At least once a day, Tom would bundle up in his gear and go to the surface for a few minutes. No one else in the warren could understand it; all that was on the surface was snow, ice, and rock. There was nothing to see but and endless expanse of white and gray. As far as most of the members of the warren were concerned, their little system of tunnels and caves was all that was left of the world.
Standing on the surface, breathing in the air that was cold even after being warmed up by his mask, Tom had trouble understanding how they could live without visiting the surface. The old preacher, Andrew, had always chided Tom for not having enough religion; to Tom, this, the sky, the snow, the dead trees, even the cold that tried to pry its fingers in the cracks of his suit and freeze his blood, this was religion. Out here, he felt more human than he could ever feel cooped up in the warren. A man needed the sky above him, needed to breathe air that hadn’t been recycled and heated and scrubbed ten times over. Tom was certain that if everyone would come to the surface every once in a while, things would be better. He thought back to Higgins, the farmer they had found rocking back and forth in the middle of his wheat field, cradling his daughter’s bloodied doll. Higgins had never gone to the surface; maybe if he had, his family would still be alive.
The wind picked up, and Tom figured it was time to head back inside. He took one last look around the forest and saw motion out of the corner of his eye. Focusing, Tom could just barely make out a creeping form of white on white: a large cat was stalking prey not fifty feet away from him. As the cat crept ever so slowly and cautiously forward, Tom scanned ahead of it to try and discover its prey. Finally, he saw a fox with a winter coat of its own digging at the roots of one of the trees. As if sensing the two creatures watching it, the fox looked up and behind it, but it was too late; the cat pounced, made a single shake of its head, and the fox was still. Tom turned around and headed inside as the cat prowled off into the woods, its prey dangling from its jaws.
Tom passed through the double seal of the outer doors and entered a dressing room that opened off the main passage on the right. It took him the better part of ten minutes to remove his outdoor gear and secure it in his locker. From there he went down a staircase and passed through another seal, arriving in the main chamber of the warren. Several tunnels led out of this chamber and then branched, turned, and crossed one another, forming the road system that connected the homes, farms, and factories of everyone in the community. As much as he enjoyed the solitude that the surface provided, Tom was always happy to come through that seal and hear the bustle of several hundred people going about their business.
Normally, Tom would go through the second tunnel on the right and navigate the tunnels to his workshop, but today was a day off for the warren; a day for people to trade, rest, and play. Instead, Tom walked across the square to a small, unlabeled door next to the warren administrator’s office; he knocked once and entered.
Inside, the place was a giant warehouse with shelves everywhere filled with books, disc cases, and small sticks of metal and plastic. Tom stopped to breathe in the musty smell of old knowledge before announcing himself. “Curator?” he called out. “Are you busy?”
“Tom?” a gravelly voice called out from the opposite end of the chamber. “Not busy at all, boy. Come in; I’m at my desk.”
Tom walked down the metal steps and threaded his way through the maze of the old man’s collection. There were several routes through the shelves to the Curator’s desk, but none of them was a straight path. As he navigated the switchbacks, dead ends, zigzags, and meanderings of the stacks, Tom wondered, as he often did, whether the layout of the place was designed to expose the Curator’s visitors to as many items as was possible. When he was younger, Tom would sometimes get so hopelessly lost that he would eventually give up, pick up a book, and sit down to read it. Typically, he’d stay immersed in what he was reading until the Curator stumbled upon him, often hours later, during his own wanderings of what he affectionately called the Infomaze.
This time, however, Tom had a specific question for the old man, so he took a route he knew well and arrived only a few minutes after leaving the entrance. As he approached, the Curator was sitting at his desk, typing notes that appeared on one of the ten or so screens that surrounded him while he read information from two or three other ones. The desk itself was almost as remarkable as the stacks Tom had just passed through. It was a massive thing, with several processors, electronic storage banks, and a ton of memory built in, with file cabinets, extra drawers for odds and ends, several printers and ports, and the aforementioned monitors all tacked on as well. The surface of the thing was blanketed in piles of papers, books, and empty food containers from the cafeteria; indeed, the only clear spaces were the keyboard and the spot where new pieces were scanned into the system. Sometimes, the chair would be clear as well, but today it was occupied by the diminuative, mostly bald, bespectacled man that most members of the warren knew only as the Curator.
As Tom walked up, the Curator began talking, seeming to pick up a lecture that he had begun days or even weeks before. “You see, the warren lifestyle is ultimately unsustainable. We can grow food much more efficiently than before, but without some way to replenish the nutrients in the system, it will eventually break down. Even though we recycle waste and water, there is still inefficiency that cannot be overcome. The bottom line is that we have finite resources, not just in the matter of nutrients and water, but also in the matter of minerals and genetics. Most warrens were constructed in mineral rich areas, but there is only so far you can extend the tunnels, once again, eventually the mines are going to stop producing the ore that we need. Also critical is the fact that improvement, evolution, requires regular injections, pardon the double entendre, of outside DNA, or the people grow stagnant.” The Curator paused to look up at Tom. “You already know all this, of course. You actually provided an analysis of some of the problems. What you don’t know, can’t know, really, is that some of my colleagues in Warren E4 have published an interesting solution to some of these problems.”
“Really?” Tom said. “I didn’t know the E Warrens were still operational. They had food riots and civil war in the tunnels; how can they still be publishing?”
