“We do.”
“Excellent, we’re off to a fine start that will benefit us all. We are, as you know, newcomers to your lands, granted by right of God and King, and by right of Manifest Destiny to rule over and subjugate all peoples we encounter should they prove incapable of opposing us. Regardless of our motive, our methods remain singular in their objective; to wit, either by direct violent action upon the persons of said indigents, or by systematic destruction of their habitat and subsistence patterns, or by insipid destruction of their social fabric and way of life as categorized by cultural affiliation, through such deus ex machina vectors such as disease, alcohol, enforced indoctrination of our religious beliefs, legal removal of children for purposes of education and assimilation, restriction to peripheral lands unsuitable to sustaining traditional lifestyles and conducive to general cultural deterioration through long-term programs to ensure dependency, loss of dignity, removal of personal responsibility in matters of familial care, education, sustenance procurement, shelter maintenance, and so on.
“Toward the satisfactory completion of our singular goal, we are herewith purchasing from those in attendance and those peoples they represent, the following: your land, your life.
“In return, and as payment for the above, we offer you one hundred million buffalo skulls, the rusted hulks of five hundred thousand combines, desiccated farms, diseases, substance abuse, dependency, structured lives, handouts, starvation, hatred, loss of intellectual and spiritual property, identity, will, dignity, and pride. Sign here, please.”
“No.”
“I am empowered to offer the following as further incentive. Complete biological data on peripheral population and projections leading to the inevitable conclusion: to wit, within six generations those populations centered in the secondary and primary civilizations, characterized by protective measures of extreme technological life-sustaining intervention, will become extinct as a species, due primarily to pressure and displacement by a new speciation of the Homo sapiens hominid lineage, which will arise in pressured environments commonly found among peripheral populations, such as yours.
“In exchange for this data, we request intensive biological analysis of your peoples over the next century, including the right to blood and its protective properties thereof, including rad resistant properties, vaccine and serum potential, immunodefense systems against toxemia and related syndromes, new organs and new properties of organs, neurological developments and all genetic traits determined to be conducive to species survival. In short, we ask for your life. We’ll worry about the land later.”
“It seems,” Daniel Horn said, “that your Manifest Destiny possesses a heretofore unknown appendix, wherein lies the inevitable conclusion, a conclusion you have espoused as wholly natural: species extinction. Unfortunately, the species about to become extinct is your own.”
“You do not understand our desperation.”
“I do now, Dr. MacAlister.”
“Will you help us? Will you save us?”
“In the manner you have just described, no, we won’t help you.”
“But don’t you see? We have bled for you. For five hundred years we have bled for you, for what we did to you.”
“That blood is unhealthy, Doctor. Do you grasp my meaning?”
“Whatever happened to reciprocity?”
“It lives on, but it was never what you believed it to be. You saw it with a scientist’s eyes, Doctor, so you saw wrong. I’m not really interested in explaining it to you, Doctor. William has come to understand, finally. You might want to ask him.”
“He tells me nothing.”
“Nothing you want to hear.”
“Will you help us, Daniel? A few drops of blood? The conveyance of your dead?”
“We’ll think about it, Doctor.”
American NW, Midwest Hole, July 14, A.C. 14
The coyotes streamed down the hillside, driven from their invisible places and becoming four distinct mercurial shapes parting the high magenta grasses. They reached the dry riverbed then scattered. William blinked, and they were gone.
Somewhere behind him rose a ragged slope, lifting the earth into an undercut cresting wave that hung frozen over the flat sweeps of sand and silt. Its shadow slowly crawled across him. He remembered standing on the ridge, the earth giving under him, a heavy, bruising fall.
His backpack lay a dozen meters away, resting against a tuft of grass. The flap had torn, and he saw a liquid glint of metal in the darkness within.
It felt over. The journey cut short, incomplete. He didn’t have the strength to get up.
He’d seen into the coyotes, read their new imperatives like blushes of red behind their eyes. Opportunists, newly aggressive and far too clever for comfort. When night came, they, too, would come.
