Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (11 page)

Chapter 10

The Speech

There had been a sense of unease in the vicinity due to the supposed biological hazard originating in the Dexter’s home. When the two friends were invited to give a conference at the local high school about the possibility of terraforming other planets, they accepted immediately. It was an opportunity to improve their relations with the neighborhood.

              They were told that the students would be from the eleventh and twelfth grades and that there would also be teachers and other adults present. A few tenth graders might show up but, since they were very immature and the auditorium was full, there would be no seats reserved for them. They would sit in the aisles and, if they behaved badly, they would leave. All of the students knew that Mariah and Sofia had come to speak at the school, but not everyone realized why. The story of Mars was known but their city’s involvement was news in the eyes of the youngest. Those were things from Washington or Houston. What did Columbia have to do with it? Mars was a cold planet, right? The fourth rock from the sun, right? If there weren’t really Martians, what was the deal?

              The parents realized what the problem was. There was a Martian greenhouse on the other side of the street. In addition to the older students, many tenth graders did, in fact, decide to show up. In their joviality, it seemed to them like a good hour to waste. After all, they knew that two Martians who were real eye candy were coming to talk.

              Sofia and Mariah were greeted by the school principal, Ron Gibson. They thought he was younger than they’d been told. He was tall, lightly cologned and had an air of good karma about him. His eyes were gray without a hint of blue. He did not wear a tie. He looked like he was a New Yorker, a European or on vacation. Ron Gibson confessed that he didn’t know much about terraforming but that both the topic and those giving the conference had been suggested by a friend of the community who was involved in his being elected to his position. He had accepted immediately since nobody valued good relations with the community more than he did.

              “In the election for my leadership, I was able to win over a record number of people who are not part of the school community, strictu sensu. Those who aren’t teachers, employees or students,” he explained. “Education is everyone’s task, even those who don’t have school age children. They, by definition, are candidates for being students’ parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles and are important financiers for our school. At this moment, eight percent of the people going to our school’s athletic events and, take note, twelve percent showing up at our cultural activities do not have children in school—more than double what was seen before my first term. Thus, when concern for other planets’ future arises in our neighborhood, I’ll want to invite the best in our city so we can learn and debate those themes,” the principal explained.

              “Would this harrowing description of the community’s concern you just gave us not, in reality, be the person of Dr. Rebecca Radcliff?” Sofia asked.

              “Our school pediatrician is very beloved by all and worries about the future,” Ron said without resentment. “She has a peculiar interest in what she calls heavy metals and for what she calls accidental propagation of mutagenesis in the ecosystem. Don’t ask me why since, for me, if it’s metal, it’s heavy and that closes the case. But, well, it seems that some heavy metals are not as good for children as gold or silver or diamonds,” he said with great familiarity, “and that their use in laboratories located in our community should be explained well so it can be understood well.”

              “Diamonds are not considered precious metals,” Mariah began to say, but Sofia interrupted her saying, “but they shine like metal, as do pearls and polished ivory, which is what makes them precious.”

              “There you have it,” said the principal. “They may not technically belong to the metal category but they belong to the broader category of metals and other such things. Could it be, given that they are equally precious, they may be considered mutant metals? You tell me. You’re the specialist.” The word mutant seemed out of place and he had looked directly at Sofia when he pronounced it.

              “I see that you’re a man interested in science,” Mariah tried break in. “We could ...” but she was once again interrupted by Sofia who clarified that he was very interested and very interesting. A good acquisition for the neighborhood.

              “Thank you,” accepted Ron Gibson, unflappably. “I like to please my neighbors and contribute to the community.”

              “And you do please,” Sofia confirmed. “You please me. You’re one of those people who looks good anywhere.”

              Mariah blushed a little and cut in, “Shall we go to the conference, principal?”

              “Let’s go,” he responded, smiling. “We’re all going to learn from you.”

              Mariah knew Sofia’s attitude when she was being put to the test. She would become defiant and put the pressure back on whoever was pressuring her. It often turned out well, but it wasn’t always appropriate. Besides, Mariah’s family lived in that neighborhood and had more to lose or gain than Sofia. On their way, Mariah reminded her friend of that. It wasn’t enough to come out of the presentation on top; they needed to win the people over, too.

              When they arrived in the auditorium, it was full. The eleventh and twelfth grade students had taken their places in the front and the teachers and locals of different ages and backgrounds were seated farther back. Mariah recognized several people, namely local reporters, but she also saw people she didn’t know and, be it because of their clothes or their attitudes, they did not seem to be from the community.

              The principal introduced the speakers. He spent more time talking about Mariah, who was a former student at their school and living proof that the future for students who were more inspired, more integrated, and harder working would know no limits. He described her personal trajectory. It was comforting that young people the school had known as teenagers had come back a short time later, so genuine and so surprising. As for Sofia, he reminded them that, despite her not having been a student at their school, she had a very special relationship with the community hosting the school and where a state-of-the-art laboratory had been set up.

              “When they see cars carrying biological hazards markings entering and leaving our neighborhood, some people become apprehensive and ask themselves if this research should not be restricted to universities.” He preferred to emphasize the fact that the closer the geniuses who decided America’s future were to the community, the more the community could learn from them and the more the community could demand accountability. “We’re not here today to demand accountability. We’re here today to learn from Americans like us who love the earth as much as we do,” he ended.

