She asked to see the ledger, and as she leafed through it, her expression flowing from puzzlement to comprehension, he reflected on the difference between the way she looked now - a schoolgirl stuck on a problem, barely a teenager, worrying her lower lip, innocent and grave - and earlier when she had entered the cabin; then she had appeared self-possessed, elegant, masking her reaction to the grime beneath a layer of aristocratic reserve. She had one of those faces that changed drastically depending on the angle at which you viewed it, so drastically that Donnell would sometimes fail to recognize her for a split second.
‘I didn’t believe you… about extending your life,’ she said excitedly, continuing to pore over the ledger. ‘He doesn’t come right out and say it, but the implication - I think - is that you may be able to stabilize the bacterial colony
‘Magnetic fields,’ said Donnell. ‘He was too much in a hurry, too busy understanding it to see the obvious.’
‘There’s a lot here that doesn’t make sense. All this about NMR, for example.’
‘What?’
‘Nuclear magnetic resonance.’ She laughed. ‘The reason I almost flunked organic chemistry. It’s a spectro-scopic process for analyzing organic compounds, for measuring the strength of radio waves necessary to change the alignment of nuclei in a magnetic field. But Magnusson’s not talking about its analytic function.’ She turned a page. ‘Do you know what these are?’
There were three doodles on the page:
Beneath them Magnusson had written:
What the hell are these chicken-scratchings? Been seeing them since day one. They seem part of something larger, but it won’t come clear. Odd thought: suppose the entirety of my mental processes is essentially a letter written to my brain by these damned green bugs, and these scribbles are the Rosetta Stone by which I might decipher all.
‘I see them, too,’ said Donnell. ‘Not the same ones, but similar., Little bright squiggles that flare up and vanish. I thought they were just flaws in my vision until I saw the ledger, and then I noticed this one…’ He pointed to the first doodle. ‘If you turn it on its side it looks exactly like an element of the three-horned man Richmond drew on his guitar.’
‘They’re familiar.’ She shook her head, unable to remember where she had seen them; she gave him a searching look. ‘This is going to take time, and Richmond doesn’t have much time.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘Maybe we should go back to Shadows. With all the resources of the project…’
‘Richmond knows he’s nearly terminal,’ said Donnell sharply. ‘He won’t go back, and I have my own reasons not to.’
For the first time since Magnusson’s death, he had an intimate awareness of her unencumbered either by doubts about her motives or by the self-loathing he felt when he was brought up against the fact of his bizarre existence. Her face was impassive, beautiful, but beneath the calm facade he detected fear and confusion. By escaping with him, she had lost herself with him, and being lost, as she had rarely been before, she was at a greater remove from her natural place in the world than was he, to whom all places were unnatural.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
‘This and that,’ he said. He took back the ledger and read from the appendix. ‘“Mitochondria research has long put forward the idea that human beings are no more than motile colonies of bacteria, so why do I shudder and think of myself as a disease in a borrowed brain?” That, too.’
The subject obviously distressed her. She looked away and ran her eye along the mosaic of dirt and faded pattern spanning the linoleum. “There wasn’t anyone at Shadows who’d subscribe to a purely biological definition of the patients,’ she said. And she sketched out Edman’s theories as an example, his fascination with the idea of spirit possession, how he had snapped up the things she had told him about the voodoo concept of the soul, the gros bon ange and the ti bon ange.
‘The part about your influence on me,’ he said. ‘Do you buy that?’
A frail pulse stirred the air between them, as if their spirits had grown larger and were overlapping, exchanging urgent information.
‘I suppose it’s true to an extent,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think it means anything anymore.’
Sleep did not come easily for Donnell. Lying on the cot, he was overwhelmed by the excitement of being away from Shadows, by the strange dissonance everything he saw caused in his memory, at first seeming unfamiliar but then wedding itself to other memories and settling into mental focus. Triggered by his excitement, he experienced a visual shift of an entirely new sort. The moonlight and the lights of the other cabins dimmed, the walls darkened, and every pattern in the room began to glow palely - the grain of the boards, the wallpaper, the spiderwebs, the shapes of the furniture - as if he were within a black cube upon whose walls a serpentine alphabet of silver smoke had been inlaid. It frightened him. He turned to Jocundra, wanting to tell her. Both she and Richmond were black figures, a deeper black than the backdrop, with fiery prisms darting inside them, merging, breaking apart; like the bodies of sleeping gods containing a speeded-up continuum of galaxies and nebulae. The screen mesh of the door was glowing silver, and the markings of the moths plastered against it gleamed coruscant red and blue. Even when he closed his eyes he saw them, but eventually he slept, mesmerized by their jewel-bright fluttering.
He waked to the sound of running water, someone showering. Richmond was still snoring, and the sun glinted along spiderwebs, glowed molten in the window cracks. Bare feet slapped the linoleum, the floor creaked under a shifted weight. He rolled over, and looked through the gap in the bathroom door. Jocundra was standing at the window, lifting the heft of her hair, squeezing it into a sleek cable. Water droplets glittered on her shoulders, and she was wearing semi-transparent panties which clung to the hollows of her buttocks. She bent and toweled her calves; her small breasts barely quivered. A feeling of warm dissolution spread across Donnell’s chest and thighs. Her legs were incredibly long, almost an alien voluptuousness. She straightened and saw him. She said nothing, not moving to cover herself, then she lowered her eyes and stepped out of sight behind the door. A minute later she came out, tucking her blouse into a wraparound skirt. She pretended it had not happened and asked what they were going to do about breakfast.
That day, as her mother would have said, was a judgement upon Jocundra. Not that it began badly. Richmond went out around ten to scout the area for a change of cars, promising to return at noon, and she buried herself in Magnusson’s notes, fearful that she had misread them the night before. She had not. The bacteria were passively steered by the geomagnetic field toward the dopamine and norepenephrine systems, and there they starved to death; the two systems were centers of high metabolic activity, and in performing their functions of brain reward and memory consolidation and - at least so said Magnusson - running the psychic machinery, they used up all the available energy. Of course the bacteria bred during their migration, and their breeding rate was so far in excess of their death rate that eventually they put too much of a burden upon the brain’s resources. What Magnusson did not say, but what was implicit, was that if the bacteria could be steered more rapidly back and forth between centers of low and high metabolic activity, this by a process of externally applied magnetic fields, then the excess might be killed off and the size of the colony stabilized.