Knocking on Heaven's Door

by Sharman Apt Russell

  “Tonight,” he said, touching her shoulder. Tonight he would take her to the radio tower, up the circular metal stairs that went to the very top, where they could look at the stars. “Tonight,” he repeated and let her go, although his gaze followed her until she had passed the decorated tree—not giving it or the children another glance—until she was out the gate, her arms swinging.

  A blonde woman crossing the courtyard saw Brad’s expression and smiled with approval. Somehow Brad had redeemed himself at the lab. He had finally gone on a quest. He had hinted at a mystical experience, a peyote vision and Oneness with the universe. Above all, he had brought back Clare, competent and serious, heavy breasted and round hipped, still young enough to have a child. Although some tribal members sneered at the lab rats, Clare did not, and they appreciated that. She was quiet but well spoken when asked her opinion. She was a good hunter and got along with the lab’s own hunters, something Brad had never been able to do. Even Brad’s former lovers approved of her, as if their taste in him was now justified. Apparently he wasn’t so bad if he could attract someone as desirable as Clare.

  Brad smiled back at the blonde woman—their affair was ancient—and remembered that he had promised to download Clare’s student files from her old failing solarcomp into a new one. Like all new solarcomps, this would be made of recycled parts, mostly nanoplastic. Stopping before the solstice tree, Brad admired a perfectly shaped ball, a particularly clever ornament.

  Plastic wasn’t a concern. The plastic for solarcomps would never run out. The world before the supervirus had loved its plastic, which lasted forever, still piled up in buildings and storage sheds, still overflowing the houses and hospitals and shopping malls, still filling the oceans and rivers and lakes with tiny disintegrating particles. And that was just the old plastic. The newer nanoplastic didn’t even break down into smaller parts. For a very long time, they would have enough supplies to produce their solarcomps. The problem wasn’t a lack of materials.

  Brad thought about the Los Alamos Three. Thankfully, one of them had been a historian. Thankfully, the Pleistocene scholars and Costa Rican Quakers had also understood the importance of the worldwide web, the treasure of human knowledge. They had to know the past so as not to repeat it and, yes, they had to honor the past, too—like the lab honored this solstice tree. They couldn’t throw out all human achievement. At the least, they had to know where they came from, the story of the supervirus, the existence of the Paleos, the origin of The Return. Moreover, they had to keep connected. They had to stay united, one large tribe, joining their resources of intellect and moral clarity. The satellites in space would last many hundreds of years. The web was in place, bathing them in waves of knowledge, history, information, instantly translating Russian into English, English into Russian, Russian into Spanish, Spanish into English. Maintaining the web was almost effortless. The web, the satellites—they were not the problem.

  Suddenly irritated, Brad stalked toward his office at the far end of the east wing of the courtyard. The problem was education. The problem was labor. The tribes didn’t appreciate the skills needed to repair a motherboard, much less build one. People like Clare and Jon and that tough-as-a-glyptodont grandmother elder still depended on computers for communication—for being human—but they didn’t like to work on them. They spent a year or two at the lab and then avoided further service. The Costa Rican Quakers, of course, had a good balance. Their rotation system was exemplary. But the situation was desperate among the Russians, where the culture was so strongly nostalgic. Sometimes Brad wondered how many solarcomps the Russians even had left. When would they run out?

  Alone in his office, alone with his own private and somewhat specialized computer, Brad felt himself relax. He twisted his back, loosening his shoulders and neck. He wanted to tweak some of his old work on the Theory of Everything. The quest had provided insights after all. In fact, he felt rejuvenated, something to do with talking to Luke under the stars. The old man had been so calm and wise. Perhaps it was the balance of male and female. And Clare, of course, this new energy had something to do with Clare. And the peyote vision. Something to do with Dog.

  Brad opened to his favorite screen image, Albert Einstein, his childhood hero. His mother had set him the problem of Einstein’s equation when he was twelve and asking too many questions about his father. Energy and mass were different forms of the same thing. Pure energy was electromagnetic radiation—waves of light, radio waves, X-rays—traveling at a constant speed of roughly 1,078,260,480 kilometers per hour. Energy at rest equals mass times the speed of light squared. But why square the speed of light? And what about energy in motion? Figure it out, his mother had said, and when Brad did—what about antimatter? she asked.

