"It is odd." Even Poppy has to admit this. "You get these shrug‐ups, the dust creeping up out of the gully bottoms and hanging there off both edges, a sure sign of big rains, right? A warning of flash floods. But sometimes the dust does this an hour in advance of a flood set off by rains fifty klicks away. So, you tell me: how does the dust know to move? It's not like the blur tides; we know how they happen."
"Mysterious are the ways of the Lord," Gran‐Gran tells him.
"Yeah, right. And the ways of the dust, which extends over quite an area and which seems to know what's going on in any given part of it. But how? That's my question."
Poppy wants a down‐to‐earth, commonsensical explanation.
•
Broadband Basin is dead quiet. A hint of boogoomen activity over by Benny Bob's Old Bunker isn't much more interesting. The shambolic gaggle of vaguely human figures is a common occurrence, as if the Boogoo preserves delicious memories of the breach that took Benny Bob's family, shortly after he himself got himself dissed. That's something Son doesn't like to think about, especially parked out here in the Boogoo. The blurs stripped Son's uncle right down to his molecules. Dissed him in seconds.
Gaggle is an Auntie word; shambolic is Poppy's.
A sharp reminder from his hip, plus twinges from old problems with elbow and foot, spooks Son into wondering if the blurs are about to make a meal of him after all. He has to smile at himself.
You've got to watch for boogoomen, but they're generally easy to avoid; they're not going to hurt you unless you just about offer yourself up for the dissing. And there's usually no problem telling a boogooman from a GameBoy. Anyway, these days the blurs are less consistently dangerous to things in the vicinity. Outside remains deadly perilous, though lately the dust isn't as certain to diss you as it used to be. At least not always, and you could call this a positive development.
Maybe the Boogoo has become distracted by the war with its counterpart inside Eden. Of course Poppy says this kind of talk is bushwa. Dubbyabushwa, even. "It's only a big dumb dust bunny," he says. "How's anything going to distract the Boogoo?"
Son has had no sign of Poppy in an hour, but he can trust that he remains close by and that he's watching his back. The same way Son is, he'll be watching both for meat and for other predators, including the GameBoys that are surely homing in on them now.
•
It's hot, and Son is sweating. His blur mantle is permeable, cooling him as it dries. The mantle also routinely disses dirt and dead skin, though it's unclear how it knows what to diss and what not to. More importantly, these cloaks supply Son and every other bio out here with near‐perfect camouflage from other bio‐blur predators. Even more, it convinces the rest of the Boogoo that Son is actually part of itself, rather than a rival complexitization. Otherwise he'd be dissed before he knew it. Mind you, Benny Bob's reaction, back when he was taken, suggested he knew.
Auntie, who trained as a biohistorian before everything went to hell, compares the bio‐blurs to clownfish. They lived among the stinging tentacles of another sea creature, apparently immune and protected from predators that were not. But this wasn't real immunity. What it was, the young clownfish would brush against its chosen host, its mucous coating absorbing the chemical the anemone employed in its own mucus to avoid stinging itself to death. Afterwards, it enjoyed effective immunity because its host took it for a part of its own body. But sometimes the fish got it wrong and that was that. Game over. Could be that's what happened to Benny Bob.
•
Overall, though, the bio‐blur mutualism works okay.
The bios' blur mantles serve as camouflage for both predator and prey at the same time they're generally proof against getting dissed by the Boogoo. The blurs, on the other hand—maybe the Boogoo as a whole, in some way—must also benefit from the relationship. Auntie says the Boogoo may have uses for bio sense organs and mobility. Poppy says that's horseshit.
simple alternatives
Son reads the vast gray panorama sprawled before him, looks for signs of things that might be reading him.
As the sun climbs higher in the sky, the land and its nearly invisible inhabitants respond in their various ways. And Son reads more. This land, all its names and shapes, embodies a living memory, a history of survival lessons. He recites each feature as he watches, confirming this world he shares with the others. He applies the ken in ongoing palaver with his family and with the land even as he helps to shape and maintain this trove of knowledge and practical lore.
