by Greg Bear
A nation could only stand so much.
Three - Christmas Eve 2004,
Santa Barbara, California
Patricia Luisa Vasquez opened the car door to release her seat harness. She was anxious to get into the house and start the festivities. The psychological testing at Vandenberg the past few days had been exhausting.
"Wait," Paul Lopez said. He put a hand on her arm, then stared at the dashboard. Vivaldi's Four Seasons played on the car stereo. "Your folks aren't going to want to know—"
"Don't worry about it," she said, pulling back a strand of very dark brown, almost black, hair. The lower half of her round face was illuminated by an orange streetlight, light olive skin pink in the sodium glow. She regarded Paul solicitously, tying her hair into two braids parted in the middle. Her square, intense eyes reminded him of a cat's gaze just before pouncing.
"They'll love it," she said, laying hand on his shoulder and stroking his cheek. "You're the first non-Anglo boyfriend I've ever introduced them to."
"I mean, about us rooming together."
"What they don't know won't hurt them."
"I feel a little awkward. You keep talking about your parents being old-fashioned."
"I just wanted you to meet them, and to show you my home."
"I want that, too."
"Listen, with the news I have tonight, nobody's going to worry about my maidenhood. If Mom asks how serious we are, I'll let you answer."
Paul grimaced. "Great."
Patricia pulled his hand toward her and made a rude sound against the palm with her lips, then opened the door.
"Wait."
"What now?"
"I'm not. . . I mean, you know that I love you."
"Paul. . .”
"It's just. . .”
"Come on inside and meet my family. You'll calm down. And don't worry."
They locked the car door and opened the trunk, pulling groceries out of the back. She huffed up the front walk with a box, her breath clouding in the cold night air. She wiped her feet on the front step mat, swung the screen door wide, caught it with her elbow and shouted, "Mama! It's me. And I brought Paul, too."
Rita Vasquez took the box from her daughter's arms and laid it down on the kitchen table. At forty-five, Rita was only slightly plump, but the clothes she wore invariably conflicted with even Patricia's rudimentary sense of fashion.
"What is this, a care package?" Rita asked. She held her arms out and folded Patricia in them.
"Mama, where did you get that polyester suit? I haven't seen one of those in years."
"I found it in the garage, packed away. Your father bought it for me before you were born. So where's Paul?"
"He's carrying in two more boxes." She removed her coat and savored the smells of tamales steaming in corn husks, baking ham and sweet potato pie. "Smells like home," she said, and Rita beamed.
In the living room, the aluminum tree was still bare—decorating the tree on Christmas Eve was a family tradition—and a gas log burned brightly in the fireplace. She reacquainted herself with the old plaster bas-reliefs of grapes and vines and leaves beneath the cornice, and the heavy wooden beams across the ceiling. She smiled. She had been born in this house. Wherever she went, however far, this would be home to her. "Where are Julia and Robert?"
"Robert's been stationed in Omaha," Rita answered from the kitchen. "They can't make it this year. Be out in March, maybe."
"Oh," Patricia said, disappointed. She returned to the kitchen. "Where's Papa?"
"Watching TV."
Paul came in the kitchen door heavily loaded. Patricia took one of the boxes from him and laid it on the floor next to the refrigerator for unloading. "We were expecting an army, so we brought lots of stuff," she said.
Rita pushed through layers of food and shook her head. "It'll get eaten. We're having Mr. and Mrs. Ortiz from next door, and cousin Enrique and his new wife. So this is Paul?"
"Yup."
Rita hugged him, her arms barely meeting around his back. She took hold of both his hands and stood away, surveying. He smiled. Tall, thin Paul, with his brown hair and light skin, looking more Anglo than the others. Still, Rita smiled as they talked. Paul could hold his own.
She walked down the hall to the den where her father would be sitting in front of the television. They had never been well-off, and the TV was a twenty-five-year-old model that made a rainbow ghost whenever it received 3-D transmissions.
"Papa?" Patricia said quietly, sneaking up behind him in the half-dark.
