Eternity (Eon, 3)

by Greg Bear

  “He’s a competent politician and administrator,” Farren Siliom said, reining in the senator with a glance. “It isn’t our duty to keep power forever. We’re doctors and teachers, not tyrants. Is there anything else of significance, Ser Olmy?”

  There was, but Olmy knew it would not be discussed before these partials.

  “No, sir. The details are all on record.”

  “Gentlemen,” the president said, raising his arms and opening his hands to them. “Have you any final questions for Ser Olmy?”

  “Just one,” Tikk’s partial said. “How do you stand on the re-opening of the Way?”

  Olmy smiled. “My views on that issue are not important, Ser Tikk.”

  “My original is most curious about the views of those who remember the Way vividly.” Tikk had not been born until after the Sundering; he was one of the youngest neo-Geshels on Axis Euclid.

  “Ser Olmy has a right to keep his opinions to himself,” Farren Siliom said.

  Tikk’s partial apologized without any deep sincerity.

  “Thank you, Ser President,” Mishiney’s partial said. “I appreciate your cooperation with Earth’s parliament. I look forward to studying your complete records, Ser Olmy.”

  The ghosts faded, leaving them alone above the dark fathomless void, now empty of both Earth and Moon. Olmy looked down and spotted a glimmer of light amidst the stars: Thistledown, he thought, and his implants quickly provided a calculation that confirmed his guess.

  “One last question, Ser Olmy, and then this meeting is completed. The neo-Geshels…if they manage to get the Hexamon to re-open the Way, do we have the resources to continue the Earth’s support at present levels?”

  “No, Ser President. Successful re-opening would cause long delays at the very least in major rehabilitation projects.”

  “We’re already strapped for resources, aren’t we? More than the Hexamon is willing to admit. And yet, there are Terrestrials—Mishiney among them—who believe that in the long run, re-opening would benefit us all.” The president shook his head and picted a symbol of judgment and a symbol of extreme foolishness: a man sharpening a ridiculously long sword. The pict symbol no longer had a connection with war, per se, but its subtext was still a little surprising to Olmy. War with whom?

  “We must learn to adapt and live under the present circumstances. I believe that deeply,” Farren Siliom said. “But my influence is not boundless. So many of our people have become so very homesick! Can you imagine that? Even I. I was one of the firebrands who supported Rosen Gardner and demanded a return to Earth, to what we thought of as our true home—but no one alive in the Way had ever been to Earth! How sophisticated we think we are, yet how irrational and protean our deepest emotions and motivations. Perhaps a better grade of Talsit would help, no?”

  Olmy smiled noncommittally.

  The president’s shoulders slumped. With an effort, he squared them again. “We should learn to live without these luxuries. The Good Man never availed himself of Talsit.” He walked to the edge of the platform, as if to avoid the abyss beneath their feet. Earth was coming into view again. “Have the neo-Geshels carried their activities to Earth? Beyond people like Mishiney?”

  “No. They seem content to ignore the Earth, Ser President.”

  “The least I’d expect from such visionaries. That’s a political wellspring they’ll regret overlooking. Surely they can’t believe the Earth will have no say in such a decision! And on Thistledown?”

  “They’re still openly campaigning. I found no sign of subversive activities.”

  “Such a delicate balance a man in my position holds, trying to play so many factions against each other. I know my tenure in this office is limited. I’m not good at hiding my beliefs, and they are not the easiest beliefs to hold these days. I’ve fought the notion of re-opening for three years now. It will not die. But I can’t help believing that no good will come of it. ‘You can’t go home again.’ Especially if you can never decide where home is. We’re in a delicate time. Shortages, weariness. I see the inevitability, someday, of re-opening…. But not now! Not until we have finished our tasks on Earth.” Farren Siliom regarded Olmy with an expression near pleading. “I’m as curious as Senator Tikk, I’m afraid. What are your opinions about the Way?”

  Olmy shook his head slightly. “I’m resigned to living without it, Ser President.”

  “Yet you won’t be able to renew your body parts soon…or are the shortages already acute?”

  “They are,” Olmy admitted.

  “You’ll resign yourself to city memory willingly?”

