The Devil Delivered and Other Tales (11 page)

Jenine let it drop. Just another smoke screen. William watched her, saw her mind work, and knew her soul. All so clear now.

“What remains unspoken,” Jack Tree said, repacking the pipe he’d yet to pass to anyone, “is what has brought us here. I think the time for true words has begun.”

Jenine leaned back and steepled her fingers, elbows perched on the arms of the chair. A gesture William had seen a thousand times. A gesture of lies and secret contempt. “Very well. First of all, to whom do I speak? You, Jack, or Daniel Horn?”

Jack Tree looked away, his eyes squinting as he gazed out across the valley.

“Begin any time,” Daniel Horn said. He wouldn’t let her narrow her targeting. If she had hidden knives of a personal sort, the kind of information NOAC operatives loved to collect, she’d have to throw them at all three men. Made wounding random, and of uncertain efficacy. No leverage here, Jenine.

“NOAC has NUN approval for the following preemptive actions, gentlemen. I make that clear now, should you believe—erroneously—that your foes are not united on this matter. We are absolutely united.” She paused, tracking her severe expression across all three faces opposite her. A conscious gesture, almost mechanical. She’d practiced, but not enough, not nearly enough.

“We’re not illiterate, Doctor,” Daniel said. “You’re united on nothing. Major crises in Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Ukraine, South Africa—the whole damn game’s blowing up in your faces, and that’s not even mentioning the economic mess. Now, do go on, Doctor.”

“Stealth strikes,” Jenine snapped. “Full ground incursion with punitive objectives. Oil fields reclaimed, mineral rights on all lands acquired by your peoples retracted once the areas are secured.” She scanned the faces again, this time more successfully. “Any attempt to resist these missions will be met with the full retaliatory might of NOAC military force. Your people will die, gentlemen.”

Max Ohman barked, “Justification?”

Jenine smiled. “Our major concern is for the safety of all indigenous peoples in the Midwest, and all citizen populations of the North American Confederacy who have been assessed as at risk from the Medicine Wheel Project. Your stress data is in my opinion flawed—”

“Since when did you become an engineer?” Max asked, his teeth still bared.

“My opinion has been granted authority, Mr. Ohman.”

“By whom?”

“NOAC and NUN have placed me in the primary position as negotiator in these proceedings.”

“Big effing deal,” Max said. “You may have authority in some kind of illusory political sense, but I was challenging your opinion. Crunch some numbers for me, Doctor. Show me the flaws in the equations. Would you like pad and paper? Us engineers still use those, you know.”

“You, Mr. Ohman,” Jenine said coolly, “have been granted the privilege of attending this meeting as an observer. That is a privilege I am empowered to retract at any time.”

Max snorted and looked away.

“Now,” Jenine resumed, “where was I?”

“Killing my people in order to save them,” Daniel Horn said.

“More than just your people are in danger,” Jenine said. “NOAC is responsible to its citizens—”

“Since when?” Max asked.

She ignored him, and continued. “We are obliged to protect them from unwarranted risks, arising from either corporate activities, or external political instability.”

Daniel asked softly, “Are you suggesting that my position as head of the Lakota Nation is inherently unstable?”

“Your recent actions in concert with Ladon Corporation have suggested this, Mr. Horn.”

“Your ultimatum?” Daniel asked.

“Close down the project immediately. The sanctions will be lifted, and normal relations can resume.”

“Dr. MacAlister,” Daniel began, leaning forward, “you more than anyone must know that my people and your people have never had normal relations. As for sanctions, you have maintained the imposition of the most insidious kinds of sanctions for five hundred years and counting. Do you actually imagine that you can still hurt us?”

Jack Tree spoke, “Kill us, yes, by all means. What is a few more scars on your conscience?”

“She can’t,” Max said. “Her threats are sheer bluff. Every peripheral nation in the world is watching this play out. Secondary and primary nations are gridlocked on this, politically and philosophically. Protests and riots are erupting in one major city after another. It’s all falling apart, all because one lone independent nation said yes to the dream.”

