Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff VanderMeer

  I stood there on the steps, stooped, overcome by so many emotions. It was hard not to cry over something.

  But then I took a step forward, and another. Heavy steps, as if the hummingbird weighed me down. Or something did. My boots thick, awkward, made of solid metal.

  Each step upward was easier than the last.

  * * *

  At the top of the stairs, an hour of climbing later, I came to new concrete steps and a portal of a door. Framed in a circle of stainless steel, the oval of the door shuttered like a closed storefront. A button next to it. No pass code here. But the button was thumb shaped, interactive.

  That gave me pause. If I wasn’t the right person, would I suffer Ronnie’s fate?

  I pushed the button anyway. The door slid up revealing a red-lit antechamber. Stepped inside and the door shut again. A light mist hissed out of holes in the walls. Moment of panic. Drugged, poisoned. Found out. Didn’t belong here. Had never belonged here.

  But the mist had a pleasant scent and I realized I was being decontaminated. Run through some protocol.

  Why did I have to be clean to get to the other side, but Ronnie had come back out contaminated?

  After it was over, the portal opposite slid open, a large, dim-lit space beyond.

  I hesitated once more. I’d been given so many last chances to turn away that I hadn’t recognized. Now was being given another one. To heed the warning that was Ronnie’s corpse. To recognize the limits of what I had left to give. No normal life waited outside. But life of a kind waited. I could try a different part of the King Range wilderness. I could become expert at avoiding militias. Sleep by day, wander by night. Pipe dream. Faint home.

  One thing I knew: if I crossed that threshold, I wouldn’t be going back there. Felt it in my bones.

  So I bent and leaned through the door into another world.

  [107]

  You could say Silvina had built a bunker out of a cavern. Or a command-and-control center out of the top of a mountain. You could call it many things. You might be looking at it right now. You might know more about it than me. It would’ve taken years. Secrecy. Patience. So many millions. Piece by piece. Using different experts and contracts so no one knew the full extent of it. Toward the end, she must have trusted only “Friends of.” I had a vision of servants entombed with their ruler.

  I had come out into a nondescript, rectangular space shoved up against the side of the mountain. Framed by rough-hewn stone walls and a steel-beam-reinforced ceiling studded with the dimmest possible blue lights. Every surface seemed chosen to reject mold and decay. A sterile quality I didn’t like but that was purposeful.

  Not much of it registered as important. Just unfinished or hurried. You could see the outline for an elaborate kitchen and island on the far side of the room, with the mountain rock jutting out uneven above another concrete wall. But it had never been built. Instead there was just a sad-looking kitchenette with a cheap mini fridge. One huge doorway, opposite me, led to an area stacked with bunk beds, none of them used. A small medical clinic. A space clearly meant for exercise. Spartan, with mats and little else.

  That Silvina had run out of money became obvious the more I explored. That she had spent it only on the most important things.

  As I remembered Unitopia, I understood the space better. The disconnect was the scale. The scale was off. And the function. Not an island. A bunker. A cavern, with most of the same layout as Unitopia. Just that the “domes” were rough, limited by the conditions. Strange how that altered so much, how what should be familiar became so unfamiliar.

  A smell of age and mustiness that came not from what Silvina had built but what surrounded it. The feeling of a cathedral, thick with history. Unitopia had that, too, but I recognized it here because it felt less human.

  A door led to a cramped room with a few monitors against a far wall and more chairs and tables. A desk. A logbook with terse scribbled entries. The sense that Silvina at one time had meant to have a staff here, under the mountain.

  The monitors alternated showing different views from the mountainside. Some reflected the long view of private satellites and drones. But some, from their vantage, were disguised as bits of the very gravel across which Hellmouth Jack and I had frantically searched five years before.

  The ghost of my other life found that clever, even roughly elegant. That the ground had been alive with surveillance. That we had been shoveling cameras, not just stones.

  The main dome, past all these unimportant adornments, lay beyond these impermanent monuments. Of this odd version of Unitopia. If the blueprint was true, nothing else remained that I had not seen, and all the rest was empty, and bleak.

  I don’t think I hesitated. My steps were as steady as before. I leaned no more heavily on my cane. It was all laid out as perfectly as if a dream and there could be no tension, no suspense, because in a dream you were carried along without a choice.

  * * *

  In the dome, there was a great and terrible window at the far end through which, even from the entrance, I could tell things were moving. So I resisted the window, because it wanted all my attention. Instead, I tried to take in the place entire.

  In that dome, too, was a kind of medical station, and more monitors—larger ones—along the left side. On the right side, built-in shelves housed books, but also technical equipment. Any odds and ends. Perhaps personal effects. A sliding ladder had been attached. The bookshelves weren’t painted. The raw wood and shoddy construction told me there’d been no time or no money to paint.

  The silence here was profound. A kind of holy quality. The budget for soundproofing must have been unlimited. The soft blue light in that space soothed and suffused in such an unearthly yet pleasant way. The smell of stone rich with water. I could see in the near distance, where the stone lay exposed, the water glistening. Moss glistening. More cave than construction.

