Aeon Ten Read online

They bring me food every day. They clean me and my clothes, ignoring their own incrustations of street filth that never seem, somehow, to cling to what is mine. I create the poisons in the first two days, and give them to Mama Jones. She grins and vanishes. Now, after five days, she brings a newly-dead streetrat into my lab, and tosses it onto the central table where I am running a gene-expression synthesizer.

  Streetrats are black-coated rodents with long naked prehensile tails, and claws that can find purchase in the sheer faces of rock that line the City. Over my thousands of wall-years I have watched them evolve from creatures the length of my little finger to monsters with bodies as long as my forearm. What the children of the streets leave behind, the streetrats eat.

  "Is this my dinner?” I stare at Mama Jones.

  She laughs. I have never heard any sound like this: a grating giggle that chokes itself off, then bursts out again, over and over. “No,” she says, finally.

  "A gift?"

  "No. What can you do with it?"

  Again I have underestimated her. She apparently understands what my lab is for. I weigh the possibilities; maybe this is the opening to my freedom. I inspect the dead animal. “What would you like me to do with it?"

  "Grow some new ones. Make them pets for us."

  Aah. This is wonderful. I try to conceal my glee, but I'm sure she notices it. “All right. This will take some time. Maybe a year.” This is too long for her, I know.

  "Thirty days.” It is a statement of limitation.

  "I'll do what I can."

  "Thirty days.” She makes a sign with her hand, and three boys appear from the front room. Another sign from her, and they all turn and leave.

  I maneuver my flowchair to the lab door, and secure the door as best I can against further visits. Twenty days are window dressing. This plan of mine will take about ten days; in that time, I will have the desired pets ready, with a few important additions.

  First, I will send a message out through the droppings of these pets. An intestinal bacterial resident, one I know quite well, will carry a most interesting cytomegalovirus. Cytomegaly is the merging of cells due to the breakdown of cell walls, as when the City breaks down the walls between small apartments to create a large meeting-chamber.

  But my virus will bear another burden: the immunoharmonizer that was, long ago, my signature. When the virus infects someone, it will begin the selective merging of their cells and the breakdown of their musculature and bone; little by little, they will become immobile, dissolve, and begin to spread helplessly in a carpet across their stone floors, merging into each other as they meet. Thanks to other retroviral transfers, their cells will be reeducated to draw sustenance from the air and stone and water itself, even from the beetles and other creatures that scutter across them as they lie like coatings everywhere.

  Only their brains and senses will remain whole, to contemplate their changes. They will become one vast coat of human paint throughout the City. As once I was, in my wall.

  Of course, this will take much time, and I create clocking genes that will trigger in later viral generations to begin the transformations only after the rodents have spread everywhere. Some few people may be resistant, most likely these children, but I have saved the children for the last.

  I have a special surprise for them.

  My new animals will enjoy being scratched on the neck and under the ears. That is where I will put the secretory glands for demorphin, which will be clocked through a few generations before they are expressed. Demorphin is an opioid a thousand times as potent as morphine. Once the glands begins their work, the children will pet these new creatures, take up the opioid through their fingers and mouths, and they will stop feeling pain. Pleasure will rule them.

  What a gift pain is. Once it is removed this way, life will follow soon after.

  When I am done, the children will be gone, and I will regenerate my legs in the tanks I have not yet opened. Then I will walk the streets of the City, immune, and enjoy my masterwork.

  I smile, and begin.

  * * * *

  I keep the process secret, locked in my lab. I don't need to await generations of breeding to arrive at my goal; I have the Gengine.

  The Gengine is a reality engine, made over fifteen thousand years ago by the spider-limbed Snin. It procreates virtually from a known genestrand, making an entire synthetic world in which its creations live and breed, running thousands of generations in seconds, testing millions of branches of descent, behavior and chemistry in minutes. In a day or two, it pops out the genestrand for the desired end creature, and synthesizes a complete animal, using a vat similar to those now used for making bioandroids here.

