Cullsman #9

by Michael John Grist

  "You came back," said the robot, its voice was rusty with ivy and creepers.

  "Across the world on top of a mountain," said the myna bird. "But now I'm tired. Can I lie down here?"

  The robot looked at its arm hanging from the myna bird's beak, and began to shake more powerfully than it ever had before. Its lost arm made it think of happier times, when there were people all around, cheering, throwing rose petals over its massive chrome head.

  On the robot's trembling lap, the myna bird closed its mechanical eyes.

  "Goodnight," it said.

  "Goodnight," said the robot. "Thank you."

  Then it too closed its eyes. Soon its trembling subsided, and finally it shut off completely, its last spurt of power used up.

  The trees grew up around it until they eclipsed even its head, and the myna bird on its lap was swallowed up in the tangle of hot jungle.

  4. ROUTE 66

  There's a figure on the horizon, drawing near.

  An old man in frayed denim dungarees kneels at the side of the tarmac road, watching. There's a spray can of WD40 from the old store in his left hand, a ragged clump of wire wool spun through with blood and lacerated skin in his right hand.

  "Dammit," he curses, as he tracks the figure along the black highway snaking through empty desert, the star-studded midnight sky reflecting on polished blacktop. Constellations dot to dot across the shiny old road, here and there disturbed by the central glint of refracting cat's eyes, forming new and curious imaginary beasts on the black surface, the earth's alteration of the heaven's map.

  It's a young man, with long white hair, a pistol-belt around his waist.

  The old man curses again and pushes himself to his feet, the sowing ceased. He worries about his children, worries about the seeds and the field. The harvest is nearly come.

  All around blocky sandstone buttes loom from the darkness, like giant gardeners tending to the strip of alien stone set through their territory. Somewhere, perhaps on the peaks of the gloomed outcroppings, a wolf howls into the night.

  The old man sets the WD40 can down, brushes as much steel wool from his hand as will come, then looks back at his home, where his children sleep. It is an old petrol station, with signs and pumps all tipped over and enmeshed in a spider's web of 20th century found-object art, blending golden arches with road signs, pinned with plastic chip bags rustling their lullaby Lays song throughout the night.

  There is no time, and the young man is drawing closer. He turns and hobbles alongside the highway for a few yards, until he reaches a poorly constructed wooden watchtower stacked up around a sign with an enormous yellow shell on top. He climbs up the creaking aluminum step-ladder to the turret, and peers out over the desert, back along the swaying umbilicus of road, towards the red haze of city.

  "Dammit!" he whispers again, shakes his left foot vigorously in the air, then settles down in the watchtower to wait, shotgun crooked across his lap. Every now and then he glances down protectively at the polished section of the road, a stretch some 20 yards long and shining like a beacon with the starlight.

  * * *

  The young man is pale, like an alien birthed between the stars. He looks tired, the old man thinks. He wonders at how far he's walked. 20 miles to the city, maybe, wearing those flea-bitten black clothes, rags really, the cloth bundled up around him like a mummy, alone for hours on this windy plain. But there's no room for sympathy, not now. He has children to protect. He raises the shotgun to his shoulder, sights down its length as the young man approaches.

  "Stop there," he calls down, when the young man's within range. The young man stops and looks up, his gaze fixing quickly to the old man in his makeshift tower.

  "Leave me alone," he says in a dead monotone, and walks on.

  "I've got a shotgun pointing at your head, son. Stop walking."

  "So shoot me," the young man says, and walks on.

  The old man is confused, this never happened before. He's never had to actually fire the gun, and he's not sure it works anymore. Still, he can't let this pale stranger near his children. He takes careful aim near his feet, nervous, not sure he's doing the right thing, then pulls the trigger.

  There's a boom, and the old man's body is kicked backwards out of his turret. He falls, then lands hard on the tarmac road in a cloud of dry dust.

  "Dammit," he mumbles, feels blood wetten his lips. He tries to rise but cannot for the pain his chest.

  A pale face appears across the sky, blocking out the stars. The young man, his white hair long and curling round his cheeks, white like falling snow.

