by Greg Bear
She had refused any form of cooperation. Ram Kikura had her own boundaries, and she was damned if she would step over them.
In New Zealand, spring brought lovely weather and the amusement of lambs. Lanier tended their small flock of black-faced sheep; Karen helped when she wasn’t lost in her own funk. Unable to work, confined to their home and valley, she was not doing well.
They worked together, yet kept their distance. Lanier had lost whatever enthusiasm Mirsky had kindled. He did not know what would happen next. He didn’t much care.
In his way, he had once adored the Hexamon, and all it had stood for. Over the past few years, he had seen from a distance the changing character of the orbiting precincts, the shifting sands of Hexamon politics. Now, lost in its own needs and regrets, the same Hexamon that had worked to save the Earth had finally betrayed him, and betrayed Karen…had betrayed Earth.
Earth’s Recovery was not yet finished.
Perhaps now, it would never be done, whatever the assurances broadcast around the world nightly from the orbiting bodies. He found these particularly galling; smooth, pleasant, informative, day by day educating the Earth about progress in the re-opening.
Now and then, Lanier heard of Recovery efforts continuing in a desultory fashion.
He felt old again, looked older.
Sitting on their porch at night, he listened to cool night breezes wafting through the bushes, thinking thoughts convoluted and fuzzy as balls of yarn.
I am only a single human being, he told himself. It is right that I should wither like a leaf on a tree. I am out of place now. I am finished. I hate this time, and I do not envy those being born.
Perhaps the worst part of it all was that for a brief moment, he had felt the old spark again. With Mirsky, he had thought of fighting the good fight; he had hoped perhaps here was an agency more powerful and wise than all of them.
But Mirsky was gone.
Nobody had seen him in months.
Lanier tried to get up out of his seat, to go to bed and sleep and for a short time lose all these painful thoughts. His hands pushed on the wood, and his back moved forward, but he could not lift himself; his pants seemed stuck to something. Puzzled, he leaned over one side of his chair. Silently, something exploded. A ball of darkness edged in from one side of his eyes and his head became enormous.
The ball of darkness centered and became a great tunnel. He grabbed the ends of his chair arms but could not straighten.
“Oh, God,” he said. His lips were numb as rubber. Ink spread in the back of his head. Doors closed with rhythmic slammings on all his memories. Karen not with him; not where she was. This was the way his father had gone, younger even than he was now No pain just the sudden withdrawl of He had not thought himself so “Oh, God.”
The tunnel yawned wide, full of rainbow night.
46
Thistledown
Buried sixty meters within the outer perimeter of the seventh chamber’s southern cap were seven generators, connected by seven field-lined shafts of pure vacuum to the sixth chamber machinery. The generators had no moving parts and nothing to do with electrons or magnetic fields; they worked on far more subtle principles, principles developed by Korzenowski based on mathematical reasoning that had primarily begun with Patricia Luisa Vasquez in the late twentieth century.
These seven generators had created the stresses on space-time that had resulted in the Way. They had not been used for four decades but were still sound; the vacuum shafts were still operating and completely free of matter or time-linked energy, that enigmatic byproduct of interaction between universes.
In the hole leading to the seventh chamber, an observation blister had been erected and the bore hole pressurized with air. The blister was now filled with monitoring equipment, giant red spheres studded with silver and gray cubes the size of a man’s head, tracting back and forth within the blister’s shell, silently avoiding their human masters whenever encountered along their complex paths.
Korzenowski floated where the Way’s singularity had once been, his body precessing like a slow top, gray hair standing out from his hand in the blister’s gentle cooling breezes. With catlike eyes, he observed the construction on the southern cap of the seventh chamber, radiating for kilometers outward from the bore hole, huge black concentric rings of virtual particle stimulators and their reservoirs of graviton-stabilized tritium metal. These would not be brought into play until after the opening of the Way; the stimulators could be used as weapons, and were capable of stripping the Way clear of matter for a distance of several hundred kilometers, giving the Hexamon its first “beachhead,” should it need one. Soon, the traction beam radiation shields would be in place to focus the backwash of disrupted matter that the stimulators might create along the same path as the stimulator beams.
Fearsome weapon, fearsome defenses…
Fearsome opponents.
At rest, Korzenowski’s thoughts wandered. He used his two hours of daily inactivity to put the events of the past few months in perspective. The blister was deserted but for him and the machines.
In two more weeks, the Way generators would be ready for tests. Virtual universes of fractional dimensions—continua with little more than abstract reality—would be created in deliberately unstable configurations. The night sky over Earth would sparkle with their deaths, as particles and radiations unknown in this continuum—or any stable continuum—left their tracks in the protesting void.
In three weeks, if the first tests went well, Korzenowski would order the creation of a torus, an independent and stable universe turned in upon itself. He would then dismantle the torus and observe how it faded; the manner of its demise could give clues as to the state and superspatial location of the Way’s sealed terminus.
