Brad stumbled and then was still. As usual, he hadn’t been watching for animals. That wasn’t his job. Someone like Clare always did that. Besides, he didn’t associate this weird decaying city with hunting or being hunted. Luke’s hand slowly released his arm. The two-story, glass-walled store was another thirty meters away, directly in front of them. The male lion stood to their right, a healthy animal in his prime, as long as Brad was tall and three times his weight. The lion opened his mouth, half yawned, shook his mane, stretched the muscles of his back and haunches, and moved forward with a mincing step. Brad could smell urine and a faint rotting odor, perhaps the lion’s breath as he exhaled, bits of flesh still in his teeth.
Luke did the talking. “We are going over there!” The old man raised his arm and pointed at the open doors. The hand that held his spear also lifted, not yet ready to throw, but getting ready. “We do not want to disturb you, and you must not disturb us.”
Brad almost dropped his own spear because his palm was so sweaty. He recovered in time and also prepared to throw his weapon, trying to look calm, trying to feel calm, imitating Luke. He had heard of this often enough, how hunters spoke sternly to the lions whom they met unexpectedly or who came to steal their kill. The voice you used had to be firm, half scolding, but not threatening or shaming. One hunter told Brad that humor helped. It was important to be good-natured. Naturally, all that depended on the lion’s mood, too.
Luke was firm enough, but he didn’t sound good-natured. “We are going over there now, and if you try to stop us, we will be angry. You have your place, by the cottonwoods. That place over there is ours. That is where we are going.”
Slowly, Luke did just that.
Brad followed, walking backward so that he still faced the lions. In response, the male lowered his head and began lashing his tail back and forth.
“You have your place, by the cottonwoods!” Luke repeated. “We are going to our place, over here.”
They edged, side by side, through the open doors. At their seeming disappearance, the lion advanced a few more steps with the two small lionesses close behind. The larger two females on the ground, however, had not moved again beyond that first lifting of their heavy heads. Suddenly one of them sighed and slumped forward as if returning to sleep. Brad took that as a good sign.
Now he and Luke were trapped in an Electro store with a pride of lions blocking the only entrance. Brad imagined running through these aisles with the male running after him. It would be hard to turn and throw a spear. The lion’s padded feet might skid on the nanomarble, as might his own leather shoes. Skidding, falling, an arm bringing down a display of some pre-supervirus appliance. Something smashing on the floor. Then a lioness at one end of the corridor, another lioness at the other end. More metal and nanoplastic crashing. Luke shouting from somewhere.
“Where are we going?” Luke whispered, watching through the glass wall, his spear still raised.
Earlier, as they had walked along the highway into town, Brad had been busy changing his plans. Modifying the transmitter was too complicated. He didn’t know enough, and he risked damaging the lab’s radio. In any case, he didn’t really need that kind of power or that long a wave. He wanted something smaller, more subtle, more like a microwave, which is why he had remembered this particular Electro store.
“The edutoy section,” he said now, but did not yet move in that direction.
“They won’t come inside,” Luke assured him.
“Why don’t you keep watch?” Brad suggested. “Just to be sure.”
Brad felt himself breathing normally again. After all his fears, leaving the store had been anticlimactic. The male lion and four lionesses were in their original position under the cottonwood trees, but this time they barely twitched when the two humans emerged through the doors. Only one of the large females opened her eyes. Her tail flicked. Flick. Flick. Flick. Brad felt hypnotized by that flash of creamy skin as he and Luke walked backward toward the street, their packs bulging with boxes that Brad had grabbed somewhat hurriedly, if not at random. Huh-huh-huh-HUH. The male snored. Huh-huh-HUH-HUH. The rest of the pride slept or pretended to.
With the lions behind them, Brad stopped at the nearest safe open space, wanting to open his pack and sort through his treasures, rethink, and discard. This was not his first scavenging trip, and as he removed the packaging, he was no longer amazed at the pristine condition of something made and wrapped in plastic one hundred fifty years ago. Protected from the elements, most items looked new, if also absurd and irrelevant. While Brad studied his selection, Luke kept guard, still disbelieving.
