by Greg Bear
Plass showed him how the open vehicle worked. “It has its own pilot, makes a field around the passenger compartment.”
“It looks familiar enough,” Olmy said.
Plass sat next to Olmy and placed her hand on a control bar. “My husband and I used to tend our plot out there … flowers, herbs, vegetables. We’d drive one of these for a few hundred meters, outside the work zone, to where the materials team had spread soil brought through the first gate.”
Olmy sat in the vehicle. It announced it was drawing a charge in case it would be needed. It then added, in a thin voice, “Will this journey last more than a few hours? I can arrange with the station master for—”
“No,” Olmy said. “No need.” He turned to Plass. “Time to put on a suit.”
Plass stepped out of the car and nervously smoothed her hands down her hips. “I’m staying here. I can’t bring myself to go out there again.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t see how you’ll survive.”
“It looks very chancy,” Olmy admitted.
“Why can’t they open a ring gate from here?”
“Rasp and Karn say they have to be within five hundred meters of the lesion. About where the other clavicle is now.”
“Do you know what my husband was, professionally? Before we came here?”
“No.”
“A neurologist. He came along to study the effects of our experiment on the researchers. There was some thought our minds would be enhanced by contact with the ordered domain. They were all very optimistic.” She put her hand on Olmy’s shoulder. “We had faith. Enoch still believes what they told her, doesn’t she?”
Olmy nodded. “May I make one last request?”
“Of course,” Plass said.
“Enoch promised us she would open a way through the demarcation and let us through. She claimed we couldn’t do anything out there but be taken in by the allthing, anyway …”
Plass smiled. “I’ll watch her, make sure the fields are open long enough for you to go through. The guild was very clever, sending you and the twins, you know.”
“Why?”
“You’re all very deceptive. You all seem to be failures.” Plass clenched his shoulder, then turned and left as Rasp and Karn entered the storage chamber. The twins watched her go in silence. They carried their clavicles and had already put on their pressure suits, which had adjusted to tightly fit their small frames.
“We’ve always made her uncomfortable,” Rasp said. “Maybe I don’t blame her.”
Karn regarded Olmy with deep black eyes. “You haven’t met a ghost of yourself, have you?”
“I haven’t,” Olmy said.
“Neither have we. And that’s significant. We’re never going to reach the allthing. It’s never going to get us.”
7
They cursed the opening of the Way and the change of the Thistledown’s mission. They assassinated the Way’s creator, Konrad Korzenowski. For centuries they maintained a fierce opposition, largely underground, but with connections to the Naderites in power. In any given year there might be only four or five active members of this most radical sect, the rest presuming to lead normal lives; but the chain was maintained. All this because their original leader had a vision of the Way as an easy route to infinite hells.
—Lives of the Opposition, Anonymous, Journey Year 475
The three rode the tiny wheeled vehicle over a stretch of bare Way floor, a deeply tarnished copper-bronze colored surface of no substance whatsoever, and no friction at this point. They kept their course with little jets of air expelled from the sides of the car, until they reached a broad low island of glassy materials, just before the boundary markers that warned they were coming to the demarcation.
As agreed, the traction lines switched to low power, and an opening appeared directly ahead of them—a clarified darkness in the pale green field. This relieved Olmy somewhat; he had had some doubts that Enoch would cooperate, or that Plass could compel her. The vehicle rolled through. They crossed the defenses.
Behind them, the fields went up again.
Now the floor of the Way was covered with sandy soil. The autopilot switched off the air jets and let the vehicle roll for another twenty meters.
The pressure suits were already becoming uncomfortable; they were old, and while they did their best to fit, their workings were in less than ideal condition. Still, they would last several weeks, recycling gases and liquids and complex molecules, rehydrating the body through arterial inserts and in the same fashion providing a minimal diet.
Olmy doubted the suits would be needed for more than a few more hours.
The twins ignored their discomfort and focused their attention on the lesion. Outside the pyramid, the lesion seemed to fill the sky, and in a few kilometers it would be almost directly overhead. From this angle, the hairlike swirls of spinning world-lines already took on a shimmering reflective quality, like bands sliced from a wind-ruffled lake; their passage sang in Olmy’s skull, more through his teeth than through his ears.
The full character of the Night Land came on gradually, beginning with a black, gritty, loose scrabble beneath the vehicle’s tires. Olmy’s suit readout, shining directly into his left eye, showed a decrease in air pressure of a few millibars beyond the demarcation. The temperature remained steady, just above zero degrees Celsius.
They turned west, to their left as they faced north down the Way, and came upon the path Olmy had seen from the peak of the pyramid. Plass had identified it as the road used by vehicles carrying material from the first gate Enoch had opened. It had also been the path to Plass’s garden, the one she had shared with her husband. Within a few minutes, about three kilometers from the Redoubt, passing over the rise that had blocked his view, they came across the garden’s remains.
The relief here was very low, but the rise of some fifty meters had been sufficient to hide what must have been among the earliest attempts at elaboration. Olmy was not yet sure he believed in the allthing, but what had happened in the garden, and in the rest of the Night Land, made any disagreement moot. The trees in the southwest corner of the orchard had spread out low to the ground, and glowed now with a galaxy of sparks, much like the body of Number 2, their silhouettes flickering like frames in a child’s flipbook. The rest of the orchard had simply turned to glittering ash.
