Текст книги "Burning Paradise"
Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 20 страниц)
26
ANTOFAGASTA
CASSIE AND THOMAS AND BETH CAME into the kitchen, staring at the syringe and the disposable needles on the table. Nerissa wanted to stare too, but she forced herself to look away. “What do you mean to do with those?”
“Calm down.” Beck’s expression was impassive, his face the same assembly of clenched muscles and coolly evaluative eyes that had always made him seem so naturally authoritative. “I need to perform a test. It’s not hard to understand. May I explain?”
You’d fucking better! She waited for him to go on.
“After the first round of attacks I had an opportunity to perform an autopsy on a simulacrum. A sim isn’t much more than a human body with a core of green matter running through it, concentrated in the skull and the trunk but extending into the extremities. A hypodermic needle in the calf muscle of a sim will aspirate a small amount of that green matter. The same penetration in a human being just kicks back a few drops of blood, less than you’d lose to a sample at the doctor’s office.”
“You are not,” Nerissa said, “sticking a needle into me or any child I’m responsible for.”
“I’m afraid I have to. Ethan and Leo were almost ambushed at the mail drop in Mazatlan, even though that location was known to just a few of us. Before we set out into the Atacama—or before you fly back to the United States—I need to know that no one in this room has communicated our plans to the hypercolony.”
“What, you think I’m a sim? Or Cassie? Or your own son?”
“I don’t think so, and I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I just want certainty. Isn’t that worth a little inconvenience? I got the idea from you, Mrs. Iverson.”
“From me!”
“From what you told me about your interview with the mother of the sim in Pennsylvania. Given that sims gestate in human hosts, the fact that we all have well-established family histories means nothing.”
“We all have long histories with the Correspondence Society, too. Doesn’t that count?”
“Of course it does, but not in the way you’re suggesting. Society researchers have been working with cell colonies ever since Ethan isolated the Antarctic samples. We’ve cultivated them in quantity, and with what seemed like reasonable caution, given that there was no obvious risk of infection. But we were wrong about that. We were almost certainly exposed. Any of us could have been infected, and we might have passed that infection to our families.”
“Ethan and I have no children.”
“No. But your sister did.”
Nerissa saw Cassie’s eyes widen as she worked out the implication. Thomas just looked puzzled.
“You are not doing this.” Nerissa took her niece’s hand, her nephew’s hand. “Cassie, pack what you need and help your brother do the same. We’re leaving.”
“I can’t allow that,” Beck said.
“You think you can stop us?”
“Eugene?” Beck said. “Mind the door.”
Dowd smiled thinly and moved to block the entranceway. He tugged back his shirt to reveal a pistol crammed into the waistband of his jeans, a gesture that looked to Nerissa both laughably theatrical and insanely, creepily threatening. “What, he’s going to shoot us?”
“I surely hope not. There’s absolutely no need for it. But we’re at war, whether you like it or not. Declare your objections, but please cooperate. We’re talking about a momentary discomfort. Do it and have done with it. Then Eugene will drive you and the children to the airport and you can forget about all this.”
“Is this why you sent Ethan away? He would never let you get away with this.”
“If you like, you can watch me perform the test on myself before you submit to it.”
Nerissa thought about Eugene at the door. From what she had seen and heard of Dowd’s behavior toward Beth, he was callous and potentially violent. But she doubted he’d shoot an unarmed woman. Unless he thinks refusing the test means I’m not human. Dowd had killed sims in the desert, according to Beck. And he was anxious to kill more. Was it worth the risk of testing his conviction?
She wished she had even a moment more to think this through. But Beck was already reaching for the box of syringes.
“Aunt Ris?” Cassie said.
Leo stepped forward.
“If you have to do this,” he said to his father, “you can start with me.”
Beck carried the syringe, the disposable needles, a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, and a package of adhesive bandages into a small room at the back of the house. The room, probably meant for storage, had been fitted with a wooden desk and two chairs. A narrow door, locked, faced onto the alley behind the house. There was no window. A fluorescent ceiling bar washed the room with pale, uncertain light.
Beck took the chair behind the desk and gestured his son into the chair opposite him. He would have preferred to start with the Iverson woman, since she was the main stumbling block. But Leo had volunteered, so Leo it would be. He took a pistol from the top left drawer, examined it to make sure it was loaded and ready to fire, then put it on the desk next to the syringe.
