Eon (Eon, 2)

by Greg Bear

  "How long do we have?" Lanier asked.

  "Until the order goes through channels? A week, probably."

  Lanier grinned and shook his head.

  "What's there to be amused about?" Cronberry asked coldly, wrapped in a loose shell of smoke.

  "The records say we have two weeks before the war."

  Hoffman invited Lanier to her office for drinks that evening. He arrived at seven, after a quick dinner in the JPL cafeteria, and again checked his agents at the door. Hoffman's JPL office was as spare and utilitarian as the one in her home in New York, the major difference being more shelves of memory blocks.

  "We tried," she said, handing him a Scotch neat. "Well." She toasted him with a raised Dubonnet on the rocks.

  "We did," he said.

  "You look tired."

  "I am tired."

  "Weight of the world on your shoulders," she said, looking at him cautiously.

  "Weight of a couple of universes," he said. "I'm discovering how tough a bastard I am, Judith."

  "Me too. I talked to the President again this afternoon."

  "Oh?"

  "Yes. I'm afraid I called him an idiot. I'll very likely be fired or forced to resign by the time you're in orbit."

  "Good for you," Lanier said.

  "Sit. Talk to me. Tell me what it's like. I want to get up there so badly. . . .” She pulled out chairs and they sat across from each other.

  "Why?" Lanier asked. "You've seen the blocks, all the information."

  "That's a stupid question."

  "It is," Lanier admitted. They were both getting slightly tipsy before the alcohol could possible have had time to take effect. Lanier had noticed the condition before, in times of stress.

  "Goddamn, I sure understand what the Russians are worried about," Hoffman said after a moment's silence. "For the last ten years we've been beating the pants off of them in every area—diplomatically, technologically. In space and on Earth. Hares to their tortoise. They're dinosaurs and they hate anything faster and more adaptable. Why, young Ivan doesn't know a computer terminal from a tractor wheel. Even the Chinese are beating them."

  "The Chinese might edge ahead of us in a generation or two."

  "Good. Serve us right." Hoffman said. "Now the Stone comes down, and we intercept it, claim it, let them have little useless nibbles of it in the interests of international cooperation. . . . And whatever's on the Stone, it might just as well be a tombstone for the Eastern bloc. We'll be in control of unimagined technology. Jesus. I wish we could sit down with them and reason. . . but they're too scared, and our President is too damned stupid."

  "I don't think stupid is the right word. Shell-shocked, perhaps."

  "He knew a little about the Stone when he ran for office."

  "He knew it was coming," Lanier said. "None of us knew much more than that."

  "Well, fuck him if he can't take a joke," Hoffman said, staring at the shutters on the window. "When you were a pilot, way back when," she continued, "you crashed once. Where did you want to be before your plane went down?"

  "At the controls," Lanier said without hesitation. "I wanted to save the plane so badly I couldn't even think about punching out. I thought it—the plane—was absolutely beautiful, and I wanted to save it. I also wanted to keep it from killing other people. So we both landed in a lake."

  "I'm not nearly so brave," Hoffman said. "I think the Earth is beautiful, and I want to save it. I've been working my buns off to do so. Now all I get is shit. Your airplane didn't thumb its nose at you. It didn't call you on the carpet for your best work, did it?"

  Lanier shook his head.

  "That's what's happening here. So now I'm saying to myself, 'The hell with 'em.' I want to be up on the Stone when it happens."

  "If everything goes to hell on Earth, we're not going to get down from the Stone for years. Not even the lunar settlement will be able to help us."

  "Earth will survive?"

  "Barely," Lanier said. "A year of sub-zero temperatures throughout the northern hemisphere, plagues and starvation, revolutions. If the libraries reflect our reality, maybe three or four billion people will die overall."

  "But it isn't the end of the world."

  "No. It may not even happen."

  "Do you believe that?"

  Lanier kept his silence for a long moment. Hoffman waited, hardly blinking. "No. Not now. Perhaps if the Stone had never arrived."

