He offered to drive and Nerissa nodded gratefully. She buckled herself into the passenger seat and allowed her head to slump against the head rest. Her breathing deepened into gentle snores as he drove away from the farm house. The fitful light of the fire reflected from the windshield, the dashboard, her face. Asleep, she looked exactly like the woman he remembered, but bent, Ethan thought, almost to the point of breaking: bent to the limit of her endurance.
He pulled over where the laneway met the county road. Nerissa opened her eyes and mumbled a word that might have been, “What?”
“Shh,” he said, reaching through the driver’s-side window. “Just picking up the mail.”
One last time. He lifted the hinged door of the rural delivery box, withdrew a single letter and switched on the car’s overhead light long enough to glance at it. The return address was illegible and probably meant to be, but he recognized the handwriting at once. The letter was from Werner Beck.
He tucked it into his shirt pocket.
Half an hour later he was on the federal turnpike, cold air from an open window flushing out the stink of kerosene and worse things. He hadn’t thought about a destination. He drove west in a river of red taillights, Nerissa asleep beside him, headed nowhere but away.
PART TWO
THE FISHERMAN AND THE SPIDER
Consider a fisherman—let’s say, a young man who owns a small boat and weaves his own nets.
One sunny morning the fisherman sails out from the harbor and casts his net into the ocean. By the end of the day he has accumulated a fine catch of succulent fish. Back ashore, he sets aside a share of the bounty for his evening meal. He guts and cleans the fish and roasts them over an open fire on the beach. Perhaps he calls down his wife from their seaside cottage; perhaps the couple dine alfresco as the sun sets, gazing into each other’s eyes; perhaps, nine months later and as an indirect result of their activities on that happy evening, the fisherman’s wife bears a healthy child… but these plausible sequelae are not pertinent to our story.
Now imagine another biological organism, in this case a spider: a common orb-weaver spider, of which there are some three thousand species worldwide and probably one or two in your own garden or backyard. Like the fisherman, the spider weaves a net (of sticky silk) and uses it to capture another species (a moth) as food. Like the fisherman, the spider prepares its meal before it consumes it—it pumps digestive enzymes into the body of the captive insect, sucks out the liquefied matter, and discards the empty husk, much as the fisherman discarded the inedible bones and organs of his fish. Perhaps the spider follows his meal by finding a mate, impregnating her, and offering his body to be devoured; perhaps the female then produces a pendulous, silk-encased sac of fertilized eggs… but all this, like the fisherman’s amorous evening, is incidental to our story.
The fisherman’s tale is pleasant, even heartwarming. The spider’s tale is viscerally disgusting. But from an objective point of view, nothing distinguishes one from the other but the details. A net is a net, whether it’s made of nylon or spider silk. A meal is a meal.
The important difference lies in the realm of subjective experience. The fisherman’s day is richly felt and easily imagined. The spider’s is not. It is extremely unlikely that the simple fused ganglia of an arachnid generate much if anything in the way of psychological complexity. And an anthill—although it is also a functional biological entity, capable of its own equivalent of net-casting and food-gathering—has no centralized brain at all and no perceived experience of any kind. The rich inner experience of the world is central to human life and our appreciation of it. But the preponderance of life on Earth gets along perfectly well with out it. In this respect, human beings are a distinct minority. The fishermen of the world are greatly out numbered by the spiders.
11
JORDAN LANDING, ILLINOIS
“I’M NOT WHAT SHE SAID I AM,” THOMAS insisted. “I’m not useless.”
Sitting across from him at a table in the diner, Cassie was inclined to believe it. Not for the first time, Thomas had surprised her.
“Well, look who’s back for supper,” the waitress had said when they came in. “We close at seven,” she added, “so don’t dawdle. Fireworks start at eight—I guess you decided to stay for the fireworks?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cassie said. Maybe it had been a mistake to come back to the same restaurant where they had bought breakfast. Being recognized was never good. But most of Jordan Landing’s restaurants had already closed for Armistice Day, and the other exception, a Chinese restaurant called Lucky Paradise, didn’t appeal to Thomas.
The waitress brought meatloaf for Cassie and a hamburger and French fries for Thomas. Thomas tucked in eagerly. His appetite seemed to have come back, despite the trauma of the last few days. It was almost as if Beth’s insult had invigorated him.
Once they had retrieved the papers and the key from Werner Beck’s hidden safe, they left the house by the rear door, hiked through a wooded allotment to another quiet residential street, then circled past the commercial section of town to the motel. Back in their room, Leo insisted on reading the papers his father had left him before he would discuss the contents. When he finished, he looked up and said, “We have to think about what happens next.”
“You could start,” Beth suggested, “by telling us what’s in those pages.”
“Well… lots,” Leo said. “It’s sort of a plan.”
“A plan for what?”
“My father wrote this and left it where I could find it in case there was another attack on the Society. Over the last few years he learned some things he didn’t share, things about the hypercolony. Ways we might be able to affect it. Hurt it.”
“Like?”
Leo shook his head: “I need to go through it again. But what I can tell you is, if we do what my father wants us to do, it’s going to be dangerous. You might not want to get involved.”
Beth rolled her eyes. “Fuck, Leo—I am involved.”
“I know, and you’re right, but we’re talking about a whole other level of commitment. I need a decision from you, too,” addressing this to Cassie, “you and Thomas both. And even if you want to join in… I’m going to have to think about whether it’s a good idea to let you do that.”
Cassie felt a twinge of foreboding. Something about the expression on Leo’s face, the pinched V of his brows: what ever was in those papers had frightened him, but it had also filled him with a kind of grim hope.
Beth remained sourly suspicious. “Are you even considering taking them along? Why? If this is so fucking dangerous. I mean, no offence,” a brief and insincere glance at Cassie, “but they’re baggage. She hasn’t done anything more useful than pay for a few meals, and as for Thomas, he’s a kid—he’s useless.”
Cassie flushed at the injustice of it (as if Beth had performed some invaluable service!), but before she could answer Thomas piped up: “I’m not useless.”
“No?” A glimmer of cruelty in Beth’s voice. “What have you done except sleep? Sleep and occasionally cry?”
“Nothing—”