As Amelia listened to this, wondering if any of it was true, or if it could help her if it were, she was looking down at Kamchatka. The dark land below her was studded with white-sloped volcanoes, but some were black, because their sides were so hot they melted the snow that fell on them. Bizarre to see land so hot that snow melted on it. The lower land around the volcanoes was thickly forested, and white with snow. There were a few towns, scattered like giant navigational beacons, but it was easy to imagine that the habitat corridors they were working so hard to establish in North America were the natural order of things here. Was Kamchatka lightly populated? Had the Russians done things better? She had thought the Russians were crazy despoilers of their country. But maybe that was the Chinese. The Chinese had definitely wrecked their land. Maybe their rule had reversed the Leopold rule, and been What’s good is what’s good for people. That was maybe what people meant when they talked about the greatest good for the greatest number—number of people, they meant. What Leopold had been saying was that taking care of the land took better care of people, over the long haul. Kamchatka, magnificent, bizarre—alien—like another world: was it doing well? She had no idea.
Then over the Aleutians, and then over Canada, where she saw more and more other aircraft in the skies around her. There had been some giant robot freighter airships over Siberia, but the midwinter dark kept a lot of small craft out of the sky, or headed south. Now she was seeing all kinds of airships lighting the sky like lanterns, including a bevy of skyvillages, floating along at the seven-thousand-foot level, the altitude that was generally kept clear for them. Amelia loved skyvillages. They were round or polygonal collections of balloons, often actually a single ring of a balloon made to look like a circle of old-style balloons, holding aloft under them (or it) platforms on which complete little villages were built, in some cases even towns of a few or several thousand people. Thirty to fifty balloons, or units of a single balloon, held each skyvillage aloft, with the smaller resort versions displaying twenty-one balloons, as in the children’s book The Twenty-one Balloons. People spoke very highly of life in these villages, and Amelia always enjoyed her visits to them. They included farms, and some had so much surface area and so few people that they were almost entirely self-sufficient, like the townships on the ocean, so that they hardly ever came down.
Amelia was now flying at around ten thousand feet, so the skyvillages she saw below her looked like flower arrangements, or cloisonné jewelry. Canadians in particular liked to fly or live in them. Her cloud show was popular in many of them, she had been told, although a little research had revealed that liking her show appeared to be a kind of campy thing, indulged in by young people who liked to laugh. Oh well. An audience was an audience.
Apparently people were beginning to wonder why she wasn’t broadcasting. Nicole told her that daily. People were aware she was flying but not broadcasting. Rumors had it that she was traumatized by the death of the polar bears. Well, so what? It was true. Something like true. She couldn’t characterize how she felt. It was new, it was unpleasant. Maybe it was trauma, sure. She didn’t know. Maybe feeling stunned was part of being traumatized. But she had always felt a little stunned, she realized. A little distant, a little removed. She had hated aspects of her childhood so much that she had gone off to be alone whenever she could, and as that seemed to help, inside herself she was always a bit removed. A few seconds behind whatever happened to her, or happened in front of her. Had she always been traumatized? And if so, by what?
She didn’t know. Her mother was an obvious candidate, but then again her mother hadn’t been that bad. Just your ordinary stage mom, in fact, so why had she reacted so badly to all that? What was wrong with her that made her want so badly to get away from everyone? Was it just that the world was fucked, that people saw that and didn’t change, that they didn’t give a shit? Or was it something in her, something wrong with her?
Now again she was a bit behind what she was actually seeing, because one of the skyvillages below her was tilted sideways and spinning slowly down toward the Earth. “Frans, what’s with that skyvillage down there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Its balloons! It looks like they’ve popped?”
“Where are you looking, please?”
Amelia took the controls and headed down after the distressed aircraft. “Go as fast as you can!” she cried.
“Going.”
Amelia piloted, and Frans took over propulsion and ballast, and also established contact with the skyvillage, which was now putting out a mayday. Half of its balloons had popped all at once, and in the abrupt tilt everything aboard it had been thrown into chaos. They were dropping fast, not refrigerator fast, but with considerable negative buoyancy. They were just now pulling themselves off the tilted walls of their buildings and trying to get a grip on the situation, but had not achieved that, obviously. In fact they sounded desperate.
After her recent adventure putting the Assisted Migration on the vertical to deal with the bears, Amelia could well imagine the chaos. “Get down there,” she told Frans. “Spill more helium now. Come on, go. Go!”
“At our current speed we will intersect them while they are still approximately a thousand feet above the ground.”
“Good. How can we hook onto the side of them that’s lost its balloons?”
“Our grappling hook might serve that purpose.”
“Good. Do it. Go faster.”
“Must be able to reestablish buoyancy when we connect to them.”
“Don’t we have helium reserves in those tanks?”
“Yes—”
“Go faster then! Come on!”
She called down to them and explained her plan. They were happy to hear she had one.
The Assisted Migration dropped toward the sinking skyvillage, much more slowly than Amelia would have liked, even in what seemed to her some kind of slow motion, but in fact they were dropping fast, Frans said. As fast as possible.
“Never forget to film your adventures,” Frans added at one point.
“Fuck that!” she cried. “I hate that! Don’t you dare say things that my production team has programmed you to say!”
“Not sure what I can say then.”
“Then just be quiet! Really, Frans. You’re just reminding me that you’re a program. It’s very disappointing. I say fuck that shit, I hate that shit. You’re just like everyone else.”
Silence from Frans.
When they reached an altitude just above the falling skyvillage and had lowered Amelia’s swing rope with a grappling hook on its end, people on the skyvillage ventured out onto their sharply canted platform, all of them roped and harnessed like climbers, to collect the Assisted Migration’s grapple and hook it to the edge of the village floor, midway around the arc of busted balloons. It was so amazing to see the villagers out there in their harnesses, maneuvering like mountain climbers, that Amelia started to film it.
“Hey people,” she said to the cloud, “this is Amelia, I’m back. Check out what these folks are doing to save their skyvillage. It’s amazing! I hope they are solidly belayed, because they are just hanging there. Now there, look—there they have it. Okay, they’re going to hook our line to their floor, and we’re going to pull them up as much as we can. Frans, get us back to the strongest buoyancy we’ve got.”
“Releasing reserve helium now.”
“And quit sulking. People, Frans is annoyed with me right now, but it’s not my fault. Our producers are manipulative creeps. That includes you, Nicole. But for now let’s concentrate on the heroism of our people in trouble down there. Looks like we’ve got enough loft to pull up the side of the village that lost its balloons. I heard one of them say they thought a meteorite shot through that arc of their balloon circle. Anyway, they’re almost back to level. We’ll let them down at—at where, Frans? Where’s a good big airfield we can help them down onto?”