Yellowstone
“You’ve got to
remember, humanity always goes extinct,” said Wei, staring
disinterestedly at the line of women and children shuffling toward
the slave station down by the river. “Always. A thousand years, a hundred thousand, a
quarter million—doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, humans go
extinct.” He was speaking Urem, the language the Stasis used among
themselves.
“I thought that was
why we were here? To try and prevent it?” Pierce asked, using the
honorific form appropriate for a student questioning his tutor,
although Wei was, in truth, merely a twelfth-year trainee himself:
the required formality was merely one more reminder of the long
road ahead of him.
“No.” Wei raised his
spear and thumped its base on the dry, hard-packed mud of the
observation mound. “We’re going to relocate a few seed groups,
several tens of thousands. But the rest are still going to die.” He
glanced away from the slaves: Pierce followed his
gaze.
Along the horizon,
the bright red sky darkened to the color of coagulated blood on a
slaughterhouse floor. The volcano, two thousand kilometers farther
around the curve of the planet, had been pumping ash and steam into
the stratosphere for weeks. Every noon, in the badlands where once
the Mississippi delta had writhed, the sky wept brackish
tears.
“You’re from before
the first extinction epoch, aren’t you? The pattern wasn’t
established back then. That must be why you were sent on this field
trip. You need to understand that this always happens. Why we do this. You need to know it
in your guts. Why we take the savages and leave the civilized to
die.”
Like Wei, and the
other Stasis agents who had silently liquidated the camp guards and
stolen their identities three nights before, Pierce was disguised
as a Benzin warrior. He wore the war paint and beaten-aluminum
armbands, bore the combat scars. He carried a spear tipped with a
shard of synthetic diamond, mined from a deep seam of prehistoric
automobile windshields. He even wore a Benzin face: the epicanthic
folds and dark skin conferred by the phenotypic patches had given
him food for thought, an unfamiliar departure from his white-bread
origins. Gramps (he shied from the memory) would have died rather
than wear this face.
Pierce was not yet
even a twelve-year trainee: he’d been in the service for barely
four years-subjective. But he was ready to be sent out under
supervision, and this particular operation called for warm bodies
rather than retrocausal subtlety.
Fifty years ago, the
Benzin had swept around the eastern coastline of what was still
North America, erupting from their heartland in the central isthmus
to extend their tribute empire into the scattered tribal grounds of
post-Neolithic nomads known to Stasis Control only by their code
names: the Alabamae, the Floridae, and the Americae. The Benzin
were intent on conquering the New World, unaware that it had been
done at least seventeen times already since the start of the
current Reseeding. They did not understand the significance of the
redness in the western sky or the shaking of the ground, ascribing
it to the anger of their tribal gods. They had no idea that these
signs heralded the end of the current interglacial age, or that
their extinction would be a side effect of the coming Yellowstone
eruption—one of a series that occurred at six-hundred-thousand-year
intervals during the early stages of the Lower First Anthropogenic
epoch.
The Benzin didn’t
take a long view of things, for although their priest-kings had a
system of writing, most of them lived in the haz ily defined
ahistorical myth-world of the preliterate. Their time was running
out all the same. Yellowstone was waking, and even the Stasis
preferred to work around such brutal geological phenomena, rather
than through them.
“Yes, but why take
them?” Pierce nodded toward the
silently trudging Alabamae women and children, their shoulders
stooped beneath the burden of their terror. They’d been walking
before the spear points of their captors for days; they were
exhausted. The loud ones had already died, along with the lame. The
raiders who had slain their men and stolen them away to a life of
slavery sat proudly astride their camels, their enemies’ scalps
dangling from their kote kas like bizarre pubic wigs. “The Benzin
may be savages, but these people are losers—they came off
worse.”
Wei shook his head
minutely. “The adults are all female, and mostly pregnant at that.
These are the healthy ones, the ones who survived the march.
They’re gatherers, used to living off the land, and they’re all in
one convenient spot.”
Pierce clenched his
teeth, realizing his mistake. “You’re going to use them for
Reseeding? Because there are fewer bodies, and they’re more
primitive, more able to survive in a wilderness . . .
?”
“Yes. For a
successful Reseeding we need at least twenty thousand bodies from
as many diverse groups as possible, and even then we risk a genetic
bottleneck. And they need to be able to survive in the total
absence of civilization. If we dumped you in the middle of a Reseeding, you would
probably not last a month. No criticism intended; neither would I.
Those warriors”—Wei raised his spear again, as if saluting the
raiders—“require slaves and womenfolk and a hierarchy to function.
The tip of your spear was fashioned by a slave in the royal
armories, not by a warrior. Your moccasins and the cloth of your
pants were made by Benzin slaves. They are halfway to reinventing
civilization: given another five thousand years-subjunctive, their
distant descendants might build steam engines and establish
ubiquitous recording frameworks, bequeathing their memories to the
absolute future. But for a Reseeding they’re as useless as we
are.”
“But they don’t have
half a deci—”
“Be still. They’re
moving.”
The last of the
slaves had been herded between the barbed hedges of the entrance
passageway, and the gate guards lifted the heavy barrier back into
position. Now the raiders kicked their mounts into motion, beating
and poking them around the side of the spiny bamboo fence in a
circuit of the guard posts. Wei and Pierce stood impassively as the
camel riders spurred down on them. At the last moment, their leader
pulled sideways, and his mount snorted and pawed at the ground
angrily as he leaned toward Wei.
“Hai!” he shouted, in
the tonal trade tongue of the northern Benzin. “I don’t remember
you!”
“I am Hawk! Who in
the seventh hell are you?”
Wei glared at the
rider, but the intruder just laughed raucously and spat over the
side of his saddle: it landed on the mud, sufficiently far from Wei
to make it unclear whether it was a direct challenge.
Pierce tightened his
grip on his spear, moving his index finger closer to the trigger
discreetly printed on it. High above them, a vul turelike bird
circled the zone of confrontation with unnatural precision, its
fire-control systems locked on.
“I am Teuch,” said
the rider, after a pause. “I captured these women! In the name of
our Father I took them, and in the name of our Father I got them
with children to work in the paddies! What have you done for our
Father today?”
“I stand here,” Wei
said, lifting the butt of his spear. “I guard our Father’s flock
while assholes like you are out having fun.”
“Hai!” The rider’s
face split in a broad, dust-stained grin. “I see you, too!” He
raised his right fist and for an instant Pierce had an icy vision
of his guts unraveling around a barbarian’s spear; but the camel
lifted its head and brayed as Teuch nudged it in a surprisingly
delicate sidestep away from Wei, away from the hedge of thorns,
away from the slave station. And away from the site of the timegate
through which the evacuation team would drive the camp inmates in
two days’ time. The prisoners would be deposited at the start of
the next Reseeding. But none of the Benzin would live to see that
day, a hundred thousand years-objective or more in the
future.
Perhaps their camels
would leave their footprints in the choking, hot rain of ash that
would roll across the continent with tomorrow’s sunset. Perhaps
some of those footprints would fossilize, so that the descendants
of the Alabamae slaves would uncover them and marvel at their
antiquity in the age to come. But immortality, Pierce thought, was
a poor substitute for not dying.