of rushing water. The path turns and descends a little ways, and soon we’re at the bank of a stream that runs downhill. This little clearing is idyllic, like something from a storybook. Lush green grass fills the spaces between the trees and the rushing creek, and yellow and blue wildflowers provide splashes of color. Though I usually prefer pen and paper, I find myself longing for a brush and stretched canvas to paint this pristine little meadow.

Chariya pulls up and dismounts, letting her reins fall. She dips her hands into the stream and pulls up a palm full of crystal clear water. “See this?” she says. “Clean. Pure. Drinkable.” She puts her hands to her mouth and slurps. “We’ve been working for decades to develop a system that uses organic materials to filter and purify water contaminated by fallout from the Religious Wars and from Old world extraction operations. Only in the last twenty or thirty years, have we managed to truly make a difference.”

Vale pulls up his horse at my side, his leg brushing mine. “On our way to Normandy, Osprey knew which streams were clean and which weren’t,” he says.

Chariya taps the side of her head. “We’ve got every square meter of the Wilds mapped and it’s all in here.”

“Maybe Chariya does,” Squall chuckles. “For the rest of us, we have our astrolabes.”

Chariya smiles at the compliment and stands up, stretching her back. Her arms sweep out, encompassing the stream, the path, and the deepening woods around us. “After the Wars, new forests took root in areas that hadn’t been completely devastated. Those trees sucked the chemicals from the soil and water into their roots and grew off of the ruination of the past. Some of those who survived and lived out here in the Wilds began helping the natural process along by planting more trees and by living with as little an impact as possible. Those people became Outsiders.”

“We didn’t call ourselves Outsiders at first,” Squall cuts in. “But Okarians began calling us that, and we rather liked the term.” He smiles slightly at Chariya, who seems unperturbed by the interruption.

“In the Sector, our ancestors started farming again,” she continues. “Cutting the trees, controlling the land, building irrigation canals, planting seeds, beginning the same destructive cycle that always leads to larger populations, more demand for agriculture, conflicts over resources, climate change, environmental devastation, and ultimately to the destruction of large swaths of our world.

“It seems every generation, every civilization, makes some form of the same mistake. We forget—or ignore—that nature has intrinsic value beyond resources for our material gain. We believe we can harness all of nature, lash it to our plow, and bend it to our own will with no consequences. We believe we can treat nature like cattle, cattle like machines, and humans like machines, and what comes of the prosperity we extract through these unnatural means? The wealthy and powerful become ever more wealthy and more powerful, while the poor and oppressed grow ever more enslaved. We think we improve on nature through science, through advanced agricultural practices, through manipulation of DNA, through this and that and the other. But we are always wrong. There is only nature, and we are part of it. If we set ourselves in opposition to nature, it will always rise up against us, eventually. And it will win.”

I sense that, like me, Vale, Miah, and Soren are having a hard time not interrupting. I clamp my mouth shut, shift in my saddle, and let the woman have her say. The only way we can hope to convince her to join us is if we allow that. As Rhinehouse said, it has to be the Outsiders’ decision. We can’t force them and we can’t bully them. All we can do is state our case.

“The Outsiders, though, chose another path,” Chariya continues. “They realized they could live off the land without chopping down the trees, without destroying the ecosystems that had sprung up in humanity’s absence. We try, where possible—like with our water filtration systems—to nurse the ecosystems back to life. It’s a harder life, yes, and we make sacrifices. It’s why we’re always on the move. It’s why we choose to limit our families to two or three children at most. Death, from disease and injury, or a lack of the latest medical care, is more common here than in the Sector. But we accept that. We are willing to pay that price because we believe that death is a natural part of life. It is not something to fear. In death is rebirth, it is both an ending and a beginning.”

I think of Tai and my mom. In both cases, their deaths were a new beginning. But I can’t accept it, not like Chariya. I would do anything to bring them back to me.

