Lord of All Things (60 page)

“With all due respect, Señor,” he pronounced, “I doubt you are truly in a position to judge. To be frank, you have said nothing concrete about this perilous Japanese gentleman; you have merely made a few vague claims. I hear the word ‘dangerous’ a great deal. Why exactly do you say so? Please give us some solid proof.”

That made him sit up and look, this Miller. Ha! He hadn’t been expecting anyone to put up a fight.

“Professor?” The American turned to the man who had accompanied him, who had an imposing Roman nose. “Would you perhaps…?”

The professor nodded, looked at his watch, and gazed straight ahead for a moment as though doing sums in his head. Then he smiled softly. He hurried across the room and looked out a window that opened onto the dark courtyard of the ministry building. “If you would be so kind as to join me, Señor Larreta,” he said, gesturing in invitation. He spoke Spanish with a Mexican accent.

Fine, then. Fernández Larreta had no idea what this was about, but he would maintain his good manners despite everything. He got up and went to stand next to the professor, who was wearing a bolo tie.

“Look up at the sky.”

Fernández Larreta looked up, following the professor’s outstretched arm. There was a pale, blurry spot of light in the night sky, which moved very slowly as he watched.

“Do you know what that is?”

Larreta shrugged. “Of course. It’s the space station. The habitat.”

“Precisely. The man we’re looking for built that station.”

“So?” The chief of police was surprised to hear this, but of course he didn’t let it show. “Good for him. I just don’t understand why that makes him so extremely dangerous, as you claim.”

“Because Mr. Kato did not build this gigantic object with his own two hands,” said the professor. “That would have taken him something like a hundred thousand years. He built it using nanotechnological robots of extraterrestrial origin that he has somehow learned to control. Are you up to date with how nano-replicators work?”

Larreta looked at him disdainfully. What was this, a classroom test? “I have read what everybody has in the newspapers. I know that they’re supposed to be able to build on the scale of individual atoms.”

“That’s right. Most importantly, they can build copies of themselves atom by atom. Those copies then make copies, and so on and so forth. The problem is they don’t just conjure these atoms out of thin air, they take them from their surroundings.” The professor turned around and began pacing the room, one hand on his back, gesticulating with the other. Larreta could vividly imagine him doing that in a lecture hall. “Now imagine that these nano-replicators get out of control. They multiply and multiply, and nobody is able to stop them. Imagine it happening here, in this office. Over there on the minister’s desk. What would happen? First, the nano-replicators would attack everything around them, taking it apart into atoms to make copies of themselves—the leather on the desktop, the wood beneath, the lamp that’s standing there. Since they’re built to be as efficient as possible, that would happen with breathtaking speed. In less time than it takes you to draw breath, the desk would be gone, changed into nano-replicators. And then? Do you believe the machines draw the line at humans? Human beings are made of atoms, too, just like animals, plants, everything in existence. Atoms they can use to build further copies of themselves. And since by now there are not simply a few of these nano-replicators but multitudes—the same as the mass of that desk—it would all happen that much faster. Before you could understand what was going on, the minister himself would be taken apart for his atoms, as would you, Señor, and all of us. The room, this building, the whole city block—it would keep on and on, faster and faster. And,” he concluded, looking at each of them in turn, “nobody would be able to stop it.”

The minister put his finger inside the collar of his shirt. “All that’s just a vague theoretical possibility, though, isn’t it?”

The professor shook his head slowly and deliberately. “Unfortunately not.” He pointed up to the sky. “As you said, there is the space station. You’ve all seen the pictures. The nano-replicators exist, and they quite clearly work—and Mr. Kato is the only one they will obey. If he so chose, he could unleash them, and it would take only a few hours for them to blanket the whole Earth with copies of themselves. Copies that could then only attack one another. That would be the end of the world—so utterly and definitively the end that it would make nuclear war look like a mild cold. Up until now all this was just the nightmare of scientists who research nanotechnology—they call it the ‘gray-goo’ scenario. But ever since Mr. Kato’s space station arrived, it’s no longer a theory but a hideously real possibility. If he should happen to decide to do it this minute, nobody alive on Earth would see the dawn. And if you ask me, that is more power than any one man should have.”

