by Greg Bear
Mirsky heard the exercise supervisor read off the numbers of the four space-suited defenders and order them to assume a reclining posture. "Your airlock is also incapacitated," the supervisor added laconically. "Fine work, Lieutenant Colonel. . . You may proceed."
Mirsky and his three comrades advanced toward the mock-up. The defenders lay on the lunar soil outside the open hatchway, motionless except for the advancing numbers of their backpack life support displays. Mirsky leaned over and winked at one of them through his visor. The defender glared back at him, not in the least amused.
"Look over your shoulder at two o'clock, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel," one of his men advised. Mirsky turned around and followed the line of the corporal's thickly protected arm and gloved finger.
The Potato, a sharp point of light with a clearly discernible oblong shape, had just risen above the Moon's horizon.
It seemed that all his life, people had been pointing it out to him—Yefremova three years before, the first among them.
"Yes, I see," Mirsky acknowledged.
"That is why we train, is it not, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel?"
Mirsky didn't answer. The supervisor cut in and demanded they stop the useless chatter.
"The stars have ears, Corporal," Mirsky advised the soldier. "Let's take our objective and get home in time for more political lessons." The corporal met Mirsky's glance and grimaced but said nothing more.
In their own bunker, four hours later, the exercise supervisor walked down the aisle between the sleeping slings of the victorious team, shaking hands and congratulating them warmly, and then handing out letters from home. All the men received letters, if only from party cell coordinators in some outlying village. The supervisor stopped by Mirsky's sling last.
"Only one letter for you, Comrade. . . Colonel," he said, handing Mirsky a thick and carefully sealed and taped envelope. Mirsky took the envelope and stared at it, then at the supervisor.
"Open it."
He carefully tore off the end and took out five folded sheets of paper, "A promotion," he said, unwilling to be very emotional about the whole thing.
"And your orders, Comrade," the supervisor said. "Gentlemen, are we interested in discovering where our new Colonel Pavel Mirsky is going?"
"Where?" several asked.
"Back to Earth," Mirsky said.
"Back to Earth!" the supervisor echoed. "This is, what—your fourth training tour on the Moon in two years? And now back to Earth."
The men watched him carefully, grinning.
"To the Indian Ocean," Mirsky said. "For final training as battalion commander."
"To the Indian Ocean!" the supervisor shouted, pointing one finger at the floor—symbolically indicating the Earth—and then raising both his hands, looking upward and nodding at the ceiling.
The men cheered and broke into applause.
"Now, you will have the stars you have always wanted, Colonel," the supervisor said, shaking his hand firmly.
Chapter Four
The rest of the fourth chamber slipped by the train windows quickly, a blur of hilly terrain, small lakes and outcroppings of what looked like granite.
"The line ends at the sixth chamber. We'll be met by Joseph Rimskaya and some of the Chinese team at the terminal annex."
"Rimskaya? I had a teacher with that name at UCLA."
"Rimskaya is why you're here. He recommended you."
"But he left the university to join the Bureau of Math and Statistics."
"And he met the Advisor while working in Washington," Lanier added.
Rimskaya had been her professor in a special math seminar. She hadn't liked him much; he was a tall, blocky man with a wiry red beard, loud and assertive, a political science professor and expert in statistics and information theory. A rigorous mathematician but not, in her opinion, in possession of the insight necessary for truly valuable research, Rimskaya had always seemed the perfect academician to her: rigid, demanding, an unimaginative taskmaster.
"Why is he here?"
"Because the Advisor finds him useful."
"His specialty was statistical theories of population behavior. He belongs in sociology."
"That's right," Lanier said.
"How—"
Lanier appeared irritated. "Think, Patricia. Where did the Stoners go? Why did they go there, how did they get there?"
"I don't know," she answered quietly.
"We don't know, either. Not yet. Rimskaya is head of the sociology group. They might be able to tell us."
"This is such an ass-backwards way of teaching."
"I'll be patient if you will," Lanier said.