  The muffling of so much, the vastness of the space and how that made so small what had been placed in it, made me not see everything at first.

  But as I walked slowly forward, as my eyes adjusted to the scale … I came across a second body.

  Slumped in a chair, in front of the medical station. Even at a distance, I could tell it had been there longer than Ronnie on the stairs.

  I hesitated. Came closer. Lingered on details to avoid the larger question.

  Clothed in a green jumpsuit, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail. Her eyes were black, open, blood vessels exploded. Her hands gripped the chair like claws. There was to her aspect a kind of convulsion of purpose. A motion interrupted that encoded motion into the stillness.

  Oh, Silvina, even so long dead, you had the aspect of someone who might return to life.

  I approached her as if she were delicate and made of something breakable, that she would shatter at the slightest touch. But she’d never been fragile.

  “To be a weakness that is a strength. To let the world breathe into you and out of you. To find a path through.”

  Had no place to put this revelation. So casual, in its way. So terrible and casual. This dead body in an office chair, in a cavern with monitors. Under a mountain.

  I tried to be coldhearted. To focus on the details. To make some sense of the incomprehensible.

  But a horror had come over me, the more I examined the body. Never touching it, but circling it. A drowning, buried feeling crawling over my skin.

  A sound left my mouth that was a keening. A sound I bit my tongue to stop. If it went on much longer, it would never end.

  The terrible thought. The unthinkable.

  That as Hellmouth Jack and I searched and searched and searched for this place atop the mountain … that Silvina had been down here, watching us. Observing us through the pebbles at our feet.

  That she had still been in the world then. That if only I had been smarter, more savvy, more observant, I would have come up those steps into her secret place to find her alive.

  That if I had been alone, not chained to a
sociopath, she would have revealed herself to me.

  Physically ill at the thought. So ill, I bent over and would have retched, but suppressed the impulse. Blasphemous. To do it in that space. I took a breath instead. Another. Stood up straight and let the cavern air, withered but pure, fill my lungs. Felt better. Felt clear. Did not want to be empty.

  When I really looked at Silvina’s face. When I looked clear and unflinching. It wasn’t ecstasy I found there. Not like Ronnie. No, not ecstasy and not terror, either. More a sense of … completion.

  Of coming to rest. Finally.

  * * *

  I was conditioned to look for clues from Silvina. To look for messages. It took long moments before I realized she had left no message. That the letter was the last of it. That her body was the last of it.

  A huge, black three-ring binder sat on a desk nearby. Inside, a two-thousand-page manuscript in Spanish. Titled “Unitopia.” My college Spanish was rusty, but even a glance, a skim, told me that this was her real manifesto. Not the one meant for me and people like me. Not the middle-class, watered-down version. In English. But the unadulterated vision. It would be harsh, uncompromising. It would not budge on how the physical laws of the universe worked. Of how the laws of cause and effect worked. It would not try to give false hope, but give the hope of a real way forward. No matter how uncomfortable.

  I wept, reading what I could of it. I wept because I knew that she had not believed anyone would implement her ideas. That was why it existed here and not out in the world. Delusional. Naïve. Unworkable. Dangerous. That is what the enemy called the necessities for survival. For flourishing.

  So she’d left it here and found another way.

  And it had killed her. Hadn’t worked.

  Clear to me there, in that moment.

  In front of her like an altar, that odd medical station, which had three tubes for syringes held within a clear polymer container, radiated the cool hum of climate-control. Two were missing. One of the two lay cracked on the floor beneath Silvina’s dangling hand. It took no imagination to guess that Ronnie had taken the second.

  Whatever it was, Silvina had thought it would change the world. Each was a different “approach,” according to the documentation. Each promised radical transformation. Each promised contamination until you would see the world so differently. And as you walked out into the world, what had captured you would capture others and they, too, would be transformed. “We must change to see the world change.”

  Or was it transform the world? Would the recipient change the world? The science in front of me, the documentation, was not meant for a layperson. A change to the genetic code? Or changes. Radical changes. Not to become superhuman or erase difference or erase anything. References to the salamander’s unique defensive toxin, and the alkaloids in the flowers preferred by the hummingbird, which could be hallucinogenic to humans. Some evidence of a quest to harness their power without the toxicity. Chemical biomimicry.

  Could it mean a kind of healing? A kind of healing, an ebb and flow. A restoration of the health of the world? Is that what the diagrams meant? Incoming and outgoing. A contamination that meant the ecstatic.

  I was irradiated by my belief. Riddled through. But was I ready to follow?

  One last magic potion.

  One last chance. One last terrible, awful choice.

  I spent some time frozen, arguing with my own thoughts.

  Derangement or genius? Was it even possible? If I was right, to create not a deadly pandemic or a biological bomb but a new, true seeing? Let the world in through your pores like a salamander, see all the colors of the flowers only a hummingbird could see.