  “Or death,” Olmy said. “But that won’t be for years.”

  “Do you miss the challenges, the opportunities?”

  “I try not to worry about the past,” Olmy said. He was being less than candid, but he had learned long before when to be open, and when not.

  “You’ve been an enigma for all your centuries of service, Ser Olmy. So the records tell me. I won’t press you. But in your brief…considerations of the problem, have you thought of what might happen to us, should we re-open the Way?”

  Olmy did not answer for a moment. The president seemed to know more about his recent activities than Olmy found comfortable. “The Way could be reoccupied by Jarts, Ser.”

  “Indeed. Our eager neo-Geshels tend to overlook that problem. I can’t. I’m not unaware of your researches. I believe you show extreme foresight.”

  “Ser?”

  “Your researches in city memory and the Thistledown libraries. I have my own active rogues, Ser Olmy. You seem to be accessing information with a direct bearing on re-opening, and you’ve been studying for years, at some personal cost, I imagine.” Farren Siliom regarded him shrewdly, then turned back to the railing, knocking it lightly with the knuckles of one hand. “Officially, I’m releasing you from any further duties. Unofficially, I urge you to continue your studies.”

  Olmy picted assent.

  “Thank you for your work. Should you have any further thoughts, by all means let me know. Your opinions are valued, whether or not you think we need them.”

  Olmy left the platform. The Earth had rotated into view again, perpetual responsibility, unfamiliar home, sign of pain and triumph, failure and regrowth.

  3

  Gala, Island of Rhodos, Greater Alexandreian Oikoumenē, Year of Alexandros 2331-2342

  Rhita Berenikē Vaskayza grew wild on the shores near the ancient port of Lindos until she was seven years old. Her father and mother let the sun and sea have their way with her, teaching her only what she was curious to know—which was a great deal.

  She was a brown, bare-limbed wild thing, wide-eyed and elusive among the brown and white and faded gold battlements and columns and steps of the abandoned akropolis. From the bright expanse of the porch of the sanctuary of Athēnē Lindia, palms pressed against the crumbling walls, she stared down the cliffs into the azure unending sea, counting the steady, gentle march of waves against the rocks.

  Sometimes she crept through the wooden door into the shed that housed the giant statue of Athēnē, rising thick-limbed and serene in the shadows, looking decidedly Asiatic, with her radiant brass crown (once gold) and her man-high stone shield. Few Lindians came up here; many thought it was haunted by the centuries-dead ghosts of Persian defenders, massacred when the Oikoumenē regained control of the island. Sometimes there were tourists from Aigyptos or the mainland, but not often. The Middle Sea was not a place for tourists any more.

  The farmers and shepherds of Lindos saw her as Artemis and believed she brought them luck. In the village, her world seemed full of welcoming smiles from familiar faces.

  On her seventh birthday, Berenikē, her mother, took her from Lindos to Rhodos. She did not remember much about the island’s biggest city besides the imposing bronze Neos Kolossos, re-cast and erected four centuries ago, and now missing all of one arm and half of another.

  Her mother, with red-brown hair, as wide-eyed as her daughter, led her thro
ugh the town to the whitewashed brick and stone and plaster home of the first-level Akademeia didaskalos—the master of children’s education. Rhita stood alone before the didaskalos in the warm sunny examination chamber, barefoot in a plain white shift, and answered his simple but telling questions. This was little more than formality, considering that her grandmother had founded the Akademeia Hypateia, but it was an important formality.

  Later that day, her mother told her she had been accepted into the first school, her lessons to begin at age nine. Then Berenikē took Rhita back to Lindos, and life went on much as before but with more books and more lessons to prepare her and less time to run with wind and water.

  They did not visit the sophē on that journey; she had been ill. Some said she was dying, but she recovered two months later. This all meant very little to young Rhita, who knew almost nothing about her grandmother, having met her only twice, in infancy and at age five.

  The summer before she began her formal schooling, her grandmother called upon her to return to Rhodos, and to spend some time with her. The sophē was reclusive. Many Rhodians thought she was a goddess. Her origins and the stories that had grown up around her supported their beliefs. Rhita had no fixed opinions. What the Lindians said and what her father and mother told her were confusingly far apart on some points and close on others.