Leo looked from the pistol to his father and back again. “Really?”
“Before we get started, let me ask you a question. Have you been sleeping with Cassie Iverson?”
Leo stared and said nothing.
“At this point you’re allowed to tell me it’s none of my business.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“I ask because I know your loyalties might be divided right now. You want to protect Cassie. Naturally enough. But she doesn’t need your protection. There’s nothing dangerous about this. I’ll show you. You can see how it works. Maybe you can help when we do the others.”
Beck pulled his chair away from the desk and rolled up the cuff of his pants. Then he dampened a tissue with alcohol and swabbed a patch of pale skin on the calf of his left leg.
“The body of a sim has to appear fully human, and it has to be able to pass as human even after trivial injuries, bumps and scratches and so forth. That’s why the largest deposits of green matter are protected by the skull and torso. At the extremities, the green matter runs thinner. It forms a kind of sac around the bones of the leg, for instance. So the needle—” He extracted a sterile needle from its package, screwed it into the barrel of the syringe, flicked off the protective cap. “The needle has to reach the bone.”
He pushed the needle into his leg. The penetration was painful but not unbearable. “The green matter is protected by a membrane where it interfaces with human muscle and fat, so I need to make sure I’ve actually penetrated the sac, if it exists. It takes a certain amount of pressure.” He pushed until he felt the electric scrape of the needle against his femur. “If you want to make sure I’m not cheating you can do the rest yourself—pull back the plunger and aspirate a little blood—”
“No,” Leo said in a choked voice.
“Then I’ll do it.” He allowed a few drops of blood to well into the
barrel of the syringe. Red and quite human. He withdrew the needle. A bead of blood swelled from the puncture point. He daubed it with a tissue and covered the spot with a bandage. “That’s it. Okay? When we finish here you can tell your girlfriend and her nervous aunt how simple it is.”
“Maybe so, but—”
“Now it’s your turn. Roll up your cuff.”
“Do you really think—I mean do you honestly think I’m one of them?”
Beck dropped the used syringe into a wastebasket and peeled a fresh one out of its sleeve. “I’m not doing this because I suspect anyone of anything. I would prefer to trust my instincts. But people get killed that way. And if sims come into existence by parasitizing a woman’s womb—”
“You think I parasitized my mother’s womb?”
Beck paused with the syringe in his hand and gazed steadily at his son. “No. Of course not. But we have to be sure.”
“You wouldn’t be doing this if she was still alive. If she was still alive maybe you wouldn’t have gone so fucking crazy.”
“That’s a disappointing answer.”
It was an insult Beck would never have taken from anyone else. And it was grotesquely untrue. Mina had never had that kind of influence over him. Beck had married her when he was a student, not long after he had been introduced to the Correspondence Society. If he had ever loved her—and he believed he once had—that love had been undermined and ultimately destroyed by her contempt for his work. They had talked about divorce, but before they could act on it she had been killed in the accident that carried her car down the steep embankment of a California turnpike and into a sturdy spruce, one branch of which penetrated both the windshield and the pale pink arch of her throat.
Beck had been thinking about the accident lately. For years he had tried very hard to forget it, but recent events had provoked some unavoidable speculation. At the time of the accident Leo had been five years old. “Do you remember the day your mother died?”
“Not really.”
“You were with her.”
“Not in the car.”
No, not in the car, at least not when the accident happened. The story, as the State Police pieced it together from Leo’s teary account, was that Mina had pulled over to the verge because the boy needed to pee. (They had been many miles from the nearest rest stop and Mina would never have insisted that Leo simply hold it in; in Mina’s view, Leo’s needs had to be met as soon as they were announced.) Leo had scuttled into the bushes and had probably been fumbling at his fly when a sixteen-wheel cargo truck taking tight curve at an unsafe speed sounded its air horn.
The truck had missed the idling car by a generous margin, but Mina, constitutionally nervous and surely startled, had apparently put the vehicle into gear and tried to steer it farther from the road. Maybe she had stepped too hard on the accelerator, or maybe she had been looking over her shoulder instead of watching where she was going. In any case the car had gathered speed, sledding on wet summer grass to the brink of the embankment and then over it. When the police arrived they found Leo standing in the bushes, his jeans rank with urine and tears running down his face. He had been treated for shock before Beck was allowed to take him home.
“Do you remember where she was taking you that day?”
