by Greg Bear
She tried to imagine tens of millions of Stoners—such a population could easily have been accommodated by Thistledown City alone—tooling off down the corridor in their robot cars.
The library entrance was a solid sheet of a material resembling black marble. As they approached, an amplified voice asked them to halt for identification. They stood for a full two minutes before being cleared to enter.
A broad half-ellipse flowed aside in the black expanse. Beyond waited the ubiquitous security team in gray and black, passing them through after more ritual. The interior of the library was fully illuminated; no additional strip lighting was necessary. "No circuit breakers in Thistledown," Takahashi said. "We're not even sure how the power gets to the lights, much less where it comes from."
The library proper was smaller in overall volume than its cousin—or ancestor—in Alexandria and had no visible stores of records. The main floor was a pastel-blue-carpeted plaza beneath a sheet of softly glowing white material which stretched without support for a hundred meters. The plaza was dotted with at least a thousand lime-green padded seats. In front of each seat was a chromium teardrop on a slate-gray pedestal.
The fabrics and materials in the library showed no sign of wear or decay.
Takahashi led her to a seat. Recording and monitoring equipment surrounded the seat, looking out-of-place and obviously rigged by the investigators. "We use this one normally, but the choice is yours."
She shook her head, "I don't like all this stuff," she said, indicating the equipment. Moving through the ranks of seats, she chose one about twenty meters from the edge of the array and sat.
Takahashi followed. "You can show yourself the entire Stone from here—as it used to be," he said. "Would you like a tour of the cities when they were occupied?" He pushed aside a fabric-covered lid on her seat arm and showed her how to use the simple controls on the panel beneath. "These are just the basics. There are hundreds of other tricks possible. Feel free to experiment. Think of it as a vacation. It's no fun to watch, and I have no real business here except to show you the ropes, so I'll wait outside. Join me when you're done—say in an hour or so?"
She didn't feel easy about being on the plaza alone, and she had deeply appreciated Lanier's staying with her in the Alexandria library. Still, she agreed with a nod and settled into the seat, manipulating the controls with one hand. A simple circular graphic display hovered before her, as crisp and clear as something solid. Takahashi had misinformed her on one point, and her fumbling triggered a tutorial. It corrected her errors and informed her—in only slightly accented American English—how to operate the equipment properly. Then it provided her with call numbers and codes for other types of information.
She called up a student's basic guide to the second chamber city. In an instant, Alexandria surrounded her. She appeared to be standing on the portico of an apartment in the lower floors of one of the megas, looking down on the busy streets. The illusion was perfect—even providing her with a memory of what "her" apartment looked like. She could turn her head and look completely behind her if she wished—indeed, she could walk around, even though she new she was sitting down.
In both her ears—or somewhere in the middle of her head—a voice explained what she was seeing.
She spent half an hour in Alexandria, observing the clothes the people wore, their faces, their hair styles and expressions and ways of moving. Some of the outfits attracted her. Others were positively puritanical—in a slinky sort of way. One of the most popular styles at the time of the record, for women, was an opaque robe—usually in pink or dusty orange—with hood, capped by a small crimson disk of some feathery material. Some women wore hexagonal blue designs on their left shoulder blades—
("?"
(For information on insignia of office and rank, positively and silently vocalize the following code string. . . . )
—and others red ribbons draped over the right shoulder, terminating in gold beads. Men's clothing was no less flamboyant, or somber; the distinctions seemed to point up sexual attitudes quite different from those in her time, her world.
She heard them speaking. It was a peculiar speech, resembling Welsh but occasionally understandable as English or French.
("What language did you—this unit—speak to me, and how did you know?"
(Late twenty-first-century English, the earliest accessible without specific code, selected because of your conversation before access to data.)
While ethnic populations still retained versions of their mother tongues, many of the languages had mutated into a common tongue—though she was informed subliminally that fashions in language were much more variable over shorter periods of time. Rapid changes were possible because learning had been accelerated by tutorial devices such as those in the library. One could learn any new language or variation in a few hours, or mere minutes.
For the written languages she understood, many of the spellings had been simplified or—paradoxically—made more complex. Had there been a time when flowery spelling was in vogue?
(This is the famous Nader Plaza, which won awards for architectural excellence before the Thistledown vessel left Earth behind. . . . )
She listened attentively, completely lost in the experience. Some men wore kilt-like skirts and unyoked sleeves, others wore business suits that would not have been out of place in twenty-first-century Los Angeles. Shoes seemed to have gone completely out of fashion, perhaps because automated sanitation kept everything spotless.
(What about social deviation? Ghettos and tenements?)
The scene shifted dizzily.
(Social unease in Alexandria and the rest of the Stone is not unknown. Certain districts have been kept free of constant city maintenance. The citizens living in these districts have chosen to avoid all modern conveniences, and shirk any equipment invented after the twentieth century. Their wishes are strictly observed; they are often honored citizens, and they are entitled to their belief that technology led to the Death, and that God wishes us to live with no supports not mentioned in the works of the Gentle Nader and his Apostles of the Mountain.)
