Blood Music

CHAPTER TWENTY

Mother? Howard?” Suzy McKenzie wrapped herself in the sky-blue flannel robe her boyfriend had given her the month before in celebration of her eighteenth birthday, and padded barefoot down the hall. Her eyes were bleary with sleep. “Ken?” She was usually the last to wake up. “Slow Suzy” she often called herself with a secret, knowing smile.

She didn’t keep clocks in her room but the sun outside the window was high enough for it to be past ten o’clock. The bedroom doors were closed. “Mother?” She knocked on the door of her mother’s room. No answer.

Surely one of her brothers would be up. “Kenneth? Howard?” She turned around in the middle of the hall, making the wood floor creak. Then she twisted the knob on her mother’s door and pushed it open. “Mother?” The bed had not been made; the covers slumped around the bottom. Everybody must be downstairs. She washed her face in the bathroom, inspected the akin of her cheeks for more blemishes, was relieved to find none, and walked down the stairs into the foyer. She couldn’t hear a sound.

“Hey,” she called out from the living room, confused and unhappy. “Nobody woke me up. I’ll be late for work.” She was in her third week of waitressing at a neighborhood deli. She enjoyed the work it was much more interesting and real than working at the Salvation Army thrift store—and it helped her mother financially. Her mother had lost her job three months before and lived on the irregular checks from Suzy’s father, plus their rapidly diminishing savings. She looked at the Benrus ship’s dock on the table and shook her head. Ten thirty; she was really late. But that didn’t worry her as much as where everybody had gone. They fought a lot, sure, but they were a close family except for her father, whom she hardly missed any more, not much anyway—and everybody wouldn’t just go away and not tell her, not even wake her up.

She pushed the swinging door to the kitchen and stepped halfway through. What she saw didn’t register at first: three shapes out of place, three bodies, one in a dress on the floor, slumped up against the sink, one in jeans with no shut in a chair at the kitchen table, the third half-in, half-out of the pantry. No muss, no fuss, just three bodies she couldn’t immediately recognize.

She was quite calm at first She wished she hadn’t opened the door just then; perhaps if she had opened it a few moments earlier, or later, everything would have been normal. Somehow it would have been a different door-the door to her world—and life would have gone on with just the minor lapse of no one awakening her. Instead, she hadn’t been warned, and that wasn’t fair, really. She had opened the door at just the wrong rime, and it was too late to close it.

The body against the sink wore her mother’s dress. The face, arms, legs, and hands were covered with raised white stripes. Suzy entered the kitchen two small steps, her breath coming short and uneven. The door slipped out of her fingers and swung shut. She took a step back, then one sideways, a small dance of terror and indecision. She would have to call the police, of course. Maybe an ambulance. But first she would have to find out what happened and all her instincts told her just to get out of the kitchen, out of the house.

Howard, twenty, regularly wore jeans without a shirt around the house. He liked to go bare-chested to show off his well-muscled, if not brawny frame. Now his chest was a reddish brown color, like an Indian’s, and ridged like a potato chip or an old-fashioned washboard. His face was calm, eyes closed, mouth shut He was still breathing.

Kenneth—it had to be Kenneth—looked more like a pile of dough in clothes than her eldest brother.

Whatever had happened was completely incomprehensible. She wondered if it was something everybody else knew about but had forgotten to tell her.

No, that didn’t make sense. People were seldom cruel to her, and her mother and brothers were never cruel. The best thing to do was back out the door and call the police, or somebody; somebody who would know what to do.

She looked at the list of numbers pinned above the old black phone in the foyer, then tried to dial the emergency number. She kept fumbling, her finger jerking from the holes in the dial. Tears were in her eyes when she finally managed to complete the three digits.

The phone rang for several minutes without answer. Finally a recording came on: “All our lines are busy. Please do not hang up or you will lose your priority.” Then more ringing. After another five minutes, she hung up, sobbing, and dialed for the operator. No answer there, either. Then she thought of the conversation they had had the night before, about some sort of bug in California. It had been on the radio. Everybody getting sick and troops being called in. Only then, remembering this, did Suzy McKenzie go out the front door and stand on the steps, screaming for help.

The street was deserted. Parked cars lined both sides—inexplicably—for parking was forbidden between eight in the morning and six at night every day but Thursday and Friday, and this was Tuesday, and the enforcement was strict. Nobody was driving. She couldn’t see anybody in a car or walking or sitting in a window. She ran up one side of the street, weeping and shouting first in supplication, then in anger, then terror, then again begging for help.

She stopped screaming when she saw a postman lying on the front walk of a brownstone between two parallel wrought-iron fences. He lay on his back, eyes shut, and he looked just like Mother and Howard. To Suzy, postmen were sacred beings, always reliable. She used her fingers to push the terror out of her face and scrunched her eyes shut in concentration. “That bug’s gotten everywhere,” she told herself. “Somebody has to know what to do.”

She returned to her house and picked up the phone again. She began dialing all the numbers she knew. Some went through; others created only silence or strange computer noises. None of the phones that rang were answered. She redialed the number of her boyfriend, Cary Smyslov, and listened to it ring eight, nine, ten times before hanging up. She paused, considered for a moment, and dialed the number of her aunt in Vermont.

The phone was answered on the third ring. “Hello?” The voice was weak and tremulous, but it was definitely her aunt

“Aunt Dawn, this is Suzy in Brooklyn. I’m in big trouble here—”

“Suzy.” It seemed to take time for the name to sink in.

“Yes, you know, Suzy. Suzy McKenzie.”

“Honey, I’m not hearing too well now.” Aunt Dawn was thirty-one years old, no decrepit old woman, but she didn’t sound at all well.

“Mom’s sick, maybe she’s dead, I don’t know, and Kenneth and Howard, and nobody’s around, or everybody’s sick, I don’t know—”

“I’m kind of under the weather, myself,” Aunt Dawn said. “Got these bumps. Your uncle’s gone, or maybe he’s out in the garage. Anyway he hasn’t been in here for…” She paused. “Since last night. He went out talking to himself. Not back yet. Honey—”

“What is going on?” Suzy asked, her voice cracking.

“Honey, I don’t know, but I can’t talk anymore, I think I’m going crazy. Good-bye, Suzy.” And then, incredibly, she hung up. Suzy tried ringing again, but there was no answer and finally, on the third attempt, not even a ringing sound.

She was about to open the phone book and begin dialing at random, but she thought better of it and returned to the kitchen. She might be able to do something-keep them cool, or warm, or bring whatever medicine was in the house.

Her mother looked thinner. The ridges seemed to have collapsed on her face and arms. Suzy reached out to touch her mother’s face, hesitated, then forced herself. The skin was warm and dry, not feverish, normal enough except for its appearance. Her mother’s eyes opened.

“Oh, Mother,” Suzy sobbed. “What’s happening?”

“Well,” her mother said, tongue licking at her lips, “it’s quite beautiful, actually. You’re all right, aren’t you? Oh, Suzy.” And then she shut her eyes and said no more. Suzy turned to Howard sitting in the chair. She touched him on the arm and jumped back as the skin seemed to deflate. Only then did she notice the network of root-like tubes extending from the cuffs of his jeans, vanishing into the crevice between the floor and the wall.

More roots stretched from Kenneth’s paste-colored arms into the pantry. And behind her mother, reaching over her skirt and into the cabinet beneath the sink, was a single thick pipe of pale flesh. Suzy thought wildly for a moment of horror movies and makeup and maybe they were shooting a movie and hadn’t told her. She bent closer to peer behind her mother. She was no expert, but the pipe of flesh wasn’t makeup. She could see blood pulsing in it.

Suzy climbed slowly back up the stairs to her bedroom. She sat on the bed, braiding and unbraiding her long blond hair with her fingers, then lay back and stared at the very old silvery linoleum on the ceiling. “Jesus, please come and help me, because I need you now,” she said. “Jesus, please come and help me, because I need you now.”

And so on, into the afternoon, when thirst drove her to the bathroom for a drink. Around her gulps of water, she repeated her prayer, until the monotony and futility silenced her. She stood by the banister, still in her sky-blue robe, and began to make plans. She wasn’t sick—not yet—and she certainly wasn’t dead.

So there had to be something to do, someplace to go.

And still, in the back of her mind, she hoped that perhaps in the way she opened a door, or on some path she might follow through the streets, she could find her way back to the old world. She didn’t think it was likely, but anything was worth the chance.

There were some tough decisions to be made. What good was all her education and special training if she couldn’t think for herself and make tough decisions? She did not want to go into the kitchen any more than she had to, but food was in the kitchen. She could try entering other houses, or even the grocery store at the end of the block, but she suspected there would be other bodies there.

At least these bodies—alive or dead—were her relatives.

She entered the kitchen with her head held high. Gradually, as she went from cabinet to cabinet and then to the refrigerator, her eyes lowered. The bodies had collapsed even further; Kenneth seemed little more than a filament-covered white patch in wrinkled clothes. The fleshy roots into the pantry had gone straight for the plumbing, climbing up into the small sink and into the water tap, as well as down the drain. At any minute she expected something to reach out and grab her—or for Howard or her mother to turn into lurching zombies—and she gritted her teeth until her jaws ached, but none of them moved. They no longer looked like they could move.

She emerged with a box full of all the canned goods she thought she would need for the next few days—and the can opener, which she had almost forgotten.

It was dusk by the time she thought to turn on the radio. They hadn’t had a television since the last set broke beyond repair its hulk sat in the foyer under the stairs, gathering dust behind boxes of old magazines. She pulled out the multiband portable her mother kept for emergencies and methodically searched the dials. She had once play-acted at being a ham radio operator, but of course the portable couldn’t send anything.

Not a single station played on AM or FM. She picked up signals on the short wave bands—some very dear—but none in English.

The room was rapidly darkening now. She agonized before trying to switch on the lights. If everybody was sick, would there still be lights?

When the shadows had filled the living room and there was no avoiding the dilemma—either sit in the dark, or find out whether she would have to sit in the dark—she reached up to the big reading lamp beside the couch and turned the switch quickly.

The light came on, strong and steady.

This broke a very weak dam in her, and she began to mourn. She rocked back and forth on her curled-up legs on the couch and keened like someone demented, her face wet, hands braiding and unbralding her hair and using it to dry her face until it hung in damp strips down to her collarbone. With the single light casting a golden crescent over her face, she wept until her throat ached and she could barely keep her eyes open.

Without eating, she went upstairs, switching on all the lights—each steady glow a miracle—and crawled into her bed, where she could not sleep, imagining she heard someone coming up the stairs, or walking down the hall toward her door.

The night lasted an eternity, and in that time Suzy became a little more mature, or a little crazier, she couldn’t decide which. Some things no longer mattered much. She was quite willing, for example, to forego her past life and find a new way to live. She made this concession in the hopes that whatever was in charge would simply allow the lights to keep burning.

By dawn she was a physical wreck-exhausted, hungry but unwilling to eat, her whole body tense and wrung out from terror and watchfulness. She drank from the bathroom tap again…and suddenly thought of the roots leading into the plumbing. Retching, Suzy sat down on the toilet and watched the water pour clean and clear from the tap. Thirst finally compelled her to take the chance and drink more, but she vowed to lay in a supply of bottled water.

She prepared a cold meal of green beans and corned beef hash in the living room, and was hungry enough to throw in a can of plums in heavy syrup for good measure. The cans stood in a row on the battered coffee table. She sipped the last of the plum syrup; nothing had ever tasted so good.

She returned to her bedroom and lay down, and this time slept for five hours, until awakened by a noise. Something heavy had fallen within the house. Cautiously, she descended the stairs and looked around the foyer and living room.

“Not the kitchen,” she said, and knew immediately that was where the sound had come from. She opened the swinging door slowly. Her mother’s clothes—but not her mother—lay in a pile before the sink. Suzy entered and looked at where Kenneth had been in the pantry. Clothes, but nothing else. She turned.

Howard’s jeans hung from the seat of the stool, which had toppled to one side. A glistening pale brown sheet hung down along the whole wall, neatly edged into the cornices, protruding slightly where it covered a framed print.

She took the mop from the opposite corner, behind the refrigerator, and stepped forward with the handle pointing at the sheet. I’m being incredibly brave, she thought. She poked the sheet gently at first they drove the broom clear through it into the lath and plaster beyond. The sheet quivered but did not otherwise react. “You!” she screamed. She swung the handle back and forth over the sheet, shredding it from corner to corner. “You!”

When most of the shreds had fallen to the floor and the wall was covered with holes, she dropped the broom and fled the kitchen.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon, the ship’s clock said. She regained her breath and then went around the house, turning off the lights. The miraculous energy might last longer if she didn’t use it up immediately.

Suzy then took an address book from beneath the phone in the foyer and made a list of her supplies, and what she would need. There was at least five more hours of daylight, or light enough to see by. She put on her coat and left the snow porch door open behind her.

Down the street, lined with the same parked cars, to the corner, to the grocery, without purse or money, wearing her coat over her pajamas and sky-blue robe; out into the upside-down outside world to see what there was to see. She even felt vaguely cheerful. The wind was blowing fall-cool and a few leaves rattled along the pavement from the trees spaced every few houses. Vines crawled along the wrought-iron fencing between the steps, and flowerpots sat on ledges before the first floor windows.

Mithridates’ grocery was closed, iron bars across the front doors. She peered through the bars on the windows, wondering if there was any way to get in, and thought of the service entrance on the other side. The door there hung slightly ajar, a great heavy black metal-sheathed thing she had to heave with all her might to push open farther. She felt it catch and let it go, watching it for an instant to make sure it would stay open. In the service corridor, she stepped over another pile of clothes, topped by a grocer’s apron, and pushed through double swinging doors into the deserted grocery.

Methodically, Suzy went to the front of the store and pulled out a rickety shopping cart. A computer cash register ticket clung to the bottom of the basket with a leaf of very old lettuce. She wobbled the cart down the aisles, picking out what she hoped was a sensible array of foods. Her usual eating habits were not the best. Even so, she had a better figure than most of the health food and diet fanatics she knew—something in which she took solemn pride.

Canned hams, stew beef in tins, canned chicken, fresh vegetables and fruit (soon to be scarce, she imagined), canned fruit, as many bottles of spring or mineral water as she could fit into a liquor box and wedge into the cart’s lower rack, bread and some slightly stale breakfast rolls, two gallon jugs of milk from the still-cold dairy case. A bottle of aspirin and some shampoo, though she wondered how long the water would come out of the shower tap. Vitamins, a big jar. She tried to find something in the drug shelves which might fight off what had happened to her family—and the mailman and the grocer, and perhaps everybody else. Carefully she read and re-read bottles and instructions on boxes, but nothing seemed appropriate.

Then she pushed the cart up to the cash register, blinked at the aisle and the locked door beyond, and swung her load around. Nobody to pay. She hadn’t brought money anyway. She was halfway toward the back when another thought occurred to her, and she returned to the register.

Where rumor had said it would be, on a shelf above the bag storage bin, was a large heavy black pistol with a long barrel. She fiddled with it carefully pointing it away from her, until she found a way to roll out a cylinder. The gun was loaded with six big bullets.

Suzy didn’t like holding the gun. Her father owned guns and the few times she visited, he always warned her to stay away from them, not even touch them. But guns were for protection, not play, and she didn’t want to play with it, that was for sure. Anyway, she doubted there was anything she could shoot effectively.

“But you never know,” she said. She put the gun in a brown bag and placed it in the upper basket of the cart, then wheeled the cart down the service corridor, over the grocer’s empty clothes and onto the sidewalk.

She stored the food in the foyer and stood with the milk jugs one in each hand, trying to decide whether she wanted to put them in the refrigerator. “They won’t last long if I don’t,” she told herself, assuming a very practical tone. “Oh, God,” she said, shuddering violently. She put down the jugs and wrapped her arms around herself. When she closed her eyes, she saw every kitchen in every home in Brooklyn, filled with empty clothes or dissolving bodies. She leaned against the stair railing and dropped her head into her arms. “Suzy, Suzy,” she whispered. She took a deep breath, straightened, and picked up the jugs. “Here I go,” she said with forced brightness.

The brown sheet had vanished, leaving only the holes in the wall. She opened the refrigerator and wedged the milk jugs into the lower shelf, then inspected what food was available for supper.

The clothes didn’t look right, just lying there. She took the broom and stirred her mother’s dress to see if anything was hidden beneath the folds; nothing was. With forefinger and thumb, she lifted the dress. Slip and panties fell out, and from the edge of the panties peeped a tampon, white and pristine. Something glinted near the collar and she bent to see. Little lumps of gray and gold metal, irregularly shaped.

The answer came to her too quickly, thought out with a panicky kind of brilliance she wasn’t used to.

Fillings. Tooth fillings and gold crowns.

She picked up the clothes and dumped them in the hamper in the service porch. So much for that, she thought. Good-bye Mother and Kenneth and Howard.

Then she swept the floor, pushing the fillings and dust (no dead cockroaches, which was unusual) into a dustpan and dropping them into the trash beside the refrigerator.

“I am the only one,” she said when she was finished. “I am the only one left in Brooklyn. I didn’t get sick.” She stood by the table with an apple in her hand, chewing thoughtfully. “Why?” she asked.

“Because,” she answered, twirling around the kitchen floor, eye going quickly to haunted corners. “Because I am so beautiful, and the devil wants me for his wife.”

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

In the past four days,” Paulsen-Fuchs said, “contact with most of the North American continent has been cut off. The etiology of the disease is not known precisely, but it is apparently passed through every vector known to epidemiologists, and then some. Mr. Bernard’s materials indicate that the components of the disease are themselves intelligent and capable of directed action.”

The visitors in the viewing chamber-Pharmek executives and representatives from four European countries-sat in their folding chairs, faces impassive. Paulsen-Fuchs stood with his back to the three-layer window, facing the officials from France and Denmark. He turned and indicated Bernard, who sat at the desk, tapping its surface lightly with a hand heavily marked by white ridges.

“At great risk, and some foolhardiness, Mr. Bernard has come to West Germany to provide a subject for our experiments. As you can see, our facilities here are well-equipped to keep Mr. Bernard safely isolated, and there is no need for removal to another laboratory or hospital. Such a transfer could, in fact, be very dangerous. We are quite willing to follow outside suggestions on the scientific approach, however.

“Frankly we don’t yet know what sort of experiments to conduct. Tissue samples from Mr. Bernard indicate that the disease—if we should actually call it that—is spreading rapidly throughout his body, yet in no way impairs his functions. In fact, he claims that with the exception of certain peculiar symptoms, to be discussed later, he has never felt better in his life. And it is apparent that his anatomy is being altered substantially.”

“Why hasn’t Mr. Bernard been transformed completely?” asked the representative from Denmark, a young-looking plump man in a black suit, his hair like close-cropped fur. “Our few communications with the United States show that transformation and dissolution takes place within a week of infection.”

“I don’t know,” Bernard said. “My circumstances are not the same as victims in a natural environment. Perhaps the organisms in my body are aware that it would do them no good to complete the transformation.”

The dismay on their faces showed they were still not used to the concept of noocytes. Or perhaps they simply did not believe.

Paulsen-Fuchs continued the discussion, but Bernard closed his eyes and tried to shut the visitors out. It was worse than he had imagined; in just four days, he had been subjected—politely enough, and with great concern—to fourteen such meetings, to a battery of tests conducted through the sliding panel, to questions about every aspect of his life, past, present, private and public. He was the center of a secondary shock wave spreading around the world—the wave of reaction to what had happened in North America.

He had gotten out just in time. The etiology of the plague had altered drastically and now followed several patterns, or perhaps no pattern at all; it was possible the organisms reacted to their environment and altered their methods accordingly. Thus, large cities tended to be silenced immediately, most or all of their citizens being infected and transformed within forty-eight hours. Outlying towns and rural areas, perhaps because of a lack of common sewage and water systems, were affected less rapidly. Spread of the plague to these areas appeared to proceed through animal and insect vectors as well as direct human contact

Infrared pictures taken by Landsats and spy satellites, processed and interpreted by countries like Japan and Great Britain, showed incipient changes even in the forests and waterways of North America.

Already, he felt like Michael Bernard no longer existed. He had been swallowed up in something larger and far more impressive, and now he was on display in a museum, tagged and curiously enough, able to talk back. Ex-neurosurgeon, male, once well-known and wealthy, not very active of late, caught in social whirl and with scads of money to spend from lecture tours, book royalties, appearances in motion pictures…

It seemed quite possible that Michael Bernard hadn’t existed for six years, having vanished sometime after he last applied scalpel to flesh, drill to skull.

He opened his eyes and saw the men and one woman in the chambers.

“Dr. Bernard.” The woman was trying to attract his attention, apparently for the third or fourth time.

“Yes?”

“Is it true that you are at least in part to blame for this disaster?”

“No, not directly.”

“Indirectly?”

“There was no way I could have foreseen the consequences of other peoples’ actions. I am not psychic.”

The woman’s face was visibly flushed, even behind the three layers of glass. “I have—or had—a daughter and a sister in the United States. I am from France, yes, but I was born in California. What has happened to them? Do you know?”

“No, Madame, I do not.”

The woman shrugged Paulsen-Fuchs’ hands away and shouted, “Will it never end? Disaster and death, scientists—responsible, you are all responsible! Will it—” And she was hustled from the viewing chamber. Paulsen-Fuchs raised his hands and shook his head. The two chambers quickly emptied and he was left alone.

And since he was nothing, nobody, that meant that when he was alone, there was nothing there at all.

Nothing but the microbes, the noocytes, with their incredible potential, biding their time…unrealized.

Waiting to make him more than he had ever been.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

The lights went out on the fourth day-in the morning, just after she awoke. She put on her designer jeans (from the Salvation Army thrift store) and her best bra and a sweater, took out her windbreaker from the closet behind the stairs, and stepped out into the daylight. No longer blessed, she thought. No longer desirable to the devil or anybody. “My luck’s running out,” she said aloud.

But she had food, and the water was still running. She considered her situation for a moment and decided she wasn’t that badly off. “Sorry, God,” she said, squinting at the sky.

Across the street the houses were completely draped with mottled brown and white sheets that glistened like skin or leather in the sun. The trees and iron railings were hung with tatters of the same stuff. The houses on her side were starting to be overgrown, too.

It was time to move on. She wouldn’t be spared for long.

She packed food into boxes and stacked the boxes in the basket. The gas was still on; she cooked herself a fine breakfast with the last of the eggs and bacon, toasted bread over the fire as her mother had once taught her, spread it with the last of the butter and slathered it with jam. She finished four slices and went upstairs to pack a small overnight bag. Travel light, she thought. Heavy winter jacket and clothes, gun, boots. Wool socks from her brothers’ drawers. Gloves. Frontier time, pioneer time.

“I might be the last woman on Earth,” she mused. “I’ll have to be practical.”

The last thing into the cart, waiting at the foot of the stairs on the sidewalk, was the radio. She only played it a few minutes each night, and she had scrounged a boxful of batteries from Mithridates’. It should be useful for some time.

