by J L Forrest
“I smell it,” she says. “You’re mostly human, but you’re bits of other things too.”
“DNA splices,” I explain. “Some from other organisms, some engineered from scratch. You know what DNA is?”
“Not really.” She scrunches her lips and her eyes narrow.
“I’m what’s called a Harque.”
“What’s a hark?”
“Spelled with a Q-U-E. A Harque is a kind of record keeper, an observer, an advisor.”
Her head tilts.
I continue, “Avidità Corporation relies on computers, but computers can be hacked and falsified. Neither blockchaining nor quantum computing have stopped viruses or malware. Some Harques provide a biological checksum, ensure the AI are reporting correctly, doing what their owners directed them to do.”
Her brow furrows.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sure none of that made sense.”
“You don’t forget things.”
“Not much. It’s called an eidetic memory.”
“You’ll remember everything we’re saying now?”
I nod. “I keep a running narrative, going on in my head, all the time.”
Imagine she’s tasted a sour lemon—that’s her expression. I almost laugh.
“I don’t think you’re much of a normal human either,” I say.
She tilts her head the other way.
“An educated guess,” I say.
“The Horned Lord says your memory is interesting.”
“Does he?”
“But He says your heart is much more interesting.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re good.”
I frown. “I’m not sure about that.”
“Why?”
“I’ve killed a lot of people.”
“You don’t enjoy it.”
“No.”
Eagna nods. “Please come with me now. No need to kill anyone. There’ll be breakfast waiting.”
“Tempting,” I say, “but I can’t. My friends are expecting me.”
“You mean Thomas Avidità?”
My breath catches—she must have talked with her mother? “Yes.”
“You’ll tell him everything you’ve seen and heard, everything you’ve learned, and what you tell him will be true and correct.”
Has my heart dropped into my intestines? “You’re a smart and articulate girl, you know that, Eagna?”
“I cannot let you go to Thomas Avidità.” She steps closer.
“You’re smart,” I say, “but you’re also small, and there’s not much you can do to stop me. Head back to your mothers. By the time you reach them, by the time they can send anyone to retrieve me, I’ll be long gone.”
So much for fashioning a raft. No time. I’ll have to swim for it.
“My mothers aren’t here,” she says, “but I’m not alone.”
Shit.
I grasp the spear.
“I brought my puppies,” she says.
The two fluff-balls, the little dogs beside her during the voyage from New Juneau. Laughing, I let go my breath.
“Take your puppies back with you,” I say. “Now, go! My clothes have got a bit more drying to do.”
Raising her face to the brightening morning sky, Eagna howls. Two more howls join her little-girl voice, songs like war horns, elemental and near. The first pale wolflike beast leaps onto the boulder behind her. The second, its fur a mottled charcoal gray, emerges from the trees to the north.
Lithe animals with long snouts. Shaggy. Toothy but neither dogs nor wolves.
Tall as horses.
Eagna holds out her small hand toward me. “Come with us, Aurelius.”
I stand, clutching my shoddy spear with both hands, and I position the fire between me and the beasts. They hesitate to approach, come no closer, as frightened by fire as any other animal.
The little girl gestures toward the flames, as if brushing dust from the air, and they go out. Snuffed. Only tendrils of smoke.
I run. I run my ass off. I run faster than I’ve ever run before.
XXVIII. Ice Age, Part I
Recollected
2131.3.21.20:12 GMT
Alt 40.1E6m
High Earth Orbit
EIK-Cel Station
Mr. Avidità hunkered over a bioengineering workstation. He dissected an organism I didn’t recognize, nothing I’d ever studied in any textbook. Fleshy, eight legs, a tail, no discernible head, probably endoskeletal. Its underbelly looked vulval.
“Thank you for coming,” he said to me, not looking up from his microscope.
I never responded to such questions. If the King summoned me, I went. His thank yous amounted to ceremony.
The room’s speaker system was playing the last bars of Radiohead’s 2016 “Burn the Witch”.
