Now it was Miriam’s turn to be bewildered.
“I simply don’t know,” the Rector confessed. “I think I never did know. I think there is something in the Artifact nearly as rich and strange as all our earthly religions put together. Nearly. Miriam, when I spoke with the Travellers I put some of these questions to them. I have a sense of what their spirituality consists of… and I think it may not be incompatible with ours. They don’t claim to have unraveled every mystery. In fact, they’re quite humble about their ignorance. They think consciousness might have some special relationship to the hidden order of the universe, even a persistence after absolute death. I’m not sure whether this ought to be called religion or cosmology. But they acknowledge that some subtlety of mind may be bound into the functioning of stars and time.
“They didn’t ask me to abandon my Christianity, Miriam. It’s only that I’ve had to be more honest with myself about the things I know and the things I don’t. The divinity of Christ, the extrinsic nature of God… maybe I was never really convinced of those things. Only wanted to believe them.
“So you’re right, Miriam. I don’t guess I’m entitled to call myself a Christian any longer. But I can perform the memorial service. I can help you say goodbye to your father, and I can mark the mystery of death, and I can honor it—perhaps more sincerely than ever before. I would be pleased to perform that service for you. But if you feel I’m unqualified, I’ll step aside. Maybe we can find someone else, maybe even here in town.”
Miriam was stunned. She gazed at the Rector, then shook her head. “No… that’s all right. You do it.”
“Thank you, Miriam.”
“It’s not a vote of confidence. I don’t think it matters who says the words. If there’s a Heaven, it’s beyond our commanding, and if there’s a Hell, our prayers won’t keep us out of it.” She looked at her watch. “Shouldn’t we leave? It’s getting late.”
* * *
She drove with him to Brookside Cemetery, through the gates and up a winding road to the graveside. She had wanted an outdoor service. Miriam hated chapels. They smelled like overripe sachets, like decaying lavender.
Mist still lingered in the lowlands and across the water, but the sun had burned the sky blue overhead. Mt. Buchanan rose up behind the cemetery like the shoulders of a green and granite colossus. This was a hillside plot, and it was pleasant to see the rows of graves running down to the main gate and the road.
From this hillside Miriam watched the crowd begin to gather.
She had mailed an announcement of the memorial service to those few of Daddy’s friends still living, mainly retired staff from the Community College and the members of the Bridge Club whose company he had enjoyed before his stroke. She was surprised by the relative youth of the crowd beginning to gather—too many strangers, faces she did not recognize—and by its size.
Cars had filled the chapel parking lot at the foot of the hill, and more cars had begun to park along the road, all the way down to the intersection and out of sight.
Troubled and vaguely frightened, Miriam turned to Rector Ackroyd. “Daddy didn’t know all these people.”
“The service was announced in the Observer”
She knew that; she had clipped the announcement. “But why are they here? What for?”
“To mark a solemn occasion. Miriam, your father was the last man in Buchanan to die before Contact. Do you know what that means? His was the last involuntary death in this town.”
But it was a reasoning that made Miriam hostile, for reasons she didn’t wholly understand.
“I don’t want strangers here.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way. But it’s not a joke. They’re sincere—their feelings are genuine.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“I know,” the Rector said simply.
Miriam frowned but acquiesced. She was beginning to feel numbed by the morning’s events. Rector Ackroyd read the service and Miriam listened distantly, unable to associate this ceremony with her father; he had become intangible, a fading memory of a pleasanter time. I’m here to mourn, she reminded herself sternly. But what about all these other people?
The hillside was covered with people, all silent and attentive, even those who must be too far away to hear the service.
Half the population of Buchanan must have come here, Miriam thought.
Maybe they had also come to mourn.
Not for her father. For something they had lost or given up. For what they couldn’t have back. For a way of life.
For the town, the country—for the planet, Miriam thought.
Chapter 13
Arguments and Unwindings
When Lillian refused to see him for a physical exam—despite his nudging, his cajoling, and at last his ill-concealed anger—Matt decided enough was enough. Extraterrestrial mysticism was one thing; jeopardizing her health and the health of her unborn child was quite another.
He arranged to have lunch with Jim, see if he could attack the problem from that angle.
A few weeks ago, it might have been hard to fit lunch into his schedule. Today, free time was easy to come by. His office consultations had dropped to a trickle. He spent most of his time at the hospital doing shifts for absentee residents, and much of that time convincing Tom Kindle to submit to physical therapy. He had not seen a new patient, nor more than a handful of his reliables, since what they were starting to call “Contact.”
Nor, despite the hours at Buchanan General, had he seen much of Jim Bix. Jim—like Lillian, like Annie Gates, like so many others—had accepted the promise of immortality that night in August.
Matt had still not developed a strategy for talking to such people.
Jim had been his closest friend. Contact had turned him into a stranger.
* * *
They met in the cafeteria. The staff cafeteria was a basement room the size of a basketball court, and today it was almost deserted. The ventilators hummed like meditating monks and the air smelled faintly of cabbage.
