Forever Free (23 page)

They spoke in absolute unison: "When I do something like this, I'm an actual 'group mind,' like Taurans and Man aspire to being. It can be useful, but confusing, too." The two figures collapsed into a pile of hundreds of scuttling cockroaches. Two Mickey Mouse robots rolled toward them, and they quickly re-formed into John Wayne, who kicked one of the robots onto the roof of Molly Malone's.

"How do you do that?" I asked.

"It's a matter of practice. Eye-foot coordination."

"No, I mean how do you change back and forth? You can't take molecules of metal and turn them into organic material."

"I suppose you can," he said. "I do it all the time."

"What I mean is, it's inconsistent with physical law."

"No, it's not. Your version of physics is inconsistent with reality."

I was starting to get an Alice-in-Wonderland dizziness. Maybe Lewis Carroll had been one of them.

"Let me turn it around," he continued. "How do you turn food into flesh? Eating."

I thought for a second. "Your body breaks down the food into simpler compounds. Amino acids, fats, carbohydrates. Components that aren't burned for energy may turn into flesh."

"That's your opinion," he said. "I had a friend a few thousand years ago, not far from here, who said that you took part of the spirit of the animal or plant that you ate, and it became part of your own spirit. Explains all kinds of sickness."

"Very poetic," I said, "but wrong."

"You likewise. You just have different ideas about what poetry is, and what 'right' is."

"Okay. So tell me how you do it."

"I don't have the faintest idea. I was born being able to do it, just as you were born able to metabolize. My Timucuan friend was able to metabolize as well as you, even if he described it differently."

"In nine thousand years, you haven't tried to find out how your body works?"

"Not everybody's a scientist." He changed from John Wayne to a man I vaguely recognized from the kids' schoolwork, an artist whose medium was body sculpture. He had four and six fingers, and a heat-sensing eye installed in his forehead. "I'm a kind of historian."

"You've lived alongside humans since prehistory," Cat said, "and no one ever suspected?"

"We don't keep real good records," he said, "but I think that at first, we were open about what we were, and co-existed. Somewhere along the line, I think when you got language and society, we started to hide out."

"So you became myths," Diane said.

"Yeah; I can do a great werewolf," he said. "And I think we were taken for angels and gods sometimes. Every now and then I'd be a plain human for a lifetime, appearing to age. But that's kind of boring and sad."

"You've been Man as well?" the sheriff asked. "You've tapped into the Tree?"

"Not as tricky as you might think. I have a lot of control over my neural organization. The Tree can't tell me from a human—and you guys are just humans, with a hole in your skull and some odd ideas." He turned into Wayne again, and said with the actor's drawl, "Buncha god-damn Commies, if ya ask me."

"Did you do it?" The sheriff and the Omni made an odd tableau in the middle of us: the two biggest men standing there, both with guns holstered on their hips. "Did you make them disappear?"

John Wayne didn't invite him to slap leather, a challenge I don't think he would have understood. He just shook his head sadly. "I don't know what happened. I was in an elevator with two people, two Men, and they just plain disappeared. There was a little 'pop' and their clothes fell to the floor. The elevator doors opened and I rolled out—I was in the shape of a food-dispensing robot—and the whole office building was empty, except for clothes.

"There was a huge racket outside, thousands of traffic accidents. A floater crashed through a picture window; I took human shape and ran down the stairs to the basement until things calmed down."

"Where were you at the time?" I asked.

"Titusville sector. It's part of Spaceport Administration. We went near it on our way here." He took the shape of an oversized statue of Albert Einstein, and sat in the dust, cross-legged, his eyes at our level. "It was a convenient coincidence, since I would have headed for a spaceport no matter where I'd been at the time. Waiting for someone to come explain what has happened."

"I don't think we know any more than you," Marygay said.

"You know your own circumstances. Maybe together we can come up with something." He looked off to the east. "Your ship is an old-fashioned fighter, Sumi class, and its communication system has safeguards that prevented it from telling me much. I know you came from Middle Finger via the Aleph-10 collapsar. The ship also knows you, and it, were somewhere else before, but it can't say where."

