Wireless

by Charles Stross

  Korolev’s nose pitches up almost ten degrees, right out of ground-effect. “Come on!”

  They make it.

  The iceberg slams out of the darkness of the storm and the sea like the edge of the world; fifty meters high and as massive as mountains, it has lodged against the aperture between the radiator fins. Billions of tons of pack ice has stopped dead in the water, creaking and groaning with the strain as it butts up against the infinite. The

  Korolev skids over the leading edge of the iceberg, her keel barely clearing it by ten meters, and continues to climb laboriously into the darkening sky. The blazing eyes of her reactors burn slick scars into the ice below. Then they’re into the open water beyond the radiator fins, and although the sea below them is an expanse of whiteness, they are also clear of icy mountains.

  “Shut down engines three through fourteen,” Gagarin orders once he regains enough control to keep the shakes out of his voice. “Take us back down to thirty meters, lieutenant. Meteorology, what’s our situation like?”

  “Arctic or worse, Comrade General.” The meteorologist, a hatchet-faced woman from Minsk, shakes her head. “Air temperature outside is thirty below, pressure is high.” The rain and hail have vanished along with the radiators and the clear seas—and the light, for it is now fading toward nightfall.

  “Hah. Misha, what do you think?”

  “I think we’ve found our way into the freezer, sir. Permission to put the towed array back up?”

  Gagarin squints into the darkness. “Lieutenant, keep us at two hundred steady. Misha, yes, get the towed array back out again. We need to see where we’re going.”

  The next three hours are simultaneously boring and fraught. It’s darker and colder than a Moscow apartment in winter during a power cut; the sea below is ice from horizon to horizon, cracking and groaning and splintering in a vast expanding V-shape behind the

  Korolev’s pressure wake. The spectral ruins of the Milky Way galaxy stretch overhead, reddened and stirred by alien influences. Misha supervises the relaunch of the towed array, then hands over to Major Suvurov before stiffly standing and going below to the unquiet bunk room. Gagarin sticks to a quarter-hourly routine of reports, making sure that he knows what everyone is doing. Bridge crew come and go for their regular station changes. It is routine, and deadly with it. Then:

  “Sir, I have a return. Permission to report?”

  “Go ahead.” Gagarin nods to the navigator. “Where?”

  “Bearing zero—it’s horizon to horizon—there’s a crest rising up to ten meters above the surface. Looks like landfall, range one sixty and closing. Uh, there’s a gap and a more distant landfall at thirty-five degrees, peak rising to two hundred meters.”

  “That’s some cliff.” Gagarin frowns. He feels drained, his brain hazy with the effort of making continual decisions after six hours in the hot seat and more than two days of this thumping, roaring progression. He glances round. “Major? Please summon Colonel Gorodin. Helm, come about to zero thirty-five. We’ll take a look at the gap and see if it’s a natural inlet. If this is a continental mass, we might as well take a look before we press on for home.”

  For the next hour they drive onward into the night, bleeding off speed and painting in the gaps in the radar map of the coastline. It’s a bleak frontier, inhumanly cold, with a high interior plateau. There are indeed two headlands, promontories jutting into the coast from either side of a broad, deep bay. Hills rise from one of the promontories and across the bay. Something about it strikes Gagarin as strangely familiar, if only he could place it. Another echo of Earth? But it’s too cold by far, a deep Antarctic chill. And he’s not familiar with the coastline of Zemlya, the myriad inlets off the northeast passage, where the submarines cruise on eternal vigilant patrols to defend the frontier of the Rodina.

  A thin predawn light stains the icy hilltops grey as the Korolev cruises slowly between the headlands—several kilometers apart—and into the wide-open bay beyond. Gagarin raises his binoculars and scans the distant coastline. There are structures, straight lines! “Another ruined civilization?” he asks quietly.

  “Maybe, sir. Think anyone could survive in this weather?” The temperature has dropped another ten degrees in the predawn chill, although the ekranoplan is kept warm by the outflow of its two Kuznetsov aviation reactors.

  “Hah.”

  Gagarin begins to sweep the northern coast when Major Suvurov stands up. “Sir! Over there!”

