This time—paying attention—she was disturbed by the differences. Brad’s status, for example. He was a man who avoided the quest and mocked the Council. Yet people at the lab tolerated him. They fed him although he did not hunt or gather food. They let him follow his interests, working for days alone on his computer with his equations and his Theory of Everything. They ignored his rudeness and bad behavior. In truth, they treated him like an elder although he was still in his thirties and brash and inexperienced and selfish and headstrong.
Alone now and calm, Clare admitted that elders were not always or even typically people whom other people liked and admired. And Brad was like an elder in some ways. His knowledge did not involve the skills of The Return. Instead, he had studied history and philosophy and literature. He understood quantum physics and panpsychism, the basis of their worldview. He commanded a breadth of information, and sometimes he used the past to think about their future—how they would keep scavenging, what they would run out of, what they would not. Clare suspected the Council consulted fairly often with Brad and listened to his ideas. They tolerated him because they needed him. One Council member had even made love to him.
Clare rose, put on her pack, and began moving through the landscape, effortless, smooth, running but not running. She sent energy into her legs. She pushed energy into her lungs and through her body. She kept alert watching for other animals who were also moving through the landscape stalking her or simply watching. She drank sparingly from her leather bottles and was happy when the springs she had been told about were actually there, when she could drink as much as she wanted and refill her bottles. She saw lion tracks and felt anxious. She saw an antelope herd but did not hunt them. That night, she climbed a large oak tree and built a nest, tying herself to the branches. Her legs twitched from exertion.
Before sleep, she thought of Brad’s father, who had left the lab much as she was leaving. Perhaps he had gone back to the northern tribes or become a bushkie or died in an accident or been eaten with relish by a saber-toothed cat. No one knew. The hunter had stayed four years, a married man and then a father. When Brad was still a child learning to walk, the hunter announced he had to go and would not likely return, and Brad and his mother had never heard from him again. That was the end of the beautiful lab rat and the brave hunter. Clare could see how Brad had made this into a story, a polished tale, a touchstone. Now she was leaving him, the end of another story, the brave lab rat and the beautiful hunter.
In the morning, Clare was sick, vomiting up acid and taste of elk, and she thought about the baby growing inside her. She must have gotten pregnant in the weeks after the peyote ceremony. She was almost certain the child was Brad’s, since she knew when she ovulated—when she desired sex more than usual—and she remembered that night, giving up her doubts and grudges, giving herself eagerly to Brad, that night and all the nights afterward, excited by his strangeness and declarations of love. Of course, the possibility remained that Jon was the father. They had lain together, too, a few days earlier.
Clare heaved one last time, wiped her mouth, and drank some water. She wouldn’t be sick again until the next morning.
That’s how it had been with her first child, Elise, sick every morning for three months, sick but happy, sick but laughing. She had made her husband laugh with her. They were not much older than teenagers. “I’ve never seen anyone throw up and smile,” her husband said as Clare coughed, spit, her stomach knotted. She was sick but not tired, not worried, not like so many other women. It was her first baby, the whole tribe petting her and making a fuss, her mother and father and grandmother happy. The pregnancy had felt easy. Even the birth, always dangerous, had felt easy.
Then the midwives put the baby on Clare’s chest. Elise had squirmed her face upward, found a nipple, and sucked hard. The little hands fisted, fists flailing. After a while, the sucking and gasping for air seemed connected. Suck, gasp. Suck, gasp. After a while, the midwives murmured and took the baby away, into the light, and Clare knew the meaning of bereft.
Her life had been full. Now it was empty. She called out for her baby. She told her husband, kneeling by the bed of skins, “Get the baby!” She could hear the midwives murmuring about skin, blue skin, and gasps for air. Heart damage, a hole in the heart. It was common enough.
Later some of the people—Clare’s mother—had blamed Clare’s husband. Children like this did not live long. Clare’s husband should have suffocated the newborn, who would only suffer, not thrive. The midwives would have helped. Everyone in the tribe would have helped. The child would disappear. A quick sorrow.
