Waterhole Number Three is distorted by heat shimmer where a column of air rises above Ahuk Hole. Sometimes, not today, you get full‐on geysers erupting as much as a hundred meters into the air. Poppy says this hole is all that remains of a pre‐ESSEA Mall geothermal power station. Except for the hemmelite ball‐bearings they sometimes find amid wadi‐bottom jetsam after flash floods. These balls, each as big as two fists, were part of huge turbines and shafts, a way of reducing energy lost to friction. They have two of them back in the Bunker. They're useless but interesting, and Poppy has allowed an exception to the rule they must cull material possessions to a minimum. Sometimes he weighs a ball in one hand as he makes a pronouncement, or when he takes a moment just to sit.
Most of the complex had been comprised of mere steel and was soon dissed—disassembled and converted to more of themselves by the blurs. Not for the first time, Son tries to imagine the power station as it appeared in the days before the Boogoo. Never mind that Poppy says it wouldn't have appeared, since it was a stealth installation, invisible to would‐be attackers.
Neither do the maps show anything where Eden now stands, which suggests this was another stealth installation. But what was it? Odd atmospheric effects sometimes enclose Eden, a bit like the heat shimmer over Ahuk. Poppy thinks the whole bio enclave might be shielded at times under a force‐field bubble. That would take some bubble, mind you; nobody knows how big Eden is, though the birds they've seen, according to Auntie, would need a considerable range to reproduce. The bubble, if it is a bubble, is beyond the ken; there's no way they can read it.
Another odd thing are the red, green, and orange mats that ring those ponds around both Ahuk and Waterhole Number Three following rains. Auntie says they're colonial microbes. "Probably cyanobacteria and algae," she says. Evidence that the primordial microbial superorganism, billions of years old, in some way persists despite everything. Auntie suspects this is the missing link that underlies the meat‐eats‐meat food chain. Though she also says this world is full of surprises, and it doesn't do to narrow our thinking too much in this matter or others.
So, the pigswarm over there by the dry pools could be feeding on residual bacterial scum. They used to find pigswarms only around wet areas like this one, but these days they're liable to appear just about anywhere.
Son watches. He tends his world, mentally reshaping it in light of events, many of them subtle. He does this well. He may not be as good a hunter as Poppy, not yet, but he's good.
Auntie says he's already better at some things.
no more peaches
Poppy nearly drove Son nuts, a few years back. Before he became a man.
"Sonny's got a new toy," Poppy liked to say. He said this once or twice right in front of Gran‐Gran, for God's sake, but the worst was once within earshot of Auntie. "You've sprung a fulltime hard‐on, these days." He snorted. "Don't think no one notices." The Bunker is a small space, and Poppy's crude teasing made this chronic condition all the more obvious. Auntie's noticing, and his noticing her noticing, made the situation worse again.
His stomach growls. He wonders what Auntie and Gran‐Gran are planning to fix for dinner. Sad to say, the peaches are all gone. Gran‐Gran ate the best part of them; she has no teeth, and claims she can't handle meat. Maybe. Anyway, she's old and she deserves consideration. That's what Poppy says, and he's her son, so no arguing on that score. Never mind. What's done is done, as Poppy also says, and what's done can't be helped. So there'll be no more peaches, not in Son's lifetime nor, most likely, in anyone else's.
•
Not only has Gran‐Gran eaten all the canned peaches, given the chance she also likes to rip up books, books being the work of Satan. Never mind she often bemoans the fact their library has no Bible. This means Son gets nothing but Gran‐Gran's version of the Scriptures, which, even Poppy says, may exist nowhere else except in her own head. Her scriptures, as near as Son can make out, consist mainly of fulminations against books, book learning, and the goddamned dentistry that made it impossible for her to eat red meat in the first place. "Fulminations" is an Auntie word, and it's a good one. Gran‐Gran talks to God regularly, and often relays messages to Son while they're still hot. "What you and Auntie are doing?" At least she has the sense not to speak of this when Poppy's around. "It's an abomination. You're looking at a couple of eternities in Hell plus, just to get you started, a kick in the ass from God hisself. You hear me?"
