Life is getting a little dull here in the Great Nation of Colorado. Of course, we don’t call ourselves a nation. Maybe we do feel superior to all of you farther south, where you never see snow, where you talk funny and don’t enunciate your p’s and q’s, so to speak, but we are still very much part of the North American tribes. We admire the Council although my father says we should have more representation on it since we have so many more people; it’s only fair, he says, and gets quite passionate. My father is a wordy person to begin with, and when he gets quite passionate you really don’t want to be there having to listen to all those words.
But that’s not what I wanted to write about, and this is one reason I miss your assignments; they helped me focus. They gave me “structure,” a word I know you would use in one of your comments, and in that structure I feel more free than just walking the trails here on my own.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about China. Let’s say that I leave Colorado and cross North America and get to New York Harbor Two and take a boat to Africa. There I venture into the dark interior and discover an amazing culture of great spirituality and tenderness. These people spend entire days making up songs which they sing to each other for entire nights. They have very few material possessions, not even spears, for they live only by gathering plants and catching fish with nets in the great lake that dominates their world. They love their children above everything else and are always asking them about their dreams. The children explain their dreams very carefully because these people believe that all dreams come true. They sleep with the animals they do not hunt. Yes, although this sounds like a tall tale or myth, these people actually cuddle right next to the gazelle and the zebra. Of course they no longer scavenge or go into the cities. When I try to show them my solarcomp, they simply look away; they live in peace and harmony without any thought of the future or the past. Although I am impressed by this beautiful and astonishing culture, I know I cannot stay here, for I will never truly be one of them. I do not have their purity of heart but must keep traveling. Like “a rolling stone,” I have to move on.
One day I find myself in China. Let’s say that my days were eventful between leaving the coast of Africa in my trusty boat and walking the quiet streets of Beijing. Because I am a mute, I don’t feel the sadness. And I have to wonder if these streets are as empty as they seem; can it really be that all the people of China are gone, every last one?
I think not. From my reading, I know that the Chinese were very advanced technologically; their computers and computer scientists were among the best in the world. They believed in technology with all their hearts. If it seems unbelievable that no one at all survived the supervirus in China, it seems equally unbelievable that whoever did survive would give up on the worldwide web. Personally, I doubt that very much. Instead I think they gave up on us. After all, the Chinese had good reason to be suspicious of Russia and America (although not, I guess, of Costa Rica) and maybe they thought that we had started the supervirus. Maybe they thought we were tricking them with our talk of The Return and the Great Compromise and ecological harmony. Or maybe they just weren’t interested in all that. Maybe they didn’t respond to our emails because they didn’t want to, and they just listened to our conversations instead and kept careful note of what we were doing. While we gave up our guns and our ships and our airplanes, they kept theirs and fixed them, one by one, and all the while they had children who had more children who fixed more machines. Maybe they have plans to visit us now? Maybe they have evil scientists working away on planes to fly over here and enslave us all.
I think you would stop me at this point from being “too creative, perhaps” and losing the thread of my plot. “Weren’t you last on the streets of Beijing?” you might ask. “And while I think it’s good to speculate about what might have happened in China, you don’t want to let your imagination run completely wild.”
Of course, I do want to let my imagination run completely wild; that’s exactly what I want to do. But I also have to agree with some of what you say, and I don’t really think the Chinese are coming to get us in their airplanes. I just wonder what’s happening in the rest of the world. Outside Colorado! What else is happening! Don’t you wonder, too?
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DOG
The golden animals came together over food and found that ironic, especially the two cats, who seemed disposed to irony. Sharing food, the deer and the bears and the mice and the cats and the horses and the camel and Dog entered into each other’s lives, feasting on those physical memories—nibbling sweet grass, chewing cud. Dog was especially intrigued by the rumen, with its stages of digestion and dense populations of bacteria and protozoa breaking down cellulose, the rich community within the stomachs of the ungulates like nested Russian dolls. (What were Russian dolls?) How extraordinary. The microorganisms breeding and giving life to the larger organism. The synergy, the symbiosis. Many different species side by side, dependent on each other, inside each other, combined into one thing.
