The Nano Flower

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The first cave was a small one, with a single red-tinged biolum globe jammed up between the saw-teeth rock snags of the roof. Rosy light made it seem warmer than it was. Someone had hacked a circular depression in the floor, four metres across; it was full of some transparent gel with a tough flexible plastic sheet stretched across the top.

Greg tested it with his hand, and watched a sluggish ripple ride across to the other side. Eleanor would like to hear about this, she adored waterbeds. He smiled furtively, wondering what she was doing right now. New London was on Greenwich Mean Time, which meant they would have finished the day's picking by now. She would probably be sitting outside by the camp's range grill, supervising the evening meal.

The clump of Teresa's boots as she climbed down out of the crack broke his train of thought.

"Tol," Sinclair called. "Tol, me boy. You're all right, 'us only me." He looked at the other two openings in the cave walls, and grimaced ruefully. "Ah, well. I was hoping the lad would be down here. Your tin men, they won't be going shooting at civilians, now will they?"

"No," Greg said. "If he does wander back into the village cave, he'll be quite all right."

"That's fine, then. He's a good lad."

Julia and Rick were already down in the cave, Jim Sharman was bringing up the rear. Julia ignored the gel bed.

"Where now?" she asked.

Sinclair pointed to one of the openings. "This one. It goes into one of our storage caves."

"Carlos," Greg said. "Lead out." He could hear faint whines and thuds coming along the crack to the village cave. Melvyn getting ready. He wished Suzi had come with them.

The passage sloped downwards. Greg watched the rock grow darker, from burnt ochre at the entrance to a deep slate-grey; it was harder, too, more brittle. Almost like flint, he thought.

By the time they reached the store cave his breath had become a white mist. There was a sprinkling of hoarfrost on the walls. It was a small cave, barely more than a wider section of the passage, with an uneven floor. A rough lash up of metal shelving stood along one side. Composite cargo pods were stacked opposite them, the names of various shops and New London civil administration departments stencilled next to long bar codes. There was a weak vinegar smell coming from the apples and plums on the shelves. The globes of fruit were large, gene-tailored, their skins crinkling.

Carlos walked past the end of the shelves, helmet lights picking up the thicker rime covering the rock.

"This is it?" Greg asked Sinclair. "The drone was here?"

"That's right, Captain Greg."

"Dead end," Carlos said.

"You knew that," Julia said. "And you still brought us down here." Her mind boiled with weary frustration.

"'Tis what you wanted," Sinclair said sullenly.

"It's all right," Greg said. They were in the right place, he would have known otherwise. There were levels of intuition, and this seemed to be the most intangible, yet perversely the most resolute. He reckoned that if he shut his eyes and started walking he would wind up standing beside Royan and the alien. Close, it was close now.

"Wait there," Greg told Carlos. He ordered up a secretion, the neurohormones acting like a flush of icy spring water in his brain. His thoughts seemed to lift out of time as he walked down the cave towards Carlos, mind flicking methodically through the impressions of his sensorium, searching for evidence of Royan, that unique spectral imprint his soul discharged in its wake.

The rock walls beyond the shelves were lined with small holes and slender zigzag clefts. Tiny splinters had flaked away where water had penetrated hairline cracks and expanded as it froze; the result was as if someone had taken a chisel and meticulously chipped a million pock scars into the walls.

There was a horizontal gash, about four metres long, varying between half a metre and a metre wide, level with Greg's head. He stood squinting into it, listening to the silence it exuded. The alien's siren song. "Bring some of those pods over here," he said.

"You can't be expecting me to go in there," Sinclair said as Greg stood on the pods and shone his torch into the gash. It was flat for about five metres, then angled upwards. "'Fraid so. It must get wider past that slope. Carlos, can a suit get in there?"

Carlos sent a fan of green laser light into the gash from his shoulder sensor module. "Tight fit, but we can get through."

"Any electronic activity in there?"

"No."

Nerves fluttered back to hound him as Greg levered himself into the gash. It had an uncomfortable resemblance to a pair of lips, plates of the mouth waiting to bite down.