Over the next few months, they would “fish” for that terminus. A temporary virtual universe the size and shape of the Way, but of finite length, would be generated, would be encouraged to merge with the terminus, and would create an attractive bridge between the generators and their now-independent progeny.
Ramon Rita Tiempos de Los Angeles
Korzenowski shut his eyes and frowned deeply. He could not help but know the source of these increasingly frequent interruptions and what they signified. When Patricia Vasquez’s mystery had been transferred to his assembled partials, to bind them and give them a core, somehow memory and drive had been transferred as well. In theory, that was unlikely. But Vasquez had been in a highly disturbed state, and Korzenowski, unusually shattered, had not been a textbook model for the transfer process.
He did not fight the impulses. For the moment, they did not work opposite to his wishes, and they did not disturb him unduly. But the reckoning would have to come soon. He would need to submit to major personality restructuring.
That was risky and he could not take risks now, central as he was to the Hexamon’s effort.
There, he told himself after a few minutes had passed. Quiet. Peace. Integration.
“Konrad,” came a voice from the blister’s bore hole entrance. Korzenowski grimaced and turned to face the voice. It was Olmy; they hadn’t talked in weeks. He spread his arms and slowed his precessing, then tracted outward from the center.
They picted intimate greetings and embraced each other in the near-weightlessness. “My friend,” Korzenowski said.
“I’ve disturbed your free time,” Olmy said, picting polite concern.
“Yes, but no matter. I’m glad to see you.”
“Have you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“Garry Lanier suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage.”
“He wasn’t protected—” Korzenowski’s face paled. “He’s dead?”
“Very nearly. Karen discovered him a few seconds after it happened and immediately called Christchurch.”
“His damned Old Native pride!” Korzenowski exclaimed. The anger was not just his own.
“They reached him within ten minutes. He’s alive, but he needs reco
nstruction—the brain is extensively damaged.”
Korzenowski closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. He did not approve of forced medication, but under the circumstances, he doubted the Hexamon would give Lanier much choice in his treatments. “They did this to him,” he said bitterly. “We’ve all had a hand in it…”
“There’s guilt enough to go around,” Olmy said. “If Karen consents to reconstruction, most of the damage can be reversed…But he’ll need medical aid that he’s always been on record as refusing.”
“Have you told Ram Kikura?”
Olmy shook his head. “She’s being kept under house arrest, held in a communications null. Besides, my own leash is short.”
“So is mine,” Korzenowski said, “but I can swing wide enough to hit some influential people.”
“I appreciate that,” Olmy said. “I’m afraid my political status is uncertain at the moment.”
“Why?”
“I’ve refused to take command of the Emergency Defense Effort.”
“You’d be the best choice,” Korzenowski said. “Why refuse?”
Olmy smiled and shook his head.
Korzenowski, staring into his eyes, felt a small tingle of sympathy. He’s not alone, either. But he couldn’t decide what made him feel that way, or what the feeling implied.
“I’ll explain later. It’s not the time now. I think I’ll be hard to reach for a while, however.” The last message he picted in tight-beam so that only Korzenowski could receive it. “If you need to tell me anything, please…”
Korzenowski examined Olmy for a moment, then picted, “I’ll feel very alone without you to speak to, should I need you…or Garry, or Ram Kikura.”
Olmy nodded understanding. “Perhaps we’ll all meet again. Star, Fate and Pneuma willing.” He tracted swiftly back to the bore hole.
Korzenowski floated alone once again in the blister, surrounded by wheeling machines, red spheres and gray cubes. No use trying to rest now, he told himself, and returned to work.
47
Earth
Lanier struggled on the lip of a well. Every time he relaxed his hands and waited to fall, somebody held on to him. He could not die. He began to resent being saved. So long as he was alive, he was condemned to suffer the sour old-party taste in his mouth, and feel the constant disruption in his stomach and bowels. In a moment of lucidity, he tried to remember who he was and could not.
Light exploded around him. He seemed bathed in supernal glory. At the same moment, his mind itched. And he heard the first clear words in what seemed a very long time: “We’ve done all we can without reconstruction.”
He pondered those words, so familiar and yet alien.
“He wouldn’t want that.”
Karen.
“Then there’s nothing more we can do.”
“Will he become conscious again?”
“He’s conscious now, in a way. He’s probably listening to us.”
“Can he speak?”
“I don’t know. Try him.”
“Garry? Can you hear me?”
Yes why not just let me die Karen No there’s “work to do.”
“Garry? What work?”
is the Recovery over
“…recovery over…”
“Garry, you’ve been very ill. Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“I couldn’t just let you die. I called the Hexamon medical center in Christchurch. They’ve done all they can for now…”
He still couldn’t see, couldn’t tell whether his eyes were open or closed; the glory had faded to brown darkness.
“…don’t let them.”
“What?”
“Don’t let them.”
“Garry, you tell me what to do.”
She was speaking Chinese. She sounded very unhappy. He was making her unhappy.
“What’s reconstruction?”
Another voice interposed, speaking English. “Ser Lanier, you can’t recover fully without reconstruction. We send tiny mobile medical devices into your brain and they help repair nerve tissue.”
