Future War

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  And there in a wood, a Piggy-wig stood . . .

  Edward Lear: The Owl and the Pussy-cat

  On the third, day beyond the womb we come to the cool cool river. Peeg and Porcospino and Ceefer and papavator and I. We stand among the trees that come down to the edge and watch the river flow. The sun is high above us; light shines and gleams from the moving water. Peeg is fascinated. He has never seen true water. Only the dream water when he was a seed high in heaven. He goes down over the stones to touch his trunk to the flowing river.

  “Alive!” he says. “Alive.”

  It is only water, I tell him but Peeg cannot accept this. There cannot be enough water in the world for all this flowing: no, it must be some great coiling creature, flowing across the earth, up into heaven and back to earth again. A circle of never-ending movement. For a creature of no hands and very little words, Peeg has much opinion about the hardworld. Opinions should be left to beings like me who have much words, and clever hands. Why, he does not even know his own true name. He calls himself Peeg because that is the name he found on his tongue when he woke in the womb of mamavator. I tell him, You are not a pig, a boar, you are a tapir. A tapir, that is what you are. See, you have a trunk, a snout, pigs do not have trunks or snouts. He will not be told. Peeg is his name, Peeg is what he is. Creatures with few words should not toy with powerful things like names.

  Ceefer flexes her claws, cleans between her toes.

  “What it is is not important,” she says. “How we get across it is.” She is a law to herself, Ceefer. She has as many words as I; this I know because she has the smart look in the back of her eyes. You cannot hide that look. But she keeps her words much to herself. If she has a name, one she found on her tongue in mamavator, she keeps that also to herself. So I have my own name for her. Ceefer. Ceefer Cat.

  We follow the river to a place where the smooth shining water breaks over rocks and stones into white spray.

  “Here we will cross,” I say. “Ceefer will go first to make sure there are no traps or snares.” She grimaces at the white water; she loves to fish but hates to get her fur wet. In a few bounds she is across, sitting on the far side shaking water from her feet. We follow: Porcospino, then Peeg, then papavator, then me. The Team Leader must be last so he can watch over his team. I can see that Peeg’s small feet are far from safe on the slippery rocks.

  “Peeg!” I say. “Be careful careful careful.” But the glitter and shimmer of the running water have dazzled him. His small feet lose their balance. In he goes. Screaming. Splashing. Feet clawing, kicking, but there is nowhere for them to catch hold.

  And the current has hold of him, is sweeping him towards a gap in the rocks to wedge him, drag him down, drown him.

  Flash blue silver: papavator steps over me, straddles his long, thin metal legs to form a good steady base, unfolds an arm. Down goes the arm, in go the fingers locking in the mass of hair and circuitry at the back of Peeg’s neck, up comes Peeg thrashing and squealing. In three strides papavator is on the far bank. Peeg is a dismal, dripping huddle on the shore.

  “Up, up,” I say. “Move move. We must go on. We have far to go this day to get to our Destination.” But Peeg will not move. He stands shivering, saying over and over and over again these words: Bit me bit me bad being bad being bit me bit me bad being bad being. The river being that seemed so wonderful, so friendly to him has turned evil and hostile. I go to talk to him, I stroke the coils of circuitry around his head, stroke the bulge on his side that covers the lance. He will not be consoled by my words and my touching. He is beginning to upset the others. I cannot allow that. We shall have to wait until Peeg is ready before we go on. I signal for papavator to unfold the arm with the needleful of dreams on it. Great dreams there are in the needle. Perhaps the flying dream. That is the one Peeg loves best: that he is back in heaven, flying, laughing and crying and pissing himself with happiness as the angels look down upon him and smile at their Peeg. He lifts his trunk to touch the needle. Dream good, Peeg.

  Papavator settles on his metal legs, opens his belly. Time to feed. Porcospino and I suck greedily from the titties. Ceefer flares her nostrils in displeasure. She prefers the taste of gut and bone and blood. Tonight, she will hunt by the light of the moon and the shine of her eyes. She will kill. She will swallow down blood and bones and guts and all. Disgusting creature. Not a being at all.

