Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  I laughed. “I didn’t do it myself, honey. We did it. As in us human beings.” I explained about Bob and all the people who’d gone before him, caring for those birds. Then I told her about Diane, and how it was a good thing these condors were teaching their youngster how to feed on its own. Bob had gone further than anyone knew to make the birds dependent on him. It was a bad kind of interference, like feeding bears in your backyard, and there were laws against it.

  She watched me closely the whole time, looking interested, excited even. Then too excited. Her expression changed from wonder-struck kid to the phony movie-actor face she’d made by the bus yesterday. The more I noticed it, the less I wanted to say. So, I shut up.

  Her face relaxed into a wide, wide grin. She thought I’d finished talking—didn’t notice the change in my attitude. “Killer!” she said, grinning wide. Her eyes twitched around behind the specs. She was already editing.

  My heart went cold in my chest. The little lenses in the spec’s frames looked blacker and beadier than the condors’ eyes.

  I put a finger to my lips, mainly to get my hand in range of her face. It surprised her. She watched, waiting for me to say something.

  “How are those specs attached to the tats?” I asked, like it was the most interesting fact in the world.

  “Oh!” Now she smiled naturally. She really was proud of that stuff. She folded her right ear forward and turned it toward me a little. “These little nano pads behind the ears are different. The specs’ arms rest there, and the current goes through a conductive patch. . . .”

  Good. No nasty skin-penetrating jacks. I snatched the specs off her face.

  “You can’t upload a minute of that.” I folded the specs up and put them in my thigh pocket, wanting to avoid my instinct to throw them down and crush them under my boot.

  “You put this up now, and those condors could end up dead,” I said.

  Katy looked from me to my thigh pocket, not saying a word and pissed off as hell. I would’ve been, too, had it been my stuff.

  “This could be it for me, Aunt Sue. It would at least get my investment back.”

  I shook my head.

  She waited a while, though I could tell she knew what she wanted to say. Finally, she came to it. “You care more for condors than me?”

  Now she could wait. I didn’t want to say the first thing that came to mind, so I kept my mouth shut and gave her the goddamn eye. She kept her back up, but her mouth twitched a couple times.

  “That was mean,” I said. “But you asked it, so I’ll answer you straight. I do care more about them than you. They rip through hides too tough for vultures. Smaller scavengers eat the torn-up bodies they leave behind. Bears and wolves can do the same thing, but how many more of those do we want around? I know it’s different in the city. Bodies don’t lie around there. Out here, when something dies, it just lays down under the big, blue sky. We want condors around to clean ’em up. They’re better than the alternatives.”

  I thought it was sinking in. Katy’s eyes had gotten softer.

  I pressed on. “If the media swarms these birds, they won’t make it. Condors might be used to people, but news drones would drive ’em crazy. They’d stop eating, stop raising their young right. We call ’em a recovered species, but there aren’t more than two thousand of them. Every one still counts.”

  That caught her attention. Every one still counts. Katy looked up from the ground, which she’d been staring at. In a world of nine billion people . . . My heart went out to her a little bit. She looked sorry, but she hadn’t said it yet. “You understand me?”

  She nodded in a way that disposed me to believe her.

  I took the specs from my pocket and put them on. The lenses were clear, but tinted gray like sunglasses. I saw no data display. “Iris recognition?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “The data display only works when they’re on my face.”

  “How about the recording functions?”

  “They stay on until I turn them off.”

  So, the specs had saved my whole lecture, along with the view inside my pocket. It still recorded. I took the glasses off and weighed them in my hand.

  Katy sniffed and then swallowed. She looked me right in the eye. “I’m sorry, Aunt Sue. I swear I’ll delete it.”

  I waited for her to say she’d then give the specs back to me afterward, but she didn’t. The girl knew how to stand her ground.

  The sun moved a millimeter across the sky.

  I was impressed, but I put the specs back in my pocket. “I’m sorry, but I won’t risk it.”

  “You’re never going to give them back?” Her face went red behind the green tats. Regret turned to rage so fast, I knew I’d done the right thing.

  “Only if I can find a tech I can trust to access the memory and erase these parts.”

