Nerissa shot him a poisonous look. “Thomas.”
“If Cassie and Thomas are with him, that will be your opportunity to take them out of harm’s way. But obviously, Mrs. Iverson, I don’t know with any certainty where any of them are right now. I can’t snap my fingers and make them appear in front of you. You need to exercise some patience.”
“Do you care to explain any of that?”
“I’m as concerned about Leo as you are about your niece and nephew, and I’ll do everything I can to guarantee their safety. The situation is complex, and I’d be happy to talk about it, but in the meantime maybe you’d like to have a shower and a change of clothes? No offense, but you look like you could use it. I’ll put together a hot meal for all of us as soon as you’re refreshed. How about that?”
It was testimony to her fatigue that she sighed and nodded. Beck told her how to find the bathroom.
“I understand why you brought her here,” he said when she left the room. “But it’s frankly a little awkward.”
Ethan didn’t want to get into that discussion, at least not yet. “How many houses do you own, Werner?”
“Enough. They’re only tools. You could say, weapons of war.”
“The sims came for you, didn’t they?”
“I got out of my place in Illinois minutes ahead of them. I’d been there too long in any case—I knew it was probably compromised. I was packed and ready to go when they came to the door. They didn’t see me leave.”
Ethan had heard speculation about Beck and his money—especially his money—for years before Beck confided in him. It was rumored that Beck had patented some useful invention. Or that he had inherited a fortune back in the 1990s. Or that he had criminal connections. Or all three.
That he possessed both deep pockets and useful connections was undeniable. It was Beck who had organized and paid for the annual gatherings of Society members; it was Beck who had funded key research projects when educational institutions backed out; and after the murders of 2007 it had been Beck who helped out the survivors and their families, with cash and when necessary with goods otherwise unobtainable: new names, social security numbers, passports.
Not to mention his apparently inexhaustible supply of safe houses, properties he owned but kept unoccupied so that he could relocate himself or others on a moment’s notice. More than one Society member had called Beck paranoid, and maybe they were right. But it was, Ethan thought, at least a well-funded paranoia.
“The thing is,” Beck said, “you more or less walked into a war zone.
“The war came to us. And you supplied the address, Werner.”
“Because we need to stay in touch. But I didn’t expect you to turn up on the doorstep.”
“It seemed like logical thing to do, given that Cassie and Thomas are traveling with Leo.”
“I understand. But the situation is more complicated than you realize. I’ve been working with people who aren’t part of the Society. The Society was never more than one aspect of this war, Ethan. You can think of the Society as a kind of intelligence service, gathering information about the enemy. That’s good and useful work. But wars have to be fought. And they have to be fought by soldiers, not scholars.”
Ethan sat back in his chair as Beck got up to make coffee. The coffee machine on the faux-marble counter looked as if Beck had bought it yesterday. And maybe he had. The house itself still smelled untenanted, redolent of stale air and the chemical exhalations of undisturbed carpets and furniture. Ethan had a momentary vision of Beck as the kind of furtive animal that nests in abandoned buildings. But he looked martially efficient as he filled the machine’s reservoir and dropped a filter into its basket. He was fifty years old, Ethan guessed, maybe older, but he could have been a weatherworn drill sergeant, still able to hike as far as any recruit and count off twice as many pushups. “You always were unhappy with the Society,” Ethan said. In fact Beck’s private letters had so often dripped with contempt for his colleagues that Ethan occasionally wondered why Beck bothered with them at all.
“Well, I don’t really blame the Society. So much of what we believed was essentially speculative. Before you turned up those ice-core inclusions all we really had was some anomalous data, a history of academic persecution, and a mother lode of surmise. The Society connected the dots, and what emerged was this frankly ludicrous idea, that the radio-propagative layer was also an organism. From elsewhere. From outer space. Even before ’07, nobody wanted to say that out loud. A few of the old lions took it seriously—Fermi, Dyson, Hoyle—but even those guys never contemplated doing anything about it.”
“What could they do?”
“As I said, I don’t blame them. You learn to fly under the radar. Fine. But there’s something to be said for facing facts. And since 2007 we’ve been forced to face a few.” Coffee began to seep through the filter and drip into the pot, a metronomic sound. “Or anyway, I have. You want anything harder than cream in your coffee? You look like you could use it.”
“No. Thank you.” Ethan cleared his throat. “I was seven years in Vermont, living in a cabin in the woods. Does that count as facing facts?”
“You killed some sims, you said?”
He had already given Beck a partial account of events at the farm house. “Four altogether.”
“Well, good. You did what you had to. But that’s self-defense. You were planning for the next attack, but not beyond it.”
“I managed to survive.”
“Right, but what now? What next? Find a new place to hide? Somewhere even deeper in the woods?”
Ethan shrugged.
“I wasn’t willing to settle for that,” Beck said. “What I’ve done these past seven years is make contact with people outside the Society, people who’ve had direct experience of the hypercolony or the sims.”
“I wasn’t aware such people existed.”
“You think it’s only scientists and scholars who can draw an inference or trip over a dangerous piece of knowledge? Think about it. I have reason to believe the sims constitute a tiny fraction of the human population, far less than one in a million. But there are at least a few doctors and coroners who’ve examined unusual bodies. Police officers who’ve witnessed perplexing deaths. And plenty of people who asked awkward questions and received unsatisfying or threatening answers. I made it my business to find those people.”
“How?”
“All sorts of ways. Small-town and local newspapers are a good resource. Local stories usually make it to print before they can be filtered through the radiosphere—the copy goes straight to the composing desk. The press services would never pick up an item about a traffic accident that left green matter all over the road, or, if they did, the story would get lost in transmission—but local papers often publish it.”
“So you run down believe-it-or-not stories in rural newspapers?”
“Much more than that. I have contacts on three continents. I’ve been able to put together a network of people who understand what we’re dealing with—understand it viscerally, not just theoretically—and who are motivated to take action.”
“What kind of action?”
“Every living thing is vulnerable, Ethan. Even the hypercolony.”
“You honestly think you’ve discovered a way to hurt it?”
“If it couldn’t be hurt it would never have expended so much effort attempting to hurt us.”
“Do you realize what you’re admitting?”
Ethan looked up, startled: Nerissa stood in the kitchen doorway, wearing fresh clothes and carrying a towel. Beck displayed a thin-lipped flush of irritation, quickly suppressed. “I hope you’re feeling better, Mrs. Iverson. What is it you think I’m admitting?”
“That you provoked it—the hypercolony. It isn’t just afraid of what we might know, it’s afraid of what you might do with that knowledge.”