---

Here Instead of There (Part 2 of 2)

By Elizabeth Bear

(… Continued from Part 1)

With the launch gone, there was just one rubber dinghy with an outboard motor stowed under the floor of the hangar, along with two kayaks, a sailboard, and a jet ski in an abjectly terrifying state of disrepair. There were twenty-three human souls on the pod, plus Henry.

Doc and her wife went up and down the steads alerting our neighbors that they needed to clear out. By the time they came back, we’d gotten the fugs organized into evacuation groups. We packed six people into Doc’s boat, in a space meant for four. Four more into the dinghy with one girl who was sober enough to steer and seemed competent to run the motor.

That left Kai, Miriam, Henry, me, and ten dirtbags. I didn’t even suggest that we give the Filth Is A Protest girl one of the kayaks and turn her loose, a level of self-restraint I was smugly proud of.

Evacuation logistics wasn’t my problem. I’m terrible at delegating, but all my effort was going into fixing either the radio or the cell transmitter so we had some chance of reaching Earwyn or Caspian and telling them to stay on shore.

Miriam and I were each probably five minutes from an utter meltdown—her about the fugs, me about the cell transmitter—when it turned out that some of our neighbors were okay people. Two other squatters stopped by and gave the rest of the kids a lift, jamming their boats past capacity.

Now only us permanent inhabitants were in danger, and at least one of us—me—needed to remain behind to try to fix comms and reach Earwyn and Caspian. I tried to push Miriam into the square foot of decking left in the last boat, but she wasn’t having any. “I’m not leaving my dog.” A flat statement of fact.

Oh, so Henry was her dog, all of a sudden.

Fine, fine.

Kai and Miriam moved the instruments out of the hangar and into the living room, and got to work fortifying the storm shelter in the interior of the pod. The shelter was Miriam’s bathroom and not the share bathroom, a small providence that almost sent me back to Sunday school and believing in God. A good trick, since faith was something I’d abandoned after my youth pastor told me there was no such thing as anthropogenic climate change; the weather was just terrifying because God was angry at people for fornicating.

And playing loud music.

The eerily calm conditions persisted. A three-quarters moon rode high. When I looked south an ominous wall of black was advancing up the sky.

Because the transmitter set its own timestamp based on network information, I had to use a whole different set of tactics on it. I hadn’t been sure it would work, and it was close to two a.m. when I finally got it online.

I crowed like a rooster. Miriam and Kai came running over, Henry yodeling with excitement at their heels. “Did you get them?”

“Not yet. I just got a signal. And, looking at the time, they’re probably in the middle of their shopping expedition right now.”

I pinged anyway. To my surprise, they pinged right back. I opened a coded channel and said, “Tell me you’re still ashore.”

“Need us to run back and get something?” Earwyn said. “The whole town is deserted, it’s weird as hell. We got in and out with no problem.”

“There’s a hurricane coming,” I said. “A bad one. You need to turn back and seek shelter in town.”

“We’re more than halfway,” Earwyn said. “When’s the storm arriving?”

I looked at my maps and predictions again. I’d been too busy to run back over to the doc’s and get newer data. “The leading edge should be on us in about an hour. Wind’s going to pick up in advance of that and there will be a lot of chop and gale-force gusts. Heavy seas.”

“We should be able to make it back in time to evacuate you,” Caspian said.

“I really think—”

Earwyn cut me off. “If you all get killed, what are we gonna do for a rhythm section?”

“Hey,” said Miriam. “What am I, chopped liver?”

Earwyn laughed. It sounded strained even over the airwaves. “Everybody wants to be the lead guitarist, Mir.”

“Oh I see. You want my job.”

“Not that badly,” Earwyn said softly, in a tone I recognized. “We’re coming back. Sit tight, we’ll have you out of there in no time and then we can skedaddle for a hurricane hole. Charge all the batteries, we might need them.”

“Earwyn, we’re going to have to close the hangar.”

“We can slide in underneath. Go pack,” she said firmly. “And don’t forget Henry’s potty pads. And make sure the searchlights are turned on so we can find you.”

I tried one more time to convince her to turn around, but she didn’t respond. I slammed the heel of my hand against the edge of the console. “Fuck this fucking corrupt system so hard.”

Miriam snorted. “You’d be part of the system if you hadn’t gotten kicked out for hacking.”

