by Aeon Authors
KC held the skull at arm’s length. She struck a pose and spoke in a deep, theatrical voice. “Alas, dear Yorkie, I knew thee swell.” Or was it Warwick? And was that actually from the play? She didn’t know. She settled on Yorwick and let it go.
She heard a bell ring three times and then three times again. Supper. She finished burying the half-eaten billy-rat she’d found behind the barn earlier in the day, and with Yorwick in one hand and her shovel in the other she started back to the house.
On the way, she stopped to wade for a moment in a stream that cut deep into the soil to expose boulders veined with granite and shelves of limestone that overhung shallow pools and the crumbling walls of old safety bunkers that had turned out not to be so safe. Here and there were jumbles of bones from the wars and the sometimes comical remains of genetic mishaps from the pan-speciation that followed the breakout. The soil here was rich with the damp, earthy scents of lives-having-been-lived. KC had another sniff of Yorwick and sampled the air in comparison. Most of the hominid specimens she dug up from time to time came from hereabouts.
At the house, KC’s grandmother was sitting on the porch peeling a basket of small, perfectly round potatoes. She wore a white denim shirt and blue jeans and she raised a leather-gloved hand in greeting. KC leaned her shovel against the porch rail and sat down. She cradled Yorwick in her lap and watched her grandmother work. She looked at the basket of potatoes and then at her grandmother.
“I thought I heard the supper bell,” she said.
“You did,” her grandmother answered. “But nobody’s going to be eating until someone cleans these spuds and gets ’em in the oven.” She smiled and took off her gloves and kissed KC on the forehead the way she did no matter if it had been ten minutes or ten hours since she’d seen her last.
KC put Yorwick down on the porch and took up the potatoes. She kicked at the bottom corner of the screen door so that it slapped against the frame and then popped open again. On her way into the house she said, “You shouldn’t go over there by yourself,” echoing a phrase she’d heard her grandmother utter a hundred-and-many times herself. It was generally safe in the potato fields, and the potatoes were good value, each one providing exactly seven grams of high-yield protein and two-hundred milligrams of omega 3 antioxidants. But it was better to go picking in pairs so that one of you could keep watch. The little tubers could be sneaky and the bite was painful occasioning amputation and a prolonged and unpleasant limb-regeneration process. KC’s comment went unanswered as she’d had known it would.
She went inside. It was quiet in the house. She dropped the skinned potatoes in the sink and watched them squirm as she turned on the water. She listened for a moment to the purling of the water and the rustling of a worried cabbage in its bin in the fridge. Through the screen door she saw the last squint of the sun above the horizon and heard her grandmother humming the melody of a nursery rhyme called Little Moon, Too, which told the story of some people who had traded their fortunes for berths on a satellite colony in order get away from the wars, and how they’d named the satellite Atlas after a book they’d all read. They’d promised to come back and save the world when the wars were over and the gene-splicing organisms had gone back into the labs where they belonged.
KC joined in at the end of the song, singing just loud enough to hear herself over the gurgles and gasps of the spuds as she plucked them from the sink and dropped them in a bowl of vinegar.
“Atlas shrugged,” she sang,
“Atlas died
Up up in space
Where nobody cries
Round and round
Round and round
Round and round forever
She left the potatoes soaking in the bowl to make sure they were dead, and went back out on the porch. A pinprick of light slid in a languid arc across the sky just above the horizon. Out of habit born of childhood games, KC lifted her shoulders in a shrug and made a wish upon Little Moon Too.
Nobody knew what killed the Looners, but it was interesting to imagine them up there with their simulated gravity offline; desiccated bodies floating around, bumping into tables and portholes and things, and then spinning slowly off to bump into something else, like party balloons only not so shiny.
KC’s grandmother picked Yorwick up from where KC had left him. She ran a finger along where the sagittal suture was supposed to be, at the crown of the skull, the cute little wandering crack where the parietal bones would have met if the skull was that of a pre-extinction human. But the suture wasn’t there.
KC leaned in closer. She should have noticed it first thing. It meant that Yorwick had been hatched, not born. He hadn’t had to squeeze his head into the world through a dark and narrow birth canal, partially collapsing it like the old-world humans.
“You found this where?” her grandmother asked.
“By the fence,” KC said. “But I thought it must have come from the creek.”
Her grandmother nodded once. “Might have. You can’t tell sometimes.”
“But how?” KC asked. “How can something that’s dead move around like that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” her grandmother mused. “Some things aren’t quite as dead as they appear to be, now are they?”
“Is it a sapiens postremus, do you think?” KC asked.
Her grandmother turned Yorwick over and peered into his vacant brainpan. “I think it’s a prime. Restless bones. Trouble. The others’ll be coming soon.” She stood and brushed little bits of still-squirming potato skin from her jeans. “We’d better get ready. You get word to the doctor.”
“Word to the doctor,” KC echoed, “Yes, you’re right.” In truth, she had no idea whether her grandmother’s implied wisdom was right or wrong or wholly irrelevant. Any way it came out, it gave her an excuse to get off the farm. She started off across the yard at a run. “I should probably tell Eddie’s grandmother, too, don’t you think?” she shouted as she crossed the shock-line and joined the road. She thought she heard her own grandmother say something that might have sounded like No, but there was already too much distance between them to be irrevocably sure.
