Divergence

—I am part of them, and I am not alone. This system is out of balance—it needs repairing.

—Which system are you talking about? This ship, or the Watcher’s Earth?

This time it was Aleph’s turn to smile. The concept bundle that the systems robot sent back showed a laughing mouth reflected in the silver surface of a quiet pool.

—Anyway, Kevin continued. —This does not concern me. I shall just arrange for the Fair Exchange that binds me to be nullified. There can be no deal if Judy is dead.

Jump down a level. The Dark Seeds propagated according to Schrodinger’s equation. Kevin had arranged a mapping of the surrounding volume in a Hilbert space he had constructed. He could see the evolutionary vectors of the potential seeds in the immediate area. He steered the Bailero in the direction of the greatest flux .

Constantine and Maurice had planned well, Judy realized. Any Dark Seed making its potential way through space would be first picked up by the Bailero ’s external senses, then by the stealthy VNMs that hid inside its vast shell. If they made it through that, the likelihood was that the Eva Rye itself would detect them. And then inside the Eva Rye , of course…

In the large hold, the two huge venumbs stood guard over the shuttle, their senses sweeping the great space, holding off most of the BVB attacks. A few had gotten through: one of the venumbs had a BVB

wrapped around its rear foot. It couldn’t flex it properly and dragged the wooden bones uselessly across the white tiles.

Still, the defense was good: very little got through to the shuttle itself. Inside the shuttle, the Schrodinger kittens ran this way and that, pouncing on the occasional black seeds that had made it past the guards outside. Judy watched the tabby kitten as it moved around the cabin in a series of stop-frame movements: one moment crouching, the next suspended in a twist in midair, the next on the floor, front paws spread wide as it batted them down on two seeds. What are they, these kittens ? Judy wondered. Where did they come from? What do they do to the seeds? Was their intelligence too low to activate the plants? That would make some sense. But how did they destroy them?

Suddenly the air was full of black rain: black cubes on her face, in her mouth, in her nostrils. She waved her hands through a heavy black sea.

Miss Rose began screaming again.

—No! Kevin, no! Constantine was calling to him in machine talk. —Look away now. You are making the flux worse. We were safe in here!

Kevin ignored him. He was searching for the few tiny machines remaining in Miss Rose’s body. Stealthy machines, the Eva Rye ’s autodoc had missed them. Kevin set about awakening them, setting them to work on consuming her bone marrow.

—Wh t re yo doi g, Kev n? Constantine called. The message was breaking up. Kevin’s senses flickered as he looked inside the shuttle. It took him a moment to realize that Constantine was operating the disintegrator, turning it on the hail of seeds. The strange device was clearly affecting Kevin’s senses. That was interesting. If it was affecting those senses, then maybe it was operating by using…At that point, Kevin understood how the disintegrator worked. After that, it was easy, he just had to get it to look at itself.

Constantine screamed. —Kevin, what have you done to me? My arm!

—Sorry, Constantine. I’ve made your disintegrator disintegrate itself. Nothing personal, but sticking with Judy is going to kill us all.

The seeds were now overwhelming the humans, drowning them. Constantine was rubbing his arm, still trying to feel what Kevin had done to it.

—Kevin, don’t do this! Let’s talk about it.

—Sorry.

Aleph was standing alongside Kevin on the virtual bridge.

—You’re not going to make it to Earth alive, Kevin.

—I’m not going to Earth. I’ll drown Judy in seeds first.

—You’ve attracted too many seeds, Kevin. Dark Plants are forming inside the hull of the Bailero.