Eon

by Greg Bear

  She had no idea what a “gate opener” was and didn’t feel it was appropriate to ask. She could look it up later. ”Are they going to leave the corridor?”

  “I do not know,” Gardner said. ”Their leader, Ser Olmy, has been informed of the timetable. He believes they can escape the sealing of the Way. They have been delayed by stopping at several reopened gates to drop off nonhuman clients.”

  Hoffman absorbed the news quietly, slapping her left hand lightly against her thigh. She had assumed the four searchers and Vasquez had died or been irretrievably lost in the shuffle.

  For the time being, she had managed to forget about them.

  Now she once again had something to worry about, with little knowledge of the perils involved, or their chances for success.

  “Our zero hour will be in forty-three minutes,” Corprep Gardner said. “By the way, I thought I would inform you that numbers of Hexamon citizens have been solicited by a small group of your people. There is a ‘wild party’ going on in the quarters of Axis Thoreau. Some of your female personnel are bartering sexual favors, for what commodities I don’t know. I have placed that party off limits to my people.”

  Hoffman looked at him, startled, not sure how to respond.

  “That’s wise,” she finally managed. ”I don’t know who would corrupt whom the most.”

  In the stone: From end to end of the seven chambers: darkness and quiet.

  In the first chamber, clouds had built up since the re-rotation; rain threatened in the darkness.

  In the bore holes, the absolute silence of vacuum, and no activity but the occasional flight of a tiny monitor.

  In the second chamber, a faint whistle of wind as the atmosphere regained its equilibrium. More windows had broken out, and some buildings--including a mega—had collapsed despite the efforts of the engineers.

  In the third chamber, much the same, though no buildings had collapsed.

  The scattered glows of still-active illusart windows in Thistledown City resembled a swarm of fireflies.

  In the fourth chamber, the washed-out forests and unleashed waters had finally made their peace with each other. The compounds formerly occupied by Eastern and Western bloc personnel had been washed away, their debris carried down to the lakes or jammed up against trees near the shorelines.

  Those who had died to invade or defend the Stone—the Potato—the Thistledown—still lay in their graves, unseeing, their patterns flown, personalities vanished, Mysteries made even more mysterious.

  The fifth chamber: as dark and hollow as a vast cavern in the Earth, with only the eternal sound of waterfalls and rivers.

  The sixth chamber, vigilant, the only chamber besides the seventh still illuminated by a plasma tube, although that was uncertain and unreliable.

  The plasma tube flickered and was extinguished. No matter.

  All the preparations had been made, and now only monitors patrolled the Thistledown’s vastness.

  The seventh chamber. A wind blew gently down from the cap, rustling the copses of scrub forest; it lazed through the abandoned tent with a faint whistle, flapping the canvas. A section of the tent sagged where a pole had drifted loose during the de-rotation.

  Surprisingly little else had been disturbed.

  The detonators waited patiently beside their charges.

  The joined precincts of Axes Thoreau and Euclid were too far down the Way to be visible from this point without the aid of a high-powered telescope. The Way seemed empty, infinite, eternal and serene: the greatest thing ever created by human beings.

  Outside the Thistledown, black space and stars and Moon and poor battered, burned, winter-besieged Earth, where few if any were even thinking of the asteroid or the possibility of rescue. How could there be rescue from such total misery and death? History had passed them by.

  The asteroid’s overhauled Beckmann drive engines prepared for their part in the drama, stockpiling reaction mass to be slung out and dematerialized in the combined beams. They would reduce the kick of the separation, and the combined kick and counter-thrust would maneuver the Thistledown into a circular orbit around the Earth, at an altitude of some ten thousand kilometers.

  The precincts of Axes Thoreau and Euclid began their acceleration, in an apparent suicide run to smash themselves against the seventh chamber cap. Within, twenty-nine million human beings--corporeal and otherwise--did the various things humans do while waiting to see if they will live or die.

