All that must be done on a timely basis, considering that the situation had become urgent ever since the Other had begun to use the internet of things—household mechanical systems and ordinary appliances—to invade homes and kill people whom Asher Optime, a Restoration Movement fanatic, considered his enemies. Urgent had ceased to be a strong enough word when the Other had graduated to the use of orbiting weapons platforms to perform some executions.
Primarily, Artimis explored the enormous archives of satellite-based spectrography as well as real-time surveys, carefully examining lithologic relationships—rock strata, soil deposits, hydrologic systems—for clues to the lair she sought. Because the project had discovered that the Other had engaged with the internet virtually from its inception, it might have been in the area for a long time, having arrived decades or centuries earlier; therefore, the history of the people of the region was also of serious interest, including the lore and legends of indigenous tribes that had been collected by scores of anthropologists over many decades. Were there old reports of strange lights in the sky? Had generations of Crow and Sioux and Blackfoot and others passed down stories of seemingly supernatural events or of eerie encounters with spirits of unearthly form?
The unequaled sophistication and anonymity with which the Other used the internet indicated an off-the-charts intelligence and higher technology than anything of human invention. Contrary to the war-of-the-world scenarios Hollywood ground out, most scientists with specialties germane to the subject believed an extraterrestrial species capable of traveling thousands of light-years across deep space wouldn’t be aggressive and hostile, but instead enlightened and beyond war. This view of the Other had held for ten months from the time that its actions on the internet—though not its footprints or its shadow—had been detected fourteen months earlier. But then it had begun killing people.
Historically, scientists were wrong far more often than they were right. Science advanced as the collapse of one consensus led to humble reevaluation, better data, new theories. If scientists were always or even mostly right in their claims, the Flat Earth Society would still be holding conferences; bleeding with leeches would still be considered a cure for disease; and the abiogenesis crowd that believed life-forms arose spontaneously from inanimate matter like dirt and dung would still be in charge of universities.
Although Artimis Selene possessed considerable knowledge of many things, she was not a scientist. However, she had a theory of her own, which she had shared with no one. She suspected that the Other was not an extraterrestrial life-form that had gestated in a strange womb or issued from the egg of a hideous hive queen; it was something less vulnerable and more formidable than that. Even as Ganesh was landing in Helena, Artimis searched urgently for their quarry’s lair, although she dreaded locating it. If her suspicion proved correct, the Other was an existential threat.
71
In a no-doubt fruitless effort to calm her nerves, to get a bridle on her fear and clear her mind enough to think, Joanna wanted coffee spiked with whiskey. Wyatt was quick to oblige her, pouring for himself as well. She could not sit, but needed to remain on her feet as she sipped the brew, as if she might at any moment have to run from a mortal threat. She walked room to room, and Wyatt walked with her.
The ranch house, after which Joanna had unconsciously modeled her home in Santa Fe, no longer charmed her. The cream years of her childhood were rancid now. Those long-ago days had not been bright with magic, but dark with sorcery inexplicable. This was a place of murder and deception, of unknown forces that, if known, might reveal horrors yet undreamed.
As a reader and writer, she liked stories in which one mystery was solved only to reveal another, in which the unknown, when known, remained to some degree mysterious, ineffable. In life, she wanted no part of such a story. She needed to know and, by knowing, take whatever action would put an end to doubt and fear.
In the living room, they stood at the windows, watching the rain slant under the veranda roof, the drops shattering like glass on the wood floor, speckling the lower portion of the big pane. Storm light stuttered across the yard, and in every bright flurry, she expected to see the great shambling figure, rearing on its hind legs, its lantern eyes fixed on her.
“If it comes,” she said, “there’ll be no stopping it from getting in the house. No door will keep it out, no series of doors.”
He knew she spoke of the bear. “I have the pistol. Maybe one or two shots won’t be enough to put it down, but it can’t take ten forty-five-caliber rounds at close range.”