Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

They climbed up to the base of the tallest of the three Pinnacles, where there was a circular hollow, like a dry hot tub, in which you could sit and be sheltered from the wind. Judy pulled her knees up to her chest and rocked backward and forward. She shook her head when Dawn offered her the joint.

“Dawnie, they’re going to kill me.”

“What?”

“I know it. They’re going to do away with me.”

“What do you mean, kill you? Who?”

“Maa and Mr. Davis. They’re working themselves up to it. They pulled me out of the flow, now they’re throwing me back.”

She had that strange tone again, that sarcastic tone. Dawn fitted the roach into a clip and hunkered down, trying to light a match.

“I don’t understand you, honey. I don’t think anyone’s out to get you.”

“It’s all such a worry, what with the town hating us so much. Mr. Davis is looking into getting proper sewage laid, but that isn’t going to hold them for long.”

“Judy?”

“You don’t know. You haven’t even been here.”

“Try and keep your mind on one thing. Talk to me.”

“I was her little girl. They said that, over and over.”

“Judy, they worship you. They hold you up on high. You’re the one’s been to the ships. They wouldn’t harm a hair on your head.”

“Mr. Davis has got guns, you know. Stashed out in the desert. He’s got people training.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“You should be scared. He’s giving out radiation badges.”

“Clark’s doing this?”

“So you can detect it. It’s colorless and odorless. You have to wear the badges.”

“Is there something radioactive here, Judy?”

“Must be. Mr. Davis wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.”

“Judy, has Clark got something radioactive?”

“It’s the Dark Forces, Dawnie. The Left Hand. You can feel it, can’t you? It’s all over this place. Mr. Davis keeps talking about sacrifices. How we need to make them. For the Light. He goes on and on. It’s like he can’t think of anything else.”

“And you think he means you?”

“Why would he kill me, Dawnie? When he found me and took me up and looked after me for so very long?”

“I don’t know. I can’t believe he wants to hurt you — wait a minute. You said he found you?”

“In Salt Lake. That’s all I remember. I was just a little kid. He picked me right up off the floor like a shiny penny.”

“I thought you walked out of the desert. Maa Joanie waited for you and you came back to her.”

“I was the answer to her prayers.”

“Are you saying you’re not her daughter?”

“Dawnie, there are things that are over and done. We don’t like to talk about the things that are over and done.”

She leaned forward and hugged Dawn tight, pressing in, molding herself to her body. Help, Dawn thought. If you’re out there, Ascended Masters, help me. This is my distress call, my beacon.

No one came. No higher presence, no lights in the sky. Do not fear, she told herself.

do not fear

Rumors. You had to look out for the cigar-shaped craft, the ones with the insignia on the side. They were the dark ships. If they were invisible, you’d still feel their energy, the negativity directed at the Earth base in a great black beam. There was radiation everywhere, in the menthol cigarettes, the purple aum blotter acid, the water, the lentil stew. There were people who couldn’t be trusted, aligned to the Left Hand. They’d buried sources around the compound. Pellets of uranium. They were signaling to their masters using infrared.

She found Wolf and Coyote in a wickiup, singing rebel songs. The air was full of mesquite smoke. They’d sewn rainbow patches onto their clothes.

Everyone knew there’d soon be another raid. FBI, CIA, some clandestine government agency without an official name. Didn’t matter: The government was at the bottom of it. They were rolling up the Brotherhood. Ultralow mental frequencies. Secret offshore prisons. Lightworkers tortured, disappeared. Plausible deniability. COINTELPRO. How much radiation? Terrestrial or etheric? Who could say? They were in a remote area, free from the psychic vibrations of major cities. Maybe the Pinnacles had been chosen as an experimental site.

By whom?

“What are you doing?” she asked Wolf.

“I’m cleaning my gun.”

“Why?”

“So it can speak.”

Coyote slumped down next to her and held a Zippo lighter over the crotch seam of his jeans. He farted loudly. A little greenish puff of flame spurted out.

“It only takes a spark,” he said, “to light a prairie fire.”

“You’re disgusting.”

He laughed, showing a mouthful of yellow teeth. “You know there aren’t any ships, right? No ships filled with joy?”

Rumors. There were agents up on the rocks with masks and protective suits, sweeping, searching, combing the area. Clark was collecting the dosimeter badges for testing. The darkness coiled its way through the camp, rising up between people, causing fights. Coyote built a Geiger counter. A little box with a handle and a microphone on a rubber cord. When he held up the mike, a needle jumped across the dial and clicks and pops stuttered out of the speaker. In our food, our skin, our blood, the marrow of our bones. Everyone with their own decontamination regime. Scrubbing and gargling. Rose crystals, aluminum foil, lemon verbena tea. Was the whole site infected? In the chickpeas. Sprayed into the air from crop dusters. Fine droplets. Microscopic scale. Coyote, throwing lumps of quartz, snickering about background radiation, cosmic rays. Ten, twenty parts a million. The Tronics were broken. Sabotage? They had no protection. The darkness, getting into the circuits. The violet ray, the green ray, the black ray of despair.

Every day more people left, others arrived. Drifters, bikers, informers, agents. Every morning Dawn woke up and looked for Judy. Until she saw her she couldn’t relax. The camp had split into two factions. The radiation freaks clustered around Clark and Joanie; the others were with Wolf and Coyote. You saw people carrying rifles. A new phrase, a new philosophy.

Armed love .

Off the pigs! Strike terror into their plastic hearts. Clark and Joanie walked about, dressed like Christmas trees, shouting at people about the Command. The Ascended Masters were looking down on them in horror. Wolf and Coyote were taking their orders from the black ships. Kill their gods, whispered Coyote. Rise up and be free. It was a declaration of war. Angry scenes in the dome, radfreaks versus armed lovers, shouting, finger pointing, clenched fists punching the air. Clark tried to bring order. The hierarchy existed for a reason. Not everyone could send messages through the sacred channel to the sky. The fate of the Earth was in their hands. Unity was everything! His voice was high and cracked. No one seemed to give a damn. Coyote squatted down and pissed up against his throne. Wolf called out from the floor. Armed love! Only one division, one barrier — between the living and the dead. Time to break it down. Time to storm heaven.

Great liberation on hearing. The dead were tunneling through, slithering under the wire. Where were the ships, the beautiful ships filled with joy?

Now death was inside the dome, a skeletal communard breaching the citadel of the living. Clark was brandishing a pistol. Shots were fired. People ran for cover. Dawn didn’t know the name of the young man who fell. Blond hair. Death’s blue-eyed boy, clutching his chest. We aren’t settlers, he’d said, rapping round the fire. We are unsettlers. We want to learn water, learn animals fire sun moon edible plants. We want to be a dropout nation, living wild and free. Rattle the bones. Bones and stones. Ancient, futuristic. Red rose blooming through his shirt. Just a boy, shivering, bleeding out. He couldn’t speak. He was heading into the bardo. How it was decided, Dawn would never know, but instead of taking him to a doctor, they all gathered around with their instruments. Coyote was scurrying here and there, dishing out squares of blotter, connecting cables, getting mixed up in the paths and flows. And so they hooked the boy up to the Tronics and began the final session.