Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer

Author:Jeff VanderMeer [VanderMeer, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374719029
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2021-04-05T21:00:00+00:00

UNITOPIA

[59]

Maybe it wasn’t wise, but I lingered in Unitopia. It had a sweet, naïve quality. No sense of threat, just of emptiness, of abandonment. I thought perhaps I would encounter the man who had popped out of the doorway before, but, no, not even him. And I had to slough off the aftermath of excitement, slow my breathing, try to take a moment to reset.

By then, the midafternoon sun had slanted and deepened in a way that made the holding pond resemble a real lake. The walkway had a bronzed look, under that touch, and the buildings a comfortable, lived-in feel. Even the geodesic monstrosity at the end. Perhaps I felt apart from this, from this idea of “sustainability,” but I realized I could have gotten used to it. That it also felt like “sovereignty.” And those portal views of other places—they had stuck with me. Maybe they would, in time, have become real views from other Unitopias.

Silvina, stateless. Belonging, in a way, to no place and no one. Perhaps, at first, Unitopia had felt like a way to create her own country.

Had people even lived in Unitopia itself? I didn’t know. How sad if they had worked here for such a different future … but lived in a subdivision named “Lake Woods” or “River Creek.” Revolutionaries trapped in a theme-park life.

The community Silvina could not sustain, but, also, didn’t seem to have the patience to sustain. Even though she’d poured so much effort into it, brought in green-tech experts and even biologists. On the cusp of trying to make Unitopia independent. Teetering there.

Something impossible.

No, in the end, easier to tear it down and start over. The soundless scream of social media these days. The system must be destroyed. It can’t be fixed. Unitopia must have begun to seem like a Band-Aid applied to a gaping chest wound.

But how did you get from Unitopia to a kind of, for lack of a better term … weaponized taxidermy? And from that to bioterrorism? Or was that a pretty normal progression after you realize Unitopia is going to fail. That it’s not enough or not in the right direction. So you set off in a new direction, without a map. Maybe you even say, “Well, I tried to be good, to play by the rules. I tried a sustainable approach.”

On the west shore of the island, I found a relaxing nature park, along with a sign showing what you might see there. I sat on a bench and read about dredged reclamation and restored wetlands. Red-winged blackbirds in the reeds. Tanagers on migration. Marsh wrens. Great blue herons. The types of frogs. Even a rare sighting of a beaver.

But no hummingbird, no salamander.

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