“That’s an unsettling notion,” said Sparky.
“I didn’t mean it to be so,” Panthea assured him. “I offer the thought only so that we might better understand ourselves.”
“The thing is, I want a mother,” Bridget said, not plaintively, but with a solemnity that left no doubt that this mattered to her. “Even if I never meet Corrine, even if I meet her and then don’t much like her, which seems quite possible, I nonetheless want to believe that she’ll return some day, that at least the chance exists I could touch her, hug her. Maybe ask her why she went away. Even though I suspect she might have no good reason why.”
Panthea sympathized. “I’ve been fortunate to have adoptive parents who loved me. It’s easier for me than for you to consider that we might be . . . outsiders in this fundamental way.”
Most of my life, I’d fantasized about my parents, not always in a sensible fashion. For instance, in my mind, my mother sometimes had been a former supermodel whose face was horribly scarred in an accident. Destitute and unable to show herself in public without causing pregnant women to miscarry and children to be so traumatized that they had to be institutionalized for the rest of their lives, she did the selfless thing—leaving me to be found on the highway and retreating from civilization to live in a convent with a sack over her head. Sometimes I imagined my father was a famous actor or a mob boss, or a millionaire with amnesia who would come looking for me when he remembered I existed, or he was that guy who invented the world’s best pillow and sold millions on cable TV commercials.
If what Panthea proposed was true, I would regret not being able to indulge in such fantasies anymore, but a second reason for dismay occurred to me. “Does this mean we’re not human?”
“No,” Panthea said. “Even if what I’ve seen as a seer is correct, we’re human, of course. The difference is that we were engineered maybe in a laboratory or else someplace beyond our easy comprehension, then brought into the world by surrogate mothers who perhaps didn’t have full knowledge of their role.”
“That doesn’t sound exactly human,” I said.
“Surrogate mothers have been around for decades,” Panthea said. “They have helped many couples when the wife was physically unable to carry her own fetus. Some of our DNA, our special abilities, may be from the Rishon of the first universe, but they, too, were human.”
“Until they degenerated into Nihilim,” Bridget said.
“Which does not mean you and Quinn and I will likewise become moral and then physical degenerates. Many Rishon of this second universe are well along that path. We have been seeded into this world to prevent their further slide into an apocalyptic disaster, at least as they are being encouraged and assisted by the Nihilim.”
“I don’t want to be one of the X-Men,” I said. “There’s way too much angst involved in being one of the X-Men. Being one of the X-Men only works if you’re as handsome as Hugh Jackman, and then not much. Anyway, even the X-Men aren’t big box office anymore.”
Maybe Sparky was impatient with all of us or maybe just with me, but he was snappish when he said, “No matter how you got here, you’re human, Quinn. And you’re human, Bridget. Your special talents come with an obligation, a serious one. Both of you have a duty to use them for the purpose you were given, a duty to your country, the world, humanity. Duty isn’t to be taken lightly. Get over yourselves and get your asses in gear.”
I like to think I would have gotten over myself and shifted my ass into gear before much longer, but just then dire events began to cascade with such velocity that I had no choice but to embrace my otherworldly heritage and the duty that came with it.
“What’s this?” Bridget asked in the tone of voice with which a curious but wary character in one of the Alien movies might express interest when about to examine the large purselike egg in which a face clutcher waited to seize her head.
We were on the federal highway, approaching its intersection with the interstate, which was at this point somewhat elevated above the lesser road. Heavy rain slashed the night, the skeins dividing it into diagonal slivers like a completed puzzle in which the narrow slices of the image did not quite align. Bridget let our speed fall. Leaning over the steering wheel to squint through the rain-blurred windshield, she said, “That cluster of lights on the interstate, to the west. There’s been an accident—or it’s a roadblock.”
From the back seat, leaning forward, Panthea said, “Roadblock. The ISA is looking for us. And a blockade to the west means there’s also one in the eastbound lanes we can’t see from here.”