Son’s eyes glinted just a little in the starlight. His hand was still on the button of the device. And Eiko realized it was not warmer water from a hole in the boat that was leaking. It was Son’s blood. His shirt was torn. The gash in his side was visible, a darker seam in the almost lightless night. A wound from shrapnel, maybe from that second explosion as they leapt over the side.

Son was dead.

Chapter 46

There is a “real” world, out there, but we do not perceive it directly. It is assembled by the sensory and nervous systems of each individual animal, and it is assembled differently by every one of them. What we perceive is a construct.

Every animal’s perception of the world, constructed by its evolved sensory apparatus and nervous system to take best advantage of its environment, is subjective—there are no colors out there, as we perceive them, waiting for us. There is no sound—only waveforms.

And perhaps the strangest fact of all: Outside our bodies, there is no pain. Pain is something we create.

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

46

THE SAFE ROOM’S DOOR was hardened with ballistic material. Motorized blinds of a similar material were lowered over the windows.

Evrim and Ha sat on the floor, as they had been told to do. There had been a perimeter alarm, hours before. Moments later, they heard the two explosions in the distance. Then silence. Then the all-clear.

Another ship destroyed. Ha found herself too tired to care, and went to sleep.

But then the shore alarm sounded, hours later.

What was it Ha had seen, from her window, in the blue hour just before dawn, when the alarm woke her? Men—the shadows of men, breaking from the trees and running for the hotel. But not running—sort of loping. Encumbered by heavy gear, most likely. One of the ships had finally penetrated Altantsetseg’s cordon.

The men had stayed just outside the angles of the flood lamps, moving in the cover of the overgrown hotel gardens, skirting the terrace. Mixed in with the alarm was the sound of terrified monkeys howling in the trees—the alarm’s living echo.

And then something smashed against the side of the hotel, and she had run for the safe room.

Ha was thinking, again, of Altantsetseg in her tank. The body is a machine. Altantsetseg’s was a nexus of violence. What had she said that day at the temple? About the holon? You can’t tell where your command ends and the response algorithm begins. It’s like an extension of the nervous system, but more than that: information in the system flows bi-directionally. It’s as if your limbs talked back—as if your limbs were little minds that innovate and improvise.