Blood Music

always duplications.

—Where am I going?

Eventually, above the *blood music*. You are the cluster chosen to re-integrate with BERNARD.

—I am Bernard.

There are many BERNARD.

Perhaps a million others, thinking as he thought now, spreading through the blood and tissue, gradually being absorbed into the noocyte hierarchy. A million changing versions, never to be re-integrated.

You will meet with command clusters. You will experience THOUGHT UNIVERSE.

—It’s too much. I’m frightened again.

FRIGHTENED is impossible without hormonal response of macro-scale BERNARD. Are you truly FRIGHTENED?

He searches for the effects of fear and does not find them.

—No, but I should be.

You have expressed interest in hierarchy. Adjust your processing to ^{**************}.

The message is incomprehensible to his human mind, embedded in the biologic of the noocyte cluster, but the cluster itself understands and prepares for the entry of specific data packages.

As the data comes in—slender coiled strings of RNA and gnarled, twisted proteins—he feels his cells absorb and incorporate. There is no way of knowing how much time this takes, but he seems to almost immediately comprehend the experience of the cells rushing past in the capillary. He feeds off their recently shed experience- memories.

By far the greatest number are not mature noocytes, but normal somatic cells either slightly altered to prevent interference with noocyte activity, or servant cells with limited functions specified by simple biologic. Some of these cells do the bidding of command clusters, others ferry experience memory in hybridized or polymerized clumps from one location to another. Still others carry out new body functions not yet assumable by untailored somatic cells.

Still lower in the scale are domesticated bacteria, carefully tailored to perform one or two functions. Some of these bacteria (there is no way to connect their type with any he knows by human names) are small factories, flooding the blood with the molecules necessary to the noocytes.

And at the bottom of the scale, but by no means negligible in importance, are tailored phage viruses. Some of the virus particles act as high-speed transports for crucial information, towed by flagellate bacteria or slimmed- down lymphocytes; others wander freely through the blood, surrounding the larger cells like dust clouds. If somatic cells, servants or even mature noocytes have abandoned the hierarchy—rebelled or malfunctioned drastically—the virus particles move in and inject their package of disruptive RNA. The offending cells soon explode, casting out a cloud of more tailored virus, and the debris is cleaned away by various noocyte and servant scavengers.

Every type of cell originally in his body-friend or foe-has been studied and put to use by the noocytes.

Dislodge and follow the trail of the command cluster. You will be interviewed.

Bernard feels his cluster move back into the capillary. The walls of the capillary narrow until he is strung out in a long line, his intercellular communications reduced until he feels the noocyte equivalent of suffocation. Then he passes through the capillary wall and is bathed in interstitial fluid. The trail is very distinct He can “taste” the presence of mature noocytes, a great many of them.

It comes to him suddenly that he is, in fact, still near his brain, possibly still in his brain, and that he is about to meet one of the researchers responsible for breaking through to the macro-scale world.

He passes through crowds of servant cells, information-bearing flagellates, noocytes waiting for instructions.

I am about to be introduced to the Grand Lunar, he tells himself. The thought and accompanying mental chuckle is passed into his experience data almost immediately, extruded and hastily retrieved by a servant cell, and carried away to the command cluster. Even more rapidly, a response comes to him.

BERNARD compares us with a MONSTER.

—Not at all. I’m the monster here. Either that, or the situation itself is monstrous.

We are nowhere near to understanding the subtleties of your thought. Have you found the ‘downloading’ informative?

—So far, very informative. And I admit I feel humble here.

Not like a supreme command cluster?

—No. I am not a god.

We do not understand GOD.

The command cluster was much larger than a normal noocyte cluster. Bernard estimated it held at least ten thousand cells, with a commensurately greater thinking capacity. He felt like a mental midget, even with the difficulty of making judgments in the noocyte realm.

—Do you have access to my memories of H.G. Wells?

Pause. Then, Yes. They are quite vivid for not being pure experience memories.

—Yes, well they come from a book, an encoding of an unreal experience.

We are familiar with *fiction*.

—I feel like Cavour in The First Men in the Moon. Speaking with the Grand Lunar.

The comparison may be appropriate, but we do not comprehend it. We are very different, BERNARD, far more different than your comparison with the unreal experience would suggest.

—Yes, but like Cavour, I have thousands of questions. Perhaps you don’t wish to answer all of them.

To keep your fellow macro-scale HUMANS from knowing all we might do, and trying to stop us.

The message was just unclear enough to show Bernard that the command cluster was still unable to completely encompass the reality of the macro-scale.

—Are you in touch with the noocytes in North America?

We are aware there are other, far more powerful concentrations, in much better circumstances.

—And…?

No response.

Then, Are you aware that your *enclosing space* is in jeopardy?

—No. What sort of jeopardy? You mean the lab?

^*The lab^* is surrounded by your fellows in *uncertain hierarchy relationship*.

—I don’t understand.

They wish to destroy ‘the lab’, and presumably all of us.

—How do you know this?

We are able to receive RADIO FREQUENCY TRANS MISSIONS in several LANGUAGES *encodings*. Can you stop these attempts? Are you in a position of hierarchy INFLUENCE?

Bernard puzzles over the request.

We have memory of the TRANSMISSIONS.

—Then let me hear them.

He can taste the passage of a flagellate, intersecting the messenger of the command cluster, returning with a packet of data. Bernard’s cluster absorbs the data.

He “listens” to the transmissions now in memory. They are not of the best quality, and most of them are in German, which he poorly understands. But he can understand enough to realize why Paulsen-Fuchs has been looking worse and worse of late.

The Pharmek facility is surrounded by camps of protesters. The countryside all the way out to the airport is dotted with them; the protesters number perhaps half a million, and more are arriving by bus, automobile or on foot every day. The army and police do not dare break them up; the mood throughout West Germany, and most of