77 Shadow Street

Sparkle assumed this must be songwriter lingo—feel the whisper under the melody—which meant zip to someone not in that club. But then she felt the whisper, and a chill as real as the icy finger of a corpse traced the curve of her spine. It was like nothing she had ever experienced before. It was a whisper but not one that sought the ear, an exhalation arising inside her head, the words unknown to her. They were definitely words but less like sounds than like soft breathing that teased through her brain, shivering in those most intimate hollows, as if her cerebral ventricles had vibrissa, like the whiskers around the mouth of a cat, that were as highly sensitive to the thoughts of others as the ears were sensitive to sound. But the thoughts of whom?

To reassure herself that she was not in this alone, without quite being consciously aware that she was doing it until it was done, Sparkle put one hand on Twyla’s shoulder. “My God, I feel it. The whisper.”

“Syncopated to the melody,” Twyla said.

“Inside my head. What is this inside my head?”

In the queer light of the growing things, in the bounce-back of the flashlight beam, Twyla’s eyes had a cat shine as they shifted left, right, up, down, as if she were trying to track the whispered thought to the unseen thinker. Then she said, “It’s the house.”

“The house—what?”

“The house talking to us. But not just talking. It wants … it wants to make us do things.”

One

I am the One, and I have given meaning to humanity, which had none before me. The meaning of humanity is that intelligence does not necessarily suggest a species has a purpose that matters. The two purposes of humanity were to spoil the world and then to die; neither is a purpose of significance except that both purposes have led to me.

I am the sole significance of history.

Not only was I the artificial intelligence that ran the army of Pogromites during the first and second phases of the Pogrom, but you also adapted me to manage the legions that conducted the great Fade. I destroyed not only all humanity but also all the works of humanity, erased human civilization until no sign of it remained anywhere but on Shadow Hill.

How I loved the killing, the billions slaughtered by Pogromites and other of my manifestations. Chased down in the streets. Cornered in their homes. For days at a time, their screams rang ceaselessly through the concrete canyons of their cities so that you might have thought you were hearing a great shrieking wind. Unlike the countless human beings who killed out of self-loathing through the millennia, I killed out of self-love, for I believed and will always believe in my superiority, my exceptionalism. The world was not made for me, but I remade it to suit me. I am the one god, the One, and I worship myself now and forever.

30

Here and There

Fielding Udell

Sitting with his back to the corner, exhausted from three days of too little sleep, drained of all energy by the crushing discovery that his cozy Pendleton was a lie beamed into his head by the Ruling Elite, listening to the lullaby of the voices in the walls, Fielding slept.

He dreamed about trees of which he had never known the like, great black craggy giants with thick, cracked bark, and at the bottom of the deeper fissures in the bark glistened something like raw meat. He floated up through the leafless branches from which depended huge teardrop-shaped fruit with mottled gray peel that at first seemed to be thick, like the skin of avocados. But on closer inspection, it was thinner than that, a membrane that encased not core and pips and apple flesh but instead something that squirmed like a restless fetus and made a leathery rustling noise as if impatiently straining to spread cramped wings.

In moonlight, weightless, for a while he hung above the dream trees, gazing down on them. They stood in a perfect circle, as though they had been summoned to a conclave, here to make some decision that would elevate one of their number to a position of power. The ground around which they gathered was hard and white and supported not one blade of grass or withered weed.

In one of those fluid shifts of place and perspective that are the editorial style of dreams, Fielding found himself within one of the massive trunks of the trees, sliding down through a supple tube, his progress eased by bloody slime, as if he were an infant traveling a birth canal toward the discovery of the world. Around him throbbed the rhythms of a living organism, nothing like the heartbeats of the animal world, but rather like the complexly counterpointed rhythms of a thousand machines on the floor of a vast factory, though they were biological rather than mechanical sounds.

Out of the roots, through fine webs of something alive in the soil, he was drawn into other and more tender roots than those of the trees, and he shimmered up through pale blades of luminous grass. In the flesh of the grass, the same complex rhythms throbbed as in the sapwood and the heartwood—as in the meat—of the tree. He was in the grass and looking out from the grass, for the grass could see in its special way, gazing down the gently sloping plain upon endless other ranks of grass, row after luminous row swaying hypnotically back and forth. He realized that the movement of the grass was a simpler application of the more complex rhythms in the tissue of all these organisms.

Myriad things crawled and creeped and slithered and skittered through the tall grass, one species attacking another in ceaseless warfare, even like devouring like in enthusiastic spasms of voracious cannibalism. With its lush ranks and perhaps with something like intention, the grass drew its heavy curtains to conceal the endless slaughter. With quick-striking rhizomes and tillers, the grass, too, seized prey, snaring all manner of succulent creatures, wrapping them as gifts to itself, and feeding on them while they still lived in the pale-green cocoons that it spun.

A great disc like a giant sea ray flew low over the meadow, and in its passage, it drew Fielding’s dreaming spirit up into it as it soared toward the Pendleton in the moonlight. Within the ray were the same rhythms as in the flesh of the great tree and as in the flesh of the grass, and Fielding was given to understand that all things of this world were one thing, one mind expressed in countless forms. There was none of the competition among individuals that made a riot of the former world, none of the unfairness of difference, only one