by J L Forrest
After sunset the Milky Way embraces the horizons, an endless stream, and from where I’m standing it might be the milk of a Goddess—divine Hera breastfeeding the infant Heracles, her milk washing the firmament. Tempting, this romance, but the only Gods which have ever existed are New.
I should have ignited the lozenge before changing the baby’s diaper.
My headlamp is a simple unidirectional LED. Everything I’m carrying is low tech by Avidità standards—nothing which a backpacker couldn’t have scrounged from REI before the collapse of the global economies, nothing I can’t explain away to anyone I encounter. My 105-liter backpack holds fifty-three compact diapers, baby paraphernalia, ample wipes, a carbon-fiber tent, a lightweight sleeping bag, an insulated pad, a camp stove, fifteen kilos of dried food, first-aid and emergency kits, overland gear, binoculars, a change of clothes, blankets, a three-liter water bladder, a water filter, flares, ammunition, a dozen sealed feeding bottles, and sixteen kilos of formula—brands still produced in North American until Blight. At my hip I carry a mint fifty-five-year-old Walther P99 AS with a fifteen-round magazine.
The lozenge brought us down within a wide, scalloped valley, terrain carved during the last ice age. In the minutes before sunset, I climbed a boulder and surveyed the stunted pines dotting the valley from the edge of the Eastern Mountain Plateau to the foothills of the Boundary Ranges. In these valleys many trees are dead, but more still live, and many appear young. A black line of burnt foliage crosses several kilometers northeast, but to my eye the burn looks old. To my nose, which has never known an atmosphere outside the Stations, terraria, and interplanetary vessels, the air reeks of woodsmoke.
Many wildfires still ravage this world, most around the equator and in Russia.
Our landing had to have been spectacular—this slender black bullet screaming in at three hundred kilometers an hour, flaps open, parachute deployed. We plowed a kilometer-long trench through a marshland, splashing mud and grass all the way.
In thirty-seven seconds I’d cleared the lozenge, backpack in place, baby in his harness, and I sprinted five hundred meters west before ducking behind a granite outcropping. The baby hiccoughed and whimpered but, to my relief, held back the full force of his lungs. I afforded six minutes to observe the abandoned lozenge, its cockpit open wide, and also the surrounding area.
Peaceful. The evening downslopes whispered from the hillsides.
I laid down the backpack, retrieved a diaper, and got to work. Off came the old diaper, wrapped and taped, and this I buried. I wiped him clean, laughed with him, played peekaboo, and—
Voices on the wind.
I peered over the outcropping. Two men and a woman investigated the lozenge. Nearby, four old-fashioned, electric-powered ATVs awaited, parked and powered down. An ATV would be convenient. I wouldn’t have to lug a forty-four-kilo pack, I wouldn’t have to jog, and we might make better time.
But I’d have to fight for one and I didn’t like those odds.
From my pocket I eased the lozenge’s self-destruct switch and, before tossing it away, I triggered it.
The drop vessel exploded, an oxygen-fed burst of powdered magnesium which for seven seconds burned at 2200ºC. Not in a roar, but like a dragon taking a breath, this consumed everything around it. The ATVs melted to rims and frame, and nothing but bones remained of their riders. That pine which had first greeted me glowed a magnificent orange, a candle flame to heaven, instantly gone.
I finished changing the diaper.
“Hey, motherfucker,” the man said.
He stood behind me, holding a rifle, not braced against his shoulder but slung low like an electric guitar. He blinked in shock, his jaw hanging, overcome at how his friends or family or whoever they’d been had died. His clothes were threadbare, one of his flannel-shirt buttons missing. A month’s worth of beard covered his face.
“You killed them,” he said, raising his gun.
The baby squealed, drawing his attention.
I shot him between the eyes. Not how I wanted this to begin.
Now I figure I’m three klicks west of my latest murders. I don’t feel good about them, but I don’t feel bad either. I wipe my sweaty palms on my jacket, and one comes back smeared with baby drool—that wobbling sphere I’d noted on the way down from orbit.
