Джон Адамс: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

You might very well figure out an escape route sometime before the world above recognizes the disaster of your absence, but you might never. You might spend forever staring up at the darkness, unable to fathom the way out. You might try and fail. And you might succumb to a despair greater than any ever felt by merely mortal prisoners: because even those have always known that escape, of a kind, was inevitable, and never beneath the stars has such a merciful end ever been planned for you.

It came out of the sea; it destroyed a city; it died. That’s the story. That’s what everyone knows. It was tall and terrible and incomprehensible and biological and beautiful, and it breathed out gouts of acid like it was nothing, and it tore down our towers with its terrible claws, and its skin was armor against almost everything we had to throw—everything but small-scale nuclear weapons. It melted in the face of our atomic might; it burned and howled and screamed and fled and fell and rotted in the slag that had been the beach. Scientists in hazmat suits picked it apart, squirreling every precious scrap away in secret laboratories, coaxing its secrets from the melted marrow of its bones.

That’s the story. That’s what everyone knows.

I was a child when the creature stepped out of the sea, defying everything we thought we knew about our place in the world. I can remember the sight of it on the morning news, before my mother screamed and turned the monitor off, saying that it was nothing a child should be looking at. She hadn’t understood how ubiquitous it would become. No one had. There had never been anything like it before, tall as a skyscraper, ancient as the moon. It had remade our understanding of, well, everything, and it had done it as easily as it killed 2.5 million people, as easily as it left Seattle and the surrounding area in ruins.

It came; it killed; it died, and we pulled it apart to see what we could see. That’s the other thing I remember about the arrival. Crying because there was this huge, beautiful, dead creature sprawled on the sand after three days of destruction—by that point my mother had stopped trying to cover my eyes, had somehow managed to grasp that everything was changing—and we weren’t going to bury it the way we’d buried my dog when he died. We were going to hurt it, and keep hurting it, until it wasn’t anymore. That was how we’d punish it for daring to hurt us. We’d hurt it so badly that it no longer existed.

Biologists looked at the crenulations of its brain and the structure of its neurons and declared it nothing more than an oversized, biologically complex animal, no more complicit in its own actions than a rabid dog.

Physicists and material engineers looked at the composition of its bones and the shape of its skeleton and declared it a miracle of form and function, something we could use to make our damaged towers taller and stronger, immune to future monsters.

Everyone had something to say about the creature, which by that point was known around the world as The Beast. Parts of it went on display in natural history museums, once the radiation had died down. Cute plush toys were sold, considered tasteless until the manufacturer loudly announced that a portion of each sale was being donated to the trusts dedicated to helping the survivors of Seattle. Movies were made. Genres of science fiction were revitalized.

Time passed.

The nuclear weapons used to kill the creature had been selected because they wouldn’t leave the coastline uninhabitable forever. A decade, yes, and residents would need to filter their water and avoid growing vegetables for a decade after that, but those were things that could be worked around. Those were hurdles to be overcome. Seattle began to rebuild. The Beast loomed large in the public consciousness, but the creature, the real animal, was chipped away, worn into nothing one forgotten moment at a time.

We were killing it all over again, feeding it into the great machine of human history, where we always had to be the victors, and anything that challenged the narrative of our own superiority had to be destroyed. We were hurting it.

It came out of the sea; it destroyed a city; it died. That’s the story. That’s the narrative.

This is the truth.

Fifteen years is a long time. Long enough to clean the radiation from a ruined city; long enough to render an impossible creature into its component parts; long enough for a child too young to understand why everyone is crying to become a marine biologist and be loosed, in her own time, upon the world.

Plane tickets were easy. Explaining why I wanted to go to Washington was hard. I wasn’t a resident of the state, had no relatives who had either died or relocated when the creature came, and the maps I had so carefully drawn, so carefully considered, weren’t the sort of things I wanted to share. But my thesis had been on the impact of radiation on tide-pool invertebrates, and my adviser wrote me a glowing letter of recommendation. After fifteen years of nightmares, I was finally on my way to where they’d started. Not with a wave of destruction that rose from the sea and slaughtered everything in front of it. With a creature that fell, never understanding what it had done wrong, and with the look it had cast down the coast as it died.

The scientists had been so quick to say that the creature was only an animal, that it didn’t know, didn’t understand, couldn’t possibly have had any motivation beyond instinct. They had never paused to ask themselves whether it might have been intelligent in its own way, or whether that intelligence might have had a purpose when it came for Seattle. They had seen the same thing I had, the flail, the fall, the last, frantic look along the coast, and they had come to different conclusions.

Fifteen years and six weeks after the creature came out of the sea, I parked my rental car on the overgrown slope of a road that hadn’t been maintained in far too long, shielding my eyes as I peered into the towering, mossy forest between me and the ocean. Even before the attack, Washington State had some of the most protected beaches in the country, barricaded by evergreen forests, hidden by the curvature of the coast. Now, after a decade and a half of neglect, those beaches might as well be on another planet. No human had set foot on them since the bombs fell.

Everything happens in its own time. I checked my boots, ran a finger along the line of tape dividing them from my jeans—always tape where there might be ticks; it’s only common sense—and started into the trees.

Mosquitoes buzzed among the branches, and deer and rabbits watched me with no sign of fear, so unaccustomed to the presence of humans that they no longer understood that I might be a threat. I wasn’t, not yet: it would be another decade, at least, before it was safe to hunt here. Another decade of lazy days and silent hunting seasons, of starvation when the herd wasn’t thinned before the end of the growing season. Everything has its dark side, even a cessation of gunfire.

I pushed my way through the woods, fighting for every step against the tangled green that threatened to shove me back out to the road, where I belonged. When the tree line ended, it was abrupt and unexpected: I pushed through a veil of blackberry creepers and was suddenly standing at the top of a sloping hill leading down to a narrow, rocky strip of shore. It would widen as the tide went out, but not much, no, not nearly enough to make this place appealing to developers or vacation-goers or even local families. There had always been better beaches, more accessible beaches, places where they could spread out their towels and enjoy the faltering Pacific sun.