“No. And I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”
“She was taking you to the doctor.”
“I wasn’t sick.”
“I know you weren’t. I told Mina so. But she wouldn’t believe me.”
Leo had been a healthy boy, but in Mina’s eyes he was perpetually fragile and endangered. On that July day she had been concerned about a bump on Leo’s leg where he had bruised it jumping a rail fence in a friend’s backyard. Their family doctor had diagnosed a simple hematoma and told her the lump would disappear in a few days, but Mina somehow talked him into scheduling an X-ray at a local hospital. She had been driving Leo to that appointment on the day of the accident.
“I know I haven’t been particularly successful as a father.” For nine years between Mina’s death and the 2007 murders Beck had clothed, fed and schooled his son to the best of his ability. But it wasn’t in his nature to be a nurturing parent. His methods had been strictly pedagogical. “I’ve always trusted you. That’s not in question. But you have to take this test, Leo. We all do.”
“You think I might have killed my mother?”
Beck wasn’t sure how a five-year-old Leo could have accomplished that, given the circumstances. But Leo was the only witness to what had actually happened. “I just need you to roll up your cuff, son. I need to see a drop of blood. That’s all.”
Leo looked at his father, at the syringe in his father’s hand, at the pistol on his father’s desk. “I don’t know who the fuck you are anymore. Maybe I never did.”
Cassie joined Aunt Ris on the sofa opposite the door where Eugene Dowd stood guard. Beth sat cross-legged on the carpet, thumbing through a Spanish-language celebrity magazine; Thomas sat next to her, brooding.
Cassie needed to tell Aunt Ris how she felt about Leo. She was on the verge of making a decision Aunt Ris would almost certainly resist, and Cassie wanted her aunt to understand it even if she didn’t agree with it. She was afraid of many things at this moment, but she was most afraid of seeming ungrateful or unloving to the woman who had traveled so many thousands of miles to find her. “Volunteering to go in there first,” she said, “that’s the kind of thing I learned to expect from Leo—”
“It bought us a little time but it doesn’t really help. Not as long as Eugene’s blocking the door. Maybe if we could get out an upstairs window or climb down from the balcony… but I’m not sure Thomas could manage it without falling.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll take the test. If Leo isn’t hurt, I mean. If he says it’s okay.”
“Maybe Leo trusts his father, but I don’t. And I’m not sure I trust Leo.”
“I know him better than you do.”
“Cassie, listen. I know you’ve been close to Leo in the last few weeks. But he’s his father’s son. You have to look out for your own interests.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“Maybe after we get back to the States—”
“I’m not going back to the States. Not without Leo. Not unless Leo wants me to.”
There: she had said what she meant to say. Or at least stammered out a bare and inadequate summary of it. There was so much else. All the compelling evidence she had stored in her heart and her mind but could never share.
After a long moment’s silence Aunt Ris said, “Cassie, what do you really know about Leo Beck? All I know is that he’s loyal to his father. And that he killed an innocent man.”
But Leo wasn’t loyal to his father, not the slavish way Aunt Ris was implying. And as for the man Leo had killed, that act had been driven by fear and desperate circumstances, not carelessness or malevolence. What Aunt Ris could not have seen was Leo’s grief and guilt. It was Cassie who had held Leo’s head against her shoulder late one night in a room in Panama, stroking his hair as he admitted his anguish over the death he had caused; Cassie who had heard his confession (“I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry,”), Cassie who had felt his tears against her skin. “I know I care about him. I know he cares about me. And I know what we’ve been through together.”
Aunt Ris looked more sad than angry. “Cassie, I—”
She broke off at the sound of a knock at the front door. Eugene Dowd sprang to attention. He put his hand on his pistol and gestured to the others to keep quiet. There was no peephole in the door and no angle from which he could see the visitor through the window beside it. A few seconds passed before the knock came again, more urgently.
“Okay,” Dowd said. “You, you, you and you,” cocking his finger at Beth, Thomas, Cassie and Aunt Ris, “upstairs, now. I’ll signal if it’s safe to come down. Go!”
Beth stared blankly. Aunt Ris stood and took Thomas’s hand. At the foot of the stairs she turned back and said, “Cassie—come on!”
“No.” Cassie was already moving toward the room where Leo and his father were conducting their test.
