by Greg Bear
The huge hangar was filled with a slightly acrid smell which Anna couldn’t quite identify. She guessed it was a mix of the smell of the sea and the ship, burned and scored and decayed.
“I read in the guidebook,” Kawashita said. “These ships were raised two centuries ago, during a period of intense interest in Japanese military history. Great expense, great effort. Opening the tomb of the sea.”
They took a moving walkway through the first hangar, into the second, which contained a large battleship in even worse condition. Scaffolding hinted at half-hearted restoration work. “This is the Yamato,” Kawashita said. “She was sunk at the end of the Second World War. At one time, before his death, she was the flagship of Admiral Yamamoto. It was here that he heard about our defeat at Midway, and became sick with fear and rage.”
The third hangar contained a collection of small ships and submarines. They passed through quickly to the fourth.
“Another aircraft carrier,” Anna said. It was smaller than the Akagi. Not much restoration had been completed. The hull was broken into three sections, held together by special lift fields. The island superstructure was on the port side, and a huge chunk of skeletal metal had been lifted up by an explosion on the forward flight deck.
“This is my ship,” Yoshio said.
Anna held his hand tightly. His throat was taut and his arm was almost rigid as iron.
“They bring my ship back, and now you bring me back. We are not very much like we were, last time we saw each other.” He took her over to a bronze plaque under the looming propellors, darkened with age, on which hundreds of names were inscribed in Japanese characters. Two other plaques on each side translated in Cyrillic and Roman letters.
Anna read the Roman letters, found a sub-heading, “Pilots,” and went down the alphabetical list.
She found what she was looking for. “Kawashita, Yoshio, Sub-Lieutenant.”
“These are the dead,” he said.
On the hovercraft, Yoshio was lost in thought, chin held in his fingertips, frowning slightly. Anna sat beside him for an hour before breaking the silence.
“Where to now?”
“I’d like to go to many places. Can we arrange that?”
“I think so. DiNova will bitch, but—”
“Do you trust me?”
Anna held a knuckle to her teeth. “No, not completely. I haven’t been around you long enough.”
“Do you want to take a chance?”
She felt her heart jump. “On what?”
“On an old pet monkey, suddenly become a lover?”
“You’re cruel.”
“Well?”
“What kind of a chance?”
“The whole shot,” Yoshio said. “Whatever the ceremonies are now.”
“You’re picking a hell of a time to ask,” Anna said, her voice cracking.
“Then this is a hell of a time for an answer.”
She had never been inclined to spend a long time making decisions. She weighed everything but found no rational arguments one way or the other. “Buddha and Lords,” she breathed. “I’m supposed to love him—you, the man. I’m supposed to—”
“Do you?”
“All?”
“The whole shot.”
“Except financial,” she mused. “You don’t need that. You’re a planetholder.”
“Okay.”
“You’re a fool, Yoshio.”
“Then you’re a bigger one, no?”
“Where, and when?”
“On the ship, when we return, soon.”
“You won’t believe this,” she said, her voice breaking. “You’re the first who’s ever asked. And you’re the only one I thought I could say yes to.”
“Then?”
“Yes!” She ran away from him, down the stairs to the covered lounge. Yoshio sat in the starlit dark, nodding his head, whistling an old popular Japanese song.
Twenty-Two
“Goddamm it, let’s get some order on this ship!” Anna stormed across the bridge, glaring at the officer of the deck in orbit. “Social occasions aren’t worth the loss in time.”
“Congratulations, madam,” the ODIO said, smiling at her over his shoulder.
“Leave this ship for a few weeks and everything falls apart.” She ordered her chair out of its nook and sat in it imperiously, lifting her hand to warn away an attending sphere. “Mister Oliphant,” she said to the ODIO, “call Mister Kondrashef to the bridge. We are about to do unspeakable things to space-time.”
Oliphant stepped back from the bridge monitors and stood with his hands clasped behind him. He was officially relieved of duty until another port of call was made. Kiril Kondrashef appeared on the bridge in a uniform slightly fancier than the occasion called for. Nestor looked him over with a withering stare.
“In celebration, madam,” he explained.
“Of what? Having something to do for a change?”
“Of your impending marriage.”
“What cause do you have to celebrate? Think I’ll soften in my conjugal bliss?”
“A contented captain is a good captain, so the legends say.”
“Tell me if you notice any difference. Request permission to leave orbit, and make damned certain a waste beam doesn’t cook our sensors. I’ll expect you to dodge.”
“Request made,” Kondrashef said, watching the automatic sequencer. All orbit organization was handled through computers. “Permission granted. Rental charges halted.”
“I have a series of worlds plotted on my duty tapas,” she said. “I expect to orbit around the first objective in about seventy hours.”
“How many objectives?” Kondrashef asked.
“At least twenty. We’re looking for a good place to honeymoon.”
“Kyushu wasn’t good enough?”
“Terrestrials don’t think the way we do, Kiril. Yoshio and I are seeking peace and quiet on far, sparsely peopled worlds. A romantic quest.”
