The child’s death had depressed her. And yet—Clare rallied—the ceremony was an important one. Community. She was sheltered in its arms.
The next afternoon she went for a bath in the hot springs, something she had begun to do almost every day, waiting for a time when most people in camp would be busy or napping. Craving solitude, she was relieved to see that the pools were empty. A movement fluttered in her stomach, butterfly wings. Clare struggled not to cry. Women became emotional when they were pregnant. That was natural. The poor boy dying in pain. Clare remembered how he had once run through the tents, chasing other children and being chased. She remembered how proud he had been when she had whittled him a toy spear. He must have been five. How he strutted and got into trouble poking one of his friends. He had lived a good life in his short life. Clare’s face streamed with tears. But that was fine. She owed him water, a child from her people, the Rio Chama people, another child lost.
The pools descended in temperature, the hottest next to the cliff face and source of the spring, the coolest near the river, which bounded the winter camp. Low walls had been built years ago, enclosing each of the four bathing areas, the rocks covered with lichen, ferns, and small yellow flowers that thrived in the microclimate of murmuring heat. Clare avoided the pond clouded with steam and settled into water that was only lukewarm but better for the baby and still scented with growing plants. As she lowered herself, mud and algae stirred from the sandy bottom and coated her skin, her arms, her breasts, submerged now and greenish. She rested the back of her head against spongy moss.
And let herself drift, deeper, plugging her ears and closing her eyes. She heard the beat of her heart, steady, slow, beat, beat. In her womb, another heart was also beating. Clare tried to imagine that piece of flesh, whole and perfect, pulsing rhythmically. Such a tiny organ, small as the nail of her finger, smaller than this yellow flower. Alone in the warm water, in the darkness of thought, Clare listened—beat, beat—and prepared for the worst.
The baby would be born blue and gasping. This time Jon would take the baby outside and not return. This time, no one would suffer for weeks and months and then years. Jon would do what he had to do. He had promised her that. Damaged children should not be allowed to live. He had said this firmly. He would take the baby away and that would be best for her and best for the child and best for the tribe. He would protect her.
Clare had nodded yes. Yes! Elise! The little girl singing. The waiting. The hoping. Clare could not go through that again.
But perhaps this time would be different? Perhaps the baby would be just fine, crying, loud, then suddenly asleep. Clare stretched and unrolled. The pools were so close to camp. She didn’t fear predators. She listened for any Paleos, who might warn her of danger. She willed herself to relax in the warm water. She curled and uncurled her toes. She smelled something in the air, the tang of a crushed herb. She lived in the best of worlds, the best of times. She lived in abundance. She made herself breathe deeply. She let herself drift. The baby pulled hard at her nipple. She almost felt that satisfying pain. She cupped her breast. The baby suckled, rested, suckled, the milk leaking from pursed lips. At last the baby gave a sigh, its stomach full, its tiny face opening like a bud. Oh, what a big yawn. Oh, what a funny face. The baby rested quiet and warm on her stomach, his skin dark against her skin, dark hair moist with the mighty effort of nursing. They slept together. They breathed together and dreamed together.
Jon was carrying the baby outside. But Jon looked so sad, his eyes wet, his steps slow. The baby was damaged, after all. In her dream, Clare drifted outside the tent, outside the bed where she had birthed her son, as she followed Jon to the stream by the camp. No one else followed him, and the bundle in his arms didn’t stir. In her dream, Clare felt numb. This was for the best. By the musical water, the splashing and gurgling, Jon turned to the north, a good direction, the place of rain and snow. Delicately, he lifted the rabbit skin away from the child’s sleeping face. For a moment Jon paused, controlling his emotion. Then his hand rose to cover the small mouth and nose.
Clare tried to scream. But her voice had no sound. She was a spirit in a dream. He had the wrong baby. This was a healthy baby with abundant wiry hair and relaxed brow. This baby wasn’t sick and blue. This baby had suckled and rested and yawned and slept. How could Jon have made such a mistake?
