How long did he cry? Who knew, but suddenly, Jeremy was there. “Well, hey there, little guy! Whatcha doing here with no pants on? Where’s your mama?” Jeremy picked Ozzie up under the arms and regarded him.
Gaby came up beside her husband and slipped a brown arm around his belted waist. “The Tampico Alliance campfire is cold. They must have left early in the morning, be well on their way now—” She gave a quick gasp. “He’s hurt!”
She pointed at the scratch down Ozzie’s hip and thigh, where his mother’s fingernail had gouged as his pants came off. She reached out to brush off the few surviving fire ants.
Jeremy turned him around to look at the ant bites, and the state of Ozzie’s bruised and abraded buttocks came into full view. They both winced, then looked at one another, stunned.
Their preteen daughter Maria joined them, her infant sister Deirdre slung behind her delicate prepubescent shoulders. “Ay, what’s happened to him?” She looked closer at his injuries.
Gaby shooed her away. “Go see to your brothers and make sure everything’s tied down on the wagon! Go!”
Maria hesitated, seemed about to question further. She saw the intensity in her parents’ eyes and obeyed instead.
“The light’s not good here, but I don’t see any deep wounds. He was walking okay,” Jeremy observed.
“Nobody should beat a child like this!”
“No, nobody should.” Jeremy pressed his lips together. “I’m going to have a word with his mother.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“There was a time I was almost like an uncle to her. I can’t just let this go.”
Gaby nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll see if I have some britches for him. I just got some almost new ones for Deirdre to grow into that might fit.”
These big trade camps were a wonderful time for parents to trade children’s clothing, swapping outgrown garments and buying bigger ones, making complicated chains of deals based on children’s relative ages, sizes, and the garments’ conditions.
Jeremy shambled down the short path to Jessica’s tent, finding her sprawled on the bedroll, fully dressed, snoring and drooling, the floor of the yurt strewn with clothing. He shook his head, picked his way across the floor, and nudged her with his toe.
She didn’t budge. He squatted down and shook her. Her snoring lessened, but that was all.
He looked around and saw a glass jug of clear liquid on a box serving as a nightstand. He uncorked and sniffed it: water. He dripped it right on the center of Jessica’s forehead, and watched her splutter her way into wakefulness.
“What the hell?”
“Where’s your son?” Jeremy asked gently.
Jessica sat up. “Ozzie? He was just here! He pissed himself—” She looked around and frantically struggled to her feet, disoriented by waking in the dusky twilight.
“Did you punish him?” Jeremy spoke softly, so softly.
“I may have given him a little whack.” Her glazed, lying eyes met his steady ones.
“Jessica—”
“Where is he?” Her voice rose in abrasive demand. But her eyes fell.
“He’s safe, and with us. We’re taking him for now. We’re heading back to Bolivar here in a bit, traveling overnight; it’s cooler. You know where we live. Once you sober up, you come get him.”
“I’m not a drunk!” Her lips rictused in ugly crying.
“You’re a drunk. You know you’re a drunk. You’ve known it a long time. And now you’re drinking again. Ozark’s safer with us. You know he is.”
She looked like she might fight. Swaying on filthy bare feet, she looked like she might run out the door and search wildly after her son.
But in the end, she opened the nightstand and pulled out a bottle of the cheap, raw tequila that the Tampico group had brought to trade. She put it to her lips and chugged, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She held the jug out to him, and he ignored it.
“Good luck, Jessica,” he said.
“Yeah, whatever.”
He turned to go. He heard the bottle glug again before the tent flap closed behind him.
XVI.
Renovation
Abiba croaked in Awar, “How…do I…get free?”
A twisted, painful prison at the best of times, her body was stiff from sprawling on the hard bunk for so long. Her skin, already scarred from her disfiguring injuries, was puckered and tented from dehydration. She smelled her body’s rank odor with disgust.
