For a time the two rested there in silence, Mary hogtied on the floor mat and Freeta leaning against the stake. Once Mary tried to roll over, but with her legs drawn so tightly behind her body it was impossible. She couldn’t tip over.
Finally she asked Freeta, “If you’re an immortal, why are you down here, too? Who’s this Toby, or Zark, or whatever his name is?”
Freeta stirred. She began to test her bonds; turning and twisting and squirming. The cords of her muscles rippled faintly under the girlish skin. The ropes hissed and cracked as if subject to great stress but they held firm. She even tried lunging away from the stake, which bent momentarily but proved stout enough not to break or pull out. Freeta dropped to her knees again, panting.
“Still too much drug,” she gasped. “And he’ll be back before the rest wears off. Zark may be mad but he’s no fool.”
“I’m sorry you got involved in this,” she told Mary. “What did Zark, I mean Toby, tell you?”
“He said you weren’t human. That you knew your creator, and he’s dead.”
“He’s right, in part. Zark is one of the originals. He did know the creator. Most of us are descendants—like myself. If he undresses you’ll notice he doesn’t have a navel. What did he tell you of the Master?”
“Only that he came during the Ice Age and died; and that you were one of his great dreams. But that’s over twenty thousand years ago isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s been a long time as you measure it. It’s been long even for us. And I fear that for Zark it’s been too long.”
She tested her bonds once again.
“Mary, try to get over here next to me to see if we can free each other and I’ll continue the story.”
Awkwardly imitating sometimes an inch worm and sometimes a sidewinder snake, Mary managed to move slowly towards Freeta, a fraction of an inch at a time.
“We call ourselves the An-Grell. We were his helpers,” she continued, “to help him build his second dream. He created us from your ancestors’ tissues, purifying the design and stripping away some of the limitations that Mother Nature hadn’t yet removed. He made us smarter and, since he didn’t want to keep retraining us, he made us immortal.”
“Immortal?” Mary whispered.
“Yes, immortal. And since accidents will happen to all of us, he gave us the power of complete regeneration to restore limbs and bodies to wholeness. In short, physiologically we were the perfect research assistant. And long did we labor for the Master. He made many of us and we built a great city. We delved, researched, and built many things—airplanes, cars, great computers, and more.
“We discovered that with the powers of intelligence, regeneration, and immortality came the power to change the structure of our bodies at will. As the years passed and our numbers and accomplishments grew some began to experiment.
“Through arts similar to what you now call meditation, yoga, and zen, a few of our kind began to improve our creator’s design of us as we had many other things.
“The experimenters’ first accomplishment was full control of aging. They learned to age and mature their bodies. They became not only larger and stronger but fertile. The An-Grell could now have babies.
“Much to everyone’s surprise, fertility spread like wildfire among us. The instinct to nurture and reproduce was built too deeply into our predecessors’ genes for the Master to exorcise completely.
“Training centers and sessions were set up everywhere. The population of the city doubled in only one hundred years, where the doubling produced by clone vats had been planned to take a thousand. So while we basked in the bliss of parenthood and family for the first time, we suffered many of the problems of rapid growth—unrest, crime, unplanned children abandoned to wander the streets of the Golden City, and suicide. I was born of parents in this time. Despite the drawbacks, it was a glorious age.
“The leader of the new experimenters was Zidex. As a result of their discovery he was catapulted into fame and power. He declared, ‘This is just the beginning of what can be accomplished.’ He said, ‘Given time and practice, this body we inhabit can be shaped into anything.’
“But others disagreed with Zidex. ‘If the Master had meant for us to create babies and do these other things, he would have told us how himself. We were created to help bring about the second dream,’ they said, ‘This wild experimentation will bring us nothing but trouble.’
“‘But the Master built us to experiment,’ countered Zidex. ‘He wants us to do things he can’t do himself. Why should this be any different than the hundreds of other experiments we conduct?’”
“Zidex did learn to transform himself. One day he presented himself in the form of an ape. A few years later he was a giant wolf. His followers, too, rapidly gained in proficiency and soon the Golden City was populated with all manner of mammalian beasts as well as humans. Even some of the human shapes were distorted. Some grew long arms, some longer legs. Some grew old and withered looking, others grew younger until they could barely toddle.
“Finally this First Crisis was brought to a head by the Master’s return to the city. He said the shape changers were an abomination and not part of his dream—and that was it. The city rallied instantly against Zidex’s followers and they were cast out to fend for themselves in the wilds of the world. My parents and I were among those exiled. Zark was a leader of those that remained in the city.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mary, still several feet away from the stake.
“Don’t be,” Freeta answered. “My parents and I survived.
“With the exiles gone, for a while the Golden City returned to a semblance of the times before Zidex’s experiments and revelations. The people of the city had never had much to do with the wilds to the south and now that those wilds were home to the fallen, they cut off relations completely and turned inward.
“Those cast out with Zidex scattered about the earth. They had never been unified to start with, and their fates were various.
“Some despaired entirely and committed suicide.
“A few were contrite, believing they’d been duped or seduced by Zidex. These decided that, even if they could not live in the Golden City, they could live by its codes. They ceased using their new powers altogether. They became like hermits wandering the earth looking for absolution. These were called the Prophets, not always with respect.
