"The Light of Other Days" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clarke Arthur C., Baxter Stephen)

Chapter 27 Family history

When she was forcibly restored to open human society, Kate was relieved to find she’d been cleared of the criminal conviction brought against her. But she was stunned to find she was taken away from Mary, her friends, and immediately incarcerated — by Hiram Patterson.

The door to the suite opened, as it did twice a day.

There stood her guard; a woman, tall, willowy, dressed in a sober business-like trouser suit. She was even beautiful — but with a deadness of expression and in her dark eyes that Kate found chilling.

Her name, Kate had learned, was Mae Wilson.

Wilson pushed a small trolley through the door, hauled out yesterday’s, cast a fast, professional glance around the room, then shut the door. And that was that, over without a word.

Kate had been sitting on the room’s sole piece of furniture, a bed. Now she got up and crossed to the trolley, pulled back its white paper cover. There was cold meat, salad, bread, fruit, and drinks, a flask of coffee, bottled water, orange juice. On a lower deck there was laundry, fresh underwear, jumpsuits, sheets for Kate’s bed. The usual stuff.

Kate had long exhausted the possibilities of the twice-daily trolley. The paper plates and plastic cutlery were useless for anything but their primary purpose, and a nearly useless for that. Even the wheels of the trolley were of soft plastic. She went back to her bed and sat desultorily munching on a peach.

The rest of the room was just as unpromising. The walls were seamless, coated with a clear plastic she couldn’t dig her nails through. There wasn’t even a light fitting; the grey glow that flooded the room — twenty-four hours a day — came from fluorescents behind ceiling panels, sealed off behind plastic, and anyhow out of her reach. The bed was a plastic box seamlessly attached to the floor. She’d tried ripping the sheets, but the fabric was too tough. (And anyhow she wasn’t yet ready to visualize herself garrotting anybody, even Wilson.)

The plumbing, a john and a shower fixture, was likewise of no value to her greater purpose. The toilet was chemical, and it seemed to lead to a sealed tank, so she couldn’t even smuggle out a message in her bodily waste — even supposing she could figure out how.

…But despite all that, she had come close to escape, once. It was enjoyable to replay her near-triumph in her mind.

She’d concocted the scheme in her head, where even the WormCam couldn’t yet peer. She’d worked on her preparations for over a week. Every twelve hours she had left the food trolley in a slightly different place — just that fraction further inside the room. She choreographed each setup in her head: three paces from bed to door, cut the second pace by that fraction more…

And each time she’d come to the door to collect the trolley, Wilson had been forced to reach a little further.

Until at last there came a time when Wilson, to reach the trolley, had to take a single pace into the room. Just a pace, that was all — but Kate hoped it would be enough.

Two running steps took her to the doorway. A shoulder charge knocked Wilson forward into the room, and Kate made it as far as two paces out the door.

Her room turned out to be just a box, standing alone in a giant, hangar-sized chamber, the walls high and remote and dimly lit. There were other guards all around her, men and women, getting up from desks, drawing weapons. Kate looked around frantically, seeking a place to run -

The hand that had closed on hers was like a vice. Her little finger was twisted back, and her arm bent sideways. Kate fell to her knees, unable to keep from screaming, and she felt bones in her finger break in an explosion of grinding pain.

It was, of course, Wilson.

When she’d come to, she was on the floor of her prison, bound there with what felt like duct tape, while a medic treated her hand. Wilson was being held back by another of the guards, with a murderous look on that steely face.

When it was done, Kate had a finger that throbbed for weeks. And Wilson, when she next came to the door on her twice-daily routine, fixed Kate with a glare full of hate. I wounded her pride, Kate realized. Next time, she will kill me without hesitation.

But it was clear to Kate that, even after her attempted escape, all that hate wasn’t directed at her. She wondered who was Wilson’s real target — and if Hiram knew.

In the same way, she knew, she had never been Hiram’s real target. She was just bait, bait in a trap.

She was just in the way of these crazy people with their unguessable agendas.

It did no good to brood on such things. She lay back on her bed. Later, in the routine she’d used to structure her empty days, she’d take some exercise. For now, suspended in light that was never quenched, she tried to blank her mind.

A hand touched hers.

Amid the chaos and recrimination and anger that followed the retrieval of Mary and Kate, David asked to see Mary in the cool calm of the Wormworks.

He was immediately jotted by the familiarity of Mary’s blue eyes, so like the eyes he had followed deep into time, all the way back to Africa.

