"If you think about it," the sim said, "perhaps you already know the answer to that question."
28
ANTOFAGASTA / THE ATACAMA
THE ALLEY WAS EMPTY. A ROW OF RETAIL businesses blocked the late afternoon sun, their shabby back doors and peeling paint obscured by deepening shadows. Leo looked both ways, then tugged Cassie to the left. She followed wordlessly, gripping his hand so tightly it must have hurt him. Every trivial noise, the scuff of her shoes on the asphalt or the rattle of a trash bin as she brushed it with her hip, sounded both muted and much too loud, like an explosion heard underwater.
She couldn't think. Why couldn't she think? There was nothing in her head but a lightning- shot replay of the last few minutes. Her thoughts were like birds blown to sea, frantic and exhausted but with nowhere to settle.
Leo ducked into the building that adjoined the house, a public parking garage. Cassie was conscious of how purposefully he moved, scanning the forest of concrete pillars as he pulled her toward a stairwell, keeping the hand with the pistol in it at his thigh, disguised by his body. She saw the splashes of blood and green matter from the dead sim on the cuffs of his jeans. He smelled of sweat and spent gunpowder and crushed leaves. She stayed close behind him as he vaulted up the circling stairs, though she could hardly catch her breath.
He left the stairwell at the top of the garage, the open- air third story. Wind blowing between the ranks of parked cars carried the faint scent of gasoline. The sun was close to setting and the sky was a surreal shade of blue. Leo still had his hand in hers, or vice versa, and he pulled her toward a particular vehicle, an unmarked white van; belatedly, she recognized it as the rented vehicle Leo's father had been driving. He let go of her and fumbled a set of keys out of his pocket.
Cassie found herself able to ask, "Where are we going?"
"Just get in." Leo opened the passenger- side door for her.
"No—wait. Wait! Aunt Ris and Thomas—"
"What about them?"
"They're still back at the house!" Or had been, moments ago. She tried to sort out the collage of nasty images that comprised her memory. Aunt Ris and Thomas retreating up the stairs. Beth Vance dead behind them. Eugene Dowd dead, too, but not before he had killed two invading sims. . . . "They're still alive! Or, I mean, they were when I left. We have to help them!"
"No," Leo said.
"But—"
"Cassie, no. If they're alive, they'll be okay. Listen." He cocked his head. "Listen. Do you hear that?"
At first all she heard was the ringing that sounded in her ears like an alarm clock with a broken switch. Then, faintly, she registered the yodeling siren of an emergency vehicle, getting louder.
"Two minutes, three minutes, and the house is going to be full of police. Your aunt and your brother can fend for themselves—"
"They'll be arrested!"
"Maybe, but they'll be alive. We can't help them by going back, and we won't be doing them any favors if we leave a truck full of dynamite parked next door. So get in. Please, Cassie. Get in the van."
She wanted to do as he asked. She tried to lift herself through the open door. But her legs betrayed her. It wasn't cowardice, it was physical weakness. She slid down almost to the floor, then forced herself up on wobbling knees. Fucking humiliating.
"You're in shock," Leo said. "Here, let me help you."
Because her head was spinning she allowed him to fold an arm around her and boost her into the passenger seat. He buckled her in place. When their eyes met she said, "I'm not afraid."
"I know you're not. I absolutely know that."
Not afraid, but she couldn't suppress the deep sense of wrongness that was coursing through her.
She was only distantly aware of the city as Leo drove out of the garage into a deepening dusk. The sky drained into blackness, traffic lights bloomed like luminous nocturnal flowers. They passed three police cars and an ambulance screaming in the opposite direction. Cassie put her head back and closed her eyes, helplessly and pointlessly afraid for her aunt and her brother. Were they still alive? Would they actually go to prison? Did the Chileans have anything kinder than a jail cell set aside for children like Thomas and women like Aunt Ris?
These thoughts yielded to fragmented visions that weren't quite dreams, and when she opened her eyes again the city streets had given way to an empty highway cut into a rocky canyon. The cabin of the van was chilly now. And it still smelled rank. The stink of violence had followed them. The smell of blood and green matter and black powder. She wanted a bath. She said, "Where are we going?"
Leo answered slowly, perhaps reluctantly: "Into the Atacama."
Cassie sat upright. "The desert?"
"Yeah, the desert."
"Why?"
He gazed steadily down the highway. "Where else is there to go? What else is there to do? We don't have passports. We don't have money. We can't leave the country and we can't stay in the city. My father could have helped us, but my father's dead. The only weapon we have is in this van. About half a ton of dynamite and blasting caps and a machine that might help us use them. And your uncle is in San Pedro."
Cassie tried to process this statement. All she really knew about Werner Beck's plan was what Aunt Ris had shared with her, and Aunt Ris had also shared her skepticism about it. She remembered Dowd's description of the breeding colony in the desert, the spider- legged sentries and the columns of mysterious light. "We'll be killed."
"Maybe. Probably. I don't know."
