"Neither am I, Martin. Look at me."
"What? Sir, are you—done?"
"Turn around, Martin. There's no other way, son. I need you to see, before we can trust you."
"What? Sir, with all due respect, what is this?"
"Turn around, Goddammit!"
Cundieffe whirled around now, his face flushing with anger. "There's no need to swear—Oh my God, sir!"
From the moment he first met AD Wyler at a special dinner at the Academy, Cundieffe had felt a strange vibration from AD Wyler that he couldn't admit to himself was something sexual, and so he'd buried it as something unworthy of himself. It was a unique experience, never repeated, even when he came into contact with real homosexuals. Now he understood why.
AD Wyler stood before Cundieffe with his pants around his ankles, and his spindly, hairless legs planted akimbo to afford Cundieffe an unobstructed view of the featureless join of flesh where every other member of the human species, it was fairly certain, had some sort of reproductive organs. At first he thought the Assistant Director was tucking, but there was nowhere to hide anything; nor was he wounded, for there were no scars, no pubic hair, no vestigial traces of either sex; only a tiny urethra on the forward edge of the pelvic bone, a purely neutral means of passing waste.
An atomic bomb was a horrible event to be sure, but it was as of yet an abstract notion, and a real one, with precedent. This was Cundieffe's atomic bomb. "What happened to—What—What are you?"
"I'm a human being, Martin, just like you. Just like six and a half billion human beings on this planet. We're no different from them, except for the niggling detail that we do not reproduce."
"'We?' How many of you are there?"
Wyler stooped and hoisted his pants, fastidiously tucking in his shirt. "Only a few thousand accounted for, but we expect that's going to change. There's been a lot of speculation among us about how we came to be— viruses, radiation, even controlled experiments—but most of us believe we're a natural product of evolution. We're the answer to the world's overpopulation problem, Martin, and it's wars, and famines, and depleted environment.
"Look at ants, Martin. One of nature's oldest living creations, and largely unchanged. Because they have mastered specialization. Workers and soldiers give up their reproductive duties to their queen, and specialize in their respective talents for the survival of the nest. In the last few hundred years, homo sapiens has forced an evolutionary crisis and become its own agent of extinction. We are born without the costly investment in reproduction which burdens other human beings, and instead have those energies expressed themselves in higher intellects, greater stamina, and an instinctual public ethic. All of us hold positions of some influence in government, academia and business, and all of us work for the continued survival of the species, and to keep our secret. We are nature's plan for keeping the human race alive." Wyler washed his hands, watching Cundieffe. "So, now you know whose side you're on."
Cundieffe backed away from Wyler in the general direction of the toilet stalls. "Sir, I don't think you understand—"
"Martin, there's nothing to be upset about. It's what you are, it's what we are."
Cundieffe turned and raced for the first stall, slammed the door and bolted it. His face was hot and slick with sweat and tears. Why was AD Wyler doing this to him? All he'd ever wanted was to serve the Bureau, to be accepted, and now these head games, this mutant bullshit.
By God, Martin, you are a BOY! And you will ACT LIKE ONE!
He was a man. Compared to AD Wyler, he was a man.
His mother explained to him when he was nine, and going off to summer camp. How other boys had different parts from his, and might tease him, but not to take it personally, it wasn't his fault, it was just the way God had made him, and God had His reasons.
"Martin, come out of there at once."
Cundieffe undid his belt and tore open his slacks, yanked down his shorts and there it was.
He was a man.
Martin had indeed taken some ribbing at summer camp that year, and at high school, he'd refused to bathe with the other boys. No one but his mother had laid eyes on it since that summer camp, excepting his regular physician, who was a very kind man and an old friend of the family, and so had never stared or made him feel uncomfortable.