  My creature gets a name: Shix. I vat-clone it to get others, and they are shixen. They will breed; I have given them fluffy brown fur with gray stripes and mottling, and big startled black eyes, and I have shortened their tails to little wagging nubs. Their claws are tamed as well: no long needles, but tiny retractible pins that only come out for climbing hard surfaces. The fingers and toes are lengthened to compensate, so that they can cling to a child's arm or leg and ride along.

  The shixen sing little musical phrases to each other, and groom together, and breed quickly. They would be no match for their streetrat progenitors in a fight, but they have no need of fighting. Their little demorphin glands solve that problem.

  When I created the glands, I made their secretions as sweet as sucre, succulent, fruity and sour, and nothing that tastes the transparent ooze ever wants to stop. The demorphin kicks in later, and it binds the taster permanently to the pet.

  Demorphin was my favorite toy in the days of my long-ago freedom. It was Alayre's downfall; she had prisoned me in her own drug-laced web, and I was forced to take the extreme measure of feeding my counterattack to her with kisses. Like my shixen, I am immune to demorphin—I always have been—but Alayre was not. She wasted slowly, turning a little grayer beneath her golden tone every day, until at last she knew; and as she knew, she died.

  She had warned the City, told them of all my works. They came then for me, and locked me in stone forever. So they believed.

  Now I test my shixen against a pack of streetrats, in a small closed room. An observation window gives me a full view. These shixen carry the active glands for demorphin, unlike those in which I will bury the genes for later appearance.

  The rats range, climb, hiss, their coats dark and slick, their teeth bared; the shixen huddle at first, then spread out.

  A rat approaches a shix, coat bristling; the shix lies down in a submissive grooming posture, and the rat is curious. It scents the secretions at the shix's neck, sniffs closer, and licks.

  It seems magic. Soon the rats are all lying beside shixen, still licking them at the neck. When the shixen stand up and move away, the rats lie helpless in the thick stupor of opiate intoxication.

  I do not sleep. Within a few days, I have folded the expressive genes for this magic away, to activate and express themselves in the creatures’ descendants. I am ready for the children.

  In ten days, forty shixen have come from the vat, full-sized, eyes goggled in astonishment, ready to cling to anything warm and soft. In the remaining twenty days, I synthesize my cytomegalo-plague for the City's inhabitants. I feed it to the shixen, packaged in the bacteria I place in the fruit I give them.

  The day comes, and Mama Jones arrives at my lab door. “Is it ready?"

  "Yes. It was hard work.” As I lie to her, I sweep the door open to show her the table where the shixen loll tumbled on their backs in a clump, munching on the soft blue-green kwakiat fruit they hold in their tiny hands.

  The girl's pinhole eyes widen into dark amazement, and she approaches the table. “They're beautiful.” I haven't heard such words from any of these children before. She extends a hand to one of them.

  It feels her warmth, and takes hold of her thumb with its fingers. Then it drops the kwakiat and comes to her shoulder, hand over hand, tail-nubbin wagging. It sits against h
er left ear and makes a soft musical note in its throat.

  She grins. “Now we can walk with the rich ones, and taaalk the waaay they dooo.” She mimics perfectly the vowel tonings of the well-dressed curiosity-seekers who used to come to see me in my prison. Then she whistles piercingly, and the children crowd into the doorway.

  The children take the shixen onto their bodies, feed them, pet them, croon to them; the shixen sing in response. It is instant bonding.

  Mama Jones smiles at me, but her eyes are once again pinpricks of black in ther red-target irises. “You did what I asked. But what else did you do?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "You are not tired. Your eyes tell me things. What did you do to these animals?"

  "I made them as you asked.” Always a positive statement, never a denial.

  "We'll see.” She tosses her head slightly, then grins provocatively at me. An amazing girl.

  How perfectly she manages her speech, gliding without effort from the gutter-sounds of her filthy companions to the elegant, incisive, musical ironies of the wealthy women she sees through pitiless child eyes. When the demorphin begins its work, I must be very careful with her.

