Clare let the men talk out their ideas, arguing in the ramada, arguing while they made their hunting weapons. She listened to both sides, her mind so much clearer now, more and more back to her old self. (Only sometimes she felt her stomach drop at the enormity of what she had done. She looked at Elise and could hardly believe this was her daughter, this shimmering creature. Her life made whole.) Finally one night she called for a decision as they ate dinner, billowing clouds in the west lit with pink and orange like a grass fire in the sky. Clare listened again as the two men repeated their main points. When Brad’s voice rose to a certain level, she intervened.
“Of course, you’re both right,” Clare said from behind the babies. “We have to hide from the Council. We have to find a safe place to live. And we have to think about the future as well, for our children and for ourselves. We want to flourish, not just survive. So there has to be a third alternative. There has to be … somewhere the Council and the elders won’t find us, at least not for a certain amount of time. There has to be somewhere close by the lab but not too close where we can hide but still negotiate with the tribes.”
“North, still?” Luke protested.
“North, but where no one goes. Where no one has a reason to go,” Clare said. “Maybe the hunting is bad. Maybe there’s a bad feeling. Something we can live with. A place they won’t think about. Meanwhile we’ll keep in contact. We’ll arrange meetings—on our own terms.”
“Not a city, not a town,” Brad objected. “They are too sad.”
Luke looked at Dog.
“What?” Clare prompted.
“Yes, that might work,” Dog said to everyone.
Luke and Dog had been to this place a long time ago, south of the lab, east of Albuquerque. They had climbed to the top of a high mesa rimmed with rock where the Acoma Pueblo had stood for over a thousand years. For hundreds of years, only one trail snaked up to the village, with a rope ladder for the last treacherous feet. Inaccessibility was the pueblo’s defense, since few enemies wanted to make an attack huffing and climbing a steep slope. Later in the twentieth century, people had built a road, also winding dizzily upward. That road was the main access now, the trail lost and overgrown.
Brad had never heard of the Acoma Pueblo.
Luke pointed out that this was a good sign.
“There’d be no water on the mesa,” Brad countered.
“Rain catchments, nano catchments,” Luke replied. “People lived there before.”
“We’d go elsewhere for hunting then.”
“That’s mostly what they did. They grew food, too.”
Clare could see that Luke was conceding. Perhaps Brad’s reminders had convinced him, how the bushkies had thrown stones, rocking him backward. And how Clare had saved him, her spear in the crazy bushkie’s chest—although that seemed a thousand years ago, too. The old man shrugged at her. Was this what she wanted? Would this make her happy? She nodded back, and after a time, after more questions, Brad also nodded, conceding as well. Clare knew he was thinking they could shelter on the mesa temporarily, while he emailed and cajoled his friends at the lab, using his charms to talk them back home.
Clare nursed the boy. The girl was asleep. Clare didn’t think they could ever go home. She remembered Jon’s reaction to Elise. Other people would feel the same way. Her children would never be accepted in the lab or in the tribes. Clare felt the grief of that. She felt regret for her lost family and friends. But she felt the pull at her breast more. She remembered how much babies anchored you to them.
Brad and Luke began to plan. For their first months, maybe through winter, the mesa was big enough to provide food, with plenty of mice and rabbits, probably even a resident deer herd. And Luke hadn’t felt any sadness from the pueblo. Probably not many people had lived there at the time of the supervirus. Luke only had good memories of his stay there, chanting to the sun, killing a bear with Dog, eating bear fat.
In the dimming light of day, Brad drew a route in the sand. He wanted to stop at Los Alamos for a pair of eyeglasses and the things he needed to build a solarcomp. But—Brad reconsidered and redrew his map—Los Alamos took them too far north. So it would have to be Albuquerque, and that wasn’t good. Albuquerque was one of the big places that receivers avoided.
“What will we do about fire?” Luke wondered. “That’s what brought in the Round River people.”
“Right,” Brad thought. “We’ll have to come up with new ways of preparing meat, baking roots. We can make solar ovens …”
We will have to come up with rules, Clare thought, as she put the babies down beside her in their nest of rabbit fur. If they were going to build a new community, they had to make agreements, contracts of behavior among the humans and between the humans and the golden animals. She had already talked to Dog and the saber-toothed cat. She knew what the big cat had done, leaping into Jon’s mind, putting him to sleep. She had already warned Dog and the cat both: This could never happen again. They would have to agree never again to interfere with the physical world, the world of humans.
“I promise,” Dog had said.
“I promise,” said the saber-toothed cat.
Clare had never known a Paleo to lie or be able to lie.
“No, we can’t,” Dog told her. “We can’t lie to you.”
There would have to be rules, Clare thought, for the people who would eventually come to the mesa to see the golden animals and to see Elise. Because, Clare knew, once the Council and elders had been pacified, these people would come. They couldn’t be stopped. Like Brad, they would want to know. They would be curious. They would be eager. Unlike Jon, they wouldn’t be afraid of Elise as a ghost or spirit. She was something new. A door had opened. A wind was blowing through the open door. Eventually, some of these people would want to join their community, and that would be a good thing as the babies grew up and needed children to play with and marriage partners, too. This would be the start of a new tribe, different from any other tribe in the world, any other in the history of the world.