“Cassie, please,” Aunt Ris said, but she didn’t wait, hurrying up the staircase and yanking a bewildered and frightened Thomas behind her.
“I’m from the Port Authority,” a male voice with a Chilean accent said from beyond the door. “I need to speak to Werner Beck on an urgent matter.” Followed by more furious knocking.
Dowd opened the door a crack and peered out, his had still grazing the grip of his revolver. “Show me some ID,” he said.
The door burst inward, knocking him to the floor.
Beck realized he was imperfectly prepared for this impasse with his son. Leo sat angrily immobile, and for the moment Beck could do nothing but stare back. “You need to do this,” he said, startled by the grief that groaned out of the hinge of his own voice, “or—” Or what?
He was distracted by sounds from the adjoining room: a knock at the door, muted voices. Then the crash of a forced entry, more shouting. Beck dropped the syringe and reached for the pistol on the desk. But Leo acted first—vaulted from his chair and grabbed the gun.
There was a gunshot from the front room, then a much closer crash as the door that connected this room to the alley behind the house was forced open and rebounded from its jambs. Beck saw Leo swing the pistol to confront the intruder from the alley, a man in civilian clothes carrying what looked like an automatic weapon. Leo fired before the intruder could pick a target. The intruder fell back, and Beck smelled the familiar fertilizer reek of sim fluids. He watched as Leo put a second killing shot into the sim’s head, which stilled the squirming thing. No hesitation, Beck found himself thinking. He admired Leo’s cool-headedness. It was a more satisfying vindication than any needle test could have been.
Another gunshot came from the front room, followed by a third. “Give me the pistol,” Beck said.
Leo faced him with the weapon in his hand. It seemed to Beck that Leo was almost eerily calm, neither angry nor afraid. Beck put his hand out. Leo didn’t lower the barrel.
Beck felt the first bullet as a blow to his ribs, driving him backward. Then he was on the floor, breathless and bewildered. Leo stood over him, his face still utterly expressionless. Beck’s hand fell on the syringe he had dropped. He surprised himself by flailing it at Leo’s leg, burying the needle in Leo’s thigh.
Leo’s second shot drove all thought to extinction.
Cassie’s fear had filled her to brimming. It roared in her ears like the screech of a power saw. She kept moving, but mindlessly, as if a clumsy puppeteer had taken control of her arms and legs. Events became a series of still frames projected behind her eyelids.
Dowd on the floor, blocking the front door with his legs as a stranger struggles to push through…
Cassie took a step toward the room where Leo was.
Aunt Ris screaming Cassie’s name even as she vanished beyond the upstairs landing, tugging Thomas behind her, Thomas looking back with his mouth a shocked O and eyes wide…
Another step.
Dowd raising his pistol and firing it: splintered wood and a noise like a blow to the head, but the stranger still ramming through as Dowd struggled to his feet and leveled the pistol again…
Step.
Beth forcing herself to her feet and staggering toward the stairs, her face a terrorized mask, all tooth and eye….
Step.
A different noise from the room where Leo was, thumping and a gunshot….
Which meant the house was being attacked from the alley as well as the street, but she didn’t stop: her feet, her legs, her invisible puppeteer all wanted to carry her to Leo.
Dowd firing again, the stranger tumbling into the room leaking red and green matter, but that only served to force the door wide open. Dowd shouting at Cassie and Beth: “Get down!”
Cassie did not get down.
Dowd peering around the door: “Shit, there’s another one!”
Two more steps, which put Cassie within reach of the room.
Dowd firing his pistol at some target Cassie couldn’t see, then stumbling backward as a bullet from outside penetrated the door and his body. Another stranger stepping over the body of the fallen sim, some ordinary-looking man not even angry but just going about his lethal business…
Beth taken by a bullet as she clung to the stairway banister, tumbling onto the risers with her head opened like a melon and its redness gushing out…
Dowd, enraged and dying on the blood-drenched carpet, firing a final shot that struck the sim and doubled it over…
…as Cassie entered the room to which Leo and Werner Beck had retreated for their blood test, which had become a blood test of a different kind. Cassie’s vision was clouded and somehow noisy, but she saw Leo standing (still alive!) over the body of his father and the reeking corpse of a sim. His expression was shocked and his eyes glittered with fear or grief, but he reached for Cassie with his free left hand, gesturing frantically with his pistol toward the alley. Though she was nearly deafened by the gunshots still echoing in her head she saw him mouth the words, Come with me.
