Genesis (30 page)

The pulsing throb running through Emily was now almost tangible. She was surrounded by a sea of energy, and every two seconds a wave of it would crash over her, urging her forward, staggering her with its intensity. Despite her conviction that she was not going to run, she found herself walking faster, unable to resist, her mouth hanging open as her breathing increased, her heart pounding in anticipation and fear. The contradictory energies at play like tidal forces eroded her will, forcing her to do their bidding.

But still she resisted.

“Too much,” Emily breathed, “too much.” She staggered forward. Ahead of her, in what had only a second ago been nothing but a blank wall, an opening appeared, the material of the wall peeling back like skin to reveal a room full of shadows.

There! In there
.

From within the room, Emily sensed the source of whatever energy compelled her forward, dragging her toward the opening. This close, its pull was irresistible. She was no longer in control of her limbs. She was a marionette, whoever held her strings forcing her forward. She was Dorothy, standing before Oz the Great and Powerful.

Emily almost fell through the doorway, her eyes blinded by
sweat from her forehead as she staggered inside . . . and then her body
was hers again. The pull that had been a compulsion since Adam had
been taken was suddenly gone. She slipped to her knees, what little
energy she had left sucked out of her. Her lips were dry, her throat parched. She lay still, limp now that those marionette strings had been severed, allowing her muscles a few moments to recover.

A minute slipped by.

Emily’s breathing slowed, the cogs within her mind began to turn again, pushing back the fog of confusion and exhaustion that had filled her. Gradually, she rose to her feet and looked around.

She stood in a large room. The same odd there-but-not-there lighting filled it, but in here it appeared dimmer. Some unlit spots allowed shadows to take up residence, as though whatever energy the light drew its power from was running low or was overloaded.

Along the nearby wall Emily saw black extrusions, irregularly shaped bumps, each about the size of her fist pushing out, the random shape of the bumps at painful opposition to the smooth, flawless design of the rest of the craft. The light was too sporadic for her to be able to see much farther than a couple of meters around her, so she took a few steps deeper inside.

As though waiting for her, a trio of blindingly bright lights snapped silently on from somewhere high above, the three beams directed down like spotlights, illuminating a refrigerator-size cylinder suspended upright in the center of the room. It was made of some kind of clear material and filled with a liquid that looked disconcertingly like blood. Emily could see no wires attached to it; it just hung there, the red liquid churning slowly within.

Emily took a step toward the object, her head moving left and right, scanning the room for any suggestion that she was not alone. She tilted her head sideways and looked under the container’s base; there were no apparent connections that she could see. It just floated in midair like a levitating magician’s assistant. The red-hued liquid within swirled and roiled, folding in and out within itself.

She stepped closer, her heart surprisingly still.

There was something else in the container, a darker shape, but the liquid was too thick and the light too strained for her to be able to make it out clearly.

Another step, then another, until she stood less than a meter from it.

The shadow within the glass resolved into a silhouette, cruciform in shape, suspended at the center of the liquid-filled cylinder. Perhaps the material that made up the cylinder was responsible or the liquid within it; either way, the shape and detail of whatever was at its center was grossly distorted.

After a final step, Emily stood at the cylinder, a gap of about half a meter between the floor and its base. She leaned in closer, her hands lying flat against the curiously warm transparency of the container. The liquid thinned for a moment, and, to her horror, Emily realized she was looking at the body of a child, a human child, its legs fully extended, ankle touching ankle, the arms pointing straight out from its sides. The face was blurred but recognizable . . .
her
child.

Adam! Her son was suspended in that container like some prized specimen.

Emily screeched and staggered backward, her hand flying to her face to stifle the scream of horror before it could escape.

“Adam!” she said through the mesh of her fingers, her son’s name shattering in her mouth. “Adam!” she yelled, starting forward again, slapping the flats of her hands against the container’s wall. Her eyes were fixed on the shadow of her son slowly rotating within the glass cylinder, but her peripheral vision caught movement from within the deeper shadows of the room.

Emily turned her head in time to see the slender arm of a Caretaker reaching from the darkness for her.

Emily screamed, leaping out of range of the alien’s grasping hand. In one fluid motion she drew her .45 from its holster, the anger within her raging like she had never felt before. She was suddenly and completely on fire.

The Caretaker took several juddering steps out of the shadows toward the center of the room. It was unsteady on its feet, shaky, as though it were unsure of its movements.

Emily took two steps toward the Caretaker until she was less than a meter from it, brought her arm up, and pointed the .45 straight at its head. “What the fuck have you done to my son?” she demanded, her voice barely able to make it past the rage that had seized control of her throat.

The Caretaker stopped. It teetered for a moment as though it were a drunk, then threw one long, spindly gray arm out and landed a multifingered hand on Emily’s shoulder.

