Tales of Old Earth

by Michael Swanwick

  Which was how I came to be lost.

  There are neighborhoods in the camp. People have a natural tendency to sort themselves out by the nature of their suffering. The twitchers, who were victims of paralogical reprogramming, stay in one part of the camp, and the mods, those with functional normative modifications, stay in another. I found myself wandering through crowds of people who had been “healed” of limbs, ears, and even internal organs—there seemed no sensible pattern. Sometimes our doctors could effect a partial correction. But our primitive surgery was, of course, nothing like that available in their miraculous age.

  I’d taken a wrong turn trying to evade an eyeless, noseless woman who kept grabbing at my blouse and demanding money, and gotten all turned around in the process when, without noticing me, Gevorkian went striding purposefully by.

  Which was so unexpected that, after an instant’s shock, I up and followed her. It didn’t occur to me not to. There was something strange about the way she held herself, about her expression, her posture. Something unfamiliar.

  She didn’t even walk like herself.

  The vics had dismantled several tents to make a large open space surrounded by canvas. Propane lights, hung from tall poles, blazed in a ring about it. I saw Gevorkian slip between two canvas sheets and, after a moment’s hesitation, I followed her.

  It was a rat fight.

  The way a rat fight works, I learned that night, is that first you catch a whole bunch of Norwegian rats. Big mean mothers. Then you get them in a bad mood, probably by not feeding them, but there are any number of other methods that could be used. Anyway, they’re feeling feisty. You put a dozen of them in a big pit you’ve dug in the ground. Then you dump in your contestant. A big guy with a shaven head and his hands tied behind his back. His genitals are bound up in a little bit of cloth, but other than that he’s naked.

  Then you let them fight it out. The rats leap and jump and bite and the big guy tries to trample them underfoot or crush them with his knees, his chest, his head—whatever he can bash them with.

  The whole thing was lit up bright as day, and all the area around the pit was crammed with vics. Some shouted and urged on one side or the other. Others simply watched intently. The rats squealed. The human fighter bared his teeth in a hideous rictus and fought in silence.

  It was the creepiest thing I’d seen in a long time.

  Gevorkian watched it coolly, without any particular interest or aversion. After a while it was obvious to me that she was waiting for someone.

  Finally that someone arrived. He was a lean man, tall, with keen, hatchetlike features. None of the vics noticed. Their eyes were directed inward, toward the pit. He nodded once to Gevorkian, then backed through the canvas again.

  She followed him.

  I followed her.

  They went to a near-lightless area near the edge of the camp. There was nothing there but trash, the backs of tents, the razor-wire fence, and a gate padlocked for the night.

  It was perfectly easy to trail them from a distance. The stranger held himself proudly, chin up, eyes bright. He walked with a sure stride. He was nothing at all like the vics.

  It was obvious to me that he was an Owner.

  Gevorkian too. When she was with him that inhuman arrogance glowed in her face as well. It was as if a mask had been removed. The fire that burned in his face was reflected in hers.

  I crouched low to the ground in the shadow of a tent and listened as the stranger said, “Why hasn’t she turned it in?”

  “She’s unstable,” Gevorkian said. “They all are.”

  “We don’t dare prompt her. She has to turn it in herself.”

  “She will. Give her time.”

  “Time,” the man repeated. They both laughed in a way that sounded to me distinctly unpleasant. Then, “She’d better. There’s a lot went into this operation. There’s a lot riding on it.”

  “She will.”

  I stood watching as they shook hands and parted ways. Gevorkian turned and disappeared back into the tent city. The stranger opened a radiant door and was gone.

  Cause and effect. They’d done … whatever it was they’d done to that woman’s daughter just so they could plant the bippy with me. They wanted me to turn it in. They wanted our government to have possession of a device that would guarantee obedience. They wanted to give us a good taste of what it was like to be them.

  Suddenly I had no doubt at all what I should do. I started out at a determined stride, but inside of nine paces I was running. Vics scurried to get out of my way. If they didn’t move fast enough, I shoved them aside.

  I had to get back to the bippy and destroy it.

