Destiny's Children - Coalescent. Part 51

Behind us Lucia sat quietly on her bench, her baby on her lap; her gaze was fixed on its face, as if she wanted to shut us out, a malevolent world that wanted to use and control her and her child, even those of us motivated to save her-and I couldn't blame her.

Now it was my turn to do some pacing. I tried to ignore the hammering of my heart, the remote stink of the Crypt, and to think clearly.

Did I agree with Peter?

Peter's theorizing about hives and eusociality was all very well. But the reality of the Crypt, which I felt in my blood, was a good deal warmer than his hostile a.n.a.lysis, a lot more welcoming. And I wasn't about to argue with Rosa about the Order's history, and the work it had done over centuries. Whatever Peter said, I felt I had no more right to close that down than to shut down the Vatican.

And then there wash.o.m.o superior .

I had seen for myself that Peter's "Coalescents" were not like other humans. Perhaps theywere a more advanced form; perhaps Rosa was right that we would need the warm, fecund discipline of Order living to survive a difficult future on a crowded Earth. In which case, what right did I have to make decisions about their future? . . . I felt I was losing touch with the world. I drew on the thick, musty air, suddenly longing for a fresh blast of cool oxygen-rich topside atmosphere to clear my head. I was one man, flawed, vulnerable, mortal, woefully ignorant, and these issues escalated above me on every scale. How could I possibly make a decision like this?

For some reason I thought of Linda, my ex-wife. She had always had a lot more common sense than I did. What would Linda say, if she was here?

Look around you, George.

Lucia looked up at me, her eyes full of bewilderment, her body battered by childbirth, her face prematurely lined with pain.

Cut the bulls.h.i.+t. Remember what you said to that kid Daniel: you admired him because he had responded to this wretched child Lucia on a human level. You were as pompous as always, but you were right. Well, look at Lucia now, George; look at her with that sc.r.a.p of a baby. I wouldn't trust you to adjudicate on the future of humankind. And I'm not interested in your self-pitying whinging about whether you'll die childless or not. But you are a fully functioning human being. Act that way . . .

Of course. It was obvious.

I walked up to Rosa, and said as softly as I could, "Here's the deal. I'll help you disarm Peter. But you have to open this place up. Connect with the world. I think Lucia has suffered, and if I can stop that I will."

She glared at me; her anger was taking over. "What right have you to make such p.r.o.nouncements?

You're a man, George, and so is that murderous fool in the rock. This is a place built by and for women.

Who are you to lecture us on our humanity?"

"Take it or leave it."

Gnawing her lip, she studied my face. Then she nodded curtly.

Together, we crossed to Peter's cleft in the rock. But things didn't go as planned.

"I couldn't hear you," Peter whispered. "But I could see you. You've come to some kind of deal, haven't you, George? A deal that is bound to preserve the hive." He sighed, sounding desolate. "I suppose I knew this would happen. But I can't let you do this. I shouldn't have let you talk about negotiating at all.

I'm weak, I suppose."

"Why can't we talk? . . ."

"It has to stop here, or it never will.Because the hive is ready to break out. Think about it. Hives need raw material-drones, lots of them, living in conditions of high population densities, and highly interconnected. Until the modern era, less than one human in thirty lived in a community of more than five thousand people. Today more thanhalf the world's population lives in an urban environment. And we are more interconnected than ever before."

"What are you saying, Peter?"

"When the breakout comes it will be a phase transition-all at once-the world will transform, as water turns to ice, as a field of wildflowers suddenly blooms in the spring. In its way it will be beautiful. But it's an end point for us. There will be new G.o.ds on Earth: mindless G.o.ds, a pointless transcendence.

From now on the story of the planet will not be of humanity, but of the hive . . ."

"Peter." The situation was rapidly slipping away from me. "If you'll just come out of there-"

"You know why you're prepared to betray me, to save the Order?Because you're part of the hive, too.

George, you're just another drone-remote from the center, yes, but a drone nonetheless. Perhaps you always were. And the tragedy is, you don't even know it, do you?"

