Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  Belcraft heard him gasp.

  “The damn stiff! Look at the stiffs!”

  The flesh had begun to flow away from Meg’s slender bones, turned to a luminous fluid that spread slowly to bathe the juniper brush and gather in a moon-glowing pool on the rocky floor.

  “It’s slower-acting than the Enfield organism,” Bel-craft told them. “Maybe different enough to save us. I was there to watch the city dying. I saw a boy on a bicycle, trying to outrun the dust. He lost the race. I saw his body dissolve into the same kind of shining stuff—”

  “My God! Let’s go.”

  The photographer snatched his still camera and ran, yelling back for Gibson to bring the video gear. Gibson stayed where he was, frowning at Belcraft.

  “Doctor, what do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think.” Belcraft found Anya’s trembling hand in his. “The Enfield organism consumed nearly everything except stone and soil and metal. This isn’t attacking the brush or the blanket. Nothing so far except Meg’s body. I don’t know why. If it’s anything infectious to us, we don’t know a cure. It’s time to run if you want to run, but I’m not sure running would save you.”

  “So?” Standing fast, Gibson grinned at Anya. “Nichevo.”

  Edging with her toward the tunnel wall, Belcraft heard him start the video camera. They stood transfixed, eyes on what had been Meg. Slowly turning to molten silver, her flesh ran off her bones. Not quite human bones, they were drawn too thin, shaped a little oddly. For a time they remained intact, a delicate fretwork of palely incandescent metal. Then they, too, began crumbling into that slowly spreading liquid pool.

  It reached Torres and flowed over the body, spreading like the liquid helium he had once seen climbing out of a beaker in a cyronics laboratory. It covered the tattered clothing, the unshaven face, the gaping mouth and the grinning teeth and the ugly wound the bullets had torn, until the body became a figure of desperate agony, cast in glowing silver.

  But it did not dissolve.

  “There!” Pointing, Anya clutched his arm. “The fluid —it’s evaporating!”

  He saw a bright mist rising from the brush where Meg had been, from all the glowing pool. In a moment he caught its odor, a penetrating pungency, a little like ether, really like nothing he had known.

  The whir of the camera had stopped.

  “Tape’s used up.” Gibson took it off the tripod. “I’m getting out.”

  They followed him around the tunnel bend. The bright sky in view, Belcraft heard Anya breathing hard. He reached to catch her hand.

  “Get back!” she gasped. “Stay away! I think—”

  She reeled against the tunnel wall. He caught her in his arms and felt her shivering against him as if from a chill. The warmth and the scent of her body brought him a fleeting recollection of their nights together back at Enfield when he hadn’t yet known she was an agent of the KGB. And he caught something different, a hint of the ether-sweetness that had risen from Meg’s molten flesh.

  Ahead of them, Gibson had come upon the fugitive photographer, sprawled on the rocks, snoring and unconscious. He carried the man out into daylight and came back for the camera gear.

  The shadow of the mountain had crept across that boulder shelf outside the tunnel. Belcraft laid Anya there on the ground and knelt to examine her. She was unconscious. Her body felt hot, with four or five degrees of fever. The shivering had stopped. Her pulse was slow, but it seemed regular and strong. The pupils were dilated when he opened her eyes, but they contracted normally.

  “Alive,” he told Gibson. “She’s still alive.”

  “So’s he.” Gibson nodded at the photographer. “But he’s got that funny smell. Like the child’s when the flesh was running off her bones.”

  The body was hot as Anya’s, when he examined it. Pulse slow but normal. Pupillary reflex normal.

  “What do you think?”

  “We’ll have to wait.”

  “Whatever.” Gibson shrugged. “You know, Doc, somehow I can’t feel much afraid. I was dying, back there when the plane went down. Alphamega brought me back to life—and I’ve been different since. I don’t know what she is or how she does it, but I just can’t believe anything from her could really hurt me.

  “Though—”

  He looked suddenly around him and found a place to sit on one of the fire-stained foundation rocks. Shivering, he grinned wryly at Belcraft.

  “I guess I’ll soon be finding out.”

