Ravenous Dusk (75 page)

Tentacles gingerly encircled him, winding round his legs and arms and neck and lifting him up out of the water.

A blazing night sky of eyes gazed down on him from above and beneath the water. Most of them were still Keogh's steely gray, but many of them glinted the green-gold Storch saw when he looked in the mirror.

"I sampled your blood when I took you in, Zane. Your immune system is riddled with Spike Team Texas leukocytes. They developed an immunity to the lysing agent years ago, from a sample they collected in Iraq. You were there, but you have no idea where you were, though you dream of it still, in your blood."

The cord that held him to it all just snapped. To die, for once and for all, after all this shit, would be no big deal. To lose—

"They never shared it with me, but I knew they'd share it with someone. I'm so glad it was you, Zane. We shared it when I was with you in prison, but we could not disseminate it to our extended body, because we were not yet One. When we are, you will live on in our heart, for your immunity will insure our survival. That you, who took so much from us and repaid us only with scorn, should be the one to deliver us from our enemies, should prove even to you that this is destiny."

Floating above his body, Storch thought he heard the sound of a big prop plane approaching, but when he looked down, he saw that it was the whirring teeth of a mouth beneath his feet. The tentacles lowered him into it gently, as if with love and reverence.

"I hope you will take this in the spirit in which it is intended, Zane. I do admire your kind. One billion years of striving, killing, dying and evolving, shaped you to perfection, and brought you to me. I will not waste you."

And with that, the island ate him.

Cascades of chill, distilled raindrops bathed the glade at dusk. She lay under the spreading fingers of a thirty-foot Fraser fir, lazily drinking in the moisture through her pores, feeling the rhodopsin and chlorophyll come alive in her skin at the lingering touch of the full-spectrum sunset filtering through the branches.

The "sun" did not set as such, so much as fade, going purple, then black. The full-spectrum halogen lamps crept along metal tracks on the inside of the dome. Pools of shadow bubbled up and stretched out from beneath each tree, spreading and meeting in the glade. Her glade.

The night called her from sleep, the faint vibrations of the Mission's activities dying off to a low drone she felt in the soil. She rose and stalked the glade.

In the three days she'd stayed with this cell of the Mission, they'd come to a simple, unspoken arrangement. She stayed in the forest. They stayed out. She ripped out the cameras that tracked her movements and drove out any invaders who came uninvited into her domain. The forest was hers, as much of a home as she'd ever had, because others feared to take it from her.

There was a seductive thrill to being feared, that felt like home, too. No longer the poor dying girl, now she was the devil girl, Diana, El Chupahombre. She had sought only to have a life, a plain little life with a job and an apartment in a shitheel small town. She had only wanted to escape her cancer. She had paid dearly, in pain and bondage and fear, but now she had been saved, transformed and liberated. Death had no claim on her now. Her body would change with the seasons, forever. Men feared her more than they hated her, which was a purer sort of worship than most men offered up in prayers. She would give them much to fear, when the time was right.

She even had a high priest. Dr. Barrow brought room service and news, and she let him stay to talk for as long as it pleased her. She let him believe that she suffered his presence, but he was a sharp and avid observer, and she did not always hide her eagerness to learn from him so well. He did not make her ask about Storch, but her body betrayed her by flushing a silvery red when he told her Storch had gone to jump out of a plane over a radioactive atoll in the Pacific.

She feigned disdain and asked him about other things, letting him study her in fearful awe as she teased more information out of him. Sometimes she let him ask questions, but she seldom gave him answers. He seemed to know more about her experiences than she did, and nodded gravely at things she repeated that she did not understand. She turned questions back on him as soon as she could, and kept him talking until she grew restless and sent him away. He had a lecturer's tendency to digress on tangents that were sometimes irrelevant, sometimes nonsense, but sometimes darkly revelatory. He told her about what science knew was happening to her, but sometimes he talked of other things, half-myth and half-science, that he'd read in books supposed to be older than humankind. The awful gnosis of the
Necronomicon
, the
Pnakotic Manuscripts
, and the
Book Of Eibon
contained the other half of the natural world, forbidden heresies that she recognized instinctively as truth, for they alone could explain Keogh, Storch and herself. He rambled until she cut him off, or he saw a glimpse of what she was becoming in the shadows, and lapsed into stuttering.

