Knocking on Heaven's Door

by Sharman Apt Russell

  Dog had to agree. The bear’s DNA shimmered in the darkness. Thymine, thymine, thymine. And there, gossamer, the fragile chromosome—a too-thin wall, certain electro-positively charged molecules, certain proteins easy to break apart.

  The bear let go of Dog’s neck and Dog floated to the ground, the bear snapping up a bit of loose intestine. Grunting, the bear dropped to all fours and began to feed more seriously, a chunk from Dog’s flank, a prod at the gaping stomach wound and then a daintier bite. She didn’t want to hurry this.

  Dog wasn’t in pain. That first surge of adrenaline had been swamped by shock. Almost instantly, neurochemicals in the brain were produced and released. Dopamine. Serotonin. Systems shutting down, some of them quiet, some fussing a little. He couldn’t move his legs. Or twitch an ear. He couldn’t regulate his body temperature. Without a stomach, he certainly wasn’t hungry. Only his lungs kept filling with air and letting out air, his breaths moving shallowly in and out. His heart had one last beat. One more contraction of the left ventricle. Dog felt relaxed. He watched and waited.

  A burst of light in the brainpan. Dog was walking with Lucia in a place of red rock and rimrock, sweeps of grass and towering buttes, places where the Warrior Twins had once walked, where the Pueblo people and Navajo people had lived centuries ago. Now Lucia was climbing a steep road to the top of a mesa, and Dog didn’t understand why. This was human business—the shape of twigs left in a game trail—and he was content with that. He only had to follow Lucia.

  At the end of their climb, at the very top, they moved away from the adobe pueblo cracked with heat and dwindling with rain. Along the edge of the mesa where the ridge rose slightly, at another jumble of rock, Lucia climbed again in the dimming light to a wide flat perch where they watched the sunset, the plain extending in all directions, the horizon bounded by hills and buttes, the view stupendous. Lucia turned in a circle, her hair loose. Dog puzzled over the word stupendous and the idea that a view could be important. The horizon flared in splashes of pink, orange, red, the dust in the atmosphere accumulated from years of drought in the deserts of the American West, wind sweeping over eroded land and brushing up the earth like a broom. The red ball slipped below the curve of the planet, and Lucia said out loud, “He’s not coming tonight.”

  Apparently they had been waiting for someone. Now they scrabbled down rock, and Dog curled against his human, sleeping without a fire or tent. No hyena or lion, no saber-toothed cat or shortfaced bear would be hunting on such a dry mesa with its thin covering of grass and shrubs. No one would climb so high for this.

  In the morning they set snares for mice, Dog sniffing and Lucia putting out the traps. For water, they used the rain collectors made long ago by the humans who once lived here, depressions carved in stone by the most ancient people and then, later, the nanobarrels. After two more nights of waiting, on the third sunset, another hunter joined them, a tall long-limbed dark man younger than Lucia. He sat beside their fire as Lucia put her hand on Dog’s neck, telling him not to growl. Like other humans they had met, the man was interested in Dog. He studied Dog but did not offer a hand to smell.

  “I know where a black bear is denning,” the man said. “You can have the skin.”

  “A black bear on the mesa?” Lucia asked.

  “A few animals come this way. Perhaps they’re like you and me. Curious. Perhaps they need a safe place.”

  Lucia nodded, pleased. “How are your wife and son?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” The hunter shrugged. “I left a long time ago.”

  “Ah,” Lucia was sad.

  “Ah,” the hunter was sad. Then he shrugged again.

  The two humans sat and watched the sky. As the red sun dropped below the horizon, the hunter stood and began to chant. Grateful for the sun. Asking its blessing. Grateful for the gift. Asking the sun to rise again. Dog recognized the feeling, like when he smelled certain kinds of rot, like when he discovered a new DNA he had never seen before. Lucia listened patiently but without real interest. Dog could smell elk jerky in the hunter’s pack and wondered if they would eat that soon. Dog lifted his face and put his nose against Lucia’s cheek, and she reached out and cupped her hands around his muzzle and shook him lightly back and forth.

