Knocking on Heaven's Door

by Sharman Apt Russell

  She stopped to let Brad drink, knowing he would be thirsty and unused to this speed. She had filled two leather water bottles at the river and was carrying them both, something he hadn’t noticed. Anyone else would have objected. It was a point of pride to carry your own weight. Clare felt more intrigued than annoyed. Did the lab rat not know the rules or just not care? Either way, how long could you live with other people like this? Did he get into many quarrels? Was he often eldered?

  “Why are we doing this again?” Brad asked, his dark skin shiny.

  Clare suppressed her irritation. “For one thing,” she said, “we should tell them about the bushkie and the lizards.”

  And the man nodded, because this made sense to him. He had seemed especially disturbed by the lizards. Anyone hunting in the area should know about them. Everything, Clare understood, had to make sense to this student—and on his terms, not just because someone else said so. Because of this, he had questioned The Return so persistently last night, worried it like a hyena. He looked for places to attack, holes that needed filling. It was annoying and draining but—Clare took a mental step back—his argumentativeness also had value. In fact, she would use him as an example in her next lecture. It was important to question. Important to debate. Sometimes Clare wished her other students would worry at things more.

  But not too much, she qualified. Too much independence and they would never turn in any of their assignments.

  In a few hours, they began moving uphill. Brad was breathing hard and needed again to stop and drink. Clare had to wonder what these hunters were doing. The grazing animals were down below, not up here in this volcanic debris, these giant boulders thrown into the air millions of years ago. Humped rocks lay in a heap, melded together. Pillars of rock rose weirdly, eroded into mushrooms or phalluses. On the highest boulders, shelves of slickrock gave predators a place to lie and drowse on a warm surface. No deer or antelope would linger here long.

  Yet here, apparently, was where the hunters had decided to make an early camp, for in the distance now Clare could hear voices. Brad had stopped and was also listening. He looked apprehensive, and Clare understood. These were strangers to him. He was the oddity. She moved around him to take the lead.

  Brad surprised her by grabbing her arm. He made the sign for silence, touching his lip, and the sign for listening, cocking his head.

  Clare listened again. Maybe, yes. The voices seemed unusually loud. Maybe one of them was angry. She shrugged and nodded at her student. His hearing was good. Like him, she didn’t want to walk into a quarrel.

  They moved closer to the noise, quietly, not calling out. Soon Clare could hear a female sobbing, a continuous wail that hardly contained space to breathe.

  A man screamed. “Blahblahblahblahblahblah! Blahblahblah!”

  The fierceness was wrong, completely wrong, and now Clare also felt apprehensive. She had seen people fight before. She had seen anger between men and women, often about sex but sometimes, too, over status or chores. In front of other people, in a society of thin-walled tents, most arguments stayed within prescribed bounds. No one wanted to suffer the consequences of upsetting the community, the long speeches and criticisms afterward, talking it out endlessly around the campfire. No one wanted to be everyone else’s entertainment. So people were careful. They controlled their worst selves.

  “Blahblahblahblahblahblah,” the man gabbled.

  Clare couldn’t make out the words and motioned to Brad. She was going over there. Higher up. Her finger pointed: you stay here.

  But Brad shook his head. He would not stay here. He would follow her.

  Clare scowled. The tall dark man shook his head again. It wasn’t the time to debate, and she took off her pack, waiting while he did the same. Then she went on with exaggerated movements—quiet, her spear in hand—hoping Brad could be quiet, too, climbing up and circling the voices for a place where she could see and not be seen.

  When she found it, she bent low, crawling through the slickrock space between two high rocks. Brad crouched and crawled behind her.

  The male voice got louder. There was another higher-pitched voice. The female had stopped crying. Clare and Brad were above a small natural clearing surrounded by pink-and-white cliffs. Clare stretched out on the ground and inched forward, scraping against pebbles, sticks, and thorns. Lifting her head slightly, she could see the scene below. Brad inched beside her, well hidden by a tuft of grass. Despite everything else, she noted her approval at his cautiousness.

