Chapter 12 2

"Oh! Nick!." Kelly trembled, her voice so thin it was hard to hear, "Guy killed you in Fairfax, that's true."When the fog surrounded us here last night, I thought he was dead like you, I thought our lives were wasted and the terminal was useless.I can't believe it. " "I never thought something like this could happen," Nick said, turning around and moving his bloodied hands, looking at himself in amazement as he turned himself up and down like an unbelievable toy for a child, "but I The experience on this planet is not enough to show our life's ability," he looked at Kelly, "how did you do it? How did you bring me back from the dead?"

"It's up to you, Nick. Of course the tetrahedron helped me a lot. Last night in the cave, it told me that you could be resurrected in the body of a dead Gai. It told me what to do, so I woke up Tom , and ask him to help me. If you have enough time and there is no threat of white mist, I think you can do it all by yourself." "You're so kind, Kelly," Nick said, looking very pleased.But the grin on his face faded when he saw the shadowed terminal tower, "But we still have a lot to do. Look at our terminal, it's a complete lair for space snakes." He frowned and looked at the dead metal ants around the stone, "Our replicators are all dead too."

"When you die, they all die!" "So they should start up again now?" Slowly, tremblingly, she picked up a small motionless copying machine and brought it to Nick, who poked its red head with his fingers.The shiny machine actually instantly came to life, twisting in Kelly's hands, and then hovering over Nick's head. I heard a loud hum.The dead ants rose from the ground, several, dozens, hundreds... They gathered together and stopped at one end of the stone.I smell hot sulfur again. "Yeah!" Tom took a few steps back. "This is too much." "It's all right, Mr. Hood,"

Kelly yelled at him, "The replicators aren't space invaders, they're from our side." They flew towards the stone, though I didn't see any indication.The ants began to join each other, their feet hooked, their silvery heads forming a honeycomb ball, ten feet in diameter, with a black passage leading to its opening. "Maybe we weren't born for nothing," cheers Nick, waving Kelly and Tom into the aisle. "Let's take the tetrahedron to the terminal. If the space snake doesn't fight too hard, I think we'll light the semaphore." Kelly whispered, "If we can."

She jumped up the passage, but Tom stepped back, frowning at its smooth, bulbous tail. "Will metal ants do anything you want them to do?" He squinted at Nick, then mustered up the courage to ask aloud, "Can you make them find me a cigarette?" "Come on," Nick said, "I've got to go find Uncle Kim." "My brother?" he shrugged. "Why waste time with that poor fool? Better let him stay there. He's not an idealist and won't like our new world." Enraged by Tom's words, I stood up and tried to refute him.Kelly yelled in the shiny sphere, defending me, I suppose, and Nick took Tom's fat arm up the black passage.None of them saw me. I wanted to scream, but it seemed like something was stuck in my throat.

I don't know what made me feel dizzy, I broke out in a cold sweat, I felt exhausted and I started to shake.I fell behind the stone, filled with resentment. Although I don't know what made me like this, but I saw the black shadow in the middle of the sphere, which was made of metal ants, and they exuded bitterness. Tom stepped on the passage carefully, and then walked up with his head held high . Next up is Nick.Freshly regenerated from Guy's flesh, he looked impatiently across the rolling fog at the tachyon terminal shrouded in space snakes.Although I've known my children since they were kids, Nick is now a frightening stranger to me.

I sobbed in pain, wondering about myself.I began to feel that there was some truth in Tom's words. I had always regarded these children as lovely guests in the family, but now the world seemed to be theirs. My world is a narrow minority enclave, where the power is constantly cut off, the sewers and toilets are infested with cockroaches, and there are annoying quarrels between parents from time to time.The mother worked a menial job, and the father died young. Tom's scheming and I'm so honest.That gray, miserable world made me such a coward—perhaps as my father used to say.I reflect on myself this cold night and see no use to me in the new world before the fog.

