Knocking on Heaven's Door Read online

  Then Brad had put it all together. Yes, he had done that! The sunflower outside his window existed on all levels of physics, very large (gravity) to very small (quantum mechanics), in three dimensions (matter/energy/consciousness), in four dimensions (time), and in five dimensions (consciousness/the holographic principle). TOE. The Theory of Everything. Five additional dimensions were relatively unimportant. The human mind could not make sense of them all. But math could. His math could.

  “Still sulking?” A least favorite colleague bounced into the room. She looked at the bright side of things. She was that type.

  Brad moved to keep her away from his computer, talking as a distraction. “I shouldn’t have to do this. I could die.”

  “Maybe.” Briefly his colleague smiled, as though that might be the bright side of things. “But most people don’t. Everyone has to do this. You’ve avoided it for as long as anyone I know.”

  “I have bad eyesight.”

  “You’re getting a guide. You’ll have lots of help.”

  “I hate sleeping in trees.”

  “Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?” The least favorite colleague laughed outright. “You’ve become alienated from the cultural fabric, Brad, from who and what we are as a people—as a species. If ever there was a reason for the quest, you are that reason.”

  By now, Brad had effectively blocked her from his screen. Blah, blah, blah, he thought, rearranging her on his hierarchy of least favorite, putting her down even lower than before. This meant elevating certain others, which was problematic. “I’m sure you’re wrong,” he said smoothly.

  “You’ll come back a better person.” His colleague was really grinning now. “That would be good for everyone.”

  Only a few remaining juniper, rough-barked giants, dotted the hills surrounding the lab. In the last two hundred years, most of northern New Mexico had returned to grassland, the forests burning and dying, the rustling yellow grass—blue grama and black grama, sideoats grama and hairy grama—flowing out like water dipping and rolling with wind and swells, punctuated by the occasional green tree and pink rock cliff, dominated by the bright blue sky. Brad felt a familiar ache in his rib cage. Nothing so pretty as this view.

  Just behind the hills, the city of Los Alamos blighted the landscape. Scavenger parties went there reluctantly. No one liked the sad cities, and some receivers insisted they could feel the sadness, which had a color like smoke. Brad suspected they were simply projecting their emotions. He was a receiver himself and had been to Los Alamos more than once.

  Walking slowly, carrying a leather pack, spear in hand, Brad turned to look back at the lab and its cluster of adobe buildings. He and the other lab rats lived full-time at the compound while the other half of their community, another hundred people or more, came from all over habitable North America. For a few months, they helped produce the solarcomps, monitoring the satellites that orbited the earth, keeping the balance, and then happy to leave and not return, back to their wandering tribes. Brad never understood that.

  He adjusted his eyeglasses. The feel of nanoplastic against thumb. He wondered, not for the first time, if plastic was as conscious as wood. Scavenger material. Was there any difference between “natural” objects and those made by humans? Experiments in the late twenty-first century had indicated not.

  Ahead of him, his guide seemed to pause, as if waiting. At their introduction this morning, he had felt her staring at his face. “Yes, they are called glasses.” Brad had nodded pleasantly. “Taken from dead people.”

  No doubt she made everything herself, the deerskin tunic and pants decorated with plant dye, the spear carved from wood with an obsidian point, all the fetishes and artwork of The Return. She looked older than Brad felt himself to be or at least more weathered, sun bronzed, sun beaten, with those wrinkle lines around her mouth and eyes. Her braid was striking, however, that long thick brown hair. Those dark brown eyes. The mouth nicely shaped with lips that curved up in a slight bow. That was interesting. And her features were symmetrical.