  In those years, his early teens, his favorite book had been the twenty-first-century biography of Albert Einstein, which put the scientist at a turning point in history. Because of Einstein, people in the mid-twentieth century knew that matter and energy were the same thing. Everything was the same thing. Science as mysticism. Scientist as saint. Einstein represented a new way of seeing the world until finally in 2059 came the realization that thought could also travel in waves. The living proof was a hungry bird, a teratorn weighing 15 kilograms and standing 3.3 meters tall. Now the existence of a third property “apart” from matter and energy—unconscious consciousness immanent in the electromagnetic waves of the universe—threw the old string theories out the metaphoric window. New ideas and new equations started to make sense. That iconoclast Bohm, and others, started to make sense. Experiments with DNA and the holographic principle revealed some of the secrets of organized life and became the basis for a panpsychism, a TOE that went beyond anything Einstein had imagined.

  Idly, Brad called the old biography to the screen. The author had emphasized Einstein’s tragedy over his genius, highlighting the scientist’s final years, when he had ignored mainstream developments in modern physics, suspicious of the new school of quantum mechanics, dismissing even the strong and weak nuclear forces. The book had won every prize of its chaotic time, making Einstein come to life as a mournful King Lear, Fool, and Prometheus, eternally foolish, eternally suffering. The pathos had appealed strongly to Brad.

  He studied the famous photograph of wild hair and deep-set eyes. If only Einstein could have seen the work that continued after his death and built on his ideas. In Brad’s adolescence (and, Brad admitted, for a long time after that as well) he had had daydreams in which he talked to Einstein, in which he sat with Einstein on a grassy hill or quiet spot in the lab and brought him up to date. At first, the great scientist had argued, as he had argued in his own lifetime—not ready to see the indivisible interconnectedness of the universe. Patiently, Brad had explained. Step by step. And Einstein listened with growing interest. His questions were probing, brilliant, as were Brad’s answers. In the end, the great man was so grateful. So impressed. They began to collaborate. Almost they were like father and son.

  And what did Einstein often say to Brad, speaking to him in particular? Brad spoke out loud, softly in his office. “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

  Brad closed his eyes. He remembered Dog’s gift. The double helix. Amazing. Three golden lines. Mysterious. Unfortunately, almost everything else about that day was a blur. Brad opened his eyes and began opening his computer files, skimming through yesterday’s advances, refreshing himself. Energized.

  Later in the afternoon, a least favorite colleague bounced into the room—no one ever knocked at the lab. But Brad didn’t feel the usual annoyance, not like before. And the colleague was not bouncing so much as hurrying. “There’s someone here,” she breathed, noticeably exhaling and inhaling.

  A figure pushed at her from behind so that she half fell further into Brad’s office.

  “L
uke!” Brad stood up. Luke looked terrible and smelled awful.

  The least favorite colleague caught her balance and turned toward the wild-haired, wild-eyed old man. Brad noticed she had already steadied herself and was preparing a defense. Lab rats weren’t as soft as the tribes imagined. They exercised. They trained for their quests. They hunted their own food.

  “It’s okay, Judith,” Brad said to the woman. “I know him.”

  “I have to talk with you alone,” Luke squeaked, clutching a leather sack to his chest.

  “It’s fine,” Brad assured the woman again. “He’s fine. He’s from my quest. Thank you. Thank you.”

  “I’ll be close by,” Judith said. Brad nodded. That was nice of her.

  As soon as they were alone, Luke closed the door and squinted at Brad craftily. “Only you can help,” he whispered. “The only one. Dog said you would know what to do.”

  It shocked Brad to see Luke so disheveled. And where was Dog? But, of course, Luke couldn’t bring the direwolf into the lab. The first thing to do was arrange a bath and food for the old man. Then, obviously, Luke needed to rest. Things had gone badly for him. The blonde woman could find a spare room.

