by Greg Bear
Demetrios turned his genial features on Rhita and smiled with a mix of confidence and shyness that Rhita found disconcerting. “I am honored,” he said.
“As am I. I hope you weren’t…troubled by your journey. I seem to have been the reason for it.”
“Irritation, no more,” Demetrios said. “I’m still not sure what I’m doing here…. We seem to be going on a long journey, and the queen personally told me I was needed. I can’t imagine why.”
“Because you’re the mekhanikos with the most advanced ideas,” Oresias said. “Her Imperial Hypsēlotēs expects we’ll be seeing some real marvels, and hopes you can explain them to us, if our mistress Vaskayza cannot.”
“She did discuss wonders. I confess I couldn’t understand all she said…. Are we looking for the door that opened for the sophē to enter this world?”
“Maybe,” Rhita said.
“That would be a marvel, indeed.” He shook his head in wonder, and then looked at the box holding the clavicle. “Is that one of the Objects?”
Rhita nodded. Demetrios had the features of an aborigine from Nea Karkhēdōn, but with lighter, more olive-toned skin. There was perhaps some Latine blood in him, or Aigyptian.
“You will pardon my reverent curiosity,” he said. “Mechanikoi in my studio have been taught about the sophē’s Objects from childhood. To actually see one…” He seemed about to ask if he could touch it, but Oresias shook his head discreetly.
“I am pleased to meet you,” Demetrios concluded, smiling again. Rhita glanced at the other men in the wagon. She was the only female in this wagonload. There were only two other women in the entire expedition. She had hoped there might be more, but even under Kleopatra’s influence, the attitudes of Alexandreia were very different from those of Rhodos.
The steam wagons wound through the Brukheion and Neapolis in the early dawn, passing a few market owners and fishermen walking or riding donkeys to their stalls. The air was crisp, cleaner than it had been the past few days, which seemed auspicious. Alexandreia had once been renowned for the purity of its air; the factories of the delta had changed that.
Once through the Neapolis and Aigyptian district—where the roadway rose above the hovels on disdainful concrete pillars—the nekropolis spread out before them on the city’s western border, a jumble of limestone, red and gray granite and marble tombs. They were not stopped at the city’s gates; the queen’s influence among the police was still strong.
The sun was well up as they passed through the city of the dead. The poor had invaded the nekropolis centuries before, moving into the tombs of forgotten families and setting up a unique, violent social structure that had become a way of life unto itself. The most the police could do was keep the nekropolis from moving into the Neapolis; the Aigyptian quarter acted as a buffer. Still, the caravan was not bothered on the rutted, potholed highway through the tombs.
The queen had her contacts and supporters here, as well.
Beyond the last dismal scatter of old graves, a military highway rose out of the scrub grass and sand like an inky mirage. The caravan followed this route to the aerodromos, an additional ten schoene to the west. Upon their arrival, the morning was well under way. Rhita could smell kerosene and oil on the wind, and heard a continuous low roar as jets and other gullcraft took off to patrol the Libyan borders. She could see little through the plastic windows in the canvas covering the wagon; they faced away from the aerodromos.
“We’re here,” Oresias said, standing and flexing his knees. Demetrios stood beside him, still unsure of his place.
The caravan had stopped on an apron of asphalt near a broad concrete quadrangle. As she stepped down, glancing left, Rhita saw long rows of gleaming silver gullcraft, sleek fighters that were all wing and larger needle-shaped bombers with markings of the provinces of Ioudaia and Syrian Antiokheia. Beyond them lay the western desert, a narrow ribbon of cream above the white concrete and black asphalt. A fighter screamed down the closest runway, passing within barely a hundred arms of the line of wagons. Rhita shifted the box with the clavicle to one arm and covered her left ear, wincing at the din.
