Lord of All Things (61 page)

The business with the American agents was all taken care of. They had staked themselves out in the house opposite. Guarneri had given them four of his trusted men as well, officially as protection. They would make sure that the agents didn’t do anything stupid.

“And another thing, which is going to stay our little secret, Commander,”
the chief had told him. “These Americans want to get their man, and they’re telling the craziest stories you ever heard to get him. I’m not impressed, but the minister has allowed them to send along more of their own people.” And then the chief’s face grew grim. “I would very much appreciate it, Commander Guarneri, if the Buenos Aires police proved to be fully up to the task. Bring me that man, and bring him in alive.”

Which was exactly what Guarneri intended to do.

“The truth is,” Hiroshi said, “they didn’t send those probes out to explore other planets.”

“Then why did they do it?”

“To destroy them.”

Charlotte felt the cold creeping into her bones. “Destroy them? How…” She stopped. She knew how nanites could destroy a planet, of course. She had seen it with her own eyes on Saradkov. If the nanites hadn’t stopped, if they had simply kept on and on and on, they would have had no chance. None at all. “What a terrible notion.”

“Basically, the probes are much like viruses themselves, but on a planetary scale. The program is as simple as can be: land on a life-bearing planet and convert the whole biosphere into rockets that will then carry copies farther out into space. And keep going until there’s nothing left of the world.”

“They deliberately target life-bearing planets for destruction?”

“Yes.”

“Why would anybody do that?”

Hiroshi took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I only know that’s the case. I know the basic programming for these probes, and it’s unmistakable. That’s how it was coded. As for the reasons, I can only speculate.”

He took his hands off her head. Her skin felt cool where they had been—all night long, as it seemed to Charlotte. Cool and now forlorn.

“I wondered whether perhaps they were at war with an alien power, with some galactic enemy, and at some point felt they had no other choice but to use this weapon. Or whether they were so desperate they didn’t care. Or whether it was an act of revenge by the last humans left alive after a devastating attack from space. Whatever the reason, the probes must have been developed in a hurry. Their designers didn’t even take the time to give them a new information matrix that would only contain those programs and blueprints the probes really need. They simply took what they had and slapped the killer program on top. Quick and dirty. The way I was building my own nanomachines, before I merged. When it didn’t matter whether it was elegant or efficient, just that it worked.”

Charlotte rubbed her temples gently and tried to understand. “They launched their rockets with machines designed to destroy alien planets.…Where did they send them?”

“Everywhere. In all directions.”

“And then what? One of the rockets eventually reaches a solar system, finds a life-bearing planet, crash-lands, and begins its work of destruction…”

“And within a few days all life on that planet is wiped out. Without a trace. The whole planetary crust is converted into new rockets, right up until the moment they run out of some important element. But by then they’ve built and launched millions of new probes, each looking for another new planet to destroy. And so on forever. Even if it took thousands of years for one probe to reach its target, there must be trillions of killer probes all over the galaxy by now. It’s a wave of destruction that has been spreading outward from Earth for the last hundred thousand years. These rockets can reach very high speeds as they travel, half light-speed or even more. No matter how I run the numbers, I’m forced to conclude that half the Milky Way has been wiped clean of life by now. That’s why we’ve never made contact with extraterrestrial intelligence; there’s none left. Our ancestors killed them all.”

She sat up and turned to face him, fighting the giddiness she felt. “But surely not everywhere. Surely there must have been some form of life, somewhere, on some planet who—which—managed to react in time.”

“I don’t know whether that’s something we should hope for,” Hiroshi said darkly. “But the chances are minimal.”

He raised his hand and pointed out the window. “Just think of that walk we took. Three million years. Even if a species evolves on some planet that might one day develop a technology that could serve to stop the nanites, when the probe arrives it can arrive at any point in those three million years, and from that point the world’s fate will be decided within days. But the probes attack any life-bearing planet, even one where life has only just developed. That means there are actually billions of years during which a planet is defenseless. No, once one of these probes arrives, it inevitably means a living world will be turned into a desert and millions more probes will be launched on their way, onward and ever onward.” He added, “And there will be no end to it. We have no chance of being able to catch every one of these probes, and we have no chance of being able to render them harmless. Even if we develop interstellar space flight one day, the universe will be dead wherever we go.”

“And in the end only Earth will be left,” Charlotte said softly.

“Assuming that there is anything left, given the way we’re treating it.”

Quite so. And it didn’t look as though there would be. She felt as though dark clouds were pressing in on all sides, as though a black mist had swallowed her. “Have you cured me?”

“Yes.”

“And what about the submarines? Will they stay inside me?”

“No, they’re already dissolving into harmless molecules. You’ll excrete them over the next few days.”