  Now Luke was emptying his leather sack on the floor, and Brad was stepping back as Dog’s head tumbled out, lips pulled back from the gums. The yellow teeth still looked ferocious. The blue eyes were open and clouded. A fly escaped into the room.

  Luke crouched and petted the direwolf’s bloodied fur, above the edge of the neck where he had severed it from the body.

  “He said you would know what to do,” Luke repeated. “He told me what to tell you. It’s all planned out. Just before he died. He told me what to do.”

  PART TWO

  Because of Brad, Dog knew about the holographic principle, how everything in the world was a four-dimensional image formed of waves that were themselves formed by electromagnetic and quantum processes. He knew about quantum non-locality, how the billions of cells in his body were in constant non-physical communication, a complex bio-holo-electromagnetic field organized by DNA into the biohologram of Dog’s body and Luke’s body and Brad’s body. He knew about DNA from Lucia and from his own research and study, and he knew about radio waves from some deep mutation in his brain, from his birth to a direwolf in a northern cave.

  CHAPTER TEN

  CLARE

  Clare was appalled. At first she couldn’t speak. And Brad couldn’t return her stare. Literally, he couldn’t face her. Clare turned her attention to Luke, who was also appalling. Since she had last seen him, the old man had become a real bushkie, his gray hair matted, his eyes unfocused as he patted the head of a decapitated direwolf. The former Luke had been trim in loose-fitting leather. But now he seemed to fill up Brad’s office, sitting on the floor like a big animal in a small trap. His smell and the smell of the dead Dog permeated the room, for he had been here all day, hiding, talking. What he proposed was crazy, crazier than any bushkie had ever dreamed, crazy and irresponsible and absolutely forbidden by the Council.

  “We’ll have to modify the transmitter in the tower,” Brad said.

  Then Clare realized that Brad was not avoiding eye contact because he felt ashamed. Brad was simply turned inward, obsessed with his new plan, this sacrilegious experiment. Brad was actually listening to Luke and encouraging him. Clare sat down in Brad’s office chair, tired from walking all day with the other hunters, walking and finding little game, three javelinas and a single coati. It wasn’t much, considering the number of people they had to feed. It wasn’t unexpected, either, since the lab rats never moved to another camp but scoured the same hunting grounds over and over. All day, Clare had felt oddly dispirited, sorry about her quarrel with Brad that morning. At some point, she had made her decision. She had something important to tell Brad and she would not wait any longer. So she had come immediately to his office, not cleaning herself, not helping the other hunters skin the animals.

  “Brad!” she spoke loudly to get his attention. “You know you can’t do this.”

  They both looked at her, and suddenly Luke did not seem so unfocused.

  “This is …” Brad hesitated. “An extraordinary opportunity.”

  “Then ask the Council first. That’s why we elected them.”

  Of course, Brad didn’t bother to answer that. They both knew what the Council would say. “Right,” Clare agreed. “Because it is wrong. Because we don’t do this kind of thing anymore.”

  Luke said, “You can’t let Dog die.”

  Clare pointed to the object on the floor. “Dog has already died.”

  The old man flinched.

  “Don’t be cruel,” Brad chided, and it was as if he truly could not help himself now, as if he truly had no choice: he began to lecture. “We know DNA uses radio waves to create the organism’s natural biohologram. We know that after death the biohologram is no longer cohesive.” Brad started to move about the room, but Luke was in the way, so the lab rat gestured instead, also pointing to Dog’s head on the floor. “Obviously, in Dog’s DNA, the switch for matter and energy no longer works. But the switch for something else might, for what we call the unique consciousness of the organism. Dog thinks it does.”

  Brad corrected himself. “Dog thought it did. Before he died. He believed that his own DNA, with the right radio wave, could be turned on again and that it could, ah, reanchor, reassemble the unique consciousness that had been formed up to the time of his death.” Brad was speaking very fast now to prevent Clare from interrupting him. “Dog had an extraordinary gift. An insight into the structure of DNA and the genetic pattern. I saw it myself when we were joined by peyote. I saw it myself, Clare! Dog knows how to turn on his own DNA. He knows the right frequency, the right amplitude, sine, and cosine.”

