Abruptly, the window with the building went black.
“One portal to go,” Miller commented.
“They’re openings to other worlds.”
“I’m looking at another planet?”
“You are,” Dr. Miller said.
“How does that work?”
“As far as we understand physics, it can’t.”
“If I jumped down there right now?”
“You’d end up in that jungle. Probably fifty, a hundred light-years from here.”
“Could I get back?”
“Who knows?”
Flynn noticed that a couple of the uniformed security people had appeared on the catwalk. People blocking his exit were not wanted. Also, there’d been a lot more traffic in the past. He remembered aliens down on the machine floor. “Where is everybody?”
“Flynn, the station’s being retired. The grays are leaving Earth. Everybody’s leaving.”
“What?”
“You know this thing—what these fools released into the universe—”
Doors ahead opened silently onto a room that was at once startlingly familiar and exceedingly complex. Flynn said, “Mac, there are machines in there with hyperdimensional shapes. This means that human eyes and human minds can’t make sense of them any more than a bird can figure out a living room. Don’t look around in there, it’ll disorient you.”
“More than disorient you,” Miller added. “You can become psychotic, and the effect can be permanent.”
There were now four workers—three following them, and one lingering at the end of the catwalk. So they weren’t workers, they were guards, as Flynn suspected. He felt a familiar tension rise in his muscles.
“Come on, guys,” he said, “the sooner we get this done, the safer everybody’s going to be.”
Mac asked, “Can Morris do anything to us down here?”
“Unknown,” Dr. Miller snapped.
“What about those creatures on the surface?” Flynn asked. “We saw security preventing them from moving out of the restricted zone.”
He shrugged. “Something somebody left behind. A failed experiment in human–alien hybridization. They have human genes, so we’re not going to be killing them, as per E. O. 2241-R.”
“Which means what?” Mac asked.
Flynn said, “A restricted executive order that states that anything carrying more than ten percent human DNA is human and subject to human law. It was promulgated during the second Bush administration.”
“You never told me that—or any of this—before,” Mac said.
“His memories of this place were blocked. Morris can get into the mind, remember, so we sent him out with his skills but not his memories.”
“Okay, question time’s over,” Flynn said. “Let’s do this.”
“Past the catwalk, we move on the red lines only. Don’t ever step off. Not ever. If you do, you’ll become lost and we will not be able to find you.”
“It looks normal.”
“It’s not. Come on.”
They moved carefully along the catwalk, keeping their eyes on the path ahead, not looking at the machines that loomed around them.
“They’re watching us,” Mac whispered.
“Back off your guards,” Flynn said.
“They’re not guards. They’re a dismantling team. The facility’s going to be mothballed. Earth is being abandoned.”
“You said that, but will you say why?” Mac asked. “What’s been released into the universe?”
Dr. Miller stopped. He turned and faced Flynn and Mac. “Aeon is doomed. At least, the natural species is. They’re going to be rendered extinct by their own creation.”
“We know that,” Flynn said. “There has to be more.”
Miller nodded sadly. “The species they created—”
“The biorobots?” Mac asked.
“They’re much more than robots. They’re self-evolving and full of bad programming.”
“In what way bad?”
“As Aeon woke up to the fact that they weren’t alone in the universe, they got scared. They saw they were primitive. They saw that others were more intelligent. They felt threatened, and used their knowledge of genetic engineering to build what is essentially a self-programming warrior species.”
“Which is what me and Flynn are fighting. Two people, only one of which is presently any good at it.”
“It’s an isolated band,” Miller said.
“So why not just tell the more advanced aliens to get rid of them. Then we can all go home.”
“Flynn, do you remember why we’re doing it this way?”
“I’m a low-tech weapon. If the other aliens use their powers, there will be subspace echoes that stand a chance of being detected by the main body. So will their communications, all their activities. I assume that they’re not leaving to abandon us, but to hide us.”
He thought of the wire back at headquarters. It would undoubtedly be on the way out, which would be all to the good, as far as Flynn was concerned. He wondered about Geri. Could her mere presence here be a danger?
“No angels to protect us?” Mac asked.
“Not around here.”
Flynn thought about that. No angels. The universe full of dangerous life. Somewhere out there, surely something better would one day be found. But clearly today was not that day.
“Let’s get this done, Doc,” Mac said. “I’m ready. Sort of.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE GREAT, black thing stopped Mac in his tracks.
“Take it easy,” Flynn said.
“What in holy hell is that?”
If evil had a color, this fat cylinder—nine feet long and standing on four squat legs—was painted that color. Flynn remembered how frightening its absolute darkness had appeared to him the first time he saw it.
Mac stood staring at it, gripping the rail that followed the catwalk the three of them were on.
Flynn noticed that two of the guards who weren’t guards were now close behind them. Too close.
“What’s going on?” he asked Miller.
