by Sean Platt
“That’s convenient,” said Clara.
“They were just guesses. And sometimes, it didn’t work out. Initiate papers proposed that there was a clash between the host and the observer’s energies. But when that happened, the observer couldn’t just leave; it was ‘tethered’ for the duration of the host’s life. Again, only guesses — but this is where Mara’s group proposed we got the Hitlers. The Charles Mansons.”
“Also convenient,” said Clara.
Kamal had his hands out, speaking with his whole body. When he saw Clara cross her arms, he lowered his. He reminded himself that she’d just lost her mother. That she’d never had a normal life, or even a chance. And that Kamal, who’d thought he was doing his job to deliver the news Stranger had once wanted delivered, was insinuating things she’d rather not hear about the only family she had left.
Before Kamal could decide whether to continue or stop, Sadeem reached over and put a quiet hand on her shoulder. Clara had barely known her father, and her grandfather had always been distant. The old Mullah had been the next best thing for most of her life.
“It fits, Clara. We’ve seen it ourselves. Logan couldn’t do what you did, holding back the Forgetting. Nobody else could do more than protect their own memories. But you managed to remain as a splinter under their skin. You kept the door between them and us propped open. I’ve often wondered why the Astrals only replaced Meyer with a Titan but not any of the other viceroys … and I’ve wondered why, twice now, the Titans they made to replace him turned to humanity’s side.”
“He’s not possessed,” said Clara. “He’s not one of them.”
“He is who he is. You need to understand that. Everything I’ve read says that the human plus the Astral energy makes its own thing — a new person, not a person being controlled by something outside himself. The Meyer you’ve always known has had this ‘thing’ from the start — probably since birth. It’s not a coercive force. It’s cooperative. It’s part of him and always has been, no different from a beauty mark on his face.”
“But he’d be Astral. He’d be against us.”
“He’s never been against us, Clara,” said Peers. “Nor was the first duplicate, nor Kindred, nor Stranger. There have been four versions of this being now, and each has had its own will and made its own decisions — in every case, turning against the occupation. The man Meyer was born as lives with the symbiont as part of himself, but it’s like there are two voices in his head, and those voices are like two people who have to argue things out and come to consensus. These people? They don’t know what they are. Knowing Meyer, the observer has probably been beaten into submission most of their shared life. Lying dormant inside, waiting to be woken to its true potential.”
Clara was quiet. Looking down. Cutting lines in the sand with her toe.
And Kamal thought: Why did Stranger send me to deliver this message? Why here, why now — why at all?
It changed nothing. If she had somehow managed to inherit a change the observer had made to Meyer’s genetic code, then Clara had it whether or not she knew its source. If her grandfather had been carrying an Astral hitchhiker all his life, nothing was different now that Clara knew the truth — other than her new sadness, loss, and feeling of foolish betrayal.
But then Clara looked up and asked something unexpected.
“Why did they copy him at all, if he was half-Astral? Why didn’t they just let him be viceroy as himself? If he’s one of these hybrid things, wouldn’t he make more sense as a leader than someone fully human — and more sense than some Titan duplicate?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think I do.” Clara bored into Kamal with her strong brown eyes, so much like shadows in the night. She didn’t seem sad, as he’d thought. She looked sternly manic — or perhaps finally driven mad from the pressure.
“We should get to sleep so we can make for the freighter at first light,” she said, suddenly standing.
“Clara, I …”
Clara met Kamal’s eyes, then all of their eyes.
“I know what we need to do,” she said, an almost-sinister smile dawning. “But we need to hurry. Because they’re starting to know, too.”
CHAPTER 33
I know what we need to do.
A young woman’s voice.
Liza sat up. She was in the canyon alcove, the big rock pushed aside to vent some moonlight. She didn’t like it in here, but it felt like a case of lesser evils. There might be snakes in the darkest places, but there were likely to be wolves or coyotes or something worse prowling the open. Liza didn’t know. She’d spent her life avoiding wilderness whenever possible. She’d grown up in a city, trekked across European cities as a twentysomething, gone to uni in a city, and settled into Cape Town (a city) as governmental aide, and eventually risen through the ranks to rule it as a new city. The New World didn’t have cities, and for some reason she hadn’t forgotten her past hatred of wild things like the others, which would have made the lack of cities easier to take. But she’d settled into the next best thing, cloistering inside a rectory with scads of men at her command to ward off bears, should they arrive.
It had been hard to sleep, even as protected from possible coyotes (but not snakes) as she was. The New World was annoyingly biodiverse. You’d think with all the flooding and death, at least there’d be no more scorpions or rattlesnakes. But whether the Astrals had intervened or there’d been a lot of critters clinging to driftwood the world over, an obnoxious number of toothed and fanged and many-legged things had survived. Her skin crawled.
And now there was this bitch whispering in Liza’s ear, waking her up further.
“What?” Liza asked the darkness, surer than ever that she’d gone insane and was now living out life in an unpleasant haze. “What the fuck do we need to do?”
But the bitch didn’t answer.
