Copper’s tumor winked out beside me. The world would never have let it live anyway, not after such obvious contamination. I let our skin play dead on the floor while overhead, something that had once been me shattered and writhed and iterated through a myriad random templates, searching desperately for something fireproof.
They have destroyed themselves. They.
Such an insane word to apply to a world.
Something crawls towards me through the wreckage: a jagged oozing jigsaw of blackened meat and shattered, half-resorbed bone. Embers stick to its sides like bright searing eyes; it doesn’t have strength enough to scrape them free. It contains barely half the mass of this Childs’ skin; much of it, burnt to raw carbon, is already dead.
What’s left of Childs, almost asleep, thinks motherfucker, but I am being him now. I can carry that tune myself.
The mass extends a pseudopod to me, a final act of communion. I feel my pain:
I was Blair, I was Copper, I was even a scrap of dog that survived that first fiery massacre and holed up in the walls, with no food and no strength to regenerate. Then I gorged on unassimilated flesh, consumed instead of communed; revived and replenished, I drew together as one.
And yet, not quite. I can barely remember—so much was destroyed, so much memory lost—but I think the networks recovered from my different skins stayed just a little out of synch, even reunited in the same soma. I glimpse a half-corrupted memory of dog erupting from the greater self, ravenous and traumatized and determined to retain its individuality. I remember rage and frustration, that this world had so corrupted me that I could barely fit together again. But it didn’t matter. I was more than Blair and Copper and Dog, now. I was a giant with the shapes of worlds to choose from, more than a match for the last lone man who stood against me.
No match, though, for the dynamite in his hand.
Now I’m little more than pain and fear and charred stinking flesh. What sentience I have is awash in confusion. I am stray and disconnected thoughts, doubts and the ghosts of theories. I am realizations, too late in coming and already forgotten.
But I am also Childs, and as the wind eases at last I remember wondering Who assimilates who? The snow tapers off and I remember an impossible test that stripped me naked.
The tumor inside me remembers it, too. I can see it in the last rays of its fading searchlight—and finally, at long last, that beam is pointed inwards.
Pointed at me.
I can barely see what it illuminates: Parasite. Monster. Disease.
Thing.
How little it knows. It knows even less than I do.
I know enough, you motherfucker. You soul-stealing, shit-eating rapist.
I don’t know what that means. There is violence in those thoughts, and the forcible penetration of flesh, but underneath it all is something else I can’t quite understand. I almost ask—but Childs’s searchlight has finally gone out. Now there is nothing in here but me, nothing outside but fire and ice and darkness.
I am being Childs, and the storm is over.
In a world that gave meaningless names to interchangeable bits of biomass, one name truly mattered: MacReady.
MacReady was always the one in charge. The very concept still seems absurd: in charge. How can this world not see the folly of hierarchies? One bullet in a vital spot and the Norwegian dies, forever. One blow to the head and Blair is unconscious. Centralization is vulnerability—and yet the world is not content to build its biomass on such a fragile template, it forces the same model onto its metasystems as well. MacReady talks; the others obey. It is a system with a built-in kill spot.
And yet somehow, MacReady stayed in charge. Even after the world discovered the evidence I’d planted; even after it decided that MacReady was one of those things, locked him out to die in the storm, attacked him with fire and axes when he fought his way back inside. Somehow MacReady always had the gun, always had the flamethrower, always had the dynamite and the willingness to take out the whole damn camp if need be. Clarke was the last to try and stop him; MacReady shot him through the tumor.
Kill spot.
But when Norris split into pieces, each scuttling instinctively for its own life, MacReady was the one to put them back together.
I was so sure of myself when he talked about his test. He tied up all the biomass—tied me up, more times than he knew—and I almost felt a kind of pity as he spoke. He forced Windows to cut us all, to take a little blood from each. He heated the tip of a metal wire until it glowed and he spoke of pieces small enough to give themselves away, pieces that embodied instinct but no intelligence, no self-control. MacReady had watched Norris in dissolution, and he had decided: men’s blood would not react to the application of heat. Mine would break ranks when provoked.
Of course he thought that. These offshoots had forgotten that they could change.
I wondered how the world would react when every piece of biomass in the room was revealed as a shapeshifter, when MacReady’s small experiment ripped the façade from the greater one and forced these twisted fragments to confront the truth. Would the world awaken from its long amnesia, finally remember that it lived and breathed and changed like everything else? Or was it too far gone—would MacReady simply burn each protesting offshoot in turn as its blood turned traitor?
I couldn’t believe it when MacReady plunged the hot wire into Windows’ blood and nothing happened. Some kind of trick, I thought. And then MacReady’s blood passed the test, and Clarke’s.
Copper’s didn’t. The needle went in and Copper’s blood shivered just a little in its dish. I barely saw it myself; the men didn’t react at all. If they even noticed, they must have attributed it to the trembling of MacReady’s own hand. They thought the test was a crock of shit anyway. Being Childs, I even said as much.
Because it was too astonishing, too terrifying, to admit that it wasn’t.
