Sierra wept, holding out her arms to take her child.
Mackenzie cut the umbilical cord and suctioned the infant’s mouth until it winced and started to scream.
“Get out,” Mackenzie told Sierra. Before I change my mind.
Between sobs Sierra managed to say, “Thank you, Mac,” and tried to embrace her.
“Just go,” Mackenzie said.
Wrapping the baby in a waiting blanket with the expertise of a neonatal primate handler, Sierra bundled it into a large basket. It wouldn’t do to have the security cameras see her leave with a newborn. With one last look at Lucy, Sierra was gone.
Taking Lucy’s hand, Mackenzie ran the back of her fingers over the animal’s cheek. Lucy’s mouth was open enough to reveal wicked canines and pink gums. Mackenzie didn’t know how long she watched the even rise and fall of the huge barrel chest before she finally pushed the pentobarbital.
Mackenzie’s fingers broke the surface of the pool. She felt Tituba’s warm shoulder against her own and saw mist clinging in tiny droplets on the gray hairs of the old gorilla’s brow. The moonlight reflected in her cloudy, digitized eyes. She took Tituba’s hand and felt the callused fingers close on her own.
“Stop.”
The virtual safari closed down and the rectangle that was Mac’s living space came into view. She slipped off the headset and gazed at the window wall she had programmed with a jungle night scene. The moon was rising through a stand of kapok trees, and howler monkeys called from a distance.
Henry’s gentle snoring replaced the chuffs of gorillas.
She got up and stood beside the bed, watching him sleep. She loved this man. And he loved her enough to agree to bribe their way to a birth license. It had been three years since Sierra walked out of the F.R.E.S. with a basketful of human infant. Within a year, she had been arrested, her daughter placed in foster care. But the news couldn’t leave it alone; a gorilla had given birth to a human child.
Mackenzie would force the world to look into the eyes of a living animal again.
Mackenzie arrived at the F.R.E.S. cryobank long before the sun came up. What had been a thousand acres of carefully controlled habitats for hundreds of species was now occupied by a resort hotel and casino. She pushed past a throng of tourists to the elevator banks. Once inside, she scanned her security clearance and hit the button that took her down to the maze of labs, offices, and cryobanks deep underground. As director of the bank, no one would question why she was here hours before any other personnel arrived.
The freezers were on the lowest floor, a good thousand feet underground. Liquid nitrogen circulated through tanks sunk into the rock, losing little to evaporation as the chambers themselves were kept at −100° C.
Mackenzie struggled with the thermal suit, which usually required two people to secure. She locked the headgear in place and opened the airlock. The visor fogged briefly as the temperature differential passed and the system took over.
At the apex of five corridors she stood, listening to her breath quicken through the regulator, and considered the line of tanks vanishing in either direction into the rock-hewn cavern. Fur and feather, claw and fang, all reduced to a frozen zoo, a mausoleum waiting to be awakened by a more enlightened generation. The human soul had no meaning without them.
She took a wheelie down a corridor until she stood before tank PG51619.
She punched a code into the lock, and a tower rose from its nitrogen bath, streaming with sublimed gas. Holding her wrist to the codes, she identified the right box and the data was projected by the heads-up holo display in her visor.
The image of Tituba turned and looked into Mackenzie’s eyes as a karyotype and medical history scrolled beside it.
Selecting one of the fifty HD polytubes containing Tituba’s fertilized embryos, Mackenzie placed it into the insulated carrier. The tower receded with a puff into the silver sea of nitrogen.
Outside the airlock, she peeled off the thermal suit and tucked the cylindrical carrier into her backpack. She checked the time. She had the first appointment of the day for implantation. She couldn’t be late.