But “Get the baby!” Clare had said and her husband had done what she asked although no one expected the little gasping girl to live past her first month or first year. No one expected her to live two, three, four more years. Weaker than other children, smarter than other children, brighter in spirit than other children, Elise had glowed like a candle in a tent, sheltered by parents who clung to the belief that she would grow up like any other child. She would flourish like any other child. With every day that passed, they worked to deceive themselves.
Some of the people blamed Clare’s husband for not killing the baby that first day and then for not getting Clare pregnant again and then for dying himself so soon after Elise died. Apparently he had climbed the cliff to reach an eagle’s nest. Many people liked such feathers for their pipe, and the fall could easily have been an accident. An accident, the tribe said, although they all saw the grief in his carelessness. They all suspected he had been blinded with tears.
For this, Clare had also blamed him—not for leaving her alone but for still having tears. She wondered if her husband had loved their daughter more than she did. For her part, she had felt empty the day Elise finally grew too big for an organ turned wrong and leaking blood. She didn’t have any grief left when they put Elise in a tree to be eaten by birds. She had felt almost nothing, only going back later to sit under the ravens and crows cawing and swirling until the other women had to lift her up and force her away. Later, she didn’t recognize Elise’s bones. They didn’t seem like her child’s bones, so small and hard and white, and she watched her mother and grandmother wrap them in a skin and bury them in the ground, and she still felt nothing, comfortably detached. This little packet wasn’t her daughter.
Clare did not want to think about Elise now. Elise wasn’t a good daytime thought but something Clare saved for darkness, when she could bring up memories and relive them just as she fell asleep. She didn’t want to think about the new baby either, not yet. She certainly did not want to think about Brad and what he planned to do with Dog’s head, the physical proof of his latest equations.
“We’ll finally know,” Brad had said. “We’ll know if it’s true.” Desperately, Clare had argued back that they already knew enough. They had enough truth. Desperately, she had begged him not to do this, even ordering Luke out of the room and having sex with Brad, using the most obvious and oldest trick: do this for me, please, for my love. The next day, she had threatened to leave. She had threatened to tell the Council. But nothing worked. Nothing budged Brad from his stubborn desire.
And he knew she wouldn’t tell the Council. She wouldn’t be the one to betray him. Didn’t she understand obsession? For four years, she had kept alive a daughter who should have died at birth. Didn’t she understand delusion?
Clare drank, wiped her mouth, and slung her pack over her shoulders. She wouldn’t tell the Council, but she couldn’t stay at the lab with Brad either. She believed in The Return, their charted course. After the supervirus—a bed of bones, a sea of ash—humans had to find another way. They had to go back to what had worked for tens of thousands of years, and they had to go forward with a new humility. Their old compact with the earth. Their new compact with the earth. They were part of something larger than themselves. They were part of everything, not separate, not gods, not above the world, not interfering with the world.
Clare began walking fast, effo
rtlessly, wanting to reach winter camp the next day. So many people had suffered and died so that she could be here, right now, in this moment, this beauty. Brad would fail. His equations would be wrong. Someone would discover what he was trying to do. Hunters would be sent to destroy his equipment, his computer. They might imprison him, as her tribe had imprisoned the murderous bushkie. Dog’s supposed insight would be revealed as the hallucination of a dying animal. There were so many ways this experiment could end badly. Clare had no doubt. Brad would not succeed. But that wasn’t the point, not for her. Freedom was not unlimited. You didn’t do something just because you could.
Clare imagined a game trail worn through yellow grass. Suddenly the trail forked. Perhaps one way led to a pond and another higher into the mountains. Two trails went in opposite directions. It was never meant to be. She and Brad had met so strangely. Crucified lizards. The way he cupped her face, the peyote god on his breath, the direwolf listening. A polished story, a fable.
She swam across the land, a swimmer in grass.
