Lightspeed: Year One

On the plane, somewhere high above the Rockies and streaking towards Los Angeles through clearing, night-bound skies, Sylvia drifts between the velvet and gravel folds of dream sleep. She dozed off with the volume setting on her tunejack pushed far enough towards max that the noise of the flight attendants and the other passengers and the skipjet’s turbines wouldn’t wake her. So, there’s only Beethoven’s 6th Symphony getting in from the outside, and the voices inside her head. She’s always hated flying, and took two of the taxi-cab yellow Placidmil capsules her therapist prescribed after her first treatment gave her insomnia.

In the nightmare, she stands alone on the crumbling bank of a sluggish, muddy river washed red as blood by the setting sun. She doesn’t know the name of the city rising up around her, and suspects that it has no name. Only dark and empty windows, skyscrapers like broken teeth, the ruins of bridges that long ago carried the city’s vanished inhabitants from one side of the wide red river to the other.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us, and isn’t that what Matthew Arnold wrote, or T. S. Eliot, or Maharshi Ramakrishna, or some other long dead man? Sylvia takes a step nearer the river, and a handful of earth tumbles into the water. The ripples spread out from the shore, until the current pulls them apart.

Behind her, something has begun to growl—a low and threatful sound, the sound of something that might tear her apart in an instant. She glances over her shoulder, but there’s only the buckled, abandoned street behind her and then the entrance to an alleyway. It’s already midnight in the alley, and she knows that the growling thing is waiting for her there, where it has always waited for her. She turns back to the river, because the thing in the alley is patient, and the swollen crimson sun is still clinging stubbornly to the western horizon.

And now she sees that it’s not the sunset painting the river red, but the blood of the dead and dying creatures drowning in the rising waters. The river devours their integrity, wedding one to the other, flesh to flesh, bone to bone. In another moment, there’s only a single strangling organism, though a thousand pairs of eyes stare back at her in agony and horror, and two thousand hearts bleed themselves dry through a million ruptured veins.

And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.

Countless talons and fingers, flippers and fins, tear futilely at the mud and soft earth along the river’s edge, but all are swept away. And when the sun has gone, Sylvia turns to face the alley, and the growling thing that is her life, and wakes to the full moon outside the skipjet’s window.

“You can’t expect more of them,” Fera says, “Not more than you expect of the straights, not just because they’re going through the same thing you are.”

“None of us are going through the same thing,” Sylvia replies, not caring whether or not Fera hears the bitterness in her voice. “We’re all going through this alone. Every one of us is alone, just like White said in his book. Every one of us is a species of one.”

“I think you expect too much,” Fera says, and then the elevator has reached the twenty-third floor, and the hidden bell rings, and the doors slide silently open. Sylvia steps out into the hall.

“Please promise me you won’t spend the whole weekend locked in your room,” Fera says. “At least come back down for Circe Seventeen’s panel at eight, and—”

“Yeah,” Sylvia says as the doors slide shut again. “Sure. I’ll see you there,” and she follows the hallway back to her room.

Sylvia is standing in front of the long bathroom mirror, her skin tinted a pale and sickly green by the buzzing fluorescent light. She’s naked, except for the gauze bandages and flesh-tone dermapad patches on her belly and thighs. The hot water is running, and the steam has begun to fog the mirror. She leans forward and wipes away some of the condensation.

“There’s always a risk of rejection,” Dr. Collier said, and that was more than three weeks ago now, her third trip to the Lycaon Clinic. “You understood that before we began. There’s always the risk of a violate retrovirus, especially when the transcription in question involves non-amniote DNA.”

And, of course, she’d understood. He’d told her everything, all the risks and qualifying factors explained in detail long before her first treatment. Everyone always understands, until they’re the one unlucky fuck in a thousand.

No one ever lied to me, she thinks, but there’s no consolation whatsoever in the thought.

In places, the bandages are stained and stiff with the discharge of her infections. Sylvia dries her hands on a clean white wash cloth, then begins to slowly remove the dermapad just below her navel. The adhesive strips around the edges come away with bits of dead skin and dried blood still attached.