Clare understood that she, herself, would have to change. She would have to accept the golden animals as part of her family. They shouldn’t have to hide from her or follow behind. There shouldn’t be any more secrets.
And she would have to be more firm with Elise. People would be coming to meet the little girl, and Elise would need to make these people comfortable, to comb and braid her hair, to walk on the ground. Clare thought she had already seen a difference in her oldest daughter. Now she was a big sister with responsibilities. She was already maturing, speaking more seriously, not so flighty or self-absorbed.
There would have to be rules. You shouldn’t do something just because you could. There would have to be new agreements. They were moving now beyond The Return, and that thought made Clare open her eyes in the darkness, where she lay next to the babies. They would have to be careful. Thoughtful. Clare let the two men plan out food and water and cooking and eyeglasses while the moon rose and the stars appeared and the babies murmured. The boy gave a big yawn. The girl sighed as though in the middle of a dream.
Clare had to watch where she put her feet. In the last hundred fifty years, the asphalt road had cracked and heaved, and grass and shrubs now covered these holes. It would be easy to turn an ankle or trip and spill the babies from their sling. Clare watched her feet and tried to look only at the view when she and Brad and Luke stopped to catch their breath as they climbed up, up, and up the steep road, the plain of yellow grass spreading below, the mesas and buttes spreading into the distance. In their travels here, stopping at a small town outside Albuquerque, getting their supplies, and then walking quickly east, Clare had noted these pillars of rock standing like sentinels, red rock layered with white. All the mountains in this area were bare boned, without trees, sculptures of wind. There would be less game here in this vast desert bowl and fewer people looking for game, and that suited Clare just fine.
They switchbacked to the top of the mesa, the blue space be
low getting bigger and bigger, more and more space everywhere. Clare’s rib cage seemed to expand. Her heart ached with a longing to fly, and her limbs felt lighter, her bones weightless—as if she really could fly: jump up, flap her wings, and be gone. Oh, yes, she thought, she would like living here. She would like all this space and sky.
“A Stairway to Heaven,” Brad said.
Clare smiled back. “I don’t know that quote.”
“It’s the title of an old book from the twenty-first century, a biography of Albert Einstein. A Stairway to Heaven.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“When we get the solarcomp working,” Brad promised, “when we have the web again, you can read it.” Brad was also in high spirits, wearing a new pair of eyeglasses, with a second pair in his pack along with the motherboard and computer supplies they had scavenged.
Clare nodded, although she doubted she would have time in the immediate future to read a book. Once they reached the pueblo, there was so much work to do and so few people to do that work. Still … she let her mind drift a bit, with Luke and Brad right beside her watching for animals or signs of danger, with Dog and the golden animals looking after them, too.
She thought of her students. She would make time for a long email. She owed them an explanation, and she wanted to write it all out from beginning to end, not holding anything back. At least, not anything important. She would start with Brad’s quest and how they had met Luke. What Brad and Luke had done to bring back Dog’s unique consciousness. What she had done. She’d tell them about Elise. That would be shocking, she knew. But she’d be honest about everything. (Except, perhaps, about Jon. What he had done. You could draw boundaries when you wrote. Jon had behaved badly. She didn’t need to tell the world.)
She’d introduce the golden animals. The bears, the horses (the darling colt), the deer, the mice, the camel, the calico cat. She’d describe the two Paleos, Dog and the saber-toothed cat, and the long talks they sometimes had now that these animals spoke in sentences.
“Dear Carlos,” Clare imagined writing. Yes, she would send each one an individual letter, something personal. “When I read your last email to me, I was touched. It’s natural to feel that way about a teacher, especially one with whom you have shared the intimacy of writing but never knew physically. You never saw me sneeze or act grouchy in the morning. You felt liberated at how easily and powerfully you could express your feelings and thoughts when you wrote, and you projected some of that good feeling—that love and joy of creative expression—onto me. I became your confidante and we have, indeed, had many good collaborative moments in your papers …”
Brad spoke suddenly, “Have you ever grown food?”
“Oh, you know,” Clare brought herself back. “It’s not exactly against The Return. It just never seemed necessary. We throw out seeds of plants we like to eat. We don’t tend them but we plant them, I guess, where we know they’ll get more water than usual.”
“I think we had a garden at the lab. I can’t believe I never paid any attention.”
“Hmm,” Clare said.
Brad began to plan a garden.
Dear Alice, I’m so sorry I stopped responding to your assignments. In truth, I didn’t know what to say. My life and plans were very uncertain then, and I didn’t want to upset you with possibilities and ideas that I didn’t yet understand myself. Now things seem a little more settled, and I want you to know that I very much enjoyed reading about your “adventures” in China. I was also pleased to see how you acted as your own editor when you pretended to know and respond to what I would say. Yes, you wandered off topic and lost the thread of your plot. But sometimes that can be fruitful, when we are trying to discover what is really most important to us, when we are trying, still, to find our real themes—the heart of the story.
