Endgame (17 page)

He didn't. We hoisted Tokughavita up onto an examination table, and now he was intensely curious about what the hell we were doing. I held him down, imagining the little Newbie viruses swarming all over him, over my arms, down my throat and lungs. . . . I shuddered, but we just had to know.

Arlene made a circuit of the room, reading labels on machines: “VitSin Mon—vital signs, no good; uh . . . AutoSurg, Lase, KlaveSep—hey, Fly, does this thing separate the two binaries of a Klave pair?”

“Search me, Arlene. Better yet, keep reading the damned labels. There's got to be a microbiological auto lab here somewhere.”

“MikeLab?” asked the overcaptain. I'd been thinking of him as our “captive” for so long that I forgot he was a real person with real concerns. “Have something? Am sick?” Now he sounded horrified and jerked against my restraining hold.

“You might have picked up a bug,” I said noncommittally; too much chalance: he panicked, his face turned white, and his strength doubled as he frantically tried to buck me off him. I leaned down with all my weight, crushing him to the cushiony examination table. “Hold still, damn you! You want me to clock you upside the head? If that's the only way I can keep you here . . .”

At the warning note in my voice, he quieted instantly, but I could feel his heart pounding through my forearm as I held him down. “Am going to die? To die? To die?”

“Not that kind of bug,” I growled. “You've been hunting the Newbies—the aliens that attacked us, the ones that wiped out the Freds. . . . Well, we figure that's where they went.”

“Where? How?”

“VanCliburn ElektroStim,” Arlene read. “PosEmit, PosAlign, PosPolar.”

“The aliens, the ones that evolve real fast—we think they evolved into microscopic form, and they're infecting you, all of you. That's why you're sometimes twice as smart as normal, how humans built this ship and . . . and other stuff.”

“On me?” Overcaptain Tokughavita slowly stared down the length of his body, every muscle tense and trembling. I don't know what he was looking for; if the Newbies were large enough to be visible, they'd have been spotted long ago.

“We have to get you under the—what did you call it?”

“MikeLab is there,” he said, looking at the last machine in the semicircle surrounding the tables.

“Arlene!” I shouted, nodding at the identified device. She ran there immediately.

“MikeLab/MolecuLab—this is it, Fly!”

“Drag it over here. Toku, how do we hook this thing up? We want to examine your tissue to see if they've infected you.”

He squirmed. “Let up, let up! Can take sample myself, examine!”

“Arlene?”

She gritted her teeth and pulled her lips tight. “Jeez, Fly, it's your call. You're the guy with three stripes on your sleeve. Personally, I'd sooner trust a Fred.”

I slowly relaxed my grip on Tokughavita. He struggled away from me and sat up. He turned back to look at me, trying to see if I were going to do anything. When I didn't move, he slid to the ground and tried to stand, but his knees were so weak, he fell to a squat on the deck. The overcaptain forced himself upright and leaned on the MikeLab just as Arlene wheeled it over.

He stared at the mass of buttons, obviously unfamiliar with the system. “Are you a medical officer?” I asked. Tokughavita shook his head tightly. His pale hand hesitated over the various touchscreen buttons, then finally landed on one marked
Sample.

He inserted his hand into a small shelf that looked like the covered tray that coffee comes out of in a vending machine. A light flashed, and he convulsively jerked his hand away—a small nick was gouged from the heel of his thumb, and it bled nicely for a few minutes.

“You got some way to project the image where we can see it?” asked Arlene. Overcaptain Tokughavita just stared at her, uncomprehendingly; he seemed more interested in his bleeding hand. Maybe he fretted he was going to bleed to death.

It was so weird—when in the slightest danger, they totally freaked, not just Tokughavita, but Josepaze when I had the knife to his throat, and even the clowns at the dinner table when a knife flipped into the air. But when they saw an injury was
not
going to lead to death (the one thing they could never fix, being human), they shut off the fear like an electrical circuit.