From the radio, she had learned that people were very worried, not just about Brooklyn, but about the entire United States, all the way to the borders, and Mexico and Canada beyond. Short wave news broadcasts from England talked about the silence, the “plague,” about air travelers being quarantined, and submarines and aircraft patrolling up and down the coast. No aircraft had as yet penetrated to the interior of North America, a very distinguished-sounding British commentator said, but secret satellite photographs, it was rumored, showed a nation paralyzed, perhaps dead.

Not me, Suzy thought. Paralyzed meant not moving. “I’ll move. Come look at me with your submarines and planes. I’ll be moving and I’ll be wherever I am.”

It was late afternoon as Suzy pushed the cart along Adams. Fog obscured the distant towers of Manhattan, allowing only pale silhouettes of the World Trade Center to rise above gray and white opacity. She had never seen fog so dense on the river.

Looking back over her shoulder, she saw great kitelike sails of brown and tan loft up in the wind over Cadman Plaza. Williamsburgh Savings Bank was sheathed along its 500-foot height with brown, no white this time, like a skyscraper wrapped for mailing. She turned down Tillary, heading for Flatbush and access to the bridge, when she thought how much she looked like a bag lady.

She had always been afraid of becoming a bag lady. She knew sometimes people with problems like hers couldn’t find places to live, so they lived on the streets.

She wasn’t afraid of that now. Everything was different. And the thought tickled her sense of humor. A bag lady in a city covered with brown paper bags. It was very funny but she was too tired to laugh.

Any kind of company would have been welcome—bag lady, cat, bird. But nothing moved except the brown sheets.

She pushed the cart up Flatbush, stopping to sit on a bus bench and rest getting up and moving on. She took Kenneth’s heavy jacket from the cart and slipped it over her shoulders; evening was dosing and the air was becoming quite chilly. “I’m going to sing now,” she told herself. Her head was full of lots of rhythms and rock beats, but she couldn’t find a tune. Pulling the cart up the steps to the bridge walkway, one step at a time, the cart lurching and the undercarriage scraping, a tune finally popped into her head, and she began humming the Beatles’ “Michelle,” recorded before she was born. “Michelle, ma belle,” was the only part of the lyric she remembered, and she sang that out between pulls and gasps.

Fog enveloped the East River and spilled across the expressway. The bridge rose above the fog, a highway over the clouds. Alone, Suzy pushed her cart along the middle walkway, hearing the wind and a weird, low humming sound she realized must be the bridge cables vibrating.

With no traffic on the bridge, she heard all kinds of noises she never would have heard before; great metallic moans, low and subdued but very impressive; the distant singing of the river; the deep silence beyond. No horns, no cars, no subway rumbles. No people talking, jostling. She might as well have been in the middle of a wilderness.

“A pioneer,” she reminded herself. Darkness lay everywhere but over New Jersey, where the sun made its final testimony with a ribbon of yellow-green light. The walkway was pitch black. She stopped pushing the cart and huddled next to it, wrapping her coat tighter, then getting up to put on boots and wool socks. For several hours she sat in a stupor beside the cart, one foot wedged against a wheel to keep it from rolling.

Below the bridge, the sound of the river changed. Her neck hair stood on end though she had no real reason to be spooked. Still, she could feel something going on, something different. Overhead, the stars gleamed still and clear, and the Milky Way blazed unobscured by city lights and dirty air.

She stood and stretched, yawning, feeling scared and lonely and exalted all at once. She climbed up and over the walkway railing, onto the southbound lanes of the bridge, and walked to the edge. Gripping the railing with gloved, cold-numbed fingers, she looked across the East River, toward South Street, then swept her gaze over the no-longer-dark to the outlines of the ferry terminals.

It was still a long rime to dawn, but wherever the river touched there was light, and wherever the river flowed there was a green and blue brilliance. The water was filled with eyes and pinwheels and Ferris wheels and slow, stately bursts like fireworks, all speckled against a steady cobalt glow. She might have been looking down on a million cities at night, twisted and spun around each other.

The river was alive, from shore to shore and past Governors Island, where the Upper Bay became a Milky Way in reverse. The river glowed and moved and every part of it had a purpose; Suzy knew this.

She knew that she was like an ant on the street of a big city now. She was the uncomprehending, the limited, the transient and fragile. The river was even more complex and beautiful than the early evening skyline of Manhattan.

“I’m never going to understand this,” she said. She shook her head and looked up at the dark skyscrapers.

One of them was not completely dark. In the top floors of the south tower of the World Trade Center, a greenish light flickered. “Hey,” she said, marveling more at that light than everything else.

She pushed away from the railing and returned to her cart on the walkway. All very pretty, she told herself, but the important thing was to keep from freezing, and then to move when the dawn was bright enough to see by. She huddled next to the cart

“I’ll go see what’s in the building,” she said. “Maybe it’s somebody like me, somebody smarter who knows about electricity. Tomorrow morning I’ll go see.”

Asleep or awake, shivering or still, she fancied she could hear something beyond hearing: the sound of the change, the plague and the river and the drifting sheets, like a big church choir with all its members’ mouths wide open, singing silence.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Paulsen-Fuchs pulled up a chair in the viewing chamber with a distant scrape of metal and sat on it. Bernard watched him drowsily from the bed. “So early in the morning,” he said.

“It is afternoon. Your time sense is slipping.”

“I’m in a cave, or might as well be. No visitors today?”

Paulsen-Fuchs shook his head, but did not volunteer an explanation.

“News?”

“The Russians have pulled out of the Geneva U.N. Obviously they see no advantage to a United Nations when they are the sole nuclear superpower on the Earth. But before they left, they tried to get the security council to declare the United States a nation without leadership and hazardous to the rest of the world.”

“What are they aiming for?”

“I believe they are aiming for some consensus on a nuclear strike.”

“Good God,” Bernard said. He sat up on the edge of the cot and held the back of his hands up before his eyes. The ridges had receded slightly; the quartz lamps treatments were making at least cosmetic improvements. “Did they mention Mexico and Canada?”

“Just the United States. They wish to kick the corpse.”

“So what is everybody else saying, or doing?”

“The U.S. forces in Europe are organizing an interim government. They have declared a touring U.S. Senator from California in line of succession for the Presidency. Your Air Force officers at the base here are putting up some resistance. They believe the United States government should be military for the time being. Diplomatic offices are being rearranged into governmental centers. The Russians are asking American ships and submarines to be put into special quarantine stations in Cuba and along the Russian coast in the northern Pacific and the Sea of Japan.”

“Are they doing it?”

“No reply. I think not, however.” He smiled.

“Any more on the bird-fish kills?”

“Yes. In England they are killing all migratory buds, whether they come from North America or not. Some groups want to kill all birds. There is much savagery, and not just against animals, Michael. Americans everywhere are being subjected to great indignities, even if they have lived in Europe for decades. Some religious groups believe Christ has established a base in America and is about to march on Europe to bring the Millennium. But you’ll have your news over the terminal this morning, as usual. You can read about it all there.”

“It’s better if it comes from a friend.”

“Yes,” Paulsen-Fuchs said. “But even a friend’s words cannot improve the news as it is today.”

“Would a nuclear strike solve the problem? I’m no expert on epidemiology—could America actually be sterilized?”

“Highly unlikely, and the Russians are well aware of that. We know something about the accuracy of their warheads, failure rates, and so on. They could at best manage to burn out perhaps half of North America sufficiently to destroy all life forms. That would be next to useless. And the radiation hazard, not to mention the meteorological changes and the hazard of biologicals in the dust clouds, would be enormous. But—” He shrugged. “They are Russians. You do not remember them in Berlin. I do. I was just a boy, but I remember them—strong, sentimental, cruel, crafty and stupid at once.”

Bernard restrained himself from commenting on Germany’s behavior in Russia. “So what’s holding them back?”

“NATO. France, surprisingly. The strong objections of most of the non-aligned countries, especially Central and South America. Now enough talk of that. I need a report.”

“Ay, ay,” Bernard said, saluting. “I feel fine, though a touch groggy. I’m considering going crazy and making a great deal of noise. I feel like I’m in prison.”

“Understandable.”

“Any women volunteers yet?”

“No,” Paulsen-Fuchs said, shaking his head. Perfectly seriously, he added, “I do not understand it. Always they have said fame is the best aphrodisiac.”

“Just as well, I suppose. If it’s any consolation, I haven’t noticed any changes in my anatomy since the day before yesterday.” That was when the lines in his skin began to recede.

“You have decided to continue the lamp treatments?”

Bernard nodded. “Gives me something to do.”

“We are still considering anti-metabolites and DNA polymerase inhibitors. The infected animals are showing no symptoms-apparently your noocytes are not pleased with animals. Not here, at least. All sorts of theories. Are you experiencing headaches, muscle aches, anything of that nature, even though they may be normal for you?”

“I’ve never felt better in my life. I sleep like a baby, food tastes wonderful no aches or pains. An occasional itch in my skin. Oh…and sometimes I itch inside, in my abdomen, but I’m not sure where. Not very irritating.”

“A picture of health,” Paulsen-Fuchs said, finishing the short report on his clipboard. “Do you mind if we check your honesty?”

“Not much choice, is there?”

They gave him a complete medical twice a day, as regularly as his unpredictable sleep periods allowed. He submitted to them with a grim kind of patience; the novelty of an examination conducted by waldoes had long since worn off.

The large panel hummed open and a tray containing glassware and tools slid forward. Then four long metal and plastic arms unfolded, their grasping parts flexing experimentally. A woman standing in a booth behind the arms peered at Bernard through a double glass window. A television camera on the elbow of one of the arms spun around, its red light glowing. “Good afternoon, Dr. Bernard,” the woman said pleasantly. She was young, sternly attractive, with red-brown hair tied back in a stylishly compact bun.

“I love you, Dr. Schatz,” he said, lying on the low table which rolled out below the waldoes and the tray.

“Just for you, and just for today, I am Frieda. We love you, also, Doctor,” Schatz said. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t love me at all.”

“I’m starting to like this, Frieda.”

“Hmph.” Schatz used the fine-maneuver waldo to pick up a vacuum ampoule from the tray. With uncanny expertise, she guided the needle into a vein and withdrew ten cc’s of blood. He noticed with some interest that the blood was purple-pink.

“Be careful they don’t bite back,” he warned her.

“We are very careful, Doctor,” she said. Bernard sensed tension behind her banter. There could be a number of things they weren’t telling him about his condition. But why hide anything? He already considered himself a doomed man.

“You’re not telling it to me straight, Frieda,” he said as she applied a skin culture tape to his back. The waldo removed the tape with a sticky rip and dropped it into ajar. Another arm quickly stoppered the jar and sealed it in a small bath of molten wax.

“Oh, I think we are,” she replied softly, concentrating on the remotes. “What questions do you have?”

“Are there any cells left in my body that haven’t been converted?”

“Not all are noocytes, Dr. Bernard, but most have been altered in some way, yes.”

“What do you do with them after you’ve analyzed them?”

“By that time, they are all dead, Doctor. Do not worry. We are very thorough.”

“I’m not worried, Frieda.”

“That is good. Now turn over, please.”

“Not the urethra again.”

“I am told this was once a very expensive indulgence among wealthy young gentlemen in the Weimar Republic. A rare experience in the brothels of Berlin.”

“Frieda, I am constantly amazed.”

“Yes. Now please turn over, Doctor.”

He turned over and closed his eyes.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Candles lined the long ground-floor lobby window facing the plaza. Suzy stood back and surveyed her handiwork. The day before, she had pulled her way through a wind-shredded stretch of brown sheet and found a candle shop. Using another cart stolen from an Armenian grocery on South Street, she had heisted a load of votive candles and taken them back to the World Trade Center, where she had established her camp in the ground floor of the north tower. She had seen the green light at the top of that building.

With all the candles, maybe the submarines or airplanes would find her. And there was another impulse, too, one so silly she giggled thinking about it. She was determined to answer the river. She stuck the candles onto the window ledge, lighted them one by one, and watched their warm glows become lost in the vaster darkness all around.

Now she arranged them in spirals along the floor, going back to space them out as her supply diminished. She lighted the candles and walked from flame to flame across the broad carpet, smiling at the light, feeling vaguely guilty about the dripping wax.

She ate a package of M&Ms and read by the light of five bunched candles a copy of Lady’s Home Journal stolen from a concourse newsstand. She was pretty good at reading—slow, but she knew many of the words. The magazine pages with their abundance of ads and tiny columns of words about clothes and cooking and family problems were welcome doses of anesthetic.

Lying on her back on the carpet with the food cart and the empty candle cart nearby, she wondered if she would ever be married—if there would be anybody to marry—and ever have a house where she could apply some of the hints she now pored over. “Probably not,” she told herself. “I’m a spinster for sure now.” She had never dated extensively, had never gone all the way with Gary, and had graduated from special classes in high school with the reputation of being nice…and dull. Some people like her were kind of wild, making up for not being too bright by doing lots of daring things.

“Well, I’m still here,” she said to the high dark ceiling, “and I’m still dull.”

She carried the magazine down the stairs back to the stand, candle in one hand, and picked out a Cosmopolitan to read next. Back on the lobby level, she fell asleep briefly, woke up with a start when the magazine fell across her stomach, and walked around from candle to candle, snuffing them out in case she wanted to use them again tomorrow night. Then she lay down on her side on the carpet, using Kenneth’s coat for a pillow, one candle still burning, and thought of the massive building above her. She couldn’t remember whether the twin towers were still the tallest in the world. She thought not. Each was like an ocean liner upended and stuck into the sky-taller than any ocean liner, actually; so the tourist brochure said.

It would be fun to explore all the shops on the concourse, but even half-asleep, Suzy knew what she would have to do, eventually. She would have to climb the stairs to the top, wherever the stairs were, find out what made the light, and look out across New York—she could see all of the city and much of the state from that vantage. She could see what had happened, and what was happening. The radio might receive more stations that high up. Besides, there was a restaurant on top, and that meant more food. And a bar. She suddenly wanted to get very drunk, something she had tried only twice before in her life.

It wouldn’t be easy. Climbing the stairs could take a day or longer, she knew.

She started up out of light sleep. Something had made a noise nearby, a squeaky, sliding scrape. Dawn was gray and dim outside. There was a motion in the plaza-things rolling, like dust-kittens under a bed, like tumbleweeds. She blinked and rubbed her eyes and got to her knees, squinting to see more clearly.

Feathery cartwheels blew in with the wind, sometimes spinning and falling over, crossing the five acres of the plaza, their wind-vane spokes flapping at the edges. They were gray and white and brown. The fallen ones disassembled on the concrete and flattened out, adhering to the pavement and lifting foot-high fronds. They were pouring into the plaza now, more as day brightened, running into the glass and smearing, spreading outward.

“No more going outside,” she told herself. “Uh-uh.”

She ate a granola bar and turned on the radio, hoping to still be able to receive the British station she had heard the day before. With a little tuning, the speaker produced a weak voice, cross-thatched with interference, like a man speaking through felt

“…to say that the world economy will suffer is certainly an understatement. Who knows how much of the world’s resources—both in raw materials and manufactured goods, not to mention, financial records and capital—lies inaccessible in North America now? I realize most people worry more about their immediate survival, and wonder when the plague will cross the ocean, or whether it is already with us, biding its time—” Static overwhelmed the signal for several minutes. Suzy sat with crossed legs next to the radio, waiting patiently. She didn’t understand much, but the voice was comforting. “—yet my concern, as an economist, must be with what happens after the crisis passes. If it passes. Well, I’m an optimist. God in all His wisdom has some reason for this. Yes. So there has been no communication from the whole of North America, with the exception of the famous meteorological station on Afognak Island. The financiers are dead, then. The United States has always been the great bastion of private capital. Russia is now the dominant nation on the globe, militarily and perhaps financially. What can we expect?”

Suzy turned the radio off. Blather. She needed to know what it was that had happened to her home.

“Why?” she asked out loud. She watched the wheels tumbling through the plaza, their remains beginning to obscure the concrete. “Why not just kill myself and end it all?” She tossed her arms out with self-conscious melodrama, then began to laugh. She laughed until it hurt and became frightened when she realized she couldn’t stop. Hands over her mouth, she ran to a water fountain and gulped the clear, steady stream down.

What really scared her, Suzy realized, was the thought of climbing the tower. Would she need keys? Would she get halfway and find she couldn’t go any farther?

“I’ll be brave,” she said around a bite of the granola bar. “There’s nothing else I can be.”

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

It had been a normal and a good life, selling parts and junk out of his back yard, going to auctions and picking up odds and ends, raising his son and being proud of his wife, who taught school. He had taken great pleasure in his major acquisitions: a load of tile, all different kinds, to fix up the bathroom and kitchen in the huge old white house; an old British jeep; fifteen different cars and trucks, all blue; a ton and a half of old office furniture, including an antique wooden file cabinet which proved to be worth more than he had paid for the whole load.

The weirdest thing he had ever done (since getting married) was shave the thinning hair on his crown to expedite going bald. He had hated the in-between state. Ruth had cried when she saw him. That had been two months ago and the thinning hair had come back, as unruly and distasteful as ever.

John Olafsen had made a good living back when life had been normal. He had kept Ruth and seven-year-old Loren in good clothes and well fed. The house had been in his family for ninety years, since it had been new. They had wanted for little.

He pulled away the scratched black enamel binoculars and wiped fatigue and sweat from his eyes with a red bandana. Then he continued his peering. He was surveying the broad spread of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and the Sandia Labs across the road. The smell of dried grass and dust made him want to blow his nose, leave, pack up…and go nowhere because that was exactly the only place he had left to go. It was five thirty and dusk was coming on. “Wave your flag, Jerry,” he murmured, “you sonofabitch.”

Jerry was his twin brother, five minutes younger, twice as reckless. Jerry had flown crop dusters in the Salinas Valley. How John had escaped, neither of them knew, but it was obvious Jerry was too full of DDT and EDB and what have you. He just plain didn’t taste good to whatever had eaten the town of Livermore.

And Ruth, and Loren.

Jerry was down between the big modern square buildings and the old bungalows and barracks, scouting the thirty-foot-high mounds that now rose wherever there was empty space on the LLNL grounds. He carried another red bandana on a stick. Neither brother was ever without a bandana. Each Christmas, they had bought each other new ones, wrapping them up in red foil with big red ribbons.

“Wave,” John growled. He shifted the binoculars and saw the red bandana circling rapidly on the stick: once clockwise, once counterclockwise, then three times clockwise. That meant John should come down and see what there was to see. Nothing dangerous…as far as Jerry could tell.

He hefted his two hundred and fifty pounds up and brushed down the knees of his ragged black Levis. Curling red hair and beard glowing against the eastern grayness, he climbed out of the drainage ditch and squeezed through the barbed wire fence, the chicken wire fence, and the no-longer-electrified inner perimeter fence.

Then he ran and slid down the twenty-foot grade and hopped another culvert before slowing to a casual walk. He lit up a cigarette and broke the match before tossing it into the dirt. Fifteen or twenty cars were still parked in a lot next to the old Yin-Yang fusion project buildings. An especially impressive mound, about sixty feet in diameter, rose from the earth near the lot Jerry stood on top of the mound. He had come across a pick somewhere and was dangling it head-down by the handle, a big grin on his beardless face.

“No more joggers,” he said as John climbed the mound to join him. They called some of the peculiar things they had seen in Livermore joggers. The name seemed appropriate, since the things almost always ran; not once had they seen one standing still.

“Gladdens my heart,” John said. “What’s your plan?”

“Dig my way to China,” Jerry said, tapping the mound. “Ain’t you curious?”

“There’s curious, and curious,” John said. “What if these mounds are something the lab people put in…you know, defense, or maybe an experiment out of hand?”

“I’d say an experiment’s already got out of hand.”

“I still don’t think it came from here.”

“Shit” Jerry plunked the head of the pick on the mound, cracking the already fissured dirt and dried grass. “Why not and where in hell else?”

“Other places got labs.”

“Sure, and maybe it’s aliens.”

John shrugged. They’d probably never know. “Dig, then.”

Jerry brought the pick up and expertly swung it down. The point broke through the dirt like a pin through an eggshell and the handle almost jerked from his hands. “Hollow,” he grunted, pulling it loose with some effort. He knelt down and peered into the pick hole. “Can’t see.” He got to his feet and swung the pick again.

“Hit ’em,” John said, licking his lips. “Let me hit ’em.”

“We don’t know anything’s down there,” Jerry said, snatching the pick handle away from his brother’s broad, thick outstretched hand.

John nodded reluctantly and put the hand in his jeans pocket. He looked off at the setting sun and shook his head. “There’s nothing we can do to them,” he said. “There’s just us.”

Jerry swung three times in quick succession and a hole a yard wide caved in. The brothers jumped back, then retreated several more steps for caution’s sake. The rest of the mound held. Jerry got on his hands and knees and crawled up to the hole. “Still can’t see,” he said. “Go get the flashlight.”

It was getting dark when John returned with a heavy-duty waterproof lantern from their truck. Jerry sat by the hole, smoking a cigarette and tapping the ashes into it. “Brought a rope, too,” John said, dropping the coil next to his brother’s knee.

“What’s the town look like?” Jerry asked.

“From what I could see, same as before, only more so.”

“Be anything left tomorrow?”

John shrugged. “Whatever it turns into, I suppose.”

“Okay. It’s dark down there, night makes no difference. You hold on, I’ll go on down with the light—”

“No way,” John said. “I’m not staying up here without a light.”

“Then you go down.”

John thought about that “Hell, no. We’ll tie the rope to a car and both go down.”

“Fine,” Jerry said. He ran with the rope to the nearest car, tied it to a bumper, and paid it out on the way back. About thirty feet of rope remained when he reached the top of the mound. “Me first,” he said.

“Dur rigor, as the Frogs say.”

Jerry lowered himself into the hole. “Light”

John gave him the light. Jerry’s head dropped below the rim. “It’s reflecting,” he said. The beam shot back up into the moist evening air and caught John’s face as he peered after. When enough space presented itself, he took hold of the taut rope and followed his twin.

Their mother had told them stories, passed on from a Danish-speaking grandmother, about such mounds full of elf gold, dead bodies, weird blue fire and “skirlin’ and singin’.”

He never would have admitted it, but what he truly expected to find was Morlocks.

Both twins were sweating by the time they set foot on the bottom of the hollow mound. The air was much warmer and more humid than outside. The lantern beam cut through a thick, sweet-tasting fog. Their boots sunk into a resilient dark purple surface that squeaked when they moved. “Gaw-awod-damn,” they said simultaneously.

“What the fuck are we going to do, now that we’re here?” John asked plaintively.

“We’re going to find Ruth and Loren, and maybe Tricia.” Tricia had been Jerry’s girlfriend for the past six years. He had not seen her dissolve, but it was easy to assume that was what had happened to her.

“They’re gone,” John said, his voice low and hidden in the back of his throat.

“Hell they are. They just been disassembled and brought down here.”

“Where in hell do you get that idea?”

Jerry shook his head. “It’s either that or, like you say, they’re gone. Do they feel like they’re gone?”

John thought a moment. “No,” he admitted. Both of them had known the feeling of having someone emotionally close to them die, and knowing it without even being told. “But maybe I’m just foolin’ myself.”

