Blood Music (20 page)
—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
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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.
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.
