by Greg Bear
He could not.
Just before the tallest hills stood growths like the tangled roots of upended trees, leafless, barren, dozens of meters high and stretching in ugly, twisted forests several kilometers across. A kind of pathway reached from the northern wall of the Redoubt, through the demarcation, into a tortured terrain of what looked like huge strands of melted and drawn glass, and to the east of the castle. The path continued to drop behind a closer hill, and he could not see where it terminated.
The atmosphere around the Redoubt was remarkably clear, though columns of twisted mist rose around the Night Land. Before a wall of blue haze at some fifty kilometers distance, everything stood out with complete clarity.
Olmy turned away at a knock on his door. Plass entered, wearing a look of contentment that seemed ready to burst into enthusiasm. “Now do you doubt me?”
“I doubt everything,” Olmy said. “I’d just as soon believe we’ve been captured and are being fed delusions.”
“Do you think that’s what’s happened?” Plass asked, eyes narrowing as if she had been insulted.
“No,” Olmy said. “I’ve experienced some pretty good delusions in training. This is real, whatever that means.”
“I must admit the little twins are busy,” Plass said, sitting on a small chair near the table. These and a small mattress on the floor were the only items of furniture in the room. “They’re talking to anybody who knows anything about Enoch’s gate openers. I don’t think you can talk to the same person twice here in an hour—unless it’s Enoch.”
Olmy nodded. He was still digesting Enoch’s claim that the Office of Way Maintenance had sent an expedition with secret orders … In collusion with the opener’s guild. Perhaps the twins knew more than he did, or Plass. “Did you ever hear anything about an official mission?” he asked.
Plass did not answer for a moment. “Not in so many words. Not ‘official.’ But perhaps not without strong support from Way Maintenance. We never did believe we were outlaws.”
“You’ve both talked about completion. Was that mentioned when you joined the group?”
“Only in passing. A theory.”
Olmy turned back to the window. “There’s a camera obscura near the top of the pyramid. I’d like to look over everything around us, try to make sense of our position.”
“Useless,” Plass said. “I’d wait for a visitation first.”
“More ghosts?”
Plass shrugged her shoulders and stretched out her legs, rubbing her knees.
“I haven’t been visited,” Olmy said.
“It will happen,” Plass said flatly. She appeared to be hiding something, something that worried her. “I wouldn’t look forward to it. But then, there’s nothing you can do to prepare.”
Olmy laughed, but the laugh sounded hollow. He felt as if he were slowly coming unraveled, like Enoch’s bundle of relived world-lines. “How would I know if I’ve seen a ghost?” he asked. “Maybe I have—on Thistledown. Maybe they’re around us all the time, but don’t reveal themselves.”
Plass looked to one side, then said, with an effort, her voice half-choking, “I’ve met my own ghost.”
“You didn’t mention that before.”
“It came to visit me the night after we left Thistledown. It told me we would reach the pyramid.”
Olmy held back another laugh, afraid it might get loose and never stop. “I’ve never seen a ghost of myself. What’s that experience like?”
Crazy to even ask.
“We do things differently, then. I seemed to be working backward from some experience with the allthing. A ghost lets you remember the future, or some alternate of the future. Maybe in time I’ll be told what the allthing will do to me.”
Olmy considered this in silence. Plass’s somber gray eyes focused on him, clear, child-like in their perfect gravity. Now he saw the resemblance, the reason why he felt a tug of liking for her. She reminded him of Sheila Ap Nam, his first wife on Lamarckia.
“Your loved ones, friends, colleagues … They will see you, versions of you, if you meet the allthing.” Plass said. “Remembrance. A kind of immortality.” She looked down and clutched her arms. “No other intelligent species we’ve encountered has a history of myths about spirits. No experience with ghosts. You know that? We’re unique. Alone. Except perhaps the Jarts … and we don’t know much about them, do we?”
Olmy needed to get rid of this topic. “What are the twins planning?”
