Seed (13 page)

Muffled voices came to him. His body shifted painfully. Daylight crashed into his head.

“You alright?” A riot mask hovered over him. The security guard’s gloved hand pawed Sumedha’s bones. The helix reformed in Sumedha’s mind. It sank into his body. He breathed deep. Everything hurt.

“Are you injured?” The guard’s hand probed.

Other members of his security team stood over him now. He smelled their pheromones. Fear, mixed with an always present revulsion for Sumedha. He didn’t mind. They couldn’t help their aversion. They were animals, the crude produce of nature’s raw hand, and he was strange to them. They did their job, and they were well fed for it.

“I have no significant injuries,” he told them.

He pushed the hand away and tried to sit up. Weight held him down. He shoved, realizing it was the body of one of his security team. A piece of two-by-four the length of Sumedha’s arm protruded through the soy epoxy armor on the man’s back—a piece of the trailer.

“Holy fuck!” Snake walked up, eyes wide. Dirt caked him, pressed deep into his pours. Blood trickled from a cut on his head. He motioned at the truck and trailer, now nothing more than a twisted hunk of chassis and splintered wood from which flames rose. Bodies lay in a ring around it like scorched flower pedals. “You fucking see that?” He poked the impaled security guard with a toe. “Holy fuck!” The rest of the security team coalesced around Sumedha, their riot masks pivoting vigilantly.

“Time to get the Designer home,” one of them commanded. A woman. Terse, in control. The others took hold of Sumedha’s arms.

“Stop,” Sumedha ordered. They hesitated. “Let go of me. I am not finished here.”

Reluctantly, they unhanded him. He shoved the body off his chest and sat up. Mud and excrement covered his shift, and something else. Charred flesh.

Sumedha rose, stepped forward, grabbed Snake by the chin.

“Focus. I need your mind present in this moment. Are you with me?” Snake blinked, nodded. “Good. I want these people housed. I want their deaths documented. I want every symptom listed. That is why they are here. Do you understand?” Again Snake nodded. “Good. Whatever you need to make this happen, you will have.” Sumedha turned to the nearest Satori landrace, who stood gaping over the smoking body of what was probably his partner. “You,” Sumedha commanded. “Get back to work. Round up more landraces. Clear the dead from the pens first. Then clean this up.” He motioned at the bodies and mangled pens surrounding the crater. The landrace let out a long, low moan, then chuffed and nodded. Sumedha nodded to his security detail.

“Now we may go. I have work inside.”

….

“Will it hurt?” The girl stood naked, knees together, arms crossed tight over her breasts. She trembled, completely hairless, her skin almost as pale as the biolumes glowing opalescent within the ovular room’s flesh.

“It will.” Sumedha did not look up as he spoke. He stood at the room’s center beside a long bone table, atop which lay a meaty cocoon the wormy color of viscera. He pulled up the sleeve of the fresh shift he had donned. Pushed a hand through a slit at the cocoon’s end. Fished around inside, felt the nipple tip of the gland at the cocoon’s center, and massaged it. The cocoon flexed intestinally around his arm. When he withdrew his hand, viscous yellow liquid covered a forefinger. His gaze fixed on the girl. “How do you feel?”

“I do not want it to hurt.”

“It is inevitable. The retrovirus will affix itself to your cell nuclei. If the splice works, you will begin to change on a cellular level. There will be pain. It will last for perhaps two or three days.” He watched her for a few seconds, searching for viral symptoms. “How do you feel?” he repeated.

“Cold.”

“That is fine. Do you have any aches? Any nausea?”

The girl shook her head. Then asked, “Will it kill me?”

Sumedha considered for a moment. Overhead hung five glistening amniotic sacks, red as the back of an eyeball. Just three months ago the girl had been no more than a microscopic nub of splitting cells floating in such a womb.

“Your predecessors presented with problems,” he said. Flipper arms, scoliosis, progeria, swollen hearts. “They did not survive. But you have developed more rapidly.” In the past week her hips had widened. Her face had taken on an adult angularity. “The indications thus far are that you are a more stable platform. And this is a new version of the graft.” The form the helix had taken in his dream pulsed in Sumedha’s mind. “It contains a protein that will respond only to direct environmental stimuli. This should avert previous problems of cascading mutability. I am optimistic you will survive.”

