Greg bear, p.4
Greg Bear, page 4
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from Vergil. I poured first the booze, then the bleach, then the ammonia into the water. Chlorine started bubbling up and I left, closing the door behind me. The phone was ringing when I got home. I didn’t answer. It could have been the hospital. It could have been Bernard. Or the police. I could envision having to explain everything to the police. Genetron would stonewall; Bernard would be unavailable. I was exhausted, all my muscles knotted with tension and whatever name one can give to the feelings one has after—Committing genocide? That certainly didn’t seem real. I could not believe I had just murdered a hundred trillion intelligent beings. Snuffed a galaxy. It was laughable. But I didn’t laugh. It was easy to believe that I had just killed one human being, a friend. The smoke, the melted lamp rods, the drooping electrical outlet and smoking cord. Vergil. I had dunked the lamp into the tub with Vergil. I felt sick. Dreams, cities raping Gail (and what about his girlfriend, Candice?). Letting the water filled with them out. Galaxies sprinkling over us all. What horror. Then again, what potential beauty—a new kind of life, symbiosis and transformation. Had I been thorough enough to kill them all? I had a moment of panic. Tonorrow, I thought, I will sterilize his apartment. Somehow, I didn’t even think of Bernard. When Gall came in the door, I was asleep on the couch. I came to, groggy, and she looked down at me. ‘You feeling okay?” she asked, perching on the edge of’ the couch. I nodded. ‘What are you planning for dinner?” My mouth didn’t work properly. The words were mushy. She felt my forehead. ‘Edward, you have a fever,” she said. “A very high fever.”
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I stumbled into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Gall was close behind me. “What is it?” she asked. There were lines under my collar, around my neck. White lines, like freeways. They had already been in me a long time, days. “Damp palms,” I said. So obvious.
I think we nearly died. ! struggled at first, but in minutes I was too weak to move. Gail was just as sick within an hour. I lay on the carpet in the living room, drenched in sweat. Gail lay on the couch, her face the color of talcum, eyes closed, like a corpse in an embalming parlor. For a time I thought she was dead. Sick as I was, I raged—hated, felt tremendous guilt at my weakness, my slowness to understand all the possibilities. Then I no longer cared. I was too weak to blink, so I closed my eyes and waited. There was a rhythm in my arms, my legs. With each pulse of blood, a kind of sound welled up within me, like an orchestra thousands strong, but not playing in unison; playing whole seasons of symphonies at once. Music in the blood. The sound became harsher, but more coordinated, wave-trains finally canceling into silence, then separating into harmonic beats. The beats seemed to melt into me, into the sound of my own heart. First, they subdued our immune responses. The war—and it was a war, on a scale never before known on Earth, with trillions of combatants—lasted perhaps two days. By the time I regained enough strength to get to the kitchen faucet, I could feel them working on my brain, trying to crack the code and find the god within the protoplasm. I drank until I was sick, then drank more moderately and took a glass to Gail. She sipped at it. Her lips were cracked, her eyes blood-Blood Music
shot and ringed with yellowish crumbs. There was some color in her skin. Minutes later, we were eating feebly in the kitchen. “What in hell is happening?” was the first thing she asked. I didn’t have the strength to explain. I peeled an orange and shared it with her. “We should call a doctor,” she said. But I knew we wouldn’t. I was already receiving messages; it was becoming apparent that any sensation of freedom we experienced was illusory. The messages were simple at first. Memories of commands, rather than the commands themselves, manifested themselves in my thoughts. We were not to leave the apartment—a concept which seemed quite abstract to those in control, even if undesirable—and we were not to have contact with others. We would be allowed to eat certain foods and drink tap water for the time being. With the subsidence of the fevers, the transformations were quick and drastic. Almost simultaneously, Gail and I were immobilized. She was sitting at the table, I was kneeling on the floor. I was able barely to see her in the corner of my eye. Her arm developed pronounced ridges. They had learned inside Vergil; their tactics within the two of us were very different. I itched all over for about two hours—two hours in hell—before they made the breakthrough and found me. The effort of ages on their timescale paid off and they communicated smoothly and directly with this great, clumsy intelligence who had once controlled their universe. They were not cruel. When the concept of discomfort and its undesirability was made clear, they worked to alleviate it. They worked too effectively. For another hour, I was in a sea of bliss, out of all contact with them. With dawn the next day, they gave us freedom to move again; specifically, to go to the bathroom. There were certain waste products they could not deal with. I voided those—my
09
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urine was purple—and Gail followed suit. We looked at each other vacantly in the bathroom. Then she managed a slight smile. “Are they talking to you?” she asked. I nodded. “Then I’m not crazy.” For the next twelve hours, control seemed to loosen on some levels. I suspect there was another kind of war going on in me. Gall was capable of limited motion, but no more. When full control resumed, we were instructed to hold each other. We did not hesitate. “Eddie…” she whispered. My name was the last sound I ever heard from outside. Standing, we grew together. In hours, our legs expanded and spread out. Then extensions grew to the windows to take in sunlight, and to the kitchen to take water from the sink. Filaments soon reached to all comers of the room, stripping paint and plaster from the walls, fabric and stuffing from the furniture. By the next dawn, the transformation was complete. I no longer have any clear view of what we look like. I suspect we resemble cells—large, flat, and filamented cells, draped purposefully across most of the apartment. The great shall mimic the small. Our intelligence fluctuates daily as we are absorbed into the minds within. Each day, our individuality declines. We are, indeed, great clumsy dinosaurs. Our memories have been taken over by billions of them, and our personalities have been spread through the transformed blood. Soon there will be no need for centralization. Already the plumbing has been invaded. People throughout the building are undergoing transformation. Within the old time frame of weeks, we will reach the lakes, rivers, and seas in force. I can barely begin to guess the results. Every square inch
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Blood Music
of the planet will teem with thought. Years from now, perhaps much sooner, they will subdue their own individuality—what there is of it.
