Elizabeth Hand - Glimmering

“Yes.” Nellie nodded. “Me too. And more—more of us than you can imagine.”

Jack shook his head. “But—how?” he whispered.

“Leonard Thrope. Among others. He travels, he gives them to people he meets—”

“But why? Why ? ”

“So that we can change. Petra virus, hanta virus, AIDS, torminos simplex—they change our bodies and make us vulnerable. Even exposure to UV light can do it. It all makes us susceptible, Jack—do you understand what that means? It means we are capable of taking, of receiving. The viruses change us, but they also open us, so that things can get inside. They kill us—usually, depending on what we have—but sometimes they make it possible for other changes to happen—”

“Fuck you. AIDS is not a fucking gate, this is not some fucking—”

Nellie smiled, maddeningly. “Fusax is what makes us gates, Jack. Do you know what it really is?”

He stared, desperate, trying to remember what Leonard had said about the drug, dredged up nothing save the image of a grinning demon who held a staff impaled with human skulls.

“It’s a type of bacteria.” Her hands moved as she spoke, drawing circles in the air. “A kind of spirochete: a symbiotic microbe. We all have remnants of them inside our brains. These particular spirochetes—the fusarium—once they were just simple bacteria. But millions of years ago they attached themselves to us. They merged with our brain cells, they became neurotubules—part of the passageways that transmit thought and sensation, part of our neurochemistry. And now they’re part of us—all of us, not just you and me. They orchestrate the way we think; they may even be what gives us consciousness.

“ Fusarium is a mutation. An independent researcher discovered it, and then he decided to share it, with people here, in the States. And in Japan. At first they thought it might keep the petra virus from replicating. Because in the right individuals—people whose body chemistry has been altered by cancer, or UV radiation; people whose immune systems have been damaged by AIDS or petra virus or chemotherapy; in people whose immune systems have already been changed—the fusarium attach themselves to proteins and—”

“You’re fucking nuts.” Jack stumbled backward and bumped into the wall. “This is crazy, you’re—”

Nellie shook her head emphatically. “No. It works. It threads itself inside us—within our brain cells, within our neurochemistry, our immune systems. There’s no one place where it happens. The immune system is like a cloud, it’s everywhere inside us. Like consciousness. It’s not just in our lymph nodes, or liver—it’s there, too, of course, but the immune system can move, just like consciousness can move. That’s why people die from a broken heart, or depression. That’s why sometimes we live, even when we should die: because our emotions and T cells, our thoughts and our blood are all woven together. There are things dancing inside us, Jack—cells and bacteria and bits of light. They make a cloud, they form a web. And now, with fusarium , this cloud of—of knowing—it can move outside us. Our consciousness can move between us. Over great distances, between the living and the dead.”

He shook his head.

“There are doors opening everywhere, Jack. The world has changed. We must change, too, or die—and that’s what the Fusax does. It changes us. It doesn’t always work, but when it does—it’s not crazy, Jack. It’s evolution.”

“Get the fuck away from me! You’re a fucking lunatic — how would you even know —”

“It’s everywhere, Jack. It’s on the street, in IZE. Do you know about ice?” Her voice dropped. “GFI holds the patent on the IT discs. Without IZE they’re just 3-D TV. But with the drug—” She hunched her shoulders, shivering. “It’s incredible. I did it a few times, before I met Leonard. The chemical effects produced by the fusarium aren’t addictive—but IZE is. GFI owns the pharmaceutical company that developed it. It’s not a street drug at all. GFI owns it; GFI has made it addictive; they’re making it available now, through drug cartels. Eventually, once everything’s restored, they’ll market it. They’ve got the sky stations repairing the ozone layer, so they’ll be able to continue broadcasting. They’ve got the IT technology to tie into TV and the web. And they’ve got IZE.”

Jack stammered, “But—why?”

“Why not? It’s not a conspiracy. If GFI really can repair the atmosphere, the rest will fall into place. Everyone will just pick up where they left off. The technology exists to retrofit televisions for IT, and GFI has already invested in front-end manufacturing sites in Malaysia. It’s not such a big deal, really. Except that an incredibly powerful new psychotropic drug has been introduced all over the world, as part of a multinational corporation’s five-year plan,” she ended. “So you see that Leonard Thrope is just a very small messenger—”

Jack struck her hand. “How do you know all this? Who told you, who started it, how do you know?”

She tilted her head toward the door. “The movie. The documentary materials.”

She ducked from the alcove, out of sight and back again. “Here.” She handed him a stack of legal-sized papers. “Look.”

A rusted paper clip clamped them together, that slick heavy mimeograph paper he hadn’t seen since childhood. He glanced at the top sheet. Japanese, but there were scattered English words in there too, amidst tiny smudged photographs—

He turned the page, scanning down columns of unreadable text until he found a list of Japanese names printed in English. One name seized him—

He heard Leonard’s voice, saying, “He told me that he’d come to the monastery in 1946, right after the war … H e had set up this sort of laboratory —”

“Oh my God,” breathed Jack. “He’s a fucking war criminal—what the fuck are they doing?”

Nellie crouched beside him. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe he’s making amends. Because this drug could be a fantastic thing. Some day we may all think of him like Louis Pasteur.”

Jack thought of invasive bacteria that did not respond to antibiotics; of viruses that replicated hundreds of times in a heartbeat. He drew a finger to the inner corner of his eye, felt the faint encrustation, grains of emerald sand.

Nellie nodded. “Blue Antelope, all those fundamentalists—they think we should all just die—”

She touched the scarred aureole. “They think that would be making amends. They’re wrong. I was with them for a while, but not anymore. When I first got sick, I just wanted to kill people—do you know what I mean?”

Jack stared down at his hands. “Yes.”

“But then Leonard contacted me about the documentary, and after we met he gave me the Fusax. And after a while I saw that it could be different. That it was different.”

She reached for the ripped T-shirt at the edge of the futon, plucked something from it. A needle. “Look—”

She took the bedsheet, held it so that he saw the candlelight through it, showing the fabric’s weave. “Here—”

She gave him one end of the sheet to hold. She began piercing the cloth with the needle. Tiny perforations appeared. In one spot the fabric grew weaker, thinner, until a small hole gaped there and the flame glowed, as though it had burned its way through the cloth.