The card-carrying furfuckers looked down their narrow green true-believer noses at Zeb and his edgy like, but they didn't push that my-shit-don't-stink agenda too hard. They needed the manpower because not everyone on the planet thought it was a great idea to aero/orno/helithopter numerous dumpsterloads of rancid biotrash around the far north so a bunch of mangy Ursidae could gobble it free of charge.
"This was before the oil shortage really kicked in?" says Toby. "And the carbon garboil business took off. Otherwise, they'd never have let you waste such valuable primary material on bears."
"It was before a lot of things," says Zeb. "Though the oil prices were already getting pretty steep."
Bearlift had four old-model 'thopters they'd bought on the grey market. The Flying Pufferfish was their nickname. 'thopters claimed to use biodesign: they had a helium/hydrogen gas-filled blimp with a skin that sucked in or exhaled molecules like a fish's swim bladder that contracted and expanded and allowed them to lift heavy weights. Plus, they had stabilizing ventral fins, a couple of heli-blades for hovering, and four bird-like flapping wings for manoeuvrability at slow speeds. The upside being minimum fuel consumption, ultra-high freight weight, and the ability to fly low and slow; the downside being that a 'thopter flight took forever, the software on the things failed regularly, and few among them knew how to fix the brutes. Questionable digimechanics had to be called in, or rather smuggled in from Brazil, where the digital darkside flourished.
They'd hack you as soon as look at you down there. Roaring business in politicians' medical records and sordid affairs, celebrities' plastic surgeries - that was the small end. At the big end it was one Corp hacking another. Hacking a powerful Corp was the kind of thing that could get you into the real crapola, even if you were firewalled by being on the blackbox payroll of another powerful Corp.
"So I suppose you did it," says Toby. "The kind of thing with the real crapola."
"Yeah, I'd been down there, just making a living," says Zeb. "That was one reason I was taking a breather at Bearlift: it was ultra far from Brazil."
Bearlift was a scam, or partly a scam. It didn't take anyone with half a brain too long to figure that one out. Unlike many scams it was well meaning, but it was a scam nonetheless. It lived off the good intentions of city types with disposable emotions who liked to think they were saving something - some rag from their primordial authentic ancestral past, a tiny shred of their collective soul dressed up in a cute bear suit. The concept was simple: the polar bears are starving because the ice is almost gone and they can't catch seals any more, so let's feed them our leftovers until they learn to adapt, "adapt being the buzzword of those days, if you'll recall, though I doubt you're old enough; you must still have been in playskirts. Learning to wiggle your little mantrap."
"Stop flirting," said Toby.
"Why? You like it."
"I remember adapt," says Toby. "It was another way of saying tough luck. To people you weren't going to help out."
"You got it," said Zeb. "Anyway, feeding trash to the bears didn't help them adapt, it just taught them that food falls out of the sky. They'd start slavering every time they heard the sound of a 'thopter, they had their very own cargo cult.
"But here's the scammiest part. Yes, the ice had mostly melted; yes, some polar bears had starved, but the rest of them were drifting southwards, mating up with the grizzlies, from which they'd separated themselves a mere two hundred thousand years ago. So you'd get bears that were white with brown patches or bears that were brown with white patches, or all brown or all white, but whatever was on the outside was no predictor of temperament: the pizzlies would avoid you most of the time, like grizzlies; the grolars would attack you most of the time, like polar bears. You never knew which kind any given bear might be. What you did know was that you didn't want your 'thopter to fall out of the air over bear country."
As Zeb's had just done.
"You stupid fuck," he said again to Chuck. "And whoever hired you is a double stupid fuck," he added, not that they were listening. Or - he had a sudden nasty thought - maybe they were.
Crash
Everything was going fine at Bearlift until Chuck turned up. Zeb was in some trouble at that time, true enough ...
"Unlike at any other time," says Toby.
"You laughing at me? Victim of a confused youth due to parental abuse? Plus, I grew too fast?"
"Would I laugh?"
"Matter of fact, you would," says Zeb. "Heart like shale. What you need is a good fracking."
Zeb was in some trouble at that time, true enough, but nobody at Bearlift Central seemed to know or care: half of them were in trouble themselves, so it was Don't ask, Don't tell.
