The Devil Delivered and Other Tales

by Steven Erikson

  LUNKER: Can’t get off what you can’t get onto first, so the rats won’t get a ride, no matter how much they squeal. It’s kind of sweet, in a pathetic, pan-suicidal way.

  PACEMAKER: I’ve reviewed the population projection data and it seems William Potts is playing Pandora. This is highly alarming information.

  BOGQUEEN: Details, please.

  PACEMAKER: Very well, and bear in mind the data is no longer secured, it’s riding a very accessible crest. I won’t bore you with technical details, but the conclusions the top-dog geneticists have reached can be stated as follows.

  One: Pressured populations possess a greater likelihood of mutation that selects for successful adaptation to changing environments. Dynamics remain typically tautological, but the result is speciation—the emergence of a new species of hominid. Homo sapiens neosapien, whatever you want to call it. This speciation is rapid-fire, the so-called punctuated equilibrium hypothesis. Very fast in its definition process. It’s happening now among certain peripheral populations—those groups who for whatever reason are outside civilized intervention in environmental management. The traits are highly variable among these groups, but they meet the definitive requirements: increased phenotype viability.

  Two: Central populations, defined as those that are insulated from the global environmental denigration by civilized intervention, for example, NOAC citizens, Eurocom, SINJO urban populations—these populations are not experiencing the rate of mutation or the selective perquisites found in the peripheral populations.

  Three: Furthermore, these Central populations are on a trend toward extinction. Negative birthrates, increased infertility, chronic toxemic disorders and related dysfunctions.

  Tip your hats, ladies and gentlemen, the show’s closing. It was a short run, sure, but fun while it lasted.

  BOGQUEEN: I wish I could cry, but the irony’s got me laughing one of those devil-laughs.

  CORBIE TWA: Pray, tell.

  BOGQUEEN: Goes back to the official line on mass extinction. We rewrote Nature’s laws to suit our own inevitable fouling of the nest. We holed up in our shielded cities and kept on poisoning the outside world. We figured we’d killed Nature, and good riddance.

  CORBIE TWA: But she moves on, she moves on.

  BOGQUEEN: We thought we could leave it behind, but it’s left us behind. Life’s out there, gentlemen. We’re in here, and we’re dead. Ha ha ha.

  PACEMAKER: I can guess at the ramifications all this has to Ladon’s Medicine Wheel Project. Escape. Unfortunately, the data goes on to other projections, and these are dreadful indeed. You see, those new traits being expressed by the peripheral populations are also deemed positive selections to long-term survival in nongravitational environments with high-rad doses. These new people or whatever you want to call them are not only smaller, they’re also radiation resistant. They’re off to the stars, friends. The dream is in their reach, not ours.

  BOGQUEEN: “Share the blood…” I grasp the nature of William’s treaty mime in the last transmission.

  CORBIE TWA: I don’t like this at all. Ladon and the Lakota are playing a helluva dangerous game here. If they keep saying no, then desperation will incite desperate measures: NOAC will launch military invasions, their science teams will roll in on their heels and sweep, sample, retrieve, stabilize, and secure enough tissue and blood samples to once again cheat Nature.

  LUNKER: Everyone’s waiting. After all, if NOAC can self-justify annexing a sovereign nation, then every other peripheral population with the Right Stuff is fair game. You’re right, Corbie, we’ll cheat Nature. We’ll cheat death.

  BOGQUEEN: Of course that runs in the face of the party line on the inevitability of mass extinction. It’s the fatalists versus the immortalists. NOAC’s got its own party-lined inertia to deal with among the populace. A populace NOAC’s been busy unplugging from reality for half a century. They made fatalists of their citizens in order to stay in power, now that very fatalism is handcuffing them.

  CORBIE TWA: That won’t last. NOAC has no choice but to take the heat and get nasty.

  LUNKER: No doubt the Lady at Ladon’s aware of all this, as is the Lakota. They’ll have to start negotiating, or they’re slag.

  SECURICOM:

  Tracking …

  Tracking …

  Tracking …

  Rogue captured. Identified: Stonecaster, Source: Vancouver, 21VR-213 South District A.

