The car came to a stop amidst others, the same old models that had been parked outside the Grange hall. The early arrivals, Edward saw, were standing near the fires, lit with gold, partly shadowed.
Lucy levered open her door and stepped nimbly to the sweet-smelling, trodden hay grass. Edward dragged himself out of the car.
“Are you O.K., dear? Are you sure you want to be here tonight?”
Edward nodded dumbly. How could she be so appallingly blithe at his imminent demise?
They walked toward the crowd. Sally Lunn was not visible. The other six elderly officers separated themselves and approached. They were wearing their sashes and nothing else, their old carcasses somehow not pitiful or funny, but immensely dignified and potent. They carried archaic flails and scythes.
“Is your husband ready?” one asked. Edward thought he recognized Roger Swain, The Presbyter.
“Yes.”
“We will escort him. You must remain behind.” Swain took Edward by the elbow. The six officers and Edward began to walk uphill.
Looking up as he ascended, Edward stared full into the beaming face of the moon. Where had it come from? A moment ago it had been nowhere in sight.… He stumbled, and was forced to drop his gaze. When he looked up again, there were only innumerable stars.
By the time he reached the top, he was winded, more from fear than physical exertion. Under the dark trees, away from the flames, he could hardly see. They stopped to let his eyes adjust. Edward thought he saw an open work structure, like a giant wicker beehive. They moved toward it.
The structure was an airy hut woven of willow withes. Sally Lunn sat cross-legged inside it, clothed in a robe. Edward could feel her presence from six feet away.
“Happy Saint John’s Eve, Edward. We’re glad you could make it.”
The other officers had faded respectfully back and left him alone with Sally Lunn.
Edward collapsed nervelessly to the earth. He thought he could hear the gentle purling of a stream or spring nearby.
“Do you know who I am now?”asked Sally Lunn.
Edward shook his head no.
“I think you do. I am the Sun and the Moon and the Earth. I am Ceres and Gaea and Demeter, Persephone and Hecate. I am the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. I am burgeoning and fecundity, blossom and fruit. Do you acknowledge this?
Edward’s lips were very dry. “Yes,” he whispered.
“Do you know why you are here tonight?”
“Not really. But I can guess.”
“It’s because of your wife.”
“I know that much—”
“Quiet. You know nothing. Your wife is a very important person. Look at me. This body I inhabit is one of a few special ones, receptive to me. I come into it only from time to time. I am immortal. But although I can lend it a few years, this body is not immortal. In fact, it will soon go to feed the soil. This chapter of the Grange will be without their Sally Lunn. The important work they do would falter without guidance, But your wife—”
Revelation burst on Edward then, and he dared to get to his feet and interrupt. “You mean to possess her.”
“I already have.”
The officers had drifted back silently during Edward’s audience, and now stood outside the door of the hut. Sally Lunn spoke softly.
“It only remains for you, as Lucy’s husband, to marry me.”
Edwin Landseer, the Plowman, was helping Edward to remove his clothes, while Betty Rhinebeck, the Attendant, was slowly pulling the robe off Sally Lunn’s wrinkled shoulders. The Presbyter was aspersing them both with crisp water, while Alice Cotten, the Thresher, plumped up a bed of fragrant herbs and ferns. As Edward stared, Sally Lunn’s robe pooled about her waist.
She was no longer old. She was young as spring, a nymph with unmottled skin and abundant flesh, supple as a reed. Her hair was as thick as wheat in a field. She looked like Lucy and like every woman he had ever coveted. A heady perfume rose from her loins, indistinguishable from the earth.
Nancy Rook, the Sluicekeeper, was behind Sally Lunn, lowering her backward to the bracken. The goddess dug her heels into the ground and arched her back off the ground so her robe could be removed from underneath her, then finally pulled off her uplifted feet when she settled back down.
Calvin Culver, the Sower, guided Edward between her legs.
It was infinitely more intense than what Edward had experienced with Lucy in the garden. And that had been the headiest sex he had ever had.
He rose to meet the sun.
He answered the moon’s pull.
He tasted the earth.
He was a long, hot root in the soil.
He found the spring, the honeyed well on the hill, and drank deep.
The act felt as immemorially old as the grinding of one stone against another, with the grain being crushed between.
Then he flowered whitely, like an anemone.
When it was over, he lay for a time in Sally Lunn’s arms, eyes closed. He dared not look whether she was young or old again.
“Would you die for me right now, Edward?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I am pleased to say it won’t be necessary. But someday I might ask again.”
After a quiet interval, he somehow knew he was expected to get up and redon his clothes, so he did. The sashes came to lead him back downhill. He looked over his shoulder once, like Orpheus. The hut was empty.
The fires were dying down, the people dispersing. He found Lucy. Her hair was crazy, and her shirt hung out of her pants.
Driving back home,he was too baffled at being alive to be able to talk.
But in bed, holding the wife he had never known, whom he had so recently remarried, he found his voice and asked, “What I did tonight—it doesn’t bother you?”
Sleepily, Lucy said, “But why should it, dear? She was only me.”
PHYLOGENESIS
Life is tenacious, life is ingenious, life is mutable, life is fecund.
