by Greg Bear
They watched the uncertain, wavering image of Patricia’s granddaughter, placed in the context of the house-memory like a mannequin within some museum exhibit, or a zoo animal on display. “Ser Olmy, how does your Jart justify this?” Korzenowski asked.
“It’s distressed that a valued bit of information should be damaged,” Olmy said.
“I mean the…‘packaging’ of an entire world.”
“In their own way, they try to serve the Final Mind,” Ry Oyu said. “They want to send all they’ve stored on to the Final Mind. And that is what they’ll do. But we should be able to stop this woman’s suffering…. The time has come for decisions. The Jarts know the Way will soon cease to exist. They accept me as a representative of descendant command. They’re anxious to present the fruits of their labor to the Final Mind. They’ll do anything I say…. As far as they’re concerned, this is the time they’ve been waiting for, the time that justifies their entire history.
“I can take Patricia’s Mystery, and her granddaughter’s stored mentality, back to the geometry stacks and try to give them some peace.”
“Why?” Korzenowski asked, his eyes square and cat-like now, as if he were suddenly all Patricia Vasquez. “Why just them? Why not restore all the worlds the Jarts have destroyed and packaged?”
Ry Oyu shook his head. “Not within my means. I do what I can do now largely to fulfill promises. Long ago, when I was merely a gate-opener,” he tapped his own chest emphatically, “I failed to teach Patricia Vasquez properly. I make up for that by giving her another chance, and her granddaughter, as well. Besides, there’s the aesthetic satisfaction.”
“Garry Lanier refused special privileges,” Korzenowski said, his face contorted, a mask of contradictory personality and emotion. “Why should you give us…give Patricia Vasquez special consideration?”
Ry Oyu considered this for a moment. “For my past self,” he said. “We can’t correct all of our failures. But the Engineer has redeemed himself for the creation of the Way…Olmy has suffered for his ambition and feelings of self-importance…Mirsky has paid some of his own debts. Please allow me to correct one of my own failures.”
The Engineer’s face relaxed. “All right,” he said softly. “Take them home.”
“And what do you choose? Ser Olmy, freed from the Jart…where would you go? Ser Korzenowski, still carrying part of Patricia Vasquez, where would you go?”
“I am incomplete without her,” Korzenowski said. “I think she will stay with me, and be content, as long as she knows some part of her is going home. I…we’d like to journey down the Way and become part of the Final Mind.”
Olmy considered. “That would be fascinating,” he said, “but I’m not sure I’m ready. If all the stories we’ve heard are true, we follow that route wherever we are, however we go.”
“They are true,” Ry Oyu said.
“I think of how few beings have actually known this,” Olmy said. “How privileged we are. I know where I’d like to go, still alive, still incarnate.”
“Where is that?”
“Timbl,” he said. “The Frant homeworld. I have many friends there.”
“There should be enough time to re-open the gates to Timbl,” Ry Oyu said.
“Don’t you feel a bit like Santa Claus?” Korzenowski asked, or perhaps it was Patricia; the Engineer knew very little about the old terrestrial legends.
Ry Oyu smiled and turned toward the image of the room, and the jumbled figure of the woman within. “I’ll convey all this to our hosts. I’m sure they’d be proud to have the creator of the Way go with them to meet descendant command.”
Rhita focused on the wise-looking, smiling gray-haired man, feeling more secure in his presence. He did not have the fierce aspect of a Zeus, but more the calm air of Aserapis with his stalks of corn and Plutonian dogs, his ceremonial bulls and festivals of resurrection.
This calm man spoke of going home.
“I’m going back to Gaia?” she asked, her voice strong in this place without true sound or true voices.
“Now,” Ry Oyu said, “we perform the most sacred of weddings once again. Patricia, carried within me, will you have the patterns of your own granddaughter as a shell in which to live, until we can search for the home you have lost?”
Olmy saw the image of Rhita shimmer, become solid, fade in color; become solid yet again. Always, the young woman’s eyes watched Korzenowski, and Korzenowski watched her.
“Rhita, will you lend part of your self to this shadow of your grandmother, that she may have the strength to go home?”
“Yes,” Rhita said.
She felt a mingling of their waters, like the mingling of seas so clearly visible along the outermost pillars of Hercules, entering into the broad ocean of Atlantis.
She saw a dense weave of realities, Gaias in profusion, and knew that none of them were exactly like her world. But the gray-haired, smiling man who might have been Zeus or Aserapis told her to choose one in which the Jarts never did open a gate, never did invade…in which the expedition never happened…he suggested no more.
She closed her eyes.
“Time for saying au revoir,” the second avatar said. “I entrust Ser Korzenowski to these command individuals.”
Korzenowski transferred his clavicle to the gate-opener and backed away. The Engineer became separated from Olmy and Ry Oyu as the bubble split in two. Olmy watched him move off and vanish behind another black barrier.
