Knocking on Heaven's Door

by Sharman Apt Russell

  Now she reached for the bearskin she used as a pillow, a scrawny black bear her husband had killed a decade ago when their daughter was born. Preparing for sleep, she searched among her favorite images of Elise, the one with the garland of flowers, the one by the river of shells. The bawling calf intruded into the scene. But there was nothing she could have done. Calves died. Daughters died. Clare touched the leather bag around her neck. Six years and the grief fading like the drums. The women in the tribe had said this would happen. They hadn’t mentioned how much else would fade, too.

  A Bed of Bone, a Sea of Ash, submitted by María Escobar

  Our assignment is to write about The Return and I have thought a long time about this. I found it very hard to do this assignment and then I realized that it was because my mind keeps going round and round and round about what happened before The Return when almost everyone in the world had to die and there were billions of bodies lying in the streets and in their homes rotting and filling up with disease. Men, women, and children just dropped where they were and lay on the ground. People couldn’t take care of each other because the supervirus struck them down so hard and so fast—like a bolt of lightning! No one knows where it came from. Maybe from a mutation in our viral-powered batteries and electrical stations since none of those things worked afterward. Or maybe it was made by someone who just hated the human race! Whatever the reason, all those people died and all those people were just like me with their own hopes and dreams, their special way of thinking about things. Maybe their lives weren’t as good as mine because they lived in a polluted world with constant wars and not enough food and water for everyone but they were still people and the fact is that my life is so good now because they died and made room for me and for all the other animals and plants. They had to die so we could have The Return and live like we do on a planet in balance with the right number of people and with social institutions like the quest and the Council and the elders and the right way to do things. But still it seems sad that this had to happen and I sometimes think we are all standing on a big graveyard, that we all live on a bed of bones and a sea of ash. I know I am turning in this assignment late but I hope you will still read and count it as part of my work in your evaluation of me as a student. I do need to be positively evaluated so I can go on my long quest next year and so I am turning this in late even though I know it is really late.

  The Founder Effect, submitted by Alice Featherstone

  Our assignment this week is to write about The Return, summarizing in four hundred words or less “the key elements that came together to create one of humanity’s most singular and impressive achievements.” Hah. That was an easy forty words.

  In the late twenty-first century, scientists produced the first clones of extinct animals like the mastodon and glyptodont. The big surprise was that some of these Paleos were telepathic. The existence of thought that could move in waves sent physicists off in a new direction, with the dream of unifying quantum mechanics with the electrifying principles of panpsychism; at the same time, the idea of speaking to animals caught fire in the public imagination. Paleos were the latest and biggest cultural phenomena. More importantly for us today, Pleistocene Play Parks in North America and Mongolia expanded our understanding of the Paleolithic lifestyle, that grand period of almost two million years during which human beings evolved and flourished as hunters and gatherers.

  In the early twenty-second century, when the supervirus hit the earth like a bolt of lightning, a conference of Pleistocene scholars at St. Petersburg, Russia hid for six months in an antique bunker readied for nuclear attack. These academics, people from all over the world, developed and pushed forward the idea of The Return. Meanwhile, a group of computer scientists in the southwestern United States lived for almost a year in a more sophisticated bunker prepared in case of biological warfare. These men and women were committed to maintaining the planetary wireless web which allowed the few survivors left to communicate with each other. At the same time, an extended family of Quakers in Costa Rica carried the exquisitely rare gene of immunity. These Friends relied on their civic beliefs; as Quakers, they insisted on consensus and worked around-the-muck sending out long-winded emails exhorting humanity to live harmoniously on the earth, forsaking the viral technology and intra-species violence that had crushed us like lice between your grandmother’s fingers.

  The Return was a result of this founder effect, three populations kept connected by radio signals and the solarcomps. Although other groups in Africa and elsewhere died out or disappeared from the worldwide web, those of us committed to The Return survived. The re-creation of a Paleoterrific lifestyle, innate to our species, is our “final utopia;” or as the Russian tribes say, “We are home.”

  Let me conclude, after 395 words, that we’ve reached the anniversary of our 150th year and we still can’t stop talking about how great we are.

