“What do you mean? Why couldn’t you do it?”
“Oh, nothing. I’m just so happy.”
Then they started dancing around. Sheila Brooks was holding Ebi and swinging her. She was far too tall for the thinker, and her head kept hitting the stamen that hung down like a showerhead. It didn’t matter, they kept on dancing.
Komodo stood there, tried to keep his composure. Off in the distance, he could hear some of the other Atoms fighting, issuing harsh threats. Someone was about to get hurt. Komodo knew he should go to them, break up the fight, tend to the wounded. It was his responsibility. But he couldn’t move.
“Would you care for some cake, Ms. Brooks?” Ebi asked.
“I don’t know. I’m on this diet. My biospheres don’t converge harmoniously. I’ve got to hold little bags of pills under my tongue until they burst. Every pellet does something different. It’s all written down, somewhere.”
“I made it myself, from my garden. It’s pharmfresh.”
“Well, I guess that’s okay. Sure. Sounds good.”
Ebi went to a corner of the small thinker and returned with a thickly iced cake. Stuck into the cake, lighting up the semigloom of the thinker, were eleven burning candles.
“Today your birthday? Why didn’t you say so before?”
Ebi giggled. “It’s not exactly my birthday.”
“A not-exactly-your-birthday party, just for the two of us?”
“Sort of like that,” Ebi said, softly. “Like your cake?”
“Great! Totally terrific! Best I ever ate!”
“Ms. Brooks, what’s your mom like?”
“My mom?” Sheila Brooks sounded stricken. “My mom is dead.”
“Mine too.”
“Really? That’s sad.”
“Yes. She died the day I was born.”
A quiver came into Sheila Brooks’s voice. “Mine too.”
“Do you remember her?”
“That’s crazy. How can you remember someone who died the day you were born?”
“I remember my mom,” Ebi said, as sweetly as she ever said anything in her life.
“Come on.”
“I really do. It was in the water. Water was all around, mad and angry. But I could still see her, looking at me, smiling. She liked me, I could tell. Except then, she flew away . . . just went, into that water.” Ebi paused a minute, then went on as cheerfully as ever. “You know, Mr. Komodo once told me that I am the only Atom ever born on Radioactive Island, but it’s not true, not exactly. I was born offshore. I could correct Mr. Komodo when he says that, but I don’t. It’s better that way, I think.”
“But that’s impossible. You must have dreamed it,” Sheila Brooks said, her voice cracking. “How can you remember being born? It can’t be done.”
“Is it that unusual? It has always been so simple for me. I just sit here and think about it. I wouldn’t say so if it wasn’t true. If I concentrate hard enough, I can do it right now.”
“Right here?”
“Sure. I’ll do it.”
A moment went by with no sound. Outside the thinker, Komodo thought his heart had stopped. Then, piercing, undeniable: “Waaaa!”
“Ebi! Are you all right?”
“Yes,” came a small voice. “Okay. I’m sorry if I alarmed you, Ms. Brooks. But it makes me so happy—happy and sad—to recall that moment. I bet you could remember too. I know you could—absolutely. You have such a good memory.”
Sheila Brooks was over by the wall of the thinker, her large, spidery hands pressing against the elastic sides. Komodo could see the bony fingers right above his head. “I think I try to. Sometimes I think it’s all I ever do. But I can’t do it—it doesn’t work. Sometimes I think I’m getting close, and then all this other crap, those stupid movies and the rest, they come in and block everything up . . .”
Komodo could hear Sheila Brooks weeping then. She cried for a minute or so until Ebi said, “I think you’d make a great mom, Ms. Brooks.”
“Me? No way. Bobby—my husband, Mr. Zeber. He’s wanted children for so long. But that’s not for me. I’m a mess. Everyone knows it. I read it in the paper. They say I march to the beat of a different drum machine. I’m lucky they don’t have me shut up somewhere, in a bin. It’s where I belong, you know. Not out here. I don’t fit in. Look at me. I can’t even dress right.”
“But I like the way you dress.”
“Get out!”
“I like it and I think you’d be a great mom!”
“I could never be anyone’s mom, it wouldn’t be fair.”
“You could be my mom, if you want.”
Sheila Brooks let out a high-pitched laugh. “But Ebi . . . don’t you think it’s a little late for that?”
