Eternity (Eon, 3)

by Greg Bear

  “Could you?”

  Patrikia nodded at the bright sky. “Perhaps. But not likely. Once, another gate opened on Gaia, and with the queen’s support, I spent years searching for it. But it was like a marsh ghost. It vanished, reappeared somewhere else, vanished again. And now it has been gone for nineteen years.”

  “Would it take you to Earth, if you found it?”

  “No,” the sophē said. “It would probably take me back into the Way. From there, however, I might be able to go home.”

  Rhita felt sad, hearing the old woman’s soft voice fade on the last word, her face deep in shadow under her hat, feline black eyes closing, opening halfway, infinitely tired. The sophē shuddered and looked appraisingly at her young granddaughter. “Would you like to learn some interesting geometries?”

  Rhita brightened. “Yes!”

  She lay half-asleep on her cot in the bare whitewashed room, listening to waves from a distant storm breaking just a few dozen arms away, great poundings of Poseidon’s fists on the rocks, coinciding in her dreams with the slow thump of the hooves of a huge horse. Moon filled a near corner with cold light. Rhita opened her eyes to slits, feeling a presence in the room with her. A shadow crossed the moonlight, carrying something. The girl stirred on her leather bed, still not fully awake, her body lost in comfort.

  The shadow came closer. It was Patrikia.

  Rhita’s eyes closed and then opened slightly again. She was certainly not afraid of the sophē, but why was she in her room at this late hour of the night? Patrikia grasped her granddaughter’s hand in her own dry, strong fingers and placed it on something metallic, hard and smooth, unfamiliar yet pleasant to touch. Rhita murmured an incoherent question.

  “This will know you, recognize you,” Patrikia whispered. “By your touch, you make it yours, years from now when you mature. My child, listen to its messages. It tells you where, and when. I am too old now. Find the way home for me.”

  The shadow passed from her room, and the moonlight faded. The room filled with darkness. Rhita closed her eyes and soon it was morning.

  On this new morning, Patrikia began teaching Rhita two languages that did not exist on Gaia, English and Spanish.

  The sophē died, attended only by her three surviving sons, in the bare room where five years before her granddaughter had slept and dreamed of horses. Now a young woman, beginning her third-level studies at the Hypateion, Rhita hardly knew what emotions she felt. She was of middle height but gawky, her face bluntly, boyishly attractive, her figure slight; her hair was reddish brown, and her brows arched quizzically over green eyes, her father’s eyes in her mother’s face. What part of her was Patrikia? What did she carry of the sophē?

  Her father was a slow, careful man, but his grief and worry were evident as he led the stade-long funeral procession across the sun-beaten carved stone roadway to the Merchant’s Harbor, taking the sophē’s frail body to the boat that would carry it out to sea. His two brothers followed, Rhita’s uncles, teachers of language in the Hypateion; after them came the entire faculty of the four schools, dressed in gray and white. Rhita walked a step to one side and behind her father, saying to herself, I do what she wanted me to.

  Rhita studied physics and mathematics. That was what she carried of the sophē.

  Her talents.

  One year after the funeral, as spring greened the orchards and the vineyards and olive groves came into flower, Rhita’s father took her to a secret cave a dozen stadia northwest of Lindos, not far from where she had been born. He refused to answer her questions. She was a grown woman now, or thought she was. She had already taken a lover, and she objected to being ordered about, being led mysteriously to places she knew and cared nothing about. But her father insisted, and she did not enjoy defying him.

  The caves were blocked by thick, narrow steel vault doors, ancient with rust but with hinges well-oiled. Overhead, a flight of Oikoumenē jet gullcraft maneuvered, probably from desert aerodromoi in Kilikia or Ioudaia, leaving five nail-scratches of white against the soft blue sky.

  Her father opened the vault doors with a ponderous key and nine twists of a combination dial hidden in a locked recess. He preceded her into the cool darkness, past casks of wine and olive oil and dry stores of food hermetically sealed in steel drums, through a second door into a tiny rear tunnel. Only when the gloom became impenetrable did Rhamōn press a black button and turn on a light.