“Very well. We’ll enter first warp in ten hours.”
“Fine. Yeoman,” she addressed the hovering sphere, “notify DiNova that I’m canceling all business dealings which can’t be handled by ship-to-ship or deep-space communications. He’ll select the best dealings for me, to be delivered to my cabin.”
“When’s the happy day?” Kiril asked.
“We’ll be married on Bayley’s Ochoneuf,” Nestor said. “If you do your job right, in seventy-two hours.”
Twenty-Three
“Do you remember what it was like, sleeping through the warp?” Anna asked.
Kawashita shook his head. “I’ll be ready for this one,” he said. “As long as it isn’t too strong.”
“One of the hazards of the trade, like getting seasick on a boat.”
“I was seasick for two weeks on my first deployment,” Kawashita said.
“The effects are minor on a well-tuned ship. Without warp it would take us a thousand years to get where we’re going, and ten times the fuel.” Kawashita nodded but didn’t seem to listen closely. He watched Anna’s body in the light of the cabin modifier, like a ghost, her shadows brownish-warm from the floor’s afterglow. As she turned, the air fluoresced around her, leaving a series of heat-images.
“You like?” she asked.
“Beautiful.”
“Me or the modifiers?”
“Women haven’t changed much in four centuries. Still full of vanities.”
“Ha! I saw you trying on new hairstyles in the mirror. Vanity, thy name is Methuselah.”
“When I read through the libraries under the dome, there were so many books fearful of technology,” he said. “Afraid computers would take over mankind—”
“They did,” Anna said. “On Myriadne, three hundred years ago. And maybe one or two times since—mechanical shutdowns, b
alky systems; that sort of thing. We design around them now.”
“Or that technology would leave us neck deep in poisonous muck. They hardly ever mentioned a time when something like a modifier could turn every motion into art. Or when ships could bring the treasures of other civilizations to all corners of the human Galaxy, without wars—”
“The wars exist,” Anna said. “But they’re chiefly economic, or psychological.”
“So now I’m filled with optimism,” he said. “I’ve lived long enough to see.”
“You didn’t like Earth, though,” Anna said, bringing her face down to him and pointing a finger at his chest.
“In my time there was only three percent of the population Earth has now, but more than half lived miserable lives. Who am I to complain? I’ll go somewhere else to live.”
“Don’t think it’s all rosy, Yoshio,” Anna cautioned, lying beside him. “You’ve only sampled the surface. And you’ve had all the facilities of the rich to fall back on. Lots of people are still unhappy. Most.”
“Then they’re fools. They’re well-fed, educated, have the resources of a galaxy’s information within a few minutes’ reach—”
“On Earth perhaps. But when you get to the fringes, the new colonies, life is much harder—harder than it needs to be. There are still tyrannies and wars and torture. I’ve seen some of it. Earth is old and stable now, but very few of its citizens can experience new things directly. They’re locked into their lives by the security they’ve built up. On some colony worlds people can experience a thousand different lives—and face the consequences. Adventure and novelty are hellish things most of the time. For every asset, there’s an equal or greater number of debits.”
“What are your debits?” Kawashita asked.
“Estrangement from my family. Loneliness—even now, though you fill a big gap. But one future husband isn’t enough. How many friends do I really have? A few, subject to the vicissitudes of employment. A few in the entourage, people who accept me as I am, without trying to get more from me. But none I can call close, not like a friend I had when I was a girl—”
DiNova’s voice broke in. “Anna, my regrets. This is an emergency. We have twenty minutes until warp sequencing. The Aighors have officially denied all knowledge of activity in the Ring Stars.”
Anna sat up on the bed. “How many ships are headed there now?”
“Who can count them all? Five hundred, a thousand.”
“Can we beat them?”
“If we use our geodesic buildup and blow half our fuel.”
“We won’t find any more around the Ring Stars. Tell Kiril to get us there, and use three eighths if he absolutely has to. We can’t afford to gamble with the rest. Our allowance is inflexible.” She looked at Kawashita, her face wreathed in a smile.
“What’s happening?”
“If the Aighors deny any responsibility for the Ring Stars, we aren’t limited by treaties. We can mine as much information as we want.”
“What will we do when we get there?”
“If we get there ahead of everybody else, we’ll put some special equipment to work. If you’re going to be my husband, you’ll have to learn some family secrets. Think you’re ready for them?”
“If you don’t expect full understanding.”
“Hell, I don’t ask that of myself.”
“The Waunters will be there?”
“Not before us. Their ship will run a long, long time, but it won’t push through higher spaces nearly as fast as Peloros. Hell, Yoshio—we’re riding a hard, gemlike flame!”
Kawashita had never seen Anna like this. She paced back and forth across the cabin, talking of things he knew little or nothing about—pinching the ship’s hole to increase spatial evaporation, analyzing the Ring Stars for charm and cohesion effects after years in a probability-altered space—and so on, for the quarter hour until warp sequencing. A bell chimed on the ship’s intercoms.
“Be at peace, mates,” Kondrashef advised in somber tones. “We’re riding into hell again. God save your bloody souls.”
