Текст книги "Burning Paradise"
Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson
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The next day the shift boss took me aside and gave me a lecture about minding my own business, do my work and let the truckers do theirs, etcetera. And if I wanted to keep my job I should shut my mouth and get on with it. Which didn’t really bother me because I’d got to the point where I’d saved enough of my salary to move on. And it looked like there’d be no hard feelings if I did.
Which might have been the end of the story if Bastián hadn’t spent one of those Chilean holidays, I forget which one, Feast of the Virgin, Feast of Peter and Paul, Feast of What ever, in Antofagasta with his buddies from the port where he used to work. He came back with a couple of bottles of Pisco. No drinking allowed in the camp but he bribed a guard. So he and I sat up one Friday night and shared a bottle, out behind the ware houses where there was nobody to see us. Getting steadily drunker and complaining about the job. When up comes that light again, brighter this time. Like a wire strung between the desert and the stars. And somehow we get the stupid idea of taking one of the Toyotas in the motor pool and driving east, at least a little ways, just to see if we can see what’s going on.
You know what they say about curiosity, right? Killed the fucking cat.
Eugene Dowd interrupted his monologue to attend to the actual painting of the car, and the noise of the compressor and the stink of the paint drove Cassie outside. Thomas was fascinated by Dowd’s work on the car, and Cassie agreed to let him watch as long as he stayed behind the glass door of the upstairs office—a ventilator built into the wall of the garage sucked most of the urethane mist out of the building, but Cassie didn’t want him breathing even a little of it. Beth volunteered to stay with Thomas where she, too, could watch Dowd. She had been watching Dowd all day, Cassie had noticed, and Dowd had returned every one of her frequent glances, with interest.
Outside, the sky was cloudless and the air was tolerably warm for December. Cassie walked past Dowd’s noisy wind chimes, around a corner of the garage to a patch of packed brown earth, sheltered from the wind, where a pair of ancient lawn chairs had been set up. She was surprised to find Leo in one of them, reading.
Reading a book. Reading the book her uncle had written, The Fisherman and the Spider. She gaped at the tattered yellow jacket. “That’s mine, Leo—where’d you get that?”
He looked up, startled. “Hey, Cassie.”
“The book,” she said grimly.
“Oh. Sorry. Yeah, it’s yours. I grabbed it from the hotel room in Jordan Landing.”
Cassie had thought the book was lost. She didn’t know whether to be grateful to Leo for saving it or angry that he hadn’t bothered to give it back.
He added, a little sheepishly, “I didn’t think you’d mind…”
She sat down in the brittle webbing of the second chair. She imagined herself falling through, getting her behind stuck in the aluminum struts. That would be graceful. “No. I mean, I guess it’s okay. But I do want it back. You’re actually reading it?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, this is me, actually reading it. That surprises you?”
“I don’t know. I just never pictured you…”
“Reading books?”
Frankly no, though she was less surprised now than she once would have been. His finger marked his place in The Fisherman and the Spider, about halfway through. She said, “Well, what do you think of it?”
“It’s your uncle’s book, right?”
“Right.”
“About insects.”
“He studied them.”
“But really about the hypercolony.”
She was pleased that he understood this. “In a way, yeah.”
He turned his head up toward the sky. “I was thinking about the way they talked about it in school. The great discovery. Marconi bouncing signals from Newfoundland to France. The radio-propagative layer.”
Cassie nodded.
“But it’s alive. And that’s what your uncle’s book is about, at least between the lines. The hypercolony as a kind of insect hive.”
It was an idea Cassie had struggled with for a long time. She could grasp that the hypercolony was a diffuse cloud of tiny cells surrounding the Earth, each cell functioning like a neuron in a kind of brain. A huge, peculiar brain, surrounding the Earth. Okay, she got that. And it intercepted human radio signals, analyzed them, subtly altered them, and bounced them back in ways people found useful.
All that was basic Society stuff. And since the hypercolony was a sort of brain, she accepted that it might be intelligent. It had to be intelligent, to do what it did. Some early Society theorists had even tried to make contact with it: they had broadcast signals on dormant frequencies, sending out simple mathematical formulas or even questions in basic English, hoping for a response. But no response had ever come.
