(Olivia. She had broken her engagement, he learned much later, two months after their single date. They had smiled at each other on the last day of class—and passed out of each other’s lives. He had been—what? Shy, inept? Too romantic, too in love with that single lovely and Petrarchan night? Where was she—in the North American biomass.)
And even if he accepted what he had been told, he had certainly not been told everything. A million questions remained, some idle, most crucial. He was still, after all, an individual (wasn’t he?) anticipating a virtually unknown experience.
The command clusters—the researchers—none answered him now.
In North America—what happened to all the bad people whose memories were preserved by the noocytes? They were, to be sure, suspended from the world in which they had been bad just as surely as if they were in prison—far more suspended. But being bad meant bad thinking, being evil meant being a cancer cell in the society, a dangerous and inexplicable screw-up, and he was not just thinking of ax murderers. He was thinking of politicians too greedy or blind to know what they were doing, white collar sharpies who had swindled the life’s savings from thousands of investors, mothers and fathers too stupid to know you shouldn’t beat your children to death. What happened to these people and to the millions of screw-ups, evil screw-ups, in human society?
Were all truly equal, duplicated a million times, or did the noocytes exercise a little judgment? Did they quietly delete a few personalities, edit them out…or alter them?
And if the noocytes took the liberty of altering the real screw-ups, perhaps fixing them or immobilizing them some way, going into their thought processes and using a kind of grand consensus of right thinking as a pattern for corrections-
Then who was to say they weren’t altering others, people with minor problems, people with all the complexes of little screw-ups and errors and temporary nastiness…things all humans have. Occupational hazards of being human. Of living in a tough universe, a different universe than the ones the noocytes inhabited. If they did correct and edit and alter, who could say they were good at it? Knew what they were doing, and retained workable human personalities afterward?
What did the noocytes do with people who couldn’t handle the change, who went crazy—or who, as was hinted, died incompletely assimilated, leaving partial memories, like Vergil’s partial in Bernard’s own body? Did they cull and weed here, too?
Was there politics, social interaction, in the noosphere? Were humans given an equal vote with noocytes? Humans had, of course, become noocytes—but were the genuine, the original noocytes more or less well regarded?
Would there be conflict, revolution?
Or would there be profound quiet-the quiet of the grave, because of a deletion of the will to resist? Not an important thing free will, for a rigid hierarchy. Was the noosphere a rigid hierarchy, lacking in dissent or even comment?
He didn’t think so.
But could he know for sure?
Did they really respect and love humans as masters and creators, or did they simply suck them in, chew them up, digest the information needed and send the rest into entropy, forgotten, disorganized, dead?
Bernard, do you now feel the fear of Big Change? The completely different—sublime, or hellish—as opposed to the difficult, often hellish status quo?
He doubted that Vergil had ever thought these things out. He may not have had time, but even allowing him the time, Vergil simply did not think such things through. Brilliant in the creation, slovenly in the consideration of consequences.
Wasn’t that true of every creator?
Didn’t anyone who changed things ultimately lead some people—perhaps many people—to death, grief, torment?
The poor human Prometheuses who brought fire to their fellows.
Nobel.
Einstein. Poor Einstein and his letter to Roosevelt. Paraphrase: “I have loosed the demons of Hell and now you must sign a pact with the devil or someone else will. Someone even nastier.”
Curie, experimenting with radium; how responsible was she for Slotin, over four decades later?
Did Pasteur’s work—or Salk’s, or his own—save the life of a man or woman who ultimately went on to wreak havoc, to turn bad, to really and truly screw up? Undoubtedly.
And did the victims ever think, “Sue the bastard!”
Undoubtedly.
And if such thoughts were heeded, such questions asked, wouldn’t all parents slaughter their children while they slept in the cradle?
The old cliché—Hitler’s mother, aborting herself.
So confusing.
Bernard rocked back and forth between sleep and nightmare, coming down hard on the side of nightmare, and lifting up on another swing to a kind of ecstasy.
Nothing will ever be the same again.
Good! Wonderful! Wasn’t it all badly flawed anyway?
No, perhaps not. Not until now.
Oh, Lord, I am driven to prayer. I am weak and incapable of making these judgments. I do not believe in you, not in any form that has been described to me, but I must pray, because I am in dread, in unholy fear.
What are we giving birth to?
Bernard looked down at his hands and arms, swollen and covered with white veins.
So ugly, he thought.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The food appeared on top of a waist-high, grayish spongy cylinder at the end of a high-walled cul-de-sac.
Suzy looked down at the food on the plate, reached out to touch the apparent fried chicken, and drew her finger back slowly. The food was warm, the cup of coffee was steaming, and it looked perfectly normal. Not once had she been served something she didn’t like, and not once had there been too much, or too little.
They were watching her closely, keeping track of her every need. She was being tended like an animal in a zoo, or at least that was the way she felt.
She knelt down and began to eat. When she had finished, she sat with her back to the cylinder, sipping the last of the coffee, and pulled her collar up. The air was getting colder. She had left her coat in the World Trade Center—or what the north tower had become—and for the past two weeks, hadn’t felt any need for it. The air had always been comfortable even at night.
