She sat there cold and quiet for quite a while before her face cracked open. What came out of her might have been mistaken for a sob in any other company but this one. With tears brimming in her eyes, she laughed. "I—I'm so sorry…I'm just so fucked up inside…" The laughter twisted into true sobbing then, and she shook, but did not recoil, from the many hands that touched her then.
"We understand you, Stella Orozco," Dr. Echeverria said. They enfolded her in their empathy, warmth penetrating her, opening her up to their love. She knew that she belonged.
The crowd began to form into rows, facing her and thirty or forty others who came up to stand beside her. She looked at them and felt her face reflecting their giddy children's glee. They were special in some way the others did not understand any better than she. It was not merely some initiation ceremony. They had been chosen.
Ten men and women stood in single-file before her. As the first approached her, a stoop-shouldered old black man who smiled wide at her with new-grown teeth, she looked to left and right, even as her own feet carried her towards him.
The young Asian woman on her left embraced the first of her line, a middle-aged white man who looked like a shelled turtle. Eyes wide open, they locked lips and their jaws worked for a moment in a rigorous but clinically chaste kiss. On her right, two boys, no older than twelve or thirteen, held each other and swapped spit like sleepwalking junior prom sweethearts.
The old man wrapped his arms around her and his mouth became the Grand Canyon. He said to her what the voice in her head had been saying all along. This is how we share, and how we survive. By communally pooling our genetic diversity in our brightest lights, we insure that none who have joined us will ever die.
"We live in you," whispered the old man with baby teeth.
"And I live in you," she replied, and kissed him.
~9~
There are those who say that dying is like passing through a tunnel into a bright white light. Ancestors and guiding spirits assemble to escort the departed soul to its greater reward. Worldly concerns fall away as the eternal peace and serenity of the afterlife enfolds them like a mantle and dispels all uncertainty, all fear, all darkness.
Zane Ezekiel Storch was not one of those people.
For just about forever, Storch did indeed float in an infinite corridor of darkness, and if he stared hard enough, he could see a light at the end, but he was pretty sure that wasn't St. Peter waiting in it. Sometimes it was close enough to see through, and there were usually men there, attaching things to him and asking him questions, inflicting what they hoped was pain and getting no answers. When they left him alone, he could almost reach into the light to the mere earthly darkness on the other side, but whenever they tried to reach him, the light fell away, their questions and their torture only filtering into the tunnel as background noise beneath the grinding voice of God.
This, alone, was why Storch believed he was dead. God was in here with him, and He never shut up. Most of the time he could not remember his own name, let alone the litany of crimes that could have brought him to this limbo, but he knew one thing. God was with him always, right under his skin, inside his skull. God was very concerned with his personal salvation. God had lessons to teach, and there was nothing to do but listen.
In your old life, your transfusion from Lt. Dyson kindled the first stirring of the fire of change in your cells. Directed to adapt to hostile environments, yet your body lacked the ability to do so. What you perceived as sickness was really the highest blessing, an undetectable form of fluid cancer that lay dormant in you until the Radiant Dawn touched you. Now your transformation is underway, you have swallowed entropy, but without guidance, it may devour you, yet. All that keeps you from tumbling back into the evolutionary abyss, into formlessness—is me.
God repeated Himself quite a lot. It was vital that Storch understand, and for the moment, they had nothing but time. There were visions, culled from the lost library of his cells:
—watching from cover behind a palisade of jagged rocks as the last of the Others come roaring out of their caves and into the trap of fire he and his clan had built. And they aren't men like his clan, but Others, black scaled skin and sinuous, upright-rambling snake-bodies, and terribly wise, golden eyes still blazing with the pride of an empire lost to these thieving, warm-blooded egg-stealers. But the world has moved on, life is change, and their day is done. Watching the males run burning into extinction, and then joining in as the females and, finally, the squirming hatchlings, are dragged out of their nest and slaughtered with rocks and sticks, the new tools that will change in the hands of their descendants into knives, and swords, and guns and nuclear warheads…
This is where you lost yourselves, God said. Here is where you learned to make, and ceased to be. Once, you had the potential to be so much more.
—at play in towering forests of broad-leafed trees, gorging himself on a dazzling array of fruits with his clan-mates in the Eden of his father's Bible. No fear of predators or hardship from the elements here, in this nurturing arcadian womb. Yet they are all sick with fever, seeing and fearing things that do not exist, seeing events that have not happened yet and never will, and seeing also things that happened before, that happen again and again in their heads. The comfortable cradle of the Now has been upset and cast them out, and memories and dreams echo through the once-blissful silence of instinct. The sickness splits them apart, each seeing their clan-mates as Others, where once they were as fingers on a hand, and retreating into the garbled abyss of their own heads. They have always been one body, but now they are many, and they are trying to kill each other. He surprises another of his kind and tears its throat out with his teeth. One less to compete with for food and mates, the fever tells him.
Through the trees, he sees the wall of cold black stone that bounds their habitat on all sides, but in its cyclopean face today, there is an open door. Hooting to the others, he gathers a few pieces of fruit, and approaches it.
