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The woman braced to a halt. She stepped out of the solar-ped wagon and scanned the horizon, checked her compass. A rangy hound hopped out as well, circled the wagon and relieved itself. The day would heat up soon enough, forcing them to rest. She needed to find a suitable area to set up their midday camp. She spotted an outcropping and headed onward.

She called for the dog. “Come on Jasper, let’s go.”  

The Settlers had  traveled north. Beyond the desert of the Americas. To the lush open-border valleys and along the coastal tributaries and tidal pools of Alaska, the Northwest Territories, Yukon, Nunavut, Greenland.   

Russia had long ago succumbed to joint military invasions led by the North Koreans and Chinese during the Third World War. These two countries, in tenuous alliance, now occupied the former Soviet bloc countries including Siberia, the most fertile land mass left anywhere. Although, that honorary title would certainly dissolve itself if corporate dictatorship continued to exhaust the land at its present rate.

The Third World War had not been about religion or oil, but something even more basic. The right to food. No one could have predicted the speed with which global warming escalated during the twenty-first century. Crops failed. Livestock suffered. Fisheries closed. The stage was set for famine, war, and ultimately, the death of hundreds of millions. Just in time to usher in the second act, the Great Glacial Melt of 2087. As if God himself were adding insult to injury. In an instant, the seas opened wide, swallowing whole some of the greatest cities of the twentieth century: Shanghai, Tokyo, Dubai, New York. Not that it mattered by then. Mites and bed bugs had laid waste to entire Zip codes. Rats carried with them a resilient strain of avian flu near lethal to humans. Water doped with every known pharmaceutical poured out of city taps. Disbanding into small nomadic tribes, moving north, these were the only options left.

After the wars and natural catastrophes, human activity slowed to a quarter of what it was during the Technology Revolution. For the next few hundred years, the earth could finally spend time cooling off, repairing itself, seeking balance; its inhabitants duly humbled, for the most part. Native plants took hold again. Forests cobbled together. Scavengers thrived. Coyotes, hyenas, crows, and vultures; raccoons, pigeons, squirrels, humans. Larger predators like bears and wolves re-inhabited their respected niches and feasted on cows and deer.

The oceans, slower to recover, teemed with algae and jellyfish blooms, the occasional school of minnows. Where before coral beds had once sheltered dense populations of angel fish, lionfish, feather stars, oriental sweetlips, and gobies among the multitudes of species, they now crumbled to dust, the seabed below as barren as a paved lot.

Genetic modification and delimiting crop varieties had stunted the ability of many crops to adapt quickly enough to the extreme climate swings. Seed banks around the world had been stripped bare. But by some miracle, Svalbard had escaped unscathed. Or rather, a tectonic shift had hermetically sealed the opening, thus far thwarting any attempt to excavate its holdings. Speculators imagined a veritable Noah’s Ark of food, a feast of mythical proportions.  

She soon enough reached the rock shelter, kudzu webs casting a stranglehold on nearby tree limbs, a stream gurgled nearby. The woman hacked through the vines, matting them together for a cushion on the hard stone, covered them with a blanket. The dog secured the territory, sniffing the perimeter, marking his scent.

Roasted chicory root provided an adequate substitute for coffee. She set the solar kettle in the full sun and foraged for edibles. A salad of dandelions, rock tripe, boiled horsetail root, pine shoots, and juniper berries would suffice for now. Then a hunt after tea, once the temperature cooled.

She awoke with a start. Jasper’s fur stood on end, his head alert, a growl gaining traction. Just beyond the canopy of vines, the kettle whistled, then briskly stopped.

“Hello?” A man’s voice. Jasper barked low and guttural. She instinctively grabbed the dog’s collar.

To be continued…

When I was a student living in Okinawa Prefecture, I would occasionally hear about a little-known tourist attraction called Yurei No Kabe, or, The Wall of Ghostly Voices. Located on Iriomote Island near the Maryudu Falls, you’ll find hidden amid the dense overgrowth and lush coves of orchids and sweet alyssum, a deeply pocked overhang stretching seventeen metres tall. I have tried to find it on Google’s satellite imagery, but alas, close-in detail is not yet available.

According to legend, Buddhist monks, upon breaking their vows of silence were banished from the monastery and sealed into the caves where they lived out the remainder of their lives. Their voices, longing to be heard even after death, escaped their physical confines and tunneled into the caves to keep others from falling into similar unhappy fates. Visitors came to the site to to listen at the walls of the cave and could find answers to their most worrisome questions, just by speaking into a hole in the cave.

In the past, answers came swiftly and accurately, but over time, the answers have degraded to the point where they are incomprehensible or not even forthcoming.

The reality, however, is that dime-sized fissures in the wall penetrate deep into the rockbed, some tunneling several hundred metres to reach the other side of the cliff. These tunnels are lined with an unusual specimen of flatworms, each only a couple centimetres long. Suckers at the head and tail allow these indigenous creatures to suction themselves to a surface such that their mucousy forms can either sway slack or stretch taut. In this manner, the slightest breeze of damp tunneled air causes the millions of worms to audibly vibrate at a frequency similar to a human voice.

Their bodies are sensitive enough that they can register the subtle nuances of human language and shift their forms to correspond in a complementary way to the question just posed. In this manner, their vibrations were able to provide “answers” to the hopeless souls that stumbled by the cliff.

Recent climactic fluctuations, however, have irreversibly altered their fragile environment to the point where their sensitivities have declined and the species as a whole are quickly becoming extinct. An acquaintance of mine who recently visited the cave tells me how some of the fissures are so clogged with the deteriorating bodies of dead worms that human intervention is periodically necessary to clear out the debris to provide ventilation for the remaining flatworms.

Whispering a question into one of the clear passages, “What can we do to help you?” my friend received the following cryptic reply, “No creature stands still for long.”

®2009