Extinction (10 page)

Just like all those people out there ended by Reptars and lasers.

And just like the coming plagues. The legends were all metaphorical and written like poetry, but as long as there’d been a civilized humanity, there’d been Mullah. Even thousands of years ago, record keepers had known times would change and that stories warped through millennia, so they’d been careful. The Astral visitors of the first epoch had
told
them to be careful. And because those first Mullah had been precise in their descriptions, the modern Mullah had always felt relatively confident, in the broadest strokes, of what would happen.

There might be a literal plague, or perhaps a massive kill-off.
 

There might be an illness, or maybe the Astrals would activate some ancient Earth-moving machine and tilt the axis enough to fuck up the ice caps and flood the shorelines.
 

Perhaps the Astrals would split the planet in two. Maybe they’d somehow excite the sun and trigger massive, deadly solar flares.
 

Peers only knew two things for certain: First of all, what came next would be worse than devastating. All traces of modern society would be destroyed or buried. And second, some people
would
survive. That was the way it had always been: a new seed cluster meant to reboot the human race so it could try again, and maybe prove the planet more worthy the next time around.
 

Meyer and Kindred would be among them. According to the scrolls, the King survived the cleansing. Were they really going to “survive” while hiding in a bunker? It didn’t feel right. They had to get out — try for the Cradle and a rendezvous with the other viceroys beyond their exodus. But how could he get them out? And when?

Peers longed for a window, but there were none in the bunker. But when they’d been topside he’d been able to feel the Ark’s judgment like static in the air. What the first group had seen at Sinai would be nothing by comparison. Everyone out there would be facing their own personal demons — perhaps literally, as Cameron had faced Morgan Matthews. Or maybe the Ark would spare them the soul-searching and simply eliminate most of them. The verdict was in, and humanity was — as it had always been — guilty as charged.
 

Guilty of being an inferior race. An inferior representation of the seeds the Astrals had planted untold ages ago.
 

Guilty of being barbaric. Of thinking only of the one, never truly the whole. Guilty of living disjointed, isolated lives. Even birds could think as a group intelligence, and yet humans could not. All signs pointed to Egypt and Ancient Maya as finding harmony in a collective subconscious, but current Earthlings hadn’t pulled it off. Instead, they’d created email and instant messaging. They’d created social networking. There was no collective on the surface the way there was in the Astral motherships — the way, even, that humans had managed mental collectives before.
 

Why
wouldn’t
they be guilty?
 

This iteration of humanity was a failed experiment.
 

How many people would die because Peers told the Horsemen to saddle up and ride?

He’d earned his role. Ravi thought Peers was “the Fool” the scrolls talked about, and Peers had to agree. Fool indeed.
 

Saving this group was the only road to redemption. To get them out. And not just Meyer and Kindred. His actions had killed Cameron, Charlie, Jeanine, maybe even Clara. If he couldn’t save every one of the people in this basement, they wouldn’t need to string him up. He’d do it himself.

Peers ran his hands through his hair, elbows on his knees. When he looked up, Piper was looking directly at him.

“Peers?” she said. “You okay?”
 

He shook his head — not that he wasn’t okay but that he didn’t need her attention.
 

She came closer. Meyer saw her move and raised an eyebrow. Kindred, watching Meyer, saw his head turn and turned his own: a chain reaction of attention, headed right where Peers didn’t want it.
 

Piper looked back at Meyer and Kindred. Then, glaring until they looked back at their own business, she settled in and spoke more softly.
 

“You can tell me,”
Piper said.
 

That’s when Lila, in the bathroom, started to shriek.

CHAPTER 11

“You have something I want, and I have something you want. That’s the way this works.”
 

“Unacceptable,” the woman said to Stranger.
 

“Were you not listening? About the Internet?”
 

“It’s meaningless.”
 

Stranger laughed. Astrals were, in the end, like people. You could separate beings into three classes, and the highest could be a giant anemone creature that called itself Divinity — but rules were still the same in the end. There was still posturing. There was still pride. And even though Divinity in its normal form didn’t carry weapons or have a torso, there was still a lot of saber-rattling and chest-pounding.
 

“Listen to you,” Stranger said, leaning back on a thing that, here in the new section of the ship, looked like a giant white lozenge. “You brought me to White Castle. Unless you’re stupider than any human, you know you need to at least hear what I have to say. But now we’re here, and you’ve got to put up the same front as any man or woman
Unacceptable
.
Meaningless
.
Irrelevant
. Everything is beneath you, ain’t it? I could psychoanalyze the
shit
out of that. Would you like to have your matter-transporters or whatever manifest you a couch to lie back on?”
 

“We do not understand the need for a couch.”
 

Stranger waved his hand dismissively. “Let me see it. Let me see the stream.”
 

“Tell us more about the blind spot.”
 

“So you
are
interested? I
do
matter?”

“The Mullah. Tell us what they were hiding. Tell us what you believe our drones missed.”
 

“Not until I see what I want to,” Stranger countered, becoming serious.
 

“You would not understand it.”
 

“Then there’s no reason not to show me.”
 

