by Greg Bear
A week ago we took the small cart out on one of the (to her) monotonous journeys. She grew bored early. After suggesting we turn around before dark, which we didn’t, she became silent. In the dark, the cart’s roof-mounted lights shining across featureless concrete, we felt more alone than we had between the stars. Here was isolation at its most extreme—just ourselves, ten thousand kilometers of planet under our feet, and a few machines. She said she was afraid we’d lose our souls here but couldn’t explain why. The hair on my neck raised and the dark was filled with ghosts. She began to cry. Humans have long since learned that some residue of living things persists after death, as a record of organized particles moving in personal spaces. Why not with the Perfidisians? By the time we reached the dome, we were both terrified. It took us several hours to calm down. She was angry with me for two days after.
But the Perfidisians were too thorough to leave ghosts behind. So what do I look for, when I go from point to barren point on the plains?
For that one overlooked item. No living being is perfect. Perhaps some individual Perfidisian forgot one tiny artifact. the equivalent of a nut or bolt, too minor to be detected by the Centrum and USC instruments. Anything. And while I look, I work, try to recall…What is that key I know exists, but which can’t be remembered?
Anna is patient. She may last me out.
The Peloros has been gone for a month. It will take another four months to complete its missions and return to check up on us.
Thirty-Four
Oomalo Waunter took away the sheet of paper from the bulkhead, leaning against a foam pad on the scaffolding. If there was the faintest hint of a seam, he’d find it. He was convinced the ship had secret hiding places. The conviction wasn’t entirely rational—the Crocerians would almost certainly have found any hidden artifacts of value. But it was something to do. While he did it, he worried.
Since the seizure by the USC ship, Alae had brooded and done very little work. They’d left the Ring Stars and set up a deep-space orbit around galactic center while they considered where to go next. Perhaps that was what she was brooding about.
He took a graphite block and marked an X on the bulkhead to indicate how far he’d searched. When he shined a light from below, the X would reflect the glare and he could tell where to move the scaffold. He’d covered a tenth of the ship this way.
His allotted work for the wake-period done, he went to the sea-tanks, scattering his clothes along the way. Under the ceiling’s strip sunlight—the inner perimeter of the ship’s hull—he swam for kilometers, circumnavigating the tanks. The water was faintly slippery from some reaction with the metal bottom, but he was used to that. The ineradicable smell of iodine didn’t bother him either. The Aighors had kept this artificial ocean stocked with several varieties of dangerous aquatic life, to “play” with on long voyages—mainly to keep fit and maintain social order. Dozens of ship’s commanders had been chosen through combat in the tanks. Now they were quiet, except for the slap of waves on the far bulkheads and the sounds of his splashing.
Alae sat in the oblong booth which looked down across the port warp node generators. The old transparent metal had taken on a beautiful green tint across the millennia. Below, even when dormant, the generators which started the chain reactions of spacial shifting were surrounded by spikes of red fluorescence.
A half-broken tapas pad sat on her lap. It was good only for writing with a scriber and erasing with a finger. She had had it since childhood, and it served her as a kind of doodle pad. Written on its screen now were the words, “Baubles, toys, blue skies.”
She had bought all the information she could about Anna Sigrid Nestor. She had studied the woman again and again during the judgment, covertly glancing at her, measuring her. What the USC loytnant had said about Nestor and Kawashita made sense. Nestor had planned, schemed, hidden, won. They—Alae and Oomalo, most deserving—had lost. The Centrum, as always, had ruled against independents. Glamor over labor and discovery. Power over—
She put the pad aside slowly and backed out of the booth. Without the subtle presence of her body’s energy field, the sensitive spikes on the generators cooled to a deep, steady blue.
Oomalo was on his second lap when he heard Alae calling his name. “Waunter!”
“What?” He stopped swimming and lifted his head out of the water.
“We’re going.” She walked along the edge of the tanks. He swam in place with slow, regular strokes. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“To claim our property.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. But we’re going.”