  Ceefer. Peeg. Porcospino. Papavator. Me, Coon-ass. One more in our team to make it the full one-hand’s-worth-and-one. Here she comes now, down the beams of light that slant into the shadows among the trees of the river’s edge: she does not need dreams to fly in. Only Peeg and I have the gift of colour-seeing, and Peeg is rolling and grunting in his needle-dream. The others cannot see as I do how the colours flow from blue to green across her wings and back, the cap of brilliant red, the beak and feet of brightest yellow. This, I think, is the world called beautiful. She settles on papavator’s outstretched arm. No pulp, no pap for her. She feeds on pellets from the hand of papavator himself. But for all her colours, she has only one word; that is the trade the angels made: one word, two syllables that she sings over and over and over. Bir-dee. Bir-dee. Bir-dee.

  Ceefer Cat looks up from her eternal cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, sudden, sniffing. In the backs of her eyes are the red moving shapes that are her gift from the angels. She stiffens, bares her teeth, just a little. That is enough. One of the things that goes with having hands and colours, and much, much words, is more fear than others: the fear that looks at what might be and shivers. Anxiety, that is the name for it.

  Danger. Bir-dee leaps up into the air again, darting and many-coloured, brilliant, dashing through the air, and then I can see her no longer through the canopy of treetops. But I do not fear that she will fly away out of all seeing and never come back, she is keyed to my scent, she will always come back to me, however far she flies.

  Ceefer is waiting in the shadows beneath the trees, Porcospino is ruffling and rattling his quills, papavator has closed himself up and is lurching on to his silly thin legs. But Peeg sleeps on. He grumbles and mumbles and drools in his dream. It must be a very good dream that papavator has in his needle. “Peeg, Peeg, danger coming, danger coming! Awake! Awake! The others have reached the dark of the deep forest, they are looking back; why do we not come?”

  I do not have the senses of Ceefer, but I can feel the thing she feels; huge and heavy, moving through the forest on the other side of the river.

  There are secrets that mamavator gave only to me, to be shared with none other; secrets whispered to me in the warmth of the womb, in the dream-forest that is so like, and so unlike, this hard-forest. The middle finger of my left hand is one of the secrets told to none but I. It is made from the same almost-living stuff as the emplants that trail almost to the ground from the sockets behind my ears, from the skulls of all my team.

  Quick. Quick. Out comes the emplant in the back of Peeg’s head.

  Quick. Quick. In goes the middle finger of my left hand.

  Up, I think. Up. Peeg twitches in his sleep, a great heaving twitch. Up. He staggers to his feet. Forward, I think and the thought pours out of my finger into his head and as he moves forward, still dreaming his needle-dream, I hop up on his back, ride him with my finger. Move. Move. Run. Run. Fear. He wails in his dreams, breaks into a trot, a canter. I lash him into a gallop. We fly over the dark, dark earth. Porcospino and Ceefer run at my side, papavator covers the ground with his long, clicking strides. The trees rise up all around us, taller and darker and huger than any dreaming of them. Run Peeg run. The dream of the needle is beginning to wear thin, the hardworld is pouring in through the tears and cracks in the dream, but I do not release him from my mind. From far behind comes a tremendous crashing, as if the dark, huge trees are being torn up and thrown into heaven; and the sound of mighty explosions. We run until all running is run out of us. Full of fear, we stop, listening, waiting. Presently, there is the smell of burning. The red shapes in the
backs of Ceefer’s eyes flicker and shift: she is scanning. She sits to clean herself.

  “Whatever it is, is gone now,” is all she will say. She licks her crotch.

  We sit, we pant, we wait. The rain begins, dripping in fat drops from the forest canopy. Soon the smell of burning is gone. As I sit with the rain running down my fur, Bir-dee comes to me, perches on my hand, singing her glad two-note song. I stroke her neck, ruffle her feathers, smooth down her glossy blue wings. Only when the others are asleep with the rain from high high above falling heavily upon them, do I extract the reconnaissance chip from her head and plug it into the socket beside my right eye.

