I glanced again to the body on the floor. “Just humans.” My initial nonreaction was fading, replaced by the coldness and the distant sound of drums. I had never considered panic to be a relief before.
Sherman shrugged broadly. “Can you blame us? They’d mow us down like wheat if they knew that we existed. Now come along, Sal. I’m not going to ask again, and I do have ways of enforcing your cooperation.”
“You mean you’ll drug me.” I finally swung my feet down to the floor and stood. “I’m getting really tired of that, you know.”
“Then you should stop making people feel the need to do it.” Sherman tapped his foot impatiently. “Are you coming, or am I sedating you? I simply need your answer.”
“I’m coming.” My plastic-soled socks made no sound as I walked across the bubble and out through the hole he’d made; I stepped carefully around the blood pooling on the tile floor. “I’d rather be someplace where I won’t be shot if they figure out what I am. But I’m warning you, I am going to try to escape.”
“You wouldn’t be my best girl if you didn’t.” Sherman turned and started walking down the hall, clearly trusting that I would follow him. For a moment, I considered defying his expectations. I could turn and bolt in the other direction: my experience at John Muir had shown me that a stolen lab coat and an “I belong here” attitude could get me a long way. Maybe I’d be able to find the exit. Maybe I’d be able to get away.
And maybe I’d find myself gunned down by some guard with more testosterone than training, and wind up bleeding to death in an unmarked hallway in a building I didn’t know. It wasn’t worth the risk. Sherman was the devil I knew, and I believed him when he said he wouldn’t kill me. He wanted a chimera-dominant future. We were an endangered species, and he wasn’t going to go out of his way to endanger it further.
I followed him.
We walked along the row of bubbles, each with its own sleeping occupant, until we reached a door in the far wall. Sherman entered a code in the key pad and the door swung inward, allowing a rush of cool air to flow over us. The other side was a long tunnel of white, with gently billowing panels of what looked like vinyl sheeting connected by thick plastic joints. It was like a hose that someone had turned into a walkway for some reason. The lights were very bright, especially compared to the dim room where I’d been imprisoned. I glanced at Sherman, suddenly nervous and seeking the reassurance that he had always been so happy to offer me.
“It’s an umbilical,” he said, grabbing my arm and yanking me forward into the open doorway. “It’s what has us connected to the rest of the idiots. Now walk, Sal. I don’t have time for this crap.”
“Where does it go?”
“Away.” He pushed me this time, planting his hand between my shoulders and shoving me hard enough that I stumbled for several steps. That was enough to let him follow me into the umbilical. The door swung shut behind him, sealing with a clang. “Do you have any concept of what I risked to get in here, to get to you? You’re the only shot we have right now. I’m not going to let your neurosis be what stops me. Now move, or I’ll move you.”
His voice was cold, leaving absolutely no doubt in my mind that he would make me do what he wanted if I didn’t go along with it willingly. I started walking, and Sherman paced me, his longer legs eating up the distance with ease.
The air in the umbilical smelled of antiseptic and nothingness. It was the kind of non-scent that could only be achieved by feeding the ventilation system through so many filters that we would probably be safe from virtually any form of biological attack. Some of the rooms at SymboGen had smelled like that, and they had always been the ones that unnerved me the most. Their silence and their cleanliness had seemed oppressive in a way that could never have been achieved by good, honest noise and dirt.
“If God exists, He created everything in the world just to make a bit of a mess,” said Sherman, making me flinch. I hadn’t expected his thoughts to be such a close mirror of my own. His hand closed around my upper arm in a friendly hold that I knew could quickly become a trap. “Humans have been trying to clean up the world ever since they figured out soap and water. I think that’s what their Devil really taught them. There’s a lot of bollocks in the Bible about humans learning modesty and shame when they first sinned, but I don’t think they went ‘oh no, I’m naked.’ I think they went ‘oh no, I’m filthy.’ That was the true fall from grace. You can’t be a part of nature if you’re trying to be clean all the time.”
“You’ve read the Bible?” I asked, bemused.
“Not all of us got dyslexia from the integration, my poppet. I’ve been reading since I was eight weeks old.” He continued to pull me along. “You’re the only one of us to have that particular complication, actually, and I doubt you would have if you’d occurred under lab conditions. You probably chewed through something that you shouldn’t have before you knew any better. It’s really a pity we can’t midwife ourselves into being, don’t you think?”
We were halfway down the umbilical now, with white, faintly ridged walls stretching out in either direction. My stomach gave a lurch as I suddenly realized what the tube-tunnel really reminded me of: It was like being a parasite again. It was like we were walking through the gut of a giant, passing from one end to the other to be digested or excreted at the whim of our monstrous host. I didn’t say anything.
Sherman seemed to take that as an invitation to keep talking. “Tansy got herself a host of psychological issues, but the majority of them came with the body, I think—the brain was too far gone before she got in there to start stitching things back together. That’s important to remember. When we fight them to a standstill they’re going to try to placate us with their old and infirm, the people whose brains have already been damaged one way or another. We can work around some things—we’re clever, in our way, even before we have a fat mammalian brain to do our thinking for us—but we can’t rewire a busted engine. Can you imagine a world full of Tansys? All of them delusional and violent and running around with no one to restrain them? No, that won’t work at all. It’s healthy brains or nothing. Hence the breeding programs. It will be so much easier with infants.”
“They’ll try to make it nothing,” I said, my voice little more than a whisper.
To my relief, Sherman seemed more amused than angry at my statement. “Oh, I know, I know. They’re going to keep fighting to the bitter end, because that’s what men do. What they’re going to refuse to realize is that the bitter end passed some time ago. They’ve already lost. All that’s left from here is the messy process of birth.”
I opened my mouth to answer him, and he swung around to press his raised index finger to my lips, shushing me.
“Shh, shh, my pet, it’s time to be quiet now.” We had reached the door on the far end of the umbilical. It gleamed, black and secretive against all of that nauseating whiteness. “I’m going to open this and let us out. You mustn’t shout or scream or carry on, and most of all, you mustn’t try to get away. If you do that, I can’t protect you. And I know you don’t believe me right now, Sal, but I am your best chance of getting through this alive. Do you understand?”
I had trusted Sherman for most of my life. Even considering his recent betrayals, the habit of trust was strong within me. I forced myself to nod, slowly at first, and then with gathering enthusiasm, until my head was bobbing up and down with surprising force.