“Yes. I thought she was you, for a while.”
“And she is not?” Jane was deadly serious.
“No…” He found himself smiling as only Jane could make him do. “You’re unique, Jane. Not to be duplicated, not even by scrambling a few genes to formula. Her memory duplicates yours only to the point when… they… came and took you away for a while.
“She doesn’t… share any of the rest with you. Or me. And she doesn’t feel, Jane, the way you do. I sensed it the minute I began working with her, but didn’t know what I was picking up—or why. She’s only a baby, an infant, with a ready-made brain and no… soul yet. What progress she’s made he twisted to conform to his own kinks.” Kevin glanced hopefully over his shoulder.
Jane was tilting her cheek into her fur collar to regard Nordstrom’s sluglike writhing on the concrete. His lenses had smashed into spiderweb fractures. His knees and elbows were scraped raw. They both contemplated Nordstrom, Kevin torn between revulsion and unwanted pity and wondering what Jane thought of such a poor specimen of humanity. They had forgotten the second Jane, but she hadn’t forgotten them.
Something picked Jane up and rammed her against the meat locker door, so hard the force of her body slammed it shut.
“Jane!” Kevin’s arms and legs fought his immobility. It was like swimming in epoxy Jell-O. He moved but accomplished nothing; only his voice and face could express his distress.
The other Jane’s eyes were darting from Kevin to Jane to Nordstrom, her confusion multiplied by the necessity of controlling three people instead of one.
“Did you do that? You’ll hurt her,” Kevin rebuked.
“I don’t want to hurt. But… I hear the voices. I must do what I must do. I must Recall the failed unit. And I must… erase the flawed recording. I must undo.”
“You can’t undo humanity. She’s as real as you, with as much right to exist—as she is—as you have now. More… she was here first.”
“No! I remember. You remember. I woke up in the hospital, and you said, ‘Hello, I’m Dr. Blake. I’m here to take care of you.’ That was the first. I was always here.”
“Not you. Her memories poured into you. Your own true memories started where you thought your amnesia began: when you were found in the snow in Minneapolis and taken into custody. The aliens dropped you there to… hurt Jane, empty Jane, return her, maybe—only Jane was hurt herself at the time… unconscious. You missed one another.
“That’s when you were born, when you lay naked in the snow. That’s why you couldn’t remember anything beyond the moment the aliens lifted you into their ship on Crow Wing bluff—you weren’t there. She was! They could give you her memories only up to the moment they released her.”
“We share the same memories?”
“To a point, yes. But you don’t feel them in the same way she does. She lived them. You… swallowed them. Whole. If you hurt her, erase her, whatever, you consume your source. Jane… they’re wrong, those genetic missionaries from outer space. They can’t undo what happened to her. She outgrew her use to them, that’s all. You can, too.”
“You… love… her.”
“Yes.”
“And me?”
“I… care about what happens to you.”
“But we are the same, she and I. Why don’t you love me, too?”
“Because… it confuses me. Because I loved her first. Because she is different from you, no matter how much the same. Because she is Jane.”
“I am Jane.”
He nodded. “Another Jane, who’s already stockpiled her own individual memories. The voices can’t override that.”
“They can.” Jane herself pushed away from the wall. “I’ve heard them, too… all along, ever since we left the bluff. I can’t escape them. I haven’t ever, not for a moment. That’s why I came here, Kevin. She drew me, not you.”
“But that’s all they can do—draw you to her,” Kevin argued. “We’ll leave, go so far away the Call can’t reach you—”
“She won’t let us.”
He confronted the second Jane for a grim moment, reading the raw necessity in her eyes before turning back to the first.
“Jane, you must… fight. I can’t fight for you anymore. You have to defend yourself.”
“Against myself? I can’t harm myself.”
“She is not yourself. She’s an illusion of self. She’s much more in their control, for instance. She won’t be able to stop herself. You’ll have to stop her.”
“Stop her? Destroy her?”
“To save yourself.”
“Save… myself.” Jane’s eyes rested sadly on the other Jane.
