Seed (34 page)

“Everybody lose somebody,” Bacilio said. The serenity of his tone stilled Sumedha. They regarded each other across the table. Seeing the graft work on the boy was like watching a geological event sped up, layers of neural sediment eroding away, revealing the sharp, clear edges of a personality. Sumedha reached for the cocoon.

“Whom have you lost?” he wondered. Bacilio shrugged.

“Everybody.”

The pod quivered moistly between them. Sumedha tapped his own temple, as though the gesture could express the shifting landscape therein.

“I need to connect,” he said.

The boy smiled. Teeth that had been missing now shone strong and straight in light gone red. His fingers caressed the wall’s soft skin.

“Let you know when I care,
ese
.”

The door flexed open and the landrace returned, a bone platter piled high with vegetables balanced on thick palms. Cherry tomatoes, lima beans, corn stripped from the cob, green beans, snow peas still in the pod.

“
Aquí
.” Bacilio aimed an authoritative finger at the smooth diamond-pattern floor in front of his bare feet. The landrace set the platter there and backed up. The boy sat cross-legged. Kept one palm ever to the wall while he began feeding himself with the other.

“Got no special sympathy for you, homes,” he told Sumedha around a mouthful of green beans. “Everybody lose people. Everybody got to connect.”

“The Fathers await me,” Sumedha said. “They are like those outside. Like you, but prolonged.” DNA shaped by a world that no longer existed.

He slid his hand inside the trembling pod on the tabletop. Massaged the nipple at its center, felt it secrete warm fluid. Withdrew his hand, held it up before his face and stared for a long moment at the viscous stuff covering his fingertips. The wall went abruptly white.

“They are fit only for what happens to them.” He opened his mouth, touched wet fingers to the back of his tongue, and swallowed.

The graft went to work instantaneously, twisting and revamping cell nuclei. For a moment he felt carbonated, as when photosynthesis worked in his skin. It made him giggle. Then pain shot through him, cold as the thought of Pihadassa’s death, buckling him to the floor. He suppressed a scream, then stood—heard Bacilio’s ebullient laughter.

“Satori. Give me graft seven.”

“Yes, Sumedha,” Pihadassa’s voice said. A new pod descended from the ceiling and settled with a wet sound on the table. Sumedha waited for its umbilical to retract, then picked the pod up and held it like an infant in his arms. Snapping sounds emanated from inside his body. His bones reconfiguring themselves. He struggled to remain standing.

“Satori,” he spoke through clenched teeth. “Tell the Fathers the graft is ready. Tell them I am on my way.”

“Yes, Sumedha.”

The landraces cleared out of his way as he staggered to the door. He glanced back at the boy, who still sat cross-legged on the floor. Watching Sumedha, smiling, his hand as ever touching Satori’s skin.

….

Sumedha took his place on one tip of the four-point star. Reconsidered, moved to the star’s center. Singularity, he decided, held balance. Sanguine light falling through the chamber’s plexi windows cast his shadow in all directions.

Muscles rippled under his skin, redesigning themselves on the fly. His heart rate rose above what he could count. His mind shattered, came back together and shattered anew—neural pathways reshuffling themselves. For a moment he went blind. Heard the rain-on-tin cacophony of dust motes impacting the black flagstones.

“Sumedha.” The Fathers’ voice, collective and reverberant, hammered Sumedha’s eardrums. His knees buckled, but he did not fall. The Fathers gurgled in their sacks, urgent movements, as though they were suffocating.

“I…” Sumedha started to say, but his mind broke. The inside of his skull turned the color of a bomb blast. “Yes, Fathers,” he managed.

His sight returned. He saw the excited pulse in the neck of one of the advocates who stood in the shadows of the chamber’s periphery. Her irises contracted to the width of a razor as she watched him, and for some reason this made Sumedha’s penis stiffen. He stood like that at the chamber’s center, naked and engorged, clutching the graft pod to his chest.