“No!”
“You’re sweet.”
Komodo couldn’t see, but he knew Ebi’s face must have been big, open. “I’m serious. What do you think about Mr. Komodo?”
“What about Mr. Komodo?”
“You know, if you and Mr. Komodo could . . . then it would almost be like . . . well, maybe you wouldn’t really be my mom, but I could pretend that you were, for a little while.”
Sheila squealed like she was a teenager and this was girl talk. “You think me and Mr. Komodo should . . . that’s crazy.”
It was about then that Komodo fainted, fell onto the petals of the thinker, and pulled the whole thing down around Sheila and Ebi’s heads.
Fieldwork
“FURBALLS!”
They pounced unexpected from the underbrush, rapacious warmbloods, their red rat eyes beady streaks in the greasy moonlight. Onward they surged, flaring bucky incisors, breath hot and clutchy, closing ground. He ran from them, skittered over the mossmuck on hopelessly stunted appendages.
No chance. Not a prayer. Furballs can’t be outrun. It’s Prewire’s instinctual decree, you could look it up: “When confronted by the sudden presence of superior-sized woodchucks and worse, freeze! Make yourself a pithy twig, a braided root—never run away.” That’s because, as any garden skink knows, furballs eyeball peripheral, crosshair on motion. They work in packs, ply canny angles. Plus, they’ve got the speed. They’ll chase you to a corner, rend your leathers gnash by gnash.
So why was he running? Because Prewire’s impulse told him to! “Haul ass!” it screamed. Prewire . . . wrong? How could that be? When Prewire fails, the system’s junked. Termination, over and out. But what was there to do? Nothing overrides Prewire: It impulses, you obey, there is no next question. So he was running, to what he knew was the deadest of ends.
Then the pain was in him, a million electric ants charging up his spinal column as the malignant chomps serrated through to the bone. Rodents to the left, rodents to the right, there was no escape. It was madness! To die here—eaten by shrews in this unknown place, who knew how many million years from home. But then, from across all time came a familiar voice: “Swing your tail! Clout ’em out! Only shot you got!” He knew that voice, recognized those words. They were his own. Well, not exactly his. Rather, they came from that moldy King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms. He’d said them during a curiously similar situation in Gojiro vs. the Gigantor Prairie Dogs down the Burrow of No Return. It always pissed the monster off, the way little snatches of pathetic dialogue from those movies stuck inside the Quadcameral like resistant disk viruses. But here, backed against that primeval wall by Prewire’s bum steer, Gojiro was happy for the cue.
Across a hundred ice ages, the message decoded. A body coiled, a tail lashed: a reflex born. Thud! Thud and thud! Furballs flew through the air, yowling clumps of hair. Vertebrae bent and broke against the bark of new-sprung pines, the swamp echoed with their thrashing death throes. What sweet music those last gasps made!
But it wasn’t over. Still they came, exothermic, viviparous, a horde of hyperbolic metabolism. The swinish New Order: There was no turning back the tide, the tyranny. The Empire of the Saurs was diasporized, vanished from the earth. Those coldbloods who remained—suddenly subalterns
within the new, harsh hegemony—would have to adapt, become a different race. Without the reign to roam, they required a reconfigured scheme, an updated operating manual. They’d have to accommodate themselves in cracks, get canny in the crannies, never forget they were living in The Man’s world.
A bittersweet moment: to feel power slip from your kind, to become a refugee in the place you once ruled, yet to know that through change, Life goes on, that’s the way of the Evolloo. For no more than a moment later (or was it a hundred thousand years?) in another forest (on which drifting continent?) that same little lizard was again surrounded by gnawing shrews. Except this time he didn’t need input from a melancholy movie star to make good his escape. Now he didn’t run, didn’t give himself away. He couldn’t. “Play dead,” the Prewire commanded. “Play dead or be dead.” Change had come, instinct imprinting the proper course. Without backtalk or precondition, the zard submitted, made himself colder than any stone, breathed not a single breath. The misdirecting fecal pellet, that was a nice new wrinkle, a little extra something to flummox the vaunted sniffer now standard in mammalian snouts. Soon enough, they gave up and skulked away, off to pilfer the young of their brethren or however furball bastards filled their days at the dawn of primate times.