Jack Tree said, “You were so certain, Doctor, weren’t you? Convinced by all your covert anthropological data. You thought the dreamtimes were dead. You’ve plied us with schemes designed to make us invisible, even to ourselves. You called it the application of successful adaptative cultural adjustment. For all your efforts to save us by destroying us, we have still defied you. We have met our dream.” He paused and studied the steatite pipe in his hands. “Not, I’ll grant you, in the way I would have imagined it. The pattern in the skies is new to me, so new that it sometimes frightens me. But I am old, my days are almost done. What I pass on to my children is and always will be the one thing you cannot control, cannot shape to suit your ends. My gift is the history of the damned, and my poison is truth. You see, Doctor, I
remember
.”

Jenine said, “You’re all making a terrible mistake.”

“If we are,” Daniel said, “it will be ours, not yours. Possessing something—even freedom—is two-edged. Our days of sucking at your collective tit are over. The time’s come for you to let go.” He smiled, and it was a smile of sad wisdom. “I had hoped for your blessing, for the cleansing of your hands. But no, you still try to possess us. If it comforts you to call that possession something else, like protection, compassion, or a justifiable maternal instinct, then so be it. Whatever word you choose, it still means chains to us.”

Entry: American NW, July 11, 2014

“Enough of the preliminaries,” Jenine said, “let’s get to negotiating this treaty.”

Jack Tree repacked his pipe and set a burning ember to the steatite bowl. “We have come to listen, Dr. MacAlister.”

“As representative of the North American Confederacy and spokesperson for the divine will of the Triumvirate of
A.C
. 14, I am authorized to negotiate the honorable purchase of the following items from those gathered here as representatives of the Lakota Nation and related sovereign peoples of the Midwest Hole; said representatives being thusly identified and duly recorded: John ‘Jack’ Tree Whose Roots are Deep, and Daniel Horn, of the Lakota Nation. Do you acknowledge your presence here at this gathering?”

“We do.”

“Excellent, we’re off to a fine start that will benefit us all. We are, as you know, newcomers to your lands, granted by right of God and King, and by right of Manifest Destiny to rule over and subjugate all peoples we encounter should they prove incapable of opposing us. Regardless of our motive, our methods remain singular in their objective; to wit, either by direct violent action upon the persons of said indigents, or by systematic destruction of their habitat and subsistence patterns, or by insipid destruction of their social fabric and way of life as categorized by cultural affiliation, through such deus ex machina vectors such as disease, alcohol, enforced indoctrination of our religious beliefs, legal removal of children for purposes of education and assimilation, restriction to peripheral lands unsuitable to sustaining traditional lifestyles and conducive to general cultural deterioration through long-term programs to ensure dependency, loss of dignity, removal of personal responsibility in matters of familial care, education, sustenance procurement, shelter maintenance, and so on.

“Toward the satisfactory completion of our singular goal, we are herewith purchasing from those in attendance and those peoples they represent, the following: your land, your life.

“In return, and as payment for the above, we offer you one hundred million buffalo skulls, the rusted hulks of five hundred thousand combines, desiccated farms, diseases, substance abuse, dependency, structured lives, handouts, starvation, hatred, loss of intellectual and spiritual property, identity, will, dignity, and pride. Sign here, please.”

“No.”

“I am empowered to offer the following as further incentive. Complete biological data on peripheral population and projections leading to the inevitable conclusion: to wit, within six generations those populations centered in the secondary and primary civilizations, characterized by protective measures of extreme technological life-sustaining intervention, will become extinct as a species, due primarily to pressure and displacement by a new speciation of the
Homo sapiens
hominid lineage, which will arise in pressured environments commonly found among peripheral populations, such as yours.

“In exchange for this data, we request intensive biological analysis of your peoples over the next century, including the right to blood and its protective properties thereof, including rad resistant properties, vaccine and serum potential, immunodefense systems against toxemia and related syndromes, new organs and new properties of organs, neurological developments and all genetic traits determined to be conducive to species survival. In short, we ask for your life. We’ll worry about the land later.”

“It seems,” Daniel Horn said, “that your Manifest Destiny possesses a heretofore unknown appendix, wherein lies the inevitable conclusion, a conclusion you have espoused as wholly natural: species extinction. Unfortunately, the species about to become extinct is your own.”

