Body Surfing

wings.”
    “God did want us to fly!” J.D. Thomas said so forcefully that Jasper took a step back. “Who or whatever God is, it granted us the minds to unlock the secret of air travel, as well as a thousand other mysteries! This is just the latest, and by no means the last of our evolutions. I’ll say it again, Jasper, a new age is dawning. The Covenant has succeeded. All the other Mogran are gone save you and Leo and the Alphas, skulking away in their caves and castles. It is time to forge a new relationship between mortals and Mogran, one based on cooperation and a recognition of our mutual interests. With the Mogran assuming their rightful place at the head of the species, we can create an era of peace and prosperity and universal harmony.”
    Michaela realized what Jasper was going to do even before he did.
    Jasper, no!
    Sorry ’bout this , Jasper said, but someone’s gotta stop this nut job .
    “Utopias never work,” he said out loud, and launched the body of his beloved at the demon.

13
    F or one thousand eight hundred ninety-four years (not counting the ten pointless years of his fleshly existence) he has wandered the earth.
    If he ever conceived of a destination, a goal—his own country, his own religion, his own home even—he has long since given up on it. Even before that happened, he convinced himself he never had a starting point either. Like the ancient river from which his kind take their name, he has no single source, but emerged imperceptibly from the movement of untold numbers of electrons. (Ah, but even the Nile was dammed, wasn’t it, its eighty-four billion cubic meters of water converted into 20,000 megawatts of electricity annually, meaning the river is not simply his namesake, but a kind of cousin—a cousin who, like him, can be contained within borders, however briefly.) But no, the Germanic child who died when the Roman Empire stretched from the Tigris to the Tyne is no more the source of him than the addled gas jockey who now houses his ethereal essence.
    He has possessed 46,881 people—the population of a good-sized city stretching from the wheat fields of Palestina to the apple orchards just outside the door that used to hang from these hinges. Many he took for less than a minute, one for almost a century, but in his memory there is no difference between them. He has complete recall of the shortest-and longest-inhabited of his hosts. At one point hethought of them as parents; then, when he came to understand that he left them in a rather different state from the one he’d found them in, he came to think of them as children. But for more than a thousand years he’s just thought of them as meals. A new set of experiences, largely indistinguishable one from the other. There is an occasional skill to be learned—a language, a science—but these are tools. Any kind of emotional charge has long since vanished. It’s been a thousand years since he gave serious thought to the idea of companionship, romantic or platonic. But when Foras came to him, Leo’s mind went immediately to one idea.
    A friend.
    Not a lover. No, not love, for sex is the one thing destined to separate the Mogran from each other.
    No, Leo wanted a companion. An ally. Someone to share eternity with. To toy with the Legion and whatever comes after them, as well as to engage in the larger battle with the Alphas and their ridiculous—selfish, really, positively flesh-centered—idea that the original nine are the only Mogran who deserve to exist. And why nine anyway? Why that cutoff? Did they have a problem with double digits?
    Ah, too many thoughts. Leo hadn’t been this introspective in centuries. It was all Jasper’s fault. The fledgling had slowed him down. Made him think instead of act. Made him wish he’d never learned the secret—certainly he would think long and hard before attempting it again. But right now, he had loose ends to tie up. Starting with this one. Qusay, Mohammed Jr . A shame his soul hadn’t been bound when Leo found him. He had more spunk than Jasper ever would, even if he possessed fifty thousands lives of his own. Although Jasper could still be useful to him, if only to distract the Legion and the Alphas.
    But Leo didn’t like to do things the easy way. And besides, he had a score to settle. A point to make. Jasper would die, by Leo’s hand. And Q. would be the one to bring him here.
     
    Q. heard the bucket filling after the fact. After the water splashed him in the face. Time