False Idols - Published Version

Chapter 21

                  

Against his will, Nick felt himself standing in front of the other Aeons. He saw Abril gasping with her hand over her mouth, and Kobus grinning and wincing. He realized, with sudden shame, that he was naked. He tried to cover himself but found his arms were pinned to his sides.

Laura's face took on a distant look. She spoke so softly Nick could barely hear her voice. "I remember, when I was a child, before I - before the MindWave... my father took me deer hunting. You enjoy hunting deer, don't you, Nick? I saw you hunting a buck in the ether on the day of the riots. Well, this was a real hunt, not just some simulation in the ether. I saw a beautiful stag with a great rack of antlers. I took aim and fired. My bullet went wide and hit him in the gut instead of the heart. My rifle jammed and I couldn't load a second round. How he struggled, that stag did, as he lay thrashing in the dirt. His marvelous antlers became tangled in the roots of a nearby tree, and he fought in vain to free them. I can still hear his panicked bleating now. It was pitiful to watch such a beautiful creature struggling like that. I tried to calm him but my touch only made him panic even more. Finally my father came and put a bullet between his eyes."

Laura's eyes lost their distant gaze and focused on Nick. "And then the stag looked so peaceful, so calm, so majestic. As if the horror of a few moments earlier never happened. I took his head and mounted it above my bed as a trophy."

Nick squinted back at her. "Laura... I don't - what does that have to do with anything?"

"Your feelings towards humanity echo my feelings towards that stag. We both feel pity when we see the death throes of a doomed animal. But when the moment of horror is past, you will learn to look at it with equanimity, just as I did."

"Mankind is not some wounded deer," protested Nick. "And even if it were, how could you suggest we shoot it again?"

"No, I'm suggesting nothing of the sort," said Laura dismissively.

"What the hell are you suggesting? Sterilization? Eugenics?" He needed to know what Laura's plan was, partly out of sick fascination with her psyche, and partly out of hope that she'd reveal some specific crime that he could take as evidence to the government.

Laura laughed as if amused by the simplicity of his train of thought. "No, Nick. We don't need to do anything at all. The population will collapse all by itself."

Nick's voice lowered to a whisper and he stepped backwards, experiencing an instinctive fear of Laura. "What do you mean?"

Laura gestured with her eyes towards the apple tree that stood at the top of to the peak. A leaf fell from one of its branches, was caught in the fierce wind and twirled into a detailed three dimensional map of the Earth's ecology. Nick watched as the map ran an animation.

The simulation displayed a counter of the Earth's population, which was initially a little under eight billion. The counter ticked precipitously down as the animation sped two decades into the future. The animation revealed that the key killer was dwindling supplies of unpolluted drinking water, although famines also became a major killer as the fuel used for transporting food became increasingly expensive.

At the end of the bleak animation, the population counter stood at 100 million.

"Good riddance," called out Kobus.

"My God, what can we do?" asked Nick. He felt his pulse racing, even though in the ether he didn't have a heart.

Laura responded impassively. "Even we Aeons can't stop it. It's inevitable."

He was reminded of his father's oft-repeated refrain that Langar Foods had just delayed the inevitable. He had never really considered what his father meant by that. Now the hard truth stared him in the face. Civilization would have collapsed a decade ago without the cheap foods created by Langar. Yet as his father had always hinted, that respite was only a temporary one.