  “Where?” Gagarin glances at him. Suvurov is quivering with anger, or shock, or something else. He, too, has his binoculars out.

  “Over there! On the southern hillside.”

  “Where—” He brings his binoculars to bear as the dawnlight spills across the shattered stump of an immense skyscraper.

  There is a hillside behind it, a jagged rift where the land has risen up a hundred meters. It reeks of antiquity, emphasized by the carvings in the headland. Here is what the expedition has been looking for all along, the evidence that they are not alone.

  “My God.” Misha swears, shocked into politically incorrect language.

  “Marx,” says Gagarin, studying the craggy features of the nearest head. “I’ve seen this before, this sort of thing. The Americans have a memorial like it. Mount Rushmore, they call it.”

  “Don’t you mean Easter Island?” asks Misha. “Sculptures left by a vanished people . . .”

  “Nonsense! Look there, isn’t that Lenin? And Stalin, of course.” Even though the famous moustache is cracked and half of it has fallen away from the cliff. “But who’s that next to them?”

  Gagarin brings his binoculars to focus on the fourth head. Somehow it looks far less weathered than the others, as if added as an afterthought, perhaps some kind of insane statement about the mental health of its vanished builders. Both antennae have long since broken off, and one of the mandibles is damaged, but the eyeless face is still recognizably unhuman. The insectile head stares eyelessly out across the frozen ocean, an enigma on the edge of a devastated island continent. “I think we’ve found the brother socialists,” he mutters to Misha, his voice pitched low so that it won’t carry over the background noise on the flight deck. “And you know what? Something tells me we didn’t want to.”

  ANTHROPIC ERROR

  As the summer dry season grinds on, Maddy finds herself spending more time at John’s home-cum-laboratory, doing the cleaning and cooking for herself in addition to maintaining the lab books and feeding the live specimens. During her afternoons visiting in the hospital she helps him write up his reports. Losing his right hand has hit John hard: he’s teaching himself to write again, but his handwriting is slow and childish.

  She finds putting in extra hours at the lab preferable to the empty and uncomfortable silences back in the two-bedroom prefab she shares with Bob. Bob is away on field trips to outlying ranches and quarries half the time and working late the other half. At least, he says he’s working late. Maddy has her suspicions. He gets angry if she isn’t around to cook, and she gets angry right back at him when he expects her to clean, and they’ve stopped having sex. Their relationship is in fact going downhill rapidly, drying up and withering away in the arid continental heat, until going to work in John’s living room among the cages and glass vivaria and books feels like taking refuge. She has taken to spending more time there, working late for real, and when Bob is away she sleeps on the wicker settee in the dining room.

  One day, more than a month later than expected, Dr. Smythe finally decides that John is well enough to go home. Embarrass ingly, she’s not there on the afternoon when he’s finally discharged. Instead, she’s in the living room, typing up a report on a subspecies of the turtle tree and its known parasites, when the screen door bangs and the front door opens. “Maddy?”

  She squeaks before she can stop herself. “John?” She’s out of the chair to help him with the battered suitcase the cabbie half-helpfully left on the front stoop.

  “Maddy.” He smiles tiredly. “I�
�ve missed being home.”

  “Come on in.” She closes the screen door and carries the suitcase over to the stairs. He’s painfully thin now, a far cry from the slightly-too-plump entomologist she’d met on the colony liner. “I’ve got lots of stuff for you to read—but not until you’re stronger. I don’t want you overworking and putting yourself back in hospital!”

  “You’re an angel.” He stands uncertainly in his own living room, looking around as if he hadn’t quite expected to see it again. “I’m looking forward to seeing the termites.”

  She shivers abruptly. “I’m not. Come on.” She climbs the stairs with the suitcase, not looking back. She pushes through the door into the one bedroom that’s habitable—he’s been using the other one to store samples—and dumps the case on the rough dressing table. She’s been up here before, first to collect his clothing while he was in hospital and later to clean and make sure there are no poisonous spiders lurking in the corners. It smells of camphor and dusty memories. She turns to face him. “Welcome home.” She smiles experimentally.

  He looks around. “You’ve been cleaning.”