He shivered with a sense of the evanescence of human life. Was Mary really no more than the transient manifestation of genes which had been passed to her through thousands of generations, even from the long-gone Neanderthal days, genes which she in turn would pass on into an unknown future? But the WormCam had destroyed that dismal perspective. Mary’s life was transient, but no less meaningful for that; and now that the past was opened up, she would surely be remembered, cherished by those who would follow.

And her life, shaped in a fast-changing world, might yet take her to places he couldn’t even imagine.

She said, “You look worried!”

“That’s because I’m not sure who I’m speaking to.”

She snorted, and for an instant he saw the old, rebellious, discontented Mary.

“Forgive my ignorance,” David said. “I’m just trying to understand. We all are. This is something new to us.”

She nodded. “And therefore something to fear?… Yes,” she said eventually. “Yes, then. We’re here. The wormhole in my head never shuts down, David. Everything I do, everything I see and hear and feel, everything I think, is -”

“Shared?”

“Yes.” She studied him. “But I know what you imply by that. Diluted. Right? But it isn’t like that. I’m no less me. But I am enhanced. It’s just another layer of mind. Or of information processing, if you like: layered over my central nervous system, the way the CNS is layered over older networks, like the biochemical. My memories are still mine. Does it matter if they are stored in somebody else’s head?”

“But this isn’t just some kind of neat mobile phone network, is it? You Joined make higher claims than that. Is there a new person in all this, a new, combined you. A group mind, linked by wormholes, emergent from the network?”

“You think that would be a monstrosity, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what to think about it.”

He studied her, trying to grasp Mary within the shell of Joinedness.

It didn’t help that the Joined had quickly become renowned as consummate actors — or liars, to be more blunt. Thanks to their detached layers of consciousness, each of them had a mastery over their body language, the muscles of their faces — a power over communication channels that had evolved to transmit information reliably and honestly — that could beat out the most expert thespian. He had no reason to suppose Mary was lying to him, today; it was just that he couldn’t see how he could tell if she was or not.

She said now, “Why don’t you ask me what you really want to know?”

Disturbed, he said, “Very well. Mary — how does it feel?”

She said slowly, “The same. Just… more. It’s like coming fully awake — a feeling of clarity, of full consciousness. You must know. I’ve never been a scientist. But I’ve solved puzzles. I play chess, for instance. Science is something like that, isn’t it? You figure something out — suddenly see how the game fits together — it’s as if the clouds clear, just for a moment, and you can see far, much farther than before.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve had a few moments like that in my life. I’ve been fortunate.”

She squeezed his hand. “But for me, that’s how it feels all the time. Isn’t that wonderful?”

“Do you understand why people fear you?”

“They do more than fear us,” she said calmly. “They hunt us down. They attack us. But they can’t damage us. We can see them coming, David.”

That chilled him.

“And even if one of us is killed — even if I am killed — then we, the greater being, will go on.”

“What does that mean?”

“The information network that defines the Joined is large, and growing all the time. It’s probably indestructible, like an Internet of minds.”

He frowned, obscurely irritated. “Have you heard of attachment theory? It describes our need, psychologically, to form close relationships, to reach out to intimates. We need such relationships to conceal the awful truth, which we confront as we grow up, that each of us is alone. The greatest battle of human existence is to come to terms with that fact. And that is why to be Joined is so appealing.

“But the chip in your head will not help you,” he said brutally. “Not in the end. For you must die alone, just as I must.”

She smiled, coldly forgiving, and he felt ashamed.

“But that may not be true,” she said. “Perhaps I will be able to live on, survive the death of my body — of Mary’s body. But I, my consciousness and memories, will not be resident in one member’s body or another, but — distributed. Shared amongst them all. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

He whispered, “And would it be you? Could you truly avoid death that way? Or would this distributed self be a copy?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. And besides the technology is some way away from realizing that. Until it does, we will still suffer illness, accident, death. And we will always grieve.”

“The wiser you are, the more it hurts.”

“Yes. The human condition is tragic, David. The greater the Joined becomes, the more clearly I can see that. And the more I feel it.” Her face, still young, seemed overlaid by a ghostly mask of much greater age. “Come with me,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

Kate couldn’t help but jump, snatch her hand away.

She finessed her involuntary gasp into a cough, extended the motion of her hand to cover her mouth. Then, delicately, she returned her hand to where it had been, resting on the top sheet of her bed.

