by Greg Bear
“Do you? Maybe you do. I thought, when I found out about your mother’s lover, I thought I would die. It hurt almost as much as this does. I thought I owned her.”
Bernard wished the conversation would take another direction. “Gerald doesn’t mind going off to school for a year.”
“But I didn’t. I was just sharing her. Even if a woman only has you for a lover, you share her. She shares you. All this concern with fidelity, it’s a sham, a mask. Mike. It’s the record that counts. What you do, how well you do it, how dogged you are.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Say.” His father’s eyes widened.
“What?” Bernard asked, taking his hand again. “We stayed on together thirty years after that.”
“I never knew.”
“Didn’t need to know. I was the one who needed to know, to accept. That’s not all that’s on my mind. Mike, remember the cabin? There’s a stack of papers up in the loft, under the bunk.”
The cabin in Maine had been sold ten years before.
“I was doing some writing,” his father continued after swallowing hard and painfully. His face wrinkled up and he made a bitter moue. “About when I was a doctor.”
Bernard knew where the papers were. He had rescued them and read them during his internship. They were now in a file in his office in Atlanta.
“I have them, Father.”
“Good. Did you read them?”
“Yes.” And they were very important to me, Father. They helped me choose what I wanted to do in neurology, the direction I wanted to take Tell him, tell him!
“Good. I’ve always known about you, Mike.”
“What?”
“How much you loved us. You’re just not demonstrative, are you? Never have been.”
“I love you. Loved mother.”
“She knew. She was not unhappy when she died. Well.” He made the face again. “I have to sleep now. You sure you can’t find a good young new body for me?”
Bernard nodded. Tell him.
“The papers were very important to me, Father. Dad.”
He hadn’t called him Dad since he had been thirteen. But the old (old) man didn’t hear. He was asleep. Bernard picked up his coat and valise and left, passing the nurse’s station to inquire-out of habit-when the next medication would be.
His father died at three o’clock the next morning, asleep and alone.
And farther…
Olivia Ferguson, the same wonderfully smooth eighteen years old as he, her first name echoing her complexion, her plush dark hair pressing against the Corvette’s neck rest turned her large green eyes on him and smiled. He glanced at her and returned the smile and it was the most wonderful evening in the world, it was fine; the third time he had taken a girl out on a date. He was, wonder of wonders, a virgin—and this night it didn’t seem to matter. He had asked her out near the bell tower on the UC Berkeley campus as she stood near one of the twin bronze bears, and she had looked at him with real sympathy.
“I’m engaged,” she had said. “I mean, it couldn’t be anything—”
Disappointed, and yet ever-prepared to be gallant, he had said, “Well, then it’ll just be an evening out. Two people on the town. Friends.” He hardly knew her; they shared an English class. She was the loveliest girl in the class, tall and composed, quiet and assured yet not in the least distant. She had smiled and said, “Okay.”
And now he felt the freedom, released from the obligation of pursuit; the first time he felt on equal footing with a woman. Her fiancé, she explained, was in the Navy, stationed at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Her family lived on Staten Island, in a house where Herman Melville had once stayed a summer.
The wind blew her hair without mussing it—miraculous, wonderful hair which (in theory) would be delightful to feel, run his hands through. They had been talking since he picked her up at her home, an apartment she shared with two women near the old white Claremont Hotel. They had driven across the Golden Gate into Marin to eat at a small seafood restaurant the Klamshak, and talked there—about classes, about plans, about what getting married was all about (he didn’t know and didn’t even bother to fake sophistication). They had both agreed the food was good and the decor not in the least original-cork floats and nets on the wall, filled with plastic lobsters and a weary-looking dried blowfish, an old holed dory perched out front on shell-strewn sand. Not once did he feel awkward or young or even inexperienced.
He thought, as they drove back across the bridge, In other circumstances, I’m sure we’d fall in love with each other. I’m positive we’d be married in a few years. She’s terrific—and I’m not going to do anything about it. The sensation he felt at this was sad and romantic and altogether wonderful.
He knew that if he pressed her, she would probably come up to his apartment with him, and they would make love.
Even though he hated and despised being a virgin, he would not press her. He would not even suggest it. This was too perfect.
They sat in the ‘vette outside the converted old mansion where she lodged and discussed Kennedy, laughed about their fears during the missile crisis, and then held hands and just looked at each other.
“You know,” he said quietly, “there are times when…” He stopped.
“Thank you,” she said. “I just thought you would be good on a date. Most men, you know—”
“Yeah. Well, that’s me.” He grinned. “Harmless.”
“Oh, no. Not harmless. Not in the least.”
Now was the turning point It could go one way, or the other. He flashed on her olive-colored body and knew it was smoothly, youthfully perfect He knew that she would go with him to his apartment.
“You’re a romantic, aren’t you?” she said.
“I suppose I am.”
“I am too. The silliest people in the world are romantics.”
He felt heat in his face and neck. “I love women,” he said. “I love the way they talk and move. They’re enchanting.” He was going to open up now, and regret it later, but what he felt was too true and undeniable, especially after this evening. “I think most men should feel a woman is, like, sacred. Not on a pedestal, that sort of thing. But just too beautiful for words. To be loved by a woman, and-That would just be incredible.”