I’m at a full-on run and the baby’s closed his eyes again.
IV. New Year’s Day
Recollected
2112.1.1.8:44 GMT
Alt 40.1E6m
High Earth Orbit
EIK-Cel Station
I named the rabbit Flapjacks. Why isn’t important.
On Christmas morning, the other children played in the dormitory’s great room or in the cherry-blossom garden. They banged around with new toys they could’ve printed themselves, but these toys had arrived in wrapping paper and therefore generated real excitement. I carried Flapjacks with me to the design lab, where I managed to cobble together plans for a hutch. While printshop drones completed the hutch, I read everything I could about the history and safekeeping of rabbits.
Seven days after adopting him, on New Year’s Day, I sat in a comfortable chair in a quiet reading room in the dormitory’s upper levels. Flapjacks rested in my lap, accepting a good petting, digesting a carrot.
Sunlight streamed through the windows, and Earth rotated into view. Mr. Avidità paid me a visit, not in person this time, but projected by drone.
“How’s Flapjacks?” he asked.
“Doing well, Your Grace.”
“You made an excellent choice, Aurelius.”
I stroked Flapjacks between the ears. Through the windows, South America swept into view, and Earth occupied eighteen degrees of my vision. I’d been studying the Amazon rainforests, often by telescope. When I first began observing them, I noted how anemic and sparse they appeared compared to the satellite imagery in the records. During the months of my study, they shrank. Swathes of tan and dark brown. Daily the river’s dirty waters thinned and, while giant Pacific storms dropped incredible rains into the watersheds, the runoff carried more topsoil and clay into the Atlantic.
“Earth is dying,” I said, “isn’t it?”
Mr. Avidità frowned, slipping his virtual hands into his virtual pockets. “That remains to be seen. The old girl has taken a beating.”
“We all came from Earth.”
“Humanity came from Earth,” he said, “though you were born here on EIK-Cel.”
“From an artificial womb.” I hadn’t meant my words to carry so much self-loathing, so much disappointment.
“You and your crèche-mates are miracles, Aurelius. Never think otherwise. The advances which allow you to exist, we’re using them to resurrect ten thousand extinct species. The innovations in mining and extraction which caused so much pollution down there,” he said, meaning Earth, “have allowed us to core nickel-iron asteroids and build terraria where elephants roam savannas without fear of poachers, where wolves hunt a tundra without the terror or rifles and snares. What you are, Aurelius, is a culmination of all Creation. Be proud.”
Sniffling, I nodded. “Yes, Your Grace.”
“Happy New Year, Aur.”
“Happy New Year, Your Grace.”
“There’s no school today. Go enjoy yourself.”
His hologram vanished and the drone which had projected it flew away. I returned Flapjacks to his hutch, changed his water, and gave him a fresh bowl of pellets and lettuce. That afternoon I did a lot of playing outside—outside meaning something different to a boy who grew up on Station rather than Earth—and I remember each detail, each taste of pollen, the scent of grass smeared into the knees of my pants.
Before the end of the day, one of the other boys punched me in the nose, and to this day the flavor of that blood at the back of my throat remains distinct. They teased me relentlessly. I, the one who cared for animals, who felt fear, who in my early years suffered night terrors and wet myself.
Oh, yes, they beat me.
In the crèches, Mr. Avidità allowed a certain amount of violence, and I accepted that. Wishing for an existence without violence seemed as stupid as wishing for a world with unicorns.
My namesake once wrote, Is one doing me wrong? Let himself look to that; his actions are his own.
Our cosmos is brutish, which was clear enough to me at that guiltless age. Why should the existence of brutes ever surprise anyone?
V. Staked Victims
2131.4.9.10:37 PST
58°47’10.5”N 132°07’19.6”W
Alt 277m
British Columbia (Dissolved)
Stikine Region
146km to Destination
In strength and aggression I never matched the other boys, even into our teens and twenties. Those alphas now command military units against the Nesteler Group or the UPRC, but they can have that life. I don’t want it.
