And as the factions clash with one another, a new biological threat rises from the ashes of Black Ep, an even deadlier contagion with one purpose: mankind’s extinction.
“A compelling work that will appeal to fans of speculative fiction and apocalyptic thrillers.”—Midwest Book Review
And as the factions clash with one another, a new biological threat rises from the ashes of Black Ep, an even deadlier contagion with one purpose: mankind’s extinction.
“A compelling work that will appeal to fans of speculative fiction and apocalyptic thrillers.”—Midwest Book Review
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Overview
And as the factions clash with one another, a new biological threat rises from the ashes of Black Ep, an even deadlier contagion with one purpose: mankind’s extinction.
“A compelling work that will appeal to fans of speculative fiction and apocalyptic thrillers.”—Midwest Book Review
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781440631351 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2008 |
| Series: | An Idlewild Novel |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
edenborn
By nick sagan
g. p. putnam's sons
Copyright © 2004 Damned If I Don't ProductionsAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-399-15186-9
Chapter One
pandoraThis is the Sunday to beat all Sundays. I'm taking a stroll through the park and we're talking sunny shores, shade-giving trees and sailboats floating on the Seine. It's an infinity of pleasure and leisure, with couples gazing out at the water together, families enjoying open-air picnics, and no one in a rush. There's green grass beneath me, and blue sky above. I'm carrying the End of the World in my veins, but I don't know it yet.
A nineteenth-century French boy moves past me in a blur. It's not his speed that blurs; he's walking no faster than I am. But he's not so much a boy as a collection of colorful dots in the shape of a boy, as if his atoms were somehow visible to the naked eye. He pays me a smile, and I pay him one back. This kid is full of springtime and laughter, reminding me of a young footballer I used to coach in my teenage years. I watch a dot labrador lope after him, stopping short to watch his dot master bend down to uproot some dot lilies. At a distance everything looks real, but up close like this you can see things for what they are. That's not the case in most domains, where the illusion of life is near absolute.
Champagne signals me. She's dressed for this with her embroidered traveling dress, her lace fichu, her fancy hat and her parasol. I'm the anachronism with my fringed faux-leather coat, blue jeans and silver eyebrow piercings. But neither of us fit in because we're the only ones here who don't smack of pointillism. And we're both wearing our old faces, the ones programmers and artists assigned us while in the real world our bodies slept and slept some more.
"You tweaked it," she says.
"You noticed. Do you like?"
She scrunches her nose up. "I don't know yet. Tell me what you did."
"Played with color, made it a little less painterly," I say, passing her the bottle of Beaujolais I've brought for this occasion. "You're the art historian-give me some of your expert opinion."
"There's something else."
"Yeah, I disabled the automatic composition. When you turned your head, the dots that made up the characters used to rearrange to fit your point of view. They'd frame up to create a perfect pointillist painting wherever you look."
"And now they behave more like regular people."
"Right. You don't like it?"
"Who said I didn't like it?" She smiles, popping the cork. "You're so sensitive, Pandora. Don't be so worried about what people think."
"Who said I'm worried?" I say, taking the glass from her after she pours. "Cheers."
"Yeah, cheers." We clink and drink to the second half of our lives: eighteen years of wonderful, terrible freedom. Today is the anniversary of the day the lie unraveled, the day we learned what we were, where we were, and why. It's hard not to think of it as a birthday.
"Nice," she decides of the wine.
It is-this vintage is crisp and not too dry, not half as complex as the "serious" wines she prefers. You can keep your oak and berry and nutty bouquets, thank you very much.
I tell her how I programmed this particular Beaujolais, but she's not interested. "We'll have a real drink when you come up," she says, threatening me with a far-too-serious twenty-year-old bottle of Riesling she just discovered in a Bavarian pub. Over the years she has filled her wine cellar with a collection that would be the envy of any oenophile, building it up by looting the stocks of the dead. We're all scavengers these days, indulging our various hobbies as compensation for the work we do.
My work is technical. If anything breaks, I fix it. I'm responsible for power, communications, computer systems, IVR and similar inorganic technologies. I am not responsible for cloning or parenting. I couldn't do what Champagne does. I chose this line of work because-
Excuse me, Pandora. Another matter requires your attention.
Can it wait? I'm telling a story here.
I can see that. I can also see you're telling it wrong.
Here we go.
You should start earlier, when you realized your world wasn't real.
It's my story, Malachi, and I'll tell it my way. Give me a minute, will you?
I can afford you another three minutes, and then we should talk.