I felt as if the cave, the giant, densely peopled superstructure of the Crypt, was rotating around me. Was it possible I really had somehow been sucked into some emergent superorganism-was it possible that my decision now was being taken, not in my or Peter's or Lucia's interests, but in the mindless interests of the hive itself? If so-how could Iknow ? Again I longed for oxygen.

"I can't think through that, Peter. I'm going to follow my instinct. What else can I do?"

"Nothing," he whispered. "Nothing at all. But, you see, I'm the only free mind in this whole d.a.m.n place.

Good-bye, George."

"Peter!"

I heard a click.

And then the floor lurched.

I clattered into one wall, an impact that knocked the wind out of me. Some of the lights failed; I heard a bulb smash with a remote tinkle. There was a remote rumbling, as if an immense truck was pa.s.sing by.

There was a second's respite. I saw Lucia on the ground. She was sheltering her baby. They were both gray with dust.

Then rock fragments started hailing down from the ceiling, heavy, sharp-edged. I pushed myself away from the wall, crawled over to Lucia, and threw myself over her and the infant. I was lucky; I was. .h.i.t, but by nothing large enough to hurt.

The rumbling pa.s.sed. The rock bits stopped falling. Gingerly I moved away from Lucia. We were both gray with dust, and her eyes were wide-shock, perhaps-but she and the baby seemed unhurt.

I heard running footsteps, shouts. Torchlight flickered in the dimly lit corridor.

Rosa was at the cleft in the rock, pulling away rubble with her bare hands. I could see a hand, a single hand, protruding from beneath the debris. It was b.l.o.o.d.y, and gray dust clung to the dripping crimson.

I ran over. My battered legs and back were sore, my lungs and chest hurt from where I had been thrown against the wall. But I dragged at the rock. Soon my fingers were aching, the nails broken.

Rosa, meanwhile, had taken a pulse from that protruding hand. She took my arm and pulled me away.

"George, forget it. There's nothing we can do."

I slowed, jerkily, as if my energy was draining. I let the last handful of rubble drop to the floor.

I took Peter's hand. It was still warm, but it was inert, and I could feel how it dangled awkwardly. I felt inexpressibly sad. "Peter, Peter," I whispered. "You were only supposed to blow the b.l.o.o.d.y doors off."

Running footsteps closed on us. Hive workers, of course, drones, most of them women, all of them dressed in dust-covered smocks. Faces swam before me in the uncertain light, gray eyes troubled. I grabbed Lucia's hand, and she clung to me just as hard. "Go," I shouted at the drones. "Get out. There may be more falls. Take the stairs. Go, go . . ."

The drones hesitated, turned, fled, and we followed.

The long climb up stairs of cut stone and steel was a nightmare of darkness and billowing smoke. It got worse when more drones joined us, and we became part of an immense file of women, children, a few men, all clambering up those narrow, suffocating stairwells. The power was down in some sectors, and by flickering emergency lights I glimpsed people running, collapsed part.i.tion walls, smashed gla.s.s. In the hospital areas, and in the strange chambers where themamme had lived, squads of people were working busily, pus.h.i.+ng beds and wheelchairs out of damaged rooms. But the air thickened rapidly, and it became stiflingly hot; the ventilation systems must have failed.

I just pushed my way through the mobs of drones. My only priority was getting out of there: myself, Lucia, and the baby, for not once did I release her hand.

It was only when I got aboveground that I got a clear sense of what was happening.

Peter had placed his Semtex skillfully. He had broken open the upper carapace of the Crypt. The result was a great crater, collapsed in the middle of the Via Cristoforo Colombo, with a plume of gray-black tufa dust hanging in the air above it. Workers from the nearby offices and shops, clutching their cell phones and coffees and cigarettes, peered into the hole that had suddenly opened up in their world.

There was a remote wail of sirens, and a lone cop was doing his best to keep the onlookers away from the hole.

