by Greg Bear
The confusion worked for her, in one way; nobody could think of charges to bring against her, not even Ras Mishiney, who received the news of Lanier’s death with barely controlled rage. The easiest course seemed to be to ignore her, let her blend into the evacuation effort. There could even be some political capital made by publicizing her devotion to duty in the face of tragedy.
When the orbiting precincts were full to capacity, camps were set up near the most technologically sophisticated urban centers on Earth. The ideal centers for relocation could provide city memory facilities and the advanced technology Hexamon citizens often needed for daily maintenance; like hothouse flowers, Karen thought, or specialized insects in a hive…Very much like all human beings, only more so.
She was assigned to the camps being constructed around Melbourne, acting as liaison between the Old Native administrators and the evacuation officials from the orbiting precincts. Day in and day out, as the week progressed, she smoothed over difficulties, improved understanding, and made sure that the resentments of the Old Natives did not hamper progress. At night, exhausted, she slept in a small, private bubble habitat, dreaming of Garry and of Andia as a child…and of Paval Mirsky.
When she did not sleep, in those short rest periods, she wept, or lay quiet as a stone on an emergency cot, face set, trying to puzzle through her reactions. Despite their separation, emotionally and sexually, she had never stopped relying on Garry’s presence, or at least the knowledge that he was available.
She was grateful for the chaos and the work. She suspected her grief was stronger and harder to come to grips with than if she and Lanier had been close all along; she could not put aside the thought that given a few more months, they might have come together as strongly as before.
The world was changing again. Karen actually relished the challenge of change; but with Garry at her side, what work they could have done! What problems they could have solved, and with such style!
The wounds of grief were already beginning to heal through her glorification of the good memories, and cloaking of the bad. She resisted these mild dishonesties at first, and then gave in, if only to shed her pain.
The camps neared completion by the end of the week. Shuttles already were arriving, disembarking evacuees.
Just after noon on the last day of the week, Karen climbed the side of a low, scrub-covered hill, carrying a small wrapped sandwich and a bottle of beer. She looked over what had once been a broad parkland. Hundreds of Hexamon machines—no larger than trucks—had planned, designed, and extruded emergency shelters, creating what would in a few days become fully functional, largely self-contained communities.
To the east, dumps of raw materials awaited the attentions of intermediate processors, which separated out the raw materials necessary for the construction machines. Purified minerals and cellulose and added foodstuffs—necessary for the machines’ quasi-organic components—were stacked in hills of meter-wide cubes.
The community on the flat land below the hill was more than half-finished, and already it bore some resemblance to the cities on Thistledown. For the moment, all the structures—row upon row of domes and tiered prisms, broad expanses of farm belt, large community centers like inverted cups—were translucent or white, but soon organic paints and textural modifiers would be layered over them, coloring and sculpting; interiors would then be added. Very few would be equipped with decorating projectors. The Hexamon’s evacuees would have to get used to more austere environments.
No doubt they would feel deprived, Karen thought. But this community would still be more advanced by several centuries than any other city on Earth.
By being forced to live on Earth, perhaps the Hexamon citizens would finally carry out the necessary but long-delayed steps in the Recovery. Terrestrial and Orbiting Hexamons would finally be compelled to come to terms with past and future.
Unless, of course, nothing happened to Thistledown…. Then the evacuees would return and things would continue as before.
But that seemed highly unlikely. Whatever the outward explanations, Karen saw the hand of Mirsky behind the evacuation.
Again, she found herself beseeching the Russian to take care of her husband. It had become a daily ritual. She found a surprising amount of comfort in it.
If forces beyond her comprehension were still at work, it was possible Garry had not simply passed into oblivion. Even if she never saw or spoke with him again…he would exist, somewhere.
The wind blowing over the camp and toward the hill brought a scent of fresh greenery—the scent of a city growing, coming alive. Karen glanced up at the sky and cruelly, irrationally, wished for Thistledown to be destroyed.
Not until late that evening, waking from a troubled sleep, did she realize why; and in the morning, preparing for conferences between the Melbourne city fathers and newly elected corpreps for the camp town, she had almost forgotten again.
The wish remained.
You have to know where you are. You cannot live in two worlds.
64
The Way
In the odd moments—whatever those moments were, time or delusion—when Rhita was not being examined, tested, questioned, whatever it was the Jarts did to her—when she could think a thought that she was reasonably sure was her own, she tried to understand what her grandmother had told her. That she worked through a wall Patrikia herself had not penetrated was obvious to her now; a wall of ignorance regarding the Jarts. What are they doing to me? They seemed to be keeping her thoughts and self in a separate enclosure. She did not feel her real body; or at least, she did not believe her real body was still connected to her. Some of the illusions presented to her were very convincing, but she had learned to distrust all apparent realities.
Where am I? She was back in the Way again, that much seemed probable; she had been given the impression that whatever had been done to Gaia, the task was not yet finished. By deduction, she would not be kept there; it would perhaps be more convenient to those testing her to have her body nearby.
