The Big Dark Sky (85)

In the past few days, when it reached out to Joanna by phone, the thing had said it was in a dark place, a mental darkness. Only you can help me, Jojo. Maybe it was four thousand years old, just as it claimed, a nearly immortal life-form from another world. Having been here and monitoring events for centuries, perhaps it began with an antipathy for human beings, an instinctive dislike more emotional than reasoned. Antipathy could have evolved into detestation as it came to understand why it disliked humanity. Then if it had chanced upon the demented philosophy of Asher Optime and been propagandized by it, detestation might have sickened into homicidal hatred.

As the sky thrashed the land with light, and willows whipped it with shadows, Joanna turned from the window with sudden insight and interrupted Wyatt as he read another passage. “Do you think just reading Optime’s essays could convert someone into a radical advocate of human extinction by whatever means necessary?”

Wyatt looked up from his phone. “Not a normal person, no. A seriously unbalanced person. Or some lost soul with a weak will, looking for purpose, some reason to be.”

“There’s no shortage of the unbalanced and the lost. Never has been. But no normal person, weak or not, would be turned into a mass murderer just by reading essays. Neither would an extraterrestrial, a higher intelligence that could travel across the galaxy.”

“No argument,” Wyatt said.

“It would require a more . . . intimate and intense connection.”

“What do you mean?”

“Asher Optime must be within the radius.”

“What radius?”

“The thing can control animals and read minds only within a certain radius of its location. That’s what it said.”

Uneasy as long as her back was to the window, Joanna turned to face the night. Her faint reflection loomed in the glass, as if she were already dead and her spirit had come now to haunt the place where she’d been murdered.

She said, “Xanthus Toller is absurd. He’s ignorant. But he’s also charismatic.”

Wyatt agreed. “Otherwise there wouldn’t be any Restoration Movement.”

“So maybe this Optime guy is equally charismatic. This thing, this alien, can read his mind, enter his twisted inner world. If Optime’s madness is unique and compelling, if his mind is a dark carnival, grotesque but fascinating and perversely appealing . . .”

“With enough charisma,” Wyatt said, “a murderous psychopath can convince people he’s a righteous visionary, even without them being drawn deep into his weird inner world. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, so many others. When people think their lives are without meaning, they’ll seek meaning even from the creepiest of charlatans.”

“But could an extraterrestrial of superhuman intelligence be swept away by charisma, by the romance of hate and violence?”

Having gotten to his feet, Wyatt appeared as another spirit in the window glass. “On this world, high intelligence doesn’t always come with common sense.”

“True enough. But—”

“Too often it’s twined with arrogance, with narcissism. How often in the past century and a half have we seen the ruling class, many highly intelligent, lead their people in a foolish pursuit of one utopia or another, only to bring them to ruin and despair?”

“Too often.”

“So why should it be any different on another world, with another intelligent species? As alien as this thing might be, it could have a lot in common with our kind. Like fallibility. Like the ability to deceive—and be deceived. What little I’ve just read by Optime suggests he’s got the power to make genocide sound like a noble quest. At least to some empty seekers.”

Turning from Wyatt’s reflection to the real man, Joanna said, “Optime wants the entire human race liquidated. So does this thing, Optime’s apostle. And it’s going to start here. We’re dead if we don’t get out of this place right now.”

He didn’t disagree. “But where do we go?”

“Beyond whatever the effective radius is, just in case it was lying when it said it won’t read us again, or if it changes its mind. Someplace where our thoughts are private, where we can figure out how to deal with it.”

“And if there is no way to deal with it?”

Joanna turned to survey the room. Although the house had so little changed in twenty-four years, although it had once been a haven and a comfort, it now seemed as strange as if it stood on a world other than the one on which she’d been born.

“Do you feel its presence, Joanna? Is the thing here now?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” She snatched her purse from the coffee table. “Come on. Leave the luggage, leave everything, just get out quick.”

In the garage, her rented Explorer stood alone. Wyatt’s Range Rover was outside in the driveway, where they’d left it when they had returned from the visit to Hector and Jimmy Alvarez.

She grimaced at an acrid smell that hadn’t been here before. She couldn’t identify it and didn’t take time to seek the source.

Wyatt settled in the passenger seat, and she got behind the wheel. The engine would not turn over.

Neither Joanna nor Wyatt had any illusions. The battery hadn’t gone dead. The vehicle hadn’t failed because of any fault of the manufacturer.

They got out of the Explorer. He opened the hood, and they both recoiled from the spectacle revealed.