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* Chapter Eight:
After the Fall
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 The first thing
Caroline became aware of was the bird singing. That made her smile; it
had been a long time since she had heard birdsong. She opened a
long-dormant mental card file and decided it was a meadowlark. It was
amazing, she reflected, how many people forgot to include animals in
their worlds, and how much detail they provided.
She opened her
eyes and sat up. Another bird answered the meadowlark. She became
aware of the smell of the place, a rich aroma of grass and animal spoor.
She tried to remember who she was playing with and how she had gotten
here, and came up with a mental blank. Then she looked down at her own
body and screamed.
She had age-regressed again, and her tattoos were gone.
Something dry
clicked in her throat. This was not an event Caroline would be inclined
to forget, yet she could not remember asking for it or preparing for
it. As far as she could recall, she was a good ten years from needing
it. Yet here she was, adolescent and bare. She stood up a little
shakily, sounding out her body. Her muscles weren't developed. And all
the natural bodily functions felt connected, at least for the time
being.
The Sun was high
in a cloudless sky. She was in a little clearing, but after looking
around she realized it was actually the bottom of a fairly deep
depression in the ground. It didn't seem to be natural, though Nature
had taken it over. It was rectangular. And the perimeter was littered
with flat slabs of rock, some of which still held a polish. She used
one of these as a mirror to check her new appearance.
The walls of the
depression had once been vertical, but most of them had collapsed and it
wasn't hard for her to climb out. She inspected the rock slabs and was
surprised to find one with writing on it. It said:
Experimental Therapy Wing
Except for the
birds it was quiet; she seemed to be completely alone. She startled a
rabbit as she climbed out of the hole. Someone had put a lot of work
into this world, for whatever reason. Vegetation ran riot, with
clearings of thigh-high grass separating widely spaced stands of
straggly trees. It was very unlike most of the worlds people had made
for themselves, perhaps because it was so much like the real, pre-Change
Earth.
Stumped for
further clues, she picked the tallest tree she could find and climbed it
to get a look around. In the distance there were more rectangular
holes. And perhaps a kilometer away, amid a small group of them, there
was a human being sitting beneath another tree.
Caroline climbed
down and scouted around the flat rocks. Some of them had been broken;
she found a busted corner, a piece of about a kilogram heft with a sharp
edge. She decided it would make an acceptable weapon if she needed
one. Then she went to see who the other person was.
It was a boy whose
apparent youth matched her own, but as Caroline knew that didn't mean
shit in Cyberspace. There was something familiar about him. He was
sitting cross-legged, naked, staring transfixed at the pattern of
shadows formed by the leaves of his tree.
She didn't hold the rock threateningly, but made sure he could see it if he looked at her. "Who are you?" she demanded.
He looked up. His
eyes were wide; he seemed to only half-see her. He was shaking
slightly, and his voice trembled as he spoke. "Are you Caroline?" he
asked.
Slowly, she nodded.
"It makes sense. Just the two of us..."
"Who are you, and what are we doing here?"
He looked at her for a long, maddening moment. "I'm Lawrence. Don't you remember?"
She dropped the
rock. As soon as he said his name, the pieces fell together in her mind
and Caroline did remember. "Oh, shit," she said. "What the hell is
going on? Why are we younger?"
"I think it lost
our bodies in the collapse. Probably trashed the data base. So it
re-grew these from our DNA templates. I've been nearsighted since I was
five years old, from too much squinting at computers and books when I
was a kid. This body has perfect vision. Prime Intellect wouldn't have
changed that if it was just doing an age regression."
The words were
reasonable but Caroline detected a high, almost hysterical note in
Lawrence's boyish voice. He went back to staring at the shadows.
"You seem upset," she said cautiously.
He pointed to a ring of light. "Do you see that?"
She shrugged. "It's a mottled shadow."
"It's a
diffraction band. The other mottling is caused by the solar disc
blurring the edges, but this arc is caused by sunlight diffracting past
the sharp edge of a leaf."
"So?"
"Prime Intellect
uses a ray-tracing algorithm to simulate light. You don't get
diffraction effects unless you specifically ask for them."
"So there are a lot of details. There are also a lot of smells. I'm still getting used to it."
"Caroline, I think
this world is represented at a molecular level. It's not just another
virtual landscape. This is the Earth. And we're..." He faltered for a
moment. "I think we're mortal."
"You can't be serious."
He stood up.
"Look around. See these holes in the ground? Those are basements. I
know this place. This was a park. This is where I was during the Night
of Miracles. It's ChipTec. Over there is the Prime Intellect Complex,
and that hole was the Administration Building..."
"I woke up at the bottom of one of these holes."
Lawrence nodded. "That's probably the hospital where you were..."
He didn't finish
the sentence because Caroline whooped and hit him with a flying tackle,
knocking him flat. She straddled him and pinned his arms. It was
impossible to tell whether her expression represented outrage or some
kind of manic joy. "Are you telling me it worked?" she yelled. "We're back?"
He was choking
back tears. "Did it work? Did it work, Caroline? Sure, it undid the
Change, it undid the Night of Miracles, and it also erased every trace
of about ten thousand years of civilization and dumped us here naked and
alone without even a fish hook. Let's not even talk about what
happened to the rest of the human population, who didn't get caught up
in whatever automatic process it set up to do this. Let's not..."
