Destiny's Children - Coalescent. Part 52

Abil stood at the head of his unit. Briefly he surveyed their faces. There were ten of them, all friends- even Denh. They would support him now to their deaths. But his stripes were only provisional, and he knew that if he fouled up they would chew jockey to replace him for the next drop, wherever and whenever it was.

That wasn't going to happen. He grinned tightly. "Reds, forward." They formed into two rows, with Abil at the head.

They trotted along the line of the path in the ice, keeping to either side of the rut, heading steadily toward the central mountain. The going turned out to be treacherous. Even away from the main paths the ice was worn slick by the pa.s.sage of human feet. There were a few stumbles, and every so often there was a silent burst of vapor as somebody stepped into an oxygen puddle. Every time one of his unit took a pratfall Abil called a halt to run fresh equipment checks.

After about a mile Dower paused. The rut had led them to a crater in the ice, maybe ten yards across- no, Abil saw, the edges of this shallow pit were too sharp for that, its circular form too regular, and the base of the pit was smooth, gunmetal gray. Dower pressed her finger to the surface, and read Virtuals that danced before her Eyes. "Metal," she said. She beckoned to Abil. "Corporal. Find a way in."

He stepped gingerly onto the metal surface. It was slick, and littered with bits of loose frost, but it was easier than walking on the ice. He sensed hollowness beneath his feet, though, a great volume, and he trod lightly, for fear of making a noise. He knelt down, pressed his palm to the metal surface, and waited. Where his knee touched the metal he could feel its cold, clawing at him through the diamond pattern of heating filaments in his skinsuit. It took a few seconds for results from his suit's sensors to be displayed, in hovering Virtuals before his face.

He was rewarded with a sketchy three-dimensional cross section. The metal plate was a couple of yards thick, and much of it was solid, fused on a base of rock. But it contained a hollow chamber, an upright cylinder. Probably some kind of low-tech backup system. The covering for the hollow was no more than a couple of yards away.

He walked that way and knelt again. His fingers, sc.r.a.ping over the sheer surface, quickly found a loose panel. By pressing on one side of it, he made it flip up. Beneath that was a simple handle, T-shaped. He grasped this, tugged. A lid rose up, attached by mechanical hinges.

Abil peered into the pit, using his suit lights. The pit was a little deeper than he was tall. He saw a wheel in there, a wheel set on a kind of spindle. Its purpose was obvious.

Dower came to stand beside him. She grunted. "Well done, Corporal. Okay, let's take a minute. Check your kit again." The troopers, working in pairs, complied.

Dower pointed at the mountain. "You were right-uh, Denh. The mountain's tectonic, not impact- created. We're standing over a midocean ridge: a place where the crust is cracking open, and stuff from within wells up to form new ocean floor. And where that happens, you get mountains heaping up, like this. On this planet it's still happening. The loss of the sun destroyed the surface and the air, but it made no difference to what's going on down deep. All along this ridge you will have vents, like valves, where the heat and the minerals from within the planet come bubbling up. And that heat will keep little pockets of water liquid, even now. And where there's liquid water-"

"There's life." That mumble came from a number of voices. It was a slogan from biology cla.s.ses taught to five-year-olds, all across the Expansion.

"Andthat is the ecosystem that will have survived this planet's ejection from its solar system: something like bacteria colonies, or tube worms perhaps-probably anaerobic, living off the minerals and the heat that seeps out of the cracks in the ground. Radioactivity will keep the planet's core warm long after that lost sun itself has gone cold. Strange irony-life on this world will probably actually lastlonger than if it had stayed in orbit around its sun . . ."

Abil piped up: "Tell us about the warren, sir."

She began to sketch with one finger in the loose ice. "The warren is a rough toroid dug into the ice, encircling that central peak. In places it's nearly a mile deep. It's not a simple structure; it's a mess of interconnected chambers and corridors. We suspect the birthing chambers are the deepest, the closest to the mountain rock itself; that's the usual arrangement.

"Now here-" She slashed at her diagram, drawing diagonal lines that reached up from the torus and down to the face of the mountain. "Runs. Access chutes. Some of them vertical, probably the oldest, fitted with lifting equipment; the more recent ones will have stairs and ladders. You can seethese runs provide access to the surface, for the disposal of the dead, foraging missions for oxygen, perhaps other resources.These lower tunnels reach down to the face of the mountain, to the pockets of liquid water and the life-forms down there. With suitable processing the colonists will be able to live off the native organic compounds." She looked up. "You need to know that it's common for colonies of this type to reprocess as much of their raw material as possible." She let that hang in the silence.