As they walked around their wagon, she saw the two beecraft squatting on the apron, sullen and nondescript brown with patches of yellow and white. They seemed ugly and ungainly compared to the fighters, like flying houses. Their wide horizontal blades drooped, man-sized nacelles on the tips coming within three arms of the ground on each side. A few men in red and white flight outfits stood beside the beecraft, engaged in conversation, watching the wagons’ passengers disembark.
Climbing down from the back of the next wagon in line was the Kelt and a small contingent of the palace guard; all to protect her, she realized.
She stifled a sudden urge to drop the clavicle and run into the desert.
A whistling breeze riffled little lines of sand on the asphalt, scattering grains about her feet. She looked up at the sun, shading her eyes against the brilliance.
It was a perfect day for flying. She had hoped it might be otherwise. She thought of the sanctuary of Athene Lindia, with its stone steps hot in the sun and the lapis-blue water beyond.
“Time to board,” Oresias said. “Didaskolos, assist your student, if you please.”
Demetrios offered his hand but Rhita declined, moving ahead of them with quick, small steps to show her determination.
“Ours is the machine on the right,” Jamal Atta instructed.
Oresias shaded his eyes and looked across the field to the low buildings nestled among sand hills to the south. “Are we expecting a reception?” he asked. Rhita followed his pointing finger and saw a line of distant vehicles about half a parasang from the asphalt apron.
“No,” Atta said, tensing. “We have this part of the field to ourselves.”
“Then we’d better hurry.”
Demetrios moved up behind Rhita as if to protect her. The palace guards and the Kelt joined their group at the beecraft hatchway, falling in line at Atta’s command. The military advisor cursed repeatedly under his breath, eyes flicking between the people and piles of supplies yet to be loaded and the approaching wagons.
Oresias rapped on the plastic canopy and the kybernetes opened a small window. “Get this thing off the ground first if you have to. Get her out of here if they reach us before we’re ready.”
“I’ve got a query on the radio,” the kybernetes said.
“There weren’t supposed to be any queries,” Oresias told him sharply.
“Then I don’t suppose they expect an answer,” the kybernetes replied casually. “Everybody has to be loaded two minutes before we can leave the ground. I need time to get my blades up to speed.” He snicked the window shut.
Rhita found her seat within the narrow fuselage, a thinly padded canvas square stretched across two parallel iron bars. Demetrios handed her the case containing the slate and helped her secure the clavicle in its box behind a net in an overhead rack. The whine of the jet motors directly overhead was hideously loud, disorienting. A crewman handed them ear-covers and motioned for all to be seated and strap themselves in.
Outside, the last of the supplies was being hastily piled into the second beecraft. The wagon drivers retreated to their vehicles and spun them away from the apron toward the military road. Rhita wondered what would happen if they were caught; why had things gone wrong? Had they gone wrong?
She clapped her hands over the ear-covers and closed her eyes. She had never flown before.
Oresias tapped her shoulder and she opened her eyes.
We’re going, he mouthed to her. She glanced out the square window between the explorer’s seat and her own and saw the ponderous jet nacelles blurring as the blades picked up speed. The roar seemed to turn her entire body to liquid. She hadn’t urinated in hours. The need was intense. She clenched her teeth.
The two beecraft left solid ground and drifted off the apron, accelerating north. She couldn’t see what the soldiers in the vehicles behind them were doing. She hoped t
hey weren’t shooting.
Demetrios, sitting beside the Kelt across the aisle, grinned despite his gray face and strained expression. Rhita closed her eyes again.
She knew she would never again see Rhodes or Rhamōn or the sanctuary of Athene Lindia. The feeling came to her as an absolute certainty, beyond question.
For the first time, she actually understood the parallels between her grandmother’s journey and her own. Her grandmother had been young, too; only a couple of years older than Rhita was now. She had not just flown from her home, but had been lifted by rockets into space, away from Gaia—from Earth.
So who was responsible? What could she have done to avoid this misery? Rhita prayed, remembering the comfort and peace of sitting quietly in the shadow of Athene’s sanctuary, and for the merest instant she was back there, with Athene towering above her in the dark wooden shed.
