Split Earth Will Crumble
Story by charles_they on SoFurry
An ecoterrorist of ambiguous species is en route to infiltrate and bomb a hydroelectric dam. They reflect on the path that led them there along the way through a series of short vignettes.
Split Earth Will Crumble
by C.M. Averin
"We warned them not to flood the land.
"The grass roots rose against them first. One pale, gold, summergrass blade in a drought, crying out for rain, but without a way to beg the weather. Then another, then another, until they found themselves in the waters. They weren't sailors come to claim and pillage, adrift at sea, no—they were the swell, and yes, maybe they were stuck in the same space, but they were the crest and the trough, rising and crashing down over and over because what was wasn't good enough. Their silence hadn't worked to break the clouds, so what did they have to lose by shrieking and howling, growling and grunting, demanding of the sky for green?"
The voice is perched both in pitch and tone on a teetering precipice with masculinity and femininity gone somewhere far over the edge, distant, lost, but still looming. It pauses for breath. There's a rhythmic, lapping splash suck, splash suck, splash suck that follows their footpaws along the waters' edge. There is no gurgle, no babble, no brook, no murmur, no purl. The water is not still, but it is quiet, slow, and empty, not of this place, but just in it, occupying space that never belonged to it. The ground-nesting nightjars and solitary owls both large and small call out to the recorder, but they are lost and the voice does not call back. The beetle-ridden Engelmann's and rocky firs who dared tread water were cut down, and those that remain are kept thirsty. The water is pristine. The sound is pristine. Each word and notword hits the recorder only once, then bounces off the mud and surface, gone into the sky.
"I am Shale."
They hesitate. The name is not theirs. The analog, the recorder is not familiar, not a friend, not of the generation or cycle. It is a stranger come to bear witness. It threatens to tell. In the silence, it listens to the splash suck.
"The grassroots were hardy, and together, they survived. Survival, though, wasn't the goal. Shared rainfall would tide them over only so long before they withered and died. Two of the old ones—whose roots then went far deeper than the grass's ever would, even given seven cycles forward and back—rose next, when the surveyors came again for consultation. But, what use is consultation if it means—oh, shit."
The water's edge splashes but there is no suck. They speak low, quiet, emptied of the greatness and earthliness they embodied moments ago. There are blades like whirlwinds slicing sky and air overhead.
"We—we don't really know how they find us out here. Or, if they do, because we might just have bad luck, but it's…suspicious, to say the least. I ditched everything digital just in case. Means no camera, but.
"I'm Shale. It doesn't matter what I look like, or who I am, or where I came from, other than I'm not from here like you're from here if you grew up on rez or if some rich European dude wore your ancestor's pelt because it was in fashion back in the day. The Dene and Dane-zaa peoples are from here, but if they did what we've been trying to, everything would already be over and they'd be dead. They'll probably be blamed anyway, I guess, but maybe the distance—and this tape—will make it clear we're just some lone wolves. Like that ever happens when it's us.
"But, you know all of this already, because you're listening, so I'm gone, and you're going to be Shale, too. Welcome to eco-terrorism. Oh, drone's gone. Think I'm still good."
The water's surface sucks in a deep breath as they begin to move again.
#
"We knew that Things Must Change," they begin.
The heartbeat rhythm splash suck has become thudlift, stop, thud, wait, lift, thudlift, snap of branch, leaf, grunt, hoot, wingbeat, wingbeat, silence, heavy breathing, thud but not of footpaw, erratic and arrhythmic, an attack waiting to happen.
"But, then again, the Dene and Dane-zaa have known that since before the settlers invented time. The balsam poplars and trembling aspens grew out of old white spruce stumps and fallen black spruce logs, giving new shelter to the things below. Yellow glacier lily corms were—are—will be—sacred, so they show respect, but they couldn't grow forever and they made sure something else lived instead. Whole meadows of those sun-star flowers, little bits of day and night interwoven through the valley and trees, were made to not rise again. At least, for a little while. Drone."
whirr. Two footpaws_whirr_ become four, chest_whirr_ meets earth, and breath, like bod_(whirr)_y, grows still. Air is drawn quick into the maw of rotating blades.
"I'm not here to romanticize. The slimy sculpin gets eaten by the Arctic grayling and our pike, the world keeps turning, it's the circle of life and all that jazz," they murmur_whirr_ through grit teeth and the corn_whirr_ of their muzzle, "but, that Things Must Change doesn't mean the thing that was is gone, just different. The new thing blooms on the corpse of the old, but it's not sad, because that's how the island comes to be on the turtle's back. The detritus is accumulated old, strong, but flexible earth that knows its connections. A place for grass roots to take hold and find sustenance, stored away for those to come. Like the dried corms.
"Only issue is, the settlers never really understood that. It's why they flooded the land. It's why they consulted, then ignored the consultation. Heh, it's even why they eat the mushrooms, even though they're of corpses and the body—they're obsessed with eating death and wearing the native pelt like they'll gain its strength, and with cannibalizing the living things that came before as if that'll preserve them in their own time. Yet, anyone who settles for less—or doesn't settle at all—is the savage in their eyes. Unless, of course, you're one-sixteenth Cherokee, though. Then you've obviously got a civilized say."