“They seem to regard all of this as a challenging game. Who knows? They’re working. It’s even possible they’ll think of something. I’ve come to admire them, in a way. A limited way.”
Olmy aimed the binoculars toward the Watcher, its single glowing eye forever turned toward the Redoubt. He felt a bone-deep revulsion and hatred, mixed with a desiccating chill. His tongue seemed frosted. Perversely, the flesh behind his eyes felt hot and moist. His neck hair pricked.
“There’s—” he began, but then flinched and blinked. A curtain of shadow passed through the few centimeters between him and the window. He backed off with a groan and tried to push something away, but the curtain would not be touched. It whirled around him, swept before Plass, who tracked it calmly, and then seemed to press against and slip through the opposite wall.
The warmth behind his eyes felt hot as steam.
“I knew it!” he said hoarsely. “I could feel it coming! Something about to happen.” His hands trembled. He had never reacted so drastically to physical danger.
“That was nothing,” Plass said. “I’ve seen them many times, more since I first came here.”
Olmy’s reaction angered him. “What is it?”
“Not a ghost, not any other version of ourselves, that’s for sure,” she said. “A parasite, maybe, like a flea darting around our world-lines. Harmless, as far as I know. But much more visible here than back on Thistledown.”
Trying to control himself was backfiring. All his instincts rejected what he was experiencing. “I don’t accept any of this!” he shouted. His hands spasmed into fists. “None of it makes sense!”
“I agree,” Plass said, her voice low. “Pity we’re stuck with it. Pity you’re stuck with me. But more pity still that I’m stuck with you. It seems you try to be a rational man, Ser Olmy. My husband was exceptionally rational. The allthing adores rational men.”
6
Rasp and Karn walked with Olmy on the parapet near the peak of the Redoubt. Their work seemed to have sobered them. They still walked like youngsters, Karn or Rasp lagging to peer at something in the Night Land and then scurrying to catch up; but their voices were steady, serious, even a little sad.
“We’ve never experienced anything like the lesion,” Karn said. The huge dark disk, rimmed in bands and flares of red, blotted out the opposite side of the Way. “It’s much more than just a failed gate. It doesn’t stop here, you know.”
“How do you mean?” Olmy asked.
“Something like this influences the entire Way. When the gate got out of control—”
Rasp took Karn’s hand and tugged it in warning.
“What does it matter?” Karn asked, and shook her twin loose. “There can’t be secrets here. If we don’t agree to do something, the allthing will get us soon anyway, and then we’ll be planted out there … bits and pieces of us, like lost and broken toys.”
Rasp dropped back a few steps and folded her arms in pique. Karn continued. “When the lesion formed, gate openers felt it in every new gate. Threads trying to get through, like spider-silk. We can see the world-lines being twirled here … But they bunch up and wind around the Way even where we can’t see them. Master Ry Ornis thought—”
“Enough!” Rasp said, rushing to catch up.
Karn stopped with tears in her eyes and glared over the parapet wall.
“I can guess a few things,” Olmy said
. “What Deirdre Enoch says leaves little enough to imagine. You aren’t failed apprentices, are you?”
Rasp stared at him defiantly.
“No,” Karn said.
Her twin turned and lifted a hand as if to strike her, then dropped it by her side. She drew a short breath, said, “We act like children because of the mathematical conditioning. Too fast. Ry Ornis told us we were needed. He accelerated training. We were the best, but we are too young. It holds us down.”
A sound like hundreds of voices in a bizarre chorus floated over the Night Land, through the field that protected the Redoubt’s atmosphere. The chorus alternately rose and sank through scales, hooting forlornly like apes in a zoo.
“Ry Ornis thought the lesion was bending world-lines even beyond Thistledown,” Karn said. Rasp nodded and held her sister’s hand. “Climbing back along the Thistledown’s worldline … where all our lives bunch together with the lives of our ancestors. Using us as a ladder.”