She sighed. “And what was it all for? So that I can live with this dreadful knowledge?”

“I cured you because I could. And because I could, I had to. And I told you all this so that I’m not the only one who knows.” Hiroshi gazed ahead, his eyes full of pain. “I told Rodney and his wife as well, but given the way they reacted I don’t know whether they’ll suppress it entirely or take the knowledge with them to the grave.”

A question occurred to her, one that had shot through her head earlier. “How did the nanites on Saradkov know that they were on Earth? How can they find that out?”

“The rocket they built and launched told them. By looking at the constellations. It took a while, because the stars change over the course of a hundred thousand years, but once the rocket knew, it sent back the predetermined code signal. In fact, there’s even a module on all the rockets that determines on the approach to a planet whether or not it’s Earth—otherwise, there would probably be far more probes arriving here. I assume the one that landed on Saradkov was defective in some way.” Hiroshi raised his head and seemed to be listening to something that only he could hear. Then he got up and said, “I have to go now.”

Charlotte was startled. She put out her hands toward him. “But why? You’ve only just arrived.”

“They’ve found me.”

“Found you? Who?” she asked, expecting to hear more monstrous revelations.

But all Hiroshi said was, “The police. They’ve put up roadblocks and they’re lying in wait.”

“How do you know that?”

He raised his hand and waggled his fingers, hinting at a shape that might have been a cloud. “Let’s just say I have my little spies everywhere.” He went to the door that led to the deck. “Sayonara.”

She sat there motionless and felt she was dying—here, now. “Farewell? Why not just good-bye?”

He hesitated. Then he came back and stood before her, looking down at her sitting there. With a tenderness she would never forget as long as she lived, he took her face in his hands and studied it as intently as if he wanted to remember her features forever.

“I have become the lord of all things,” he said softly. “I always thought I would be able to create a wonderful future, but I was wrong. I have too much knowledge and too much power to stay on in this world.” He let her go. “We won’t meet again. That’s why it’s farewell.”

3

Dawn was breaking as Hiroshi left the house. They were out there. He knew it, however good they were at hiding. He didn’t show he knew it as he walked calmly over to the rental car, unlocked it, and climbed in. He started the motor as though nothing were out of the ordinary.

High up above him, invisible to all those surveillance instruments that were doubtless pointed right at him, floated a swarm of nano-components. They were so small that they didn’t need propellers to stay aloft but simply hung in the air like bubbles in honey. Taken together, they formed a vast eye through which Hiroshi could look down on the city. At first, this kind of double vision had taken a little getting used to, but he had learned to live with his eye in the sky. By now he could drive the car and simultaneously watch himself driving down the street. Which is how he had seen the police setting up their roadblock and putting sharpshooters at all the exits. They knew where he was, and they were determined to take him.

Well, they wouldn’t succeed. The only question was how to avoid anyone getting hurt in their vain attempts to stop him.

The wide cordon actually worked in Hiroshi’s favor. All he needed to do was get out of these narrow side streets and reach the Avenida de los Incas. After that there should be no problem.

“He’s coming,” the captain said and signaled with his hand. “Go go go!”

The policemen took up position, grim-faced. They were a special-weapons unit, kitted out with bulletproof vests and helmets. There was a general sense of relief that the hours of waiting were over. They could hear the lone car coming toward them from somewhere up the street. Two men drew the spiked chain into place a couple of yards beyond their roadblock. Better safe than sorry. Now they could see the headlights approaching.

“Take aim,” the captain ordered. “Fire at my command.”

Eight men raised rifles to their shoulders. Eight muzzles pointed at the fragile little car that was heading for the roadblock without slowing down.

“He’s got to be able to see us,” the captain muttered irritably, batting away a couple of mosquitoes. “Antonio, give him the light.”

Antonio raised the heavy flood lamp over his head and waved it from side to side. The men saw countless mosquitoes dancing in the beam.

Mosquitoes?
the captain wondered.
At this hour of the morning?
The car still showed no signs of slowing.

“Shoot out the tires,” he ordered.

The men swung their muzzles a fraction. There were mosquitoes everywhere now, making straight for the rifles for some reason. What the devil had gotten into them?

“Fire!”

Their fingers tightened upon the triggers, and the triggers crumbled as they squeezed. A moment later the muzzles themselves fell apart in a drift of fine, dark powder.

“
Madre de Dios!
” one of the policemen yelled.

The roadblock dissolved as well, collapsing in the blink of an eye. And then the car was upon them and simply drove on through at speed. The men threw themselves aside in the nick of time and just caught a glimpse of the man at the wheel, who was looking straight ahead as calmly as if he hadn’t noticed a thing.

The spiked chain had also dissolved into dust. And the mosquitoes were gone.

