The Devil Delivered and Other Tales Page 12

  After a moment, she leaned against him. “See what happens,” she muttered, “when you peel back the pages.”

  “Life, Stel, nothing but life.”

  “It’s never just one life, Jim. We should live lots of lives. That’s the whole point. Either that, or go out quick. Quick and bright.”

  He watched her pull hard on her cigarette. “Should quit that,” he said. “It’ll kill you for sure.”

  Stel raised an eyebrow, then joined in his laughter.

  Net

  BOGQUEEN: What a mess.

  LUNKER: Well, at least the Lakota withdrew from the area.

  CORBIE TWA: Big deal. Those tar sands will burn underground for decades. Cappin the wells is just for show.

  BOGQUEEN: Clearing the air. What’s the news on Lapland? All I heard was another incursion.…

  LUNKER: Went sour. God knows who’s supplying the peripherals, but they’re hammering anything that comes close. Restricted weapons to boot. Clearly, they have an inside line, and have had it for a while, enough to prepare.

  BOGQUEEN: Anybody else get the feeling we’ve been living in serious ignorance of the real goings on in this untidy little world of ours?

  PACEMAKER: Muckers, picked up an unofficial burst. SF’s lit up. Half the city’s on fire, the other half is one giant lynch mob. Burning limos, burning mansions, burning millionaires …

  CORBIE TWA: Had it comin, every fuckin one of em. The have-nots take back what they never had but always wanted. The long sleep’s finally over, I guess.

  BOGQUEEN: Don’t jump the gun. NOAC will come down hard. You’ll see.

  PACEMAKER: Maybe, maybe not. Command structure’s in trouble, so goes the whisper. Nothing’s been mobilized yet, except the world news teams.

  LUNKER: Ouch.

  PACEMAKER: In any case, the rest of the world is slowly swimming into the vortex. Tactical nukes flicking everywhere. SINJO’s massing troops to head to Pakistan, but China’s seriously distracted by that Taiwan counterstrike. Picked up a loose sat feed—fields of bodies, square mile after square mile. The Chinese army’s collapsed—

  CORBIE TWA: What’s new?

  PACEMAKER: Some nukes were flung at Taiwan, got shot down. Glowworms flicked Biks in Beijing last night, at least two. It’s going haywire over there.

  LUNKER: Scratch old China.

  CORBIE TWA: And what’s SINJO without China? Japanese hardware, none of it working since the islands started making bright spots in the ring of fire.

  PACEMAKER: We drown in the sea of our discontent.

  LUNKER: Any news on William?

  BOGQUEEN: None. Consensus is he’s gone down.

  PACEMAKER: Seems likely. What a shame, there was a real tide rising under him.

  BOGQUEEN: Mind you, it’s only been three days.

  Saskatchewan Precinct, Val Marie

  Heel-rocking.

  Images of father, never still when standing, always back and forth, a lecturer uncomfortably constrained by the slow imperative of words.

  “Mapping the brain, William. Sociobiology’s end run. We are nature, not nurture. All is predictable now.”

  Heel-rocking.

  “Bullshit. That’s how you respond to those assertions, son. Hogwash in tender company. It’s human conceit, such claims. The defense lawyers are having a field day. The notion of justice is out the proverbial window.”

  Rocking.

  He seemed pleased by this, the dark half of his purportedly nonexistent soul showing. Books on shelves provided his backdrop, his hunched shoulders seeming comfortable in taking their collective weight. “Of course, it’s pointless arguing the subject rationally. The ammunition that blows the sociobiologists out of the water isn’t found under the microscope. The rational age is concluded, son. Time’s come again for poets.”

  Poets. Did they have the refutation at hand? Could the imperfect connotative refraction of words spoken, words written, reveal the lie of the genetic determinists? Who’d listen?

  Father and his slow measured words, like sticks tossed onto a bonfire, the match and white-spirit in his hands, the boy tied to the hard, unyielding post. Connote, denote, put the ambient strains together, concoct a meaningful wholeness out of the parts, find the sum greater and thus the lesson to those sociobiologists. Mapping with anal certitude, a crow on the lips, a savage rush of freedom riding the conclusion.

