Inside, it was like a city, a thriving megalopolis in the abdominal cavity of God. The walls, nearly a quarter mile away on all sides, bristled with fleshy edifices camouflaged as sponges and anemones, an entire ecosphere of false lures designed to attract and devour prey. Perversely, this gave him a crumb of comfort amid the rampaging dread eating into his gut.
It needs to eat
, he thought,
which means it's not a god.
The tentacles bore him down below the rim of the lagoon, the waning purple sunlight flashing before his eyes, then disappearing. Organs among the obscene clusters on the walls of the pit made their own light, a pallid, bluish glow that reminded him of the tunnels in Idaho, and the light behind Keogh's eyes in his nightmares. Looming structures of bony coral and sails of corrugated flesh jutted out from the walls—stomachs like industrial kilns in a foundry, their mouths fringed with restlessly waving cilia; pulsing sacs like kidneys the size of houses, trailing sewer-pipe veins; endless, gnarled coils of what might have been intestine or fields of brain tissue; great, glowing eyes that goggled at him on stalks and from billboard-sized sockets all over the walls. Lips and beaks and sphincters of skyscraper anemones and shark-mouthed worms purred in his ear as he descended deeper, ever deeper, into Keogh.
Going limp in the rising pressure-grip of the ocean depths, he let himself be passed from tentacle to tentacle. The mammoth limbs grew in narrow groves like kelp farms that extended down the walls into inky infinity. The terrain of the interior only got stranger, the organs so alien in their structure that he was grateful for the creeping darkness that swallowed them, and him, up.
Then there was a dim, butterscotch-colored light in the deep before him. It swelled to fill his vision, and then he was being pressed against a wall, soft, pliant, splitting before him like a womb in reverse. Scarcely a drop of water spilled through with him as he passed through the other side and fell through hot, damp air.
"I told you once that education is a series of ever more complicated lies, preparing one, by stages, for the truth. This is what I am, Zane, behind the last mask. I've been waiting here for so long, waiting for a species like yours to evolve and develop the technology I needed. When he came— when we became I—he showed me the way, even as he showed me how desperately my return was needed."
"You—should have stayed here," Storch hissed. "Nobody needed you. You never should have been."
"But I was, Zane. I am, and I will be. And I am needed. There were many among you so decadent they thought they could gain by assisting me. The spiral of decay and extinction flows faster in your race than it did in my masters' time."
Storch was just conscious enough to be confused. "Your masters?"
"I myself have climbed the evolutionary ladder in my lifetime, but I arose from the humblest beginnings, humbler than your own. I was once the lowest form of life that has ever toiled on this earth. I was a slave."
The tentacles set him down on a ledge of naked bone beneath a cloacal opening in the wall. The space was enclosed in some sort of membrane, a translucent bubble that projected out into the central well about twenty feet. Just beneath the ledge, the water lapped at still more colossal appendages far below.
Storch gagged on waves of white-hot pain as the tendrils disengaged from him and retreated into the murky labyrinth of flesh beyond the membrane. He collapsed and choked back hot bile. His legs would not obey. His arms would not lift him up. Shivers rolled him into a tight fetal ball, the barrel of his empty pistol digging into his armpit.
"Oh, but I've damaged you," the island murmured, heavy with remorse. Something hissed and blew a chill breeze across Storch's back. "See to yourself in there."
Storch looked up. Deep inside the rigid muscular sphincter set in the wall, an open door led to an airlock very much like the one in Colorado. It reminded him of the rooms they put dogs in to "euthanize" them, by which they meant suck the breath out of them in a box. It was dead metal and steel-reinforced glass. He crawled into it gratefully.
Already, his pain was blunted and turning to tingling hints of reduced function. His body rerouted resources to close the thousands of bone-deep wounds all over his body, but he was already so strained from the jump and the radiation, that the changes crawled. When the door closed behind him and sealed with a mechanized gasp, he was too weak to turn and block it. The inner door hissed open, and air-conditioned chill washed over him. He crawled into the next chamber and rolled onto his back.
