The Devil Delivered and Other Tales (2 page)

“Don’t know how wise they were,” Grandpa cut in; then he fell silent, his gaze far away.

Jim said nothing. He’d never heard doubt before, not in the telling of the stories, especially not in this one.

After a long moment filled only by the wind and an impatient snort from the palomino, Grandpa spoke on, “He told Sitting Bull that the fight was over. That the Americans would come after him, hunt him down. That the White Chief couldn’t live without avenging the slaughter—that the White Chief’s justice counted only with the whites, not for Indian dogs. Sitting Bull was tired, and old. He was ready for those words. That’s why he called them wise. So after McLaren arrived, he took his people back. He surrendered, and was starved then murdered. It would’ve been a better death, I think, if he’d kept his rifle.”

Jim straightened and met his grandfather’s eyes. “I don’t want this plowed up, Grandpa. Maybe Who Hunts the Devil is gone, but maybe he isn’t. Maybe he’s just sleeping. If you wreck the Medicine Wheel, he’ll be mad.”

“Your father wants to plant wheat, Jim. That’s all there is to it. And the old times are gone. Your father understands this. You have to, too.”

“No.”

“Once the harvest’s in, we’ll come out here and turn over the land.”

“No.”

“It’s empty, you see. The buffalo are gone. I look around … and it’s not right. It’ll never be right again.”

“Yes, it will, Grandpa. I’ll make it right.”

The old man’s smile was broken, wrenching at Jim’s heart. “Listen to your father, Jim. His words are wise.”

Val Marie, Saskatchewan Precinct, June 30, Anno Confederation 14

William Potts opened his eyes to the melting snow puddled around his hiking boots. He rubbed his face, working out the aching creases around his mouth. A smile to make people nervous, but it was getting harder to wear.

Slouched in an antique chair and half-buried by his bootsuit, he turned his head an inch, to meet the eye of a diamondback rattlesnake probing the glass wall beside him. An eye milky white, the eye of a seer proselytized limbless and mute, but scabbed with deadly knowledge all the same.

The aquarium sat on a stained oak end table, its lower third layered in sand and gravel. Stone slabs crowded the near end. A sun-bleached branch stripped of bark lay in the center, angled upward in faint salute. At the far end, two small buttons of cacti, possibly alive, possibly dead—hard to tell despite the tiny bright red flowers.

The snake was avoiding its tree, succinctly coiled on a stone slab, its subtle dun-colored designs pebbled by scales that glittered beneath the heat lamp.

William watched its tongue flick out, once, twice, three times, then stop.

He grunted. “We are rife in threes.”

At the crowded basement’s far end, Old Jim rummaged through a closet, his broad hunched back turned to William.

“This guy’s eyes,” William said, frowning at the snake, “are all milky white.” He lowered his voice. “Time to shed, then? Tease off the old, here’s something new. Into the new where you don’t belong. You know that, don’t you? Because your sins are
old
.”

Old Jim pulled out a walking stick, a staff, and dropped it clattering to the floor. “It’s here someplace,” he said. “I hid it when that land claim went through. Figured Jack Tree and his boys would swoop down and take everything, you know? The snake’s blind, son. Burned blind.”

William shifted in the narrow chair. “Conjured by thy name, huh? Makes you easier to catch, I suppose.” The snake lifted its head and softly butted the glass. Once, twice, three times. “One day,” William told it, “you’ll wear my skin. And I’ll wear yours. We’ll find out who slips this mortal coil first.” He shifted again and let his gaze travel over the room’s contents.

Old Jim’s basement was also the town museum. Thick with dust and the breath of ghosts. Glass-topped tables housed chert and chalcedony arrowheads, ground-stone axes and mauls, steatite tobacco pipes, rifle flints and vials full of trade beads. White beads, red beads, turquoise beads. Furniture shaped by homesteaders’ rough, practical hands filled every available space. Cluttering the walls: faded photographs, racks of pronghorn, elk, deer, heads of wolf, bear, coyote, old provincial license plates from before the North American Confederation, quilts, furs, historical maps. A fossilized human femur dug out from three-million-year-old gravel beds that, before the Restitution, would have been called an anomaly and deftly ignored.

William smiled. “Three million ten thousand years of history jammed into this basement, Jim. Exactly where it belongs. In perfect context. In perfect disorder. With a blind snake curating the whole mess.”

