What a horrific thought. She stands there, blue eyed, pink skinned, frail and weak. The waning light passes through her cheeks so easily, I can map her blood vessels without resorting to scans. But she’s truly alive. Stubborn as the owl holding out through the rain for her choice of fresh-killed fish. Fierce as the coyote fighting for scraps around the poison seeps. Four billion years of wild perfection, and she’s asking to be cut up and domesticated by the same fools who so ruined the earth, most of it is unfit for her to walk on. The same fools who sent robots to explore other worlds and turned their sons into robots to police this one.
“You don’t know what you ask, miss.”
“Don’t you want to help me?”
“I …” My duty is to the biosphere of which she is but one part. “I am a ranger.”
“I won’t go back.”
If only I were just a robot. “Then something terrible will happen.”
I follow her gaze to the rainbow, a nearly perfect semicircle stretching across the clouds. She sees seven distinct bands of color. I see the continuum, about sixteen thousand gradations at this resolution, with an ugly line where my UV sensor doesn’t mesh with the visible band. I can track a bee through the forest by the heat of its wing muscles, but I can no longer see the rainbow—not as she does—not as a human being.
I turn back to her. “I understand you need the earth. It needs you as well, but for now you are harmful to one another. There are rainbows enough for other days.”
She turns her wild, bloodshot eyes on me. “How many days do you think I have, Frey?”
Fair enough. It will be another century before reintroduction, maybe more. There is still much to be done, much to coax nature to do for herself. The girl will never see that day, it’s true, but I still must ensure that it comes.
She sits, her slight frame barely deflecting the tattered canvas of my folding chair. She startles at movement in a nearby treetop—just an owl stretching its wings—then recovers her defiant glare.
“I won’t go back. I’ll die first.”
Something terrible … I want to help her, I do—and that’s exactly why I cannot. I turn the easel and start lining out the shape of her eyes.
For a few days, I stay close and tend to neglected maintenance so I can also tend the girl. To supplement the ration bars, I take a few rabbits. They are prolific, easily tracked in infrared, and quickly dispatched with a well-aimed stone. Feeding her is no problem. Protecting her is another matter. As she heals, she starts exploring. When the black bear comes to test the waste bin lids, she’s sensibly wary. She’s fascinated, though, by the dusty little lynx created to replace the extinct wildcats. When I catch her trying to lure a skunk, she repays my every warning with a dozen questions. She’s clever and she knows it, but she doesn’t know this world.
Later, on the overlook, I encourage her quiet rest by continuing her portrait. I experiment to find a suitable representation for her loose sandy curls. She sits before the blush of dawn, looking north past fields of millet to where the citadel rises through the mist. I tell her about the beavers, and thinking the idea might cheer her, suggest that when she’s recovered, she might come with me to check on them.
She stares into the distance and makes no reply, but after resting that way for some time, declares, “You must be very old.”
“I am,” I admit without looking up from my brush work, “very, very old.”
“How can you be so very old if the world is as dangerous as you say?”
“Because I am a ranger, made for a time when the world was more dangerous still.”
The chair creaks the way it does when she’s deciding whether to glare or just “harrumph.”
“I’m part machine. My augmentations make me quick and strong. They enhance my senses and strength. I can go weeks without food or water, hours without a breath, and I’ve survived injuries no natural could hope—or would want—to.”
“Such as?”
“I … don’t remember, specifically.”
“I don’t believe you!”
The mind is adept at burying the unendurable, yet retaining its significance. This is one reason I stand here instead of a mere robot. Many a haunted man has been saved by his phantoms, but when one has survived as long as I have—and buried as much—little else remains.
“Memories are more malleable than you think.”
She mulls this over. “And the animals? Are they made to survive the dangers too?”
“No. They survive mostly as nature always has, by producing offspring faster than they are killed. The grow-houses make up the shortfalls. Any surpluses starve. The carcass of one is carrion for another.”