  Which was stupid, stupid, stupid. If I’d kept my head down and walked slowly, I would have been invisible. Invisible and safe. The way I did it, though, cursing and screaming, I made a lot of noise and caused a lot of fuss. Inevitably, I drew attention to myself.

  Inevitably, Gevorkian stepped into my path.

  I stumbled to a halt.

  “Gevorkian,” I said feebly. “Linda. I—”

  All the lies I was about to utter died in my throat when I saw her face. Her expression. Those eyes. Gevorkian reached for me. I skipped back in utter panic, turned—and fled. Anybody else would have done the same.

  It was a nightmare. The crowds slowed me. I stumbled. I had no idea where I was going. And all the time, this monster was right on my heels.

  Nobody goes into the camp after dark, unless they have to. But that doesn’t mean that nobody goes in after dark. By sheer good luck, Gevorkian chased me into the one part of the camp that had something that outsiders could find nowhere else—the sex-for-hire district.

  There was nothing subtle about the way the vics sold themselves. The trampled-grass street I found myself in was lined with stacks of cages like the ones they use in dog kennels. They were festooned with strings of Christmas lights, and each one contained a crouched boy. Naked, to best display those mods and deformities that some found attractive. Off-duty soldiers strolled up and down the cages, checking out the possibilities. I recognized one of them.

  “Sergeant Major Pathak!” I cried. He looked up, startled and guilty. “Help me! Kill her—please! Kill her now!”

  Give him credit, the Sergeant major was a game little fellow. I can’t imagine what we looked like to him, one harridan chasing the other down the streets of Hell. But he took the situation in at a glance, unholstered his sidearm, and stepped forward. “Please,” he said. “You will both stand where you are. You will place your hands upon the top of your head. You will—”

  Gevorkian flicked her fingers at the young soldier. He screamed, and clutched his freshly-crushed shoulder. She turned away from him, dismissively. The other soldiers had fled at the first sign of trouble. All her attention was on me, trembling in her sight like a winded doe. “Sweet little vic,” she purred. “If you won’t play the part we had planned for you, you’ll simply have to be silenced.”

  “No,” I whispered.

  She touched my wrist. I was helpless to stop her. “You and I are going to go to my office now. We’ll have fun there. Hours and hours of fun.”

  “Leave her be.”

  As sudden and inexplicable as an apparition of the Virgin, Shriver stepped out of the darkness. He looked small and grim.

  Gevorkian laughed, and gestured.

  But Shriver’s hand reached up to intercept hers, and where they met, there was an electric blue flash. Gevorkian stared down, stunned, at her hand. Bits of tangled metal fell away from it. She looked up at Shriver.

  He struck her down.

  She fell with a brief harsh cry, like that of a sea gull. Shriver kicked her, three times, hard: In the ribs. In the stomach. In the head. Then, when she looked like she might yet regain her feet, “It’s one of them!” he shouted. “Look at her! She’s a spy for the Owners! She’s from the future! Owner! Look! Owner!”

  The refugees came tumbling out of the tents and climbing down out of their cages. T
hey looked more alive than I’d ever seen them before. They were red-faced and screaming. Their eyes were wide with hysteria. For the first time in my life, I was genuinely afraid of them. They came running. They swarmed like insects.

  They seized Gevorkian and began tearing her apart.

  I saw her struggle up and halfway out of their grips, saw one arm rise up above the sea of clutching hands, like that of a woman drowning.

  Shriver seized my elbow and steered me away before I could see any more. I saw enough, though.

  I saw too much.

  “Where are we going?” I asked when I’d recovered my wits.

  “Where do you think we’re going?”

  He led me to my office.

  There was a stranger waiting there. He took out a hand-held detector like Sergeant Major Pathak and his men had used earlier and touched it to himself, to Shriver, and to me. Three times it flashed red, negative. “You travel through time, you pick up a residual charge,” Shriver explained. “It never goes away. We’ve known about Gevorkian for a long time.”