“Not sure.” Then, to Mac, “This is a bioeditor. It’s what can do what you need done.”
“What’s that down there, a black hole?”
Miller said, “The best way to explain that formation comes in a poem by W. H. Auden. Do you know his work?”
Mac said nothing. Flynn remembered the lines from Dr. Miller’s explanation the last time he’d been here and quoted them: “‘The crack in the tea-cup opens / a lane to the land of the dead.’”
“We think what you’re looking at is an entrance to a parallel universe. Not another planet, but the undiscovered country, the land of souls.”
Mac took a step back. He gestured toward the machine. “It looks like some kind of torture chamber from hell.”
“No, actually, it’s from California. It was built at the Trident Group in Palo Alto.”
“Built by us?” Flynn asked.
“Built at the Trident Group, not by the Trident Group, unfortunately. By the grays. It’s soul science, this thing. We’re not there yet.”
“You can smell the evil. You can see it.” Mac turned away from the thing. “Soul science the hell, it’s satanic.”
Dr. Miller said, “There is no supernatural, only the natural world, some parts of which we understand and some we don’t. It’s natural to fear the unknown.”
“It looks evil to me. Gotta say.”
“Mac, it works.”
Looking at it now, being in this room again, took Flynn back to how he had been before his time in the machine. What had changed in him went way deeper than biology. He had come out of it with new reflexes, but also with a better, more careful, quicker mind, and a deep new river of spirit within him.
“It’s not evil, it’s just … different. Here”— he took Mac’s hand— “touch it.”
Mac pulled back, but Flynn was faster. When Mac’s hand touched the wall of the thing, the same thing ha
ppened as when Flynn had done it before. The whole side of it shuddered like the most delicate flesh, or the surface of a pond.
“It feels alive,” Mac said. “Just like that disk, only more so.”
“It’s not a creature,” Dr. Miller said, “but it is intelligent.”
“What’s it going to do to me?”
“When you enter it and concentrate in an organized way on the alterations you want, as long as they’re possible, it’s going to make them.”
“Does it hurt?”
Flynn said, “It’s going to be the strangest thing you’ve ever experienced. But it doesn’t hurt.”
“Go on.”
“Your body seems to disappear. It’s like you’ve become a kind of chaos, a sort of storm. You’re roaring, rushing, all confused. But alive. Incredibly, totally alive. The feeling will scare you worse than anything you’ve ever known, but you won’t want it to stop. Then your body will focus around you in the same form as the machine. A liquid blackness. You need to think about your eyes. Imagine seeing things two miles away. Seeing microscopically. Sparks will start hitting your eyes the same way they hit my hands when I began thinking about my draw speed. I went into the depths of myself, the why of me, my hopes and loves and fears. You mention angels—I felt like an angel, Mac, an angel in the light. Then all of a sudden, thud, and I was lying there in the thing, just me again in that cold, dark hole. I cried, Mac. I sure as hell did.”
“If I want to stop, can I?”
“No,” Dr. Miller said.
Mac walked up to it. “Why don’t you do this to more people? Flynn needs an army.”
“We worked on that. Hard. So did the grays. To make somebody truly exceptional, they have to start out at the top of their game. We can’t put an ordinary person in there and have a man with incredible abilities come out. And now it’s too late. Machines like this, soul editors, are real easy to detect. This thing has to be gotten out of here pronto. To tell you the truth, this whole facility has been kept in operation by the grays, in hope that you’d make it in before they had to pull the plug.”
Flynn burst out, “Why in hell don’t they just help us?”
“This isn’t help?”
Mac stood even closer to the machine, looking at it, caressing its trembling flank. “Has anybody ever died in it?”
“There have been heart attacks. The first person to test it died of a stroke. That was in Palo Alto.”
“Flynn, if this kills me, I want my ashes scattered in Big Bend, down along that ridge near Panther Junction—you know the place.”
It was where Mac had almost won Abby, in a flaring sunset, on an evening so long ago it seemed like it belonged to another life. He’d kissed her, and Flynn saw Abby melt into him, and the joy in his eyes when she did. Later, around their campfire, she had searched Flynn with her own teary eyes. After moonset, she came to him in the inky night and whispered, “Hold me,” and Mac, lying in his sleeping bag under the stars, had silently mourned.
“I know it. I’ll do it.” He wanted to say that it wouldn’t happen that way, Mac wouldn’t die, but what did he know? Not even Dr. Miller knew.
Dr. Miller said, “You go around it, Mac. Stay on the red trail. When you reach the entrance, it’ll look like a tunnel with red glowing walls. You just lie forward into it, and the machine will do the rest.”
“It’s like the first time your ma ever held you,” Flynn said, “like remembering your birth.”
Mac shook his head, stood still for a moment, then strode around the machine and was gone.
It made no sound.
“Is it working?”
“Stand back.”