In the center, however, rose a mound of gnarled brown shot through with vivid reds and greens, and in the middle of this mound, facing almost due south, not looking at anything in particular, was a face some three meters in height, its skin the color of green wood, with several broad cracks running from crown to chin. The face did not move or exhibit any sign of life.
Puffs of dust rose from the ash, tiny little explosions from within this mixture of realities. The ash quickly writhed and filled in to erase the newly-formed craters. It seemed to have some purpose of its own, as did everything else in the garden but the face.
Ruin and elaboration; one form of life extinguished, another imbued.
“Early,” Karn said, looking to their right as a sprawl of shining dark green leaves stretched, expanded, and braided into eye-twisting knots. “Didn’t know what it was dealing with.”
“Doesn’t look like it ever did,” Olmy said, realizing she was speaking as if some central director actually did exist.
Rasp set her sister straight. “Geometry is the living tissue of reality. We’ve seen textbook studies of gates gone wrong. Mix constants and you get a—”
“We’ve sworn not to discuss the failures,” Karn said, but without any strength.
“We are being driven through the worst failure of all,” Rasp said. “Mixed constants and skewed metrics can explain all of this.”
Karn shrugged. Olmy thought that perhaps it did not matter; perhaps Rasp and Karn and Plass did not really disagree, merely described t
he same thing in different ways. What they were seeing up close was not random rearrangement; it had a demented, even a vicious quality, that suggested purpose.
Above the rows of flip-book trees and the living layers of ash stretched a dead and twisted sky. From the hideous black chancre, with its sullen ring of congealed red, depended curtains of rushing darkness that swept the Night Land like rain beneath a moving front.
“Mother’s hair,” Karn said, and clutched her clavicle tightly in white-knuckled hands.
“She’s playing with us,” Rasp said. “Bending over us, waving her hair over our crib. We reach up to grab and she pulls away.”
“She laughs,” Karn said.
“Then she gives us to the—”
Rasp did not have time to finish. The vehicle swerved abruptly with a small squeak before a sudden chasm that had not been there an instant before. Out of the chasm leaped white shapes, humanlike but doughy and featureless—fungal. They seemed to be both expelled and to climb out, and they lay on the sandy black-streaked ground for a moment, as if recovering from their birth. Then they rose to loose and wobbling feet and ran with speed and even grace over the irregular landscape to the trees, which they began to uproot. These were the laborers Olmy had seen from the pyramid. They paid no attention to the intruders.
The chasm closed, and Olmy instructed the car to continue.
“Is that what we’ll become?” Karn asked.
“Each of us will become many of them,” Rasp said.
“Such a relief to know!” Karn said sardonically.
The rotating shadows ahead gave the ground a blurred and frantic aspect, like unfocused time-lapse photography. Only the major landmarks stood unchanged by the sweeping curtains of revision: the Watcher, pale beam lancing out from its unblinking eye, the Castle with its unseen giant occupant, and the obelisk with its scaffold and hordes of white figures working directly beneath the lesion.
Olmy ordered the vehicle to stop, but Rasp grabbed his hand. “Farther,” she said. “We can’t do anything here.”
Olmy threw back his head, then grimaced like a monkey in the oldest forest of all, baring his teeth at this measureless madness.
“Farther!” Karn insisted. The car rolled on, jolting over the regular ridges some or other force had pushed up in the sand.
Above the constant sizzle of rearranged world-lines, like a symphony of scrubbing and tapping brooms, came more sounds. If a burning forest could sing its pain, Olmy thought, it would be like the rising wail that escaped from the tower and the Castle. Thousands of white figures made thousands of different sounds, as if trying to talk to each other but not succeeding. Mock speech, sing-song pidgin nonsense, attempts to communicate emotions and thoughts they could not truly have; protests at being jabbed and pulled and jiggled along the scaffolding of the tower, over the uneven ground, like puppets directed by something trying to mock any process of construction.
Olmy’s body had up to this moment sent him a steady bloodwash of fear. He had controlled this emotion as well as he could, but never ignored it; that would have been senseless and wrong, for fear was what told him he came from a world that made sense, that held together and was consistent, that worked.
Yet fear was not enough, could not be an adequate response to what they were seeing. This was a threat beyond anything the body had been designed to experience. Had he allowed himself to scream, he could not have screamed loudly enough.
The Death we all know, Olmy told himself, is an end to something real; death here would be worse than nightmare, worse than the hell one imagines for one’s enemies and unbelievers.
“I know,” Karn said, and her hands shook on the clavicle.
“What do you know?” Rasp asked.
“Every meter, ever second, every dimension has its own mind here,” Karn said. “Space and time are arguing, fighting.”
Rasp disagreed violently. “There are no minds, no minds at all!” she insisted.
Light itself began to waver and change as they came closer to the tower. Olmy could see the face of oncoming events before they occurred, like waves on a beach, rushing over the land, impatient to reach their destinations, their observers, before all surprise had been lost.
