by Tony Daniel
A man sits in a clear space, holds his knees to his chest, and stares. Orf stops well away from him.
I am looking for a man named Neilsen Birchbranch. Do you know where I can find him?
The man says nothing.
Do you know where I can find Neilsen Birchbranch? He works for the Protectorate.
The man says nothing, but begins to rock back and forth on his haunches.
I’m looking. Can you.
The man begins to moan.
Orf moves onward. At a point where the piles of rubble begin to be higher, a makeshift roadblock has been set up. Orf stops at it, and a group of men and women, all armed with rifles, come out of the declivities of the town scree.
Come out of there, an old man says. He points his gun at Orf.
There isn’t anybody in here.
Come out, or we’ll blow you to hell.
I’ve already been there.
Come on out of there.
I’m looking for a man named Neilsen Birchbranch. He works for the Protectorate.
Goddamn we will shoot you, you goddamn Mattie.
Do you know where I can find him?
The old man spits on the ground. Reckon he’s with the others.
The others?
That’s what I said.
Where are they?
Out at the dump.
Where’s the dump?
That way. The old man points with his gun. Now come out.
Orf turns and rolls away in the direction of the dump. Shots ring out. They ricochet off him and crackle against the rubble.
Five miles out of town, Orf finds the dump. There are bodies here; hundreds of bodies. Men, women, children. At first, he thinks they are the dead from the quakes, collected and brought here.
With the edge of a saw blade, Orf turns one of the bodies over. It is a woman. She has been shot in the head.
Most of the other bodies are people who have been shot. Or hacked up. Or had their necks broken with clubs.
The loggers have had their revenge.
And there among the bodies, Orf pauses. He has recognized one. It is the woman from the field, the speaker, Mother Agatha. It is her; there is no mistake. A small bullet hole is in the forehead of her peaceful face.
Orf rolls back to the city. It is night. He bursts through the roadblock without stopping. Shots, the flash of muzzles. It is all so much waste. Down lightless streets, and streets lit with fires, some deliberate, some not. Every half hour or so, another earthquake rumbles through, throwing rubble willy-nilly. There are often screams.
Orf comes upon a steady fire, well maintained, and sees that it is surrounded by people—people in the blue and brown dress of Matties. It is a silent throng. Orf hangs back, listens.
Oh Mother Agatha Mother Goddess hear our prayer.
Hear our prayer.
We know we have done wrong. We have sinned against you. Hear our prayer.
Hear our prayer.
Hold back your wrath. We are unworthy and evil. This we know. We beg you even still. Hold back your wrath. Hear our prayer.
Hear our prayer.
Goddamn mother—
The report of a gun. Someone—man or woman, Orf cannot tell—crumples in the ring of the fire. Instead of fleeing, the others stand still.
Another shot. Another falls.
Hear our prayer.
No one moves.
Another shot. A man falls, groaning, grasping at his leg. No one moves. He writhes in the shadows of the fire, in the dust of the ruins. No one helps him.
The rifleman shoots no more. The man writhes. The voice of the minister goes up to his goddess, and the people respond mechanically.
Like robots are supposed to, Orf thinks. The man ceases his writhing. There is nothing to do. Orf rolls on quietly through the night, out of the city and east. The going is easy over the broken highway. In two hours, Orf is in what was Port Townsend.
There is no rubble here, no ruins. The sea has washed it away. No bodies. No trees. Only desolation, bare-wiped desolation. He rolls down to where the docks had been, and looks out upon the lapping waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Then the slap of an earthquake, and Orf discovers the reason for the missing city. The slap runs its way down to the sea and is perfectly mirrored by the other side of the strait. Reflected back, a tsunami. Rolls over the land. Nothing left to take. Almost enough to suck in a digging robot. Orf must backpedal with his threads, dig in to keep from being pulled forward by the suck of the water as it retreats to the sea.
Everyone is drowned here.
Orf will not find Neilsen Birchbranch by looking in the cities. He heads to the southwest now, back to the center of the mountains.
