Darwin's Paradox (5 page)

Schlange quickly slithered out of that mire, covered her tracks by arranging her own “death” and ensured that all witnesses to the creation of Proteus were silenced, including Darwin’s creator, Vogel, whose murder was blamed on Julie’s father. With the help of nuyu and nuergery treatments, she then emerged as Gaia.

Julie snapped into a sitting position with an exasperated grunt. Summoning her earlier resolve not to expose herself in the open like this, she rose, flung on her damp clothes and got back on the move.

***

When Julie doubled back around a treacherous river gorge, she found fresh boot tracks and a recently dropped soy-chip wrapper on the ground. They were getting sloppy, she thought, picking up the wrapper. Or was that they didn’t care if she knew they were there. Either way, it suggested over-confidence. Reminded of how she’d evaded Frank when he’d stalked her after she broke up with him, Julie found the idea of playing cat and mouse with her pursuers strangely pleasant.

A sudden breeze cooled her face and Julie stopped to gaze at a dark anvil-shaped cloud rearing up like a fierce dragon above the lower cumulous layer. The storm cloud cast a rain shadow that bore down on her and within moments black clouds scudded overhead. A salvo of huge raindrops hammered down on her like missals, soaking her instantly and sluicing down her back and front. The wind wicked away her remaining heat and she ran for cover. Her magnified senses now detected someone following her, about fifty meters behind. Her sloppy pursuers, she thought, fingering their litter in her pocket.

She found a small grotto and hastily erected her tarp under a few scrubby birch trees as if to settle in. She left her pack inside then slipped out through the scrub and doubled back to where she heard the sounds of her pursuers, rustling nervously and whispering to one another. She found them hunkered under an ash tree that offered little protection from the pouring rain. One lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes trained at her tarp, still thinking her there. The other pressed into the tree to get out of the rain and complained about everything, including her: “Vee-damn it, Roger. Every time our air scanner finds that crazy chickyvee, she takes off. It’s as if she knows we’re here. Veemelds give me the creeps. Especially
her
. Chaos, she deserves to be dead. When do we pull her in?”

She felt anger boil up and broke into a crouched run. Before the complainer had time to react, she’d raced up from behind and whacked him hard with the butt of her gun. Roger, who’d trained his binoculars on the tarp the whole time, turned. For a heartbeat they stared at one another, eyes blinking back the rain. Then, hardly breaking her initial momentum, she leaped, leg flying. Her boot connected with his chin. It threw him back and he collapsed on the ground as she landed on her feet.

“
Now
you have a reason to call me a ‘crazy chickyvee’,” she said darkly.

Both men were going to have king-size aches when they woke up, she thought as she tucked the discarded wrapper into the waste-band of Roger’s pants. She found communicators and Pol-issue laser guns on both men. Julie grabbed the pair of binoculars, the communicators and the guns and was about to leave when she turned back, smiling suddenly with wicked inspiration.

After a few moments, she sprinted back to her tarp and backpack, both pairs of pants under her arm. She removed the spare laser-cells, tossed the guns and the men’s pants into the bushes, then packed up and set off in the hissing rain as darkness fell. Negotiating rough terrain was treacherous in the dark, but Julie pressed on, needing to gain a good distance from her clumsy and no doubt angry pursuers.

As
she crested a ridge above a stunning vista of the river valley below, Julie stopped to wipe the sweat that was dripping into her eyes and took in the view of the swollen river, lined with a thick canopy of trees and shrubs. The river had widened considerably here and was dotted with numerous islands. SAM, her A.I., had once told her that around 700 million years ago this whole area was a large mountain system that had eroded down over millennia. All that remained were the harder Precambrian rocks scattered as islands in the Saint Lawrence River, much like the pink granite outcrop she was standing on.

This region was aptly called the Thousand Islands and a hundred years ago it supported a tourist industry of avid boaters. Now the hazy blue-green landscape before her lay silent to its history, and for a moment she felt akin to the first explorers like Cartier, Cavalier and Champlain, who had forged their way up the gulf of Saint Lawrence and gazed in wonderment at this new foreign land.