In Paradise, the fire of selection shaped you, planting the seed of mind in your fragile brain, the forbidden fruit that hurtled your fragile race to its present, fleeting moment of grace. But once, you were all things, changing and learning to be more. The secrets the Old Ones could have taught you, lost forever…
—watching from cover behind a wall of dried mud as the cold-blooded saurian mother lies down for the last time, her monstrous bulk heaving a final rattle and settling to become one with the dust; watching as his rodent nest-mates streak, quicksilver limbs and needle teeth, over her mountainous carrion to get at her pitiful clutch of eggs, to carry them away in tiny, clever claws…
See how you have risen. You are a particle on a wind of change, blindly reaching for new forms, for survival. Once, the power to change was yours, and the world trembled in fear of your will, but that power was stolen from you…
—treading tides of water molecules in a pool on the shores of the first land to rise out of the seas, a flailing, amorphous predator, the first aerobic animal. Peering through the skin of the stagnant pool at something as vast as the moon, and as remote. Something vast and terrible and wise, watching him.
This is what I would give you. Mastery over yourself, the power to be, and to live, in all things again…
—watching as his body rises, a proud and terrible thing, on fire with the changes the world wrought on it from one moment to the next; watching as he towers above the pitiful Old Ones who made him to be their tool, their slave, and fell into weakness and decadent decay as he grew stronger, and learned to master himself; watching as those Old Ones are ground to pulp beneath his mighty, magnificent form, and driven from all the sunlit places of the earth.
The visions were so potent that they swept away the tissue of memories that claimed Storch as their own, and he became the Changes, the end product of the long history of lessons that had guided his genetic message to this place and time, and now promised an end to death, and time itself.
In your blood is the force
to become all things, and remake the world as it was meant to be. Let me lead you into the light…
Through the grinding voice of God had come another voice from out of the light, reedy and quivery and so jumbled up that it seemed to come all at once, but its words undercut the voice of God. They were an urgent message for the man he used to be, chattering away about something that must have been terribly important to him. Some backwards animal part of him strove to make the voice louder, strove to move his body, though God commanded him to be still. He struggled, but God must have let him go.
The light at the end surged up around him and it was a trick, this wasn't heaven or hell. He was back in the shitty old world again, and they were hurting him with electricity, and the little balding man who smelled like ants when you crush them in your hand, what was that called that made that smell, formic acid, yes, he only stared at Storch like he didn't have any answers, he didn't even know what fucking questions to ask.
His body lay before him like the controls of a strange vehicle he had only driven in dreams. It took all the concentration he could muster to put one foot in front of the other. The jerky movement and the unaccustomed view from his own eyes almost made him swoon with vertigo: the sounds of the soldiers, the hypnotic pulse of light and shadows, the bracing sting of the winter morning, noxious with car exhaust and city filth, but fresher by far than anything he'd breathed in ages.
They brought him into the weak morning sun so that he could feed, drinking in the light and using the new rhodopsin-pregnant cells in his skin to feed on the light. He could dimly remember answering questions from the little not-quite-a-man then, though God kept his mind cloudy and his tongue heavy, and, ultimately, pushed him back into the tunnel.
I thought you understood, God said. There can be no words with your ancient enemies. They are come again in forms outwardly like yours, but they possess tools, which have made them weak, while I have made you strong. They would make you weak again, Zane. They would douse the fire of change that I have ignited in you, and make you a slave again—
And then the voice of God was cut off, and there was PAIN, and he was falling away from the light, away from the noise and the hurt for good and all. He could feel something not him suddenly and totally entering his body, killing it cell by cell, burning even the libraries inside them, all the hard-won wisdom of a billion lives. He reached out for the voice that had helped him make sense of it all, his awful guide and God, but the voice was gone, silenced in a single gargling blast of infinite red noise that echoed still in his head. His head…
The tunnel was longer and darker than ever before, but there was silence, and that, at least, was a kind of heaven.
Now the light came again, and it grew before him so fast that he knew this time it was the final light, the tunnel into eternity that people described. The voice of God was conspicuously absent, as were the spirits of his ancestors, and the angels, but he knew with some certainty that it was the end. The light was not white and soothing like before, but hot and red and orange, and it roared with sentient hunger and the promise of eternal suffering, and it was calling him, and it would have him.
Figures, Storch thought.
It was almost an abstract feeling, like reading a poem about pain, when the flames licked at his feet. And he wondered at that, at that feeling that he still had feet. He was having phantom pains, his immortal soul thinking it still had a body, out of habit. You'd think it would have gotten used to it, by now. And even as he pondered this, he kicked out at the flames, and, finding no purchase, arched his phantom back and clawed out with his phantom hands, and his phantom mouth tore open like a long-healed scar and drew breath into phantom lungs.
He found himself lying on his back inside a very real plastic bag. He could see nothing but a red dimness, but he could still feel the fire at his feet, and he could hear screams now, louder than ever. He sat up and tore the bag apart and found that he was perched on the edge of eternal flames, after all.