  “U.S. Special Security,” the stranger said, and flipped open his ID. It meant diddle-all to me. There was a badge. It could have read Captain Crunch for all I knew or cared. But I didn’t doubt for an instant that he was SS. He had that look. To Shriver he said, “The neutralizer.”

  Shriver unstrapped something glittery from his wrist—the device he’d used to undo Gevorkian’s weapon—and, in a silent bit of comic bureaucratic punctilio, exchanged it for a written receipt. The security officer touched the thing with his detector. It flashed green. He put both devices away in interior pockets.

  All the time, Shriver stood in the background, watching. He wasn’t told to go away.

  Finally, Captain Crunch turned his attention to me again. “Where’s the snark?”

  “Snark?”

  The man removed a thin scrap of cloth from an inside jacket pocket and shook it out. With elaborate care, he pulled it over his left hand. An inertial glove. Seeing by my expression that I recognized it, he said, “Don’t make me use this.”

  I swallowed. For an instant I thought crazily of defying him, of simply refusing to tell him where the bippy was. But I’d seen an inertial glove in action before, when a lone guard had broken up a camp riot. He’d been a little man. I’d seen him crush heads like watermelons.

  Anyway, the bippy was in my desk. They’d be sure to look there.

  I opened the drawer, produced the device. Handed it over. “It’s a plant,” I said. “They want us to have this.”

  Captain Crunch gave me a look that told me clear as words exactly how stupid he thought I was. “We understand more than you think we do. There are circles and circles. We have informants up in the future, and some of them are more highly placed than you’d think. Not everything that’s known is made public.”

  “Damn it, this sucker is evil.”

  A snake’s eyes would look warmer than his. “Understand this: We’re fighting for our survival here. Extinction is null-value. You can have all the moral crises you want when the war is won.”

  “It should be suppressed. The technology. If it’s used, it’ll just help bring about …”

  He wasn’t listening.

  I’d worked for the government long enough to know when I was wasting my breath. So I shut up.

  When the Captain left with the bippy, Shriver still remained, looking ironically after him. “People get the kind of future they deserve,” he observed.

  “But that’s what I’m saying. Gevorkian came back from the future in order to help bring it about. That means that time isn’t deterministic.” Maybe I was getting a little weepy. I’d had a rough day. “The other guy said there was a lot riding on this operation. They didn’t know how it was going to turn out. They didn’t know.”

  Shriver grunted, not at all interested.

  I plowed ahead unheeding. “If it’s not deterministic—if they’re working so hard to bring it about—then all our effort isn’t futile at all. This future can be prevented.”

  Shriver looked up at last. There was a strangely triumphant gleam in his eye. He flashed that roguish ain’t-this-fun grin of his, and said, “I don’t know about you, but some of us are working like hell to achieve it.”

  With a jaunty wink, he was gone.

  14

  Ice Age

  It was early afternoon when Rob carried the last carton into their new apartment and was—finally, officially—moved in. He was setting it down atop a stack of crated books to be unpacked later when Gail said something from the kitchen. “What’s that?” he shouted.

  She poked her head into the hallway. “I said—Hey, the landlord left the old refrigerator in.”

  Rob sauntered to the kitchen. The counters were cluttered with boxes of half-unpacked cooking utensils. “Probably too much trouble to remove it.”

  The refrigerator, yellowed to a grimy antique ivory, was welded immovably into the corner of the kitchen by decades’ worth of petrified crud. Its top, the motor housing, rose like an art deco pagoda, in three tiers of streamlined vents. This made the refrigerator look vaguely futuristic—the future of the 1930s, though, not of the present.

  Rob patted the motor housing. “This is actually very good design,” he said. “In modern refrigerators the motor is set underneath and the waste heat from it rises up into the refrigerator. Then the heat has to be pumped out by the same motor that produced it, generating yet more waste heat. It’s a vicious cycle. But with the modern machines they’re after consumer gloss, so the motor is set down there anyway.”

  Gail pulled a bottle of zinfandel out of a cardboard box and set the now-empty box under the kitchen sink. “Trash goes there,” she said. “You want some wine?”