She pulls another handful of water up to her mouth and drinks, then turns to run her fingers over the feathery leaves of a fern. “It’s because of the choices we’ve made that we can live as a part of the ecosystem. We feed off of the natural world, we take no more than we need, we move to give the ecosystem time to regenerate, and we die natural deaths and are returned to the earth from whence we came. The old scripture says ‘For dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return’ and we practice that. We don’t hold ourselves apart from the land and the other animals and plants we share it with, but rather consider ourselves to be a part of the land. It’s because of the choices we’ve made that I can drink this water without fear for my health.”

“What does all this have to do with stopping the Sector?” Miah blurts, unable to contain himself any longer.

“It is because of the choices the Sector has made that you are here asking for our help,” Chariya responds calmly. I cock my head slightly to the side as I realize that wasn’t exactly an answer to Miah’s question. “Be patient, Jeremiah Sayyid. There’s yet one more thing to see before I can fully answer your question. It’s just down this valley, another fifteen minutes’ ride.”

She nudges her horse with her boots—the Outsiders seem to be able to guide them without ever touching the reins, and indeed, Chariya’s horse isn’t even wearing a bridle. Meanwhile, I’m still occasionally forced to grip Lakshmi’s mane for dear life when she sets out at a fast, bumpy trot without my permission.

Chariya and Squall lead us down into a little ravine, where we follow a series of descending switchbacks into a larger valley. As they lead, I mull over what Chariya told us. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. As much as I want to disagree, to argue with her, I wonder if there’s truth to what she said. I never thought the Resistance might not be asking enough questions. Questions that go beyond the Sector, beyond my family and friends. What about the land we take our resources from? What about the animals we push out with our cities and towns? Is it possible that even the Resistance isn’t going far enough? That the Outsiders have chosen a better path—to forego the advances of science to live within the rhythms of the earth?

“But all the things we’d have to give up,” I mutter, almost to myself. “Museums, art, music, turning the lights on and off at night….”

“They haven’t given those things up,” Vale says, interrupting my thoughts. Here the trail is wide enough for two horses to ride together, and Vale’s caught up to me just as I was thinking aloud. “They still have music and art and entertainment. We saw that last night.”

I nod, but don’t say anything more. I can’t quite process my thoughts right now.

“But you’re right,” he says wryly, glancing at me sideways. “I do quite enjoy electricity and hot showers, and Sector medicine has done wonders for hundreds of thousands of people.”

“It’s done terrible things, too,” I remind him. My voice comes out harsher than I intended, and I regret my words when I see him wince. “It’s all about balance,” I offer, trying for a middle ground. “We know the Sector’s gone too far. But do we have to live in the Wilds and abandon everything we’ve built in order to preserve our environment?”

Vale shrugs, looking thoughtful. “The Sector has done some amazing things. We can’t devalue that. But out here, they live just as peacefully.”

“You think you live peacefully?” Chariya calls from the front of the line. “You think your people are innocent of environmental destruction and devastation?” She holds her hand up and her horse pulls to a stop. “The Resistance and the Sector are squabbling over something that is of relatively minor importance to us. We don’t rely on cultivated seeds at all—what difference should it make to us, if they are hybridized or genetically modified to taste better or to supposedly enhance health? We get our nourishment from foods that grow naturally, on their own time. Your food, your seeds, your battles, mean nothing to me. But what you’re about to see is a different matter.”

Up ahead, bright splashes of sunlight paint the ground where the tree line disappears, and the stream we’re following drops out of sight. Chariya leads us down and out of the trees, and as we emerge into the light, the sight before me steals my breath away.

The hilltop across the valley has been stripped bare, cut away, and dug out. Terraces of rock and dirt layer deep into the ground, wholly unnatural, burrowing into the earth like an inverse beehive. The little stream we’ve been following drops down to meet a larger river, and where the two meet, eddies of yellow, red, and brown water swirl away downstream, evidence of chemical effluence that will carry far beyond this site alone. Where the orange-red stream tumbles through the valley, the lush grasses from our side of the river have died, and the shrubs and trees are mere skeletons, dead leaves clinging to branches that can no longer nourish them.

“Uranium mining,” Chariya says, bitterness rife in her voice. “Of a new size and scale. This is not the first of its kind, but it is comparatively recent. I can’t take you to the mine itself because the ground is too toxic. But up above you can see the lake where they keep the slurry.

