by Greg Bear
Plass stared at the twins, then grabbed for the hatch frame and stubbornly shook her head. “We’re going to hear more about this allthing,” she said. “Deirdre Enoch is still working. Something is still happening there. The Redoubt still exists.”
“Your husband told you this?” Rasp asked with a taunting smile.
“We’ll know when we see our own ghosts,” Plass said, with a kick that sent her flying back to her cabin.
Plass calmly read her Bible in the common area as the ship prepared a meal for her. The twins ate on their own schedule, but Olmy matched his meals to Plass’s, for the simple reason that he liked to talk to the woman, and did not feel comfortable around the twins. There was about Plass the air of a spent force, something falling near the end of its arc from a truly high and noble trajectory.
Plass seemed to enjoy his company in return and asked about his experiences on Lamarckia.
“It was a beautiful world,” he said. “The most beautiful I’ve ever seen.”
“It no longer exists, does it?” Plass said.
“Not as I knew it. It adapted the ways of chlorophyll. Now it’s something quite different, and at any rate, the gate there has collapsed … No one in the Way will ever go there again.”
“A shame,” Plass said. “It seems a great tragedy of being mortal that we can’t go back. My husband, on the other hand … has visited me seven times since I left the Redoubt.” She smiled. “Is it wrong for me to take pleasure in his visits? He isn’t happy—but I’m happier when I can see him, listen to him.” She looked away and hunched her shoulders as if expecting a blow. “He doesn’t, can’t, listen to me.”
Olmy nodded. What did not make sense could at least be politely acknowledged.
“In the Redoubt, he says, nothing is lost. I wonder how he knows? Is he there? Does he watch over them? The tragedy of uncontrolled order is that the past is revised—and revisited—as easily as the future. The last time he returned, he was in great pain. He said a new god had cursed him for being a counter-revolutionary. The Final Mind. He told me that the Eye of the Watcher tracked him throughout all eternity, on all world-lines, and whenever he tried to stand still, he was tortured, made into something different.”
Plass’s face took on a shiny, almost sensual expectancy and she watched for Olmy’s reaction.
“You denied what the twins were saying,” Olmy reminded her. “About echoes along world-lines.”
“They aren’t just echoes. We are our world-lines, Ser Olmy. These ghosts … are really just altered versions of the originals. They have blurred origins. They come from many different futures. But they have a reality, an independence. I feel this … when he speaks to me.”
Olmy revealed his confusion. “I can’t visualize any of that. Order is supposed to be simplicity and peace … Not torture and distortion and coercion. Surely a universe of complete order would be more like heaven, in the Christian sense.” He pointed to the Bible resting lightly in her lap.
Plass shifted and the antique book rose into the air a few centimeters. She reached out to grasp it, then pulled it close again. “Heaven has no permanent change, and certainly no death, as we know death,” she said. “Mortals find that attractive, but they are mistaken. No good thing lasts forever. That sort of existence becomes unbearable. Now imagine a force that demands that something last forever, yet become even more the essence of what it was—a force that will accept nothing less than compliance, but can’t communicate.”
Olmy shook his head. “I can’t.”
“I can’t, either, but that is what my husband describes.” Several seconds passed.
Plass tapped the book rhythmically with her finger.
“How long since he last visited you?” Olmy asked.
“Three weeks. Maybe longer. Things seemed quiet just before they told me I could return to the Redoubt.” She closed her eyes. “I believed what Enoch believed, that order ascends, that it ascends forever. I believed that we are made with flaws, in a universe that was itself born flawed. I thought we would be so much more beautiful when—”
Karn and Rasp tracted forward and hovered beside Plass, who greeted them with a small shiver.
“We have ventured a possible answer to this dilemma,” Karn said.