You can't help but hear her. It's harder to listen, though, and nobody pays her much mind. "You know," Poppy sometimes says, and it isn't always clear when he's joking, "I should put you down. You aren't good for a damned thing."
"Should have done it before she finished the peaches," Son said this morning, only kidding, eating his breakfast of stewed meat and soy mash.
"You watch your mouth, Sonny," she told him. "You want to respect your elders."
Taking Son's side for once, Poppy laughed and said, "Nothing but a black hole for peaches."
"Time was, I'd give you a whupping as well." Gran‐Gran's eyes glittered as she shrank into herself.
Poppy laughed some more. "Yeah, yeah," he told her. "You don't contribute one solitary thing around here except a lot of noise. But you are kin. So count yourself lucky."
Gran‐Gran calls Son "Sonny." Auntie used to, though she doesn't anymore. Not since things between them changed. Now she calls him "Son," same as Poppy always has. One more thing for Poppy to pick up on.
Auntie isn't related by blood. She's just a woman that Poppy took in, way back when. Thinking about Auntie makes Son hard again, distracting him from the business at hand, something he can't afford to have happen.
•
And he feels excited.
It could be the games with Auntie, though he weighs any joy in that quarter against dread at Poppy's wising up to what's happening. More likely it's been the changes. What those changes are, he can't quite say. The godbolts may be part of it. But it's more than that. And he senses more coming. Some of it's being revealed in the world outside; some is coming from inside himself. It's exciting. It's different. There's more to reality than just the Boogoo and the Bunker. And much of it, probably most, remains mysterious.
Some of the changes at home, though, no matter how much more he now looks forward to awakening each morning, some of them have been scary. For one thing, it's like everyone is aware of the biggest change except Poppy. But how can the supreme survivalist remain oblivious? Son sickens at the thought that, despite appearances, he might already know.
•
The first time, Son was laid up with something they never identified. So, Poppy went out to hunt alone. Auntie was nursing Son when one thing led to another, with her teasing a boy who wasn't a little boy anymore. And the upshot was he experienced an important rite of passage before Poppy got home that evening.
That was okay. Son and Auntie understood it was simply a thing that happened. It wouldn't change things; it was never going to happen again. The next time, he faked an illness. And the next, and the next.
Before long, Poppy was expressing concern at this chronic problem that resisted diagnosis. "If it's an allergy," he said. "We need to know whether it's to something inside or something outside."
•
Beneath his excitement at the changes, at all the action, behind the dread at Poppy's discovery of what's been going on, there lurks a new fear. Son only recognizes it sometimes in his dreams and, rarely, when he's still‐sitting. He gets this sense that the land, part of who he is, is slipping over a precipice. A whole new world impends at the same time the ken is failing.
The familiar face of their land threatens to morph into something alien and unreadable.
•
Son attends to his breathing.
He never mentions to Poppy the clear‐thinking that can displace any aches and pains, any boredom. He inhabits the moment—all that is past is past, and all that hasn't happened is not yet. So all there really is, all that he is, dwells
in this breath in and this breath out. Poppy taught him still‐sitting and how to read the land, but Son discovered for himself this side effect of still‐sitting, the mental sanctuary offered in every breath.
Though disturbing things can well up within this sanctuary. For example, just now he realizes he wants to take Auntie and leave the Bunker. To find a place of their own. He knows this is wrong; he doesn't need Gran‐Gran to tell him so. For Auntie is Poppy's woman. Son's father's wife, in the old way of talking about such things. But that doesn't alter the fact: Son wants Auntie to himself.
The question is, does Poppy know that already?
•
All hell breaks loose.
changes
The godbolts have returned.
Flash, flash, flash.
With every puckling in the sky above, a living crater below recoils to a hundred‐meter radius or more and then reverses, flowing back toward the strikepoint.
Flash, flash.
