The Devil Delivered and Other Tales (15 page)

Then there was smoke.

*   *   *

Old Jim turned off the television set. There hadn’t been much of a picture, but since the satellite feed was from far across the Atlantic, that was no surprise. He went to the window and looked at the distant horizon. Nothing to mark the burning firestorm that now raged hundreds of kilometers to the northwest. Come the morning, he knew, there would be smoke, and the sun would turn coppery as it traversed the sky.

“Now, that’s what I call a fuckup,” Stel said from the sofa.

Jim grunted.

“Cheer up,” Stel said. “She’s got to leave his room sometime.”

He turned to her. Stel’s ample legs were crossed, the denim of her jeans taut. She had a cigarette in one hand, a mug of coffee in the other. There were lines bracketing her mouth, her still-full lips pale and set in a half smile. A face of the modern age—one look into those seen-it-all eyes—the face of history. A face needing tender hands.

She must have seen something in his expression, for she said quietly, “I’ve had my eyes on you for years. But you were lusting after someone else.”

“I was?”

“Grief, I think she’s called.”

He squinted, blinked, then turned back to the window.

“Wrong guess?” she asked behind him.

“Wrong guess,” he answered. A moment passed. “Hate’s the lady, Stel. You should’ve seen me. I pored over books, I learned all there was, every magazine, every goddamned article.”

“About what?”

“Cancer. Diseases. Pesticides, herbicides. Did you know cancer was the unmentioned epidemic as far back as the Eighties? Cigarettes were outlawed virtually everywhere and the number of smokers went way down, but still the stats climbed. No change. No change at all. It was all lies. What killed us was in the air, in the water, in the packaging for our foods. Then, later, in GMO and irradiation and microwaving. Cancer viruses, prions, systemic rejection so bad, people became allergic to being alive. It was all going down, Stel, all going down.” His eyes slowly lost their focus, seeing nothing beyond the glass. “Remember Regina in ’06? A quarter million head incinerated in two weeks—you could see the glow from Saskatoon. Funny, isn’t it. Before Regina was called Regina, it was called Pile of Bones, only then it was a mountain of buffalo bones.” He paused, rubbed the bristle on his chin. “Round and round. A quarter million head every two weeks. And then there were none. And then all the young people, shaking like leaves, going senile—like some bad science-fiction movie. It wasn’t fair, how they died. Not fair.”

“Still hating, Jim?”

He shrugged, focus returning, close this time, to his own face reflected in the windowpane. “The passion goes. I’d kind of expected it to eat me up from the inside, but it didn’t.”

“It’s the ones left behind,” Stel said. “I lived nearly twenty years in the city, did you know that? When I was young. Never was a country girl, now ain’t that a joke.”

He faced her again, wondering at the sudden jump in her thoughts, catching the slight shift in her tone. Her eyes were on the table. She leaned forward and fished another cigarette from the pack, lit it, then leaned back again. “I lived with a woman in the city. Twelve years.” She looked up, grinned. “I go both ways, you know.”

“Lucky you.”

Her gaze returned to the table, seeing back years and years. “She died. Reaction to tear gas. Oh, we were hell on wheels. What a life. No tomorrow. We knew it, we pushed all the way, every damn minute. We flew high. We screamed at the State, fought every surrender. And it was all for nothing. I should’ve died with her, I should never have lived on, so long, all these years. Wasn’t just her dying that broke my heart, it was everything, it was losing all the battles, never winning—they took it all away, called it efficiency, streamlining. Said the global economy was to blame, but that was all bullshit. Excuses for cold hearts—” She looked up. “What a laugh. We thought we were fighting policies, but we weren’t. We were fighting cold hearts, cruel thoughts, blood like ice. You can’t beat that, because you can’t get in, can’t get past that wall. Me, I wanted to go out hot, white hot. Burning fierce. Now look at me.” She smiled. “Old and soft and hiding here in this dying town.”

Jim walked over and sat beside her, close enough so that their thighs pressed together. “What a pair we are, eh?”

After a moment, she leaned against him. “See what happens,” she muttered, “when you peel back the pages.”

“Life, Stel, nothing but life.”

“It’s never just one life, Jim. We should live lots of lives. That’s the whole point. Either that, or go out quick. Quick and bright.”

