So instead, she mostly told Brenda about the complicated journey they had taken to get there, about Morley’s odd little ways, and about how they had managed in the piercing cold of the Arctic. And finally, without going into details, she explained that Leon had died, and there had been a lengthy inquiry into the incident.
“But why in Reykjavík?” Brenda asked, but when Charlotte simply shrugged, she dropped the question and then confessed she had expected her to have paired up with Adrian by the time they came back. “For some reason, I had the feeling he was keen on you. And you would have made a lovely couple.”
Charlotte chased the last stubborn spoonful of vanilla ice cream around the bottom of her glass and found herself thinking of Leon, of how masculine he had looked in his parka. “Adrian? No, he behaved like a big brother, that was all. And I don’t think it was because he’s shy.”
“Maybe he’s gay?”
Charlotte considered the possibility. Somehow that didn’t seem likely either. “We just didn’t click. Maybe climatology is all he lives for.”
After that Brenda told her about the move, about all the little differences she still hadn’t gotten used to in daily life in Argentina, and about how Lamita’s adoption had worked out. “We would have been right up the creek without Pari. He dragged us along to the right offices and told us when to put a banknote inside our passport, and all of that. We had to fly to Dhaka twice before we could bring her back with us. Thank goodness we found a nanny who gets along well with Jason; we’ve been a bit more flexible since then.”
“And how’s she coping here?”
Brenda tilted her head, thinking. “Well now. It’s only been a few weeks, so I think it’ll be hard to say for a while. She only speaks Bengali, so that’s a problem, and…I hope we’ll manage.”
“I’m sure you will,” Charlotte said with feeling.
At last it was time to set off. “Girls’ time is over for today,” Brenda declared with a melancholy sigh. They took another taxi. “I don’t dare get behind the wheel here. I probably never will. Just look at the way they drive! I mean, they see the highway code as just a set of recommendations really, don’t they?”
When they arrived, Jason showed up to say hello but refused to let Charlotte kiss him on the cheek and stormed off in a huff when she greeted him in Spanish. Tom wasn’t back yet. Brenda showed her the guest room, the other main rooms, and the garden, and then they sat down in the kitchen for coffee.
At some point the girl made an appearance as well. A dark, thin face peering around the corner, shy but inquisitive, only to vanish again instantly when Charlotte looked that way. Her curiosity finally won out; the little girl scampered into the kitchen, staying close to the wall, and hid behind Brenda, who smiled wryly and put an arm around her. From the safety of this position, she peered again at the visitor, more closely this time.
Charlotte leaned forward. “Tomar naam ki?—What’s your name?”
The thin little girl blinked in astonishment, then whispered back in Bengali. “Lamita. My name’s Lamita.”
“How are you, Lamita?”
“I’m fine.” The girl leaned in closer to Brenda and glanced up at her, full of gratitude.
Brenda meanwhile was looking wide-eyed at Charlotte. “Since when do you speak Bengali?”
Charlotte tried to remember. “I think some of the gardeners at our house in Delhi were from Bengal. I mean, I seem to remember always hearing the language out in the garden.”
“You’re a godsend. We’ve had such trouble trying to talk to the child, you just wouldn’t believe it. She understands me, but I can’t understand her. If she has an ache or a pain, I can’t even get her to tell me where it hurts. It’s as if we’d taken in a pet.”
Charlotte looked at Lamita. The girl really did seem like a shy forest animal somehow, or like a creature beaten and mistreated for an age, suffering and silent. “I’m here for a while. Maybe I can talk to her a bit.”
“You must.” Brenda turned to her adoptive daughter and looked at her. “Would you like something to eat? Cake?”
Lamita nodded wordlessly, her eyes huge.
“Yes? Please say yes.”
“Yes,” the girl whispered with a look of terror in her eyes, as though she had only ever been punished when she dared to speak.
“By now I just feel sick whenever I see cut-price T-shirts,” Brenda said as Lamita sat next to her, devouring a slice of cake. “A T-shirt for a dollar—who can make a living from that? I can’t stand buying cheap clothing anymore. Behind every shirt and pair of pants, I see a kid like Lamita, sitting in an airless room from morning till night and sewing until her fingers bleed.”
“I thought the factory had gone bust?”
“Well that one did. But how many other textiles factories do you think there are out there? And other companies making other stuff, all along the same lines? Hundreds of thousands.”
Charlotte found herself thinking of Hiroshi and his plan to end poverty for good and create prosperity for all with the help of robots that built robots. It might have been a completely crazy plan, but at least he meant well. And perhaps the plan wasn’t even that crazy. She looked at Lamita and wondered how many children like her were slaving away under unspeakable conditions at that very moment just so people in rich countries had something to buy.
Burntwood Lake lay in the north of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, thirty miles or more from the nearest marked road, and even that road was not something anyone used to city life would recognize as such. The only way even to find the lake was to have a good off-road vehicle and know the landscape like the back of your hand, meaning that not many people ever did.
