"Bell-BrightNewSkies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bell M Shayne)

SHAYNE M. BELL

BRIGHT, NEW SKIES

I took my broken goggles to the UV-protective goggles store built into the dike
across from the World Trade Center. The wheelhouses of two Siberian cargo ships,
docked behind the store to unload wheat, towered above the dike, and I could not
stop looking at them because I remembered the days when America exported wheat
to my country of Siberia, not the other way around. When Mother could get
American wheat, she would bake it into bread early in the morning, and she would
laugh at my five brothers and me after the aroma made us tumble out of bed and
hurry into the kitchen, rubbing our eyes. "What will this country come to,"
she'd say, "if capitalist bread can pull even young communists out of bed?"

But that was a long time ago.

"Lady, either go in the store or get off the sidewalk."

Complete stranger. High voice but a man, I guessed -- I could not see under his
burnoose for physical confirmation. His New Jersey accent told me nothing more
than place of origin. I forced myself not to appear startled -- not to show any
sign of weakness in front of him. The science of biology can teach you that,
teach you not to startle, but to observe and record. Biology had startled me
many times, but I had flinched only once, not very long ago. I did not flinch in
front of this man. I pulled my chador tighter around me and walked toward the
store, wary of the man behind me on the sidewalk, listening for any sound that
he was moving toward me. I was in a good part of New York City, I kept telling
myself. Nothing bad should happen to me here.

But part of me kept saying that this was New York, not Irkutsk, that I was in a
temperate land now, not a polar, and that things were different here. You never
knew. The very conference on ozone depletion I had come to speak at had
collapsed, and in a world where things like that could happen despite the
desperate evidence outside the conference doors, anything at all could happen.
Anything.

Bells jangled when I opened the door. The store was cool. The man did not follow
me inside. I closed the door and looked back out at the man as I did so. He was
standing there, watching me. Sunlight glinted on goggles under his burnoose. He
could have easily walked around me, so I did not know what made him angry enough
to order me off the sidewalk. Maybe he belonged to one of the sects that kept
women indoors where their skins would never burn and he thought I should not be
out like this.

"Can I help you?" asked a clerk, dim in her chador in shadows behind a counter,
Greenwich Village accent.

I considered asking her to call the police, but I decided to calm myself. The
man outside could be merely a religious fanatic, not a pervert, in which case a
three-cabbie cab would do as well for me as the police if I needed help leaving
this place: one of the expensive cabs, with a driver, a bodyguard riding shotgun
in the front passenger seat, and the bodyguard's rifle that Americans counted as
the third cabbie. I realized the man could also be following me, keeping tabs on
where I went; the worst that would happen then would be that more company
executives would track me down and try to talk to me, try to pay me money for
what I had discovered, as if that were what I would want --me, from Siberia, a
woman with memories of an old-fashioned, communist mother who would have been
ashamed of me for taking it. My discoveries were worth more than money: they
were worth the sight in animals' eyes. I could stop the rush of blindness in all
species. But even so, I could not decide whether to announce my discoveries. I
would have to change a species forever to save its sight -- genetically enhance
it; ensure, through adaptation, the final destruction of the world we knew and
the creation of a new. I could not sell such techniques for money. If I decided
to use them, I had to give them to a company that would use them well, and
quickly, and sell its procedures cheaply. Doing that, at least, would have made
my communist mother proud.

"Can I help you?" the clerk asked again, genuine concern in her voice this time.
I let the kindness of her concern wash over me.

"Yes," I said, but then I stopped. It was a day for worries, and maybe even
shock. On the counter next to the clerk stood a stuffed penguin wearing
Xavier-Briggs UV-protective goggles, smiling as if it were as happy on top of a
glass case as it would have been on a beach, and all I could do was stare at it.
I hadn't seen a penguin, alive or stuffed, since I'd left Antarctica one year
before. "Who did that to a penguin?" I asked. I did not have to add: one of the
last penguins.

"It's not real. Feel it. It's fake. Marketing ploy -- you've seen the TV ads?
But the stuffed animals they make these days look so real, don't they?"

I nodded and forced myself to look away from the penguin, pulled my broken
goggles out of an inside pocket of my chador. That made me remember to throw
back the hood, take off my borrowed goggles, and run my fingers through my hair.
I was always forgetting to throw back the hood of my chador when I walked in a
store, and I wasn't always in a hurry.

"Prescription or merely protective?" the clerk asked.

"Protective. My eyes are still good."

"Lucky you. We have to send out for prescription, and that can take an hour. Go
ahead and look around at what we have in stock. Try on anything."

I walked off down an aisle of goggles, wondering if she'd said lucky you because
I wouldn't have to wait or if she meant to comment on the fact that my eyes were
still good. I glanced back out the door. The man was still standing on the
sidewalk, looking into the store. If he worked for Xavier-Briggs or some other
company that had hired him to follow me --and if I could prove it -- I'd sue
them for harassment. I passed cases of diamond-studded goggles, then rows of
fluorescent orange and green goggles. I needed a pair of good work goggles.

The clerk walked over to me. "Should I call the police about that man outside?
Is he a threat to you?"

"I don't know," I said. "He ordered me off the street, and that was the first
time I heard his voice. I remember voices, so I don't know him. But he's just
standing there, looking at us."

"I'm calling the police."

She called them on a phone on the wall behind her cash register, then she walked
to the front door and locked it. "They're coming," she said.

The man just kept standing on the street, looking into the store.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I did not come here to disrupt your business."

"It happens," she said with a shrug. "But I have your accent now. You're from
Siberia, aren't you?"

So she played the game, too. Picking out accents was a game I'd played with
expatriot friends I made at Columbia when I was a visiting professor there. We
tried to learn what we could about a person from the voice, now that people
everywhere hid in clothes for protection against the sun. Voices told more about
people than I ever imagined. I could now hear if a man were fat or if a woman
were anorexic or if someone were developing skin cancer, all from the voice. My
mother claimed to be able to tell what kind of skin cancer people were
developing, just from the words they spoke about other things.

