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Because you can think yourself into it, and be there, just like it was—”

“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 me. You feed me and make me feel good and I don’t even know you’re my mother and brothers.”

“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 really my mother and Kenny and Howard?”

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?”

“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 become me, and I don’t die at all. I just lose this particular me. So I can tune in to anybody else, and I can be anywhere else, and it becomes impossible to die.”

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 forever.”

39

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 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 domesticized 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.