Ry Oyu lifted the clavicle, as if to become used to its weight and capabilities again. “Ser Olmy, these are servants of the Final Mind—however misguided. They tell me they are eager to convey you to your chosen gate. They are preparing to find the gate and open it now. I believe we can trust them. But no one knows how much time has passed there…”
“Always an element of risk,” Olmy said.
“Uncertainty keeps us interested,” Ry Oyu commented.
“Thank you.”
“You are quite welcome. They will accept their modified expediter any time you choose to give him up.”
Olmy was not at all reluctant to part with this reminder of his greater failure. Again, he was surrounded by a pale fire. The Jart within him vanished.
For a moment, he savored the wonderful aloneness. To be restored, alive and sane, and to return to Timbl…
He thought of Tapi and Ram Kikura, of other failures less spectacular and ultimately perhaps more haunting.
“Be content, Ser Olmy,” Ry Oyu said, and clasped his hand, then released it.
Their bubble split in two again.
Ry Oyu turned to the command individuals. “I would like to travel back to the geometry stacks. I will need to open gates to two worlds in universes very slightly different from our own.”
His bubble moved back through the barriers, into the flaw station, and down to the Way.
He carried Korzenowski’s clavicle lightly. The bubble spread open at the bottom and gave him access to the living bronze surface.
The gate-opener closed his eyes and murmured the ritual incantations that prepared his mind, however unnecessary they might be in his present form.
“I lift this clavicle to worlds without number, and bring a new light to the Way, guiding this gate that all may prosper, those who guide and are guided, who create and are created, who light the Way and bask in the light so given…”
The surface of the Way grew dark with the approach of the accelerating kink. That would make opening gates even more difficult. There was little time left, perhaps only hours, and he had much work to do, much searching even after the gate was open.
He finished with, “Behold…I open a new world.”
He had never before, in all his career as gate-opener, made a double gate. Yet this gate would open onto two precisely chosen worlds.
A circular depression began to form beneath his feet, its edges sparkling. The first world spun beneath him, as seen through the clavicle; here was an alternate to Rhita’s Gaia, a spreading branch from the
Gaia where Patricia had arrived and made her changes, yet where no Jarts had ever invaded.
The gate-opener could not stretch this gate far back in time. He made a brief attempt, then pulled back and concentrated on locating Rhita Vaskayza. A Rhita who had never known the Jarts, who had never traveled to find the Jart gate…
The Way shimmered violently, and he wondered if there would be time.
81
Home
Rhita walked through the grove where Berenikē had told her she would find her father. She saw Rhamōn sitting discouraged among the olive trees, back against a gnarled trunk, head in hands, face twisted with troubles. Having fought some petty battle against the Akademeia’s increasingly rebellious board of masters. Needing encouragement.
“Father,” she said, and then stepped back as if slapped. Something fell on her, into her; something at once familiar and very alien. She saw herself, strange and exhausted, tumbling from nowhere, as if into a cup…Memories of invasion, destruction and something like death filled her. She closed her eyes and held her hands to her head, wanting to scream. She gasped like a fish with the shock of assimilating so much, feeling for an instant that she must have lost her mind…
Stumbled on a root and almost lost her balance.
When she recovered, the memories were cached in deep background, safely isolated for the moment.
“Rhita?” Rhamōn looked up from his reverie. “Are you all right?”
She made up an excuse to cover her confusion. “Some illness, I think…from Alexandreia.”
She was home for a vacation. Truly home, not in a dream or a nightmare. She grasped her upper arms with both hands. Real flesh, real trees, her real father. All the other memories, visions, hallucinations…faces. Nightmares.
“I felt faint. I’m all right now,” she said. “Perhaps it was Grandmother touching me.”
“We could use her touch,” Rhamōn said, shaking his head.
“Tell me what’s happened,” Rhita said. And sat before her father, digging her hand into the dry, caky soil, clenching the dirt between her fingers.
I will sort this out, in time. I promise myself that I will. Visions and dreams and nightmares enough for a dozen lifetimes.
The legacy of the sophē. Who was, even now…Where? Doing what?
The Way was coming apart. The flaw station had moved out of sight, retreating in the face of the Engineer’s accelerating destruction. Ry Oyu gave up his human form then, hovering as a twist of light and pattern over the double gate, searching across a different Earth, an Earth without the Death, reaching through the geometry stack some decades back in time, finding a specific moment.
Even in his immaterial form, the stresses on the Way began to dissolve him. He shifted character again, hid himself within the geometry of the gate, found the gate itself dissolving, struggled to keep integral long enough to complete this last but not least important of his duties—
Patricia Luisa Vasquez stepped from the car of her fiancé, Paul, clutching a bag of groceries. The air was chill with California’s mild brand of winter, and the last light of day spread gray and yellow fingers along the scattered clouds high overhead. She started up the flagstone path to her parents’ house—
And dropped the bag onto the lawn, arms thrown wide, neck jerked back, eyes seeming to vibrate in their sockets.
“Patricia!” Paul shouted from the car.
She rolled onto the ground, then straightened again, bucking against the grass, grunting and whining incoherently.
Then she lay back limp, spent.