Sharing food, they shared everything. They entered into each other’s thoughts, and Dog added new parts to his composite personality—the subtlety of deer and caution of mice and selfishness of cats. In turn, the other animals gained his experiences and those experiences he had from Brad and Luke/Lucia and the giant shortfaced bear, absorbing this new knowledge almost effortlessly. They were a unique form of consciousness, after all, no longer constrained by brain size or lack of neural networks. Wheelboarding through the lab. Albert Einstein. Email.
Email! Words that traveled over great distance. All the non-Paleos were impressed by that, but it meant even more to the saber-toothed cat. “I’ve always felt limited,” she said, “by what I could and could not explain to the other cats.” Already, Dog noted, she was speaking differently.
For all the golden animals, Dog included, merging with Elise was particularly dramatic. The human cortex. The pathways of language. Syntax and meaning. Dog had entangled with humans before but not like this, not briefly becoming one consciousness.
When that happened, when they briefly became one consciousness—after they had eaten together and entered into each other’s lives and entered into each other’s thoughts and become full to the point of bursting—a part of Dog panicked.
He wanted to keep to the habit of himself. This was another way of dissolving, if not into the larger universal consciousness, then into a group of diverse beings that could, it seemed to Dog, swamp his own unique beingness. He wasn’t ready to be a four-year-old girl, loving Clare more than he loved Luke. He didn’t want to be a colt or a grumpy camel. He didn’t want to be a feline.
When that happened, when the experience of being one became too overwhelming, Dog withdrew.
And they were all thrown back into their slightly separate selves, somewhat less separate than before.
“That scared you,” the saber-toothed cat said.
The scavenger gene, Dog thought. We’re built to run away.
“A little,” he admitted. “I know you can know what I am thinking now. I know I don’t have to speak to you like this in words and sentences. But I prefer it.”
“There’s some advantage,” a deer offered, “to the different voices.”
“Yes, that’s what I mean.” Dog was grateful. “There’s a certain exchange of ideas when we are all different or pretend to be.”
“A kind of energy,” a second deer said. “Things bouncing off things.”
“Maybe that’s why unconscious consciousness became consciousness. And why consciousness itself split into parts.” This from a bear.
“I want my mother.” The contrary camel.
“We all keep wanting different things when we are separate.” Elise.
“I want two things that seem to oppose each other. I want to enter the larger consciousness, to dissolve, and then I want to come back to myself, my unique consciousness.” The calico cat.
“That doesn’t seem possible.” A mouse.
“But could it be possible? Someday?” Another mouse.
“We’ve done something like it just now, among ourselves.” Dog.
“Perhaps we need to practice. Let’s try that again?” The saber-toothed cat.
The question turned into assent, and they merged again and then withdrew into their separate, slightly less separate selves. This time, Dog felt more in control. All the animals were encouraged and pleased. They could do this as a group, merge and withdraw. What else could they do?
“I think we need more of us,” the mice said together.
The golden animals walked on, talking among themselves, walking through fire and burned grassland that reminded Dog of walking long ago with Luke through the burn of another fire—charred earth dotted with charred animals caught by surprise. The air had been hazy with smoke, the smoke burning Dog’s eyes, the ground burning his paws. That fire, too, had been started by an evening lightning storm, slowed at first by rain and the cooler temperatures of night, then spreading fast in the next day’s heat and wind.
“We’ve walked a circle,” Elise said to Dog when at one point they walked through the fire again, the flames high on each side.
“We’re going back to your mother now and your new sister and brother.”
“But that’s where the fire is going, too,” Elise said.
Dog thought that maybe he should have thought about this before, and he began to run, and they all followed him until they came to the juniper tree, where Elise taught them the trick of standing still and becoming invisible.