Clare woke with a jerk, half rising from the pool.
Jon squatted beside her. He looked concerned. “Clare?” he repeated. “Are you all right?”
Assignment Six: What I Would Like to Do This Summer, submitted by Alice Featherstone
At first this seemed like a pretty unexciting assignment. I thought of all the things I would like to do this summer and they are mostly things I have done every summer and can describe easily, but they didn’t interest me in terms of writing about them. Mainly I would like to travel; I would enjoy leaving the mountains of Colorado for the first time and going south to see your tribe and then even farther south, as far as the peyote fields. I know that won’t happen because this kind of long travel has to be approved by the elders and usually we are too busy in the summer and can’t spare a large group of hunters. Then I emailed you, and you said that this assignment didn’t have to be something that is possible or going to happen, that we could use our imagination. I have plenty of imagination and suddenly this paper didn’t seem so dull.
What I would like to do this summer is go to Africa. Such a trip will involve a number of challenging steps. First I have to find a boat and get it seaworthy, ready to cross the “great desert of the ocean.” The best place from which to start is New York Harbor Two, the one built after the last rising of the coastal waters. This means I will have to walk all the way to New York which will take me many months. That will be a tremendously interesting part of my journey as I pass through places few people have seen in the last one hundred fifty years. The high radiation will mean that wherever I go, I can’t stay long. Even so, I will get to observe how the Paleos have adapted farther north, where the herds of mammoths and mastodons cover the plains and it snows in the winter all the time, not the occasional cold we get in Colorado. The colder weather is also something I will have to adapt to, and I will be responsible, of course, for all my food, water, and shelter.
In New York I will have a new set of problems. A big city like New York will be really sad. Scavengers who have gone to the big cities here like Albuquerque and Denver have said that even the mutes among them sometimes feel a sadness, and this is something I’d like to experience for myself since I am a mute. In truth, however, I don’t think I will feel anything. I think I will be able to walk “among the great fallen skyscrapers” (as the poets say) without a qualm. From what I have read, my main problem will be navigating the large rivers that would now be running through parts of the decaying megapolis, flooding the streets and the “canyons created by concrete and ambition.” This excites me even more since I have never seen a large river, just the little ones here that we still call rivers.
Once I am at the harbor, I will have to decide which boat to use. I am sure that many of them will have been destroyed in the storms of the last century and some will be too old for me to scavenge. Some will have computer programs I don’t understand. Some will have engines I can’t fix. In this part of the assignment I am really using my imagination since I don’t know how to use any computer but this solarcomp and I wouldn’t have any idea about how to fix an engine; it could be that what I need is a large sailboat but I have read that this kind of boat takes more than one person to operate unless you are very skillful which, obviously, I am not. In the end, I would select and repair just the right vehicle, and then I would stock it with enough food and water to last the many weeks of being on the salty waves.
Then on to Africa! By now I would have sent out emails over the worldwide web and radio announcements across the ocean to anyone listening. We haven’t heard “a peep” from Africa for over one hundred years but does this mean that ever
yone is gone? I think not. By the time the supervirus appeared, Africa had already seen the worst of global warming and people were already in survival mode. The messages we did get for fifty years were from a few humans who had immunity like the Quakers in Costa Rica and those emails were strange from the very beginning, especially since our computers had trouble translating their dialect. I think those people just stopped communicating with us because they didn’t want to communicate with us anymore. They were still angry about global warming. They didn’t agree with the Great Compromise by the Los Alamos Three, although they never explained why, whether they wanted nothing to do with the old technology or whether they wanted to keep all the old technology they could. Since they stopped emailing us, I assume the first. Having abandoned their solarcomps and their radios, I believe that they went out into the grassy savanna, into the desert, into the jungle and began living like their ancestors, like us, with spears and poison darts. Only maybe they went deeper. Maybe they went further. Maybe they have achieved a new spirituality and culture that would amaze and astound us!