  Yet both Ronnie and Silvina were dead. Not ascended, not “repaired.” Dead. Sick, sick, stupid thought. Maybe they had been the wrong hosts drawn to imperfect serums. Maybe they hadn’t, in the end, been strong in the way I was strong. Could that be why I had been chosen? If I had truly been chosen. By fate, if not really by Silvina.

  What if one last syringe was just chance?

  What if Silvina was just delusional?

  * * *

  I left the question, along with Silvina’s body, for a time, because I trusted there was something more to find. Because I needed to sit with that question for a time.

  Because I needed to look through the enormous round window.

  [108]

  An ark existed there beneath the earth. Or a kind of ark.

  I would have been the first to look upon that miracle except for Silvina, except for Ronnie. Because she would have had to create it with only the most trusted, loyal friends. Because double-blinds were necessary to prevent any one person from knowing what it meant. Because it would have taken decades from first thought to last. Because when she started no one had ever built an ecosystem this way.

  What I saw, when I came close to the window, was a scene lit by an artificial sun. The glass so thick and rimed with green, it was like looking into the past.

  But it was actually the future.

  A creek surrounded by understory trees and bushes, framed by ferns. Birds stitching through the undergrowth. A squirrel drinking from the creek. Fish visible in the creek, fins cutting the surface. Clean, pure water. Butterflies and bees. Lizards and, yes, according to the species list on the wall, hummingbirds and salamanders. Just in glimpses. In blinks.

  It was painfully like the creek near the farm. Painfully like the places I had explored as a child. The mud and flux of it. The smooth, flat creek stones. The moss. A dream of what I’d been.

  Mundane. Extraordinary. It could be any half-unspoiled habitat. But artificially created, it became a work of extraordinary imagination. The detail that had gone into it. The sheer ambition.

  Collected over time. Relocated. A simplification of habitat. A simplification of species. Calculating what could be sustained and what could be maintained. And, on the wall opposite, safe in what I saw now had the detail of honeycomb, samples of all that could not. A fortune had been thrown at this, and a fortune more required.

  The DNA for revival.

  It would last at least a century on its own, Silvina believed, from the documentation I could find. It would be there if the world destroyed itself, to help. Preserve, change, and save.

  On the raised platform, also, a complex control panel, automated. Fail-safes, and fail-safes for the fail-safes. Heat, cold, light, water levels, food dispensed where necessary. I could hear the sweet, soft hum of generators buried in the earth. Muffled, like every other sound.

  Her dead body across the room. This towering above her. A kind of balance to that. A kind of hedging of bets. If this doesn’t work, there would be the ark. If one solution didn’t fit, wasn’t ready, then …

  Dying for an elixir that might transform the world. Sacrificing your entire life for an underground creek beneath a midnight sun that you, by pure will, sheer strength of mind, had wrenched into a self-sustaining pattern … of whatever duration.

  And still I didn’t know if it was hubris, if it was folly. Would the ark begin to die now that Silvina was dead? Was it dying now? Would it soon be as lifeless as Ronnie on the stairs, the hummingbird in my pocket? And how much did the world need to change or did it just need to be rid of us?

  The rheum of green around the portal window. The sense of algae encroaching. In a hundred years, if this survived, would it be something strange and different and mutated? The roof set to open and the air that came in kill what had waited so patiently within for renewal.

  I thought about what world waited for me out there. What was left. Knew maintenance of what I had found was beyond me. Knew that had not been Silvina’s purpose for me. If there was purpose.

  In the slow sinkage of that, the recognitions, I began to know what to do.

  If not for the ark, I would have made a different choice.

  * * *

  The end of the text I’d seen in the Unitopia visitor center, so long ago, read:

  But once you got used to this new perspecti
ve, you’d look at the ground and it’d open up its layers, past topsoil and earthworms, down into the deeper epidermis, until you’re overcoming a sense of vertigo, because even though you’re standing right there, not falling at all, below you everything is revealing itself to you superfast. And maybe then, while still staring at the ground, even more would open up to you and you’d regress to the same spot five years, ten years, fifty years, two hundred years ago … until, when you look up again, there’s no street at all and you’re in the middle of a forest, and there are more birds and animals than you could ever imagine because you’ve never seen that many in one place. You’ve never even seen this many old-growth trees before. You’ve never known that the world was once like this, except in the abstract.

  You’re, in fact, standing on an alien planet. And once you got used to that, maybe then … only then … you’d be able to reach a level in which you inhabit the consciousness of an animal—something less advanced, at first, like a tortoise or squirrel, and then work your way up to something “fairly” intelligent, like a wild boar or a raccoon.

  And once you’d worked your way “up” to human, or sideways to human, or down to human … whatever that looks like … then and only then would you be allowed to look to the future, to think of a time beyond, only then would you know enough because you’d feel it in your skin, and in your flesh …

  I don’t know if that is the change Silvina sought. It feels like just one part of something bigger. Just to see the world better, to be vulnerable to it, is not enough. No one thing can be enough. The ark told me that. The three formulas told me that.

  To take the chance is to believe in death as well as life. To believe that, even with the odds against you, you should jump off the balcony. To trust you’ll get through it. Somehow.