Snow Over Utopia

by Rudolfo A. Serna

  They were able to find the camp, slipping past the disciple sentinels in fading light. Camouflaged in black cloaks to avoid detection, covering their scent with wild gland oil to fool the hounds, they stayed off the ground by climbing into the skeletal frames of rotted high rises whose bones were like those of Juggernauts washed up from their graves.

  In the clear night, Delilah watched the Chief Disciple, who sat cross-legged among fires of burning human flesh, taking in deep wafts from the pyres.

  Eyes closed in meditation, its body tattooed green except for the blood-red face. Embedded in its nose and mouth were metal rings with chains that hung connected to the ears, snipped at birth to make them long and slender. Its horns, shaped out of human bone, were fashioned to represent those on the ancient demon god’s head.

  The Chief Disciple’s horns stood tallest among all of the disciples, signifying its role as leader of the gang that he commanded with guttural grunts and bestial sounds, articulating orders to his lieutenants.

  Another creature lay at the Chief Disciple’s feet.

  A female body, tattooed green, connected to a chain, looking strong beside her lord that commanded its kin.

  In the moonlight and bonfires, Delilah could see the finger-bone necklace that hung between the naked female’s green breasts, her headdress of long black feathers. Her powerful body tethered to the prince, her brother.

  The meditative demeanor of the Chief Disciple reminded Delilah of her father when communing with the rotor, in a trance, waiting to receive a message from the Earth Machine. She could not figure out what it was that the Chief Disciple waited for, what transmissions he was receiving, or whether or not he was receiving those messages from the same source that her father had gotten them from. A living program in the roots of a giant tree, in communique with a powerful being buried in the ice and snow.

  The disciples had killed Delilah’s mother years before.

  She daydreamed of seeing her mother again, beneath the green glare of the rotating orbs. She often thought that her father held her mother, bathed in the green light broadcasted from the rotor. But she would not be able to see, until it was her time to monitor the orbs.

  If Delilah could, she would kill the Chief Disciple where he sat and exact revenge for her mother’s death.

  She could see his eyes open, as if he was waking from a trance, staring in their direction, into the dark, without the use of a rotor to find them. Delilah’s hand slowly reached behind her and felt the edge of the bow on her back, but she knew that she was too far away to make the kill.

  Does he see us?

  The Chief Disciple sat, while around him the gang members sounded their animal moans and yelps, imitating the creatures of the valley. He felt the smoke, watched the birds that had been in towers overgrown with vegetation, hearing their squawking as they fled their roosts at midnight. He watched them rising into the moonlight. From the sound of the birds’ chatter, the Chief Disciple knew that something was in the thick flowering lofts, watching their camp.

  From their cover, the hunters watched the Chief Disciple’s obsidian, tattooed eyes reflecting the firelight.

  Perhaps we are too close, she thought, but it should have been too dark and far away for the disciples to see, while the hunters own eyes were able to pierce the dark, the disciples were still human, forged in the pain and glory of the apocalypse, while the hunters were descendants of the Robot Queen’s genetic experiments. It was their kind that had received the power, the magic of the science still locked in the manuscripts of the library.

  There’s no way, Delilah thought.

  So confident in their stealth, Delilah underestimated the Chief Disciple’s power. He reached up with his green hand and sharpened black nails, pointing in their direction, growling commands to his legion. The two-headed hounds in their pens howled along with the grunting and snorting of their masters.

  Delilah gave the hand signal to move, to scramble from their positions, and to retreat over the spines of ruins twisted over with pieces of steel, with trees and the tips of steeples that made up the valley. Silent and quick, they vaulted over ridges of houses filled with dirt. Shrubs and tall grass grew there, hiding the holes in the earth, pits that opened into space.

  Delilah heard a gasp, felt a hand reach out for her leg, and turned to see Salem falling, disappearing into the ground. She reached for him, but his hand slipped just out of reach. He disappeared into the ground without yelling.

