The End Has Come

We choose our destinations carefully. Never small villages, although most of the planet now lives in small villages. And of course not the cities, unlivable and abandoned. We pick large settlements: harder to attack, but that’s where the targets are.

Usually.

* * *

Jenna stares at the dead soybeans; this was her experiment. But I know she won’t cry. Unlike Zane and Sarah, my other two apprentices, Jenna can summon a sort of steeliness that sometimes worries me. Once, when she was small, I actually saw her hit another child in a dispute over a toy. Hit him! He froze immediately, of course, in normal Extreme Involuntary Fear Bradycardia — but she did not. Even now, the memory makes me shudder.

Genes are strange things. Even with the inhibiting compounds now tightly woven into our DNA from the Dants’ Blessing, we are individuals.

Jenna says, “I’ll start the plant analyses.”

Zane, who has come into the lab, says, “I’ll help.”

She smiles at him. He smiles back. They make a plan to divide the work and I turn to my own experiments, which are not doing much better than Jenna’s. The wheat plants look normal, but CO₂ levels have changed their physiology, and they contain thirty percent less iron and twenty-two percent less zinc than preserved samples from forty years ago.

At least, I think those are the percentages. I nurse along my decades-old absorption spectrophotometer. So much sophisticated equipment on Earth is either falling apart or newly manufactured in ways that do — that must — protect the environment and the living things within it. The trade-off is worth it. Doing no harm comes first. Mutuality comes first. I don’t understand how pre-Blessing humans tolerated their world. Manufacturing chemicals leaching into the soil and water, people sickened and dying by the greed of others, whole landscapes destroyed by dangerous mining practices, toxic work environments . . . .

I breathe deeply, before I get overwhelmed.

But, still, our equipment is inadequate. I remember computers; there were still a few around when I was a boy, running on cannibalized parts. We could not do now what Ian McGill did fifty years ago: describe the genetic changes that confer the Blessing. There are no gene sequencers left. Nor can we communicate the results of our scientific work to each other as easily as could McGill. But I have seen the great pile of shameful trash outside Buffalo, before the whole area was proscribed: dead computers, gasoline-powered cars, airplane fuselages, frivolous electronics, all costing innocent lives and destroying the Earth. Never again.

Jenna finishes her tests and scowls. “This batch of soy shows more zinc and iron, but the plants couldn’t live with the CO₂ level. And the batches that can live with it are still starving us of key nutrients!”

“We’ll cross-breed again,” Zane says.

“It never does any good!” Jenna’s scowl deepens. “Without enough zinc and iron . . .”

She doesn’t finish; she doesn’t have to. Nearly everyone is already suffering the symptoms of reduced micronutrients: anemia, weakened immune systems, and reduced hormone production.

Jenna hurls the tray of useless plants to the greenhouse floor. Zane shudders.

* * *

We come together after dark, to plan. The village in the valley is not large, but it is important for its size. There is a scientific facility, a small soap manufactury, and a textile mill, all powered by the turbine set into the swift river. Cottages, each with its neat garden. Their windows glow with electric light, but it is torches that illuminate the meadow near the river, where the music comes from. “A dance,” Carl says half scornfully, half wistfully.

I train the night-vision goggles on the festivities. The villages are always celebrating something or other. Fools.

“Two of them,” I say. “Watching the dancing. I’ll do recon. You get into position.”

* * *