World Enough, and Time

by James Kahn

  He touched the first body he came to. Warm, dry. Good pulse. It was a naked man, bald-headed, seemingly asleep. The body beside this one was also naked, also bald; and then Josh realized that all the sleeping Humans had had their heads shaved. And then Josh realized that the next Human was Rose.

  He felt her pulse. Strong. He lay down beside her—between Rose and the adjacent Human. He remained motionless for some minutes until he gradually grew calmer, drew strength from her warmth, from her serenity. He stroked the softness of her cheek. “Rose, dear Rose,” he whispered.

  Finally he sat up. “Time to leave this place,” he said resolutely, and began lifting her off the mattress.

  But something caught, and he couldn’t pull her up. Something at the back of her head.

  He crawled over the cloth to where her head rested, crawled with growing alarm. He cupped the back of her head in his hands, and felt his alarm turn liquid: emerging from the back of her shaved scalp was a cord. Gingerly he turned her head to look. There it was, evil, sickening: a black, thumb-thick cable, plugged snugly into a three-inch-long, thin rectangular box implanted solidly into the back of her skull. The surgery was recent, the wound not completely healed, stitches still in place.

  Josh gasped in disbelief. No, that was the horror, he believed all too well. With a strangled cry, he tore the plug from her head. Briefly, she twitched in his arms, then lay still. He felt her pulse: still full.

  He was aware, suddenly, of a red light blinking on and off above the door through which he’d entered, and in the room beyond. He picked up Rose, carried her lightly out the door into the anteroom, and pulled at the door that led back Into the main lab he’d originally entered: the door was now locked. He found the doors to Limbo and Nirvana locked as well. He tried kicking all three, but his foot was hurting now, and in any case, doubts had attenuated his strength. He ran back into the Communion room.

  There was one more door, he saw, at the back of the room.

  It was beside a large opening in the wall through which all the cables from all the shaved heads exited in a great twining bundle. The red light was still flashing. He tried the door. It was open. With Rose slung over his back, he entered the next room.

  Here the light was bright as day, making him squint. He dropped to his knees and set Rose down, trying to get his bearings, accommodate his eyes to the glare. All at once, the door behind him slammed shut. Josh swiveled to find a tall, cherubic man standing behind him. Not a man; a Neuroman.

  “Welcome,” said the strange figure. “I am Gabriel. You have come to the end of your journey.”

  CHAPTER 16: The New Animal

  HE stood eight feet tall, pink and plump and dressed in flowing white robes, and he smiled an exaggerated smile that was somehow more mean than happy.

  Josh moved between Rose and the towering Neuroman, and crouched, knife in hand.

  “No, no,” laughed the tall one, “I’m only Gabriel, and there’s no need to attack me. You’ve had a long journey, I’m sure, and could undoubtedly use some rest. As for me, I’m only the ANGEL on the night shift, here. In any event, I never resort to physical violence.”

  This banter put Josh off his guard. He stood a bit, and lowered his knife, as Gabriel turned his back to the young hunter and walked toward the wall.

  Josh noticed the room for the first time now—it was empty except for a large iron box into which ran all the cables from the preceding room. On top of the box was a panel of some kind, covered with buttons. Gabriel began nimbly pushing various buttons, his back still to Josh.

  “What have you done to them?” Josh demanded. “Make her wake up,” he continued, pointing to the unconscious Rose.

  “Oh, I’ve done nothing,” Gabriel answered, still pushing buttons. “The Queen’s done it all. There; now you must be feeling just a little sleepy from your long trip … what did you say your name was?”

  “Joshua. Joshua,” he replied. He was feeling sleepy all of a sudden; so sleepy, in fact, that he decided to sit on the floor right beside Rose.

  “Well, Joshua,” Gabriel said, turning around to face him now, “our Queen is a remarkable animal. She is brilliant, beautiful, and gracious. She’s taken droves of insignificant, directionless creatures and molded them into a coherent, cogent organism. She’s creating a new order on this planet. By the stars, it’s a new world!”

