“It’s academic now,” I said; “both Man and Tauran. No group, no group mind.”
The sheriff shook his head. “We’ll grow back, same as you. Most of the frozen ova and sperm are Man.”
“You assume the others are all dead,” Disney said, “but all we really know is that they’ve disappeared.”
“They’re all in some big nudist colony in the sky,” I said.
“We have no evidence one way or the other. Your group is here and so is ours. Omni on the Moon and Mars and in local spaceships all report the disappearance of humans and Taurans, but none of us is gone, as far as we can tell.”
“Other starships?” Stephen said.
“That’s why I was waiting at the Cape. There are twenty-four within one collapsar jump of Stargate. Two should have returned by now. But only unmanned drones have come in, with routine messages.”
“Why do you think the Omni were spared?” Marygay said. “Because you’re immortal?”
“Oh, we’re not immortal, except the way an amoeba is.” He smiled at me. “If you had targeted me this morning, rather than the hot dog stand, you would probably have done enough damage to kill me.”
“I’m sorry–”
He waved it away. “You thought I was a machine. But no, except for you, the thing seems species-selective. Humans and Taurans disappear; birds and bees and Omni don’t.”
“And the thing that sets us apart is that we were trying to escape,” Cat said.
Disney shrugged. “Suppose for a moment that the universe does care about intent. What you were doing would get its notice.”
That was a bit much. “And that would piss off the universe so much that it would destroy ten billion people and Taurans.”
Anita moaned softly. “Something…something’s wrong.” She stood erect, her back arching, and her eyes grew round and bulged. Her face swelled. Her coveralls became taut and the seams started to split.
Then she exploded: one horrible wet smack, and we were all spattered with blood and tissue; a piece of bone glanced off my cheekbone with stinging force.
I looked at the Omni. He was Disney, covered with blood and gore, and then he flickered, between Disney and an apparition that was mostly fangs and claws–and then he was Uncle Walt again, clean.
Most of us, including me, sat down. Chance and Steve sort of fell down. Where Anita had been standing, there were a pair of boots with two blood-streaked stalks of bone.
“I didn’t do this,” Disney said.
The sheriff drew his pistol. “I don’t believe you.” He shot him point-blank in the heart.
——————————————————————————–
Chapter thirty
The next few minutes were grotesque. The little robots rolled out to clean up–Mickey and Donald and Minnie chanting admonitory rhymes while they speared and vacuumed up the fragmentary remains of a woman I’d known for half my life. When they went to police up her boots, all that was left that had any individuality, I followed the Omni’s example and kicked them away. The sheriff saw what I was doing and helped.
We each picked up a gory boot. “There has to be some way to bury her,” he said.
Disney sat up, clutching his chest. “If you’ll stop shooting me, I can help.” He closed his eyes, his skin chalk grey, and for a moment it looked like he was just going to fall back dead. But he transformed himself, slowly, limb by limb, into a large black working man in overalls, clutching a shovel. He got to his feet with exaggerated stiffness.
“You been around these normal people too long,” he said in a gravelly Louis Armstrong bass. “You suppose’ to control that temper.” He whacked a robot away with the shovel, and pointed with it, toward a stand of palm trees. “Let’s take her over there, put her to rest.” He addressed the others. “You all get inside and clean up. We take care of this part.”
He hefted the shovel and walked toward the palms. As he passed the sheriff, he said, “Don’t do that. It hurts.”
The sheriff and I followed him, each with our grisly token. It took him about a minute to dig a deep square hole.