The woman seemed to freeze. Her eyes moved in small ticks, and Stranger took this to mean she was discussing something with the hive mind. Or perhaps the big lit-up anemone thing using her like a puppet was having trouble working her controls. He wished they could have done this in person, Stranger and this ship’s Divinity. But nope — even intergalactic visitors had their gatekeepers.
 

“A window will open to your side,” Divinity said through the woman’s mouth.
 

“I’m afraid of heights.”

“It is not a hole in the ship. It is a window based on a human display screen. The same hybrid technology used to communicate with the viceroys.”
 

“I know. I was kidding.”
 

The woman stared at him.
 

“Open your window.” Then, because he knew she wouldn’t understand: “I’ll try not to jump through it.”
 

A panel slid open. The large lozenge thing he’d been perched on began to hum. Maybe it was some kind of computer or database; Stranger didn’t know. He was more human than Astral and — almost by definition — always had been.
 

The panel filled with squiggling lines, white on blue.
 

“I don’t understand this,” he said.
 

“Put your hand on its surface.”
 

Stranger did, and for the first seconds he was sure he’d made a stupid move — the Astrals were about to trick him. But that was pesky human insecurity, which Stranger wasn’t immune to. If Divinity wanted him dead, there were easier ways to do it. And what he knew was more valuable to them than whatever they had to offer.
He
was mainly curious. But for the Astrals, this was a matter of success and failure, of cost and consequence. They didn’t understand the Internet thing, for sure. But that was the point — and
the fact that they didn’t get it
was, interestingly enough, something Divinity
did
seem to understand.

With his palm to the glass, Stranger found his vision blurring. The room dissolved and became like mist. He could move his focus around if he tried: reaching out with his mind to see the woman’s face, the smooth white surface of the Titan-sized door where they’d entered, the presence of his own boot-clad feet. But unless he directed his attention, Stranger saw nothing beyond the haze.
 

It was as if he were smoke again. Just the Pall, free to roam and meddle and become — free to urge the Ark open, because opening a wound was the only way to see it clean.

“Do you see what you seek?” said the woman’s disembodied voice.
 

Stranger couldn’t find his mouth. He thought his answer instead. But since he was in the Astral memory stream — the source of spheres like Peers Basara had found, containing a vision of his unfortunate secret — his mind seemed to touch the Astral mind again. He was back to the Pall, able to communicate without any words.
 

I don’t see it.
 

“Recall the donor.”
 

You mean Meyer Dempsey,
Stranger thought/said.
 

“Turn your mind toward his vibration node.”
 

He wanted to make a sexual joke — Stranger had inherited plenty of lust from Meyer — but he refrained, instead expressing his continued lack of understanding.

“Stop thinking like a human.”
 

Kind of tricky .

“Stop looking for an individual. All individuals are peaks in the species’ vibration. Individuals do not normally matter. We direct you to one peak or node because of your fixation on a specific individual, but to us the differentiation is meaningless.”
 

Meaningless, huh? So is it also irrelevant?

“Yes,” the woman answered, not getting it.
 

He thought of Meyer Dempsey, who’d been an unwitting part of the alien collective for two years. He’d never been Astral, but they’d still managed to suck most of his personality out like milkshake through a straw and implant it into a pair of Titan clones. The feeling of Meyer was still here somewhere, like a copied file. The Astrals wouldn’t understand that metaphor (ironic, really, considering the circumstances), but it was true enough for Stranger.
 

Okay,
he thought/said.
I think I found Meyer’s brain in here.
 

“Move out one node.”
 

Then I’ll put my right leg in and shake it all about.

“One node to the first iteration,” the woman clarified, ignoring him. “The iteration flagged as an imperfection.”
 

All right.
 

He didn’t know what it meant until he tried. But once he did it was simple. There was a blob of energy in the stream that seemed like a backup of the original Meyer Dempsey, but just past it Stranger could feel something that qualified as a “node,” all right. Like a lump in space.
 

Now what?

“Enter it.”
 

Stranger focused. He felt himself putting this new node on like a jacket. Meyer without being Meyer. And that made sense, because the node just past the Dempsey file was logically Kindred’s predecessor — the nameless Meyer who’d lived between the true man and the one who named himself Kindred. The man who’d never realized he wasn’t a copy, even after being killed by Raj Gupta.
 

Stranger didn’t bother to ask Divinity anything more. He hadn’t told them what he was looking for because he didn’t really know.
 
Part of this was sheer human curiosity: the need to know where he, when he’d been the Pall, had come from. But another part of this seemed essential for a reason Stranger felt but couldn’t quite articulate.
 

He knew the Pall had come into being when the Astral collective had done their psychic autopsy on the first Meyer clone and determined that he’d been somehow “infected” with too much of Meyer’s raw humanity. But the issue wasn’t just academic to Stranger. The question of how and why the Pall had been born was central to all of this — to what was happening with Clara and the way the Astrals couldn’t see her without their BB drones, to the ant farm experiments the Astrals were performing while pretending to be doing something entirely different, to the way the Internet had changed everything for everyone.
 

It
mattered
.
 

He shook mental arms and legs, feeling the first Astral Meyer’s psyche settle on his mental shoulders.
 

What had gone wrong with this first clone? What had the Astrals found so threatening that they’d cut it away before making Kindred — then flushed it out so it could coalesce, roam free, and return in boots?