When the spasm passed she shut her eyes and took small sips of the chilly December air. The darkness that formed behind her eyelids was cavernous and oddly comforting. She didn’t move until she felt the pressure of Ethan’s hand on her shoulder.
“Ris? Are you all right?”
Obviously not. But in the sense he meant… well, she was recovering. “Help me up, please, Ethan.”
She leaned into him until her dizziness passed. Back to the car, then, where she rinsed her mouth with bottled water, spitting it onto the verge.
Funny how this feeling had snuck up on her. It wasn’t the mem ory of the sim’s awful death that had triggered it. It wasn’t even the horrific inference she had drawn from her meeting with Mrs. Bayliss, the idea that a human womb could be shanghaied by an alien organism. What had sent her reeling out of the car was simply the thought of her niece and nephew, of Cassie and Thomas, friendless and vulnerable and believing she was dead.
Not that it was exactly a new thought, but she had kept it at a safe distance in the frenzied activity of the past few days. But time, or the drowsy, sun-warmed comfort of the moving car, had lowered her guard.
She allowed herself another sip of water as Ethan steered back into traffic. A pair of eighteen-wheel trucks barreled past, lords of the turnpike on this chilly weekday afternoon. She found herself thinking of the custody hearings back in ’07, held in the aftermath of the massacre. A panel of Family Health and Social Welfare workers had reviewed Nerissa’s suitability as a caregiver for her orphaned niece and nephew. Nerissa had testified to her willingness to make a new home for them, had promised they would receive any counseling or therapy they might need. And those vows had been authentic; she had made them without reservation, though she was less than certain of what FHSW called her “parenting potential.” In the end, the tribunal had expressed more confidence in her ability to raise two kids than she actually felt.
She had always admired her sister’s devotion to her children, even occasionally envied it; but children had never been on Nerissa’s agenda, except in a vague maybe-someday sense. Her career and her troubles with Ethan had rendered the question moot. Then, suddenly, she found herself responsible for two traumatized children. She had taken a leave of absence from the University after the murders and she knew that going back would make her a sitting target, should the killers return. A new city, responsibility for Cassie and Thomas, the unfathomable threat hanging over them all, not to mention her own burden of traumatic memories… some nights she had come awake in the sweaty certainty that she couldn’t handle any of it: the kids would despise her; she would be reduced to poverty; they would all be butchered in their sleep.
But it hadn’t happened that way. The kids had slowly adapted. For months Cassie had covered her ears at the slightest mention of her parents; she had been clingy, reluctant even to walk to school by herself. Slowly, however, her confidence had crept back. And so, in equal measure, had Nerissa’s. It was as if they had learned a silent magic: how to draw strength from each other in a way that left each of them stronger. Thomas, though he was younger than Cassie, had recovered even more quickly. There were difficult moments, of course, sudden and unprovoked outbursts of tears or anger, demands to be taken back to his real home, his real mother… but Thomas had been willing to accept Cassie’s consoling hugs and, later, Nerissa’s. She remembered the first time he had come crying into her arms. The surprising warmth and weight of him, the damp patch his tears left on her shoulder.
Protecting them had become the central business of her life. It was what was left, after so much else had been taken from her. And it was a job for which she possessed, to her surprise, a certain aptitude.
But ultimately she had failed at it. She had been away from home the night the sims came back. And for purely selfish reasons. An evening at the theater with John Vance—Beth’s father, who was one of the Society’s singletons, separated from his wife after ’07. They had seen a Performing Arts Center production of Twelfth Night. Then drinks at John’s place. And then to bed, in the secure knowledge that Cassie could look after Thomas, that it was good for Cassie to feel in charge once in a while, to take on some of the responsibility she was beginning to assume as an adult… and other self-serving rationalizations.
You let your vigilance lapse, Nerissa thought. She had felt safe enough to let a little buried resentment leak out—resentment of a duty she had never wanted but couldn’t refuse; resentment that she had been relegated to a supporting role in the lives of these children rather than a starring role in her own. She had chosen to slake her loneliness in the company of a man for whom she felt nothing more than a passing affection. And as a result Cassie and Thomas were gone. Not dead (please God, not dead), but out there somewhere in the company of Werner Beck’s cocksure son and John Vance’s sullen daughter—bound, in all likelihood, for one of Werner Beck’s safe houses. Assuming Beck himself hadn’t been killed. The sims had been more selective this time around, but surely Beck was one of their primary targets. Because Beck, as Ethan had always insisted, was the heart of the Society. Its mainspring, its motivating force. Its most dedicated and most dangerous member.
The turnpike ribboned through Ohio into Indiana. By dusk the sky had grown clear, the air colder. Outside Indianapolis they passed a local radio station, its broadcast antenna aimed like a steel flower at the meridian, whispering to the radiosphere, which would whisper its message back to the neighboring counties and suburbs… to the entire world, given a powerful-enough signal.
Ethan tuned in the station in time for a newscast. The world was facing a nervous and unusual Christmas. In northern Africa, General Othmani’s forces had encircled and destroyed a brigade of League of Nations peacekeepers. In Europe, a conference on the Balkan crisis had adjourned without reaching an accord. And the Russian Commonwealth and the Pan-Asian Alliance were butting heads over an oil port on the Sea of Okhostsk, with reports of an exchange of artillery fire.
None of these small crises was unusual in itself, but the combination seemed ominous. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s starting to unravel,” Ethan said. “The peace they gave us.”
“Imposed on us. And I’m not sure we should call it peace.”
Pax formicae, she thought. The peace of the anthill.
“If any of what Bayliss said is true—if the hypercolony is infected
and at war with itself—that would obviously affect the way it manages the world.”
“Or else it’ll all be resolved by New Year’s.” Nerissa shrugged. “No way of knowing.”
Then the state and local news. The Indiana legislature had passed a bud get extension. The Farm Alliance was threatening to boycott the Midwest Corn Exchange unless prices stabilized. State Police were participating in the search for four young persons sought in a murder-assault case. The weather would be clear and seasonably cool for the next few days.
“If we drive through the night,” Ethan said, switching off the radio, “I think we can make Werner’s place by morning.”
She had met Werner Beck only once, at a Correspondence Society gathering in Boston before the massacres of ’07. Brief as it was, the meeting had soured her on the Society and helped derail her relationship with Ethan.
The Correspondence Society, true to its paranoid principles, was really two organizations. The majority of its members were academics or scientists who used the mailing list to share unpopular or even whimsical ideas related to their research. For those people it was little more than an academic equivalent of the Masons or the Shriners: a notionally secret social club, useful as a way of networking with other professionals. They weren’t required to take seriously the idea of the radiosphere as a living entity.