  The next day they speared the small female bear with her cubs and gorged on the greasy meat. Dog was allowed to eat from the choicest parts! The hunter stayed with them helping scrape and tan the skin until one morning his pack was on his back, and he said good-bye. “North,” he said, rubbing Dog’s ears and chest and scratching Dog’s stomach until Dog flopped over, spread his legs, and whined with pleasure. The hunter showed his teeth. “Beyond the farthest tribe.”

  A smell in the brainpan. Brad breathed in his father’s odor as he leaned against the man’s leg, sharp bitter sweat and dried blood from a deer his father had killed and carried home. Speaking to someone else, the man reached down and petted Brad’s head, gently stroking the wiry dark hair. The hunter let his hand settle on his son’s shoulder, the fingers warm and firm. Brad buried his nose in his father’s leather pants. His mother said something. She stood close, nearby, laughing. Suddenly his father picked Brad up and was swinging him in the air, pretending to toss him to his mother but never actually letting him go. “Who wants this little boy?” his father was chanting and laughing, too. Brad giggled and squirmed so that his father had to hold on tightly.

  Where was Luke?

  Luke held tight to the trunk of a pine tree. He had climbed as high as he could to escape the giant shortfaced bear, his pack a burden but also necessary, with enough food and water to last for days. Luke closed his eyes, seeing Dog disemboweled and suffering, bleeding, dying. Lucia wrapped her arms around the tree and sobbed. She was old and useless. She was alone.

  A cloak of sorrow settled over Dog’s shoulders. He brought it close against the chill of night. Flashes in the brainpan. Memories of smell. But mostly touch. Luke petting him hard. Dog leaning hard against Lucia’s leg. Dog curled against Luke’s animal skins, feeling the warmth through the night.

  Dog couldn’t bear to be separated like this. He couldn’t live or die apart from Luke, and he reached out with yearning, with love—Brad quoted an old and revered Quaker—“or something like love that doesn’t split, the way love does, into loving and being loved.” Dog knew this had happened many times before. Dying ground sloths reached out to each other. Dying humans reached out to each other. They couldn’t bear to be separated like this. They didn’t know what to do.

  But Dog knew what to do. In a nanosecond, he had lodged himself in Luke’s cerebellum. This took some effort and hastened for a nanosecond the dissolution of the matter/energy/consciousness that had been Dog, who died painlessly in the sense that time stopped for him and he lived only as thought—knowledge—inside Luke’s brain. Dog didn’t mind. It was only temporary.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BRAD

  Brad wanted to chase after Clare. If he could talk to her before she reached the winter camp, he could persuade her that what he was doing was right or, at least, inevitable. Moreover, she had been the catalyst. She had made the decision to follow the tracks from the riverbank that led to Luke and Dog and the bushkies. She had stirred the peyote tea, wakening the plant so that Dog and Brad could exchange neurosignals, receiving and transmitting.

  In that exchange, Dog had learned about the Theory of Everything while Brad—he admitted wryly now—had learned about the scent of rabbit and the pleasure of licking his own balls. The mutant direwolf had taken more than he gave when they played with their TOEs by the stream that afternoon. But now the animal was about to reveal to Brad something extraordinary, something humanity had always dreamed about, always pursued—immortality.

  Brad caught himself. That kind of hubris wouldn’t convince Clare. And that really wasn’t what he was doing. This really wasn’t about ambition or arrogance or assuming godlike powers or perverting natural law. (Brad could hear Clare accusing him.) This was … an op
portunity. A wind blowing through the window of a room. An open door! “Unscrew the locks from the doors,” a nineteenth-century poet had said. “Unscrew the doors themselves!” This was a relationship with the world: I know you. I am part of you because I know you, and I must know more. I must know everything I can know. I must reach the limits of knowledge. This was a thirst, and this was the real quest. Brad felt his heart swell. Of course, Clare would agree. Of course, she would return with him.