Her stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast and longed for fresh meat. She’d run out of her store of dried venison a while ago and was tired of eating roots, herbs and berries. She decided to risk a fire and catch a vole or shrew with her sling. For silence it surpassed the Pol laser gun. She’d made the sling long ago from a piece of rabbit pelt and Aard had shown her how to use it. She’d quickly become adept at hurtling a stone and hitting its target ten meters away. She’d downed grouse, other birds, voles and even rabbits with her silent weapon. Although her hunting weapon of choice was the crossbow, it had not been practical to take on this trip, so she’d settled for the sling, which she could fold up and stash into her pocket.

Julie found a small grotto with a thicket and slung her pack out of view in a silver birch tree before proceeding to a clearing where she’d seen several burrow holes. Accepting that she was trading good travel time for some comforting food in her belly, Julie resigned to wait it out. She found a comfortable position and sat cross-legged, the sling poised in her left hand, and watched the scrubby ground littered with den entrances.

As she waited patiently, Julie took a deep inhale of the sweet peppery fragrances of mint and heather, mixed with the boggy-sweet smell of poplar, hickory and pitch pine. The breeze that sighed through the shrubs and the snapping of the broom’s drying seedpods reminded her of the time Angel had discovered these delightful things. Three years old, Angel had shrieked with joy at the explosive pop of the pods as they threw their seeds into the air in one of nature’s many exuberant displays of propagation. Julie pulled one of the mint stalks beside her to her nose and after a long sniff, she sighed deeply.
Am I doing the right thing? Dear Earth, I hope Angel’s safe

There!
A head popped out of the nearest hole. In one fluid motion, Julie aimed and let fly. Thunk! First shot and she’d successfully struck a vole on the head, instantly killing it. Thinking of supper with a smile, Julie sprang up and fished the limp animal out of the hole it had fallen into.

Back at the grotto where she’d hidden her pack, Julie waited for sunset to hide the smoke and then made a fire using some birch bark and dried grass she’d gathered as tinder. She impaled the animal on a willow branch for a skewer. As she waited for the fire to die down to cook the animal over the hot coals, Julie absently watched the flames lick the darkening sky to the east. Her gaze followed the soaring sparks that winked out one by one like dying stars and found her thoughts drifting home to Daniel and Angel.

When the fire had subsided sufficiently, she propped the skewer against several other branches teepee-style over the coals and let the animal cook as she turned to watch the sunset and sip chamomile tea she’d brewed in her small pot. The pungent-sweet smell of the tea made her smile through the corner of her mouth: Angel hated this tea.

Julie stirred the floating chamomile heads with her finger and let her mind wander to the past. When she’d discovered that she was pregnant with Angel she’d become terrified of whether she’d make a good mother. That had all disappeared when Angel was born. One look at her sweet helpless baby and Julie knew exactly what to do. And she’d continued...until now. Her little girl was growing up and both mother and daughter were suffering the growth pains. Lately they’d snapped at one another like snarling cougars while Daniel looked on in bemusement. She’d give anything for even that now. Julie wondered when she’d see her little girl again.

It wouldn’t be in Icaria if she could help it. Where they’d hate and fear Angel for her abilities even as they’d coax her for services from those same abilities. Angel was never going there, Julie thought grimly, her nose flaring with fierce determination as she watched the sun disappear behind the horizon. What if she failed in her mission? It was ambitious at best, with significant deterrents, such as her own status in Icaria. It was going to be difficult to find, let alone convince, those in government to leave her and her family alone, if she was still considered a murderer.

What had Frank done with her information cube? She’d pleaded with him to give her information to someone trustworthy Victor Burke, the mayor of Icaria. Had she been wrong? Her cube not only contained vital information on Darwin’s manufacture and etiology but also held her models of personality-types for Dystopians in addition to incriminating information on Gaia and her henchman, John Dykstra, Chief of Secret Pols—information that would have cleared her own name. She knew Burke got her information because SAM told her during their last communication that Burke had arrested Dykstra. What about Gaia, then? Was she so powerful that Burke didn’t want to touch her?

Julie realized how hungry she was when she inhaled the delicious aroma of roasting meat carried on the smoke of the fire. She turned to check the cooking animal and gasped. The rodent was on fire!

