Moore nodded.
Memories of intercepted negotiations, scrolling past in Christmas colors: “Theseus. They found something out there?”
“Maybe. Nothing’s certain yet, just—hints and inferences. No solid intel.”
“Still.” An alien agency capable of simultaneously dropping sixty thousand surveillance probes into the atmosphere without warning. An agency that came and went in seconds, that caught the planet with its pants down and took God knew how many compromising pictures along God knew how many wavelengths before letting the atmosphere burn its own paparazzi down to a sprinkle of untraceable iron floating through the stratosphere. An agency never seen before and never since, for all the effort put into finding it. “I guess that qualifies as a common threat,” Brüks admitted.
“I guess it does.” Moore turned back to his war wall.
“Why were they fighting in the first place? What does a vampire have against a bunch of monks?”
Moore didn’t answer for a moment. Then: “It’s not personal, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“What, then?”
Moore took a breath. “It’s—more of the same, really. Entropy, increasing. The Realists and their war on Heaven. The Nanohistomites over in Hokkaido. Islamabad on fire.”
Brüks blinked. “Islamabad’s—”
“Oops. Getting ahead of myself. Give it time.” The Colonel shrugged. “I’m not trying to be coy, Dr. Brüks. You’re already in the soup, so I’ll tell you what I can so long as it doesn’t endanger you further. But you’re going to have to take a lot on—well, on faith.”
Brüks stifled a laugh. Moore looked at him.
“Sorry,” Brüks said. “It’s just, you hear so much about the Bicamerals and their scientific breakthroughs and their quest for Truth. And I finally get inside this grand edifice and all I hear is Trust and God willing and Take it on faith. I mean, the whole order’s supposed to be founded on the search for knowledge, and Rule Number One is Don’t ask questions?”
“It’s not that they don’t have answers,” Moore said after a moment. “It’s just that we can’t understand them for the most part. You could resort to analogies, I suppose. Force transhuman insights into human cookie-cutter shapes. But most of the time that would just get you a bleeding metaphor with all its bones broken.” He held up a hand, warding off Brüks’s rejoinder. “I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.”
“And yet.” Brüks glanced at the wall, where AEROSOL DELIVERY glowed in shades of yellow and orange. Where a murderous tornado had rampaged the night before. “They seem to solve their conflicts pretty much the same way as us retarded ol’ baselines.”
Moore smiled faintly. “That they do.”
He found Lianna back on the front steps, supper balanced on her knees, watching the sun go down. She looked back over her shoulder as he pushed through the door.
“I asked about your brain-boosters,” she said. “No luck. The assembly line’s booked or something.”
“Thanks for trying,” he said.
“Jim might still be holding. If you haven’t asked him already.”
He shifted his tray to one hand, used the other to rub away the vague pain behind his eyes. “Mind if I join you?”
She spared one hand to take in the staircase, as broad and excessive as a cathedral’s.
He sat beside her, picked at his own plate. “About this morning, I, uh…”
She stared at the horizon. The sun stared back, highlighting her cheekbones.
“… sorry,” he finished.
“Forget it. Nobody likes being in a cage.”
“Still. I shouldn’t have shot the messenger.” A sudden chilly breeze crawled across his shoulders.
Lianna shrugged. “You ask me, nobody should shoot anybody.”
He raised his eyes. Venus twinkled back at them. He wondered briefly if those photons had followed a straight line to his eyes, or if they’d been shunted around some invisible spillway of curves and angles at the last nanosecond. He looked around at the cracked desert floor, lifted his gaze to the more jagged topography in the distance. Wondered how many unseen agents were looking back.
“You always eat out here?”
“When I can.” The lowering sun stretched her shadow along the ramparts behind them, a giantess silhouetted in orange. “It’s—stark, you know?”
Ribbed clouds, a million shades of salmon, scudding against an orange and purple sky.
“How long does this go on?” he wondered.
“This?”
“They lurk out there, we wait in here. When does somebody actually make a move?”
“Oldschool, you gotta relax.” She shook her head, smiled a twilit smile. “You could obsess and second-guess for a solid month and I guarantee you wouldn’t be able to think of anything our hosts haven’t already factored five ways to Sunday. They’ve been making moves all day.”
“Such as?”
“Don’t ask me.” She shrugged. “I probably wouldn’t understand even if they told me. They’re wired up way differently.”
Hive mind, he reminded himself. Synesthetes, too, if he wasn’t mistaken.
“You do understand them, though,” he said. “That’s your job.”
“Not the way you think. And not without a fair bit of modding on my own.”
“How, then?”
“I’m not sure,” she admitted.
“Come on.”
“No, really. It’s a kind of Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven. The moment you start to think about what you’re doing, you screw up. You just have to get into the zone.”
“They must have trained you at some point,” Brüks insisted. “There must have been some kind of conscious learning curve.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” She squinted up at some invisible behemoth he still couldn’t see. “But they kind of—bypassed that. Zapped my fornix with just the right burst of ultrasound and next thing I know it’s four days later and I have all these reflexes. Not so much that I understand them as my fingers do, you know? Phonemes, rhythms, gestures—eye movements, sometimes—” She frowned. “I take in all these cues and equations just—come to me, piece by piece. I copy them down and I send ’em off. And the next day they show up in the latest issue of Science.”
“You never examined these reflexes afterward? Played the piano really slowly, taken the time to watch what your fingers were doing?”
“Dan, they won’t fit. Consciousness is a scratchpad. You can store a grocery list, jot down a couple of phone numbers—but were you even aware of finishing your supper?”
Brüks looked down at his plate. It was empty.
“And that’s just a couple of swallows half a minute in the past. You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?” Her dreads swept back and forth in the gloom. “Whatever I’m doing, it’s got too many variables. Won’t fit in the global workspace.” She flashed him a small, apologetic smile.
They program us like clockwork dolls, he thought. Way off to the west, the sun touched gently down on a distant ridge.
He looked at her. “Why are we still in charge?”
She grinned. “Who’s we, white boy?”