Nerissa came to herself in an unfamiliar bed in a small room with the shades drawn. Ethan's sleeping body was beside her for the first time in seven years, which was perhaps why lines from The Divine Comedy were running through her mind as she fumbled toward awareness, drawn out of sleep by daylight scything past the margins of the window blinds . . . reciting poetry to herself as if she were still chasing her degree, lost in memories more pleasant than yesterday's. Oh god, she thought. Yesterday. The sickening weight of what they had seen and done.
When they first arrived here (a generic Motel 6 off the turnpike) Ethan had been exhausted and driving erratically. He had barely been able to strip to his underwear before he tumbled into bed and fell fast asleep. Nerissa had been equally exhausted but she had forced herself to stand under a hot shower before she followed him to bed, needing to wash off the stink, real or imagined, of kerosene and soot and blood and crushed green leaves.
And today might not be any better than yesterday. Face that fact, she instructed herself. Yesterday the simulacrum had blinded itself and she had cut off both its legs and tied crude tourniquets around its stumps and dumped its surviving fraction into the trunk of the car. Today she would attempt to interrogate it. Or bury it. Or both. Probably both.
What was almost as hard to bear as the physical horror of yesterday's events was the look Ethan had given her, not once but several times, an expression of disbelief bordering on distaste. As if her actions had passed beyond the bounds of decency . . . and maybe they had, but that was a line she had stopped trying to draw.
Finding a place to interrogate Winston Bayliss was the morning's pressing problem. This rented room wouldn't do. So she paid the bill at the motel desk and they drove west, mostly in silence, and left the turnpike where Ethan's map showed a nature reserve. It was a cold day, the wind tumbling blunt grey clouds from the western to the eastern horizon. They parked on the margin of the road in a stand of sugar maples and yellow birch. Nerissa opened the trunk of the car, and Ethan helped her carry Winston Bayliss into the shadow of the woods.
She had bound the stumps of the sim's legs and wrapped a makeshift bandage over the clotted sockets where its eyes had been. She had covered the bullet wounds in its body with strips of flannel (from an old shirt of Ethan's) and duct tape. She had wrapped what remained of its lower body in a plastic trash bag, to keep the mess inside, and that was how they carried it, Nerissa grasping its arms, Ethan supporting the bagged torso, stepping through drifts of brittle leaves and over fallen tree trunks colonized by yellow shelf fungus, until they were safely distant from the road. Then they propped Winston Bayliss more or less upright against an outcrop of mossy granite.
Inevitably, the sim was dying. What was surprising was that it had not yet died. The smell coming from it was obscene, the same odor Nerissa had tried and failed to purge from herself the night before, a stench so ponderous she imagined weighing it on a scale. She was careful to stand upwind.
The simulacrum's voice was a moist, gurgling rasp. It began by asking for water. Nerissa put a plastic water bottle within its reach and watched as the simulacrum groped for it in the dry leaves. The creature looked oddly natural in this setting, she thought— as if it had grown from the detritus of the forest floor, mushroom- pale and streaked with autumn colors.
"Better just let it talk," Ethan suggested. "Let it say what it wants to say." Because that was all it would ever say. It would say what it wanted them to hear. Nothing more. Nothing less. It was beyond any power of coercion.
The simulacrum repeated some of what it had told them yesterday, about the hypercolony being part of a vast ecology that stretched across light- years of space. It addressed most of these remarks to Ethan, who listened without expression. It insisted once again that it was part of a parasitical system that had recently infected the hypercolony in order to commandeer its apparatus of reproduction.
Reproduction, Nerissa thought: Ethan had once called it the blade of evolution. There was no intelligence in evolution, only the cuttingboard logic of selective reproduction. She envisioned the work of evolution as a kind of blind, inarticulate poetry. What was it Charles Darwin had said? From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved . . . There is grandeur in this view of life.
Grandeur or horror. The idea that all the kaleidoscopic strangeness of biological systems could unfold without guidance or motivation was almost too unsettling to accept.
Ethan had written in one of his books that "nature knows without knowing," and in his Society papers he had compared the hypercolony to an anthill or a termite nest. The anthill knows how to build itself, how to breed workers, how to feed and cosset its queen. But in fact the anthill knew nothing: what looked like knowledge was only a set of procedural rules, a chemical template constructed by a complex environment. And thus the hypercolony. It appeared to know far more than human beings— it even knew how to manipulate human beings. But it knew these things the way an anthill knows. It exploited language but it didn't understand language. It excreted words the way a worker bee excretes royal jelly.
In its bed of leaves, the dying sim excreted words into the autumn air.
By human standards, it said, the hypercolony's life cycle is immensely long. But it is finite. It begins and ends in a brief, intense pulse of reproductive activity, a kind of swarming, in which it broadcasts its progeny to distant stars. On Earth, that pulse began almost ten years ago.