And that gentle touch came again, the fingers warm, strong, unmistakable despite the SmartShroud glove which must cover them. She felt the fingers squirm into her palm, and she tried to stay still, eating the peach.

Sorry shocked you. No way warn.

She leaned back a little, seeking to conceal her own handspelling behind her back. Bobby?

Who else??? Nice prison.

In Wormworks right?

Yes. DNA trace. David helped. Refugee methods. Mary helped. All family together.

Shouldn’t have come, she signed quickly. What Hiram wants. Get you. Bait in trap.

Not abandon you. Need you. Be ready.

Tried once. Guards smart, sharp…

She risked a glimpse to her side. She could see no sign of his presence, not so much as a false shadow, an indentation in the bedcover, a hint of distortion. Evidently SmartShroud technology was improving as rapidly as the WormCam itself.

I might not get another chance, she thought. I must tell him.

Bobby. I saw David. Had news. About you.

His signing now was slower, hesitant. Me what me?

Your family… I can’t do it, she thought. Ask Hiram, she signed back, feeling bitter.

Asking you.

Birth. Your birth.

Asking you. Asking you.

Kate took a deep breath.

Not what you believe. Think it through. Hiram wanted dynasty. David big disappointment, out of control. Mother a big inconvenience. So, have boy without mother.

Don’t understand. I have mother. Heather mother.

She hesitated. No she isn’t. Bobby, you’re a clone.

David settled back and fixed the cold metal Mind’sEye hoop over his head. As he sank into virtual reality the world turned dark and silent, and for a brief moment he had no sense of his own body, couldn’t even feel Mary’s soft, warm hand wrapped around his own.

Then, all around them, the stars came out. Mary gasped and grabbed at his arm.

He was suspended in a three-dimensional diorama of stars, stars spread over a velvet black sky, stars more crowded than the darkest desert night — and yet there was structure, he saw slowly. A great river of light — stars crammed so close they merged into glowing, pale clouds — ran around the equator of the sky. It was the Milky Way, of course: the great disc of stars in which he was still embedded.

He glanced down. Here was his body, familiar and comfortable, clearly visible in the complex, multiply sourced light that fell on him. But he was floating in the starlight without enclosure or support.

Mary drifted beside him, still holding on to his arm. Her touch was comforting. Odd, he thought. We can cast our minds more than two thousand light years from Earth, and yet we must still grasp at each other, our primate heritage never far from the doors of our souls.

This alien sky was populated.

There was a sun, planet and moon here, suspended around him, like the trinity of bodies that had always dominated the human environment. But it was a strange enough sun — in fact, not a single star like Earth’s sun, but a binary.

The principal was an orange giant, dim and cool. Centred on a glowing yellow core, it was a mass of orange gas, growing steadily more tenuous. There was much detail in that sullen disc: a tracery of yellow-white light that danced at the poles, the ugly scars of grey-black spots around the equator.

But the giant star was visibly flattened. It had a companion star, small and bluish, little more than a point of light, orbiting so close to its parent it was almost within the giant’s scattered outer atmosphere. In fact, David saw, a thin streamer of gas, torn from the parent and still glowing, had wrapped itself around the companion and was falling to its surface, a thin, hellish rain of fusing hydrogen.

David looked down to the planet that hovered beneath his feet. It was a sphere the apparent size of a beachball, half-illuminated by the complex red and white light of its parent stars. But it. was obviously airless, its surface a complex mesh of impact craters and mountain chains. Perhaps it had once had an atmosphere, even oceans; or it might have been the rocky or metallic core of a gas giant, an erstwhile Neptune or Uranus. It was even possible, he supposed, that it had harboured life. If so, that life was now destroyed or fled, every trace of its passing scorched from the surface by the dying sun.

But this dead, blasted world still had a moon. Though much smaller than its parent, the moon glowed more brightly, reflecting more of the complex mixed light of the twin stars. And its surface appeared, at first glance, utterly smooth, so that the little worldlet looked like a cue ball, machined in some great lathe. When David looked more closely, however, he could see there was a network of fine cracks and ridges, some of them evidently hundreds of kilometres long, all across the surface. The moon looked rather like a hard-boiled egg, he thought, whose shell had been assiduously if gently cracked with a spoon.