"Yes. I'm Siberian," I said. "From Irkutsk."

"You came for the conference?" I nodded.

"What do you study?"

"Ecosystems, and how to adapt them to the new world."

"Ah, that explains why the penguin upset you. They aren't adapting, are they?"

"I will not buy anything made by Xavier-Briggs," I said, looking back at the
begoggled penguin on the counter. All my life I had talked about adapting, with
all kinds of people about all kinds of adaptations. I walked down an aisle,
looking at the goggles. I saw goggles with little gold crosses on the sides, and
I thought of the finely wrought Russian Orthodox church near my mother's house
and how I had talked with her about adaptation there. The communists had made it
into a museum, and my mother was proud of that. She used to take me there to see
the art on display, art confiscated from private owners after the revolution and
now set out for all the people to see. One day we arrived early in the morning.
The curator was just opening for the day, and we met him outside on the steps.
He was scraping wax off the steps and sweeping up the remains of candles that
had burned down in the night. "They make such a mess here," he said.

"Who?" I asked, in my little girl's voice.

My mother looked sharply at me. "The superstitious in this town who won't give
up trying to worship here," she said.

"Why?" I asked. "It's a museum now. Why do they want to burn candles on the
steps?"

"Because they think this place is holy, whether we call it a museum or not," the
curator said, and he swept the candles into a garbage pail and we all walked
inside. I thought and thought about those people, whoever they were, trying to
do on the steps what the church had been built for, and thinking about them and
their disappointments made me cry. Mother took me outside, and we sat on the
steps while I stopped crying. There were still flecks of wax on the steps by my
shoes. I reached down to brush them away, into the grass. My mother was not
cross with me. "A lot of people cried when we made this place a museum," she
said. "But a new world had come to us back then, and we all had to adapt to it.
In the case of the people who valued this place as a church, we had to force the
adaptation, for their own good. It's turned out all right. Forced adaptations
might be painful at first, but only at first. In a generation, no one will think
of this place as anything but a museum."

In spite of those words, I'd gone on to spend my life trying to keep things the
way they were, trying to find ways for the natural world to survive as it was
without changing it to fit new realities. How I had failed. If I had listened to
my mother all those years ago, I would have known that I would fail.

"Have you seen these?"

The clerk held up a pair of goggles with tiny aquaria in the temples. Little
blue fish swam in them behind tinted glass.

"We import them from Taiwan," she said.

I took them out of her hands. "How do you feed the fish?" I asked.

"The tops open, here." She opened one for me, then closed it again. "We sell
little boxes of food for the fish, along with the goggles."

I tried them on and looked in a mirror. The goggles looked terrible on me, but
they were fun. "How much are these?" I asked.

"Four hundred ninety-seven dollars. Plus tax."

I took off the goggles and handed them back. "What I really need is something
that can get knocked around in the open," I said. "Work goggles."

"I carry a Swiss line that might be just the thing for you."

She led me to a back comer of the store, and I could hear water there, and
distant booms from the unloading of one of the Siberian ships. We were evidently
standing at the edge of the dike, fifteen feet below the new sea level. I
touched the wall. It was cool but not damp.

The Swiss goggles were fine: black, sturdy frame, scratch-resistant lenses.
"I'll take them," I said, and someone knocked on the door. We both looked at the
door. Three men in suits stood there. Customers, I thought.

"Meet me at the cash register," the clerk said, and she hurried to unlock the
door.

I carried my goggles to the cash register and looked at the penguin. I couldn't
help it. It looked so real, and so silly in its goggles. I almost touched it to
see if it were fake, after all.

"You can save that species, can't you?" the clerk asked me, back now, at the
cash register.

"What do you mean?" I asked. The men in their goggles and burnooses had walked
up with her and the man with the Jersey accent was with them, and suddenly I
knew. These were all company people. Probably Xavier-Briggs. I did not know what
was going to happen. The police were not coming. The clerk had obviously never
called them. Her call had brought these men.

"Why don't you do something to save the penguins?" the clerk asked me.

"I would have to destroy them -- turn them into something different --to save
them," I said. "I'm not sure it's worth that."

"Gifts of nocturnal eyes and nocturnal biorhythms would save the species from
extinction," one of the men said.

"No," I said. "The penguins would still be extinct. I would just have created a
new creature on their basic frame."

"So you can do it."

So I'd been tricked. I was admitting too much of what I could do and what I
hesitated to put into practice. I put the goggles on the counter.

"No, they're yours." The clerk pushed them toward me. "We'll buy you anything
you want from here." She'd kept the Taiwanese goggles with aquaria, and she
tried to hand them to me, too. "You at least would take good care of the fish,"
she said.

I would not touch the goggles. I would not be bought with gifts or money.

"Only the species that can adapt will survive, and not all the ones we need are
going to make it," the clerk said. "We have to help them."

And make billions in the process. I'd heard it so many times before, from so
many companies. Whoever could finally save the cows, alone, would make billions.
My communist mother, the year after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, when she
finally gave up hope of it ever coming back, looked at me and said the only
people who would survive now would be the ones who adapted to money-grubbing.
"Adapt," I spat the word out. "You want me to use what I developed to change the
natural world so it can adapt to the ugliness and desperation uncontrolled
capitalist corporations brought on the earth. And that hasn't changed, has it?
You are all still uncontrolled. All I might do if I work with you is prolong a
species' suffering."

"You don't believe that," the clerk said. "You were stunned by a stuffed
penguin. You came in here to buy goggles to protect your own eyes. If you didn't
want to live in a world that might still include penguins, in whatever form, you
wouldn't be here to take care of yourself."

I looked down and said nothing. This clerk could read more than accents. And
this was an odd conversation, for me. Yes, they had tried to buy me with gifts
of goggles. Yes, that gift implied much more. But they hadn't yet talked about
what more it implied. They had talked mostly about saving species. These people
were a little different, after all. "How do I know any of you will let me give
eyes to the penguins?" I asked.

"We have a list of species to save first," the clerk said. "We could let you add
some of those you love most to that list. If we start research and testing on
your processes now, perhaps by spring we could have cows in fields again."

