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The first time Talia had seen the salmon run, she had been eight years old. And it had changed her life forever.
She’d clung to her father’s waders as she stood behind him in the stream, watching the brilliant red bodies course through the rushing water, chasing the lure at the end of his pole.
“King ‘a fish! They’re beautiful animals,” he’d told her, when the hooked jaws had clamped around the bait, and she’d shied away from the thrashing fish as he reeled it in and cupped his hands beneath its belly, “see? He won’t hurt you. Here, touch ‘im.”
Cautiously, Talia had stepped forward to stroke the scaly back. It had been delightfully slimy, and she’d giggled, fear ebbing as she’d stepped in for a better look. The fish’s jaws had gaped open and shut, open and shut, as it peered at her through eyes of liquid gold.
“Salmon are my favorites,” her father had said, cradling the greenish belly in his hands, “because they fight like hell, even when the odds are against them. They come all the way from the ocean, you know? Up rivers, past all kindsa dangers and roadblocks, just to lay their eggs. Even when it kills ‘em, they find their way home.”
It kills them?
It had been, at the time, the saddest thing she’d ever heard in her short life; that this wondrous creature, with its shining scales and gemlike gaze, was doomed to die…
She’d patted the fish’s crimson back in solidarity.
“Why do they die, Papa?”
Despite the sorrow of the prospect, her father, as immovable as river rock, as easygoing as water flowing, had simply shrugged and hummed thoughtfully.
“There’s nothin’ for ‘em to eat up here. And the journey’s long and hard. But they do it anyway, so that their children can live. They’re willing to give their all for the ones who will come after them. And they feed others, too; the birds, the bears, the trees… and us, yeah. They don’t survive, no, but their touch on the world does. There’s something noble about that, I think.”
He’d stroked the fish gently through the water, drawing oxygen over its gills again and again, before releasing it to dart away back into the current.
“This guy, we’ll let go; he still has a job to do upstream. Maybe a little of his nobility will rub off on you if you pop those slimy fingers in your mouth, eh? Like Finn MacCool and the Salmon of Knowledge.”
Though he’d been joking, she could only conclude that something had rubbed off on her that day, if not nobility; she’d thought of the water, alive with flashes of crimson and half-moon jaws, on slow days in the classroom. Thought of the thrashing bodies, populating the riffles and filling them with redds and hope, through the course of her adolescence. Found her way into those riffles herself, armed with waders, a clipboard, and an eager sense of anticipation that hit a fever pitch as summer begins to wind to a close, and spawning season reaches the peak of its fervor.
And she’d thought of them as she penned her doctoral dissertation on the ways in which the changing world had slowed their frantic run. On the ways in which it could be restored to its former speed and glory. Her beaming father had strung a silver necklace with a leaping, knotwork depiction of the Salmon of Knowledge around her neck at her graduation, with a whispered “that’s my girl,” and a pat to the shoulder; high praise from his even-keeled lips.
When the engineers from Faro Automated Solutions had arrived on the banks of rivers she’d come to think of as “hers,” tools in hand, Dr. Talia Bain had been there to advise them.
And the rivers had run scarlet with the dart of fish once more.
—
Today, the salmon are running for the last time.
Their shining red bodies already bear signs of the catastrophe racing across the ocean toward them; pockmark lesions, left by acid rain from the fires burning on the other side of the world, stipple their gleaming hides. Their fins are ragged, their teeth worn and their color a pale shadow of the ruby glow she remembers from her youth.
It’s enough to make the inside of her mask fog with tears.
But not enough to keep her from her work.
The end of the probe carves even more marks into their skin as she samples their dying flesh, each plug vanishing up the long, metal chute and into the supercooled storage container on her back. The internal cylinder rotates as she presses the trigger, filing each sample away safely alongside a snapshot of the collection conditions and a numerical identifier that fits neatly into the Zero Dawn inventory system.
You’ll be back again, someday, she whispers to them, silently, as she picks her way among the ghosts, drinking in their essences for the long sleep that awaits them, this is just a temporary setback. Another dam to cross. They’ve never stopped you before.
They won’t stop you now.
Something in the trees beyond rattles alarmingly, and Talia freezes. On the other side of the river, picking his own way through the riffles, Asuka lifts his head, his whole body going tense. For half a moment, neither dares to move, eyes fixed on the source of the sound.
Abruptly, a flock of bedraggled birds erupts from the treetops, protesting hoarsely as they beat their way into the grimy drizzle. A few don’t make it above the low-hanging clouds, dropping limply back into the forest below, overwhelmed by the toxins building in the air and their own critical exhaustion.
But as disheartening as the sight is, it’s a good sign; if there are still birds, and they can fly fast enough to escape the forest… then nothing nearby has lunged for them, seeking to grind them into biofuel.
And that means that they still have time.
Exchanging a last, meaningful glance with Asuka across the seething water, Talia turns back to her work.
—
She’d spent a solid hour with her head between her knees, trembling, before agreeing to the Gamma position.
In the end, she’d had to try; what other choice was there? Silence and emptiness? If she didn’t at least try, then it would be a sure thing. Better to go down swinging and to miss than to never have thrown the punch at all; at least if she tried, there was a chance, however slim, that it would land .