This moon was a ball of water ice. Its smoothed surface was a sign of recent global melting, presumably caused by the grotesque expansion of the parent star, and the ridges were seams between plates of ice. And perhaps, like Jupiter’s moon Europa, there was still a layer of liquid water somewhere beneath this deep-frozen surface, an ancient ocean that might serve as a harbour, even now, for retreating life…

He sighed. Nobody knew. And right now, nobody had the time or resources to find out. There was simply too much to do, too many places to go.

But it wasn’t the rocky world, or its ice moon — not even the strange double star itself — but something much grander, beyond this little stellar system, which had drawn him here.

He turned now, and looked beyond the stars.

The nebula spanned half the sky.

It was a wash of colours, ranging from bright blue-white at its centre, through green and orange, to sombre purples and reds at its periphery. It was like a giant watercolour painting, he thought, the colours smoothly flowing, one into another. He could see layers in the cloud — the texture, the strata of shadows made it look surprisingly three-dimensional — with finer structure deeper in its heart.

The most striking aspect of the larger structure was a pattern of dark clouds, rich with dust, set out in a startlingly clear V-shape before the glowing mass, like an immense bird raising black wings before a flame. And before the bird shape, like a sprinkling of sparks from that bonfire behind, there was a thin veil of stars, separating him from the cloud. The great river of light that was the Galaxy flowed around the nebula, passing behind it as if encircling it.

Even as he turned his head from side to side, it was impossible to grasp the full scale of the structure. At times it seemed close enough to touch, like a giant dynamic wall-sculpture he might reach into and explore. And then it would recede, apparently to infinity. He knew his imagination, evolved to the thousand-kilometre scale of Earth, was inadequate to the task of grasping the immense distances involved here.

For if the sun was moved to the centre of the nebula, humans could build an interstellar empire without reaching the edge of the cloud.

Wonder surged in him, sudden, unexpected. I am privileged, he thought anew, to live in such a time. One day, he supposed, some WormCam explorer would sail beneath the icy crust of the moon and seek out whatever lay at its core; and perhaps teams of investigators would scour the surface of the planet below, seeking out relics of the past.

He envied those future explorers the depth of their knowledge. And yet, he knew, they would surely envy his generation most of all. For, as he sailed outward with the expanding front of WormCam exploration, David was here first, and nobody else in all of history would be able to say that.

Long story. Japanese lab. The place he used to clone tigers for witch doctors. Heather just a surrogate. David WormCammed it all. Then all that mind control. Hiram didn’t want more mistakes…

Heather. I felt no bond. Know why now. How sad.

She thought she could feel his pulse in the invisible touch at her palm. Yes sad sad.

And then, without warning, the door crashed open. Mae Wilson walked in holding a pistol. Without hesitation she fired once, twice, to either side of Kate. The gun was silenced, the shots mere pops.

There was a cry, a patch of blood hovering in the air, another like a small explosion where the bullet exited Bobby’s body.

Kate tried to stand. But the nozzle of Wilson’s rifle was at the back of her head. “Don’t even think about it.”

Bobby’s ’Shroud was failing, is great concentric circles of distortion and shadow that spread around his wounds. Kate could see he was trying to get to the door.

But there were more of Hiram’s goons there; he would have no way through. Now Hiram himself arrived at the door. His face twisted with unrecognisable emotion as he looked al

Kate, at Bobby’s body. “I knew you couldn’t resist it. Gotcha, you little shit.”

Kate hadn’t been out of her boxy cell for — how long? Thirty, forty days? Now, out in the cavernous dimly lit spaces of the Wormworks, she felt exposed, ill at ease.

The shot turned out to have passed straight through Bobby’s upper shoulder, ripping muscle and shattering bone, but — through pure chance — his life was not in danger. Hiram’s medics had wanted to give Bobby a general anaesthetic as they treated him, but, staring at Hiram, he refused, and suffered the pain of the treatment in full awareness. Hiram led the way across a floor empty of people past quiescent, hulking machinery. Wilson and the other goons circled Bobby and Kate, some of them walking backward so they could watch their captives making it obvious there was no way to escape.

Hiram, immersed in whatever project he was progressing now, looked hunted, rat-like. His mannerisms were strange, repetitive, obsessive: he was a man who had spent too much time alone. He’s the subject of an experiment himself, Kate thought sourly: a human being deprived of companionship, afraid of the darkness — subject to constant, more or less hostile glares from the rest of the planet’s population, their invisible eyes surrounding him. He was being steadily destroyed by a machine he had never imagined, never intended, whose implications he probably didn’t understand even now. With a pang of pity, she realized there was no human in history who had more right to feel paranoid.

