Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “Dinner soon,” their hostess said pleasantly, “but first we need a few samples of your cells”—(“cellsssss”)—“from your lungs and other organs, to help us rebuild our own.”

  At first Luck thought she’d misheard, because the woman’s expression remained so friendly. Starlock’s sharp voice told her she had not. “What do you mean?” Starlock asked, taking tight hold of Luck’s hand.

  “You want to operate on us?” asked Luck, suddenly alarmed. Starlock stepped backward, pulling Luck with him.

  “Oh, no,” Miz Babbidge said, almost cooing. The woman’s volatile mix of sympathy and rancor now resolved into a frightening eagerness focused entirely on the two Protos in front of her. “You made that sound awful. We’re Naturalists. We would never use you as fodder for an experiment. But we need your cells with their unaltered DNA. Through no fault of our own, some parts of our bodies aren’t working as they should. Our lungs, for instance.” (“For instanssss.”) She took a shuddering breath by way of illustration. “With a little electricity, the right enzymes, and a consistent cellular contribution from you, we can make things work again.” The group in the lab moved ever so slightly closer to the Protos, and Luck could feel their need filling the room.

  Miz Babbidge gestured for her guests to enter the lab, but Starlock, holding Luck’s hand tightly, turned to leave. They bumped into the solid figures of four men who had come up behind them undetected. Strong hands clamped down on the Protos’ shoulders, wrenched their arms behind their backs with professional skill…

  …and the world turned to chaos around them. Beyond the open doors at the end of the hallway, the tornado roar of air transpos filled the air, and everyone outside and inside began to yell.

  The men holding Luck and Starlock let go, and the others inside the lab rushed past them, unholstering guns as they went. The dining area emptied as the Naturalists flooded outside. Luck heard bullets ricochet off metal out in the courtyard and then the fast, endless repeat of automatic weapons.

  “Go! Go!” Miz Babbidge yelled at the Protos as she too pushed past. “Go farther inside and hide!” she ordered. “They’ve come to take you! And they will be much worse to you than we are.”

  “To take us?” Luck yelled back, terror and confusion equally mingled in her mind.

  “They call themselves Naturalists, like us, but they’re killers and crazy!” Miz Babbidge called over her shoulder, and then she too disappeared into the chaos.

  “Come on,” Starlock breathed. “If she’s calling someone else crazy…”

  He was pushing Luck in the opposite direction, away from the outer doors. They flew wildly down the hall as plumes of dust swirled into the building.

  “The Protos are there!” a man yelled from the courtyard. “Get inside!”

  Luck dared to glance back. Soldiers from the newly arrived air transpos were fighting their way into the building. A leader of these new arrivals—an unmodified man with a very large gun—was looking right at Luck as he ran through the outer doorway. A gunshot and the man pitched forward, and then there were people fighting hand to hand, and she stopped looking, because Starlock pulled her around a corner in the hallway.

  They dashed to the end of this new hall, turned again. When they found a metal door in a side passage, Starlock wrenched it open, pulled Luck through, and locked it behind them with a huge sliding lever, shutting out the sound of the melee. From there they chose a path at random and ended up in a basement corridor, filled with all manner of old machinery, piled clothing, and stacks and stacks of canned food.

  “Which way?” Luck asked, when they reached an intersection.

  “This way, I think,” Starlock answered, pausing to get his bearings and then choosing a direction. “If we go far enough, we might come out beyond their walls.”

  “Wait, then,” said Luck, stopping him by a heap of camouflage uniforms. They pulled these over their clothing and found scarves to conceal their unusual complexions. Then they ran on for a long while until they came to a dark stairwell, leading upward. At the top was a door with a grate set into its lower half. Starlock knelt down and looked through.

  “It’s the street,” he told her. “And it’s pretty dark out now.”

  “But where are we going? Out of the city?”

  “Look,” he said.

  Luck peered through the grate. Framed against the sky in the distance was the building Miz Babbidge had pointed out.

  “She said the Proto Authority was there,” Luck said, understanding.

  Starlock nodded. “It’s what we came to see.”

  9. THEY REACHED A NEW WORLD

  They emerged into twilight, somewhere quite a distance from the perimeter wall of the compound. Air transpos were spinning up not far away and the noise of gunfire could still be heard sporadically, but before them was a small, quiet street that lay mostly in darkness. Everywhere they looked, buildings were adorned with plants growing around windows, framing doorways, spilling artfully off roof corners. It was as though the humans believed that nature still held sway here.

  Starlock led Luck past a few abandoned vehicles to the corner, which opened onto a larger street. Turning back, they could see dust rising from the distant courtyard where they had landed, and in the midst of the dust cloud were two transpos lifting into the air. As the vehicles cleared the outer wall of the Naturalists’ complex, there was a deafening boom. The Protos ducked, but Luck’s eyes stayed riveted to the nearest transpo as its forward window blew out, followed by the pilot, who dropped, flailing, out of sight.