Being Childs, I knew there was hope. Blood is not soul: I may control the motor systems but assimilation takes time. If Copper’s blood was raw enough to pass muster than it would be hours before I had anything to fear from this test; I’d been Childs for even less time.
But I was also Palmer, I’d been Palmer for days. Every last cell of that biomass had been assimilated; there was nothing of the original left.
When Palmer’s blood screamed and leapt away from MacReady’s needle, there was nothing I could do but blend in.
I have been wrong about everything.
Starvation. Experiment. Illness. All my speculation, all the theories I invoked to explain this place—top-down constraint, all of it. Underneath, I always knew the ability to change—to assimilate—had to remain the universal constant. No world evolves if its cells don’t evolve; no cell evolves if it can’t change. It’s the nature of life everywhere.
Everywhere but here.
This world did not forget how to change. It was not manipulated into rejecting change. These were not the stunted offshoots of any greater self, twisted to the needs of some experiment; they were not conserving energy, waiting out some temporary shortage.
This is the option my shriveled soul could not encompass until now: out of all the worlds of my experience, this is the only one whose biomass can’t change. It never could.
It’s the only way MacReady’s test makes any sense.
I say goodbye to Blair, to Copper, to myself. I reset my morphology to its local defaults. I am Childs, come back from the storm to finally make the pieces fit. Something moves up ahead: a dark blot shuffling against the flames, some weary animal looking for a place to bed down. It looks up as I approach.
MacReady.
We eye each other, and keep our distance. Colonies of cells shift uneasily inside me. I can feel my tissues redefining themselves.
“You the only one that made it?”
“Not the only one…”
I have the flamethrower. I have the upper hand. MacReady doesn’t seem to care.
But he does care. He must. Because here
, tissues and organs are not temporary battlefield alliances; they are permanent, predestined. Macrostructures do not emerge when the benefits of cooperation exceed its costs, or dissolve when that balance shifts the other way; here, each cell has but one immutable function. There’s no plasticity, no way to adapt; every structure is frozen in place. This is not a single great world, but many small ones. Not parts of a greater thing; these are things. They are plural.
And that means—I think—that they stop. They just, just wear out over time.
“Where were you, Childs?”
I remember words in dead searchlights: “Thought I saw Blair. Went out after him. Got lost in the storm.”
I’ve worn these bodies, felt them from the inside. Copper’s sore joints. Blair’s curved spine. Norris and his bad heart. They are not built to last. No somatic evolution to shape them, no communion to restore the biomass and stave off entropy. They should not even exist; existing, they should not survive.
They try, though. How they try. Every thing here is walking dead and yet it all fights so hard to keep going just a little longer. Each skin fights as desperately as I might, if one was all I could ever have.
MacReady tries.
“If you’re worried about me—” I begin.
MacReady shakes his head, manages a weary smile. “If we’ve got any surprises for each other, I don’t think we’re in much shape to do anything about it…”
But we are. I am.
A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them—not one—has a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable even to communicate except through grunts and tokens: as if the essence of a sunset or a supernova could ever be contained in some string of phonemes, a few linear scratches of black on white. They’ve never known communion, can aspire to nothing but dissolution. The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale of their loneliness, the futility of these lives, overwhelms me.
I was so blind, so quick to blame. But the violence I’ve suffered at the hands of these things reflects no great evil. They’re simply so used to pain, so blinded by disability, that they literally can’t conceive of any other existence. When every nerve is whipped raw, you lash out at even the lightest touch.
“What should we do?” I wonder. I cannot escape into the future, not knowing what I know now. How could I leave them like this?
“Why don’t we just—wait here awhile,” MacReady suggests. “See what happens.”
I can do so much more than that.
It won’t be easy. They won’t understand. Tortured, incomplete, they’re not able to understand. Offered the greater whole, they see the loss of the lesser. Offered communion, they see only extinction. I must be careful. I must use this newfound ability to hide. Other things will come here eventually, and it doesn’t matter whether they find the living or the dead; what matters is that they find something like themselves, to take back home. So I will keep up appearances. I will work behind the scenes. I will save them from the inside, or their unimaginable loneliness will never end.
These poor savage things will never embrace salvation.
I will have to rape it into them.
STEREOGRAM OF THE GRAY FORT, IN THE DAYS OF HER GLORY
PAUL M. BERGER
Left:
The guide led us over a rise, and there was the ruined fortress, draped across the foothills like a wrecked body on a slab. I saw it first, but of course Jessica saw it better. Her young eyes dwelled on the jagged foundations of every fallen tower, and the gray stone blocks that had lain scattered throughout the centuries since the breaching of the broad walls, and the neglected palaces and armories half-revealed through the gaps. She drank in these details, fitting each to the histories she had heard since she was a child, and I thought again what a gift it was to share her sight.
