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Highland Books Limited - Umoya Lister

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267 pages

English

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This is "geofiction" cli-fi where our planet is a key actor. Greenhouse gases lead to natural disasters and the dismal politics of scarcity. Yes, our world is groaning, symbolised by a tsunami hitting the Scottish holy island of Iona... A scientist couple begin an evidence-based protest, but this morphs into a fight against a charismatic African empire-builder even as they face their own private temptations and tragedies. Nobody taught them just how difficult this path would be nor how much the whole world would become their battleground.

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Thriller

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Publié par	Highland Books Limited
Date de parution	25 janvier 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781909690844
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Contents
--- Dedication
--- Author’s Note
01. Breaking the Rainbow
02. The Waves
03. The Ruptured Gasfield
04. The Sanctuary, the Dove
05. In Africa
06. Easter in Iona
07. Puffing in the Face of God
08. Speak to the Earth
09. Danger
10. Ozone and the Forest: the Burning Bushes
11. The Darkening North
12. On Trial
13. Darkness
14. Tim Falls
15. The Air Chill with the Breath of Snow
16. The Falling Mountain
17. Areopagitica
18. Separation
19. New Africa; New Power
20. I to the Hills will Lift Mine Eyes
21. Beating Ploughshares to Swords
22. Food Ethics in Time of Famine
23. The Hunger Wars
24. The Mugging
25. October: Give us this Day our Daily Bread
26. Probable Cause
27. The Plan
28. To Africa, to Home
29. No Way Out
30. African Spring
31. Ubuntu in November
32. The Waters of Satan
33. America Distraught
34. Zuvu rashona – the Sun has Set
35. Descent to Hell
36. Prisoners of Hope
37. The Loss that Breaks the Soul
38. By Reason of our Frailty we Cannot Always Stand Upright
39. The Rain
40. The One Right Thing
41. To Lose Genadendaal, our Valley of Grace
42. The Shepherd
PlanetQuake
Umoya Lister