“These are for children,” the old man repeated.
“Well, they loved their children then just as we do now,” Brad murmured, reading the instructions. “They wanted the best for them, and before the supervirus that meant the best education in science.”
Ironically, they were at a playground for children. Nanotechnology meant that some of the equipment remained sturdy enough to climb on, although Brad had no interest in testing that. From his historical research, he knew this shrubland had once been a green lawn. Children had skated, swung, roller-boarded, hover-dived, shouted, cried, and laughed—all around him, thousands and thousands of children. There was no shortage of children then. There had been, in truth, too many children.
Brad felt a chill, his sweat drying in the winter air. Perhaps it was a reaction to their encounter with the lions. He tried to focus on the How to Make Your Own Panpsychism Radio kit. This one was for advanced students and promised that the simple resulting receiver would be able to get signals from complex crystals. Another kit—Brad looked anxiously in his pack for that one—helped the mute child build a receiver/transmitter for frequencies from the Paleos. The signals were not words, of course, since only human receivers understood in word images what the Paleos were thinking. But the instructions promised that the frequencies could still be seen and charted and that this would demonstrate the newest principles of physics, the world as a constant interplay of waves sending and receiving. Brad threw away the box, which showed the face of an absorbed young woman, and kept the contents. He wanted this one certainly, and maybe this next one.
But he felt strange. He felt like crying. A sadness weighed him down, his arms and legs heavy. He could barely move his hands to repack the supplies. He could barely speak to Luke without his lips trembling.
“You feel it now?” Lucia asked.
“I never have before.” Brad fought to control himself before bursting into tears.
What a waste. The dreams. The ghosts. The innocence. Children laughing and playing. The pain and fear as the adults suddenly died and the children were alone and dying, too. Children shouldn’t be alone like that. The nanoplastic slide was still orange, the climbing gymnasium red and blue. The colors horrified him. The incongruous scrubland of snakeweed and rabbitbrush. The entire world, natural and human-made, seemed to be mourning. Gray smoke curled, drifting up from the earth. Brad wiped his eyes and nose and grabbed his pack. “Let’s get out of here.”
He couldn’t shake the feeling until the city of Los Alamos was well behind them and hidden by intervening hills. Even then, Brad looked to the east and felt an echo. Even the next day, when they could see the lab ahead, he felt a weariness. The children crying. The weight of grief. People had tried to tell him. He had thought them superstitious.
Luke took him straight to the office, where they ate the rest of their jerky while Brad worked on the kits. Judith knocked and wanted in, and Brad gave her a muffled excuse. He was fine. He was busy. A few others came by. Brad ordered them away. The smell of Dog’s head was getting so much worse.
But the kits were easy to assemble and modify. Lucia recited her numbers and kept adding refinements, as if the Dog in her head could respond to new questions and situations. Brad put these refinements into the computer, along with software to translate the numbers and turn them into frequencies, amplitude and oscillation, sine and cosine. He had nev
er done anything like this before, and yet it all seemed to fit together, his former equations, what Lucia/Luke knew about radio and DNA, what Dog knew about dying. Flicking the switch. Not the biohologram. But the other switch. The holo-consciousness.
The biggest problem was the minutiae of connection—connecting the numbers to the software, the computer to the radios, the radios to each other. Of course, the kits were from the same era as the satellites in space, the worldwide web. That compatibility turned out to be key, although at one point Brad also had to sneak out and steal a solarcomp, which he disassembled for its nanowiring. Some connections had to be physical.
He was too excited to eat now, too excited to sleep, too excited to stop himself. He fiddled. He rearranged. He talked out loud. Luke/Lucia and Dog sat and watched.
Eighteen hours later, Brad stood up from his work and stretched his back. His shoulders ached, and he swung his arms in circles, forward, then backward. On the floor, three transmitters from three kits were linked with wires to the computer on the desk. Extra parts lay scattered on the chair and table. Brad surveyed the mess and knew this would work.