That’s my dream—to find out. I want to know what is going on in Africa and in China and India, too, when I think about it. That’s what I would like to do this summer; I’d like to go on a really long trip over the ocean.
The Stuffed Teratorn, submitted by Carlos Salas
Someone stood up in silence today and told a story from the heart, and I wanted to answer that speaker because I felt my own heart quake in response. But I was too timid, which we are not supposed to be when our hearts quake, and now I have decided to write you instead. Apparently when the scientists cloned that first teratorn nearly two hundred years ago, they kept the live bird to study, of course, and when the animal died, they stuffed it full of chemicals and synthetic matter so that it still looked like a real teratorn. The biohologram had deflated, the unique consciousness was dissolved. But the scientists kept this facsimile in their lab, like some strange dead hologram. This story disturbed the speaker in my Meeting, the image of a teratorn alive and yet not alive, the feathers real but nothing remaining behind the eyes. So the speaker asked this of silence: what were those scientists thinking? And I thought about that and wondered if one of these scientists, or maybe more than one, had simply grown very fond of this teratorn. They loved the bird. They wanted to see their pet every day. That’s what I didn’t want to say out loud: they did this out of love.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DOG
Dog had a new trick to show Luke.
Luke! Dog called out vigorously. Luke? He coaxed.
The old man was close to their campsite, but if he heard he didn’t reply. He only spoke out loud to Dog now, never mentally and never at a distance. He didn’t want to receive Dog’s thoughts. He didn’t want to send his own. Dog understood. Luke had regrets about bringing Dog back from the dead.
Lucia showed up a few minutes later, her face and arms scratched from checking her traps and crawling through hackberry. There was hardly any game so close to the lab, Dog didn’t help with hunting anymore, and Brad was almost as useless. Suddenly Lucia had to spend a fair amount of time catching her food, and this made her irritable. “Stop yelling,” she said to Dog as she sat down and began to skin the squirrel. “I can hear you. I’m not deaf. You’d think … someone like you … would be more patient.”
Lucia didn’t know what to call Dog. Pure Consciousness? Radio Wave Dog? Dog Number Two?
Dog understood. That’s why he had learned this new trick.
Come here, he said.
Lucia stripped the skin from the squirrel’s body. It wasn’t much of a meal, especially if Brad showed up around suppertime as he had promised, spending the night and going back to the lab in the early morning.
Touch me, Dog said. But Lucia ignored him, intent on her task.
Lucia/Luke had not reacted well to Dog’s earlier shifting golden form. For weeks, Dog’s outline had seemed about to escape into the rest of the world, a blurry motion that made Luke nauseous. Once Dog could maintain his shape, he continued to shimmer with a golden light not even Brad could explain—the puzzle sent the lab rat back to his equations and twenty-first-century books on physics. The glow was barely noticeable now, and Dog felt good about that, although he still had so much more to learn. The DNA turned on. The unique consciousness reassembled. The unique holo-bioform was gone. But a memory of that pattern remained, an electromagnetic memory taking the form of Dog’s body, remembering what to do and—then, suddenly—not remembering. It was so hard to keep your body shape when the actual molecules were not there anymore. Holo-hair, holo-skin, holo-muscle, holo-bones. Dog had to focus all the time. Lucia didn’t realize how difficult this was.
Touch me, Dog repeated and barked insistently. He had just learned to bark a few days ago, and he practiced it with another surge of pride. Look at me! Sending sound waves into the air when I have no lungs or vocal cords! Dog didn’t know how he did this. He suspected he wasn’t doing anything that affected the physical world so much as the perception of that world. This was something he needed to discuss with Brad. Dog theorized that when he thought about barking, he sent that thought into the minds of all the beings around him, and if those beings had a memory or understanding of this sound, then they would hear it. The theory was testable if he and Brad could find someone who didn’t have any previous memory or understanding of barking—or any similar animal noise. Although that seemed unlikely.
