He could see no one in the neighboring cells, but he caught his breath and held it when he spotted the outline of a sentry in a chair beside the outer door. The chair was tipped back against the wall, and the guard's hands lay folded in his lap, his feet propped on another chair. His features were wreathed in shadow, but Storch believed he was asleep.
He jerked and went rigid when he heard the voice. "You awake."
Storch kept playing possum, though the voice made him itch all over, like the light again. The acoustics in the cell refracted the interrogator's voice at him from a thousand angles, as if he were lying in a tuning fork. The voice cut through the oscillating wail in his eardrums, rode it like a carrier signal into the fillings in his teeth and the reptilian basement of his brain.
"Feel the dust of one billion years crumble away from your eyes," the voice whispered. "Hear the voices of the cells of your body singing of the unspeakable wonder of the outside world with new voices. Feel them changing to meet that world as flower, or as fist.
"Breathe in the air and feel the tide of myriad invaders absorbed and turned into antibodies, to devour their own kind. Reach for the barrier between your body and your mind; that wall is gone, never to return. Listen to the harmony of your bodysong, Zane Storch. Gone is the strident clash of the mind and body. You are not a ghost anchored in flesh. You are sentient flesh."
He felt battered and sunburned and sick to his stomach, and if the interrogator's words had proven true, he would have willed his own heart to stop. It was him! The motherfucker who made RADIANT, who destroyed his life and set him on his blind dive into this awful present. He'd infiltrated the base, him or one of his clones, or perhaps he or it had been here all along. How many of them are there, really? If there was one, then the Mission's failure was total. His might not be. Keogh, or Quesada, or whatever he really was, had come to gloat and gibber. Storch willed himself to lie still, to invite him closer by his passivity. But he was too weak not to listen.
"You have evolved.
"Only hours ago, you killed me. In their hate and fear, your friends have killed so many of me this night that I have reached out to you, that my message will not be snuffed out. I have come to show you the whole truth, of which the Mission only taught you a tiny shred. For it is the way of education, which must needs be a series of ever more complicated lies. Forgive me if I must lie a little to you now, but the path to the close of this stage is a long one, and you are not yet ready for the whole truth.
"It is hard for the individual to face even a ray of that truth, for it is so vast. To perceive that we are not the finished product of a perfected creation, but one rung on a ladder that time and nature are climbing, that is unacceptable to most. As an individual, you are but one iteration of one species that is itself a fleeting expression of the Life Force on the earth. What can we do? For all that we try to learn, to improve ourselves, we are hardwired from conception; even the degree to which we may improve is etched in protein. The human animal is a big, stupid ape, but his cells are smart, each smart enough to believe it is the ape. It is not so. Not yet.
"You have climbed further up the ladder in this night than the human species has in nine million years, as an individual. Natural selection chooses traits, species, not individuals. You, my beautiful mutant, have broken the rules. Why have I given you this gift, my self-proclaimed enemy, who would destroy my work and stop the climbing of the ladder?
"We are all becoming one sentient flesh, one body. The internecine warfare of life, the malignancies of death-fear and selfism, will stop. I would have you understand.
"Once, all the earth was a proving ground. Life reached out to conquer new environments, reproduced like mad and passed their superior genes on to their children. Animal DNA was far more elastic, then; life changed as the earth changed, and it was changing so fast in those days… When the earth turned cold, some became smaller and warmer, and they took to stealing their dinosaur neighbors' eggs for food when everything else dried up. And they became mammals, and they became us. And to move to the next stage, all we have to do is want to bad enough.
"Now look at the mess we've made of evolution. One fine day out on the alluvial plain, we became self-aware, and we figured out how to cheat natural selection before sundown. We learned how to make tools, and suddenly we could effortlessly vanquish any predator, tame fire so we could stay up all night brooding. We shaped animals into tools and food supplies and wiped out everything else. And we built a wall against death, against the tide of natural selection. And we will colonize other worlds someday, spreading through the universe like a metastasizing cancer.
"We've become the gods of our world, and what has it cost us? Every day, the gulf between what humans are and what they have grows larger and larger. For every tool we invent that makes life easier, we grow weaker. We're feeding our life force into a lie, Zane. We've run so far so long into the dead end that we think we can't turn back. Our cells want to evolve, though we're trying to freeze them. We thwart our bodies' struggles to adapt to our artificial environments, and that frustrated energy expresses itself as organic entropy, as cellular madness. As cancer.
"Radiation can cause cancer, but it can also mutate an organism, cause changes that pass on to future generations. It's like a jump-start, but most radiation doesn't do much but stir things up, entropy wreaking havoc in the system. But there are thousands of seemingly random amino acid sequences between each gene in our DNA. Scientists have dismissed them as mere buffers, but they are the keys to evolution. Encode that radiation, and it'll impose a new order on cancer cells, where the adaptive 'buffers' are rendered naked to activation. Neoplasm is the blank slate on which the light writes. With it, you can cause the system to become entropy, and death becomes life without end."
