“Okay, Vincent,” he said. “You got me good, dude, you got me good. But the game isn’t over yet.”
“Those are bacteria,” Nijinsky said to Billy. “They’re moving!”
“Of course they are, they’re alive.”
They sat close together, both just a few feet from Burnofsky, who tried to snort and sneeze and somehow dislodge their creatures from his nose. But a pretend sneeze is nothing like as powerful as the real thing, and they had moved from the nostrils, where air was compressed into the vast sinus cavity.
The sinus cavity was bigger in the m-sub than a domed football stadium. The sides of the sinus were covered by a fragile tissue stretched across a network of capillaries so dense that in places it seemed the membrane was little more than a sheet of waxed paper drawn tight over a nest of red worms, each pulsing with platelets and white blood cells that brought their heat to warm the passing air on its trip to the lungs.
In other places the surface was covered by cilia, little clumps made up of soft, slow-waving, overcooked noodles whose job it was to push along the smears and clumps and balls of gray mucus, like some bizarre volleyball game.
The walls of the sinuses were mountain ridges, three of them, with deep canyons between.
For a space filled with air it made Billy think, incongruously, of video he’d seen of the ocean floor, filled with waving anemones and distorted geography. Everywhere were strange, brightly colored shapes, some almost half the size of his nanobots, others no bigger than cupcakes.
Pollen, Nijinsky had explained. The sinus was full of pollen, some like starfish, others like blowfish, others like random bits of coral. And of course there were the smaller, more sinister bacteria, some scattered singly, some in slow-squirming clots.
“We’re going up there,” Nijinsky said and, with one biot’s arm, pointed. It was dark, of course, they were far from external light and the tiny lights of the biots and nanobots did not reach all the way to the “roof.”
They climbed, though of course with very little sense of gravity it soon ceased to seem as if they were climbing and became a horizontal—if hilly—walk.
They reached the “roof” and there was a long field of what looked at first like cilia. But on closer view they were more like yams, some of which were long enough to look a bit like handless arms.
“The olfactory cells,” Nijinsky explained up in the world. “The sense of smell. They go up into the olfactory bulb, which is how we get into his brain.”
“I don’t like this,” Billy said.
“It’s scary at first,” Nijinsky allowed. “Disturbing.”
“Yeah, but …I thought we were going to fight some nanobots.”
“Not on this trip,” Nijinsky said.
“I don’t like this,” Billy said again.
“He doesn’t want to mind-rape a helpless old man—imagine that,” Burnofsky said. “What’s the matter, boy? Don’t you know you’re saving the world?”
“It’s tight getting through,” Nijinsky said. “We’ll have to cut some bone.”
“Why not pick up some of those bacteria and bring them with you?” Burnofsky said. “Surely there’s some strep and some staph and a few other lovelies close to hand. I doubt my immune system is very strong.”
“We don’t do that,” Nijinsky said dully.
Burnofsky laughed. “See, Billy? He’s the good guy. You can tell because he’ll wire me, he’ll use me, but he won’t kill me.”
“I . . .” Billy began.
Nijinsky didn’t slow down and Billy’s nanobots kept pace, following the monstrous biots into the dense forest of olfactory cells.
“You ever study World War II in school” Nijinsky asked.
“Study?”
“Toward the end of the war we—the Americans, the British, our allies—we started bombing cities. Cities full of people, most of them not soldiers. We dropped firebombsand we even dropped atomic bombs. It was pretty terrible.”
“Ah, here it comes,” Burnofsky snarled.
“It was very bad, burning cities full of people. But we had to. And even though it was bad, it was necessary.”
“Don’t you have a flag to wave, Nijinsky?” Burnofsky said.
“You know why it was okay to do those terrible things?” Nijinsky asked.
Billy shook his head.
Nijinsky leaned close to Burnofsky, no longer really speaking to Billy. He put his face right up close to Burnofsky and looked into his eyes. “I’ll tell you why it was okay. Because they started it. Because some madman decided he had to take over the world. And weak, pitiful, depraved people like Mr Burnofsky here, helped those madmen. Evil men and the weak men who help them sometimes leave us no choice.”
Burnofsky spit in his face.
Nijinsky didn’t flinch.
“Just like the men who attacked the safe house you were in left you no choice, Billy. You didn’t shoot them because you wanted to. You did it because you had to. That’s one of the reasons we hate people like that, because they make us …Because they turn us into them.”
Then Nijinsky leaned closer still, put his lips a millimeter from Burnofsky’s ear. His next words were barely voiced, a whisper Billy did not hear. “Enjoy what’s coming. You deserve it.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Minako could not stop shaking. She had never in her entire life been near violence of any sort. In the last hour she’d seen savagery and death.