“No,” Kevin groaned. “Don’t confuse yourself with her! Do what I say, Jane. Stop her.”
“I have always done what you say, Kevin. Unless it has been what they said. Yet I have respected the I-ness in myself, and must respect the I-ness in another—”
A sound like stage thunder reverberated across the light-spangled ceiling. Kevin looked up. An iron track was tearing loose above them, driving toward the floor—not above them. Above Jane.
“Jane—no!” He wasn’t sure whether he appealed to one, or both.
The fur coat bristled around Jane’s form. Silver light tipped the amber hairs. Her arms lifted slightly from her sides, as they had in Lynn Volker’s bedroom.
The plunging track paused, its long metal arms twining like licorice in midair, and floated to a sand-soft landing on the concrete floor.
“How did you do that?” Kevin was impressed.
“I practiced,” Jane said simply. “On a dumpster.”
Her other self had not been idle. Metal scraped concrete. The massive girder of dead metal moved. Twisted rails shifted, inched forward. Above them a freight train of empty meat hooks began rattling down their aged tracks. The fallen beam scraped several feet forward, lumbering toward Jane herself like a metal dinosaur.
“Save yourself!” Kevin shouted.
Jane, confused, turned from the oncoming metal to her own image. Her counterpart stood rapt, her arms also slightly extended, her eyes cast up until the pupils were nearly obscured, her bobbed hair lifting all around her face.
A humming droned along the animated metal and the rattling hooks, a buzzing even Kevin could perceive. The other Jane’s lips moved, vibrated really. Kevin could almost hear words in another tongue, a distant, alien litany being chanted.
Both Janes tilted their heads in concert, as if tuning in to a radio wave only they could receive.
“Observe the data slate—they coincide again.”
“And both are fully conscious this time. One must neutralize the other.”
“Perhaps. The outcome is always debatable when action is left to a single entity.”
“Our duplicate probe lacks the attachment to the Zyunsinthians that hampered the first.”
“But not an attachment to the male humanoid.”
“Moot. Their programming meshes into synchronicity. They will merge into genetic eclipse and one will eat the other.”
“But can we be sure which?”
“The slate will say.”
“And then?”
“Then we are done meddling.”
“What of the surviving probe?”
“Let it glean until it collapses.”
“Stop it!” Kevin urged the silence he suspected was not one. He focused his will on the original Jane, pleading. “Stop her!”
Jane debated. “Hurt… her?”
“So she won’t hurt you! I didn’t teach you that, but sometimes one’s I-ness strikes at another’s. They knew that, your makers. They programmed you to survive. They gave you the power. Use it, Jane!”
Kevin saw the slow-motion working of Jane’s mind and heart on her face, saw that lightning intelligence slowed to molasses by a moral dilemma he could barely comprehend. It was suicide of a sort he urged on her, and he had taught her too well to avoid self-destruction.
Two tons of twisted metal ground tow
ard Jane like a giant steel slug while she weighed her right to stop it at its human source. Its motions rasped like grinding gears, like giant jaws masticating. With all the racket, Kevin only saw Nordstrom move; he never heard it. Neither did either Jane.
Nordstrom skittered across the floor on all fours, something hacking into the concrete with each crawl forward. He rose to his knees, then elevated a grinning metal blade and let it fly. The meat cleaver spun with the same rhythmic grace as before, heavy head pulling it over and over itself to its target.
The blade sank deep into a field of fur, lost itself in golden ripples, in a gasp of surprise and the infinitely endless sinking of a body to the concrete.
Chapter Forty-one
* * *
Kevin was dreaming. Every constraint had fallen from him. He had fallen—endlessly, to a cold gray floor. He had fallen upon something white and mushy on that floor, something he loathed so much that he was mashing it to pulp to escape it and only miring himself further in its sticky web.
Someone was shouting every obscenity in the language. Someone was echoing it back. Echolalia, the psychiatrists called it. Pain teased the edges of his awareness. He felt only a terrible numbness expanding from his center and freezing everything around him, freezing even other people.
