“But . . . Chicago? And in the middle of some sort of postapocalyptic nightmare of the future? How can I believe—”
“You can believe it or not. It’s your choice. I can only say what is true.”
“Airmid. Bloody goddess of healing Airmid?”
“If you like . . . . We have been known in so many times, so many places. So many different names . . . Wherever the fabric between worlds, between times, is weak or particularly thin we may be perceived. Some perceive us as beings from some other universe, timeline, running in parallel. The fairies. Elves. The Tuatha de Danann.”
“Portals. Your friend LaSalle mentioned them. But . . . perceived?”
“Or seen. Is this Elfenhame? The Otherworld? Fairyland? Depends on who is doing the seeing. And when, from their temporal origin point. And where they traverse the divide. Am I human? A magical creature? A messenger of heaven? Perspective is everything. Context is everything. Dependent upon your frame of reference.”
“Magic is science we do not yet comprehend.”
“Yes. Exactly so.”
“My ancestor—
“Lord Thomas Learmont de Ercildoune.”
Gaelan nodded.
“He was an especially good man. Poet, philosopher, prophet. Brilliant. All the House of Learmont have been so ever since. From Thomas to . . . you. He could foretell the future, but it was a future we enabled him to see.”
“You showed him . . . this?”
“No, of course not. Thomas observed what his mind, his—frame of reference—would allow. And only what we could afford to show him. A forward look into history, but only in bits and pieces. He puzzled out some of the rest, but through his decidedly medieval prism. He was the first keeper of the healing book, what we call the Saf Rafah. I gave to it him myself to carry back into his time. A rather practical reason, if shortsighted.”
She was convincing, but Gaelan did his best to remain unconvinced. “Practical?”
“My father was a man with a temper. A genius. Powerful, a great, great healer. Yes. A man, not a god, no more than I am a goddess. You know, of course, the story of the warrior Nuada who lost his hand in battle many hundreds of years ago by your own timeline. It was one of the few times we dared to insert ourselves into the past. Into someone else’s business—a disastrous war.”
Gaelan knew the legend well enough. Airmid one-upped her father, replacing the silver hand her father, the god of medicine Dian Cecht, had set into the stump of Nuada’s wrist with one of flesh and bone. Dian was furious and destroyed Airmid’s healing cloak, which contained within it the curing herbs for all illness and disease. With the raging breath of a powerful storm he shook her cloak until it was bare; all the cures had been cast to the four winds, never again to be found.
“My father was furious with me, and with good reason. I’d been driven by arrogance. Stupidity, using technology I had no right to . . . Nuada was a great but damaged man who had the vision to change a world engulfed by darkness. I wanted so much for him to succeed. And I believed, stupidly, without two human, perfect hands he would be worse than dismissed . . . I feared for him, for his safety and his ability to withstand . . . All this is beside the point. When my father learned of what I’d done, he threatened to destroy everything. Legend says it was a cloak into which I’d gathered all healing knowledge, but that is not quite correct. A bit more high-tech than that, but again, it is of little matter and a long time ago. I knew my father would carry through with his threat, and I worried that all medicine, all science, would be lost forever. I created a sort of backup copy.”
“The ouroboros book.”
“Yes. The Saf Rafah.”
Airmid’s people, the Tuatha de Danann . . . Historians had been ambiguous. Legend or history? A mythological people or a highly advanced civilization settling eventually in Ireland? Advanced in medicine. Advanced in technology. But from the future? No wonder there had been scholarly confusion—if Gaelan were to believe her.
“You see, Mr. Erceldoune, we are quite human. Throughout history, we have been thought of as magical beings. Magic is mostly about perception, is it not? What was magical to Thomas, to Arthur Conan Doyle, to those a century ago or eight, all science, all technology, is magic. We can fly, yes, but it is explainable. Our miniature pedal drones.” She kicked out her feet and touched her wrist. The blades whirred. “Something you, a man of the twenty-first century, can comprehend. Wormholes in your time—only just beginning to be understood. Time travel is a fiction. Even now, we don’t know how it works—not exactly, only that it is possible.”