Rainbows for Other Days
written by
C. Stuart Hardwick
illustrated by
Andrew Sonea
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C. Stuart Hardwick is a real southerner—he’s from South Dakota. Ghost towns and geysers, stone tools and dinosaur bones were the backdrop to Air Force jets and mankind’s first steps on the moon. Weaned on Black Hills treasure hunts and family lore like pages from a Steinbeck novel, Stuart spent summers creating “radio shows” on antique recording tape, making stop-animation films, and speculating down the barrel of a telescope.
A science fair robot led to a career in software development and even a stint working with the creator of the video game Doom (who played his music way too loud). Over time, editing and technical writing brought Stuart back to his first love—storytelling. Along the way, he married an aquanaut, got hugged by a manatee and studied writing at UC Berkeley.
Stuart draws literary inspiration from contrasting cultures and styles. His blog, Sputnik’s Orbit, features a hardboiled retelling of Paradise Lost set in the atomic ruins of Nagasaki. “Rainbows for Other Days” began as a study of just such a crossroads and is now being developed into a novel. Other projects include a far-future holy war set against echoes of an extinct alien culture, and a thriller pitching a female oil contractor into a battle of international intrigue.
Stuart lives in Houston with his family and urban sled dog, and has been known to wear a cape.
For more information visit Stuart at: cStuartHardwick.com.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Born and raised in Ottawa, Canada, 20-year-old Andrew Sonea is currently breaking into the illustration field. After spending much of his youth playing water polo at a competitive level—eventually reaching the Canadian Junior National Team—he decided to quit the sport in order to pursue art.
In high school he began to take art more seriously, and taught himself how to do digital painting. Despite having painted in oils, acrylics and watercolor, he still prefers using digital tools for his final images.
Andrew attended Sheridan College for illustration, but after less than a year into the program he decided to drop out and continue along the self-taught route. Andrew began painting fantasy after getting interested in Magic: the Gathering, and is highly inspired by painters from the late nineteenth century, as well as contemporary fantasy and science fiction artists.
He enjoys the process of helping others and has done hundreds of paintovers for other artists to help teach them concepts. For several years he was a moderator on one of the largest art forums, ConceptArt.org, where he also led weekly competitions. He has even won six Teen Challenges and one Character of the Week Challenge there.
He is continuing to move forward and plans on working freelance in the foreseeable future.
To see more of Andrew's art, visit: andrewsonea.com.
Rainbows for Other Days
I need the little brush, the one so good for feathering the paint where the rainbows cut the clouds. As I rummage through my pencils and broken bits of chalk, an alert hits my subsystems. I pause to access the sensor net and confirm for myself. The sour rain is coming.
My folding chair squeaks—a lone echo against the hot black rocks overlooking the preserve. For long minutes, bristles on canvas make the only other sound. Then the breeze stirs, the easel titters, and the forest below fills with whispers. The sun’s getting low, the thunder’s close, and the approaching band of rain will be a killer. Rainbows will have to wait.
By dusk, I’ve carried my things down the hand-hewn steps to the ranger station, a boxy gray building with arched metal roofing like
two Quonset huts superimposed at right angles. The ground floor’s for working, the upstairs for living. I don’t go upstairs.
I take some water and rations, though I’m unlikely to need either, and slip on my knee boots and poncho. The rain doesn’t burn any more, but the gear helps with the mud, and that’s where I find most of the strays. In heavy rains, the gullies grow bloated and orange with muck. I work from the tree-lined banks, peering down through the silt, mostly in infrared. The strays are usually drowned, and I carry them up the bank and note their location for later disposal. Occasionally, I find a survivor, but that’s not likely tonight—not in the sour rain. Still, these sweeps are essential. The rain does enough damage. The reconstituted wilderness is fragile. It doesn’t need corpses fertilizing the soil any more than it needs foraging homesteaders.
By the time I head down the steep winding path toward the citadel, the dark skies have opened up. Despite my upgraded senses, I don’t find so much as an owl or lizard all the way down. Anything that can, has fled.
