The Sum of Her Parts (30 page)

“Real pretty.” Whispr’s comment reflected his characteristic preference for brevity. “If it’s show and tell time I’m afraid our hosts are out of luck: I left all my toys at home.” Not for the first time Ingrid could only sit back and admire his bluster. Raising his voice, he unflinchingly addressed their captors.

“Mind telling us what this is all about?”

By way of reply the male escort came near. Huge dark eyes peered into Whispr’s own. An emboldened Whispr held the stare unblinkingly.

At least, he did until the fat man began to unzip his face.

While Whispr uttered a little gargling sound and drew back, Ingrid simply sat and stared. As the man’s skin split down the middle she could see that his female companion was likewise shedding her epidermis. The halves of two humans formed wrinkled piles at their owners’ ankles.

What stood revealed in their wake was not a pair of butterflies.

“Oh shit,” Whispr mumbled. He repeated it over and over. As a defensive mantra it was singularly unhelpful.

The exposé was the more shocking for the fact that it was unpreceded by any hints. Neither their captors’ ventral or dorsal sides had revealed the slightest indication of a seal or seam. Now their skin and clothing lay mounded up around their feet. Or where their feet would have been if they’d had any.

Where the fat woman had been standing, a complex of meter-long golden spires unfolded. Each terminated in points save for several that devolved into smaller prehensile spires that replaced sloughed-off hands and fingers. From the center of the architecturally admirable being a pair of glistening lenses protruded on stalks
to contemplate the two stunned Namericans. Light shimmered on this confusion of limbs that appeared to be fashioned of pure buttery gold. Could this motile clash of golden spears still be considered a “her”? Ingrid wondered.

Stepping clear of his mound of shed epidermis and now unnecessary clothing, “her” companion had also straightened up. At least he was composed of flesh and bone, Ingrid concluded as she studied the creature. This notwithstanding the fact that the head seated on the flexible neck consisted of a single spherical multilensed yellow eye, or that both arms terminated in single-lensed eyes of a more familiar sort, or that lenses different from the other two shone from the vicinity of his bare hips. Covered in centimeter-long brown fur, the torso was centered on a sturdy square base from whose underside jutted four legs. A gripping tentacle protruded from each knee.

The female had stepped out of a sketch by Wright while her associate would not have been out of place in a Lovecraftian popent. As a still stunned and speechless Ingrid and Whispr looked on, the mélange of golden spires ambled stiffly over to the table where they sat. Though no mouth was visible, a voice emerged from the clashing, organo-metallic depths. Not only were the words it uttered comprehensible, the vowels emerged in a surge of syntastic liquidity that was positively soothing.

“You are confused. That is to be expected.”

“Are we also expected to be frightened?” Whispr had pushed his chair as far away from the table and the being in front of him as the wall behind him would permit. “Because that’s really what I am.”

Oblivious to any intended irony, the spire being focused her singular gaze on the slender Meld. “That is to be regretted even as it is understandable.”

Ingrid swallowed hard. “What—are you? You’re not, you can’t be Melds.”

“But we are.” Though it was impossible to tell where the great compound orb that topped the male’s body was looking, his multitude of lesser eyes were inclined in her direction. “Though not as you are thinking of us. In the End there are only Melds.”

“I’m not a Meld,” she countered reflexively. “I’ve had a couple of recent manips, but they’re only cosmetic and easily reversed.”

“Baby steps,” observed the female. “For purposes of further dialogue you should know that my name is Sarah.”

Sarah
. Ingrid found that she had been invaded by a frightening calm. Sarah the perambulating, intelligent sculpture.

“And you may call me Johan.” The voice of the spire’s companion emerged from somewhere within the thick fur that covered its body.

Ingrid fought to hold on to her sanity. “You said that you’re not Melds as we are thinking of you. What does that mean? What did you mean when you said that ‘in the end there are only Melds’?”

Through a subtle physical shuffling that might have been used to indicate emotion, Sarah realigned her gleaming golden integuments. “We are Melds, doctor, but we proceed from a different starting point. When I say that we are not Melds as you think of us, that is because we are not human.”

