The Devil Delivered and Other Tales Page 6
So the gov’ts got clever, like I said. Flood the lines with useless information and call it unrestricted access. Meanwhile, pull the funding chain on the universities and call it enlightened merger. Faculties became Ministries, the cynical academics suddenly found themselves in charge of social policy, students became gov’t trainees, and mandatory university enrollment was the funnel. Out the other end, an endless spewing forth of ideas, carefully shaped opinions and general consensus. Combine that with full employment and a penal system that put the countless criminals and malcontents to blue-collar work, and you’ve got a prosperous, paranoid, but happy populace. The Jihad stuff fit perfectly, giving the gov’ts all the power they wanted. Things were good for them right about then. Except for all the wars and the Big Crash that took down the old US of A. And the Mideast debacle and all those nukes being thrown around—
BOGQUEEN: You’re digressing, Corbie. To focus all that, one of the big ideas that took hold unplugged the environmental movement. First, you had the alliance fucked up. People with power quickly quit complaining or making dire predictions. Second, and this was the idea itself, concocted by the academics in dry tones: Life is characterized by periods of mass extinction. We may have accelerated this one, but that’s all just relative. What you’re seeing is an inevitable expression of Nature. The Great Mother wipes clean the slate, once again. Relax everyone. Can’t fight the inevitable and, really, should you? Natural order is natural order, after all. Go with the flow, sure it’s sad, but it’s better feeling sad than feeling guilt-ridden.
CORBIE TWA: Naturally, we bought it, with a worldwide sigh of relief. Absolved at last, pass the salt.
BOGQUEEN: Ozone depletion, oh well, it was bound to happen eventually. We’ve adapted, with our rad shielding and unguents and elixirs. No different from all those volcanic eruptions on the Rim. Too bad about those rad leaks in Asia, and as for those peripheral human populations, we can help them.
CORBIE TWA: Help indeed. That’s what the boy’s gnawing at, isn’t it.
STONECASTER: But he’s one of those students you were talking about. Why isn’t he converted?
PACEMAKER: He was probably too sharp for his own good. And given his talent on the Net, he might well have accessed the so-called unrestricted files, which contain, among other things, a whole list of forbidden subjects, repressed data analyses, heretical theses, not to mention anthropological monographs, from which one can cull the most surprising information. Historical revisionism is the official line, as you said. The forces of evolution can well serve deterministic notions, if misapplied. Even more disturbing, it can be philosophically extended to justify any means, given the inevitable end.
BOGQUEEN: It’s the extinction stuff that’s now in trouble. William’s out there recording field observations that run contrary to the mass extinction idea. The beasts are changing, because they’re pressured populations. Out there we’re getting leapfrog speciation, at a phenomenal rate of mutation.
PACEMAKER: There are profound implications to that notion.
BOGQUEEN: You’d better effing well believe it. And there is a political side to that last entry. Never mind the telepathic snake, that conversation between Dr. Jenine MacAlister and Max Ohman provided a pretty succinct statement of the issues.
FREE WHIZZY: Who’s Max Ohman?
BOGQUEEN: The Lady’s right-hand boy. Ladon’s Chief Engineer.
FREE WHIZZY: Well, I can see how the theoretical stuff might trigger some kind of philosophical ruckus, but I still can’t grasp the risk to the politicos.
BOGQUEEN: It’s too soon to tell, really. I’d rather not speculate. Besides, I’ve got faith in the boy.
STONECASTER: You must be crazy. The kid’s cooked. If he’s not pulled out, he’ll be dead inside a week.
BOGQUEEN: I know. He’s running out of time.
CORBIE TWA: Maybe that’s his real message.
…
Net
… Behold, I am the back door, and my name is Malachai.…
JOHN JOHN: Who?
…
JOHN JOHN:
NOAC CENTRAL: This path is unauthorized. Contact NOAC through the means described in the NOAC Directory. This path is unauthorized.
