by Greg Bear
“It may take us back to the Way.”
“Patrikia’s big water-pipe world.”
“Yes, my Queen.”
Kleopatra stood, holding her finger to her temple on the upper end of her scar, clenching and relaxing her jaw. “What would your expedition need? More than what Patrikia once requested?”
“I don’t believe so, Hypsēlotēs.”
“Not a great expenditure. The Objects are all working properly? The Rhodian mekhanikoi have kept them in good shape?”
“They have required no maintenance, my Queen. Other than changing batteries…They are working properly.”
“You could guide this expedition?”
“I think that is what my grandmother wished.”
“You’re very young.”
Rhita did not deny it.
“Could you?”
“I believe so.”
“You lack your grandmother’s passion. She would not have hesitated to say yes, even if she doubted herself.”
Rhita did not deny this, either.
Kleopatra shook her head slowly, walking around the table. She stopped with her hands resting on the back of Rhita’s chair. “It’s political folly. Risking a confrontation with the Rhus, and a storm in the Boulē should secrecy be broken…My position is not enviable now, young woman. There’s a part of me irritated—no, not just irritated, angry!—at your simply being here, making your tacit request. And another part…the part your grandmother took advantage of…”
Rhita swallowed, locking her neck muscles to keep from constantly bobbing her head in agreement.
“I’ve already spread some minor punishments for your ill-treatment in the Mouseion. In a way, I’ve already supported your cause. But it is not easy for me to simply give in to my desires. And I do desire that you find something…wonderful, maybe even dangerous, wonderfully newly dangerous. Something far above this incredible tangle of low-level threats and high-level hatred and intrigue.” She bent beside Rhita, bringing her face close to the young woman’s, eyes shifting over her features. “What collateral do you offer?”
“Collateral, my Queen?”
“Personal guarantees.”
“None,” Rhita replied, her heart faltering.
“None at all?”
Very softly, hating herself, fearing herself and her own uncertainties, Rhita said, “Only my life, Hypsēlotēs.”
Kleopatra laughed. Straightening, she took Rhita’s hands in her own and raised her from the chair, as if they might dance. “There’s some of the old girl in you after all,” she said. “Can you show me?”
Rhita unlocked her neck muscles long enough to nod once.
“Then bring your clavicle here and show me, as your grandmother did. I enjoyed that experience.”
19
Thistledown, Fifth Chamber
After thirty-one days of investigation, Olmy had reached a decision. The Jart mentality, in its present location, could not be studied safely. He knew too little about the system it was stored in, whereas the Jart apparently knew everything.
He stood in the second room, jaw muscles working. The mentality’s displayed image had not changed noticeably in all the time he had studied it. Placid, undisturbed, timeless; soon to be reborn, and perhaps to attempt its higher purpose yet again…
Olmy had never put himself into a situation where his inner being could be violated. He had even shied away from mixing personalities with lovers and friends, not uncommon back in the heady days of the Jart Wars. Whenever he had joined entertainments in city memory, he had always carefully wrapped a tight shell around his self.
He regarded this foible with as much amusement as anyone; but he had violated the rule only once, when he had downloaded Korzenowski’s reassembled partials into his implant memories. Korzenowski’s scattered mentality had been close enough to share only his outer layer of thoughts, and nothing deeper, however.
In a way, he detested deep intimacy. He valued his singularness. He had never subscribed to the old poet’s maxim that to be alone was to be in bad company. Olmy clearly understood why he rejected deep intimacy; he did not want to know himself completely, or to have anybody else know him. He did not relish the thought of exploring his own mentality, as others did.
But to know the Jart, the best way would be to download it into an isolated implant within himself. He could not trust any device to resist the Jart’s explorations; inside, he could constantly monitor the downloaded mentality, and even shift it from an implant using one system to another with a different system. He had three large memory implants, one of them only five decades old, the extra two installed in anticipation of carrying the Engineer’s partials, all of Talsit construction. Each could be modified at will, isolated, examined from outside with little or no chance of unwanted output from whatever was kept in memory…
The plan had been inevitable all along.