“Jesus, Jesus,” Paul said, bending over her, hand on her forehead, other hand waving, not knowing what to do.
“Don’t let Mother hear you say that,” Patricia whispered, her throat raw.
“I didn’t know you were epileptic.”
“I’m not. Help me up.” She tried to gather up the spilled groceries. “Oh, what a mess…”
“What happened?”
She smiled fiercely, sweetly, triumphantly, and then the smile faded and was replaced by puzzlement. “Don’t ask,” she said. “I’ll tell you no lies.”
If I know where I am, she thought, I know who I am. Nothing was very clear; she had only vague, scattered recollections of a group of people trying valiantly to help her, and succeeding. But she was home, on the walkway just outside the little bungalow in Long Beach, and that meant she was Patricia Luisa Vasquez, and the worried young man kneeling on the grass beside her was Paul, whom she had mourned for some reason, just as she had mourned…
Looking around at the streets, the houses, unburnt, solid, skies clear of smoke and flame. No Apocalypse.
“Mother will be so pleased,” she said in a hoarse croak. “I think I’ve just had an epiphany.” She reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck, hugging him so hard he grimaced.
Around his head, she peered up with sharp, cat-like eyes at the stars just beginning to shine overhead.
No Stone in the heavens, she told herself. Whatever that means.
82
In the Flaw
With grave misgivings still, Korzenowski submitted to being “stored.”
The Engineer experienced a time of cold nothingness, and then a wonderful and nightmarish jumbling in the maelstrom of information gathered by the Jarts—the remnants of thousands of worlds, trillions of beings, gathered haphazardly through time, now transmitted along the flaw, to pass into the Final Mind.
The Way gathered in great coils and supercoils, eating itself like some ineffable burning fuse, and died.
The time of avatars on Earth came to an end.
83
Timbl
Olmy felt rather than saw the gate closing above him. Static crackled in the dry air and a low moan spread out from where his feet lightly touched red sand. Then, nothing but the whisper of a thin breeze.
For a moment, he feared that all he would see would be another Jart conquest, a world fanatically packaged and preserved for descendant command. But Timbl had not been invaded by the Jarts. They apparently had not bothered to reopen this particular gate until now, and they would never return.
He stood in the raw, blinding glare of Timbl’s sun, smiling broadly. His altered skin could withstand this much ultraviolet; it even felt good to him, familiar. It seemed to make little difference how much time had passed here; Timbl at any time would be home to Olmy.
He was at the top of a hill. Below the hill, to the north, lay a flat paved field, still kept polished white, despite the absence of Hexamon vehicles. This was where the main gate to Timbl had once opened. It had been closed just before the Sundering, when the Hexamon had begun its withdrawal from the Way.
Olmy looked to the west and saw the brilliant blue ocean. A tiny torch-like arc crossed overhead and was intercepted by a purple beam of light. Cometary fragments still fell here, and were still intercepted by Hexamon defenses…Not so much time had lapsed, after all.
There were undoubtedly a good many Hexamon citizens on Timbl, refugees after the closing of the gate. He would not lack for human company. But that wasn’t what he sought out first. Any visitor to Timbl had to be personally welcomed by a Frant to have official status.
Early in their history, when Timbl had been besieged by devastating comet falls, Frants had evolved to pass along the memories and experiences of every individual to its fellows. The great mass of Frants carried the memories of all individuals, if not in detail, then at least as a kind of inbred history. Any individual Frant, returning home, was quickly absorbed, integrated, debriefed.
By now, every mature Frant on Timbl would know something about Olmy. They would have assimilated the experiences of the Frants he had worked with, decades past; sharing the memories, diffusing the personalities. Every adult Frant would be his friend.
He did not deserve so much, but here it was.
Olmy walked down the hill to the east, toward the ripe, wind-swaying fields of yellow and blue food plants, into the closest village with its characteristic c
entral stupa. He passed young Frants, who stared impassively after him; the young would not yet recognize him. Olmy met his first mature individual just outside a marketplace closed for the midday rest period.
The Frant, tall and gangly, face narrow, eyes protruding to each side, its shoulders cloaked with ceremonial foil, sat on a broad stone bench. It regarded him silently for a moment.
“Greetings, Ser Olmy,” it said. “What a surprise to see you here.”
“My pleasure,” Olmy said.
EPILOGUE
First, Mirsky told his companion, we start at the beginning.
And then? Lanier asked.
We search for points of interest, until we come to the end.
And then?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Karen Anderson has once again provided invaluable help with my odd languages and history. Her work on the last chapter of Eon laid many stones for the foundations of the Oikoumenē in this sequel. Adrienne Martine-Barnes lent much useful research material; I’ve ignored her direct observations on the architecture of Rhodes, at my peril, to demonstrate deep historical changes on Rhodos. Brian Thomsen, illustrious editor, believed and trusted and took risks, and also worked valiantly to keep my prose from stumbling. Blame these fine folks for nothing; all error in this book is mine, or perhaps my computer’s.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