The Curator grinned. “Well, I guess they have a more than academic interest in the problems, hmm? Their population, and therefore the situation, has stabilized for the moment, but they realize more than anyone that time is running out. It’s too bad most of their solutions are reliant on technology breaking a threshold in the next 20 years or so. Do you see that happening?”
Tom shook his head. “No. If anything, tech is regressing. My apprentices won’t be able to recreate many of the things that I can do, and if not for this library I would have lost much of my old master’s knowledge. Besides, most warrens, ours included, seem to have barely enough minerals to make repairs to current devices, much less invent and build new ones.”
The Curator put his hand on his chin and hummed to himself, like he tended to do when pondering an abstract theoretical concept. “Well, there’s nothing for it at the moment. We will all starve and die, or we won’t. To be honest, I still hold out hope for the latter. Anyways, you didn’t come here to listen to me ramble about what some colleagues on the other side of the continent are doing. What did you need, my boy?”
“I was hoping you’d look in your database for an animal.”
“Writing a story?”
“No.” Tom paused, wondering what the Curator would think. Whether what he saw on the surface had been a hallucination or not. “When I was on the surface today, I saw something. A big, white cat stalked and killed a white fox. It sounds stupid, but I want to know the species of the cat.”
The Curator frowned and rocked back in his chair. “Tom, there hasn’t been any wildlife spotted on the surface in this region for at least a generation. Are you sure you actually saw it?”
“When have you known me to see things that aren’t there? Is it possible that these are some creatures that used to live farther north and then migrated here? Or, and this is where I’m almost afraid to hope, is it possible that things are getting better up there?”
The Curator sighed. “Your first theory seems the more likely. There are records from before the Cooling that indicate several species of foxes, bears, and, I believe, cats who survived in the bitterest north. However, these all lived near the coastline, where fish was abundant. We’re close to the coast, only 50 miles or so, but I don’t know if we’re close enough for that sort of wildlife.” He paused to take a drink of coffee. “As for your second theory, I don’t know. Personally, I don’t think it’ll ever warm up. At least not in our lifetimes. I think that the Cooling will have effects that outlast our species.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes while Tom pondered a question that had been gnawing at him for years, ever since he learned that the world had not always been cold and barren. Presumably, the Curator was pondering a similar topic. Finally, Tom asked his question. “Curator, what happened? What caused the Cooling?”
“Eh?” the Curator grunted, it seemed he had started to doze off. “I’m surprised to hear that question. It’s not one anyone seems to think about anymore, but it would be good for people to remember. Long ago, our civilization was thriving; we had luxuries, we could travel across continents in hours, we as a species were well over six billion strong. However, there were costs to all of this. We were greedy for land, our machines belched smoke into the air and chemicals into the water.
“This did not cause our downfall, though. At the same time as we were becoming aware of the impact of our success, the planet, we realized later through the miraculous gift of hindsight, was coming out of a small ice age. As a result, the temperatures were rising, and many of the elite believed that our activities were the direct cause of this increase in temperature. Dire warnings were given; we were told to stop the evils of our ways or incinerate ourselves. There were a few scientists who published papers trying to show that the correlation between our exhaust and the warming of the planet was flimsy at best and needed more data and more thought; however, these were shouted down by the public and by the media, who had latched on to the dramatic idea.
“The temperature kept rising, and nothing anyone did seemed to make a whit of difference. The elites became convinced that the damage we had done before realizing our errors was too great. They proposed many drastic measures to bring the planet’s temperature back in line. Several were put into action. The planet’s stratosphere was altered chemically to reflect more light, thereby trapping less heat. Similar measures were put into place on the surface as well.
“For a while, things seemed to go according to plan. The warming slowed, then stopped. Then, generations later, the planet began to enter another ice age, one that, due to our interference, was worse than any that came before.”
The Curator stopped, sipping his coffee. “And here we are,” Tom said.
The Curator nodded. “Aye, and here we are.”
* * *
Three weeks after leaving the warren, Tom stopped on a south facing slope to rest. He had been travelling south, trying to find a break in the snow and ice; some place where people could live above the surface, where they could enjoy the open air, and the sun on their face. Some place where their cattle and children could grow strong; some place where humanity could start over.
At first, he had trouble sleeping. The quiet, aside from the ever present wind, was overwhelming. He missed the smells, sounds, company, and, often most of all, the warmth of the warren. At first he struck west towards the coast, which was where he saw the first other life since leaving the warren. There was a whole colony of seals on the beach, huddled for warmth, but looking healthy and strong. He camped for a day on the bluff above the beach, just watching.
Towards the end of his first week out, he came on a great bay with the ruins of a vast city all around it. Animals prowled throughout, but he saw no sign of recent human habitation. He hurried across the vast bridge and traveled south as quickly as his legs and skis would take him. The place had a haunted feel about it.
As he traveled south from there, it seemed as though he never left the ruins. There was a relatively clear road lifted above the ruins, and he only left them for brief periods of time, as though the builders had needed some break between cities, just to know where the borders were.
Now, resting in one of these places, he looked around in the solitude and saw a sheltered hollow below him and heard the sound of running water. Leaving the road to investigate, he found some green saplings and a few birds, resting in the shelter of the hollow.
It was just a small place, about the size of his workshop back home, but it was proof. The world hadn’t died, there was still hope.
