Dragon Virus
Dragon Virus
a tragedy in six evolutions/
an evolution in six tragedies
Laura Anne Gilman
Book View Café Edition
November 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61138-178-8
Copyright © 2012 Laura Anne Gilman
The Rapture Different
Walter Jon Williams
“Every Rapture’s different,” Laura Anne Gilman tells us
early on in her new work
Dragon Virus
,
and this proves a useful tool for looking at the book as a whole. The book
depicts massive change seen through half a dozen different eyes, and whether it’s
the Rapture or the end of civilization or the next stage in human evolution
depends on which character is looking, and when.
Another useful tool for looking at
Dragon Virus
is the notion embodied in the title of another novel,
Soft Apocalypse
, by the new writer Will
McIntosh, which reminds us that not every world ends with a bang.
In a soft apocalypse, change isn’t necessarily violent or
sudden. It doesn’t have to be the result of alien invasion, volcanoes,
earthquakes, thermonuclear war, or advancing legions of zombies. Change can be
insidiously slow, and as crushing and inevitable as an advancing glacier.
What
Dragon Virus
depicts is a slow but inescapable change in DNA, the very essence of what makes
people human. It’s a change without any obvious cause, and without a cure, and
it takes place over generations. The scientists don’t have an answer. The army
can’t fight the change, because there’s no one to fight. The politicians can’t
prevent it, because the problem isn’t political. And ordinary people are
helpless, because the problem isn’t ordinary.
And it’s from the ranks of ordinary people that Laura Anne
Gilman draws her characters. These aren’t supermen who can battle armies of
invaders or who save the world with dazzling super-science: they’re
unexceptional people — cops, an elderly janitor, young people still in school —
whose task is to bear witness. Well-drawn and sympathetic, they’re caught in
the change without being able to alter its course. They can hope to survive;
they do their best for their loved ones; they deal with the changed
circumstances of their lives as well as they can.
They soldier on and do their jobs. They avoid violence and
fanaticism, and seek love and companionship. These people have heart. You care
about them — and through them, you care about what is happening in Gilman’s
world.
These characters can’t escape the bubble of change, and
their only choice is to somehow adapt. The answers they find in their
increasingly alien landscape are personal and conditional. Even those who aren’t
strictly human struggle to retain their humanity.
Laura Anne Gilman makes you care. You care about her characters
and their choices; you care about what’s happening to their world. And that’s
the best thing you can say about any writer.
You accept the
absurdity of the situation
because it is said so seriously. It’s only
later, when you’re out of the scenario, when you’ve had time to cool off and
calm down, you can type up the report and get some distance from it all.
Religious hysteria. Post-millennial delusions. Things were
easier back when it was only drugs. You just had to hold their hands, keep them
from jumping out the window until they came down.
“Hear you had a good one.” Molly leans over the partition,
sleepy blue eyes barely visible under the brim of her gimmie cap, the trooper
logo covered with a fine layer of red grit.
She’s been off-roading; must have been in on that
pursuit-of-suspect I heard over the radio. Nice job — money went into the
river, perp tried to off himself with a cop-induced suicide. No great loss to
the gene pool. She’s pulled the dust mask down, and it hangs around her neck,
government-issue trendy, what all the best cops are wearing.
“Wheelies.”
One word speaks a multitude. Wheelies aren’t the worst of
the god-needies, although I’m not fond of any of them. The RV-loaded caravans
of holy rollers — wheelies, for short —will at least pack up and go away,
eventually. Just not before they’ve riled the locals with their Bible thumping
and lamentations. Like there wasn’t enough of that home-grown, they have to
bring it across state lines?
“Something about dragons?” She isn’t going to go away. This
is more interesting than Wheelies usually get. We overlap shifts; first-source
story will get her an audience for the retelling, later on.
“Teenager took the Rapture, middle of the 7-11 parking lot.
One of theirs, thank god.”
Hell to pay when a local decided to go Wheeling. “Screaming
about dragons rending the flesh from his bones.”
“Bleeding?” All the details, man. All the gory details. I
oblige her.
“Oh, it was a bonafide Rapture, yeah.”
o0o
Raptures started way back before anyone knew what was up.
Before the air started souring, before the red tides and blue tides and whatnot
washed up on shore. Before the babies started being born wrong. Maybe Wheelies
and their ilk came up around them, maybe it was a case of like finding like,
and feeding on each other. Suddenly everyone knew someone who’d been in on a
Rapture. It was a fad. A passing insanity. Only it didn’t pass.
o0o
“I see them.”
I know the signs: eyes wide, staring at something I don’t
want to see. Arms uplifted, twitching like a marionette, face scrubbed-clean
fresh, mouth slack jawed and smiling like it wants to scream. He’s fourteen
maybe, max. Carrot-topped, cut brush-short. Sharp nose, tanned skin, jeans and
a football jersey in blue and red, number 7. Lucky seven. He should be in school,
or ditching school, not riding the roads looking for some glorious ending
always over the next hill. A plastic bottle of pop lies at his feet, a dark
puddle staining the gray-white of his sneakers.
“See them! See them!”
