Evolution (79 page)

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.

Joan felt a stab of pain in her lower belly, hard enough to make her gasp. She had a sense of things escalating out of control.

Bex was staring at her accusingly.

“Bex, are you OK?”

“You said Rabaul wasn’t going to hurt us. You said it was so unlikely, while we were here. You said we were safe.”

“I’m sorry. Really. Alison, please go sit down. There’s nothing you can do here.”

Scott ignored her. “Look, whoever you are, whatever you want, we are hot, we are tired, we are thirsty, we are already starting to feel sick.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Elisha said evenly. “Psychosomatic. You’re being neurotic.”

Scott actually snarled. “Don’t you psychoanalyze me. I demand—”

“You demand, you demand, yammer, yammer, yammer.” He approached Scott. She held her ground, her arms tightly wrapped around her girls. Elisha lifted Bex’s aquamarine hair, tugged it gently, rubbed it between his fingers. “Genriched,” he said.

“Leave her alone,” Scott hissed.

“How beautiful they are, like toys.” He ran his hand down Bex’s hair to her shoulder, then squeezed her small breast.

Bex yelped, and Scott pulled her away. “She’s fourteen years old—”

“You know what they do, Dr. Joan Useb, these genetic engineers? They stuff a whole extra chromosome into their kids, an extra chromosome full of desirable genes. But, aside from the hair and the teeth, do you know what that extra chromosome does? It stops those perfect kids breeding with us old-style unenhanced
Homo sapiens.
Now, what higher exclusion barrier can you imagine than that? Today, the rich even set themselves up as a separate
species.
” As if absently, like pulling a fruit from its branch, he pulled Bex away from her mother’s grasp. One of the female terrorists held back Scott. Elisha ripped open the girl’s blouse, exposing her light, lacy brassiere. Bex closed her eyes; she was muttering to herself, a song or a rhyme.

“Elisha, please—” Now there was another stab of pain in Joan’s belly, a liquid surge. She found herself bent double. Oh, Christ, not now, she thought. Not now.

Suddenly Alyce was here. “Take it easy. Sit down.”

The wall images were changing, Joan saw. Her vision was misted, but there seemed to be a lot more orange, black, gray.

Alyce was grinning, a humorless grimace, like a skull’s. “That’s Rabaul going up. Great timing.”

Elisha had gotten hold of the girl’s wrists and pushed her arms over her head.

Joan said quickly, “Come on, Elisha. You aren’t here for this.”

“Aren’t I?”

Scott said grimly, “If all you want is something to fuck,
take me.
”

“Oh, but there would be no point,” Elisha said. “It’s not the act but the symbolism, you see. This is the first time since the extinction of the Neandertals that there have been two distinct human species in the world.” He stared down at the girl. “Is it rape, if the act occurs between different species?”

The doors blew in.

There was screaming, running, the crackle of gunfire. Small black pellets were hurled through the open doors and burst. White smoke began to fill the air.

Joan looked for the terrorists, trying to count. Two of them had fallen when the doors were charged. Another two, running and firing, fell as she watched, suddenly turned into tumbling puppets. Most of her delegates were on the floor or cowering under the furniture. Two, three, four looked as if they might be hurt: She saw inert shapes in the smoke, splashes of bloodred in the gray murk.

A new ripple of pain passed over Joan’s abdomen.

Elisha stood before her. He was smiling. He had hold of a length of black cord that extended from his waistband.

At least Bex had been released; the girl, in the arms of her mother, was backing away.

“Elisha. You don’t have to die.”

His smile broadened. “All over the planet, five hundred of us are poised to make the same statement.”

Alyce half reached for him. “Don’t do it, for God’s sake—”

“You won’t be harmed,” he said. He pulled his balaclava back over his head. “I die as I lived. Faceless.”

Joan screamed, “Elisha!”

He tugged on the cord, as if starting a gasoline engine. There was a flash around his waist, a belt of transient light. Then the upper half of his body tipped away from the lower. As the pieces of him fell, neatly bisected, there was a stink of blood, the acid stench of stomach contents.

Alyce clung to Joan. “Oh, God, oh, God.”

The smoke was thickening, blinding, and Joan was coughing like a lifelong smoker. Now the pain came again, washing through her abdomen and back. She held on to Alyce. “Has it ever struck you how maladaptive group suicide is?”

