By Chris Krechowiecki-Shaw
“Hello, this is Sempervirens Outpost, broadcasting near Issaquah Bay, eighteen-hundred hours. Can anyone read me?” Nahele hears Valerie’s daily call through the thin mycelium-board walls of the radio room. Yet again, no response. Valerie sighs and takes a few slow, deep breaths. A sign she’s trying to center herself and shake her sadness. Then she walks off to make her evening meal.
The dawn pulls a dense fog up from Issaquah Bay. Nahele, as usual, is watching. These moments of serenity, the cocoon of fine droplets sticking to her in a cool embrace before the heat of the day, are her greatest treasure. She starts off with the nucleation and hydro-extraction protocols. Water, even in the form of fog, is too precious to waste. The other biochems will start up their protocols soon, but she likes to get a head start in the misty mornings.
Nahele is aware of Daphne and Kezia beginning their processes. The warm late spring sun is breaking through the fog, and there is already enough solar energy to start recharging reserves for the small, self-sustaining Outpost. The last up is Valerie, as ever, but what she lacks in punctuality she more than makes up for with cheerfulness and love. In many ways, she is the soul of the Outpost.
“Namaste, girls! Another beautiful sunrise!” she beams. She stretches, performing a sequence of unhurried sun salutations before going about her rounds.
“Good work, Nahele! Getting the most of the morning’s bounty!” she chirps, before scuttling onwards.
“How are we this morning, Daphne? Looking well!”
“Kezia, my dear, always a pleasure to see you!”
Valerie is different from the others. For one thing, she’s a generalist, while the others are bio-chemical specialists. Her job at the Outpost is to check everyone else is coordinating properly, identify and perform major repairs that are beyond the capability of self-healing protocols, and to generally lift the mood as she does so. The technical details of thylakoids, pheophytin, and vacuoles that absorb Nahele and the others day-to-day seem incomprehensible to her, but she, in turn, regales them with her thoughts on philosophy and spirituality. She also is in charge of external communications.
“Hello, this is Sempervirens Outpost, broadcasting near Issaquah Bay, eighteen-hundred hours. Can anyone read me? Please respond. Over.”
Valerie repeats this, a daily mantra, three times to the crackle of empty static.
“Namaste, Nahele!” chirps Valerie, her tiny frame and musical cadence giving the impression of a joyful songbird flitting from branch to branch. The fog is slow to lift, Valerie’s fingertips make swirling eddies and she shifts yoga poses. Daphne and Kezia are working with no real urgency. Nahele can refill the water reserves, something that has been difficult to maintain lately.
Valerie chatters happily as she works. Ecosystems are catalogued and sung to, performance checks made, decorative beads strung, and a new basket woven. In the dripping forest, Nahele can see Valerie collect some more medicinals for refinement in the lab later, and absent-mindedly pick flowers to thread into her matted brown hair.
The day-long gloom gives the Outpost a sleepy feel, as though it’s spent the whole day beneath the duvet. Valerie’s the last to finish. Sitting down at the radio station is her last task, a final beat of the day’s rhythm, before making her evening meal of nutritional algae seasoned with forest herbs, berries, and mushrooms.
“Hello, this is Sempervirens Outpost,” she starts, and then stops. The texture is different.
“Hello? Do you read?”
A modulation to the static that could be a voice.
“Hello?”
“Who’s there?” crackles a voice in response, the tone gruff and suspicious. Nahele can feel Valerie’s excitement course through her.
“Sempervirens Outpost, broadcasting near Issaquah Bay. So happy to connect with you!”
There’s a tense silence, Valerie sitting upright on the edge of her seat.
“Who’re you?” demands the voice.
“Sempervirens Outpost. We overlook the Issaquah Bay from the Butte. I’m Valerie. Where are you calling from?”
“Are you from the government?”
Nahele is old enough to remember the government from her early youth. They fled the Bay, with everyone else, not long after Valerie was born. She doubts if Valerie has any real concept of them. It’s probably been decades since anyone from the government has even thought of here, if they still exist.
“No?” replies Valerie. “It’s just me and the girls here?”
“Hmm,” grumbles the voice, “sounds like the sort of thing the government might say to lure me in.”
“Honestly, we’re not, I don’t even know what a government looks like!”
There’s only silence. Valerie cajoles a few more times, no success. The other person must have gone. She gets up and goes to make her evening meal, humming as usual, but this time sounding a little flat.
Once, Issaquah would have heard and felt the bustling of the nearby city, full of people, gobbling up resources from far away and belching out the unwanted waste. Because of this waste, built up on a planetary scale, the city now sits beneath the waves. Nahele watches the mist clear to reveal a few empty towers and the great needle poking forlornly through the sea towards the sky.