“Quite so.” The minister gulped. “Tell me what you plan to do and what you need.”

It was a dream. Suddenly she was quite sure. Time had come to a stop, the rest of the world had vanished, and there was only her and Hiroshi’s voice.

“Do you remember Seito-Jinjiya, the Island of the Saints? That obsidian knife you wanted to touch, no matter what?”

What a question! “Do I remember? That’s what gave me the idea of looking for the first human race. It’s what ruined my academic career.”

Hiroshi’s voice again, speaking as though all that was unimportant. “I held you, do you remember? You screamed when you touched the knife, and you fell into the water.”

She had to smile. “It all seems a hundred years ago.”

“I can’t prove it, but I suspect not only that the knife was created during the era of the first human race, but also that it must have had something to do with someone who was involved in creating the nanites. And then your strange ability to read objects…” He stopped. “As I say, I can’t prove any of this. Nobody will ever be able to prove it. It’s just a suspicion…or let’s say it’s how I explain all of this to myself. How I explain I knew so much about these nanites before I ever saw them for the first time. I already had the basic idea—robots that build robots, remember? When we were on the swings in your garden that day, I was already thinking about it. It would probably just have stayed an idea, the kind of naive idea you have when you’re a kid and then you quickly forget. But it must have been the soil upon which some seed fell. Something that reached me through you. From that object, from a past we know nothing about. Most of my inventions weren’t my inventions at all—they were rediscoveries, something mankind already knew once before.”

“So the probe would have been launched from Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago—and then it came back, during our time?”

“Not that probe as such. Since they were launching nanites, they must have planned for the probes to reproduce.”

“I see. So they launched a probe that found an alien planet, landed on it, built more rockets and more probes, which flew off in turn and found other planets…and then eventually one of those rockets happened to find its way back to Earth?”

“Exactly.”

Charlotte had to think about that for a while. Perhaps she dozed off again as she did so; she couldn’t say. All she knew was a long time passed before she thought to ask, “The first human race…If they were able to invent something like that…these nanites…then they must have been very advanced, mustn’t they? Technologically, I mean.”

“No doubt about it,” Hiroshi said.

“But in that case…” She stopped. What Hiroshi had told her struck a chord somewhere in her mind. It could only have been as he suspected. “I would somehow expect such an advanced civilization to have left more traces behind. That there would be a…I don’t know…a vast machine buried somewhere. A stretch of freeway. Something like that.”

“I remember taking a very long walk through Boston and surroundings, and someone telling me that a hundred thousand years is a long time. Long enough for all sorts of things to fall to dust,” Hiroshi said. “But it may simply be that there’s no record because of the nanites.”

“How’s that?”

“The first humans may have been just as warlike and aggressive as we are. I’m sure they were. Perhaps there was a war at some point, fought with nano-weapons. Or an accident and they got out of control. Remember, nanites can’t just build anything, they can also take anything apart. The one implies the other.”

Charlotte tried to imagine it. “You mean the nanites could have destroyed the whole civilization, so that the survivors were left in the Stone Age?”

“You could build nanomachines that swarm out and turn every scrap of ultrapure silicon they find into dust. In the blink of an eye, no computer could function. You could build nanomachines that destroy everything made of paper—that’s the end of books, libraries, all human knowledge. Nanomachines that destroy anything made of metal…the possibilities are endless.”

“You could also build nanomachines that kill people.”

“That, too.”

“If that’s what happened, then why are there still people at all?”

Hiroshi heaved a deep sigh. “I don’t know. I haven’t found any history books from back then after all, just blueprints. I’m still piecing it all together. But if there was a conflict, then the other side used nanotechnology as well. And if it was an accident…we could imagine all sorts of explanations. A last-minute rescue plan. A clash between nanomachine armies that fought each other. Or simply chance.” He hesitated. “It’s just a thought, but a lot of viruses look as though they might be remnants of nanomachines.”

“Viruses?”