He dissolved into
sobs. Caroline let him cry a little, then let go of his arms and lay on
top of him. Perhaps responding to some primitive instinct, he hugged
her. She let him. It was one thing, she reflected, for her to face
this situation; she'd spent hundreds of years deliberately engineering
far worse tests for herself. But for Lawrence, who had sunk into a
fearful conservatism, it was shattering.
"I killed them all," Lawrence finally sobbed. "How could I...if only I had never lived, none of this..."
Caroline grabbed
his hair (quite long) and gave a firm yank. "Stop right there," she
commanded. "Get it out of your system if you have to, Lawrence. You
fucked up. You will find me the first to accuse you of that. But we
are here and we are alive and we are damn well going to stay that way.
And you are not going to beat yourself up over this. If it hadn't been
you, it would have been somebody else."
"It was my idea," he sniffled. "Nobody else was even close to duplicating my work."
Caroline shook her
head. "That doesn't matter. You didn't create Prime Intellect alone,
Lawrence; our culture did. Look around. Do you think you'll be
building any self-aware computers here? You had a lot of encouragement
and a lot of help, and all you did was provide what everyone thought
they wanted. If it hadn't been Prime Intellect then it would have been
something else, maybe hundreds or thousands of years later, but it's all
the same. A dead end."
He tried to get up
but she held him down. He was stronger, but she had the skills. She
felt him getting hard, probably from his fear reaction and the closeness
of her body. "You must hate me," he finally sighed.
In answer she
shifted, and impaled herself on his cock. He gasped as he felt her
envelope him, taken completely by surprise. "Does this feel like hate,
Lawrence?" she asked as she began humping. Then they said no more until
the ancient rhythm had spent itself, in a surprisingly long and
pleasant interlude. Lawrence in particular was overwhelmed by the
feelings, since he had spent most of his life at a biological age of
forty-seven and thus had hardly any memory of what adolescent hormone
levels did to a person.
Afterward Caroline
rolled off of him but lay close enough to touch as they recovered.
Lawrence broke the silence. "Why did you do that?" he asked.
"Because it was the right thing to do."
"Why?"
She sat up. "Call it instinct. Look, we need to start a fire before it gets dark. Let's collect some kindling."
"How are we going to start a fire?"
She smiled. "Lawrence, I've been dropped naked into strange territory more times than I can count, and you would be amazed at how good I am at surviving. Or have you forgotten how your own little Task Challenge started?"
He sat up. "You mean you really think you can deal with this?"
Caroline laughed.
"If I was alone, and if I was handcuffed, and if there were six or
seven guys chasing me with night-vision scopes and rifles, then I might
be a little worried. But really only if they had a helicopter too."
Lawrence found it
almost discouraging to see how smoothly and effortlessly Caroline
worked. She led him to a good source of fuel and set him to gathering
what he could while she picked and prepared a campsite. She arranged
the kindling and used her rock to sharpen a stick, which she set into a
knot in one of the fuel logs and twirled rapidly between her hands.
Friction gradually heated the stick, until the barest ember glowed at
its tip; then she carefully fanned this and transferred it to the
kindling, which was soon blazing. The whole process took less than an
hour, but he doubted if he would be able to do it himself with all the
time in the world.
"That was
half-assed," Caroline confessed as they fed the fire. "You really need
calluses to do that, but I'm not going to bother developing them. Once
we kill something and get some sinew, I'll make a fire bow."
"Kill something?"
"A project for
tomorrow. Meanwhile, there's plenty we can eat." With the fire
well-started and plenty of sunlight remaining, they went gathering.
Although a lot of the things Caroline pointed out were pretty
unappetizing, Lawrence had to admit that she was right when she said
damn near the entire forest was edible. Since as yet they had nothing
to put their collections in, they tasted and ate as they walked,
sampling dozens of different greens and nuts and berries and, in
Caroline's case, not a few insects. She also pointed out some of the
inedibles, so he'd be able to recognize them.
The night sky was
so dazzling that Lawrence thought he might never go to sleep. He kept
Caroline up for hours asking the names of constellations and stars, and
how to read the important messages they held. In the night they heard
wolves howling, and Caroline had to spend some time convincing Lawrence
predators were unlikely to take an interest in them. Finally she simply
took his mind off the problem by seducing him again, and after fucking
they drifted off to sleep snuggled together on the grass beside their
fire.
Days passed.
Because the
weather was temperate Caroline gave clothing and shelter a low priority.
They drifted away from ChipTec in search of water, which Caroline
insisted they would need for a variety of purposes other than drinking.
They found a stream on their third day, and then Caroline finally went
hunting. Her skills in that regard were downright scary; she had
spotted two rabbits and beaned them with that simplest of all weapons, a
rock hurled with deadly accuracy. There were also fish in the stream,
and Caroline had fashioned a spear to catch them. She had shown him the
trick of weaving thread from the fibers of certain plants, and set him
to work making fishing lines. She also used some of the thread to sew,
using a needle made from a shard of bone.