  Below, an old man knelt in a circle of stones built as a wall one meter high. The man was small and beardless, in leather tunic and pants, his gray hair loose about his face. The stone circle was five meters in diameter, and the man rested on his knees at its center, the earth around him swept bare. It took Clare a moment to understand why this man held his arms oddly. His hands were tied behind his back, his head down as though he were injured or tired. Just outside the stone wall, another man stood and screamed, his mouth a hole in a flowing brown beard. In one fist he held the hair of a female, who slumped against his leg. Clare scanned the area, back and forth, trying to take in everything. Another younger male sat on the ground, also outside the circle. There was the strong smell of skunk cabbage.

  “Bushkies,” Brad mouthed.

  But four of them? Clare had never heard of bushkies coming together like this. They lived alone, almost by definition.

  Abruptly, in mid-howl, the bearded man stopped screaming. He lifted the female, holding her against his waist with one arm, where she hung as though half-conscious. The old man in the circle of rock did not move. The young man outside the circle also did not move. The man holding the woman began to speak, normally now, although hoarsely. He had had a vision. He was going to save the female. He was going to save the world. He knew what to do. His voice deepened. He chanted.

  Something about his speech was familiar to Clare. Briefly, she closed her eyes. She knew what the man was doing. She recognized the cadence. The repetitions. Even some of the words. This was what the tribe did when someone died. They had a ceremony before the circle of fire. They used certain phrases over and over, rhythms like a drum beat, familiar and comforting. They had done this for her husband, fallen from a cliff, a feather in his hand. They had done this for her father, gored by a stallion; for Esperanza, dead of old age; for Wren, deformed at birth; for Gregory, bitten by a rattlesnake; for Jon’s father and mother, who hunted together and who had died together, their judgment clouded by dehydration. Clare thought for a moment, eyes closed, of the death chants she had heard.

  They had done this for her daughter. The longing was like an attack, unexpected, inappropriate. It hollowed out her chest. She felt gutted. She wanted her daughter. She wanted her little girl. The warm hands patting her face. The weight of the body carried on her shoulder. The high voice prattling nonsense and singing, always singing. A sorrow shook Clare’s body. The shock of loss all over again.

  “Bushkies,” Brad repeated sourly.

  Social Problems: Assignment Four, submitted by Dimitri Wu

  We have to deal with the problem of scavenging. How much should we scavenge from the cities and what should we scavenge? And who should do this?

  Here in Russia and everywhere else, the survivors of the supervirus first kept away from cities and towns and villages because they thought the disease was still there, wherever people had once been. They thought the supervirus was still in those dead bodies and in buildings and in anything people had touched. I believe they were right to be so careful. Like most of us here, I don’t think the supervirus came from any human source but from a mutation in the viral batteries. Those viruses were everywhere, grabbing conductive metals and lining them up into nanowires. By the twenty-second century, viral technology was the answer to every problem, from expensive energy to pollution and global warming. Everything was run with those cheap viral batteries.

  After a long time, we realized that the supervirus was really gone and we could now ente
r these places safely. But did we want to? No! We had become happier with the things we made ourselves from the earth. We were happier living the life we were meant to live, the deep-down true life rediscovered by our great-great-great-great-grandmothers and our great-great-great-great-grandfathers. (I am myself descended from Li Kuo-fu Chao, specialist in the radio communication between Paleos and humans, and from Long Wu, specialist in Paleolithic tool-making. Of course, everyone in our tribes has ancestry among such scientists since these were the men and women who survived the supervirus by hiding for many months in their antique bunker. I know I am not extraordinary in my heritage but I am still proud of it, still respectful. Sometimes I think I inherited from these ancestors a certain knack for making spear points, since mine rarely break when I am flinting, as well as the ability to hear Paleos better than my friends. This is particularly true when it comes to mammoths. We have many mammoths here in Russia and Mongolia, unlike some other parts of the world, and I have found that I can hear them from a very far distance.)