New creatures will come, then. The immensity of their
capacity for thought will be inconceivable.
All my hatred and fear is gone now.
I leave them—us—with only one question.
How many times has this happened, elsewhere? Travelers never came through space to visit the Earth. They had no need.
They had found universes in grains of sand.
S!eepside Story
O
liver Jones differed from his brothers as wheat from chaff. He didn’t grudge them their blind wildness; he loaned them money until he had none, and regretted it, but not deeply. His needs were not simple, but they did not hang on the sharp signs of dollars. He worked at the jobs of youth without complaining, knowing there was something better waiting for him. Sometimes it seemed he was the only one in the family able to take cares away from his momma, now that Poppa was gone and she was lonely even with the two babies sitting on her lap, and his younger sister Yolanda gabbing about the neighbors.
The city was a puzzle to him. His older-brothers Denver and Reggie believed it was a place to be conquered, but Oliver
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did not share their philosophy. He wanted to make the city part of him, sucked in with his breath, built into bones and brains. If he could dance with the city’s music, he’d have it made, even though Denver and Reggie said the city was wide and cruel and had no end; that its four quarters ate young men alive, and spat back old people. Look at loppa, they said; he was forty-three and he went to the fifth quarter, Darkside, a bag of wearied bones; they said, take what you can get while you can get it.
This was not what Oliver saw, though he knew the city was cruel and hungry.
His brothers and even Yolanda kidded him about his faith. It was more than just going to church that made them rag him, because they went to church, too, sitting superior beside Mom-ma. Reggie and Denver knew there was advantage in being seen at devotions. It wasn’t his music that made them laugh, for he could play the piano hard and fast as well as soft and tender, and they all liked to dance, even Momma sometimes. It was his damned sweetness. It was his taste in girls, quiet and studious; and his honesty.
On the last day of school, before Christmas vacation, Oliver made his way home in a fall of light snow, stopping in the old St. John’s churchyard for a moment’s reflection by his father’s grave. Surrounded by the crisp, ancient slate gravestones and the newer white marble, worn by the city’s acid tears, he thought he might now be considered grown-up, might have to support all of his family. He left the churchyard in a somber mood and walked between the tall brick and brownstone tenements, along the dirty, wet black streets his shadow lost in Sleepside’s greater shade, eyes on the sidewalk.
Denver and Reggie could not bring in good money, money that Momma would accept; Yolanda was too young and not likely to get a job anytime soon, and that left him, the only one who would finish school. He might take in more piano students,
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Sleepside Story
but he’d have to move out to do that, and how could he find another place to live without losing all he made to rent.9 Sleepside was crowded.
Oliver heard the noise in the flat from half a block down the street. He ran up the five dark, trash-littered flights of stairs and pulled out his key to open the three locks on the door. Swinging the door wide, he stood with hand pressed to a wall, lungs too greedy to let him speak.
The flat was in an uproar. Yolanda, rail-skinny, stood in the kitchen doorway, wringing her big hands and wailing. The two babies lurched down the hall, diapers drooping and fists stuck in their mouths. The neighbor widow Mrs. Diamond Freeland bustled back and forth in a useless dither. Something was terribly wrong.
“What is it?” he asked Yolanda with his first free breath. She just moaned and shook her head. “Where’s Reggie and Denver?” She shook her head less vigorously, meaning they weren’t home. “Where’s Momma?” This sent Yolanda into hysterics. She bumped back against the wall and clenched her fists to her mouth, tears flying. “Something happen to Momma?”
“Your momma went uptown,” Mrs. Diamond Freeland said, standing flatfooted before Oliver, her flower print dress distended over her generous stomach. “What are you going to do? You’re her son.”
“Where uptown?” Oliver asked, trying to control his quavering voice. He wanted to slap everybody in the apartment. He was scared and they weren’t being any help at all.
“She we-went sh-sh-shopping!” Yolanda wailed. “She got her check today and it’s Christmas and she went to get the babies new clothes and some food.”