Yes, Gaelan could see the sense of it, but. He opened his mouth to ask a question, but Airmid held up a hand.
“We are seen only in glimpses and shadows. Out the corner of people’s eyes. The space-time continuum frays and repairs itself continually, regenerating only to fragment in another place, another time. There are many portals to many worlds. This is ours. The world of your future.”
“Were you not more than that? More than a glimpse here and there?”
“Yes, particularly in Ireland, and only that one time did we dare make that mistake—Nuada, the result. The consequences that followed. The boundary between worlds is very fragile there, and eventually we were revered as deities, venerated. It did much for the ego, but in the end, we were feared. Too clever for our own good. Especially after—”
“You fixed Nuada’s hand. I am certain that would have raised some medieval eyebrows.”
“Indeed, and so we fled back to our side of the divide. It was the last time we’d venture that far from . . . home. Since then, we have appeared occasionally to certain people—those who possess an ability to perceive us. Some more than others. But mostly in grainy images, barely seen phantoms. Thomas could see us, could interact with us. Conan Doyle could see us, but not interact with us.”
“Conan Doyle wrote as much. A journal he kept. I discovered it . . . It was to his great frustration that he could look but not touch.”
“We do not understand what gives one the ability to fully cross such portals from one time, one universe, to another, or how the portals work. All of us—in here—were in Chicago when events started reeling out of control. It is where all the horror began. Ground zero. Had we been in New York or London, it is possible we would never have crossed paths. Your friend Tesla created the portal to connect these exact points. Yet destiny always seems to find a way, does it not?”
Destiny. Was this his, then? To be privy to yet another monumental secret. One he could never disclose? Or did fate have something else in mind?
“It began, you see, not long after your accident in Chicago.”
Was it only weeks ago? The image flashed before Gaelan, vivid and too fresh. Tumbling down the limestone cliff, his bike exploding as its fuel tank hit the rocks just above his head. He’d implored the gathered good Samaritans, “Let me be. I’ll be fine. No need to call nine-one-one . . .” Gaelan shuddered, and the memory disintegrated into grains of sand.
“Are you listening?”
Gaelan nodded. “Sorry—”
“It seems you nodded off. Are you all right?”
“Yes. Sorry. Go on.”
“A medical treatment, that’s all it was intended to be. A man’s pain seeing his wife stricken by a terrible genetic disease, and then their daughter contracting the same fatal illness. A young girl. A tragic story. At first, a noble instinct to save one life, then the possibility to save many, many lives. Is that not always the way? Not everyone involved in the project was in it for altruistic aims. You see, in the treatment, in the cell strain from which it was to be derived, lay the treasure map right to the Holy Grail. The elixir of life.”
“Immortality.” How long ago must it have been in their timeline? How many years in his future . . . ? And how had that come to this?
“Patient X, the individual from whom the cell strain was derived, was a man of unique physiology. His tissues possessed the capability to infinitely regenerate, unheard of in
humans at the time. Yet there he was.”
Gaelan fidgeted nervously with his fingers. He knew where this was headed.
“The mechanics of the regeneration worked at a subcellular level, wrought of technology so far advanced from anything of which he would have been aware, far beyond whatever advances had so far been accomplished in the realm of genomic manipulation. It would have been incomprehensible to him—to anyone of his time.”
“Me.” A statement of acceptance. But she spoke of him in the past tense.
“Yes. Your accident last month, by your timeline, was the trigger, but in our world, decades ago. The circumstances surrounding an impossible-to-believe rapid recovery from your traumatic injuries had been largely discredited by hospital and medical officials. Dismissed as a sort of mass hysteria amplified by social media, fake news, and tabloid journalism.”
“But I thought you said—”
She ignored the interruption. “However. Not all were quick to dismiss the so-called Miracle Man. One of these, a multibillionaire. A man at the very pinnacle of corporate and political power in the United States. The world. Your world. Our world.”