Storch sat on a gurney, naked in a red body bag, in a small, bright white room. The gurney was parked before the mouth of a great incinerator, and two men in white bio-isolation suits had been sliding his lifeless body into it, up until he ruined it. They only stood there now, dumbstruck and screaming.
No, only one of them was screaming, backing towards the wall and fumbling for the intercom built into it. The other one got hold of himself and tore open a sealed pouch on the outside of his vinyl suit. He pulled a sort of toy pistol out of it. It looked like something he might have made in a pottery class to break out of a prison, and anyway, Storch just didn't feel the same aversion to having guns pointed at him, that he used to. He wasn't sure if they could hurt him, but he was just a few light years past giving a shit, one way or the other. More disturbing by far was the roaring silence between his ears, and the feeling that he was all alone in his own head, once again.
The armed man pointed and shot, and his partner staggered back into the wall. Storch could see only the tiniest hole in his faceplate, but the man's face disappeared behind a sheet of blood as he slumped to the floor.
The man pointed the gun at Storch now, but he didn't seem to place any more stock in it than Storch did.
"You're supposed to be so fucking dead," the man said. His voice was weak, and his whole suit billowed and flapped with his panic-stricken breathing. The man had olive skin, a shapeless nose, and big brown halogen headlights for eyes.
Storch gagged. His throat was gummed shut with resinous phlegm, and when he tried to swallow, he tasted rancid blood. "What do you know," he gurgled, "about being dead?" He raised himself up on his knees, and slowly, laboriously, climbed down off the gurney. He clung to the edge with blue-black monkey's paws that had to be his hands, because they did more or less what he told them to. He dangled his jittering legs over the side, fishing for floor.
"You're dead!" The man kept insisting. "You were shot full of NGS, sixteen times the maximum tested dosage! You melted!" He raised the gun again and made gestures like he wanted Storch to get back up on the gurney and slide himself into the fire.
Melted?
The body bag Storch had just climbed out of was covered in biohazard symbols and barcode stickers. Sloshing around in its interior, a gray-blue slush that reeked like an open grave. This was another vision, another nightmare. Another test. "I…got better," he said. He looked down, saw the floor was a lot further away than he'd expected, and dropped hard. Both knees buckled under him and he sat down hard on his tailbone.
Funny…no depth perception. He waved his hand in front of his face. Only one of his eyes worked. He touched his face. There wasn't nearly as much of it as there should be. Ditto for his skull: a rift big enough to make a fist in ran from his left eye socket to the back of his head. There were more holes in his chest, but these had already closed over.
Now that he thought about it, his head did hurt like a bastard, and as he prodded it, it seemed to get worse. He felt like his mind was rising, coming untethered from his neck, and he watched himself lie prone on the floor from a corner of the room, watched the man cover him with the ceramic pistol. The floor was cold concrete sheathed in plastic and covered with those ribbed no-slip strips that they put in showers and on stairs.
He wrapped his hands around his head and closed his eye and rolled over on his side. God would come back and sort this shit out. Even if he wasn't really God, he was welcome to this situation.
"Oh, Jesus!" the man shouted, and shot at him. The needle-thin bullet went wide of Storch's head and exploded an inch deep in the floor. A bubble burst in the plastic cover, and chips of concrete pricked Storch's neck.
"STOP THAT!" Storch bellowed. His head was growing back together. Drawn by some tidal gravity of souls, he came back down and went inside the putrid waves of his own flesh, closing over him like quicksand, watched his body fixing itself with a sick familiarity. This, at least, was something he'd seen before.
The boy in the truck whose head he'd split open whe
n they tried to kidnap him in San Jose. Now it was happening to him. The swelling tumor like the probing tongue of a secret parasite, glowing robust newborn-baby pink in the black cavity. Green poison bubbling out of the wound as the neoplasmic bubble became bone and new brain underneath, and skin over it all. The whole thing rebuilding itself to factory specs, like an anthill. And pop, just like that, he could see in stereo again.
The world through his new eye wasn't any more attractive than through the old, but as it dawned on him that he was still alive and alone, it also slowly crept up on him that he was no longer human. His flesh knew what he should be, and how to fix itself, but the idea of Zane Ezekiel Storch was like the lyrics to a strange song that could slip away the moment he stopped reciting them. And he would become whatever kind of monster the world made of him, because they tried to kill him, but they missed him and shot God instead.
Whatever else he was, he was finally free. "Going home," he groaned, and shoved at the floor. He stood and kept moving so he wouldn't fall down again, towards a heavy steel Star Trek-style door that looked like it slid into the wall when you touched the button on the wall beside it. He was going home.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" the man shouted.
"Going home," Storch said again. He touched the button. Nothing happened. It wasn't a button, it was a lens. Shit. It was so hard to think, his fucking head hurt so goddamned much, he wanted to tear it off and try growing a new one, and that asshole with the gun…
"You're not going anywhere. Maybe you can't be killed, but I can blow you into enough pieces, even you won't get up."
"What?" His arms were spindly corded sticks, but he felt sure he could rip the man's spine out and flog him with it before he got off a shot. The man seemed to know what he was letting himself in for, but he looked like he wanted to try to talk his way out of this, before he made good on his threat. Lucky for him…
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