The End Has Come

She wants it, too, although when I begin, she seems startled at herself. I would bet my rifle that she didn’t know she could experience desire like this — how would she know, living here? She’s a virgin. Then I’m the one who’s startled. I have never known sex like this. She holds nothing back. Not while we do it, not while we talk. And it doesn’t seem to occur to her that I might be holding back. Without knowing me at all, she trusts me utterly — not to hurt her, not to lie to her, not to ignore her pleasure.

Is she fucking crazy?

I reach for her again.

* * *

I transfer the soybean filtrate into a beaker and prepare the reagent. But then the ancient spectrophotometer refuses to turn on. The display stays dark. Nothing lights, nothing works, nothing I do repairs it. The thing is finally dead.

I’ve lost equipment before. But for some reason, this loss affects me profoundly. I sit on a stool and sob like a four-year-old.

Maybe it’s the low zinc and iron in my blood. For millions of years, humans absorbed zinc and iron mostly from animal flesh. Barbarianism should not be the price of health.

Or maybe it’s not what’s in my blood but what’s in my head.

Eventually I rise from the stool and splash cold water on my face. I can’t stand to be in the lab any longer. It’s dusk and music has started by the river, for the second day of the festival. There will be people there, laughter, Mutuality. I make my way toward the bright music, trying to let it overcome the ideas circling, like savage bears, in my bruised mind.

* * *

“There’s a dance tonight,” Jenna says, “part of the Blessing festival. I know you can’t dance but there’s a bonfire and music and games and it’s fun.”

She lies tangled in soft, worn, clean sheets in the last rays of sun slanting through a high window. Her bare breasts rise and fall gently. Her hair is as tangled as the sheets and her eyes are bright, gray flecked with gold.

The enemy might be at the dance.

So far, at least, I’ve passed as one of these . . . . “people.”

She’s talked all afternoon. I know her now. How can she be one of them?

I make myself remember Carl, sixteen years old.

Kaylie, the best shot I ever saw.

Jerome, who ran away from his village at eleven and somehow survived alone until we found him.

Matt, Ruhan, Pedro, Susan, Terry.

* * *

Both Dant16 and Dant23 are at the dance, standing in the shadows beyond the bonfire, observing. What if I showed them the broken absorption spectrophotometer and pantomimed a great need for another? Would they make me one, or the alien equivalent? Can their tech really be so different that they cannot replace ours?

Or do they want us to have, year after year, less and less?

* * *

Jenna says shyly, “I’m going to say something dumb.”

We walk toward the river. In the warm twilight she wears only loose pants and a sleeveless tunic of some woven blue cloth. She doesn’t notice, or at least doesn’t remark on, my long heavy jacket. Her hand moves ceaselessly in mine, like some small fidgety animal.

“What dumb thing are you going to say?”

“I think . . . that you’re different.”

I tense. Oh, God, no . . . what has she noticed? Will she betray me? I don’t want to have to —