The Nano Flower

by Peter F. Hamilton

  It took a while for the end of the procession to register. The last globe, a brick-red colour, which Julia said was probably zircon, had travelled halfway up the crater before he noticed the alien flesh dilating out from the rim to recover the shaft.

  "Is that it?" Maria asked.

  "This is the last phase," Julia said. "The cells will be regrouping; they've been spread pretty thin around the second chamber for the mining and refining. It's a big area to cover, I'm glad half of it was complete before the alien started."

  "Last phase?" Victor queried.

  "Departure."

  * * * *

  Greg wondered if it was fate again that put New London over the middle of the Atlantic while Europe was still in darkness, awaiting the dawn. The asteroid would be visible from four continents: Europe, Africa, and North and South America. All of them with perfect viewing conditions.

  Did people make the era, or did the necessity of the time throw up the right people? Either way, Greg thought, God had singled out Julia, and no messing.

  They had listened to some of the channels while the globes had risen out of the crater. The whole world knew something was going on up at New London, that the Co-Defence League's geosynchronous Strategic Defence platforms had been used for the first time, that Julia Evans herself was up there, that she'd ordered an evacuation.

  She told Sean to plug the asteroid back into the communications net, mainly to try and reassure people that the emergency wasn't life-threatening. The Globecast franchise office had been transmitting pictures of the refined globes back to Earth ever since. Greg could taste a sweet irony in that. What would Clifford Jepson be thinking?

  Maria turned the Falcon again, pointing its tail at the northern hub. Greg could see the seemingly infinite line of sunlit globes stretching towards Polaris, like multicoloured stars raining down from heaven.

  A bulge rose in the middle of the alien flesh, quickly distending, lengthening. It formed a conical spike six hundred metres high, then stopped. The tip began to lean over, tracing a widening spiral as the asteroid's rotation carried it round.

  Greg could sense the anticipation flooding out of the alien, a mix of excitement and fear. Julia's personality had given it emotions, it could feel, and it was scared, nerving itself up.

  Nothing lasts for ever, he told it sorrowfully.

  The alien jumped. A vast spasm rippled down its flanks, hitting the base of the crater wall, and it let go. It was changing shape almost at once, contracting into a sphere four hundred and fifty metres in diameter.

  Greg reckoned it was travelling a lot faster than any of the globes; its trajectory taking it away from New London's rotation axis and the line of globes. When it slipped above the crater rim and into the direct sunlight the flesh changed colour, darkening to ebony.

  "Do you want to follow it?" Maria asked.

  "No," Julia said. "We can see from here."

  New London was seven kilometres behind it when the alien began its metamorphosis. The flesh flowed again, flattening out into a lentoid shape. Greg saw a circular silver stain emerge at the centre and split into six arms, spreading out to the rim.

  "That looks like metal," he said.

  "It is," Julia agreed. "Titanium motes that are only a few atoms in diameter. The cells can manipulate them to form a surface coating quite easily."

  Greg gave her an uneasy glance, wondering again just how much of a union existed between them.

  The alien was still expanding, a disk two kilometres wide now, the titanium completely covering one side, facing the sun full on, painfully bright to look at.

  "I did the right thing, didn't I, Greg?" Julia asked.

  "Yeah, both ways. I've had to sit back and endure what happened between you and Royan, my friends. That hurt, Julia. And this thing," he waved a hand at the windscreen. The alien was retreating from New London, still growing, ten—fifteen kilometres across now, at least. That made it hard to believe it was leaving. It was such an overwhelming presence, breaking down his conviction of a neatly completed deal. "Look at it. We couldn't have let that loose in the solar system. It's too powerful. You can't ignore it; either it would have engulfed us, or we would have abused it, little people twisting it to serve parochial needs. And there are a lot of little people in the world, Julia. Maybe that's why you stand out so much."

  "Maybe."

  Size was the killer, forcing him to accept his own insignificance. New London was big, but the asteroid was something that had been tamed, he could admire that. But now he could finally appreciate Royan's internal defeat, his broken soul. Royan had known what was at stake, that was why he'd been prepared to use the gamma mines.