For ten years the hypercolony has been using borrowed human technology and unwitting human collaboration to construct its means of reproduction on the surface of the Earth. This is the culmination of the hypercolony's reproductive strategy. Any threat to the reproductive mechanism it has constructed is an existential threat to the hypercolony itself. That's why the Correspondence Society was targeted seven years ago— to protect the hypercolony's means of reproduction, which would have been threatened by premature disclosure.
It was a sinfully bloodless way to describe serial acts of murder, Nerissa thought. But, of course, the sim had long since ceased appealing for sympathy. And it claimed not to be the responsible party.
Snow began to fall from the cloud- heavy sky, gusting through the leafless branches of the trees. A few small flakes collected on the sim's face and melted into droplets, pink with dried blood. The creature's voice was hoarse. It paused to drink once more from the water bottle.
When it spoke again, Nerissa had to lean closer to hear it.
The hypercolony evolved to live in the vacuum of space, but so did many other organisms. The hypercolony was already infected with a parasite when it arrived in this solar system, or became infected soon thereafter. The parasite lay dormant and undetected for centuries. Once the process of reproduction began, the parasite was activated.
The parasite is analogous to a virus: it can reproduce itself only by commandeering the reproductive mechanism of another organism. For more than a year now it has been exploiting the hypercolony's resources for its own purposes. The mechanism by which the hypercolony reproduces itself has been hijacked. The facility that was meant to deliver the hypercolony's seed organisms to nearby stars has been doing something very different— creating and launching new viral packets to follow and infect the hypercolony's vulnerable offspring.
In one of Ethan's books there was a similar story, which Nerissa had found horrifying. Carpenter ants in Thailand were susceptible to infection by a certain fungus. The fungal threads germinated and grew in the ant's body, and as they infiltrated the infected ant's brain it would begin to climb obsessively—madly—to the highest leaf on the highest limb it could reach. There it died, creating for the fungal growth now sprouting from the ant's corpse a launching pad from which its spores would be distributed over as broad an area as possible. Some few of those spores might then germinate inside another carpenter ant, which in its fatal madness would climb to the highest leaf on the highest limb it could reach . . .
But the hype
rcolony isn't dead, nor is it entirely defenseless. Its final strategy is to destroy the reproductive mechanism it created, in order to deny its use to the parasitic entity and to protect its own potential offspring. And it wants to manipulate what remains of the Correspondence Society into collaborating with it in that effort.
Well, why not? From the human point of view, the "reproductive mechanism" (if such a thing actually existed) was little more than a debilitating tumor. It deserved to be destroyed, no matter which side of this celestial feeding frenzy it served.
The dying sim shivered. Its shiver became something like a convulsion. The water bottle dropped from its right hand, while its left clenched empty air. It coughed a spray of red and ochre phlegm into the nearby leaves and freshly fallen snow.
"Excuse me," it said.
Excuse me. If you have any questions, you should ask them while there's time.
Nerissa had only one question— was Cassie one of those people supposedly being exploited by the hypercolony?— but Ethan stepped in front of her, bending on one knee to address the sim. He looked like he was praying to it, Nerissa thought. Or proposing marriage. "The mechanism that manipulates radio signals, does the hypercolony control that or do you?"
You meaning the parasite, the virus.
"I do," the sim whispered.
(But there is no I, Nerissa reminded herself. No mind. Just process.)
"So the hypercolony can't use that tool anymore. But both entities are able to produce and control simulacra?"
"Yes."
"How are they created? How were you created?"
"I was born to a human mother."
No, Nerissa thought. That can't be right.
"The reproductive mechanism, will you tell us where it is?"
"No."
"Because you want to protect it?"
"Yes."
"And you're implying we should want to protect it."
"Yes."
"Why would we do that?"
"Its destruction would be disastrous for humanity. Not just because of the temporary loss of global communication, though that would be catastrophic in itself. The boundaries that have been placed on human behavior would be breached. Conflicts could escalate out of control. You know what warfare meant a hundred years ago. Consider what it would mean now, if it were allowed to happen again."
"I find that unconvincing," Ethan said.
"I don't expect to convince you. But I hope you'll at least consider what's at stake. More specifically, it's entirely likely that people you care about will be killed unless you intervene."
"What people?"
The eyeless simulacrum turned its head toward Nerissa. "Cassie. And Thomas. And many others."
"Do you mean what they're doing is dangerous? Or do you mean you'll kill them if you have the chance?"
"Both."
"Then why in God's name should we help you?"
"I'm not asking you to help me. If you choose to protect your civilization in general or your loved ones in particular, my interests will also be served."
"Then tell us where Thomas and Cassie are— can you do that?"
"I don't know where they are, but I believe they're looking for Werner Beck."
Nerissa couldn't restrain herself any longer. "How do you know that? What do you know about Cassie and Thomas, and what do you know about Werner Beck?"
