The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [96]
I would have felt a lot safer if my visitor had stood still in order to plead her case, but she seemed incapable of that. Her desire to keep moving was as irresistible as her desire to communicate. The derangement of her body and brain by whatever designer disease was consuming her was not yet powerful enough to make her fall down or impair her crazed eloquence.
“Come with me!” she begged, as I huddled back against the wall, desperate to evade her spasmodically clenching fingers. “Come with me to the far side of life, and I’ll show you what’s there. There’s no need to be afraid! Even death isn’t the end, just a new beginning—but this isn’t death, just a better way of being. Disease is the metamorphosis that frees us from our caterpillar flesh to soar as spirits in a mass-less world blessed with infinitely more light and color than any mere VE. I have come to be your redeemer, Mortimer—the redeemer for whom you have waited far too long. Love me as I love you, dear Mortimer: only love me, and you will learn. Let me be your mirror; drown yourself in me!”
She made a lunge for me as she spoke the last few words, but I dodged aside and she stumbled. Her uncanny fever was interfering with her motor responses, and she couldn’t get up immediately, but when I made a bid for the door she was quick enough to block the way.
“Don’t be silly!” I implored her. “Help is on the way. Even if you were to contaminate me, I’d be in hospital within the hour.”
I knew that I wasn’t getting through to her. Her own speech wasn’t completely incoherent, but that didn’t mean that she could listen or understand what I said to her.
She came after me again, and I had to grab a chair, using the legs to fend her off. I didn’t know whether it would do any good—for all I knew, I might have been infected already simply by virtue of breathing the same air—but the notion that she might actually lay her fevered hands upon me seemed particularly horrible.
“There’s no return from eternity, Mortimer,” she babbled on, the words beginning to tumble over one another in spite of their adequate grammar and syntax. It was as if she had programmed her voice to deliver her message whether or not she could keep conscious control of it—and perhaps she had. “This is no ordinary virus created by accident to fight a hopeless cause against the defenses of the body,” she went on. “The true task of medical engineers, did they but know it, was never to fight disease but always to perfect it, and we have found the way. I bring you the greatest of all gifts, my darling: the elixir of life, which will make us angels instead of men, creatures of light and ecstasy. We were fools to think that we had drunk at the fountain of youth when we had only armored our bodies against the ravages of age. Youth is a state of mind. The finest flame burns hot and brief, my love, and must be shared. What you call life is petrifaction of the soul.”
I kept moving all the time, while her movements grew jerkier. As she came to resemble a mere marionette I thought that it was only a matter of time before her strings broke, but she stubbornly refused to collapse.
I tired before she did, and she tore the chair from my grasp. I found myself backed into a corner, with nowhere to go.
FIFTY
The flesh of my persecutor’s face was aglow with silver, and it seemed impossible that she could still be upright, but she was in the grip of a terrible supernatural urgency, and she pounced like an angry cat, catching me by the arms.
I tried to knock her down. If I had had a weapon in hand I would certainly have used it, with all the force I could muster. It probably wouldn’t have done any good. I doubt that she would have felt any pain, and no matter how badly disabled her internal technology might have been, I wouldn’t have been able to disable her with anything less than a sledgehammer.
In the very last moment, I gave in.
There seemed to be no sensible alternative but to let her take me in her arms and cling to me. Nothing else