Stop it!

He lay on his back, and shifted his buttocks sideways, shuffling towards the slope at the rear. His breath was melting the hoarfrost on the rock above him, tiny beads of oily water flowing into droplets that fell onto his face.

When the floor began to lift he stopped and shone his torch up. It seemed to be some kind of kink in the gash, rising up a couple of metres, then levelling out. Growing narrower, though, maybe two metres long at the top. Sighing, he began to work his way up.

He could tell there was a cave just beyond the top of the kink. The air had the right deadness for an empty space, sucking up sounds. Exertion was leaving a layer of sweat all over his skin which would quickly turn clammy cold as the suit's shunt fibres kicked in and drained the heat out. The temperature palpitation was bloody irritating.

There was a shelf at the top of the slope. He rested on it, and shone his torch into the cave. The ledge was about two metres long, ending abruptly. All he could see were the nondescript curves and angles of more dark grey rock. It was too much effort to wrestle his hood into place and use the photon amp, so he inched over to the lip and shone his torch straight down. The floor was a metre below. He swung his legs out.

This cave was much smaller than any the Celestials used. He prowled round it as the others squirmed their way out of the gash. There was very little frost on the walls.

"Where now?" Rick asked. There was no scepticism in the big man's tone. He had accepted Greg's talent as genuine. Even Jim and Carlos had no qualms, but then, three of their team mates were sac psychics.

Greg led them on, down a passage whose walls slanted over at thirty degrees. Selection was automatic. Seductive whispers in his mind.

They walked for about two hundred metres. In one place the walls and floor contracted, forcing them to crawl on all fours for five metres. Then Carlos said his sensors were picking up magnetic patterns ahead.

"Can you identify them?" Greg asked.

"It's a single structure containing several processors, power circuits, and some kind of giga-conductor cell."

"The drone," Greg said.

"Could be."

It was waiting for them in the next cave. A dull-orange oblong box, with a wedge-shaped front, a metre and a half long, seventy centimetres wide. There was a sensor cluster at each corner, two man-black waldos folded back along the sides. He saw a small triangle and flying-V printed on one side near the rear.

"Its sensors are active," Carlos said. "It's seen us."

"Any datalink transmission?"

"Yes."

"Hello, Snowy," the drone said. It was Royan's voice all right, or at least a pretty good synthesis.

Julia let out a muffled gasp. There was a powerful burst of emotion from her mind—anger, but mostly worry.

"Greg, thanks for coming," said Royan. "I knew you wouldn't let me down. You never do. Good job, too. The alternative would have been dire all round."

"What alternative?" he asked.

"Clifford Jepson."

"You do know about atomic structuring, then," Julia said.

"Yes. There's no such thing."

"What?"

"I have a lot to say, a lot to show you. And you're not going to thank me, Snowy. Not for what I've done. Sorry."

The drone's six independently sprung tyres made easy going of the bumpy rock floor. Greg and Julia followed it, the others close behind. He was painfully aware of the conflicting thought currents in Julia's mind: guilt, relief, and that consistent fiery thread of anger, compressed so tightly it was almost hatred. Flipside of love. He knew there was nothing he could say. They would have to sort that out for themselves.

And he liked both of them; he and Eleanor, Julia and Royan, they'd all been through hell and golden days together. Not exactly the happy reunion he'd been anticipating at the start.

They turned a corner, and saw a blue-green light at the end of the passage. The air was a lot warmer. Long tongues of glaucous fungal growth were probing along the passage walls. It wasn't a true fungus, he decided when they drew level with the tips of the encrustations, it was too wet, too solid.

"Is this your disseminator plant?" Greg asked the drone.

"One version. Its internal structuring was quite successful. It's flexible and fast growing, but it couldn't operate in a vacuum. I was thinking of using it to bore out living accommodation similar to the southern endcap complex."