This was the attitude she’d found among the majority of her new coworkers in the ARTEMIS Lab; a sort of collective rage against the dying of the light that had driven them all upstream. Some of them had been familiar, colleagues she’d mingled with at conferences or thrashed through hip-deep water alongside during field seasons past.
Others had been astronomical figures, titans whose papers she’d pored over again and again while formulating her own. And others still had come from further afield. She had crossed the hallways to work with hydrologists in the POSEIDON offices, consult with riparian plant ecologists assigned to DEMETER… even spoken to a few AETHER scientists about gas exchange and nutrient cycling between water and air.
The scope of the collaboration, the far-reaching impacts of the project, would have been exhilarating if it weren’t all so dire.
Why did it take the end of the world to get them to finally, finally listen to us and give us the tools to do our work???
Most of her time had been spent with the freshwater working group under Lars van Beek, a giant in both stature and reputation, with a honking laugh that even the apocalypse couldn’t seem to quash.
“So,” he’d told her at one of their last check-in meetings, when she’d presented the results of her cross-collaborations and brought up the models on the room’s holographic projector for the working group to see, “I think the takeaway here is that salmon are vital members of the first wave, right?”
Spinning the holomap about and drawing her fingers together to zoom in on the western coast of North America, Talia had tapped at the relevant rivers, highlighting each in turn and displaying a pull-out of projected run numbers for each of the four species inhabiting them.
“Yeah. Sockeye at the very least, even if we have to keep the chinook on ice a little longer. Nerka can’t be left for later; not as a keystone species. The ecosystem might well fail to initialize without them. Even without grizzlies in the first wave, their contribution to the nitrogen cycle of the riparian forests in the PNW is… like… I think 24%, ideally? Maybe more, post Claw-Back.”
She’d waved a hand vaguely, as though she could pluck the proper numbers from midair.
Across the table, Simisola, one of the aquatic insect biologists she’d come to know more recently than the others, had nodded thoughtfully, drumming her fingertips against her folded arms.
“Easy source of protein for our first-generation Cradle residents, too. Caddisfly larvae populations ought to be good for it, if we ask GAIA to stagger the releases a little bit.”
Murmurs of assent from around the table. Lars had nodded approvingly, reaching out to sign off on the actionable item and shuttle it on ahead to Dr. Ronson’s terminal for final review.
“Let’s move ahead with sampling of genetics, then. You’re the experts, Dr. Bain. Dr. Watanabe. What do you propose?”
Despite herself, Talia had felt her body tense; they’d come to the part of the presentation that the two of them had been biting their nails over for the past several weeks. The stress of the hypothetical made real had been almost too much to bear, and she’d glanced across the table to lock eyes with Asuka, her west Pacific counterpart.
His encouraging smile had been enough to bring some of her wayward courage back into line.
She’d cleared her throat, banishing the jitters as best as she could, and pulled up another map overlay, expanding Access Permissions to the entire table with a quick tweak of the Settings panel.
“We’ve been thinking both flesh samples and fertilized eggs; we’ll want to preserve as much genetic diversity as possible. I don’t know if they’ll actually hatch, once they’ve been in deep-freeze at the Ark facilities, but…”
She’d shrugged broadly, hoping to hide the tremor of uncertainty as it passed from head to toe.
“GAIA can always clone fry using genetic material from the eggs themselves. We’ll want to preserve genetic diversity of each species across rivers, too; each one has a unique population, we’ll have to keep them separate, and hatch them out in their home rivers, if we want to maintain them. And…”
Hesitation had stopped her tongue. Once again, she’d met Asuka’s eye, and he’d given her an encouraging nod.
They’d agreed that she’d be the one to do the talking. She couldn’t let him down now, when it counted.
The request had tumbled out in a rush as she’d gripped the edge of the table hard enough to turn her knuckles white.
“Asuka and I want to do the collecting ourselves. We’ve been doing it for years now. And our input isn’t needed here, after this. Let us have one last field season before Elysium.”
She’d half expected them to push back. But the table had filled with nods of assent, with little murmurs of approval and sympathy, and even a few of envy.
I should have known , she’d reflected as the tension had eased, and the meeting had begun to break apart, that they’d understand.
After all… she herself could hardly have denied any one of them the chance to touch the beautiful, dying planet they’d all chosen to twine their lives around one last time.
—
The last of the collection cylinders is strapped into place, now, tamped down for the long flight to the Ark facility up in British Columbia that will house the samples until they’re ready to emerge again, into a world that waits for them with bated breath.
Shading her eyes, Talia watches the vert lift off, her heart beating in her throat in time with the chopper’s wings as it vanishes into the low-hanging clouds.
On the other side of the field, Asuka leans out of the passenger compartment of the second vert, this one poised to take them onward to Elysium and the end of their journey. From here, she can’t see the expression of concern hidden beneath his mask. But she can hear it in his voice.
“Tal? The Cal-Mar swarm is moving inland. We gotta go.”
