Blood Music (21 page)
“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 anybody 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.
“I just need time,” Suzy said.
“Honey, if you want, you can have forever.”
Bernard floats in his own blood, uncertain with whom he is communicating. The communication is carried up the stream of blood by flagellates, adapted protozoans capable of high speed in the serum. His replies return by the same method, or are simply cast into the blood flow.
Everything is information, or lack of information.
—How many of me are there?
That number will always change. Perhaps a million by now.
—Will I meet them? Integrate with them?
No cluster has the capacity to absorb the experiences of all like clusters. That must be reserved for command clusters. Not all information is equally useful at any given time.
—But no information is lost?
Information is always lost. That is the struggle. No cluster’s total structure is ever lost There are always duplications.
—Where am I going?
Eventually, above the *blood music*. You are the cluster chosen to re-integrate with BERNARD.
—I am Bernard.
There are many BERNARD.
Perhaps a million others, thinking as he thought now, spreading through the blood and tissue, gradually being absorbed into the noocyte hierarchy. A million changing versions, never to be re-integrated.
You will meet with command clusters. You will experience THOUGHT UNIVERSE.
—It’s too much. I’m frightened again.
FRIGHTENED is impossible without hormonal response of macro-scale BERNARD. Are you truly FRIGHTENED?
He searches for the effects of fear and does not find them.
—No, but I should be.
You have expressed interest in hierarchy. Adjust your processing to **************.
The message is incomprehensible to his human mind, embedded in the biologic of the noocyte cluster, but the cluster itself understands and prepares for the entry of specific data packages.
As the data comes in—slender coiled strings of RNA and gnarled, twisted proteins—he feels his cells absorb and incorporate. There is no way of knowing how much time this takes, but he seems to almost immediately comprehend the experience of the cells rushing past in the capillary. He feeds off their recently shed experience-memories.
By far the greatest number are not mature noocytes, but normal somatic cells either slightly altered to prevent interference with noocyte activity, or servant cells with limited functions specified by simple biologic. Some of these cells do the bidding of command clusters, others ferry experience memory in hybridized or polymerized clumps from one location to another. Still others carry out new body functions not yet assumable by untailored somatic cells.
Still lower in the scale are domesticated bacteria, carefully tailored to perform one or two functions. Some of these bacteria (there is no way to connect their type with any he knows by human names) are small factories, flooding the blood with the molecules necessary to the noocytes.
And at the bottom of the scale, but by no means negligible in importance, are tailored phage viruses. Some of the virus particles act as high-speed transports for crucial information, towed by flagellate bacteria or slimmed-down lymphocytes; others wander freely through the blood, surrounding the larger cells like dust clouds. If somatic cells, servants or even mature noocytes have abandoned the hierarchy—rebelled or malfunctioned drastically—the virus particles move in and inject their package of disruptive RNA. The offending cells soon explode, casting out a cloud of more tailored virus, and the debris is cleaned away by various noocyte and servant scavengers.
Every type of cell originally in his body-friend or foe-has been studied and put to use by the noocytes.
Dislodge and follow the trail of the command cluster. You will be interviewed.
Bernard feels his cluster move back into the capillary. The walls of the capillary narrow until he is strung out in a long line, his intercellular communications reduced until he feels the noocyte equivalent of suffocation. Then he passes through the capillary wall and is bathed in interstitial fluid. The trail is very distinct He can “taste” the presence of mature noocytes, a great many of them.
It comes to him suddenly that he is, in fact, still near his brain, possibly still in his brain, and that he is about to meet one of the researchers responsible for breaking through to the macro-scale world.
He passes through crowds of servant cells, information-bearing flagellates, noocytes waiting for instructions.
I am about to be introduced to the Grand Lunar, he tells himself. The thought and accompanying mental chuckle is passed into his experience data almost immediately, extruded and hastily retrieved by a servant cell, and carried away to the command cluster. Even more rapidly, a response comes to him.
BERNARD compares us with a MONSTER.
