by Greg Bear
“It doesn’t matter,” Ry Ornis said impatiently. “Issa Danna knew better than to open a gate into chaos. He knew the signs and never would have completed the opening. But—in the linkage, the slaving, qualities can be reversed if the opener loses control.”
“A gate into order—but the slaved clavicles behaving as if they were tuned to chaos?” Olmy asked, trying to grasp the complexities.
Ry Ornis seemed reluctant to go into more detail. “Those instruments, and the gate-openers associated with them, no longer exist in our world-line,” he said. “Ser Plass remembers that one hundred and twenty people accompanied Enoch and Issa Danna. She remembers two master openers and seven assistants. Here on Thistledown, we have records, life-histories, of only eighty, with one master and two assistants.”
“I survived. You remember me,” Plass said, her expression desperate.
“You remain in our records,” Ry Ornis confirmed. “We don’t know why or how.”
“What about the other survivor?” Olmy said.
“We don’t know who he or she was,” Ry Ornis said.
“Show him the other,” Plass said. “Show him Number 2, show him what happens when you survive, but you don’t return.”
“That’s next,” Ry Ornis said. “If you’re ready, Ser Olmy.”
4
The flawship cradled in the borehole dock was sleek and new and very fast. Olmy tracted along the flank of the ship, resisting the urge to run his fingers along the featureless reflecting surface.
He was still pondering the meeting with the figure called Number 2.
Around the ship’s dock, the bore hole between the sixth and seventh chamber glowed with a violet haze, a cup-shaped field erected to receive the southernmost extensors of Axis City, gripping the remaining precincts during their evacuation and repair. Olmy swiveled to face the axis and the flaw’s blunt conclusion and watched the workers and robots guide power grids and huge steel beams into place to act as buffers.
The dock manager, a small man with boyish features and no hair, his scalp decorated with an intricate green and brown Celtic braid, pulled himself toward Olmy and extended a paper certificate.
“We’re going to vacuum in an hour,” he said. “I hope everybody’s here before then. I’d like to seal the ship and check its integrity.”
Olmy applied his sigil to the document, transferring its command from borehole management and the construction guild to Way Defense.
“Two others were here earlier,” the dock manager said. “Twins, young women. They carried the smallest clavicles I’ve ever seen.”
Olmy looked back along the dock and saw three figures tracting toward them. “Looks like we’re all here,” he said.
“No send-off?” the manager asked.
Olmy smiled. “Everyone’s much too busy,” he said.
“Don’t I know it,” the manager said.
As a rule, gate openers had a certain look and feel that defined them, sometimes subtle, usually not. Rasp and Karn were little more than children, born (perhaps made was a better word) fifteen years ago in Thistledown City. They were of radical Geshel ancestry, and their four parent-sponsors were also gate-openers.
They tracted to the flawship and introduced themselves to Olmy. Androgynous, ivory-white, slender, with long fingers and small heads covered with a fine silvery fur. Each spoke with a resonant tenor voice. Karn had black eyes, Rasp green. Otherwise, they were identical.
To Olmy, neither had the air of authority he had seen in experienced gate-openers.
The dock manager picted a coded symbol and dilated the flawship entrance, a glowing green circle in the hull.
The twins solemnly entered the ship.
Plass arrived several minutes later. She wore a formal blue suit and seemed to have been crying. As she greeted Olmy, her voice sounded harsh. She addressed him as if they had not met before. “You’re the soldier?”
“I’ve worked in Way Defense,” he said.
Gray eyes small and wary, surrounded by puffy pale flesh, face broad and sympathetic, hair dark and cut short, Plass today reminded Olmy of any of a dozen matrons he had known as a child: polite but hardly hesitant.
“Ser Flynch tells me you’re the one who died on Lamarckia. I heard about that. By birth, a Naderite.”
“By birth,” Olmy said.