I lay still, limp, and watched as Nick followed Tom into the silver ball, and the passage rolled up to seal the black entrance.I was sweating and shaking constantly.I don't know what I want and what should I do?I watched the bright ball fly towards the cave and drop down the cliff, where Nick or Kelly must have found me.A few minutes later it rose again, hanging high like a shrunken moon.It flew through the fog towards the tower in the distance. After it left, I calmed down a lot, and felt a little bit of hope and joy.Regardless of my outcome, Nick and Kelly are well on their way to their world, ending a 600-million-year hiatus, and the black seed on the information missile is finally destined to bear fruit.

Driven by curiosity, I climbed up the red "altar".It was flat and round at the top, twenty feet wide, hard, warm to the touch, hard enough to break the pocketknife in my pocket.Before I could solve the mystery, suddenly a group of metal ants rushed down to me. Shocked and terrified I jumped off the rock and they landed on the rock with a thud and began to attach to the outer layer of the stone, forming another metal shell.A burst of dazzling sunlight made my mouth bitter again.Their screams pierced my brain, and I staggered back a few steps to see the stone rise. Its shape surprised me.Turns out it wasn't spherical but oval and I believe it was mounted on the dome of the tachyon signal tower and when Nick died the metal ants dropped it and inserted it pointed down The rock was removed, leaving a bottom almost as flat as the rock.It was dug out leaving a large hole in the rock.

The metal ants ignored me and flew away with the stone.Their screams died away, leaving only the smell of sulfur mingled with the stench of the fog.The sun was bright again, and I threw a stone into the altar and walked slowly out onto the road. I climbed the canyon slowly, with a hint of regret, nostalgic for Gai's kingdom, the cozy refuge I had found from all space disasters.Thinking about the fate of Billy Levelland and Andy, and our female guard in green suspenders, I suddenly made a decision: go back to Fairfax. A short climb left me out of breath and looking for a place to sit.When I realized my weakness, and remembered Carter's torment after escaping from the ants, my impulsive thoughts faltered a little.Although now I'm a fugitive from the terminal, the new world of children, I can't find a place to go.