Revulsion washes over her face, and I think perhaps I’ve steered her thoughts along the desired path, but no.
“At least they get to live. They survive or they die, but at least in the preserve they’re free. Where’s my preserve, Frey?”
“You have the citadel.”
“The animals are free and the people are caged!”
Finally, I look up from the canvas. “Nature is given time and space to restore itself. People are prevented from overtaxing its recovery. The needs of both are met.”
“Needs? What do you know about needs? What people need most is freedom!”
“You can’t need anything more than continued survival.”
“No?” She unfurls herself from the chair and stamps around the easel, pointing out across the treetops. “Then how do you explain that!” Her voice, finally full and clear, but strained as if forced to be so against its nature, echoes in the distance.
I know where she’s pointing. There’s something there … something I’ve seen before. I look away, though, across the forest.
She rounds on me, her face growing red. “You monster!” Her cheeks streak with tears. She pumps her fists, shakes and screeches, “Why won’t you look?”
I never look that way. It’s better not to look, not to have to forget again. But she stands there glaring, her eyes red and wet, her skin red and raw. Her echoes linger. She needs me to look—so I look.
The citadel is a massive, enclosed octagon of mildew-stained concrete, twenty stories high and as many kilometers across. Against the nearest face stands a large, flat-roofed warehouse, part of the south agricultural complex. The complex is maintained by robots and by rangers like me, one-time soldiers remodeled to preserve the race they helped bring to ruin. From the grow-houses and hatcheries, ponds and paddies, they can’t see what I see. They can’t see the warehouse roof jutting out like a shelf six stories over their heads, ten stories beneath a ventilation porch dimpling the citadel wall. They can’t see the bones, heaped on that roof, broken and scattered, the final remains of countless desperate jumpers over hopeless generations.
I look. Even at this distance, my enhanced senses easily fix the number of individual dead. With my spatial coprocessor, I estimate the number of similar sites that might exist throughout the citadel. With my old military psyops database, I extrapolate the number of others who are physically or mentally unable to find similar release. I look. I see. I understand. My augmented proprioception even tells me how many calories I’m burning as I quake before the sight.
“I …”
Any man might say he didn’t know, might seek forgiveness for his inaction, might express sympathy or sorrow. I didn’t know, but I am not a man.
“I will contact the caretakers at once.”
“No!”
She throws her tiny self against me like a bird attacking a mountain. She beats impotently against my chest, wasting her energies on my internal armor.
“Don’t you get it?” she cries, “They jump ’cause they’d rather die than go on living in that … that incubator! It’s a three-day journey through the mechs to reach that vent. Jumpers save up rations for the trip. They send their friends ahead to
distract the caretakers. They have a big sendoff before they go, and if they make it, they’re heroes ’cause at least they had the courage to try.”
I understand the bones, but not her choice of words. How is courage connected with suicide? She seems to know what I’m thinking. She closes on me, forcing tremulous sounds from vocal chords barely up to the strain.
“There’s nothing else to try for! But some people have even more courage than that. Some pay to get their daughters smuggled into the drains! Just for a way out—any way out! Do you want to know what they pay, Frey? Do you want to know what they pay?”
I stagger back from this outburst. Once it’s spent, though, she throws herself against me, weeping and clutching so tightly, I take the belated precaution of disarming my combat reflexes.
“I won’t have it all be for nothing, Frey! I won’t go back. I won’t! And if you tell, they’ll just close off the last bit of hope! Don’t you see? Isn’t there anything human left inside you at all? Rocks can survive. That’s not enough for us; we need to live!”
She cries, simple, earnest, gulping sobs. What consolation can I offer? What protection can I give against a thousand poisons in the land, from radioactive dust blown in from the wastelands, from a recovery plan that will not permit what she desires? Already, she stays me from my duties. Am I to invite more of her kind to join her? Am I to sacrifice the wilderness for one wild girl? I could give back the gains of a decade just so she might live long enough to see her children die. It would never be enough, and it would never be allowed.