Olmy had simply avoided the obvious.
How much was he willing to sacrifice for the Terrestrial Hexamon? His mentality, his soul? If the Jart somehow managed to corrode its way through all internal barriers, to outwit and outmaneuver him, then more than that would be lost.
The Jart had allowed itself to be captured.
It was a Trojan Horse.
Of this much he was sure.
And he was about to take the horse within the walls of his own precious citadel, his mind.
If his safeguards failed, the Jart might do what it had probably planned to do all along. It could become a spy, a saboteur in human form, within the Hexamon. It could control all of his memories, even, in the worse case imaginable, convince his enslaved personality that he was acting of his own volition.
Hormonal implants kept his body chemistry in relative balance, but the sharp bite of fear was still apparent. Olmy had never been so unsure of the outcome of his plans.
He returned to the first room, where Beni had died, and opened a small box of equipment. Onto the panel’s output device he locked a data valve. Drawing several leads from the valve’s smooth round surface, he fastened them to the curved band that would slide tightly around the base of his skull.
The downloading could take hours; the equipment here was ancient. The valve would not allow any unregulated surge of information.
You’re about to become a bomb, he told himself. A very dangerous rogue indeed.
The room was silent but for the faint hum of the valve. He thought of the fifth chamber landscape, six kilometers above, and of the mass of the Thistledown all around them; even more ancient than this equipment. A weight of history and responsibility that he had carried for most of his life.
If he were to die right now, killed by this rash process or by some unexpected irregularity in his body—rare, but not unknown—he knew he would have performed his duty to the Hexamon many times over. He would not regret simply ceasing to be. And perhaps Korzenowski or someone else would pull the Hexamon through these dangerous times.
He reexamined the wires. All fittings were correct. First, however, he had to take a few precautions. He rigged a strong traction field near the door, laying two small nodes on each side. The nodes would draw from the room’s hidden power supply. If he simply tapped a remote button, or sent a sharp whistle, or blinked his eyes in a rapid code, the field would activate…And there was no way to turn it off or harm the nodes, since they would lie within their own field.
He would not be able to escape. Nothing inside him would be able to escape. This would be a tomb for both of them.
If necessary, Olmy would stay in the room for several weeks, waiting to see if the process was successful. He had rigged other traps for himself in Alexandria, in the fifth chamber near the train station, in the third chamber. All he had to do, should something go wrong away from this small sanctuary, would be to make his way to one of those traps, activate traction fields, and wait to die—or wait to be discovered.
Nobody knew of these traps. Nobody knew of his plans.
And then, there wer
e the traps within his own mind…Mental trip-wires controlled by the same internally-downloaded partial that would oversee the Jart’s mentality.
If he felt himself losing all control, and could not make it to a trap, a blunder across these trip-wires would release a small explosive charge in his chest.
Satisfied that everything was in order, he reconnected the leads and sat on the floor, legs in a lotus, before the panel. He removed a small vial of nutrient fluid from his equipment case, lifted it to the silent air in toast, and said, “Beni. Mar Kellen. Nameless researchers. Star, Fate and Pneuma be kind to you all.” He drank it down and laid the vial aside.
Then he reached up and touched the valve.
The transfer began.
20
Gaia, Alexandreia, Lokhias Promontory
The evening after their meeting, Rhita dined with the queen on sturgeon, lentils and fruit in the hall of Ptolemaios the Guardian. They took their seats at a marble table, a servant standing behind each, and looked out over the parapet at the sun setting on the ancient capital.
Kleopatra explained the unusual menu as each dish was served. “This is a royal fish, flown in fresh from Parsa, a fish beyond price, garnished with its own roe. The lentils are a common dish, coarse and healthy, served with unleavened bread made of bleached maize from the Southern Continent. The fruit is Gaia’s gift to rich and poor, common to us all. Would that all commoners could eat as well as their rulers.” As they ate, they did not discuss the gate or anything else of immediate consequence. “We’ve made enough interesting decisions today,” Kleopatra averred.
