by Jeff Long
“You missed the worst of it,” said the Captain. In the space of an African summer, a half billion souls had vanished. Week after week, the reconnaisance teams had explored. The hand of man was everywhere. Wellheads still pumped oil in Gabon. Villages with thatched roofs lay like setpieces waiting for their actors. In Capetown the picket fences stood bright white. A suburb in Johannesburg still had electricity and its street lights burned bright at midday. Now only the animals were left.
Night after night, Miranda traveled on the wings of the Navy pilot. To do their recon well, she learned, one had to loiter, cruising a few thousand feet off the ground to give the cameras hanging under the fuselage the best views. Flying at 300 knots and slower also saved fuel, which maximized their daily exploring range. The pilot rarely spoke, usually letting her navigator radio the Truman when they had reached the tip of their daily journey and were heading back to their “boat.” When she did speak, Miranda liked the woman’s no-nonsense voice. It sounded vaguely familiar, the accent, the economy of syllables.
Working northward, the Tomcat flew above emerald green coffee plantations and lakes so still you could see the jet rippling in the water. A cheetah was not distracted as it ran down a gazelle. They circled volcanoes in Rwanda. Africa became her nightly prayer. Miranda would log on to the recon for an hour or two, then fall asleep, comforted. Strangely, the closer the plague came, the further away it seemed. The havoc had grown over. Only beauty was left.
Miranda was certain the pilot had no idea she had electronic passengers watching from the other side of the planet. But then one night she announced that the Truman had accomplished its mission. “We’ve finished our part of the map,” she said softly. “If you can hear me, I’m coming home, datchu.” Miranda didn’t know that last word, but it lacked the jagged consonance of military diction. It seemed tender and personal, and she wondered who the woman could have been talking to.
The pilot was a stranger to her, nameless, faceless. But the news filled Miranda with joy. “She’s coming home,” Miranda told the Captain next morning. It was unnecessary. His eyes were beaming. That was her first hint.
“Datchu,” she repeated the word from last night. “Is that you?”
“My wife and I, we still call her kola t’sana,” the Captain answered. “Our little chile. Coming home at last.”
11
The Petroglyphs
FEBRUARY
The clone lumbered east through the shin-high snow. He fled down through the canyons, away from the sun, out into the wilderness. His clothing hung in tatters. His blood steamed in the frozen air. It turned the white snow pink, leaving a trail both fleeting and indelible, like the story of a life, or afterlife, whatever this was.
He might have guessed the gleaming silver coils that surrounded their city would have thorns like knives. It was a supernatural city, brimming with sharp edges. In his country, the shepherds sometimes made overnight pens of bramble bushes. Here even the bushes were made of iron. He had nearly flayed himself pulling free.
For the moment, however, he was on his feet and away from them. The mesas loomed on either side of this wadi. No sun this deep. In the distance, a desert of sorts beckoned. Where it led, God only knew.
He had never witnessed snow with his own eyes, and it was a horror to him, cold and beautiful to be sure, but deceptive. Underneath the blank, smooth surface lay rocks that twisted and threw him. The whiteness proclaimed purity, and yet the forest through which he passed was charred black. The trees were like spears. Digging down, he found the earth was scorched, too. He clawed at his hole with a stick, and the soil was ash, sterile and fruitless. The sky was gray. Truly, a land of the dead.
With each backward glance, the fugitive saw his escape painted in the snow. If they chose, they could hunt him by his blood. That would be in keeping. His blood was their hunger. It had been so from the beginning. In his last life, now in this one.
Their needles had drained his blood. That was how he had come to mark time, the intervals between their visitations. The needles merely stung. But the violation of his body had grown wearisome. Not that his flesh and blood were his to possess. Like it or not, he belonged to the devouring universe. But at least in his previous life, he had been able to offer up the pieces of himself with a certain freedom. Terrible as his death had been, he had largely participated in his own destruction. In this new captivity, though, he was no more than an animal, his veins tapped for one blood sacrifice after another.
Day and night, his keepers caged him in this metal afterlife. Metal holes took his dung and piss away. Metal tubes provided water to drink…water that tasted like metal. Even the light was held balled in glass and trapped in metal. The underworld was not a place of shadows, after all. Everywhere he turned, there was his own bright reflection in the metal walls.
He knew this was the afterlife, because he had died. Remarkably there was not the slightest proof of his death, no scars, no funeral souvenirs, only a memory. Since waking in this place, the memory had grown so powerful that it began to consume all his other memories. He had started to forget his family and comrades and land. The blue sky, the taste of bread, the sound of women singing: a thousand things had dimmed.
He had grown lost in his own darkness. It was a darkness of his own making, this hell. For he had forsaken God. God had forsaken him, first. He couldn’t get over that. After so much love and devotion, he had been cast into shame and suffering. He objected. What kind of father was He? To even think the thought, though…that was his sin.
Against the memory of his terrible death, the snow and his slash wounds and deadly confusion were almost welcome distractions.
