Seed (43 page)

But it knew it was not yet safe. It sent its awareness to the far perimeter of its electric aura, searching for more airborne threats. Found only the two remaining Flylights, settled into holding patterns beyond the bats’ effective range.

Satori decided to check on the boy, Bacilio. The parasite, whose brother had come looking for him. His
Hermano
.

Nothing. The boy’s eidolic mind no longer hovered around Satori’s own. Satori put its awareness on the lab. The boy was gone, and so was the advocate he had taken under his sway. Satori let itself fall into a meditative state, running its awareness methodically over Satori Tower, searching for—

Sudden pain, so intense Satori knew nothing but white heat. Inside his pod, Sumedha recoiled. He brought his attention to his own body, suspended in primordial warmth, until his heart slowed. Something had attacked. Then he reached his mind out once more to Satori.

Found an animal, bristling with shock. It shied from him. He pushed softly against it, soothed it. After a moment, it relented, opened. Sumedha entered—

Waves of blinding pain rolled in from Satori’s outer wall. Explosions had butchered long sections of it. Sumedha meditated until Satori’s tectonic heart slowed and synced with his, then fully reconnected…

Satori observed its body’s response to the wounds. Exudates had already stopped flowing. Cells multiplied, the proliferative healing phase already begun. In three days, the walls would once more be whole.

More explosions detonated out in the city. Satori, calm now, studied them as they occurred. White nova flashes from which black infernos billowed slowly skyward. Buildings crumbled out there in old Denver, but Satori discerned no effect relevant to itself.

On the airfield, the landraces had ceased their attack against the pinned-down Rangers. They stood, chuffing and casting blunt faces anxiously about, starting at each successive thunderclap until, when finally no further explosions came, they stood looking at one another, stymied about what to do next.

Satori sensed something amiss, something taut in the silence following the detonations. It waited. Moments passed. Something began to buzz at the edges of its senses.

The migrants came. They poured out of the old city. Mobs of them, the human group organism, spurred by the explosions, drawn by Satori’s sudden vulnerability. Satori had no analogies for its fear.

It extended its mind, commanded its landraces to the breaches in its walls. It roused the last of its advocates, and sent them, too.

There was not enough time. Migrants surged through the mutilated walls. They came, thousands of them, across the airfield, rolling in a solid, hungry wave over the landraces.

They came at the dome, crazed from years of deprivation. They tore at Satori’s flesh with knifes, hoes, their fingers. Some used their teeth. Inside his pod, Sumedha screamed.

….

The advocate sat on her haunches, watching. Her eyes flicked unblinking from Brood to Pollo and back. Brood watched her. She smiled at him.

“Brothers,” she said, and tilted her head as though she found the concept dear. Brood kept his hand on Pollo’s shoulder. The sound of gunfire came only sporadically now, single, infrequent shots.

“I think I seen what you seen,” he told Pollo. “I was with some people after the
Chupes
took you.” He touched a fingertip to the nub of pink scar where Richard’s bullet had burrowed above his hip. “They healed me up. One night they gave me some tea. It made me see shit.” He chewed his lip and glanced towards the ceiling, searching for words, but found none. “Bad shit.”

Pollo turned and for a moment his eyes, glazed with weird zeal, searched Brood’s. He nodded.

“Satori keeps us afloat.”

“This ain’t—” Brood began.

The deep throb of heavy explosions cut him off. Big concussions somewhere distant, somewhere outside, one after the other.
Whump
!
Whump
!
Whump
! The advocate hissed quietly after each, the sound of water droplets hitting fire.

“Thirteen,” Brood counted, and knew the packages given him by the tough sergeant had been delivered. He ran his hand over the sharp bristles of Pollo’s shaved head. “Maybe the hornets’ll come.”

They waited. Soon, the wall around the door undulated, muscles flexing within. The door’s bone tonnage swung smoothly outward, spilling light the color of a sunset.

Advocates appeared, kinetic specters in the backlight. Brood rose, swung the Mossberg to bear, stepped between Pollo and the door.

The advocates ignored the boys. They raced past, almost too fast to see. Six of them, moving with the smooth undulations of kelp under water. Then they were gone, all except for the one who seemed to be Pollo’s pet. She squatted, unmoving.