  The alien had become two-dimensional, a veil of titanium atoms that lacked the substance of a mirage. He guessed there must be a net of cables to support the sail and provide some degree of control. But they were probably no thicker than a gossamer thread. Invisible and irrelevant.

  A hundred and twenty kilometres in diameter, and it didn't even seem to be slowing down. A flat white-hole eruption.

  Maria backed the Falcon eighty kilometres away, a leisurely thirty-minute manoeuvre. When they stopped, the alien was two hundred and sixty kilometres in diameter.

  The measurement had to come from the Falcon's sensors, its dimensions defeated the human eye. Such vastness perturbed his comfortable visual references, cheating him into believing the sail was down. In his mind it had become a featureless silver landscape; not an artifact or a living creature. Logic warring with belief. He was truly in alien country now.

  Four hundred kilometres in diameter. The sail engulfed half of the universe; powerful waves of sunlight would roll across it, washing over the Falcon and dazzling Greg before the windscreen's electrochromic filters cut in.

  He experienced the figment kiss as the sail reached five hundred kilometres in diameter. A strand of thought spun out from the knot of cells at the centre of the sail, the one he couldn't see, but knew was there. Julia's teasing lips brushed his.

  And he was standing on a beach of white sand with the deep blue ocean before him, stretching his arms wide in primal welcome to the rising sun, soaking his naked body with its warmth. He dived cleanly into the water, striking out for the shore beyond the far horizon, abandoning the past with giddy joy.

  The ghost haze of solar ions gusted against the alien sail, beginning the long push out to the stars.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The Frankenstein wasp crawled round the metal bar of the conditioning grill, and poised on the cliff-like edge of copper paint facing into the office. Greg could make little sense of what it saw, just smeared outlines, as if he was wearing a glitched photon amp. But the wasp was aware of the empty space ahead, and somewhere out there were flowers, pollen. Sugar tugged at it like a tidal force.

  Greg used his espersense to locate the mind he wanted; four metres from the wasp, slightly below. He pushed the wish into the insect's instinct-governed brain. A need to fly towards the man sitting at the desk. Wings blurred furiously.

  "You just want the stinger changed?" Jools the Tool had asked Greg curiously that morning. He was a small man, dressed all in black. Round gold-rimmed glasses shielded his damp eyes with pink-tinted lenses. His chalk-white skin looked unhealthy, though Greg wrote it off as partly due to the time of day. The sun hadn't risen when he rang the pet shop's bell.

  "Yeah," Greg said. "That's all."

  "So how are you going to control it?"

  "I'm a gland psychic."

  Jools the Tool nodded a grudging acknowledgement, and led him past the cages of sleeping animals to his cubbyhole surgery at the rear of the shop.

  The operation hadn't taken long. Greg stood behind the little Frankenstein surgeon, watching the microscope's flatscreen over his shoulder. It showed the wasp, magnified to thirty centimetres long, held down with silk binding sheaths. Micro-surgical instruments delicately amputated its stinger, and stitched in a wicked-looking hollow dagger to replace it. Blades and clamps
danced with hypnotic agility around the yellow-and-black striped abdomen, responding to the waldo handles which Jools the Tool was caressing.

  "I've primed it with a shot of AMRE7D," he told Greg as the artificial stinger was filled with a clear fluid. "It's a neurotoxin, one of the best. Once it's in the bloodstream, you've got a maximum of twenty seconds before death occurs."

  The back of the man's head was distinguishable now, hair like a logjam, lunar mare of skin. Greg guided the wasp down to the nape of the neck, allowing the insect's own instincts to take over for the landing. When the warmth of the skin pressed against its legs, his mind shouted out the compulsion. The wasp thrust its composite stinger into the skin, expelling the AMRE7D in a single blast.

  Clifford Jepson's hand swatted the wasp, his yell of surprise and pain rattling round the office.

  Greg focused himself on the boiling thought currents. I want you to know something before you die, Jepson, his mind whispered. I want you to know why.

