The Fifth Harmonic Read online

  But I do know that I began this journey a week ago with a stranger named Maya. I know that this stranger has now become the center of my rapidly contracting universe. And I know that my journey will be concluded not with “some modicum of comfort,” but atop this plateau.

  Completing the journey I began with Maya—that is the end. If it proves to be a means to something else, wonderful—I am more than ready to be made whole again, to reach a new level of consciousness. But if nothing else happens, I will have no regrets. What I've seen and felt and learned on the path to this point is justification enough.

  So, no matter what it takes, I will finish what I began.

  And I know even the old Will must appreciate that.

  “Get out of my way,” I mouth, and he fades from sight.

  Desperation fires my limbs. From somewhere in my wasted system I extract new strength and resume my crawl. The twenty vertical feet seem like twenty stories, but I don't look up. I look no farther than the next step. One step at a time, each its own Everest. Conquer one, and then the next, and the one after that . . .

  And then there are no more steps. A flat, barren expanse of volcanic granite stretches before me. Toward the rear I see a tall tree with a slim, straight, branchless trunk, topped by a dome of leaves glowing silver in the moonlight. A ceiba tree, a silk-cotton tree . . . Maya's World Tree.

  I'm here. On the plateau. I've made it.

  I look over my shoulder at the world below, nearly day-bright under this brilliant moon. I see the roofs of the village, the white stripe of beach, and the glittering ocean beyond it. And on that beach, at the waterline, a lone tiny figure. Somehow I know it's Maya, standing there alone, watching . . . waiting.

  I know she can't see me, but I wave. It's all I can do to lift my arm. Then I turn and start to drag myself across the rock. I try to recall Maya's instructions.

  Not far from the edge is a large circle carved into the rock. You will find it in the shadow of the leaves of the World Tree.

  With my eyes I follow the impossibly long line of the ceiba's trunk shadow across the rock to the splotch of black cast by its leaves.

  Not far? Not for a walking man, perhaps. But a continent away for this crawling man.

  I aim for the leaf shadow. The rough granite, still warm from the oven of the day, tears at my palms and forearms, and wears the knees of my pants. I struggle to within half a dozen feet of the shadow and stop, just about in. I listen to the harsh rattle of air struggling through my constricting throat and swear I've got no more to give . . . can't move another inch.

  I collapse flat on my belly, panting, gulping sobbing breaths as I try to slide myself across the rock. I reach out, clawing ahead, certain that I can't advance another inch . . .

  And feel my hand slide down a grooved wall. I lift my head. I'm there. A circular concavity, ten feet or so across, carved out of the living rock, stretches ahead of me. But only partly in shadow—more than half of its circular expanse is moonlit.

  Maya's words rush back at me.

  You must be positioned before the shadow of the World Tree flees the circle.

  From the looks of things, that won't be long—I can almost see the shadow moving away. With a final desperate burst of strength I force myself ahead, roll down the six-inch edge, and crawl to the center of the depression. Along the way I find what feel like peg holes carved into the rock.

  Two lines of holes cross at the center of the circle. They point to the four corners of the world. You must reach the center . . .

  I do. I find where the lines cross, and slump there. Made it.

  . . . and place a tine in a hole at each of the four corners. The fire tine must face the east . . .

  I fish the tines out of my pockets and hold them up. The moonlight does strange things to them . . . the colors look odd, subtly altered. I glance around. I know where the Pacific is, so I insert the fire tine in a peg hole of the line heading the opposite way.

  . . . the air tine faces north, the earth tine south, and the water tine west. Do not place them too far from the center. They must remain within easy reach.

  Done, done, and done. I look and see the World Tree shadow hovering on the edge of the depression. Have to hurry.

  Then you must lie naked on your back, touching the fire tine with your left hand, the air tine with your right, the earth and water tines with your feet.

  I shrug off my clothes, stretch out on my back, and position myself according to Maya's instructions. I lay there under the moon and stars, spread eagled in the concavity like a plucked chicken in a skillet.

