Nor could I imagine what it did. But then I began to look with new eyes atthese offshoots, these biped shapes my own cells had so scrupulously andunthinkingly copied when they reshaped me for this world. Unused to inventory —why catalog body parts that only turn into other things at the slightestprovocation? — I really saw, for the first time, that swollen structure atopeach body. So much larger than it should be: a bony hemisphere into which amillion ganglionic interfaces could fit with room to spare. Every offshoot hadone. Each piece of biomass carried one of these huge twisted clots of tissue.

I realized something else, too: the eyes, the ears of my dead skin had fed intothis thing before Copper pulled it free. A massive bundle of fibers ran alongthe skin’s longitudinal axis, right up the middle of the endoskeleton, directlyinto the dark sticky cavity where the growth had rested. That misshapenstructure had been wired into the whole skin, like some kind of somatocognitiveinterface but vastly more massive. It was almost as if…

No.

That was how it worked. That was how these empty skins moved of their ownvolition, why I’d found no other network to integrate. There it was: notdistributed throughout the body but balled up into itself, dark and dense andencysted. I had found the ghost in these machines.

I felt sick.

I shared my flesh with thinking cancer.

Sometimes, even hiding is not enough.

I remember seeing myself splayed across the floor of the kennel, a chimerasplit along a hundred seams, taking communion with a handful of dogs. Crimsontendrils writhed on the floor. Half-formed iterations sprouted from my flanks,the shapes of dogs and things not seen before on this world, haphazardmorphologies half-remembered by parts of a part.

I remember Childs before I was Childs, burning me alive. I remember coweringinside Palmer, terrified that those flames might turn on the rest of me, thatthis world had somehow learned to shoot on sight.

I remember seeing myself stagger through the snow, raw instinct, wearingBennings. Gnarled undifferentiated clumps clung to his hands like crudeparasites, more outside than in; a few surviving fragments of some previousmassacre, crippled, mindless, taking what they could and breaking cover. Menswarmed about him in the night: red flares in hand, blue lights at their backs,their faces bichromatic and beautiful. I remember Bennings, awash in flames,howling like an animal beneath the sky.

I remember Norris, betrayed by his own perfectly-copied, defective heart.Palmer, dying that the rest of me might live. Windows, still human, burnedpreemptively.

The names don’t matter. The biomass does: so much of it, lost. So much newexperience, so much fresh wisdom annihilated by this world of thinking tumors.

Why even dig me up? Why carve me from the ice, carry me all that way across thewastes, bring me back to life only to attack me the moment I awoke?

If eradication was the goal, why not just kill me where I lay?

Those encysted souls. Those tumors. Hiding away in their bony caverns, foldedin on themselves.

I knew they couldn’t hide forever; this monstrous anatomy had only slowedcommunion, not stopped it. Every moment I grew a little. I could feel myselftwining around Palmer’s motor wiring, sniffing upstream along a million tinycurrents. I could sense my infiltration of that dark thinking mass behindBlair’s eyes.

Imagination, of course. It’s all reflex that far down, unconscious and immuneto micromanagement. And yet, a part of me wanted to stop while there was stilltime. I’m used to incorporating souls, not rooming with them. This, thiscompartmentalization was unprecedented. I’ve assimilated a thousand worldsstronger than this, but never one so strange. What would happen when I met thespark in the tumor? Who would assimilate who?

I was being three men by now. The world was growing wary, but it hadn’t noticedyet. Even the tumors in the skins I’d taken didn’t know how close I was. Forthat, I could only be grateful — that Creation has rules, that some thingsdon’t change no matter what shape you take. It doesn’t matter whether a soulspreads throughout the skin or festers in grotesque isolation; it still runs onelectricity. The memories of men still took time to gel, to pass throughwhatever gatekeepers filtered noise from signal — and a judicious burst ofstatic, however indiscriminate, still cleared those caches before theircontents could be stored permanently. Clear enough, at least, to let thesetumors simply forget that something else moved their arms and legs on occasion.

At first I only took control when the skins closed their eyes and theirsearchlights flickered disconcertingly across unreal imagery, patterns thatflowed senselessly into one another like hyperactive biomass unable to settleon a single shape. (Dreams, one searchlight told me, and a little later,Nightmares.) During those mysterious periods of dormancy, when the men layinert and isolated, it was safe to come out.

Soon, though, the dreams dried up. All eyes stayed open all the time, fixed onshadows and each other. Offshoots once dispersed throughout the camp began todraw together, to give up their solitary pursuits in favor of company. At firstI thought they might be finding common ground in a common fear. I even hopedthat finally, they might shake off their mysterious fossilization and takecommunion.

But no. They’d just stopped trusting anything they couldn’t see.

They were merely turning against each other.

My extremities are beginning to numb; my thoughts slow as the distal reaches ofmy soul succumb to the chill. The weight of the flamethrower pulls at itsharness, forever tugs me just a little off-balance. I have not been Childs forvery long; almost half this tissue remains unassimilated. I have an hour, maybetwo, before I have to start melting my grave into the ice. By that time I needto have converted enough cells to keep this whole skin from crystallizing. Ifocus on antifreeze production.

It’s almost peaceful out here. There’s been so much to take in, so little timeto process it. Hiding in these skins takes such concentration, and under allthose watchful eyes I was lucky if communion lasted long enough to exchangememories: compounding my soul would have been out of the question. Now, though,there’s nothing to do but prepare for oblivion. Nothing to occupy my thoughtsbut all these lessons left unlearned.

MacReady’s blood test, for example. His thing detector, to expose impostersposing as men. It does not work nearly as well as the world thinks; but thefact that it works at all violates the most basic rules of biology. It’s thecenter of the puzzle. It’s the answer to all the mysteries. I might havealready figured it out if I had been just a little larger. I might already knowthe world, if the world wasn’t trying so hard to kill me.

MacReady’s test.

Either it is impossible, or I have been wrong about everything.

They did not change shape. They did not take communion. Their fear and mutualmistrust was growing, but they would not join souls; they would only look forthe enemy outside themselves.

So I gave them something to find.

I left false clues in the camp’s rudimentary computer: simpleminded icons andanimations, misleading numbers and projections seasoned with just enough truthto convince the world of their veracity. It didn’t matter that the machine wasfar too simple to perform such calculations, or that there were no data to basethem on anyway; Blair was the only biomass likely to know that, and he wasalready mine.

I left false leads, destroyed real ones, and then — alibi in place — I releasedBlair to run amok. I let him steal into the night and smash the vehicles asthey slept, tugging ever-so-slightly at his reins to ensure that certain vitalcomponents were spared. I set him loose in the radio room, watched through hiseyes and others as he rampaged and destroyed. I listened as he ranted about aworld in danger, the need for containment, the conviction that most of youdon’t know what’s going on around here — but I damn well know that some of youdo…