  Josh felt vaguely entranced by this inelegant patter; he couldn’t say why. An ambiguous combination of revulsion and hope rolled around inside him, like wineskins full of quicksilver. He found himself hopelessly unable to move; and then, with a start, remembered the anger that had brought him to this spot. “But the suffering you’ve caused …” he began.

  “Means versus ends,” the Neuroman glibly returned. “An old and fictional argument. It is all means, it is all ends. You believe there is more death and suffering now than there was before our time? No, there is not. We have merely redirected it toward a purpose. That is the only difference. We have injected purpose into the eternal process.

  “You know what the world is now? It is anarchy, Joshua. Another indistinguishable phase in the endless cycle, on this earth, of conflict, struggle, domination, and confusion. We are changing all that. We are reordering the biosphere. We are raising the level of integration of this world into the meaning of the Universe …”

  Josh was losing the thread. He knew why he was here. “Dicey is dead because of your schemes,” he accused.

  “There is no death,” Gabriel assured him. “This Dicey—she was a loved one?—her energy will return to us all. Her body will decompose in the sea, she will help the coral grow, she will be eaten by sea birds who will die and decompose and nourish the yellow flowers that give off oxygen that you yourself will breathe—molecules of your own dear Dicey—some of which you will keep, and some breathe out again, to shower over the earth, some to be expelled into the reaches of the Universe. It is all one field of energy, like the field of yellow flowers that perfumes the air with the sweet scent of Dicey’s electrons, and yours and mine. We are all forever.”

  Josh strained to see the relevance of this to the mass slaughter of Human beings, but he was having difficulty organizing his thoughts—difficulty concentrating.

  “As for the rest of these Humans,” Gabriel continued, “they are all part of the Queen’s Grand Experiment. She has collected that lot with care, selecting for the most unique—the essential—brains. We ANGELS, of course, have been her hands in the actual surgeries—the implanting of electrodes in the critical areas of cerebral cortex, then making the connections to the computer. But then it’s the Queen, herself, naturally, who integrates all that information, through the computer, into her own brain, to complement and augment her own not insubstantial cognitive processes.

  “There has never been such an experiment!” he went on, becoming visibly excited, his cheeks flushing, his fingers working the air. “Imagine it! By the stars, it is monumental! A thinking organism, a great intelligence at its center, directing its processes, utilizing the information in a thousand lesser brains—using it, integrating it, reprocessing, relaying, recombining—and all electronically, so there is no loss of information, no communication breakdowns, no language barriers—no language at all, except for the language of one DNA, the language of the neurotransmitters, the language of the electrons. Whole new levels of consciousness, by the stars! New leaps of…”

  Josh had been only half-listening at best, his mind turning obliquely in its own internal, autonomous rhythm on nothing he could fathom. Now, suddenly, he saw Rose begin to stir, and it jolted him more fully awake than he’d been since entering this barren room. “Where am I?” moaned Rose. Josh lifted her up into his lap, held her to his chest. “You’re safe now, Rose. Wake up, we have to leave.” Gabriel laughed unkindly. “No, Joshua, you cannot leave. You’re here for a reason, most fortunate Human.”

  Josh stared dully at the Neuroman, unmoving. Not that he couldn’t move, necessarily; but simply that in some myst
erious, indefinable way, he had no desire to move, no will.

  Rose sat up. Her face was alert, her demeanor comprehending. She felt scared and happy. “Oh, Joshua,” she said, seeing him clearly for the first time. She hugged him powerfully: feeling great love, and also trying to transmit some of her poised energy to him.

  Gabriel smiled at the scene, then went on speaking. “You cannot leave because you are needed by our Queen, both of you. Especially you, Joshua. You see, every thought process is accompanied by a certain pattern of electrical discharges—perhaps I should say caused by a certain pattern of discharges—which can be recorded as a brain wave on an oscilloscope. Every type of cerebral process is characterized by its own peculiar pattern of wave, which may differ in frequency, amplitude, shape, and a host of other variables. Now the Queen, in her unknowable wisdom, has discovered she is in need of certain classes of thoughts—that is, certain categories of electrical patterns—caused by certain configurations of nerve cells, firing in just certain ways—in order to mesh with other patterns she and her brains do possess, in order to reach certain kinds of new understanding of the Universe, understandings which you and I could never grasp. And these discharge patterns she is desirous of are, of course, necessarily accompanied by certain specific and characteristic brain wave patterns.”