"I'm thirsty," she said.
Leo gestured at the door, where a bottle of Fanta from some previous trip had been abandoned half- full in the cup holder. She unscrewed the lid and took a long gulp. The liquid was flat and sticky but it lubricated her mouth.
"I need to do this," Leo said. "And it might work. If it didn't have a chance of working they wouldn't have sent sims to kill us. And I'm tired of running, Cassie. I don't want to run anymore." He spared a glance at her. "If you want, you can bail out when we get to San Pedro."
"What would I do then?"
"I don't know. Hitch a ride to Antofagasta or maybe to Santiago. And then . . . I don't know."
"I don't know either. And I'm tired of running too."
"Pretty brave," he said.
Wrong. She was a long way from brave. She wasn't even orbiting brave. But she liked that he thought of her that way.
Three hours out of Antofagasta the road leveled off. Cassie's exhaustion had caught up with her and she drifted in and out of a dreamless metallic sleep, opening her eyes just long enough to register the barren hills, the ore trucks passing in the opposite lane like moonlit leviathans. Her thoughts circled repeatedly around the day's atrocities (Eugene Dowd, Werner Beck, poor Beth with her brains spilled on the stairway). She struggled to suppress those thoughts. And when that tactic failed she turned her eyes up to the desert stars.
The smell was becoming unbearable. "Can we crack a window?"
"It's cold out," Leo said, but he obliged her by rolling the driver's-side window down an inch. He was right; the desert had given up its heat to the sky; the air that rushed in was clean but cutting.
"All right, enough." He rolled the window back up. The stink returned, indomitable. The reek of green matter. Sim blood.
Leo took his right hand from the wheel and touched his thigh. She said, "Are you hurt?"
"No."
But his hand came away wet.
"You are. You're hurt."
"No, Cassie."
That smell. Like vinegar and leafy matter, the way her hands had smelled when, as a child, she had picked aphids from her mother's rosebushes. An idea began to form in her mind, an idea so terrible it felt like a sudden sickness.
"Leo."
"What?"
"Can you pull over? I need to pee."
"You want me to stop?"
"Just pull over, please. It's kind of urgent."
She hated the way he was looking at her now, the careful unblinking attention. "If
you say so. Sure."
The van slowed and drifted right. There was nothing outside but a vastness of ragged, pale hills. No traffic in either direction. Cold air and that naked sky. A rising moon.
The wheels gritted on the gravelly verge. Cassie didn't wait until the van came to a stop. She tugged the handle and pushed the door open, fumbled at the latch of her seat belt and tensed for the jump.
But as soon as she began to move she felt Leo's hand on her arm. His grip was so tight it hurt her. She turned to look at him, gutted by her terrible intuition, and there was nothing in his eyes, nothing she recognized as human.
29
THE ATACAMA
THE FEMALE SIM ESCORTED ETHAN TO THE chamber where, she said, the hive conducted the first steps of its swarming. To Ethan it looked like an anonymous factory floor: a wide, low-ceilinged space, noisy with machinery, lit by banks of buzzing fluorescent tubes.
He had expected something more conspicuously strange. But he guessed this prosaic space made sense. The hypercolony was exploiting human technology, which was why its breeding ground resembled a factory. It was a factory: a factory devoted to the manufacture of nascent hypercolonies— or of the organisms that would parasitize them.
Ranks of laboring simulacra parted before the cart like a sea, and Ethan was assaulted by the stink of green matter, the concentrated essence of the hypercolony, a toxic amalgam of freshly- mown hay, ammonia, acetic acid. "In this room," the sim said, "the hypercolony assembled what you might call spaceships, though each one is small enough to hold in your hand— a dense core of living cells, in a shell designed to protect the contents from dispersion and radiation and steer them toward a target star on a journey of many thousands of years. Once the payload arrives in a hospitable solar system the cells will be released to do what they do naturally: use carbonaceous and icy orbital bodies as a resource for making millions and eventually trillions of copies of themselves. These daughter cells then gather into a diffuse orbit around any rocky, watery planet with a potential for evolving complex life. When and if a suitable civilization arises, they engage it and exploit it to repeat the cycle."
Telling him these things, Ethan thought, was a subtle assertion of power, as if to say: We have nothing to fear from you. Even with this knowledge you can't hurt us. But it was also a bid for understanding and maybe something more than understanding . . . surely not sympathy? Could these creatures actually expect sympathy from him, when he had counted the cost of their life cycle in the corpses of people he had loved?
"But we are not the colony," the sim insisted. "You wrote in The Fisherman and the Spider that a parasite is always a simpler organism than its host, if only because it doesn't have to duplicate the function it steals from another. And that's true of us. The cells we're assembling into these vessels aren't designed to reproduce themselves on the surface of asteroids and planetesimals. They're designed to attach themselves to colonial cells already present and to usurp their function."
We are not the entities that murdered your friends and family, in other words, and so Winston Bayliss had also said. It was a claim Ethan could neither accept nor reject. It might or might not be true.
