He shook his head. ‘No. Not quite.’
‘What are you, then? Really the Son of God?’
He smiled. ‘There is no God, Nina, not in the sense people understand it, but then you know that, don’t you. There are chances though, chances for the future. Sometimes the universe creates such chances, such hopes. But it is futile. People aren’t conscious enough. I love them all, but I know they’re not conscious.’
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you are.’
‘I am shattered hope,’ he said. ‘And you must do what you came here to do. I realise now I’ve had my chance. You are my reward.’
‘You’re a liar,’ Nina cried. ‘You’re a paranorm.’
‘Then kill me like you’ve been ordered to!’ he shouted. ‘Go on, do it!’
She turned away. Can’t do it. Can’t. ‘Get out of here, Emory Patrick. Get out now. Run anywhere. There’s not much time.’
She heard him laughing. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘What a beautiful ending.’
‘I mean it!’
‘I know you do. You have fought against this so painfully, haven’t you? You have been dreading it. But it’s inevitable. Now.... turn around.’
She could not disobey the order. Even as she was turning, with agonising slowness, she was remembering the words of Sable Grant. If he is what his people claim he is, it would be worse. Yes. Worse because the world can’t handle it, doesn’t want it, not even the so-called enlightened New Agers, such as Sable herself. The world destroys things it can’t understand. Don’t make me do this. Don’t!
She was facing him now, and he was holding her Talent in the depth of his eyes. He held her in stasis, as he’d held the entire convention site before him in stasis earlier. He directed her will.
‘No,’ she said, but the word never made a sound.
‘I felt you coming yesterday,’ he said. ‘And some part of me welcomed it. I can’t let you deny me now. It’s over, Nina. I screwed up. Now it’s time for me to go.’ He grinned wearily. ‘Let’s just say I have better things to do. I’m sorry. I hope you’ll forgive me one day.’
Inexorably, he drew her Talent out of her, focused it on himself. Her eyes were streaming. She could taste blood in her mouth. It was as if her hands were around his heart, crushing it to a pulp. He was too strong to resist. There was no contest. Her Talent was tiny in comparison to his. In the end, she let go, and let him have it all.
Soon, he was lying back on the bed, and a single fly was buzzing round the otherwise silent room. His eyes were open and he looked slightly surprised but not afraid. Nina stood over him swaying, one hand forced between her teeth. She was biting hard, but could feel no pain. She felt drained of all feeling. Ultimately, it had been just another job. She’d deceived herself believing the thing she’d become would have it any other way.
‘You’re so beautiful,’ she said in a thick voice, mumbling around the obstruction of her hand. ‘I don’t have to forgive you, because there’s nothing to forgive. This is just what I do. Sometimes.’
Then she sat down beside him to keep the vigil, until the others came.
The Green Calling
She feels she is losing her humanity, bleeding into the green and the damp. Her flesh is sprouting silvery, scaly fungus that has to be dabbed with ointment every night. She is never dry. And now, trapped and held by the vengeful green, the legends no longer seem implausible.
It was Canvey’s notes that started it off.
‘At night, the man-woman looked in through the screen door. It seemed to be naked, its skin covered in a green pigment.’
A man-woman? Could mean anything. An effeminate boy, a masculine girl. Some deranged dream of Canvey’s. Perhaps only an illusion, kindled in the sputtering lamplight; a face beyond the screen. The green calling.
Silva wishes she’d never seen those words. It is too easy to believe in them when it’s dark.
She dreamed of rain for three consecutive nights before she began the journey that led her inevitably to Canvey’s Retreat, on the inner jungled slope of an extinct volcano, in the heart of the Neotropic cloud forest. Not gentle, soothing rain but furious hot downpours; unending and corroding. It was presentiment perhaps, or just an educated guess.
Now, bathed in a patina of her own sweat, she sits gazing at the gauze-covered window openings of the Retreat, wrapped in a steamy lamp-light haze, listening to the pitiless downpour beyond the mouldering walls. Dying insects convulse upon the page beneath her hands, poisoned by the odourless insecticide painted onto the inner walls. The desk she is sitting at groans as she shifts her position to glance at the place above her right wrist, where her dark-coloured shirt leaves the skin exposed. There is a strange discoloration of the flesh there, a strange consistency. Deliberately, Silva pulls down her sleeve. A rogue torturing thought meanders through her sluggish mind: I will never go home, never. I will stay here forever until the moulds and the lichens cover me and kill me. She stands up abruptly to stem the discouraging mantra. She opens the screen door and looks outside.