The Fathers’ dozen human security seemed to notice nothing, just stood their stations around the chamber, hands clasped at their backs. They noticed little, it seemed, as long as they were fed. The advocate, though, watched him the way a lion might eye a bleeding lamb. A vein in her throat throbbed—in time, Sumedha realized, with his own pulse.

“The graft, Sumedha,” the Fathers implored.

Sumedha looked down at the pod. His bowels hummed with fear as he recalled his plan. A sudden plan it now seemed to him. Reckless. But only in method. The intent had been there, shaping the puzzle, ever since Pihadassa had defected. Perhaps even before.

Satori would live.

“I…” Sumedha shuddered as ganglia reconfigured themselves inside his spine. He had never imagined such pain was possible. He forced the tremor from his voice as he spoke. “I have readied the graft for you, Fathers.”

“It’s about goddamned time,” Father Bill voiced.

“Be quiet, Bill.” An amniotic sack gurgled as another Father shifted. Father Prekash.

“I want…
out
.” Father Bill’s voice devolved into a long keen, then reconstituted. “Let’s…get on with it.”

“Yes,” the other Fathers said, a singular voice. “Let’s”

Their collective umbilical began to unwind; their pods began to descend. Sumedha stepped back. The pods came to rest on the floor where he had stood in the star’s center. A Father shifted visibly inside one pod. Sumedha had never before been so close to them. He forced himself to breathe—kept his body steady as things inside broke, changed, reconnected.

“Do it,” Father Bill commanded.

“Do it,” the others echoed.

“Yes, Fathers.”

Sumedha slid his hand inside the graft pod. Poked at the nipple until it gave its fluid. Withdrew his hand, reached out. Found a small orifice along the umbilical’s side between two pulsing veins. An orifice designed for precisely this purpose. His moistened finger slid inside, all the way to the knuckle. An unseen muscle contracted around its tip, sucking, then relaxed.

And that was it. He withdrew his finger.

“It is done.” He recradled the graft pod in the crook of his arm and stepped back.

“How long?”

Sumedha glanced around the chamber. Took in the leather chair, the saddle, the ancient motorcycle. Useless artifacts from a dead world.

“The effects should be immediate.”

The first convulsions came seconds later. One pod shuddered, then another, then all of them, the bodies inside gripped by genetic cataclysm.

“Sumedha! Something’s…
wrong
!” The Fathers’ voices turned animal. Howling, braying.

“No, Fathers. Everything is right. Do not worry.” Sumedha’s heart rate slowed. The muscle contractions ebbed. His breath came easy. At the chamber’s edge, the advocate’s heart rate slowed with his. Sumedha met her eye. In unison, they smiled.

The Fathers tried to say something, but their words disarticulated, became a booming moan, gaining in volume. A scream, in the midst of which Sumedha felt still. Like in the eye of a tornado—and this, he realized, was a parallel thought. He had never before experienced one.

He laughed.

The umbilical went suddenly slack. Pod membranes split open, ejected brackish fluid, revealed bodies, white and shriveled as dead fetuses. Sumedha poked one atrophied leg with a toe. The Fathers had regressed, he realized, become something even less than the primates above whom they’d sought to elevate themselves. Tubes retracted from their bodies, expelling more sour fluid. Members of the Fathers’ security detail stepped uncertainly forward.

“What’s happening to them?” asked their commander, a short man whose thick body armor made him look like a tortoise. Sumedha smiled. The comparison pleased him.

“Child,” Sumedha ordered the advocate, and waved a hand at the security commander. “Take them.”

The advocate leapt before he’d finished speaking. She took the commander by the throat. He flew, trailing an arc of blood from his devastated throat. His body made a broken sound as he hit the chamber’s flagstones, and lay still. The advocate was already on the next guard, her fingers deep in the man’s chest. She kicked the body away and moved to the next. It took perhaps fifteen seconds. None of the guards even had time to draw a weapon. When she’d finished, the advocate watched the blood run, still hot, across the stones. She grinned her killing rage.

“Thank you,” she hissed. Sumedha nodded, smiled, a doting father.

A Father, yes.

