The Devil Delivered and Other Tales (7 page)

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 momentum, 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.
    So the gov’ts got clever, like I said. Flood the lines with useless information and call it unrestricted access. Meanwhile, pull the funding chain on the universities and call it enlightened merger. Faculties became Ministries, the cynical academics suddenly found themselves in charge of social policy, students became gov’t trainees, and mandatory university enrollment was the funnel. Out the other end, an endless spewing forth of ideas, carefully shaped opinions and general consensus. Combine that with full employment and a penal system that put the countless criminals and malcontents to blue-collar work, and you’ve got a prosperous, paranoid, but happy populace. The Jihad stuff fit perfectly, giving the gov’ts all the power they wanted. Things were good for them right about then. Except for all the wars and the Big Crash that took down the old US of A. And the Mideast debacle and all those nukes being thrown around—

BOGQUEEN:
You’re digressing, Corbie. To focus all that, one of the big ideas that took hold unplugged the environmental movement. First, you had the alliance fucked up. People with power quickly quit complaining or making dire predictions. Second, and this was the idea itself, concocted by the academics in dry tones: Life is characterized by periods of mass extinction. We may have accelerated this one, but that’s all just relative. What you’re seeing is an inevitable expression of Nature. The Great Mother wipes clean the slate, once again. Relax everyone. Can’t fight the inevitable and, really, should you? Natural order is natural order, after all. Go with the flow, sure it’s sad, but it’s better feeling sad than feeling guilt-ridden.

CORBIE TWA:
Naturally, we bought it, with a worldwide sigh of relief. Absolved at last, pass the salt.

BOGQUEEN:
Ozone depletion, oh well, it was bound to happen eventually. We’ve adapted, with our rad shielding and unguents and elixirs. No different from all those volcanic eruptions on the Rim. Too bad about those rad leaks in Asia, and as for those peripheral human populations, we can help them.

CORBIE TWA:
Help indeed. That’s what the boy’s gnawing at, isn’t it.

STONECASTER:
But he’s one of those students you were talking about. Why isn’t he converted?

PACEMAKER:
He was probably too sharp for his own good. And given his talent on the Net, he might well have accessed the so-called unrestricted files, which contain, among other things, a whole list of forbidden subjects, repressed data analyses, heretical theses, not to mention anthropological monographs, from which one can cull the most surprising information. Historical revisionism is the official line, as you said. The forces of evolution can well serve deterministic notions, if misapplied. Even more disturbing, it can be philosophically extended to justify any means, given the inevitable end.

BOGQUEEN:
It’s the extinction stuff that’s now in trouble. William’s out there recording field observations that run contrary to the mass extinction idea. The beasts are changing, because they’re pressured populations. Out there we’re getting leapfrog speciation, at a phenomenal rate of mutation.

PACEMAKER:
There are profound implications to that notion.

BOGQUEEN:
You’d better effing well believe it. And there is a political side to that last entry. Never mind the telepathic snake, that conversation between Dr. Jenine MacAlister and Max Ohman provided a pretty succinct statement of the issues.

FREE WHIZZY:
Who’s Max Ohman?

BOGQUEEN:
The Lady’s right-hand boy. Ladon’s Chief Engineer.

FREE WHIZZY:
Well, I can see how the theoretical stuff might trigger some kind of philosophical ruckus, but I still can’t grasp the risk to the politicos.

BOGQUEEN:
It’s too soon to tell, really. I’d rather not speculate. Besides, I’ve got faith in the boy.

STONECASTER:
You must be crazy. The kid’s cooked. If he’s not pulled out, he’ll be dead inside a week.

BOGQUEEN:
I know. He’s running out of time.

CORBIE TWA:
Maybe that’s his real message.

…

Net

… Behold, I am the back door, and my name is Malachai.…

JOHN JOHN:
Who?

…

JOHN JOHN:

NOAC CENTRAL:
This path is unauthorized. Contact NOAC through the means described in the NOAC Directory. This path is unauthorized.

JOHN JOHN:
*******