He moved forward, proffering his wet fingertip. The girl watched with wide dark eyes, shook her head, retreated until her back pressed into the wall’s soft meat.

“I do not want it to hurt.”

Sumedha noted her fear, and smiled. The helix never failed to surprise.

“Your situational comprehension far exceeds expectations. Your brain has solid neurological cohesion despite your rapid growth. I am indeed optimistic.” He leveled his finger at her face. “Open your mouth.” The girl stared at the cocoon’s yellow bile. Her face registered disgust. She clenched her jaws shut. “Open,” Sumedha commanded. The girl mutely shook her head.

The walls vibrated suddenly, a warm but insistent hum. Satori spoke.

“Sumedha.” Pihadassa’s smooth voice. “The Fathers wish to see you.”

Sumedha closed his eyes, pleasure spreading through his mind. A hot vortex of longing opened inside his chest as the last vibrations of his partner’s voice faded. He breathed until the feeling passed. When he opened his eyes, the walls, which had gone briefly, intensely violet, were turning pale once more. The girl trembled before him.

“I will only be a moment longer, Satori,” he informed the room. “But first I need a steady table, please.”

Immediately, a section of floor stretched hard and flat. It rose beside the girl, snapping and popping as bone framework articulated into place.

“A little lower,” Sumedha told it. It settled slightly. “Good.” He motioned to the girl with the mucused finger. “You will take this. Step forward, please.” She did so. “Good. Lean across the table.” The girl hesitated, then lay face down on the table. “Restraints, please.” A pair of digits rose out of the table and wrapped themselves like an enormous thumb and forefinger around the girl, and squeezed. The girl cried out. “Not so tight,” Sumedha said. They loosened; she quieted. Sumedha moved around the table until he stood directly over her. “Relax,” he told her. With one hand pushed open her rump. “Relax.” He slid the mucused finger sharply into her rectum. She grunted, whimpered. Sumedha waited, breathing, two helixes turning in his mind. The girl and the retrovirus. Slowly, warmly, they merged.

When he’d finished, he crossed the room and inserted hands into a small opening in the wall, shaped like a bowl. Thick saliva poured over them, cleansing.

“It hurts.” The girl squirmed against the restraints.

“Hold still. You will expel the retrovirus before your system absorbs it.” The wall began to undulate, tonguing Sumedha’s hands dry. “Only another moment.” He withdrew his hands, placed a palm against the wall and closed his eyes. His heart rate slowed, syncing with Satori’s. He counted ten slow beats, then said, “Release,” and opened his eyes. The restraints retracted and the girl stood. Sumedha looked her up and down, wondering vaguely if the splice would crack her bones, buckle her organs, force her immune system to implode and begin devouring her. For the moment, she looked healthy. “Assistant,” he called. A door stretched open in one wall, revealing an ovular hallway. A thick-shouldered landrace stood there, naked and grunting quietly with each patient breath. “Take her back to her pod,” Sumedha ordered. The assistant nodded, entered the room, gripped the girl by the arm. “I’ll monitor you periodically for the next few days, girl.” He stepped towards the door.

“Minerva,” she said. Sumedha hesitated, turned.

“What did you say?”

The girl gazed at her feet. She spoke quietly.

“My name is Minerva.”

“You…have a
name
? Who gave you a name, girl?”

“Pihadassa.”

Sumedha’s mind tilted inside his skull.

Pihadassa. Sister. Wife. Sumedha had often puzzled over the primate pair bond. He had toyed on occasion with trying to isolate and eliminate it, but found it too entwined with innumerable other evolutionary functions. Social structures, hierarchies. Tweaking the pair bond sent ripples through the entire group organism, where the effects became too complex to predict. Better to work with it.

The Fathers had reached the same conclusion. Had created him as half of a unit. He touched the wall once more, felt Satori’s slow, strong heartbeat—one for every five of his own. Together he and Pihadassa had been part of Satori. Now…Sumedha was less so. Longing coursed through his chest, the need to connect. He reached out his mind, tried to bring the entire city, throbbing with life, inside himself. He could not.

The walls hummed again.

“Sumedha, the Fathers wish for you to join them now,” Pihadassa told him. No, not Pihadassa.
Satori
. Sumedha pressed palms hard against his eyes. An animal sound escaped from his throat. He took a breath, stood upright, saw the girl and assistant both watching. The assistant chuffed, agitated. Sumedha faced the girl.