  “Not much.” She feels her face heat.

  He shakes his head. “Thank you.”

  She can’t decide what to say. “No, no, it’s not like that. If I wasn’t here I’d be . . .”

  John shuffles. She blinks at him, feeling stupid and foolish. “Do you have room for a lodger?” she asks.

  He looks at her, and she can’t maintain eye contact. It’s all going wrong, not what she wanted.

  “Things going badly?” he asks, cocking his head on one side and staring at her. “Forgive me, I don’t mean to pry—”

  “No, no, it’s quite all right.” She sniffs. Takes a breath. “This continent breaks things. Bob hasn’t been the same since we arrived, or I, I haven’t. I need to put some space between us, for a bit.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh.” She’s silent for a while. “I can pay rent—”

  This is an excuse, a transparent rationalization, and not entirely true, but she’s saved from digging herself deeper into a lie because John manages to stumble and reaches out to steady himself with his right arm, which is still not entirely healed, and Maddy finds herself with his weight on her shoulder as he hisses in pain. “Ow! Ow!”

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  “It wasn’t you—” They make it to the bed, and she sits him down beside her. “I nearly blacked out then. I feel useless. I’m not half the man I was.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she says absently, not quite registering his meaning. She strokes his cheek, feeling it slick with sweat. The pulse in his neck is strong. “You’re still recovering. I think they sent you home too early. Let’s get you into bed and rest up for a couple of hours, then see about something to eat. What do you say to that?”

  “I shouldn’t need nursing,” he protests faintly, as she bends down and unties his shoelaces. “I don’t need . . . nursing.” He runs his fingers through her hair.

  “This isn’t about nursing.”

  Two hours later, the patient is drifting on the edge of sleep, clearly tired out by his physical therapy and the strain of homecom ing. Maddy lies curled up against his shoulder, staring at the ceiling. She feels calm and at peace for the first time since she arrived here.

  It’s not about Bob anymore, is it? she asks herself. It’s not about what anybody expects of me. It’s about what I want, about finding my place in the universe. She feels her face relaxing into a smile. Truly, for a moment, it feels as if the entire universe is revolving around her in stately synchrony.

  John snuffles slightly, then startles and tenses. She can tell he’s come to wakefulness. “Funny,” he says quietly, then clears his throat.

  “What is?”

  Please don’t spoil this, she prays.

  “I wasn’t expecting this.” He moves beside her. “Wasn’t expecting much of anything.”

  “Was it good?” She tenses.

  “Do you still want to stay?” he asks hesitantly. “Damn, I didn’t mean to sound as if—”

  “No, I don’t mind—” She rolls toward him, then is brought up short by a quiet, insistent tapping that travels up through the inner wall of the house. “Damn,” she says quietly.

  “What’s that?” He begins to sit up.

  “It’s the termites.”

  John listens intently. The tapping continues erratically, on-again, off-again bursts of clattering noise. “What is she doing?”

  “They do it about twice a day,” Maddy confesses. “I put her in the number two aquarium with a load of soil and leaves and a mesh lid on top. When they start making a racket I feed them.”

  He looks surprised. “This I’ve got to see.”

  The walls are coming back up again. Maddy stifles a sigh: it’s not about her anymore, it’s about the goddamn mock-termites. Anyone would think they were the center of the universe, and she was just here to feed them. “Let’s go look, then.” John is already standing up, trying to pick up his discarded shirt with his prosthesis. “Don’t bother,” she tells him. “Who’s going to notice, the insects?”

  “I thought—” He glances at her, taken aback. “Sorry, forget it.”

  She pads downstairs, pausing momentarily to make sure he’s following her safely. The tapping continues, startlingly loud. She opens the door to the utility room in the back and turns on the light. “Look,” she says.

  The big glass-walled aquarium sits on the worktop. It’s lined with rough-tamped earth and on top, there are piles of denuded branches and wood shavings. It’s near dusk, and by the light filtering through the windows she can see mock-termites moving across the surface of the muddy dome that bulges above the queen’s chamber. A group of them have gathered around a curiously straight branch: as she watches, they throw it against the glass like a battering ram against a castle wall. A pause, then they pick it up and pull back, and throw it again. They’re huge for insects, almost two inches long: much bigger than the ones thronging the mounds in the outback. “That’s odd.” Maddy peers at them. “They’ve grown since yesterday.”