“Our birth geometry, outside the Way, is determined by a vacuum of infinite potential,” Rasp said, nodding with something like glee. “We are forbidden from tapping that energy, so in our domain, space has a shape, and time has direction and a velocity. In the universe Enoch tapped, the energy of the vacuum is available at all times. Time and space and this energy, this potential, are bunched in a tight little knot of incredible density. That is what your husband must call the Final Mind. That our female visitor re-named the allthing.”
Plass shook her head indifferently.
“How amazing that must be!” Karn said. “A universe where order took hold in the first few nanoseconds after creation, controlling all the fires of the initial expansion, all the shape and constants of existence …”
“I wonder what Enoch would have done with such a domain, if she could have controlled it,” Rasp said, hovering over Plass, peering down on her. Plass made as if to swat a fly, and Rasp tracted out of reach with a broad smile. “Ours is a pale candle indeed by comparison.”
“Everything must tend toward a Final Mind. This force blossoms at the end of Time like a flower pushed up from all events, all lives, all thought. It is the ancestor not just of living creatures, but of all the interactions of matter, space, and time, for all things tend toward this blossom.”
Olmy had often thought about this quote from the notes of Korzenowski. The designer of the Way had put together quite an original cosmology, which he had never tried to spread among his fellows. The original was in Korzenowski’s library, kept as a Public Treasure, but few visited there now.
Olmy moved across to see Rasp and Karn in their cabin while Plass read her Bible in the common area. The twins had arranged projections of geometric art and mathematical figures around the room, brightly colored and disorienting.
He asked them whether they believed an allthing, a perfectly ordered mind, could exist.
“Goodness, no!” Karn said, giggling.
“You mean, Godness, no!” Rasp added. “Not even if we believed in it, which we don’t. Energy and impulse, yes; final, perhaps. Mind, no!”
“Whatever you call it—in the lesion, it may already exist, and it’s different?”
“Of course it would exist! Not as a mind, that’s all. Mind is impossible without neural qualities—communication between separate nodes that either contradict or confirm. If we think correctly, a domain of order would reach completion within the first few nanoseconds of existence, freezing everything. It would grasp and control all the energy of its beginning moment, work through all possible variations in an instant—become a monobloc, still and perfected, timeless. Not eternal, but eviternal, frozen forever. Utterly timeless.”
“Our universe, our domain, could spin on for many billions or even trillions more years,” Karn continued. “In our universe, there could very well be a Final Mind, the summing up of all neural processes throughout all time. But Deirdre Enoch found an abomination. If it were a mind, think of it! Instantly creating all things, never being contradicted, never knowing. Nothing has ever frustrated it, stopped it, trained or tamed it. It would be as immature as a newborn baby, and as sophisticated—”
“And ingenious,” Rasp chimed in.
“—As the very devil,” Karn finished.
“Please,” Rasp finished, her voice suddenly quiet. “Even if such a thing is possible, let it not be a mind.”
For the past million kilometers, they had passed over a scourged, scrubbed segment of the Way. In driving back the Jarts from their strongholds, tens of thousands of Way defenders had died. The Way had been altered by the released energies of
the battle and still glowed slightly, shot through with pulsing curls and rays, while the flaw in this region transported them with a barely noticeable roughness. The flawship could compensate some, but even with this compensation, they had to reduce their speed to a few thousand kilometers an hour.
The Redoubt lay less than five thousand kilometers ahead. Rasp and Karn removed their clavicles from their boxes and tried as best they could to interpret the state of the Way as they approached. Evidence of immense constructions lined the wall of the Way: highways, bands connecting what might have been linked gates; yet there were no gates. The structures had been leveled to thin lanes of rubble, like lines of powder.
Olmy shook his head, dismayed. “Nothing is the way it was reported to be just a few weeks ago.”
“I detect something unusual, too,” Rasp said. Karn agreed. “Something related to the Jart offensive …”
“Something we weren’t told about?” Plass wondered. “A colony that failed?”
“Ours, or Jart?” Olmy asked.