“Bullshit,” Jerry said. “I know they’re not dead. And if they’re not dead, then nobody else is, either. Because you saw—”

“I saw,” John butted in. He had seen the clothing filled with dissolving flesh. He had not known what to do. It had been late morning and Ruth and Loren had come down with what seemed like some kind of bug the night before. White stripes on their hands, their faces. He had told them they would all go into the doctor in the morning.

The time between seeing the clothes and when Jerry arrived was still blank. He had screamed, or done something to hurt his throat so he could hardly talk. “Then why weren’t we taken, too?”

Jerry patted his belly, as prominent as John’s. “Too big a bite,” he said. He swirled at the fog with his hand. The beam wouldn’t go more than a few feet in any direction. “Jesus, I’m scared,” he said.

“Gladdens my heart,” John said.

“Well, you’re the one suggested we go down here,” Jerry said. John didn’t object to the reversal of truth. “So now you tell us which way to go.”

“Straight ahead,” John said. “And watch out for Morlocks.”

“Yeah. Jesus. Morlocks.”

They walked slowly across the spongy purple floor. Several moist and unhappy minutes passed before the beam showed a surface ahead. Glistening, irregular pipes, mottled gray and brown, Vaseline-shiny, covered a wall, pulsing rhythmically. To the left, the pipes bent around a curve and vanished into a dark tunnel. “I don’t believe this,” Jerry said.

“Well?” John pointed to the tunnel.

Jerry nodded. “We know what the worst is already,” he said.

“You fucking hope we do,” John growled.

“You first.” Jerry pointed.

“Love you, too.”

“Go!”

They entered the tunnel.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Paulsen-Fuchs told Uwe to pause at the top of the hill. The camps of protestors around Pharmek’s compound had doubled in size in just a week. There were now about a hundred thousand, a sea of tents and flags and banners, most on the eastern side of the compound, near the main gates. There didn’t seem to be any particular organization to their protest, which worried him. They were not political, just a cross-section of the German people, driven to distraction by disasters they could not comprehend. They came to Pharmek because of Bernard, not yet knowing what they wanted to do. But that would change. Someone would take charge, give them a direction.

Some of the more ignorant of the public were demanding Bernard’s destruction and the sterilization of the containment chamber, but that wasn’t likely. Most European governments acknowledged that research on Bernard could be the only way to study the plague and find out how to control it.

Still, Europe was in the grip of panic. A great many travelers-tourists, businessmen, even military personnel—had returned to Europe from North America before the quarantine. Not all of them had been rounded up. Some had been found undergoing transformation in hotels, apartments, houses. Almost invariably the victims were killed by local authorities, the buildings carefully incinerated and sewage and water systems liberally dosed with sterilizing agents.

Nobody knew whether such measures were effective.

Many people, around the world, were convinced it was just a matter of time.

With the news he had received that morning, he halfway hoped they might be right. Plague might be preferable to suicide. “North gate,” Paulsen-Fuchs said, getting back into the car.

The equipment had finally been delivered and now crowded half the containment chamber. Bernard rearranged the cot and desk and stood back, looking at the compact laboratory with satisfaction. Now at least he would have something to do. He could poke and prod himself.

Weeks had passed and he had still not undergone the final transformation. No one outside could tell him why; nor could he explain to himself why he had not yet communicated with the noocytes, as Vergil had. Or thought he had.

Perhaps Vergil had simply gone insane. Communication might not be possible.

He needed far more equipment than could be crammed into the chamber, but most of the chemical analysis he was planning could be done outside and the information fed into his terminal.

He felt something like the old Michael Bernard now. He was on a trail. He would find out or help the others discover how the cells communicated, what chemical language they used. And if they would not speak with him directly, he would then find a way to speak to them. Perhaps control them. Pharmek had all the necessary expertise and equipment, everything Ulam had had and more: if necessary, they could duplicate the experiments and start from scratch.

Bernard doubted that would be allowed to happen. From conversations with Paulsen-Fuchs and other Pharmek personnel, he had the impression there was quite a storm raging around him now.

After running a brief inventory on the equipment, he began refreshing his memory on procedures by reading the manuals. A few hours later he tired of that and made an entry in his computer notebook, knowing that it was not private, that it would be read now or later by Pharmek and government personnel-psychologists perhaps, the doctors certainly. Everything about him was important now.

He hesitated, fingers over the keyboard, and was about to continue when Paulsen-Fuchs buzzed for his attention from the viewing chamber.

“Good afternoon,” Bernard said, spinning his chair around. As usual now, he was naked. A camera in the upper right hand comer of the viewing chamber window continually fed his body contours and characteristics into the computers for analysis.

“Not a good afternoon, Michael,” Paulsen-Fuchs said. His long face was even longer and more haggard than usual. “As if we do not have problems enough, now we face the possibility of war.”

Bernard stepped close to the window and watched the executive shake out a British newspaper. The headlines sent a queasy thrill down his spine.

“When?” he asked.

“Yesterday afternoon. The Cubans reported a radioactive cloud advancing across the Atlantic. NATO military satellites confirmed the hot-spot I suppose the military knew ahead of time—they must have their seismographs or whatever but the press only found out this morning. The Russians used nine or ten one-megaton bombs, probably submarine-launched. The whole canal area is…” He shook his head. “Nothing from the Russians. Half the people in Germany expect we will be invaded within the week. The other half are drunk.”

“Any word on the continent?” That was how they had come to refer to North America in the last two days: the continent the real center of the action.

“Nothing,” Paulsen-Fuchs said, slamming the paper on the viewing chamber table.

“Do you—the Europeans—expect the Russians to invade North America?”

“Yes. Any day now. Eminent domain, or whatever you English-speakers call it. Right of salvage.” He began to chuckle. “I am not their lawyer, but they will think of the correct words, and justify themselves in Geneva, if they haven’t bombed Geneva by then, too.” He stood with his hands spread on the table, around the paper. “No one is prepared to discuss what will happen to them if they do invade. The U.S. government in exile postures and threatens with its European-based troops and navy, but Russia does not take them seriously. Before your call last month, I had planned to go on my first vacation in seven years. Obviously, I cannot go on vacation,” he said. “Michael, you have brought something into my life that may kill me. Pardon my self-centered moment.”

“Understood,” Bernard said quietly.

“Old saying in Germany,” Paulsen-Fuchs said, staring at him. “‘It is the bullet you don’t hear that gets you,’ Does that have meaning for you?”

He nodded.

“Then work, Michael. Work very hard, before we are all dead by our own hand.”

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

At the security desk Suzy found a long, powerful flashlight—very fancy, black like binoculars with a beam that could be spread wide or focused in by turning a knob—and set about exploring the concourse and lower-level walkway between the two towers. She spent some time trying on clothes in a boutique, but she couldn’t see herself very well in the flashlight beam and that quickly palled. Besides, it was spooky. She made a half-hearted effort to see if others like herself had entered the building, and even ventured briefly into the Cortlandt Street subway station. When she was satisfied that the lower floors were empty—except for the ubiquitous piles of clothes—she returned to her Candlelight Room, as she had dubbed it, and planned her ascent.

She had found a chart of the north tower and now traced her finger along the plan of the lobby and lower floors. Flipping back each sheet of the thick manual, she realized that the building did not have long stairwells, but stairs at different places on each floor.

That would make her climb even more difficult. She found the door that led to the first stairway on the chart and walked to it. It was locked. Doubling back to the security desk, she nudged a pile of uniform with her foot and revealed a massive ring of keys on a retractable cord. She pulled the belt from the loops, noticing a bra in the clothing, and removed the keys. “Excuse me,” she whispered, rearranging the clothes into an approximation of their former state. “I’m just going to borrow them. I’ll be right back.” She caught herself and bit the fleshy part of her thumb until she left vivid tooth marks. Nobody there, she told herself. Nobody anywhere. Just me, now.

It took her a few minutes of slowly reading the labels on the keys to find the one that opened the door to the stairwell. Beyond the door, the stairs were utilitarian concrete and steel. On the next floor they opened onto a hallway. She peered around the corner and down a white corridor leading past doors to various offices, some marked and some merely numbered. A quick look into several of the offices told her little.

“Okay,” she told herself. “It’s nothing but a hike, a long hike. I’ll need food and water.” She looked down at her loafers and sighed. They’d have to do, unless she decided to borrow a pair of empty shoes from—

She didn’t relish that idea. In the ground floor lobby, she took a plastic shopping bag from behind the newsstand and filled it with lightweight foods from her cart. Water was more difficult; the plastic jugs were too bulky to hang comfortably from her belt, but she decided there was little alternative. And if she found water still available on the upper floor-there had to be water-coolers—she could always leave the jugs behind.

She began her climb at eight thirty in the morning. It was best, she thought, to climb steadily ten floors and then rest, or explore and see what was visible from that level. That way, she might reach the top by the end of the day.

Humming “Michelle,” she went from flight to flight, hands gripping the steel rails, passing through door after door. She tried to establish a rhythm. Kenneth and Howard had taken her hiking in Maine once and she had learned that every hiker had a certain rhythm. Following that rhythm made the trail a lot easier; breaking the rhythm to follow someone else made it much more difficult.

“Nobody to follow,” she told herself on the fourth level. She tried singing “Michelle” again, but the rhythm didn’t match her steps, so she whistled a march by John Williams. On the ninth level she began to feel winded. “One more.” And on the tenth, she squatted with her back against the wall of the elevator lobby, staring at the doors. “Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.” But she was stubborn—her mother had always said so, somewhat proudly—and she would persist “Nothing else to do,” she said, her voice hollow in the deserted lobby.

When her breathing eased, she stood and arranged the bottle of water and the sack of food. Then she crossed to the next door and opened it. Up another flight. Another lobby, more hallways, more offices. She decided to investigate one of the restrooms.

“Check for water,” she said. She looked between the Men’s and Women’s and giggled, then chose the Men’s. Shining the flashlight over the mirrors and fixtures, she gave in to curiosity and walked the length of the lavatory. She had never before seen the tall white porcelain fixtures lining the wall. She had even forgotten what they were called. She looked under the stalls and froze, fear tangling and twisting with perverse laughter inside.

A pile of clothes lined the floor in one of the stalls. “Got sucked right down the toilet,” she murmured, straightening and wiping tears from her eyes. “Poor guy. Goddammit.” She dabbed at her eyes with her rolled-up sleeves and twisted the hot-water knob on the sink. A trickle of water came out. More came when she turned the cold knob, but it didn’t look promising.

She left the lavatory and sauntered down a hallway. Behind a big double wood door with Japanese-sounding names on it was a waiting room, plush velvet couches and glass tables with a big desk near the back wall. There was no receptionist behind the desk, and no pile of clothes, either. Nothing for her there.

From the waiting room, she looked down on the plaza. The concrete was completely covered with brown now. “Climb,” she told herself. Stairway to heaven. Die at the top and be closer. But climb.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

It’s like crawling down a throat” John said.

“Jesus, you’re morbid.”

“It is, though, ain’t it?”

“Yeah,” Jerry said. He grunted and stooped lower. “We’re behaving like idiots. Why this mound, and why now?”

“You picked it out”

“And I don’t know why. Maybe no reason at all.”

“Good as any, I suppose.”

The tunnel walls were changing as they walked farther along. Big fleshy pipes gave way to fine, glistening net, like spray-painted tripe. John poked his face and the light up close to the surface and saw each little dimple in the net filled with tiny disks and cubes and balls, stacked atop each other in a jumble. The floor was narrowing, the spongy purple rising up in ridges, the ridges running parallel with the tunnel. “Drainage,” Jerry said, pointing.

They passed the light back and forth to share its comfort, sometimes shining it at each other’s faces, or inspecting their skin and clothing to see that nothing was clinging to them.

The tunnel widened abruptly and the thick sweet fog drifted around them. “We’ve walked far enough to be under another mound,” Jerry said. He stopped and pulled his boot from something sticky. “There’s stuff all over the floor.”

John trained the light on Jerry’s boot. Brownish-red goo covered the sole. “Doesn’t look too deep,” he said.

“Not yet, anyway.” The fog smelled faintly like fertilizer, or like the sea. Alive. It circulated in thin, high veils, as if caught between curtains of air.

“Which way now? We don’t want to just walk in circles,” Jerry said.

“You’re the leader,” John said. “Don’t ask me for initiative.”

“Smells like someone left seaweed in a candy store,” Jerry said. “Makes you gag.”

“Mushrooms,” John said, pointing the light down. White capped objects about two inches wide lay all around their feet, popping beneath them as they walked. He aimed the light higher and saw vertical and horizontal lines through the fog ahead.

“Shelving,” Jerry said. “Shelves with things growing on them.” The shelves were less than a quarter-inch thick, supported by irregularly spaced brackets, all made from a hard white substance that glistened in the beam. On the shelves were stacks of what looked like burned paper—wet burned paper.

“Yucch,” Jerry commented, feeling one of the stacks with a curled finger.

“Wouldn’t touch anything if I was you,” John said.

“Hell, you are me, brother. Minor differences.”

“I’m still not touching anything.”

“Yeah. Probably a smart idea.”

They proceeded along the length of the shelving and came to a wall covered with pipes. The pipes grew out onto the shelves and diverged into smaller clusters, leading to the glistening brown stacks. “What is this stuff, plastic or what?” Jerry asked, feeling one of the shelf braces.

“Doesn’t look like plastic,” John said. “Looks more like clean white bone.” They stared at each other.

“I hope not,” Jerry said, turning away. Walking through the fog and swirling air to the other end of the shelving, they found a foamlike white matrix, resembling a rubbery honeycomb, pocked with open bubbles filled to the rim with purple syrup. Some of the bubbles dripped purple onto the floor, where each drop hissed and smoked on impact.

John held back an urge to gag and mumbled something about having to get out

“Sure,” Jerry said, bending down to peer at the bubbles. “Look at this, first.”

John reluctantly bent, hands on knees, and looked at the bubble his brother had indicated.

“Look at all those little wires,” Jerry said. “Little beads traveling on wires, above the purple. Red beads. Looks like blood, don’t it?”

John nodded. He dug into his jeans pocket and pulled out a Swiss army knife he had found under the torn-up seats of the British jeep. He used his fingernails to withdraw a small magnifying glass from the knife handle. “Shine the light on it.” With the beam filling the bubble, he peered through the glass at the purple liquid and the tiny wires with red drops.

The closer he looked, the more detailed it became. Nothing he could identify, but the purple fluid’s surface was composed of thousands of pyramids. The white material resembled foam plastic or cork.

He gritted his teeth. “Very pretty,” he said. He took hold of the edge of a bubble and tore it away. The liquid splashed at his feet and the fog thickened. “They’re not here.”

“Why’d you do that?” Jerry asked.

John slugged the soft honeycomb and pulled his hand away glistening with purple. “Because they’re not here.”

“Who?”

“Ruth and Loren. They’re just gone.”

“Hold on-” Jerry admonished, but John swung with both hands now, tearing the lattice of bubbles apart. They could hardly see each other for the sweet, cloying fog. Jerry grabbed his brother’s shoulder and tried to pull him back. “Stop it, stop it, John, goddammit!”

“They took “em!” John screamed. His throat spasmed and he clutched it with one hand, still gripping and tearing and punching with the other. “They’re not in here, Jerry!”

The rolled in the goo until Jerry pinned both his brother’s arms. The light fell with its beam tilting upward behind them. John shook his head, sweat flying, and began a long, silent sob eyes scrunched shut mouth stretched wide. Jerry hugged his brother tightly and looked over his shoulder at the beam-lit, swirling fog. “Shh,” he said over and over. They were covered with the smelly brown muck. “Shh.”

“I been holdin’ it in,” John said after sucking a deep, tremulous breath, “Jerry, let me go. I been holdin’ it in too long. Let’s get out of here. Nobody’s here. There’s nobody down here.”

“Yeah,” Jerry said. “Not here. Maybe somewhere, but not here.”

“I can feel them, Jerry.”

“I know. But not here.”

“Then where the hell—“

“Shhhh.” They lay in the muck, listening to the soft hiss of the fog and the curtains of air. Jerry could feel his eyes opening as wide as a cat’s in the dark. “Sh. There’s something—”

“Oh, Christ,” John said, struggling from his brother’s arms. They stood, dripping muck, facing the direction of the lantern’s beam. The fog roiled and puffed in the light.

“It’s a jogger,” Jerry said as a silhouette took shape.

“It’s too big,” John said.

The object was at least ten feet across, flattened, fringe hanging from its side, appearing brownish in the uncertain light.

“It doesn’t have legs,” Jerry said, awed. “It’s just floating there.”

John stepped forward. “Goddamn Martians,” he said quietly. He raised his fist. I’ll break—”

And there was a moment of forgetfulness.

Morning light tinted the east aquamarine. The town, covered with brown and white sheets, resembled something that more properly belonged underwater, a low, flat section of ocean bed.

They stood in the drainage ditch beyond the fences, looking toward the town.

“I can’t move much,” Jerry said.

“I can’t either.”

“I think it stung us.”

“I didn’t feel anything.”

John moved his arm experimentally. “I think I saw them.”

“Saw who?”

“I’m pretty confused, Jerry.”

“Me too.”

The sun was well into the sky before they were able to walk. Over the town, transparent hemispheres drifted between the outlines of the buildings, occasionally shooting down thin pencils of light. “Looks like jellyfish,” Jerry commented as they wobbled toward the road and the truck.

“I think I saw Loren and Ruth. I’m not sure,” John said. They approached the truck slowly, stiffly, and sat in the front seat, closing the doors behind. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“I saw them down where we were. But they weren’t there. That doesn’t make sense.”

“No, I mean, where do we go now?”

“Out of town. Somewhere else.”

“They’re everywhere, John. Radios say that.”

“Goddamn Martians.”

Jerry sighed. “Martians would have zapped us, John.”

“Fuck ’em. Let’s go away.”

“Whatever they are,” Jerry said, “I’m pretty sure they’re from right around here.” He pointed emphatically toward the ground. “Right from inside that fence.”

“Drive,” John said. Jerry started the engine, put the truck in gear and roared them off down the dirt road. They spun out on East Avenue, narrowly missed a deserted car at the next intersection, and squealed onto South Vasco road, heading for the highway. “How much gas we got?”

“I filled ’er up in town yesterday. Before the sheets got the pumps.”

“You know,” John said, bending to pick up an oil rag from the floor and wiping his hands, “I don’t think we’re smart enough to figure out anything. We just don’t have any idea.”

“No good ideas, maybe.” Jerry squinted. Someone stood by the road a mile ahead, waving vigorously. John followed his brother’s puzzled stare.

“We’re not alone,” he said.

Jerry slowed the truck. “It’s a woman.” They stopped forty or fifty yards from where she stood on the road shoulder. Jerry leaned out the driver’s side window to see her more clearly. “Not a young woman,” he said, disappointed.

She was in her fifties, hair jet black and flowing, and she wore a peach-colored silk gown that flagged behind her as she ran. The brothers looked at each other and shook their heads, unsure what to think or do.

She approached the passenger side, out of breath and laughing. “Thank God,” she said. “Or whomever. I thought I was the only one left in the whole town.”

“Guess not,” Jerry said. John opened the door and she stepped up into the cab. He moved over for her and she sat, releasing a deep breath and laughing again. She turned her head and regarded him sharply. “You fellows aren’t hoodlums, are you?”

“Don’t believe so,” Jerry said, eyes trained on the road. “Where you from?”

“Back in town. My house is gone, and the neighborhood’s all wrapped up like a Christmas package. I thought I was the only one in the world left alive.”

“Haven’t been listening to the radio, then,” John said.

“No. Don’t like electronic things. But I know what’s going on anyway.”

“Yeah?” Jerry asked, moving the truck back onto the road.

“Yes indeed. My son. He’s responsible for this. I had no idea what form it would take, but there’s no doubt in my mind. And I warned him, too.”

The twins glanced at each other again. The woman tossed her hair and deftly slipped a flexible band around it

“Yes, I know,” she said, chuckling. “Crazy as a bedbug. Crazier than all that back in town. But I can tell you where we should be going.”

“Where?” Jerry asked.

“South,” she said firmly. “To where my son was working.” She smoothed her gown down over her knees. “My name, by the way, is Ulam, April Ulam.”

“John,” John said, awkwardly extending his right hand and gripping hers. “This is my brother, Jerry.”

“Ah, yes,” April said. “Twins. Makes sense, I suppose.”

Jerry started laughing. Tears came into his eyes and he wiped them with a muck-stained hand. “South, lady?” he said.

“Definitely.”

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

Electronic Journal of Michael Bernard

Bernard pushed his chair back from the desk after saving the entry in memory. There was too much to record, too much detail; he despaired of ever being able to explain the sensations to the researchers outside. After weeks of frustration, of cabin fever, and then trying to break the chemical language within his blood, there was suddenly a feast of information so huge he couldn’t begin to absorb it All he had to do was ask, and a thousand or a million intelligent beings would organize to analyze his question and return detailed, rapid answers.

“What am I to you?” would bring in reply:

Father/Mother/Universe

World-Challenge Source of all

Ancient, slow

Mountain-galaxy.

And he could spend hours replaying the sensual complexes which accompanied the words: the taste of his own blood serum, the fixed tissues of his body, the joy at nutrition being diffused, the necessity of cleansing, protecting.

In the quiet of night, lying on his cot with only infra-red scanners trained on him and the ubiquitous sensors taped to his body, he swam in and out of his own dreams and the cautious, almost reverent inquiries and replies of the noocytes. Now and then, he would awaken as if alerted by some mental guard dog that a new territory was being probed.

Even in the day, his sense of time became distorted. The minutes spent conversing with the cells felt like hours, and he would return to the world of the containment chamber with a disconcerting lack of conviction about its reality.

The visits by Paulsen-Fuchs and others seemed to come at longer intervals, though in fact the visits were made at the same established times each day.

At three P.M., Paulsen-Fuchs arrived with his elaborations of the news reports Bernard had read or seen earlier that morning. The news was invariably bad and getting worse. The Soviet Union, like an untamed horse set loose, had now left Europe panicked and bristling with helpless rage. It had then retreated into sullen silence, which reassured no one. Bernard thought briefly of these problems, then asked Paulsen-Fuchs what progress there was on controlling the intelligent cells.

“None. They are obviously in control of all the immune system; other than having an increased metabolic rate, they are very thoroughly camouflaged. We believe they can now neutralize any anti-metabolite before it begins to work; they are already alert to inhibitors like actinomycin. In short, we cannot damage them without damaging you.”

Bernard nodded. Oddly, that didn’t concern him now.

“And you are, now, communicating with them,” Paulsen-Fuchs said.

“Yes.”

Paulsen-Fuchs sighed and turned away from the triple glass. “Are you still a human, Michael?”

“Of course I am,” he said. But then it occurred to him that he was not, that he had not been just a human for more than a month. “I’m still me, Paul.”

“Why have we had to snoop to find this fact?”

“I wouldn’t call it snooping. I assumed my entries were being intercepted and read.”

“Michael, why haven’t you told me? I am foolishly hurt. I assumed I was an important person in your world.”