After his family, the ken is his most precious possession. This is who he is, in important ways. He is embodied in this land and in this knowledge, in this merging of his physical and mental worlds.
Auntie is the only person he can discuss this kind of thing with. Gran‐Gran just throws up her hands and says it can't be any part of God's plan, because she has no goddamned idea what he's talking about. Poppy describes it as one more load of horseshit and, where it distracts from the business of staying alive, dangerous horseshit at that. "We do what works, boy," he says. "And we learn what we can from what doesn't, if it doesn't kill us first. Why complicate things?"
And what Son is doing now isn't strictly hunting. It's more like daydreaming, a habit Poppy says is going to kill him. It's important to stay clear about what's only in his mind and what's out there in the world and, when he's outside, to focus on the last. Easier said than done.
•
For Poppy's money, Son's watching too often focuses on things with uncertain survival value. At the moment he's scoping out traces of the old world. Ahuk Hole, for example, and certain unnatural regularities that suggest bygone roads and railways.
The first time Auntie showed him the maps, carefully hidden from Gran‐Gran in the back storeroom, he was still too young to read. Nevertheless, he was amazed at the number and variety of things recorded in them. When he got older, he found the names around the Bunker especially fascinating. The Bunker wasn't marked, of course, but there were hundreds of town and villages, rivers and ponds, roads and railways, shelters and evacuation centers. And they looked at the USA, what Poppy calls Homeland, though it lies on the other side of the planet.
The smaller and newer of two atlases in the Bunker—the one with fewer maps and less detail—shows the world more the way it is today, the way it was twenty years ago, at least, after the Great Flood. What Poppy calls "The Fabulous Floosher." The smaller atlas has transparent overlays interleaved so you can restore coastal and island areas submerged by the seas. Big Bangkok is a densely cross‐hatched smirch lying just off the mainland and covering easily thirty percent of what used to be ESSEA. Bangkok was already underwater when Poppy got the ESSEA posting. "Never mind," he says. "You can forget the Big Bang. I've seen the Big Apple before it went under. The heart of ESUSA, center of the United Securistats of America. Now that was something."
Sealed away atop its one‐hundred‐and‐fifty‐meter stilts, ESUSA Mall—in turn the heart of the Big Apple, New York City, and ESSEA's counterpart on this side of the planet—initially survived the Great Floosher and all the rest. But Poppy reckons the Boogoo eventually took that and ESSEA too.
Whatever. ESSEA Mall isn't on any of their maps; it was built after those atlases were published. Nor does any map include the geothermal power station where Ahuk Hole blows today. "Security considerations," Poppy says, as though that's the end of the matter.
Even so, the maps show a world with many, many more places and things than you see now. Plants once covered hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of square kilometers where nothing remains except the Boogoo. You got endless fields of peach trees. Or so Son imagines. Plankton farms covered the seas from horizon to horizon, supplying far too much protein for the remnant populations finally, but still usable for energy. You got whole towns and cities full of people. There was almost nowhere on Earth that had no people. There were so many places that no one person could ever name or remember them, so they'd needed these maps. Whole big books of
maps.
The world had been rich beyond imagining. There were specialists, Auntie says, scientists who did nothing but try to identify and name all the different living creatures. Son remembers the look of unutterable loss on Poppy's face when he said, "Hard to know where things went wrong."
Once, Poppy took the atlas from Auntie and showed Son a part of the USA that the map said was Utah. This turned out to be a special day. More than just Son's birthday. "That's our real home, Son," Poppy told him. "Not this godforsaken place we live in now." He stopped to cough and wipe at his eyes, and got angry at Auntie when she told him, "Don't be sad. We still have each other."
"I'm not sad," he replied. "I've got something stuck in my throat." Dry‐eyed, he looked at Son and said, "Listen up. Being sad for things gone and past hoping for is for women and children. You hear me? And you're twelve years old now. It's time to get you out of this den of women and make a man of you. A hunter."