  The other hunters stopped and looked back where Delilah kneeled over the hole Salem fell into. They kept on scanning the trees, waiting to be attacked, spreading out along their flanks, their blades at the ready while she peered down into the ground that had given way.

  Some of them ran to her and dropped the end of a rope into the opening. Delilah climbed in while two others held on to her as she descended.

  Her feline eyes could not penetrate the moonless dark. Her nocturnal vision scanned the void, arcing through the black pitch.

  “Salem!” She called out, her voice echoing, trying not to reveal their location to the packs of disciples looking for them.

  She took a stone from her belt, held it out until it sensed her and glowed green. She pointed it into the abyss, into the giant hollow body of the fallen building that mummified underground, its frame holding up centuries of earth sediment.

  Green light brushed along the lattice of calcified beams that held the hives of giant spider ants. Receiving chemical commands to obey their queen, the spider ants dug deeper. Clacking legs and pincers raised to catch whatever fell into their lair. The size of a human head, they dissected the corpses to take to their nests, feeding their newborns.

  “Salem!” Delilah called out, louder this time, but there was no answer except for the clacking of legs somewhere deeper than the green light could penetrate. The ammonium smell of the spider ants’ nests rose to her nostrils, making her sick, and she climbed back up to the opening, pulling herself over the rim of the hole, gulping fresh air.

  “He’s gone. Keep moving,” she whispered.

  Delilah knew that the body of Salem was already being plucked apart, but she had to concentrate on escaping to the hidden trail ahead of them through the trees, leaving behind her friend to feed the teeming ants even now scurrying to their nests with bits of his body.

  The hunters avoided the sludge pits and ant holes, leaping the jagged landscape, knowing that the disciples were somewhere in the woods searching for them, trying to cut them off from the safety of the library.

  The hand of one of the scouts went up, signaling the others to halt and lay low.

  They could hear the war party trampling through the brush ahead of them, the dogs snapping at each other’s heads in a vicious frenzy. They could see the torches’ haloes in the tree line ahead of them.

  “Stop.” Delilah gave the orders. “Take aim.”

  The hounds, catching the scent of the hunters that penetrated their borders.

  Drawing their bowstrings back, the hunting party aimed for the bodies of the demon hybrids and their hounds. Delilah felt nothing but contempt for the creatures that hissed and snarled with eyes black as the human ash pits they danced in, reveling in their lord.

  They released their arrows, and the razor-sharp points punctured the black leather cover, and the hunters moved in with their blades, slicing at the green necks decorated with metal spikes. The choking sounds from the slashed windpipes filling with blood surged among the battle cries and the sounds of those dying in the grass.

  Delilah stood over the disciples’ bodies that bled out.

  She heard something moving behind her. Unable to turn in time to dodge the disciple lurching towards her, she felt the sting in her side. She swung her blade. The disciple turned away, screaming, holding its face.

  Delilah looked down, thinking she had moved fast enough to avoid a straight deathblow, but watched as her body began to burn where the spear had punctured her side.

  The poison made its way q
uickly through her system. She could no longer feel her legs. Her body grew weak, collapsing in the sand, the pain exploding all through her.

  Seeing Delilah’s grave condition, her comrades rallied and cut down the advancing vanguard of the gang. But then she lay in the grass looking up into the cat eyes of her comrades, unable to speak, the pain flooding her chest.

  “Quick …”

  One of the hunters kneeled and held her head. She could not breathe.

  She woke with Eden sitting across from her on a wooden chair. The girl’s bandaged face serene, the long yellow hair, a pensive pose as if listening to the sleeping huntress. The whisper of a single globe of the rotor slowly rotating overhead—the green globe taking readings on the daughter of its master below. The rotor would only be complete when the other two globes joined one another’s orbit.

  “Hello,” Delilah said as she slowly sat up from the gurney.

  “We are both alive now. In ‘real time,’ as your father says,” Eden said in the green glow of one of the bearings of the rotor that whispered over them, while the other two remained in the corner of the infirmary.

