Echopraxia by Peter Watts Read Free Book Online

now,” Brüks said.
    The old soldier turned to face him. Regret mingled with the tactical reflections in his eyes.
    â€œNot a chance,” he said.
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    EITHER WAR IS OBSOLETE, OR MEN ARE.
    â€”R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
    TWO GUARDS STOOD at the door halfway down the hall, one to each side, like a couple of dark golems in matching pajamas. Brüks had not been invited to the party inside but he followed Moore at a distance, hanging back along the edge of the corridor for want of any other destination. Bicamerals brushed past in both directions, going about whatever business involved the domestication of weaponized whirlwinds. They seemed unremarkable in the morning light slanting through the windows. No arcane ululations. No vestments or hooded robes, no uniforms of any kind that Brüks could make out. A couple wore denim. One, preoccupied with a tacpad as he passed, was stark naked except for the tattoo squirming along his chest: some kind of winged animal Brüks was pretty sure didn’t exist anywhere in the taxonomic database.
    They still had stars in their eyes, though.
    Ahead, Moore stepped between the guards and into the room. Brüks sidled up in his wake. The sentries stood still as stone, barefoot, faces forward, their beige coveralls identically featureless. Empty holsters hung from their belts.
    Their lightless eyes wouldn’t stop moving. They jiggled and jerked in panicked little arcs, back and forth, up and down, as though terrified souls had been buried alive in wet cement. Someone coughed softly down the hall. All four eyes locked on that sound for the merest instant, froze in synchronized quadrascopic far focus: then broke, and resumed struggling in their sockets.
    There was a market niche for zombies, Brüks had read, among those who still took their sex in the first person. He tried to imagine fucking any creature possessed of such eyes, and shuddered.
    He passed by on the far side of the hall. Parallax served up a moving slice of the room behind the door: Jim Moore, a tabletop holo display in standby mode, a handful of Bicamerals nodding among themselves. A woman: lean as a greyhound beneath a mimetic body stocking, a bone-pale face under a spiky shock of short black hair, jawline just a bit more prognathous than any card-carrying prey might feel comfortable with. She turned her head as Brüks crept by. Her eyes flashed like a cat’s. She bared her teeth. On anyone else it would have been a smile.
    The door swung shut.
    â€œHey. Hungry?”
    He jumped at the hand on his arm but it was only a woman, dreadlocked and gracile and with a smile that warmed his skin instead of freezing it. Her skin was uniform chocolate, not the rainbow swirl of false color it had been the night before; but he recognized the voice.
    â€œLianna.” He grunted, taking her in. “You’re the first person I’ve seen here who’s actually dressed like a monk.”
    â€œIt’s a bathrobe. We’re not really into gang colors around here.” She jerked her chin down the hall. “C’mon. Breakfast.”
    *   *   *
    They selected their meals from a commons that looked reassuringly like a conventional cafeteria bar (cloned bacon, Brüks was relieved to see; he’d been afraid the Bicamerals would be vegan traditionalists), but they ate sitting on the sprawling steps of the main entrance, watching the morning shadows shorten by degrees across the desert. The quiet hiss of an idling tornado drifted over the ramparts behind them.
    â€œThat was quite the night,” Brüks said around a mouthful of egg.
    â€œQuite the morning, too.”
    He raised his eyes. Far overhead, the contrail of some passing airbus etched a line across the sky.
    â€œOh, it’s still up there,” Lianna remarked. “Kinda flickers in and out of the higher wavelengths if you stare hard enough.”
    â€œI can’t see it.”
    â€œWhat kind