Accidental Creatures (31 page)

“Graham put Helix in the vat room. You have to keep her away from Lilith. They’re both queens. They’ll fight each other until one or both of them is killed.”

“Well, I think it’s too late for that. I was sleeping. When I woke up the tetra guarding me was gone. She left the door open. They’re... swarming in the vat where Lilith sleeps. If Helix got in here, as you say, that would explain it.”

“Slatermeyer, you’re already suited. You have to go in there and break them up.”

“Are you crazy? I can’t even see anything — they’re fighting so closely all I can make out is arms and legs. I don’t stand a chance of getting through the tetras, let alone separating Helix and Lilith. I’ll get killed. They’ll rip my mask off, or pull open my seals.”

Hector shook his head. “You have to try. Lilith and the others attacked Helix when she hatched, and drove her out of the vat. They’ll kill her now. Or she’ll kill Lilith. You have to try to stop it. Please. If I could get there, I’d do it, but Graham’s lackey, Benny, welded the door shut. There’s no one else. You have to do something.”

Colin shook his head reluctantly. He’d already suffered who knew how much exposure to the growth medium. If he threw himself into that mob of fighting tetras, he’d surely get more.

“Please.” Hector stared at him, his eyes wide and desperate.

Colin sighed. “I’ll try. But I’m not going to risk whatever’s left of my life in a futile effort to separate them. You know how strong they are. But I’ll get in, and I’ll try to talk to the other tetras, try at least to get them to back off. I’m sorry, Doctor, but they’re your brainchildren, not mine.”

Hector slammed his fist down on the coffee table in front of him. The impact must have jarred the transceiver recording his image. His face blurred, and then came back into focus, but sideways. “Go,” he said. “Do what you can.”

oOo

Hector walked into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. Straightening, he stared at his image in the mirror. How, he asked himself, how had things gotten this bad? At what point had he crossed over from the sane and illustrious life of a corporate researcher to this — this mad nightmare where he asked his assistant to risk his life for the good of a project that would never meet its stated goals? He thought back over the decisions he had made, and realized that it was in the very beginning, when he’d had the dream and decided to follow it. He had stopped being an employee of GeneSys right then, had stopped caring, really, if this project was in their best interests, or his. Though he hadn’t known it at the time, he had offered himself up in service to Lilith and her kind, and since he’d taken that step, there was never any time afterwards when he could have changed anything. As he gazed in the mirror, the ventilation grating on the wall behind him popped off, and a woman crawled out. Hector turned to face her. She dusted off her jeans and straightened up, looking around her.

“Oh, sorry. I had no idea what room I’d end up in. In fact, I was afraid I had the wrong apartment. You’re Hector Martin, aren’t you?”

Mutely, he nodded.

She smiled and offered her hand. “Chango Chichelski. Boy am I glad you’re home. I was supposed to bring you my sister’s air tanks. Vonda tested them and there’d been blast inside. But Benny caught me, and he got them. He-” she paused, struggling with the possibilities. “He was coming upstairs. He had a blowtorch.”

“They welded her inside,” said Hector.

“What? Where?”

“In the vat room. Down in the sub-basement. There’s an old biopoly lab with test vats. It was in disuse for years until I took it over for the project.” Hector glanced at the hole in the wall above Chango’s head.

“We have to get in there.”

Chango followed his gaze. “I got into a maintenance stairway. Lots of places to go from there. Big conduit housings, access crawl ways for plumbing. I took the ventilation system.”

“And you found your way here.”

“I had to pop out and check the circuit boxes. They label them by apartment. I couldn’t really be sure I had it right, but I do have a pretty good sense of direction.”

Hector bit his lip. “Do you think you could make it down there?”

Chango puffed out her cheeks. “Geez, that’s a long haul. It’d take awhile. I don’t know.”

“Maybe we should just go down there and unweld that door. I’m afraid they may be killing each other right now.”

“They?”

“Helix and Lilith — her mother.”

“Oh, her mother...”

The transceiver at Hector’s wrist bleeped and he answered it. It was Slatermeyer. “What happened?”