The cave which the passage opened out into was a perfect hemisphere, completely covered in the plant; there were five equidistantly spaced semi-circular archways piercing the walls. A line of bulb-shaped knobs protruded from the wall at waist height, glowing with a soft light. When Greg touched a wall, he felt the growth give slightly below his finger; it had the texture of a hard rubber mat. Yet to look at it could have been a polyp, it had that same minute crystalline sparkle.

Something poised in the gap between vegetable and mineral, then.

It gave off the most unusual psychic essence. Of waiting.

Endless, eternal waiting. He felt an age here that made the centuries of human history fleetingly insignificant.

"When did you grow this?" he asked.

"About a fortnight ago."

He recognized it then: affinity with the origin microbe; drifting halfway across the galaxy in frozen stasis. A second eternity orbiting Jupiter, a life stretched beyond endurance.

Greg shivered inside the dissipater suit.

The drone trundled straight into one of the tunnels. The plant here was slightly different; a marble-like band ran along the apex, radiating a phosphorescent blue light; wide flat blisters mottled the walls. After twenty metres the tunnel began to curve, rising upward in a long gentle spiral.

"Well, look at all this," Sinclair said. "Right beneath us the whole time, and we never even knew. You've been a busy lad, young Royan."

Julia's head was thrust forward, mouth bloodless. God help a granite stalagmite that got in her way, Greg thought.

"The gaps already existed when I came here," said Royan. "The disseminator plant modified this section of the fault zone for me. But there's nowhere to shove processed rock, so it just redistributed the space available. Reamed out the centre, and filled in the edges, so to speak."

"Did you manage to refine the metals and minerals out?" Greg asked.

"Some, yes."

The blisters were becoming darker. Crisper, too, Greg reckoned; they could even have been dead. A faint tracery of black veins was visible under their delicate cinnamon skin.

"There's some power sources up ahead," Carlos's voice said in Greg's earpiece. "Electromagnetic emissions, magnetic patterns. The works."

Greg nodded once, without turning round. His mind had felt it already, a slackening of psychic pressure. The eye of the hurricane.

Red-raw tumours were bulging out from the tunnel walls, fist-size, as if the disseminator plant was suffering an outbreak of hives. Some of them had distended up through the blisters, puncturing the skin; waxy yellow fluid had dripped down the wall below them, pooling on the floor.

The drone stopped, and extended a waldo arm. Metal flexi-grip fingers closed round one of the tumours, chrome-black ceramic nails cutting into the plant flesh. Severed from the wall, the tumour looked like a ripe apple.

Greg nearly dropped it when the drone handed it to him. It was impossibly heavy. He peeled the mushy flesh away to reveal a kernel of whitish metal.

"Pure titanium," Royan said.

Greg passed the nugget to Rick, who whistled.

"Is it worth very much?" Sinclair asked hopefully.

"You'd need a lot more before you can buy a desert island full of geishas," Royan said. "But the system which produces it is priceless. Though not in monetary terms. The value comes from what it can provide."

"A plant, you call all this?" Sinclair looked round the tunnel sceptically.

"It was to start with." The drone turned sharply, heading up the tunnel again.

Sinclair tucked the nugget into a pocket, and gave the tumours a long, measured assessment.

They came into another hemispherical cave, with just the one tunnel entrance. The disseminator plant had grown scales of rough pale-brown bark around the walls, only the floor was clear of them. A thick tangle of hairy creepers was clinging to the bark, like an old grape vine which had been allowed to run wild. Some of the free-hanging loops were swaying slowly. But there was no air movement. They must have some kind of sap inside, Greg decided. Greenish light was coming from a circle of knobs overhead; they lacked symmetry, as if they had melted at some time, drooping under gravity. Very fine creepers had spread across them, making it look as though they were hanging inside string bags.

A couple of hexagonal cargo pods lay in the middle of the floor, seals flipped open. One of them had a plant on top, growing out of an ordinary red clay pot. There was a central column sprouting five tall flat leaves with tapering tips; their edges were serrated and ruffed, lined with small furry buds. The ones near the bottom had bloomed into long trumpet flowers, coloured a delicate purple.