  But Luke said no. The morning after Luke’s return, after a long tiring night of discussion (and lovemaking), Clare had packed up her supplies, picked up her spear, and walked away from the lab. And Luke said they couldn’t go after her. They didn’t have time. Dog’s instructions did not make sense to Luke and, for that reason alone, tended to slip away. Luke was struggling to keep Dog’s voice alive, an effort that gave him a headache and made him cranky. They had to do this now. They couldn’t waste time running after Clare.

  Brad was seeing new sides to Luke, first a grieving old man and then a stern taskmaster. Luke became Lucia became Luke became Lucia again, the higher voice alternating with the deeper one, mourning Dog, dictating to Brad the numbers in his head, and organizing their trip to the abandoned city of Los Alamos.

  At first, Luke had questioned the need for that trip—until Brad took him up the radio tower, showed him the transmitter, and explained what was required to modify it to Dog’s needs. A new childish Luke whined, “Don’t you have those things in the lab?” A new insistent Luke decided, “We’ll leave tomorrow. Make your excuses.”

  Brad had to decide what those excuses would be. No one—no one—could know where they were going or what they were thinking of doing. A chance meeting in the courtyard with Judith gave him the lie when she asked about Clare and remarked, pointedly, that she had heard them arguing. Brad whispered back as if in pain—because he actually was in pain, because he hated letting Clare go—that his lover had gone back to her tribe. He was going after her. He and Luke. He had to hurry. They would be gone a few days.

  His least favorite colleague looked sorry for him. “Just the two of you? Is that safe?”

  “Maybe not,” Brad said. He felt a little ashamed. He was always lying to Judith, who, in her way, had always remained loyal to him. “But it’s something I have to do. Don’t let anyone know until I’m gone.”

  “I have a good feeling,” his least favorite colleague reassured him. “Quarrels like this can make a relationship stronger.”

  In the distance, they could see airplanes. For one hundred fifty years, the machines had sat in the sun and wind, not rusting or falling apart as much as they did farther north where it rained more often. At least from here, some of the planes still looked flyable, although Brad knew better. All the rubber would be gone, tires included, and the wiring corroded or eaten by rodents. Brad speculated, as he had before, about what it would take to restore a plane and fly to one of the population centers in Costa Rica or Russia. Fixing the battery would be easy since most solar cells were not viral technology. But he would also need to repair and restart the nanoengines. Then he would have to reprogram the computers for flight and navigation. In the end, what would be the point? Every human who wanted to be in communication was already on the solarcomps. Everything that needed to be said could be said.

  And, of course, rebuilding a pre-supervirus airplane was completely against Council rules. Brad had to admit those rules were not arbitrary. The Los Alamos Three had decided against such flights when they still feared contagion or a new strain of the supervirus. Abandoning motor transportation and guns had also been part of the Great Compromise between the Paleolithic scholars and New Mexican scientists, which, generations later, still seemed to be working. Despite low fertility rates and mutations from the overheated power plants, humans were still here and the population stable. Some would say the human race was thriving. Clare would say they lived in the best of times, the best of worlds.

  Following Luke down a hill, scaring up a herd of white-tailed deer, Brad thought of Clare and how she had argued with him, begged him, made love to him. Don’t do this. Please. Don’t do this. His refusal was ironic since what he wanted most (well, maybe not most) was her approval. He admired her tremendously. He admired her work, how she carried on the principles of the Los Alamos Three in the constant emails and grading of papers. How she persevered with students who didn’t appreciate her efforts but only wanted a life of hunting and gathering, mating, art, ritual, sleeping, family—everything The Return promised, everything The Return fulfilled. Clare was right about so many things, and by midday, hungry and thirsty, Brad was wondering if she were not right about this, too. If the rules were not arbitrary, then why was he breaking them?

  Luke interrupted his thoughts. “The quickest way is to follow the road.” The old man had stopped and was pointing down an incline. “If you can handle it.”