Her mind might be anywhere.
Is Typhon testing me? She did not know; perhaps it did not matter. Jarts seemed interchangeable.
The tests they put her through were occasionally enlightening, to the extent that she remembered them, and that she could work with those memories in the scattered moments she had left to herself.
She was placed in different social situations with phantoms of people she had known. At first, these phantoms did not include those she had met in Alexandreia. She played the scenes with some hope they were real; part of her played them in earnest, quite deluded; she gave what she thought were honest performances. But part of her, however suspended, was always skeptical.
Many times she met Patrikia. Many times certain scenes were reenacted. In this way, her own memory was brought to the forefront, and Rhita was given an opportunity to review it, at the same time the Jarts did so.
All this changed after an immeasurable time. Her life became rooted; she became a student in Alexandreia. The delusion was not interrupted by her captors.
She stayed in the women’s dormitory, fought her way through social and political ostracisms, and attended classes on mathematics and engineering. She hoped soon to begin her studies in theoretical physics.
Demetrios became her didaskalos. The small part of her still suspended in skepticism wondered if this was the real psyche of Demetrios; there seemed something more convincing about him.
All of her surroundings were real enough that she began to relax. Her skeptical suspended self faded until she regarded such memories as passing delusions themselves. The last perception of this fading, skeptical Rhita was: They have finally gotten through my guard.
Then Alexandreia became real, if somewhat skewed at times.
She remembered nothing of the journey to the steppes.
Rhita won most of her academic battles. Demetrios seemed to take an interest in her beyond the normal relationship between didaskalos and student. They had som
ething in common neither could define.
The days passed, Aigyptian winter coming, dry as usual but cooler; they went boating on Mareotis. He confessed that he had taught her almost as much as he knew, outside of political wisdom; “You seem slow to acquire that,” he told her. She did not deny it; she expressed her belief that honesty seemed a better policy than merely fitting in.
“Not in Alexandreia, it isn’t,” he said. “Not even for the granddaughter of Patrikia. Especially not for her.”
White ibises stalked through reedy shallows near the sandstone and granite retaining walls that had maintained Mareotis’s ancient boundaries for a thousand years. Rhita sat in the boat, trying desperately to remember something, her head hurting; perhaps she felt the pressure of her didaskalos’s attentions. They weren’t unwelcome, but there had been something else far more urgent…meeting with the queen? When would she do that?
“I’m still waiting for my appointment with Kleopatra,” she said, apropos of nothing.
Demetrios smiled. “Your father’s doing?”
“I think so,” she said, her head hurting more.
“He wants to beat out the bibliophylax.”
“I don’t think that’s the reason…. It must take a long time for anybody to see the queen.”
“Reasonably enough. She’s very busy.”
Rhita pressed her hands to her cheeks. They felt like…nothing made solid.
“I need to go back to shore,” she said quietly. “I feel ill.” Perhaps it was then that the long, continuous delusion began to unravel, and not because of her captors. Something within Rhita’s psyche was going wrong. All she had seen and felt erupted within her hidden thoughts, seeking release.
Days seemed to pass. She studied, tried to sleep quietly at night, but sleep was an odd thing, a void within a void.
She dreamed in these troubled sleeps of a young girl pounding on her grandmother’s door, wanting in. Who was this young girl, who wished to see Patrikia when she was very busy and could not attend to just anybody? The young girl wept and grew thinner, starving. In one night’s dreams she was nothing more than a husk, wrapped in a tight linen shroud and smelling of herbs, slumped against the door like a roll of stiff cloth, jaw slack. The next night, she was not there, but the knocking continued anyway, empty and desperate.
Patrikia never gave an audience to the girl.
Rhita, however, did finally get an appointment with the queen. She walked through the private quarters, noticing Oresias sitting in one corner, reading from a very thick, very long scroll, like an ancient scholar; she saw a funeral portrait of Jamal Atta on the wall.
And then a red-headed Kelt led her into the queen’s innermost chamber, the bedroom, deep in the palace, surrounded by arms and arms of quiet stone, cool, dark. The room smelled of incense and illness. Rhita examined the Kelt, who regarded her with outwardly solemn, inwardly terrified eyes. She said, “I should know your name, too.”
“Go in,” the Kelt told her. “Never mind my name. Go in to the queen.”
The queen was ill, that much was obvious. Rhita saw her on her long, wide leather bed, draped in the skins of exotic animals from the Southern Continent; gold oil lamps hung around her, and dim electric lamps as well. The queen was very old, thin, white-haired, wearing a black robe. Objects in wooden cases lay scattered around the bed. Rhita stopped by the bed’s right corner; the queen’s eyes followed her.
“You’re not Kleopatra,” Rhita said.
The queen did not speak at all, merely watched her.
“I need to speak to Kleopatra.”
Rhita turned and saw Lugotorix—that was his name—standing by the entrance to the bedroom. “I’m not in the right place,” she said.