Her body had become something to inspire fear in men, and a bitter late defense against further invasions from foreign bodies. Quills made of rigid, oversized hairs covered her outer arms and legs and back, and fine black fur and glossy black feathers covered everything else. Even in full light, she was a sleek hole in the universe, an unknowable shadow. Her pelt was learning to reflect ambient color. The woman who'd craved only invisibility was becoming a chameleon. There were other changes, subtler, but all with a purpose which she burned to discover, while there was still a human self inside her to understand it all.

She heard the airlock open before the last of the light had dimmed, and heard his warily noisy approach. "Ms. Orozco? I've brought you food—"

When she dreamed, she saw herself as a predator in woods much like these. He came earlier and earlier each night, and it got harder each time to shake off the adrenaline rush of the dreams. Restless, she sheathed her claws and called to him, "Barrow, I'm over here."

Alone in the dark, she tried to sort out the distorted images Keogh showed her, the ones that came unbidden to her whenever she closed her eyes. Her perspective on them was so limited, because she was not herself dreaming, but some other creature, limited in its perception but alive with instinct and awareness. Barrow told her these were her ancestral memories—coded in the "junk" introns of her DNA, along with the past genotypes of all her ancestors, going back to the primal ancestor of all plant and animal life.

After a mere ten thousand generations, the dreams fused for all human beings into the life of one hearty, lucky, beetle-browed hominid. Beyond that, the dreams got stranger, and for her, more
real
. It was as if all her ancestors were thinking one word, one image that drove them, but she was still too much herself to hear or see it. It must have been a wonderful word, to drive life so far, so fast. Echoing Storch, Barrow cautioned her against trying to discover it. Humanity was won by submerging the animal. If she let herself give in to the temptations of her dreams, she would lose herself for good, change into something, and never come back. She didn't answer, but her unsteady head shake told Barrow volumes. Fuck him. He would only value her humanity so long as she intrigued him.

She felt worn out after hours of his restless eyes, fires at the bottom of sunken, black-ringed pits in his pallid face. With his words and his gaze, he hoped to dig some secret out of her that she could not herself unravel. She stayed in the shadows of the forest, yet near enough that he felt her breath on his face.

"What do you want to talk about tonight?" he asked, lurching into the open central glade with heavy canvas sacks dragging from each hand.

"Why do you have a forest in here?"

He reflexively jumped back and dropped the sacks. One of them spilled out oranges and apples and bananas on the sodden earth. His refusal to bring her meat had angered her at first, but his arguments had worn her down. Paradoxically for one dedicated to a campaign of genocide, he was a strict vegan, but she knew the real reason. Animal proteins spoke to her body, adding their traits to her own genome and accelerating change. But they were idiots to think that the vegetable kingdom had nothing to teach her.

"It was an early and somewhat naïve early ecology project, begun in the fifties," Barrow said. "They thought they could restore everything that might be destroyed in an all-out nuclear war. Then, in the sixties, the ecology people took over, but Johnson cut the funding out from under them. It's been ours ever since. We kept up the work. It's more symbolic, now, than anything else. I think that's why most of us resent you."

She came to the edge of the deeper shadows of the tree, close enough to reach out and touch him. "I'm poisoning their symbol?"

"Well," he began, flinching as if she were about to punish him, "Well scientists hate unknown quantities. Soldiers fear them. And—and you are kind of a…bitch." She enjoyed his fear more than was good for her, she knew.

"Maybe a man-eating bitch-goddess is just what they need to wake them up."

"To what?"

