Текст книги "Burning Paradise"
Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson
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10
RURAL VERMONT
ETHAN TOOK NERISSA TO THE FARM HOUSE attic and checked his surveillance feeds. Two sims were approaching from the direction of the main road. The afternoon light was fading but he could clearly see the automatic rifles the creatures held at a ready angle. Only members of the armed forces were legally permitted to carry such weapons, but these two men, roughly the same apparent age as the creature in the cellar, seemed not to be soldiers. One wore a business suit, the other wore blue jeans and corduroy shirt. They moved in parallel on opposite sides of the access road, keeping to the shadows of the trees.
That was the front of the house. Out back, the surveillance cameras had apparently shut down, leaving Ethan entirely blind in that direction. But he could only address one problem at a time. He took one of the three hunting rifles he kept in a rack on the wall and carried it to the west-facing window. He had replaced the original window and frame with a sheet of double-thick birchwood ply into which he had cut an embrasure large enough to allow him to sight along the barrel of the rifle.
The first target would be the easiest. He waited until the sim in the business suit reached the clearing in front of the house. There was no way to approach the house without crossing that empty space. The sim left the cover of the trees, running. Ethan’s first shot split the sim’s skull, spilling a cascade of green matter threaded with blood.
The next shot wouldn’t be as easy. The second sim, the one in blue jeans, broke from the woods before his companion had finished falling. He veered away from the front of the house, attempting to get out of Ethan’s range. The narrow embrasure in the plywood afforded Ethan some protection, but it also restricted his field of fire. He brought the rifle hard up against the wood and squeezed the trigger.
He hit the target, but he hit it low. Ethan guessed he had clipped the simulacrum’s spine, because the creature fell and couldn’t stand up again. After a moment it abandoned the struggle and used its arms to drag itself toward the house. Ethan managed to put a second bullet in the sim’s neck. Gouts of blood and green matter spewed from the wound and the creature stopped moving.
But Ethan still didn’t know what was happening out back, where the cameras had been destroyed or deactivated. He ran to the east-facing window and leveled his rifle, pulling away in time to avoid a hail of bullets from a third sim’s automatic weapon. Plywood splinters peppered his face and a flurry of dust and debris showered down from the attic ceiling. He glanced back to make sure Nerissa hadn’t been hit. She was still standing, unhurt but obviously terrified. He told her to get down on the floor.
The sim who fired on him had been crossing the open space in back of the house and was out of sight now, but Ethan didn’t have to wonder where it had gone: he heard the sound of the back door being kicked in. The creature had entered the house.
Everything Ethan knew about the anatomy of the simulacra he had learned from Werner Beck. Werner Beck had not only survived the attempt on his life in 2007, he had managed to wound and disarm both of his attackers. And in the days that followed Werner Beck had taken his captive sims apart—piece by piece, making notes.
He had distributed a monograph on the subject to all the survivors loyal or reckless enough to stay in touch with him. Ethan had a copy in his files. Anatomical Details of the Artificial Human Beings, with diagrams and photographs. The photographs had been particularly disturbing: two sims, still alive, mounted on dissection boards and opened from the chest down. The skin of their torsos had been peeled back and pinned in place like the pages of a book, ribs and bloody musculature fully exposed, several small but functional human organs partially removed. Ethan had forced himself to memorize the details. Sacs of green matter, essentially identical to the contents of the cells Ethan had cultured from Antarctic ice cores, occupied most of the gut and extended into the extremities including the skull. The skull sac was surrounded by a web of nervous tissue that presumably performed some of the functions of a human brain. The scaffolding of bone was indistinguishable from a human skeleton. In the abdominal and chest cavities, dwarfish human organs (a heart hardly bigger than a golf ball, a liver that might have been taken from a newborn infant) served the shell of flesh that gave the sims their human appearance. Cut a sim and it would bleed. Cut deeply and it would bleed green.
The green material was complex but amorphous, the same no matter where in the body it was located. That meant the sims were less vulnerable to some kinds of physical damage than human beings were. Attacking one with a knife would be nearly suicidal. A bullet through the soft parts would only slow it down, while a bullet through the spine would drop it in its tracks without killing it. A shot to the head was the best bet, Werner Beck had written, since the skein of nervous tissue under the skull was an essential interface, allowing the simulacrum to control its body.
