An unexpected peal of laughter floated back to her, then silence.
Wearily, she trudged on. Already they had forgotten her, and her ankh. Almost she could envy them. Her responsibilities weighed heavily upon her. She had not laughed since the Hudson.
According to her goggles, there was a supply cache in Philadelphia. Once there, they could go back on full rations again.
The tents were bright mushrooms in the clearing. Work-to-Death lay dying within one of them. The women had gone off with the men into the bush. Even in this ungodly heat and humidity they were unable or unwilling to curb their bestial lusts.
Judith sat outside with the offworlder, the refrigeration stick turned up just enough to take the edge off the afternoon heat. To get him talking, she asked, “Why did you come to Earth? There is nothing here worth all your suffering. Were I you, I’d’ve turned back long ago.”
For a long moment the offworlder struggled to gear down his complex thoughts into terms Judith could comprehend. At last he said, “Consider evolution. Things do not evolve from lower states to higher, as the ancients believed, with their charts which began with a fish crawling up upon the land and progressed on to mammals, apes, Neanderthals, and finally men. Rather, an organism evolves to fit its environment. An ape cannot live in the ocean. A human cannot brachiate. Each thrives in its own niche.
“Now consider posthumanity. Our environment is entirely artificial—floating cities, the Martian subsurface, the Venusian and Jovian bubbles. Such habitats require social integration of a high order. A human could survive within them, possibly, but she would not thrive. Our surround is self-defined and therefore within it we are the pinnacle of evolution.”
As he spoke, his hands twitched with the suppressed urge to amplify and clarify his words with the secondary emotive language offworlders employed in parallel with the spoken. Thinking, of course, that she did not savvy handsign. But as her facility with it was minimal, Judith did not enlighten him.
“Now imagine a being with more-than-human strength and greater-than-posthuman intellect. Such a creature would be at a disadvantage in the posthuman environment. She would be an evolutionary dead end. How then could she get any sense of herself, what she could do, and what she could not?”
“How does all apply to you personally?”
“I wanted to find the measure of myself, not as a product of an environment that caters to my strengths and coddles my weaknesses. I wanted to discover what I am in the natural state.”
“You won’t find the natural state here. We’re living in the aftermath.”
“No,” he agreed. “The natural state is lost, shattered like an eggshell. Even if—when—we finally manage to restore it, gather up all the shards and glue them together, it will no longer be natural, but something we have decided to maintain and preserve, like a garden. It will be only an extension of our culture.”
“Nature is dead,” Judith said. It was a concept she had picked up from other posthumans.
His teeth flashed with pleasure at her quick apprehension. “Indeed. Even off Earth, where conditions are more extreme, its effects are muted by technology. I suspect that nature can only exist where our all-devouring culture has not yet reached. Still … here on Earth, in the regions where all but the simplest technologies are prohibited, and it’s still possible to suffer pain and even death … This is as close to an authentic state as can be achieved.” He patted the ground by his side. “The past is palpable here, century upon century, and under that the strength of the soil.” His hands involuntarily leapt. This is so difficult, they said. This language is so clumsy. “I am afraid I have not expressed myself very well.”
He smiled apologetically then, and she saw how exhausted he was. But still she could not resist asking, “What is it like, to think as you do?” It was a question which she had asked many times, of many posthumans. Many answers had she received, and no two of them alike.
The offworlder’s face grew very still. At last he said, “Lao-tzu put it best. ‘The way that can be named is not the true way. The name that can be spoken is not the eternal name.’ The higher thought is ineffable, a mystery which can be experienced but never explained.”
His arms and shoulders moved in a gesture that was the evolved descendant of a shrug. His weariness was palpable.
“You need rest,” she said, and, standing, “let me help you into your tent.”
“Dearest Judith. What would I ever do without you?”
Ever so slightly, she flushed.
The next sundown their maps, though recently downloaded, proved to be incomplete. The improbably named Skookle River had wandered, throwing off swamps that her goggles’ topographical functions could not distinguish from solid land. For two nights the party struggled southward, moving far to the west and then back again so many times that Judith would have been entirely lost without the navsats.