  But back to the social problem of scavenging. Of course, we have to scavenge some parts and supplies so we can have the computers decided on in the Great Compromise and so we can connect to the worldwide web and the satellites going above the earth. We don’t want to lose the history of humanity, which is also why we still have to write papers. We have to scavenge what we need for radios, too, for communication in case the computers fail.

  And the decision of who scavenges is also not such a difficult one. As it turns out, most of those people have to be mutes. In the beginning, when we sent receivers into the cities, they always came back lonely. They came back weeping, like my grandfather did when he had to go scavenging as a punishment when he was young. My grandfather went to bed and didn’t stop sleeping for two days. He said he couldn’t explain how he felt, only that I should avoid scavenging myself, and this I have done. My grandfather is a wise man and I listen to what he says.

  In conclusion, scavenging is another social problem we have to deal with. We have to scavenge but we don’t like to and we do it respectfully and without great joy.

  Social Problems: Assignment Four, submitted by María Escobar

  Animism is not really a social problem but it is a big part of our society and so I thought I would write about it. Animism is integral to who we are! Back in the twenty-first century when they cloned the first teratorn, the scientists got quite a shock when this large hungry scavenger bird started squawking for food and demanding meat. Some of the scientists realized that they were hearing this bird in their own heads! That they were receivers! But no one knew what receivers were then because no one thought that consciousness could exist outside the physical body. People didn’t know much about electromagnetic fields or the holographic principle. They just believed in simple biology and nothing else.

  Then people’s brains began hearing the thoughts of the Paleos and they realized that they were wrong and that consciousness could exist outside a body and even more than that. Consciousness could travel. The consciousness of a teratorn can travel about two kilometers down from the sky where I can hear it when I am out in the jungle hunting with my friends. Probably the teratorn I was receiving yesterday sounds a lot like the one they first cloned, just squawking and squawking for meat whether it be fresh or rotten. Teratorns are not fussy.

  Hearing the Paleos changed everything and scientists had to rethink a lot of things. They started thinking about consciousness and thoughts moving and mainly they thought in terms of waves, how waves are everywhere, radio waves, low frequency waves, high frequency waves, light waves, sound waves. Satellites in space already let us connect to the waves of the Internet on our computers and people were used to being “bathed in the web” as the proverb says, or “bathed in waves.” The Paleos made us realize that people and animals could also receive and send out waves or at least humans could receive waves sent out by certain Paleos although humans can’t send waves back to the Paleos very well and they can’t send out or receive waves to each other. My friends and I try to do this all the time and we really can’t.

  The physicists started thinking more about waves and they started the idea of panpsychism which means there is a kind of constant wave going on everywhere that is a form of consciousness or at least it is something that consciousness can travel on and through. It is everywhere and in everything. This new idea meant that people started doing a lot of experiments with animals and plants and rocks and they had some very interesting results. Then came the supervirus and everyone died. Those of us who didn’t die stopped doing any kind of experiments except for continuing to think and reflect about all of this which the Council and elders encourage us to do because we are the universe reflecting on itself and because animism is part of who we are and part of The Return as decided on by the Pleistocene scholars who lived in Russia and then agreed to by the Los Alamos Three and the Costa Rican Quakers.

  Today we sometimes say panpsychism and sometimes animism and one way to understand that is to say that panpsychism is the scientific and technical term and includes the holographic principle, and animism is what most of us believe. We believe the world is alive and conscious and all the parts of the world are alive and conscious. There are many different ways of believing this. (I know I should end this paper soon because you have word counts and I respect that and I am almost done but for this last thought which I think is important in its way.) I have a tree I like to sit under and I talk to this tree and I think it hears me and I think being friends with this tree calms me down and helps me be a better hunter and gatherer. I’m a receiver but I can’t really hear what this tree is saying because humans can only hear certain Paleos and nothing else. My friend Carlos doesn’t believe in talking to trees or rocks or even animals that aren’t Paleos because he follows more the Quaker beliefs that are very matter-of-fact and scientific. Even so this is not the kind of thing we argue about because we both believe in the fundamentals of physics and that’s what’s important whether we call it panpsychism or animism. We both have the same belief even though the details differ a little.