So the lake had become the favored retreat for those few souls who could last out the cold winters this far north, enjoying the peace and quiet and the solitude. Some of them had built cabins in the woods around it, which the government knew nothing about. If one or two of them also brewed moonshine in their own stills, who cared? A shot of conversation juice was just what you needed after a day spent fishing on the lake.
Remote though the area was, there was nevertheless a webcam in one of the cabins that gave real-time Internet views of the northeast shore of Burntwood Lake and its little island. The student who had installed it went by the user name NorthernLight in the Internet forums, and he had made sure to include a solar-powered battery pack to keep the webcam computer running, along with an antenna that kept the whole thing connected to the Internet via a relay at the northern edge of Grass River Provincial Park, by Cranberry Portage. His uncle was a park ranger and had helped him mount the relay antenna and patch it discreetly into the park’s own telephone system. NorthernLight studied computer science in Winnipeg and loved being able to check in anytime to see what was happening on “his” lake. And he was far too proud of his setup to have secured the website with a password. The whole world should be able to share his labor of love.
Which was precisely what sealed the fate of Burntwood Lake, Saskatchewan.
Hiroshi’s computer room was no longer a simulation lab: it had become a control room much like NASA mission control. Except that Hiroshi was all alone in front of his monitors. One of the screens showed Burntwood Lake. He was watching it anonymously via a far-flung network of various servers, most of which were not in the US; nobody would ever be able to find out later that at this particular moment he had been connected to the webcam of the lake-fishing fanatic who went by the name NorthernLight. That was important.
On another screen he was watching a graphic-interface depiction of what the nanites he had dispatched were up to. They were busy. They had reproduced their population by a factor of one hundred billion before they even set out, and now it was all happening rather fast. Watching them at work gave him some idea of what they must have done back on Saradkov Island. Based on all the reports, it had all happened very fast there as well. At fir
st, he had taken that with a grain of salt; his calculations had shown that they would have to have been reproducing and building at positively dizzying speeds. But the reality of what he was watching now exceeded even those figures.
The most fascinating aspect was he didn’t even need to leave the house. At first, he had worked out all kinds of complicated plans for how he could travel and cover his tracks. But there was no need for any of that. All he had to do was dose a nanite metacomplex with the right commands, then put them down on the floor of his lab, and send them on their way to carry out his orders. Not that he’d even needed to do that; they could have set out directly from the glass beaker he kept them in. No material actually presented an obstacle to the nanites. These machines could dismantle armor, alarm systems, electric fences, and who knows what else atom by atom with no trouble at all. They could slip through the opening they had made and then put all the atoms right back into place. This was one of the basic routines written directly into the transporter units; there was no need even for a specific, separate command.
The only real problem was guiding them on their way through rock and soil, under rivers and roads, all the way to their goal. These nanites could do a great deal but they couldn’t read GPS signals—that would have been asking too much of a robotic complex that had arrived on Earth from the unknown depths of space. So Hiroshi had to steer them. To do this, he had needed to modify their programming somewhat. Which was good practice anyway, since some modification would be needed for the plan he had in mind.
How could he keep in touch with the complex while it was out in the world? He could have used radio, of course. That was the nanites’ standard operating procedure, so to speak. But then he would have run the risk of detection—he was sure the government still had him under surveillance. Hiroshi had finally hit upon a simple but astonishingly effective solution: the metacomplex simply built a microscopically thin telephone cable from copper and iron atoms as it went along. The cable was hooked up to a nanoscale transmitter back in Hiroshi’s lab. All he had to do was set his multiband to the very lowest signal strength and place it where the nanites had set out from. Then he could communicate with the complex as it went on its way, and nobody was any the wiser.
Hiroshi had tested all this out first, of course. And of course the first few attempts had gone wrong—drastically wrong, even. But he had eventually enjoyed his first success: he had ordered a nanite complex to set out for the farthest edge of his extensive estate and construct a cube of pure iron. Then Hiroshi had taken a stroll through the garden and, lo and behold, there was the cube, nestled at the foot of the fence.
None of what came next had been hard. The nanites may not have had a navigation system for planet Earth, but they were able to record distances and directions they traveled down to the micrometer. All Hiroshi needed to do was measure the distance between his lab and the target—the island in the middle of Burntwood Lake—as precisely as he could and then program the nanites with instructions along the lines of “First go 2,507 kilometers, 318 meters, and 12 centimeters north, then go 1,689 kilometers, 781 meters, and 3 centimeters east.” Once they reached their target, they had orders to build a long red pole from the ground up, which he duly spotted on the picture broadcast by the webcam right in the middle of the island. Bull’s-eye on his first attempt. It was almost unnerving.