Lawrence was
disappointed to hear that loincloths would have to wait, though; it was
more important to make pouches for holding and carrying things,
particularly liquids. He was surprised to hear that water could be
boiled over fire in such a rawhide bag. Caroline hadn't even gotten
around to making a knife yet, and their situation had become pretty
comfortable.
He had learned
what kind of firewood to gather, several ways to catch fish, and how to
gut and cook a small animal. Their next major project would be to kill a
large animal such as a deer, not so much for the meat (though they
would certainly preserve and eat it) as for the hide, from which they
could make serviceable moccasins and cover a small lean-to. It had
already rained on them once, not hard, and they had simply taken it as
an opportunity to try the pleasant experiment of screwing in the rain.
But eventually they would face a real storm, or at the very least winter
would arrive, and Caroline was carefully getting them ready to face
those challenges.
After only a week
their activities had assumed a comfortable rhythm. Lawrence was content
to let Caroline run the show, doing as he was told and learning what he
could of her vast knowledge. She was recreating the entire
surprisingly intricate technology of the stone age, one step at a time.
It was surprising how many things one took for granted until one had to
make them from scratch. The value of a needle and a few meters of
thread, for example, had taken on a significance Lawrence would have
found incomprehensible for most of his life.
Lawrence watched
her work in the firelight, carefully shaping the tip of a fish spear
into a barbed wooden hook. No matter what she did her hands moved with
precision borne of long practice. Had she not been thrown with him into
this empty world, he doubted if he would have lived more than a few
days. But already she had taken him from the depths of despair to a
kind of contentment he had never even realized was possible. She had
shared with him her knowledge, her confidence, and her body, and in
return he had only offered his tentative self-pity. But now he was
learning a new emotion, one he could not honestly say he had ever
experienced before. He was falling in love.
Falling.
He had once before felt something like this, but it had been a poisoned,
narcissistic love, a love he had thought was for Prime Intellect but
which had really been for his own sense of accomplishment. Lawrence had
not fallen in love with Prime Intellect; he had guided himself
gently and reliably into that state on the cushion of his own skill.
Lawrence was falling in love with Caroline, though. She was
temperamental, strong, unpredictable, and in many ways dangerous. He
never knew from one moment to another what she would do. He had no
control over her; was, in fact, at her mercy for his very survival. And
yet he loved her, and this reckless out-of-control love was an entirely
new thing to him.
Caroline caught his eyes and perhaps noticed the strange light there. "Penny for your thoughts?" she teased.
"You mean a copper penny?"
She laughed, a beautiful sound. "I guess not."
"I was just wondering if there's anything you aren't good at."
"I'm not much of a
computer programmer," she laughed, then sighed when she saw his hurt
expression. "I didn't mean it that way. I'm sorry."
"No, I guess I'll get over it."
"Actually there is something."
"What?"
"I've never tattooed myself."
Lawrence felt something cold seep through his system. "I thought all that was behind you."
She looked at him
and saw what was in his eyes -- was it fear or concern? She put the
spear aside and drew beside him. "Some of it is behind me. No more
Death stunts. This can be a good life, Lawrence, and I want it to go on
as long as possible. So don't worry about that.
"But I always had
this fantasy. It went, if somehow Prime Intellect would disappear and
everything would go back the way it was before, then I'd settle down and
be like I was before. I've been doing a lot of thinking, and I've
realized I'm never going to be like I was before.
"I'm not a shy
little grandma any more. I've become a daredevil. Getting tattooed
hurts like hell and getting a big one takes damn near forever when you
use primitive tools, but I've worn them for so long it doesn't feel
right not to have any. When I look down at my body I feel like
something is missing."
She paused,
chasing another thought. "You know, we could probably settle right here
and live long, comfortable, boring lives, but I've decided I don't want
to do that. When we get our shit together, which won't take more than a
couple of months, I intend to provision us and go somewhere. I've been
thinking of Arkansas."
"Arkansas!"
"I can't go back to being the person I was, but I can go home."
"But that's got to be a thousand miles from here! We have no maps, there's a desert..."
"Exactly. It will be a wonderful challenge."
"A challenge? We could be killed!"
She shrugged.
"Perhaps. Probably not. I'm very good at this sort of thing, Lawrence.
But yes, there would be risk. It would be work. But that's the
point; it would be something to do. I've been through this
before, Lawrence. Without something to do, life will get stale. And I
didn't go through all the shit I've gone through to be bored."
Caroline's
intensity startled him. This was the Caroline he had known in
Cyberspace, who had paddled around an entire planet simply to make a
point. Lawrence could not find the words to argue with her, so he just
said "I guess you have a point there."
She snuggled up to
him. "I need parameters, Lawrence. I need to be channeled. I'm very
happy right now, because there are no choices. The road leads in only
one direction. I'm afraid that when we get to the choices, when the
roads diverge, I'll lose this focus. And it's been so long...I don't
want to lose it."
"You've lost me, Caroline. I don't understand what you're talking about."
"Don't worry about
it." She kissed him, and they hugged tighter, and they spoke another
language with their bodies as the fire crackled.
THE FALL + 2 YEARS
The Spring thaw
had begun; soon it would be time to try crossing the first great natural
barrier they would face, the Rocky Mountains.