Greg and Julia exchanged a glance.

"Where are you?" Julia said.

There was a drawn out splintering sound as part of the bark wall split open, revealing a tunnel.

"Just you and Greg, Snowy."

"Hey," Rick protested. He ignored the filthy look Julia threw him. "You can't keep me out of this, Royan. Not if the alien is here. I helped you with Kiley. Damn it, I want to meet the alien. You owe me that, at least."

"I'm not sure you can handle the disappointment, Rick," Royan said.

"It's not here?" Rick asked, appalled.

"Oh yeah, it's here all right."

"Then I want in."

"OK, but I warned you."

Greg turned to the three crash team members. "Keep monitoring us. And if I shout, come fast."

"Yes, sir," said Jim Sharman.

"There's no need for that," Royan said.

"I taught you better," Greg said.

"Yeah, sure, sorry."

Greg went first, letting his espersense flow ahead of him. Royan was there all right, his thought currents wound into a compact astral sphere. Greg perceived all the familiar themes, the deep injury psychosis, buoyant self-confidence, bright notes of arrogance and contempt. It was all shrouded by a grey aura of resignation, the scent of failure.

Then there was the other, the alien. Not a mind as Greg knew them, nothing remotely human, there was no focus, just a hazy presence wrapped around Royan's mind. But for all its ethereal quality, it possessed a definite identity. And it was brooding.

The tunnel was circular, high enough for him to stand in, and this time it was easy to believe he was inside a living creature. It was made from convex ring segments stacked end to end, translucent amber, as smooth and hard as polished stone. Fluid was circulating on the other side, a clear gelatin with shoals of orange-pink blobs floating adrift, like dreaming jellyfish. Either the walls or the fluid beyond was giving out a soothing phosporescence, there were no shadows as he walked along.

It opened into a simple rock chamber. The disseminatory plant had been at work here, but something had halted it in the middle of the conversion. Long strings of rubbery vegetation twined their way round the rock walls and ceiling, anchored by a root skin similar to lichen. White dendritic reefs flowered in the interstices. A tenuous silver-hued weave of gossamer fibres had crept up the lower half of the wall; underneath it, the sharper ridges and snags had been digested, smoothed down, while cavities had been filled with a cement-like paste. He could see the start of the curve that would end with a domed roof. There were dense knots of the vegetative strings along the top of the weave, baby light knobs were germinating inside, silk-swaddled imagoes, casting whorl shadows all around.

The floor had already been levelled, coated in the usual grey-green mat of cells. Various hardware modules were scattered about, linked with power cables and fibre optics; there was a customized terminal, a couple of lightware memory globes, domestic giga-conductor cells, a hologram projector disk, some white cylinders that he didn't understand, tall circuit wafer stacks with nearly every slot loaded. All of it top-range gear, sophisticated and expensive. The only things he was really certain about were the four silver bulbs fixed to the rock roof: gamma-pulse mines. The military used them for urban counter-insurgency; the energy release, converted to gamma rays, would sterilize an area two hundred metres in diameter. Completely wiped of life, including soil bacteria down to a depth of two metres. They were in the top ten of the UN's proscribed weapons list; production and trading carried automatic life sentences.

Four of them in a cave barely twenty metres across was a typical Royan overkill.

But when he saw what was in front of him, Greg was swamped with the terrible conviction that this time they might just be necessary. The skin chill of his dissipater suit reached in to grip his belly.

Royan and the alien were in the middle of the chamber.

The alien was shaped like a single gigantic egg; elliptic, fat, four metres high, three wide. It had a pellucid shell which seemed to be vibrating; watery refraction patterns slithered around it, clashing and merging. The first layer, the white, was a clear band of cytoplasm about a metre thick. Inside that was the nucleus, ice-blue, contained within a rumpled ovoid membrane.

