The Helper looked at Murdoch’s bloody organism with pity and grief.
If he died—and he was nearly dead now—Murdoch would be dead forever. There hadn’t been time to engineer a transition, to grow a second Murdoch for the Murdoch-essence to inhabit. There was only this fragile plasmic Murdoch with a scant few neocytes inside him. The neocytes had only reproduced a few tens of tens of times. They had not mapped or expanded Murdoch in any significant way.
But Murdoch had made his choice. This was an involuntary death, which the Travellers found abhorrent.
The Helper made an arm and reached out to the window of the car. The window glass shattered and fell away in a fine gray powder. The arm extended further, reached inside the car to Murdoch and touched his damaged body.
Mass surged inward from the body of the Helper, which was proportionately diminished. Multiple millions of its subunits anticipated new tasks—sealing broken blood vessels, containing and fostering the spark of plasmic life.
Soon Murdoch was covered in what appeared to be a featureless black cocoon.
The cocoon was motionless; Murdoch was motionless inside it. Prompt and feverish activity had begun, but it was internal and below the threshold of perception. Superficially, nothing changed.
Days and nights passed. The sky outside the open garage roiled with clouds.
Periodically, that December, there was lightning.
Murdoch woke in January.
The Helper had retreated; he was alone in the car. He opened the door and staggered out into dim daylight.
The sky was gray and threatening. The weather was bleak and dangerous everywhere that winter; he had been warned about storms.
The neocytes were still at work inside him. Murdoch could have chosen to move directly into his new life, his virtual life; but he wasn’t finished with the flesh… Tyler’s gunshot had interrupted him.
There were things he wanted to see.
He couldn’t say precisely what things—literally could not say, to himself or to anyone else. In the aftermath of his injury, he had very nearly died; the flow of blood to the brain had been interrupted for too long. The neocytes were reconstructing that tissue, but much of their work was conjectural and slow, elaborating the holon of Murdoch’s self from its fragmented parts. He was himself, but he was inarticulate and he didn’t trust himself to drive; too much neuromuscular memory remained unreconstructed.
Mute, he walked in the direction of the setting sun.
He walked for weeks.
His legs were unnaturally strong and his stamina seemed unlimited. The weather was only a minor hindrance, and his wordless contact with the Artifact helped him anticipate and avoid the worst winds and lightnings. He sheltered in abandoned buildings, storm cellars, gullies.
Some nights he slept in the rain. His body had been changed on the inside; extremes of hot and cold no longer bothered him. He seldom ate. He didn’t need to, though he drank copiously when there was water.
He crossed the Mississippi at Cairo and passed into the prairies, where the storms were often fierce. One night, crouched in a pipe section where a four-lane bypass had been abandoned in mid-construction, he watched a blizzard unroll from the western horizon like a flat white wall. The wind made a sound like freight trains passing through the sky. After midnight, when the snow had almost blocked the pipe at each end, a wild fox—drenched and miserable—crept inside with him. The fox was terrified of Murdoch but more terrified of the blizzard. Murdoch strengthened his tegument and let the fox chew harmlessly on a finger until the animal was exhausted and no longer afraid of him. Then he cradled the fox against the warmth of his body until both of them were asleep.
In the morning it was gone, but Murdoch was startled and pleased that he had remembered the name of the animal during the night. Fox: the animal was a fox. He said it out loud. “Fox!”
It made his throat hurt. He didn’t care. The pleasure of speech was almost unbearable.
“Fox!”
He walked west and north along a road shrouded in glittering blue-white snow.
“Fox!” he exclaimed from time to time, and the word fell away across the empty winter farmland. “Fox, fox, fox!”
Late that winter, Murdoch passed through Kansas and crossed the state border into Colorado, where he glimpsed for the first time the thing he had come all this distance to see: the Home he had heard about from the Travellers.
This was what had drawn him, this was his reason for clinging to the flesh. Some stubborn fraction of A.W. Murdoch had wanted to see this miracle with his own eyes.
From a great distance it looked like a mountain, a curvature of blue and white nearly lost in the haze of the horizon.
It was Murdoch’s good fortune that the skies had cleared in the eastern lee of the Rockies. With a little more luck, the weather would hold until he was closer. But distances were hard to calculate with such an object. How many more miles to go? How far to the horizon, and how far beyond that?
He walked a day and a night and another day and another night.
Words returned to him piecemeal as the days passed and his neural tissue was restored. The effect was sometimes comic, as when Murdoch would suddenly halt along the verge of an empty road, point his index finger, and announce to the heedless air some newly acquired noun—“Window/” or “Fence!”
Proper names were more elusive. He could barely pronounce his own. “Murdoch,” he said, but it sounded clumsy and grotesque. Nor could he remember the name of the girl he had met in Loftus, though the memory was vivid and he often felt her silent presence. Maddeningly, the name lingered on his tongue but couldn’t be coaxed from his mouth. “Suh-suh-suh…” He worked at it, day after day, until his jaw was sore.
Home stood on the horizon, closer now. It drew the eye irresistibly, a miraculous blue pearl capped with white. The white was snow. Like a mountain, Home rose more than 50,000 feet into the rarified air, up where it was always cold, where the snow never melted.
The Travellers had explained to him, wordlessly but vividly, how the creation of Home had begun. Months ago, on the eve of Contact, a single microscopic neocyte—a kind of seed—had come to rest on this plain of dry, rolling land where Colorado met Wyoming. Instantly, the Traveller organism had begun to reproduce itself. One made two, two made four, four made eight—in less than an hour, a million; two million; four million. The organisms grew themselves from the constituent parts of soil, sand, water, air, and light. When their numbers were large enough—uncountably, inconceivably large—they organized themselves into machines, into devices as big as cities.
Home required immense tonnages of raw matter. The building machines began by digging into the earth, cratering the prairie and displacing the antelope herds. But that was only a modest first step. As Murdoch approached, he felt a series of rhythmic tremors. Under the imponderable substance of Home, he knew, a conduit had been opened into the magma of the earth itself.
The days remained clear, but a cold wind blew steadily from the west. Murdoch felt weaker, the farther he walked.
He understood that he couldn’t get as close to Home as he might have liked. It wasn’t a healthy environment. The wind, curling around a sphere more than thirty miles in circumference, created a turbulence that could sweep.him off his feet. Deadly gases vented from the magma tap, and the heat at the cratered base was well beyond human tolerance.
But he could get a little closer than this.
“Suh,” he pronounced. “Suh—suh—”
It wasn’t good enough.