Knocking on Heaven's Door

by Sharman Apt Russell

  Brad tried to remember where they should be going—back to the stream where he had gone before to fill up their gourds and water bottles. That seemed such a long time ago. The smoke was making everything look dim. Worse, he had lost his eyeglasses. Half-blind, he stumbled next to Luke, who seemed to be following Dog and the golden animals. Brad tried to think of what they needed to do.

  “No,” he said when they came to the streambed, and Dog and the golden animals turned right toward the pools of water. They were very small pools in a curve against the grassy bank. “The pools aren’t deep enough,” he told Dog since that was easier than speaking out loud, “and they are on the wrong side, right against the bank where the fire will be. Flames kill people in a grass fire, but so does radiant heat, and standing in shallow water won’t protect us if we can’t keep the fire at a distance.”

  He tried to say some of this to Luke and Clare, but his mouth was too dry.

  “Just to the left,” he explained to Dog, “the stream dries out completely and gets wider. There’s another arroyo coming in at that point, another gravel bed, so that’s another firebreak. We are better off there if we have enough cleared space around us. If we can get in the center of that, equidistant from the flames.”

  “Trust me,” Brad mouthed to Clare, and she nodded and turned left.

  This was Newtonian physics, nothing more or less, and Brad thought of slopes, the speed of flames, radiant heat in a straight line. How much protection did the arroyo give them? Were five meters of cleared gravel and sand enough? What vegetation should they rip up first? Grass fires didn’t shoot out many embers, but there would be a few. How many? Should they stand or huddle, the baby in the center? The babies. There wasn’t much time. There really wasn’t that much to think about. Still, Brad felt that if he could get the math just right …

  He pointed to a spot where the arroyo met the streambed, and Clare put down the sling, and then the three adults spread out like hyper-insects, their adrenaline high, moving more quickly than they would have thought possible, pulling up plants and shrubs that had grown up since spring, scuffing over clumps of grass.

  A wall of fire makes a particular sound, like nothing Brad had ever heard before, yet something he recognized almost immediately. He yelled at everyone to stop. Stop and huddle around the babies, faces inward! Clare had to be urged away from the patch of grass she was uprooting. “Leave it!” Brad yelled, which made his throat hurt even more. Luke stumbled over, the last to join them, his hands held awkwardly against his chest. Brad noticed that his own fingers were torn and bloodied, too.

  Then the fire roared down on them, a broken circle, the mouth of the arroyo a gap, the two ends of the streambed a gap, the fire leaping to the other bank of the arroyo. The golden animals moved in and out of the flames, Elise and the bears and the deer and the horses and the mice and a camel and a small cat, the direwolf and the saber-toothed cat with her blocky head. There was nothing they could do, but they wove in and out of the fire like a wreath, and then when the heat became most intense, they came to stand around the humans, a circle of golden consciousness that couldn’t and didn’t block the waves of overheated electrons. Still it was a gesture Brad appreciated. It was a comfort, and much more comforting than that, within minutes, as the fire whispered and roared, Brad knew it was not going to kill them. This was the worst it would do, blistering their exposed skin. They would survive.

  All the adults wore shoes made of leather and yucca rope, and they were grateful for this as they walked back upstream to the pools, the sand and gravel still hot, the pools also hot and steaming. They found a place to sit nearby, gingerly, in the sand and sun without shade for their burns since all the trees and shrubs were black sticks stabbing the sky. They were alive. They felt euphoric. They felt like talking. They counted their blessings. Brad had a daughter! And a son! Clare sat here beside him! She nursed his children. Clare laughed at his pleasure and beckoned to Elise. “Come here, sweetheart, meet your siblings.” The little girl floated over, acting shy.

  The babies, impossibly, fell asleep. The adults told their stories. Brad went first, the details boring to him since he already knew them and had spent most of his time in a badger’s hole, dreaming about a horse’s tail. Clare also described the birth quickly. That was over. She felt chagrined she had never guessed that Brad was tied up all the while, and Lucia, too, thrown in the pit next to Brad. Clare described Jon and his dark eyes in the birthing shelter, the way he held the boy without warmth or kindness, the way he stared at the girl as though she were food.