—Not at all. I’m the monster here. Either that, or the situation itself is monstrous.
We are nowhere near to understanding the subtleties of your thought. Have you found the ‘downloading’ informative?
—So far, very informative. And I admit I feel humble here.
Not like a supreme command cluster?
—No. I am not a god.
We do not understand GOD.
The command cluster was much larger than a normal noocyte cluster. Bernard estimated it held at least ten thousand cells, with a commensurately greater thinking capacity. He felt like a mental midget, even with the difficulty of making judgments in the noocyte realm.
—Do you have access to my memories of H.G. Wells?
Pause. Then, Yes. They are quite vivid for not being pure experience memories.
—Yes, well they come from a book, an encoding of an unreal experience.
We are familiar with *fiction*.
—I feel like Cavour in The First Men in the Moon. Speaking with the Grand Lunar.
The comparison may be appropriate, but we do not comprehend it. We are very different, BERNARD, far more different than your comparison with the unreal experience would suggest.
—Yes, but like Cavour, I have thousands of questions. Perhaps you don’t wish to answer all of them.
To keep your fellow macro-scale HUMANS from knowing all we might do, and trying to stop us.
The message was just unclear enough to show Bernard that the command cluster was still unable to completely encompass the reality of the macro-scale.
—Are you in touch with the noocytes in North America?
We are aware there are other, far more powerful concentrations, in much better circumstances.
—And…?
No response.
Then, Are you aware that your *enclosing space* is in jeopardy?
—No. What sort of jeopardy? You mean the lab?
*The lab* is surrounded by your fellows in *uncertain hierarchy relationship*.
—I don’t understand.
They wish to destroy ‘the lab’, and presumably all of us.
—How do you know this?
We are able to receive RADIO FREQUENCY TRANS MISSIONS in several LANGUAGES *encodings*. Can you stop these attempts? Are you in a position of hierarchy INFLUENCE?
Bernard puzzles over the request.
We have memory of the TRANSMISSIONS.
—Then let me hear them.
He can taste the passage of a flagellate, intersecting the messenger of the command cluster, returning with a packet of data. Bernard’s cluster absorbs the data.
He “listens” to the transmissions now in memory. They are not of the best quality, and most of them are in German, which he poorly understands. But he can understand enough to realize why Paulsen-Fuchs has been looking worse and worse of late.
The Pharmek facility is surrounded by camps of protesters. The countryside all the way out to the airport is dotted with them; the protesters number perhaps half a million, and more are arriving by bus, automobile or on foot every day. The army and police do not dare break them up; the mood throughout West Germany, and most of Europe, is very ugly.
—I have no power to stop them.
PERSUASION?
Another inner chuckle.—No; I’m what they want destroyed. And you.
You are far less influential in your realm than we are here.
—Oh, yes, of course.
For a long period, no messages issue from the command cluster. There is even less time. We are transferring you now.
He feels a subtle shift in the voice as he is moved by flagellates away from the command cluster. Follow. He realizes that a group of clusters has broken away from the command cluster. They are communicating with him, and their voice seems oddly familiar, more direct and accessible.
—Who is guiding me?
The response is chemical. An identifying string is brought to him by a flagellate, and suddenly be knows he is being guided by four clusters of primary B-lympho-cytes, the earliest versions of the noocytes. Primary B-lymphocytes are accorded a place in most command clusters, and treated with great respect; they are the precursors, even though their activities are limited. They are primitive in both meanings of the word; less sophisticated in design and function than recently created noocytes, and the ancestors of all.
You may enter THOUGHT UNIVERSE.
The voice fades in and out like a bad telephone connection. Choppy, incomplete.
The sensation of being in a noocyte cluster ended abruptly. Now Bernard was neither embodied nor shrunk to the noocyte scale. His thoughts simply were, and the place where they were was excruciatingly beautiful
If there was any extension in space, it was illusory. Dimensions seemed to be defined by subject; information relevant to his current thinking was close at hand, other subjects were farther away. The overall impression was of a vast, many layered library, arranged in a sphere around him. He shared this center with another presence.