  "Why did you shoot at me?" he asks slowly.

  The old man coughs blood. "I warned you."

  "Yes, you did."

  Slowly the young man sits down, takes off the mangy coat wrapped around his shoulders, revealing black hunting garb at a high polish.

  "I see you have a section of road to guard," he says.

  "Swore to sponsor it, I did," says the old man.

  "I don't see your name on the signs."

  "It's there. See the big shell? That's my coat of arms, this is my ancestral land."

  The young man looks slowly, lazily, then back. "I always thought that was an oil company's logo."

  "No," says the old man, "you're confused, it's been in the family for generations. Always has been. Always just been like that."

  "Perhaps you're right," says the young man. "These are confusing times, aren't they?" He reaches out for the fallen shotgun, rests it across his knees.

  The old man tries to rise again, but his back fails him. His head is buzzing insistently, and he wonders if he's broken his spine. His eyes flicker to the shotgun resting in the young man's lap, and he realizes he's failed.

  "Promise me you won't harm my children," he says.

  "You have children?" asks the young man. "I doubt it, father. Not here, in the desert. How would you keep them?"

  "I farm!"

  "You farm the desert?"

  "No, of course not. Only a fool would attempt that."

  "Of course."

  "Everyone knows that nothing will grow in the sand."

  "Everyone knows that."

  The old man coughs more blood. "I farm the road, the stars.

  "The stars?"

  "The night can be generous, if you know how to seed her. If you know how to protect her. You'll see. If it wasn't for me, all this wouldn't be here," he says, and waves his arm around weakly.

  The young man sighs.

  "I have no desire to hurt you, farmer. Perhaps I should fetch your children, so they can be with you."

  "Yes, yes," says the old man eagerly. "Please, do that. But don't hurt them."

  "Of course." The young man rises, shotgun in hand, and wanders away from the fallen man by the shell sign, walking the polished black of the road to the building tucked under the station's spreading canopy, swaddled by the web of signs and pump hoses and detritus.

  The old store-front stands before him, the door a buckled metal frame with only a few shards of glass left. He attempts to push it open, but the metal only bends a little and doesn't budge. He kicks at it, but it only seems to wedge harder against the ground. Instead he kneels, and peers through the lower portion into the deep gloom inside.

  "Hello," he calls. A faint echo bounces back to him. "Anyone here?"

  No answer. He pushes the few spikes of glass in the door to the ground and crawls through, into the darkness. Somewhere far behind he can hear the old man calling about his children, not to hurt his children.

  There's a smell of age, decay, the acid of stale urine. The floor is sandy beneath him. He gets to his feet, reaches out and grips the shadow of a shelving unit, runs his hands along its length, lets it guide him in.

  Turning at the end of the aisle he spots the flicker of a candle in a corner, behind the counter. He pads over to it, stepping over piles of stacked metal tins, the fallen register, still chained to the desk, and comes to a tiny nub of candle wick, burning down in
to a shallow pool of white wax in a rusted metal dish.

  To his right, in the wavering half-light, he sees two small skeletons lying side by side, on a half-inflated air mattress cramped in the shallow floor space behind the counter. One has a blonde wig of long hair dumped across its face, the other a portion of fuzzy black carpet propped against the skull-top, approximating a hair-line. Both have thick black smudge marks around the jaws, oily dust caking over the teeth and jaw and cheeks.

  The young man nods, as if in recognition, then turns to the candle and extinguishes it with a pinch of his fingers. Then he takes a long final look around the darkened room, brushes a hand along the counter, feels the rough texture of mottled plastic, and leaves the store.

  * * *

  "Help!" the old man calls faintly. The young man walks over to him, notes his bloodied hand, the threads of metal woven into the skin, and the black smudges at his mouth, the worn patches at his knees. There's a dark patch now beneath his head, spreading into the light desert sand, carrying motes of dust with it like rocks in a lava flow.

  "My children, you didn't hurt them?" he says, as the youth's shadow falls across him.