Things were changing, and that was disturbing—or exciting. She wasn’t sure which.
To tell the truth, Suzy McKenzie had been bored much of the time. She had never been much on imagination, and the stretches of rebuilt Manhattan she had traveled had not appealed to her much. The huge canal-pipes pumping green liquid from the river into the interior of the island, the slow-moving fan-trees and propeller-trees the expanses of glassy silver bumps, like collections of road reflectors, spread over hundreds of acres of irregular surface—none of these things had interested her for more than a few minutes. They had no relation to her. She could not begin to understand what they were for.
She knew it should all have been fascinating, but it wasn’t human, and so she didn’t much care.
People interested her; what they thought and did, who they were, how they felt about her and she about them.
“I hate you,” she said to the cylinder as she returned her plate and cup to its top surface. The cylinder swallowed them and lowered out of sight “All of you!” she shouted at the walls of the cul-de-sac. She wrapped her arms around herself for warmth and picked up the flashlight and radio. It would be dark soon; she’d have to find a place to sleep, perhaps play the radio for a few more minutes. The batteries were weakening, even though she had played it sparingly. She walked out of the cul-de-sac and stared at a forest of fan-trees climbing a steep reddish-brown mound.
On top of the mound was a many-faceted black polyhedron, each facet sporting a silvery needle about a yard long. There were many others like it on the island. She hardly noticed them now. Walking around the mound took about ten minutes. She entered a shallow valley the length of a football field, its sides lined with gently curving black pipe as thick as her waist. The pipe
vanished in a dimple at the end of the valley. She had slept in such junctions before. She walked to the end of the valley and knelt down near the depression. She ran her hands over the surface of the dimple; it was quite warm. She could lie here for the night, under the pipes, and be fairly comfortable.
The sky glowed brilliant purple to the west. The sunsets were usually orange and red, subdued; the horizon had never looked so electric.
She turned on the radio and pulled the speaker dose to her ear. She had turned down the volume to conserve the batteries, even though she suspected that was ineffective. The short wave transmitter in England, ever-faithful, came on immediately. She adjusted the knob and hunched deeper under the pipes.
“…riots in West Germany have centered around the Pharmek facilities housing Dr. Michael Bernard, suspected carrier of the North American plague. While the plague has not yet spread beyond North America, tensions run high. Russia’s sealed borders and…” The signal slid and she readjusted.
“…famine in Romania and HunCary, now in its third week, and no relief in sight…”
“…Mrs. Thelma Rittenbaum, noted Battersea psychic, reports that she has had dreams of Christ appearing in the middle of North America, raising the dead and preparing an army to march on the rest of the world,” (A shaky woman’s voice on a tape of poor quality spoke a few unintelligible words.)
The rest of the news was about England and Europe; Suzy enjoyed this most of all, since occasionally it seemed the world might be normal, or at least recovering. There was no hope for her home; she had given up hope weeks ago. But other people, elsewhere, might be leading normal lives. That was comforting to think about.
Not that anybody, anywhere, knew or cared about her.
She turned the radio off and curled up tighter, listening to the hiss of liquid flowing in the pipes, and low, deep groans from someplace far below.
She slept, surrounded by blackness with patches of stars showing between the outlines of the pipes. And when, in the middle of a warm dream about shopping for clothes, she awoke-
Something was wrapped around her. She stroked it drowsily—soft warm, like suede. She fumbled for the flashlight and flicked it on, running the circle of light across her covered legs and hips. The covering was pliable, light blue with indefinite green stripes—her favorite colors. Out from under the covering, her arms and head were cold. She was too sleepy to question; she pulled the cloak high and slipped back into her dreams. This time, she was a young girl, playing in the street with friends from years ago, friends who had since grown up and in many cases, moved away.
Then one by one the buildings were torn down. They all watched as men with huge sledgehammers came along and knocked the brownstones down. She turned to see how her friends were reacting and they were all grown up, or grown old, receding from her and calling for her to follow. She began to cry. Her shoes were stuck to the pavement and she couldn’t move them. When all the buildings were gone, the neighborhood was a level lot, plumbing sticking up in the air, a toilet leaning crazily on a pipe where some upper floor must have once been.
“Things are going to change again, Suzy.” Her shoes loosened and she turned to see Cary, embarrassingly naked.
“Jesus, aren’t you cold?” she asked. “No—it wouldn’t matter. You’re just a ghost.”
“Well, I suppose,” Cary said, smiling. “We just all wanted to warn you. You know? It’s all going to change again, and we wanted to give you a choice.”
“I’m not dreaming am I?”
“Nah.” He shook his head. “We’re in the blanket. You can talk to us when you’re awake, too, if you want.”
“The blanket…all of you? Mom and Kenny and Howard?”
“And lots of others, too. Your father, if you want to talk to him. It’s a gift.” he said. “Sort of a going-away present. We all volunteered, but then there’s a lot more of me, and all the others, than we strictly need.”