“Terrific,” she snarled, grabbing the stick and blowing out the flames. She poked the skewer into the ground and put out the campfire, then turned back to her food with a sigh of disappointment. She gingerly picked the black and smoking vole off her skewer and with wincing fingers practically threw it on her bark-plate. It was one sad looking specimen. “Don’t look so glum, pal.” She smiled sadly at the vole’s melted face. “Someday I’ll be just like you. What goes around, comes around. Happens to all of us.” She sighed, taking a small bite. Her teeth sank through the burnt crust into soft meat and she thankfully chewed.

She had to admit that her luck couldn’t hold out indefinitely. On good days, she made about twenty kilometers. On the bad days, when she had to traverse or veer around a tributary, bay or marsh, she gained less than ten kilometers in her trek. At this rate she was at least another week, possibly two, from Icaria-5. She hadn’t even reached Lake Ontario yet and she still had to cross the turbulent Gananoque River, then hike another three hundred kilometres to Icaria-5. Someone was bound to catch her off guard and she’d be either dead or hauled to the Pol Station for execution or dissected at Icaria’s DP, depending on who caught her first. “Dead or worse...just like you,” she said to the vole then took another bite and chewed slowly, letting the evening cacophonies of birdsong lull her.

Her gaze drifted back to where the sun had set to the southwest, the direction she was going. Glowing like crimson embers beneath dark purple clouds, the sky lit a brilliant red gash over the dark horizon. The contrast was remarkable.

Contrast and paradox were deeply embedded in nature, she mused. Her father had always recognized that these lay at the heart of chaos theory. Just as wisdom existed in folly, action in inaction, bravery in cowardice, and ultimately order in chaos. Julie knew her father had been an honorable and meticulous scientist, a fractal ecologist who didn’t shy away from controversy. He’d been brave and daring when it came to seeking the truth, yet he’d carelessly cast her to the neurologists to play with and then lied like a coward to her about what he’d done. Julie looked down at what was left of her food and sighed, no longer hungry.

How did chaos theory apply to her? Irregular phenomena, that’s what chaos was. She seemed to cause it wherever she went like the spread of an epidemic. Changing populations of insects, the propagation of an impulse along a nerve, the random changes in weather, the rise and fall of civilizations...What had her father created? A paradox. That’s what she was. He’d called her his angel. “Yeah,” she murmured to herself. “I’m an angel alright, an angel of chaos...”

After cleaning up in the growing darkness, Julie carefully surveyed her surroundings to ensure no one lurked nearby, then laid out her insupad and sleeping bag on a flat piece of ground inside a tight ring of bushes. She placed her backpack as a pillow at the head of the insupad then took off her sweaty clothes and slid into the bag, tucking Aard’s gun beside her. She lay on her back, hands clasped behind her head, and looked up at the clear night sky through the broken canopy of shrubs above her. She spotted the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia and Cepheus and wondered if Daniel was gazing at the same night sky. The rhythmic sissing of crickets covered the night with a comforting mantle.

She felt Aard’s gun nestled against her skin like a lover’s hand. It seemed so long ago, she thought, when out of rage she’d shot Frank in the crotch for hurting her uncle and then accidentally shot and killed Ron Hicks, Frank’s Pol partner in the ensuing struggle. Where was Frank now? Probably dead. While he’d recovered well enough from her gunshot wound, he’d told her just before she fled Icaria that he was battling Darwin disease. No one lived more than six months with Darwin, she thought, stroking the weapon and feeling it warm in her hand.

She heard the lonely cry of a wolf echo in the darkness. It sent her mind to the times she and Daniel curled up together and watched the stars, wrapped in nature’s exquisite night sounds. Since they’d come out here they’d never been apart. Until now. Was she soothing herself or torturing herself by coaxing out these thoughts? She supposed that depended on whether she expected to see him soon again...or not...

Julie turned on her side and, shutting her eyes, she imagined Daniel’s arms embracing her from behind, his warm body moulded to hers. His warm breath sighing on her neck. She felt the ache of longing swell inside her and wrapped her arms around herself. Did he ache for her too? More likely he was outraged with her.