Even then, death might not be instantaneous. Beck’s captive sims had survived for days as he systematically cut and flayed them—they had pretended pain at first, and when the pretense failed they lapsed into an observant silence. Loss of blood eventually killed one of them: its small heart simply stopped beating; the other sim died when Beck experimentally fired a bullet into its skull.
Ethan traded his rifle for a pistol, then took a second one from its rack and offered it to Nerissa. “You know how to use that?” She nodded: like many other survivors she had taken a course after the 2007 massacre. Her hands shook, but she checked the pistol to ensure that it was loaded, then clicked off the safety.
“Stay here. Wait for me.” And shoot anything that comes up in my place, he didn’t have to add. Then he opened the attic door and moved down the narrow stairs to the farm house’s second story, a hallway with more stairs at the far end. Daylight was fading and the hall was dim. Ethan paused every few paces, listening for sounds from below but hearing little more than the pounding of his own pulse.
If he had any advantage it was his intimate knowledge of the farm house, its angles, its shadows, its exposed places and its high ground. He hugged the left-hand wall until he reached the landing of the stairway, then leaned into the emptiness beyond the railing with his pistol sighted toward the front door. Nothing. But there was a rattle that might have come from the kitchen.
Ethan’s respect for his opponent was complete. He thought again of Werner Beck dissecting the captured sims, an act that seemed both cruel and vengeful until you realized it was neither—the sims felt no pain and were indifferent to indignity. They weren’t even individuals, in the human sense. They even were less autonomous than ants or termites, mere extensions of the superorganism that had created them: massive, complex, far-traveled, ancient. Not even remotely human, and above all, not to be underestimated.
Ethan hurried down the stairs, mindful that he was exposed to fire from the sim’s automatic rifle. From the bottom of the stairs he could see most of the farm house’s main room, which was empty. Which left the kitchen. The door to the kitchen was closed. He couldn’t remember if he had closed it himself. He had no choice but to announce his presence by throwing it open, pistol ready, thinking with some fraction of his mind of Nerissa: she was armed but terrified, and if he died here—
But the kitchen too was empty. The back door was askew in its frame, hanging by one hinge where the sim had kicked it in. A trail of muddy boot prints led from the broken door to the entrance to the cellar. Ethan looked at the stairwell with dismay. He could only conclude that the sim was down there with Winston Bayliss.
Move, he told himself. He had no choice but to attempt the cellar stairs.
He was halfway down when he saw the sim at the foot of the stairs with its back to him, looking utterly human with its upturned collar, its sagging blue jeans, the nascent bald spot at the crown of its head. The automatic rifle was raised, but not in Ethan’s direction. The sim began to turn as Ethan’s foot hit a creaking riser. But it was no faster than a mortal man. Ethan had been granted that rare gift, an easy target. He squeezed the trigger of the pistol.
Simultaneously, the sim began firing into the darkness of the cellar. In this enclosed space the sound was deafening. Ethan flinched, but not before his bullet took the simulacrum at the base of its skull. The sim’s automatic rifle sprayed a few more bullets, then fell silent. The sim toppled over, inert.
Ethan stood over the body and put a finishing shot into its head. Green matter gushed out, emitting a rank chemical-fertilizer stink.
Then he looked around the cellar, realizing what it was the sim had done: incredibly, it had shot Winston Bayliss.
The creature that called itself Winston Bayliss was still strapped to the chair where Ethan had left it, held in place by coils of duct tape, but its upper body slumped at a nasty angle: the invading sim’s rifle fire had nearly bisected it at the hip. Bayliss was leaking blood and green liquid at a furious rate.
It raised its head and looked at Ethan steadily. “Please,” it said faintly. “Please, will you bandage the wound? We still need to talk.”
Ethan could only stare.
“As quickly as possible,” Winston Bayliss said. “Please.”
The idea of staying here even an hour longer had become absurd. It was past time to leave, and everything would have to be burned. His notes, his video gear, the attic arsenal—the farm house from its foundation to the peak of its mossy roof. Ethan had been preparing for this contingency since his first days here. He had stored a dozen canisters of kerosene in the main floor closet, and every morning he put a fresh book of matches in his hip pocket.
He came up the stairs to the attic and found Nerissa waiting, her pistol aimed at his chest. She lowered the weapon instantly, to Ethan’s relief. The way her hands were shaking, one awkward twitch might have killed him. “Is it dead?” she asked.
He managed to nod. Though for all he knew there might be more on the way.