Denh said queasily, "You mean,people ? But we saw the corpses in that great ring."

Dower shrugged. "In these wild warrens patterns vary . . . Just remember two things. First, across the Galaxy we are at war. Our alien enemy is pitiless, and cares nothing for your moral qualms, or even your nausea, Denh. We need warm bodies to be thrown into the war, and that's why we're here. We're a press gang, nothing more. And second-remember that whatever you see down there, however strange it seems to you,these are human beings . Not like you-a different sort-but human nevertheless. So there's nothing to fear."

"Yes,sir ," came the ritual chorus.

"All right. Abil-"

Denh pushed herself forward. "Let me, Captain." She jumped into the pit and rubbed her hands, pretending to spit on the palms, to the soft laughter of her mates. "Clockwise, you think?" She turned the wheel.

The ground shuddered under Abil's feet. The great lid of metal and rock slid back, disappearing under the ice. Denh yelped, and jumped out of her hole.

The run was a broad, slanting tunnel cut into the ice. Crude steps had been etched into its lower surface, four, five, six parallel staircases. There was no light but the stars, and the spots of their skinsuits.

Eight of the ten teams would enter the run, leaving two on watch on the surface. Dower waved two units forward to take the lead. Abil's red team was one of them.

Abil led the way into the hole. He clambered easily down the stairs, wary, descending into deeper darkness. His hands were empty; though the weapons of his team bristled behind him, he felt naked.

Abil had descended maybe two hundred yards into the hole when suddenly the ice under his feet shook again. The lid was closing over the hole, like a great eyelid, shutting out the stars. He heard hurried, gasping breaths, the sounds of panic rising in his troopers. He tried to control his own breathing. "Red team, take it easy," he said. "Remember your briefing. We expected this."

"The corporal's right," growled Dower, somewhere above him. "This is just an air lock. Just wait, now."

For a few heartbeats they were suspended in darkness, their puddles of suit light overwhelmed by the greater dark.

There was a hiss of inrus.h.i.+ng air. Then a coa.r.s.e gray light flickered into life from fat fluorescent tubes buried in the walls. Abil looked up at the lines of troopers, weapons ready, standing on the floor of the cylindrical hall.

Dower held up her gloved hand. "You hear that?"

They listened in silence. Sound carried through the new air: m.u.f.fled footsteps from beyond the walls, pattering away into the void beyond. And then more footsteps-many more, like an approaching crowd.

"They have runners," Dower whispered. "Throughout the warren. Patrolling everywhere. If one of them spots trouble, she runs off to find somebody else, and they both run back to the trouble spot, and then they split up, and run off again . . . It's a pretty efficient alarm system."

There was a noise from behind Abil, carried through the new, thick air. Only a few steps beneath him, there was another lid door, like the one they had come through from the surface. It, too, had a wheel set on an upright axle.

The wheel was turning with a sc.r.a.pe.

"They're coming," Dower said, hefting her weapon. "Let's have some fun."

The door slid back.

Chapter 50.

I like to escape from the crowds. Even in the winter, the center of Amalfi and its harbor area swarm with locals and tourists, mainly elderly British and Americans here for the winter sun.

So I climb the hills. The natural vegetation on this rich volcanic soil is woodland, but higher up the land has been terraced to make room for olive groves, vineyards, and orchards-especially lemons, the specialty of the area, though I swear I will never get used tolimoncello ; I can never get it off my teeth.

I like to think Peter would have seen the aptness of my retiring here, to Amalfi. For as it happens it was here, over a century ago, that Bedford, the protagonist of H. G. Wells'sThe First Men in the Moon , fled after his remarkable adventures in the moon, and wrote his own memoir. I keep a copy of the book, a battered old paperback, in my hotel room.

Yes, it would have pleased Peter. For what Bedford and Cavor found in the heart of the moon was, of course, the hive society of the Selenites.

I kept hold of Lucia, with her baby, all the way out of that hole in the ground.

When we could get away from the area, I found a cab and took her to my hotel. I couldn't think of anywhere else to go. We attracted some odd stares from the staff, but it did give us a chance to calm down, clean up. Then I called Daniel, whose number, on a dog-eared business card, Lucia had always kept with her.