  “Yes … in real time,” Delilah said, pulling herself up from the mattress, the blanket slipping off, still hurting from the wound that had spread across her back. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the girl sitting on the chair.

  Eden could not see the cat eyes that watched her, yellow and piercing, reflecting the green light of the orb that slowly circled above them, seemingly watching her in case she had slipped away and would need to be uploaded to the stream, joining the Earth Machine, and maybe even her own mother.

  “I was trying to see into your mind,” Eden’s soft voice said.

  “What did you see?” Delilah asked, moving her legs over the edge of the gurney to the floor until her bare feet touched the cold, polished stone.

  “I could not see anything, but your father said that we have the power to see, even without eyes.”

  “He knows these things,”

  “Your father asked if I would sit here with you.”

  The blanket slipped further away, exposing the bruise that had consumed most of Delilah’s back to the cool air of the cave.

  “Does it hurt much?” Eden asked.

  “No—” Delilah grimaced with the pain that shot through her when she stretched her arm.

  Eden carefully stood from the chair that had been placed across from the sleeping huntress. Her hands reaching out to grab the edge of the gurney, being careful not to kick the tin machine pumping at her feet. Eden felt her way around the edges, reaching out, finding Delilah’s powerful shoulder, tracing the muscle to the center of the back and then moving towards the wound that had risen on her side.

  “It is better, it has gone down,” Eden said, applying an ointment from a ceramic vial that she carried with a leather strap around her neck.

  Delilah felt the gentle pressing of her cool hand.

  “How long have I been here?”

  “It seems like a long time,” Eden said.

  “My father?”

  “He should be here soon.”

  Eden moved around the frame of the bed, and the huntress could clearly see the girl’s bandaged face and light, shoulder-length hair in the dim candlelight.

  “Thank you,” Delilah said.

  These were words that Eden had never heard before. She tried to see Delilah, but without the power of the rotor, it would be dark until the bright flashes of the Witch Mother told her again to continue to the sea.

  But I can’t, she seemed to remember saying to her in the dream. Miner is gone and I have no way to get there. The bright light and flashing wind would always wake her before she could see the face of the one wearing the ascetic robe.

  The whispers of the rotating orbs were like swaying trees. The bearing that had been circling over them floated back to the others, reforming the trinity, rotating together in a perfect circle.

  Delilah tried to see past the bandage that covered Eden’s empty sockets, the scars running from her eyes down both cheeks, the light-colored hair down passed her shoulders—a lighter color of hair that she had never seen in her own race. Only on some of the dead human captives she had found after killing a disciple raiding party. Light hair and eyes of the feral northern clans that escaped the great assimilation of the Robot Queen’s precession across the wasteland. Maybe that’s where Eden comes from, the huntress thought. She hadn’t realized that Eden was formed in a bath of mutantoid solution and gas. That she was injected into a surrogate sack of amniotic fluid, and birthed in a mutantoid warehouse under purple heating lamps, then taken and raised in the conditioning camps of the company town.

  “Your hair is so light,” Delilah said.

  “I do not understand—light,” Eden said.

  “It is almost yellow.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” Eden said.

  “It is like the color of the leaves before the coming of the cold.”

  Eden seemed to remember the colors of the leaves above the stream and how that color turned the water gold in its reflection.

  That’s when my eyes were taken.

  Delilah looked at her face, not sure if the girl understood the explanation.

  The poison had been purged from Delilah, but she could still feel the damage caused by the venom that nearly killed her, a virile concoction mixed in rusty tin cans pulled out of the ground by the disciple witch doctors, who mixed the venom and disease into a paste and applied it to the tip of their spears. The same poison had killed Delilah’s mother.

  But Delilah’s father was able to get the antidote to his daughter in time, unlike her mother, who had been too far away and too severely stabbed to save, dying in her father’s arms.