Now he has been four years a man.
•
From where he watches under the vast bowl of the sky, the land is everything the Bunker isn't.
You see a clean and uncomplicated sweep from horizon to horizon. You've got the simple relationships of hunter and hunted. The lines and shadows of the terrain, its dunes and outcrops. The watchtowers and boogoomen remain mysterious but fairly predictable, part of the ken. The Bunker, on the other hand, is a hole in the ground inhabited by four people who may soon find it impossible to live together. And it's impossible to live apart, so where does that leave them?
He wants things back in the Bunker to be as straightforward as they are out here. "And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride." More Poppy wisdom. Though Son has only ever seen pictures of horses, and has no more than a hazy notion of what a beggar is.
Son casts his thinking eight hundred kilometers south, beyond the bounds of the intelligible world toward the Great Sea, roughly where the Eastern Seaboard Southeast Asia Mall used to stand. He concentrates his mind, marshals all he has read and heard, conjuring worlds past and possible from Auntie's stories and the books in the back storeroom. If there's an alternative to life in the Bunker, it must lie that way. The ESSEA Mall.
Then Son's attention is wrenched northwards.
angry gods
Flash.
The watching has just turned prime time.
Flash, flash, flash.
The gods are angry. About seven klicks northwest of Eden, fake Edens flicker and dance across the landscape as godbolts crackle and hiss out of the high haze, leaving a succession of smoking craters across the Boogoo. Truly spectacular.
Flash‐sizzle, flash.
The land itself cringes. Crater walls draw away from each strike to one‐hundred‐and‐fifty meters before lensing back to erase all trace of themselves. High above, the sky puckles. That's how Poppy describes it, though Auntie says there's no such word. It's like a series of yellow‐green holes opening and then puckering shut. It's too bad she can't be out here with them to watch. This is so cool. Son clicks his spearsticks together to attract Poppy's attention and shoots him a double thumbs‐up. Poppy brushes aside gods and their fireworks alike. They've got work to do.
The godbolts stalk across the terrain, just missing the false‐Eden holos that wink in and out at random from eastern horizon to western. Never does the barrage tend closer to where Son watches. The ken suggests that he and Poppy remain safe, stationed as they are well inside the five‐kilometer safe zone surrounding Eden. Never have either Eden mirages or godbolts trespassed on this apparently sacred area.
But even at this distance, where he's concealed in the same overburden of dust that's cratering way off in the distance, he feels it. The reaction. Like a mild electric shock followed by a tremor. It runs from the ground beneath him right up through his mantle. For that moment, he and the land are kin. Has Poppy also felt this? He'd never admit it if he has.
At one with the Boogoo. Wow. That's something he can tell Auntie. She'll enjoy the idea, unlike Poppy who'd probably threaten to lock him away in the back storeroom for a few days, the way he used to when Son was little, leaving him alone with himself till he got his head straight again.
Whatever. What's past is past.
•
Gran‐Gran is the one who named them godbolts. Poppy laughs and says that's right, we've got the gods pissing down fire on us poor sinners who didn't know how to look after the world we were given in the first place. Of course that's bushwa. It's merely an old satellite system gone gaga with neglect and blasting away at random.
But here's a real gap in the ken. No matter how much they ponder it, looking for a pattern, the godbolts randomly target spots right across the land, the one constant being they never strike within five kilometers of Eden. Another gap, of course, is the nature of those decoy Edens.
It was Poppy who, contrary to all his own better advice about useless speculation, raised the issue again last night: "Godbolts or satrays, where do you suppose the triggerman is hiding?"
"Only one place stays safe," Auntie replied. "Maybe that's also the command center."
"Eden?"
"That's right."
Poppy wasn't convinced. "Why?" he asked.
"Good question," Son added. "And you still have to ask who he's shooting at."
This was Gran‐Gran's cue to kick in with the Word: "It's the Lost Tribe of Israel. Flung out of paradise to wander the rest of their days."