Clearing a space in the middle of the room, he set the transmitters at equidistance from each other and told Luke to put Dog’s gummy maggot-oozing head in the center. The ritualistic circle wasn’t necessary, but it looked right and seemed to make Luke happy. It seemed to evoke a certain optimism. A human aesthetic, Brad thought. A sense of order.
At the computer, Brad brought up the program and set it to run. Then he sat down on the floor with Luke, both of them cross-legged.
Brad had to remember to breathe. Dog’s head stared up at the ceiling. Brad turned the radios on, one by one. The transmitters sent out their signals. The computer moderated. The switch in Dog’s DNA turned on. Reanchor. Reassemble.
Luke whispered, “Dog, come home.”
Above Dog’s head, a golden cloud formed, two meters long by another meter tall and wide—about the size of a direwolf. Brad found himself whispering, too, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” He sat cross-legged on the floor, rapt in awe.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CLARE
Meadow came out of the tent with her face averted. Clare’s grandmother followed close behind, and Clare could hear the boy inside crying. Two children in camp were sick. What incredible bad luck.
“The ants run up his leg,” Clare’s grandmother said in a low voice as she watched Meadow walk toward the stream. The elder was referring to Meadow’s nine-year-old son. A cut on his thigh had become infected, and the bacteria were in his lymph channels now, streaking red like a line of harvester ants. Hard knots had formed under the armpit, which was tender and hot.
“Fever?” Clare asked. The elder pointed her thumb up.
Meadow was a woman who understood illness and injury. She would have yarrow and aspen bark to reduce the boy’s fever, with chewed willow to ease the pain. She would have made poultices to draw out the pus, and she would be careful to keep her son rested, warm, and hydrated. But Clare knew, and Meadow knew, that the child really needed antibiotics, a medicine once refined to an art and then an arms race between disease and its cure. After the supervirus, the first Council had decided against the manufacture of these compounds, and that ruling had been upheld again and again. Hadn’t the men and women who produced the supervirus worked at a similar task, synthesizing molecules, altering nature? The image still caused a collective revulsion.
Of course, plants with antibacterial properties were allowed—echinacea, goldenseal, garlic—although they were hardly as fast or as effective. If the infection spread to the lungs, a mullein tea was good for pneumonia. Also Apache plume, dandelion, and poppy thistle. If the boy developed a urinary infection, juniper berries were a diuretic. The tribe had a store of all these herbs, dried and fresh. Meadow would be thinking frantically now: which to use, what to do? Her husband would also be thinking and praying to one of his gods. The boy’s father was a polyanimist, believing in many spirits, the totem of every animal and plant. But which one could help his son now?
“I have to go to the other boy,” Clare’s grandmother was saying. She put a hand on her stomach. “Very tender. Some spasms. Fever.”
“You don’t think?” Clare was horrified. Her grandmother shrugged. Without doubt, all the healers in the tribe had been searching on their solarcomps, looking up symptoms and reading the old accounts. For appendicitis, the best treatment was also unavailable—antibiotics and surgery.
Her grandmother looked old and tired. But Clare didn’t offer to go with her to the next tent to see the next sick child. Perhaps that was wrong. Clare put a hand on her own stomach, which bulged like the lip of a buffalo gourd. She reminded herself: These sick children couldn’t harm her child. Bad luck wasn’t contagious.
“Go to the hot springs,” her grandmother suggested. “The water is just right for you. Take Jon.”
The kindness almost made Clare weep. She almost reached out and hugged the other woman, nostalgic for the refuge of those soft breasts. Not everyone in the tribe was so nice to her. Some people still commented that she had not helped with the move to the winter camp. Some people seemed angry that she had stayed at the lab through the solstice. Jon was one of those people, although he pretended otherwise. He pretended to have hardly noticed her absence. He insisted the child she carried was his, even though Clare explained carefully that this was not likely true. He insisted he would claim the baby at the central fire—for where was the lab rat to say differently? Who else would raise the umbilical cord and promise a father’s muscle, heart, tutelage? Jon insisted now that Clare sleep with him in a separate tent he set up for the two of them near the communal kitchen. He insisted Clare stop hunting large game. He insisted she not travel away from the camp for more than a few hours, even with other people. He insisted he was pleased to have her back.
