Lanier floated in the flawship’s prow, alone and content to stay that way for a long time. Kilometer after thousands of incommensurable kilometers flowed by, black and gold and indistinct.
What it had all come down to was that he owed more to Earth than he did to Patricia. And he could not help her complete her journey—see her through safely—because it was not his journey to make.
Did she survive? Reach her destination?
Even if she did, in this half-dream, half-nightmare Way of stacked universes, she was as far from him—and as inaccessible—as if she had died.
Olmy tracted behind him, clearing his throat.
“I’m fine,” Lanier said testily.
“That was never at question,” Olmy said. ”I thought you might wish to know our situation. We’re well ahead of the plasma front. The radiation is tolerable—though I’d suggest a thorough physical Talsit session when we arrive.”
“What about the precincts?”
“We’ve communicated with them. As we suspected, they are accelerating toward us now. They’ve agreed to lift their grips and let us pass through them.”
“Can we do that?”
“With some luck, yes,” Olmy said. ”They’ll be at thirty-one percent light-speed.”
“I suppose that will be something to see,” Lanier said.
“I doubt we’ll ‘see’ much of anything,” Olmy said.
“Figure of speech.”
“Yes. There’s food available if you wish it. Ser Yates is equipped to eat and would enjoy your company.”
“How long until we meet the precincts?”
“Twenty-seven minutes,” Olmy said.
Lanier swallowed hard and rotated. ”Sure,” he said. ”I could eat.”
He ate very little, however, glancing nervously about the cabin—at the nonhumans, secluded in their traction bubbles, dormant or disturbingly active (the snake with four heads was doing a quick, jerky ballet in its greenish fluid); at Prescient Oyu, who frankly returned his look; at Yates as he ate, the most human-seeming of them all, the most natural in his habits, and yet an opener of gates.
Olmy was quiet and still. Not far from him, the worker that held Korzenowski’s reconstructed personality—and part of Patricia as well--floated wrapped in traction lines, its image shut off as it continued the long process of final maturation.
Lanier put aside the rest of his uneaten meal and said he would rather wait at the bow. Olmy agreed.
They crowded forward, Lanier beside Olmy and Yates, with the odd U-shaped beast on the opposite side of the flaw passage, still surrounded by its quarantine field. The two Frants relaxed behind them all, curled up with only necks and heads extended.
Ahead, the black and gold became a warmer orange and brown. The flaw pulsed faintly pink, disturbed by their accleration.
“Just a few seconds,” Olmy said.
The Way appeared to balloon outward in all directions.
Lanier felt his hands tingle, and his eyes grow warm. The flaw vibrated and glowed to searing blue. The transparent bow grew darker and darker to compensate. The flaw passage through the middle of the ship vibrated and groaned.
Just a few seconds of life—less--Lanier felt as if he were exploding.
He yelled in pain and surprise and flung out his arms and legs.
Then it was over. He drifted against a net of traction lines, blinking. The Way was black and gold again. The flaw glowed faintly pink.
“There’s no damage,” Olmy said.
“Correction,” Yates said, holding a hand over his eye.
Lanier had struck him with an elbow. He apologized.
“Nothing to be upset over,” Yates said. ”All the more excuse for some Talsit. Quite exciting, actually.”
Behind them, accelerating at four hundred g’s, the linked Axis Nader and Central City met the plasma front with their building shock wave of space-time, beginning the process of convening the Way into an elongated nova.
The radiation level outside the flawship increased sharply.
The charges around the perimeter of the seventh chamber were set.
Engineers had gone throughout the Thistledown, making final structural checks and testing the sixth chamber machinery. When the asteroid was blown from the beginning of the Way, the sixth chamber machinery would face an enormous strain—the end of its duties as stabilizer of the Way, and a sudden and violent increase in its policing of destructive forces inside the chambers.
The precincts of Axes Thoreau and Euclid had been moved north a hundred thousand kilometers from the seventh chamber.
Within the twin cylinders, the confusion was enormous.
Most of the Axis citizens—the Naderites, orthodox and otherwise, and a surprising number of homorph Geshels—had been reassigned to new quarters; few were completely familiar with their new precincts. There was a sense of holiday, of triumph, and also a heavy air of anxiety.
By the hundreds, the Earth people filled the processing halls, tended by Geshel doctors and watched over by advocates.
A male homorph—Hoffman said the word and added it to her rapidly growing vocabulary—took skin samples from his group of twenty Earth people. She was seventh in line. For each he had a smile and a few well-chosen words of encouragement. He was handsome, but not to her taste—a little too finely honed, his characteristics not noticeably different from those of a dozen other homorphs. Or perhaps her senses weren’t sophisticated; she was used to the broad varieties of physiognomy from her time, when unavoidable defects—misshapen noses, corpulence, dental misalignments—produced a medieval carnival of features.
When the samples had been stored, he produced a face-shaped cup from his floating toolbox. ”This performs a number of medical analyses,” he told them. ”These tests are also voluntary—but your cooperation will be most helpful.”
They all cooperated, peering into the cup and watching a series of complex patterns for several seconds.
Throughout the proceedings, she felt a sense not of coming misery or servitude, but of camaraderie. So many of the attendants proudly flew projected flags over their left shoulders.
Flags of India, Australia, China, the United States, Japan, the USSR, and other nations. All were willing—eager, even--to speak to their charges in native tongues.
When the medical exams were completed, they were led off to a series of elevators opening on one side of the hall. Ann Blakely, Lanier’s secretary and now Hoffman’s, crossed over from another group.
