"So how did you know?"
"Doomsday machines are not easy things to assemble. It would have taken a great deal of time and effort for no actual payoff. Faking it was the logical alternative."
"That's not good enough, Ken. Try again."
"I also subjected him to Ganzfeld interrogation once. It gave me certain insights into—"
She shook her head.
He didn't speak for a while. Finally: "We were both off the leash."
"I thought you gave yourself a new leash. I thought your rules…"
"Still. I know how he felt." Lubin unfolded—carefully, carefully—and climbed slowly to his feet.
"Did you know what he'd do?" She couldn't hide the pleading in her voice.
He seemed to look down at her. "Lenie, I've never known anything my entire life. All I can ever do is go with the odds."
It wasn't what she wanted to hear. She wanted him to describe some telltale glitch in Desjardins's shadow-show, some compelling bit of evidence that said the worst will not happen. She wanted some channel of ostensible input traced back to an empty socket, impossibly disconnected from its fiberop. Anything but a gamble based on empathy between two men without conscience.
She wondered if he was disappointed, even a little bit, that Desjardins had been faking it after all. She wondered if he'd really been expecting it.
"What are you so down about?" Lubin asked, sensing what he couldn't see. "We just saved the world."
She shook her head. "He was going to lose anyway. He knew that better than we did."
"Then we advanced the schedule significantly, at least. Saved millions of lives."
How many millions, she wondered, and then: what difference does it make? Could saving twelve million today make up for killing ten million in the past? Could the blood-soaked Meltdown Madonna somehow transmute into Saint Lenie In the Black, savior of two million net? Was the algebra of guilt really so elementary?
For Lenie Clarke, the question didn't even apply. Because any millions saved today had only been spared from a fate she'd condemned them to in the first place. There was no way, no way at all, that she would ever be able to balance those books.
"At least," she said, "the debt won't get any bigger."
"That's a needlessly pessimistic outlook," Lubin observed.
She looked up at him. "How can you say that?" Her voice was so soft she could barely hear herself. "Everyone's dead…"
He shook his head. "Almost everyone. The rest of us get another chance."
Ken Lubin reached out his hand. The gesture was absurd to the point of farce; that this torn and broken monster, gored, bleeding, could pretend to be in any position to offer assistance to others. Lenie Clarke stared for a long moment before she found the strength to take it.
Another chance, she reflected, pulling herself to her feet.
Even though we don't deserve one.
Epilog: Singular Hessian
Failure to converge. Confidence limits exceeded.
Further predictions unreliable.
Acknowledgements
The usual gang of suspects, without whom I could never have pulled this off:
David Hartwell, my editor, nailed some serious structural problems with the first draft and helped me fix them. Moshe Feder took point through the day-to-day grind from delivery to rewrite to kicking-and-screaming to rending-of-garments to wracking, hysterical sobs, and finally to parturition
In what has become an annual rite, a motley collection of subversive literary and political malcontents—Laurie Channer, Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, Becky Maines, John McDaid, Janis O'Conner, Steve Samenski, Isaac Szpindel, and Pat York— met clandestinely at an Undisclosed Location back during the summer of 2002. There, they tore apart the first two chapters of this puppy (among others), then helped to sow them back together again. This is the second time that a whole bunch of people have seen how my novel begins, while virtually no one sees the rest until it's too late to change anything. I suspect self-esteem issues may be involved.
But the fact that hardly anybody read the whole thing doesn't mean that lots of people didn't contribute to it. David Nickle offered advice, insights, and endless mockery throughout the process; his input proved so valuable I can almost overlook the fact that I had to get up at five thirty in the fucking morning and go running for ten miles to avail myself of it. Laurie Channer withstood endless pissing and moaning over a story for which her input was frequently solicited even though she was never actually allowed to read the damned thing. (She still hasn't, as of this writing.)
I owe many details of the helicopter crash scene to Glenn Norman and Glenn Morrison, both pilots, and both more helpful to pesky authors than I had any right to expect. I was astonished to learn that even when a helicopter loses all power in mid-flight, it's still possible to walk away from the crash by practicing an emergency technique called «autorotation». Glenn Morrison, in fact, survived a crash eerily parallel to the one described herein, except for the fact that he is not blind. (For the record, he doesn't think there's a hope in hell off pulling off that maneuver in real life if you are blind, and he knows his stuff. On the other hand, he doesn't know Ken Lubin.)
Parts of other people's life histories made their way into the story. Certain impressionistic details of the dog attack took their inspiration from wild canines encountered by one Rob Cunningham on his travels through India. (You may know Rob as the dude who created those gorgeous spaceship designs for Homeworld and Homeworld 2, the RTS computer games from Relic Entertainment.) Eight-year-old Achilles Desjardins's experiments with aerobraking were lifted from the childhood confessions of Mark Showell, fisheries biologist, although Mark is not a sexual sadist so far as I know. (If anything he's a masochist, judging by the guy he chose to do his Master's under.)
Isaac Szpindel, MD, Ph.D., skilled in so many and varied endeavors that it makes me sick, helped me load Taka's lines with plausible medical chrome. Dave "the bioinformatician" Block answered numerous impertinent questions about artificial nucleotides and minimum genotype sizes. (Unfortunately, one of the things he taught me was that you can't cram a 1.1MB genotype into a cell 250nm across, which contradicts physical stats for ßehemoth already described in Maelstrom.) Major David Buck, of the New Zealand Defence Force, helped me out on the subject of Fuel Air Explosive ordnance. Steve Ballentine, Hannu Blommila, Rick Kleffel, Harry Pulley, Catriona Sparks, Bebe Schroer, Janine Stinson, Mac Tonnies, and David Williams have all pointed me to relevant research papers, reviews, opinions, and/or news articles that went into the ßehemoth mix one way or another. Jan Stinson also went through the manuscript with an editorial eagle-eye, catching typos and bigger problems which I hope the rest of you won't notice. Not to mention others whom I've probably forgotten, and of whom I hereby pre-emptively beg forgiveness.
You can't blame any of these good folks if this book sucks, since none of them were allowed to read it. (If it does suck, maybe that's why.) You can't even blame David Hartwell, who did read it, because the book would have sucked even harder without his input. You can only blame me, and you might as well since I've already got your money.
Well, fifty cents of it, anyway.
Notes and references
Once again it's time to trot out a variety of citations that will hopefully serve as a valuable educational resource, even though they're primarily intended to cover my ass against nitpickers.
If you have come late to this saga, you may not find the following references as complete as you'd like. Any real-world science elements introduced in Starfish and Maelstrom were cited at the end of those books; I don't repeat those citations here, even though many elements persist into ßehemoth. (I do, however, cite related research that has come out since Maelstrom was released, especially if it makes me look especially prescient in some way.) So if you're looking for my original sources on smart gels, «fine-tuning», or the Maelstrom Ecosystems, you'll have to go back and check the other books. You still may not find everything you're looking for, but you might at least make my Amazon numbers look a little less dismal.