Thirty-Five
Kawashita removed a chart from a plastic pouch and unrolled it for Anna. The hot bricks in a hibachi beneath the table kept their feet warm in the cold room, but little else. They were wrapped in several layers of clothing, but Anna was still chilly and not very attentive.
“We’ve covered these paths so far,” he said. “Together, look at the patterns.”
“So? Straight lines, curves, all the normal ways a vehicle runs.”
“I’m not so sure,” he said. “I’ve numbered the times we went certain ways. Some paths have been covered a dozen times, with variations of only a few meters.”
“So?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe you could suggest something. After all, you were born into a more complex world.” That had become a standing joke between them. Anna ignored it and said in a stage whisper, “I don’t understand why we should freeze to death when we have a perfectly good environmental system. All we have to do is turn it up.”
“I think better when I’m cold.”
“I don’t,” she said. “Can’t think at all. Maybe I could decipher your squiggles if it was warm.”
“We can find warmth within ourselves,” Kawashita said, rolling the paper. “Just concentrate on your—”
“I’m no good at meditating,” Anna said. “Not as good as you are, anyway. And I’m getting tired of all this pretense. Why give up the comforts of home? And don’t dodge the question—I’m getting irritated.”
Kawashita nodded and slipped his feet from under the table. “I am trying to reproduce a situation,” he said. “It must have been ten years ago. I had a dream.”
“About what?”
“I’m not sure now. I was so involved in the illusions that I thought it was a simple nightmare. Just after we came back, it occurred to me there was more to the dream than fear. But I cannot remember details.”
Anna laughed. “So you’re going to nudge your memory with a bit of tea cake? Search for times lost?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I never finished the book, but some French author from your time wrote about incredibly detailed memories conjured up by the taste of a tea cake.”
He shrugged. “The cold helps. It was in a situation like this that I ate breakfast, ten years ago, after the nightmare. It was winter outside, and I warmed my legs with an urn of hot bricks under a table. And I did something that related to the dream…but I’m not sure what.”
“Wrote it down? Talked it over with someone?”
“No. It wouldn’t have made sense to them.”
Anna swung her legs out of the pit and stood up. “Well, this experiment is at an end, unless you want me to live in another part of the dome. Jog your memory some other way. If you want, we’ll order a memory analyzer.”
“Yes, I thought about that, but the brochures said such devices are very bad at retrieving dream memory. When the mind wants a dream forgotten, the process is pretty thorough.”
“The mind, or your hosts,” Anna said.
“Yes. It was something about my situation.” He frowned. “I think…wait. I know! I was a great king, in a magnificent palace, watching a huge spiritual hand scrawl something on a stone wall with a fingernail made of fire. But what did it write?”<
br />
“Read the Bible.”
“I don’t understand.”
“‘You have been weighed in the balance, and found wanting,’ or something to that effect. An old biblical tale.”
Kawashita looked at her with brows lifted, mouth open slightly, eyes showing prominent whites. “Yes,” he whispered. He scurried off, robe shustling behind him, to another room in the house.
“Anna the muse,” she said to herself. She reached into a fold of her robe and brought out a remote switch. “Let’s get this place heated. And clear the hibachi out. Bring back the usual furniture.”
“Yes, madam,” the voice replied.
Kawashita scribed busily on the surface of his tapas pad. The memory extension units—containing all the libraries he thought would prove useful—rested in their cases next to his sleeping pad. A meter away was Anna’s sleep-field, a luxury she had refused to give up.
The dome followed a twenty-four-hour cycle. Judging from the brightness of the artificial sun, and the color of the sky projection, it was late afternoon. Anna left Kawashita in their bedroom and walked among the bare shoots of trees and bushes planted around the house. The hills were beginning to green with fresh grass. After the recent shower the air was fresh and smelled of wet loam. The dome didn’t have all the conveniences of the Peloros, but it was pleasant, and she had little cause for complaint.