  Delilah studied Eden’s face, trying to remember the last moments before falling into the deep sleep that only the rotor could penetrate, she heard her father speaking to her, telling her that she would live.

  “Your father says that you are a hunter.”

  “Yes,” Delilah said, stretching her arm out, the pain slashing across her back.

  “What does your name, Delilah, mean?” Eden said.

  “I am not sure. My father says that it was my previous name in another land, another time. But he says a lot of things. Like all things I guess, it comes out of old books.”

  The Librarian had told his daughter the name of the blind girl, the name whispered to him by one of the rotors.

  “How did you get your name?”

  “That is the name the old woman gave me. Before that, I had no name—or maybe I always had it—I don’t know,” Eden said.

  “Eden is a beautiful name,” Delilah said.

  “I do not know what that means.”

  “What? Eden?” Delilah said.

  “Beau-ti-ful,” Eden said.

  Delilah could not explain the meaning of the word at first, staring at the bandaged face, blinking the large, yellow eyes and rubbing the ridges of her slightly elongated ears, a habit from childhood, when she was asked a question and didn’t know how to answer it.

  “It’s something you see, or hear. Maybe in your visions—your dreams? I guess it is something that is pleasant. Funny, I am not sure how to explain …”

  “It’s alright … I think I understand. It is a good thing. Like the wind in the trees,” Eden said.

  “Yes,” Delilah said.

  “Your name is beautiful also,” Eden said.

  Delilah smiled.

  “It is just a name,” she answered shyly.

  Eden thought that perhaps Delilah’s face was also beautiful, even though she had not touched it, had felt only the strong limbs and the long hair that Eden had moved aside in order to place the ointment on Delilah’s wounds as she slept. The hair that she thought must have been so much darker than hers, long and black, braided in the center of Delilah’s back.

  “They are all names from some other time,” Delilah said. “Eden, too.”

  “What do you mean?” Ede
n said.

  “Your name, Eden, comes from dead texts, ancient stories told long ago.”

  Holding onto Delilah’s arm, using it to guide her so that she would not fall back into the dark.

  “Why did the old woman give me that name?”

  “She must have had her reason,” Delilah said, “was she your mother?”

  A mother, Eden thought … Witch Mother?

  “No … no mother.”

  They faced one another. Delilah’s yellow eyes scanned Eden’s bandaged face. Why did they take her eyes? Delilah thought.

  They were both silent for a moment.

  “What else is beautiful?” Eden asked.

  “The hills, mountains, the sky,” Delilah said.

  “Oh,” Eden said, lowering her head.

  “What is wrong?” Delilah said.

  “I cannot see those things,” Eden said. “What else? Tell me. What else is beautiful?”

  Delilah looked at Eden’s bandaged face in silence.

  “I don’t … know,” she said.

  She is also beautiful, Delilah thought, looking at the bandages and scars caused by the violent and merciless blade, suddenly remembering the battle at the base of the cliffs.

  The pain surged. She lifted her hand to her forehead, remembering the face of the Chief Disciple pointing at them, his sister bride chained to him.

  “How did I survive?” Delilah said.

  “Survive? I don’t know; they brought you here,” Eden said.

  “The others. Did they all live?”

  “Yes, I think. Some of them …”

  Salem, Delilah thought.

  The images of the battle continued to swarm over her. The pain she had felt, lying in the grass, her comrades screaming to hurry her up the trail to the mountain hideout. The disciple torches falling to the ground. Dogs’ heads whipping about shrieking. Delilah began to shiver.

  “I think I need to lay down,” Delilah said.

  “Yes, you should,” Eden said.

  She lay back with the wound in her back still tender and burning. “Would you sit with me till my father gets here?” Pulling a woven blanket over her.

  Eden stepped away from the gurney, still holding on to the edge of the frame, finding her way back to the chair, thinking about the words, father—mother, and what they meant. There was nothing like that in the stalls of the nursery. She sensed the strong connection between the Librarian and his daughter.