AIs ran the biolabs, monitored the million-million daily splices, the unending recombinations of raw genetic material. Only one in ten billion resulted in a viable organism, but that meant the labs invented a hundred new creatures per day.
“This is an interesting one,” said Mr. Avidità, folding back a wet flap of skin-like material, revealing a fleshy tube.
“Looks like a wasp’s ovipositor,” I said, “a few orders of magnitude larger.”
“Superficially.”
“What can I do for you, Your Grace?”
So much white! Every surface in the biolabs shone as whitely as possible. White for pure. White for clean. White for sterile. White reassured the lab’s few technicians. If blood or some other bodily fluid escape its confines, splattered where it wasn’t supposed to go, white revealed it.
I stood at ease, hands crossed behind my back, waiting for Mr. Avidità to answer me. The music shifted into Cabal Monkey’s 2073 masterpiece, “Racial Facial”. White. The irony.
“We’ve accumulated more than enough genetic material on the Stations,” he said, “to ensure the survival of humanity for a thousand generations. In the terraria, we have two-thirds of all species known to exist at the beginning of the twenty-first century—not exactly a Noah’s Ark, but frankly our Arks aren’t mythological bullshit.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
Why’d he summon me? I didn’t have many hours before I, and the baby, would launch from Station and drop into Earth’s atmosphere. Mr. Avidità continued his dissection, snipping one leg from the odd creature on his bench, setting the limb aside.
“We estimate,” he said, “all species which have ever existed represent less than one-one-trillionth of one percent of all DNA-based life which could ever evolve. Isn’t that remarkable?”
No joke. That so many organisms might, statistically speaking, emerge from DNA’s matrix—nothing short of mind-blowing.
“It is, Your Grace.”
“You might be wondering,” he said, “the real purpose of your mission?”
“You’ve always discouraged me from asking about such things.”
He chuckled. “Crèche-born aren’t supposed to know a goddamned thing about the purposes of their missions. You’re to know the what, the how, the when, and the where, but never the why. All the black-op bullshit your brothers are doing these days, you think they’ve got the faintest clue why they’re slaughtering the residents of the Xīwàng Orbiter? Or crushing Nesteler on Ceres? No, they do not.”
He incised the creature’s tail, examining its tendons, identifying unusual interlinkages between its vertebrae.
“You’re different, Aur. You’ve always been different. You’re sensitive, discerning. You appreciate subtleties. You’d choose a rabbit over an empire.”
“Doesn’t that make me foolish, Your Grace?”
He laughed, looked up from his microscope, and set down his tools. “It makes you the smartest goddamned motherfucker of the lot of us.”
I waited.
He continued, “If whatever’s going on in the Alaskan Panhandle is the work of the UPRC or, more so, if it’s some Nesteler project—fuck ‘em. I need to know what’s going on dow
n there, Aur. Diplomatic attempts with the Queens have failed. Our drones don’t last more than five minutes inside their airspace, which as near as I can tell has no planes, no drones, and no conventional ground-to-air defenses. I mean, what the fuck? They capture my spies quickly enough too. Hell, you might be no exception there.”
This startled me. “You don’t have faith in me, Your Grace?”
“You’re the apple of my eye, Aur, but so far those bitches have sniffed out every single goddamned thing I’ve thrown at them. Still, I’ve got an intuition with you.”
“An intuition?”
He shrugged and turned back to his work. “You’re the man for the job, right?”
“You’re risking my life on an intuition?”
“Yes, Aur, I am.”
Ever had to swallow a pill that wouldn’t quite go down? That you had to force, that hurt all the way to your stomach?
“You going to tell me the why?” I asked.
“If it’s Nesteler,” he said, “if it’s the UPRC—”
“Fuck ‘em. Yes, I got that part, Your Grace.”
“But what if it’s not?”
What if? I had nothing to say on the matter, hadn’t thought of it, couldn’t have said in that moment what it might mean if the phenomena—the change in surface condition, the Horned Lords, the Queens—weren’t some other corporation’s top-secret program.
