Genetic lessons from a far place.
He got up without knowing why, and walked outside. Now the jagged horizon was there—the same frame he had seen in his mind.
Somehow this Lane had opened, unfolding itself like a blossoming flower. At the command of the thing in his dining room.
And above sung the technicolor gallery he had seen in the mind-memories of the dead bodies. Electron-positron plasmas, immense and intricate, hanging where the stars had once been. He was seeing into the very end of the universe, the Omega Point, hanging in a sky where logic said it could not be. But was.
He stood there trying to fathom how he could see an open sky from inside the self-folded esty. This simple but colossal change meant that someone—something—had mastered the esty itself, could unwrap it like a Christmas package to find fresh delights.
He walked down into the torn and seared yard.
Without a sign or word, he knew that the Far One was gone.
Across a wrecked landscape came his family. Nikka limped. Benjamin and Angelina carried Ito’s body.
“He’s gone,” Nikka said simply.
One Grey Mech’s bolt had killed his son. In the same instant Angelina had suffered an in-body electronic blowout and the skin along her left side had ruptured, a thick purple bruise gone stiff and already yellowing.
On his oldest son’s face was an expression of surprise and pain. Nigel reached out to the cradled body and ruffled the hair tenderly, bent and caught the familiar smell. Then he made himself stop.
“I . . . we’ve got to . . .” He could not make his throat work.
“The readers,” Nikka said, limping past him toward the house.
The thing he had seen was not there now. The rooms felt cold.
They got Ito into the readers and did what they could to pull forth from his brain cells the essence of him. Fluids, sutures, digital artifice. The labor was long and the family scarcely spoke, concentrating fully and leached of all else but their yearning.
They sat at last on their porch and watched the feathery swaths of brilliance in the sky. He told them what he could and Nikka spoke for the first time since they had lowered Ito into the preserving solutions. “So the bodies . . .”
“Were addressed to us.” Nigel nodded grimly. “Or someone like us.”
Angelina supplied in a wan, empty voice, “Someone who would come.”
“And we may not be the first.” Nikka watched the slow churn in the sky impassively. “The Grey Mech who killed Ito would have killed others, too.”
“But it did not get all of us,” Nigel added. “The other Grey Mech prevented that.”
Benjamin’s face had been containing anger for a long time as they worked and now it came out, first in a string of oaths and then a final forlorn wail. At last, gasping, he said, “Why? Bodies sent back like invitations—Grey Mechs—Ito—
for what?”
Nigel knew that there was no real answer to the despair under Benjamin’s words and that the best anyone could do was to talk about the surface. So he said gravely, hands knotted before him, “The bodies attracted the attention of humans. They were like bottles with scraps of paper rolled inside, tossed out into an ocean. Only the curious, only someone who understood the human need to communicate across the impossible stretch of time, would pay any attention.”
Nikka’s drawn mouth moved but the rest of her face did not, eyes staring into an emptiness. “Most mechs have never respected us enough to learn how to read our brains directly. To them we’re messy, archaic. So they wouldn’t know how to decipher the bodies, even if they cared.”
“Except the Grey Mech,” Angelina added.
“Grey Mechs,” Nigel insisted. “One Grey Mech opposed the other. Saved us, I expect.”
They sat in silence as chill winds blew across the fitful landscape. Nigel knew they were all digesting the strange fact that there was more than one Grey Mech, acting out of concert.
“So one faction of mechs wants us to survive?” Nikka asked with sudden bitterness.
Nigel got up and walked behind her chair, began kneading her neck and shoulders. His broken arm somehow did not hurt now though he knew that he would inevitably pay for this later.
She resisted him for a moment and then relaxed into his hands. He felt the release in her. “I suppose there are Grey Mechs from different times, eras,” she said. “The Grey of our time wanted to stop any humans from learning about that sky.”
Above, prickly streamers wreathed hard orange knots, bristling with ferment.
Angelina said wonderingly, looking up, “That’s what the mechs want to do. Make themselves into those plasmas.”
Nigel nodded. “So they can outlive solid matter itself.”
Nikka said with caustic scorn, “Our son died because he had seen that?”
“In a way,” Nigel said gently, his hands digging into her tense muscles. “To stop us from spreading the information. And that’s why the somebody”—he thought of the strange yet human figure he had seen—“sent the bodies. To bring us here.”
Angelina said, “I hate the way we have been jerked around.”
Nigel nodded, his expression distant. “We aren’t the superior species here. We get used, that’s the order of things. I wonder if our pets sometimes feel what we’re feeling now.”
Nikka was inconsolable. “And all for what?”
Suddenly he recalled Alexandria saying, Who would read a suredead body, lover?
Nigel ventured a guess, the only one left. “So we would go back. We understand this in a way that images or memories in a body could not. Somebody wants us to take back what we’ve learned.”