  Behind the precincts, half a million kilometers down the Way, a tiny defense flawship was decelerating drastically, the flaw ahead of it brightening to violet and blue. It had to slow to Earth orbital velocity b the time it followed the linked precincts out the end of the Way—if it managed that feat at all.

  The charges buried in the walls of the seventh chamber synchronized.

  The grips of Axes Thoreau and Euclid were withdrawn, and the huge cylinders coasted south toward the seventh chamber cap at just a little over forty thousand kilometers per hour, or eleven kilometers per second.

  The detonators reached their appointed microsecond.

  Within the seventh chamber, there .was a noise beyond human description. Billions of tons of rock and metal rushed in toward the axis from the seven charge points, and immense fissures shot outward to the vacuum of space.

  Around the northern pole of the asteroid, dust and debris spread out in a wide circular fan, followed by a white glow more brilliant than the sun. The glow faded to red and purple.

  A seventy-kilometer-wide monk’s cap of rock was propelled away from the asteroid. The asteroid withdrew much more slowly from its severed end, and for the briefest moment, between them, there was a hole in space, filled with the light of the plasma tube, showing an infinite perspective--out of which flew the linked precincts of Axes Euclid and Thoreau, barely missing the asteroid itself, shunting aside debris with conical traction fields. Through the fading glow and spinning chunks of rock and metal, the precincts passed out of range of the Thistledown’s Beckmann drives. The drives then fired to maneuver the Thistledown into orbit.

  The Way was now an independent entity. The hole in space began to heal, wrapped in a thousand varieties of darkness—violet and sea green, carmine and indigo—venting winds mightier than a thousand hurricanes into the vacuum.

  Closing.

  Sealing itself off forever from this universe.

  Olmy sat back and closed his eyes. Yates was more animated, rubbing his hands together. Senator Oyu appeared as cool as ever, but Lanier noticed her eye movements were frequent and jerky.

  If Prescient Oyu was even slightly nervous, and Olmy resigned, then Lanier figured he had every right to be terrified.

  “Are we going to make it?” he asked.

  “Just barely,” Olmy said, eyes still shut.

  Lanier faced the bow.

  The brightness of the seven coordinated blasts had reduced the bow to opacity. Now it cleared and gave them a view of the Way’s beginning.

  Within a glowing circle of molten asteroidal debris and frozen streaks of rushing water vapor was a circle of blackness.

  The circle was shrinking, being taken over by an iridescent nullity that hurt the eyes: the new terminus of the Way.

  And then, within the diminishing black circle, Lanier saw a dull white crescent. He blinked.

  The Moon.

  The flawship twirled in the outrushing atmosphere. The iridescent nullity had almost completed its task; it seemed to take them forever to approach the rapidly shrinking blackness and crescent Moon.

  Chunks of soil rose from the walls and shimmied up the fresh, nacreous boundary. The boundary eclipsed the Moon.

  “Oh, God,” Lanier said. He clasped his hands and closed his eyes.

  Epilog:

  Four Beginnings

  One

  6 P.D.

  And all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men ...

  The phrase occurred to Heineman often as he piloted a blunt-arrowhead flyer from point t
o devastated point around the globe.

  What the Death itself had not incinerated or poisoned, the Long Winter had ravaged; it had seemed for a time that even the ingenuity, technology and power of the New Hexamon itself could not make the situation right.

  Yet, as Lenore—his wife of four years—reminded him during his worst, most discouraged moments, “They managed to climb back up even without our help—our presence has to make things move faster.”

  But even hope and the prospects of a brighter future could not take the edge off, or reduce the bitter gall of what he saw in the course of a single day’s surveying.

  India, Africa, Australia and New Zealand and much of South America had emerged from the Death with minor damage. North America, Russia and Europe had been practically sterilized. China had lost a quarter of its population in the nuclear exchange; another two-thirds had died of starvation during the Long Winter, which was subsiding only now, with help from the orbiting precinct. Southeast Asia had crumbled into anarchy and revolution and genocide; the destruction there was almost as complete.

