Prelude
The Water Bear
Prelude
2068
In the shadow of Lhotse, on Fluxor, in the Orion Molecular Cloud, the primal forests burned. Years of unrelenting heat had turned the once-lush canopy to fuel, and fire now leapt from crown to crown, in diaphanous folds, consuming everything in its path.
In a high mountain glade, cut from stands of sassafras and Huon pine, where the mosses and ferns had been stripped away to reveal the black earth beneath, a young girl rocked on her heels and began to feel real fear, as she watched the embers fly in the valley below, starting new fires faster than a Pursang girl could run.
The girl understood the bioscience of fire perfectly well. Each year the wildfires burned the vast eucalyptus forests that girdled the world, regenerating them, but these high montane rainforests, once lost, were gone forever, so the people made their defenses.
The forest occupied a mile-high tooth of rock, with its head in the clouds above, where the mountain continued its long march to heaven alone. It was called Atwusk’niges, in the old song, which meant father sky. Into its tortuous couloirs, the Pursang had made firebreaks, and cut trails deep into its living heart. To preserve the forest, we must first destroy it, her father had said, as they slashed and burned.
✶
Higher, in the limpid airlessness of low orbit, the vast triangularity of Fluxor Station loomed like a massif in space, busied by the complexly polyhedral warships of the Horu fleet. By day, from the forest below, these ships had a strange, translucent appearance, like floating cities of the dead. The girl watched an incoming tender deploy its geometry drive, and a sphere of space unfolded into an impossible shape, as another city-sized rock began its descent to the surface.
It disappeared in flames over the horizon.
She hoped the Horu wouldn’t target her this day.
✶
When it came, the fire flew up the rock with a sibilant roar, fueled by volatile organic aerosols already in the air. It was on the girl in a flash, then gone, leaving dozens of spot fires to fight.
She marveled at the suddenness of it, slow then fast.
There was no time to lose. Their primary defense was a dam cut into the highest ledge of the forest. This had been filled by truckloads of snow thrown down from the mountain above, a vertical drop of a thousand meters or more. More than one worker had made the same long fall when scree gave way beneath their scrabbling wheels, and they tumbled into the abyss. Beneath the dam ran a network of microprocessor-controlled flow junctions, and below them a network of fireproof pipes, and below those, the people with their hoses and tools.
The main killer of humans in a forest fire is radiant heat. The girl was well-enough protected by a long-sleeved shirt, and goggles, and a wide-brimmed hat, when she remembered to wear it. She jammed it on and struggled with her hose towards the flames.
There was a hoary debate, among old Pursang firefighters, about the best way to use water to fight a fire. At an early stage in a fire’s development, it was generally said that the water should be used to directly douse the flames. Later, when the fire came in sheets, some believed the water should be sprayed in the air at the trees to remove the greatest amount of heat from the system. She was in the air mist camp, because that was what her father said, and he, a Pursang holy warrior, who had journeyed between the stars, knew everything.
It was filthy work. Her hose had to be worked through dense and prickly underbrush, once lush but now bone-dry, that crackled and stung through her clothes.
But it must be done.
Ash and dust filled the sweltering air.
She was hungry, and tired.
✶
She was finally at rest, perched on the lip of a narrow arête, exhausted, but exhilarated by the day’s extraordinary events, and was unfolding her afternoon’s food from a waxed paper bag, when the next great gout of fire flew up from below, at impossible speed, and engulfed her in flames.
The heat was unbearable, but she was alive.
Her whole world slowed.
She knew she had two options: go in or go down. Down was generally the right move in a high mountain fire, since it leads below the suffocating pall of smoke that rises from the flames, but that would mean a fifty-meter drop or more to the level below. The alternative was to burrow into the rock face, which was riddled with fissures and cracks. She had no time to think. She ran towards the first gap she could see. This meant a ten-meter sprint through swirling flames. As though in a dream, she saw other Pursang make similar binary choices around her.
Time slowed again, and she was fast.
She found a crack, but it proved to be an unlucky choice: A shallow notch, with the bone-dry undergrowth inside it already smoldering, ready to burn. She scrambled in and up, for just a few meters, until she reached a dead end.
And gamely turned to meet her fate.
When a strong hand reached down and pulled her to safety.