The music transitioned into King Makis’s 2019 “Re-Entry”, a track bizarrely playful and grand and moody.
“What if it’s not?” Mr. Avidità repeated. “Then we’ve got a real conundrum.”
“Why?”
“It’s almost always a mistake to destroy the unknown, to deny it your full attention. If whatever’s going on down there has nothing to do with Nesteler or the UPRC, it might represent a new threat, but it might also offer us some new opportunity.”
I nodded, as if I had the faintest idea what he meant.
He continued, “As I mentioned, Aur, we’ve got enough material to ensure the survival of humanity, but what the Earth needs is a fallow period.”
“Your Grace?”
“What I mean is this—you know we invented Blight? Of course we didn’t name it Blight. It’s not like I brought the branding team together to dream up the best possible trademark for the end of civilization.”
Was Station rocking? Was our orbit stable? Were we about to careen into Earth’s atmosphere?
Only my head spinning. I forced myself to take a long, slow, quiet breath.
“We have to save humanity,” he said, “like we’ve got to save lions and elephants. But here’s the trick—we also need to hit Earth’s reset button.”
I swallowed hard. “How do we accomplish that?”
“An ice age.”
“What?”
“We’re quite sure of the engineering.”
“I’m actually not sure I understand, Your Grace.”
“An ice age. I mean to cool the Earth to something like the late Pleistocene.”
“That’ll kill most of whoever’s left down there.”
“I’ve already killed a few billion,” he said. “What’s a few more million?”
My mouth was hanging open. I closed it—before it filled with flies.
“Here’s the thing, Aur—” He made another incision, examined what appeared to be two livers. “If you infiltrate the Queen’s territory, talk with Bett and Cailín, determine that what’s happening down there is something new, I’ll cancel or postpone the ice age, see if we can work something out with the Queens of the Horned Lord. If you assassinate them, or you report that the phenomena are the expression of a competitor’s technologies, well—”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Now you understand the why?”
I did.
“It’s up to you, Aur. Your call, should you find yourself before the Queens.” He split the creature’s ribcage, examined its chest cavity. “If you decide there’s something there which Avidità Corporation needs to understand better, well, you come back here and let me know.”
“Otherwise?” I asked.
“I’m going to drop Earth’s average temperatures by fourteen Celsius.” Once more he looked up at me. “You’re my man. Don’t think of the weight as being on your shoulders, though. The decision to strike the final blow, to obliterate what’s left of humanity on Earth, that’ll be mine. The only power I’m giving you,” he said, “is to stay the execution.”
Sodom and Gomorrah, I thought.
“Go on,” said Mr. Avidità, tugging an eight-chambered heart from the organism’s chest, “make your final preparations.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
For one more moment the dissected creature held my attention, then I departed for the crèche.
XXIX. Easter Hunt
2131.4.15.7:48 PST
56°27’05.6”N 132°22’17.4”W
Alt 7m
Wrangell Island
The Faen
Eagna’s puppies don’t yet give chase but I am flying, full sprint, into the thickest growths of pine I can find. I choose any land over which horse-sized predators might not be able to stretch their legs, but I’m not sure how much ground I can cover either.
You try running naked and barefoot through wet forests scarcely above freezing, see how you do. The adrenaline does all the work, pushes the grisly reality to the back of my mind.
Don’t think about what the rocks are doing to my feet.
Don’t think about the branches and nettles against my bare skin.
Don’t think about the maximum velocity of any canine.
At least I’ve dried off. Hell, I’m working up a sweat. Gripping my spear, I swing it like a dull machete, sweeping the greenery ahead, clearing the way. I enter a rock-strewn hollow, a series of pine-needle-blanketed bowls and sharp hillocks. My toes are bleeding.
Howls echo through the forests, the pitch raising the hairs on the back of my neck. Now they’re coming.