  Ashes, barren plains, snow-covered valleys and hills soon to become glaciers; scudding gray, snow-thick clouds casting black shadows over fallow earth; continents given over to bacteria and cockroaches and ants, and among these new ecologies, a few scattered animals who had once called themselves human beings, who had once lived in comfortable houses and known the basics of electrical wiring and taken newspapers and subscribed to provincial points of view about reality ...

  Who had once had time for the luxury of thought.

  It was heartbreaking. Heineman came to think of his kind—the engineers and scientists and technicians of the Earth—as the very tools of Satan himself. His latent Christianity returned with a vengeance. He knew he severely tried Lenore’s patience, but from his meandering visions of apocalypse and angels and resurrection he could at least take some solace, find meaning, and search for destiny and God’s plan. If he had once been an agent of Satan, now—without switching occupations he was an agent of the angels, of those who would transform Earth into paradise ...

  Lenore tried, again and again, to point out that engineers were as much responsible for saving the Earth as for destroying it. Without the orbital platforms and the whole paraphernalia of space-based defense, the Earth would have been wiped utterly clean of life; the NATO and Soviet platforms managed to destroy some forty percent of all missiles.

  Not enough, not enough ...

  And how many children, how many animals, how many innocent and--But, Lenore would counter, no one born with a mouth and a need is innocent ...

  She was often right, Of course.

  The masters he served now were not perfect, hardly angelic.

  They were intelligent, powerful, reasonable; their leaders lacked the ignorant erratic blindness of Earth’s leaders. But they still differed with each other, sometimes strongly.

  So Heineman, with his wife, flew the skies of Earth and charted the damage, and hoped for a day when grasses would grow and flowers bloom, when snows would recede and the air would be clear of radioactivity.

  He worked hard for that day.

  And he was faithful to his new masters, for he was born again in more ways than one. On his first day back on Earth, he had suffered a fatal heart attack.

  Larry Heineman was on his second body. Lenore assured him it was better than his first.

  He had his doubts, but it certainly felt better.

  New Zealand dusk, with another spectacular sunset in the offing.

  Overhead, the large beacon of the Thistledown rose clear and unobscured, and not far away, the speeding point of the orbiting precincts crossed the sky in the opposite direction.

  Garry Lanier emerged from the Talsit tent and saw Karen Lanier speaking with a group of farmers at the camp fence.

  The farmers had brought their children to the camp two weeks before for Talsit cleansing; they, at least, would not give birth to monsters, or suffer the long-term effects of radiation poisoning. But for the adults, there was still much suspicion and distrust; the early rumors of alien invasions and hordes of sky-traveling devils had seemed peculiarly convincing in the aftermath of the world’s end. Karen’s obvious pregnancy—six months along—did much to reassure them they were dealing with real human beings.

  Lanier still had not told their story to any Earth-bound survivors.

  Who could absorb such an incredible and complicated tale when one’s thoughts were on simple survival and the health of one’s children, or sheep, or townspeople?

  He stood with his hands in his overalls pockets and watched Karen talking quietly with the shepherds. They had lived and worked together since returning to Earth and had married two years ago. Their life was busy, and they were good for each other, but ...

  He was not yet content, not yet free of the manifold neuroses he had picked up in the past decade. At least he could feel the edges of his mental wounds puckering and healing, scarring up, perhaps even smoothing away.

  Lanier only took physical Talsit sessions to cleanse his body; they were required at least every six months to prevent ill effects from the atmospheric radiation. He did not indulge in mental Talsit, whatever Olmy’s urging; he was, after all, a rugged individualist, and he would rather accomplish those things on his own.

  In a few months, he and Karen, if they could be spared from their labor here, would join Hoffman and Olmy and perhaps even Larry and Lenore.