Patricia was silent for a moment. "No guarantees," she said. "I wish you'd stop seeming so peeved at me when I just ask straightforward questions."
Lanier raised his eyebrows and nodded. "Please don't take it personally."
So he's under strain, she thought. Well, so am I. Only he's had time to get used to it. If you can ever get used to something like the library. . . or the Stone itself. Then again, there's almost certainly more. . . .
She had the sudden vision of a maze of chalkboards waiting for her in the seventh chamber, filled with wandering mathematicians working on some grand, unified problem. Over them all, on a huge video screen, the Advisor watched patiently, like God. Lanier was her avatar.
"Rimskaya's half Russian," Lanier continued. "His grandmother was a widower and an immigrant and her name was applied on the U.S. entry papers to her son, as well. He speaks Russian like a native. Sometimes he acts as interpreter between the Russians and us."
The train's hum increased in pitch and they plunged into the fourth chamber's northern cap.
The fifth chamber was darker than the previous sections she had visited. A canopy of flat gray clouds painted the cylinder's upper atmosphere, cutting out half the tubelight. Beneath the clouds was a Wagnerian landscape of barren mountains, resembling ragged lumps of anthracite mixed with dark-rainbowed hematite. Between the mountains were rusty abyssal valleys, cut by waterfalls feeding into quicksilver rivers. The mountains toward the middle of the chamber floor were startling in their contortions—arches, giant rugged cubes, broken-tipped pyramids and causeways of irregular slab steps.
"What in hell was this?" she asked.
"A kind of open pit mine, we think. Our two geologists—you met Robert Smith, he's one—speculate that when the chambers were hollowed out, the fifth wasn't finished off. They left it for raw material. And the Stoners used it. These are the scars."
"Perfect for fans of old horror movies," Patricia said. "Can't you just see Castle Dracula here?"
They said nothing throughout the short trip down the next tunnel into the sixth chamber. As the train's hum decreased in pitch and the tunnel dark brightened, Lanier stood and said, "End of the line."
The lower terminal was a cavernous construct of unpainted slabs of reddish concrete and mottled gray-and-black asteroid rock. The platform was marked with faint lines, as though long winding queues had once formed there.
"This was a worker's station once," Lanier said. "When they modified the sixth chamber, this served as a debarkation point. Six hundred years ago, perhaps."
"How long has the Stone been deserted?"
"Five centuries."
They walked up a ramp into a building constructed mostly of thick transparent panels, giving an excellent view of the sixth chamber.
The valley floor was layered with gigantic inert mechanical forms, cylinders and cubes and stacks of circular plates laid on edge, resembling a monstrous circuit board. Just outside the terminal building, a row of spherical tanks marched off to a distant wall. The wall was at least a hundred meters high, and the tanks half that in diameter. Below this level of the terminal, between the spheres and a parallel row of cylinders resting on their sides, was an immense gully filled with glistening water. The channel was lined with pipe ends and cyclopian pumping apparatus. Over it all, thick black clouds floated in clumps, dropping curtains
of rain and flurries of snow. Somewhere was a constant pulsing, less heard then felt, like the infra-sound beats of moving mountains or the grinding of distant sea bottoms.
Looking up at an angle, between decks of clouds, she could dimly see the opposite floor of the chamber, bumped and ridged with a carpet of mysterious mechanism.
"No moving parts in the whole chamber except for large pumps, and not many of those," Lanier said. "The builders relied upon a built-in weather cycle. Rain falls, picks up heat, flows down channels into shallow ponds, evaporates, carries heat up, and the atmospheric maintenance systems drain it off, we're still not sure how."
"What does it all do?"