  Josh was no longer attending, he was lost in a gray zone of consciousness that touched back to earth only periodically. Rose, on the other hand—to her own bewilderment—understood everything Gabriel was talking about, even though she was certain she’d never heard any of it before.

  Gabriel was now making fine adjustments on the knobs and buttons that lined the panel on the great iron box. He continued his monologue happily, almost as if to himself. “Now some Humans, it seemed likely, had brains that manufactured the electrical patterns the Queen wanted. The problem was how to find these Humans. By the stars, it was no problem! We simply built a wave generator. Like an old radio transmitter, really, only we could send out any frequency and roughly any shape wave we wanted.

  So the Queen wanted a seventy-f our-cycle-per-second-low-amplitude-damped sinewave: so that’s what we transmitted. And that, Joshua, is what pulled you here.” Josh responded to the sound of his name. His eyes flickered, his attention focused on the Neuroman. Gabriel went on.

  “We generated this wave in its purest form, and you synchronized with it. Like the sudden waves of a passing boat in a pond rippling with frogs and leaves and fish—all the ripples vanish, the water bends to the imprint of the waves. And then the boat passes and the waves dampen out, and the rippling crosscurrents return. It is what happens to an epileptic whose seizures take control when he is exposed to lights that flash at the frequency of the focus of his seizures. It is what happened to you, by the stars, every time you had one of your fits, or trances, or whatever you liked to call them.”

  “My spells!” exclaimed Josh.

  “Precisely. Which became stronger and stronger the closer you came to the source. There were, in fact, several different frequencies we transmitted—it is several different configurations of brain cells that the Queen is interested in. I’ve just been fiddling with the wave generator here, now, and by the way you’ve been responding to the low wattage signals I’ve been sending, I’d say you had the seventy-four CPS locus—probably just behind your Sulcus of Muldaur near the Sylvian Fissure, which makes sense, behaviorally speaking; those with your wave pattern, I find, are the most tenacious and ingenious, and invariably the ones who somehow manage to worm their way into the castle—to the source—before being captured. No wonder it’s a trait the Queen wants to cultivate,” he laughed brightly.

  Rose sat motionless, in horrible fascination, rapt by what Gabriel was saying. She didn’t understand all of it, but much was clear to her—and this fact alone riveted her to the floor. Beyond this, she had thoughts of assaulting the Neuroman—she found him hateful and low, and she knew this was their only chance for escape. But angered though she was, she could move no more than Josh. Whether it was her weakened condition, or Gabriel’s hypnotic speech, or some pulse of wave signals he was generating, or some implant they’d sewn into her brain, or some combination of these, she could not tell. She only knew she must leave this place, and she could not.

  Gabriel pushed more buttons on the keyboard. Josh felt his gray limbo fade into blackness, into the black sucking void with which he was now so familiar. The black void and the exploding light, imploding light, stronger now than ever before, brighter than the core of the heaviest sun, pulling Josh in, pulling Him apart…

  Isis sat in the dark cool of the air vent. Through the thin wire screen she looked into the brightly lit room. There sat Josh on the floor, dozing beside a woman—the woman tied up in the Vampire camp, the friend of the girl with the blood-smell. Beside them, a tall man—one of the creatures-without-smell—was saying some boring thing. Probably that’s why Joshua was sleeping. Maybe she should wait until Josh woke up. She didn’t like this creature, though, there was something fetid about his odorlessness. She stared at him without blinking.

  Suddenly the tall strange man walked to the big box he stood near and began turning dials. Isis didn’t like it. She watched Josh, looking for a cue. Josh rolled over, lay still on the floor, unconscious. In a matter of moments, his arms began to twitch; then his entire body started jumping, jerked around by some invisible force. It had to do with the tall one, Isis was certain, the creature-without-smell. Softly, she hissed.

  Once more, she hooked her front claws into one side of the thin grating that covered the portal to the duct in which she’d been crouching. With her hind legs she bashed at the screen, and after two good blows, sent both screen and herself sprawling into the room.