But that was a question the sim refused to answer.
It died as they watched.
Its human parts died first. Nerissa supposed the creature's heart simply stopped beating, exhausted by fever and infection. It exhaled for the last time, its stinking breath a cloud of moisture quickly carried away by the breeze. Then the internal parts of it lost all cohesion. The body went slack and began to leak green fluid from its many wounds.
Nerissa helped Ethan cover the remains of the simulacrum with a blanket of fallen leaves— not to protect the creature, and much less out of any misplaced respect for it, but because it would be an unpleasant and dangerous discovery for any hiker or local child who happened to stumble across it.
Animals would get at the remains, no doubt. The bones would be scattered. By winter's end only ants and beetles would have any interest in what was left. The sim's corpse might help feed a few insect colonies deep in the pine duff and rotting logs of the forest, an irony Nerissa found unamusing. There is grandeur in this view of life. Well, no, she thought. Not much.
"So we have to find Werner Beck," she said when they were back in the car. The snowfall had grown more intense and the road was a pale, curtained obscurity. "I assume you know how to do that?"
"He's in Missouri, according to his letter."
The letter Ethan had collected from his mailbox as they fled the farm house. "Did he have anything else useful to say?"
"You can read what he wrote when we find a place to stop."
"All that stuff the sim said. What do you think? You believe any of it?"
Ethan shrugged. "Some of it might have been true. Some of it sounded plausible, at least."
There was a quotation Nerissa recalled, something from a Greek phi los o pher named Xenophanes. Ethan used to admire the way she could dredge up fragments of poetry and prose from her catch- all memory. But it wasn't a talent, it was a freak of nature. Her own tawdry little magic trick. "And even if by chance he were to utter the perfect truth, he would himself not know it, for all is but a woven web of guesses."
"Yeah," Ethan said, "that sounds about right."
13
RURAL KANSAS
CASSIE WASN'T SURPRISED BY HOW easily Leo managed to steal a car. Boosting cars was a skill he had learned from his friends back in Buffalo— not his Society friends but the east side musicians and petty criminals he hung out with on weekends. The company he kept was one of the reasons Cassie had never taken him seriously, and why Beth's fascination with him had seemed so shallow. But now that Cassie was a criminal herself, she appreciated the skills Leo had learned.
Armistice Day had brought a lot of cars into Jordan Landing from neighboring farms and rural routes, which presented a wealth of opportunities. Leo waited until after midnight, then selected a late- model white Ford Equipoise, an economy vehicle common in these parts, parked in the lot of a motel a half mile north on the main strip. The owner of the car was probably asleep and likely wouldn't report the theft until morning, which would give them a decent head start. He broke off the car's radio antenna and used it to jimmy open the driver's-side door. Firing up the ignition was a more serious obstacle, but there was a tool kit in the glove compartment— tire-pressure gauge, needle- nose pliers, a screwdriver with interchangeable bits— and with these Leo somehow contrived to start the engine. Thankfully, none of this attracted any attention. God bless the peaceful little towns of this peaceful land, Cassie thought, and God bless their honest and trusting inhabitants.
By dawn they were a couple of hundred miles west and within an hour's drive of their destination. They were headed for an auto- repair shop called Dowd's, on a flat strip of Kansas highway between Salina and Great Bend.
DOWD'S AUTOMOBILE SERVICE AND PARTS, the sign said.
It wasn't much of a sign: a slab of whitewashed plywood on which the letters had been stenciled with orange paint. It had been tacked to what looked like a converted barn, the only visible structure from horizon to horizon where Federal Turnpike 156 crossed the exit for a town called Galatea. The unpaved yard where they parked was littered with rusted engine parts and the shell of what Leo said was a 1972 Packard, and the only thing moving was a set of cut- tin wind chimes hanging from a bracket screwed to the building's aluminum siding.
At the sound of Leo's horn a man emerged from the darkness behind the corrugated- steel door of the garage, wiping his hands on a blackened rag and blinking at the morning sun. The man was tall, skinny except for the slight paunch under his coveralls, and somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty years old. His moustache and the sweep of brown hair dangling over his collar made him loo
k like he'd stepped out of a Civil War daguerreotype.
Cassie climbed out of the car, Thomas beside her. She desperately needed to pee, though she dreaded to imagine what might pass for a restroom in this establishment.
The man came to a stop a few cautious feet from the car. "What can I do for you folks?"
Leo said, "Are you Eugene Dowd?"
The man stopped wiping his hands and tucked the rag into the hip pocket of his coveralls. "I guess I am. Who might you be?"
"My name's Leo Beck. I think you know my father."
Dowd remained expressionless. The wind gusted, and Cassie heard the clatter of the wind chimes— like music that forgot how to be music— and the creaking of the Packard's loose hood. Finally Dowd said, "Is this your car?"
"Not exactly."