  As he followed the swinging brown braid, Brad thought now of amending himself: the glasses were not taken from dead people but from a specialized store with a drawer of eyeglasses kept as novelty items since people in the twenty-second century mostly had their eyes lasered, with the wealthy getting their genes changed, too. The glasses were an old-fashioned technology and would, someday, finally run out. Brad had already mentioned this to the Council, how the lab must eventually start grinding lenses. How Spinoza in the sixteenth century had been a lens grinder, telescope lenses and microscope lenses, the first Westerner to use a geometric proof to define God, define substance, define finite and infinite, showing by logic and definition that God was an infinite being composed of one substance who contained everything, everything created from that divine substance. Who had said, “We are all modes in the Body of Being.” Energy mode, consciousness mode, matter mode. Nothing was outside the Body of Being. There could be no Creator outside Creation. It was not exactly TOE but the beginning of TOE as explored by Einstein and Bohm and all the great physicists to follow.

  His guide waited more obviously now for him to catch up, her expression careful not to show impatience. Pleasantly, Brad nodded at her again. He recognized the stoic impassivity of the tribes, alternating with Dionysian celebration. He would have to insist on his right to think during the next few weeks. Her job was to watch out for him. His job was to think, despite what her elders said.

  “Do you need to rest?” the woman asked.

  Brad waved a magnanimous hand, and she led him away from the view, down one hill, up the next. He walked behind and huffed a little but still kept the pace, his stride longer than hers after all. Surreptitiously, he watched her bare legs, the rippling movement of calf muscle. He was in better physical shape than she or anyone else thought. He lifted weights in his office. He ran laps in the compound. He had even spent the last few months practicing with his spear. He hated sleeping in trees, and he was frightened, yes, of being eaten alive by a lion or giant shortfaced bear. Who wouldn’t be? But avoiding the quest all these years had become more of a game than anything else, manipulating the Council, seeing how much he could get away with.

  “When do we camp?” he called ahead, partly to slow the woman down. The afternoon light was already turning yellow, mid-October, and the days shorter.

  “Maybe we’ll walk through the night,” she shot back. Brad felt a mild alarm. She was his guide, and she was in charge. She could make him walk through the night if she decided that this was part of his quest, something he needed to do to come back a better person. Every member of the human tribe—and he was a member, Brad admitted, even lab rats were members—had to go out into the world alone or with a guide for weeks at a time, every two years, every four years. Keeping the balance. Keeping humble, keeping alert, connected, unsafe. The principles of The Return.

  He hadn’t done this since he was fourteen years old.

  Instead he had been busy discovering the secrets of the universe. Did she know that? Brad hurried to catch up. What was her name again? “We met so quickly before,” he said, at her side. “When did you do your service in the lab?”

  The woman seemed amused. “A long time ago, when I was a teenager. You were there. A teenager, too.”

  “I’m sorry I don’t remember you,” Brad said insincerely.

  “You really don’t want to be here, do you?” she asked and seemed genuinely curious, without judgment.

  Brad shifted his pack, his shoulders already feeling the strain. How honest should he be?

  “I don’t either,” the woman answered for him, and now she did slow down so they could talk. Her clothes were decorated with red spirals. Brad found himself counting the red dots. “Guides get information first, about who they are taking. You haven’t ever done any serious hunting. You exercise some but not much. You wouldn’t be able to walk comfortably through the night. You don’t know much about the plants and animals in this ar
ea. You’ve spent your life in the lab. As my student, as a hunting partner, you could get me killed.”

  Her tone was neutral. Her eyes kept moving back and forth—scanning the grass, the bushes, the horizon. She was looking for something to eat or for something that might want to eat them.

  Brad remembered walking like this beside his mother, listening to her explain how there were secrets everywhere. He had also watched her scan the horizon, and he had felt safe because he was with her, because he was a child walking this very hill perhaps, this blue sky, this yellow grass. His mother had been on his mind lately—the anniversary tomorrow, and he wouldn’t be home, wouldn’t light the candles or honor her spirit. He remembered his mother on her deathbed. The cancer had taken over, and she mumbled incoherently. Soon after, working through the night, he had written the equations that resolved the holographic principles of four different theories, starting with Einstein’s. It was as though her death had liberated him, as though death were his inspiration.

  “You’re wrong about the plants and animals,” he corrected the woman. “I know them pretty well.”

  “You’ve read about them?” she emphasized the verb.

