The observers saw in the tiny slice of space between the vessel and the body the merest suggestion of a sentient pulsing gelatinous influx. Quickly, the container was pulled away, while at the same time a transparent shell rose up from within the M&A platform to fully enclose the patient.
Beneath this perspex carapace, Shelly began instantly to metamorphose.
The lips of her incision drew closed of their own volition. Her stomach swelled noticeably, then just as significantly concaved, as the leucothean lifeform introduced into her abdomen swiftly absorbed organs, bloated, then shrunk into extensions that blew through her like a wind of pure somatic change. The expression on Shelly’s face betokened no pain, just shock, and then, amazingly, a species of bliss. Her eyes rolled back into their sockets; when they revolved again a full minute later, they revealed themselves transmuted into the flinty optic roundels of all angels. Attenuating and wavering, her limbs went through various test modes of ectoplasmic configuration before settling down to the angelic perfection of human similitude.
Most astonishingly, Shelly’s body began to float above the M&S pedestal, constrained only by the clear lid.
Above, in the observation galley, Fabiola began to retch. Brewster struck the dome of the theater a resounding blow. Rand sought tranquility in dull recitation of facts.
“The imago will automatically seek the global seraphian layer and the company of its kind. The canopy prevents its flight until it can be brought into the open. Already the new angel is part of the leucothean group mentation, able to detect and respond to human distress in all its forms via contact with our wafers along non-local dimensions—”
Fabiola turned and slapped Rand’s face. Brewster restrained her from further assault, but needlessly, for she slumped into her seat in tears.
Rand massaged his rubescent cheek. “Such a simple operation in theory, but fraught with more than its share of emotional complications.”
* * * *
Rand beneath her, Brewster above, Fabiola performed slow gyrations upon the twin fleshy impalements of their cocks thickening inside her. Brewster had his inner elbows locked beneath her axillaries, hands clamped behind her neck; Rand cupped her pendulous breasts. Entrained in lubricious synchronous routines, the threesome resembled in their fluid unity some tripartite hybrid not entirely dissimilar to the dualistic being which had come into life just hours ago in the surgical theater beneath their rapt gaze.
The trio’s movements accelerated with their growing urge toward completion. Inter-responsive sounds escaped the participants: from Fabiola, a cascade of panting mewls; from Brewster, coarse-grained grunts; from Rand, soothing wordless encouragements. Within speedy minutes, their orgasms spilled over the barrier separating potential from actualized, guttural howls an operatic accompaniment to the release. Brewster slumped sideways over onto the mattress, pulling Fabiola with him and thus levering Rand onto his side: six legs tangled like the limp fronds of sea plants.
For a time, until they regained an ease of breathing, they did not speak. Then Brewster broke the silence.
“I should have been kinder to her. I see that now. But I was an ignorant brute.”
Unlinked from her lovers, Fabiola rolled over onto her back, pulling the men into a cradling embrace on either side. She said, “Kinder? Perhaps. But I doubt that any of us could have dissuaded Shelly.”
Brewster growled. “Of course, I blame the angelmakers too. They should have refused her as an unstable volunteer.”
“What other kind would they ever get?” Rand wryly asked.
Fabiola suddenly said, “No one’s innocent. We’re all angelmakers.”
Brewster rose up on one elbow, glaring. “What?”
“I mean that the four of us had a unique dynamic that drove Shelly to her fate. And also that our society as a whole demanded her transformation. We planted a slow virus of ideation within her during childhood, and it finally came awake and transcribed itself.”
Brewster dropped back down. “I don’t know if I buy that, Fab.”
“It’s true nonetheless.”
Rand’s voice held a genuine perplexity. “Do you remember, Brew, something you said years ago, when we were still in school? That the four of us made a whole? Why don’t I feel a missing part now?”
“I suppose because Shelly’s still out there in some form.”
Fabiola volunteered, “The findings are still imprecise regarding how much individual mentation remains after hybridization.”
Rand shuddered. “Not much I hope.”