“Yes. Viruses aren’t alive. They’re basically machines that attack living cells and hijack them into producing copy after copy of the virus until they’re burned out. It’s hard to imagine an evolutionary pathway that could have produced something like a virus. The idea they may have actually been built seems to me to fit quite well.”

That reminded Charlotte of something, of a riddle she had spent a long time trying to solve years ago in another life. “The genetic bottleneck,” she said.

“I’m sorry?” Hiroshi asked, caught off-guard.

“We’ve been researching the human genome ever since the nineties. And we’ve learned that human beings the world over are far more closely related than we had expected. If you run a statistical analysis of mitochondrial DNA—the part of the genome that comes from the mother—then you find out every human being alive today has just a few thousand common ancestors who lived about seventy thousand years ago.”

“And how have they explained that?”

“There’s a theory about the explosion of a volcano called Toba on Sumatra about seventy-four thousand years ago. Supposedly, an unusually powerful eruption, strong enough to have influenced the planetary climate. The theory is it led to a long cold period, and that
Homo sapiens
almost died out during that time.” Charlotte took a deep breath. “But a war like you describe…that would explain things as well. It would fit the time frame.”

“It would also fit the big picture,” Hiroshi said.

“What do you mean?”

He stopped, seemed to be considering something. “On Saradkov the nanites suddenly ceased all replication and expansion, and I always said I didn’t know why they did that. Do you remember?”

“As if I could forget.”

“Ever since I merged with them and gained access to all their programs, I know what stopped them. They did it themselves. They noticed they were back on Earth, and in that scenario their programming required they cease all activity and send radio signals offering to self-destruct.”

“Self-destruct?” Charlotte repeated, astonished.

“A safety mechanism.”

She thought about this. It made no sense to her. “Why would an explorer probe that happened to wind up back on Earth self-destruct? It would be enough to power down. Or it could carry out its exploration program here on Earth. That wouldn’t be such a tragedy.”

“There’s one reason that would explain it. A horribly simple reason,” Hiroshi said. He exhaled, and it sounded like a sob. “The most horrible reason you could imagine.”

Night blanketed Buenos Aires. Traffic had thinned after midnight, so it was no trouble to cordon off the streets where things were about to get underway. It wouldn’t be long now. Dawn would break soon. The morning rush hour would start. They would have trouble if things lasted that long.

Commander José Guarneri sat in the passenger seat of his car with a clipboard on his lap and a map of Buenos Aires folded to show Belgrano and the surrounding area. He had a radio to his ear and was drawing in the roadblocks with a thick red pen as they were reported in.

“Group four, Rodríguez,” he heard. “Commander, there’s a man here who’s going crazy about the roadblock. He’s a newspaper delivery man. He wants to deliver these newspapers no matter what.”

Guarneri pressed the transmission button. “Tell him he should think about whether he wants to feature in tomorrow’s edition. Headline: Dead in a Hail of Bullets.”

That seemed to do the trick. At least, there were no further reports from that direction.

“Group one?” he asked. “Anything happening?”

“Still light in the window, but otherwise nothing to report. No sign of movement.”

“How about the directional mics?”

“Occasional quiet conversation between a man and a woman. Sometimes in English, sometimes in what could be Japanese. Then silence again.”

“Are they having sex?”

“No idea. If they are, we can’t hear anything.” The captain cleared his throat. “We could start the operation while it’s quiet. Maybe that’s when they’re asleep.”

“Negative,” Guarneri replied. “We’re not going in.” He thought for a moment and then switched to the general band. “Guarneri to all. A reminder: whatever we do, we’re waiting till he comes out. The daughter of a former French ambassador to Argentina lives in that house; you guys are not going to screw this up for me, you hear me?” That was something his men could understand.

It wasn’t the whole truth, though. Guarneri had a strong feeling even he didn’t know all the ins and out of the story. “I don’t want anyone setting foot in that house,” the chief of police had told him in person and in no uncertain terms. “And if those
norteamericanos
try anyway, you stop them, understand? By whatever means necessary. Ambassador Malroux is a good friend of mine; I could never look him in the eye again if anything happened to his daughter.”