Earth Thirst Read Online Free PDF

could remember the way Arcadia used to be. We used to not fear the sun. We used to be able to breathe the air. We used to be able to sleep anywhere.
    But so much has changed in the last two hundred years.
    The seed of our panic had been laid by the Romantics and had been steadily nurtured by the Modernists and their hyphenated children. Stir in the nihilism of Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Lovecraft, and Camus—as well as the brutal reality of two World Wars—and the resulting harvest was rife with fear, despair, and a mad yearning to be coddled. Capitalism, Communism, and a few other -isms tried their best, but it took corporate greed to finally figure out how to yoke humanity, and once yoked, they were easy to lead.
    We became the bogeymen, the terror that threatened everything they were told they needed. The message spread, always the same. At first it was just the Internet, magnified by the vitriolic half-percent that purports to be the reasonable voice of the popular consensus, and then talk radio, in all the big markets, began to treat it as something other than a bad Internet meme that wouldn't die. Eventually, the networks discovered there was money in fear-mongering and the modern monster was given a face and a mission statement: we were the children of anarchy, the sons and daughters of Free Love radicals who wanted to turn the world into a socialist prison camp; the world was a free market economy, and we were the barbarians who only wanted to pillage and plunder the marketplace.
    All the while, their dark Satanic mills kept pumping poisons into the air, earth, and water. We didn't stop them because we were afraid to, and that fear has started to seep up from Mother's roots.

    * * *

    There is whisky in Captain Morse's mug, and the alcohol blurs his eyes and taints his breath. It gives him strength too, a ruddy flush in his cheeks, and his gestures are big and exaggerated. As if he were playing for a television audience, the one he imagines due to him for his courageous stance against corporate malfeasance and ecological destruction. “They're going hunting,” he tells me as I enter the bridge. He points out the curved window at the two narrow shapes on the water. “Both of them.”
    The harpooners are moving away from the factory ship, heading in an easterly direction. Hugging the edge of the persistent storm that never quite breaks. I don't see the patrol boat. “Any whale sign?” I ask.
    Captain Morse's mouth flaps for a second and then he gestures off toward port, mumbling something about radar echoes. He strides across the deck and jabs the sailor standing in front of the navigation console in the shoulder. “Get in front of them,” he commands. “We need to be beat them to the pod.”
    The man, one of three able-bodied sailors who came with the boat, glances at me briefly and then nods. “Aye aye, Cap'n,” he replies as he complies. The growling sound beneath our feet grows louder, and the persistent tremor in the deck increases. In my gut, I can feel the slow twist of our changing aspect as the Cetacean Liberty responds to the sailor's commands. The factory ship begins to drift to starboard, and I finally spot the thin blade of the patrol boat peeking from around the bow of the bigger ship.
    The pair of harpooners stay squarely in front of us.
    “Tuna,” Captain Morse says.
    “Excuse me?” I inquire.
    “It's not ‘chicken' when we're on water. Right? So, what's the ‘chicken of the sea'? Tuna.” He laughs, a bray of open-mouthed laughter, punctuated by a long pull on his mug. “Let's go show these bitches how to play tuna .”
    I wonder how long he's been waiting to say that, and as I watch the factory ship and its armored shadow grow smaller and smaller, I also wonder if there's another game being played. A wild what? A wild salmon chase, to keep with the captain's nautical vernacular. Both harpoon boats make sense if they are actually trying to harvest a whale. Realistically, we can only