The Fountain of Age by Nancy Kress Page B

light. Her feet made no sound. She moved toward more light, and somewhere in that light was a figure. She couldn’t see it or hear it, but she knew it was there. And she knew who it was.
    It was someone who really, truly, finally would listen to her.

    Al Cosmano squirmed in his sleep. “He’s waking,” a nurse said.
    “No, he’s not.” Dr. Jamison, passing yet again among the rows of cots and gurneys and pallets on the floor, his face weary. “Some of them have been doing that for hours. As soon as the ambulances return, move this row next to the hospital.”
    “Yes, doctor.”
    Al heard them and didn’t hear them. He was a child again, running along twilight streets toward home. His mother was there, waiting. Home . . .

    The stage was so bright! The stage manager must have turned up the lights, turned them up yet again—the whole stage was light. Anna Chernov couldn’t see, couldn’t find her partner. She had to stop dancing.
    Had to stop dancing .
    She stood lost on the stage, lost in the light. The audience was out there somewhere in all that brightness, but she couldn’t see them any more than she could see Bennet or the corps de ballet. She felt the audience, though. They were there, as bright as the stage, and they were old. Very, very old, as old as she was, and like her, beyond dancing.
    She put her hands over her face and sobbed.

    Erin Bass saw the path, and it led exactly where she knew it would: deeper into herself. That was where the buddha was, had always been, would always be. Along this path of light, curving and spiraling deeper into her own being, which was all being. All around her were the joyful others, who were her just as she was them—
    A jolt, and she woke in an ambulance, her arms and legs and chest strapped down, a young man leaning over her saying, “Ma’am?” The path was gone, the others gone, the heavy world of maya back again around her, and a stale taste in her dehydrated mouth.

    Lights and tunnels—where the hell was he? An A-test bunker, maybe, except no bunker was ever this brightly lit, and where was Teller or Mark or Oppie? But, no, Oppie hadn’t ever worked on this project, Henry was confused, that was it, he was just confused—
    And then he wasn’t.
    He woke all at once, a wrenching transition from sleep-that-wasn’t-really sleep to full alertness. In fact, his senses seemed preternaturally sharp. He felt the hard cot underneath his back, the slime of drool on his cheek, the flatness of the dining-room fluorescent lights. He heard the roll of rubber gurney wheels on the low-pile carpet and the clatter of cutlery in the kitchen dishwashers. He smelled Carrie’s scent, wool and vanilla and young skin, and he could have described every ligament of her body as she sat on the chair next to his cot in the dining room of St. Sebastian’s, Detective Geraci beside her.
    “Henry?” Carrie whispered.
    He said, “It’s coming. It’s almost here.”

    Ship withdrew all contact. It had never encountered anything like this before. The pre-being did not coalesce .
    Its components were not uniform, but scattered among undisciplined and varied matter-specks who were wildly heterozygotic. Unlike the components of every other pre-being that ship had detected, had guided, had become. All the other pre-ships had existed as one on the matter plane, because they were alike in all ways. These, too, were alike, built of the same physical particles and performing the same physical processes, but somewhere something had gone very wrong, and from that uniform matter they had not evolved uniform consciousness. They had no harmony. They used violence against each other.
    Possibly they could, if taken in, use that violence against ship.
    Yet ship couldn’t go away and leave them. Already they were changing spacetime in their local vicinity. When their melding had advanced farther, the new being could be a dangerous and powerful entity. What might it do?
    Ship pondered, and feared, and