Evolution

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, a

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 i

“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 gri

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?”