She had heard the name Nader mentioned several times, but it took her some time to get around to toggling a different branch of the "footnote" function. As she did so, she asked for explanations of several other things any Stoner would have taken for granted. That triggered an elementary, synopsized history of the Stone, and of the time between the Death and the construction of the Thistledown.
She was more than a little shocked to discover that the Gentle Nader was, in fact, Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and independent investigator who had made a big stir in the 1960s and 1970s. He was still alive, back on Earth—her Earth, her time—but in the library records his name was always used reverently. He was always "Gentle Nader" or "the Good Man." Those who took his name—the Naderites—were a powerful political force, and had been for centuries. Or. . . would be. She vowed to use the physicist's concept of time from here on, with events strong along a line, and no particular breakdown into past, present or future.
After the Death, the hideous Long Winter and the Recovery Revolutions, a Spaniard named Diego Garcia de Santillana rose to power in the remains of Western Europe, under the banner of the Return to Life movement. He initiated a tentative push for world government. The next year, in 2010 (just five years from now, she thought, breaking her vow) the first Naderite coalitions formed in North America. Nader—"martyred" during the Death—had been chosen for his stand against nuclear energy and excessive technology; however just or unjust the elevation, he became a saintly figure, a hero in a wasteland still filled with fear and rage against what the human race had done to itself. In 2011, the Naderites absorbed the Return to Lifers, and the re-emerging governments of North America and Western Europe made pacts of exchange and cooperation. Naderite governments were put into office by landslide elections and immediate curbs were sought on high technology and nuclear research. "Agrarianize!" became the rallying cry of a th
ird of the world economy, and the Raiders—an elite, somewhat shadowy organization—fanned out around the world to "persuade" reluctant governments to join in. In Russia, the revolution of 2012, staged by Naderite sympathizers, brought down the last Council government of the USSR, which had already retreated into its center of power, the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic. Nations throughout the Eastern bloc regained their political sovereignty, and most of them went over to the Naderites.
That, at least, explained the prevalence of Nader's name in the records. Between 2015 and 2100, the followers of the Good Man consolidated their power over two-thirds of the world. The only dogged resistance in those decades was in Asia, where the Greater Asian Cooperative—made up of Japan, China, Southeast Asia (occasionally) and Malaysia—renounced Naderism and returned enthusiastically to scientific research and high technology, including nuclear energy. The first real opposition to the Naderites in the West began in 2100 with the Volks movement in Gross Deutschland—
She switched off the machine and lay back in the chair, rubbing her eyes. The information had come in printed displays, selected visuals and even more selected sounds. Where documentation of the multimedia sort was lacking, print took over, but with subtle and clear vocal accompaniment. Compared to this, simple reading was torture and current video methods as archaic as cave paintings.
If she were so inclined, she could pleasantly spend the rest of her life here, an eternal scholar parasitizing the knowledge of centuries neither she nor her ancestors had lived through.
Considering the alternatives she faced, that prospect was very attractive.
The hour was almost up.
She returned to the system briefly to look up information on the corridor, the exodus of the Stoners and the desertion of the cities. In each instance she was met with a very graphic floating spiked ball signaling no access.
Meeting Takahashi outside, where he was calmly smoking a cigarette—the first she had seen on the Stone—Patricia stretched her arms and neck. "I'm going to have to come back."
"Of course."
"Where to next?"
"A short tour. We can't walk to where we're going in any reasonable time, so we'll use a truck."
The garage for the third chamber trucks was a sheet metal shed nestled incongruously at the base of one of the chamber-spanning arches. A subway entrance opened nearby; the transit lines that had once served Thistledown City were no longer operative, however, and to get from one subway junction to anywhere else in the city, it was necessary to drive trucks along the narrow service roads.
"I can't access anything in the libraries on the exodus," Patricia said as Takahashi inspected a truck. He bent down to peer beneath the chassis, then stood straight and brushed his hands together.
"The archaeology group is working that out now. We should be back in time for their weekly report; that's at eleven hundred hours." He glanced at his watch. "It's oh nine hundred now. Everything seems to be shipshape. Shall we be off?"
He held the driver's door open for her. "Had your truck lessons yet?"
Patricia shook her head.
"It's about time, then, don't you think?"
She shrugged nervously.
"Not hard at all. Especially here. The service roads are easy to follow. We've learned the code for the signs on the walls that service machines used—not that different from bar codes on Earth. Replaces street signs. I just shine a pen reader on the signs near the corners and we know where we are. I tell you when to turn. . . you turn. All the service roads are surrounded by walls; you can't fall off anything even if you try. Okay?"
"Okay."
He climbed into the shotgun seat and showed her the column guidance system. "It's like an airplane in one respect—push the column forward and the truck moves forward; the farther you push, the faster it goes, up to a hundred klicks. Slow down by pulling the stick back to upright; reverse by pulling the stick toward you. Maximum speed in reverse is about ten klicks. Gear shifting is automatic. Grip the handles on the horizontal bar and twist the bar the direction you want to go. If you want to make a complete about-face without moving forward or back, just hold the column on the center line and twist the bar as far as it will go. The truck will rotate around its center line. Want to practice?"
