“War,” she said, “is an obvious possibility. You inferred that the colony has intervened in every developing conflict since the Great War. And that’s true. Without replaying history I can’t demonstrate how much could have gone wrong for human beings in the last century. But even now, the Russians and the Japanese are fighting over oil ports in the Sea of Okhotsk. Neither side can get any traction in that conflict, precisely because we’re manipulating electronic communication even as the warring parties struggle to encrypt it. Our thumb is on the scales, you might say. But suppose we ceased to intervene. Isolated artillery exchanges could easily escalate to formal war. With war, mercantile shipping would be threatened. Peripheral nations would be drawn into the battle. Ultimately, one side or the other would win. But at what price? Lives and resources spent and a legacy of mutual distrust that would invite other, even bloodier wars. Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity. Alternatively, if the colony’s influence were to be gently withdrawn, institutions like the League of Nations might have a chance of averting the worst outcomes. But if the colony dies to night, large-scale bloodshed is inevitable in both the long and the short term.”

Possibly true. Probably true. Who could say? Ethan was tempted to tell her she was wasting her breath.

He was distracted by a vibration that seemed to come from underground, a seismic grumble, a high metallic whine.

“That’s the power generators ramping up. What you’re about to see is the launch of a seed vessel. Look: you can see the carrier at the center of the beam antenna.” She was talking about an acorn-shaped pod poised at the center of the petals. “It’s driven by a beam of quantum-coherent light. The light strikes the mirrored underside of the vessel and creates a superheated gas, a plasma. There’s no need for a rocket or any such clumsy devices. The beam can lift only relatively light cargo, but our cargo isn’t massive. Moisture in the atmosphere could diffuse the beam, which is one reason why we launch from the Atacama, where the atmosphere is thin and arid. You’ll need these, Dr. Iverson.”

She handed him a pair of goggles with coated lenses, like welding goggles. Before he put them on he saw dozens of simulacra evacuating the area near what she had called the beam antenna. After he put on the goggles he could see nothing at all until the steel and glass flower began to glow, a light that came through the lenses in shades of smoky amber.

The noise reached him belatedly, but it was sudden and shocking, a continuous thunder. The seed vessel appeared to hover for a fraction of a second, then vaulted upward on a pillar of furious light.

It all happened quickly. The vessel became a spark, an ember, finally vanished as if it had fallen into the bowl of the sky. The beam flickered off.

Ethan removed the goggles. Dry wind blew through the windowless cart. He shivered.

“Are you cold?” the sim asked.

No, he wasn’t especially cold. It was only that he had been reminded by this spectacle of who he was talking to: this creature beside him, a human gloss on something ancient, formic, emotionless…. He couldn’t help looking at the distant berm that enclosed the facility. He would never see the other side of it. He would die here, buried with the discarded skins of monsters.

He wasn’t cold. He was just tired.

“We’ll go below,” the simulacrum said, “where it’s warmer.”

She drove back into the warren under the beam antenna, into the brightly-lit and perpetually busy corridors and chambers there. She said some more about the consequences of the destruction of the colony, but Ethan hardly heard her. He had made the mistake of thinking about Nerissa.

“If all electronic communication is disabled, emergency services will be crippled. Urban populations will panic. Communications might be restored using ground-based transmitters and repeaters, but that could take years. There will be many, many unnecessary deaths in the meantime. And you can’t blame us for those deaths. We’re willing to continue sustaining the peace of the world.”

“Your peace.” What had Nerissa called it? The pax formicae.

“Our peace, your peace, is there a meaningful difference?”

“Yes.”

“Even at the expense of human lives?”

For seven years Ethan had considered his marriage a closed book. Cruelly, the last few weeks had given him something to live for. Lost now, of course. Thrown away.

“And there would be consequences for your family.”

He dropped all pretense of indifference and stared. “What are you saying?”

“You’re about to be offered a choice. I’m asking you not to make it rashly. The wrong decision would have tragic consequences for the people you love.”

“Is that a threat?”

“You once drew a contrast between the fisherman and the spider. Both feed their offspring, but the fisherman loves his children and the spider does not. I’m not asking you to sympathize with the spider. I’m asking you to make the fisherman’s choice.”

The female sim spoke for a few minutes more, calmly and earnestly. Then she closed her eyes. Her body went slack, her legs folded under her and she dropped to the floor.

Outside Ethan’s cell, the corridor was suddenly quiet. The sound of engines and footsteps subsided. Ventilation fans whispered, the fluorescent ceiling tubes hummed. All else was silence.

30

CASSIE FOUGHT HIM, KICKING AT HIS LEGS and flailing at his face, trying to get enough traction to push herself out the door of the van. She managed to bloody his nose—bright red blood from the human shell of him pulsed down Leo’s upper lip—but he succeeded in pinning her to the seat, grunting through blood-stained teeth as he straddled her legs.

He was strong. He pulled shut the passenger-side door and locked it. With one hand he yanked open the glove compartment. Inside, there was a roll of duct tape and a hunting knife in a leather sheath. He used the tape to bind her wrists, then her ankles. Then he pulled the seat belt tight around her and taped the buckle so she couldn’t release it even if she managed to get her hands free.

She screamed and shouted at him as he did this. But it was late and they were deep in the high desert. A tank truck passed in the opposite direction as she struggled—she saw the word COPEC printed in fading orange letters on its side—but it didn’t stop or even slow down.

Once she was secure, Leo got behind the wheel and steered the van onto the road. Cassie stopped screaming and began quietly cursing him. He ignored her, and she tired quickly. Her throat was raw; her mouth was unbearably dry. She twisted her hands against the duct tape, though it felt as if she were peeling the skin off her wrists.

“Don’t,” Leo said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

She tried to force herself to think. To imagine some way out of this. To get past the choking humiliation of it, a presence as intense as the reek of green matter. She guessed it was Leo’s father who had driven a needle through the lie of Leo’s body and into the stinking truth.

She should have known. This was her own fault. For years she had kept a careful distance from other people, so-called ordinary people, people who had never seen what she had seen, people so authentically innocent they couldn’t even dream such things. She knew what was hidden in the world’s shadows.

But in the end she had lowered her guard. She had given herself to Leo. And the thing she had allowed herself to love was a monstrosity: no, literally a monster. She suppressed the almost unbelievably urgent need to hurt him or run from him and forced herself to look at him: at Leo’s face, now utterly impassive as he watched the road ahead. If Aunt Ris’s theory was correct (and of course it was) this creature had constructed itself in a human womb (I’m not the first woman it violated), making the necessary adjustments so its human shell wouldn’t be some parthenogenic duplicate of its host, a chromosome here, a chromosome there… the end result: this ostensibly male object, the architecture and the furnishings of its skull, the high cheekbones and acne-scarred skin and gentle eyes concealing a filthy knot of green matter where there should have been a brain, every gesture and word and touch (it TOUCHED me, dear god, I LET IT TOUCH ME) dictated by signals from an invisible hive…