JOHN JOHN: *******
NOAC CENTRAL: DISJUNCTIVE ACCESS, File opening now …
Directory: NOAC CENTRALMINISTRY OF SOCIAL EQUALIZATIONUSASK COMPLEX PATH:DATA ACQUISITIONANALYSIS, DEPT APPLIED ANTHROMACALISTER,J …
Contents:
PERSONNEL
POPULATIONS
PROJECTS
PROJECTIONS
XTND BIO ANALYSES
JOHN JOHN: ***********
USASK: Contents:
NOAC
* BRAZIL
* PACIFIC S. & C. AMERICA
* ATLANTIC/CARIB S. & C. AMERICA
* HOPI CONFED (PRE–MASS SUICIDE)
* LAKOTA NATION
* WEST CST NATION
* CENTRAL INUIT CONFED
* UNSETTLED NOAC POPULATIONS
SINJO
* CENTRAL ASIA
* N.E. COAST
EUROCOM
* GYPSIES
* LAPLANDER CONFED
OTHERS
* AFRICAN TRIBAL
* PACIFIC ISLES
* AUSTRAL/ZEALAND/GUINEA
JOHN JOHN: **************** ******
USASK: GENETIC ANALYSIS subsection only file presently ported.
JOHN JOHN: ******* ********
USASK: Date of last entry: APRIL 09/2014
GENETIC ANALYSIS of PERIPHERAL POPULATION OVERGROUP FINNOSLAVIC, LAPLANDER (see synonyms cat6B) DETERMINED SECOND GENERATION ADAPTIVE TRAITS:
(field and sample observer: GBM)
* Radiation Resistivity:
Semipermeable membrane detected on liver of subject; biopsy analysis incomplete but suggests new function based on mutated cell walls and armored nuclei (cf. file cytology 23), the latter previously observed at other nonregenerative areas
* Homeostatic Mechanisms:
Overall reduction in body mass: with increased ratio of mass to surface; increased fluid retention (without accompanying loss of body heat) and increased functionality of retained fluid
* UV Shield & Defense Mechanisms:
Multilayered retinas with nascent regenerative capacities; epicanthic folds around eyes; altered sleep cycle; melanin detected in lenses; reflective body hair (follicle is flat and edged, with high oil content)
* Resistance to Toxins:
Overall flushing mechanisms as indicated by flush glands that concentrate toxins then expurgate through bowel tract (glands still incomplete)
* Nonspecified Adaptations:
expanded visual spectrum to include marginal infrared detection; other traits common to all pressured populations (see notes)
NOAC: INTERCEPT
JOHN JOHN:
USASK: Return to previous menu?
NOAC: INTERCEPT & TRACKING
JOHN JOHN: Shit.
NOAC: TRACKING
JOHN JOHN:
NOAC: TRACKING
JOHN JOHN:
NOAC: CAPTURED
USASK: Security Class 7 you are UNAUTHORIZED to proceed further.
NOAC: Where am I?
USASK: NOAC Security File, Shunt 2761B, Personnel, Codename Hackhunter.
NOAC: That’s me, you assholes.
USASK: Subject of file is UNAUTHORIZED to access contents.
NOAC: What the fuck. You pricks, I’m one of the good guys.
USASK: Subject of file is UNAUTHORIZED to access contents. GO BACK.
NOAC: Shunt this to Securicom. Pissing off the good guys is bad business. Hackhunter signing off. For good.
FOUR
American NW, Terminal Zone, July 7, A.C. 14
A year for every day.
Decay of plastic welds. His bootsuit was falling apart beneath the invisible torrent from the cloudless sky. Earlier, at dawn, he’d woken in his shield tent to the roar of machinery. Climbing out, he sa
w a thousand combines cresting a nearby ridge, emerging from a storm of dust and toppling mindlessly over the steep embankment. Loping along the ridge, almost invisible in their reflective fur, a half-dozen coyotes appeared, observing their handiwork. He listened to them laugh.
And the sun rose once again.
