by Greg Bear
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
January 15: Today, they began speaking with me, halting at first, then with greater confidence as the day progressed.
How do I describe the experience of their “voices”? Having finally crossed the blood-brain barrier, and explored the (to them) enormous frontier of my brain, and having discovered a pattern in the activities of this new world—the pattern being me—and realizing that the information from their distant past, months ago, was accurate, that a macroscopic world does exist—
Having learned this much, they have now had to learn what it is to be human. For only then could they communicate with this God in the Machine. Appointing tens of millions of “scholars” to work on this project, in perhaps only the last three days, they have indeed cracked the case, and now chatter with me no more strangely than if they were (far example) aboriginal Australians.
I sit in my desk chair, and when the appointed time comes, we converse. Some of it is in English (I think—the conversation may occur in pre-literate portions of the brain, and be translated by my own mind into English afterward), some of it visual, some of it in other senses—mostly taste, a sense which seems particularly attractive to them.
I cannot really comprehend the size of the population within me. They come in many classes: the original noocytes and their derivatives, those converted immediately after the invasion; the categories of mobile cells, many of them apparently new to the body, newly designed, with new functions; the fixed cells, perhaps not individuals in a mental sense having no mobility and being assigned fixed, if complex, functions; the as-yet unaltered cells (nearly all the cells in my brain and nervous system fall into this category); and others I am not yet clear on.
Together, they number in the tens of trillions.
At a crude guess, perhaps two trillion fully developed, intelligent individuals exist within me.
If I multiply this crude number times the number of people in North America—half a billion, another rough guess—then I end up with a billion trillion, or on the order of 1020. That is the number of intelligent beings on the face of the Earth at this moment—neglecting, of course, the entirely negligible human population.
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 wh
en 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.”