Olivia looked through the windshield, a smile flickering on her face. Then she looked down at her purse and smoothed her calf-length blue dress with her hands. “It’ll happen,” she said.
“Yeah, sure.” He nodded. But not between us.
“Thank you,” she said again. He held her hand, and then reached up to caress her cheek. She rubbed against his hand like a kitten and tugged on the door handle. “See you in class.”
They hadn’t even kissed.
—What has happened to me since? Three wives—the third because she looked like Olivia—and this distancing, this standing apart. I have lost far too many illusions.
There are options.
—I don’t understand.
What would you wish to revise?
—If you mean go back, I don’t see how.
It is all possible here, in Thought Universe. Simulations. Reconstructions from your memory.
—I could live out another life?
When there is time.
—With the real Olivia? She…where was she, is she?
That is not known.
—Then I’ll pass. I am not interested in dreams.
There are more memories within you.
—Yes…
But where did they fit, where did they come from?
Randall Bernard, twenty-four, had wed Tiffany Marnier on the seventeenth of November, 1943, in a small Kansas City church. She wore a silver-beaded silk and white lace gown that her mother had worn for her wedding, no veil, and the flowers had been blood-red roses. They had-
They sipped a cup of wine between them and exchanged their vows and broke a piece of bread and the minister, a Theosophist who would by the end of the 1940s be a Vedantist, pronounced them equal in
the eyes of the Deity, and now united by love and common regard.
The memory was tinted, like an old photograph, and not good on details. But it was there and he hadn’t even been born, and he was seeing it, and then seeing their wedding night, marveling in the quick glimpses of his own creation and how so little had changed between man and woman, marveling at his mother’s passion and pleasure, and his father’s doctorly, precise, knowing skill, even in bed a doctor.
And his father went off to war, serving as a corpsman in Europe, moving with Patton’s U.S. Third Army through the Ardennes and crossing the Rhine near Coblenz-sixty-five miles in three days—and his son watched what he could not possibly have seen. And then he watched what his father could not possibly have seen:
A soldier in plus-fours stepping into the dark, dank hallway of a brothel in Paris; not his father, not anybody he knew—
Very dim, but clear in outline, a woman rocking a child in orange sunlight coming through an isinglass window—
A man fishing with cormorants in a gray early morning river—
A child staring out of a barn loft at a curie of men in the yard below, slaughtering a huge black and white wide-eyed bullock—
Men and women doffing their long white robes and swimming in a muddy river surrounded by red stone bluffs—
A man standing on a cliff, horn bow in hand, watching a herd of antelopes cross a hazy grass plain—
A woman giving birth in a dark underground place, lit by tallow lamps, watched by smeared, anxious faces—
Two old men arguing about impressed balls of clay in a circle drawn in sand—
—I don’t remember these things. They aren’t me, I didn’t experience them—
He broke free of the flow of information. With both hands, he reached up to red-glowing circles over his head, so warm and attractive.—Where did they come from? He touched the circles and felt the answer in his hundred-cell body.
Not all memory comes from an individual’s life.
—Where, then?
Memory is stored in neurons-interactive memory, carried in charge and potential, then downloaded to chemical storage in cells, then downloaded to molecular level. Stored in introns of individual cells.
The insight was almost agonizing in its completeness and intensity.
Symbiotic bacteria and transfer viruses naturally occurring in all animals and specific for each species—are implanted with molecular memory transcribed from the intron. They exit the individual and pass on to another individual, “infect,” transfer the memory to somatic cells. Some of the memories are then returned to chemical storage status, and a few return to active memory.
—Across generations?
Across millennia.
—The introns are not junk sequences…
No. They are highly condensed memory storage.
Vergil Ulam had not created biologic in cells out of nothing. He had stumbled across a natural function—the transfer of racial memory. He had altered a system already in existence.
—I do not care! No more revelations. No more insights. I’ve had enough. What happened to me? What did I become? What good is revelation when it’s wasted on a fool?
He was back in the framework of Thought Universe again. He looked around at the images, the symbolic sources of different branches of information, then at the rings over his head. They glowed green now.
You are DISTRESSED. Touch them.
He reached up and touched them again.
With a jerk, he stretched out into the interface and began to integrate with the macro-scale Bernard; up the tunnel of dissociation, into the warm darkness of the lab. It was night—or at least sleeping time.
He lay on his cot, barely able to move.
We can no longer hold your body form.
—What?
You will be withdrawn into our realm again soon, within two days. All your work in the macro-scale must be completed by that time.
—No…
We have no choice. We have held off long enough. We must transform.
“No! I’m not ready! This is too much!” He realized he was screaming and held both hands to his mouth.
He sat up on the edge of the cot, his grotesquely ridged face dripping sweat.
CHAPTER FORTY
Are you going to leave again? Just go away?” Suzy held on to Kenneth’s hand. He stopped before the elevator. The door opened.