  Clare wanted to yell back that she was not a buffalo. He had already explained all this, and she understood the basic concept. They wanted to send radio waves into a dead animal’s head. They wanted to recreate Dog’s connection to the panpsychism that unites all things. Consciousness that travels in waves. The unique consciousness that emerges and evolves with the biohologram of each DNA-based organism and that dissolves when the biohologram dissolves. They wanted to disobey one of the primary rules of The Return, the Council, the elders, and the last hundred fifty years—not to interfere with the natural order. Never to muck-a-luck again. And yes, she yelled, this was punishable. They could be severely punished for this. They wanted to do something humans had never done before, something no one knew anything about, something Brad was doing only because he thought he could do it, because this … mutation had whispered to a bushkie before he died.

  “Luke isn’t a bushkie.” Brad pretended to be indignant for his friend.

  Luke spoke from his place on the floor, “Dog told me what to do. I heard him. I know what to do. But we need Brad’s help.”

  Brad explained again that Dog needed his insights into DNA to be translated into numbers and the numbers put through a computer that would moderate the radio signal. Radio waves varied from one millimeter to a hundred kilometers. They were as variable as DNA itself. Everything had to be finely tuned.

  Clare couldn’t believe this was happening. “No one cares about that!” she heard herself shrieking. “No one cares how you do this!”

  She couldn’t believe she was here in this stale stuffy room filled with scavenged materials, ugly plastic, ugly metal, ugly walls. She couldn’t believe she was screaming at a poor crazy bushkie and the decaying flesh of a cowardly direwolf. This wasn’t her. This wasn’t her life. She should be with her tribe. She should be striding through the yellow grass, the winter sky a blue bowl over her head. The cool air. Rich smells. Mountains like humped animals in the distance. She should be walking through this precious world they had miraculously been given back, the only world they would ever have, spear in hand, alert in the moment.

  “It’s not the how,” she said and actually stamped her foot.

  The family of ground sloths murmu
red sweet nothings to each other. The big slow animals weighed at least two hundred kilograms and were the most pleasant-tempered of all the Paleos, perhaps of any animal on earth. Despite their claws, they would also be the most defenseless except that their meat tasted terrible, a nauseating flavor even teratorns scorned. Saber-toothed cats, lions, and bears taught their cubs, and wolves and hyenas taught their pups: don’t bother. And so the giant sloths were left alone to spend their days eating leaves and roots, cooing back and forth all the while, a constant reassurance between parent and child, sibling and sibling, wife and husband. Here-I-am. Sweetling. Here-I-am. Don’t-go-far. Don’t-worry.

  With her back against the rough trunk of a pine, Clare rested and listened to the murmuring sloths. Deliberately, slowly, she chewed a stick of elk jerky. Soon she would get up and hurry on again, across the land, almost running but not quite running, covering as many kilometers as she could, walking until nightfall, when she would sleep in another tree, not bothering to hunt or put out snares or make a fire. She wasn’t comfortable traveling this distance alone, but she had no choice. Deliberately, calmly, she thought of Luke and Dog. Naturally Luke had come to depend on the direwolf for company. Naturally the bushkie had been distraught when his beloved companion died. The loss of such a friend had pushed the old man/woman over the edge. He was to be pitied. Poor Luke. Poor Dog.

  Clare felt better now. She touched her stomach, her center. She knew who she was. So many things at the lab had been wrong—not big things, little things, but still so many of them, surprising her. The solstice tree with its round ornaments. The jokes the hunters made as they sat around a campfire. The way they cooked their meat in clay pots, with many of the herbs she knew, but still tasting wrong. The strange vegetables that came from their gardens, squash that was too big, and something called beets. Clare had been in service at the lab before, long ago, but she didn’t remember feeling so alienated then. Of course, she thought now, she had been younger, less observant and more flexible. Also she had slept and eaten mostly with her own group, the other tribal members in service. She hadn’t really been paying attention.