  The moon is so bright it blots out the stars. And it's so silent here—the night sounds have faded away.

  I turn my head and watch the last traces of the World Tree's shadow slide clear of the circle . . . and as it does, I feel a tingle in my right hand and see the air tine begin to glow.

  Or is it just a trick of the moonlight?

  I feel a similar tingle in my left hand and see the fire tine pulsing with a red light. I'm too weak to lift my head to check the other tines, but by the tingle in my feet I assume they're glowing as well.

  And then I hear a sound . . . no, sounds. High-pitched notes, ringing softly in the night, just this side of my auditory threshold. It's the tines. They're ringing. I close my eyes to better focus on the sounds. I reach for them and find them, draw them closer. And as they near, they blend, harmonizing into a single glorious resonance. I open my eyes—

  And cry out!

  The moon has moved closer! It hovers over me, moving closer still, taking over the whole of the sky. I feel I could reach out and touch it if only I had the strength.

  It draws closer still until I fear it will crush me. I feel the tug of its gravity, pulling me from the depression, but I grip the tines and hang on. And then I feel another force, this one pushing against my back, forcing my body upward until I'm stretched and bowed like some live insect pinned to a board. I can hold on no longer. The force from behind is ripping through my spine, erupting through my chest. I'm dying, I must be dying.

  I scream into the vault of the night—

  And then . . .

  I am elsewhere.

  I see nothing now, but have a sense of a huge void yawning around me, and I am falling through it. I feel as if I've left my body, and I wonder if this is death, if I am going to gaze from above at the empty shell of my body and then move off into that fabled tunnel of light.

  But this lasts for only a heartbeat or two, then the void collapses and I am in a very crowded place, if I can call whatever this is a place, and I am still falling.

  And now I realize that I am still in my body, truly inside my body, falling through it, completely aware of this organism that has housed me since conception.

  Completely aware . . . not merely through the ordinary senses that filter through the conscious and subconscious, but in other ways that I never imagined possible.

  Is this the new level of awareness Maya mentioned? Is this the Fifth Harmonic?

  Whatever this is called, I am aware of every organ, every tissue, every cell in my body.

  More than aware, I am here. I see the cells, I hear them, I feel them, and it's too much, too much, too much—the detail, the noise, the incessant activity, like being thrust into the center of an infinite hive of manic adrenalized bees, so much more than I can absorb or comprehend or tolerate. I must cut back the overwhelming input, shut down the feeds, and narrow my focus . . .

  I constrict my awareness until I am outside a single cell. I press up against its soft translucent membrane like a street urchin outside a bakery window. I watch the raw nutrients around me slip through to the cytoplasm, I hear the rhythm of the organelles within as they assemble their assigned proteins and package them for export.

  I too slip through the membrane, gliding past the mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum toward the nucleus where I see the switchbacked coils of DNA arranged within, so close, so clear I can count the base pairs on the helixes
.

  I'm frightened. I don't understand this. What's happening to me? Am I losing my mind? Is this another hallucination, a late aftereffect of Ambrosio's teonancatl juice?

  But I seem to be in control here, and that eases my fears somewhat. I loosen the reins—just a little—on my awareness and gradually open myself to more cells and tissues. And as I do I become aware of a sound, growing in volume, ethereal, musical, yet distinctly unlike the tones I heard from the tines. These are sung by voices, tiny yet not high-pitched, hundreds, thousands, millions of voices, growing, swelling, not in my ears but in my consciousness. Myriad tiny voices, yet I feel I can pick out each one and hear its note.

  And as I sift through the tones that make up this chorus, I pick out sounds of discord. Some only mildly off key, others harsh and atonal, grating voices that sour the harmony.

  I isolate two discordant subchoruses echoing from opposite directions. I home in on one and flow there. As I near the source I sense increased activity, mounting steadily until I find myself in a war zone. My defense mechanisms are out in force: macrophages, the huge voracious cells that gobble up bacteria, viruses, and anything else they come across that doesn't belong, are rushing back and forth, attacking and digesting microbial invaders, protecting my repair mechanisms as they tend to the task of reconstructing landscapes of severely mangled tissue.