I follow the swollen creek behind the citadel complex, where the trees spill out of the hills. The road to the grow-houses has flooded, so I cross the narrow cable bridge and climb into the preserve to where the beavers have their ponds. The sour rains are fewer than they once were, and for several years now these dams have had regular keepers. They’re a promising sign of recovery and the perfect platform from which to continue my sweep before moving farther east along the drainage.
The upper dam is wide enough and old enough to have saplings sprouting along it. I have no fear of crossing, even as thunder rattles up through the roots and limbs beneath my feet. Here and there, fish carcasses flash in the lightning, but only a few. The forest is quiet except for the rain, but it’s a violent kind of peace. Everything is hiding. Only the water moves—falling, dripping, collecting—flooding down past underbrush wilting and gray.
The air stinks of muck and earth. The overtaxed creek has filled the lower pond with yellow sediment. There amidst the flotsam is a heat signature—a stray. I hurry across and down the bank to the second dam, a shabby tangle no taller than I am and far less substantial than the first. I see my quarry caught on an island of jumbled branches, what might be the beginnings of a lodge. I scan the water and trees. No predators, and though the yellow floodwater is caustic and tainted, it’s no real threat to me. The dam is overtopping, though—in danger of collapse.
I shuck off my poncho and leap. I beeline through the murk, around the submerged branches and up beside the stray. She’s just a girl—nearly grown—and filthy, clothed in gray tatters and covered in blisters and sores. She’s washed in from the creek, from water too acid even for my artificially toughened hide. I check her heart and lung sounds—evaluate her in multiple spectra and frequencies. She’s half drowned and badly dehydrated. Her blood chemistry is off. Without immediate attention, she’ll die.
I steel myself and run the script. My cheeks burn. My forehead sweats. I struggle not to retch as my lungs fill with mucous and fluid as if I were the one drowning. I bend over the girl, press my lips into hers—smear them with sticky, reparative slime and breathe oxygen and engineered immune cells into her ragged lungs. She coughs enough to clear the water from her body. I cough until I’m shaking, until my ocular implants ache and run with tears that will repair her corneas just as they maintain my own bio-polymer lenses.
Now she has a chance.
Back at the station, I strip and wash her, and apply a medicinal salve. I push a liter of saline into her veins and wrap her in the softest blanket available, something old and woolen and olive drab. By morning, she’s had two more liters and her lips have regained some color. I leave her to sleep while I tend to repairs, but she doesn’t have my power feed; she’ll need nourishment if she’s to survive.
At midday, I boil a ration bar and rouse her for a few sips of broth. She objects with vague, gagging sounds of protest. I tell her I’m a ranger, that I’ll mend her and return her to the citadel as soon as she’s strong enough. Her eyes, already swollen and clotted, squeeze tight, as if in self-defense. She whispers with effort, “Take me outside!”
I warn of the sour rain. She glares through puffy red slits. The climate service has announced the end of a nearby remediation. The rains will freshen, at least for a while. I’ll take her out when it’s safe. I promise. This seems to satisfy her, and I coax a few more sips. She sleeps the rest of the day and long into the night.
My office is bright with moonlight when I’m roused from my hammock by a crash. She’s upset the tray on which I’ve left the salve and my few medical implements. When I reach her, she scowls and cowers like an animal. Again, she rasps, “Outside!” The rain’s let up. We can both hear the slowing patter of the drips outside the windows. I should not have promised—she’s in no condition—but she pulls the blanket snug and waits.
Very well. I scoop her up, careful of the salve, and carry her out across the cluttered porch and down to the station yard. I stand in the moonlight, unsure quite what to do next. Then the breeze stirs her tangled curls. Her eyes close and her cheeks warm. She draws in the night, like a tonic, and sighs.
I clear a space on the covered upstairs balcony for the bed I no longer use. Tucked in before the open air, she finally rests.
She sleeps for a night and a day, waking for broth but making no further demands. By the second morning, her color is better and she’s strong enough to sit and try to eat. I’ve found a Muscovy dead on the nest, and I fry its eggs for a meal. I help her with the blanket, then fill her plate and sit, using an equipment crate for a stool.