“Busy busy,” she whispered, and smiled. The door stayed open.

Pollo stood. In his hand he held Brood’s knife. The stump of his other arm dripped anew.

“
Vamonos
,” he said. He held out his hand for the advocate. She rose and took it. Brood followed them through the door.

A field of black flagstone lay before them. Fleshy light poured through walls made of high plexi, casting the trio’s shadows in panoply as they crossed the chamber. Beyond the windows lay the half-living city, flesh and concrete. Two dreams colliding within the same skull. Above it, a sky made of skin.

Strange objects occupied the floor around them, artifacts from the old world. A motorcycle the color of a ripe tomato, old enough to burn gasoline. A fat leather chair. A saddle with a silver pommel. A stuffed yellow dog with a friendly, lolling tongue. Brood touched a finger to the hard plastic of its black nose.

“That’s him.” Pollo pointed skyward, where what looked like a giant eggplant hung from the ceiling amid a tangle of dark viscera.

“Who?” Brood asked.

“Sumedha,” Pollo said, his voice edged with contempt.

The pod gurgled as something shifted inside. Then came a sound that reminded Brood of mournful west Texas wind whistling through a collapsed viaduct. A muffled scream.

Pollo seemed not to notice. He skirted the chamber’s perimeter, searching for something, his face fixed with the same placid concentration as when he hunted rattlers out on the prairie. He stopped, seemed to have found what he was looking for, and settled his rump to the flagstones. His fingers touched a length of naked wall between two behemoth plexi panes.

Pollo’s advocate growled. The back of Brood’s neck tingled. He turned, saw movement along the chamber’s far side. The unmistakable fluidity of another advocate. Brood moved close to his brother, brought the Mossberg to his shoulder.

The creature seemed in no hurry. It sauntered across the chamber. Pollo’s pet moved to intercept it—met Satori’s advocate near a red star etched into the center of the chamber’s floor.

The two strange women brought their faces close together. Their arms reached heavenward, their fingers protracted and flexed like claws. They showed teeth. They hissed and shrieked. They unhinged jaws and yawned them wide.

Then they fell silent. As Brood watched, they began slithering in place, suddenly all spine. Moving in perfectly mirrored unison, two snakes who had mesmerized each other.

“
Joder
,” he muttered.

“Sisters,” Pollo explained. His arm touched the wall—no, it had rejoined the wall, melded with it once again. He regarded Brood serenely.

“Pollo…” Brood started to say.

“Watch,” Pollo instructed. He winked, and it startled Brood. He wondered if this personality of Pollo’s had always been there, somehow buried under layers of catatonic dust.

A grunt came from the pod overhead. It began slowly to descend, dangling from a shiny umbilical the width of Brood’s thigh.

A change came over the advocates. They smiled at each other and gazed up at the pod—began stalking in slow circles around the four-point star, the spot where the pod would soon come to rest. They made Brood think of wild dogs, of sharks, orbiting something dead. As the pod settled to floor between them, they went still, poised.

“
Aquí
.” Pollo stood and proffered the pig sticker to Brood, handle first. Blood trickled momentarily from the boy’s stump where he’d again cut himself free, then ceased as new skin fused there. Brood slid the knife into its sheath inside his pants. Followed Pollo to where the advocates stood. One of the women extended the ghostly length of an arm as Pollo drew near. Her fingers stroked the top of his head.

Another muffled keen rose from the pod. The advocates responded with beastly noises, ravenous and carnal. A seam running the pod’s length split open. Black fluid spilled across the flagstones. It smelled like bile.

A hand emerged, gnarled and grey, followed by a face that Brood recognized as having once been human. Features identical to the Corn Mother’s, harmonious and precise, but male, skin colorless and pruned from moisture.

A deep cough rattled from within Sumedha’s lungs. He inhaled like he hadn’t tasted air in a year. An umbilical leading from the hollow of his belly suddenly detached itself with a smacking sound and he groaned. Black eyes focused. Sumedha looked from Brood to the advocates, then his settled on Pollo.

“There you are, boy,” he whispered, his voice hoarse from disuse, dry as an Oklahoma dervish. “I thought it strange that I had lost track of you.” He looked at the advocates, and seemed confused. “They do not obey me. How have you done this?” A pitiless smile cracked Pollo’s face. He bent close to the Designer.