Then the rains began.
There was no choice but to leave the offworlder behind. Neither he nor Harry Work-to-Death could travel under such conditions. Judith put Maria and Leeza in charge of them both. After a few choice words of warning, she left them her spare goggles and instructions to break camp and follow as soon as the rains let up.
“Why do you treat us like dogs?” a Ninglander asked her when they were underway again. The rain poured down over his plastic poncho.
“Because you are no better than dogs.”
He puffed himself up. “I am large and shapely. I have a fine mustache. I can give you many orgasms.”
His comrade was pretending not to listen. But it was obvious to Judith that the two men had a bet going as to whether she could be seduced or not.
“Not without my participation.”
Insulted, he thumped his chest. Water droplets flew. “I am as good as any of your Canadian men!”
“Yes,” she agreed, “unhappily that’s true.”
When the rains finally let up, Judith had just crested a small hillock that her topographies identified as an outlier of the Welsh Mountains. Spread out before her was a broad expanse of overgrown twenty-first-century ruins. She did not bother accessing the city’s name. In her experience, all lost cities were alike; she didn’t care if she never saw another. “Take ten,” she said, and the Ninglanders shrugged out of their packs.
Idly, she donned her goggles to make sure that Leeza and Maria were breaking camp, as they had been instructed to do.
And screamed with rage.
The goggles Judith had left behind had been hung, unused, upon the flap-pole of one of the tents. Though the two women did not know it, it was slaved to hers, and she could spy upon their actions. She kept her goggles on all the way back to their camp.
When she arrived, they were sitting by their refrigeration stick, surrounded by the discarded wrappings of half the party’s food and all of its opiates. The stick was turned up so high that the grass about it was white with frost. Already there was an inch of ash at its tip.
Harry Work-to-Death lay on the ground by the women, grinning loopily, face frozen to the stick. Dead.
Outside the circle, only partially visible to the goggles, lay the offworlder, still strapped to his litter. He chuckled and sang to himself. The women had been generous with the drugs.
“Pathetic weakling,” Child-of-Scorn said to the offworlder, “I don’t know why you didn’t drown in the rain. But I am going to leave you out in the heat until you are dead and then I am going to piss on your corpse.”
“I am not going to wait,” Triumph-of-the-Will bragged. She tried to stand and could not. “In just—just a moment.”
The whoops of laughter died as Judith strode into the camp. The Ninglanders stumbled to a halt behind her, and stood looking uncertainly from her to the women and back. In their simple way, they were shocked by what they saw.
Judith went to the offworlder and slapped him hard to get his attention. He gazed up confusedly at the patch she held up before his face.
“This is a detoxifier
. It’s going to remove those drugs from your system. Unfortunately, as a side effect, it will also depress your endorphin production. I’m afraid this is going to hurt.”
She locked it onto his arm, and then said to the Ninglanders, “Take him up the trail. I’ll be along.”
They obeyed. The offworlder screamed once as the detoxifier took effect, and then fell silent again. Judith turned to the traitors. “You chose to disobey me. Very well. I can use the extra food.”
She drew her ankh.
Child-of-Scorn clenched her fists angrily. “So could we! Half-rations so your little pet could eat his fill. Work us to death carrying him about. You think I’m stupid. I’m not stupid. I know what you want with him.”
“He’s the client. He pays the bills.”
“What are you to him but an ugly little ape? He’d sooner fuck a cow than you!”
Triumph-of-the-Will fell over laughing. “A cow!” she cried. “A fuh-fucking cow! Moo!”
Child-of-Scorn’s eyes blazed. “You know what the sky people call the likes of you and me? Mud-women! Sometimes they come to the cribs outside Pole Star City to get good and dirty. But they always go back to their nice clean habitats afterwards. Five minutes after he climbs back into the sky, he’ll have forgotten your name.”
“Moooo! Moooo!”
“You cannot make me angry,” Judith said, “for you are only animals.”
