by John Barnes
Antommarchi found an emergency candle in a bottom drawer. He poured rubbing alcohol over a medical sponge.
Antommarchi’s medical office was nicely decorated with nostalgic photos of famous European ruins: the Acropolis, the Roman Colosseum, Pompeii. All of these heritage shots were suitably soft-focussed and misty.
“In the 20th century, when a man joined a mass army,” said Antommarchi, searching for equipment, “he received a great many injections. Flu, measles, mumps, polio, rubella, tetanus, yellow fever, hepatitis, and typhoid. None of those diseases will ever kill a ninja zombie. Human diseases cannot live in their flesh.”
Calderon sat on a bare wooden stool in the candle-light. He knew that he was taking a dreadful step. He had always feared needles.
Antommarchi found a rubber hose, tied off his own arm, slapped his own forearm, and found a vein.
“Every man has to die of something,” he remarked, “even a superman must die. But I will never die from an epidemic disease. I promised myself that, when I was a bio-warrior.”
“How did that work out?”
“Well, a healthy soldier is important, of course. But what if he’s a healthy soldier who can also infect the enemy? That’s even better, isn’t it? I once worked in such an exciting, high-tech field.”
Antommarchi decanted fluid into the crook of his arm.
A rumble overhead drew Calderon from the bare stool to the window. A flotilla of helicopters was passing overhead, awkwardly-shaped cargo ships, their double-rotors beating in a strange, ungainly fashion, like flying kitchen equipment. There were two dozen of them. They were heading to the northeast. They had no markings.
“I thought those helicopters were coming to save us,” said Calderon.
“No, those are the rich people,” said Antommarchi, “retreating to safety.”
“But this town is the rich people’s safety.”
“That was then, and this is now.”
After Calderon’s own injection, Antommarchi gave him hot beef stew, laced with some pills he had. He plied him with cornbread and whiskey. After this heavy meal, Calderon sat on the couch and stared at the candle-lit wallpaper.
He could feel the potion hitting his nerves. Mostly, Calderon could feel it way down in his feet, because his feet had the longest nerves, back and forth from his brain. His feet had a different nervous vitality inside them. They were faunlike and springlike in their bones, they seemed to want to curl up.
“Leaving humanity is an act of biomedical science,” said Antommarchi. “The reaction to treatment will vary somewhat among patients, it’s always like that... Sometimes people turn back.”
“Ninja zombies turn back into people?” said Calderon.
“I never did. But then, Kutuzov and I didn’t take the cheap rubbish the Mexicans used. I was a biotechnician: I knew exactly what I was getting. Also, everything was so very different, at the beginning. We were not human any more, but we didn’t know that was true. We didn’t understand what it meant.”
“It was always here in the town, all along, then, wasn’t it?” said Calderon. “Even before Kutuzov built this town, I bet it was here, somehow. There’s nothing new about the narco trade in a Texas border town.”
“It’s no news that the needle is stronger than our flesh,” said Antommachi. “Kutuzov is a superman. His brain is full of intelligence boosters. He has wealth, technology, political power, the love of women... He is an addict of heroin! Heroin, for God’s sake. Heroin is a child’s toy. High school children take heroin.”
“He’s not human, but he’s still a junkie?” said Calderon. “Our big-shot boss is a zombie, a ninja, and a junkie?” He broke into a cackling shriek of laughter.
“It’s time for you to rest a while, Calderon. Look, the night is falling.”
“Do you have any heroin handy? Can I borrow some?”
6.
CALDERON GOT FEVERED and weak from the treatment he’d been given. His housekeeper looked after him. She brought him soup.
She also brought along her grown son, who had been fighting in uniform.
The kid’s morale was still good. Obviously things hadn’t been going well for mankind in general, but he despised ninja zombies. He and his human comrades had never lost even one stand-up fire-fight against zombies. They were always victors in battle.
Any platoon of well-armed, well-supplied human troops could set up kill-zones and mow zombies down like tall grass. Their so-called germ weapons were no big deal against well-organized troops with soap and water.