She relaxed so suddenly that he thought she might lose her footing. She put a hand on a shelf to steady herself.
All this must have been unimaginably hard on her. Ethan had loved this woman once and maybe still did, though the gap of doubt and blame between them had grown vast and was probably unbridgeable. He couldn’t look at her without seeing the Nerissa he had once known: Nerissa across a table in the faculty cafeteria, quoting writers he hadn’t read and whose names he barely recognized, her long hair threatening to interfere with a plate of French fries—her liveliness and her ready smile, then so available, now so completely erased. She looked unspeakably tired. Night was falling and he wished he had a comfortable bed to offer her, but there was much to be done and no time to hesitate. Miles to go, in the words of one of those poems she had liked to recite. Miles to go before we sleep.
He took the first of his dozen jerricans of kerosene into the cellar, where he poured the contents over the corpse of the dead sim and along the floorboards. Nerissa emptied another canister over the firewood stacked under the single window, which he had boarded over, and as she worked Winston Bayliss began to plead with her. “Bind my wounds,” it said. “Take me with you.”
The sim had bled out massively from its human parts, and now it was leaking its greener contents onto the cellar floor. A reeking mess, Ethan thought. But the fire would cleanse all that.
“He’s practically cut in half,” Nerissa said. “The one who broke in did that?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“What this thing said, about there being two kinds of sims, do you think that’s possible?”
“I don’t know. Half of what these things do is theater.”
“I can explain,” Winston Bayliss said. “If you bind my wounds. If you take me with you.”
“Maybe we should,” Nerissa said.
Startled, Ethan looked up from the trail of kerosene he had laid. “Are you serious?”
“I mean if it knows something about Cassie and Thomas.”
“Cut off my legs,” Winston Bayliss said. “They’re useless. Tourniquets above the stumps will keep me alive for a time, if you do it quickly.”
Madness, Ethan thought. But Nerissa turned to him and asked in a voice gone steely and indifferent, a voice he barely recognized, “What about it, Ethan? Do you have an axe down here? A hatchet?”
“Jesus, Ris!”
“Because if we burn it we’ll never know why those others wanted it dead.”
“What exactly are you suggesting? That we hack off its legs and, what, put it in the trunk of the car?”
“Well, it would fit,” she said. “If we did that.”
He hoped it was a macabre joke. Or maybe the kerosene fumes were getting to her. But no. He had always known when she was serious. “Ris… even if what you’re suggesting might be useful, and I’m not admitting such a thing even for a second, we’d be taking a crazy risk. We don’t know for sure what’s looking out through that thing’s eyes, but what ever it is, I don’t want it watching us.”
“That needn’t be a problem,” the sim said.
Ethan and Nerissa looked at it. The wounded sim had worked its right hand loose from its bonds—the flow of blood had slicked and softened the coils of duct tape. It raised its free hand to its face (its slightly pudgy face, now pale and unearthly in its bloodlessness), curled the thumb into a hook and thrust it into the socket of first one and then the other of its eyes.
Once the burning began they couldn’t linger. In the dark, the fire would be visible for miles.
Everything Ethan had wanted to keep—fake ID, a supply of cash and traveler’s checks, a fresh pistol—he had packed into a single cardboard filing box, which he slid it into the backseat of Nerissa’s car. His own car, the secondhand Chrysler he drove into town on weekends, was parked in an outbuilding separate from the house. But it would be smarter to take Nerissa’s car: no one had seen it here and there was nothing to associate it with Ethan or his farm house. He doused the wooden walls of the outbuilding with kerosene and tossed a match behind him. The tindery structure began to burn hastily, and by that time the farm house was already well along, flames creeping up from the foundation and licking out of the first-floor windows. Ethan hurried to the car: he wanted to be gone before the ammunition in the attic began to cook off.
He offered to drive and Nerissa nodded gratefully. She buckled herself into the passenger seat and allowed her head to slump against the head rest. Her breathing deepened into gentle snores as he drove away from the farm house. The fitful light of the fire reflected from the windshield, the dashboard, her face. Asleep, she looked exactly like the woman he remembered, but bent, Ethan thought, almost to the point of breaking: bent to the limit of her endurance.
He pulled over where the laneway met the county road. Nerissa opened her eyes and mumbled a word that might have been, “What?”
“Shh,” he said, reaching through the driver’s-side window. “Just picking up the mail.”