  She looked at me differently, like I was something more than a stringy old woman. I was someone to be reckoned with. “You don’t trust me.”

  I nodded. “Sorry to say.”

  She took a deep breath and looked me up and down. I stood my ground. “You can head out now,” I told her, “if you’re no longer interested.” Now I’d learn what she was really here for. I kept my hand on my pocket. If she tried to take the specs back by force, I’d crack ’em in half and pitch the pieces over a cliff. If she was that kind of person, I wanted to know it.

  She steamed over it for a while, looking from me to the Canyon’s south rim. I got tired of waiting. “Trust has to be earned, girl.” I pointed down the trail toward Horn Creek. “Let’s get going.”

  She gave me a look. Whether it was calculating or compassionate, I couldn’t quite tell. She did stay, though. “You go ahead,” I said. “It’s different when you’re the one leading.” She sighed and took off in the direction I pointed.

  There’s nothing like walking out on a trail and seeing no one ahead of you, even when you can see for twenty miles. You know you’re not the first. You’ve got a trail beneath your feet, right? But it sure can feel like it.

  I wasn’t sure Katy appreciated it. Where before she nipped at my heels, now she never got more than fifty meters ahead. Every time she’d stop to enjoy a view, she’d glance back, making sure I saw her appreciate it.

  Part of me thought it sweet. For all she was a strong young woman, brave enough to shoot herself up with tech that would grow under her skin, she craved attention like a little kid.

  Another part of me felt uneasy about it.

  “Aunt Sue?”

  I stopped and looked where she pointed. I’d been more caught up in my thoughts than was appropriate for the situation.

  “A turtle?” she asked. She took a few steps through the cactus chains. I scanned the space, looking for the snake she might not see. My gaze fell on the creature. She crouched down to look at it. The scaly legs and blunt face were as familiar to me as an old friend.

  “It’s a tortoise, honey. A desert tortoise. These are new here.” Its shell was something else altogether. It had grown spikes all around the edges, each one an inch or two long. Despite the heat, I suddenly felt cold.

  “How’s it new?” she asked. She reached forward, real slow. The tortoise tucked up. She stroked its shell with one finger. She didn’t know it was any different. I didn’t see any need to point it out. I hoped it was a fluke, unique to this one animal.

  I spoke carefully, not sure how much I wanted to reveal. “Back in the days when they covered the Mojave Desert with solar panels, some crazed conservation biologists set a bunch of tortoises loose here. They figured the environment would be friendly for ’em and no one could put up solar panels in the park. The damn things thrived. Now you can’t hardly walk a trail without tripping over one.”

  “They’re damned?” she asked.

  I smiled a little, but she didn’t see it. She watched the tortoise. I decided to tell. “Damned lucky. It’s against the law to move an endangered species, but we did. We were right to do it. You can’t find a desert
tortoise in the Mojave Desert these days. They’re all here or in roadside zoos, far as I know.”

  She turned to face me, all attention. “ ‘We’ as in us human beings?”

  “As in me. My first job out of college, I did desert tortoise surveys for utility right-of-ways. Years before I came here.”

  I could tell she was impressed. She looked back to the tortoise, her eyes running over it and the ground around it. “It’s been eating these cactus.” She pointed to nibble marks on the prickly pears’ new growth. “Its little mouth can bite between the thorns, huh?”

  “You’re right.” I fingered the specs through the fabric over my pocket. It wouldn’t hurt to let her record this. She couldn’t upload until we got above the rim, anyway. I pulled the specs out and handed them to her. “Here, get some video.”

  She gave me a solid, thoughtful look and then took them from me. As she slid them past her ears, she shivered.

  “You okay?” It was a strange thing to see, as hot as it was.

  “Yeah. The tats start to tingle when they build up too much charge. Feels good to let it bleed off into the specs’ batteries.”

  The thought made me itch. All those tiny machines, vibrating under her skin. “I’d gladly lend you a shirt to cover up.” I wouldn’t let her keep the specs just on that account, if that’s what she was thinking. At the moment, she didn’t appear to be thinking about me at all. She filmed the tortoise carefully from several angles and distances. I had to smile a little. I wanted people to know somebody cared enough to save these tortoises.