Beyond the meagre light of the lamp, the night is hot-breathed, pungent, saturated darkness. Silva feels the jungle’s presence rather than sees it; she senses its voluptuous oppressiveness. She knows that somewhere out there her companion preservationist, Lal, is intruding into the brutal, deadly lushness, perhaps crouched beneath a drooping tree-fern, or squatting on the sodden walkway that cuts a perilous pathway through the foliage.
‘Where are you?’ Silva hisses into the night.
Lal is not human, but a multi-task biomech, laboratory bred, laboratory tested. To some degree, Silva shares this heritage, even though her specialities, her genetic nudges are widely different from Lal’s. In many ways, the jungle is their mother, enveloping and vast: it spawned the plants that surrendered the magical elixirs which permeated the womblike fluids in which Lal was constructed by molecular computers and Silva floated as a foetus. Silva, like Lal, is an experiment. For the experiment to be successful, she will never age. She is the daughter of Longevity Program VI. The fate of daughters/sons one to five remains unknown to her.
Silva does not want to call out into the dark. She is afraid of what she might invoke; something other than the sleek wet form of Lal, something so very other. Then again, she hates to be alone here at night. It is too easy to succumb to the feeling that she is being watched. She has two human assistants, Luis and Jesus, who are locals, but they take one of the vehicles back down the trail to the village at the end of every afternoon. Silva is spending more and more time alone, poring over the documents and data-disks that are bursting from every damp wooden box and rusting crate in the Retreat. Most of them can be junked, but there are jewels to be found; Canvey was one of Virichem’s best operatives. Now that he is dead, his notes and files are treated with reverence. They are to be preserved - the paper documents laminated, the magnetic media transferred to holocrystal. Canvey supervises these procedures from the walls. There are dozens of photographs of him as a young man pinned up around the desk. He was sixty-seven when he died; alone, uncared-for, malnourished. The victim of a stroke. There are no photographs of him as an older man. Only the memory of his youth kept him company. And who knows what wild ideas Canvey came up with, living alone up here in this wilderness? Who knows what he might have discovered?
‘So much information is lost every day,’ Silva’s mentor Alcestis once said to her. ‘Every day, priceless human knowledge crumbles to dust, data is corrupted, never to be regained.’
‘But surely someone else will think of it one day,’ Silva said, frowning. ‘There are so many of us. Someone will think the same thing again.’
‘That is not the point,’ Alcestis replied stiffly. ‘Each mind colours the information it generates with its own unique tone. There is no such thing as precise reproduction.’
It was Alcestis who’d encouraged Silva to specialise in information preservation. Alcestis had been a young research grad then. Now, she is a woman going grey who’s di
scovered her metabolism is inexorably slowing down. Silva still looks like a teenager. She and Alcestis have maintained a close friendship via computer link for a long time, but never meet face to face any more. Alcestis resents growing old.
Thinking of Alcestis, Silva wonders whether she should go back indoors and call her via the laptop. The laptop will not last for much longer, she is sure. At this very moment, in this landscape of speedy adaptation, a new mould is bound to be developing that specialises in eating computers. Silva wants to tell Alcestis about the patch of strange skin on her arm; she wants reassurance. Alcestis has a medical background; she will know things the over-worked, not-too-informed local doctor will not. Silva has been putting this call off for several days.
She glances at her watch to try and work out what time it is where Alcestis lives. The watch has stopped. She notices its face is partly occluded by a yellowish stain. Tears of weary frustration gather in her eyes. A dear friend, years dead, had given her that watch. Now it is tainted, half eaten by the jungle. She removes it lovingly, saying under her breath, ‘I hate this place.’
The laptop makes a disturbingly unfamiliar noise when Silva turns it on; a tired whine deep in its micro-depths. A moment of panic, the fear of being isolated is interrupted by a more sensible thought: so, order another one! (But what if the roof-dish falls apart? What if... What if...?)