I stared at her, shocked at the cruelty. “Wow, so is that really what you think of me? Fuck you too.” My heart squeezed. I couldn’t believe I’d just said that, but I couldn’t take it back either—so I got up and left to make sure we had as many charged portables as possible. If by some miracle Earwyn and Caspian reached us, it wouldn’t hurt to ballast the launch with them and it sure wouldn’t help to run out of juice in the middle of a hurricane.

---

The launch didn’t beat the storm. We crammed into the bathroom with our backpacks and sleeping rolls and jugs of water and our stale rice cakes and peanut butter. I still didn’t feel much like talking to Miriam, so I didn’t mind that she padded the tub with a bunch of pillows, spread her sleeping bag on top, and climbed in with Henry. She turned her back on Kai and me to ostentatiously bury her attention in her e-reader. The dog stretched out and started snoring.

I propped myself against the wall with my feet on one side of the toilet, and Kai stretched out parallel to the tub, feet against the wall by the sink. The head had no windows, but a skylight molded into the roof. Rain began to drum against it as the wind rose. The pod shuddered with the impact of heavy seas against its pylons. When the waves rose high enough to wash over the deck and strike the walls of the pod, every hit felt like we were inside Kai’s bass drum. Lightning painted the walls with staccato brightness.

“That’s what I love about living here,” Kai muttered. “There’s always some kind of amazing bullshit going on. Pass me the marmite, would you?”

“It’s antisocial to eat yeast extract in an enclosed space,” I said, and handed it over.

While Kai was opening the jar, our power flickered. We all looked up expectantly as it came back on. A moment later darkness fell for good, followed by the dying whine of the exhaust fan.

“Dammit.” I got up and sat on the toilet seat to pull my boots on.

“You’re not going out there,” Miriam ordered, putting her reader aside.

The temptation to agree with her, to walk away from the problem, to remain here in relative safety—it was strong. I chewed my lower lip and stared down at the linoleum, which flickered in and out of visibility with the rolling lightning flashes. The wind was so loud I could not hear the thunder.

“If the searchlights are off, how are Earwyn and Caspian going to find us?” I whipped the cords around my speedlacers, wishing my boots were waterproof. At least vegan leather could survive a little salt water probably.

“I don’t understand how we lost power,” Kai said. Rummaging sounds suggested they were feeling for their boots also. “It doesn’t come from anywhere except right here. There are no lines to go down, and even if the solar panels blew off, the batteries are all in the hangar.”

“SeaBit probably patched the solar array along with everything else they busted.”

“I’ll come,” Miriam said.

“Please stay with Henry,” I answered. “I’ll rope in and Kai can belay me if I have to go outside.”

We stared at each other in the glow from Miriam’s reader and the stutter of lightning.

“I’m sorry,” Miriam said. “I was having a lot of feelings. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

“I was having feelings too.” I finished tying my boots by muscle memory and stood up.

“I really ought to—”

Kai interrupted. “Listen to Dr. Haf.”

I moved toward the door. “Don’t call me doctor.”

“How the hell did you wind up ABD anyway?” Kai asked.

Miriam said, “I’m telling you, he got kicked out for hacking.”

“You don’t know me.” I tried to keep it light and make it okay to go back to the banter and teasing. I wasn’t sure if I was being a hypocrite, or a grownup.

“How else would somebody as smart as you wind up in a punk house?”

I nearly lost my temper because I was still so mad at her I almost didn’t register the compliment. Almost, but not quite. And once I heard it, it cooled me off enough that I could answer with a joke instead of escalating again. “Punk pod. And I didn’t get kicked out. I quit.”

Miriam’s voice slowed down in the dark. “I didn’t know that about you.”

“How does anybody with half a brain not walk away from this fucking system? It’s so fucking hopeless. Everything is broken.”

“Huh,” Miriam said. Then, softly, as I grabbed a headlamp out of my pack: “You crazy kids be careful out there.”

---

“They’re not going to make it through this weather,” Kai said, when the bathroom door was shut behind us. “I hope they turned and ran.”

“Me too,” I said. “But could you live with yourself if we didn’t at least try to get the lights on?”

Miriam’s bedroom had windows, and all we could see through them was the incessant flicker of lightning, brilliance filtered through rippling sheets of water running down the transparent poly.

“Let’s see if we can fix it in the hangar,” Kai said.

“If it’s not in the hangar I don’t think we can fix it. Is there rope anywhere?”