"We were in the middle of nowhere," I said, "a tenth of a light-year from Middle Finger. We'd taken a converted cruiser and were headed out twenty thousand light-years—"

"I remember that from the Tree. I thought the request was denied."

"We sort of hijacked it," Marygay said.

Einstein nodded. "Some people suggested you might. That they should have let you go ahead with it, to prevent violence."

"One of me was killed," said the Tauran.

There was an uncomfortable silence. The Omni said something in Tauran, and Antres replied, "True."

"We'd gone about a tenth of a light-year, when the antimatter fueling the cruiser suddenly evaporated."

"Evaporated? Do you have a scientific explanation for that?" Einstein grew a third eye and blinked it.

"No. The ship suggested 'transient-barrier virtual particle substitution,' but as far as I could find out, it doesn't apply. Anyhow, we limped back to Middle Finger in these converted Sumi fighters, and found everybody gone. It turns out that if you make corrections for relativistic simultaneity, they disappeared the same time our antimatter did.

"We assumed that our being off Middle Finger had saved us. But it happened here, too."

He stroked his huge moustache. "Perhaps you caused it."

"What?"

"You just posited the argument yourself. If two improbable things happen simultaneously, they must be related. Maybe one caused the other."

"No. If putting a bunch of people in a starship and accelerating caused impossible things to happen, we would have noticed long ago."

"But you weren't going anywhere. Except the future."

"I don't think the universe cares about our intent."

Einstein laughed. "That's your belief system again. You just used the word 'impossible' to describe events you know did happen."

Cat was amused. "You have to admit he has a point."

"Okay. But the other anomaly is that you guys are still here, when all the humans and Taurans disappeared. So maybe you caused it."

He changed into a huge Indian brave, I suppose a Timucuan, scarred with elaborate tattoos, impressively naked, smelling like a wet goat. "That's more like it. Though I'll ask the others about virtual particle transient barrier, whatever. Some of them know science."

"Can you talk to them now, like telepathy?" Cat asked.

"No, not unless they're in my line of sight. The way I talked to your ship. We used to just call each other up, but most of the systems are failing. We leave messages on the Tree now."

"We ought to check the Tree again ourselves," the sheriff said, "Antres and I"

"Especially the Tauran Tree," the brave said. "We can tap it, but a lot of it is confusing."

"I'm afraid much of it is confusing to me as well," Antres said. "I'm from Tsogot. We're in contact with Earth, or were in contact, but our cultures have been diverging for centuries."

"That might be useful." The brave changed into a kindly-looking old man. "A doubly alien perspective." He produced a blue package of cigarettes and lit one, wrapped in yellow paper, which smelled even more noxious than the one before. I sorted through grandfatherly images and came up with Walt Disney.

"Why are so many of your images from the twentieth century?" I asked. "Are you reading our minds, Marygay and me?"

"No, I can't do that. I just like the period—end of innocence, before the Forever War. Everything got kind of complicated after that." He took a deep drag on the cigarette and closed his eyes, evidently savoring it. "Then it got too simple, if you ask me. We were all sort of waiting for this Man thing to run its course."

"It survived so long because it worked," the sheriff said mildly.

"Termite colonies work," Disney said. "They don't produce interesting conversation." To Antres: "You Taurans got a lot more done, or at least more interesting things, before you had a group mind. I went to Tsogot once, as a xenosociologist, and studied your history."

"It's academic now," I said; "both Man and Tauran. No group, no group mind."

The sheriff shook his head. "We'll grow back, same as you. Most of the frozen ova and sperm are Man."

"You assume the others are all dead," Disney said, "but all we really know is that they've disappeared."

"They're all in some big nudist colony in the sky," I said.

"We have no evidence one way or the other. Your group is here and so is ours. Omni on the Moon and Mars and in local spaceships all report the disappearance of humans and Taurans, but none of us is gone, as far as we can tell."

"Other starships?" Stephen said.

"That's why I was waiting at the Cape. There are twenty-four within one collapsar jump of Stargate. Two should have returned by now. But only unmanned drones have come in, with routine messages."