  A Question, submitted by Carlos Salas

  I wonder if you would send us a new picture of yourself? I have just had the honor of participating in the Council elections, which as you know can be lengthy among the Costa Rican Quakers and are quite unlike your elections by majority rule in the Los Alamos tribes. This was my first time in the silence since I have proven myself as a young adult and I would like to thank you for your guidance in helping me reach clearness through my writing. During this process, the posted photos of the Council members struck me as particularly useful for we are, of course, visual animals highly attuned to nuances of the face and body. And this made me think of you and the fact that we have not had a recent image of you in many years.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DOG

  Dog thought of himself as a dog because that is how Luke thought of him, as the kind of loyal beloved pet that Luke had read about on his solarcomp when he was a child in the lab—the indomitable robot Trevor of the Trevor series published just before the supervirus, a motorized dog but still recognizably canine with lolling tongue and metallic bark; Lucy, the Staunch Standard Poodle, heroine of the urban penthouse; Günter, the German Shepherd, fighting crime and terrorism; and many other, older stories, Lassie the Border Country, Flipper the dolphin.

  Dog reminded himself that dolphins were not dogs. Dolphins ruled the sea. Dog wasn’t sure if that was his mistake or Luke’s. As often as not, his thoughts became images tangled up with words and the words sometimes crossed meanings like two ants exchanging smells, each heading off in the opposite direction. Luke did that, exchanging boy for girl and flipper for paw, and since their minds were a bit too enmeshed, Dog suffered from Luke’s confusions.

  Like thinking he was a dog instead of a direwolf, a true Paleo altered slightly by a few mutations that affected him—to be honest—more than slightly. Dog began scratching the fur on his neck with his left hind-foot claws. Most direwolves had four claws on each foot while he had five. Most direwolves, like Dog himself, were heavy-muscled, wide-shouldered, big-jawed, sharp-teethed scavengers. But unlike him, most didn’t have a mind that sometimes left its borders, Border Country Lassie! and so didn’t have Luke and sometimes Lucia tangling in his head, wheelboarding through neural synapses (what was wheelboarding?) and flooding his dendrites with memories that didn’t come from him, not from his hormones, not his receptors.

  Dog scratched, releasing a cloud of fleas. Fleas, Dog thought without much interest. Their DNA was relatively simple: adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine. The helix zipping and unzipping. Sending and receiving. Dog was obsessed with DNA, having first learned about this magnificent double molecule from Lucia and since that day making it entirely his own, calculating the genetic sequence of fleas and trees and bees and snow geese, species he stored away in a file (what was a file?) somewhere in his brain. Dog felt lucky that so much DNA filled the world, so many different kinds of flexible comb-like strands of nucleotides twisted about each other like snakes in a den fitting together, interlocking, sending out signals, receiving signals. The weak and the strong hydrogen bonds.

 
Lucia, the weak and the strong, spending years in her den at the lab studying DNA and then later, when she left the lab and became Luke, mourning the flaws in her biohologram, the lack of a penis where she felt there should be one, where she could imagine that fleshy tubular structure protruding so clearly that it seemed, voilà! there it was! (What was voilà?) Luke/Lucia were obsessed with their genitalia. Dog understood. Who wasn’t?

  But neither Luke nor Lucia had the ability to see DNA as Dog did, the alpha male of this obsession: a mental image of twisty ribbony codes, the teeth of the code always pairing the same way—complementary, protruding, nitrogenous bases—but varying, too, in their seemingly infinite electro arrangements. The helices appeared whenever Dog focused on a living creature, the focus usually triggered by smell, but sometimes—like this flea—by movement or color or even sound. A lion’s cough in the night. Lion: thymine, adenine, cytosine, guanine. A water spider on the scum of a pond. Water spider: cytosine, guanine, cytosine, guanine.

  The flea hopped from one hair to another hair on Dog’s flank as Dog tilted his head and turned to sniff the cloud of insects. The DNA in this flea was a little different. An error in replication. This flea would live a little longer than other fleas and lay more eggs and breed more fleas, and some of them would live longer and lay more eggs and breed more fleas. Who would all live longer because of this change in a single gene.