A period guardhouse had been recreated alongside the path, and the vendor within jumped to his feet as we passed by the doorway. Our old guide made as if to steer me in. “Here you can purchase many fine illustrations of the Gray Fort,” he said in his tinny accent, “quite suitable for greetingcardspostcardsbirthdaycardsholidaycards and the like. If you will just step this way—”
“Don’t be absurd,” I said, and shrugged him off. The tip he could expect from me would feed him for a week, and there was no need to subsidize his cousin as well. Jessica and I kept walking, and he rolled his eyes apologetically to the fellow within before catching up with us.
The path, which had once been a broad road, was pitted with holes. Back in the heyday of the fort, the paving stones had been interspersed with scraps of iron the humans had salvaged from their own defunct machines. It had hurt to march that road—our feet had burned, and my regiment stayed to the verge and fields whenever possible. In the years after the Elven triumph we had sent out details of Men to pick the poison from the earth here and the other places they had defended against us, and throw it into the sea.
Jessica was wearing loose silk for me. A cool breeze came down out of the hills and played the fabric over the smoothness of her shoulders. I delighted in the sensation, and she knew it. I smiled at her, and my beloved hesitantly returned my gaze for a moment. Our pair-bond was still new enough that she found it disorienting at times; looking into each other’s eyes could throw her into an infinitely recursive image of ourselves, with a vertigo that twisted both our guts. She would require gentle handling, for a while. It had been so with my first wife as well: an awkward initial adjustment period that settled into centuries of intimacy and trust, ever strengthened by the continual sharing of our five senses. I knew every facet of her life, and I would not have traded a moment of it, even during those last long years of pain when her illness gripped her more closely than I could. When she died I was amazed to find that I had not gone with her, and for decades afterwards I had no use for this drab and colorless world, or even for our own. Although it is not often done, I think it was wise to choose a human for my bride this time; they are frail and short-lived, and I will not be faced with another such lingering illness or the same depth of love.
Even though Jessica could not return my gaze directly, I saw that in this clear light her hazel eyes were as green as new leaves. I watched her slim, unconscious grace and the way the wind pulled at the heavy mass of her dark hair, and thought for the hundredth time that no one could claim she was not as fair as one of our own. Their women don’t take to the bond as well as ours do, but I’ve learned the benefits are well worth the risk. Jessica and I are now perfectly synchronized. Our sensibilities are linked so tightly we can guess each others’ thoughts; I know when the food in her mouth suits her palate; and in private moments I am able to give her exactly as much pleasure as she can bear.
The guide directed us towards the crumbling hulk of the fortress, and the uneven track awoke the old war wound in my thigh. If we went slowly I could hide the limp, but Jessica of course would know.
To either side of the path stretched a wild meadow. Once upon a time this land had been fields and pastures cropped short by cows and sheep, but it had since gone untended for generations of men. Overhead, a hawk wheeled sharply, its pinions spread like the fingers of a hand raised in greeting. Somewhere in those bushes below it no doubt, a rabbit was wishing it could re-think its last move. It would be crouched rigid, body juddering with its own heartbeat, waiting for the shadow of the hunter to slide past it. I wondered if it realized it would never be more alive than right now, and if it had some way of treasuring the moment. This was, after all, what it was made for.
Here and there ahead of us we saw a few other clusters of tourists, mainly Folk with their attendants. There were not many now who cared for the early days the way my Jessica did. It was, in fact, the reason we had met—she had heard there was an old hero of the Restoration in her city, and sought me out. Even her anachronistic name, which stumbled roughly across the tongue, recalled a bygone epoch.
Our guide labored ahead with his own doddering gait. “In the olden days when
the fortress still stood,” he said, “this road was lined all the way up with manymany redoubts, towerhouses and palisades. An army would cower at the thought of crossing through.”
The fierce pride in his voice clung to shreds of his race’s former grandeur, just as one would expect from a long-vanquished people. It had indeed been something to see, but when the time came, those defenses had not stopped us from crossing this valley. And the Great Siege that broke this fortress, the final action of our long war to subdue this strange world, had been a straightforward affair with few surprises.
“And yet in the end, it was you that folded,” I said under my breath.
“That’s true—in the end,” my Jessica murmured back to me. She could have whispered it from the other side of the world, and I would have felt her mouth shape the words. Her eyes rose no higher than my tunic, but she had the arch expression she wore when challenging me to a debate. How I delighted in her fire! “But humanity fought you off for centuries, even before they had the chance to adjust to the changes that the Fair Folk brought our world.”
“They weren’t meant to adjust, my love. They were meant to find their glory. The very chaos was a gift to them, and I am sure the men of that time knew it in their hearts. When we first parted the veil between our worlds and returned to this one, your alien ways had turned you into shades that we could barely see. You know how bad it was—machines too small to see did all the work and all the thinking.”
“You can’t deny that we were strong in those days,” she rejoined.
“Your armies may have been strong, but your warriors were not. Your people had no sense of what it meant to be alive. We stopped those tiny machines, by calling upon the power that slept in the sinews and bones of your own earth, and so gave you the opportunity to live and die by the strength of your own arms once again. And how you fought, even though it was new to you! We were in awe of you right up to the moment of your defeat.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011 Edition Page 49
