62
Along a lonely stretch of desert road in the military-restricted zone of the White Sands Missile Range, the Abundance had relived the biblical tale of Noah.
A flood of rain drowned Noah's world. But Noah had prepared by building an ark to save himself and the creatures of his land. He could not save each beast, so aboard his ark he took breeding pairs from every species: sheep and wolves, antelopes and lions-all. And when the deluge covered the flocks and packs and herds and prides of the old world, the ark ferried the rescued pairs to a new world, where the animals were fruitful and multiplied.
Inside a deep vault at ground zero, a flood of fire drowned the Abundance's world. But the Abundance had prepared by building an ark, to save itself and the essences of creatures it had absorbed. By the time the inferno erupted, the ark had already escaped.
The ark contained Gen's genetic code and a perfect recording of her mind-all her memories, her personality, intact and safe. The ark was a spore, a seed-able now to replicate Gen's mind and body along with myriad other lifeforms. And all this precious cargo, stored as pure information at the quantum level, fit neatly inside the several hundred-thousand molecules of the ark-smaller than a sugar grain.
A woven mesh of diamond threads formed the ark's tough hull. Thousands of whip-tailed flagella propelled it forward. The frigid environment slowed, but did not stop its journey. It swam through the icy slush of blood from the visual cortex at the back of Gen's brain, forward along the optic tract. It crossed the thalamus, passed the optic chiasma and traveled on to pierce the retina of her left eye; voyaged across the polar ocean of the vitreous humor to exit the pupil. There it paused, atop the curved world of the cornea.
Then the ark engulfed a tiny bead of liquid nitrogen, forming around the droplet a chamber with an open nozzle. The chamber generated a burst of heat by rapidly oxidizing glucose. The nitrogen exploded into gas, driving the ark like a microscopic rocket through the frosty air of the Lucite vault.
The ark reached a seam in the vault's walls, found a weakness in the seal and grew a cutting tool of a hundred diamond-toothed cilia to bore through the flaw, while chemical enzymes and dissemblers broke down the Lucite molecules.
Moments later, the ark broke out of the vault and jetted like a self-propelled pollen speck to the cargo door of the Humvee, escaping through the gaping chasm of the door seams.
Outside, the ark tumbled and bounced in the truck's slipstream, busily reconstructing itself. The ark grew much larger, its flagella morphed into wings that drove it upward through the air with a high-pitched whine. Now the size and shape of a mosquito, it buzzed toward a flitting river of screeching bats, seeking to hitch a ride with a temporary host.
By the time the nuclear fireball had turned Gen's abandoned body into hot plasma and scattered its atoms, the ark that carried her genes and a copy of her mind was safely far away from the funeral pyre. It flitted over white sands in the gut of a free-tailed bat.
Inside the creature, the ark disgorged its passengers. Go forth. Be fruitful and multiply. Mitobots spread through the bat's bloodstream. Replicating. Taking control of the animal's brain and muscles.
Now the ark had become a mammal with strong, leathery wings and it made good headway through the pink dawn sky. The ark broke away from the swarm of other bats, no longer drawn to return to the shelter of a cave.
The time had arrived at last for the Abundance to fulfill its mission. The bat flew on for many miles away from the bomb site. Then it alighted on the white gypsum sand and began the final change to reach the stars.
* * *
Gen experienced herself as more than human, or dolphin, or even any creature from Earth. She was an integral part of a vast web of life that carried within it the histories of countless worlds, all stored in the quantum computer mind of DNA.
Jimi MacGregor had touched on only part of the truth when he'd suggested that mitochondria were seeds sent out by an ancient, progenitor race to jump-start life on other planets. The reality was grander than that-and much, much tinier.
Bodies are mortal; genes are immortal. Long before the Earth was born, the progenitors had gained immortality by uploading their minds into quantum computers constructed as self-replicating, double-helical molecules: DNA. They had engineered mitochondria as their ships, becoming microscopic explorers, voyaging forever to new worlds, bearing life. Over the eons, they had seeded life on Earth and innumerable planets, combining and recombining the essence of creatures, gathered throughout the land and sea and sky of diverse evolving worlds.
The Abundance was not a probe in the ordinary sense; there was no home world to report to. The civilization that had sent the mitochondria, lived within the mitochondria. Now the time had come to launch another pollination mission from the rich zoo of Earth, to cross the galaxies trading genetic information, the news of life.
A dense, shimmering mist spread from the free-tailed Mexican bat, consuming matter from the surrounding desert. The assembler nanobots replicated exponentially, making trillions of copies of themselves. Soon, a crater formed and deepened as the assemblers converted tons of mass into the construction of a tall diamond tower. Roots plunged a thousand feet into the desert, and buttresses rose on all sides, anchoring and bracing the tower in position.
The Abundance communicated to Gen, and now she readily understood their chemical language. The beings offered her a choice: Her mind could travel onward to new worlds, as a member of an ageless civilization; or she could remain behind, resurrected in the form of the young woman she had been. But if she chose to stay on Earth, the powers of the mitobots would remain with her for less than a day. Then she would revert to being an ordinary human, all mitobots gone from her body.