“Namaste, girls, what beautiful sunshine!”
Valerie is up a little later than usual today, but no less chirpy. The heat of the sun makes the perfume of the forest floor rise; resinous scents from old needles, the earthy musk of mycelium, flowers calling to pollinators with sugary fragrance. Nahele takes a moment to draw her focus towards the beautiful, interconnected web of being that is the forest, letting it immerse her within itself. A moment of peace and comfort. Her consciousness returns to the surroundings and Valerie’s bustling, perhaps a little more hurried than usual.
A few years ago, the Outpost had more people. An expedition left for the old city limits, looking for salvageable parts, but never returned. There’s been an emptiness since deep beneath Valerie’s chirpy exterior. Perhaps Valerie is hoping the radio voice from yesterday knows about them? She never talks about the lost party anymore. As evening approaches, Nahele can tell from how Valerie moves, jerky and distracted, that her usual inner peace is missing.
“Hello?” asks Valerie on the radio, slightly earlier than her usual broadcast. She fiddles with strands of her hair.
“That you again, government lady?” comes the crackle. Is there a hint of humour in there?
“Please, just call me Valerie!” she replies, with a nervous giggle.
“’Kay then, Valerie, how many of ya are up there?”
“Me and the girls: Nahele, Daphne, and Kezia. And you?”
“Just me these days, with Pappy gone. No G-men in black? I’ll hear them if they are, Pappy taught me all about them and how they tried taking him off to their mind-cages!”
Valerie is once again at a loss for what to say. Nahele is familiar with the old stories from the time when the city was evacuated and left to the sea. The government were accused of everything: spiriting the population away to slave in caves, grinding them up for meat, even mind control, all of which struck Nahele as being well outside the skillset of an administration that couldn’t stop cities falling beneath the waves.
“So where are you living?” asks Valerie, after an awkward pause.
“Oh, let’s not share all our secrets just yet!” chuckles the voice.
“Well, at least tell me your name!”
“All right,” concedes the voice, “you can call me Buck.”
The next few days mark an early start to summer. Good for energy generation, bad for water. The mists boil off quickly in the mornings, leaving no refuge from the searing heat. Valerie starts to focus on clearing the perimeter, removing dead wood and dry grass, maintaining fire breaks, and taking usable biomass to store for the winter. She and Buck chat most evenings now. There’s less suspicion, but still a background of tension between the two, as though they are still working out what can and can’t be said. Buck snorts with laughter one evening when Valerie talks about one of her favourite subjects, restorative justice for the forest.
“Ha, I don’t know why I ever thought ya was a government agent. You’re one of those hippy kooks who talks to trees and collects farts in a jar, ain’t ya?” he chuckles.
“Well,” Valerie flusters, not good with quick retorts, “you’re a, a stupid-head!”
Buck laughs even harder, and Valerie joins in awkwardly, as though she’s forgotten how.
“So what’s the energy and food gen system that you run?” asks Valerie.
“System?” scoffs Buck. “That’ll be my axe and my rifle, I reckon! Plenty out there for a man who knows how to take what he needs!”
The shock is written on vegan Valerie’s face, but it doesn’t compare to the horror that rises through Nahele. Tribal memory runs deep, and she knows what men like that have done to her kind. How they have been thoughtless and merciless in their destruction.
“Don’t tell me you have those dumb algae vats! That stuff ain’t natural by any means, it’ll rot your brain!”
“Algae are just as natural as any part of the ecosystem, actually.” Valerie purses her lips, oozing cold politeness. “I think I’ll go and enjoy my nutritionally balanced meal right now.”
She shuts off the radio and stomps off to make her evening meal, with a bit less mindfulness than usual and a little chakra-staining anger.
Valerie keeps in contact with Buck, to Nahele’s quiet disappointment. Possibly sensing a change in her old friend, Valerie explains, unprompted: “There’s so few of us around, we can’t afford to fall into the divisions of the past, Nahele. We have to at least keep communications open.”
Nahele is not so sure. Better to be alone than consorting with those who are actively destructive, but she keeps those thoughts to herself. Buck and Valerie share their locations by flashing mirrors in the midday sun. He’s just on the other side of the Issaquah River, but lives in an underground bunker.
“With your above-ground gear and fire perimeter, they’ll see you from space,” he says.