  STONECASTER: No reason to nab me. I’m just surfing the waves, Securicom.

  SECURICOM: Your files contain restricted data, including logs from Subversive Rogue named Potts, William.

  STONECASTER: There’s a goddamn flood out there, Securicom. I can’t keep track of all the flotsam that drifts my way. Who the hell is this Potts, William?

  SECURICOM: Evidence indicates full complicity, Stonecaster. Your antiquated equipment has been tagged. Admit your culpability in this matter and penal reforms will take your remorse into account. Logs generated by Subversive Potts, William, are illegal material. Furthermore, additional Subversive data indicates Swamp activity with known dissidents and terrorists.

  STONECASTER: You’ve got it all wrong. I don’t know any of them.

  NOACom

  … witnesses describe a bright, blinding flash in the northwest quadrant of the sky. Residents from as far away as Chicago saw the collision.

  The orbiting station was an abandoned SINJO laboratory that SINJO officials confirm as deactivated in 2016. The station, reportedly valued at 180 million NOAC-M, was completely destroyed in the collision with the NOAC orbiting defense platform.

  Disruptions occurred in all related transmission frequencies, including laser-tracking and guidance systems, as well as microwave transmissions.

  NOAC Securicom officials have stated that the terrorist, manning a SUN-12 System, has been thoroughly negated with fierce rigor.…

  VORPAL: I’ve got a gunner on my tail. I need help. Anybody? Anyone out there? Fuck, I said I need help here.

  THROWBACK: I’m spreading my wing, Vorpal. Hurry up, now, time’s short.

  BLANC KNIGHT: I’m dead, all you who can hear me. Someone prop me back in the saddle. My last charge. I see your gunner, Vorpal. He’s mine. Watch.

  American NW, Val Marie, Sask. Precinct, July 19, A.C. 14

  Like a single seed pulled clean from its home, William felt himself riding the prairie winds, no longer corporeal, a memory of self tugged free. He could feel a distant pain, a steady susurration of sand blown against skin; he heard voices from the place he’d left, a faint whisper of surf in his ears, reminding him of weekends at the beach as a child—when he’d believed the warm ocher stretch of water was limitless beyond the fine white sand, when he’d thought it was an ocean, and he remembered his shock at discovering that it was but a lake, the last remnant of an inland glacial sea. The discovery had made the world suddenly larger, but more than that, he’d marveled at the sudden knowledge of time and the changes wrought on this earth—all there for his eyes to see, for his mind to unveil.

  He heard those voices, was aware that he knew those who spoke, and that his body was undergoing manifest changes, which seemed the entire subject of their conversations. He wondered at their concern, when he himself felt nothing, when in fact he’d already gone—out into the wastelands, one ghost among many.

  He flew on, memories in dogged pursuit, beneath a sky of night so vast and clear and bristling with stars, he imagined the plain below him had risen to heaven, and the wind that carried him—pressed so inexorably between two immense forces of nature—was the voice of angels.

  He wanted to sing, when he’d never sung before; he wanted to dance, when the music of his life had always been grim. He wanted to hear a voice calling to him from somewhere above, a child’s voice that might have been his own. (Yet knew it wasn’t, not quite.) Come to me! Fly to me! Rise higher, higher!

  Tears (intrusive saline ejected from glandular ducts) of joy, a love of life not his own now overwhelming him (descrambl
ed the voice of God from an antiquated com sat, the voice of the Father) with a child’s memory—Is this death? Is this truly death? Such joy, such a call to heaven, such a voice of dreams—

  Son, can you hear me?

  Father?

  Go back, please. Pull out—

  In William’s tenth year, his father had turned fifty. The blood was stretched thin between them, even as they walked side by side along the beach strand. Pelicans wheeled out beyond the surf, and the wind was hot as it gusted down from the aspen fringe. The trees were dying, leaves curling and turning black. The whole ecozone was changing, his father explained. The transition zone was moving north; the boreal forest was drying up, burning fierce. The north had become a conflagration no amount of technology could change. And the lake was poisoned, mostly with coliform bacteria from a province that was home to as many pigs as people, but did nothing to treat the porcine sewage.