Peter was the only fatality that day. He really had planted his bomb carefully. It wasn't hard for the forensic teams to establish his guilt, through traces of Semtex on his clothes and under his fingernails, and to figure out the purpose of his little remote-control radar gun. His true ident.i.ty was quickly established, and he was linked with the mysterious group that had bombed the geometric optics lab in San Jose.

But that was where the trail ran cold, happily for me. Peter had signed into our hotel under an a.s.sumed name, and-as far as I know-never brought any of his bomb-making equipment there. The hotel staff hadn't seen much of him, and didn't seem to recognize the blurred face on the news programs.

Still, I checked out-paying with cash, making sure I left no contact address at the hotel-and fled Rome, for Amalfi.

I did bring with me all that was left of Peter's possessions. It would surely have been a mistake for me to leave them behind. And anyhow it didn't seem right. I burned his clothes, his shaving gear, other junk. I kept his data, though. I copied it from his machines to a new laptop I had bought in Rome. Then I destroyed the machines as best I could, wiping them clean, breaking them open and smas.h.i.+ng the chips, dumping the carca.s.ses in the ocean.

The incident soon faded from attention: bomb attacks in crowded cities are sadly commonplace nowadays. The authorities are still digging, of course. A common theory is that maybe there is some kind of trail back to the usual suspects in the Middle East. But a consensus seems to be emerging that it must have been Peter who was primarily responsible for both attacks, in San Jose and Rome, and that he was some kind of lone nut with an unknowable grudge, for no other link has been found between the geometric optics lab and the big hole in the ground in Rome.

As for that great underground city under the Appian Way, before the authorities were able to penetrate it fully-and I've no idea how they did it-the swarming drones cleared it out. There was little left to see but the infrastructure, the rooms, the part.i.tions, the great vents for circulating the air. The purpose of some rooms was obvious-the kitchens with their gas supply, the dormitories where the frames of the bunk beds have been left intact, the hospitals. Some other chambers I could have identified, had anybody asked me, like the nurseries and the deep, musty, mysterious rooms where themamme-nonne had lived.

They even dismantled their suite of mainframe computers.

It was obvious to everyone that some great project had been sustained down here, for along time. But it was impossible to say what that project might have been. Conspiracy theories proliferated; the most popular seems to be that the Crypt was aDoctor Strangelove nuclear war bunker, perhaps built by Mussolini himself.

Remarkably enough, the Order itself wasn't linked with the Crypt. Somehow the surface offices closed off their links with the underground complex-they must have been prepared for an eventuality like this -so that they were able to pose as just more accidental victims of the disaster. When things calmed down they even continued to sell their genealogy services, presumably based on local copies of the Order's core data. You'd never have known anything happened.

Not all the drones from the Crypt vanished into the alleyways. As it happened Pina, Lucia's untrustworthy friend, suffered a broken arm when she fell through a smashed ceiling, and was trapped under rubble. The drones couldn't get her out before the firefighters reached her. She was taken to one of Rome's big teaching hospitals. I conscripted Daniel's help to hack into the relevant hospital files to find out what happened.

When the doctors began to study her, and dug out the old files they had compiled when she was trapped after that similar accident years before, they were startled by Pina's "subadult" condition. They were able to trace the mechanism of her sterility. An impaired hypothalamic hormone secretion led to an inadequate gonadotrophic secretion, which in turn blocked ovulation . . . And so on. I didn't really understand any of this, and I didn't know any medics I could trust to decode it for me. I don't suppose it mattered anyhow, for though the doctors could figure outhow the sterility occurred, they couldn't figure outwhy . And Pina, evidently, wouldn't talk.

They kept her in hospital for two months. Strangely, by the end of that time, there were some changes in the condition of her body. It seemed that her glands were starting to secrete the complex chain of hormones that would have been necessary to trigger ovulation: it was as if she was entering p.u.b.erty at last, at the much-delayed age of twenty-five. Perhaps if all the drones could be removed from the hive, they too would "recover."

But before this process was complete Pina disappeared from the hospital. She was checked out by "relatives," just as Lucia had been. I didn't hear of her again.

