“This is for your own good,” she croons. “After all, what life is it for you now, packed into those awful camps and cities, inhaling each other’s rank breath? Never knowing the serenity of wildness that’s your birthright?”
For the survivors, she promises health, clean skies, beauty, and happiness. They will live vivid lives, and her reapers will keep them company all their days and nights.
Oh yes, it will be a better world. And she will stop mercifully, she vows, well before human numbers fall too low.
Mercy, of course, is a word subject to interpretation.
• NOOSPHERE
Somewhere in the background Alex heard voices and thought other refugees must have come aboard. But that couldn’t be. By now he and Teresa must be the only ones left alive on Easter Island, protected by the thin, passive field of his little resonator. It had to be some news channel then, frantically reporting this horrible new endeavor in extinction.
In parts of Eurasia, the Americas, Africa, the effects were straightforward — no earthquakes, nothing hurled into space. Just death, simply death.
Death of human beings.
It’s actually a rather simple combination, he pondered as his device built a finely meshed picture of events on the gravitational bands. He worked cautiously, so as not to be detected by the enemy network. They’re using parameters that couple perfectly with human flesh, in pocket standing waves shaped to match, tidally, the human figure. I never even thought of that, though it’s obvious enough from earlier data. The clues were there in all those effects Teresa and others felt. It just took a certain mindset to see it.
Wave a beam like that around and you can kill millions. It depletes interior fields so little, it’s potentially self-sustaining.
The first strikes had been surgical, precise, taking out the world’s centers of gravitational research… all possible points of opposition. That included Colonel Spivey’s former resonators, for instance, and the Russian and Japanese and Han stations, too. Most of those were off-line now. Some flickered on idle, with no one at the helm. And two or three appeared even to have been hijacked, joining the original rebel cylinders in spewing beams of death.
It was too horrible to grasp, of course. If he let the full meaning penetrate it would numb him to uselessness, and Alex couldn’t afford that right now.
He tried some tentative pulses to get the feel of the sphere. It was touchy, delicate, like a wild beast. As it spun, it gave off the queerest, brief half images — subtly warped reflections of the spotlights, the looming shuttle cargo bay, his own face.
He hadn’t any chance to get familiar with the resonator since it was lifted, dripping, out of the nanogrowth tank many days ago. Now he had to leap straight into the saddle, without benefit of practice or simulation, from the gazerdynamic equivalent of a dray wagon straight to a rodeo horse.
What he wanted to do was give the bastards a taste of their own medicine. But without diagnostic backup, that would take too long. Meanwhile, thousands were dying in Tokyo and other places. Something had to be done about that first.
“All right—” he said aloud.
The subvocal mistook his words as commands and sent the sphere precessing in its housing. It took several seconds of concentrated effort to settle it back down again. Jen used to warn him about using the temperamental input device when emotions were running high, but what choice did he have?
All right, Alex thought with silent, iron discipline. Here goes nothing.
She is slicing through Manaus — scouring the cities and towns of the Amazon — when her familiars report yet another band of desperate military men trying to interfere again. Now a squadron of them are streaking toward one of her resonators in screaming hypersonic aircraft, attempting to overcome her guardian whirlwinds with sheer speed and agility, trying to lock their missiles on target before she can respond.
Daisy obliges them in their courage to face death. Tracking their telemetry, she fills their cockpits with blood and grue.
But two aircraft continue on course. Their pilots have succeeded in setting their autopilots in time! She slips into military channels using codes stolen long ago from supposedly secure caches. By these routes she reads the appropriate control sequences — childishly simple — and uses them to take command of the hurtling ships, overriding their literal-minded computers, sending them careening about on reverse courses, bound for their points of origin.
Then it’s back to work. There is so much housecleaning left to do. She’s barely begun her chores. In minutes she has cleared the island of Sumatra, where the few remaining orangutans may now dwell in peace, undisturbed by terrible tall interlopers. No more human hands will wield chain saws there. On to Borneo! Her whirlwinds respond and sweep across the sea.
Strictly speaking, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She is no physicist, no geologist. The actual nature of the forces she is tapping matters as little to Daisy as the manufacturing details of a computer. All are technical fields that other experts studied, analyzed, and then reduced to beautifully simple, publicly accessible world-models.
Daisy knows all about models. She’s stolen many choice ones recently, from her now-extinct cousins, from her ex-husband’s employers, from all those clever males who thought they knew so much. She deals with the Earth’s interior now through such software intermediaries, as an enchantress might coerce nature by commanding demons and sprites to do her bidding for her. She treats the roiling, surging channels of superconductivity far below as she formerly did the highways and byways of the Net, as yet another domain to rule by proxy, by subroutine, by force of will.
In minutes a terrible storm of death has been unleashed across Java. Now she directs her attention below again, gathering yet another bundle of energy to focus against that funny, strange mirror some called a “singularity,” crafting yet another death cyclone to unleash this time on an obscene so-called “civilization” force-grown in a desert — Southern California.
But what’s this? In a faraway quarter, Daisy senses a presence where she’d thought all competition vanquished. Where only the dead were supposed to reign!
At the briefest of commands, her familiars streak to check out this effrontery…
•
Alex rocked back in dismay. For an instant the whirling sphere had conveyed a sudden, vivid illusion of slitted lizards’ eyes! Only by quickly switching channels, sending his machine spinning along a new axis, did he make that looming presence vanish from the glistening globe.
He breathed raggedly for a moment. All right. Don’t let it shake you!
But it was impossible to escape the sense of loneliness. Always, before, he’d had scores of skilled workers to help him. True, they called him “wizard” and “tohunga.” But press flacks and Nobel committees to the contrary, no scientist with a grain of honesty ever claims he “did it all alone.”
And yet, that’s exactly what I’ve got to do now.
With a shuddering sigh, Alex pictured the Earth’s involute interior, now livid with convecting magnetism, strung and laced with man-modified channels of surging current. Those currents had grown more finely filigreed every day since his first, tentative scans so long ago, in search of Alpha and then Beta. Now they were a jungle of connections through which he must find a way to do battle.
No more delays. You’ll have just one chance to take them by surprise.
And so, with desperate determination, he triggered his best shot.
Again, for the briefest instant he thought he saw a glitter of scales sweep across the spinning sphere, which were chased off by a ripple of tawny orange and black. In an eye-blink the apparitions were gone and the battle joined.