Bernard shook his head and chuckled. “You are indeed, Paul. You’re my host. And as soon as I figured out precisely what to say, in speech, you would have been told. Will be told. The dialogue between the noocytes and myself is just beginning. I can’t be sure we don’t still have fundamental misunderstandings.”

Paulsen-Fuchs stepped toward the viewing chamber hatchway. “Tell me when you are ready. It could be very important,” he said wearily.

“Certainly.”

Paulsen-Fuchs left the chamber.

That was almost cold, Bernard thought I was behaving like someone suspended from society. And Paul is a friend.

Yet what could he do?

Perhaps his humanity was coming to an end.

CHAPTER THIRTY

On the sixtieth floor, Suzy realized she would not be able to climb any higher that day. She sat in an executive chair behind a sprawling executive desk (she had pushed the executive’s gray suit and fine silk shirt and alligator shoes into a corner) and looked through the window at the city some six hundred feet below. The walls were covered with real wood paneling and signed Norman Rockwell prints in buffed bronze frames. She ate a cracker with jam and peanut butter from her plastic shopping bag and sipped on a bottle of Calistoga mineral water from the executive’s well-stocked bar.

A brass telescope mounted in the window gave her great views of her home neighborhood, now thickly shrouded with the leathery brown stuff, and whatever else she wanted to look at to the south and the west. The river around Governors Island no longer looked like water. It looked muddy and frozen, and peculiar solidified waves spread out in circles to meet other waves from Ellis Island and Liberty Island. It looked more like raked sand than water, but she knew it couldn’t have turned into sand.

“You must have been very rich, made a lot of money,” she said to the gray suit and silk shirt and shoes. “I mean, this is nice and fancy. I’d thank you if I could.” She finished her bottle and dropped it into a wooden trash basket under the desk.

The chair was comfortable enough to sleep in, but she hoped to find a bed. She had seen rich executives on the old television with private bedrooms in their office suits. This office certainly looked fancy enough. She was too tired to search for a bedroom right now, however.

The sun descended over New Jersey as she massaged her cramped legs.

Most of the city, what she could see of it, was covered with brown and black blankets. There was no better description. Someone had come along and wrapped surplus army blankets all the way to the tenth or twentieth floors of all the buildings in Manhattan. Occasionally she saw vast sheets of the material rise up and sail away, just as they had in Brooklyn, but there was less of that activity now.

“Good-bye, sun,” she said. The tiny red arc dipped and vanished, and for the first time in her life she saw, in the last second of refracted light a brief flash of green. She had been told about that in high school, and the teacher had said it was very rare (and hadn’t bothered to explain what caused it) and now she grinned with pleasure. She had actually seen it.

“I’m just privileged, that’s all,” she said. An idea began to form. She wasn’t sure whether it was one of her weird touches of insight, or whether it was just some daydream. She was being watched. The brown was watching her, and the river. The piles of clothes. Whatever the people had turned into was watching her. It wasn’t an unpleasant sort of watching, because she knew she pleased them. She wouldn’t be changed as long as she kept on doing what she was doing.

“Well, gotta search for my bed now,” she said, pushing up from the chair. “Nice office,” she said to the gray suit.

Beyond the secretary’s desk in the outer office was a small unmarked door. She tried it and found a closet full of forms and papers stacked on shelves, with supplies lower down and an odd little box with a glowing red light. Something was still feeding the box electricity. Maybe it was a burglar alarm, she thought, working off batteries. Maybe it was a smoke detector. She closed the door and went the opposite direction. Around the corner from the big office was another door, this one marked with a brass plaque saying PRIVATE. She nodded and tried the knob. It was locked, but she was already an expert pilferer of keys. She picked out a likely candidate from a desk drawer and inserted it. The second choice worked. She turned the knob and opened the door.

The room was dark. She flicked the flashlight switch. The wide beam swept a comfortable-looking bed, nightstand, a table with small computer in one corner, and—

Suzy screamed. She heard a thump and out of the corner of her eye saw a small thing move under the desk, and other things under the bed. She lifted the light. A pipe rose beside the bed. On top of the pipe was a round object with many flat triangular sides and strings hanging from each side. It swayed and tried to avoid the light. Something small and dark scampered past her feet and she jumped back, pointing the light at her shoes.

It might have been a rat, but it was too large and not shaped right, and too small for a cat. It had many large eyes or shiny parts on a round head but it had only three legs, covered with red fur. It ran into the big office. She quickly shut the door on the bedroom and backed away, hand clamped over her mouth.

The hell with the top floor. She didn’t care any more.

The hallway outside the secretary’s office was clear. She picked up the radio from the secretary’s desk, the bottle of water and her bag of food and quickly arranged them, looping her belt through the bottle’s handle and hanging the bag over her shoulder and behind her back. “Jesus, Jesus,” she whispered. She ran down the hallway, bottle thumping against her butt, and opened the door to the stairwell. “Down,” she murmured. “Down, down, down!” She would try to leave the building. If there were things on the upper floor, she had no other choice. Her loafers thumped rapidly on the stairs. The bag of food bounced and suddenly ruptured, scattering crackers and small jars and bits of jerky down the stairs. Jars broke and an unopened can of plums descended one stair at a time, rolling and clumping, rolling and clumping.

She hesitated, reached to pick up the plums, and then looked at the wall beyond. A sheet of brown and white coated the wall. Slowly, eyes wide, she peered around the railing. Filaments of white covered the door and a sheet of dark brown was torturously creeping up the side wall.

“No!” she screamed. “Goddammit, no! You fuckers, you leave me alone, you let me go down!” She tossed her head and pounded on the railing until her fists were bruised. Tears flew from her eyes. “You leave me alone!” Still, the sheets advanced.

Up again. Whatever was higher up, she had to go. She could fight it off with a broom, but she couldn’t wade through it—that would be too much, and she really would go crazy.

She picked up what food she could and stuffed it into her pockets. There had to be food in the restaurant.

“I’m not going to think about it,” she told herself over and over again, not in reference to eating, which was of small concern to her now. She wasn’t going to think about what she would do after she made it to the top.

The sea of brown, leathery blanket-material was obviously intent on covering the whole city, even to the upper floors of the World Trade Center.

And that would leave very little room for Suzy McKenzie.

CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

April Ulam shielded her eyes to look into the sunrise. The windmills of Tracy were silhouetted against the yellow sky, propellers still turning, feeding power to the deserted gas station where the twins had refueled the truck. She glanced at John and nodded as if in agreement; yes, indeed, another day. Then she walked back into the small grocery store to supervise Jerry’s search for provisions.

She was a lot tougher than she looked, John decided. Crazy or not she had the brothers in a spell. They had spent the night in the station, exhausted, after traveling less than twenty miles out of Livermore. They had finally decided to take the central valley route. This had been suggested by April; it was best, she thought, to avoid what had once been populated areas. “Judging from what happened in Livermore,” she had said, “we don’t want to get bogged down in San Jose or anyplace else.”

The way they were going, they would inevitably have to drive through Los Angeles, or find some way to skirt around it, but John hadn’t mentioned that.

She gave them direction, at least. There was no sense criticizing because without her they would still be in Livermore, going mad one way or another-probably violently. John walked around the truck, hands in his pockets, looking at the dirt.

They were all going to die.

He didn’t mind. He had become very, very tired last night—tired in a way sleep could never cure. He could tell Jerry was feeling the same way. Let the mad woman lead them around by the nose. Who cared?

Los Angeles might be interesting. He doubted they would ever get to La Jolla.

Jerry and April came out of the store with shopping bags in both arms. They propped the bags in the back of the truck and Jerry took out a worn map from the truck’s glove compartment.

“580 south to 5,” he said. April agreed. John took the wheel and they rumbled down the freeway.

For the most part, the highway was free of cars. But at wide intervals they passed deserted (or at least empty) vehicles-trucks, cars, even an Air Force bus—along the roadside. They didn’t stop to investigate.

The asphalt was clean and the drive was fast. The hills around the San Luis and Los Banos reservoirs should have been green with winter rains, but they were a matte gray, as if coated with primer before application of a new color. The reservoirs themselves were glossy green and still as glass. Nowhere was bird or insect visible. April regarded all this with fated pride; my son did this, she seemed to be thinking, and while a frown crossed her face as they passed the reservoirs, on the whole she did not seem to disapprove.

Jerry was both intrigued and thoroughly spooked by her, but he wasn’t about to say anything. Still, John could sense his unease.

The fields to each side of 5 were covered with mossy brown sheets that glistened in the sun like plastic “All those trees and vegetables,” April said, shaking her head. “What do you think happened to the crops?”

“I don’t know, Ma’am,” Jerry said. “I just spray ’em, I don’t judge ’em.”

“Not just people. Takes over everything.” She smiled and shook her head. “Poor Vergil. He had no idea.”

They made a pitstop at a Carl’s Junior just off the highway. The franchise’s doors were open, and there were a few piles of clothes behind the service counter, but the building was undisturbed and unconverted. In the rest-room, as they pissed in parallel, John said, “I believe her.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s so sure.”

“Hell of a reason.”

“And she ain’t lying.”

“Hell no. She’s looney tunes.”

“I don’t think so.”

Jerry zipped up and said, “She’s a witch, John.”

John didn’t disagree.

The monotonous brown-covered farmlands gradually changed color and character as they approached the Lost Hills turnoff. More bare earth appeared, dusty and dead-looking. Little spouts of air swept the land in the distance like maids cleaning up after a wild party. “Where did all the crops go?” April wondered.

Jerry shook his head. Don’t know. Don’t want to know.

John squinted into the dusty haze ahead and tapped the truck’s brake pedal, down-shifting expertly. Then he slammed the brakes hard and the truck spun out, tires squealing. Jerry cursed and April grimly hung on to the edge of the window.

The truck came to a halt reversed on the roadway. John turned them around and grabbed the gearshift back into neutral.

They stared. No words were necessary—or even possible.

A hill was crossing the highway. Slow, ponderous, perhaps a hundred feet high, the mass of shiny brown and primer gray moved through the wind-churned dust barely a quarter mile ahead.

“How many of those are there, do you think?” April asked pertly, breaking the silence.

“Can’t say,” John demurred.

“Must be one of them Lost Hills they were announcing,” Jerry said without a hint of levity.

“Maybe that’s where all the crops went,” April speculated. The brothers did not care to discuss the point John waited until the hill had passed, and a half hour later, as it slid over the fields toward the west, started the truck again and put it back in gear. They slowly crossed the mangled asphalt. The air smelled of crushed plants and dust.

“Martians,” John said. That was his last protest to April’s claim of knowing what had really happened, fie said very little after that until they started the climb up the Grapevine, past the unconverted trees and buildings of Fort Tejon and the vague outlines of tiny Gorman. As they neared the ridge, he stared at Jerry with wide eyes, pupils dilated, and said, “City of Angels, coming up.”

It was five o’clock, early evening and getting dark.

The air over Los Angeles was as purple as raw meat.

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

At noon, Bernard’s lunch was delivered through the small hatch—a bowl of fruit and a roast beef sandwich with a glass of sparkling water. He ate slowly, reflectively, occasionally glancing at the VDT. It displayed the tab’s recent results in analyzing some of his serum proteins.

The screen’s alphanumerics were mint green. Red lines were taking shape under the numbers, which scrolled up as new series were added.

Bernard, what is this?

—Not to worry, he answered the internal query. If I don’t do research, I malfunction.

Their level of communication had improved enormously in just a couple of days.

You are analyzing something to do with our communication. There is no need. You already communicate through the proper channels, through us.

—Yes, indeed. But will you tell me all I need to know?

We tell you what we are assigned to tell you.

—You’ve riddled me, so allow me to riddle you. I have to feel I’m not powerless, that I’m doing something useful.

With great difficulty, we have been trying to comprehend *encode* your situation. To VISUALIZE. You are in an enclosed SPACE. This SPACE is of *concentration* you regard as SMALL.

—But adequate, now that I have you fellows to chat with.

You are restrained. You cannot *diffuse* through the limits of the enclosed SPACE. Is this restraint by your choice?

—I’m not being punished, if that’s what you’re worried about.

We do not *encode* comprehend PUNISHED. You are well. Your body functions are in order. Your EMOTION is not extreme.

—Why should I be upset? I’ve lost It’s all over but the (ahem) loud encoding.

We WISH you were more aware of the physiology of your brain. We could tell you much more about your state. As it is, we have extreme difficulty finding WORDS to describe the location of our teams. But to return to the prior question. Why do you WISH to process other forms of communication?

—I’m not blocking my thoughts, am I? (Am I?) You should be able to figure out what I’m doing on your own. (How could I block my thoughts to you?)

You realize our inadequacy. You are so new to us. We regard you with…

—Yes?

Those who have been assigned to replicate this state to… This is unclear.

—I’ll say.

We regard you as if you were capable of mild *dissociation* reproof for minimal performance of assigned processing.

—You regard me as what?

We regard you as a *supreme command duster*.

—What is that? And that brings up a whole host of questions I would like to ask.

We have been authorized to answer those questions.

(Jesus! They knew the gist of the questions even before he had formed them in his mind.)

—I’d like to speak to an individual.

INDIVIDUAL?

—Not just the team or research group. One of you, acting alone.

We have studied INDIVIDUAL in your conception. We do not fit the word.

—There are no individuals?

Not precisely. Information is shared between dusters of…

—Not clear.

Perhaps this is what you mean by INDIVIDUAL. Not the same as a single mentality. You are aware that cells cluster for basic structuring; each cluster is the smallest INDIVIDUAL. These clusters rarely separate for long into single cells. Information is passed between clusters sharing in assigned tasks, including instruction and memory. Mentality is thus divided between dusters performing a function. Important memory may be *diffused* through all dusters. What you flunk of as INDIVIDUAL may be spread throughout the *totality*.

—But you’re not all of one mentality, a group mind, collective consciousness.

No, as much as we can analyze those concepts.

—You can argue with each other.

There can be differences of approach, yes.

—So what is a command cluster?

Key duster placed along travel *Juncture*, lymph and blood vessels, to monitor performance of traveling clusters, servant cells, *tailored* cells. You are like the mightiest of cell command clusters, yet you are ENCLOSED and have not yet chosen to exert your power to *lyse*. Why do you not exert control?

Eyes dosed, he pondered that question for a long while—perhaps a second or more—and replied,

—You are becoming acquainted with mystery.

Are you attempting to challenge by these researches into our communication?

—No.

There is a *disjunction* here.

—I’m getting tired now. Please leave me alone for a while.

Understood.

He rubbed his eyes and picked up a piece of fruit He suddenly felt exhausted.

“Michael?”

Paulsen-Fuchs stood in the reception area. “Hello, Paul,” Bernard said. “I’ve just been having the weirdest conversation.”

“Yes?”

“I think they’re treating me like some sort of minor deity.”

“Oh, dear,” Paulsen-Fuchs said.

“And I probably only have a couple of weeks left.”

“You said that when you arrived only then, you said a week.”

“I can feel the changes now. It’s slow, but it’s still going to happen.”

They stared at each other through the three-layer glass. Paulsen-Fuchs tried to speak several times, but nothing came out He lifted his hands helplessly.

“Yeah,” Bernard said, sighing.

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

North America, Satellite Transmission from High-Altitude Reconnaissance RB-1 H; Voice of Lloyd Upton, Correspondent EBN

Yes, in place—leads separate and patched—we’re all a bit nervous here, don’t mind the teeth chattering. Taping now? And the direct feed…yes, Arnold? 1,2,3. Lloyd Upchuck here, yes, that’s how I feel… Okay. Colin, that bottle. The orange suit won’t upset the viddy? It upsets me. Let’s begin.

Hello, I’m Lloyd Upton from the British branch of the European Broadcasting Network. I’m now at twenty thousand meters over the heartland of the United States of America, in the rear compartment of an American B-l bomber modified for high-altitude reconnaissance, an RB-1H. With me are correspondents from four major continental networks, from European branches of two United States news organizations, and the BBC. We are the first civilian journalists to fly over the United States since the beginning of the most hideous plague in world history. We are accompanied by two civilian scientists whom we will interview on the return leg of our flight which has thus far averaged twice the speed of sound, that is Mach 2.

In just eight weeks, two short months, the entire North American continent has undergone a virtually indescribable transformation. All familiar landmarks—entire cities-have vanished beneath, or perhaps been transformed into, a landscape of biological nightmare. Our aircraft has followed a zigzag course from New York to Atlantic City, then over to Washington, DC, through Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio, and soon we will be dipping down to one thousand meters to pass over Chicago, Illinois and the Great Lakes. At that point we will double back and fly along the Eastern seaboard to Florida, and over the Gulf of Mexico we will be refueled from aircraft flying out of Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba, which, miraculously, has escaped the major effects of the plague.

We can imagine the grief of Americans stranded in England, Europe and Asia, as well as other parts of the globe. I greatly fear we can bring them no solace with this historic overflight. What we have seen can bring solace to no member of the human race. Yet we have not witnessed desolation, but rather a weird and- if I may be forgiven a bizarre sort of aesthetic judgment wonderful landscape of an entirely new form of life, its origin shrouded in secrecy, though the authorities themselves may not know. Speculation that the plague arose in a biological laboratory in San Diego, California has neither been corroborated nor denied by government authorities, and EBN has been unable to interview a potential key participant in the… uh… drama, famed neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Bernard, currently kept in sterile confinement near Wiesbaden, West Germany.

We are now transmitting direct-feed video and still pictures from our cameras and special real-time reconnaissance cameras aboard our aircraft Some will be seen live; others are being processed and edited and will follow this historic live broadcast.

How can I begin to describe the landscapes beneath us? A new vocabulary, a new language, may be necessary. Textures and forms hitherto unknown to biologists, to geologists, cover the cities and suburbs, even the wildernesses of North America. Entire forests have become gray-green…uh…forests of spires, spikes, needles. Through telephoto lenses we have seen motion in these complexes, elephant-sized objects moving by unknown means. We have seen rivers undergoing some sort of controlled flow, patterns unlike the flow of normal waterways. On the Atlantic Coast, most especially in the vicinity of New York and Atlantic City, for a distance of some ten to twenty kilometers the ocean itself has been coated with an apparently living blanket of shiny, glassy green.

As for the cities themselves—not a sign of normal living things, not a sign of human beings. New York City is an unfamiliar jumble of geometric shapes, a city apparently dismantled and rearranged to suit the purposes of the plague if a plague can have a purpose. Indeed, what we have seen supports the popular rumor that North America has been invaded by some form of intelligent biological life—that is, intelligent microorganisms, organisms that cooperate, mutate, adapt and alter their environment New Jersey and Connecticut show similar biological formations, what the journalists of this flight have come to call megaplexes, for want of any better word. We leave further refinements in nomenclature to the scientists.

We are now descending. The city of Chicago is in the state of Illinois, situated at the southwestern tip of Lake Michigan, a huge inland body of fresh water. We are now about one hundred kilometers from Chicago, moving southwesterly over Lake Michigan. Let’s move the camera to show what we, the correspondents and scientists and crew aboard this flight, are seeing directly. This special high-detail visual display screen is now showing the surface of Lake Michigan, absolutely smooth, very much like the surface of the ocean around the seaboard metropolitan areas. The grid is, I assume, for mapping purposes. Pardon my finger, but I may point out these peculiar features, seen before in the waters of the Hudson River, these peculiar and quite vivid yellow-green circles, or atolls, with the extremely complex radiating lines like the spokes of a wheel. No explanation for these formations is known, though satellite pictures have occasionally shown extensions of the spokes racing to the shore to connect with topographic changes taking place on the land.

Pardon me? Yes, I’ll move. We have, uh, been informed that some of these displays are classified, for our eyes only, as it were.

Now we have changed course and are swooping in an arc over Waukegan, Illinois. Illinois is renowned for its flatness, as well as for its automobiles, Detroit being in… no, Detroit is in Michigan. Yes. Illinois is renowned for its flat topography, and Chicago has been called the Windy City, because of winds blowing in from Lake Michigan. As we can see, the topography is now a network of ground very much like farmland, though instead of grids and squares, the divisions are ovoid-elliptical, I meaner circular, with smaller circles filling in between larger circles. In the center of each circle is a mound, a sort of point reminiscent of the central cone in lunar craters. These cones—yes, I see, they are actually cone-shaped pyramids, with concentric steps or tiers rising along the outside. The tips of these cones are orange, rather like the flight suit I am wearing. Day-glo orange, very striking.

We have slowed considerably. The swing-wings have been deployed, and we now pass at a comparatively leisured pace over Evanston, north of Chicago. Not a sign of humanity wherever we look. We are all… er… quite nervous now, I believe even the U.S. Air Force officers and crew, for if anything were to go wrong, we would be deposited directly in the middle of… Yes, well we won’t think about that. Lower and slower.

We have decided to pass over Chicago because of satellite and high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft photographs showing a concentration of biological activity around this once-great city. As Chicago was once the capitol of the American heartland, now apparently it is serving as some kind of focus, a clearing house perhaps, for activity all around the country, from Canada to Mexico. Great pipeline-like structures can be seen flowing into Chicago from all directions. In some areas the pipelines open up into broad canals and we can actually see the rapid flow of a viscous green fluid… Yes. There. Can we…? Well, later in the broadcast. The canals must be a half kilometer wide. Amazing, awesome.

Rumors from major centers of military intelligence in Wiesbaden and in London and Scotland point to another and very different center of activity on the West Coast of the United States. Details are not available, but apparently Chicago shares with Southwestern California the distinction of being prime points of interest for investigators and researchers. We will not be flying to the West Coast, however; our aircraft does not have the range without refueling, and there are no refueling points that far across the continent.

We are now experiencing some acceleration as we make several sharp turns. Passing over the suburb of Oak Park, where, with reference to a map spread before me, not a single street or roadway can be identified. And now over Chicago itself, if I may judge by proportion perhaps just over Cicero Avenue, now out to the lake again, yes, that’s Montrose Harbor and Lake Shore Drive and Lincoln park, identifiable only by outline against the lake. More acceleration, a wide circle, over the area of the Museum of Science and Industry perhaps—we are all guessing here. And now I can see waterways, perhaps the original branches of the Ship Canal, and now we are down to approximately a thousand meters, a very perilous altitude, for we have no idea how high these biologicals may extend. Lord, I am frightened. We all are. We are now passing over…yes…

Jesus. Pardon me. They must have been the stockyards, Union Stocksyards. That’s what they must have been. We have just barely seen them, but the pilot has started us into a steep climb and we are now swinging due south. What we have seen…

Pardon me.

I am wiping my eyes, out of terror, awe, for I have seen nothing like this in all the hours we have been wandering over this nightmare land. Telephoto cameras showed us extensive detail of what must at one time have been the famed stockyard of Chicago. When we consider the enormous mass of creatures–pigs, cattle-concentrated in those regions, perhaps we should not be surprised or shocked. But the largest moving creatures I have seen have been whales, and these exceeded in size the largest whale by I know not precisely how much. Great brown and white eggs, could they have been hovering? Perhaps just on the ground. Greater than dinosaurs, yet with no discernible legs, head, tail. Not without features, however, extensions and elongations, tended or surrounded by polyhedrons, that is, icosahedrons or dodecahedrons—with insect-like legs, straight not jointed, legs that had to be two or three meters thick. The ovoid creatures or whatever they were could have easily spread across a rugby field.

