Slant

  His theory is that the Other was taken into custody for unspecified crimes by some government. Since it was the government of the United States of America that moved once again into Hispaniola to bring stability and take charge in a power vacuum, he presumes it was the U.S. of A., land of both Giffey’s birth and the Other’s, that split him down the middle.

  Since Giffey is now coming down with the same malady as Jenner, ticks and expostulations of meaningless rage, it is an easy assumption that he was therapied, equipped with monitors, perhaps as the condition of some sort of judicial punishment. Or…

  The Other was seen as useful. He was equipped with monitors that restructured his psyche, giving him the mask of Jack Giffey as a thorough, self-deluding cover, making the Other into a human smart bomb. An unaware warbeiter targeting Omphalos. Jenner was recruited elsewhere, a separate piece of the plan; and Park, who thought he had recruited Giffey, was led into the scheme like a man picking a forced card from a magician’s deck.

  How else would Giffey and Jenner get access to MGN?

  Somebody knows. Somebody has been suspicious of this place for some time. Or perhaps it is simply government paranoia, set to strike against some overweening aspect of the Republic of Green Idaho. Actually, he can sympathize with that, even cheer on his programmed, fictional self.

  Jack Giffey’s goals never did make much sense. But to confront Seefa Schnee, and her personal bell-ringer…

  He could do worse.

  The neutral affect accompanying this hypothesis is striking. But now he has other fish to fry. He manages to catch the door before it swings shut.

  The lights flicker out once more, and a disturbing shudder goes through the building, as if Omphalos is trying to wake up. He hears the woman’s steps on the stairs falter. She stops. Then, in the darkness, she continues with a sure gait. She is very familiar with this place, these heavy steel stairs.

  He still has his flashlight. He waits to switch it on until he can no longer hear the woman’s steps. There are at least three flights, perhaps four or five. It’s a long way down.

  In the darkness, the light’s beam darting ahead, he begins his descent. The Giffey persona probably knows what to do under these circumstances; it seems likely he has received special instructions or training.

  He allows Jack Giffey to rule, for the time being.

  But this also leads to his uttering little squeaking, jagged obscenities, and he claps his free hand over his lips to hide the noise.

  34

  >Jill, I’m trying to reach you. Can you respond?

  She can’t. She assumes the message is from Nathan; Roddy allows her this much as he uses all her resources to leapfrog back into control of Omphalos. But he will not allow her to answer Nathan.

  >Jill, I’m in Green Idaho. I’m inside Omphalos and I’m looking for Roddy. I’ve left everything in La Jolla with the techs. They’re working to shake you loose. Anything you can tell us would be useful.

  Jill receives this in complete silence. Then, Roddy tosses her a quick cold query: “What will he do?”

  “They seem to have discovered where you are, and they already know what you are doing.”

  Roddy considers this. “They will shut me down.” His thinking is labored; he has not yet completely reintegrated his basic memory.

  “I think they will cut your I/Os and then study you,” Jill says.

  She catches a cubist glimpse of what Roddy is observing. There are more than twenty people in Omphalos now; some have died, and some have entered recently. He is tracking all of them. The man named Marcus has not moved for some minutes, but is still alive. He is surrounded by recently arrived people, five of them, that Roddy has not yet labeled. Jill guesses that they are doctors.

  There is another figure marked in steady green, alone. He is in an area Roddy does not control, in an elevator created for the personal use of Seefa Schnee.

  Another three figures, each marked flashing red, are present, but Roddy is not letting her see their exact locations. They may be below ground level.

  Roddy tracks all of these people as intrusions. He clearly wants to eliminate most of them; and for the first time, Jill sees, Roddy is not going all-out to protect Marcus Reilly. He is more concerned with Seefa Schnee. But to Jill’s puzzlement, there are two Seefa Schnees in Roddy’s maps of Omphalos.

  One of them is being pursued by a flashing red intruder. The second sits alone in a room not far from Roddy’s central location, wherever that may be.