© Umoya Lister
Full Copyright Notice & Publication Details
Dedication
To my family.
In memory of my mother’s town, no mean city, the old Alice that was, and those long-ago saints and neighbours who shaped her, her school, her hospital, her press, her farms, her churches and her university, and through them her daughters and sons.
Author’s Note
The book is set in the future. All characters in the work are wholly fictional and do not record living persons. Theological errors are mine alone, and my apologies go to atmospheric chemists if the urgency of plot occasionally overwhelms the slowness of kinetics. My thanks to all those who have helped, especially the critical readers, and to Philip and Fiona at Highland for their support and kindness. Special thanks go to Alice, my editor: her professionalism, diligence, insight and patient rigour are greatly appreciated.
Chapter 1
Breaking the Rainbow
That year there were no rainbows. They’d left the Earth. Men made them leave.
Well, hardly any. A few bows lingered, uncertain. Brave lights blessed the holy isles. But the rest? Men forced them away. Men blocked the soft hidden infrared; men ripped Earth’s protective veil, to bask in the ravaging ultraviolet.
In the long-ago days when Earth was Eden and fat children played under warm wet clouds, the arcs of Grace shone abundantly. Under tropical skies low rainbows came gently curving in the late evenings, as promises after thunder, or unexpectedly in the early mornings, showering souls with blessings under the dawn sun.
In the Mediterranean lands, in cool weather when gentle rains fell long on soft ground, little bows flittered like winter butterflies, momentary fragments of wing, chords of beauty. Arching over Jerusalem and Rome, and the distant Cape of Good Hope, these winter bows were friends in the east, in clearing skies of evening, or morning angels of life, bringing rain from the west.
Further north, in the moister lands, the bows were commonplace, winter and summer, unremarked delights in rain opposite sun, messengers of hope in time of dark cloud.
Near the Poles, where the world is glittering hard, and the sun is everywhere or nowhere, solar haloes came as often as sparkles danced on the sea. Occasionally they hung playfully upside down in the cirrus, great smiles in the heavens. In the long winter night they sometimes circled the glimmering moon. Mostly, the bows lived in ice crystals close by the sun. They stood beside the fire, two great curving pillars of gold, visible splendour flanking the great unseeable light, a trinity of glory. Turn, and sometimes far on the opposite horizon was the sharp anthelion spire of white; watching Lucifer.
A planet with bright rainbows is a planet fit for life. But that year Earth had no home for them. The angelic rainbows went unseen. Men changed the air, the air in which they lived and moved and had their being. Men made them hide.
Men broke them, broke the Rainbow Covenant, God’s free gift of Grace.
But Grace remains, in every sparkle of light, each rainbow diamond. The host of the Lord encamps around the dwellings of the just. Our guardian angels watch, in time and beyond time, to record, to protect.
Here is the record of one such guardian, a rainbow of Grace.
Spitsbergen
Ash breathed out and her breath hung in the air, changing it, making it warm. “Speak to the Earth and it shall teach thee,” she thought, from the twelfth chapter of Job. “I wonder what it will say to my breath?”
She shivered, drew up the string round her parka hood so that only her eyes sneaked out. She stood on a metal grating welded over the roof of the air-monitoring cabin. Far below, a thousand feet down, the tiny huts and aerials of the research station glinted. To the south, behind her, curving to the horizon was the snow-plateau, a lovely bright dome of ice. Eastwards, the great glacier swept down to the head of the bay. Flanking the ice river were mountains, the dragon’s teeth of Spitsbergen, each fierce peak a jutting triangle of rock.
Beside her to the west, the atmospheric monitoring cabin hugged into its own sharp summit. She could see the cable car pylon standing on its separate concrete pillar; clinging to the peak. Below and beyond, the sweep of King’s Bay widened to the Atlantic Ocean. Beyond that lay Greenland, a few hundred miles away – the Atlantic here shrunk to a mere channel, but profound: in the gap lay the extraordinary hole in the Earth’s crust that is the Molloy Deep.
She turned northwards, looking over the sheer cliff below her. The little jetty stood out into the bay. Blue icebergs drifted in the dark open water. In places plates of white ice made a crazy pavement on the sea surface. Across the still water of the sound she could see far over the northern hills: it seemed she could almost reach to grasp the Pole, hiding over the horizon where the fire of the new sun lay flat across the north, bright and potent in the midnight air, just before Easter.
Her mountain shimmered. Flakes of snowy confetti fell on the lacy veil of white that capped the summit over the warm brown features of the vertical cliff faces. Brows of dark rock lined the bays of snow, like eyes. Around the base of the peak the snow spread out a wide skirt, full and soft. Something old – the gentle rocks; something new – the tinsel-bright glisten of the research station; something borrowed – the warmth of the waters in the inlet, bringing in the Atlantic heat from the far tropics; something blue there, the Arctic, the northern Mediterranean – the wide polar sky, pastel blue, lightest soft blue, not the deep azure of the tropics but the thin fragile sky of the North.
Enough of the sublime – it was time to get on with the job. She leaned out over the railing to grapple with the air-inlet funnel. She hated the task, yet the adrenalin was fun. Out and out over the sky she leaned, stretching with her thin-gloved right hand, while her thick-mittened left gripped tight to the icy railing.
As she leaned, she felt a ripple of vibration in her feet. She glanced down. The roof grating under her boots was shaking, snowflakes falling from it. The movement stopped. She leaned further. The air inlet funnel was only just within her reach, far out from the rail. It had been installed by the Norwegian air chemistry institute’s giant Viking, whose arms were as long as a Cambridge punt pole. Yes! She had it. She clasped the cold metal and began to work her fingers round the funnel to clear the ice block.
That’s when the Earth struck.
She lost her footing. Her feet slipped on the icy steel in the first great shake. As her legs scrabbled up the rails to regain balance, the bigger pulses came. She tipped, her back on the rail. The shaking got worse.
Her handhold on the rail slid, turned, was gone.
She hung, hung in space, over the cliff, a hundred feet sheer, then a thousand feet down.
Her right hand tightened, grasping the funnel cone, gripping for her life. Absurdly, she saw, far below, a startled Arctic hare bounding across the cliff-edge, snow-white against snow, escaping as the snow began to avalanche.
The hare saved her, made her think. The hare didn’t lose its footing on heights. The cabin was shaking more, but it was strong steel. The funnel was mounted on an armoured airhose, tough, reinforced.
“You’re a scientist, Ash, THINK!” she screamed to herself. She swung her loose heavy gloved left hand round and grabbed the funnel, closer to the apex of the cone, just as the other hand was slipping off.
Yes, the Viking had attached the funnel properly. He always did. It would hold her hundred and ten pounds.
She was swinging now, two hands on the funnel and hose, arcing over the cliff.
Now came noise. Rumbling, crashing, groaning.
Then human noise.
Feet pounding on the ladder steps. Wild hair. The Viking. He’d seen her. In seconds he was over the rail, right leg twisted round a bar, leaning out with his huge arm. He gathered in the tough airhose pipe gently, like an elephant softly using its trunk to rein in a calf. Then he lunged. She felt her tough tool belt hauled by his vast paw. He lifted her like that, belt first, over the railing, then lost his grip and dropped her face down on the icy metal.
“Still breathing?” he asked, when he’d climbed back to safety and she’d sat up.
“Thanks. Could have given me a softer landing. Vikings! Always dumping poor women on the deck. What happened?”
“Earthquake I think. Big one. Very big. That first warning ripple – must have been the P wave. You know – the first fast wave. I figured maybe something was coming. You sure fixed that funnel good. I bet the shake cleared every crystal of ice in the inlet.”
They clambered down the ladder and pulled open the heavy insulated door of th