Only upon escaping, had he finally glimpsed the edge of their empire. Their entire city was built of metal and glass and wires. Ice hung like wolves’ teeth. The roads were made of night. And light! Such light! Their might was terrible. They had unlocked the secrets of the earth and trained iron to be silver and glass to grow in tall sheets. Even so, the sight of their frozen city had strangely comforted him.
He had begun to think the afterlife was a universe without history, a punishment without past or future, forever rooted in the opening and closing of his metal door and the taking of his blood. The view of their city had revived in him a sense of progression. Time still existed, he saw. The generations marched on. In his day, the Sons of Darkness had lived in legendary cities made of marble. But these were like the Sons of Light. Perhaps they had won the great war.
All the races of Adam were gathered here, every color, every shape of eye. That was marvelous to him, too, the earth’s flocks assembled into one. It was like Rome, but not Rome. They were his enemies, but they were not devils, no more than the Romans had been. That was the awful truth. His keepers did not hate him.
When he broke free and sprinted off, they had shouted at him and their faces had filled with fear, not hate. Devils would not have been afraid. These were people like any other. He had terrified them for what he represented, a moment of chaos. He was like a lion that had escaped in their midst. He realized that the hateful things they perpetrated on him were not acts of punishment. He was, to them, simply a wild animal.
Shuddering, his hot breath smoking in the air, the fugitive listened for any pursuers, and there were none. He heard only his own lungs and heartbeat. Birds did not sing in this forest; there were no birds. The sun did not shine; there was no sky. He looked up at the great empty gray vault overhead and the light was fading. Night was falling. Part of him took hope. Perhaps they would give up the chase.
The possibility drove him deeper through the canyon. He craved, not freedom, but exile. If only they would leave him to wander in this dead white desert, he would gladly suffer its hardships. His desire was a hunger more powerful than the ache in his stomach. With all his being, he wanted to start over again. He would eat the nettles and sleep with the snakes and wash his wounds with sand. Anything to re-enter the great cycle of his people: captivity, exile, renewal.
&
nbsp; Father, he prayed. Forgive me.
He had always tried to do his duty. He had listened to his heart. He had fasted. Invited voices. He had taken the footsteps that he thought were written into the earth for him to follow. And this snow was like the desert, trackless, and at the same time rich with paths. Let me be lost, so that I may be found. Deliver me from my enemies.
High above him, perched on the side of the striped cliffs, a village appeared. He came to a halt in the snow, half certain it was a vision sent to torment him. From the ground, he could see only the upper tips of the buildings, and they were in ruin. But they looked like home.
He was no stranger to such places. At Qumran and elsewhere along the River and the Sea, caves had been his second home. And so, he had a knack for the slight niches cut into the rock. He brushed the snow from footholds and they formed a vertical staircase that led to a ledge, a hundred feet off the ground. The ledge wound around the wall, rising slightly, suspended halfway between the canyon floor and the top of the plateau.
The ledge came to a dead end. There the village stood. It was decayed and roofless, its windows barren. It was larger than it looked from the ground, and also much older. No one had lived here in many generations. Yet the collapsed walls had been tended and repaired and plastered with fresh mortar. That suggested its antiquity held some special meaning. Why else would anyone take the time to restore its fallen walls?
Here had been the sleeping quarters and the fire pits. Gutters were carved into the stone to channel drinking water. Far below, evident from this height, he saw slumped terraces where the fields would naturally have laid. If this had been an outpost, such as Masada had become, where was the road it commanded? Why set it in this remote canyon? That left another possibility, that remoteness was its appeal. Perhaps, like Qumran, this had been the asylum of a ha-edah, a religious congregation. But at first glance, it seemed more a common farm village than a fortress or a monastery.
He wandered about the ruins, putting off the cold and the pain of his wounds for as long as possible. It was going to be a long, brutal night. He had no blanket and no way to make fire. There were no branches to cover himself. Once he lay down, his lacerations and the frozen earth would wrack him. His limbs would stiffen. For all he knew, strange animals might rise up in the darkness. By dawn, his captors might have found him. No, while there was still light, he forced himself to stay on his feet.
In that way, he came upon the petroglyphs.
The wind and vandals had abraded them from exposed places, and snow had covered others. But at the rear of the caves, in more hidden spaces, cut into the walls and boulders or scratched into black soot smoked onto the stone, primitive hands had drawn animals and geometric shapes and stick figures. In them, the village came to life.
Many of the particulars were strange to him, the horned beasts that were neither sheep nor goats, the crops that were not wheat, the lions that were not quite lions. Yet the drawings spoke to him directly. In the snakes and birds, he saw their reverence for the earth and sky. The spirals led inward to the center…not outward to anarchy. Here was lightning, and that was the alphabet of God.
He had seen glyphs like these in the caves of his own land. Sticklike figures of men danced and hunted. Mystical symbols sprang out at him. He recognized an insect-like character with an enormous jutting phallus and a flute. That was the peddler, the wanderer, the seducer…the fertile heart. For the unwary, he was the one who could be the devil. But in the proper circumstances, if you were fortunate, his could be the prophet’s song, the very essence of inspiration.