“Such adventures we have,” she said with a sniff. “Because of Ser Korzenowski’s cleverness.” She glanced away, then fastened her eyes on him and leaned her head to one side. “I’m not looking forward to this. Have they told you I’m a little broken, that my thoughts take odd paths?”
“They said your studies and experiences have influenced you,” Olmy said, a little uncomfortable at having to re-establish an acquaintance already made.
Rasp and Karn watched from the flawship hatch.
“She’s broken, but we are young and inexperienced,” Rasp said. Karn laughed, a surprising watery tinkle. “And you’ve died once already, Ser Olmy. What a crew!”
“I presume everyone knows what they’re doing,” Plass said.
“Presume nothing,” Olmy said.
Olmy guided Plass into the ship. The dock manager watched this with dubious interest. Olmy swung around the fields to face him.
“I take charge of this vessel now. Thanks for your attention and care.”
“Our duty,” the dock manager said. “She was delivered just yesterday. No one has taken her out yet—she’s a virgin, Ser Olmy. She doesn’t even have a name.”
“Call her the Lark!” Rasp trilled from inside.
Olmy shook hands firmly with the manager and climbed into the ship. The entrance sealed with a small beep behind him. The flawship’s interior was cool and quiet. With intertial control, there were no special couches or nets or fields; they would experience only simulated motion, for psychological effect, on their journey—at most a mild sense of acceleration and deceleration.
Plass formally introduced herself to Karn and Rasp. Since she wore no pictor, only words were exchanged. This suited Olmy.
“Ser Olmy,” Plass said, “I assume we are in privacy now. No one outside can hear?”
“No one,” Olmy said.
“Good. Then we can speak our minds. This trip is useless.” She turned on the twins, who floated like casual accent marks on some unseen word. “They’ve chosen you because you’re inexperienced.”
“Unmarked,” Rasp said brightly. “Open to the new.”
Karn smiled and nodded. “And not afraid of spooks.”
This seemed to leave Plass at a loss, but only for a second. She was obviously determined to establish herself as a Cassandra. “You won’t be disappointed.”
“We visited with Number 2,” Rasp said, and Karn nodded. “Ser Ry Ornis insisted we study it.”
Olmy remembered his own encounter with the vividly glowing figure in the comfortably appointed darkened room. It was not terribly misshapen, as he had anticipated before the meeting, but certainly far from normal. Its skin had burned with thousands of the tiny firefly deaths of stray metal atoms. Number 2 had stood out against the dark like a nebula in the vastness beyond Thistledown’s walls. Its hands alone did not glow, and silently, nervously ascribed shadowy arcs against its starry body as it tried to speak.
It lived in a twisted kind of time, neither backwards nor forwards, and its words required special translation. It spoke first of things that would happen in the room after Olmy left. It spoke next with a prediction that the Way would soon end, “in the blink of a bird’s eye.” The translator relayed this clearly enough, but could not translate other words; it seemed Number 2 was inventing or accessing new languages, some clearly not of human origin.
Plass said, “It’ll be a mercy if all that happens is we end up like him.”
“It was once a male? How interesting,” Rasp said.
&nb
sp; “We are fiends for novelty,” Karn added with a smile.
“Monsters are made,” Plass said with a grimace, clasping her Bible, “not born.”
“Thank you,” Karn said, and produced a forced, fixed smile, accompanied by a glassy stare. Rasp was obviously thinking furiously to come up with a more witty riposte.
Olmy decided enough was more than enough. “If we’re going to die, or worse, we should at least be civil.” The three stared at him, each surprised in a different way. This gave Olmy a bare minimum of satisfaction. “Let’s go through our orders and manifest, and learn how to work together.”
“A man who wants only to die again—” Karn began, still irritated, but her twin interrupted.
“Shut up,” Rasp said. “As he says, time to get to work.”
Karn shrugged and her anger dissolved instantly.
