A vision of chill intellects and severe black robes filled Abil’s mind. “The Commission, sir? Me? ”
Dower laughed. “Just think about it … Ah. We’re about to leave orbit.”
Abil could sense the subtle inertial shift, as if he was in a huge elevator, rising from the frozen planet.
Dower snapped her fingers, and a Virtual of the Target materialized between their faces. Slowly turning, bathed in simulated light, the planet was like a toy, sparkling white, laced here and there by black ridges of true rock, stubborn mountain chains resisting the ice. Starships circled it like flies.
Dower reached out to touch one dimpled feature.
The view expanded, to reveal a broad, walled plain. Abil realized he was looking down on the warren he had visited. Around the mountain peak, great cracks had been cut into the ground. Drones were being shepherded out of the warren by the mop-up squads. The drones filed toward the bellies of freighters that had settled from space, down onto the ice, to swallow them up. The drones looked bewildered, and they milled to and fro. Here and there one or two broke lines, and even lunged at the troopers. The silent spark of weapons cut them down.
For every live drone that came walking to the surface, Abil saw, a dozen carcasses were hauled out.
Dower saw his expression. “There were probably a billion drones in that one hive alone. A billion. We’ll be lucky to ship out more than a hundred thousand.”
“A hundred thousand — is that all, sir?”
“The waste is terrible — yes, I know. But what does it matter? They were a billion purposeless lives, the culmination of a thousand pointless generations. And look here.”
She tapped at the floating image. The deep-buried colony turned red, showing as a clear torus shape around the ice-buried mountain. And when the viewpoint pulled back, Abil saw that there were many more such red blotches scarring the planet’s white face, from pole to pole, around the equator.
“There are about a thousand warrens on this one planet,” Dower murmured. “Probably most of them unaware of each other. We probably won’t even be able to clean them all out. I’ve seen this before, many times, on worlds as different from this, tar, as you can imagine — but all warrens are essentially the same. Anywhere where the living is marginal, where people are crowded in on each other, out pops the eusocial solution, over and over. I think it’s a flaw in our mental processing.”
In one place two of the colonies were in contact; tendrils of pale pink reached out from their red cores, and where they touched, crimson flared. Dower spoke a soft command. The simulated image’s time scale accelerated, so that days, weeks passed in seconds. Abil could see how the two colonies probed toward each other, over and again, and where they came in contact crimson flared — a crimson, he realized, that showed where people were dying.
“They’re fighting,” he said. “It’s almost as if the colonies are living things themselves, sir.”
“Well, so they are,” Dower said.
“But — a thousand of them. That makes um, a trillion people on this light-starved planet alone — all living off the scrapings from the thermal vents …”
“Makes you think, doesn’t it? Oh, the Coalescents are efficient. But they are just drones. We own history.” She waved her hands and produced a new image, a star field, crossed by a great river of light. She pointed to the Galaxy core. “Leave the Coalescents to their holes in the ground. That is where we are going, tar; that is where our destiny will be made — or broken.”
When she had gone Abil restored the image of the slowly turning globe, its white surface pustulous with warrens.
There were no cities here, he thought, no nations. There were only the Coalescent colonies. The huge entities waged their slow and silent battles against each other, shaping and spending the lives of their human drones — drones who may have believed they were free and happy — and all without consciousness or pity. On this world the story of humankind was over, he thought. On this world, the future belonged to the hives.
But there were other worlds.
The starship leapt away with an almost imperceptible lurch. The frozen world folded over on itself and dropped into darkness.
Chapter 52
One of my favorite walks is quite short. You follow the staircases cut into the rock, and pass through alleyways and under archways, and between the tottering houses that lean so close they almost touch. After only a few minutes, you can clamber all the way from Amalfi to Atrani, a tiny medieval town that nestles in the next bay along this indented coastline.
In the central piazza of Atrani there is an open-air cafй where you can sip coffee or Coke and watch the sun slide over the looming volcanic hills. It’s peaceful enough, so long as you avoid the times when the schoolchildren flood through the square, or the early evenings when young men pose for the girls on their gleaming scooters and motorbikes.
Yesterday — it was a Sunday — I made the mistake of sitting there at noon. All was peaceful, just a few churchgoers, everybody remarkably smartly dressed as they strolled through the square, talking in that intense, very physical way the Italians have. The waiter had just brought me my coffee.
And somebody set off a cannon. I jumped out of my seat, my heart pounding. The waiter didn’t spill a drop.
The shot turned out to be from a church set high on the hillside, where the clergy celebrate each Sabbath with a little pyrotechnics. But in the square of Atrani the noise was deafening.
It is never quiet in Italy.
I know I can’t hide out here forever. Some time soon I’ll have to reconnect with the real world.
For one thing my money won’t last forever. There has been a stock market crash.
It was actually quite predictable. There’s an analysis that dates back to the Great Depression that has detected cycles, called Elliott waves, in the various economic ups and downs. Why do these simple analyses work? Because they are models of the human herd instinct. The traders on the stock exchange floor don’t make rational decisions based on such factors as the intrinsic value of a stock. They just see what their neighbors are doing, and copy them. Just like the rest of us.
Predictable or not, the crash has wiped out a chunk of my savings. So I must move on.
I intend to finish this account, and then … Well, I don’t quite know what to do with it, save to send it to Claudio at the Vatican Archives. It seems right that it should be preserved. If Rosa ever gets in touch again, she will get a copy, too.
I think I should pay another visit to my sister Gina in Miami Beach. She should know what became of Rosa — she’s her sister, too, whether she likes it or not. And perhaps Great-Uncle Lou will enjoy hearing of the fate of Maria Ludovica, the mamma-nonna, who was still producing babies like popping peas from a pod at the age of a hundred.
As for me, after that, I will go home, back to Britain. Maybe not to London, though. Somewhere without the crowds. I need a job, but I want to go freelance. I can’t bear the thought of becoming enmeshed in another huge organization, a great press of people all around me.
I think I’ll look up Linda. I haven’t forgotten how my instinct, in those dreadful moments in the depths of the Crypt, was to turn to her memory for support. One way or another she’s been there for me since we met. There’s a lot to build on.
Unlike Peter, I refuse to believe the future is fixed.
I hope one day to put all this behind me. But sometimes I am overwhelmed. If I am in a crowd, sometimes I will detect a whiff of that leonine animal musk of the Coalescents, and I have to retreat to my room, or the fresh air of the empty hills above the towns. I will never be free of it. And yet a part of me, I know, will always long to be immersed again in that dense warmth, to be surrounded by smiling faces like mirrors of my own, to give myself up to the mindless, loving joy of the hive.
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