by Greg Bear
“Patricia!” Lanier called from the tent. She jumped, slightly guilty, but there was no urgency or rebuke in his voice.
“Yes?”
“Work to do.”
“On my way.” She returned to the tent.
They sat by a folding table arranged under the awning.
Lanier took a slate and plugged in a memory block, then set the apparatus between them. ”You should have some idea now why we need you here. We have a couple of mysteries to figure out, and that” he pointed down the corridor—”may not be the greater.”
“I wouldn’t think so,” she said.
“I’ve already programmed a first-draft schedule for you. You’ll get a tour of the third chamber city—concentrating on a library there. That city was called Thistledown, just like the Stone itself. It’s a couple of centuries newer than Alexandria. And you’ll make several return visits to the library in the second chamber. That’ll take a week or two, just getting you started.” He pointed to the slate and tapped a RUN button.
Instructions scrolled down the screen. ”Here’s how to use the subways, schedules, and precautions. Obviously, I won’t be able to guide you all the time, or even very often. Work piling up all over. And I’ll probably be returning to Earth for a short while. During that time, you’ll report to Carrolson. Most of the facts you need to know, regarding security, are in that block. Who to talk to, who not, protocol, that sort of thing. Farley, Wu and Chang are fine people, but be circumspect. Be circumspect around anyone who doesn’t have the same privileges you do.”
“Who else can I talk to, besides you?”
“Carrolson. You can talk to her about everything but what you read in the libraries. I’m working to get her clearance for that, too. But not yet. You’ll meet others in a couple of days. Some will have library clearance, and you’ll be working with them, coordinating, cross-checking. Clear enough? For the next couple of weeks, it’s going to be study, study, study.”
“How far from the camp can I go?”
“As far as you can walk, but take along a radio. We have a security base about fifty kilometers down the corridor, with sensors set to pick up any activity in the corridor for several hundred kilometers. If they call a retreat, get back to the tunnel as soon as possible.”
“What’s the likelihood of that happening?”
“Small.” Lanier shrugged. ”Maybe nonexistent. Hasn’t happened yet. I hope you don’t resent kid-glove treatment. If anything happened to you, the Advisor would have new hairless rugs all over her floor.”
Patricia grinned. ”So who’s my duenna?”
“Until Carrolson gets here, Farley. Questions?”
“Let me get started, then I’ll ask questions.”
“Fair enough.” Lanier left her at the table. She picked up the slate and began the first memory block.
Chapter Six
Lanier left on the next shift, saying he would be back in two days to begin the next pan of her education. Carrolson arrived a few hours later, carrying a box of memory blocks and a more powerful processor recently shipped from Earth. ”At least I can take part of my work with me wherever I go,” she said.
Farley, Wu and Chang immediately began submitting some of their problems to the new processor.
Patricia studied the cubes that contained information on the corridor.
The length of the corridor was unknown, but radar signals sent from the bore hole had not yet returned after the passage of four months. It was assumed that either the corridor had no end or that the signals had been absorbed in some as-yet-unexplained way.
Exploration teams had made several forays into the corridor, but until recently, none had proceeded farther, than five hundred kilometers. To that point, the corridor was indistinguishable from the seventh chamber it adjoined: a thick layer of dirt, atmosphere at Stone-normal pressure—650 millibars—and the normal intensity of flux tube lighting.
The corridor differed from the seventh chamber in one respect: 436 kilometers down the line, it was surrounded by a circuit of artificial structures, four motionless cupolas floating without support above wide dimples in the soil. Each of the four cupolas stood alone, spaced at equal distances from the others around the circumference. What they were made of was unknown, but the substance didn’t match any of the characteristics of matter except for solidity. Eight hundred seventy-two kilometers down the line was another circuit, and a new expedition was exploring in that area now.
Patricia tapped the slate’s burnisher against her tooth, then reached into her personal effects bag and brought out the stereo attachment and a coin of Mozart. The attachment fitted easily in the standardized socket and played The Magic Flute as she read on, undisturbed.
She cut the music and took a break after an hour and a half.
Despite Carrolson’s protestations that she wasn’t Vasquez’s nursemaid, to Patricia that described her role exactly. She had no immediate duties in the seventh chamber, and her expertise wasn’t complementary to Patricia’s. Still, there was a certain comfort in having the older woman around. She was relaxed, self-confident and easy to get along with. A good person to ask questions of, if only to bounce thoughts around.
The intricacies of Stone protocol and organization were not easy to master. A chart in the memory block Lanier had left with her showed it all clearly. Under the supervision of the ISCCOM regulatory committee, NATO-Eurospace—more directly, NASA and the European Space Agency—were in charge of the Stone’s exploration.
The Joint Space Command had a very large say in how the studies were conducted. Despite the civilian overgarments, this was largely a military operation. Judith Hoffman, nominally coordinating the civilian and military agencies from her offices in Sunnyvale and Pasadena, tempered this reality a little.
The Stone security team consisted of some 300 Americans (about half), 150 British and 100 Germans; the remaining 50 were from Canada, Australia and Japan. France was not a member of NATO-Eurospace and had declined an invitation to send its nationals to the Stone, no doubt partly in protest of NATO pressure to join in the major rearmament of the first two years of the twenty-first century.