The only big problem, he said, was the civilians. Just, way too many civilians: massive crowds of weak, effeminate soft targets. Civilians were city people. They couldn’t forage like soldiers, survive outdoors or keep themselves clean and fit. They couldn’t live even one day without their data and electricity.
The civilians were the true prey of the zombies. Worse yet, they were also the source of the zombies. A loyal soldier would fight zombies to the bitter end and save the last bullet for himself, but a weak civilian would despair, surrender, and join the zombie ranks.
That was the problem. Not military, but civilian. An army couldn’t save a city of zombies, because zombies burned their own neighborhoods. Zombies ripped out their own wiring, ripped up the plumbing. They methodically broke every switch, joint, faucet, wire, pole, and conduit.
San Antonio, Houston, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth: they were all stripped and broken; giant, gently-burning, sabotaged urban machines. Zombies had ruined all of them, beyond repair, mostly with bare hands, crowbars, torches. There was talk of cauterizing the zombie towns with nuclear weapons, but nothing would come of that. Any town taken by zombies was already rubble.
Calderon listened quietly to the soldier’s grievances. He just nodded and smiled. Calderon could still talk, when he felt the need of it, but he felt less and less will to express himself in human language. The vesicles in his head were changing shape. Even the sutures in his brain were readjusting, in their bony, squeaking fashion.
His housekeeper and her son didn’t notice this about him. They’d never understood him very well.
Calderon could feel a distinctly new nervous awareness of his own brain, as an organ made of distinct lobes. He could feel his brain, as a thing made of sections.
These body parts once combined to make him Leslie Calderon, but he understood now that this had always been a fakery. Human consciousness was like an optical illusion.
He did not miss Leslie Calderon, but he did somewhat miss San Antonio, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth... A world just shouldn’t lose big cities. These huge, vital places, these centers of light and culture, plunged into blackness, perishing, that felt very wrong, it felt frightening...
But Calderon himself felt much better. He had his health back, and something much darker and stronger than his merely human health. He hadn’t realized how much pain an old man felt in daily life, those sneaking twinges in his spine, a bad molar that bothered him, his stiff neck from too much time drawing...
His new nerves didn’t handle pain in the old human way, with the sharp, focussed pangs. Pain for him now was a sense of swift, aristocratic annoyance. A neural disgust.
Fort Lucky was being destroyed, but he felt happy, alone in his room. He heard people shouting in the streets. Sometimes the electricity flickered on for short periods. There was gunfire. It bored him.
Mostly, he looked at his own drawings. They fascinated him. Not because they were good, but because they were so human.
He could have studied his drawings for weeks, with a feral concentration, but he was hungry. There was nothing left to eat in his house – at least nothing he would have thought about eating in the past.
But humans were limited eaters. Humans were afraid to eat new things, because the pain of indigestion would really bother them. But – once the human fear and disgust went away – the human stomach and gut, as a digestive system, could physically manage almost any substance that human teeth could chew.
It occurred to Calderon to eat some of his drawings. The paper did not taste offensive, and it was surprisingly fun to chew and swallow. It even filled his stomach.
Eventually, though, he felt poorly nourished. He went out to the market. It was not a market day.
He smelled food, though. There had been a big party of some kind; the smell of a bonfire in the air, and they’d been eating. They’d been feasting on good old-fashioned meals, ready to eat packs, the indestructible, long-lasting rations that armies ate.
The crowd of rioting civilians had eaten these plastic packs very hastily, throwing away quite a lot of them. Calderon moved from one scattered pile of trash to the next. He dabbed in the meal-packs with his forefinger and sucked the scraps of food off it and swallowed.
Soon his mood lightened. He even felt elation. He became curious, and he wandered light-footed through the deserted town.
Fort Lucky was entirely dark, but he felt no darkness. This was their Dark Age, but it was no longer his own. He was enlightened. He felt no more fear, guilt, or shame. Great historical burdens had left his spirit.
He was free of all human consequences. Humanity had failed completely, and so had he, but all that was behind him. His life was full of promise.