Yes, yes—we have been told… we have just been informed there are airborne life forms, living things and that we have narrowly missed a couple of them, resembling gigantic manta rays stretched out, gliders or bats, also white and brown. Flowing in a stream southwest, as if forming a squadron or flock. Excuse me. Excuse me.

Cut the sound. Cut the sound, dammit. And turn that camera off me.

(Pause of five minutes.)

We’re back, and apologies for the delay. I am human and…well, at times liable to a touch of panic. I hope this will be understood. And I myself stand in amazement before the calm and expertise of the…uh…the officers and crew of this aircraft, professionals all, damned good men. We have just passed over Danville, Illinois and will shortly…a few seconds from now be over Indianapolis. We have seen changes in the character of the landscape, or if I may call it a bioscape, below us, changes in color and shape, but we are at a loss to interpret what we see. It is as if we have passed over an entirely new planet, and while our two scientists have been taking readings and scribbling notes furiously, they are much too busy to pass on whatever theories or hypotheses they may have.

Indianapolis is below us, and as indecipherable, as mysterious and…beautiful and alien as the other megaplexes. Some of the structures here appear to be as tall as the buildings they replaced, some perhaps a hundred to two hundred meters tall, casting shadows now in the afternoon light Soon time will reverse for us, as ft were, as we head east, southeast, and the sun will set The shadows lengthen on the bioscape, the atmosphere is remarkably clear no industry, no automobiles…yet who can say what sort of pollution a living landscape might cause? Whatever pollution there is is not passed on to the atmosphere.

Yes.

Yes, that is confirmed by our scientists. When we passed low over Chicago, the readings indicated virtually pure air, smoke-free, pollution-free, and that is reflected in the pure colors of the horizon. The air is also moist and, for this time of year, unseasonably warm. Winter may not come to North America this year, for by now Chicago and the cities we have passed over should be blanketed by at least light snowfalls. No snow. There is rain, warm and in large drops-we have passed over areas of dense overcast; but no snow, no ice.

Yes. Yes, I saw it too. What looked like a fireball, a meteor of some sort perhaps, remarkable— And several more, apparently—

(Voices in the background, quite loud, sound of alarms)

My God. That was apparently a re-entry vehicle or vehicles in the upper atmosphere, just dozens of kilometers away. Detectors aboard the aircraft are screaming warnings about radiation. The pilots and officers have activated all emergency systems and we are now in a steep climb away from the area, with… yes, with yes… no, we are in a dive, presenting I believe a posterior profile to whatever the object was-

There is talk here that the fireball was a matches the profile of a re-entry vehicle a nuclear missile an ICBM perhaps and that it did not repeat did not of course how would we be here? did not go off and now—

(More voices, sounding puzzled; more alarms)

I believe we cannot pull out of the dive now. We have lost most instrumentation. The engines have quit and we are in a powerless dive. We still have radio communications but-

(End transmission RB-1H. End direct feed Lloyd Upton EBN. End scientific telemetry.)

CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

Benard lay on the cot, one leg off the side and the other crooked with his foot propped against a fold in the mattress. He hadn’t shaved hi a week, nor bathed. His skin was heavily marked with white ridges and his lower legs had grown prominences from his upper shins to the base of his toes. Even naked he looked like he was wearing bell-bottom trousers.

He didn’t care. Except for his hour-long session with Paulsen-Fuchs and his ten minute physical each day, he spent much of his time on the cot, eyes closed, communing with the noocytes. The rest of the time he spent trying to crack the chemical language. He had received little help from the noocytes. The last conversation on the subject had been three days before.

Your conception is not complete, not correct.

—It isn’t finished yet.

Why not let your comrades proceed with the work? There is more that can be accomplished if you devote your attention inward.

—It would be simpler if you just told us how you communicated…

WISH we could be more *pure* with each other, but command clusters believe discretion is best now.

—Yes, indeed.

The noocytes, then, kept things from him and from the researchers outside the chamber. Pharmek, in turn, kept things from Bernard now. Bernard could only guess their reasoning; he hadn’t challenged them on Paulsen-Fuchs’ slow reduction of news and research findings. In some ways, it hardly mattered; Bernard had more than he could do adjusting to the noocyte interactions.

The terminal was still on, still displaying data supplied to the computer three days ago. Red lines had completely replaced the scrolling green numbers now. Infrequently, they were joined by blue lines. The curve determined by their lengths smoothed out as, byte by byte, the chemistry was broken down into an intermediary mathematical language, which in the next phase would be translated into a kind of pidgin of formal logic notation and English. But that next phase was weeks or months away.

Focusing his attention on the memory prompted an uncharacteristic noocyte interruption.

Bernard. You still work on our *blood music*.

Hadn’t Ulam used that phrase once?

Is it that you WISH to join us on our level? We did not consider this possibility.

—I’m not sure what you’re suggesting.

The part of you which stands behind all issued communication may be encoded, activated, returned. It will be like a DREAM, if we understand fully what that is. (ANNOTATION: You dream all the time. Did you know that?)

—I can become one of you?

We think that is a correct assessment. You already are one of us. We have encoded parts of you into many teams for processing. We can encode your PERSONALITY and complete the loop. You will be one of us—temporarily, should you choose. We can do it now.

—I’m afraid. I’m afraid you’ll steal my soul from inside…

Your SOUL is already encoded, Bernard. We will not initiate unless we receive permission from all your mental fragments.

“Michael?” Paulsen-Fuchs’ voice pulled him out of the conversation. Bernard shook his head and blinked at the viewing chamber window. “Michael? Are you awake?”

“I’ve been… awake. What is it?”

“A few days ago you gave us permission to have Sean Gogarty visit you. He is here now.”

“Yes, yes.” Michael stood. “In there with you? My eyes are blurry.”

“No. Outside. I suspect you will wish to get dressed, clean up first.”

“Why?” Bernard countered testily. “I’m not going to be a pretty sight no matter how often I shave.”

“You wish to meet him as you are?”

“Yeah. Bring him in. You interrupted something interesting, Paul.”

“We are all becoming just interruptions to you now, aren’t we?”

Bernard tried to smile. His face felt stiff, unfamiliar. “Bring him in, Paul.”

Sean Gogarty, professor of theoretical physics at Kings College, University of London, stepped up into the viewing chamber and shielded his eyes with one hand as he peered into the containment lab. His race was open, friendly, nose long and sharp, teeth prominent. He was tall and carried himself well, and his arms looked well-muscled under his Irish wool jacket His smile faded and his eyes narrowed behind stylish aviator glasses as he saw Bernard. “Dr. Bernard,” he said, his voice pleasantly Irish with a touch of Oxford.

“Dr. Gogarty.”

“Professor, that is, just Sean, please. I like to eschew titles.”

“Then I am Michael.” Am I?

“Yes, well in your case… er… it’ll be a bit harder to stick to that. I know of you, and I’m sure you’ve never heard of me, er, Michael.” Again the smile, but without certainty, troubled. As if, Bernard thought, he expected a human being and met

“Paul has briefed me on some of your work. You’re a bit beyond me, Sean.”

“Indeed. This thing, this incident in your country is as much beyond me, I’m certain. I have a few things I would like to talk out with you, Michael, and not just you.”

Paulsen-Fuchs looked at Gogarty with some apprehension. No doubt this meeting was sanctioned by several governments, Bernard thought, or it never would have happened, but Paul was still on edge.

“My colleagues, then,” Bernard gestured at Paulsen-Fuchs.

“Not your human colleagues, no,” Gogarty said.

“My noocytes.”

“Noocytes? Yes, yes, I understand. Your noocytes. Tielhard de Chardin would have approved of that name, I think.”

“I haven’t been thinking much about Tielhard de Chardin lately,” Bernard said, “but he might not be a bad guide.”

“Yes, well, I’m here just barely, by the scruff of the neck,” Gogarty said, “and my time has been limited. I have a notion to propose to you, and I would like you and your small colleagues to pass judgment on it.”

“How did you get detailed information about me, about the noocytes?” Bernard asked.

“Experts all over Europe are being approached. Someone came to me on a hunch. I hope it doesn’t affect his promotion. I’m not highly respected by all my fellows, Dr. Bernard-Michael. My ideas are more than a touch far-out”

“Let’s hear them,” Bernard said, growing impatient.

“Yes. I assume you haven’t heard much about Information Mechanics?”

“Not a whisper,” Bernard said.

“I’m working in a very specialized area of that branch of physics—an area not yet recognized—the effects of information processing on space-time. I’ll put it simply enough, because the noocytes may already know more than I and be better able to explain it to you—”

“Don’t count on it. They relish complexity, and I don’t” Gogarty paused and sat absolutely still for several seconds. Paulsen-Fuchs glanced at him with fleeting anxiety.

“Michael, I have amassed a great deal of theoretical structure which supports the following assertion.” Deep breath. “Information processing—more strictly, observation—has an effect on events occurring within space-time. Conscious beings play an integral role in the universe; we fix its boundaries, to a great extent determine its nature, just as it determines our nature. I have reason to believe- just an hypothesis so far—that we don’t so much discover physical laws as collaborate on them. Our theories are tested against past observations both by ourselves—and by the universe. If the universe agrees that past events are not contradicted by a theory, the theory becomes a template. The universe goes along with it. The better the theory fits the facts, the longer it lasts-if it lasts at all. We then break the universe down into territories or particular territory, as human beings, beings thus far quite distinct No extraterrestrial contact, you know. If there are other intelligent beings beyond the Earth, they would occupy yet other territories of theory. We wouldn’t expect major differences between the theories of different territories—the universe does, after all, play a major role—but minor differences might be expected.

“The theories can’t be effective forever. The universe is always changing; we can imagine regions of reality evolving until new theories are necessary. Thus far, the human race hasn’t generated nearly the density or amount of information processing—computing, thinking, what have you—to manifest any truly obvious effects on space-time. We haven’t created theories so complete that they pin down reality’s evolution. But that has all changed, and quite recently.”

Listen closely to the GOGARTY.

Bernard perked up and began to pay more attention.

“If I only had time to present my mathematics, my correlations with formal information mechanics and quantum electrodynamics…and if only you could understand!”

“I’m listening. We’re listening, Sean.”

Gogarty’s eyes widened. “The…noocytes? Have they responded?”

“You haven’t given them much to respond to. Do go on, Professor.”

“Until now, the densest single unit of information processing on this planet was the human brain…slight nod to cetaceans, perhaps, but not nearly as much stimulus and processing going on, much more insular I’d say. Four, five billion of us, thinking every day. Small effects. Time stresses, little tremors as it were, not even measurable. Our powers of observation—our power to formulate effective theories—is not sufficiently intense to bring about the effects I’ve discovered in my work. Nothing in the solar system, perhaps not even the galaxy!”

“You are rambling, Professor Gogarty,” Paulsen-Fuchs said. Gogarty gave him an irritated nod and fastened his eyes on Bernard’s, pleading with him.

He speaks of interest.

“He’s getting to the point, Paul, don’t rush him.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much, Michael. What I am saying is that we now have conditions sufficient to cause the effects I’ve described in my papers. Not just four, five billion individual cogitators, Michael, but trillions…perhaps billions of trillions. Most in North America. Tiny, very dense, focusing their attention on all aspects of their surroundings, from the very very small to the very large. Observing everything in their environment and theorizing about the things they do not observe. Observers and theorizers can fix the shape of events, of reality, in quite significant ways. There is nothing, Michael, but information. All particles, all energy, even space and time itself, are ultimately nothing but information. The very nature, the timbre of the universe can be altered, Michael, right now. By the noocytes.”

“Yes,” Bernard said. “Still listening.”

Something not stated…evidence…

Two days ago,” Gogarty said, becoming more animated, his face reddening with excitement, “the USSR apparently launched a full-scale nuclear strike on North America. Unlike the Panama strike, not one of the warheads went off.”

Bernard looked at Paulsen-Fuchs first with pique, then amusement He hadn’t been told a thing about this.

The USSR is not that bad at building warheads, Michael. There should have been holocaust. There wasn’t Now, I have compiled several striking graphs from observations and information. One very important source was an American reconnaissance aircraft carrying scientists and reporters over North America, with a live broadcast going to Europe by satellite. The aircraft was in the middle of the United States when the strike was attempted. The plane apparently went down, but not because of the strike itself. Nobody is sure why it crashed, but the way its telemetry and communications were cut off…The timing, the queuing, fits my theory precisely. Not only that but in places around the globe, very peculiar effects were felt Radio silences, power cut-offs, meteorological phenomena. All the way out to geosynchronous orbit-two satellites separated by twelve thousand kilometers malfunctioned. I put the effects and coordinates of the incidents into our computer and it produced this profile of the four-space field.” He lifted a blown-up photo of a computer image from his satchel.

Bernard squinted to see it more dearly. His vision suddenly sharpened. He could make out the grain of the photo paper. “Like a weightlifter’s nightmare,” he said.

“Yes, a bit twisty around the torus,” Gogarty agreed. “This is the only figure that makes sense in light of the information. And no one can make sense of this figure-but me. I’m afraid it’s made my stock jump a bit in the scientific marketplace. If I’m correct, and I believe I am, we are in for a lot more trouble than we think, Michael…or a lot less, depending on what sort of trouble you’re anticipating.”

Bernard could feel the diagram being intensely absorbed. The noocytes left off their constant tinkering with his mentality for seconds.

“You’re giving my small colleagues a lot to think about, Sean.”

“Yes, and their reactions?”

Bernard closed his eyes.

After several seconds had passed, Bernard opened his eyes again and shook his head. “Not a word,” he said. “Sorry, Sean.”

“Well, I’d not expected much.”

Paulsen-Fuchs looked at his watch. “Is that all, Dr. Gogarty?”

“No. Not quite. Michael, the plague cannot spread beyond North America. Or rather, beyond a circle of seven thousand kilometers diameter, if the noocytes are averaged out over that area of the globe.”

“Why not?”

“Because of what I’ve been saying. There are too many of them already. If they were to expand beyond that radius, they would create something very peculiar—a portion of space-time much too closely observed. The territory would not be able to evolve. Too many brilliant theorists, don’t you see! There would be a kind of frozen state, a breakdown on the quantum level. A singularity. A black hole of thought Time would be severely distorted and the effects would destroy the Earth. I suspect they have limited their growth, realizing this.” Gogarty wiped his brow with a kerchief and sighed again.

“How did they prevent the warheads from detonating?” Bernard asked.

“I’d say they’ve learned how to create isolated pockets of observation, very powerful. They delude trillions of observers into establishing a small, temporary pocket of altered space-time. A pocket where physical processes are sufficiently different to prevent warheads from detonating. The pocket doesn’t last long, of course—the universe violently disagrees with it—but it lasts just long enough to prevent holocaust.

There’s one crucial question,” he continued. “Are your noocytes in communication with North America?”

Bernard listened internally, and received no response. “I don’t know,” he said.

They can be in communication, you know, without using radio or any such familiar means. If they can control the effects they have on the local manifold, they could create waves of subtly disrupted time. I’m afraid we don’t have instruments sensitive enough to detect such signals.”

Paulsen-Fuchs stood and tapped his watch meaningfully.

“Paul,” Bernard said, “is that why my news has been cut back? Why I didn’t hear about the Russian attack?”

Paulsen-Fuchs didn’t answer. “Is there anything you can do for Mr. Gogarty?” he asked.

“Not immediately. I-”

“Then we will leave you to your contemplation.”

“Wait a second, Paul. What in hell is going on? Mr. Gogarty would obviously like to spend much more time with me, and I with him. Why all the limitations?”

Gogarty glanced between them, acutely embarrassed.

“Security, Michael,” Paulsen-Fuchs said. “Little pitchers, you know.”

Bernard’s reaction was a sudden, short wry bark of a laugh, “Pleasant meeting with you, Professor Gogarty,” he said.

“And you,” Gogarty said. The viewing chamber sound was cut off and the two men departed. Bernard walked behind the lavatory curtain and urinated. The urine was reddish-purple.

You are not in charge of them? They command you?

—If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m quite mortal. What’s with my piss? It’s purple.

Phenyls and ketones being discharged. We must SPEND MORE TIME studying your hierarchic status.

“I’m low monkey,” he said aloud. “Very low monkey now.”

CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

The fire crackled lustily and cast broad, dim tree-shadows across the historic old buildings of Fort Tejon. April Ulam stood facing away from the pit with arms wrapped around herself, her tattered gown rippling slightly in the chill evening breeze. Jerry poked the fire with a stick and looked at his twin. “So what did we see?”

“Hell,” John said firmly.

“We saw Los Angeles, gentlemen,” April said out of the gloom.

“I didn’t recognize anything,” John said. “Not even like Livermore, or the farm fields. I mean—”

“There wasn’t anything real there,” Jerry finished for him. “Just all…spinning.”

April advanced and pulled her gown away from her legs to sit on a log. “I think we should tell each other what we saw, as close as we can describe it. I’ll begin, if you wish.”

Jerry shrugged. John continued to stare into the fire.

“I think I recognized the outlines of the San Fernando valley. It’s been ten years since I last visited Los Angeles, but I remember coming over the hills, and there’s Bur-bank, and Glendale…I just don’t remember what they looked like, back then. Hazy air. It was hot, not like now.”

“The haze is still there,” Jerry said. “But it doesn’t look the same.”

“Purple haze,” John said, shaking his head and chuckling.

“Now if you agree that we saw the valley—”

“Yeah,” Jerry said. “Maybe that.”

“Then there was something in the valley, all spread out.”

“But not solid. Not made of solid stuff,” John said slowly.

“Agreed,” April said. “Energy, then?”

“Looked like a Jackson Pollock painting all spun around,” Jerry said.

“Or a Picasso,” John said.

“Gentlemen, I’d agree, and amend a little—it looked a great deal like a Max Ernst to me.”

“Don’t know about him,” Jerry said.

“Something spinning in the middle. A tornado.”

April nodded. “Yes. But what kind of tornado?”

John squinted and rubbed his eyes. “Spread out at the bottom, all kinds of spikes going out—like lightning, but not glowing. Like shadows of lightning.”

“Touching,” John said. “Then disappearing.”

“A tornado dancing, perhaps,” April suggested.

“Yeah,” the twins said.

“I saw trains of disks weaving in and out, under the tornado,” she continued. “Did you?”

They shook their heads in unison.

“And on the hills, lights moving, as if fireflies were crawling up to the skies.” She had her exalted look again, staring dreamily over the fire. John wrapped his hands around his head and continued shaking it.

“Not real” he said.

“No, indeed. Not real at all. But it must have some connection with what my son did.”

“Shit,” John said.

“No,” Jerry said. “I believe you.”

“If it started in La Jolla, and spread all over the country, then where is it oldest and most established?”

“La Jolla,” Jerry said, looking at her expectantly. “Maybe it got started at UCSD!”

April shook her head. “No, in La Jolla, where Vergil worked and lived. But all up and down the coast, it spread fast So maybe all the way down to San Diego, it has united, come together, and made this place its center.”

“Fuck it” John said.

April said, “We can’t get to La Jolla, not with this in the way. And I’ve come here to be with my son.”

“You’re crazier than shit” John said.

“I don’t know why you gentlemen were spared,” April said, “but it’s obvious why I’ve been.”

“Because you’re his mother,” Jerry said, laughing and nodding as if at a great deduction.

“Exactly,” April said. “So gentlemen, tomorrow we will drive back up and over the hill, and if you wish, you can join me, but I will go by myself if need be, and join my son.”

Jerry sobered. “April, that is crazy. What if that’s just something really dangerous, like a big electrical storm or a nuclear power plant gone haywire?”

“There ain’t any big nuclear power plants in LA,” John said. “But Jerry’s right. It’s just fucking crazy to talk about walking into that hell.”

“If my son is there, it will not hurt me,” April said.

Jerry poked the fire vigorously. “I’ll take you there,” he said. “But I won’t go in with you.”

John looked hard and seriously at his brother. “You’re both bugfuck.”

“Or I can walk,” April said, determined.

Jerry stood with his hands on his hips, staring resentfully at his brother and April Ulam as they walked toward the truck. Sweet purple-pink fog spilled out of the LA basin and drifted at tree-top level over Fort Tejon, filtering the morning light and leaving everything without shadow, ghostly.

“Hey!” John said. “Goddammit hey! Don’t just leave me here!” He ran after them.

The truck crested the hills on the deserted highway and they looked down into the maelstrom. It looked very little different in daylight.

“It’s like everything you’ve always dreamed, all rolled up at once,” Jerry said, driving intently.

“Not a bad description,” April said. “A tornado of dreams. Perhaps the dreams of everyone who’s been taken by the change.”

John clutched the dash with both hands and stared wide-eyed down the highway. “There’s about a mile of road left,” he said. “Then we got to stop.”

Jerry agreed with a curt nod. The truck slowed.

At less than ten miles an hour, they approached a curtain of dancing vertical streamers of fog. The curtain stretched for several dozen feet above the road and to each side, rippling around vague orange shapes that might have once been buildings.

“Jesus, Jesus,” John said.

“Stop,” April said. Jerry brought the truck to a halt. April looked at John sternly until he opened the cab door and stepped out to let her exit Jerry put the shift lever into neutral and set the brake, then got out on the other side.

“You gentlemen are missing loved ones, aren’t you?” April asked, smoothing her tattered gown. The maelstrom roared like a distant hurricane—roared, and hissed, and bellowed down a rain gutter.

John and Jerry nodded.

“If my Vergil’s in there, and I know that he is, then they must be, too. Or we can get to them from here.”

“That’s crazier than shit” John said. “My wife and my boy can’t be in there.”

“Why not? Are they dead?”

John stared at her.

“You know they aren’t I know my son is not dead.”

“You’re a witch,” Jerry said, less accusing than admiring.

“Some have said so. Vergil’s father said so before he left me. But you know, don’t you?”

John trembled. Tears rolled down his cheeks. Jerry stared at the curtain with a vague grin.

“Are they in there, John?” he asked his brother.

“I don’t know,” John said, sniffing and wiping his face with one arm.

April walked toward the curtain. “Thank you for your help, gentlemen,” she said. As she entered, she became scrambled like a bad television picture, and then vanished.

“Look at that!” John said, trembling.

“She’s right” Jerry said. “Don’t you feel it?”

“I don’t know!” John wailed. “Christ brother, I don’t know.”

“Let’s go find them,” Jerry said, taking his brother’s hand. He pulled gently. John resisted.

Jerry pulled again.

“All right,” John said quietly. “Together.”

Side by side, they walked down the few yards of highway and into the curtain.

CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

Her leg cramped on the eighty-second level. With a twist and a cry, she fell on the stairs and knocked her head against the railing. One knee caught a stair edge just below the patella. The flashlight and radio flew from her hands onto the concrete landing. The bottle of water wedged between two stairs and burst open, soaking her and dribbling away as she watched, paralyzed with pain. It seemed hours—but was probably only minutes—before she could even pull herself up to the landing. She lay on her back, eyes sandy from needing to weep and having no tears.

