If you looked at it that way the hypercolony wasn’t really an enemy, at least in the sense of a malevolent, conscious opponent. And maybe that was what Beck had failed to understand. There was no more malice in the hypercolony than there was in a natural disaster… and it wasn’t even necessarily a disaster, Nerissa thought, except for those of us who, like willful children, poked our fingers into the lethal business of the hornet’s nest.
Antofagasta was a busy industrial city. Copper refineries and cement factories etched parallel lines of smoke on the northern sky; a huge port dominated the harbor. Nerissa, Ethan and Beck took a taxi from the airport to a three-bedroom row house on the fringe of the hotel district.
Night had fallen by the time they finished unpacking. Ethan turned on the TV, and a Televisión Nacional newscast began to repeat what Nerissa already knew about the fighting in Magadan. She crossed the street to a tiny Líder store and exchanged some of the pesos they had bought at the airport for basic groceries. Back in the kitchen she fried fish and vegetables for three but ended up eating very little of it herself. Her appetite had been fragile since she left Buffalo and she had lost a few pounds already.
There was no evidence of the army Beck had said would be waiting for him. No cryptic messages, no hooded partisans knocking at the door. When she asked him about that, Beck said he’d contact “some people” tomorrow. And Nerissa carefully refrained from rolling her eyes.
She and Ethan shared a bedroom. What made this especially unsettling was that to night might be one of their last nights together. Sooner or later Ethan would be off to the interior of the Atacama, Sancho Panza to Beck’s Quixote, and with any luck she’d be back in the States with her niece and nephew. She might not see Ethan again even if he survived. She wanted him to survive, of course, but did she want something more than that? How much of their shipwrecked marriage might it be possible to salvage? If they were together under less dire circumstances, if they were granted time enough to discover what they had become after seven years of separation… what might be possible?
He opened the curtains and turned down the bed. Nerissa repeated some of what Beck had said on the airplane and asked Ethan bluntly whether he still believed in Beck’s plan.
Ethan frowned. Even that small gesture was hauntingly familiar. The creases at the corners of his eyes. The buckled V between his brows. “I think it has a chance.”
“So you buy all that stuff about radio waves?” Nerissa understood the concept only vaguely, but Beck claimed to have isolated key frequencies at which the orbital cloud of the hypercolony communicated with itself. He believed he could disrupt those signals—not globally, but locally, at the Atacama site. Which would have the effect of isolating the Atacama facility from the orbital hypercolony. Which would render the resident simulacra inert, perhaps even kill them. Supposedly.
“It wasn’t just Beck who did the research. If he can suppress activity at the site long enough, then yeah, we can get inside and damage it. Whether that will have any lasting effect is hard to say. It depends on which theory of the hypercolony’s life cycle you accept.”
“So even if it works, nothing might happen.”
“I’m pretty sure something will happen.”
“But the hypercolony might have a way of defending itself.”
“Also possible.”
“But you think it’s worth doing?”
He shrugged.
Lying in bed, exhausted but sleepless, she found herself recalling a film Ethan had shown her years ago. A home movie, basically, made by one of his undergraduate students during a research trip to Japan. Ethan had been working with a nest of Asian giant hornets, insects that were also called “yak-killers”—the species was responsible for an average of forty human deaths every year. This particular nest was in a forest close to a settled community in Kanagawa Prefecture, and it would have to be destroyed once Ethan had secured specimens. Ethan approached the nest in protective clothing as carefully sealed as a diving suit. His face through the plastic visor looked tense but not frightened, and his movements were calculated, deliberative. Respectful was the word that came to mind.
As he approached the nest it detected his presence and reacted to it. Dozens of wasps swarmed out and darted directly at him. The camera wavered but the cameraman stood his ground; two of Ethan’s other students panicked and ran. Ethan did not. Even as the fist-sized hornets clustered on his visor, struggling with the selfless lethality of a suicide bomber to reach his face, he went about his work. And when he was done taking samples, he poisoned the nest with the same impersonal efficiency.
She woke an hour before dawn from a terrible dream. In the dream Ethan had been back in Japan, but the hornets were as big as people and they had faces like the face of Winston Bayliss. She came to herself (I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost) convinced she had heard some ominous noise, but when she went to the window there was no one in the alley behind the house, only a cat digging through a drift of refuse. “Don’t go,” she said.
She wasn’t sure whether she meant to wake him. She heard him turn over in the bed.
“Don’t go. The only reason you can’t see how crazy this is is that we’ve been neck-deep in crazy for years. Beck is delusional. There is no army. He doesn’t know what’s out there in the desert or where it came from or what it wants or how it can hurt you. Don’t go.”
Enough of the ambient light of Antofogasta seeped through the window that she could see his head against the pillow, eyes closed. She assumed he was asleep, but he startled her by saying, “Come back to bed.”
“Ethan?”
He didn’t move. Maybe he still wasn’t altogether awake. “I don’t have a choice, Ris.” His voice thick, words like an extended sigh. “This is what I have to do. There’s nothing else. Come back to bed.”
The cat pricked its ears and chased something invisible down the alley and out of sight. Nothing else moved. The air itself seemed sterile and empty. Then I’ll find my own way home, she thought.
23
CROSSING THE EQUATOR
THEY FOLLOWED THE HIGHWAY IN TWO vehicles: Eugene Dowd’s white van, with Dowd and Beth in it, and a sky-blue Ford Concourse Dowd had rented with the promise that he would return it to the rental agency’s Valparaiso branch. Cassie took turns at the wheel with Leo, occasionally checking the mirror to see if they were being followed.
The Trans-American Highway was an advertisement for the success of the Pan-American Common Market. It passed through some of the hemisphere’s most rugged and beautiful terrain, and it was a feat of large-scale multinational engineering to rival the Channel Tunnel, the Danyang–Kunshan Bridge, or the Jordanian desalinization towers. Under other circumstances Cassie might have relished the trip. As it was, her connection with Leo Beck made it at least bearable.
Had she adapted to Leo, or was it the other way around? But it seemed to Cassie that there was no compromise in their unfolding relationship, only a series of surprising discoveries. Cassie had been with boys before, on what she preferred to think of as an experimental basis. Well, two boys. There had been Rudy Sawicki from high school, a math prodigy with bad skin who was nevertheless sweet and gently lascivious when they were alone together. But he wasn’t Society, and their relationship had collapsed under the weight of unspeakable truths. And there had been Emmanuel Fisher, whom everyone called Manny: he was Society, and for a year they had seen each other every weekend. But the closer she got to Manny, the more he felt entitled to make decisions on her behalf or to overrule decisions she had made. Eventually, after a trivial argument about homework, he had called her a bitch and thrown her copy of Wuthering Heights against the wall so ferociously that the school librarian complained about the broken spine. By mutual consent, they hadn’t dated after that.