At speed, the flawship’s forward view of the Way became a twisted lens. Stray atoms and ions of gas within the Way piled up before them into a distorting, white-hot atmosphere. Rays of many colors writhed from a skewed vertex of milky brightness; the flaw, itself a slender geometric distortion, now resembled a white-hot piston.
Atoms of gas in the Way were becoming more and more of a problem. They were one of the results of so many gates being opened to bring in raw materials from the first exploited worlds.
The flawship’s status appeared before Olmy in steady reassuring symbols of blue and green. Their speed: three percent of c’, the speed of light in the Way, slightly less than c in the outside universe. They were now accelerating at more than six g’s, down from the maximum they had hit at 4 ex 5. None of this could be felt inside the hull.
The display showed their position as 1 ex 7, ten million kilometers beyond the cap of the seventh chamber, still almost three billion kilometers from the Redoubt.
Olmy had a dreamlike sense of dissociation, as always when traveling in a flawship. The interior had been divided by its occupants into three private compartments, a common area, and the pilot’s position. Olmy was spending most of his time at the pilot’s position. The others kept to their compartments and said little.
The first direct intimation of the strangeness of their mission came on the second day, halfway through their journey. Olmy was studying what little was known about the Redoubt, from a complete and highly secret file. He was deep into the biography of Deirdre Enoch when a voice called him from behind.
He turned and saw a young woman floating three meters aft, her head nearer to him than her feet, precessing slightly about her own axis. “I’ve felt you calling us,” she said. “I’ve felt you studying us. What do you want to know?”
Olmy checked to make sure this was not some product of the files, of the data projectors. It was not; no simulations were being projected. Behind the image he saw the sisters and Plass emerging from their quarters. The sisters appeared interested.
Plass bore an expression of shocked sadness. “I don’t recognize her,” she said.
Olmy judged this was neither an illusion nor a twin-sisterly prank. “I’m glad you’re decided to visit us,” he said to the woman. “How is the situation at the Redoubt?”
“The same, ever the same,” the young woman answered. Her face was difficult to discern. As she spoke, her features blurred and re-formed, each time subtly different.
“Are you well?” Olmy asked.
Rasp and Karn sidled forward around the image, which ignored them.
“I am nothing,” the image said. “Ask another question. It’s amusing to see if I can manage a sensible answer.”
Rasp and Karn flanked Olmy.
“She’s real?” Rasp asked. The twins were both pale, their faces locked in dread fascination.
“I don’t know,” Olmy said. “I don’t think so.”
“Then she’s used her position on the Redoubt’s timeline to climb back to us,” Rasp said. “Some of us at least do indeed get to where we’re going!”
Karn smiled with her usual fixed contentment and glazed eyes. Olmy was beginning not to like this hyper-intelligent twin.
Plass moved forward, hands clenched as if she would hit the figure. “I don’t recognize you,” she said. “Who are you?
“I see only one of you clearly.” The young woman pointed at Olmy. “The others are like clouds of insects.”
“Have the Jarts taken over the Redoubt?” Rasp asked. The image did not answer, so Olmy echoed the question.
“They are alone in the Redoubt. That is sufficient. I can describe the situation as it will be when you arrive. There is a large groove or valley in the Way, with the Redoubt forming a series of bands of intensely ranked probabilities within the groove. The Redoubt has grown to immense proportions, in time, all possibilities realized. My prior self has lived more than any cardinal number of lives. Still lives them. The Redoubt sheds us as you shed skin.”
“Tell us about the gate,” Karn requested, sidling closer to the visitor. “What’s happened there? What state is it in?” Again, Olmy relayed the question. The woman watched him through a flux of discomforting intensity.
“The gate has become those who opened it. There is an immense head of Issa Danna on the western boundary of the gate, watching over the land. We do not know what it does, or what it means.”
Plass made a small choking sound and covered her mouth with her hand, eyes wide.