It was nearly dark by the time KC got to Eddie’s house and knocked on the door. The house was big, and situated in the middle of a gathering of buildings that KC’s grandmother called a town. She’d explained that a town was a place where people used to live in herds, like toothcows, only not always trying to eat each other, the key word being always.
Eddie’s grandmother answered the door. She was wearing a long, black dress with a frilly white collar that looked like it was choking her, like lady’s lace, the delicate fungus that grew up the side of the barn in the springtime and then crawled off into the fields to hunt in the summer.
“Edward….” That’s how she said it, all drawn out and dramatic…Edward…was “occupied elsewhere.” The door closed, leaving KC standing there staring at it.
“Sheesh,” said KC to the door. She promised herself that the next time she saw Edward she’d tell him that he ought to ask for a new grandmother, one with at least a little personality. Maybe she would mention it to the doctor.
An hour later, she approached to the doctor’s house, perched atop Laboratory Hill, which was in fact just a mild, unruly episode in the otherwise catatonic flatness of the prairie. The night had settled in the fields and on the trees, chasing the shadows and the things that usually hid in them out into the world-at-large. The darkness was softened by Big Moon’s rising up and spilling buckets of creamy white light down from the sky. All around, things were busy hunting, rooting in the weepgrass, and foraging in the canopies of the longfinger trees, just out of sight. KC sidestepped a duck-billed rip-mole prowling around in front of the doctor’s house and rang the doorbell. She waited. Little Moon, Too twinkled in its graveyard orbit between Big Moon and the horizon, and KC shrugged for luck.
She rang again and called out, and the door at last swung open. The doctor peered out at her, broke after a moment into an uncertain smile
, and stepped back from the threshold to let her in.
She told him about Yorwick and how her grandmother had sent her over.
The doctor’s caterpillar eyebrows came together in a V. What little chin he had jutted out in a thoughtful manner. He nodded once, a little sideways, the way that doctors do, like he believed her but then maybe not.
“I haven’t seen you in some time, KC,” he said. “How are you two getting along out there? Is there anything you need?”
KC shook her head. “Everything’s…” she started. She stopped cold. She craned her neck and peered past him through a set of paned glass doors into a little parlor off the entryway.
“Eddie?”
Eddie Johnson was sitting in a large, wing-backed chair in a corner, just visible from where KC was standing. She pushed past the doctor and stood looking into the room, gaping in spite of her efforts at self control.
The doctor came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. Gently, he steered her into a chair across the room from Eddie. “I’m sorry, KC,” he said. “I should have said something earlier.”
KC sat. She stared. Eddie stared back. Or into space, who could tell? His lips were thin, a pale shade of blue, turned up in a sleepy kind of smile. His clothes hung on the thinness of his frame as if it were them supporting him instead of the other way round. His hands lay limp on his thighs and the fingers seemed to KC strangely emaciated, gnarled and knobby where the joints bulged beneath the listless gray gauze of his flesh. The eyes were hollow chasms. And yet there was a spark in there somewhere, a faint presence, like moonlight on a fragment of bone at the bottom of a hole.
“So it’s true,” KC said. She perched, tense and fully aware on the edge of her seat, her senses probing through the house for the creak of a floorboard or the sibilant rasp of pent up breath. “Where is she?” She could not believe that she was about to lose her temper like this, and over Eddie no less—or rather, what was left of Eddie. On the other hand, she had a lot of time invested in Eddie, daydreaming time and night-dreaming time both.
The doctor attempted a confounded look at first, but eventually issued a sputtering sigh of resignation.
“Look at him,” KC demanded. Dangerously close to shedding a tear and showing the doctor just how mature she wasn’t, she added, “He mated, didn’t he? He’s going prime.”
The doctor pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yes.”
“Is she here?”
“No.” The doctor shook his head. “She’s not here.” He pulled a chair close and sat, fingering his lapels, his round, jowly face going red. “I’m sorry, KC. I didn’t know until just….”
KC opened her mouth but for once the words didn’t come. Adults, she steamed, do they ever know what’s going on? Is there something about getting old that makes you stupid?
The doctor sat back in his chair and tapped his chin and scratched his head like it hurt to think that hard. “I don’t know how it happened.” He dug in the pocket of his corduroy jacket and pulled out a little white box. He fiddled with some keys on the side of it and handed it to KC. “Look for yourself,” he said. “He hasn’t been out of the district.”
“Maybe he hacked his chip,” KC scoffed, and was immediately sorry.
“You know that’s not possible,” the doctor answered, scolding only a little. “Males possess neither the intelligence nor the initiative for anything of the sort.”
“Maybe your locator’s broken.” She flipped the box diffidently into his lap.
He picked it up and scrolled through a menu and handed it back again. “You see? You went to Eddie’s before you came here. The locator’s functioning.”
KC closed her eyes, wishing she could vanish from the planet before they opened again. It didn’t work. She went on the offensive. “You promised.”