He sipped thick, acidic water from the spitter, then slowly lowered his backpack. Now noon, the place he had found himself in was a dead-ground. Leaning barns, silos with peeling walls, dead oak trees, and a farmhouse encircled by abandoned machinery. A last circling of the wagons, but it had been useless. The redskins were in the mirror.
No ghosts here, simply the thunderous silence of their absence. William looked around, blinking painfully as he studied the detritus of his own kind, and smelled the poison in the air. Subsurface leakage, coming up from the well near the barn. Pesticides, herbicides, concentrations in the water table like lifeless jellyfish.
A strange, almost incandescent moss covered the cinder blocks lining the well, had spread outward to cover three plastic leprechauns with an oily, vaguely translucent patina. Two plaster fawns crouched in the skeletal shade of the dead oaks, their paint faded but still the animals stood, frozen immobile by terror. In their eyes, nothing but white.
William almost laughed. Zombie Bambis, hallelujah. He wished he could laugh. He hadn’t laughed in so long.
Dehydration. Musn’t run out of moisture.
He walked over to the well, set his blistered hands on the cool moss covering the cinder blocks, leaned over, and looked down. A pool, viscid in shades of blue, magenta, bottle-fly green. Pale round waterbugs swam dizzying circles beneath the surface. Damn things didn’t even need air anymore. William straightened and took a few steps backwards.
He removed a flare from his belt, activated it, and tossed it into the well.
Fire! A pillar of poisonous flame! He watched it eating a vertical path skyward. A sudden eye glares upward, and meets the steady polished eye of a satellite. They study each other, then wink with their own designs.
I anoint this dead-ground, absolution of its sins burning into oblivion, whilst the scarabs beneath the surface of a dead skin race down into cool darkness, and there await the coming of their first breaths. Savage oxygen, the lungs that birth the cough of flame.
I see you all come closer, drawn by this crisp cut to the air, this clean crackle which my dying hands have cast into the well of darkness.
Gather, then, while I bathe. When I emerge, you will be able to touch me, and I will be able to touch you. Our spirits will join, and we will march like a sea that swallows the earth. We will march, and none may stop us. Ghosts, we are all ghosts now. We must deliver the new world unto the inheritors, who know us not.
The dead-grounds are alive once again.
Behold this self, Daniel. I am Mene before the feast.
The water was like ice against his skin, as close to pain as he could remember. He carefully reattached the clasps on the rotting bootsuit, and scanned the ruined farm with new eyes.
The farm’s battered arrogance had fallen in upon itself, and now the air was filled with ghosts, the streaming dead still mute but brimming with their separate stories. All eyes rested on him.
He would be their language, their words, now. He understood that much. He would speak for them all. God had given him the lie, laid bare and bleeding. We have lived in our heaven, and we have made it as it is. Somewhere above, the fallen angels still climb.
William stared at his hands. His sight had changed. The bones stood out sharply, solid in a fading haze of mortal flesh. Blood pulsed through the capillaries, faintly glowing.
He retrieved his backpack and stiffly worked his way into the straps. The pillar of fire had been sighted. Satellites, high-altitude reconnaissance craft. Activity in the Hole. Pinpoint resolution, down to the water trickling from his hair. As attentively as these ghosts, machines watched him, recorded his movements, then dutifully reported the data. Still, the heat sensor records would baffle the analyzers. Around him flowed an ice age, there in the breath of beasts dead for ten thousand years. They are my body, Daniel, and I am their voice.
His joints protested dully as he lurched into motion. Knees refusing to bend, balance awry, tottering and jolting forward, stalking like a stiff marionette.
The ghosts closed in, flowing and brushing against him, bolstering him upright with their gelid shoulders, broad wintry backs. Nearby, he saw a coyote and recognized it.
“I remember you. The last hunt. Bison antiquus. I see you keeping your distance, friend.” The words were in his head, but so was everything else. No borders left, his skull porous, his thoughts drifting in the air, delicately traced by the satellites, and heard by the coyote.