  "No, I didn't."

  "They're afraid for me. They don't know where I am, why didn't you bring them to me?"

  The young man looks down on his face, the knowledge of such things heavy upon him. He flips open the shotgun barrel, looks into the chambers. One shot left.

  "They were sleeping," he says. "I didn't want to wake them."

  "Oh. Well, that's good. Just be sure to sow on the hardest places of the road, only at midnight."

  "Sow?"

  "The seeds. That is when they are at their brightest, but they will only appear for you if the road is well tilled. Then they must be plowed in, polished into the smoothness. Only then will there be enough food for the three of us."

  "What seeds?"

  "You'll only see them at night, if you smooth out the road to perfection."

  The young man pauses, thinking. Sights down the shotgun, finger reaching to the trigger.

  "You mean the stars?" he asks, but the old man is no longer listening, his eyes begin to focus wildly, on the sky, the youth's face, his clothing, the shotgun.

  "You must be the father now," he says. "But you wear such strange clothes, and your hair is so white. You must feed the children now."

  "I will."

  "I trust you. You're a good man." He pats at the young man's knee with his blackened bloody hand, sewn through with strands of wire. "You will be the farmer now."

  The young man stands, and points the end of the shotgun at the old man's face.

  "Thank you," says the old man.

  He pulls the trigger.

  The spent shell ejects and drops to the ground by his feet. He kneels, retrieves a few shotgun shells from the dead man's pockets, drops them into his own, and walks away.

  5. C22

  Indonesia Dec 2020

  Atmospheric CO2 – 420ppm – Mauna Loa Observatory

  The jet drops me at a landing strip outside Kuala Lumpur. I toss the FT aside, shake the flabby captain's hand while he gapes at me, and don my carbon mask.

  The air outside is retrograde, they've recidivized in KL by some 30ppm this year alone. New factories churning out eco-goods for Manchuria; nobody thinks about the carbon blast-furnaced to make them.

  A diesel taxi and into the city; the driver tells me he's a Nigerian with an export family back in the motherland. Good luck with that, I want to tell him. News won't have reached here yet of the meltdown.

  "Came to COP 19?" he asks me, in African-accented Globish. He doesn't recognize me. That's fine. I nod. I'm white, in a suit, in the Muslim capital.

  "Princess or tiger?" he asks. Front page of the FT, the Economist, the Nikkei, every day for months now. What is behind the door, princess or tiger?

  "Neither yet," I answer.

  "Smart man. Tiger fuck you. Princess fuck you too. Not either best."

  I point through the front glass at a djinn of cycling plastic bags, rising up between the sand-blasted skyscrapers.

  "You see a lot of those?"

  He hawks, unrolls the window, and spits a gob into the crepuscular smog. Grit and shit blows through the gap. He winds it back up quickly. "Fuck my transmission, man," he says. "Get under this cab and fuck it up."

  When he says 'man' he sounds like he's from Queens. Plastic cyclones and shitty Hollywood movies. Fuck this city, I hate Indonesia.

  We pull up to the Bok rotunda. Hogs of Western reporters cluster in portable plastic boxes, heads to their listening jacks, tuned to the simulcast coming out of this latest Kyoto revocation. Indonesia will balk. States of Gibraltar will balk. Caribbean isles will balk. I know what it'll be, because I know about Nigeria.

  "Here," I tell the driver. He stops abruptly, a bicyclist clams up into the boot, rides the back window.

  "What the fuck, man!" The cyclist rolls off the back and punches the glass. I toss a crumpled 50 Ringgit note to the driver, fix up my carbon mask, and get out.

  Reporters home in on me. I think the finger at them, and push by. They press up against the sheen windows of their haz-mat boxes, goggling. Some of them start strapping on their masks, and I get the brief comical notion of Superman putting on an eye-patch in a telephone box. Lois, can you hear? Lois?