“I am not an animal!” Child-of-Scorn shook her fist at Judith. “I refuse to be treated like one.”
“One does not blame an animal for being what it is. But neither does one trust an animal that has proved unreliable. You were given two chances.”
“If I’m an animal, then what does that make you? Huh? What the fuck does that make you, goddamnit?” The woman’s face was red with rage. Her friend stared blankly up at her from the ground.
“Animals,” Judith said through gritted teeth, “should be killed without emotion.”
She fired twice.
With her party thus diminished, Judith could not hope to return to Canada afoot. But there were abundant ruins nearby, and they were a virtual reservoir of chemical poisons from the days when humans ruled the Earth. If she set the ankh to its hottest setting, she could start a blaze that would set off a hundred alarms in Pole Star City. The wardens would have to come to contain it. She would be imprisoned, of course, but her client would live.
Then Judith heard the thunder of engines.
High in the sky a great light appeared, so bright it was haloed with black. She held a hand to lessen the intensity and saw within the dazzle a small dark speck. A shuttle, falling from orbit.
She ran crashing through the brush as hard and fast as she could. Nightmarish minutes later, she topped a small rise and found the Ninglanders standing there, the offworlder between them. They were watching the shuttle come to a soft landing in the clearing its thrusters had burned in the vegetation.
“You summoned it,” she accused the offworlder.
He looked up with tears in his eyes. The detoxifier had left him in a state of pitiless lucidity, with nothing to concentrate on but his own suffering. “I had to, yes.” His voice was distant, his attention turned inward, on the neural device that allowed him to communicate with the ship’s crew. “The pain—you can’t imagine what it’s like. How it feels.”
A lifetime of lies roared in Judith’s ears. Her mother had died for lack of the aid that came at this man’s thought.
“I killed two women just now.”
“Did you?” He looked away. “I’m sure you had good reasons. I’ll have it listed as death by accident.” Without his conscious volition, his hands moved, saying, It’s a trivial matter, let it be.
A hatch opened in the shuttle’s side. Slim figures clambered down, white med-kits on their belts. The offworlder smiled through his tears and stretched out welcoming arms to them.
Judith stepped back and into the shadow of his disregard. She was just another native now.
Two women were dead.
And her reasons for killing them mattered to no one.
She threw her head back and laughed, freely and without reserve. In that instant Judith Seize-the-Day was as fully and completely alive as any of the unworldly folk who walk the airless planets and work in the prosperous and incomprehensible habitats of deep space.
In that instant, had any been looking, she would have seemed not human at all.
19
Radio Waves
I was walking the telephone wires upside down, the sky underfoot cold and flat with a few hard bright stars sparsely scattered about it, when I thought how it would take only an instant’s weakness to step off to the side and fall up forever into the night. A kind of wildness entered me then and I began to run.
I made the wires sing. They leapt and bulged above me as I raced past Ricky’s Luncheonette and up the hill. Past the old chocolate factory and the IDI Advertising Display plant. Past the body shops, past A.J. LaCourse Electric Motors-Controls-Parts. Then, where the slope steepened, along the curving snake of row houses that went the full quarter-mile up to the Ridge. Twice I overtook pedestrians, hunched and bundled, heads doggedly down, out on incomprehensible errands. They didn’t notice me, of course. They never do.
The antenna farm was visible from here. I could see the Seven Sisters spangled with red lights, dependent on the Earth like stalactites. “Where are you running to, little one?” one tower whispered in a crackling, staticky voice. I think it was Hegemone.
“Fuck off,” I said without slackening my pace, and they all chuckled.
Cars mumbled by. This was ravine country, however built-up, and the far side of the road, too steep and rocky for development, was given over to trees and garbage. Hamburger wrappings and white plastic trash bags rustled in their wake. I was running full-out now.
About a block or so from the Ridge, I stumbled and almost fell. I slapped an arm across a telephone pole and just managed to catch myself in time. Aghast at my own carelessness, I hung there, dizzy and alarmed.