With her was Doreen Cunningham, former head of security in the science compound.
“Everybody’s so tense,” Cunningham whispered to Hoffman.
“Not me,” Hoffman said. ”I feel like I’m on some kind of holiday. The big folks are taking over now. Oh, Lord.” She had just peered into their elevator. It didn’t have any floor.
Even with explanations and a demonstration from the attendants, it took some coaing to get them to move forward.
They hung on to each other as a group of sixty ascended.
Cunningham kept her eyes closed. Most of the Russians were resigned to the worst, she told Hoffman; their gloomy pessimism kept them pretty much to themselves.
“Somebody told me a few of our people have defected,” Hoffman said, keeping her eyes resolutely on the back of the person in front of her.
The elevator walls were too uniform to show motion, and there was no sensation, unpleasant or otherwise, but she still wasn’t enjoying the trip.
“Four—two Russians and two Americans; that’s what I’ve heard.”
“Anybody know who?”
“Rimskaya,” Cunningham said. ”And Beryl Wallace.”
“Beryl ...” She raised her eyebrows and shook her head. “I wouldn’t expect that from her ... or Rimskaya.” Did she feel they had betrayed her? That was ridiculous. ”What about the Russians?”
“One of them is Mirsky,” Ann said. ”I didn’t recognize the second name.”
Mirsky didn’t surprise her at all. She could read strangers clearly but not the people in her own command. So much for the instincts of a master administrator.
Their quarters were spread through the precincts. More homorphs met them as the groups were further divided and escorted to apartments on different levels.
“You’ll be sharing quarters in parties of three,” their escort told them. ”Space is at a premium now.”
“Roomies?” Cunningham asked Hoffman and Blakely.
“Roomies,” Hoffman said. Blakely nodded.
Their group of twelve dwindled rapidly as attendants shunted them into vacant quarters. They were the last three, escorted by a single female homorph, who picted a Russian flag over her shoulder. Their apartment was at the very end of a long, gently curved cylindrical hallway.
Green numbers beneath the door glowed brightly as they approached.
The rooms were small and very blank. The homorph remained to give them basic instructions on use of the data services. She then wished them well and departed.
“Such a hurry,” Blakely said, shaking her head.
“Since we’re out of the action,” Hoffman said, “or along for the ride, whatever, we might as well settle in.”
Within minutes, they were eagerly discussing the possibilities of decor with an assigned ghost from the library. They had several hours before the Breakout, as it was being called; Hoffman used that time to contact others in the precinct who had been assigned quarters.
Blakely and Cunningham decided on an interim decor which gave some color and shape—and considerably more apparent living space—to the apartment. Hoffman joined them to examine the facilities, and to sample the food provided by an automatic kitchen tucked in one corner.
Citizens and Earth people alike, the assigned ghost informed them, would be able to witness the breakout, almost in its entirety.
Monitors placed throughout the Thistledown would transmit detailed views of the events and their results; everyone had a ringside seat, if they desired one.
No longer hungry, or very interested in playing with the quarters, the three women sat before a continuous document what was happening in the asteroid and the precincts..
The images were almost too real. After a few minutes, Cunningham turned away from the display and began giggling uncontrollably. ”This is ridiculous,” she said, clutching her cheeks and rolling back on the apparent Oriental-pattern carpet.
”It’s terrifying.” Blakely caught the bug next.
“We’re hysterical,” she said, and that sent them both into fresh paroxysms.
”We don’t have any idea what’s going on.”
“Oh, I do,” Hoffman said solemnly, feeling left out.
“What?” Cunningham asked, trying to be serious.
Hoffman rolled one hand into a near-cylinder. She peered through it at them. ”Blow one end off—the end no one ever tried to drill through. The north pole.”
“Jesus,” Cunningham said, her giggles gone as quickly as they had started. ”What would have happened it we had tried to drill through it? Where would the drillers have ended up?”
“Blow the north pole off,” Hoffman resumed, ignoring the unanswerable question, “and knock the Stone off the corridor. And after that—”
“What?” Ann asked, owlish now and also very serious.
“This half of the city leaves the corridor. We become a space station.”
“And the Stone?” Cunningham asked.
“Another moon.”
“And we go back to Earth?” Blakely asked.
Hoffman nodded.
“Damn,” Blskely said. ”It’s a ... I don’t know what it is. A fairy tale. Maybe it’s the day of resurrection. What did they call it? Rapture. Dead people flying up through the freeways. People leaving their cars right through the roofs.”
Embarrassed, Blakely turned back to the projected display.
“That doesn’t make any sense, does it? No freeways, no cars. Only angels coming from the sky.”
Hoffman made a deep, shuddering sigh. ”You’re right,” she said. ”it’s a fairy tale.” Then, abruptly, she broke into laughter, and couldn’t stop until her lungs ached and her face was wet with tears.
An hour before the scheduled breakout, Corprep Rosen Gardner picted a personal message to Hoffman requesting that he be allowed to visit. A few minutes later, he arrived at the apartment door in person—”incarnate,” Hoffman reminded herself. She invited him in. By that time, they had all regained some semblance of control.
Gardner’s political work on behalf of the divided Hexamon and the Naderites was no longer necessary, he explained; he had volunteered to act as Corprep in the New Nexus for the Earth people, and chose Hoffman as the most logical person to speak with. He offered to keep her informed by linking her with his private memory and information service.
Her vacation was over, she thought, not without some regrets. She was on call again.