One last time. He lifted the hinged door of the rural delivery box, withdrew a single letter and switched on the car’s overhead light long enough to glance at it. The return address was illegible and probably meant to be, but he recognized the handwriting at once. The letter was from Werner Beck.
He tucked it into his shirt pocket.
Half an hour later he was on the federal turnpike, cold air from an open window flushing out the stink of kerosene and worse things. He hadn’t thought about a destination. He drove west in a river of red taillights, Nerissa asleep beside him, headed nowhere but away.
PART TWO
THE FISHERMAN AND THE SPIDER
Consider a fisherman—let’s say, a young man who owns a small boat and weaves his own nets.
One sunny morning the fisherman sails out from the harbor and casts his net into the ocean. By the end of the day he has accumulated a fine catch of succulent fish. Back ashore, he sets aside a share of the bounty for his evening meal. He guts and cleans the fish and roasts them over an open fire on the beach. Perhaps he calls down his wife from their seaside cottage; perhaps the couple dine alfresco as the sun sets, gazing into each other’s eyes; perhaps, nine months later and as an indirect result of their activities on that happy evening, the fisherman’s wife bears a healthy child… but these plausible sequelae are not pertinent to our story.
Now imagine another biological organism, in this case a spider: a common orb-weaver spider, of which there are some three thousand species worldwide and probably one or two in your own garden or backyard. Like the fisherman, the spider weaves a net (of sticky silk) and uses it to capture another species (a moth) as food. Like the fisherman, the spider prepares its meal before it consumes it—it pumps digestive enzymes into the body of the captive insect, sucks out the liquefied matter, and discards the empty husk, much as the fisherman discarded the inedible bones and organs of his fish. Perhaps the spider follows his meal by finding a mate, impregnating her, and offering his body to be devoured; perhaps the female then produces a pendulous, silk-encased sac of fertilized eggs… but all this, like the fisherman’s amorous evening, is incidental to our story.
The fisherman’s tale is pleasant, even heartwarming. The spider’s tale is viscerally disgusting. But from an objective point of view, nothing distinguishes one from the other but the details. A net is a net, whether it’s made of nylon or spider silk. A meal is a meal.
The important difference lies in the realm of subjective experience. The fisherman’s day is richly felt and easily imagined. The spider’s is not. It is extremely unlikely that the simple fused ganglia of an arachnid generate much if anything in the way of psychological complexity. And an anthill—although it is also a functional biological entity, capable of its own equivalent of net-casting and food-gathering—has no centralized brain at all and no perceived experience of any kind. The rich inner experience of the world is central to human life and our appreciation of it. But the preponderance of life on Earth gets along perfectly well with out it. In this respect, human beings are a distinct minority. The fishermen of the world are greatly out numbered by the spiders.
—Ethan Iverson, The Fisher man and the Spider
11
JORDAN LANDING, ILLINOIS
“I’M NOT WHAT SHE SAID I AM,” THOMAS insisted. “I’m not useless.”
Sitting across from him at a table in the diner, Cassie was inclined to believe it. Not for the first time, Thomas had surprised her.
“Well, look who’s back for supper,” the waitress had said when they came in. “We close at seven,” she added, “so don’t dawdle. Fireworks start at eight—I guess you decided to stay for the fireworks?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cassie said. Maybe it had been a mistake to come back to the same restaurant where they had bought breakfast. Being recognized was never good. But most of Jordan Landing’s restaurants had already closed for Armistice Day, and the other exception, a Chinese restaurant called Lucky Paradise, didn’t appeal to Thomas.
The waitress brought meatloaf for Cassie and a hamburger and French fries for Thomas. Thomas tucked in eagerly. His appetite seemed to have come back, despite the trauma of the last few days. It was almost as if Beth’s insult had invigorated him.
Once they had retrieved the papers and the key from Werner Beck’s hidden safe, they left the house by the rear door, hiked through a wooded allotment to another quiet residential street, then circled past the commercial section of town to the motel. Back in their room, Leo insisted on reading the papers his father had left him before he would discuss the contents. When he finished, he looked up and said, “We have to think about what happens next.”
“You could start,” Beth suggested, “by telling us what’s in those pages.”
“Well… lots,” Leo said. “It’s sort of a plan.”
“A plan for what?”
“My father wrote this and left it where I could find it in case there was another attack on the Society. Over the last few years he learned some things he didn’t share, things about the hypercolony. Ways we might be able to affect it. Hurt it.”