* * *
A Beam? Could that strange compulsion that overtook Gojiro inside the White Light Chamber truly be a Beam? The very word roused the deepest longings. The reptile tried to wrap his battered mentality around the idea. “It’s like I go where I been but I ain’t been, do what I done but I ain’t done, know what I know but I don’t know. Like the ghost’s inside me and I’m the ghost . . . a schizoid for all seasons.”
It couldn’t be a Beam, could it? Beams sprang from the Eye of the Matrix itself, in them flowed the soul of the Mainstem, the cohering force of Life—why would anything like that suddenly root inside his rueful head? The monster rolled himself into a tight ball. What was happening to him? All he knew was once that bizarre pneumatic force clamped its pirate frequency across the Quadcameral dial, back he’d go, through Time’s netherways, stopping off here and there as if to sample a bit of life and cuisine in every cene—Pleisto, Plio; Eo, too.
It ended in that egg. That confounding egg! “Mom!” Then he’d be digging, upward, through hard black dirt. “Mom!”—a glimpse of her face, that’s all he wanted, a picture to remember, treasure. But there was only searing light and a cry. That cry! “Waaaa!”
Bleary from his all-era blue jaunt, the reptile split lids, expecting to see Komodo. Every other time he’d woken up wailing, Komodo had been there to soothe and steady, to say it was morning now and the wild things were away. But now there was only Joseph Prometheus Brooks, eight times over, electronic gray and hoary on those Philcos.
Brooks! Riveted to his spot in the middle of the Valley where the Heater came to life, just as the forbidding Ahab once stood beside the mast where he nailed the Whale’s bounty. Brooks . . . staring out . . . staring out.
* * *
It seemed like the best thing to do at the time: Wipe away all emotionality, declare Brooks an object, a neutral item suitable for study, clinical use. It was only fair, Gojiro decided, recalling the humiliation he’d felt as he pored over those field studies that constantly turned up on Radioactive Island beaches, monographs with titles like Soma-sensory Pathways in the Medial Lemniscus and Related Structures of the South Sea Varanidae. How hideous it was to think of those safari-suited bio-boys smugly aggregating scats, pulsing strobes, dropping zards into infernal obstacle courses. Criminals. Who appointed them experts on the ’tilic life? By what license did they suppose their reports to be definitive? Nevertheless, Gojiro couldn’t keep away from those master theses. Bereft of Bunch and Beam, he felt he had no choice but to grab whatever shred of secondhand self-knowledge came his way, even if it came interred within the provincial sapienspeak of Order, Class, and Phylum. Now, however, he resolved to apply the same torpid criteria to Brooks. Joseph Prometheus Brooks: specimen. There was justice to it.
As might be expected, the reptile’s initial inclination was toward the ultra-invasive, the noggin nip, neural removal. And why not? Wasn’t Brooks’s brain legend, totemic? “The most powerful mind in the history of mankind has stopped thinking!”—isn’t that how they hyperbolized in that newsreel of Brooks’s phony funeral? But really, the saga of Brooks’s brain was only beginning, what with all the legal hassles regarding which scholarly institute might be granted access to the scientist’s supposedly defunct mentality, not to mention those tabloid stories about Israeli graverobbers selling cuttings of the vaunted cogitator on the black market. Brooks’s brain could stand a little demystification, the monster decided. An image invited: the mythic mind sitting like a Jell-O mold in the middle of an open, upraised claw and then squeezed tight until it oozed from between every leathery digit, electrostat tests to be made on the runoff.
How the great reptile would have loved to set Brooks down in a T-maze, raising and lowering his thermoregs at irregular intervals, then harshly grading the scientist’s performance in various motor skills. However, owing to the promise he’d made to Komodo barring such hands-on intervention, Gojiro was forced to reject that methodology. He would have to restrict his analysis to mere observation.