  “We are locked in the rational world’s death throes. But when logic hurts the powers that be, the subject in question is deftly made subjective. You unplug its efficacy by claiming noncontextuality. That’s how the powers that be disarmed history as a discipline comprising lessons in human nature anchored in time. That was then; this is now. Now bears no relation to then; then tells us nothing of now. We were amoebas then; now we’re supermen.

  “So, rationality is a precept, and where it breaks down there is savagery, thus proving the precept. But rationality is also, at its core, self-serving. Logic isn’t the straight line they make it out to be; it’s a circle pretending to be a straight line. Nice trick, but don’t be fooled. The rational mind is a closed system, with rejection its primary weapon.”

  Logic in these words, constructed as an argument. But recall the resonance of hidden meaning. Recall the rocking, the rocking, the boy and the hard, unyielding stake.

  “And here’s the final joke. The rational world’s now reduced humanity to flawed machines, slaved to genes and thus justifiably and ultimately irrational. To that I have but one response: Huh?”

  Huh.

  Deciding he was well enough after all, Jenine MacAlister sat atop him, guiding his penis in.

  He lay beneath her, aroused and bemused, his life reduced to two forces, one found, the other lost. Neither rational in their precepts and otherwise immune to morality, since there’s no such thing as guilt in the rational world.

  “True judgment is noncontextual, William. The specific extracted and applied to an implacable structure of ethics. The application yields either conjunction or clash. This is true judgment. Extenuating circumstances are the rational means of destabilizing the structure of ethics—they sound reasonable and by their very reasonableness they weaken the structure. Do it over and over again and the structure disintegrates. No framework makes true judgment impossible. A world of ‘buts’ superceding a world of ‘thou shall nots.’ This is how a rational world becomes amoral, cold, bloodless, clinical, and efficient.

  “Genocide? Contextually rational. Jews, Cambodians, North American Indians, Slavs, Croatians, Serbs, Muslims, you name it. All contextually rational. Which is how genocide is a crime that is repeated throughout history, again and again, and again. By virtue of subjectivism, of relativism, of the momentary logic of brutality.”

  A whispering laugh, unceasing wind. The prairie wind has the last laugh. Pleasure in movement, satisfaction in eternity. In the wind you’ll find our ghosts, the inexorable wordless truth of history. Eager to strip you dry of all tears, of all pretenses to life. In the wind, you may rock, you may fall.

  “Listen to the wind, William. Aren’t you glad you’re in here?”

  The subtle game of poets can be heard in the whisper of the wind.

  NOACOM: You have been tracked with eleven other illegal mockers involved in the dissemination of seditious information.

  STONECASTER: Not me. Must be someone using my moniker.

  NOACOM: Punitive measures are being prepared. You will be penal-tagged.

  STONECASTER: You can’t do that. I’m not your boy!

  NOACOM: Conciliatory gestures will be taken into consideration. Securicom is prepared to exercise clemency should you provide information leading to the subduction of your illegal contacts.

  STONECASTER: I don’t know them. Honest.

  Net Happynews

  … the planet’s rotation has dragged the skyhook across most of continental North America. Static discharges are affecting weather patterns, and witnesses state that the night sky is split by a line of continuous lightning. At th
e same time, spokespersons for Ladon state that the measured data thus far indicates minimal effect from Coriolis winds, due primarily to the “shunting” nature of the outer skin, which is “sloughing off” friction. Furthermore, the spokesman went on to say, the deep anchor points are barely registering any strain, although the full height (and weight) of the elevator is yet to be reached.…

  Twenty-four new species of plants are running wild, reclaiming areas cleared of tropical rain forest. Domestic crops are losing the battle, despite intensive GOM interventions and bio countermeasures. These new species and an estimated three hundred additional as yet unidentified species have emerged from the remaining blocks of rain forest almost simultaneously in eighteen different regions, from Sumatra to Central America, with the most rapid emergence in the Amazon and in the Congo, as well as Madagascar. Slash and burning seems to trigger an intensification of new growth. Initial analyses indicate high toxicity in the majority of these new plants.