  Rhita’s mother was almost frantically thrilled by this privilege, which Patrikia had accorded to none of her other grandchildren. Her father, Rhamōn, accepted it with the calm, self-assured air he had in those days, before the sophē’s death and the factional fighting at the Akademeia. Together, they took her to Rhodos by horse cart, driving along the same cobbled and oiled road they had followed two summers before.

  Patrikia’s house stood on a rocky promontory overlooking the Great Naval Harbor. It was a small gypsum-plaster and stone dwelling, in late Persian style, with four rooms and a separate study on the low cliff above the beach. As they walked up the path through the vegetable garden, Rhita looked over a brick wall at the ancient Fortress of Kamybsēs across the harbor, rising like a huge stone cup from the end of a broad mole. The fortress had been abandoned for seventy years, but was now being refurbished by the Oikoumenē. Workmen clambered along its thick crumbling walls, tiny as mice. The Neos Kolossos guarded the harbor entrance a hundred arms beyond the fortress, still armless, standing with more dignity withal on its own massive block of brick and stone, surrounded by water.

  “Is she a witch?” Rhita asked Rhamōn softly at the front door.

  “Hsss,” Berenikē warned, crossing Rhita’s lips with her finger.

  “She’s not a witch,” Rhamōn said, smiling. “She’s my mother.”

  Rhita thought it would be nice for a servant to open the door, but the sophē had no servants. Patrikia Vaskayza herself stood smiling in the doorway, a white-haired brown-skinned dried stick of a woman with shrewd, deep-seeing eyes wreathed in leathery wrinkles. Even in the heat of summer, the wind blew cool on the hill, and Patrikia wore a floor-length black robe.

  She touched Rhita’s cheek with a dry finger tip, and Rhita thought, She’s made of wood. But the sophē’s palm was soft and warmly sweet-scented. From behind her back, she brought out a garland of flowers and looped them around Rhita’s neck. “An old tradition from Hawaii,” she explained.

  Berenikē stood with head bowed, hands pressed firmly to her sides. Rhita saw her mother’s awe and vaguely disapproved; the sophē was very old and very skinny, to be sure, but not frightening. At least not yet. Rhita tugged at the flowers around her neck and glanced at Rhamōn, who gave her a reassuring smile.

  “We’ll have lunch,” Patrikia said, her voice husky and almost as deep as a man’s.

  She walked slowly ahead of them into the kitchen, measuring each step precisely, slipper-shod feet scuffing the rough black tile floor. Her hands touched a chair back, as if she were greeting a friend, then tapped the rim of an old black iron basin, and finally smoothed along the edge of a bleached wooden table laden with fruit and cheese. “After my son and daughter-in-law—sweet people that they are, but they intrude—after they go home, we can really talk.” The sophē glanced sharply at Rhita, and despite herself, the girl nodded agreement, conspiring.

  They spent much of the next few weeks together, Patrikia telling her tales, many of which Rhita had already heard from her father. Patrikia’s Earth was not the Gaia Rhita had grown up on; history had gone differently there.

  On a warm hazy day when the wind was still and the sea seemed lost in glazed sleep, her grandmother walked slowly ahead of her in a nearby orange grove, a basket of fruit slung over one arm. “In California, there used to be orange groves all over, beautiful big oranges, much bigger than these.” Patrikia lifted a reddish, plum-sized fruit in her thin, strong fingers. “The groves had almost disappeared by the time I was your age. Too many people wanted to live there. Not enough room for the groves.”

  “Is California here, or there, Grandmother?” Rhita asked.

  “There. On Earth,” Patrikia said. “There’s no such name here.” She paused, staring up at the sky reflectively. “I don’t know what’s happening where California would be in this world…I suppose it’s part of Nea Karkhēdōn’s western desert.”

  “Full of red men with bows and arrows,” Rhita suggested.

  “Maybe so. Maybe so.”

  After eating alone together in the kitchen, Rhita listened quietly to the sophē in the welcome cool of the summer’s evening, an old oil lamp glowing and smoking sweetly on a wicker table between them, supplementing the twilight as they shared glasses of warm tea. “Your great-grandmother, my mother, comes to visit me now and then…”

  “Isn’t she in the other world, Grandmother?”