It was the Society’s mathematicians and cyberneticists and in no small part her uncle who had come up with an explanation: the hypercolony functioned without conscious volition of any kind. The hypercolony didn’t know anything about itself or its environment, any more than a carrot understands the concept of organic farming or the color orange. It just lived and grew, mindlessly exploiting the resources available to it: vacuum, rock, sunlight, other living things. Its powers were in some respects almost godlike, but it was an insect god—mindless and potentially deadly. Her uncle had known that, and though he couldn’t mention the hypercolony by name in his published book, Leo was right: it was there between the lines, on every page.
He gave her a brooding look. “You’d think it would be hard to hate something you can’t see or touch. But it’s not. I do hate the fucking thing. I hate it as much as my father does. He used to say, given that we know what we know, the only honorable thing to do is declare war.”
“In a way, isn’t that what we’ve done?”
“More than in a way. The man I shot… he was a casualty of war. Along with everybody who died in ’07 and everybody who died last month.”
Of course Leo was still dwelling on the man he’d shot. So was Cassie. She thought the act was forgivable even if their defense would never stand up in a court of law. She accepted her share of responsibility, and she knew that in Leo’s place she might have behaved the same way. But the memory was still too awful to contemplate. The blood, the furtive way they had tried to dispose of the body. And in the end, even if they shared responsibility, it was Leo who had pulled the trigger.
He looked at the book in his hand, then offered it to Cassie. She shook her head. “Finish reading if it you want.”
“You ever meet your uncle?”
“A few times. Before ’07. But I don’t remember much about him. Uncle Ethan and Aunt Ris visited sometimes, back when I lived with my parents. He was just a quiet guy who smiled a lot and didn’t say much.” And since Leo had raised the subject, Cassie allowed herself to broach a delicate subject: “My uncle was pretty close to your father. According to Aunt Ris, Werner Beck was pretty much the head of the whole Correspondence Society.”
“I bet she said more than that.”
“Well—”
“It’s okay, Cassie. I know my father has enemies.”
“I’m not sure enemy is the word. She said he was brilliant.” Which was true, though her other words had included arrogant and narcissistic.
“He’s not shy about telling people things they need to hear, whether they want to hear them or not.”
“He wrote to you, right?”
“Once a month. Long letters. He called it my real education.”
“How come you didn’t live with him?”
“After ’07, he figured I wouldn’t be safe anywhere near him. He sent me to live with a cousin of his in Cincinnati. A married couple, no kids, they didn’t know anything about the Society. He paid them pretty generously to look after me. They put me up in a spare room and enrolled me in school. Decent people, but they didn’t really want me there… and it wasn’t where I wanted to be. So as soon as I was legal I bought a bus ticket to Buffalo and got a job washing dishes. I knew there were survivors there who could help me out. My father told me about your aunt and the people she was connected with, how to get in touch with them. He didn’t really approve, but I think he understood.”
“But we weren’t what you hoped we’d be?”
“Well. You know what my father used to say about the Society? He said it was social club when it should have been an army.”
Possibly true. “That changed in ’07,” Cassie said.
“No, not for the better. The murders were obviously meant to drive the Society into hiding, and that’s what happened. We cringed like dogs. Quoting my father. Which is what I found in Buffalo, a bunch of whipped dogs…” He gave Cassie a look that seemed both sheepish and defiant. “Anyway, that’s how it seemed. Don’t do anything rash. Whisper. Mourn, but don’t get angry.”
“Some of us did get angry, Leo. Even if it didn’t show. Some of us were angry all along.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.” He shifted his legs, making the ancient lawn chair creak. The only other sound was the wind furiously tangling the wind chimes. “Anyway, what could I say? My father survived ’07. I wasn’t an orphan. I could hardly complain to someone like—”
“Like me?”
“Someone who’d seen what you’d seen.”
Well, yes, Cassie thought. She had caught one indelible glimpse of her parents’ slack and bloodied bodies before Aunt Ris covered her eyes and pulled her away. You can’t unsee something like that. But what did that buy you? Only bad dreams and guilt. A clinging sadness she could never quite escape.
But anger, too. We never lacked for anger. “Well,” she said, “we’re in the same boat now.”
“Orphans?” Leo asked sharply. “Is that what you mean?”
“No. I mean—”
“I don’t know for sure he’s dead. But whether is or whether he isn’t, he wouldn’t have sent me here unless he wanted me to finish his work.”
“You really think Eugene Dowd can help us do that?”
“Dowd seems to think we’re here to help him. But my father trusted him.”
