The Dead Town

In spite of its watery appearance, the swarm didn’t make liquid sounds, still buzzed and hissed and sizzled, but the tone had become lower, less the furious zeeeeee of angry wasps, more the grumbling drone of bumblebees. Through the spiraling currents of this pool, which included numerous whorls that intersected and spun off new coils and curls, there bobbled what appeared to be lumpy forms more coherent than the rest, though they seemed to dissolve as new lumps formed elsewhere.

Frost might have fled back to the second floor, to leave the house by an upper window and a porch roof, if instinct had not said Wait. Weak-kneed and shaking on the stairs, he slipped his pistol in the shoulder rig under his jacket. He gripped the railing with his left hand to steady himself, leaned against it. With his right sleeve, he wiped at the cold sweat that stippled his brow.

In the foyer below him, under a mirror, stood a narrow side table holding three ceramic vases of different sizes. The gray tide washed under it, around its legs. For a moment the table seemed to be of no interest to that voracious multitude, but then the slender legs began to dissolve. The table tipped forward, and the vases slid off. They didn’t shatter as they fell into the pool, but bobbled briefly before apparently dissolving. The table came apart and the pieces were briefly flotsam before deliquescing out of sight into the spiral currents.

Intuition needed a while to be heard through the roar of Frost’s terror, but finally he began to suspect that the swarm had lost track of him. There was something aimless in its motion as it swashed back and forth in the foyer, as though it had forgotten its purpose and quested this way and that, in search of some reminder of what it had been pursuing.

Frost suspected that if he moved or in any way drew attention to himself, he might inspire an attack. He leaned against the railing and quieted his breathing.

Dagget was dead. They had been not just partners but also best friends. Frost wanted revenge. But he knew there would be none. The best he could hope for was to survive. And with his sanity.

Chapter 30

After Nancy Potter, replicant of the mayor’s wife, threw down the last of the angels and crushed them underfoot, shrieking with delight, she eventually grew somewhat calmer. But she was not able to keep her promise to hurry at once with Ariel to the barn to assist the girl in becoming what she was meant to be. All of the shattered figurines had left a mess on the living-room floor, and Nancy could not merely walk away from such appalling disorder. She was alarmed that by eliminating the porcelain icons, which in themselves were symbols of unreason and disorder, she had created this other chaos herself, and she was unable to remember the chain of reason by which she had justified such behavior. In a disordered environment, the highest efficiency could not be achieved, and she must at all times be efficient. She must vacuum the living room and restore order before going to the barn.

Ariel was not a replicant. She was a Builder, although a much different kind of Builder from those at work elsewhere in Rainbow Falls. As a Builder, she lived by the same principles that were programmed in the replicants. Indeed, Builders had an appreciation for order and efficiency even greater than that of the replicants. Each replicant was a single organism, but each Builder was a colony of billions of nanoanimals each of which was mandated to destroy only for the purpose of efficiently constructing other things — new Builders — that were more finely ordered than those beings that they deconstructed. When the colony acted as one, either as a swarm or in the form of a single creature, the imperative to order things around them according to their programmed directives was an irresistible motivating force.

Consequently, Ariel fretted about the delay but didn’t protest much when Nancy wanted to clean the living room and put things right once more. She dusted diligently while Nancy gathered the larger fragments of the figurines, and she vacuumed while Nancy polished the glass shelves in the display case with Windex. When Nancy became disturbed about a few scratches in the shelves, realized she could not make them look perfect, and smashed them, Ariel picked up the bigger shards of glass and disposed of them. She also vacuumed again while Nancy went to the kitchen and for a while sat at the dinette table with her eyes closed and her hands limp in her lap.

Replicant Nancy’s thoughts were as jumbled as laundry tumbling in a dryer. The real Nancy had not kept the most spotless possible house, but she’d been a demon about laundry. Therefore, because the replicant had downloaded the woman’s memories, the laundry metaphor occurred to her, and it served her well. One by one, she took her tumbling thoughts from the dryer, ironed them, folded them, and put them away.

When Ariel finished bringing order to the living room, she came into the kitchen and said, “Can we go to the barn now?”

Eyes still closed, Nancy said, “I need a couple minutes more.”

After nine minutes and twenty-six seconds, Ariel said, “I really need to become what I’m meant to be. I really do.”

“Just a minute,” Nancy said.

Four minutes and nine seconds later, Ariel said, “Please.”

At last Nancy opened her eyes. She felt much better. Her mind was ordered. Efficiency was again possible.

Oblivious of the weather, Nancy and Ariel crossed the yard from the house to the barn.

Most of the building’s sixteen hundred square feet were in the main room, with a small tack room at the back. The walls were well insulated, and there was an oil furnace.

Along the south wall, horses watched the women from three stalls. Queenie and Valentine, the mares. Commander, the sorrel stallion.

The interior of the stalls in which the mares stood had earlier in the day been fortified with eighth-inch-thick steel plating. All of the windows had been filled with insulation and covered with inch-thick squares of sound board.

When the work began, the mares, in terror, were likely to try to kick out the walls and doors of their stalls when they saw what happened to the stallion.

Victor’s plan was more ambitious than merely the elimination of humanity to the last pathetic individual. He intended also that every thinking creature in nature should be chased down in every field and forest, and deconstructed by Ariel’s variety of Builder. Victor’s definition of thinking included any life form with even minimal self-awareness. Any animal that took joy in life, that exhibited even the least curiosity about the world, that had the slightest capacity for wonder, must be hunted to extinction. The substance of those creatures would be used to make more Builders that could mimic all the myriad species, to mingle with their herds and run with their packs and fly with their flocks, and ruthlessly eliminate them. In the seas, too, were beings with capacity for joy and wonder — dolphins, whales, and others — that must eventually be extinguished to the last specimen by aquatic Builders in the event that the seas proved too vast and self-cleaning to be effectively poisoned.

With a triumphant smile that Nancy understood, Ariel walked to Commander’s stall. The girl had no apple for him, but she let the stallion snuffle and work his soft lips over her hand.

When in time nothing lived upon the planet other than Builders, replicants, insects, and plants, the two kinds of Communitarians would die at Victor’s satellite-broadcast command. Only he would remain for a short while to witness a world without performers or audience, without anyone but him to remember its history, with no one to seek a future or even to want one. In the beginning had been the Word, but in the end no word would ever be spoken again, from pole to pole. Victor’s rebellion had begun more than two hundred years earlier, and it had not ended with his death in Louisiana, for it continued here under the management of his clone, Victor Immaculate. This rebellion would be the greatest in history, not only in the history of the earth but also in the history of all that is, for Victor Immaculate would in the end kill himself, the last self-aware creature on Earth, and thereby signify that his maker, the New Orleans Victor, and his maker’s maker were as meaningless as history, which had led to this nothing, these unpopulated landscapes in which no eye delighted.

The triumph that Ariel anticipated as she moved to the mares in response to their nickering, the triumph that tasted sweet to Nancy, as well, was the eventual obliteration of everything of which they could not be a part, which happened to be everything, whereafter even the Community, having fulfilled its purpose, could cease to exist.