Miah and Vale are utterly speechless. Soren looks almost unsurprised, his brow furrowed, mouth set in a hard line. For my part, aside from the clear implications of the devastation at hand, I’m not entirely sure what Chariya is talking about.

“Pit mining is illegal,” Vale whispers. “No one’s done it since the Old World.”

“But … I thought …” Miah stammers, “modified hydraulic fracking is the more common … is how we....”

Soren shakes his head, bitterly, and for once does not say anything to rebuke Vale’s thoughts.

My mind races back to everything I learned about Old World extraction practices. I remember Doctor Malik explaining that one of the things that contributed to the beginning of the religious wars was something not very religious at all—resources. Particularly water. Even as the ice caps melted and glaciation decreased, flooding many of the old cities and changing national borders, the amount of drinkable water shrank dramatically. Partly because of dams and diverting water for agriculture, and partly because of water pollution thanks to mining practices that contaminated groundwater for hundreds of kilometers around extraction sites. I don’t know much about how mines work, but I remember seeing some of the photos of the effluent and runoff from those sites. It was disgusting. No wonder everything around here is dead.

Chariya shakes her head. “Yes, once upon a time, the Sector relied exclusively upon relatively small scale methods of deep in-situ mining, or hydraulic fracking. Although no less destructive to the groundwater, hydraulic fracking at least didn’t require cutting out hillsides and destroying large swaths of the surrounding area.”

“But ... why?” Vale asks.

“Listen to yourselves!” Chariya says, her voice sharp, rebuking. “Are you so blind as to think the airships you fly across the Sector, the hovercraft you drive, the transport craft you use to power your food distribution lines do not require power? That the uranium and plutonium that fuels them comes out of thin air and disappears harmlessly once used? I, too, was a Sector citizen once. Like you, Jeremiah, I was an engineer. I worked on a team that refined and designed many of the nuclear reactor cores that now power your transportation through Okaria. But as I began to understand what uranium mining does to the environment, I abdicated my role and applied for a transfer to the Farms. When I realized what a farce that was, too, I fled, and found a home with the Outsiders, the only people who recognize the sacrifices we must make in order to avoid sacrificing everything around us.”

“I may not have left the Sector for the same reasons you did, but I don’t want this destruction any more than you do,” Vale says, his voice strong and clear. “You want to fight this battle? You need allies just like we do. We’re willing to fight alongside you.”

I remember watching Vale give his graduation speech from the SRI all those months ago. He was charismatic, determined, persuasive. Even as he proclaimed the virtues of the Sector and spoke out against everything I stood for, I almost wanted to believe him. Now, I really do believe him, and more than that, pride has welled up in my belly and made it flip-flop in funny ways.

She shakes her head. “You think it’s as simple as that, as lines drawn on a map? As a battle to be won or lost? It’s never so simple. What happens if you win, Valerian Orleán? Who is to say that the sins of your parents will not one day become the sins of your children?”

Vale recoils as if slapped. His eyes narrow and his fingers turn white on the reins.

Miah cuts in before Vale’s anger gets the best of him. “You can’t fault Vale for what his parents have done. You can’t blame someone for ignorance.”

“Is that so?” she demands. “You can excuse someone who participates blindly in a system of injustice, who never questions where his meat and his fuel comes from, who never questions what is happening beyond the veil of propaganda and political speeches?”

“Yes,” Jeremiah says without hesitation. “You can and you should. Vale did question it, which is why we are here, talking with you. The people of Okaria have had their agency forcibly taken from them, especially those on the Farms and many in the factory towns who have had their ability to make choices, to think critically, taken from them by the Sector’s ‘system of injustice’, as you say. Will you fight against that, or will you continue to blame them for something they can’t control?”

“It’s too late,” Chariya says with a vehemence like a hot wind. “What about the privileged in the capital? Has their agency been eliminated, too?”

“In many ways, yes,” Miah says. I’m struck by how he has become such a forceful spokesman for our cause.

“No, Jeremiah. You are wrong. The people of the Okarian Sector had the chance to reject destruction before Valerian’s parents rose to power. Before Soren’s mother rose to power. That Faustian bargain was made long before you were even born. Now the Sector has chosen, and you all will reap the consequences.”

