“Deliver the messages, Max. The world doesn’t want your project to get off the ground. Period. It’s dangerous, untested—”
“Right, the official line. Come on, Doctor, we both know why NOAC and SINJO, and EUROCOM for that matter, are pissing themselves. It’s economic, pure and simple. Or, rather, if you’ll excuse my blunt language, bloody greed. Ladon’s not offering a piece of the pie, and you’re all offended. Stopping us is your obsession, Jenine. You and your bosses. The Lady has a message for you, all of you, and it’s this: Stop panicking, you might get your piece of the pie, eventually. But only if you’re nice.”
“You’re exploiting the Lakota—”
“Bullshit. They aren’t children, Doctor. Never were, despite your most cherished beliefs. The noble savage was your creation, Doctor, not theirs. They won’t live in a bottle of your making. Hell, you want to see the effects of your social engineering programs, look in your own backyard. God never granted you the right to fuck around with other people’s cultures.”
“Who’s speaking?”
“A snake whispering in your ear, Doctor. She’s bored under that rock, waiting for night. She echolocated you out of the ether. You were just passing by, but her hunting instincts are up, and she’s with you now, with her newly reflective skin that makes her invisible, a ghost at your ear, whispering.”
“I’ve been placed in an untenable position.”
“And it’s all yours, Jenine.”
“Go to hell.”
“I’m already here.”
Net
LUNKER: Another streamer from Bound for Ur, friends. This stuff must come from an Inner Ear, if you catch my drift.
VORPAL: I can’t believe what I’m reading. NOAC’s got spy sats tracking every Ladon shipment on the whole goddamn planet?
LUNKER: Desperate measures … I admit my back’s up on this. Look, we’ve all been chased before, so we know how it feels.
BLANC KNIGHT: The Lady’s not human, friends. She’s something else entirely. Something more than human.
LUNKER: You anticipating she’s going to drop a perfumed scarf, Blanco?
BLANC KNIGHT: I’ll take it up if she does, Lunker.
VORPAL: Bravo, sirrah! Count me in.
LUNKER: If the Lady’s as uncanny as you say, she isn’t likely the kind to ask for help. I’d think she can manage her own battles. She’s done it so far.
VORPAL: Things aren’t looking good right now, though. At least that’s what’s between the lines from Bound for Ur.
BLANC KNIGHT: Well, we’re looking at spy sats, correct? I mean, they’re rather small and delicate, aren’t they? Microsats usually are.
VORPAL: Indeed, and of course com sats are much larger. We’d need to loop in and get a tracking matrix on the eye-spies—
BLANC KNIGHT: Not necessary. Bound for Ur’s provided us with transport routes for all of Ladon’s shipments. We’ve got times, dates, lats and longs. The eye-spies will be right on them. Ergo.
VORPAL: I’m setting up for a com sat interface now. Where’s my Nintendo joystick? You with me on this, Blanco?
BLANC KNIGHT: Let me know which one you grab, and I’ll feed you the coords on the nearest eye-spy.
VORPAL: Lovely.
LUNKER: You guys are scary. Hey, anybody skimming the official news lately? Some weird things going on.
…
LUNKER: Hello?
Net
JOHN JOHN:
NOACOM: THIS IS AN UNRESTRICTED LINE. GO BACK. YOU ARE NOT CLEARED FOR THIS LINE.
JOHN JOHN:
NOACOM: FREEDOM FILES REQUIRE CLEARANCE. WHO IS THIS, PLEASE?
JOHN JOHN:
NOACOM: Freedom Files: In keeping with the NUN Charters and Conventions, all information is accessible to all citizens. Freedom Files represents a block of accessible information assembled by NOAC, SINJO, EUROCOM, and other National Cartels. This information block complies with all NUN Charters and Conventions. This information is an unrestricted line, and is accessible to all citizens.
JOHN JOHN:
NOACOM: YOU ARE NOT CLEARED TO ACCESS FREEDOM FILES, CITIZEN. GO BACK, OR PROSECUTION AS UNOFFICIAL USAGE WILL RESULT. WARNING, PROHIB FUNCTIONS ON THIS LINE WILL DESTROY YOUR SYSTEM AS A PUNITIVE MEASURE. IDENTITY WILL BE DETERMINED AND ALL ASSETS SEIZED. GO BACK.