  * * * *

  The days pass slowly now, as slowly as when the wall held me. The children only visit to clean and provide food. I tinker with the shixen some more, making their coats shimmer, giving their brains the tools for language mimicry, taking away the demorphin glands, and I name one of them after Alayre and speak her tones and accents to it.

  The shix looks at me quizzically, and its tiny mouth forms the Taranese sounds I gave it, in a high soft pitch like Alayre's, “Jono, what will I do with you?"

  Something in me leaps up at this, and I sit very still while my eyes dry again. I damn myself for this weakness, and then I teach the shix every little phrase Alayre would use on me in love. I damn myself again, and I forget to eat, and I feed this little creature and groom it and keep silent while it mixes the words of my dead love with its own squeaks and chitterings.

  At last my obsession repels me, and I hear myself say to the shix, “Every place we choose is our home,” in Share, in the accents of the girl Mama Jones. I must forget Alayre.

  The shix says it in the voice of this street girl, catching even my own tiny failures of enunciation. I want to hear it again, and as I teach the shix to say other things the girl has said to me, I realize that I am simply trading one obsession for another.

  Taking the shix in my hands, I wring its neck.

  * * * *

  Finally the girl comes one day on her regular visit, and her look tells me that she knows what I have done. She grins, the pupils of her red eyes tiny. “Your pets."

  "Are they to your liking?"

  That grating, choking laugh again. She reaches into a pouch at her side very slowly, and extricates a small mass of mangled flesh, holding it by the nubbin of its tail. “They'll make a good dinner for you. Here.” She throws it on the floor by my chair, and leaves.

  The specimen she has dissected reveals to me that she has found its demorphin-secreting glands. Unfortunately for my dinner enjoyment, I hadn't thought to make the shix better-tasting than streetrat.

  I want to know whether some of the shixen had gotten free, whether some of the children had escaped being affected, but now there is no one to ask.

  * * * *

  The children have not returned for many days. Managing my bodily wastes is troublesome, but with the Gengine I breed small sluglike sanitation creatures that handle the job quite well. By now the last of the City ichor is gone from my blood, and the skin I expropriated is truly my own at last.

  I busy myself in my lab, testing out new Gengine variations on the shixen, working on new bacterial transporters for viral transformers. These little tools are widely used in this city now; the corporations who manufacture bioandroid servants like to upgrade their living human products using the viruses.

  The conversations of passers-by, over many years, taught me the ways of these people. Bioandroids, or andros, are vat-bred human slaves here. Want to extend your andro's eyesight up into the ultraviolet? Give him some U-455 inhalant, have him sniff up the gene-changing viruses, and he'll catch a bad cold. Five days later he'll be seeing into the youvee, talking about the new colors. The fast-moving magic of viral transforms.

  Got an andro mining crew running short on stamina? Infect one of them with Myo-92, and they'll all catch a case of muscle-cell upgrade. Since the bacteria are generation-clocked, the infection can't spread any further than you let it. But remember, Myo-92 leaves the subject with weakened resistance to a range of simple viral diseases, so be sure to inoculate your andros.

  I listened well to the thrill-seekers staring at me in my prison, while they spoke of these things. Now I cook and eat the last of my latest special crop of shixen, vat-bred now for taste.

  I am lonely: the realization penetrates my concentration like a bullet. The talking creatures I produce are no comfort; their behavior is to me as if I had held up a hand puppet to give myself enjoyment. I think of Alayre again, and then I realize I want to see Mama Jones, and I damn myself once more.

  This loneliness is unlike any other feeling I have had. Rage, lust, hatred, greed, fear, all are my intimate friends, and I wore them as tightly as the wall-skin that held me for so long. Now I move about this apartment and lab in my chair, still walled in, but freedom fills me during my creating, a freedom that overcomes the prison of my hate. Something has changed in me. I fear it, and I long for it.