"Patty!" Ramon Vasquez looked around the rear cushion of his chair, a big grin lifting his pepper-gray mustache. He had been partly paralyzed by a stroke three years before and even with surgery hadn't fully recovered. Patricia sat on the divan beside him.
"I've brought Paul home with me," she said. "I'm sorry Julia can't be here this time."
"Me, too. But that's air force." Ramon had been in the air force for twenty years before retiring in 1996. Except for Patricia, the family was enmeshed in the air force. Julia had met Robert at a party on March Air Force Base six years ago.
"I've got something to tell everybody, Papa."
"Oh? What's that?" Had his speech improved since they last talked face to face? It seemed so. She hoped so.
Rita called out from the kitchen. "Daughter! Come help me and Paul put away this stuff."
"What're you watching?" Patricia asked, reluctant to leave.
"News."
A commentator—and his scarcely less formidable ghost—was leading into a story about the Stone. Patricia lingered despite her mother's second call.
"As more and more personnel are sent to the Stone, citizen and scientific groups are asking for an open forum. Today, in the fourth year of a joint NATO–Eurospace investigation, the cloak wrapped around the Stone is as impenetrable as ever, and—"
So it was no news after all.
"—Russian participants are particularly unhappy with the requirements for secrecy. Meanwhile, protestors from the Planetary Society, the L-5 Society, the Friends for Interstellar Relations and other groups have gathered around the White House and around the so-called Blue Cube in Sunnyvale, California, protesting military involvement and alleging a cover-up of major discoveries within the Stone."
An earnest, clean-cut and conservatively dressed young man appeared on the screen. He stood in front of the White House and spoke with exaggerated gestures. "We know it's an alien artifact, and we know there are seven chambers inside—huge chambers. We didn't put them there. There are cities in every chamber—deserted cities—all but the seventh. And there's something incredible there, something unimaginable."
"What do you think it is?" the interviewer asked.
The protestor flung his hands up. "We think they should tell everybody. Whatever's there, we as taxpayers have the right to know!"
The commentator added that NASA and Joint Space Command spokespersons had no comment.
Patricia sighed and placed her hands on Ramon's shoulders, automatically rubbing his muscles.
Paul watched her closely at dinner, waiting for her to find the right opportunity, but she didn't. She felt uncomfortable with the friends and neighbors present. This was something only her immediate family should know, and she couldn't tell even them as much as she wanted.
Rita and Ramon seemed to accept Paul. That was a plus. Eventually, they would have to know about the living arrangements—if they hadn't figured it out already: that Patricia and Paul were more than just dating acquaintances, that they were living together in that haphazard way reserved for coed dormitories.
So many secrets and discretions. Perhaps they wouldn't be as shocked as she expected—wanted?—them to be. It was a little disturbing to think that her parents might regard her as a grown-up, sexual being. She was not nearly as open about it as most of her friends and acquaintances.
Eventually, she and Paul would be married, she was sure. But they were both young, and Paul was not going to ask until he felt he
could support them both. Or until she convinced him that she could—and even with her doctorate, that wasn't likely for several more years.
Not counting, of course, the pay she would receive from Judith Hoffman's group. That money would go into a separate security account until her return.
When the dishes were cleared and everyone had gathered around the tree, family and friends helping to decorate, she signaled her mother that they had to talk in the kitchen. "And bring Papa." Rita helped Ramon into the kitchen on his aluminum crutches and they sat around the battered wooden table that had been in the family for at least sixty years.
"I have something to tell you," Patricia began.
"Oh, madre de Dios," Rita said, clasping her hands and smiling rapturously.
"No, Mama, it's not about Paul and me," she said. Her mother's face stiffened, then relaxed.
"So what, then?"
"Last week, I received a phone call at school," Patricia said. "I can't tell you all about it, but I'm going to be gone for a couple of months, even longer. Paul knows about it, but I can't tell him any more than I've just told you." Paul entered the kitchen through the swinging doors.
"Who was it called you?" Ramon asked.