Life’s cycles are flavored with irony. They’ve been following me, following the scent of blood, and in an hour they’ll come to close the book. Patient bastards. What’s ten thousand years, after all?
He stared at the object inside his backpack, the clarity of his thinking almost too bitter to bear.
Someone had challenged planetary laws. Semipermeable, pliable polysteel that shunted friction like water off a seal’s back, turned heat into static—a hundred trillion threads a single molecule thick, each kilometers long, accommodating stress factors in the nano-bloodstream of carbon corpuscles. When I say it bends, I mean it bends, Doctor.
The laws dictated equatorial placement: rotational imperatives. Ladon tried acquiring it. Rivals and nations caught wind and went to the New United Nations. Before long, they’d hammered so many legal spikes into the equation, Ladon couldn’t buy a bucket of dirt if it came from the equator. They had no choice but to look elsewhere, and to challenge toe-to-toe the exigencies of rotational dynamics.
It took eleven years before the Lady and Max Ohman stood atop the mountain, raised high the stone tablet, then swung it shattering down. Not an elevator as much as a slide, the tail of a spermatozoa, slanting skyward. Another miracle of engineering tethering it in place.
Nobody should reach that high. Frail humans should never strive for godhood. The wax melts; justice is meted out. Exaltation is suspect. Anybody with balls like that deserves to get them chopped off. They stand so tall, their shadows cover the world, and we frail humans begrudge the loss of light upon our upturned faces.
Not that we ever paid any attention to it when it showered down its brilliant promise.
But never mind that.
Nobody should reach that high. No matter the quagmire of emotions drowning in insipid fears and flaws, no matter the primal pit of terror bubbling uneasy beneath those words. It was a statement voiced the world over, there in those shadows cast down by achievement. Sometimes a whine, mostly vicious with blind, unreasoning hatred. The unspoken secret remained: What the shadows hid was darkness in the soul, and its voice was spite, and it said, Nobody should reach that high.
Well, Ladon reached, was reaching even now. It seemed the world was having trouble living with that fact.
An hour before dusk. Maybe less. William continued staring at the object in the backpack. He felt sickness in his flesh, something like a fever, but somehow sour as well. A taste of corruption.
The ghosts were gone. He’d sent them off, riding the storm as it tracked the blistered lands of the Hole. He hoped one would come back in time, one in particular. He’d not seen that one yet, but he was sure it was there, somewhere in the army of dead that had dogged his tracks.
A sound off to his right, footsteps crunching through the crust of calcined sand. And beyond that—William now heard—the hum of a rover’s engine.
“Oh hell,” William mumbled through broken lips. “I thought it was over.”
* * *
“The Lord have mercy,” Old Jim breathed softly as he crouched down beside William Potts. “Unpack the kit, Stel, I figure he’s taken more than seventy MRs for every day he’s been out here, never mind the dehydration, sun- and wi
ndburns and, hell, starvation.”
Stel handed Old Jim the medikit. Her gaze remained on William as she tried remembering what he’d looked like, that night in his room. Gaunt even then, but this. She barely recognized him.
“He’ll need plasma,” Old Jim said as he prepared a syringe. “Fluids.”
“He needs clean marrow,” Stel said.
“Better call the university. Tell ’em we’re taking him back to Val Marie, and they’d better get someone over, fast.”
Old Jim’s weathered hands worked over William, stripping back the ragged bootsuit. He knew there were questions that Stel wanted answered. Questions about how he’d driven all over the damn place, about how he’d found the boy. The Hole was a big place, after all. The chances of finding him were damn near hopeless.
He injected William with E-67 flushant, the latest available in rad treatment.
How the hell can I tell her I had help? How can I tell her that I followed an old Indian ghost?
“Let’s get him in the buggy.”
Some goddamned ghost leading me across the prairie, an Indian ghost carrying a goddamn rifle slung with red-hawk feathers.
“Jim,” Stel said.
He looked up and cursed the shadows that hid her face.
“Jim,” Stel said again.
“What?”