Martin's penis was less than half the length of his pinky, and incapable of becoming erect. His mother had told him that due to a birth defect affecting his glands—not her words, oh no, she called it a "heavenly test"—his male organ had simply stopped growing in infancy. Despite the painful hormone shots that'd made him sick and furious by turns throughout his later childhood, puberty had simply never arrived. He had no testicles whatsoever, and no hair had ever grown to hide the minuscule thing he micturated with, but would never entertain the quixotic notion of showing it to a human being.
Until now.
"Assistant Director Wyler? I don't understand the full implications of this incident, but I want to state in the clearest, yet most respectful terms, that a grave error has been made. I—I need you to see this, I guess—"
Before he could think better of it, he shoved open the stall door and shambled out with his slacks down. For a moment he dreaded that Wyler would be gone, or worse, that someone else would be here. At least no one in the Navy knew, because he always used the stalls, for fear that someone would peek at him. It didn't make him any less of a man, if his mother had told him once, she'd told him a thousand times.
Wyler was there, and he didn't laugh. Instead, he only shook his head sadly and clucked his tongue. "My God, what did they do to you?"
"What? Sir, I didn't judge you—You were born—as you were, and I—well, I'm a man."
"No, Martin, no, you're not."
"Look at me! I have a penis! I'm a man!"
"That is a surgical construct, and not a very good one. Your parents, like many who have borne one of us, couldn't face up to the ambiguity. They had your sex assigned with a knife, Martin. A penis was built for you while you were still a baby, but by the looks of it, they abandoned the procedure midway through. You had hormone shots, but they didn't help. Because the receptors for those hormones simply didn't exist in you."
Cundieffe sat back down on the restroom floor, the chill tile leaching the warmth out of his bony, naked ass. He stared blankly ahead while Wyler circled around him and stooped to speak into his ear. "You've lived all your life trying to play a role that doesn't suit you, Martin. You're one of us, Martin. You can help us, and we can help you."
When Cundieffe fainted, he swooned into the Assistant Director's waiting arms.
37
There were snapshots from the moments after the irradiation, unstuck in time and shuffling themselves into view only when there was nothing else to see or hear. Like now.
Soldiers clawing at their bowels and eyes, tearing themselves open to let something out; screaming their vocal cords to shreds as their healthier comrades restrain them.
A fountain of sand and pulverized concrete where Stella Orozco was standing, the greedy hole pulling the whole junkyard in after it.
His feet hanging in space, his fingers snarled in a toppled stand of chainlink fence.
A young, homely woman in a smart blazer and skirt shouting nose to nose with a hulking officer in unmarked black fatigues. His hand shoves at her shoulder one too many times, and she jabs him with a taser. Everyone pointing guns, they're fighting over him.
Guns and medics surrounding him, shuddering with the vibrations of the truck beneath them. One of the medics sedates him, then carefully pries open his left eye, then his right, clears his throat and spits into them.
He felt crippling nausea sloshing through him in slowly subsiding waves. His skin felt two sizes smaller, and his insides felt as if they'd been stirred with a stick and mixed with a generous portion of army ants. His ears still rang from the explosion. He snapped his fingers beside each ear, and could barely hear clicking, as on a dead long distance line.
He was not restrained, but he lay still. If he moved, he knew, his skin would break open wherever he put weight on it and blood like clotted ketchup would dribble out of him, and his hair and teeth would fall away, but he wouldn't have to look, because his eyes would have scabbed over. He'd been cooked by that fucking light, and he would die soon, and die horribly. It was something to hope for, given the alternative. Maybe he was in a lighted room now, with officers and feds and the press watching him in eager anticipation of the months of interrogation, the years of trials, and the inevitable execution. Because that was what the United States government did with terrorists.
And a terrorist he was. He'd participated in a monumental act of butchery, an insane campaign of genocide he could never hope to explain.
Your Honor, they weren't human, they were—things.
I didn't know the full extent of the plan.
I was only following orders.
He hoped to God they would catch Wittrock, but knew they wouldn't. Men like that never got caught or killed, not when they could persuade others to do it for them.
