Radiant Dawn

by Cody Goodfellow

  "What're you going to do to Radiant Dawn?" Stella asked.

  "I thought I made myself clear before. We're at war, dear heart."

  "You called them a disease. I thought that meant you were trying to cure them."

  "They are a disease. But there's no cure. They have to be destroyed."

  "They're human beings!"

  "Oh no," Mrachek clucked her tongue at Stella as if she were a potty-mouthed child. "They were human beings once; poor, dying souls who came to Radiant Dawn as their last hope for survival. Like you did. But they've been reengineered into something else, and they're an unstable population. It's either them, or us."

  After the Indians, the slaves and the Jews, you'd think white people would back off that argument. For once, don't let race cloud your thinking, don't let this become a fight, because there's nowhere to storm off to when you lose. "They seem to want to keep to themselves. Why can't they be contained?"

  "Could the first egg-stealing mammals be contained? Could primates be kept in the trees? Could we be kept from using tools to make the world we've made? Whether it's in their nature or not, they're going to spread, and they're going to replace us. Unless it's finished here." Mrachek rubbed the bridge of her nose wearily.

  "But if they're what's next, who are we to stop them? Who are you to kill them off?"

  "Come look at this," she said, and beckoned Stella closer to the microscope. She approached, eyes on the dartgun resting in Mrachek's palm on the countertop. She peered through the lenses, adjusting the focus until she could make out an undifferentiated sea of particulates. She dialed up the magnification by a hundred and the sea became a wall of cells, amorphous sacs, mortared together by neoplasmic streamers. Stella recognized the formless blobs immediately. Cancer cells. Organic anarchy incarnate, they had no function other than to proliferate and murder their host. Stella saw these cells in her dreams.

  "They're not yours. They've been cultured from Mr. Napier, although cultured isn't the right word, because they don't even require a growth medium. They keep multiplying until they've expended all available resources, weeks after separation from the parent organism. These aren't taken from Napier's cancer. They are Napier. A small enough sample breaks down into this, the dormant state." Feeling Mrachek hovering over her, Stella backed away from the scope, stepping on the medic's toes.

  She didn't seem to notice. More to herself than for Stella's benefit, she began to lecture. "Did you know, there's a theory, I didn't used to have any use for it, but some homeopathic researchers point to the origin of cancer as the result of the dead end of evolution. We've made everything for ourselves, so we can't genetically improve, and our genes are striking back the only way they know how; cancer as frustrated evolutionary force expressing itself as death. If it can't change us, it'll kill us all off and start again. But someone signed a peace treaty, and sold us out."

  Was she talking about Keogh? Even before she came to Radiant Dawn, he knew what was wrong with her, had offered her words of comfort that she'd foolishly interpreted as an invitation.

  "Stella dear, we're not meant to be replaced by cancer. This isn't the natural order, it's the work of a—" she faltered, busied herself with the syringe, drizzling a minuscule amount of a bluish fluid into the dish. "Look at it now," she said.

  Stella had watched crystals grow as a child. It was fascinating, and she'd badgered those of her foster parents who responded at all to her desires to buy her the kits, and she'd stay up all night, watching the lowly, particolored rocks remake themselves into delicate spires and fairy-palaces before her eyes. All that wonder rushed back into her heart and turned to ashes as she realized what she was seeing.

  The blue fluid coursed through the intercellular crevices and elicited an almost electrical response from the cancer cells. They bloomed. The walls of each tiny cell erupted in questing vines that sped out and intertwined with their neighbors' shoots, tangling and twisting and reaching out of the tissue sample, reaching greedy boring shoots towards the lens. Stella jerked back and her hands went to her eyes. It'd been like watching fire.

  "What do you see?"

  "They're becoming…nerve cells?"

  "Not nerve cells. They're still cancer cells, but they take on all the traits of functional nerve cells when they're introduced to liquefied dendrite cells, or any neurotransmitters. In the last hour, this particular sample has been adipose tissue, skeletal muscle fiber, and glial brain tissue. Is that nature?"