At night, grazing on the tough grasses inheriting the earth. All the delicate
and beautiful soft grasses were gone.

"Your penguins could be next," one of the men said.

"Will you at least talk with us?" another asked. "Xavier-Briggs' bioengineering
division is second to none. We can do this work faster than anyone else. You
must want things to move quickly now."

"I'll think about this," I said.

"Others will eventually discover what you have," the clerk said. "You should act
now while you have a chance to shape the world in ways you want it shaped."

"I'll need time to think about all this," I said. "Let me pay for the goggles
and go." I took my credit card from my purse and held it out to the clerk. I
knew now that she was no mere clerk, but she had been minding the store, so she
had probably been trained to make sales. I was suddenly chilled to think how
closely these people had watched me and how accurately they had anticipated my
actions and how quickly they had set up this elaborate ruse to talk to me.

The "clerk" took my card and deducted fifty-nine Siberian dollars for the Swiss
goggles from my account. I left the Taiwanese goggles on the counter, put on my
new goggles, and walked out of the store. No one offered me a ride I would not
have accepted. None of them asked where they could find me. I was sure they knew
how to find me. I walked along, trying to imagine adding the names of six or
seven species to a list of a handful to be saved, and wondering how I would
choose and whether I should attempt to set up an entire little ecosystem of
saved species that could prey on each other in the new world.

A wind had started blowing, from inland up the Hudson, and it was dusty. I had
half an hour to get to the Central Park entrance on Seventy-Ninth Street, meet
the three people I'd flown over with, and go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
to see its controversial exhibit "The Green Hills of Earth: Landscape Painting
before Ozone Depletion."

My mother had never joined any of the new political parties in Siberia. After
the breakup of the Soviet Union, she never voted again. As I walked along the
streets of New York after leaving the goggles shop, I remembered standing once
in front of our house in Irkutsk, watching people walk to the church/museum to
vote in a confusing election with candidates from fifteen political parties, and
my mother would not go. I could not understand that. She had talked to me so
often about how communists could force successful adaptations in society, but
now she would not adapt herself to a new society. Remembering that made me
suddenly realize that she had been just like me -- or that I was just like her,
after all: we both wanted the world to stay the way it had been. My mother's
world had been communist, and she hadn't wanted it to change. All those years
ago, I felt her watching me when I finally set off down the street to vote, and
I seemed to feel her eyes on my back again as I walked down these streets in New
York City. I felt it so strongly I turned around once, and an old woman was
behind me, but she was black and dressed in an ankle-length, black skirt and a
long-sleeved, green silk blouse and burnoose, the kind of fine clothes my mother
could never have worn because she hardly saw such things in the stores of
Irkutsk through most of her life and when they did come she didn't have the
money. The black woman smiled at me, and I hurried on to the park.

Savka Avilova, my old friend, stood waiting in front of the park entrance. I
could tell it was Savka, even in his abayeh and burnoose. He always stood in a
crowd with confidence and interest. I walked straight over to him. "Nadya, how
could you tell it was me?" he asked.

I just smiled. "Where are the others?"

"Inside. Come with me to get them."

I looked up at the protective dome that covered the Park. "No," I said.

Savka grabbed my arm and pulled me closer to the entrance. "Smell the air," he
said.

The air flowing out of the park smelled of growing plants. Humus. Faintly of
lilacs, though it was not their season.

"Come in," he said.

"No," I said again. "Take away this dome and the plants in there would die. I
don't find that beautiful. I remember those trees growing without domes over
them."

Savka left me and went in after the others. I walked away from the park
entrance, back to where the air smelled of dust and exhaust and people who could
afford to bathe only once a week, even in summer heat. I bought the week's Time
at a newsstand. The cover story was on the new coastal settlements in Antarctica
after the ice cap had melted. I didn't turn there first. I started reading about
the underwater Swedish cities, and the underwater mines they were developing,
and their underwater farms. The Swedes all planned to move into the Baltic. A
hundred feet of seawater was the best defense against UV radiation for any
fair-skinned man or woman.

I had started reading about the state of Missouri's plans to build a dome over
all of Saint Louis when a blind woman walked by, tapping the sidewalk with a
metal rod torn from some rusted machine. "I'm hungry and thirsty," she kept
saying. "Will someone please buy me food?" No one bought her any food. None of
the street vendors handed her anything especially not a glass of water. She kept
tapping her way down the sidewalk. "I'm hungry and thirsty," she said again and
again. Midwestern accent. She'd come here from some desertified part of Iowa.

I bought a hotdog and a Coke and carried them to the blind woman. "Here's some
food and drink," I said. I told her what I'd brought. She reached out above the
food, so I put it in her hands. She did not wear goggles. There was no need. Her
eyes were UV blinded, white, the color fading from her irises, like my mother's
eyes before she died of skin cancer. My mother had looked at me with those
fading eyes and asked me to drive her to Lake Baikal one last time, before she
couldn't see it anymore. We spent the day on a rock high above the lake,
watching the sunlight on the water, and the clouds reflected there, and when my
mother spoke to me that day it was the first time I could hear the skin cancer
in her voice: low, and dark behind her words.

"Nadya," Savka called, behind me.

I turned. Savka waved to me. The other two were with him. I left the blind woman
and walked back to them: Yegor Grigorovich, Gomel State University, specialist
in the treatment of advanced skin cancers; Aruthin Zohrab, Novosibirsk State
University, noted for his work in developing UV-resistant strains of wheat; and
Savka, Moscow M. V. Lomonosov State University, dreamer, theorist, believer in
man's ability to restore the ozone layer.

"You were talking to that blind woman?" Aruthin asked.

I nodded.

"Have you read a newspaper today?" Yegor asked. "The UN Commission on Blindness
estimates fifty million people have gone blind in China. Another hundred million
may go blind in the next ten years."

"How can that country go on with so many blind people?" Aruthin asked. "What
will they do with them?"

