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What I figured out was that we were there to sanitize their operation. You know what I mean? So nobody from outside ever got to see the mine. What ever they did there was always out of sight, over the horizon. We were as close as anybody was allowed to get—and all we ever saw were these guys in their unmarked trucks.
Which made me curious.
Bastián, not so much. It was just a job to him, he didn’t give a fuck how the mine worked. Not until one night, one of those nights without a breeze of any kind, I woke up, it might have been three or four in the morning, I couldn’t sleep, so I stepped out of the bunk house to get some air, cold as it gets at night even in summer in the Atacama, and the light was shining again, like a candle on the horizon. So I went and woke up Bastián. There, I told him. See? There’s your goddamn alicanto.
I don’t know what that is, Bastián says, serious for once. Maybe some kind of smelter they’re ru
I could tell he was curious. We talked it over now and then for a couple of weeks. But it was busy times. Lots of supplies going into the mine. And something else strange: nothing ever came back the other way. No copper, no ore, nothing raw and nothing refined. One time I asked one of those white-shirt truck drivers how that worked. Did they dig a dry hole or what? And he looked at me like I was something that crawled into his boot during the night. No, he says, we’re still getting it up and ru
The next day the shift boss took me aside and gave me a lecture about minding my own business, do my work and let the truckers do theirs, etcetera. And if I wanted to keep my job I should shut my mouth and get on with it. Which didn’t really bother me because I’d got to the point where I’d saved enough of my salary to move on. And it looked like there’d be no hard feelings if I did.
Which might have been the end of the story if Bastián hadn’t spent one of those Chilean holidays, I forget which one, Feast of the Virgin, Feast of Peter and Paul, Feast of What ever, in Antofagasta with his buddies from the port where he used to work. He came back with a couple of bottles of Pisco. No drinking allowed in the camp but he bribed a guard. So he and I sat up one Friday night and shared a bottle, out behind the ware houses where there was nobody to see us. Getting steadily drunker and complaining about the job. When up comes that light again, brighter this time. Like a wire strung between the desert and the stars. And somehow we get the stupid idea of taking one of the Toyotas in the motor pool and driving east, at least a little ways, just to see if we can see what’s going on.
You know what they say about curiosity, right? Killed the fucking cat.
Eugene Dowd interrupted his monologue to attend to the actual painting of the car, and the noise of the compressor and the stink of the paint drove Cassie outside. Thomas was fascinated by Dowd’s work on the car, and Cassie agreed to let him watch as long as he stayed behind the glass door of the upstairs office—a ventilator built into the wall of the garage sucked most of the urethane mist out of the building, but Cassie didn’t want him breathing even a little of it. Beth volunteered to stay with Thomas where she, too, could watch Dowd. She had been watching Dowd all day, Cassie had noticed, and Dowd had returned every one of her frequent glances, with interest.
Outside, the sky was cloudless and the air was tolerably warm for December. Cassie walked past Dowd’s noisy wind chimes, around a corner of the garage to a patch of packed brown earth, sheltered from the wind, where a pair of ancient lawn chairs had been set up. She was surprised to find Leo in one of them, reading.
Reading a book. Reading the book her uncle had written, The Fisherman and the Spider. She gaped at the tattered yellow jacket. “That’s mine, Leo—where’d you get that?”
He looked up, startled. “Hey, Cassie.”
“The book,” she said grimly.
“Oh. Sorry. Yeah, it’s yours. I grabbed it from the hotel room in Jordan Landing.”
Cassie had thought the book was lost. She didn’t know whether to be grateful to Leo for saving it or angry that he hadn’t bothered to give it back.
He added, a little sheepishly, “I didn’t think you’d mind…”
She sat down in the brittle webbing of the second chair. She imagined herself falling through, getting her behind stuck in the aluminum struts. That would be graceful. “No. I mean, I guess it’s okay. But I do want it back. You’re actually reading it?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, this is me, actually reading it. That surprises you?”
“I don’t know. I just never pictured you…”
“Reading books?”
Frankly no, though she was less surprised now than she once would have been. His finger marked his place in The Fisherman and the Spider, about halfway through. She said, “Well, what do you think of it?”
“It’s your uncle’s book, right?”
“Right.”
“About insects.”
“He studied them.”
“But really about the hypercolony.”
She was pleased that he understood this. “In a way, yeah.”
He turned his head up toward the sky. “I was thinking about the way they talked about it in school. The great discovery. Marconi bouncing signals from Newfoundland to France. The radio-propagative layer.”
Cassie nodded.
“But it’s alive. And that’s what your uncle’s book is about, at least between the lines. The hypercolony as a kind of insect hive.”
It was an idea Cassie had struggled with for a long time. She could grasp that the hypercolony was a diffuse cloud of tiny cells surrounding the Earth, each cell functioning like a neuron in a kind of brain. A huge, peculiar brain, surrounding the Earth. Okay, she got that. And it intercepted human radio signals, analyzed them, subtly altered them, and bounced them back in ways people found useful.
All that was basic Society stuff. And since the hypercolony was a sort of brain, she accepted that it might be intelligent. It had to be intelligent, to do what it did. Some early Society theorists had even tried to make contact with it: they had broadcast signals on dormant frequencies, sending out simple mathematical formulas or even questions in basic English, hoping for a response. But no response had ever come.
It was the Society’s mathematicians and cyberneticists and in no small part her uncle who had come up with an explanation: the hypercolony functioned without conscious volition of any kind. The hypercolony didn’t know anything about itself or its environment, any more than a carrot understands the concept of organic farming or the color orange. It just lived and grew, mindlessly exploiting the resources available to it: vacuum, rock, sunlight, other living things. Its powers were in some respects almost godlike, but it was an insect god—mindless and potentially deadly. Her uncle had known that, and though he couldn’t mention the hypercolony by name in his published book, Leo was right: it was there between the lines, on every page.
He gave her a brooding look. “You’d think it would be hard to hate something you can’t see or touch. But it’s not. I do hate the fucking thing. I hate it as much as my father does. He used to say, given that we know what we know, the only honorable thing to do is declare war.”
“In a way, isn’t that what we’ve done?”
“More than in a way. The man I shot… he was a casualty of war. Along with everybody who died in ’07 and everybody who died last month.”
Of course Leo was still dwelling on the man he’d shot. So was Cassie. She thought the act was forgivable even if their defense would never stand up in a court of law. She accepted her share of responsibility, and she knew that in Leo’s place she might have behaved the same way. But the memory was still too awful to contemplate. The blood, the furtive way they had tried to dispose of the body. And in the end, even if they shared responsibility, it was Leo who had pulled the trigger.