“I also bring news,” he said, standing before her with his hands behind his back. She was beginning to get a sense of the orthodox Naderite: dedicated, almost chivalric, not unlike some of the political conservatives she had dealt with on Earth. ”We have word of Patricia Luisa Vasquez, and the four who were sent to find her.”
“Yes?”
“Three of the four have returned to our precincts. They are Lawrence Heineman, Karen Farley and Lenore Carrolson. They were kept as captives for a time, I am ashamed to say, by the Geshels in Axis Nader and Central City. They were released just before the Geshel precincts began acceleration. They will join your people shortly.”
“And the others?”
“Patricia Luisa Vasquez was given an opportunity to find her way home,” Set Gardner continued. ”What that means, precisely, I am not sure; the details are sketchy. She and Garry Lanier were detained and sent with the gate opener and his party to one point three ex nine; many in that party, including Lanier, are now on their way back, and have passed through the accelerating precincts safely. They will not return to our sector in time to join with us, however.”
She had no idea what a “gate opener” was and didn’t feel it was appropriate to ask. She could look it up later. ”Are they going to leave the corridor?”
“I do not know,” Gardner said. ”Their leader, Ser Olmy, has been informed of the timetable. He believes they can escape the sealing of the Way. They have been delayed by stopping at several reopened gates to drop off nonhuman clients.”
Hoffman absorbed the news quietly, slapping her left hand lightly against her thigh. She had assumed the four searchers and Vasquez had died or been irretrievably lost in the shuffle.
For the time being, she had managed to forget about them.
Now she once again had something to worry about, with little knowledge of the perils involved, or their chances for success.
“Our zero hour will be in forty-three minutes,” Corprep Gardner said. “By the way, I thought I would inform you that numbers of Hexamon citizens have been solicited by a small group of your people. There is a ‘wild party’ going on in the quarters of Axis Thoreau. Some of your female personnel are bartering sexual favors, for what commodities I don’t know. I have placed that party off limits to my people.”
Hoffman looked at him, startled, not sure how to respond.
“That’s wise,” she finally managed. ”I don’t know who would corrupt whom the most.”
In the stone: From end to end of the seven chambers: darkness and quiet.
In the first chamber, clouds had built up since the re-rotation; rain threatened in the darkness.
In the bore holes, the absolute silence of vacuum, and no activity but the occasional flight of a tiny monitor.
In the second chamber, a faint whistle of wind as the atmosphere regained its equilibrium. More windows had broken out, and some buildings--including a mega—had collapsed despite the efforts of the engineers.
In the third chamber, much the same, though no buildings had collapsed.
The scattered glows of still-active illusart windows in Thistledown City resembled a swarm of fireflies.
In the fourth chamber, the washed-out forests and unleashed waters had finally made their peace with each other. The compounds formerly occupied by Eastern and Western bloc personnel had been washed away, their debris carried down to the lakes or jammed up against trees near the shorelines.
Those who had died to invade or defend the Stone—the Potato—the Thistledown—still lay in their graves, unseeing, their patterns flown, personalities vanished, Mysteries made even more mysterious.
The fifth chamber: as dark and hollow as a vast cavern in the Earth, with only the eternal sound of waterfalls and rivers.
The sixth chamber, vigilant, the only chamber besides the seventh still illuminated by a plasma tube, although that was uncertain and unreliable.
The plasma tube flickered and was extinguished. No matter.
All the preparations had been made, and now only monitors patrolled the Thistledown’s vastness.
The seventh chamber. A wind blew gently down from the cap, rustling the copses of scrub forest; it lazed through the abandoned tent with a faint whistle, flapping the canvas. A section of the tent sagged where a pole had drifted loose during the de-rotation.
Surprisingly little else had been disturbed.
The detonators waited patiently beside their charges.
The joined precincts of Axes Thoreau and Euclid were too far down the Way to be visible from this point without the aid of a high-powered telescope. The Way seemed empty, infinite, eternal and serene: the greatest thing ever created by human beings.
Outside the Thistledown, black space and stars and Moon and poor battered, burned, winter-besieged Earth, where few if any were even thinking of the asteroid or the possibility of rescue. How could there be rescue from such total misery and death? History had passed them by.
The asteroid’s overhauled Beckmann drive engines prepared for their part in the drama, stockpiling reaction mass to be slung out and dematerialized in the combined beams. They would reduce the kick of the separation, and the combined kick and counter-thrust would maneuver the Thistledown into a circular orbit around the Earth, at an altitude of some ten thousand kilometers.
The precincts of Axes Thoreau and Euclid began their acceleration, in an apparent suicide run to smash themselves against the seventh chamber cap. Within, twenty-nine million human beings--corporeal and otherwise--did the various things humans do while waiting to see if they will live or die.
Behind the precincts, half a million kilometers down the Way, a tiny defense flawship was decelerating drastically, the flaw ahead of it brightening to violet and blue. It had to slow to Earth orbital velocity b the time it followed the linked precincts out the end of the Way—if it managed that feat at all.
The charges buried in the walls of the seventh chamber synchronized.
The grips of Axes Thoreau and Euclid were withdrawn, and the huge cylinders coasted south toward the seventh chamber cap at just a little over forty thousand kilometers per hour, or eleven kilometers per second.
The detonators reached their appointed microsecond.
Within the seventh chamber, there .was a noise beyond human description. Billions of tons of rock and metal rushed in toward the axis from the seven charge points, and immense fissures shot outward to the vacuum of space.
Around the northern pole of the asteroid, dust and debris spread out in a wide circular fan, followed by a white glow more brilliant than the sun. The glow faded to red and purple.