  Hoffman put down her drink and ran her fingers around the rim of the glass. "Well. I'm going to try to get up there. Don't ask how. If I make it, I'll see you on the Stone. If I don't. . . You've been good to work with. I'd enjoy working with you more." She reached out and drew him to her, kissing him on the forehead. "Thank you."

  A half hour later, after they had drained three drinks apiece, she escorted him to the door. She took a folded piece of paper and pressed it into his hand.

  "Now take this and use it however you will. You can give it to Gerhardt if you want, or you can destroy it. It's probably not that important now."

  "What is it?" he asked.

  "The name of the Russian operative on the Stone."

  Lanier's hand tightened on the paper, but he did not unfold it.

  "The President is moving quicker than I thought he would," Hoffman said. "Sometime tomorrow, you're going to be ordered to close the libraries. He wants to convince the Soviets we're on the up-and-up."

  "That's insane," Lanier said.

  "Not very. It's politics. He's got big problems. Did I just say that? Yes. I even understand the President now. I must be drunk. Anyway, does it matter?"

  "It sure as hell could."

  "Then do what you wish. It'll take them a couple of weeks to find out and mount an effort to remove you." She smiled. "As soon as Vasquez does her stuff, you let me know somehow, okay? Not all the cards have been played yet. There are senators and a couple of members of the Joint Chiefs still on my side."

  "I'll do that," he said. He took the paper and put it in his pocket.

  She opened the door for him. "Good-bye, Garry."

  The agent several steps down the hall regarded him with a deadpan expression.

  Do I really want to know?

  He had to know.

  He had to get the Stone ready for whatever would come.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Heineman piloted the V/STOL alone, using the aircraft's rocket to push the tuberider along the axis from the first chamber bore hole. It had been only forty minutes since he had linked the tuberider and V/STOL in the south polar bore hole. The "ground" surrounded him on all sides, giving him a peculiar sensation of vertigo at first; which way should he orient? But he adapted quickly.

  Using radio beacons set up in each chamber, coordinating through the V/STOL's guidance computers, he could tell his position within a few centimeters. Cautiously and lovingly, he eased the assembly from chamber to chamber, using temporary propulsion packs on the tuberider and the aircraft, coordinated through the aircraft's own customized guidance system.

  Coming up on each bore hole was a thrill that raised the hair on his neck. In the center of the massive gray caps, that tiny hole—wider than a football field, no challenge really, but from a distance almost invisible. . .

  He flew steadily over the fifth chamber's darkly Gothic landscape of clouds, mountains and chasms. Entering the bore hole between the fifth and sixth chambers, he issued a terse instruction to a crew of his engineers waiting near the seventh chamber singularity: "Take 'er down. I'm coming through in a few minutes." They acknowledged and began to dismantle the top of the research scaffold.

  It was Heineman's intention to thread the needle without readjustment, slowly but expertly.

  The mated vehicles were monstrous from an aerodynamic viewpoint, and cumbersome from any perspective, but the flight was not difficult. The near-vacuum of the Stone axis offered no resistance.

  Even concentrating on the last phase of the delivery, Heineman couldn't stop thinking about flying
the aircraft.

  Reentry was the uncertain part. Once the tuberider was threaded and steady on the singularity, Heineman would test the clamps by moving thirty-one kilometers down the axis. Descent would be much less complicated—so he was told—that far down the corridor; he could descend in almost a straight line instead of the spiral necessary within the rotating chamber.

  The V/STOL would unlink and propel itself away from the axis with short bursts from hydrogen peroxide motors. Then it would fall steadily, encountering resistance at the level of the atmosphere field barrier and plasma tube, about twenty-two kilometers above the chamber floor, three kilometers from the axis. Jets and upwellings from coriolis and compressional heating made the first thin kilometer of air tricky; the V/STOL's pilot would have to forget a lot of the truisms learned on Earth.