#
It has been thirty minutes since the whirr began. It swells and approaches from two_whirr_ directions, closing_whirr_ in like swooping_whirr_ gulls spotting newhatched_whirr_ sea_whirr_ turtles_whirr_ on the beach_whirr_ sand_whirr_ but_whirr_ there_whirr_ are_whirr_ no_whirr_ waves_whirr._
"…"
RUSH
There is silence: no great horned owl shriek to warn others of its range, and no shuffle of brush from the grounded short-eared owl or shoreside croak of western toad. Only the recorder's gentle clicking is audible.
"…I have no idea what that means," they say. Paw pads push root and soil, then brush against smooth, woven fabric. A footpaw snaps a branch, and there is no remark. "The Site 'C' dam is just supposed to power fracking operations in the northern basins—Liard and Horn River, as well as the embayment to the east. They couldn't fence off the flooded river, but they could fly a few drones to watch for prying eyes that might become loud muzzles. It's funny—not haha funny—that that's what drew our attention away from the fracking and to the dam in the first place. When the actual dam had been built, and when they'd flooded the land, we'd sort of just…given up on Peace River."
They let out a sound located in the back of their maw and the uncomfortable rift between a giggle and a chortle. The voice is still not intelligible as a body. There is no fur colour in the voice, nor muzzle shape, nor paw size, nor tail length. The need to disclose identity swells like a flooding river, but only overflows in these short moments. It never breaks.
"That 'not haha-funny' feeling is feeling a bit too familiar. It has been for a few years, now. I think—I think that's what guilt does. I'm a settler from anywhere but here, carrying a—carrying a bomb, intended for a turbine in a dam built by settlers, for settlers, and I built it myself. I learned how to build it. And—and even in this kind of act, I'm still guilty, because I'm not them. I'm playing the role of them, like make-believe, but I can just, just go back to wherever it is I came from when this is all over, and they'd take the blame again. Anytime before the sun rises, I could call it quits and never have to care about the dam again.
"But I can't, and I do, so I'm here—angry grass, here."
The rhythmic heartbeat of underpaw earth stops. Chain-links jingle as a muzzle presses against them. The distant
rumble __rumble_ rumble rumble rumble_
of water creeps over some distant, concrete crest.
"Oh—wow. I'm here. We're here."
#
"I used to be a schoolteacher_teacher,"_ they start, then pause, once again uncertain in their identification. The echo reaffirms them—makes them intelligible. The concrete tunnels hold no stories in them, but insist upon what is now. "I suppose I still am_stillam."_
Each pawfall has a soft, damp plap(plap) to it. The rumble of water in freefall meeting water at rest is muffled, here.
"Right now_now,_ though_though,_ I'm a hard hat that pinches my ears a little_little,_ a reflective vest that's a poor fit_poorfit,_ and a clipboard with a paper that just says 'SITE C' in all capital letters_letters._ Oh, and a tape recorder_corder._ I'm invisible_ible._ It's funny_funny_—we met when the anti-fracking group did this exercise where everyone stands up_standup,_ then they read what you'd be willing to do_todo,_ and if you wouldn't_wouldn't,_ you sat down_satdown._
"They started at marching_marching._ Most sat down at impersonation_nation._ The four of us were the only ones still standing when they said 'bomb a building_building.'"_
There's a click, then a damp
RUSH
as warm air flees the room ahead, and cold air chases the warm's tail. The rumblewater is overwhelmingly present, drowning the plap(plap) for a moment, but then, that, too, is gone. The kingrattle of suspended metal lattice underpaw is felt by the recorder more than heard, barely audible over the groan of churning turbines.
"NONE OF US ARE INDIGENOUS," THEY START, AND THERE'S SHUFFLING AND A THUD. "NO MATTER WHAT BLOOD QUANTUMS SAY OR DON'T SAY. IT'S NOT A MASK. IT DOESN'T MIX. SOCIAL JUSTICE IS REDISTRIBUTING STOLEN RESOURCES AMONG SETTLERS. IT ISN'T DECOLONIZATION. YOU CAN'T START FROM COLONIALISM. GUILT IS—"
THE NOISE IS TOO MUCH.
#
"They say that history is written by the victors," they say, and the early morningbird crows, as well as one distant, kraa-ing raven, disagree, yelling back abuse from trees and powerlines. "I don't know how to feel about that. I think that it's true, but not in the way I grew up reading about it.
"When the Dane-zaa and Cree made the long river Peace River after their fighting, the river won, because it became something—a story put into and pulled back out of the river over and over again, renewed every time its name was spoken. When the Dene peoples teach their cubs how to form the words in their muzzles, the stories win, because they live on and reshape. The old story becomes a new one, then an old one, then a—well, you get the idea.
"When, or if, the bomb goes off at sunrise, it's not us or them who lose or win. Whatever's written doesn't matter—it's the story, the meeting of storytellers, nesting beliefs and believers, that wins. The resistance isn't in the act. I don't get to be done, having done this, or anything else, because the resistance is in the oral history—in the telling of the resistance, in that story of possibility meeting storytellers who thought that story impossible to be told; that there was, is, and can be, all at the same time, something other than what is had now."
Wingbeats linger like pockets of loose silt and shale and sand collapsing by the riverside. The raven passes overhead, silent, and fades into the wood.
"The written word and settler time are dangerous, I think, because they're so closely interlinked. Because, well, what comes when you divide the world into what is and what will be, as if they're two differents and unconnected by the gaping hole you've left in the middle? When seven from now and seven ago are separate, fixed points, two frayed ends of a split, woven rope you've added length to by making gaps, you split the earth and make a chasm—but, shale doesn't hold a shape, and the edges will crumble, make a new edge, and crumble again."