She was wearing her old flannel nightgown. The furniture and décor, even the loose personal effects, were all hers, from her apartment in Bishop. They must have taken pictures before they moved it all, because they hadn't misplaced anything, down to the shelving of her books and the arrangement of coats and hats on the rack beside the door. Everything but her phone.
She smelled flowers. Looking over her shoulder, she noticed the vase of bright zinnias, mums and poppies, then her eyes went to the card. Our Prayers & Best Wishes For Your Recovery, read the front in faded gold script. All of the ER staff from Bishop County Hospital had signed the inside. Thor, the amorous ambulance driver, had made an imprint on the edge with his dentures. Nurse Fisher, ever the den mother, had taken it upon herself to pen a little guilt-wracking message that Stella couldn't finish without crying.
She remembered then that He was there with her. Inside her. Making a mockery of her solitude.
You needed time for yourself.
"What a joke," she said aloud. "I need the rest of my life for myself. I need my head for myself."
Ask yourself, Stella: where would you be now, if not for me?
She closed her eyes, and the dark was cold and choked with dust, and she felt the concrete slabs crushing her, the tie-rods impaling her…
She screamed and her eyes snapped open. She gripped her comforter so hard it purred and tore between her whitened knuckles.
You were ready to surrender yourself to death. Surrender to life, Stella.
She went to the window and looked out. A field of fresh, unbroken powder stretched out to a pine forest on one side, and a plunging river gorge on the other. Beyond, Stella could see only crystalline wreaths of fog, but her inner ear told her she was on a mountaintop. She remembered nothing about coming here. He'd controlled her from the moment she stepped out of the trailer in Baker, let her see none of the journey. A pair of Radiant Dawn patients trundled by just beneath her window. They looked up and waved as they passed.
"How many slaves do you have here?" she asked. She had come to realize that He was neither God nor Guardian Angel, but she couldn't bring herself to call him by name. There was still an outside chance that she was insane, and the voice in her head a delusion brought on by her ordeal. But she knew different. She knew the patients outside were tuned in to the same voice. She could feel it all around her, as if the building itself were His body. Driving this place, where cancer became the key to an eternity of servitude.
I help all who come to me, in their turn.
"You only heal our bodies to steal them, diablo. Do you even have a body of your own?"
His voice in her head tingled with amusement He tried to share with her, goosing her endorphins. You are too young to understand. You still can't imagine that when you have died, the world will go on. You don't really believe that the world existed before you were born, or that it was ever anything you could not understand. The world is older than you, Stella Orozco, and older and stranger by far than you or anyone else imagines.
"Spare me your indoctrination bullshit. I'm alive, and I owe you my life. But I'm me. Don't try to take that away, or I'll make you sorry you saved me." She rediscovered the food, mouth watering and stomach groaning, was He doing that to her? Determined not to be shut up any longer than necessary, she wolfed down her food and drowned it as fast as she could.
I am not an invader, Stella. I am your guide. All of us who have undergone the transformation must eventually learn to accept what we have become. This is not easy. You have been told you are going to die, and to make your peace, when suddenly you are not only cured, but reborn—
"Into slavery," she cut in, swallowing a splash of hot chocolate too quickly and scalding her throat. She chased it down with some of the orange juice, fresh-squeezed and almost drugged with vitamins. "This is a fucking jail. Everyone has their own private you in their heads, spewing bullshit all day and night, and taking over the controls whenever they zig instead of zag."
You have a hard time accepting what you are. How would the rest of the world understand it? You have to be protected, and, yes isolated, during this fragile phase. You, of all people, must see how what we've done here could be misunderstood, and the terrible harm they can do.
"But you're in my goddamned head! You're in there, so you know how fucking crazy it makes me! How could you do that?"
Why are you all my children? You've engulfed your cancer, tamed it even as it has devoured and remade you. Now your body is a function of your mind, but in the wake of your transformation, you have been pushed dangerously close to madness. See what you might have become—
Blink. Stella's body wriggling worms, no arms legs head, a tumor undulating across the sheets. The sun burns her eyes and her body eats them up, she grows scales and a child's crude rendition of legs, and mouths, eating and vomiting and screaming—
With evolution sped up infinitely, human beings would speciate almost immediately. With every individual a species unto himself, the earth would become an abattoir, with competition on a scale never before seen. I am here to remind you of who you are, Stella, to keep you human. Or at least, as human as you want to be.
"I think—" she fought for breath, for words: "I think I'd be alright on my own…" Hating her weakness, she steeled herself. She would never blink again. "Who made you God? Who voted to have you in everyone's heads?"
I am not a god. I only let you believe that because you need it to be true.
"And what about God? You know there's nothing out there that sits in judgment?" She surprised herself with her ridiculous question, because there was no sarcasm in it. She regretted her sincere hope as soon as she voiced it, that there was no God, for surely she was as damned as He. But He only shrank away from her inside her mind, and a fog enveloped her, and it was very hard indeed to remember what she'd asked Him, at all.