JOHN JOHN:
NOACOM: YEAH WELL FUCK YOU, TOO.
Lakota Nation, Terminal Zone, July 5, A.C. 14
The small tracked machine circled him from a distance at first, then began spiraling closer. After a while, he stopped walking and waited for it.
Its four sensor eyes examined him in turn, the metallic half dome swiveling with a faint hum. Its steel chest opened up to reveal a monitor screen. The image flickered, then steadied to reveal Jenine MacAlister’s face.
Her voice came from a speaker above the monitor. “So one of my searchers found you. Good. Please speak clearly when you record. I assume you have delivered the appeal to Daniel Horn. What was the answer? Will they talk?”
William glanced up to see a hooded hawk circling overhead. Earlier, he’d panicked a score of shiny mice on a knoll. They had been collectively weaving blades of grass, making long green tunnels between den holes. The mice seemed to possess extra digits on their front paws. William couldn’t be certain—the mice quickly disappeared down their holes—but the weave of the grass blades looked intricate, precise.
A new voice came from the speaker: “The recording device is voice activated. Please speak to activate the recording device.”
A loud roar startled William. He looked back into the sky to see the hawk diving earthward. Far above, like a piece of the sun, a ball of white fire descended. Amber smoke poured from it in a tail. It cut its way across the sky, spinning, flinging burning fragments out to the sides. The roaring sound deepened.
William raised a hand to cover his eyes. His attention was drawn to the skin of his hand. Burned, blistered, the first epidermal layers cracked and yellowing. His fingerprints were gone.
A distant detonation to the southwest. Thunder beneath his feet, then silence.
He closed his broken lips on the spitter, drew in a mouthful of recycled water. A taste like ashes. He blinked rapidly, but the blank spots continued to swim across his vision. Blank, like patches of snow on a gray day.
He saw the helishuttles before he heard them. They flew in formation, miming the contours of the ground; skimming hilltops, plunging down into valleys. They approached quickly, on a route that would take them nearly over his head. The muffled sound of their blades barely carried on the wind.
William stared, blinking and shifting his head as they swept into and out of blind spots. A moment later the helishuttles reared up in front of him, then over. He saw the Ladon logo on their underbellies, a dragon coiled around a tree against a black field. He swung round and continued staring after them.
“The recording device is voice activated. Please speak to activate the recording device. Camera is recording.”
William tried to smile, but his lips split and he winced. He opened his mouth and crouched down to one of the visual sensors. He stuck out his swollen tongue, tried to move it, then withdrew it, closed his bleeding mouth and sat back, shrugging.
He looked down at his hands, closed them into fists. His skin and flesh felt waxy. He dug his nails into his palms. As good as a candlestick, and this monitor, on this machine programmed to return to her, is as good as a plaster wall. So I come forth, the fingers of a man’s hand, and so that you may see the part of the hand that wrote, here on this shiny screen.
William reached out to the screen, then hesitated. Someone crouched down beside him. William glanced over, nodded. I recall the photograph, the days at the fort, during that hard winter. You weren’t wearing rad goggles back then, of course. But you’ve been disarmed a thousand times, old man, haven’t you.
Sitting Bull shrugged, then grasped William’s hand. I will guide you thereon, in this message. I will write this for you.
Who will r
ead it?
She cannot. Daniel can, but she will never ask him. All the records have been sealed, and this language of pictures, ancient as it is, is nevertheless complicated, for our thoughts were never simple.
Of course they weren’t.
Do you know, the ghosts are dancing?
Is that your message?
Clever boy. We’ve known that all along, your cleverness. Even so, this spirit you quest for, it changes our countenance and leads us into doubt.
I make no grand claims, Sitting Bull.
This spirit you quest for, it is your own?
I’m not sure. I still keep denying it.
Sitting Bull finished guiding his hand, and let it fall. He smiled at William. Blindness inside and out. Here, take my goggles.
No, thanks.
Tell me, William Potts, will your final fire be hot?
Hot as hell. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The machine swiveled its eyes one last time, then crawled away, northward. William rose and retrieved his backpack. Far to the southwest, pillars of smoke reached skyward in a row, each pulled to one side by the steady wind. William squinted. Four, maybe five pillars. It was getting hard to tell things like that.