The chores were straightforward: load up the edible refuse, in Whitehorse or Yellowknife, sometimes maybe Tuk, where the Beaufort Sea offshore oilrig tankers dumped their garbage when they weren't tipping it illegally. The oilrigs still produced a lot of real-animal-protein leftovers in those days because nothing was too good for the tanker crews. Pork - they ate a lot of pork byproducts - and chicken, or something next door to it. When it was labmeat it was top grade, camouflaged in sausages or meatloaf so you really couldn't tell.
You'd pack the postmeal slops into the 'thopter, then grab a beer, then fly the 'thopter to the Bearlift drop locations, hover while dumping off the loads, fly back. Nothing to it except mind-numbing boredom unless there was bad weather or mechanical failure. In that case you'd have to set the 'thopter down while trying to give the mountain-sides a miss, then wait out the weather or kick your heels until Repair showed up. Then repeat. Pretty routine. The worst of it was listening to the green-nosed furfucker sermonizing that went on in the Bearlift-town bars when you were trying to get spongefaced on the crapulous booze they hauled in there and dispensed by the vatful.
Apart from that, it was eat, sleep, and on a good day have a tussle with one or another of the girl staff, though Zeb had to be careful about that because some of them were snarly and others were taken, and he tried to stay out of brawls, never having seen any percentage in rolling around under bar stools with some enraged moron who considered he'd staked eternal twat rights because of his pre-eminent cock and his dimples, and who might have a knife. Unlikely a handgun any more because it was around that time that the CorpSeCorps was confiscating those, having raised the spurious banner of civic safety and thus effectively securing a monopoly for themselves on killing at a distance. Some guys hid their Glocks and other name brands, dug them in under stones in case of dire need, but for the same reason they were unlikely to be carrying. Though not every law and declaration was respected up there in the boonies. Things in the north were always a little fuzzy around the edges, law-wise. So you never knew.
Anyway, the girls. If there was a Back Off sign on a little or big or medium-sized set of cheeks, he always backed off. But if someone crept into his dorm room under cover of darkness, who was he to whimper? He'd been told since a child that he had the morals of a sowbug, and he hated to defeat expectations, in addition to which rejecting a girl's overture would be hurtful to her self-esteem. Some of those wouldn't have stood up too well under the light, but one of them had an amazing floppy ass, and another one had a set of boobs like two bowling balls in a string bag, and ...
"Too much information," says Toby.
"Don't be jealous," says Zeb. "They're dead now. You can't be jealous of a bunch of dead women."
Toby says nothing. The lush corpse of Zeb's one-time lover, Lucerne, floats in the air between them, unseen, unmentioned, and certainly unburied as far as Toby is concerned.
"Alive is better than dead," says Zeb.
"No contest there," says Toby. "But on second thought you never know till you've tried."
Zeb laughs. "You have an amazing ass too," he says. "Not floppy, though. Compact."
"Tell about Chuck," says Toby.
Chuck entered Bearlift Central as though tiptoeing into a forbidden room while pretending he had a right to be there. Furti
ve but assertive. To Zeb's mind, his clothes were too new. They looked as if Chuck had just come from one of those crispy outfitter shops, zippers and Velcro and flaps all over, like some kind of kinky video puzzle game. Undo this man, find the leprechaun, win a prize. Never trust a man with new clothes.
"But clothes have to be new sometimes," says Toby. "Or they did back then. They weren't created old."
"Real men know how to dirty up their clothes in about one second," says Zeb. "They writhe around in mud. Apart from the clothes, his teeth were too big and white. When I see those kinds of teeth, I always want to give them a gentle tap with a bottle. See if they're fake, watch them shatter. My dad, the Rev, had teeth like that. He used whitener on them. The teeth plus his tan made him look like some kind of light-up deep-sea devilfish or else a long-dead horse's head in a desert. It was worse when he smiled than when he didn't."
"Back off on the childhood," says Toby. "You'll get woeful."
"Woe, your foe? Say no to woe? Don't preach at me, babe."
"It works for me. Backing off woe."
"You sure about that?"
"So, Chuck."
"So. There was something about his eyes. Chuck's eyes. Laminated eyes. Hard and shiny. They had a sort of transparent lid over them."