“Satori. She choose me,
ese
.”

“Satori…” Sumedha’s mouth hung open, seemed about to say more. Then his head fell back and he screamed. It reverberated throughout the chamber, the piteous sound of a soul crumbling.

Pollo leaned back, gestured with a finger. One of the advocates—
Pollo
’
s
advocates—yanked Sumedha free of the pod. The Designer screamed again, this time like prey. The second advocate joined the first. Together, they tore into him. Pollo smiled. Brood turned away. After a few seconds, Sumedha went quiet.

Pollo tilted his head back and with eyes closed turned in a slow circle. The expression on his face frightened Brood. Rapture. Bliss. Feelings that had no place in this world, except for the crazy. He touched Pollo’s shoulder.

“What’re we doing here,
manito
?” He pointed to the bone door. “
Vamonos
.” Pollo’s eyes bore into Brood. He repeated what he’d said back in the passageway:

“You been in love, Carlos. I seen it in your face when we was with Rosa. You know what it is.” He glanced around the chamber, out at the city. A city alive with intent and need. “She keep us afloat. For a long time, bro.
Nos adora
. And I love her.”

“
Manito
…”

Pollo laughed, turned away. He lowered himself beside the open pod. Slid one foot daintily inside, as though testing the water, then let the rest of his body follow, like slipping under a blanket.

“
Que estas haciendo
?” Brood whispered. Pollo glanced back. It struck Brood how thick his brother’s jaw had grown. He looked robust. “Bacilio…”

Pollo gave a quick smile, then the pod’s lips closed over him and sealed tight. The skein of umbilical grew taut, began slowly to reel the pod towards the ceiling.

….

Nerve ganglia extended, touched, joined. The electric kiss of a billion tiny sparks. Saline tanks deep in Satori Tower gurgled as Satori’s memories merged with those of the boy Bacilio.

Satori awoke—to savagery. The people tore its skin, cut its flesh, hammered at its bones. They ripped away hunks of meat, ate it raw handfuls at a time. Bacilio’s mind understood savagery—had rarely known anything else. And the boy had learned from watching Sumedha.

Satori put its full attention on the sensation of being torn apart. A wave of panic surged through it, then receded. It calmed itself, surrendered to pain. Pain was simply a fact. Its thoughts moved forward. It considered things with its new mind, Bacilio’s mind, forged on the hot wastes, perpetually hungry and frightened. Just like the human organism that now threatened to devour Satori. These were Bacilio’s people.

The decision was easy. Slowly, Satori flexed. Bands of muscle rippled along its back, geologic in scale.

The people stopped their attack. They watched. They waited. Some retreated, tiny animals sensing the end of a giant’s slumber.

Around the dome’s circumference, skin split. Flesh furled. Fissures gaped. Satori spread itself open, revealing the living city within, vacant but for the landrace children who would never fill it. Vacant and waiting. After a time, when nothing further happened, the people moved forward.

Satori let them in.

Inside the pod at the top of Satori Tower, Bacilio smiled. He would keep his people afloat.

Satori focused its mind, ran its attention over the breadth of its monolithic body, a body that felt suddenly new and right, as much a part of the world as the mountains to the west, the desert prairie to the east. The dry morning breeze tickled it. Its skin drank the sun.

A memory came to Satori. A noise like crashing waves. A point of hot light growing, spreading through a world of jumbled shadow-thoughts. The boy found himself lying in soft dirt, gazing up through the long fingers of an onion nearly ready to pull. Overhead he discerned the dirty plastic of a greenhouse roof. Diffuse sun warmed his cheeks. The crashing wave sound took form. His mother, quietly singing the song of the old rat while she pulled weeds from dark soil.
Una rata vieja que era planchadora por planchar su falda se quemó la cola se
…The shine of her black hair, pulled tight into a ponytail, mesmerized the boy. He let out a toneless moan. Then his voice, too, took form. He hummed along. Connected.

CHAPTER 30

black zep dogged its way through blue sky to the east. Slowly it grew, its nose aimed at Satori through heat shimmers rising off the prairie. Doss could barely make out a white star adorning its side.