  They stood in a low, wide cavern, the air sweet with the smell of the dry rock. In the yellow glare of the single light bulb, her father advanced behind his looming shadow to a rough-hewn, stout wooden cabinet and pulled out a deep drawer. The wood’s groan sounded heavy and sad between the hard walls. Within the drawer were several fine wooden boxes, one as large as a traveling case. He withdrew that one first and carried it to where she stood, kneeling before her and unlocking the lid.

  Within, surrounded by a cushion of velvet molded for something at least three times its size, was an object barely as wide as her two palms spread together. It resembled a pair of handlebars from one of the sophē’s bikykloi, although much thicker, with a curved saddle pointing away from the juncture.

  “These are yours now, your responsibility,” he said, lifting his hands as if refusing to touch the box any more. “She was saving them for you. You were the only one she thought could take up her work. Her task. None of her sons were up to the job. She thought we were suited for administration, not adventure. I never argued with her…these things scare me.” He stood and backed away, his shadow swinging off the box and its contents. The sculpted-looking thing within gleamed white and pearl.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “It is one of the Objects,” he answered. “She called it a ‘clavicle.’”

  The sophē had brought three Objects with her from the Way in her wonderful journey to this world. Their powers had never been explained to Rhita; Patrikia had simply told her what some of them did, not how. Her father brought forward the other boxes, laying them on the dry floor of the cave, opening them. “This was her teukhos,” he said, indicating a flat metal and glass pad a little larger than her hand. He reverently touched four small shiny cubes nestled next to the pad. “These were her personal library. There are hundreds of books in these cubes. Some have become part of the Hypateion’s sacred doctrine. Some have to do with Earth. They’re in languages that don’t exist here, mostly. I suppose she taught you some of them.” His tone was not resentful, merely resigned; perhaps even relieved. Better his daughter than him. He opened the third box. “This kept her alive while she came here. It gave her air to breath. All of these are yours.”

  Bending over the largest box, she reached for the saddle-shaped Object. Even before her finger brushed the surface, she understood that this was the key that opened gates from within the Way. It was warm and friendly, not unfamiliar; she knew it, and it knew her.

  Rhita closed her eyes and saw Gaia, the entire world, as if marked on an incredibly detailed globe. The globe spun before her and expanded, drawing her down to the steppes of Nordic Rhus, Mongoleia and Chin Ch’ing, lands beyond the power of the Alexandreian Oikoumenē. There, in a shallow swale, above a trickling, muddy stream, glowed a brilliant red three-dimensional cross.

  She opened her eyes, terrified and pale, and stared down at the clavicle. It was three times its former size now, filling the molded velvet cushion.

  “What’s happening?” her father asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t want these things.” She ran to the cave opening and into the sunshine. Her father trailed after, slightly hunched, almost obsequious, calling out, “They are yours, my daughter. No one else can use them.”

  She outran him and hid in a cleft between two weathered boulders, wiping tears from her eyes. She suddenly hated her grandmother. “How could you do this to me?” Rhita asked. “You were crazy.” She pulled her knees up to her chin, bracing her sandaled feet against the rough dry rock. “Crazy old woman.”

  She rememb
ered the shadow in the darkness when she was a girl and kicked out against the stone until her heel was bruised. The months Rhita had spent almost alone with her, listening to her stories, thinking of that fabulous world…she had never imagined that it actually existed, as real as Rhodos or the sea. Patrikia’s world had always been as far away as dreams, and as unlikely.

  But Grandmother had never lied, never even stretched the truth, about anything else they had discussed. She had always been perfectly straightforward, treating her as an adult, explaining carefully, answering her questions with none of the dissembling adults often hid behind.

  Why should she have lied about the Way?

  As dusk softened the outlines of the tree branches overhead, visible through the cleft, Rhita emerged from the rocks and walked slowly down the slope to the cave. There, her father waited, sitting beside the vault door, a long green stick held in both hands across his knees. She didn’t even consider the possibility he might hit her; Rhamōn had never physically punished her. The stick was just something to fiddle with and contemplate.

