“Gradually I isolated the one strain, the cerebrimus, and found the ideal mating of spores and medium. And after some more time, the decaying process of the corpses themselves slowed. If you look, you’ll see that some of them are remarkably preserved.”
I looked where he gestured at the last cadaver, lying with the soles of its feet pressed against the slick stone walls. Its flesh was pale but with a rosy flush, not puckered or mottled as some of the others were.
I reached out to touch it, then snatched my hand away. “But—how did you—”
Trevor shrugged, as though the answer were obvious. “DNA,” he said in his honeyed drawl. “The spores produce molecules that imitate those in human DNA, so successfully that they can fuse with them, and producing the same bends and cricks that cause human genes to mature. They repeated this process, over thousands and thousands of generations as I refined them.
“Human DNA is programmed to decay after a certain number of years. But these fungi cause mutations in the strands: when you eat one, it produces a sort of chemical explosion in your brain; and after the smoke clears, your DNA has basically reset itself. It’s no longer programmed to die. This is no instant immortality, nothing as banal as that; but the rate of aging is slowed considerably. The really miraculous aspect of all this is that the brain cells themselves actually regenerate; and that of course is an effect the Ascendants have been looking for all along, with their geneslaves and other horrors.”
He paused, staring raptly into the dimness, then added, “And of course, it has had some very interesting applications for some of the geneslaves. The energumens, for one. They have been engineered to have such fleeting life spans; but these could change all that.”
Turning, he swept one arm out toward the banks of rotting logs piled high with their soft and luminous fruits. “I have made other discoveries as well,” he said proudly. “All here, all by myself. Mushrooms that look like psilocybin and have the same initial reactions; but which cause a slow, debilitating madness, and ultimately death. And my Amanita dacryion, my little cups of tears—they taste heavenly, but after a meal you are filled with such sorrow that all hope flees, and all desire to live.”
“But why?” I said, a little desperately. “Why all these—these things ?”
Trevor’s hand dropped to his side. “Because we have enemies, Wendy. Very powerful enemies. We have learned to fight with whatever weapons we can.”
And then another thought came to me. I shivered, recalling his words earlier, and asked in a low voice, “How long has it been?”
He looked puzzled. “How long?”
I pointed at the corpses. “You said they’ve been here a very long time— how long?”
Trevor tapped a finger to his lips, leaning against the table so that his shadow cut through the green mist. “Oh—let’s see—ninety years for Antonin, I think. A little more than that for Catharine.”
“And upstairs—on the mantel, those skulls—”
He brightened, as though suddenly seeing the logic behind my questions. “Oh, those were some of the first ones. I brought them here with me—misplaced sentiment, I suppose. Giles finds them morbid.”
“And you,” I whispered. “How old are you?”
He smiled and plucked another of the star-shaped growths from the table. “I’ll give you a hint. I was born in the Free State of Virginia, three years before the Third Shining.”
The Third Shining. Nearly two hundred years before.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. When I opened them, he was still facing me, chewing calmly, his enhancer a silver crescent across his face. “Why are you telling me this?”
He shrugged, still smiling. “Because you and your friends will be with us for several months—at least until March, when the roads will be more easily traveled. And because I have learned from experience that guests here become curious, over time, and it is more expedient to explain certain things truthfully to those who can bear the knowledge—to those who might perhaps benefit from learning new things. And because I think that we share a common enemy, you and I. You know what it is like to have been enslaved, to have been a pawn in the hands of the Ascendants. Someone with your history, with your powers—you might well benefit from what we have learned—”
I shook my head fiercely. “I have no enemies—”
Again that raised eyebrow. “No? And what of Margalis Tast’annin?”
“He was a madman—I knew nothing of him before we were captured—and besides, he’s dead now.”
Trevor’s voice rang out eerily in the dimness. “But what he stands for is not dead! The strength and horror of NASNA and the Ascendant Autocracy are not dead! They still breed geneslaves in their laboratories and cells. Everywhere on Earth humanity has become a tyrant, bending animals and children and heteroclites to their will. And not only within the Ascendant Autocracy: the Balkhash Commonwealth is no better, and some believe that the Habilis Emirate is worse.”
I shivered. I had never had any interest in talk of this sort. At HEL, Dr. Harrow had tried in vain to educate her empaths in politics. I retained only a vague memory of multicolored images on glowing mapscreens, their borders swelling and retreating, amoebalike, as each day brought subtle and evanescent political changes to the continents depicted there. “I know nothing of this,” I insisted.
“You should learn, then!” Trevor’s hand slapped down upon the edge of a table. “Six hundred years ago there was a war here—a different kind of war, a ground war. They fought because men enslaved other men, bartered and sold them like animals. It was an abomination to man and nature, and the world never recovered from it. Even a hundred fifty years later it was still reeling from the horrors of slavery—and then the First Shining came and they were all wiped away.”
I looked away from the glare of his enhancer. “But there are no slaves now.”
“Aren’t there?” Trevor whipped the enhancer from his face, so that the piercing light from his optics lit our corner of the room. “What were you at HEL, Wendy? What was Fossa? What was Miss Scarlet? And these are only the geneslaves! What of the moujik peasants from the Commonwealth, and the child farms on Kalimantan?”
I shook my head stubbornly. “I know nothing of this, nothing! And my friends know less—in the City they live simply, for pleasure only, or for knowledge—”
“In the City they live for nothing now!” cried Trevor. “Ascendant janissaries from Araboth and Vancouver have occupied it. If any of your friends survived the initial attacks, they are prisoners—slaves or worse. Your lover was one of the fortunate ones, to have died before they arrived. You of all people should know what happens when the Ascendants seize control.” I said nothing, only stared numbly into the misty phosphorescence swirling about him.
He was right: in the days following Dr. Harrow’s suicide, Ascendant personnel had swarmed into the Human Engineering Laboratory. They had murdered many of the other empaths and surely would have killed me as well, after subjecting me to more of their “research.” I thought of the paintings and ’files hanging in the corridors upstairs; of the scars upon Miss Scarlet’s throat; of Fossa, and the other aardmen who had given obeisance to the Aviator in the Cathedral. I thought of Justice dead; of countless others in the City of Trees, bound to steel gurneys with their heads shaved as mine had been, screaming as their minds were taken from them.