by Greg Bear
He fumbled at the stall latch and stepped out, brushing past a well-dressed, elderly gentleman with a cane. “Windy day out,” the gentleman said, nodding and half turning to track Hicks with his gentle eyes.
“Yes indeed,” Hicks returned, pausing at the door, glancing back.
The gentleman nodded at him again, and their gazes held. God. Is he one? Possessed by a spider?
The old man smiled and proceeded into the stall Hicks had vacated.
Hicks returned to the cafeteria and resumed his seat in the booth. “How many people have been recruited, so far?”
Reuben had eaten nearly all of his second hamburger. “They haven’t told me,” he said.
Hicks clasped his hands in front of him. “Do you feel that you’ve been possessed?”
Reuben squinted. “I honestly don’t know. If they’re not lying to me, they’re helping all of us, and I’d rather be doing this than something else. Wouldn’t you?”
Hicks swallowed hard. “Do you still have free will?”
“Enough to argue. It takes my advice, sometimes. Sometimes, it doesn’t listen, and then it moves me around, so I suppose then I don’t have control. But it seems to know what it’s doing, and as it says, there isn’t time enough to explain to everybody.”
“You are extraordinarily persuasive,” Hicks said.
“Thank you. And thanks again for the food.” Reuben dabbled a french fry through a smear of catsup and lifted it in salute before biting into it.
“Where’s the spider?”
“Back in my pocket.”
“Can I take it with me, make up my mind later, after I’ve talked to people?”
“No, man, you touch that spider, it’s going to…you know. Have you. I’m obliged to tell you that much.”
“I can’t really agree under those circumstances,” Hicks said. Fear and caution win out.
Reuben stared at him, disappointed. “It really needs you.”
Hicks shook his head, adamant. “Tell them, it, that I cannot be coerced.”
“Looks like I made a mistake, then,” Reuben said.
Something brushed Hicks’s hand where it lay on the seat’s vinyl. He had hardly turned his head to glance down when he felt a slight prick. With a scream, he leaped up out of the booth, banging one knee on the underside of the table. He fell over on the carpet and a tumbler of water spilled on his legs and feet. Pain shot up his leg and he held his knee with both hands, grimacing.
Three other patrons and two waitresses gathered around him as his vision cleared. Sharp warmth moved rapidly up his arm, into his neck, his face, his scalp. The pain subsided. He pulled his lips back and shook his head: so stupid.
“Are you all right?” a man asked, bending over him.
“I’m fine,” Hicks said. He searched rapidly for an explanation. “Bit my tongue. Very painful. I’m fine.”
He got up on an elbow and examined his hand. There was a tiny red spot on his thumb. It stung me.
Reuben was not in the booth. The man helped Hicks to his feet and he brushed himself off, thanking the others and apologizing profusely for creating a fuss. His hand touched an egg-sized lump in his coat pocket. “There was a young man with me. Did you see where he went?” He glanced nervously at the floor and the booth seat, looking for the spider. But it’s in my pocket, he reminded himself.
“There’s somebody leaving now,” a waitress said. She pointed.
In the archway to the cafeteria, Reuben glanced over his shoulder at Hicks and smiled.
The boy walked briskly into the lobby, turned, and vanished. There was no need to follow him, so Hicks picked up the check and paid the waitress. He was shaking all over and wanted to cry, but didn’t know whether it was British reserve or the instructions flowing through him that helped him maintain.
Doesn’t feel bad, actually. Of course, I’m not in control…
He returned to his room, lay back in the bed, and closed his eyes. His shaking subsided and his breathing became steady. He rolled over on his side. The spider climbed out of his pocket and attached itself to the base of his neck.
What Reuben had tried to explain, then, unfolded before him in much more detail. An hour later, he wondered why he had even thought of resisting.
Sometime in the evening, the spider released his neck and crawled across the bed, dropping to the floor. He watched with less than half his attention; information was still flowing into him, and while some of it was incomprehensible, within a few minutes the flow would change, and he could understand more.