Fernández Larreta put down the telephone receiver, shaken, and looked at the minister and the Americans. “They say that their rifles…crumbled into dust. The moment they took aim.”

The minister’s jaw dropped. He had loosened his tie a few hours earlier, then he had taken off his jacket, and after that he had undone a couple of buttons at the top of his shirt. By now he looked thoroughly unministerial. The chief of police, by contrast, had retreated to the restroom several times over the course of the night to check his tie was still neatly in place. He looked away, pained. The
norteamericanos
weren’t much better: they also looked distinctly disheveled. And the way they chewed gum the whole time! It was distressing, as though they were determined to prove all the clichés right.

“Did you say…dust?” Miller repeated, making sure he had understood.

Larreta repeated what the police commander had told him, in his best English. How the car hadn’t even slowed down. How the captain had given the order to shoot out the tires. And how the mosquitoes had swarmed.

“Those were no mosquitoes,” the professor broke in. “Your people were seeing nanotechnology at work. What they thought were mosquitoes were tiny flying machines capable of breaking iron atoms free from their crystalline lattice structure.” He rubbed the side of his nose, thinking. “Astonishing. I wonder how he’s controlling them. I really do.”

“The scientist from the States thinks that his control system has to be the weak point,” Guarneri heard the chief of police say grimly over the radio. “He has to be able to control both at once—the car and his bugs. However he’s doing that, he’s only human. So he can’t cope with too many opponents at once.”

“Understood,” the commander said. “That means we’ll have to attack him from all sides if we can.”

“Exactly. Where is he now?”

José Guarneri looked down at his map, though of course he already knew the answer. “Driving west along Avenida de los Incas.” He followed the route. “We could try to head him off where it crosses Combatientes de Malvinas. It’s a pretty big intersection. We’d have room to fire.”

It also had a number of residential high-rises. But that was the case everywhere in this part of Buenos Aires.

“Good,” said the chief. “Do it.”

Guarneri switched broadcast bands and rattled out a series of orders, thinking fast. They had to work quickly. “Helicopter! Get on his tail, and don’t lose sight of him, but for the moment just observe. Prepare to fire as soon as he’s at the intersection.” Turn the dial, next band. “Get our man with the bazooka in place. And tell him that if he misses and brings one of the buildings down, I will personally tear him a new one.” Next band. “Get the armored cars moving, quick!” Clack. “I need snipers in place everywhere, as many as you can deploy, and over the widest possible area.” Clack. “I don’t want to see so much as a stray dog for the next twenty minutes at the intersection of los Incas–Malvinas, never mind a citizen. Yes, rush hour, I know. Bus, I know that, too. I don’t care. If the president’s sick child wants to get through that intersection in an ambulance, you don’t let it through until I say so, understand me?”

“He’s coming,” someone said.

They all listened. A lone car roaring down the broad Avenida de los Incas. By now he was paying no attention at all to speed limits or red lights.

Two hundred yards.

“Ready arms,” Commander Guarneri ordered.

The man with the bazooka drew a bead on the car. He was concealed behind an advertising billboard that was endlessly rolling its floodlit panels around and around overhead. The man tapped at his earpiece to make sure he still heard the hum of the radio channel. The captain in charge of the roadblocks looked up as a blind went up in a seventh-floor window in the brown-and-white apartment building right by the intersection. He gestured to one of his men to take up position by the front doors. The armored cars with the squadrons of men rolled slowly down the side streets.

One hundred yards.

The snipers got the car in their sights as it approached. The helicopter had been following their man at a safe height. Now it dropped and picked up speed, closing the gap.

“Ready…” the commander said over the general band.

Just then something happened to the car. The dozen men watching through telescopic sights saw it…change.

“What the…?”

It took only seconds. The headlights blinked out. The contours of the car melted and shifted. The machine that only moments before had been an ordinary midrange automobile rose into the air and thundered over the intersection at an altitude of about six yards. Nobody had time to react. The man with the bazooka shut his eyes. The snipers took their fingers off the triggers without even knowing they’d done so. The armored cars stopped. The policemen stood there staring at the plane as it climbed rapidly, still following Avenida de Los Incas, and vanished into the cloudless morning sky.

Hiroshi flew low, and the landscape rushed past beneath him. Pasture, fences, old-fashioned windmills, black cattle, and decrepit-looking houses. Gradually even these disappeared. The sparse grasses grew ever sparser, the roads—dirt tracks at best—ever fewer, and the farther he flew, the fewer the signs of agriculture on the land below him. That meant he was headed the right way. La Pampa province lay ahead of him. From then on the landscape would become ever drier and harsher, until he eventually reached the salt lakes.