"That is to say, we have a parasitical relationship with the colony. But we also inherit its symbiosis with animal cultures and its means of reproduction. That's why we need to prolong this colony's existence for a few more years. And that would be a good thing for you, for your family, for human civilization."
Ethan doubted that his skepticism escaped her attention.
"You once wrote that symbiosis succeeds because it's energy- efficient. Each organism in a symbiotic relationship relies on the other for some function it can't perform itself. That's perfectly true. The colony by itself can't mine or refine ore, can't construct the tools it needs to propagate itself. And the human species, like most such species, finds it difficult to suppress its own self- destructive tendencies. Together they can do what neither can do alone."
The cart passed through the assembly room into another featureless corridor, this one leading more steeply upward. The eye- watering stink of green matter faded. Ethan caught a whiff of fresh air, mingled with a moist updraft from the warrens below.
"This facility is literally the sine qua non of the hypercolony we now control. If it were to be damaged beyond repair, the entire colony would cease to function. Not gradually, but at once and forever. You have to consider the consequences of that."
The cart turned a corner, and as they approached the surface Ethan saw a patch of sky. Night again. He felt irrationally disappointed that he wouldn't feel the sun on his face again before he died. And of course he would die. He had been told too much. He wouldn't be allowed to carry this knowledge back to the human world. He could only assume that the colony would kill him once he refused what ever bribe or threat it ultimately offered.
They reached the surface not far from the flower- shaped structure that was the heart of the installation. A central pillar supported a dozen highly polished metallic petals: a steel and glass tulip, seen from an ant's perspective. Human simulacra swarmed around the base of it, and Ethan thought he could see a few of the six-limbed creatures moving in the iron lacework around the petals, sailors in the rigging of a nightmarish sailing ship.
He shivered in the night air. The female sim opened a compartment under the cart's seat and pulled out two plastic windbreakers, one for her and one for Ethan. As a sim she was indifferent to discomfort— why bother with the jacket? But he guessed shivering was a waste of physical energy, easily enough prevented.
She drove to a higher vantage point. Apparently something was about to happen, something she wanted him to see. She parked in an elevated clearing almost as tall as the surrounding berm, next to an abandoned and partially- disassembled backhoe with its arm and bucket raised in a frozen salute. The steel lotus loomed in the near distance, lit from below and reflecting moonlight from its highest places.
She gave him what he supposed was meant as a searching look. "The Correspondence Society arrived at a reasonably accurate understanding of the relationship between the hypercolony and human society. But you never really asked yourselves what would happen if that relationship broke down."
Not true. During his seven- year sojourn in backwoods Vermont, Ethan had given the question much thought. Of course the consequences might be dire. In the long term, a return of humanity's demonstrated penchant for bloody war. In the short term, a prolonged and catastrophic failure of the communications grid, a disaster that would cripple vital functions in every nation on Earth.
"War," she said, "is an obvious possibility. You inferred that the colony has intervened in every developing conflict since the Great War. And that's true. Without replaying history I can't demonstrate how much could have gone wrong for human beings in the last century. But even now, the Russians and the Japanese are fighting over oil ports in the Sea of Okhotsk. Neither side can get any traction in that conflict, precisely because we're manipulating electronic communication even as the warring parties struggle to encrypt it. Our thumb is on the scales, you might say. But suppose we ceased to intervene. Isolated artillery exchanges could easily escalate to formal war. With war, mercantile shipping would be threatened. Peripheral nations would be drawn into the battle. Ultimately, one side or the other would win. But at what price? Lives and resources spent and a legacy of mutual distrust that would invite other, even bloodier wars. Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity. Alternatively, if the colony's influence were to be gently withdrawn, institutions like the League of Nations might have a chance of averting the worst outcomes. But if the colony dies to night, large- scale bloodshed is inevitable in both the long and the short term."
Possibly true. Probably true. Who could say? Ethan was tempted to tell her she was wasting her breath.
He was distracted by a vibration that seemed to come from underground, a seismic grumble, a high metallic whine.
"That's the power generators ramping up. What you're about to see is the launch of a seed vessel. Look: you can see the carrier at the center of the beam antenna." She was talking about an acorn- shaped pod poised at the center of the petals. "It's driven by a beam of quantum- coherent light. The light strikes the mirrored underside of the vessel and creates a superheated gas, a plasma. There's no need for a rocket or any such clumsy devices. The beam can lift only relatively light cargo, but our cargo isn't massive. Moisture in the atmosphere could diffuse the beam, which is one reason why we launch from the Atacama, where the atmosphere is thin and arid. You'll need these, Dr. Iverson."
She handed him a pair of goggles with coated lenses, like welding goggles. Before he put them on he saw dozens of simulacra evacuating the area near what she had called the beam antenna. After he put on the goggles he could see nothing at all until the steel and glass flower began to glow, a light that came through the lenses in shades of smoky amber.