  Grass, yucca, and scrub brush grew through the cracks of the twenty-first-century highway so that it looked more defined than actually present, designated by lines of abandoned solar cars skewing to the left and right of its center. Brad knew the cars contained the remains of people who had died from the supervirus in the act of fleeing. He knew he would find other human artifacts as he and Luke walked toward the city, not bones—those had crumbled into the earth long ago or been carried off by animals—but pieces of glass and plastic, photo pods, the treasures that couldn’t be left behind. Some receivers said that places like this, the desperation of people, still emitted waves of sorrow. A smoky depression.

  “I’ll be fine,” Brad said confidently. “And you?”

  Luke grunted. “It’s just mixing up with everything else. Dog doesn’t care and that helps.”

  At first Brad thought Luke was referring to Dog’s head, which the old man had insisted on bringing with him, wrapped tightly in his pack. Then he remembered the Dog lodged in Luke’s head, that singular echo spouting instructions.

  “Paleos don’t care,” the old man repeated, “about how many people died.”

  They followed the curve of the road past a few adobe buildings and then many adobe buildings, roofs falling, doors hanging, and a large burned area hit by lightning, only its charred walls left, ashy metal, and unrecognizable debris. More solar cars littered the streets torn up by roots of hundred-year-old oaks and juniper trees. Brad knew the shop he wanted, a two-story Electro built toward the edge of town. Most of Los Alamos had used adobe construction, cool in summer and warm in winter. But in the year of the supervirus, 2113, the newest buildings had been made of a nanoglass designed to let in light even as it moderated the sun’s heat. Fifteen decades later, the elegant structures of stores like Electro were still standing, still responding to the seasons, still filled with things people had once needed. In front of Luke now, Brad found himself walking faster. Dog was really beginning to smell.

  Brad thought of Clare again, how he had walked behind her and the bouncing head of the javelina. The thick straight line of her braid.

  “I was here with your mother once,” Lucia called out, perhaps to get him to slow down. And Brad remembered calling out to Clare, “Where will we camp tonight?” Trying to get her to slow down.

  “We came for your eyeglasses,” Lucia limped beside him. The speed of Luke’s transformations was becoming alarming, his personality swinging back and forth in the space of an hour. Sometimes the old man crossed the borders of time as well as gender, speaking with the voice of a younger Lucia, a woman from the lab still doing research on the rate of mutations among the tribes. That woman chattered about broken chromosomes and lab politics from over thirty years ago, unaware that the results of her work had long been censored by the Council and that the politics of her day were irrelevant. By now Brad understood that Lucia had been in love with his mother.

  “We took back a round ball for the solstice tree.” The old woman’s knees seemed to be hurting, and she stopped to rub them. “Your mother loved stewed rabbit with rosemary. There was wild
rosemary growing in big clumps here.”

  Brad worried that Luke was going crazy. He didn’t know if bringing Dog’s unique holo-consciousness back would help his friend or not. Probably not.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, meaning the limp.

  “Arthritis.” Lucia shrugged. She chatted about herbal remedies as they walked through the falling-down buildings, avoiding crashed cars and concrete upheavals. Brad saw a few non-native flowering plants and trees imported from the Mediterranean or South America, still surviving in isolated pockets. Despite the growth of vegetation, the rusted litter would be a jangle on anyone’s nerves, he thought. It was no wonder that human scavengers got spooked. Soon enough, the Electro store was in front of them—doors open, locks disabled long ago—and Brad moved toward it eagerly, not noticing the lions until Luke pulled him back.

  The pride had staked out their resting area in a grove of cottonwoods growing up beside the glass-walled store, the trees watered by a spring that also watered a thick understory of grass and shrubs. The sudden appearance of two humans interested the male, who rose from his comfortable lounge on the ground and padded forward, less than twenty meters from Brad. Two lionesses camouflaged in tawny coats lifted their heads. Brad saw more movement behind them, two smaller lionesses who also got up out of curiosity or deference to the male.