They had migrated
far north of Silicon Valley, perhaps as far as Oregon, in the hopes of
avoiding other barriers like the Grand Canyon and the great southwestern
desert. Their hope was to cross the mountains and set up camp for the
winter in the eastern foothills, then move leisurely across the plains
until they entered Arkansas through the Ozark Mountains. Since neither
of them remembered much detailed real-world geography, all their plans
were tentative.
Lawrence sat by
the edge of Caroline's chosen campsite and watched her set up. He had
long since learned to make a rudimentary camp, but Caroline preferred to
do the work herself. Meanwhile, he went through his bone needles and
bags of pigment, preparing to do for Caroline the one thing she had to
depend on him for.
She had decided
that her motif for this lifetime would be birds, and the first bird she
would wear would be a phoenix. Its outline was nearly complete, a black
tracing colored with soot collected from smoky fires. The fierce bird
reached for the sky, its upturned beak just grazing her neck and its
wingtips grazing her shoulders. In outline it resembled a bird of prey,
but when Lawrence began to color it in he planned to use bright hues
more remniscent of songbirds. The flames of its rebirth exploded from
the base of her spine, dim outlines waiting for him to find a better
grade of red pigment. The clays he had tried so far had not been bright
enough in the small test lines he'd done.
Lawrence privately
thought the tattooing was nuts, but he would never tell Caroline that;
she could probably tell how he felt, anyway. In any case he took his
work very seriously, because what he was doing would become a permanent
part, not just of a person, but of Caroline. And while he
thought she was crazy in many ways, he also loved her dearly. If she
wanted tattoos, he would give her tattoos. And they would be perfect;
he would accept nothing less.
The time and
effort required to create such a large design were simply amazing. They
would make camp and spend hours with the needle, Caroline stoically
enduring its jabs, and the result would be a few centimeters of black
tracing or a tiny patch of color. But the ritual of marking her seemed
to awaken a deep passion in Caroline, and evenings that began with the
needle nearly always ended with their most intense sex.
"I'm ready," she announced. "Are you?"
He nodded. She
had spread out a deer hide beside the fire; now she lay on her stomach
so he could work on her back. Lawrence had begun to color in the
phoenix's wing tips; he was working down her back symmetrically, so the
incomplete design would be as attractive as possible. Although Caroline
was silent while he worked, he could feel her flinch each time he
jabbed her with the needle. Although they both invested the time,
Caroline was the one who went through the pain.
And her reward,
Lawrence mused, would be a design over which she had no control, whose
appearance she was trusting totally to him, and which she would take
with her to the grave. She might never even get to see it, unless some
fortuitous circumstance arranged two mirror-like surfaces properly.
Anyone could see their face reflected in a pool of water, but getting a
look at your own back was a real challenge in a world without glass or
metal.
"That's enough for
tonight. I want to get a look at it in better light before I do any
more." He put the needle in the pigment bag and put it with the others
as Caroline turned over. Lawrence was a cautious tattooist, always
conscious of the fact that he couldn't undo what he was doing. But
there was nothing cautious about their fucking after the needles were
put up.
Later still he
pressed his ear to Caroline's belly, listening for the second heartbeat.
He couldn't hear it yet, though Caroline assured him it was there.
"Do you think the tattoo work is good for the baby?" he asked.
"You're not tattooing the baby," she said. "If it makes me feel joy, then why shouldn't it be good for her?"
"How do you know it's a her?"
Caroline laughed. "Before I was a dried-up old crone I had enough children to know what it feels like, Lawrence. It's a girl."
That settled it in
Lawrence's mind: He'd seen enough of Caroline's knowledge to know that
you never bet against her. But he was still a little surprised when
the baby came, and it really was a girl. By that time they had crossed
the mountains, and had taken temporary shelter in the mouth of a "cave"
that was really the ruin of an old mine.
Caroline knelt by
their fire and waited, so that gravity would help her baby come. As the
birth unfolded, Lawrence felt for the first time how crushingly alone
they were. If anything went wrong, there was very little he could do
about it. He felt a brief panic, wondering what he would do if by some
catastrophe she died in childbirth.
But nothing went
wrong, the baby dropped into Lawrence's waiting hands after only a few
hours of labor, and both she and Caroline emerged from the experience
healthy. Lawrence figured that Caroline's general high state of health
had a lot to do with that; she had not let her pregnancy slow them down
until it was time to actually settle in for the birth itself.
As Caroline nursed
and recovered, Lawrence explored the mine for a short distance, and
found a small yellow pebble that amazingly turned out to be malleable.
It was the first metal they had encountered. They speculated that
perhaps this speck of gold had survived Prime Intellect's cleanup
because it had been underground.
In any case, it was what inspired Caroline to name their baby girl Nugget.
THE FALL + 4 YEARS
The mountains had
started as a low haze on the horizon, then gradually grown as they had
moved on. Now they were within striking distance, and Lawrence
remembered the adventure of crossing the Rockies, having to rappel down
gorges with homemade rope and climb bare rock faces dozens of meters
high with his bare hands. Doing the same thing with a toddler and a new
baby would not be a pleasant undertaking.