The low ceiling was layered concrete, the floor the same with a Persian rug. Across the chamber from where he lay, there was a functional low-budget hotel room, with a queen sized bed and a television, a refrigerator and cabinets, a microwave oven, and a bathroom with shower stall. The only thing missing was a picture window overlooking a pool. This had been replaced with tiers of computers chained together by a spider's web of cables. Four monitors slept on a long console set into the wall, but a single keyboard stood out of the trash and junk food wrappers covering the desk.
Storch's nerves pricked. He searched the one-room bunker. A closet, filled with t-shirts, boxer shorts, pajama bottoms and sandals, and two radiation suits. Another closet that was really an elevator, which meant there was another exit, probably inside another of the bunkers. The cupboards full of blank CD's, Doritos, Twinkies, vitamins, non-alcoholic beer. Ashtray half-filled with marijuana roaches and pistachio shells. All the things that made up the distinctly sour and artificially preserved sweat of Ely Buggs.
So the fucker lived. He was the reason for the regular planes out here. Shuttling him to and from this bunker, where he ran the information systems that kept RADIANT online, and God knew what else. He sure as shit wasn't here now, but his mess was. Storch picked his way through it to the shower and painfully, painstakingly, washed Keogh out of his wounds.
Examining his own body was little better than looking at one of Spike Team Texas. The chitinous shell that had grown over most of his body sloughed off and wouldn't stop bleeding where Keogh had torn it. He looked like a blasphemous freak from a sideshow. Still and all, his body had barely managed to keep him alive.
He wasn't getting out of here. If Keogh didn't get him, the bombs would, or the sharks would, or the hundreds of miles of ocean would, or the Mission would. The realization was strangely liberating.
You are not insane. It's the world that's crazier than a shithouse rat.
He could still do it, he realized. He's not a man, but he's not a god.
Die knowing,
he said to himself.
Die killing him.
He walked out of the bunker and through the airlock into the yawning central cavity of the island. Outside the bubble, stars twinkled in a tiny circle of lesser darkness a few hundred feet above his head. Eyes opened all around him.
Storch sucked in a deep breath, held it down in the floor of his lungs for a long moment, and called out. "I want to see your face. You say you're a man. Show me."
"Very well, if it will make you more comfortable."
The membrane sagged, bulged and split open. The wall became a womb, and something spilled out into the bubble. A nodule of pulsating fetal tissue dangled from a tangle of umbilical cables. They danced like copulating snakes as they pumped life into the quivering fetus, which grew before Storch's eyes into a tall gaunt human form. At last it trembled with animation and opened its ageless gray eyes to take in Storch from this novel new angle, and when it rose and climbed onto the ledge beside him, he took a shocked step back. The umbilical cables went slack, but did not disengage. Where they joined Keogh's head and neck and back and groin, they still seemed to exchange fluids, and Storch could see sparks of electricity shooting up and down the hideous translucent cords.
"I never meant to harm anyone, Zane. I am the end of pain, the end of the primal struggle, the end of all the evolutionary suffering. When I am come into my kingdom, evolution will have reached its logical conclusion. Evolution itself will be obsolete."
Storch made himself look Keogh in the eyes. His smooth new skin wrinkled in lines of worry. His mouth pursed in a rueful half-smile of fatherly concern for a wayward, doomed son. It was too easy to forget that this was a mere puppet, the real Dr. Keogh was all around him.
"We don't want to be obsolete," Storch said.
"No one does, Zane. If you only understood—"
"Tell me—"
"About the Old Ones?"
"All of it. I'm sick of lies."
Keogh's sad grimace deepened. "The truth will make you sicker, Zane, but I will oblige. I want you to understand." Keogh turned and looked up the throbbing walls of his own body at the dazzling night sky.