But she could never forgive him for what he had done to her — and to Bobby. And, she realized, she had absolutely no idea what Hiram intended for them, now that he had trapped his son.

Bobby held Kate’s hand tight, making sure her body was never out of contact with his, that they were inseparable. And even as he protected her he was able subtly to lean on her without allowing the others to see, drawing strength she was glad to give him.

They reached a part of the Wormworks Kate had not seen before. A kind of bunker had been constructed, a massive cube half-set into the floor. Its interior was brightly lit. A door was set in its side, operated by a heavy wheel as if this was a submarine bulkhead.

Bobby stepped forward cautiously, still clutching Kate. “What is this, Hiram? Why have you brought us here?”

“Quite a place, isn’t it?” Hiram grinned, and slapped the wall confidently. “We borrowed some engineering from the old NORAD base they dug into the Colorado mountains. This whole damn bunker is mounted on huge shock-absorbent springs.”

“Is that what this is for? To ride out a nuclear attack?”

“No. These walls aren’t to keep out an explosion. They’re supposed to contain one.”

Bobby frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“The future. The future of OurWorld, Our future, son.”

Bobby said, “There are others who knew I was coming here. David, Mary, Special Agent Mavens of the FBI. They will be here soon. And then I’ll be walking out of here. With her.”

Kate watched Hiram’s eyes, glancing from one to the other of them, scheming. He said, “You’re right, of course. I can’t keep you here. Although I could have fun trying. Just give me five minutes. Let me make my case, Bobby.” He forced a smile.

Bobby struggled to speak. “That’s all you want? To convince me of something? That’s what this is all about?”

“Let me show you.” And he nodded his head to the goons, indicating that Bobby and Kate should be brought into the bunker.

The walls were of thick steel. The bunker was cramped, with room only for Hiram, Kate, Bobby and Wilson.

Kate looked around, tense, alert, overloaded. This was obviously a live experimental lab: there were whiteboards, pin boards, SoftScreens, flip charts, fold-up chairs and desks fixed to the walls. At the centre of the room was the equipment which, presumably, was the focus of interest here: what looked like a heat exchanger and a small turbine, and other pieces of equipment, white, anonymous boxes. On one of the desks there was a coffee, half-drunk and still steaming.

Hiram walked to the middle of the bunker. “We lost the monopoly on the WormCam quicker than I wanted. But we made a pile of money. And we’re making more; the Wormworks is still far ahead of any similar facility around the world. But we’re heading for a plateau, Bobby. In another few years the WormCams are going to be able to reach across the universe. And already, now that every punk kid has her own private WormCam, the market for generators is becoming saturated. We’ll be in the business of replacement and upgrade, where the profit margins are low and the competition ferocious.”

“But you,” said Kate, “have a better idea. Right?”

Hiram glared. “Not that it will concern you.” He walked to the machinery and stroked it. “We’ve gotten bloody good at plucking wormholes out of the quantum foam and expanding them. Up to now we’ve been using them to transmit information. Right? But your smart brother David will tell you that it takes a finite piece of energy to record even a single bit of information. So if we’re transmitting data we must be transmitting energy as well. Right now it’s just a trickle — not enough to make a light-bulb glow.”

Bobby nodded, stiffly, obviously in pain. “But you’re going to change all that.”

Hiram pointed to the pieces of equipment. “That’s a wormhole generator. It’s squeezed-vacuum technology, but far in advance of anything you’ll find on the market. I want to make wormholes bigger and more stable — much more, more than anything anybody’s achieved so far. Wide enough to act as conduits for significant amounts of energy.

“And the energy we mine will be passed through this equipment, the heat exchanger and the turbine, to extract usable electrical energy. Simple, nineteenth-century technology — but that’s all I need as long as I have the energy flow. This is just a test rig, but enough to prove the point of principle, and to solve the problems — mainly the stability of the wormholes.”

“And where,” Bobby said slowly, “will you mine the energy from?”

Hiram grinned and pointed to his feet. “From down there. The core of the Earth, son. A ball of solid nickel-iron the size of the Moon, glowing as hot as the surface of the sun. All that energy trapped in there since the Earth formed, the engine that powers the volcanoes and earthquakes and the circulation of the crust plates… That’s what I’m planning to tap.