She took his hand, and he pulled her into the alley behind the house.
27
THE ATACAMA
MAYBE BECAUSE HE EXPECTED TO DIE AT any moment, Ethan felt a deadening blankness wash over him. All the endless precautions he had taken, all the demented and paranoid protocols he had followed so assiduously for so many years, had in the end won him nothing. He was helplessly under the control of the entity that governed the world. He had lost even the ability to properly think.
They put him in one of the trucks next to the female sim who had cuffed him. He could see the creature more clearly by the glow from the dashboard. Its hair was short and dark, its skin coffee-brown. It gave him a contrite, solicitous look as it steered the truck in a half circle and joined the convoy of vehicles, all now headed away from San Pedro de Atacama and toward the breeding facility deep in the desert. Its expression—like its words, like its gestures—was of course a calculated lie.
He wondered what it wanted from him. Why he had been kept alive.
“We just want to talk,” it said again.
Ethan’s mouth was as dry as the salt flats they were driving through, but he managed to ask, “Why bother?”
“I understand the objection you’re making. You’re right. You have no reason to believe anything we say. But we’re offering you more than words, Dr. Iverson. We can show you what we are. We have a demonstrable claim to make. As a scientist, perhaps you can appreciate that.”
He didn’t answer. He turned his face to the window. To the moonlit desert, the ghostly salar, his own bitter reflection.
“It wouldn’t have worked,” the sim said. “Werner Beck’s weapon. It’s true that he can suppress cellular signaling in isolated cultures of green matter. But our bodies are more robust than that. We can function for prolonged periods of time without contact with the orbital hypercolony. His so-called war would have been little more than a futile gesture. I think you know that, Dr. Iverson, on some level.”
These were gambits, not facts. Maybe it was true he had doubted Beck. Maybe it was true that a gesture, however impotent, had seemed to him more attractive than a lifetime spent in hiding. But if so, so what? Why play this game? “If he’s not a threat, what are you afraid of?”
“What makes you think we’re afraid?”
“A lot of good people died at your hands.”
“No, not our hands. Don’t you remember what Winston Bayliss told you? There are two entities competing for control of the hypercolony. We’re not the entity that killed your friends in 2007. We have a different nature and different aims. May I explain?”
Ethan put his head against the window glass. The cab of the truck was warm but he felt the cold of the night seep through.
“We can talk later,” the simulacrum said. “But I want to emphasize that you’re not in danger.” It smiled. “You’re safer than you realize, Dr. Iverson.”
The road cut the horizon like a surveyor’s line. The last human settlement Ethan saw was a cluster of ware houses and tin-roofed machine sheds, which must have been the way station where Beck’s flunky Eugene Dowd had once worked. It faded in the mirror like a transitory blemish on the purity of the desert.
He shifted his body, trying to relieve the pressure on his cuffed hands. He didn’t want to think about the handcuffs. To undertake an inventory of his helplessness would be to invite panic. He preferred this dead indifference. He could imagine nothing more terrifying than the possibility of hope.
He shrank back in his seat when their destination first appeared on the arc of the horizon. A hill, a mound—in the dark, and from a distance, it really did look shockingly like the mound of an anthill or a termite nest. It was only as they approached it, and as the convoy began to slow, that the hill resolved into a twenty-foot berm of excavated earth and industrial detritus through which an entranceway had been cut. The western sky was lightening now and it seemed to Ethan that the debris pile (heaps of unused or discarded sheet metal, rebar, insulated wire, machine parts) was both weirdly prosaic and wholly alien, lavish in what had been discarded but economical in the way it had been repurposed as a barrier to the wind or other threats.
“You must be at least a little bit curious about what we do here,” the sim said. “As a scholar, I mean. As a scientist.”
Maybe he had once been capable of such curiosity. Not anymore. The sim was trying to bait him into an interaction; he refused the bait. He watched the road ahead, trying to make himself as indifferent as a camera.
As the truck topped an incline and crossed the berm he saw the whole installation for the first time: an enormous industrial facility enclosed in a crater of debris. He was impressed despite himself, not least by the size of it. An entire American town could have been dropped into this space—say, one of those little Ohio towns he and Nerissa had passed through only weeks ago. Except this wasn’t a place where human beings lived. The grid of paved roads was inhumanly exact, illuminated with harsh lights at every intersection, the roads lined with faceless concrete structures like aircraft hangers or bunkers, some of which emitted plumes of black smoke. “Machine shops,” the sim said, following his gaze. “We do our own manufacturing here. Not everything we need can be brought in from outside.”