  Clare was most concerned about what Jon had told Brad about the Council and elders. They knew everything. They had Brad’s notes on his computer. Had they really sent Jon to take her and Brad back to the lab? Or had Jon come on his own, without permission?

  “He thought Elise was … a ghost.” Clare worried this piece of information. Jon had obviously been shaken by Elise. He thought her unnatural, the unique consciousness of a human reanchored, reassembled, without the physical biohologram. A new kind of being in the world. Perhaps he was having a religious crisis?

  “That’s a nice way of putting it,” Brad said. “He tried to kill me, and he tried to kill Luke, to get us out of the way.”

  Clare corrected, “He didn’t kill you, although he could have. He tied you up.”

  “He left us to burn!”

  “Later, yes, when the fire came.” Clare shook her head. She had known Jon all her life. He had always been a good hunter, singing sweetly by the fire. Brad had seen that himself at the summer camp: Everyone liked Jon. “I just can’t believe … someone could change that much.”

  No one spoke for a moment. Then Luke said dryly, “I guess we’ve all changed.”

  Clare seemed happy to drop the subject. “He was taking me to the pools,” she went on. “And then he suddenly stopped. He stopped, and I broke away so I could come back and find you, untie you, and then he grabbed me again. And then …” Clare looked around for Dog. But Elise, Dog, and the golden animals had gone wandering off some time ago. “The saber-toothed cat was there, jumping into Jon. She jumped into him. She disappeared. And Jon slumped over and fell down.”

  Brad had a lot of questions about that. But he asked only, “Was Jon dead?”

  Clare didn’t think so. She didn’t know.

  Brad shifted in his burned skin, his neck and arms painful. None of them wanted to think about what had happened to Jon when the fire swept over him. Certainly, they needed to have a talk with Dog. The golden animals had some explaining to do.

  “If Jon didn’t come on his own,” Clare obsessed, “that means the Council does want to see us. He said they were angry, and that sounds true. What will they do about Elise? What if they take the babies away from us?” She looked down at the infants shaded by her body.

  Brad wanted to hold her but couldn’t make himself move. “We’ll never let that happen,” he said.

  Now Luke told his version, how Jon had attacked him late in the night when Clare was sleeping and Lucia relieving herself under the glittering stars, enjoying this rare moment alone—the river of stars, the open plain after the cramped birthing tree. Lucia had breathed in deeply. To the west, she could see lightning flashes in the sky. She could hear thunder and feel the heat of the day still rising from the ground. Perhaps the fire had started then. She had suddenly felt so tired. It had been a long birth. Before she could even shake herself dry, Jon had her in a chokehold on the ground and trussed like a javelina for roasting.

  “We treat javelinas better,” Brad said, watching Clare. Perhaps she would always feel sorry for her former student and lover. “We don’t roast them alive.”

  “Well,” Luke shrugged. “The man is dead now. You can be sure of that.”

  And Brad was sure, poking Jon’s body with his foot. Perhaps that was disrespectful, but he felt he had earned a little revenge. Then he felt guilty. He would not have wished this death on anyone. Then he felt vengeful again. The hunter had left
him and Lucia to the same death.

  Dog and Luke watched him kick the blackened flesh. The three of them were on their way back to the birthing tree where Brad hoped to salvage his solarcomp, maybe his eyeglasses, anything of use spared by the flames. Brad noted that Jon’s body was fairly close to the streambed, a good distance from where the hunter had stood with Clare when the saber-toothed cat jumped into his brain and put him to sleep. At least, that was Dog’s story. The hunter had only been put to sleep.

  “He must have woken up,” Brad murmured to himself. “Tried to run.”

  “We could bring him back,” Dog urged suddenly, speaking to Luke, too. “If you took something now, some DNA …”

  Luke made a sound of disgust.

  “No,” Brad said firmly. This was finally the right decision. He had promised Clare and Luke both. He thought of Clare, waiting by the pools. With two babies. This was still a surprise. “No,” Brad repeated. “That’s not going to happen. That’s never going to happen again.”

