Body Surfing

form an organization to hunt them down and kill them?’
    “Because of the Covenant, of course.”
    “What’s that? More of your pseudoreligious mumbo jumbo?”
    “You’re referring to the Ark of the Covenant, I assume? I can assure you, the Hebrews took the term from us, not the other way around.”
    “I don’t care about etymology. I want to know what it is .”
    Jasper! Why are you talking to this guy instead of getting my tongue as far from him as you can?
    “Nice use of the word etymology,” Thomas said. “It’s getting easier, isn’t it? Accessing all the information in your consciousness? It’s amazing what even a few badly educated specimens of middleclass America have been exposed to, especially in the age of radio, television, and the internet. All the ambient information that passes by everyone else’s eyes is as present to you as your favorite book or your mother’s name. You’re hardly a seventeen-year-old boy anymore, are you?”
    Jasper started to tell Thomas to get on with it, but the doctor waved him silent. “A long time ago, when it became clear that the proliferation of the Mogran was becoming problematic, both for us as well as for humanity, the original nine—the so-called Alpha Wave, if Q. told you about it—formed a pact to control the spread of our kind. In the first place, we elected to conceal the secret of our reproduction from our offspring, which it had taken us quite some time to learn ourselves, and, in the second, we decided to track down the nine hundred or so Mogran whom we had created in ignorance, and eliminate them.”
    “You’re one of the original Mogran? But that must make you thousands of years old.”
    Thomas smiled. “I could tell you the number of days, the number of minutes and seconds even, but suffice to say that I was already ancient when the pyramids were built. I saw the walls of Troy come down, and the Tower of Babel, and the destruction of Pompeii.”
    Jasper waved a hand at the doctor’s body. “You must’ve been in this body for at least a hundred years. How do keep yourself from jumping?”
    “Such a practical boy! Your questions are almost startlingly banal. Listen, Jasper: no Mogran ever fully learns to resist the urge to jump. The seesaw of frenzy and lull is an incontrovertible aspect of our nature. This was one of the things that led to the Covenant in the first place. Our jumps were wreaking havoc. We carried information from one part of the world to another in the blink of an eye. The pace of technological innovation was vastly accelerated, far faster than the finite sensibilities of mortals could handle it. It was decided we would take the necessary steps to ensure that we never jumped again.”
    “You mean—”
    Thomas nodded.
    “I do.”
    What’s he mean? Michaela said.
    “Think about it,” Jasper said out loud.
    Ouch!
    Jasper looked at the man in front of him. It seemed to him that the wound on Thomas’s head had faded even more in the past five minutes. “How long have you been in this body?”
    “The Covenant was negotiated over the course of about five hundred years and was finalized right after the first Council of Nicaea. So about—”
    “Seventeen hundred years. Jesus Christ.”
    The doctor smiled wryly. “Idle minds in the Legion would have you believe he was one of us. I have worked the story myself from time to time. But Jesus was just another deluded young man who thought he was the Messiah. They were a dime a dozen back then. Or a dupondius a dozen, as the case may be.”
    “Wait a minute. If you signed on to this Covenant to eliminate all the other demons, then why did you tell Q. you wanted to capture Leo and use him to reveal the secrets of the Mogran to the world?”
    “Jasper, Jasper, Jasper. You are hopelessly naive. I never had any intention of exposing the existence of Leo or you or any other Mogran, at least not yet. That was nothing more than a bit of misdirection, as the movie people put it. A plausible story that would cover my tracks, even as it convinced Q. to do what I wanted.”
    “I thought you convinced Q. to do what you wanted by hypnotizing him.”
    Thomas smiled wryly. “Like you, Q. possesses a certain stubbornness of will that almost resembles fortitude. Suffice to say that Leo forced my hand when he possessed Michaela, and I took the expedient route.” Thomas’s eyes roved up and down Michaela’s body. “He did a nice job, by the way. On the remodel.”
    Jasper! I don’t