Bitter Oath (New Atlantis) - By Nhys Glover Page 0,2

been destroyed by man. But he’d been determined to go down fighting, just as his parents would.

He still remembered the day he’d woken up to find himself alone in the world. The winter expedition, of which he was an insignificant part as a graduate student of twenty five, had been in the heart of what was left of the northern wilderness of Quebec. They’d been looking to track the endangered snow owls.

Everyone had been sick. They’d all blamed it on food poisoning, when they turned in early that night. By morning – was it the next day or the one following – he was never quite sure, he woke to find every last person of their eight-man team dead.

And, as he hiked out to their vehicles, and made his way along the rough tracks back to civilization, he found no one else alive but him. By the time he reached the bigger towns, his growing terror that he was the only person in the world left alive, was out of control.

If he hadn’t seen a flash of colour on the roadside just out of La Tuque, he would certainly have gone mad. But he had seen it, and chased after it, until he found the teenage girl. She had been crazed with loneliness, too, just like him. But she’d also been terrified of the stranger that he was. It had taken him days to calm her down; days to convince her he meant her no harm.

Saidie had travelled with him in search of others. By the time the military patrol had found them, they numbered ten. He’d wanted to go home to Toronto, to see if his parents had survived. They were strong, he’d told the military, and they would have made it, if he had. Of course, he’d been wrong. Strength had nothing to do with surviving the Last Great Plague. No one had ever found out what the survivors had in common that made them each the one-in-a-thousand who went on.

But the armed force had their orders – no one was allowed to return to the once-populated areas. The threat of further disease from the decomposing corpses was too great.

Before he knew it, he was at a holding camp. His wasted, sick body had been traded for a healthy, new one. Then, because of his skills and knowledge, he was redeployed to New Atlantis.

Here, he’d worked as a curator in the Knowledge Centre for one hundred and fifty years. Then Time Travel was perfected, and he was able to volunteer as a Researcher. His job since that time had been to Jump back to the past and collect primary, ecological data on all that they had lost.

He had been fifty years into his second clone body when he Jumped for the first time. That Jump had lasted forty years. The only reason he’d come back was because his body was wearing out. For the next ten years, until he was forced to integrate with his next clone, he spent his time collating his findings from that first Jump. This became his pattern over the period: Jump to pre-industrial societies, usually in Northern America, research their ecology for ninety years, return to Start Point, and spent the last of the hundred years of each clone’s life collating his findings. Then he’d transition into a new clone, so he could Jump again.

But this had been his last Jump. He was on his eighth and last clone, and his ninth life. No Consciousness could be integrated into a tenth body. He’d been told this just before going in, this time. So he’d left his return until the very last moment, because he wanting to make the most of his final time in-situ.

And that last gem of knowledge seemed to be the central jewel of his impressive crown. A possible sighting of the larger cousin of the extinct giant Palouse earthworm (Driloleirus Americanus), a species that had only been found in the Columbia River Drainages of eastern Washington and Northern Idaho.

There had been over 2,700 varieties of earthworms identified by the beginning of the 21st Century. By the end of that century, there’d been only a handful left. Without their ability to convert decaying litter into nutrient, the planet’s food sources disappeared. The soil began to die.

For most of the last years, before the end of the Second Dark Age, scientists had begun to believe that the Holy Grail for saving the ecology of their dying planet was earth worms. Some were