Through their respective commanders, the Stone security team took orders from U.S. Navy Captain Bertram D. Kirchnet—commander of external security—and Army Brigadier General Oliver Gerhardt, in charge of internal security.
The six hundred team members worked throughout the Stone to defend the civilians in case of attack. Who might attack was unspecified, but in the beginning, obviously, attack was expected from the seventh chamber, or from hidden elements in the unexplored second and third chamber cities.
Lanier acted as Hoffman’s direct voice on the Stone. He coordinated science, engineering and communication. Carrolson was the senior science supervisor; Heineman was in charge of civilian engineering and a woman named Roberta Pickney, civilian communication.
The structural breakdown of the science team was informative.
There were mathematicians, archaeologists, physicists, social scientists (including historians), computer and information specialists, and medical/biology experts. There were also four lawyers.
Engineering consisted of support—with a military adjunct—and mechanics. Communication also had a military adjunct, in charge of coded transmission. Pickney, assisted by Sylvia Link, was responsible for internal Stone communications and Earth-space-station-lunar settlement networks.
Patricia thought she would never be able to remember even the most important names. Names had never been her strong suit—faces and personalities she did better with.
Besides the United States and Eurospace civilian personnel, representatives from Russia, India, China, Brazil, Japan and Mexico had been invited to serve on the science team. Some Australians and one Laotian were to arrive soon. Carrolson intimated there had been trouble with the Russians. They had only been on the Stone for a year, after finally agreeing to certain restrictions. Despite their agreement, they had been demanding (reasonably enou
gh, Patricia thought) access to all information on the Stone, including the libraries. The libraries, Carrolson explained, were a purely American preserve, by direct order of Hoffman and the President.
“They’d save us all a hell of a lot of trouble if they just opened everything up to everybody,” Carrolson said. ”I despise secrecy.” But she enforced her orders.
“So who’s handling the science team while you’re here with me?” Patricia asked.
Carrolson smiled. ”I put Rimskaya on it. He’s snarly, but efficient. And people will certainly think twice before coming to him with complaints. Me, I’m just a pussycat. I need this kind of vacation.”
Lanier’s memory block specified precisely whom she could talk to, and whom not, about her studies. If she wished to discuss the library, she could only speak with Rimskaya, Lanier and one science team member she hadn’t met yet—Rupert Takahashi. He was on the current corridor expedition.
Patricia ate lunch with Carrolson and the three Chinese, napped for half an hour, then took her slate and a camp stool across the flat to the dwarf forest, where she sat and began to make her own notes.
Carrolson joined her an hour later, carrying a thermos of iced tea and a couple of bananas.
“I’ll need some tools,” Patricia said. ”A compass, a ruler, some pencils, or ...I’ve been thinking. Is it possible that one of the engineers or electronics people could make a tool for me?”
“Name it.”
“I’d like to know what the value of pi is in the corridor.”
Carrolson pursed her lips. ”Why?”
“Well, so far as I’ve read, the corridor is definitely not made of matter. It’s something else entirely. Last night—I mean, last sleep, Farley and I talked and she explained what she knew. This morning I peeked at some of the papers Rimskaya and Takahashi put together before my arrival.”
“Back in the amateur days of superspace mathematics,” Carrolson said wryly. ”Rimskaya probably should have stuck to his expertise.”
“Perhaps, but he made some interesting suggestions. Tomorrow, Karen is going to take me to the bore hole.” She pointed up at the plasma tube and the southern cap axis. ”If I can have a pi-meter by that time, maybe I can learn some things.”
“Done,” Carrolson said. ”Anything else?”
“I don’t know if it’s even possible, but as long as we’re measuring pi, I’d like to measure slash aitch and the gravitational constant, whatever else they can think of pertaining to the qualities of the universe. A kind of multi-meter.”
“You think the constants will vary here?”
“Some of them, at least.”
“Slash aitch, the quantum of momentum? We wouldn’t even exist.”
“There could be a difference in ratio. I’d just like to know.”
Carrolson stood, picked up the empty thermos and the banana skins and returned to the tent. Minutes later, she and Wu left in the truck, taking the tunnel back to the sixth chamber.
Patricia stared down the corridor, frowning slightly.
She had very real, if limited, power. She had just made a Nobel laureate jump to do her bidding.
For much of her life, Patricia had spent her most important moments in her head, lost in a world that would have been completely incomprehensible to the vast majority of people on Earth. Now, sitting by the dwarf forest, listening to the Mozart Jupiter Symphony and staring down the length of the corridor, she felt at first nervous, then irritated that the state wasn’t coming fast enough.
She knew where to begin. If the corridor wasn’t made of matter, there were only a few alternatives. Either it was a tube of restraining forces, passing beyond the end of the asteroid through some superspace trickery, or it was not. If not, then it was likely to be constructed itself of superspace trickery. (She considered, and dismissed as philosophically useless—for the moment—the notion that the corridor was an illusion.) Superspace trickery was the more difficult concept to work with. If the Stoners had used the machinery in the sixth chamber to distort space-time, there would be consequences.
