CONTRAILS VANISHED FROM THE SKY

DEVIL'S RAINBOWS, TREE HUGGERS AND GOLDEN SHOWERS

     Their pairing was a given.  No one in the class would volunteer to spend a week with the clawed witch whose friendship with Liriodendron had not made him popular either.  On the transport they were glued to the windows as they flew North, watching the desert green up, spare grass islands in the sands changing to an unending scrub broken by the glints of a few rivers sparsely lined with stunted trees.  The ice had not spread its mantle that far south, but the landscape had been devastated by centuries of windstorms, heavy snow or hail, rain deluges.  It once was a populated area and the occasional shades of streets or highways could be divined beneath the brush.  Here and there would appear strange serpentine drifts widening into deltas leaning against ridges.  They looked like mudflows, but they were smooth, devoid of the cracks that form in dried mud.  Their color was a sickly greenish gray and, when the transport pilot took a low, circular pass over one of the largest in sight, his passengers could make out curving parallel streaks of weak colors almost drowned in the prominent vomit tone.

     As they flew further North into once urbanized areas there were more of these splashes of ungodly refuse. There was silence in the craft.  The students had been told how one of the early flygliders' reconnaissance pilots was intrigued and thought to investigate the nature of this phenomenon.  He landed at the edge of a delta.  There was a slight haze breezing his way and when he slid open the bubble over his cockpit he began to inhale something like smoke, but with no odor.  His feet hardly on the ground he started coughing, ill feelings burning in his chest. Back aboard he headed for the nearest medic station.  That was over two hundred miles away. He nearly died.

     Further research found that the sites were discharge lagoons at, or below, the Ancients' disposal sites.  The massive hills of refuse engineered to safely store the trash of cities and towns could not weather the extreme conditions of the cataclysm's deluges.  Their enclosures failed and their contents flowed away or spilled on site with the organics rotting, mostly to methane gas, the metals and glass sinking in the flow and the lighter plastics floating to the surface to dry within a blend of a foul chemistry, the haphazard mix of the age's noxious substances carelessly tossed away with kitchen or shop detritus.  The plastics broke down to ever tinier fragments and sorted themselves by density, or inertia, or resistance to fragmentation to create the telltale streaks that eventually dried and rose as deadly dust in a breeze.

     The enigma solved, the researchers asked the original investigator if he would care to come up with a moniker for these sites to title the scientific paper they planned to publish.  Still healing, painfully bent down on a cane, he whispered his rancor.  "Sure," he said, "call them the Devil's Rainbows of the Anthropocene."  That was a bit theatrical for scientific nomenclature, but the writers had the decency to keep it and it became the best-known title at the Institute.

     So, the transport's passengers knew very well that they were about to leave the Rainbows zone and breach the southern limit of glaciation.  It had been centuries since the creeping glaciers had scraped the land clean and dumped or washed the residues into the ocean in their own version of the old canard 'dilution is the answer to pollution.'  Still, the ice was not a continent-sized bulldozer.  In places, the Ancients' relics would be there, nearly intact, waiting for the transport passengers to study, but likely not yet rendered a poisonous soup.  Yet the pilot could not miss a chance to spook his charges.

     "Now, boys and girls," he said on the PA, "just in case you run into mud, if you don't see green grass, if you don't hear frogs, move on. Fast."

     Betula had turned back to the window to watch the forest now sweeping below. "Idiot..." she said, perhaps just a bit too loud.

     The crew dropped off the teams one at the time in their allocated spot, gleefully verifying that all had left gear and garments in numbered laundry bags and exited the machine in their birthday suit.  This annual defrocking of the intellectuals was a highlight in the rotation schedule of the transport crews, a prized assignment to enjoy sights and events well beyond the monotonous routine of their short-haul flights.  It would be a scenic journey over the Ancients' lands with the occasional stops where one after another pair of bare-assed junior eggheads hopped off in the wild.  Then, on and on further North where the best student duo was assigned the most remote spot, a forest clearing at the foot of a waterfall.  The pilot ogled Betula as she undressed, smacking his lips and murmuring comments to his crewmate.  She was nude when he addressed her in a concerned tone.