The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (16 page)

dirwhals!

december 10

T
his evening near the end of our shift the sun cracked like a brilliant orange yolk over the horizon. Bushard was standing next to me at the rail, and I told him it reminded me of the radiant and cold northern sunsets of my youth. He conceded that it would be possible to see it as beautiful, if only he could forget that beyond the twilit sand we could see was an operatic expanse of more sand. If he could erase this particular moment in history, have chosen another industry, and could, in fact, be someone other than himself, he said, then yes: beautiful. I told him that was the uplift I’d been looking for. He shrugged and replied it wasn’t his job to cheer me up.

Tuva, my sister, you know me! I am long gone; your anger is justified. I left you when I could have stayed, when you needed me most, and my guilt has tugged at me like a living thing as we’ve crossed these dunes, looking for the bounty we have slowly come to realize may no longer be here. My messages to you go unanswered, but still I write, as if to underscore my own solitude and give shape to this expedition. These notes are addressed privately to you as well as myself; I feel compelled to put everything down. Will you read them? Years from now, will any of this make sense? At the very least I hope to find a friend in this log; and if not you, then perhaps someone else will consider these jottings of note. Perhaps I will even find fame in an obscure journal of history. I’m dating these entries; there’s no reason for everything to come to nothing. The light has gone, the room is asleep. Let’s begin.

My name is Lewis Dagnew, low crewman and spotter aboard the shipper-tank
Halcyon,
a tight-sleeper in an iron fo’c’sle, and one of thirty men to cast our lots and try our luck amidst the rolling dunes and oppressive heat found in the territory known as the Desert Gulf of Mexico. We left terra firma—packed dirt—over a year ago, and came to pin our fortune on the sliding sands; a fevered prospect, thus far an elusive hope. In the
Halcyon
’s case, fortune means a full hold; and we are here, a million miles from home, surrounded by a basin of sand four thousand miles wide, for one reason only: to spot, lance, and render dirwhal, that sand-diving beast, that dirt-drinking mass, that oil-saturated slowpoke who gave rise to an industry that not too long ago supported the energy needs of the entire southern biosphere.

According to a normal timetable for an expedition like ours, we should’ve been off the sand months ago. Instead, we’ve pushed farther and farther out, treading concentric and ever-widening circles that place us well outside of the historically teeming hunting grounds. The heat during the day is constant and unyielding, the temperature yet to dip below 113 degrees, and our daily sweep has come to feel like a slow grinding scuttle across the floor of an arid oven. We’ve been issued sun-suits for the UV, but they do little to mitigate the heat. At the end of our deck shifts we go below, peel the heavy suits from our skin, and make jokes about being basted in our own juice.

We are, it seems, alone on the sand. In the galley there’s a poster that explains how the pay structure works. It’s titled: Envision Success. But there have been no true dirwhal sightings, no trumpet’s call. Instead we compare heat-induced hallucinations of dirwhals breaching just off the bow and slipping back into the sand, never to be seen again.

In the early months, we glimpsed other shipper-tanks cresting over the far dunes, but at that distance it was unclear if they were friendly vessels or not. We steered clear, and they disappeared like memories. Tuva: I would say that this state of isolation and disappointment dovetails with my general constitution and the luck I’ve had so far in life. But I am resolved to think of this voyage as more than a series of setbacks, even as the majority of the crew has begun to fret about the apparent barrenness of our surroundings. I am not here to sound the depths of my self-pity; I am here to push past the vagueness of my limited accomplishments. This morning, Renaldo caught me holding this journal and suggested I bind the pages and title it the
Denouement
. But why not assume that tomorrow will bring us what we’re looking for? Tonight I said as much to Bushard before lights-out.