Her eye was caked so firmly shut, it might be blind for all she knew—that discomfort overshadowed by the intensity of the spiking pain behind it. Her breath vibrated in her chest like a broken balloon trying to inflate.
A young girl—whose name Abiba didn’t recall, or never knew—was sitting nearby in the ship’s tiny cabin, doing something to a sharp blade. She set the knife aside when she heard Abiba, and closed the two steps between them.
“What is it?” She bent to put her ear close to Abiba’s lips.
“Free. I…free.” Abiba formed the words laboriously.
The girl saw that her mouth was parched, the mucus membranes like tissue paper. She took a bowl of fresh water, wet a clean cloth, and dripped moisture onto Abiba’s tongue.
Bit by bit, drop by drop, Abiba worked her cheeks and tongue, spreading the moisture, lubricating the surfaces so they could glide against her teeth instead of sticking.
The words were distinct enough to understand now. “I can’t get free.”
Confused, the girl tugged at her bedding, lifted her bamboo-light limbs one at a time. “Are you bound up somewhere?”
Abiba groaned in negation—a sound like a sandstorm hitting a grove of palm trees.
She beckoned feebly at the water. The girl helped her drink—tiny sips at first, then more. Her body absorbed the moisture greedily, and like a shriveled plant, she gradually began to come alive. “The ctenophores.”
“They’re safe, Auntie Abiba. We’ve been caring for them while you’ve been ill.”
“Take me…” she jerked feebly in the bed.
“Can you get up?”
“Carry me!” The girl obeyed. The woman’s body was light as a child’s.
They stepped to Abiba’s corner workshop full of tanks. The young woman’s careful gait reminded Abiba of the rocking of the deck, that movement which had become integrated into her awareness until she barely felt it. Abiba reached for the nearest tank, fanning her fingers like a baby reaching for a toy. The girl moved closer so she could slip her hand into the water. She scooped up a ctenophore in her palm.
In an instant that took a million years, the beast reached its foaming tentacles into the bodies of the old woman and that of the young girl. Moisture instantly subsumed Abiba’s remaining dryness—water that spread like fire, wetness that immediately spun into bubbles with foamy walls. Each bubble of the foam was composed of finer foam, of finer foam, and finer, and fine enough to penetrate her living cells and intercalate the strands of each DNA molecule for 10-31 seconds before whirling down the stacked pi states of the electrons in a spin-entangled dance.
The woman and the girl both now-then-had-would-later-have skirts of undulating spacetime, as well as wings of brittle, functional correlations that turned illusory and then firmed up and turned illusory and then firmed up.
The pulsation became (both instantly and millions of years in the future) so rapid it could not be counted even by the multiple decision states accessible by the quantum computers embedded in the nuclei and mitochondria of the women’s cells, and in every bacterium in their guts and on their skin and hair.
Now/long ago, Abiba and the girl appeared before Bilqis, who was holding her own ctenophore.
Bilqis looked up—startled, then tranquil, enchanted, when she saw Abiba attended by her caregiver. Each of the two women was a vision of light beyond light, a chord of sound beyond sound.
Abiba’s voice had transformed into an instrument that couldn’t have been more different from
the raw groans and gasps of just a few minutes earlier. “The masters of the vultures are approaching; four hundred of them. They’re yours, if you only will it. From this time forward, all things will be different between them and us. They approach from the south. They will leave by becoming one with the soil.”
The girl found herself unconsciously humming along in harmony with the words Abiba spoke, words that fired her brain like music.
Bilqis took a step towards the pair, her hand raised in preparation to make a point or perhaps to ask a question, but they were absent.
On the ship, Abiba glided upright from the workshop to the rail of the deck, moving like a snail on her gelatinous skirt. She held a ctenophore in her hand. She turned her formerly twisted back to the waxed wooden rail.
To the girl, she said, “This is not yet your time. But don’t worry, child, it will be soon. We all have our day,” she beamed in elation, “because we own the power of creation.” She put her arms out, and the girl moved forward, thinking she was about to embrace her.