  The designers had estimated the aircraft's fuel use. It could make twenty ascents and descents, and fly approximately four thousand kilometers at cruising speed in the air, before having to tap the tuberider fuel, oxygen and hydrogen peroxide tanks. Fully loaded, the tuberider could refuel the V/STOL five times. And when it was clamped to the singularity, the tuberider could travel indefinitely using the spatial transform effect.

  Now, both plane and tuberider were traveling light. Once they were threaded, crews could load them with fuel and oxygen from the staging area of the seventh chamber bore hole.

  The sixth chamber rotated around him, a cylindrical cloudscape with broken patches revealing the machines he had only learned about three days before.

  He was half-convinced the archaeologists and physicists had conspired to keep him away from the most interesting parts of the Stone out of sheer spite. "No moving parts," Carrolson had said. "We didn't think you'd be interested." He gritted his teeth, then blew out his breath with a whistle. The sixth chamber machinery was overawing. He had never dreamed he would see anything like it, even on the Stone. It almost took his attention away from piloting the tuberider and V/STOL.

  The last bore hole approached rapidly. He slowed the assembly and nudged the craft one last time. Allowing for some mid-hole corrections and drifts caused by irregularities imposed on the Stone by its Earth–Moon orbit, he would be able to slide right onto the singularity, slow the assembly with the clamps and then proceed with the tuberider test.

  "There it is, "Carrolson said, pointing. She stared through the polarized and filtered binoculars at the plasma tube where it joined the southern cap, then handed the glasses to Farley. Farley squinted through them and clearly saw the mated vehicles, seemingly poised without support; the singularity was impossible to make out from this distance.

  "He's going to fly it down today?"

  Carrolson nodded. "Heineman will try it out and stay here until Lanier returns."

  Rimskaya walked up behind them and stood silent while they passed the glasses back and forth. "Ladies," he said some moments later, "we have work to do."

  "Certainly," Farley said. Carrolson grinned behind Rimskaya's back. They returned to the tent.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Vasquez continued her tour of the third chamber city by way of the library simulation. She discovered she could wander at will through the record, taking any route she chose, although she was still unable to enter private spaces.

  Mostly, she used the tours to relax between long periods of heavy brainwork. She also made tours on foot; the independence she felt, going from place to place in the Stone with a pocket map or slate and memory blocks—no one questioning her about her intentions—was exhilarating. She could almost shut out the dark thoughts—but not quite.

  She rode the trains from the sixth to the third chamber at least once every twenty-four hours. Occasionally, she used the second chamber library, sometimes staying over and sleeping on the cot in the darkened reading room. That wasn't her favorite place to sleep—she much preferred the tent in the seventh chamber, near people—but it was the most private. Not even Takahashi used the second chamber library often.

  The libraries were the two foci of her work. As the problems moved from point to point on their routes through her mind, she occupied herself with gathering more information than she actually needed, and reveled in the intellectual luxury.

  When she asked for reference materials having to do with Stone design, the library displayed its solid-looking and convincing black sphere surrounded by an outward-facing circle of spikes. A pleasant voice would announce: "There is no current access to that material. Please consult an active librarian."

  Early on, she sensed a pattern, and it proved very frustrating. Virtually all material dealing with the theory and construction of the sixth chamber was inaccessible. There was no material on the seventh chamber and the corridor—the response for her queries in that area was simply, "Not in records," accompanied by a black bar.

  While fuming over these rebuffs, it occurred to her that she might go back through the records and look up her own papers—even future papers—to see if she had a counterpart, and if that counterpart had made a mark in the Stone's universe.

  But she had an almost superstitious reluctance to probe that deeply. When she finally did come across her own name, it was by accident.

  The only real clues to the sixth chamber were in the Alexandria library, bound into a seventy-five-volume set of basic instruction manuals that looked as if it had been printed for handymen and engineers as a collector's edition, or a testimonial for retirees.

