Blood Music

Vergil lay in the middle of the living room, arms and legs cruciform, and laughed. Then he sobered and asked himself what impression he had made on Edward, or on Bernard for that matter. Not important, he decided. Nothing was important but what was going on inside, the interior universe.

“I’ve always been a big fellow,” Vergil murmured.

Everything

—Yes, I am everything now.

Explain

—What? I mean, explain what?

Simplicities

—Yes, I Imagine if s tough waking up. Well, you deserve the difficulties. Damn very old DNA finally waking up.

SPOKEN with other

—What?

WORDS communicate with ^*share^* body structure ^*external^* is this like ^*wholeness WITHIN^{* *}totality^* is EXTERNAL alike

—I’m not understanding, you’re not clear.

Silence inside for how long? Difficult to tell the passage of time, hours and days in minutes and seconds. The noocytes had screwed up his brain clock. And what else?

YOU ^*interface^{* *}stand BETWEEN^* EXTERNAL and INTERNAL. Are they alike.

—Inside and outside? Oh, no.

Are OUTSIDE ^*share body structure^* alike

—You mean Edward, don’t you? Yes indeed…share body structure alike.

EDWARD and other structure INTERNAL similar/same

—Oh yes, he’s quite the same except for you. Only—yes, and is she better now? She wasn’t well last night.

No answer to that question.

Query

—He doesn’t have you. Nobody does. Is she all right? We’re the only ones. I made you. Nobody else but us has you.

A deep and profound silence.

Edward drove to the La Jolla Museum of Modem Art and walked across the concrete to a pay phone near a bronze drinking fountain. Fog drifted in from the ocean, obscuring the cream-plastered Spanish lines of the Church of St. James by the Sea and beading on the leaves of the trees. He inserted his credit card into the phone and asked information for the number of Genetron, Inc. The mechanical voice replied swiftly and he dialed through.

“Please page Dr. Michael Bernard,” he told the receptionist.

“Who’s calling, please?”

“This is his answering service. We have an emergency call and his beeper doesn’t seem to be working.”

A few anxious minutes later, Bernard came on the line. “Who the hell is this?” he asked quietly. “I don’t have an answering service.”

“My name is Edward Milligan. I’m a friend of Vergil Ulam’s. I think we have some problems to discuss.”

There was a long silence on the other end. “You’re at Mount Freedom, aren’t you, Dr. Milligan?”

“Yes.”

“Staying down here?”

“Not really.”

“I can’t see you today. Would tomorrow morning be acceptable?”

Edward thought of driving up and back, of time lost and of Gail, worrying. It all seemed trivial. “Yes,” he said.

“Nine o’clock, at Genetron. 60895 North Torrey Pines Road.”

“Fine.”

Edward walked back to his car in the morning grayness. As he opened the door and slid into the seat, he had a sudden thought. Candice hadn’t come home last night.

She had been in the apartment that morning.

Vergil had been lying about her, he was sure of that much. So what role was she playing?

And where was she?

CHAPTER TWELVE

Gail found Edward lying on the couch, sleeping fitfully as a chill freak winter breeze whistled outside. She sat down beside him and stroked his arm until his eyes opened.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi to you.” He blinked and looked around. “What time is it?”

“I just got home.”

“Four-thirty. Christ. Have I been asleep?”

“I wasn’t here,” Gail said. “Have you?”

“I’m still tired.”

“So what did Vergil do this time?”

Edward’s face assumed a patent mask of equanimity. He caressed her chin with one finger—“Chin chucking,” she called it, finding it faintly objectionable, as if she were a cat.

“Something’s wrong,” she said. “Are you going to tell me, or just keep acting like everything’s normal?”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Edward said.

“Oh, Lord,” Gail sighed, standing. “You’re going to divorce me for that Baker woman.” Mrs. Baker weighed three hundred pounds and hadn’t known she was pregnant until her fifth month.

“No,” Edward said listlessly.

“Rapturous relief.” Gail touched his forehead lightly. “You know this kind of introspection drives me crazy.”

“Well, it’s nothing I can talk about, so…” He took her hand in his and patted it.

“That’s disgustingly patronizing,” she said. “I’m going to make some tea. Want some?” He nodded and she went into the kitchen.

Why not just reveal all? he asked himself. An old friend was turning himself into a galaxy.

He cleared away the dining table instead.

That night, unable to sleep, Edward looked down on Gail from his sitting position, pillow against the wall, and tried to determine what he knew was real, and what wasn’t.

I’m a doctor, he told himself. A technical, scientific profession. Supposed to be immune to things like future shock.

Vergil Ulam was turning into a galaxy.

How would it feel to be topped off with a trillion Chinese? He grinned in the dark, and almost cried at the same time. What Vergil had inside him was unimaginably stranger than Chinese. Stranger than anything Edward—or Vergil—could easily understand. Perhaps ever understand.

What kind of psychology or personality would a cell develop—or a cluster of cells, for that matter? He tried to recall all his schooling on cell environments in the human body. Blood, lymph, tissue, interstitial fluid, cerebrospinal fluid…He could not imagine an organism of human complexity in such surroundings not going crazy from boredom. The environment was simple, the demands relatively simple, and fee levels of behavior were suited to cells, not people. On the other hand, stress might be the major factor—the environment was benign to familiar cells, hell on unfamiliar cells.

But he knew what was important, if not necessarily what was real: the bedroom, streetlights and tree