“Some tried to escape. It made them into living mountains, carpeted with fingers, or forests filled with fog and clinging blue shadow. Some waft through the air as vapors that change whoever encounters them. We’ve learned. We don’t go outside, none for thousands of years …”
Rasp and Karn now flanked the visitor, studying her with catlike focus.
“Then how can you leave, then return to us?” Olmy asked.
The young woman frowned and held up her hands. “It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t know. I am so lonely.”
Then she was gone. Plass, Rasp and Karn, and Olmy stood facing each other through empty air.
Olmy startled, suddenly drawn back to the last time he had seen a ghost vanish—the partial of Neya Taur Rinn.
Plass let out her breath with a shudder. “It is always the same,” she said. “My husband says he’s lonely. He’s going to find a place where he won’t be lonely. But there are no such places!”
Karn turned to Rasp. “A false vision, a deception?” she asked her twin.
“There are no deceptions where we are going,” Plass said, and relaxed her hands, rubbed them.
Karn made a face out of her sight.
“No one knows what happened to the gate opened at the Redoubt,” Rasp said, turning away from her own session with the records. Since the appearance of the female specter, the twins had spent most of their time in the pilot cabin. Olmy’s presence seemed to afford them some comfort. “None of the masters can even guess.”
Karn sighed, whether in sympathy or shame, Olmy could not tell.
“Can either of you make a guess?” Olmy asked.
Plass floated at the front of the common space around the pale violet bulkhead, arms folded, having found some sort of calm but not looking in the least hopeful.
“A gate is opened on the floor of the Way,” Rasp said flatly, as if reciting an elementary lesson. “That is a constraint in the local continuum of the Way. Four point gates are possible in each ring position. When four are opened, they are supposed to always cling to the wall of the Way. In practice, however, small gates have been known to rise above the floor. They are always closed immediately.”
“What’s that got to do with my question?” Olmy asked.
“Oh, nothing, really!” Rasp said, waving her hand in exasperation.
“Perhaps it does,” Karn said, for the moment playing the role of thoughtful one. “Perhaps it’s deeply connected.”
“Oh, all right, then,” Rasp said, and
squinched up her face. “What I might have been implying is this: if Issa Danna’s gate somehow lifted free of the floor, the wall of the Way, then its constraints might have changed. A free gate can adversely affect local world-lines. Something can enter and leave from any angle. In conditioning we are made to understand that the world-lines of all transported objects passing through such a free gate actually shiver for several years backward. Waves of probability retrograde.”
“How many actually went through the gate?” Olmy asked.
“My husband never did,” Plass said, pulling herself into the hatchway. “Issa Danna and his entourage did, however. Maybe others, after the lesion formed … against their will.”
“But you didn’t recognize this woman,” Olmy said.
“No,” Plass said.
“Was she extinguished when the gate became a lesion?” Olmy continued. “Was her world-line wiped clean in our domain?”
“My head hurts,” Rasp said.
“I think you might be right,” Karn said. “It makes sense, in a frightening sort of way. She is suspended … And so we have no record of her existence.”
“But the line still exists,” Rasp said. “It echoes back in time even in places where her record has ended.”
“No,” Plass said, shaking her head.
“Why?” Rasp asked.
“She mentioned an allthing.”
“I didn’t hear that,” Rasp said.
“Neither did I,” Olmy said.
Plass gripped her elbow and squeezed her arms tight around her, pulling her shoulder forward. “We heard different words.” She pointed at Olmy. “But he’s the only one she really saw.”
“It looked at you, too,” Rasp said. “Just once.”
“An allthing was an ancient Nordic governmental meeting,” Olmy said, reading from the flawship command entry display, where he had called for a definition.
“That’s not what she meant,” Plass said. “My husband used another phrase in the same way. He referred to the Final Mind of the domain. Maybe they mean the same thing.”
“It was just an echo,” Rasp said. “We all heard it differently. We all interacted with it differently depending on … Whatever. That means more than likely it carried random information from a future we’ll never reach. It’s a ghost that merely babbles … like your husband, perhaps.”