“Like?”
Leo shook his head: “I need to go through it again. But what I can tell you is, if we do what my father wants us to do, it’s going to be dangerous. You might not want to get involved.”
Beth rolled her eyes. “Fuck, Leo—I am involved.”
“I know, and you’re right, but we’re talking about a whole other level of commitment. I need a decision from you, too,” addressing this to Cassie, “you and Thomas both. And even if you want to join in… I’m going to have to think about whether it’s a good idea to let you do that.”
Cassie felt a twinge of foreboding. Something about the expression on Leo’s face, the pinched V of his brows: what ever was in those papers had frightened him, but it had also filled him with a kind of grim hope.
Beth remained sourly suspicious. “Are you even considering taking them along? Why? If this is so fucking dangerous. I mean, no offence,” a brief and insincere glance at Cassie, “but they’re baggage. She hasn’t done anything more useful than pay for a few meals, and as for Thomas, he’s a kid—he’s useless.”
Cassie flushed at the injustice of it (as if Beth had performed some invaluable service!), but before she could answer Thomas piped up: “I’m not useless.”
“No?” A glimmer of cruelty in Beth’s voice. “What have you done except sleep? Sleep and occasionally cry?”
“Nothing—”
“Right.”
“Nothing except what you guys asked me to do. I don’t try to have things my own way. I don’t complain.” He added, his eyes fixed on Beth: “And I didn’t try to phone anybody.”
Beth reddened and lunged forward—Cassie stepped in front of her brother—but Leo put a hand on Beth’s shoulder to hold her back. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s talk about this.”
Meaning he wanted to talk to Beth alone. So Cassie grabbed her jacket and Thomas’s and left the room with Thomas in tow. She said she’d find dinner and be back by nine.
After the meal—the waitress hurried them out so she could close up “before the fun starts”—Cassie took her brother by the hand and walked with him to the park at the center of town.
Henry Wallace Park, named for the former president, extended from the town hall on the north to the central post office on the south, and it was already filling with people. The park was pretty, Cassie thought, in a modest way—though probably at its best in summer, when the chinkapin oaks would be in full leaf and the air rich with the scent of mown grass. To night the skeletal limbs of the tree and the fading sunset created an atmosphere more somber than the mood of the crowd. But that wasn’t surprising. Armistice Day, ever since it had subsumed Thanksgiving as the nation’s end-of-November holiday, had always been about defying the first chill of winter, even here in relatively balmy southern Illinois. Colored lanterns had been strung around the bandbox. Behind a cluster of picnic tables, cheerful men in flannel shirts and gaudy aprons dispensed hot dogs from a smoking grill. A banner over the bandstand announced 1914—ARMISTICE—2014, and a group of children in school uniforms waved laurel-wreath flags.
Since 2007 Cassie had felt ambivalent about Armistice Day. Her high-school history classes had seemed overlaid with an invisible (and literally unspeakable) irony. Of course, the “century of peace and progress” hadn’t been as peaceful as everyone liked to pretend. It was true that the Great War with all its horrors had served as midwife to the Benelux Pact, the European Coal and Steel Alliance, the Treaty of Rome—all those dull but worthy defenses against war, along with generations of European statesmen whose names Cassie would forever associate with the smell of chalk dust and pencil shavings: Lord Lansdowne, René Plevin, Benedetto Croce. But there had been the Russian civil war, which had simmered hot and cold for almost a decade before the Smallholders Party finally unseated that nation’s creaking, brutal monarchy. There had been the countless border disputes that always threatened to erupt into something worse—Trieste, the Saarland, the Sudetenland. The ethnic “cleansings” that had persisted even after the European Accord on Human Rights. And even as the nations of Europe settled into the detente of the 1930s and 1940s, their reluctant retreat from empire had sparked countless Asian and African rebellions. It had been the Century of Peace only by contrast with what had gone before.
But under all that was the unmentionable truth about the hypercolony. In her last year of school Cassie had written an essay about the social and political movements of pre-Armistice Europe, and she had been impressed by the arrogance with which certain famous men (Hegel, Marx, Treitschke) had claimed the mandate of history—a word they often capitalized, as if history were a physical force, as predictable and as irresistible as the tides. The twentieth century knew better. At least that was what the textbooks said. The twentieth century had discarded the naïve idea that history had a built-in destination.