He strolled out into the scrub of the desert, ignoring all roads and trails. He walked until he could look around himself and see, in a wilderness of scrub and arroyos, that there was not one visible trace of the works of man. Not one ruin, not one boundary, not one claim of ownership.
He suddenly knew that there was nothing between him and true happiness. He even knew what true happiness was.
All he really wanted, all he desired, was existence. To walk and breathe, under the moon and stars. He would be happy in the simple, immediate, yellow-eyed way that a panther was happy. A panther would prowl the woods and tall grasses, a panther would sleep when he wanted, a panther would see, smell, hear something of interest, and tear it to pieces and eat it raw.
And that would be happiness for Calderon, too. He too was strong and cunning and healthy and he too would leap on smaller things and shred them with his jaws and drink their fresh blood.
He would not be human any more, but he would be a native of the landscape. He would have no need of a fort: he would belong to the world. He and the world would be as one entity. The sun would bring him brightness every day, and every day would be better than the last.
FAR IN THE future small groups of humans eke out a hard and difficult existence, constantly on the run in a civilization of machines intent on destroying them for being dangerous pests. In Great Sky River, third in his classic Galactic Centre saga, Gregory Benford introduced the Family Bishop, fighting for their lives on the distant world of Snowglade, lives dependent on cybernetic implants and mechanical aids to survive the day. In the story that follows one splinter of the Family continues their struggle with mech power.
SHE CAREFULLY WATCHED inky shadows stretch long and threatening, pointing away from the hot eye of the Old Sun. Its harsh radiance cast fingers across the stream-cut plain. Like daggers, Erika thought, pointing at us from the rear.
The Lancer attack two days ago had come from behind. That had left three Family Bishop members all sprawled like loose bags. Suredead.
Something had hit them firing from long range, something with remarkable aim. To do that took size, to get good triangulation and hammer their inboards, fry them fast before their diodes responded.
Something big should be easy to spot. Even in the excitement, they should have seen it coming. As far as Erika could see, there had been nothing obvious, no crinkling play of sandy light.
Distant peaks held no white blanket, though it was winter. Her foremothers had named this world Snowglade but there was little of that now. The mechs had come and began drying the biosphere millennia ago, to suit their rust-vulnerable needs. Now oxygen was dropping, too.
She called up her Betsy Aspect, whose compressed wisdom included mechlore.
I concur: no other weapons systems than a Mantis class could so deftly target.
“Okay.” Erika forwarded this to the Family on general com and they began spreading out, seeking cover. Her Aspect strengths were in scavenging food and tactical maneuvers, not tech. Erika knew well the crafts of foraging and stealing, of flight and pursuit, of deception and attack. But not suit tech.
Her daughter Mina sent —I looked up our casualties over the last year. Seems like the mech have been knocking dead Bishops who had tech Aspects, mostly.—
I deduce the same. Lancers can only shoot from nearby, in such wretched terrain.
Erika nodded. This valley was a victim of the mechs’ Great Drying that had cleared so many forests. Less damp for mechs, less shelter for their human pests.
Betsy went on with details but then Erika heard/felt a thin, high, cold skreeeee skating by. She ducked automatically and sent —Got a passing fringe field from behind.—
“Sounded like a Lancer bolt,” Mina called. Others chimed in on general comm. Erika felt their rising panic.
“There’s nothing to be learned from the second kick of a mule,” she said. It was an old truth though she had no idea what a mule was. “Get to ground.”
Another ranging skreeee forked in the air and the Family ran. This one was plainly from their rear left.
—Hey lookleft! Fist!— she called on general comm. In the sensory bath of linked electromag and acoustic signals she heard back peppery voices, scattershot burps and grunts, rings and bings that echoed in the hot still silence of a dusty late afternoon.
The Family seemed to her to hang suspended in the distance, stretched over several klicks and hopping like flies in their servo’d leaps. They were all most vulnerable at the top of their arcs, but each got longer range on their sensorium too. Gravid and slow they came behind her, descending like down-swarming molasses, all six hundred and twenty nine frail figures, what remained of Family Bishop.