Brewster sat up suddenly, as if struck by inspiration. “Let’s memorialize this day. I propose that every year on the anniversary of Shelly’s ascension, we spend a holiday together.”
“I second the motion,” said Rand.
Fabiola gripped both their hands. “It’s unanimous. In memory of Shelly, a school reunion each year.”
Brewster wedged his big hand into her wet crotch, enfolding her whole sex back to her anus. “And you’ll be our homecoming queen.”
“And you the jester,” suggested Rand.
They all laughed before they all kissed.
* * * *
Brewster seemed as proud of the Sacramento Rainforest as if he himself had planted each of its towering black-leaved trees, artfully draped each of its sensate lianas, animated each of its animals, programmed each of its buzzing bugs. Conducting Fabiola and Rand down one of the region’s many public trails, hot sunlight butterscotching their bare arms, he lectured in an earnest manner most unlike his bluff self outside this artificial wilderness, delivering anecdotes, statistics and philosophy.
“You’d never believe you were walking through what was once a metropolitan concentration, now would you? Just carting away the demolition debris to the plasma incinerators took the better part of a decade. But currently you won’t find more than a few score people at any given time within a hundred-mile radius. A handful of daytrippers, some hikers and overnight campers, and a smattering of guides such as myself. One minute.”
Brewster had halted by a tree with a diseased limb. He bent to its base and began scraping away dead leaves from around the trunk. After a few swipes, he exposed the tree’s inset partner to the communion wafer in his wrist. Mating his wafer to the wood-rimmed one, Brewster internalized the feed, then stood.
“Nothing out of the ordinary. Just planned rot.”
Rand effortlessly shrugged off his bulky pack, revealing a patch of sweaty shirt fabric beneath. “Lofters may have solved the weight problem, but I’ve yet to wear a pack that truly breathes.”
Fabiola chimed in with her own complaint. “My feet are absolutely aching. How much farther, Brew?”
“Just a mile or so. I swear, you two youngsters should apply for early systemic reboots. I had a couple of ’booters in here last week—ninety years old if they were a day—and they didn’t chaff me as much as you two.”
Rand pulled his pack on again with an exaggerated show of self-sacrifice. “Can we help it if desk-play has made me and Fab soft? We can’t all spend every day slogging through the muck and mire like you do. Some of us have a civilization to run.”
Brewster snorted. “Poking alien slimebags in cages in one case, and guiding giant gasbags into orbit in the other. Such noble pursuits. Let’s go, and no more bitching.”
Brewster’s “mile or so” proved closer to five. But the sight at the end proved inspiring: a luxuriant greensward rolling at a slight inclination toward a posted but unbarricaded cliff edge.
Brewster tapped his wafer with quick codes. “I’ll shut off the warnings from those posts while we’re here. I think we’re all mature enough not to tumble over the edge.”
Shucking their packs onto the lawn, the three friends strolled toward the land’s edge. Attaining this stanchion-dotted terminus, they saw the boulder-studded Sacramento River churning turbulently some fifty feet below, a muddy snake writhing in digestion, death or birth.
“The Rewilderness Institute has upped the flo
w for rafting season. If you two could have spared me more than a single day—”
“But we couldn’t,” said Fabiola decisively. “So let’s enjoy our picnic and not spoil it with ‘might have beens.’”
They retreated several yards from the dropoff and began to spread a feast from the contents of their packs. Soon, a large blanket played host to a dozen dishes, hot and cold. Rand popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, and poured portions into the glasses outheld by his companions. After filling his own, he proposed a toast.
“To Shelly, now five years gone, wherever she may be.”
Glasses clinked, and were drained off. Fabiola swiped a finger past the corner of one eye, then smiled and said, “I’m starving. Let’s eat.”
Sprawled laughing on the blanket with his friends, Rand had a chicken leg halfway to his mouth when he froze as if an icicle had replaced his spine. He touched his wafer uselessly. “Oh sweet Gaia…”
The others reacted to his alarm. “What is it, Rand?” “Spill it, boy!”