  More on new species. Get this one. A new type of howler monkey has been discovered in the jungle-blocks of Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Costa Rica. Aggressive as hell, forming communities numbering in the hundreds, these howlers have been raiding farms and killing livestock. They are proving very difficult to capture and as yet none have been taken alive (“They’ll never take me alive!”), but dead ones have been examined and some details are immediately obvious, like the larger braincase, and opposable thumbs and opposable big toes. Sexual dimorphism seems to be increased, with the males massing 2.5 times larger than females. Estrous cycles are all mixed up, now that so much meat has been added to what heretofore (cool, always wanted to use that word) was a vegetarian diet.…

  Don’t be surprised if you can’t read this! EM rads are getting scary high from all those flicked Biks, messing up wave bands everywhere. It’s getting so no one can hear all those doomsayers out there telling us it’s all over and the fat lady’s too sick to sing so no point in waiting for it.…

  Val Marie, the third night

  “It’s all gone out of proportion. I wasn’t doing anything worth noticing.”

  Jim glanced across at Stel, then shrugged at William’s claim, and said, “Makes no difference to me. It’s what comes of talking so people can hear you, anyway. They listen, and then they put their own spin on things. Nothing you can do about it.”

  A faint smile from the cracked, peeling lips. “You mean I can absolve myself of all responsibility?”

  “Depends on your ego,” Stel said, with a dark grin. “Wasn’t you starting all those wars, was it?”

  He looked away. “Field observations. Punctuated equilibrium. I noticed the insects first. Imagine my surprise when I discovered higher orders were in on the game. And then … it was just logical … to take a new, hard look at the Lakota. At Daniel. That double blink—when you could get him without the shades on. That’s what tipped me. That inner transparent eyelid, coming up from below, all the way up—I saw it shooting pool with him.”

  Stel said, “She said she’d be back tomorrow morning. To take you home.”

  William looked at her, then nodded.

  “Well?” she asked. “Is that what you want?”

  “No.”

  “Fine. Good. What do you want us to do?”

  Jim watched the boy studying them both, and wondered what he was thinking. Nobody can know anyone else. Nobody can get into someone else’s brain. Nobody knows even himself. But you could always wonder, couldn’t you?

  “Take me back out.”

  “Under the Hole,” Jim said, nodding, as Stel snorted in disgust.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll die this time,” Jim said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  William said nothing.

  Aw, hell, what a stupid thing to say.

  “Goddammit,” Stel growled, “we went out and found you—”

  “He didn’t ask us to,” Jim cut in.

  “Just take me out,” William said. “Tonight.”

  “We ain’t got a bootsuit—”

  “I don’t want one.”

  “Expect to do some evolving of your own?” Jim asked, brows lifting.

  William shook his head. “Jack Tree was right. Not for me. I’m not the one. Never was. The wrong ghosts.” The red-shot eyes fixed on Jim. “Your ghosts, I think.”

  Jim said nothing. The lad had guessed right. Assuming he’d guessed. Then he shrugged and said, “It’s the world we got, but that doesn’t mean it has to make sense.”

  “I know. Too bad that so much of it does.”

  Yes. We poisoned. We doctored. We raped. We pillaged. Barbarians at nature’s gate, what a joke that we kept insisting that what scared us was on the other side. Jim rose from the chair. “All right, we better get ready, then.…”

  Net

  PACEMAKER: All right, folks, I shook the dust out of my printer and now there’s hard copy. Somebody needs to keep a record of all this, before the plug’s pulled.

  FREE WHIZZY: Make copies, tick-tock.

  PACEMAKER: I have no problem with that. It all comes down to interpretation, anyway, so the more the merrier.

  FREE WHIZZY: I’ve picked up a streamer, says someone gassed most of the Lapland Republic. Killed everyone. And now they’re collecting bodies for research or something.

  LUNKER: I heard it different. Gassed, yeah, but some kind of knockout, since they need living subjects to work on.

  PACEMAKER: Last I heard, it went south. The whole thing, because the incursion was cracked and leaked, meaning when the bastards arrived they found no one. The peripherals were all gone.

  FREE WHIZZY: Guess there’s no news fit to print anymore. Who to believe?

  William staggered after stepping clear of the vehicle.

  Dropping his goggles over his eyes, Jim climbed out from behind the wheel and walked round until he stood at William’s side.

