The Eskimo Invasion

by Hayden Howard

  In the falling debris lay a green gourd-shaped vase unbroken, but under its surface glaze, appearing spider-web cracked. Dr. West gently extricated its smooth beauty. "Already we must have reached the 1100s A.D. because this is a Kuan vase, and the crackle-lines in the porcelain are intentional."

  The crowbar smashed upward, and burned wreckage fell down. "Genghis Khan has taken Peking."

  Blue-and-white porcelain shards fell like rain. "Already we are through with the Mongols and you are poking your crowbar into the Ming Dynasty. We are less than 500 years from the surface."

  Sand streamed down from a rodent's tunnel. Above them glowed a little round hole like a luminous eye. "It is daylight up there!"

  Gently, Dr. West laid his hand on the shoulder of the Esk and took the crowbar from him. "I am your leader, your angakok, your Mao, and only I have the power to break through to the Present. Close your eyes. The Future is blinding."

  Dr. West thrust up the crowbar through the worn brick paving of the Manchus, shouldered aside the thin new bricks of the Communists, and lifted his head into the dazzling sunlight.

  The long pink walls within the Imperial City glowed with sunlight. The vast paved square lay golden with dust. Covered with motionless ripples of loess dust, the Great Square where millions had paraded before Mao's platform was shrouded with Gobi dust.

  A distant chopping sound made Dr. West turn his head uncertainly, his ears confused by the echoes. His low angle of vision, with only his head above the widespread pavement of the enormous square, made the pink walls seem to lean inward. Arches appeared too close or too distant. Empty brown flower beds along the walls seemed tilted like brown stripes, as Dr. West blinked in the strange perspective of the Great Square and arches, as if his head had risen in a Daliesque painting. His nervous gaze sought the sound. Chunk-echo! Chunk-echo!

  So close he had not noticed in the foreground glowed clean white rib cages in the golden dust. In waves of dust floated smooth white ovals. He stared at the shadowed eyeholes of the skulls. Esks or men?

  Thousands of skeletons lay all around him, no matter which way he turned his head. The perspective made them appear to him as if they lay in concentric circles around him, as if fallen from a dance pattern. He blinked his eyes. Close to his hand a skeletal hand overlapped another's hand as if -- Esks or men?

  Dr. West struggled up out of the hole and whirled, peering down at the smiling Esk in its darkness. "Stay back! The sun will kill you," he lied. "My command is wait. Send down this word." Already he could hear his other Esks chattering in the tunnel. "Until darkness, wait."

  He stared at a fallen signboard. The withered paint still extolled Mao III's last Three-Anti's Campaign: Anti-Imperialist. Anti-Revisionist. Anti-Intellectualist. He dragged the flimsy signboard over the hole.

  From the effort of dragging the signboard, Dr. West swayed like an old man, his heart pounding.

  Chunk-echo! Chunk-echo! Turning, scanning for the chopping sound in the burning sunlight, he dizzied, the pink walls flowing past. He stopped.

  On the distant pink wall, the dark shape, the shadow of the shape, bent up and down. Chunk-echo! Chunk-echo!

  His throat clutching his soundless shout, Dr. West ran forward. Across golden ripples of dust, he ran toward the pink wall. He saw moving on the brown strip of the bare flower bed, shadowed upon the pink wall, up and down, the dark figure wielding a hoe.

  Man or Esk?

  Startled, whirling, cornered, the squat figure raised its hoe like a weapon.

  It is a man, Dr. West thought as joy blurred his eyes.

  He felt his face stretching. Smiling senselessly as an Esk, Dr. West staggered toward the man.

  The ragged man backed against the pink wall. The sunlight glinted on his hoe's blade.

  "We both are men," Dr. West blurted in Chinese.

  The old man shifted his weight. On the chopped dirt, with his foot, he was trying to conceal something behind his incongruous blue tennis shoe. Dr. West extended his open hand, and the old man's eyes slitted in fright, his elbows rising, the gleaming snake's head of his hoe poised to strike.

  "It is true I am an American -- " Dr. West spread his open hands in a gesture of peace. " -- a whiteman, but you and I -- not Esks. We are men."

  The old man's forehead creased vertically as if squeezed by conflicting beliefs, his foot guarding the sack. "These seeds are not to be eaten. They are for -- seeds."

  "May your crop be -- " Dr. West fumbled into his pocket and handed the old man whatever he found there, " -- be fortunate."

  Hesitantly, the gnarled hand closed on the pencil stub. Dipping his head, the old man abruptly lowered his hoe and squatted down. From a grease- stained knotted rag he extricated a leathery strip. Twisting it apart, he proffered the larger part to Dr. West.

  Solemnly the old man chewed.

  Dr. West chewed the hard-smoked meat, salty as tears. "Where are -- the people?" Dr. West's eyes burned.