When the multi-meter arrived—if it did what she had requested—she could begin laying down parameters. Curved space on the scale of the corridor would probably produce fluctuations in the value of pi, since the diameter of a circle, in any seriously distorted manifold, would vary in relation to its circumference. Other constants would vary depending on distortions in higher geometries.
She gave up trying to force the state after a while. The facts weren’t sufficient to warrant straining herself.
There was nothing she could do, for the moment, but relax and read.
She plugged another memory block into the slate.
“How long did it take you to get used to living without night?” Patricia asked. Farley tapped her fingers impatiently against the wall of the arch, waiting for the axis elevator. They stood fifty meters east of the tunnel ramp, on a smooth-polished square of nickel-iron.
“I’m not sure I am used to it,” Farley said. ”I live with it, but I miss starry nights.”
“With all their technology, you’d think the Stoners would have come up with some way to have darkness.”
“Shutting off the plasma tube would be a huge waste of energy,” Farley mused. ”Especially for the seventh chamber. I mean it does seem to go on forever—and how could you shut off something like that?”
Patricia pulled out her slate and typed, Seventh chamber plasma tube—power supply? Maintenance? Same as other chamber tubes?
The elevator door opened and they entered the large circular cabin.
The door closed as Farley pressed a button. They both grasped bars mounted in the walls. At first, the acceleration of the elevator increased their total weight, but as they rose—approaching the axis—the effects canceled out. The elevator reached a steady velocity after traveling about a third of the way up the shaft. Their weight had decreased considerably by then. Shortly after, they began to decelerate, slipping smoothly into near-weightlessness. The door opened and a guard in black and gray greeted them.
The axis compartments surrounding the seventh chamber bore hole had been pressurized and heated, but otherwise they remained much as the Stoners had left them, centuries before.
Ribbons of newly wired lighting crisscrossed the cavernous staging area.
“We’re going to the singularity monitor,” Farley said. The soldier gestured for them to board a cart. They followed the ropes and took their seats, buckling themselves in.
“I have a feeling you’re going to show me something else astonishing,” Patricia said accusingly. ”I’m not even used to the other wonders yet.”
“Ancillary wonder,” Farley said mysteriously. “A result of the other wonders, if you follow Rimskaya and Takahashi’s theories. But you’re the space-time expert here.”
“I’m not so sure,” Patricia said distantly.
“If the corridor is a matrix of bent geodesics, a warped tube of space, what would you expect to find at its center?”
“I wondered about that yesterday afternoon.” She paused as the cart neared the end of the staging area. ”It’s not going to work down the center. There’s going to be a region where all the rules fail.”
“Precisely.”
“A singularity?”
“That’s where we’re going,” Farley said.
The guard pulled the cart alongside an airlock mounted in the rock wall. Farley gripped a guide bar and helped Patricia out of her belt.
The guard saluted and said he would wait for them.
They entered the airlock. Farley switched on a light and pulled down two rumply, one-size-fits-all pressure suits from a rack. ”You can snug the arm and leg lengths a bit with these straps. Mobility and finesse aren’t really needed here, just pressure and temperature and air. This isn’t the most visited spot on the Stone.”
The rear wall of the airlock was equipped with a broad-runged ladder, ascending to a wheel-opened hatch in the ceiling. Bits and pieces of equipm
ent—some obviously long-abandoned—lay stacked in the corners and under the ladder.
“Just watch your step. Take everything slowly. There’s no danger if you’re careful. If anything happens to your suit—very unlikely—we can be back in the lock in less than two minutes.”
Farley checked Patricia’s suit seals and pressed a red button on a panel mounted near the ladder. The air was quietly pumped out of the chamber until Patricia could hear only her own breathing. Farley switched on their suit radios.
“Up the ladder,” she said.
“I’ve never been in a spacesuit before,” Patricia said, climbing the rungs after Farley.
“You didn’t get spacesick, according to the OTV crew.”
“Being weightless is fun.”
“Hmm. Took me three days to get used to it.”
Farley spun the wheel on the hatch and pushed it open. It glided slowly upward, then stopped until she ascended another rung and gave it a push. It swung out of the way. Compact floodlights had been installed in the bore hole, though the opening to the seventh chamber was only a dozen meters away, and the milky glow of the inner plasma tube spread faintly throughout.
Patricia turned to look south. The walls of the bore hole—rough and grooved with irregular lines—faded into inky blackness. At the end of the blackness was a circle of light the size of a BB held at arm’s length. She looked up as best she could and saw a wide intrusion of dark rock in the asteroidal “Plasma tube begins anew in each chamber,” Farley said.
“It butts against the caps, sustained by a very weak bottle. The bottle also acts to keep the atmosphere in—otherwise, it would all have licked out through the bore holes. Leaked, I mean. Leak?”
“Leaked is fine,” Patricia said. ”Wouldn’t air be kept down in the chambers because of the rotation?”
“Scale height is the key. Without the bottle, the atmospheric pressure at the bore holes would still be about a hundred and eighty millimeters of mercury.”