They ducked into Miriam’s closet while I averted my eyes. A moment of rummaging later and they were back with a coil of climbing rope and the harness Miriam uses to clean the pylons. And harvest kombu, or whatever that stuff is. “I haven’t got a second harness to belay from.”

“Stay inside the door. When I go out, I’ll take a wrap around the mooring posts.”

Tight-faced, Kai nodded, and we went out into the main living area of the pod.

The wall of poly overlooking the southern sea was de-opaqued by the power failure, and lightning walked across the water so profusely I felt we were inside a Van de Graaff generator, looking out. The floor was awash in a centimeter of brackish water, which seemed to have been forced past the seals of the door into the hangar. That didn’t bode well for the situation inside. Maybe I had been unfair in blaming SeaBit’s poorly timed updates for the power failure.

Well, only one way to be sure.

“Fuck,” said Kai. “I’m glad I moved the drums.”

Even inside, I wasn’t sure the instruments were going to survive. But there wasn’t anything we could do about it, so there was no point in saying anything. I stepped into the harness and tied the line through the loops on the front. “Ready?”

“Ready,” Kai said.

I opened the door to the hangar and was staggered by the howling wind. What remained of the shredded bay doors was flapping in the wind. Our laid-on flooring was gone, lifted up and washed away by swells that regularly filled the bay. The external doors faced north, so the crest of the waves broke over the pod rather than rushing through the gap where they had hung. Water still filled the gap, rising to wet my boots and spill into the living area.

“Shit,” Kai said, as I said, “Got me?”

They nodded, and I walked out into the storm.

The wind shrieked and whistled under the pod and into the hangar. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like on deck. Even protected on three sides it felt like walking into the gale whistling around the observation deck of the CN Tower. It battered me from side to side, sending me reeling like a drunk as I crashed toward the catwalk railing. Another wave rose around me. I had to brace myself and stand until it passed. Kai yelped as seawater spilled into the pod and drenched them.

At least it wasn’t cold.

The hangar roof flexed up and down under the sucking force of the wind, thundering and rattling. A gust knocked me back. I leaned into it, lunged forward, and hurled myself at the railing. The wind eddied just as I got there and nearly lifted me over and into the water. Only the tautness of the rope and a frantic grab saved me. I felt the snap as Kai got yanked a step forward.

I freed one hand from the rail—peeling my fingers out of a deathgrip—and dropped the rope around one of the mooring stanchions, making sure it passed under the cleat so it wouldn’t slip off. That gave Kai a little mechanical advantage. I flashed a thumbs-up through the flickering darkness but didn’t turn around so the headlamp wouldn’t blind them.

If they called anything after me, I didn’t hear.

The main batteries were at the back of the hangar, along with the charging rig for the launch and the rack for the portables, which we’d carried inside to Miriam’s room. I struggled toward them, using the railing to steady and haul myself along. The headlamp didn’t reveal any obvious damage, and they were supposed to be sealed and stormtight…

A row of red and orange lights on the front suggested there was a problem.

I didn’t really want to be wrestling with a giant electrical storage system while up to my calves in seawater, did I? And yet, here I was. I wasn’t going to open the watertight housing—I’d destroy it if I tried, and letting the storm in to corrode the contacts didn’t seem like it would be viable. Either I could fix the problem from the console, or the problem could not be fixed until the storm was over.

As I reached the system, the roof began to make a new and more horrible shuddering sound. Metal rent and screamed. I didn’t look up. I don’t think I could have forced myself to look up if I had tried. The water running down my face now was warm and unsalty: clean tropical rain. The lightning flashes seemed more direct, and brighter.

The console controls were designed to be watertight. I reached them, clipped a carabiner between my harness and a grab bar, and waved a thumbs up back at Kai.

I hoped they saw it.

The electrical monitoring system had frozen. No real problem to fix that: I did a safe reboot and reset the system clock, just as I had for the fridge. A moment later, Kai whooped loud enough that I even heard it faintly over the storm. I turned: light spilled out of the doorway, and our searchlights cut through the sky overhead, vanishing all-too-quickly into mist, horizontal rain, and a cloud deck so low I thought I might be able to touch it if I climbed up one of the access ladders.

Which would, of course, be suicide.

The hangar roof was completely missing. Bucketing rain hammered my face. Another wave rolled through, pulling me against my clipped-in harness.

And somehow, I still had to unclip myself and get back across the hangar to the door.

---

Somehow, I did it, though I think Kai probably dragged me the last few steps. We got the door shut behind us and surveyed the wreckage of the living room. “Fuck,” Kai said, “I need a beer.”