Gaelan thought about the pharmaceutical companies that would have been listening, ears pricked, to the story of a Miracle Man not so easily dismissed as the public might believe. Like Transdiff—Anne’s employer.
“The dose makes the poison,” Gaelan whispered. It was as valid for Paracelsus as it was now and ever would be.
Arie shook her head. “In this case, not so much. The dose can be infinitesimal. Small as the cannula of the finest-gauge hypodermic needle.”
“You created the book. I became immortal because of something I did incorrectly with a formulation in that book. Hundreds of years ago. And the book itself, far older than that. Any discoveries, any misuse of them, the consequences . . . all from this world. I don’t—”
“A classic paradox. A book created in the future, passed backwards, to Thomas in the thirteenth century . . . set in motion by events seven centuries later that led . . . ultimately . . . to . . . this. This world. This nightmare we all must live in. It was never intended . . .”
Destiny.
“All we can do is hope to find a way back. End the loop. Eliminate the pathway that eventually, always, leads us to this fate.”
“You’ve tried . . . before?”
“Yes. Once or twice. Different ways, but as I said, we don’t quite know how the portals work. It’s as much luck as anything.”
“And my being here . . . a stroke of luck?”
“Destiny that you would come to this place, I suppose. Muscle memory—a return to a safe port . . . ? It doesn’t matter. We only want to put things to rights. We think . . . we believe . . . some of us, anyway, that it’s possible. This is where you fit into that absurdist play. Will it work this time? We don’t know. Can’t know. We can only keep trying.”
“Did you not realize you were playing with fire? Giving a match to scientific toddlers?”
She looked stricken. “Don’t you think I’ve done nothing, all these years, but regret my lack of . . . judgment? It is why I must . . . we must make it right.”
“I have to ask . . . The mechanism . . . I’ve always wondered how it was possible for me to . . . The specificity of the recipes in the book. Unique to each disease, illness described. Brilliant. Yet, the sensitivity to even the slightest error . . . How could I have known that to err, even in the slightest—”
“Infinite tissue regeneration had never been intended as part of the book, you see. But we were betrayed by one of our collaborators. After my father threatened to destroy every last vestige of medical advancement, I realized something had to be done. To preserve the work into the future, no matter the repercussions. I feared a return to the Dark Ages. And my fears were not misplaced, as you might have already figured out. Not exactly the Enlightenment out there, is it?”
“Why? What happened?”
“When it became known it was possible to accomplish genomic manipulation on such a grand scale, the reverberations were earth-shaking, as you might imagine, and not only for curing disease.”
A chill snaked down Gaelan’s spine. It wasn’t just immortality, but immortal—perfect—humans. A quest that had gone on for millennia, finally achieved. The temptation to drink at that grail . . .
“Researchers were already working on genome editing. CRISPR, for example . . . others in various states of progress. Combined with what we . . . what was discovered in your genetic structures . . . The first superhuman was created in only three years. The technology for it—”
“The beginnings of a master race.”
“Yes. Stronger, faster, smarter . . . but only for those who might afford the technology.”
History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it always rhymes, does it not? Dear God. The samples of his blood he’d given Anne. For the good of medicine, he’d told her. And gave her the tools to use it. Was he not equally complicit? And Anne?
“The experimentation was prone to corruption from both the potentially lucrative nature of it and the technology itself. No one knew that the tiny machines—the nanobots—were smart. They adapted, changed, and beyond anyone’s real control, for we did not understand how or why.”
“The lesions?”
“Yes. As the technology became more widely in use, it was cut with other things. Supply was limited, expensive, so . . . Certain mutations were accompanied by terrible, disfiguring adverse effects and it spread like a virus among the general population. You can live forever but be ever disfigured and in eternal pain.”