Tilting his head back Whispr rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “Sure you’re not.” Lowering his gaze once again he looked over at Ingrid. “I don’t know what’s going on here, doc. Maybe this is some elaborate variation on the usual interrogation-of-intruders scenario.” He gestured at the two utterly incomprehensible figures standing before them. “But I do know that these are just melds. Or automatons. Probably designed to jar us out of our mental comfort zones so that we’ll be scared enough to do whatever they want.”

Ingrid was less willing to dismiss the claim out of hand. As a doctor she could not envision how any human body could be pushed, shoved, and crinkled into the quadrupedal eyeful that was
Johan, far less into the structural impossibility that was Sarah. Still, where the eyes could be fooled the mind would follow.

“You’re saying that you are—aliens.”

“Indeed.” Johan spoke in the same flat tone he had employed when he had been encased in the camouflaging fat suit.

Ingrid noted with interest that his crowning compound eye was capable of full rotation, like a hematite sphere suspended in a magnetic field. What must it be like, she wondered, to be able to see in every direction simultaneously? What unimaginably elaborate neuroptic connections were required to process so much visual information? For that matter, where in that furry mass was the controlling brain located?

Sarah was clashing toward the door. “Come with us.”

As they followed the two no-longer-disguised shapes, Ingrid found herself trying to make eye contact with several of the other overweight—or perhaps simply oversized—figures they passed in the wide corridor. None glanced in her direction, though several did speak to and exchange gestures with the outré shapes who were leading the way. Did all of the obese shapes contain within them spires or seers? Or were there other forms, other shapes even more extreme than those represented by Sarah and Johan? Were their radically different escorts the purveyors of outrageous lies, nothing more than extreme Melds as a scornful Whispr insisted? Or …?

Aliens? Truly, she thought, what was more alien to human experience than the existence of metastable metallic hydrogen? Except possibly quantum entangled nanoscale cerebral implants. Her head was pounding.

Was Nerens the headquarters for some kind of invasion? Assuming, she told herself as calmly as she could, that more than one kind was possible.

When they reached an oval opening at the end of the corridor, Johan stepped to one side and gestured with an eye-arm.

“Please.…”

It took Ingrid a moment to discern the outlines of the vehicle she was being asked—politely, she noted—to enter. Transparent as a soap bubble and to all outward appearances no thicker, it had a single curving bench but no visible instruments, machinery, or means of propulsion. Whispr held back.

“We go in there,” he murmured, “and maybe we don’t come out again.”

She met his concerned gaze. “Like we have a choice. What alternative do you propose, Whispr?” She gestured back the way they had come, down the length of what was only one corridor among many. “That we make a break for it?” Turning away from him she nodded understandingly at the thing that called itself Johan, stepped into the bubble, and nearly lost her balance. Unexpectedly, the floor gave slightly under her weight, like a transparent spring. Devoid of options, as his companion had coolly pointed out, a wary Whispr followed.

Their escorts joined them. Ingrid had to concentrate in order to be able to see the walls of the oval opening close. There was no door. The surrounding material rippled like a pond that had been struck with a stone as it sealed tightly behind them.

A moment later the bubble began to move. It did not accelerate sharply, but once in motion neither did it ever seem to slow down. Other than the occasional appearance of an overhead light, the tunnel down which they were speeding was pitch-black. Within the bubble it was not completely dark, however. Portions of Sarah’s golden limbs emitted a pale purple efflorescence of their own.

So absorbed was Ingrid in her own thoughts that she did not notice when they hit the midpoint of their journey. There must have been a midpoint because that was when the remarkable vehicle began to slow. She estimated that they had spent the same amount of time decelerating as they had in speeding up. When it
finally stopped moving, the bubble came to a halt opposite a portal exactly like the one through which they had entered.

“How far do you think we’ve come?” she asked her companion as she exited the transportation device. “Or did we just go in a big circle?”