The first time Chuck appeared at the canteen table with his tray and said, "Mind if I join you?" he scanned Zeb, an overall back-and-forth of those laminated eyes. Like scanning a barcode.
Zeb glanced up at him. He didn't say yes, he didn't say no. He gave an all-purpose grunt and continued work on his rubbery conundrum of a sausage. You'd have expected Chuck to start with personal questions - where you from, how'd you get here, and so forth - but he didn't. His opening ploy was Bearlift. He said what a great org it was, but since that got no nodding and yupping from Zeb, he intimated that he was only there because he'd hit a bad patch in his life and was, you know, keeping quiet for a while, until things blew over.
"What'd you do, pick your nose?" said Zeb, and Chuck gave a dead-horse-teeth laugh. He said that he guessed Bearlift was for guys who, you know, sort of like the Foreign Legion, and Zeb said the foreign what, and that was the end of that one.
Not that he could shake the guy by being rude. Chuck backed off, but he still managed to be ever-present. Zeb would be at the bar labouring away at the next morning's hangover and all of a sudden there would be Chuck, buddying up, offering to get the next round. Go to the can, take a leak, and there would be Chuck, materializing like ectoplasm, taking a leak two stalls down; or Zeb would be sliding round the corner in the seedier part of Whitehorse and, guess what, Chuck would be sliding round the next corner over. He most likely went through Zeb's stuff in Zeb's broom closet of a room when Zeb wasn't in it.
"He was welcome to it," says Zeb. "Nothing in my dirty laundry but dirty laundry because the real dirty laundry was in my head."
But what was his game? Because it was obvious he had one. At first Zeb thought Chuck was gay and was about to start some trouser nuzzling, but it wasn't that.
Over the next few weeks Chuck and Zeb had flown a couple of lifts together. There were always two in a Pufferfish; you'd take turns dozing. Zeb tried to avoid partnering with Chuck, who by this time was giving him the nape prickles, but on the first occasion the guy Zeb was supposed to have flown with was called away by an aunt's funeral and Chuck had inserted himself into the slot, and the second time the other guy got food poisoning. Zeb wondered if Chuck had paid the two of them off to go missing. Or strangled the aunt, or put E. coli in the pizza, to make it convincing.
He waited for Chuck to pop the question while they were in midair. Maybe he knew about some of Zeb's earlier capers and was hiring for a hitherto-unknown bunch of darksiders who wanted Zeb to tackle a bolus of seriously forbidden hackery; or maybe it was an extortion outfit after some plutocrat, or a hireling connected with IP thieves who needed a skein of professional trackwork to further their kidnapping of a Corp brainiac.
Or maybe it was a sting - Chuck would propose some flagrantly illegal jest, record Zeb agreeing to do it, and then the giant lobster claws of what passed for the justice system would descend and clench; or maybe there'd be some goofy blackmail demand, as if you could get shit from a stone.
But nothing abnormal happened on these two runs. They must've been soothers, to set Zeb at ease. Signal that Chuck was harmless. Was his dinkiness a deep cover?
It almost worked. Zeb started thinking he himself was paranoid. Twitching at shadows. Worrying about a slithery nobody like Chuck.
That morning - the morning of the crash - had started out as usual. Breakfast, some anonymous bunwich with mysterious ingredients, couple of mugs of caffeine substitute, slice of toasted sawdust. Bearlift got its supplies on the cheap: It considered its cause to be so noble and worthy you were supposed to be humble, eat food stand-ins, save the good stuff for the bears.
Then loading up the offal, biodegradable sacks of it forklifted into the belly of the Puffer. Zeb's scheduled flying partner had been scratched off that day's list - cut his foot dancing barefoot on broken glass to show how tough he was in one of the local knocking shops while higher than the ionosphere on some cretinous pharmaceutical, it was said - and Zeb was supposed to be doubling with an okay guy called Rodge. But when he went to get in, there was Chuck, all togged up with his crispy zippers and Velcro flaps, smiling with his enormous white horse teeth but not with his laminated eyes.
"Rodge get a phone call?" said Zeb. "Grandmother died?"
"Father, in fact," said Chuck. "Nice day. Hey, I brought you a beer." He had one for himself too, just to show he was a regular guy.