The spider climbed the television stand and quickly, with surprisingly little noise, drilled into the base. For an hour, sounds of cutting, stray beams of light, and puffs of smoke and dust issued from the television. All was quiet and still for another hour. Then two spiders dropped through the hole. Both crawled into Hicks’s pocket.
“Bloody hell,” Hicks said.
PERSPECTIVE
The Andrew Kearney Show (Syndicated Home Info Systems Net), December 19, 1996; guest appearance by science fiction writer Lawrence Van Cott:
Kearney: Mr. Van Cott, you’ve written sixty-one novels and seven works of nonfiction, or rather, it says here, speculative nonfiction. What is that?
Van Cott: Science fiction without characters. Non-fact articles.
Kearney: We’ve been hearing for the last couple of months about the means by which the President’s aliens will destroy the Earth. We’ve heard about things falling from the sky near the Philippines and in the Atlantic, passing into the Earth’s interior. Two such objects have been sighted so far. Last night I interviewed Jeremy Kemp himself. He says that we have evidence the objects are causing a ruckus inside the Earth, below the crust. Van Cott: From what I’ve heard, you should be interviewing Walter Samshow and David Sand. They saw one of the objects first. Kearney: They’re not available, apparently. (Van Cott shrugs)
Kearney (Leaning forward): What could these objects be? You’re a science fiction writer; perhaps you can speculate in ways scientists won’t, or can’t.
Van Cott: It’s a serious subject. I don’t think speculation is what we need right now. I’d prefer to wait and see what the experts think.
Kearney: Yes, but you have degrees in physics, mathematics… (Glances at his notes) I’d say you’re as much an expert as anyone, if we assume you’ve kept up on the reports. Have you?
Van Cott: I’ve read or listened to all that’s been made public.
Kearney: Out of professional interest? Van Cott: I’m always interested when reality catches up with me.
Kearney: Surely you have some theories. Van Cott (Silent for a moment, tamps his pipe with his finger, looks up at the overhead lights): All right. (Leans back, holding out the bowl of his pipe) If these objects are as heavy as we think, they should be very big. But when they hit the ocean, they didn’t make much of a splash. So they can’t be both heavy… (Clasps his hands together around the bowl of the pipe and shakes them, then withdraws them to arm’s length) and big. Heavy and small, that’ s something else. Not much energy transfer to the ocean or the sea bottom. Not much of an impact area. So we can draw some logical deductions. One, each object is very dense. Say they’re made of neutronium. That fits the bill. We may not need black holes. Neutronium is matter squeezed down to push electrons and protons together to make neutrons. Nothing but neutrons. Never mind where the aliens would get this neutronium. Don’t ask me. I don’t know for sure. I also don’t know how they keep a lump of neutronium squeezed together. The second one throws off a lot of sparks and causes radiation poisoning. Some people say the second one is making most of the noise, inside. (Pokes the pipe down at the floor) That speaks to me. That tells me something. Two objects, let’s assume one is neutronium, then the other might be made of antineutrons, antineutronium. Kearney: Neutrons are neutral particles, as I understand it. How can there be antineutrons if they’re neutral? (Music rises)
Van Cott (Sighing): That takes a while to explain. Why not break for a commercia
l, and then I’ll tell you. (Break)
Van Cott: Neutrons are electrically neutral, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have anti-particles. When two antiparticles meet, they annihilate each other completely. So now we have two objects, falling through the Earth. Neutronium is very dense compared with rock. The objects — let’s call them bullets — would orbit within the Earth, passing through the core as if it were very thin air. They would be very cold — neutronium, being dense, would absorb lots of heat. They would not slow much at all during each orbit.
The antineutronium bullet would interact with the Earth’s matter and create what’s called an ambiplasma, which would prevent the antineutronium from blowing up all at once. This bullet would slow down much more rapidly. So finally it comes to rest at the center of the Earth, spitting and sparking, making lots of noise. When the other bullet slows down enough to also come to rest, the two meet…and I’m not sure what would happen after that.