He ran a hand through his unkempt brown hair. “This stuff ever been cataloged, Jim? Diligently recorded and filed on memchip, slipped into envelope, envelope sealed and labeled, inserted into a storage box, box stacked on other boxes, shifted to a dark, deep shelf beside the rat poison, behind the locked door in the university basement a few hundred miles from here? And you presume the guise of science? Hah.”

Old Jim didn’t answer.

Answers are extinct.
“I’m an expert on extinction,” William said. “A surveyor of the exhausted, the used up, notions made obsolete by their sheer complexity. It’s a world bereft of meaning, and who knows, who cares? I don’t and I do. The last gasps of a dying science. The last walkabout, the last vision quest. We’ve digitalized the world, Jim, and here I am riding the sparks, in bootsuit and eyeshield and sensiband. Out under the Hole.”

“Got it!” Old Jim straightened. In his hands was a rifle. He grinned at William. “Right after Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull ran up here to hide out from the Americans.” He hefted the rifle. “This was his. Used it against the Seventh. Left it behind when he went back to get killed. And you know what he said?” Old Jim’s eyes were bright.

William nodded. “He said, ‘The ghosts are dancing.’”

Old Jim shook his head. “He said, ‘We have fired our last shot.’ That’s what he said. And that’s why he left it here.” Old Jim stepped close and placed the rifle, reverently, in William’s hands.

William ran his fingers along the barrel’s underside until he found the maker’s mark; then he straightened and held it close to the aquarium’s lamps. “English, all right. So far, so good.”

“That’s gone down the family line, you know? Hell, my family goes back to before Batoche. Métis blood.” He removed his baseball cap and ran his forearm along his brow. “It’s Sitting Bull’s rifle, son, sure as I’m standing here.”

“The stock’s been carved some,” William said. He handed it back, then rose. “You might be right, Jim. Couldn’t prove otherwise.”

“Some of you fellas should come down here and record all this stuff,” Old Jim said. He returned the rifle to the closet. “Jack Tree gets his hands on this, and you and your university can kiss it all good-bye.”

“I’ll suggest it to my employers,” William said, pulling on his gloves. He paused, glancing at the rattlesnake.

Old Jim said softly, “Most of them gone now.”

Again, William nodded.

“Burned blind, you know. Can’t hunt, can’t eat. Fulla tumors and stuff, too. Course, not much left to eat out there, anyway. Sure you don’t want a hot chocolate?”

“Can’t. I’m fasting.”

The old man shook his head again. “A damned strange thing to be doing, son, if you ask me. Exactly what kind of research you into?”

“I’m cataloging ghosts, Jim.”

“Huh?”

“I walk on the winds, ride the snows. My heart beats in time with the ticking of stones.”

Old Jim’s eyes held William’s. Slowly, he said, “You’d better get something to eat, son. Soon.” He reached out and tapped the goggles hanging around William’s neck. “And don’t take those off out there. Even when it’s snowing. Blowing snow and clouds don’t stop the rays. Nothing stops those rays.”

“Burned blind.” William nodded.

Old Jim walked over to the aquarium and studied the snake. “Around here, years back,” he said, “these fellas were called Instruments of the Devil.”

“Yea verily,” William said. “‘And into the pit God casts all vermin, and into the pit shall they slither unending among the implements of history.’”

“Never heard that Scripture before,” Old Jim said.

William smiled, then headed for the stairs.

Old Jim followed. He watched William pull on the goggles and activate maximum shielding, then raise the bootsuit’s hood and tighten the drawstrings. “Back out in the Hole,” Old Jim said, shaking his head once more. “I used to ride horses out there.”

“The horses run still,” William said. He faced Old Jim. “Keep squinting.”

“You, too. Mind the Hole, mind the Hole.”

Net

14.30.06 STATUS REPORT 00:00.00 GMT

Means:

Sea Level: +82.37 cm AMR

Temperature: +2.6012 C. AMR

Carbon Dioxide: +.06% AMR

Carbon Monoxide: +1.12% AMR

Methane: +.089% AMR

Nitrogen Oxide: +.0112% AMR

Organochlorine Count: +.0987 ppm (holding)

Airborne Silicia Count: +1.923 ppm (holding)

Aerosol Sporco (volume): +367 AMR

Mare Sporco (sq. km): 113000 (Med.) (rising)

86950 (Carib.) (holding)

236700 (Ind.) (rising)

Nil Ozone areas (since 01.01.14):

Midwest Hole: holding

Arctic Hole: +23416 sq. km

Antarctic Hole: +3756.25 sq. km

Australian Hole: +6720 sq. km

Spawns: 24 (varied) (down 13)

Rad Drift Alerts:

India (north)

Korea (south)

Bio Alerts:

Ciguatera Epidemics (+1000s): 17 (holding)

Retroviral General: 07 (+6/01.01.14)

Ebola-16/Hanta Outbreaks: 112 (+7)

Undifferentiated ISEs: 316 (+45)

BSE/CJD/CWD composite index: 2.4b.