I have stolen this fire from the Old Ones who believed themselves gods, and I have learned from their mistakes. I am the eye of the needle through which the world must pass to become Paradise. I only want to help you evolve, Stella. Let me help you.
"What makes me so special? Why do I get to evolve? You've got to know how much I fucking hate you."
Again, laughter and brain-candy. Your cancer made you special. It was the seed of my gift to you, but that day is coming soon, when I will come into the hearts and minds of all the world's people, and make them one.
"You're going to give the whole world cancer?"
We are going to give the whole world cancer.
"And if I don't want to?"
I will give the world what it wants. Life without suffering, infinite adaptability, a guide to direct them to the good for themselves and for their planet. I will share this gift with all the peoples of the world. If you try to stop me…
The brain-candy abruptly shut off and her inner ears flip-flopped, and she gasped and clutched the sheets, but still she felt as if she were falling.
Don't make me show you.
She didn't.
Later, He let her go outside.
The biting cold and ice crystals in the air stung her face and lungs, and she pulled up the hood of the parka she wore. The snow lay two feet deep on the ground, several inches of it fresh powder. The altitude made her giddy, light-headed.
"Where am I?" she asked.
Western Idaho, in the Seven Devils Mountain Range. We are much more isolated here, but much better protected, too.
"I don't see much to protect."
In the spring, this will be a farm. With water from the many streams and generators below-ground, we will be completely self-sufficient. We will thrive.
Her eyes took it all in, but she was surprised by what she felt in His voice. Emotions: pride, love for this place and the people in it. If He thought He was God, he played the role well. God must've felt this way when He turned back the waters of the Flood, and let mankind begin again.
As she trudged away from the building, she looked around it and saw only a p
arking lot and a few outbuildings with snowmobiles, a plow-truck and a helicopter under tarps on a concrete pad. A small village of trailers, already half-buried in snow, flanked the tower on two sides, which was a dead ringer for the one she'd visited at the hospice village in the Owens Valley.
"Where are the houses?"
We learn from our mistakes. This colony will live in tunnels beneath the ground until those who would destroy us are neutralized. But we are growing so fast—thus, the trailers.
She shivered. He took note of this, and added, Not all of us will live below. You may stay above, until your fears are smoothed away.
She stopped short of giving the thought voice, but the sensation washed over her. She hadn't been thinking of the fear of being underground again, but of those who would destroy us, the Mission: Delores Mrachek, who'd died trying to stop her from becoming what she was today, and of the man who died in the ground trying to save her. If he could mistake her thoughts, then there was some part of her he could not reach. Swiftly, she forced herself to think of something else.
"So that's where everybody is? Digging tunnels?"
There are many kinds of work yet to be done to make this a home. We are lucky to have an assortment of various skilled tradespeople among us, but I have had to teach most of the rest to perform the necessary work. I will show you.
He guided her back into the building, silent cues she might have mistaken for her own impulses if she didn't know better. Going down the main corridor, past a trauma center and a solarium with dozens of couches, she turned and went down a broad, gently sloping ramp that switchbacked on itself twice before spilling out in a cavernous space. The walls and ceiling were rough-hewn, like the surfaces of a mine, but the colonists had nearly finished covering it up; prefab living modules were assembled on a steel lattice two stories high and extending back into the shadows. Each module was about the size of her quarters upstairs, but seen from the outside, they looked like deluxe animal cages: Tupperware slave quarters.
"I never really thought about the afterlife too much, but I'm pretty sure it never crossed my mind that we'd all be slaves living in goddamned Habitrails."
Ah, Stella, if only you understood, that it is your insolence that makes you so valuable to us. None of you are slaves, any more than I am your master. These quarters are only temporary. The awakened body must be sheltered from those who would destroy it.
"You had no problem taking over my body, when you needed to."
Things had to be done to insure your survival, Stella. There was no other way. You didn't know how to heal yourself yet, and you were so very damaged.
She flinched in anticipation of another reminder, but nothing happened. She hated herself for feeling gratitude along with relief.
"Why don't you just take us over? Then you'd have all the slaves you want, and none of the hassle."
I couldn't if I wanted to. It is you that keeps your body alive. At this stage, your body could not withstand it for long…
"But we're still your slaves. You'll take us if we try to leave."
When the threat to your kind is gone, all of you will be free to leave, to build new lives. I only hoped to keep a few behind, those with the training and nature to help receive those who come for irradiation. This place will come to be known as a holy place, like Lourdes, or the headwaters of the Ganges. This will be the place where humanity will begin to be reborn.
"Until it gets bombed again. Why don't you get help? If this is something the whole world is going to want, why try to hide where only the Mission can find you?"
We had received assurances from the government before, but I know now that they care more for our success, than our survival. They have their own reasons for allowing us to progress, but I believe they support the Mission, as well. Neither could survive without government sanction, at some level.
"So it'll keep happening. And no one will help us."
We need no one. The Mission is weak. They will not resist striking at us here with all their remaining strength, and soon. When they do, we will absorb their blow, and they will be no more.