Kearney: Maybe this anti- or whatever-plasma would keep them separated. Van Cott (Nodding): Smart thinking. Maybe, and then again — maybe not. Maybe the pressure at the Earth’s core would hold them together long enough for them to fuse. Kearney: What would happen then? Van Cott: Complete or almost complete annihilation of a hundred or two hundred million tons of matter. (Holds his hands clenched in a double fist, spreads his fingers, and moves the hands slowly apart) Think of it as a kind of time-delay bomb with a fuse controlled by gravity.
Kearney (Considerably sobered): That…Mr. Van Cott, that is a very disturbing thought. Have you spoken about this to anybody else?
Van Cott: No, and I’ll probably be sorry I mentioned it here. It’s my private speculation. I don’t suppose it’s private anymore.
43
December 23
Walt Samshow and David Sand had been aboard the Glomar Discoverer for only an hour when they received an urgent phone call from Jeremy Kemp. Otto Lehrman, the Secretary of Defense, had released pictures from three Navy Kingfisher subtracker satellites just that morning. Why the pictures had been released was not explained; Kemp surmised it was part of a power struggle in Washington between the President and his decimated Cabinet and the military. Sand quickly hooked up a computer slate to the phone and Kemp transmitted the photos from California. There were more than a hundred.
An hour later, Samshow scrolled through the pictures on the slate screen while Sand asked Kemp about the details.
All of the pictures were of deep-ocean regions, taken from low-Earth-orbit submarine-tracking satellites. The satellites were equipped with laser spectrometers to detect oil and other detritus from submarine operations and ocean weapons testing.
The first fifteen pictures tracked the atmosphere and ocean surface above the deep trenches from south of the Philippines to the Kamchatka Peninsula, at approximately five-hundred-kilometer intervals, with little magnification. All were in false color to show concentrations of free oxygen in the near-ocean atmosphere. Within each picture were dozens of red dots against the general blue and green background.
The next group of ten showed waters off the western coast of Central America, with similar dots. In groups of two or three pictures, the ocean surfaces above all the world’s deep trenches were shown to be regions of high free-oxygen concentration. Several unenhanced color photographs of very high magnification focused on an area three hundred kilometers east of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean. They showed several square kilometers of ocean turned white with what appeared to be froth or spume. Then Samshow reminded himself of the scale: each tiny bubbling speck would have to be tens of meters across.
Here was the source of the atmosphere’s increase in oxygen. No natural phenomenon could be blamed for such a display.
“So much for that,” Kemp said. “Did you catch the Andrew Kearney Show last night?”
“No,” Sand said. “We’re not watching much TV here.”
“Have you ever met Lawrence Van Cott?”
Sand hadn’t.
“I have. He’s sharp. He said something on the Kearney Show that’s got Jonathan Post very excited. I haven’t heard the tape yet, but Post says Van Cott may be on to something. Not black holes. Neutronium pellets?”
“Still out of my league,” Sand said. He wanted to get back to the satellite data. Kemp passed on a few more items of information and then hung up. Sand reexamined the photographs on the slate as Samshow scrolled through them again.
“Why oxygen?” he asked. “Volcanic activity?”
“I don’t think so,” Samshow said. “Not in my experience. Something is definitely dissociating seawater into hydrogen and oxygen. But only the oxygen is showing up…”
”Something!” Sand asked softly. “What, machines? Where?”
“There don’t appear to be bubbles above the ocean plains. Only in the trenches, and here and here, in known fracture zones.” He scrolled back. “Wherever there are deep cracks in the crust, something is storing up hydrogen and releasing oxygen.”
Sand made a clench-jawed tsk-tsk. “Kemp says oxygen is up by another percentage point in the Pacific region, and half a percent in central Eurasia.”