  Gentle, careful Father, she thought. Life was complicated for him. The politics of succession at the Akademeia was getting nasty. He didn’t need any more grief.

  He stood, threw the stick away and wiped his hands on his pants, staring at the ground. She went to him and hugged him fiercely. Then they returned to the cave, gathered up the Objects in their cases and, fully burdened, carried them down the hill to the whitewashed house where Rhita had been born.

  4

  Terrestrial Hexamon, Axis Euclid

  The journey into Axis Euclid city memory was brief. Olmy chose a downline link and dropped a complete copy of himself into the matrix buffer to await entry into the central crèche. His body appeared to sleep; in fact, a partial in his three implants was processing data on recorded Talsit ambassador interviews, searching for behavioral oddities that could give him clues to true Talsit psychology. He knew he had no time for rest; he could feel it as well as think it, an itch, a compulsion, a restless impatience difficult to control.

  If he felt a personal kinship to any male beside Korzenowski, it was Tapi, his son. He had known many children in the city memory crèche, sometimes as a tutor, sometimes as a judge; few were as high in quality as Tapi, and Olmy was convinced his opinion was objective. In less than five years of city memory education, the youngster was progressing to a level of sophistication rare in the crèche. Olmy doubted the boy would have any difficulty earning an incarnation; still, the exams were not easy.

  He had resented Ram Kikura’s motherly suggestion that he visit Tapi; and yet, without her making the suggestion, he might have sacrificed such a luxury to his work…

  Fatherhood was not a simple proposition.

  They had applied to create Tapi seven years ago, two years after Olmy’s official retirement. At that time, the conflicts between the orbiting bodies and Old Natives on Earth had not seemed particularly strong or destructive; the Recovery had seemed on track, and both had felt there would be time to create and nurture a child. They had planned the boy’s mentality in close cooperation, deciding against the orthodox Naderite fashions of less structured creation as well as physical childbirth. Ram Kikura, with a feminine sensibility that had struck Olmy with its strength and conviction, had said, “A mother and father are not made by a few hours of pain and awareness of bad physical design…”

  They had referred to the great philosophical treatises on mentality, and used classic design templates for non-parental aspects that Olmy (actually, Olmy’s tracer) had found uncatalogued in Thistledown’s third chamber library. Working in city memory for eight days (almost a year in accelerated time) they and their partials had combined the parental mysteries, selected large blocks of parental memory for endowment at certain growth stages, and overlaid the templates with great care to create the mentality they would call Tapi. The name came from Tapi Salinger, a twenty-second-century novelist they both admired.

  Some conceived in city memory had as many as six parents. Tapi was biparental, with a predisposition toward masculinity. He had been born, achieving active status, six years before, both parents in attendance, one of only thirty children quickened in city memory that year. His body image at that time had been a six year old boy, Polynesian in appearance—Polynesians and Ethiopic blacks had been considered the most beautiful of the human races in Ram Kikura’s youth—and extremely puckish in behavior. Indeed, Ram Kikura had begun to call her son Robin instead of Tapi, but as he had matured and sobered (though never losing the spark of Robin Goodfellow), Tapi prevailed. For the first year of their son’s life, Ram Kikura and Olmy stayed in constant personal attendance, leaving city memory only for pressing duties, which were few. They had established several fantasy living spaces, allowing Tapi to grow in several simulated eras almost simultaneously.

  The wonder of city memory was the flexibility of mental reality. With most of the resources of Hexamon libraries a part of the memory matrix, construction of simulated environments was a matter of a few moments’ effort. The wisdom of historic time—as documented and as perceived by the Hexamon’s greatest scholars and artists—was available to Tapi, and he had thrived on it.