“Many others felt they had been right no matter what the Master said. Sure, there were hazards to these new practices just as there were in many other activities of life, so they should be pursued carefully—but not forbidden. The majority of this motley of outcasts began to build new cities and new civilizations in the wilds and they kept breeding. These outcast An-Grell were called the Mortals.
“The Mortals thrived and built cities. These grew rapidly and prospered. The frontier spirit imbued the Mortals with new love for growing things, for change, and for baby making. But the challenge of living and building and growing outside of the Golden City in the wilderness was tremendous. It cost the settlers much of their self-training and self-knowledge. They remained fertile but they aged uncontrollably and died. But they and their children grew even more skillful in manipulating the material things of the world, for the material things were here in great abundance.
“Another group felt as did the Prophets that they had done wrong, but now that they were exiled they had to find a new life. These joined the Mortals and were soon absorbed by them.
“A very few An-Grell felt the creator was jealous of them, that he was withholding gifts from them. Zidex felt this way and continued with a small band of his followers to practice and expand his arts. These Zidexites were later called witches, warlocks, and by the names of other magical creatures—especially werewolves.
“Because, as they practiced, they made their changes faster and faster. The very first transformations took years, but Zidex and others learned to pick up the pace dramatically until they could make the man-wolf transmutation, Zidex’s favorite, in weeks, then hours.
“He and his followers explored shapes that were further and further from that of mankind. They delved into using the brain in other ways that you currently identify with witchcraft or psychic powers—ESP, clairvoyance, precognition.
“Zidex himself was always one of the most daring of this group and finally his mind cracked. Whether he had pushed himself too far and too fast and got trapped in a change he couldn’t recover from or was seduced by an even more insane follower we never found out.
“And … he attacked the Master,” Freeta whispered with a shudder.
She was staring off into the distance and her accent and syntax had slurred into a strange archaic form. Mary was almost beside her now. After a moment Freeta continued.
“The Master survived the attack but his second dream didn’t. The Master viewed those shambles and left without saying where he was going, or if or when he would return. He just left. His final words were, ‘This has cost me greatly. You have all betrayed me.’
“Then began the First War and the Great Fall. The people of the Golden City had supported the Master in the First Crisis, but after he was attacked he abandoned them. It drove them crazy. For the first time they felt a taste for revenge. Zidex had driven away the Master, therefore Zidex and his followers must be destroyed.
“The Golden City prepared for war. Once again it doubled in population as the clone banks produced an army of specially developed warriors. Then this great force set out to hunt and destroy.
“As is always the case in war and revenge, the first to suffer were the innocent and unwary. Zidex and his followers had fled and hidden so the cities and settlements of the Mortals, who had turned from his ways long ago, were the first destroyed—the armies of the Golden City were blind to such nuances. In their madness, all who were driven from the city were Zidex’s followers.
“The war ended up being between the Mortals and the Golden City. For the Mortals were numerous, civilized, and ready to stand and fight. The spirit of life and mortality was in them. They had taken root in the wilderness and adapted to its ways.
“The first part of the war was brief by the standards of Immortals, though it lasted many years. The forces of the Golden City reduced Mortal cities one by one and gave no quarter. Men, women, children, animals, everything was destroyed, for they feared that anything left alive might be a shape changer.
“Finally the Mortals too developed a taste for revenge. They drew upon their superior material knowledge to launch a single massive counter-assault on the Golden City. They vaporized it and all the land surrounding it for a hundred miles. The blast nearly split the earth and ultimately ended the Ice Age.
“The Golden City and all its knowledge, robots, people, and clone banks were gone, just as finally as the Master. They could never be recreated from the remains. But the clone armies and those Immortals not in the city survived. The clone warriors were outstanding fighters. Too diffuse to be attacked by the Mortal’s city-destroyer weapon, too strong and cunning to be defeated in field combat, they continued to reduce the Mortals city by city.
“This part of the war lasted a millennium. All the cities of the Mortals were destroyed and those they rebuilt were destroyed again.
“The Mortals lost everything—reduced to savagery although they survived. Another ten millennia passed while the warriors of the Golden City slowly diminished as their lives lost all meaning. Without the Master, without their own city, and with no more Mortal cities to destroy their armies dissolved and the remnants fought among themselves. The clone warriors, by the way, died off even more rapidly. What point is there in designing a fighter to live forever?
“For a while the followers of Zidex seemed to thrive in the chaos and spread throughout the world. But without the resources of the Golden City they could not advance further in their art. They discovered too that fertility was a transient stage; the shapeshifting destroyed it. So their numbers on earth have slowly diminished as well.
“Fairly recently, less than six millennia ago, the Immortals ended their vendetta and declared a Great Truce with the Mortals.
“You humans were creating civilization that would eventually become like those the Mortals had built and the Immortals had destroyed. No one felt any enmity against humans, even though you were becoming so numerous you would soon overwhelm the remaining An-Grell.
“In the Great Truce, all the children of the Master, Mortals and Immortals, Zidexites and the remnants of the Prophets, also agreed not to inflict their violence on your emerging race. Civilization is once again flowering and in general we now live our lives quietly and separately from yours. But occasionally one of us will still intervene, usually from insanity. Zark has gone insane and is planning on breaking the truce in some devastating way.”
By now Mary had wiggled as close as she was going to get.