He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, this is me, actually reading it. That surprises you?”
“I don’t know. I just never pictured you…”
“Reading books?”
Frankly no, though she was less surprised now than she once would have been. His finger marked his place in The Fisherman and the Spider, about halfway through. She said, “Well, what do you think of it?”
“It’s your uncle’s book, right?”
“Right.”
“About insects.”
“He studied them.”
“But really about the hypercolony.”
She was pleased that he understood this. “In a way, yeah.”
He turned his head up toward the sky. “I was thinking about the way they talked about it in school. The great discovery. Marconi bouncing signals from Newfoundland to France. The radio-propagative layer.”
Cassie nodded.
“But it’s alive. And that’s what your uncle’s book is about, at least between the lines. The hypercolony as a kind of insect hive.”
It was an idea Cassie had struggled with for a long time. She could grasp that the hypercolony was a diffuse cloud of tiny cells surrounding the Earth, each cell functioning like a neuron in a kind of brain. A huge, peculiar brain, surrounding the Earth. Okay, she got that. And it intercepted human radio signals, analyzed them, subtly altered them, and bounced them back in ways people found useful.
All that was basic Society stuff. And since the hypercolony was a sort of brain, she accepted that it might be intelligent. It had to be intelligent, to do what it did. Some early Society theorists had even tried to make contact with it: they had broadcast signals on dormant frequencies, sending out simple mathematical formulas or even questions in basic English, hoping for a response. But no response had ever come.
It was the Society’s mathematicians and cyberneticists and in no small part her uncle who had come up with an explanation: the hypercolony functioned without conscious volition of any kind. The hypercolony didn’t know anything about itself or its environment, any more than a carrot understands the concept of organic farming or the color orange. It just lived and grew, mindlessly exploiting the resources available to it: vacuum, rock, sunlight, other living things. Its powers were in some respects almost godlike, but it was an insect god—mindless and potentially deadly. Her uncle had known that, and though he couldn’t mention the hypercolony by name in his published book, Leo was right: it was there between the lines, on every page.
He gave her a brooding look. “You’d think it would be hard to hate something you can’t see or touch. But it’s not. I do hate the fucking thing. I hate it as much as my father does. He used to say, given that we know what we know, the only honorable thing to do is declare war.”
“In a way, isn’t that what we’ve done?”
“More than in a way. The man I shot… he was a casualty of war. Along with everybody who died in ’07 and everybody who died last month.”
Of course Leo was still dwelling on the man he’d shot. So was Cassie. She thought the act was forgivable even if their defense would never stand up in a court of law. She accepted her share of responsibility, and she knew that in Leo’s place she might have behaved the same way. But the memory was still too awful to contemplate. The blood, the furtive way they had tried to dispose of the body. And in the end, even if they shared responsibility, it was Leo who had pulled the trigger.
He looked at the book in his hand, then offered it to Cassie. She shook her head. “Finish reading if it you want.”
“You ever meet your uncle?”
“A few times. Before ’07. But I don’t remember much about him. Uncle Ethan and Aunt Ris visited sometimes, back when I lived with my parents. He was just a quiet guy who smiled a lot and didn’t say much.” And since Leo had raised the subject, Cassie allowed herself to broach a delicate subject: “My uncle was pretty close to your father. According to Aunt Ris, Werner Beck was pretty much the head of the whole Correspondence Society.”
“I bet she said more than that.”
“Well—”
“It’s okay, Cassie. I know my father has enemies.”
“I’m not sure enemy is the word. She said he was brilliant.” Which was true, though her other words had included arrogant and narcissistic.
“He’s not shy about telling people things they need to hear, whether they want to hear them or not.”
“He wrote to you, right?”
“Once a month. Long letters. He called it my real education.”
“How come you didn’t live with him?”
“After ’07, he figured I wouldn’t be safe anywhere near him. He sent me to live with a cousin of his in Cincinnati. A married couple, no kids, they didn’t know anything about the Society. He paid them pretty generously to look after me. They put me up in a spare room and enrolled me in school. Decent people, but they didn’t really want me there… and it wasn’t where I wanted to be. So as soon as I was legal I bought a bus ticket to Buffalo and got a job washing dishes. I knew there were survivors there who could help me out. My father told me about your aunt and the people she was connected with, how to get in touch with them. He didn’t really approve, but I think he understood.”
“But we weren’t what you hoped we’d be?”
“Well. You know what my father used to say about the Society? He said it was social club when it should have been an army.”
Possibly true. “That changed in ’07,” Cassie said.
“No, not for the better. The murders were obviously meant to drive the Society into hiding, and that’s what happened. We cringed like dogs. Quoting my father. Which is what I found in Buffalo, a bunch of whipped dogs…” He gave Cassie a look that seemed both sheepish and defiant. “Anyway, that’s how it seemed. Don’t do anything rash. Whisper. Mourn, but don’t get angry.”
“Some of us did get angry, Leo. Even if it didn’t show. Some of us were angry all along.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.” He shifted his legs, making the ancient lawn chair creak. The only other sound was the wind furiously tangling the wind chimes. “Anyway, what could I say? My father survived ’07. I wasn’t an orphan. I could hardly complain to someone like—”
“Like me?”
“Someone who’d seen what you’d seen.”
Well, yes, Cassie thought. She had caught one indelible glimpse of her parents’ slack and bloodied bodies before Aunt Ris covered her eyes and pulled her away. You can’t unsee something like that. But what did that buy you? Only bad dreams and guilt. A clinging sadness she could never quite escape.
But anger, too. We never lacked for anger. “Well,” she said, “we’re in the same boat now.”
“Orphans?” Leo asked sharply. “Is that what you mean?”
“No. I mean—”
“I don’t know for sure he’s dead. But whether is or whether he isn’t, he wouldn’t have sent me here unless he wanted me to finish his work.”
“You really think Eugene Dowd can help us do that?”
“Dowd seems to think we’re here to help him. But my father trusted him.”
“To do what?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Leo said, “when he finishes his story.”
16
ON THE ROAD
SOMEWHERE ON THE TURNPIKE WEST OF Columbus, Ohio, the events of the last few days settled on Nerissa like an unbearable weight. Suddenly breathless, she asked Ethan to pull over. She was out of the car before he finished braking, falling to her knees next to a weed-clogged drainage ditch. A barrel stave had tightened around her chest. Her head felt heavy. The sun was viciously bright, the noise of passing trucks cruelly loud. She put her hands into the yellow grass, leaned forward and vomited up the remains of this morning’s breakfast.