The exterior of the tower formed first, and now a complex interior architecture took shape. The whole construction hummed with molecular activity.
Meanwhile, Gen discovered Toshi Yamato present with her, talking to her in the quantum stream of mind. She flashed intense flavors of surprise and love. Toshi was saying farewell. The Abundance could resurrect his body-mind from its recorded patterns, but he had chosen to travel to the stars. He already knew she had chosen to stay behind, to rejoin Cade. He could taste all her experiences with Cade and Lana and Haven and Jimi. Delicious. He felt happy for her. Toshi said he was with someone he wanted Gen to meet.
Suddenly Gen knew the soulful flavors of her own mother, Arista Monteverde. Gen had never known her mother, or heard her own last name. Her mother's DNA blueprint provided Gen an intimate knowledge of the woman. Her mother had been a gifted dancer and lover of music. Gen resembled her strongly, and recognized much of herself in her mother's genetic traits. Gen learned that her mother had not gone insane and killed herself, but Col. Eberhard had eliminated her, so that she could never reveal the secrets of Gen's birth. In a fraction of an instant, Gen and her mother savored each other's mind and tasted the sweetness of perfect understanding.
Strong-flavored joy and sorrow mixed in Gen's awareness. She communicated the taste of saltwater; she and Toshi and her mother were wansalawata: one-saltwater. Good-bye, Toshi. Good-bye, Mother. I am part of you, you are part of me.
Another mind-a vast, collective consciousness-reached out to Gen with the flavors of kinship and benevolence. Images arose of insectlike beings, each with a thin, flutelike appendage for a mouth. The flute-mouth served many functions, including sex and egg-laying-and enabled the creatures to communicate with musical tones.
Gen realized with awe that she was seeing the bodily form of the ancient progenitors themselves, as they had physically existed before they became immortal beings, patterns of pure information. The hive-dwelling race, creators of the Abundance, called itself K'o-K'o-Pelli.
The diamond spire was now complete. Gen understood the giant, gleaming structure was a spore pod, a tower for launching seeds into space. In an underground reaction chamber, heat and pressure intensified as a coiling serpent of energy. The rising energy now felt undeniably pleasurable, even intensely erotic, and the powerful sensations kept building, flooding the length of the tower in fast-pulsing waves of bright light, and sounds like high-crying flutes or whale songs.
The rapture that Gen had resisted before, transported her now; but this time, she welcomed the blissful climax with all her being. Harmonics vibrated upward through the crystalline tower, growing steadily stronger until the whole diamond spire rang like a choir of a million glass harmonicas. Just when Gen felt that she would shatter from the ecstasy of the angelic chord, hydrogen atoms smashed together in the reaction chamber and fused into helium, unleashing thermonuclear fire.
The launch sequence began.
Microscopic starships, encased in diamond for their journey through interstellar space, were injected into the launch barrel and propelled through the bore with nuclear-powered electromagnetic pulses. A thousand-billion diamond spores shot out of the tower at one-tenth the speed of light, scorching the atmosphere, slicing lightning-bolt trails into deep space above the blue curve of Earth, streaming onward in a trillion different trajectories, like miraculous stardust.
* * *
Gen awoke, naked, standing in the sand. She swayed a moment, panting, sweating, wondering how she had not exploded into a supernova from the force of the orgasm.
She examined her hands carefully, turning them over before her eyes. Same hands. Same self. The Abundance had kept its promise, restoring her bodily as the young woman, Gen Monteverde.
The diamond spore pod before her towered as tall as a skyscraper. With its flying buttresses, it looked like a futuristic cathedral sculpted of cut crystal. As she watched, it collapsed inward upon itself, not shattering and tinkling like glass, but dissolving into clouds of glittering powder that made a deafening whooomph as it fell to form a mountain of bright snow.
Gen turned around once in the now-empty desert. The fusion fireworks had probably triggered alarms at most of the strategic defense systems in North America. She needed to get out of here.
Her heart tugged her toward Cool Bay Inn. But first, she had a problem to fix, and only about twenty hours to do so with the help of the Abundance still active in her tissues. The irony was that now that the life span of the mitobots was running out, she had finally attained full communication with them-and total control.
Gen closed her eyes and sorted through her set of genetic codes. Birds. She needed a raptor, strong and fast, to fly to Redstone Labs. She chose an osprey, a large hawk, and simply willed her body to transform into the bird.
The Abundance went to work: Code readers gave osprey-building instructions to microscopic engineers that broke down and rearranged the human anatomy. Gen sighed as her skin softened like melting wax. Her body shrank rapidly, shedding excess mass as a heavy mound of gooey flesh that bubbled and steamed and charred the white sand.
The osprey's head was white; its body, dark brown above and white below. A dark line, like Cleopatra's mascara, ran through the osprey's eyes. The only abnormality in the hawk's appearance, Gen knew, was its purple eyes.
Gen leapt into the sky, pumping broad wings. She opened her beak wide and gave a piercingly shrill call: k-yewk, k-yewk, k-yewk.
Twenty hours. She was truly going to miss the alchemy of shape-shifting.