  Dog felt conflicted. He adored mutations! Still he snapped at the flea, hoping to crush it between his teeth.

  Dog! He could hear Luke calling.

  Luke, he answered, don’t get your pants wet.

  Inspired, Dog urinated on a patch of prickly pear. Luke would probably have rabbit for dinner. They ate rabbit almost every night.

  Prickly pear: adenine, thymine. Dog inhaled the satisfying odor of himself: phenol, ammonia, steroids. He began to trot, half hurrying, half not, toward the campsite that Luke had set up for the night. The nights turning slightly colder now, the cold welcome, not a stranger.

  Halfway home, skirting the edges of an eroded canyon, Dog saw the column of light three meters tall and thin, a stick of glow floating above the ground. The hairs on Dog’s neck stood up. His head lowered. His eyes slitted. His ears lay flat. He was ready for an attack!

  Although there was nothing to attack. Only a thin stick of glowing light.

  But that light … Dog trembled. The stick of light disappeared. Dog whined. Superstitiously he backtracked, another longer way to Luke.

  On seeing him, the crabby old man picked up a real stick as if to beat Dog for being late. Forget it, Dog said. He wasn’t a pup anymore. The crabby old man grabbed Dog by the long guard hairs on his neck. Dog twisted and turned his head, trying to bite the man’s arm, growling deep—a very satisfying growl after his pathetic whining just a short while ago—and managed to nip a little flesh. The old man yelled and shook harder, not letting go. Dog scrabbled with his feet and surprised the old man by lunging forward, hitting Luke’s knees with his shoulders, bringing the human down with a thud. This was very very satisfying. Now the grip on Dog’s neck loosened and Dog could reach the crabby old face. He bared his teeth, his long yellow fangs dripping saliva.

  “No, no,” Luke pleaded. Dog almost howled with pleasure. A surge of adrenaline. Dopamine! Oxytocin! “No,” Luke commanded, but Dog began to lick his face, long swoops of tongue over leathery skin. “Get off me!” Luke said. “That’s enough!”

  Dog felt an intense surge of love, so that his penis stiffened.

  Normally the crabby old man would give up now and roll on the ground to protect his eyes and mouth. But today Luke reached down to grab Dog’s back feet, giving them a squeeze. Dog was startled and fell to the side as Luke came up, lifting paws from the ground. “Hah!” Luke struggled to a standing position, still holding Dog’s back legs. The crabby old man had won this round. Payback, Dog warned him. Luke laughed out loud.

  They ate rabbit that night, meat that Luke had snared and cooked over a fire. Dog leaned hard against Luke’s leg as though wanting more food although in fact he was full. Rabbit: adenine, adenine, adenine. He just wanted to feel Luke’s hard shin bone, and then he wanted Luke to rub down his fur with his long hand, and then he wanted Luke to cup his muzzle and shake it lightly back and forth, and then he wanted Luke to thump his hindquarters, and then he wanted Luke to remove the tick from his shoulder, and then he wanted Luke to flatten his fur again, all the way down his body with his long hard hand.

  The moon shone yellow, round and full, a pregnant woman, a gourd full of seed. Luke felt nostalgic and became Lucia after dinner, the crabby old man as serene wise woman. Lucia’s voice was higher and her pets softer, more gentle, and Dog liked them, too. He wanted to talk now about the glowing stick of light. Remembering, he saw it again. The stick had been a flower glowing, floating, vertical, a flower stem three meters long, topped by a composite of smaller flowers, each ovule fertilized and forming a seed. Sunflower: guanine, cytosine, adenine, thymine. But this glowing flower didn’t have DNA. None at all. Nothing there. No there. Something was very wrong with this flower.

  Dog couldn’t explain any of this to Lucia/Luke. Their communication was limited, based on patterns, games they already knew. On not much new. Dog leaked out feelings. Lucia leaked out words. Dog grunted and leaned hard against her leg.