Oliver’s hands clenched. Momma had asked him what he wanted for Christmas, and he had said, “No. thing, Momma. Not really.” She had chided him, saying all would be well when
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the check came, and what good was Christmas if she couldn’t find a little something special for each of her children? “All right,” he said said. “I’d like sheet music. Something I’ve never played before.”
“She must of taken the wrong stop,” Mrs. Diamond Freeland said, staring at Oliver from the comers of her wide
eyes. “That’s all I can figure.”
“What happened?”
Yolanda pulled a letter out of her blouse and handed it to him, a fancy purple paper with a delicate flower design on the borders, the message handwritten very prettily in gold ink fountain pen and signed. He read it carefully, then read it again.
To the Joneses.
Your momma is uptown in My care. She came here lost and I tried to help her but she stole something very valuable to Me she shouldn’t have. She says you’ll come and get her. By you she means her youngest son Oliver Jones and if not him then Yolanda Jones her eldest daughter. I will keep one or the other here in exchange for your momma and one or the other must stay here and work for Me.
Miss Belle Parkhurst 969 33rd Street
“Who’s she, and why does she have Momma?” Oliver asked.
“l’m not going!” Yolanda screamed.
“Hush up,” said Mrs. Diamond Freeland. “She’s that whoor. She’s that uptown whoor used to run the biggest cattlous.
Sleepside Story
Oliver looked from face to face in disbelief. “Your momma must of taken the wrong stop and got lost,” Mrs. Diamond Freeland reiterated. “That’s all I can figure. She went to that whoor’s house and she got in trouble.” “I’m not going!” Yolanda said. She avoided Oliver’s eyes. “You know what she’d make me do.” “Yeah,” Oliver said softly. “But what’ll she make me do?” Reggie and Denver, he leamed from Mrs. Diamond Freeland, had come home before the message had been received, leaving just as the messenger came whistling up the outside hall. Oliver sighed. His brothers were almost never home; they thought they’d pulled the wool over Momma’s eyes, but they hadn’t. Momma knew who would be home and come for her when she was in trouble. Reggie and Denver fancied themselves the hottest dudes on the street. They claimed they had women all over Sleepside and Snowside; Oliver was almost too shy to ask a woman out. He was small, slender, and almost pretty, but very strong for his size. Reggie and Denver were cowards. Oliver had never run from a true and worthwhile fight in his life, but neither had he started one. The thought of going to Miss Belle Parkhurst’s establishment scared him, but he remembered what his father had told him just a week before dying. “Oliver, when I’m gone—that’s soon now, you know it—Yolanda’s flaky as a bowl of cereal and your brothers.., well, I’ll be kind and just say your momma, she’s going to need you. You got to turn out right so as she can lean on you.” The babies hadn’t been born then. “Which train did she take?” “Down to Snowside,” Mrs. Diamond Fre. eland said. “But she must of gotten off in Sunside. That’s near Thirty-third.”
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“it’s getting night,” Oliver said. Yolanda sniffed and wiped her eyes. Off the hook. “You going?” “Have to,” Oliver said. “It’s Momma.” Said Mrs. Diamond Freeland, “I think that whoor got something on her mind.”
On the line between dusk and dark, down underground where it shouldn’t have mattered, the Metro emptied of all the day’s passengers and filled with the night’s. Sometimes day folks went in tight-packed groups on the Night Metro, but not if they could avoid it. Night Metro was for carrying the lost or human garbage. Everyone ashamed or afraid to come out during the day came out at night. Night Metro also carried the zeroes—people who lived their lives and when they died no one could look back and say they remembered them. Night Metro—especially late—was not a good way to travel, but for Oliver it was the quickest way to get from Sleepside to Sunside; he had to go as soon as possible to get Momma. Oliver descended the four flights of concrete steps, grind- ‘i”
lng his teeth at the thought of the danger he was in. He halted at the bottom, grimacing at the frightened knots of muscle and ‘.’. nerves in his back, repeating over and over again, “It’s Mom-ma. lt’s Momma. No one can save her but me.” He dropped his bronze cat’s head token into the turnstile, clunk-chunking through, and crossed the empty platform. Only two indistinct figures waited trackside, heavy-coated though it was a warm evening. Oliver kept an eye on them and walked back and forth in a figure eight on the grimy foot-scrubbed concrete, peering nervously down at the wet and soot under the rails. Behind him, on mosaic · S the station smudged white the walls hung a gold trumpet and the number 7, the trumpet for folks who couldn’t 5O
Sleepside Ston/
read to know when to get off. All Sleepside stations had musical instruments.
The Night Metro was run by a different crew than the Day Metro. His train came up, clean and silver-sleek, without a spot of graffiti or a stain of tarnish. Oliver caught a glimpse of
the driver under the SLEEPSIDE/CHASTE RIVER/SUNSIDE-46TH
destination sign. The driver wore or had a bull’s head and carried a prominent pair of long gleaming silver scissors on his Sam Browne belt. Oliver entered the open doors and took a smooth handgrip even though the seats were mostly empty. Somebody standing was somebody quicker to run.