“A dream is a wish your heart makes,” he said, then turned his back to me and pulled his pillow over his head.

december 18

T
he
Halcyon
is a G Model 7 Kermode shipper-tank—one of the last in a series to roll out of Detroit before the invasion shut those factories down during my father’s generation—equipped with modified sand-treads and a flat metal deck. We are a slow-moving factory, an ungainly vessel that serves both as a hunting ship and a one-stop bio-processing plant. Our bow curves like a shovel, and is weighted for equal distribution at the contact points with the porous sand that surrounds us. The bridge rises abruptly, perpendicular, straight up, and is well windowed to aid with spotting. Stem to stern measures 180 feet, the length of three full-grown dirwhals laid head to tail. Middeck there’s a portable tryworks—three huge iron cauldrons perched atop industry-grade burners—where all our rending will theoretically occur. The cutting instruments—bizarrely curved, long-handled pole-knives so sharp you can’t help but imagine slipping them through flesh—are lashed under the portholes for easy access.

From a distance, the overall impression the ship gives on the sand is that of a single and colossal iron shoe. Our hold, now empty, is a cavernous double-deck capable of storing the rendered bio-matter of anywhere between four to six hundred mature dirwhals. At four RPMs, the engine roar of the
Halcyon
is deafening; at six it’s like confusion opening in your skull. Below deck it’s a Minotaur maze of close corridors and low ceilings, poorly lit passageways that dead-end for no discernible reason. The buggy-steerers, mates, and coopers: they’ve each got their bunks aft, walls decorated with posters and postcards. Our Captain Tonker’s got his king’s quarters. The rest of us sleep in the bow near the engine, where there is little relief from the motorized churn of our generators.

Today the plan had been to send a small group out in the buggies to explore the grounds to the south of us. I had been eager to leave the ship, but at the last minute one of the coopers decided he wanted to go, and I was forced into another eight hours of watching the sand from the hoop-rig near the stern. The buggies—we have four of them, small six-wheeled dune crawlers, each equipped with shock-prongs and a large sand-visor—zipped over the sand and away from the
Halcyon
with the buzzing speed of small insects. No one waved.

Of the dirwhals I have yet to see I know this: they are large beasts, well toothed, long and finned, with a wide head that tapers to a flat tail, but their skin is the color of coal, which makes them easy to spot against the dunes. They have been known to attack shipper-tanks, but they are no match for the ordnance in our bomb-lances, and accounts of dirwhal aggression are at this point little more than spook stories, things of the past. It’s possible they’ve evolved to fear and avoid us. It’s more likely, though, that as their numbers have dwindled they have simply moved farther out into the basin, and as a result the hunting strategy aboard the
Halcyon
is straightforward: wherever they go, we follow.

In the spotter’s manual, there is a color page delineating dirwhals by genus. Eight of twelve are crossed out, and two of the remaining four don’t render into usable energy. According to the timeline provided, hunting began in earnest forty-seven years after the Shift—the same year the Gulf drained and Further North refroze—and it’s taken us all of three generations to thin out what at first seemed an unlimited resource and the solution to all our energy problems. They are known to burrow under the sand to avoid the sun, but they sleep and feed on the surface. It’s been established that running an electrical current through the sand rouses them, but each day we send buggies to plunge a charge, and so far the pronging has yet to reveal anything at all.

Months ago, I telecomped my sister—yes, you, Tuva—that things here weren’t so different from home: no perceivable seasons, weather that drives you into yourself, the illusion of unlimited space, shifting loyalties, petty grievances that burrow and sprout unexpectedly into meadows of resentment.
That’s nice of you to say,
my father comped back. I asked to speak directly to you, and he told me you weren’t interested in coming on the line.

I could have insisted. I could have explained myself more clearly. Instead I cut the connection. Later, Renaldo told me I had a message. It read:
Everything is worse
. I stared at your message for an hour, typing and erasing different versions of a single apology before giving up and resolving that tomorrow, or the next day, I would try again. I never did. Weeks went by. Months. And now I’ve been informed that we are out of range for communication with anyone outside of the basin.