  “I did this,” I said to Katy. “Saved a species. No amount of video could’ve hidden those critters in the back of a van and brought them across the state line. A billion people thinking about it couldn’t have carried them as gently as we did to bring them here, alive and ready to thrive in a place we knew would suit them.”

  Katy looked at me seriously, but I couldn’t tell if she was thinking hard about what I’d said or only half paying attention as she recorded. “Wow,” she finally said. “That’s . . . It’s . . .”

  I cringed, afraid she would label me “killer” and wondering how I’d deal with it.

  “It’s really cool, Aunt Sue.” She rested her palm on the tucked-up tortoise’s shell. “That is really cool.”

  I smiled big then, because I believed she meant it. “You can keep the glasses on for a while, but I’ll want them back tonight.”

  “I’ll hand them over anytime you ask.”

  It was the right thing to say. Maybe too right, but I had to give her a chance to earn my trust. It would be cruel to withhold it without reason.

  We saw a dozen more tortoises that afternoon. Seven were alive. Five were dead, their shells shattered. They all had the spiked fringe around their shells. My gut wrenched each time I saw it.

  “Do the condors smash them?” Katy asked. “Maybe they drop them from up high.”

  “I doubt it. Condors don’t think to kill.”

  “Condors don’t talk, either.”

  I didn’t have any answer for that, but she watched me, waiting. “They eat what’s dead,” I said. “They could pry a tortoise open but would only do it if they smelled something dead inside.”

  “What else would do it?”

  I just shook my head. I still hadn’t told her the spikes were something new. “A wolf wouldn’t have a big-enough mouth,” I said. “Stay closer, okay?”

  The whole thing gave me a bad feeling. I tried to make myself feel better, told myself the tortoises were better off than if they’d gone extinct. We’d thought the move through as carefully as we could. Playing God is a tough role, but in this case, somebody had to do it.

  We slept that night at Horn Creek, just above where the trail crosses it. You still don’t want to get too close to the creek. I insisted on a tent. Ever since we’d come into this drainage, I’d felt like something watched us. Once, I heard a rustle and crunch off to the trail’s right. Way out across the plateau, I thought I saw something moving out there between the desert thorn and wolfberry. Horn thickets. Whatever they were, they would go still whenever I looked right at ’em, like stealthy things will do. Same thing happens when your imagination runs wild, so I didn’t mention it to Katy. It was probably just some critter out there minding its own business. No need for both of us to be paranoid.

  I woke in the dark to the sound of hoofs, clattering on rock in the next gulch over, distant and echoing. For a while, I wondered if I dreamt it, or if maybe that stag still walked the canyon as a ghost. Maybe the damned thing was still alive. The sound faded. I stared at the tent’s fabric overhead for a good long while, listening and hearing nothing else. The moon was half full and bright. The branches of a dead cottonwood tree cast twisted shadows on the tent. I rolled to my side.

  Katy’s eyes were wide open, shining in the dark with reflected moonlight. She looked over at me. She’d heard it too. Neither of us said a word. We just lay there together. The creek’s splash and trickle finally lulled me.

  I must’ve fallen hard asleep, because when I woke up, Katy was gone. You can only be so quiet getting out of a sleeping bag and tent with the zippers and all. I was proud she’d done it so well, but worried about where she’d gone. I pulled my pants on and found she’d taken her specs out of my pocket.

  I got out of the tent and looked around. The sky was the gray-blue color it turns just before dawn. I hated to think what a wolf could do in this light. I wanted to shout for Katy and hear her yell right back. I did not. It would be a wrong thing to stir up every animal in Horn Creek just because I was worried. Hell, it could call a wolf right in and scare the deer into hiding from here to Salt Creek.

  Instead, I looked around. It was hard to stay quiet. On a still morning, the Canyon can seem like a big, empty room, all walls and echoes. My breath sounded too loud. My feet crunched on the sand. I stopped every couple steps to listen and looked sharp all around.