None of this will persuade her. She needs to be free. She needs to survive. She cannot do both.
“We’re all machines,” I say at last. “We all are bound to our programming.”
None of us are strangers to pain, either. When tears are overridden, my sinuses ache with a cold, metallic pang. It pricks me now as I set down my brush and wrap her in my arms.
The girl is growing stronger. She’s ventured to the edge of the woods to jury-rig a watering trough fed from the station’s gutters. She’s determined I recognize her ingenuity.
“See? We could even help the rangers. We can stay out of the preserves and help restore the wastelands. We’ll survive. We’ll look out for each other. You could help us plenty if you wanted.”
Wants and needs are less distinct than she imagines. Freedom is far more circumscribed. Yes, I have a great deal of discretion—to take what I need, go where I like, and do what I must do. But what I must do, mostly, is follow my program.
She’s programmed differently but no less surely—to dream, to mate, to carve out a life and a home. It’s her nature to scrabble and climb and seek every advantage. If fortune is kind, she’ll fill the world with her progeny. If not, she’ll soon be replaced by another with more restraint or less, better reflexes or better luck—whatever it takes to survive. That’s how life has always adapted. But mankind long ago learned to change his culture instead of his bloodline, to let his ideas bear the brunt of the risks. This worked so well, his numbers swelled and he soon outstripped the endurance of any land that held him.
Whatever I might want, whatever compassion I might yet harbor, this land is protected.
After so many minutes in the midday sun, the girl’s pale flesh is likely already burning. “You can help me by keeping safe,” I say, “and by leaving my duties to me.”
I clamp my fingers around her handiwork, intending to recover the scrap metal. It’s a clever design, though, a single aluminum sheet, loosely folded into a basin like an origami flower. I bend over a sharp edge and leave the thing where it is. It’s not a bad idea exactly, but it’s motivated by naïve compassion instead of a reasoned plan. The preserves can’t be maintained forever. Creatures too dependent on the vagaries of human kindness will have no place in the self-regulating wilderness to come. Short-sighted compassion is no compassion at all.
“Mankind can never surpass nature’s wisdom, miss.”
She cocks her head and squints, shielding her eyes with her hand. “No? Why’s that?”
“Because he wants what he can never have—an end to suffering. Nature wants nothing. It just is. Life seeks its level. It now and then visits misery or pain and then goes on its way. But man is unhappy. He makes gods and governments to alleviate suffering and walls off his children from it. When the walls fall down, the deluge strikes. So he builds higher still, till he dams up the whole of the world. And when the whole world crashes down, there’s nothing left but suffering.”
She steps up, grasps my hood by a corner, and flicks it suddenly away. I’m conscious of the subtle whir as my lenses refocus. She masks her revulsion in an instant, but not the altered tension in the muscles holding her smile. “You could help us anyway.”
Perhaps. If I had time. If my program didn’t forbid it. If hers didn’t require it. If the world already had the balance I am programmed to establish.
For millennia, mankind binged on Earth’s pantry. When he’d wrung from it more than it could bear, he fought over the scraps. Finally, he fought for his very existence, by which time little remained of the resilient hand of nature. If anything of man was to survive, someone had to rebuild what he’d trampled. Someone had to restrain his ambitions until the job was done. This was too much responsibility for a robot, too much temptation for a man. So it was given to the rangers. We had the requisite drive and reason, and our passions had already been ceded to cybernetic control.
That’s me—committed soldier and savior. And to ensure I remain so, it’s only necessary that anything be removed that might distract or dissuade me. This is done mostly by erasing the memory of anything that stirs what humanity I have left. It only takes the right intercranial chemistry at the right moment—easily within the grasp of my regulatory subsystem. But every excision takes with it another sliver of what once was me.
I don’t want anything. I can’t afford to. The girl thinks me a monster. Perhaps she’s right.