As for the Chinese coming to get us in airplanes, I think you are right again—that’s not going to happen. On the other hand, other surprises may …
Dear Dimitri, I know that change can be difficult. It’s upsetting that someone in your tribe wants to start using guns to protect yourselves from the tigers that are growing more numerous in your area. Of course, I agree with you. I also think that relying on guns for this problem would be a bad idea. Like you, I believe your tribe can come up with more creative solutions.
Do try to remember, though, that the person who is trying to make this happen had a son who died and that he or she is still grieving that loss. It may not be easy for you to understand the feelings that come with the death of a child, the sense of disharmony and disconnect, but I have experienced them myself, and I know these feelings sometimes make us do things we wouldn’t do otherwise. I will explain more about that later in this email.
First I want to talk with you about The Return, which we cannot think of as something that will always remain the same. Our ancestors lived this kind of life for tens of thousands of years, but eventually, inevitably, something happened and things changed. Paleos like the mammoth and saber-toothed cat disappeared, and for a long time that affected how we saw physics and the relationship of consciousness to matter. The cloning of the Paleos was another change. And global warming. And the supervirus. As with many processes—think in terms of the metamorphosis within the moth’s cocoon—change triggers more change and then change can start happening ever more quickly. The Return now is part of the accelerating nature of human and cultural evolution. The Quakers remind us, “All is flux.” In that flux and chaos, many things happen that are outside our control. What we are able to control is our own acceptance and response …
Dear María, I am so proud of you for your long quest, your quinceañera! I know your parents must be proud, too. You’ll be taking your place as an adult now in your tribe. You’ll start to make decisions with the others, and perhaps someday you will even be an elder yourself and certain important decisions will be yours to make …
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
DOG
Dog sat and admired the view. A thunderstorm built in the west, billows of white and gray and dark-gray cumulonimbus forming into massive towers, warm air rising through rapidly dropping temperatures until the condensed water and ice became heavy enough to fall, the electrical energy building as more water and ice particles were repeatedly split and separated. Here and there shafts of sun pierced through the cloudscape illuminating a red rock butte or patch of yellow grass. The world glowed, bathed in color, saturated with red and orange and yellow. The plain of grass and desert scrub and rock formations stretched to the horizon, bounded by bony mountains in the far distance. Some of the mountains looked like sleeping animals, some like the parts of human giants—a resting head, a shoulder and arm. Dog knew the old myths, what Clare told Elise at her pretend bedtime, what she whispered to the babies as they fell asleep. Spider Woman. The Warrior Twins. Lucy the Staunch Standard Poodle.
Humans loved stories just as Dog loved stories.
Now the golden animals surrounded him. They couldn’t stay away for long. The golden animals admired the view. A small puffy cloud scuttled in front of the thunderstorm like a white-tailed deer. A dazzling spear of lightning cracked open the sky. The earth boomed.
Elise was singing. Then she interrupted herself, “My mother needs me back home.” As she practiced keeping her holo-feet on the ground, the child teetered on the edge of rimrock, the drop below her straight down, heart-stopping if any of them had a heart. Lately Elise had taken on the task of entertaining her brother and sister while Clare prepared animal skins and finished the winter garden that Brad had started and soon abandoned. The four-year-old was also letting Clare braid and fuss over her hair. She had a little bit of the horse in her now, compliant and willing to please, and she had Dog’s voice whispering in her ear about what love meant, what it meant to make the people you love happy. She loved her mother. And she loved the babies, their contagious smiles when she made funny faces and told them jokes.
“You have time,” the saber-toothed cat said. “Th
ey’ll nap a little longer.”
The saber-toothed cat also liked to help Clare, nudging the babies to sleep when they were fussy, when they got tired of pruning their neural networks and learning language and mastering the movements of their arms and legs. The twins were working hard, and they were hard work, too, for everyone else. No one had foreseen how hard it would be raising up human twins.
Dog thought of Brad, who was also working doubly hard, taking his turn with the babies, hunting rabbits, gathering roots, thinking up new inventions like solar ovens that cooked their food without smoke—and then, at night, spending hours at his computer. His stream of tedious emails to the Council. His secret emails to the blonde-haired woman and other allies. His theories and explanations broadcast to the tribes around the world, with math equations at the end.
Like Clare, Dog believed Brad was naive when he insisted that someday the Council would let them come back to the lab. That all would be forgiven. This was not Dog’s own experience. He remembered his mother’s teeth on his neck.
“Look,” Elise spoke, and Dog let her voice surprise him. “Something beautiful.”
Thirteen sunflowers of varying size from one to three meters floated in the air just past the rimrock ledge. Each one had its composite disk of flowers, each ray flower adding to the circle’s edge with a long curling yellow petal, each flower in the center containing an ovule fertilized and becoming a seed. The composite disk, the thick stalk, the large healthy leaves glowed, luminous, like a pillar of light.
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