As drones died all around him Abil began to feel numbed by it all, as the waves of faces, all so alike, crisped in the brilliant glare of the flames.
As they worked deeper, though, he began to notice a change. The a.s.sailants here were just as ferocious, but they seemed younger. That was part of the pattern he had been trained to expect. He wished he could find a way to spare the smallest, the most obviously childlike. But these young ones threw themselves on his troopers" flames as eagerly as their elders.
And then, quite suddenly, the troopers burst through a final barrier of drones, and found themselves in the birthing chamber.
It was a vast, darkened room, where ancient fluorescents glowed dimly. The troopers fanned out. They were covered in blood and bits of charred flesh, he saw, leaving b.l.o.o.d.y footprints where they pa.s.sed.
They looked as if they had been born, delivered through that terrible pa.s.sage of death. One flamethrower still flared, but with a gesture Abil ordered it shut off.
In this chamber, people moved through the dark, as naked as those outside. n.o.body came to oppose the troopers. Perhaps it was simply unthinkable for the drones that anybody should harm those who spent their lives here.
Cautiously Abil moved forward, deeper into the gloom. The air was warm and humid; his faceplate misted over.
Women, naked, nestled in shallow pits on the floor, in knots of ten or a dozen. Some of the pits were filled with milky water, and the women floated, relaxed. Attendants, young women and children, moved back and forth, carrying what looked like food and drink. In one corner there were infants, a carpet of them who crawled and toddled. Abil moved among them, a b.l.o.o.d.y pillar.
The women in the pits were all pregnant-tremendouslypregnant, he saw, with immense bellies that must have held three, four, five infants. In one place, a woman was actually giving birth. She stood squat, supported by two helpers. A baby slid easily out from between her legs, to be caught, slapped, and cradled; but before its umbilical was cut another small head was protruding from the woman"s v.a.g.i.n.a.
She seemed in no pain; her expression was dreamy, abstract.
One of the breeder women looked up as he pa.s.sed. She reached up a hand to him, the fingers long and feather-thin. Her limbs were etiolated, spindly; her legs could surely not have supported the weight of her immense, fecund torso. But her face was fully human.
On impulse, curious, he reached up and ran his thumbnail under his chin. His faceplate popped and swung upward. Dense air, moist and hot, pressed in on him.
The smells were extraordinary. He distinguished blood, and milk, and p.i.s.s and s.h.i.t, earthy human smells. There was a stink of burning that might have come from his own suit, a smell of vacuum, or of the battle he had waged in the corridors beyond this place.
And there was something else, something stronger still. Abil had never seen an animal larger than a rat.
But that was how he labeled this smell: a stink like that of a huge rat"s nest, pungent and overpowering.
He looked down at the woman who had reached up to him. Her face really was beautiful, he thought, narrow and delicate, with high cheekbones and large blue eyes. She smiled at him, showing a row of teeth that came to points. He felt warmed. He longed to speak to her.
An attendant leaned over her, a girl who might have been twelve. He thought the girl was kissing the pregnant woman. When the girl pulled away her jaws were opened wide, and a thin rope of some kind of paste, glistening faintly green, pulsed out of her throat, pa.s.sing from her mouth into the breeder"s. It was beautiful, Abil thought, overwhelmed; he had never seen such pure love as between this woman and the girl.
But he, in his clumsy, bloodstained suit, would forever be kept apart from this love. He felt tears well.
He fell to his knees and reached forward with bloodstained gloves. The breeding woman screeched and thrashed backward. The attendant girl, regurgitated paste dribbling from her mouth, instantly hurled herself at him. She caught him off-balance. He fell back, and his head cracked on the ground. He struggled to get up. He had to get back to the mother, to explain.
There was an arm around his throat-a suited arm. He struggled, but his lungs were aching. He heard Denh"s voice call: "Kill the breeders. Move it!" A gloved hand pa.s.sed before Abil"s face, closing his faceplate, shutting out the noise of babies crying, and through its murky pane he saw fire flare once more.
The captain sat on the edge of Abil"s sick bay bed. "Denh is acting corporal for now," Dower said gently.
Abil sighed. "It"s no more than I deserved, sir."
Dower shook her head. "That d.a.m.n curiosity of yours. You certainly made a mistake, but hardly a fatal one. But you weren"t adequately briefed. In a way the fault"s mine. I argue with the Commissaries before every drop. They would tell you grunts nothing if they had the chance, I think, for they believe n.o.body but themneeds to know anything."
"What happened to me, sir?"
"Pheromones."
"Sir?"
"There are many ways to communicate, tar. Such as by scent. You and I are poor at smelling, you know, compared to our senses of touch, sight, hearing. We can distinguish only a few scent qualities: sweet, fetid, sour, musky, dry . . . But those Coalescent drones have been stuck in their hole in the ground forfifteen thousand years . Now, the human species itself is only four or five times older than that. There has been plenty of time for evolutionary divergence."
"And when I cracked my faceplate-"
"You were overwhelmed with messages you couldn"t untangle." Dower leaned closer. "What was it like?"
Abil thought back. "I wanted to stay there, sir. To be with them. To belike them." He shuddered. "I let you down."
"There"s no shame, tar. I don"t think you"re going to make a corporal, though; command isn"t for you."
Dower"s metal Eyes glistened. "You weren"t betrayed by fear. You were betrayed by your curiosity- perhaps imagination. You had toknow what it was like in there, didn"t you? And for that you risked your life, and the lives of your unit."
Abil tried to sit up. "Sir, I-"
"Take it easy." Dower pushed him back, gently, to his bed. "I told you, there"s no shame. I"ve been watching you. It"s one of the responsibilities of command, tar. You have to test those under you, all the time, test and a.s.sess. Because the only way the Expansion is going to prosper is if we make the best use of our resources. And I don"t believe the best use ofyou is to stick you down a hole in charge of a bunch of grunts." Dower leaned closer. "Have you ever considered working for the Commission for Historical Truth?"
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 s.p.a.ce, 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 carca.s.ses were hauled out.
Dower saw his expression. "There were probably a billion drones in that one hive alone. Abillion . We"ll be lucky to ship out more than a hundred thousand."
"A hundred thousand-is thatall , 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 pa.s.sed 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, atrillion people on this light-starved planet alone-all living off the sc.r.a.pings from the thermal vents . . ."
"Makes you think, doesn"t it? Oh, the Coalescents are efficient. But theyare 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 wherewe 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 ent.i.ties 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 pa.s.s 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 cafe where you can sip coffee or c.o.ke 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 isnever 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 a.n.a.lyses 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, themamma-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.