Of course, Brad didn’t feel tired. The adrenaline surge was too strong. But they had already accomplished so much, and he needed time to sort out his thoughts. Luke had started a fire, stubbornly cooking food, and the smell of meat and onions was noticeable. They should eat dinner, Brad thought. Five glowing mice floated ten centimeters above the ground, close to his feet, staying near their dead bodies and DNA. They didn’t make a sound, and Brad knew he could put his hand right through them. The mice didn’t look particularly confused or upset. But it was hard to tell for sure.
They should eat dinner. After that, the next step would be to study the floating mice to see in what ways they resembled Dog and in what ways they did not. They should slow down and eat dinner and study the floating mice.
This time, Dog didn’t agree. “Do another animal,” he said, insistent as a dog playing a game, bringing a stick, bringing it back again.
“We don’t even know why the last one disappeared.”
“The last one was me,” Dog admitted. “I didn’t help. I let it go. I wanted to see what would happen.”
“You’re influencing them?” Brad should have known. Similarly, he had influenced Dog. But why did that work? What was that influence? This was happening so fast.
“Please,” Dog said. “Please, please.”
Brad chose a bundle of camel hair. He didn’t think they were ready for this. He muttered to himself, “We’re not ready for this.” Even so, he let Dog give him the numbers for the animal’s DNA, and he plugged those numbers into the equations he knew by heart now, not bothering to fine-tune or modify, just letting the computer stream the data into numbers that modulated the radio signals and then turning the radios on, just letting the software do its work.
“What the muck?” Luke asked, jumping back into the fire and burning himself—they would realize later—as the shape of a glowing camel appeared in the middle of their campsite. This happened to be hair from a large male, as tall as Brad at the shoulder, taller at the hump, and much taller when the animal lifted his long neck and pulled back rubbery lips in a gesture of reaching out for food. Dog rushed to put his nose next to the camel’s feet, up to the bumpy knee and skinny flank. Almost immediately, the golden blurry outline became more clear. There was less arcing and sparking, less radiance. Brad peered through the fingers he had put up to protect his eyes.
How could they stop then? They were producing these animals from the DNA in hair! Brad was stunned. He hadn’t thought it possible, although Luke had warned him that it was very likely possible. Luke knew about DNA.
The horse hair came from a colt, long legged, ears up, the animal wanting to run and then stopping, curious, innocent and coltish and endearing even as pure consciousness.
The deer crowded against the colt, and Brad worried they would merge into each other, half horse, half deer. But both colt and deer seemed to know their boundaries, close but not touching.
In other ways, the golden animals hardly seemed aware of each other. Nor did they seem to notice Brad or Luke or Dog. They seemed to be—Brad searched for the right word—preoccupied. Busy adjusting.
The black bear was next, from a worn skin. By now Luke had stopped protesting. Briefly, he and the direwolf reminisced. They had killed a similar female a long time ago. The bear had been hibernating. They had been helped by another hunter.
Brad moved on to the teeth—another horse, a calico cat from the lab, a second bear. By now even Luke seemed caught up in the glory and the wonder. Creation. Genesis. The time for stopping was long past. Brad felt feverish. It was so easy. Dog fed him the numbers. The radios turned on. Another glowing animal. Perhaps it was the software, designed to be intelligent and getting better with every use. Perhaps it was Dog’s influence. Perhaps it was something else. It was so easy. So quick.
Night had fallen, but that didn’t matter. They didn’t need daylight, surrounded as they were by the light of the camel, the horses, the deer, the bears, the mice beginning to move away from their dead bodies. The deer kept together in a herd. The bears kept close to Dog. The calico cat sat by herself and didn’t watch the mice, absorbed in her own experience.
Later, and throughout his life, Brad would have vivid dreams that recreated this scene. The dreams were set amusingly in different cultural contexts.
The Christian God brought forth the beasts of the earth, the winged fowl and every creeping thing, and looked upon His work with pleasure, this great bearded God in the sky who said, “Lo, it is good,” and “Be fruitful and multiply.”
