Just then the chance was presented to him when Asher Optime, of all people, stepped through the opening where the floor-to-ceiling window had been.
His black slicker flared like a cape, and the black hood slid back from his head, and his hand came out of a pocket with a black pistol in a firm grip.
Joanna knew Optime’s face from the research that she and Wyatt had done, but there was no way he could know her. Nonetheless, when he stepped into the room, he turned in her direction, met her eyes, and came directly toward her. “Jojo Chase,” he said. “I avenged your mother’s murder, freed you from your worthless father who might well have murdered you one day, yet now you would stand against me if you could. Look at you, Jojo, the innocent child become just another of your selfish species. I called you to come to me in my hour of need, in my despair, to cure me with your innocence. But you can’t cure even yourself, for you’re innocent no more. You stand beside the useless monkey, as stupid and evil in your own way as he is stupid and useless in his.”
“Kill me,” Jimmy said, and Joanna knew he meant to die in her place, though such a trade wouldn’t be one the Other would ever care to make. In its madness, it was bent on killing them all.
Ophelia quickened into action, snatched from Wyatt’s holster the pistol Ganesh said was as useless as a breadstick against an entity like the Other, and shot Asher Optime in the head.
The enemy of mankind and savior of the Earth reflexively fired a round that shattered a window, and then he spilled onto the Navajo rug, his roomy slicker folding around him like the bat wings of a creature that had been felled not by an ordinary bullet but instead by one made of silver.
Perhaps the Other had never previously been in control of a living avatar when it had died. Whatever the reason, the death of Asher Optime occasioned an eerie stillness, brief but absolute, as if the people present were stunned by the inevitability of the young woman’s courage while their alien nemesis was shocked immobile by its indirect experience of death.
Kenny and Leigh Ann were first to move, intervening between Ophelia and the nearest bugform machine, acting on an impulse to shield her, as she said, “Octavia, sister, we did it!”
The Other recovered from whatever emotion or cold calculation briefly paralyzed it. Three metal assassins with radiant yellow eyes clicked-hissed-keened as they stilted and scissored toward the woman and her protectors. Quick as long-legged spiders, with many-jointed hands pincered like those of praying mantises, they snared, seized, dragged their quarry into a hateful embrace, lifted them—
Joanna cried out—“No!”—but it wasn’t her cry that summoned an electronic hum reminiscent of the feedback from the giant amplifiers that some heavy-metal bands stacked on their concert stages.
Ganesh Patel looked to the ceiling as the humming grew rapidly loud, louder. The unbroken windows vibrated, as did the walls, as if the plaster were the skin of a timpani. Fine Pueblo pottery jittered on display shelves, and bultos of various saints danced discreetly in the open trastero, and the tassels on lampshades shivered, and he thought that Artimis had somehow focused on this residence rather than on the vessel secreted under the lake, that the carrier laser with its burden of dissolution particles was sizzling down on them. The air filled with a crackling noise, as if the world were being wrapped in miles of cellophane.
In a voice not entirely his own, Ganesh heard himself say, “You stinking piece of shit, you scum, eat this. EAT THIS!” No longer in control of himself, he stooped and plucked up the dropped gun with which Optime had been shot. His mind had been read in a flash, his culpability discovered, his punishment determined. Rising to his full height, he brought the pistol to his mouth, inserted the barrel between his lips. An explosion rocked the night, not loud because it occurred at great depth beneath the lake. The land quaked, and the house rolled for a moment on the land, and a watery sound louder than the falling rain was surely the consequence of a great quantity of Lake Sapphire’s substance washing over its shores before, in the wake of the shockwave, sliding back where it belonged.
Grimacing at the bitter taste of steel and cordite, Ganesh put the pistol on an end table as the bugbots released their unharmed captives and collapsed like the useless junk they were. The alien AI, the Other or whatever its makers might have called it, had been integral to the vessel, operating through machines that it commanded and through living avatars like crows and grizzly bears and Jimmy Two Eyes—and last of all through the son of parents who came from Mumbai to this land where freedom made possible the unlimited use of the human imagination and facilitated technology advanced enough to save the world when the world needed saving. That vessel from a far star was now nothing but loose beads of various substances, like the house where Harley Spondollar had once lived.