  The refrigerator hummed lightly, a friendly, reassuring sound. “Sure. The landlord left the refrigerator on; there’s probably even some ice left.”

  “That’s what I like about you. You ain’t got no couth at all.”

  Rob shrugged. “I’m a barbarian.” He opened the freezer compartment and found it almost overgrown with old ice. It had already swallowed up two ice cube trays and an ancient package of frozen peas. One tray, though, was almost free, and by hammering on it with the heel of his hand he could get it loose. He cracked the tray and carried a handful of ice back to the table.

  “Plenty extra,” he offered. Gail curled a lip. But she set out a goblet for him anyway, and poured wine in it.

  Rob leaned back and swirled his drink, listening to the ice clink. He took a sip.

  And stopped. Was that a bug in the one ice cube? He fished it out with two fingers and held it up to the light.

  The cube was heavily frosted across one surface where condensate from the freezer had formed, though that was already beginning to melt from the wine. Within the cube were swirls of tiny bubbles, too small to notice if you didn’t look closely. And beyond them, deep in the center, was a large black speck, a creature the size of a horsefly trapped in the ice’s pellucid depths. He peered closer.

  There was a wooly mammoth in his ice cube.

  It was dark and shaggy, with a head that tapered down to a long, filament-sized trunk. Two all but invisible tusks twisted from its mouth. Its legs were folded in against the body. Its fur was a deep auburn red. A small and perfect wooly mammoth, no larger than a bread crumb.

  Rob didn’t move. The ice was cold and stung his hand, but he didn’t shift it. All he could think of were the Saturday afternoon movies that began with someone finding an ancient animal frozen in ice. Though usually those ended with the animal eating Tokyo, he reminded himself.

  “Hey,” Gail said. “What’re you staring at so intently?”

  Rob opened his mouth, shut it again. Gently he lowered the ice cube to the tabletop. Drops of water appeared on its side, oozed down to the Formica, and began to form a micropuddle.

  “Gail,” he said carefully, “I want you to look inside this ice cube and tell me what you see.”

  Followi
ng his example, Gail placed her hands flat on the table and leaned forward. “Wow,” she whispered. “That’s—Rob, that’s beautiful.”

  The creature was fractionally easier to see now. Its tusks, long for its size—was that an indicator of age?—were yellowed and one was broken at its tip. Its eyes, frozen open and almost too small to be seen, were blue. The fur was badly matted, and there were a couple of tiny bare patches.

  Gail jumped up and began running water in the sink. She returned with a bowl that steamed gently. “Here,” she said, “let’s thaw it out.” With infinite care she eased the ice cube into the water.

  After a while Rob said, “Ice melts slowly doesn’t it?” and then, reluctantly, “Maybe we should call the Smithsonian or something.”

  “If you could convince them to look at this,” Gail pointed out, “which I doubt, they’d only take it away from us.”

  “There is that,” Rob agreed, relieved that Gail too felt no obligation to give the mammoth away.

  At last the ice melted. Rob fished out the wee mammoth with a spoon. It was still and tiny in his hand. Suddenly, he felt very close to tears. Against all logic, he had hoped it would thaw out alive. “Here,” he said, and let the beast fall from his hand to Gail’s.

  By dumping the contents of every carton in the house onto the floor, Gail had managed to find a magnifying glass. Now she squinted through it. “That’s a wooly mammoth all right,” she said. “Would you look at those eyes! And—guess what—the toe leathers are pink!” Her voice fell to a mutter then rose again: “Hey, are those spear points in its side?”

  Rob’s momentary tristesse melted in the heat of Gail’s excitement. He leaned over her shoulder, trying to see. “I wonder how you’d go about getting something like this preserved in Lucite,” Gail mused. Then she straightened and turned to face him. “Maybe there’s more of these in the freezer!”

  Gail took the lead. She opened the refrigerator and peered into the freezer. Nudging the ice cube tray with a finger, she squinted at the ice around it. Then, gingerly, she pulled out the tray and, after examining it briefly, stared through the small space that was not yet swallowed up by the slow, devouring ice. She whistled softly.