Nothing, I thought. Nothing. I remembered the first time my mother and I had
seen a blind Chinese. He had walked across the border and all the way to
Irkutsk, somehow, in the fall 10 years before. Mother took him into our home.
Neither of us spoke a word of Mandarin, and he knew no Russian. I made him some
tea and put the warm cup in his hands, and he held it and tried to stop shaking
from the cold. We let him sleep by the stove after supper. He kept holding the
teacup -- he wouldn't let go of it. In the morning, he was gone. He hadn't taken
anything. He'd set the teacup in the middle of the table. We looked for him, but
we couldn't find him on the streets around our house, or downtown.

"The museum is just up the street," Savka said. "We should get in line."

We started walking toward the Metropolitan. A line of people stretched from its
doors, down the steps, and up a hundred feet of the sidewalk. Everyone in line
was waiting to see "The Green Hills of Earth."

"There are still lines," I said. "After five months of exhibition."

"A silly exhibition, fifty years too soon," Aruthin said. "Most of us in this
line can remember the Earth as it was. I am going because I love the Constable
landscapes on loan here, nothing more."

"At least now we can appreciate your Constables," Yegor said. "Landscape art was
undervalued before ozone depletion."

They went on like that, the two of them. Savka and I stood behind them, in line,
listening to them talk about art, moving forward step by step.

"What made you give up?" Savka asked me, quietly, suddenly.

"I haven't 'given up'!" I said. I was angry with him for asking such a question,
for suggesting such a thing. "My life has been the study of biological diversity
and how to preserve it. I will not give up on that."

"But you wouldn't come into the park to see the diversity preserved there."

He couldn't see the world the way I saw it. He thought that domed park a good
thing. "We had so much," I said to Savka. "And we have lost so much."

We listened to Yegor and Aruthin talk about art, and to the noise of the traffic
on Fifth Avenue. We didn't talk for a time. But I knew Savka well enough to know
he wouldn't let this conversation just end. He noticed the Time I was carrying.

"You were in Antarctica, weren't you?" he asked. "What is it like?"

"Cold," I said.

"Just cold?"

Where could I start? He was reading me like I knew he could. I'd seen things in
Antarctica I hadn't told anyone about. "There's still a lot of ice--at least it
seems that way to me," I said. "The sea is completely free of ice."

"Where were you?"

"At Mirnyy. I was there in the summer, so there was always light, glinting off
the ice. The glare is softer in the mornings, and the ice looks deep blue then
-- almost purple."

We walked ahead slowly, maybe five feet, then I looked at Savka and decided to
keep talking, to tell him about what had made me flinch in Antarctica: make him
see that I hadn't given up though I'd been hurt. "I walked out my first morning
there," I said. "I wanted to look at the sea. The morning was quiet. There was
no wind. Then I realized it was too quiet -- no seabirds were hunting fish.
There were no birds at all, I thought, at first.

"But there were still some birds. There were still penguins. I came around a
bend in the beach and saw hundreds of them lying there, blind, starving. Many
had already died, and the stench was terrible. I knew the penguins were starving
when I went to Antarctica: the phytoplankton extinctions led to the extinction
of krill the penguins fed on and there was nothing left for them to eat. But it
never occurred to me that the penguins would go blind. I hadn't realized how the
suffering of their looming extinction would be compounded. Two chicks had just
hatched, and I watched them stare up at the sun and try to walk, and I realized
they were being blinded, even then, just out of their eggs. I knelt so that my
shadow was over their heads for a time and tried to think of a way to save them,
but there was no transport for them to a zoo and no way to nurse hatchlings at
the base. I had to leave them. I stood up and looked around and I was standing
in the middle of all those hundreds of dead and dying penguins, and I could do
nothing for them. Nothing, Savka. Nothing."

I'd twisted my Time into a tight roll. I unrolled it, then rolled it back the
other way to try to get the bend out of it. It was something to do with my
hands.

"You two are a somber pair," Aruthin said.

"Here is the museum entrance," Yegor said. "Get out your money."

We paid and went inside, stayed in line for "The Green Hills of Earth." After a
time I asked Savka and the others to save my place, and I walked off toward the
ladies' room. But once around a corner, I just sat on a bench and looked at the
crowds of people coming in to see paintings of an old Earth.

Someone tapped my shoulder, and I looked up at somebody in a burnoose, wearing
goggles inside the museum. "Are you just going to sit here, lady, or will you
come with me now to talk to the Xavier-Briggs people?"

It was the man with the Jersey accent. I was sure he was a man, now, after his
touch. I did not scream. I did not cause a scene. I did not even get very angry.
I just knew, then, that it was time to talk with them, time to start my work. In
his abayeh and burnoose, the man looked like a medieval monk waiting to receive
my confession. But I had nothing to confess, except that I was tired: very, very
tired of working for something that would never be. The world would all change
now, and I would help mold that change. That was my choice. I did not know what
my mother would have thought of my decision. But I was younger than her, and
maybe different from her after all, because I was voting again -- I realized
that now -- I was voting in the new world I would help to be born.

I sat up straight, threw back the hood of my chador, pulled off my goggles (I'd
forgotten to do all that again, once inside), and spoke to the man. "Wait for me
outside," I said. "I want to look at these paintings. Then I will go with you to
talk to your people."

I tried not to imagine him smiling in the shadows of his burnoose.

I looked away and imagined, instead, the Sphenisciformes nocturnalis that would
come, the nocturnal penguins, with their large owl eyes and their thick lids,
waking at dusk to tumble into a dark sea. There they would feed on UV-resistant
krill I would develop, if I could, and if not krill, something. I would find
something to change for them so they could eat in the blackness of their new
world.

I took my place in line and went with Savka and Aruthin and Yegor to look at
Constable's The Hay-Wain and The Grove at Hampstead and the soft sunlight in
those paintings. We walked along past the works of so many other landscape
artists, and somewhere between Frederick Church's Heart of the Andes, with its
sumptuous trees, and Van Gogh's A Cornfield, with Cypresses, I opened my Time to
the article on Antarctica and looked at each photograph. In years to come, the
photographs from Antarctica would look very different. These had no penguins.