You see the beauty of it? The energy we humans burn up, here on the surface, is a candle compared to that furnace. As soon as the technical guys solve the wormhole stability problem, every extant power-generating business will be obsolete overnight. Nuclear fusion, my hairy arse. And it won’t stop there. Maybe some day we’ll learn how to tap the stars themselves. Don’t you see, Bobby? Even the WormCam was nothing compared to this. We’ll change the world. We’ll become rich -”

“Beyond the dreams of avarice,” Bobby murmured.

“Here’s the dream, boy. This is what I want us to work on together. You and me. Building a future, building OurWorld.”

“Dad.” Bobby spread his free hand. “I admire you. I admire what you’re building. I’m not going to stop you. But I don’t want this. None of this is real — your money and your power — all that’s real is me. Kate and me. I have your genes, Hiram. But I’m not you. And I never will be, no matter how you try to make it so…”

And as Bobby said that, links began to form in Kate’s mind, as they used to as she neared the kernel of truth that lay at the heart of the most complex story.

I’m not you, Bobby had said.

But, she saw now, that was the whole point.

As she drifted in space, Mary’s mouth was open wide. Smiling, David reached out, touched her chin and closed her jaw. “I can’t believe it,” she said.

“It’s a nebula,” he said. “It’s called the Trifid Nebula, in fact.”

“It’s visible from Earth?”

“Oh, yes. But we are so far from home that the light that set off from the nebula around the time of Alexander the Great is only now washing over Earth.” He pointed. “Can you see those dark spots?” They were small, fine globules, like drops of ink in coloured water. “They are called Bok globules. Even the smallest of those spots could enclose the whole of our Solar System. We think they are the birthplaces of stars; clouds of dust and gas which will condense to form new suns. It takes a long time to form a star, of course. But the final stages — when fusion kicks in, and the star blows away its surrounding shell of dust and begins to shine — can happen quite suddenly.” He glanced at her. “Think about it. If you lived here — maybe on that ice ball below us — you would be able to see, during your lifetime, the birth of dozens, perhaps hundreds of stars.”

“I wonder what religion we would have invented,” she said.

It was a good question. “Perhaps something softer. A religion dominated more by images of birth than death.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

He sighed. “Everybody should see this before they die.”

“And now we have,” Mary said, a little formally. “Thank you.”

He shook his head, irritated. “Not them. Not the Joined. You, Mary. I hope you’ll forgive me for that.”

“What is it you want to say to me, David?”

He hesitated. He pointed at the nebula. “Somewhere over there, beyond the nebula, is the centre of the Galaxy. There is a great black hole there, a million times the mass of the sun. And it’s still growing. Clouds of dust and gas and smashed-up stars flow into the hole from all directions.”

“I’ve seen pictures of it,” Mary said.

“Yes. There’s a whole cluster of stapledons out there already. They are having some difficulty approaching the hole itself; the massive gravitational distortion plays hell with wormhole stability.”

“Stapledons?”

“WormCam viewpoints. Disembodied observers, wandering through space and time.” He smiled, and indicated his floating body. “When you get used to this virtual-reality WormCam exploration, you’ll find you don’t need to carry along as much baggage as this.

“My point is, Mary, that we’re sending human minds like a thistledown cloud out through a block of spacetime two hundred thousand light years wide and a hundred millennia deep: across a hundred billion star systems, all the way back to the birth of humanity. Already there’s more than we can study even if we had a thousand times as many trained observers — and the boundaries are being pushed back all the time.

“Some of our theories are being confirmed; others are unsentimentally debunked. And that’s good; that’s how science is supposed to be. But I think there’s a deeper, more profound lesson we’re already learning.”

“And that is.”

“That mind — that life itself — is precious,” he said slowly. “Unimaginably so. We’ve only just begun our search. But already we know that there is no significant biosphere within a thousand light years, nor as deep in the past as we can see. Oh, perhaps there are microorganisms clinging to life in some warm, slime-filled pond, or deep in the crevices of some volcanic cleft somewhere. But there is no other Earth.

“Mary, the WormCam has pushed my perception out from my own concerns, inexorably, step by step. I’ve seen the evil and the good in my neighbour’s heart, the lies in my own past, the banal horror of my people’s history.

“But we’ve reached beyond that now, beyond the clamour of our brief human centuries, the noisy island to which we cling. Now we’ve seen the emptiness of the wider universe, the mindless churning of the past. We are done with blaming ourselves for our family history, and we are beginning to see the greater truth: that we are surrounded by abysses, by great silences, by the blind working-out of huge mindless forces. The WormCam is, ultimately, a perspective machine. And we are appalled by that perspective.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

He faced her. “If I must speak to you — to all of you — then I want you to know what a responsibility you may hold.