  Stella clenched her fists at her temples. A cure for what was killing her. But was it worse than death, or better than mortal life? She couldn't stand much more of this argument, unless she could drive it into personal territory. "How would you know what's natural?"

  "Stella dear, I was a Major in the US Army Medical Research of Infectious Diseases—USAMRID. I treated emerging viruses in seventeen countries, and I was never afraid. I'm afraid now. Come on."

  She stood and led Stella back down the back corridor, where the quarantine cells were. To the last cell, behind two doors. Where they kept Napier.

  She stopped just short of the double-paned viewing slot. Seeing him—it—would be too much. When she'd seen it the last time, it'd been burned, and shot full of more bullets than she could've carried in a duffel bag, and yet it walked, and regarded her with those gray eyes that weren't Seth Napier's, or Stephen's, but something wiser than a disease. Mrachek's chubby little hand pressed at the small of her back, gently shoving her towards it. She planted her feet, but the medic's lower center of gravity and deceptive strength rocked her off her heels and she stumbled against the door.

  It wasn't what she'd call a disappointment, but it wasn't anything she'd have expected, either. The thing that mauled Mrachek and the soldier was gone. Faced with inescapable containment, Napier lay in a fetal curl, naked, on his cot. In the dim reddish light, he appeared to be shivering, and Stella turned to give Mrachek hell for letting him freeze, when Mrachek switched on a bright white light in the cell.

  It was like turning sunlight on a tub of nightcrawlers. Napier wasn't moving, but his skin wriggled and shifted as the vital tissues underneath waged war over the proper way to build a human body. Its head rolled back and eyes opened and fixed on Stella. Those eyes. The face around them twitched in and out of Napier's and Stephen's features, but the eyes knew her. The thing that'd been Seth Napier grinned at her and splayed out his arms, to display its new body, or to offer her a hug.

  "Look at him, dear heart. Is this the next dominant species? Is this what you'd give the world to?"

  Right away, she noticed that Napier's new body was younger and more powerfully muscled than either he or Stephen had been. Then she noticed the buboes. She'd never seen the symptoms of bubonic plague outside of textbooks, but that was the word that came to mind. Pendulous, purple-black sacs sprouted from his armpits and groin, a collar of them round his neck; even, she noticed, in a sort of turkey crest on his scalp.

  "What's wrong with him?" Stella whispered.

  "Absolutely nothing, dear. He started swelling up like that about twenty-four hours after we brought him in. They're sort of like plague buboes, but they're also like testes. They contain a virus, similar to Rouss' sarcoma virus, only much more aggressive, and infinitely more precise."

  Stella knew only a little about RSV, or any of the other mutagenic viruses which caused cancer in some animals as a by-product of infection. But Stephen hadn't given Seth Napier cancer. "How do you mean?"

  "They're almost more like airborne gametes, only they spawn cancer. They infect their host and immediately set about playing havoc with tumor suppressors and oncogenes in any and all tissue they encounter, and the result is swift, terminal cancer. But in subjects like Mr. Napier, who already had cancer, the effects are much more pronounced. It's somatic-cell cloning. We think he's gone into this phase because his body thinks he's the last one left. He could infect an entire city."

  "Why is he…twitching like that?"

  "We think they do it whenever
they're under stress, or it could be because he was an accident, not properly altered. We just don't know enough, yet. Everything we learn, we're going to learn from that."

  Stella felt sick. Mrachek stood between her and anyplace to sit, so she slumped against the wall. "How long have they been here?"

  "Less than a week. They were altered shortly after midnight on the Fourth of July. But we knew they were coming. This was the result of a generational human-breeding program, among other things. We had to wait until we knew, because we couldn't kill innocent human beings. We tried to stop it, but now we have a narrow window of opportunity to stop them before they spread. And they will." Mrachek then did something Stella had suffered almost no one to do to her, let alone a captor. She wrapped her arms around Stella and Stella sagged against the woman's compact bulk. At least she wouldn't let herself cry.