"You can't keep life in a bottle. He was right about that. Life isn't a bunch of trees under glass, or a species that drugs and recombines its genome to blunt the forces of nature. Life is always what's waiting to be born inside us, that will do it all better."

Barrow hadn't blinked or breathed since she'd started to speak. "I try to tell them that," he finally said. "Keogh has preoccupied them for so long that they see him as the face of nature trying to erase us. They aren't fighting for the balance of life that we were founded to defend, they're fighting out of fear."

"You people have made him into a god, more than he has. You've been so busy trying to find out what he is and how to kill him, but you don't know who he is. He's just a virus, an amoeba that thinks it's a man. He wants to eat everything and make it into himself, but he thinks he's saving the world."

"He's a virus with an army, if you're right. If they're still out there—"

"I told you they were,
pindejo
."

"I—Sorry, I just—the Major…anyway, assuming they're out there in large numbers, what are they going to do first?"

"RADIANT's gone. Which means he doesn't need it anymore, or won't soon."

"We've been over that scenario since before the Idaho raid, and we can't figure how he could deliver scalar wave radiation without an energy weapon—"

"He's a smart virus, but he's an infectious agent. He only pretends to be human because he ate one, and now he wants more. He exists to spread, so he will. If he can make a virus that carries his nasty self in it, he will."

"It's—I'm sorry, Ms. Orozco, but—"

"Stop saying that, or I'll make you."

He blinked. "Saying what?"

She touched his chin. "
Sorry
."

He jerked back. "Gaia, what the hell—"

She hadn't realized how hot she was. The rhodoplasts that tinged her skin deep violet under her pelt were orders of magnitude more powerful than a plant's chlorophyll in the volume she had, but they generated so much waste heat that Barrow's trembling chin already had a thumbnail-sized blister rising on it. Barrow had told her they were made by the symbiotic eubacteria in her intestines, that had themselves been freed from evolutionary stasis by RADIANT. Somewhere in their past, they used the protein to make energy. How her enhanced genes traded traits with their host body was only one of the many things he hoped to understand, given time—

"Shit, I'm sorry," she said, then stopped just short of touching him again.
Some nurse you'd make now…

"I was—It's okay, really. I was just saying that a virus carries only a simple DNA genome, or even a strand of RNA."

"I know what a virus is."

"Oh—"

"All a virus is, is a protein bottle with a genetic note inside that needs animal cells to copy itself. But over time, all these retroviruses have inserted shit into our DNA, supposedly to reproduce themselves, but you said yourself that the Old Ones used viruses along with radiation. They used to give instructions for genetic change."

"True, but he needed the government to build RADIANT for him, and he had to breed people like rabbits for a decade before that to get a genetic template he could project through the satellite. He doesn't have any bioweapons labs, and he hasn't even tried to get into ours."

"He doesn't need to. He's got at least three hundred walking talking virus factories, each with a on-board gray matter computer."

"He couldn't transmit consciousness through a virus…"

"He shouldn't have been able to transmit his consciousness through light, dumbshit. If life wants it to happen, it'll happen. You said yourself, the Shoggoths were never supposed to become
sentient
." She pursed her lips and bulged her eyes as she said this last word to relax him and get him to unclench his anal diction. It just scared him more.

"You're starting to sound like we shouldn't fight it."

"No, asshole. With all due respect to your PhD. in flying saucers or whatever, I think I've experienced a little bit more natural history than you. It's easy to look at fossils and say, 'gee whiz, those monkeys just turned into people,' or 'oh, shit, the dinosaurs just went extinct,' but you don't see what's written into the stone in front of your fucking face! The specimen in that rock is writhing in agony—not just the pain of death, but the anguish of losing the race. It wasn't a fucking animal parade down through the eons like on your fucking charts, it was a race, and it was a war. That's what your fucking friends in Baker kept telling me, anyway, even though they didn't get it, either, and neither did I, at the time. It's not just a war, it's
the
war!"