I'm confident it will be easier to get out than Carter.After the autumn rain, water is not a problem.If I'm lucky, I'll find fruit trees or wild animals.At noon, I almost got up in a hurry, whistling and shooting a shotgun.I dried my blankets, filled my canteen with water from a well at the top of the cave, and gathered my little food, and suddenly I felt like a nomadic hunter with minimal equipment. That night I lay on a solid rock, and waited till dawn to set out.I felt an inexplicable loneliness, as if my life was about to end.I look back on my life, this time without emotion, very objectively.I re-examined my failures, and if I was a coward, what was there to blame?I'm a loser in love, but I think there's a reason for that, it's the family's fault.If I could learn to laugh at my father's Yiddish jokes, if Tom could learn not to make fun of the family, if Tom and I really understood each other... I eventually fell asleep, but had a horrible dream.In the dream, the invisible bloody mist demon competed for the skin of me who was sleeping soundly under the moonlight.I woke up before dawn, my whole body ached, my clothes soaked in sweat, and I started shivering again from the cold.I figured it must be the gamma virus in my blood again.I lay straight, staring desolately out of the dark cave, until I saw the blood-red light shining on the cave wall. At first I thought it was my illness that made me hallucinate. I moved and tried to lie down, but a sharp pain made me feel that the world was about to face a new disaster.I crawled out of the wet blanket to find a light source. The southwest sky turned a strange red color, as if the sun was rising in the opposite direction, and I tiptoed and waddled back, the red light making it easy for me to do so. I couldn't stop shaking.To get a better view, I stepped onto the road.The red light became brighter and brighter, and slowly, its color also became golden.That's when I saw the tachyon terminal station. I stopped, fear turned to wonder, lessened by the light emanating from the top of the tower.I knew that Nick and Kelly had lit the semaphore and were signaling to their mysterious ancestry. I stood there for a long time, the cacophony of the space snake died away, the towers seemed closer and closer in the light, and the land of the ridge was bathed in the eerie green of the terminal towers, and then slowly Into midnight blues and purples.I stood trembling in the wind until the terminal turned red again. Of course the real signal is invisible, it travels in a strange way, these lights are only sent out to guide those spacecraft to land.Looking at the luminous spire, I suddenly felt an inexplicable regret. I could have been a part of it.I could have stopped Kelly and Nick and gone into the ball with them, I could have stayed with them in that magical tower, waiting for its creator to arrive, not like now... Sighing in pain, I stumbled back to the cave.I lay down trembling, watching the changing light, I almost decided not to go, just waiting here to see the arrival of the spaceship. As dawn came, a cold westerly wind brought a foul smell of melons.I suddenly realized that I couldn't be here.I don't know when the signal will reach Nick's ancestors, nor if it will actually reach the election.Even if the signal can be transmitted, how long it will take the spacecraft is still unknown.All I know is that a small piece of beef jerky will only last me a few days. Enduring the stench of the mist, I braced myself and started the long march out of the valley, toward the mountain peak occupied by space snakes and the land in front of me.The colored lights of the signal lights still illuminated the cliffs above me as I set out, but slowly faded as the day dawned.My memory is a bit fuzzy, and my consciousness is fragmented into disconnected fragments in despair. Sun, light, frost, ice, mountains and desert mirages. Those were truly formidable trials, they are in my memory, and will never be.In it, difficult realities seem to be mingled into wonderful dreams, and I will recall a purposeless night when I lay on high ground without even a stone or a grove to protect against the icy, biting wind.I couldn't sleep, my eyes followed the stars, and when I saw a new star in the sky, I couldn't help but guess: if there was one, it would be a creature from this group of stars, responding to the tachyon signal. Maybe a star, because it's not moving.It's blue, unlike any planet's color, so bright it's slowly becoming unbelievably colorful.is a redder color than Mars, which is bluish-purple.It rises to the apex faster than the planets.In the dream-like light of green and yellow, its gloom cast a frost-like strangeness on the lifeless land around me. It was too bright, and I was afraid that the space snake would find me because of it, and I trembled like losing my mind. Swipe over my head, it becomes spherical and I calm down to find a place to hide.I stood up and saw it start to accelerate variably, and I began to notice an echo that must have been from the tachyon signal light. From my perspective, the terminal stands below the horizon, but I can see the red ball it shoots into the far sky.A torrent across the spectrum, the blue receding at the black ridges, and the rings of light kept alternating, turning faster and