They’d been taken to see Jindal, a worm of a man who kept rocking back on his heels, then forward onto his toes, trying to look taller than he was. He had snapped out a set of superfluous instructions to his security people, but they were already vectoring armed men toward the sublevels.
“You need to evacuate the building,” Plath said.
“Hah. Just what you’d want if this were all a ruse. Just what you could be after, no? I think so. I think we’ll wait until—”
The phone chirped. He grabbed it, listened, face darkening. “The freight elevators are blown. The doors are jammed. They may be booby-trapped.”
“I’d bet on it,” Plath said.
“Caligula was keeping the elevators to use for his own escape,” Keats said, walking it through in his own mind. Elevators stopped at the loading bays, from there to the alley, and off he would go. In five minutes he could be clear of the blast and any police cordon.
Jindal’s forehead creased. And he may have started to sweat just a bit.
“Evacuate the building!” Plath yelled. “We’re not here because we want to die, we’re trying to save innocent people!”
Innocent people, Keats noted. So there was still a Sadie somewhere inside Plath.
Jindal shook his head slowly. “If I’m wrong and the place blows up, I’m dead. If I’m wrong and I evacuated the building, the Twins will …” He shook his head doggedly. “There are worse things than dying.”
“Yes, but none are really as permanent,” Wilkes said.
“Take us to the Twins,” Plath said urgently. “If you don’t have the balls to make a decision, take us to the Twins!”
“Now, you bloody fool!” Keats added.
When Jindal still stood, frozen in indecision, Plath spun on her heel and marched for the elevator. “I’ve been there before. I know the way.”
Four security men trained their guns on her. Plath, without turning around said, “I’m Sadie McLure. Now, you may be too gutless or stupid to make a decision, Mr. Jindal, but you know as well as I do that your bosses would throw you out of that window if you deprived them of a chance to deal with me themselves. So I’m getting on the elevator, and I’m going upstairs.”
Wilkes put on a falsely cheery smile and said to Keats, “I think she’s back.”
Caligula had seated the jack. It was in an awkward position, and he had to turn the screw using a crowbar that could be moved only a few degrees at a time.
His vision had not deteriorated further. Which meant whoever was running the biot in his head had moved on in search of a faster way to stop him. And his hand hurt like hell. He’d used the do-rag as a makeshift bandage, but the blood had soaked through almost instantly.
Well. At this point death was a certainty. Death by brain hemorrhage or death by natural gas explosion. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, you pays your money, you takes your chances.
Remembering the old carnival barker cant made him smile. They had not been so bad, those days. He turned the crowbar. It had been lonely a lot of the time, especially after he gave up his daughter. But he couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t.
When he’d caught his wife in bed with another man, he killed the man and then, much to his own surprise, let his wife live. He’d even forgiven her.
He had forgiven her. Their daughter had not.
His phone buzzed softly. He closed his eyes and leaned back from the jack. There was only one person who could possibly be calling him, only one person who had ever had the number.
He pulled the phone from his pocket with his good hand.
“Yes, baby,” Caligula said.
“Call me Lear. How many times do I have to tell you that? Call me Lear!”
Caligula said nothing, just closed his eyes.
“Why hasn’t the Tulip been blown up?”
“Well, I’m working on it,” he said, feeling very weary.
“You’re ruining the timing!”
“Listen, baby … Lear. Listen to me. This will be the last time we have a chance to talk.”
“Are you arguing with me? Are you failing me? Again?”
Caligula sighed. “They tried to stop me. Plath, Keats … I can’t get out of here. I’m going to die.”
At least there was a moment of hesitation. At least there was that much. Maybe she didn’t really care, but the news at least made her pause. Made her blink, perhaps, at the other end of the line.
“I guess it’s karma,” Lear said at last.
“What?”
“For you killing Mom. It’s karma. Cosmic justice.”
