Maybe so, but what had Beck really accomplished? He talked about a worldwide network of researchers and proto-soldiers, all primed to confront the hypercolony and to destroy its facility in the Atacama desert, which was wonderful, and maybe, at a stretch, even plausible, but the details were suspiciously sparse. Beck had offered Wyndham in England as a typical researcher, and he had cited Eugene Dowd, the man Cassie and Leo and Thomas were supposedly traveling with, as a typical soldier. But that hardly constituted an army. And it was little more than speculation on Beck’s part that an attack on the Atacama site, even if it succeeded, would materially damage the hypercolony. There could be other such facilities elsewhere in the world. Beck said not—but pressed to explain his reasoning, he became evasive.
He had been generous with his money over the years, but according to Ethan it was money he had more or less inherited; all Beck himself had done was to create a network of front companies and dummy accounts that allowed him to administer his own income without leaving an obvious electronic trail. And she wondered how secure that income stream really was. Beck’s safe house had been a little shabby, and so was his customary wardrobe of tweed jacket and denim trousers.
None of this amounted to madness, but how should she parse his style of conversation (mannered and condescending), his monomania, his obsessive attention to the minutiae of privacy and security? All the surviving families of the victims of ’07 shared these traits, to one degree or another, but at least they had tried to build lives outside the boundaries of their necessary paranoia. Beck was entirely enclosed by it. Even Ethan, whose isolation in his Vermont farmhouse had been nearly as complete as Beck’s, had managed to retain his sanity—maybe because he was objective enough to question it. Beck allowed himself no such unmanly doubts.
And that was the crux of the matter. Beck was impervious to doubt. He believed in his army of followers, his implacable enemy, and his invincible strategy; and to question any of that was not only stupid but, in Beck’s eyes, a betrayal so heinous as to be unforgiveable.
Ethan, dozing next to the window, had left Nerissa with instructions not to wake him. The flight attendant served lunch as the plane curved over the Pacific west of Panama, but it was typical airline fare; he wasn’t missing anything. She found her attention drawn to Beck’s tray as he ate—the way he tugged the foil cover from the tray and folded it in thirds, likewise the wrapper from which he had extracted the cutlery. He took a sip from his thimble-sized cup of black coffee after every four bites. She counted. Four bites. Sip. Four bites. Sip. It was metronomic.
“What are you looking at, Mrs. Iverson?”
She jerked upright like a guilty schoolgirl. “Nothing… sorry.”
Beck glanced at Nerissa’s tray, now a clutter of torn packaging and half-eaten food. “The attendant should be around shortly to pick that up.”
She forced a smile and hoped it would end the conversation. Beck shifted his gaze to her face, but his expression of disgust hardly changed. “Since we have a moment, can I say something?”
“Of course.”
“I want to put this to you directly. Bluntly. Because it’s obvious you’re skeptical about what I mean to do in Chile.”
“I wouldn’t say—”
“All you want to do is reclaim your niece and nephew. And I have no problem with that. You’re not a soldier, and neither is Cassie or Thomas. If they’re in the company of Leo, they’re only an impediment to his work. Taking them back to the States is probably the most useful service you could perform.”
Wake up, Ethan! Nerissa thought. But Ethan didn’t stir. The plane lurched through a patch of turbulent air and she reached out to steady her coffee cup.
“But you’re wrong about what we’re doing in the Atacama. Others have expressed similar reservations. I’ve heard the argument for accommodation more often than I care to remember, though less often since 2007—the idea that the hypercolony has given us something valuable in exchange for a trivial diversion of resources. The idea that interfering with that puts both parties at risk and even constitutes a threat to world peace. I have to say, it’s a contemptible attitude.”
“I saw my sister and her husband murdered. I’m not inclined to forgive that.” Where was the flight attendant? The entire plane seemed to have been enveloped in a kind of sunny afternoon coma.
“I know. But you’ve wondered, haven’t you, what we stand to lose if I’m successful?”
Sure she had wondered. If it was true that the hypercolony had molded the world the way a potter works wet clay on a wheel—if it had actually coaxed prosperity out of poverty and made a tractable chorus of the world’s discordant human voices—then yes: “Of course I wonder about the consequences.”
“As I see it, humanity will be forced to take responsibility for its own future.”
“For better or worse.”
“All of us who survived 2007 bear a heavy burden. People around us are allowed to go about their lives, while we carry this unspeakable knowledge. So we try to cope. We do what we have to do. You’ve elected to stand back and look after the children while others fight. That’s your choice, and it’s a good and useful one. But as a civilian, the consequences of what we do are not your concern. You need to let the soldiers fight the war.”
Between planes at Pudahuel Airport they sat in a lounge nursing drinks—mineral water for Beck, beer for Ethan, rum and Coke for Nerissa. She passed the hour between flights listening to an English-language news broadcast on a TV set behind the bar.
Was the control of the hypercolony already faltering, as Winston Bayliss had suggested? More Russian and Japanese troops and gunships had been dispatched to Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk. There was footage of brick buildings collapsing under mortar fire. Such outbreaks were not altogether unknown and were usually tamped down as soon as they started, but this one might be different. The diplomatic saber-rattling continued to intensify and the League of Nations seemed helpless to intervene. Shattered walls, broken bodies: was that what the world would look like in five or ten or fifty years?
She stole another glance at Beck. Give him his props, Nerissa thought. He was a clever and persuasive salesman. As toxic and as fraudulent as his worldview might be, he had successfully peddled it to a number of intelligent people, apparently including Ethan.
In other words, he was a natural leader. But maybe that was what had made the last century so peacefuclass="underline" an enforced vacation from natural leaders. And if the hypercolony were destroyed they would come storming back—our Napoleons, she thought. Our Caesars. Our terrible and rightful rulers.
A smaller single-prop plane carried them from Santiago to Antofagasta, and as it bent down to the Cerro Moreno runway strip she caught her first glimpse of the coastal mountains that bordered the high salt desert of the Atacama.
The driest place on Earth. More than forty thousand square miles of sand, salt and ancient pyroclastic debris. A great place to put an observatory, if anyone had been funding observatories, because the skies were so consistently clear.
It was the place (if Beck was to be believed) in which the hypercolony had built its breeding ground. She tried to imagine that entity, to think about it without hatred or fear. Perhaps the way Ethan thought of it, as an organism of great age and complexity. It was intelligent, Ethan and Beck believed, but not self-aware. It didn’t think, in human terms, but it calculated. It was like the computers the utility companies used, but infinitely more subtle, programmed by its own unfathomably long evolutionary history.
And out there in the Atacama it had assembled some means to deliver itself to new, distant worlds. Using rockets, maybe, like the ones in the paperback science-fiction novels Cassie used to jam into her schoolbag, or something better than rockets. Something to do with beams of light. Something that could be constructed only with the resources of a technologically adept culture.