It was almost true. Although he hadn’t actually guaranteed Eddie to her, he’d never said anything about inter-district, self-initiated breeding, either. And then it hit her. Inter-district. The inter-district drama club. Hamlet. Ophelia. The cast party. That bloody hussy.
While she’d been thinking it through, the doctor had been rambling on about something in his weird, hypnotic, biobotic doctor voice. “…evolution is a messy business, KC. Even directed evolution. Even in reverse. There are always mutations, deviations, little impromptu experiments going on. Of course, we’ll run some tests, set up a control, take samples…baseline DNA…” Blah blah blah, KC lost the thread. “…habitat pressure, maybe….”
Finally, he stopped for a breath. KC could tell from the way he winced that she was looking at him like he was crazy. Habitat pressure. Right. There were only a few hundred free range hominids on the entire planet. The doctors kept tweaking the DNA and the DNA kept tweaking back. It could be thousands of years before there was a self-sustaining, breeding population that even remotely resembled Homo sapiens sapiens.
He started up again. “Patience, KC. You must have patience. You don’t have the perspective that I have….”
No kidding, she thought. Perspective. Patience. She was sixteen. He was four hundred and something. He was on his fourth body with a new one gestating in a vat in the greenhouse out the back. She thought maybe he could use a dose of perspective with a capital P right up his….
The following night KC and her grandmother and the doctor stood along the fence near the gate looking out at the prairie. KC kicked absently at the dirt and her foot hit something hard and brittle. She looked down and saw a convex disk embedded in the ground. She recognized Yorwick, dug him the rest of the way out, and held him in her hand.
“How did he get here?” she wondered aloud.
“I don’t know,” her grandmother said. “But it couldn’t have been easy for him. He must be quite keen to see this.”
The doctor chuckled and lit his pipe. A cool breeze slipped through the weepgrass, making it sound even sadder than usual, and moonlight hung in the air like a mist of tiny glass beads. There was movement behind them and they turned to see Eddie coming through the fields, leaning hard on his grandmother’s shoulder so that she was as good as carrying him. With them came another; a skinny, pallid, wasted creature with long, lanky dark hair. Her. She carried a bundle in her arms, blue-black and lustrous in the soft light. An egg. The stranger struggled a little with the weight of the egg, her attention given completely over to it, and nearly stumbled in a badgerweed hole. KC pictured the egg slipping down into the burrow and the yolk being sucked out like a milkshake through a straw. She heard something growling the in night air, a vicious sound, like a bone being slowly and deliberately crushed in the jaws of some malevolent beast. It took her a moment to realize that the sound was coming from her own throat.
“KC,” her grandmother cautioned. “You’ll behave yourself and you’ll start doing it right this minute.”
KC pasted a smile on her face but it kept falling off, so she turned her back and looked out across the fence and over the dark stillness of the plains. Something moved, and it wasn’t a dust devil.
“Um,” she said, “Is that them?”
Off in the distance, somewhere between the fence and the vague hem of the horizon there was a stirring, like a mouth in the darkness, opening to speak, only instead of words or voice, what issued forth was light. Faint at first, no more than a hint of a glimmer, it grew to a definite shimmer and then to a luminous, pulsating sphere that had no defined surface or boundary. It glowed blue, no, yellow, no, green. Now a brilliant red, like the feel of the sun on your skin on a hot day, and now a whirling, mesmerizing violet. It came across the prairie like a kind of purposeful wind, gliding, buffeting slightly from side to side. As it closed in, knots of color within the sphere separated out into individuals, a dozen, two dozen, more. Limbs, long and slender, came into view and became legs, four for each creature, not much more than spindles of bone with plump, round bodies suspended in the center like a spider’s, like chatterbugs, skimming the surface of the ocean, quivering with bloodlust as they feed on shell m
ice coming up for air.
KC shaded her eyes against the light. She’d never seen a prime before; a post-reproductive, post-hominid male, let alone an entire pod.
The doctor nudged her shoulder, smiling. “Bio…” he started.
“Luminescence. Bioluminescence. I know,” KC cut in. She looked at Eddie. He was still leaning against his grandmother. Miss Oaf-eelia, as KC had christened the interloper, stood next to him, oblivious, cooing vacuously at the egg like the mate-thieving harlot she was.
The animals came closer and KC saw the heads. Human-like, only not quite. Like Yorwick. They were large, half-again KC’s height, and covered all over in a velvety sheath, everywhere apart from the heads. It was the velvet that emitted the undulating glow, KC saw. One of them came close to the fence and she felt a need—a sudden, irresistible compulsion—to reach across and stroke its leg.
KC’s grandmother grabbed her arm with a dexterity KC had forgotten the old surrogate possessed. “You want to die?” she scolded.
“That’s how they hunt,” the doctor said. “They lure their prey. The luminescence comes from parasites on the exoskeleton. They’re toxic to the touch. That’s why the primes stay on their side and you stay over here. If they came over, they’d wipe you all out and we’d have to start the whole project all over again.”
“Open the gate.” It was Eddie’s grandmother. She stood erect and imposing in her long black dress with the high white collar, but her voice trembled just a little, just enough to notice. “It’s time.”