The ground overhead was black as black, an iron roof that somehow was yet as anxious as a hound to leap upon me, crush me flat, smear me to nothingness. I stared up at it, horrified.
Somebody screamed my name.
I turned. A faint blue figure clung to a television antenna atop a small, stuccoed brick duplex. Charlie’s Widow. She pointed an arm that flickered with silver fire down Ripka Street. I slewed about to see what was coming after me.
It was the Corpsegrinder.
When it saw that I’d spotted it, it put out several more legs, extended a quilled head, and raised a howl that bounced off the Heaviside layer. My nonexistent blood chilled.
In a panic, I scrambled up and ran toward the Ridge and safety. I had a squat in the old Roxy, and once I was through the wall, the Corpsegrinder would not follow. Why this should be so, I did not know. But you learn the rules if you want to survive.
I ran. In the back of my head I could hear the Seven Sisters clucking and gossiping to each other, radiating television and radio over a few dozen frequencies. Indifferent to my plight.
The Corpsegrinder churned up the wires on a hundred needle-sharp legs. I could feel the ion surge it kicked up pushing against me as I reached the intersection of Ridge and Leverington. Cars were pulling up to the pumps at the Atlantic station. Teenagers stood in front of the A-Plus Mini Market, flicking half-smoked cigarettes into the street, stamping their feet like colts, and waiting for something to happen. I couldn’t help feeling a great longing disdain for them. Every last one worried about grades and drugs and zits, and all the while snugly barricaded within hulking fortresses of flesh.
I was scant yards from home. The Roxy was a big old movie palace, fallen into disrepair and semiconverted to a skateboarding rink which had gone out of business almost immediately. But it had been a wonderful place once, and the terra cotta trim was still there: ribbons and river gods, great puffing faces with panpipes, guitars, flowers, wyverns. I cros
sed the Ridge on a dead telephone wire, spider-web delicate but still usable.
Almost there.
Then the creature was upon me, with a howl of electromagnetic rage that silenced even the Sisters for an instant. It slammed into my side, a storm of razors and diamond-edged fury, hooks and claws extended.
I grabbed at a rusty flange on the side of the Roxy.
Too late! Pain exploded within me, a sheet of white nausea. All in an instant I lost the name of my second daughter, an April morning when the world was new and I was five, a smoky string of all-nighters in Rensselaer Polytech, the jowly grin of Old Whatsisface the German who lived on LaFountain Street, the fresh pain of a sprained ankle out back of a Banana Republic warehouse, fishing off a yellow rubber raft with my old man on Lake Champlain. All gone, these and a thousand things more, sucked away, crushed to nothing, beyond retrieval.
Furious as any wounded animal, I fought back. Foul bits of substance splattered under my fist. The Corpsegrinder reared up to smash me down, and I scrabbled desperately away. Something tore and gave.
Then I was through the wall and safe among the bats and the gloom.
“Cobb!” the Corpsegrinder shouted. It lashed wildly back and forth, scouring the brick walls with limbs and teeth, as restless as a March wind, as unpredictable as ball lightning.
For the moment I was safe. But it had seized a part of me, tortured it, and made it a part of itself. I could no longer delude myself into thinking it was simply going to go away. “Cahawahawbb!” It broke my name down to a chord of overlapping tones. It had an ugly, muddy voice. I felt dirtied just listening to it. “Caw—” A pause. “—awbb!”
In a horrified daze I stumbled up the Roxy’s curving patterned-tin roof until I found a section free of bats. Exhausted and dispirited, I slumped down.
“Caw aw aw awb buh buh!”
How had the thing found me? I’d thought I’d left it behind in Manhattan. Had my flight across the high-tension lines left a trail of some kind? Maybe. Then again, it might have some special connection with me. To follow me here it must have passed by easier prey. Which implied it had a grudge against me. Maybe I’d known the Corpsegrinder back when it was human. We could once have been important to each other. We might have been lovers. It was possible. The world is a stranger place than I used to believe.
Tales of Old Earth Page 27