  Nature has a way of humbling humanity, son. But the lesson sinks home only when tragedy gets personal, and even then the humility runs its course—the glittering paradigms of modern society sweep away every dark, difficult moment. We answer Nature with claims of compensation, relocation funding, declarations of disaster zones and emergency relief. We pick through the rubble looking for dead children and functionable television sets. Disaster is a place where we are temporarily left behind—watch us scramble to catch up, watch how eager everyone is to help us catch up, so as to not be reminded of the futility of progress.

  Dad?

  Yes, son?

  What’s SIDS?

  Pain flared and William knew his face was smiling. The voices had gone silent, eyes now upon him. It had always been that way when he smiled.

  But look at these stars. Heaven is not vaulted, not here. On the prairie, the night sky is infinity on the edge of comprehension. Look at the stars, connect the dots, and the truth comes clear.

  Have you seen a man smile when his life breaks? Your breath stills and you realize the effort it took to manage that smile. That smile, Father, is nature’s answer to life itself.

  This was a sea once, son. Fed by glacial melt, it’s been dying in phases for ten thousand years. Walk west of here and you’ll come to beach ridges—those pale denuded strips full of cobbles and nothing else since too many idiots vertically plowed over them. Memories of ripples in the shrinking pool. This is the last phase, William. The lake’s going fast, very fast. I’m so very tired.…

  One ghost among many, and each one held to its own story, its own version of life’s lessons. There was no agreement, no consensus on cause and effect. Even the angels argued, there amidst the wind that never ceased.

  Extinction is an abstract concept. Death is personal. It’s a survival mechanism on the emotional front—who can weep for a lifetime?

  Don’t ask that question, son, because I can answer you. It’s still going on, it still spills out every now and then. Look at our species and think of madness as a biological imperative to self-destruction. In the past sixty years, every goddamn neighborhood became home to outwardly normal, reasonable people—sometimes odd, but mostly convincing you of their harmlessness. Madness, in all the guises allowed to it in an anonymous society. I’ll give you a generic example: An eight-year-old boy is found dead, chained to a bed in a room made dark by blinds taped to the windows. He’s got bite marks on him, he’s clawed grooves in the filthy hardwood floor; he’s bruised and malnourished and he died from none of these things. No, he died because he couldn’t understand what he’d done wrong, and in not knowing he concluded that the act of being alive was his crime. He sought his only absolution … by dying. A lifetime of weeping, mercifully short you’ll agree. His mother lived in society, she shopped down at the local supermarket. His father was an upright citizen, patriotic, a family man.

  What made them unique? Nothing. That’s what’s so frightening, but more than that, it’s the secret of enlightenment—to realize that they were not unique, that the mechanisms of social control are structured to avoid comprehension of their profound normality, and that something’s been triggered, on a collective scale encompassing our entire species, that delivers the simple unavoidable message that madness is among us. We’ve poisoned the world outside, son, as a direct manifestation of our inner insanity. We are in the end run of ultra success. Nature draws more than one rein, son. We can see the external, the environmental checks now laying siege to our species. But the internal is the one we cannot accept. The last thing we’ll all taste is the barrel of the gun we ourselves shove into our mouths.

  Dad?

  What is it, William?

  Happy birthday.

  That generic boy, chained to his bed, was with him now, here in the winds that might have been humanity’s final scream. A small, frail ghost, still whispering I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry, Mommy. What did I do wrong?

  You were born, son, with the added misfortune of surviving it. You were new and helpless and you trusted—my, how you trusted. You never learned the lessons of withholding that trust, of relying upon your judgments, of mastering healthy skepticism. Your gods took you in hand and led you into Hell. Regular folk, the kind that hosted parties, backyard barbecues, but to you they were gods, and like God Himself they laid a judgment upon you, that you should suffer, that you should know the anguish of a guilt you never earned. They gave you life, and you lived their definition of it.