Social Problems: Assignment Five, submitted by María Escobar
I have decided to turn in another paper for extra credit. I feel that my last papers were not exactly the best I could do and as I have said before I really need a good evaluation from you so that I can go on my first long quest this summer. This quest is very important to me and if writing an extra paper will help you evaluate me better then I am very happy to do that.
Global warming is not really a social problem now but it was a social problem in the past, and so I think that counts. At the beginning of the twenty-second century, people were only using viral technology as well as wind and solar and hydrocell and they were not emitting much carbon dioxide into the air. But like the web says, “The damage was done.” Most of the planetary ice was gone, the oceans were higher, many cities along the coast had flooded, there were new deserts, and there wasn’t much land for gardens and growing food. People starved, drowned, and died of thirst or disease. Many species went extinct, even as the scientists were still busy cloning the Paleos. Cloning by then was so easy that they could have cloned all the species going extinct because of global warming but no one bothered because there wasn’t enough room for them anymore.
Here in Costa Rica the weather got hotter and drier and we still have a lot of fires which destroy the jungle. We also have a lot of storms around the coast but since no one lives there it doesn’t matter. We don’t go thirsty and after the supervirus killed off almost all the humans, the plants and animals recovered fast so we have plenty to eat. The good news is that malaria and other diseases are hardly a problem at all now, although we don’t know why.
Global warming was a huge and terrible mistake and everyone feels very bad about it. I think it was our worst mistake, even worse than the supervirus because the supervirus killed off only humans and global warming killed off so many other animals and plants. Once when I was a kid, I apologized to the planet for doing this and I had a ceremony where I cut my finger and let drops of blood soak into the earth. Actually I cut myself too much and it started bleeding a lot and my parents were mad at me. But that’s just the kind of thing kids do. What’s done is done. The important thing is that we learned our lesson.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DOG
Dog remembered dying with a greater clarity than anything he remembered about being alive. In those last moments, his body was deliriously busy, bladder emptying, heart pumping, right and left atria filling with blood, priming the ventricles, ventricles contracting, propelling blood to lungs, aortic and pulmonary valves opening, atria filling—and then not filling. Where was the blood? The heart waited to contract. The non-beating of the heart. Where was the rich hot blood?
Time flowed differently in those moments of death, consciousness twisting gently apart from matter/energy, the double helix zipping and unzipping. Einstein had discovered that gravity could warp the curve of space and time, that time slowed near a large mass such as a sun or planet or black hole, that time was affected by matter. Now Dog understood that time was also affected by consciousness.
Dog knew about Einstein because of Brad. Because of Brad, Dog knew about the holographic principle, how everything in the world was a four-dimensional image formed of waves that were themselves formed by electromagnetic and quantum processes. He knew about quantum non-locality, how the billions of cells in his body were in constant non-physical communication, a complex bio-holo-electromagnetic field organized by DNA into the biohologram of Dog’s body and Luke’s body and Brad’s body. He knew about DNA from Lucia and from his own research and study—and he knew about radio waves from some deep mutation in his brain, from his birth to a direwolf in a northern cave.
He knew about the five relatively unimportant dimensions of time, which might not be so unimportant. His brain waited impatiently. All the cells were impatient. Where was the oxygen? The cells cried out as one. Where was the oxygen? Excitement grew. Suddenly the optic nerve had no choice. Dog could no longer see. No more images formed of light waves refracted by air, cornea, and aqueous humor, inverted and then reinterpreted by the brain. He would never see like that again. Suddenly he could no longer hear. Or taste or smell. The cells growled, scavengers waiting for food. A teratorn hopped forward on the ground. A condor flapped to sit on a branch. A spiral of vultures twisted in the sky. But the birds in Dog’s brain would get nothing from this meal of nothing being sent to them by nothing, a heart with no blood. Before their scavenger eyes, the tiniest scraps of oxygen disappeared. The bones of the beast were hollowed, the marrow crunched. No oxygen, no food, no prize. Dog gasped.