A seventy-kilometer-wide monk’s cap of rock was propelled away from the asteroid. The asteroid withdrew much more slowly from its severed end, and for the briefest moment, between them, there was a hole in space, filled with the light of the plasma tube, showing an infinite perspective--out of which flew the linked precincts of Axes Euclid and Thoreau, barely missing the asteroid itself, shunting aside debris with conical traction fields. Through the fading glow and spinning chunks of rock and metal, the precincts passed out of range of the Thistledown’s Beckmann drives. The drives then fired to maneuver the Thistledown into orbit.
The Way was now an independent entity. The hole in space began to heal, wrapped in a thousand varieties of darkness—violet and sea green, carmine and indigo—venting winds mightier than a thousand hurricanes into the vacuum.
Closing.
Sealing itself off forever from this universe.
Olmy sat back and closed his eyes. Yates was more animated, rubbing his hands together. Senator Oyu appeared as cool as ever, but Lanier noticed her eye movements were frequent and jerky.
If Prescient Oyu was even slightly nervous, and Olmy resigned, then Lanier figured he had every right to be terrified.
“Are we going to make it?” he asked.
“Just barely,” Olmy said, eyes still shut.
Lanier faced the bow.
The brightness of the seven coordinated blasts had reduced the bow to opacity. Now it cleared and gave them a view of the Way’s beginning.
Within a glowing circle of molten asteroidal debris and frozen streaks of rushing water vapor was a circle of blackness.
The circle was shrinking, being taken over by an iridescent nullity that hurt the eyes: the new terminus of the Way.
And then, within the diminishing black circle, Lanier saw a dull white crescent. He blinked.
The Moon.
The flawship twirled in the outrushing atmosphere. The iridescent nullity had almost completed its task; it seemed to take them forever to approach the rapidly shrinking blackness and crescent Moon.
Chunks of soil rose from the walls and shimmied up the fresh, nacreous boundary. The boundary eclipsed the Moon.
“Oh, God,” Lanier said. He clasped his hands and closed his eyes.
Four Beginnings
6 P.D.
And all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men ...
The phrase occurred to Heineman often as he piloted a blunt-arrowhead flyer from point to devastated point around the globe.
What the Death itself had not incinerated or poisoned, the Long Winter had ravaged; it had seemed for a time that even the ingenuity, technology and power of the New Hexamon itself could not make the situation right.
Yet, as Lenore—his wife of four years—reminded him during his worst, most discouraged moments, “They managed to climb back up even without our help—our presence has to make things move faster.”
But even hope and the prospects of a brighter future could not take the edge off, or reduce the bitter gall of what he saw in the course of a single day’s surveying.
India, Africa, Australia and New Zealand and much of South America had emerged from the Death with minor damage. North America, Russia and Europe had been practically sterilized. China had lost a quarter of its population in the nuclear exchange; another two-thirds had died of starvation during the Long Winter, which was subsiding only now, with help from the orbiting precinct. Southeast Asia had crumbled into anarchy and revolution and genocide; the destruction there was almost as complete.
Ashes, barren plains, snow-covered valleys and hills soon to become glaciers; scudding gray, snow-thick clouds casting black shadows over fallow earth; continents given over to bacteria and cockroaches and ants, and among these new ecologies, a few scattered animals who had once called themselves human beings, who had once lived in comfortable houses and known the basics of electrical wiring and taken newspapers and subscribed to provincial points of view about reality ...
Who had once had time for the luxury of thought.
It was heartbreaking. Heineman came to think of his kind—the engineers and scientists and technicians of the Earth—as the very tools of Satan himself. His latent Christianity returned with a vengeance. He knew he severely tried Lenore’s patience, but from his meandering visions of apocalypse and angels and resurrection he could at least take some solace, find meaning, and search for destiny and God’s plan. If he had once been an agent of Satan, now—without switching occupations he was an agent of the angels, of those who would transform Earth into paradise ...
Lenore tried, again and again, to point out that engineers were as much responsible for saving the Earth as for destroying it. Without the orbital platforms and the whole paraphernalia of space-based defense, the Earth would have been wiped utterly clean of life; the NATO and Soviet platforms managed to destroy some forty percent of all missiles.
Not enough, not enough ...
And how many children, how many animals, how many innocent and--But, Lenore would counter, no one born with a mouth and a need is innocent ...
She was often right, Of course.
The masters he served now were not perfect, hardly angelic.
They were intelligent, powerful, reasonable; their leaders lacked the ignorant erratic blindness of Earth’s leaders. But they still differed with each other, sometimes strongly.
So Heineman, with his wife, flew the skies of Earth and charted the damage, and hoped for a day when grasses would grow and flowers bloom, when snows would recede and the air would be clear of radioactivity.
He worked hard for that day.
And he was faithful to his new masters, for he was born again in more ways than one. On his first day back on Earth, he had suffered a fatal heart attack.
Larry Heineman was on his second body. Lenore assured him it was better than his first.
He had his doubts, but it certainly felt better.
New Zealand dusk, with another spectacular sunset in the offing.
Overhead, the large beacon of the Thistledown rose clear and unobscured, and not far away, the speeding point of the orbiting precincts crossed the sky in the opposite direction.
Garry Lanier emerged from the Talsit tent and saw Karen Lanier speaking with a group of farmers at the camp fence.