Rand stood up, his face pale. “It’s a call from my Institute. All off-duty personnel to report immediately. But there’s no point. You’ll learn why any minute yourself.”
The general alert came through to Brewster and Fabiola within seconds. Rand nodded at their dismay.
“Billions of tons of Jovian volatiles on a collision course with the planet. An unprecedented d-link misreception. Estimated area of impact, middle of the North American west coast. Estimated energy release, two point five tunguskas. Estimated time of atmospheric entry, ninety seconds.”
They had no time for any action save throwing themselves to the ground and hugging each other.
A noise like the fabric of spacetime ripping assaulted them. The horizon lit up as if a second sun had been born. A hot wind from a hotter hell arrived, and the ground flapped like a bedsheet hung out in hurricane.
Torn treelimbs whipped past the three people. Ripped apart, the humans themselves rolled toward the cliff edge.
A stanchion caught Fabiola in the gut. Frantically she clawed at it, managing to wrap her arms around it. It tilted out of its socket, but held at a rakish angle.
The shaking earth eventually ceased its convulsions. Warily, Fabiola released her grip on the pole, crawled a few inches away from the cliff, and stood. She spit an oyster of bright blood, then looked about for Rand and Brewster.
The men were nowhere in sight.
She advanced cautiously but anxiously to the crumbling edge of the greensward. In the river, she thought to discern two bobbing heads and an occasional flailing arm.
Fabiola looked into the sky. “The angels,” she murmured. Then, louder, demandingly, “The angels. Where are the angels?”
She mumbled the answer as soon as it occured to her. “Helping the millions of others hurt in the cities. But surely there’s just one angel free for us.”
She screamed then, a single name.
“Shelly!”
Not discontinuously, but riding the gravitic fluxlines of the planet, an angel swiftly descended. Arrowing for the water, it pulled up short of the surface and did something Fabiola had never seen an angel do.
It hesitated.
“Go!” Fabiola yelled.
The angel dropped like a stone into the torrent. Seconds later, it emerged, grasping a human form like an eagle with its prey. Within moments, the dripping angel and its burden hovered above Fabiola.
An unconscious Brewster dropped a few inches to the earth with a sodden thud.
“I’ll help him! Get Rand! Get Rand!”
The generic angel turned its emotionless iconic countenance to the human woman, then back to Brewster. Ignoring Fabiola’s orders, the angel plunged its resuscitory hands into Brewster’s chest.
Fabiola began beating the angel’s unyielding back. “No, no, I’ll revive him. Help Rand!”
The angel persisted in its fixed course of action. Only when Brewster puked and shudderingly began to breathe unassisted did the angel rise and fly back to the river.
It returned five minutes later with Rand’s corpse.
Fabiola supported Brewster half-sitting; the big man seemed only half-cognizant of his surroundings, stunned by the treachery of his paradise. Fabiola looked up at the floating angel that bore Rand in pieta formality.
Fabiola spoke with a stern sadness. “He’s brain-dead, you fool. There’s nothing you or I can do for him here. Go discontinuous and bring him to a medical center. They might be able to do a neural reweave.”
Instead of obeying, the angel deposited Rand’s body at Fabiola’s feet and scooped up Brewster. They vanished together.
Fabiola stroked Rand’s brow and wept.
“Was that you, Shelly? Was that you? You didn’t wait for me to answer your question. It felt just awful to die beneath the ice. It hurt worse than tongue can tell. But now it hurts much worse to live.”
THE JONES CONTINUUM
Carr tunes the snap generator with exquisite precision. He feels almost like an integrated component of his creation. His nimble fingers nudge the slide controls on the crackle-finished main console up and down, like the delicate digits of a record producer seeking to obtain the proper sound mix for some merry pop melody. Ruby LED displays flicker through an infinity of interdimensional coordinates, before finally being locked onto the proper set. Seemingly relieved, Carr unbends from over the large bank of controls.