Instead, Abiba somersaulted backwards over the rail, into the blue waters of the Red Sea.
Abiba released the ten-legged ctenophore in her hand as she whooshed into the water. It jetted off without a backward glance. Abiba didn’t need to breathe, or she’d have sighed. She didn’t need to make sound, or she’d have laughed in joy, joy yet bubbling forth from deep within her.
She surfaced after a few nanoseconds, and also about eight minutes later. She had taken advantage of the fact that “here and now” makes sense, but that the concept of events “happening now” simultaneously throughout the universe—including at the far-flung locations where particular electrons entangled with the electrons in her DNA were located—is fundamentally meaningless.
She popped up at the mouth of a rocky tunnel. Abiba allowed the plunging waves of the rapidly rising tide to wash her into the corridor.
Inside the cave, she let the water jet her along. The tunnel turned a ninety-degree angle, then sloped to ankle depth and ended abruptly at an ascending stone stairway. This was the entrance to the temple Kankeshwari Mata. She hit the liminal point at the start of the flagstones and wallowed, lingering patiently there.
Within minutes, a cloud of ctenophore companions converged on her, turning brilliant colors of reds, greens, and oranges. They spun and quivered around her, communing as she grew ten arms herself, preparing for the sacred transfiguration that was about to begin. Once she was properly tentacled, the small creatures whirled off, dancing in increasingly intricate patterns.
The compact aquatic creatures jetted their way along the coast of the island. Their destination was a harbor named Diu on the island’s north side. A long bridge at the harbor’s end crossed Diu to mainland India.
There are only a few hundred Asiatic lions still living on this planet, and they all reside on a fat peninsula of land in the province of Gujarat, India. Centuries ago, this subspecies—which once ranged from Turkey and Egypt to the southern tip of the subcontinent—submitted, and was almost utterly destroyed, in its competition with a fiercer predator: woman.
In their genes, these lions remember how woman shaped her world into a place of ownership. She made the night a place of safety, a place where she could give birth peacefully, and sent her mates to the edge of darkness to guard her human cubs. These lions retain within the methylation of their DNA the remembrance of how, in the light of day, they carried woman in a symbiosis older than horse and man, a feline, multi-appendicular centaur known as Durga.
With such a steed, the buffalo demon Mahishasura had had a snowball’s chance in quantum Hell of defeating her.
In the black-hole abode of darkness, these lions now know her as Kali. Kali, more than any other avatar of any other goddess, is their very own. She laps up every drop of the adversaries’ blood to prevent it from fertilizing the world with its evil.
A lion, with its preternaturally powerful hearing, can hear a chital place its delicate hoof on a clump of dry leaves from three miles away. The lions lounging, feeding, or mating in the former Gir wildlife refuge raised their heads and laid back their ears.
The ctenophores had surfaced near Gir and begun to emit a high-pitched bioelectronic beeping that grew louder and louder, like droning cicadas. The hot Gujarat sun beat upon their backs, and as the sound swelled louder and louder, the golden carnivorous beasts grew frantic. They abandoned kills, shaking their heads and flicking blood from their whiskers, light rainfalls in a tapering crimson spiral. They left mates mid-copulation. They pressed playful cubs flat in the dirt with spatulated velvet paws, ignoring their struggles. In time, each one began to walk, and then to lope, in the direction of the sound.
The first lion to crest the ridge overlooking the beach was an adolescent female, still scrawny due to her inexperience at catching prey. Her head popped above the horizon line and she sighted the school of succulent creatures spiraling and undulating in the shallow water. She approached the lapping waves and pawed tentatively, kitten-like, at the ctenophores. Soon, she was followed by a big male with the breed’s characteristic mohawk mane. She retreated slightly to see what he might do with these aquatic prey animals—so baffling, yet enticing. Another lioness arrived; another lion; and more and more. They paced the shoreline tensely, occasionally clawing and biting at each other in brief irritated scuffles, or else sat on their haunches, spectating.