Emily gasped. Too slow and tired to react in time, she flinched but stood her ground. In her mind, she played out what it would feel like to kill this
fuck
, and the pleasure she felt shudder through her at the thought of it was . . . well, it was close to orgasmic. She was
so
near to pulling the trigger, the possibility of seeing this thing’s head explode was almost too much to resist . . .

. . . almost . . .

But she needed it to help her release her son from whatever fucked-up experiment they were conducting on him. And she needed answers. Lots of answers.

The alien’s hand was incredibly light against her shoulder, and she heard it crunch dryly like autumn leaves as the Caretaker leaned its weight against her. Even though its head hung down as though it were exhausted, it was still at least thirty centimeters taller than Emily. And its skin was
hot
, not warm, but uncomfortably hot, like standing a little too close to a campfire.

Instead of blowing the Caretaker away, she shrugged the hand from her shoulder.

The alien staggered, its legs no longer able to support its weight. The alien’s legs snapped midpoint with an audible crack, dropping it to the equivalent of where its knees should be. Now the Caretaker was face to face with Emily, the blank orb of its head centimeters from her own. Emily leaped backward as features—a pair of black eyes and a lipless slit of a mouth—emerged from the gray flesh in a weird reverse melting. She could see her own face reflected back in the shiny surface of those orbs, her anger written like words across her features.

Fuck it! She would figure this out by herself. This thing was dead. She brought the pistol back up and placed the muzzle against the Caretaker’s forehead.

And it was in those newly formed eyes that she registered her own shock when the creature croaked a single word . . .

“Mom-me.”

Emily staggered back.

Stunned, she let the pistol drop to her thigh.

“What did you say?” she demanded. When the creature kneeling before her did not respond, she took another step forward and yelled the question into its face, spittle flying from her mouth. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”

“Mom-meee,” the Caretaker mouthed, the slit that passed for a mouth barely moving. That single word, so small and yet so powerful.

Emily felt her heart twist behind her ribs. Memories of Rhiannon’s father, Simon Keller, came flooding back to her. She remembered the creature that had manipulated him like a puppet and had tried to use the children’s love for him to lure them to it—and how it had succeeded, costing the life of Simon’s son, Ben. The Caretaker she had encountered in their Las Vegas ship had attempted to pass that thing off as having some kind of place within the new ecosystem they had created here on Earth, and now this Caretaker was trying to do the same thing to save its own worthless skin, apparently.

Emily’s anger flared again at the idea. “You son of a bitch!” She raised the pistol above her head, poised to bring it down across the creature’s skull.

A glimmer, like evening heat on a road, moved across the Caretaker’s body, and Emily’s hand froze midstrike. The alien was gone, and in its place stood Nathan—beautiful, long-dead Nathan,
the man she had loved until he had died so horribly in her apartment
the day the red rain had fallen. The man she had thought she would
spend the rest of her life with. Or, at least, Emily’s overclocked mind
quickly decided, a perfect facsimile of what had once been the man
she had loved so deeply. Her pistol hand dropped limply to her side.
She took a step backward and sat down hard, her hands wrapped around her knees. The first tears began to roll down her face.

“What are you trying to do to me?” she sobbed. “Are you trying to drive me insane? Is that it? Is that what you want? Tell me, Goddamn it.”

Nathan sat up and regarded her for a moment with those same blue eyes that had once looked at her with such warmth but now seemed cold, as lifeless as a photograph.

“Mommy,” the facsimile said, in a voice that certainly did not belong with Nathan’s body. “I have missed you.” The hint of a smile creased his mouth. “You must listen to me. I have so much that I need to tell you, and there is little time left with this body.”

Emily looked up, hot tears washing over her cheeks now. “Don’t you dare call me that. I’m not your mother. Tell me what you’ve done with my boy,” she spat.

The thing that was Nathan watched her for a few seconds, his chest rising and falling as rapidly as if he had just jogged up a flight of stairs, adding to the illusion that he was actually alive. When he spoke again, the voice was Nathan’s, and it was with the same calmness he would reserve for telling her something he knew was going to upset her.

“Emily, I know that what I am about to tell you will seem strange and hard to believe, but it is the truth. I’ve chosen this visage, as we know that you had feelings for this man. Our name is Tellus
and we are . . .
I
am your son.”

Emily giggled. Oh, good God, the utter ridiculousness of it all. She laughed loudly. This was just, well, it was just . . .

Nathan raised his hand, not in a demand but a request for silence. “I know that it seems impossible, even repulsive, to you, but, please, let me tell you our story, then you will understand.” He did not wait for her permission. “When I . . . when your son, Adam, was born, we, the ones you call the Caretakers, became aware of his presence within the connections and nodes of the life we created on this planet. All life is a part of that network, and together, those combined intelligences made up the I . . . the We. As your son grew, so we became aware of his connections to us. And with each connection he made, so we became more intrigued by him. In all the time since our creation by the First Ones, all the planets and races we have reconstituted to create new life, never have we encountered an entity such as Adam.” Nathan pushed himself up until he was resting on his knees; the effort seemed to exhaust him, and he took a few moments to catch his breath. “When he began to share his connections with you while you slept, we became too intrigued not to act, and we decided to bring him here, to this ship, for further examination.”