  Shivering, I finish the day's work, and return to my main room to leaf through permtexts that hold images of my ancient life. As I open the first volume, the door clicks.

  Mama Jones and Nemizanah enter. He dangles his plasma torch from one hand and watches me.

  "Something has changed,” she says. Her eyes are ruby and dark-pupilled. “There is a strange disease spreading through the City."

  A hopeful question comes up in me, and I keep it back. “What kind of disease?"

  "You know."

  "Me?” My hopes rise. Perhaps these awful children have contracted it.

  She laughs that way of hers again, the sound of sticks dragged over rough stone. “They found one of your animals. They aren't fools. They are very afraid. People are dissolving and sticking together."

  "Sticking together?” It must be my plague.

  "We will take you to see.” She gives a guttural screech, and several of the older children scuttle in and seize me. They haul me out to the corridor where a wheeled cart is waiting, lower me onto it, and push me off out and along the understreet.

  Several cross-streets away from my lair, they slow down. Mama Jones points into a side corridor. “See?"

  It is dark right now—the evening dimming of the City lights is almost complete—but little by little I make out a lumpy distortion of the corridor walls and ceiling.

  "Take me closer,” I say.

  "No. We don't want to catch this disease."

  Propelling myself with hands on floor, I roll into the corridor. My eyes adapt to the dim light. A face, no, two faces, become visible side by side where the wall meets the floor. Their eyes are closed, and their expressions are peaceful. As I watch, I hear the susurrus of exhaled breath. They seem to be asleep.

  Now I can make out their bodies, unclothed, fused, stretched many times a person's height along the lower part of the corridor wall. Their tissues seem to have taken root in the very crevices of the wall; what is left unabsorbed of their skeletons is no more than a few ridges and knobs under their spread-out skins. Their heads have been flattened considerably, but still bulge outward, keeping the faces, ears and brains intact. Hands and feet, arms and legs, genitalia, all have become a part of a fused sheet of flesh reaching on down the corridor and into a utility recess.

  Oh, this is perfect. If only I had made their human skins turn the color of my wall-prison, it would have been beyond perfection.

  I reach out and touch my handiwork, rejoic
ing. One pair of eyes opens.

  "Hello.” A man's voice, soft and breathy. The lungs still work.

  "Hello."

  "You are still free?” He smiles at me.

  "Yes. Do you like this?” I smile back.

  "We do."

  Now the other pair of eyes opens, and a woman's voice says, “We like this."

  "Why?” My surprise must be apparent.

  "We are together."

  I laugh, and turn and push my way back to the children. “Is this the only place this has happened?"

  Mama Jones says, “It is happening everywhere. People are calling it the living City. Some of my children have joined it."

  At this I lose control of my astonishment. “What?"

  "They say it is beautiful. Now everything comes to them, and they think together.” She smiles now, and her smile has a soft, dreamy quality to it, as if she has become a child again. “Did you do this to them with our pets?"

  I look at the two wall-people, their eyes now closed again. Deep rage and frustration surge up in me. I snap, “I want a tissue sample from them. Then take me back to my place.” I want to hurt someone. The girl gets two children to push me, and she walks beside me. I ask her, “Do you want to be part of the living City too?"

  She trails her fingers along the skin-wall. “I don't know. It is a big step to take."

  "How can you want this? I don't understand."

  She looks at me. “No. You wouldn't understand happy people."

  "Do you?"

  She stops, and so do I. “Not before,” she says. “Now, I'm not sure. Maybe being happy is possible."

  "Only possible?"

  She frowns at me. “I don't know. I will find out."

  "And then what?"

  She gestures, and she and the others return me to my hidden apartment. I am shaken.

  * * * *

  Several days of testing and Gengine analysis on the tissue samples showed me that everything I designed fell into place. But my changes apparently interacted with a series of andro upgrade viruses to create a vast range of wild mutations. A terrible suspicion comes over me, and I wait impatiently until Mama Jones returns with her escorts for the daily visit.