  The shadow of the mountain seemed suddenly cold. Reeling giddily, Belcraft lay down beside Anya, his arm beneath his head. The weakness, the fever, the infection from Meg—it was hitting him. Yet, like Gibson, he couldn’t feel afraid. What he felt, instead, was a trembling awe.

  Meg had been a wonder to him since the day he found her in the ashes of EnGene, but a loving wonder. He felt strangely certain that nothing from her would harm him now. He nestled himself into a little hollow in the ground, waiting with a warm expectation for whatever came. When he woke, perhaps he would know—

  “Sax?” Anya was kneeling over him. “Are you okay?”

  He sat up, feeling oddly as if a long time had passed, perhaps many days. The shadow of the mountain, however, had moved only a little. Gibson lay among the foundation stones where he had been sitting. The snoring photographer hadn’t moved.

  “All right. In fact, very well.” He caught a deep breath, peering uncertainly at Anya. “How are you?”

  “Fine.” She looked radiant. “Never better. But …” Her smile became a puzzled frown. “Different.” She peered into the tunnel, shaking her head. “Something has happened to me, Sax. It’s … it’s hard to explain.”

  “I think … perhaps … perhaps I understand.” His voice had fallen to a whisper. “Meg has touched me before. She always left me feeling lifted, cleansed, happier—in a way I never understood. This time, lying here, I thought I felt her touching me again.”

  Still on her knees, Anya looked at him searchingly, her face grave with amazement. It must have tanned while she slept. The pink flush of sunburn was somehow gone, and the cracks in her lips had healed. She caught her breath. He waited for her to speak.

  “Sax—” Emotion had hushed her voice, and she paused again. “I tried to tell you what I am. What I was. I knew you hated me, but I couldn’t feel ashamed of anything. Not then. I thought I’d had to do whatever I had done. I was proud to think myself a loyal soldier of my country. I even felt I’d been right, using you to lead that killer here.

  “But I wouldn’t do it now.” He saw tears welling out of her greenish eyes. “Not any of it. I do feel ashamed—”

  “Don’t!” His own eyes filling, he reached to seize her hand. “This—whatever it was—it has left me different. I’m ashamed, myself, of the way I hated you. Enough to kill you, if I’d felt able. Ashamed of the way I remember sometimes treating Vic—as if he had been no more than the spoiled brat I always thought he was.

  “If I’d realized what he was going to do, if I’d encouraged him and worked with him, everything might have been different. He might have been alive today. Meg might have lived to become what he wanted her to be. But even as things are—”

  Turning to peer into the tunnel, he pulled himself straighter before he came back to her.

  “Don’t grieve.” He grinned at her. “Meg wouldn’t want us grieving. You know—” Frowning, he stopped to organize his thoughts. “I woke up with a notion. About what has happened. About what Meg was, or maybe what she is. I think Vic planned her for this.”

  She waited, green eyes wide and lips a little parted, so lovely since she woke that awe caught his voice.

  “Vic used to talk, but I never imagined …” He paused to get his breath and put it into words. “That scrawny little kid, full of ideas too big for him. He was going to create a good virus. A notion he kept nursing as he learned more biology. It was to be an artificial microorganism designed to heal. Engineered to infect everybody, repair damaged or defective
cells, transform us into something closer to what we should have been. Once he called it a gene for goodness.

  “He must have brought the notion with him when he came to EnGene. He had his problems there. I wonder if Meg wasn’t engineered to carry on a project the military wouldn’t let him complete. He must have designed her—her body—to become a laboratory in which that virus might be perfected.”

  Anya stared, lips parting wider.

  “When we watched Meg’s body melting, I think it must have been dissolving into that benign virus. Spreading into the atmosphere as that shining pool evaporated. I think we’re infected now, carrying the virus, doing our own bit for Vic.”

  “If that’s true—” He saw Anya shiver. “It’s too big for me to believe.”

  “We have another test in progress.” He squinted at Gibson and the photographer. “If they wake up changed—”

  The photographer still lay snoring. Gibson had stirred, murmuring something in his sleep, but before they woke, Pancho Torres came stalking out of the tunnel. Almost a scarecrow, drawn gaunt, clad in tattered rags, but grinning with pleasure when he found them. His torn face had grown whole again.