SHAYNE M. BELL

BRIGHT, NEW SKIES

I took my broken goggles to the UV-protective goggles store built into the dike
across from the World Trade Center. The wheelhouses of two Siberian cargo ships,
docked behind the store to unload wheat, towered above the dike, and I could not
stop looking at them because I remembered the days when America exported wheat
to my country of Siberia, not the other way around. When Mother could get
American wheat, she would bake it into bread early in the morning, and she would
laugh at my five brothers and me after the aroma made us tumble out of bed and
hurry into the kitchen, rubbing our eyes. "What will this country come to,"
she'd say, "if capitalist bread can pull even young communists out of bed?"

But that was a long time ago.

"Lady, either go in the store or get off the sidewalk."

Complete stranger. High voice but a man, I guessed -- I could not see under his
burnoose for physical confirmation. His New Jersey accent told me nothing more
than place of origin. I forced myself not to appear startled -- not to show any
sign of weakness in front of him. The science of biology can teach you that,
teach you not to startle, but to observe and record. Biology had startled me
many times, but I had flinched only once, not very long ago. I did not flinch in
front of this man. I pulled my chador tighter around me and walked toward the
store, wary of the man behind me on the sidewalk, listening for any sound that
he was moving toward me. I was in a good part of New York City, I kept telling
myself. Nothing bad should happen to me here.

But part of me kept saying that this was New York, not Irkutsk, that I was in a
temperate land now, not a polar, and that things were different here. You never
knew. The very conference on ozone depletion I had come to speak at had
collapsed, and in a world where things like that could happen despite the
desperate evidence outside the conference doors, anything at all could happen.
Anything.

Bells jangled when I opened the door. The store was cool. The man did not follow
me inside. I closed the door and looked back out at the man as I did so. He was
standing there, watching me. Sunlight glinted on goggles under his burnoose. He
could have easily walked around me, so I did not know what made him angry enough
to order me off the sidewalk. Maybe he belonged to one of the sects that kept
women indoors where their skins would never burn and he thought I should not be
out like this.

"Can I help you?" asked a clerk, dim in her chador in shadows behind a counter,
Greenwich Village accent.

I considered asking her to call the police, but I decided to calm myself. The
man outside could be merely a religious fanatic, not a pervert, in which case a
three-cabbie cab would do as well for me as the police if I needed help leaving
this place: one of the expensive cabs, with a driver, a bodyguard riding shotgun
in the front passenger seat, and the bodyguard's rifle that Americans counted as
the third cabbie. I realized the man could also be following me, keeping tabs on
where I went; the worst that would happen then would be that more company
executives would track me down and try to talk to me, try to pay me money for
what I had discovered, as if that were what I would want --me, from Siberia, a
woman with memories of an old-fashioned, communist mother who would have been
ashamed of me for taking it. My discoveries were worth more than money: they
were worth the sight in animals' eyes. I could stop the rush of blindness in all
species. But even so, I could not decide whether to announce my discoveries. I
would have to change a species forever to save its sight -- genetically enhance
it; ensure, through adaptation, the final destruction of the world we knew and
the creation of a new. I could not sell such techniques for money. If I decided
to use them, I had to give them to a company that would use them well, and
quickly, and sell its procedures cheaply. Doing that, at least, would have made
my communist mother proud.

"Can I help you?" the clerk asked again, genuine concern in her voice this time.
I let the kindness of her concern wash over me.

"Yes," I said, but then I stopped. It was a day for worries, and maybe even
shock. On the counter next to the clerk stood a stuffed penguin wearing
Xavier-Briggs UV-protective goggles, smiling as if it were as happy on top of a
glass case as it would have been on a beach, and all I could do was stare at it.
I hadn't seen a penguin, alive or stuffed, since I'd left Antarctica one year
before. "Who did that to a penguin?" I asked. I did not have to add: one of the
last penguins.

"It's not real. Feel it. It's fake. Marketing ploy -- you've seen the TV ads?
But the stuffed animals they make these days look so real, don't they?"

I nodded and forced myself to look away from the penguin, pulled my broken
goggles out of an inside pocket of my chador. That made me remember to throw
back the hood, take off my borrowed goggles, and run my fingers through my hair.
I was always forgetting to throw back the hood of my chador when I walked in a
store, and I wasn't always in a hurry.

"Prescription or merely protective?" the clerk asked.

"Protective. My eyes are still good."

"Lucky you. We have to send out for prescription, and that can take an hour. Go
ahead and look around at what we have in stock. Try on anything."

I walked off down an aisle of goggles, wondering if she'd said lucky you because
I wouldn't have to wait or if she meant to comment on the fact that my eyes were
still good. I glanced back out the door. The man was still standing on the
sidewalk, looking into the store. If he worked for Xavier-Briggs or some other
company that had hired him to follow me --and if I could prove it -- I'd sue
them for harassment. I passed cases of diamond-studded goggles, then rows of
fluorescent orange and green goggles. I needed a pair of good work goggles.

The clerk walked over to me. "Should I call the police about that man outside?
Is he a threat to you?"

"I don't know," I said. "He ordered me off the street, and that was the first
time I heard his voice. I remember voices, so I don't know him. But he's just
standing there, looking at us."

"I'm calling the police."

She called them on a phone on the wall behind her cash register, then she walked
to the front door and locked it. "They're coming," she said.

The man just kept standing on the street, looking into the store.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I did not come here to disrupt your business."

"It happens," she said with a shrug. "But I have your accent now. You're from
Siberia, aren't you?"

So she played the game, too. Picking out accents was a game I'd played with
expatriot friends I made at Columbia when I was a visiting professor there. We
tried to learn what we could about a person from the voice, now that people
everywhere hid in clothes for protection against the sun. Voices told more about
people than I ever imagined. I could now hear if a man were fat or if a woman
were anorexic or if someone were developing skin cancer, all from the voice. My
mother claimed to be able to tell what kind of skin cancer people were
developing, just from the words they spoke about other things.

"Yes. I'm Siberian," I said. "From Irkutsk."

