At the start of his second week, they climbed the Ben as Joona had promised. It was a short bike ride from the cottage to the visitor center perched on the banks of the River Nevis, which meant they were among the first to arrive that morning. They locked the bikes into the rack, then pulled on their walking boots.
The trek was a lot easier than he was expecting, just as she said it would be. Once they crossed the small bridge by the visitor's center, they picked up a simple track running along the side of the hill, heading steadily upward. It was paved with rough stone, with neat steps cut in on the steepest parts, which seemed slightly incongruous for a supposed wilderness walk. Joona told him that the Scottish Environment Agency had to maintain it at this standard to prevent erosion. It had to cope with thousands of walkers during the course of the year.
As they climbed he could see more and more of the glen with its astonishingly green vegetation stretching away below him. The path had already started to lead through the huge swath of bright, fresh bracken that had sprung up along this section of the hill. Small wooden bridges took them over narrow fissures.
It wasn't long before the path curved around into a deep, grassy cleft with a stream at its head, white water coursing noisily through the rocky gully it'd cut into the slope. They walked toward the water, then suddenly switched back to climb the steepening slope at a reasonable angle. Another turn brought them out to a marshy saddle with its own lochan of dead, peaty water. Lawrence took a look at the vast scree-smothered slopes looming above them and sighed in mild dismay. He still couldn't see the actual top of the mountain yet. They stopped for a while above the lochan to drink some tea from their flasks and put on another layer of clothing. It was getting colder with every meter they ascended. The air below the cleft had been perfectly clear, giving them grand views across the beautiful Highland peaks. Here the mountain was accosted by thin strands of mist pushed along by the constant wind, reducing visibility.
For the next stage the path zigzagged up a steepening scree-covered slope. The tufts of grass and heather became less and less frequent until it was just stone and raw soil under their feet. Each sharp turn in the path was marked out by a cairn. Slush began to build up on Lawrence's boots as he trudged onward. Patches of snow appeared more frequently on either side of the path. The mist was thickening. He couldn't see the bottom of the glen anymore.
"It's so clean up here," he said as they stopped for another rest. "I love it."
Joona eased herself onto a boulder and pulled the flask out of her backpack. "I thought your whole planet was clean."
"It is. But that's a different sort of clean. I was expecting Scotland to be different. You had so much heavy industry around here, I thought there'd be more... I don't know, remnants. Streams that are half rust from all the old machines dumped in the lochs, mounds of slurry out of abandoned coal mines, that sort of thing."
"Scotland's heavy industry was mostly down south. Besides, you saw the reclamation plants outside town; they're busy little bees."
"Yeah." He'd noticed them on the first morning when they cycled into town, gently disturbing the landscape on the other side of the River Lochy from Benavie: underground factories strangely reminiscent of the chemical plant on Floyd, long flat-topped mounds covered in lush grass. This time there were no heat exchange pillars on top, only rows of black vents that could have easily been overlooked. The real giveaway to how much industry was hidden below the earth were the pipes running down the rugged side of Creag Chail above them: twenty wide concrete tubes that emerged from the mountainside a couple of hundred meters up only to vanish into the ground behind the mounds. They carried enough water down from the Highlands to power the whole reclamation site.
Joona told him the site had grown up from a single aluminum plant that had been built there in the twentieth century to take advantage of the hydro power. As the Brussels parliament of that time slowly started to introduce stricter legislation governing recycling, the plant had expanded, with subsidiaries springing up to reclaim other types of materials.
Now almost all of Earth's consumer products were designed so that at the end of their lives they could be broken down into their constituent elements, which were then fed back into the start of the manufacturing cycle.
Fort William handled just about every breakdown procedure, from the original aluminum cans to electronic components, glass to concrete, and the whole spectrum of polymers. One of the most modern facilities of its kind in the world, it employed everything from smelters, catalytic crackers and v-written enzyme digestion right up to ionic fission for toxics. Junk from all over Europe arrived by train, ship and canal barge to be sorted and extracted.
"I guess there's not much pollution these days," he said.
"Not in the industrialized nations, no, not after the Green-wave. Even the nonindustrial regions like Africa and Southern Eurasia are relatively clean as well. It's not in the corporate interest to foul up their future territory."
"Joona, you've got to stop looking at everything so cynically. Just because people have different goals from yours doesn't automatically make them evil."
"Really?' She gestured down the glen. "One day if they have their way the whole world will be just like this. Everyone living in their big cozy house in their tidy suburban estate."
"Yeah, terrible. Imagine that, everybody having to put up with low crime and good medical benefits."
"But no freedom. No difference. Just the corporations and their uniculture."
"That's bull," he said. "People have been complaining about multinational companies and creeping globalism since the middle of the twentieth century. The world still looks pretty varied to me."
"Superficially it is. But the underlying trend is unification. National economies are becoming identical, and it's all due to the corporations."
"Fine by me. I have no objection to them investing money in poor countries and spreading their manufacturing base. It gives everyone a chance to buy a stake."
"There is no chance. If you want to get any kind of decent job, then you have to join up. And once you're in, so's your family."