  Roddy seems to sense Jill’s interest in his mother. He switches her available set of views suddenly, and in so doing, gives her some control over spaces in which he is no longer interested. For a few seconds, Jill studies miles of service corridors and unfinished floors within Omphalos, all empty, silent, boring.

  She finds one human and quickly moves her viewpoint to study him. Using Roddy’s method of seeing, she barely recognizes the man at first—it is a man. But the figure is too familiar to escape recognition for long.

  Nathan is inside Omphalos, just as he said!

  Jill rushes her sensory awareness through the halls and chambers, tries unlocking a few doors, finds that she can, and makes a clear pathway toward the center and, she hopes, toward Roddy and Seefa Schnee.

  35

  The trail of dead and dying wasps and bees has thinned; Nathan sees a small, twitching body only every few yards now, and he’s walked at least half a mile through twisting service corridors, down stairs, through doors that should have been locked but open at his touch. He is so deep in Omphalos—maybe even below ground level—that his pad can make only occasional contact with the outside through the satlink in his rented armored car—all that was available at the Moscow airport.

  He stops for a moment to catch his breath. None of the corridors in this part of Omphalos look finished; the walls are bare metal and flexfuller and concrete, unpainted, wiring and fibes and piping clearly visible. He can hear the rush of air and water through pipes and ducts overhead. The lighting is sparse, designed for arbeiters—deep red and intermittent at best.

  People are not supposed to be here.

  His heart thumps even after he has rested and caught his breath. “Christ, I’m scared,” he tells himself, and tries to focus on bringing his fear under control. The problem is, his fear is entirely rational. He is in danger. He saw the bodies in the waiting room, and followed the trail of insects from there to where he is now…

  He has a crude map supplied by the FBI, glowing faintly on his pad’s night display. He thinks he knows where he is. There’s a couple of unmarked spaces, quite large, below ground. He’s near the upper reaches of the larger of the two, at the center of Omphalos, if his reckoning is correct.

  He wishes he had never met Seefa Schnee. He remembers the night, near the end of their brief relationship, when Seefa spent several long, agonizing hours arguing with him, trying to explain over his heated objections how to put insect colonies to directed neural use. He can’t bring himself to believe she’s succeeded; if he does, he’ll have to swallow a lot of crow, amend his estimates of her ability, and he does not want to do that. Seefa Schnee has never been a gracious winner in any intellectual conflict.

  None of that matters much, however, when he concentrates on why he is really here. Not to help the FBI, not even to serve his troubled country, but to find the snare into which Jill has fallen, and release her, any way he can.

  Nathan has come to regard Roddy as the worst kind of blind date, a kidnapper who has stolen something very valuable to him.

  Jill is perhaps the sweetest intellect he has ever met in his thirty-two years. Nathan is more than half in love with her, an angelic platonic love freed of any physical connotations, though he has had rather impractical dreams:

  He’s never told Ayesha any of this, of course.

  He puts his pad in his pocket. From this point on, the map is useless.

  ‘He’s back to dying bugs.

  Anybody with half a brain can see Torino is
absolutely right, Schnee told him that significant and aggravating night. Nature is a complex of minds. Every species has its own neural boundaries, gathering information and fixing it as knowledge. And knowledge is anatomy, the continuing body of the species—

  To Seefa, every bee in a colony is an obvious analog of a neuron in a brain, though capable of both more complex neural judgment and motion. Node in the hive lattice and muscle combined. And how is a hive, viewed as a whole, basically different from you and me, or any other animal, but most especially social animals? The social order is a kind of super-mind, nested within the species super-mind. It’s so obvious it’s trite.

  Nathan silently agreed that it was trite. Also, dead wrong. He has never thought much of Torino’s work, and Seefa’s ideas were, if anything, even wilder.

  He crouches over, a black and yellow wasp. It bobs its abdomen wearily as it crawls along the hall, trying to get back home.