  “Come on!” Starlock said, pulling her down the street as the transpo spun out of control. Luck couldn’t see the impact, but the sound of a crash reached them moments later. The whine of the second transpo continued, growing louder and closer, until it was visible flying low above the street they’d just left, a searchlight sweeping the ground. They hid themselves in the shadow of a vine-covered building as it passed.

  “You think they’re looking for us?” Luck asked.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  The transpo flew off in another direction and she and Starlock continued. On this new street, which was lined with beautiful trees, the vehicles were not empty. Corpses lay against car windows and across seats—colorful faces, withering. Through the back window of a vehicle, three eyes—each a different color—in a neat row across a woman’s dead face seemed to follow Luck as she went.

  The next street was worse—a dozen vehicles, inside which were arms in odd shapes, shining horns, long folded legs, elongated torsos of bodies that had shriveled almost to skeletons. There were more body types and variations than Luck could have imagined—and all had been overcome as they tried to leave.

  The whir of the air transpo grew louder as it doubled back to look for them, and they crouched in a dark doorway as its searchlight flooded the street. In the glare, Luck saw four dead humans—a family—inside an overturned vehicle. Suspended in their seat belts, their matching large heads hung heavily toward the ground with something like antennae curling out of their hair. She wondered fleetingly if those strange curling bristles conferred additional senses, or if they were merely decorative quirks. The rats scurrying through the vehicle and leaving raw, pink bite marks in their flesh didn’t care either way. In the last of the glow from the transpo’s searchlight, Luck registered that one of the adult humans was not quite dead—a low, hoarse exhale was escaping the woman’s mouth.

  “Starlock…,” Luck whispered, clutching his shoulder.

  “Look,” he said, “they’re going to crash.”

  The transpo had flown off erratically, its searchlight sweeping in wild arcs. As they watched, it bobbed over buildings and disappeared from sight. The sound of its collision reached their ears almost immediately.

  “They’re dropping like fli
es,” Luck said.

  But the noise of the transpo’s engines had already been replaced by a low, deep rumble. An enormous vehicle was rolling onto the street, identical to the truck they’d seen in the Naturalists’ courtyard.

  “Collecting more kids,” Starlock whispered.

  The truck plowed down the road toward them, shoving vehicles out of the way as it went. As it passed, they could hear babies crying within.

  “Let’s hope the fighting’s stopped back there,” Starlock murmured.

  “The Naturalists aren’t so bad if they’re saving all those kids,” Luck whispered.

  “If they’re actually saving them,” he said grimly.

  Luck thought of the lab and the gurney with the straps and the ravenous expressions of the Naturalists when they spoke of taking the Protos’ undamaged cells. “We’ll keep our fingers crossed,” she whispered.

  When the truck had gone, they followed the street for a long way until they arrived at what was certainly one of the main thoroughfares of the city. From there they had a clear view of the Bureau of Modifications, which was outlined by the last glow of the sunset, so that the edges of its diamond facets smoldered with reddish light.

  “It’s pretty close,” Luck said.

  “And look—there are lights on.” Most of the building was dark, but one floor near the middle was fully lit up.

  They crossed the wide boulevard, weaving through vehicles full of humans, then passed through a gardenlike strip in the middle of the street where deep rows of flowering trees briefly blocked the scent of decay. The other side of the boulevard was more crowded, the vehicles packed tightly and crashed into each other, so that it was difficult to find their way through. Luck avoided looking directly at the occupants of the cars, but when they reached the far side of the street, it was no longer possible to escape the sight of humans; the pavement was clogged with people who’d gotten out to walk before they collapsed. There had been, at one point, a stampede, which had left bodies piled against each other in waves. Luck tried to keep her eyes slightly unfocused, but flashes of horror got through anyway: faces, hands, legs, in every shape and color, some mummified, some bloated. Rats were scampering over everything but only biting occasionally—she wondered if there was something about the taste of humans that they didn’t like.

  At last, the Protos’ way was blocked by a sidewalk so thickly covered with corpses that they would have to climb over them to continue on.

  “I can’t do it, Starlock!” Luck cried, stopping in a tiny clean patch of pavement. She leaned over and crushed an arm against her nose, her stomach heaving. “I can’t take anymore.”

  “Just a little farther…,” Starlock said. “It’s right there.”

  The high, crystal building was much closer. They could see it above everything, growing darker and darker against the sky, but with one floor still brightly lit.

  He wrapped his scarf more tightly around his nose and mouth and did the same for Luck. Then he took her hand and together they climbed over the hill of bodies. Luck tried not to feel the soft give beneath her shoes nor to see the tangled limbs and wings and brightly furred appendages on which she was stepping. Some of the bodies were glowing with bioluminescence. Others had a kind of aura around them, flickering and fading as they bathed themselves and nearby corpses in a ghostly illumination.

  If the Naturalists had been telling the truth, these were not humans, a new and varied species; these were humans who could not stop changing themselves. Seeing their grotesque diversity on such a scale, Luck understood that no natural process could be responsible.

  “They’re still breathing,” Starlock gasped beneath his scarf.

  Luck said nothing. She could hear labored breaths here and there, but she didn’t want to look any more closely.