"Judith Hoffman."
"Who's that?" Rita asked.
"The woman on television?" Ramon asked.
Patricia nodded. "She's an advisor to the President. They want me to work on something with them, and that's as much as I can tell you."
"Why should they want you?" Rita asked.
"I think they want her to build a time machine," Paul said. Whenever he had said that before, Patricia had become angry, but now she shrugged it off.
She couldn't expect Paul to understand her work. Very few people did—certainly not her parents and friends. "Paul has some other crazy theories, too," she said. "But my lips are sealed."
"Like a clam," Paul said. "She's been hard to live with the past few days."
"If you wouldn't keep trying to get me to talk!" She sighed dramatically—she was doing a lot of that lately—and looked at the cream-colored ceiling, then turned to her father. "It's going to be very interesting. Nobody will be able to reach me directly. You can send mail for me to this address." She drew the phone pad across the table and wrote down an APO address.
"Is this important to you?" Rita asked.
"Of course it is," Ramon answered.
But Patricia didn't know. It sounded crazy, even now.
After the guests had left, she took Paul on a nighttime tour of the neighborhood. For a half hour, they walked in silence, passing from one streetlight glow to the next. "I'm coming back, you know," she said finally.
"I know."
"I had to show you my home, because it's very important to me. Rita, Ramon, the house."
"Yes," Paul said.
"I think I'd be lost without it. I spend so much time in my head, and what I do there is so different. . . so bizarre to most people. If I didn't have a center, a place to return to, I'd get lost."
"I understand," Paul said. "It's a very nice home. I like your folks."
She stopped him and they faced each other, holding hands at arm's length. "I'm glad," she said.
"I want to make a home with you, too," he said. "Another center, for both of us to come back to."
Her expression was so intense she seemed about to leap on him. "Cat's eyes," Paul said, grinning.
They circled back and kissed on the front porch before going in to join her parents for coffee and cinnamon cocoa.
"One last pit stop," she said as they prepared to drive back to Caltech.
She walked down the hall to the bathroom, past the graduation pictures and the framed contents page of the issue of The Physical Review her first paper had appeared in. She stopped in front of the cover and stared intently at it. Suddenly, her heart seemed to miss a beat, leaving a peculiar hollow in her chest, a brief, almost pleasant sensation of falling, fading, then returning to normal.
She'd felt it before. It was nothing serious, just a cold wind down the middle of her chest, every time she truly accepted the idea of where she was going.
Four - 1174, Journey Year 5 Nader,
Axis City
The Presiding Minister of the Axis City, Ilyin Taur Ingle, stood in the broad observation blister, staring out across the Way through the city's blue glow at lanes bright with the continuous flow of traffic between the gates. Behind him stood two assigned ghosts and a corporeal representative of the Hexamon Nexus.
"Do you know Olmy well, Ser Franco?" the Presiding Minister picted, using graphicspeak.
"No, Ser Ingle, I do not," the corporeal representative replied, "though by reputation he is famous in the Nexus."
"Three incarnations, one more than law allows because of his extraordinary service. Olmy is one of our oldest citizens still corporeal," the minister said. "An enigmatic personality. He would have long since forfeited his majority rights and retired to City Memory if it wasn't for his usefulness to the Nexus." The P.M. instructed a sprayer to release his special variety of Talsit. The mist filled a cubic area surrounded by faintly glowing purple traction fields. Ingle entered the field and took a deep breath.
The ghosts hadn't moved, their images fixed until called upon, visible only to indicate their City Memory personalities were tuned in to the chamber, listening and watching.
"He is of Naderite background himself, I believe," the corporeal assistant said.
"Yes, he is," the minister said, nodding. "But he serves the Hexamon regardless of who is in power, and I have no doubt where his loyalties lie. A most unusual man. Tough, in the old sense of the word—a man who has lived through great changes, great pain. I've had him recalled from one point three ex nine. He's been supervising our preparations for the Jart offensive. But he can be of more use to us here. He is the one to send now. Axis Nader can't disagree with him or accuse us of partisan assignment; his reports to them are always detailed and accurate. Inform the President that we are accepting the task and sending Olmy."