He couldn’t see. He couldn’t hear. He couldn’t smell. It wasn’t so bad. The very absence of these things had a new richness and meaning. He watched his DNA zipping, unzipping, the deflating hologram, signal waning. The last waves of consciousness released. Like bubbles in water.
Dog’s mouth filled with bubbles. The giant shortfaced bear had bubbles in his saliva, too, Dog remembered. He had seen them just as he turned his head before the darkness closed in. The bear had surprised Luke and Dog, charging from a screen of quivering aspen while Dog was distracted by the scent of a deer carcass bloated with gas. It was clever of the bear to hide his thoughts and to hide in that scent, so close, waiting while the direwolf came closer, closer, closer, and sniffed the bait. Behind Dog, closely, Luke limped up the grassy hill and called him away. Luke’s hips hurt. The deer was putrid. They would find something better to eat.
Close, closed, closely. Dog played word fetch. Dog loved a putrid smell and was thinking of rolling in it. He didn’t care if that would annoy Luke. In fact, Dog was still angry at Luke, who had surrounded himself with humans, Brad and Clare, his real human pack. Now Dog would roll in the bubbling, falling-off, insect-filled ribs of the deer and that would make Luke curse and yell, and that was good. Luke had become too calm and wise. Dog missed the crabby old man. He missed their games.
But Dog didn’t get this last bit of fun, this last roll in bubbling rotten flesh because just then the giant shortfaced bear broke through the screen of quivering aspen, pulling apart the white-barked trees as if they were grass. Dog turned his head to look. The huge animal towered over him, a living mountain of hair and muscle and catlike face yowling and spitting. Long heavy claws swiped the air and across Dog’s back, flipping him over, swiping through his stomach and chest.
Very quickly, Dog began to die, his stomach and intestines quivering like aspen leaves, the blood rushing through his veins to fall on the ground, pulled by gravity away from the stunned madly beating heart, blood that would never return, never loop again. The perfect circle of his veins and heart had been cut. Dog felt the loss of perfection. The blood poured on the ground as the giant shortfaced bear grabbed Dog by the neck and stood up on her two flat back feet. She held Dog in her mouth as if he were a pup, shaking him back and forth with delight and fury. Dog himself had shaken things like that, sticks or small animals. Once he had tried t
o shake his father’s tail.
Luke was close behind him on the grassy hill. Dog! Dog! Luke screamed even as he turned away from the bear and began pumping his legs, his pack bouncing against his back. Dog felt the waves of Luke’s fear. The horror and grief.
The giant shortfaced bear also enjoyed those emotions. She almost dropped Dog in order to chase after Luke, but the human was running surprisingly fast. The joy of eating Luke was in the future, and the giant shortfaced bear was having such a good time eating Dog now.
In these last moments, just before dying, Dog didn’t really want to hear the thoughts and feelings of the giant shortfaced bear. But they were so close, and she was so loud. She was so thrilled to be hurting him, slicing him, shaking him. All the tension in her body fell away, the release of that desire which had built up painfully in the last few weeks and the satisfaction settling in like the digestion of a big meal. Not all giant shortfaced bears loved to kill as much as this one did. But as a species, they were prone to pathology.
Brad began to lecture. Brad knew a lot about the animals and plants of The Return because he had read so much. His access to the computers in the lab was unparalleled, and his work schedule unusually light. He had considerable leisure time. Brad’s voice explained to Dog that all too often giant shortfaced bears were psychopaths, the wiring of the carnivore slightly wrong, the pleasure in the kill misdirected. Oddly enough, these bears were predominantly scavengers like Dog, lacking a bone structure strong enough to bring down large animals, while lighter prey like horses and camels tended to out-maneuver them. The natural competition between scavengers could have been the reason the bear chose to trick and catch Dog. More likely, however, she was simply following her psychotic urges to kill something, anything, and Dog was available. Giant shortfaced bears, Brad concluded, should never have been cloned. They were genetically flawed.
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