Meanwhile, over Rabaul, the earthquakes had gotten increasingly severe. At last they cracked the seabed above Rabaul’s magma chamber. The magma was rising to the surface through great tunnels, some of them three hundred meters wide. Now seawater rushed into the tunnels and flashed instantly to steam. Meanwhile, other gases, carbon dioxide and sulfur compounds that had been kept dissolved in the magma by the higher pressure of the depths, like the carbon dioxide in a bottle of soda. But now the bottle was cracked, and the gases came bubbling out.
In the rock chambers, the pressure escalated exponentially.
II
Emergency lights came on, filling the room with a cold glow.
The false ceiling had broken up into polystyrene shards that hailed down on the fleeing attendees. Joan saw Alison Scott grab her two girls and huddle with them in a corner. The exposed roof space, filled with insulation-lagged ducts and cables, was cavernous, dark, dirty.
Fine nylon ropes tumbled down through air thick with polystyrene dust. She glimpsed black-clad shapes that moved, spiderlike, through the roof space, and slid down to the bar’s littered floor. They wore skintight black coveralls and balaclava hoods with silvery eye visors. She counted five, six, seven of them. She couldn’t tell if they were male or female. They all carried slim automatic weapons.
Alyce Sigurdardottir was tugging at her arm, trying to make her climb down from her table. But she resisted, aware that she was still the center here; she felt, maybe irrationally, that things would get even worse if she gave in to the chaos.
One of the invaders looked to be in command. On the floor, the others gathered around him as he surveyed the situation. He, she? No, he, Joan thought; in a group like this, it will be a he. Two of the intruders stayed with the leader. The other four made for the doors. With their backs to the walls they trained their weapons on the delegates, who herded, sheeplike, toward the center of the room.
There was only one hotel staff member here: the barman, the young Australian who had caught Alyce’s eye. He was slim, with curly black hair — at least part Aborigine, Joan thought — and he wore a bow tie and sparkling vest. Now, with great courage, he stepped forward, hands spread. “Listen,” he began. “I don’t know what you want here. But if you will let me call—”
The gun’s sound was quiet, oddly like a leopard’s cough, Joan thought absently. The boy fell, twitching. There was a sudden stink of death shit, a smell she hadn’t encountered since Africa. The delegates screamed, fell back, froze, as they each in their separate ways sought not to attract the attention of the murderers.
Beyond all this, incongruously, the smart walls continued to cycle, showing meaningless images of the New Guinea volcano, the toiling robot factories on Mars, ads for beer and drugs and technological trinkets.
As Joan had expected, the leader, his symbolic killing done, approached her. His gun was at his side, presumably still hot. His visor had been sewn into the balaclava. It was stylish, almost chic.
Before he could speak, she snapped, “Are you afraid to show me your face?”
He laughed and pulled off his balaclava — he, yes, she had been right. His head was shaven. He was white, with brown eyes. He was maybe twenty-five, surely not much older than the barman he had just killed. He eyed her, measuring her unspoken challenge.
His followers peeled off their balaclavas. They all had ostentatiously bare scalps. There were four men, including the leader, and three women.
Joan asked, “Are you Pickersgill?”
The leader laughed. “Pickersgill doesn’t exist. The global police state chases a chimera. Pickersgill is a pleasing joke, and useful.” His accent was Midwestern American, but with a faint exotic burr; such was the worldwide dominance of American English nowadays, this boy could have come from anywhere.
“So who are you?”
“I am Elisha.”
“Elisha, tell me what you want,” Joan said carefully.
“You are not setting the agenda now,” the boy said. “I will tell you what we have done. Dr. Joan Useb, we have released the disease.”
Joan’s skin prickled.
“You are all infected. We are infected. Without treatment, in a few days most of us will die. If this situation is resolved to our satisfaction, perhaps we will all survive. But we are prepared to die for what we believe. Are you?”
Joan considered. “Do you want the table?”
He stalked up and down before the coffee table, thinking it over. The absurd little table was the focus of power in this room: Of course he wanted it. “Yes. Get down.”
With Alyce’s help, she clambered down to the floor. Elisha leapt with some agility on to Joan’s improvised podium and began to bark commands in what sounded like Swedish to his colleagues.
“Classic primate behavior,” Alyce murmured. “Male dominance hierarchies. Paranoia. Xenophobia verging on schizophrenia. That’s what’s going on here, under the horse feathers.”
“But it’s only dealing with the horse feathers that is going to get any of us out of here—”
She was drowned out by a huge flapping noise, as if some vast pterosaur were coming in to land on the roof of the hotel. It was a helicopter, of course, suspended in the sky beyond the roof. And now an amplified voice boomed through the walls, announcing itself as the police.
The terrorists blasted their weapons at the roof, bringing down even more of the ceiling. The conference delegates cowered and screamed — thereby adding to the din the bad guys wanted to create, Joan thought, her hands pressed to her ears. When the police stopped trying to communicate, the guns were shut down.
Joan stood up carefully, brushing away dust. She was oddly unafraid. She looked up at Elisha, who stalked his coffee table podium, flushed, breathing hard, his gun resting on his shoulder. “You haven’t a chance of getting what you want, whatever it is, unless you let them speak to you.”
“But I don’t need to speak to police, or their mind-twisting psychological advisors. Not when I have you here — you, the self-styled head of the new globalization, this holon.”
Alyce sighed. “Why do I get the feeling that such an innocent word is suddenly going to become the name of a new demon?”
“We listened to your grandiose speech in the ceiling space, excluded from the light — how fitting!”
Joan said, “You really—” You really don’t understand. Wrong words, Joan. “Please. Tell me your concerns.”
He eyed her. Then he clambered down off his table. “Listen to me,” he said more quietly. “I heard what you said about the global organism into which we must soon be submerged. Very well. But any organism must have a boundary. What about those beyond the boundary? Doctor Joan Useb, the three hundred wealthiest people on the planet own as much as do the poorest three billion of their fellow human beings. Beyond the bastions of the elite, some poor regions are effectively enslaved, the people mined for their labor and bodies — or body parts. How is your global nervous system to be made aware of their misery?”
Her mind raced. Everything he said sounded rehearsed. Of course it did: This was his moment, the crux of his life; everything she did had to be governed by understanding that. Was he a student? If he was some kind of latter-day cultural colonial type on a guilt trip, maybe she could find weak spots in his commitment.
But he was a murderer, she reminded herself. And he had killed so casually, with not a moment’s hesitation. She wondered what drug regime he was using.
“Excuse me.” A new voice. It turned out to be Alison Scott. She was standing before Elisha, her two terrified daughters at her side, their hair of blue and green shining in the meaningless, flickering light of the walls.