Her stomach goes cold at the thought; the last time she’ll feel the earth beneath her feet. The last time she’ll stand beneath the open sky.
Fighting back tears, she waves her acknowledgment.
“Yeah. Just give me… five seconds.”
There’s one last thing she has to do.
Reaching between the layers of her protective slicker, she grasps the warm metal of the Salmon of Knowledge, hanging in its customary place at the base of her throat. The holo-drive she’s wired in between the folds of stainless steel has been bumping against her breastbone all day, hard to ignore even to a woman practiced in shrugging off discomfort in the field.
It takes more force than she expects to break the chain. But eventually, it parts, and the necklace comes loose in her hand. Toeing a dent into the soil with the tip of her boot, she drops her gift into the divot, brushing a careful layer of earth back over it with a gloved hand.
Someone else will have you, someday, if we’re clever and lucky and we put our all into this, she thinks, and if the salmon run again. They’ll need your wisdom. Keep it safe for them until then.
With a heart made heavy by the grief of an entire planet and the burden of hope, Talia Bain steps into the vert, and slides the door shut.
-
Shava discovers why the salmon run when he’s eight years old.
He delights in the sight of their scarlet bodies as they flash by at his feet, fighting the current in the shallows and thrashing wildly at the ground with their tails. On the opposite bank, his mother and the other fishermen raise their voices in a timekeeping song, slapping rhythmically at the water with tasseled rods, beguiling the fishes closer and closer, and into the nets that will trap them for transport back to the Campus on the rise above.
Shava’s meandering path doesn’t take him too close to the nets; he knows better than to interfere with the adults’ work by now. Instead, he picks his way across rocky riffles, eyes on the gleaming fish, cataloging their efforts as they stir the riverbed in frantic bursts of activity.
Why do they come all the way here, he’d asked his mother, the last time the crimson fish had arrived in the river and thrashed themselves into a mass grave of reeking carcasses, just to die?
Perhaps it’s their ancestral resting place, his mother had suggested, and these fish are old, and ready to make their final journey.
They certainly look like they’re trying to dig their own tombs; all across the rocky substrate, clean patches are beginning to emerge as a result of their efforts, cleared of the last bits of algae and detritus from the summer blooms. As he watches, a knot of fish coalesces in the freshly-swept space, churning the water into an opaque mess as they thrash around each other in a frantic tangle. They scatter just as quickly as they’ve gathered, and, as the stirred-up sediment begins to settle, Shava picks his way carefully toward the clearing’s edge to examine the aftermath.
“They’re laying eggs,” he announces to the gathered fishermen later, as he hauls himself out on the bank. Picking his way carefully across the rocky shore toward them and stepping daintily around drying nets and baskets of catch, he adds, “That’s why they come up here every year. See?”
Dipping a hand into one of the rubber pouches hanging from his belt, he withdraws the eggs from the carefully scooped nest of sand and water that he’s prepared for them, holding them out for the gathering crowd.
His gathered tribemates let out murmurs of appreciation, a few even reaching out to roll the jellylike spheres about carefully with a fingertip.
His mother reaches out to ruffle his hair with a hand speckled with flakes of scale.
“My little scholar… well done! Here, help me with the nets, and you can archive it in the Chronicle when we return to the Campus.”
Shava beams, tilting his find back into the pouch and sloshing out into the chilly waters again, scattering fish left and right as he goes.
“Let me put these back in their nest, first. I… still haven’t figured out why they die after they lay them, though,” he admits, as he wades into the shallows, carefully turning the pouch out into the nearest of the cleared areas and settling the eggs back in among the scrubbed stones.
The head fisherman’s voice rattles like rocks tumbling down the riverbed as he calls out from his place among the baskets of catch, tallying their total harvest for the day. But the warmth in his tone is undeniable, and even from here, Shava can picture his smile, and the way it crinkles up his eyes with kindness.
“You have a quick mind, Shava. And many years left to puzzle it out. We have faith that you will.”
As he galumphs back to the shore, glowing with the praise, a different sort of glow, nestled in among the rocks, catches his attention. Turning toward it with a little frown, Shava digs his fingers into the soft soil of the bank, fishing out the shining object and dunking it into the current to clean away the pebbly dirt.
It’s a metal fish roughly half the size of his palm, formed of intersecting angles and spirals and dotted by rust after so many years lying buried in the mud. Held in and among the angles of the ornament by a tangle of wire is a rubber capsule, sealed at each end with a cap of thin plastic. In the center of the translucent container, a small device blinks on and off, on and off, a small yellow light pulsing with steady rhythm.
A data storage chit, he realizes, as he carefully unwinds the wires and pops the top of the capsule open, tilting the device into his palm alongside the metal fish, from the Old Ones… like the kind that we attach to the Chronicle to preserve its information. I wonder if it can read this one, too?
“ Shava ,” his mother calls, snapping him out of his reverie, “you letting the algae grow between your toes, my love? Come here! The nets!”
Tucking his find away safely in his still-damp pouch, Shava waves an acknowledgement, and picks up his feet, hurrying from the stream and onto the stony shore.
One way or another… he’s going to figure it all out.
Even if it takes the rest of his life.