Nate suddenly felt bad for the older man. Ryder was behaving like an early Alzheimer's patient who is realizing that he's losing recognition of his grandchildren's faces. "Tell me," Nate said.

Ryder nodded, swallowed hard, pressed on — hardly the picture of the powerful leader he'd appeared the night before.

"I think that after the Goo found its safe haven here under the sea, it needed to have more information, more DNA sequences to make sure it could protect itself. It produced a minute bacterium that could spread throughout the oceans, be part of the great world ecosystem but could pass genetic information back to the source. We call the bacteria SAR-11. It's a thousand times smaller than normal bacteria, but it's in every liter of seawater on the planet. That worked fine to transmit information back to the Goo for three billion years — everything that could be known was in the sea. Then something happened."

"Animals left the water?"

"Exactly. Until then, everything there was to know — every piece of information that could be known — was transmitted through DNA, replicators, in creatures that lived in the seas. The Goo knew everything. Mind you, it might take a million years to learn how to make an arthropod's segmented shell. It might take two million years to learn to make a gill or, say, twenty million to make an eye, but it had its safe niche, so it had the time — it didn't have anywhere it needed to be. Evolution doesn't really have a destination. It's just dicking around with possibilities. The Goo is the same way. But when life left the water, the Goo got a blind spot."

"I'm having a little trouble seeing the immediacy of your story, Colonel. I mean, why, beyond the obvious that I'm sitting inside this thing, is this supposed to be urgent?"

"Because four hundred million years later, the land creatures came back into the water — sophisticated land animals."

"Early whales?"

"Yes, when mammals came back to the sea, they brought something that even the dinosaurs — the reptiles and amphibians that had come back to the water — didn't have. Something the Goo didn't know. Knowledge that didn't replicate itself through DNA. It replicated through imitation, learned knowledge, not passed on. Memes."

Nate knew about memes, the information equivalent of a gene. A gene existed to replicate itself and required a vehicle, an organism, in which to do it. It was the same with memes, except a meme could replicate itself across vehicles, across brains. A tune you couldn't get out of your head, a recipe, a bad joke, the Mona Lisa — all were memes of sort. They were a fun model to think about, and computers had made the idea of a self-replicating piece of information more manifest with computer viruses, but what did that have to do with — But then it hit him. Why he'd learned about memes in the first place.

"The song," Nate said. "Humpback song is a meme."

"Of course. The first culture, the first exposure the Goo had to something it didn't understand. What, maybe fifteen million years ago it found out it wasn't the only game in town. Three billion years is a long time to get used to living in what you think is your private house only to suddenly find out that someone moved into an apartment above you while you were sleeping.

"For a long time the Goo didn't perceive that genes and memes were at odds. Whales were the first carriers. Big brains because they need to imitate complex behaviors, remember complex tasks, and because they could get the high-protein food to build the brains the memes needed. But the Goo came to terms with the whales. They're an elegant mix of genes and memes, absolute kings of their realm. Huge, efficient feeders, immune from any predation except from each other.

"But then something started killing whales. Killing them in alarming numbers. And it was something from the surface world. It wasn't something the Goo could find out about from its ocean-borne nervous system, so that's when I think it created the whale ships, or a version of them. Late seventeen or early eighteen hundreds, I'd guess. Then, I think when it had somehow gotten back enough samples of human DNA, it made the whaley boys. To stay camouflaged but to watch, to bring people back here so it could learn, watch us. I may have been the final link that started the war."

"What war? There's a war?" Nate had a quick vision of the paranoid megalomaniacs that the Colonel said he'd considered for pseudonyms, Captain Nemo and Colonel Kurtz, both complete bedbugs.

"The war between memes and genes. Between an organism that specializes in the replication of gene machines — the Goo — and one that specializes in the replication of meme machines — us, human beings. I brought electrical and computer technology here. I brought the Goo the theoretical knowledge of memes and genes and how they work. Where the Goo is now and where it was before I came is the difference between being able to drive one and being able to build a car from lumps of raw steel. It's realizing the threat. It's going to figure it out."

Ryder looked at Nate expectantly. Nate looked at him as if he wasn't getting the point. When he'd studied under Ryder, the man had been so cogent, so clear. Grumpy, but clear. "Okay," Nate said slowly, hoping Ryder would jump in, "so you need me to… uh…?"

"Help me figure out a way to kill it."

"Didn't see that coming."

"We're at war with the Goo, and we have to find a way to kill it before it knows what's happening."

"Then don't you think you should keep your voice down?"

"No, it doesn't communicate that way." The Colonel looked perturbed at Nate's comment.

"So you want me to figure out how to kill your god?

"Yes, before it wipes out the human race in one fell swoop."

"Which would be bad."

"And we have to kill it without killing everyone in Gooville."

"Oh, we can do that," Nate said, completely confident, the way he'd seen hostage negotiators in cop movies tell the bank robbers that their demands were being met and the helicopter was on the way. "But I'm going to need some time."

The strangest thing was, as Nate left the Colonel's chamber after being in direct contact with the Goo for only a few minutes, his hangover was completely gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Could Be Worse,

Could Be Dog Years

"Evidently," said Nate, "where we screwed up was killing the whales."

"No way," said Amy.

"We tipped our hand."

"About being meme machines, right?"

"Yeah. Are you sure you're not spying for him?"

"Nope. Know how you can tell? When I was spying, did I ever touch you here?"

"No. No, you did not."

"And did I ever let you touch me here?" She moved his hand for him.

"No, you did not. Especially not in public."

"Yeah, we should probably go back to your place."

She had called him on his buzzy, bug-winged speaky thing, about which he made a mental note to ask what the name of it was at his first convenience. They'd met for coffee at a Gooville café that catered to whaley boys. She'd assured him that no one would notice them, and, strangely enough, the whaley boys had completely ignored them. Maybe he was no longer news.

"If they say anything, I'll just tell them that we're having sex," Amy said.

"But you said you didn't think I should tell the Colonel I'd seen you."

"Yeah, but that was before he let you in on his secret plan."

"Right."

"Although I'm a little ashamed of how old you are. We should talk about that."

"So should I move my hand?"

"Yeah, down and a little to the right."

"Let's head back to my place."

Back at his apartment, standing in the kitchen, he said, "Hey, what do you call this thing?" He pointed to that thing.