Gregory Bear - Blood Music

She hugged her mother, feeling solid flesh, and gave up on the thought it was a dream. It was real. Her brothers hadn’t picked her up at the house—that couldn’t have been real, could it?— but they had taken her up the elevator and here she was with her mother, warm and full of love, waiting to feed her daughter.

And over her mother’s shoulder, out the window, the changed city. She couldn’t imagine that, could she?

“What’s going on, Mother?” she asked, wiping her eyes and standing back, glancing at Kenneth and Howard.

“The last time I saw you, we were in the kitchen,” her mother said, giving her the once-over. “I wasn’t very talkative then. Lots of things were happening.”

“You were sick,” Suzy said.

“Yes… and no. Come sit. You must be very hungry.”

“If I’ve been asleep two weeks, I should have starved to death,” she said.

“She still doesn’t believe,” Howard said, grinning.

“Shh!” her mother said, waving him off. “You wouldn’t believe, would you, either of you?”

They admitted they probably wouldn’t.

“ I am hungry, though,” Suzy admitted. Kenneth pulled out a chair and she sat before an immaculate table setting of fine china and silver.

“We probably made it too fancy,” Howard said. “Too much like a dream.”

“Yeah,” Suzy said. She felt punch-drunk, happy, and she didn’t care what was real any more. “You clowns overdid it.”

Her mother heaped her plate with ham and salads and Suzy pointed to the mashed potatoes and gravy.

“Fattening,” Kenneth said.

“Tsk,” Suzy replied. She lifted the first forkful of ham and chewed on it. Real. Bite of tooth on fork, real. “You know what happened?”

“Not everything,” her mother said, sitting beside her.

“We can be a lot smarter now, if we want to be,” Howard said. For a moment Suzy felt hurt; did he mean her? Howard had always been ashamed of his grades, a hard worker but not in the least brilliant. Still, he was smarter than his slow sister.

“We don’t even need our bodies,” Kenneth said.

“Slower, slower,” her mother admonished them. “It’s very complicated, darling.”

“We’re dinosaurs now,” Howard said, picking at the ham from where he stood. He made a face and let go of the slice he had lifted.

“When we were sick…” her mother began.

Suzy put down her fork and chewed thoughtfully, listening not to her mother, but to something else.

Healed you

Cherish you

Need

“Oh, my God,” she said quietly around her mouthful of ham. She swallowed and looked around at them. She lifted her hand. White lines lay across the back, extending beyond her wrist to form faint networks beneath the skin of her arm.

“Don’t be afraid, Suzy,” her mother said. “Please don’t be afraid. They left you alone because they couldn’t enter your body without killing you. You have an unusual chemistry, darling. So do a few others. That’s not a problem anymore. But it’s your choice, honey. Just listen to us… and to them. They’re a lot more sophisticated now, honey, much smarter than when they entered us.”

“I’m sick now, too, aren’t I?” she asked.

“There are so many of them,” Howard said, sweeping his arms out across the view, “that you could count every grain of sand on the Earth, and every star in the sky, and still not reach their number.”

“Now listen,” Kenneth said, bending close to his sister. “You always listen to me, don’t you, Seedling?”

She nodded like a child, slow and deliberate.

“They don’t want to hurt, or kill. They need us. We’re a small part of them, but they need us.”

“Yes?” she said, her voice small.

“They love us,” her mother said. “They say they come from us, and they love us like… like you love your cradle, the one in the basement.”

“Like we love Mom,” Kenneth said. Howard agreed earnestly.

“And now they give you the choice.”

“What choice?” Suzy said. “They’re inside me.”

“The choice whether to continue like you are, or to join us.”

“But you’re like me again, now.”

Kenneth knelt beside her. “We’d like to show you what it’s like, what they’re like.”

“You’re brainwashed,” she said. “I want to be alive.”

“We’re even more alive, with them,” her mother said. “Honey, we’re not brainwashed, we’re convinced. We went through some very bad stuff at first, but that’s not necessary now. They don’t destroy anything. They can keep everything inside them, in memory, but it’s better than memory—”

“ Because you can think yourself into it, and be there, just like it was—”

“Or will be,” Howard added.

“I still don’t know what you mean. They want me to give up my body? They’re going to change me, like they did you, like the city?”

“When you’re with them, you won’t need your body any more,” her mother said. Suzy looked at her in horror. “Suzy, honey, we’ve been there. We know.”

“You’re like a bunch of Moonies,” she said softly. “You always warned me Moonies and people like that would take advantage of me. Now it’s you trying to brainwash me. You feed me and make me feel good and I don’t even know you’re my mother and brothers.”

“You can stay the way you are, if that’s what you want,” Kenneth said. “They just thought you’d like to know. There’s an alternative to being alone and afraid.”

“Will they leave my body?” she asked, holding up her hand.

“If that’s what you want,” her mother said. “I want to be alive, not a ghost.”

“That’s your decision?” Kenneth asked. “Yes,” she said firmly. “Do you want us to leave, too?”

She felt the tears again and reached for her mother’s hand. “I’m confused,” she said. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you? You’re really my mother and Kenny and Howard?”

They nodded. “Only better,” Howard added. “Listen, sis, I wasn’t the smartest fellow in town, was I? Good-hearted, maybe, but sometimes a real rock quarry. But when they came into me—”

“Who are they?”

“They came from us,” Kenneth said. “They’re like our own cells, not like a disease.”

“They’re cells?” She thought of the blobby things—she forgot their names—she had seen under the microscope in high school. That scared her even more.

Howard nodded. “Smart, too. When they came into me, I felt so strong—in the mind. I could think and remember all sorts of things, and I remembered stuff I hadn’t even lived through. It was like I was talking on the phone with zillions of brilliant people, all friendly, all cooperating—:”

“Mostly,” Kenneth said.

“Well, yeah, they argue sometimes, and we argue, too. It’s not cut and dried. But nobody hates anybody because we’re all duplicated hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of times. You know, like being Xeroxed. All across the country. So like, if I die here, now, there’s hundreds of others tuned in to me, ready to become me, and I don’t die at all. I just lose this particular me. So I can tune in to anybody else, and I can be anywhere else, and it becomes impossible to die.”

Suzy had stopped eating. Now she stopped picking at the food with her fork and put the utensil down. “That’s too heavy for me right now,” she said. “I want to know why I didn’t get sick, too.”

“Let them answer this time,” her mother said. “Just listen to them.”

She closed her eyes.

Different people

Some like you

Died/disaster/end

Set aside, conserved

Like parks these

People/you