“The waste is terrible—yes, I know. But what does it matter? They were a billion purposeless lives, the culmination of a thousand pointless generations. And look here.”

She tapped at the floating image. The deep-buried colony turned red, showing as a clear torus shape around the ice-buried mountain. And when the viewpoint pulled back, Abil saw that there were many more such red blotches scarring the planet’s white face, from pole to pole, around the equator.

“There are about a thousand warrens on this one planet,” Dower murmured. “Probably most of them unaware of each other. We probably won’t even be able to clean them all out. I’ve seen this before, many times, on worlds as different from this, tar, as you can imagine—but all warrens are essentially the same. Anywhere where the living is marginal, where people are crowded in on each other, out pops the eusocial solution, over and over. I think it’s a flaw in our mental processing.”

In one place two of the colonies were in contact; tendrils of pale pink reached out from their red cores, and where they touched, crimson flared. Dower spoke a soft command. The simulated image’s time scale accelerated, so that days, weeks passed in seconds. Abil could see how the two colonies probed toward each other, over and again, and where they came in contact crimson flared—a crimson, he realized, that showed where people were dying.

“They’re fighting,” he said. “It’s almost as if the colonies are living things themselves, sir.”

“Well, so they are,” Dower said.

“But—a thousand of them. That makes um, a trillion people on this light-starved planet alone—all living off the scrapings from the thermal vents . . .”

“Makes you think, doesn’t it? Oh, the Coalescents are efficient. But they are just drones. We own history.” She waved her hands and produced a new image, a star field, crossed by a great river of light. She pointed to the Galaxy core. “Leave the Coalescents to their holes in the ground. That is where we are going, tar; that is where our destiny will be made—or broken.”

When she had gone Abil restored the image of the slowly turning globe, its white surface pustulous with warrens.

There were no cities here, he thought, no nations. There were only the Coalescent colonies. The huge entities waged their slow and silent battles against each other, shaping and spending the lives of their human drones—drones who may have believed they were free and happy—and all without consciousness or pity. On this world the story of humankind was over, he thought. On this world, the future belonged to the hives.

But there were other worlds.

The starship leapt away with an almost imperceptible lurch. The frozen world folded over on itself and dropped into darkness.

Chapter 52

Chapter 52