Sitting Bull was gone, but that was something he’d always known.
JIM’S STORY
Saskatchewan, Canada, June 30, A.D. 2004
Jim had stopped asking why he was still here. The question had run through his mind again and again, until it seemed to fall into the rhythm of his heart, his breathing, each swing of the shovel, each toss of the bale. But now he’d stopped, like a clock running down into silence, down into a world without time.
Chubb, the red heeler, came into view from around the barn, prowling, nose testing the air for any new scent of cat. Jim wasn’t sure, but he figured that there was at least one left, hiding somewhere. Hell of a mean dog. Mean mean mean. Still, haven’t got the heart to put him under. The Morrisons lost the ranch so fast, and now the old beater’s got no cows to chase. Besides, cats don’t kick back. Hell, though, I liked all the cats. Reminded me of Ruth, of course, and Albert, and the way things used to be.
It was in his head now, the old voice in his blood rising like a chant. The land had never been kind, but it had become downright vicious lately. He’d done his best to turn things over. Farming had sucked the land dry and dead, and without Ruth’s school-learning in the finer points of modern agriculture, the profits had quickly vanished. He’d tried to turn the land back, back to its original state. Pasture, cattle, the prairie regained from the exhausted, topsoil-stripped earth, the combines rusting into motionless hulks in beds of high grass. But it had been way too late, and righting the wrong tasted sour, for one simple reason: He was the only one left.
Grandpa dead of a heart attack, Ruth dead of ovarian cancer, Albert dead three days after his second birthday to leukemia.
The night past had seen a windstorm, a real duster—walls of black airborne dirt trudging across the hills—no rain, just wind, scouring the paint from the barn’s west wall, pitting the house’s siding, chewing leaves from the branches of the trees in the windbreak. He’d woken this morning to an ochre sky with the sun a mere blush of pink. And his backyard had changed—ten inches of soil stripped away, right down to the gravel that had been left behind by glaciers ten thousand years past, and on this lumpy bed of limestone cobbles curled-up skeletons lay in clumps. Scores of them. The wind had exposed a burial ground, right there in his goddamned backyard.
Jim lit a cigarette to get the taste of dust out of his mouth. He watched Chubb pause at the front wheel of one of the university trucks, lift a leg, and give it a wet what for. A bunch of scientists were crawling round among the bones out back. The head archaeologist had told Jim that there’d been a blowout site just like this one about ninety minutes northwest of here, years back, called the Gray Site. It’d been right beside a farmhouse, too, one that had seen more bankruptcies and more owners than any other in the area. Jim grunted, not surprised.
The burial ground was an old one, from way before the time of the Cree, Assiniboine, and Lakota. Four thousand years old, before horses, which explained why there were as many dogs buried there as people. The archaeologist had shown him a dog’s vertebra, the way the edges had compacted from a lifetime of pulling travois. Down the slope a ways was a larger jumble of bones: women and children. The damned dogs got more ceremony than did the women and children.
Bloody scientists, the second bunch this month. The other group had come to test his well water. Statistically high incidences of cancers in the area. Someone’s thesis in biochemistry. The well was foul, but Jim had known that all along. Herbicidal residue, pesticides, lead, mercury. And maybe an angry water spirit, loose somewhere down below, unappeased and full of venom.
It was no wonder that Chubb seemed so at home here. No wonder at all. Mean dog, mean, mean. Mean.
There was going to be trouble. That citified Indian from Winnipeg, Jack Tree, had been stirring things up with pushing land claims back into the Supreme Court. News of the burial ground was bound to feed his fires, even though the people buried were from so long ago that their closest relatives probably lived somewhere in Mexico. Or so the archaeologist said. Jack Tree would know that, and he wouldn’t give a damn. He’d play on public ignorance; he’d raise a wave of emotion and ride it as far as he could.
It’s not right. I got more ties to this damn land than Jack Tree. He’s from South Dakota, for Christ’s sake. He thinks he can sit behind a mic in Ottawa and take it all away from me. The hell with that.
Bloody hot summer, too. The hottest yet.
The cat bolted into view, a tawny shot from under his pickup. Chubb ducked his head, muscles rippling as he raced in explosive pursuit.
Jim sighed. He’d liked all the cats.