She continued staring down on him a moment longer. Then she turned away. “I need a cigarette.”
* * *
Jim drove steadily, his antiquated patrol buggy bouncing and jolting on its stiff shocks. It’d been years since the Palliser Triangle Survey, when he’d played chauffeur to a bunch of scientists. He remembered all the weather readings they took, and the soil and plant samples. Insect nets strung out between the tents at night; animal traps, bird snares, bat nets that looked like giant lobster traps. When it was all over, they rushed off to the university with all their goodies. Old Jim had gotten a six-month bonus to his credit line, arthritis in his misaligned hip, and the solar-powered patrol buggy. Even with the crotchety hip, Jim figured he came out ahead in the deal.
Stel smoked in the seat beside him. William lay unconscious along the length of the back bench. The silence was as thick as the smoke.
Dusk had arrived, the sun spreading out on the west horizon like a copper lake. Helishuttles had been coming and going through the Hole for a week now. Jack Tree and his cronies were cooking something big along with that corporation. Somewhere out there on the dead lands. Old Jim’s expression soured as he thought of Jack Tree. Too damn clever by far. One day he’ll hear about my artifact collection, and come calling. He’ll take it all. The law backs him. He’ll take it all from me. All eight generations, swept away. Too goddamn clever by far.
“What’re his chances?” Stel asked suddenly.
Jim shrugged. “Short term, he’ll make it fine. Long term…” Jim shrugged again. He licked his lips, kept his eyes on the rolling plain in front of them. “Figure he’s burned blind, though.”
“Blind,” Stel said. “Well, hell, what’s to see these days anyway? Damned TV stations all losing it every ten bloody minutes, for Christ’s sake. Al says it’s those helishuttles. Remote-guided, he says, with a flight path right over town screwing up transmissions or something.”
“Oh yeah,” Jim said, not really listening. Goddamned TVs—who buys the shit they’re saying anyway. World’s gone to hell, ain’t it just. He’d seen the latest shots of Iraq in the National Geographic. Robot camera teams rolling through ancient ruins. Caption talked about it being the first city ever built. Talked about some king named Gilgamesh. The shots were eerie as hell. Red sky, all those cobbled roads and things exposed by the blown sands. And here and there the rusting hulks of tanks and trucks. Eerie because it all looked so normal, like the pictures were just waiting for someone to walk through, some kid herding goats or something. But nothing. Nuclear fallout still at lethal levels.
The first city was dead, would always be dead.
More shots, modern echoes in Iran. Black, burned-up bodies covering the streets, the squares, covering the steps leading up to slagged mosques. Not a bird, probably not even a bug. Even the Indian Ocean was half-dead, all the surface plankton incinerated in the multiple blasts, a yard of water stripped off the whole damn ocean.
Maybe the boy’s on to something, after all. He’s wearing the scars we keep running from. He knows we’re running out of room. He knows we fucked it up, we’re fucking it all up even now. Bloody wars, ninety million dead of starvation in Africa, Armageddon in Jerusalem, plague in China, Bombay carpet bombed. Here I am trying to save a boy from rad posioning. What the hell for?
“Heard the weather’s coming back,” Stel said, lighting a last cigarette as the old motel on the edge of town came into view.
“We’re in a loop,” Jim said. “Goes round and round.”
Stel took a deep drag, released the smoke in an even stream. “Must be sunspots or something.”
Old Jim swung the buggy up onto the motel’s cracked parking lot pavement. “Must be,” he said.
* * *
They took William to his old room in the hotel. Stel washed him down, so gently, it stung Jim’s eyes to watch. When they had the boy laid out on the bed, Jim set up the plasma kit. Saline, electrolytes, anti-leukemic compounds, lithium, and more E-67. The standard rad treatment setup, available in every peripheral town. With some old fart like me trained like a monkey. Mix this, drip that. Tap the vein, insert with a steady probing motion—you’ll feel the venal wall when you puncture it. Bathe all solar burns in weak saline and E-67. Run the flush as soon as possible, and that means the catheter. If the victim’s male …
Stel watched him for a few minutes, then headed to the door. “I’ll buzz that woman who keeps calling for him. Guess she’ll come and pick him up.”
