Gregory Bear - Blood Music

Minutes later, he was strong enough to help her into the kitchen. He peeled an orange and shared it with her, feeling the pulse of the sugar and juice and acid down his throat. “Where is everybody?” she asked. “I called hospitals, friends. Where are they?”

The harmonic orchestral sensation returned, beats coordinating into recognizable fragments, the fragments coalescing, coming into a focus of meaning, and suddenly—

Is there DISCOMFORT?

–Yes.

He answered automatically and in kind, as if he had expected the exchange and was ready for a long conversation.

PATIENCE. There are difficulties.

–What? I don’t understand—

*Immune response*. *Conflict*. Difficulties.

–Leave us, then! Go away!

Not possible. Too INTEGRATED.

They weren’t recovering, not to the extent they were free of the infection. Any feeling of returning freedom was illusory. Very briefly, saying what his strength would allow, he tried to explain to Gail what he thought they were experiencing.

She propped herself up out of the chair and went to the window, where she stood on shaking legs, looking out at green commons, other rows of apartments. “What about other people?” she asked. “Have they got it, too? That’s why they’re not here?”

“I don’t know. Probably soon.”

“Are they… the disease. Is it talking to you?”

He nodded.

“Then I’m not crazy.” She walked slowly across the living room. “I’m not going to be able to move much longer,” she said. “How about you? Maybe we should try to escape.”

He held her hand and shook his head. “They’re inside, part of us by now. They are us. Where can we escape?”

“Then I’d like to be in bed with you, when we can’t move any more. And I want your arms around me.”

They lay back on the bed and held each other.

“Eddie…”

That was the last sound he heard. He tried to resist, but waves of peace rolled over him and he could only experience. He floated on a wide blue-violet sea. Above the sea, his body was mapped onto a seemingly limitless plane. The noocyte endeavors were charted there, and he had no problem understanding their progress. It was obvious that his body was more noocyte than Milligan now.

–What’s going to happen to us?

No more MOTION.

–Are we dying?

Changing.

–And if we don’t want to change?

No PAIN.

–And fear? You won’t even allow us to be afraid?

The blue-violet sea and the chart faded into warm darkness.

He had plenty of time to think things through, but not nearly enough information. Was this what Vergil had experienced? No wonder he had seemed to be going crazy. Buried in some inner perspective, neither one place nor another. He felt an increase in warmth, a closeness and compelling presence.

“Edward…

–Gail? I can hear you—no, not hear you—

“Edward, I should be terrified. I want to be angry but I can’t.

Not essential.

“Go away! Edward, I want to fight back—

–Leave us, please, leave us!

PATIENCE. Difficulties.

They fell quiet and simply reveled in each other’s company. What Edward sensed nearby was not the physical form of Gail; not even his own picture of her personality, but something more convincing, with all the grit and detail of reality, but not as he had ever experienced her before.

–How much time is passing?

“I don’t know. Ask them.

No answer.

“Did they tell you?

–No. I don’t think they know how to talk to us, really… not yet. Maybe this is all hallucination. Vergil hallucinated, and maybe I’m just imitating his fever dreams…

“Tell me who’s hallucinating whom. Wait. Something’s coming. Can you see it?

–I can’t see anything… but I feel it.

“Describe it to me.

–I can’t.

“Look—it’s doing something.

Reluctantly, “It’s beautiful.

–It’s very… I don’t think it’s frightening. It’s closer now.

No HARM. No PAIN. *Learn* here, *adapt*.

It was not a hallucination, but it could not be put into words. Edward did not struggle as it came upon him.

“What is it?

–It’s where we’ll be for some time, I think.

“Stay with me!

–Of course…

There was suddenly a great deal to do and prepare for.

Edward and Gail grew together on the bed, substance passing through clothes, skin joining where they embraced and lips where they touched.

Bernard was very proud of his Falcon 10. He had purchased it in Paris from a computer company president whose firm had gone bankrupt. He had cherished the sleek executive jet for three years, learning how to fly and getting his pilot’s license within three months from “a sitting start,” as his instructor had put it. He lovingly touched the edge of the black control panel with one finger, then smoothed his thumb across the panel’s wood inlay facing. Peculiar, that out of so much left behind—and so much lost—an inert aircraft could mean something important to him. Freedom, accomplishment, prestige… Clearly, in the next few weeks, if he had that long, there would be many changes beyond the physical. He would have to come to grips with his fragility, his transience.

The plane had been refueled at La Guardia without his leaving the cockpit. He had radioed instructions, taxied up to the executive aircraft service bay, and shut the jets down. The attendants had performed their work quickly and he had filed a continuation flight plan with the tower. Not once did he have to touch human flesh or even breathe the same air as the ground crew.

In Reykjavik he had to leave the plane and attend to the fueling himself, but he wore a tightly wrapped muffler and made sure he touched nothing with his ungloved hands.

On his way to Germany, his mind seemed to clear—to become uncomfortably acute in his own self-analysis. He did not like any of the conclusions. He tried to blank them out, but there was little in the cockpit to completely absorb his attention, and the observations, the accusations, returned every few minutes until he put the plane on autopilot and gave them their due.

He would be dead very soon. It was, to be sure, a noble kind of self-sacrifice to donate himself to Pharmek, to the world that might not yet be contaminated. But it was far from making up for what he had allowed to happen.

How could he have known?

“Milligan knew,” he said between clenched teeth. “Damn all of them.” Damn Vergil I. Ulam; but wasn’t he similar to Vergil? No, he refused to admit that. Vergil had been brilliant (he saw the reddened, blistered body in the bathtub, had been had been) but irresponsible, blind to the precautions which should have been taken almost instinctively. Still, if Vergil had taken those precautions, he never would have been able to complete his work.

Nobody would have allowed it.

And Michael Bernard knew all too well the frustrations of being stopped dead in his tracks while following a promising path of research. He could have cured thousands of people of Parkinson’s disease… if he had simply been allowed to collect brain tissue from aborted embryos. Instead, in their moral fervor, the people with and without faces who had contrived to stop him had also contrived to let thousands of people suffer and be degraded. How often had he wished that young Mary Shelley had never written her book, or at least had never chosen a German name for her scientist. All the concatenations of the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, coming together in people’s minds—

Yes, yes, and hadn’t he just cursed Ulam for his brilliance, and hadn’t the same comparison crossed his mind?