Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

Andrew pushed himself to his feet with a wince. The land here was clear for four, five hundred yards around him. Downslope, he saw wide paths cut in the trees, starting to grow in with underbrush. Harper’s men had been at work here, but they had not been back in some time.

Still, he could follow one of those paths and eventually find himself back at Eliada.

Andrew marched upslope a few dozen yards. His doctor’s bag lay where he’d dropped it as he twitched and stumbled down the hillside. Miraculously, it was intact.

No, Andrew corrected himself. There was no miracle because there had been no battle. He had not been attacked by her, any more than he had encountered Loo in the trees.

The mechanism of this thing had simply preyed upon his own doubts and fears and aspirations. It had somehow aided him in isolating something that for lack of a better word might be called “sin.” And for a physician, sin was failure.

Andrew shut his eyes. Oh yes—the Juke had done its work with the brainless cruelty of a clockwork. It had done everything that it might, to draw him into its web—to ripen him for what amounted to a religious conversion.

All of which gave rise to another question: why hadn’t the strategy worked?

It should have. Andrew thought himself clever enough. He had been a good student and, recent experience notwithstanding, a competent physician. But he was under no illusions that he possessed heroic will or genius insight. What was it that saved him?

Norma said the Juke tended to make its deepest mark upon close families—through the amniotic fluid and germ plasm of the host mother, no doubt. And Andrew was far enough from the stem of that family tree that he was barely affected at all.

He flexed the fingers of his broken arm, and thought then about another possibility.

Perhaps it was something in Norma’s remarkably curative tea.

What was it she had said? Good for the body and the soul. Might she have discovered some root, some concoction that lessened the ability of this thing to rob men and women of their wills? It would explain how it was that she and her ilk had lived in this place for so long, without falling into the thrall of these creatures.

I will have to ask her for the recipe—as soon as I find my way back, he thought as he hefted the bag in his good hand and started to climb back up the slope. It wouldn’t be hard—there was a good plume of wood smoke climbing into the sky. Perhaps, thought Andrew as he climbed, they are cremating Loo now.

§

Or perhaps, Andrew thought as he first took sight of what was left of the Tavish’s homestead, the Juke hasn’t finished with me yet.

At the opening of the path was a body of a man, his intestines torn from his middle and stretched through the blood-quickened dirt, mingled with pine needles. More corpses were stacked in the middle of the common, in the same place that just a day ago, Andrew had worked his meagre skills to try to save Loo. The table was gone—perhaps locked in the still-smouldering ruins of the house where Loo had been kept in her last weeks.

Andrew knelt down by the first corpse and took a good look at the cut. Nothing had clawed its way out of this one and no creature had torn it either. The cut was crosswise across the gut, and it was neat enough to be from a blade, not neat enough to suggest a sharp one.

Andrew touched the man’s face. He stared with wide milky eyes up into the pines. Blood flecked his beard, and flies buzzed in Andrew’s ear. He let go of the man’s face, and touched his fingertip to the cooling tube of intestine, and drew a deep breath of the smell of this place—and uncertainly at first, he stood up, shaking with the realization: this was no chemical fakery. This was not something that Norma’s tea would drive off.

Andrew left the single corpse and made his way through a thickening cloud of flies to the others. Eyes stinging, he made a count: there were seven here, among them what was left of Hank, his skull split from the side. One eye hung out, its orb crusted with dirt where it touched the ground.

He wanted to cry out, to call for Norma—but he didn’t. The ones who’d done this weren’t in sight, but they mightn’t be far. So Andrew picked up his doctor’s bag, and propelled by the slimmest hope he struggled his way up the hill as quick as he might, to Norma Tavish’s cabin.

§

He didn’t have to get that far to find her. She was on her back, a great slash across her throat, beside a rain barrel next to the barn. Her hands were still clenched in fists, as though she were still alive, waiting for another fight to come.

Andrew reached down with trembling hands and opened those fists, uncurling each finger. He smoothed her hair back. He tried to lift her but that was beyond him. So he reached down and shut her eyes—the last grace he could give her. He left her there under the trees, and made for her house.