  "Do you see now why they have to be destroyed?" Mrachek asked.

  "What do you care what I think? I'm just a guinea pig, aren't I?"

  "Who told you that?"

  "I've got ears. If I didn't have cancer myself, what good would I be to you? I'm going to be part of some experiment…" And she was crying now, the hell with it.

  "I—I didn't want to tell you, before, but truth to tell, I didn't care for you all that much. But—yes, I would like you to participate in an experiment, when it's time."

  Stella ripped free and shoved past Mrachek, bolted for the door. She was being handled, like the social workers who placed her with the hitters and the neglecters, because this was the best they could do, and if she'd just try to get along…

  "Fuck you, fat white bitch," Stella hissed over her shoulder.

  "I think you may want to participate," Mrachek cooed, undeterred by Stella's hostility. The dartgun was nowhere in sight, but Stella didn't want to touch the doctor long enough to hit her, anyway. She kept walking away, but she stopped dead in her tracks when the import of Mrachek's last, soft remark hit home.

  "With what I can learn from the unfortunate Mr. Napier, I'll be able to cure your cancer, Stella. Without altering you. You'll be human. And alive."

  "Keep your Nazi Frankenstein claws off me, fat white dyke." Stella went out the door and directly into her own cubicle across the corridor. She collapsed onto her cot and cried, and hammered her fists against the wall until they were numb and bloody. When she finally slipped into sleep, she dreamed of swimming in a sea of cancer that ignited into a fire of nerves when she dove in, a fire of fleshy wires that ate her up and made her new.

  23

  Storch's first clear thought upon waking this time was not of fear or despair or the loneliness he'd tried to bury when Buggs left. It was almost worse. He felt a vast and exhausting sense of disappointment, that the one person in this tired old world that he could count on had let him down yet again. He'd been captured. For the fourth time in as many days, Sgt. Zane Ezekiel Storch, Special Forces commando and unsung hero of the Gulf War, had been knocked down and hogtied like a second-rate Sam Spade knockoff in a hack detective yarn.

  This time, they weren't taking any chances. His arms were cuffed behind his back and his feet shackled, and the two were bound by a chain sheathed in a steel bar that kept him from reaching the tools in his bootheels. He lay on his side on a cold metal bench. The metal vibrated against his cheek, telling him he was in another truck, but the steadiness and the higher pitch of the engine told him this time he was in the back of a van, or a delivery truck.

  Or a paddy wagon. Don't forget the police. You're still a wanted cop-killing felon, for all they know. But somehow, Storch didn't think he was lucky enough merely to have been arrested. He knew he hadn't just fallen asleep at his post in the Motel 6, and his pants were still unsoiled, so the EMP weapon the militia used on him was out. His stomach felt like a pilotless ship on a stormy sea, and his mouth was as dry as cotton batting, so he'd probably been gassed, this time. Or drugged. Whatever the cause, whoever had him, he wasn't planning on being there when they arrived. He blinked his eyes rapidly, trying to discern some form to the darkness around him, but he may as well have been blindfolded.

  "Don't try to move," a voice, a man's voice, said close to his ear.

  "Are you fucking kidding?" he asked, and a clammy palm clapped over his mouth.

  He could feel breath against his ear now, could feel a fine mist of spittle as the speaker leaned in closer still and said, "Keep quiet. Don't make them come back here. Don't make them—" As Storch's senses started to sharpen up to his normal capacity, he noticed a mushiness to the voice, as if it issued from a mouthful of broken teeth. No wonder you don't want them back here. So why aren't you tied up?

  Storch nodded vehemently to indicate that he understood, and wanted the stranger's hand off his face. It was all he could do not to bite that hand. "Who's they?" he whispered. "And who the hell are you?"