“You’re not making sense, Cary.”
“You’ll make it. You’re a strong girl, Suzy.”
The dream background had become nebulous. They both stood in orange-brown darkness, the distant sky brightening to orange as if there were fires on the horizon. Cary looked around at the surroundings and nodded. “It’s the artists. There are so many artists, scientists, I kind of feel lost. But I’m going to be one of them soon as I decide. They give us time. We’re honored, Suzy. They know we made ’em and they treat us real good. You know, back there,” he gestured at the darkness, “we could live together. There’s a place where all of ’em think. It’s just like real life, the real world. It can be the way it used to be, or the way it’s going to be. Any way you want.”
“I’m not joining Cary.”
“Nah. Didn’t think you would. I didn’t really have any choice, when I joined, but I don’t regret it. I wouldn’t have ever been as much in Brooklyn Heights as I am now.”
“You’re a zombie, too.”
I’m a ghost.” He smiled at her. “Anyway, part of me’s going to stay with you, if you want to talk. And another part’s going away when they change.”
“It’s going back the way it was?”
He shook his head. “It’ll never be the same. And…look, I don’t understand all this, but it won’t be too long before there’s another change. Nothing’s ever going to be the same.”
Suzy looked at Cary steadily. “You think being naked would tempt me?”
Cary looked down at his image. “Never thought about it,” he said. “Shows you how casual I’m getting. Can’t you change your mind?”
She shook her head firmly. “I’m the only one who didn’t get sick,” she said.
“Well, not the only one. There’s about twenty, twenty-five. They’re being taken care of, as best we can.”
She preferred being unique. “Thanks a lot,” she said sarcastically.
“Anyway, wear the blanket. When the change comes, wrap up in it real tight. There’ll be a lot of food left over.”
“Good.”
“I guess you’re going to wake up now. I’ll get out of the way. You can see us when you’re awake, too. For a while.”
Suzy nodded.
“Don’t throw it away,” he warned. “Otherwise you’ll get hurt.”
“I won’t”
“Well.” He reached out and touched her crossed arms with a spread palm.
She opened her eyes. Dawn was pale orange-gray above the pipes. The surface of the dimple and the pipes themselves were cold.
Suzy wrapped the blanket tighter and waited.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Paulsen-Fuchs stood in the observation chamber, leaning forward on the table, eyes lowered. He had had enough of staring at what lay on the cot in the containment lab.
Bernard had lost his human form in the early morning. The cameras had recorded the transformation. Now, a gray and dark brown mass lay on his bed, portions extending to the floor on two sides. The mass moved fitfully, sometimes experiencing a short, violent shudder.
Before he had been confined to one position, Bernard had picked up the portable keyboard and carried it with him to his cot. The telephone cord-wire issued from the side of the mass. The keyboard itself was somewhere under, or within.
And Bernard was still sending out messages, though he could not speak. The monitor in the control lab recorded a steady flow of words, Bernard’s record of his transformation.
Most of what came from the keyboard was virtually unintelligible. Perhaps Bernard was very nearly a noocyte himself.
The transformation didn’t make Paulsen-Fuchs’ decision any easier. The protesters—and the government, by not exercising authority to prevent them—had demanded that Bernard be killed, that the containment lab be completely sterilized.
They were over two million strong, and if their demands were not carried out, they would destroy Pharmek brick by brick. The army had said it would not protect Pharmek; the police had abrogated their responsibility as well. There was nothing Paul
sen-Fuchs could do to stop them; only fifty employees were left on the grounds, the others having been evacuated for their own safety.
Many times he had considered simply leaving the facility, going to his home in Spain and isolating himself completely. Forgetting what had happened, what his friend Michael Bernard had brought with him into Germany.
But Heinz Paulsen-Fuchs had been in business too long to simply retreat. As a very young man, he had watched the Russians enter Berlin. He had put aside all vestiges of his unenthusiastic Nazi past, tried to be as nondescript as possible, but he had not retreated. And during the years of occupation, he had worked at three different jobs. He had stayed in Berlin until 1955, when he and two other men had started Pharmek. The company had nearly gone bankrupt in the wake of the thalidomide panic; but he had not retreated.
No: he would not abrogate responsibility. He would flip the switch that would send sterilizing gases into the containment lab. He would instruct the men with the torches who would enter and finish the task. That would be defeat, but he would at least stay, and not hide out in Spain.
He had no idea what the protesters would do once Bernard was dead. He walked slowly from the observation chamber, into the control lab, and sat before the monitor on which Bernard’s message was appearing.
He ran it back to its beginning. He could read fast enough to catch up with the words. He wanted to review what Bernard had already said, to see if he could make sense of more of it.
Bernard’s final electronic diary entries, beginning 0835
Gogarty. They will be gone in weeks.
Yes, they do communicate. Minor kinsmen. Outbreaks of the “plague” we are not even aware of—Europe, Asia, Australia—people without symptoms. Eyes and ears, gathering, learning, reaping the inconsiderable crop of our lives and history. Marvelous spies.