  "Planting." The old man seemed surprised that the question had been asked. "Outside the walls the dirt has more dampness for crops." His hand fingered the dry soil of what had been a flower bed in the Great Square. "But my wall keeps out the wind. My knees ache. Before the electricity stopped, I was a subway conductor, not a -- "

  "Whose skeletons?" Dr. West interrupted.

  The old man's eyelids closed, wrinkling, and his forehead wrinkled as if he had begun pondering a deeper question. "You say you are an American. I never truly believed that the Americans sent the plague. Our bodies, the stench in the subway -- None of the Smiling People were sick. They cared for us as best they could."

  "Then these are the skeletons of men?" Dr. West's heart contracted.

  "No, Esks, of course!" The old man's face showed surprise at Dr. West's ignorance. "Their souls have flown, I think."

  "The Esks are dead everywhere?"

  "I do not think they are truly dead. They joined hands."

  The old man glanced at the sky. "The flesh has been gone from their bones for a season."

  Dr. West covertly expectorated the salty meat into his palm, and stared at the old man's leathery face.

  "Who can say who is dead? In this little world -- " the old man ruminated his salted meat solemnly, " -- little can be understood -- Circles like dancers. Many little circles joined together like a net. But they did not dance."

  "All the skeletons are in this square?"

  "I think everywhere in Peking, and in other places all over the world, I am told. They did not dance, although they were smiling like bridegrooms and brides at the sky." The old man squinted upward.

  Dr. West blinked from the skeletons of the Esks to the blinding sky. "What did you see -- up there?"

  "See? We old men know only the body dies. When men are hungry enough, meat can be salted and it makes no difference to the soul. A poor man like myself understands only how to survive on this Earth."

  "What did you see?" Dr. West repeated, his voice rising.

  "They are all around us, I think." The old man turned his weathered face. "Years ago when there were not so many, we called them the Smiling People. We called them the Dream Persons. Perhaps they were smiling because they were in a dream and they knew what was going to happen. Your face is angry."

  "I'm not angry. I want to know!" Dr. West's chest pain was tightening.

  "Nor I," the old man muttered, closing his gnarled knuckles around the handle of his hoe. "After the confusion, the lack of rations, some of us killed Dream Persons. Not enough. Pulling out a few hairs does not kill the head."

  "What did you see!"

  "It is too difficult to explain." The old man glanced sideways toward the pink arch. "Some day someone will repair the electricity. The subway cars will move. I will receive my ration tickets because I was -- am not a peasant! In my subway car -- " The old man stared past Dr. West's shoulder toward the center of the Great Square.

  On the glaring sand out there was a dark movement.

  Beside Dr. West, the old man r
aised his hoe with a hissing inhalation of fear or rage, and scurried out across the dust, running like a spider across the golden ripples of the Square toward the dark spots emerging like ants cut of the pavement.

  "Oh god, they're coming out of the tunnel." Dr. West saw his distant Esks wandering out into the glaring sunlight.

  As the old man's diminishing silhouette reached them, his hoe's blade flashed high and struck. One small figure staggered, clutching its shoulder. The old man struck again with the hoe, and another figure slumped to its knees. Somehow the old man appeared entangled among them but his hoe struck down, and his back heaved up but his hoe did not rise. The old man's small figure lurched away.

  Empty-handed, the old man ran back toward Dr. West, his face contorted. "More. Again! Returned." His breath hissing, he ran past Dr. West through the pink arch out of the Square.

  Dr. West knew the old man had run for help, for other men to help slaughter his Esks. The old man could not know how many Esks were spreading out of the tunnel. The consequences?

  Dr. West's heart pain clutched. He stared at his Esks emerging like lost children into the Great Square. Dr. West started toward them.

  "Go back!" he shouted. "Go back down into the hole."

  He tried to herd the spreading Esks back to the tunnel.

  You are too late, he thought sadly at them. Your purpose -- "Go back!" he shouted in sudden anger. You have destroyed my life , he thought as he pushed helplessly at them. Without malice, you have multiplied. All over the world your increasing numbers have hastened the Malthusian forms of death for man. All of my adult life, you have multiplied, confronting me with my inability to halt either your purpose or lack of purpose. He was past anger. "Please go back."

  His Esks were smiling at the empty sky. Their hands were linking. On all sides of Dr. West, they were forming little circles of Esks touching other little circles throughout the Great Square. They stood waiting.

  "You are too late. Go back." Dr. West glanced from the dark tunnel to the pink arch through which savage human men would attack.

  The wind moved. The dry air crackled. Dr. West thought he heard a humming sound. It was coming from the Esks.

  "My God!" All around Dr. West, the Esks -- their hair was standing on end. They were smiling upward as the whip-crash of lightning blinded Dr. West. The lightning arose from them. His retinas and the visual part of his brain retained the imprint of the lightning flashing upward in static electric discharge as he lurched in the deafening boom of colliding air molecules refilling the gulf.