We splashed toward the fridge. Kai handed me two sterile packs of brew and fished out a couple more for themself. “Let’s get a couple for Miriam,” I said.

Kai grunted, and provided.

Miriam’s bedroom was dryer than the living room. We’d remembered to shut the door behind us and the seals were holding.

When we opened the bathroom door, Miriam looked up, face streaked, jaw set firmly. She was hugging Henry and biting her lip hard enough that my jaw muscles ached in sympathy. Sitting and waiting in the dark probably took just as much courage as splashing around in a hurricane.

“Haf thought you might like a beer,” Kai said, and tossed her one.

She caught the box left-handed, without letting go of the dog. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she said. “And thank you.”

“All in a day’s work,” I answered. “And I really need to get some dry clothes on. No staring at my butt, okay?”

---

The wind howled for another two hours, intensifying along with the lightning.

“How can this be getting worse?” Miriam said.

“Eyewall,” I said with a shrug. “We should get a break soon.”

She shook her head. “Is there any place worse than this?”

Yeah, I thought. Lots of places. What I said was, “There’s always someplace worse that you could be.”

The eye passed over us a half hour later: a fantastic bubble of clear still air, fluffy cumulus, warmth, and the saturating pink-mauve light of dawn. We had all scrambled out on the deck to observe it when the silence fell.

“It’s not over,” I warned them. “This is just the halfway point.”

“I’ll take it,” Kai said, and went to get more beers.

The living room was wrecked. The water had drained away, but everything was wet to six inches. The guitars might be okay: we’d put them up high and it didn’t look like the water had gotten into their electronics. The amps and monitors were toast.

I just stood on the deck and looked up into Kasimir’s unseeing eye, my arms folded on the railing. All of the other pods seemed to have made it through the first half of the storm, though I doubted any of them were precisely intact. We were all going to have a lot of repair work.

Miriam handed me a beer. I pulled the tab out and drank deeply. Beer is where the pod’s gluten-free lifestyle meets aesthetics and aesthetics win.

Please don’t tell them.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said, as much to the ocean and the hurricane as to Miriam. “What if we just … put this satellite weather data on a feed that anybody can access?”

“It’d need constant updates, right? They’ll be trying to take down. And put us all in jail.”

“Just me,” I said. “And so, I go into hiding. Stay on the move. And keep putting the feed back up again.”

She looked at me. “How does that get us a bass player?”

I shrugged. “If you’re going to drop out, share houses are a good place to rack out. I can make sure you know where to find me.”

“They’ll catch you eventually.”

“Civil disobedience has it risks,” I agreed. “Anyway, if they catch me they’ll have to put me on trial, right? That will make a big public fuss also.”

She opened her mouth to argue and was cut off by the whine of an electric boat engine. We both whirled around—and saw the launch coming towards us from the hangar of the leeward SeaBit.

Our launch, with the terrible purple and acid green spray paint job decorating it. And there were two people inside.

A lungful of air whooshed out of Miriam and tears started in the corners of her eyes. I, of course, remained manly and inscrutable and did not whoop and spill beer all over my hand waving wildly in the air.

“Kai!” Miriam yelled. “Get out here! It’s Caspian and Earwyn. They’re not dead!” The relief in her voice cut through me.

“You like her,” I said, before I could stop myself.

Miriam whirled on me. “That’s bullshit.” Her mouth went sideways. “How did you know?”

“Everybody else always says ‘Earwyn and Caspian.’” I swallowed. “She likes you too, you know. You should—”

“What?”

“You should tell her. Anyway,” I swallowed, “I’m glad they made it. That was not a plot twist I saw coming. Let’s meet them in the hangar, we’re going to need to lash the yacht down before the south wall of the eye gets here.”

---

They got docked in the hangar without incident, largely because by now the storm had blown the last shreds of the external doors clean off. Our bandmates were gray-faced and staggering with exhaustion, and Caspian had managed to sprain his wrist and hyperextend his elbow, but they were intact and the launch was seaworthy. There was no running for it now, though—the storm completely surrounded us.

As I handed Earwyn out of the boat, I said, “Please tell me you weren’t out in the storm this whole time.”

She shook her head. “We made it to the archipodlago and realized we weren’t going to be able to dock with Crash Pod in those seas even if we could find it, so we went to the leeward one and holed up there. We still barely made it inside.”

