Darwin's Bastards Read online

  UNCLE CHAD

  “Seriously,” I tell Cuban,“there may still be trout in these streams.”

  But he just pages through his read-out. Which is exactly what Powter in the corner office does whenever I ask him a question, the same posture and everything, and I wish Cuban wouldn’t remind me of work in the middle of what’s turning into a pretty nice vacation. The girls fast asleep.

  “So,” I try again, “what was the old lady like?”

  “Hm? Oh, sprightly, certainly.”

  “Feisty?”

  “Yes.”

  “And was that, like, her last interview on the face of this earth?”

  “Very likely.” He scratches his neck with his pinkie and makes himself smile. “Unless I can be superhumanly persuasive on the other side of the country.”

  “So what are her last words on record?”

  “Transcriber’s just finished . . . let me see. All this useless code.”

  He monkeys around. The road curves away from the river and goes straight on through the trees. But there’s a pud-pud-pud noise somewhere. Above us? I’m so used to the boat and the waves constantly thudding against its hull that I can’t get used to hearing things from inside the car. It’s unnerving.

  “Can you hear that?” I ask.

  DR. CUBAN

  I was not expressly given consent by the administration of Chrétien University to undertake this trip; indeed, all documents required by federal and provincial bodies in order for the final leg of the project to proceed—requiring, in this case, no less than thirteen signatures by nine individuals—were forged by myself. On the occasion of the obligatory video conference between Deputy Equanimity Minister Q3mv4 and my immediate superior, Dean Cherry, I artfully arranged for local law enforcement to tow Cherry’s car from his driveway that morning and successfully impersonated him simply by wearing a pair of false teeth over my own, which was only fair considering that Q3mv4 wore a voice modulator and blackface. The certification with which I presented Ms. Feist ought to have been embossed by the Equanimity Ministry and by failing to inspect the document thoroughly she implicated herself under no less than seven sections of the Universal Privacy Act. Mr. Chad Campbell and his wards can be charged as accessories under three sections of the Act as they abetted my crimes but held no secrets, as far as Equanimity is concerned, worth revealing. At any rate Mr. Chad Campbell is now dead at my side and I can’t imagine the girls in the back are much better off. Leaflets drop from the sky like someone’s opened a bale of them, and one drifts down through where the windshield used to be and lands in my lap. Friendly little thing. Dead or wounded? Keep my tally accurate! Live-feed. stone.cold.

  The car went out of control, of course, after the Olympians’ grenade blew out the left-hand tires—a classic example of the murderous precision and absolute randomness that was so typical of them in the old days—and our impact with the trees killed Chad rather neatly. Or quickly, rather. “Neatly” is not accurate at all. The first thing I do once I’m out in the road is wipe the blood off my glasses.

  The smell from the chewed-up pine trees is rather wonderful.

  The trail of the Olympians’ exhaust makes a U-turn out over the forest; they must be steering back to scalp us, but they’re too low now for me to see just where they’ve gone. What are those sleds burning, diesel? I hear the rumble but there are too many echoes to be able to pinpoint them. And what in hell brought them over the border? It’s unheard of since the Gosling, Jr. Incident in ’49. Ah, the smart-mouth girl peers out at me. The way her seat’s twisted backwards she must not see the others. Is the quiet one still alive back there?

  “There’s been an accident,” I tell Smart-mouth through the oddly unbroken window. “I need tools. Pop the trunk.”

  She doesn’t blink. She might be in shock. Good Lord, how long does she have? I once saw an entire Central Asian village die from shock. Finally a hand comes up to push the hair out of her eyes.

  “Where’s the switch?” she asks.

  “Beside the emergency brake. Feel behind you with your left hand.”

  “Where’s Carla?”

  “Pop it open so I can get the tools.”

  I crunch over the glass to the back of the car and right away I hear it pop, bless her, even over the roar of them coming, but the trunk can’t open because the frame’s buckled. I wedge a branch into the gap and force it. My suitcase. I crane my head around to watch the treetops as I feel inside for the gun. From my peacekeeping days. I can’t feel it, must be tangled with the recording equipment, so I haul the suitcase out and what, of all things, is under it?

  The buckle-proof hydrogen tank. Which was at 93 per cent before the dashboard feed went.