“It’s tough just being human again, you know?” he said. “It’s lonely. So we’ll go back, yes.”
“Lonely? What about how I’ll feel? You’ll be dead again.”
“Not dead, Seedling. You know that.”
“Might as well be.”
“You could join us.”
Suzy started trembling. “Kenny, I am afraid.”
“Look. They left you, like you asked, and they’re letting you go. Though what you’ll do out there, I don’t know. The city’s not made for people any more. You’ll be fed and you’ll live okay, but…Suzy, everything’s changing. The city will change more. You’ll be in the way…but they won’t hurt you. If you choose, they’ll set you aside like a national park.”
“Come with me, Kenny. You and Howard and Mom. We could go back-”
“Brooklyn doesn’t exist any more.”
“Jesus, you’re like a ghost or something. I can’t talk sense to you.”
Kenny pointed to the elevator. “Seedling-”
“Stop calling me that, goddammit! I’m your sister, you creep! You’re just going to leave me out there—”
“That’s your choice, Suzy,” Kenneth said calmly.
“Or make me a zombie.”
“You know we’re not zombies, Suzy. You felt what they’re like, what they can do for you.”
“But I won’t be me anymore!”
“Stop whining. We all change.”
“Not that way!”
Kenneth looked pained. “You’re different than you were when you were a little girl. Were you ever afraid of growing up?”
She stared at him. “I am still a little girl,” she said. “I’m slow. That’s what everybody says.”
“Were you ever afraid of not being a baby? That’s the difference. Everybody else is still locked into being babies. We’re not. You could grow up, too.”
“No,” Suzy said. She turned away from the elevator. “I’m going back to talk to Mom.” Kenny grabbed her by the arm.
“They’re not there anymore,” he said. “It’s a real strain, being rebuilt like this.”
Suzy gaped at him, then ran into the elevator and leaned against the back wall. “Will you come down with me?” she asked.
“No,” Kenneth said. I’m going back. We still love you, Seedling. We’ll watch over you. You’ll have more mothers and brothers and friends than you’ll ever know. Maybe you’ll let us be with you, sometime.”
“You mean, inside me, like them?”
Kenneth nodded. “Well always be around. But we aren’t going to rebuild our bodies for you.”
“I want to go down now,” she said.
“Going down, then,” Kenneth said. The elevator doors started to close. “Good-bye, Suzy. Be careful.”
“KennnNETHHH!” But the door closed and the elevator descended. She stood in the middle of the floor and ran her fingers through her long, stringy blond hair.
The door opened.
The lobby was a webwork of gray, solid-looking arches supporting the upper mass of the tower. She imagined—or perhaps remembered what they had shown her—the elevator shaft and the restaurant deck being all that remained of the original tower, left specially for her.
Where will I go?
She stepped on the gray and red speckled floor-not carpet, not concrete, but something faintly resilient, like cork. A brown and white sheet—the last she saw of that particular substance—slid down over the elevator door and sealed it with a hissing noise.
She walked through the webwork of arches, stepping over cylindrical humps in the red and gray
surface, leaving the shadow of the transformed tower and standing in half-clouded daylight.
The north tower stood alone. The other tower had been dismantled. All that remained of the World Trade Center was a single rounded spire, smooth and glossy gray in some areas, rough and mottled black in others, with a hint of webwork in patterns pushing up through the outer material.
From the transformed plaza, covered with feathery treelike fans, to the waterfront there was nothing more than twenty feet tall.
She walked between the fans, waving gently on their shiny red trunks, down to the shore. The water was a solid, gelatinous green-gray, no waves, smooth as glass and just as shiny. She could see the pyramids and irregular spheres of Jersey City, like a particularly weird collection of children’s blocks and toys; the reflection in the solid river was vivid and perfect.
The wind sighed pleasantly. It should have been cold or at least cool, but the air was warm. Already her chest hurt with not crying. “Mother,” she said, “I just want to be what I am. Nothing more. Nothing less.” Nothing more? Suzy, that’s a lie.
She stood by the shore for a long time, then turned and began her hike into Manhattan Island.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
To Bernard, the ridiculous environment he had lived in for so many weeks seemed the lesser of two realities.
He did little work now. He lay back on the bed, keyboard under his arm, thinking and waiting. Outside, he knew, the tension was building. He was the focus.
Paulsen-Fuchs could not prevent two million people from getting at him, destroying him and the lab. (Villagers with torches; he was both Dr. Frankenstein and the monster. Ignorant frightened villagers doing God’s work.)
In his blood, his flesh, he carried part of Vergil I. Ulam, part of his father and mother, parts of people he had never known, people perhaps thousands of years dead. Within, there were millions of duplicates of himself, sinking deeper into the noocyte world, discovering the layers and layers of universes within the biologic: old, new and potential.
And yet—where was the insurance policy, the guarantee that he wasn’t being deceived? What if they were simply conjuring false dreams to make him quiescent, to drug him for the metamorphosis? What if their explanations were all sugar-coated phrases meant to reassure? He had no evidence the noocytes lied—but then, how could one tell when something so alien lied, or if “lie” was even an accessible concept for them?