"Yes, Ser Ingle."
"I believe the ghosts have their questions answered, now?"
"We listen," said one ghost. The other did not move.
"Fine. Now I will meet with Ser Olmy."
The ghosts faded and Corprep Franco left, fingering his neck torque to pict a flag of official business over his left shoulder.
The P.M. turned off the traction fields and the chamber became smoky with more Talsit. The smell was disconcerting, sharp like old wine, as Olmy entered.
He approached the minister quietly, not wishing to interrupt his reverie.
"Forward, Ser Olmy," the minister said. He turned as Olmy walked up the steps to the blister platform. "You're looking fit today."
"And you, ser."
"Mm. My wife made me a wonderful forgetting last turn. Removed much unpleasantness from my twentieth year. That was not a good year, and the loss was a relief."
"Excellent, ser."
"When will you marry, Olmy?"
"When I find the woman who can purge my twenty-first year, first incarnation."
The minister laughed heartily. "I hear you keep a fine advocate company in Axis Nader. . . . What's her name?"
"Suli Ram Kikura."
"Yes, of course. . . She's been active smoothing things between the Nexus and the Korzenowski hot heads, has she not?"
"Yes. We seldom discuss it."
The minister sucked in his breath, looked concerned and stared down at the platform. "Well, just so, then I have a difficult mission for you."
"My joy to serve the Hexamon."
"Perhaps not this time. No mere investigation of illegal gate commerce. Every few decades, we send someone back to the Thistledown to check stability. But we are doubly motivated this time. The Thistledown has been reoccupied."
"Someone crossing the Forbidden Territories?"
"No. More puzzling. Nothing has disturbed our sentries at the first barrier. Apparently the occupants have entered the
Thistledown from outside; perhaps more startling, they are human. Not in great force, but they're organized. There's no use speculating where they come from; the information is too equivocated. You'll have authority, of course, and the necessary transportation. Ser Algoli will inform you about the other requirements. Understand?"
Olmy nodded. "Ser."
"Good." The minister leaned over the railing and peered at the surface twenty kilometers below. A maelstrom of lights swirled around several of the lanes. "There appears to be a jam-up at that gate. Ah, it's the season for worries. The month of the Good Man." He turned to Olmy. "Good luck. Or, as the Eld put it: Star, Fate and Pneuma be kind."
"Thank you, ser."
He stepped back from the platform and left the chamber, taking the lift up the long, slender pylon to the Central City, where he arranged his affairs for a protracted absence.
The assignment was a privilege. Return to the Thistledown was forbidden for any purpose not essential to the Nexus. Olmy hadn't been there for well over four hundred years.
On the other hand, of course, it could be a very dangerous mission—especially with information so equivocated. He could help ensure his mission's success by bringing along a Frant.
If there were humans in the Thistledown, and they weren't city renegades—the most likely explanation—then where did they come from?
Far too narrow and equivocated for his ease.
Chapter One
April 2005
On the first leg of the trip, in the passenger cabin of the long-bed shuttle, Patricia Vasquez had watched the Earth's cloud-smeared limb on a video monitor. Before her own transfer, cameras mounted in the shuttle bay had shown her the long waldos maneuvering the huge cargo out of the bay into the waiting arms of the OTV—orbital transfer vehicle—as if two spiders were trading a cocoon-wrapped fly. The operation had taken an hour, and with its slow fascination had distracted her from thoughts about her present circumstances.
When her own turn came and she donned the passenger bubble to be guided across the ten meters to the OTV's lock, she worked hard to appear calm. The bubble was made of transparent plastic, so she did not suffer from claustrophobia—almost the opposite, in fact. She could feel the immensity of the blackness beyond the spacecraft, though she could not make out stars. They were outdone by the glow of the Earth and the close, brightly lighted surfaces of the OTV, a train of clustered tanks, balls and prisms wrapped in aluminum beams.