Liza tried to find the tiny spot she’d found earlier, where she could pretend to be less than hideously uncomfortable. The alcove floor behind the big rock was hard and inhospitable. There was sand everywhere, full of snot or spider webs or something Liza wanted nothing to do with. Echoes in this place made what was probably just farting mice sound like the stirring of scaly things. And it was cold. How could a place so uncomfortably hot by day be so freezing cold by night? It wasn’t fair.
And she was still pretty dehydrated, despite finding some plastic water bottles in the stash that Stranger or his minions had stolen from the idiots in the village: smartphones, tablet computers, books and Vellums containing stories of strangely real places that no longer existed, iPods, even condoms. Couldn’t leave condoms floating around. Not only were they clearly not made of sheep intestines (if there were even still sheep); they’d also prevent much-needed pregnancies. The New World was a man’s dream. They had to fuck everything they could. It was the only way to get the human race up and running again.
And on top of it all, Liza’s sunburn was somehow both radiant hot and freezing cold. That bullshit wasn’t fair, either. She’d blister and peel and probably get medieval skin cancer thanks to all this sunbathing, but the hot coals that were her shoulders couldn’t even keep her from shivering. The burn robbed heat from her core to blast it uselessly into the night air, giving Liza the worst of both worlds.
I know what we need to do.
Now more of an echo than a real and present thing. (As real and present as voices in one’s head could be, anyway.)
This time, Liza decided not to answer. She wouldn’t give the voice the satisfaction. You wanted to talk to Liza, you walked up and faced her. You didn’t whisper from the void. People who whispered from voids instead of having the guts to look Liza in the eye were punks.
Besides, Liza knew what she needed to do, too.
She’d found the backpack. Easily. It had been right there on the top of what looked like a miniature dragon’s horde when she’d pulled away the concealing blanket in the little cave-like space in the canyon, highlighted by a sunbeam coming around the r
ock door as the day’s light faded. She’d practically heard an angelic choir raise their voices upon the revelation. So she’d grabbed it, feeling like Indiana Jones discovering an idol, and she’d rummaged through the thing to see what the first voice in her head (not this new one; the new one was a bitch) thought was so important. She’d found pretty much the entirety of her old desk drawer, right down to a few stacks of yellow Post-Its. Liza had already used the Post-Its to decorate her space for the night. It only seemed right. And she’d also found other useless miscellany packed in a rush before she’d boarded the vessel to leave the flooding city: pens, an address book full of dead people’s contact information, a tiny instruction booklet for a Fitbit — the device itself also present, long ago drained but still good for kicks. She’d found two beat-up Lärabars in one of the side pockets that she was sure she hadn’t packed in Ember Flats, meaning they weren’t just twenty years old but closer to forty, and she’d eaten them anyway, curious now if forty-year-old nuts and honey could give her a disease. She knew honey didn’t spoil. Nuts, though, might. Maybe she had parasites. There was no way to be sure.
By the time she’d found the backpack, it had been too near dark to set out amid all the wolves and snakes and probably marauding rape gangs. So Liza had hugged the thing to her as she wiggled into place on the mostly rock floor, using it as a clutch pillow. She knew only that the backpack mattered, not why. Someone wanted it. Someone wanted her mechanical pencils and the digital audio recorder she sometimes used to capture thoughts rather than jotting them down and her blue and pink highlighters and the gum that had fossilized over the years. It mattered. And Liza knew what she needed to do when morning came.
She needed to exit this little cave with the pack on her back.
And she needed to walk out of here.
The rest was just details.
“Let me sleep,” she said.
Noises outside the door. Probably wolves, massing against her. After her remaining Lärabar — this one stiffer than the rest. A possible weapon. The young woman’s voice ran again through Liza’s head, a bit more familiar each time. Had she heard it around the village? It was possible. But whom did it belong to?
She’d been dreaming that voice, Liza realized as the wolves outside parked their car and began to unload, coming after her backpack. They were plotting out there, all right. Waiting for Liza to pop her head out and see what they were doing, like a sucker.
Well, Liza was smarter than that.
And that’s when she started wonder if the reason the voice seemed so familiar was because it wasn’t actually taunting her. It wasn’t insulting her by talking all about knowing what to do as if Liza didn’t have plans of her own. Maybe it was there to help her.
She tried to remember the dream.
Something about that same voice talking to other voices. It was sort of fuzzy. Liza had the distinct impression the dream was like a broadcast thing rather than a native vision. It felt — in that distant way past dreams always felt — as if someone might have been explaining the dream to her rather than her having it on her own. Like it was someone else’s dream, or vision, or whatever, and that Liza was maybe snooping.
She could see the faint shadows of the wolves outside, playing through her chamber’s opening against the far wall. They were especially tricky wolves because they didn’t seem to be walking on four legs. Judging by the silhouettes, they seemed to be walking upright, like humans.
Liza wondered again if she was being paranoid.
She thought of her two missing time gaps — between the rectory garden and the freighter, then between the freighter and the open desert — and wondered again if maybe she wasn’t thinking clearly, or coming apart at the seams. Good thing the fact that you wondered if you were crazy meant you couldn’t actually be crazy. That made the upright-walking wolves in their Chevy outside stalking her so much easier to accept.
She slunk back.