“You’re too old,” William said, “for mere trickery. You were here and you were there, on the edge of that continental bridge. You watched our arrival. Did you know what it meant? Did you know then what it always means, friend?”
But the earth yields to the shovel, and is turned over, flipped onto its back. Again and again, this is what we do, and each time, the firmament fills with spirits departing the old ways. We move on. We never look back.
The coyote dropped back, then behind, into his wake. Ready to pick at the pieces, prepared as ever to contemplate the scatter of garbage, the meanings of the twisted tin can and the candy wrapper, the crushed velvet of moss beneath a tire’s track. The coyote contemplates, and might even smile as the can rusts and withers to dust, as the wrapper crumbles under the sun, as the moss slowly springs back.
The coyote stays in our wake, and patiently awaits the coming of our bones, scattered like a sprung bundle of sticks. A disarticulated map to mull over, the wind moaning through the holes in our skull. It listens to that song, but soon tires of the repetition. In a world where nothing changes, we’d best move on.
Humped-back transports crawled a ritual dance on the plain below. William leaned sideways into the wind, his broken boots precariously gripping the edge of a ridge, and studied the mechanical dance on the valley floor. A score of smaller vehicles buzzed randomly through the greater design. He watched two converge, then drive out from the swarm, approaching him side by side, lumbering steadily up the slope.
Daniel and Jack Tree emerged from the vehicle on the left. A squat, wide man stepped out from the vehicle on the right. The stranger wore sunglasses and a baseball cap with the Ladon crest above the brim. His face was lined, clean-shaven, and almost flat, the bones underneath Mongoloid, the incisors in his maxilla and mandible shovel-shaped. A hairline crack along his zygoma revealed an old, poorly healed, broken cheekbone.
“Can you hear me?” Daniel asked, stepping close.
William nodded.
“Can you see me?”
He nodded again. Cranial characteristics displayed the wondrous lineage of Daniel, so close to that of the Asian stranger. William turned and studied Jack Tree. Caucasoid traits for the most part. Even the bones contributed to the mask that had dissipated like smoke the possibilities of prejudice, a trick of sympathy that swayed the media, enraptured the public.
“See any spy teams out there, William?”
He looked back at Daniel.
“Sorry, applied anthropologists, then.”
William shook his head.
“Our arrays picked up a heat signature,” the stranger said, his wide-boned hands on his hips. “Big one. We tracked you from it.”
William smiled and said, “I would speak, if you can hear me.”
The stranger frowned at Daniel, then shrugged. “I hear you fine, son.”
“A pillar of flame. I am reborn to the hour. Watch me burn, gentlemen.”
Jack Tree barked an uneasy laugh. “You’re talking to an engineer, Potts, not some goddamned mystic.”
“The fire is only the beginning,” William said, steadying his gaze on Jack Tree, who stepped back. “The wheel will spin, and lightning will scar the sky. There’ll be thunder, but from the earth. And the clouds will
not fall, but ascend. Heaven, gentlemen, is not shot through with orbiting machines. There is no happy hunting ground. You had it, once, but it’s gone now, and that, Jack Tree, is what’s written on your heart. The truth you have chosen to hide, even from yourself.
“The buffalo were doomed. You didn’t need us. You didn’t need us for war, or spite, or murder. Granted, we busted up your game something awful, but the four horses needed riders, and you rode them. I am here, and I see how the cold wind shakes each of you. The ghosts are dancing, my friends.”
A cell buzzed at the stranger’s hip. He snatched at it with a blue hand. William watched the blood pool in the man’s torso, pulling away from the extremities. The man cupped a hand over the earpiece, listened, then nodded. He returned the phone to his belt.
“Fucking weather pattern sprung up out of nowhere. We’ve got a blow coming.” He swung expressionless eyes on William. “A fucking bad one.”
“They won’t stay at home any longer,” William said, smiling at Jack Tree. “They’re coming with you. I’m sorry about that, but they refuse to be forgotten. Not now, not again.”