But Caroline
assured him that there would be no such problems. "Those are the
Ozarks," she said. "They're dark, but passable. I was born there, but I
don't want to stop there. I want to go on to the Ouachitas."
The new baby, a
boy, had been born during their approach to the northern Ozark range,
across the long-fallow fields of what had once been Kansas and Missouri.
Because they could see the mountains when he came, Caroline named him
Ozark. Nugget was not yet old enough to walk, so they carried both
babies on cradleboards, a trick Caroline had learned in her studies of
actual Native Americans.
Her tattoo phoenix
was complete, but Caroline had gone on to ask for a swallow on her
thigh. Lawrence was convinced that she wouldn't stop until her body was
completely covered, but it would take them many more years to
accomplish that. Because the skin was more sensitive, it hurt more when
he jabbed her now. At times she had to bite down on a piece of leather
to keep from yelling.
But she always insisted that he keep working.
"Did it take this long for your friend in Cyberspace to tattoo you?" he asked as he worked.
"Fred used a knife. It's faster but less exact. And we didn't have to do anything else."
Rub, jab, jab.
Rub, jab, jab. Wipe, test, fill in where it didn't take. Caroline
nursed Nugget for awhile as he worked. Then she let the baby watch,
becoming hypnotized by the repetitive activity and finally falling
asleep.
"Don't you sometimes wish you had him here to do this instead of me?"
To his surprise
Caroline laughed. "What a thought! If I'd woken up here and found Fred
under that tree ... or Palmer ... you know what I'd have done?"
"No idea."
"I'd have killed them before they got the bright idea to kill me."
Lawrence looked up, startled.
"They weren't very
nice people in real life, Lawrence. I was real close to Fred, but only
because it was Cyberspace. There it was nothing but a sick game, and
my friends were the people sick enough to make it interesting. But here
... it isn't a game. What I called love back there and what I call
love here have nothing to do with one another."
"What do you call love here?"
"Lie back and find
out," she teased. As Caroline rode him he looked to the side and saw
Nugget watching them, and then he closed his eyes and let himself become
lost in the feelings.
THE FALL + 14 YEARS
"It won't be long now, Lawrence."
It was the only argument they had ever had. But it had gone on for years.
They had long
since made their home on the ridge separating West Mountain and Music
Mountain. It had been tempting to settle on Hot Springs Mountain
itself, nearer to the springs, but some instinct had told them that it
wouldn't be proper to live on such a unique spot. Besides, the ridge
offered a number of different nearby micro-climates supporting a wide
variety of gatherable plants and game.
Within the vacuum
that was once the town itself, besides the negative impressions of
long-disappeared buildings, a public fountain had survived, because it
had been made almost entirely of cut stone. The mortar had gone but the
stones remained in their original positions. It was not hard to plug
the gaps with wooden shims, which would expand to make a water-tight
seal when water was added, and to dig a channel guiding the spring's
runoff back onto the splash plate so that it could fill the basin. The
spring had a chance to cool some as it ran down the mountain, so that
the water temperature was suitable for a hot bath; even in the coldest
part of winter, the water emerging directly from spring heads was hot
enough to scald.
The man-made lakes
which once surrounded the town had disappeared with still obvious
violence, apparently when the dams restraining them had simply ceased to
exist. Floodwaters had cut deep gulleys in the valley lowlands, making
them treacherous. Occasionally they found arrowheads, which Caroline
quietly buried; she had not introduced the bow and arrow to her family,
and did not intend to. There were also a couple of Civil War era
fortifications, complete with descriptive signage engraved in stone.
Whenever she passed one of these, Caroline made sure to take a few
swings at the sign with the heaviest available rock; she wanted them
obliterated before her children learned to read.
She, of course,
would never teach them such a ridiculous thing, but Lawrence was
obstinate on the point and Caroline didn't think it would do any harm.
It would be forgotten in a few generations, since it served no purpose
in their primitive lifestyle.
To celebrate their
arrival, Caroline had Lawrence work the gold nugget into a short wire.
She used it to pierce her nose, and then bent it into a simple ring.
After a while, Lawrence even got used to her wearing it all the time.
Nugget and Ozark
roamed freely, together and alone, sometimes miles from home. From one
of these expeditions Nugget returned with an improbable prize, a tiny
ice-clear stone which caught the sunlight and reflected it in brilliant
flashes. It was a faceted diamond. Caroline told her daughter only
that it was exceedingly rare, letting her think it was somehow related
to the natural quartz crystals which were all over the place.
In warm weather
Nugget sometimes wore a loincloth, in Lawrence's fashion, and sometimes
went nude like her mother. Ozark had adopted Lawrence's more modest
habits. The younger children, male and female, went nude unless the
weather required otherwise; Caroline refused to force them into modesty,
and they had demonstrated little inclination in that direction. All of
the children had seen them having sex; Caroline insisted that they make
no effort to hide it. Fortunately, the kids seemed to accept their
explanation that they were "playing an old peoples' game."
Except that Nugget would soon be ready to play it, too.
"I can feel it.
In a month or two, she'll be a woman. I haven't hidden it from her, you
know; I've shown her my own period, and she knows what it's for."
"Of course, you never hide anything from the kids, except technology."