Into the forest. Orf wanders without aim. A day. Many days. Once, he remembers the mu, tries to go out of himself and find it. The uplink doesn’t work; there is only static on a clear channel. Have all the satellites fallen from the sky? He wanders on, a giant among the gigantic trees.
>>
Across one divide. Down a valley. Finally, back to the dig site. All is devastation here, a tumble of stone. Not a sign of anyone. The living area is caved in. Orf digs, but cannot locate the mu. All he finds is a twisted piece of red metal—the remains of Laramie’s Humvee. Nothing else. No reason to stay.Across another divide. Another valley. No longer caring to keep track. Stopping to look at rocks, or a peculiar bend in a river. The accumulation of snow.
One day, the earthquakes stop.
Quiet, child. Hush now. You’ve seen too much for young eyes. Hush and be quiet for a while and take your rest.
Winter, it must be. Orf coming over Snow Dome, down the Blue Glacier and into the valley of the Hoh, where the biggest of the big trees are. Darkness earlier and earlier. In these towering woods, at these high latitudes, winter days are a perpetual twilight. Orf alongside the Hoh. Its water opaque with outwash sludge, the heart of Mount Olympus, washing away to the sea.
Then away from the river, deeper into the rain forest. As deep and as wild as it gets, many miles from roads. If there are roads anymore.
One hushed afternoon—or perhaps early evening, they are blending—a climbing rope, dangling from a tree. Movement to the left.
Another rope. Many ropes falling from the trees like rain that stays suspended. And down the ropes men and women slide like spiders. Orf is surrounded. They are dressed in tattered suits of green. Silently, they gather round the digger until Orf cannot move for fear of crushing one of them.
Men and women. Some have rifles slung across their backs. Two women carry children in the same manner, and the young ones are utterly, utterly quiet.
All right. Orf has not heard a voice in weeks, and his own, arising from his exterior speakers, startles him. What is it you want?
One of the men in green steps forward.
Wait, he says.
Orf waits with the silent people for he knows not what. And then there is a movement in the undergrowth of vine maple. From around a low slope and over some deadfall, the mu appears. It moves clumsily. Whoever is at the controls doesn’t know what he’s doing, Orf thinks.
The mu scampers up to the digger and stops.
Andrew walks over the slope.
He steps lightly along the deadfall on the forest floor and comes to stand beside the mu. In his hand is a metal box with an antenna extended from it.
Do you want this thing back?
They are silent for a while. It is not a strained silence, but is right. Orf speaks first.
Laramie is dead. I couldn’t save her.
I know.
What happened at the dig?
I’m not sure. I’ve only got secondhand information, but I think that the secret policeman coerced Gurney into sabotaging the place. I think he threatened to hurt his family. It was a bomb. A big bomb. Probably chemical. Everybody died, not just. Not just Laramie.
So. I’m sorry. So. Who are these people?
Andrew laughs. It has been so, so long. That dry
laugh. A harsh, fair laugh, out of place before, perhaps, but suited now to these harsh times.
These are rangers of the United States Park Service. They live here. In the tops of the old growth. We guard the forest.
We?
Somehow or another, I’ve become the head ranger.
/\////
Winter, and the rangers bundle in the nooks of their firs and hemlocks, their spruces and cedars. The digger must remain on the ground, but using the mu, Orf can venture up to their village in the trees.In the highest tree, in the upper branches, Andrew has slung his hammock. Orf and he spend many days there, talking, discussing how things were, how they might be. Politics have shifted in the outside world, and Andrew is part of them now, seeking a place for his band of outcast civil servants that has become a family, and then a tribe.
The rangers hold the center of the peninsula against Mattie and logger, or against the remains of them. There is to be no clearing of the forest, and no worship of it, either, but a conservation and guard, a stewardship and a waiting. Rangers defend the woods. They take no permanent mates and have no children. The young ones Orf had seen before were stolen children, taken from Matties and loggers. Ranger women in their constant vigilance could not afford to be pregnant, and if they were, took fungal herbs that induced abortion. All must be given to the watching.
Winter, spring. Another year. Years. The fortunes of the rangers ebb and flow, but always the forests are held. Orf comes to their aid often with the mu and, when the situation is very dire, with the whirling blades of the digger.