Then the beecraft lurched sharply and she saw dazzling iron-pewter sandpaper through the window—ocean directly below them, hundreds, perhaps thousands of arms away.
“We’re turning east,” Oresias shouted in her ear. “I think we’ve gotten off without any damage. At least we’re not being followed.”
“What will we come back to?” Atta shouted. Even at high volume, his voice expressed dismal unhappiness. He flung his hands out and rubbed his temples with his fingertips. “What went wrong?”
The question remained unaswered. As planned, they kept radio silence, staying five or six parasangs off the coast.
The pressure in her bladder was becoming too much. She leaned forward, gestured for Oresias to lift an ear-cover, and said something in a low voice. He still could not hear her.
“I have to urinate,” she shouted. The explorer raised an eyebrow and pointed to the back, where a crewman was pissing into a metal canister. “There’s a curtain.”
Rhita nodded. Not too embarrassing for a former gynandros—what Patrikia called a tomboy. When she was done, as a small sign on the canister instructed, she poured the contents into a funnel in the floor. Presumably, it fell from the beecraft and dribbled across the sea, her own personal rain.
She finally became used to the noise, and ate from a packet of dried fruits and nuts, drinking wine thoroughly diluted with water. One of the three crewmen handed out plastic packets of olive oil, telling everyone, “For your health. Suck it down.”
Rhita glanced at the overhead rack and saw the clavicle secure behind its netting. She tried to persuade herself that the expedition was under way and there was no sense feeling regret, but regret dominated her thoughts anyway.
In an hour, her attitude began to change. She was almost used to the bobbing and the rising and falling in her stomach. Looking out the window and seeing the clear, cloudless air of the coast—and then, far to the southwest, the smoggy haze above the delta—gave her a new perspective that was actually exciting. She listened to Oresias and Jamal Atta plotting their course with the kybernetes, who had left the beecraft in charge of his assistant. Behind and to their right flew the second craft, matching course precisely.
The Kelt and the palace guards took the situation quietly and stoically. Rhita thought there was a kind of contest between them—the first to show any sign of unease, lost.
Demetrios no longer looked so gray, but he was obviously unhappy. Rhita leaned across the aisle and then unbuckled her harness to get closer to him. She tapped his ear-covers and he lifted one side away.
“Let’s have a contest,” she said, giddy.
“What kind of contest?” he shouted.
“The first one to look scared or sick or upset, loses.” She nodded at the guards and the Kelt and grinned. “Game?”
“Game,” Demetrios said, returning her grin. “I’ve lost already, though,” he said ruefully.
“Starting now. Let’s sober up.”
Atta looked at them with patent disapproval.
“Where are we?” Rhita asked him, lurching near the group of three and grabbing hold of an overhead rack. Her bravery seemed unlimited now.
“West of Gaza,” Oresias said. “Making good time. We’re following Alexandros’s route! Sort of. We have a stop in Damaske for refueling, then Bagdade, then on to Raki below the Kaspian Sea, where we’re followed by an aerial tanker. We refuel in mid-air over the Hunnos Republic, and within two hours we’re at your site in the prairie steppes. I hope our allied provinces are good on their pledges to the queen.”
The sound of the beecraft’s engines equated with security for Rhita now. She napped for an hour, dreaming of sandy wastes, and found they had crossed Ioudaia and were nearing Damaske. Like an enormous pastry fresh from the oven, the sand and rock and crusted mountains passed below. She thought of caravans and days of travel, of dying of thirst and digging for water in ancient wells…That was romance.
Crossing it all like god’s bird was simply unreal.
Out of the baked pastry desert came a distant patch of green, spread across the sands like a spill of paint. Rhita smelled Damaske before she actually saw it; a smell of life and water and greenery that made her lift her head and twitch her nose, hoping for more. Demetrios and Oresias were deep in expedition plans; the mekhanikos was catching up on what he had missed. She wondered how she would feel if she had been conscripted, as Demetrios had. But I was conscripted, she reminded herself. My grandmother chose me. She crawled from her harness and looked through a window.