Carr and his console occupy the middle of a converted soundstage somewhere in California. This commandeered facility, chosen for reasons of security and subterfuge, is large and desolate-feeling, housing the ghosts of actors, directors and cameramen, and their fictional realities. Carr is suddenly struck by how fitting this setting is, in terms of their attempt to breach an alternate worldline. The huge space traps and alters sound oddly. Carr and his busy crew fill only a small portion of the high-ceilinged building. Cables snake across the cement floor from console to portal to mainframes. Big kliegs on telescoping shafts with tripod feet light the scene harshly. Shadows lurk beyond the perimeter thus defined.
Men and women—dressed like Carr in sexless antiseptic white “bunny-suits,” complete with closefitting hoods—monitor various instruments and convey hushed instructions from one station to another through headphones and pin-mikes. Lurking back in the shadows are a cluster of officers wearing the various uniforms of the U.S. Armed Forces. They are not half so creepily impressive, however, as the assorted plain-clothes observers, who Carr knows represent more secretive and powerful branches of the government.
Carr wipes cold sweat from his brow. So much is riding on this one mission. His reputation, years of hard work, further grants… He’d prefer to be going through the portal himself, but that’s impossible. As the inventor of the snap, he’s too valuable to risk. No, the success of all his efforts ride on the performance of the select team standing nervously by the portal. These four men and one woman have been selected and certified by ranks of government experts. If anyone can deal with the unknown terrain that lies beyond the portal and establish a beachhead for democracy, it is these five cross-dimensional explorers.
Leaving his console, Carr walks to the group.
Jones is their leader. Solid, responsible Jones, his looks as All-American as his name. Carr finds it odd, how these types always seem to spring up, ready to lead, when the nation needs them. Glenn, Armstrong, and now Jones, another from the same mold. He’s a big man, made to appear even taller and bulkier by his outfit. Like the rest of his party, Jones wears, over his desert- camouflage fatigues, segmented plates of Kevlar body-armor, bound to a loose aramid mesh substrate that will allow ventilation in the hot environment they expect to encounter. Combat boots add an inch to Jones’ height. Weapons and supplies are strapped across his back and chest, hang from hips and waist. Fragmentation grenades, food concentrates, a canteen, medipak, the latest rapid-fire rifle with laser-sights…
Carr lays a hand on Jones’ armored shoulder. “Well, Charles, I guess this is
it. There’s not much I can say now, except ‘Good luck.’”
Jones’ voice is firm. “We couldn’t ask for a better base team—or mission head, Phil. Just make sure you have the portal open at the right time, and we’ll do the rest.”
Carr knows he wanted to say a hundred things at this point, but has forgotten every last one in the excitement. All he can remember is a final admonition.
“Remember, we’re fairly certain that the physical laws in this universe are different from ours. All the theoretical work indicates there will be a deviation from our own continuum. Nothing major at the quantum level—Planck’s Constant and all that crap should be identical to ours down to a few dozen decimal places. But those accumulated small discrepancies may amount to macroscopic differences which we can’t predict. You’ll have to move cautiously. All we know is that life is possible there. You know all our test animals returned unharmed…”
Skinny Kent interrupts, his voice nervous. “What about those weird results with the higher animals?”
“Right, Tom, right. That monkey and cat did return with initial behavior abnormalities, but those cleared up soon after. We now suspect that most of their atypical behavior derived from sharing the same cage, albeit with a glass divider. However, just to be sure, you’ve got your various psychotropic stabilizers. Take them as Doctor Benson advises.”
Carr nods to the lone female expedition member. Doctor Benson smiles weakly, her hands fidgeting with the plastic catch that holds her belt of grenades. She squeezes the twin prongs to release the catch, clicks it shut, releases it, clicks it shut, releases—
Suddenly realizing that the sound is mimicking the large snap that will signal their departure, Benson forces her hands to hang laxly by her side.
They are all uneasy, Carr included, and Jones, in his leaderly manner, takes over.
“Let’s do it, then.”
Carr shakes hands all around. “Charles, Tom, Mike, Heather, George. Our hearts go with you. Oh, yes—the President sends his best wishes too. Well see you back here at oh-nine-hundred on the dot.”
The Paul Di Filippo Megapack Page 33