Clare had started to avoid Jon during the day. At night, things were easier, when they couldn’t see each other.
The elders wove a basket for Meadow’s son, a flat-bottomed platform of yucca leaves and willow sapling with raised sides so the boy couldn’t fall out. The corners would be tied to branches at the top of a tree, with the basket wedged firmly in place. Everyone went with the mother and father as they carried the small corpse to a large oak close to camp so that the tribe could see the birds wheeling in the sky, black dots rising and falling. Everyone helped the parents be strong as they lifted the basket to the top of the oak.
Meadow’s husband had prayed to the consciousness of the cat, a good hunter in every form, African lion and native mountain lion, jaguar, ocelot, bobcat, and house cat—feral and fierce in its pursuit of small mammals. The husband had even prayed to the saber-toothed cat, who had a particular love of human flesh. He had prayed for the strength of the cat to hunt and fight the infection in his son’s body, the bacteria that finally traveled to the boy’s brain so that his neck stiffened and he complained of claws behind his eyes. The father had called to the cat, but the birds answered instead, red-headed vulture, black crow and raven, white-necked condor, teratorn. The birds wanted his son, and to the birds he and Meadow gave the body. The two of them would watch the scavengers every day as they cleaned the bones bleaching white through the dry summer. Later, in a year’s time, the parents would return to the oak and bring down the remains to bury or burn.
On this night, after the tribe went to hoist the basket into the tree, they sang a death chant around the fire: the familiar words and rhythm, the same for a child as an adult, for female or male, everyone the same. Clare was dutiful, sitting next to Jon. “What is given is taken away. Our lives that were given are taken away. Our children who were given are taken away. Our good fortune that was given is taken away. All is flux and change. All is fire. For souls, it is death to become water. For water, it is death to become earth. Out of earth, water arises. Out of water, soul.”
The chant came from the early Greek philosophers, the earlie
st age of Western culture. Death was nothing to fear, said men like Heraclitus and Epicurus. There was no death. There was only one law, one divinity. Clare knew the chant well but had only recently learned its history from Brad, who could get quite excited by this continuity of thought. It was not odd, he had explained, that the tribes repeated these ideas so many years later. The Quakers, especially, had believed in tradition, the human heritage. Even the Russians still used this chant, one of the bonds between the three populations. Around the campfire, the men and women would also quote the Eastern mystics and the original tribes from this land, the Navajo and Pueblo people. The Blessing Way. The Warrior Twins. This was the bridge, Brad said, language and history, as much a part of The Return as knapping arrowheads.
Across from Clare, the mother of the dead child held a young nephew on her lap. The other children of the tribe, solemn and well behaved, sat next to their parents. For some of them, this was new—this death, these chants, and the basket left in a tree. Their eyes were anxious. Would their playmate, their friend, never return?
Clare went around the large circle, some of the faces shadowed and some lit by the orange and yellow flames. She felt a presentiment, an ache, a pride. Their group was still healthy, almost a third of the population under twenty, newborns to teenagers. Their group was still strong. Clare lingered on the faces of her mother, her father, her grandmother, her two uncles. She nodded privately at her girlfriends. She nodded at Jon’s former wife, nursing a baby by her new husband. Some people were also watching her, she saw, nodding at her, a valuable pregnant woman. Their group was still united.
Brad was naïve, she thought, to think these people chanted with a sense of history. Life was too hard now, too engaging, to think about the past. How long would it be, she wondered, before her students refused to care about events before the supervirus, about countries and cultures that no longer existed? Why should they spend their time studying a broken heritage instead of studying something more important? Like tracks in the white sand of a riverbank. Like the meaning of a darkening cloud. Why even learn to read and write?
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