  She landed on her feet, somewhat akimbo. The noise drew the attention of both Rose and Gabriel, but before anyone could act, Isis leapt. In a second, she was on the Neuroman’s face, her teeth sunk viciously into one of his eyes, her claws making deep furrows in his artificial skin.

  They rolled wildly on the floor, Isis clinging to Gabriel in frenzied attack. Josh continued intermittently convulsing in the corner. The interruption broke Rose’s trance somewhat, but she still hadn’t the strength or will to join in the attack on Gabriel. Instead, with great effort, she picked herself up and teetered over to the console Gabriel had been manipulating. She didn’t know exactly what to do, but simply began pushing buttons randomly. Nothing happened. Josh remained unconscious on the floor, twitching periodically.

  The Neuroman threw the little Cat against the wall and stumbled to his feet, his face dripping Hemolube. Isis was on him again immediately, though, madness personified. Rose watched the struggle with grim stupefaction, then watched Josh convulsing on the floor. She turned more dials. Nothing. She tried to hit the Neuroman: she could not move.

  “I must help,” she thought, “but something prevents me from harming Gabriel directly. And poor Joshua is at the mercy of this machine I cannot turn off. A puppet of the radio waves. If only I could cut the strings …” The image was clear to her, though the entire concept was confusing, almost overwhelming. She didn’t know what electromagnetic waves were, had never even heard the words; yet, somehow, she did know. Words were bombarding her from deep inside her consciousness, strange words that disoriented, yet inspired: static interference, dispersion, scintillation, flux. Her head was spinning, tumbled by the noise of the fight, the noise of Joshua’s seizures, the noise in her brain. Suddenly out of the screaming jumble of nonsense came epiphany: without calculation or comprehension, she ran over and picked up the wire grating Isis had knocked into the room; then ran back to Joshua and wrapped the fine mesh around his head, bent it into place until it loosely cradled his skull, an ill-fitting, cross-hatching of wire.

  Almost instantly, Joshua’s convulsions ceased. The fight between Isis and Gabriel continued. The Neuroman oozed Hemolube everywhere from deep scratches and cuts; but he had Isis by the neck, now, and was finally strangling the weakening kitty.<
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  Josh woke up. He felt groggy, but the sight of Rose brought everything back to him in an instant. His thinking cleared as the trance vanished like smoke in a fast wind. “Rose …” he said.

  “Joshua,” she implored, pointing him toward the diminishing battle. “Help her, quickly.”

  With the full image of the little Cat being throttled, Joshua’s rage returned in full. He dove into Gabriel furiously. Isis pulled free and renewed her own attack. Josh quickly took a syringe from his pocket, tore open the fading Neuroman’s head valve, and clicked the empty syringe into place. Gabriel raised his hands in lost fear. “Wait, wait,” he pleaded, “I beg you, by the stars, do not inject air. I am beaten, I am yours.”

  Isis bit him once more on the leg, then sat, hissing, a few feet away, ready to pounce, her fur puffed out. Josh panted, his hand on the syringe. As he stood there, composing himself, catching his breath, he brought his hand up to pull the annoying wire cap off his head. Rose stopped him in time.

  “No, no, you must leave this place,” she warned. “It’s all that protects you from your spells. I … I don’t know why, but it does.”

  He nodded, accepting without questioning her knowledge.

  “Please,” Gabriel spoke up again. “Go freely. Only take the syringe from my head.”

  Isis bit him in the foot once more, then backed off again at a motion from Josh. “Keep quiet until you’re spoken to,” Josh advised the bleeding Neuroman. To Rose, he said: “Go back into the room next door. Unplug everyone from the cables.”

  Without a word she hurried into the Communion room to complete this task. Josh turned his attention again to Gabriel. “Now,” he urged with quiet fury, “tell me where is your vile Queen, that I may have words with her …”

  “I cannot…” began the Neuroman.

  “Tell me where or I empty this into your head,” he whispered, putting light pressure on the plunger. The pressure made Gabriel’s wounds ooze even faster. “By the stars, I cannot,” Gabriel pleaded. “By the stars, there is no Queen.”