“There was a Jesuit called Teilhard de Chardin. He believed that just as life had covered the Earth to form the biosphere, so mankind — thinking life — would eventually encompass life to form a higher layer, a cogitative layer he called the noosphere. He argued that the rough organization of the noosphere would grow, until it cohered into a single supersapient being he called the Omega Point.”

“Yes,” she said, and she closed her eyes.

“The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and centrality.”

“You’ve read de Chardin?”

“We have.”

“It’s the Wormwood, you see,” he said hoarsely. “That’s my problem. I can take no comfort from the new nihilist thinkers. The notion that this tiny scrap of life and mind should be smashed — at this moment of transcendent understanding — by a random piece of rock is simply unacceptable.”

She touched his face with her small young hands. “I understand. Trust me. We’re working on it.”

And, looking into her young-old eyes, he believed it.

The light was changing now, subtly, growing significantly darker.

The blue-white companion star was passing behind the denser bulk of the parent. David could see the companion’s light streaming through the complex layers of gas at the periphery of the giant — and, as the companion touched the giant’s blurred horizon, he actually saw shadows cast by thicker knots of gas in those outer layers against the more diffuse atmosphere, immense lines that streamed toward him, millions of kilometres long and utterly straight. It was a sunset on a star, he realized with awe, an exercise in celestial geometry and perspective.

And yet the spectacle reminded him of nothing so much as the ocean sunsets he used to enjoy as a boy, as he played with his mother on the long Atlantic beaches of France, moments when shafts of light cast by the thick ocean clouds had made him wonder if he was seeing the light of God Himself.

Were the Joined truly the embryo of a new order of humanity — of mind? Was he making a sort of first contact here, with a being whose intellect and understanding might surpass his own as much as he might surpass his Neanderthal great-grandmother?

But perhaps it was necessary for a new form of mind to grow, new mental powers, to apprehend the wider perspective offered by the WormCam.

He thought. You are feared and despised, and now you are weak. I fear you; I despise you. But so was Christ feared and despised. And the future belonged to Him. As perhaps it does to you.

And so you may be the sole repository of my hopes, as I have tried to express to you.

But whatever the future, I can’t help but miss the feisty girl who used to live behind those ancient blue eyes.

And it disturbs me that not once have you mentioned your mother, who dreams away what is left of her life in darkened rooms. Do we who preceded you mean so little?

Mary pulled herself closer to him, wrapped her arms around his waist and hugged him. Despite his troubled thoughts, her simple human warmth was a great comfort.

“Let’s go home,” she said. “I think your brother needs you.”

Kate knew she had to tell him. “Bobby.”

“Shut up, Manzoni,” Hiram snarled. He was raging now, throwing his arms in the air, stalking around the room. “What about me? I made you, you little shit. I made you so I wouldn’t have to die, knowing -”

“Knowing that you’d lose it all,” Kate said.

“Manzoni.”

Wilson took a step forward, standing between Hiram and Bobby, watching them all.

Kate ignored her. “You want a dynasty. You want your offspring to rule the fucking planet. It didn’t work with David, so you tried again, without even the inconvenience of sharing him with a mother. Yes, you made Bobby, and you tried to control him. But even so he doesn’t want to play your games.”

Hiram faced her, fists bunching. “What he wants doesn’t matter. I won’t be blocked.”

“No,” Kate said, wondering. “No, you won’t, will you? My God, Hiram.”

Bobby said urgently, “Kate, I think you’d better tell me what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, I don’t say this was his plan from the beginning. But it was always a fallback, in case you didn’t — cooperate. And of course he had to wait until the technology was ready. But it’s there now. Isn’t it, Hiram?…” And another piece of the puzzle fell into place. “You’re funding the Joined. Aren’t you? Covertly, of course. But it’s your resources that are behind the brain-link technology. You had your own purpose for it.”

She could see in Bobby’s eyes — black-ringed, marked by pain — that he understood at last.

“Bobby, you’re his clone. Your body and nervous structures are as close to Hiram’s as is humanly possible to manufacture. Hiram wants OurWorld to live on after his death. He doesn’t want to see it dispersed — or, worse, fall into the hands of somebody from outside the family. You’re his one hope. But if you won’t cooperate…”

Bobby turned to his clone-parent. “If I won’t be your heir, then you’ll kill me. You’ll take my body and you’ll upload your own foul mind into me.”