  Brad suddenly felt tired of her. “Do you have something against reading?”

  The woman whose name he couldn’t remember smiled. “No. Actually, I teach reading and writing. Mostly I work with students who probably do have something against it, against too much reading anyway, too much writing.” She thought about that for a moment. “What they like is what we are doing now. This …” she gestured. They had reached the top of the next hill, a large valley opening below them. Grazing herds spread across the yellow grass, an extended family of camels, a large group of elk, another of horses, each group a careful distance from the other. There was plenty of grass for everyone, with only mild discomfort that they had to share. Flocks of birds swirled above the animals, dots of black rising and falling. A range of mountains seemed to fill the eastern sky.

  Is that where we’re going? Brad wondered. She was in charge. He hated that.

  “This is what stirs them and me,” the woman said. “We live in abundance, the best of times, the best of worlds. Thousands of years and billions of deaths to reach this beauty, this wealth, this diversity—to hold it in our hands. All of history has brought us to this moment, and if the burden is great and the cost high, then the prize—this moment—is even greater. If Thee cannot see that, what can Thee see or know or understand?”

  The woman quoted the Costa Rican Quakers and looked at him sideways. Her tutelage was beginning. It wasn’t only about survival.

  And Brad found himself nodding. Of course, he understood why The Return had become sacred to the tribes. One hundred fifty years ago, the supervirus had wiped out almost every human being on the planet. In response—combining the power of the worldwide web with the psychic comfort of hunting and gathering—the survivors had recreated a Paleoterrific lifestyle, a stable and flourishing culture. Humans lived peacefully now among the resurrected Paleos. They beat their little drums and sang their heritage songs and decorated their camelskin tents. Moreover, the latest discoveries in physics only confirmed their cultural animism. Utopia! They had already forgotten the lesson they were supposed to learn.

  Brad looked at his guide and wondered, frankly, at her ignorance. Oh, he had a hundred replies for her, all the ways their wonderful world balanced on a knife blade, about to fall and crash. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. He could quote the Quaker proverbs, too. He opened his mouth. She looked back at him and waited, her mouth curved slightly in a bow. The afternoon light colored the grass. He smelled something sweet and tangy, some herb crushed by their passing.

  In that moment—and that’s how things happened for him, a glimpse of something bright and luminous, a flash of inspiration followed by years of persistent effort—he felt his body lighten as though he had just taken off his pack. She was literate. She had soft round breasts. She had read the Quakers. He saw their sexual future. He would tell her about his work. She would listen admiringly and ask the right questions. They would spend hours together talking like this around the campfire, about life and history, about everything.

  “How old are you?” he blurted. Could he possibly get this woman pregnant? Could she still have healthy children?

  The woman led the way, silently now since he had made his interest too obvious. Brad was discouraged but not overly so. It had been a long time since he had felt something like this so strongly. He knew he had a difficult personality: arrogant, obnoxious, withholding, then demanding. He had gone through every possible relationship at the lab until they were all now his least and least favorites. But he had certain virtues, too. He went after what he wanted. And he didn’t often fail.

  Following her legs, those calf muscles working, Brad breathed more easily, going down a winding game trail to the valley below. He guessed they would be gone less than a month, not a long quest and not a short one. Someone had already calculated this. He needed enough time away from the lab to show his hunting-and-gathering prowess and to reweave himself into the fabric of their culture. One with the people. One with the species! His pack, he had been told, would feel heavier tomorrow and heavier still the day after that. But by the last day, it would be a part of his body, a weight he accepted like a leg or arm. Perhaps he would bring down an elk. Perhaps he would perform the camel dance. Perhaps his guide would sing the peyote song. Perhaps he would hallucinate, have a vision or two. Whatever was required, Brad decided now, he would oblige. He would work to please her.

  The final part of their descent was through a rocky area, jagged thrusts of hardened lava and tuff, an anomaly in the undulating grass. Brad watched his feet in the scree and gravel, knowing he would feel these jolts tomorrow, the awkward angle of his back against gravity. Something brushed his ear, and he glanced to the right for no particular reason.