“Well, they’re not fighting anymore. They’re just sort of... wrapped around each other.”

“What are they doing?”

Slatermeyer laughed, the sound distorted by his suit’s radio into a harsh grate. He shrugged. “I know what it looks like.”

oOo

There was her body, but she was someplace else. Her body was busy, it had no use of her mind, and her mind swam amid black waters of nowhere, like a question gone unanswered, and then the answer came, and she was there, here, her. Lilith and she, entwined in thought and body, asking and answering each other the question of their being.

“They say it began in a garden,” said Lilith, “but I know better. It began with a dream.”

The brilliant blackness of the void faded around them, and they stood in a green place with a tree and a snake in the tree. Her sisters were there, adorned with fig leaves. They stood with their arms linked in a crisscross pattern, like a row of x’s with legs.

“Before we existed we were a dream dreaming ourselves into existence,” thought Lilith as one of the sisters broke out of the line, lay down and closed her eyes. Soon another detached herself and danced over the head of the sleeper. “We crossed over into the world through the mind of Hector Martin.” The sleeper turned over and wakened, and the dancer rolled over her bowed back in a somersault and stood, arms outstretched, at the head of the dreamer.

“This is how we happened, but I remember before the dream, before anything. I remember the void.”

The tree was made of cardboard, and Helix saw the void reach up with empty hands behind it, and the blackness rushed in and toppled it and her sisters were gone. All that remained was a ring of x’s, spinning around them.

“This is where we came from.” Helix knew somehow.

“Everything comes from here,” either she or Lilith thought, she couldn’t keep track anymore. “From the well of possibility, where nothing is known. Everything comes from here, everything returns here, but only in the world do we know that we exist.”

“But what difference does it make, if we only end up here again?”

“All the difference. All the difference in the world. We are a pattern, and the pattern continues. We return to the void, but our pattern is forever in the weave of the world.”

The void around them gradually returned to being the waters of the vat, and Helix realized she could open her eyes and lift her head. She and Lilith separated, and the sisters flowed in to buffer them from one another.

The consuming rage that had driven her into her mother’s arms was gone, and she allowed her sisters to guide her with numerous small hands, up onto the dive platform and down into the other vat. They had been designed to replace the vatdivers; trading cheap labor for in-house slavery. But it hadn't worked out the way GeneSys wanted. Instead of docile biological machines, it had gotten the Lilim, and now, they were here to stay.

The first time she’d lucked out and gotten into the output system. The ducts were clean, the air was fresh and ready for breathing, and the only fellow travellers she had to contend with were some very passive algae caulking the duct’s seams, probably there to breathe extra oxygen into the mix. It was good air. This, on the other hand, was not good air. She’d taken a wrong turn back there somewhere and wound up in the exhaust system. This stuff had pretty much been breathed by everyone on the twenty-second floor, and smelled like it. Plus the walls of the duct were covered with a fine grit of dust mites. They crunched beneath her palms and got ground up under her fingernails as she crawled down the narrow shaft.

Chango squirmed around a corner to find an opening in the duct, but it was only a vent from another apartment. She crawled on until the duct ended in a vertical shaft, and she took it down, trying to slow her descent by bracing her arms and legs against the walls. Dust mites caked at her elbows and knees, and soon she was sliding in a streak of their crushed bodies. She passed several floors before the duct banked inward and halted her downward plunge.

Here the duct was joined by several others, and became considerably larger. She took the opportunity to sit upright and catch her breath. Looking around at the duct walls, now faintly luminescent with some sort of algae, she was glad for the dive-suit she wore. Hot and uncomfortable as it was, it was better than picking up goddess knows what from this ventilation system and its attendant organisms. She probably shouldn’t even be breathing in here, but she didn’t have air tanks; couldn’t have fit through the ducts if she had.

She crawled on through the darkness, her way lit only by the phosphorescent glow of the algae clinging to the walls. If anything, the air was worse than ever. It was warmer now and humid, and she was pretty sure the oxygen level was dropping off. Her head swam, and there was a faint ringing in her ears. She had to get out of here.

