The bastards got them all. There isn’t even anything left to bury. Damn them, damn them to an alien hell in agony and tears.
The supplies and weapons were with the cadre. Hannah’s group is only forty miles northwest; I can join them. But all at once I know that I won’t.
Hidden under a brush fall, I spend the night silently chanting the farewell song for my dead.
Carl, sixteen years old.
Kaylie, the best shot I ever saw.
Jerome, who ran away from his village at eleven and somehow survived alone until we found him.
Matt, Ruhan, Pedro, Susan, Terry.
Rest in fucking peace.
I stand in the greenhouse, staring at the tray of crossbred wheat plants. Morning light streams like green water through the uneven glass; there must have been iron oxide impurities in the glassmaker’s last firing. The steamy air smells loamy, rich with life.
Jenna comes in. “Oh, it’s so hot in here and — Dad? What is it?”
“I ran the tests on the ashing filtrate from this last batch.”
“And . . . ?” Her pretty face wrinkles quizzically.
“The strain is producing ten percent more zinc than either parent plant.”
Now Jenna stares at the plants. “Ten percent more? But how . . . .”
“I don’t know. If we had a gene sequencer . . . .”
She grimaces, then tries to console me. “Wheat was never genetically engineered anyway, only crossbred. Do you really need a sequencer? The important thing is the increased nutrition.”
“Yes,” I say, smiling at her, “of course.” And there it is — Jenna’s major flaw as a scientist. She is intelligent, meticulous, even inventive. But she is mostly interested in practical results: Of what use is this? Not: Why did this happen?
Why did this happen? I have a theory, but no way to test it.
“Dad,” she says, “will you run the tests on of my soybeans — tray number eighteen? Julie and Gary and Miguel are getting together a group to hike into the mountains. We’ll be back by dark, but they want to leave right away, and they only got around to informing me now.”
There is no rancor in the way she says this, only pleasure in the proposed expedition. I think about bears, then remind myself that attacks are less frequent than when I was a boy, that Jenna has tranquilizer darts, that she’s not an extreme sensitive. I say, “Of course I’ll run your tests. Have fun.”
“Thanks!”
Before she can leave, however, the door opens and a stranger limps in. We both smile at him. “Hello,” I say, “I’m Larry Travis. Can we help you?”
“Jake Martin,” he says. His smile seems strained. Is he ill? “I’m on my way to Bremerville to see my sister, but I hurt my leg. Hoping I can stay here a few days.”
“Of course. We have room at our bungalow. This is my daughter, Jenna.”
She says, “What’s wrong with your leg? Do you need a doctor? I can send for one from Castleton.”
“No, ma’am, I just need to stay off it a bit.”
“Jenna, take him to the bungalow and get him something to eat. No, wait — you want to hike. Jake, do you mind waiting here about half an hour while I finish up a —”
Jenna says quickly, “I’ll take him.”
“But you —”
“I’m happy to take him.” She smiles again at the stranger, and he says, “Thank you.”
As they leave, him leaning a little on her shoulder to favor his left leg, I stare after them. Why did Jenna so abruptly change her mind?
I shrug and begin the dry-ashing procedure on her soybeans.
No enemies sighted yet. But they’re here. I buried my guns in the woods; they can detect metal at close range. Meanwhile, there is this woman, taking me home, collecting some hot food from a refectory, letting me lean on her all the way. I don’t need to lean on her, and I think she knows that. She and her father take me in without a second thought — nobody here would harm anyone else. But this woman . . . How can she be one of the dehumanized, alien-whipped, de-sexed sheep? Her?
She smells like strawberries.
“How did you hurt your leg?”
“Stupid clumsiness,” I lie, and she laughs. The laugh sounds confused.
We talk, although it’s hard to keep my mind concentrated. She’s smart and — like all of them — sweet. But she isn’t like all of them.
My cock is like stone.
This woman . . .
Dant23 comes in to the lab as I finish the tests. He waves his tentacles at me and I smile. I show him Zane’s and my own handwritten notes on the zinc percentages in different wheat strains.
Does he read them? Does he somehow photograph them with his eyes and transmit them to some unimaginable computer somewhere? Does he only pretend to know what they mean? There is no way to tell.
The Dant came down from their ship twenty years ago, when everyone alive from before the Blessing was very old, and we still know almost nothing about them. Not why they chose to help humanity by altering our genes for EIFB. Not why they chose a volcano, of all things, to distribute the molecules that conferred that incalculable boon. Obviously, they wanted to be able to contact humanity without risk of violence to themselves, but we, not them, are the major beneficiaries of their Blessing.
The library at Bremerton has books, very old, with pictures in them that I saw only once, years ago, and still have nightmares about. Worldwide wars. Bodies in trenches. Instruments of medieval torture. Children spitted, women raped, cows slaughtered for meat. People who ate flesh.
Dant23 makes a noise, waves a different tentacle, and settles into a corner of the lab to observe.
She wants it, too, although when I begin, she seems startled at herself. I would bet my rifle that she didn’t know she could experience desire like this — how would she know, living here? She’s a virgin. Then I’m the one who’s startled. I have never known sex like this. She holds nothing back. Not while we do it, not while we talk. And it doesn’t seem to occur to her that I might be holding back. Without knowing me at all, she trusts me utterly — not to hurt her, not to lie to her, not to ignore her pleasure.
Is she fucking crazy?
I reach for her again.
I transfer the soybean filtrate into a beaker and prepare the reagent. But then the ancient spectrophotometer refuses to turn on. The display stays dark. Nothing lights, nothing works, nothing I do repairs it. The thing is finally dead.
I’ve lost equipment before. But for some reason, this loss affects me profoundly. I sit on a stool and sob like a four-year-old.
Maybe it’s the low zinc and iron in my blood. For millions of years, humans absorbed zinc and iron mostly from animal flesh. Barbarianism should not be the price of health.
Or maybe it’s not what’s in my blood but what’s in my head.
Eventually I rise from the stool and splash cold water on my face. I can’t stand to be in the lab any longer. It’s dusk and music has started by the river, for the second day of the festival. There will be people there, laughter, Mutuality. I make my way toward the bright music, trying to let it overcome the ideas circling, like savage bears, in my bruised mind.