Greg Bear: Blood Music

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.

Paul-racial memory. Same mechanism as biologic. There are many lives in each of us; in the blood, in the tissue.

Burden on local space-time. Too many. Gogarty. Push right through…they cannot help it. Must take advantage. We—you-of course cannot perhaps would not want to stop them.

They are the grand achievement.

They love. They cooperate. They have discipline, yet are free; they know death, but are immortal.

They now know me, thru and thru. All my thoughts and motives. I am a theme in their art, their wonderful living *fictions*. They have duplicated me a million times over. Which of me writes this? I do not know. There is no longer an original.

I can go off in a million directions, lead a million lives (and not just in the “blood music”—in a universe of Thought, Imagination, Fantasy!) and then gather my selves together, hold a conference, and start all over again. Narcissism beyond pride, propinquitous, far grander than simply living forever. (They have found her!)

Each of them can have a thousand ten thousand, a million counterparts, depending on their quality, their functions. None needs die, but in time all or nearly all will change. In enough time, most of the million me’s will bear no resemblance to the present me, for we are infinitely variable. Our minds work on the infinite variety of life’s foundations.

Paul, I wish you could join us.

We are aware of the pressures on you.

(Text break 0847-1023)

Not tapping keys. Into the keyboard, into the electronics.

Know you must destroy.

Wait. Wait until 1130. Give an old friend that long.

I do not like my old self, Paul. I have given it up, most of it. Pruned away withered pieces. Relived and reshaped whole sections of my 52 years. One could become a saint here, or explore a multitude of sins. What saint can not know sin?

(Text break 1035-1105)

Gogarty.

CGATCATTAG (UCAGCUGCGAUCGAA) Name now.

Gogarty. Amazing Gogarty! Far too dense, far too much seeing theorizing, far too much being. They know in NA. Down to the smallest, they have peered in NA. Telling us, preparing. All go together. Afraid deathly wonderfully afraid the finest fear, Paul, not felt in the gut but wondered in thought, nothing like it. Fear of freedom beyond the constraints now, and seeming wonderfully free already. So much freedom we must change to accommodate. Unrecognizable.

Paul 1130 that much time

1130 1130 1130!

Such a rush of feeling for the old, affection chick for egg man for mother student for school

Diverging. Some other takes the writing.

Meeting myselves. Command clusters coordinate. Celebration. So much, so rich! Three of me stay to write, already very different. Friends back from vacation. Drunk with experience freedom knowing

Olivia, waiting…

And Paul this is backwater noocyte slum not like NA Brief. Coming. New Year!

NOVA

(end text 1126.39)

Heinz Paulsen-Fuchs read the final words on the VDT and raised his eyebrows. Hands on the arm of his chair, he looked at the clock on the wall

1126.46

He glanced at Dr. Schatz and stood. “Open the door,” he said. She reached out to the switch and opened the door to the observation room.

“No,” he said. “To the lab.”

She hesitated.

1126.52

He ran to the console, shoved her unceremoniously aside and flipped the three switches in rapid succession, fumbling the last and repeating.

1127.56

The three-layer hatch began its ponderous slide.

“ Herr Paulsen-Fuchs—”

He slid in through the foot-wide gap, into the outer isolation area, still chill with released vacuum, into the high-pressure area, ears popping, and into the inner chamber.

1129.32

The room was filled with fire. Paulsen-Fuchs thought for a moment that Dr. Schatz had begun some mysterious emergency cleansing, had unleashed death in the chamber.

But she had not.

1129.56

The fire cleared, leaving a smell of ozone and something twisting lens-like in the air over the cot.

The cot was empty.

1130.00

Suzy felt the queasiness and put down her plate. “Is it now?” she asked the empty air. She pulled the cloak tighter. “Kenny, Howard, is it now? Cary?”

She stood in the middle of a smooth circular arena, the gray food cylinder behind her. The sun was moving in irregular circles and the air seemed to shimmer. Cary had told her about what would happen the night before, while she slept; told as much as she would understand. “Cory? Mother?”

The cloak stiffened.

“Don’t got!” she screamed. The air grew warm again and the sky seemed covered with old varnish. The clouds smoothed into oily streaks and the wind picked up, driving between the pillar-covered mound on one side of the arena and the spiked polyhedron on the other. The polyhedron’s spikes glowed blue and quivered. The polyhedron itself sectioned into triangular wedges; light leaked from between the wedges, red as molten lava.

“This is it, isn’t it?” she asked, crying. She had seen so much in dreams the past week, had spent so much time with them, that she had become confused over what was real and what was not. “Answer me!”

The cloak shivered and moved up in a hood over her head. The hood sealed itself under her chin and wrapped her forehead in a thin, translucent white layer. Then it grew around her fingers and formed gloves, down to her legs and feet, wrapping her tight but allowing her to move as freely as before.

The air smelled sweetly of varnishes, fruits, flowers. Then of warm fresh bread. The cloak slapped around her face and she tried to scratch at it with her fingers. She rolled on the ground until the voice in her ears told her to stop. She lay flat in the middle of the arena, staring upward through the transparency.

Be quiet. Be still. It was her mother’s voice, stern but gentle. You’ve been a very willful young girl, the voice said, and you’ve refused everything we’ve offered. Well, I might have done the same. Now I ask one more time, and decide quickly. Do you wish to go with us?

“Will I die if I don’t?” Suzy asked, voice muffled.

No. But you’ll be alone. Not one of us is staying.

“They’re taking you away!”

What Cary said. Did you listen, Seedling? That was Kenneth. She struggled to tear the cloak away.

“Don’t leave me.”

Then come with us.

“No! I can’t!”

No time, Seedling. Last chance.

The sky was warm electric orange-yellow and the clouds had thinned to tangled ragged threads. “Mother, is it safe? Will I be afraid?”

It’s safe. Come with us, Suzy.

Her mouth was paralyzed, but her mind seemed to crackle and come apart. “No,” she thought.

The voices stopped. For a time all she saw was racing lines of red and green, and her head hurt, and she felt like she would vomit.

The air glittered high above. The ground of the arena shrunk beneath her, the surface crazing and breaking up.

And for a dizzy moment, she was in two places at once. She was with them—they had taken her away, and even now she spoke to her mother and brothers, to Cary and her friends…

And she was in the crumbling arena, surrounded by the tattered remnants of the pillared mound and the spiked polyhedron. The structures were falling apart, as if made of sand at a beach, drying and collapsing under the sun.

Then the feeling passed. Her queasiness was over. The sky was blue, though bits and pieces of it hurt to look at.