Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction by John Joseph Adams

Author:John Joseph Adams [Adams, John Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781481450300
Google: Rz2FCgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1481450301
Barnesnoble: 1481450301
Goodreads: 25152058
Published: 2022-02-25T02:34:19+00:00

the white sea of concrete, it lay before her like scar tissue in the body of the jungle. The Rio Negro was languid as an exhausted lover—the water was lower than she could remember since the last drought. She hadn’t forgotten what it had been like, as a child, to stand on the dry bed of the river during the big drought, feeling like the world was about to end.

Bright rooftops came up toward her as the plane dipped, and she tried to see if there were any green roofs—hard to tell from this height. Never mind; she would know soon enough, when she joined the new project.

“Been on holiday?” the man next to her said pleasantly.

Fernanda was caught off guard. She had spent three months in the coastal jungle studying the drought, counting dead trees, making measurements of humidity, temperature, and rainfall, and, on one occasion, fighting a forest fire started by an agricultural company to clear the forest.

Her left forearm still hurt from a burn. The team had camped in the hot, barren expanse, and after two months, she and Claudio had broken up, which was why she was coming back alone. Theyd established beyond doubt that barren wasteland was hotter than healthy forest, and that less rain fell here, and that it was similar to an urban heat island. Far from being able to regrow the forest, they had to fight greedy marauders to prevent more of it from being destroyed. Claudio remained behind with the restoration team, and the rest of them had trekked through the deep coolness of the remaining healthy forest until they had got to civilization.

She had grown silent as the forest muttered, called, clucked, and roared around her, had felt its rhythms in some buried ancestral part of her, and her pain had quieted to a kind of soft background noise. Now she looked at the man in his business suit and his clean-shaven, earnest face, the shy smile, the hint of a beer belly, and thought how alien her own species seemed whenever she returned from the forest.

“Business,” she said coldly, hoping he wouldn’t inquire any further. The plane began its descent.

The city was the same and not the same. She found out within the next few days that the cheerful family gatherings at Tia Ana’s, which V A N D A N A S I N G H

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