They saw Jon drag Clare from beneath the juniper branches, the babies crying and struggling in her arms. Holding Clare’s wrist, the hunter hurried in the direction of the pools by the ephemeral stream. This is good, Dog thought. Perhaps the streambed would provide a firebreak. Perhaps the pools would give them some protection. Jon and Brad might need to do some clearing of grasses and shrubs. But with Lucia and Clare helping, the work would go quickly. They had just enough time. The fire was moving fast.
“Dog?” He heard Lucia in his mind and swung his holo-body around to search for her, breaking the illusion of invisibility.
“Here,” she called, and Dog padded toward the source.
Déjà vu. Dog knew the phrase from Luke, who knew it from the reading he had done as a boy and who had experienced the feeling himself. A feeling of repeating something from the past. I’ve been here before. I’ve done this already. Lucia was tied up again. Crazy bushkies.
Maybe that’s what humans really are, Dog thought. A species of bushkie. What was wrong with people? What was wrong with his master, his mistress? Why was she always getting tied up and dumped somewhere to die?
This time Brad was tied up beside her, both of them half-hidden in a shallow pit or caved-in animal burrow. Brad was unconscious and Lucia gagged with a rabbit skin. Dog knew who had done this, who had dragged them here, hoping they would die from heat and dehydration and save him the trouble.
Dog shivered although he wasn’t cold. Dog whined and growled and couldn’t help himself. Luke! he shouted in warning. Lucia! He howled. The fire was coming. He felt bad, bad, bad. He couldn’t bite through the yucca rope. He couldn’t drag Lucia out of the fire’s path. He couldn’t do anything in the physical world. He was built to be useless. The habit that was Dog felt distraught.
He felt a weariness, like Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor on the plains of battle fighting the barbarians. “Evil,” the emperor wrote over two thousand years ago, “the same old thing. No matter what happens, keep this in mind. It’s the same old thing, from one end of the world to the other. It fills the history books, ancient and modern, and the cities, and the houses too. Nothing new at all. Familiar, transient.”
That was Brad, Dog knew—Brad dreaming or hallucinating. Dog whimpered. You want different things when you are separate. Dog didn’t want Lucia to die in the fire. (What was the point of all this birthing and dying?) The golden animals surrounded him. Elise pretended to pat his shoulder. They tried to think of ways to help, but none of them had a physical body.
“Let’s tell my mother,” Elise suggested, and so Dog did that.
But Clare was also helpless, with the babies in her arms, although she started yelling at Jon and tried to turn back. Jon only grabbed her with bruising strength and kept moving forward.
“You said the boy was a mute,” the calico cat said.
The habit of Dog felt distraught and annoyed. Yes, yes. What did that matter? No matter.
“But he is not a mute now,” the cat insisted, and the golden animal was right.
“You changed him somehow,” the camel said, “when you were here before.”
“Do that trick with time,” a horse urged. “We could use five minutes.”
The cat had a plan. Dog’s visit into the womb had shifted the boy from mute to receiver and that apparently was not a hard thing to do. Mutes were so close, almost there—a bit of consciousness away. The problem wasn’t physical. This was about thought that could travel in waves. And waves weren’t always or only physical. A little proximity … a direwolf in the brainpan. Newborns were so plastic.
Jon would be different, of course. His mind and brain had hardened. He would be less plastic. But he was still human, the calico cat said, and humans and cats had a special relationship. Before the supervirus, before all the beloved pets were suddenly freed to go extinct or feral, the cat’s ancestors had learned how to rub up against humans and lie down against humans and purr for humans and drowse and harmonize. The cat’s ancestors understood humans—the cat preened a little—and if he were to creep into Jon’s mind now, if he were to lie down next to certain neural networks, if he were to stretch and purr, drowse and shut his eyes in contentment … they would harmonize. The proximity. A subtle shift. A little extra consciousness. Mute to receiver.