I leap across boulders deposited an ice age ago, slick with moss and lichen. As I vault downed pines, tree trunks scattered across the craggy terrain like pickup sticks, a splintered branch catches me under the rubs and cuts deep.
Stumbling, skinning my knees, I keep moving. The howls close on me—fuck they’re quick!—and I look for a new route, anywhere I might go that they can’t. The boulders pile one atop another and I climb, climb, climb—
Stones arise from either side of a slender crevasse, a mere gash in the earth. Ferns and currants crowd the gap between the crevasse’s edges of loose earth and granite. The bottom is three meters down.
I leap.
In the fall, the ferns slap my legs, my groin, my stomach. I roll and manage to regain my feet, spear still in hand. With my back wedged against stone, I guard the slender opening above. Impossible to flank me, to take me from any other direction, so I wait.
On either side of the crevasse, along its lip, the beasts appear. First the pale one—I’ll think of him as Whitey—then the dark one, Blackie.
Past them, past the surrounding trees, the sky has brightened into a clean blue, promising a pleasant springtime afternoon.
Whitey lowers his furry head, growls, and lifts his hackles.
I brace the spear.
He springs for me and his jaws catch my left shoulder, but the spear slides into his chest, drives through lungs and heart, and bursts from his back. Two hundred fifty kilos of dead puppy pin me, and I slide to my ass. Whitey’s blood bathes me.
Blackie circles the crevasse’s lip. He growls, paces, seeks an angle of attack. In better circumstances—less injured, less exhausted, less trapped—I could lift Whitey’s cadaver and return to my defensive position. Not so easy now.
After several failed attempts to dislodge the spear, I let it go. I manage to shove Whitey aside, but I have to twist myself, to turn my back to Blackie.
He growls, lowers his head into a space made tighter by his brother’s corpse, and snaps at me. His drool slicks my s
houlder.
I punch his nose. “Fuck you!”
After freeing my legs I crouch, sandwiched between the carcass on one side and the ravine wall on the other. Blackie snaps again, nearer my head.
My spear’s point juts from Whitey’s back. I could yank it free, maybe fight my way out—
—only speed will do—
—and I spring onto Whitey, wrap both hands around the spear’s bloodied haft, plant my feet in Whitey’s fur, and pull.
I pull with every gram of strength I’ve got, but I was never as strong as my brothers. The haft slides another meter from the body, but it snags a rib or catches the tough heart meat. I tug again, twist the spear between myself and Blackie—
He lunges.
His teeth catch my hip, yank me up, then lose their hold. Pain spreads white-hot across my flank and I fall, face down against Whitey’s fur.
Blackie bites my left leg and this time his teeth puncture skin and muscle. I scream my lungs out. While I clamber at the crevasse’s edge, the beast drags me. We teeter and I wrap my hands around the spear, not sure if I’m hoping for it to slip free or hold fast.
His teeth hit bone.
“Fuck!”
I lose my grip and rise above the crevasse. My fists fall on dark fur and hard muscle, and the beast carries me overland, dragging me by my leg. My blood flows hot, wet, and dark. Hauled over rocks, logs, roots, I keep screaming.
Of all the ways to die, I never imagined being eaten alive.
My head strikes a slab of limestone—
Sedimentary. Calcium carbonate.
—and—
XXX. Grove of the Horned Lord
Unknown Time (Late Day, Assume Easter Day)
Unknown Location
Alt Unknown
Assume Wrangell Island
Assume the Faen
If I hadn’t gotten a concussion in the Hall of the Queens, I’m pretty sure I’ve got one now. I’m under a large canvas, an open-walled tent similar to one I once shared with Mr. Avidità. A soothing breeze caresses me, and it carries the aromas of wildflowers and roasting meat. Without turning my head I know I’m in an encampment—campfire smoke, conversation, the laughter of children. I’m lying in a cot, propped on pillows. Raised on bundles of cloth, my left leg has bled through layers of bandages. At least someone has thrown a sheet over me.