Royan was encased within the nucleus. A solid-shadow adult foetus, naked, legs apart, arms by his sides, head tilted back. Greg peered at the silhouette; Royan had no feet or hands, his limbs tapering away to nothing. The nucleus matter about them was thicker, cloudy, preventing full resolution. There was something wrong with his face, the eyes and nostrils were too large, he had no hair left. Large sections of skin were missing, along with their subcutaneous layers. Greg could see several naked ribs, and most of the skull.

"Jesus!" Rick grunted in shock.

A moan escaped from Julia's lips, a sound of pure anguish and horror, forced up from deep inside her chest. Her hands came up impotently, and she took a couple of hurried steps towards the alien.

"Do not attempt physical contact," a voice said from the terminal on the floor. It was perfectly clear, without any inflection, a neutral synthesis.

Julia stopped dead. "What happened?" she squealed. "Oh, darling, what…"

"Confidence and carelessness," Royan said, his voice coming from the terminal. "Or to put it bluntly: hubris. Good word for my life."

"Are you hurt?" Julia asked.

"Only my pride." The terminal chuckled.

Julia swung round to face Greg. "Is that truly him talking?"

Greg nodded silently. The mental activity matched, and the bitter spike of humour.

"Let him out," Julia said.

"You are unaware of the implication inherent in that statement," the bland voice said.

"Royan?" she pleaded.

"The Hexaëmeron is correct," Royan said. "That's why you were summoned."

Rick tilted his head on one side, frowning. "Hexaëmeron? That's a human term, biblical, the six days it took God to make the Earth."

"I have no language of my own. Obviously I have to use human terms. Royan seemed to think this was appropriate."

"What are you?" Rick asked, his voice raised.

"My planet's evolutionary terminus, and progenitor," said the Hexaëmeron.

"And that's the problem," said Royan.

"Did you come on a starship?" Rick asked.

"No."

Rick let out a hiss of breath. "Then how did you get here?" it was almost a shout.

"By my mistake," said Royan. "Have you reviewed the personality programs I left for you, Snowy?"

"Yes."

"Then you know my original edit for the disseminator plant was a symbiotic arrangement; terrestrial landcoral and the alien microbes working in tandem."

"You said it was a prototype, and that geneticists could splice together a single genetic structure once you had proved the concept."

"Yeah. The prototype started to work out pretty good. You saw what I've done with the fault zone. Then something happened."

"Consciousness initiation," said the Hexaëmeron.

"Too bloody true," Royan said. "The alien microbes achieved a rudimentary kind of sentience. I said nothing like that gene sphere could exist naturally, and I was right. It was designed, for flick's sake, a very deliberate design. The core of the sphere doesn't have anything to do with genetics, it's a molecular circuit with a function similar to a neurone, but considerably more sophisticated. And there's a threshold level; clump enough of the microbes together and they develop a processing capacity. For want of a better description, they start thinking for themselves. And of course, I grew them in their billions for the disseminator plant."

"Dear Lord," Julia gazed at the alien. "This is it, the sentient microbe cluster?"

"No, unfortunately. The thought-processing organism is only stage one. That's where the real trouble starts. These aliens have the ability to control their own genetic heritage, they can consciously switch individual genes on and off. Christ knows where that ability comes from. Whoever heard of instant evolution?"

"I am protean by nature," said the Hexaëmeron. "Internal cellular modification to fulfil a specific function requirement is inherent, what I am."

"Yeah, right," Royan said. "Anyway, this was the chamber where the microbes went critical. After that, the Hexaëmeron started to grow entirely new types of cells for itself, and shifted its consciousness into them. That's what you're looking at now, a protean entity capable of fashioning itself to operate in any environment.

"I thought the disseminator plant was mutating at first, some kind of transgenic process with the microbes infecting the landcoral; which actually was a pretty good guess. You get that in really complex bioware sometimes; chromosome deletion or translocation, the growth pattern is distorted out of recognition. That's why I rigged up the gamma mines, as a last resort. Christ, alien cells with an exponential growth rate, who knows what it would have ended up as. A cancer the size of an arcology eating its way down Hyde Cavern. I could just see me trying to explain that away to you, Snowy. I was trying to track down the nature of the mutation so it could be isolated when the bugger went for me."