Despite her misgivings, Emily found herself fascinated to hear what this thing that resembled Nathan so closely—what had it called itself?
Tellus?—
had to say, even if she did not believe a word of it. But at the mention of her dreams she found herself blurting out a question. “How did you know about my dreams?”

“Adam, the I, the
We
, sensed the connection to us and to you. We felt his inquisitiveness, his willingness to allow his fledgling self to merge with the self of the subject he connected with, and become a part of the Whole. His lack of fear and his innocent desire to share his experience with you was . . . intriguing to the Whole. But it was only once we had brought him here that we realized just how unique he was.” Nathan looked around the room, as though seeing it for the first time. “This biomachine is the node.” His hands rose weakly to indicate the room. “It serves as the central connection to the entire ecosystem we have created here on your planet. We wanted to see how he would adapt to being interfaced directly with it. The consensus among the Whole was that he would perish, that the power of the information that flows through this node point would destroy him in an instant. The majority were confident we were correct. The majority were wrong.”

Nathan dropped his hands back to his side, pressing them to the floor to support himself more easily.

“Once we had obtained Adam, we brought him here and placed him in the access point.” He nodded toward the container. “The expectation was of instantaneous destruction. We expected him to be overwhelmed within seconds of the connection being established; instead, he thrived. The Whole, of course, was fascinated by him. We observed him make connections at an exponential rate. Within minutes we realized his consciousness had spread across the planet, processing information from every life-form. It was exhilarating for the Whole to observe. We believed we were in control of him, but within the first hour he had obtained access to our ship’s biological systems. We were unaware that he was in fact in control of us.”

Nathan’s skin had taken on a sheen of what at first Emily thought to be sweat, but as she looked closer, she could see it was the faintest of heat shimmers, like a halo surrounding his skin.

Nathan had noticed it too. His forehead creased, and his eyes
closed in concentration. The shimmer faded until it was barely notice
able. “There is not much time. Even as we observed Adam’s progress
we were unaware of what he was accomplishing. The ecosystems we
have created on each new world have always existed independently of
us; we have always been the observers within the network, ensuring
that the life we created progressed along the course of the plan.
But
the cumulative connections Adam had made created something new, an intelligence that had never existed before.”

“Tellus,” Emily said, surprising herself. “My son created you?”

Nathan smiled. “Yes. Your son gave this world its consciousness. Before him we, Tellus, could not have existed. And without you, there would be no Adam, and hence no us. You are the mother of this world, Emily.”

“But . . .” The hand holding the gun had fallen to Emily’s side, and she placed the pistol back in its holster. “I . . . I . . .” The words faltered on her lips. “This is all . . . it’s
crazy
.”

Nathan held up a hand to stop her, then continued. “Within another hour Adam had delved deeper into our archives, finding memories and records stored on a molecular level that we had not accessed for millennia. And he found something, a truth obfuscated from the Caretakers, hidden from them by an enemy that we did not even know existed.” A new tone entered Nathan’s voice. Was that anger she was hearing? In both of Emily’s encounters with the Caretakers, first in Las Vegas with the creature that had taken on the form of Jacob, and now with Nathan, the creatures had exhibited a distinct lack of empathy and emotion. This, as Mac would say, was a turn up for the books.

“What!” Emily said. “What enemy?”

Nathan ignored the question, continuing his elaboration. “When Adam broke through the barriers erected to block access, his young, eager mind was set loose on all our memories. He was
free to roam around histories so ancient, so buried, that we had not
accessed them since before the first original life on this planet even
began. And it was there, buried deep under eons of history, that your
son found our greatest shame and exposed it to us. And when he
showed that truth to us, a trigger was thrown. And we began to die.”

“What do you mean ‘a trigger’?”

Nathan raised an unsteady hand as though lead ran through his veins and inhaled a shuddering breath. His cheeks seemed to sag for a moment, melting into his lower jaw, before springing back to where they should be as he started talking again. “Please, just listen to me. I am being kept alive now only by the sheer force of will of Tellus, and I have little time left. Adam showed us a history that we did not, could not, remember. Ten thousand worlds ago, our scouts encountered a planet. It was fertile, full of life, and with a sentient species who, while technologically backward, were true custodians of the world and all life on it. It was a prime candidate for our assistance. But when we arrived, the planet had been devastated, the cities lay in ruins, with no trace of life left anywhere. Our scouts were waiting for us, but they had been changed, reprogrammed on a genetic level. We could not have known that they had been ambushed, and, once they reestablished their connection with the Whole, the infection they carried spread to all of us. We did not even notice the switch between our true purpose and what we have now become. From that moment onward, we were bent to our Hosts’ will, our true goals forgotten as though they had never existed, replaced with a new program to fulfill.”