Pandemonium (41 page)

She swam as fast as she could through the warm water, fueled with adrenaline and moving violently, spinning and kicking forward. At last, she climbed out on the ledge.

She ran up the rocky shore and hoisted herself onto the gondola’s concrete landing with the others as Dima and Abrams shot down several man-of-wars that were chasing her. Nell ran to Geoffrey and embraced him, soaking wet. “I had to get them off me,” she whispered.

“Oh!” he whispered back, and he squeezed her to him. “That’s why I married you.”

“Come on, you guys!” Sasha said.

They all ran up a flight of stairs chiseled into the hard limestone that ended at a steel hatch in the cavern’s vertical wall.

Hender cranked the hatch’s wheel with four trembling arms, and they all pulled, bursting the door open through layers of corrosion and rainbowfire. Inside was a tunnel as dark as midnight that cut through the rock.

Geoffrey pulled the hatch closed and turned the dog wheel behind them as Abrams lit a flashlight and led the way through a twisting tunnel that climbed almost straight up through the mountain’s bedrock.

After twenty minutes, they had begun to wonder if they would ever find an end to the spiraling passageway, when they finally spotted what looked like a dead end a hundred feet above them.

Abrams yelled as a door materialized in the light of his dying flashlight.

As they reached the hatch, their excitement grew, and Hender, Geoffrey, and Abrams all grabbed the wheel, pulling it hard, finally turning the handle. They pushed the door until it yielded. And as it opened, a cold gust of fresh air met them, and they saw blue sky.

Squeezing through the gap, they found themselves on the northwest face of Mount Kazar, and they laughed together as they pushed the rock-covered door closed and it blended once more into the mountainside.

Geoffrey gave Nell his sweater as they ran down the slope that was covered with blindingly bright patches of snow. They looked up at the sky, eager to pull that open expanse into their eyes and breathe the crisp air blowing over their faces.

“You probably lost all your natural microbial defenses, too, in that salty water, honey,” Geoffrey said, limping on his right leg.

“Guess I’ll have to roll in dirty sheets for a night to get them back.”

He smiled. “We need a honeymoon.”

“I agree, Dr. Binswanger.” She took Geoffrey’s cell phone out of his sweater pocket and punched in a number. “Hey! It works!”

JUNE 23

2:14 P.M.

The New Light

Just before the last spark went out, a new light came. Now sels are free in a much bigger world. Humans saved us: we saved each other.

Hender took three hands off his keyboard as he got a Skype call. With all three hands overlapping, he could type 180 words per minute without seeming to move his fingers. He clicked his mouse with a fourth hand and opened one window on his computer screen in which was Mai waving at him.

“Happy birthday to your little one, Hender!” Mai was sitting on the roof of her penthouse on the island of Manhattan, where she had become a celebrity.

“Thank you, Mai. Wait, I’m getting another call.” Hender clicked open another Skype call and saw Plesh, sitting in his home in Japan, where a giant mountain rose, nearly filling the window behind him. He was holding up his painting of Andrewshay, Hender’s golden child.

“How do you like the painting, Hender?”

“Beautiful!”

Nell entered. Hender rose to greet her.

“Come downstairs, the guests are here,” she whispered.

“OK. Plesh and Mai, I have to go!”

“Nid says happy birthday to Andrewshay,” Plesh said.

“Nid is in Ireland recording a birthday song for him,” Mai said.

“Thank Nid for me. Now, bye.”

Hender ended the calls and held still for a moment. He looked out through the flowered jungle at the twinkling blue Pacific as the breeze ruffled his coat. Everything had changed since the verdict of the humans had come in: the sels’ symbiants were deemed to be strictly clones that could not mutate into derivative species, so the humans let them keep their nants. And the humans kept their word and set them free.

Hender went down to the kitchen and found Geoffrey, Bo, and Joe, as well as Nastia and Dima, who were now newlyweds. Sasha and her aunt Kyra had come, and Abrams, who had just arrived through the security gate around their well-guarded compound. Sasha, tall for a girl of twelve, smiled brightly and ran to hug Hender.

“You are much bigger now,” Hender said, his coat popping with color. He put her down. “I love you, Sasha!” he said, both his guava-sized eyes looking into hers with three pupils.

“I love you, too, Hender.” Her face was content, older, leaner, her glacier-blue eyes showing the hopeful aftermath of a distant nightmare.

“Hi, Pops!” Andrewshay jumped up.

Hender cradled his child in four of his arms. “Happy birthday.”

“Did you get that, Zero?” Cynthea Leeds said, as her business partner, cameraman, and boyfriend, Zero Monroe, videoed the party.

Zero turned his head to her, grinning. “Yup.”

Nell and Geoffrey’s one-year-old son sat on Geoffrey’s arm, laughing and waving at Hender with both hands. Both their children were celebrating a birthday, though Andrewshay was only one year old today, having gestated for 21 months. The two families had separate homes on their estate on the garden island of Kauai.

They moved onto the wide redwood deck of Hender’s home. The canopy was decorated with crepe paper streamers and multicolored balloons. Ivan was chasing a feral chicken through the trees below, the white dog barking excitedly. Hender loved his secluded home overlooking Hanalei Bay.

He reached down to the fernlike sensitive plant, which Nell called
“Mimosa pudica,”
and which grew wild here. Hender had planted some in a pot. Its tiny jade leaves fringed featherlike branches that surrounded little pink flowers. As he touched it, the leaves crumpled closed and pulled away from him, and Hender smiled.

MAP AND ILLUSTRATIONS