Wildflowers spring from vast fields of pillowy black lava barely cool. Bacteria dwell in pockets of oil squeezed between seams and strata, and they proliferate in anaerobic and glacial niches. Nodding fronds and waving worms cluster around hot mineral springs gushing from the floor of the sea, lightless and under immense pressure. Dead staffs, cut years gone by, planted in good soil, take root and sprout leaves. A subarctic pine thick as a pencil, when examined, reveals seventy annual growth rings. Fish and frogs are immured in mud during years of drought, to reawaken with the first rains. Herman Melville once heard a gnawing sound from within a favorite table and watched an insect bore its way out of the unblemished surface, having gone dormant in the original tree from which the table was made decades ago.
Most hardy, most tenacious of life—if living they can indeed be called—are perhaps the viruses. Classified as obligatory parasites—doomed always to an existence dependent on other organisms—barely more than some nucleic acid in a protein coat, they can lie in wait in animate—smallpox in a blanket—for a passing host. Given merely an instant’s contact, they will plant themselves and flourish.
But al1 these examples, however diverse, presuppose at least a minimal planetary environment, a nurturing biosphere. Without that—when a planet dies—can life endure?
This was the vital problem the human race found itself facing.
The invaders came to Earth from space without warning, their skins hardened for atmospheric reentry. In blind fulfillment of their life cycle, they sought biomass for conversion to more of their kind. Earth offered al1 they needed.
Only in the final days of the plague, when the remnants of mankind huddled in a few last redoubts, did anyone admit that extermination of the invaders and reclamation of the planet was impossible. The ecosphere had been fundamentally disrupted, damaged beyond repair.
Then did the chromosartors begin to work feverishly to adapt a new man to the alien conditions. With a snippet from the marsupials, a string from the Pinnipedia
, incorporating dozens of other genetic components, they refashioned woman and man for the new conditions.
And their overal1 model, the organism they felt offered the best tactic for survival, was, out of al1 creatures, the most simple.
Virus.
* * * *
The host was sick. Here in its adult environment, without predators its own size, capable of a long, long existence, it had succumbed to infection. In the forbidding vastness of circumsolar space it wallowed, out of control, plainly dying.
Stars hung in the limitless vacuum, pinpoints sharp as loss: orange, blue, white, ruby. One blazed only a few Astronomical Units away, correspondingly more dominant. These luminaries were the only watchers. There was no active mind present to care about what was to occur.
Scale was hard to determine in this wilderness, but the stricken creature seemed to occlude a goodly number of stars with its bulk, in its spasmodic progression through the vacuum.
Ripples pulsed across the organism’s elastic surface, convulsions engendered by unseen internal disquiet. It was plainly a system out of control.
These wavelike motions picked up speed, acquired a crazy tempo, like that of a fibrillating heart. The host looked like an amniotic sac disrupted by the frantic movements of its strangulating inhabitant.
Suddenly, noiselessly, without warning, the host ruptured. Amorphous fragments and thick sheets of biological substances—along with liquids and gases—blew off and scattered in every direction, the solids pinwheeling and tumbling end over end.
Among these useless fragments were several large flocks of objects that seemed still viable. Small ovoids, complete and self-contained, these were the vesicles. Unlike the object that had expelled them, they were born helpless, without control over their course. They radiated off into the depths of space, limning the surface of a ghostly, expanding sphere.
There happened to be no other hosts in the immediate vicinity. The vesicles were thus doomed to wander indefinitely.
The hosts—the prey of the vesicles—although much larger and more capable than the aimlessly floating parasites, were still insignificant targets, compared to the distances that separated the two.
But time was long, and any likely event must come to pass. Eventually, the vesicles would chance to meet a new host.
* * * *
There was movement amid the great lifeless night.
A segment of stars was occluded by a tremendous glaucous bulk moving slowly. Its exterior possessed a quasi-organic texture, like a bluish grey compound of fat and plastic. It had a relatively high albedo, so it was rather bright. Its shape was a featureless ovoid. It resembled nothing so much as a titanic mottled pill-capsule.
In its creeping passage, the host was moving toward something that seemed, at first, a single smaller object with many components. This object was also moving, on a path tangential to the host. As the distance between the two objects narrowed, the latter resolved itself into a flock of discrete entities.
The vesicles’ long unconscious seeking was almost at an end. The gravitic memory of their ejection from a common source with identical force and trajectory had kept them together on their uncontrolled flight through the long night, a cluster of small pods that were identical in substance to the host.
Now the foremost portion of the host intersected the flock of vesicles. Some stuck, held not by magnetism or gravity, but by adhesive forces biological in nature. Others—too far away or not tenacious enough—drifted by, losers in the cosmic lottery.
The ones that had clung to the host had a chance to live and reproduce. The ones that had failed to catch on would, in all likelihood, die. Perhaps they would plunge into this system’s sun. Perhaps they would simply wither away, their natural capacities exhausted, their dormancy become final death.
The host emerged from the diminished cloud of vesicles. The two units continued on their separate paths. The sleek uniformity of the host’s thick skin was now broken by the scattered forms of the clinging vesicles, like limpets on a rock. But there was no reaction from the host to this change in its condition. It seemed unaware of its doom. No host, in fact, had ever been known to exhibit sentience.