Presently, because he could suddenly feel them burning, he knew his eyes were open. He blinked furiously, sloughing off crust and dust until planes of gray lesser darkness took shape around him and resolved into the cinderblock walls of his cell. Letting his head droop to one side, he peered through slitted lids at the faint nimbus of fluorescent light visible through the bars. A tiny square of window in a door let it into the cell block—or
brig
, wasn't that what squids called their jails, even on land? The meager stream of light haloed a minimalist steel head beside his bunk and a steel washbasin and scuffed steel mirror set into the wall above it. The floor was ever so slightly concave, with a drain in the center of the poured concrete floor, and a horizontal slot at waist level was set into the door. A man could live and die in this cell with no excuse to leave, Storch thought, but he doubted he'd be here for long. This was probably the brig at China Lake, or possibly Twenty-Nine Palms. In the morning, he'd be transferred with much fanfare to a federal holding facility, where the interrogations would begin. He wondered how well his counterinterrogation training would hold up against the people who thought it up.
He could see no one in the neighboring cells, but he caught his breath and held it when he spotted the outline of a sentry in a chair beside the outer door. The chair was tipped back against the wall, and the guard's hands lay folded in his lap, his feet propped on another chair. His features were wreathed in shadow, but Storch believed he was asleep.
He jerked and went rigid when he heard the voice. "You awake."
Storch kept playing possum, though the voice made him itch all over, like the light again. The acoustics in the cell refracted the interrogator's voice at him from a thousand angles, as if he were lying in a tuning fork. The voice cut through the oscillating wail in his eardrums, rode it like a carrier signal into the fillings in his teeth and the reptilian basement of his brain.
"Feel the dust of one billion years crumble away from your eyes," the voice whispered. "Hear the voices of the cells of your body singing of the unspeakable wonder of the outside world with new voices. Feel them changing to meet that world as flower, or as fist.
"Breathe in the air and feel the tide of myriad invaders absorbed and turned into antibodies, to devour their own kind. Reach for the barrier between your body and your mind; that wall is gone, never to return. Listen to the harmony of your bodysong, Zane Storch. Gone is the strident clash of the mind and body. You are not a ghost anchored in flesh. You are sentient flesh."
He felt battered and sunburned and sick to his stomach, and if the interrogator's words had proven true, he would have willed his own heart to stop. It was
him!
The motherfucker who made RADIANT, who destroyed his life and set him on his blind dive into this awful present. He'd infiltrated the base, him or one of his clones, or perhaps he or it had been here all along.
How many of them are there, really?
If there was one, then the Mission's failure was total. His might not be. Keogh, or Quesada, or whatever he really was, had come to gloat and gibber. Storch willed himself to lie still, to invite him closer by his passivity. But he was too weak not to listen.
"You have evolved.
"Only hours ago, you killed me. In their hate and fear, your friends have killed so many of me this night that I have reached out to you, that my message will not be snuffed out. I have come to show you the whole truth, of which the Mission only taught you a tiny shred. For it is the way of education, which must needs be a series of ever more complicated lies. Forgive me if I must lie a little to you now, but the path to the close of this stage is a long one, and you are not yet ready for the whole truth.
"It is hard for the individual to face even a ray of that truth, for it is so vast. To perceive that we are not the finished product of a perfected creation, but one rung on a ladder that time and nature are climbing, that is unacceptable to most. As an individual, you are but one iteration of one species that is itself a fleeting expression of the Life Force on the earth. What can we do? For all that we try to learn, to improve ourselves, we are hardwired from conception; even the degree to which we may improve is etched in protein. The human animal is a big, stupid ape, but his cells are smart, each smart enough to believe
it
is the ape. It is not so. Not yet.
"You have climbed further up the ladder in this night than the human species has in nine million years, as an individual. Natural selection chooses traits, species, not individuals. You, my beautiful mutant, have broken the rules. Why have I given you this gift, my self-proclaimed enemy, who would destroy my work and stop the climbing of the ladder?