And the drones simply poured out of the crater, in baffling numbers, in hundreds, thousands.

Dressed alike, with similar features, and now obscured by the dust, they looked identical. Even now there was a kind of order to them. Most of them came out over one lip of Peter's crater, in a kind of elliptical flood. At the edge of the ellipse were heavier, older women, some of them with their arms linked to keep out strangers. At the center of the ma.s.s were the younger ones, some cradling infants, and here and there I saw hospital workers carrying the heavy chairs of themamme-nonne . n.o.body was in the lead. The women at the fringe would press forward a few paces, blinking at the staring office workers, and then turn and disappear back into the ma.s.s, to be replaced by others, who probed forward in turn. As they reached the buildings at the sides of the road the flowing ellipse broke up, forming ropes and tendrils and lines of people that washed forward, breaking and recombining. They probed into doorways and alleyways, swarming, exploring. In the dusty light they seemed to blur together into a single rippling ma.s.s, and even in the bright air of the Roman afternoon they gave off a musky, fetid odor.

FOUR.

Chapter 49.

As the shuttle skimmed low over the surface of the frozen planet, it was the circle of the dead that first struck Abil.

Not that, in those first moments, he understood what he was seeing.

Captain Dower was piloting the shuttle herself, an effortless display of competence. The planet was far from any star, and the shuttle was a bubble, all but transparent, so that the hundred tars and their corporals flew as effortlessly as dreams over a plain of darkness. Below, Abil could see only the broad elliptical splashes of paleness picked out by the flitter's spots. The ground was mostly featureless, save for the subtle texture of ripples in the ice-the last waves of a frozen ocean-and, here and there, the glistening sheen of nitrogen slicks. Dower had said the ocean of water ice had probably frozen out within a few years, after the Target had been ripped away from its parent sun by a chance stellar collision, and then the air rained out, and then snowed.

Abil looked into the sky. This sunless world was surrounded by a great sphere of stars, hard as shards of ice themselves. In one direction he could see the great stripe that was the Galaxy. It was quite unlike the pale band seen from Earth: from here it was a broad, vibrant, complex band of light, littered with hot young stars. The Third Expansion of humankind now sprawled across tens of thousands of light-years, and had penetrated the dust clouds that s.h.i.+elded much of the Galaxy's true structure from Earth. When he looked back the other way, the fields of stars were unfamiliar. He wondered where Earth was- though surely Earth's sun would be invisible from here.

Once, all of humanity and all of human history had been confined to a single rocky world, a pinpoint of dust lost in the sky. But since humankind had begun to move purposefully out from the home planet, twenty thousand years had s.h.i.+vered across the face of the Galaxy. And now, in the direction of home, every which way he looked he was seeing stars mapped and explored and colonized by humans. It was a sky full of people.

His heart swelled with pride.

Captain Dower called, "Heads up."

Abil looked ahead. The spots splashed broad lanes across the ice, diminis.h.i.+ng to paleness toward the horizon. But they cast enough light that Abil could see a mountain: a cone of black rock, its flanks striped by glaciers. All around it was a broad, low ridge, like a wall around a city. The diameter of the rim walls must have been many miles. There was some kind of striation on the plain of ice inside the rim wall, a series of lines that led back toward the central peak.

Dower turned. Her metallic Eyes glinted in the subtle interior lights of the shuttle. "That's our destination. First impressions-you, Abil?"

Abil shrugged inside his skinsuit. "Could be an impact crater. The rim mountains, the central peak-"

"It isn't big enough," came a voice from the darkness. "I mean, a crater that size ought to be cup-shaped, like a scoop out of the ice. You only get rim mountains and splash-back central peaks with much larger craters. And anyhow I haven't seen any other craters here. This planet is a sunless rogue. Impacts must be rare, if you wander around in interstellar s.p.a.ce."

That had been Denh. She was in Abil's unit, and Abil needed to get back in the loop.

"So," he said, "whatdo you think it is, smart-a.s.s?"

"That peak is tectonic," Denh said. "It's hard to tell, but it looks like granite to me."