He watched her pull hard on her cigarette. “Should quit that,” he said. “It’ll kill you for sure.”

Stel raised an eyebrow, then joined in his laughter.

Net

BOGQUEEN:
What a mess.

LUNKER:
Well, at least the Lakota withdrew from the area.

CORBIE TWA:
Big deal. Those tar sands will burn underground for decades. Cappin the wells is just for show.

BOGQUEEN:
Clearing the air. What’s the news on Lapland? All I heard was another incursion.…

LUNKER:
Went sour. God knows who’s supplying the peripherals, but they’re hammering anything that comes close. Restricted weapons to boot. Clearly, they have an inside line, and have had it for a while, enough to prepare.

BOGQUEEN:
Anybody else get the feeling we’ve been living in serious ignorance of the real goings on in this untidy little world of ours?

PACEMAKER:
Muckers, picked up an unofficial burst. SF’s lit up. Half the city’s on fire, the other half is one giant lynch mob. Burning limos, burning mansions, burning millionaires …

CORBIE TWA:
Had it comin, every fuckin one of em. The have-nots take back what they never had but always wanted. The long sleep’s finally over, I guess.

BOGQUEEN:
Don’t jump the gun. NOAC will come down hard. You’ll see.

PACEMAKER:
Maybe, maybe not. Command structure’s in trouble, so goes the whisper. Nothing’s been mobilized yet, except the world news teams.

LUNKER:
Ouch.

PACEMAKER:
In any case, the rest of the world is slowly swimming into the vortex. Tactical nukes flicking everywhere. SINJO’s massing troops to head to Pakistan, but China’s seriously distracted by that Taiwan counterstrike. Picked up a loose sat feed—fields of bodies, square mile after square mile. The Chinese army’s collapsed—

CORBIE TWA:
What’s new?

PACEMAKER:
Some nukes were flung at Taiwan, got shot down. Glowworms flicked Biks in Beijing last night, at least two. It’s going haywire over there.

LUNKER:
Scratch old China.

CORBIE TWA:
And what’s SINJO without China? Japanese hardware, none of it working since the islands started making bright spots in the ring of fire.

PACEMAKER:
We drown in the sea of our discontent.

LUNKER:
Any news on William?

BOGQUEEN:
None. Consensus is he’s gone down.

PACEMAKER:
Seems likely. What a shame, there was a real tide rising under him.

BOGQUEEN:
Mind you, it’s only been three days.

Saskatchewan Precinct, Val Marie

Heel-rocking.

Images of father, never still when standing, always back and forth, a lecturer uncomfortably constrained by the slow imperative of words.

“Mapping the brain, William. Sociobiology’s end run. We are nature, not nurture. All is predictable now.”

Heel-rocking.

“Bullshit. That’s how you respond to those assertions, son. Hogwash in tender company. It’s human conceit, such claims. The defense lawyers are having a field day. The notion of justice is out the proverbial window.”

Rocking.

He seemed pleased by this, the dark half of his purportedly nonexistent soul showing. Books on shelves provided his backdrop, his hunched shoulders seeming comfortable in taking their collective weight. “Of course, it’s pointless arguing the subject rationally. The ammunition that blows the sociobiologists out of the water isn’t found under the microscope. The rational age is concluded, son. Time’s come again for poets.”

Poets. Did they have the refutation at hand? Could the imperfect connotative refraction of words spoken, words written, reveal the lie of the genetic determinists? Who’d listen?

Father and his slow measured words, like sticks tossed onto a bonfire, the match and white-spirit in his hands, the boy tied to the hard, unyielding post. Connote, denote, put the ambient strains together, concoct a meaningful wholeness out of the parts, find the sum greater and thus the lesson to those sociobiologists. Mapping with anal certitude, a crow on the lips, a savage rush of freedom riding the conclusion.

“We are locked in the rational world’s death throes. But when logic hurts the powers that be, the subject in question is deftly made subjective. You unplug its efficacy by claiming noncontextuality. That’s how the powers that be disarmed history as a discipline comprising lessons in human nature anchored in time. That was then; this is now. Now bears no relation to then; then tells us nothing of now. We were amoebas then; now we’re supermen.