She turns away, staring out at the ruined landscape before us. She puts one hand over her eyes to shade them, silent for a few moments. The destruction is as thorough as if a wildfire had ripped through.

“You act as though you’re above those consequences,” Soren says.

“As if these terrible things aren't part of our fight, too” I add.

“We can’t tell you what to do or ask you to fight our battles for us,” Soren speaks up. “But this isn’t just our battle. It’s yours as much as it is ours. And if you choose to stand aside now, we can’t stop them from continuing along this path, you’ve sealed your own fate as much as ours.”

“You say those in the Sector made their decision long ago,” Vale says. “That there is no turning back from that Faustian bargain. We’ll, you’re right.”

I snap my head around.

“You’re right and you’re culpable. You knew the truth, yet you didn’t stay and try to change things. You left and opted out. Well, I left, too. Soren left. Miah left. The Alexander’s left. We left, but we’re not opting out. We’re fighting back. You think purifying one stream and living like nomads is going to save the world? It’s not. It’s important, yes, but your work isn’t going to get rid of pit mines like this. We believe things can change, but only if people know the truth. And we can’t help them see the truth alone. We need you.”

“No decision has been made, friends,” Squall says. “And many of us heed our own counsel as much as we heed our Elders. But we want you to understand our situation. We’ve been keeping tabs on the Resistance and Sector activities for years, but you, if I’m not mistaken, know little of how we live. Chariya has voiced our questions and objections and we will have to think on them long and hard before any of us cast our lot in with you.”

Just then, I hear the roar of an old-model hovercar in the distance, coming at us at speed. Suddenly afraid, I jump and put my hand to my empty gun holster, thinking it can only be Sector forces, and my horse startles and shies. But the car pulls up to a sharp stop next to us and I glance over to see Osprey driving, a huge grin smeared across her face.

“Goddamnit Osprey,” Squall curses, “you’re so loud, you’ll bring the whole mountain down.”

“Thought you might want to know I was coming,” Osprey says, not in the least bit chagrined.

“Where did you get that hovercar?” Vale asks.

“Where do you think?” Osprey replies. “We stole it from you. From the Resistance, actually, not the Sector. One of the bases forgot to lock this baby up one night, and I nabbed it.”

“Which one?” Remy demand.

“Not telling,” she smirks. “Ask around, maybe someone will own up to it.”

“Turn on the silencer, or I’ll shoot the damn thing down,” Squall snarls.

“Okay, okay.” She bends down to pull out a knob that silences the hovercar. “Now, what’s going on?” Osprey asks, climbing out and standing next to Soren.

Chariya looks to Squall, but Squall is now shading his eyes, squinting into the distance, past Osprey and the hovercar toward where the woods open out into the valley, where a crystal clear spring emerges from the forest to join with the poisoned river. We whirl and follow his eyes to see a figure emerge from the forest’s shade. It’s a strange silhouette, though, almost monstrous. The shoulders are enormous, and unbalanced, and the figure seems to drag its legs as though wounded or carrying something very heavy. For a split second I’m afraid of it, its lumbering, awkward gait the stuff of children’s nightmares.

Then the figure starts waving its arms and sinks to the ground, and in an instant both Chariya and Squall have wheeled their mounts and are pounding down the gentle slope of our side of the valley. Vale, Miah and I exchange glances, and we, too, urge our horses forward, riding down the hillside as fast as we dare. Osprey motions for Soren to climb into her hovercar and their doors thud shut, then quickly passing us as they breeze over the poisoned river to join Chariya and Squall. Soren’s horse plods along dutifully behind us.

As we approach I realize it’s not a monster. Far from it—it’s a man. And he’s carrying another limp, bedraggled human over his shoulders. When Squall and Chariya dismount, bend down to press fingers to his neck, checking for a pulse, and to examine his wounds, I pull up short next to them. They turn the man over, and I realize with a heavy shock that the dirty, bloodied man is Chan-Yu, and the woman he was carrying, like a deer on a hunter’s shoulders, is Linnea Heilmann.