  “Tres veces!” He turned to look back into the dark behind him. “Tres veces! Three times I have died, and La Maravilla has restored me.”

  He came on to stand over them.

  “Amigos míos.” As if in solemn reproof, he shook his wild-haired, blood-grimed head. “I see sorrow on your faces. You should be rejoicing. Perhaps you think you saw La Maravilla dead. I remain to testify that she lives. As she will live forever. Today we have witnessed a holy miracle. The blessed angels came to reward her loving goodness. They have taken her alive into heaven.”

  He lifted a bare-boned, red-streaked hand as if to challenge doubt.

  “I was never a believer. Not until the holy Maravilla lifted me high, to let me see the true glory of heaven. A stranger place, and far more splendid, than the priests have ever proclaimed. Its shape is a great, blazing rainbow around a black and dreadful pit that must be hell itself, because she says it devours stars.

  “She took me to meet los ángeles. The very angels! Me, Pancho Torres, who had lain in prison, without hope or love, awaiting a death I had truly earned for killing. These were real and living angels, flying on shining wings, living in floating palaces of rainbow fire. I saw that they love her. She loves them. She is happy that her work for her querido Vic can now be left for us to finish, and she says we must not weep for her.

  “I begged her to take me there with her, but she says we must stay. To complete the holy task Vic made her for—though she never told me what that is.”

  “I think I know,” Belcraft told him. “I think we have already begun it.”

  51

  Omega

  Pancho Torres remained behind when they left the mine. La Madre de Oro had become a sacred place, a shrine to La Sagrada Maravilla. She must be remembered, and he had made a vow to stay here forever, tending the site of her miraculous transformation and relating the wonders of her life to the pilgrims who would come.

  Gibson and the photographer had recovered as suddenly as they had been stricken, the photographer apologetic about his needless panic flight and almost abjectly grateful to Gibson for staying to videotape the transformation and rescue his abandoned camera. Gibson shrugged and said it was nothing. Cheerily humming an old Serbo-Croatian dance tune his grandfather used to whistle, he helped stow the cameras in the Ford. The virus had left them both declaring they’d never felt better.

  Gibson gave Torres the camping gear and supplies he had bought. The photographer found a jacket he said he didn’t need. Belcraft left his spare clothing and his shaving kit. Pancho thanked them in La Maravilla’s holy name and stood alone in the dark tunnel-mouth to wave his adiós.

  Back in the hot car with Anya, Belcraft found his awe-struck elation fading into troubling tension. Herself transformed, she looked lovelier than ever, as innocent as Meg had been, infinitely desirable. He yearned for the love he had lost—but she had never loved him, merely used him to guide Harris here.

  He felt her own troubled glances at him, but he kept his eyes on the road.

  “Sax …” Her slow whisper was nearly too faint for him to hear. “Do you hate me still?”

  “No!” The violence of his own tone startled him. “But there are things I can’t forget. Things that hurt too much.” He looked at her and flinched away. “The virus may have changed me, but there are things it can’t erase.”

  He heard no answer. Tense and trembling at the wheel, he drove on.

  Down on the mesa rim, he saw muddy tracks where a vehicle had gone off the road. He stopped the car and climbed out to follow them down into a deep arroyo. The black van lay there upside down, the top caved in. The doors were open, nobody inside. The driver and the Mexican cop had vanished, along with the body of Harris.

  When he got back to the car, Anya stood waiting silently. With only an uneasy glance, he beckoned her into the car and drove on again.

  “They must have wrecked when the virus put the driver to sleep.” He tried not to listen when she spoke. “The colonel must have stopped to do what he could for them.”

  He dodged a boulder and flinched again when the lurching car tossed her against him. Every word and every chance touch stirred emotions hard to control, even when he told himself that the past had closed behind him. Meg was dead forever, beyond human help. Anya herself had been transformed—

  Yet he couldn’t help the chill around his heart.