The Hindu god Brahma used thought to create water into which he let loose his semen, which became a golden egg, which split into two, male and female, splitting into two again and again and again and again until every plant and animal had come into existence.
P’an Ku was a Chinese being whose body turned into the world: the head the mountains, the blood the rivers, the left eye the sun, the right eye the moon, the fur the forests, the fleas on the fur the creatures of the forest.
Most often Brad saw himself and Luke shaping figurines from clay, shapes only a few centimeters high, which Brad threw behind his shoulder to land on a pile of other clay figurines all jumbled together. Very serious, very fast, the two men worked, making squirrels, bears, horses, mammoths, mice, deer, camels, direwolves, glyptodonts, on and on. Finally Luke grew big in size, taller than a pine tree, and sprinkled this pile with water from his penis, and the clay figures began to grow.
Sometimes Brad used nanometal to build a giant shortfaced bear that reared on her hind legs, dropping and shuffling forward, leaving no tracks in the dust, without sound or smell. Ahead of the bear, a golden nanosnake twined through the grass—although the grass didn’t part, the snake flowed up Brad’s body into his mouth, his stomach, his colon, flowing out his anus. Then the bear was in him, too, moving through him without sound or smell.
Brad always woke from these dreams with a feeling of joy.
That night, he saved the saber-toothed cat for last, carefully placing the half-broken fang on the ground near the radios. Sending and receiving. The DNA turning on. The unique consciousness reanchored, reassembled. Luke stepped back as the huge animal swung her shining head back and forth, from Luke to Brad, as if trying to understand. No one knew why saber-toothed cats were so strongly attracted to human flesh. Maybe, Brad wondered for the first time, it was an actual form of love, more beneficent than anyone had supposed.
He brushed the idea aside. He was in danger of losing all sense of science and proportion. Reality was becoming too unreal. Finally, they had to stop. Finally, they were out of body parts and bits of hair.
Dog nudged the saber-toothed cat, who did not respond as quickly as the other animals, who kept wanting to disperse and fade into a cloud. Dog and the giant cat seemed to be conversing. Brad couldn’t hear, although the other glowing animals came forward slightly, as if they could. After a moment, the saber-toothed cat stretched on the ground, her blocky head with the long curved teeth resting on her paws, her shoulders and front legs bunched with muscle, her paws cupped around her physical broken tooth, everything but the tooth softly translucent.
Now, at last, Brad was exhausted. He couldn’t imagine sleeping, but he also couldn’t imagine staying awake. He had to rest. He had to rest now.
Keeping watch for the night didn’t matter. Not even the glowing animals mattered. Who would be here in the morning? Who would drift away? It didn’t matter. No matter. Dog’s pun.
Brad and Luke looked at each other. Neither was sure which one of them spoke. Too many waves in the air. Too many thoughts mixed up. Brad took his pack and put it next to the dying fire, the uneaten stew, and Luke joined him on the hard ground, their legs and arms mingling as they closed their eyes, their bodies touching—not something men like them would normally do, but something they did instinctively now.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CLARE
From the red willow near the stream, Clare could hear the noises of camp, the play of chi
ldren or shout of a parent. For the sake of solitude, she was making the basket here and not in front of her tent, where too many people would stop and comment and chat. First she had cut the limber branches, dug a pond close to the stream, and put in the branches to soften. During this time, she rested and drowsed. Then, with an obsidian flake, she cut the end of each branch, took one side of the butt between her teeth, and pulled down the other side. The willow spilt in two, showing its white interior, smelling cleanly of sap. Holding the butt, she tore off the bark in another quick motion. These branches were young and easy to prepare and—biting and pulling, biting and pulling—she soon had a pile of long white strips beautiful to a woman about to make a basket.