  The tiniest of movements caught his eye, the play of shadow and light, a peripheral tease. Much later he would think that this glance aside had been the beginning. If something had not tickled his ear. If he had not stopped to peer more closely into dirt and rock. Later it comforted him to shape this into a story: the fate of the world, perhaps of the universe, hanging on a glance.

  The small animal puzzled him at first. Its position was so odd. And what was the creature attached to? Brad stopped, squatted to see better, and exclaimed. Almost immediately, the guide was at his side.

  Someone had stretched a white-collared lizard on its back. Someone had spread apart the lizard’s front legs, lengthened out the back legs, and driven the limbs with sharpened thorns into a cross of wood as long as Brad’s palm. Each leg, in addition, was wrapped with twine to prevent escape. Someone had crucified a lizard on a cross made of wood and yucca fiber. Then that someone had built a shrine, a circle of rocks that Brad saw now was a careful construction of walls dug into the ground, a miniature grotto, with the lizard propped against the larger back wall.

  Brad knelt to peer into the grotto—was he mistaken somehow?—and had a dizzying twist of perspective, as if he were only as big as the lizard itself. The man-sized creature rose up in front of him, white throat pulsing, in the center of a glittering rock room, the walls embedded with silver mica and white quartz. The air smelled of dust and blood. The arms stretched out. He knelt before the sacrifice.

  Brad blinked, back to his real size, kneeling on the ground. From that position, he jerked, the pack shifting so that he almost lost his balance. He yelped in pain as he put down his palm and felt skin tear against volcanic rock. The guide steadied him and then picked up the gruesome object, the lizard that was suddenly and clearly dead.

  “A bushkie,” the woman standing above him said. Brad got to his feet, and she handed him the cross and lizard.

  He dropped them back into the grotto. “It’s disgusting,” he heard his voice jump too loudly. “You know who did this?”

  “No, I’ve never seen anything like this before. But someone saw a
bushkie at the other end of this valley. An old man.”

  “It’s disgusting,” Brad repeated. “How can people like that exist?’

  His guide shook her head. “There aren’t many of them.”

  “There shouldn’t be any.”

  She stared at him. “What would you have us do?” she asked. “People are sometimes damaged. They are born that way. Should we kill them?”

  Brad hesitated.

  “Cage them?” the guide pressed.

  Brad shook his head.

  After that, they started looking and found six more tiny bodies stretched out and impaled with thorns, each enshrined by circles of rock. Some were older than the others, dried in the sun. Brad worked to keep his temper, to act like her, so calm and rational. Secretly he felt the presence of mental illness like pain in his stomach, bile in his mouth. Occasionally a man or woman left the comfort of the human tribe. Almost always they were chemically damaged. Schizophrenics. Delusional. Usually they didn’t live long on their own. Their very smell attracted predators.

  The guide—her name was Clare—said that the bushkie had done this over a period of months. The mummified lizards were likely from summer, the newest bodies from a week or two ago.

  “You think this is some old man?” Brad confirmed.

  “Yes, he’s been seen,” she said, leading them down into the valley to where Brad hoped was a safe place to camp. Perhaps a little shaken herself, Clare didn’t insist that he hunt that evening. They ate jerky instead, cold food from her pack, and slept in a tree.

  But Brad had to catch the next night’s supper. He had expected this. He was already getting more help than others who went on a quest, already pampered with jerky for his first meal. For most of the day, getting supper proved harder than he had imagined, mainly because Clare was so aggravatingly cautious. She wouldn’t let him approach a mare that had strayed from her group. “That herd is too close. The stallion will be here before you can bleed her,” Clare said. “And he’ll be angry.” She insisted that camels were similarly dangerous. “Watch for antelope,” she advised. “If you’re good with the spear …” When Brad suggested snares for smaller game like rabbits and mice, Clare agreed they could do that in the evening—but too much trapping meant stopping early for camp, and she wanted to move on into the mountains.