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.That's not part of my life."The doctor nodded again.Woody thought he'd look perfect on the back ledge of somebody's car."I had to ask.There were no drugs found in your blood or urine samples.But there was a needle mark.Left a pretty nasty bruise on your arm." He pointed to Woody's left arm, and Woody pushed up the short sleeve of the hospital gown to reveal a dark blue, mottled spot."I don't know how that happened," he said with a flatness intended to assure the doctor that further questioning would be futile."I have no idea at all."Chapter 35Rose Parmalee had begun to feel sick.It wasn't just the dopiness, the sense of lassitude that had bound her ever since she had been placed in the glass cage, ever since the men had caught her, stripped her, raped her over and over again.It wasn't due to that humiliation, or the assurance that she would never leave this place, whatever this place was, alive.It was even worse than that.She had felt listless, her muscles refusing to obey her.Her appetite for the barely edible food they gave her diminished until she ate nothing at all, yet bloody diarrhea dripped from her, her sphincter muscles too weak to contain it.Lesions had broken out over her flesh, red blotches that opened if she so much as touched them, oozing a thin, pale yellow pus followed by blood.She knew she was dying, and it seemed so unfair.When the men came in, wrapped in their suits of what looked like thick plastic, their heads encased in flat-topped hoods, she asked them why they were doing this to her, what was happening, how much longer it would go on.But their eyes, barely visible through the darkly transparent panels of glass that covered them, gave no answer, and their voices never spoke.If they did, the words never escaped the confines of their shroud-like garments.They touched her with heavy gloves, lifted her arms to take her blood, wiped her filthy buttocks, held plastic mouthpieces over her mouth and nose to steal her breath, forced open her mouth and pressed swabs against her cheeks and tongue.Nothing was her own.Everything her body produced was theirs, and they took it as though it was their right.Everything but her tears, for she had no strength and no heart left to shed them.She had wanted to kill herself, but she had not had the strength to smash her head against the glass walls, and they kept her nails cut too short for her to try and rip open her own throat, or claw at the veins in her wrists.When the sores began, she rubbed at them in the hopes that she would bleed to death, but when they saw what she was doing, they strapped her down.They would not even let her die."What did you do?" she asked them every time they came in."Why did you do it?"Goncourt.Goncourt was the name that she remembered with her mind that was gradually fragmenting, splitting apart under the torture, the disease, whatever they had done.She remembered caring, centuries ago, about something other than death.The earth, and making it pure again.A silly and stupid dream, it seemed now.Nothing was clean, nothing was pure.The earth was a glass lined cage, and inside it everything was sickness and filth, and only death could end that.Only death could stop the pestilence.In her shattered, decaying mind, the cage was the earth, and the earth was a cage, and the only freedom was in death.And when she had decided that, she tried to embrace the men who came into her cage, tried to lift her arms and tug off their hoods and take their flesh in her corrupted hands, breathe her fatal breath into their lungs, kiss and slay her slayers.But her hands, bound, would not rise.She had such a sacred gift to grant, but she could not, and the frustration chipped away even more of her sanity.Until one day, when she heard a voice other than her own asking for answers, for reasons, for death.It sounded muffled, as if from far away, and her short-term memory bore the sensation of intrusions, her mouth and vagina and buttocks and flesh recalled recent violations of smooth metal and glass that felt as rough to her tattered skin as sisal.And suddenly the voice became a sound she had not heard for so long that at first she thought she was dead and dreaming.It was a voice other than her own, and she was hearing it clearly, without the filter of heavy plastic, the muffling of ghostly hoods.And the voice said her name, said Rose, and she worked and worked until she was able to open her eyes, the dry inner surfaces of her lids scraping the eyeball so that she would have screamed if she had the breath.Then she saw, through a red haze, his face.She knew it, though the name that went with that face no longer lived in her rotting brain.She equated warmth and love and tenderness with the face, and thought that now, at last, this was death, and in another moment she knew it as his beautiful face became larger, swam into her sight like a bright planet, like the earth gleaming blue now, no longer red, and the sweet coolness of its seas touched her face, and its soft winds blew into her mouth and blew back out again, taking her breath, her life, her very soul, so that as she died she knew that she had saved it after all, that by taking her life, the sweet earth would live.~*~Keith knew he should put his headgear on quickly in case Billy Magruder re-entered, but he could not.He stood over her, entranced, breathing in the vile odor of her body, her last breath from riddled lungs, and found in it such ineffable sweetness that tears came to his eyes.She knew.Somehow she knew why he was there, what he had come to do.He still tasted the bitter dryness of her lips on his own, and thought he could feel the virus dance joyously as it swirled into his lungs, swam into his veins, burrowed in his cells, claiming him.And its joy became his own as well, and he knew that what he had done was right.It meant his death, and the deaths of billions, but life for something far greater.Keith pulled on the hood, turned it so that he could see through the transparent plastic plate, and connected the seals.He had purposely left the blood collection tube in the supply room, and when he and Magruder discovered it was missing, he had gestured to Magruder that he should exit the cell, remove his suit in the airlock, get the tube, and place it in the airlock for Keith.Magruder had shrugged in agreement, far from anxious to go through the complicated airlock procedure twice, especially since the end of their three-day shift was only an hour away.Strict procedures went by the board when it was time to punch out, and Keith knew that Magruder was one of the least punctilious of Goncourt's staff.So he had been left alone for priceless and fatal minutes with Rose Parmalee, just long enough to take her blood and her kiss out into the world that was waiting for its deadly salvation.The airborne virus had been introduced into her cell two weeks before, and the onset of illness, much to Freeman and Horst's dismay, had been immediate, her decline rapid.The selected gene had either failed to act as an antibody, or the virus had once again refused to obey the genetic commands imprinted upon it.Whatever the reason, the search for the unique gene would have to be continued.This attempt had been a total failure, leaving the germs free to tear through her body like fire through dry grass.Never had a subject sickened so quickly.They took tests and samples every six hours, in order to trace the path of the illness, find the weakest breaches in the defense.But now, thought Keith as he followed the painstaking procedures in the airlock, it didn't matter any longer.All the tests, all the cloning, all the experiments, none of it meant a thing.He smiled as the tainted air was drawn from the chamber, and the bath of water washed his garb until nothing clung to the smooth plastic.Then the lock filled with filtered air, and the light went on, signaling that it was safe to remove the suit, which would be sterilized [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]