Caligula hung his head and for a minute could not go on. Could not speak. “Lystra. Baby. You have to know—”
“Goddamn it, you old piece of shit, call me—”
“I didn’t kill her. You know I—”
“Blow it up! Blow it up!”
“—didn’t take your mother’s life.”
“Shut up! Just shut the hell up and do it!”
“You did, Lystra. You killed your mother.”
Heavy breathing at the other end of the line. Then, a weird, distorted voice, like a child trying to sound grown-up. A whining, almost singsong voice. “No, I didn’t.”
“Lystra …”
“You did. You killed her. Yeah, you killed my mother and then you gave me away.”
“Baby …” Caligula’s voice broke. He felt a sharp pain in his head. Any other time he would have thought it was just the beginning of a headache.
“How could I? I was just a little girl.”
How long did he have? Minutes or seconds?
“You’re right,” he said at last. “You’re right, ba—Lear. I did it.”
“Hah! I told you so. Now, do this. Do it and all is forgiven.”
He managed a slight laugh, a hoarse sound. “I don’t think even God can forgive me all I’ve done.”
“Then it’s no problem, Daddy. I am god now.”
She hung up the phone. Caligula knew it was true. Not about his poor, mad daughter being god. But yes, he had killed his wife, her mother. A week after they’d reconciled, he’d been drunk and angry at what he thought was a flirtation with the carny who ran the Mad Mouse ride. He’d punched her. He’d punched her hard, right in the jaw. She had fallen, unconscious, to the floor of their shabby trailer.
He’d left her there.
When he woke, raging with thirst from all the drink, filled with remorse, he’d found her still on the floor. But with her throat cut.
The bloody meat cleaver was on the floor beside her.
He had roused a sleeping Lystra from her bed and washed the red stain from her hands. Burned her bloody clothing in the fifty-five-gallon drum where the carnies burned trash and kept their hands warm on cold nights.
It was his fault she had done it. Who had taught her violence? Who had revealed his rage to the impressionable ears of a young girl?
And then, cowardly, unable to face Lystra, unable to cope with the madness that was already a part of her, he had shipped her off.
Caligula did not believe in karma. He believed in damnation. His own, and hers as well. And the damnation of the world.
He set the crowbar in place and heaved with all his might.
The pipe snapped. Whatever sound it made was obliterated by the roar of high-pressure gas gushing into the room.
He choked from the smell, reeled back, staggered to the far end of the chamber, and set the timer on the explosive device for ten minutes.
That should be enough.
TWENTY-FIVE
Sadie McLure. In person. In the flesh. And the rest of her little crew as well. Benjamin Armstrong felt disappointed. It should have been a triumph, but she was walking in under her own power, head held high.
“Someone get me a … a knife! Or a baseball bat! Something,” Benjamin snarled.
“Benjamin,” Charles chided mockingly. “There will be plenty of time for that.”
“I’m going to beat her bloody and rape whatever is left of
her!” Benjamin saw his own spittle flying. He felt the way Charles drew him back, restraining him, knowing Benjamin otherwise would have gone at the girl with his fist until some better weapon appeared.
More and more security men and women were arriving—by elevator, by stair—all armed, all looking to the Twins for guidance.
“The building is going to blow up,” Plath said calmly.
“Of course it is,” Benjamin sneered. “You know, your father was the smart one, not you, you stupid little bitch!”
“Caligula is in the basement,” Keats said, striving to mirror Plath’s even tone, despite the realization that one way or the other, his own time was fast running out.
He flashed on a memory of his brother Alex, chained to his cot in a mental institution in London. Mad. Utterly, terribly mad from the death of his biots. Of course, Alex had had more than one die. But at the same time, Alex had been strong.
“It’s Caligula,” Plath repeated.
Charles’s eyes narrowed. “What is Caligula?”
“He’s the one in the basement. Looks like he’s rupturing a pipeline. He’ll wait until the gas builds up and—”
“System!” Charles yelled. “System: show all cameras in the basement of this building!”
