Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk (31 page)

“Is any of this relevant to the piece you’ll be writing about me, Miss Laidlaw?” Barnaby snapped.

“Lydia,” she said. “Not Miss Laidlaw.” She held out a hand. She grinned.

Barnaby was jolted off-track. The woman was being friendly? Hadn’t she just been attacking him a moment ago? Berating him over his taste in women?

Numbly, dumbly, he shook the outstretched hand. Lydia had quite a grip.

“And may I call you Barnaby?”

Barnaby nodded.

“There,” said Lydia, getting up. “Ice broken.” And, humming a little tune to herself, she returned to the rear of the plane and her fellow journalists.

Barnaby, dazed, topped up his glass of Cristal and struggled to fathom what the hell had just happened.

A FREE LUNCH

T
HE SHE-WOLF EMERGED
tentatively from the forest of pine, spruce and cedar, sniffing the air. Her breath huffed around her in gauzy clouds. She had dark grey fur and a white muzzle and was beautiful, with a haughty set to her shoulders, imperiously pricked ears.

She seemed to sense that there were people not far away, people observing. Her gaze kept drifting towards the hide where Barnaby, the journalists, Jakob and their Inuit guide were bunkered down. The hide was downwind of her and well camouflaged, looking like a low white hummock, part of the landscape, but still she was aware that something was amiss. She took a few hesitant paces out from the shadow of the trees, into the snowfield, placing each paw with precision. She was gauging the threat level, wrestling with her instinct to turn and flee.

Nobody in the hide dared breathe. They stared through their binoculars, waiting, hopeful.

Gradually the she-wolf relaxed, judging that the threat, if one existed, was not imminent. She let out a soft, gruff bark.

Almost immediately, a half-dozen cubs tumbled out from the treeline. They yipped at one another and gambolled in the snow, rolling, fighting, cuffing.

Meanwhile their mother ventured further out into the open, towards the thing that had lured her from her den: a caribou carcass. The guide, John Kunayak, had shot the reindeer the day before and laid it out as bait that morning. The scent of blood and meat must have been unbearably intoxicating for the she-wolf. It was a wonder she hadn’t appeared earlier. But then one of the animal kingdom’s life lessons was that you should be wary of food that came too easily. There was no such thing as a free lunch.

She approached the carcass by a circuitous route, eyes constantly scanning the horizon. All at once she lunged for the caribou, seized a hindleg between her jaws and dragged the dead beast backwards. Within moments she had rejoined her brood, bringing them a banquet. The cubs set to work with relish, delving into the deer’s underside, tearing through the skin and gorging on the soft innards, while their mother gnawed on a haunch. Soon every wolf, big and small, was smeared in blood, its pelt pinkened. The caribou’s body twitched as it was devoured, as though somehow brought back to life.

Eventually all had eaten their fill, and the she-wolf hauled what was left of the carcass off into the forest. Her cubs, bellies distended, waddled after her.

The group of visitors had seen what they had been brought here to see. John Kunayak led them back to the Sno-Cat, a three-mile trek through knee-deep snow. Isaac, the eco-blogger, wheezed and struggled the entire way, demanding a rest stop every few hundred yards. He was not built for physical exertion, and the extreme cold was exacerbating his asthma. OwlHenry soon lost patience with him, calling him a fat, lazy mummy’s boy. Isaac retorted that at least he wasn’t a fucking tofu-eating scarecrow. The name-calling might have degenerated into a fistfight if Jakob hadn’t stepped in and separated the antagonists.

“Here are your options,” he told them. “You can stop squabbling like a pair of babies, or I can
klap
you both round the ruddy head ’til I’ve knocked some sense into you,
ja
? Which is it to be?”

Isaac and OwlHenry fell silent, like scolded schoolchildren.

“That’s better,” said Jakob.

It was two hours by Sno-Cat back to the oilfield, a noisy, jolting journey over rough terrain, but at least the vehicle’s cab was heated, blissfully so after the wind-chilled subzero temperatures of the Alaskan wilderness. Barnaby just so happened to be sitting next to Lydia. The seating was ungenerous, everyone squashed together all hugger-mugger. He felt her flesh pressing against his, her warmth permeating through the duck-down insulation of their Canada Goose pants and parkas. He concentrated on the landscape outside, making a show of ignoring her. On the rare occasions when he sneaked a sidelong glance at her, she was also ignoring him – yet she was smiling, too. Always smiling.

SCAPEGOATING AND VICTIMISATION

T
HE
G
LO
C
O DRILLING
station covered twenty acres of permafrosted nowhere. Rigs and derricks hunched over one-storey cinderblock buildings, all surrounded by a chainlink fence four metres high and topped with razor wire to deter curious fauna, principally polar bears and grizzlies.

The party of visitors ate dinner that night in the mess, surrounded by grizzled, boisterous roustabouts. Country music blared from the loudspeakers, and in the adjoining bar-cum-recreation-area football fans cheered a game on the TV and personal grudges were settled noisily over the pool table.

The food was basic, hearty and none too wholesome. Every main course was meat-based and served with biscuits and gravy. OwlHenry had a hell of a time finding anything he could accept as edible, in the end resorting to a selection of the soggy, overcooked vegetable side dishes.

“So we saw some wolves today,” said Isaac in his customary world-weary drawl. “Big whoop. What’s that meant to prove?”