After the dinner, Rhita was shown by a wizened white-haired chamberlain to a windowless room deep in the ancient, cool lower floors of the royal quarters, in the palace’s north wing.
“Do you trust him?” the chamberlain asked her just outside her door, jabbing his finger at Lugotorix.
“Yes,” Rhita said.
The chamberlain looked him over with a squint. “If you say so.” He raised his hand and a servant at the end of the hall advanced. A few mumbled words of Aigyptian—which Rhita did not understand—made the servant run to the end of the hallway. A moment later, while all three stood waiting in awkward silence, a dour, stocky old man in a leather apron and arm-chaps brought forward a Ioudaian machine gun and a bullet-proof vest.
“This is the palace armorer,” the chamberlain explained. He took the weapon from the armorer and handed it to the Kelt, who accepted it with obvious admiration. Then the chamberlain ordered the armorer to instruct the Kelt in its usage, which he did, using Hellenic and a touch of Parisiani.
“You wear an armored vest, and she doesn’t,” the armorer explained, “because you should always be between her and a hasisin. Understood?” The Kelt nodded grimly.
At another gesture from the chamberlain, two massive Aithiopians stalked toward them from the end of the hall. The Kelt raised his new weapon instinctively, but the chamberlain tapped the gun’s black barrel with a disdainful finger and shook his head. “Ceremony,” the chamberlain explained. “You’re to join the Palace Guard.”
The Kelt was initiated on the spot in a brief blood-sharing ceremony with the Aithiopians. Judging by his astonished expression, he was quite impressed. Rhita was less enthusiastic; she was tired, and vaguely wondered why she had to witness all this.
A cot was brought into the corridor and placed near the door of her sleeping chamber. Then the chamberlain gestured to the armorer and the Aithiopians and they left.
“You’re going to be comfortable here?” Rhita asked him, standing in the doorway. He patted the cot with the splayed fingers of one huge hand and shrugged.
“It’s too soft, mistress, but it won’t hurt me.”
“What do you think of all this?” she asked, her voice lower.
The Kelt pondered for a moment, thick dark-blond eyebrows knitted. “Will I go with you, or stay here?”
“You’ll come with me. I hope.”
“That’s okay, then.” He was obviously unwilling to comment further. Rhita closed her door and walked around the room, trying not to feel closed in. The fanciful murals painted above a wainscot did little to add to the room’s size. They depicted crocodile and hippopotamus hunters on Lake Mareotis, and were doubtless very old—perhaps two thousand years. Their sense of perspective was primitive. Rhita suspected she could do better herself, and she had never been a quick study at drawing.
After examining the exquisite furniture—ebony and ivory and highly polished silver and brass—she lay on the feather mattress and stared at the purple silk canopy hanging from the ceiling.
What in hell am I doing?
Teeth clacking together with exhaustion and anxiety, Rhita remembered she had not yet looked at the slate to see if there was a message for her today. She removed the slate from her case and turned on the display.
My dear granddaughter,
If you have met the queen, you know she is a very smart woman, tough and quite capable of holding her own in a troubled Oikoumenē. But she is also a woman who will die shortly—politically, perhaps, before her body dies. The Oikoumenē will soon be run by aristocratic administrators, men for whom politics is a precise and clear-cut science. They already resent her for her intuitions and unpredictable decisions. That is why the gates must be found and examined before she dies or is deposed. She is our last chance. No reasonable politician would allow an expedition such as this. For one thing, no reasonable man would believe in the existence of something like a gate. Kleopatra believes because it gives her a much-needed thrill, a sense of bigger things in a life focused on day-to-day crises. I have disappointed her once, but I think the need is still in her. All the same, do not be arrogant with our queen. Exercise your inborn caution. And beware the lure of the palace. It is a dangerous place. Kleopatra lives there as a scorpion among snakes.