faster, very harsh.I watched until the globular shimmering moon sank in the distance, and the night suddenly rose. I wondered what was going on with the glowing thing, curled up in my blanket, and I lay, waiting for the space snake.I am asleep.In the dream, space snakes had found me, emitting the suffocating stench of fog and singing at me in Kelly's voice, tearing at my skin. That dream was at least partially true.I saw the fog, and shivering in the drizzle, I motivated myself to go to the last mountain.What I found instead of the expected firewood and shelter was a rippling white current that moved imperceptibly down to the furthest end of my line of sight. I was sleeping in a concrete pipe in the pavement, and I was covered in a cold sweat as the nightmarish fog came over me and its skinned creatures trapped me in the pipe.I lay terribly weak, even having trouble breathing.I climbed out at dawn, and the fog left slime to record the level it had reached.I was literally haunted by the figments of grotesque dreams in which I struggled through that hideous valley of fog, with that nasty lingering smell of melons.I limped over the bloody litter, feces, I saw it clinging to the bones of animals, and I heard the horrible meowing. A bridge is missing.I struggled through the stony canyon, wading in the shallow river of slime.I heard the screeching of metallic ants and saw a silver ball drop in my direction. I want to fend it off with my red hat.When it hit, I had a strong bitter taste in my mouth.The ball fell into the river.Kelly appeared, and I wasn't sure if it was a dream: her naked body mesmerized me.She was like a stone with a short life that Venus touched. I, who had not completely lost my mind, raised my gun. "Go away!" I gasped, I couldn't take it anymore. "Uncle Kim," she said, choking with pain, "don't you know me? "You are a space monster!" I was very surprised to hear my hoarse and harsh voice, like a strange lunatic talking, strange like those space snakes, like those things in the fog, like the things in my blood Gamma germs. "The ambassador is here, Uncle Kim," she said in her voice and the smile in her eyes, as if she wanted to comfort me. "I think you need help." "No!" I involuntarily raised my gun, maybe I've had enough. "The space snakes are gone," she gazed at the sky. "They never liked it here. We have too much moisture and oxygen for them." "But there's still fog." "We'll need them," she said, shaking her flowing hair back in distress, "when we get to Venus. They're caused by rot spreading from our dumps faster than gamma infections on Earth. Faster. That decay kills half of the oxygenates in the upper air of Venus. "When temperatures are moderate, more intelligent fliers (fog) find their food. They fight back in self-defense. "The fog obscured the marching army sent to stop us from polluting its planet, made up of exceptionally mutant beings that thrived and survived in our biological universe. It was an army from Venus, which, by the way, brought Our people are stuck on Mercury." "If only we..." The simple truth leaves me speechless, "If only we had known!" "That's why the space snakes are here," she said in a jerky voice, growing faster and faster, reminding me of Nick. They knew what was being done to our craft. They were trying to contact us. There was a breakthrough when they were able to explain to our intergalactic friends. You should have seen that when the Venusians started to 'drag' the fog back, The joy of them jumping around the terminal." "Why bother with the fog?" My throat was sore and hoarse, "When humanity is extinct, why not just invite our space friends to take over the planet? "Uncle Kim!" she made a face at me. "It's not that bad. The Venusians are very humane by our old military standards. They're concentrating their military power around our space centers and in the Gobi The Tianmen and permanent Soviet military bases. There was no massacre, the space snakes did prevent air travel, and the fog drove humans from the sea. But we have found the vast majority of humans alive and well on dry land." I stare blankly at my swollen and blistered hands for a moment, then back at her. "So the world isn't over," she slowed down, giving her time for an enigmatic questioning smile, "if you can bear the shock! Our big job is done, we have a A short vacation. The ambassador is leaving to visit our neighboring planet. Your enterprising brother is inviting my poor mother to study the new snow on Sandys slopes. Nick was on his way to visit old friends at Fairfax, and Guy had enough energy that he had to see the women again. " "Won't Bill Bleveland be surprised?" She gave a short laugh and shrugged. That subconscious gesture may have concealed her feelings more, but the liquid flowing in her golden body almost made my heart stop. "I came out to look for you again, although everyone else has given up on you," she paused halfway through the lead-colored passage to look at me, "Maybe it's a matter of time, if you can see what you look like, a man in clothes Raggedy!" She laughed at me.I was struggling to keep up with her when I stopped again and was stabbed by her purely teasing stare. "Jin!" Her concern brushed away her laughter, "What's wrong with you?" "At one point, I'm only human," I said, startled by my own