His dream reversed the commonplace paralysis nightmare. In it, only Kevin moved; everyone else was paralyzed. Only one someone else was here, though; he looked at her and saw double.
What was under his hands was not a someone, but a something. He crushed it. In his power and his insane sovereignty over time, he dragged the red-splotched white spider through a trench thick with an imagined river of guts and blood to a door that opened on utter darkness.
He pushed it through, for its own sake as well as his, and slammed the silver metal shut. Kevin stared at the door, at its old-fashioned refrigerator-style handle. You might call it a meat locker. A blood-stained white cloth drooped from his hands, something he had acquired for no good reason he knew.
He turned back to the frozen scene to feel his muscles freezing now, just as time and those trapped within it resumed their feeble flows.
Jane stood in the middle of the empty trough, looking at him. Jane lay heaped in fur on the concrete. Kevin’s arms began to sting with what some distant sense told him were bite marks—a lot of them. Other things hurt. Nothing hurt as much as seeing Zyunsinth lying still on a cold hard floor.
Kevin’s legs didn’t want to work. He lurched over to Jane anyway, threw himself down beside her, pushed his hands up one sleeve feeling for a pulse.
He parted the coat, the matted bloody fur. The cleaver still bit into her midriff. He hesitated, then pulled it away. Blood spurted, his hands pressing the red tide back, trying to stem the massive, mindless pumping of the abdominal aorta.
The flag of surrender in his hands became a winding sheet, a tourniquet. You couldn’t tourniquet the whole bloody thoracic cavity, a voice told Kevin, jeering. He nodded. There were many voices here. He heard them now.
“Kevin?” said one.
“What?” croaked something near him on the floor. He remembered claws at his throat, choking, choking. He remembered not breathing, not needing to breathe, only needing to throttle back…
“Kevin.”
She, the fake, stood near him, shock painting her features slightly green.
He looked up. She seemed ten feet tall. He thought he was trapped in a hole, a depression rapidly filling with blood. His greasy fingers slid off one another as he tied the… the cloth (Nordstrom’s nightshirt, the Voice whispered beside him) tight around Jane’s gut.
Her closed eyelids flickered in a dead white face.
“Jane… my God, didn’t you see it coming? Why didn’t you stop it?”
Her head shook slightly.
“I didn’t do it,” False Jane said.
Kevin shut her out of his sight for a moment. “You were supposed to. Well, aren’t you going to finish your work?”
“I—” The duplicate Jane knelt beside him, tilted her head to study her duplicate. “I… feel no compulsion anymore. The anomaly is removed. The voices are silent.”
“She’s still alive, dammit, somehow—!” Desperation made him face the unfaceable. He stared at the second Jane. “You! Can you… stop the bleeding? Make it clot. Folk-medicine hacks can do it, surely you can. Here, your hand—”
She would have held back, but Kevin forced her palm to the blood-soaked bandage circling Jane’s body. The tremor he felt in her arm only disgusted him.
“Power; that’s what they all want, but you’ve got it. Use it! Save her. The bleeding, slow it, stop it.” He kept repeating the words, the commands, shouting at the simulacrum of Jane as Jane lay dying beneath them both.
Jane herself took a raspy breath. Her eyes, dulled with systemic shock, focused briefly on his. “Ec… ec-na—”
His emotions fisted into a baseball in his throat. They always cling to some non sequitur, the dying. “I know the word, Jane,” he soothed. “I know… I know you always did your best—”
Her head shook, impatience brightening her eyes. “Ecna…” Her breath sighed to silence.
Beside him, her living duplicate squatted miserably, her hand pressed to the bloody cloth and accomplishing nothing.
“Oh, my God.” Kevin shook his head to clear away the crosstalk of voices—Nordstrom’s screeched obscenities; his own inner voice of self-accusing, unbridled fury; other voices less easy to isolate. “Of course—!”
“Jane.” Kevin hung close enough over her face to kiss it. “Jane, I’m putting you under. You’re going to rest now.” He collected his dispersed self, wadded his will into something that would function. “You’re going to rest when I say the word you know so well. Ecnalubma.”