The farmers had brought their children to the camp two weeks before for Talsit cleansing; they, at least, would not give birth to monsters, or suffer the long-term effects of radiation poisoning. But for the adults, there was still much suspicion and distrust; the early rumors of alien invasions and hordes of sky-traveling devils had seemed peculiarly convincing in the aftermath of the world’s end. Karen’s obvious pregnancy—six months along—did much to reassure them they were dealing with real human beings.
Lanier still had not told their story to any Earth-bound survivors.
Who could absorb such an incredible and complicated tale when one’s thoughts were on simple survival and the health of one’s children, or sheep, or townspeople?
He stood with his hands in his overalls pockets and watched Karen talking quietly with the shepherds. They had lived and worked together since returning to Earth and had married two years ago. Their life was busy, and they were good for each other, but ...
He was not yet content, not yet free of the manifold neuroses he had picked up in the past decade. At least he could feel the edges of his mental wounds puckering and healing, scarring up, perhaps even smoothing away.
Lanier only took physical Talsit sessions to cleanse his body; they were required at least every six months to prevent ill effects from the atmospheric radiation. He did not indulge in mental Talsit, whatever Olmy’s urging; he was, after all, a rugged individualist, and he would rather accomplish those things on his own.
In a few months, he and Karen, if they could be spared from their labor here, would join Hoffman and Olmy and perhaps even Larry and Lenore.
They would reload their temporary implants with new training, new data, and work with Earth’s corprep, Rosen Gardner, and Earth’s senator, Prescient Oyu, to coordinate the massive task of cleansing the atmosphere and reorganizing the survivors.
Paradoxically, the Naderites would soon have to deal with the infant cries of their own creed, which was rapidly gaining power in areas not yet touched by the reconstruction.
Lanier did not often think of the Way now, or of what had happened years past. His mind was too occupied with more immediate concerns.
But every now and then he would shut his eyes for a moment and open them again. He would turn to Karen and meet her sunny smile and run his hands through her yellow hair.
No sense worrying about those who were farther away than the souls of the dead.
Journey Year 1181
Olmy stood in the AM.Euclid public observation chamber, hands folded behind his back, waiting for Korzenowski.
Together they would try to convince Earth’s chief advocate, Ram Kikura, that the legal rights of the survivors on Earth could not supersede the New Hexamon’s duty to eventually force them to undergo Talsit purging.
He gathered his if they were not purged mentally as well as physically, the condition of their thinking would be such that strife and discord would tear the Earth apart again, in centuries if not sooner. They had to be mentally healthy to face the future the New Hexamon was already structuring for them; there was no room for the kind of archaic, sick thinking that had led to the Death in the first place.
Olmy was not sure he could convince Ram Kikura, however. She had been rereading the Federalist Papers and consulting ancient constitutional law cases.
Korzenowski arrived, late as usual, and together they spent a few minutes watching the passage of continents, seas and clouds below. The horizon was still orange and gray with dust and ash in the stratosphere; where clouds parted, much of the land was covered with snow.
“Is your woman going to give us a hard time today?” the Engineer asked.
“No doubt,” Olmy said.
Korzenowski smiled. ”I have a confession. Another young woman has been giving me difficulties lately. Oh, I realize we should all be concentrating on the reconstruction ... but I think you’ll understand why my mind wanders.”
Olmy nodded.
“She probably did not succeed,” Korzenowski said.
“At going home?”
“It’s very unlikely. I’ve been thinking about Way theory. Part of me keeps pursuing those problems. We understood the geometry stacks so little. When Patricia expressed her theories, they seemed right at the time ... and they very nearly were. But not right enough to take her home.”
“So where is she now?”
“That I cannot say.” Korzenowski held one hand to the side of his head. ”This persistence, though ... this pressure to keep working on the problems ... I can’t say I object. The theory is fascinating. Thinking about it is one of the most enjoyable things I can do. And perhaps some day we can try again.”
“From Earth?” Olmy asked.
“We still have the sixth chamber,” Korzenowski said. ”It wouldn’t be nearly as difficult as it was before. And we could do it better.”
Olmy didn’t reply for some moments. ”It may be inevitable,” he conceded, “but let’s not mention it to the Nexus right away.”
“Of course,” Korzenowski said. ”After all this time, we—I am very patient.” The Engineer’s intense, sharp gaze, like that of a cat waiting to pounce, made the hair on Olmy’s neck tingle.
He hadn’t experienced such an atavistic response in years.
“Let’s go fight the good fight with your advocate,” Korzenowski suggested. They turned away from the view of Earth and took an elevator to the Nexus antechambers, where Suli Ram Kikura waited.
Pevel Mirsky: Personal Record
If I am not too far off—or the distorting effects of our journey are not too difficult to calculate—then today is my thirty-second birthday.
I have settled in to life in the Central City, taking part in the rituals and exchanges of the Geshel life. I update my personality copies each week and make the acquaintance of dozens of citizens every day, many anxious to converse with me; and I work.
I study history. Those who assign work here believe that my perceptions and abilities make me a unique lens through which to view and interpret the past. Rodzhensky helps. He has adapted far more completely than I, and even plans, in his next incarnation, to take on a custom neomorph body.
I often meet with Joseph Rimskaya, but he is still morose and not very stimulating. I believe he is homesick and perhaps should not have defected. He plans to undergo Talsit therapy soon, though he has said that before. Beryl Wallace, the other American, we seldom see. She has been assigned to an observation party; a unique and sought-after job, in which I believe she must be serving more as a mascot than anything else, but I could be wrong. The implants can perform wonders.
I was never an intellectual. Philosophy bored me; questions of ultimate meaning and reality seemed pointless. I did not have the capacity for far stretches of the imagination. With the implants, all that has changed. I have taken a dozen more steps on the road to being a different person.