Only one explanation I could see: they had somehow come to believe that nothing existed except the material world, that death completely ended everything.
No soul, no spirit, no “spiritual community” higher than lumpen materialism. And maybe that was why they were so dadblamed individualistic: with
nothing
outside themselves, why should they bother believing even in society or their own community?

So anomie—lack of a higher sense of morality, of faith—led directly to their ridiculous atomism. If you don't have faith in anything, not even the survival of your own species, then why
not
every man for himself? Women and children overboard, I'm taking the lifeboat!

I realized something. Maybe it was that very lack of faith, caused by the discovery that we're the only race in the galaxy that isn't crudely immortal, that allowed the damned Newbies to somehow infest the humans in the first place. The Newbies were so frightened of our core of faith, it acted like a
vaccine
against them. So maybe Arlene and I were immune? I shook my head; too deep for me.

I leaned over and stared at the machine myself. It was squat with a video touchpanel, like a slot machine. Most of the labels were incomprehensible—one read only
DxTxMx,
but in the lower left corner was an orange button labeled
Viz.
On blind faith, I pressed it.

Somebody up there, etc. A hunk of cheese suddenly appeared, floating in front of our faces. I jumped back, then realized it was a color 3-D image of the nick taken out of Tokughavita's hand, magnified thousands of times. The button below
Viz
was labeled +
Mag
– so I started pressing +, and the magnification increased, the outer edges of the image vanishing to keep it overall the same size. There was probably some way to rotate it, but I hadn't a clue.

Eventually, just standing there holding my finger on the + side of the touchbutton, the magnification grew so large that we could just make out the tiny dots of individual cells. As it got larger, we saw numerous tiny critters . . . obviously, his flesh was covered with
bacteria; all flesh is. But we were looking for something that would jump out as wrong, or alien . . . not that that was a given; maybe the Newbies evolved into microbes that looked just like everything else. But it was all we had to go on.

Several minutes passed, and I was still standing there like a dummy, magnifying by holding my numb fingers, one by one, against the screen. At last, within the individual cell, I started to see chromosomes—but still nothing that looked really alien. Deeper and deeper we went, like that old ride that used to be at Disneyland in California when I was a kid. At last, I saw the spiral shades of what must be DNA or RNA or something. “What happened to the color?” I mused. “Why is it so dark?”

“At this magnification,” Arlene said, “you can't use visible light to see things. When you get down to individual atoms, you essentially fire electrons at it and look at silhouettes. Nothing else has a small enough wavelength to even notice events on the angstrom level.”

“Oh. Of course.” Actually, I didn't have a clue what she had just said, but I caught the important point: the machine wasn't broken; that was the best it could do for physics reasons.

When I blew up the image large enough to see the individual strands of DNA, I finally found what I was looking for: I saw a whole series of elaborate, ring-shaped,
triple-
helixes—and no way was a three-strand helix natural to a human body.

I had found my Newbies, and my mouth was so dry I couldn't even work up enough spit to swallow. There they were, small as life . . . not just microscopic, but
molecule-size.

And those tiny things were the enemy, controlling the overcaptain's thoughts and actions whenever they chose to override his own will. How in God's name were we supposed to fight something that could pass
right through a bullet without noticing anything but vast amounts of empty space?

I would have been awed, but I was too busy being scared.

I
f you looked up the word “stupefied” in the dictionary, you'd have found a picture of Overcaptain Tokughavita. He was more stunned than any six other people I'd ever known . . . for about ten seconds. Then all of a sudden, his expression vanished, replaced by that air of insufferable intelligence I knew meant the Newbie disease had taken control once again.

This time, we were ready. Arlene and I grabbed him, one at each end; that force plus the cuffs meant he was effectively neutralized. Time for the interrogation.

“What is your name?” I asked.

He—they, whatever—looked me up and down; in a flash, it must have comprehended how much we knew or had guessed. “We are now the resuscitators.”

“Why—”

“Because we bring the dead back to life.”

“How much access—”

“Most of the long-term verbal memory, no associative or fantasy memory.”

I held up my hand. “Halt! Wait until I finish the question before you answer it, so Arlene can follow the—debriefing.”

