Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

Like most gifts emergent too soon in children, Joan’s drew quick scrutiny. Little did we know her next gift would be so perfectly timed with history’s next chapter.

Sometimes I’m not sure I remember the beginning of war or how the Wars ended. It feels like we’d been born into perpetual war, to be honest, and now we hover above our own past like impotent Greek gods, without any use, living off of the dying and dry planet below.

In my memory, back on Earth, the word war stopped being a picture or a subject or a nightly news show somewhere far away in the past. It fragmented and shattered and splayed itself across all times and places. Alliances formed or deformed quickly, as in chemistry experiments. Large powers were dispersed into smaller ones; small powers joined in collectives, like bees in hives, and grew dangerously alive. Leaders rose and fell faster than seasons.

There wasn’t time to educate the children.

As in medieval times, and during other world wars, children simply had to learn to live within the miasma of violence. Pick up this weapon. Don’t think. Act.

The year before the Wars began, it seemed that technology and evolution were on the cusp of a strange bright magnificence. Technology had made houses smart, and cars, and employment centers, and education. The physical world seemed only a membrane between humans and the speed and hum of information. The age of synthetic biology came along in just the way the age of computers had: in a makeshift garage lab, some brainy nerd kid on the edge of adulthood discovered the pieces of an intense puzzle all on her own. Soon microbes were created that converted corn into plastic, in a process a little like brewing beer. Throw a seed out the window at night, and before long you could have a garden of unearthly delights: anything from a toddler’s sippy cup to a complete set of synthetic scaffolding for a house.

It wasn’t that difficult, as things turned out. The more we understood our bodies, the more we understood the universe, and vice versa. A living organism was a ready-made production system that, nearly exactly like a computer, was ruled by a program. Its genome. Synthetic biology and synthetic genomics capitalized on the fact that biological organisms were already programmable manufacturing systems. Microbes couldn’t turn a rock into gold, but they damn sure could convert shit into electricity.

The newly engineered microbes of this era could detect poisons in drinking water or aerosol spray. They could spread out laterally to create biofilm; they could copy superimposed patterns and images, serving as microbial photocopy machines. E. coli —one of the world’s fastest-duplicating bacterial machines—could be reprogrammed to make bactoblood for fast and easy transfusions. Microbe technology gave rise to fast and reliable new ways to detect and identify diseases; genetic microbe solutions, combined with stem cell medical advances, made old narratives about sickness and health fall away as quickly as the old story about Earth being flat. Human limbs could be made to regenerate. Deceased hearts made to beat. Blinded eyes made to see. Secular miracles.

Of course, with the speed of these advances—with the superhuman shotgun blasts of these cures and hopes and solutions—came their counterparts: terrible advances in warfare. When the first nuclear drone attacks erupted, for a while, and counterpart drones returned fire, the War was waged almost without soldiers. But all agon eventually reduces itself to human violence. It was almost as if humans couldn’t bear their distance from the killing. The drama. The theater of war.

Then came what was once supposed unthinkable: child armies.

Child armies were born quickly and organically, in the moment after the family, as a unit of social organization, broke down and lost its role within the social structure. At first their emergence seemed only expedient, only circumstantial: there were child porters, spies, messengers, scouts. It took only a little longer until there were child shields, and finally child soldiers, in every army. But then the world has always made violent use of children. The rhetoric of protecting children from war, shielding those most vulnerable from our most horrific truths, was always a hypocrisy designed to protect the illusions that adults carry that we care more about our children than we do about ourselves, until finally that pretense, too, fell.

And then the wars crescendoed, vacuuming civilian life away forever.

As a child soldier, Joan had been extraordinary. Her military prowess only missed earning her official recognition because she so often laid down her arms in secret, or near-secret, during pivotal moments in battle. Almost no one saw her quietly sliding her rifle down the side of her body while the blue light near her temple ignited. No one but she heard the cacophonous song raging in her head, an epic battle story she was living one stanza at a time. When she reached out to touch trees or water or dirt, and the entire battlefield buckled like a sheet being shaken, or the earth opened up and literally swallowed the tanks and Humvees and front-line fighters of whomever the enemy was that week, or water simply left its banks at the sides of rivers and swept fighters away from the knees up. No one was looking quite directly at her.

The first time Leone saw Joan’s otherworldly combat techniques, the story goes, was one day when they arrived too late at a battle zone. Joan’s mother had been stationed there as a nurse. Just before they reached the site, a vibration bomb had gone off, exploding everyone—including Joan’s mother—from the inside out. Joan and Leone had run into the medical tents too late to stop the blood from splattering indifferently over patients and doctors and nurses.

In my narrative, I give her mother’s face a half-smile, blue eyes, rose cheeks. As if she’d been remembering her daughter in the moment before her death. But in truth we’ll never know. They were unable to revive Joan’s mother, her face already the color of a pale moon on a quiet winter night, her eyes terribly open, her throat bombed open like a second mouth. Leone saw Joan jam her hand into her mother’s raw and splayed-open gullet. The image of Joan’s hand within the red and blue and bone made Leone retch. When Joan turned away from her mother and stood up, the look on her face was murderous and iced.

Igraft the scene at my abdomen.

Joan walked straight back out into the fray that day, her hand still bloody with dead mother muck. She bent down toward the ground low enough to put her cheek to the earth. Leone saw something flickering near Joan’s ear and thought it might be an enemy laser sight, so she hid behind a blown-up jeep and tried to cover Joan from possible snipers. But no sniper shot came. Instead, she recognized the familiar blue light at Joan’s temple, and watched Joan put her lips to the earth, almost like she was giving the earth mouth-to-mouth.

Then everything everywhere burst into flames, save the two of them. Plastic polystyrene and hydrocarbon benzene, together, made a hot fire jelly. Like Napalm B, it caused fire, explosions, burns, asphyxiation… and stuck to human skin. At the time, that’s what Leone interpreted: jets had flown by and dropped Napalm B. In their wake, burning bodies everywhere—enemies and comrades alike.

When Leone looked at Joan’s face as she retreated from the field, she could have sworn she saw her whole head glowing aquamarine, like the light in the center of a single flame.

“There are no more mothers,” Joan said, and in her voice was a rage as old as Earth’s canyons, cut by erosion and plate tectonics and the force of water. And yet her emotions were still those of a teen, unable to contain what raged inside her body.