  A few miles farther on, they met Colonel Quayle’s minibus. The man at the wheel stopped it on the road and got out to flag them down. Headquarters wanted an update from Anya. He let them both into the vehicle. Anya spent two hours in a tiny phone booth, while the technician sat frowning over his instruments, keeping her in contact.

  Waiting, Belcraft thought of the letter, aching again for all Vic had suffered. He lived again through all they had seen in the tunnel, dazed again by the puzzling wonder of Meg’s transfiguration into something still beyond understanding. He felt drained and numb. Too much had come too fast, and Anya’s role in it still tore him.

  Though he didn’t want to look, her pale-haired head was visible through a glass window in the little booth, huge headphones over her ears. Hating himself for the ice in his heart, he found no way to warm it. She came out at last, with a wan glance at him and a grateful nod when the technician gave her a cold Carta Blanca.

  “I’ve reported to Clegg.” She spoke to the technician more than to him. “I talked to Sam Holliday. Talked to the Pentagon. Talked to the White House. I’m told that the President has been on the hot line to the Kremlin, explaining the little he knows about Alphamega and trying to convince them that she was never a military threat.”

  She shrugged and sipped the beer.

  “Nobody understands what she was, or wants to believe anything I say. The President and the general secretary have agreed to send teams of experts to collect the evidence and question witnesses and look for confirmation they don’t expect to find.”

  “They’ll find it.” Belcraft found himself speaking to the technician, not to her. “Whenever their experts begin meeting carriers and picking up the virus.”

  Following the minibus on down the road, they found Colonel Quayle with a little group of men sitting out of the sun under a bluff, gathered around his private ice chest to make a picnic on sandwiches and beer. The colonel looked tanned and fit again. Scanning the others, Belcraft blinked and shook his head.

  Mickey Harris!

  Quite alive again, though he had lost the mirror sunglasses. His dark face had been half-washed, but mud and clotted blood still caked his hair. The bullet wounds had closed. Waving a bottle of Tecate in a cheerful invitation for them to join the picnic, he stood up and came to Anya’s side of the car.

  “Hiya, Sister Anya!” He grinned at her genially, not visibly contrite. “They tell me I was dead. I never thought I’d let a wo
man knock me off. I’m glad to say I forgive you, no matter what you done. Sister, I’ve seen the light.”

  He brushed at the flies crawling over his matted hair.

  “Believe me, Sister, I know I’ve got a lot to answer for, because I’ve let the devil rule me nearly all my wicked life. I hate to think back to all my hellish sins. Ungodliest of all, the ugly way I meant to kill you if you hadn’t got me first.

  “But I’ve got great news for you, Sister.

  “I’ve known the glory! I’ve learned to bow my head in humble prayer. I’m born again, and all my sins have been erased. It’s true I’ve been laughing all my life at the priests and the preachers and what I thought was their crazy blather about salvation. But my soul has been redeemed. The eternal glory of the gracious Lord dawned on me while I lay knocked out or dead—whatever it was—back there in the bottom of that ravine. Christ came to me, and I was reborn into His holy fold.

  “Praise God!” He leaned toward her earnestly. “Sister, are you saved?”

  Anya flushed and bit her lip, but she answered evenly, “I’ve seen miracles today, and they have changed me.”

  She nodded stiffly at Belcraft, and they drove on.

  “The virus seems to hit us differently.” He heard her thoughtful murmur. “Look at Jim Gibson. An evil animal back when he used to be the Scorpion, deadly as a snake. He seems decent now. He looks and talks and even walks like a different man. But Mickey—”

  She made a face.

  “Still a slimy bastard! I think I liked him better the way he used to be.”

  Belcraft tried to keep his eyes on the flood-ruined road. The rocks and ruts and gullies claimed most of his attention, but she was hard to ignore. When those hazards let him, he couldn’t help another glance. The virus had left a radiance in her, shining in her beryl-green eyes and her perfect skin. Though the sweetish reek of the virus was gone, he couldn’t help catching her own clean human scent, couldn’t help a pang of bitter longing whenever the car jolted her against him.