No word on how it might be affecting crop yields, weather, or the ecology in general. Neither the pestilential heat nor this torrential rain felt especially normal.
Below that was an item headlined lights in sky sighted WORLDWIDE.
These were the same C- or O-shaped lines Simon had pointed out back in Arizona. They had been seen as far north as Anchorage and as far south as Mexico City. Reports from Europe and Asia were fragmentary and primarily concerned with the immediate crisis, but a few similar stories had slipped through. ("Note," Emil Hardy's copy said, "cable news networks only intermittently available but showing recent video from India of similar phenomenon on larger scale." Whatever that meant.)
* * * * *
Diane woke for a few moments while I was with her.
"Tyler," she said.
I took her hand. It was dry and unnaturally warm.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"You have nothing to be sorry about."
"I'm sorry you have to see me like this."
"You're getting better. It might take a while, but you'll be all right."
Her voice was soft as the sound of a falling leaf. She looked around the room, recognizing it. Her eyes widened. "Here I am!"
"Here you are."
"Say my name again."
"Diane," I said. "Diane. Diane."
* * * * *
Diane was gravely ill, but it was Jason who was dying. He told me as much when I went to see him.
He hadn't eaten today, Carol had informed me. Jase had taken ice water through a straw but otherwise refused liquids. He could barely move his body. When I asked him to raise his arm he did so, but with such exquisite effort and torpid speed that I pressed it down again. Only his voice was still strong, and he anticipated losing even that: "If tonight is anything like last night I'll be incoherent until dawn. Tomorrow, who knows? I want to talk while I still can."
"Is there some reason your condition deteriorates at night?"
"A simple one, I think. We'll get to that. First I want you to do something for me. My suitcase was on the dresser: is it still there?"
"Still there."
"Open it. I packed an audio recorder. Find it for me."
I found a brushed-silver rectangle the size of a deck of playing cards, next to a stack of manila envelopes addressed to names I didn't recognize. "This it?" I said, then cursed myself: of course he couldn't see.
"If the label says Sony, that's it. There ought to be a package of blank memory underneath."
"Yup, got it."
"So we'll have a talk. Until it gets dark, and maybe a little after. And I want you to keep the recorder running. No matter what happens. Change the memory when you have to, or the battery if the power gets low. Do that for me, all right?"
"As long as Diane doesn't need urgent attention. When do you want to start?"
His turned his head. The diamond-specked pupils of his eyes glittered in the strange light.
"Now would not be too soon," he said.
ARS MORIENDI
The Martians, Jason said, were not the simple, peaceful, pastoral people Wun had led (or allowed) us to believe they were.
It was true that they weren't especially warlike—the Five Republics had settled their political differences almost a millennium ago—and they were "pastoral" in the sense that they devoted most of their resources to agriculture. But nor were they "simple" in any sense of the word. They were, as Jase had pointed out, past masters of the art of synthetic biology. Their civilization had been founded on it. We had built them a habitable planet with biotech tools, and there had never been a Martian generation that didn't understand the function and potential uses of DNA.
If their large-scale technology was sometimes crude— Wun's spacecraft, for instance, had been almost primitive, a Newtonian cannonball—it was because of their radically constrained natural resources. Mars was a world without oil or coal, supporting a fragile water- and nitrogen-starved ecosystem. A profligate, lush industrial base like the Earth's could never have existed on Wun's planet. On Mars, most human effort was devoted to producing sufficient food for a strictly controlled population. Biotechnology served this purpose admirably. Smoke-stack industries did not.
"Wun told you this?" I asked, as rain fell continuously and the afternoon ebbed.
"He confided in me, yes, though most of what he said was already implicit in the archives."
Rust-colored light from the window reflected from Jason's blind, altered eyes.
"But he could have been lying."
"I don't know that he ever lied, Tyler. He was just a little stingy with the truth."
The microscopic replicators Wun had carried to Earth were cutting-edge synthetic biology. They were fully capable of doing everything Wun promised they would do. In fact they were more sophisticated than Wun had been willing to admit.
Among the replicators' unacknowledged functions was a hidden second subchannel for communicating among themselves and with their point of origin. Wun hadn't said whether this was conventional narrowband radio or something technologically more exotic—the latter, Jase suspected. In any case, it required a receiver more advanced than anything we could build on Earth. It required, Wun had said, a biological receiver. A modified human nervous system.
* * * * *
"You volunteered for this?"
"I would have. If anyone had asked. But the only reason Wun confided in me was that he feared for his life from the day he arrived on Earth. He harbored no illusions about human venality or power politics. He needed someone he could trust to take custody of his pharmacopoeia, if anything happened to him. Someone who understood the purpose of it. He never proposed that I become a receiver. The modification only works on a Fourth—remember what I said? The longevity treatment is a platform. It runs other applications. This is one of them."
"You did this to yourself on purpose?"
"I injected myself with the substance after he died. It wasn't traumatic and it had no immediate effect. Remember, Tyler, there was no way for communication from the replicators to penetrate a fully functioning Spin membrane. What I gave myself was a latent ability."
"Why do it, then?"
"Because I didn't want to die in a condition of ignorance. We all assumed, if the Spin ended, we'd be dead within days or hours. The sole advantage to Wun's modification was that in those last days or hours, as long as I lasted, I would be in intimate contact with a database almost as large as the galaxy itself. I would know as nearly as anyone on Earth could know who the Hypothetical were and why they had done this to us."
I thought, And do you know that now? But maybe he did. Maybe that was what he wanted to communicate before he lost the ability to speak, why he wanted me to make a recording of it. "Did Wun know you might do this?"
"No, and I doubt he would have approved… although he was running the same application himself."
"Was he? It didn't show."
"It wouldn't. Remember: what's happening to me—to my body, to my brain—that's not the application." He turned his sightless eyes toward me. "That's a malfunction."
* * * * *
The replicators had been launched from Earth and had flourished in the outer solar system, far from the sun. (Had the Hypotheticals noticed this, and had they blamed the Earth for what was in fact a Martian intervention? Was that, as E.D. had implied, what the sly Martians had intended all along? Jason didn't say—I presumed he didn't know.)
In time the replicators spread to the nearest stars and beyond… eventually far beyond. The replicator colonies were invisible at astronomical distances, but if you had mapped them onto a grid of our local stellar neighborhood you would have seen a continually expanding cloud of them, a glacially slow explosion of artificial life.