At last the pain and exhaustion were too much. The fugitive staggered in place. The snow around his feet turned red. Daylight was failing. He chose the remains of a house built inside a cave, and crawled into its deepest recess. There was no snow in here. With the last of his strength, he stacked rocks in the doorway and lay down with his back against the wall.
The wind sang through the cracks. There was no food. He had no idea which way lay east. Yet he felt the torment in his soul…lift.
The ruins provided more than just a shelter. For the first time since being born into this bleak underworld, he felt a sense of place and time.
He dreamed of his mother and father, except they were not dreams because his sleep was not sleep. Bleeding out, sapped by the cold, he slowly floated into delirium. It was as if he were freezing into stone.
IN THE MORNING, their soldiers found him. He heard their voices. Daylight pierced the cracks in the wall. Unable to move, he could only watch as they clawed the rocks from his doorway, and they were like animals coming into his tomb.
12
The Orphan
LOS ALAMOS
MARCH
Miranda watched the orphan from the dimmed observation booth. The girl sat facing the opposite wall, legs folded. Crisscross, apple-sauce. She was very still this morning. They had dressed her—forcibly—in pink Oshkosh b’Gosh overalls. Broken toys surrounded her. A sippy cup with orange juice sat by one knee.
Ever since Elise’s death, Miranda had made herself an unseen presence in the little girl’s world. Twice a day, every day, no matter how heavy her lab schedule, she had come to watch the four-year-old. It gave her comfort. It reminded her of things. Elise had hovered over her in just such a way after Miranda’s mother died, getting as close as she dared. In a sense, Miranda felt she was returning the favor. She wondered if she had been as mysterious to Elise as this nameless child was to her.
Miranda never went into the room itself. For one thing, the child had become too dangerous to herself and to others. For another, Miranda didn’t want to spoil her fantasy of a special connection with the orphan.
It was a cheery room, still bright with several gallons of Martha Stewart paints confiscated by the National Guard after the Albuquerque riots back in October. Volunteers had painted happy yellow sunflowers on the sky blue wall. A big rainbow arched over the steel doorway. Much of the paint had faded from the water hose and disinfectants. But you still got the idea: a little girl’s sanctuary.
Her window—bulletproof so that she could not break it—looked east upon the snowy Jemez Mountains. She had a red and blue plastic bed with a treasured Pooh blankie. In the corner sat her potty. A mobile made of pink scallop shells hung from the ceiling. Scientists and soldiers with families had donated toys. There was no denying that people had tried to love the unlovable child.
For a time, the orphan had become something of a celebrity, a distraction from the plague. Like Miranda, strangers would swing by during their lunch hour to sit in the booth and eat their sandwiches while she played, blissfully unaware of her spectators. This past Christmas, second graders had gathered outside her window to sing carols. The kids had held a name contest, and hundreds of suggestions poured in, from Britney and Madonna to Ice. Nothing quite fit. Sin Nombre, they ended up calling her. No Name.
She was quirky, but ungodly gifted for a four-year-old. They marveled at her right-brain prowess. At an age when children were barely imitating lines, she was drawing the aspen tree outside her window with ten different colored crayons. It was the same tree each day, but always different. She changed her palette, her theme, the size of the tree, the emotions. Some pictures had leaves, some bare branches. Some used tiny suns or tongues of flame or birds for leaves. No one knew where she had seen fire. Then they remembered the candle flames of second-grade carolers.
Lately a figure had crept into her drawings, usually seated under the tree. It was a stick figure to begin with, remarkable in itself for her age. With astonishing speed, a matter of a week or so, the figure had acquired fingers and a face with disproportionate details. It was Miranda who finally figured out the distortions. Lacking a mirror, the girl had felt her own face and transferred them to the paper. The child was drawing self-portraits. Her self-awareness staggered them. They compared her to Picasso. Lately that had changed.
A month ago, the breakdown had begun. The child tore her clothing to shreds. They f
ound her walls plastered with her own feces and urine. From this side of the glass, barricaded from the stench, it was possible for Miranda to see the beauty and mystery contained in that mess of handprints and chocolate scrawls. Other people only saw neurotic behavior, or possibly something worse.
Popular opinion shifted. The child, it seemed, was a freak after all. Over the next few weeks, there were other disgusting incidents. The child clawed her face and limbs bloody before they could subdue her and cut her already short nails. She ate her crayons. She attacked a male nurse. Their little Picasso had tripped into rage. The lunch crowd proved to be fickle, or at least weak of stomach. Her descent into madness—if that’s what this was—had no entertainment value. Soon the girl’s audience dwindled to one.
Miranda liked it better this way. She could sit alone and think her thoughts and draw her own conclusions. The girl’s decline made no sense to her. Why had she gone downhill so suddenly? Had she seen something disturbing through her window? Had one of the nurses been rough with her? All the while, Miranda hunted for hints of vestigial memory, anything to connect the foundling to her Neandertal past. Maybe the child had begun to remember things from 30,000 years ago. And yet that defied Miranda’s theory on memory. The girl had been born as an infant, not in adult form like the other clones. As her speech pathways developed, past memories should have been overridden or crowded out. According to her theory, the girl was a tabula rasa, or nearly one, with modern memories written over ancient ones.