“Not just us,” Rasp added. The hooting chorus now came from all around the Redoubt. From this side of the pyramid, they could see a slender obelisk the colors of bright moon on an oil slick. The obelisk rose inside an immense scaffold made of parts of bodies, arms and legs strapped together with cords. These limbs were monstrous, however, fully dozens of meters long, and the obelisk had climbed within its scaffolding to at least a kilometer in height, twice as tall as the Redoubt.
The region around the construction crawled with pale tubular bodies, like insect larva, and Olmy decided it was these bodies that were doing most of the singing and hooting.
“Right,” Karn agreed. “Not just us. Using the branching lines of all the matter, all the particles in Thistledown and the Way.”
“Who knows how far it’s reached?” Rasp asked.
“What can it do?” Olmy asked.
“We don’t know,” Karn said.
“What can we do?”
“Oh, we can close down the lesion, if we act quickly,” Rasp said with a broken smile. “That shouldn’t be too difficult.”
“It’s actually growing smaller,” Karn said. “We can create a ring gate from here … A cirque. Cinch off the Way. The Way will shrink back towards the source, the maintenance machinery in the sixth chamber, very quickly—a million kilometers a day. We might even be able to escape along the flaw, but—”
“The flaw will act weird if we make a cinch,” Rasp finished.
“Very weird,” Karn agreed. “So we probably won’t get home. We knew that. Ry Ornis prepared us. He told us that much.”
“Besides, if we did go back to Thistledown, who would want us now, the way we are?” Rasp asked. “We’re pretty broken inside.”
The twins paused on the parapet. Olmy watched as they clasped hands and began to hum softly to each other. Their clavicles hung from their shoulders, and the cases tapped as they swayed. Rasp glanced at Olmy, primming her lips.
“Enoch spoke of a plan by the Office of Way Maintenance,” Olmy said. “She claims she was sent here secretly.”
“We know nothing about that,” Karn said guilelessly. “But that might not mean much. I don’t think they would have trusted us.”
“She also said that the allthing has some larger purpose in our own universe,” Olmy continued. “Something that has to be completed, or our existence will be impossible.”
Karn considered this quietly, a finger against her nose, then shook her head. “We heard her, but I don’t see it,” she said. “Maybe she’s trying to justify herself.”
“We do that all the time,” Rasp said. “We understand that sort of thing.”
They had reached the bottom of the stairs leading up to the peak and the camera obscura. Karn climbed two steps at a time, her robe swinging around her ankles, and Rasp followed with more dignity. Olmy stayed near the bottom.
Rasp turned and looked down on him. “Come on,” she said, waving.
Olmy shook his head. “I’ve seen enough. I can’t make sense out of anything out there. I think it’s random—just nonsense.”
“Not at all!” Rasp said, and descended a few steps, beseeching him to join her. “We have to see what happened to the openers’ clavicles, if they’re still out there. It could be important.”
Olmy hunched his shoulders, shook his head like a bull trying to build courage. Then he followed her up the steps.
The camera obscura was a spherical all-focal lens, its principle not unlike that of the ray-tracing binoculars. Mounted on a tripod on the flat platform at the peak of the pyramid, it projected and magnified the Night Land for anyone standing on the platform. Approaching the tripod increased magnification in logarithmic steps, with precise quickness; distances of a few tenths of a centimeter could make objects zoom to alarming proportions. Monitors on the peripheral circle, small spheres on steel poles, rolled in and out with slow grace, tracking the developments in the Night Land and sending their results down to Enoch and the others inside.
Olmy deftly avoided the monitors and walked slowly, with great concentration, around the circle. Karn and Rasp made their own surveys.
Olmy stopped and drew back to take in the Watcher’s immense eye. The angle of the hairless brow, the droop of the upper lid, gave it a sad and corpse-like lassitude, but the eye still moved in small arcs, and from this perspective, there was no doubt it was observing the Redoubt. Olmy felt that it saw him, knew him; had he ever met the opener, before his mission to Lamarckia, perhaps by accident? Was there some residual memory of Olmy in that immense head? Olmy thought such a connection might be very dangerous.