  He wanted to see something good in this, but it wasn’t working. He felt sick inside. Stel had refused to come, saying she’d rather stay at the hotel and run interference if it proved necessary. Jim knew she’d had other reasons, and she’d earned the right to keep them private.

  “I don’t understand,” William said, struggling with his backpack straps.

  Jim stepped close and helped him. “About what?”

  “There was nothing … uh, revelatory in my entries. Beyond the evolutionary data. I was musing on the notion of extinction—”

  “Except for all the ghosts.”

  William winced and looked away.

  Not much to see. It was 2 A.M. and the sky was overcast. There was nothing definite out there, nothing at all.

  “Did you really see them, William? Those ghosts?”

  “I’m seeing them right now, Jim.” A faint laugh. “Alas, sanity proves irretrievable.”

  “Is this … is that all you wanted?”

  “An interesting question. Can you answer it for yourself? Look back on all those years and ask the same question?”

  “Alas, the past proves irretrievable.”

  “But can it be redeemed? Can we? Can you?”

  “Is that what you’re out here looking for, William? Redemption?”

  “It’s a universal longing, isn’t it?”

  Jim shook his head. “Don’t know about that. Sometimes you just have to write it off. The whole damned thing.”

  “Like the Martians did.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing important. Tell me, what do you hate?”

  Jim grunted. “What don’t I hate? I hate it all, William. The fucking endless ways of dying that never just gets it over with and takes everybody, every damned one of us. No, some of us got to live on. And on. With our sack full of hurts. For what? I don’t know.” His shoulders fell, a new wave of exhaustion taking him.

  “I want to believe … in something. The new animals,” William looked over at him. “That’s something. It makes me … optimistic. Not personally. But in the sense of life refusing to give up.” />
  “Isn’t that what you’re doing?” Jim asked. “Giving up?”

  “You and me, Jim. Homo sapiens sapiens. We’ve been pushed to the wayside.”

  “So what if we have? Go find some shelter. Live out what’s left to you.”

  “A life spent hating? Sorry, I didn’t mean that to sound like an attack. I guess I’m having doubts.”

  “Good. Let’s get back into the crawler and have a beer with Stel.”

  William smiled, then shook his head. “Not about that, Jim. It’s just the misplaced faith. When I walk a path, I don’t expect other people to follow it. Even vicariously.” His smile grew rueful. “Then again, I was posting, wasn’t I? I should have anticipated what would happen. But what I can’t seem to get across is, my dialogue is with myself. No one else, certainly not anything like God. It’s with my own past.”

  “Well,” Jim said, “I haven’t been reading your mail. But it seems people are needing something. They were waiting, that’s all, waiting for someone to follow.”

  “But I’m not offering anything. There’s nothing implicitly apocryphal in musing on evolution and tossing in the occasional fictitious conversation.”

  “That’s the thing about intentions,” Jim said, grinning, “nobody gives a fuck. So, are you the one who’s been breaking into secured files and releasing classified information?”

  “No, that’d be Max Ohman. Bound for Ur.”

  “He told you?”

  “No. I sniffed back. He’s pretty good at covering his trail.”

  “You found him anyway.”

  William shrugged. “I had to get … intuitive on occasion. Anyway, lots of other hackers joined in before too long. It’s where this war is being fought.”

  Jim grunted. “Until someone blows up the Tar Sands, or nukes a city.”

  “Maybe our species is indeed insane. Determined to go out with a bang, and if possible, take the others with them. Out of spite—if we can’t have this world neither can you.”

  “It still sounds impossible to me,” Jim said, feeling the cool wind on his face as he stared skyward. “Evolution was supposed to be slow.”

  “Yes. But very few missing links in the fossil record. That should have provided a clue. You don’t get missing links, creatures sharing traits from what came before and what’s to come. Well, a few, but not nearly as many as there should have been. If the jump is sudden, and absolute, there are no missing links, and that fits the fossil record. Oddly enough, the peripherals might well be such a transition population, since they possess traits still nascent in functionality. Anyway,” William said, adjusting the straps on his backpack, “I wish I could wash my hands of all this. It wasn’t what I wanted. None of it.” He laughed then. “Sitting Bull tried to show me, back at the very beginning, during the first storm, but I didn’t understand.”