“We’re not all going to fit in Miriam’s bathroom,” Kai said.

“The back half of the storm should be weaker,” I said. “And her bedroom came through okay. We can stretch out in there.”

“Where are our packs?” Caspian asked, looking through the door into the waterlogged interior.

“We took them into the bedroom,” Miriam said. “They’re fine, unless Henry is peeing on them. I left him locked inside.”

“Dammit, Henry! Come on, folks. Let’s get this food secured before the storm comes around again.”

---

The wall of clouds was close by the time we finished moving cases of expired tofu and halvah into the pod. Lightning danced through it, and the sky overhead was an absolutely flawless blue. Everybody else went inside to spread out pads and sleeping bags. I stayed on deck for a few last minutes.

I wanted a chicken sandwich, and I wasn’t going to get a chicken sandwich. I wanted a safe place to hide from noticing how fucked up the world is, and there were no places that safe. And I wanted the girl.

Three strikes, buddy. Tough luck all over.

So none of those things were going to happen. But I had just figured out how to effectively counterprogram one tiny scrap of the neoliberal corporate client state. And all it was going to cost me was any chance of peace, quiet, and obscurity for the rest of my life.

And probably, in the very near future, my freedom.

A lot to ask of a guy who never finished his dis.

There was a sat link in the weather station, even if it was offline right now. I opened the access panel and synced my device to it. I could work on the specifics of how to grant the world access to this data while we were waiting out the storm.

Miriam came up behind me. “We got Caspian and Earwyn back,” she said. “Are you still going to risk this?”

My hands kept on tapping away.

Miriam said, “You’re not stopping?”

“It was never about revenge.” Well, okay. It was never entirely about revenge.

“I’m impressed,” Miriam said. “I’ve known a lot of guys who can’t learn something even when a friend actually gets killed.”

I snorted and kept my eyes on the data. The storm loomed; the wind began again to ruffle my hair.

“Won’t they trace it back to you?” Miriam asked.

“Eventually. But I can keep on the move.”

“What about The Crash?”

“As I said, you can find another bass player.”

“Spoken like somebody who’s never had to try and find a decent bass player.”

“And anyway, it’ll take ’em a while to catch on. I’m not using my own login and I am going to automate the data forwarding process, make it as robust as I can, and encrypt and conceal the tunnel.”

“I knew you got kicked out for hacking. You didn’t quit, did you?”

“Miriam,” I said, and as I did I realized I wasn’t sure I’d ever said her name to her before. My tone probably gave away everything. It didn’t matter anymore. “I never got caught for hacking.”

“Did you get kicked out for civil disobedience, then?”

“No. I was always too much of a coward to protest before now.”

“Then what?”

“I was serious when I said I quit. I dropped out. Or just kind of stopped showing up, rather. I didn’t have the courage to tell them why I quit, and maybe I didn’t understand it myself at the time. But I think, looking back, it was because I couldn’t see the point in what I was doing anymore. It’s not science if it’s just a commercial product.”

“Huh,” she said. “Well, hurry up, the storm is coming. And I don’t think you have any more dry clothes.” She looked over her shoulder: I glanced to see Earwyn waving her inside, and she patted my arm and went.

Huh.

I looked out over the water. Sunlight sparkled on a near-flat calm. So impossibly peaceful.

Behind it loomed the storm.

---

Host Commentary

By Valerie Valdes

Once again, that was part two of Here Instead of There by Elizabeth Bear.

Crises and disasters, no matter how big or small, can be galvanizing experiences, crucibles that burn away rationalizations and illusions, reducing us to our most essential selves. We discover what we’re willing to do and be, what we’re willing to risk and lose, what’s most important to us and what is replaceable. Such experiences also tend to bring people together, despite a lot of apocalyptic fiction to the contrary. When storms unleash their wrath, people shelter each other. When things break, we take turns fixing them. Sometimes, too, living through terrible circumstances can inspire in us the desire to reach out instead of hiding. The world can be overwhelming in its cruelty and capacity for causing pain, but sometimes the way to fight back is not simply to take up arms, but to become a healer. Not to walk away from a broken system, but to build a better one inside, beside, despite it. Not every act of revolution needs to be big and loud and visible; sometimes the quietest deed can be the eye of a much bigger hurricane.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please do share it.

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And our closing quotation this week is from Ursula K. Le Guin, who said: “No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.”

Thanks for joining us, and may your escape pod be fully stocked with stories.