The shadowy interrogator rose and approached the bars. Storch could barely make out his lips moving, barely hear his hands rapping against the bars, over the din of his whispering voice.
"Imagine the flow of life through species, the accretion of traits over millions of years, as the passage of a lifetime. Imagine you are that animal. The wind blows, and you grow a pelt. The water table sinks, and you grow claws to follow it, and a hump to store it. A virus invades you, and you build up an immunity, and make your own viruses to defend yourself against predators. The world changes, and you adapt. This is the gift I have given you. Your flesh is alive to the changes evolution takes millions of years and billions of lives to recognize. This is the gift I would give the world. I would wreak the greatest single evolutionary step in the history of humankind without taking a single human life. The Mission would call me a monster and kill me and all my children, and steal my gift from the world. Has nature ever been so generous, or so merciful, as I?"
In the echoing split-second after he fell silent, Storch sprang out of the bunk and hurled himself at the bars. His left leg gave out under him almost immediately, and he fell, Keogh starting to back away even as Storch's hands coiled round his tie and one lapel of his blazer. Storch barreled full-bore and unprotected into the bars, head splitting in stars and all the blood seemed to drop out his brain at once, and the impact turned it to a whirling cloud of ash. Still his hands clamped Keogh's clothes, the man-thing's struggles banging his head against the bars several times more before Storch came alive and pulled back, bracing one foot against the bars.
Keogh was screaming, and whispering at the same time. "Please! God! Don't! Guard! Guard! You can't kill me."
"Motherfucker, I can kill you for the rest of my life," Storch growled, the words mangled by an upper lip split to the bone. He threw all of his weight backwards, hands coiled up in the flailing Keogh. He smashed into the bars like a piñata and his screams cut off abruptly in a sibilant gurgle, his skull settling like the wrapped shards of a shattered vase. His head poked halfway into the cell, drizzling bright arterial blood and pale, pureed brain into the pool of fluorescent light on the floor. His collarbones smashed, arms stuck out at odd backward angles, as if t
hey were trying to become wings. He hung there without moving, without healing or fighting back despite his sudden and total dissolution. Storch stepped back from the body and marveled at the meaning of this.
Perhaps Keogh himself was human. Perhaps this was only a human dupe of some kind, like Buggs. Storch saw now that the man he'd killed was black, and younger than himself. Dressed in a conservative suit, with an empty shoulder holster under his jacket. An FBI agent. Had Keogh been speaking though this man? Had he dreamt the whole thing? Not this. The dead man, at least, was real.
As if on a television in an adjacent cellblock, he heard the frantic scrabbling of keys against the outer door, saw the light blocked by close-shaven heads and Shore Patrol helmets and black berets.
But what about himself? The awful damage he'd wrought on the body was out of all proportion to the worst violence he ever could have dealt out with his hands—or a car, for that matter. The whisperer had been right about one thing. He was changing. The thought of it was scarier than knowing he was going to die a hated terrorist.
"You've only begun to change," the whispered voice told him. He jumped away from the dead thing jammed into the bars, but it hung still, silhouetted by blinding light as the outer door opened. Guards recoiled from the transfixed corpse, tried in vain to pull it down, had to settle for reaching around it to get at the lock. Screaming, "Get down! Lie down on the fucking ground, now!" But he could scarcely hear them.
The whispering voice was the tube of a tsunami, folding over him with crushing, godlike force. It was a voice from within his own head.
Storch whirled and faced himself in the cloudy steel mirror on the wall. He splashed water on it and clawed at it with his hands, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't see himself past the strange, wizened face with blue-gray eyes. "Let me be your guide," the face said, with his voice.
He was already screaming when the guards set in beating him with truncheons, surrounding him and pounding his back like a chain gang digging a trench. The pounding mirrored his own heartbeat, which in turn marched in lock-step with the pulse of Keogh in his veins.
Long after his body stopped reacting even reflexively to the pounding, the guards hoisted him up by both arms and dragged him into the corridor. They turned away from the light and bore him down into the darksome core of the brig. One guard opened a heavy steel door set into a blank concrete wall, like the entrance to a kiln. They threw him into it and slammed the door shut behind him. For a long time, he heard locks slamming home, and shouting voices, bits of flotsam on the ocean of sound roaring inside him.
"NOW WE CAN BE ALONE, the Keogh in his brain proclaimed. "NOW YOUR EVOLUTION CAN BEGIN."
Coming in 2001 -Radiant Dawn II: Ravenous Dusk
Table of Contents
Prologue
Radiant Dawn Page 38