They now entered the fringes of shadow. The revisions of their surroundings felt like deep drumming pulses. Caught directly in a shadow, Olmy felt a sudden rub of excitement. He saw flashes of colors, felt a spectrum of unfamiliar emotions that threatened to cancel out his fear. He looked to his left, into the counterclockwise sweep, anticipating each front of darkness, leaning toward it. Ecstasy, followed by a buzz of exhilaration, suddenly a spasm of brilliance—all the while the back of his head crisping and glowing and sparking. He could see into the back of his brain, down to the working foundations of every thought; where symbols with no present meaning are painted and arrayed on long tables, then jerked and jostled until they become emotions and memories and words.
“Like opening a gate!” Karn shouted, seeing Olmy’s expression. “Much worse. Dangerous! Very dangerous!”
“Don’t ignore it, don’t suppress,” Rasp told him. “Just pay attention to what’s right before you. That’s what they teach us when we open a gate!”
“These aren’t gates!” Olmy shouted above the hideous symphony of brooms. The twins’ heads jerked and vibrated as he spoke.
“They are!” Rasp said. “Little gates into directly adjacent worlds. They’re trying to escape their neighboring realities, to split away, but the lesion gathers them, holds them. They flow back behind us, along our world-lines.”
“Back to the beginning!” Karn said.
“Back to our birth!” Rasp said.
“Here!” Karn said, and Olmy brought the car to a stop. The two assistants, little more than girls, with pale faces and wide eyes and serious expressions climbed down from the open cab and marched resolutely across the rippled sand, leaning into the pressure of other streams of reality. Their clothes changed color, their hair changed its arrangement, even their skin changed color, but they marched until the clavicles seemed to lift of their own will.
Rasp and Karn faced each other.
Olmy told himself, with whatever was left of his mind, that they were now going to attempt a cirque, a ring gate, that would bring all this to a meeting with the flaw. Within the flaw lay the peace of incommensurable contradictions, pure and purifying. Within the flaw this madness would burn to less than nothing, to paradoxes that would cancel and expunge.
He did not think they would have time to escape, even if the shrinking of the Way was less than instantaneous.
He stood on the seat of the car for a moment, watching the twins, admiring them. Enoch underestimated them. As have I. This is what Ry Ornis wanted, why he chose them.
He hunched his shoulders: something coming. Before he could duck or jump aside, Olmy was caught between two folds of shadow, like a bug snatched between fingers, and lifted bodily from the car. He twisted his neck and looked back to see a fuzzy image of the car, the twins raising their clavicles, the rippled and streaked sand. The car seemed to vibrate, the tire tracks rippling behind it like snakes; and for a long moment, the twins and the car were not visible at all, as if they had never been.
Olmy’s thoughts raced and his body shrieked with joy. Every nerve shivered, and all his memories stood out together in sharp relief, with different selves viewing them all at once. He could not distinguish between present and future; all were just parts of different memories. His reference point had blurred to where his life was a flat field, and within that field swam myriad possibilities. What would happen, what had happened, became indistinguishable from the unchosen and unlived moments that could happen.
This blurring of his world-line rushed backward. He felt he could sidle across fates into what was fixed and unfix it, free his past to be all possible, all potential, once more. But the diffusion, the smearin
g and blending of the chalked line of his life, came up against the moment of his resurrection, the abrupt shift from Lamarckia—
And could not go any further. Dammed, the tide of his life spilled out in all directions. He cried out in surprise and a kind of pain he had never known before.
Olmy hung suspended beneath the dark eye, spinning slowly, all things above and below magnified or made minute depending on his angle. The pain passed. Perhaps it had never been. He felt as if his head had become a tiny but all-seeing camera obscura.
There was a past in which Ry Ornis accompanied the twins; he saw them working together near a very different vehicle, tractor rather than small car, to make the cirque. Already they had forced the Way to extrude a well through the sand. A cupola floated over the well, brazen and smooth, reflecting in golden hues the flaw, the lesion.
Olmy turned his head a fraction of a centimeter and once more saw only the twins, but this time dead, lying mangled beside the car, their clavicles flaring and burning. Another degree or two, and they were resurrected, still working. Ry Ornis was with them again.
A memory: Ry Ornis had traveled with them in the flawship. How could Olmy have lost this basic fact?
He rotated again, this time around a new and unfamiliar dimension, and felt the Way simply cease to exist, and his own life with it. From this dark and soundless eventuality, he turned with a bitter, acrid wrench and found a very narrow course through the gripping shadows, a course illumined by half-forgotten emotions that had been plucked like flowers, arranged like silent speech.
He had been carried to the other side of the lesion, looking north down the endless throat of the Way. The gripping baleen of shadow from the whale’s mouth of the lesion, the driving cilia whisking him between world-lines, drove him under and over a complex surface through which he could see a deep mountainous valley, its floor smooth and vitreous like obsidian. Black glass, reflecting the lesion, the flaw behind the lesion, scudding layers of mist. The cilia that controlled Olmy’s orientation let him drop to a few meters above the vitreous black floor.