At the center of the grid a huge construction of glass and metal reflected the predawn glow of the sky like an impressionist sculpture of a sunflower. Ethan tried to estimate its size by comparing it to the figures moving near it: it was at least as large as an Olympic-style sports stadium, maybe larger. He couldn’t guess its purpose, and the sim didn’t offer an explanation.
As the truck moved deeper into the facility Ethan was surprised by how busy the streets were. If all the workers moving among the buildings were sims, Beck must have underestimated the global population of them. And there were animals here, too. It was hard to identify them in the uncertain light but they moved with a crablike gait, close to the ground….
“Don’t be afraid, Dr. Iverson.”
But he was afraid, because the animals weren’t animals. The truck passed within a yard of one of them and Ethan saw the furred body moving efficiently on four oddly-articulated legs, the torso curving to support a third pair of limbs—arms—with small long-fingered hands, and the head… not quite a human head, but a leathery caricature of one, with featureless eyes and a slit grin of a mouth….
It scuttled past the truck trailing a shadow like a Rorschach blot.
“They’re no threat to you,” the sim said. “Would you like to know what they are?”
His silence passed for assent.
“In a way, they’re nothing more than memories. Using that term as you did in your book The Fisherman and the Spider. Do you remember what you said about African termites? ‘They have no capacity for memory, but the hive remembers. Its memories are written in the genome of its population, inscribed there by the hive’s evolutionary past.’ The hypercolony remembers in the same way, and its memories are even longer. It has interacted with many sentient species on many planets. In one case, perhaps millions of years ago, it learned to emulate creatures like these. Now it can create them at will. It could create others, quite different, but only these are suited to this planet’s atmosphere and chemistry. They’re useful—they can manipulate small objects as efficiently as human beings, with slight modifications they can serve as guards or warriors, and they’re especially adept at climbing and construction work.”
Sims of a different species, Ethan thought. But no, really it was the same species—the hypercolony—mimicking a different host. He couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Do you grow them here?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“We give birth to them. Just as we give birth to ourselves. You intuited that a sim can grow in a human womb, by a process analogous to infection. That’s true. That’s how Winston Bayliss came to exist. But most female sims have a perfectly functional reproductive system. I was born here, to a mother like myself. My body could give birth to more sims, or to one of those six-limbed creatures. Many of the sims here are dedicated to producing replacement workers.”
“I find that disgusting.”
“The fisherman finds the spider disgusting, though both cast nets for food. But you’re capable of a deeper understanding.”
“Am I?”
“Of course you are.”
He had been duped into a pointless conversation. Pointless from his perspective, at least. He still didn’t understand why he had been kept alive and why he was being told these perverse truths, if they were truths.
“For now, you need food and rest. And as soon as we’re in a secure place I’ll take off those handcuffs. I’m sure they’re uncomfortable.”
The truck moved onto a grated steel ramp and through an arched entranceway to a tunnel under the earth. The light ahead was entirely artificial, the concrete walls gray and unpainted. Side corridors opened onto bright, wide spaces where sims both human and six-limbed moved in masses, servicing machinery. Ethan craned his head and watched the morning sky disappear behind him.
They put him in a cubicle with a cot and a mattress, a simple toilet, and a single overhead light. The female sim left him, then returned briefly with a bowl containing a greasy mixture of beef and vegetables—food the sims ate, Ethan supposed; the food they were obliged to eat by the quasi-human nature of their bodies. He took a few bites and lay down on the cot. The food was edible, but could it have been drugged? Or was it shock and fatigue that made sleep so irresistible?
When he opened his eyes again he couldn’t tell how much time had passed. The air in this chamber was neither warm nor cool. It might be night. It might be day. The remains of the stew had congealed in its bowl. He emptied his bladder and was just zipping up when the female sim unlocked the door of the chamber and stepped inside.
He looked her over again, this apparently young and studiedly friendly woman in jeans and a white shirt. All the sims in the facility seemed to dress that way, apart from the six-limbed creatures. He wondered how it worked—did they place bulk orders with a retailer in Santiago? Five hundred white cotton shirts, delivered to a blank place on the map?