Jim sat at a corner table picking at salad and rice pilaf. Matt pulled up another chair and regarded his friend. Same old ugly son of a bitch he ever was, Matt thought.
But the conversation was like an old car on a cold day, hard to start and hard to keep running.
“You don’t look like you’re sleeping much,” Jim said.
In fact he hadn’t been. Too much to think about. Too many things he didn’t want to think about. His days were either empty or surrealistic and his nights were often sleepless. But he didn’t want to say that. “I didn’t come to complain. Actually, I wanted to talk about Lillian. She refused to come in for monitoring. I wondered if you knew that. I don’t anticipate any problems with the pregnancy, but it seems like a bad precedent.”
Jim listened carefully. Then he wiped his chin with a paper napkin and shrugged. “If she says she doesn’t need to see you, and there’s no pressing problem, maybe we ought to leave it at that.”
“There isn’t currently a problem. But she’s pregnant and forty, and that’s hardly a risk-free scenario. And you know it, Jim. If she wants to change doctors—for whatever reason—okay. Fine. We’ll set her up with a specialist. But she has to see somebody.”
“Does she?”
“Christ’s sake, Jim!”
His exclamation echoed around the empty room.
“All I’m saying, Matt, is that she has more access to her internal condition than she used to. It sounds strange, but it’s true. She knows things you might not expect her to know.”
“I’m skeptical of that.”
“I guess I would be too, in your position. I don’t know what I can say to convince you. If it means anything, Tm convinced.”
“Convinced of what? That Lillian doesn’t need medical care?”
“That she knows whether she needs it or not. If she did, Matt, I’m sure she’d come to you.” He folded the napkin. “We miss seeing you. Why don’t you stop by the house sometime? Tal
k to her yourself. She’d be happy to talk.”
“Can she perform an ultrasound on herself? Can she diagnose an ectopic pregnancy?”
“I believe she can.”
“Jesus!”
“Matt, would you calm down? I can explain it… but not if you’re raving.”
He wondered if he ought to simply leave the table. But Jim was his friend, or had been his friend; maybe he was obliged to listen a while longer.
“It feels like a century since we talked about this. That night at your house. Less than a month ago. Remember that? Just before Contact. We got drunk.”
“You were talking about machines in the blood.”
“Neocytes.”
“Is that what you call them?”
“It’s the consensus name.” Matt let this pass.
“The point is,” Jim said, “they’re still here. Not in you. You sent ’em packing. Your blood is original stock—and I guess you know that, since I haven’t seen you down in the path lab doing your own smears.”
True. The Travellers, as Annie called them, had told Matt they would leave his body, and he had believed it—he had never questioned the matter.
“But the rest of us are still carrying neocytes,” Jim said, “and they’re doing some work. Nothing too obvious yet. But take Lillian. If she was ectopic, or preeclamptic, or anything like that, the neocytes would deal with it. Or they would let her know so she could take the appropriate steps. I’m not sitting here telling you Lillian should go through this pregnancy unmonitored. The point is, she is monitored. She’s getting better attention than you or I could give her, and she’s getting it twenty-four hours a day.”
“And that’s…” He couldn’t contain his horror. “That’s okay with you?”
“It’s a benevolent process, Matt. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“My God. My God. What about the fetus? We’re talking about your child. Are they working on it, too? Is the child full of… neocytes?”
“Yes, it is.”
Matt stood up too quickly. The table rocked and an empty cafeteria glass dropped and shattered on the floor.
Jim bent to pick up the pieces. He put two daggerlike shards on the table, out of harm’s way. He said, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You’re bleeding,” Matt said.
He’d cut his hand. The blood that oozed out was thick. It was the color and consistency, Matt thought, of hot blackstrap molasses.
* * *
Later in the afternoon, he stopped by Tom Kindle’s room.
The floor nurse called Kindle “a handful,” her code word for a patient who was uncooperative but good-humored about it. Kindle, who had lived alone on the slopes of Mt. Buchanan for some years, seemed to be adjusting fairly well to the new situation—his injury, Contact. Matt guessed he had the advantage of not feeling suddenly like an outsider… he had been an outsider all along.
When Matt entered the room, Kindle was watching TV; when he noticed Matt, he hit the mute button on the remote control.
“They moved in the TV this morning. I said I didn’t want to pay for it. They said I didn’t have to. Nobody else using it. It’s been years since I watched TV much.” Kindle shook his head. “Now I get a chance and there’s nothing good on. Nothing but the news.”
“Last time I looked,” Matt said, “there wasn’t any news. Not the kind of news I’m used to. All the armies went home and nobody robbed the grocery store.”
“I think that is news,” Kindle said. “Seems like it’s a more peaceful world.”
“Shit on that. The graveyard is peaceful.” Kindle turned back to the TV screen. “Have you seen this?”
Matt looked at the picture. It was the octahedron in Central Park. There was a CNN logo in the lower-left corner of the screen.