“Neither,” Karn said, looking up from her clavicle. She lifted the device, a small fist-sized sphere mounted on two handles, and rotated the display for Olmy and Plass to see. Olmy had watched gate openers perform before, and knew the workings of the display well enough—though he could never operate a clavicle. “There have never been gates opened here. This is all sham.”
“A decoy,” Plass said.
“Worse,” Rasp said. “The gate at the Redoubt is twisting probabilities, sweeping world-lines within the Way to such an extreme … The residue of realities that never were and never could be are being deposited.”
“Murmurs in the Way’s sleep, nightmares in our unhistory,” Karn said. For once, the twins seemed completely subdued, even disturbed. “I don’t see how we can function if we’re incorporated into such a sweep.”
“So what is this?” Olmy asked, pointing to the smears of destroyed highways, cities, bands between the ghosts of gates.
“A bad future,” Karn said. “Maybe what will happen if we fail.”
“But these patterns aren’t like human construction,” Plass observed. “No human city planner would lay out such a map. Nor does it match anything we know about the Jarts.”
Olmy looked more closely, frowning in concentration. “If someone else had created the Way,” he said, “maybe this would be their ruins, the rubble of their failure.”
Karn gave a nervous laugh. “Wonderful!” she said. “All we could have hoped for! If we open a gate here, what could possibly happen?”
Plass grabbed Olmy’s arm. “Put it in our transmitted record. Tell the Hexamon this part of the Way must be forbidden. No gates should be opened here, ever!”
“Why not?” Karn said. “Think what could be learned. The new domains!”
“I agree with Ser Plass,” Rasp said. “It’s possible there are worse alternatives than finding a universe of pure order.” She let go of her clavicle and grabbed her head. “Even touching our instruments here causes pain. We are useless … any gate we open would consume us more quickly than the gate at the Redoubt! You must agree, sister!”
Karn was stubborn. “I don’t see it,” she said. “I simply don’t. I think this could be very interesting. Fascinating, even.”
Plass sighed. “This is the box that Konrad Korzenowski has opened for us,” she said for Olmy’s benefit. “Spoiled genius children drawn to evil like insects to a corpse.”
“I thought evil was related to disorder,” Olmy said.
“Already, you know better,” Plass rejoined.
Rasp turned her eyes on Olmy and Plass, eyes narrow and full of uncomfortable speculation.
Olmy reached out and grasped Rasp’s clavicle to keep it from bumping into the flawship bulkheads. Karn took charge of the instrument indignantly and thrust it back at her sister. “You forget your responsibility,” she chided. “We can fear this mission, or we can engage it with joy and spirit,” she said. “Cowering does none of us any good.”
“You’re right, sister, about that at least,” Rasp said. She returned her clavicle to its box and straightened her clothing, then used a cloth to wipe her face. “We are, after all, going to a place where we have always gone, and always will go.”
“It’s what happens when we get there that is always changing,” Karn said.
Plass’s face turned livid with her disagreement. “My husband never returns the same way, in the same condition,” she said. “How many hells does he experience?”
“One for each of him,” Rasp said. “Only one. It is different husbands who return.”
Though there had never been such this far along the Way, Olmy saw the scattered wreckage of Jart fortifications, demolished, dead and empty. Beyond them lay a region where the Way was covered with winding black and red bands of sand, an immense serpentine desert; also unknown.
Olmy felt a spark of something reviving, if not a wish for life, then an appreciation of what extraordinary sights his life had brought him. On Lamarckia, he had seen the most extraordinary variations on biology. Here, near the Redoubt, it was reality itself subject to its own flux, its own denial.
Plass was transfixed. “The next visitors, if any, will see something completely different,” she said. “We’ve been caught up in a sweeping world-line of the Way, not necessarily our own.”
“I would never have believed it possible,” Rasp said, and Karn reluctantly agreed. “This is not the physics we were taught.”