“For God’s sake, Joan—”

“I mean, individual suicide can sometimes be justified, from a biological point of view. Perhaps a suicide is removing a burden from her kin. But what biological rationale can group suicide ever have? The capacity to believe in cultural dictates has been adaptive. It must have been or we wouldn’t have it. But sometimes the mechanism goes wrong—”

“We’re crazy. Is that what you’re trying to say? We’re all crazy. I agree.”

“Ma’am, please come with me.” A shadow before her. It looked like a soldier in a space suit, reaching for her.

Pain rippled through her again, an extinction of purposeful thought. She crumpled against Alyce Sigurdardottir. She heard another explosion. She thought it was just another part of the military or police operation.

She was wrong, as it happened. That had been Rabaul.

Once the sea had penetrated the magma chamber, the explosion became inevitable.

Shreds of molten magma flew into the air faster than sound, reaching heights of fifty kilometers. They broke up into solidifying fragments, ranging from tiny ash particles to chunks a meter wide. Mixed in with all of this were chunks of the shattered mountain itself. These bits of rock had been hurled far above the weather, far above aircraft and balloons, above even the ozone layer, fragments of Rabaul mingling with the meteorites, burning brightly and briefly. It was a sky full of rock.

And on the ground, the shock wave moved out from the shattered caldera at twice the speed of sound. Silent until it hit, it leveled everything in its path, houses, temples, trees, bridges. Where it passed energy poured into the air, compressing it and raising it to enormous temperatures. Anything combustible burst into flames.

People could see the shock was coming, but they could not hear it and they certainly could not flee it. They just popped into flame and vanished, like pine needles on a bonfire. This was just the beginning.

Space suited soldiers bundled Joan out of the smoke-filled bar, out of the hotel, and into fresh air. She was put on to a stretcher that was hauled away at running speed. All around her was a blizzard of movement, people running, cars rushing, tarmac beneath, helicopters flapping through an orange sky.

Now they were bundling her into the back of a van. An ambulance?
One, two, three, lift.
The stretcher slid inside the vehicle, alongside a kind of narrow bunk bed. There was anonymous equipment on the walls, none of it bleeping or humming, nothing like the equipment in the medical soaps she had once been addicted to.

She waved her hand through the air. “Alyce.”

Alyce grabbed her hand. “I’m here, Joan.”

“I feel like an amphibian, Alyce. I swim in blood and piss, but I breathe the air of culture. Neither one thing nor the other—”

Alyce’s drawn face was above her, distracted, fearful. “What? What did you say?”

“What time is it?”

“Joan, save your breath. Believe me, I’ve been through this; you’re going to need it.”

“Is it day or night? I lost track. I couldn’t tell from the sky.”

“My watch is broken. Night, I think.”

Somebody was working on her legs— cutting away her clothes? The ambulance lurched into motion, and she heard the remote wail of a siren, like some animal lost in the fog. All she could see was the bare, gloomily painted roof of the vehicle, those meaningless bits of equipment, and Alyce’s thin face.

“Listen, Alyce.”

“I’m here.”

“I never told you my family’s true history.”

“Joan—”

She said sharply, “If I don’t make it out of this, tell my daughter where she came from.”

Alyce nodded soberly. “You came to America as slaves.”

“My great-grandfather worked out the story. We came from what is now Namibia, not far from Windhoek. We were San, what they called ‘bushmen.’ We nearly got wiped out by the Bantu, and in colonial days we were killed as vermin. But we kept some cultural identity.”

“Joan—”

“Alyce, gene frequency studies show that female-line DNA among San women is more diverse than anywhere else on Earth. The implication is that San genes have been around in southern Africa much longer than any genes anywhere else on Earth. People of San ancestry are about the closest we’ll ever get to the direct line of descent from our common grandmother, our mitochondrial Eve—”

Alyce nodded soberly. “I understand. So your child is one of the youngest people on the planet— and the oldest.” Alyce covered her hand. “I promise I’ll tell her.”

The pain came in waves now. She felt as if her mind were dissolving; she struggled to think. “You know, normal human births are statistically likely to happen at night. An ancient primate trait. It’s as well to bear your child in the safety of your treetop nest.”