  I realize I'm in my right calf where my cells are struggling to undo the damage done by the shark's teeth.

  Struggling is the word. The defenders and the builders cannot work at full capacity. They're crying out to the rest of my body for the raw materials they need to manufacture the proteins for healing, reconstruction, and defense, but they're not receiving them. I search for a way to help, to increase the flow of nutrients to the war zone. I open the arterioles feeding the area; this increases the blood supply, but that's not the problem. The blood itself is depleted of nutrients. They're being siphoned off somewhere else.

  And I know where.

  I home in on the other discordant notes. These are louder, and originate at the other end of my body. I move toward the sound, aware of its source, dreading to face it, yet knowing I must.

  In my throat I find the tumor. This is not the cartoonish Captain Carcinoma of my teonancatl dream. No lumpish megalomaniacal cyclops with a booming voice, this is the real thing—a megalopolis of cellular chaos where matted sheets of deformed cells with bizarre nuclei wail a mindless atonal cacophony as they grow, swell, divide . . . grow, swell, divide in rapid cycles of mitotic madness—and it is so much more frightening than Captain Carcinoma.

  Here it is . . . here is the mass of mutated cells that is slowly choking off my life. But where is the frenzied immune activity I'd seen in my leg? All activity here is the malignancy's. My defenders, my phagocytes and antibodies, hurry past, rushing no doubt to my injured leg, utterly oblivious to the monster that is devouring their world from under them.

  Blind hatred explodes within me and I surrender to it. I yearn for a weapon so I can attack the tumor. I see a sudden flash of light and one of the tines—the fire tine—appears before me, alive with tongues of flame. The sight of it startles me. What am I supposed to do with it?

  And then I know. I grab it and leap upon the tumor, tearing at the membranes of its cells, ripping them open, spilling their contents, rending cell after cell until I am awash in cytoplasm.

  I stop, exhausted, surveying the carnage I have wrought . . . and it is negligible. I've barely scratched the surface.

  I watch the surviving cells, the oblivious masses of remaining cells continue their mad, headlong race of division and multiplication as if nothing has happened.

  A head-on assault obviously won't work. Nor can I replace the protective Rb and p53 proteins missing from each tumor cell. At one point, months ago perhaps, I could have made a preemptive strike when the malignancy was small and annihilated it. But now . . . now it is huge, its cells numbering in the billions, and it has colonized farflung reaches of my body.

  I am doomed unless I find a way to alert my immune system.

  Desperate, I flow to one of the lymph nodes in my neck. Here is where the first skirmishes took place. The alarm should have gone out from here to the rest of my body—Mutiny! Mutiny!

  But I see no signs of a struggle; instead an insidious fifth-column invasion has taken place. The tumor cells have quietly infiltrated the node and taken up residence, all the while continuing the wild division begun by their parent, and have crowded out most of the original occupants. Though the lymph node fairly bulges at its seams with malignant cells, the few remaining defender cells remain oblivious to them.

  As I watch the tumor cells divide, I want to scream at my defenders to wake up and attack. Chew up the bastards and spit them out!

  Maybe if I set an example. I still have the fire tine, so I thrust it into the chaotic nucleus of the nearest tumor cell just as it is preparing to divide. I use it to slash at the DNA . . . but the mitosis continues unabated.

  I back away, defeated, discouraged. Frustration claws at me as the one cell becomes two. I stand helpless, crying out for a solution. What damn good is this new level of awareness, this vaunted Fifth Harmonic if I can't—?

  Sudden movement catches my attention. A formerly idle white blood cell suddenly darts past me and leaps on one of the new tumor cells. It quickly engulfs it, then moves on to the other. I watch, stunned, as it devours the second.

  What just happened?

