pack straps astonished her. This was the body of a slave. He had been harrowed. Every mark was the mark of use.
It disconcerted her. She had known the damned in many of their incarnations, as prisoners and prostitutes and killers and banished lepers. But she had never met a slave. Such creatures weren't supposed to exist in this age.
Ali was surprised at how well his shoulder fit in her hand. Then she recovered herself with a tidy pat. 'You'll survive,' she told him.
She walked a little distance away and sat down. For the rest of that night, she lay curled in a ball with his shotgun, protecting Ike while he finished returning to the world.
Am not I
A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me?
– WILLIAM BLAKE, 'The Fly'
18
GOOD MORNING
Health Sciences Center, University of Colorado, Denver
Yamamoto emerged from the elevator with a smile.
'Morning!' she sang to a janitor mopping up a roof leak.
'I don't see no sun,' he grumbled.
They had an old-fashioned blizzard raging out there, four-foot drifts, minus nine degrees. They were under siege. She would have the lab to herself today.
Yamamoto found last night's guard still on duty, asleep. She sent him off to the dorm to get some rest and hot food. 'And don't come back until this afternoon,' she said. 'I can hold down the fort myself. No one's coming in anyway.'
She was like that these days, mother to the world. Her hair was thicker, her cheeks in constant bloom. She hummed to the Womb, as her husband called it. Three more months.
The Digital Satan project was nearing completion. The lab was getting downright gamy with fast-food wrappers, sixty-four-ounce soda cups recycled as pencil holders, and mummified birthday leftovers. The bulletin board was bushy with doctored snapshots of lab personnel, excerpts of articles, and, most recently, employment notices for positions here and abroad.
She entered without double-gloving or a surgical mask. All kinds of lab rituals had fallen by the wayside, yet another sign that the project was getting short. Vials lay couched on a Taco Bell box. Someone had made a mobile of the computer chips they'd fried over the months.
Machine Two pumped out its endless hush-hush-hush nursery-room rhythm. Except for the head, a young hadal female had just disappeared from existence, bones and all. Yet now she could be resurrected with a CD-ROM and a mouse. She was about to become electronically immortal. Wherever there was a computer, there could be a physical manifestation of Dawn. In a sense, her soul was truly in the machine.
For several weeks now, Yamamoto had been beset with awful dreams of Dawn. The hadal girl would be falling off a cliff or getting swept out to sea, and she would be reaching for help. Others in the lab related similar nightmares. Separation anxiety, they self-diagnosed. Dawn had been part of the gang. They were all going to miss her. All that remained was the upper two-thirds of the hadal's cranium. It was slow going. Machine Two was calibrated to make the finest slices possible. The brain offered their most interesting exploration. Hopes remained high that they might actually unravel the sensory and cognition process – in effect, making the dead mind speak. All they had to do for the next ten weeks was baby-sit a glorified bologna slicer. Patience was a matter of Diet Pepsi and ribald jokes.
Yamamoto approached the metal table. The top of the girl's cranium was pale white inside the block of frozen blue gel. It looked like a moon suspended in a square of outer space. Electrodes fed out from the top and sides of the gel. At the base, the blade sliced. The camera fired.
The machine had pared away the lower jaw, then worked back and forth across the upper teeth and into the nasal cavity. Externally, most of the flared, batlike nose and all of the stretched, fringed earlobes were gone now. In terms of internal structures, they'd shaved through most of the medulla oblongata leading up from the spinal cord, and reduced most of the cerebellum – which controlled motor skills – at the base of the skull to digital bits. No lesions or abnormalities so far. For a necrotic brain, all systems were remarkably intact, practically viable. Everyone was marveling. Hope I'm that healthy after I die, someone had joked.
Things were just starting to get interesting. From around the country, neurosurgeons and brain and cognition specialists had begun calling or E-mailing on a daily basis to keep updated. Certain parts of the brain, like the cerebellum they'd just passed, were fairly standard mammalian anatomy. They explained what made the animal an animal, but did little to fill in what made the hadal a hadal.
No longer would Dawn be just so much subterranean animal carcass. From the limbic system upward, she would once again become her own person. A personality might emerge, a rational process, clues to her speech, her emotions, her habits and instincts. In short, they were about to peek out through Dawn's cranial window and glimpse her worldview. It was tantamount to landing a spacecraft on another planet. More than that, this was like interviewing an alien for the first time and asking for her thoughts.
Yamamoto feathered through the electrodes, sorting the right-side wires, laying them out neatly on the table. It was still a slight mystery why Dawn seemed to be generating a slight electrical pulse. Her chart should have showed a flat-line, but every now and then an irregular spike would jump up. This had been going on for months. It was a fact that, if you waited long enough, electrodes would eventually detect vital signs even from a bowl of Jell-O.
Yamamoto moved around the table to the left side and fanned out the wires on her palm. It was almost like braiding a child's hair. She paused to peer down into the gel block at what was left of the hadal face.
'Good morning,' she said. The head opened its eyes.
Rau and Bud Parsifal found Vera in a western clothing store in Denver International terminal, trying on cowboy hats. One could not have invented a more perfect antidote to the darkness on everyone's mind. Everyone had an opinion, a fear, a solution. No one knew where any of it was going down there, what they might find, what kind of world their children were going to grow up in. But here, in this gigantic, sweeping, tentlike terminal saturated with sunlight and open space, you could forget all that and simply eat ice cream. Or try on cowboy hats.
'How do I look?' Vera asked.
Rau patted his briefcase in applause. Parsifal said, 'Lord spare us.'
'Did you come together?' she asked.
'London via Cincinnati,' said Parsifal.
'Mexico City,' said Rau. 'We bumped into each other in the concourse.'
'I was afraid no one was going to make it,' Vera said. 'As it is, we may be too late.'
'You called, we came,' said Parsifal. 'Teamwork.' His paunch and hated bifocals made the gallantry that much more charming.
Rau checked his watch. 'Thomas arrives within the hour. And the others?'
'Elsewhere,' said Vera, 'in transit, incommunicado, occupied. You've heard about
Branch, I suppose.'
'Has he lost his mind?' Parsifal said. 'Running off into the subplanet like that. Alone. Of all people, you'd think he'd know what the hadals are capable of.'
'It's not them I'm worried about.'
'Please not that 'the enemy is us' business.'
'You don't know about the shoot-to-kill order then?' Vera asked. 'All the armies got it. Interpol has it.'
