“I suspect it’s a hybrid, biological
“I’m out of my league,” Bailey said.
Kirby nodded. “We all are. I’m only guessing.”
“You have more to base your guesses on than I do. Fact is, I have zip to base any on.”
“I can’t claim I’m right about any of this. I’m not a futurist. Or maybe I am, now that I’ve been here.”
From where she knelt beside Julian Sanchez, Padmini Bahrati said worriedly, “Something’s happening here.”
“And it’s not good,” Silas Kinsley added, standing over her to direct his flashlight on the fallen blind man.
He must stay away from the windows lest he be seen by one of the Ruling Elite. He hoped he had dodged back from the glass in time to escape notice.
Perhaps the knock that came a short time later had been Bailey Hawks, as he claimed when he shouted through the door. But there was no way of knowing. Fielding might have opened the door only to find the horrific thing from the courtyard as it went from one apartment to the next to perform a memory wipe on everyone, to make them forget what they had seen when the Spin Machine broke down and the false reality of a luxurious Pendleton faded to the miserable truth.
Although all his suspicions had proved to be true and though his theories had been vindicated, he didn’t know what to do next. Without a computer he had no purpose, and without furniture he didn’t even have a place to sit comfortably and brood. He wandered through the queerly lighted rooms for a couple of minutes, but the condition of them depressed him.
The past few days, as he often did, Fielding had sat at his computer, conducting his research with such intensity that he had forgotten to go to bed at a reasonable hour, yet he’d risen early each day after getting less than half the sleep he required. Now, without his quest for truth to distract him, his exhaustion began to manifest, exacerbated by the emotional and the intellectual weight of this recent devastating event. His limbs felt almost too heavy to lift, and if his legs were cast iron, his eyelids were lead.
Fielding sat on the floor, his back in a corner, his legs out in front of him, his upturned hands limp in his lap.
He thought about the incredible fortune he had inherited and about the intolerable guilt that once plagued him because he was so indefensibly rich in such a poor world. Evidently, at some point, after dozens of societal and environmental calamities, after even the force-field domes had failed to save the cities, his wealth had withered away, and he had become, like everyone else, a brainwashed prisoner of the Ruling Elite. This was the truth, and there was nothing that he could do to change the truth. He was surprised to discover, however, that he wished he could have his wealth back and that he didn’t feel the least bit guilty about wanting it. He should have been relieved to be a pauper at last, but his heart ached for his money. He wondered why he had undergone this change, but he was too weary to think about it.
As he balanced on the edge of sleep, numerous murmuring voices rose in the walls against which he leaned, as if the nannies and butlers from the old days were all chanting a lullaby to rock him off to dreamland. He smiled and thought of the Pooh bear with which he slept when he was a little boy, how soft it was and how sweetly it cuddled against him.
The creatures that had been forged out of the bodies of Smoke and Ashes were lying on the floor in the light of the sconces and the yellow glow of the fungus, trembling at first and gasping as though exhausted, but then suddenly mortally still. After a brief stillness, those disparate parts of different species began to fall apart from one another, the hodgepodge organism quickly collapsing into a pile of dismembered limbs, loose eyeballs, sets of strange teeth, and detached ears, as though they were the pieces of some bizarre pop-it-together toy in the tradition of Mr. Potato Head. Disassembled, the various parts began to melt into gray sludge.
Edna said, “Smoke and Ashes must have eaten something very bad.”
“Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it got into them some other way.”
Voice faltering, Edna said, “Whatever did our kitties do to deserve a fate like that?”
“Better them than us,” Martha declared.
She loved the cats, but she wasn’t as sentimental about them as was her sister, who did needlepoint portraits of them and sewed costumes for them to wear on holidays.
“We don’t even have their poor bodies to cremate,” Edna said. “They’re like sailors lost at sea.”
“Get a grip, dear.”
After some sniffling, Edna said, “I miss our lovely furniture.”
“We’ll get back to it.”
“Do you think we will?”
Martha watched the two puddles of gray sludge, and instead of answering the question, she said, “If they turn back into cats, do
Padmini and Tom retreated a few steps to allow Silas and Bailey to provide Dr. Kirby Ignis with the benefit of their flashlights as he knelt beside Julian Sanchez. The blind man seemed to be paralyzed yet rigid, but that was the least worrisome aspect of his condition.
Only recently Silas would have thought himself delirious or insane if he had witnessed such a thing, but he entertained no doubt that the current transformation of Julian from a man into a