He hadn’t pushed the nanites anywhere near their limits in terms of how fast they could get there. There was no need, after all. He didn’t quite know how fast they could have gotten there if so instructed—within a couple of hours?—but it was fine by him that they had taken a week. It had given him time to prepare himself for what came next. Because the next order he gave the nanites was to carry out a program that was already stored in their memory, a program they had brought with them when they came to Earth. Hiroshi hadn’t altered a line of it; he wanted to see how it played out of its own accord.
He checked one more time that the camera was running, then gave the order to start. It started right away, breathtakingly fast. Rootlets sank down into the earth, probing for energy, just as they had done the whole way over—although never in such vast numbers. The nanites replicated, the metacomplex became a meta-metacomplex and then a metacomplex to the third power, the fourth, soon to the fifth power, and even higher. Positioning elements ran out for miles all around, branching out like the roots of a tree in their search for certain rare minerals. Transporter elements raced along the newly created tracks, carting along the prospector units, the diggers, the cutters, and finally the molecular structures that would capture the cargo atom by atom so that it could then be taken elsewhere and unloaded. They built up a stockpile of all the elements they would need.
Other digger units did nothing but dig a hole down into the ground, deeper and ever deeper. Other nanites collected the earth that had been moved and took it apart into individual molecules, which were either added to the stockpiles for later use or simply thrown away. The first building work began: swarms of nanites ferried a stream of iron and carbon atoms into the hole, where other nanites assembled them into huge steel rings with a very specific internal structure. Other nanites built conduits and cables, huge motors and generators, and curious circuitry.
And the hole that ran straight down into the earth from the middle of the island grew deeper and deeper. A hundred yards. Two hundred. Five hundred. A mile. Two. Three. When it was nearly three and a half miles deep, digging finally stopped and the machine built itself a bottom to the shaft, and then the stockpiles of material all around the site began to stream down to build a rocket atom by atom, which would take a probe full of nanites off to space. Meanwhile, the generator complexes loaded up the energy storage units, filling them to bursting point.
Hiroshi watched, fascinated, as the rocket was built, studying each component as it emerged, marveling at the care and design that had gone into all the details. The recording was still running—good. For this machine had more technological riddles in every cubic inch of its construction than any single human being would be able to unravel in a lifetime of work. The construction of the shaft itself, however, was no great riddle: it was a simple linear motor. The array of magnetic coils would grasp the rocket in their fields one after another in quick succession and hurl it upward at accelerations that no living being would have been able to survive. Since there were no living beings onboard, that was not a problem. The rocket would be traveling at three times the speed of sound by the time it left the mouth of the shaft, after which its own engines would kick in and accelerate it still further, taking it up into space in less than two minutes.
And it looked like it wasn’t long now until takeoff.
Just then the third screen blinked. It ran a simple message program connected to a small computer in the kitchen, which Mrs. Steel could use to get in touch if absolutely necessary.
“Mr. Kato, you have a visitor. A Miss Malroux has just arrived and asks whether she can speak to you.”
“In fact, I’m not supposed to disturb him at all,” said the housekeeper, a sturdy woman whose blond curls lay on her scalp as though cemented into place. “It’s only for emergencies, he said. Only if the house is on fire or someone’s injured, or if the police turn up, or the president calls. Those were his very words. Because right at this moment he’s at work on a very important project where any interruption could mean that the whole undertaking was in vain.” She was still leaning over the little white laptop, which lay on a folded tea towel on the kitchen counter next to an array of pepper grinders of various sizes. The cursor was blinking below the message she had just sent. “But you’ve already been here once. I don’t think he’d want me to just send you on your way again.”
I hope not, Charlotte thought. She perched herself on a barstool by the kitchen counter with the cup of coffee that Mrs. Steel had set in front of her. She sat down with exaggerated care, as though it might all go wrong if she made any unnecessary noise up here
or disturbed the stillness of the house. But probably Hiroshi wouldn’t want her sent on her way. She held fast to the thought.
She had considered calling on her way here. Asking if it would be all right for her to come. But she hadn’t called out of a sudden fear that he might say no, and then what? So she had arrived unannounced in the hope he would find it more difficult to say no if she were standing right in front of him. In the end, it hadn’t helped at all. Now she was even less than a voice on the phone. She was a message sent from the kitchen to his study.
Mrs. Steel was tapping her fingers restlessly on the marble worktop. She was waiting for an answer, but Charlotte suddenly realized she also had no idea what to do now. She had probably just been busy with some housework, and now there was an unexpected visitor in her kitchen, and she couldn’t get on with her day.
“What is this very important project he’s working on?” Charlotte asked despite knowing perfectly well the housekeeper wouldn’t tell her. Not that she even needed to ask: she could imagine it quite well for herself. On Saradkov, Hiroshi had seen the nano-robots in action that only a little while before he had told her couldn’t be built. It was only logical he would want to find out how they had been.
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