Then the Paleos could talk to Jon as they talked to Clare and Brad and Lucia. Maybe they could convince him to let Clare go. Or untie the other humans. The cat said this would work. His genes told him so.
The question became an assent. They only had a few minutes left, but the cat went off and accomplished his task with seconds to spare. It all happened on the quantum level.
Then Dog went forward alone to speak to Jon as soon as they were back in normal time. And when Jon understood, when he heard the voice of the direwolf in his mind, he was overjoyed—as the golden animals had hoped he would be. Jon had always wanted to be a receiver. Jon had always felt left out. All his life, he had watched other hunters know things he did not know. Even small children could tell when a teratorn had found something dead or warn the tribe that a glyptodont had lumbered too close to the hot springs. Then someone would be assigned to tell Jon—don’t go over to the hot springs. There’s a glyptodont.
He had compensated, of course. His work with ravens and crows, intelligent corvids, was praised by the elders. But Jon had never felt satisfied. Yes, he could ka-ka-ka and kroack and thonk and gurgle and hunch his shoulders. Still, how could he ever really know if the conversation had been a success, if he had really been communicating? This, this, he said to Dog, is what he had always wanted. Jon felt enlarged. He felt freed. “I can hear you,” he marveled.
“You’ll hear all of us,” Dog assured him.
“The glyptodont? Teratorns?”
“Humans and Paleos have this ability. Now you have it.”
Jon took a moment to pause and say thank you to the earth and sky. To the precious world surrounding him.
Clare took this as an opportunity to break away, while Jon was standing still and preoccupied, talking to Dog. She wrenched her arm free and started back for Brad and Lucia. The twins continued to cry and complain. Dog noticed how the air was getting smokier.
“No!” Jon grabbed Clare again.
“Listen to me,” Dog said.
“Later,” Jon said, “there will be time for this later.” And he shut down his mind and went back to dragging Clare in the direction of water.
&nbs
p; The saber-toothed cat stood behind Dog, her holo-tongue lolling between her curved teeth. “Let me try now.”
“To talk with him?” The habit of Dog despaired.
“No, not to talk with him,” the big cat said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
BRAD
Brad was coughing, and that woke him up. Also Luke was slapping his face and shaking him by the shoulders, trying to pull him out of the pit. Brad’s arms were untied, and perhaps it was the pain of returning circulation that caused his eyes to snap open. His shoulders and arms and feet were loose, and he could stretch, and he did, and the cramps in his muscles started, and he almost screamed. But then there was water on his mouth and down his throat, and this was the most important thing although his stomach protested and he threw up, his entire body hurting now.
Somewhere a baby cried. Clare was holding Brad, giving him more water, making him get up despite the cramps and pain. Clare was here, and that must be his baby. Brad felt weak with relief and dehydration.
“Get up, get up!” Clare shook him.
How could she be so cruel?
“Brad! The smoke! You smell that, don’t you?”
“There’s a fire,” Dog whined.
Brad pushed up on his wooden legs. Clare helped lift him, one arm gripping his shoulder and back. When she tried to pull him forward, however, they tripped, almost caught themselves, and then fell to the ground.
“Just give me some time!” Brad hissed.
“There’s no time,” Clare said.
“Let me take him,” Luke shouted. “You take the babies.”
Brad suddenly felt a little more awake. Babies? And smoke? A grass fire?
“Where’s Jon?” he asked as they stumbled forward. No one answered. Nothing mattered but moving as quickly as they could. Luke urged Clare to go ahead but she only muttered, “I can’t go any faster.” And she really did look awful, Brad thought, her face gaunt, blood running down her legs. Despite the need to hurry, despite everything, he tried to get a glimpse of the baby crammed into a sling against her breasts. Babies? Yes, he heard them crying and whimpering, two voices.
Knocking on Heaven's Door Page 21