“No new body.”
“Your body is fine, such as it is. It’s your brain that’s damaged.”
“No privilege.”
“What’s he mean?” the voice asked somebody else. Karen responded.
“He doesn’t want any privileged medical attention.”
“Ser Lanier, this is standard procedure. You mean—” voice fading, addressing somebody else, perhaps Karen again, “—he refuses implant preservation?”
“He always has.”
“None of that involved here, Ser. Straight medicine. You haven’t refused medical help before.”
No, I haven’t. Long life.
“Although I must say, if you’d come in to Christchurch, we could have told you this was coming on. We could have prevented it.”
“Are you from orbiting bodies?” Lanier asked slowly. He opened his eyes, could feel the eyelids open, but still saw nothing.
“I was trained there, Ser. But I’m from Melbourne, born and bred. Can’t you hear the Strine?”
In fact, he could now; the thick Australian accent.
“All right,” he said. Did he have any choice? Was he too afraid of dying, after all? He could hardly think, much less think straight. He simply did not want to be responsible for Karen’s pain.
Karen wept somewhere far away. The sounds faded and the brownness darkened to black. Before losing all consciousness, he heard another voice, this one with a Russian accent.
“Garry. More help coming. Get well, my friend.”
Mirsky.
48
Thistledown
Olmy had decided to disappear when it had become apparent they were going to offer him the command position. There was more risk than he was willing to take in harboring the Jart and standing at the center of the Hexamon’s most sensitive activities.
After speaking with Korzenowski, he returned to his apartment below the Nexus chambers, then to his old apartment in Alexandria, and cleaned both of all traces. He then prepared to deactivate his library link. He hesitated. Before severing all ties, he had one last duty to perform. He called up his favorite tracer and inquired as to the whereabouts of his son.
Thistledown, the tracer quickly replied.
“Incarnate?”
“Successfully born and now receiving body indoctrination.”
Neither he nor Ram Kikura had been there…Guilt and remorse were not emotions implants were made to control. “Can I speak to him outside of open channels?”
The tracer did not respond for several seconds. “Not directly. But he has set up a clandestine data account that can only be accessed by you.”
Olmy smiled. “Access it.”
The account contained only a single message. “Accepted for defense service. First duty in a few days. Success to us all, Father.”
Olmy read the message several times, and viewed the accompanying pict signifying love, respect and admiration. Without thinking, he reached out to touch the pict. His fingers passed through it.
“I have a message for my son,” he said. “And a request.”
When the message was in Tapi’s account, Olmy withdrew the tracer and shut down the terminal.
The time had come to hide himself where he was certain he could not be located. Stockpiling the few resources he needed, he moved them into a maintenance worker’s temporary quarters in a service tunnel near the north cap, third quarter.
He was not yet ready to present his information to the Hexamon; there was much more work to do. As yet, he had nothing that might be strategically useful; he had learned a great deal about Jart society, but nothing significant about Jart science and technology. There was little chance this Jart carried detailed information about such things; that would have been foolish in the extreme, given its misson. But Olmy still felt the need for a few more weeks of investigation…
In truth, he was losing himself in the study. He saw the t
rap—his own trap, not the Jart’s—and carefully avoided it; he could bury himself in his own head and simply process the information his partial passed on, for months at a time, returning to the outside world only to take his nutrient supplements and perhaps check on progress with the reopening.
He had never been given the opportunity to study an enemy so closely, so intimately; and studying one’s enemy was like examining a skewed mirror of one’s self. In time, playing against the strengths and weaknesses of an opponent, one could become a kind of negative impression, like a superimposed mold. And vice versa.
Olmy no longer despised the Jart. He sometimes thought himself close to understanding it.
They had worked out a kind of psychological pidgin that allowed each to think in the other’s manner, within a common bond of language. They had begun exchanging personal information—no doubt carefully selecting and pruning, but still offering each other personal insights. Olmy told the Jart of his background, his natural birth and conservative upbringing, the Exiling of the orthodox Naderites from the second chamber city; he did not tell of Korzenowski’s stored partials and his centuries-long conspiracy.
And through the Jart, Olmy learned:
A civilized planet is a black planet. No waste and no chance of detection. We hide here and prepare ourselves for service in the Way. There are many planets like this, where expediters in and out of service wait for their assignments. {I} was brought into service on such a world, lovely dark against the stars; {I} do not know what a natural birth is. {We} have been brought into service by duty expediters for as long as {my} memory is informed; at creation, {we} are supplied with knowledge necessary to {our} immediate duties. Reassignments bring further knowledge; {we} do not forget our past assignments, but place them in reserve, that they may inform {us} in emergency later.
Olmy told the Jart about human childhood: education, entertainment, choosing and receiving one’s first implants, the libraries; he did not tell the Jart about the Thistledown or what it was, and he carefully monitored his visual information so that the Jart could not see the starship’s gently curving chambers. He tried to provide the illusion that he, too, had been born and raised on a planet.