  “Muck-a-luck, it’s never going to happen,” Luke said and pointed his finger aggressively at Dog. “One of yours killed a human being. Have you forgotten that?”

  Dog lowered his head and nosed his flank as if biting for a tick. He shook himself like someone finished with grooming, sat on his haunches, and went through his explanation again. Brad only half listened. They had already heard Dog make this speech, with Clare and Brad and Luke asking questions, with the saber-toothed cat standing nearby but not speaking herself.

  Yes, the saber-toothed cat had leapt into Jon’s mind and body, lying next to a certain neural network. She had—to use a metaphor—begun to eat, like chewing the gristle on a bone. Chew, chew, chew. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw. The saber-toothed cat used the memory of her jaw muscles, the strength of those muscles, to bite down, tear down, tear apart. She only had to cut through one connection between sleep and wakefulness, a little bit of gristle connecting one thing to another.

  “But it was a physical connection in the brain,” Luke said now, again.

  Dog admitted that.

  “I thought you couldn’t affect the physical world?”

  Dog had thought so, too. But not all parts of the brain were purely physical. Sleep was a transitional time, consciousness deliberately becoming unconscious. Sleep wasn’t about death or physical injury, a lack of blood to the brain or an absence of oxygen. Sleep was a kind of choice. And saber-toothed cats had a special relationship with humans. They loved humans.

  “She didn’t hurt him,” Dog insisted. “She only put him to sleep. That’s all she can do. She put him to sleep just that one time. You were in trouble! It was an emergency.”

  “What about you?” Luke pressed. “Can you jump into our brains and eat them?”

  This question had also been asked before, and Brad understood that Luke simply needed the reassurance. He needed to hear Dog say it again.

  “No,” Dog said. “Only the saber-toothed cat.”

  Brad watched as Luke sighed and let his shoulders loosen. Saber-toothed cats had always been drawn to the flesh of humans, their favorite food. That was normal. That was familiar. Dog was clearly telling the truth. Surprisingly, Brad also felt better now. The direwolf twined around Luke’s legs before moving forward and pretending to sniff at Jon’s corpse, the clothes and skin burned away. Then he looked back meaningfully at the two men. They got the message. This could have been them, not Jon.

  “What’s done is done,” Brad said out loud, and he meant all of it—all they had done, and Luke understood that, too. Without speaking, they walked on to the charred juniper tree where Brad’s melted solarcomp lay with the other debris, ash and lumps of nothing useful. There was nothing to bring back to Clare. All their supplies were gone but the clothes and shoes they wore and the sling with the image of a swallow. They didn’t have any spears. They didn’t have any water bottles or gourds. They didn’t have a bone awl. They didn’t have any medicine. They didn’t have a way to communicate with the lab or Clare’s tribe or any tribe. They didn’t have any maps to pull up on the solarcomp they didn’t have. Brad didn’t have any eyeglasses. They were all in some pain, with first-degree burns. Only the babies had escaped injury.

  Brad thought of what they did have. Water and the skills to get food. Water and the skills to make what they needed. Water and the option of scavenging in the abandoned cites for what they couldn’t make. Back to Los Alamos, Brad thought reluctantly. He knew the store where the eyeglasses would be kept in a bottom drawer. He remembered bursting into tears at the children’s playground, the waves of sadness.

  “Hey,” Luke rummaged at the base of the blackened tree. “Oh, well, no.” Luke sounded disappointed. “Never mind.”

  For no reason at all, Brad thought of Jon’s biohologram deflating. He imagined that moment when Jon’s unique consciousness dissolved into the larger consciousness, knowing everything now, part of everything.

  No one wanted a campfire that night. They stretched on the sand by the pools, eating the cooked meat Clare had stripped from the rabbits and mice caught unaware by the flames. Luke had also gathered yucca root, already half-baked, and mesquite beans from a stand of trees downstream, inexplicably untouched. Tomorrow, Luke promised, he would find what he needed to make a paste for their injured skin. The coolness of the night refreshed them, and Brad thought he smelled rain.

  “Rain?” Clare looked up at a cloudless sky, the stars appearing in small groups. “Tomorrow,” Brad predicted, “I think it will rain.”

