From a distance Leo Beck had seemed like just another nervy, chain-smoking Society boy. Undoubtedly that was what Beth had imagined him to be. (Cassie was tempted to wonder what Leo had seen in Beth, but that was a mean thought.) So it had surprised her to learn that Leo was a habitual reader; it had surprised her to see how easily he related to Thomas. In bed, during the few but precious opportunities they shared during the drive south, Leo was gentle when she wanted him to be and fiercely eager at exactly the right moment—and he was good company afterward. With Leo beside her she could sleep soundly, even in a dark room in a strange country. As her eyes closed he kissed her ear or her forehead and whispered, “Sleep well.” Simple, comforting words. She cherished them. You too, she thought. Sleep well, Leo.
The Trans-American Highway crossed the Darien Peninsula on the Pacific side of the peninsula’s mountainous spine. Often she could see the highway winding ahead of them, a high steel ribbon where it spanned marshes and gorges or hugged rocky scarps, though as acts of engineering the tunnels were even more impressive, cutting through massive rock-faces as cleanly as a bullet. As the day approached noon Dowd signaled his intention to pull over at the next rest stop, which turned out to be a wide space at the side of the road featuring a cafeteria, four pumps marked GASOLINA SINPLOMO, a gift shop, and a view that rivaled anything Cassie had ever seen in Aunt Ris’s back issues of National Geographic.
PART THREE
BURNING PARADISE
What is intelligence, exactly? Maybe that sounds like a simple question. We know—or think we know—what our own kind of intelligence is like. After all, we experience it on a daily basis.
But there are other kinds of intelligence. There is the intelligence of the hive—the complex behavior that arises from individually unintelligent organisms following a few simple behavioral rules in response to cues from the environment. And there is a kind of intelligence that inheres in the ecosystem as a whole.
Evolution, over time, has created entities as diverse as crinoids and mushrooms and harbor seals and howler monkeys, all without a predetermined goal and without devoting even a moment of thought to the subject. You might even conclude that this kind of thoughtless intelligence is more powerful and patient than our own. What are the limits to mindless intelligence? Or, and here’s an even more striking question, could mindless intelligence successfully mimic mindful intelligence? Could an entity (an organism, hive, ecosystem) learn to speak a human language, perhaps even deceive us into accepting it as one of our own and allowing it to exploit us for its own purposes?
Such an entity would lack real self-awareness. It would never experience the inner life we discussed in a previous chapter. But given an adequately broad sample of human behavior to mimic, it could almost certainly conceal those deficits from us.
Why would such an entity want to fool us? Perhaps it wouldn’t. But mimicry is one of the common strategies by which a species gains an advantage over its competitors. We may hope the question remains for ever hypothetical. But the possibility is real.
24
ANTOFAGASTA
LATER—AFTER STORIES HAD BEEN TOLD on both sides, mistaken assumptions corrected, difficult truths shared—Nerissa asked Cassie to help her put Thomas to bed.
“I can go to bed by myself,” Thomas said, but it was a token protest, and he seemed secretly relieved when Nerissa led him upstairs. She took him to the room she had shared with Ethan until he left, where she separated the single beds, one for Thomas, one for Cassie. Nerissa planned to spread a blanket on the carpet and sleep by the door, guard-dog style.
Cassie made no objection, though she seemed slightly miffed at the idea of being relegated to a room with her little brother. Nerissa had seen the looks that passed between her niece and Beck’s son Leo, and she could guess what might have happened during the journey from Buffalo to Antofagasta. That was dismaying but not surprising, and Nerissa withheld judgment. But it was hardly practical to allow Cassie and Leo to share a room…. and Werner Beck would have vetoed the idea.
Nerissa remembered Leo as a truculent adolescent with an unfortunate penchant for petty crime, but maybe he’d changed. Or maybe his truculence had been an understandable reaction to his status as his father’s son. The awkwardness between Beck and Leo suggested the latter. Still, she would have thought Beth Vance was more Leo’s type. But Beth had apparently been more attracted to Eugene Dowd, the semi-literate garage mechanic Beck had shanghaied as one of his “warriors.”
At least Dowd—unlike the rest of Beck’s supposed army—had actually shown up for the battle.
Thomas’s eyes closed and his breathing steadied almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. Nerissa tucked the blankets around him while Cassie stood at the window, looking past the wrought-iron balcony railing to the dusty back alley where a garbage truck groaned through the heat. “The next thing we need to do is get you and Thomas back to the States.”
Cassie closed the curtains. “Really? Is that even safe? After what happened with the man we killed—”
“The man Leo killed.” Nerissa had cringed when she heard this part of their story, but she hadn’t shied away from dealing with it. “There won’t be any legal problems. If it happened the way you said it did, there’s no substantial evidence to connect you or Thomas to the crime.”
“Except for the man who saw us… the man Beth hurt.”
“At best, the police might have a vague description. And even if, somehow, they did come after you, it wouldn’t be hard to put together an alibi. But you won’t need one.”
“If the sims find us it hardly matters about the police.”
That was unfortunately true. “But it’s not you they’re after. You’re in far more danger here than you would be back in Buffalo.”
“No.” Cassie shook her head. “You’re wrong. It was me they came for. The sim that got run over on Liberty Street was looking for me.”
“You don’t know that. It might have been coming for me, or it could have been a ruse, or a feint, or even a way of getting at Beck through you and Leo.”
“I saw it looking at me from the street. It knew I was there.”
She seemed unwilling to admit any other possibility, and the
discussion was making her agitated. “Okay, Cassie, but even so, all we can do is take care of each other the best we know how. You, me, Thomas—”
“And Uncle Ethan?”
“Maybe. He’s in—”
“I know. He’s in the desert, looking for a place for Leo’s father and his soldiers to meet up,” Cassie said. (All Beck’s imaginary soldiers, Nerissa thought.) “Are we going to wait for him to get back?”
“I’d like to. But we may not have time. We need to be on a plane out of here as soon as it can be arranged.”
“Why?”
“For one thing, we can’t keep on exposing Thomas to this kind of danger. It’s not right.”
“Leo’s staying.”
“I’m not responsible for Leo. What Leo does is between him and his father.”