Thus I found my sister, and lost her again.
There are other loose ends I can’t resist tugging on.
I’ve been reading about eusocial organisms. I’ve learned that one characteristic of hives, just as much as the sterility of the workers and the rest, is suicide — the willingness of a drone to sacrifice itself for the greater good, and so for the long-term interests of its genetic heritage. You see it when a termite mound is broken open, or a predator tries to get into a mole rat colony. It’s seen as proof by the biologists that the key organism is the global community, the hive, not the individual, for the individual acts completely selflessly. It was certainly true of the Order. When the Crypt was attacked, such as during the Sack of Rome, some of the members gave their lives to save the rest.
But here’s the rub. In the end Peter committed suicide, to protect — what? He had no family. The future of humankind? But again, he had no children — and no direct connection to that future.
What he did have a connection to was the Slan(t)ers.
The Slan(t)ers have no leader; their network has no central point. Their behavior is dictated by the behavior of those “around” them in cyberspace, and governed by simple rules of online-protocol feedback. Among the Slan(t)ers — I’ve found — there are virtually none with children. They are too busy with Slan(t)er projects for that.
The Slan(t)ers don’t have any physical connection, as did the Order. They don’t even live in the same place. And their interest in the group isn’t in any way genetic, as with the Order. There is no pretense that the Slan(t)ers are a family in the normal sense. But nevertheless, I believe the Slan(t)ers are another hive — a new, even purer form of human hive made possible by electronic interconnections — a hive of the mind, in which only ideas, not genes, are preserved.
Peter believed that everything he did was in the service of the future of humankind. But I believe that he wasn’t really acting for any rational goals. The Slan(t)ers, the hive as a whole, had recognized the existence of another hive — and, like a foraging ant coming on another colony, Peter attacked.
At the crux, Peter wondered if I was a hive creature myself. Perhaps I was; perhaps I am. I am sure he was. And if the Order truly was a hive — and if it wasn’t unique, if the Slan(t)ers are, too, a new sort altogether — then how many others are out there ?
Anyhow, just because Peter was really following hive dictates doesn’t mean he was wrong about the human future.
On his computer I found a few emails he’d been composing to send me, never finished.
“I think about the future. I believe that our greatest triumph, our greatest glory, lies ahead of us. The great events of the past — the fall of Rome, say, or the Second World War — cast long shadows, influencing generations to come. But is it possible that just as the great events of the past shape us now, so that mighty future — the peak age of humankind, the clash of cymbals — has echoes in the present, too ? The physicists now say you have to think of the universe, and all its long, singular history, as just one page in a great book of possibilities, stacked up in higher dimensions. When those pages are slammed together, when the great book is closed, a Big Bang is generated, the page wiped clean, a new history written. And if time is circular, if future is joined to past, is it possible that messages, or even influences, could be passed around its great orbit? By reaching into the farthest future, would you at last touch the past? Are we influenced and shaped, not just by the past, but echoes of the future? …”
Sometimes at night I look up at the stars, and I wonder what strange future is folding down over us even now. I wish Peter was here, so we could talk this out. I can still see him leaning closer to me conspiratorially, on our bench in that dismal little park by the Forum, the sweet smell of limoncello on his breath.
Chapter 51
Beyond the air lock door, there was a tunnel. It branched and bifurcated, and the light glowed pearl gray. It was like looking into a huge underground cathedral, shaped from the glistening ice.
And in the foreground was a mob.
There must have been a hundred people in the first rank alone, and there were more ranks behind, dimly glimpsed, more than Abil could count. They were small, squat, powerful looking. They were mostly unarmed, but some carried clubs of rusty metal. And they were naked, all of them. They looked somehow unformed, as if ill defined. The males had small, budlike genitals, and the females’ breasts were small, their hips narrow. None of them seemed to have any body hair.
All this in a single glimpse. Then the Coalescents surged forward. They didn’t yell, didn’t threaten; the only noise was the pad of their feet on the floor, the brush of their flesh against the ice walls. Abil stood, transfixed, watching the human tide wash toward him.
Denh screamed, “Drop! Drop!”
Reflexively Abil threw himself to the ground. Laser light, cherry red, threaded the air above him, straight as a geometrical exercise.
The light sliced through the mob. Limbs were cut through and detached, intestines spilled from unzipped chest cavities, even heads came away amid unfeasibly huge founts of crimson blood. Now there was noise, screams, cries, and soft grunts.
The first wave of the mob was down, most of them dead in a heartbeat. But more came on, scrambling over the twitching carcasses of their fellows, until they, too, fell. And then a third wave came.
Abil had never confronted death on such a scale — a thousand or more dead in seconds — it was unimaginable, unreasonable. And yet they continued to come. It wasn’t even murder but a kind of mass suicide. The Coalescents’ only tactic seemed to be to hope that the troopers would run out of fuel and ammunition before they ran out of bodies to stand in its way. But that wouldn’t happen, Abil thought sadly.
So many had been slain now that, he saw, their heaped corpses were beginning to clog the tunnel entrance. Abil tried to think like a corporal. He got to his feet, waved his arm. “Forward the throwers!”
Four of his troopers, carrying bulky backpacks, hurried forward. They launched great gouts of flame into the mounting wall of corpses, and at the defenders who continued to scramble over their fellows. Scores more Coalescents fell screaming onto the pile, their limbs alight like twigs in a bonfire. But that pile of corpses was alight, too. Soon the air was filled with smoke and grisly shards of burned bone and skin.
But the flames wouldn’t hurt Abil and his men in their skinsuits. He waved again. “Go, go, go!”
He led the way into the fire. He put his arms before his faceplate as he hit the barrier of flame, and he felt the carbonized corpses crumble around him as he forced his way through them. But in seconds he was through, into the denser air of the corridor beyond the air lock.
And he faced more people — thousands of them, all eerily similar. Just for an instant the front rank held back, gazing at this man who had emerged from the lethal flames. Then they surged forward. The corridor was a great tube of people, squeezing themselves like paste toward him.