"When the Stone was first designed, the sixth chamber was going to be another city. But the builders had specified that the Stone could only accelerate at three percent g. Just before the Stone was outfitted—and before the completion of the major excavation—they found a way to allow the Stone to accelerate to the limit of its power. The method was complex and expensive, but it gave the Stone a versatility the builders couldn't pass up. So the sixth chamber was equipped with selective inertial damping machinery, which makes up a small fraction of what is here now." He nodded at the vista through the glass. "That's why none of the chamber floors are inclined, and none of the ponds or rivers are equipped with slop barriers. They don't need them. The sixth chamber can selectively damp the effects of inertia on any object in the Stone. On a large scale, it overcomes acceleration and deceleration of the entire ship. On a small scale, it prevents inertial effects in the trains. It's self-regulating, though we haven't found any 'brain' yet."
The rain hit the transparent roof and ran down the forty-five degree slope over the stairwell. Lanier paused to look at the beads and rivulets of water.
"Since that time, the machinery has been modified and expanded. It once covered about three square kilometers, and the rest of the sixth chamber was used for industry and research, things that couldn't be done in the cities. Now, it maintains the seventh chamber as well."
Four people, all clad in yellow rain gear, marched along the edge of the channel beyond the terminal. They had parked their truck a few meters away, on a raised roadbed.
"Our reception committee," Lanier said. They walked to the head of the staircase. Cold air pooled in the stairwell, and Patricia shivered as an outside gust blew some of it over them. Rain sang softly overhead. Between the rivulets on the glass, through a trench-like break in the clouds, Patricia saw the opposite northern cap. All the other caps had been virtually blank, featureless. This one was furrowed by a row of rectangular boxes, spaced at equal intervals like a steep flight of stairs. On the face of each box was an elliptical design. The boxes, she estimated, were at least a kilometer wide, and the ellipses half that along their major axis.
The first of the four to reach the top of the stairs doffed his rain cap. Patricia looked down to see her former professor, his face ruddy and bearded, eyes small and suspicious as if from some long-harbored hurt. Rimskaya was just as she remembered him. He returned her stare defensively, then nodded to Lanier. Behind him, a tall, even-featured blond woman and two Chinese, a man and a woman wearing green caps, removed their gear and shook water off onto the floor.
Rimskaya approached Patricia, his every gesture conveying aloofness, if not disgust. "Miss Vasquez," he said. "I hope you are up to this. I hope you do not make me seem like a fool for choosing you."
She opened and shut her mouth like a carp, then laughed too loudly. "Professor, I hope so, too!"
"Don't mind him," said the blond woman, her voice pleasant and deep, with a faint British accent. "He's said nothing but good about you for four months now." She clutched her own cap under her arm and held out her hand. Patricia shook it. Her grip was firm and warm. "I'm Karen Farley, this is Wu Gi Me, and Chang i Hsing." Chang smiled broadly at Patricia, her straight black bangs hanging down over her eyebrows, the latest Chinese fashion. "We're from Beijing Technological University."
Rimskaya still studied Patricia. His gray eyes narrowed. "You are healthy, no space sickness, no emotional distress?"
"I'm fine, Professor," she said.
"Good. Then you—" he indicated Farley, Wu and Chang "—you take care of her. I'm going to the first chamber to rest. I'll be gone a week, perhaps longer." He held his hand out to Lanier and they shook once, firmly. "I am tired," Rimskaya said, "not least because I have no idea what this all signifies. I have never been an imaginative man, and this place. . .” He shuddered. "Perhaps it will suit you better, Miss Vasquez." He bowed stiffly to his colleagues, then picked up his gear and walked toward the ramp leading to the train platform.
Patricia looked after him, nonplussed.
"I envy him. . . a bit," said Wu in perfect California English. He was about her height, just on the edge of plumpness, with a stiff crew cut and a childlike face. "I have read some of your papers recently, Miss Vasquez."
"Patricia, please."
"They are quite beyond me, I'm afraid. Chang and I are electrical engineers. Karen is a physicist."
"Theoretical physics. I've been very impay-tient to meet you," Farley said.
"'Impay-shent,'" Lanier corrected.
"Yes." Farley grinned at Patricia's puzzlement. "I'm a Chinese citizen also. I can fool most people most of the time. Correct me, please, when I blunder."
Patricia looked between them owlishly. She felt a bit strung-out, not yet ready to meet new people and stretch her sociability.
