Peter believed that everything he did was in the service of the future of humankind. But I believe that he wasn’t really acting for any rational goals. The Slan(t)ers, the hive as a whole, had recognized the existence of another hive — and, like a foraging ant coming on another colony, Peter attacked.
At the crux, Peter wondered if I was a hive creature myself. Perhaps I was; perhaps I am. I am sure he was. And if the Order truly was a hive — and if it wasn’t unique, if the Slan(t)ers are, too, a new sort altogether — then how many others are out there ?
Anyhow, just because Peter was really following hive dictates doesn’t mean he was wrong about the human future.
On his computer I found a few emails he’d been composing to send me, never finished.
“I think about the future. I believe that our greatest triumph, our greatest glory, lies ahead of us. The great events of the past — the fall of Rome, say, or the Second World War — cast long shadows, influencing generations to come. But is it possible that just as the great events of the past shape us now, so that mighty future — the peak age of humankind, the clash of cymbals — has echoes in the present, too ? The physicists now say you have to think of the universe, and all its long, singular history, as just one page in a great book of possibilities, stacked up in higher dimensions. When those pages are slammed together, when the great book is closed, a Big Bang is generated, the page wiped clean, a new history written. And if time is circular, if future is joined to past, is it possible that messages, or even influences, could be passed around its great orbit? By reaching into the farthest future, would you at last touch the past? Are we influenced and shaped, not just by the past, but echoes of the future? …”
Sometimes at night I look up at the stars, and I wonder what strange future is folding down over us even now. I wish Peter was here, so we could talk this out. I can still see him leaning closer to me conspiratorially, on our bench in that dismal little park by the Forum, the sweet smell of limoncello on his breath.
Chapter 51
Beyond the air lock door, there was a tunnel. It branched and bifurcated, and the light glowed pearl gray. It was like looking into a huge underground cathedral, shaped from the glistening ice.
And in the foreground was a mob.
There must have been a hundred people in the first rank alone, and there were more ranks behind, dimly glimpsed, more than Abil could count. They were small, squat, powerful looking. They were mostly unarmed, but some carried clubs of rusty metal. And they were naked, all of them. They looked somehow unformed, as if ill defined. The males had small, budlike genitals, and the females’ breasts were small, their hips narrow. None of them seemed to have any body hair.
All this in a single glimpse. Then the Coalescents surged forward. They didn’t yell, didn’t threaten; the only noise was the pad of their feet on the floor, the brush of their flesh against the ice walls. Abil stood, transfixed, watching the human tide wash toward him.
Denh screamed, “Drop! Drop!”
Reflexively Abil threw himself to the ground. Laser light, cherry red, threaded the air above him, straight as a geometrical exercise.
The light sliced through the mob. Limbs were cut through and detached, intestines spilled from unzipped chest cavities, even heads came away amid unfeasibly huge founts of crimson blood. Now there was noise, screams, cries, and soft grunts.
The first wave of the mob was down, most of them dead in a heartbeat. But more came on, scrambling over the twitching carcasses of their fellows, until they, too, fell. And then a third wave came.
Abil had never confronted death on such a scale — a thousand or more dead in seconds — it was unimaginable, unreasonable. And yet they continued to come. It wasn’t even murder but a kind of mass suicide. The Coalescents’ only tactic seemed to be to hope that the troopers would run out of fuel and ammunition before they ran out of bodies to stand in its way. But that wouldn’t happen, Abil thought sadly.
So many had been slain now that, he saw, their heaped corpses were beginning to clog the tunnel entrance. Abil tried to think like a corporal. He got to his feet, waved his arm. “Forward the throwers!”
Four of his troopers, carrying bulky backpacks, hurried forward. They launched great gouts of flame into the mounting wall of corpses, and at the defenders who continued to scramble over their fellows. Scores more Coalescents fell screaming onto the pile, their limbs alight like twigs in a bonfire. But that pile of corpses was alight, too. Soon the air was filled with smoke and grisly shards of burned bone and skin.
But the flames wouldn’t hurt Abil and his men in their skinsuits. He waved again. “Go, go, go!”
He led the way into the fire. He put his arms before his faceplate as he hit the barrier of flame, and he felt the carbonized corpses crumble around him as he forced his way through them. But in seconds he was through, into the denser air of the corridor beyond the air lock.
And he faced more people — thousands of them, all eerily similar. Just for an instant the front rank held back, gazing at this man who had emerged from the lethal flames. Then they surged forward. The corridor was a great tube of people, squeezing themselves like paste toward him.
But they ran into flames. The front rank melted back like snowflakes.
After that Abil let the flamers take the lead. They just cut a corridor through the swarming crowd, and the troopers strode ahead over a carpet of burning flesh and cut bone. The crowd closed behind them, clustering like antibodies around an infection, but the troopers’ disciplined and well-drilled weapons fire kept them away. It was as if they were hacking their way into some huge body, seeking its beating heart. As drones died all around him Abil began to feel numbed by it all, as the waves of faces, all so alike, crisped in the brilliant glare of the flames.
As they worked deeper, though, he began to notice a change. The assailants here were just as ferocious, but they seemed younger. That was part of the pattern he had been trained to expect. He wished he could find a way to spare the smallest, the most obviously childlike. But these young ones threw themselves on his troopers’ flames as eagerly as their elders.
And then, quite suddenly, the troopers burst through a final barrier of drones, and found themselves in the birthing chamber.
It was a vast, darkened room, where ancient fluorescents glowed dimly. The troopers fanned out. They were covered in blood and bits of charred flesh, he saw, leaving bloody footprints where they passed. They looked as if they had been born, delivered through that terrible passage of death. One flamethrower still flared, but with a gesture Abil ordered it shut off.
In this chamber, people moved through the dark, as naked as those outside. Nobody came to oppose the troopers. Perhaps it was simply unthinkable for the drones that anybody should harm those who spent their lives here.
Cautiously Abil moved forward, deeper into the gloom. The air was warm and humid; his faceplate misted over.
Women, naked, nestled in shallow pits on the floor, in knots of ten or a dozen. Some of the pits were filled with milky water, and the women floated, relaxed. Attendants, young women and children, moved back and forth, carrying what looked like food and drink. In one corner there were infants, a carpet of them who crawled and toddled. Abil moved among them, a bloody pillar.