Evelyn couldn’t believe her eyes.
A sigh of astonishment shuddered through the train. The barely audible hum of the motor joined in with the bass notes of the Zarathustra theme, pregnant with mystery, while the Lunar Express slowed and then the first fanfares burst out brightly. Strauss might have been thinking of Nietzsche’s new dawn, while Kubrick used it for the transformation of the human race into something newer, higher, but right at this moment Evelyn was thinking of Edgar Allan Poe, a writer whose depths she had plumbed enthusiastically in her youth, and she remembered one sentence from his work, the terrifying ending of Arthur Gordon Pym:
But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.
She held her breath.
Ten, maybe twelve kilometres away from them, atop a plateau, high above a promontory that jutted out like a terrace beneath it and then fell away into a steep canyon, something sat, gazing up at Earth.
A person.
No, it had the shape of a human form. Not a man’s shape, but a woman’s, perfectly proportioned. Her head, limbs and body gleamed gently in front of the endless sea of stars. No expression on that face, no mouth, eyes or nose, but still there was something soulful, almost yearning in her posture as she sat there with her legs hanging over the edge and her arms out to the side, supporting her, elbows straight, her whole attention focused on that silent, distant planet above her where she would never walk.
She was at least two hundred metres tall.
Dallas, Texas, USA
If Loreena Keowa hadn’t already been the best-known face of Greenwatch, they would have had to invent her.
There was no mistaking her ancestry. She was one hundred per cent Tlingit, a member of the nation that had inhabited the south-east coast of Alaska since time immemorial and whose ancestral homeland included parts of the Yukon Territory and British Columbia. There were about 8000 Tlingit left, with numbers falling. Only a few hundred of the old people still spoke the melodic Na-Dené tongue perfectly, although these days more and more young people like Keowa learned it too, seeing themselves as the standard-bearers of ethnic self-determination in a newly green America.
Keowa came from a Raven clan in Hoonah, the Village on the Cliffs, a Tlingit settlement on Chichagof Island. Now, if she wasn’t spending her time in Vancouver, where Greenwatch was headquartered, she lived forty miles west of Hoonah in Juneau. Her features were unmistakably Indian, but at the same time bore the signs of white ancestry, although to the best of her knowledge no white man had ever married into the clan. Without being good-looking in the classical sense, she had a wild and enticing aura about her that could easily seem romantic. Her long, shining black hair exactly matched what a New York stockbroker might expect Indian hair to look like, whereas her style of dress went dead against all the clichés of the noble savage. As far as she was concerned, you could protect the environment quite as well while dressed in Gucci and Armani. She was clear and factual in her work, and hardly ever launched into polemics. Her reports were known to be well researched, unsparing, but at the same time she managed never to damn a culprit irredeemably. Her enemies called her a walking compromise, the ideal solution for milksop Wall Street eco-activists, while her defenders valued the way she brought people and viewpoints together. Whatever the truth of it, nobody could claim that Green-watch’s success wasn’t largely down to Loreena Keowa. In the past couple of years it had grown from a small internet channel to take front place among America’s ecologically aware TV stations, and had a remarkably good track record when it came to corrections or retractions – no mean feat, given that the race for a scoop on the internet went hand in hand with a worrying lack of research credibility.
It was typical for Greenwatch to feel a crude sort of sympathy for the chief strategist of EMCO, Gerald Palstein, who should really count as their bad guy. But Palstein argued for various green positions, and he’d been the victim of an attack in Calgary when he put an end to something that had always made environmental activists turn purple with rage. At the beginning of the millennium, companies such as ExxonMobil had breathed new life into an area of business that had almost been abandoned, and they had the Bush administration’s full, eco-unfriendly support. This was the exploitation of oil sands, a mixture of sand, water and hydrocarbons with huge reserves in Canada, among other places. The reserves in Athabasca, Peace River and Cold Lake alone were estimated at 24 billion tonnes, catapulting the country up in the list of oil-rich nations to place two, behind Saudi Arabia. Mind you, it cost three times as much to extract the black gold from the sands as from conventional sources, making it a losing business as long as the price per barrel hovered between twenty and thirty dollars. But in the end, rapidly climbing prices had justified the intensive investment, thanks also to Canada’s proximity to the thirsty primary consumer, the USA, grateful for every oil supplier that wasn’t an Arab nation. The oil companies pounced on the slumbering reserves with dollar signs in their eyes, and within a very short time this led to the complete destruction of the boreal forest in Alberta, the moorland biotopes, the rivers and lakes. Additionally, 80 kilos of green-house gas were released into the atmosphere for every barrel of this synthetic oil extracted, and four barrels of polluted water flowed out to poison the land.
But the price per barrel collapsed, for ever. Open-cast extraction stopped overnight, leaving the companies that had driven the business unable to repair the damaged ecosystems. All that was left were ravaged tracts of land, increased incidence of cancer in the population – and companies such as Imperial Oil, a traditional business headquartered in Calgary, which for almost 150 years had made its money from extracting and refining oil and natural gas, and, in the end, increasingly from oil sands. Just as it was at the forefront of the industry, the lights went out, and Palstein, strategic director of the majority shareholder EMCO, which owned about two-thirds of Imperial Oil, had to go to Alberta to tell the management and a stunned workforce that they were being let go.
Perhaps because it was more effective to vent anger on one man than on the ohso-distant Moon, whose resources had led to the disaster, somebody shot at Palstein in Calgary. The deed of a desperate man, at least so most people saw it.
Loreena Keowa thought that there were good grounds for scepticism.
Not that she had an answer either. But how long could an embittered, unemployed shooter expect to escape justice? The attempted killing had been one month ago. A great many things about the theory of an enraged lone gunman didn’t make sense, and since Keowa was working anyway on a feature about the environmental destruction wreaked by the oil companies, Trash of the Titans, it made sense to her that she should look into the case in her own way. Even before helium-3, Palstein had been vocal about the need for his industry to switch direction. He was on record as being no friend of the oil-sands project, and she felt that he had been unfairly treated at the press conference in Anchorage. So she had offered him a TV portrait that would show him in a better light. In exchange, she hoped for some inside information about EMCO, the crumbling giant, and more even than that, she was excited at the thought of being able to help clear up the shooting, in the best tradition of American investigative journalism.