Part 83 (1/2)

At this point, however, no one appeared to notice or to care. They were rolling her through the steel air lock. On the other side, Winston Bartlett was already waiting, standing next to a gurney with straps.

No!

Chapter 34

_Friday, April 10

9:34 P.M.

_

She was still conscious as David and Debra lifted her onto the gurney.

There was no operating table in the laboratory, but this procedure did not require one. It consisted of a series of small subcutaneous injections along both sides of the spine, followed by a larger injection at the base of the skull.

As the injections began, she drifted into a mind-set where she was never entirely sure how much was real, how much was fantasy, how much deliberate, how much accidental. She remembered that she felt her grasp of reality slipping away, but there was no sense of pain. Instead, images and sensations in a sequence that corresponded to the pa.s.sage of time drifted through her mind. It was couched in terms of the people she knew.

The first image was her mother, Nina, and they were together, struggling through a dense forest Initially, she thought they were looking for her father's grave, but then it became clear they were searching for some kind of magic potion that would save her mother's life. As they clawed their way through tangled tendrils and dark arbors, she became increasingly convinced their quest was doomed, that she was destined to watch Nina pa.s.s into oblivion.

But then something happened. The forest opened out onto a vast meadow bathed in suns.h.i.+ne. In the center was a cl.u.s.ter of snow-white mushrooms, and she knew instinctively that these would bring eternal life to anyone who ate them.

”Come,” she said to Nina, ”these can save you.”

”Ally, I'm too old now. I don't want to be saved. There comes a moment in your life when you've done everything you feel you needed to do.

You've had the good times and now all that's left is the slow deterioration of what's left of your body. It robs the joy out of living.”

”No, Mom, this is different,” she said plucking one of the white mushrooms and holding it out. ”This prevents you from growing any older. You'll stay just the way you are. You can have a miracle.”

”'To never escape this vale of tears? To watch everyone you love grow old and wither and die? Is that the 'miracle' you want me to have?” Then she looked up at the flawless blue sky and held out her arms as though to embrace the sun. ”My mind Ally. You've given me back my mind. Now I can live out whatever more life G.o.d will see fit to give me and actually know who I am and where I am. That's miracle enough for me.”

As she said it, a beam of white light came directly from the sun and enveloped her. Then the meadow around them faded away and all she could see was Karl Van de Vliet, who was bending over her and lifting back her eyelids.

”Alexa, I can't tell you what you're about to feel, because no one has ever been where you're about to be. G.o.d help us, but we're on the high wire without a net here. But any new cell configurations should immediately form tissue that's a facsimile of what's already there.

That's what the simulations show.”

She was listening to him, not sure if he was real or a dream. Then she heard Bartlett's voice.