  They would reload their temporary implants with new training, new data, and work with Earth’s corprep, Rosen Gardner, and Earth’s senator, Prescient Oyu, to coordinate the massive task of cleansing the atmosphere and reorganizing the survivors.

  Paradoxically, the Naderites would soon have to deal with the infant cries of their own creed, which was rapidly gaining power in areas not yet touched by the reconstruction.

  Lanier did not often think of the Way now, or of what had happened years past. His mind was too occupied with more immediate concerns.

  But every now and then he would shut his eyes for a moment and open them again. He would turn to Karen and meet her sunny smile and run his hands through her yellow hair.

  No sense worrying about those who were farther away than the souls of the dead.

  Two

  Journey Year 1181

  Olmy stood in the AM.Euclid public observation chamber, hands folded behind his back, waiting for Korzenowski.

  Together they would try to convince Earth’s chief advocate, Ram Kikura, that the legal rights of the survivors on Earth could not supersede the New Hexamon’s duty to eventually force them to undergo Talsit purging.

  He gathered his if they were not purged mentally as well as physically, the condition of their thinking would be such that strife and discord would tear the Earth apart again, in centuries if not sooner. They had to be mentally healthy to face the future the New Hexamon was already structuring for them; there was no room for the kind of archaic, sick thinking that had led to the Death in the first place.

  Olmy was not sure he could convince Ram Kikura, however. She had been rereading the Federalist Papers and consulting ancient constitutional law cases.

  Korzenowski arrived, late as usual, and together they spent a few minutes watching the passage of continents, seas and clouds below. The horizon was still orange and gray with dust and ash in the stratosphere; where clouds parted, much of the land was covered with snow.

  “Is your woman going to give us a hard time today?” the Engineer asked.

  “No doubt,” Olmy said.

  Korzenowski smiled. ”I have a confession. Another young woman has been giving me difficulties lately. Oh, I realize we should all be concentrating on the reconstruction ... but I think you’ll understand why my mind wanders.”

  Olmy nodded.

  “She probably did not succeed,” Korzenowski said.

  “At going home?”

  “It’s very unlikely. I’ve been thinking about Way theory. Part of me keeps pursuing th
ose problems. We understood the geometry stacks so little. When Patricia expressed her theories, they seemed right at the time ... and they very nearly were. But not right enough to take her home.”

  “So where is she now?”

  “That I cannot say.” Korzenowski held one hand to the side of his head. ”This persistence, though ... this pressure to keep working on the problems ... I can’t say I object. The theory is fascinating. Thinking about it is one of the most enjoyable things I can do. And perhaps some day we can try again.”

  “From Earth?” Olmy asked.

  “We still have the sixth chamber,” Korzenowski said. ”It wouldn’t be nearly as difficult as it was before. And we could do it better.”

  Olmy didn’t reply for some moments. ”It may be inevitable,” he conceded, “but let’s not mention it to the Nexus right away.”

  “Of course,” Korzenowski said. ”After all this time, we—I am very patient.” The Engineer’s intense, sharp gaze, like that of a cat waiting to pounce, made the hair on Olmy’s neck tingle.

  He hadn’t experienced such an atavistic response in years.

  “Let’s go fight the good fight with your advocate,” Korzenowski suggested. They turned away from the view of Earth and took an elevator to the Nexus antechambers, where Suli Ram Kikura waited.

  Three

  Pevel Mirsky: Personal Record

  If I am not too far off—or the distorting effects of our journey are not too difficult to calculate—then today is my thirty-second birthday.

  I have settled in to life in the Central City, taking part in the rituals and exchanges of the Geshel life. I update my personality copies each week and make the acquaintance of dozens of citizens every day, many anxious to converse with me; and I work.

  I study history. Those who assign work here believe that my perceptions and abilities make me a unique lens through which to view and interpret the past. Rodzhensky helps. He has adapted far more completely than I, and even plans, in his next incarnation, to take on a custom neomorph body.