  In the prickly scent of ozone, on his knees he groped, his hand closing on the soft back, the still-warm shoulder of an Esk woman as delicately boned as Marthalik had been so many years ago, and Dr. West cried out. His sight was returning, but he was afraid to look upward.

  All around him lay the fallen bodies of the Esks in their dance patterns. He thought he heard the humming sound above his head. Crouched in the dust, instinctively he clung to the Earth. His eyes closed tightly as fists. In tightening pain his heart labored.

  Because he had almost seen the end, he thought he understood the beginning. Forty-two years ago the huge white shell had fallen down through the polar inbending of the Earth's magnetic lines of force, down through the weak inturning of the Earth's ionospheric radiation belts, smashing down on the Boothia Peninsula near the North Magnetic Pole. Oh God, why couldn't it have fallen at the lifeless South Magnetic Pole?

  The humming sound seemed closer, huger.

  Everywhere, he thought, are your eggs wafting at random through the universe?

  He was afraid to look up as the humming grew inside his skull, and his evasive mind fled backward. Forty-two years ago a young Eskimo stared at the Burned Place , Dr. West thought frantically. Peterluk, yes, with his grimy finger he would have poked whatever lay within the inner shell. He stood too close to --

  Sharp heart pains reflected from Dr. West's chest down the inside of his left arm. His thoughts blurred as if something from above overlapped his brain. From the nucleus of the cell -- no, shell -- a repatterning flowed -- through Peterluk -- to his gonads? Yes, for your purpose, his genetic material was altered. His offspring would be patterned for your purpose.

  Dr. West's face twisted like a tired smile as his thoughts clung to the Boothia Peninsula. Peterluk's fanciful explanation of the first Esk emerging as a fully grown baby-man from the splitting hump of a dying monster, who was perhaps Peterluk, had been an inexplicable lie. Peterluk's wife's explanation was closer. Yes, Eevvaalik's explanation that the first Esk was born a month after a huge glass hypodermic repeatedly violated her, in artificial insemination, was only half a lie.

  Yes, unknowingly Peterluk carried your purpose to Eevvaalik's uterus, Dr. West thought, where it grew more efficiently than the babies of our purpose. Your Esks had the advantage of a one-month gestation period and more rapid maturation. In rapid generations of Esks, your purpose almost covered the Earth.

  His hand pressing his chest, his cramping heart pain, Dr. West grimaced at the golden dust. Those unsophisticated Esks believed you were coming down for them. For them you had become the true myth of power like a huge white Grandfather Polar Bear coming down.

  Dr. West was afraid to look up. Who are you? You, whose pattern was passed on through billions of Esks, your pattern that included such adaptability! Smiling, smiling, your Esks instinctively behaved in a nonviolent manner. Yes, nonviolence enabled their maximum survival in the peculiar environment of this particular planet at this time. How they multiplied! But your time fuse was burning in them. Cued somehow, your Esks joined hands in their billions. In vast dance patterns for -- whom?

  Dr. West wanted to look up. Joining hands , he thought, Esks looking upward. Upward toward your purpose, your purpose --

  Dr. West looked up at the sky. Dazzling blue, the sky was visually empty, but Dr. West was seeing sparkling representational patterns imposed directly on his brain. With his eyes there was nothing up there with sufficient molecular density to be seen. But in the visual portion of his brain he was being communicated with --

  He understood. He was being shown a diagrammatic pattern of a brain, flowing thoughts, circling memories. Transmitting neuron cells were represented as strings of sparkling dots. Electric potentials within these cells discharged in sequence, symbolic dots blinking in succession like falling dominoes, symbolizing the flow of conscious thought. Life!

  All around Dr. West in the Great Square the Esks lay dead. The vital electric flowings which had been their consciousness, the sum of their memories and experience, and their subconscious dreams, had stopped -- forever?

  From his memory the symbol for a single free electron was drawn, a dancing e. He supposed he was being shown the essence of life as the electron skipped along a neuron pathway in the brain.

  Surprisingly, the electron was towing an unknown symbol. As if connected by an invisible string, the unknown symbol followed its electron along the neuron pathway, bobbing like a red balloon pulled by an erratic electron child.

  A simplified pattern of a brain was outlined by billions of these moving symbols.

  On the blackboard of his consciousness enlarged a more sophisticated diagram of an electron with its unknown satellite. The connecting string of force was behaving more like a rabid rubber band, so that the unknown symbol was whirling everywhere around its electron. Strangely, the electron was not near the center of this activity. All the varying orbits of the unknown symbol were distorted upward. The unknown symbol was being acted upon by another force from below.

  As if rising from the center of the Earth, tiny particles were shown bombarding the unknown symbol. Illustrating gravitons? To Dr. West's surprise, the force of gravity seemed to be REPELLING the unknown symbol. Unable to break free from its electron, the unknown symbol strained upward in each distorted orbit as if trying to escape from the Earth. At the same time, all the unknown symbols were being moved along the neuron pathways of every living brain.