I did hear of Giuliano Andreoli, as it happened, having searched for his name on the Internet. Lucia's first lover was arrested for attempted rape, but committed suicide in his cell before the case could be brought to trial. I could imagine what Peter would have made of that: to the Order, Giuliano was just a sperm machine, used once and then discarded, pushed out into the glaring light of the outside world and an empty future. What he had known in the hive, that brief overwhelming moment of love and l.u.s.t, must have come to seem like a dream.

As for Lucia herself, she is now living with Daniel and his family, in their bright, airy home in the hills outside Rome. Daniel's parents turned out to be decent, humane folk. And usefully enough, like many expats they don't entirely trust the competence of the Italian authorities, and were happy to get Lucia medical treatment privately and discreetly.

Lucia has had her third baby-a boy, in fact, l.u.s.ty and healthy. It turned out to be a simple procedure to snip out her spermatheca, as Peter had called it, the little sac on her womb that would have continued to bleed Giuliano's seed into her for the rest of her life. Daniel's family now talk of putting her through school.

I don't know whether there will ever be love between Daniel and Lucia. Even now that the pressure of relentless childbirth is off her, n.o.body seems to know how her body will adjust in the future. And she is damaged. She has never heard what became of her first child, who must have been in one of those immense creches on that fateful day. I think that is a wound that will never heal. But at least in Daniel, and his family, she has found good friends.

Sometimes, though, I wonder about Lucia's true destiny.

In all the reports about the Crypt, what was most notable for me was what was missing. The little carvedmatres , for instance, which Regina had brought from Roman Britain-the symbolic core of her family, and then of the Order. They were never mentioned, never found.

Peter told me that among some species of social insects the colonies breed by sending out a queen and a few workers, to start a colony all over again. I think I will try to keep watch on Lucia and her young family.

As for my sister, I haven't seen Rosa since I lost sight of her in the crush, deep in the Crypt. I don't think she could have gone back to the Order, though. In the end she knew too much-more than she was supposed to know-and yet she needed to know it. It must be necessary from time to time for the Order to throw up somebody like Rosa with an overview, somebody capable of perceiving greater scales, more complex threats. Peter's understanding was itself a threat to the Order-and she had to develop an equivalent understanding to beat him. But a drone isn't supposed to know she's in a hive.Ignorance is strength. In the end she saved the Order by sacrificing herself, as a good drone should, and knew what she was doing every step of the way.

Thus I found my sister, and lost her again.

There are other loose ends I can't resist tugging on.

I've been reading about eusocial organisms. I've learned that one characteristic of hives, just as much as the sterility of the workers and the rest, issuicide -the willingness of a drone to sacrifice itself for the greater good, and so for the long-term interests of its genetic heritage. You see it when a termite mound is broken open, or a predator tries to get into a mole rat colony. It's seen as proof by the biologists that the key organism is the global community, the hive, not the individual, for the individual acts completely selflessly. It was certainly true of the Order. When the Crypt was attacked, such as during the Sack of Rome, some of the members gave their lives to save the rest.

But here's the rub. In the endPeter committed suicide, to protect-what? He had no family. The future of humankind? But again, he had no children-and no direct connection to that future.

What he did have a connection to was the Slan(t)ers.

The Slan(t)ers have no leader; their network has no central point. Their behavior is dictated by the behavior of those "around" them in cybers.p.a.ce, and governed by simple rules of online-protocol feedback. Among the Slan(t)ers-I've found-there are virtually none with children. They are too busy with Slan(t)er projects for that.

The Slan(t)ers don't have any physical connection, as did the Order. They don't even live in the same place. And their interest in the group isn't in any way genetic, as with the Order. There is no pretense that the Slan(t)ers are a family in the normal sense. But nevertheless,I believe the Slan(t)ers are another hive -a new, even purer form of human hive made possible by electronic interconnections-a hive of the mind, in which only ideas, not genes, are preserved.

Peter believed that everything he did was in the service of the future of humankind. But I believe that he wasn't really acting for any rational goals. The Slan(t)ers, the hive as a whole, had recognized the existence of another hive-and, like a foraging ant coming on another colony, Peter attacked.

At the crux, Peter wondered if I was a hive creature myself. Perhaps I was; perhaps I am. I am surehe was. And if the Order truly was a hive-and if it wasn't unique, if the Slan(t)ers are, too, a new sort altogether-thenhow many others are out there ?

Anyhow, just because Peter was really following hive dictates doesn't mean he was wrong about the human future.

On his computer I found a few emails he'd been composing to send me, never finished.

