As she trudged away from the building, she looked around it and saw only a parking lot and a few outbuildings with snowmobiles, a plow-truck and a helicopter under tarps on a concrete pad. A small village of trailers, already half-buried in snow, flanked the tower on two sides, which was a dead ringer for the one she'd visited at the hospice village in the Owens Valley.
"Where are the houses?"
We learn from our mistakes. This colony will live in tunnels beneath the ground until those who would destroy us are neutralized. But we are growing so fast—thus, the trailers.
She shivered. He took note of this, and added
, Not all of us will live below. You may stay above, until your fears are smoothed away.
She stopped short of giving the thought voice, but the sensation washed over her. She hadn't been thinking of the fear of being underground again, but of
those who would destroy us
, the Mission: Delores Mrachek, who'd died trying to stop her from becoming what she was today, and of the man who died in the ground trying to save her. If he could mistake her thoughts, then there was some part of her he could not reach. Swiftly, she forced herself to think of something else.
"So that's where everybody is? Digging tunnels?"
There are many kinds of work yet to be done to make this a home. We are lucky to have an assortment of various skilled tradespeople among us, but I have had to teach most of the rest to perform the necessary work. I will show you.
He guided her back into the building, silent cues she might have mistaken for her own impulses if she didn't know better. Going down the main corridor, past a trauma center and a solarium with dozens of couches, she turned and went down a broad, gently sloping ramp that switchbacked on itself twice before spilling out in a cavernous space. The walls and ceiling were rough-hewn, like the surfaces of a mine, but the colonists had nearly finished covering it up; prefab living modules were assembled on a steel lattice two stories high and extending back into the shadows. Each module was about the size of her quarters upstairs, but seen from the outside, they looked like deluxe animal cages: Tupperware slave quarters.
"I never really thought about the afterlife too much, but I'm pretty sure it never crossed my mind that we'd all be slaves living in goddamned Habitrails."
Ah, Stella, if only you understood, that it is your insolence that makes you so valuable to us. None of you are slaves, any more than I am your master. These quarters are only temporary. The awakened body must be sheltered from those who would destroy it.
"You had no problem taking over my body, when you needed to."
Things had to be done to insure your survival, Stella. There was no other way. You didn't know how to heal yourself yet, and you were so very damaged.
She flinched in anticipation of another reminder, but nothing happened. She hated herself for feeling gratitude along with relief.
"Why don't you just take us over? Then you'd have all the slaves you want, and none of the hassle."
I couldn't if I wanted to. It is
you
that keeps your body alive. At this stage, your body could not withstand it for long…
"But we're still your slaves. You'll take us if we try to leave."
When the threat to your kind is gone, all of you will be free to leave, to build new lives. I only hoped to keep a few behind, those with the training and nature to help receive those who come for irradiation. This place will come to be known as a holy place, like Lourdes, or the headwaters of the Ganges. This will be the place where humanity will begin to be reborn.
"Until it gets bombed again. Why don't you get help? If this is something the whole world is going to want, why try to hide where only the Mission can find you?"
We had received assurances from the government before, but I know now that they care more for our success, than our survival. They have their own reasons for allowing us to progress, but I believe they support the Mission, as well. Neither could survive without government sanction, at some level.
"So it'll keep happening. And no one will help us."
We need no one. The Mission is weak. They will not resist striking at us here with all their remaining strength, and soon. When they do, we will absorb their blow, and they will be no more.
"Where are all the people?" she asked. She had seen only the pair beneath her window.
They are at breakfast in the common hall. Come
.
She followed His subtle nervous cues deeper into the cave, walking by the modules, seeing each decorated with a few pitiful personal effects, but still looking like plastic cages. Most of them held toys, posters of singers and cartoon characters. Many of the rest contained nothing except a few scraps of clothing. Orphans, the poor, foreigners, immigrants like herself. He would not discriminate by wealth or check their insurance. All they had to have was the seed of cancer and a willingness to give up everything.
She passed the last module and turned into a short, wide tunnel lit by a peculiar glowing crust on the ceiling. It occurred to her that she had seen no machines down here, no electricity, though He had mentioned underground generators. She wondered if the bioluminescent stuff was Him, as well.
She came out of the tunnel and into a hall nearly as large as the living space. Tables ran in rows perpendicular to the entrance, and they were all filled. Men, women and children of all races and ages ate together amid a drone of good-natured chatter. All wore the same black tracksuits and parkas that she had, but despite all this, there was no sense that this was a prison, or a hospital. Had she expected them all to have His face? Had she expected a monstrous commune, chewing in unison, muttering His platitudes, like brainwashed cultists?
"You want me to believe you're doing this for us," she said. "Why?"
If you had lived as long as I have, you would understand.
"I'm not so stupid. Tell me."
I have seen races rise and fall. They believed they had achieved perfection, and they tried to stop change, to control it with their tools. And they were swept away by their own creations, only to pave the way for a new race to begin the long slow climb, and inevitable fall. Always, the pattern of self-fulfilling prophecy has been the same. On this world and a million others. If you were as old as I, if you saw the same mistakes being made again and again, the waste, the suffering perpetuated down through eternity, what would you do? Would you wait for a god to put it right? How long would you wait before you saw that no one was coming to fix it, that no one but you could do it?
Stella looked out at the shining, smiling faces, at the children delivered from death. There had to be a worm in the apple He offered.
"But you used machines to change us. Your death-ray satellite is good, but everyone else's machines are evil?"