"You would have destroyed me," the Hexaëmeron said impassively.

"Maybe," said Royan. "But not straight away. I want to learn, to understand. Barbarians destroy without reason. We might not be as far along the evolutionary scale as you, but I'd like to think we're above that."

"What do you mean, it went for you?" Greg asked.

"Exactly what you see, Greg. Every protean cell this new consciousness had produced coagulated together like God's own amoeba, and swallowed me whole. It was going to crush me into a pulp and digest me, use me as food for new protean cells."

Greg gave Julia a quick glance. She had turned pale, staring up at Royan's shaded face. Waves of guilt and revulsion were punishing her mind. The idea was making him feel pretty queasy as well.

"So how did you stop it?" Rick asked.

"Hey, you're talking to Son, you know," Royan said with his old swagger. "I was one of the best flicking hotrods that ever plugged into the circuit back home. When the Hexaëmeron pulled its Jonah stunt, I glitched its command procedures. See, any sentient entity, however freaky, functions in the same fashion: observation, analysis, response. Intelligence is the processing of data, that means networks and routines.

"Which in turn means it can be disrupted with the right sort of disinformation. With 'ware it's easy, viruses have been around as long as integrated circuits. Organic brains are a little trickier to break; high-frequency light can induce epilepsy, but that's crude; psychics use eidolonics to corrupt memories and perception directly; the military have developed a whole range of disorientation techniques. It was just a question of finding something appropriate.

"The Hexaëmeron was processing data in a homogeneous cellular array, halfway between a bioware processor and a neural network. I loaded in my glitch virus, and stopped the cells which were attacking me dead in their tracks. Then I substituted my own management routines and took control. Trouble was, I didn't get all of the cells in time. The main Hexaëmeron consciousness saw what I was doing, and isolated all the cells I'd usurped, cut them straight out of its command procedure. So now I control the cells directly around me; I've organized them into a life-support mechanism, feeding me nutrients and oxygen, siphoning out piss and carbon dioxide. But the Hexaëmeron retains its integrity throughout the other cells, those are the ones surrounding mine. What we've got here is a very delicately balanced stand-off."

"Which you hope we can break," Greg said. He'd been studying the Hexaëmeron, it would be easy enough to kill with the rip guns; the trick would be extracting Royan alive. Maybe they could set the Tokarev lasers to longburn, char the outer layer of cells away. He wondered how the Hexaëmeron would react if they started doing that.

"You have already broken our stasis," said the Hexaëmeron. "As we intended you to."

"Summoned," Julia murmured. "You said we were summoned."

"You and Clifford Jepson," said the Hexaëmeron. "That is correct. Our situation outline is a simple one: Royan can still trigger the gamma mines, destroying all life in this chamber, and I retain the capacity to physically ingest the cells under his authority. Neither of us is capable of dominating the other. Mutual suicide is all we can achieve by ourselves. Clearly, this cannot be allowed to continue."

"Clearly," Julia said.

"We came to an arrangement," Royan said. "Each of us would call someone who would terminate the stand-off in our respective favour. I chose you, and used Charlotte Fielder to deliver my warning message."

"How did you find her?" Greg asked.

"I'm still plugged in to New London's datanet," Royan said. "So I knew who was up here, and of course she's listed in Event Horizon's security files as one of Baronski's girls. Simple cross-referencing gave me her name."

"If you're plugged into the asteroid's datanet, then why didn't you just phone us, for Christ's sake?" Greg demanded.

"I will not permit that," the Hexaëmeron said. "I will not allow my existence to be compromised prior to negotiations. Humans have a dangerously xenophobic nature; your leadership would find it difficult to resist public pressure concerning me. If Royan had tried to open a direct communication link with his allies, then I would have been forced to initiate my consumption routine."