  I had to because the Canyon is not a big, empty room—ever or anywhere. Far from it. Even the Tonto Plateau only looked flat compared to the eight-hundred-foot-tall Redwall cliffs. Here where we’d camped, rounded hills fifty to a hundred feet high from creek bed to crest surrounded us. A critter could easily hide close enough to hear every step and smell you sweat. I scanned the ground and hills as if Katy’s life depended on it.

  The scuffmarks put me on to her: little drag marks in the silt on the rock ledge next to the creek. Then I saw footprints in the sand. The tread marks were familiar. I’d followed them down the trail for hours yesterday. It was Katy for sure. She’d gone exploring like young people will do. Like I had done and still do. I followed her trail up the drainage a ways before I saw her.

  She stood almost halfway up the hill slope on the creek’s other side. She saw me and waved big, swinging her arm wide overhead. She kept doing it, afraid I wouldn’t see. God only knows why she didn’t shout.

  No, I take that back. God had nothing to do with it. She didn’t shout because she had an instinct for quiet. Maybe living in a goddamned city with millions of people hones that instinct. I hurried up the slope, sensing she had something to show me.

  She sure as hell did. Just at her feet, beneath a narrow shale ledge on the hillside, sat that stag’s skull. That stag. There was absolutely no doubt about it, because my pulaski was still stuck in its rack. I could read my name etched on the damn handle.

  So, I had killed it. Not that day but before the season had ended and it could shed its horns. Life couldn’t have been easy with a pulaski stuck to its head. A couple horns on that side were broken, like it had bashed its rack against things to try to knock it loose.

  I knelt down and set my hand on what would’ve been its snout. The skull still had some dried skin and fur stuck to it, but it was mostly covered with a patchy light green moss. The rest of the bones were scattered and gone, but even the wolves and coyotes wouldn’t touch that creature’s crazy head.

  I bowed my head and let out a long breath.

&n
bsp; “I’m sorry,” I whispered. Some things need to be said out loud, no matter what.

  Katy stood by, silent and respectful. She had the specs on, of course, but I didn’t give a damn.

  Besides, it was her moment, too. I hadn’t told her what I’d been looking for on this trip, and here she’d found it. Exactly it. It made the hair on my arms stand up. She looked from me to the skull with eyebrows pushed together. Without a word, she knelt down. She stroked each long, sharp incisor once with her index finger. Anybody could see there was something wrong about those teeth.

  “I’m sorry too,” she said. Then she looked sideways at me to see if she’d done the right thing.

  I almost cried. I closed my eyes and swallowed it. She had a sense for people. It was the right thing to say, but it hurt me. It was hard not to take it as criticism.

  The sky was now bright. The sun had risen somewhere, but we still stood in the shadows of the Canyon’s eastern walls. I let out a breath and turned away from the skull.

  A couple of quick clops. A clatter. Katy’s eyes got wide. Mine bugged out too. The sounds came from the west, from the hill’s other side. More clip-clops and scraping sounds.

  Katy took off, running quick and quiet, toward the hilltop. I opened my mouth to shout, but clamped it shut real quick. It would be better not to surprise whatever was over there. I clearly remembered the look on that stag’s face, so many years ago, when I dared follow its herd to where it had gone to protect them.

  I turned back to my old friend. I grabbed a horn with my right hand and then stomped on the aged antlers. One strong blow shattered them to pieces. I grabbed my old pulaski from the pile of shattered bone.

  Katy was halfway up the hill. I ran to follow, slowed by my hip and the pulaski. I kept my head down, watching the ground carefully to make time and still stay quiet. Just short of the hill’s crest, I looked up. Katy was nowhere to be seen. She’d gone over to the other side. I got to the hillcrest and lay on my belly, heart pounding, to have a look around.

  The critters caught my eye first. It wasn’t a whole herd. There were six bucks down there in the stream bottom, two bigger and older than the others. They all had those crazy racks. None had grown quite as big as my old friend’s, but they all had a couple of warped, flattened plates like moose, and crooked bone spears bristling out with no rhyme or reason. I looked around but didn’t see or hear Katy. There were plenty of places to hide. She must’ve been using them wisely. My eyes were drawn back to the bucks.