David Nickle - Eutopia

It sat still for an hour, staring out with black and unblinking eyes. Then it became agitated, throwing itself against the sides of the jar. Andrew held it still so it wouldn’t shatter; this made the creature angrier. It whistled—that sound that Andrew had heard before, and he surmised was the thing’s speech. He sent Norma to the door, to see if anyone were coming but no one was—they were all in their mystical trance around the bonfire.

“You make them see God,” said Andrew as the thing slid down the side of the jar, like it was falling into despair. “That’s how it works, isn’t it? You make them see God with your narcotic fumes, and so they think they’re special, and that makes them think you are special. They start to worship. That how it works?”

The thing ran a clawed hand down the glass.

“Then what happens? You get bigger, with all the food they give you—and you go lay your eggs in one of their girls? And so it goes?”

“Hey,” said Norma. “Don’t be talkin’ to it. That’s how it starts!”

“Shhh,” said Andrew. He felt an awful black thing welling in him—a deep hatred that he could barely put a name to. He saw Maryanne Leonard, he saw Lou-Ellen Tavish… he saw Jason Thistledown, trapped in the quarantine. Dr. Nils Bergstrom, driven mad by it he figured, pulled from his course of sterilization. And he saw this thing in the jar, a dim angry shape, ever-changing, like a djinni in a bottle.

His hands were shaking as he lifted the jar off the shelf. He sat down by the stove, with the jar on his lap. The thing was moving in circles now. Spinning. Let it spin, he thought nastily, wear itself out.

“All because we’re willing to believe,” said Andrew. And with his good hand, he covered the air-holes, but he couldn’t bring himself to keep it there. He half-turned back to Norma.

“You were right to want to kill it,” he said, as the thing flopped and struggled and cursed, its whistles muffled by suffocating glass.

Andrew did not kill the thing right then. But it died on its own all the same. If it were older it might have made it—like the Juke that’d hung and lived in Eliada. But this was a baby—a newborn. It sent noise from the jar as it expired—tapping and scratching and whistling. It was hard to see what it was doing, because the glass was so streaked with mucous and blood. But its death was not quiet.

As the creature died, Andrew huddled like a boy in the arms of the old mountain woman, curled around the raw spot in his middle where so far as he could tell, his soul had once resided; while around them, the forest whistled and screamed the baby Juke’s dying lament up and down the mountainside.

The Oracle woke a-screaming that night.

Before she was done, she was joined by her sisters—Missy, who was waiting up during that part of the night anyway, hunkered in the crook of a fallen tree—and then Lily, who slept on the flat of a creek-side rock.

The three girls screamed until they lost their wind and paused, looking around blinking to see what attention it brought them.

It took time to find out. The rest of the Feegers were camped downstream, most all of them out cold from the labour of the past days, preparing the march and making that first hard climb, down rock-face and scrub slope, carrying all they needed. By the time they got down to the stream, a spot in the crook of two mountains like the bend of a lady’s middle, they curled up and slept like the dead.

And you don’t wake the dead with just a shout. So it took time, and that did not make the Oracle happy. She demanded to know where the Feegers were. Just to show she meant business, she swatted Lily a good one across the ear.

“I have word from Him,” said the Oracle Patricia. “Gather my people.”

And so Lily and Missy took off for the camp, and the Oracle was left alone a moment before they came. She calmed herself, hand on belly, walking into the rushing stream that was made dim silver by the moon. She caressed her belly, which was still small.

She dropped to her knees in the cold mountain water, felt the ice travel up her thighs to her middle, where the Host waited for their larder to fill. If it weren’t filling, they’d start in on her straight away—but they were wise enough to know that there was a proper time of things.

Oh soon , she thought, and smiled a little. You can thank old Lothar when the time comes. He will be a Saint for the part he plays in making you strong… .

And her smile fell away, as she recalled the cry that had awakened her—not a cry for help, but one of dying. A dying son; a dying grandson.

Murdered by the hand of ignorant heathen. Like those others, maybe, who stole the Son. Those ones though—those might be sinners: folk who, with strong application of word and stick, could be made to see to their God. To see to Him right.

Not like these killers… .

She stood now, and stared down the stream, where around the bend she saw the light of lamp and torch, as her Feeger kin made their way up the bed, to see what their Oracle wanted now.

When they got there, she made it clear that it was only a little thing, a few drops of blood, scarce an ounce of courage, and doing it would not take them long from their path.

“But there ain’t a choice,” she said. “Wicked heathen folk did a thing. They got to be shown .”

The sleepy-eyed Feegers didn’t know what to do with that at first, and for that instant, the Oracle felt a sliver of doubt.

But that doubt vanished, as a cry rang out. There in their midst, Lothar, eyes shining in the starlight, lifted his blade above his head.

“Wicked heathen!” he shouted, his voice cracking, and shouted again: “Wicked heathen!”

And the Oracle smiled upon him, and Lothar hollered some more. And before long, the rest did too.

He will be a Saint, all right , thought the Oracle. Lothar will do it for us fine .

The first morning after Loo’s death, Andrew Waggoner went to see her body intending to perform a post mortem examination.

He might even have done it. Good as their word, the families had neither burned nor buried her, but wrapped the girl up in a blanket and placed her back on that foul bed in the awful shack where he’d found her. He brought his physician’s bag and a candle to see her by as he went into the single room that stank so sweet of death; he shuffled in like an old, sick man, and he fell to his knees, as though in prayer.

He was not in prayer—not precisely—but as he crouched there he realized that he would not be able to cut into this girl’s body and learn anything from it. It was as much as he could do to lift the cloth from her head and look at her face. And even that, he could not do for long.

In some, death brings a final serenity. That was how it had seemed for Maryanne Leonard, whose face had been so pure and clear in death, above her mangled torso. One could have imagined that her fleeing soul had paused an instant to show a hint of the transcendence it sought. One could take comfort in such a thought.

There was no such comfort looking on Loo. Death had etched a final, leaden idiocy to her: no joy, no redemption signalled in her face. There was not even the pathos of surrender. In the end, she was just insensate meat.

Bergstrom meant to spare you from this , he thought.

Andrew knew, of course, that Bergstrom meant to do no such thing when he travelled here with his armed surgery. He meant to spare the race, his race, more abominations like Loo. But as for Loo?

The doctor was not caring for his patient; he was not caring for the unborn children she might make. He was caring for a larger body of patients than this girl and her young.