The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [136]
Working at the canopy level is tricky and requires a lot of practice. Almost all of the collectors get up there from time to time, but some of them have come to specialize in the task, working up in the high branches every day. Ivy is one of these specialists. Over the last ten months she’s built up great networks of bright-yellow nylon cords running up and down sets of trunks at various elevations and spanning from one tree to the next. In the mornings she floats upward, hoisted by a gas-powered motor to her perch, and then spends the rest of the day checking her snares, edging out on slender branches to pluck eggs from their nests with her mouth, sliding down along cords strung between the trees like some cross between Tarzan and James Bond, collecting birds and butterflies and iridescent mosses and plants whose roots never touch the ground. Ivy is good at her job, is generally acknowledged to be the best there is, and she takes tremendous pride in it. Her mind remains something of a weather system, but the latest medication, combined with the respect and support of her coworkers, seems to buffer her from the worst of the winds and storms.
Ursula prefers variety, and like most of the other collectors she chooses not to specialize but rather just to do whatever’s needed. Occasionally one of her supervisors tells her to try to find more grubs, or worms, or katydids. Sometimes she’s instructed to walk in a straight line and collect everything in her path. Other times she’s given self-dispensing canisters of KaOX Mist to send up through the breezeless air in order to drop a column of insects onto her collection mat. At the end of each day the supervisors make a cursory examination, jot down a few notes on their clipboards, and pack the samples into watertight crates to be shipped downriver and stored in giant freezers at the Ark, Inc. headquarters. The idea is to save as many species as possible. It doesn’t matter so much if in the process they collect a thousand of the same kind of insect, or so the thinking goes. In the future there will be plenty of time to sort them all out. Or even better, there will be a robot programmed to perform the task at an amazing speed, an enormous robot with built-in cyclotrons, microscopes, cameras, computer-imaging equipment, a built-in library containing every known gene, a built-in nanogarage full of nanoforklifts, nanocranes, nanobulldozers, nano–arc welders, a well-stocked supply of the building blocks of life, a built-in primordial pool, petri dish, fish tank, birdcage, terrarium, greenhouse, and a couple of built-in plasma bulbs, buzzing with purple and blue rays, just for show. And when the time is right the mayor of the world will cut a ribbon and a crowd will cheer and a multicultural team of technicians will flick the On switch and the robot will go to work, re-creating the Amazon rain forest and shipping it piecemeal to a freshly cleared two-million-square-mile swath of Brazil, or if the bidding is higher elsewhere, to a climate-controlled Canada, or a climate-controlled China, or a climate-controlled North Pole. In the end there will be no shortage of Amazon rain forests—there will be plenty of them to go around.
Spotting some movement, Ursula looks past the tree trunk and sees a Yanomama man making his way toward her, carrying a bow in one hand and a red, blue, and yellow macaw in the other. He holds the dead bird out for balance as he steps over a fallen tree. He is naked, his genitals darker than the surrounding skin. His face and body are painted with the serpentine patterns of the Patahamateri tribe. As he gets closer, she recognizes him.
“Hi, Walter,” she says.
Walter waves. “Yo, Ursula, how’s the bug business?” He squats down next to her. From up close she sees that his long, pale body is covered with more red bites and scratches than usual.
“The bug biz is booming,