She seems put off and tries to speak, then scratches out a whisper. “It’s wrong.…”
“I’m sorry, miss?”
“To waste food. I can’t eat all this.”
She takes the fork and hesitates, then saws through the mounded eggs and pushes the bulk away. Her nod, chin first, is an invitation I let pass. She gulps down a bite, winces, and chews the next more carefully. Then she nudges the rejected eggs farther up the lip of the plate, closer to me, and speaks with her mouth full of food.
“You eat, don’t you? You a man or a machine?”
“I’m a ranger, miss.”
She squints, wholly unsatisfied, and takes another bite, watching as if to see what I might do. But I’ve taken her meaning. I pull my camp knife from its scabbard and scoop up some eggs.
Normally, my acquisition of energy and chemical supplements is accomplished far more efficiently, but I push in a bite without comment.
She downs her mouthful in several swallows, watching all the while. “Why do you cover your face?”
I stop chewing. The hood, really just a pinned scrap of raw canvas, is for her benefit. To all external appearances, I am still a man. My service couplings and ports are concealed within my clothing, my armor and augmentations below my skin. Some of my sensors, though, are necessarily conspicuous. The orbital modifications—and the ocular implants that permit me to see quite clearly with a cloth over my face—are disturbing to naturals. They’re disturbing to me.
I swallow. “Eat.”
Instead, she sets down the fork. “What’s your name?”
“Ranger triple-zed, one-two-one—”
“No!” She violently waves a hand and rasps, “I don’t need your damn URI, I already got one!” Her elbows grinding the table, she turns her palm toward me, pointing to the number blazoned below her wrist as she coughs and wheezes a breath.
I lift an aluminum cup in which she might not have noticed her water, and set it closer to her. “Yes, miss. Two-two-seven—”
“Carralodelphina!” She takes the cup in both hands and sips. “People call me Carra. What do they call you?”
“People …”
She glares. If I say they call me ranger, I gather she’s picked out something to throw in my direction.
“I’ll put these eggs aside
for later.”
The rains have freshened and finally paused. Late in the afternoon, she falters down the stairs by herself, though I’ve asked her to ring for my help. She’s found a spare sheet and wrapped herself in a sort of toga. I reach her before she can fall and help her down to the landing.
She holds up a dusty, leathery thing, an ancient jacket with a ragged sleeve.
“This has ‘Freytag’ written in the collar. I guess that’s you?”
I stare at the writing, conscious that the answer should come easily, feeling as if something precious and familiar has been taken—or maybe just lost to neglect. She mistakes my stumble for reticence.
“Fine. Well, I’m calling you Frey.” She drops the glare with the jacket. “Take me outside, Frey.”
I’ve just set out the easel, so to cheer her, I carry her up to the overlook. As I climb, the forest canopy draws flat, wrapping the hillsides in a ruffled sea that expands to encompass the horizon. She looks around, clearly pleased. This is as “outside” as she can likely conceive within the confines of natural human senses.
A rattle sounds nearby, and she eagerly looks for its source. Diamondbacks have been moving into the hills along the edge of the preserve, attracted by the growing rodent population. One has found its way onto the warm, exposed rocks of the overlook, and in response to our arrival, has coiled itself defensively. Despite this warning and mine, though, the girl ambles over as soon as I set her down. She bends and reaches as if to stroke the serpent’s head. It rattles and strikes, but I strike faster. I snatch it behind the jaw, holding it while she gawks.
“The outside is full of dangers,” I say, tossing the snake out over the treetops. “I’ve been engineered to survive. You have not.”
The sun has slipped into the hills behind us. She stares east, toward a purple sky and the last of the sour rain. She sees the rainbow, perhaps her first, and draws a startled breath.
“Then make me like you.”
Writers of the Future, Volume 30 Page 13