Praise for KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR
“In classic science fiction style, Russell presents a devastated world reformed into a seeming paleolithic paradise…. [A] suspenseful and gripping tale.”
—William Seager, author of Natural Fabrications: Science, Emergence and Consciousness
“Like Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson, Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of human reorientation within a radically reanimated world…. An urgent story that immerses the reader in the agonizing entanglements and wonders of being.”
—Gib Prettyman, associate professor, Pennsylvania State University, associate editor, Resources for American Literary Study
“Sharman Apt Russell’s vibrant new novel will enthrall readers with its vision of a future in which animism, panpsychism, and hard science come together to show us how the forces shaping consciousness and the universe are one and the same.”
—Imre Szeman, co-author of After Globalization
“An intriguing and compelling tale of humanity struggling to recover its indigenous allegiance to Earth and Earth Law despite the genie of physical science having well and truly escaped from the bottle.”
—Freya Mathews, author of For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism
“A gripping read—I couldn’t put it down, but I didn’t want it to end! Sharman Russell knows how to pay tribute to the great traditions of science fiction storytelling—and how to make them new for the twenty-first century.”
—Lisa Yaszek, author of Galactic Suburbia and past president of the Science Fiction Research Association
“With compelling characters, a driving rhythm, and a rich plot, Knocking on Heaven’s Door smoothly navigates between the principles of biology and physics, the mystique of animism, the politics of posthumanism, and the tropes of science fiction.”
–Keren Omry, assistant professor, University of Haifa, and vice president of the Science Fiction Research Association
“Russell has a knack for fast-paced action and poetic turns of phrase, and readers will turn the pages quickly…. A wild and enjoyable ride.”
—Stephanie Vie, associate professor, University of Central Florida, and author of (E)dentity
“‘A bed of bones, a sea of ash’ … a new age in science and a world reborn—the backdrop of Sharman Apt Russell’s literary masterpiece, Knocking on Heaven’s Door. So immersive and profound is this beautiful tale of discovery that it guarantees to inspire the metaphysicist in every reader. Russell’s implementation of panpsychist theory brings this book to life as one of the most extraordinary sci-fis of our time…. Rich with philosophical themes.”
—Jack Symes, author of “In Defense of Strong Emergentist Panpsychism,” University of Birmingham
“Russell’s earned a spot next to Margaret Atwood and Daniel Quinn for sparking readers to reflect on the tensions between the natural environment and our ever-evolving technology.”
—Sean Murray, associate professor, St. John’s University, and author of Composition Incorporated: Turbo Capitalism, Higher Education, and the Teaching of Writing
“Even though the world has been utterly changed by a virus, where the only contact left between continents is the Internet, Russell’s novel remains steadfastly optimistic. A refreshing alternative to near-future dystopias, she offers a glimpse of a ‘future primitive’ in which people live more sustainably and equitably, sustained by a sense of wonder when nature turns out to have been panpsychic all along.”
—Melody Jue, author of “Vampire Squid Media”
Copyright © 2016 by Sharman Apt Russell
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design and cover illustration by Ivan Zanchetta
Print ISBN: 978-1-63158-068-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63158-077-2
Printed in the United States of America
To all writing teachers past, present, and future
PART ONE
Brad understood why The Return had become sacred to the tribes. One hundred fifty years ago, the supervirus had wiped out almost every human being on the planet. In response—combining the power of the worldwide web with the psychic comfort of hunting and gathering—the survivors had recreated a Paleoterrific lifestyle, a stable and flourishing culture. Humans lived peacefully now among the resurrected Paleos. They beat their little drums and sang their heritage songs and decorated their camel skin tents. Moreover, the latest discoveries in physics only confirmed their cultural animism. Utopia! They had already forgotten the lesson they were supposed to learn.
CHAPTER ONE
CLARE
Clare breathed in the smell of blood. Sharp, metallic, in the air, on her skin. She slipped her knife into the space between the joint and bone of the mare’s hip—a small young female but still too much meat, more than enough for their next few days of hunting. Tonight she and Jon would feast on the rump with garlic and onion, some saltbush leaves, perhaps a mint paste. If they followed the stream east, they might find watercress. Clare felt happy thinking about her dinner. She felt … lust. A fervent yearning. Her mouth filled with saliva. A violent tenderness. Her heart expanded, blossomed, pressed against her ribcage so that she mewled without sound, kittenish. She slunk forward, barely in control, through the grass …
No, no, these were not her thoughts.
“Cat! Cat!” Clare yelled and stood, dropping the knife, picking up her spear from the bloodied ground. Her hunting companion rushed to join her, his spear also in his hand.
“Where?” Jon asked.
On the rock ledge above them. Of course, a perfect place for sleeping and drowsing and waiting for prey. Clare and Jon would never have lingered near such a ledge if that weren’t where the mare had been, their own chosen prey, the foolish young female separated from her herd and resting in the shade. Clare pointed and began backing away, always facing the low rock cliff. Jon understood and fanned off to the side.