“None of us is, mistress,” the Kelt said. “Remember. I am trying to be strong, to remember, but it is difficult. Remember!”
Rhita trembled, but did not feel her fear deeply.
Typhōn came out of the shadows, undistorted, as convincing now as Lugotorix, his face textured with experience, eyes wise, knowing, more human. “You are permitted to remember now,” the escort said.
65
Thistledown City
Tapi Ram Olmy walked down the corridor of the centuries-old apartment complex, searching for the floor designator of the Olmy-Secor Triad Family’s unit, as his father had instructed. He found it easily enough. The door was open, showing an interior decorated with the style and taste of the original occupants. He had often studied that period in his father’s life; the triad family had spent only three years in this unit, after being forced out of Alexandria, the second chamber city, in the last stages of the Exiling. And yet his father had always returned to this place, as if it represented home more than any other living space he had had.
Tapi, still fresh to the much more stable world beyond city memory and the crèche, found such devotion curious, but accepted it; whatever his father did, Tapi was sure, was fit and proper.
Olmy stood near the apartment’s single broad window, in a wide room to the right of the entrance. Tapi entered without speaking, waiting to be noticed.
Olmy turned. Tapi, for all of his youth, was discomfited by his father’s appearance. He seemed to have abandoned juvenation, or neglected his periodic supplements. He was thinner, haggard. His eyes seemed to fix on Tapi without seeing him.
“I’m pleased you could come.”
Tapi had pulled every string he could think of to be here, when every available member of the defense forces was on constant duty. He was not about to explain this to his father, however.
“I’m pleased you asked me.”
Olmy approached him, his eyes coming into focus again, looking him over with a loving gaze that pretended to be objective. “Very fine,” he said, observing those little details and embellishments apparant only to one who has lived in a self-designed body. “You’ve done well indeed.”
“Thank you.”
“You carried my message to Garry Lanier, I understand…before he died.”
Tapi nodded. “I regret not serving under him.”
“He was a remarkable man. This…is more awkward than it should be, between two men used to serving the Hexamon…”
Tapi listened intently, head cocked to one side.
“I would like for you to convey my love to your mother. I cannot see her.”
“She’s still isolated,” Tapi said. “I can’t talk to her now, either.”
“But you’ll be seeing her before I will.”
Tapi’s lips tightened on one side, the only acknowledgment of worry.
“I’ll never see either of you again. I can’t explain much more than that…”
“You’ve told me this once before, Father,” Tapi said.
“This time there’s no doubt, no second chances.”
“Pavel Mirsky came back to us,” Tapi said, hoping to make an extreme comparison as a joke. Olmy smiled in a way that chilled him.
“Probably no chance of that, even,” Olmy said.
“Can I ask questions, Father?”
“I’d prefer you didn’t.”
Tapi nodded.
“I couldn’t answer if you did.”
“Can I help in any way?”
Olmy smiled again, this time warmly and with a slight nod. “Yes,” he said. “You’ve been reassigned to Way defense in the seventh chamber.”
“Yes.”
“You can tell me one thing. My research hasn’t borne any fruit here. Do your weapons still attack only Jart or nonhuman objects?”
“They’re not set for human objects. They won’t fire on them.”
“Under any circumstances?”
“We can target them to fire on any object, manually…But there’s little time expected to do any manual targeting.”
“Don’t Olmy said.
“Ser?”
“Just that. Don’t manually target a human object. I will not compromise you any more than that.”
Tapi swallowed and glanced down at the floo
r. “I must ask one question, Father. You are not working under Hexamon instructions. That much is obvious.” He looked up and reached out to touch his father’s arm. “Whatever you’re doing is for the good of the Hexamon?”
“Yes,” Olmy said. “In the long run, I think it is.”
Tapi backed away. “I can’t hear any more, then. I will do my best to…do this, not do this. Whatever. But if I see any sign, even the…” His anger and confusion were apparent.
Olmy shut his eyes and gripped his son’s hand.
“If you have the least suspicion I’m lying, or working to harm the Hexamon, you target manually.”
Tapi’s face was grim. “Anything else, Ser?”
“You have my blessings,” Olmy said.
“Will I ever know?”
“If there is any way, within my power, to let you know what happened, and why, I will.”
“Are you going to die, Father?”
Olmy shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“What do you wish to tell Mother?”
Olmy handed him a block. “Give this to her.”
Tapi tucked the block into a pocket and moved toward his father, hesitated, and finally put his arms around him, hugging him tightly. “I don’t want you to go, not forever,” Tapi said. “I couldn’t say that to you the last time.” He pulled back and Olmy saw tears on his cheeks.
“My God,” he said softly. “You can cry.”
“It seemed a good thing…”
Olmy touched his son’s tears with a finger, in wonder, and said, “It is. I’ve always regretted losing that.”
They left the apartment together, and Olmy closed the door. They parted in the corridor, saying nothing more, walking quickly in opposite directions.
Your son is very much like you, the Jart commented.
“Too much,” Olmy said.
66
