Blood Music

by Greg Bear

  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 an
ybody 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.