A knot on her forehead, one leg that just wouldn’t move right, little food and no water; scared, hurting, and with thirty more stories to go. The flashlight beam flickered and went out, leaving her in complete darkness. “Shit,” she said. Her mother had deplored that word even more than taking the name of God in vain. Since they were not a particularly religious family, that was a minor infraction, odious only when used in front of those it would offend. But saying “shit” was the ultimate; an acknowledgment of bad manners, bad upbringing, or simply surrendering to the lowest emotions.
Suzy tried to stand and fell down again, her knee ripe with new agony. “Shit, shit, SHIT!” she screamed. “Get better, oh please get better.” She tried to rub the knee but that only made it hurt worse.
She felt for the flashlight and found it. With a shake, it lit up again and she directed the beam around to reassure herself the brown and white sheets and filaments hadn’t overtaken her. She looked at the door to the eighty-second floor and knew she wouldn’t be able to climb stairs for some time, perhaps the rest of the day. She crawled to the door and glanced over her shoulder at the radio as she reached for the knob. The radio lay on the landing; it had come down hard when she fell. For a moment, she thought she might as well abandon it, but the radio meant something special to her. It was the only human thing she had left, the only thing that talked to her. She might be able to find another in the building, but she couldn’t chance silence. Trying to keep her injured knee straight, she crawled back for it.
Getting past the heavy fire door resulted in more misery and more bruises when it slammed on her arm, but she finally lay back on the carpet of the elevator lobby, staring up at the acoustic ceiling overhead. She rolled onto her stomach, alert for anything moving.
Stillness, quiet.
Slowly, trying to conserve her strength, she crawled out of the lobby and around a corner.
Beyond a glass partition, the entire floor was covered with drafting tables, white enamel legs on beige carpet, black lamps arranged like so many birds with adjustable necks. The glass door had already been propped open with a rubber wedge. Hobbling past the desk and couches, she leaned on the nearest table, eyes bright with exhaustion and pain. There were blueprints on the drafting table beside her. She was in an architect’s office. She looked at one drawing more closely. It laid out deck plans for a ship. So this was an office for people who designed ships. “What the hell do I care?” she asked herself.
She sat on a tall stool with locked casters. With one foot she labored for half a minute to unlock the casters, then rolled herself down an aisle between tables, using the table edges to push herself along.
Another long glass wall separated the drafting area from office cubicles. She stopped and stared. All the fear had gone now. She had run out of it. There might be more fear available the next morning, she thought, but for now she didn’t miss it. She simply observed.
The cubicles were filled with things moving. They were so strange that for a time she hardly knew how to describe them to herself. Disks with snail feet crawled along the glass, their edges actually lighting up. Something fluid and shapeless, tike a blob of wax a lavalight, bobbed around in another cubicle, straining on black ropes or cables that stretched and sparkled; the blob fluoresced green wherever it struck glass or furniture. In the last cubicle, a forest of scaled sticks, like chicken legs, bent and swayed in an impossible breeze.
“It’s crazy,” she said. “It doesn’t mean a thing. Nothing’s happening because it doesn’t make sense.”
She rolled away from the cubicles, up against the far windows. The rest of the floor seemed clear—no crumpled clothing. Seen from across the floor, the cubicles resembled aquariums filled with exotic sea creatures.
Maybe she was safe. Usually whatever was in an aquarium didn’t come out. She tried to convince herself she was safe, but it really didn’t matter. For the moment, there wasn’t anywhere else she could go.
Her knee was swelling, straining her jeans. She thought about cutting the jeans open, and then decided it was best simply to slide out of them. With a grunt, she let herself down from the stool and leaned back against a filing cabinet. Lifting her hips, balancing on one leg, she humped and bunched the jeans carefully past the swelling.
It wasn’t very ugly yet, just puffy and purpling under the kneecap. She poked it and felt faint, not from pain, but simply because she was drained. There was nothing left of Suzy McKenzie now. The old world had gone first, until nothing remained but buildings, which without people were like skeletons without flesh. New flesh was moving in to cover the skeletons. Soon the old Suzy McKenzie would be gone, too, leaving nothing but a quizzical shadow.
She turned her face north, around the edge of the cabinet and over a low credenza.
There was the new Manhattan, a tent city with skyscrapers for poles; a city made of toy blocks with the blocks rearranged under blankets. Glowing warm mellow brown and yellow in the sunset. Newer York, filled with empty clothes.
Old Suzy dropped back on the carpet, cradled her head in her arms and pushed her hauntingly empty jeans under her knee to elevate it. “When I awake,” she told herself, “I will be a Wonder Woman, shiny and bright. And I will know what’s happening.”
Down deep, however, she understood she would wake up normal enough, and the world would be the same.
“Not a good deal,” she murmured.
In the dark, filaments grew silently over the carpet, reaching into the glass cubicles, subduing the buoyant creativity within.
37
–I belong to nobody. I am not what I once was. I have no past. I am cut loose and there is really nowhere to go but where they wish to take me.
–I am separated from the outside world physically, and now mentally.
–My work is done here.
–I am waiting.
–I am waiting.
Truly, you WISH to journey among us, be among us?
–I do.
He stares at the red and green and blue on the VDT. The figures lose all meaning for the moment, as if he is a newborn child. Then the screen, the table it rests on, the lavatory curtain beyond and the walls of the containment chamber are replaced by a silvery null.
Michael Bernard is crossing an interface.
He is encoded.
No longer conscious of all the sensations of being in a body. No more automatic listenings and responses to the slide of muscles past one another, the bubbling of fluids in the abdomen, the push and roar of blood and pounding of the heart. He no longer balances, tenses or relaxes. It is like suddenly moving from the city into the heart of a quiet cave.
At first, thought itself is grainy, discontinuous. If such a thing can be, he visualizes himself at the very basement of the universe, where all the atoms and molecules combine and separate, making silent noises at each other like scuttling shellfish on the bottom of the sea. He is suspended in silent, jerking activity, unable to critique his situation or even to be sure what he is. Part of his faculties are temporarily cut off. Then—jerk! He can critique, evaluate. Thought moves like a dissociation of leaves across a lawn in a breeze.
Jerk! Now, like a sluggish flow of gelatin circling and setting up in a cold bowl.
Bernard’s journey has not even begun yet. He is still caught in the interface, not big, not small. There is part of him still relying on his universe-sized brain, still pushing thought along cells instead of within cells.
The suspension becomes a drawn-out unconsciousness, thought pulled like a thread to fit a tiny needle’s eye
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