Looking back I still see the camp crouched brightly in the gloom, a squat angular jumble of light and shadow, a bubble of warmth in the howling abyss. The snow blows past in horizontal streaks caught against gullies or outcroppings, it spins into blinding little whirlwinds. I am a bottom-dweller on the floor of some murky alien sea.
#And then there was light short story skin
I walked among these new offshoots wearing the skin of a quadruped and because they had not seen me take any other shape, they did not attack.Īnd when I assimilated them in turn-when my biomass changed and flowed into shapes unfamiliar to local eyes-I took that communion in solitude, having learned that the world does not like what it doesn’t know. I did not stop running until I arrived here.
I fled into the night on four legs, and let the rising flames cover my escape. I hid within it while the rest of me fought off the attack. Fortunately there was another shape to choose from, smaller than the biped but better adapted to the local climate. It was on the other side of the mountains-the Norwegian camp, it is called here-and I could never have crossed that distance in a biped skin. How ill-adapted they looked! How inefficient their morphology! Even disabled, I could see so many things to fix. I remember the biped offshoots surrounding me, the strange chittering sounds they made, the odd uniformity of their body plans. I remember my reawakening, too: dull stirrings of sensation in real time, the first embers of cognition, the slow blooming warmth of awareness as body and soul embraced after their long sleep.
I barely managed to grow enough antifreeze to keep my cells from bursting before the ice took me. By the time I’d regained control of what was left the fires had died and the cold was closing back in. Mutinous biomass sloughed off despite my most desperate attempts to hold myself together: panic-stricken little clots of meat, instinctively growing whatever limbs they could remember and fleeing across the burning ice. It killed most of this offshoot outright, but a little crawled from the wreckage: a few trillion cells, a soul too weak to keep them in check. I can only remember that I once knew them. Now I cannot remember all the things I knew. I was the very hand by which Creation perfects itself. I was a soldier, at war with entropy itself. I spread across the cosmos, met countless worlds, took communion: the fit reshaped the unfit and the whole universe bootstrapped upwards in joyful, infinitesimal increments. I was an explorer, an ambassador, a missionary. I will go into the storm, and never come back. I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the long Antarctic night. Being Childs, I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the next phase. Being Blair, I go to share the plan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called Clarke so many changes in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves.
The world is busy destroying my means of escape. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door.
MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. They are placeholders, nothing more all biomass is interchangeable. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.
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