“You do not understand our desperation.”

“I do now, Dr. MacAlister.”

“Will you help us? Will you save us?”

“In the manner you have just described, no, we won’t help you.”

“But don’t you see? We have bled for you. For five hundred years we have bled for you, for what we did to you.”

“That blood is unhealthy, Doctor. Do you grasp my meaning?”

“Whatever happened to reciprocity?”

“It lives on, but it was never what you believed it to be. You saw it with a scientist’s eyes, Doctor, so you saw wrong. I’m not really interested in explaining it to you, Doctor. William has come to understand, finally. You might want to ask him.”

“He tells me nothing.”

“Nothing you want to hear.”

“Will you help us, Daniel? A few drops of blood? The conveyance of your dead?”

“We’ll think about it, Doctor.”

American NW, Midwest Hole, July 14,
A.C
. 14

The coyotes streamed down the hillside, driven from their invisible places and becoming four distinct mercurial shapes parting the high magenta grasses. They reached the dry riverbed then scattered. William blinked, and they were gone.

Somewhere behind him rose a ragged slope, lifting the earth into an undercut cresting wave that hung frozen over the flat sweeps of sand and silt. Its shadow slowly crawled across him. He remembered standing on the ridge, the earth giving under him, a heavy, bruising fall.

His backpack lay a dozen meters away, resting against a tuft of grass. The flap had torn, and he saw a liquid glint of metal in the darkness within.

It felt over. The journey cut short, incomplete. He didn’t have the strength to get up.

He’d seen into the coyotes, read their new imperatives like blushes of red behind their eyes. Opportunists, newly aggressive and far too clever for comfort. When night came, they, too, would come.

Life’s cycles are flavored with irony. They’ve been following me, following the scent of blood, and in an hour they’ll come to close the book. Patient bastards. What’s ten thousand years, after all?

He stared at the object inside his backpack, the clarity of his thinking almost too bitter to bear.

Someone had challenged planetary laws. Semipermeable, pliable polysteel that shunted friction like water off a seal’s back, turned heat into static—a hundred trillion threads a single molecule thick, each kilometers long, accommodating stress factors in the nano-bloodstream of carbon corpuscles.
When I say it bends, I mean it bends, Doctor.

The laws dictated equatorial placement: rotational imperatives. Ladon tried acquiring it. Rivals and nations caught wind and went to the New United Nations. Before long, they’d hammered so many legal spikes into the equation, Ladon couldn’t buy a bucket of dirt if it came from the equator. They had no choice but to look elsewhere, and to challenge toe-to-toe the exigencies of rotational dynamics.

It took eleven years before the Lady and Max Ohman stood atop the mountain, raised high the stone tablet, then swung it shattering down. Not an elevator as much as a slide, the tail of a spermatozoa, slanting skyward. Another miracle of engineering tethering it in place.

Nobody should reach that high. Frail humans should never strive for godhood. The wax melts; justice is meted out. Exaltation is suspect. Anybody with balls like that deserves to get them chopped off. They stand so tall, their shadows cover the world, and we frail humans begrudge the loss of light upon our upturned faces.

Not that we ever paid any attention to it when it showered down its brilliant promise.

But never mind that.

Nobody should reach that high. No matter the quagmire of emotions drowning in insipid fears and flaws, no matter the primal pit of terror bubbling uneasy beneath those words. It was a statement voiced the world over, there in those shadows cast down by achievement. Sometimes a whine, mostly vicious with blind, unreasoning hatred. The unspoken secret remained: What the shadows hid was darkness in the soul, and its voice was spite, and it said, Nobody should reach that high.

Well, Ladon reached, was reaching even now. It seemed the world was having trouble living with that fact.

An hour before dusk. Maybe less. William continued staring at the object in the backpack. He felt sickness in his flesh, something like a fever, but somehow sour as well. A taste of corruption.

The ghosts were gone. He’d sent them off, riding the storm as it tracked the blistered lands of the Hole. He hoped one would come back in time, one in particular. He’d not seen that one yet, but he was sure it was there, somewhere in the army of dead that had dogged his tracks.