“To do what?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Leo said, “when he finishes his story.”
16
ON THE ROAD
SOMEWHERE ON THE TURNPIKE WEST OF Columbus, Ohio, the events of the last few days settled on Nerissa like an unbearable weight. Suddenly breathless, she asked Ethan to pull over. She was out of the car before he finished braking, falling to her knees next to a weed-clogged drainage ditch. A barrel stave had tightened around her chest. Her head felt heavy. The sun was viciously bright, the noise of passing trucks cruelly loud. She put her hands into the yellow grass, leaned forward and vomited up the remains of this morning’s breakfast.
When the spasm passed she shut her eyes and took small sips of the chilly December air. The darkness that formed behind her eyelids was cavernous and oddly comforting. She didn’t move until she felt the pressure of Ethan’s hand on her shoulder.
“Ris? Are you all right?”
Obviously not. But in the sense he meant… well, she was recovering. “Help me up, please, Ethan.”
She leaned into him until her dizziness passed. Back to the car, then, where she rinsed her mouth with bottled water, spitting it onto the verge.
Funny how this feeling had snuck up on her. It wasn’t the mem ory of the sim’s awful death that had triggered it. It wasn’t even the horrific inference she had drawn from her meeting with Mrs. Bayliss, the idea that a human womb could be shanghaied by an alien organism. What had sent her reeling out of the car was simply the thought of her niece and nephew, of Cassie and Thomas, friendless and vulnerable and believing she was dead.
Not that it was exactly a new thought, but she had kept it at a safe distance in the frenzied activity of the past few days. But time, or the drowsy, sun-warmed comfort of the moving car, had lowered her guard.
She allowed herself another sip of water as Ethan steered back into traffic. A pair of eighteen-wheel trucks barreled past, lords of the turnpike on this chilly weekday afternoon. She found herself thinking of the custody hearings back in ’07, held in the aftermath of the massacre. A panel of Family Health and Social Welfare workers had reviewed Nerissa’s suitability as a caregiver for her orphaned niece and nephew. Nerissa had testified to her willingness to make a new home for them, had promised they would receive any counseling or therapy they might need. And those vows had been authentic; she had made them without reservation, though she was less than certain of what FHSW called her “parenting potential.” In the end, the tribunal had expressed more confidence in her ability to raise two kids than she actually felt.
She had always admired her sister’s devotion to her children, even occasionally envied it; but children had never been on Nerissa’s agenda, except in a vague maybe-someday sense. Her career and her troubles with Ethan had rendered the question moot. Then, suddenly, she found herself responsible for two traumatized children. She had taken a leave of absence from the University after the murders and she knew that going back would make her a sitting target, should the killers return. A new city, responsibility for Cassie and Thomas, the unfathomable threat hanging over them all, not to mention her own burden of traumatic memories… some nights she had come awake in the sweaty certainty that she couldn’t handle any of it: the kids would despise her; she would be reduced to poverty; they would all be butchered in their sleep.
But it hadn’t happened that way. The kids had slowly adapted. For months Cassie had covered her ears at the slightest mention of her parents; she had been clingy, reluctant even to walk to school by herself. Slowly, however, her confidence had crept back. And so, in equal measure, had Nerissa’s. It was as if they had learned a silent magic: how to draw strength from each other in a way that left each of them stronger. Thomas, though he was younger than Cassie, had recovered even more quickly. There were difficult moments, of course, sudden and unprovoked outbursts of tears or anger, demands to be taken back to his real home, his real mother… but Thomas had been willing to accept Cassie’s consoling hugs and, later, Nerissa’s. She remembered the first time he had come crying into her arms. The surprising warmth and weight of him, the damp patch his tears left on her shoulder.
Protecting them had become the central business of her life. It was what was left, after so much else had been taken from her. And it was a job for which she possessed, to her surprise, a certain aptitude.
But ultimately she had failed at it. She had been away from home the night the sims came back. And for purely selfish reasons. An evening at the theater with John Vance—Beth’s father, who was one of the Society’s singletons, separated from his wife after ’07. They had seen a Performing Arts Center production of Twelfth Night. Then drinks at John’s place. And then to bed, in the secure knowledge that Cassie could look after Thomas, that it was good for Cassie to feel in charge once in a while, to take on some of the responsibility she was beginning to assume as an adult… and other self-serving rationalizations.