Andrew hopes to open the Mohole back up one day, when all is secure, to continue the dig—especially in light of Orf’s discovery of . . . whatever it is that is down there. But now there are politics and fighting, and that time never comes. Andrew was right, and tribes, strange tribes, arise in the outside world. Governments crumble and disappear. Soon it is rangers alone who keep a kind of learning and history alive, and who come to preserve more than trees.
In any case, Andrew’s heart seems to have gone out of the project. Somewhere below his love is buried, deeper than any man’s has ever been buried before. If he goes back down, he may come upon her yet. Andrew is a brave man, Orf knows. But maybe not that brave.
And always Orf hears rumors of a bad man and killer who appears here and there, sometimes in the service of the Matties, sometimes working for logger clans. But Orf never finds Neilsen Birchbranch. Never even discovers his real name. And a time comes when the rumors cease.
Many years. Andrew grows old. Orf does not grow old. The digger’s nuclear fusion pile will not run down. Only a malfunction could keep Orf from living a thousand years. Perhaps a thousand more.
One morning, in the mu, Orf climbs to Andrew’s hammock and finds that Andrew has died in the night.
Gently, Orf envelops the man in the mu’s arms; gently, he carries the body down from the trees. And walks through the forest. And crosses a divide. And another. To the valley of the Elwha. And up the Lillian River, to a basalt stela that, curiously, has no foramens in its makeup. That speaks of deep things, from far under the earth. That this land—strange peninsula between two salt waters—may be the place to dig and find what those things are.
At its base, Orf buries his friend, Andrew Hutton.
And then, Orf—digger and mu—returns to the long-abandoned worksite. Orf clears the rocky entrance, finds the old passage. Orf digs down into the earth, and closes the path behind him.
/\////
In the heart of the great horseshoe twist of the Olympic Peninsula, in the heart of the mountains themselves, there lives a monster, a giant, who some say is also a god. A ranger, hunting in some hidden dale or along the banks of a nameless rivulet flowing from the snow’s spring runoff, will feel the presence of another, watching. The ranger will turn, and catch—what?—the flash of tarnished metal, the glint of wan sun off a glassy eye? Then the spirit, the presence, will be gone from the ranger’s senses, and he will question whether he felt anything at all. Such sightings happen only once or twice in a fortnight of years.But there is a rock, black and tall, in the deepest, oldest wood, up a secret tributary of the Elwha River, where young rangers, seeking their visions, will deliberately go. Some do not return from that high valley. Others come back reporting a strange and wonderful thing: On a particular night in October, when the moon is new and all the land is shrouded, they say the monster emerges from a hole in the mountains—but never the same hole—and closes the way behind. The monster travels to the rock on the Lillian.
The earth rumbles like distant thunder, and trees are gently bent out of the monster’s way as if they were thin branches. And at that rock on the Lillian River, the monster stays for a time, shining darkly under the stars. The monster stays and is utterly silent. The reasons why are lost to legend, but at that time young rangers with strong and empty hearts are given waking dreams and prophesies to fill them.
Then, not long before sunrise, the monster moves, pivots on its great bulk, and returns from whence it came. There are those who follow, who are called to track the monster back to its lair. These are seldom the strongest or the bravest, and they are not particularly missed. Some say the monster eats them or tortures them in fires of liquid stone. But others say that the monster leads them to a new land, wider and deeper than any human can conceive, under the mountain, that the Earth is bigger on the inside than on the outside. No one knows. No one knows, because they do not return to tell the tale, and the world falls further into ruin, and the monster—or god—no longer speaks.
Other eBooks from ElectricStory.com
Michael Bishop
Unicorn Mountain
No Enemy But Time
Terry Bisson
Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories
Numbers Don’t Lie
Mark Jacobson
Gojiro
Paul Park
Soldiers of Paradise
Sugar Rain
The Cult of Loving Kindness
Rudy Rucker
The Secret of Life
Lucius Shepard
Beast of the Heartland and Other Stories
The Golden
The Jaguar Hunter
Richard Wadholm
Astronomy
Howard Waldrop
Dream Factories and Radio Pictures