  Patrikia smiled and nodded, her face a mass of wrinkles in the golden-orange light. “That doesn’t stop her. She comes when I sleep, and she says you’re a very bright girl, a wonderful child, and she’s proud to share her name with you.” Patrikia leaned forward. “Your great-grandfather’s proud of you, too. But don’t let us get you down, dear. You’ve time enough to play and dream and grow up before your day comes.”

  “What day, Grandmother?”

  Patrikia smiled enigmatically and nodded at the horizon. Aphrodite dazzled and shimmered over the sea like a hole in a dark silk lamp shade.

  Rhita returned to Patrikia’s house two years later, no longer a wild child made polite by the presence of an impossibly old grandmother, but a studious, well-groomed young girl intent on becoming a woman. Patrikia had not changed. To Rhita, she seemed like a preserved fruit or an Aigyptian mummy that might survive forever.

  Their talk this time was more about history. Rhita knew quite a bit about Gaia’s history—and not precisely as the Oikoumenē wanted it taught. The Akademeia Hypateia used the distance between Rhodos and Alexandreia to some advantage. Decades before, the Imperial Hypsēlotēs Kleopatra the Twenty-first had given the sophē far more discretion as to curriculum than the royal advisors found pleasing.

  At eleven, Rhita was already aware of politics. But she was proving even more adept at numbers and the sciences.

  In the long evenings on the porch, watching the death of days along purple and gray and red horizons, Patrikia told Rhita about Earth, and how it had almost killed itself. And she told Rhita about the Stone that had come from the stars, hollow like a gourd or some exotic mineral, built by Earth’s children from a future time. Rhita puzzled over the subtle geometries that allowed such an enormous object to be whipped back through time into another closely similar universe. But her head seemed filled with sunlit bees when Patrikia described the corridor, the Way, that Earth’s children had attached to the Stone…

  She slept restlessly and dreamed of this artificial place shaped like a never-ending water-pipe, with holes leaking onto an infinity of worlds…

  As they gardened, weeding and killing insects, planting barricades of garlic around tender young flowers, Patrikia told Rhita the story of her arrival on Gai
a. She had been young then, sixty years ago, when she been given the chance to seek a gate in the Way that might take her to an Earth free of nuclear war, where Patrikia’s family might still live.

  Instead, she had miscalculated and come to Gaia.

  “I became an inventor at first,” she said. “I invented things I knew from Earth. I gave them the bikyklos. Farm tools. Things I remembered.” She waved her hands as if to dismiss them. “That lasted only a few years. Soon, I was working for the Mouseion, and people began to believe my stories. Some treated me as if I were more than human, which,” she shook her head firmly, “I am not. I will die, my dear, probably very soon…”

  Within five years of her arrival on Gaia, Patrikia had been called to the palace to meet with Ptolemaios Thirty-five Nikephoros. The old ruler of the Oikoumenē had questioned her closely, examined the devices she had brought with her and managed to keep safe, and proclaimed her a true prodigy. “He said I was obviously not a goddess, and not a demon, and attached me to the court. Those were hard times. I made the mistake of describing Earth’s weapons to them, and they wanted me to help them build bigger bombs. I refused. Nikephoros threatened to imprison me—he was feeling quite pressed by Libyan desert armies then. He wanted to wipe them all out with one blow. I told him again and again what the bombs had done to Earth, but he didn’t listen. I went to prison in Alexandreia for a month, and then he released me, sent me to Rhodos, and told me to start an akademeia there. He died five years later, but the Hypateion was well established. I dealt with his son well enough…a nice boy, rather weak. And then his granddaughter…first her mother, of course, a strong, willful woman, but brilliant, but then the Imperial Hypsēlotēs herself as she came of age…”

  “Do you like it here?” Rhita asked, adjusting her broad straw sun-hat. Patrikia pushed her wizened lips out and shook her head ruefully, admitting and denying nothing.

  “This is my world, and it is not my world,” she said. “I would still go home, given a chance.”