"Where are all the people?" she asked. She had seen only the pair beneath her window.
They are at breakfast in the common hall. Come.
She followed His subtle nervous cues deeper into the cave, walking by the modules, seeing each decorated with a few pitiful personal effects, but still looking like plastic cages. Most of them held toys, posters of singers and cartoon characters. Many of the rest contained nothing except a few scraps of clothing. Orphans, the poor, foreigners, immigrants like herself. He would not discriminate by wealth or check their insurance. All they had to have was the seed of cancer and a willingness to give up everything.
She passed the last module and turned into a short, wide tunnel lit by a peculiar glowing crust on the ceiling. It occurred to her that she had seen no machines down here, no electricity, though He had mentioned underground generators. She wondered if the bioluminescent stuff was Him, as well.
She came out of the tunnel and into a hall nearly as large as the living space. Tables ran in rows perpendicular to the entrance, and they were all filled. Men, women and children of all races and ages ate together amid a drone of good-natured chatter. All wore the same black tracksuits and parkas that she had, but despite all this, there was no sense that this was a prison, or a hospital. Had she expected them all to have His face? Had she expected a monstrous commune, chewing in unison, muttering His platitudes, like brainwashed cultists?
"You want me to believe you're doing this for us," she said. "Why?"
If you had lived as long as I have, you would understand.
"I'm not so stupid. Tell me."
I have seen races rise and fall. They believed they had achieved perfection, and they tried to stop change, to control it with their tools. And they were swept away by their own creations, only to pave the way for a new race to begin the long slow climb, and inevitable fall. Always, the pattern of self-fulfilling prophecy has been the same. On this world and a million others. If you were as old as I, if you saw the same mistakes being made again and again, the waste, the suffering perpetuated down through eternity, what would you do? Would you wait for a god to put it right? How long would you wait before you saw that no one was coming to fix it, that no one but you could do it?
Stella looked out at the shining, smiling faces, at the children delivered from death. There had to be a worm in the apple He offered.
"But you used machines to change us. Your death-ray satellite is good, but everyone else's machines are evil?"
RADIANT is only a crutch, a catalyst, to spread the message over borders and quarantine zones. Even so, the technology is very, very old, and deceptively simple. The real machine is us. When there are enough of us, we will be all we need to change the world. When we are of one mind, there will be nothing beyond our grasp. Help me do this, Stella.
She could find no words that she could not see him turning back on her. After all, was it not her desperation to come to Radiant Dawn that had set her on the path to where she now stood?
She walked over to the nearest table and, looking defiantly around, took a seat. The others at the table favored her with smiles and greetings. They knew her name, and her job. She looked them over, looked deep into each pair of eyes, looked for Him. She saw only people who were stunned and overjoyed to find themselves alive.
An older Hispanic man offered her a cup of juice. She saw no coffee, then realized that drugs of any kind would be unnecessary, here. "Stella Orozco," he nodded to her and smiled. "I'm Dr. Javier Echeverria. We will be working together, I think." She stared into his hazel eyes for a long time, thinking, I see you. She took the juice and sipped from the cup, still watching everyone around her.
They were a motley assortment, heavier on children and the old, but she noticed that the older people looked on the whole stronger and healthier than she, wearing their gray hair as a badge of status. The children, by contrast, looked wise
for their years, and were integrated into the general population without supervisors, without anyone around them who could be their parents. They participated in the conversations around them as full partners in the colony. They talked about work, mostly, but also about their lives, their cancers, always fondly, and always in the past tense. As if they thought they were in Heaven.
Dr. Echeverria was touching her shoulder. "I only asked you if you had worked in the fields in Salinas, when you were a girl."
"Is this your idea of small talk?" she demanded, shouting at the table at large. "You're in all of us, aren't you? Looking at yourself through all these eyes, talking to yourself in all these voices? And you talk about stupid bullshit like where I—"
He patted her hand and sat back. The whole table was watching her now. She saw pity in their eyes, and started to hate them. No. Not pity. Empathy. They were all like this, when they first arrived. They had adapted. She would, too. "I meant no insult, Señorita Orozco. I myself worked the fruit crops in Salinas as a boy. That was where I was exposed to the pesticides that gave me my cancer. Like yours, of the liver. I was only going to say that I might have seen you there."
She looked away from him, biting back the impulse to call him a liar. She had nothing else to say.
"I was very angry too, Señorita Orozco, when I learned of my sickness. My parents had saved up enough to get out of the fields and applied for citizenship. They sent me to medical school, but much to their chagrin, I returned to the fields as a public health worker. That was when I first became sick."
"My mother died in the fields, Doctor. Nobody sent me to medical school. We are not so alike as you suppose."
"I am sorry, Señorita Orozco. I only meant to say that you are not so alone here, as you might believe. All of us were bitter, because we were alone in our suffering. But your pain is commonplace here, as is your race, your poverty, your misfortune. You will have to find some other reason to be so angry all the time."
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