Since early adolescence she had wanted to use an artist’s modifier to create and record four-dimensional abstract experiences. She fulfilled her dream in a shed a hundred meters from the house, working an hour each day. In a month or so, she thought she might have something worth showing to Kawashita. Attached to the shed was a cloning laboratory with an agricultural attachment, which she was adapting for landscape and gardening purposes. That took another hour or two a day.
Next came the five years of business records to examine and assimilate. Using a tapas, she looked over the bases of her financial empire and worked out theories for improving profits and efficiency. As an adjunct to that study, she was brushing up on planetary geology, exobiology, xenopsychology, and a touch of warper science. Since she foundered on anything beyond algebra, she relied on her tapas to solve complex problems.
Still, she was restless. She didn’t say anything, but it was clear Kawashita knew. She guessed she might last a year, even two, but beyond that she’d have to become active again. She watched the approaching orchestrated sunset. “I’m burned-in,” she said. “Fixed and unchangeable.” She turned to take another path, this leading past the truck-garden plots. A few lettuce heads were making their debut, but everything else was still dormant or undecided. An earthworm—one of sixty thousand born two weeks before—struggled on the concrete path. She reached down and carefully removed it to the soil.
Two weeks ago Kawashita had shown her a few entries from his tapas journal. They’d interested her but had been too rough and esoteric to mean much. Still, his ideas seemed to be reaching some conclusion. She hoped their schedules would coincide.
The stars came on. They were set to mimic the outside sky. A sensor on the top of the dome followed the skies closely, and if any event presented itself—meteor, aurora, or ship in orbit—the inner projector reproduced it.
“I’ve become awful domestic the past year,” she whispered to herself. She kneeled in the dirt and sniffed the flowers on a blackthorn hedge. The routine was pleasant, her life was settled; for the first time in her memory she was content. Yet…not. The pressure in her throat began and moved up to squeeze a few drops of moisture from her eyes. She was afraid. If she had to leave, would he love her enough to come with her? If not, what would she do without him? They’d twined like the squash vines—separation would tear a few roots and leaves, bloody them both.
She repeated her name to herself, like some mantra of strength, but all the power had gone from it. She knew, now, of things more important than her planet-swapping career and reputation. There was peace to think about, and self-knowledge, and asking questions—probing for the sources of human corruption.
She respected Kawashita’s search, but she wasn’t anxious to join in on it.
It was clear what her life would be like, one way or the other. Peace would never last long. She’d always rush from goal to goal. “Dammit, that’s the way I am,” she said through clenched teeth. She filtered the dirt through tightened fingers. A worm, squeezed in half, wriggled out and fell to the peak of the little pile. She stood up quickly and brushed her hands on her overalls. She longed for the clean, certain corridors of her ship. Her clumsiness didn’t result in any tiny slaughters there.
The dome, despite its far-reaching night sky, seemed to cramp her. Her lips worked as she half walked, half ran, to the perimeter. A honeycomb of shelves for equipment storage stood by the airlock. She chose an environment backpack and cycled through the lock. Outside she slipped on sunglasses—the planet’s true time was still before sunset—and turned up the shield’s radiation filters.
The stretches of concrete were heartbreaking. They went on and on without relief, like some nightmare of infinity brought down to human terms. A few kilometers off was one tiny relief in the expanse—the Waunters’ abandoned probe. She stared at it speculatively for a few minutes. Before she could reach it, dark would fall on the outside, and she didn’t want to be caught on the plains at night—not again. Tomorrow, then. It would be something to look forward to.
Thirty-Six
Kawashita sat in the tiny rock garden, eyes closed, listening to the water splashing across the narrow streambed. Earlier in the morning he had exercised in the sandpit behind the house, swinging the silver rods, ripples forming in his tightened cheeks with the intensity of his concentration. Now he was doing in his head what he had done with his body. His thoughts shot at different targets, abstractions, conundrums, child’s puzzles. He made up a few simple poems. Just as promptly, he forgot them.