Inside his cloak, Son again shivers with strange pleasure at the quick series of jolts. With each strike, the sky puckles for a second or so before he feels it, and he feels at one with both the earth beneath him and the heavens above. Even Poppy sees a vital element in what's happening. "Like pissholes in a snowbank," he once said, when godbolts struck through a thin cirrus overcast. "Live pissholes."
Son has never seen snow, dead or alive, but in his imagination, it's like bright white versions of these gray dunes without end. And the pissholes are brighter yellow. Down here at the surface, meanwhile, the impacts are blinding even in daylight. Another round of godbolts strikes even closer. Clouds of smoke explode off vaporized boogoo and bedrock, and the land heaves and lurches with panicked swarms.
Then, as though in awe, the bio‐blurs go still as can be. The godbolts have never struck this close to Eden before.
The white‐hot flashes strike closer, and then closer, but the smartest thing is to stay put. As expected, the attack soon veers away again. Far to the north, a couple of other green oases, spitting images of the real Eden though generally lower‐rez, appear to be drawing the triggerman off.
No big mystery there. "Those extra Edens?" says Poppy. "They're holos, plain and simple. Part of old satellite surveillance and intervention systems. The godbolts aren't just root‐de‐toot‐tooting away at random, at least not always."
Root‐de‐toot‐tooting. Son loves that expression.
"The sat systems can project holo decoys as well as satrays. Sow confusion among the enemy and suchlike."
"So why are the satellites shooting at their own decoys?" Son has asked. "And why don't godbolts ever target the real Eden?"
"Good questions, chum." Poppy looked pleased. "Real mysteries. Even if the same stations that project them are shooting at them, you have to figure the holos are decoys meant to draw fire from the real McCoy. But now the real questions become these. What makes that patch of scrub jungle so important? Why are the decoys drawing fire from the same stations that project them? And, finally: Unless the triggerman is only some dumb machine on autopilot, why hasn't it figured out the real target must lie within that five‐klick no‐fire zone?
"There's only one answer," Poppy concluded. "That satray system is blind to Eden. And what does that tell you?"
"Eden must be the real target."
"Bingo."
•
Son tries to relax back into his watching. He squints his lenses to take a quick telescopic look everywhere he'd expect to find GameBoys playing at stealthiness.
His blur prosthetics keep improving. As recently as a year ago, the lenses still rendered things in soft focus, especially in low light. Lately, however, his sight is better outside than it is in the Bunker. Smell, taste, and hearing, even his touch, are also sharper. Poppy reports the same experience; he claims that, like any other faculty, prosthetic senses improve with use.
"It's more than that," Auntie says. "Just look at the border wars." And like the watchtowers and boogoomen, she argues, the bio‐blur mantles and prosthetics are part of a larger development, something independent of whatever Poppy or the others might do. She believes the entire Boogoo is evolving.
As for Gran‐Gran, any talk of evolution only incites an "Abomination!" or two and a look of disgust at the stupidity or, worse, the sinfulness of some people. So, Poppy says the godbolt strike patterns suggest Eden is the real target, while Auntie figures they instead show Eden must be where the triggerman is hiding. Gran‐Gran, for her part, believes that God has simply set out to fry some sinners.
Of course Son is experiencing changes beyond these, things that don't bear talking about with Poppy, or with Gran‐Gran. The changes inside him connect with other changes outside him. It's part of this larger thing. This feeling part of the Boogoo.
did the boogoo eat the marshmallow mallsters?
Bingo.
Maybe he can daydream and watch at the same time after all, because look what he has found. Four, maybe five GameBoys lurk in the shadow of Doo‐wop Drop, clumsily inconspicuous as they watch a pigswarm, probably hoping for a straggler. They're oblivious to a huge monkeyswarm that's been edging in to jump the GameBoys themselves. This could be fun. These must be the same GameBoys he and Poppy missed killing this morning. They're stupid enough. The fact they're currently more interested in pigmeat than in revenge doesn't mean anything; they're easily distracted.