  The problem with our concept of mind is that we confuse our own kind of self-awareness with thinking in general. Self-awareness is an attribute of certain kinds of social animals. Why should a mind be self-aware? It’s enough it’s world-aware. If it isn’t socially connected to other minds, it doesn’t need social filters or self-modeling. It’s self-making, self-sufficient. It measures and embodies and acts. A world-aware mind is just one step closer to God than you and I.

  He values self, his own, Jill’s, Ayesha’s, the selves and awarenesses of his friends and family. He doesn’t give an empty damn for theory and selfless science at the moment. Intellectual games don’t help him keep up his courage.

  There’s a door ahead, heavy steel, half-open. He hears a buzzing from the other side of the door, soft and insistent, all-pervasive in the otherwise silent hallway.

  Nathan takes a deep breath, holds it, and peers through the door, more than half expecting to die.

  The next room is warm and dry, not completely dark, but very nearly so. His eyes adjust slowly to the dimness. He doesn’t dare use his flashlight.

  The walls are covered with irregular lumps: wasp nests.

  The floor is thick with large black and red ants moving purposefully between tall mud mounds. He can’t see any beehives; perhaps they’re in the walls.

  A simple winding trail has been kept clear, bare concrete floor, not quite a foot wide. It crosses the room, passes around the mounds, perhaps—he hopes—extends to a door on the other side.

  There is no time to backtrack and find another way.

  He makes his first step, listens. The sound is a constant hum and a whispery, chitinous shuffling. The wasps fly around him, but do not land or make aggressive moves. The air is full of them, however. If he sucks in his breath, he might drag a few of the stinging insects into his mouth, into his lungs.

  He’s soaked. Sweat pours from his face and down his back.

  Maybe these are just failed experiments. Maybe Seefa keeps them around for protection. They’re good at that, certainly, but they aren’t uncontrolled or hair-trigger, like killer bees.

  Nathan estimates, hopes is perhaps the better word, that he has crossed the room halfway. He can dimly see a yellow glow bouncing from several clustered ant mounds that reach to the roof like stalagmites in a cave. He walks gingerly around the mounds, and a wasp buzzes against his cheek, making him jerk to one side. For a nauseating moment, he feels he is about to lose his balance and topple into the ants, but he recovers with an out-thrust arm and steadies himself.

  The wasp does not sting, the insects remain calm. Controlled.

  Controlled, or self-controlled. Humans have been talking with bees and other social insects, in various ways, for sixty or seventy years. Bee-direction is a well-established science used in agriculture. Maybe Seefa has mastered control of some kinds of social insects, and that’s where her accomplishment ends.

  But as his eyes adjust, he sees that the nests, the ant trails, even the flight paths of the wasps, the arrangement of their clumped paper nests, is hauntingly familiar. Not circuitry—nothing so crude as that—but arrangements dictated by pure lattice theory. Not random, not natural; evocative, deeply, familiar to any student of thinker design.

  Self-ordered, cooperative, connected, after a fashion.

  A controlling fashion established, he tells himself, by none other than crazy, unfashionable, out-of-control Cipher Snow.

  He sees the light beyond the mounds. It’s another door, or rather a window in a door, but the door is closed. He can’t make out what lies beyond. It’s only slightly brighter beyond the door than in here with the insects.

  What Nathan can’t bring himself to believe, even now, is that he has already found Roddy, that all of this is part of the child-like, dangerous thinker who has snared Jill.

  The door handle is mercifully free of insects. He opens the door slowly. Beyond is a small glass-enclosed chamber equipped with a decade-old Mitsu-Shin terminal and a rolling programmer’s chair. He recognizes the chair. It was Seefa’s favorite; she had it with her at Mind Design. The back of the seat is covered with printed plastic stickers of daisies and kittens.

  The door closes slowly, quietly. The insects stay in their room.

  Outside the glass walls, Nathan sees a large garden. As he watches, concentric rings of lights come on over the garden, brightening slowly to full sun-glare. He puts his hand over his eyes, half-blinded.

  “Seefa?” he calls out.

  Silence.