A knot on her forehead, one leg that just wouldn’t move right, little food and no water; scared, hurting, and with thirty more stories to go. The flashlight beam flickered and went out, leaving her in complete darkness. “Shit,” she said. Her mother had deplored that word even more than taking the name of God in vain. Since they were not a particularly religious family, that was a minor infraction, odious only when used in front of those it would offend. But saying “shit” was the ultimate, an acknowledgment of bad manners, bad upbringing, or simply surrendering to the lowest emotions.

Suzy tried to stand and fell down again, her knee ripe with new agony. “Shit, shit, SHIT!” she screamed. “Get better, oh please get better.” She tried to rub the knee but that only made it hurt worse.

She felt for the flashlight and found it. With a shake, it lit up again and she directed the beam around to reassure herself the brown and white sheets and filaments hadn’t overtaken her. She looked at the door to the eighty-second floor and knew she wouldn’t be able to climb stairs for some time, perhaps the rest of the day. She crawled to the door and glanced over her shoulder at the radio as she reached for the knob. The radio lay on the landing; it had come down hard when she fell. For a moment, she thought she might as well abandon it, but the radio meant something special to her. It was the only human thing she had left, the only thing that talked to her. She might be able to find another in the building, but she couldn’t chance silence. Trying to keep her injured knee straight, she crawled back for it.

Getting past the heavy fire door resulted in more misery and more bruises when it slammed on her arm, but she finally lay back on the carpet of the elevator lobby, staring up at the acoustic ceiling overhead. She rolled onto her stomach, alert for anything moving.

Stillness, quiet.

Slowly, trying to conserve her strength, she crawled out of the lobby and around a corner.

Beyond a glass partition, the entire floor was covered with drafting tables, white enamel legs on beige carpet, black lamps arranged like so many birds with adjustable necks. The glass door had already been propped open with a rubber wedge. Hobbling past the desk and couches, she leaned on the nearest table, eyes bright with exhaustion and pain. There were blueprints on the drafting table beside her. She was in an architect’s office. She looked at one drawing more closely. It laid out deck plans for a ship. So this was an office for people who designed ships. “What the hell do I care?” she asked herself.

She sat on a tall stool with locked casters. With one foot she labored for half a minute to unlock the casters, then rolled herself down an aisle between tables, using the table edges to push herself along.

Another long glass wall separated the drafting area from office cubicles. She stopped and stared. All the fear had gone now. She had run out of it. There might be more fear available the next morning, she thought, but for now she didn’t miss it She simply observed.

The cubicles were filled with things moving. They were so strange that for a time she hardly knew how to describe them to herself. Disks with snail feet crawled along the glass, their edges actually lighting up. Something fluid and shapeless, like a blob of wax a lava light bobbed around in another cubicle, straining on black ropes or cables that stretched and sparkled; the blob fluoresced green wherever it struck glass or furniture. In the last cubicle, a forest of scaled sticks, like chicken legs, bent and swayed in an impossible breeze.

“It’s crazy,” she said. “It doesn’t mean a thing. Nothing’s happening because it doesn’t make sense.”

She rolled away from the cubicles, up against the far windows. The rest of the floor seemed clear—no crumpled clothing. Seen from across the floor, the cubicles resembled aquariums filled with exotic sea creatures.

Maybe she was safe. Usually whatever was in an aquarium didn’t come out. She tried to convince herself she was safe, but it really didn’t matter. For the moment, there wasn’t anywhere else she could go.

Her knee was swelling, straining her jeans. She thought about cutting the jeans open, and then decided it was best simply to slide out of them. With a grunt, she let herself down from the stool and leaned back against a filing cabinet. Lifting her hips, balancing on one leg, she humped and bunched the jeans carefully past the swelling.

It wasn’t very ugly yet, just puffy and purpling under the kneecap. She poked it and felt faint, not from pain, but simply because she was drained. There was nothing left of Suzy McKenzie now. The old world had gone first, until nothing remained but buildings, which without people were like skeletons without flesh. New flesh was moving in to cover the skeletons. Soon the old Suzy McKenzie would be gone, too, leaving nothing but a quizzical shadow.

She turned her face north, around the edge of the cabinet and over a low credenza.

There was the new Manhattan, a tent city with skyscrapers for poles; a city made of toy blocks with the blocks rearranged under blankets. Glowing warm mellow brown and yellow in the sunset. Newer York, filled with empty clothes.

Old Suzy dropped back on the carpet, cradled her head in her arms and pushed her hauntingly empty jeans under her knee to elevate it “When I awake,” she told herself, “I will be a Wonder Woman, shiny and bright. And I will know what’s happening.”

Down deep, however, she understood she would wake up normal enough, and the world would be the same.

“Not a good deal,” she murmured.

In the dark, filaments grew silently over the carpet, reaching into the glass cubicles, subduing the buoyant creativity within.

CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

—I belong to nobody. I am not what I once was. I have no past. I am cut loose and there is really nowhere to go but where they wish to take me.

—I am separated from the outside world physically, and now mentally.

—My work is done here.

—I am waiting.

—I am waiting.

Truly, you WISH to journey among us, be among us?

—I do.

He stares at the red and green and blue on the VDT. The figures lose all meaning for the moment as if he is a newborn child. Then the screen, the table it rests on, the lavatory curtain beyond and the walls of the containment chamber are replaced by a silvery null.

Michael Bernard is crossing an interface.

He is encoded.

No longer conscious of all the sensations of being in a body. No more automatic listenings and responses to the slide of muscles past one another, the bubbling of fluids in the abdomen, the push and roar of blood and pounding of the heart. He no longer balances, tenses or relaxes. It is like suddenly moving from the city into the heart of a quiet cave.

At first, thought itself is grainy, discontinuous. If such a thing can be, he visualizes himself at the very basement of the universe, where all the atoms and molecules combine and separate, making silent noises at each other like scuttling shellfish on the bottom of the sea. He is suspended in silent, jerking activity, unable to critique his situation or even to be sure what he is. Part of his faculties are temporarily cut off. Then—jerk! He can critique, evaluate. Thought moves like a dissociation of leaves across a lawn in a breeze. Jerk! Now, like a sluggish flow of gelatin circling and setting up in a cold bowl.

Bernard’s journey has not even begun yet He is still caught in the interface, not big, not small. There is part of him still relying on his universe-sized brain, still pushing thought along cells instead of within cells.

The suspension becomes a drawn-out unconsciousness, thought pulled like a thread to fit a tiny needle’s

eye—————————

——————————————————

————————————————

——————————————

————————————

——————————

————————

——————

—————

————

——

—

The small bursts upon him and his world is suddenly filled with action and simplicity. There is no light, but there is sound. It fills him in great sluggish waves, not heard but felt through his hundred cells. The cells pulse, separate, contract according to the rush of fluid. He is in his own blood. He can taste the presence of the cells making up his new being, and of cells not directly part of him. He can feel the rasping of microtubules propelling his cytoplasm. What is most remarkable, he can feel—indeed, it is the ground of all sensation-the cytoplasm itself.

This is now the basis of his being, the flow and electric sensation of pure life. He is aware of the knife-edge chemical balance between animation and dead jelly, with its roots in order, hierarchy, interaction. Cooperation. He is individual and, at the same time, he is each of the fellows of his team, the other hundred-cell clusters downstream and upstream. The downstream companions are as distant, as chemically isolated as if they were at the bottom of a deep well; the upstream companions are intense, rich.

He can no more puzzle the mechanisms of his thought than he could in his universe-sized brain. Thought rises above the chemistry, the interchanges within his cluster and die processes within his cells. Thought is the combination, the language of all interaction.

Sensation along the membranes of his cells is intense. It is here that he receives, feels the aura and pressure of huge molecular messages from outside. He takes in a plasmid-like data lump, *ases* it, and pours information from it, absorbing it into his being, duplicating those parts which will be needed by others among his companions. Now the lumps come rapidly, and as he breaks and pours each one, each string of molecules a library, he finds bits and pieces of Michael Bernard returning to him.

The huge Bernard is encompassed within a tiny hundred-cell cluster. He can feel there is actually a human being on the level of the noocytes—himself.

Welcome.

—Thank you.

He senses a fellow team member as a diversity of tastes, all possible varieties of sweetness and richness. The camaraderie is overwhelming. He loves his team (how can he love anything else?). He is an integral part, in turn loved and necessary.

Abruptly, he tastes the wall of a capillary. He is part of the research team, passing on information by manufacturing nucleic acid packets. Absorbing, re-making, passing on, absorbing…

Extrude. Push through.

That is his instruction. He will leave the capillary, enter the tissue.

Leave a portion stuck out into the data flow.

He pushes between the capillary cells—support cells, not themselves noocytes—and lodges in the wall. Now he waits for data in the form of structured proteins, hormones and pheromones, nucleic acid strings, data perhaps even in the form of *tailored* cells, viruses or domesticated bacteria. He needs not only basic nutrients, easily available from the blood serum, but supplies of the enzymes which allow him to absorb and process data, to think. These enzymes are supplied by *tailored* bacteria which both manufacture and deliver.

The blood is a highway, a symphony of information, instruction. It is a delight to process and modify the rich broth. The information has its own variety of tastes, and is like a trying thing, liable to change in the blood unless it is carefully monitored, trimmed of accretions, buffed. Words cannot convey what he is doing. His whole being is alive with the chatter of interpreting and processing.

He feels the dizzying spiral of recursion, thinking about his own tiny thought processes—molecules thinking about molecules, keeping records of themselves—applying words that until now have had no place in this realm. Like bringing God’s word for a tree down to the tree and speaking it, watching the tree blossom in blushing confusion.

You are the power, the gentle power, the richest taste of all…the ultimate upstream message.

His fellows approach him, cluster around his appendage in the blood, crowd him. He is like an initiate suddenly inspired with the breath of God in a monastery. The monks gather, starved for a touch, a sign of redemption and purpose. It is intoxicating. He loves them because they are his team; they are more than loving to him, because he is the Source.

The command clusters know that he is, himself, part of a greater hierarchy, but this information has not made it down to the level he now occupies. The common clusters are still in awe.

You are the flow of all life. You hold the key of *opening* and *blocking*, of pulse and silence.

—Farther, he said. Take me farther and show me your lives.

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

Suzy. Wake up.”

Suzy’s eyes fluttered open. Kenneth and Howard stood over her. She blinked and looked around at the blue plaster walls of her bedroom, the sheets pulled up to her neck. “Kenny?”

“Mom’s waiting.”

“Howard?”

“Come on, Seedling.” That’s what Kenneth had always called her. She pushed the blankets down, then pulled them back up; she still had on her blouse and panties, not her pajamas.

“I have to get dressed,” she said.

Howard handed her the jeans. “Hurry up.” They left the bedroom and shut the door behind them. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stuck them into the pants legs, then stood and tugged them higher, zipping and buttoning. Her knee didn’t hurt. The swelling had gone down and everything seemed fine. Her mouth tasted funny. She looked around for the flashlight and radio. They were on the floor by the bed. Picking them up, she opened the door and stepped into the hall. “Kenny?”

Howard took her arm and gently nudged her toward their mother’s bedroom. The door was closed. Kenneth turned the knob and opened it and they stepped into the elevator. Howard pushed the button for the restaurant and lounge.

“I knew it,” she said, shoulders slumping. “I’m dreaming.” Her brothers looked at her and smiled, shaking their heads.

“No, you’re not,” Kenneth said. “We’re back.”

The elevator smoothly lifted them the remaining twenty-five floors.

“Bull,” she said, feeling the tears on her cheeks. “It’s cruel.”

“Okay, the part about the bedroom, the house—that’s a dream. Some stuff down there you probably don’t want to see. But we’re here. We’re with you again.”

“You’re dead,” she said. “Mom, too.”

“We’re different,” Howard said. “Not dead.”

“Yeah, what are you, then, zombies? Goddammit.”

“They never killed us,” Kenneth said. “They just…dismantled us. Like everybody.”

“Well, almost everybody.” Howard pointed at her and they grinned.

“You lucked out, or missed out,” Kenneth said.

She was scared now. The elevator door opened and they stepped out into a fancy mirrored hall. Lights reflected into infinity on either side. The lights were on. The elevator worked. She had to be dreaming, or she was finally and totally crazy.

“Some died, too,” Kenneth said solemnly, taking her hand. “Accidents, mistakes.”

“That’s only part of what we know, now,” Howard said. They walked between the mirrors, past a huge geode cut open to show amethyst crystals, past a monumental lump of rose quartz and a sliced nodule of malachite. Nobody met them at the maitre d’s station. “Mom’s in the restaurant,” he said. “If you’re hungry, there’s plenty of food up here, that’s for sure.”

The power’s on,” she said.

“Emergency generator in the basement. It ran for a while after the city’s power stopped, but no more fuel, you know? So we found more fuel. They told us how to work it, and we turned it on before fetching you,” Howard said.

“Yeah. It’s hard for them to reconstruct lots of people, so they only did Mom and us. Not the building maintenance supervisor or the others. We did all the work. You’ve been asleep for a while, you know.”

“Two weeks.”

“That’s why your knee’s better.”

“That, and—”

“Shh,” Kenneth said, holding up his hand to caution his brother. “Not all at once.” Suzy looked between them as they guided her into the restaurant.

It was late afternoon. The city, dearly visible from the restaurant’s broad picture windows, was no longer wrapped up in the brown and white sheets.

She couldn’t recognize any landmarks. Before, she could pick out at least the hidden shapes of buildings, the valleys of streets and the outlines of neighborhoods.

Not the same place.

Gray, black, dazzling marble white, arranged in pyramids and many-sided polyhedrons, some as translucent as frosted glass. Slabs hundreds of feet high marched off like dominoes along what had once been West Street from Battery Park all the way to Riverside Park. All the shapes and masses of the buildings of Manhattan had been dropped into a bag, shaken, rearranged, and repainted.

But the structures weren’t concrete and steel any more. She didn’t know what they were.

Alive.

Her mother sat behind a broad table heaped high with food. Salads lay in bowls along the front a thick ham partially sliced rose from the middle, trays of olives and sliced pickles taking up the sides, cakes and desserts the rear. Her mother smiled and slid out from her seat behind the table, coming forward on her muscular ex-tennis-player legs, holding out her arms. She was dressed in an expensive Rabarda gown, long sleeves draped with beaded detailing and fringe, and she looked absolutely terrific. “Suzy,” her mother said. “Don’t look so upset. We’re back to visit”

She hugged her mother, feeling solid flesh, and gave up on the thought it was a dream. It was real. Her brothers hadn’t picked her up at the house—that couldn’t have been real. Could it?—but they had taken her up the elevator and here she was with her mother, warm and full of love, waiting to feed her daughter.

And over her mother’s shoulder, out the window, the changed city. She couldn’t imagine that could she?

“What’s going on, Mother?” she asked, wiping her eyes and standing back, glancing at Kenneth and Howard.

“The last time I saw you, we were in the kitchen,” her mother said, giving her the once-over. “I wasn’t very talkative then. Lots of things were happening.”

“You were sick,” Suzy said.

“Yes…and no. Come sit. You must be very hungry.”

“If I’ve been asleep two weeks, I should have starved to death,” she said.

“She still doesn’t believe,” Howard said, grinning.

“Shh!” her mother said, waving him off. “You wouldn’t believe, would you, either of you?”

They admitted they probably wouldn’t.

“I am hungry, though,” Suzy admitted. Kenneth pulled out a chair and she sat before an immaculate table setting of fine china and silver.

“We probably made it too fancy,” Howard said. “Too much like a dream.”

“Yeah,” Suzy said. She felt punch-drunk, happy, and she didn’t care what was real any more. “You clowns overdid it.”

Her mother heaped her plate with ham and salads and Suzy pointed to the mashed potatoes and gravy.

“Fattening,” Kenneth said.

“Tsk,” Suzy replied. She lifted the first forkful of ham and chewed on it. Real. Bite of tooth on fork, real. “You know what happened?”

“Not everything,” her mother said, sitting beside her.

“We can be a lot smarter now, if we want to be,” Howard said. For a moment Suzy felt hurt; did he mean her? Howard had always been ashamed of his grades, a hard worker but not in the least brilliant. Still, he was smarter than his slow sister.

“We don’t even need our bodies,” Kenneth said.

“Slower, slower,” her mother admonished them. “It’s very complicated, darling.”

“We’re dinosaurs now,” Howard said, picking at the ham from where he stood. He made a face and let go of the slice he had lifted.

“When we were sick…” her mother began.

Suzy put down her fork and chewed thoughtfully, listening not to her mother, but to something else.

Healed you

Cherish you

Need

“Oh, my God,” she said quietly around her mouthful of ham. She swallowed and looked around at them. She lifted her hand. White lines lay across the back, extending beyond her wrist to form faint networks beneath the skin of her arm.

“Don’t be afraid, Suzy,” her mother said. “Please don’t be afraid. They left you alone because they couldn’t enter your body without killing you. You have an unusual chemistry, darling. So do a few others. That’s not a problem anymore. But it’s your choice, honey. Just listen to us…and to them. They’re a lot more sophisticated now, honey, much smarter than when they entered us.”

“I’m sick now, too, aren’t I’?” she asked.

“There are so many of them,” Howard said, sweeping his arms out across the view, “that you could count every grain of sand on the Earth, and every star in the sky, and still not reach their number.”

“Now listen,” Kenneth said, bending dose to his sister. “You always listen to me, don’t you, Seedling?”

She nodded like a child, slow and deliberate.

“They don’t want to hurt, or kill. They need us. We’re a small part of them, but they need us.”

“Yes?” she said, her voice small.

“They love us,” her mother said. “They say they come from us, and they love us like…like you love your cradle, the one in the basement”

“Like we love Mom,” Kenneth said. Howard agreed earnestly.

“And now they give you the choice.”

“What choice?” Suzy said. “They’re inside me.”

“The choice whether to continue like you are, or to join us.”

“But you’re like me again, now.”

Kenneth knelt beside her. “We’d like to show you what it’s like, what they’re like.”

“You’re brainwashed,” she said. “I want to be alive.”

“We’re even more alive, with them,” her mother said. “Honey, we’re not brainwashed, we’re convinced. We went through some very bad stuff at first, but that’s not necessary now. They don’t destroy anything. They can keep everything inside them, in memory, but it’s better than memory—”

“Because you can think yourself into it, and be there, just like it was—”

“Or will be,” Howard added.

“I still don’t know what you mean. They want me to give up my body? They’re going to change me, like they did you, like the city?”

“When you’re with them, you won’t need your body any more,” her mother said. Suzy looked at her in horror. “Suzy, honey, we’ve been there. We know.”

“You’re like a bunch of Moonies,” she said softly. “You always warned me Moonies and people like that would take advantage of me. Now it’s you trying to brainwash me. You feed me and make me feel good and I don’t even know you’re my mother and brothers.”

“You can stay the way you are, if that’s what you want,” Kenneth said. They just thought you’d like to know. There’s an alternative to being alone and afraid.”

“Will they leave my body?” she asked, holding up her hand.

“If that’s what you want,” her mother said.

“I want to be alive, not a ghost.”

“That’s your decision?” Kenneth asked.

“Yes,” she said firmly.

“Do you want us to leave, too?”

She felt the tears again and reached for her mother’s hand. “I’m confused,” she said. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you? You’re really my mother and Kenny and Howard?”

They nodded. “Only better,” Howard added. “Listen, sis, I wasn’t the smartest fellow in town, was I? Good-hearted, maybe, but sometimes a real rock quarry. But when they came into me—”

“Who are they?“

“They came from us,” Kenneth said. “They’re like our own cells, not like a disease.”

“They’re cells?” She thought of the blobby things—she forgot their names—she had seen under the microscope in high school. That scared her even more.

Howard nodded. “Smart, too. When they came into me, I felt so strong—in the mind. I could think and remember all sorts of things, and I remembered stuff I hadn’t even lived through. It was like I was talking on the phone with zillions of brilliant people, all friendly, all cooperating—”

“Mostly,” Kenneth said.

“Well, yeah, they argue sometimes, and we argue, too. It’s not cut and dried. But nobody hates anybody because we’re all duplicated hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of times. You know, like being Xeroxed. All across the country. So like, if I die here, now, there’s hundreds of others tuned in to me, ready to become me, and I don’t die at all. I just lose this particular me. So I can tune in to anybody else, and I can be anywhere else, and it becomes impossible to die.”

Suzy had stopped eating. Now she stopped picking at the food with her fork and put the utensil down. “That’s too heavy for me right now,” she said. I want to know why I didn’t get sick, too.”

“Let them answer this time,” her mother said. “Just listen to them.”

She closed her eyes.

Different people

Some like you

Died/disaster/end

Set aside, conserved

Like parks these

People/you

To learn.

The words did not just form alone in her mind. They were accompanied by a clear, vivid series of visual and sensual journeys, across great distances, mental and physical. She became aware of the differences between cell intelligence and her own, the different experiences now being integrated; she touched on the forms and thoughts of people absorbed into the cell memories; she even felt the partially saved memories of those who had died before being absorbed. She had never felt/seen/tasted anything so rich.

Suzy opened her eyes. Already, she was not the same. Something in her had been bypassed—the part that made her slow. She wasn’t completely slow now, not all the way through.

“See what it’s like?” Howard asked.

I’m going to think about it,” she said. She pushed the chair back from the table. Tell them to leave me alone and not make me sick.”

“You’ve told them already,” her mother said.

“I just need time,” Suzy said.

“Honey, if you want, you can have forever.”

CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

Bernard floats in his own blood, uncertain with whom he is communicating. The communication is carried up the stream of blood by flagellates, adapted protozoans capable of high speed in the serum. His replies return by the same method, or are simply cast into the blood flow.

Everything is information, or lack of information.

—How many of me are there?

That number will always change. Perhaps a million by now.

—Will I meet them? Integrate with them?

No cluster has the capacity to absorb the experiences of all like clusters. That must be reserved for command clusters. Not all information is equally useful at any given time.

—But no information is lost?

Information is always lost. That is the struggle. No cluster’s total structure is ever lost There are always duplications.

—Where am I going?

Eventually, above the *blood music*. You are the cluster chosen to re-integrate with BERNARD.

—I am Bernard.

There are many BERNARD.

Perhaps a million others, thinking as he thought now, spreading through the blood and tissue, gradually being absorbed into the noocyte hierarchy. A million changing versions, never to be re-integrated.

You will meet with command clusters. You will experience THOUGHT UNIVERSE.

—It’s too much. I’m frightened again.

FRIGHTENED is impossible without hormonal response of macro-scale BERNARD. Are you truly FRIGHTENED?

He searches for the effects of fear and does not find them.

—No, but I should be.

You have expressed interest in hierarchy. Adjust your processing to ^{**************}.

The message is incomprehensible to his human mind, embedded in the biologic of the noocyte cluster, but the cluster itself understands and prepares for the entry of specific data packages.

As the data comes in—slender coiled strings of RNA and gnarled, twisted proteins—he feels his cells absorb and incorporate. There is no way of knowing how much time this takes, but he seems to almost immediately comprehend the experience of the cells rushing past in the capillary. He feeds off their recently shed experience-memories.