On the huge screen with its multitude of squares showing the Armstrong empire, five windows opened. Three were black. But two were still in operation, one trained on an instrument panel, while the other was a grainy long shot of pipes and …
“There!” Jindal cried, pointing. “There’s someone down there. You can just see their back!”
“One of the engineers,” Charles scoffed, but he didn’t sound too sure of himself.
Suddenly the grainy figure reeled back, spun away from whatever he had been doing.
In Caligula’s head Keats’s efforts were beginning to work. Blood that had been just a single-cell spray from the throbbing artery had become a gusher, like a cartoon of an oil well. The clear cranial fluid around his biot was growing opaque with the floating Frisbees of red blood cells and the soggy sponges of white blood cells.
The force of the blood knocked his biot loose of its perch and sent it spinning, end over end. What had been a sort of narrow but calm seam of watery fluid was now a turbulent underground river.
He would not make it back to the artery.
“He’s hemorrhaging,” Keats said. To the Twins he explained, “I have a biot in his brain. I’ve cut an artery. I’ve damaged one optic nerve.”
The camera no longer showed the man in question.
“Can you get back to his eye?” Plath asked.
She still hadn’t realized … Keats nodded. “On my way.”
“You don’t give orders here!” Benjamin raged at Plath.
But his brother was no longer with him on that. Charles said, “Why would Caligula blow up the Tulip?”
Plath glanced at Keats, who seemed to her to be elsewhere. Looking through his biot’s eyes, seeing a different scene altogether.
In fact, Keats’s biot was racing madly back toward Caligula’s eye. His biot swam and crawled, shouldered its way through the clinging platelets, the lymphocytes, the tendrils of detached neurons, floating like seaweed.
He had never moved so fast. He didn’t wonder at which direction to take, which planes to use to flow through the 3D maze of Caligula’s brain. The calm had come over him.
He knew what was coming for himself, but he was no longer afraid. A slight smile stretched his mouth. His eyes glistened.
He was there, in that place of peace and calm and wild, frantic action.
“Floor Thirty-Four,” Plath said to Benjamin. She didn’t know what Floor 34 was. Just that it was the one part of the Tulip aside from the data center that was unreachable by elevator. A guess. An intuition.
A bluff.
The silence that followed was all the confirmation necessary. Charles was shaken.
“And who sent Caligula to do this act of terrorism?” Benjamin asked, voice silky and malevolent now.
“Me,” Plath said.
Charles blinked. “But … Surely you …” His tone was almost pleading.
“Lear,” Wilkes said when Keats remained silent. “It was Lear. He’s wired her. He got Vincent to wire her. We’ve cleared her brain of wire, but—”
“So now you see that we were right! Now, now with our beautiful people all dead on the Doll Ship, all destroyed. Now you—”
“Look, you’re a piece of shit who needs to die a painful death. The two of you,” Wilkes snapped. “But we do not blow up buildings full of innocent people. We’re trying to stop this from happening.”
Benjamin’s face was a snarl. Charles was guarded, worried. It was he who said, “Jindal, get Burnofsky up here.”
Keats had reached the optic nerve. He sank a probe. “I can see,” he said in a dreamy, disconnected, emotionless voice. “Caligula is looking right at it. At the bomb. There’s a timer.”
“How much time left?” Jindal asked.
Benjamin raged at him. “Follow my brother’s orders, now!”
“I have a weak picture,” Keats said, speaking to Plath. “I’ll try for a better one.”
Jindal rapped orders to his people, then, undeterred—Accustomed to abuse, Keats thought—he said, “Our people will be through the door into the sublevel in a few minutes.”
“How are they getting through?” Plath asked.
“They’re cutting through the steel with a blowtorch and once they’re in—”
“A blowtorch? Cutting into a room full of gas?” Wilkes cried. “Isn’t that, uh, stupid?”
“She’s right,” Charles said.
“No,” Plath said sharply. “No. Maybe better to blow it up now rather than wait. Less gas now. More later.”