We have voyaged a considerable distance since achieving near light-speed. I do not believe anyone expected what is happening now.
The Way is so complicated; even those who created it could not predict all of its possibilities.
We now journey down a ghost Way, its local nature altered by the violence of our near light-speed passage. It has no diameter or boundaries as such; objects with mass simply cannot exist beyond a distance of more than twenty thousand kilometers from the course on which we ride. (The flaw, or singularity, vanished three months ago. Simply evaporated in a pulse of newly created particles, some of them unknown even to the Geshels.) We have traveled beyond the domain of the super-set of external universes which encompassed all our various world-lines.
Even were we to stop now and open gates to the “outside,” whatever that may be, we would encounter realms without matter, perhaps without form or order; it is highly doubtful we would find anything familiar.
There are an infinite number of alternatives to the Way, each originating in an alternative world-line, yet reaching beyond that world-line. Until now, Way researchers have not known quite how the alternate Ways were stacked or arranged, or indeed whether they could even be considered real. Since the Way intersects a large group of alternate world-lines—perhaps all—could there be more than one Way?
But by traveling close to the light-Speed within the Way, we have answered these questions and found new ones to ask. We have distorted Way geometry in more than the requisite four dimensions; we have also contracted the fifth dimension, drawing the alternate Ways together.
The Way boundaries have become transparent in a wide variety of frequencies, and we can perceive the shape of other Ways. We can select which Way we wish to inspect, using devices similar to the gate-opening clavicles. It is in observing these alternate Ways that Beryl Wallace is now occupied.
We can even see (and in some instances, communicate with) beings in other Ways.
So there are an infinite number of world-lines, and because of this one human artifact, an infinite number of connections between them. Our researchers devise schemes to allow us to cross over to other Ways, other super-sets of world-lines, but even with implants I have difficulty understanding what they are discussing.
This much I do know. There are Ways where the beings of thousands of completely different universes hold commerce, exchanging in some cases only information, in other cases actually exchanging different types of space-time. Is it possible to conceive of the potential that would exist between two universes of differing qualities? Would that potential be called energy?
Rirnskaya, morose as he is, has continued working, and has even made some significant contributions to the researches.
He believes he has found a definition of information: the potential that exists between all time-like dimensions (time itself, and the fifth dimension separating world-lines, for instance) and space-like ‘dimensions. Wherever space and time interact, there is information, and where information can be ordered into knowledge, and knowledge can be applied, there is intelligence.
Lest anyone reading this journal of a primitive man should think we spend our time mired in abstractions, let me also say that I am discovering the richness available to those who are willing to alter their major characteristics. The variety of emotions available to a reconfigured human mind, thinking thoughts impossible to its ancestors ...
The emotion of-*-, describable only as something between sexual love and the joy of intellection--making love to a thought? Or &&, the true reverse of pain, not “pleasure” but a “warning” of healing, growth and change. Or (A+), the most complex emotion yet discovered, felt by those who consciously endure the change between mind configurations, and experience the broad spectrum of possibilities inherent in thinking and being.
I have barely begun to taste the varieties of human love.
Personalities are not necessarily isolated here; I can belong to a wide spectrum of personality aggregates, and yet still retain my individuality ... I lose nothing and gain a thousand new tastes of human affection.
What use is it to try to measure the distances we have traveled?
What use is the personality of the old Pavel Mirsky to comprehend them?
Soon, I firmly resolve, I will gather up my courage and join with the extended personalities in City Memory.
And yet with all this to occupy me, I still mourn. I still weep for the lost part of myself, still feel sad for a land I cannot return to, a land doubly inaccessible now. But the weeping is buried deeply, where even Talsit sessions have dificulty reaching ... perhaps lodged in the one area it is illegal to modify, known as Mystery. How ironic, that in this way I still feel like a Russian, and that so long as any part of me exists, it will be Russian. Because I share the same Mystery with the old Pavel Mirsky, I feel continuity. I feel ...
An urge for the stars, yes, but more than that.
When I was a child in Kiev (or so a few dim portions of my memory inform me) I once asked my stepfather how long people would live when the Worker’s Paradise was achieved.
He was a computer technician, very imaginative, and he said, “Perhaps as long as they wish. Perhaps a billion years.”
“How long is a billion years?” I asked him.
“It is a very long time,” he said. ”An age, an eternity, time enough for all life to rise and all life to end. Some people call it an eon.”
In geological terms, I learned later, an aeon is indeed a billion years. But the Greeks who coined the word were not so specific. They used it as a pointer to eternity, the lifetime of a universe, far more than a billion years. It was also the personification of a god’s cycle of time.
I have survived the Worker’s Paradise. I have survived the end of my universe, and may survive countless others.
Dear stepfather, it looks as if I will outlive the gods themselves ...
A true eon.
So much to learn, and so much change to look forward to.
Each day I breathe deeply, count my choices and realize how lucky we are. If only I can convince Rimskaya. Sad man. I am free.
Aigypto
Year of Alexandro, 2323
Young queen Kleopatra the 21st had just spent a long and drowsy four hours listening to the complicated testimony of five ostracized congressmen from the Oxyrrhynkhos Nome’s Boule. Their complaints, her most trusted counselor decided, were without merit, so she dismissed them with a stern smile and warned them not to take their complaints outside Aigyptos, to any other polity, or they would be exiled from the Alexandrian Oikoumen, and forced to wander east or west in the lands of the barbarians, or even worse, in Latium.
