Gregory Bear - Blood Music

Sensation along the membranes of his cells is intense. It is here that he receives, feels the aura and pressure of huge molecular messages from outside. He takes in a plasmid-like data lump, *ases it, and pours information from it, absorbing it into his being, duplicating those parts which will be needed by others among his companions. Now the lumps come rapidly, and as he breaks and pours each one, each string of molecules a library, he finds bits and pieces of Michael Bernard returning to him.

The huge Bernard is encompassed within a tiny hundred-cell cluster. He can feel there is actually a human being on the level of the noocytes—himself. Welcome. —Thank you.

He senses a fellow team member as a diversity of tastes, all possible varieties of sweetness and richness. The camaraderie is overwhelming. He loves his team (how can he love anything else?). He is an integral part, in turn loved and necessary.

Abruptly, he tastes the wall of a capillary. He is part of the research team, passing on information by manufacturing nucleic acid packets. Absorbing, re-making, passing on, absorbing…

Extrude. Push through.

That is his instruction. He will leave the capillary, enter the tissue.

Leave a portion stuck out into the data flow.He pushes between the capillary cells—support cells, not themselves noocytes—and lodges in the wall. Now he waits for data in the form of structured proteins, hormones and pheromones, nucleic acid strings, data perhaps even in the form of *tailored* cells, viruses or domesticized bacteria. He needs not only basic nutrients, easily available from the blood serum, but supplies of the enzymes which allow him to absorb and process data, to think. These enzymes are supplied by *tailored* bacteria which both manufacture and deliver. The blood is a highway, a symphony of information, instruction. It is a delight to process and modify the rich broth.

The information has its own variety of tastes, and is like a living thing, liable to change in the blood unless it is carefully monitored, trimmed of accretions, buffed. Words cannot convey what he is doing. His whole being is alive with the chatter of interpreting and processing.

He feels the dizzying spiral of recursion, thinking about his own tiny thought processes—molecules thinking about molecules, keeping records of themselves—applying words that until now have had no place in this realm. Like bringing God’s word for a tree down to the tree and speaking it, watching the tree blossom in blushing confusion.

You are the power, the gentle power, the richest taste of all… the ultimate upstream message.

His fellows approach him, cluster around his appendage in the blood, crowd him. He is like an initiate suddenly inspired with the breath of God in a monastery. The monks gather, starved for a touch, a sign of redemption and purpose. It is intoxicating. He loves them because they are his team; they are more than loving to him, because he is the Source.

The command clusters know that he is, himself, part of a greater hierarchy, but this information has not made it down to the level he now occupies. The common clusters are still in awe.

You are the flow of all life. You hold the key of *opening* and *blocking*, of pulse and silence.

–Farther, he said. Take me farther and show me your lives.

“Suzy. Wake up.”

Suzy’s eyes fluttered open. Kenneth and Howard stood over her. She blinked and looked around at the blue plaster walls of her bedroom, the sheets pulled up to her neck. “Kenny?”

“Mom’s waiting.”

“Howard?”

“Come on, Seedling.” That’s what Kenneth had always called her. She pushed the blankets down, then pulled them back up; she still had on her blouse and panties, not her pajamas.

“I have to get dressed,” she said.

Howard handed her the jeans. “Hurry up.” They left the bedroom and shut the door behind them. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stuck them into the pants legs, then stood and tugged them higher, zipping and buttoning. Her knee didn’t hurt. The swelling had gone down and everything seemed fine. Her mouth tasted funny. She looked around for the flashlight and radio. They were on the floor by the bed. Picking them up, she opened the door and stepped into the hall. “Kenny?”

Howard took her arm and gently nudged her toward their mother’s bedroom. The door was closed. Kenneth turned the knob and opened it and they stepped into the elevator. Howard pushed the button for the restaurant and lounge.

“I knew it,” she said, shoulders slumping. “I’m dreaming.” Her brothers looked at her and smiled, shaking their heads.

“No, you’re not,” Kenneth said. “We’re back.”

The elevator smoothly lifted them the remaining twenty-five floors.

“Bull,” she said, feeling the tears on her cheeks. “It’s cruel.”

“Okay, the part about the bedroom, the house—that’s a dream. Some stuff down there you probably don’t want to see. But we’re here. We’re with you again.”

“You’re dead,” she said. “Mom, too.”

“We’re different,” Howard said. “Not dead.”

“Yeah, what are you, then, zombies? Goddammit.”

“They never killed us,” Kenneth said. “They just… dismantled us. Like everybody.”

“Well, almost everybody.” Howard pointed at her and they grinned.

“You lucked out, or missed out,” Kenneth said.

She was scared now. The elevator door opened and they stepped out into a fancy mirrored hall. Lights reflected into infinity on either side. The lights were on. The elevator worked. She had to be dreaming, or she was finally and totally crazy.

“Some died, too,” Kenneth said solemnly, taking her hand. “Accidents, mistakes.”

“That’s only part of what we know, now,” Howard said. They walked between the mirrors, past a huge geode cut open to show amethyst crystals, past a monumental lump of rose quartz and a sliced nodule of malachite. Nobody met them at the maitre d’s station. “Mom’s in the restaurant,” he said. “If you’re hungry, there’s plenty of food up here, that’s for sure.”

“The power’s on,” she said.

“Emergency generator in the basement. It ran for a while after the city’s power stopped, but no more fuel, you know? So we found more fuel. They told us how to work it, and we turned it on before fetching you,” Howard said.

“Yeah. It’s hard for them to reconstruct lots of people, so they only did Mom and us. Not the building maintenance supervisor or the others. We did all the work. You’ve been asleep for a while, you know.”

“Two weeks.”

“That’s why your knee’s better.”

“That, and—”

“Shh,” Kenneth said, holding up his hand to caution his brother. “Not all at once.” Suzy looked between them as they guided her into the restaurant.

It was late afternoon. The city, clearly visible from the restaurant’s broad picture windows, was no longer wrapped up in the brown and white sheets.

She couldn’t recognize any landmarks. Before, she could pick out at least the hidden shapes of buildings, the valleys of streets and the outlines of neighborhoods.

Not the same place.

Gray, black, dazzling marble white, arranged in pyramids and many-sided polyhedrons, some as translucent as frosted glass. Slabs hundreds of feet high marched off like dominoes along what had once been West Street from Battery Park all the way to Riverside Park. All the shapes and masses of the buildings of Manhattan had been dropped into a bag, shaken, rearranged, and repainted.

But the structures weren’t concrete and steel any more. She didn’t know what they were.

Alive.

Her mother sat behind a broad table heaped high with food. Salads lay in bowls along the front, a thick ham partially sliced rose from the middle, trays of olives and sliced pickles taking up the sides, cakes and desserts the rear. Her mother smiled and slid out from her seat behind the table, coming forward on her muscular ex-tennis-player legs, holding out her arms. She was dressed in an expensive Rabarda gown, long sleeves draped with beaded detailing and fringe, and she looked absolutely terrific. “Suzy,” her mother said. “Don’t look so upset. We’re back to visit.”