"We're escorting Patricia to the seventh chamber," Lanier said. "But she may want to rest here awhile."
"No." Patricia shook her head firmly. "I'm going for the big picture today."
"That's a woman," Farley said. "Suicidal doggedness. Something I admire. Chang has it. Gi Me—we call him Lucky—Gi Me's a lazy fellow, though."
"Both she and Professor Rimskaya are slave drivers," Chang said. Her English accent was markedly less proficient than Wu's and Farley's. She produced two packets of rain gear from a pouch in her own coat and gave them to Lanier and Patricia. They suited up quickly and left the shelter of the annex.
The air smelled of clean rain, ozone and metal. The rain had slowed to a drizzle and the snow had stopped. Water slid in sheets from sloping metal walls below the elevated road, collecting in gutters and washing to a catch basin meters below. Patricia peered into the basin and saw the smooth funnel of water descending into darkness.
The truck on the roadbed was a replica of the vehicle which had taken them across the first chamber. Farley offered Patricia the shotgun seat again, and the others climbed into the back, pushing aside boxes of fabric-wrapped scientific gear. Farley edged the truck forward, then brought it up to speed.
The roadbed expanded into a broad flat ribbon, winding through complexes of tanks and gray shapes hidden behind a rapidly spreading fog. Wu leaned between the two seats. "This stuff that looks like asphalt—it isn't. It's asteroid rock, all the metals removed, ground up and mixed with a plant-based oil. Very tough, no cracks. We wonder who's going to patent it."
Somehow, Patricia found the dreariness invigorating. There was a bluish quality about the fog that made her feel as if she were within a sapphire. The rain resumed, and the drum of water on the truck's roof—combined with a gentle surge of warm air from the heater—made everything seem secure, no more strenuous than watching an entertainment on a video.
She snapped herself out of that feeling quickly. Lanier was watching her. She angled her face toward him and then looked away. How could they consider her so important? In the face of this monumental mystery, what could she possibly do?
The size alone was enough to paralyze thought. Looking up through gaps in the cloud cover to the opposite side, she could just as well have been looking from the window of a shuttle reentering the atmosphere.
The truck followed the gently curving highway and crossed the sixth chamber in twenty minutes. The familiar arch and tunnel entrance loomed ahead. Farley switched on the lights as the tunnel envelo
ped them.
After the stormy sixth chamber, the clarity and brightness of the unhindered plasma tubelight was welcome.
"You can almost hear the birds singing," Patricia commented.
"I wish," Farley said. They descended the ramp. Ahead stretched an arrow-straight road, about half as broad as the sixth chamber highway and made of the same material. To each side of the road, sandy hummocks topped with stiff yellow grass dotted the floor for several kilometers. A short hike away were stands of low, scrawny trees. To the west, up the curve of the chamber floor, Patricia saw small lakes and what looked like a river emerging from one of the cap tunnels. A few fleecy clouds clung to the cap. The landscape was equally homogenous and bland right up to the limits of the tubelight both east and west. The plasma tube itself emerged from the center of the cap in a straight, unobscured beacon.
Patricia could feel the anticipation building in the cabin, centering on her. They were waiting for her reaction.
Reaction to what? If anything, this chamber was less impressive than the first. Her shoulders tensed. So what was she supposed to say?
Lanier reached between the seats to touch her arm. "What do you see?" he asked.
"Sand, grass, lakes, trees. A river. Some clouds."
"Look straight ahead."
She looked. The air was clear. Visibility was at least thirty kilometers. The northern cap seemed to be obscured, not nearly as obvious as the looming gray presence in the other chambers. She looked up and squinted, trying to make out the end of the plasma tube.
It didn't end. It went on, certainly more than thirty kilometers, getting dimmer and thinner until it almost merged with the horizon.
Of course, on a non-curved surface—as the cylinders were, viewed parallel to the axis—the horizon was much higher. Given unlimited distance, the horizon would begin at a true vanishing point in the perspective. . .
"This chamber's longer," she said.