"For what?" asked Poppy. "Target practice? What kind of God is that?"
"Their God is an angry god."
"Yeah? Well, it looks like he can't hit them, whoever they are, or the strikes would've stopped long ago."
Son also did what he could to keep Gran‐Gran fired up: "Maybe God threw them out to wander, and then he decided he was even more pissed off than he first thought."
"Okay," Auntie said. "But if he's God, why can't he hit them?"
Such is the palaver that keeps things from getting dull in the Bunker. Of course there are no answers to many of these questions. Their world largely remains an enigma, another Auntie word.
"In the old days," said Auntie, "we believed we understood the gist of things on planet Earth."
Gran‐Gran scoffed at this. "We knew squat, that's what we knew. And look where it got us."
This world, where it got them, is the only world Son has ever known.
Though he's coming to think he may no longer know this world after all. And he's less and less at home either out here on the land or back in the Bunker.
But never mind all that. Today is proving truly special, and he feels great despite everything.
irrepressible life
The sun caresses Son's erect member through the dust. His blur mantle, a second skin, squeezes gently.
The rising heat of the day also lifts three latecomer dragons. More than he sees this, Son feels two of them, not much bothered by the distant godbolts, make their ways up different sides of Big Tabletop. More good watching. Never mind the assorted pains and apprehensions, Son wants to erupt with his youth and power.
"Sap's arisin'," Gran‐Gran would say when he was younger, and then she'd cackle. Something to do with trees. Right now, he remains as still as he imagines a tree would stand, though he wants to leap for joy.
•
Son is a real man. Never has he felt more sure of this. And he's becoming more and more a man. Maybe more than a man, according to Auntie. When he turned twelve years old and first joined Poppy on the hunt, he believed that was all there was. For what else could he become except a hunter, maybe one day as good as Poppy? That was then. Now he's changing in ways he couldn't foresee and doesn't understand. At the same time, maybe even in sync, his whole world is changing, both in the Bunker and outside. Month by month, day by day.
This world is so much more than he could have known when he was younger. It's both more interesting and scarier than he could have imagined. Poppy's world of globetrotting adventure and combat, Auntie's world of science an
d civilizations, Gran‐Gran's heaven‐or‐hell door prize awaiting the end of your tour of duty in this vale of sorrow—Son no longer worries about missing so much. What's playing itself out in the here and now promises something more glorious, richer with possibility than any past world.
He loves it, the way his life brings new surprises every day.
•
The third lizard, a huge one, ascends Broken Ridge. A monkeyswarm, sated with an earlier kill or intimidated at the size of this beast, sidles out of its way around to the other side of the hill, out of Son's line of sight. But he knows, as surely as if he were part of the swarms, they'll encounter at least one other monkeyswarm already parked there. He's good at this. So he isn't surprised at an explosion of dust gathered by contrary winds and spun down a crest of dune sculpted by the northeasterlies.
Not too many years ago, what Auntie calls the weed species, pretty much the only species left, took to swarming. Generally you can't see them, but they're out there. The dragons don't swarm, of course. They usually operate alone, at least until after a kill. Then you may get two or three showing up for lunch, tearing into each other when the menu proves too light. They don't swarm, but they're bigger than lizards were in the old days. A lot bigger, Poppy says. The GameBoys don't swarm either, strictly speaking. They hunt in packs.
The two other dragons surmount Big Tabletop far enough apart they can settle down to sunbathing. Too bad. Son had wanted a tussle, more entertainment. Sonny's Surprise, the next ridge over, appears clear of bio life.
All's quiet over where Lesser Deep Wadi debouches at Waterhole Number Three. If you're willing to take your chances with the local bio‐blur pecking order, this is a good source of water, though it needs to be taken back to the Bunker for processing. The hour past noon on cloudless days is safest. The cold‐blooded dragons move to bask on high ground, and the warm‐blooded swarms seek shade. But it's a trade‐off, given what you sweat getting to the water and back again. Especially if you have to fight, or run.
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