Alex maneuvered slowly past a crowd that had spilled into the street, watching dancers perform a haka on the marae platform of an imposing Maori meeting house. Sloping beams of extravagantly carved red wood overhung the courtyard where bare-chested men stuck out their tongues and shouted, stamping in unison and flexing tattooed thighs and arms to intimidate the delighted tourists.
George Hutton had taken Alex to see the real thing a while back, at the wedding of his niece. It was quite a show, the haka. Evidence of a rich cultural heritage that lived on.
For a while, at least…
Alex shook his head. It’s not my fault there won’t be any more hakas — or Maori — in a few years’ time. I’m not responsible for the thing swallowing the Earth from within.
Alex hadn’t made that monster — the singularity they called Beta. He’d only discovered it.
Still, in ancient Egypt they used to kill the messenger.
He would have no such easy out. He might not have been the one to set Beta on its course, but he had made the evaporating Iquitos singularity, Alpha. To George Hutton and the others, that made him responsible by proxy — no matter how much they liked him personally — until Beta’s real makers were found.
Alex recalled the image that had begun unblurring in the holo tank as they probed the monster’s involute topology. It was horrible, voracious, and beautiful to behold. Undeniably there was a genius somewhere… someone a whole lot better than Alex at his own game. The realization was humbling, and a bit frightening.
Immersed in his own thoughts, he had been driving the little Tangoparu company car on mental autopilot, threading past one bottleneck after another. Just when it seemed traffic would open up again, red brake lights forced him to stop hard. Shouts and horns blared somewhere up ahead.
Alex leaned out the window to get a better look. Emergency strobes flashed. A bobbing magnus-effect ambulance hovered near one of the massive, blocky tourist hotels, where budget-conscious travelers rented tiny, slotlike units by the cubic meter. The vehicle’s spherical gas bag rotated slowly around a horizontal pivot, using small momentum shifts to maneuver delicately near white-suited emergency workers. Alex had no view of the injured, but stains on the clothes of shocked bystanders told of some bloody episode that must have gone down only moments ago.
The crowds suddenly parted and more police hove into view, wrestling along a figure swaddled in restraint netting, who howled and writhed, wild-eyed, with face and clothes flecked in blood and spittle. A green gas canister at his belt showed him to be a dozer — one of those unfortunates more affected by excess carbon dioxide than other people. In most, such borderline susceptibilities caused little more than sleepiness or headaches. But sometimes a wild mania resulted, made far worse by the close press of crowding human flesh.
Apparently, supplemental oxygen hadn’t helped this fellow… or the poor victims of his murderous fit. Alex had never seen a mucker up close like this before, but on occasion he had witnessed the effects from a distance.
“You don’t get anything, but what something else gets taken away . . “He distantly recalled Jen saying that last time he visited her office in London, as they stood together at the window watching the daily bicycle jam turn into a riot on Westminster Bridge. “True-Vu tech put a stop to purposeful street crime,” she had said. “So today most killings are outrages of pure environmental overload. Promise me, Alex, you’ll never be one of those down there… the honestly employed. ”
Horribly fascinated, they had observed in silence as the commuter brawl spread onto Brunner Quay, then eastward toward the Arts Center. Recalling that episode, Alex suddenly saw this one take an unexpected turn. The officers hauling the wild-eyed mucker, distracted by frantic relatives at their sleeves, let their grip loosen for just a moment. Even then, a normal man might not have been able to tear free. But in a burst of hysterical strength the maniac yanked loose and ran. Ululating incoherently, he knocked down bystanders and then hurtled through the traffic jam — directly toward Alex’s car!
The mucker’s arms were pinned. He can’t get far, Alex thought. Somebody will stop him.
Only no one did. Nobody sensible messed with a mucker, bound or unbound.
Deciding at the last moment, Alex kicked his door open. The madman’s eyes seemed to clarify in that brief instant, replacing rage with an almost lucid, plaintive expression — as if to ask Alex, What did I ever do to you? Then he collided with the door, caroming a few meters before tumbling to the street. Somehow Alex felt guilty — as if he’d just beaten up a helpless bloke instead of possibly saving lives. That didn’t stop him, though, from leaping out and throwing himself atop the kicking, squalling man — now suddenly awash with incongruous tears as he cursed in some inland dialect of Han. With no better way to restrain him, Alex simply sat on him till help arrived.
The whole episode — from breakaway to the moment officers applied the spray sedatives they should have used in the first place — took little more than a minute. When the trussed-up mucker looked back at him through a crowd of snapping True-Vu lenses, Alex had a momentary feeling that he understood the fellow… far better, perhaps, than he did the gawking tourists around him. There was something desperately fearful and yet longing in those eyes. A look reminding Alex of what he sometimes saw in a mirror’s momentary, sidelong glance.
It was a queer, disturbing instant of recognition. We all create monsters in our minds. The only important difference may be which of us let our monsters become real.
After wading through congratulatory backpats to his car, Alex looked down and saw for the first time that his clothes were smeared with blood. He sighed. Why does everything happen to me? I thought academics were supposed to lead boring lives.
Oh, what I wouldn’t give for some good old-fashioned British boredom about now…
No sooner was he seated than the driver behind him blew his horn. So much for the rewards of heroism. Edging around a final tourist bus he saw open lanes ahead at last. Carefully Alex fed the engine hydrogen, spun up the little car’s flywheel, and gradually built up speed. Soon the northern reaches of the Mamaku range sped by as he left Rotorua behind and set off across the central plateau.
This highway shared the chief attribute of Kiwi roads — a stubborn resistance to straight lines. Driving entailed carefully swooping round hairpin bends and steep crags, intermittently staring over precipices into gaping, cottony nothingness.
It was easy to see how New Zealand had got its Maori name — Ao Tearoa — Land of the Long White Cloud. Mist-shrouded peaks resembled recumbent giants swathed in fog. The slumbering volcanoes’ green slopes supported rich forests, meadows, and over twenty million sheep. The latter were kept mostly for their wool nowadays, though he knew George Hutton and many other natives ate red meat from time to time and saw nothing wrong with it.
In this land of steam geysers and rumbling mountains, one never drove far without encountering another of Hut-ton’s little geothermal power stations, each squatting on a taproot drilled near a vein of magma. Mapping such underground sources had made George wealthy. The network of sensors left over from that effort now helped Alex’s team define what was happening in the Earth’s core.
Not that anyone expected the scans to offer hope. How, after all, do you get rid of an unwanted guest weighing a million million tons? A monster ensconced safely in a lair four thousand kilometers deep? You surely don’t do it the way the Maori used to placate taniwha… demons… by plucking a hair and dropping it into dark waters.