  Clifford Jepson's muscles had locked rigid, maybe from terror, maybe from the neurotoxin. Greg looked out through bugged eyes, feeling throat muscles like iron bands, hands clawing at the chair's leather arms.

  You were offered an honourable chance to end the madness over atomic structuring. You refused it because you thought you could squeeze more money from the deal. You were greedy, Jepson. And that greed killed my friend. It might have been your psycho-cyborg Reiger who pulled the trigger, but you loaded his program, you ran him. Now you're going to die because of it. I'm glad, and I hate you for that as well.

  Greg cancelled the gland's secretion, and opened his eyes. He was sitting in the passenger seat of a navy-blue Lada Sokol, parked in the shade of a Japanese umbrella pine in a big open-air car park. Fifty metres in front of him, the ornate carved stone of the stately home which Globecast used as its European headquarters burned brightly in the mid-morning sun. A flock of white birds were flying through Kent's cloudless azure sky overhead.

  "Did you close the deal?" Col Charnwood asked.

  "Yeah."

  "Good." Col Charnwood flicked the Lada Sokol into gear and drove carefully out of the car park.

  * * * *

  Some time after midnight Charlotte pulled on a white silk robe and went out on to the balcony to enjoy the cool breeze that blew in from the Fens basin. It was so refreshing after the sweltering heat of the day. She let it ruffle her hair as she gazed up at the night sky. The alien solar sail was definitely smaller tonight. It had been crawling away from New London over the last few days, now it was low in the south-east, while the fuzzy patch of the asteroid's archipelago glowed above the western horizon.

  According to the channel newscasts, light pressure from the Sun was constantly accelerating it. She hadn't known that light could exert pressure; apparently it could. A tiny pressure, but the sail's surface area was the size of a small country, making the overall force colossal. In another twenty days it would reach solar escape velocity; after that it could go wherever it chose in the galaxy. Several times since returning from New London, Charlotte had found herself thinking what it must be like having that much freedom. What a wonderful thing to be able to roam the universe at will, searching out wonders and horrors. And to voyage so majestically, sailing on a sunbeam.

  She had never seen a star so gloriously radiant. It was probably bright enough to cast a shadow at night; but Peterborough's permanent light haze made it impossible to know for sure.

  They had a good view of the city from their penthouse in the Castlewood condominium, especially the futureopolis of Prior's Fen Atoll. The day they moved in she spent hours on the balcony staring out at the mega-structures that seemed to float on the green-hued swamp.

  She thought it strange that she had never visited Peterborough before; after all it was an incredible focal point for wealth. But after she arrived, she realized it ordered a different sort of money to the type she was used to. Peterborough's money was active money, it was finance consortium muscle, corporate power, political influence; the only gambling here was the venture capital backing industrial research lab. Nobody hoarded money in Peterborough, they worked it; the static, emasculated trusts which enabled her patrons to glide indulgently through life shrank from this city's vitality.

  Prior's Fen epitomized the new culture, bold, purposeful architecture sticking two defiant fingers up to the dead past. The antithesis of Monaco.

  It had been a long journey between the two cities and the physical distance was the least of the gulf she had bridged. But now she'd found it, she knew she wouldn't be leaving.

  There were stockbrokers to see in the morning. A new chapter of life to begin.

  Victor Tyo had brought Dmitri Baronski's private memory cores with him when he returned from the Prezda with her furniture and clothes and trinkets. "I figured you were the best person to sort through the bytes," he had told her. "The rest of Baronski's girls should be told where they stand. And somehow I don't think they'll be too keen on hearing it from me."

  She'd given every piece of that clothing to a charity shop in Stanground, along with the cheaper jewellery. The other girls she had called one at a time, telling them the way it was now, arranging for them to pick up their cut from Dmitri's Zurich account. But the rest of the data, the finance and industry gossip the old man was supposed to squirt over to the Dolgoprudnensky, that was interesting. She could see some valuable deals opening up if the knowledge was exploited properly by Fabian's cargo agents.