  As I said before, this is not a social problem. It’s more like a social achievement!

  Re A Question, submitted by Carlos Salas

  I hope you don’t think I was being too personal when I asked for a recent picture. And thanks for your comments on my last paper. They were extensive and I learned a lot. You are really a great teacher. Thank you again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DOG

  Dog shivered although he wasn’t cold, and Dog watched. The part of him that was Luke felt bad, bad, bad. He had run away. He had run away from Luke who was hurt now, scared and tied up. Dog called out to Luke/Lucia but neither of them answered.

  Dog had followed the bushkies and Luke to this camp and then to the river and then back to this camp. Along the way, Dog ate part of a dead skunk and a snake and an antelope already picked over by hyenas. He was hungry now but stayed hidden in the mesquite and brittlebush and watched the bushkies as they gathered around the rock wall. The circle had taken a day to build because the younger male was clumsy and the older male didn’t work but only told the others what to do. Sometimes the older male barked, “Blahblahblahblah,” and sometimes he gave a speech, and when it was time for him to do that, everyone had to stop and listen.

  Dog knew the speech very well by now. The bushkie had seen a pillar of light. The light had risen up from the ground. The light had called to him. The light had blessed him and named him the speech maker, the one who gave and the one who took away. The light had risen up from the ground, a pillar of light blazing and growing until it hallowed the earth and inseminated the sky, the sky a new father, the earth a new mother. The bushkie had seen the light, and once, when he commanded it to appear, the others had seen the light, too.

  At this point, the others had to join in. Had the female seen the light? Yes, she had to say. She had seen the pillar of light. Had the boy seen the light? Yes, the boy had to s
ay. He had seen the pillar of light rising from the ground. Dog knew they were telling the truth. Their voices often lied about other things but not about this. About this, they were confident.

  Dog knew what made humans happy. Stories made them happy just as stories made Dog happy. Adenine, guanine, cytosine. The double molecule, ribbony, twisty. Playing with Luke, pretending to be mad, pretending to be sad. Genes, mutations, replications. Humans liked stories, and Dog liked stories, but humans turned their stories into the world. Humans needed, Lucia said, to make their mark on the world. They had the gene for mark, stamp, push, move, alter, rearrange, shift, gouge, transform. They needed to assert themselves. They needed to build circles of rock, and they needed a story to go with the circle. They needed to make little crosses of wood, and they needed to make big crosses of wood, and they needed a story to go with the cross.

  No, the story came first, Dog reminded himself. They needed the cross to go with the story. They needed Luke to go with the story. The bushkie had seen a pillar of light. Now he needed Luke to be tied up. Sad, scared Luke. No pretending this time. No game of being angry. Luke was really sad.

  Dog reminded himself that although he felt hungry he should watch, not hunt, not eat. He thought of a rabbit: adenine, adenine. He remembered being a pup. He remembered the den all over his body, his skin, his hair, the warmth of his mother and his siblings. Someone touching him constantly. His mother nuzzling or his sister licking (she thought she was licking herself) or his brother bumping, bump, shove, touch, caress. When someone entered the den from outside, when his father nosed carefully down into the tunnel, even the fresh air felt like a touch. Everything in the world wanted to touch him. The dark safe world wrapped around.

  What a shock to leave that world into sunlight. Now his mother growled and nipped. Stay away. Don’t do that. With his own sharp teeth, Dog bit at the bright new world. He bit his father’s tail, and his father growled. Stay away. Don’t do that. Now Dog was separate from his mother and siblings. He was separate from their skin and warmth, from these rocks, those plants, this sky.