  "You don't know? Aren't you one of them? If you crossed them, they wouldn't keep you alive. You must be awfully important to them, for them to take you alive. We—he—he never wanted to hurt anybody before, you know? He was—he changed, I guess…"

  "For the last fucking time," Storch said, sounding as unlike a helpless prisoner in shackles as he possibly could, "who are they?"

  "They're the Radiant Dawn. Or, like, they're the new Radiant Dawn. They're different, but more like themselves than they ever were," a mirthless chuckle of pain and irony. "I was—I'm—"

  And it clicked in Storch's head. "You're Sperling."

  "Yes. Yes, that's—How do you know me?"

  "I've been looking for you. I'm the one who found your daughter."

  "You're the one who called me?" Sperling spat, ignoring his own warning. "Then this is all your fault. If you wouldn't have called me, they would've left me alone—" hyperventilating, face purpling, "was almost free—got me at the airport…" The weakness, the shrinking, self-pitying tone of Sperling's voice made Storch want to break him in half. Then he settled back on a bench across from Storch and drew his knees up, wrapped them in his skinny arms, caught his breath. "Oh, bullshit. I knew someday they'd come for me. Quesada never wastes anything."

  "Who's Quesada?"

  "He's probably using another name, now. But that's who he was when I—when my wife and I—" his words broke up into hitching sobs. Storch tried to maintain his own self-control long enough to get answers out of the man.

  "This Quesada, he ran Radiant Dawn, the cult in the Seventies?"

  "He—yes, he was the leader. Our father, we called him. Our radiant father."

  "And he took Sidra from you nine years ago."

  "Yes, but—"

  "And you let him keep her. You didn't tell the police."

  "It wasn't like that. You don't—please try to understand, it wasn't how it looked. We couldn't—" Sperling reached down into himself and pulled out a cloak of eerie calm. If Storch had been a policeman instead of a soldier, he would have recognized the sublime, almost blissful state that overcomes a fugitive when at last the time has come to confess.

  "He was able to keep it all submerged—out of the news, and so far down in our heads, that we'd never remember. He had this way of looking into you that just blew everything you thought you wanted for yourself right out of your head, everything you thought you were. After Sidra was taken, we started to remember. He preached Tantric sex, and made us have orgies in front of x-ray machines, microwave ovens, and do shit I couldn't begin to describe. He wanted us to be bathed in the radiance when we procreated, so that while our spirits intertwined with the infinite and came unhinged from our bodies, the radiation would reshape our bodies, moving them up the ladder towards perfection, until we would no longer need bodies. Then one day, he told us he was finished, and threw us out. Don't look at me like that, you have no idea what it's like until you've been inside it, until he's been inside you."

  Because Storch was a soldier, and a soldier hogtied in the back of a truck, he couldn't find the velvet glove he needed to stroke Sperling. He wanted to kill him more than e
ver. "You're a piece of shit. How could you let somebody else degrade you like that, and then give him your only child? What did you think you were going to get out of it?"

  "My child? Why didn't we go to the press after he threw us out? Why didn't we sue him or have him arrested when most of us were diagnosed with terminal cancer within a few years of leaving? Wouldn't you? Well, we didn't. We did everything we did for the good of the species. We believed we were changing ourselves for our children's sake. And when the time came, those of us who survived were glad to give up our kids, because they were his, too." He sat back and let the words rattle around the space between them, as if it should've made sense to Storch, should've silenced all his accusations, cut his judgment down to size.

  "We were all sterile," he went on at last. "He was their father. Our wives were the mothers, and radiation was the midwife. Not a single birth defect, you know. Picture of health, every one of them. We never contacted each other after he threw us out, but I think everybody kept track of everybody else. When he came for them nine years ago, we each handled it our own way. Marie and I told as much of the truth as we had to, that our daughter was gone. She was his child, they were all his kids, and he was welcome to them."

  "I don't want to hear any more," Storch cut in. "Help me get free, and I'll get you out of here."

  Sperling's laughter was louder, if not cheerier, than before. "There's no escaping. The children—children of the Dawn—the Moon-Ladder…"