  I screw down the shut-offs with one hand and unclamp the brackets with the other, gun already in the back of my belt, and out of the corner of my eye I see Smart-mouth slide out onto the pavement. And the cumulative roar of their sleds is honestly no different, but I know they’re upon us because now there’s a buzz in the back of my skull, the same manner in which a sperm whale might come to realize that those eternally glamorous Olympians were all of fifty feet away. Had we talked about sperm whales at one point, or was that the dehydration?

  In the middle of the road Smart-mouth freezes like a monument to flippancy, hands bunched under her throat, shredded tires scattered around her. I complete my task and turn to see the first Olympian buzz up from behind me, a brute so big his sled lurches under him. Tanned muscles, blond hair, white smile and immodest bathing suit. A feed address is tattooed across his chest—skull.fucker.gov—and he’s screaming, neck veins bulging, eyes on the girl. How could snapping her back make him any more famous? I’ll never understand Americans, I suppose. What makes us Canadian.

  I swing the suitcase 270 degrees then let go as he flies past. It hits him in the ribs, not the head like I’d planned, but he’s knocked off regardless, crashing through the underbrush on the far side of the road, and his sled cuts a gouge up the asphalt until it stops three feet from the girl. She stares at it and makes a noise like a kicked dog, the same noise Alanis Morissette made when she tripped over her coffee table, though she didn’t even bruise. Nimble from yoga.

  Now I see how the brute would’ve commemorated his glory; the rest of the pack, with sequins and mascot dogs, circles the treetops, cameras dangling. Arranging another volunteer to come down after us. Like an old lawnmower the untenanted sled starts with a simple pull-cord, and as a string twangs in my shoulder it clamours to life with one tug. I see myself reflected on the monitor, wearing Dean Cherry’s so-called teeth. What great dignity. By the time Cherry sees the documentation I will likely be dead. I strap the hydrogen tank onto the sled with the belts the brute neglected to use and let the sled idle as I pull its nose up. Diesel gusts in my face. The Olympians are in a cluster now, heading west, but after that they’ll circle south. I put the thing in drive and as the sled lunges upwards I let go of the handles. The girl’s crouched behind me with her hands over her ears.

  “Get to the car!” I say. I slide the gun out of my belt.“Get inside!”

  The Olympians turn south. The sun gleams off their teeth. They talk with their hands. They don’t even watch us because they believe it’s enough—more than enough—to have us on their feeds. I don’t lift the gun yet because if my arms get tired they’ll shake too much to aim.

  The sled’s above the trees now, sunlight flashing off the hydrogen tank, and before the Olympians deign to notice I lift the gun and fire.

  I might not have had the brains to stay in my disinfected office but I have the brains to not stand gawking. As a new sun opens for business a hundred feet above us I dive-roll towards the open car door, but now I’m lying on my face because my brain has been struck by lightning from my left hip. Broken, of course. Everything goes as black as gouged asphalt, even with the heat melting the hairs on the back of my neck, but now I feel her little hands around my wrists, dragging me. Steel engines clank onto the highway one after anoth
er—the aluminum frames must have melted instantaneously. I would explain this to Smart-mouth if I weren’t in shock.

  She tilts me back in the passenger seat and from there she must see that Mr Chad Campbell is horribly dead. She feeds me six aspirin and I wash them down with gel.

  “Carla’s all right, though, hey?” Smart-mouth whispers. “Say something, Carla?”

  “Who’s got a lug-wrench?” asks a small voice in the back.

  Smart-mouth smiles.

  “Coo that,” she says.

  She wraps me in a blanket for the shock—something worthwhile is taught in the schools. Every tree in sight is burning; one falls across the road in front of us.

  “What happened to the brute down here?” I ask.

  “Haven’t seen him,” says Smart-mouth.

  “Me neither,” says Carla. “Dr. Cuban, is that right what she said that Chad’s hurt?”

  “That’s true, child. I’m sorry. I’m sorry but he didn’t make it.”

  After a moment I hear disembodied sobs. Lord knows what sort of shape she’s in back there. I feel better already, lucid. Is that possible? Was six aspirin too many? I clutch the blanket to my chin.

  “Satellites’ll see the fire by now, right?” Carla asks between deep breaths. “Then the constables come?”

  “They need to come cover him up,” Smart-mouth says. “He can’t sit looking like that. I can’t keep mild much longer. He has to get me to the oboe recital!”