“I’ve seen it before.” He remembered when the octahedrons came out of the sky last spring, all those dark and ominous shapes—how Rachel had watched the videotape replays almost obsessively. Everybody had been afraid of the octahedrons, which had functioned, as far as Matt knew, mainly as monuments, or at most as a diversion. The real war had been microscopic and brief. Why invade the Earth when you can invade the bloodstream? A question of scale.
“I’ve seen the fuckin’ thing a dozen times too,” Kindle said. “That’s not the point. Watch!”
And with a deep reluctance Matt took a second look at the TV screen. This was videotape, but recent.
Kindle said he’d been watching it all day, over and over again.
Matt stared without comprehension as the octahedron—that vast black shape featureless and tall as a ten-story building—somehow unwound itself.
The motion was difficult to focus on even in slow-motion playback. It reminded him of a spring uncoiling. It was that kind of action… but multidimensional and terrifyingly fast.
Nothing decent moved like that. It made him think of a trap sprung, a cannon fired, a rattlesnake striking, every fast and deadly thing.
He blinked at the screen with his mouth open.
Kindle laughed. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
No. It was frightening. He felt nauseated.
The octahedron unwound into countless smaller shapes. The CNN camera zoomed closer, and Matt was able to see that each shape was the same, a bulbous saucer mounted on a truncated cone. Perhaps about the size of a person, though it was difficult to judge. He couldn’t tell whether these devices touched the ground or hovered above it. “Thousands of ’em,” Kindle said. “More.”
They began to move, radiating away from their point of origin through the trees and along the bike paths like an obscenely strange mass of strolling tourists.
Like a nest of ants, Matt thought, swarming out of its hole. “One for every town and city in North America,” Kindle said. “How do you know that?”
“The guy on the newscast said so. Don’t ask me how he knows.”
“What are they?”
Kindle shrugged. “Helpers. So the TV says.”
“ ‘Helpers’?”
“That’s what CNN is calling them. Don’t blame me, Matthew—I don’t write the news.”
He looked at the screen. There was a Helper in close focus now. It was a featureless matte-black object, and it looked about as helpful as a mace, a claymore, or a ballistic missile.
“Sit down, Matthew,” Kindle said gently. “You don’t look too well.”
* * *
Later—when the shock wore off—Matt told Kindle some of the things Jim Bix had said, about “neocytes” and the possibility of physical changes in the body.
Kindle absorbed all this with a thoughtful expression. “Matthew,” he said, “did you ever hear of a nurse log?”
Matt said he hadn’t—did it have something to do with the floor nurse, Miss Jefferson?
“No, not that kind of nurse. Back in the eighties, I worked for a while in Canada. Logging on the west coast of Vancouver Island. I got to know some of the forest there, what they call climax forest, meaning a forest that hasn’t been burned for a long time. Centuries. They have some 800-year-old cedars over there. Amazing trees. And it rains nonstop half the year, so in places you get what they call a temperate rain forest. Very dense vegetation, very wet.
“Decay is one of the main things that happens in a place like that. Every time one of these huge hemlocks falls down, or a cedar, say, or an amabilis fir, it’s not just a dead tree. It’s food. It turns into what’s called a nurse log, because it’s nursing new trees, among other things. When it’s rotting, that log might contain more organisms than there are people on the surface of the Earth. It’s so full of life it actually heats up—as much as five or six degrees warmer than the air.”
“This is interesting,” Matt said, “but—”
“I’m almost finished. Shit, you doctors are impatient people! All I mean to say is that it strikes me maybe the Earth is like a nurse log. All that talk about pollution, global warming, and so on. People used to say, Are we killing the Earth? My theory
is, we already killed it. It’s dead. Like a nurse log. So all these decay organisms just arrowed in on it. Maybe humanity was already the first stage of decay, like a fungus growing in the heartwood. Then the insects move in to eat the wood rot and the birds eat the insects…”
“That’s disgusting,” Matt said.
“A little. It’s how nature works, though. Why should it be different when we’re talking about the whole planet? This thing in space, the Artifact, the octahedrons, these Helpers—” Kindle shrugged. “They just smell a rotting log, that’s all.”
* * *
Matt wasn’t cheered by these speculations, and he left the room sour-minded and unhappy. It was almost six o’clock—he’d wasted an afternoon staring at the horrors on Tom Kindle’s TV set. Time to go home.
Dinner with Rachel. Another evening to endure.
He had come to dread this time of day.
Worse, Kindle’s forest analogy haunted him during the drive home. Maybe the Earth was a nurse log; maybe the old hermit was right.
But he thought about Jim Bix, his smile fixed in place, his blood the color of thirty-weight motor oil.
A worse thought: Maybe Jim was a nurse log.
Something new growing in the hollow shell of him.
Maybe Lillian was a nurse log.
Maybe they all were.
Chapter 14
B E
Beth Porter was accustomed to seeing the Artifact suspended in every clear night sky and seldom gave it much thought. It was something people talked about on TV, like war or the economy. About as insubstantial as that. There had never been a war in Buchanan; the economy just meant people getting laid off, or not, at the pulp mill; and the Artifact was a light in the sky, as alarming as a streetlamp.
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