above, we offer you one hundred million buffalo skulls, the rusted hulks of five hundred thousand combines, desiccated farms, diseases, substance abuse, dependency, structured lives, handouts, starvation, hatred, loss of intellectual and spiritual property, identity, will, dignity, and pride. Sign here, please.”
“No.”
“I am empowered to offer the following as further incentive. Complete biological data on peripheral population and projections leading to the inevitable conclusion: to wit, within six generations those populations centered in the secondary and primary civilizations, characterized by protective measures of extreme technological life-sustaining intervention, will become extinct as a species, due primarily to pressure and displacement by a new speciation of the Homo sapiens hominid lineage, which will arise in pressured environments commonly found among peripheral populations, such as yours.
“In exchange for this data, we request intensive biological analysis of your peoples over the next century, including the right to blood and its protective properties thereof, including rad resistant properties, vaccine and serum potential, immunodefense systems against toxemia and related syndromes, new organs and new properties of organs, neurological developments and all genetic traits determined to be conducive to species survival. In short, we ask for your life. We’ll worry about the land later.”
“It seems,” Daniel Horn said, “that your Manifest Destiny possesses a heretofore unknown appendix, wherein lies the inevitable conclusion, a conclusion you have espoused as wholly natural: species extinction. Unfortunately, the species about to become extinct is your own.”
“You do not understand our desperation.”
“I do now, Dr. MacAlister.”
“Will you help us? Will you save us?”
“In the manner you have just described, no, we won’t help you.”
“But don’t you see? We have bled for you. For five hundred years we have bled for you, for what we did to you.”
“That blood is unhealthy, Doctor. Do you grasp my meaning?”
“Whatever happened to reciprocity?”
“It lives on, but it was never what you believed it to be. You saw it with a scientist’s eyes, Doctor, so you saw wrong. I’m not really interested in explaining it to you, Doctor. William has come to understand, finally. You might want to ask him.”
“He tells me nothing.”
“Nothing you want to hear.”
“Will you help us, Daniel? A few drops of blood? The conveyance of your dead?”
“We’ll think about it, Doctor.”
American NW, Midwest Hole, July 14, A.C . 14
The coyotes streamed down the hillside, driven from their invisible places and becoming four distinct mercurial shapes parting the high magenta grasses. They reached the dry riverbed then scattered. William blinked, and they were gone.
Somewhere behind him rose a ragged slope, lifting the earth into an undercut cresting wave that hung frozen over the flat sweeps of sand and silt. Its shadow slowly crawled across him. He remembered standing on the ridge, the earth giving under him, a heavy, bruising fall.
His backpack lay a dozen meters away, resting against a tuft of grass. The flap had torn, and he saw a liquid glint of metal in the darkness within.
It felt over. The journey cut short, incomplete. He didn’t have the strength to get up.
He’d seen into the coyotes, read their new imperatives like blushes of red behind their eyes. Opportunists, newly aggressive and far too clever for comfort. When night came, they, too, would come.
Life’s cycles are flavored with irony. They’ve been following me, following the scent of blood, and in an hour they’ll come to close the book. Patient bastards. What’s ten thousand years, after all?
He stared at the object inside his backpack, the clarity of his thinking almost too bitter to bear.
Someone had challenged planetary laws. Semipermeable, pliable polysteel that shunted friction like water off
“No.”
“I am empowered to offer the following as further incentive. Complete biological data on peripheral population and projections leading to the inevitable conclusion: to wit, within six generations those populations centered in the secondary and primary civilizations, characterized by protective measures of extreme technological life-sustaining intervention, will become extinct as a species, due primarily to pressure and displacement by a new speciation of the Homo sapiens hominid lineage, which will arise in pressured environments commonly found among peripheral populations, such as yours.
“In exchange for this data, we request intensive biological analysis of your peoples over the next century, including the right to blood and its protective properties thereof, including rad resistant properties, vaccine and serum potential, immunodefense systems against toxemia and related syndromes, new organs and new properties of organs, neurological developments and all genetic traits determined to be conducive to species survival. In short, we ask for your life. We’ll worry about the land later.”
“It seems,” Daniel Horn said, “that your Manifest Destiny possesses a heretofore unknown appendix, wherein lies the inevitable conclusion, a conclusion you have espoused as wholly natural: species extinction. Unfortunately, the species about to become extinct is your own.”
“You do not understand our desperation.”
“I do now, Dr. MacAlister.”
“Will you help us? Will you save us?”
“In the manner you have just described, no, we won’t help you.”
“But don’t you see? We have bled for you. For five hundred years we have bled for you, for what we did to you.”
“That blood is unhealthy, Doctor. Do you grasp my meaning?”
“Whatever happened to reciprocity?”
“It lives on, but it was never what you believed it to be. You saw it with a scientist’s eyes, Doctor, so you saw wrong. I’m not really interested in explaining it to you, Doctor. William has come to understand, finally. You might want to ask him.”
“He tells me nothing.”
“Nothing you want to hear.”
“Will you help us, Daniel? A few drops of blood? The conveyance of your dead?”
“We’ll think about it, Doctor.”
American NW, Midwest Hole, July 14, A.C . 14
The coyotes streamed down the hillside, driven from their invisible places and becoming four distinct mercurial shapes parting the high magenta grasses. They reached the dry riverbed then scattered. William blinked, and they were gone.
Somewhere behind him rose a ragged slope, lifting the earth into an undercut cresting wave that hung frozen over the flat sweeps of sand and silt. Its shadow slowly crawled across him. He remembered standing on the ridge, the earth giving under him, a heavy, bruising fall.
His backpack lay a dozen meters away, resting against a tuft of grass. The flap had torn, and he saw a liquid glint of metal in the darkness within.
It felt over. The journey cut short, incomplete. He didn’t have the strength to get up.
He’d seen into the coyotes, read their new imperatives like blushes of red behind their eyes. Opportunists, newly aggressive and far too clever for comfort. When night came, they, too, would come.
Life’s cycles are flavored with irony. They’ve been following me, following the scent of blood, and in an hour they’ll come to close the book. Patient bastards. What’s ten thousand years, after all?
He stared at the object inside his backpack, the clarity of his thinking almost too bitter to bear.
Someone had challenged planetary laws. Semipermeable, pliable polysteel that shunted friction like water off
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