Earth Thirst (The Arcadian Conflict) - By Mark Teppo Page 0,21
it?”
“The bank has a branch in Adelaide,” he says. He tells me the name of the bank. “They'll be expecting you.”
“And then what?” I ask.
“Find out what happened,” he says. “Find the reporter.”
Mere.
A strange emotion tugs at me. “And then what?” I repeat, at a loss of what else to say.
“Help me find the root of this poison before it infects all of Arcadia,” he says.
What other choice do I have, really? The rootless die after a while. They can't find soil that will nourish them, and the other method of staying alive is bloody.
It never ends well.
He gives me a different number to reach him at—a private line I can call directly. After I hang up, I scour the house, looking for a source of useful news. Fortunately, the caretaker is one of those who prefers to thumb through a paper over breakfast rather than scan a newsfeed on a computer. I find a stack of newspapers in a recycling bin in the spare bedroom, but there's only a week's worth. If there was a story to be found in the Southern Ocean, the world has moved on already.
Australian elections are coming up and the front-runner has just been caught in the sort of scandal that would derail a US candidate, but as Down Under isn't as tightly wound as North America, the media has to work pretty hard to make the story seem worthy of the attention they're giving it. Piracy is up along the Somalian coast. People are still killing each other in Central Africa. Countries in the Middle East are changing governments. Again. Though it has been a long time since much dramatic change swept across Outremer. It used to take centuries for these lands to change hands, and now it is a matter of decades. A pipeline rupture near the Black Sea has caught the media's fancy as well as a story about infidelity between a Hollywood power couple. Based on the amount of column inches devoted to each story, it's hard to gauge which is the worse disaster, though I suspect the Hollywood couple's agents are milking the story a bit as neither has had a decent hit in the last five years.
The ecological and environmental impact of the pipeline rupture makes me want to run back to the woods and hide underground, but that's been the reaction for decades now and what has it gotten us? Arcadia weeps as the world dies a little bit more, and we're all incrementally closer to death. All of us.
Some more quickly than others.
There are scabs on the knuckles of my right hand and, compulsively, I pick one off. There is no blood, but the flesh underneath is pale.
“Careful,” I whisper to myself, “you could scar.”
Wouldn't that be a novelty?
I could bury myself beneath the roots of any of the cypress out there and wait for the world to change again. Would I wake up or would the chemical poison in my blood kill me while I slept? Would my decaying corpse end up poisoning the tree that was wrapped around me?
That's what Callis had warned me about. Poison, getting at the roots. Killing Mother, the Grove, Arcadia—everything.
Crawling into the ground and waiting for the end wasn't a soldier's death, anyway. I have fought on Mother's behalf for a very long time. My head is filled with half-remembered dreams of a thousand wars. I've been a good soldier. I deserve something more.
Who backed Kyodo Kujira? What does Prime Earth know? What happened to the Cetacean Liberty?
Mere will know how to find the answers.
NINE
Everything but the forward prow of the Cetacean Liberty is wrapped up tight in white plastic wrap, and it lolls in the water like a burn victim soaking in a saline bath. A harbor patrol car is parked on the dock nearby, and only one of its two occupants is awake. The other has his seat levered halfway back, his cap pulled down low on his face to block out the half-dozen mercury vapor lights permanently trained on the shrink-wrapped boat. The light reflects harshly off the white wrap, and there isn't a shadow anywhere within thirty yards of the Cetacean Liberty.
Either Prime Earth or the South Australian government has turned the boat into a floating art installation—a minimalist tabula rasa that waits for meaning to be imprinted upon its slick nakedness. What do we see when we look upon this abstract symbol? This bleached blot, waiting for its Rorschach stain.