Rhita thought about the chamberlain, the armorer, the Aithiopian guards, and the ceremony she had been made to witness. Somehow, it all made a little more sense. She turned off the slate, grateful to the sophē for her foresight—and insight. But her teeth still chattered, and sleep was not easy to find.
Planning for the expedition to the site in Nordic Rhus began the next morning, in secret. The pace of the next two days was dizzying; the queen and her advisors seemed to be racing against time to get their preparations made, and Rhita was soon made privy to the reason for speed and discretion.
Kleopatra had once, decades before, controlled most matters involving exploration and research in the Oikoumenē. She had assumed this royal prerogative in her youth, even before the influence of the Boulē had waned and Kleopatra had gathered more and more power to the Ptolemaic Dynasty and away from the Alexandreian and Kanopic aristocracies.
“Your grandmother cost me dearly when her gates wandered and vanished,” Kleopatra said, lips twisted in a wry smile. She shuddered and dismissed the past with her hand. “But the aristoi have been getting into a fair amount of trouble lately. Farmer and kleroukhos revolts, conscription failure in the Kypros crisis…They’ve been in hiding for the past few months, letting me take the fall, and that gives me some room to breathe. If I breathe secretly. Secrets don’t last long in Alexandreia. I have to have this expedition outfitted, and on its way, within five or six days, or chances are it’ll be stopped by the Boulē Royal Counselor.”
Kleopatra introduced her to a trusted advisor, Oresias, an explorer and expert on the Nordic Rhus who had a fierce loyalty to Kleopatra. Oresias was tall and lean, of late middle age, strong and aquiline and white-haired; centuries past, he might have been one of Alexandros’s generals. With his help, Rhita hastily prepared a list of supplies and people necessary to the expedition. On something more than whim, she included the name of Demetrios, though they still had not met; she thought she might enjoy the company of a fellow mathematician.
Oresias consulted with another trusted advisor, Jamal Atta, a short, black-haired man, retired general of the Oikoumenē Overland Security Forces. Ja
mal Atta was of Berber ancestry, but affected the style of an old Persian soldier. Together, they plotted the difficulties and dangers of entering unfriendly territory.
Rhita thought about the long journey to Nordic Rhus with no small amount of trepidation. As Oresias spread the plans before her on a cards-and-jackals table in the royal game room, his strong, badly-scarred index finger tracing the likeliest routes, she wondered what the queen’s motivations really were. Had Patrikia read Kleopatra’s intentions truly?
The expedition would be politically risky; they would have to avoid detection by the Nordic Rhus high-frequency towers placed along their southern borders, from Baktra to Magyar Pontos. The independent Rhus-allied republics of the Hunnoi and Uighurs also lay in the path, and both were renowned for fierce and heartless warriors. Intrusions might be regarded as justifying counter-intrusions, or even lead to small border wars. Jamal Atta mentioned these possibilities in passing, as simple comments on Oresias’s plans.
The expedition’s vehicles would be Ioudaian beecraft, large hovering vehicles powered by Syrian jet turbines. Atta fanned out a handful of pictures of these beecraft with their top-mounted long broad spinning blades and forward canopies like bug’s eyes.
“I cannot say how reliable they are,” Atta said in his deep, froggy voice, with his face even longer and darker than usual. “We can get two of them from the palace secret police. They have a range of five hundred parasangs. A parasang is about three hundred Oikoumenē schoene—rope-lengths.” Rhita said she knew military and Persian measures. Jamal Atta lifted an eyebrow, pursed his lips and continued. “Weapons we can get plenty of—black markets flourish in the delta, if we can’t transfer them from the palace armory or the weapon factories at Memphis. The question I need answered is, why are we going? What do we plan to do if we find what we’re looking for?” Both Atta and Oresias had been told some details, but not all, about the unlikely thing for which they would search.
Rhita stared at the plans spread on the game table. “We’ll try to enter the gate,” she said.
