Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

“I know you did. Good girl.” The Oracle squinted at him. “You ain’t like th’ others here, are you? Black man.”

“I guess I’m not,” he said, carefully, studying this girl. She was just a girl—he didn’t expect that she was any older than Jason Thistledown, and might well have been younger. And yet, they called her Oracle. “And you aren’t, either. Can I see your baby?”

The girl took a possessive stance, sheltering the bundle with her body.

“Ain’t my baby,” she said, her voice going high. “Ain’t larder.”

Andrew made a hushing noise. “May I see?”

For a moment they stood still, the only sound being the pattering of rain on the quarantine’s roof. It sounded like it was coming harder. At length, she looked up at Andrew.

“It’s the Lost Child,” she said in a small voice, and reached over with a hand, and pulled aside some cloth. “Like you.”

A tiny claw revealed itself, talons gleaming in the lamplight.

“We saved him,” said Lily.

And the Oracle said, “Too late, too late. So we brung ’im here.”

Andrew stared as she removed more of the cloth, drawing the bent claw out, caressing the thing’s chest.

“Heathen did this. So this is our reminder—of what we do with Heathen that bring harm to the Old Man. To the Son.” The Oracle pulled the cloth back over the corpse. “And you—you smell of him.”

Andrew bit down on the inside of his cheek. No wonder, he thought. This was the thing that’d ripped itself from Loo Tavish. And these girls had it—they had it, because of course they were Feegers, and the Feegers had torn through the Tavish village with knives, and now…

“What are you going to do with the Heathen here?” asked Andrew.

“Same thing,” said the Oracle, “but we can tell the difference. There’s the ones that hurt him. They got one smell. There’s the ones that don’t know yet. They got another.”

“Kill the one,” said Lily. “Learn the other.”

“Then there’s another kind,” said the Oracle. “Smell different. Not one of either. And then—there’s you.”

“Smell of the Lost Child.”

“Black man. With that smell.”

“A mystery.”

“So Mr. Harper—the people in the mansion—the big house—they were harming him?”

“Took him away,” said the Oracle. “Not this one. An elder. They twisted him around, hurt him. Made him do things. That ain’t the order.”

And so they were murdered—cut down by old swords and axes, and the house burned, by this entire community—this extended family—of criminals, bowing to service this animal—this Mister Juke.

How apt, he thought, that the folk of Eliada had named the creature Juke. Apt, but off the mark. The real Jukes were these Feegers—men and women if not congenitally criminal, then made so by the spoor of this parasite. And so it became with anyone who encountered this beast, and its young.

“You have one inside you,” said Andrew to the Oracle, “don’t you?”

At that, the girl beamed.

“And a baby,” said Andrew. “It’s early, but you have a baby too.”

“No,” she said. “He’s got the baby. Larder. It’s better for Him, with larder. As might you know.”

Andrew opened his mouth to speak, and shut it again. This was as he’d surmised and as Norma Tavish had explained to him—the Jukes did better in a womb with child than on their own, by killing and eating the child, stealing its nourishment and so on. It was one thing to understand the behaviour, another to see these… children, apparently understanding what was before them, well enough to deliberately set it in motion.

To make a child for food. A deliberate sacrifice.

And what did they mean: as might you know?

“Why would you?” he asked.

But it wasn’t only the thought. He felt a deep vibration up his back: a deep, basso rumbling, or a moan, as of great timbers drawing against one another.

The Oracle and Lily heard it too. The two girls bent their heads back, and began to hum and sing, in high, broken voices. They mingled with the deeper noise into a harmony as Andrew had never heard before. He flexed his elbow, and the shooting pain drew him back from reverie.

The sounds mingled and bent, and slowly, the room filled up with a cool light. Andrew looked to its source, and saw: the two tall doors were opening.

§

Two things dwelt there.

One was luminous: a tall, slender man in robes, flesh of buffed mahogany, his brow unfurrowed and gaze open and loving.

A Dauphin.

He stood in a great glass dome, as high as a cathedral. His head nearly reached the apex; doves flew about him, and settled on his shoulders.

When he spoke, he sang, and the doves joined him in harmony. It was a song of forgiveness and welcoming; its lyric spoke straight at Andrew Waggoner.

Come on to Heaven, said the man, raising his hand to touch the glass over his head, and bringing rays of gold where his fingertips tarried. Looking up through there, Andrew felt certain: the shades of Loo Tavish, Maryanne Leonard, might never reach him from this exalted place.