Zeb grunted, took the beer, twisted off the top. "Need to take a leak," he said. In the can he poured the beer down the hole. Top seemed to be sealed on, but you could fake those things, you could fake just about anything. He didn't want to swill or munch any item that had been in Chuck's hands.
The Puffers were always complex while taking off: the helicopter blades and the helium/hydrogen blimp provided lift, but the trick was to get high enough before you started the wings flapping, and to cut the heli-blades at exactly the right time, or the whole thing could tip and spiral.
But there was no problem that day. The flight was standard, threading the valleys through and around the Pelly Mountains, pausing to bombard the landscape a few times with bear yummies; then over to the high-altitude Barrens with the Mackenzies all around, postcard snow on the tops, with a couple more drops; then crossing the remains of the Old Canol Trail, still marked by the occasional World War Two telephone pole.
The 'thopter responded well. It stopped flapping and started hovering right over the dump spots, the hatch opened as it was supposed to, and the biotrash tumbled out. At the last feeding station, two bears - one mostly white, one mostly brown - were already cantering towards their personal garbage dump as the 'thopter approached; Zeb could see their fur rippling like a shag rug being shaken. Being that close was always a bit of a thrill.
Zeb turned the 'thopter and headed southwest, back towards Whitehorse. Then he handed over to Chuck because the clock said it was Zeb's turn to catch some zizz. He lay back and blew up the neck pillow and closed his eyes, but he didn't allow himself to drift off because Chuck had been far too alert during the entire flight. You don't get that geared up over a non-event.
They were about two-thirds of the way to the first narrow mountain valley when Chuck made his move. Through his almost-closed eyes, Zeb saw the one hand moving stealthily over towards his thigh, holding a thread of glitter. He sat up fast and whacked Chuck across the windpipe. Not hard enough, though, because although Chuck gasped - not a gasp, hard to describe it - although he made that sound and dropped whatever he'd been holding, he grabbed at Zeb's neck with both hands and Zeb whacked him again, and of course nobody was flying the controls at that point, and in the thrashing around something must've been hit by a leg or a hand or an elbow, and that's when the 'thopter folded two of its four wings and tipped sideways and
went down.
And Zeb found himself sitting under a tree, staring at the tree trunk. Astonishing, how clear the frilly edges were, of the lichen; light grey with a tinge of green, and an edge that was darker, so intricate ...
Stand up, he ordered himself. You need to get moving. But his body didn't hear.
Supplies
A long time later - it seemed like a long time, he felt as if he was wading through transparent sludge - Zeb rolled to one side, put his hands on the ground, pushed himself to his feet beside the spindly kind of spruce. Then he threw up. He hadn't noticed feeling sick right before: he just suddenly puked.
"A lot of animals will do that," he says. "Under stress. Means you don't have to put the energy into digesting. Lightens the load."
"Were you cold?" says Toby.
Zeb's teeth were chattering, he was shivering. He took Chuck's down vest, added it to his own. It wasn't ripped much. He checked the pockets, found Chuck's cellphone, mashed it with a rock to destroy any GPS and eavesdropping functions. It started ringing just before he did the mashing; it took everything not to answer it and pretend he was Chuck. Maybe he should've answered, though, and said that Zeb was dead. He might've learned something. A couple of minutes later his own phone rang; he waited until it stopped, then mashed it as well.
Chuck had a few more toys, though nothing Zeb didn't have himself. Pocketknife, bear spray, bug spray, folded-up tinfoil space-age survival blanket, those things. By great good luck the bear gun they always carried with them in case of groundings and attacks had been tossed out along with Chuck. Bear guns were the exception to the new no-guns rules because even the dickwad CorpSeCorps bureaucrats knew you needed a bear gun up there. The Corps didn't like Bearlift, but they didn't try to shut it down either, though they could have done that with one finger. It served a function for them, sounded a note of hope, distracted folks from the real action, which was bulldozing the planet flat and grabbing anything of value. They had no objection to the standard Bearlift ad, with a smiling green furfucker telling everyone what a sterling lot of good Bearlift was doing, and please send more cash or you'll be guilty of bearicide. The Corps even put some of the cash in themselves. "That was back when they were still massaging their trust-me images," says Zeb. "Once they got a hammerlock on power, they didn't have to bother so much."