voice, "I'm afraid I don't belong in your new superhuman world," I raised my voice tenaciously when I saw her hurt." One more thing, I believe my old gamma-type infection has returned." "Our new medical treatment will heal it quickly," she said off the ramp, her golden "cat" legs over the smooth red stone to the edge of the golden water, where she paused, her golden hands on her golden hips, She eyed me suspiciously. "There is a quicker cure," There was something in her glee that I dreaded knowing, "You know our bodies make what Nick says are antibiotics against every virus. There's a way I can share antibiotics with you, though your doctor Might frown on the prescription." I stood admiring her brown loveliness while I waited to figure out what she was doing.I felt a throbbing, and wondered vaguely if her inhuman strength had begun to lift me from my long weariness.Fond memories dance in my head like champagne bubbles: the pixie-like cuteness of the stern-eyed baby Kelly, the way her little hand rests in mine trustingly, her joy in her own unique and mysterious music The look, the strange game she played with little Nick, the magical moment when she was transformed into a mature woman after touching the tetrahedron.She turned slightly, and the sunlight gilded her face and thighs.I was shaken by my sudden and unexpected lust, and troubled, I suddenly realized my bold vision and wanted to turn around. "You don't have to feel like you're fucking incest," she mocked my embarrassment with a silvery laugh, "you're not my real uncle after all," her eyes became serious, almost sad, "you gotta know , Kim, the tetrahedron has told me how you have felt about me for a long time, I always knew you better than yourself - loved you more than anyone else, that's why I came to you." Her eyes became calm and direct, choking my breath. "That's why I came back to you. I don't want to hurt you any more, whatever..." She paused to look at me. "Whatever we do, I hope you don't take it too seriously." I waited in a vertigo of excitement. "First, there's something I have to tell you." Her voice dropped with grief. "Nick and I are leaving in the tachyon ship, and we're going to represent our entire group of planets. I don't know when I'll be back." Her face reflected my crushed pain. "I'm sorry, Kim. I don't want to leave you, my mom, Uncle Yuri, and Aunt Carolina. But it's part of the work we were born to do. And we're all excited about it. It's another mission to Help us adapt to the cultures of those planets." I nod sadly. "I think you should know," she said, "that no other creature can follow me and Nick until the health and rules are fully settled, and we're going to have to keep you here." She jumped over the clods and ran towards me with her arms outstretched.I dropped the gun and turned silently to show her the filthy stench and drying clay all over me.She hugged me as if the dirt on me didn't exist.She kissed me—Kelly kissed me. I followed her out of the quagmire.The piercing screeches of metal ants instantly became a beautiful wedding march.They lead us to a lake obscured by fog.She told me to throw away my old mud-covered clothes, and we bathed there.The freezing snow should have made me feel frozen, but she was doing her superhuman powers to make the lake invigorating.That day and night hold a special place in my memory, indescribably precious.Surrounded by her lilac deodorant, I am intoxicated by the incredible aura of her golden body.In that moment I was more than just a person.She made me forget that I was a coward, a coward. Kelly gave me a taste of the joy of Superman, how can I not value it?Her prolonged kisses left a lonely pain in my soul.My eyes were clouded, and when she opened the door to the sphere, all I saw was a blur of blue. "The starship is now loading on the top platform," her voice was rapid, rising and falling, as if she sensed my regret. "The air up there is too thin for you. I have to leave you here," She gave me a quick final hug in her cool arms, "Don't forget me, Kim." As if I would ever forget her. Looking at the drab blue, I saw the globe in the center of a great white plain surrounded only by bloody mist.A cold wind stung my cowering nakedness.I looked back at Kelly one last time, and a sense of aloneness came over me. "You'll be fine, Kim!" Her words encouraged me. "You're a big boy now, after all. I know you're going to be fine—and strong enough!" I heard "love" in her mischievous words.All of a sudden, I realized that I had made a huge mistake never telling her how much I loved her.I wanted to say it, but my voice was hoarse, and I knew she understood all of my feelings.I fought back my tears and waved goodbye to her.I fell down the tunnel. The blue light faded, and the faint image of the central tower in the distance revealed in the dawn, and I could see the high-level platform; for a moment, the signal lights were dazzling again in the gray-white clouds.The air there is too thin for me.A rosy light, a baptism of gold, shadows flitted over the non-earthly important objects around me.I saw Yuri Marco and Carolina driving up the ramp to meet me.When the signal lights changed, I, who had seemed indifferent, grinned and waved goodbye.With a certain repressed longing, I stepped into the future I had avoided. 【End of the book】