RADIANT is only a crutch, a catalyst, to spread the message over borders and quarantine zones. Even so, the technology is very, very old, and deceptively simple. The real machine is
us
. When there are enough of us, we will be all we need to change the world. When we are of one mind, there will be nothing beyond our grasp. Help me do this, Stella
.
She could find no words that she could not see him turning back on her. After all, was it not her desperation to come to Radiant Dawn that had set her on the path to where she now stood?
She walked over to the nearest table and, looking defiantly around, took a seat. The others at the table favored her with smiles and greetings. They knew her name, and her job. She looked them over, looked deep into each pair of eyes, looked for Him. She saw only people who were stunned and overjoyed to find themselves alive.
An older Hispanic man offered her a cup of juice. She saw no coffee, then realized that drugs of any kind would be unnecessary, here. "Stella Orozco," he nodded to her and smiled. "I'm Dr. Javier Echeverria. We will be working together, I think." She stared into his hazel eyes for a long time, thinking,
I see you
. She took the juice and sipped from the cup, still watching everyone around her.
They were a motley assortment, heavier on children and the old, but she noticed that the older people looked on the whole stronger and healthier than she, wearing their gray hair as a badge of status. The children, by contrast, looked wise for their years, and were integrated into the general population without supervisors, without anyone around them who could be their parents. They participated in the conversations around them as full partners in the colony. They talked about work, mostly, but also about their lives, their cancers, always fondly, and always in the past tense. As if they thought they were in Heaven.
Dr. Echeverria was touching her shoulder. "I only asked you if you had worked in the fields in Salinas, when you were a girl."
"Is this your idea of small talk?" she demanded, shouting at the table at large. "You're in all of us, aren't you? Looking at yourself through all these eyes, talking to yourself in all these voices? And you talk about stupid bullshit like where I—"
He patted her hand and sat back. The whole table was watching her now. She saw pity in their eyes, and started to hate them. No. Not pity. Empathy. They were all like this, when they first arrived. They had adapted. She would, too. "I meant no insult, Señorita Orozco. I myself worked the fruit crops in Salinas as a boy. That was where I was exposed to the pesticides that gave me my cancer. Like yours, of the liver. I was only going to say that I might have seen you there."
She looked away from him, biting back the impulse to call him a liar. She had nothing else to say.
"I was very angry too, Señorita Orozco, when I learned of my sickness. My parents had saved up enough to get out of the fields and applied for citizenship. They sent me to medical school, but much to their chagrin, I returned to the fields as a public health worker. That was when I first became sick."
"My mother died in the fields, Doctor. Nobody
sent
me to medical school. We are not so alike as you suppose."
"I am sorry, Señorita Orozco. I only meant to say that you are not so alone here, as you might believe. All of us were bitter, because we were alone in our suffering. But your pain is commonplace here, as is your race, your poverty, your misfortune. You will have to find some other reason to be so angry all the time."
She sat there cold and quiet for quite a while before her face cracked open. What came out of her might have been mistaken for a sob in any other company but this one. With tears brimming in her eyes, she laughed. "I—I'm so sorry…I'm just so fucked up inside…" The laughter twisted into true sobbing then, and she shook, but did not recoil, from the many hands that touched her then.
"We understand you, Stella Orozco," Dr. Echeverria said. They enfolded her in their empathy, warmth penetrating her, opening her up to their love. She knew that she belonged.
The crowd began to form into rows, facing her and thirty or forty others who came up to stand beside her. She looked at them and felt her face reflecting their giddy children's glee. They were special in some way the others did not understand any better than she. It was not merely some initiation ceremony. They had been chosen.
Ten men and women stood in single-file before her. As the first approached her, a stoop-shouldered old black man who smiled wide at her with new-grown teeth, she looked to left and right, even as her own feet carried her towards him.
The young Asian woman on her left embraced the first of her line, a middle-aged white man who looked like a shelled turtle. Eyes wide open, they locked lips and their jaws worked for a moment in a rigorous but clinically chaste kiss. On her right, two boys, no older than twelve or thirteen, held each other and swapped spit like sleepwalking junior prom sweethearts.
The old man wrapped his arms around her and his mouth became the Grand Canyon. He said to her what the voice in her head had been saying all along.
This is how we share, and how we survive. By communally pooling our genetic diversity in our brightest lights, we insure that none who have joined us will ever die.
"We live in you," whispered the old man with baby teeth.
"And I live in you," she replied, and kissed him.
~9~
There are those who say that dying is like passing through a tunnel into a bright white light. Ancestors and guiding spirits assemble to escort the departed soul to its greater reward. Worldly concerns fall away as the eternal peace and serenity of the afterlife enfolds them like a mantle and dispels all uncertainty, all fear, all darkness.
Zane Ezekiel Storch was not one of those people.
For just about forever, Storch did indeed float in an infinite corridor of darkness, and if he stared hard enough, he could see a light at the end, but he was pretty sure that wasn't St. Peter waiting in it. Sometimes it was close enough to see through, and there were usually men there, attaching things to him and asking him questions, inflicting what they hoped was pain and getting no answers. When they left him alone, he could almost reach into the light to the mere earthly darkness on the other side, but whenever they tried to reach him, the light fell away, their questions and their torture only filtering into the tunnel as background noise beneath the grinding voice of God.
This, alone, was why Storch believed he was dead. God was in here with him, and He never shut up. Most of the time he could not remember his own name, let alone the litany of crimes that could have brought him to this limbo, but he knew one thing. God was with him always, right under his skin, inside his skull. God was very concerned with his personal salvation. God had lessons to teach, and there was nothing to do but listen.