“It can make any physics it wishes,” Plass said. “Any reality. It has all the energy it needs. And it’s captured, analyzed, and transformed any number of human minds, from any number of universes, to teach it our variations.”
“Yet it knows only unity,” Karn said, taking hold of Plass’s shoulder.
The older woman did not seem to mind. “It knows no will stronger than its own,” she said. “Yet it may divide its will into illusory units. If it is a mind, and if it is a tyrant …” Plass pointed to the winding sands, stretching for thousands of kilometers beneath them. “This is a moment of calm, of steady concentration. If my memories are correct, if what my husband’s returning self … selves … tell me, is correct, it is usually much more frantic. Much more inventive. And much more liberated from any sort of self-control.”
Karn made a sour face and placed her hands on the bars of her clavicle. She rubbed the grips as her face tensed with concentration. “I feel it. There is still a lesion …”
Rasp took hold of her own instrument and went into her own state. “It is still there,” she agreed. “And it is bad. It floats above the Way, very near the flaw. From below, it must look like some sort of bale star …”
They passed through a fine bluish mist that rose from the northern end of the desert. The flawship made a faint belling sound. The mist passed behind.
“There,” Plass said. “No mistaking it!”
The gate pushed through the Way by Issa Danna had expanded and risen above the floor, just as Rasp and Karn had felt in their instruments. Now, at a distance of a hundred kilometers, they could see the spherical lesion clearly. It did indeed resemble a dark sun—or a chancre. A glow of pigeon’s blood flicked around it, the red of rubies and enchantment.
The black center, less than the width of a fingertip at this distance, perversely seemed to fill Olmy’s field of vision. His young body decided it was time to be very reluctant to proceed. He swallowed and brought this fear under control, biting his cheek until blood flowed.
The flawship lurched. Its voice told Olmy, “We have received an instructional beacon. There is a place held by humans less than ten kilometers away. They say they will guide us to safety.”
“It’s still there!” Plass said.
They all looked down through the flawship’s transparent nose, away from the lurid pink of the flaw, through layers of blue and green haze wrapped around th
e Way—down twenty-five kilometers to a single dark, gleaming steel point in the center of a rough, rolling land.
The Redoubt lay in the shadow of the lesion, surrounded by a penumbral twilight suffused with the flickering ruby of the lesion’s halo.
“I can feel the whipping hairs of other world-lines,” Karn and Rasp said together. Olmy glanced back and saw their clavicles touching sphere to sphere. The spheres crackled and clacked. Karn twisted her instrument toward Olmy so that he could see the display. A long list of domain “constants”—pi, Planck’s constant, others—varied with a regular humming in the flawship hull. “Nothing is stable out there!”
Olmy glanced at the message sent from the Redoubt. It provided navigation instructions for their flawship’s landing craft; how to disengage from the flawship, descend, undergo examination, and be taken into the pyramid. The message concluded, “We will determine whether you are illusions or aberrations. If you are from our origin, we will welcome you. It is too late to return now. Abandon your flawship before it approaches any closer to the allthing. Whoever sent you has committed you to our own endless imprisonment.”
The ghastly light cast a fitful, abbatoir glow on their faces.
“Cheerful enough,” Olmy said.
“We have always gone there,” Rasp said quietly.
“I have to agree,” Plass said. “We have no other place to go.”
They tracted aft to the lander’s hatch and climbed into the small, arrowhead-shaped craft. Its interior welcomed them by fitting to their forms, providing couches, instruments, tailored to their bodies. Plass sat beside Olmy in the cockpit, Rasp and Karn directly behind them.
Olmy disengaged from the flawship and locked the lander onto the pyramid’s beacon. They dropped from the flawship.
The landscape steadily grew in the broad cockpit window.
Plass’s face crumpled like a child’s about to break into tears. “Star, fate and pneuma, be kind. There!” She pointed in helpless dread, equally horrified and fascinated “I see the opener’s head.”