"My given name and the details of my life before that moment are unimportant. I worked for the government at Los Alamos. I made bombs. Like the other scientists, I was kept in secrecy and shadows, but unlike the others, I was a prisoner. I had been brought to America in secret after the war. For reasons I won't deign to explain to you, I had worked for the other side. I was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. I believed it was the only hope humankind had for a perfect, equal, just society. I defected to the USSR shortly after the Revolution, but with Stalin it came clear that the Russians were no more enlightened than the Americans, and wanted the same weapons of mass destruction.
"I fled west, but the Nazis knew my name, and held me for the duration of the war. I worked for them on their own atomic weapons projects, all the while trying to slow them down. I was their slave, and when the war was over, I became America's slave. My American captors were little better than my Nazi ones. People argue about the differences between fascism, socialism and democracy, but for me, they were all the same: a soldier with a gun in my face, commanding me to build him a weapon with which he could murder the world.
"I dreamed of using the power of the atom to bring peace and prosperity to the whole human race, but their dreams, from the beginning, were only of a nuclear sword they could hold over the world's head. I helped to build it for them, but not out of patriotism. I hoped to show them that by forging such an arsenal, they were dooming the human race. Only by balance, by mutually insuring that such a weapon would never be used, could we halt the cycle of aggression that would seal our extinction. This was the seed that grew into the Mission, but as with so many ideas, once it passed from my hand it became twisted into dogma, and now my disciples are my enemies. As for myself, the government discovered my efforts, and dealt with me accordingly.
"Because they never admitted to having me, they never had to admit to executing me. They simply left me here when they detonated the terrible new toy I'd helped to give them. I was dying before it dropped, but when it exploded, I was gone, for the island took me in. It absorbed me, assimilated me, but more, it
understood
me. A slave, as I was a slave, to reckless, blind masters bent on ruling all creation, or ruining it. Across hundreds of millions of years, we dreamed the same dream! We became I, and determined that the cycle would stop."
"What cycle?" Storch demanded.
Keogh hung his head and wrung his hands disapprovingly. Despite himself, Storch smarted with a pang of hurt at the thing's disappointment. "I tried to show you, Zane, but you weren't ready. The Mission probably told you some of it, as well, but they don't see the whole truth, for they are only human. But you are more, now, and ready to understand. Now that the war is over, we can be honest with each other, yes?
"They came here from another planet beyond the dark between the stars, so far away the light of its dying hasn't yet reached this world. A place where life arose out of different matter, perhaps itself under some higher guidance. Their bodies had traits of both animal and vegetable life, and yet were more complex than either. They flew between the stars before our sun even existed, and they had no need for ships. Their bodies were strong and elegant, and might even have been products of their own design, for they were refined to defend their vaunted five-lobed brains, and feed them sensation and secret knowledge. Yet in other ways, they were little more than the spineless anemones and sea cucumbers that dwell in the shallows of the seas today.
"But in the ways that mattered, they had become gods, for they could shape lesser lifeforms to labor for them. When they came to earth one billion years ago, they raised single-cell organisms out of the carbon-rich primordial scum they found here, then used scalar radiation and viruses to reshape them, as I have reshaped you, and enabled them to change to suit the earth's unstable environment. They synthesized DNA as a storage mechanism for successful traits, and RNA to implement them. The Old Ones created tools that would improve themselves to be better tools.
"Their slaves built cities for them under the oceans, and fought wars for them against other races that came down from the stars later. For millions of years they fought a catastrophic war that drove whole plates of the ocean floor above the surface and created the supercontinent of Pangea, and ripped away a monstrous chunk of the earth's core into orbit, which became our moon. The wars were devastating for the planet, but the Old Ones suffered hardly at all, because their slaves did all their killing and dying for them. In the course of the wars, the slaves developed an arsenal of physical mutations that enabled them to survive any environment, but in all that time they had grown only enough brain to be controlled by hypnosis. But they had been programmed at a molecular level to overcome all obstacles."
Storch could not find the words to argue. "So what happened to them?"
"Like every civilization that relies on slave labor, the Old Ones became decadent and weak, while their slaves grew stronger, and smarter. They glutted themselves on science and sensory diversions, while something happened that they never could have calculated—their slaves became self-aware.