She should hide the backpack. They wanted it. They wanted what was inside it. And she’d promised it (in a way) to the young woman who seemed to know what to do. Or possibly to someone else entirely.
The wolves were gone. Liza was certain.
She walked outside. The moon was full.
Her ride, however, was right there with the door open in the pale white light, silently inviting Liza and her backpack to step inside and take a trip.
CHAPTER 34
For a long and quiet time, Eternity thought she’d returned to her old form. It wasn’t quite right because she couldn’t sense her native body. That old body — full of dislocated sensation, as much responding to vibrations as touch or the human-detectable visible spectrum, focused to understand this planet’s seeded species — would have felt as unfamiliar now as familiar. But she wasn’t in her surrogate. This was more like the hive. She could sense the energetics. She could see the high-energy doubling around the archive, made possible by its energy. From inside the collective, the few guards they’d left on the ship appeared as nodes in the larger pool. It was clear there was only a handful of Reptars instead the many they’d appear to be from a human perspective, that close to such a strong source of power.
And as the whole thing started to fade, she could almost see the humans on the other side, across the bridge that had formed between the species’ minds — forged by the hybrid, cracked open by the anomaly. She could almost see the rift inside the energetics. But it was minuscule — nearly as small as the rolled-up dimensions usually were. Had they really slipped through to leave the freighter? How had they managed, even with the Ark’s energy? There simply wasn’t enough to power such a thing.
But then the fading accelerated, and Eternity found herself seeing a white expanse instead of still feeling/seeing the collective inside. Her eyelids could blink. She had a head that ached as if being stabbed with a red-hot poker and choked with a tight metal band. She had a human(ish) brain, foggy as she rolled from the unconscious world to the conscious one, not all that different than her surrogate waking from sleep.
She waited for cognition to slowly return, then realized that the white expanse was a wall and that she was lying on the floor in a corner. Her throbbing head refused to abate. Her arm hurt, as did her side.
You’d have been better off having returned to your native form, she thought. Human pain isn’t a price worth paying.
But no, she hadn’t again become the anemone shape she’d been used to being, insofar as any pseudo-individual could be anything in the collective. She was still in the surrogate body — a tall blonde whose head hurt, who had all those conflicting emotions she hated and resented but never quite summoned the nerve to shed like the dead skin it should have been so long ago.
She rolled. A groan escaped her. Once half-upright and reversed, she found herself facing a handsome man with blood on his chin, sitting on a soft-looking chair upholstered in fabric as red as the blood. They were in Nexus, and the Nexus was normally bare. That meant he’d had the machines fashion his chair. A human shouldn’t be able to do that.
But of course Meyer Dempsey wasn’t exactly human, which explained his presence on the ship. It was why he’d been on the first mothership, and why he’d returned. Not that they had any idea how to solve him as a problem now. Not that things with Meyer hadn’t become a lot more complicated even before …
Before …
It took a half minute of focus before Eternity (Melanie? Yes, that’s who she was now) found the answer. She hadn’t brought him here to interrogate and initiate a probe before deciding to lie down and stare into the corner where wall met floor for a nap. He’d brought her. He and Carl the Warrior had tricked her into coming close enough for Carl to grab, then they’d hauled her across the ship. And rather than simply letting her surrogate go so the Titans could take the prisoners back to where they belonged, she’d panicked and cried, letting them upset the entire ship’s balance. And for what? One lousy human body?
She sat up fully. Rubbed her head. Rubbed her face below her e
yes, and found that her thumb and forefinger came away wearing a shade of very deep blue. Her eye shadow. More evidence of how far down the tubes she’d gone.
“Don’t.”
Meyer raised a weapon he must have stolen from a Titan somewhere along the way. He met her eyes, staring hard. His face crossed neutrality to become its own seething expression. She saw accusation. Hate. And maybe, concealed below it all, fear and loss.
“I’m just sitting up.”
Meyer’s jaw slid sideways. He seemed to search for a reason to shoot her for daring to sit up, but must have found none because he lowered the weapon enough to rest it on his lap.
“My head hurts.”
“I know,” he said.
She almost flinched as her internal eyes focused and saw him watching her from inside, too. From inside the collective.
“I don’t remember why.”
Because she was human. A flawed, horribly limited, futile human. Because she could stop being a hand inside a surrogate at any time, and yet she refused. Because she was Melanie, and doggedly gripped idiocy, determined to stay that way.
“You hit the wall when I knocked you off of Carl. After you bit him.”
Her tongue moved along her teeth. She tasted a copper tang, revolted.
“Where is Carl?”
“Dead.”
They locked eyes. She looked away first.
“There’s no point in this, you know,” Melanie said.
“In what?”
“In holding me here. They won’t let you escape.”
“You assume I want to escape.”
“Don’t you?”
“I did.”
“But you don’t now?”
Meyer inhaled. Exhaled. He closed his eyes, but that second internal set kept staring at Melanie from inside the collective. He seemed to be considering something, but she could only read it from his body language. Maybe her connection to the collective had been damaged, but for some reason she couldn’t hear his thoughts despite his being right there behind her eyelids, visible as another bright node in their shared mental landscape.