Yet I can run as fast as any of those assholes and twice as gracefully. I can glide.
Since detonating the lozenge, I’ve covered sixty-five kilometers, stopping last night for six hours, during which I and the baby slept. While I’m fresh I’m pushing hard, before I reach the foothills and Boundary Ranges. It’ll be slower going there, though routes exist today which were closed before the world grew warmer.
By morning, clouds blanket the sky. I’m unaccustomed to them, as I am to a horizon which drops forever from me as I follow the watershed. It drains toward the Alaskan Panhandle, gathering all the moisture the Pacific can throw at it, and the misty mountains rise around me. The Inklin River Valley bursts with greenery, so many species their names exceed Ms. Trotsky’s best efforts to teach me botany.
Not that I failed to memorize each plant I studied—a Harque seldom forgets—but many of these species do not appear in Station’s records, and the satellite images suggested fewer trees, especially on the region’s south-facing slopes, than grow around me now.
Cedar, hemlock, orchids, mushrooms, worts, and endless varieties of fern—much of this vegetation should no longer survive, climate has shifted so much and so suddenly, and around the world the fires burn and floods wash nutrients into the bleached seas.
Here, life blooms.
Perhaps I simply lack perspective, having never seen it in person before?
Sometimes the baby cries to be fed, to be changed, to crawl, or to lie still. His complaints, however, seldom last long. He babbles and wiggles like any three-month old, like any of the other younglings in the crèches. I suspect he’s no more human-standard than I, and while he cries and drools like most babies, sometimes his focus sharpens and his gaze dissects everything before it.
An adult gaze.
Then he naps again or needs a new diaper. Only a baby after all.
By midday the clouds disperse and Sol warms the air into a soup. My sweat gathers into cascades, gluing the backpack to my spine, bunching my pants between my thighs. Pills balance my sodium and provide electrolytes, I stop jogging long enough to heat food for me and formula for the baby, and I hurry on.
I parallel the riverbank, and the Inklin channels me between the tree line and endless marshes. Insects swarm and hum. The river tends north and eventually it will join another tributary, bearing southwest toward New Juneau.
Clouds come and go, but when the sun shines, it shines unforgivingly. Though I place a mesh sunscreen over the baby, keeping it there through the afternoon, I worry he might sunburn.
By five o’clock I’ve covered another fourteen klicks and, for the first time since scuttling the lozenge, I need a good rest. I hike into the trees and they shade us, giving me a place to sit, cook dinner, and check the diaper. The baby cries, hungry, but I feed him as Sol dips behind the hills. Laying out a blanket for him, I let him crawl.
Maybe there’s time for me to eat in peace.
From downriver a moan catches my ear, deep enough to be a man’s. I sit still, not chewing, scarcely breathing. The moan rises, piteous, and I leave my meal unfinished. After packing, I strap the baby to my chest, babbling nonsense at him, distracting him, calming him.
Bushwhacking through scrub and ferns, I cut westward without leaving the forest. Beyond a crest opens an unfamiliar stretch of the river which bows through wild grasses. At this meadow’s heart stand five tall poles, squarely erect.
No, not poles, but stakes. Vlad Dracula, I’ve read, once impaled twenty-thousand men in a single day. By comparison, I suppose, what I’m looking at seems mild.
Three men and two women, all naked, each penetrated in the same horrific place. Blood crosses paint their chests. For each, the stake exited differently—through the neck, from the arched back, beside the shoulder—and only one man still lives. He grips the top of his stake as if he might keep himself from sliding lower, as if he might lift himself off it and save his life.
I tug the sunscreen over the baby’s face while my right hand falls to the handle of my pistol. Studying the meadow, the river, and the trees, assuring myself no one else watches, I take three steps into the open.
Spotting me, the dying man’s eyes widen. Two more steps, and I stand so close he could spit on me. Nailed to one stake is a wooden sign, but the wrong side faces me, and I’ve no idea what’s on it.