She took the next branch she could find, wending her way through several switchbacks lined with fine, feathery, growths that squished between her fingers and left a faint trail of slime where they brushed across her face.

She climbed over a lip into a larger chamber. At first she thought there were flecks of dirt blowing through here, but then she realized they were swarming and nipping microscopically at her exposed flesh. Dust mites, only these ones flew, and to them she was one motherfucking huge dust bunny; the challenge of their careers, their big opportunity to prove just what excellent flying dust mites they were. Chango suppressed a scream and squeezed her eyes shut as she dashed through the biting swarm, searching for a way out.

Her hands plunged through something thick and gelatinous, to mite-free air on the other side. She lunged through and found herself on the other side of a shimmering blue-green membrane which sealed itself back up behind her. Ahead of her was another one, only it was orange instead. They were filters, apparently. As Chango progressed through the prismatic slimefest, the air steadily improved. And the wind picked up.

She dove through a deep purple membrane to find herself in a howling indraft, surrounded by the hum of turbines. She was pulled along the duct at nearly twice her crawling speed and then the duct gave way to a larger chamber where it was joined by several others.

Chango careened off the lip of the duct, plummeting towards one of four big turbine fans in the opposite wall. A narrow crossbar spanned the fan’s ten foot diameter, and as she tumbled through empty air, Chango reached for the metal struts, desperately hoping to grab on before she was diced by the blades. Her left foot struck the center of the crossbar first, and she twisted forward, her hands spread wide, managing to grab a strut with her right hand. For perilous seconds she teetered there, flailing desperately with her other hand to keep balance, her face inches from the whirring blades. The wind sucked at her, and she was glad of the divesuit hood that prevented her from being pulled in by her hair. Finally she grabbed hold of another strut and got her other foot braced against the cross bar. Slowly, carefully, she crawled across the vortex of the fan and pulled herself up over the lip of the vent opening. She perched there on the casing for a few seconds, catching her breath and looking around. A narrow walkway ran beneath the fans. Of course. They’d need to get in here in case something big got jammed in the blades. Like her, for instance. To her right she spotted a small door. Chango wedged herself between the fan casing and the wall, and gradually lowered herself down to the walkway. Clinging to the iron rail she made her way around to the door. It opened with a crank handle, and she was outside, finally, in the welcome, mundane dust of empty narrow walkways and the outsides of ducts and machine casings.

Chango threaded her way along the service hall, wondering where she was. Somewhere deep in the innards, she thought, and she imagined the weight of the building pressing in on her. Here and there, service lights illuminated a knot of pipe work or a bundle of electrical cables. The rest was just shadows and the vague, humming sounds of hidden machinery.

She noticed that the electrical lines were converging like tributaries into a bundled cable that ran along the wall. She followed it, and saw it grow as more lines joined it. It was as thick as her leg by the time she reached what could only be the main conduit for the whole building; a massive rope of cables surrounded by a catwalk and bristling with bundles of electrical lines like the one she’d followed. Gaping, Chango walked out onto the catwalk, and looked down, and up. Like the spine of some mighty giant, the cable ran for as far as she could see in either direction, fed by a million lines connected to millions more multi-processor brains of all sizes in offices, light switches, and thermostats all over the building. She reached her hand over the edge of the catwalk, and she could have sworn she felt them thinking. oOo

Helix lolled against the side of the vat, her limbs buoyed by the waters. Three sisters, Jacinth, Nicar, and Coleanus, swam up to her and wrapped their arms around her, cuddling close. “GeneSys is our enemy. It is what put you in here, not Graham. Even though he thinks it was his idea, he did it for GeneSys,” their touch said. It was from Lilith. For the past hour or so, these three had been swimming back and forth between Helix and Lilith, bearing messages in their skin.

Helix didn’t have to say anything, but she felt... frustration, rage at Graham and Benny, hopelessness at ever finding her own vat. And something else. A familiarity with what she was doing; not how she was talking, but with whom.