  It was in the forty-fifth volume, a hefty tome of two thousand pages containing theory of early sixth chamber machinery and inertial damping, that she found her name in a footnote.

  In the dark reading room, with the desk lamps and strip lighting providing the only illumination, she stared at the reference, her back stiffening.

  "Patricia Luisa Vasquez," she read, as if the sounds were magic, "Theory of n-Spatial Geodesics as Applied to Newtonian Physics with a Special Discourse on ρ-Simplon World Lines." She had never written a paper with that title—not yet, at any rate.

  It would be published in 2023, in an issue of the Post-Death Journal of Accepted Physics.

  She would survive the Death.

  And contribute, at least in this small way, to the construction of the Stone.

  She found the article in the Thistledown City library, where it was apparently regarded as too archaic to be interdicted. She read it, palms damp, and found much of it very difficult. Weaving her way through the unfamiliar symbols and obscure terminology, trying to get the gist of what her counterpart would write, eighteen years from now—or had written, centuries past—a ghost of an explanation occurred to her.

  In the Stone's revised original plans, the sole purpose of the sixth chamber machinery had been to damp the momentum of selected objects within the Stone, in directions roughly parallel to the axis. This function had eliminated the need for banked channels of rivers, special architecture for buildings, even for a different design in the chambers themselves.

  At the beginning of the Stone's construction, an upward limit had been placed on the Stone's acceleration and deceleration of 3 percent g. With the sixth chamber machinery, there was no need to limit the acceleration at all. The Stone's chambers became part of a controlled and separate reference frame, independent of outside influence.

  Chapters in the manuals explained how the damping system did not operate universally; if it had, the Stone's rotation would have been useless, and everything within the chambers would have floated around weightless. The damping was highly selective.

  And that was super-science. The implications were astonishing. What the sixth chamber machinery did, in effect, was alter the mass-space-time character of everything in the Stone.

  That was little short of being able to manipulate space and time in such a way as to create the corridor.

  Yet the Stone did not travel faster than light, and it did not possess artificial gravity—not in the first six chambers, at any rate. Those achievements could also have been expected in light of the the
ory of inertial damping. Why hadn't the Stone's engineers and physicists been able to close the conceptual loop?

  She returned to the Alexandria library and skimmed the manuals, but in themselves they provided no answer, concerned as they were with theory and maintenance of specific Stone machinery.

  On her cot in the reading room, she buried her face in her palms, squeezing the bridge of her nose and rubbing her eyes. Her brain felt tight. Too much concentration. Too little time, trying to force the queued problems, trying to emerge with answers ahead of schedule.

  She had to have a break. She stood and followed the strip lighting to the lower floor, emerging in the tubelight and sitting on a bench surrounding a treeless concrete planter.

  She tried to shut out all conscious thought, to get back into the state, but she couldn't.

  Thoughts of Paul and her family kept interposing.

  "I am losing myself," she murmured, shaking her head. She was becoming nothing but a series of thoughts floating in gray void, a cerebral point. Overworking.

  Then—a gap in the void.

  She had once studied fraction spaces—individual dimensions operating without counterparts, and dimensions of less than unit numbers. Time without space; length without breadth, depth or time. Probability without extension. Half-spaces, quarter-spaces, spaces composed of irrational fractions. All to be handled by fractional transforms and fractal geometric analysis. She had even begun to chart the geodesics of higher fractional spaces, and the way these geodesics might project in five- and four-space.

  She dropped her head between her knees. Her thoughts were zagging. No order, no discipline.

  The corridor—just an extension of the sixth chamber machinery, designed for inertial damping.

  On a journey of centuries, the Stoners had changed their minds, or perhaps lost sight of the original goals. A world unto itself, the Stone had impressed upon succeeding generations its own character, until it seemed perfectly natural to live in rotating cylinders, hollowed out of asteroid rock. In time, perhaps even the asteroid had seemed to fade out of immediate awareness, leaving only life within cylinders.