Alex blinked once. Twice. And then he understood.
It was a perfect sphere which glistened his own image back at him, sweeping around into infinite concave vistas. He cried an oath. He’d forgotten about the other resonator!
Alex looked down at his left hand, tightly gripping his portable plaque. And he still wore the subvocal! Maybe…
But no. “Damn!” he cried. “We haven’t got power. The idea’s no damn goo—”
He cut short as the sphere’s gimbals suddenly hummed, rocked back and forth, and then steadied at a prim angle. Microprocessors chuckled and clicked.
“What do you think I’ve been doing since you saddled me with that great beast?” Teresa asked. Alex stared at her, so she shrugged. “Well. It helped pass the time. Now, come on! Here’s a display unit I ripped off a while back. No holo, just flat screens. But you can plug in there.”
Alex knew his jaw gaped open. Shutting it, he could only say — “I love you.”
“Damn straight.” She nodded quickly. “If you save our lives we can talk about that. Now stop fucking off and get to work!”
He turned around to face the archaic control unit, plugging in and loading his control software, using the subvocal to begin a startup sequence, sparing only a moment to shoot one final look her way. “Bossy wench,” he muttered affectionately.
She said nothing, but her eyes offered more confidence in him than he’d ever had in all his life — so he decided he had better try his best.
There are buildings that look like charnel houses — one out on the open tundra, one in a desert, one undersea, and one perched on an island bluff under the shadow of dark statues. Within each chamber, towering cylinders still vibrate, rotating within their delicate cages. Nearby, however, no living creature stirs. The walls are streaked with blood.
Those who built the cylinders are gone, but power still flows at the whim of electronic spirits. Computers process ornate pro-grams, casting forth bolts of energy, tickling wrath from far below. Each machine sings the new song it’s been taught… a song of death. Death spirals outward from the target areas, hunting fatal resonances with bipedal beings that are so numerous, they aren’t hard to find in dozens, hundreds, thousands…
This doesn’t go on uncontested. Cautiously, brave soldiers approach each site, though daunted by gruesome things they see along the way. Over radio and Net they hear of like horrors beginning to take place in cities far away.
Terrified but determined, the soldiers grimly attack — only to be struck down by something unseen, -intangible, unstoppable. Their nimble aircraft switch to autopilot, drifting slowly off course, no longer guided by anything remotely resembling men.
Frantic orders pour over secure channels calling for harsher weapons to be readied. But those will take time to unseal and prepare. Meanwhile, the circles of death expand…
• LITHOSPHERE
“Daddy, thank God you came!”
Claire was in his arms before Logan got fully out of the taxi. He squeezed his daughter tightly. “I’m here. Yeah. Hey, come on, sunshine. Don’t cry.”
“I’m not… crying,” she protested through snuffles. But she didn’t draw back until she’d wiped both eyes on his shoulder. When he finally got a chance to look at her, they were red but dry. It had been months since he’d last visited chez McClennon, when summer’s humid, scented air made for long, lazy evenings lit by lightning bugs. Now there was a bite of winter in the stiff gulf zephyr that whipped the fringe, of cypress trees. From Claire he sensed a quivering, over-wrought tension.
He turned to pay the driver, but the man ignored Logan’s proferred credit card. He bent over, covering one ear, listening intently to some news flash coming over his button earpiece, then suddenly cried out in dismay, gunned his engine and took off! Almost instinctively, Logan’s hand reached into his pocket for his own receiver.
But no, he had resigned from the struggles of the world. While his family needed him, the universe could fend for itself.
“What’s all this about your mother locking herself into her room?” Logan turned and asked his daughter.
The wind whipped Claire’s reddish-brown hair. “It’s worse than that, Dad. She’s electrified her whole wing of the house.”
“What?”
“She won’t even answer the intercom, though I can tell she’s busy working in there—” Claire cut short as a yell of pain echoed round the corner of the house.
“That’s Tony,” she explained, taking Logan’s arm. “He was going to try prying a window.”
“Sounds like that worked great,” Logan commented as he was dragged along. “Be nice,” she chided back. “Tony’s good. He’s just never taken on Daisy before.”
Logan came around the corner to see a lanky, black-haired teenager holding one arm and sucking singed fingers. On the ground a screwdriver still smoked around the extra insulation that must have saved the boy from even worse burns. “Hullo, Mr. Eng,” Tony said.
“Hi, yourself,” Logan answered, thinking, So he’s never taken Daisy on before? I’ve got news for both these kids. Neither have I. Not really.
When you come right down to it, I’m not sure anybody ever has.
Out in the real world they try to act against her. Military men take hammers to the peace seals on cruise missiles, desperately bypassing fail-safes, reprogramming the robots to seek sites never named on contingency lists — to fly across widening swaths of no-man’s land and destroy other machines… machines now casting storms of long-range death.
Trying to accomplish so many unprecedented things, naturally, the men make mistakes. They seek targeting information through the Net and so give away their intentions. Forewarned, Daisy swings her deadly beams to slice through military outposts, clearing them of living crews, leaving the robot bombers unmanned and unready.
Of course there are limits to such delaying tactics. Eventually, surviving soldiers will manage to pick off the resonators one by one. Despite the chaos in the Net, some bright hacker will finally decipher the sinuous path of her commands, tracing all of this back to her. Given enough time.
But time is on her side now. With every passing minute,
Daisy grows in power. Soon her creations will be self-sustaining, driven by currents in the Earth’s own dynamo. They will be whirling storms of death, as permanent as the weather — scythes of mortality splined and tuned to reap a narrow and specific harvest, humanity.
“Antibodies,” she says, giving biological metaphors to her creations. “I’m making antibodies against a parasite.”
As fabled Nemesis once implacably hunted murderers, so she pictures herself, seeking just vengeance for the slain manatee, reprisal for the long-dead moa, vindication for vanished condors. “Every species needs natural controls, and humans have lacked one far too long.”
There is a proper order to things, she believes. The food-chain is meant to be a pyramid, and every top predator should be rare, its numbers few. Mankind reversed this time-tested arrangement by breeding out of all proportion, creating a teetering edifice, doomed to fall.
“Ten thousand,” she concludes. That would be a good figure. That many humans might remain, out of ten billion, to make a decent world population. This she counts as merciful, since the planet might be better off without the species altogether. But after all, she is a mother. And vile as the race might be, she cannot bring herself to wipe out every last human child.
“Ten thousand or so wandering hunter-gatherers. Maybe even twenty. That’s as many humans as this world ever needed.” Even wrath must be satiable, and so Daisy targets this limit for herself. As the Net fills with rising cries of anguish, she murmurs reassurance that the panicked world cannot hear and would not understand if it could.