“The Night Land changes every hour, sometimes small changes, sometimes massive,” Enoch said, walking slowly and deliberately up the steps behind them. She stopped outside the camera’s circle. “It tracks our every particle. It’s patient.”
“Does it fear us?” Olmy asked.
“No fear. We haven’t even begun to be played with.”
“That out there is not elaboration—it’s pointless madness.”
“I thought so myself,” Enoch said. “Now I see a pattern. The longer I’m here, the more I sympathize with the allthing. Do you understand what I told you earlier? It recognizes us, Ser Olmy. It sees its own work in us, a cycle waiting to be completed.”
Rasp held a spot within the circle and motioned for Karn to join her. Together, they peered at something in complete absorption, ignoring Enoch.
Olmy could not ignore her, however. He needed to resolve this question. “The Office of Way Maintenance sent you here to confirm that?”
“Not in so many words, but … Yes. We know that our own domain, our home universe outside the Way, should have been born barren, empty. Something quickened it, fed it with the necessary geometric nutrients. Some of us thought that would only be possible if the early universe made a connection with a domain of very different properties. I told Ry Ornis that such a quickening need not have happened at the beginning. We could do it now. We had the Way … We could perform the completion. There was such a feeling of power and justification within the guild. I encouraged it. The connection has been made … And all that, the Night Land, is just a side effect. Pure order flowing back through the Way, through Thistledown, back through time to the beginning. Was it worth it? Did we do what we had planned? I’ll never know conclusively, because we can’t reverse it now … and cease to be.”
“You weren’t sure. You knew this could be dangerous, harm the Way fatally if the Jarts gained an advantage?”
Enoch stared at him for a few seconds, eyes moving from his eyes to his lips, his chest, as if she would measure him. “Yes,” she said. “I knew. Ry Ornis knew. The others did not.”
“They suffered for what you’ve learned,” Olmy said.
Enoch’s gaze steadied and her jaw clenched. “I’ve suffered, too. I’ve learned so very little, Ser Olmy. What I learn repeats itself over and over again
, and it has more to do with arrogance than metaphysics.”
“We’ve found one!” Karn shouted. “There’s a clavicle mounted on top of the green castle. We can pinpoint it!”
Olmy stood where Rasp indicated. At the top of the squat, massive green castle stood a cube, half-hidden behind a mass of root-like growth. On top of the cube, a black pillar about the height of a man supported the unmistakable sphere-and-handles of a clavicle. The sphere was dark, dormant; nothing moved around the pillar or anywhere on the castle roof.
“There’s only one, and it appears to be inactive,” Rasp said. “The lesion is independent.”
Karn spread her arms, wiggling her fingers. A wide smile lit up her face. “We can make a cirque!”
“We can’t do it from here,” Rasp said. “We have to go out there.”
Enoch’s face tensed into a rigid mask. “We haven’t finished,” she said. “The work isn’t done!”
Olmy shook his head. He’d made his decision. “Whoever started this, and for whatever reason, it has to end now. The Nexus orders it.”
“They don’t know!” Enoch cried out.
“We know enough,” Olmy said.
Rasp and Karn held each other’s hand and descended the stairs. Rasp stuck her tongue out at the old woman.
Enoch laughed and lightly slapped her hands on her thighs. “They’re only children! They won’t succeed. What have I to fear from failed apprentices?”
The Night Land’s atmosphere was a thin haze of primordial hydrogen, mixed with carbon dioxide and some small trace of oxygen from the original envelope surrounding the gate. At seven hundred millibars of pressure, and with a temperature just above freezing, they could venture out of the Redoubt in the most basic pressurized worksuits.
Enoch and her remaining, ever-changing people would not help them. Olmy preferred it that way. He walked through the empty corridors of the pyramid’s ground floor and found a small wheeled vehicle that at one time had been used to reach the garden outside the Redoubt—a garden that now lay beyond the demarcation.