“So, rationality is a precept, and where it breaks down there is savagery, thus proving the precept. But rationality is also, at its core, self-serving. Logic isn’t the straight line they make it out to be; it’s a circle pretending to be a straight line. Nice trick, but don’t be fooled. The rational mind is a closed system, with rejection its primary weapon.”

Logic in these words, constructed as an argument. But recall the resonance of hidden meaning. Recall the rocking, the rocking, the boy and the hard, unyielding stake.

“And here’s the final joke. The rational world’s now reduced humanity to flawed machines, slaved to genes and thus justifiably and ultimately irrational. To that I have but one response: Huh?”

Huh.

Deciding he was well enough after all, Jenine MacAlister sat atop him, guiding his penis in.

He lay beneath her, aroused and bemused, his life reduced to two forces, one found, the other lost. Neither rational in their precepts and otherwise immune to morality, since there’s no such thing as guilt in the rational world.

“True judgment is noncontextual, William. The specific extracted and applied to an implacable structure of ethics. The application yields either conjunction or clash. This is true judgment. Extenuating circumstances are the rational means of destabilizing the structure of ethics—they sound reasonable and by their very reasonableness they weaken the structure. Do it over and over again and the structure disintegrates. No framework makes true judgment impossible. A world of ‘buts’ superceding a world of ‘thou shall nots.’ This is how a rational world becomes amoral, cold, bloodless, clinical, and efficient.

“Genocide? Contextually rational. Jews, Cambodians, North American Indians, Slavs, Croatians, Serbs, Muslims, you name it. All
contextually
rational. Which is how genocide is a crime that is repeated throughout history, again and again, and again. By virtue of subjectivism, of relativism, of the
momentary logic of brutality
.”

A whispering laugh, unceasing wind. The prairie wind has the last laugh. Pleasure in movement, satisfaction in eternity. In the wind you’ll find our ghosts, the inexorable wordless truth of history. Eager to strip you dry of all tears, of all pretenses to life. In the wind, you may rock, you may fall.

“Listen to the wind, William. Aren’t you glad you’re in here?”

The subtle game of poets can be heard in the whisper of the wind.

NOACOM:
You have been tracked with eleven other illegal mockers involved in the dissemination of seditious information.

STONECASTER:
Not me. Must be someone using my moniker.

NOACOM:
Punitive measures are being prepared. You will be penal-tagged.

STONECASTER:
You can’t do that. I’m not your boy!

NOACOM:
Conciliatory gestures will be taken into consideration. Securicom is prepared to exercise clemency should you provide information leading to the subduction of your illegal contacts.

STONECASTER:
I don’t know them. Honest.

Net Happynews

… the planet’s rotation has dragged the skyhook across most of continental North America. Static discharges are affecting weather patterns, and witnesses state that the night sky is split by a line of continuous lightning. At the same time, spokespersons for Ladon state that the measured data thus far indicates minimal effect from Coriolis winds, due primarily to the “shunting” nature of the outer skin, which is “sloughing off” friction. Furthermore, the spokesman went on to say, the deep anchor points are barely registering any strain, although the full height (and weight) of the elevator is yet to be reached.…

Twenty-four new species of plants are running wild, reclaiming areas cleared of tropical rain forest. Domestic crops are losing the battle, despite intensive GOM interventions and bio countermeasures. These new species and an estimated three hundred additional as yet unidentified species have emerged from the remaining blocks of rain forest almost simultaneously in eighteen different regions, from Sumatra to Central America, with the most rapid emergence in the Amazon and in the Congo, as well as Madagascar. Slash and burning seems to trigger an intensification of new growth. Initial analyses indicate high toxicity in the majority of these new plants.

More on new species. Get this one. A new type of howler monkey has been discovered in the jungle-blocks of Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Costa Rica. Aggressive as hell, forming communities numbering in the hundreds, these howlers have been raiding farms and killing livestock. They are proving very difficult to capture and as yet none have been taken alive (
“They’ll never take me alive!”
), but dead ones have been examined and some details are immediately obvious, like the larger braincase, and opposable thumbs and opposable big toes. Sexual dimorphism seems to be increased, with the males massing 2.5 times larger than females. Estrous cycles are all mixed up, now that so much meat has been added to what heretofore (cool, always wanted to use that word) was a vegetarian diet.…