"You came for the conference?" I nodded.

"What do you study?"

"Ecosystems, and how to adapt them to the new world."

"Ah, that explains why the penguin upset you. They aren't adapting, are they?"

"I will not buy anything made by Xavier-Briggs," I said, looking back at the
begoggled penguin on the counter. All my life I had talked about adapting, with
all kinds of people about all kinds of adaptations. I walked down an aisle,
looking at the goggles. I saw goggles with little gold crosses on the sides, and
I thought of the finely wrought Russian Orthodox church near my mother's house
and how I had talked with her about adaptation there. The communists had made it
into a museum, and my mother was proud of that. She used to take me there to see
the art on display, art confiscated from private owners after the revolution and
now set out for all the people to see. One day we arrived early in the morning.
The curator was just opening for the day, and we met him outside on the steps.
He was scraping wax off the steps and sweeping up the remains of candles that
had burned down in the night. "They make such a mess here," he said.

"Who?" I asked, in my little girl's voice.

My mother looked sharply at me. "The superstitious in this town who won't give
up trying to worship here," she said.

"Why?" I asked. "It's a museum now. Why do they want to burn candles on the
steps?"

"Because they think this place is holy, whether we call it a museum or not," the
curator said, and he swept the candles into a garbage pail and we all walked
inside. I thought and thought about those people, whoever they were, trying to
do on the steps what the church had been built for, and thinking about them and
their disappointments made me cry. Mother took me outside, and we sat on the
steps while I stopped crying. There were still flecks of wax on the steps by my
shoes. I reached down to brush them away, into the grass. My mother was not
cross with me. "A lot of people cried when we made this place a museum," she
said. "But a new world had come to us back then, and we all had to adapt to it.
In the case of the people who valued this place as a church, we had to force the
adaptation, for their own good. It's turned out all right. Forced adaptations
might be painful at first, but only at first. In a generation, no one will think
of this place as anything but a museum."

In spite of those words, I'd gone on to spend my life trying to keep things the
way they were, trying to find ways for the natural world to survive as it was
without changing it to fit new realities. How I had failed. If I had listened to
my mother all those years ago, I would have known that I would fail.

"Have you seen these?"

The clerk held up a pair of goggles with tiny aquaria in the temples. Little
blue fish swam in them behind tinted glass.

"We import them from Taiwan," she said.

I took them out of her hands. "How do you feed the fish?" I asked.

"The tops open, here." She opened one for me, then closed it again. "We sell
little boxes of food for the fish, along with the goggles."

I tried them on and looked in a mirror. The goggles looked terrible on me, but
they were fun. "How much are these?" I asked.

"Four hundred ninety-seven dollars. Plus tax."

I took off the goggles and handed them back. "What I really need is something
that can get knocked around in the open," I said. "Work goggles."

"I carry a Swiss line that might be just the thing for you."

She led me to a back comer of the store, and I could hear water there, and
distant booms from the unloading of one of the Siberian ships. We were evidently
standing at the edge of the dike, fifteen feet below the new sea level. I
touched the wall. It was cool but not damp.

The Swiss goggles were fine: black, sturdy frame, scratch-resistant lenses.
"I'll take them," I said, and someone knocked on the door. We both looked at the
door. Three men in suits stood there. Customers, I thought.

"Meet me at the cash register," the clerk said, and she hurried to unlock the
door.

I carried my goggles to the cash register and looked at the penguin. I couldn't
help it. It looked so real, and so silly in its goggles. I almost touched it to
see if it were fake, after all.

"You can save that species, can't you?" the clerk asked me, back now, at the
cash register.

"What do you mean?" I asked. The men in their goggles and burnooses had walked
up with her and the man with the Jersey accent was with them, and suddenly I
knew. These were all company people. Probably Xavier-Briggs. I did not know what
was going to happen. The police were not coming. The clerk had obviously never
called them. Her call had brought these men.

"Why don't you do something to save the penguins?" the clerk asked me.

"I would have to destroy them -- turn them into something different --to save
them," I said. "I'm not sure it's worth that."

"Gifts of nocturnal eyes and nocturnal biorhythms would save the species from
extinction," one of the men said.

"No," I said. "The penguins would still be extinct. I would just have created a
new creature on their basic frame."

"So you can do it."

So I'd been tricked. I was admitting too much of what I could do and what I
hesitated to put into practice. I put the goggles on the counter.

"No, they're yours." The clerk pushed them toward me. "We'll buy you anything
you want from here." She'd kept the Taiwanese goggles with aquaria, and she
tried to hand them to me, too. "You at least would take good care of the fish,"
she said.

I would not touch the goggles. I would not be bought with gifts or money.

"Only the species that can adapt will survive, and not all the ones we need are
going to make it," the clerk said. "We have to help them."

And make billions in the process. I'd heard it so many times before, from so
many companies. Whoever could finally save the cows, alone, would make billions.
My communist mother, the year after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, when she
finally gave up hope of it ever coming back, looked at me and said the only
people who would survive now would be the ones who adapted to money-grubbing.
"Adapt," I spat the word out. "You want me to use what I developed to change the
natural world so it can adapt to the ugliness and desperation uncontrolled
capitalist corporations brought on the earth. And that hasn't changed, has it?
You are all still uncontrolled. All I might do if I work with you is prolong a
species' suffering."

"You don't believe that," the clerk said. "You were stunned by a stuffed
penguin. You came in here to buy goggles to protect your own eyes. If you didn't
want to live in a world that might still include penguins, in whatever form, you
wouldn't be here to take care of yourself."

I looked down and said nothing. This clerk could read more than accents. And
this was an odd conversation, for me. Yes, they had tried to buy me with gifts
of goggles. Yes, that gift implied much more. But they hadn't yet talked about
what more it implied. They had talked mostly about saving species. These people
were a little different, after all. "How do I know any of you will let me give
eyes to the penguins?" I asked.

"We have a list of species to save first," the clerk said. "We could let you add
some of those you love most to that list. If we start research and testing on
your processes now, perhaps by spring we could have cows in fields again."

