by Greg Bear
Or ... would be. She vowed to use the physicist’s concept of time from here on, with events strung 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 third 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 track.”
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 track 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 off load food, equipment, whatever the building needed through
these halls. Automatic carts would deliver the goods to the appropriate chutes 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 giving us one.”
“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.” Patricia entered the foyer ahead of him. The quarters were pristine white, furnished with ungraceful white blocks barely suggestive of couches and chairs and tables. ”It’s ugly,” she said, taking a turn around the windowless living room. Oval doors led off to two equally white and blocky bedrooms—at least that was what she assumed they were. The beds could have been settees.
The only object in the apartment that was not white was a chromium teardrop on a pedestal. Patricia paused next to it.
“Like the ones in the library.”
Takahashi nodded. ”Off limits.” He indicated the little box attached to the base of the pedestal. ”Any tampering and alarms go off in the security offices.”
“It’s a home library unit?”
“We assume so.”
“It works?”
“As far as I know, nobody’s tried. You might ask Garry.”
“Why no windows? Is this an inner apartment?”
“None of the apartments had simple windows.”
“And why so ugly?”
“If you mean plain, that’s because nobody has chosen an environment. No design because nobody’s living here. Vacant, you see.”
“Yes. What would it take to decorate it?”
“Some sort of rental contract, I assume,” Takahashi said. “Then it might respond like everything else around here. You could decorate by voice.”
“Wonderful,” Patricia said. ”Nobody’s entered any other living quarters?”
“Not in the third chamber. Locked up tight as a drum.”
“Then how did they find this one? Just by accident?”
“Yitshak Jacob went from floor to floor, alone, and walked around the circumference of the building on each floor. This was the only apartment that had a number glowing.”
“How would anyone know when they were home?”
“Maybe their number would glow and the door would open as they approached. Maybe they had other ways. We’re far from understanding such basic things.”
If we don’t know the basics, Patricia thought, how can I ever hope to understand the embellishments ... the sixth chamber, the corridor?
“We’ll go back the way we came,” Takahashi said, “and we’ll to get to that meeting before it begins.”
They barely made it. The cafeteria in the first science team compound had been rearranged, and a low stage, lectern and rows of seats now occupied the dining area. Rimskaya stood near the stage as interested team members entered the cafeteria, talking and looking for good vantage points in the rows.
Patricia and Takahashi entered at precisely 1100. Most of the seats were filled, so they sat in the back. Karen Farley turned in her seat and waved at them. Patricia returned the wave and then Rimskaya came to the lectern.
“Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, our report this morning has to do with the exodus from the Stone. We have made substantial progress with this problem and can now present our conclusions with some degree of confidence.” He introduced a slight man with wispy light brown hair and delicate Apollo-nian features. ”Dr. Wallace Rainer of the University of Oklahoma will present our conclusions. Today’s meeting should not last more than thirty minutes.”
Rainer looked to the back of the room, received an affirmative nod from a woman on the projection system and stepped up to the lectern, brandishing a collapsible metal pointer. ”All of the archaeology group has worked on this report, and several members of the sociology group as well. Dr. Jacob is indisposed, and I drew the short straw.”
Amused chuckles from the audience. ”Jacob never delivers reports,” Takahashi said. ”Very shy. He prefers deserted ruins.”
“There has always been some puzzlement as to the coexistence of the second chamber city, known as Alexandria, and the far more advanced Thistledown City in the third chamber. We’ve all asked the question at one time or another: Why did the Stoners keep Alexandria in its earlier state, rather than rebuilding and modernizing? Certainly people with our present-day temperament would feel awkward living in comparatively primitive surroundings when more modern facilities could he had for the price of a little urban renewal.
“We know a great deal now about living conditions in Alexandria but substantially less about Thistledown City. As you know, security—Stoner security—is very tight at Thistledown City, and unless we want to do some extensive breaking and entering, we have only one location where we have access to living quarters. Alexandria is more open, in some ways more friendly, if I may be excused a very unanthropological judgment.
“All of us here have level two security; we are aware the Stoners were humans, and that they came from a culture remarkably similar to our own. In fact, they come from a future version of the Earth. We know that there were at one time two major social categories: the Geshels, or technically and scientifically oriented peoples, and the Naderites. I’m wondering, by the way, who’s going to tell Ralph about this.”
Weary laughter from the audience. ”Old joke,” Takahashi whispered to Patricia.
“We now know that Alexandria, before the exodus of the Stoners, was occupied largely by orthodox Naderites. They seemed to cling to technologies and styles predating the twenty-first century.”
Patricia, with something of a jolt, realized none of these people except herself, Takahashi and Rimskaya would know the reason why that particular dividing line was important.
“In this way, they were something like the Amish. And like the Amish, they made concessions—the megas and other architectural innovations among them. But their aim was clear; they chose to retain the style of Alexandria and rejected the more advanced style of Thistledown City. We are not at all sure when this division of the orthodox Naderites and their more liberal fellows and Geshels occurred, but it was not early in the Stone’s voyage.
“We are fairly certain now that Thistledown City had been evacuated and locked up at least a century before Alexandria. In other words, the exodus had occurred in the third chamber almost a hundred years before the final evacuation of the second chamber. There is substantial evidence that the second chamber was finally emptied by force.
