The ape, with a cretinous determination, continued to climb the building. Windows crackled as he drove his toes through them. Faint shrieks of alarm were heard from inside.
The android matched speeds with a woman with talons, feathers, and a twelve-foot wingspan. His files suggested her name was Peregrine.
"The second ape-escape this year," she said. "Always he grabs a blonde and always he climbs the Empire State Building. Why a blonde? I want to know."
The android observed that the winged woman had lustrous brown hair. "Why isn't anyone doing anything?" he asked.
"If we shoot the ape, he might crush the girl," Peregrine said. "Or drop her. Usually the Great and Powerful Turtle simply pries the chimp's fingers apart and lifts the girl to the ground, and then we try to knock out the ape. It regenerates, so we can't hurt him permanently. But the Turtle isn't here."
"I think I see the problem now."
"Hey. By the way. What's wrong with your head?" The android didn't answer. Instead he turned on his insubstantiality flux-field. There was a crackling sound. Internal energies poured away into n-dimensional space. He altered course and swooped toward the ape. It growled at him, baring its teeth. The android sailed into the middle of the hand that held the blond girl, receiving an impressionist image of wild pale hair, tears, pleading blue eyes.
"Holy Fuck," said the girl.
Modular Man rotated his insubstantial microwave laser within the ape's hand and fired a full-strength burst down the length of its arm. The ape reacted as if stung, opening its hand.
The blonde tumbled out. The apes eyes widened in horror. The android turned off his flux-field, dodged a, twelve-foot pterodactyl, seized the girl in his now-substantial arms, and flew away.
The ape's eyes grew even more terrified. It had escaped nine times in the last twenty years and by now it knew what to expect.
Behind him the android heard a barrage of explosions, crackles, shots, rockets, hissing rays, screams, thuds, and futile roars. He heard a final quivering moan and perceived the dark shadow of a tumbling long-armed giant spilling down the facade of the skyscraper. There was a sizzle, and a net of what appeared to be cold blue fire appeared over Fifth Avenue; the ape fell into it, bounced once, and was then borne, unconscious and smoldering, toward its home at Central Park Zoo.
The android began looking at the streets below for video cameras. He began to descend.
"Would you mind hovering for a little while?" the blonde said. "If you're going to land in front of the media, I'd like to fix my makeup first, okay?"
Fast recovery, the android thought. He began to orbit above the cameras. He could see his reflection in their distant lenses.
"My name is Cyndi," the blonde said. "I'm an actress. I just got here from Minnesota a couple of days ago. This might be my big break."
"Mine, too," said the android. He smiled at her, hoping he was getting the expression right. She didn't seem disturbed, so probably he was.
"By the way," he added, "I think the ape showed excellent taste. "
"Not bad, not bad," Travnicek mused, watching on his television a tape of the android, who, after a brief interview with the press, was shown rising into the heavens with Cyndi in his arms.
He turned to his creation. "Why the fucking hell did you have your hands over your head the whole time?"
"My radar dome. I'm getting self-conscious. Everyone keeps asking me what's wrong with my head."
"A blushingly self-conscious multipurpose defensive attack system," Travnicek said. "Jesus Christ. Just what the world needs."
"Can I make myself a skullcap? I'm not going to get on many magazine covers the way I look now."
"Yeah, go ahead."
"The Aces High restaurant offers a free dinner for two to anyone who recaptures the ape when it escapes. May I go this evening? It seems to me that I could meet a lot of useful people. And Cyndi-the woman I rescued-wanted to meet me there. Peregrine also asked me to appear on her television program. May I go?"
Travnicek was buoyant. His android had proved a success. He decided to send his creation to trash Bushmill's office at MIT.
"Sure," he said. "You'll get seen. That'll be good. But open your dome first. I want to make a few adjustments."
The winter sky was filled with bearded stars. Where the weather was clear, millions watched as fiery patterns-red, yellow, blue, green-stormed across the heavens. Even on Earth's dayside, smoky fingers tracked across the sky as the alien storm descended.
Their journey had lasted thirty thousand years, since their Swarm Mother had departed her last conquered planet, fired at random into the sky like a seedpod questing for fertile soil.
Thirty kilometers long, twenty across, the Swarm Mother looked like a rugged asteroid but was made entirely of organic material, her thick resinous hull protecting the vulnerable interior, the webs of nerve and fiber, the vast wet sacks of biomass and genetic material from which the Swarm Mother would construct her servants. Inside, the Swarm existed in stasis, barely alive, barely aware of the existence of anything outside itself. It was only when it neared Sol that the Swarm began to wake.
A year after the Swarm Mother crossed the orbit of Neptune, she detected chaotic radio emissions from Earth in which were perceived patterns recognized from memories implanted within its ancestral DNA. Intelligent life existed here.
The Swarm Mother, inasmuch as she had a preference, found bloodless conquests the most convenient. A target without intelligent life would fall to repeated invasions of superior Swarm predators, then captured genetic material and biomass would be used to construct a new generation of Swarm parents. But intelligent species had been known to protect their planets against assault. This contingency had to be met.
The most efficient way to conquer an enemy was through microlife. Dispersal of a tailored virus could destroy anything that breathed. But the Swarm Mother could not control a virus the way she commanded larger species; and viruses had an annoying habit of mutating into things poisonous to their hosts. The Swarm Mother, thirty kilometers long and filled with boimass and tailored mutagenic DNA, was too vulnerable herself to biologic attack to run the risk of creating offspring that might devour its mother. Another approach was dictated.
Slowly, over the-next eleven years, the Swarm Mother began to restructure herself. Small idiot Swarm servantsbuds-tailored genetic material under carefully controlled conditions and inserted it via tame-virus implant into waiting biomass. First a monitoring intelligence was constructed, receiving and recording the incomprehensible broadcasts from Earth. Then, slowly, a reasoning intelligence took shape, one capable of analyzing the data and acting on it. A master intelligence, enormous in its capabilities but as yet understanding only a fraction of the patterned radiation it was receiving.
Time, the Swarm Mother reasoned, for action. As a boy stirs an ant nest with a stick, the Swarm Mother determined to stir the Earth. Swarm servants multiplied in her body, moving genetic material, reconstructing the most formidable predators the Swarm held within its memory. Solid fuel thrusters were grown like rare orchids in special chambers constructed for the purpose. Space-capable pods were fashioned out of tough resins by blind servants deep in the Swarm Mother's womb. One third of the available biomass was dedicated to this, the first generation of the Swarm's offspring.