Evolution

The political and economic pressures might indeed have induced a receptivity in the global power brokers that hadn’t existed before. Joan Useb’s ideas could indeed have shown how to ally the interconnections offered by technology with older primate instincts of cooperation. And it might have gone beyond mere ecological management. After all no species before had had the potential to be linked globally, not in four billion years of life on Earth. Given time, Joan’s approach might have inspired a cognitive breakthrough as significant as the integration of Mother’s generation.

Humans had become smart enough to damage their planet. Now, just given a little more time, they might have become smart enough to save it.

Just a little more time.

But now the lights went out. There were explosions, like great footfalls. People screamed and ran.

Meanwhile, over Rabaul, the earthquakes had gotten increasingly severe. At last they cracked the seabed above Rabaul’s magma chamber. The magma was rising to the surface through great tunnels, some of them three hundred meters wide. Now seawater rushed into the tunnels and flashed instantly to steam. Meanwhile, other gases, carbon dioxide and sulfur compounds that had been kept dissolved in the magma by the higher pressure of the depths, like the carbon dioxide in a bottle of soda. But now the bottle was cracked, and the gases came bubbling out.

In the rock chambers, the pressure escalated exponentially.

II

Emergency lights came on, filling the room with a cold glow.

The false ceiling had broken up into polystyrene shards that hailed down on the fleeing attendees. Joan saw Alison Scott grab her two girls and huddle with them in a corner. The exposed roof space, filled with insulation-lagged ducts and cables, was cavernous, dark, dirty.

Fine nylon ropes tumbled down through air thick with polystyrene dust. She glimpsed black-clad shapes that moved, spiderlike, through the roof space, and slid down to the bar’s littered floor. They wore skintight black coveralls and balaclava hoods with silvery eye visors. She counted five, six, seven of them. She couldn’t tell if they were male or female. They all carried slim automatic weapons.

Alyce Sigurdardottir was tugging at her arm, trying to make her climb down from her table. But she resisted, aware that she was still the center here; she felt, maybe irrationally, that things would get even worse if she gave in to the chaos.

One of the invaders looked to be in command. On the floor, the others gathered around him as he surveyed the situation. He, she? No, he, Joan thought; in a group like this, it will be a he. Two of the intruders stayed with the leader. The other four made for the doors. With their backs to the walls they trained their weapons on the delegates, who herded, sheeplike, toward the center of the room.

There was only one hotel staff member here: the barman, the young Australian who had caught Alyce’s eye. He was slim, with curly black hair — at least part Aborigine, Joan thought — and he wore a bow tie and sparkling vest. Now, with great courage, he stepped forward, hands spread. "Listen," he began. "I don’t know what you want here. But if you will let me call—"

The gun’s sound was quiet, oddly like a leopard’s cough, Joan thought absently. The boy fell, twitching. There was a sudden stink of death shit, a smell she hadn’t encountered since Africa. The delegates screamed, fell back, froze, as they each in their separate ways sought not to attract the attention of the murderers.

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.