“Approaching dangerous concentrations,” Samshow said. “We’re going to see conflagrations…forests, cities.”
“I’ve already given up smoking, thank God,” Sand said.
Edward Shaw sat in a comfortable antique chair in the bar of the Stephen Austin Hotel — alone, with a whiskey sour in one hand and a fistful of Smokehouse almonds in the other. He had returned to Austin to straighten out his affairs, as might a man condemned to death by lingering illness. He found himself unable to cope with ordinary life any longer.
Austin and environs had been his final effort to get in touch with the past and attempt at least a symbolic reconciliation. His last girlfriend — almost a fiancée — had married a bank vice-president and wanted nothing to do with him. The university had taken his departure philosophically.
He had even broken free of Reslaw and Minelli in Arizona, though Minelli had promised to meet him in Yosemite in late March, weather allowing. He did not want his malaise to burden them. Reslaw, lightly bearded, hair cut to a thin shag, told them he was going to Maine to live with his half brother.
Edward had come back to his hometown to discover that his two-bedroom apartment had been emptied and rented to another tenant the month before — having been forgotten by the government agents looking after his affairs during his quarantine. That seemed a rather major oversight. At least the landlady had been kind enough to store his belongings in the event of his return. He had sold the furniture, but — to his own amusement — learned he still had a few things he couldn’t bear to part with. These he had stored in a rental shed at the exorbitant rate of one hundred dollars a month, paid in advance for five months.
These things done, Edward became what he wanted to be, footloose and fancy free.
He had few doubts that the Earth would soon come to an end. He had bought a small-caliber pistol in case that end might prove too painful. (Pistols were at a premium now.) He had apportioned his savings and the government money to allow him a full five months of travel.
He had no urge to step outside the boundaries of the United States. Purchasing a small motor home (trading in his Land Cruiser) had depleted his assets by about a third. Now, for his final day in Austin, he was spending the night in the hotel, wrapped in a peculiarly enervated melancholy.
He was anxious to get moving.
He would travel around the country, and in late March or April he would end up in Yosemite, where he would settle in. The first part of his journey would give him a great overview of North America, as much as he could cover — something he had always wanted to do. He would spend a few weeks in the White River Badlands of South Dakota, a few days in Zion National Park, and so on, hitting the geological highlights until by full circle he came back to his childhood and the high rocky walls of Yosemite. Having surveyed some of what he wanted to see of the Earth, he would then begin
to catalog his interior country.
Good plans.
Then why did he feel so miserable?
He could not shake free of the notion that one spent one’s life with a treasured friend or loved one. Edward had always been essentially a loner. He felt no need to see his mother; she had kicked him out of the house at sixteen, and he had lost touch with her years ago. But there was still the myth, the image of the dyadic cyclone, as John Lilly had called it…the pair, facing life together.
He finished the whiskey sour and left the bar, brushing salt dust from his hand with the screwing motion of a bunched-up napkin. The doorman nodded cordially at him and he nodded back. Then he went for a two-hour walk around downtown Austin, something he had not done since he had been a student.
It was Sunday and the town was quiet. He wandered past white picket fences and black iron fences surrounding old well-kept historic houses. He studied bronze historical plaques mounted on pillars. Leaving the older neighborhoods, he finally stood in the center of concrete and stone and steel and glass pillars, the balmy midwinter Texas breeze rippling his short-sleeved shirt.
A human city, yet very solid and substantial-looking.
How could it just go away?
Not even geology encompassed the instant demise of worlds.
The next morning, having slept soundly enough and with no memorable dreams, Edward Shaw began his new life.
45
December 24
Lieutenant Colonel Rogers sat in his trailer, waiting for word from the civilian liaison, a small, dapper saintly faced NSA man named Tucker. Tucker had but one role in this conspiracy — there was no other word for it — and that was to convey whether or not the weapon had been acquired.
The Sunday New York Times lay spread across a desk below three blank television monitors. On the front page, three headlines of almost equal size vied for attention:
