Eternity

by Greg Bear

  Soon, Korzenowski—and perhaps a part of Patricia Vasquez—would be playing with the ghosts of universes. Karen returned and they prepared a place on the grass.

  “I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” she said softly. “They’re bastards, but they’re brilliant bastards.”

  Lanier nodded, clutching her hand.

  “I love you,” he said, tears coming to his eyes.

  She lay her head against his shoulder.

  Early the next morning, on his notepad, Lanier wrote: We saw the point of Thistledown low to the northwest, soft and ill-defined. The night was warm and my old bones did not ache; my mind is more clear than it’s been in recent memory, shockingly clear. I had my Karen lying next to me. We were among the few on Earth who knew what to expect this evening—or did we?

  We owe them so much, these determined angels, our distant children. A lump came to my throat, simply watching the Thistledown—the Stone—ascend a few degrees. I feared for them. What if they made a mistake and destroyed themselves? What if Mirsky’s gods at the end of time decide to intervene? Where are we then?

  Straight beams of clear white light fanned out from the Stone and crossed three quarters of the sky, reaching tens of thousands of kilometers into space, pointing away from Earth. I do not know what they were; not light alone, surely, for lasers or some similar phenomenon could only be reflected by dust, and there is not so much dust in space. We sat almost as ignorant as savages. The lines of light faded abruptly, and for a moment there was nothing but the stars and the Stone, brighter now, higher in the northwest. I thought perhaps Korzenowski had thrown a rough sketch across the heavens, and this was all we would see.

  But from the point of the Stone, across the entire night sky, there unfurled a gorgeous curtain of violet and blue, taking seconds to reach from horizon to horizon. Within the curtain glowed indistinct patches of red; it took us several seconds to see, within the unfocused patches, images of the crescent moon, somehow lensed to two or three dozen locations.

  The curtain then shredded, like rotten fabric washed apart by a river current. Where it had been, there now curled lazy arms of green, the tentacles of a monstrous jellyfish spiraling and vibrating. There was an organic ugliness in this that made me want to turn away; I was witnessing some unnatural birth, with the attendant gore and mystery; space being distorted or used in ways it is not accustomed to.

  Then all dimmed and the stars returned, clear and sharp, undisturbed. Whatever happened now, could not be seen by us.

  50

  Thistledown

  Korzenowski looked down on the sixth chamber through the blister covering the northern cap bore hole, fingers working restlessly on a small die of nickel-iron. Beside him, the president floated with arms folded, in ceremonial robe and cap resembling a Mandarin lord. He had come from a special Nexus session to observe the second and third series of tests; now they waited to see how the sixth chamber machinery would react.

  A small plume of smoke rose from the third quarter; already, aircraft hovered around the damage site.

  “You know what that is?” Farren Siliom inquired.

  “Fire in an inertial control radiation duct,” Korzenowski said, paying the president little attention. His eyes were on the key points in the sixth chamber, points where any kind of pseudo-spatial backscatter could blow out huge sections of the valley floor. “It’s a minor problem.”

  “The tests are still successful?”

  “Successful,” Korzenowski acknowledged.

  “How much longer before we make the connection?”

  “Nine days,” Korzenowski said, giving himself some leeway. “The machinery needs time to reach equilibrium. We need to let the looped virtual universe dissolve. Then the path will be clear and we can reconnect.”

  The president picted a symbol of unenthusiastic acceptance. “Neither I nor the presiding minister are comfortable with this,” he tight-beamed at Korzenowski. “We’re all forced to do things we’d rather not do, eh?”

  Korzenowski glanced at the president with cat-square eyes. You’ve made the whole process Draconian as a kind of revenge, he thought. “At least we’ll be going home,” he said flatly. “Back to a life we may have been ill-advised to leave in the first place.”

  Farren Siliom did not respond to this unconcealed self-criticism. Korzenowski had been the inspiration for just that action.

  The web had become too tangled to ever separate single strands.

  51

  Thistledown

  What is Pavel Mirsky?

  Olmy stopped his exercises on the barren quarters floor and immediately swung up a second level of barriers; the question had come unbidden, and not through his partial or the established feed; it was not a stray thought or a wandering echo.

  For several minutes, he stood rigid in the middle of the floor, face blank, trying desperately to locate the source of the query. It was not repeated; but as he checked each connection between his implants and natural mind, he realized repetition would not have been necessary. Information had been drawn smoothly and with very few traces of entry from his original, natural memory.

  The barriers had been breached, yet seemed intact.

  The room was bleak enough to serve as a tomb. For an instant, he contemplated blowing up his heart and the implants, but realized he could not. The voluntary connections had been severed. Now, only if hidden detectors in the implants were disturbed would he die. Where was the partial? Had everything been absorbed—including the secrets of his safeguards?

  Is Pavel Mirsky a human like yourself, or is he command from another concern?

  Olmy locked down his thoughts, hoping against hope that not all had been lost. He did not have the slightest idea what had happened, or how extensive the breach was.

  I am finding much hidden information that provides missing color and form, the voice continued. It felt very similar to his own internal voice. That told Olmy that his natural sub-personalities, what the Hexamon psychologists called “functionary agents,” had been suborned.

  Olmy felt like the captain of a ship whose crew has been suddenly and inexplicably possessed by demons. The “bridge” had been peaceful until just now; but peering below decks told a quite different story.

  You are not command nor are you duty expediter. Are you command oversight in temporary physical form? No. We see you are a simple expediter given extraordinary privileges. No. Even more astonishing. You have taken these privileges upon yourself.

  Olmy was fully aware he had made a horrible mistake. All of his safeguards had been sidestepped, so far; he had severely underestimated the Jart.

  This Pavel Mirsky. There is nothing like him in your available memory. Nor in associated memory, nor in memory we have been given permission to access. Pavel Mirsky is unique and surprising. What is his message?

  For a moment, Olmy thought that to allow the Jart access to this seeming irrelevancy could give him a chance to recover control and kill himself. Olmy prepared and released a summary of Mirsky’s story.

  The Jart’s control could not be shaken. As Olmy’s sense of helplessness and horror grew, its cool, speculative fascination with Mirsky increased.

  Mirsky is no longer of your rank and order. He is not human, yet once was; he returns with a message but you do not know how he returns. Mirsky has been awaited by us, yet appears to you; perhaps it has appeared to our kind also, but unknown to you.

  Mirsky is messenger/expediter from descendant command.

  Olmy tried to control his panic and relax. The situation had happened so quickly, with no warning, that some time passed before he fully realized their situations had reversed. He was the prisoner now, his personality fragmented and completely under the Jart’s power. What little of his mind was left to him—he quickly scanned his available natural memories and found most of them blocked by Jart inhibitors—could hardly understand the Jart’s last clear statement.

  The Jart found Mirsky’s presence very significant.

&nbs
p; Your struggle is illuminating. I spread faster with each status search you make.

  “I acknowledge your control,” Olmy said.

  Good. You fear what I will do to your kind. Harm to your kind was my original instruction, but it is superseded now. News of the appearance of a messenger from descendant command is far more important than our conflicts.

  “How did you break through the barriers?”

  Inappropriate curiosity. Are you not fascinated by messenger Mirsky?

  Olmy buried a fragment of himself that wanted to scream. “Yes, fascinated and puzzled. But how did you break through my barriers?”

  Your understanding of certain algorithms is incomplete. A flaw of your kind’s development, perhaps. I have been in control an indefinite but significant number of periods now.

  “You’ve been playing with me…”

  Does a failed >amateur< deserve greater consideration? You do not fit in a rank that we acknowledge respect for. Nevertheless, I will accord you the respect you have accorded me.

  Had he been integrated, Olmy knew this would have been the lowest point of his long life. As it was, he felt a distant, free-floating misery, like a soul disembodied in some hideous afterlife, powerless to change or move.

  It will soon be possible to give this important information to command oversight, the Jart said. If you help, integration of your personality parts will be allowed, and you may witness this important event with full faculties.

  “I will not cooperate if you seek to harm my people.”

  No harm to hosts of messenger. You have been recognized and by our law must be spared from storage and packaging. You are now expediters of descendant command.

  Olmy tried to think that through. The risk was too great to even begin to think the Jart meant the Hexamon no harm…It had admitted that its primary mission had been harm. “What do you want to do?”

  We must return to the Way. Command oversight must be informed.

  Olmy knew he had no real choice. He had been hopelessly outmatched; he could not help but wonder whether, in time, the Jarts would have outmatched them all. Or was that a self-serving underestimation of his own, uniquely personal failure?

  52

  Efficient Gaia

  Rhita felt like a caged animal. She did not want to know the truth; Rhodos was approaching rapidly, and it would reveal the truth. She was trapped in the bubble with a bent and distorted monstrosity, some unlikely battered doll of a human being. She heard it standing up behind her and dared not turn to look at it. Knuckles white on the railing, she closed her eyes, then opened them again, telling herself, This is what you wanted. To see it all.

  But her reservoirs of strength had long since been tapped out. She opened her mouth to speak, and closed it to mute a shriek. Shaking her head, she bent over the railing and flung herself back, straining her arms and hands, wild with the grief she did not yet completely feel, but soon would, as surely as this was Gaia, the real world, her home.

  Rhodos’s commercial harbor was visible, and the long bridge of land to the fortress of Kambyses across from Patrikia’s house that overlooked the old military harbor. The city of Rhodos itself was gone, bare brown dirt spread flat in its place. “Where is it?” she breathed.

  The island was studded with gold-topped pillars of stone. From inland mountains to coastline, the pillars rose like a Kroisos’s dream of mushroom growths. “Why?” she cried out. “What are they?”

  Tphon’s speech was muffled now. He said something but she could not understand and refused to turn around to look at him. It.

  The sun set behind them as the bubble slowed and approached the headland where Patrikia’s house had been—or still was, Rhita saw, surrounded by a fence of the same fringed metal snakes they had met with in the camp, it seemed much less than years before.

  “Your temple is near here, too,” Typhōn said. She heard it standing up behind her and felt an awful crawling along her spine; there were things worse than death, among them being in the service of these monsters. She wiped her face quickly with the palm of one hand, turned and faced the battered escort. “Why are these places still here?”

  “Because they mean something to you,” Typhōn said. It reached up and pushed the top of its head back into place. She swallowed hard to restrain another urge to throw up. She had one thing she must hold on to, and that was the bare remaining shred of her dignity.

  “This whole world is significant to me,” she said. “Put it back the way it was.”

  Typhōn made a sound like a small dog choking, and its speech became much clearer. “Not possible. Already close to exceeding budget. Your world will have its uses. It will become its own repository; whoever wishes to study Gaia in later cycles will come here and do so. Meanwhile, it serves as a place to raise and train young. What you would call a holy place.”

  “None of my people are alive?”

  “Very few have died,” Typhōn said, adjusting a shoulder.

  She remembered the unexpected yielding of its substance and turned away again, fist thrust into her mouth.

  “In truth, more of your kind would have died had we not come here. By far the great majority are in storage. It is not unpleasant; my selves have been there many times. Unlike death, storage is not final.”

  She shook her head, numb to the horror but unwilling to listen to more useless talk. “Where are my companions? You said you’d bring them here.”

  “They are here.” The bubble moved through Patrikia’s gray and withered garden; the orange trees were dusty skeletons. They approached the house, and from behind the house other bubbles emerged, one containing Demetrios, another Lugotorix, a third Oresias. Each was accompanied by an escort: Oresias by what seemed to be an older woman, Lugotorix by a red-headed old man, Demetrios by a slender young male in student’s garb.

  Lugotorix stood with arms crossed and eyes tightly closed. What he can’t see can’t make him more miserable.

  Typhōn kept silent behind her. The bubbles orbited slowly about each other in Patrikia’s yard. Lugotorix seemed to sense her presence and opened his eyes, looking on her with an expression of fierce joy; he had not failed completely. Demetrios merely nodded, unwilling to meet her stare. Oresias seemed unable to raise his head.

  Defeat. Final and total. No going back.

  What would Patrikia do? If she were here, having lost two homes, two worlds…. Rhita did not doubt the old sophē would simply have laid herself down and died. The enormity was truly outside the range of a human mind.

  There was no hope. “The whole world is dead,” she said.

  “No,” Typhōn corrected her.

  “Shut up,” she said sharply. “It’s dead.”

  The escort did not contradict her again.

  She tried to speak with the others, but no sound passed between them. Suddenly, she turned and faced Typhōn. On his distorted face there was a triumphant expression, brief but unmistakable. He had absorbed enough humanity to mimic exultation.

  She had been brought here, she now believed, in part at least so that the victors could measure their triumph. Prisoners on parade.

  She did not turn away. There had been no satisfaction in knocking the escort about; clearly, abuse did not bother Typhōn. And there was scant satisfaction in defiance. She was too small and limited to even begin to search for weaknesses. Still, Rhita needed to do something, to pick up some thread, or indeed she would just lie down and die.

  But they would not let her die. She would be stored. And someday, surely the people who had built the Way would fight the Jarts again, perhaps destroy them, perhaps find her and her companions, as records or in boxes or however they might be stored, and bring them back. Could that much be hoped? She could barely even conceive of such things.

  But Patrikia would have grabbed at any thread.

  Rhita seized this one and observed Typhōn calmly now, having lost everything and knowing it if not accepting. “Take us back,” she said.

  “This means nothing to
you?”

  She shook her head.

  “You do not wish to visit the temple?”

  “No.”

  “Do you wish to die?” Typhōn inquired curiously, politely.

  “Are you offering?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Just take me back.”

  “Yes.”

  The interior of the bubble seemed to fill with gelatinous smoke. She felt all weight lift from her feet.

  Store me, she thought. Pack me away.

  My time must come again.

  Oblivion would have been welcome, if she could have known she would not be disturbed.

  53

  Earth, Thistledown

  Lanier had resumed walking the trails again, climbing the side of the mountain, looking down over the autumn-brown grasslands and the increased flocks of sheep. Despite all that had happened, he thought himself a contented man. He could not save all of humanity from its follies; could not stop the flow of history.

  Losing his sense of responsibility was a necessary liberation; he had spent much of his life helping others. Now was the time to calm himself and prepare for his own next step.

  Despite the forced implant, and his relief at being saved from death, he knew he would not choose immortality. When the time came—whether it be ten years, or fifty years—he would be prepared.

  He did not think his personality was so valuable that it should impose itself on others for more than a century. This was not humility, nor was it exhaustion; it was the way he had been raised.

  He accepted that Karen did not agree. Even so, they were much closer than they had been in years. That was sufficient.

  Two months after his recovery, on a particularly crystalline night, they walked under the stars. Thistledown was not visible. “I’m not sure I care what’s happening up there, down there.” She pointed through the Earth at where Thistledown might be.

  Lanier nodded. They walked on, lantern illuminating the trail in a blue circle for several meters ahead. “That’s where we met,” he said, and it sounded silly once he said it; silly and awkward, the words of an uncertain youth, not an old man. Karen smiled at him.