  Flight. Soaring. Trees and clouds and sun, the bright shine and coil of a river, the curved edge of the world: all crazy, all turned on end. Then, something huge as the moon: huger even than mamavator when we saw her for the first time, steaming in the forest clearing where we were born: something earthbound and stamping, stamping out of the forest, into the river, standing with the water flowing around its feet while it fires and fires and fires, explosion after explosion after explosion tearing apart the trees and rocks of the river bank where we rested. Before it stamps away down the river it sets the smashed trees alight with flames from its chest.

  I blank the chip with a thought, extrude it, give it back to Bir-dee. To have hands, and colour, and much, much words, to know; this is the worst punishment of the angels.

  The bravest animals in the land

  Are Captain Beaky and his band.

  Captain Beaky

  Who made you?

  The angels made me from a seed.

  The angels planted a seed in the womb of mamavator and nurtured it, and grew it. Flesh of the flesh of mamavator. She suckled and fed us.

  What are you?

  The servants of the angels, the agents of their work upon this world.

  Two natures of service, two natures of servant have the angels; the soft and the hard; those of the inorganic and those of the organic. The service of the inorganic is not greater than the service of the organic, the service of the soft is not greater than the service of the hard; both were created in the likeness of the angels to complement each other in their weakness.

  Recite the weaknesses of the organic.

  Pain. Hunger. Tiredness. Sleep. Emotion. Defecation. Death.

  Recite the weaknesses of the inorganic.

  Noise. Expense. Energy. Breakdown. Vulnerability. Stupidity.

  Why have the angels, themselves perfect, created such imperfection?

  Because the angels alone are perfect.

  Because no created thing, no thing of the hands, may assume to the perfection of the angels, that is the great sin. What is the name of the greatest sin?

  Pride.

  How may we purge ourselves of the sin of pride?

  By the faithful service of the angels. By the humble obedience of their will. By the execution of their assignments.

  To the letter.

  To the letter.

  I have always wondered what that final part of the Litany means. To the letter. I think that it has something to do with the dark marks on papavator’s skin; those regular, orderly marks; and they have something to do with words, but the understanding of it is not a gift the angels have chosen to give this Coon-ass. Perhaps they are the prayers of the inorganic: papavator himself takes no part in our nightly recitations; his own hard, inorganic devotions he makes well apart from us; long, thin legs folded up under him, arms and antennae drawn in. It is not sleep, the inorganic do not sleep, not as we sleep. Strange, the lives of the inorganics. How marvelous, the will of the angels, that has made us so different, so weak in ourselves, yet so strong together to their service.

  Every night, when Ceefer has sniffed out a place free from traps and poisons for us, we gather in a circle in the forest for the Litany. I lead, they respond as best they can. Bir-dee has only two words, yet no matter how far she is flying, however high, she always returns to sit with the others, shifting from foot to foot because she is not made to stand on the ground, cocking her head from side to side as if the wonder of the words is being communicated to her by some spiritual channel I do not understand. And Peeg loves the Litany, would have me say the words over and over and over because though I know that he does not understand what he is saying—they are just sounds he was born with in his skull—inside the words he can see the angels reaching down to lift him up into heaven and set him flying among the stars.

  I have said that papavator does not take part in our worship. There is another, sad to say. Ceefer says that she does not believe. There are no angels, there is no heaven, she says. They are comfortable words we have invented because we know that we all must die and the knowing frightens us. She thinks that is brave. I think it foolish. It is certain that we must die, and that is frightening, but would she say it is wrong to comfort ourselves with dreams, like the dreams papavator keeps in his needle? I have tried to steer her right but she will not believe. She is a stubborn animal. Our arguing upsets Peeg; he has a great faith but the light shines through it, like sun through the leaf canopy, easily stirred by the wind. I would order Ceefer to believe, but she would laugh that dreadful cat-laugh at me; so every night when we recite she sits and cleans herself, licking licking licking. That licking, it is as bad as any laughter.

  At the end, after Porcospino has scraped a hole in the leaf-litter and one after the other we shit into it, Peeg asks for a bible story.

