Burning Paradise

Whoever had produced these images must have had access to some very sophisticated equipment, maybe one of the new sca

“Some of us aren’t biologists,” Nerissa said. “If you want me to understand this, you’ll have to dumb it down a little.”

“The details don’t matter as much as the function. Think about what these cells do. They travel immense distances through the vacuum of space. They duplicate themselves—at least so we surmise—by absorbing minerals and trace elements from the rocky or icy surface of asteroids, comets, planetesimals. They do this at temperatures far below the freezing point of water and with no driving force apart from faint sunlight and slow catalytic chemistry. They communicate with one another over enormous distances by generating microbursts of narrow-band radio-frequency energy. Which would be remarkable enough. But they do something that’s even more impressive. In our case, they tacked inward toward the sun and occupied a stable orbit around the Earth. Ethan’s research suggests they were present as much as forty thousand years ago, possibly longer. And once their numbers reached some critical threshold, they began to function as a coherent network. Do you understand what that means, Mrs. Iverson?”

“Only vaguely.”

“Their intercommunication became complex. The pseudochondritic cells interact with each other much the way brain cells do. And as soon as our species began to generate radio signals of its own, the so-called radiosphere started to function as a vast distributed transceiver, relaying radio waves around the globe but also analyzing those signals, making of itself an analytical computer more sophisticated than any such device we’ve ever dreamed of building.”

“So are they some form of life, or are they machines?”

“At the chemical level all living things can be construed as machines. We have no evidence that anyone designed these objects, though it’s possible. The likeliest scenario is that they evolved over an immense span of time and gradually acquired the characteristics they now possess. On the cellular level they’re immensely sophisticated; more importantly, the network they form is itself a unitary entity. The hypercolony. The hive, to borrow Ethan’s description. It’s the hypercolony that has learned to comprehend and manipulate human society, and it’s the hypercolony we have to destroy.”

If that was even remotely possible. Ethan inspected the micrographs. Cyberneticists had estimated that just one of these tiny cells was capable of faster and subtler calculations than even the massive transistorized computers operated by insurance companies or the Internal Revenue Service. The Society’s physicists thought the processing must operate at a deep, fundamental level of reality—the “quantum” level, a term Ethan didn’t entirely understand. But a more immediate question was vexing him. “Why haven’t I seen these micrographs before?”

“Why should you have?”

“Well, the Society—”

“Ethan, this isn’t the work of the Society. Wyndham is an independent researcher. I underwrote his work myself.”

“Nevertheless, I would have liked to have seen them.”

“I chose to limit the exposure of this information.”

“Why?”

“In order to protect it. Isn’t that obvious? For years we assumed the precautions the Society took were good enough to hide our work from the hypercolony. But the events of 2007 proved that theory disastrously wrong. We have no secrets and probably never did. The only conclusion I can draw is that the Society itself has been corrupted and infiltrated.”

“So you set up another circler of researchers.”

“More than one, and I’ve put up firewalls between them. If one

circle is compromised, the others remain secure. And where the Correspondence Society was basically a club for frustrated scholars, my people are better motivated.”

“Why, what motivates them?”

“Anger,” Beck said. “Fear.”

Beck repeated his promise that he would take Ethan and Nerissa to rendezvous with Leo (and presumably with Cassie and Thomas). But he refused to say anything more specific, except that it would be “a long trip.” Nerissa continued to press, which made for a sullen evening meal, after which she and Ethan retired to the upstairs bedroom.

The room was as spare as every other room in this barely-inhabited house. A single bed, muslin curtains over the window, a layer of undisturbed dust on the uncarpeted parquet floor. “He’s insane,” Nerissa said.

“He’s been right in the past.”

“I notice that’s not a denial.”

“If he’s paranoid, is that so hard to understand? Given the life he’s led?”

“A ridiculously privileged life. Heir to millions.”

True, but the whole story, at least as Ethan understood it, was more complex. Yes, Beck’s parents had been wealthy. Beck’s father had immigrated from Poland in the 1960s with a degree in engineering, some experience at the Nagórski plant in Starachowice, and an ambition to work with aircraft. Within a few years he had generated three modestly profitable patents and owned a small manufacturing facility in Portland that supplied parts to Boeing. He had married an American woman who died of pancreatic cancer after giving birth to their only child, Werner, and he had never remarried.

Beck’s father had been frugal by nature and had raised his son that way. When he died at the age of fifty-seven, he left Werner Beck a staggeringly diverse portfolio of investments, sole ownership of a successful company that was about to go public, and a work ethic only slightly less demanding than the disciplines practiced by Tibetan monks.

The fortune hadn’t diverted Beck from his academic career, which he had conducted with the same Spartan intensity. When Beck discovered the Correspondence Society he had immediately diverted some of his wealth to the support of clandestine research. And if Beck felt his generosity entitled him to a certain amount of deference, a little centrality in an otherwise decentralized organization, who could say he was wrong?

In 1990 Beck had married a former student who gave birth to one child, Leo, and who had little to do with the Society. She died in a car accident when Leo was very young. Her death must have been traumatic for Werner, but that was pure surmise on Ethan’s part: Beck had never spoken about his feelings and had seemed reluctant even to mention the loss. But it was after the death of his wife that Beck severed all contact with conventional academia and began to devote himself exclusively to the Society’s business.

“And the only reason you know any of this,” Nerissa said, “is that Beck told you. He could have been lying.”

“Why would he lie?” The money was real, Ethan thought. The work was real.

“He may not be clinically paranoid, but he’s almost certainly narcissistic. He needs to feel special, like he’s fulfilling some grandiose destiny. On bad days, he probably suspects his own inadequacy.”

“And you’re making that diagnosis based on what exactly?”

“Jesus, Ethan, think about it! He wants us to think he’s fighting a clandestine war, that he has a cadre of secret soldiers, that he’s figured out the hypercolony’s weaknesses…”