Dog knew Brad would be impressed with his theory, with his bark, with his pant, with his whimper. Dog could hardly wait to demonstrate. But now Lucia almost dropped her skinless squirrel in the dirt because hearing noises come from Dog, after months of silence, still startled her. “Oh, be quiet,” the old woman said.
Perhaps she wouldn’t like Dog’s newest trick, either. Dog couldn’t really feel hurt or sad about that. He couldn’t really feel pride either, because he didn’t have those hormones running through the blood vessels in his brain anymore, connecting with receptors, starting chemical cascades. He didn’t have receptors. He didn’t have a brain. But he had the memory of these things, and he focused on that, and he stopped feeling almost-pride and started to feel almost-anxious. He was worried about Lucia. Why was she angry? Had he done something wrong? Was something wrong with Luke/Lucia? Dog felt a surge of almost-love and that was almost-good enough.
He whined. Please touch me.
Lucia grumbled, stood up, and moved forward, ready to put her hand right through Dog’s carefully controlled, fully detailed, and slightly translucent body. Instead she felt soft fur grainy with dust and the hardness of skin, muscle, and bone. Instead her hand stopped at that line where she felt Dog’s flesh, a pressure back against her own flesh. Automatically, she moved her hand in the beginning of a pet down Dog’s flank.
Then she jerked her hand away. “What are you doing?”
Dog stepped forward, banging his muzzle against her leg. He thought about that push and sent that thought into the air and minds of all the beings around him and he knew that Lucia could feel it now, the weight of a direwolf’s body against her body—causing her to stumble back. Dog kept pressing forward and jammed his cold nose into Lucia’s hand, the one not holding the skinned squirrel. He knew she could feel that pressure, that coldness.
Dog himself could not even be sure his holo-paws were completely touching the ground. He thought he might be floating a little. He concentrated. He did not have the physical sensations Lucia was having now—the warmth of the woman’s palm, the satisfying pet that smoothed down his guard hairs. But he had the memories. He had the habit. The feeling would come later. It had taken him time, after all, to be able to see colors and shapes again, the cliff face that sheltered them from the wind, the pink-and-yellow sky and sun rising in the east. It had taken time to hear voices and bird calls and fire crackling. It had taken time to understand time, how one moment followed another, how he should pretend to sleep and then wake. His own sense of touch would come next. Everything
was coming faster and faster.
Lucia gave a sigh. “Dog.” It was a lonely world without her friend and companion. The old woman squatted and began to pet him in earnest.
Dog had to focus. He had to remember. He had to keep his paws on the ground. Eventually all this would become second nature. Tomorrow, Dog thought—with a powerful almost-desire—tomorrow he would work on smell.
Brad ate more than his share of squirrel stew, but Luke was in a good mood and hardly noticed. Dog, of course, didn’t eat anything. He slumped next to Luke, head down as though he were napping, still practicing his skills and sending out those thoughts of gravity and weight, texture and substance. Luke kept one hand on Dog’s neck, occasionally scratching Dog between the ears, occasionally grabbing and pulling a handful of fur to which Dog reacted by jerking his paws and snuffling.
Being physically present for Luke took all of Dog’s concentration. He couldn’t really talk to Brad until the old man had fallen asleep by the fire, not retreating to his tree house tonight but curled in animal skins next to Dog.
Brad also waited for Luke to fall asleep. Then “It’s fantastic,” he said. “Your fur feels dirty, you can growl. You’re as scary as the first day we met.”
Brad didn’t have to say any of this out loud, because Dog didn’t only receive word images or word feelings from Brad now but distinct and separate words, something that resembled speech, with intonations, prepositions, punctuation. A sense of distance. Dog could see how being able to talk like this—to focus on a specific and controlled idea rather than on what else you were thinking, on what you were really thinking—helped humans discuss and plan. He could hunt in the words like a lioness in the grass. And he could hide in the words like a rabbit in the grass.
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