Nothing altered in her face. She was far too weak to show the slightest relaxation into trance. Her body had cast its own spell on her ebbing senses, and would not be denied.
“Jane,” he said, he coaxed, his voice so calm, so professional. “Jane, I’m going to ask you to slow down your body. Your metabolism. I know you can do it. Just… slow it down. I know you’re stressed, but slow, the blood is pumping more slowly now. It’s thickening. You can feel it. Like molasses, so lazy, so… slow. It doesn’t want to leave you. It wants to rest, as you do. It wants to pool, to clot, to lie quiet as still waters. Peaceful. It is untroubled now. Calm, as you are. So still.”
He glanced to the bandage. Old flow still darkened it. Whether his hypnotic charm had worked, he couldn’t say. Certainly conventional medicine could do nothing for her—nothing Turner had available in this almost-hospital would help her. Yet to rely on Jane, feeble as she was, to perform psychic surgery on herself before the internally seeping blood could drown her was wishful thinking.
Kevin leaned back on his heels and sighed. His own blood pumped wildly, throbbing at a dozen sore points on his body. He began to remember parts of the violent tussle with Nordstrom, his… mauling… of Nordstrom—and vice versa. His shoulders slumped as adrenaline dissipated. He was tired, like Jane. He needed a rest, like Jane.
A hand plucked at his jacket sleeve. Jane’s. And not Jane’s.
“Kevin. I didn’t mean to hurt you, only to hold you. But I couldn’t hold you any longer. And you got hurt.”
Her hand reached for his face, but he twisted away.
“I’m fine. As fine as can be expected. And you’re fine. Just dandy. Apparently you no longer feel a need to wipe your other self off the face of the earth.”
She simply shook her head, more confused by the bitterness in his tone than his meaning. “Kevin, what’s wrong? I feel like I’m… lost. Or loosened. I feel—light. Maybe I was glad to see you hurt Dr. Nordstrom like that.”
“Were you? Bully for you.” Kevin absently rubbed his forearm. Bite welts swelled under his fingertips. His eyes remained on Jane, his Jane.
“I’ve got to think. She seems… to be holding. But a wound like that—nothing in Turner’s pseudoho
spital setup can save her. We forget how lethal knives can be, how some wounds drive too deep, are too internal to staunch.”
Kevin bent over Jane, then worked his hands under the coat’s lush folds. He staggered upright, Jane swagged in his arms.
“Where are you going?”
The woman kneeling at his feet seemed about three inches tall now. Maybe she was the Alice in Wonderland, shrinking and expanding on command. Jane was heavy, but the empty space around him felt heavier. He knew where he had to go, but he didn’t have to tell anybody. Anybody.
“I’m coming with you!” The woman was standing and shouting far away behind him. He was walking toward a door. He couldn’t see it yet, but he knew there was a door. And behind it lay another door. There was always another door. He would find all the doors and go through them one by one.
“Kevin, wait!”
He passed the metal door. Behind it, nails scratched and Nordstrom was muling and puking. Nordstrom was locked in. He could pass no doors until he was found. That was… good. That might buy… time.
A door, lit by the intensified overhead lights, jumped into Kevin’s path. It was a broad, metal-sheathed door, rust-eaten, with a push-on metal bar that was a hopeless barrier to an armless man.
Kevin paused. If he could not loose Jane, he could not unloose the door. He could not unloose Jane.
He stood there, balked, until she came up behind him.
“I want to go with you.” Her soft, husky voice would have been poignantly familiar had it not been so alien. “I have nothing left to do.”
“Open the door,” he said finally.
“How?”
“Any damn way you please. And then think about what you can do with an internal combustion engine.”
“What internal combustion engine?”
“Any one you choose.”
She threw her frail weight onto the door’s bar and slowly shoved it open on darkness. A ray of light from the room they were leaving burnished her platinum-pale face.
“Where are we going?” she asked as he walked past her and into the next cavernous, ill-lit space, draped in Jane, blood and Zyunsinth.
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