Whispr’s expression was grim. Plainly he was preparing himself for the worst. “Can’t say. Tunnel was too dark, no landmarks, impossible to estimate direction or speed. More than a kilometer, less than a hundred, maybe. I think there near the end we were traveling on a downward grade. But I’m just guessing.” His smile was crooked. “I expect it’s all guessing from here on out.”

In the course of the short walk that followed, Ingrid noted other Melds who were recognizably human, but only one or two possible Naturals. Their familiar shapes helped to mitigate the shock of encountering one being after another who made Johan and Sarah look positively normal.

There was the giant who was forced to walk hunched over. Nearly all white, he (for unsupportable reasons she thought of it as a he) managed the feat only because a dozen or more short legs ran the length of his upper torso from where the hips began to where the long, backward dragging arms protruded. The head—she turned away from moonlike eyes and piercing azure pupils that floated freely from one side of the iris to the other.

The giant was the largest of the creatures they passed, but far from the most exotic. A pair of perambulating, big-eyed seashells came toward them. They flanked a very ordinary-looking Natural woman. Workpad in hand, brown hair tied behind her in a bun, she reminded Ingrid of hospital staff she often encountered while having lunch in one of her home tower’s restaurants. Striving to catch her attention, Ingrid gazed fixedly in the other woman’s direction. When the Natural walked right on past without acknowledging the stare, Ingrid considered calling out. Ultimately she
decided to hold her peace. She and Whispr were still prisoners, still considered intruders and trespassers. Untimely vocal outbursts might not be the best way to ingratiate themselves with their escorts.

There was an individual who looked like an emaciated horse crossed with an industrial robot, several walking crystals with rotating faces, and a whole platoon of creatures that might have been meter-tall upright millipedes save for their bright rainbow colors and the dozens of tiny gloves they wore on their multitude of hands. If these were merely Melds, as Whispr stubbornly continued to insist, then they represented manipulations of the human body far beyond anything she had ever heard of, read of, or dreamed of. So extreme was the eclectic panoply of shapes and sizes that they passed in the passageway that they looked to be the product of magic and not science, as if they had been maniped at the hands of a djinn instead of those of a biosurge.

She was looking back at still another biological impossibility when they turned a corner. As her attention shifted forward once again she found herself smacked by a sudden dollop of vertigo. Whispr had to grab and steady her to keep her from falling. For once she welcomed the contact.

Someone had punched a hole in the world in front of them and filled it with sublime.

I
N AN IMMENSITY OF
darkness floated a black ovoid bleeding chrome. Only its vitreous sheen, reminiscent of polished onyx, enabled her to distinguish it from the surrounding blackness. That, and the ripples of sinuous silver that occasionally materialized from deep within the gigantic object to flow from right to left before being reabsorbed into the specular body from which they had initially emerged. No railing, no barrier separated her and her companions from stepping into gaping infinity.

As she recovered her equilibrium and her brain struggled to make sense of what she was seeing, she picked out in the downward distance some sort of ramp or avenue. Suspended in the dark, it pierced the side of the ovoid like a hypodermic, drawing out not cells but tiny figures. Her pounding heart seemed to have risen into the vicinity of her throat. She grew aware that Sarah was speaking.

“Very few humans, Naturals or Melds, have seen the ship. But you needed to be convinced. We want you to be convinced because we require the assistance of human doctors. Naturals such as yourself are especially valued.”

She hardly heard the escort. Staggered by the sight before her, still fighting to maintain her balance, she realized now that the industrial fabrication site she and Whispr had discovered after crawling through one of Nerens’s climate control ducts was not Morgan Ouspel’s Big Picture.
This
was the Big Picture. “It’s real, and it moves,” Ouspel had told them. And the Painters of the Big Picture, those who made it move, were …

Alien. Not of this world.

And Het Kruger had called
her
an intruder.

Having seen far more of the extreme than his companion, Whispr was better equipped to maintain his mental stability. Concentrating on the prosaic helped.

“How can you get something this big on and off the surface of the planet without being detected coming or going?” He nodded into the abyss. Sounds muted by distance drifted up to them. “You’re gonna tell me you’ve got some kind of cloaking device or something, right?”