You let your vigilance lapse, Nerissa thought. She had felt safe enough to let a little buried resentment leak out—resentment of a duty she had never wanted but couldn’t refuse; resentment that she had been relegated to a supporting role in the lives of these children rather than a starring role in her own. She had chosen to slake her loneliness in the company of a man for whom she felt nothing more than a passing affection. And as a result Cassie and Thomas were gone. Not dead (please God, not dead), but out there somewhere in the company of Werner Beck’s cocksure son and John Vance’s sullen daughter—bound, in all likelihood, for one of Werner Beck’s safe houses. Assuming Beck himself hadn’t been killed. The sims had been more selective this time around, but surely Beck was one of their primary targets. Because Beck, as Ethan had always insisted, was the heart of the Society. Its mainspring, its motivating force. Its most dedicated and most dangerous member.
The turnpike ribboned through Ohio into Indiana. By dusk the sky had grown clear, the air colder. Outside Indianapolis they passed a local radio station, its broadcast antenna aimed like a steel flower at the meridian, whispering to the radiosphere, which would whisper its message back to the neighboring counties and suburbs… to the entire world, given a powerful-enough signal.
Ethan tuned in the station in time for a newscast. The world was facing a nervous and unusual Christmas. In northern Africa, General Othmani’s forces had encircled and destroyed a brigade of League of Nations peacekeepers. In Europe, a conference on the Balkan crisis had adjourned without reaching an accord. And the Russian Commonwealth and the Pan-Asian Alliance were butting heads over an oil port on the Sea of Okhostsk, with reports of an exchange of artillery fire.
None of these small crises was unusual in itself, but the combination seemed ominous. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s starting to unravel,” Ethan said. “The peace they gave us.”
“Imposed on us. And I’m not sure we should call it peace.”
Pax formicae, she thought. The peace of the anthill.
“If any of what Bayliss said is true—if the hypercolony is infected
and at war with itself—that would obviously affect the way it manages the world.”
“Or else it’ll all be resolved by New Year’s.” Nerissa shrugged. “No way of knowing.”
Then the state and local news. The Indiana legislature had passed a bud get extension. The Farm Alliance was threatening to boycott the Midwest Corn Exchange unless prices stabilized. State Police were participating in the search for four young persons sought in a murder-assault case. The weather would be clear and seasonably cool for the next few days.
“If we drive through the night,” Ethan said, switching off the radio, “I think we can make Werner’s place by morning.”
She had met Werner Beck only once, at a Correspondence Society gathering in Boston before the massacres of ’07. Brief as it was, the meeting had soured her on the Society and helped derail her relationship with Ethan.
The Correspondence Society, true to its paranoid principles, was really two organizations. The majority of its members were academics or scientists who used the mailing list to share unpopular or even whimsical ideas related to their research. For those people it was little more than an academic equivalent of the Masons or the Shriners: a notionally secret social club, useful as a way of networking with other professionals. They weren’t required to take seriously the idea of the radiosphere as a living entity.
Those who did take the idea seriously were more likely to be members of the Society’s inner circle, numbering no more than five hundred individuals in universities and research facilities throughout the world. Invariably, their work had confronted them with evidence they could neither safely publish nor honestly ignore. Ethan, for example. Ethan had been one of those outer-circle Society academics until his work with Antarctic ice cores. He had shared some of his results with Werner Beck, who had pushed him into conducting isolations of the chondritic dust he discovered in his samples. It was Werner Beck who had recruited him into the inner circle.
The inner circle didn’t hold conferences in the conventional sense, but every few years there was an informal gathering somewhere in the world. That year, Beck had booked rooms in a motel in Framingham outside of Boston. It wasn’t necessary to rent function rooms—the Society attendees amounted to six men and two women (four from the U.S., one from Denmark, two from China and one from India); the entire gathering would fit comfortably in a single hotel room. Each delegate was scheduled to present a paper deemed too sensitive for the larger Society mailing list. Ethan would be reporting on his work with the ice cores; Beck, on the cultures he had succeeded in growing from Ethan’s extractions.
Ethan had introduced her to Beck in the motel’s coffee shop. She had expected someone slightly larger than life. And maybe he was, but only in the metaphorical sense: Beck was no taller than Nerissa herself, and she topped out at five and a half feet. His hair was dark and thinning. He wore a beard: a uniform quarter-inch of facial hair so carefully manicured that it had a topiary quality. He dressed casually, in spotless jeans and a white shirt open at the neck, and in contrast to most of the attendees he looked as if he’d spent some time at the gym—broad shoulders, thick upper arms.
