2312

But they also saw the Terran news noting that the animals were always landing in their original native habitats, shifted if necessary to adjust to climatic change since their disappearance. Also, that although they were not genetically modified organisms, an intense breeding effort in the terraria had created much more genetically diverse animals than the remnant Earthly populations. This was part of Wahram’s publicity packet information, so he was particularly pleased to see the media pick that up. Also the reports were noting that animals had for the most part come down in wilderness preserves, and in areas of hills, deserts, pasturage, and other least-human-impacted spaces-never in cities, and only once or twice in villages. A Colombian village that suffered an aerial invasion of sloths and jaguars had already renamed itself Macondo, and clearly would live to tell the tale.

For a while Swan slept on a couch in their impromptu conference center. Wahram found he was not comfortable letting her out of his sight. She was still acting very affectionately toward him, cast into some kind of ecstasy by her night spent with the wolf. Sleeping with her head on his leg. The poor thing looked emaciated still, somewhat as in the tunnel.

“I want to go back out,” she said now when she woke up. “Come with me. I want to follow the caribou again, and they need beaters. Maybe I’ll see my wolf too.”

“All right.”

He saw to the arrangements, and the next morning they joined the rest going north that day, and heloed out in a frost-steamed sunrise. “Look,” Swan said as the sun cracked the distant horizon, leaning over him to stare right into it.

“You can burn your eyes here too,” he said. “You can burn your eyes out even on Saturn.”

“I know, I know. I look without looking.”

The new light cracked in shards on the numberless patches of water spread on the land. Near the Thelon River they landed and got out, the helo buzzed away, and suddenly they were on the vast windy tundra, walking on variously crunchy or squishy ground, in some ways like the icy ground of Titan. Wahram upped the support of his body bra and tried to accustom himself to the give of the soggy land. For a while the act of walking over the broken ground of the semi-frozen caribou path felt like working in a waldo, and because of the body bra, in a way it was.

He straightened up and looked around. Sunlight mirrorflaked off water into his brain, and he adjusted the polarization in his glasses. Swan kept pulling down her glasses to look around with her naked eyes: sometimes she reeled, tears frozen on her cracked red cheeks, but she laughed or moaned orgasmically. Wahram only tried it once.

“You’re going to go blind,” he told her.

“They used to do it all the time! They used to live without any glasses!”

“I believe the Inuit protected their eyes,” he groused. “Strips of leather or some such thing. Anyway, it was something to withstand. They were stunted by life up here, held back from full humanity by their own harsh planet.”

She hooted at this and threw a snowball at him. “How you lie! We are bubbles of Earth! Bubbles of Earth!”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “ Lark Rise to Candleford. We were taught it too. ‘When alone in the fields, with no one to see them, they would hop, skip, and jump, touching the ground as lightly as possible and crying, “We are bubbles of Earth! Bubbles of Earth! Bubbles of Earth!” ’ ”

“Exactly! You were brought up Unitarian?”

“Aren’t we all? But no, I read it in Crowley. And I can’t hop, skip, or jump in this g. I would trip and fall.”

“Oh come on, get tough.” She regarded him. “You must weigh a lot here. But you’ve been here a long time, you should be used to it.”

“I haven’t been doing much walking, I confess. My work has been more sedentary.”

“Recreating Florida, sedentary? Then it’s good you’re out here.”

She was happy. He stumped along comfortably enough; he had been exaggerating the impact of the g, just to annoy her. Now the cold air and the sunlight were giving the day a kind of crystalline quality. “It is good,” he admitted.

So they walked the southern edge of the caribou’s route east, and Swan planted transponders and photographed tracks and took soil and fecal samples. In the evenings they gathered with other trackers at a big dining tent set up daily in a new position. In the short nights they lay on cots in the same tent and caught a few hours of sleep before eating and heading out again. After the third day of the beat they had to deal with the helicoptered arrival of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who arrested them and flew them to Ottawa.

“No way!” Swan cried as they watched the land unfurl below them. “We weren’t even in Canada!”

“Actually we were.”

The vast fields of wheat at midday looked very different than they had during their recent morning trip out. “Look at that!” Swan exclaimed at one point, gesturing down with disdain. “It looks like an algae bloom on a pond.”