  “What’s your name again?” I ask her.

  She moves her hair aside and gives me a hard look.

  “Yukon,” she says.

  “Yukon?” Suddenly I’m not lucid, my hip can’t decide if it’s numb or in agony, and all its point-counterpoint is going to make me vomit. “Really, ‘Yukon’?”

  Why am I speaking such inanities while lodgepole pines collapse against each other and flame roars on all sides? Pine needles curl on the hood of the car. Everything incinerated by that business with the hydrogen tank, my masterstroke of senile grandstanding.

  “We should all get out of here,” says Carla in the back. “This is all on fire. Hey, look up there! Helicopter.”

  I blink up through where the windshield used to be and sure enough three of them approach in a triangle—three long-tailed MacKenzies that look like dragonflies. I assume they’re constables, but what if they’re production assistants for skull.fucker.gov? I am numb below the navel and my tongue is a hairbrush. I am incapable of defending these girls beyond the three bullets in the gun now in Yukon’s hand, so if it comes to—no, no, not to worry. I can see the maple leaves painted on them. Thank Christ. If they open their storage bay and wheel out the head in a jar I will kiss it on the lips.

  Yukon stands in the road, waving her skinny arms as the smoke gusts around her. She kneels beside me.

  “After they get Carla out, they’ll cover him up and take us all home, all right?”

  “Please,” says Carla in the back.

  “I can’t keep looking at him!” blurts her sister. “How long’s he going to keep dripping?”

  “The helicopters mean it’s military now,” I say. “They’ll take custody of him.”

  “He won’t come with us?” asks Yukon. “He’s not useless, you know, he’s Uncle Chad!”

  “He won’t come today,” I say.

  The point of the triangle is landing. The other two stay aloft.

  “I’m going to sing to him then,” says Carla from the back.

  “Go,” says Yukon.

  And so she begins to sing. There in the car. A reedy voice, but strong enough. The MacKenzie’s crew is disembarking, scuttling towards us, but my attention is elsewhere.

  We’ve been through the hard ti-imes

  Come upon some pain

  Take my hand and these rhy-ymes

  Here comes my refrain

  It is a show, though there’s no blindfold or ball-gag or parking lot.

  This is not the end my frie-end

  This is not the end

  Yukon kneels on the pavement, clutching my good leg, wetting the seam of my trousers with her snot and tears. Here at last is a new experience and I can’t think what to do next. My hands feel like they’ve spent a year in ice water, but I put one on her shoulder. Carla is projecting more now; she wants her uncle to enjoy the number.

  This is not the end my frie-end

  She stops there. Yukon looks up, wipes her nose on her wrist and swallows hard.

  “That was so pants,” she says.

  LEE HENDERSON

  THE AUROCHS

  Beware of the scribes, which desire to walk in long robes, and love greetings in the markets, and the highest seats in the synagogues, and the chief rooms at feasts; LUKE 20:46

  VERONA RUPES

  I’m known as Verona Rupes. With tons of determination and over many years, never mind how many, I spent my entire life, and mine and not a few other men’s fortunes in pursuit of the Aurochs. How I became Director of the Sony-Smithsonian Museum of Extinction in New Hope, Virginia, and commandeered enough respect and trust in my industry to own one, is the story of my life. The Aurochs was more than a giant cow. It was a Polish-made sports utility vehicle. First rolled off the Dae-woo Motors assembly line in May 1999 days before the sudden seizure of the nation’s economy following a dispute with Russia over oil transfer credits. I searched for one of these SUVs my entire career. I was obsessed, yes. For a few years here and there I can recall being distracted by the happiness of marriage or a mistress or the sale of some trifle, a fleeting success. My most recent wife Polli was a brave blonde meds trafficker with her own skytaxi and looked a ninth my age. But that ended over a decade ago now, and the truth is, all my other endeavours and adventures in the field of antiquities were swings around the light poles in my lifelong hunt for the 1999 Daewoo Aurochs. I swear this car has been stuck in my mind’s eye like a fleck of gold I can’t rub off. It’s because of the Aurochs that my first love is post-Industrial antiquity.