“When did she talk to you?” he demanded. “Where?”

“She came to my pod,” the girl said, backpedalling.

“I see. What did she tell you?”

“She gave me my name. She said it was a wise name.”

Sumedha said nothing for a moment. He breathed, letting his heart slow. The landrace grunted impatiently. Sumedha leveled a finger at it.

“You be still.” To the girl he said, “She told you more.” The girl’s face creased with fear. She looked at the floor, where her bare white feet sank into spongy snake scale, and shook her head.

“No.”

“You should barely be able to follow simple directions. And yet you know to lie.” Sumedha slowly shook his head, marveling. “The helix dances.” Its beauty calmed him.

“I do not want you to hurt me,” the girl whimpered. Sumedha moved close, took the girl’s face in his hand and forced her to look up at him.

“Tell me what Pihadassa told you, girl.”

“Minerva.” A current of defiance ran beneath the fear in the girl’s voice.

“Minerva.” Sumedha said it slowly, trying out the sound of it. “You have identity attachment. This is very good.” He let his hand slide down her throat. Settled thumb and forefinger on the nerves behind her jaw, and squeezed. The girl mewled. Her pulse quickened under Sumedha’s palm. “Tell me what she told you.”

“She said she will have a child.”

Sumedha released the girl. His mind brought forth the memory of Pihadassa emerging from her bed, her body languid with sleep.

“I want to have a child,” she had said. Then touched her lips to his head, and mounted him. Their day had begun as it was meant to—joined—and it was as though she had said nothing, simply whispered dream noise.

But she had said it, and meant for him to hear it. A seed planted.

The girl started to say something, then cried out. She doubled over, wrapped arms over her stomach.

“It hurts,” she gasped.

“The graft is taking effect.” Sumedha addressed the assistant. “Take her to her pod.” The assistant grunted obediently, took the girl under the shoulders and ushered her towards the wall. It flexed open before them. “I will check on you shortly,” Sumedha told her. Then, as the landrace hustled the girl out of the room and the door began to shrink behind them, he called: “Do not worry.” Immediately, he wondered why.

The walls hummed once more.

“Sumedha,” spoke Pihadassa’s voice. “The Fathers demand you cease whatever you are doing and join them at once.”

“Satori, inform the Fathers I will be there momentarily.”

….

Sumedha counted his steps. Four times four across the blood-hued Temple floor. His mind touched each number with the same pressure as his foot touching cold flagstone.

Strange objects stood station across the Temple’s empty space. An ancient, fat motorcycle, polished red. An ornately worked leather saddle with silver pommel. A square bed the size of Sumedha’s entire abode, piled with silken pillows. A worn leather chair, beside it a standing brass lamp with green glass shade. Artifacts from the Fathers’ lives, totems to what it had once meant to be human. Sunlight filtered incarnadine through the dome’s flesh, spilled ambient through granite-arched plexi windows twice the height of a man. A stuffed hunting dog, a Labrador, seemed alive in that light, poised as Sumedha stepped past it.

He reached the Temple’s center. Took his station there at one point of a four-pronged star lazed black into the floor. Kassapa and Paduma had already taken up their positions, Paduma at the star tip to Sumedha’s left, Kassapa directly opposite. They wore white shifts. In unison, they nodded their greeting. Sumedha nodded and together they silently waited, breathing—totaling three.

Sumedha’s mind, unbidden, touched the number:
four
.

Four was a balanced number. The vacant star point to his right felt like a distortion in the fabric of things. Pihadassa’s station. It bent around his mind like a helix missing code, a puzzle whose pieces he could not move:
three
. Sumedha reached out, touched his mind to his siblings’. Sensed their mute tension, as though the air between them had changed shape. They were three. An imbalanced number.

“Sumedha.”

The voice came from everywhere, four harmonized layers. The song that breathed life into the universe, the sound of the world’s own beating heart. Sumedha bowed deep, every nerve afire with fear and love. Reverence hushed his voice:

“Fathers.”

They hung high overhead at the center of the Temple’s vaulted marble ceiling, the very top of Satori Tower. Four amniotic sacks attached to thick umbilicals. Occasionally one sack or another gurgled, and Sumedha could see the outline of a limb or torso as an atrophied body shifted within.

“You’ve made us wait.” The voice said.