A stag has dropped its collar and I must retrieve the data before the transponder runs down. I leave before first light and hike deep into the hills, but my thoughts are on the girl. The audit is due. She’ll be flagged as an invasive species and dealt with accordingly. The worst part is, she’s right—a small group of naturals might well survive. A community might even be useful on the edge of the wastelands, but they lie too many kilometers away, past too many rangers and too many sensors. All will conspire to prevent it. If I can’t appeal to her reason, to her sense of self preservation, there is no one else to hear me. The recovery will go forward according to a plan not blind exactly, but resolute by design. One way or the other she’ll die, and I won’t even remember her face.
I find the collar near a ridge, in an area where the deer have been stressing the goats and boars. In the valley lies the dam from which the citadel gets most of its power. The morning sky is clear, the sun is low and orange, and the hillsides glow with dappled green. But something’s wrong. The reservoir’s banks are littered with fallen pines. Its waters are muddy and choked with foam and debris.
The lake has turned.
Across the globe, industrial-era ruins lay moldering beneath centuries’ worth of regrowth and reinjury. As they decay, they produce methane, hydrogen sulfide and a macabre cocktail of industrial poisons. A hidden seep must have formed beneath the reservoir lake. In this newly tropical climate, its products have accumulated in the deep cold waters, undisturbed for decades. Now something’s upset them, and a mass of cold asphyxiating gas has burst through the surface.
I see it in infrared, a false-violet blanket hugging the valleys as it courses down toward the citadel. I signal the alarm. The caretakers and rangers will have little trouble escaping the cloud, but I hurry back just in case I’m needed. By the time I reach the hills behind the citadel, the sun is high and the cloud has dispersed.
Within the preserve, five seeps are known. The sensors around the nearest
have all tripped. This likely means part of the cloud followed the ravine above the beaver dams. A thousand meters back, I head east along the high ground and around to the seep. The coyote is alive and well and shepherding her pups down through the withered underbrush in search of fresh meat. I press on, down to the ponds and the beavers. I know from the sensors that they survived the rains. Now I find one lounging atop the upper dam, gnawing bark from a willow branch.
I circle around the lower pond, toward the end of a sensor path left by a larger animal, probably one of the bears that frequent my trails. But sensors can be misleading.
Across from the bridge, near the spot where I first saw the girl, I find her once again. She’s stretched out in a crook between two branches where she’d no doubt crept to spy on the beavers before the gas cloud washed over her. I kneel and move her golden curls aside. All healed up now, she’s pretty and pale and wrapped in percale. Her face rests on folded arms as if she were napping on her pillow. Finally, she’s at peace.
A woodpecker’s drumming echoes through the trees, too late to send her scampering for a vantage point or assailing me with breathless questions. I rock forward on one knee and press my cheek against her hair. My breathing falters. My forehead throbs with icy pain.
At least, in the end, she was free.
The overlook is too quiet and too wet, so I’ve ventured upstairs and out on the balcony. In a corner of the girl’s portrait, I carefully draw the letters of her name. Then I use a large brush to overcoat the canvas with heavy white gesso made from flaxseed oil and chalk. Then come purples, blues and grays, and soon I’m feathering in the seven distinct bands of color that she would see stretched above me, across the eastern sky. Thus protected, her portrait will remain hidden as long as I stick to visible light—as I do when painting rainbows.
I try not to think of her, not to mourn, not to dream—but it’s hopeless. The memories cloud my conscience. In a day or two as they surface, each will be wiped away like damp paint. I can work fast when I need to, though. I finish with the brushwork, pull the bed back inside, and put the old jacket away. I seldom climb these stairs anymore. I don’t often step back in the shadows to straighten and sweep the cobwebs. I never leaf through the canvases and boards, stacked in crates and on shelves and standing in rows against the walls. They are nothing I need to attend to. They will keep. I set this latest painting with the others—rainbows for other days.