Meanwhile the pigswarm heads off, the GameBoys in hot pursuit. The monkeyswarm, nearly indistinguishable from its background, misses its chance for the pigswarm ambush, and elects not to chase after the GameBoys in their undisciplined, probably futile, pursuit of the pigs, which leave no stragglers.
•
Flash, flash.
A couple of godbolts strike well north of the GameBoys, who stop for a moment to gape. Then they move off to disappear around Doo‐wop's other side.
It's funny. Poppy says some species are smarter where they operate as swarms. The jury's still out with respect to other animals. For example, if people are so smart, why did so few survive compared to other bio‐blurs?
Auntie would say it's because the rest of them, tucked away as they are in the malls, really are smart; intelligence is in short supply only out here in the wastes. Poppy reads things differently. "Get it through your head, woman," he says. "The malls are long gone. The Boogoo scarfed them right up, along with all the sweet little marshmallow mallsters inside them. Not to mention everything else in the world. And small loss, the way things were going."
According to Poppy, part of the problem was the mallsters had these blurs inside them. The so‐called medibots. Repair and maintenance bots. Maybe, but they also routinely messed up mallster minds with touches of stealth PR. Psychoneurotherapeutic reconstruction. That much was common knowledge, Poppy claimed. One more control exercised by the Powers That Were. "It's like the way wild blurs mess with the weed species' minds. Don't imagine the swarms get those mantles for free, chum."
What Son didn't ask, and Poppy didn't volunteer: if that's true, then what have the solitary bios, Son and Poppy for two examples, traded for their own mantles?
This is too much thinking and not enough watching. Son returns to his watching.
•
Utterly motionless, stilling even thought, he performs his new trick. This is something Poppy can't do. Auntie tells him he's becoming a real man plus. Something new. He focuses on himself from outside himself, watching from key points in his surrounds. Taking his prey's point of view keeps him sharp; seeing himself through the eyes of potential predators helps keep him alive. Just now he's all the land watching back at where he watches from.
It's like he's watching his own back. And this multiple POV on his Long Lookout Ridge station reveals nothing but dust, which is good.
Son is invisible. A good hunter.
a real man, plus
The fleye appears out of nowhere.
Son hears the thing before he sees it. Only a moment earlier he'd wondered at a touch of quea
siness, the wee cramp in his gut.
All he knows about fleyes he learned from Poppy. These relics of the Second War for World Peace and Freedom in Our Time are surveillance and ranging drones, lightweight, thin‐shell hemmelite mini‐warbots. Their bee‐like mode of flight produces the high‐frequency buzzing. So that's all they are, or were. Poppy says he can't imagine what they're doing these days, or who or what might be running them. He calls them bumblebees because of their buzz and because, he says, they do nothing except bumble around annoying people. They used to be elements of a larger warbot, now extinct. The one time Son ever saw him drunk, Poppy claimed he beta‐tested this thing as a ground observer and test target, talked about it as though it were an old pal and not just some machine.
Poppy had no idea what Son was talking about when he mentioned the queasiness the fleyes brought on.
This fleye darts from place to place faster than the eye can track. It's here, it's there, then it's back here again. Meanwhile Son's getting erratic impressions of himself and his surrounds from what can only be fleye POVs. It's all coming too fast to focus. Whoa! Now the fleye is hovering right up there in his face. He's never been this close to one of these things before. He ogles himself as reflected in this multi‐faceted lens, goggling at pointblank range back at himself. Neither is this any part of Poppy's inventory of fleye specs.
Son remains still. He doesn't want to cue any predators. Though even the stupidest predator might wonder what this gizmo is doing here, and what it's looking at. Up close and personal this way, its querulous whine reminds Son of Gran‐Gran tripping out on the way things ought to be but aren't.
"Go away." Son keeps his voice so low this thing would need to read lips. "Go away."
As though in response, it comes in close enough to turn Son cross‐eyed. He fires a right hook at the thing and then a left, and to hell with predators. It dodges him with ease.
He can almost hear Poppy snort with derision at this failure of discipline. Son takes a quick look around and spots signs of Poppy about seven meters away and shifting closer.
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