Of note: there is no wind here in the Gulf, and the stillness is eerie. Yesterday, Renaldo mentioned that up in the hoop-rig, high above the deck and away from the engine noise, he had the sensation that we were the only moving thing for miles. It felt, he said, like he was the last man in the universe, cut loose from the earth, drifting through a painting.

january 15

T
his morning, Captain Tonker summoned all hands to the aft-deck. We gathered, and he stood above us on the bridge, brow furrowed against the sun. He’s a terse man, not given to conversation. He’s made it clear that he will brook neither dissent nor opinion. Those of us in the bow see him rarely. But what he had come to tell us was now that we were moving farther and farther into the basin, those on watch were to be spotting for two things: dirwhals, and other shipper-tanks, which, given our current location, would most likely belong to the Firsties. A collective groan, followed by hissing, went up among the crew.
Protection kooks,
someone explained to me when I asked who the Firsties were. Bushard added: kamikaze environmentalists; degenerates; cultists; criminals. Captain Tonker held up his hand for silence.

Their aim, he said, is to put us out of a job. Shipper-tanks have been dodging Firsties for years, and between them and Captain Tonker it’s a pointed circle of antagonism. He went on to explain that as the number of dirwhals has decreased, the number of preservationists active in the dunes has tripled, and their aim is the disruption—sabotage—of expeditions like ours, either by the violent immobilization of licensed shipper-tanks or by provoking us into firing on them. The law is on our side, he said, but they care nothing for the law. He ground his fist in his palm, and asked us how we felt about such heartlessness? So, his order: spot the Firsties, and report them, but under no circumstances were we to engage, even if provoked. They had cameras, they wanted us to fire on them, and they would stop at nothing to manufacture an incident, even if it came at great cost to their organization. He asked us if we understood. We answered: yes, of course.

No one knows how old Captain Tonker is, but we know from the coopers that as a young man he’d been mate aboard a small fleet of shipper-tanks during the Great Hunt of ’78: the hinge-creak moment when it became clear just how lucrative the dunes could be. He’d been aboard a buggy doing a routine sand-prong, and whatever charge they sent down roused the earth itself. An entire dirwhal colony came to the surface. The lances were still rudimentary in those days—plagued by poor penetration and ordnance malfunction—but it didn’t matter: by the end of the second day, so much unrendered viscera had been spilled that his buggy had trouble finding traction in the sand. They were cutting and cooking for weeks. Flames licked the tryworks and illuminated the night sand, where the dead dirwhals were rolled together like pallets of log, awaiting their turn at the cutting platform. They were their own sun, a pulsar of energy that incinerated for twenty-four hours a day, and even so some of the dirwhals they lanced fell rotten before the buggies could pull them to the docks. The voyage had lasted all of two months, and taken them no more than two hundred miles into the Gulf. With the payout he got, he bought an island off the Canadian coast. Afterward he was made captain, and rechristened his ship the
Halcyon
.

“Ah, the good old days,” Bushard said when he heard the story. “Renaldo, answer me this: where have all the flowers gone?”

Renaldo shrugged. “Tonker’s got ’em all,” someone said back.

Four weeks have passed since my last entry. Every day we wake up, scan the dunes from the deck of the
Halcyon
for movement, and see none. The only news delivered on Thursday came after Renaldo ran a lance check and discovered that half of them were temporarily inoperable on account of disuse. “That matters
why
?” Tom, one of the coopers, had the misfortune of saying as Captain Tonker emerged from the steerage. To our great pleasure, he was demoted on the spot; to our displeasure, he now sleeps with the rest of us in the bow. “Every downside has a downside,” Renaldo told him when he complained that he was sick of sleeping with those of us he considered below his station. “Welcome to the melting pot.”

january 29

T
uva, a question: How long do you stare at something before you realize it isn’t going to change? How long before you understand your own misfortune to be something other than a series of bad breaks? Here is my memory of home: long, dark days; a small-efficiency trailer; an expanse of frozen tundra; my inability to set anything in the right direction; a growing desperation that would not quiet. During the winter we slept in our boots. Our father moved us there, following a job, from Vancouver: you were five, and I was six. Every morning, he kicked around the kitchen, then put on his goggles and one-piece and hopped the bus that took him to the upland digging grounds, where he worked on a crew that removed layers of barely melted permafrost using outdated and rusty scalping equipment.