  The breeze was growing chilly now. She went back into the bedroom, sliding the glass door shut behind her. Fragments of the city's street lighting leaked round the edges of the curtains, giving the room's white furniture a phosphorescent hue.

  Fabian was asleep, sprawled belly down across the double bed where she'd left him. She wondered if it was illegal for a guardian to sleep with her ward. More than likely. If only he wasn't so terribly young. But he was hers for three whole years, until he was eighteen. Nothing in her life had lasted three years before. And after three years, well. . . Dreams were part of Peterborough too.

  She smiled down at him, and slipped the robe from her shoulders. He stirred as she slid on to the bed beside him.

  "Fabian," she called softly.

  His eyes opened drowsily, and he grinned up at her. "Am I dreaming?"

  She kissed his brow. "What do you think?"

  * * * *

  Julia combed the sweat-damped hair from his eyes as he lay back on the pillows. He really is very handsome, she thought. Funny I never noticed before. Or was that never wanted to notice before? It would have been complicated.

  Then she frowned, and peered at his face. "I don't believe it! You're looking guilty already."

  "Certainly not," Victor protested. "What you're seeing is plain relief. I thought—"

  "What?" she asked eagerly. It was fun teasing him, she hadn't been free to tease a man like this for a long time. It was fun having him in bed too. Nothing astonishing, but that would come with time. She intended there would be a lot of time from now on.

  Victor shrugged. "Rick."

  "Oh, him. No. He was sweet, and hunky too, of course."

  "Thank you very much, ma'am."

  She giggled. "Not my type, though. Outside of his work, there's nothing of interest about him. Sad really."

  "My heart bleeds."

  She waited a while. "I'm extremely grateful to him, though. I would never have thought of flying the Hexaëmeron away. Lord, the thought of having to make that choice still makes me feel cold."

  "It won't happen again."

  "Thank heavens." She rested her head on his chest. "I'm going to reward Rick, show him just how appreciative I am."

  "How?"

  "Give him his radio telescope, that Steropes he's forever whining about."

  "You serious?"

  "Yes. We know it's not a pointless search any more. That puts a whole new perspective on SETI. Now people have been convinced there is life in the galaxy they'll expect a f
ollow-up. And I want Event Horizon to maintain its leadership in the field."

  "There isn't going to be much doubt about that, I'm afraid. Greg certainly isn't going to come forward to claim any credit for what happened up at New London. And Sinclair is already a channel celebrity with his religious 'cast; telling the world how you tamed the Beast and liberated the New Jerusalem. So that's another brick firmly cemented in the wall of legend. Julia Evans, superwoman."

  "Bugger." She hadn't thought of that aspect. Perhaps Greg. . . No, that wouldn't be fair at all. "Oh well, at least Steropes won't put a strain on my finances now."

  "Too true. That second chamber is quite something, even if the miners didn't appreciate losing their jobs five years ahead of schedule."

  The two of them had walked the length of the second chamber the day after the alien left, their boots kicking up puffs of arid dust. It was a landscape of rock turrets and deep zigzag canyons, delicate arched stone bridges reinforced with cores of solid iron. Instant geology; she'd seen the smoothness of water-etched curves, run her spacesuit glove over weather-chewed redstone outcrops. Yet for all its pristine state, the solid cyclorama engendered a sense of déjà-vu. It was the landscape of her childhood, a composition drawn from memory. There had been few nights when she hadn't sat on the rocks above the First Salvation Church warren and watched the sun set above the desert.

  "All part of the deal," she said. "The alien was me, after all, remember? A completed second chamber gives Event Horizon a considerable financial boost. What did you expect?"

  "Was that really necessary?" he asked quietly. "Showing your memories to that thing?"

  "It was the deal, Victor. How else could we be sure the Hexaëmeron would leave? And not just leave, but travel a long way before it resurrects its planet's species. The Centauri system would be no use. Our own ark starships will be there in less than a century; perhaps even sooner if Beswick ever does work out how to open a wormhole. But with my personality loaded in, I guarantee it won't stop for fifty-sixty light-years. Good enough, I think."