  He approaches the glass. The garden covers a space perhaps a hundred feet on a side, surrounded by waist-high walls, and beyond the walls, he can barely make out the dim reaches of a larger chamber, outside the sunlamp glow.

  A swinging door opens in the glass. Nathan steps out into a rich scent of moist dirt and greenery: peas, their tendrils curling up narrow stakes onto row after row of trellises. Bees hum industriously between small blossoms.

  To his left, four large gray and white boxes rest on concrete pads at the edge of the garden—older model INDAs. Thick fibers push from the sides of the boxes and spread in a pale radiance, then curve down and enter the dirt.

  Nathan stands on the dirt and stoops. His fingers dig into the rich black loam, encountering a slickness of warm slime, disturbingly like reaching into a woman’s genitals. He pulls his hand out quickly. The soil is laced with two kinds of fiber, and tiny plastic spheres. One kind of fiber is optical, carrying signals back to the INDAs, he thinks. The other kind connects the plastic spheres, which are obsolete medical monitors, ten or fifteen years old. He racks his memory for more details on these little spheres. He was given some as a young boy. They analyzed the contents of gastrointestinal tracts, looking for possible infections. They have since been replaced by diagnostic toilets.

  Seefa has conducted her work on a very slim budget, with great ingenuity.

  Nathan can no longer doubt what he is seeing.

  The soil is thick with bacterial growth, connected with and nurtured in some way by the peas on their trellises. The outdated medical monitors sample the bacterial populations and report on biological solutions to challenges posed by the interfacing INDAs, perhaps in the form of antibiotics or tailored bacteriophages.

  The bacteria “swap spit,” exchange plasmids, recipes, solve the challenges, and in so doing, with immense subtlety and power, though perhaps very slowly, bring to bear on human problems the most fecund and ancient powers of nature.

  It is genius, pure and simple. Nathan was wrong. Seefa was right. No one would listen to her, and she was driven to this, to supplying answers and tools to demented elitists.

  Despite himself, Nathan’s eyes moisten. Under any other circumstance, this would be a cosmic moment, as great as finding life on another world.

  His feet press into Roddy’s core substance, Roddy’s flesh, Roddy’s mind.

  Roddy, is indeed a little boy, standing in a mound of dirt.

  And perhaps by now, crucial parts of Jill are encoded in the bacteria-laden loam, as well.

  He scrubs off his feet befor
e re-entering the glass cage. Then he sits in Seefa’s chair, and tries to make sense of the INDA displays that spring up before him.

  36

  It is all so very confused. Jack Giffey stands in one poorly lit place like a ghost, and then his memory blurs and shifts and the Other stands in another equally gloomy place, and somehow the flechette pistol has been fired many times, and the woman lies on the floor. He smells smoke and electricity.

  Giffey hunkers down and lets the gun drop, There might be more left to do, but he isn’t at all sure what it is. He’s positive of only one thing—that something has gone very wrong inside him. If he is a human smart weapon, the programming has failed. And yet—

  He’s killed Seefa Schnee. That’s an accomplishment, but it is not all that he was sent here to do. It may not have been part of his specific instructions, but within his discretion. So was this a malfunction, too? The dead woman, a mistake?

  He looks up and for the first time notices where he is. A dark vaulted ceiling rises at least forty feet above, lit with tiny sparks of service lights. A door opens to the stairs behind him, and he and the dead woman are on a walkway suspended above a pool of temporarily inactive slurry, dark and viscous. The construction is unfinished. Nano pathways weave through the recesses like high-rise highways in an antique vision of the future. Drums of architectural nano have been stored down here, hundreds of them stacked high in one corner. He suspects they are empty.

  Omphalos is poorly planned, over budget: ambition without wisdom. Jack Giffey and the Other, together, agree that this is not surprising. The Other has been involved in strategic and tactical plans, right-hand man to Colonel Sir, and everything he sees here smacks of rank incompetence.

  He looks around and tries to get to his feet, but his mouth explodes with loud obscenities and his mind goes white. When it stops, he is flat on his back.