  Clare was dubious but willing to believe. “That would be nice,” she said amiably. Soon she fell asleep, the babies asleep, at least for a few hours.

  Elise and the golden animals wandered away. Dog stayed by Luke.

  The old man lay on his back staring up at darkness, stars shimmering and a sliver of moon. “What were you thinking?” Luke murmured. The refrain was a joke that had never been funny and now was just annoying.

  “You know the story of George Fox,” Dog said, as though he had grown up all his life a Quaker in Costa Rica. The voice of the direwolf sounded clearly in Brad’s thoughts and, Brad knew, in Luke’s as well. “When George Fox’s wife went to her husband and asked him to prove the existence of God’s love, he said he could not. Only she could prove the existence of God’s love. ‘How can God prove the existence of His love?’ George Fox asked his wife. ‘Can He speak to us through the trees? Through the animals? Through the sky? No, He speaks to us through you. He proves His love through you. How can He prove His love? He has only Thee.’”

  “So He has Thee now, Dog?” Luke asked.

  “Yes, we exist now,” Dog said. “Because of you.”

  The old man muttered, “I was a crazy bushkie. Brad should have never listened to me. You should have never …”

  Brad half listened to them quarrel, the same old quarrel, and then he didn’t listen, thinking instead about the future of his children. He felt fierce. Focused. They would have a future. His children would live in abundance, the best of times, the best of worlds.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CLARE

  In a landscape billowing soot, the remains of trees and bushes looked like corpses. The pools were a barren difficult place without shade, the wind whirling ash into Clare’s eyes. Even so, they stayed almost another week, eating the actual corpses left behind by the fire, building a ramada out of mesquite, and resting as much as possible. They needed something to carry water in, and Brad went back to Jon to discover that his fallen body had protected the gourds tied at his waist. (Clare thought of Jon, whom she would leave here soon. His bones would not be gathered now or mourned by the tribe but picked up casually by coyotes and ravens and carried away.) Luke made a spear, showing unexpected flair at knapping stone. Brad made rabbit snares that were less elegant but perfectly usable. Clare nursed the babies and sent her strength flowing into them and back into her. They prepared to journey on, even though they had no idea yet what direction they would take.

  Lu
ke argued for the south. The peyote fields had a bad reputation, but for that very reason they were a good place to hide. Surviving where less grass grew and fewer animals ate the grass would be difficult. The south was hotter, drier, thornier, unpredictable. But they were a functional group, not a lone bushkie sent out to die. Importantly, the elders might accept this as a kind of self-exile. If Clare and Brad and Luke willingly chose to remove themselves, the Council might not feel the need to come after them. The peyote fields would be their punishment. They would be left alone.

  Brad was adamantly opposed to the idea. The south was too dangerous, not just a difficult place to survive—as barren and bleak as this, Brad gestured at the dead trees and black soil surrounding them, using the burnt legacy of the grass fire to bolster his argument—but potentially full of murderous bushkies. Surely Luke remembered being kidnapped by bushkies, tied up, and almost sacrificed in a stone circle? Apparently bushkies could also form groups, bands of delusional schizophrenics. Brad had no intention of sending his family into that kind of danger. And he objected to the assumption that he and Luke and Clare needed to be punished—to go into exile. Instead they should go back to the lab, where he would plead their case. He had important friends at the lab. He had influence.

  Luke shot back that it was Brad who was being delusional if he thought he could talk the Council and elders into ignoring what had happened with Dog. With Elise. With the golden animals. Rules central to their culture had been dangerously ignored. Defied. Overthrown. Thanks to the Round River people, this was no secret either. By now everyone in the world had heard some kind of rumor that was becoming a story bigger and more imaginative every day. Luke remembered well the self-preserving politics of the Council. With all the North American tribes watching them, and the Russians and the Costa Rican Quakers, the elders would not pat Brad on the head and tell him to go off and be a good boy next time. At the least, they would take away the babies and give them to proper parents to raise. At the least, they would ban Elise and the golden animals from the lab and the camps. At the least, or at least likely, they would imprison one or more of the three adults. At the most—who knew what they would do?