There was a sound of something vibrating, followed by a wave of ice-cold air coming off the thing. Then it frosted over, the liquid blackness hardening and becoming covered with pale frost.
“What the hell?”
“We don’t know, except that it’s normal.”
“Have you ever been in there?”
“I tried for an increase in intelligence.”
“And.”
“IQ 148 before, 152 afterwards.”
“That’s not nothing.”
“We put a guy in, an IQ of 190. He came out completely insane. Killed himself right here on this platform where we’re standing.”
The guards were very close now. When one of them started to follow in Mac’s steps, Flynn put up a hand. “No.”
His eyes met the guard’s. And he recognized him. It was the airman killed by the biorobot at Wright-Pat, or rather, it was the biorobot, impossibly, incredibly not only alive, but here.
Flynn drew his gun and blew the creature in half.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“WHAT THE hell, Flynn, have you gone crazy?”
“It’s one of them.”
“No, that’s impossible.”
Others were crowding forward, and Flynn could hear movement behind the machine as well. When he turned to look, it was still frozen solid, doing its mysterious work. It had better be quick, because this was not going to last. He had the Bull and the Special, but Mac and Dr. Miller were unarmed. A quick calculation told him they would be done in under ten minutes.
“Any other way out of here?”
“What’s going on? You say these are Morris’s people?”
“Four of them. Three now. Five or six more in the facility. We have about eight minutes, that’s all.”
Another one came forward, and Flynn dispatched it with another roaring shot. In the distance, there was a loud pinging sound, repeated again and again, each ping farther away than the one before.
One of the creatures launched itself at Dr. Miller. Flynn took it down also, and it fell shrieking to the floor below. It missed the vortex, though. Blood flooded out of the chest, but it immediately leaped back up the twenty feet to the catwalk and came straight at Flynn. At the same moment, another of them jumped over the machine, which began to make a high-pitched sound that reminded Flynn of an animal in pain.
“This is coming apart!” he yelled to Miller. He fired again, then a second time, this time at least rendering the two on this side of the machine unable to move, at least for a while.
There were only the four of them, but they had obviously evolved yet again, because they were coming back from lethal shots in seconds, not the hours it took the one he’d “killed” in Mountainville to recover.
He drew his knife and handed it to Martin. “They have to be cut apart.”
“These are people!”
“Doctor, do as I say, or we’ll all be dead—”
The fourth one dropped down onto Flynn from somewhere above. It was in the form of a strongly built, athletic man, and it threw him sideways and off the edge of the platform. He fell toward the vortex, which seemed almost to bend toward him, as if it were hungry for him.
As he dropped, he reached out and grabbed the leg of the creature that had unbalanced him, then twisted himself upward and threw his own leg over the platform.
For an instant, they were frozen, the two of them, their strength in balance.
Blood poured down through the platform as Miller cut up the one that had been lying there, cut it up and screamed out his revulsion as he did it.
Flynn’s adversary shuddered. It redoubled its efforts.
But then Flynn was back on the platform, back on top.
Miller stood over the remains of the one he’d butchered, staring down at it with stunned eyes. Flynn grabbed the knife out of his hands and spun around, taking off the head of his attacker.
Then there was stillness. Flynn wasn’t sure if there were some that had backed off, or if they were all incapacitated.
He ran around the machine. For a moment, he didn’t understand what he was seeing. Then he did. The whole side of the thing had been laid open like a man’s guts. Hanging out was a pulsating complexity of what looked like organic wiring, wet tendrils in a thousand different colors. One of the creatures lay slumped against it, its eyes glazed with what
might be death. The other one was nowhere to be seen.
“Mac!”
No reply.
“Doc, how do I pull him out of this thing?”
Dr. Miller came around it. “My God.”
“Where’s Mac? What happened to him?”
Miller peered into the dripping tangle of wires.
Flynn knew they had little time. The creatures were all linked. Morris would know exactly what had happened here, and would be regrouping right now. Obviously, he was low on soldiers or he would have sent more.
“Mac, sing out.”
“There’s a body,” Miller said. “Under there.”
Flynn could just see it, a jeans-covered thigh under the machine. It was bulging horribly, as if the unseen part of Mac’s body had been crushed.
Flynn’s heart broke. At the same time, anger on a level he had not known possible swept him. This was more than rage, more than what he had thought of before as human emotion, a pillar of fire within him.
Bending down, he reached forward, thrusting his arms under the slumped remains of the machine. Using his leg and back muscles, then every muscle in his body, he lifted the thing. It was like cradling an injured man, just as intimate and sad.
“Hurry!”
“I’m trying.”
“Can’t hold it.” He let it down.
Mac’s leg was no longer visible. Flynn turned around. “He must have gone down into the vortex.”
“The hell I did.”
“Mac!”
He was standing beside Dr. Miller on the platform.