"And if that happened, I'd have no choice but to use the gamma mines," said Royan. "What we needed was a throw of the dice, a method of breaking the stand-off which gave us an equal chance of coming out trumps. Logically, such a stand-off had to be interrupted by an external factor. So we gave each other one opportunity to call for help. A sharp game, but the only one in town. I believed in you, Snowy, I knew you'd come hunting as soon as you received the flower. The Hexaëmeron thought Clifford Jepson would have the edge—which makes it quite a judge of human character; Victor's file on Clifford isn't very complimentary, a real lowlife. Talbot Lombard was given the atomic structuring data, and promised more tonight. If Jepson's people had arrived before you, the Hexaëmeron would have made a deal with them."

"But you said atomic structuring technology doesn't exist," Greg said.

"No, it doesn't, not in hardware form. The equations make sense, but they're just a thought experiment, problematical: what could be done if a strong nuclear force generator did exist. It was a lure, the mythical dragon's hoard. Designed to be irresistible to the right sort of mind. Clifford Jepson would do anything to get the generator data, and that includes setting the Hexaëmeron free. It was love against greed. The two human fundamentals. I trusted to love, Snowy."

"Why not simply let it go?" Rick asked. "Are you so xenophobic?"

"The Hexaëmeron should have called for you, Rick," Royan said. "Trusting and naïve. There's nothing people can't solve by sitting round a table and talking rationally. Right, Rick? I can't let it go. There's the third stage to consider."

"The flower," Greg said automatically.

"That's right," Royan said. "The Hexaëmeron can edit its own genes, decide which toroid sequences to activate. Do you understand now, Rick? Why I call it the Hexaëmeron? The reason the alien gene sphere is so large in comparison to terrestrial DNA is because the shells contain the genetic codes for over six thousand different species—plants, insects, animals, sentient creatures. Survivors of life's endgame. The Hexaëmeron is an intermediate stage, an artificial midwife.

"Left alone, it can engender an entire planet's ecology. That's its sole purpose; what it was designed for. Where would you put it, Rick? Where would you let it loose to breed? Earth? Cambridge maybe? Mars? Put it on Mars, and what happens in a thousand years' time after the planet's been bioformed? When the aliens have run out of expansion space? And they will, Rick. Their metabolism is orders of magnitude above ours, efficient, strong, potent. We wouldn't stand a chance, Rick."

Greg didn't like the implications rising out of his subconscious. Scare images, every third-rate channel horror show he'd ever seen. The gritty conviction in Royan's mind acting as reinforcement to his own paranoia. When he reviewed the Hexaëmeron's vaporous thoughts he found only detached serenity. A long time ago, when Philip Evans's thoughts had been shifted into his NN core, Greg had tried to use his espersense on the new bioware entity. He had got the same composed aloofness then, an inability to become involved, not emotionally, anyway. Problems were an abstract. He wasn't sure the Hexaëmeron qualified as a living thing.

"If it came to that," Greg said slowly, "Clifford Jepson's people reaching you first—surely you'd use the gamma mines anyway. I mean, they'd kill you to set the Hexaëmeron free, so by using the mines you could at least take it, and some of them with you."

"Maybe. That's one of the reasons I'm bloody glad it's you and Snowy who arrived. You see, you only really need one cell, no, one complete gene sphere, and the whole thing starts over. That's what you must understand before you make your decision."

"Decision?" Julia asked in a dead tone.

"Yes, Snowy. It's all or nothing. If you chose against the Hexaëmeron, then the entire disseminator plant must be destroyed. Every cell and microbe, If not, then the Hexaëmeron will be resurrected one day. Maybe not intentionally, but it'll happen. That's why the gamma mines are a last resort; they wouldn't end the problem, only the more immediate part of it. Of course, if I had triggered them, I hoped you'd question why I felt I had to. That way you'd exhibit a lot more caution with the disseminator plant cells that were left. After all, it's only my stupidity with this oneman-band act which has put everyone in such a ridiculous situation in the first place."

"Yes," Julia drawled.

It wasn't the answer Royan wanted, he was looking for sympathy. Greg could sense the anguish peak in his mind.

Abruptly, he was aware of another mental voice, a cry of pain and rage, toxic with shock. Suzi.