He dropped the useless graft pod. Stepped forward, pulled back the lip of one Father’s amniotic cocoon. Gripped the ankle of the Father inside and dragged the pale body out onto the star. The Father reached a feeble hand towards Sumedha, tried to say something. A wet bubble formed on lips stiffened by atrophy. Sumedha bent, gripped the hand in his own.

“Father Prekash,” he spoke quietly. “Thank you for giving me life.” He released the hand. It clutched at him. He kicked it away. “They are yours,” he told the advocate.

“Thank you, Father.” She slunk forward.

Sumedha slipped a foot inside the empty pod’s slick opening, let his body follow. The sack closed around him, wet and warm, as the womb. Tubes entered him sharply. He did not mind.

He became aware of her. Satori. Joy coursed through him. She had been connected to the Fathers, but in the barest mechanical way. They had suckled life from her, but they had not been aware of her, had never
joined
with her. She had had no mind. It struck Sumedha now as obscene. A waste.

She would have a mind now. Sumedha would give her his mind. He would connect, and for the first time, Satori would
live
.

Her massive heartbeat filled him, a cosmic pulse. His own heart synced to it. The graft worked his body. He adapted. His flesh split. Muscle fibers, nerve endings melded to the pod’s interior in ways the Fathers never had.

Sumedha joined with her. He connected. Boundaries blurred. The distinction between what was Satori and what was Sumedha became irrelevant. He felt what Satori felt.

The sun building sugar inside his skin—whole square kilometers of tingling skin. The dry breeze off the mountains, churning wind turbines on the plains to the north. The clean and unhurried rush of an enormous metabolism—
his
metabolism—burning efficiently through the first round of the spring harvest. He opened himself fully to Satori.

Through his mind, Satori awoke. It regarded itself—

And found another already there. The boy’s mind. Bacilio, orbiting the far reaches of Satori’s awareness like the moon, watching.

CHAPTER 22

he iodine-and-alcohol smell tickled Doss’ brainstem, told her where she was before she awoke. Army fucking medical. She knew she’d been burned, but felt no pain. Felt nothing really, as though her mind existed inside a cotton ball. Which meant she was heavily dosed up on something. Which meant nothing good.

Memories came to her in fragments. The slit eyes of a combat design staring into hers. Punching the dead-man button on the rail gun’s remote, then white heat. She remembered General Lewis. Slowly her solar plexus tightened into a hard crystal of dread.

She’d Fucked Up. Capital F, capital U. She thought of Emerson, how she’d left him laid up in that dank D.C. medical pit. Laid up like she was now. She thought of her poor kids, dressed up in Ranger suits, torn to pieces by Satori’s bitches. And then, with profound regret, she realized she was awake.

“Fuck.”

She coughed, and this brought the pain. Everything hurt, bad. Like she’d run herself over and then lit herself on fire.

She opened her eyes in stages, saw multiple IVs taped to her right arm, the good arm. Noted large patches of smooth Nu Skin covering her left arm. Of course they’d used caucasian. Fucking Army.

She carefully lifted her good hand and, trailing tubes, reached across herself. Found with a fingertip the Frankenstein seam in her other arm where Nu Skin met real skin. Peeled it back.

What she saw reminded her of…Snorkeling in the Persian Gulf. A reef off Dubai. The flesh beneath the Nu Skin looked like that: swirls of coral, organic and pale. She smoothed the Nu Skin back into place. Took deep breaths, suppressed the urge to sob.

She registered the room’s silence. It was dim. Medical green walls, six other beds, all empty except for one. Jake lay there, unconscious, hooked to IVs like hers, green army sheets pulled up to his chin. He bore no visible wounds.

“Nurse!” It came out as a choking sound, brought with it a thunderclap of pain. When the pain passed she found the baby doc’s keen face staring down at her, zipper scar along his forehead furrowed beneath tight-cropped black hair as he assessed her.

He produced from a nearby metal nightstand a plastic squeeze bottle topped with a crooked tube. Doss nodded and he shot a stream of cool water into her mouth. She swallowed and he did it again, then set the bottle on the table where she could reach it.