Three it is. Now go away before you wreck my narrative structure.
I chose this line of work because I keep clinging to the past. I grew up in a fake Brazil and a fake America, but I woke up in Belgium, the real Belgium, to learn that my wildest nightmares were true. When the kids were little, we taught it to them like this:
Desperate times had settled on us- The Black Ep swept like a scythe through our ancestors The brilliant among us knew none would survive- But against this threat some must stay alive To carry on the species So they meddled with our DNA, and gene-ripped babies came into being But who will raise them to adulthood? Only computers would serve when all were dead They built a false world for dreamers to explore While our bodies slept safely in the real Not knowing we were alone in the world With a great burden awaiting us When we awoke and saw what had been concealed One of us went round the bend With treachery and shameful acts He made six of us from ten But now the battle's fought and the battle's won With each and every successful birth
But childrearing just isn't for me-I'm terrified at the thought of bringing kids into a place like this. So it's easier for me to work behind the scenes, and stay a little closer to my old life by maintaining and upgrading the Immersive Virtual Reality I grew up in. In the real world, I visit all my nieces and nephews. I'm their favorite aunt, and I love them because I'm not totally responsible for them. Not the way Isaac, Vashti and Champagne are.
"I'm looking forward to seeing you guys," I tell my drinking buddy as I pour her another glass. "Wish Isaac would join us."
"We're closer to that than we have been in quite a while," she says.
"Sometime soon then, I hope."
"It's possible," she says, putting an accent on the word "possible." She doesn't think it'll happen, and she isn't sure that it should. There's so much history with Isaac, not all of it rosy.
"Imagine if we could. The four of us together again, all united in purpose?"
"I thought we were talking about a drink," Champagne frowns. "Good luck getting us on the same page."
"The one might lead to the other."
"Ever the optimist."
"Absolutely," I say, momentarily distracted by a dot man blowing a dot bugle, "and if we can get back on track, maybe we can bring the hermits in."
"The famed class reunion?" Her smile comes just shy of a smirk.
"I'm still hopeful," I tell her.
"That's what I love about you," she says. "You're stubborn. Or dreaming. Either way, I love it."
"It has to happen," I insist. "We have to put aside our differences."
"Tell it to Hal." That's all she needs to say, because he still won't talk to them, and only barely talks to me. That's okay, I'll take what I can get from him. He's broken, but he stole my heart when we were kids, and he's still got it, and I guess it's broken too.
Sarcastically, Champagne adds, "He's had a sudden pang of conscience, right?" I look away. "What about Fantasia?"
"Nothing," I say, No news. None of us knows where she is.
Champagne hasn't hurt my feelings too badly, but she thinks she has. People have a hard time reading me sometimes; it's a common complaint. "Hey, I'm sorry," she says, taking my hand and squeezing it. "I hope they come back around. I do. I want us all to be friends again. You know I'd like nothing more than that."
I give her a nod and squeeze her hand. There isn't a lot more I can say on the subject, and even less that I want to.
"When you talk to Hal tonight, give him my best, okay? No one's given up on him yet. Except Vashti," she says, "but you know how she is."
"I do," I tell her. "Hugs to Vash and the kids, and I'll see you soon."
Leaving Champagne at Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte, I relocate to the middle of nowhere. Just an empty domain I use as a launching pad. I send a flashing ball of yellow and black, and I wait, but no orange and black answers my call. Hal must not want the gift I got him. I check my watch. I wait longer. Maybe he's not online.
I exit the system altogether, waking up in the real world. A rolling boom suggests it's raining outside, and when I check I realize I'm as cold as Mercutio's heart. Rubbing some warmth back into my shoulders, I shut the windows against the downpour. Outside, the clouds look polluted and strange. I turn away from them to put on some clothes. No message from Hal yet. It's been weeks now. And we always talk on the anniversary; that's supposed to be clockwork; I count on it. So I bend my privacy rule and take a look at the satellites, but that corner of the world is silent and still.
Chapter Two
hajiThe disruption comes when I am halfway in and halfway out of a circular tub, tracing a pattern in water that has splashed on the ceramic tile floor. Mu'tazz calls my name, striking the door again, the knock scattering my daydreams like birds. He brings a message from father, then leaves with my whispered thanks. I make no move. The candles yield more light than warmth, and the chill keeps me where I am, contemplating my fingertips, clean and wrinkled from my evening ablution. The calluses are fading. How wondrous it is to heal. A minor miracle, except miracles defy the laws of nature and this exemplifies them. Enough. Guilt pulls me from the bath. No one likes to be kept waiting.