"Why do you think the Omni were spared?" Marygay said. "Because you're immortal?"

"Oh, we're not immortal, except the way an amoeba is." He smiled at me. "If you had targeted me this morning, rather than the hot dog stand, you would probably have done enough damage to kill me."

"I'm sorry—"

He waved it away. "You thought I was a machine. But no, except for you, the thing seems species-selective. Humans and Taurans disappear; birds and bees and Omni don't."

"And the thing that sets us apart is that we were trying to escape," Cat said.

Disney shrugged. "Suppose for a moment that the universe does care about intent. What you were doing would get its notice."

That was a bit much. "And that would piss off the universe so much that it would destroy ten billion people and Taurans."

Anita moaned softly. "Something … something's wrong." She stood erect, her back arching, and her eyes grew round and bulged. Her face swelled. Her coveralls became taut and the seams started to split.

Then she exploded: one horrible wet smack, and we were all spattered with blood and tissue; a piece of bone glanced off my cheekbone with stinging force.

I looked at the Omni. He was Disney, covered with blood and gore, and then he flickered, between Disney and an apparition that was mostly fangs and claws—and then he was Uncle Walt again, clean.

Most of us, including me, sat down. Chance and Steve sort of fell down. Where Anita had been standing, there were a pair of boots with two blood-streaked stalks of bone.

"I didn't do this," Disney said.

The sheriff drew his pistol. "I don't believe you." He shot him point-blank in the heart.

The next few minutes were grotesque. The little robots rolled out to clean up—Mickey and Donald and Minnie chanting admonitory rhymes while they speared and vacuumed up the fragmentary remains of a woman I'd known for half my life. When they went to police up her boots, all that was left that had any individuality, I followed the Omni's example and kicked them away. The sheriff saw what I was doing and helped.

We each picked up a gory boot. "There has to be some way to bury her," he said.

Disney sat up, clutching his chest. "If you'll stop shooting me, I can help." He closed his eyes, his skin chalk grey, and for a moment it looked like he was just going to fall back dead. But he transformed himself, slowly, limb by limb, into a large black working man in overalls, clutching a shovel. He got to his feet with exaggerated stiffness.

"You been around these normal people too long," he said in a gravelly Louis Armstrong bass. "You suppose' to control that temper." He whacked a robot away with the shovel, and pointed with it, toward a stand of palm trees. "Let's take her over there, put her to rest." He addressed the others. "You all get inside and clean up. We take care of this part."

He hefted the shovel and walked toward the palms. As he passed the sheriff, he said, "Don't do that. It hurts."

The sheriff and I followed him, each with our grisly token. It took him about a minute to dig a deep square hole.

We put the boots in the hole and he refilled it and patted the dirt smooth. "Did she have a religion?"

"Orthodox New Catholic," I said.

"I can do that." He absorbed the shovel and became a tall priest in a black cowled robe, with tonsure and heavy cross on a chain swinging from his neck. He said a few words in Latin and made a cross gesture over the grave.

Still the priest, he walked with us back to Molly Malone's, where several people were sitting on porch chairs and a rocker. Stephen was weeping uncontrollably, Marygay and Max holding on to him. He and Anita had had a son together, who died in an accident at nine or ten. They drifted apart after that, but were still friends. Rii brought him a glass of water and a pill.

"Rii," I said, "if that's some sort of trank, I could use one myself." I felt as if I was about to explode, out of grief and confusion.

She looked at the vial. "It's mild enough. Anybody want to take a nap?" I think everybody took one, except Antres 906 and the priest. Marygay and I went up to the inn's second floor and found a bed, and collapsed in each other's arms.

It was almost sundown when I woke up. I got out of bed as quietly as possible and found that Molly Malone's plumbing still worked, even to hot water. Marygay got up while I was washing, and we went downstairs together.

Stephen and Matt were making noise in the dining area. They'd pulled several tables together and set out some plastic dishes and forks, and a pile of food boxes. "Our fearless leader," she said. "You get to open the first box."