  The Bok Plaza is military-grade grey blastcrete, ugly as sin, spiky and macho like a Third-Reich wet dream. I hold up my COP card, though it's hardly necessary. Guards with automatic rifles, full beards, and big crimson turbans stare at me and stand aside. I stride through the long lobby, ignoring the crowds of supplicants and protestors behind the velvet rope. Over the speakers the simulcast drones on. None of it matters any more.

  A gaunt bald man with a clipboard runs up to my side.

  "Mr. President, we hadn't expected you, could you possibly-"

  "No," I say, don't break my stride. The doors are ahead.

  "Iran's at the podium," he says, "they've 20 minutes left on stanza 13.3, you see, it-"

  "Good," I interrupt. He trails off.

  I reach the big purple double doors and fling them open. The doors bang, the sound echoes around the sweaty chamber. I step in, survey the hundreds of men and women crammed into the pews of that chamber like they were beggars come for alms. The place smells of cold tea and bad air conditioning.

  The Iranian PM looks up to see me. A look of surprise runs over his face. That's right, I want to tell him. You're fucked. Tiger or Princess my ass.

  I stride forwards, down through the ranks of all those representatives bundled like Christmas faggots, into the middle of the space, and speak out over the gathering rabble.

  "Nigeria just went extinct."

  They get loud in outrage, then quiet to listen.

  "Their C22 pipeline was tapped with alkali, and the whole country's gone up." I point at the Iranian minister. "Iran did it."

  After that, things get crazy.

  Washington May 2015

  Atmospheric CO2 – 410ppm - Mauna Loa Observatory

  I pace the office and kick my way through the drifts of crumpled paper on the floor.

  "Just try to focus on Mandeville," says Baumann, the environmental Czar. He's wearing his damnable hot pink tie that makes him look like that fat oaf Trump. I'd love to pink his face by garroting it, but God knows I need him.

  "One more time," I say, turning at the plant pot, kicking my way back through the tufts of white papers grown up on the navy blue floor like carbon jungles.

  "Alright then, from the beginning," he says, and I want to punch him for laboring it. "It's the same as the Prisoner's Dilemma from game theory. You're with me thus far, aren't you?"

  I want to punch him in the solar plexus for saying 'thus'.

  "Of course I am, I'm not a goddamn trapeze artist. The Prisoner's Dilemma; selfishness and lack of trust lead to worse outcomes for all. What's it got to do with C 22?"

  "Everything. Mandeville dictates the Fable of th
e Bees, the paradox of under-consumption. The two are the same thing, especially when we start looking at fixed resource simulacra."

  "Damned bees," I mutter.

  "That's right, bees, in the 17th century, even before Adam Smith. The Puritans obviously heeded him when they got here and started laying strip malls full of crap for 'the folks' to buy."

  He does air quotes for 'the folks', referencing O'Reilly. He knows how much I hate the man, so I want to punch him for that too.

  "I understand that, Keynesian economics, et cetera."

  "Alright, good. That leads us to the tightening loop of resources, through the Prisoner's Dilemma, and into Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons. We're just going to run out of stuff to make the crap out of, and stuff to make the energy to make the crap-making factories run."

  "That's obvious, Rufus," I tell him. "Tell me something I don't know."

  "What you don't know is the catch of it. Nothing you can do will alter that."

  I kick a flurry of papers into the air. "I'm the President of the United States! Don't give me that bullshit."

  "We're way beyond the crisis point, sir," he says, unflappable. "We passed it a hundred years ago. The cataclysm is coming, and all that remains to decide is who will be on the lifeboats when that time comes."

  "You can't ask me to decide that."

  "If not you, who?"

  I gnash my teeth and look out the windows. Across the East garden I can see the rails encircling the grounds, the protestors arrayed on the pavement, all the way to the obelisk. I sub-vocalize a curse against FDR and Reagan, and turn back to Baumann.

  "C 22," I say.

  He nods.

  "It's like something out of a god-awful science fiction novel. Ice-9. It's a game of Risk gone mad."

  He shrugs. "We actually did blow the crap out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

  "Yes, and Hitler did actually kill six million Jews. Is that the mold I'm to be set in?"

  "It's the lifeboat you're to carve out, sir."