Net
FREE WHIZZY: Everybody still with me?
BOGQUEEN: Murky world here. Devonian.
CORBIE TWA: Antediluvian.
FREE WHIZZY: So the boy’s name is William, and he’s got friends in high places.
BOGQUEEN: I’m not sure that was a friendly contact.
STONECASTER: No reason to think it wasn’t, Bogqueen. Sure, maybe they argued a bit, but how much of that was for our benefit? Think about it. We’ve got some guy named William walking around under the Midwest Hole. He’s inputting on a field notebook, but somehow he’s hack enough to slice through every Security Block and swim the Swamp. Nobody catches him, nobody intercepts, nobody shuts him down. I admit it, I’ve got some serious doubts about all this.
CORBIE TWA: You’re slagging NOAC with a whole lot of heavy cunning, Stonecaster. Come on, these politicos aren’t that subtle.
STONECASTER: Really. Psychotic geniuses are a dime a dozen in any security arm of any gov’t you’d care to mention. Diabolical’s the word, I kid you not.
BOGQUEEN: Unsupported conclusions, Stonecaster. Look at the info he’s dropping our way. The contraventions are serious stuff. Straight from that historical cesspool NOAC and co. keep telling us is unimportant, outdated. But if you try getting close, for a better look at that cesspool, they cook your computer, grab your assets, and the next thing you know they’ve busted down the door and you’re penal-tagged. Sweeping streets for the rest of your miserable life.
FREE WHIZZY: What kind of contraventions, Bogqueen? I think you’ve lost most of us. So far, the boy’s mentioned a handful of creepy-crawlies that seem to have adapted to high-rad no-ozone toxic environments. This is blasphemy?
BOGQUEEN: Keep up on the literature? Anyone? There’s a party line on this stuff, the university and ministry backed monographs are pushing a revised worldview that justifies gov’t policy. It’s there in the science, in the reams of squirreled data they keep publishing.
STONECASTER: Cure for insomnia.
BOGQUEEN: Precisely. They don’t want you to actually analyze the data, or the parameters of the study. Skip to the conclusions. And the manufactured zeitgeist builds momentu
m, quietly, invasively, and insidiously.
FREE WHIZZY: Elucidate us, Bogqueen.
BOGQUEEN: It’s a kind of twisted systems theory. A few decades ago the industrial age ran up against environmental mysticism, and the shit started flying. People started noticing—or maybe finally listening to people who’d been screaming their terror for years—anyway, the subjects of mass extinction came up repeatedly. Deforestation, destruction of habitats, and species extinction rates climbing exponentially. Add that to increased rates of human toxemia, resistant diseases, herbicide and pesticide overkill, rad leaks at reactor plants, not to mention terrorists flicking Biks and you’ve got people running for the wilderness and the Great Mother who’s real sick and needs mending. You’ve got militants ready to kill to defend the lowland gorilla, and fuck the Chinese healers with their mortars and pestles and their demands for more gorilla hands, bear livers, whatever.
Anyway, the industrial revolution started losing momentum—especially with increased mechanization and skyrocketing unemployment. Compassion for the world and its nonhuman inhabitants grew, became a political force it wasn’t safe to ignore anymore.
Through all this, the academic community poured out supporting data for the environmentalists. They were allies, and they made a helluva team in a world confused enough to depend almost entirely on experts and specialists.
CORBIE TWA: So the gov’t got clever. Rest your vocal cords, Bogqueen, I’ll run a ways with the story. You others still with us?
STONECASTER: Waiting to see you pin the tail on the donkey. I figure you’re somewhere between Jupiter and Mars.
FREE WHIZZY: I’m listening.
PACEMAKER: I’ve been listening all along, but I figured I’d show myself, what the hell. Surfing your wave down here wasn’t easy, so I’m feeling pretty good about myself right now. How forward of me.
BOGQUEEN: Hi. No sign of John John?
STONECASTER: ’Fraid not. Maybe he got nabbed.
CORBIE TWA: Back to the story, then. The Net was online by then, or at least a version of it. The world started talking, and it started getting hard for gov’ts to keep their citizens sufficiently myopic. Info bled everywhere. Security parameters were a joke. Ideas had arrived, and once voiced there was no turning back. Pop goes the cork.