His eyes were his most striking feature. There was nothing nervous or tentative about them. He looked at her steadily and with a bluntness that began to make her uncomfortable. Then he smiled. “You must be Mrs. Iverson.”
Ethan, typically, had forgotten to introduce her. “Nerissa,” she said. “Hi.”
“Werner Beck.” He shook her hand briskly and briefly, then turned to Ethan. “Last time we met you were single. You’ve done all right for yourself.”
“Thank you,” Ethan said—a smidgen too obsequiously, Nerissa thought.
“It’s unusual to bring a spouse to one of these events.”
“We’re both on a sort of sabbatical. Well, a vacation. After this weekend we’re headed to Hawaii. Two weeks at Turtle Bay.”
“Sounds nice. Anyway, welcome, Ethan. We have a lot to talk about. Mrs. Iverson, I hope you don’t feel left out. But Boston’s a big city. I’m sure you can keep yourself busy.”
It was a dismissal, and not a particularly gracious one. Nerissa fought the urge to say something condescending in return. She had hoped Ethan might stick up for her, but all he offered was a nervous laugh. “Ris knows the city pretty well—she’s lived here most of her life.”
“I’m sure. Anyway, we have our first gathering this afternoon at one. It’s Wickramasinghe’s session—he’ll be talking about organic inclusions in meteorite fragments. A great lead-up to your work.” Beck’s eyes flicked back to Nerissa. “Nice meeting you, Mrs. Iverson, and I hope to see you again soon.”
“Well?” Ethan asked, after Beck had left the table.
She shrugged. “He’s well-groomed.”
“That’s your impression of him? Well-groomed?”
“A little oily.” Since you ask.
“He’s just trying to make a good impression.”
“On the unexpected spousal baggage?”
“That’s not fair.”
Perhaps not. The Society, Ethan had told her, didn’t have a strict policy on how much information members could share with their families. But it was understood that talking too freely could endanger one’s career—that was why the Society had come to exist in the first place. And much of what the Society’s inner circle had learned would have sounded bizarre or even irrational to an outsider. Nerissa understood that she would have to tread carefully here, perhaps especially around a key player like Werner Beck.
But she resented being treated as an interloper. Or worse, a potential spy. As if she cared what these people discussed at their meetings. As if their ideas would ever be more to her than an unsettling and highly speculative hypothesis.
“Anyhow,” Ethan said, “it’s his ideas that count. And he’s a solid researcher. Since his wife died a few years ago, his work is all he has. And he can afford to devote himself to it.”
“He’s a widower?”
“Raising a son by himself.”
She allowed Ethan to change the subject. They talked about their plans for Oahu. Nerissa imagined a room with bamboo furniture, a breeze, the distant sound of the sea. And herself on a shaded veranda with a drink (something with gin and an umbrella in it) to extinguish any lingering thoughts about the forces that influenced human events.
On Saturday she wandered through the secondhand bookshops in Old Boston. Nerissa found bookstores soothing, especially antiquarian bookstores—the smell of old ink, the muted acoustics. She wanted something smart but not too challenging, and she eventually settled on a tattered second printing of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister. Back at the motel she staked out a table by the window of the bar and began to read. She had not reached the end of the first chapter when she became aware of a looming shadow. A woman of, she guessed, forty-something, carrying a drink and blinking from behind an impressively dense pair of eyeglasses. “You’re Ethan’s wife, right?”
Nerissa nodded cautiously.
“I thought so. I saw you with Ethan and Beck the other day.” Her voice was small (birdlike, Nerissa thought) and she spoke with a French accent. “I’m Amélie. Amélie Fournier. I’m one of the—well, you know. I’m with the Society. Do you mind if I sit with you? Or if you’d rather be alone—”
“No, please sit. I’m Nerissa.”
Amélie lowered herself into a chair. “Thank you. I’m playing hooky from the meeting. Is that the right expression? Playing hooky? I find I can endure only so much of staring into the abyss.”
“The abyss?”
“I mean the deep of the sky. And what lives there.” Amélie
wrinkled her face, an expression not quite approximating a smile. “Of course, I don’t know how much Ethan has discussed with you…”
“My husband and I don’t keep secrets.”