Damaske claimed to be the oldest city in the world. Excavations at Jericho in the last century had challenged that claim, but Jericho was a much smaller community, hardly more than a village; Damaske had truly been a city for millennia. It was the major trading center of Syria, surrounded by orchards and fields, squat glass and steel and stone ziggurats rising from the Jewish quarter and the Horian quarter, the massive stone Persian fortress dominating the south of the city, and south of that, the international civilian aerodromos of El Zarra.
Atta returned from the kybernetes’ cabin and told her they would be landing on the outskirts of El Zarra for refueling. “I hope to get some news there, if anybody’s talking.” He shook his long head gloomily.
The beecraft dropped low and approached the aerodromos just above tree-top level. Rhita smelled dates and cook-stove camel-dung smoke and smiled despite the tension. She had never been to any of these places; if she lived, she would be a very well-traveled young woman.
The beecraft set down on a flat concrete pad near a few ragged old fuel wagons. Tired, dusty men approached the two craft, dragging long, flat sand-colored hoses behind them. They waited for the props to stop spinning, then tugged the hoses to within a few steps of the side doors. Oresias swung their door open and jumped down, followed by Atta, the bodyguards and Demetrios. The Kelt took a deep breath and shook his head as if to clear it.
Atta conferred with the closest field attendant, who seemed reluctant to say anything, concentrating on hooking up the hose and starting the fuel pumping. Atta then walked over to speak to a wagon driver, and seemed to have better luck. When he returned, he appeared, if such a thing was possible, even more desolate.
Rhita stood beside the mekhanikos as Atta told them what he had heard. “There’s no communication out of Alexandreia. We’re getting our fuel, but we were supposed to get aerial charts of the steppes from the Syrian Map Center, and they haven’t shown up.”
“What do they mean, no communication?” Oresias asked.
“Just that. No radio, no telephone, nothing, as far as the driver knows. He’s an officer, too; he talks with pilots coming in to the aerodromos. All flights are being held in Alexandreia. Ours are the only craft to land today.”
Oresias circled his fingers around his wrist and twisted them. “Something’s gone wrong.”
Demetrios squinted quizzically. “What—”
“We’re being slighted,” Atta said. “We get our fuel, but the powers in Damaske are being spare with other amenities. That tells me the queen’s influence may now be less important to them…”
Oresi
as chafed his wrist until the skin seemed about to rupture. “A blow against the palace?”
Atta shook his head, unwilling to speculate. “We still have our mission. But something’s wrong. It must have begun just before we left. We can’t radio back…it would take an hour or more to go into the city, or to the aerodromos administration and place a cable…” He shrugged. “We have no choice but to go on.”
Rhita stared at the distant towers and squat ziggurats of Damaske, realizing she was not scared, but should be. The flight’s mixed exhilaration and boredom still had a grip on her, like a drug.
“Check with your clavicle, please,” Oresias told her softly as they re-boarded the beecraft. “I want to know whether our goal is still there.”
She pulled the box from its rack and opened it, touching the handlebars with one finger. The brilliantly colored world spun before her again, and the cross reappeared in the same position, unchanged.
“Still there,” she affirmed. Oresias strapped himself into his seat, leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
In a few minutes, the beecraft were refueled and ready for the flight again. Atta came aboard at the last and angrily slammed the sliding hatch shut. “What about our aerial tanker?” he muttered. “What about the return leg?”
23
Thistledown
Olmy arrived in the fourth chamber an hour after hiking to the abandoned station in the fifth chamber. The train crossed over a broad expanse of shimmering, silvery water and dropped him off at a rest station on Northspin Island, in the first quarter, near the northern cap. Avoiding the few other hikers, he rented a tractor, drove ten kilometers to a distant trail head, and walked into the dense coniferous forests.