Gaelan needed time to process this. Could he believe it? Did he want to believe it? She still hadn’t explained how he’d come to be immortal. “Tell me how the book works. How it made me—”
“So now you believe? The design of the book is an extraordinary achievement. If only . . .” She stopped. For the first time, he noticed that her hands were trembling. “You see, the inks of the Saf Rafah are coated onto special microscopic membranes. Graphenes, microscopic membranes embedded with extracts, complex molecules all bound up with submicroscopic machines—nanobots—specific to each ailment. Some act upon DNA, activating enzymes. Others attach to virus microphages and destroy them. Others do . . . other things. Incredibly advanced. I couldn’t let the technology die completely. To do so would have condemned the world to . . . but you see, I have condemned it. Never was it intended to be so misused. I never int . . .” She was sobbing, the tears flowing freely down her face.
Gaelan had read about graphene. Twenty-first-century magic. Nanobots, too. Northwestern University was an international center for their study and development. The pieces had all been there, eventually, even without his tissue, his mutated DNA; how long until, given the state of the genomic research . . . ?
“Forgive me my tears. It has been a long time since I’ve explained it to anyone. The weight is too much to bear . . . all of this . . . our fault.” She sniffled into her flowing sleeve. “You see, the instructions to activate the Saf Rafah’s treatments were likewise hidden by language, art. To be used only by any enlightened enough to parse through the layers and layers of coding. Adept at science, at language. We thought we’d accomplished a perfect job of it, creating what appears to be medieval medical book—a grimoire, if you will.”
“To send it back to the thirteenth century, it could not be a modern, printed anything!”
“Exactly. I know it’s not as romantic as the ballads would have it, but it has the benefit of being true. Several of us were involved in creating it. As you might imagine. The art, the languages, the materials. I was—am—a physician, not an engineer. Not a linguist. Nor an artist. What I did not know was that someone on our team tampered with the complex renderings in the book, hidden within them small detours that if followed by design—or error—would eventually lead back to immortality, despite our best efforts. It was the one thing we did not want. The whole point. Yet . . .”
“But it did.”
Gaelan could not forestall the chilling image of the tiny machines swarming throughout his anatomy. He shivered at the thought. He needed to sort this out. He understood little about quantum physics, which would have come in handy right about now. “If the ouroboros book—the Saf Rafah, a book created in my future—came to me through my ancestor who’d acquired it in the thirteenth century . . .”
“Hence, the paradox. You cannot change the past, but there are many futures that might be triggered by a single event. The Saf Rafah ultimately did nothing to change what we’d become, as we’d hoped it would. Had you not fallen down that ravine, you’d never have become the Miracle Man, and none of this would have happened. Had we not been betrayed in creating it . . . There were many, many variables along the way. The book was more than a simple means to an end.”
“Had I not erred in 1625 in treating plague, I’d never have become immortal. Who knows what . . . Tell me; where are the animals . . . birds, fish . . . Outside, they’re—”
“The birds have vanished. All wildlife. Overhunting. Where there are too many people, resources are scarce. People had no choice. Chronic starvation is . . . uncomfortable, if not fatal. Is it possible to defeat? Perhaps with innovation, but our society is frozen. Paralyzed. Not quite zombies. The wealthy, the powerful have all settled far from the cities. In little utopian enclaves. Perhaps the top half a percent of the top half percent. The rest of the world lives on . . . a walking, breathing sort of death.” She smiled humorlessly. “I hear you ran into a gang of Burkies?”
“Who are they? What do they want?”
“Their aim is to kidnap us, hold us captive as part of their supply chain. We, in here, are immune to the worst of the side effects. One of the few urban enclaves, I suppose. There’s a good trade in our body parts, for food, trinkets, whatever. Especially because we can regrow them. Usually.”
“Body parts . . . ? The tumors?”
“Yes, they grow quite large. More than disfiguring. Graft one of our hands on someone else’s unuseable, disfigured limb . . . ? Brand new hand. Worth a lot of money to those who’ve got it.”
Alchemy of Glass Page 31