  Tonight she was sleeping in a tree house made of woven grass and willow branches while Dog dug a hole under a nearby mesquite. Bushkies like Luke lived without the protection of the tribe or lab. They had to protect themselves from the saber-toothed cat who liked to eat humans, from the giant shortfaced bear who liked to kill humans. Lucia petted Dog good night and climbed up to her high safe nest. A sailor boy, Dog thought, a ship’s mast. But no, that was wrong. Where did that come from? Dog circled three times and slept lightly as always. Until just before dawn when he drifted into something deep and dark, a beautiful extinction.

  That’s when they attacked. The male threw a yucca net over Dog’s face, half blinding him. They must have been watching Luke/Lucia because they knew Dog was there, they knew where he slept, guarding her through the night. He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t caught their scent. Why he hadn’t heard them? The female and boy began beating him with clubs as he floundered from under the dangling mesquite pods. The blows landed on his ribs and rump, on his head. He pawed and bit frantically at the spiky rope. Surging to his feet, he threw the netting aside.

  The humans were covered in mud and leaves, their skin rubbed with skunk cabbage. Now he smelled them. Skunk cabbage: the double helix roiled, dipped, unzipped. They carried clubs and moved back, forming a half circle. They were not genetically related. Dog could smell that, too. The male radiated contempt, the female, fear. The boy was chaotic. There was no love between them, only craziness. Only the bushkies left the tribe, and hardly any could stand each other. Dog had never heard of three bushkies together.

  Dog snarled.

  “Scramscramscramscram!” the larger male yelled.

  The boy threw a rock, which hit Dog in the shoulder. Another bruise. A bone could crack. He might lose an eye. Perhaps he should rush them, growling and biting? Dog shivered. He had teeth. He was stronger. He could scare them away. But he was a coward. That was the problem. Direwolves had that gene, the scavenger gene, sneaking through grass when an animal died, creeping and cunning when something was killed by another hunter. Not the hunter himself, not the killer himself, but sneakily, constantly prowling the edges. Scraps and remains. Marrow in the bones, tendons and joints. There was always something left when the lions were done. There was always something rotting somewhere in the grass. The direwolf snuck, snatched, escaped.

  Dog couldn’t help himself. Luke! he shouted in warning. Lucia! He howled. The boy picked up another stone. The female swung her club in the air. Dog bolted. He was built to run away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BRAD

  Brad sat in his office wishing he were famous. Centuries ago, he would have been famou
s, perhaps as famous as Einstein or Copernicus, although that level of fame was not really necessary. Brad’s long legs stretched out, cramped under the wooden desk, as he brooded in his wooden chair, staring out at the sunflowers crowded up to the window, their yellow petals radiating power, the dark-brown centers bursting with seed. He wanted to be admired—he squinted at the flowers, over two meters high, as tall as he was. He wanted his name to light up someone’s face, for his email to get that awed response: Brad! You’re the guy …

  People in the lab knew, of course. But they never spoke about it anymore and all the papers and emails sent out to the population centers in Russia and Costa Rica were strictly anonymous, in accord with the theory that science and ambition should not be encouraged. Achievements were dangerous. The desire for fame was dangerous. Brad’s longing felt inchoate. But with a sharpness at the core. He had put it all together when he was in his twenties, a decade ago, the universe as a four-dimensional image formed of waves that were themselves formed by electromagnetic and quantum processes. The vast substratum, the consciousness of the universe—waves and frequencies—organizing and projecting what was experienced as the physical world. The holographic principle.

  Brad’s mood shifted. He felt himself relax. The holographic principle. Simple holograms were produced through interference, two or more waves passing through each other to create a pattern. The holograms of the twenty-first century had split a laser beam in two, bouncing one beam off an object and letting the beams collide to create an interference pattern on photographic film. By passing another light through that film, the original image reappeared in three dimensions. Later, scientists would discover the biohologram, the way DNA used frequencies and interferences to organize a three-dimensional body, the way the double helix acted as a radio sending and receiving, a holographic projector of electromagnetic information, organizing billions of cells in constant non-physical communication. Quantum non-locality. A complex electromagnetic field.