|
16: Membrane
Still feeling the warm touch of Sindi's and Trini's hands on mine, I fell head-first into unconsciousness. I was afraid I was pitching face-first off the tenth story of the giant machine, but in my last glimmer of consciousness, I could see that I was instead falling into a pool of light and white froth, like a giant vanilla milk shake. The smell wasn't vanilla, though, it was more like soap with clove and other essences. I understand now, of course, that it was an automatic processor in a parallel string to prepare us for the body suits we'd need to avoid getting gravved out on heavy worlds, or blowing out in very low gravity, or maybe worst of all, exchanging germs with people of another time to spread horrific plagues.
This thing that the people up-time did to us, it was automatic, painless, and it must have been fairly quick. It's almost virtual in a way. The soapy bath is a lubrifacient to make it go easier. There are things in the mix to make one's nerve endings go numb, and things that make your body not shiver and tingle with electricity as the probes analyze your DNA and rearrange several layers of molecules—top and bottom surfaces of the skin, a layer in the middle of that, and the top layer of the epidermis. Other stuff happens in the body, both on the neural sheaths and on the lobes of the brain, as well as the skeletal system and of course, very importantly, in the lungs where a very fine but permanent layer of froth coats the cilia and filters whatever passes between the atmosphere and the blood. You get a sturdier, safer, more durable body. Your brain almost stops aging, and neural damage actually reverses itself. It's been said that, except for neural tissue, the entire human body regenerates itself every seven years, so that you have all new cells. You become an Amortal. Your entire body regenerates itself far more quickly and thoroughly. No cells left behind. It's not immortality, but it's not mortality as we have known it. You don't live forever, and you can certainly get splattered if you're dumb enough or unlucky enough to step in front of a rushing locomotive, but that aside, you can live many times your normal lifespan. Another of the various benefits is that the Membrane is a great equalizer of peoples—it enables you to process someone else's language, no matter how foreign, runs it through a remote processor if necessary, and shoots their words through your thoughts almost instantaneously in your own idiom. It makes a far less effective, but still spectacular, effort at translating your vocalizations into the other's language, assuming the Membrane has had enough neural net passthrough to have an on-the-fly dictionary to work with.
There is one other catch, though, which I had no idea of at that time, and neither did my two female companions. You have to die first.
That's right, the three of us died there on that platform in Washington, Indiana, outside the hidden Temporale transfer point that governs the time trains throughout this solar system. The air was too rich, the planet too massive, for our relatively spindly Martian frames. Our veins and lungs collapsed. We choked on the rich mix of oxygen and nitrogen, which our lungs couldn't process. Within five minutes, we lay sprawled in a heap and dying, the three of us. We had entered the ancient transportation network of a lost alien race that once ruled our system. Technically minded people who like acronyms often call them the LAARs, for Lost Ancient Alien Race. More ditzy right-brained artsy types just refer to them as Laars, which is easier on the memory somehow. And yes, this has everything to do with our future on Mars.
We lay dying, and come morning, when the Holy Sol rose, we might have been discovered by a group of laborers coming to repair the railroad ties, this being during the American Civil War, and sabotage rife in the border states between the Union and the Confederacy, but that is of no concern to us in this book, this part of a very sprawling story that crosses many borders both in time and space.
What saved us was that we had to cross a Membrane composed of alternative dimensional string variants. Kind of a cosmic cotton gin under the control of the Laars, if you will. The Membrane is highly intelligent in a purposed and functional way that the Laars' advanced engineering contrived. The Membrane is a beneficial organism that analyzes and then either rejects or adjusts passing life forms. For example, if there were a transfer station on a planet with an atmosphere poisonous to humans, then the Membrane would prevent me from entering that station. Likewise, when the three of us made the journey from Mars to Earth, adjustments were made to save our lives and also to prevent us from spreading our germs, or from receiving native germs that would have made us very ill or killed us. Once you have this run-in with the Membrane, you are usually never conscious of it again. It does its work behind the scenes, instantly and invisibly.
The Membrane analyzed us in a second and rearranged our molecules so that we became Amortal. It may have been minutes, hours, or days, but it seemed like seconds to me before I awakened. When we did awaken, we were forever changed. But we were alive and well. We were also extremely puzzled to awaken in the swimming pool of Mr. H.G. Wells' friend Darby Tatnall (the true Time Traveler).
|