“Signal when you are done.”

“I'll nod my head. You don't mind answering questions?” Silence. Then I remembered to nod my head.

“We exchange information, however you prefer it.”

The speech patterns were utterly different: Tokughavita was using articles and explicating the subject; I was about a hundred percent convinced that this really was a different person. Well, ninety-nine percent, maybe. He even looked different; there was no emotion, no impatience, no shred of self remaining. Maybe the Newbies, the Resuscitators, had emotions, but they simply reacted so differently that we couldn't understand them.

“What should we call you?”

“Resuscitators.”

Arlene snorted, and I translated perfectly in my head,
Another goddamned hive-collective!
We had already known that would be the case from the last Newbie we had interrogated; I don't know why she was so outraged. I asked him, or them, a few more innocuous questions to put them off their guard; then I took a sudden left turn: “So why haven't you infected Arlene and me?” I nodded, but they remained silent.

I had struck a nerve. There was no change in expression, respiration, heart rate—but I knew I had actually touched a point that puzzled and frustrated the Resuscitators. At once, I realized why they had gone to such lengths to question us about our faith—Arlene in mankind and me in God. They had figured out that our faith was somehow connected to their own inability to get inside of us.

Evidently, Arlene followed the same train of thought. “We're immune!” she exclaimed, smiling in triumph. “You can't get inside us, can you?”

“We can say nothing now.” Now that their game was blown, the Newbies didn't bother speaking like the humans of the People's State of Earth.

“Of course you can't,” I said, sticking my face right
next to Tokughavita's. “You're smarter than us . . . smart enough to know you can't lie your way out of it, smart enough to know how dangerous
we
are, so suddenly you don't want to answer questions anymore.”

The Resuscitators abruptly faded from the human's face. Over the next ten or fifteen seconds, the brain of Tokughavita returned, cold-booting. He blinked in surprise and insisted he didn't remember a word he had spoken.

But he did remember the salient discovery; he curled up on the examination table, hugging his knees with cuffed hands, head down. “What am to do? Don't want infestation.”

“Do? Toku, there's only one thing you can do—join with us. Come to us, rise up against them.”

“But cannot win! Too powerful, use own minds against us!”

“I can rid you of them, Toku . . .
if you want it enough.”

He looked up, eyes wide, color starting to return to his cheeks. He breathed through his mouth, licking his dry lips over and over. “Want . . . want more . . . more than anything. What am to do?”

“Do you believe me that I can rid you of this hellish infestation?”

“Believe.”

“Do you believe
I can save your body and soul?
Do you?”

“Yes, yes, believe!”

I caught Toku by his blue-filigreed lapels and bodily dragged him off the table in a dramatic, violent mode. I dropped him heavily to the deck, where he cringed, his courage falling away from my wrath—I might
kill
him! “Toku, if you believe, then believe in the All-Knowing One—have faith, let my faith wash you like the blood of the Lamb! Tokughavita,
open your soul to me!
Open it to faith in any spirit you find holy . . . but believe, believe!”

I became more and more dramatic, hulking over him, doing my best to imitate the exact tent-revival ministers who were forever roaming my county when I was a young boy, trying to convert all us Catholics away from what they called the “Whore of Babylon.” I felt a burning guilt in my heart; I knew, deep down, that I was committing some terrible sin. But I knew what I was doing, or I thought I did. I sweated buckets, while Arlene supported me in the background, confirming what I “called” with a response, as necessary.

It wasn't great theater, I admit; it would never have turned a head at the Chapel of Mary and Martha's, where I was an inmate for four long years of high school under Sister Lucrezia. But in the world that Tokughavita came from, he had built up no resistance to appeals to his proto-faith. He fell hard, and in less time than it took Father Bartolomeo, head of the Chapel and Sister Lucrezia's titular boss (if I'm allowed to say “titular” in the same sentence with a nun), to convince all us kids that hell was eternal, Arlene and I had lit a burning faith in Tokughavita's soul—a faith in
us!