Kawashita shivered involuntarily. The modifiers were automatically cut, and room lights became bright. Anna lay next to him with her head on his shoulder. “You’re trembling,” she said.
“It was the same before I received inoculations as a child. Waiting and not knowing what it would feel like.”
The lights dimmed to orange. His nerves tingled.
“Warp status,” the intercom said.
Kawashita shut his eyes, then found he preferred them open. The dark was too pregnant. “We’ll force the Peloros pretty near her limits,” Nestor said. “Squeeze the hole until it gives up three eighths of its mass. That will deepen our plunge. The farther we go from status geometry, the more energy we have to expend to keep ourselves together. It’s a vicious circle. So we play our cards and stay within the limits of the hand already dealt—we have no idea what we’ll pick off the table when we get there. It’s not pleasant being stranded. The cost of a Combine or USC expedition to rescue us could break my fortune into little tiny pieces. Are you ready for a few family secrets?”
“I don’t know. I can’t seem to think straight.”
“The simple ones, then. What we found on Grandfather’s trip to the Great Magellan.”
Twenty-Four
Kawashita lay in the dark, watching Anna sleep, watching the play of lights on the ceiling—designed to soothe warping passengers—and thinking about his fiancée’s family. He closed his eyes and tried to picture his first fiancée—an eighteen-year-old girl from Nagasaki, with smooth, pale skin and eyes like a flinching doe’s. But there were only bits and pieces left. At any rate, there was no comparison. Anna, if less beautiful to a Japanese, was certainly more dynamic and suited to him now.
But what price her energy? Born in the Greater Magellan, tens of thousands of parsecs from the nearest human outpost, she’d been raised among her family and the crews of the exploratory ships. Her mother, Juanita Sigrid, a cultural biologist hired by Anna’s grandfather, had fit into the unusual family as well as could be expected. Anna had assumed some of her traits: empathy, a certain cynical view of things, which masked uncertainty, and a touch of bitterness. For when the family broke up, Anna’s father and mother went separate ways, and Juanita Sigrid got the worst of everybody’s opinions. Traicom Nestor, Anna’s grandfather, regarded her as a traitor to the son he didn’t quite trust himself. When she remarried, she broke all ties with the past—including her daughter.
Anna’s father was now head of an independent consolidation. He seldom communicated with Anna, but she felt a great deal of affection for him. Her mother she felt less regard for.
Behind them all, like the background of a complex painting, was the Greater Magellan. Juanita Sigrid had found her job cut out for her.
On the near side of the cloud of stars they’d discovered an abandoned artifact—the largest structure ever found. It interconnected three stars a parsec distant from each other and contained the mass of seven rocky planets. Like an old spiderweb strung across the light-years, spun from carbon and silicon and coated with a thin film of metal, it had been abandoned long before. Without extensive energy to hold it together, it had separated into a fine cloud of debris. But that cloud still retained a haunting shape—a cupped disk with three triangular wings, aimed at the center of the Milky Way—or where the center had been forty million years before. Two worlds in the area had once supported life, and there was ample evidence that beings on both worlds had supported each other in the project. They’d apparently never developed warp technology. Their greatest effort had been spent on easing their loneliness, trying to communicate with unknown beings, for unknown reasons.
Beneath the shallow seas of one world, in ruins scattered by geological forces, the expedition managed to piece together glimpses from the distant past. Then, in a near miraculous find
, they rescued a few metal tetrahedrons from deep trenches that had once been the coast of a continent. Stored in the atoms of the tetrahedrons were the histories of both civilizations.
The Nestors selectively sold the information for a dozen years after their return.
But the financial angle didn’t interest Kawashita. He wondered how the two species had felt, locked in by the agonizingly slow means of traveling between their three stars. He wondered if they’d succeeded. If they had, where did they go? And if they hadn’t, did they die a natural death or commit suicide?
He couldn’t sleep. His head was filled with visions. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t dispel the notion that all of space and time was haunted, that every centimeter of every parsec, in all directions, was filled with kami, watching and listening.
And at this moment, stretched through some higher space that was making his deepest thoughts scatter back and forth like rain in a storm, they were traveling to see the creations of still more kami.
Everyone was foolish not to see it. Everything was wrapped in plan and deceit. He couldn’t begin to guess where he fit in. but he knew his role was far from minor. And he had failed. Once he knew why, he had two choices—the same choices he projected onto the builders of the Web as they faced their success or failure. He had lived a very long time. Not even his love for Anna could color his decision.
For that reason he stayed very quiet now and put on the masks of knowledge, acculturation, matrimony. He hoped they would come off easily when the time came.
Twenty-Five
Ships went into the Ring Stars and, if they survived the outer fields, were swept out of existence just beyond. Sometimes, light-years away, like the cast-out debris of a carnivore’s lunch, bits and pieces of them would return. Sometimes the emergency signal beacons were still working. Ships outside the fields would pick up the signals, intercept the debris, and find nightmares, things from other universes mixed with the fragments of the lost ships.