“But it won’t be like that,” Hiram said rapidly. “Don’t you see? We’ll be together, Bobby. I’ll have beaten death, by God. And when you grow old, we can do it again. And again, and again.”

Bobby shook off Kate’s arm, and strode toward Hiram.

Wilson stepped between Hiram and Bobby, pushing Hiram behind her, and raised her pistol.

Kate tried to move forward, to intervene, but it felt as if she were embedded in treacle.

Wilson was hesitating. She seemed to be coming to a decision of her own. The gun muzzle wavered.

Then, in a single lightning-fast movement, she turned and slapped Hiram over the ear, hard enough to send him sprawling, and she grabbed Bobby. He tried to land a blow on her, but she took his injured arm and pressed a determined thumb into his wounded shoulder. He cried out, eyes rolling, and he fell to his knees.

Kate felt overwhelmed, baffled. What now? How much more complicated can this get? Who was this Wilson? What did she want?

With brisk movements Wilson laid Bobby and his clone-parent side by side, and began to throw switches on the equipment console at the centre of the room. There was a hum of fans, a crackle of ozone; Kate sensed great forces gathering in the room.

Hiram tried to sit up, but Wilson knocked him back with a kick in the chest.

Hiram croaked, “What the hell are you doing?”

“Initiating a wormhole,” Wilson murmured, concentrating. “A bridge to the centre of the Earth.”

Kate said, “But you can’t. The wormholes are still unstable.”

“I know that,” Wilson snapped. “That’s the point. Don’t you understand yet?”

“My God,” Hiram said. “You’ve intended this all along.”

“To kill you. Quite right. I waited for the opportunity. And I took it.”

“Why, for Christ’s sake?”

“For Barbara Wilson. My daughter.”

“Who?…”

“You destroyed her. You and your WormCam. Without you -”

Hiram laughed, an ugly, strained sound. “Don’t tell me. It doesn’t matter. Everyone has a grudge. I always knew one of you bitter arseholes would get through in the end. But I trusted you, Wilson.”

“If not for you I would be happy.” Her voice was pellucid, calm.

“What are you talking about?… But who gives a fuck? Look — you’ve got me,” Hiram said desperately. “Let Bobby go. And the girl. They don’t matter.”

“Oh, but they do.” Wilson seemed on the verge of crying. “Don’t you see? He is the point.” The hum of the equipment rose to a crescendo, and digits scrolled over the SoftScreen monitor outputs on the wall. “Just a couple of seconds,” Wilson said. “That isn’t long to wait, is it? And then it will all be over.” She turned to Bobby. “Don’t be afraid.”

Bobby, barely conscious, struggled to speak. “What?”

“You won’t feel a thing.”

“What do you care?”

“But I do care.” She stroked his cheek. “I spent so long watching you. I knew you were cloned. It doesn’t matter. I saw you take your first step. I love you.”

Hiram growled. “A bloody WormCam stalker. Is that all you are? How — small. I’ve been hunted by priests and pimps and politicians, criminals, nationalists, the sane and the insane. Everybody with a grudge about the inventor of the WormCam. I evaded them all. And now it comes down to this.” He began to struggle. “No. Not this way. Not this way.”

And, with a single, snake-like movement, he lunged at Wilson’s leg and sank his teeth into her hamstring.

She cried out and staggered back. Hiram clung on with his teeth, like a dog, the woman’s blood trickling from his mouth. Wilson rolled on top of him and raised her fist. Hiram released Wilson’s leg and yelled at Kate. “Get him out of here! Get him out…” But then Wilson drove her fist into his bloodied throat, and Kate heard the crunch of cartilage and bone, and his voice turned to a gurgle.

Kate grabbed Bobby by his good arm and hauled him, by main force, over the threshold of the bunker. He cried out as his head hit on the door’s thick metal sill, but she ignored him.

As soon as his dangling feet were clear she slammed the door, masking the rising noise of the wormhole, and began to dog it shut.

Hiram’s security goons were approaching, bewildered. Kate, hauling on the wheel, screamed at them. “Help him up and get out of here!”

But then the wall bulged out at her, and she glimpsed light, as bright as the sun. Deafened, blinded, she seemed to be falling.

Falling into darkness.