The rising heat starts to bleach the landscape. Meadows of dancing tall grass with bright bursts of wildflowers become orange-brown tinderboxes. Joyful gurgling creeks become dusty boulder-filled gouges. Daphne and Kesia are struggling to keep systems operational, Nahele’s usual worries about water are eclipsed by the seasonal dread of wildfires. The heat saps Valerie of her usual energy. She moves slowly, stickily, keeping to the shade. She and Buck start to talk at midday and shift tasks into the evening, when temperatures are bearable.
“You just gotta live with what ya get, heat’ll come and heat’ll go,” Buck muses. “I go get my water in the twilight, keep a keen eye out for coyotes.”
Nahele is amused by how different Buck’s zen-like acceptance is to Valerie’s worldly worries, which she tries to chase away through her morning meditation and yoga.
“The summer months are so harsh, though, all the beauty of nature just dries up!” Valerie responds. Nahele can almost hear Buck’s shrug over the radio.
“It is what it is, always comes back again.”
“I guess,” Valerie relents. “This place must have been truly stunning before the worst of climate change hit.”
“Heh, climate change,” chuckles Buck, “you don’t really believe that, do ya?”
Of course, Nahele thinks numbly, hardly even shocked. Valerie jumps as if stung.
“Well, ah, of course I do! How can you not? I mean, nothing else would make sense! If there wasn’t climate change, why else would the city be underwater?”
“Why,” drawls Buck, “it’s the government, of course. How else would they evacuate everyone to the mind-prisons?”
“Aagh!” screams Valerie, a guttural roar of frustration, the closest she can find to a Buddhist swear word, as she kicks off the radio’s switch.
The following days, it feels to Nahele as though Valerie is in mourning again, like in the months after the party didn’t come back. Her morning yoga moves are perfunctory rather than joyful, some days, she skips them entirely and stays in bed longer. The daytime heat is fierce, and the air feels baked dry. Nahele can almost feel it crackle. Everything slows right down, conserving water, conserving energy. Just to make it through to the other side of summer.
The first sign of trouble is a cloud. It’s not fog from the bay, nor moisture in the air. A black cloud rises from the ground, a ridge far to the North. As it grows, a tense silence falls over the Outpost. Will it spread here? Will it mercifully miss us? There’s no escape. Where can they run to, hemmed in between dense and flammable forest and the hungry sea? As night falls, the light from the blaze casts an ominous orange glow, the first light to eclipse the stars in years, a deadly echo of the old city.
The next day, Nahele sees the sun rise, blood-red against a smoke-stained sky. The air is thick, full of the residue of destruction. Valerie, wearing a soot-stained mask, moves at a calm but constant pace around the perimeter, intent on keeping the last line of defence clear. Nobody speaks, sounds seem deadened. An ancestral sorrow rises in Nahele, feeling the pain of homes and habitats brutally gobbled up by the conflagration.
As the evening draws in, something only apparent from the position of the sun rather than its light, Valerie sits by the radio for the first time in weeks. Silently, as she eats, she turns it on. The radio crackles, but she remains silent, chewing. No response. She finishes her meal, sighs, and turns the radio back off.
Sunset comes as a relief. Valerie stands outside in the dark, watching for any sign of the blaze. After an hour, wordlessly, she takes herself off to bed.
The agony of suspense from the previous day is broken before dawn by a growing roar. The fire is here. Valerie is awake; she may not have slept. She turns on the radio again and listens to the crackling, fidgeting as she waits. Eventually, she decides to speak.
“Hello? Buck, are you safe?”
The radio crackling takes on a different texture. It could be words, highly distorted.
“It… a fire… around…”
“Buck? Do you read?”
“Can’t… too much… help!”
“Buck! What’s happening?”
Silence, except for static.
Valerie stands up, bunching her fists.
Leave him, Nahele wills silently. He’s not worth it, not after the damage his kind unleashed so gleefully.
With a decisive click of her fingers, Valerie sweeps into action. She collects a bag, putting water, a mask, a first aid kit, and a fire blanket in it. Bustling out from the Outpost, she pauses, perhaps sensing Nahele’s trepidation.
“Nahele, sweet light, I’ll be careful. I can’t leave him to this fate, though, not without a stain on my soul. Keep safe!”
With that, she’s gone. Kind-hearted Valerie, risking herself for a man she had never met, who certainly did nothing to deserve such selfless heroism.