  It’s a parable, in its own way. Analogous to the horror visited upon the sons and daughters by the fathers and mothers. They give you life: a world poisoned, its earth blasted and ripped open and breeding deadly diseases, its waters turgid and tossed with dead creatures, its air foul with invisible gases and holed like gauze letting the rays burn down the holy message of cancer and blindness.

  We needed those cars, son, to speed up our pursuit of unachievable and unworthy dreams. We needed those forests stripped away, to plant food to feed our weeping multitudes. We needed that plastic that gave you tits and made you infertile. We needed those antibiotics, those televisions and their vital programming, those bloodless cameras that never blinked nor turned away. We needed all those wars to feed our technocratic utopia. We needed those prison ships, we needed segregation, calling in those bank loans, national lotteries, millionaire athletes, movie stars, white hoods and burning crosses, doctors gunned down outside abortion clinics, walled neighborhoods with private armies, pedophiles, serial killers, terrorists, fundamentalists—we needed all those things, son, and you will, too. They’re our gift to you, given out of love because we tried to better your lives. At least, that’s what we kept telling one another. Can’t you see how much better we’ve made your lives?

  One day the trust goes away.

  Don’t take my lead, son. Don’t take anyone’s lead.

  I won’t, Dad.

  We don’t know what we’re doing. Never did. Our lives—the lives of every human who came before you—those are your lessons. Not for imitation, but for separation, for distinction. What you must learn to walk away from. Because we’re a mess, and our biggest crime is that we’ve ruined your world. Don’t you ever forgive us. Don’t you ever!

  I won’t.

  I haven’t.

  He wanted to rise into the sky, higher, ever higher. Somewhere above, among the angels, was the ghost of a child. It called to him, but all he could do was to grope blindly, yearningly, for its embrace.

  It’s what happens when tragedy gets personal.

  * * *

  Jim took another mouthful of beer, scowled at how warm his hand on the bottle had made it. “You’d of thought they’d just take him out,” he muttered.

  Stel let her head slowly slip down from the hand it leaned on, her fingers spreading her midnight hair, eyes on the empty chair beside her. After a moment she straightened, reached for her cigarettes. “That woman ain’t good for him,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged heavily, sighed out a stream of smoke. “I mean she wasn’t just his boss. That’
s what I mean. And now she’s playing some kinda game—she wants him here. Don’t know why.”

  “He’s responding to the treatments.”

  “Oh yeah, nothing but the best.”

  Jim set the bottle down on the table, drew his hands down to his lap, then leaned forward and wrapped them back round the bottle. “Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t know what I’m waiting for.”

  “You want him to come to, Jim. You want him to tell you what to do.”

  “What to do? What do you mean? What to do about what?”

  “She’s got him where she wants him. He won’t accept that—never did.”

  Jim looked away from her, squinting as he took in the empty street through the dusty window. “You believe in ghosts, Stel?”

  “Ghosts? Christ.”

  “You believe in them?”

  “No, yes. Maybe. That one brew get you drunk or something?”

  “Lived here all my life, never saw nothing out of the ordinary. Only my grandpa, well, whenever he looked out on the land, it was as if he was seeing—I don’t know—seeing more than I could see.”

  “Indian blood.”

  Jim nodded. “He said the land was full of spirits, that all of time since the very beginning was gathered there, looking up at a million different skies, but always the same sun.”

  “The Happy Hunting Ground.”

  Jim grinned sourly. “Guess so. Anyway, when he looked, I think he could see them. All of them.”

  “And you’re seeing them now, too?”

  He glanced over at her. She was leaning on the table, one hand holding up her head, the other hand stretched out on the tabletop between them, cigarette between two fingers. Her eyes searched his steadily, without once flickering away. Jim shrugged uneasily. “Had to find the boy, didn’t I? Hell, he’d made the evening news, didn’t he. Had me wishing I had a computer, so I could see for myself what all the fuss was about. Anyway, I had to find the boy somewhere out there, didn’t I?”

  Her generous mouth quirked. “Thought you was reading sign, you old Injun coot.”