Three times a week, Kleopatra received such complaints, selected from thousands of cases by her counselors, well aware they were mostly for show and had been predecided.
She was not entirely happy with the limitations of royal power imposed by the Oikoumenical Boul in the time of her fathers, but it was that or exile, and an exiled eighteen-year-old queen had few places to go outside the Oikoumen. How things had changed in the past five hundred years!
Kleopatra looked forward to her next visitor, however. She had heard many stories about the head priestess and soph of the Hypateion in Rhodos; the woman was legendary not only for the tale of how she had come to the Oikoumen, but for her accomplishments in the last half-century. Yet queen and priestess had never met.
The soph Patrikia had flown in from Rhodos two days before, landing at the Rakhotis airport just west of Alexandria and then taking up privileged residence in the Mouseion until an audience could be arranged. In those two days, the soph had been taken on the virtually mandatory tours of the pyramidons of Alexandros and the Diadokhoi to observe (how tiresome, Kleopatra thought) the gold-wrapped mummies of the founders of the Alexandrian Oikoumen, and then through the surrounding pyramids and tombs of the Later Successors.
It was said that the soph had borne the tours well, and some of her observations had been recorded for broadcast to the eighty-five nomes of the Oikoumen.
Heralds arrived to Announce that the soph had come to the Lokhias Promontory and would shortly be at the royal residence. The counselors cleared the court and Kleopatra was surrounded by her flies, as she called them—her chamberlains and makeup maids, wiping sweat from her brow, powdering her cheeks and nose, arranging her robes around the golden throne. Across the courtyard, standing half in shadow and half in sun, was the phalanx of royal security. When they divided into two lines, one on each side of the portal, Kleopatra would assume her Attitude and welcome the sophs.
The lines formed and the heralds went through their wearisome rituals.
The date was Sfithis 4, old-style, Arkhimds 27, new-style.
Kleopatra sat patiently on her throne, made of cedar from the troublesome hierarchy of loudeia, sometimes called Nea Phoenikia, sipping sparkling water from Gallia out of a cup manufactured in Metascythia. Thus in every single day she tried to utilize goods from the nomes, polities and friendly nations all around, knowing that they would feel honored and that their peoples would feel proud for serving the oldest of the old empires, the Alexandrian Oikoumen. It would be well for the sophs to see Kleopatra fulfilling her duties, for in truth the young queen had little else to do; the Boul and the Council of Elected Speakers now made the truly important decisions, in the Athenian manner.
The great bronze doors of Theotokopolos swung wide and the procession began. Kleopatra ignored the rapidly-swelling crowd of courtiers and chamberlains and petty politicians. Her eyes went immediately to the sophfi Patrikia, entering the chamber supported on the arms of her two sons, themselves middle-aged.
The priestess wore a gown of black Chin-Ching silk, simple and elegant, with a star above one breast and a moon above the other. Her hair was long, still luxuriantly thick and dark; her face appeared youthful despite her seventy-four years, her eyes black and square and penetrating. Kleopatra met those eyes with difficulty; they seemed dangerous, too provocative.
“Welcome,” she said, deliberately eschewing all the ceremony. “Come sit. I am told we have things to discuss.”
“Oh, yes, we do, my beautiful queen,” the soph said, stepping away from the arms of her sons and approaching the throne, one hand lifting the long hem of her gown. She was very spry, actually; no doubt she retained her sons in the temple for their own good, and not hers; the Oikoumen was not the easiest place to employment these days.
Patrlkia sat on the pillow-covered chair, a body length below the queen’s throne, and lifted her face to Kleopatra, eyes bright with excitement.
“I am also told you have brought some of your wonderful instruments, to show them to me, and reveal their purposes,” Kleopatra said.
“If I may ... ?”
“By all means.”
Patrikia gestured and two Hypateion students carried up a wide, shallow wooden case. Kleopatra recognized the wood: pigeon’s-eye maple from Nea Karkhedon across the broad Atlantic. She wondered how their revolution was coming along; little news leaked out from the blockaded coastal territories.
The priestess ordered the case to be set down on a wide round table of beaten brass chased with silver. ”Perhaps your Imperial Hypslots knows my story ... ?”
Kleopatra nodded and smiled. ”That you dropped from the sky, chased by a furious star, and that you were not born on this Gaia.”
“And that I brought with me ... ?” Patrikia prompted, for all the world like one of Kleopatra’s tutors. The queen didn’t mind; she enjoyed tutoring and learning. Indeed, she had spent most of her life in classrooms, learning the qualities and extent of her realm, and the languages, as well.
“You brought marvelous instruments, for which there are no exact equivalents in our world. Yes, yes, these stories are well known.”
“Then I now tell you things known only to myself,” Patrikia said.
She glanced around the court and then returned her extraordinary gaze to the young queen. Kleopatra understood and nodded.
“This will be a private audience. We will adjourn and meet in my chambers.”
The court was quickly cleared, and Kleopatra unceremoniously dropped her heavy robes and gathered a light cloak of byssos around her shoulders. With only two guards and the soph’s sons accompanying them, they strolled to the queen’s chambers. Trays of quail and crystal goblets of wines from Cos awaited them, and the soph ate with the queen, a very rare privilege.
When they were done, the sons ate, and Kleopalra and Patrikia made themselves comfortable on pillows in a corner.
Chamberlains drew curtains around them for privacy.
Then and only then did Patrikia open the lid of the wooden case.