The computer utters a musical sequence. Silva squats down in front of it and turns off the video eye. Presently Alcestis’ face will appear on the screen, while all Alcestis will see on her home monitor is Virichem’s logo. It is better that way. Silva is worried that if Alcestis should see her, she’d be compelled to make some kind of light-hearted sarcastic comment. Silva doesn’t want to hear anything like that, because the words will drip with pained bitterness. The two women haven’t seen one another for years. People like Silva never feel comfortable speaking about what makes them different. There is a kind of unity in that. At least, Silva has never heard them speak. In the centre where she grew up, there were other genetic experiments; some more obviously so than others. They never fell for the spiel that they were ‘special’. Some of them died too young, others simply fell apart: emotionally, psychologically and in a few sad cases, physically. Silva is one of the lucky ones. And yet, even now, at the age of 37, there is a danger Silva might begin to age dramatically, or develop a plague of cancers, become blind, lose her hair. She has seen some of those things happen to others. Bald children eaten from the inside; faulty flesh machines. The time that Silva lives through never really feels as if it belongs to her. Is that because of what she is, or simply part of feeling human, being a woman? Does Alcestis feel the same?
‘Oh, you’re going out.’ It is obvious to Silva that Alcestis has dressed up for some occasion. Gems sparkle at the corner of each eye. The woman looks good; she’s lost weight, although the lines on her face seem deeper.
‘Silva! How are you? How’s the jungle! Oh, God it’s been so long! I feel awful... I’m just...’ Alcestis pulls a comical face, and sits down before her video eye. ‘What the hell! Five minutes? He can wait!’
‘You look great!’
‘Nonsense! You can only see me from the waist up. Gravity is winning the battle with my will-power, my love, never mind my muscles! I’ve got Researcher’s Arse; comes from sitting at a monitor all day!’
‘No really, you look...’
Alcestis interrupts. ‘So, how’s it going? Had Canvey discovered all the secrets of the universe as everyone thought?’
Silva shakes her head, even though Alcestis can’t see her. ‘If he did, I’ve yet to come across the evidence. I think he was off his head at the end. There’s some very weird stuff.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yeah. I think he was seeing things! I’ve found these notes about, well, creatures.’ Silva’s laugh sounds a little embarrassed even to herself.
‘Creatures, eh!’ Alcestis grins and wipes a lock of hair from her brow. ‘What kind?’
‘He describes them as green men-women.’
Alcestis shakes her head. ‘Hmm, perhaps you should lose that stuff! Sure he wasn’t writing a novel?’
‘Hadn’t thought of that actually. He was looking into local legends, though I’m not sure whether he made them up or not. This place is a bit creepy.’
‘Yeah, you sound... tense.’
Silva is sure that Alcestis is wondering whether she should ask her to turn on the video eye. Her concern would make her want to inspect her friend, but Silva knows Alcestis is afraid that what she would see might sicken her, anger her. She’d once said, ‘the worst thing about growing old is that I can remember what it was like to be beautiful.’ Silva respects that and yet she wants Alcestis to see her. She needs reassurance. ‘It’s bad for the health here, so damp.’
‘How much longer have you got to stay?’
Silva shrugs. ‘Until the job’s done. I’ve got a biomech assistant, but Rodgers gave it some other task to do. It’s always out collecting samples. Isn’t much help. Al...’
‘What?’ The image suddenly shifts, blurs. Silva’s heart jumps. Don’t fade, don’t go...
‘I’ve got this patch on my arm. Think it’s some kind of fungus, but it won’t respond to treatment.’
Alcestis frowns. ‘Is it spreading?’
‘No... I don’t think so. It doesn’t hurt. I’ve tried a topical anti-fungal agent on it, which might be keeping it down, but it won’t cure it. Everything gets eaten by mould and fungus here. I don’t like it.’
‘Can you get to a local doctor?’
‘Yeah, it was she who gave me the ointment.’
‘What was her prognosis?’
Silva sighs. ‘She sees so much, so many diverse ailments. The jungle causes them. She says she often sees cases that she knows she’ll never see again. She didn’t seem that worried though.’
‘But you are...’
‘Well... I suppose I’ve got a touch of Cabin Fever.’ She laughs. ‘I’m scared I’ll turn into a walking mushroom, like something out of an old Japanese movie!’
‘Are there any other symptoms?’ Alcestis asks, suddenly and sharply.