She caught a blip edging at the far range of her vision, a dancing green dot. Maybe a Lancer on their tracks, summoned after a pillage they’d done a few days back. A fiiissss zoomed by her and then a rattle of firings in the electro spectrum. She locked onto the source and shot a mixture of electro pulses at it.
—Keep moving— Cap’n Hermann sent. He angled toward a boulder outcrop, sending a strong electro scramble pulse back to confuse any following enemy.
She landed on a polyalum slab, the old kind from early mech prefab days, when they were just setting up. A warm wind blew packing fluff into dirty gray drifts. Mechmess was so common she barely noticed it as her cushioned crust-carbon boots tramped through the tangles. It was all over this valley, too, she saw.
An idea came. She scuffed up the gray grime and used her lift boots to blow it up into the dry air to block the view from rear left. The gray grit had metals in it, an effective shield. Cloaked, she ran on, shouting —Throw chaff! Blow this grit up, to shroud!—
The Family followed her command, though she was a mere Lieutenant. From their boots a vague haze rose across the valley.
A profile appeared on the ridgeline they’d just crossed, a classic Marauder pattern. It was scrabbling fast, lean and low to the ground: a Lancer. The Family peppered it and Cravix sent a pricey launch at it. She watched the zoomer skip out, swerve, dive, avoiding the bolts the Lancer sent at it – and nail it with a satisfying crump.
But some fiiissss bolts still came. It was a full clip of scratchy e-pulses than then suddenly stopped, from no clear source. Then she saw that Hermann was down, a klick away.
—Holdfire! Holdfire!— she sent – and ran. No bolts followed her.
Erika kept a safe distance from Hermann’s crumpled form. A downed human was a clear target point for Marauder class mechs.
Then:—Mina!—No answer. —Mina!—
In a hanging moment she was certain her daughter’s gear had blown or overloaded, so the nine-year-old did not hear the warnings. Or read the scramble of electronoise. Or she was just tired and d
istracted; the run had been long, since dawn today. So Mina would be a fat target recommending itself by its stillness, in the fisheye lens of Marauder tech.
She kicked her vision over to the reds to find her people, peaking in the human IR range. Under this the land seethed with simmering browns, the sky a blank black nothing. Crimson tides washed the sun-struck hillsides as her eyes slid down the spectrum.
There they were, swarms of moving dots. Mina – yes! – just coming up from a gully.
And... something else. She went to fast-flick, red to high blue, watching out of the corners of her eyes. For fractions of a second she could see a thing of tubular legs, a cowl head, its long knobby frame prickly with antennae. Mantis?
No other clear mech signatures, though. She carefully approached Hermann’s twisted body, watching from behind a boulder and keeping out of view of the maybe-Marauder she had glimpsed.
Cap’n Hermann lay sprawled. Around his eyes oozed sticky gray pus. A bubble sat across his mouth, formed in his last breath. As she watched, it popped.
Dried blood black on the ground. At least two mechs had hit him, hammering the Cap’n of Family Bishop. The attackers came at him sudden, then gone. Mechs were like that, target specific, or the smart ones were anyway. She checked his inboards, systems, neuro.
“Cap’n’s systems are blown,” she sent on comm. Hermann had been a good Cap’n and the Mantis – it had to be that – shooting at a great distance had managed to pick him out. She quickly checked Hermann’s inboards, using a jackknife connector. Blanks, everywhere.
Their chip-stores came from far back, when the Families had the technology to scan a cooling brain and make an Aspect or lesser Face from a very recently dead person. An Aspect retained much of its original personality and once lodged digitally, Aspects could be moved easily, electromagnetically.
“He’s been extracted.” All his embedded info gone, including his chip Aspect memories. Some advanced mech had stolen Hermann, leaving only a husk. Family Bishop could carry forward nothing of him – not his interior maps learned from years on the rove, nor mech signatures, nor lore of place and time that could reside in Family history. As though he had never strode the great exodus that was humanity’s lot now.