  On the other side of the human barricade, the pavement was nearly clear. From there they ran and did not stop until they had arrived at the diamond-faceted edifice. They came to a panting halt before towering doors of black glass. In small silver lettering were the words Bureau of Modification.

  Because it was too awful to speak of, they wordlessly banged their boots against the side of the building, knocking off the gore that had accumulated. Then they tried the doors. There were no handles, and the glass didn’t budge with repeated attempts to shove it apart. Just as they were about to look for something with which to smash the doors, they came open on their own, gliding smoothly on polished tracks.

  “Cameras,” Starlock said, pointing out their glass eyes all around the building’s entrance. “Someone inside is watching us.”

  “So the Proto Authority is still here?” Luck whispered.

  “Maybe,” Starlock answered.

  And yet, after seeing the city outside, it was impossible to fear anything in this building. The humans were not in control. Together they stepped across the threshold and entered the lobby. The heavy doors slid shut behind them, closing out the city.

  They had arrived into a different world. The space was enormous and fancier than any room Luck had ever been in. Every surface in the lobby was made of crystalline facets fitted together to form sharp, beautiful patterns, like the armor of a horned lizard, done with great sheets of what looked like diamond. The walls reached up in staggered tiers to a vaulted ceiling of the same crystal, which glowed far above with a pale white light.

  In the center of the space, drawing them in, was a curving line of glass sculptures, depicting all of evolution. The parade began with a small glass amphibian emerging from a frothy glass wave. From there, the sculptures got larger: early vertebrates and mammalian reptiles, a platypus, something like a mole, then a lemur, then larger creatures recognizable as primates. There were apes then, and stooped and hairy figures that were beginning to look like Man. And then there was a Proto, a tall male with broad shoulders and features that, though rendered in clear glass, made him look like he could be related to Starlock. This Proto was flawless and proud, but something in his expression said that his time had come and gone, he had ceded the world to someone else.

  That “someone else” followed immediately in the line of figures; beyond the Proto were the largest sculptures: a human with gills and fins as well as hands, another with wings outstretched, and the final, a woman with legs twice the ordinary length, shown leaping up toward the high, high ceiling. Luck understood the glowing vault above them now: it was meant to represent perfection, and these humans were rising to it.

  The Proto statue looked forward at those magnificent human creatures with a stoic mien, informing the viewer that he understood and accepted his vast inferiority.

  “There we are, I guess,” Luck said at last.

  “There we are,” Starlock agreed. His eyes drifted back to the crystalline walls and he said, “The walls are supposed to be cells. Do you see?”

  He was right. The diamond facets butted up against each other and repeated, stylized versions of living cells, grouping and regrouping and forming intricate structures. The whole building was an artist’s version of the work done by the Bureau of Modifications.

  The room was so beautiful that it threatened to mesmerize them, and it was only with great effort that they tore themselves away. There were elevators located down a side passage, but the controls inside did nothing. This was just as well; though Luck and Starlock had both read about elevators, they weren’t eager to take their first elevator ride in a mostly dead building in a mostly dead city, after the sun had gone down.

  Instead they found the stairs.

  10. THEY SPOKE TO A DYING MAN

  Up and up they went in the stairwell, until Luck began to imagine that it was infinite, a repeating series of landings that would go on forever. At each new floor they looked through the glass window in the stairwell door, but only darkness greeted them—until they arrived at the fifty-seventh floor. Ther
e, they left the stairs into a well-lit hallway that dead-ended at a large, heavy door. When they pulled up on its handle, this door hissed open and then swung smoothly inward as if it had been waiting to welcome them inside.

  They found a kind of laboratory when they stepped across the threshold, so large it spanned half of the fifty-seventh floor. Luck’s first impression was of a polished white floor and ceiling, windows along two sides giving a view of the city and the world beyond. But her second impression was quite different. Every bit of wall that was not a window was taken up by glass tanks teeming with life. She and Starlock stepped farther inside the room, and Luck saw that each tank contained a miniature Earth environment. The nearest one looked like a tiny rain forest, and it was inhabited by snails with fantastically colorful shells. In the next tank were sand and a tiny artificial sun and a dozen varieties of ocean mollusk with delicate pastel hues, clinging to a small rock. Shimmering butterflies were in the next, frogs and toads in the one after that. And all along the edges of the polished floor were tubs of dirt out of which grew tall stalks of grain. There had been several books in the Rez school with pictures of different ecosystems, but for Luck and Starlock, this was their first time seeing most of these creatures and their vegetation in real life. Luck watched in fascination as a startlingly bright salamander walked across the glass face of its cage.

  “I don’t believe in God or anything like that,” said a hoarse voice, surprising a yelp out of Luck and causing Starlock to jump, “but still I was praying for you to come.”

  They turned to discover a man sitting in the very center of the room. They had not seen him at first because he and his desk were surrounded by tubs of tall grain stalks. He looked about forty, with two arms and two legs and skin and hair that were both a light reddish brown, which contrasted interestingly with his very light blue eyes. He sat heavily in his lab chair and quite obviously was having difficulty breathing, yet he managed to smile at them. He made a sweeping gesture, inviting them farther inside.