Muck-a-luck. Clare’s hands were wet with blood. She took the time to dry her palms on her leather shirt. The saber-toothed cat was still slinking, still seconds away, his presence betrayed by that telepathic, reckless yearning. No one knew why these hunters and scavengers lusted for human flesh the way they did. Some receivers in the tribe claimed this was more than hunger and more like love, a desire to be with humans, bonded with humans, inside each other. Clare found herself muttering, “You’d like me to be inside you, would you?” as she pushed down her fear and gathered up her anger. This was her mare, not his, her life, not his. He could have the mare when she was done. She had a tasty dinner planned. She was on a hunting trip with a friend. She had worked hard and deserved this.
Clare estimated the distance, backed up some steps, and tightened her grip on the spear. When the cat leaped from the ledge, landed, and raced toward her, she would have to strike in one of two places.
There. That t
hump on the ground, heavy body, paws on dirt. Clare shifted to a slightly different angle. The blur of movement running. Her own rush of terror. I-adore-you, the big cat spoke clearly in her mind. I-love-you. I-want-you. Clare aimed for that thought—thought that could travel in waves—and threw hard into a liquid eye. Jon’s spear drove hard, too, slipping between ribs and slicing lung, so that the blurred form jerked, stabbed on two sides and seemingly pinned to the air. Motionless before toppling over, unconscious, and then dead.
“Are there more?” Jon panted. Saber-tooths often hunted in family groups.
Clare shook her head. Her hands were trembling now, and she sat on the ground. But Jon’s release was different, an adrenaline kick of energy as he stretched out the saber-toothed cat to measure the length, 170 centimeters, looking at the teeth, 25 centimeters, estimating weight, 200 kilograms. An adolescent male, Jon proclaimed. Not particularly big. Most likely chased away by one of the other males in his family. Not thin or ill but inexperienced. Lonely and stupid.
Clare already knew this from listening to the cat’s thoughts. She sometimes forgot that Jon was a mute. That didn’t prevent him from being a good hunter. Paleos were not nearly as common as the modern natives—deer, elk, antelope, buffalo—or the imported species—horses, camels, African lions. In any case, no one hunted the Paleolithic animals. How could you hunt someone you could talk to?
Jon sang the butcher’s song and finished carving out the mare’s choice parts, wrapping the meat in her own skin, filling their packs. There was no question of disturbing or skinning the saber-toothed cat. Clare let the fear echo and fade somewhere in her chest as she stood and took her turn as guard. Before leaving, they looked back at the bodies, much of the mare still intact, opened and welcoming to the scavengers waiting for their share, the direwolf in the scrub brush, the teratorns circling above. The saber-toothed cat could have fed on this meal, too, roaring to scare away the other animals, gulping the still-warm flesh, his long canine teeth too fragile to break bone. But he had chosen another path, perhaps for something that resembled love. The big cats were a mystery.
The rest of the trip was uneventful, although Clare would have reason later to remember the last day’s hike back to their summer camp.
Of the two omens, the first was ordinary—a flock of crows blocking the light. Jon heard the cries ka-ka-kroack and sound of wings and turned to look behind him, pointing to the black belt undulating in the blue sky, bearing down on the sun like some mythical monster. Muck-a-luck, Clare thought again. Crows overhead, the world growing dark, crow sound, crow humor, crow feather, crow shit.
Jon raised his arms and began to scream. He specialized in crows and ravens, magpies and jays. Once Clare had watched him scold a bird trying to steal meat from the drying rack. “Knocka-knocka-knocka,” Jon’s shoulders had hunched in the effort of a liquid gurgle while the child whose job it was to guard the rack watched intently. “Ka-skreet!” Jon scolded, and the unrepentant raven dove in the middle of his response, the meat dangling from its beak, the child hopping up and down. Now Jon was also hopping up and down, a strong full-grown man carrying a pack, throwing back his head and shrieking happily, “Ka-skreeeet-ka-skreeet!” joining in the crow-river-storm.
The light was dimming fast. They would have to stop walking now and wait out the flight of birds, which might take hours. Ka-ka-kroak! The crows screamed. Jon screamed. Clare felt impatient. She had things to do in camp.
Then she shook her head, shaking out those thoughts. What would her students say? She lived in abundance, the best of times, the best of worlds. Jon was right to celebrate the crows gathering in flight, practice for their winter migration. Sour-smelling drops fell on Clare’s hair as she stood on the trail and untied her pack and set it on the ground: ululating, joining the wind, the black river above yellow grass, the yellow grass mixed with verbena and phlox. Jon shouted encouragement. He said something Clare copied, mimicking his ka-ka, his joy in the existence of crows who came winged and wild like a sign—for Jon would surely see this as a sign, Clare knew, of something good or bad about to happen, something obvious they should do, like prepare for the journey to their own winter camp.
And he would be right. Something good or bad would surely happen. Someone would be injured. Someone would conceive. The tribe would move to a warmer valley in the east. Clare screamed with gratitude, throat muscles straining, feet lifting. People like Jon were always right. The world formed a pattern, interconnected, interdependent. She, he, saber-toothed cat, mare, crows, without separation.