There, in thick Tyrian purple felt—the felt from Pridden and the dye from Ioudeia—rested a silver-and-glass, palmsized flat object, a second slightly smaller object and something saddle-shaped with protruding handles.
These objects were almost as famous as the Cache of General Ptolemaios Sotr, especially among scholars and philosophers. Few had ever seen them, not even her mother and fathers.
Kleopatra regarded them with unabashed curiosity. ”Tell me, please,” she said.
“With this,” and Patrikia pointed to the smaller flat object, “I can measure the qualities of space and time. Years ago, when I took refuge in the Hypateion, after the death of my husband, the tekhnai there made me new batteries, and these devices function again.”
“I must commend them,” Kleopatra said. Patrikia smiled and waved her hand as if at trivial matters.
“The philosophy and tekhnos of your world is not so advanced as mine in some respects, though very nearly. But you have wonderful mathematicians, wonderful astronomers. My work has progressed.”
“Yes?”
“And ...” Patrikia lifted the object with handles from the case.
“This instrument tells me when others are trying to open passages to our world, this Gaia. It senses their workings, and it tells me.”
“Does it have any other purpose?” Kleopatra asked, aware she was already out of her depth.
“No. Not now, not here.”
To her astonishment, the queen realized that the old priestess had tears in her eyes. ”I have never given up my dream,” Patrikia said. “And I have never given up my hope. But I am growing old, my Imperial Hypslots, and my senses are not so keen ... “She lifted herself up in her seat and resettled, with a deep sigh. ”Still, I am certain now. I have been given the proper signs by this device.”
“Signs of what?”
“I do not know why, or where, my queen, but a passageway has been opened on our world. This device feels its presence, and so do I. Somewhere on Gaia, my queen. Before I die, I wish to find this passage, and see if perhaps there is some slight chance I might fulfill my dream.“
“A passage? What do you mean?”
“A gate to the place from which I came. They have reopened my gate, perhaps. On-someone has created an entirely new road to the stars.”
Kleopatra was suddenly troubled. The instincts of a hundred and twenty generations of the Makedonian Dynastic Succession were not idle in her blood. ”Are those in your world people of peace and goodwill?” she asked.
The priestess’s eyes became momentarily distant and cloudy. ”I do not know. Probably they are. But I ask the queen to locate this passage, this gate, with all the means at her disposal ...”
Kleopatra frowned and bent forward to see the priestess’s face from a better perspective. Then she took one of the soph’s withered hands in hers.
“Would our lands benefit from this passage, this gate?”
“Almost certainly,” Patrikia said. ”I am a very minor example of the wonders that could lie beyond such an opening.”
Kleopatra frowned and pondered this for a moment. The Oikoumen was beset with many problems, some of them, her counselors assured her, insurmountable, the problems of an elderly civilization on the wane.
She did not believe this—not entirely—but the thought frightened her.
Even in an age of airplanes and radio, there had to be other things, other marvels, which would rescue them from their plight.
“This is a shortcut to distant territories, places where we might extend our trade, and learn new things?”
Patrikia smiled. ”Your understanding is quick, my queen.”
“Then we will search. I will decree that all our allied states and empires will search as well.”
“It may be hidden, very small,” the priestess warned. “Perhaps only a test gate, as wide across as a man’s arm is long.”
“Our searchers will be thorough,” Kleopatra said. ”With your guidance, they will find this gate.”
Patrikia squinted at her with almost insolent suspicion. ”I have long been regarded as a crazy old woman, despite these marvels,” she said, resting her hand on the case. ”Do you believe me?”
“Yes, upon my heritage as a Queen of Alexandros’s Egypt and the Makedonian Dynasty,” Kleopatra said. She wanted to believe the priestess. Life in the court had been very dull the past few years.
And the queen did indeed exercise some powers, chiefly in matters involving the political spirit and arums of the state. She could fit this quest into those territories nicely.
“Thank you,” Patrikia said. ”My husband never truly believed me. He was a fine man, a farmer of fish ... But he worried about me and said I should live this life only, and not dream of others ... “
“I hate limitations,” Kleopatra said vehemently. ”What will you do if we find this passage?”
Patrikia’s eyes widened.
“I will go home,” she said. ”Finally, however futile it may be, I will go home.”
“Not before you have finished your work for us, I hope.”
“No. That will be my first priority.”
“Good. So be it, the” Kleopatra called in her counselors, warned them sternly this was an Imperiai decree not subject to dissension, and issued a command that the search begin.
“Thank you, my Imperiai Hypsslots,” the priestess said as they strolled back to the court. Kleopatra watched Patrikia leave through the Theotokopolos door, on her way back to the Hypateion until such time as the search would begin. Then the queen closed her eyes and tried to imagine ...
The old woman’s home. Where would such a woman have come from? A place of gleaming towers and mighty fortresses, where people might be more like gods or devils than the men and women she knew. Only such a place could have produced this small, intense sophs.
“How strange,” Kleopatra murmured, resuming her throne.
The heavy robes were wrapped around her shoulders again.
She felt a shuddering thrill. ”How wonderful ...”
“Unless you know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”
—Wendell Barry
A book as complicated as this one cannot be written alone, and thank God for those willing, even eager, to help.
My deepest appreciation to (in no particular order) Rick Steinbach; Ralph Cooper; John S. Lewis; Louis A. D’Amario; David Brin; Anthony and Tina Chong; Craig Kaston; LCDR Patrick Garrett, USN; LCDR Dale E Bear, USN RET; the Citizen’s Advisory Council on National Space Policy; and of course Astrid.
Errors and misconceptions no doubt remain, and are my own.