The Outpost falls silent. Nahele, Daphne, and Kezia keep their systems functioning at low levels in the dust and smoke. Between them, Nahele knows they could remain operational, possibly indefinitely, but without Valerie to knit them together they will start to drift apart, cooperate less, become weaker. She knows this, but cannot marshal her thoughts into the right actions to reverse the slow decline. She’s preoccupied, her thoughts turning to Valerie, hoping against hope she’ll come back but dreading the worst. Helpless against the fury of the elements, Nahele turns back to the wisdom of those who came before her. She prays, with every fibre of her being, prays for rain. To douse the fury of the flames, to nourish the parched forest, to deliver her brave friend from danger.
Feeling her pleas rather than hearing them, Daphne and Kezia join in, drawn to the rhythms of their ancestors.
Let it rain. Wash away our cares.
Only the dry crackling of flames responds.
Soften the hard earth. Return the gurgle of the rivers.
A wind stirs, but not from the heavens, rather the inhalation of the flames themselves, consuming the forest. Death feeding more death.
Against the voracious roar of flames, Nahele feels a tingle. A shift in direction of the breeze. A fleeting taste of the sea, a shining diamond amongst the bitter ash. Then the sensation of a drop. Was it alone? She waits, tense and alert for any other sound. Then, unmistakable, a second, heavier drop, kicking dust from the ground. Rejoicing with relief, Nahele feels the patter of raindrops rise, until the drops are no longer separate but a great sheet, sweeping across the land.
The rain and cloud rises the next morning, lifting a curtain that had hidden the scars gouged into the forest. Blackened swathes have cut through, in some places leaving miraculous oases of green, elsewhere levelling whole valleys to smouldering charcoal. The forest around the Outpost has been spared, the flames stopped by the Issaquah river. From this river, a figure climbs the Butte. Valerie, with Buck on her shoulders, looking like a sparrow carrying a bull. He’s unconscious, Valerie lays him down in the lab as a temporary sick bay. Calmly but compassionately she checks his pulse, his breathing, feels for broken bones.
“He’s stable,” she says. “Passed out from smoke inhalation, but seems like I got to him in time. His ammo store went up not long after I got him out; there won’t be much left of his hideout now.”
Nahele is filled with joy to see Valerie again. She tries to bury her resentment towards Buck, her old enemy who lured her friend into mortal danger and who now lies helpless in their care. Racial memory is strong, but she can do better; she can follow the example Valerie has set, to be kind. Valerie, meanwhile, has gone back to her duties as though nothing has happened. She moves a little stiffly, but hums as she works.
As the sun sets, Valerie returns to check on Buck. Still breathing, still unconscious. In the fading light, she sits by Nahele and contemplates the landscape.
“Nature will heal itself, if we let it,” she sighs. “We just have to all work together, to want it to recover.”
Valerie’s soft words mingle with Nahele’s sadness, beholding the charred remains of the once-rich forest. Forests can regrow; she knows this, but it doesn’t make the loss any easier. Valerie shifts a little closer.
“I wouldn’t have made it back without you,” she whispers, giving Nahele a hug. “I know what you did, and it saved our lives. Thank you, Rainmaker.”
The fog creeps back in the morning. Nahele greets it with joy, feels it embrace her like an old friend returning from afar. Buck is awake and lying propped on an elbow when Valerie comes in to check on him. Her stance shows relief and joy to see him recovered, but she stands by the door, doesn’t get any closer. He is a stranger, after all.
“You saved my life,” Buck says, his voice even more gravelly than usual, “and for that I thank you. I am forever in your debt.”
“You are welcome,” replies Valerie, “but know that we don’t deal in debt here. I think your home has been totally trashed by the fire though; you are welcome to join us here.”
Buck nods, there’s no shock or denial. He has the look of a man who long ago got used to loss.
“I’d be most grateful for that. Is it just you here?”
“When you’re able to move about a bit more, you can introduce yourself to the girls.” With that, Valerie leaves the lab and heads out to check on water supplies and the groundwater levels. Hopefully, the rain has topped them up a bit.
It’s mid-afternoon when Buck hobbles out into the fragrant sunshine. He winces occasionally at bruises as he moves. Nahele gets the impression he’s not a man to follow doctor’s orders. He looks around, sees Nahele, and offers her a wide, toothy grin.
“Howdy,” he greets her. “It’s awful nice of you girls to take an old reprobate like me. I always look after my own, and I ain’t had any of my own ’cept me for a good while, but I’ll be looking out for you all now too.”
He walks over to Nahele and gives her a friendly pat on the rough bark of her trunk. Maybe it will be all right, thinks Nahele. A feeling she hasn’t felt for a while starts to surge through her, from her needles and branches down to her roots, through the mycelium network out to her tree-sisters Daphne and Kezia, then far beyond the edge of sight, multiplying as it touches each set of living roots. A burst of hope.
Leave a Reply