“The Alaskan grey wolf is an endangered species,” said Aletheia, the Goth documentarian, nibbling at her food like some eyelinered dormouse. “Humans have encroached on its habitat. We’re driving it to the brink of extinction.”

“But not here,” said John Kunayak, who was a game warden with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and also employed by GloCo as the drilling station’s designated environmental-impact assessor. “Where we were this afternoon, that was grey wolf breeding territory. The forest is where several packs are known to mate and rear their young. Have done for countless generations. It also lies directly between this site and Valdez on the Kenai Peninsula, where the refineries and tanker port are. As in, if you drew a straight line between here and Valdez, it’d go smack dab through the middle of the forest.”

“So?” said Isaac.

“So, oil pipelines tend to be laid in straight lines. Shortest, most economical route possible. They cut across country, only diverting around geographical features they can’t go over, like mountains or lakes. Most companies would have ploughed a pipeline right through those trees and not thought twice about it. The wolves would have been disturbed and would have quit the area. They’d have lost their ancestral lair. But GloCo didn’t do that. On my recommendation, they agreed to give the place a wide berth. The pipeline to Valdez runs a total of twenty-five miles out of its way, going round the forest in a big arc. It can’t even be seen by the wolves. That cost GloCo – how much was it, Mr Pollard?”

“Not sure,” said Barnaby. “Couple of extra million at least.”

“Couple of extra million it needn’t have spent – wasn’t obligated by law to spend. All for the sake of a bunch of wolves,” Kunayak concluded with an ironic grimace.

“We’re supposed to be impressed?” said Isaac.

“You have to admit it shows consideration,” Kunayak said.

“But you’re still sucking oil out of Mother Earth and pumping it across hundreds of miles,” said Dorothea to Barnaby, “all in order to feed our insatiable appetite for petrochemical products. Saving a few wolves doesn’t mitigate the damage you’re doing to the world, filling the tanks of gas-guzzling cars, heating up the atmosphere with CO
2
emissions...”

“I’m not forcing people to drive their cars,” said Barnaby. “I’m not making anyone do anything. I’m just meeting market demand. If everyone stopped using oil tomorrow, I’d have no one to sell it to. I’d have to close down that arm of GloCo and try and make do with its other assets. Don’t blame me for giving people what they want.”

“We have to blame
somebody
,” said OwlHenry. “Might as well be you.”

“No,” said Barnaby, struggling to control his temper and keep stating his case calmly. “That’s not a rational argument, that’s just scapegoating and victimisation. You want a sea change in culture, a move away from humankind’s dependence on fossil fuels, fine. But it doesn’t start with me” – he pointed at himself – “it starts with you” – he pointed round the table – “and them” – the other diners, the roustabouts in their plaid shirts and jeans – “and everyone else. We’re all equally culpable, all seven billion of us. Singling me out as the problem achieves the opposite of what you’re after. It’s denying where the true responsibility lies. It’s placing the burden of guilt on one man’s shoulders when it should be shared universally. Besides –”

Lydia interrupted him. “Don’t.”

“Huh?”

“I bet I know what you’re going to say next, Barnaby, and I’d suggest you don’t. It’s not likely to win you any friends.”

“Oh? And what am I going to say?”

“‘If it wasn’t me digging up the oil, it would be someone else,’ or words to that effect.”

Barnaby blustered, but yes, that had been more or less the tack he had been intending to take. There was no denying it.

“It doesn’t absolve you,” Lydia said. “It’s just a little bit childish, in fact. ‘I stole those doughnuts, but only because another boy would have if I hadn’t got there first.’ Rather than having the moral courage not to steal the doughnuts at all.”

“It’s not
stealing
.”

“Did you pay for the oil? Was it yours to start with?”

“I paid for the land rights to drill for it. I’m the one taking the financial risk, fronting up the capital necessary to get the stuff out of the ground. That makes me its owner, doesn’t it? As much as anyone ever could be.”

“No one owns anything,” said OwlHenry. “We just borrow whatever we have, for as long as we’re alive.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, spare us the hippy bollocks!” Barnaby couldn’t rein in his irritation any longer. “Get to grips with reality, Olly the Owl or whatever your stupid made-up name is. People own things. That’s how the world works. I have what’s mine, you have what’s yours. You wouldn’t want me to grab your shirt off you, that crappy smock thing you’re wearing – not that I’d want it. What’s it made of anyway? Hemp?” OwlHenry nodded. “Thought so. Hemp dyed the colour of turd. But if I did for some bizarre reason want it for myself, you’d never let me have it. Why would you? You need it so as not to be naked. Owning stuff is what make us human. It defines us. Those wolves we saw, they don’t own anything, and that’s why we’re better than them. That’s why we’re the dominant species and they’re on the endangered list. Because we possess, we have something to live for, a purpose: acquisition. Whereas they just exist.”

He shoved back his chair and strode away from the table in high dudgeon. It was only later, when he was in his meagrely furnished room in one of the accommodation blocks, listening to the arctic wind hiss between the buildings and pepper the window with snowflakes, that his anger began to simmer down.

The bloody nerve of these people. Trying to undermine him.
Him
. Barnaby Pollard. One of the wealthiest, most successful men on the planet. Those ignorant, arrogant little troglodytes...

But he mustn’t let them get to him. He must be magnanimous. He was a god, and gods must always learn to tolerate lesser beings.