That was the first stage. He then put all these aside and lulled his body into sleep with prana-yama, breath control. When the hands and feet were pleasantly buzzing with the total relaxation of sleep, he thought of sexual pleasure. The body’s breathing increased rapidly, but it remained asleep. The past few days he had done this again and again, and found no sign of what he was looking for. Hatred didn’t find much purchase in a purely sexual response. On the other hand, he could not concentrate long on violent impulses without waking himself up. He had to approach the issue at an angle, keeping the immediate impulse behind the screen.
It wasn’t his purpose to meditate into a state of samadhi. He was purposefully keeping his ego alert, to let himself explore certain parts of his mind hidden by wakefulness. They could be called up by thinking of certain functions. When he thought of duty and discipline, the muscles in his neck and upper back tightened. There was literally a stiff neck involved. If he thought of Anna in a nonsexual context, the top of his head grew warm—a peaceful response—and he felt a pressure behind his eyes, which was ambiguous.
Then, still calm, body asleep, he asked himself particular questions and sought out their answers by pure body response. Where had Masa’s dagger nicked him on the last night of the world? On the inside of the elbow. It ached briefly. He put the pain aside. Where had he landed when he’d fallen from a rock pile as a boy? His right rib cage chafed and ached. He continued until he’d mapped most of his body’s memory of past injuries.
The exercises were all preparatory to assembling and posing a final series of questions, each very complex. He was trying to know himself thoroughly before he embarked on the final stage.
He’d had enough for one day. He concentrated on a point, drifted onto a higher level of uninvolved awareness, then let himself down at a chosen signal—the vibration of a toe.
After plucking a few vegetables from the garden, he went into the kitchen and prepared lunch for Anna and himself. When she didn’t arrive, he ate his portion, placed hers in a hol
ding unit, and went to find her. The dome monitor couldn’t place her, so he went to the air lock. The lock light was on. He picked up a radio and held the signal button down.
“Hello,” she answered. “Get a unit and come outside. I want you to take a look at this.”
He slipped on a shoulder pack and cycled through the lock. The finder on the radio pointed his direction for him. He put on glasses and saw her standing on the plain beside the Waunter probe.
When he merged his field with hers near the small vehicle, she said, “It’s been looking at us. At the dome, at least. See this little diode? It glows when the probe is storing up data. Why is it still looking at us?”
“Maybe it’s just started. We’re only majority owners, remember. The Waunters have a right to orbit and land.”
“Of course. They’re spying on us. We haven’t looked at the recorders recently, and I haven’t been paying much attention to the night sky. I’m not sure it’s polite to orbit without telling us.”
“Hardly a matter of etiquette,” Kawashita said. “Let’s go look at the recorders.”
“I feel like pulling a muff over the thing,” Anna said. “But no sense looking for trouble.”
“When they want to talk, they’ll call. Let’s go back to the dome.”
Thirty-Seven
In the middle of the next day’s meditation, he felt the touch of an answer. It vanished for a moment, then came back with strength renewed. With every slow pulse of his heart it brightened until the light hurt the inside of his head. His breath quickened and his muscles ended their sleep.
“NO!” he shouted.
The pain stopped, but the answer remained, like a piece of iron quenched in water, not luminous but permanent. He uncrossed his legs and stood up, swinging his arms and shaking his head. He took deep breaths to loosen up his protesting body, dragged too quickly from trance. The iron-hard answer put out crystals and pointed to memories—father slapping his hands when he blamed another boy for a small house fire; mother crying for hours when he announced he was entering the military; school-books with tales full of valor, brave death, God-descended history. Women—the nonfighters—are weak; it is the triumph of man that he is built strong, so he can fight and die honorably, with calm precision and no conscious cruelty, but without quarter, without relenting, willing to inflict death on himself should he fail; forever concerned with status in society, face, honor, facing the honor of his ancestors, willing to carry that honor into the future, a vehicle for glorious victory or expunged death, for the honor of the Emperor-God, descendant of the Sun; with the precision of Buddha, like a fierce warrior donning his armor, the armor is history, the sword is faith, the strength is his years of meticulous upbringing in the supremacy of society over self…