  “What story would you like to hear?” I ask.

  “Angels. War,” says Peeg. “Lights. Flying.”

  Ceefer growls. She stalks away. She thinks it is a stupid story. She thinks all the bible stories she was taught by mamavator are stupid. I must admit there is much in them that does not make sense to me, but Peeg would have them told over and over and over again, every night if he could. He rolls on to his side, his safe side, closes his eyes. The tip of the lance slides out of the fold of skin on his side, like a metal penis. He seems to have forgotten all about the river. He does not have the circuits for long memory. Fortunate Peeg.

  “In the days of days,” I say, “there were only angels and animals. The animals looked like us, and smelled like us, but they were only animals, not beings. They were called animals by the angels because all they possessed was an anima, a livingness, but no words or spirit. The angels and the animals had existed together in the world for always so that no one could remember which had made the other, or whether they had both been made by something different altogether.

  “In those days of days, as in these days of days, animals served angels, but the angels, being as they were mighty creatures, with moods and feelings that are not to be judged by beings, grew tired of the animals and their limitations and created new servants to be better than the animals. They created servants stronger than you, Peeg”—he hears my voice in his near-sleep, the high-pressure lance slides out to almost its full length—“that could see better and farther than you, Ceefer”—though she is out, patrolling in the darkness, it is part of the story—“that could fly higher and carry more than you, Bir-dee, that were smarter and could remember better and think faster than me, an old raccoon; and that could kill better and more than you, Porcospino.

  “So excellent were the new servants that the angels were able to fly up into heaven itself, where they have been flying ever since with their hands held out at their sides.

  “Now I have said that the wisdom of the angels is greater than the wisdom of beings, and if the angels turn to war among themselves, as they did, not once, but many times in the days of days, what are we to question them? But there was war, a great and terrible war, fought by the terrible servants they had made for themselves; servants that could knock flat whole forests, that could set fire to the sky and turn the sea to piss. A war so terrible that it was fought not just upon the hard world, but in heaven also. So mighty a war that the angels in the end called upon their old servants, the animals, to aid them, and from those wordless, spiri
tless creatures created, by the shaping of their hands, beings like us.

  “Though lowly and lesser and stained by the sin of our failure to serve the angels as they wished to be served, we were permitted to redeem ourselves by aiding the angels in their war. Thus we were given wonderful weapons, mighty enough to destroy the works of angels, both organic and inorganic; mighty enough”—and here I always draw my words into a hushed whisper—“to destroy the angels themselves.”

  As they gaze into my words and in them see the angels smiling and holding out their hands to them, I go to them in turn, as I have every night since we came into the hardworld, and touch the third finger of my left hand to the sockets between their eyes, the finger that sends them down down into holy sleep.

  Unseen, unheard, black as the night herself, Ceefer returns from her patrol as I end my story.

  “Stupid,” she says. “What kind of a god is it that can be killed by beings?”

  “I do not know,” I say. “That is what faith is for. So we can believe what we cannot know.”

  “I hope it is a big faith you have,” says Ceefer, extending her hard inorganic claws to lick off the forest dirt, carefully, carefully. “Big enough for another to sit on the back of it. I will have need of your faith tomorrow.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  She blinks her round round eyes at heaven, flares her nostrils. Sensing.

  “It will be a hard day, tomorrow,” she says, and, refusing any further words with me, stalks away to find a comfortable nest among the root buttresses of the great great trees.

  “Bonedigger, bonedigger, dogs in the moonlight . . .”

  Paul Simon: Call Me Al.

  I have these pictures in my head. I suppose they must be the vision of angels, for I can see the forest spread out below me, from sea to shining sea, all its hills and valleys and rivers and lakes laid out before me. But it is more than just as if seeing from on high; it is as if I can see through the canopy of the trees; see through the trees themselves. I can see with a detail surely not possible from so great a height: I can see the place where mamavator left us before returning to the sky in lights and fire; that is a ball of blueness. I can see us, the Team, five yellow dots with a sixth moving some way ahead of us. And I can see the place where we are to go. Our Destination. The shape of that is a black, pulsing star.