  “They? Hang on, did you take workers, or . . . ?”

  “No, just the queen. None of these bugs is more than a month old.”

  The termites have stopped banging on the glass. They form two rows on either side of the stick, pointing their heads up at the huge, monadic mammals beyond the alien barrier. Looking at them closely Maddy notices other signs of morphological change: the increasing complexity of their digits, the bulges at the backs of their heads.

  Is the queen changing, too? she asks herself, briefly troubled by visions of a malignant intelligence rapidly swelling beneath the surface of the vivarium, plotting its escape by moonlight.

  John stands behind Maddy and folds his arms around her. She shivers. “I feel as if they’re watching us.”

  “But to them it’s not about us, is it?” he whispers in her ear. “Come on. All that’s happening is you’ve trained them to ring a bell so the experimenters give them a snack. They think the universe was made for their convenience. Dumb insects, just a bundle of reflexes really. Let’s feed them and go back to bed.”

  The two humans leave and climb the stairs together, arm in arm, leaving the angry aboriginal hive to plot its escape unnoticed.

  IT’S ALWAYS OCTOBER THE FIRST

  Gregor sits on a bench on the Esplanade, looking out across the river toward the Statue of Liberty. He’s got a bag of stale bread crumbs, and he’s ministering to the flock of pigeons that scuttle and peck around his feet. The time is six minutes to three on the afternoon of October the First, and the year is irrelevant. In fact, it’s too late. This is how it always ends, although the onshore breeze and the sunlight are unexpected bonus payments.

  The pigeons jostle and chase one another as he drops another piece of crust on the pavement. For once he hasn’t bothered to soak them overnight in 5 percent warfarin solution. There is such a thing as a free lunc
h, if you’re a pigeon in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’s going to be dead soon, and, if any of the pigeons survive, they’re welcome to the wreckage.

  There aren’t many people about, so when the puffing middle-aged guy in the suit comes into view, jogging along as if he’s chasing his stolen wallet, Gregor spots him instantly. It’s Brundle, looking slightly pathetic when removed from his man-hive. Gregor waves hesitantly, and Brundle alters course.

  “Running late,” he pants, kicking at the pigeons until they flap away to make space for him at the other end of the bench.

  “Really?”

  Brundle nods. “They should be coming over the horizon in another five minutes.”

  “How did you engineer it?” Gregor isn’t particularly interested, but technical chitchat serves to pass the remaining seconds.

  “Man-in-the-middle, ramified by all their intelligence assessments.” Brundle looks self-satisfied. “Understanding their caste specialization makes it easier. Two weeks ago we told the GRU that MacNamara was using the NP-101 program as cover for a preemptive D-SLAM strike. At the same time we got the NOAA to increase their mapping-launch frequency, and pointed the increased level of Soviet activity out to our sources in SAC. It doesn’t take much to get the human hives buzzing with positive feedback.”

  Of course, Brundle and Gregor aren’t using words for this incriminating exchange. Their phenotypically human bodies conceal some useful modifications, knobby encapsulated tumors of neuroecto derm that shield the delicate tissues of their designers, neural circuits that have capabilities human geneticists haven’t even imagined. A visitor from a more advanced human society might start chattering excitedly about wet-phase nanomachines and neural-directed broadband packet radio, but nobody in New York on a sunny day in 1979 plus one million is thinking in those terms. They still think the universe belongs to their own kind, skull-locked social—but not eusocial—primates. Brundle and Gregor know better. They’re workers of a higher order, carefully tailored to the task in hand, and although they look human, there’s less to their humanity than meets the eye. Even Gagarin can probably guess better, an individualist trapped in the machinery of a utopian political hive. The termites of New Iowa and a host of other Galapagos continents on the disk are not the future, but they’re a superior approximation to anything humans have achieved, even those planetary instantiations that have doctored their own genome in order to successfully implement true eusocial societies. Group minds aren’t prone to anthropic errors.