by Greg Bear
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?”
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“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.