"Max has this big-screen TV and surround sound and Blade Runneron DVD. When you watch it, you're immersed in that world, and throughout the entire movie it rains and rains. So at the end, when you go outside and the sun is shining, you think—for one split second—wow, it's stopped raining."
"It never was raining." Atticus refrained from asking who Max was, since it would derail the conversation even further.
"Exactly."
"Just get to the point."
"The movie infringed on your reality, but only so you're disoriented for a moment, just a second or two, and then it all goes back to being just a movie you watched. When Pack trade mice, they can tell what is the movie and what is the real world. Where the other person's memories end, and theirs start."
"A good book that you can put back on the shelf?"
"Yeah. For the Ontongard, both your world and the movie are equally real. You are yourself, and all the characters in that movie, and all the movies ever made in the history of the art. A million lives, all equally weighed."
"How can they think that way?"
Ukiah shrugged. "But that's really the only difference between Pack and Ontongard. We have a mutation that lets us remain individuals, with all the hates and desires and free will that implies—but the 'me' of an Ontongard host is lost under the flood of 'them.' You say that humans should deal with this. The Pack were all born human. They were infected by Coyote with Prime's mutation. They're genetically aliens, but in their hearts and souls, they're still human."
"As far as I'm concerned, the Pack are nothing but low-life slime deluding themselves that they're saving the world. They're no different from the cult. The Ontongard are convenient bogeymen to excuse the Pack's criminal behavior."
"I can show you."
It took Atticus a moment to realize what Ukiah meant. "I already had my mind raped."
Ukiah ducked his head; if he were a dog, he'd probably be flattening back his ears. "Not like that. You read me, like the Pack read you."
"No."
Ukiah locked his feral stare onto Atticus. "You want to stay blind to the danger until it kills you?" And he thought, but did not say aloud, " Kills Ru?"
Twin spikes of guilt and anger hit Atticus. He matched Ukiah's gaze, until he realized that Ukiah was offering to give Atticus free access to his memories. The offer spoke to him of sincere trust. "I don't know how."
Ukiah leaned close, locking Atticus with his intense gaze. "Just look."
Atticus never considered howhe remembered before—how he could focus on a nearby wall, and yet in his mind, like transversing some invisible dimension, walk through the houses of his childhood. Vaguely he knew it was neurons firing, replaying stored information, only his recording was perfect. At some point, the past would crowd the present out of his sight with things recalled.
He looked into his brother's dark eyes with their vaguely Asian shape, marked with exhaustion. He could feel the fearlessness with which Ukiah opened himself up in a way that seemed both trustingly childlike and patiently wise. One of them took a breath, and Atticus wasn't sure which body moved.
Ukiah's thoughts traveled to a distant time and firmly guided Atticus there too.
All his life, Prime had been caged. Loose pellets of nutrients were dropped into the feeding bowl. Water flowed endlessly in the drinking trough. He and the others in his cage had learned sometime in their pasts to use the trench in the back to urinate and defecate. Their language was a dozen words, all that was needed to explain
Ukiah flicked them forward in time.
Prime was like them, but not. They seemed to have no identity other than the group self. It was as if he were immersed in the sea, their presence shifting all around him, trying to carry him away with their nearly antlike desires. Build here. Destroy here. Gather food. Distribute it. They had bodies like himself, and anywhere there was dirt, they also grew like plants and trees and moss. They were everything until the planet was one vast organism, and the single individuals weren't even antlike anymore, but merely cells in a body.
He drifted through the world, resisting the local urges, masking his thoughts, utterly alone on a planet utterly alive. Perhaps he would have joined with them if not, ironically enough, for the memories they infected him with. They remembered the planet as it had been, the millions of species, the billions of his mother's people. And in comparison, utter worldwide genocide was unpardonable.
Ukiah took another step forward in Prime's life.
They had been pond scum, and later stolen the forms of brilliant, creative creatures, and all the ranges of life between, creeping slowly across the universe. If they ever chose to go back, they could find their home world, but its location was now lost in indifference, caring no more than a seed for its pod after it'd been cast off.
And yet, they remained true to the strictures of life formed on that planet.
Mindless as a dafi plant, they built their seed ships in orbit until L5 bristled, waiting and waiting until the last ship was built. He would have suspected that they had a reluctance to separate, tearing away from the planet that was now virtually one of them, except he knew they held no such emotion. Verily, they had nearly no emotions at all.
The time to sail, though, was now at hand.
One by one, the great solar sails unfurled, and the ships began to peel away, each on a slightly different vector as the planet circled the star, like the white heads of dafi seeds, drifting out on the wind. At the great distance, the ugly ships were merely darkness trailing behind their glistening sails.
If he didn't know that they were death spores drifting toward another planet to kill, he would have found them beautiful . . .
He had failed. They were making a landing on a new planet to rape. A shimmering teardrop of a world, teeming with life, like so many worlds before . . .
Atticus recognized Earth, the North American continent under scant cloud cover. He recoiled. No, this couldn't be true. Ukiah was controlling what he saw. Maybe he was giving Atticus only the most damning of information. Besides, these weren't Ukiah's memories; they could be elaborate creations handed to Ukiah as real. How did they compare to the real thing? The Pack took what they wanted from him, so he must be able to do the same.
Let me see Oregon,he thought, and pushed his way into Ukiah's memory.
It was like falling into a deep well. There was a shallow layer of civilized confusion, and then a long silence of dappled forest. At the bottom, he found a toddler, naked, hungry, alone, and scared.