“System,” Charles said. “Exterior, sublevel doors.”
As one they all turned to look at the monitor. Four frames. Three showed nothing but doors. The last showed two men wearing welding helmets. The bright light of the torch caused lens flares that obscured the progress of the work.
“Seven minutes, eighteen seconds,” Keats said. “I can see it now. I can see it clearly. Seven minutes and …” And it all came back to him. The calm of battle had run its course once his biot had reached its goal. Now Keats couldn’t go on. He had run out of indifference to his own fate.
Part of him didn’t want to tell Sadie. What would be gained? But he had to speak. He had to say good-bye.
“Sadie,” he said.
She must have registered the sadness and gentleness in his voice. She turned to him. “Yes?”
“Sadie,” he said again. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve seen Alex. I know what it means. Death or madness, I … I guess I believe in another life, maybe. After this one. So …”
She stared, uncomprehending. Then a sharp intake of breath. Her eyes widened. “Oh, God.”
“What?” Wilkes demanded.
“I’m getting my other biot as far from your aneurysm as possible,” he said. “But you’ll need to kill me. You can’t have it in your head with a madman running it.”
“Noah,” Sadie said. Sadie, and not Plath. Sadie. “Noah … We have to …”
He took her hand in his. “We always knew it could happen.”
“Order the men down there to cut straight through, forget cutting a hole, tell them just to cut all the way through in a single spot,” Benjamin told Jindal.
“Better to burn than to blow up,” Benjamin said. “And thus, it ends.”
“You can’t … Noah …”
“When Caligula burns, so will my biot, Sadie. You know what follows. It’s okay.”
“Noah …” She was in his arms, and tears were running down her face.
“Yes, of course, pity for the pretty boy, eh?” Benjamin said savagely. “Pity for poor, poor Noah. None for our people on our beautiful ship. And none for hideous freaks.”
Burnofsky watched the counter on his computer monitor. The number of self-replicati
ng nanobots had just crossed thirty-two million. The next doubling would take it to sixty-four million, then one hundred and twenty-eight. Pretty soon megabots would give way to gigabots and hence to terabots.
He laughed at that, slurred, “I made a funny,” took a drink, sucked on his cigarette, and touched the butt of the pistol that was stuck into his belt.
He’d been feeding the nanobots everything he could find: stale doughnuts, candy bars from the machine down the hall, half a salami he’d found in the staff fridge. He hadn’t slept in … how many hours? How many days? It was all kind of fuzzy.
He had the remote control in his hand. Press the button and the force field would drop. His nanobots would eat their way out into the world and from there they would never stop. They would eat their way through the building, its furnishings, and anyone dull enough to wait around.
But before they finished the Tulip they’d be carried on breezes or simply fall from chewed-through walls down onto the streets. Nearby buildings would be infested and begin the same accelerated decline and rot. The pace would accelerate as the nanobots doubled and doubled.
What would the reaction be? What would the government do? Nothing short of a nuclear weapon would stop the spread, and they would wait far too long for that. Nanobots would find their way onto ferries, cars, ships, and planes.
For the first few days the damage would be most visible at the epicenter. But then, here and there and all around the world they would appear and double and double and double.
People would flee to the woods and deserts. And they would survive for a while—maybe weeks, maybe months. In places the nanobots would consume all there was to consume and cease doubling. But by that time they would have eaten every living thing and much of the nonliving things as well.
He asked himself, where would be safe? Or at least, where would be safest? The coldest places, he supposed. Nanobots tended to be immobilized when things got cold enough, down to minus twenty-three Celsius or minus ten Fahrenheit. But even in the coldest lands a warm day would set them off again.
“God bless global warming,” he muttered, and laughed at his own wit.
People thought they were scared now? They thought they were terrified by Lear’s plague of madness? Wait until they saw their crops, their home, their car and its gas, their dogs and cats and cows and pigs, all chewed up, masticated by trillions of nanobots that did little but crap out more nanobots.