Every Rapture’s different, I’m told. Some see angels
ravaging the world, others demons, others plain old fire and brimstone. It’s
all about cleansing, apparently. Only the means are different. I wonder,
sometimes, if they ever just see god pouring in some bleach and flushing us
down the drain.
“Can you see them?”
Across the parking lot his gaze targets in on me, enough to
make sweat jump out under my collar. I pull the dust mask down off my face,
wanting to make sure my words are clear. My gun feels heavier, somehow, and my
hand goes to it instinctively, one finger resting just below the strap, aching
to flick upwards, release it.
Rapture makes us non-believers antsy.
He dances in place, slow rising steps like those horses they
show in parades. His arms rise higher, white-fleshed forearms blinding in the
sunlight, palms up, beseeching something on behalf of humanity that can’t
follow him.
“Can you see them?” he asks again, turning, directing the
question to me.
“No, son, I don’t.” Never lie to a Rapture. Bad Things
happen. If you believe nothing else, believe that. “Now son, let’s get you
somewhere you’re not scaring the ladies.”
No ladies here, just a tired-eyed clerk who could be
anywhere from eighty to dead for all the curiosity she shows, dragging on her
cigarette and not watching the show, two pre-pubescent females with the boy’s
red hair who were clearly enthralled with their brother’s contortions, and a
couple of the local girls slouching with what they thought was style with their
boys of the week against a rust-ridden Volvo wagon older than they were.
“The sky,” he says, a conspiratorial whisper, as though he
expects me to do something about it, then looking upward with that same
slackjawed, slightly unhinged look. The one people get when reality tilts and
slides off the table. “The sky is full of dragons.”
One of the kids leaning against the car snickers, but I risk
taking my attention from the Rapture long enough to check the sky. Blue, clear
— not even enough cloud to create a dragon-image.
I look back, just a second, and he’s in my face, looking up
to stare me in the eye, his breath hot and rancid, like onions and mud. “The
sky is full of dragons... and the dragons are filled with stars. Fear them, oh
fear them, for they are no friend to man.” And then he starts to scream.
o0o
He’d bled then, nose, mouth and ears. I had him down on
the ground, cuffed so he’d stop tearing at himself, when the other Wheelies
showed up to cart him away. They hate arriving after the fun. One, older, male,
intent-eyed, had grilled me on everything the rapture had said, word for word,
until it was set in his mind. He’d still be questioning me if another call hadn’t
come in over the radio that I had to respond to.
“All Raptures are nuts.” I’ve finished the story, make a
gesture of dismissal, telling her to go away, leave me the hell alone. Molly
finally takes the hint. Two hours left on my shift, and I’ve a day’s worth of
paperwork to do.
This, though, I could close easy. “Subject was taken by
authorized family members.
On his behalf they refused medical treatment.”
o0o
I initialed the report, put it in the “finished” stack. No
follow-up, no documentation required. Wheelies took care of their own. Not that
it took much. Raptures went splat ten times out of ten. The only question was
how long it would take, and how they’d do it.
Rapture was the partying ground of adolescent boys. The
theory was a post-millennial gender hysteria, founded and fed by Wheelie
rhetoric. If I were a Wheelie kid, I’d probably start babbling too. Easy to
dismiss in a world filled with crazies and needies.
The rest of the files — open cases, on-going investigations
— practically vibrated under my hand. Normalcy. Stability. Humanity. People I
could actually help. Or at least give closure to.
Wheelies have told us what the Raptures mean. God’s coming,
and He’s pissed. The blood of the lamb isn’t a hall pass; repent and pray the
afterlife won’t be too horrifying. You dismissed them because that’s what sane
people do. But the look on the Rapture’s face — on the
boy’s
face — it’s going to stay with me.
“… dragons... the dragons are filled with stars.”
o0o
At home, the air filter on high, I unload my gun, put it
and the bullets and the holster into the drawer. Dying for a drink, something
to ice over my brain for a couple-three hours.
When you catch a Wheelie case, you’re supposed to go for
debriefing. Homeland’s high on tracking them, like they’re some big threat.
Catch a Rapture, and you go for a full shrink-down, no excuses, no avoidance.
Most cops shrug it off; if it doesn’t require digging and stitching, it’s not
supposed to bother us. Macho bullshit. I couldn’t wait to scrape my brain off
and hand it to someone else.
“… they are no friend to man...”
Why the hell did he pick me, my shift, my town.
Life’s a bitch. I put the bottle down, unopened, and went to
bed.
And dreamed of red skies in the middle of the night, fire
and smoke and screaming. The moon was cast in red shadows, silver scales
glinting in the reflected flares. Woke sweating, swearing. Clock glowed dim in
the pitch of the room: 3 a.m.
A surge of my body got me off the bed, padded bare-assed to
the window. Blackout curtains for when I was on night shift; I push them aside
like there will be fresh air on the other side and stare through the glass up
into a still, silent sky. The stars hung clearly, stable, secure in their
place.
“… full of dragons...”
“… they’re clawing at me, tearing... they’ll tear us apart.”
I stopped going to church sometime around the time I started
drinking. Nothing to do with each other, just a happenstance of timing. Most of
what I know of the Bible comes from the leaflets the Wheelies, Thumpers, or
local Baptist do-gooders all put in the station foyer. They want to save us.
Now is not a good time to be godless.