It was pushing him to the limits to fly this thing and simultaneously keep an eye on his pursuers. In fact, he couldn’t fly—not in the sense of ever having taken lessons or qualifying for a license. Up until the very last moment he had hoped he wouldn’t have to do this at all. The machine was the smallest flier he had found in the nanite blueprint archive, and his practical experience with it was limited to just a few short border hops when he didn’t want to be bothered with immigration.

At the moment he couldn’t see anyone following him. Not that he could see a great deal, since the nano-camera could not keep up at the speed he was going. He had been forced to abandon it. Once his eye in the sky lost contact with central control, it would simply scatter in the wind and eventually dissolve into dust. But for all that he knew, they were after him. And he cherished no illusions: he wouldn’t be able to stay ahead of them for long.

Nor did he need to. All he needed was a moment to rest. No more than that. In the long run, that’s what it all came down to: rest.

An AWAC normally stationed at the US military base in Palanquero, Colombia, had been patrolling the Rio de la Plata estuary since shortly after midnight, observing air traffic over Argentinean territory. Two C-130 Hercules transporters were on their way from Guantanamo Bay naval base with a complement of 120 paratroopers from the US Marine Corps outfitted with a full range of weaponry. They would reach the operational theater in about three hours. The 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit had also been deployed from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

A squadron of F-15 fighters over the Atlantic had just undergone midair refueling when the orders came through. “Sierra Bravo, you are now cleared to enter Argentinean airspace. Target is currently at 35 degrees 47 minutes south, and 61 degrees 53 minutes west, moving west-southwest at a speed of around 500 miles an hour. Over.”

The squadron leader repeated the coordinates and confirmed.

“Set course for target and force it to land. Target is not to be destroyed. Repeat, target is not to be destroyed. Over.”

“Target is not to be destroyed,” the pilot repeated. “Wilco, over and out.”

He gave the signal to start. The next moment the first of the fighter jets peeled off from the rest and shot off toward the coast.

They were coming. Jets, very low, and coming at a hell of a speed. Hiroshi held his breath, grabbed the joystick tightly, and instinctively ducked his head.

They weren’t firing at him. Not yet at least. Instead, they thundered above him so close it seemed they wanted to clip the plane. The noise was almost deafening, and his tiny aircraft shuddered and bucked in the turbulence the jets left behind, terrifying him. He mustn’t crash! Then came the other two. Dark dots on the horizon behind him, growing larger incredibly fast. And silently. Of course, they were flying at supersonic speed. If he had seen right, they were F-15s, which could reach Mach 2.5.

Hiroshi looked at the instruments in front of him. They could hardly have looked stranger if they had been built by aliens rather than by humans of that first civilization, dead and gone for unguessed-at eons now. The first time Hiroshi had ordered the nanites to build him this aircraft, he had inspected it thoroughly to try to work out what all the controls did—a wise precaution if he actually wanted to fly in it. So he knew…well, there was a switch, or something like it, that could turbocharge the engines; technically, it would probably be possible to leave even an F-15 hanging in the sky behind him. But Hiroshi didn’t dare. He was already breaking a sweat flying this thing at five hundred miles an hour; he knew in his bones he couldn’t stay in control at Mach 4 or even more. So he did the opposite: he throttled back and lost altitude.

Once the next two jets had roared away above him, presumably pleased to have forced him to land so soon, Hiroshi ordered the nanites to convert the plane into a large all-terrain vehicle. This didn’t work quite so smoothly as it had back in the city—when the nanites began to take the jet engines apart in order to build the new motor, they cut out in the air before he had fully landed. He crashed down, maybe a yard or so, with full force. That must have done some damage. The nanites fixed it in the blink of an eye, and a minute later Hiroshi was racing across the ground at full throttle, raising an enormous cloud of dust behind him.

The soldiers of the Santa Rosa de Toay garrison were still at breakfast, locked in heated debate over the forthcoming Club Atlético game, when their sergeant came storming in. He hammered a metal mess tray onto the table until the chatter died down so that he could make himself heard. Then he read out the orders that had just arrived direct from the Ministry of Defense. At first, that was the most incredible thing about the whole business: the thought that anyone in the ministry even knew they were still there, manning this tiny little fort in the middle of nowhere. There had been precious little evidence of that any time they tried to get spare parts or maintenance funds in the last few years.

A moment later the mess hall echoed with the sound of chairs being pushed back, voices shouting, feet tramping, doors slamming. Within ten minutes a squad was headed to Santa Rosa Airport to prepare for the landing of two Lockheed C-130 transporters, while the rest of the soldiers piled into the fastest jeeps they still had and raced west along Route 14. Once they saw the cloud of dust out on the pampas, the one they had been told about, they slowed down.