‘What do you mean?’ There is a moment of tense silence, during which Silva incubates a hot core of anger. ‘It’s not cancer!’ she says at last, ‘and no, there are no other symptoms.’
There is another moment of silence and then Alcestis says, ‘Turn on the video, Silv.’
‘No, there’s no need. I’m fine.’
‘We had a promise!’
‘Now is not the time to honour it, Al. Really. I’m fine.’
Alcestis sighs. ‘Look, I’m not going to mince words. Get back to that doctor and if she has the facilities in that godforsaken place, get her to check you for soft sores. You can’t afford to play around, Silv.’
Silva is furious. She wants to say, ‘You want me to die, you want me to fall apart. You’re wishing it!’ But it is not in her nature to confront people. ‘OK,’ she says.
‘I mean it, Silv!’
‘I said OK. Look, don’t you have a date waiting? I’ll call you back some time. Take care, Al.’ Abruptly, Silva breaks the connection.
For several minutes she sits stiffly, paralysed by rage. How dare Alcestis say those things! She inspects the place on her arm where the discoloration stains her skin. It is not a soft sore, she is sure. It’s something else, it has to be; something jungle-born. The face of Canvey, youthfully thin, grins down from the wall. He stares beyond her.
Silva lies sleepless on her bed, the Retreat grinding and flexing around her. The forest is chastened by a hurrying wind. Before dawn, Lal comes in and stands by the window processing information. Its hum is comforting, even though it lacks the human desire or sensitivity to utter a greeting to Silva. Its shape is vaguely human so that it can give public presentations without causing distress to children. It can speak in a computerised voice that sounds vaguely West Indian. Staring at it in the dark, Silva is convinced it has a personality
, a soul; Lal just keeps itself to itself. Its work fascinates it, but nothing else is of interest. It is blessed with the ability never to feel lonely. Neither, Silva is sure, can it feel afraid.
Early morning. Mist hangs down from the forest canopy in shrouds. The air is not hot, but it is very humid. Silva is standing on the damp wooden walkway that has been constructed as a precarious safe route through the forest. The planks feel spongy underfoot; already the wood is rotting. Silva is playing a game with herself. In this game, the forest is the Garden of Eden, the primordial garden. In Eden, there was only one of every tree, shrub and fern. Here, it is the same - almost. Two tree ferns, remnants of a prehistoric age, grow close together in the lush foliage. Overhead, aerial gardens of orchids, ferns and mosses droop tendrils downwards. Everything is poisonous in Eden - plants, animals and insects - but Silva knows that natives to this land build up immunity to such things. Luis and Jesus are up at the Retreat transferring some data Silva has prepared onto holo-crystals. Today, Silva is trying to feel positive, actively fighting lethargic depression. (There is nothing wrong with me.) Standing here, on this narrow sanctuary, she has to fight the compulsion to step off the path. Potential death lies to either side. Luis has told her to watch out for the ajo vine; if someone steps on one they become irretrievably lost in the forest.
What would happen if I did that? Are there any foundations to their legends? Perhaps the vine gives off some kind of vapour if it’s bruised that causes disorientation. There is an explanation for everything.
The forest canopy meets over her head and invisible animals and birds traverse the aerial pathways. Silva squints upwards, narrowing her eyes into the green.
What else lives here unseen?
The jungle is older than memory, and though partially ravished by the encroachment of humanity, still able to reserve a deep inner chastity that is both dangerous and inviolable. Silva wonders whether she can will something inexplicable to manifest before her eyes, whether she can fool the jungle into giving up one of its secrets. Green men-women? The wistful fancies of a lonely madman. No such thing. And yet, as she thinks that, the sensation of unseen eyes fixed upon her unguarded back sweeps over her like a wash of fetid, warm water. She can smell something that reminds her of vomit, or certain species of fungi; sweet carrion. Something is waiting to drop onto her from the whispering canopy; something is thinking of dropping down onto her. She looks over her shoulder, and there is a blur of green movement at the corner of her vision, but then there are always blurs of green movement in this place. Silva has yet to develop what Luis and Jesus call search image - a refined visual sensitivity to the teeming shadows of the jungle. There is nothing between me and the Retreat, she thinks. I can get back at any time. She can even see the walls of the place at the end of the walkway: a short run.