"I think about the future. I believe that our greatest triumph, our greatest glory, lies ahead of us. The great events of the past-the fall of Rome, say, or the Second World War-cast long shadows, influencing generations to come. But is it possible that just as the great events of the past shape us now, so that mighty future-the peak age of humankind, the clash of cymbals-has echoes in the present, too? The physicists now say you have to think of the universe, and all its long, singular history, as just one page in a great book of possibilities, stacked up in higher dimensions. When those pages are slammed together, when the great book is closed, a Big Bang is generated, the page wiped clean, a new history written. And if time is circular, if future is joined to past, is it possible that messages, or even influences, could be pa.s.sed around its great orbit? By reaching into the farthest future, would you at last touch the past? Are we influenced and shaped, not just by the past, but echoes of the future? . . ."

Sometimes at night I look up at the stars, and I wonder what strange future is folding down over us even now. I wish Peter was here, so we could talk this out. I can still see him leaning closer to me conspiratorially, on our bench in that dismal little park by the Forum, the sweet smell of limoncello on his breath.

Chapter 51.

Beyond the air lock door, there was a tunnel. It branched and bifurcated, and the light glowed pearl gray.

It was like looking into a huge underground cathedral, shaped from the glistening ice.

And in the foreground was a mob.

There must have been a hundred people in the first rank alone, and there were more ranks behind, dimly glimpsed, more than Abil could count. They were small, squat, powerful looking. They were mostly unarmed, but some carried clubs of rusty metal. And they were naked, all of them. They looked somehow unformed, as if ill defined. The males had small, budlike genitals, and the females' b.r.e.a.s.t.s were small, their hips narrow. None of them seemed to have any body hair.

All this in a single glimpse. Then the Coalescents surged forward. They didn't yell, didn't threaten; the only noise was the pad of their feet on the floor, the brush of their flesh against the ice walls. Abil stood, transfixed, watching the human tide wash toward him.

Denh screamed, "Drop! Drop!"

Reflexively Abil threw himself to the ground. Laser light, cherry red, threaded the air above him, straight as a geometrical exercise.

The light sliced through the mob. Limbs were cut through and detached, intestines spilled from unzipped chest cavities, even heads came away amid unfeasibly huge founts of crimson blood. Now there was noise, screams, cries, and soft grunts.

The first wave of the mob was down, most of them dead in a heartbeat. But more came on, scrambling over the twitching carca.s.ses of their fellows, until they, too, fell. And then a third wave came.

Abil had never confronted death on such a scale-a thousand or more dead in seconds-it was unimaginable, unreasonable. And yet they continued to come. It wasn't even murder but a kind of ma.s.s suicide. The Coalescents' only tactic seemed to be to hope that the troopers would run out of fuel and ammunition before they ran out of bodies to stand in its way. But that wouldn't happen, Abil thought sadly.

So many had been slain now that, he saw, their heaped corpses were beginning to clog the tunnel entrance. Abil tried to think like a corporal. He got to his feet, waved his arm. "Forward the throwers!"

Four of his troopers, carrying bulky backpacks, hurried forward. They launched great gouts of flame into the mounting wall of corpses, and at the defenders who continued to scramble over their fellows. Scores more Coalescents fell screaming onto the pile, their limbs alight like twigs in a bonfire. But that pile of corpses was alight, too. Soon the air was filled with smoke and grisly shards of burned bone and skin.

But the flames wouldn't hurt Abil and his men in their skinsuits. He waved again. "Go, go, go!"

He led the way into the fire. He put his arms before his faceplate as he hit the barrier of flame, and he felt the carbonized corpses crumble around him as he forced his way through them. But in seconds he was through, into the denser air of the corridor beyond the air lock.

And he faced more people-thousands of them, all eerily similar. Just for an instant the front rank held back, gazing at this man who had emerged from the lethal flames. Then they surged forward. The corridor was a great tube of people, squeezing themselves like paste toward him.

But they ran into flames. The front rank melted back like snowflakes.

After that Abil let the flamers take the lead. They just cut a corridor through the swarming crowd, and the troopers strode ahead over a carpet of burning flesh and cut bone. The crowd closed behind them, cl.u.s.tering like antibodies around an infection, but the troopers' disciplined and well-drilled weapons fire kept them away. It was as if they were hacking their way into some huge body, seeking its beating heart.