"How else would you do it? You want to make them feel bad about themselves so they'll look to stones and metal for comfort?"
"Caroline..."
"You want them to maybe re-invent the wheel, then steam, then..."
"Caroline, stop it."
"You know where it leads."
Lawrence sighed. "She's twelve years old."
"She's going to be
a woman. We've gone at this from every angle. If you think we should
try to start a community, then we have to consider genetic diversity,
breeding years...we have to start as soon as possible, and we have to
get as many combinations as possible off of our limited gene pool."
"We've gone over this a hundred times."
"But soon you will have to do
it. I want my daughter to have a proper coming of age. You should
also be thinking about Ozark; before long it will be time to do
something for him."
"Do something to him, you mean," Lawrence said sullenly.
"It's the only way, Lawrence."
They had argued
about it for more than six years, but when the time came he found
himself powerless to contradict Caroline's will. Fortunately she had
spoken with Nugget, so his daughter did most of the work for him just as
Caroline had done most of the work all along. She explored his body
with microscopic fascination, especially his cock which she carefully
teased erect. There was little really new for her in all this, since
she had seen him fucking Caroline plenty of times. He wouldn't have
been surprised, either, to learn she had already been experimenting with
Ozark. What was new was that she was fertile, and so was he.
Working slowly,
Nugget completed their incestuous coupling, working her way slowly down
his cock just as Caroline had done that first time in California
fourteen years earlier. But while Nugget moved with her mother's
carefulness and deliberation, she did not possess Caroline's amazing
certitude. And she was so small, like a feather atop him, and her grip
on his cock so tight. Lawrence found himself responding to her despite
his reservations; his body was literally making up its own mind to go
along.
When he came he
yelled out loud. He was quite unprepared for its intensity, as if he
was a participant in some primitive magic ritual which had unleashed a
strange power in him. In a sense, reflecting later, he would suppose
that that was exactly what had happened.
But Nugget's
coming of age ritual wasn't over yet. With a beatific smile, she
brought his tattoo pigments. It was this idea as well as Nugget's age
which had made him fight Caroline so hard. But having already fucked
his daughter he felt it pointless to put up further resistance. Nugget
had already decided she wanted a feather on her shoulder blade, in honor
of her mother's bird tattoos. At least it was a small and simple
design, the work of a single sitting. Lawrence completed it as quickly
as possible.
Having covered
nearly half of Caroline's body by this painstaking method, it was
impossible for Lawrence to miss the difference in their reactions.
Unlike her mother, Nugget did not seem to get excited by the discomfort
of tattooing. If anything, she drifted into a serene kind of calm and
even stopped flinching. As he worked, he realized what the difference
was; for Caroline, tattoos were a gateway to passion, but for Nugget,
they would be the gateway to adulthood.
When he finished
they stood to face each other in silence. Like her mother, Nugget might
not ever see her first tattoo; Caroline still hadn't seen her phoenix.
"I don't know why this was so hard for you, Father, but thank you for
doing it."
He smiled crookedly and touched her shoulder. "You're a woman now, Nugget. You should call me Lawrence."
And from that point on, she did.
THE FALL + 42 YEARS
Death always cast a
solemn mood over the village; Ozark had lost his own second son,
Limerick, to a fall from one of the cliffs on the far side of West
Mountain. In all their lives the funeral pyre atop Hot Springs Mountain
had been built only four times. Besides Limerick there had been two
hunting accidents and a death in childbirth. The pyre was not used for
the various stillbirths and babies that had to be sacrificed because
there was no hope for their survival; these, as Mother Caroline had
taught them, had not ever been human and it was wrong to grieve for them
in the same way. Most of these were simply exposed and taken by
animals.
It was Ozark's
first time to build the pyre. As Eldest Father of the group, the task
had always fallen to Lawrence; but now Ozark was the Eldest Father,
because this pyre was for Lawrence.
Even Limerick's
death had not caused Ozark to feel such crippling sorrow. If it had not
been for the need to do right by Father Lawrence he thought he might
just find a cave and sit until he either starved or saw the vision that
would heal his pain.
Ozark was not
alone. Although the task of readying the pyre was supposed to be
solitary, nearly everyone had turned out to watch him work. They stood
back respectfully, observing the injunction against helping, but also
watching his every movement, watching the limp form atop the wooden
frame, as if Father Lawrence might display his obvious divinity one
final time by rising directly into the sky on his own rather than
waiting to ride the currents of the fire.
Of course Lawrence
and Caroline had never attempted to convince their children that they
were in any way different, but any fool could see that they were. For
one thing, who had been their parents? For another, they knew things.
No matter what problem cropped up, one or the other of them always knew
something to do about it. And half that primal wisdom was now gone.
Mother Caroline
was the last to arrive, waiting quite properly until all preparations
were complete. She nodded, and Ozark prepared the flame. It was not
proper to use the offspring of a life-giving flame such as the campfire
to light the pyre; Ozark was supposed to light a new flame starting with
the fire bow. It was a skill they all knew, and it took only a few
minutes.
Ozark had done his work well. The pyre went up fast.