Jim nodded. After a moment he heard Stel leave.
“Oh, son,” Jim said softly, sponging solution into William’s swollen eyes. “Just like a sun dance, huh? Push past the pain, find that cool, peaceful place. Too bad you couldn’t take your body with you.”
* * *
He’d first shown up three years ago. Even then, as he started knocking on doors, slicking the locals at the pool table, and just being damn good at listening, Old Jim knew the boy had arrived with wide-open eyes.
He’d cared about their lives. At first, it was some kind of philosophical caring. William bled for the idea of them. He came as a chronicler, but that first season changed him. The idea found faces, a score of faces. The caring changed, and when he looked in your eyes the glaze was gone. You could see him in his eyes, and he saw you, and it was a clear thing both ways.
One night, late at the hotel bar, William sat with a half-dozen locals for hours on end. Old Jim had watched the layers crumble in the boy, watched as William was pushed deep into himself by the stories the old-timers threw around. They’d been talking about the changes.
“North of here,” Aimes was saying, “where they grew canola and didn’t do much ranching, well, I remember the fields just falling dead, toppling in waves. Next thing you know, the sky’s gray with locusts, come to eat the poisoned canola, right down to the ground.” Aimes squinted down at the glass of beer in his rope-veined hands. “A hundred million, they said. A hundred million rotting locusts, the sky empty as the dawn of time.…”
“We’d get the traffic coming down from Swift Current,” Browning said. “On their way to those ski resorts in Montana. I saw one accident, shit—”
William cut in, his voice dull, “I know what’s missing.” He looked up, scanned the faces around him. Old Jim remembered the loss in the boy’s eyes, remembered the way that look made his chest tighten. “I know what’s missing here. There’s no dogs.”
“They died fast,” Aimes said, nodding. “Cats just hid during the day, did the usual at night. But the dogs died for a long while there.”
“I saw some litters make you upchuck your granma’s meat loaf,” Browning said.
“I
hear they’re doing fine in the shielded cities,” Old Jim said, trying to ease the anguish in William’s face. Hell, he remembered thinking, They’re just damn dogs. Don’t compare to the skin cancers, the babies poisoned by breast milk and living the rest of their days inside plastic-bag rooms. Don’t compare at all, dammit. Just dogs.
“There should be dogs,” William said. “Barking like hell every time I walk into the yard. Challenging the stranger, doing their job for you people. Nobody’s taken their place. You don’t challenge anymore. You don’t raise shit just to see what the stranger’s made of. No stranger ever fooled a dog. Ever.”
“That’s a damn fact, that is,” Browning said, nodding.
Old Jim stared at the boy. What you spill up tells a lot, but reaching the place where you’ll do it in the company of old men, that tells a whole lot more.
William’s outburst slipped away, into that timeless stream of gripes and bitches that filled the hours before dawn. He’d joined the town, that night. He’d shifted the place he looked at things from. He’d lined up with the peripherals, the subjects of his study, and saw the world in a new way that was in truth an old way. Maybe the oldest way of all.
A hell of a way to step out of being young. Probably the night that Stel decided she’d get him in her bed sooner or later. She wouldn’t do that for a stranger. But she’d help a local boy get a bit older.
Help was something he drew to him. Halo’d Mary and an old Indian ghost.
Net
FREE WHIZZY: So NOAC’s on its own. What do you make of the threats to invade? Anyone?
PACEMAKER: Highly unlikely. They really banked on NUN approval, and it looked for a time there like they had it, but now it’s all fallen apart.
LUNKER: All the rats have scurried to the stern, eyes tilting up, way up. Salvation beckons.
CORBIE TWA: Ladon’s not selling. The Lakota are staying belligerent. Assembly is on schedule, the orbiting chute is in position, geosynchronous perfection. Fifth Floor, men’s underwear …
The Devil Delivered and Other Tales Page 9