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 dose 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
“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
“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
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 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
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
To learn.
The words did not just form alone in her mind. They were accompanied by a clear, vivid series of visual and sensual journeys, across great distances, mental and physical. She became aware of the differences between cell intelligence and her own, the different experiences now being integrated; she touched on the forms and thoughts of people absorbed into the cell memories; she even felt the partially saved memories of those who had died before being absorbed. She had never felt/seen/tasted anything so rich.
Suzy opened her eyes. Already, she was not the same. Something in her had been bypassed—the part that made her slow. She wasn’t completely slow now, not all the way through.
“See what it’s like?” Howard asked.
I’m going to think about it,” she said. She pushed the chair back from the table. Tell them to leave me alone and not make me sick.”
“You’ve told them already,” her mother said.
“I just need time,” Suzy said.
“Honey, if you want, you can have
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE
Bernard floats in his own blood, uncertain with whom he is communicating. The communication is carried up the stream of blood by flagellates, adapted protozoans capable of high speed in the serum. His replies return by the same method, or are simply cast into the blood flow.
Everything is information, or lack of information.
—How many of me are there?
That number will always change. Perhaps a million by now.
—Will I meet them? Integrate with them?
No cluster has the capacity to absorb the experiences of all like clusters. That must be reserved for command clusters. Not all information is equally useful at any given time.
—But no information is lost?
Information is always lost. That is the struggle. No cluster’s total structure is ever lost There are