The vesicles, however, sensed the difference in their state, and they emerged from dormancy. Interior cellular mechanisms began to switch on.
Soon, the portion of the vesicles in contact with the host began to secrete a lysis-promoting enzyme. The integument of the host beneath the vesicles began to dissolve. After a short time, the vesicles and the host were immutably fused together. The vesicles continued to eat inward, single-mindedly following a program laid down long ago.
The wounds on the host closed with temporary patches slowly behind the invaders, thwarting the release of the host’s interior components into the vacuum of space.
The invasion took place in utter silence, no cries or alarms sounding in the desolation of space, despite the life-or-death nature of the struggle. Success did not lie solely with the invaders. Some defective capsids were stopped by subcutaneous membranes that formed a second line of defense. Their contents were enzymatically absorbed. However, most of the capsids soon penetrated the thick hide of the host completely, gaining access to its interior structure: a labyrinth of cells and arteries, nerves and organs, structural tubules and struts, all lit with exceeding dimness by a yellow-green bioluminescence.
A nonhomogenous environment of wet and dry spaces, some cluttered with pulsing conduits and organs, some home to roving organelles, others like the empty caverns formed in foam.
At the immediate instant of gaining entry to this variegated interior, the vesicles discharged the machinery of subversion, their living blueprints, the carriers of heritage and the template for the formation of more vesicles.
Throughout the interior of the host, falling with liquid plops from the exhausted, dying vesicles, scores of naked neohumans in all stages of maturity landed on their backs and sides and bellies, coughed up pints of fluid, and became instantly aware.
The host had now fully sealed off the holes made by the vesicles, preventing the vacuum from entering, but it was too late to forestal1 the real damage.
* * * *
6-Licorice opened his brown eyes. He wiped his lips and chin clean of the gelatinous fluid that had until this moment filled his lungs. Already the estivation medium was drying on his body, turning into opaque white flakes that would soon fall off like scales. It felt good to be awake once more—to be alive. It seemed only minutes ago that he had entered his capsid, there to dream uneasily of his short but full life—the past and what might come—but he knew he might in reality have been asleep for years.
6-Licorice lay for a second or two, considering how lucky he was to have survived. Such a short moment of reflection was all he could afford, here in this nurturing yet hostile environment. Then he levered himself up agilely off the warm rubbery floor.
6-Licorice was a fully mature adult neohuman, a fine exemplar of his species in the only form in which it existed now. He stood four feet tall, with limbs rather gracile than muscular. He was completely hairless. His eyes were big, the pupils big within them. His genitals were hidden in a pouch of skin. There was a thick crease or fold of flesh across his otherwise flat stomach.
The first thing 6-Licorice had to do was find out if 3-Peach had made it too.
6-Licorice surveyed his surroundings. He was in one of the drier corridors—roughly cylindrical in cross section—which threaded the flesh of the host immediately beneath its tough skin. (All hosts exhibited an almost manufactured uniformity.) The texture of this corridor was fibrous, almost vegetative. The jaundiced light generated by the host’s substance—although dimmer than moonlight—was perfectly adequate for 6-Licorice’s large eyes. It was in fact the only form of illumination he had ever known.
Sniffing the moist air, 6-Licorice failed to detect 3-Peach’s scent/taste. So he moved to one of the walls, where he found by touch a buried vein, which he bit into with sharp teeth.
&
nbsp; One of the many nourishing juices the host provided filled his mouth. 6-Licorice drank it gratefully.
After a few swallows, 3-Peach’s taste/scent came to him: her saliva, mixing with the host’s fluids, where she too drank upstream. (Had 6-Licorice been upstream of3-Peach, she would have responded in the same way to his trace.) It was an unmistakable and unique mix of chemicals, being bound up into her very genes, and it possessed a special affinity for all those of 6-Licorice’s lineage.
A string consisting of three molecules of allyl cyclohexylcaproate; two of allyl phenoxyacetate; five of cinnamaldehyde: 3-Peach-2-Honey-5-Cinnamon—his mate, his love, the complement to the special cargo of chromosomes that was his share of neohumanity’s continued perpetuation.
She was here! She had survived!
6-Licorice left the dribbling wound he had made in the host and began to run up the passage, in the direction from which the liquid had flowed to him.
Luck was with him, for he met no macrophages or lymphocytes or other harmful scavengers on the way. This was as expected, a kind of grace period, it being really too early for the host to have mobilized its defenses yet. Immunologically speaking, the host was still in the primary response stage.
In a short time, 3-Peach’s scent/taste filled his nostrils. He picked up his pace.
Attracted by his airborne signature, 3-Peach came running around a corner to meet him.
They collided in an ecstatic embrace and fell to the resilient floor.
In a second, instincts rampant, they were mating.
The sex lasted under a minute.
Still, it was intense, tinged with mortality and separation.
3-Peach and 6-Licorice regained their feet as soon as they were done. There could be no post-coital sleep or restful talk for them. Their world was too relentless.
The Paul Di Filippo Megapack Page 23