She hopped and hoped even so that the birds would fly fast. After a week in the field, she longed to be in her tent, bathed and dressed in clean clothes. She was hungry for something other than mare. She had the story about the saber-toothed cat to tell around the campfire and a few things to tell her girlfriends (about Jon, yes) and she was eager—she had to admit—to get back to her other work, for the pure lighted screen of her solarcomp and orderly appearance of papers scrolling down, each paper turned in on time, each a gem of rhetoric and composition. Clare cawed. Not likely! But the assignment was an important one, especially in this anniversary year. The subject of The Return evoked the best and worst responses from her advanced writing group, students of all ages but mostly teenagers ready to move past the mandatory courses in literacy. The sooner she saw what María had managed to write after weeks of procrastination and whether Dimitri had written anything at all, the better she would feel. She had a lot of grading to do. She wanted to get started.
And then it was hours before they were released from darkness, well spattered, Jon still smiling. Clare set a faster pace now—until close to the summer camp, when she stopped and held up her hand. She heard the baby cry, monotonously, whimpering with pain. Help-me, help-me, momma, momma. The mother groaned in anguish and anger. Monsoon rains had softened the soil of the canyon’s edge, soft soil that gave with the calf’s weight, rocks slithering under padded feet, causing the calf to land awkwardly on his front leg, rolling, bruising, thudding to the bottom of the streambed. The fall was not far. The fall did not kill the baby. The mother groaned as she made her way down, half sliding, her hairy rump scouring the ground clear of pebbles and thorny plants. She ignored the discomfort, the recklessness—she was not a reckless animal! Not someone to hurry like this. She lifted her trunk as she rushed to stand and sway back and forth before the baby, his leg twisted beneath him, the bone exposed.
I-saw, I-saw, the baby cried, something-beautiful.
The vibration in Clare’s head was so loud she almost swayed back and forth, too. Her head hummed unpleasantly. “A female mammoth,” she said to Jon. “A kilometer away. Her calf … I don’t know … saw something and went toward it, slipped down a canyon.”
“Two mammoths,” Jon repeated.
The baby wept. Clare felt the pain as an idea, not in her own body.
Please-momma-please.
“So?” Jon shifted the pack on his back. Female mammoths were not dangerous, and they were not meat.
“If we …” Clare hesitated. The mother would guard her son from predators until he died from thirst. The mother would sway back and forth and murmur comforting sounds and touch the baby’s face. The mother would not leave for any reason, not for her own thirst or hunger, not because of any danger—a pride of lion or shortfaced bear. The mother could not, of course, set the calf’s bone. Nor would she let Clare do that. Mammoths didn’t like human beings. Even if Clare could make the animal understand that she only wanted to help, that she could save the baby, even then the mammoth wouldn’t want, wouldn’t comprehend, this kind of help. If an injury did not heal on its own. If a tooth cracked. If a child was born weak or deformed … Clare felt the leather bag around her neck.
“He has only Thee,” she quoted the Costa Rican Quakers.
“How does that apply?” Jon wondered.
“It doesn’t,” Clare said and continued walking.
This second omen was different, a genuine prognostic.
But Clare did not recognize that at the time.
Her tentmates were out dancing. From inside the camel skins, Clare could hear the drums. Whump-whump-whump. She was too tired to read but sat cross-legged in bed, solarcomp on lap, and looked quickly at the first few papers. Some of her students had approached the assignment as a summary, describing the supervirus in such a matter-of-fact tone that the death of almost every human being on the planet became just one more world war or melting ice cap. A few had their facts wrong. “The Return,” one student concluded, “was a natural result of the near extinction of the human race, a kind of silver lining in a stormy cloud since we have all gone back now to a better way of living harmoniously on the earth.”
Clare exhaled. The Return was not a natural result at all. The Return had been sheer breathtaking serendipity. She skimmed through the topics the others had chosen to highlight: the overheating of nuclear reactors, the compromise insisted on by the Los Alamos Three, the extraordinary decision to abandon guns and motor vehicles. Nothing she hadn’t seen before. She paused at Jon’s work on animism. Yes, he had included the latest TOE or Theory of Everything. Jon was a cultural animist, not a scientific one, but she was relieved to see he gave physics its due.
Powering down the solarcomp, Clare felt guilty. Should she feel guilty? Jon was not one of the younger students. No one could object to their having sex. She was a widow, after all. Okay, yes, Jon’s wife was still alive … but everyone knew the marriage had failed and the woman was living with another man. And Jon was sweet, a good singer around the fire, a good hunter, even a good student. Clare thought of his paper, which had depended perhaps too much on figurative language. Still, he must have worked hard to have it ready before their trip.
She thought of Jon now at the campfire, bragging about the saber-toothed cat. The force of their spears. The sight of the cat stopped so suddenly, motionless in the air. Clare nestled into her bed, unkinking muscles, curling and uncurling toes. The drums were beginning to fade. One more slow dance. At the last unkink, she pinpointed her source of guilt: she felt as excited about Jon’s paper as she had about anything in their new love affair.
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