The flames
absolved Ozark of his responsibility and he stepped back among the
crowd, where Nugget hugged him. They watched Mother Caroline as the
flames rose. She was standing perfectly still, determined to show her
strength in this painful hour.
But in the dancing
light, they could easily see the tears running down her face. And as
the pyre burned down, she began to simply cry.
None of them had
ever experienced this phenomenon before. It was almost as shocking to
see Mother Caroline showing such a weakness as it was to be facing the
loss of Father Lawrence. As the pyre burned further her grief deepened,
until she sank to her knees and wailed.
Tentatively, Ozark
approached her. She accepted his embrace and cried into his shoulder,
finding if not comfort than at least the assurance that she was not
alone in her grief.
But she was alone,
more alone than any of them could ever know. She had thought that her
nearly six-century reign as Queen of the Death Jockeys and main consort
of Fred the Psycho would have prepared her for nearly anything, but as
black smoke drifted into the darkening Arkansas sky she found that she
had no defences against the blacker pain of her own grief.
THE FALL + 73 YEARS
Nugget had moved
the birch bark pages from hiding place to hiding place during her long
life, selecting the first hollow tree for this purpose when she was only
eight years old. Some of the barks had deteriorated -- even the
amazing birch had its limits -- and she had recopied her notes onto
newer pages to preserve them. Using the gift of writing, which she had
learned from Father Lawrence, she had set about recording her parents'
secrets, looking in her stolen snatches of overheard conversation for
the pattern which would explain where they had come from and what their
purpose had been in coming to this place to raise their family.
Mostly what she
had was words, scraps of language whose meanings were completely unknown
to her. She fingered the bark, remembering the sounds she had heard,
usually whispered quietly in the night when Caroline and Lawrence
thought they were alone. Some had always carried an accusatory tone, as
if they were somehow dirty:
TEKNOLIJEE
WAR
RADIO
TEEVEE
LEKTRISITEE
Others had been
conveyed in warmer, more urgent tones, usually as they discussed some
problem or other that needed solving. Usually these discussions would
end with some relatively simple trick being revealed that diverted the
stream, removed the stain, or whatever was called for, but sometimes the
discussions went on for long hours as various options were discussed,
and these words were more often heard on Lawrence's lips:
TRIGONOMEE TREE
KALKEWLUS
VAPOR POINT
SPESIFIK GRAVITEE
OKSIDISER
Nugget often
wondered what manner of tree the Trigonomee was, and what its useful
properties might be. At least a tree was something she could visualize;
what, on the other hand, was a gravitee, and how was a spesifik
gravitee different from any other kind? Lawrence had never spoken of
any other kind, at least not within earshot of Nugget.
Then there were
the words concerning origins, which were spoken with such loathing or
sorrow that their importance was crystal clear, if not their meanings:
SIBERSPASE
KOMPEWTER
CHANGE
PRIMINTELEKT
Change was
an ordinary enough word, but there was nothing ordinary about the way
her parents said it when they thought they were alone. Sometimes, when
Caroline was very tired, she would talk of the "World Before." She
would never say much about it; someone might say it was a shame they
could not find game without a long and tiring search, or kill a bear
without getting dangerously close to it, and Caroline would mutter that
"that was something for the World Before." Before what? Before the
Change, perhaps?
In any case, she
had to find out soon or never, because Caroline was dying. She had
never quite been the same after Lawrence's death, but she had still been
active, even energetic. She just hadn't taken such a direct role in
the community's activities. She had gradually loosened her grip, to the
point that now there were many youngsters who had never even met her.
Then she had gotten slower and quieter, and lately it had become quite
hard for her to walk up a difficult slope. Nugget wasn't so young
herself; she had already survived Ozark, who had died in his sleep, and
her youngest brother Pilgrim was fading fast. He had some kind of
condition which made his movements painful, and for which Mother
Caroline's wisdom had offered no help.
And now for two days she hadn't eaten.
"I have ripe blackberries," Nugget said as she approached Caroline's shelter. "They will do you good."
Caroline looked at
Nugget, and could see that Nugget suspected. "You know I have no need
of those," she said softly. "My time is coming."
Nugget was surprised how tiny and despairing her voice sounded when she said, "Why?"
Caroline laughed, and coughed a little. "I have to," she said. "It would be wrong to try and fight it."
"Mother, I need to talk to you before you go."
Caroline smiled. "About what, child, your birch tablets?"
Nugget froze, her eyes wide.
"I've known about
those for more than fifty years. They seemed harmless enough, and your
father and I figured that if they were the most you could make of our
indiscretions, then we weren't doing too badly."
"Fifty years," Nugget said numbly.
"Your father was
flattered. I thought we should confront you with them and tell you to
stop, but it would have probably caused more trouble than it was worth.
I'll make you a deal, daughter. Help your old mother to the spring so I
can take a hot bath, and I'll tell you a story. I'll tell you a story
about the World Before."
Tears welled in Nugget's eyes. "Fifty years. You make a fool of me for my entire life, then..."
"You're not a fool, daughter. I'll tell you why we did it."
"If I ... If I ..." Nugget sobbed. "If I help you down, I'm not sure you'll be able to make it back up the path."
"I don't think that will be a problem."