"Of course." She maneuvered the truck back and forth around the garage. Using the stick as a brake took some getting used to. When she felt she was reasonably proficient, she smiled at Takahashi. "Let's go," she said.
"Catch on fast, don't you?"
"Don't speak too soon," she warned.
"Okay. Spin us around." He pointed out the nearest service entrance.
The walled service roads wound through and under the city's buildings, usually avoiding grades steeper than ten or fifteen degrees. In one section, however, the ride resembled a roller coaster. Takahashi coaxed her up and down the slopes. "We just passed over the main plumbing for this neighborhood," he explained.
Where the service roads became tunnels, and where the arches and other structures blocked out most of the tubelight, large milky panels cast a soft illumination. The city was without appreciable shadow; everything was cast in a rich and even light.
Takahashi suggested she slow down as they approached a branch in the serviceway. He took a pen reader from his pocket and pointed it at a squiggle of lines of uneven thicknesses near the end of the left-hand wall. The pen was hooked to his slate, which displayed a map, a digital coordinate and directions to nearby points. "Left," he said. "We'll be entering the apartment building soon. By the back door, so to speak."
The serviceway soon passed beneath the plaza of a dazzling gold-surfaced cylindrical tower. Lights flashed at them as they passed, but the shape of the truck—or their presence within—did not trigger any automatic responses.
"Stop at that open door ahead," Takahashi said.
A sign mounted on a chain blocked the passageway to vehicle traffic. Patricia read the sign after stopping the truck and setting the parking brake.
NO TRUCKS OR PEDESTRIANS BEYOND THIS POINT
BY ORDER OF Y. JACOB
DIRECTOR ARCHAEOLOGY TEAM
"And he means it, too," Takahashi said dryly. "That's virgin territory beyond that sign. They've checked over this building, and that's why we're allowed in—but don't touch."
They climbed up a meter-high ledge and stooped over to enter the hatchway. Recently installed locks and chains held more doors open. Patricia noticed other sensing devices—some covered with silvery tape—mounted on the walls, floor and ceiling.
"The machines would offload food, equipment, whatever the building needed through these halls. Automatic carts would deliver the goods to the appropriate chutes and they would lift them to different parts of the building. From this point on, though, we're not cargo; we're people."
Another open hatchway gave access to a large ground-floor reception area. Free-form seats and couches—apparently made of natural wood—furnished a sunken conversation pit near a broad, one-piece window that stretched at least twenty meters to the ceiling. A well-maintained flower garden stretched beyond the window. She was completely taken in by the illusion until she realized the garden was illuminated by sunlight and that blue sky showed through the trees. She stopped to stare and Takahashi waited patiently with hands folded.
"That's lovely," she said.
"The garden's real; the sunlight and sky are fake," he said noncommittally.
"I was wondering how they got along without sunshine and blue skies."
"If you went outside, you'd see the window's having us on."
"It looks very real."
The floor resembled shiny stonework but felt carpeted. Patricia shuffled her feet experimentally but her efforts produced no sound.
"Going up will take some will power," Takahashi warned. At the far end of the reception area were two open shafts sunk into the wall. "Not recommended for those with vertigo." They entered the left-hand shaft. Takahashi pointed down and reached out with
his foot to tap a red circle on the floor. The circle glowed. "Seven," he said. "Both of us."
The floor receded. With no visible support, they flew up the shaft. Except for the appearance of motion there was no sensation whatsoever. Patricia's eyes widened and she reached for Takahashi's arm. Above the reception area, the shaft was featureless. There was no way of telling how many floors were passing.
"Only takes a second," he said. "Don't you love it? I don't know how many novels I've read with this sort of thing in them. In Thistledown City, it's real." This was the first time Patricia had heard him express delight. He seemed intensely interested in her reaction: Another spaghetti worm mystery, she thought. See how the girl screams.
She let go of his arm just as a portion of the shaft became transparent in front of them. They were smoothly, gently deposited on the floor beyond.
Patricia swallowed hard. "I am amazed," she said with some effort, "how well everything is working here, while nothing much works in the second chamber."
Takahashi nodded, as if acknowledging that was an interesting problem, but he was unable or unwilling to provide the answer. "Follow me, please."
The hallway curved off to either side. It was round in cross section, and its color varied smoothly from rich forest green to dark maple. Always they seemed to walk in a circle of warm light. Patricia looked down and noticed that their feet touched an invisible plane above the floor of the hallway. "We're walking on air," she said, suppressing a nervous tremor.
"Favorite illusion for the Stoners. Gets dull after a time." They stopped and Takahashi pointed down at the floor to their right. "756" glowed in red beneath a faint leaf-green line. "This is a door, and it happens to be the door we want. Now, you do the honors. Hold your hand up to the wall and press anywhere."
She reached out and did as he suggested. A seven-foot-high oval vanished from the wall, revealing a white room beyond.
"The archaeologists found this one by accident. Apparently it was vacant before the exodus and this is the way prospective tenants checked out the apartments. All the other doors in the building are personality coded or otherwise blocked to visitors. And—as you know if you tried—information on interiors of private spaces in Thistledown City is not available in the libraries. Welcome."