Wool and linen cling to my skin and sand shushes beneath my feet. Had I lived thousands of years ago, it might be green grass. Look backward; every desert was once lush.
A cold wind embraces me and I do not care. Twilight is my favorite time, and tonight the sky is clear. I can gaze up into endless lapis lazuli and count the pinpoints of pure, white light. Beauty seen is only eclipsed by beauty unseen, and though the vast distance of space keeps trillions of worlds from my eyes, it cannot keep them from my mind. What orbits that star? That one, the lowest in Ursa Major? What is it like to live there?
Questions inhabit every fiber of my being. If I could find God, I would ask one question after the other without stopping, emptying myself to savor the answers. I think sometimes that if God were to give shape and form to my thoughts, the universe would so create. But to find God, I must first find myself.
My father is a tall man with eyes as black as kohl. I am short with eyes like amber. We look nothing alike. He is not my biological parent. I consider this a trivial distinction.
For years, I did not. As much as I loved him, as much as he loved me, DNA put us oceans apart. In my heart, not his. I fought my disconnection through meditation and prayer. It took all my patience to seize that elusive moment, a moment of connection, of immediacy, the triumph of higher consciousness, that holy moment right now, right now, where the past and the future do not exist and there is no difference between you and anyone else in the world. I found it, and woke, and then it left me. But when it left, so did my fear. I can find that moment again. It is not easy, but I can find it on a night like this, if the wind dies down and everything grows calm. It is a moment of joy and my heart aches when it slips away. My father keeps it with him. In the midst of a whirlwind, in a raging inferno, or at the bottom of the Nile, he has it. He has it always.
I hear birdsong in my ear as my mask filters out impurities. Saqqara has not been sanitized; here the dead are plentiful. Inside the city, brittle skeletons pantomime slumber, while out in the desert, carrion eaters have scattered human bones far and wide. The wind hides or reveals these beneath the sand, as is her whim, and I take notice as I walk, quietly accepting these reminders of how populous this place once was.
The mask not only protects me from the environment; it protects the environment from me. The water in my breath becomes salt. Salt deposits cause cracks. Cracks wreak havoc on the structures we hope to restore. Great damage has accrued over the years, tombs slowly crumbling from the carelessness of countless tourists, dead now, but breath lingering. This is a sad thing. My brothers, sisters and I use microbes to desalinize the structures, and lasers to erase the graffiti. Together, we have spent the better part of a week restoring the Step Pyramid of Zoser. It is not a traditional pyramid with the edges of the planes rising to a point; it is more like a ziggurat, with six mastabas atop each other, each smaller than the next. It is Egypt's first pyramid, almost five thousand years old, and as I limp toward it, I take satisfaction in the work we have done. The limestone shell is clean and unmarked. We have rebuilt it, made it smooth and white again, so starlight dances on its surface. There is still much to do inside the tombs, and many loose bricks to repair. A complete restoration would take years; we return home in just days. Still, it is a good deed, a good lesson and a good challenge. Zoser built this towering wonder in the hopes of forging a connection with God, and so we honor that. We honor the brilliance of his architect, Imhotep, and the labors of countless workers whose names are lost to time. We honor the cradle of civilization. We honor ourselves.
When I find him, my father is hunched over the new ventilation system with his sleeves rolled up. He is fine-tuning the airflow and the bioremediation, to control how many salt-eating microbes will be released, and how often. His back is to me, but he senses me without turning around.
Salaam alaikum wa rahma-tullah, he says, wishing me Peace and God's Mercy.
Walaikum assalam, I say in reply.
I move to his side and we work together in silence. I can see the delicate balance he is striving for and assist him as best I can. We adjust, test, readjust and retest. Such is the process for so many tasks in life. God has blessed us with an aptitude for this kind of work, and before long we have achieved our objective. My father seals up the system and nods, satisfied. He tousles my hair, and beneath his mask I know he is smiling.
He asks if I'm hungry (I'm not), if I'm warm enough (just barely), if my legs are paining me today (no more than usual). We speak in Arabic, a difficult language for me to write, though I can speak it passably. As always, he is concerned for my well-being, but the questions are leading somewhere. What does he want? Matha tureed?
He asks if I am strong enough to travel, an old, frustrating topic for me.
Continues...
Excerpted from edenborn by nick sagan Copyright © 2004 by Damned If I Don't Productions. Excerpted by permission.
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