At night, grazing on the tough grasses inheriting the earth. All the delicate
and beautiful soft grasses were gone.

"Your penguins could be next," one of the men said.

"Will you at least talk with us?" another asked. "Xavier-Briggs' bioengineering
division is second to none. We can do this work faster than anyone else. You
must want things to move quickly now."

"I'll think about this," I said.

"Others will eventually discover what you have," the clerk said. "You should act
now while you have a chance to shape the world in ways you want it shaped."

"I'll need time to think about all this," I said. "Let me pay for the goggles
and go." I took my credit card from my purse and held it out to the clerk. I
knew now that she was no mere clerk, but she had been minding the store, so she
had probably been trained to make sales. I was suddenly chilled to think how
closely these people had watched me and how accurately they had anticipated my
actions and how quickly they had set up this elaborate ruse to talk to me.

The "clerk" took my card and deducted fifty-nine Siberian dollars for the Swiss
goggles from my account. I left the Taiwanese goggles on the counter, put on my
new goggles, and walked out of the store. No one offered me a ride I would not
have accepted. None of them asked where they could find me. I was sure they knew
how to find me. I walked along, trying to imagine adding the names of six or
seven species to a list of a handful to be saved, and wondering how I would
choose and whether I should attempt to set up an entire little ecosystem of
saved species that could prey on each other in the new world.

A wind had started blowing, from inland up the Hudson, and it was dusty. I had
half an hour to get to the Central Park entrance on Seventy-Ninth Street, meet
the three people I'd flown over with, and go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
to see its controversial exhibit "The Green Hills of Earth: Landscape Painting
before Ozone Depletion."

My mother had never joined any of the new political parties in Siberia. After
the breakup of the Soviet Union, she never voted again. As I walked along the
streets of New York after leaving the goggles shop, I remembered standing once
in front of our house in Irkutsk, watching people walk to the church/museum to
vote in a confusing election with candidates from fifteen political parties, and
my mother would not go. I could not understand that. She had talked to me so
often about how communists could force successful adaptations in society, but
now she would not adapt herself to a new society. Remembering that made me
suddenly realize that she had been just like me -- or that I was just like her,
after all: we both wanted the world to stay the way it had been. My mother's
world had been communist, and she hadn't wanted it to change. All those years
ago, I felt her watching me when I finally set off down the street to vote, and
I seemed to feel her eyes on my back again as I walked down these streets in New
York City. I felt it so strongly I turned around once, and an old woman was
behind me, but she was black and dressed in an ankle-length, black skirt and a
long-sleeved, green silk blouse and burnoose, the kind of fine clothes my mother
could never have worn because she hardly saw such things in the stores of
Irkutsk through most of her life and when they did come she didn't have the
money. The black woman smiled at me, and I hurried on to the park.

Savka Avilova, my old friend, stood waiting in front of the park entrance. I
could tell it was Savka, even in his abayeh and burnoose. He always stood in a
crowd with confidence and interest. I walked straight over to him. "Nadya, how
could you tell it was me?" he asked.

I just smiled. "Where are the others?"

"Inside. Come with me to get them."

I looked up at the protective dome that covered the Park. "No," I said.

Savka grabbed my arm and pulled me closer to the entrance. "Smell the air," he
said.

The air flowing out of the park smelled of growing plants. Humus. Faintly of
lilacs, though it was not their season.

"Come in," he said.

"No," I said again. "Take away this dome and the plants in there would die. I
don't find that beautiful. I remember those trees growing without domes over
them."

Savka left me and went in after the others. I walked away from the park
entrance, back to where the air smelled of dust and exhaust and people who could
afford to bathe only once a week, even in summer heat. I bought the week's Time
at a newsstand. The cover story was on the new coastal settlements in Antarctica
after the ice cap had melted. I didn't turn there first. I started reading about
the underwater Swedish cities, and the underwater mines they were developing,
and their underwater farms. The Swedes all planned to move into the Baltic. A
hundred feet of seawater was the best defense against UV radiation for any
fair-skinned man or woman.

I had started reading about the state of Missouri's plans to build a dome over
all of Saint Louis when a blind woman walked by, tapping the sidewalk with a
metal rod torn from some rusted machine. "I'm hungry and thirsty," she kept
saying. "Will someone please buy me food?" No one bought her any food. None of
the street vendors handed her anything especially not a glass of water. She kept
tapping her way down the sidewalk. "I'm hungry and thirsty," she said again and
again. Midwestern accent. She'd come here from some desertified part of Iowa.

I bought a hotdog and a Coke and carried them to the blind woman. "Here's some
food and drink," I said. I told her what I'd brought. She reached out above the
food, so I put it in her hands. She did not wear goggles. There was no need. Her
eyes were UV blinded, white, the color fading from her irises, like my mother's
eyes before she died of skin cancer. My mother had looked at me with those
fading eyes and asked me to drive her to Lake Baikal one last time, before she
couldn't see it anymore. We spent the day on a rock high above the lake,
watching the sunlight on the water, and the clouds reflected there, and when my
mother spoke to me that day it was the first time I could hear the skin cancer
in her voice: low, and dark behind her words.

"Nadya," Savka called, behind me.

I turned. Savka waved to me. The other two were with him. I left the blind woman
and walked back to them: Yegor Grigorovich, Gomel State University, specialist
in the treatment of advanced skin cancers; Aruthin Zohrab, Novosibirsk State
University, noted for his work in developing UV-resistant strains of wheat; and
Savka, Moscow M. V. Lomonosov State University, dreamer, theorist, believer in
man's ability to restore the ozone layer.

"You were talking to that blind woman?" Aruthin asked.

I nodded.

"Have you read a newspaper today?" Yegor asked. "The UN Commission on Blindness
estimates fifty million people have gone blind in China. Another hundred million
may go blind in the next ten years."

"How can that country go on with so many blind people?" Aruthin asked. "What
will they do with them?"