“Really? That would be unusual. But of course I shouldn’t be talking about these things at all. Mr. Beck would be upset with me. But I discover I don’t really care. I’m tired of Mr. Beck. I prefer the company of the unenthusiastic. By which I mean someone who is not so highly partisan. Mr. Beck considers himself a warrior. In his eyes we are all unsatisfactory soldiers. Some of us are reluctant to be soldiers at all, much to his disgust. I’m sorry, would you rather talk about something else? I can be a bore when I drink. People tell me so.”
“Not at all. It’s refreshing to get another point of view.”
“As opposed to your husband’s?”
“My husband’s opinion of Mr. Beck is somewhat higher than yours.”
“Yes, I am in a minority. I admit it. I think there are truths Mr. Beck is unfortunately ignoring.”
“Such as?”
Amélie hesitated. She ran a hand through her hair, which was cut in a style Nerissa hadn’t seen before, like sleek dark wings. “Each of us at this meeting represents a certain discipline. Mine is astronomy. I am an astronomer. Have you ever looked through a telescope, Nerissa?”
“Once or twice.”
“Optical telescopes are old-fashioned. Nowadays we look at the sky at invisible wavelengths. Or with photographic plates. The naked eye is an unreliable observer. But I was raised by a man whose hobby was astronomy. We lived in Normandy, in the west of the country. My father owned a large property there. Farmland. Far from the cities. The sky was dark at night. The stars were a constant presence. I became fascinated with the stars, as was my father. He used to say that there was something noble about the act of looking through a telescope. Human beings are small animals on an insignificant planet, but when we look at the sky—when we understand that the stars are distant suns—we begin to encompass an entire universe.
“As a child I was enthralled. Of course, I thought about the possibility of other worlds circling those distant suns. Inhabited worlds, perhaps. Planets perhaps with civilizations like our own, but more primitive or more advanced. Childish fantasies, but even a scientist may entertain such ideas.
“As an adult I discovered that a career in modern astronomy was more prosaic than I expected. My post-graduate project was a study of the propagative layer, the radiosphere, using high-frequency interferometry. My work met with resistance. It was hard to get cooperation or research time on the larger dish antennae. The details don’t matter—a tenured colleague from another university became aware of my work and introduced me to the Correspondence Society.” Amélie smiled ruefully. “Much was explained.”
“You believed what they told you? About the radiosphere being alive?”
“They offered me the evidence and allowed me to draw my own conclusion. Don’t you believe it?”
“I’m not a scientist. I guess you could say Ethan convinced me. His conviction convinced me.”
“Life,” Amélie said, “not of this world, and almost near enough to touch. At first it was only a surmise, but the evidence is now conclusive. Thanks in part to the work of your husband. The small seeds embedded in ancient ice cores. Think of that, a sort of gentle snow of alien life, very diffuse, sifting down from the sky, accumulating over centuries. And not dead, but still in some sense living. We are enclosed in an organism, which facilitates our communication and moves us, as a species, in a certain direction.”
Herds us, Ethan had once said, the way certain ants herd aphids.
“It’s a marvelous, a terrifying, an utterly unpalatable truth.” Amélie waved a hand at the sky—well, the ceiling—and came within an inch of knocking her drink to the floor. “For some years now we have consoled ourselves with the idea that the relationship between ourselves and this entity is symbiotic. Do you know that word? Mutually beneficial. It preserves and enhances the peace of the world, and in return… ah, what it takes in return is a matter of some debate. But Mr. Beck is more pessimistic. He suspects the relationship is purely parasitical. What the hypercolony wants, it will eventually take. Its intervention in our affairs is entirely selfish. If it wants us to be unwarlike, it’s so we won’t develop the weapons we might use to defend ourselves.”
“You think that’s true?”
“I don’t know. The evidence is controversial. But consider the implication, if what Mr. Beck believes is true. There is a form of life that is distributed throughout galactic space, and it depends for its survival on the exploitation of civilizations like our own. What does that mean?”
“I suppose… well, that civilizations like ours must be relatively common.”
“Yes, perhaps. At least common enough to have played a role in the evolution of this entity. This parasitical entity. This successful parasitical entity. The parasite is here, all around us—” Amélie leaned close enough that Nerissa could smell the alcohol on her breath. “But where are its previous victims? Where are these other civilizations like our own? Why haven’t they warned us against it? Why aren’t they here to help us?”