Off the surface, there wasn’t much to see. It was amazing how little Brooks did and how standardized those few actions appeared to be. Every morning, two hours before sunrise, the old man would appear in the doorway of that windswept stone house and walk stiff-gaited, as if on wooden legs, to the same place—exactly six feet to the right of the arched gate—where he assumed his singular posture. Then he’d just stare, motionless, his eyes fixed on a single spot, his cranelike neck upright, unwavering. At the start of his investigation, Gojiro could barely stay awake. “Talk about being out in the sun too long, this dude is pickled,” he yawned. But then, as the hours wore on, watching the stationary scientist turned hypnotic, a visual mantra. How he kept looking! There was a withering fortitude about it, an indomitable willfulness. The reptile’s conviction of Brooks’s madness began to slip; with gathering uneasiness he allowed the possibility that there was something out there—something the worldshatterer wanted to see. The monster labeled the old man’s behavior “the searching position.”
Substructured within this enigmatic trait was the equally puzzling “cradling” mannerism. Gojiro made these notes: “As if performing a sensory exercise in a beginning acting class, the Subject displays open, inclined palms, thereby giving the appearance of cradling an absent, rounded article of indeterminate size. Subject alternately holds this object close to his abdomen and then, with a small careful motion, appears to face it outward, in the general orientation of the previously described searching position. Inquiry into the striking analogy between this self-presentation and the portrait executed by Subject’s deceased wife, Leona Ross Brooks, approximately forty years earlier invites numerous textual interrogatories. Recommend close reading of this apparent coincidence at some later date.”
Gojiro filled several looseleafs in this manner. However, with each scrupulously recorded twitch of Brooks’s prominent Adam’s apple, each cross-referenced foot shuffle and hat rearrangement, the monster grew more impatient with the limitations that the same midshot from those fuzzy Philcos imposed upon his investigation.
“Got to get in tight.”
It wasn’t exactly going against his word, Gojiro rationalized, frantically rummaging through Komodo’s black bags. He’d sworn he wouldn’t leave the White Light Chamber to mash Brooks up. That was the last thing he wanted to do now. This was research, this was for science! Komodo could have no quarrel with that. Still, it was no party pushing that syringe, its needle fatter than Minnesota’s bluetipped cue, through the parietal, coursing that shrink fluid into his system. Dosage was a crap shoot—a drop too much and Alice’s dormouse wouldn’t know him from a swimmy paramecium. Through luck and little else, however, he managed to stabilize himself at approximately fourteen inche
s, a tolerable dimension.
After a monumental struggle with the passageway door, the miniaturized monster made his way out into the Encrucijada. From the beginning it felt like a mistake. Mutant or no mutant, noontime walkabouts in the desert heat were contraindicated. If his blood boiled over, bubbled from his panting mouth, he would have no refuge, no remedy, no excuse. But when he felt the Valley floor beneath his clawfeet, its sand turned to glass by the Heater’s fury, he knew there could be no turning back.
“Brooks!” Fifty feet from the unmoving old man, the shout came out before it could be properly suppressed. It wasn’t his intention to make contact with Brooks. This fieldwork was supposed to be noninterventionist, impersonal. But who was he kidding? How could anything between him and Brooks be impersonal? The two of them went back too far.
“Brooks. Remember me?”
“Brooks! Out of the multitudes, why me?”
It was useless, pointless. Maybe, amid the chiaroscuro of a rubberized volcano, deep in the fevered fantasies of a half-mad lizard, a man in black with heart-stopping stare could be made to answer for his crimes. But out here, beneath the blaring sun, every accusation desiccated to dust, blew away on the swirling Valley winds. What did Komodo say—that the old man looked through him? Now the reptile knew what his friend meant. Brooks’s demeanor did not invite smalltalk; it looked like you could snap a popper ’neath his jutting nose and he’d never raise an eyebrow.
But it was more than that, Gojiro realized as he drew closer. There was a trajectory problem. Given the near-imperceptible tilt of his dark eyes within their deep sockets, there was no way Brooks could see him, or any other object so close to the ground. “Subject’s field of vision assumes an elevated aspect,” the reptile noted. “Will attempt calibration.”
Cursing the lack of instrumentation, Gojiro nevertheless protracted the incline of Brooks’s sightline to be between thirty and forty-five degrees. The scientist appeared to be focusing on a distinct sector of sky that the monster estimated to be between two hundred and eight hundred feet above the Valley floor. “Weird,” he said to himself, peering into the empty blue. “It’s like Brooks is waiting for something to show up in that spot.” Not that the reptile was able to continue this train of thought, for right then he felt that hot breath on his neck.
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