By far the greatest number are not mature noocytes, but normal somatic cells either slightly altered to prevent interference with noocyte activity, or servant cells with limited functions specified by simple biologic. Some of these cells do the bidding of command clusters, others ferry experience memory in hybridized or polymerized clumps from one location to another. Still others carry out new body functions not yet assumable by untailored somatic cells.

Still lower in the scale are domesticated bacteria, carefully tailored to perform one or two functions. Some of these bacteria (there is no way to connect their type with any he knows by human names) are small factories, flooding the blood with the molecules necessary to the noocytes.

And at the bottom of the scale, but by no means negligible in importance, are tailored phage viruses. Some of the virus particles act as high-speed transports for crucial information, towed by flagellate bacteria or slimmed-down lymphocytes; others wander freely through the blood, surrounding the larger cells like dust clouds. If somatic cells, servants or even mature noocytes have abandoned the hierarchy—rebelled or malfunctioned drastically—the virus particles move in and inject their package of disruptive RNA. The offending cells soon explode, casting out a cloud of more tailored virus, and the debris is cleaned away by various noocyte and servant scavengers.

Every type of cell originally in his body-friend or foe-has been studied and put to use by the noocytes.

Dislodge and follow the trail of the command cluster. You will be interviewed.

Bernard feels his cluster move back into the capillary. The walls of the capillary narrow until he is strung out in a long line, his intercellular communications reduced until he feels the noocyte equivalent of suffocation. Then he passes through the capillary wall and is bathed in interstitial fluid. The trail is very distinct He can “taste” the presence of mature noocytes, a great many of them.

It comes to him suddenly that he is, in fact, still near his brain, possibly still in his brain, and that he is about to meet one of the researchers responsible for breaking through to the macro-scale world.

He passes through crowds of servant cells, information-bearing flagellates, noocytes waiting for instructions.

I am about to be introduced to the Grand Lunar, he tells himself. The thought and accompanying mental chuckle is passed into his experience data almost immediately, extruded and hastily retrieved by a servant cell, and carried away to the command cluster. Even more rapidly, a response comes to him.

BERNARD compares us with a MONSTER.

—Not at all. I’m the monster here. Either that, or the situation itself is monstrous.

We are nowhere near to understanding the subtleties of your thought. Have you found the ‘downloading’ informative?

—So far, very informative. And I admit I feel humble here.

Not like a supreme command cluster?

—No. I am not a god.

We do not understand GOD.

The command cluster was much larger than a normal noocyte cluster. Bernard estimated it held at least ten thousand cells, with a commensurately greater thinking capacity. He felt like a mental midget, even with the difficulty of making judgments in the noocyte realm.

—Do you have access to my memories of H.G. Wells?

Pause. Then, Yes. They are quite vivid for not being pure experience memories.

—Yes, well they come from a book, an encoding of an unreal experience.

We are familiar with *fiction*.

—I feel like Cavour in The First Men in the Moon. Speaking with the Grand Lunar.

The comparison may be appropriate, but we do not comprehend it. We are very different, BERNARD, far more different than your comparison with the unreal experience would suggest.

—Yes, but like Cavour, I have thousands of questions. Perhaps you don’t wish to answer all of them.

To keep your fellow macro-scale HUMANS from knowing all we might do, and trying to stop us.

The message was just unclear enough to show Bernard that the command cluster was still unable to completely encompass the reality of the macro-scale.

—Are you in touch with the noocytes in North America?

We are aware there are other, far more powerful concentrations, in much better circumstances.

—And…?

No response.

Then, Are you aware that your *enclosing space* is in jeopardy?

—No. What sort of jeopardy? You mean the lab?

^*The lab^* is surrounded by your fellows in *uncertain hierarchy relationship*.

—I don’t understand.

They wish to destroy ‘the lab’, and presumably all of us.

—How do you know this?

We are able to receive RADIO FREQUENCY TRANS MISSIONS in several LANGUAGES *encodings*. Can you stop these attempts? Are you in a position of hierarchy INFLUENCE?

Bernard puzzles over the request.

We have memory of the TRANSMISSIONS.

—Then let me hear them.

He can taste the passage of a flagellate, intersecting the messenger of the command cluster, returning with a packet of data. Bernard’s cluster absorbs the data.

He “listens” to the transmissions now in memory. They are not of the best quality, and most of them are in German, which he poorly understands. But he can understand enough to realize why Paulsen-Fuchs has been looking worse and worse of late.

The Pharmek facility is surrounded by camps of protesters. The countryside all the way out to the airport is dotted with them; the protesters number perhaps half a million, and more are arriving by bus, automobile or on foot every day. The army and police do not dare break them up; the mood throughout West Germany, and most of Europe, is very ugly.

—I have no power to stop them.

PERSUASION?

Another inner chuckle.—No; I’m what they want destroyed. And you.

You are far less influential in your realm than we are here.

—Oh, yes, of course.

For a long period, no messages issue from the command cluster. There is even less time. We are transferring you now.

He feels a subtle shift in the voice as he is moved by flagellates away from the command cluster. Follow. He realizes that a group of clusters has broken away from the command cluster. They are communicating with him, and their voice seems oddly familiar, more direct and accessible.

—Who is guiding me?

The response is chemical. An identifying string is brought to him by a flagellate, and suddenly be knows he is being guided by four clusters of primary B-lympho-cytes, the earliest versions of the noocytes. Primary B-lymphocytes are accorded a place in most command clusters, and treated with great respect; they are the precursors, even though their activities are limited. They are primitive in both meanings of the word; less sophisticated in design and function than recently created noocytes, and the ancestors of all.

You may enter THOUGHT UNIVERSE.

The voice fades in and out like a bad telephone connection. Choppy, incomplete.

The sensation of being in a noocyte cluster ended abruptly. Now Bernard was neither embodied nor shrunk to the noocyte scale. His thoughts simply were, and the place where they were was excruciatingly beautiful

If there was any extension in space, it was illusory. Dimensions seemed to be defined by subject; information relevant to his current thinking was close at hand, other subjects were farther away. The overall impression was of a vast, many layered library, arranged in a sphere around him. He shared this center with another presence.

Humans, human form, the presence said. A scurry of information surrounded Bernard, giving him arms, legs, a body and face. Beside him, apparently sitting in a reclining chair, was a wispy image of Vergil Ulam. Ulam smiled without passion or conviction.

“I am your cellular Vergil. Welcome to the inner circle of the command clusters.”

“You’re dead,” Bernard said, his voice an imperfect approximation.

“So I understand.”

“Where are we?”

“Roughly translating the noocyte descriptive string, we are in a Thought Universe. I call it a noosphere. In here, all we experience is generated by thinking. We can be whatever we wish, or learn whatever we wish, or think about anything. We won’t be limited by lack of knowledge or experience; everything can be brought to us. When not used by the command dusters, I spend most of my time here.”

A granite dodecahedron, its edges decorated with gold bars, formed between them. It rolled this way and that for a moment then addressed Vergil’s pale, translucent form. Bernard did not understand the communication. The dodecahedron vanished.

“We all take characteristic shapes here, and most of us add textures, details. Noocytes don’t have names, Mr. Bernard; they put together sequences of identifying amino acids. Sounds complicated, but really much simpler than a fingerprint. In the noosphere, all active researchers must have definite identifying symbols.”

Bernard tried to find traces of the Vergil Ulam he had met and shaken hands with. There didn’t seem to be many. Even the voice lacked the accent and slight breath-lessness he remembered. “There’s not very much of you here, is there?”

Vergil’s ghost shook its head. “Not all of me was translated to the noocyte level before my cells infected you. I hope there’s a better record somewhere. This one is hardly adequate. I’m only about one third here. What is here, however, is cherished and protected. Shade of honored ancestor, vague memory of creator.” Its voice faded in and out omitting or sliding over certain syllables. The image moved sparingly. The hope is they will connect with noocytes back home, find more of me. Not just fragments of a broken vase.”

The image became more transparent “Must go now. Supplements coming. Always part of me here; you and I, we’re the models. I suspect you have precedence now. Be seeing you.”

Bernard stood alone in the noosphere, surrounded by options he hardly knew how to take advantage of. He held his hand out toward the surrounding information. It rippled all around him, waves of light spreading from nadir to zenith. Ranks of information exchanged priorities and his memories stacked up around him like towers of cards, each represented by a line of light.

The lines cascaded.

He had been thinking

“Just another day for you, isn’t it?” Nadia turned and stepped gracefully onto the courtroom escalator.

Not the most pleasant” he said. Down they went.

“Yes, well, just another.” She smelled of tea roses and something else quiet and clean. She had always been beautiful in his eyes, no doubt in the eyes of others; small, slender, black-haired, she did not draw immediate stares, but a few minutes alone in a room with her and there was no doubt: most men would want to spend many hours, days, months.

But not years. Nadia was quickly bored, even with Michael Bernard.

“Back to business, then,” she said halfway down. “More interviews.”

He did not respond. Nadia, bored, became a baiter.

“Well, you’re rid of me,” she said at the bottom. “And I am rid of you.”

“I’ll never be rid of you,” Bernard said. “You always represented something important to me.” She swiveled on her high heels and presented die rear of an immaculately tailored blue suit He grabbed her arm none too gently and brought her around to face him. “You were my last chance at being normal. I’ll never love another woman like I did you. You burned. I’ll like women, but I’ll never commit to them; I’ll never be naive with them.”

“You’re babbling, Michael,” Nadia said, lips tightening on his name. “Let me go.”

“Like hell,” he said. “You have one and a half million dollars. Give me something in return.”

“Fuck off,” she said.

“You don’t like scenes, do you?”

“Let go of me.”

“Cool, dignified. I can take something now, if you want. Take it out in trade.”

“You bastard.”

He trembled and slapped her. “For tire last of my naiveté. For three years, the first wonderful. For the third a royal misery.”

“I’ll kill you,” she said. “Nobody—”

He brought his leg around behind her and tripped her. She fell back on her ass with a shriek. Legs sprawled, hands spread on stiff arms behind her, she looked up at him with lips writhing. “You—”

“Brute,” he said. “Calm, cold, rational brutality. Not very different from what you put me through. But you don’t use physical force. You just provoke it.”

“Shuttup.” She held out her hand and he helped her to her feet.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Not once, during their three years together, had he ever struck her. He felt like dying.

“Bullshit. You’re everything I said you were, you bastard. You miserable little boy.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. The crowds of people in the hall watched them warily, murmuring disapproval. Thank God there were no reporters.

“Go play with your toys,” she said. “Your scalpels, your nurses, your patients. Go ruin their lives and just stay away from me.”

An older memory.

“Father.” He stood by the bed, uncomfortable at the reversal of roles, no longer the doctor but now a visitor. The room smelled of disinfectant and something to hide the smell of disinfectant, tea-roses or something sweet the effect was that of a mortuary. He blinked and reached out for his father’s hand.

The old man (he was old, looked old, looked worn out by life) opened his eyes and blinked. His eyes were yellow, rheumy, and his skin was the color of French mustard, fie had cancer of the liver and everything was failing piece by piece. He had requested no extraordinary measures and Bernard had brought his own lawyers in to consult with the hospital management, just to ensure his father’s wishes were not ignored. (Want your father dead? Want to ensure he will die more rapidly? Of course not. Want him to live forever? Yes. Oh, yes. Then I won’t die.)

Every couple of hours he was brought a powerful painkiller, a modern variation on the Brompton’s cocktail that had been in favor when Bernard had begun his practice.

“Father. It’s Michael”

“Yes. My mind is dear. I know you.”

“Ursula and Gerald say hello.”

“Hello to Gerald. Hello to Ursula.”

“How are you feeling?”

(Like he’s going to die, you idiot.)

“I’m a junkie now, Mike.”

“Yes, well”

“Have to talk now.”

“About what Father?”

“Your mother. Why isn’t she here?”

“Mother’s dead, Father.”

“Yes. I knew that. My mind is dear. It’s just…and I’m not complaining, mind you…it’s just that this hurts.” He took hold of Bernard’s hand and squeezed it as hard as he could-a pitiful squeeze. “What’s the prognosis, son?”

“You know that Father.”

“Can’t transfer my brain for me?”

Bernard smiled. “Not yet. We’re working on it”

“Not soon enough, I’m afraid.”

“Probably not soon enough.”

“You and Ursula-doing okay?”

“We’re settling things out of court, Father.”

“How’s Gerald taking it?”

“Badly. Sulking.”

“Wanted to divorce your mother once.”

Bernard looked into his father’s face, frowning. “Oh?”

“She had an affair. Infuriated me. Taught me a lot, too. Didn’t divorce her.”

Bernard had never heard any of this.

“You know, even with Ursula—”

“It’s over with, Father. We’ve both had affairs, and mine is turning out pretty serious.”

“Can’t own a woman, Mike. Wonderful companions, can’t own them.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Maybe you do. I thought, when I found out about your mother’s lover, I thought I would die. It hurt almost as much as this does. I thought I owned her.”

Bernard wished the conversation would take another direction. “Gerald doesn’t mind going off to school for a year.”

“But I didn’t. I was just sharing her. Even if a woman only has you for a lover, you share her. She shares you. All this concern with fidelity, it’s a sham, a mask. Mike. It’s the record that counts. What you do, how well you do it, how dogged you are.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Say.” His father’s eyes widened.

“What?” Bernard asked, taking his hand again. “We stayed on together thirty years after that.”

“I never knew.”

“Didn’t need to know. I was the one who needed to know, to accept. That’s not all that’s on my mind. Mike, remember the cabin? There’s a stack of papers up in the loft, under the bunk.”

The cabin in Maine had been sold ten years before.

“I was doing some writing,” his father continued after swallowing hard and painfully. His face wrinkled up and he made a bitter moue. “About when I was a doctor.”

Bernard knew where the papers were. He had rescued them and read them during his internship. They were now in a file in his office in Atlanta.

“I have them, Father.”

“Good. Did you read them?”

“Yes.” And they were very important to me, Father. They helped me choose what I wanted to do in neurology, the direction I wanted to take Tell him, tell him!

“Good. I’ve always known about you, Mike.”

“What?”

“How much you loved us. You’re just not demonstrative, are you? Never have been.”

“I love you. Loved mother.”

“She knew. She was not unhappy when she died. Well.” He made the face again. “I have to sleep now. You sure you can’t find a good young new body for me?”

Bernard nodded. Tell him.

“The papers were very important to me, Father. Dad.”

He hadn’t called him Dad since he had been thirteen. But the old (old) man didn’t hear. He was asleep. Bernard picked up his coat and valise and left, passing the nurse’s station to inquire-out of habit-when the next medication would be.

His father died at three o’clock the next morning, asleep and alone.

And farther…

Olivia Ferguson, the same wonderfully smooth eighteen years old as he, her first name echoing her complexion, her plush dark hair pressing against the Corvette’s neck rest turned her large green eyes on him and smiled. He glanced at her and returned the smile and it was the most wonderful evening in the world, it was fine; the third time he had taken a girl out on a date. He was, wonder of wonders, a virgin—and this night it didn’t seem to matter. He had asked her out near the bell tower on the UC Berkeley campus as she stood near one of the twin bronze bears, and she had looked at him with real sympathy.

“I’m engaged,” she had said. “I mean, it couldn’t be anything—”

Disappointed, and yet ever-prepared to be gallant, he had said, “Well, then it’ll just be an evening out. Two people on the town. Friends.” He hardly knew her; they shared an English class. She was the loveliest girl in the class, tall and composed, quiet and assured yet not in the least distant. She had smiled and said, “Okay.”

And now he felt the freedom, released from the obligation of pursuit; the first time he felt on equal footing with a woman. Her fiancé, she explained, was in the Navy, stationed at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Her family lived on Staten Island, in a house where Herman Melville had once stayed a summer.

The wind blew her hair without mussing it—miraculous, wonderful hair which (in theory) would be delightful to feel, run his hands through. They had been talking since he picked her up at her home, an apartment she shared with two women near the old white Claremont Hotel. They had driven across the Golden Gate into Marin to eat at a small seafood restaurant the Klamshak, and talked there—about classes, about plans, about what getting married was all about (he didn’t know and didn’t even bother to fake sophistication). They had both agreed the food was good and the decor not in the least original-cork floats and nets on the wall, filled with plastic lobsters and a weary-looking dried blowfish, an old holed dory perched out front on shell-strewn sand. Not once did he feel awkward or young or even inexperienced.

He thought, as they drove back across the bridge, In other circumstances, I’m sure we’d fall in love with each other. I’m positive we’d be married in a few years. She’s terrific—and I’m not going to do anything about it. The sensation he felt at this was sad and romantic and altogether wonderful.

He knew that if he pressed her, she would probably come up to his apartment with him, and they would make love.

Even though he hated and despised being a virgin, he would not press her. He would not even suggest it. This was too perfect.

They sat in the ‘vette outside the converted old mansion where she lodged and discussed Kennedy, laughed about their fears during the missile crisis, and then held hands and just looked at each other.

“You know,” he said quietly, “there are times when…” He stopped.

“Thank you,” she said. “I just thought you would be good on a date. Most men, you know—”

“Yeah. Well, that’s me.” He grinned. “Harmless.”

“Oh, no. Not harmless. Not in the least.”

Now was the turning point It could go one way, or the other. He flashed on her olive-colored body and knew it was smoothly, youthfully perfect He knew that she would go with him to his apartment.

“You’re a romantic, aren’t you?” she said.

“I suppose I am.”

“I am too. The silliest people in the world are romantics.”

He felt heat in his face and neck. “I love women,” he said. “I love the way they talk and move. They’re enchanting.” He was going to open up now, and regret it later, but what he felt was too true and undeniable, especially after this evening. “I think most men should feel a woman is, like, sacred. Not on a pedestal, that sort of thing. But just too beautiful for words. To be loved by a woman, and-That would just be incredible.”

Olivia looked through the windshield, a smile flickering on her face. Then she looked down at her purse and smoothed her calf-length blue dress with her hands. “It’ll happen,” she said.

“Yeah, sure.” He nodded. But not between us.

“Thank you,” she said again. He held her hand, and then reached up to caress her cheek. She rubbed against his hand like a kitten and tugged on the door handle. “See you in class.”

They hadn’t even kissed.

—What has happened to me since? Three wives—the third because she looked like Olivia—and this distancing, this standing apart. I have lost far too many illusions.

There are options.

—I don’t understand.

What would you wish to revise?

—If you mean go back, I don’t see how.

It is all possible here, in Thought Universe. Simulations. Reconstructions from your memory.

—I could live out another life?

When there is time.

—With the real Olivia? She…where was she, is she?

That is not known.

—Then I’ll pass. I am not interested in dreams.

There are more memories within you.

—Yes…

But where did they fit, where did they come from?

Randall Bernard, twenty-four, had wed Tiffany Marnier on the seventeenth of November, 1943, in a small Kansas City church. She wore a silver-beaded silk and white lace gown that her mother had worn for her wedding, no veil, and the flowers had been blood-red roses. They had-

They sipped a cup of wine between them and exchanged their vows and broke a piece of bread and the minister, a Theosophist who would by the end of the 1940s be a Vedantist, pronounced them equal in the eyes of the Deity, and now united by love and common regard.

The memory was tinted, like an old photograph, and not good on details. But it was there and he hadn’t even been born, and he was seeing it, and then seeing their wedding night, marveling in the quick glimpses of his own creation and how so little had changed between man and woman, marveling at his mother’s passion and pleasure, and his father’s doctorly, precise, knowing skill, even in bed a doctor.

And his father went off to war, serving as a corpsman in Europe, moving with Patton’s U.S. Third Army through the Ardennes and crossing the Rhine near Coblenz-sixty-five miles in three days—and his son watched what he could not possibly have seen. And then he watched what his father could not possibly have seen:

A soldier in plus-fours stepping into the dark, dank hallway of a brothel in Paris; not his father, not anybody he knew—

Very dim, but clear in outline, a woman rocking a child in orange sunlight coming through an isinglass window—

A man fishing with cormorants in a gray early morning river—

A child staring out of a barn loft at a curie of men in the yard below, slaughtering a huge black and white wide-eyed bullock—

Men and women doffing their long white robes and swimming in a muddy river surrounded by red stone bluffs—

A man standing on a cliff, horn bow in hand, watching a herd of antelopes cross a hazy grass plain—

A woman giving birth in a dark underground place, lit by tallow lamps, watched by smeared, anxious faces—

Two old men arguing about impressed balls of clay in a circle drawn in sand—

—I don’t remember these things. They aren’t me, I didn’t experience them—

He broke free of the flow of information. With both hands, he reached up to red-glowing circles over his head, so warm and attractive.—Where did they come from? He touched the circles and felt the answer in his hundred-cell body.

Not all memory comes from an individual’s life.

—Where, then?

Memory is stored in neurons-interactive memory, carried in charge and potential, then downloaded to chemical storage in cells, then downloaded to molecular level. Stored in introns of individual cells.

The insight was almost agonizing in its completeness and intensity.

Symbiotic bacteria and transfer viruses naturally occurring in all animals and specific for each species—are implanted with molecular memory transcribed from the intron. They exit the individual and pass on to another individual, “infect,” transfer the memory to somatic cells. Some of the memories are then returned to chemical storage status, and a few return to active memory.

—Across generations?

Across millennia.

—The introns are not junk sequences…

No. They are highly condensed memory storage.

Vergil Ulam had not created biologic in cells out of nothing. He had stumbled across a natural function—the transfer of racial memory. He had altered a system already in existence.

—I do not care! No more revelations. No more insights. I’ve had enough. What happened to me? What did I become? What good is revelation when it’s wasted on a fool?

He was back in the framework of Thought Universe again. He looked around at the images, the symbolic sources of different branches of information, then at the rings over his head. They glowed green now.

You are DISTRESSED. Touch them.

He reached up and touched them again.

With a jerk, he stretched out into the interface and began to integrate with the macro-scale Bernard; up the tunnel of dissociation, into the warm darkness of the lab. It was night—or at least sleeping time.

He lay on his cot, barely able to move.

We can no longer hold your body form.

—What?

You will be withdrawn into our realm again soon, within two days. All your work in the macro-scale must be completed by that time.

—No…

We have no choice. We have held off long enough. We must transform.

“No! I’m not ready! This is too much!” He realized he was screaming and held both hands to his mouth.

He sat up on the edge of the cot, his grotesquely ridged face dripping sweat.

CHAPTER FORTY

Are you going to leave again? Just go away?” Suzy held on to Kenneth’s hand. He stopped before the elevator. The door opened.

“It’s tough just being human again, you know?” he said. “It’s lonely. So we’ll go back, yes.”

“Lonely? What about how I’ll feel? You’ll be dead again.”

“Not dead, Seedling. You know that.”

“Might as well be.”

“You could join us.”

Suzy started trembling. “Kenny, I am afraid.”

“Look. They left you, like you asked, and they’re letting you go. Though what you’ll do out there, I don’t know. The city’s not made for people any more. You’ll be fed and you’ll live okay, but…Suzy, everything’s changing. The city will change more. You’ll be in the way…but they won’t hurt you. If you choose, they’ll set you aside like a national park.”

“Come with me, Kenny. You and Howard and Mom. We could go back-”

“Brooklyn doesn’t exist any more.”