Dower nodded. "And the rim feature?"

". . . I can't explain that, sir."

"Honesty doesn't excuse ignorance. But it helps. Let's go see."

The shuttle dropped vertiginously toward the ground.

The profile of the rim feature was-strange. It was a raised ridge of some gray-white, textured substance. It ran without a break all around that distant mountain. It had a bell-shaped profile, rising smoothly from the ice on either side, and a rounded summit. Its texture was odd-from a height it looked fibrous, or like a bank of gra.s.s, trapped in frost. Not like any rock formation Abil had ever seen.

The shuttle slowed almost to a stop now, and began to drift down toward the upper surface of the rim feature.

Abil saw that distance had fooled him. Those "fibers" were not blades of gra.s.s: they were bigger than that. They werelimbs -arms and legs, hands and feet-and heads: human heads. The rim was a wall of the dead, a heaping of corpses huge enough to mimic a geological feature, naked and frozen into incorruptibility.

Abil was astounded. Nothing in the predrop briefings had prepared him for this.

"It's a ring cemetery," Dower said matter-of-factly. "Warren worlds are subtly different, but the template is the same, every d.a.m.n time." She glanced around sharply at the hundred faces. "Everybody okay with this?"

"There are just so many of them," somebody said. "If the whole of the rim wall is like this-miles of it- there must be billions of them."

"It's an old colony," Dower said dryly.

The shuttle swam on, heading toward the central mountain.

On the edge of a lake of frozen oxygen, the shuttle landed as gently as a soap bubble. Dower ordered a skinsuit check-each trooper checked her own kit, then her buddy's-and the walls of the shuttle popped to nothingness.

Gravity was about standard. When Abil clambered off his small T-shaped chair he dropped the yard or so to the ground without any problem. He walked around, getting the feel of the ground and the gravity, listening to the whir of the exoskeletal servers built into his suit, checking telltales that hovered before him in a display of Virtual fireflies.

Around him a hundred troopers did likewise, stalking around the puddle of light cast by the shuttle's floods. Their backpacks glimmered murky green, the color of pond water.

Abil walked out to the edge of the light, where it blurred and softened to smeared-out gray. The water ice was hard under his feet, hard and unyielding. The surface of the frozen ocean was dimpled and pocked. Here and there frost glimmered, patches of crystals that returned the lights of his suit, or of the stars. The frost was not water but frozen air.

Oxygen, of course, was a relic of life. So there must have been life here-life that mightn't have been so different from Earth-origin life-long gone, crushed out of existence as the sun receded and the cold's unrelenting fist closed. Perhaps that life had sp.a.w.ned intelligence: perhaps this world had once had a name. Now it only had a number, generated by the great automated catalogs on Earth-a number n.o.body ever used, for the tars called it simply "the Target," as they called every other desolate world to which they were sent.

"Gather 'round," Dower called.

Abil joined the cl.u.s.ter of troopers around Dower. He found his own unit, marked by red arm stripes. He joined them, showing his command stripes of red and black.

"Look here." Dower pointed to the edge of the oxygen lake.

Footprints,on the water ice sh.o.r.e: human prints, made by some heavy-treaded boot in a shallow nitrogen frost, quite clear.

"The warren's bio systems are probably highly efficient recyclers, but nothing is perfect. They still need oxygen . . ."

Abil walked up to the prints. His own foot was larger, by a few sizes. Standing here, he saw that the prints led back, away from the oxygen lake, forming a path that snaked almost dead straight toward the central mountain. And when he looked the other way, beyond the lake, he saw more trails leading off toward the rim, the circular heap of corpses.

Those striations he thought he had seen on the ice, radiating inward from the rim wall, were actually ruts, he saw now, worn into water ice as hard as granite by the pa.s.sage of countless feet, over countless years. All those journeys, he thought, shuddering, out to that great heaped-up pile of mummies. Year after year, generation after generation.

Dower hefted a weapon. "This is our way in. Form up."