  When I was at Sotheby’s Primary School where I received formal training—that’s when I first saw footage of the Aurochs. I was a preemie born with a heart defect to parents living in the hospice. No one expected me to survive long after my mother died when I was a mere two and a half, but by and by a couple dozen kilos of malleable boyhood formed itself. Harbouring a limp from my malnourishment in infancy, I was teased and ignored at Sotheby’s, and my asthma wounded me when I ran and played with other chilteens. My astigmatism surfaced by the age of two and my eyesight has been deteriorating ever since—I’d be blind without my contraband contacts. Imagine me, little Vee Rupes, in 2223, one of a billion orphans aged seven enrolled in a trade school of some kind, and I’m squinting through my blotted vision to find angles where I can see clearly the SUV pictured in an old catalogue from Fall 2188—I can practically remember the lot numbers—of nearly priceless antiques from the post-Indies. A hot purple model and the first to surface on the secondary market in more than a century. It belonged to a gravity-transportation czar with a new residence on Mars. It looked to me like the most daunting and indestructible vehicle ever bought or sold. Below the image I read that this was only one of two Aurochs left in the universe. Other kids built toy air-horses and were obsessed with learning about our first voyage to Mars in 2110. I studied the dark age before then, with all the gasoline-fuelled cars and drive-thrus and hospitals. I marvelled at the simple smalless of the number two.

  BOVINE ORIGINS

  The aurochs the vehicle’s named after was a massive prehistoric bovine that was swept away in the early tides of the Holocene Extinction Event. The aurochs had no Noah to save it. An aurochs was like a great shaggy bull mastiff with extremely long, sharp horns and blown up to nearly the size of an elephant, way longer horns than an elephant’s tusks, which must have been very threatening to people. It was hunted down and killed and skinned and eaten and sacrificed like every other massive predatory animal that lived in herds. Ever-dwindling herds of aurochs were chased b
y ever-growing human populations. Driven north by insatiable spear-and-bow hunters up from the Indian subcontinent, the aurochs was last seen on Earth in 1627 when two potbellied poachers with muskets took down a young female rutting against a tree in the dense, bleak, smoggy forests of Jaktorow, Poland. The poachers skinned and left the carcass near where Daewoo Motors set up the Aurochs factory nearly four hundred years later in complex tribute.

  The Aurochs SUV had the most epic hood ornament. Incredible. Award-winning. Dash computer operates on an unfathomably small half gig of memory. Adjustable everything. Seats nine comfortably. Slavic luxury vehicle. The Euro didn’t even exist yet to pay for this behemoth with. It was another century before the Euro and dollar merged to become our ears. The Aurochs cost over a million American dollars in Poland, a perestroika nation still teething on democracy, using a nonsense currency a hundredth the value of the American dollar. To ship one to another country required political grease and plenty of muscle—apparently no one in Poland was officially responsible for vehicle exports. The factory was shuttered. The Aurochs became an absurd jewel among automobiles, more of a rumour or myth than transportation. It was too late arriving on the scene to be of much use to people. I must confess I sometimes compare myself to the Aurochs. Even as a child I felt extinct, or approaching so—in any event, lost. The tender, school-age version of myself was as disenchanted a human being as I am today, with nothing in common with anyone, even myself.

  The big wagon’s value among collectors is hard for an outsider to fathom. The hood ornament is one reason. An aurochs fixed right at the lip there extending out beyond the front of the SUV. A brute bull in his prime with hind legs bent nearly seated on the vehicle, neither rear hoof is flat on the hood, haunch muscles taut and flexed and ripped in the moment before the bull’s about to leap forward, his long slightly curved horns tapering to a thin hypodermic vanishing point facing the road ahead, a huge ornament, three kilos of solid steel designed by prominent animalier of the time Stücka Heck, in the clean, unfussy style of Bohumil Kafka. Some auto historians speculate Heck was inspired by the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, and it’s quite possible, but tell me, what artist isn’t? But no Neanderthal ever came up with the details you see on this ornament, flesh rumpling, fierce, seething nostrils, grumped brow—and a detail you don’t notice immediately: a scorpion lying on the hood underneath the aurochs, clamped to its testicles. The scorpion’s got the balls securely pinched in its front claws and is about to pierce the aurochs’ belly with the tip of its venomous tail. All solid steel. You have to imagine the scale of this ornament, in 1999— any other car’s fibreglass hood would buckle under the weight. The Aurochs was one of the three largest vehicles on Earth.