Nothing, I thought. Nothing. I remembered the first time my mother and I had
seen a blind Chinese. He had walked across the border and all the way to
Irkutsk, somehow, in the fall 10 years before. Mother took him into our home.
Neither of us spoke a word of Mandarin, and he knew no Russian. I made him some
tea and put the warm cup in his hands, and he held it and tried to stop shaking
from the cold. We let him sleep by the stove after supper. He kept holding the
teacup -- he wouldn't let go of it. In the morning, he was gone. He hadn't taken
anything. He'd set the teacup in the middle of the table. We looked for him, but
we couldn't find him on the streets around our house, or downtown.

"The museum is just up the street," Savka said. "We should get in line."

We started walking toward the Metropolitan. A line of people stretched from its
doors, down the steps, and up a hundred feet of the sidewalk. Everyone in line
was waiting to see "The Green Hills of Earth."

"There are still lines," I said. "After five months of exhibition."

"A silly exhibition, fifty years too soon," Aruthin said. "Most of us in this
line can remember the Earth as it was. I am going because I love the Constable
landscapes on loan here, nothing more."

"At least now we can appreciate your Constables," Yegor said. "Landscape art was
undervalued before ozone depletion."

They went on like that, the two of them. Savka and I stood behind them, in line,
listening to them talk about art, moving forward step by step.

"What made you give up?" Savka asked me, quietly, suddenly.

"I haven't 'given up'!" I said. I was angry with him for asking such a question,
for suggesting such a thing. "My life has been the study of biological diversity
and how to preserve it. I will not give up on that."

"But you wouldn't come into the park to see the diversity preserved there."

He couldn't see the world the way I saw it. He thought that domed park a good
thing. "We had so much," I said to Savka. "And we have lost so much."

We listened to Yegor and Aruthin talk about art, and to the noise of the traffic
on Fifth Avenue. We didn't talk for a time. But I knew Savka well enough to know
he wouldn't let this conversation just end. He noticed the Time I was carrying.

"You were in Antarctica, weren't you?" he asked. "What is it like?"

"Cold," I said.

"Just cold?"

Where could I start? He was reading me like I knew he could. I'd seen things in
Antarctica I hadn't told anyone about. "There's still a lot of ice--at least it
seems that way to me," I said. "The sea is completely free of ice."

"Where were you?"

"At Mirnyy. I was there in the summer, so there was always light, glinting off
the ice. The glare is softer in the mornings, and the ice looks deep blue then
-- almost purple."

We walked ahead slowly, maybe five feet, then I looked at Savka and decided to
keep talking, to tell him about what had made me flinch in Antarctica: make him
see that I hadn't given up though I'd been hurt. "I walked out my first morning
there," I said. "I wanted to look at the sea. The morning was quiet. There was
no wind. Then I realized it was too quiet -- no seabirds were hunting fish.
There were no birds at all, I thought, at first.

"But there were still some birds. There were still penguins. I came around a
bend in the beach and saw hundreds of them lying there, blind, starving. Many
had already died, and the stench was terrible. I knew the penguins were starving
when I went to Antarctica: the phytoplankton extinctions led to the extinction
of krill the penguins fed on and there was nothing left for them to eat. But it
never occurred to me that the penguins would go blind. I hadn't realized how the
suffering of their looming extinction would be compounded. Two chicks had just
hatched, and I watched them stare up at the sun and try to walk, and I realized
they were being blinded, even then, just out of their eggs. I knelt so that my
shadow was over their heads for a time and tried to think of a way to save them,
but there was no transport for them to a zoo and no way to nurse hatchlings at
the base. I had to leave them. I stood up and looked around and I was standing
in the middle of all those hundreds of dead and dying penguins, and I could do
nothing for them. Nothing, Savka. Nothing."

I'd twisted my Time into a tight roll. I unrolled it, then rolled it back the
other way to try to get the bend out of it. It was something to do with my
hands.

"You two are a somber pair," Aruthin said.

"Here is the museum entrance," Yegor said. "Get out your money."

We paid and went inside, stayed in line for "The Green Hills of Earth." After a
time I asked Savka and the others to save my place, and I walked off toward the
ladies' room. But once around a corner, I just sat on a bench and looked at the
crowds of people coming in to see paintings of an old Earth.

Someone tapped my shoulder, and I looked up at somebody in a burnoose, wearing
goggles inside the museum. "Are you just going to sit here, lady, or will you
come with me now to talk to the Xavier-Briggs people?"

It was the man with the Jersey accent. I was sure he was a man, now, after his
touch. I did not scream. I did not cause a scene. I did not even get very angry.
I just knew, then, that it was time to talk with them, time to start my work. In
his abayeh and burnoose, the man looked like a medieval monk waiting to receive
my confession. But I had nothing to confess, except that I was tired: very, very
tired of working for something that would never be. The world would all change
now, and I would help mold that change. That was my choice. I did not know what
my mother would have thought of my decision. But I was younger than her, and
maybe different from her after all, because I was voting again -- I realized
that now -- I was voting in the new world I would help to be born.

I sat up straight, threw back the hood of my chador, pulled off my goggles (I'd
forgotten to do all that again, once inside), and spoke to the man. "Wait for me
outside," I said. "I want to look at these paintings. Then I will go with you to
talk to your people."

I tried not to imagine him smiling in the shadows of his burnoose.

I looked away and imagined, instead, the Sphenisciformes nocturnalis that would
come, the nocturnal penguins, with their large owl eyes and their thick lids,
waking at dusk to tumble into a dark sea. There they would feed on UV-resistant
krill I would develop, if I could, and if not krill, something. I would find
something to change for them so they could eat in the blackness of their new
world.

I took my place in line and went with Savka and Aruthin and Yegor to look at
Constable's The Hay-Wain and The Grove at Hampstead and the soft sunlight in
those paintings. We walked along past the works of so many other landscape
artists, and somewhere between Frederick Church's Heart of the Andes, with its
sumptuous trees, and Van Gogh's A Cornfield, with Cypresses, I opened my Time to
the article on Antarctica and looked at each photograph. In years to come, the
photographs from Antarctica would look very different. These had no penguins.