  I find another malignant cell preparing to divide and I use the tine again to slash at its nucleus. I watch closely this time as it divides and I notice a mark on the membranes of the new cells . . . an irregularly shaped scarlike defect.

  And suddenly another white cell is there, engulfing the pair of new tumor cells.

  It must be the scar . . . the defenders see the membrane defect as an alien attribute—a mark of Cain—and attack the cell as an outsider.

  And now I see the other white cells stirring, alerted that something is up. Their membranes ripple as they scramble to readiness. They pause, then begin a frontal assault on the other tumor cells in the node—the unmarked cells. Some message has been passed . . . a marginally aberrant protein in the tumor membranes that previously has been allowed to pass is now designated as foreign.

  The slaughter begins. The malignant cells have no defenses— they've survived this long only by their ability to pass as normal cells. Now that they've been unmasked, they're sitting ducks.

  But even this is not enough. The tumor is too vast and widespread at this point. My immune system is weakened and disorganized, decimated by the months the cancer has had free rein to run wild through my body. Given enough time and a sufficient supply of nutrients, the system might be able to rebuild itself and conquer the tumor, but it has neither. Dehydration and malnutrition favor the greedy malignancy.

  Demoralized and disheartened, I move away. If I could destroy the primary tumor mass, I could relieve the pressure against my esophagus. I could drink again. I could eat real food. I could build up my nutritional reserves and buy time for my defense forces. I could give this monster a run for its money.

  But how?

  I return to the primary site where the cancer was born. I stand on its border, in the teeming, burgeoning suburbs that constrict my esophagus and abut my trachea, and I glare at the blazing heart of its center city.

  If only it had a true heart. Or a brain. A life center I could strike at and destroy. But a tumor is the soul of polycentrism—each individual cell is a potential new tumor.

  I decide to travel to its malignant center anyway, to see where the end of my life began. The surest path there is along the tangle of new blood vessels the cancer has created to feed itself. I start to follow—

  And then stop, my mind suddenly awhirl with possibilities.

  New blood vessels . . . angiogenesis. A successful tumor has a knack for stimulating existing blood vessels to form new branches and send them its way to feed its growing cell populat
ion. A cancer can break all sorts of rules but it cannot get around the necessity of a steady blood supply to survive. No tissue, normal or malignant, can grow or even exist without that.

  This one is no exception.

  And here I am, watching my own pulsing arteries pump a continuous stream of blood into the tumor mass, feeding it. Can I do something about that? The tumor is already starving me—a little turnabout would be more than fair play.

  But how? Find that tine and slash the arteries?

  No . . . I want to kill the tumor, not me.

  Block the arteries, maybe?

  Again—how?

  Can I narrow them? I can sure as hell try.

  I start small. I concentrate on a nearby arteriole, willing the smooth muscle cells within its wall—my cells—to contract, constricting the lumen. And as I watch, I see a section of its tubular length shrink, reducing its inner diameter by a third, then a half, then all the way down to ninety percent. With only ten percent of the original flow moving through, the blood cells crowd against each other. I stimulate the sludging platelets to adhere, triggering a clot.

  Done! The arteriole is plugged. Nothing flows through it now. Exaltation surges through me like electric fire.

  The blood behind the blockage backs up to the nearest proximal branch and shunts away to down that channel. Keeping the first vessel constricted, I move to the next one, constricting and clotting its lumen exactly as I did the first. I keep moving, spreading my influence from vessel to vessel, tackling bigger and bigger arteries, systematically shutting down the tumor's life lines, cutting off its oxygen, strangling the filthy rotten bastard tissue.

  The tumor begins screaming for more blood, for new vasculature to replace the suddenly defective infrastructure. But I allow no new vessels to form. I haven't been able to block every arteriole, but I'm throttling large areas of the mass, causing them to change color, turning them a mottled blue gray as those cells choke for oxygen. The tumor cannot move, but I can almost see it writhing in agony, and that only spurs me to clamp down harder on its blood supply. I scream like a madman.