              The principal’s tone was very warm. During Mariah’s presentation, he’d shifted his gaze between her and the public, but during Sofia’s presentation, he only looked at the adults in the rows toward the back. He rarely glanced at her. Sofia immediately realized what the message was. If the conference turned out badly, she was the scapegoat. Mariah was the good example for everyone—the threat’s last name was Suren.

              Sofia Suren approached the microphone to begin her presentation when tenth grade students began entering and sat along the sides and in the aisles. They were a mob, some of whom were painted like Indian warriors, others were wearing ET masks or those of exotic mutants, but the majority came in only with the rowdiness of fifteen year olds.

              The principal got up, retook the podium’s center, and waited for everyone to enter. He then said that the younger students who wanted to learn something could stay but that this was not Halloween, and he would allow no horseplay that would disrupt the conference. Sofia smiled and the principal had almost finished, anticipating the removal of those with masks, when she interrupted him with a very agreeable and secure voice. “Oh, look, I see we’ve got some Indians here.”

              The Indians applauded and the principal looked directly at her.

              “That’s good,” continued the scientist, “because they remind us of America’s native inhabitants and that, to those original inhabitants, with our ships, our firearms and our horses, we looked like aliens to them.”

              The teens laughed.

              “Some seem to be from other galaxies.”

              “Yes,” a few voices shouted.

              “You, galactic beings, you’ve certainly had the opportunity to get to know the earthlings,” she continued, smiling warmly as if she were at least forty years old. “But let me show you some photographs of Martians, as I imagine them within twenty or thirty years. I just hope your parents don’t sue me.”

              The principal sat down, realizing that she had the audience in the palm of her hand.
She tames teenagers,
he thought.
She could be a teacher in this school.

              “Some of these Martians,” Sofia Suren proceeded, “will have blue eyes”—and projected images of a small child in the school nursery she had taken the day before. “Others will be chubbier”—and showed a photo of a Mexican baby, also from the nursery, trying to eat pap that was spilling from his spoon and running down his rosy face. “Others will love animals”—a black baby with two stuffed toys in each hand and a huge smile—“while others will like taming those savages”; a fourth baby was grabbing the tail of a friendly dog who was dragging him across the covered patio floor. She was interrupted by laughter and approving applause. The future Martians were today’s Earthling babies.                           

              “You did well in coming, young men and women, all of you who are imitating mutants remind us of what may emerge after our species disappears if Earth is again hit by an asteroid like the one sixty-five million years ago that killed the dinosaurs or if there is a repeat of the worst for which we have a register; it took place at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago. Then, not even insects survived the increase in methane in the atmosphere.”

              Silence. Sofia Suren then quickly projected a short film about the effects of the giant tsunami that had struck Indonesia and the Pacific.

              “Do you remember, during that terrible Pacific tsunami, the mother who had two children, a six-month-old baby and a four-year-old boy who barely knew how to swim? Remember, when she was swept away by the giant wave with one child in each arm, she made a heartbreaking decision to abandon the boy in the salty current, hoping for a miracle that, if it happened, could only happen to a four-year-old boy, but never to a six-month-old baby? They obviously did not remember, but they’d just been reminded.

              “Do you have any idea that the improbable miracle actually did occur and remember, on television, the look of the saved boy who was not thankful for the miracle, but seemed to wonder why his mother’s protective arm had abandoned him? Why had he not been chosen instead of his sister?”

              Sepulchral silence.

              “The catastrophe we’ll have if an asteroid hits us won’t be a tsunami. It will be of another dimension, it will be of a different degree and thousands of children will be left alone. I guarantee you that, this time, if we do not take the necessary measures, no miracle can or will happen. What we can hope is when a cataclysm the size of the one that exterminated the dinosaurs takes place again, if it does, it will, for the first time on this planet, encounter a form of life bordering on having a response to that challenge. And this response is being created right now in the northern continent between the Atlantic and the Pacific, here in the United States, here in Columbia.

              The youth applauded wildly. Mutants, Indians, Martians, and extraterrestrials of various colors and numbers of eyes, clapping quickly but explosively a simple message: catastrophes are inevitable but they do not inevitably produce helpless victims. The school’s teachers did not applaud her salvific speech. It was based on very little. Sofia had begun defending the existence of laboratories preparing life to survive in very hostile situations, but what worried them was the possibility of this hostility being provoked by mankind itself, by Sofia and her colleagues and, worse yet, the hypothesis of a mini-catastrophe happening in the middle of their neighborhood.

              Sofia emphasized that the United States government, with the help of friendly countries, had developed two projects, one medium and the other long term, related to the species’ survival in the context of unique unfavorable global events: one devised to detect large celestial bodies on a collision course with the Earth or Moon as early as possible, and if possible, to annihilate them. She showed a series of moderate level risk objects that had passed by so closely in the last few years that some had crossed the space between the Earth and the Moon. Sofia showed a photo of an asteroid in a slide where you could compare it to an Earth-bound structure, like the high school itself, a large bridge or a small city. Next, another image with the date it would cross and how close it would come to Earth visible in the graphic. The threat was gaining reality.

              “These objects are real, they are recent and they are almost invisible. They are not rare. They are gigantic rocks that wander through space and that we did not know existed only a short time ago. At this moment, NASA and friendly agencies are monitoring more than five thousand objects with those characteristics.