“Who did this?” I ask him.
“The Horned Lords,” he replies.
“Why?”
“Because we’re Christians.”
I want to turn away, to vomit, but I hold my ground. “They stake Christians, do they?”
“Staked us.” He wheezes.
“What did you do? To make them do this to you?”
Blood flecks his lips. “Nothing.”
I wait, wondering if he’ll offer something more helpful, wondering if he’ll die first. In the silence, the chirping of crickets fills the meadow. The river burbles. The baby jabbers.
“We were,” he says, gasping between words, “trying to cross the Bonlin.”
“What’s the Bonlin?”
“The Bone Line.” He coughs. More blood. “Trying to bring the Good News to New Juneau.”
I still don’t understand, but I ask, “No luck, huh?”
“This is Satan’s land. They call him Nodens, but we know his true name—” His words fade, a man out of breath, out of time.
“That stake missed your heart,” I say, “but you’re not going to live long.”
“Praise Jesus,” he says.
The baby coos, kicks, wobbles.
“What do you know about the Queens of the Horned Lord?” I ask.
He laughs, coughs, spits a bubble of blood from between his teeth. “I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters—only there’re two!”
A quote from the King James, though I’m not much for the Testaments, Old or New.
“Any last requests?” I ask.
“Say a prayer for us.”
“May the Lord bless you and keep you.” I draw the Walther and fire.
The report echoes across the valley. All the fight and tension leave the man’s body, his arm no longer braced against the stake, and he slides another meter toward the ground. Fresh blood coats the wood, dark in the fading daylight. I walk to the other side of the sign.
THE OLD GODS RULE HERE
Holstering the gun, I jog west. Sol edges toward the hilltops, and I’m wishing now for a pair of Avidità Corporation multi-vision goggles or ocular implants. But no, Mr. Avidità wanted me low-fi for this mission. Strict orders. When it grows too dark, I switch on my headlamp.
I’d hoped to camp around here this evening, to enjoy some solid rest. Less than fifteen minutes since I pulled that trigger, and I’ve covered another klick, west once more.
The baby’s gone back to sleep. At least there’s that.
VI. Gods of the New Moons
Recollected
2116.5.18.14:57 GMT
Alt 40.1E6m
High Earth Orbit
EIK-Cel Station
Flapjacks flourished.
Such a sw
eet disposition, that rabbit, and after study hours also a frequent companion. I liked him more than I liked most people, and I played with him, cared for him, and often brought him fresh greens and vegetables.
I became the boy with the bunny.
This sometimes led to beatings, but the boys never touched the rabbit. They knew whose gift he’d been.
One day, Mr. Avidità invited me for breakfast. This required me to leave the crèche and travel several Sectors of Station, past four residential discuses and several farms.
To imagine Station is, I’ve come to understand, difficult for those who’ve never experienced it. The ring-torus’s outer diameter measures ten kilometers, while its inner spans 7.85. Carbon-composite cross-spokes strengthen its circumference, unconnected to any hub but interlaced in cords. This creates a tough-yet-pliable, airtight, double-shelled inner tube with a volume of eighty-eight cubic kilometers. At 222 meters per second per second, its centripetal acceleration grants a perfect 1g to its inner curve. To either side of that tube, as the curves approach vertical, grow terraced fields and farms, and above those hang hydroponic facilities, suspended in tension from the torus’s so-called roof. Through this meters-thick shell, windows of diamondide offer views into space.
More than thirty-one kilometers of ribbon city fill the 1g circumference, including residential discuses only sixty meters across but nearly a kilometer high—an extraterrestrial urban plan which could have been drawn by Le Corbusier. Up to a hundred thousand people live in each discus, a million inhabitants in Station. These dense vertical towns nestle with atmospherically attenuated microbiomes, the largest botanical gardens humanity has ever known. Not many animals in Station—Avidità Corporation maintains terraria for those—but Station grows vegetation aplenty, along with pollinators natural and artificial.