Humming a campfire song, Clare tied three branches together and curled them into a circle for the base. With a bone awl and yucca thread, she sewed the branches to each other and slipped in strips of willow along the rim. To build up the walls of the basket, she began weaving in more willow strips horizontally. The morning was warm and the flies and mosquitoes scarce. In some ways, this was her favorite time of year. The clean white willow looked like snow, which Clare had never seen except in dirty patches high on a mountain peak in Colorado. The clean white willow looked like milk puddling in a baby’s mouth after nursing. The clean white willow looked like the flowers of spring that covered the flanks of hills near the camp. The sharpness of willow tingled Clare’s nose. In and out, she wove.
Apparently she had misjudged how many branches to collect. Sooner than anticipated, she needed more. That was also good since it gave her reason to stand and move, stretch her back, and circulate the blood in her legs and feet. At six months, she was much bigger than she had been with Elise. Already her stomach was a great melon, a camel’s hump, a full moon, a certain mountain to the east, all the names the tribe used to tease and joke. Partly her size was natural in a second pregnancy, her muscles more elastic and easily stretched. She was also less active this time, or so it seemed to her. She had less energy, and the weight of this baby seemed heavier. She had trouble urinating. Her hair was thinning. Of course, she was also older now, thirty-two this September. And maybe this was simply a larger baby filling her camel’s hump, a fat and healthy boy.
These days, her thoughts tended to follow old paths, the same worn game trails. She counted up the months and days. The baby, conceived in November, would be born at the end of fire season: a good season if the monsoons came and fires were few and small, a bad season if a dry spring and the lightning storms of summer combined with little rain. Clare had lived through bad summers, the fear of a grass fire sweeping through camp or catching a hunter unaware on the plain. She had lived with the smoke and winds of ash and soot, and she didn’t like the idea of giving birth at this time. She would have preferred a September baby.
Like a bad-tempered glyptodont, she lumbered into the chest-high shoots of red willow, creating space with the force of her belly, stumbling and splashing into the stream. But glyptodonts were more graceful, Clare thought, as she put the knife between her teeth so she could bend back the shoots.
“Clare!” someone hissed from farther upstream.
Startled, she turned. The knife was in her hand now. A tall dark man came partially out from the stand of cottonwood trees. “Clare!” he sang.
“Brad,” she said.
“Clare!” he urged.
“Brad,” she repeated.
She started to move through the willow brush but stopped before she reached the very edge. Brad also did not rush into the space between them but withdrew back into the trees, gesturing for her to follow. He wanted to stay hidden. Briefly, Clare wanted to stay hidden as well.
Brad. At last. Now she realized how much she had been expecting him. How disappointed she had been when he had not come earlier. As far as she knew, no one had emailed the elders about problems at the lab—unnatural, unapproved experiments. She had heard no rumors concerning Dog or Luke or Brad. Whatever they had done was already done, in the past and seemingly unnoticed. So where had he been for the last four months? While the child grew bigger. While Jon claimed the child.
And what would he say now? What would he think?
Clare came out of the willow brush, aware of her dirty hair, the shapeless leather shirt that showed her stomach. She put a hand on that shelf and walked forward over the uneven ground, still holding the knife and wishing she had put it down.
Brad retreated farther into the shadows.
“No one is here,” Clare said when she was only three meters away and didn’t have to yell. “Where have you been?”
Silence from the cottonwoods. She couldn’t see his face. Silence. And then, “You’re pregnant.”
Clare wanted to say something clever. “That’s right,” she replied.
“You knew when you left.” It was not a question.
“Yes.”
“You’re having my baby.” The dark man in the shadows reached out his arms, and Clare moved into them. “Well, maybe,” she murmured. “Probably.”
Brad didn’t know what to do with her stomach and the way it interfered with his kissing her. Clare turned so she didn’t face him directly because they needed to talk, not kiss. Almost against her will, she rested her head on his chest. “The baby could be Jon’s,” she said, to get this out of the way, “although I don’t think so. Where have you been? What happened with …” She didn’t finish.
“Dog.” Brad stroked her hair. He seemed very pleased. Clare could feel him smiling. She breathed in his scent. Only Brad smelled like this. “That worked out fine. Everything is fine. Dog told me where to look for you, where I might find you alone. We’ve been watching the camp.”