But history was exactly what the hypercolony had hijacked. It had grasped the raw and bloody meat of human history and shaped it to its own ends. What ever those ends might be.
The park was getting too crowded for Cassie’s comfort. She led Thomas across the street to the post-office grounds, a broad swale of grass where they could sit unobserved and watch the fireworks. The sky was dark now, the first stars beginning to glimmer. Thomas shivered and leaned into Cassie’s shoulder. “What do you think?” she asked, her own thoughts still wandering. “Do you trust him?”
“Trust who?”
“Leo.”
Thomas pondered the question. Cassie liked this about her brother, that he was seldom quick to answer. Her own impulsiveness had gained her a reputation for being bright, while Thomas’s reticence made some people think he was slow—but neither impression was really correct. Sometimes Cassie spoke without thinking. And her brother, she suspected, often thought without speaking.
“Depends,” Thomas said at last. “He’s not mean. He thinks ahead. But that doesn’t mean he’s always right. Like when… you know.”
“When he shot that man,” Cassie supplied.
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, well… I’m sorry you had to see that.”
“Why shouldn’t I see it?”
Because knowing the truth doesn’t always make you stronger. “Because you’re twelve years old, for God’s sake.”
“But I need to get used to it.”
“Used to what? People being killed? That’s a horrifying thought!”
Thomas gave her a hard look. “You don’t think it’ll happen again? I know Leo thought the guy was a sim. He never meant to kill a real person. But the Park Service man? Beth could have cracked his skull. Maybe that’s what she meant to do. He could have died. Maybe he died anyway—we don’t know.”
“We can’t let ourselves get caught. If that happens, we lose, nobody wins.”
“I didn’t say it was wrong. All I’m saying is, it could happen again. That or something like it. Probably will happen again, if we do what ever it is Leo wants us to do.”
“Well…” She couldn’t honestly deny it. “Maybe.”
“Back in Buffalo, back when all I had to do was get up in the morning and go to school, maybe it mattered that I’m twelve years old. But it doesn’t matter to the sims. It doesn’t matter to the hypercolony. I don’t want to be protected, Cassie. I want to fight.”
Thomas was a pudgy child and about as belligerent as a Quaker. He tended to cringe in the face of an argument. But the expression on his face was fierce now, almost steely. He did want to fight.
He said, “I guess this is what it was like when—”
The fireworks interrupted him. A rocket sizzled up from the park and burst into a brocade of silver stars. The noise echoed from the quarried stone of the post office building, a sound as hard as a fist.
“What it was like when people went off to war,” Thomas finished. “The big war, I mean.”
Cassie had seen pictures in textbooks, of ranks of men in brown uniforms with rifles slung over their shoulders: the Allied Expeditionary Force, off to join the battered Brits and French. And pictures of the muddy European trenches: Ypres, Passchendaele, the Marne, where countless young men had been slaughtered by other young men as bewildered and obedient as themselves.
“Leo’s not perfect,” Thomas said. “But who is? His father knows a lot, and his father trusts him. So yes. I guess I trust him. Do you trust him?”
On what terms? To make a decision and follow it to the necessary conclusion? To embrace even violence, if violence was necessary? To go to war?
Cassie surprised herself by nodding. “I do,” she said.
And in the end, what choice did she have? As recently as a few days ago she might have considered accepting the burden and promise of anonymity, might have been willing to settle for a circumspect, hidden life.
But she was a criminal now, an accessory to murder. The authorities knew of at least one death. If the Park Service man had died, he would be the second victim… and if he hadn’t died he would almost certainly have given the police a description of Leo, Cassie and Thomas. Local and regional police routinely shared reports by radio and fax, which meant those descriptions would have been available to the hypercolony, which meant it wasn’t only the authorities who might be paying attention. “Anonymity” was no longer an option.
The fireworks display began to build toward a climax, to the loud approval of the crowd in the park. Thomas watched gravely. The rocket’s red glare, Cassie thought. Rockets: a war technology, drafted into the service of celebrating peace. Some members of the Correspondence Society had once believed that larger and more powerful rockets could be used to send scientific instruments (or even human beings!) into orbit around the Earth—or farther, as in the science fiction novels she occasionally liked to read. But the building of rockets bigger than toys had been prohibited in the disarmament protocols that followed the signing of the Armistice. And maybe that, too, was the work of the hypercolony: the hive defending its high-altitude territory.