One ctenophore swam towards the bridge, trailing its back above the water in a v-shaped wake. A lion spotted it and advanced, closer to the bridge than the others yet had. He turned his back and sat, licking himself with a show of feline indifference, like a housecat with a mouse. The ctenophore sank underwater and swam away, but now a second lion saw the first and padded a bit further along the shore towards the bridge, between the bay and the first lion. This drew the attention of a third. With a thousand such seemingly random movements, the impromptu, mixed-sex pride made its way across the Shamji Bridge and across the island. Their destination was the Kankeshwari Mata Temple, where Abiba/Durga awaited them.
The sun was westering by the time they assembled on the flat seaside rock forming the temple courtyard. The many-armed Devi whom they sought was positioned at the landing where she had emerged from her tunnel. She patiently gazed at each of them in turn. Her attention kept returning to the largest male, magnificently muscled, and with a lush mane. She glided free of the water and locked eyes with him.
She slid closer, closer… she crossed some invisible boundary, and his face writhed into a carnivorous snarl, displaying a murderous intent to shred her flesh.
He gathered his haunches close to the ground, wriggled them slightly—and charged! He sprung upon her, fangs bared, claws out.
She dissolved around him and coalesced upon his rampant back.
He arched his neck and bucked, frantically as a green horse, trying to get her off.
She was tenacious.
He rolled; she spiraled effortlessly around his body. He raked at her with sharp, hard claws, large as the tines of a pitchfork, but he couldn’t reach her. He’d rest, sides heaving, tail lashing, then flash into movement, trying to dislodge her with a jolt.
The dance went on for hours. Twilight was upon them by the time his fury subsided. He submitted to her will.
Finally, the lion and the transformed woman his passenger set off inland. All the human beings they passed fell on their knees before the many-armed goddess riding a lion: ancient scripture made flesh. Then they saw what followed and scrambled to their feet in terror. Awe turned to dread, and they ran away from the squadron of very real lions padding along behind them.
The procession of lions returned across the bridge that had brought them from the mainland. They didn’t even deign to look down at the knots of children in the shallows, who were playing with the ctenophores like newfound toys.
This region was one of those which had skipped wired telephony entirely, leaping to smartphones at the dawn of the 21st century. Cruelly, they’d had the
technology for only a decade before it was snatched away by the machine sickness. The older children, who still remembered the electronic devices they used to covet, were sharing with their barely clothed youngest siblings the wonders of what the ctenophores could do. The children pretended not to hear their mothers’ twilight calls to come home, oblivious to the sharper edge on those cries tonight. Absorbed in the cybernetic screens, they didn’t even look up to see the spectacle of the lions parading by right above their heads.
The lions, for their part, surged along, unstintingly covering ground. Most of the temples were still abandoned. Much of the land had been reserved as a wildlife reserve for the lions, Before. After so much of humanity had died in the upheavals and epidemics following the machine sickness, there were other lands available for the taking. This being the case, only a handful of the local farmers had stayed, not caring to continue taking the risks inherent in defending their children and livestock from the endangered lions, not when there were lion-free farms to be claimed elsewhere. But there were a few holdouts—people in small towns whose sense of home was bound up in this place where their grandparents’ grandparents’ grandparents had lived: arcs of the spiraling DNA-electron cloud of generational antiquity.
As they moved cross-country, these few remaining people came out with bioelectric bacterial lanterns to investigate the activity in the night. Most saw the lions and fled to safety. A few intrepid souls, afflicted with curiosity or piety, formed an impromptu procession. At each abandoned temple they reached, the lion would mount the steps and turn around, with Abiba-Durga still on his back. The lion would fix them with his enormous amber eyes while she addressed them all.
“See before you the glory of Brahman! I Am the form of Brahman given life on Earth!
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 60