Species Count: 117

Malaria N. edge: +2.7 Lat.

Suvara N. edge: +3.12 Lat.

Cholera Count (/millions): 270

Bubonic: 113 (14 known bioflicked)

White Rash Deaths: 12.67

Morbilivirus-B22 Closed Zones: 16 urban (+1)

Transmutative Viral Count: 1197 (+867)

Hotzone Alerts Political:

Pakistan/India (last nuke 07.03.14)

Zimbabwe (closed since 27.05.13)

Congo Republic (closed since 11.07.08)

Rep. Lapland/Consortium Russia

Georgia/Chechen Rep/Consortium Russia

Iran (closed since 13.04.04)

Iraq (closed since 22.11.03)

Sinjo/Taiwan

Quebec/NOAC

Puerto Rico/NOAC

United Ireland/Eurocom

Israel/Assorted (no recent nukes/biochem WMD)

Argentina (internal, last Bik flicked 29.01.13)

S. Korea (closed since 15.10.07)

Indonesia (internal)

Guatemala/Belize/Consortium Honduras

Ukraine/Consortium Russia (no recent nukes/biochem WMD)

Confirmed Dead Zones:

N. Korea

Iran

Syria

Afghanistan

Columbia

California

Confirmed Dead Cities (excluding those in nations above):

Jakarta

Seoul

Hong Kong

Jerusalem

Cairo

Berlin

Sarajevo

Baghdad

Denver

Toronto

Old Washington, D.C.

Refugee-Related Minor Conflicts/Incidents: +103

Flicked Biks this month: 0

Flicked Biobiks this month: 2

Worldwide weather forecast: Hot and sunny. Hey, folks, looks like another balmy day out there!

Net

Suppressed File Index (NOACom) 219.56b

Subtitle: The Restitution

Category: Social Sciences

Subcategory: Biological Evolution/Paleoanthropology/Archaeology

Abstract: The record of anomalous finds began with the first generation of archaeological investigations originating in Europe in the nineteenth century. Prior to a defined paradigm asserting an acceptable structure to human biological and cultural evolution, many of these initial discoveries, subject to the same diligent application of accepted and then-current methodologies, were taken at face value and incorporated into the then-malleable formulation of said structures. The institutional and informal suppression of anomalous discoveries soon followed, at the expense of countless professional careers, and continued well into the twentieth century and early twenty-first century.

Deep subsurface exploration for economic purposes repeatedly yielded unexplainable evidence of human presence at periods in geologic history deemed scientifically impossible; however, the academic and scientific institutions were securely entrenched and fully capable of suppressing said discoveries. It was not until
A.C.
07 that incontrovertible evidence was uncovered in Cretaceous gravel beds at the Riddler Site in west Antarctica (for a composite list of evidence, cross-referenced dating techniques, and excavation report, see SFI NOACom 222.3a), proving conclusively that the accepted evolutionary scheme for
Homo sapiens
was in dire need of restitution.

Current theories on this issue—

Tracking …

Captured.

Rabbit goes back into the hat. Nada, folks!

Entry: American NW, June 30,
A.C
. 14

Outside, the wind, born somewhere out west, gusted through the small town with a howling hunger. Drifts of snow banked walls and stretched serrated ridges across the streets. Leaning into the wind, he trudged toward the hotel, its three-storied bulk barely visible.

Through his goggles, the world was monochrome. White sky, blending with white earth. Patched here and there with the dark, angular bones of civilization. Nature erases. Nature wipes clean the slate. Snow, the rough and wild passage of spirits. Glaciers, gravid with desire. He paused and looked up. Medicine Wheels spun up there, echoes of Ezekiel. More of them now, trying to tell him something in their blurred spinning through the storm clouds.

He pushed himself into motion once again. He passed a humped mound of snow. A car rusting under it—he’d seen it the day he arrived. A monument to fleeting technology. Once new, masked in wonder and promise. When in use, mundane, banal. Then forgotten. Now buried. The makers move on, unmindful of the lessons beneath their feet. Nature erases.