  Then difficulties had arisen, not with Tapi but with the Hexamon itself. The political winds had shifted and some had even hinted at re-opening the Way. The neo-Geshel party had grown in strength, countering the best prognostications of the Naderite political advisers. Olmy had felt the cold draft of history compelling him to prepare…

  And as the next few years passed, he spent less and less time in person with Tapi, leaving the duty of fatherhood to permanently downloaded partials. Ram Kikura had also found less time, but still maintained close contact with Tapi. Tapi had never shown resentment, nor had his growth slowed, but Olmy often felt the pangs of regret.

  The downline buffer was given access and Olmy’s original was loaded directly into the city memory crèche. Tapi waited for him, his self-designed image now that of a young man, a good approximation of what a natural son of his parents might have looked like—Olmy’s build and unaltered eyes and lips, Ram Kikura’s nose and high cheekbones, a handsome young male with the few stylish flaws that were the hallmark of intelligent body-design. They embraced, an electric concatenation of physical and mental mergings that in an earlier time might have been considered embarrassingly intimate for father and son, but which was the norm in city memory. Olmy measured his son’s progress from that embrace, and Tapi was given a healthy dose of parental approval.

  Picts and speech were unnecessary in city memory, but resorted to nonetheless; direct mind-to-mind communication was laborious and time-consuming, used only when precise communication was necessary.

  “I appreciate your coming, Father,” Tapi said. “Your partials were growing tired of me.”

  “I doubt that,” Olmy said.

  “I kept testing them to see if they matched you.”

  “Did they?”

  “Yes, but I irritated them…”

  “You should always be polite to a partial. They carry tales, you know.”

  “You haven’t accessed their memories?”

  “Not yet. I wanted to see you fresh.”

  Tapi projected a haze of body plans for Olmy’s approval. The young man’s body would be self-contained, but without the reliance on Talsit parts and other maintenance items in short supply. His design would not be able to exist so long without maintenance and nutrition, but for these times it was a better design than Olmy’s. It was certainly more practical. “What do you think?”

  “It’s very good. You’ve earned council approval?”

  “Provisional.”

  “You’ll get it. Elegant adaptation,” Olmy said, and meant it. He almost wished he could apply for reincarnation and try it out. Still, he had lived with Talsit parts for so long…

  “Do you think they’ll re-open the Way?”

  Olmy gave him the mental equivalent of a grimace. “Don’t race ahead,” he
said. “I haven’t got more than a few memory hours, and I don’t want to spend them discussing politics. I want my son to teach me all he’s learned.”

  Tapi’s enthusiasm was electric. “Wonderful things, Father! Did you ever study Mersauvin structures?”

  Olmy had, but only briefly, finding them tedious. He didn’t tell his son this.

  “I’ve made the most remarkable correlations,” Tapi continued. “At first I thought they were tedious abstractions, but then I plugged them into analysis of synthetic situation and found the most incredible judgments. They allow the most complex predictive modeling. They act as self-adapting algorithms for social scaling and planning…they even model individual interactions!”

  Tapi moved them into a private buffer. “I decorated this myself,” he said. “Nobody’s seen fit to overwrite yet. I think that’s a compliment from my crèche mates…”

  It certainly was. Private buffer decors in the crèche were usually as vulnerable and fleeting as ice in a fire. The decor, to Olmy’s view an exhausting array of mental tests and demonstrated algorithms, was far more complex and accomplished than anything he could have done.

  “I took some liberties with my formal lessons,” Tapi continued. “I applied the Mersauvin structures to external events.”

  “Oh? What did you learn?”

  Tapi displayed a jagged and discontinuous curve. “Many breaks. The Hexamon is under severe strain. We’re not a happy society any more. We were once, I think; in the Way. I compared the present dissatisfaction with psychological profiles of nostalgia for previous stages of life in natural-born homorphs. The small mimics the large. The algorithms show that the Hexamon wants to return to the Way. My teachers haven’t graded me very well on this, I’m afraid. They say the results lack rigor.”

  “What you’re saying is, we all want to go back to the womb. No?”

  Tapi agreed with smiling reluctance. “I wouldn’t put it so baldly.”