Humans, human form, the presence said. A scurry of information surrounded Bernard, giving him arms, legs, a body and face. Beside him, apparently sitting in a reclining chair, was a wispy image of Vergil Ulam. Ulam smiled without passion or conviction.
“I am your cellular Vergil. Welcome to the inner circle of the command clusters.”
“You’re dead,” Bernard said, his voice an imperfect approximation.
“So I understand.”
“Where are we?”
“Roughly translating the noocyte descriptive string, we are in a Thought Universe. I call it a noosphere. In here, all we experience is generated by thinking. We can be whatever we wish, or learn whatever we wish, or think about anything. We won’t be limited by lack of knowledge or experience; everything can be brought to us. When not used by the command dusters, I spend most of my time here.”
A granite dodecahedron, its edges decorated with gold bars, formed between them. It rolled this way and that for a moment then addressed Vergil’s pale, translucent form. Bernard did not understand the communication. The dodecahedron vanished.
“We all take characteristic shapes here, and most of us add textures, details. Noocytes don’t have names, Mr. Bernard; they put together sequences of identifying amino acids. Sounds complicated, but really much simpler than a fingerprint. In the noosphere, all active researchers must have definite identifying symbols.”
Bernard tried to find traces of the Vergil Ulam he had met and shaken hands with. There didn’t seem to be many. Even the voice lacked the accent and slight breath-lessness he remembered. “There’s not very much of you here, is there?”
Vergil’s ghost shook its head. “Not all of me was translated to the noocyte level before my cells infected you. I hope there’s a better record somewhere. This one is hardly adequate. I’m only about one third here. What is here, however, is cherished and protected. Shade of honored ancestor, vague memory of creator.” Its voice faded in and out omitting or sliding over certain syllables. The image moved sparingly. The hope is they will connect with noocytes back home, find more of me. Not just fragments of a broken vase.”
The image became more transparent “Must go now. Supplements coming. Always part of me here; you and I, we’re the models. I suspect you have precedence now. Be seeing you.”
Bernard stood alone in the noosphere, surrounded by options he hardly knew how to take advantage of. He held his hand out toward the surrounding information. It rippled all around him, waves of light spreading from nadir to zenith. Ranks of information exchanged priorities and his memories stacked up around him like towers of cards, each represented by a line of light.
The lines cascaded.
He had been thinking
“Just another day for you, isn’t it?” Nadia turned and stepped gracefully onto the courtroom escalator.
Not the most pleasant” he said. Down they went.
“Yes, well, just another.” She smelled of tea roses and something else quiet and clean. She had always been beautiful in his eyes, no doubt in the eyes of others; small, slender, black-haired, she did not draw immediate stares, but a few minutes alone in a room with her and there was no doubt: most men would want to spend many hours, days, months.
But not years. Nadia was quickly bored, even with Michael Bernard.
“Back to business, then,” she said halfway down. “More interviews.”
He did not respond. Nadia, bored, became a baiter.
“Well, you’re rid of me,” she said at the bottom. “And I am rid of you.”
“I’ll never be rid of you,” Bernard said. “You always represented something important to me.” She swiveled on her high heels and presented die rear of an immaculately tailored blue suit He grabbed her arm none too gently and brought her around to face him. “You were my last chance at being normal. I’ll never love another woman like I did you. You burned. I’ll like women, but I’ll never commit to them; I’ll never be naive with them.”
“You’re babbling, Michael,” Nadia said, lips tightening on his name. “Let me go.”
“Like hell,” he said. “You have one and a half million dollars. Give me something in return.”
“Fuck off,” she said.
“You don’t like scenes, do you?”
“Let go of me.”
“Cool, dignified. I can take something now, if you want. Take it out in trade.”
“You bastard.”
He trembled and slapped her. “For tire last of my naiveté. For three years, the first wonderful. For the third a royal misery.”