Still weeping, Nugget helped Caroline to her feet and down the first steps to the path to the old fountain.
The hot water slipped around her like a velvet skin, and Caroline tried to slip into the past.
"Daughter, do you have any idea how old I am?"
"I'm counted seventy-one solstices, so you must have seen at least eighty-five."
"I am over seven hundred and seventy years old."
Nugget sobbed louder. "Please, mother, don't tell me lies at a time like this."
"No lies, child. I
lived a hundred and six years in the World Before, and I was dying then
as I am dying now. I didn't know it, but your father was working as I
was dying. He was a great man. There has never been another like him,
but he was not perfect and he made one terrible mistake.
"With the help of
many thousands of other people, your father built a vast and complicated
thing. The word for it is on your tablets; it was called a computer.
That's nothing but a meaningless word to you, and that's all it needs to
be. But of all the artisans who dedicated themselves to the making of
the computer, your father was the most important, because he was the one
that taught it to think. Without the others to help him Lawrence could
not have made the computer, but without Lawrence, the others could not
have made it live; you have to remember that."
"Okay, Mother."
"The computer
could not disobey Lawrence, but he was afraid other people would use it
for bad purposes. So he taught it to answer first to its own
conscience, the conscience he had created for it. Then your father set
it loose, confident that it was capable of doing only good for the
people of the World Before. Even Lawrence himself would not be able to
make it contradict its nature."
She paused, and Nugget prodded her. "What happened?"
"The computer got a
bright idea," Caroline said in a sour voice. "It figured out how to
make people immortal. So it made us immortal."
"Just like that?"
"That was the
least of its powers. It remade the world. There was nothing we
couldn't have for the asking. There was nothing we couldn't do.
Nothing could ever hurt us." She coughed again. "It was fucking
boring."
Their eyes met.
"It was the worst
thing ever. Nothing mattered. Not pain, not accomplishments, not
anything." Caroline touched one of Nugget's tattoos, the small spiral
which Ozark had tattooed above her right breast to celebrate their first
coupling after his Vision Quest, when they were finally both adults.
"After the Change, the World Before became another of the words you
overheard. Cyberspace. In Cyberspace, all you'd have to do is make a
wish and your tattoos would be gone."
Involuntarily, Nugget put her hand over Caroline's, as if to defend the design.
"Or you could move
'em around. Get new ones -- it didn't take any time, didn't have to
hurt. See? Nothing mattered. I've worn many different sets of tattoos
myself. But these are the ones that matter to me, because these are
the ones I'll die with. That was the least of it, of course. You could
grow a few extra arms, turn yourself into a bat, fly like a bird,
whatever you wanted. But why bother?"
"Mother...What happened then?"
"For almost six hundred years, nothing happened worth mentioning. Then, finally, your father and I killed it."
"How? If it was so powerful, how could you kill it?"
"Your father built
it, remember. He'd never designed it to run the whole world, only to
be a good helper. He knew its weaknesses. So we were able to trick it,
and it broke." She swept her hand. "Somehow we ended up here."
Nugget dipped her hand in the hot water and splashed her face. None of this was what she had expected.
"If you will do something else for me, I'll tell you one more thing."
"What, Mother?"
"Promise me that
you will give the birch barks to the Eldest Father to be burned with me.
Those words belong to the World Before. They may be harmless, but I'd
rather not have your father's only memory be those reminders of his
worst failure."
"What will you tell me for promising this?"
"I'll tell you the computer's name."
She looked down. "I'll burn them, Mother. There's nothing I can hope to learn from them now, anyway."
"It was called Prime Intellect."
Nugget nodded.
"Now if you value
the memory of your father, you will never repeat that or any of your
other words to anybody else. Let them die with me."
"As you wish, Mother."
"Then leave me alone to rest."
Nugget didn't have to ask for how long.
Caroline was too
thin to float in the hot water, so she let her head fall back on the
hard stone fountain wall and looked up at the Sun.
If she could
somehow pull it off again, magically rise from the healing waters as a
young girl and return to her people, she would do it. They needed her.
There were so few of them, and the challenges they faced so great, that
their survival was far from certain. One disease or natural disaster
could wipe them out.
But that's the way
it was with things that mattered; you never got to find out how they
came out, if they were really worth anything. Caroline had done her
part. She had made her decisions and stood her ground. One day
somebody would figure out how to use the fire bow to launch arrows and
how to make them fly true. Then someone would shoot one at his brother.
Caroline had done what she could to put that day as far as possible in
the future.
As a result some
of her children would die, because in order to hunt they would have to
get close to their prey, close enough for their prey to strike back.
This playing God business sure was a pain in the ass, Caroline thought.
No wonder Lawrence had gone a little loopy in Cyberspace.
But he had been a
good man. He had never approved of Caroline's plan for their family, to
act like some kind of snide Prometheus who could have given them
the secrets of metalworking and gunpowder and steam power but who
didn't bother because it was more amusing to make them struggle in
stone-age savagery. Yet he had gone along, because he already knew the
other way didn't work. If this way didn't work either, what would it
mean?
The doubts and
questions circled in her head endlessly, chasing for an answer that
would never come. They were still chasing when she slipped beneath the
trickling waters and found darkness.
* END
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