Hummingbird Salamander(102)

Yet both Ronnie and Silvina were dead. Not ascended, not “repaired.” Dead. Sick, sick, stupid thought. Maybe they had been the wrong hosts drawn to imperfect serums. Maybe they hadn’t, in the end, been strong in the way I was strong. Could that be why I had been chosen? If I had truly been chosen. By fate, if not really by Silvina.

What if one last syringe was just chance?

What if Silvina was just delusional?



* * *



I left the question, along with Silvina’s body, for a time, because I trusted there was something more to find. Because I needed to sit with that question for a time.

Because I needed to look through the enormous round window.





[108]


An ark existed there beneath the earth. Or a kind of ark.

I would have been the first to look upon that miracle except for Silvina, except for Ronnie. Because she would have had to create it with only the most trusted, loyal friends. Because double-blinds were necessary to prevent any one person from knowing what it meant. Because it would have taken decades from first thought to last. Because when she started no one had ever built an ecosystem this way.

What I saw, when I came close to the window, was a scene lit by an artificial sun. The glass so thick and rimed with green, it was like looking into the past.

But it was actually the future.

A creek surrounded by understory trees and bushes, framed by ferns. Birds stitching through the undergrowth. A squirrel drinking from the creek. Fish visible in the creek, fins cutting the surface. Clean, pure water. Butterflies and bees. Lizards and, yes, according to the species list on the wall, hummingbirds and salamanders. Just in glimpses. In blinks.

It was painfully like the creek near the farm. Painfully like the places I had explored as a child. The mud and flux of it. The smooth, flat creek stones. The moss. A dream of what I’d been.

Mundane. Extraordinary. It could be any half-unspoiled habitat. But artificially created, it became a work of extraordinary imagination. The detail that had gone into it. The sheer ambition.

Collected over time. Relocated. A simplification of habitat. A simplification of species. Calculating what could be sustained and what could be maintained. And, on the wall opposite, safe in what I saw now had the detail of honeycomb, samples of all that could not. A fortune had been thrown at this, and a fortune more required.

The DNA for revival.

It would last at least a century on its own, Silvina believed, from the documentation I could find. It would be there if the world destroyed itself, to help. Preserve, change, and save.

On the raised platform, also, a complex control panel, automated. Fail-safes, and fail-safes for the fail-safes. Heat, cold, light, water levels, food dispensed where necessary. I could hear the sweet, soft hum of generators buried in the earth. Muffled, like every other sound.

Her dead body across the room. This towering above her. A kind of balance to that. A kind of hedging of bets. If this doesn’t work, there would be the ark. If one solution didn’t fit, wasn’t ready, then …

Dying for an elixir that might transform the world. Sacrificing your entire life for an underground creek beneath a midnight sun that you, by pure will, sheer strength of mind, had wrenched into a self-sustaining pattern … of whatever duration.

And still I didn’t know if it was hubris, if it was folly. Would the ark begin to die now that Silvina was dead? Was it dying now? Would it soon be as lifeless as Ronnie on the stairs, the hummingbird in my pocket? And how much did the world need to change or did it just need to be rid of us?

The rheum of green around the portal window. The sense of algae encroaching. In a hundred years, if this survived, would it be something strange and different and mutated? The roof set to open and the air that came in kill what had waited so patiently within for renewal.

I thought about what world waited for me out there. What was left. Knew maintenance of what I had found was beyond me. Knew that had not been Silvina’s purpose for me. If there was purpose.

In the slow sinkage of that, the recognitions, I began to know what to do.

If not for the ark, I would have made a different choice.



* * *



The end of the text I’d seen in the Unitopia visitor center, so long ago, read:

But once you got used to this new perspective, you’d look at the ground and it’d open up its layers, past topsoil and earthworms, down into the deeper epidermis, until you’re overcoming a sense of vertigo, because even though you’re standing right there, not falling at all, below you everything is revealing itself to you superfast. And maybe then, while still staring at the ground, even more would open up to you and you’d regress to the same spot five years, ten years, fifty years, two hundred years ago … until, when you look up again, there’s no street at all and you’re in the middle of a forest, and there are more birds and animals than you could ever imagine because you’ve never seen that many in one place. You’ve never even seen this many old-growth trees before. You’ve never known that the world was once like this, except in the abstract.

You’re, in fact, standing on an alien planet. And once you got used to that, maybe then … only then … you’d be able to reach a level in which you inhabit the consciousness of an animal—something less advanced, at first, like a tortoise or squirrel, and then work your way up to something “fairly” intelligent, like a wild boar or a raccoon.