Dog told me where to look for you. Clare registered the words but asked only, “Why are you hiding if you’ve done nothing wrong?”
“I have something—”
He caught his breath and stopped, and now Clare could hear two other voices coming closer, two women chatting as they approached the stream, perhaps to find her, perhaps for water or some other reason. Camp was so close. People came to the stream all the time.
“Where can we meet tomorrow?” Brad asked, his arm squeezing her uncomfortably.
“Oh,” Clare felt pressed. Where? But it was as if she had already thought of this. In the same way she had been waiting for him, she had also been planning, unknown to herself. How strange and how completely natural—she had been living a second life under the surface of this one.
“Downstream from here,” she whispered, “three kilometers. Go past the hot springs to an old beaver dam. Up from the dam, in the rocks, you’ll find a cave.”
“Clare!” one of the voices called. “Clare!”
“Don’t tell anyone,” Brad said, and then he was gone, not very quietly, breaking branches and twigs.
“Clare! Where are you?” The women came into the clearing between the willow and the cottonwood trees. They called out, turning their heads this way and that.
“I’m defecating,” Clare said and squatted.
They sang half the night, celebrating the full moon, the green plants in their full stomachs. Throughout the year, the Rio Chama people were careful to consume enough vitamins and minerals even if it meant chewing dry berries and herbs, eating scurvy grass and brewing pine-needle tea. But nothing was as good as the actual leaves and stems of mustards and sorrels, chickweed and beebalm, lambsquarter, vetch, and waterleaf, the lovely mess boiled until tender. Sometimes the greens were bitter, and they enjoyed that, too, the peppery flavor, the taste of anise, a sharp bite on the tongue.
The full moon rose higher in the sky as they passed around a bottle of fermented yucca drink, most of the adults getting a little tipsy. Clare sat by the fire with Jon’s arm over her shoulder as he sang, his voice joining with the women on the higher parts, the voice of the dandelion or the moon, yet he could also take the harmony with the men, deep and masculine, the voice of the lion and the sun. He smiled down at her as she came in on the women’s chorus. He
squeezed her shoulder to tell her he loved her. Above them, the eye of the moon grew as wide as it could, eager to look down on the tribe and listen to their songs. The moon was a piece of fruit hanging ripe in the sky. The moon was the belly of a woman about to give birth. The moon was a gourd full of seeds.
“You are as beautiful as the moon,” Jon whispered to her, something men had been saying for thousands of years.
Clare felt bad about lying to him. She felt guilty for snuggling up to him, smiling back and even squeezing his arm. But clearly Brad didn’t want Jon or anyone else to know he and Luke were near the camp. That Dog was near the camp. Dog told me where to look for you. Clare didn’t want to think too much about that.
The next morning she explained to Jon how she would be with her girlfriends the entire day as they walked to the west gathering baskets of green leaves. She hinted that this was a woman thing, a being-pregnant thing, something that might involve a few rituals. Maybe they would sing some special women songs, tell special women stories. Jon looked thoughtful and wise—still sleepy from the yucca drink. He was happier now, the larger she got and the longer Brad stayed away and did not email. Jon’s friends and Clare’s friends also pitched in to help Jon save face. They teased him about becoming a father, the fathers among them giving advice, and the men taking him on hunts where, Clare supposed, they did special men things, sang special men songs, told special men stories. Almost everyone in the tribe seemed to have forgiven her for leaving them to go to the lab. Now she was here. The present was what mattered.
Clare felt a sense of hurry. Even so, the sun shone well above the horizon before she finally set off with the other women, five of them walking and talking. One of the women told a story about her mother’s cousin. Another had politics on her mind, an upcoming election to replace a Council member who had recently died. They all talked about the move back to the summer camp. That would be soon. Clare listened and nodded, and when they were far enough away but still within sight of the colored tents, she begged off from the trip, saying she was unwell.
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