“Jesus, you’re like a ghost or something. I can’t talk sense to you.”

Kenny pointed to the elevator. “Seedling-”

“Stop calling me that, goddammit! I’m your sister, you creep! You’re just going to leave me out there—”

“That’s your choice, Suzy,” Kenneth said calmly.

“Or make me a zombie.”

“You know we’re not zombies, Suzy. You felt what they’re like, what they can do for you.”

“But I won’t be me anymore!”

“Stop whining. We all change.”

“Not that way!”

Kenneth looked pained. “You’re different than you were when you were a little girl. Were you ever afraid of growing up?”

She stared at him. “I am still a little girl,” she said. “I’m slow. That’s what everybody says.”

“Were you ever afraid of not being a baby? That’s the difference. Everybody else is still locked into being babies. We’re not. You could grow up, too.”

“No,” Suzy said. She turned away from the elevator. “I’m going back to talk to Mom.” Kenny grabbed her by the arm.

“They’re not there anymore,” he said. “It’s a real strain, being rebuilt like this.”

Suzy gaped at him, then ran into the elevator and leaned against the back wall. “Will you come down with me?” she asked.

“No,” Kenneth said. I’m going back. We still love you, Seedling. We’ll watch over you. You’ll have more mothers and brothers and friends than you’ll ever know. Maybe you’ll let us be with you, sometime.”

“You mean, inside me, like them?”

Kenneth nodded. “Well always be around. But we aren’t going to rebuild our bodies for you.”

“I want to go down now,” she said.

“Going down, then,” Kenneth said. The elevator doors started to close. “Good-bye, Suzy. Be careful.”

“KennnNETHHH!” But the door closed and the elevator descended. She stood in the middle of the floor and ran her fingers through her long, stringy blond hair.

The door opened.

The lobby was a webwork of gray, solid-looking arches supporting the upper mass of the tower. She imagined—or perhaps remembered what they had shown her—the elevator shaft and the restaurant deck being all that remained of the original tower, left specially for her.

Where will I go?

She stepped on the gray and red speckled floor-not carpet, not concrete, but something faintly resilient, like cork. A brown and white sheet—the last she saw of that particular substance—slid down over the elevator door and sealed it with a hissing noise.

She walked through the webwork of arches, stepping over cylindrical humps in the red and gray surface, leaving the shadow of the transformed tower and standing in half-clouded daylight.

The north tower stood alone. The other tower had been dismantled. All that remained of the World Trade Center was a single rounded spire, smooth and glossy gray in some areas, rough and mottled black in others, with a hint of webwork in patterns pushing up through the outer material.

From the transformed plaza, covered with feathery treelike fans, to the waterfront there was nothing more than twenty feet tall.

She walked between the fans, waving gently on their shiny red trunks, down to the shore. The water was a solid, gelatinous green-gray, no waves, smooth as glass and just as shiny. She could see the pyramids and irregular spheres of Jersey City, like a particularly weird collection of children’s blocks and toys; the reflection in the solid river was vivid and perfect.

The wind sighed pleasantly. It should have been cold or at least cool, but the air was warm. Already her chest hurt with not crying. “Mother,” she said, “I just want to be what I am. Nothing more. Nothing less.” Nothing more? Suzy, that’s a lie.

She stood by the shore for a long time, then turned and began her hike into Manhattan Island.

CHAPTER FORTY ONE

To Bernard, the ridiculous environment he had lived in for so many weeks seemed the lesser of two realities.

He did little work now. He lay back on the bed, keyboard under his arm, thinking and waiting. Outside, he knew, the tension was building. He was the focus.

Paulsen-Fuchs could not prevent two million people from getting at him, destroying him and the lab. (Villagers with torches; he was both Dr. Frankenstein and the monster. Ignorant frightened villagers doing God’s work.)

In his blood, his flesh, he carried part of Vergil I. Ulam, part of his father and mother, parts of people he had never known, people perhaps thousands of years dead. Within, there were millions of duplicates of himself, sinking deeper into the noocyte world, discovering the layers and layers of universes within the biologic: old, new and potential.

And yet—where was the insurance policy, the guarantee that he wasn’t being deceived? What if they were simply conjuring false dreams to make him quiescent, to drug him for the metamorphosis? What if their explanations were all sugar-coated phrases meant to reassure? He had no evidence the noocytes lied—but then, how could one tell when something so alien lied, or if “lie” was even an accessible concept for them?

(Olivia. She had broken her engagement, he learned much later, two months after their single date. They had smiled at each other on the last day of class—and passed out of each other’s lives. He had been—what? Shy, inept? Too romantic, too in love with that single lovely and Petrarchan night? Where was she—in the North American biomass.)

And even if he accepted what he had been told, he had certainly not been told everything. A million questions remained, some idle, most crucial. He was still, after all, an individual (wasn’t he?) anticipating a virtually unknown experience.

The command clusters—the researchers—none answered him now.

In North America—what happened to all the bad people whose memories were preserved by the noocytes? They were, to be sure, suspended from the world in which they had been bad just as surely as if they were in prison—far more suspended. But being bad meant bad thinking, being evil meant being a cancer cell in the society, a dangerous and inexplicable screw-up, and he was not just thinking of ax murderers. He was thinking of politicians too greedy or blind to know what they were doing, white collar sharpies who had swindled the life’s savings from thousands of investors, mothers and fathers too stupid to know you shouldn’t beat your children to death. What happened to these people and to the millions of screw-ups, evil screw-ups, in human society?

Were all truly equal, duplicated a million times, or did the noocytes exercise a little judgment? Did they quietly delete a few personalities, edit them out…or alter them?

And if the noocytes took the liberty of altering the real screw-ups, perhaps fixing them or immobilizing them some way, going into their thought processes and using a kind of grand consensus of right thinking as a pattern for corrections-

Then who was to say they weren’t altering others, people with minor problems, people with all the complexes of little screw-ups and errors and temporary nastiness…things all humans have. Occupational hazards of being human. Of living in a tough universe, a different universe than the ones the noocytes inhabited. If they did correct and edit and alter, who could say they were good at it? Knew what they were doing, and retained workable human personalities afterward?

What did the noocytes do with people who couldn’t handle the change, who went crazy—or who, as was hinted, died incompletely assimilated, leaving partial memories, like Vergil’s partial in Bernard’s own body? Did they cull and weed here, too?

Was there politics, social interaction, in the noosphere? Were humans given an equal vote with noocytes? Humans had, of course, become noocytes—but were the genuine, the original noocytes more or less well regarded?

Would there be conflict, revolution?

Or would there be profound quiet-the quiet of the grave, because of a deletion of the will to resist? Not an important thing free will, for a rigid hierarchy. Was the noosphere a rigid hierarchy, lacking in dissent or even comment?

He didn’t think so.

But could he know for sure?

Did they really respect and love humans as masters and creators, or did they simply suck them in, chew them up, digest the information needed and send the rest into entropy, forgotten, disorganized, dead?

Bernard, do you now feel the fear of Big Change? The completely different—sublime, or hellish—as opposed to the difficult, often hellish status quo?

He doubted that Vergil had ever thought these things out. He may not have had time, but even allowing him the time, Vergil simply did not think such things through. Brilliant in the creation, slovenly in the consideration of consequences.

Wasn’t that true of every creator?

Didn’t anyone who changed things ultimately lead some people—perhaps many people—to death, grief, torment?

The poor human Prometheuses who brought fire to their fellows.

Nobel.

Einstein. Poor Einstein and his letter to Roosevelt. Paraphrase: “I have loosed the demons of Hell and now you must sign a pact with the devil or someone else will. Someone even nastier.”

Curie, experimenting with radium; how responsible was she for Slotin, over four decades later?

Did Pasteur’s work—or Salk’s, or his own—save the life of a man or woman who ultimately went on to wreak havoc, to turn bad, to really and truly screw up? Undoubtedly.

And did the victims ever think, “Sue the bastard!”

Undoubtedly.

And if such thoughts were heeded, such questions asked, wouldn’t all parents slaughter their children while they slept in the cradle?

The old cliché—Hitler’s mother, aborting herself.

So confusing.

Bernard rocked back and forth between sleep and nightmare, coming down hard on the side of nightmare, and lifting up on another swing to a kind of ecstasy.

Nothing will ever be the same again.

Good! Wonderful! Wasn’t it all badly flawed anyway?

No, perhaps not. Not until now.

Oh, Lord, I am driven to prayer. I am weak and incapable of making these judgments. I do not believe in you, not in any form that has been described to me, but I must pray, because I am in dread, in unholy fear.

What are we giving birth to?

Bernard looked down at his hands and arms, swollen and covered with white veins.

So ugly, he thought.

CHAPTER FORTY TWO

The food appeared on top of a waist-high, grayish spongy cylinder at the end of a high-walled cul-de-sac.

Suzy looked down at the food on the plate, reached out to touch the apparent fried chicken, and drew her finger back slowly. The food was warm, the cup of coffee was steaming, and it looked perfectly normal. Not once had she been served something she didn’t like, and not once had there been too much, or too little.

They were watching her closely, keeping track of her every need. She was being tended like an animal in a zoo, or at least that was the way she felt.

She knelt down and began to eat. When she had finished, she sat with her back to the cylinder, sipping the last of the coffee, and pulled her collar up. The air was getting colder. She had left her coat in the World Trade Center—or what the north tower had become—and for the past two weeks, hadn’t felt any need for it. The air had always been comfortable even at night.

Things were changing, and that was disturbing—or exciting. She wasn’t sure which.

To tell the truth, Suzy McKenzie had been bored much of the time. She had never been much on imagination, and the stretches of rebuilt Manhattan she had traveled had not appealed to her much. The huge canal-pipes pumping green liquid from the river into the interior of the island, the slow-moving fan-trees and propeller-trees the expanses of glassy silver bumps, like collections of road reflectors, spread over hundreds of acres of irregular surface—none of these things had interested her for more than a few minutes. They had no relation to her. She could not begin to understand what they were for.

She knew it should all have been fascinating, but it wasn’t human, and so she didn’t much care.

People interested her; what they thought and did, who they were, how they felt about her and she about them.

“I hate you,” she said to the cylinder as she returned her plate and cup to its top surface. The cylinder swallowed them and lowered out of sight “All of you!” she shouted at the walls of the cul-de-sac. She wrapped her arms around herself for warmth and picked up the flashlight and radio. It would be dark soon; she’d have to find a place to sleep, perhaps play the radio for a few more minutes. The batteries were weakening, even though she had played it sparingly. She walked out of the cul-de-sac and stared at a forest of fan-trees climbing a steep reddish-brown mound.

On top of the mound was a many-faceted black polyhedron, each facet sporting a silvery needle about a yard long. There were many others like it on the island. She hardly noticed them now. Walking around the mound took about ten minutes. She entered a shallow valley the length of a football field, its sides lined with gently curving black pipe as thick as her waist. The pipe vanished in a dimple at the end of the valley. She had slept in such junctions before. She walked to the end of the valley and knelt down near the depression. She ran her hands over the surface of the dimple; it was quite warm. She could lie here for the night, under the pipes, and be fairly comfortable.

The sky glowed brilliant purple to the west. The sunsets were usually orange and red, subdued; the horizon had never looked so electric.

She turned on the radio and pulled the speaker dose to her ear. She had turned down the volume to conserve the batteries, even though she suspected that was ineffective. The short wave transmitter in England, ever-faithful, came on immediately. She adjusted the knob and hunched deeper under the pipes.

“…riots in West Germany have centered around the Pharmek facilities housing Dr. Michael Bernard, suspected carrier of the North American plague. While the plague has not yet spread beyond North America, tensions run high. Russia’s sealed borders and…” The signal slid and she readjusted.

“…famine in Romania and HunCary, now in its third week, and no relief in sight…”

“…Mrs. Thelma Rittenbaum, noted Battersea psychic, reports that she has had dreams of Christ appearing in the middle of North America, raising the dead and preparing an army to march on the rest of the world,” (A shaky woman’s voice on a tape of poor quality spoke a few unintelligible words.)

The rest of the news was about England and Europe; Suzy enjoyed this most of all, since occasionally it seemed the world might be normal, or at least recovering. There was no hope for her home; she had given up hope weeks ago. But other people, elsewhere, might be leading normal lives. That was comforting to think about.

Not that anybody, anywhere, knew or cared about her.

She turned the radio off and curled up tighter, listening to the hiss of liquid flowing in the pipes, and low, deep groans from someplace far below.

She slept, surrounded by blackness with patches of stars showing between the outlines of the pipes. And when, in the middle of a warm dream about shopping for clothes, she awoke-

Something was wrapped around her. She stroked it drowsily—soft warm, like suede. She fumbled for the flashlight and flicked it on, running the circle of light across her covered legs and hips. The covering was pliable, light blue with indefinite green stripes—her favorite colors. Out from under the covering, her arms and head were cold. She was too sleepy to question; she pulled the cloak high and slipped back into her dreams. This time, she was a young girl, playing in the street with friends from years ago, friends who had since grown up and in many cases, moved away.

Then one by one the buildings were torn down. They all watched as men with huge sledgehammers came along and knocked the brownstones down. She turned to see how her friends were reacting and they were all grown up, or grown old, receding from her and calling for her to follow. She began to cry. Her shoes were stuck to the pavement and she couldn’t move them. When all the buildings were gone, the neighborhood was a level lot, plumbing sticking up in the air, a toilet leaning crazily on a pipe where some upper floor must have once been.

“Things are going to change again, Suzy.” Her shoes loosened and she turned to see Cary, embarrassingly naked.

“Jesus, aren’t you cold?” she asked. “No—it wouldn’t matter. You’re just a ghost.”

“Well, I suppose,” Cary said, smiling. “We just all wanted to warn you. You know? It’s all going to change again, and we wanted to give you a choice.”

“I’m not dreaming am I?”

“Nah.” He shook his head. “We’re in the blanket. You can talk to us when you’re awake, too, if you want.”

“The blanket…all of you? Mom and Kenny and Howard?”

“And lots of others, too. Your father, if you want to talk to him. It’s a gift.” he said. “Sort of a going-away present. We all volunteered, but then there’s a lot more of me, and all the others, than we strictly need.”

“You’re not making sense, Cary.”

“You’ll make it. You’re a strong girl, Suzy.”

The dream background had become nebulous. They both stood in orange-brown darkness, the distant sky brightening to orange as if there were fires on the horizon. Cary looked around at the surroundings and nodded. “It’s the artists. There are so many artists, scientists, I kind of feel lost. But I’m going to be one of them soon as I decide. They give us time. We’re honored, Suzy. They know we made ’em and they treat us real good. You know, back there,” he gestured at the darkness, “we could live together. There’s a place where all of ’em think. It’s just like real life, the real world. It can be the way it used to be, or the way it’s going to be. Any way you want.”

“I’m not joining Cary.”

“Nah. Didn’t think you would. I didn’t really have any choice, when I joined, but I don’t regret it. I wouldn’t have ever been as much in Brooklyn Heights as I am now.”

“You’re a zombie, too.”

I’m a ghost.” He smiled at her. “Anyway, part of me’s going to stay with you, if you want to talk. And another part’s going away when they change.”

“It’s going back the way it was?”

He shook his head. “It’ll never be the same. And…look, I don’t understand all this, but it won’t be too long before there’s another change. Nothing’s ever going to be the same.”

Suzy looked at Cary steadily. “You think being naked would tempt me?”

Cary looked down at his image. “Never thought about it,” he said. “Shows you how casual I’m getting. Can’t you change your mind?”

She shook her head firmly. “I’m the only one who didn’t get sick,” she said.

“Well, not the only one. There’s about twenty, twenty-five. They’re being taken care of, as best we can.”

She preferred being unique. “Thanks a lot,” she said sarcastically.

“Anyway, wear the blanket. When the change comes, wrap up in it real tight. There’ll be a lot of food left over.”

“Good.”

“I guess you’re going to wake up now. I’ll get out of the way. You can see us when you’re awake, too. For a while.”

Suzy nodded.

“Don’t throw it away,” he warned. “Otherwise you’ll get hurt.”

“I won’t”

“Well.” He reached out and touched her crossed arms with a spread palm.

She opened her eyes. Dawn was pale orange-gray above the pipes. The surface of the dimple and the pipes themselves were cold.

Suzy wrapped the blanket tighter and waited.

CHAPTER FORTY THREE

Paulsen-Fuchs stood in the observation chamber, leaning forward on the table, eyes lowered. He had had enough of staring at what lay on the cot in the containment lab.

Bernard had lost his human form in the early morning. The cameras had recorded the transformation. Now, a gray and dark brown mass lay on his bed, portions extending to the floor on two sides. The mass moved fitfully, sometimes experiencing a short, violent shudder.

Before he had been confined to one position, Bernard had picked up the portable keyboard and carried it with him to his cot. The telephone cord-wire issued from the side of the mass. The keyboard itself was somewhere under, or within.

And Bernard was still sending out messages, though he could not speak. The monitor in the control lab recorded a steady flow of words, Bernard’s record of his transformation.

Most of what came from the keyboard was virtually unintelligible. Perhaps Bernard was very nearly a noocyte himself.

The transformation didn’t make Paulsen-Fuchs’ decision any easier. The protesters—and the government, by not exercising authority to prevent them—had demanded that Bernard be killed, that the containment lab be completely sterilized.

They were over two million strong, and if their demands were not carried out, they would destroy Pharmek brick by brick. The army had said it would not protect Pharmek; the police had abrogated their responsibility as well. There was nothing Paulsen-Fuchs could do to stop them; only fifty employees were left on the grounds, the others having been evacuated for their own safety.

Many times he had considered simply leaving the facility, going to his home in Spain and isolating himself completely. Forgetting what had happened, what his friend Michael Bernard had brought with him into Germany.

But Heinz Paulsen-Fuchs had been in business too long to simply retreat. As a very young man, he had watched the Russians enter Berlin. He had put aside all vestiges of his unenthusiastic Nazi past, tried to be as nondescript as possible, but he had not retreated. And during the years of occupation, he had worked at three different jobs. He had stayed in Berlin until 1955, when he and two other men had started Pharmek. The company had nearly gone bankrupt in the wake of the thalidomide panic; but he had not retreated.

No: he would not abrogate responsibility. He would flip the switch that would send sterilizing gases into the containment lab. He would instruct the men with the torches who would enter and finish the task. That would be defeat, but he would at least stay, and not hide out in Spain.

He had no idea what the protesters would do once Bernard was dead. He walked slowly from the observation chamber, into the control lab, and sat before the monitor on which Bernard’s message was appearing.

He ran it back to its beginning. He could read fast enough to catch up with the words. He wanted to review what Bernard had already said, to see if he could make sense of more of it.

Bernard’s final electronic diary entries, beginning 0835

(Text break 1035-1105)

(end text 1126.39)

Heinz Paulsen-Fuchs read the final words on the VDT and raised his eyebrows. Hands on the arm of his chair, he looked at the clock on the wall

1126.46

He glanced at Dr. Schatz and stood. “Open the door,” he said. She reached out to the switch and opened the door to the observation room.

“No,” he said. “To the lab.”

She hesitated.

1126.52

He ran to the console, shoved her unceremoniously aside and flipped the three switches in rapid succession, fumbling the last and repeating.

1127.56

The three-layer hatch began its ponderous slide.

“Herr Paulsen-Fuchs—”

He slid in through the foot-wide gap, into the outer isolation area, still chill with released vacuum, into the high-pressure area, ears popping, and into the inner chamber.

1129.32

The room was filled with fire. Paulsen-Fuchs thought for a moment that Dr. Schatz had begun some mysterious emergency cleansing, had unleashed death in the chamber.

But she had not.

1129.56

The fire cleared, leaving a smell of ozone and something twisting lens-like in the air over the cot.

The cot was empty.

1130.00

CHAPTER FORTY FOUR

Suzy felt the queasiness and put down her plate. “Is it now?” she asked the empty air. She pulled the cloak tighter. “Kenny, Howard, is it now? Cary?”

She stood in the middle of a smooth circular arena, the gray food cylinder behind her. The sun was moving in irregular circles and the air seemed to shimmer. Cary had told her about what would happen the night before, while she slept; told as much as she would understand. “Cory? Mother?”

The cloak stiffened.

“Don’t got!” she screamed. The air grew warm again and the sky seemed covered with old varnish. The clouds smoothed into oily streaks and the wind picked up, driving between the pillar-covered mound on one side of the arena and the spiked polyhedron on the other. The polyhedron’s spikes glowed blue and quivered. The polyhedron itself sectioned into triangular wedges; light leaked from between the wedges, red as molten lava.

“This is it, isn’t it?” she asked, crying. She had seen so much in dreams the past week, had spent so much time with them, that she had become confused over what was real and what was not. “Answer me!”

The cloak shivered and moved up in a hood over her head. The hood sealed itself under her chin and wrapped her forehead in a thin, translucent white layer. Then it grew around her fingers and formed gloves, down to her legs and feet, wrapping her tight but allowing her to move as freely as before.

The air smelled sweetly of varnishes, fruits, flowers. Then of warm fresh bread. The cloak slapped around her face and she tried to scratch at it with her fingers. She rolled on the ground until the voice in her ears told her to stop. She lay flat in the middle of the arena, staring upward through the transparency.

Be quiet. Be still. It was her mother’s voice, stern but gentle. You’ve been a very willful young girl, the voice said, and you’ve refused everything we’ve offered. Well, I might have done the same. Now I ask one more time, and decide quickly. Do you wish to go with us?

“Will I die if I don’t?” Suzy asked, voice muffled.

No. But you’ll be alone. Not one of us is staying.

“They’re taking you away!”

What Cary said. Did you listen, Seedling? That was Kenneth. She struggled to tear the cloak away.

“Don’t leave me.”

Then come with us.

“No! I can’t!”

No time, Seedling. Last chance.

The sky was warm electric orange-yellow and the clouds had thinned to tangled ragged threads. “Mother, is it safe? Will I be afraid?”

It’s safe. Come with us, Suzy.

Her mouth was paralyzed, but her mind seemed to crackle and come apart. “No,” she thought.

The voices stopped. For a time all she saw was racing lines of red and green, and her head hurt, and she felt like she would vomit.

The air glittered high above. The ground of the arena shrunk beneath her, the surface crazing and breaking up.

And for a dizzy moment, she was in two places at once. She was with them—they had taken her away, and even now she spoke to her mother and brothers, to Cary and her friends…

And she was in the crumbling arena, surrounded by the tattered remnants of the pillared mound and the spiked polyhedron. The structures were falling apart, as if made of sand at a beach, drying and collapsing under the sun.

Then the feeling passed. Her queasiness was over. The sky was blue, though bits and pieces of it hurt to look at.

The cloak fell away from her and was indistinguishable from the dust of the arena.

She stood and brushed herself off.

The island of Manhattan was as level and empty as a cookie sheet. To the south, clouds billowed thick and dark gray. She turned around. Where the food cylinder had been, dozens of open boxes haphazardly filled with cans now rested. On top of the nearest box was a can-opener.

“They think of everything,” Suzy McKenzie said. In minutes, the rain began to fall.